Not yet having read...

I was really looking forward to spending time this Winter with Richard Taruskin's The Oxford History of Western Music (five volumes, now available in paperback with a reasonable discount).  I have long admired the author's work, especially for his willingness to question received wisdom  as when he has famously and fearlessly entered controversies on "historically informed performance practice" or the politics of Shostakovitch.  In particular, the two volumes of his Stravinsky and Russian Traditions (which I read last summer in the reading room of the local University library, as it is one of those books which is considered too valuable to lend out), in which the mixture of historical, cultural, and biographical context was consistently (and admirably) balanced with musical analysis betraying a gifted ear are a stunning achievement.  What I had heard or read of Taruskin's Oxford History in advance was very encouraging; the balance of topics considered — with two of the five volumes reserved for the 20th century — seems right in proportion to their variety and volume, and it has substantial and serious reflection on music historiography.  Enthusiasm for Taruskin's project has been widespread, with even a pair of musicologists-in-training blogging their way through the books ("The Taruskin Challenge" is here, and they're already up to the Glogauer Liederbuch of 1470).  

The five handsome books arrived in this morning's post and I thought I'd ease in to reading by sampling the volume with the content matter I knew best, the fifth, which is dedicated to Music in the Late Twentieth Century.   Unfortunately, each of my first samples, arrived at by looking up the name of a favorite west coast composer from the index, has turned up some weirdness:

— In an odd paragraph on Richard Maxfield, Taruskin seems to connect Maxfield's death by suicide to the violence of some Fluxus works (Maxfield's Concert Suite from Dromenon, the Danger Musics of Dick Higgins or Nam June Paik's Hommage à John Cage) and to sadomasochism.   There is, however, no documentary evidence connecting Maxfield's death to his compositional work, and implying this — suicide as an aesthetic project — without mentioning the more plausible cause (Maxfield had long-term psychological difficulties and was a drug abuser; see, for example, the poem Richard Maxfield by Diane Wakoski) does not seem altogether responsible for a major reference work.  

— Looking up La Monte Young turned up a passage with errors that some basic fact-checking should have corrected:  Taruskin describes La Monte Young's Trio for strings as unpublished; in fact, the score was available for purchase for several years in the 1960's through George Maciunas's Fluxus Edition.*  Taruskin also underestimates the number of performances of the Trio; I heard four professional performances in Germany alone during the 1990's by three different ensembles and know of several other performances which I was unable to attend. This underestimate may appear to be trivial, but it is made as part of an argument that the work was almost unheard. 

— In another passage, in an ample section on Harry Partch, Taruskin makes a mistake about the disposition of Partch's unique instruments after his death, writing that they went from Montclair State University in New Jersey to the Smithsonian Institution.  In fact, the instrument collection was housed for many years at San Diego State University in California before moving to SUNY Purchase in 1990 and then to Montclair State in 1997, where they remain today.  Late in Partch's life, there were vague plans for the Smithsonian to receive the originals and to have a set of copies built for performance, these did not go far.  (Fortunately, people like John Schneider of Los Angeles's ensemble Partch have been building duplicate sets of the instruments and are actively presenting his scores.)  Again, this is a trivial matter, with only a remote possibility that some enthusiastic music lover will ask in vain at the Smithsonian Institution to see the Partch instruments, but when texts associated with the first three names I happen to look up are each found to have something problematic, and not problematic as a matter of differing opinions — which I would welcome — but problems due to research, it's not the sort of thing that inspires confidence. 

Reading a project like this History,  it is easy, too easy, to build a critique around the presence or absence of particular names or works.   While it is heartening to find the names of the three musicians I happened to search for in such a major reference work, their presence or absence is not critical to my appreciation of the book.  Likewise, while I certainly would have chosen alternative works as exemplifying many of the composers included (e.g. where is the late Cage?), I recognize that, given the quantity and diversity of the repertoire, much of importance will have to be passed over or even omitted.  But a judgement about this can only come after reading the whole thing, and getting a feel for the flow of Taruskin's narrative(s) and argument(s) as something larger than an assembly of facts.  So, my confidence is a bit shaken, but judgement is suspended until I get through one big Winter read.

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* Young, in a realistic assessment of personal finances, withdrew the work from the Fluxus catalog because the score was receiving too many performances without his participation, thus restricting his potential income from the work as a coach; later, in the 1990's Material Press (i.e. me) offered the score as a rental in connection with a contract for Young's rehearsal supervision.     

Postmaderna

HR staged their second Klang Biennale this weekend, with the theme "Satellit Maderna", centered around the figure of composer-conductor Bruno Maderna (1920-1973).   The major impetus for this choice of themes is a new set of five cds with all of Maderna's orchestral works, played by the hr-Symphonieorchester under Arturo Tamayo.  (The first two have already been released, the remainder should appear early in the new year.)  

WHILE it was certainly a good thing to be able to hear so much of Maderna's work, most of it very attractive — indeed with a gentleness quite distinct from his near-contemporaries — and with formidably idiomatic instrumental writing, AND especially to hear the orchestral works played by an orchestra that does them very well, AND it was also good to hear the work in contrast to major works that were contemporary to Maderna's by, a.o. Berio (Serenata), Nono (Due espressioni ), or Boulez (Le Marteau*),  AND it was good to rehear some of Maderna's electronic pieces (Dimensioni II (1959/60), using a text by Hans G. Helms and the voice of Cathy Berberian is unjustly in the shadow of Berio's Thema: Omaggio a Joyce) IT is a fundamental problem that this festival comes out of the budget line for new music.  At a certain point — and 36 years after the death of the composer, the point is surely long past — we should expect responsibility for repertoire of this age to be moved into the standard rep budget line.  The Klang Biennale did, in fact, include some actual new music, commissioned premiers by living, breathing composing folk, but the Maderna theme was a major consideration in the commissioning or selection of these works, so again, there is a real sense that the interests of music of a significant age is being used in a zero-sum game against the interests of new music.

The "Aging of the New Music" (as Adorno phrased it) has always been problematic.  There has been significant entry by 20th century music into the institutional concert repertoire, but there is a problem with music which appears to gets stuck in the phasing-in process as no longer novel, but not yet repertoire.  I'm under no illusions that all music should enter the standard repertoire — it shouldn't and that's perfectly okay — but the process of selection should be as flexible and open to surprises as possible.  The solution has got to come in not taxing the more vulnerable concerts and series for new music, but by rather finding better routes into those for traditional music. One step is clearly better documentation, more readily available (i.e. recordings, broadcasts, and online), of this music, and the other is advocacy by musicians, particularly conductors, who program the mainline series.  The fact is that music like that of Maderna is not forbiddingly obtuse in character for audiences accustomed to the trivial atonality of half a century of film music, and players, conductors especially, particularly in the pieces in which some performer choice is required, actually enjoy playing this music.  

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* I want to send a special salute to the composer Dániel Péter Biró, who flew in from Victoria, B.C. (where he teaches) in order to play guitar in Le Marteau, continuing a tradition, probably begun with Cornelius Cardew, of composers who have played this part.  

 

Tilbury on Cardew

Just finished John Tilbury's massive* biography Cornelius Cardew (1936-1981) a life unfinished and can recommend it highly, as a scholarly and — discretely — personal account of both the person and the musician.  

Cardew was very important to me, as a music student, if chiefly as the composer of Autumn '60 and the Octet '61 for Jasper Johns, two kit-like pieces in which the performer has to engage with the score in challenging ways in order to create individual parts as well as forge an ensemble from a set of notations that initially appear very open but gradually reveal themselves to be systematic and carrying many constraints when followed consequently.  (For a term paper in college, I compared Boulez's original version of ...Explosante/fixe... with the Cardew Octet '61, much to the advantage of the Cardew. I also had the pleasure of performing the piano-as-percussion-solo Memories of You several times, one of the most charming pieces of the era; my best version involved a flyswatter introduced at a strategic moment and used only once.)  Later work by Cardew, although more impressive in scale, was more interesting intellectually than musically to me — Treatise, The Great Learning — and what I knew of the Scratch Orchestra intrigued me, but I had no real feel for the project as actual music. Cardew's turn to what appeared to be rather doctrinaire and marginal party Marxism was intriguing but much less attractive and the bits of the late, mostly-tonal music I encountered ran the gamut from sweet enough (the Piano Albums or the Thaelmann Variations)  to puzzling (Mountains) to deadly dull (The Vietnam Sonata).  

(N.O. Brown and I spoke at some length about the fall-out from John Cage, with Young and Cardew representing for Brown spiritual and social/political directions, respectively;  I believe we agreed that both directions had largely failed, in the sense of moving musical or more worldly mountains, but this was still far before minimalism — for which Young was a critical catalyst — had become anything like an establishment force; who knows, with capitalism in its present state, perhaps Cardew will eventually be received as a similarly prescient force.)  

But Tilbury's book puts Cardew and his music into a context that is profoundly different from that I which had understood or imagined.  The works that were — and remain — important to me actually represented the passing or even tangential contact between the journeyman Cardew and the continental avant-garde, and Tilbury makes a very good case — albeit one that is, at times, surprisingly critical — for Cardew's unique career trajectory and, indeed, forces me to reconsider that later work and later working milieu as far closer to sense and sensibility and central concerns of the man himself than the handful of high avant-garde pieces written in his late 20s.  Perhaps more importantly, Tilbury's description of the biographical context is a valuable reminder of how distant any bit of music history can be.  For all of its detail — much of it quite intimate in nature, especially that taken from the composer's private journals and interviews with his wives — I still cannot say that I have a much of a feel for how Cardew came to be the composer he was, how he went straight from his traditional schooling as Anglican cathedral choirboy to an interest in the most modern continental-style music, or how he fit (or, at the case appears to have been, didn't fit) with the contemporary spectrum of composers in Britain.**  Knowing more about the poverty in which Cardew spent essentially his entire life***, and of his connections to Blake, Wittgenstein, Chinese classics or Mao, or to his father's William Morris-like approach to the crafts helps considerably and makes Cardew a rather more sympathetic figure, but it is still far from knowing how he really ticked.  In any case, Tilbury has succeeded in presenting more of Cardew than we had expected and yet leaving him as one of the most intriguing figures in late 20th century music.      

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*How massive? More than a thousand pages.  But it's certainly the most readable 1000+ pages I've ever encountered in a sans-serif font. Book designers, please, long books need serifs! 

**Isn't it fascinating, for example, how distant Cardew, with his connections to the continental avant-garde, to experimentalism, and to improvisation, is from his near-contemporaries in the establishment-modernists-to-be of the Manchester group? 

***In discussing money matters, it would have helped to have had some more explicit hints about the historical purchasing power of the pound to really. 

Optimal means

Filmmaker Robert Bresson: "Not to use two violins when one is enough."

Mozart on his own concertos: "They hold the happy mean between the too difficult and the too easy. They are brilliant..., but they miss poverty."

This blogger-to-be, on the edge of a manuscript, 1981:  "Everyone talks about having too many notes uptown and too few notes downtown.  Isn't the real problem not that of having too many or too few rather that of having the wrong notes?"

Accented

One of my standard post-concert cocktail party jokes has been about someday writing a history of music based entirely on the use and development of the fermata and the caesura, bearing the name Birds' Eyes and Railroad Tracks.  But now, lo and behold, what piece of musicological obscuria should have just landed in my mailbox but a history of the accent, Orchestral Accents (1960) by one Richard Korn?  Yep, analysis and history of the use of the accents, and there are two of them: < and sf(z).  (There is, to be sure, also a brief appendix discussing the ^/v markings which are somewhat different beasts, more articulation than accent).  Notated accents, according to Korn,  begin with the vertical lines of C.P.E. Bach and the equivalent wedges of the early classicists, and their use gradually changes from a notation for emphasis of a tone other than the first in a measure (syncopations) to an expressive device of its own (peaking in Stravinsky who has entire movements with more notes carrying accents than accentless).  Korn classifies their appearances: whether they occur on the attack or carry through an entire tone, whether they use sharpness of attack, timbre or volume (or some combination of the above) to create relief within the prevailing dynamic context.  I can't speak to the currency of the text today as I am sure that there has been significant musicological work done in the field since Korn's book appeared, and one would surely like to extend the American music chapter to composers besides Gershwin and Copland, but jeez, by coming up with an account of a good stretch of music history from the point-of-view of an item or two of notation, it sure ruined a reliable old bit of post-concert repartee.  But did I ever mention my pan to write a history of the repeat signs?    

Some Working Rhythms

Repetitive stress does not necessarily imply injury.  It can be musically useful. 

From a Ghanaian post office, a worker cancels stamps, spontaneously changing the pattern to fit each envelope:

Another example from a Ghanaian post office, an ensemble:



Various styles of counting cash, far less interesting than the basic pulse of each sequence are the rhythms internal to each pulse:



(See also this: Villagers in Iseh, Karangasem, Bali, stomping rice, in interlocking patterns.) 

And this: from Robert Bresson's film Le Diable Probablement. Bresson, preferred not to use non-diegetic music in his films, but his use of sound was nevertheless extremely musical.  This example uses diegetic noises to propel, through their increasingly rhythmic character, a didactic sequence (Bresson wrote: "Image and sound must not support each other, but must work each in turn through a sort of relay.")

Shadowy

The family spent a long late afternoon at the opera today with the Strauss/Hofmannsthal Frau ohne Schatten, which I had not heard since college. It's a monster of a piece, a Märchenoper (fairytale opera) in which the orchestra really gets to show off, pulling out all the stops, and the Frankfurt Opera and Museum Orchestra under Sebastian Weigle is sounding very good these days indeed, which alone made going worthwhile. Also, listening this time was a reminder that the breadth of vocal technique required suggested that Strauss was less distant to the extended techniques of the late 20th century than one would reflexively suppose. But all that said, there was something a bit embarrassing about spending time with the piece as a work of theatre. Does anyone know of a repertoire opera that is more retrograde about the role of women? (Stockhausen's Montag comes close, but it's not repertoire.) Between its essentialist reduction of women to child-bearers (in the logic of the opera, humans require shadows, but women who cannot bear children have no shadows, thus...) and the closing choruses sung by "unborn children", I now have a small terror that Die Frau ohne Schatten is going to be taken up as a pageant piece by the religious right.

Leedy: The Leaves Be Green, again

Here's a recording of Douglas Leedy's The Leaves Be Green, for solo harpsichord, played by Margret Gries on an instrument made by Owen Daly.  The performance is a bit ponderous for my taste, but it's still great to have it available.   In case you're not familiar with Leedy's work, Brett Campbell of The Eugene Weekly recently wrote:

Oregon teems with artists of national significance who should be better known than they are but are content to maintain a low-key existence here in paradise. One is Douglas Leedy, the Portland-born composer who was right there at the inception of minimalism with his University of California classmates LaMonte Young and Terry Riley in the early 1960s. Like Riley, he also studied Indian music and went onto found the electronic music studio at UCLA and make some of the earliest major synthesizer recordings. Following the example of fellow Portland native Lou Harrison, Leedy made important contributions to the study of musical tuning and was a pioneer in the early music revival, founding one of the West’s finest ensembles, the Portland Baroque Orchestra, still going stronger than ever a quarter century on. In recent decades, he’s studied the music and culture of classical Greece, crafting compositions and tuning systems that attempt to recreate its lost arts. As composer, scholar and performer, then, Leedy has been a pioneer in the 20th century’s most salubrious musical developments — minimalism, the return of beautiful natural tunings (instead of the compromised 12-tone equal temperament that, alas, still dominates most Western music), world music, electronic music and early music. Yet this trail blazing West Coast musical figure lives quietly in Western Oregon, lacking (as far as I know) even that imprimatur of modern artistic existence, a web page or MySpace.  

...which reminds me of a story, which may or may not be true, which happened in the 12th, or the 13th, or the 17th century...

Heinz-Klaus Metzger once suggested that I write the "secret, underground, history of American experimental music, all in anecdotes".  

While I'm not going to be doing that anytime soon (I'm still waiting for the blackmail checks to clear), Metzger was certainly right about the format.  

Between Ives' Memos and Cage's stories and Diary entries, the anecdote has proven itself to be the form best suited to conveying the feel of musical life on the far edge, and a form more pliable to experimental recycling for new artworks than plain vanilla prose.* One quality inevitably associated with the radical music due in large part to its exclusion from big official institutional music making is that much of the experience can only be captured in the informal discourse, much of it only surviving in messages scrawled on scraps of cocktail napkins or back of envelopes, or in memory, anecdote, and story.  A lot of this information may be of questionable veracity.  Much of it may be not more than gossip or innuendo.  But, the same is certainly true of much official music history and sorting it out requires precisely the same critical skills.   

Laura Kuhn of the John Cage Trust has recently begun a website devoted to the composer.  It includes the inevitable blog, which promises to be very useful to scholarship and general interest, but even more promising, AFAIC, is a page devoted to collecting stories.  At the moment, it's basically a long list of names associated with Cage, waiting to be filled with stories attached to those names.  (The appropriateness of a form, now mostly silent, waiting to be filled in, is not lost.) It would be very useful if the page could be indexed by completed stories as well as names, and — since we're talking John Cage here — there damn well ought to be some way of gaining random access to the contents.  (This was my complaint to musicologists at the Cage conference in '88 — in discussing archival questions, not one of them was giving a thought to the question of the appropriate format for an archive devoted to the work of an anarchist devoted to chance operations.  Random access is a no-brainer.)  And as long as I'm making wishes, shouldn't it be possible to include or link to stories in the form of graphics, audio, or video files?  In any case, praise is due Ms. Kuhn, who is off on the right track. 

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* This is also my complaint about composers blogging — how come so few of us have chosen to experiment with the blog as a compositional format?   Maybe it's a lost cause — the verbal experiments on this blog, most of them based on constraints of form or vocabulary — have either been unnoticed or gone down like uranium marshmallows chasing grain alcohol Manhattans — but isn't it a matter of composerly self-respect to play some games of the sort from time to time?

[Stravinsky silent movie]

Stravinsky conducting, Paris, late 1920's. Silent film.

Martian Chess

A friend mentioned that she had been teaching her daughter to play test, but that the daughter, six, was unhappy that the game had not princess.  I immediately thought of Martian Chess or Jetan (in Barsoomian), which Edgar Rice Burroughs invented for his 1922 novel The Chessmen of Mars (the complete text of which is at Project Gutenberg here).   I last read the novel in grade school, but I can still recall the symbiont Kaldanes and Rykors and Jetan, which is played by live players in the game, to the bloody end.  I also remember constructing my own ten-by-ten-square Jeton board and making a set of pieces from acorn shells.  I cannot recall the rules, save for one which happens to be musically relevant. That move belongs to the Princess, who is allowed once, and only once in a game to "escape", to any unoccupied space on the board.  What's musical about that?  I think that every composer, no matter how strictly he or she likes to work, should allow themselves the possibility of one escape in any piece of music, a sudden move or leap to anywhere, a break in continuity, an opportunity to start over from scratch.  The first example in which I encountered an explicit escape of this sort was in Cornelius Cardew's Octet '61 for Jasper Johns, the score of which includes a single arrow pointing to one-thirty with the instruction "out, away, something completely different", but once you  get the notion in your head, you start finding musical escapes everywhere, from the point of further tonal remove in a classical sonata to some shocking figures-in-clearings in Berlioz or Ives to Pauline Oliveros's sudden full-power amplified brainwave explosion in her performance of Alvin Lucier's Music for Solo Performer.   Pieces of music, like Martian Princesses or hard-working musicians, sometimes just need to get away from it all.

Minding Manners

A younger* colleague ponders the use of, and frustrations with, foreign plumbling here.  While the much-travelled Mr Muhly is certainly more enlightened about these things than the title figure in Gahan Wilson's cartoon "The Paranoid Abroad" — who finds himself confronted with alien bathing and hygene devices — I fear that the composer may have had some misconceptions about the mechanics and usage of certain water-bearing instruments and, in particular, seems to have been fed that line of baloney about the bidet which Europeans — in good fun, mind you — feed to all American naifs and to which I once myself succumbed, which would have the bidet serve as a machine for all manner of exotic and intimate ablutions. Rest assured, if you have heard such a story, your legs are being pulled en ensemble, for I have discovered, after twenty years of thorough-going fieldwork, interviews, and scholarly research, that Europeans do no such thing with their bidets.  They are used for washing socks. Let me repeat:  The bidet is used by Europeans travelers for the purpose of washing socks.  Yes, they are used for washing socks, and — and as my comrade in ex-patritude, Mr Harry Mathews, points out in his distinguished essay-cum-recipe, Country Cooking in Central France — may also be used in an emergency as a casserole, substituting for that customarily used in preparing the classic Farce Double. 

But what I really wanted to talk about this morning are ornaments, or, better yet, agréments, a term which (although perhaps a false etymology) conveys both the sense of agreeability  and of general agreement or consent within a community.  This is important because ornaments, or, better yet, agréments, are really a part of the social contract, alongside turning right on red, balancing peas on the back of a fork, not flying planes into building, and getting your swine flu shot. The agreement here goes to a social construction in the aesthetic sphere, distinguishing surface from structure,  figure from ground, and the desirable from the merely necessary.     

But times change and there is a constant stream, if you will, of innovations in indoor plumbing (indeed in even what plumbing is allowed indoors) as well as and in parallel to, musical style, and these innovations often play productive havoc with the conventions of the past, de facto amending the old contracts.   The very best example of this, methinks, is the use of the grace note in Webern and late Stravinsky.  These tiny notes are not — as classical tonal ornaments often are — inessential or superfluous, passing or even neighborly, as they go down deep into the bone, nay the marrow, of the music's tonal conception, having equal status at the level of the row or set with the very "principal" tones to which they are attached as graces.   They are not tonally ornamental in that classical sense, but they are also not simply tones like any others which happen to be played quickly.  Indeed, what is remarkable about them is not their rapid entry and exit from a sequence of longer tones but their attachment to other tones.  The tendency for grace notes to attach is not just a notational convenience but an acoustical feature of the style, and once one gets a feel for the crispy sound of altered octaves (sevenths and ninths)  and the occasional sweet third thrown in for relief, it is even possible to improvise in a style which would suggest that one was to this particular manner born.  In doing so, these inseparable pairs of graced and principle notes pry open a space between successive and simultaneous dyads, physically impossible, but nevertheless an illusion space of great utility and charm, utility because they, effectively, strike off a few chromatic neighbors from the on-going lists of complete chromatic aggregates, thus leaving a collection more neatly balanced between tonal and not-tonal, as well as opening — in the fashion of a barber pole — an illusion about precise registers, as two registers are almost simultaneously in play, and charming, because of the rhythmic snap and the canny effects of short-term memory which leaves the impression that these almost-octaves were, in fact, real harmonic sonorities.  Smart.  

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* How long can a composer continue to be called "young" or "younger"?  I recently encountered a review of a work by "the young composer Toshio Hosokawa", who is 54.  If this is the case,  I plan to use my remaining 6 years of adolescence well and wildly and then slide immediately into senescence, skipping adulthood altogether.  

Prosaic is more than Academic

This is a fascinating confluence of activity:  The composers James Saunders and John Lely have begun a major project about prose scores (here) and Phil Ford of the Dial M for Musicology has been using text based exercises in his teaching and there's some interesting discussion about this at the blog (here) . Also, Frog Peak Music has recently placed Christian Wolff's very influential Prose Collection online (here) and, of course, there is Upload...Download...Perform, which is just chock full of textual/musical excitement (here).

Such text-based exercises or pieces or scores were central to the teaching (in music and extra-departmentally)  of the extraordinary pianist and theorist Jon Barlow at my grad school, Wesleyan, with immediate connections to Cage, Wolff, Oliveros, Lucier, Young, Fluxus, but also to Barlow's other interests, which ran to Euclid, C.S. Pierce, Wittgenstein, Ives,  Baseball, Blake, Faulkner, Joyce, and Stein.  Barlow's student, Kenneth Maue,  investigated the genre in the early 1970's and while Maue's work clearly began in an avant-garde or experimental musical context, it rapidly entered into pedagogical and therapeutic terrain. Indeed, the compositions/piece/exercises in Maue's book Water in the Lake (1979) were probably more widely used in the classroom, in group training for business, and in personal training of a more therapeutic nature.  

It is increasingly fascinating to me how superficially similar text scores can be, but how different their intentions and results may be.  Stockhausen's two collections of text scores are wildly different from Pauline Olivero's Sonic Meditations, while the more conceptual line — from Young and Cage through many of the Upload/Downloaders seems to address more absolutely musical issues than the social processes featured in scores by other composers.  

I have tended to reserved the prose score as an efficient format for broader conceptual work, often as a kind of generalized sketch for a work which might receive more conventionally-notated specific realizations but I've recently been returning to the form for some very specific pieces that could not really have been notated otherwise, and several of my older prose score have had some very good performances, which is very encouraging.     

Structure & Sadness

Take a moment to remember Claude Lévi-Strauss, a social scientist who took music seriously, indeed as a model for the discernment of structure in cultural artifacts that do not speak for themselves.  In turn, the work of Lévi-Strauss was important to many composers, for example Luciano Berio, who used texts from the anthropologist's The Raw and the Cooked in his Sinfonia. I'm not well enoughed informed about the present statis of Lévi-Strauss's as a theorist within the disciplines of Anthropology and Ethnography (this post at Savage Minds is one place to start looking), but his writing retains its strange beauty, whether in the reflective travel book Tristes Tropiques (which begins with the sentence "I hate traveling and explorers") or in the four volumes of Mythologiques. 

Cut the Chatter!

Pliable, ever on the money, proposes, in response to BBC Radio Scotland's annual "no music day", a day of music programming without any talk by the classical DJ's.  Such a "no presenters day" is an appropriate answer to the downward spiral of replacing more and more music with mediating speech and, eventually, eliminating music altogether.  This has been tragic in the case of classical and new music programming at some of the Pacifica stations in the US (I well realize that there are other causes as well, in a mad scramble among interest groups for limited air time, but the tendency in all areas is that talk trumps tunes)  and the increased tendency of management to insist upon music programming packaged in talk is very much at work in Europe as well.  There is a place for some smart talk about music on air — and there is such a tradition in the major European broadcasters (i.e. it wasn't unusual to hear an Adorno or a Barraque introduce a piece; as a kid, I was lucky enough to have heard William Malloch on KPFK doing the same)  — but when the sum of airtime for music is constantly under pressure to reduce, then the smart talk (which has tended towards glib talk) comes at the cost of the music itself.

Unfortunately, I have very little faith that such an day without chatter will be allowed to take place.  The people who talk on air have simply more institutional influence than those who just make music.  I remember that back in the 1970's, in response to criticism about inane so-called color commentary, one of the American networks tried the experiment of broadcasting a football game with only a neutral play-by-play and a few stats.  It was great.  However, directly after the broadcast, there was a discussion round with three color-commentators, who, like Foxes in a Hen House, decided for us on the spot that the absence of comments "didn't work". 

     

Not a Zero-Sum Game

Back in grade school, before any of us really had any idea about how baseball or football really worked, many of us could manage to sum up firm opinions about this player or that or one team or another, and make authoritative rankings among them.  These opinions were often based on nothing more than a few words overheard from adults, or a memorable name (Drysdale and Coufax were THE sporting names of my earliest childhood), or even just a favorite mascot or color combination.  Not yet the stuff of a convincing argument.  

There are probably no better BS artists than 5th graders arguing about sports, but sometimes I think professional music critics come awful close and particularly so when they fall into the trap of  reducing their criticism to crude comparison ("x's performance of n was better than y's")  rather than doing the heavy labor of actually saying something concrete about particular performances.  (Here's a recent example, reviewing Loren Maazel guest-conducting the Boston Symph. on a roadshow appearance in New York while Boston's MD James Levine is out of commission.)  

Now, comparison can be interesting, particularly when one is able to say something specific about the work in question and articulate how varying performances bring out — or miss, as the case may be — particular qualities or features in the work.  And comparison can be practical, useful, as when recommending one recording of a given work from among many available.  But when it is reduced to schoolyard BS-ing about a concert which is not to be repeated, what's the point, exactly? 

One quality of music — and sometimes I think that it's precisely this quality which recommends music to the angels to practice — is that different performances of the same work can vary to the point of contradicting one another and still achieve superb musical experiences.  When we're talking about live performances and not comparing recorded commodities, it's not a zero sum game in which the excellence of one version cancels out others, indeed even when one may strongly prefer one performance over another (i.e. does anyone seriously disagree about Carlos Kleiber's Fifth and Seventh?)  the experience of those performances is always going to be made better, more richer, by alternative perspectives. 

Local and Universal

I believe that it's safe to say the reputation of J.S. Bach went into the celebratory year of 1985 as that of the universal genius and came out more that of a brilliant but very much local hero, parochial not universal.   A wider exposure to the complete catalog of Bach's work placed the canonical works of abstract and speculative brilliance in the unfamiliar perspective of being set alongside the huge quantitative bias in the BWV catalog towards functional liturgical works, almost all of them examples of extreme craftsmanship and taste, but all of them firmly anchored in a style and body of technique that was completely anchored in its particular time and place.   

Similarly, we have seen recent performance practice and scholarship — in particular, Taruskin's two volumes —  restore to Igor Stravinsky's reputation much of the Russian identity, or even, more particularly, a St. Peterburg identity, that had been very much displaced — by the composer himself, foremost, but by international critical and popular acclaim as well — by the image of Stravinsky as a central figure in an international modernism, for whom such local identification was a distraction, initially perhaps out of biographical necessity but ultimately from aesthetic choice.

*****

In the 1950's , there was a moment in much of Western Europe, North American, and to some extent in Japan in which similar musical concerns, shared application of a body of techniques suggested, for many, the outlines of a common international style and — for some time well beyond this moment — these techniques and their associated stylistic turns, appeared to be more important than any local features.   There were, to be certain, many attractive qualities to this moment, among which was a literally Utopian sense that music could be successfully transplanted anywhere and address matters of universal relevance and importance.  This was often accompanied by an appeal to the border-free practices of mathematics or the natural sciences (or, failing that, at least, in the use of language suggesting the sciences)  in describing and endorsing new musical practices.  In Europe, in particular, the notion of a music unconstrained by traditional geographical-political borders shared the odd mixture of optimism and balancing of influences with which the new, post-World War II, cross-border political and economic institutions were formed.

Now, a half century later, it is always astonishing, when listening to the famous exemplars of this repertoire, how limited or even trivial the shared features appear to be when compared with the local and individual elements.  The nationalities of the composers of Il Canto Sospeso, Le marteau sans maître,  Kontra-Punkte, or Music of Changes do not survive "drop the needle" listening tests anymore as secrets.   And it is clear that the figure and music of John Cage, for example, was very much instrumentalized through its placement into foreign musical-political dialectics into which Cage himself did not choose to enter.  What is lost or gained by this change?

It is possible that these years were particularly naive.  Certainly, the styles which later achieved some international status — texturalism, minimal music,  spectralism, the new complexity — did so without much real confusion about their local origins.  Even when composers and musical styles were (or are) better received outside of their home ports, there is little doubt about these origins.  Although music is portable in ways that works of literature are not, we'd probably have to dig back to Lully to find a composer who has as successfully buried his or her tracks in the fashion of a Joseph Conrad or B. Traven and become productive in an adopted musical idiom.

*****

Not being able to work as composer in the place I came from — due mostly to some biographical caprice, but also the practical problems of being an American composer — and respond more directly to a musical and wider community is an unhappy circumstance for me.   I have an ideal image of the good citizen-musician in my head, in dialogue with a community, but that's a role I cannot play here.  Instead, my work gets framed as something of a novelty act, the token Californian on a program here or the token ex-pat on a program there.  My failure, as a composer, to find a way to work productively from this displacement,  probably ought to be an even more pressing concern.  It would probably be easy enough to change my work, to either make a better Imitat of the local avant-garde style, so as to better integrate into the scene, or to try a more entertaining style, as the market for wandering Musikanten always has some room, so long as you cultivate that special sense of knowing when not to wear out your welcome.   

As a grad student, the great alternative to an academic career for an aspiring experimental composer was a move to New York, but I never had much affinity for the city, and it's a place with such a high density of composers relative to population and performance opportunities that, ultimately, most composers are forced into very narrow specialization in order to etch out a style — a trade mark, if you will — that can stand out from the crowd.  At that time I was neither ready nor interested in such a specialization, and I've probably still not gotten there.   Later, during a curious five years spent as a trailing spouse in Hungary, I had plenty of opportunity to take advantage of the local market conditions to buy myself any performance or recording of my own work I would have wanted, but, absent any honest connection to any possible audience for such commissions, it would have essentially been vanity publication, and vain as I am, I'm not quite ready for that.  (If you ARE into that, there's an entire industry based on hooking up soloists, conductors, and composers with middle and eastern European orchestras on a pay-for-play basis.)

To some extent, web-based communication has lessened these anxieties.  I'm more up to date about goings-on at home and, maybe, the folks back home are more aware of what I'm up to. Then there are the new networks of friends and colleagues that spring up, sometimes spontaneously and temporarily, sometimes cultivated over longer periods of time.  But this is still no substitute: it is a fundamentally different experience not to be composing with a 10,000 foot mountain in the background and the noise of an U-Bahn car makes an altogether different acoustical background than that of the San Bernadino Freeway.   Southern Californian English has a different tempo, rhythm and tune than Frankfurter German.   The desert air at sunrise demands a different music from that rising from the waters of the river Main.  This is the background against and with which I necessarily compose, even if it is now more memory than physical presence.   

   

More from the Dept. of Windmill Tilt

The director/actionist Christoph Schliengensief is planning to build a "Festpielhaus for Africa". More here (in German).

Schliengensief is someone I have found to be at his best as a talk show guest on late-night TV: as a passionate social critic and, originally, something of an outsider to the professional arts world, he has always been, at the least, articulate and entertaining, and makes an unfailingly sympathetic figure. His projects as a film and stage director, however,  inevitably appeared to drift off if not collapse altogether, and rarely in an interesting way.  Beginning as a school kid and devoted altar boy making homemade horror films and staging events in his parent's cellar, he rapidly came to some notoriety and was — and it must have been inevitable — ultimately caught, or, as the Situationists would have it, recuperated, by the Regietheatre industry in which the director's ego trumps all else, but, as his ideas have tended more to the naive than provocative, the results have been disappointing, spectacle but not spectacular.  It is probably the case that Schliegensief's particular skill set is best suited for more explicitly political actions, with the best example probably his organization in 2000 of a "Big Brother"-style container in the middle of Vienna filled with asylum-seekers, who were, one-at-a-time, voted out of Austria by callers-in, the whole staged to protest the entry of Jörg Haider's xoenophobic FPÖ into a federal coalition government.  

By all accounts, however, he is very easy to work with and he has been able to accommodate himself to the bureaucracies of some of the most complex theatrical institutions in Germany, including Bayreuth, where his Parsifal staging has come and gone with little ado.  This rather unique combination of public avant-gardist and efficient stage manager has made a Schiengensief production something of a safe choice for any theatre wishing to do their obligatory experimental production.

Schliengsief's new project does appear to have a new seriousness about it.  This is in part due to a new seriousness to Schliengensief himself, who has lung cancer and appears to be in rough shape. But the project is a problematic one and the way in which the director has wrapped it into his own autobigraphy does not make it easier to evaluate.  His plan is not to build a theatre that Africans are demanding, let alone need, but rather to build something that he, Fitzcarraldo-like, as an artist, will have built for Africa.  The blanket identity of "Africa" in this context is also problematic: it is not clear where precisely it should be built, although Schliengensief appears to have some preference for Burkina Faso, and it is unclear why and how this Festspielhaus and accompanying village should be received by or represent Africa as a whole and the question of what art, precisely, should be performed in the house when finished, is an open one, aside from a few remarks by the director that local forms should be presented alongside European imports.

On the other hand, when one considers this project in terms of costs and potential benefits, the costs appear to be modest enough that one is sorely tempted to suspend criticism and just say "why not build the damn thing and see what happens?"  Schliengensief has been careful to make sure that funding for the construction does not compete with funding for conventional aid projects, and the costs of construction in Burkina Faso, for example, with local, environmentally friendly, materials are extremely modest.    

   

 

Seasonal item

If you had to choose a Hallowe'en costume of a famous composer, who'd it be?  I'm about 16 inches too tall to pass for Richard Wagner and, as cool as his sideburns were, he had that weird under-the-chin beard going on.  Rossini, especially as he reached my age, is a more attractive idea, between the pajamas, the tournedos and, presumably, some other conspicuous signs of a sinful old age.  A choice more consistent with this particular holiday might be Gesualdo, sword and gun in hand (for more colorful and ghoulish parties, however, Gesualdo's cuckolding victim, the Duke of Andria, might make a more exciting apparation, bloodied and wearing Donna Maria Gesualdo's  dress.)  Or how about going soaking wet, as Robert Schumann, freshly fished out of the Rhein?  Or all in black velvet, as Erik Satie?   Perhaps because their images are still so fresh, contemporary composers don't appear to provide many more attractive alternatives, with Cage's denim uniform, fungi basket in hand, or a Brook's Brother-suited RCA synthesizer-operating Babbitt seeming harmless at best.  But perhaps, in the right jack'o'lantern light, encountering a Morton Feldman imposter or La Monte Young double might just cause a fright. 

Metzger, again

Too little of Heinz-Klaus Metzger's writings or interviews have been translated into English; even — or especially — when you disagree with him, he can be a pleasure to read. Here's a taste  (my hasty translation) of an interview from 2002:

"History has really shown that the emancipation of the dissonance was easier than that of women or of gays, let alone the proletariat.  It really happened easily.  Thus, it's no great wonder that certain revolutionary steps, in areas where they are easier to realize, get realized and even done well.  Somewhere in his Aesthetic Theory, Adorno notes, entirely as an aside, that even the most ingenious architectural plan must necessarily be left behind by a simple musical composition, because, by nature, it is already limited by practical concerns that a musical composition must not face.  In architecture, new structures should be built so that they do not collapse.  In music, it can be good it they collapse."

From another interview in the same year:

"Indeed, the power of music to change the world appears to be far less than the power of the world to change music.   That is the shocking recognition.  The Viennese atonal revolution achieved the end of the tonal hierarchy through the atonal idiom, as this was based not only on the equality of the tones, but rather also on the equality of all conceivable relationships among them. Thus, the superstructure for a real, long overdue revolution was taken away and remains in society, to date, absent.  For this reason the New Music still has no social basis and remains hanging in air."

"... that damned bourgeois age.  Actually, one should have been able to go directly from Marenzio and Gesualdo into atonality.  And then three hundred years of bourgeois  society and culture would have had no musical superstructure.  Mind you: One would have had the trans-bourgeois freedom and equality directly from the madrigalists — and therein, one must always consider Adorno's definition:  Equality would be the condition in which one may be different without fear." 

Heinz-Klaus Metzger

The critic/theorist/philosopher/musician Heinz-Klaus Metzger has died at the age of 77. Metzger trained to be a private piano teacher, then studied composition in Paris with Max Deutsch, a student of Schoenberg. Metzger's earliest allegiances were to the Schoenberg school and his theoretical bent brought him into early contact with Adorno.  The relationship to Adorno's work — more as sparring partner than as student (a collection of their correspondence is in preparation) — was far from simple and Metzger's article The Aging of the Philosophy of New Music (1957) — the title plays on the titles of an essay and a book by Adorno — was an important document of the Darmstadt moment, defining a critical break with prior musical practice that Adorno was never really able to comprehend.  

Metzger was one of the first public advocates for the work of Stockhausen, but also the first who would make a public break with the composer.   The disappointment with Stockhausen's development was largely replaced with Metzger's enthusiasm for the work of John Cage, whose work and ideas he promoted throughout years in which Cage and his music was otherwise unplayed in Germany.  Metzger founded, with his partner, the composer and conductor Rainer Riehn, the Ensemble Music Negativa, a loose grouping which played and recorded works by Cage and other American composers, including Feldman, Brown and Wolff.   In the late 1980's, the conductor Gary Bertini invited Metzger and Riehn to serve as dramaturgs at the Frankfurt Opera, and the two probably made a more significant musical and intellectual impact upon the house than Bertini himself, with their commission and production of Cage's Europeras 1 & 2 a landmark event. 

Metzger and Riehn also edited together, from 1977-2003, more than one hundred volumes in the series Musik-Konzepte, which was founded as a "polemic (Kampfschrift) against the prevailing absence of criteria."  This "series about composers" was, under their editorship, a unique instance of critical theory and solid musicology combined and, with a range in subjects from Perotin and Monteverdi through Cage, Nono and Lachenmann, also including some of the first serious scholarship and criticism about (then) less-well-known composers including Morton Feldman, Giacinto Scelsi, Hans Rott, and the Skryabinistes, and even included two important volumes on performance practice in Beethoven by Rudolph Kolisch.  

Metzger's own writings over the years (the most important are collected in a Suhrkamp volume Music wozu), were never prolific, declined in frequency in the later years, but he was always insightful.  About the Europeras, for example, which have truly beautiful orchestral music,  he cut to the chase with the observation that  he had always been told that there had been a diatonic and then a chromatic music, but that the instrumental parts — which were extracted from the instrumental parts to standard repertoire operas, many of them representing only inner voices and accompaniments — had made transparent how much of western classical music was composed of five, four, or fewer tones.

In the US, as a student, I had heard some vague stories about Metzger, some of them concerning his years in Cologne, where he, as an extended house guest (along with pianist David Tudor) of the artist Mary Bauermeister, was known to commandeer the bathtub on every Monday morning for long enough to read Der Spiegel from cover to cover, or at Darmstadt, where he provided virtuoso and edgy translation services in English, French, and Italian (Metzger was also a serious reader and collector of old Yiddish literature).   I had also heard some wild stories about Metzger's years with the composer Sylvano Bussotti and about his unique relationship to cash (he didn't touch it).  But it was Metzger's essay on Music in an Entertained Society that really impressed me, a coherent argument for quality in music and against its value-free commodification.

John Cage introduced me to Metzger in Darmstadt in 1990 and, though I never knew him very well, always enjoyed his slow-burning wit,  linguistic virtuosity and his mix of brilliance and eccentricity.  I was very happy to introduce him to the work of some of the American "new" musicologists and was honored that he asked me for a small essay for a Musik-Konzepte volume on the theme of progress.  But my favorite memory of Metzger was of a post-concert reception, in which we talked — both of use carefully avoiding the topic of the concert itself, which had not gone well — for a good hour about the decline in free reception food and what that said about western civilization.  

   

Forcefields and Constellations

What music does a composer respond to?  What music does a composer have to be responsible to? Is there repertoire of such importance that response in inescapable?  With so much repertoire available that an overview is increasingly impossible, why can't a composer just pick and choose arbitrarily among influences?  Or forget influence altogether and begin from scratch, from first principles, tabula rasa, with blissful disregard for the past?

Ron Silliman has an interesting post (here) about poets and influence and a "center of modernism" that seems, at first, to have a curiously strident historical determinism about it in its critique of a poet colleague's idiosyncratic version of history, but he saves his argument with the same turn that saves Adorno from only being the advocate for a particular and parochial program of German modernist musical hegemony and makes it possible to use Adorno's methods in fresh contexts, wholly unimaginable to Adorno himself*.   This turn is described by Silliman as a dynamic, but it seems to me to necessarily imply Adorno's notions of a forcefield and a constellation.  Any instance in any local music (or poetic) culture is necessarily located in a field of influences, and the attractions and repulsions that an individual working in this moment will have are in a dynamic relationship to this field.   On the other hand,  real work created in this field will appear as more or less fixed constellations of influences and connections and these concrete examples — which will have personal/individual and sometimes even arbitrary qualities — necessarily become terms by which subsequent worked is defined.**

I can't resist Silliman's money line: The polished poetics of Marianne Moore, as hard-edged as any Jeff Koons rabbit, seems to me the very denial of this dynamic.  But this is also where I disagree with him; a Moore or a Koons is a perfectly adequate term for defining the dynamic, even through negation, if that's all we want to do.  Isn't the bigger problem, however, with a Moore poem or a Koons rabbit, that, aside from being uninteresting, they are just not very good?   

_____

* It is always so shocking, for example, to read how blocked Adorno was about the important pull that French music — Berlioz, Debussy, for starts — played on German music. On the other hand, some forcefields can be surprisingly weak due to the taste and will of individuals: Couperin and Rameau lived within walking distance of one another for 11 years and appear to have never met.

**This strikes me as the real rough spot in dialectical accounts of  history:  as terms in your dialectic, you are stuck with history as it really happened, and the individuals, events and artifacts that really exist are inevitably far from ideal terms.  Ezra Pound was far from an ideal figure around whom modernist poety might be centered, but there he was.  Czarist Russia was far from an ideal place in which to launch a socialist revolution, but there it was.    

Layer Analysis

This is the season which is marked, in this part of Germany by the Zwiebelkuchen and, across the border in Alsace and Lorraine, by the quiche, and a very good season it is. For better or worse — mostly better, but let's face it, fingers have been cut and tears have been shed — the onion, Allium sepa, the lowly, bulbed, garden onion, the center of both these closely-related savory pastries, is the center of European cooking, indeed, virtually all of the world's cuisines. Sure, wheat and rye and milk, butter, and cheese and olive oil and salted cod and all manner of things that rise, rot, ripen, cure or ferment or take astonishing form or flavor when smoked, fried, baked, grilled, or boiled are each and all important. The truffle and the saffron thread, capiscum, ginger root, and the cardamom pod are miracles. But the onion provides a uniquely useful bulk and range of flavors upon which good things become better. What would Hungarian cooking, for example, be, without the countless recipes which begin: "fry a kilo of onions in lard"?

The onion is an object deserving some serious contemplation and reflection. As you peel, and slice, and dice, accidentally or purposefully allowing cell walls to open, breaking down amino acid sulphoxides and converting them into sulphenic acids, may your tears accompany the pleasure of exploring a structure of astonishing consistancy and integrity. We may joke, with ethnological wisdom, of a universe composed of elephants "all the way down", but onions really are all the way down, shoots composed of multiple, self-similar layers. I find that the appeal of this structure is less cosmological than aesthetic, and musically aesthetic in particular: works of musical depth reveal themselves to extend in time — much as each layer of the onion extends the bulk of the shoot — via rather elementary processes. This is true of form in Javanese music with the irama system uniquely relating tempo to density, or the prolongation and diminution techniques of early music or the classical tonality described by Schenker (or Stockhausen's formulas, as long as we're at it), and it's true of the self-similar structures ranging from Cage's square root form to numerous works by Tom Johnson.

Doubt

For some time, the series of landmarks I've been compiling for this blog (see the list of links in the sidebar) has been hung up over a single piece, Luigi Nono's 1980 string quartet, Fragmente-Stille, An Diotima.  As a marker for the European post-War avant-garde's final turn away from a dertain ideological and technical rigidity, it clearly has some importance and there are features in the music — the exploration of the lower threshold of audibility, the glacial tempi, Nono's use of a scale of fermati, the fragmentary continuity, and the incorporation of poetic-philosophical texts (by Hölderlin) into the score, as messages to the players —  which are extremely attractive.  However, I am not able to hold back a persistent sense of doubt about the piece as a whole.  Some of this doubt is because these features are romantic in character, a spirit not quite my own, and more of this doubt is of a technical nature, as the facile application of the slow and the low and the use of the arbitrary and fragmentary to suggest something of cryptic significance can lead to an impression of a profundity, when none is really there.  At times, Nono's score has had me convinced, but at other auditions,  more aware of my gullibility, doubt exceeds any conviction.  

A difficult position to have with regard to a work by a composer whose music was so intimately tied to (one or another form of) belief.   

Our ephemeral canon

One of the best-kept professional secrets among classical musicians is the wild state of affairs that persists in sheet music for even the most standard repertoire.  While meticulously researched editions of scores are readily available and new editions, based on alternative souces and editing principles, appear with some regularity, very often the sets of parts that an orchestra will have on their stands — whether an orchestra owns or borrows a set and which particular set they own or borrow often depends upon some delicate practical and financial considerations —  belong to older editions, at variance with the chosen score, and many sets of parts can only be brought into reasonable concordance with the conductor's preferred score through considerable amendation by the conductor, orchestral librarian and/or section leaders.  For this reason, orchestras with their own libraries work hard to conserve such edited sets and many of the best conductors make a point of owning their own sets of parts, hand-edited to their satisfaction. While, on the one hand, this makes for a certain amount of lively variety in at least the details of the repertoire, on the other hand, this leads to some fairly substantial existential uncertainties about much of the music.  I've heard, for example, that the set of parts of the Mahler First most often owned by orchestras — which is a cheap reprint of an edition with a lapsed copyright — has on the order of eight to nine hundred non-controversial errors which have to be corrected by hand before one has a set of parts that can reasonably be expected to function together.  While Mahler, who was liberal in the extreme with the quantity of his marking, may be an extreme case, the indeterminancy here should at least give some philosophical pause when one wants to point at The Mahler First, because, amid the variations in Mahler's own manuscripts and parts, amid the various scores and sets of parts, and then amid all of the interpretive and accidental variations that enter into real performances, there is scarcely anything to hold on to.  All that is solid melts into air, and all that...  

It's not the tune, it's the telling

This afternoon, I was sitting on a bench outside the stage entrance to the Frankfurt opera, waiting for my daughter to finish her rehearsal with the childrens' choir. It was about an hour before the evening's performance was to begin, so there was quite a bustle of musicians and singers and technicians and supernumeries coming into and going out of the house, in addition to the street noises behind me. Accompanying all of this was a low lyrical brass line that came out of a rehearsal room window, a cimbasso, in fact, the valved contrabass for the trombone section required for a lot of Italian opera repertoire. (If you haven't ever encountered a cimbasso in the flesh brass, suffice to say that it looks like something that Dr Seuss could've built, and sounds much lighter and agile, if somewhat thin, in the low bass register than a tuba or a low slide trombone.) The actual music that the cimbassist was playing during his warm-up was negligible, forgettable, just bits and pieces of warm-up tunes from opera accompaniments, but as an more-or--less continuous accompaniment to the unpredictable and transient sounds of all that activity around me, it was absolutely marvelous.

*****

Ron Silliman has a great post (here) on reading Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day.   He zeroes in on Pynchon's ability, as a storyteller, to weave so many strands and elements and characters together into a book which is more about that experience than about carrying a single plot forward.  Indeed, the most breathtaking aspect of ATD (like V and Gravity's Rainbow before it) is Pynchon's ability to let disparate threads resonate together at the level of theme and tone rather than the immediate connections formed by conventional narratives.  (Even in Mason & Dixon, in which Pynchon has a relatively conventional plot line to follow, the deeper coherence of the novel is not the tender story of the friendship and adventures of the two title characters, but much darker themes which Pynchon almost never allows to be explicitly articulated, making the book a curious experience of simultaneous good cheer and profound melancholy.)  

One of the real wonders to me, though, is that Pynchon's work remains in such a special class of work.  When one considers that it has been more than two hundred years since Tristram Shandy, in which Sterne definitively elevated storytelling above the mere act of telling a story, to the point of almost obviating the plot altogether, it is somewhat disappointing.

*****

I think that it was Hector Berlioz who definitively pushed music into this direction.   His idea of intermittent sounds remains astonishingly radical.  In the Symphonie fantastique, they punctuate the big tune at unpredictable, almost random intervals, yet their presence is essential. Indeed, when one thinks about it, the tune is just another tune, with very little special about it, but those accidental bits of accentuation and interruption make the tune into something auspicious.  Or in the Scène d'amour from Roméo et Juliette, in which the composer's heterodox harmonic practice renders the tonally banal into something very special: another melody, with nothing special at all about it, becomes one of the most effective and affective tunes in the repertoire, in that, in its initial appearance, it is harmonized wrong, an A major tune harmonized in c# minor; indeed, it is presented so strangely that the eventual presentation in the "correct" tonality cannot be heard as ordinary.  Like a good storyteller, Berlioz makes a tale told a million times interesting by the way he tells it.  

 

 

Holding back the snark

In the midst of the word he was trying to say
In the midst of his laughter and glee
He had softly and suddenly vanished away
For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.

I've begun a baker's dozen worth of blog postings in the past week, and abandoned all of them for their tone.  Readers of music blogs have plenty of places elsewhere to turn for daily doses of detritus, snark, surliness, or lamentations of worldly wrongs, so any of that on my part would have been superfluous. So, instead, here are a few items that have brought cheer around here:

(1) Debussy's meme. Here are the questions — in their original English — from a young girl which a 27-year-old Debussy answered; consider it a new internet meme:

Your favorite virtue.
Your favorite qualities in man.
Your favorite qualities in woman.
Your favorite occupation.
Your chief characteristic.
Your idea of happiness.
Your idea of misery.
Your favorite color and flower.
If not yourself, what would you be?
Where would you like to live?
Your favorite prose authors.
Your favorite poets.
Your favorite painters and composers.
Your favorite heroes in real life.
Your favorite heroines in real life.
Your favorite heroes in fiction.
Your favorite heroines in fiction.
Your favorite food and drink.
Your favorite names.
Your pet aversion.
What characters in history do you most dislike.
What is your present state of mind?
For what fault have you most toleration?
Your favorite motto.

(2) Here are excerpts from two favorite piano pieces, premiered on the same evening almost twenty years ago, sharing some surface features but moving into wonderfully diverse directions. Hauke Harder's 76 BPM, and my Planxty:






(3) Here's W.C. Fields as Humpty Dumpty in the 1933 film of Alice in Wonderland, one of the strangest bits of film ever made:



 

Robert Irwin

The work of artist Robert Irwin is essential; I find that the way he talks about his work is essential, too: a model of radical clarity. 

Satie...Milhaud...Bacharach?

An old friend recently pointed out this title clip from the 1967 film of Casino Royale, with a dare that I couldn't blog about it.  The movie is notorious as an incoherent mess, due to a production gone wrong in just about every way a film can, proving that the more large ego-ed filmmakers and stars you can gather together the worse the outcome will be.  It ought to be unwatchable for too many reasons to count, but somehow, almost every awful bit manages to contain some spark that keeps you glued and — the neural receptors for pleasure and pain being as proximate as they are — willing to endure more.   

With the major exception of Alan Price's score to Anderson's O Lucky Man!, I actively dislike pop music soundtracks*, but Burt Bacharach's score here is not one of the film's problems, and although the score (much of it played by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass) was very much part of the commercial music of the era, it has so many features that are untypical of mid-60's pop music that it ultimately has to be put into a category of its own.  First of all, it provides precisely the continuity that the movie's producers threw out when the last traces of the source novel were ultimately abandoned to the horde of actors, directors, and screenwriters who assembled this dog's breakfast.  If, however, with the passage of time, we can look — and listen — again to this film, not as a work of mainstream narrative, but as an effort — if only in part intentional — in '60s-pop-tinged avant-garde filmmaking, then the strengths of the score become even clearer.  

I will even venture that the block-like construction of the opening credits above reveals Bacharach standing in an authentic lineage, via his teacher Milhaud, back to Milhaud's mentor, Satie, and Satie's score for the ballet Parade, and the film insert Entr'acte, in particular.  While there are details of Bacharach's harmonic practice — modal progessions, chords with "added tones" — that immediately make a Satie-via-Milhaud connection, and the negotiation of all three composers with popular genres is obvious, the important shared features here are really formal, with the deployment, almost at random, of a limit set of blocks of distinct material without development in terms of tonality, figuration, or texture.  Where Bacharach here innovates is in the sound production, in which the various blocks are assigned distinctive dynamic profiles and discrete positions in the stereo field, an innovation in projecting the block structure which I find entirely within the spirit of the Satie-Milhaud tradition. 

_____

* For that matter, I'm skeptical about the whole notion of a musical soundtrack for film; Robert Bresson's rejection of non-diegetic music almost convinces me, but I can't be that strict and serious: as long as we grant films license to suspend disbelief, there will be a place for music in film.

       

No alibi

The party is drawing to an end and there's no better way to send — that is, push — the last guests home than hammering out a round of standards on the piano.  Pure Gebrauchsmusik.  As I run out the welcome clock with As Time Goes By, someone grabs my shoulder and asks, come on, Deej, isn't that the kind of music you really wanna write? and all I can do is shake the shoulder free and reply No, I really am writing the kind of music I wanna write...  

Composing for the Bassoon: An Interview with John Steinmetz

(I first heard John Steinmetz, as both a bassoonist and composer, during the last Claremont Music Festival,  34 (!) years ago.   Nowadays, he's one of the most active classical musicians in greater LA and along the west coast, and his composing and performing has been extended to teaching and lecturing (If you don't know it already, I strongly recommend John's essay on Resuscitating Art Music which is one of the most sensible statements of its sort.)  This interview took place, via email, over the last week or so.  John's answers were usually so complete and well-articulated that my questions were mostly superfluous.)  

DJW: We take the bassoon's range for granted, as a good utility player with both a distinctive bass and altissimo and a central tenor range designed mainly to blend. For new music, can we extend the extremes and,  in the middle, how much pitch flexibility is there for microtones,  
bending, or even slides?

JS: The bassoon is a treasure-trove of weird and wonderful sounds. Whenever writing extended techniques, work with a player. My favorite  pieces using extended techniques were composed with players' help. Working with a player ensures that the effects are playable and that they sound  expressive and musical. The player's involvement also reassures other bassoonists that the effects are workable.

Low Notes

Wagner and Mahler sometimes wrote low A for the bassoon (there must have been bassoons with that note, but nobody makes them now). The Nielsen wind quintet ends with this note. Players insert a cardboard tube in the bell to change the lowest note from Bb to A. Paul Chihara uses this effect in his Branches. The tube disables low Bb and messes with intonation and resonance of other notes.

There are fingerings for "pedal notes"--really multiphonics with a strong low pitch. (For low A, finger low F and lift the left hand 3rd finger. Lip down and give it lots of air.) On some bassoons with some reeds, some players can play low A, low Ab, low G, and maybe lower. The pedal notes 
sound much clearer when reinforced by another instrument. Very few players are practiced at this.

High Notes

Notes higher than D (2nd line in treble clef)--the highest note in the Rite of Spring bassoon solo--are possible, and the repertoire includes Eb,  E (Ravel piano concerto, Harbison wind quintet, Daugherty Dead Elvis) and even F (Wozzeck, West Side Story Dances). (According to legend, Bernstein wrote the high F in West Side Story as a prank, to tweak his friend who  
would be playing the bassoon part. But his friend saw the note before the first rehearsal, practiced it, and played it to spite Bernstein. So this prank note stayed in the  score. Some players just leave it out, because it is doubled by other instruments.) Some bassoonists practice these very high notes and can play them reliably, but some players struggle with them. On some bassoons they require special reeds and bocals (the metal neck) that may limit the  
effectiveness of other notes. Notes above D are simply less trustworthy, they are difficult to play staccato, and they are much easier to play when slurred from a nearby lower note.

Some players have figured out ways to play even higher notes, and you might enjoy including these exotic sounds if you're writing for one of those players. I recommend not writing very- or super-high notes unless you know who's going to play the music.

Bends and slides

The bassoon has lots of flexibility for bends and slides, but each note is different in its capabilities. (The bassoon, as Lou Harrison once quipped, is the only woodwind not spoiled by the Industrial Revolution. It never got modernized or standardized or homogenized, and this the source of its character and the reason for its quirky acoustics and illogical fingerings.) Some notes can be bent with lip pressure, some bend up but not down, some vice versa. In general, higher notes are easier to bend than lower notes.

Finger glissandos are easy on open tone holes (holes that are not covered with a key); slowly sliding the finger off the tone hole produces a slide of a half or whole step. Covered holes may produce slides by opening/closing the key slowly. Some players are good at slides and bends;  
others find them intimidating. (I have been surprised that the relatively easy glissandos in my Sonata scare some very accomplished players.) Some players have worked out ways to play glissandos that cover a wider range; write these only for such players.

Here are some easy slides that work upward or downward: in the bass staff,  from A to B, from B to C, from C to D, from D to E, from E to F--and the same notes an octave higher (upper E to F is iffy). These glisses can be joined to produce a longer gliss that may or may not be perfectly smooth.

Low Bb to B-natural can make a slide up or down by moving the key slowly.  Same thing for low B-natural to C.

High note finger slides sound beautifully plaintive. It's easy to slide between high B and C and between high C# and D.

Bending pitch is more challenging at soft dynamics, when wind pressure can't be varied as much. (Players control pitch through a combination of wind pressure and lip pressure.) Players who use stiffer reeds will probably have more trouble varying pitch.

Bassoons are designed with "sweet spots" so that notes sit comfortably at a particular pitch level where maximum resonance occurs; bending notes forces them away from that comfort zone, where they may not resonate as much. Often a note gets softer as it bends away from its accustomed place; players have to compensate for this in order to maintain an even dynamic,  
and that compensation is unfamiliar to most bassoonists, although it's not too hard to learn for somebody interested.

Jazz bassoonists Paul Hansen and Michael Rabinowitz have worked out ways to bend and scoop notes appropriately for jazz styles. To do this, they have evolved flexible, responsive reeds and playing style.

Microtones

Microtones are easy on many pitches, using altered lip or wind pressure or using special fingerings. Changing a pitch microtonally may also change its timbre. Very few players practice playing consistent, repeatable microtones, but all experienced players are used to shading the pitch of a note to fit its context.

Timbre changes

The bassoon can vary the timbre of most notes by opening and/or closing keys farther down the bore. This has the effect of adding or removing harmonics. This doesn't work for notes below low D. Alternate fingerings, available for many notes, can also be used for timbral effects. The low Eb and Db keys, used for resonance in many fingerings, can be opened or closed to alter the timbre of many notes.

DJW: Am I right that if you want specific sounds — like multiphonics — which are highly sensitive to the combination of player and instrument, some caution is in order when using them in pieces which you expect will be played by players you can't work with personally? This  
suggests that composers might usefully think of the bassoon very differently in solo and ensemble, particularly orchestral, contexts.

JS: Yes, I think this is a useful approach, and it also makes sense because special effects in orchestral writing are usually part of a big  texture, and so may not require as much specificity as the more exposed sounds in chamber music or solo pieces.

But, as usual, it depends. For me the first question is something like "What's the expressive purpose?" That helps me to know why a sound matters, or what matters about it. And when I know that, I can more easily figure out how to handle the technicalities. For instance, sometimes the mood or color or energy of a piece requires a very particular multiphonic sound. In that case, the composer must work with the player to find out how to produce a sound that fits the context, and if the piece is intended to be played by various people, then it will be important to use a sound that is easy to reproduce.

In other cases it's possible to give partial information about a sound and let the player work out how to do it. You can ask for a multiphonic that includes a certain pitch, or that has a certain quality ("noisy" or "includes some low sounds" or "gurgling, unstable" or "like a blender").  You might even be able to say "any multiphonic" if that suits the expressive purpose.

There are some multiphonics that any player can get, such as low F plus the right thumb Bb key. Other multiphonics are fussy and take some practice. Still others work only on some bassoons. There are books and charts about this stuff, but composers have been misled; always have a  
player try these things. One starting place is an old article of mine called "A Few Easy Multiphonics for Bassoon"  (These multiphonics are not as universally easy as I once thought, but some of them do work for many players.

DJW: How about the contrabassoon? It's gotten some attention from composers lately as a solo, even concerto, instrument. Is this a specialist instrument or will every professional bassoonist have access to and be able to double on it? What is a robust, reliable range for the  
contra? I've had the impression, in comparison to the bassoon, that there seems to be a lot less standardization and even some substantial recent innovation. Are we going to be hearing more from the contra in the future than just an "octave lower, octave slower" bassoon?

JS: Many bassoonists play contra, but not all. Not every bassoonist has access to a contra, and even those who double vary greatly in their comfort with the instrument. You're right that the instruments themselves also vary wildly; some are hard to play, and others work really well. Some have keys that are missing on others, so some intervals and trills are more difficult on some instruments. On the other hand, we now have some really terrific contra players, many of them members of symphony orchestras, with beautifully maintained instruments, sometimes with customized improvements. These people play with gorgeous sound, beautiful intonation, and technical elan. They have already started influencing the future, by commissioning and premiering works that feature the contrabassoon.

The instrument is designed to supply contrabass notes, so in my opinion it sounds best from (written) low Bb up two octaves. Because the contra usually plays a supporting role, most bassoonists are not experienced with playing solos on it, or with playing high notes. Notes above the staff tend to sound stuffy and can be unstable, although there are players who sound beautiful up there. The solo in Ravel's Mother Goose goes up to written G above middle C, and ensemble music in Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony goes higher. Recent virtuoso solo pieces have the contrabassoon screaming and wailing all the way up to (sounding) middle C. Jon Deak calls for contrabassoon multiphonics in Hyde and Jeckyll, but as I recall he lets the player  
choose. (And it's hard to tell the difference between a contra multiphonic and its low notes!)

During the 20th Century, composers sought expressive intensity by using instruments' extreme registers and special effects, but remember that all instruments have a "normal" range in which they are the most expressively supple, and in which the fullest, most resonant sound is available. Using notes and effects outside the normal range can be striking and highly expressive (I use a lot of this stuff in my own music), but in my opinion the most promising expressive potential is found in the normal range. I think this is especially true of instruments like the contrabassoon that were built to serve a particular function. (I'm also thinking of all those high-register double bass solos that overlook the gorgeous and absolutely unique sound of the instrument's low notes.)

I've heard about a new instrument, the contraforte, that a few players are trying. Apparently it is louder and has a clearer sound. We might be hearing more of those in the future.

DJW: I've recently heard that some players have taken up doubling on the French bassoon, with its different bore and keywork, for French orchestral repertoire. Is the difference between the systems too subtle, or might composing especially for the French bassoon be of interest to composers?

JS: The French and German bassoons diverged more than 100 years ago, and have developed separately since then. Although they play an overlapping  repertoire, they sound quite different and have different strengths. It  looked for a while like the French bassoon might go extinct, and many of  us thought this tragic. That instrument has a compelling sound, a superior cantabile, and a fleet and fantastic high register. Fortunately the French bassoon still has its champions, and as you say some orchestra players are now doubling, playing the French instrument for French repertoire. It's a wonderful instrument and it might very well be of interest to some  
composers.

Here's the Jolivet bassoon concerto played on French bassoon and on German bassoon.

DJW: With many composers coming from the keyboard, or even computer samples, we don't always get articulations for wind instruments right.  Moreover, there's a raging discussion about under- or over-marking scores. Do you have any suggestions about markings we have to make or markings we ought to be cautious about?

JS: In general, notation should help performers understand and realize the music's expressive intent. A mark that clarifies intent is good. A mark that helps the player to clarify intent for listeners is good. If the intent is clear without extra marks, don't add them.

It's not so simple, though. The marks available are insufficient to communicate the subtleties of phrasing and articulation that are possible, so we composers need to notate our music in a way that helps the player make good guesses about how to help this particular music to sound its  
best. In my experience as a player, seeing the notation is sometimes not enough; I may have to play and hear the music before I know what it needs. To make matters worse, many marks have ambiguous meanings or multiple meanings, and the same marks mean different things to different instruments. Even in standard repertoire people don't agree about what certain notations mean. There's a lot of confusion built in.

Here's my over-simple answer about how many marks to use: use enough to help the performers know what the music needs, and don't use any more than necessary. Sometimes adding marks helps; sometimes adding marks creates trouble. This is an art, not a science, and musicians have different tastes about how much information they want to see, and what kind. When you get stuck or confused, ask yourself about your musical intent.

Perhaps (this is just a guess) some music reveals its needs and character relatively quickly and easily, often on first playing, but other music becomes expressively clear only after a great 
deal of practicing and careful decoding of intricate notations. Both kinds of music can sound spontaneous and beautiful, but the second kind relies on lots of marks and lots of practice to make its intentions clear. In any case, there's no one right way to solve the notation problem.

Have a player play what you have written to see if it means what you thought it meant.

In standard repertoire as well as in new music, players often play differently than the notation instructs, in order to better serve the musical intent. We will slur unslurred notes, tongue notes under slurs,  shorten or lengthen notes, and so on. This is usually good news, because  even if the composer makes a notation mistake, the player will still try to serve the music.

Slurs. I think composers are most often confused about slurs. On strings and keyboards, slurs convey information about phrasing, but on the bassoon and other wind instruments, slurs are primarily instructions for articulation. The first note of a slur begins with a consonant--the tongue creates a "ta" or "da" by touching the reed--and then the notes under the slur are connected without tonguing, like notes sung on one vowel. When a new slur starts, the player makes another consonant. So if you want notes smoothly connected, like a melisma on a single vowel, put them under a slur. It's okay to slur across two notes of the same pitch; the player will tongue gently to separate the notes but make them sound smooth. Check with a player to make sure your slurs are possible; some note combinations are difficult to slur.

Articulation. An unmarked note is started with the tongue. The player won't know how hard or gently to tongue it (what consonant to use, or how accented to make the attack) and so will probably use a middling articulation until figuring out what the context calls for. If you want a  
series of notes to be tongued very gently--almost slurred--use a slur with dots or dashes over the notes, or just put a dash over every note. Because these notations have multiple meanings, add words that say "very smooth" or something similar. (For string instruments, slurred staccato produces notes with space between. Wind players looking at that notation will be  
confused, because sometimes it means "play this as a string player would," but sometimes it means "very gentle articulation.")

Weight. Accents indicate heaviness of attack. This is done either with harder tonguing or extra wind, or both. A dash can mean "lean on this note," but sometimes it means "make the note long." It's okay to put an accent or dash under a slur; the player will connect smoothly but give
emphasis with the breath.

Length. The bassoon is capable of a great variety of lengths, from a super-short staccato to a very long, smooth articulation that is almost like a slur. In between are more possibilities than there are notations.  Use words to indicate the expressive character you want, and this will  
help the player to know how short to play the notes with dots, or how long to play the notes with dashes.

An unmarked note is usually held for its full value. If you want the note shorter, then either make that clear in the character of the music, or put a dot above the note, or notate a shorter value. A dash sometimes means to play a note full value. A dot and dash together mean "a little bit shorter."

Dynamics not only indicate loudness; they are also clues to expressive character.

DJW: Finally, is there any recent repertoire for bassoon, as soloist or as ensemble instrument, that stands out for you as examples of getting the bassoon right?

JS: This is a great question! There are many, many ways to get the bassoon right, since the instrument is versatile. Here are a few pieces I have  enjoyed playing or hearing. Maybe that means these are well written for the bassoon. These are just a few that come quickly to mind:

Mario Lavista, Responsorio for bassoon and two percussion. Recorded on "Bassoon Images from the Americas," Albany Records, TROY 608. Expressive writing that includes evocative multiphonics.

Donald Crockett, Extant for bassoon and chamber ensemble. Published by MMB music. Xtet plans to record this.

John Deak, The Bremen Town Musicians for wind quintet. Short audio excerpt available here.

Wind Quintets by John Harbison, Elliott Carter, and David Maslanka. Also Carter's woodwind quartet, Eight Etudes and a Fantasy.

There's a very pretty bassoon solo in the middle movement of John Adams' Naive and Sentimental Music.

Alex Shapiro, Deep for contrabassoon and electronics. On "Notes from the Kelp," Innova 683. Audio clip available here.

Alex Shapiro, Of Breath and Touch, for bassoon and piano. On "Beck and Call," Crystal 846. Audio clip here.

Bill Douglas, Partita for Bassoon and Piano, published by TrevCo.

Gernot Wolfgang has written several terrific bassoon pieces.

David Maslanka, Music for Dr. Who, for bassoon and piano. A short piece that takes the bassoon into some unusual expressive territory, with very expressive use of some extended techniques.

For good or ill, my ideas about the bassoon inform my compositions for the instrument. See the list here.

Also, to hear another set of possibilities, check out the jazz bassoon playing of Doug Hansen and Michael Rabinowitz.

On the Impossibility of Imagining the Erotic Charge of the Classical Minuet

Social dancing has its functions.  One of the most powerful of these was made vivid for me one Saturday night, twenty years ago, in a village in the Southwest of Ireland.  The dancing floor was crowded the entire evening (my wife even persuaded me, awkward, 6'4" me, to join a dance or two or maybe even three or four, Murphy's Stout being an excellent lubricant of inhibitions). This being a routine event in the community, many of the dancers were very good, but one young pair clearly stood out for the excellence, duration, and intensity of their dancing.  When I pointed them out, one of my cousins explained that they had been engaged for several years, but had had the date set back three more years, as the fiancee's older sister, long considered not to be the marrying type, had suddenly become engaged herself, thus pushing their date back on the calendar, as her parents would now have to save up for an additional wedding.  It was clear that the dancing of the young couple —  a pious and chaste pair — was a prime vehicle for the sublimation of physical aspects of their relationship that had for them been delayed by the older sister's sudden retreat from an expected spinsterhood.

In preparation for a small commission for chamber orchestra, I've recently spent some time with classical symphonies, particularly earlier works of Haydn and Mozart.  The sense of the contrast between the more discursive sonata movements with the song-like slow movements and the cheerful finales is all familiar and sensible to me, but while, in principle, the triple metre dance movements, the minuets, should make sense, I have no real access to them.   In their subdued manner, I would like to imagine them playing out some of the same sublimated eroticism I watched on the dance floor in Ireland, but the damn things are SO gentle and subdued — even when Mozart pulls one of his asymmetric phrasings off — that such an image is impossible.   No wonder they switched to scherzos.

An age of repertoire, not of works too big to fail

I'll risk some historical over-generalization and make the claim that music moves between periods of rapid innovation, marked by singular works exemplifying the particular innovations, and periods of consolidation, in which the technical gains of the innovative era are refined and developed as elements, conventions even, of musical repertoires.   The extreme experimentation of the late 14th century, for example, was followed by the consolidation of the 15th; the radical innovations of early opera were soon enough followed by the establishment of a fairly strict regiment of conventions. 

I will further claim that we are now well into a period or consolidation, one in which both the most apparently traditional and radical strains of repertoire are better characterized by features broadly shared rather than by striking individual stylistic or technical traits.   

Which brings me 'round to the new music-political news of the day: the New York Philharmonic announcing a $10 million gift from Henry R. Kravis to support composers-in-residence and a biannual commission of some 250 grand.   This is clearly good news, and the selection of Magnus Lindberg as the first comp-in-rez under the gift is a solid choice.   However, the decision to award a single very very very large commission for a single work of new music is not so good.  

As a commenter to Lisa Hirsch's fine blog , Iron Tongue of Midnight, complains, it would have been much better to slice that commission in, say, ten parts, which would have had a more significant impact across the new music community and forced the orchestra to put at least that many premieres on their calendar.  Instead of putting all of their money on a single composer, there would be a greater field of opportunity for innovative work.  As it is, a commission of this size — basically unheard of in the new music world, in which, let's face it, 25K is a large commission — puts incredible stress on the success of a single piece by a single composer.  It literally becomes a piece that is too big to fail.  

Unfortunately, pieces which have been built up as too big to fail have a pretty lousy track record of near misses (Repons) and total failures (Montezuma, anyone?), and when expectations are so high and so much money and prestige is at stake, commissioners will feel obliged to make safe, familiar choices among composers and composers selected will feel obliged to play it safe with their works.  But in an alternative environment in which newly-commissioned works of music would be more frequently encountered, the whole calculation of risk falls another way and, while there will certainly continue to be room for commissioning composers who are already known quantities on the circuit, there will be room for some unconventional choices as well.  Moreover, it seems to me that this approach would also be a better fit for our current age of repertoire, as both the diversity and commonalities of the various strains of new musical production cannot be represented by singular examples;  the old, institutionally-nourished masterwork ethic is no longer operative.

     

How much should you know?

There is a radio interview somewhere on-line with Milton Babbitt, in which Babbitt seriously slams Paul Hindemith for Hindemith's idea that a composer should have some facility on all the instruments for which they write.  Babbitt's objection was that the limitations the individual composer has with regard to playing particular instruments would carry over to unnecessarily limiting the way one composed for the instruments.  

While I'm all for the eliminating unnecessary limits on a composer's imagination, I also think think it's useful to know more rather than less about how instruments work, but I don't think that either Babbitt or Hindemith has quite got this right.  Babbitt runs awfully close to defending a position of knowing less rather than more while Hindemith's position, valuing a certain established body of technique — craft — above all else, runs into Homo Faber territory,  more engineering than art.  I think rather more to the point is the idea that becoming familiar with an instrument as a composer is not only to determine how facile or difficult particular tasks on instruments (or voices, for that matter) might be, but to have a more intimate qualitative relationship to the instrument.  

This is illustrated by a story which Alvin Lucier likes to tell about commissioning a choral work from Morton Feldman.  Feldman asked Lucier about the range of the Brandeis Chamber Choir, which Lucier directed in the 1960's, specializing in a contemporary music repertoire. Lucier indicated that he had sopranos who could go so high and basses who could go so low. Feldman protested that he didn't want to know the extreme possibilities, but he wanted to know the range, meaning the range in which the choir had a consistent quality of sound, a fundamentally different idea and one that could only be answered based on the experience of working with closely with the particular choir.  Likewise, on instruments, it's useful to know how a sound will be produced because it tells you something musically valuable:  the tones using the open fingerholes on a flute or bassoon have a different qualities and possibilities from those using a lot of keys, for example, or the tones around the break between registers on the clarinet, which require some caution as they use either the shortest or longest lengths of tubing, and — especially with amateurs — can often speak quite distinctively as one moves between those lengths;  it's useful to know that a horn player, when muting by hand, may have to modify the pitch by adding a valve;  or knowing at least the basics about string fingering, and how it differs from the violin to the cello to the contrabass, which can be very useful in making passagework more clear...  Now, good players may well have musically acceptable end-runs around the technical problems composers pose, but I think that it is more responsible to the practice of music to keep these to a minimum.  Composers can, periodically, demand some magic tricks from players but if we want a constant stream of miracles in our scores, we have to be responsible for them ourselves.  

Most importantly, I suppose, when a composer knows something about the playing technique of a particular instruments, she or he has a better basis for being able to communicate with musicians.  Having just a bit of shared technique and technical vocabulary may often be enough to completely open up the dialogue with players, and the best opening is often when a composer can indicate with some precision that he or she is at the practical limits of his or her knowledge or ability and is respectfully seeking collaboration with a skilled and knowledgeable colleague, a useful step towards making better music together.  

     

Gift giving?

Do you find it tough to buy gifts for the composer in your life? Here are some suggestions:

(1) Twelve-tone dice. Especially suited for the composer who wants to combine 12-tone and chance techniques. Not suited for a composer with an interest in just intonation.

(2) A Suzuki Bass Melodeon.  Just the thing for someone who wants to add a bass voice for his or her melodica consort.

(3) A Richard Binder Music Nib for Pelikan Pens.  Yes, some of us still do it by hand, and just hearing the words 1.1-mm extra-smooth, very wet stub with slight added flex is pillow talk to the dedicated composer-calligrapher.

(4) The Noligraph.  I've blogged about it here before.  It's really just five ballpoints lined up in a little holder, but still a perfect stocking stuffer for the composer who likes to sketch on the sly on the backs of unpaid power bill envelopes, cocktail napkins, and the aprons of diner waitresses at half-past two in the morning.

(5) A Morgan motorcar .  To hell with that other stuff, I'd like one of these, please.

 

Composing for the Trumpet: an Interview with Joe Drew

(Trumpeter and composer Joe Drew specializes in new music and, under the nom de blog, Jodru, is the most prolific contributor to the AnaBlog associated with the Analog Arts Ensemble.  Satie once claimed that "with six trumpets you can do anything".  The possibilities which Joe describes here suggest that with one trumpet you can do almost anything.  I predict that, after this interview, there will soon be a slew of pieces featuring extreme pedal tone half-valve glissandi with plunger mute. This interview, which took place via email, is the second in a series.)

DJW: A generation or so ago, if you wrote for trumpet, that meant a Bb instrument, maybe a C, and some players might have a cornet as well. Now, it is not unusual for players to be ready to play Bb, C, D trumpets, piccolo trumpet, with some players specializing in historical instruments (natural trumpets, the F trumpet of late romantic music, even keyed bugles) and to play flugelhorn as well as cornet. What is the basic set of equipment that an orchestral player will have? What about a new music specialist?

JD: Every orchestral player will have a Bb, C & piccolo trumpet (pitched in A & Bb). Most students own all three horns by the 2nd or 3rd year of their undergraduate studies. That trio of horns will be all most gigging trumpeters need. If you are seeing an American orchestra performing German music on rotary trumpets, those players most likely do not own those instruments. They're probably owned by the orchestra or a school where one of the trumpeters is on faculty. 

A very common misconception about the C trumpet is that it's favored by orchestral players because it is brighter than a Bb. It isn't. The transpositions are much easier on a C trumpet. The American orchestral sound is so bright that somehow that basic sound and the prevalence of the C trumpet got conflated into this myth.

The next horn that most people would buy is an Eb/D. The D trumpet is most commonly used on the 3rd part in Baroque pieces, and the Eb is what most people prefer to use on the Haydn or Hummel. Owning an Eb/D also gives you more transposition options in an orchestra.

It is not at all unusual for orchestral trumpeters to have a whole variety of horns for different pieces. Gerard Schwartz liked to play the Haydn on Bb. Some guys would never dream of touching the Brandenburg on a standard piccolo. I've been to auditions where people lugged along a G trumpet just to play certain excerpts. Most players stick to that basic trio, although there is no universal system.

For many professional trumpeters, if a piece required them to use a flugelhorn, they'd have to borrow it. Same with cornet. Neither instrument is used enough for trumpeters to feel that they have to own one. That being said, it is not uncommon for a trumpeter to own all 6.

Historical specialists tend to play both the natural trumpet and dabble in the cornetto, although the players who do both equally well are rare. Most tend to focus on one in particular. In an ideal world, every trumpeter would learn the natural trumpet, because it strengthens your fundamentals so thoroughly.

A new music specialist could play most of the received repertoire with that basic trio of horns. You have to get pretty deep into the specialty before you start to require things like quarter-tone valves and double bells, but increasingly, you are going to see more and more trumpeters with that gear. I'm currently setting aside shekels so that I can add a quarter-tone valve to my flugelhorn, for instance. I've put it off for too long!

For the record, I have seven horns, but instead of the Eb/D trumpet, I have an Eb with 4-valves and a regular D trumpet.

DJW: I'm a fan of the old virtuoso cornet literature. With the growing use of the flugelhorn, is the cornet still an option for composers?

JD: The cornet definitely is an option for composer, even though they can't expect every trumpeter to own one. Aside from those old virtuoso pieces, the most famous piece that requires a cornet is A Soldier's Tale, and most people play all of that repertoire on trumpet. Though the trumpet and cornet are identical notationally, the sound is quite different, and a trumpeter can't just pick up a cornet and automatically sound good on it. If someone is going to play A Soldier's Tale on cornet, they are going to spend quite a bit of time getting comfortable on the instrument. Notes just lay differently on a cornet, and in that piece especially, the minor differences between the trumpet and the cornet can really trip you up.

The flugelhorn is much easier to switch to from a trumpet, although the sound difference is enormous.

DJW: What is a secure standard range for professionals, and how secure are the possible extensions both down- and upwards? If in doubt about the range is it more diplomatic for the composer to write out ossias or to let the player decide what to do? What endurance issues are raised by using extreme registers?

JD: The secure standard range really is what you read in the textbooks: from the low F# below the staff to the high C above the staff. A composer can expect any professional trumpet player to have that range. On the high side, it's not asking too much to go another whole step higher to the D. The low side is a different story. Most trumpeters can comfortably play a half-step below the F#. There are two common orchestral excerpts (Carmen Prelude & Ein Heldenleben) which require a pedal F that most trumpeters play by kicking out their valve slides and using false fingerings.

The possible extensions are where writing for trumpet gets highly variable. Since we're talking about classical music, I'm going to stick to what classical trumpet players can do. A lead jazz trumpeter is capable of extreme high notes which are not possible for most classical players. When I was at Yale, the Philharmonia was doing a piece by Timothy Geller, and we were all dying, because he'd written these unplayable parts where the trumpets would scream on high F's and G's for long passages. He was surprised to learn it was unreasonable, because he'd written it with the input of a lead jazz trumpeter.

I've attached a chart which outlines what is reasonable for extremely proficient professional classical players. On the high side, the high F (F6) is not unreasonable to ask. The G above that is probably pushing it. This upper extension on the standard range is either going to be very secure for a player, or it's not. Chances are, if they can get those notes, they're secure up there.

The pedal side is where it gets interesting. The pedal range down to C3 is accessible enough that a composer can ask for any of those notes from a professional. This range takes preparation to play accurately, but it is very secure. Below that, and you'll draw a blank with most trumpeters. However, these notes are not hard to get, and any trumpeter at any skill level can learn to play them in about 5 minutes! From F#2 to E1, the lower lip actually has to be outside of the mouthpiece. Since this is not a standard practice, composers shouldn't expect any trumpeter to be able to do it, but it is a wonderful sound. It's worth working with a trumpeter to get it. And just in case anyone thinks this is some kind of kooky 'new music' extended technique, just listen to this recording from 1902.

DJW: That's fantastic — you really understand why Robert Erickson named his solo piece Kryl. If the composer is in doubt about the range, is it more diplomatic to write out ossias or to let the player decide what to do, switching instruments for example?

JD: Switching instruments will give you a different sound; so, a composer should decide what's most important in the piece. Classical players like me will often use the piccolo to cheat on lead parts. To us, it's a fairly accurate imitation of the nasal sound of a jazz lead player, but put it next to the real thing, and the difference is immediately recognizable.

An ossia is certainly one way to go. Trumpeters will already take things down an octave without being asked! Diplomacy shouldn't be a concern. As all composers know, if they ask for something abnormal, the musicians will think that they're 'an idiot'. That's just a fact of life. However, professional musicians are also grown ups, and they're used to working around abnormal demands in a score. The best thing to do is make your intentions as clear as possible on the written page and deal with a player's limitations in person.

DJW: Are there leaps between registers we can ask for with some confidence, or are there some that should be avoided at all costs?  

JD: Leaps from the register below middle C to above the staff are difficult to execute on sight. A little practice makes short work of them, though. The standard range of a trumpet is small enough that leaps aren't too big of a problem. As Patty said about the oboe, we're not a piano. The leap from low C to high C is executed by a dozen facial muscles that are constricted by a metal ring that's less than an inch wide. So, it's a much more physical leap on a trumpet than it is on a piano. A composer should simply bear that in mind, however. Just because it's harder for us doesn't mean it should be avoided.

DJW: What endurance issues are raised by using extreme registers?

JD: Fatigue on the trumpet is a result of the pressure from the mouthpiece on our lips. The metal restricts the flow of blood. Imagine doing a bicep curl with a metal band clamped around your bicep. It would be a lot harder, right? Well, that's what playing the trumpet is like. As we go higher, the opening in our lips (aperture) gets smaller. The longer you play, the more swollen & tired your lips get, just as your legs wear out during a race. After a while, they wear down to the point where it becomes impossible to maintain the small aperture you need for the high notes. To return to the weight lifting analogy, it's the same as how your arms get rubbery after a weight lifting session. After long periods of exertion, our lips get rubbery too, and it's just harder to exert the finite control over them that we need to in order to play the instrument. 

The endurance of players varies widely. It's difficult to give a standard guideline for a composer to avoid wearing out a player. The key thing is to give us time to recoup. Sometimes, just a half beat where we can take the horn off the lips a bit helps get the blood flowing back in, and we're good to go again. 

There is no endurance factor for the low register. The only thing to bear in mind is that if you ask a trumpeter to play in the low register for an extended period of time, he will kind of be stuck down there. When you play 2nd on an entire classical symphony, you've been in your low setting for so long, that it's not easy to play in the high register for a while.

DJW: Let's move on to mutes. Straight, Cup, Harmon, Bucket, Solotone, Practice, any of the above in Metal or Fibre, playing in the stand, or just using your hand: what is the basic spice rack that every player will have, so that, for example, an entire section will use the same mute?

JD: Straight, Cup, Harmon, Plunger, & Practice. Every trumpet player will have one of those, and if they don't, they'll be willing to buy one to play your piece, because they know they'll need it eventually. There are tons of different mutes, and one trap to avoid is writing off-brand. When a composer asks for a mute that's not being made anymore or is really hard to track down, it just reduces a player's incentive to perform the piece. You may love the sound of the obscure mute you've discovered, but bear in mind, that not everyone will be able to find it.

DJW: The standard notation for muting is a binary + and -, on and off. What's the best notation for transient muting (moving between open and closed) or muting with a specific rhythmic profile?

JD: There really isn't a standard notation. Every player will be familiar with 'con sordino' and 'senza sordino'. A composer is always best suited by settling on a notation that's clear. If someone is writing a lot of mute changes very quickly, which is a nice effect, the notation would need to be concise. A 'cs' or + work just fine. If someone is giving specific rhythms to the mute, just put it above the staff (see below).

DJW: Since each mute affects the spectrum in different ways, a muted trumpet is not automatically a _quieter_ trumpet (indeed some mutes are at their best when used with strongly changing dynamics). Relative to the open trumpet, what are the effective ranges of the mutes? Which mutes hide the player more in a mixed ensemble and which make the instrument more penetrent?

JD: You make an extremely important point: mutes do not make a trumpet softer. If a composer writes 'con sordino' without specifying a mute, most trumpeters will put in a straight mute (I prefer a cup mute). Neither the straight or the cup mute deadens the sound of a trumpet the way a mute on a violin does. It simply changes the color of the sound. A muted trumpet can still be deafening. A straight mute makes the trumpet so nasal that it actually cuts through the ensemble, much like an oboe. The cup mute mellows out the sound. It's definitely easier to blend with a cup mute than a straight mute.

Composers tend to think that a trumpet must be muted to blend in with softer instruments in a chamber ensemble. No, no, no, a thousand times, no! A trumpet is capable of playing extremely quiet dynamics akin to subtones on a clarinet. (If you'd like, I could record an example). When I'm working with composers, I often find that they only have a mute in because they want the trumpet to blend with other instruments at a quiet dynamic. They are always surprised to learn that the mute is not necessary for that! Moreover, the straight mute, in particular, changes the sound of the trumpet so drastically that it strikes me as almost insensitive to ask for it just to have less volume. A composer who writes 'con sordino' is really asking for a timbre change; so, they should give a little more thought to the marking than, "I want the trumpet quieter".

The Harmon mute will soften the sound significantly and the practice mute completely deadens it. So, those are mutes that genuinely quiet the instrument, but again, the timbre change with them is extreme. Composers who are writing for mutes should make sure they are getting the timbre they want. The player can adjust his volume on his own.

You can play any mute over the entire range of the instrument. Mutes like Harmons and practice mutes make the extreme registers too difficult to play extensively. Other than that, there's no real limitation for a muted trumpet, particularly with the standard straight or cup. And I hope when composers catch on to the magic of the extreme pedal register with a plunger mute, you'll see a lot more writing for it! The trumpet can sound like a didgeridoo or a herd of elephants down there. It's amazing.

DJW: Speaking of the didgeridoo, how about using the mouth cavity to reinforce particular overtones? Is this as effective with the trumpet as with the low brass? What is the best notation for this — vowels?

JD: We are dealing with much smaller spaces than the low brass; so, the differences tend to be subtler. However, the mouth cavity is an extremely efficient way to manipulate the sound of the trumpet. There is no standard notation for this, and a composer would need to work directly with a trumpeter to figure out the range of possibilities. The difference between an 'a' position and an 'e' position of the tongue yields a very minute change in timbre, but for some composers, the difference would be fraught with drama. Articulation differences are much more acute. Say "ta da ga ha ka tee dee kee ghee" and then imagine that on a trumpet. Berio's Sequenza is a great place to start discovering the difference.

DJW: One real advantage of trumpet players is that they usually have a hand free. What extra work can we give a trumpet player?

JD: Bear in mind that playing one handed is stressful. There are certain pieces where I play for a long time with just one hand holding the trumpet, and I need to do some serious stretching afterward.

Keeping with the phonetic theme, composers should look to Berio and Stockhausen for just how rich this tonal palette can be. With the right mute and hand position, the trumpet can produce almost any phonetic sound. Cootie Williams was brilliant at making the trumpet speak.

Samuel Adler's Canto has the trumpeter tap on the instrument with the fingernails. There are all sorts of things we can do with our left hands. On a lot of my concerts, my left hand is fiddling with knobs while I play. That's a whole other ball game, but signal processing is definitely something that could use some compositional guidance. It would be great to have composers thinking about the trumpet that way.

DJW: Joe, off the top of my head, I get: turn pages, mute, change mutes, make percussive sounds, adjust or remove the mouthpiece, adjust the tuning slides or spit valves, remove the slides...

JD: Yes to all of this. Removing the slides while you are playing is probably the only thing that wouldn't work too well, because they aren't that easy to remove. However, there are pieces where the valve slides are removed beforehand and the effect is wonderful.

DJW: What can a player do with a half-valve (the valve is pressed 1/2 way down so that the portion of extra pipe associate with the valve is open in parallel to the ordinary length of pipe)?

JD: Anything. Literally, anything. After the unawareness about the dynamic range, the most common thing that surprises me about composers is that they are unaware that the trumpet can gliss. You can gliss over the entire range of the instrument with a half-valve depressed.

The half-valve also creates all sorts of beautiful timbre changes. For instance the B on the 3rd line of the treble clef sounds like an old lady moaning when played with a half-valve. Like Cootie with his plunger, we can imitate almost any sound with our half-valves. Talking about all this makes me realize that trumpeters really should get all this written down for composers. It's unfortunate that you have to work so closely with the performers to learn what an instrument can do, but that's how advances are made.

Berio asks for a few things in the Sequenza which just didn't work well, and he didn't find that out until Thomas Stevens got his hands on the piece. The reason Stockhausen's music for the instrument is so well-written is because he was working, often in seclusion, with his son. Come to think of it, those pieces for Marcus do represent a sort of manual for trumpet technique that would serve most composers well.

DJW: What about articulations: how much notation do you like to see on a page? I think that many composers have a weakness, coming from the piano especially, when it comes to slurs and articulations on other instruments.

JD: I don't have a personal preference. I think all composers have had experience working with gigging musicians who really prefer to have all the information they need on the page. If you care about the articulation, write it in. Trumpeters aren't used to seeing detailed articulations anywhere outside of method books, and as professionals, we get really lazy about it. So, if you get hyper specific, expect some grousing behind your back, but there's no reason to avoid it. We can deal.

DJW: What's the current standard for vibrato in trumpet playing?

JD: There is none.

DJW: Can players reliably respond when a composer asks to turn vibrato on or off or specify the width and speed of the vibrato?

JD: Yes. Trumpet vibrato can be regulated with extreme precision, regardless of how it's produced. A specific request aside from something basic like 'molto vibrato' will probably be new for most trumpet players, but there isn't a professional trumpeter who couldn't produce a rhythmic vibrato. A flutter tongue is another story, though!

DJW: Aside from the Stockhausen — of which you're a great advocate — what are some other examples of state of the art composing for trumpet?

JD: I know, too much Stockhausen, right? The thing is that he didn't just write a lot of music for us. He created an entire operatic role for us, like Brünnhilde or Siegfried. In my experience, both trumpeters & composers learn so much about the instrument from the pieces he wrote. Spending even 5 minutes with a piece like Oberlippentanz expands their perspective enormously. So, Stockhausen is a great starting point for contemporary trumpet.

Peter Maxwell Davies continues to write wonderful, very difficult music for the instrument. Mark-Anthony Turnage gave us a lovely little piece. Although I don't find it very interesting musically, Olga Neuwirth wrote a nice concerto based on a solo piece which gives us quite a bit to do. These are all straightforward concert pieces, and thank God we are getting new repertoire in that arena, because let's face it, what we have is crap.

John Williams tried to write a new standard concerto for us in the 90's, to replace the Haydn, and it's warmed over Arutunian, which is abysmal to begin with. For a composer who's interested in writing a trumpet piece, if they check out our standard body of repertoire, they're going to hear a lot of garbage. It's no wonder that composers have a hard time getting inspired to write for us!

Some of the most exciting music now is written with the new sonic awareness of the instrument that composers like Stockhausen and Berio have given us. You see a lot of effect-driven pieces, which, for me, are not too successful musically, but they are much more enjoyable listening experiences than something like the Halsey Stevens sonata. Also, they are infinitely more fun to play. You are also seeing a lot of music written for hybrid instruments with quarter-tone valves and double bells.

These are all very exciting developments, but we're still waiting for some composers to come along and turn all this into great music, if you know what I mean. As with anything, a composer can get lost in all the possible effects of a trumpet and lose the thread of what they want to say with a piece. If you want to make a melodic statement, use our best models: 2nd movement of the Hummel, Enesco's Legende, and Scelsi's Four Pieces. If you want to make a sound sculpture, there's no better model than the Sequenza.

I also think one of the basic truths of contemporary brass music is that it all happened in jazz first. The basic model of composers co-opting things that they admire from jazz trumpeters has served us very well.

If we're going to close (pity because it's been a lovely conversation), I would just put out a basic plea to composers that the trumpet is vastly more expressive than you've been lead to believe, and clearly, we need better music!

And here's a brief list of pieces that have really done wonders for our repertoire:

Berio, Sequenza X (The piano is so often forgotten here. using the piano as a resonator is a wonderful device.)

Stockhausen, Michael's Journey Around the World (This is an encyclopedia of extended trumpet techniques.)

Scelsi, Four Pieces for Trumpet (A great marriage of effects and music, and a wonderful example of how melodic one note can be.)

And others worth checking out:

Rebecca Saunders, Blaauw
Peter Eötvös, Jet Stream
Toru Takemitsu, Paths
Robert Erickson, Kryl

Peter Maxwell Davies, Sonata for Trumpet in D

N.B. :  In the original version of this interview, the score by Timothy Geller was misidentified as a work by Martin Bresnick.  

Composing for the oboe: an interview with Patty Mitchell

Patty Mitchell,  oboist/English Hornist is well-known online as the author of the the blog oboeinsight, a lively diary of playing, teaching, the mysteries of reeds, and almost everything else that goes into a professional musician's life.  As a composer, I find it very useful to listen in when instrumentalists and vocalists shop talk about their instruments and music written for them, and Patty's blog has long been one of my favorite sources of high-level oboe intelligence.  (This interview, which took place by email over the past few days, is intended to be the first of a series of conversations with instrumentalists about writing for their instruments.) 

DJW: Let's talk about range. We all know to take caution about squawking low Bbs and love the high f in the Mozart quartet, but what are the secure ranges for amateurs and for professionals? Are there breaks between registers or particular note combinations that ought to be avoided? And what about leaping between registers — avoid it, ration it out, or no problem?

PM:Aw, range ... that's always an issue, isn't it? I LOVE a low B-flat. But if you want to guarantee it's appearance writing a pianissimo B-flat would be a very silly thing to do. We can't mute our oboes at that point. So I would never suggest a pianissimo B-flat unless you are having us move down to it and having it as a final note without an attack. In other words, slurring down to it (as long as it isn't from a B which can be problematic because we have to slide) isn't as big an issue. It's the attack of a note that makes it especially difficult. Mozart, in his Piano Concerto #21, has the 2nd oboe playing triplet low Cs at the end of the piece that are killer. With the older oboes that wasn't an issue. But now? We mute the darn thing! (I just stuff my cotton swab in the bell) Then it's not so bad. Dvorak wrote low notes and I despise him for it. We can mute all but the low B-flat and low B. Then no sound will come out. Some players remove their bells to play Dvorak and that seems to help them; it throws the balance/weight off for me, so I don't do that.

A "secure range" would be from low B-flat (while keeping in mind what I wrote above) to a high F. But we can play higher. I expect my students to play up to high F by the time they are in high school. The sooner they learn those notes, the easier they are. Asking us to play them pianissimo is, again, more than a little difficult ... but Ravel sure loved to do it! (Listen to the first entrance (?) in the second movement of his piano concert (in G). Killer hard, but SO lovely when it works!

Leaps can be problematic. If you want a donkey-like sound, though, we're your instrument! (Listen to Richard Strauss and the stuff he gave EH ... lots of donkey there!)

Bad fingering combos: yes, but it's tricky to explain. Low B-flat to E-flat ... can't do it quickly so don't ask us to, but we can do it ... we have to get a bit of "nose grease" (you'll see an oboe player quickly put his/her little finger up to the side of the nose and just get it a bit greasy ... really!) so we can slide. Sliding TO the low B-flat from the E-flat is easier than the opposite, but both can be done ... (Tchaikovsky makes the EH do that several times in The Nutcracker). The same occurs with low B-flat to low C. Low B-flat to low B (or vice versa) is really mean to do. (It's slightly easier to do low B-flat to low B, as we can put our finger on both keys and just pivot the finger to get off the low B-flat key, but it's still not nice ... and NEVER ask us to do that several times in a row!)

If you had a fingering chart you could see that our pinkies have a lot of keys ... that's when things can get tricky. But rarely have I found a composer gives me something absolutely impossible. (But yes, it happens.)

For amateur players, I'm going to guess anything below about a D and above the high D will be ... well ... perhaps less than pleasant sounding. Depends on the player! There are some extremely fine amateur oboists, so one can also keep that in mind!

Pitch and dynamic range are a big issues with some amateurs, ... I suggest you don't write unisons! It's just a bad idea. I LOVE unison oboe when it's in the mid-range, but you're really asking for it unless you have very good players.

I think the biggest thing to understand about oboe is the attack issue. My students are taught early on not to "note test" because we are ALL so tempted to do that. Once we get started we are just fine. It's the darn attack that scares us. After all, we are working with two skinny pieces of wood that we have to cajole into vibrating! (WHO thought of this crazy instrument?!)

DJW: When you write that, after the attack, "once we get started we are just fine," how long can an oboist really continue playing? Breathing and endurance for the oboe are completely different from the other winds: when they end a long passage, they're gasping for breath, but oboists often end by having to exhale a mouthful of air held under pressure. Historical examples don't help much on this topic: there is baroque music in which the oboe has to play continuously and more recent music in which the oboe is used more discretely. So, without resorting circular breathing a la Josef Marx, how long is too long?

PM:You're right. We don't run out of oxygen ... we run into carbon dioxide. It's a totally different problem than any other instrument. Of course how long we can keep going does depend upon the player, the reed, the oboe ... but take a deep breath and then blow it out between your teeth, hissing. How long can YOU go? That gives you some idea of how much air we can put through those darn reeds!

I can play very long phrases. Tchaik 4? I can do the solo in one breath if necessary, unless the tempo is far too slow.  (He can too.)  I've never run out of air when I've had solos, actually. Now if we have a lot of lengthy phrases eventually we start to get awfully tired because we not only are exhaling and inhaling when we play, but we occasionally need to relax our embouchure. So there's that as well.

But if you were ask for an exact time ... geesh, hard to say! I'll have to time myself. Mostly, I hate the tremendously long phrase not because of ME but because of my listeners. They get so distracted by our not breathing ... even going so far as to not breathe while they listen! In timing myself just now with a few long things ... 50 seconds works fine for me.

I would say "too long" is when it sounds like a gimmick, when some will resort to circular breathing (remember I can go longer than some), or when it makes everyone so distracted they forget to listen!

Clear as mud, eh?

DJW: Composers love to have oboist double English Horn, and sometimes switch between the two horns with some frequency. The reeds have got to be ready and the instruments don't like to be played completely cold inside, so what is a reasonable amount of time to leave for a switch during a piece?

PM: I've had to move from oboe to EH (or the other way 'round) so quickly I have to play while moving to the stand to pick up the next instrument (thank you Mr. Mahler). I like to have a few measures at least. If I have a huge EH solo I prefer not to have to start on it cold, after playing oboe (thank you Mr. Dvorak and Mr. Berlioz). Sometimes when the EH solos are so huge, I opt to have them hire a second oboist and just play the EH part. It depends on the work. (When we did Roman Carnival Overture and New World Symphony last year I did that.) So if you DO have a player switching, I say "Please think about us and let us play a few notes before a solo on the given instrument!" But of course so many past composers didn't care about that. Go figure.

DJW: In addition to the English Horn, there is an increasing interest among composers in the "other doubles": oboe d'amore, piccolo oboe, baritone oboe, heckelphone. Are these so rare that composers should save them for commissions from players who own the instruments and specialize in them, or are players in general taking a greater interest in them with instruments available for lease when needed, or should we forget about them because oboists or concert organizers will see the names of the instruments and immediately strike the piece from the program?

PM: Oboe/EH double is expected. With the others composers need to realize that some will have to rent the instrument. Most of us are happy to do so because of the extra $$. (Where I work the first double pays 25% more, the second and all following adds another 10%.) I've never even heard of a piccolo oboe being played. Can't imagine where one would get that! D'amore and baritone oboe are rentable around here. Heckelphone would probably require an owner, so then you run into trouble. At least here. Some orchestras look at things like this and nix 'em because of the extra cost (some orchestras would have to rent them for the player). It really depends on the group.

DJW: Although some instructions are now well established, like fluttertongue, and I can always look up possible trills in reference books, I'm a bit intimidated about writing "special effects" for an instrument which I don't play myself. When it comes to composing for the oboe, it's alternative fingerings, microtones, glissandi, and multiphonics which seem to vary wildly from instrument to instrument and player to player that seem most difficult. Some composers go ahead and specify fingering or playing modes in detail, others are more impressionistic in their instructions. What is a good — meaning robust — middle path for composers to use?

PM: I played Berio's Sequenza for oboe eons ago. At the time I owned a Loree. Many of the fingerings didn't work for me; they were based on Holliger's oboe, which wasn't a Loree (I can't remember if it was a Marigaux or a Rigotaut, but it was one of those two). So yes, so much varies from instrument to instrument. And reed to reed, as well. I had to find more flexible reeds than I was using at the time to get some sounds. I'm sure I was off on others.

This is a topic I'm not sure I'm capable of answering well; I seldom do these techniques.

I CAN tell you pitch bending is pretty much a breeze. Glissandi are not because, unlike clarinet, we don't have open hole keys any longer. Some can do it; I can't. I also can't fluttertongue, as much as I've tried (we actually don't flutter the tongue; we "gargle" instead), nor can I double tongue (sigh ... it's the reason I can't audition any longer for orchestras!).

I guess I mostly prefer to get a composer's opinion about what he/she wants and I try to satisfy it. Fingerings can be given as suggestions, but as you know they don't always work!

DJW: You mentioned muting before. Is this something composers should pay attention to, or is this something that should be reserved to players discretion, to help with balancing dynamics?

PM: I've never seen a composer request that we do that. I only do it to make it less stressful to play pianissimo low notes. But if a composer wanted something muted that would be fine with me. Of course muting higher notes doesn't really help, since our sound comes primarily through they first open keys. With higher notes the open keys are toward the top of the instrument, so our sound is coming out there.

DJW: What special attribute or feature does the oboe have that you would like to bring to the attention of composers? Is there something we overuse or underuse or, maybe, some trade secret we ought to know about to help make better music for oboe?

PM: Hmmm. I'm not sure about this one. It does seem like composers have us labeled as the "make 'em cry" instrument ... but I love to do that so it works for me!

I'll have to think on this one a bit. I'm usually fairly happy with what I get ... although some contemporary composers write either ridiculously impossible or ridiculously easy stuff. (Funny how that goes!)

I HATE HATE HATE the composer whose computer played the rhythmically impossible stuff perfectly and is baffled when we aren't like a computer. And I go crazy, too, when I can tell the composer plays piano and does stuff that is so easy on piano and hard on oboe. (Like having us do an large interval over and over very quickly. Sure, we can do that on piano ... but oboe is a bit trickier!)

DJW: Piano playing may often give a composer a false sense about articulations on other instruments. There are raging debates among composers about how much to notate and while I'm mostly on the under-notate side of the debate, I believe that there are some articulations, particularly slurs, that are often essential for players. From your experience, what markings do we omit or commit too often?

PM: If you want something articulated a certain way, it is essential that it's notated! I play exactly what a composer writes. I didn't even realize some would leave out articulations. It's not like strings where, with their bowings, articulations are then added. We see it, we play it. We don't see it, we don't. The only time that rule is broken is with pop music, since it's often notated oddly in any case.

DJW: Thank you! This should be a lot of help!

Favorite Topics: Erickson

I avoid recordings, but sometimes I can't resist:  here's a newish recording of Robert Erickson's East of the Beach, in many ways typical of his later works, in the use of favorite topics or textures: an opening droning section,  a more melodic central section (here, very nicely, the melodies, in a kind of fake counterpoint of simultaneous variation — a favorite west coast style, used by Erickson, Harrison, Leedy, and many others — are nicely orchestrated with the melodic material carried by the strings and the winds providing the background continuity by sustaining tones grabbed from the melodies) and finally a cheerful hocketing section.   The title is very nice, too, especially as Erickson lived on the west coast, so that East in the title is the direction inland, not towards the water, and the piece does, appropriately, get more built-up and populated as it goes on.

If you don't know Charles Shere's book about Erickson and his music, Thinking Sound Music, you should.  Also, this article on the late music ( online here) by John MacKay is very much worth reading.

The trajectory as signature

I'm sure that not the only one who will drop everything in order to read a just-published novel by Thomas Pynchon.   The latest is Inherent Vice, a weird noir set in L.A. in the Spring of 1970. As soon as the book was opened — and to the great frustration of a family who wanted a little attention —  nothing of importance got done until it was read, word for word, straight, from cover to cover.  There is no other writer who can do this to me, and I can now count at least a half-dozen weekends lost to a new Pynchon, and at least twice that many lost to re-reads.   My admiration for the author's technical skills and imagination is unbounded, and the pleasure in the cool but caring voice of Pynchon's narrators (who regularly allow us to forget the distincton  between the ridiculous and the sublime*),  equally so, but explaining how he is able to do that is a critic's job, not mine.  So here I'll just note one feature of Pynchon's writing that has been a profound influence on my compositional thinking:  all of his novels begin in motion, with examples that would make any Calculus teacher proud of trajectories loaded with precisely the energy required to sustain the rest of each book.   Inherent Vice is typical:

She came along the alley and up the back steps the way she always used to.

The upward motion clearly sets things in play, and you know already that the book is going to be all about why she came up those stairs, and we already know some history ("the way she always used to") and, moveover, it is far from clear that the horizontal motion is forward motion, an important bit of information indeeed, for, as it turns out, very little in the book that follows will be straightforward.

Here are the opening trajectories of the other novels:

 Christmas Eve, 1955, Benny Profane, wearing black levis, suede jacket, sneakers and big cowboy hat, happened to pass through Norwich, Virginia. (V)

The arbitrary nature of Profane's journey is carried through in the novel in which every locale chosen seems equally happenstance; in V. even events of great circumstance are passed through rather than experienced.

ONE summer afternoon, Mrs Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party... (The Crying of Lot 49) 

What does it mean to come home from a Tupperware party?  Nothing less that a return to a life far less banal and ordinary. 

A screaming comes across the sky. (Gravity's Rainbow)

The path of the rocket, is everywhere mirrored in this book:  in the title, in the pattern's of Tyrone Slothrop's sexual excitement, and in the reading difficulty curve of the book itself. 

LATER than usual one summer morning in 1984, Zoyd Wheeler drifted awake... (Vineland)

The novel Vineland itself does nothing but drift, with all of the characters awakening into a much more sober era.  

Snow-Balls have flown their Arcs,... (Mason & Dixon)

Which is almost a parody of the opening of Gravity's Rainbow, with apparently gentle snowflakes in place of rockets.

And, of course, in the immediate predecessor to Inherent Vice, Against the Day, the Chums of Chance in their airship launch, in naive good spirits, with: 

..."Up we go!"... (Against the Day)

In technical terms, this is not a particularly complex way of setting a novel in progress, but when you get it right, it is inherently powerful.  In many ways, it's like the signature or motto opening of many classical works or the hook of popular music, but Pynchon never allows his signatures to only be hooks upon which events are strung along.  Rather more like a seed, these have genetic material which implies a history and suggests a future path, and Pynchon makes it clear that the scenario initially implied need not be satisfied and thus, in every moment, "the" future is continuously being recalculated or reset, and every variable may vary.  Thus, the environmental influences on the development of the seed are considerable, indeed they combine with the unpredictable dynamism to provide the interest which allows a tiny initial idea to be sustained far beyond any exhaustion in its inherent interest.   Moreover, as readers are always aware of the finite dimensions of the book as whole, we are prepared to pay attention to and take measure of the forces which will inevitably halt the trajectory, whether in a crash or a gentle landing or just a drift away.  

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* If you just want a taste of Pynchon, I suggest first the episode with Byron the Bulb, the ultimate resistor (or that little light which is going to shine, all the time) in Gravity's Rainbow, then, if you are strong enough, chapter nine, set in German Southwest Africa, of V.

Melodica!

Melodica!*, the first international online anthology of new music for melodica is now open for visits, via a provisional title page,  here.  The collection includes 17 18 works for melodica solo or ensemble by 12 13 composers, including: Jon Brenner, Stephen Chase,  Kieran Daly,  Paul A. Epstein, Graham Flett, Ben.Harper,  Aaron Hynds, Jukka-Pekka Kervinen,  Kondo Kohei, Nomura Makoto, Ushijima Akiko**.  There is considerable variety here, with a stylistic range from neo-classicism to minimalism, and from virtuoso use of extended techniques (I expect that Mr Flett's score, for example, will define the extended technical resources of the instrument for some time to come) to more conceptual/theatrical projects or  explorations of acoustic phenomena. 

This project is not yet closed to new contributors and some promised scores are, indeed, still outstanding, so check in at the site again in the future.  This has been a great experience: getting to know the work of some new colleagues as well as becoming familar with the history, technique and potential of an underappreciated instrument.  I hope that these pieces will have more exposure in the future and be widely played, that the melodica will receive more compositional attention and, not least of all, that this be a spur to more online collections of playable music for a diversity of resources, styles, techniques, and themes.  Being present, e.g. online, is a necessary first step to letting the world know about the liveliness, depth, and diversity of the new music.

Please also visit A Winter Album, an online collection of works for solo piano.  Contributions are still sought for A Spring Album, of percussion music.

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* aka "melodica factorial". 

** I hope that I am excused for including two pieces of my own, the second of which was a late effort intended to make up for the absence of a late-50's/early-60's virtuoso serial bebop melodica piece, a bit of music history fiction along the lines of "what would it have been like if Severino Gazzelloni had played the melodica instead of the flute?"

The Last Melodica Reminder

This is one last reminder to send in your scores (PDF format, to djwolf -AT- snafu -DOT- de) for the first international online anthology of new music for melodica solo or ensemble.  This is shaping up to be a remarkable collection, to say the least.

[Addendum: If you're thinking of making a late entry, here's one idea I had, complete with title, but couldn't quite make work and you are free to use it: HAND TO MOUTH, for one melodica, two players, one of whom is assigned to the keyboard while the other manages the mouthpipe, allowing for some rhythmically complex cross-articulations. ]

On the fly

Alex Ross has a very good article on traditions of improvisation (ornamentation and cadenzas especially) in classical music.   The article is subtitled "reviving the art of classical improvision" and Ross means it literally, as in bringing back the dead.  And there really is a sense that the improvisatory tradition is not only moribund, but was murdered: Ross quotes conductor Will Crutchfield's characterization of a Caruso cadenza so widely duplicated as to have become the canonical cadenza for the aria into which it is inserted as the “death-of-tradition”  and Ross himself describes Beethoven's written-out cadenza for the Mozart d minor Concerto as helping to "kill" it.   

I'm of two minds about improvisatory elements in music.  I agree that they can make a performance more fresh, more lively and, in effect, open up the musical text, but that doesn't remove the composer's responsibility to compose a score that is, on its own terms, fresh, lively, and rewarding of repeated play and listening.  Also, the simple inclusion of improvisatory elements does not automatically make the performer an interesting or musically convincing improvisor.  Further, it is one thing to consider improvisatory practices which are part and parcel of a musical style, in which the particular turns and figures chosen will be understood rhetorically in terms of that style, and it is quite another to consider improvisatory elements in the context of new music, in which the stylistic background radiation is highly diffused.

Nevertheless, the project of re-opening the musical work to the extemporaneous has been an important part of the radical music.   The examples of music which invite or require improvisatory elements — Christian Wolff's cuing pieces, the variable forms introduced in Feldman's Intermission 6 and widely expanded upon, particularly in the European avant-garde, or the animation of small cells of music common to many pieces in the West Coast experimental tradition, or Richard Maxfield's concert works using soloists improvising against tape works based on their own recorded improvisation, for example — continue to be rich in potential for new music.  There is nothing (yet) like the thick tradition of French baroque agréments, ornaments for which a composer can appeal to a body of figures and their shorthand notation  as well as a tradition for their appropriate placement within a piece of music which will be understood by a broad community of musicians as the point of departure for improvisation, but there are still recognizeable elements of a tradition in the works in which, for example, the cues of Wolff scores from the 1950's are echoed in the game-structure works of John Zorn or in the networked improvisations of small computer-based ensembles.

The project of recovering historical examples of improvisation is musicologically interesting and musically useful if, at the very least, it brings alternative cadenzas and ornamentations into the concert hall.  But performances of these revived examples are still not a restoration of improvisation to classical music, and the repetition, from a notated transcription of a historical example of improvisation is definitely not improvisation either.  Early music performers are, in general, further along this route than mainstream classical players.  The best recorder and gamba soloists today are gifted, inventive improvisers as well and when they play a set of divisions their fidelity to style is so high that it is often very difficult to know where composition ends and improvisation begins.  One is clearly hearing "the piece", but "the piece" has also been made anew through the extemporaneous elements. 

A parallel project, of recovering, through transcription, landmarks of more recent improvised music, raises lots of questions.  Again, this is musicologically interesting and a player can learn a lot from it, but as successful as a particular improvisation may have been, the composer/improviser is fallable, and more than likely to harbor some doubts about some or all of it.  But more critically, isn't simply reproducing the transcription out of the spirit of the initial enterprise?   It would be entirely possible, for example, to play a transcription of a single performance of La Monte Young's The Well-Tuned Piano, but a performance of the transcription would not be responding to the particular set and setting in which the original performance unfolded and would not be open to the possibilities for alteration that the composer always allows himself.  The better way, it seems to me, is to learn the piece as the composer prescribes, rehearsing with him directly until such a point that one has the confidence (one's own as well as that of the composer) to make one's own realization.  Even more so with works of music in which the composer's own open notation is available: while it would be possible to learn to play a Christian Wolff piano piece by transcription of a David Tudor recording, the composer's notation was specifically designed to create an indefinite number of realizations, so freezing the piece around an old Tudor recording is introducing an unwarranted restriction on the work itself, the avant-garde version of the "death of tradition."  The notational tools for a very precise, closed musical text are readily available to composers and when a composer makes a deliberate decision for a score in which elements are not all precisely or decisively described or are to be defined in real time by the performer, then it is a plain misreading of the score's notation not to reserve these elements for the improvisational domain.     

       

Choice comments

The Feuilleton in today's Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung led with an article about the phenomena of audio guides in museums.  The article closely mirrors the discussions online and elsewhere about Twittering realtime program notes during concerts.   The critique of concert twittering has mostly centered around annoyance that audience members might be looking at their cell phones instead of "really paying attention" during the concert.  I think that critique is somewhat misplaced, as the deeper issue is not the degree to which Twitterers and those who sit next to Twitterers are distracted but the degree of uniformity and control which the particular narrative medium reinforces.  For popular museum exhibitions, the most important function of the audio guides is probably their ability to regulate the speed of visitor traffic, as earplugged visitors do tend to move to the next room whenever the little voice tells them to move.  I like traffic jams as little as anyone and so I appreciate this, especially when the technology allows the listener to linger or rush to the next gallery at will.   (Actually, I find the choreography of a crowd of gallery visitors suddenly taking flight to a cue inaudible to me to have a certain post-Judson Dance beauty; though there isn't much to be said for a concert audience concentrating on their crotches, there might even be some beauty in the faces of an audience lit by the glow of little cell-phone screens).

However, this practical function for a high-traffic exhibition comes coupled with the packaging of an official-seeming narrative or interpretation of the images they see and, presumably, Twittered concert commentaries will do the same, while not even having the traffic cop function of the gallery commentary.   At present, as far as I can tell, concert twitters and museum audio guides alike represent only single points of view.  (An especially odd case is that of the conductor who pre-programs a Twitter feed to narrate, or even justify, his or her own performance.  There's so much meta-weirdness in that.)  There's no market choice before a concert as to whether the comments will come from a stuffy old-fashioned musicologist with the standard bits about standard forms and a handful of favorite anecdotes or from a new musicologist with some formal deconstruction and semi-appropriate pop-cultural references accompanied by some really juicy anecdotes or from some experimentalist with commentary chosen via chance operations from a library of thousands of possible program notes... the possibilities are endless.  (Much more interesting than the conductor's auto-narrating Twitter is the possibility of audience member's own Twittered messages.)  I want my relationships to art in a gallery or to music in a concert to be intimate, and if I wish to share that intimacy, I want to choose my partners, even my virtual partners.  No, I'm not going to take a Twitter feed in concerts or put one of those earphones on in a gallery until I have some substantial choice about the voices I might hear.    

[Addendum:  I posted this and — with a typical slow uptake — realized that I was not even considering the compositional potential of a live textual commentary to an on-going piece.   A composer who has some facility with text could surely find interesting ways of working in parallel, oblique and contrary motion with the music.  Moreover, there is no necessity that all audience members receive the same Twitter: there could be multiple composed textual counterpoints, perhaps even generated by live chance operations.  This could be a useful way of bringing new life to the open, polyvalent work of music we that was so celebrated in the '60s. EVEN BETTER THAN THAT:  Let's combine the museum guide and the concert twitter.  How about a labyrinthine work of music, the parts of which are distributed through a series of halls and galleries, through which audience members are individually guided, each getting their own sequence of musical materials and text? The possibilities are exciting.]  

Further Excerpts from the Minority Report

(1) "... nothing wrong with failure.  Experimental music is all about accepting the risk of failure.  And I'm not just talking John Cage-experimental.  You want to know an experimental musician who failed?  Wagner failed, that's who.  Wagner failed bigtime. He wrote music dramas that are unsingable and unstageable.  You don't believe me?  Name one production in which the singing and staging get all-round praise.  I'm talking praise from card-carrying Wagnerites.  When the vocal and orchestral writing demands voices that don't exist, and probably, without some form of amplification, will never be able to exist and the staging requires old-fashioned stage magic that no one believes in anymore, you've got a big recipe for failure... ...being a Wagnerite, even a Perfect Wagnerite, means not just the ordinary operatic suspension of disbelief, it means the perpetual suspension of complete satisfaction, the Tristan chord extended forever, having to be satisfied with small tidbits and morsels because no performance will ever succeed as a whole, voices, orchestra, acting, staging.."

(2) "...unable to write a piece of significant length.  Not every piece needs to be as long as the Hammerklavier or the second Feldman quartet or The Well-Tuned Piano.  And we certainly don't need programs filled with twenty-to-thirty minute pieces.   The Debussy Prélude is ten minutes long, the faun's orgasm included.  Ten minutes.  Ionization isn't seven minutes long and it's still a "sock in the jaw". The great dirty secret of the 10-minute-plus and the 20-minute-plus piece is not that they are automatically more significant, it's that, once you get past the 10-minute mark, the piece earns you more points with GEMA or ASCAP, and it happens again at 20-minutes.  We need more shorter pieces.  Serious music needs to reclaim the three-minute piece from pop music. Make the world safe again for the three-minute piece full of depth and wonder..."

(3) "...and the he started in on some business about 'Can the artist really draw?' He said that making the music I made was a sign that I couldn't write purdy, tonal music, "real music," in a traditional, classical style. Of course I can.  I'm a musician.  I've played purdy, tonal music in traditional styles all my goddamned life and I went to conservatory and learned to imitate dozens of styles of purdy, tonal music.  I wrote hundreds of counterpoint exercises and four-voiced chorales and then the canons and fugues and minuets and sonata movements and then I graduated to grading thousands of harmony and counterpoint exercises.  If that's drawing then, yeah, I can draw, but maybe I want to paint, and print and sculpt... ...the belief that no music that goes beyond the technical and stylistic of some arbitray point in the past is hopelessly pessimistic, necrophilia... and that ain't purdy..."

     

Residua

A pleasant surprise sometimes repeats itself: while working on one piece, I discover that I have actually made at least one more along the way.  Recently, sketches and ideas for a quintet soon leaked or mutated into or revealed themselves to be better suited for another ensemble, another piece, in this case a small trio for woodwinds, tentatively named Came and Went, in which a three-player scoring pattern (not quite a Beckett-Gray code, as a B-G code where n=3 is impossible) is played six times, so that all the possible assignments of each instrument to a line in the pattern are used, but the whole is interrupted by moments of repose, not-yet-tonal harmonic passages like that above, which contrast with the patterned passages, which are more ambiguous harmonically (disfunctional-but-not-yet-atonal as is my want) but also more clearly melodic, albeit with a melody well-distributed among the instruments, a gentle hocket.  The quintet is still not done, but — dreaded dynamics aside — Came and Went is all but done and gone.  

An unexpected piece is a delicate matter for a composer.  It was made it out of musical curiosity, not in response to a commission.  On the one hand, there is a temptation to file it away, as a bit of a reserve for a time when a commission is pending but the muse is not around.  On the other hand, when you like the piece and the ideas in it have already settled in your mind and you think players and listeners might like it, too, why not let it go?  

       

Bona nox!

I sometimes think that catches, like limericks, divide into two categories: clean ones and good ones.(Click image to enlarge.)

Orchestra: Organize yourself!

Mr. Cage had difficulties with orchestras, because orchestras tended to have members who found it difficult to be responsible when asked to distinguish between freedom and license. Performances of Atlas Eclipticalis and Cheap Imitation by very well-known orchestras turned out very badly because of this. Nevertheless, in spite of these experiences, Cage, the optimist, persisted in trying to get orchestras to do more rather than less, and to mature as social organizations while doing it.  Etcetera, a piece in which players not only volunteer to be conducted*, get to chose which conductor they are conducted by, and many of the late works return to the conductorless ideal, most of the time substituting the use of the neutral — and egoless — stopwatch for a conductor.  As an indication, perhaps, that this optimism is still an active force in the radical music, I'd like to point out a pair of recent works for orchestra without conductor.

The first is Samuel Vriezen's Local Orchestra (score available here) which is notated in a text format not unlike that found in prose scores by Christian Wolff.  However, I think that the spirit of Vriezen's music is here is as close to late Cage as it is to Wolff, particularly in the implied economy of tones, which is related to dynamics.  There are, however, distinctive elements here, and the primary distinction comes in the division of the work into two movements in which the orchestra is successively characterized as "consonant" and "dissonant".  Consonant or dissonant relative to what? Vriezen's "consonant" is pythgorean in character, favoring intervals of octaves, fifths and fourths; his "dissonant" movement, effectively makes an M5/7 transform on the consonant movement and favors semitones.   The major compositional decision here was formal, in Vriezen's decision to place the "consonant" before the "dissonant", the retrograde of traditional tonal resolution.  There is also one articulation trick here: the "consonant" movement is punctuated by silences, while the "dissonant" movement is continous.  The score is only a page of text, but in that page Mr. Vriezen has practically managed to write the compact edition of an early 20th century Harmonielehre.    

(Many other prose scores by a variety of composers, myself included, along these lines, are also available at Upload .. Download .. Perform ).

The second score I'd like to mention is a work of Douglas Leedy, Shining Path - Sendero Luminoso (1992-93, a score excerpt is reproduced above), the first of Three Symphonies for Unison Orchestra.  Not only did Leedy intend a conductorless ensemble, but the initial version of the score was produced on a single page (with instructions on the back side) with the expectation that the piece would probably be played without rehearsal.  the score has a Cagian pedigree,  not only in Leedy's acknowledgement of Cheap Imitation as a model, but also in the use here, of the temporal structure of Cage's Music for Marcel Duchamp.  Shining Path is many things, but most strikingly, it is a form of reckoning with the western symphonic and harmonic/polyphonic tradition.  Most members of the orchestra play a very slow, long, and winding — locally tonal/centric and directed, mid-level unpredictable, almost aimless, and globally, bound to a tonic G — melody in unison whole notes (the melody is 358 whole notes long at a tempo of half note less than 40 mm), but all have the option to articulate the melody in a variety of ways, a form of simultaneous variation more familar in non-occidental ensemble music traditions.   Furthermore, the mostly sustained whole notes are aperiodically punctuated  by sharply articulated quarter-note G's by a group of tympani and  bass instruments, following the logic of their own internal pattern but also suggesting formal markers more akin to the gong schedule of a classical gamelan work or East Asian court music than the cadences of western functional tonality.

Neither Local Orchestra nor Shining Path have been performed to date [addendum: in the comments thread, composer Lloyd Rodgers was kind to mention that he has played Shining Path with his Diverse Instrument Ensemble in Fullerton, California: Great News, but I still want to hear it live, myself, and live alongside Samuel's piece!], but both of them should be played, at the very least as a sign of some confidence in the human spirit.  Let's stay in the spirit of Cage's optimism and try to make that happen.  

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* One of the greatest joys in my musical life was rehearsing for Etcetera with Cage, Richard Winslow, and Alvin Lucier:  volunteering to be conducted by any of them was both servitude and cooperation of a special kind.   

Intermissions with Feldman

To break up some capricious and possibly ill-advised research,* I've been filling up ever-longer intermissions with the transcripts of Morton Feldman's late Middelburg lectures  (published in two volumes by MusikTexte as Words on Music/Worte über Musik). Feldman's lecture style was famously engaging. He was a great substitute for a favorite anecdote-and-general-BS-delivering uncle, unschooled but educated, unpolished but in his own way erudite, and simultaneously vague and razor sharp.**  Even in print you tend to hang on every word, especially, it seems, when you disagree most with him or when Feldman has mixed something up or even got it altogether wrong.  The editor, Raoul Mörchen, does a great job of identifying obscurities and correcting errors, which are, sometimes, slips and, not infrequently, intentional slights on Feldman's part. (Hilariously, after a series of insults on Feldman's part about the recorder, the MusikTexte publishers themselves even step in with a footnote of their own to defend, as it were, the honor of the recorder as a serious musical instrument for new music.)  Highly recommended.     

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* Under the motto "now that serialism is all over, or at most completely unfashionable, what can be learned, recovered, or renewed?", which has led to some strange and wonderful stuff, not only from the usual suspects on either side of the Atlantic but also to works and writings by people like Golisheff, Hauer, Eimert, and Heiß.   There have been a number of musicological publications on this topic of late (see, for example, volumes by Grant, Whittall, Straus) but none of these have struck me as particularly useful for composers looking for productive possibilities in the serial residua.   If we look for elements common to all of the music which might conceivably have flown under the flag of serialism (and the flag*** I'm waving is large enough to find serial elements in Music of Changes, In C, and I am sitting in a room...), we won't find much, but two ideas fundamental to serial practice — order/series and set/collection/gamut  — are so basic to so much music, that there are certainly some historical cul de sacs with potential for new music.

**As a Californian, and hopelessly constrained by my dialect, I'm constantly impressed by Feldman's ability to do this, efficiently getting across rather pointed arguments with incomplete sentences without ever without interjecting the all-utility  "you know" into every sentence.

*** My apologies for all the flag waving around here these days. Must. Find. Better. Metaphors.

The Dynamic Crisis: Blame Michael Jackson

Three scores sit on my desk that are, in theory, almost finished, waiting for dynamics.  Just a couple of markings in bold italics and maybe a hairpin or two: loud, soft, and refinements of or transitions between these two.  It would be easy enough to either go through the score and just add them instinctively, improvisatorially, or by chance or to devise some system for using dynamics to better project characteristics of other parameters in the score,  or, even easier, just leave dynamics out of the score altogether, and identify them as a matter for the performers to decide.   But each of these possibilities strikes me at the moment as a bit of a cop-out, not making a move I can actually believe does what is best for my notes.  For some composers, the materials in their pieces are born with dynamic detail or gestures or have a prevailing dynamic mood — as soft or as loud as possible, for example — but my notes happen to have come into the world rather unemcumbered by dynamic shape and, if they have any dynamic profile at all, they seem to be both comfortable and robust enough, to my ears,  to be nestled in that almost anonymous zone between mezzo piano and mezzo forte, with only brief excursions out of the zone.  But all of the other aspects of the piece are so carefully done that just making a facile or overly broad assignment of markings risks appearing, if not actually being, insensitive and arbitrary.  

The difficulty here is actually shared by many other composers, and the difficulty has several causes.  

The first lies in the subjective, contextual, and transient nature of dynamics themselves.  What a marking of forte may mean to a performer depends upon which instrument or voice is used, and in which register(s)  and in which particular combination or passage.  It may also depend upon the physical space in which one sings or plays.   It certainly depends upon the conventions of style.  How about forte in early music, which may only recognize forte and piano (if even those)?  We certainly don't operate noewadays in an enviroment in which musicians will immediately understand dynamic markings as embedded in a particular local or historical style. What is the dynamic level of In C, for example?  Or forte in 1950's/60's serial music, in which it is assigned a theoretically distinct position in a scale of dynamics?  And if you have such a scale, is a dynamic marking absolute or relative? Are the markings to be scaled up or down for the particular set of instruments or voices in play?

The advent of recorded sound, with its necessary flattening of dynamics and the disconnect between the original sound level and the sound level the recording gets played at, has also affected our understanding of dynamics.  Electronic amplication and the the use of loudspeakers have changed our relationship to amplitude (as well as spatial position) of musical sounds in substantial ways and I don't think we're even close to understanding what this means for music. We can probably agree, however, that much of the music that makes up the acoustical background radiation in our lives is music in which the conditions imposed by electrical amplification are — for better or worse — inescapable.  From Bing Crosby to Les Paul or to Michael Jackson*, the prevailing image of musical dynamics has been to a large part determined by musicians dependent upon amplification.   While there is probably no going back to a lost (and probably fictional)  acoustical paradise in which dynamics were not constrained by electronics  — as Heinz-Klaus Metzger put it: "Webern was the last composer before the advent of air conditioning" —  there has surely got to be room for a musically meaningful use of dynamics in which the constraints of electronic sound production are not the overriding criteria.    

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* Isn't it strange that in all the discussion about Jackson's use of various technologies to modify his body that the most important bit of modification was that involving a microphone?      

The Only Way to Win Is Not to Play the Game

Lesson one for young composers: Not everyone will love your music, and some people will decide that you, too, are unloveable, because of your music. 

Lesson two for young composers: Get over lesson one and get on with your own work.

Lesson three for young composers: Should people in positions of real economic or political power within the musical community use their dislike for your music and/or person as a basis for exercising their power, then feel free to call them on it, even if the stakes are modest.  Keep cool, speak clearly and loudly about this, but do not expect lasting change and make concrete plans for the independent material and moral support of your work.

Lesson four for young composers: Having wrestled with the authorities, get back on with your own work. 

*****

The most rewarding part of this blogging experience has been the exchange and conversation with musicians and people who like music who happen to inhabit very different corners of New(andnotsonew)musicland.  I'm continually surprised by the amount of fruitful practical, technical, and aesthetic exchange I can have with someone who writes tonal music for windband or modal music for church choirs or who specializes in big bands or rock or computers or hardware hacking or is a serious student of film music or even hard-core opera fans or barbershop quartet singers. The only lasting conflicts I've encountered online have actually come from people with musical repertoire interests closest to my own.  I guess that this is sometimes just a matter of strongly territorial competition, or fear of too much oxygen been consumed in a very small space, but it's mostly just a side effect of caring so much about the music and the ideas behind it: one can come to identify with some music or have the feeling that they own it, with all the exclusive rights associated with ownership. This often leads, to my ears,  to a dangerous intolerance for a diversity of viewpoints, which is hardly the most useful viewpoint for an experimental musician.  I have myself been guilty of this, and if you find me at it again, please call me on it!

*****

If you write tonal or modal music, there will be partisans of music which is not tonal or modal who are unhappy with your work.  If you write music that is not tonal or modal, there will be those who do who are unhappy with your work.  If you write tonal music, there will be other tonal composers who are unhappy with your particular technique or syle of tonality.  If you write music which is not tonal, there will be other not-tonal composers who are unhappy with your particular technique or style of not being tonal.

If you write music, there will always be someone who is unhappy with your music for being too complex and there will be someone else who is unhappy with your music for being not complex enough.   If you use a system or method, some people will be unhappy; others are unhappy if you don't use a system or method, and still other are unhappy if you use the "wrong" system or method. There will be people unhappy if you write music with catchy tunes and rhythms or refer to any other repertoire, classical, popular, or outside of the immediate historical and cultural context.  There will also be people who are unhappy if you write music that doesn't do any or all of these things.  There are people who are unhappy with music that is not active enough or diverse enough in content or character and there are people who are unhappy if they find music to be too active or too diverse.  There are people who are only happy when music is neatly packaged while there are other people who are most unhappy when they find music to be too neatly packaged.  There are people who are only happy when music contains some intellectual, cultural, and/ or emotional depth and there are people for whom happiness only comes with music that entertains and goes away without disturbing the soul.   

If you write music for instruments there will be those who are only happy with music for voices, and the same goes in reverse.   If you use "extended" techniques with voices or instruments, some people will be unhappy; if you don't use "extended" techniques, other people will be unhappy.  If you write music using electronics, there will be souls who become unhappy anytime they see a power cable or even a dry cell in a concert hall, while there are others who are unhappy anytime they don't see an electric power source.  If you bend circuits there will be people who are unhappy because you're not using a computer, the big computer people have always been unhappy with the small computer people, and there are some people who are unhappy when you do not use the same Mac laptop model.

There are some people who are unhappy if you use an alternative tuning, while there are others who are unhappy if you do not. There are people who are only happy when they hear an accordion or a vibraphone and there are people who are unhappy when they hear a cowbell or a vibraslap.  Some people are only happy in the presence of vibrato, others are happy only in the absence of vibrato.  There are people who are only happy with live music and there are people who are only happy with a broadcast or recording.  There are some people who are only happy when music is played a certain way or by certain musicians.   There are some people who simply are not ever happy with music.

It is difficult, very difficult, when the music one makes and loves does not make others happy. But when you are in a position to recognize there are some people who will never be made happy by music and others for whom their musical happiness is predetermined by a categorical preference for this or dislike for that, isn't this an opportunity to recognize that these people are lost causes, and it's better to treasure and cultivate people who still have their ears open than to worry about, let alone make music for, lost causes?   

 

 

12 Strikes and You're Out

Amazon identifies a title,  From Chords to Simultaneities: Chordal Indeterminancy and the Failure of Serialism, as belonging to a series of Contributions in Criminology and Penology. 

The radical music will save your life. (Or at least keep you a happy camper. Most of the time. Probably.)

The weekend reading was Nicholson Baker's The Anthologist, not an exhilarating and disturbing read like Inherent Vice, but a read all the same, with enough of the characteristic Baker turns (obsessive little stories and jarring non-sequitors top my list of favorite Baker tropes) to make for lively breaks between composing sessions and some escape from a neighbor's hard-hammered house renovations.  The subject and narrator of The Anthologist is a mid-career, middle-of-the-road poet; although he's reached that particular pinnacle of American poets, being asked to edit an anthology, he's in a bad patch with writing, relationships, and day jobs, and so he fills the absences of writing, relationships, and a day job with procrastination, distraction and obsessive little lessons to reader, from the all-too familiar, all-too-slow straightening-up the office to helping a neighbor lay a plank floor to holding forth before us on poetic rhyme and metre as well as a bit of ancient poetryland gossip.  He is, it seems, in the middle of a career writing poetry he really doesn't believe in; he does seem to believe in an idea of poetry — and he can rattle on and about with some passion for a number of 19th and 20th century mainstreamers —but the talents he seems to have as a poet are not those most applicable to the poetry that he actually likes.  Rhyme, for example, is not one of his strengths.  For all of his enthusiasms for rests and enjambments, his rhythm and metre seems a little stiff, too.   But he is worried enough about rhyme and rhythm to share his worries and theories — and modest theories they are — with us. The novel, though, is a comedy, and the summer of discontent was just that; all ends well (too well, if you ask me, like the last act of As You Like It, in which the Goddess Hymen descends, suddenly and without preparation, to put everything in order) : the poet gets over his bad patch, he finishes his anthology preface, his dashes off twenty-three poems during a plane fight, and he gets some steady work, housepainting, for which he seems entirely and cheerfully suited.   But to get there, we had to spend a book-length summer listening to his signs and stories of  frustration and anxiety. All the while reading this, I couldn't help but have one thought: had Paul Chowder, Baker's narrator/poet/anthologist been an experimental poet rather than a poet of the mainstream sort  — and he is mainstream enough, for example, to worry about Poet Laureates of the US or to mention, in passing, that one of his poems got read on air by Garrison Keillor — we would have been saved reading an awful lot about the anxiety that he had for rhyme, metre or status in poetryland.  You see, that's the great advantage of experimental music as well.  Experimental musicians are interested in and work with the same questions of metre and tonality and complexity and systems and style and anything else remotely connected with music that the mainstream gals and guys use, but the detachment or distance necessary to an experimental approach, combined with the in-advance knowledge that a conventional institutional career with prizes and positions is probably not in the works (and when it happens is like an unexpected gift from gods in whom we do not believe so have no need to thank) is also a gift of Gelassenheit, letting-go-ness, an invitation to compose without anxiety.

Im/Material

Sometimes you just have to move simultaneously in opposite directions: at this point, every score I make can, in principle, be delivered in electronic format, via the magic of electrons telling other electrons to "move along!" (just like little doggies), but at the same time, an obsession with the material form of the hard copy of my scores continues unabated, with several rolls of handmade Nepali paper waiting to be cut down as coverstock, and it'll be exquisite coverstock, with no two volumes ever identical.  Heck, I even went to the hardware store this week and had plywood cut for a test run of even more substantial covers.  Who knows what's next?  Stainless steel?  Cast iron?  Concrete?  

I won't push this parallel too far, but there is something here akin to my tastes in visual arts.  I am hopelessly lost in my attachment to the works of Duchamp and Irwin, one an artist who moved the artwork away from the retina and direct perception and to the mind, and the other an artist who retrieved the sensual from the mind once again.  Coincidenta oppositorum.

 

Oh... THOSE clunkers

In Germany the subsidy program for new automobile sales has the odd enough name Abwrackpraemie, but the equivalent US program, the Car Allowance Rebate System, is better known as Cash for Clunkers, a phrase which carries a special resonance for musicians.  

If lawmakers had decided to support, instead of the automobile industry, the musical arts, then they could have kept the popular name for the program.  I reckon that a Cash for Musical Clunkers program would be a great success: who doesn't have an embarrasing old score or performance that they'd love to erase from their collections or catalogues and replace with something new? I, for one, would gladly retire several old pieces in return for new commissions.    

Schematic

If you compose according to a strict plan, concept, idea, formula, how much variation or elaboration about that  idea, plan, formula, or concept do you allow?  One aesthetic pole would have the piece stripped down to the essence of the formula, idea, concept, or plan, allowing nothing more than that necessary to clearly and decisively project the concept, formula, plan, or idea.  The aesthetic approach polar opposite to that would strive to hide any overt signs of the formula, plan, idea, or concept, or even frame the whole plan, formula, concept, or idea within a larger musical context.  Of course, most real compositions will settle somewhere in the mushy middle between these two poles, allowing the concept, idea, plan, or formula to be accessible, if dressed up somewhat in ornament or affect or flowing along in some normative musical continuity, after all, in the end, and no matter what the idea, concept, plan, or formula, we are just making music, aren't we? But then again, isn't it pessimistic to assume that making music is, as a default, defined inertially, with respect to known or involuntary habits for articulating an idea, formula, concept, or plan. Isn't there something inherently weak (half-hearted, non-commital) about the overlay of a technical scheme onto otherwise conventional musical discourse in, say, the Bartok Concerto for Orchestra or Britten's The Turn of the Screw?  I'd rather go with the clear and overt presentation of concept, idea, plan, or formula in Reich's Piano Phase or Lucier's I am sitting in a room or Cage's Rozart Mix or Monahan's Piano Mechanics, each instances of optimistic assertions of the potential for music to do much more than that which habit leads us to expect.

Compositional space

Task: Describe the space in which the activity of composition takes place.  The labels associated with the axes above are only tentative and approximate: choice is fantasy but also convention, habit, tradition; calculation is planning, process, consequence, but may be complex enough to be unpredictable; chance, which is also circumstance, contingency, may be, globally, a more predictable element than either choice or calculation.  It may be more useful to think of composition not in terms of "putting things together" but rather as placing or locating activity in such a space, with finding balance (or absence of balance, as the case may well be) among methods an increasingly central concern.

.  

The Orchestra, Reformed

Somehow, in these scattered postings about orchestration, I have neglected to mention a pair of musicians doing important work on the music-technical and economic/social/political problems of making music with large ensembles.

The first is composer Daniel Goode, who has a long working relationship to the Gamelan Son of Lion (see this posting on Our Other Orchestra) and additionally has, in recent years, worked with both the concept and concrete examples of a "Flexible Orchestra", a mixed ensemble including at least one instrument in multiple instances (in a recent concert, the orchestra was composed of eleven flutes, tuba, harpsichord, trumpet, and contrabass).  Such combinations have the potential to provide very striking environments for music-making, in this case including timbral and registral variety but also allowing for at least one example of the symphonic qualities or chorus-effect made available by a single timbre in mass, an efficient and even elegant distilling of some of the most characteristic features of traditional orchestral ensembles. Mr Goode's homepage includes several articles exploring these topics (see especially the "Letter from Vienna" and "How can the orchestra be more like the gamelan?".)

The second example is composer Andrew Culver's proposals for an "anarchic philharmonic".  The first concern is obviously the institution of the "obligato conductor", but the standard composition, organization, rehearsal method, and concert structure are all rich areas for exploring alternatives. Needless to say — and precisely because I'm familiar with the pitfalls of previous experiments in this direction (Cage's orchestral version of Cheap Imitation being the central case in point, and Etcetera and some of the Number Pieces indicating some possible paths out) — I'm in complete agreement with Culver.  I can't wait to see a black flag flying oover Disney Hall or the Concertgebouw.

Don't forget your melodica!

A reminder:  one month remains before the deadline for submitting pieces for the first online anthology of new music for melodica.  The nine eight pieces (by six five different composers) received to date represent a startling diversity of music for solo melodica and melodica ensembles.

The Orchestra, Deconstructed

While writing a wind quintet this week, the necessary downtime was spent finishing a pair of wonderful and wonderfully idiosyncratic books:  Thomas Pynchon's new novel, Inherent Vice, which arrived on Monday and not only read as quickly and smoothly as a Wild Turkey chaser but also carried the same emotional after-burn, and Henry Brant's orchestration handbook, Textures and Timbres.    I'll probably have more to say about the Pynchon later, but for now: damn! between it and Mieville's The City & The City, this has been the year for the weird-boiled detective novel.  As for the Brant, he is refreshingly modest and upfront in explaining the goal of the project in hand, which is achieving homogenous orchestral textures from mixtures of instruments. His method, through defining broad timbral categories, is a sound one and always based on years of empirical study.  Nevertheless, the real substance in the book comes in a number of verbal suggestions and in many of the Brant-composed musical examples, which, particularly regarding the differentiation of contrapuntal lines, go a great distance toward a more comprehensive theory of the role of orchestration in relationship to each of the other compositional parameters. This is reading a more abitious program between the lines of Brant's text, but I think that inventive orchestration is more or less always going to have to be read between the lines of existing practices, deconstructed even, and Brant's own music was never less than that.  

Although Brant is most famous for his works with spatially separated instruments and voices, he does not explicitly discuss space as a parameter here, but it's abundantly clear that clear that Brant understood orchestration as a necessary prerequisite to making spatial music actually work.   Brant's book thus follows his own insight: the recipe for a homogenous orchestral timbre also contains the recipe for its opposite and suggests the timbres which would maximum contrast for the projection of contrapuntal materials.  

Brant's book got me to thinking about the teaching of orchestration in general and, more specifically, his use of his own musical examples made me wonder which pieces of historical repertoire  I would choose if I were to teach orchestration.   There are really three approaches possible to the topic, one — and the tactic taken by the textbooks now most widely used — attempts to teach an optimal "mainstream" orchestration aesthetic based upon standardized instrumentations and ideals of contrast and balance; a second approach is essentially through teaching the history of orchestration, particularly in its luxurious change of focus from function to color; and the third approach is more analytical in nature, taking advantage on the one hand of a more contemporary understanding of musical acoustics and, on the other hand, considering scoring patterns as integral aspects of compostional technique. 

Although my own composition instincts are mostly those of the third approach, I think I would teach with an acoustically-informed historical approach.  I would skip around rather than hew closely to chronology.  I might start, say, with a Schumann Symphony or Overture, pieces supposedly suffering from poor orchestration, and try to make the case against that supposition: the continuous doubling of the violins by the flutes, for example, usually considered a textbook example of what not to do, may just reveal instead a unique timbral imagination and conception/ When one considers that the bowing technique of Schumann's time involved a shorter stroke, with less sustain and considerable decay,  allowing the near-sine tone of the flute to emerge from the composite tone lent the prevailing melodic surface of the music an edge for which the adjective "silver" is spot-on. Then, as a counter-example, I would take the Berlioz  Messe des Mortes, a piece I really treasure, to illustrate — if somewhat paradoxically — mastery in a less-is-more style of orchestral economy, in which a large reserve of forces is kept mostly in reserve and often, in fact, paired down to some strange and wonderful subsets (unaccompanied choir in the Quaerens me, the antiphonal brass, the mens' chorus, low reeds and low strings of the Quid sum miser, the tenor soli "solo" in the Sanctus...).   As an additional counter-example, I might use some Liszt piano pieces, as examples of exploiting the full palate of an instrument's resources as  "orchestration" without an orchestra.

Only then would begin the historical survey proper, paying special attention to the historical cul-de-sacs, as the orchestral styles not taken but well worth revisiting: whole and broken consorts (especially in Morley's Book of Consort Lessons, with its contrast between sustaining instruments and plucked metal and gut strings),  polychoral or antiphonal ensembles, the five-part string texture in Lully, and then trace the mainstream of orchestral development from continuo-based ensembles to the classical four part texture with the gradual incorporation of winds and percussion (the brass, in particular, represent an interesting bit of musical sociology as the horns came from the hunt, the trumpets from the military (each bringing their own drums) and the trombones from the church tower; the origins of orchestral percussion are often even more exotic) .  I would spend some time on the Harmonie (wind) ensemble and trace wind bands through their court, civic, military, and popular traditions.  Although I would pay some serious  attention to opera orchestration (especially Rossini, Weber and Verdi), I might just skip much about the "normative" large 19th century orchestra, under the motto "nice work, if you can find it (or if your name is Johnny Williams) and you can always read about it in Adler, Blatter or Kennan"  and focus instead on the contemporary chamber ensemble (with its "classical" but one-on-a-part instrumentation)  and the composer-led ensembles (with their frequenty amplified and electronically mixed instrumentation).

     

 

   

Merce Cunningham, 1919-2009

Why walk when one can leap?

                                                             Move as if you've forgotten everything you thought you ever knew about how to pass, kick, fall and run;

                                       Break everything down into independent constituent parts, recombine, overlay (simultaneous unisons that are not in unisons, duos that are not together, etc.); 

                                                                                                         Prowling.

                    Count like a dancer, steps neither in clock-time nor in musical time; 

The dance is distributed among the spines of the dancers, the dancers distributed throughout the entire available space, "front" is wherever in space each individual dancer faces;

                                                                 Aquire movement everywhere: from animals, pedestrians, the computer, stepdance, ballet; 

                                                                                              Torsos turn.

                   Events: constant interplay between practice, composition and repertoire;

                                     Dancers, musicians, artists working simultaneously but not at the same thing;

                                                       When do you ever find time to breathe?

                                                                 Feet. Can't. Fail.

Unter Regie: Under Direction and Getting Out From Under It?

A day or two ago, the German novelist Daniel Kehlmann delivered a speech for the opening of the Salzburg Festival, where he is this year's poet in residence and director of the literature program.  He decided, in an unusually personal way, to talk about contemporary theatre, in particular the established "director's theatre."  The talk was personal because Kehlmann spoke of his father, the late director Michael Kehlmann, who he describes as "a man who, before all else, saw in the director a servant of the author," yet whose career ebbed from early successes in the face of a theatre world that increasingly expected the director to place his or her ever-larger own imprint upon productions.  Kehlmann Sr. became "old fashioned" and had frustratingly fewer opportunities to do his work.   (Kehlmann describes his own decision to keep a distance from the theatre and write novels as a choice for a career field in which no one could keep him from his work).   Kelhmann's critique of the Regietheatre is rhetorically powerful because of the combination of this personal tone, especially when coming from an author who is not a reactionary, with the fact that he never explicitly names his target.  But, all the same: Bullseye.

*****

Classical music has been under its own form of direction since sometime in the 19th century. There was conducting beforehand — we all know about Lully's fatal beat-pounding — but it was a modest and constrained task in which keeping measure was frequently shared between the primarius and the continuo players or any soloists.  But in the 19th century, the profession of the conductor quickly moved from keeping a beat to directing more complext traffic patterns,  cheering forces on, scolding, swearing, swooning, through something called interpretation, and now into the odd combination of tourism and administration.   Technique for conducting has never been standardized in the way that technique for an instrument has been, and success as a conductor depends uniquely upon psychological factors, impossible to measure objectively (save, perhaps in box-office draw) and often up as "charisma".  For almost any work of music requiring more than two handfuls of players, a director is now assumed to be required.  The conductor, to the best of my knowledge, was a development unique to the West (unique at least until the advent of the pop music producer who plays a similar role in repertoire that exists primarily in recorded form). While there are indeed ensemble leaders in other musical traditions — for example the dance masters in numerous ensemble musics — they tend to make noises themselves rather than mime before their players, thus being more fully integrated into the ensemble as players themselves.  

Increasingly the conductor became a recognized professional, someone who led musical proceedings and intervened in all parameters between the composer's instructions and the ensemble of players.  The institution of the professional conductor happens, and not coincidentally, to date fairly exactly with the invention of what we now identify as the classical canon,  and while conductors were and continue to be gatekeepers on the admission of new works to that repertoire, their prime responsibility has always been to the interpretation of canonical works.  One now compares the performances of works under the batons of various conductors with the zeal of baseball fans comparing pitching records; heck, there are even some performances out there (take Carlos Kleiber's Fifth and Seventh, for example) for which one is tempted to retire the score altogether. 

Closure of a canon — whether that of German theatre (in which a very limited number of "classical" works have now dominated the serious stage programs for generations), of "Classical Music,"  or literature (of which the most familiar examples, the holy writings of the three major monotheistic religions, have been closed to a frequently tragic effect),  is inevitably a moment in which creative energies — those which would have otherwise gone into the synthesis of new works — are now chanelled into interpretation.  I believe that the problem underlying the Director's Theatre is the same which classical (and, increasingly, pop) music have suffered: not interpretation, in and of itself, but the canonical closure which  requires interpretation to impress a contemporary identity on either the plays or the music.

*****

My own response, as a composer, to the directorial culture has been akin to Kehlman's decision not to write for the theatre:  by and large, I avoid writing for orchestra.   There are some aesthetic reasons for this (I like a certain amount of detail that smaller ensembles can do better) and the practical (orchestal commissions, when costs of engraving and part extraction are added in, rarely pay off if the performance is only a one-off).   But I don't want to give up on the attractions of the orchestra altogether.  Some of my best musical experiences and certainly many of my dreams require the services of an orchestra.  I have had some good experiences with the other obvious alternative: specifying orchestra without conductor, but that is often a hard sell for ensembles with limited rehearsal time and often for those in which the conductor is, her- or himself, deciding on repertoire and is uninterested in programming works in which she or he is visibly superfluous.    

Fortunately, there continues to be a species of conductor for whom making music, and new music in particular, is a larger cause than their own ego, among them:  Jonathan Nott, Roland Kluttig, Peter Rundel, David Robertson, Sian Edwards, Lucas Vis, and Peter Eötvös.   Conductors of this quality have the ability to be faithful to the composer's text, yet coax orchestras in interpretations which bring out more than the sum of the score's qualities, surpress its weaknesses (yes, composers are fallable), and perhaps add something complementary of their own to the mix without the work losing its identity.  We are under direction, but not yet lost to it.  

 

An Orchestration Lesson from Samuel Beckett

Orchestration is a form of personel management: who plays what, when they play it, and sometime even where they play it. Composers don't always think of orchestration this way,  and it might be useful to look at other art forms in which this aspect is more explicit:  the best playwrights and choreographers, for example, manage the exits and entrances of their players supremely well.

One of my pieces-in-progress is a wind quintet, a tricky genre due in large part to the fact that continuity has to be provided by players who have to breath every once in a while, thus inviting lots of entering and exiting in a continuous stream of changing scoring patterns.  But how might those patterns be sensibly organized, in a piece, for example, in which every combination of instruments is used only once? 

I recently stumbled onto a nice solution to this suggested by a stage work by Samuel Beckett, Quad, a "frantic mime" for four players, lights, and percussion.  Beckett wanted to organize Quad on the basis of a sequence in which every combination of the four players would be used, each combination in the sequence differing from its neighbor by the entrance or exit of one player, and when a player exits it is always the player who has been on stage longest.  

It turns out that the conditions Beckett set were mathematically impossible to realize with four players (making Quad another example of an inexorable and imperfect logic at work in Beckett), but solutions to what is now known as the Beckett-Gray code have been found for other numbers, among them n = 5, which immediately struck me as an interesting premise for a wind quintet, in which the player who has played longest is most deserving of a breather.   I have long used Gray and similar codes in other pieces (I recently mentioned a piece with some "anti-gray" coding), but I'm especially taken with the way in which the Beckett-Gray can respond to particular musical problems (in this case, continuity and the need for individual musicians to pause).  I expect to use it elsewhere, and not only in orchestration. 

Something Wild

Writer Michael Chabon makes the case for the place of wilderness in young peoples' lives (here). Unfortunately, Chabon (or, one supposes, the editor who titled his piece) identifies this as a male phenomena, but otherwise I agree.  Growing up near open desert, mountain spaces, gravel pits, vacant yards, abandoned houses, and even cemeteries always meant preserves for adventure and learning empirically to deal with a measure of danger.  Building rock forts at the desert/mountain edge of Cathedral City or tree forts in Mt Baldy oak trees were probably the first unsupervised creative acts of any consequence in my life, and there's a direct line in my mind from these rough constructions to any music I've ever made.  It's a real pity that kids today are increasingly kept away from similar opportunities.  I suppose the trend to protect children from childhood misadventure is unavoidable (even in the first of the Great Brain books, set in Utah in the last decade of the 19th century, the parents decide to shut down a cave entrance to protect kids from getting lost), particularly given the shrinking spaces in which people are forced to live,  but there ought to be a place in city planning for wild spaces in which kids can learn to deal with danger in a useful way rather than be artificially isolated from it and discover playthings and playgrounds in real, found objects landscapes rather than in the toys bought, and parks built, for them.  

Lun Dun

I'm just back from a short trip to London.  Pleasure, no business, and tourism pure were the orders of the days.  I heard a concert in the Music We'd Like to Hear series, a perfect example of composerly initiative, self-reliance, and the pooling of resources, in which three composers — John Lely, Tim Parkinson, and my friend Markus Trunk (all roughly on the experimental side of the new music community) —  each program an evening of music.  I happened to be in town for the third and final even in this year's program, John Lely's evening, which was a portrait of Tom Johnson.  It was great to see and hear Tom and his music again  (Formulas for String Quartet, in particular, should be taken up by more groups) and also to hear a work of Lely's, The Parson's Code for Melodic Contours, which was a charming (and, in its way, post-Johnsonian) demonstration of the complexity of a simple melodic curve when projected simultaneously onto multiple pitch metrics.   The other highlights of London this trip were a reading by China Mieville, some decent Jamaican food,  a Punch and Judy show, a lot of pretty pictures in galleries unafraid of wallpaper, As You Like It in the Globe, and just enough rain to remind one that Britain is a good place to visit. And visit briefly. 

Brant's Progress

Sorting through some paperwork, I recently located an article from 1979, "Spatial music progress report" written by Henry Brant for the Bennington College Alumni magazine, Quadrille; I've recopied the text and scanned the images and this is now online at David Jaffe's Henry Brant homepage.  

Summer Music

This has been another summer without much summer weather, which is mostly okay by me, a person of pallor with a low tolerance for the hot and humid.   But the weather has been stifling enough that composing in long stretches is not the order of the day so, instead, I'm composing something substantial in a number of modules,  alternating with other projects, the most rewarding of which have been copying music for some friends and doing a bit of research about some more senior American composers, some of which has ended up — should the deletionists have mercy — in either new or seriously revised Wikipedia entries.

The piece I'm composing is for out-of-doors, in a garden, perhaps, with a soloist and a number of smaller ensembles around the space.  The first module is finished: At the furthest perimeter of the space, three cyclists shall lap lazily, each lap taking the place of a Cagian time bracket into which each cyclist inserts either a bell ring or nothing, with each of the laps in which the bells ring making another step in a Gray Code non-repeating Hamiltonian circuit through a graph: 123, 213, 132, 321, 231, 312.  The sequence of ringing (or silence) in each lap is notated, as is the particular style of each ring (quick, long, long-short, anapest, sustained, muted), but the pitches of the bells are not fixed (they could be different from one another or identical) and the possibilities, within a lap, for sounds to be isolated or overlapping, are endless.  This is compositional territory that I really like, with a mixture of the calculated and specific, the arbitrary, contingent and surprising, and the elements more closely related to my own taste.  

I can already hear, in advance, that this piece is going to be highly sensitive to the maintenance of certain leisurely pace, with lots of time — and space — between sounds, but still yet inviting some sounds of portent or event.  I can't wait to hear what comes next.  

 

Forward Music Ltd.?

A bleg:  I bought some sheet music in the early 90's from Forward Music Ltd., in London.  (Good stuff, too: Barney Childs, John White...)  They seem to have fallen off the planet, or at least into realms that the internet doesn't reach, so if anyone has any contact information, I'd be much obliged.

Periodically on Paper

A list of journals (a) focused on new/contemporary/experimental music, (b) currently in operation, (c) published periodically and (d) available on paper.   I have not included journals by national music information centers, publishers, or membership organizations.  This list is definitely not complete; if you know of any further journals, please let me know and I'll update this item.

English:

Computer Music Journal.

Contemporary Music Review.

ex tempore.

Journal of New Music Research.

Leonardo Music Journal.

Musikworks.

The Open Space Magazine.

Organized Sound.

Perspectives of New Music.

Search: Journal for New Music and Culture

Signal to Noise.

Sonus.

The Sound Projector.

21st Century Music.

Tempo.

The Wire.

French:

Circuit: Musiques Contemporaines

Revue & Corrigée

German:

MusikTexte.

Neue Zeitschrift für Musik.

Positionen.

The Radical Music: Fragments of a Manifesto

Sounds articulate precise dimensions in physical space; musical sounds also articulate precise dimensions in social and private spaces.

*****

Use the minimum of resources or means required. Less is often more.

Find the core question or idea in a work. Choose and use your materials to best frame that question or idea.

All musical ideas and all musical instruments (save the vibra-slap) are potentially useful. None is universally useful. (Save the vibra-slap, which is never useful.)

But having practiced the virtues of economy, allow yourself, from time to time, a bit of extravangance, some conspicuous production and consumption.   In the end, the economy of musical production is like the bellows of a concertina, expansion necessarily paired with contraction.

*****

Go to extremes, in whichever parameter you use, including extremes of moderation.

Question parameters. A parameter is someone else's way of dividing up the aural experience. Explore the edges and boundaries of and between pitch and timbre and rhythm and dynamic and form. Explore and break boundaries between music and not-music.

Music, the physics of musical sound, the psychophysics of music, and the neuroscience of music are different concerns, each with its own territory and terminology. How might they relate? How might they not relate? What unique elements of cohesion does music bring to these disciplines and how can they extend the potential for new forms of musical activity?

*****

Follow an idea in all its consequences. Find the end of a process or pattern. Push a system to its design capacity and then push beyond it.

However, if the consequences of a process are obvious, is it necessary to carry out the process in full?

Consider the possibility of multiple versions, or realizations, of a work. Or accept the first version and move on to the next work without looking (listening) back.

Break, subvert, or invert cause and effect.

*****

There is an indeterminant number of ways of arriving at the same musical surface and it's not possible to determine the best or most efficient or most elegant way.  Worrying about this is an ethical issue, not an aesthetic one.

Start from nothing, from first principles, without assumptions and build a better (sound) world from the ground up.  Or start with everything and scrape, sculpt, and erase away, making the real, existing (wise, tired) world better. 

Limits and rules: anything we compose could, potentially, be through-composed,  by taste and experience, but sometimes the alternative, carrying out rules applied to a limited set of materials, in the manner of a game (a music game, like a language game) carries much less anxiety and leads to surprises rather than the habitual.

*****

The radical music is about complexity.  But not necessarily that complexity.

Complexity is an elusive quality: It can be algorithmic complexity (for all that's worth) or the complexity of acoustical phenomena when heard in greater detail or the complexity of historical or social context.  Sometimes a highly dense phenomena can only be heard coarsely and sometimes the simplest of conditions can overwhelm the senses.  A universally applicable and acceptable definition of either "sufficient" or "over-" complexity is impossible. (To paraphrase Potter Stewart, you know it when you hear it). When people make and listen to sounds, to music, one form or another of complexity is inevitable. Don't give it a second thought. No, strike that, don't give it the first thought, but keep it well in mind as a second.

Every piece of music has an element of the improvisational, extemporaneous, accidental, capricious, prejudiced or arbitrary. Is a piece of music interesting because of this? Is a piece musical because of this?  

*****

Experiment with scale, both the smallest, most local, and the grandest, most global, as well as the most anonymous quantities in-between.

Boredom is only a function of time, and a function with several variables.

*****

Modest work done in a serious way, leavened with levity, can carry large ambitions.

History is both a playground and a minefield, and a composer can and will write and rewrite music history with reckless disregard for the difference between a playground and a minefield.

(2007, revised 2009)

Just an Old-Fashioned Melody

We went to Wiesbaden this evening to hear (and see) Lulu.   It's astonishing how much of a period piece it has become, with the touches of alto sax and bar-room piano in the orchestra, the redundancy and charateristic curves of the various Lulu tunes and — still, best of all, as far as I'm concerned — the silent movie in the middle.  I imagine that in the 1930's, anything remotely like Lulu would have been shocking, even dissonant, in the Neo-Baroque digs of the Hessisches Staatstheater, but now, and even with a highly stylized production (read: lots of wet paint), it's just another night at the opera, and a night without Otis B. Driftwood at that.

Stand and Deliver!

Like Health Care systems everywhere, New Music suffers from a poor delivery system. The route from composer to performer to listener is often capricious, improvised, and instable, and more often a product of repertorial lethargy and personal relationships than an open market in matching musical interests.  

The web ought to be a perfect route for moving our scores to performers and attracting listeners to performances, but the low-level of web activity for new music — I keep track of 35 or 40 new music oriented blogs via bloglines and sometimes several days will pass without new messages — suggests that the new music community has a far-from-optimal approach to the web as a resource.   (It is surprising to me that  the largest traditional music publishers  and the license-collecting agencies — who have an immediate financial interest in making their wares public — do such a very bad job of it;  title searches at these sites are slow and miserable, and I'm someone who actually enjoys doing library research.) 

Here is one small proposal to help remedy this situation:  How about a blog or site dedicated to publicly registring new scores?  With probably several thousand active "serious" composers in the US alone, if only a couple hundred were to join such a registry, announcing each of their new title immediately upon composition, detailing and cross-indexing the resources required and how to obtain performance materials, one would presumably have a web page with many daily updates, thus both offering a useful way of matching performers with new scores and better mirroring the liveliness of our community.

 

The Fermata

A discussion at BloggingHeads.tv between two philosophers with interests in environmental issues, Jay Odenbaugh and Craig Callender, raises some serious questions about conservation and even the re-introduction of extinct species.  A proposal to conserve or revive any particular species is a non-chronological privileging of one particular historical moment or era over others, establishing the particular constellation of climate, fauna and flora of one moment as a benchmark against which any other state is less valued. This is an enterprise which strikes me as ultimately rather arbitrary, however immediately attractive any particular configuration may appear.  (I find their example of a restored Cave Lion population roaming Los Angeles is an especially nice addition to the long tradition of destruction-of-L.A.-narratives (see Mike Davis's City of Quartz for several more)).

It occurs to me that, in the modern invention of the "classical" music repertoire, with the predominance of late 18th through early 2oth century western European music in that repertoire, that a similar experiment in privileging one era over others — including our present era — has, in fact, already been carried out.  While it is true, on the one hand, that there has been a steady admixture of new composition and historically-informed recreations of early repertoire nipping at the edge of the trunk repertoire as well as occasional tributaries to more distant traditions, and, on the other hand, one can recognize certain qualitative benchmarks in the classical style — among them in the variability and complexity of the tonal language, the flexibility of ensemble textures, and the relationship between notation, oral transmission, and individual interpretation — one can also readily imagine a musical world in which some other, perhaps very different, repertoire or slice through repertoires had gained a similar level of prestige, and that other slice would as certainly have its own set of qualities to recommend it (moreover, the qualitative benchmarks to one musician's or listener's tastes may well be heard as deficits by another musician or listener).  

AFAIC, the problem here is not in the choice of musics to be privileged but rather in the phenomena that one music can aquire such privilege — often institutional in nature, and sharing the material power of that association — to the disadvantage of other musics.  I certainly have my own preferences and distastes and I have no problem that you do, too.  (In fact, that's what I value most about you.)  But I do have real problems when the choice has essentially been made for both of us by prohibiting the successful cohabitation of a diversity of musical materials, methods, styles, and traditions through some artificial institutional constraints on musical practice.  Unlike the streets of L.A., in which a decision to allow coyotes and mountain lions — or even genetically re-engineered mamoths, sabre tooths or cave lions — will have inescapable and immediate consequences to life, limb, environment and economy, it is the inherent advantage of music that there are no neccessary disadvanges to the cohabitation of a diversity of musical forms.  

More free scores

TauKay Edizioni Musicali has a large number of free-to-download scores online, yet another example of the way the winds are blowing for sheet music.   While there will likely remain a role for sheet music printed on paper and physically delivered to musicians and libraries — and a particular niche for elegant editions — the time and cost efficiencies of direct downloads are increasingly hard to ignore.  Sheet music, on its own, for new and experimental music, is not an especially profitable business, the larger profit is in commissions and licensing for performances, broadcasts, and recordings; sheet music is an instrument in realizing performances, broadcasts, and recordings.  If traditional sheet music publishing is either slow or expensive, it runs the risk of leading to fewer rather than more performances, which makes publishing more of an obstacle than an assist to the music.

Sheet music in the form of scores and parts for choral groups, bands, and orchestras which becomes widely used (especially by educational institutions) can be profitable as a sale or rental operation.  The individual composer must decide whether he or she can handle such operations on their own, the profit expected covering his or her costs in time and materials, or be willing to share  license fees in return for allowing a traditional publisher to carry and promote their work, or to go the download route instead.  At present, I can well imagine many composers using a tactical mix of publication methods, with solo and chamber works largely issued online and ensemble works intended for institutional use promoted via online perusal/study scores but available as rental or purchase sets of scores and parts.

One reminder to performers:  if you download a work and perform it, identify the piece accurately on your program and also let the composer know about the performance directly.  In many cases, institutions pay blanket fees for to licensing organizations, so the particular performance will not cost you anything more and the main obstacle to the composer from eventually getting her or his fee is a lack of reporting.   Reporting is the least that you can do when the composer has provided the performance materials for free.

 

   

Henry Brant as composer and orchestrator for films

It's well-known that the late composer Henry Brant had an active parallel career as on orchestrator and composer for film, but a lot of his work took place under- or uncredited, which is standard practice in film music.  During his life, Brant was always modest about his work as an orchestrator for the scores of colleagues, characterizing it as always implementing the style and preferences of the composer rather than in his own.  Mr Brant's musical executor, Kathy Wilkowski, has been kind enough to share the following list of films on which he worked.  

First, his collaborations as orchestrator:

for Virgil Thomson:  The River (1937), The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936), Louisiana Story (1948; the score won Thomson the Pulitzer Prize in Music, Brant was credited as "music technical assistant".)

for Aaron Copland:  The City (1939)

for George Antheil:  The Scoundrel (1935)

for Marc Blitzstein: at least two films.

for Douglas Moore: Power on the Land (1940) , Youth Gets a Break (a WPA-related film; Brant stated: "it was for full orchestra; he left it to me."

for Alex North: The Misfits (1961), Cleopatra (1963), Cheyenne Autumn (1964),  Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolff (1966), Africa (ABC-TV documentary, 1967),  2001: A Space Odyssey (the score was not used in the released film), The Devil's Brigade (1968),  Carny (1980; includes two compositions by Brant which were organ solos extracted from Brant's 1956 opera The Grand Universal Circus), Dragonslayer (1981), Good Morning Vietnam (1987)

for Gordon Parks: The Learning Tree (1970)

Brant's own work as a film composer was also extensive, particularly for documentary and independent films.  It includes:  Playing Fields of America (aka Sport Film) (1943), Capitol Story (aka Public Health, for the OWI)(1944), the Pale Horseman (OWI)(1944), Journey into Medicine (1946), Osmosis (1946), Outbreak (1947), The Big Break (1951), Ode to a Grecian Urn (1953; an avant-garde film to which Brant improvised on dulcimer, double-flageolet, ox-bells, double-ocarina, celesta, bass recorder, and Persian oboe), The Secret Thief (1956),  Your Community (1956), Dr. "B" (1957), Endowing our Future (1958), Fibres in Civilization (1958), Peace Music for U.N. Day (1959), a “Wind quintet film” (1960), Early Birds (1961),  Fertility & the Physician (1965), Jack Levine (1966), Chartres Cathedral (1970), Marcel Duchamp (1978; improvised by Brant), The Trappers (1981), and Noch Ist Polen Nicht Verloren (1991)

See also these posts about Brant: On the Nature of Things, and Brant on Orchestration

Billiard balls made of cellulose nitrate would occasionally explode on contact

Archiving your music is not easy:  try to keep it in several media at once (as paper originals and copies, as data on permanent and non-permanent formats), make multiple copies of each, and distribute the storage (i.e. one copy at home, one copy for the safe deposit box, one sent home to Mom).   Think plastics will last forever?  Think again:  here's a new aticle  on the degrading of plastics.  

Reboot

It's time for the annual notation reboot.  In addition to setting up new template files for the new edition of Finale, my primary engraving software, I've been doing practice runs to keep up some facility with the other notation software on my computer.  In addition to Finale, I have Lilypond, Sibelius, Turandot, Graphire Music Studio, and have recently downloaded Berlioz  (a commerical program now turned into freeware) and MuseScore (free and open sourced) to try.  Each product has useful features and a distinct workflow and I find that it's useful to have several approaches available to solving the same problem.  The new Finale (2010) doesn't have any dramatic changes, but does have two features that were worth the upgrade: an easier way of working with percussion and more possibilities for the import and export of graphics.

But don't get the impression that I'm spending all my composing time with my computer: a fresh box of black uni-ball micros has arrived,  I've ultra-sounded my Rapidographs and calligraphy pens completely clean, and have even purchased a fresh Noligraph, my favorite five-lined staff writer.   I'm now ready to compose with or without electricity and on the backs of envelopes or cocktail napkins should inspiration hit.  There are no more excuses: time to write. 

 

    

Along the river

I've long imagined that music had two origins.  The first as a extension or heightened form of speech, essentially and immediately communicative in function, and the second, more absolute and aesthetic in nature, an articulation of time passing, as relief from boredom, accompaniment to work, travel, falling into sleep (and dreams).   These two causes have long been comingled in music, but I'm not altogether sure that that is a good thing.

I was reminded yesterday that not only does music articulate passing time, but it can also articulate space. It has a physical presence with a center which it fills and thresholds into which it dis- and reappears.  I went cycling with the family alongside the Nidda, a small river near our house which empties south of us into the Main.  A lightly clouded Saturday in June was a perfect day for festivals, and as we passed over the bridge in Praunheim, a cover band on could be heard from a stage some hundred metres away in the center of the village.  As we drove on, that sound steadily evaporated with distance and barriers both natural and human-made.   Further on up the river, as we approached Heddernheim, small fragments of low brass intercut with bits of snare drum begun to cross our path, eventually revealing themselves as whole swathes of tunes and countermelodies and bass lines played by the local Fanfarenzug.    With a weakness for brass bands, I swerved off the path into a churchyard to hear the wind band more closely, especially enjoying the way in which the percussion was used to provide a continuous bed of sound for the winds,  and the gradual addition of the more higher pitched (and consequently more highly attentuated by physical distance) instruments to the total mix.  Cycling onward, the process was reversed and Heddernheim receded both as a civic and acoustical location.  The next villlage up the river soon spoke for itself in quite a different way, through a peal of church bells, announcing the hour, or — for it seemed to go on longer than usual — perhaps a special event, maybe a Saturday wedding in June.   As we went further upriver,  the gently creaking sounds of the river and the whirr of other bicycles, sometimes the steps of joggers (some of whom put their iPods or mp3 players up loud enough to "share")  were only interrupted by a pair of bridges underpasses with their ignorable traffic,  a family of insistant swans at the edge of the water, and a pair of soccer matches.  Each physical space we approached, passed by or through, or departed, was as recognizeable from its acoustic signature as from its physical shapes and forms.  Having ears means time — and space — passing need never be dull.       

Copy that

At least half my training as a composer has come from copying music. Not imitating the music of others but the note-for-note copying of scores by others both as work for hire and for my own use, to play and study. (See also this post). Whether with pen and ink on paper or by pointing and clicking with an engraving program, copying invites, indeed forces, one to attend to the music in an analytic and intimate way that, in my experience, casual listening to a recording cannot replace, and to hear imaginatively, interpreting both details and larger passages in the in-and-out-of-time unique to the written score. A major part of the copyist's work is planning the project, finding the most efficient way to move notes from the original to the copying, figuring out the most elegant layout of notes, measures, systems, pages, all of which is analytical work, tracing phrases, sections, processes, resemblances and differences, identifying local tactics and global strategies of both original and transcription, as well as the inevitable and incalaculable surprises. Even deciding where to place page turns is a matter that invites analytical and interpretive engagement!

Composers have probably trained by copying music for as long as music has been written down. The tales of the youthful Bach and Mozart copying music by others are familar to many young musicians (as I remember them, these tales often include mention of candlelight and ruining ones' eyes). While it is entirely possible that copying, indeed written notation altogether, will fade even further away from widespread use, in favor of more purely aural/oral transmission, recordings, and possibly even new technologies as yet unimagined, it is hard to escape from the recognition that copying has been a useful skill, and written notation an effective and long-lived technology for moving music from here to these as well as preserving and learning about music.

An effective technology, but not a perfect reproductive technology, in the sense of a perfect digital copy of a sound file: the risk and the charm — and, to my ears, ultimately the advantage — of the handmade copy is the interjection of interpretation into the path of transmission. On the one hand, this is just another example of (Richard K.) Winslow's law at work — "if you want a perfect copy, learn it by ear, if you want to garantee that it changes over time, write it down" — but on the other, this interpretative act can be a first step in a process moving inevitably towards new composition. Each work I have copied (as a teenager, I copied lots of Webern and Machaut and Cage and Harrison and Purcell and Lully and transcribed almost every note of Harry Partch, I later earned part of my living copying for colleagues and doing ghost-scoring for films; now I do some interesting work for Material Press) has been an invitation to compose something new, as if tracing the paths of each of these pieces has made more urgent the paths not taken.

Morton Feldman, "Piece" (1950)

Landmarks (41)

Richard Ayres: No. 37b (2003/2006).  Never mind the neutral title — this is a work of symphonic dimensions and classical formal proportions. The composer — as far as I'm concerned the most technically gifted composer of our generation — is an exuberant orchestrator, inviting the orchestra here to do everything that an orchestra can do well, and the performances I've heard have uniformly showed the orchestras honoring the challenge with equal exuberance.  He has made that rare thing: new music that orchestral musicians love to play.  The writing for the brass and string harmonics is spectacular, with some passages for the trumpets in particular touching my heart with a characteristic drag that resembled something in-between New Orleans funeral marches and mariachi playing.  (In this score, Ayres has also raised the process of muting a tuba to a cooperative musical skill of the first art. )  No. 37b  is a more than a bit of a madcap adventure, comic in genre, but with the entire range of comic expression in use, from droll to intense and from gentle to slapstick.  A comic symphony is naturally more classical than romantic, and the rapid cuts and transitions never look backward, but are sometimes detoured by cul de sacs and hairpin curves, seizing that same cinematic impulse that was captured in the some of the best works of early 20th century neo-classicism.  Why isn't real movie music ever this good?

Listening for the day

Henry Cowell: Homage to Iran; Terry Riley: Persian Surgery Dervishes

Cowell's music is an homage, with a casual relationship to Persian classical music; Riley's piece has even less to do with that tradition.  But who cares?  Each piece makes an honest gesture of tribute to a valued culture.

Losing the game

Are downloading killing recorded music sales, or is it the competition from games? 

Brant on Orchestration

Very good news: the late Henry Brant's handbook for orchestrators, begun in the 1940's and completed in 2005, Textures and Timbres, has finally been released. Music Books Plus lists the book already, Amazon, SheetMusicPlus, and CarlFischer.com should have it soon.

Brant had a unique career, not only orchestrating his own extraordinary works — most famous for their use of physical space as a compositional element —, but also working in commercial music for Broadway, radio, and in Hollywood films (his longstanding collaboration with Alex North is best known, but his credited and uncredited work for film was much more extensive.)  Several of his students have described Brant's approach to scoring as uniquly empirical, practical, and rule-of-thumb systematic, but always imaginative.

[I frequently get asked to recommend orchestration textbooks. My first recommendation is to get some hands-on experience with each of the orchestral instruments, for example through an instrumental music education course. Then, go to the books: Andrew Stiller's Handbook of Instrumentation is essential (it's now available in cd format; I think of it as the successor to Forsythe's Orchestration, an underrated book with a lot of good practical information), as well as a good introduction to the physics and psychophysics of music (there are several good choices) and William Sethares Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum, Scale places timbre within a larger context. (Likewise for Robert Erickson's Sound Structure in Music). Then a good history of orchestration (Adam Carse will do) and Berlioz's classic treatise. If you have any conducting ambitions, Hermann Scherchen's Handbuch des Dirigierens is an elegant and cultivated book but it is also very useful for orchestrators. Have a look — but not too long — at Rimsky-Korsakov, Widor, Koechlin, and Piston for some distinct aesthetic approaches (Riemann's Katechismus der Orchestrierung, too, if you can read the German in Fraktur type). The most-used contemporary university-level textbooks (Blatter, Adler, Kennan), are certainly useful as one-stop-shop references, but I find none of them as good as Stiller for basic questions of instrumentation, nor do any of them offer particulary distinctive aesthetic approaches.

There is nothing in English quite like Hans Kunitz's 13 volume series, Die Instrumentation, which treats individual instruments in detail, but the last 30 years have given us many books which advise on contemporary techniques for individual instruments, including Turetsky for contrabass, Dempster for trombone, Rehfeld for clarinet, Strange for violin, Artaud or Dick or for flute, Van Cleve or Veale/Mahnkopf for oboe, and Solomon or Schick for percussion. Several books have treated contemporary techniques more comprehensively; the book I grew up with was Gardner Read's Contemporary Instrumental Techniques, but it surely ought to be updated or succeeded.]

Have Windmill, Will Tilt

... if I were to have a logo promoting my work as a composer, that'd pretty much be it.   Composing is fundamentally an act of independence (Blake's fool pursuing his folly), not doing what everyone else is doing.  When everyone else sigs, you zag.  Composing is not so much putting things together as making an act of imagination concrete (the Hungarian word for composer zeneszerző, literally a "music catcher", is so much more to the point): hearing a dragon where others hear only creaking windmills and figuring out how to make that explicit for others. Photographer Ansel Adams once said something to the effect that he never pushed the shutter until he saw an image that wasn't literally there.  Gregory Bateson advised prospective field workers to be prepared to simply sit a good long while, not to try to document everything, not to  try to take everything comprehensively in, but to wait for something interesting and important to happen. It always does.  Every new work of music, if it rises to the extraordinary, must be an error, a mistake, even wrong-doing or a violation, by the standards of the work which proceeds it and, often,  the community of listeners.  (Blake again: Error, or Creation, will be Burned up, & then, & not till Then, Truth or Eternity will appear.)   Composition is resistance against the existing social construction of the musical. 

Groupwork

Composing is mostly on the solitary end of a private-public partnership.  Performing, recording, broadcasting is the public side.  Many composers carry out their end as covertly as possible, often in near- sacred spaces, our hermitages, garretts, and ateliers.  (Mostly a good thing, too: I'm not alone among my colleagues in never having gotten good marks for "gets along well with others" in grade school.) Some work privately and keep it so, other hold on to every scrap and sketch, allowing the possibility that their steps to be retraced by others (for examples, see the Elliot Carter and Roger Reynolds archives online at the LOC site)*.   

However composition is often taught in institutional settings and taught to groups of people, whether in formal courses (with exercises and assignments) or in more open seminar environments (Paul Bailey usefully points to a New Yorker article about creative writing workshops, an enterprise parallel in many ways to composition instruction, which asks good questions about the value of the enterprise pedagogically and the nature of its impact on writing itself.)  Typically, though, most composers who are taught in institutions get a mixture of group and one-on-one instruction.  My impression is that most directed composition ends with the model compositions associated with theory sequences, but directed composition assignments in groups can be very exciting (Cage's assignments to his New School classes and Stockhausen's group projects at Darmstadt are cases-in-point).  

Some composition teachers like to examine every detail in a student's work, others are most focused on the bigger picture.  Personally, I don't find much value myself in having my work edited note-by-note by a teacher.  Iin the end, I take responsibility for every note; another set of eyes canusefully help me with the editing, but they don't have to belong to my teacher and I refuse to be cross-examined on every detail.  That said, I do value highly the exchanges with teachers that focus on getting the ideas right, and the execution both clear and polished.   I was lucky to have composition teachers and fellow/sister composition students who shared that preference, but there are certainly ideal student/teacher pairs and groups who have worked and do work on a more nut-and-bolts level.   (This too: Seminar groups and private lessons can run a certain risk of turning into encounter groups and therapy sessions.  Having lived through California in the 1970's, I don't have much need for that myself, but if it's good for you, fine and dandy.) 

Composers also, sometimes voluntarily group together as professionals and sometimes get grouped together by others.**  There are a lot of good reasons for clustering or grouping — exchange and promotion of music and ideas,  playing each others' work, pooling of material resources, sharing concerts and publicity — and there are also some problems (who's in and who's out of the group?  what if the group falls apart, like a marriage? what if one member is more successful career-wise than others?  what if you now disavow a group?). (Ron Silliman has some thoughts on poets clustering).   Maybe it's wise for groups to have some form of pre-nuptial agreement, for the worst case scenarios.  My own engagement with other composers around Material Press has been both personally and musically rewarding;  the association is voluntary and  fair— like Frog Peak in the US the publisher only earns from scores sold, not demanding the usual 50% publishers' share of license fees, and the times we get together, socially or musically have always been good.  We could, perhaps, have done more in the way of promotion, but our lack of pushiness is also a matter of style.

See also this post from 2007 on Co-Composing, this on The Convivial Cage (2006) and this on Loneliness or Conviviality (2007).

_____

* There are three very practical and potentially profitable reasons for saving sketches: for revising or extending your own work, as material for teaching, and as salable archival materials.  I don't save my sketches, having (a) a small horror of someday being overwhelmed by them, such that I cannot do anything new and (b) some committment to the notion that there are always more than one way to create a given musical surface, with no certainty about which one is the best or most efficient way, but those are my personal quirks.  I recommend that my younger colleagues carefully save every scrap of paper and analog or digital media they make: this is your work, too.  

**The best/worst example of this being the minimalists, with the most curious moment happening when the dubious, but original, quartet of Young, Riley, Reich, and Glass got re-booted (the culprit seems to have been Nonesuch records which, no surprise, was making a heavy investment in Reich and Adams) with Young out and Adams in, albeit with Glass, Reich and Adams running as fast away from the label as they could...

The Unbearable Languidness of Institutions

If we had been limited to mainstream media this weekend, with the exception of BBC's Persian service, we'd have almost completely missed news of the events in Iran.  Traditional media institutions — aside from the fact that they never perform well on weekends — simply don't have the agility and networks of witnesses to cover stories that are not lead by releases from official sources and move faster than hourly deadlines. Internet reporting, on the other hand, while often — and wisely — having to carry caveats about verifiability, have proven themselves to have both considerable agility and a astonishing breadth of networked resources, many of them appearing nearly spontaneously.   (I'm personally amazed that two of the best sources have been diaries at the (left) Daily Kos and (conservative) Andrew Sullivan's page; new pages of photodocumentation from inside Iran and translations of twitter messages have also been very informative.)  I have no doubt that, with the weekend closing, mainstream reporting on Iran will improve, but the internet provided essential information bridging the mainstream's absence and has set a high level of quality for further reporting, changing the initial mainstream spin on the election, which essentially accepted official statements. 

*****

I didn't notice that Perspectives of New Music has — or had? — a blog.  Seems like no one else did either.  It's here but seems to have moved to a Google group here, which is just as quiet.   I'm not exactly a fan of PNM, but it has been moving in more interesting directions in the last decade or so (with features on composers including James Tenney and Pauline Oliveros; good stuff even if two decades too late), but this good news appears not to have reached a wide audience.  This is a shame, because for New Music to stay news, it has got to communicate its breadth, depth, and liveliness.   For breadth and depth, PNM could be an important component, a marker of our diversity and controversy and as a forum for the more intellectual aspects of our art form (yes, Virginia, musicians can be intellectuals), but to succeed, it has to appear lively, with a greater online present and a more rapid delivery of new information, idea, opinions, and, yes, music. I honestly hope that the inherently slow pace of PNM's paper-based journal culture does not keep it from finding a lively presence online.

*****

It was both a revelation and a confirmation for me, when as a young composer, I discovered that Europe had recognized the music I loved most — that of the American experimental tradition — as our most vital and important.   Cage and Feldman and Reich were important names here, while the American compositional establishment — the best upper set, so to speak —, the ones who got commissions and teaching jobs and other plums, were largely (and, to my ears, correctly) obscure.   In my recent listening journeys through the archives of RadiOM, I've been delighted by the realization that, in the end, we valued the experimental tradition more as well, for it has been the experimental repertoire that has survived in the archives.*  In part, I suspect that this is because the outsiders running music programming at Pacifica stations, for example, recognized both the historical importance of the radical music and its material fragility, and understood that if one was to be responsible, as journalists and citizens, that documentation was essential, not a luxury.  (Being able to rehear KPFK broadcasts by Carl Stone or William Malloch lately has been a bit like going through a second musical adolescence.)  On the other hand, where are the archived broadcasts of mainstream new music performances or interviews and the like? The programming lists of a traditional, commercial, "classical" station, like LA's KFAC, actually included a modest number of mainstreamish new music performances, but there's been no foundation created to store those archives.   I suspect that there was a form of institutional hubris at work here, not unlike that found in the large financial institutions that have fallen so greatly of late, a sense of entitlement that comes with establishment status: "we don't have to worry about archives because we're too big to be forgotten..."

*****

Don't get me wrong: we need institutions in our lives.  (Yes, Virginia, we need both the post office and the opera house).  There are just too many of us living on a small planet that somethings need to be organized on a large scale.  Efficience, reliability and redundancy all have their place. (I'm thinking now of Cage's Buckminster Fuller-inspired recognition of the essential role of "utilities" in our lives and the modest way in which it should interact with our lives.) The problem is created, however, when such institutions become bottlenecks, gatekeepers, or roadblocks, when the institution is no longer flexible enough to meet changes in supply, delivery, or demand, and particularly when the institutional will to survive is greater than its ability to recognize that it is no longer providing an adequate service.

*****

[Added, an hour or so later.]  I'd thought I was done with my institution-bashing for the day, but here's something more:  perhaps the first decent English language newspaper obituary for Henry Pousseur, who died on March 6th, appeared in the Guardian on June 11th.  

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* The survival of radical work in online archives is not a phenomena restricted to music:  check out the PennSound pages for poety, or UbuWeb for film, music, poetry, and much else.

Admission, granted

I like concerts.  I like going to concerts.  I like them to the near-exclusion of recordings from my life. But I must admit that I'm not always a perfect concert-goer.  I have, for example,  yawned during a concert. Yawning is rude and distracting to both the performers and the audience.  I shouldn't yawn during a concert.  I have also fallen asleep during a concert*.  That should probably be avoided as well. During intermissions, I sometimes move to more expensive seats that have been vacated. And, of course, as a penurious student, I did steal my way into more than one concert. Sometimes whole concert series or festivals. On occasion, I have left concerts at intermission and — albeit with somewhat less frequency — I have departed the hall in the middle of a piece.  I have coughed, to be sure.  Also sneezed.  I have made crispy plastic noises while opening packages of mints or cough drops, trying to avoid coughing or sneezing. I have sat in squeaky chairs and been unable to stifle all sqeaks.  I have worn shoes that squeak. When suffering stress, my jar has been known to crack.  Not quietly. I have dropped programs, books, sun- and/or reading glasses, articles of clothing, backpacks, briefcases, picnic baskets,  canned beverages, and — but only once — a bentō box during concerts.  I have expressed displeasure by not clapping.  But for all that, I do not talk while music is being played during concerts and I do not have a mobile phone, pager, portable music player, or wristwatch with an alarm that might go off.  Nor have I ever worn clothing so distractive as to compete with the music for the audience's attention.  To be absolutely fair, most of the things I have dropped have fallen on cushioned chairs or carpeted floors.  And while yes, a fallen bentō box is indeed annoying, but a tiffin or a schoolchild's tin lunchbox or carkeys or a handful of cutlery would be that and more so! My cracking jaw is a legitimate medical condition.   And supressing a cough or sneeze is often a hell of a lot more distracting than actually having the damn cough or sneeze and getting on with it.  And, pardon me, but I have never booed, hissed, or demonstratively exited any performance that didn't really have it coming.

In fact, I'd say that altogether, I'm just about your perfect concert-goer.   

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* I have never fallen asleep in a work of Morton Feldman's, by the way.  But I have watched three men — my father, the late musicologist and philosopher Daniel Charles, and Feldman himself — all doze off during Feldman concerts.  Charles, a large man, snored loudly — if ironically — throughout a performance of Feldman's Piano, but somehow managed to wake, as if by some form of electric shock controlled by clockwork, promptly and impressively, given his gallic tonnage, at the piece's end, rising to his feet and shouting "bravo!"

 

Genre Trouble

Once again, I'm thoroughly enjoying myself with a new China Miéville novel, The City & the City, which is a kind of late 19th century mystery story set in a wierd fictional/sci fi/fantasy universe in which the two cities in the title share the same geographical space but are otherwise essentially distinct from one another.  Miéville is a writer who clearly loves his genres, and generally respects their conventions, but not their borders (I hear echos of Kafka and Dickens here as well)  and his respect is never at the expense of getting the language right, and his language is beautifully right.  Similar in my experience to only Pynchon (and, with respect to non-"literary" genres, like legal briefs, Gaddis, or technical and commercial writing, Wallace), Miéville understands how to love a genre just enough to make it better.  If I were a 19h century romantic, I might even use the word "transcend." 

I have to wade carefully now when it comes to the subject of genre.  A post in the past which mentioned comic books casually was rightly torn in shreds by readers with a much less casual relationship to that jenre.  To be honest, with the exception of juvenile flights in sci fi and the hard boiled detective novel and the occasional but neccesary escapes into airplane novels, my reading has been mostly "literary", writing that has the conceit of being outside or even above established commercial genres.  My musical tastes, of course, are probably even more conceited.  I probably know less of or about more popular music genres — whether rock or jazz or polka or jaipongan or whatever — than most of you, and yet I am more or less convinced that the new music has a capacity — if often imperial in ambition — to both contain, critique and go beyond any other genres.  At the same time, I will note the complementary capacity of popular genres to swallow innovations whole if only to spit them out when they are done (anyone else here remember Joseph Byrd's brilliant The United of America or Stanley Silverman's Elephant Steps?  I wonder to what degree such efforts, from the late 1960's, might be considered as tales of caution for my colleagues, now, in the late years of the first decade of the 2000's, who are entering into similar cross-over projects?) (More interesting to me are the cases of composers who have parallel careers in genre musics, like Wallingford Riegger, who wrote band and choir music under a number of pseudonyms, or Jerry Hunt, who made his living largely by scoring industrial films and videos).

In his introduction to McSweeney's Mamoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, editor Michael Chabon (a writer who also knows his genres)  offers a though experiment: "Imagine that, sometime about 1950, it had been decided, collectively, informally, a little at a time, but with finality, to proscribe everyother kind of novel from the canon of the future but the nurse romance. ... I do believe that from this bizarre decision, in this theoretical America, a dozen or more authentic materpieces would have emerged.  Thomas Pynchon's Blitz Nurse, for example, and Cynthia Ozick's Ruth Puttermesser, R.N. ..."   May I suggest that any composers interested in joining our little melodica anthology project think of it in similar terms: Imagine that, sometime in the 1950s, it had been decided that the optimal vehicle for avant-garde music were the virtuoso solo melodica piece, that the melodica had had its David Tudor and Severino Gazzelloni and the Arditti and Kronos had been melodica quartets and that its repertoire had included its own Berio Sequenza, and a Cage star-chart-based etude, and an hour of Stockhausen's Klang, as well as the Steve Reich phasing piece or a Christian Wolff exercise.  (Oh wait, we have those last two. Oh well.) 

Enduring Optimism

Composer Gordon Mumma (my teacher, so I'm partisan here) has a new blog, here, and an updated webpage, here.   The greybox images on his site are particularly elegant; definitely a new trick this old dog will have to learn.

I'm delighted, also, to learn about the music of composer Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, who has a website full of scores and sound files, here.  

 

Vérités et Mensonges

For the Melodica project, I've been toying with some forgery.  The idea has been to compose the melodica pieces a few famous composers neglected to write before shuffling off.  The notion is that the world really needs a virtuoso Cage Etude and a Berio Sequenza and maybe even an hour of Stockhausen's Klang for solo melodica.  

I have discovered, however, that if you want the result to be both convincing and musical, you can't play fast and loose with your imitations or parodies, no matter how cheap or, well, funny, they might want to be.  If you want to fake a Cage Etude, for example, there's really no alternative to the discipline Cage followed, in which clear rules were established — whether for chance or choice operations — through which the notations on a star map are to be transformed into notes, intervals and chords arrayed in musical time, and then executing those rules precisely.   Forging a work that is supposed to pass as an unknown piece by a known composer requires replicating the same level of detail and depth that the composer brought to his or her work as well as using material that that is similar but not identical to material the model composer used in "real" pieces.  Anything less that that is likely to lead to an unconvincing result. The same goes, one presumes, for Ersatzstockhausen or faux-Boulez or fraudulent Ferneyhough or bogus Babbitt or counterfeit Carter or gold brick Glass or reproduction Reich... okay, you get the idea.  

One other thing:  a successful sham requires that one concocts a convincing backstory.  Like that sweet little melodica piece Morton Feldman jotted down on a cocktail napkin and promptly forgot in a booth in the back of the Cedar Tavern in '58, or that tragic work Xenakis abandoned in a foxhole while running courier services for the resistance, or that very long solo La Monte Young forgot about during one of those years in the 1960's that has long been forgotten by anyone who was really there... 

Setting the Price

A bleg:  In my sideline as music publisher, we're having some serious discussions about the price of sheet music.  We're not exactly operating in a perfectly balanced supply and demand environment, and there are real costs in materials and time in handling individually printed and shipped orders of sheet music (often with some unusual formating issues), so the calculation is far from easy.  For my own music, and the music of some others at Material Press, I'm usually happy to give away electronic copies of scores (knowing that, if all is reported correctly, I'll earn money from performance licenses), but sell paper scores to libraries or others who don't like to roll their own.  But setting the price for those paper copies is tricky, particularly (a) when a single piece has a relatively modest — by page count — size, or (b) when text or graphic scores are involved, or (c) the score is published on demand.   Peters gets 5.95US$ for a copy of 4'33", perhaps two photocopied pages in a folder.  Peer Southern sells Thomson's Piano Sonata No. 3 — 6 pages of engraved music in a folder — for five bucks.     Anthologies of smaller works by either of these composers, in an engraved and staple-bound format, range from 5 to 25 dollars.  What would you be willing to pay for a single page of instructions for a piece of music?  For a piece 5, 10, or 30 pages long?  How about a cd of recorded sound required for performance of a work?

Think Again

Repetition is opportunity.

A nice line from Xenakis:

When you say repetition, it is "thinking again about the same thing." This is what I think of as the meaning of "repetition."

(from here), reminds me  (once again) of my favorite Lewis Carroll verse, The Mad Gardener's Song:

He thought he saw an Elephant,
  That practised on a fife:
He looked again, and found it was
  A letter from his wife.
"At length I realise," he said,
  "The bitterness of Life!"

(...)

and, of course, John Cage's advice:

If we are suffering, and we are able to recognize it, we have the opportunity to change our minds. 

 

Irreverent

Without thinking too much about it in advance, I recently set some small poems by the late Charles Chase, a hometown poet, radical, sculptor, teacher, instrument repairman, small businessperson, and a great friend.  One of them has gotten me into some trouble:

we're not so crowded / where we're going / but we got room for God / being he don't mind / sharing the work / except Sundays

My settings are for ATB voices, not too difficult technically, and are rather mild in musical character, even pretty.  But the reception from prospective singers has been cool.  I just hadn't reckoned with the fact that most choral groups are either attached to religious institutions, or peopled with church-goers so this modest bit of irreverence was just enough to place it in the not usable column.  

These little songs are not central to my work, so that this is is not a major issue for me or anyone else, but maybe it is a useful illustration of current religious sensitivities.      

 

Language Extinction

It's a good thing that there's so much concern these days about language extinction.  As someone working in a musical niche, I recognize something kindred in endangered, dead, and extinct languages.  These languages, like our musics, are repositories of alternative modes of expression (at their acoustical surfaces, at the very least)  and, sometimes, perception, and the preservation of such creative diversity is a critical task.

This conservative task is entirely complementary to the goal of encouraging new linguistic invention.  Nothing is more deadening to the imagination than prescriptive linguistics when it has acquired political power (in a country like Germany or France, for example, the rules about correct spelling are a highly political affair and inability or disinclination to follow those rules can be highly disadvantageous; I have recently watched the newfound American enthusiasm for the spelling bee with some horror).  The same certainly goes for musical composition:  innovation, like the recovery of neglected historical musical paths, inevitably means a confrontation with or negation of some conventions or rules.  

   

Arts and Crafts

I just read that Sam Maloof has died, at the age of 93.  A woodworker, Maloof famously refused to identify himsef as an artist and insisted that his rocking chairs were to be rocked and his cribs were for babies to sleep in, not just striking objects to look at but exquisite surfaces to touch and be put to use.  He was part of a Southern Californian crafts scene that, to my mind, included people like the ceramicist Paul Soldner (Soldner was a neighbor when I was a kid, with a stone house like ours in Russian Village on the Claremont/Montclair border; Maloof lived in Alta Loma, not so far away) as well as countless others working in niches between the ornamental and the practical that California seemed to have always attracted like a magnet.  

I don't think it's much of a stretch to also associate a number of west coast musicians with these craftsmen — Lou Harrison and Harry Partch and Erv Wilson, certainly, but also John Cage, for all of whom craftmanship (in notation or instrument building, for example) was important, as well as the inventive use of found materials, and were never narrowly constrained by the conventional and narrow definitions of their professional disciplines, but rather an attitude that any interesting line of work could be pursued, DIY.  Moreover these musicians seemlessly incorporated craft elements into their work in contrast to the way in which a Schoenberg kept his hobbies (designing playing cards or a cardboard violin) at home or Hindemith identified the craft of composition with a guild-like professional compentency.  

There is a well-known and rather formal art historical term, Arts and Crafts, that identifies a movement in architecture and the decorative arts that, with probable roots in the English movement of the same name, flowered in California and further up the west coast.  Facing the Pacific, Asian models were as important as those from Europe, and the European models as often as not were filtered through the Spanish and Mexican colonial/mission era.   I can remember, in the 60's, visiting the homes of various elderly relatives, all of which exhibited mixtures of architecture, furniture, decor, and objects which comfortably incorporated all of these influences.  My great grandmother's place in Paso Robles was a white-plastered, red tile-roofed adobe bungalow, where persian rugs inside looked up at wrought iron Mexican lamps, and dinner was served on real blue china from China, the model for her garden was, despite the hot climate, an English one with Japanese-inspired touches. The movement was never exclusive to professional artists.  That house and garden in Paso Robles was sketched on by the owner-builder on butcher paper and later on had hand-made lace, stained glass windows, and wallpapers to accompany the purchased items.  Russian Village was only one of several complexes in Southern California with houses made from rocks, salvaged slabs of flood-wrecked concrete pavement and any other bits of thrown-away but still usable material. (The famous Watts Towers are a close sculptural relation of these houses).   The movement reached outward and downward: a standard field of instruction in public schools was "arts and crafts" rather than the traditional fine arts trio of drawing, painting and sculpture. John Cage's mother, for a time, owed an Arts and Crafts store in LA, selling materials to home hobbyists; his engagement with graphic design and, later in life, with printmaking mixed the seriousness of someone who know the mainstream world of modern art well with the play of someone who was willing to try it himself.  I also think that there's an obvious straight line to be drawn from Cage's can-do music education experiments with his Aunt Pheobe and in WPA projects to his music for percussion and the prepared piano.   

Lou Harrison will always be a professional role model for me: if he needed a particular instrument, he had it built or built it himself.  (A friend once quipped that "with every step forward in technology, Lou was apt to take two steps backward".*) Two of Lou's own role models were William Morris and Arnold Dolmetsch, direct connections to that other Arts and Crafts movement.  His calligraphy was of a different aesthetic than Cage's, connected to older historical models (Morris especially) than Cage's more strictly modernist influences (i.e. Maholy-Nagy), but both had manuscript hands that were attractive, legible, and immediately identifiable as their own, impulses that go at some odds with the emphasis elsewhere on a more uniform professional copying style.    

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* That same friend predicted that Lou would soon be making his own paper, but Lou actually became a serious advocate of non-tree papers and it was Cage who would incorporate his own paper (with ingredients including kitchen scraps) in his visual art works.  Lou was also not-entirely-so-backward with regard to technology.  With Carter Scholz, he devised several sets of computer fonts based on his calligraphy, which are now available from Frog Peak Music.

Shawn on Schoenberg

I've just read composer Allen Shawn's Arnold Schoenberg's Journey (Harvard 2002) and can recommend it highly.  It's a modest length (ca. 300 pages) work of advocacy for the music and for Schoenberg himself, written in a personal and concrete style making it a nice companion to both Charles Rosen's small Schoenberg book and Andriessen and Schönberger's wonderful Stravinsky book, The Apollonian Clockwork.  Shawn discounts his analyses in advance, but his treatment of the Six Small Pieces, Die Glückliche Hand and the String Trio are quite fine, clearly the work of a musician listening closely to music he loves and comfortable with the words needed to share what he has heard.  In his discussion of Schoenberg's life and personality, he is always interesting and musically relevant, whether writing of Schoenberg's complext relationship to religion, his passion for games and crafts, or even giving an entire chapter over to the topic of "On Being Short"*.   

It is a striking fact that Schoenberg remains a composer whose music — and person** —  is so often held only in the most reserved form of respect, only thinly concealing a serious disapproval, that advocacy is still required.  I contend that the difficulty with Schoenberg's music is its style rather than its substance or technique, and perhaps what his works need best is some defense against its devotees, whether from an Adornovian historical dialectic or dry Babbittonian technical description.  In truth, however, the style, one in which expression is so heighted and treats the darkest themes and topics which haunt our souls, has long become a permanent part of our musical language, if only most often encountered in its weak imitations found in film music.  Fortunately, in Europe at least, his work receives regular concert and stage performances and is increasingly well-played.  The 1998 Gielen/HR-Symphony recording of the one act comic opera Von Heute Auf Morgen, for example, was so brilliantly rehearsed that it revealed that the work, long considered only questionably comic and impossible to really pull off, was, in fact, a lost masterpiece, and the players under Gielen learned to play in the style with both the precision and spontaneity required of a comic work.  

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* As someone who is often the tallest composer in the room,  it was very interesting to read that people who are not tall often adopt social strategies that are the opposite of my own.

** A vivid example of this was recently provided by the German musicologist Martin Vogel, who devoted an entire volume to disparaging Schoenberg's music and personality and an entire companion volume to disparaging Schoenberg's influence (Cage in particular) as the "Mistaken Path of Modern Music".   What a waste of paper.

Melodica!

While free-reed instruments have enormous prestige in East Asian and Southeast Asian musics, they have often been a bit undervalued in the west, more associated with popular and pedagogical repertoire.  Occasionally, however, individual free-reed instruments have proven themselves to be valuable in art music as well -- just think of the harmonium in Rossini's Petite Messe Solemnelle, the accordion in Ives' Second Orchestral Set, Thomson's Four Saints in Three Acts, and many pieces by Oliveros and Skempton, or the bandoneon in Mumma's Pontpoint, Tudor's Bandoneon! or Kagel's Tango Alemán.  (Not to mention the original orchestration of Die Dreigroschenoper or Oliveros' See-Saw (a duo for Accordion and Bandoneon with Possible Mynah Bird Obbligato).   The number of composers who have written for the harmonic is long (here's one list), so I'll only note concertos by Cowell and Hovhaness.  

There has, however, been too little written for the friendliest of the free-reeds, the melodica.  Composer Christian Wolff has often used it as his axe of choice whether playing his music with others and an early tape phasing piece of Steve Reich carries the name Melodica and uses a toy example as its sole sound source.  Now is the time to remedy this lack of repertoire.    

SO HERE'S A CALL FOR SCORES  for the first online anthology of new music for melodica.  Pieces may be for any solo or combination of melodicas (although solos and four-part ensembles seem to be the most popular).  If you use specific pitches, I suggest using the range f to e''', which will cover both the most popular Hohner and generic models  (the Thomann model, for example, widely used around these parts, has the range f to f''').  Please send scores in PDF format to me by the first of September, 2009.

For some sound examples of the Amsterdam-Based Melodica Quartet ((Jeremiah Runnels, Sander Breure, Graham Flett and Taylan Susam - founder), composer and melodicaist Taylan Susam has usefully posted these:

Christian Wolff: Exercise 1
Mark So - Collateral (4)

Also, see this previous item about new music melodica, here.

 

Some Movement

I should be a short-term futurologist*: Steve Hicken is getting serious about twittered scores, here.

I've added some prose scores of my own manufacture to join the good works of the hard-working folk at Upload .. Download .. Perform, here.

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*I've always been amused by that term.  You would think, wouldn't you, that if a "futurologist" was any good, he or she'd be rich from their predictions about the future, and not reduced to peddling books and lectures?

Short Scores

I keep getting asked if I twitter.  I don't and I probably won't, but I do have one prediction: we're sure to soon see a number of twittered prose scores.   It strikes me that the constraints of the form lend themselves to prose scores based around images or tasks.  For example: THREE TRIANGLES THRICE or SO FAST THAT IT SOUNDS SLOW or ALL TUNES ALL THE TIME or CLOUDS BECOME RAIN or SOUNDS WITHOUT EDGES or EACH TONE CONNECTS TO THE LAST TONE or PLAY WITH EACH AND EVERYONE IN THE ROOM ONCE or REPEAT EVERYTHING AT LEAST THREE TIMES. 

Playable

A recent post here about all-white note pieces sent me looking for a copy of Virgil Thomson's Sonata No. 3 for piano (1930), written for Gertrude Stein who like to improvise only on the white keys.  As might be expected from Thomson, it's brief, witty, and wise, alternating between playing the naif and the wiseguy.  The disfunctional harmonies and athematicism keep the (third, of four short movements) waltz, in particular, safe from any out-of-place sentimentality.  That athematicism and all the right wrong notes make this very easy-to-play piece suitable for children and others with very short or very long attention spans.