(En)Closures

One of the features of an overwhelmingly large share of tonal music is that pieces or, at least, movements of pieces, start and end in the same tonality — with some variations, i.e. starting in minor and ending in major or vice versa etc. — with a typical tonal narrative sense of being someplace, going someplace different — different, by degrees, of course, with going to the dominant or a parallel or relative tonality being relatively modest journeys, and tonalities more distant from the tonic suggesting journeys of more exotic or adventurous varieties — and then returning to the place from which you started.  (The late composer Robert Erickson was fond of a baseball metaphor, then ends of the piece marked by home plate, and the bases implying ever more distant tonalities relative to home.  (Under the Ericksonian system, hitting a homer is slick and efficient, but having to work one's way around the bases — through whatever combination of drives, flies, bunts, walks, and and steals — is certainly more interesting.))

At the Zenith of atonal/twelve-tone/serial music's academic presence, one of the strictures was that, in order to avoid the suggestion of tonality, beginning and ending with the same tone or pitch configuration, or other suggestion of the same tonality (taken, in its most liberal sense) was to be deprecated.  (Alongside restrictions on octaves, major-minor triads and dominant seventh or stacked-third chords (I can recall that one of the common criticisms in certain academic quarters, of Steve Reich's phasing pieces, was that they usually phased all the way around their modules, coming back to the initial arrangement; but it's striking that there was little self-criticism of serial or twelve-tone works which just as systematically — if not auditionally as democratically — cycles right through their own exhausted aggregates and whatever-featured arrays, inevitably implying that the next note, the hypothetical note to follow the last one in the score, was most likely the first one (and, may I add, if we are allowed to imagine implied-but- unsounded tones in Schenkerian analysis of tonal works, then we damn well ought to be able to imagine the implied-but-unsounded in non-tonal pieces.)))  Unfortunately, holding tightly to a rule like this suggests a very weak understanding of what actually happens in a piece of tonal music, and in particular, in the very best pieces of tonal music.  In such music, I contend, the appearance of a return is usually just that, an appearance, not an identity relationship, for one doesn't really return, but arrives at a place, with similarities to the point of origin, to be certain, but so informed and so colored by the experience of everything that has transpired in the journey — and all the more so when that journey is full of tonal fakes and puns and errors —, that "the same" isn't really "the same at all."  (See also these (here and here) recent posts about the useful weakness of "same" and "different" in music.)  

I suspect that one reason we resist recognizing such differences is that we have a lot invested in the metaphorical notion of a piece as a journey with a singular trajectory, that of getting lost and coming home (or, there and back again), so that all the adventures and detours and cul de sacs along the way get largely discounted  (recently, there have been a couple of surveys of German tourists which have shared the conclusion that most German tourists enjoy their holidays least while they are actually on them, and most when they are back home on their sofas, reminiscing and planning the next package vacation) although those are precisely the parts of the journey which give it texture and distinction  (I recently had a gig which involved copying massive amounts of Beethoven & was once again reminded that I'm never sure which is more impressive: the banality (arid, bromidic, characterless, cloying, colorless, commonplace, dead, drab, drag, drudging, dull, flat, ho hum, humdrum, insipid, interminable, irksome, lifeless, monotonous, moth-eaten, mundane, nothing, nowhere, platitudinous, plebeian, prosaic, repetitious, routine, simplistic, spiritless, stale, stereotyped, stodgy, stuffy, stupid, tame, tedious, threadbare, tiresome, tiring, trite, unexciting, uninteresting, unvaried, vapid, wearisome, worn-out, zero altitude) of his material or the extraordinary things he makes out of his materal (like, wow.))  Perhaps it would be useful — if not as a listener or performer of existing music, but at least as a composer of new music — for us to change the metaphor a bit.  Maybe we don't really use music as a form of travel; at least we don't use good music as a means of traveling in straight lines from here to there and then back here.


What might an alternative metaphor sound like?  How about this from Raymond Roussel:  In his How I Wrote Certain of My Works (which is essential reading, buckoes) identifies one working method which begins with a pair of words which have some similarity — which could be homonyms or metagrams or rhymes or assonances or visual but not acoustical similarities etc. — and then creates sentences or phrases around the word with their own punning resemblances, but altogether distinct meanings, assigning this pair of sentences or phrases to the beginning and end of the poem or novel. Composition then becomes the process of connecting these two same-but-different bits of information through a process of interpolation (and often multiply interpolated interpolations (which are represented in Roussel by multiple sets of nested parentheses.))  In tonal music, or not-yet-tonal, or even not-really-trying-at-all-to-be-tonal musics, might it often be the case that apparently-same tones or tonalities are actually only punningly related, with an external marker of similarity or two temporarily confusing the listener into conflating events that are really fundamentally different in character (in a trivial example, but getting back to Beethoven, in the Consecration of House Overture, he begins with all the tones of a C major triad spread thick and wide, but ends with only Cs, in five conjoined octaves — gone to C alright — and, for that matter, hard not to hear as major, but hardly the same C as the opening)?     
       

Practicing Composition

At intervals, not periodically and not quite predictably, but often enough to suggest an irregular cycle of some five to ten years, I get hit by the thought, no, nothing so casual as a thought, rather: the conviction that I really have no idea what music is, let alone what it might be (and as a composer, that "might be" is everything.)  I'm usually full of doubts and uncertainties about my music-making  — we don't call it experimental for nothing, chums —  but this has musical-existential dimensions, calling into question not only my own catalog but the larger project of music, and my understanding of it. But after an initially phase of panic or even despair, there — to date — reliably comes a sense that this is not a crisis of confidence but rather a useful opportunity, to renew acquaintance with music as if after a moment of total sonic amnesia, with sound & its potential for organization, from the ground up, isolating it into all its possible constituent elements or atoms and then tossing them up high overhead, to see hear where they come down again, in new systems & states, configurations & complexes, permutations & modulations, in plains & fields & forests & deserts, in streams & rivers & lakes & oceans, in canyons & on mountaintops.

Sometimes this opportunity is realized through some grander compositional or theoretical project, figuring out, for example, what pitches might do for me if very flexible and accurate intonation were reliably available at little cost, OR calculating all the possible subdivisions of metrical feet in some large number of possible measured metres, and then figuring out how these weighed against one another in possible phrases, OR building a practice of harmony based on smooth voice leadings from an octave divided into equal parts OR trying to built a better orchestra... But, as often, the opportunity involves taking those idle moments that emerge with deep doubt and simply doing musical exercises, a return to the most zen-ish disciplines of apprentice days : for me, these are usually contrapuntal — species exercises against a cantus firmus, or canon writing (at unison and intervals, perhaps inverted), or bits of fugal answer. (Others probably find more use in harmonic exercises, but — for better or worse — I've always experienced harmony more as a consequence of contrapuntal lines than of sequences of chords.)  It's important for me to do as much of this in my head as directly on paper, and "in my head" usually means while walking (hence one valuable quality in having Terrier Mutt Lucky, the Composer's Best Friend around, to force me to regularly get up and go walk about), but however it gets dictated, I do have to get back to a keyboard and play it through as soon as possible, or the exercise is simply not complete. These periods of intense exercise usually include some intense score reading; at the moment, it's one Contrapunctus or Canon from The Art of the Fugue each day at the keyboard, once in the morning and once at night, cycling through the collection, no matter how little my fingers cooperate these days. I think the choice of music to play is actually not so important — last time around, I did some serious gamelan playing, next time, who knows, maybe I'll take up the viola again — the important thing is simply to have such a regular, disciplined practice in a repertoire with such clear constraints that the musical imagination is given a regular opportunity to wander.

The other opportunity this moment offers is for reassessing music history a bit. (Sometimes I think my concerns with music history and ethnography are a bit perverse; they're certainly not widely shared with my colleagues, but please grant me this one perversion!)  I've been incredibly disappointed in the most popular or prominent versions of recent music history that are on offer (although he only really covers the first half of the 20th Century, William Austin's survey is so much better than that of either Ross or the last two volumes of Taruskin's Oxford), but doesn't that simply make it more interesting, or even urgent, to formulate your own version?  On the one hand, I've become somewhat fixated on the notions that continuous memory of musical practice really doesn't extend before the last quarter of the 18th century and that the introduction of sound recording in the early 20th actually handicapped memory rather than reinforcing it, that the loss of the play of tropes and figures and affect that predates the "classical" era was a real one and worth serious investigation, and that many of the breaks our textbooks and semester schedules insert into repertoire, the turn of the 20th century in particular, were not only artificial, but actually deceptive.  I'm only at the start of these thoughts and I don't know how any of these ideas will play out compositionally, but they surely will.    

Composing Under Constraints & Musical Escapology

In one way or another, I've always composed under some set of constraints. I do so because the musical results have reliably both surprised and satisfied me, and have taken me through both comfort zones and previously unimagined places.  Many of these are tricks of the trade, widely shared in the community of composers; others may be uniquely mine.  Some are open and obvious, others are under the surface, some secrets, some puzzles, some cast away and irretrievably lost.  Working with a pre-compositional gamut of tones (sometimes a tuning) or noises is pretty common, as are using drones, ground basses (I'm very fond of ostinato basses but not so fond of repeated harmonic sequences), and hockets.  I like to take both random, constrained, and freely composed walks on pitch lattices, a practice related to an early, deep study of musical intonation.  I've used Hauer's harmonic band technique, through which any sequence of tones can be wrestled into a sequence of harmonies with smooth voice leading and often surprising local suggestions of globally a-functional tonalities. Formally, I like to use Gray Codes, Beckett Gray codes specifically, for example to control scoring patterns; this is an area where I'm probably a genuine pioneer.  I like borrowing forms from poetry, both in terms of metres and rhyme schemes (I would like to do more of the same with dance forms, perhaps especially because they're so out of favor.) I also like to use Square Root forms, following John Cage's model, but sometimes broken square root forms, in which some chunk of the pattern is missing, whether lost or intentional erased, as suggested by Lou Harrison. Harrison's phrase systems (described in his Music Primer, a beautiful small book rich in potent ideas (I received a copy as a 16th birthday present from the composer Douglas Leedy*))  are extremely useful, as are his interval and rhythm controls, the former of which anticipate Elliott Carter's methods. I like to cycle a rhythm within and through a sequence of measures and I also like increasing and decreasing series of icti over such sequences, and sometime I combine the two. I like logical sequences of numbers (here's my contribution to mathematics.)  I am also very fond of using perfect shuffles — yes, just like card shuffles — to order and reorder sequences of musical material; they are usefully rich in both familiarity and variety. And that's just from the top of my bag of tricks...

The question of whether a player or listener can or should dis- or recover these constraints and methods is unresolved, and usefully so, I think.  Not least because music works best when it works at several levels of entrance or retention: at the surface, for those just passing by, and deeper, ever deeper, for those with the time, skills, patience, imagination to go deep.  There is some music, like much of that of early Steve Reich or almost all of Tom Johnson's remarkable catalog, in which the methods are either immediately present or easy to puzzle out, but this does not make either the music or the method any less mysterious or profound for the accessibility. In such cases, knowing the local system simply makes the occasion more engaging, and ultimately removes distractions from attending intimately to either or both the underlying ideas and their physical expression in sequences of acoustic events. The flip of the coin comes with work like that of Milton Babbitt, in which aural recovery of the underlying array and the immediate rules for its projection into a score is really not on the agenda. The array itself insures a maximally even (or, by Jim Tenney's terms, ergodic**) distribution of event classes such that, statistically seen, any given sample of the surface should be more or less like any other, so that the extemporaneous process of composing out form the array is one of largely creating atypical events that defeat that evenness, emphasizing, for example, near similarities at the surface created by accident-like conjunctures found deep in the array. I would characterize this more as composing against the array rather than with it, and playing or listening to such pieces is definitely less about recovering the structure than enjoying the emergence of such playful anomalies.

I happen to find constraints like these advantageous; other composers disagree, and sometimes with something approaching anger.  Some advance the argument that composing with constraints is unnecessarily accepting unnecessary constraints on the musical results.  I would counter simply that this is mistakenly assuming that the imposition of constraints leads to a severely limited range of musical results.  In fact, in the huge vector space of possible musics, a reduction to a manageably smaller but still very large number (as with the 10^14 possible combinations that lead to my recent clarinet pieces***) is more than useful and with the huge variety of parameters, values, and contexts that can come into play for any given constraint, we are inevitably dealing in realms of finite, but still ridiculously large fields of possibilities. In any case, most anyone who claims to be composing without constraints is most likely doing exactly that — using a modality or tonality or a metre is a constraint, row tables and other pre-compositional means and tactics are constraints.  Hell, using five line-staved manuscript paper or just using a particular set of instruments and sticking with them is a constraint: be honest, how many times have you been listening to a string quartet when suddenly a Wagner tuba, a drum machine, and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir enter in?

ALL THAT SAID, the ultimate utility of recognizing a constraint is that a situation or scenario is created with authentic opportunites, among them tensions or conflicts, built into it.  And once you begin working with such a situation or scenario, the possibility or option to resolve the tensions or conflicts, and take or refuse opportunites becomes a lively presence in the work, whether tantalizingly left unaccomplished or relievedly resolved, by escaping, whether gently or through brute force, whatever limits one imagined the constraints to have set. And the question of whether this escape act is, ultimately, compositional or in the hands/mouths and ears of performers is also — and usefully so — open.

And of course, this:  My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self of the chains that shackle the spirit.  — Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music

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* About those phrase systems: I recall Brian Ferneyhough, at the chalkboard in Darmstadt, appearing to dazzle his audience with a series of transformations to a series of measures. He was practicing notihing more or less than a species of Lou's system.
** It one of those paradoxes that John Cage seemed to have understood remarkably well: maximum variety leads to maximum maximum leveling.
*** That piece is indebted to a collections of poems coming out of the Oulipo, that famous cabal of writers exploring techniques for potential literature.(1) I'm a long-time admirer of the group, and not only the technical output, but the actual literary output of several of its members, first Harry Mathews, then Georges Perec and Raymond Queneau, most recently Jacques Roubaud whose novel Mathematics: is a wonderful thing, very close to my own sympathies, full of amplifications and interpolations and built of a linear expression of a branching structure (parentheses, dots) which is so flexible that it seems obviously the ideal one for an intellectual autobiography. 
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(1) I concur with Charles Shere about Daniel Levin Becker's Many Subtle Channels: Im Praise of Potential Literature; it should sit on everyone's little Intros-to-Oulipo shelf next to Mathews and Brotchie's The Oulipo Compendium and Motte's Oulipo: a Primer of Potential Literature).  As long as I'm at it, this year has been good for accounts of experimental literature in general, and I've enjoyed Charles Bernstein's Attack of the Difficult Poems, and really admire David Antin's  Radical Coherency.

Same and Different

One of the qualities I value most in music is that it works for us as wholes which are marked by continuities and contrasts, and this despite the fact that we have such a weak and fluid notion of identity and difference in musical materials. The "same" audible stuff can be heard completely differently in alternative contexts; even fa plain & simple vanilla repetition, made by just shoving a bit of music a little further along in time, creates contrast by both the experience of that time shift and through the formation of a connection to the original statement.  At the same time, musical coherence depends upon being able to connect or hear relatedness between stretches of music although they many vary in detail or in substance. (All of this depends upon the related faculties of memory and forgetting, but that's a topic for another day, another day.)

I've been finishing up two pieces in which everything depends upon this fluidity between the musically same and different.  The first, a series of divisions or variations over a ground bass, is more straightforward due to the historical precedents, although my belatedness in working to a familiar ostinato (La Follia) places perhaps special pressures on the side of making differences, if not innovation altogether.  The second, 100,000,000,000,000 Pieces for Clarinet is more ambitious.  It also has a historical model, but the model, indeed its very form, is not a piece of music but rather a collection of sonnets of the same size and similar name by Raymond Queneau.  The unique problem here is that I have to write pieces with some certainly as to their balance between coherence and contrast, although I will never be able to hear the vast majority of the pieces in their entirety (indeed, at the given tempo, if played non-stop, a performance of all of the pieces would last more than 285 million years) composing only the pool of 140 ordered segments from which all of the pieces are assembled.

Discipline and Belief

So, I've initiated a project — the details of which will be hush-hush until the end of January — which involves at least 18 composers and an equal number of ground basses.  For my own contribution, I decided to compose first and notate later, getting the music I wanted in my ear, mind, hands, and tongue (it's wind music) before committing it to paper or monitor, as a way of increasing discipline in a musical environment that is, for me, both so rich and so familiar that going on auto pilot and just writing something out was simply too easy. (Sounding easy, which I might want, is not the same as composed easy, which I don't necessarily want.)  At the same time, knowing that I was going to commit some notes to paper put a powerful  — and powerfully useful — constraint on my paper- and screenless composing, in that I was not going to accept just some more noodling-around-out-of-habit improvisation.  When it came time to notate, this discipline had turned into a serious commitment to each note, a need, even, to believe in each note before drawing it on a page or clicking it into the data file.  Perhaps most symptomatic of this is the fact that I couldn't bring myself to copy and paste anything, not even the repetitions of the ground bass.  If that ostinato is going to remain obstinate, then I damn well want to mean it, and if that ground bass starts to get a little less grounded, then I'm taking full responsibility.

Just another ordinary piece of music: let it go.

I'm a hard critic of my own work.  Over the past few weeks I wrote a solo viola piece, in three movements, sonata-is, even.  It's workmanlike, crafty, even, in the Hindemithian sense, but not much more. (Part of the problem may have come from composing directly into a notation program, which can encourage making music that behaves like known music.) I like the second (slow, to a mutating ground*)

and third movements (fast, in square-root form) well enough and have some substantial doubts about the first, and while the whole might be useful for teaching purposes, to be honest, the piece doesn't add up to a compelling and memorable concert piece.  The question is does it not yet add up, or will it never add up?  And: is the amount of work required to make it work worth it?   My sense is that I didn't go into the piece with a distinct and clear enough idea to make a compelling piece, and what turned out instead was more a piece of habit than of invention, just more repertoire.  And — as far as I'm concerned — we're served so much repertoire these days, that just more repertoire is not much needed.  Nevertheless I do still have an ambition to make a solo viola piece, just so long as it does something more than than the habitual or the ordinary. The work done in the first movement will be let go completely, some of the other movements may get salvaged (but not necessarily for this piece) and I'll start again from the scratch, looking, listening for a musical idea that is more convincing, more urgent.

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* I'm from California, a place where the ground is known to move, so if my ground basses are instable, changing over time in a certain way, I'm excused.

Composing a Storm

A summer's evening of thunder and lightning is appropriate accompaniment to my current musical sketching. I'm considering a music-theatre piece and before I commit myself, I want to see if I'm able to compose a storm.  Some models are obvious:  Monteverdi's concitato style, Haydn's Chaos, the former more for the internal, personal, mental agitation of strong weather, the latter for the external qualities.  Some may be less so, for example, Berlioz's "intermittent sounds" which gets at the essential aperiodicity of a storm.  Storms have defeated composers:  Cage was never able to finish his "Atlas Borealis with Ten Thunderclaps" setting of those 100-letter words (once 101 letters) in Finnegans Wake, but some of the ideas went into the Thoreauvian Lecture on the Weather, with recorded weather sounds by Maryanne Amacher, a mixed success at best.  Ligeti abandoned his plans to write an opera out of The Tempest, apparently stuck on the storm, for which he planned to use some computer assistance to compose out the non-linearities of a storm. (As the tempest in the play is raised by Prospero's magic, its particular mix of nature and artifice has a particular envy and attraction for composers, with our own nature/artifice balancing act.)

*****

When I went to grad school in '83, I took the train across the US, leaving from Pomona, California and getting off three days later in Meriden, Connecticut, with transfers in Chicago, New York, and New Haven. I remember it as a staggeringly hot summer and lugging my belonging through those big humid train stations was a shock as I'd never experienced summer outside of the dry Southwest. Although the train went through some of the most amazing landscapes in Arizona and New Mexico, the highpoint of the train ride was nighttime in Kansas, where electrical storms were present, crashing, thundering, illuminating in every direction on that great flat space.  Equal parts composition and chaos. Even the most ambitious composer has to be intimidated by the weather.

Under Construction (2)

Some composers work on one piece at a time but I tend rather to have several pieces in progress at the same time, each in different stages of completion (or, as the case may well be, abandonment).  Some scores seem to write themselves, quickly without interruption, while others require a lot of pondering or re-working.  I have a few projects that have sat on a far corner of my desk and/or in the back of my mind for a long, long, time. Some could be finished in a snap, but are presently "waiting to be commissioned,"  others are troubled, perhaps hopelessly so, and still others are private projects, not ever intended for public use, but made rather just to satisfy some musical curiosity of my own, an indulgence I'm fortunate to grant myself.

Some of these sketches for pieces, my lumber, are notated conventionally, others have prose scores (or "reports" as Henry Brant called them, prose instructions from the composer to the composer to reduce anxiety in going from idea to playable score.)   The less developed are just ideas, sometimes little more than a title: Meander Scar. In Praise of Wasps & Bees. Anagoge.

Here's one example from an old notebook of a work waiting for a commission:

(The title is) Two Lines.  It's a long-ish piece for a medium-sized orchestra, divided in two not-quite equal parts in a fairly eccentric way, but seating ordinarily, the ensembles are not physically divided, but dovetailed.  And each of the two orchestras plays a long, independent melody, each an "orchestrated unison" (with some tactical intervallic, chordal, and aggregate (including unpitched percussion) doublings).  The two orchestras share a common pulse and a notationally convenient metre, but are generally independent with some distinct qualities (i.e. one has a lot of repeated tones and florid ornaments, the other has only very short and very long tones ornamented only by slow portamenti), coming together — which can mean at a unison or a consonance or some complementarity — only at major structural points (like Javanese seleh) triggered by rhythmic and tonal approchements. 

Under Construction (1)

A tower crane, perhaps 10 stories tall, recently assumed a large presence in my neighborhood's modest skyline with the view to the East now dominated by its yellow fixed mast and rotating jib that stand center and above the site of a apartment block and small shopping center under construction.   Always fascinated by large machinery and construction projects, I've made a point of following this site since the demolition of the old buildings and, in company with Mutt Lucky the composer's best friend, I've walked by at least twice daily since last summer. (I even tried to bribe the crane operator in letting me up into the cab, but no go, liability insurance and all that.)  The attraction and the action for me is in the construction — the structure, materials, processes, and logistics — with the final, finished building, something of an footnote.  As a composer, my engagement with music is very much of a piece with this, with my earliest compositional impulses probably those found while building with Lincoln Logs, Tinker Toys, Togl, or Lego and the attraction to the music of John Cage and Lou Harrison, as a budding composer of 13 or 14, was, first of all, structural — the division of the duration of the whole piece into subordinate parts — and only then came the selection and distribution of materials — sounds — into that structure. Variations on Mr. Cage's Square Root Form and Mr. H's Formal Systems & Phrase Systems are still some of the most trusted tools in my box.  They help make music which reliably holds together.  Such temporal systems are foundation and framework, and they are useful whether or not they are, in the end, audible.

The Detail That Makes The Whole

Sometimes a piece should be finished, all done, but something — and it's usually something very small — still irritates, calling attention to itself as not quite, or not yet, right.  My recent set of Compositions 2012 #s 1 - 7 on this blog provides a good example.  These are prose scores, written in text rather than a conventional staff and note graphic notation, and they are a parody (in the musical sense) of some famous pieces by one of my teachers, La Monte Young, which use the text "Draw a straight line and follow it."  I admire La Monte's straight line, which is a consistent element in his very consistent music, but I've never quite been able to stick to straight lines myself. For better or worse, I tend to meander, and my first Composition 2012 was simply a one-off, lightly affirming this. And then — for better or worse — I realized that I had to make a set of these, and in the Youngian spirit it had to be a set of seven, which I completed over the next week or so, gradually realizing that however lightly, even whimsically, the exercise began, it did have a useful, even serious function for me, making an attitude toward working, my own, a bit more clear.  So useful, but still whimsical.  When La Monte works, he tends to the thorough-going, even complete, examining all the possibilities of a set of conditions, and like his straight-line-edness, I treasure but have considerable personal distance from that approach.  And my set of seven  is a minor exploration of wandering, crooked or broken lines, composerly but by no means complete, like a 12-tone aggregate. When I was done with seven, I stopped, for the task was complete.*  But one of the seven continued to irritate. Something was not quite right. I had written, in Composition 2012 #6: "Plant a straight row of black tulip bulbs. Wait."  La Monte's structure was clearly echoed there: instructions for a performance with two tasks, and the suggestion of these tasks taking some amount of time with the adjective "straight" preserved. The black tulips were entirely my own responsibility because this was written right in the middle of an excellent tulip season and I happen to like "black" ones, those deep maroon beauties which always suggest — to me at least — that there's something wrong with the color on your mental TV set and does so in the sexiest possible way.  But "black tulips", in this context, this set of prose scores, irritated because they didn't fit at all. There was no straight line connecting them to this context.  It irritated, until a few days later, an improvement suggested suddenly itself in the middle of a morning walk with terrier mutt Lucky, the composer's best friend.  What I was after were not black but broken tulips, tulips which carry the tulip breaking virus, which makes the flowers multi-colored rather than locked onto a single color.  These are often startling plants and that word "broken" created a resonance with other texts in this set, a straight-but-broken line, patiently attended to among other kinds of not-straight and straightforwardly followed lines.  Now this may sound, for some of you, as something more like writing poetry than composing music, indeed you may not recognize any music at all in my doggerel, and that's okay, but trust me, my impulse here is entirely musical and this text articulates something I happen to find important about the way music proceeds from one moment to the next.  In any case, be assured that resolving this little irritation, moving from black to broken, or black broken, was a musical line I found worth following.
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* If there were an eighth piece, it would have gone like this: "Composition 2012 #8: Don't draw a straight line, draw a bunny and follow that."  But there are only seven pieces, so this composition does not exist.

Filling the Big Empty

New music, all-too-often at the bottom of the musical resource food chain, doesn't often get made with much choice about the environment (room, hall, studio, gallery, theatre, church, club, pub, arena, field, etc.) in which it gets presented. And — all-too-often, again — this can have serious effects on the music itself. If a main attraction of the music is a certain level of detail or subtlety, for example, all that attraction can be effectively wiped out in a room with too much ambient noise or with too much resonance. On the other hand, a music with a considerable amount of blank space — "silence" — may not work out in concert halls otherwise considered to have fantastic acoustical properties for music making, but conventional music-making with the conventional continuity of concertante composition. Earlier on, I made a lot of music that was more rests than notes, but concerts and recordings were too frequently frustrated by the space in which they were made. Paradoxically perhaps, I discovered that out-of-doors spaces — with a prevailing constant and predictable ambient sound level were much more forgiving for music with Sierpinski-like ratios of silence to sound, in that expectations of noises external to the music event proper can lead to a useful amount of unhearing, while the contrary expectation, in a church or concert hall or morgue etc. can lead, in the event of a sudden crackle in a fresnel lamp or a settling bit of architecture or furniture or some embarrassing body noise can distract, with some finality, from the continuity of the work. (As Heinz-Klaus Metzger put it: "Webern was the last composer before the advent of air conditioning.) For all my apostacy in other matters minima musicalia, the one part of the original minimal faith I've always tried to keep is the stricture that minimalism is the elimination of distractions. For this reason, among others, I made something of a serious turn in my own music away from big empty spaces in the direction of filling-up the available time. I hear this mostly a pragmatic way of dealing with the real potential of unanticipated sounds in real concert spaces to distract, and am generally more lenient with pieces intended for performance outside or in unconventional spaces. I have considerable reservations about accepting this move as a general, let alone permanent, aesthetic principle, but since there is actually quite a large body of silence-dominated music around these days (much of Wandelweiser repertoire, for example) my retreat shouldn't be much of a loss.

Keeping a Commonplace

The composer Jeff Harrington recently pointed to a page transcribing the contents of H.P. Lovecraft's Commonplace Book, here. Lovecraft left enough interesting ideas as unused material for several careers worth of weird fiction, heck even a few weird operas. (I have to admit to never having read Lovecraft; maybe I should remedy this.)

To some extent, blogs are performing, in public, the function of the Commonplace Book, the place to keep record of one's own education, jotting down gathered notes and quotes, observations, ideas. This page actually began as a more-or-less smooth transitition from the marginalia I habitually scribbled on the edges of sketches and scores. But being public has altered the scope of this project. It tends to be more political and, though something of a record of my current musical obsessions, it's not as iniitmately connected to my compositional projects as my marginalia was, indeed, I find myself rather shy about writing directly about my own compositional concerns. At the same time, my entire cogitating-sketching-composing-editing procedure has changed quite a bit. Whereas I used to be fairly rigorous in the march from sketch to score, leaving a substantial paper trail, I now do more work directly in notation software now and try to keep my sketches to bits of paper (usually A6 size) that I scatter around my desk while working — some bits of notation, formal schemes, reminders of work to be done etc. — and then brush them aside into the waste basket when no longer needed. (I think having a crowded house with kids and dog underfoot has made me much less patient about maintaining an archive of sketches (on the other hand, in my role as publisher, I'm fairly obsessive in maintain any bit of paper from the other composers in my catalog.) On the other hand, I have several hundred uncatalogued pieces in various stages of development in the form of computer files for notation programs; I have no idea how or if I'll maintain these. )

But the idea of keeping an idea book like Lovecraft's, for my music, especially for all the plans and fantasies for work-to-come, is very attractive. I do have a short list with titles and short descriptors of pieces I'd like to write (titles are very important to me), but it's just another piece of paper hanging on the wall before my desk, not a real book. An idea book is something like a diary, but more like a dream diary than a record of daily and mundane accomplishments. Like diaries, however, I think that the very "bookishness" of such a document gives it a degree of seriousness and commitment that is useful for a composer. La Monte Young, for example, has long kept an Idea Book (and some of his ideas, from the peek I've had, are really quite wonderful and surprising, in particular a pair of operas.) Do you keep an idea book?

Some Advice

Here's a small bit of unsolicited advice for my composing colleagues: Don't use the default layouts, but take an extra minute to make your computer-engraved scores look good.

I was just sent a large-ish collection of piano scores by a colleague. I like what I've played through in the scores, but the (default Finale) layout is so bad that I refuse to play any more. The staves are too large, there is no space between systems (so that the bass of an upper system is hard to sort out from the treble of the system below), the title and composer's name are squeezed into the upper margin, the copyright notice practically buried in the bass of the bottom system, and all the text is in the default Times New Roman font (and everyone knows that nothing shows you could care less than using a default Times New Roman.)

As someone who is seriously near-sighted and astygmatic, what I want most is NOT the largest staff size possible, but the clearest image. Give a little extra space; you can afford the extra paper. Yes, there's a definite macho caché — and the dense-notating complexists have a definite macho streak, but that's for another item to discuss — to having a lot of marks on the page, but the page doesn't have to be more black ink than white space. Give enough room to your title and name above and copyright notice below, even if this means having one system fewer on the first page. (And, by the way, unless it's a piece with a composer and a lyricist to sort out, all you need in the right hand is your name, not a "by John Smith" as in grade school. We're grown-ups, now, and we know the convention that the composer's name goes up there on the right so that preposition is unnecessary.) And, let me repeat, choose a nice text font that says I care at least enough about my music to take the 15 seconds time and change the damn Times New Roman to something distinctive.

Legal notice: This advice is solely my own, kiddoes, and your own mileage may vary. And one caveat: When I was a composing youngster myself, there were contests in which the secret requirement was sending in (stinky, fading, yellowing) ozalid copies. Xerox copies were automatically discarded as "unprofessional." Only a small number of inductees were aware of these secret requirements. There were rumors, of course, but what the hell did "Ozalid" mean to some kid from the desert and even if he did know about it, how could he practically get an Ozalid made on a paper boy's income? There may well be some jerks running competitions or admissions committees nowadays who accept only scores with Times New Roman fonts or printed on saddle-stitched portrait-format 9"x11" paper or with embroidered lilies on Corinthian leather coverstock. I cannot accept liability for any failed submissions to such competitions and admissions committees due to such secret requirements.

Notes & Rests, Nuts & Bolts

Most readers of books and articles about music are probably more interested in context and biography and in an impressionistic rather than deeply technical approach to describing the music itself, perhaps focused on the "meaning" of a work in extra-musical terms. (Interestingly, it's writing about popular musics that shies away most from technical description.) But — and perhaps it's the bias of a practicing musician, and a composer at that — I honestly prefer more technical descriptions and am eager to have some better ideas about how a piece was put together. I'm not embarrassed at all about discussions of materials and systems and processes and plans. I like lists and counts and charts and diagrams and lots of notated examples. And however provisional the relevance of a particular method may be to the madness of the music which ensues, I'm all in for the ride, because my intention is to learn, copy (which is composers' polite-talk for steal) and adapt, whenever something, even the tiniest trick, appears promising.

In connection with some recent deep study of music by Berlioz, a figure I consider as important and as radical as Ives and Cage, Julian Rushton's The Musical Language of Berlioz has been a constant companion. While Berlioz's life and times provides (and has often provided) ample material for biographers and cultural historians, the real interest is ultimately in the music itself and getting a handle on that achievement simply requires talking about technique, which Rushton does beautifully and concretely. More importantly, for me as a composer, Rushton lays out the material elements of Berlioz's practice in such a way that they are constantly suggestive of paths for making music that mainstream music history more or less abandoned, cul de sacs well worth re-exploring.

Books like Rushton's might be described as constructive, and indeed they read a bit like do-it-yourself books for building this or that (as a kid I had a small collection of stage magic and puppetry and outdoorsy arts-and-crafts books, so it's long been one of my favored genres.) Lou Harrison's Music Primer and Messiaen's The Technique of My Musical Language are good examples of a composers letting us in on how they work in a direct and constructive way and I've been lucky to have learned from both since High School. There are also useful bits by Boulez and Reich and Stockhausen writing as concretely about their own music (Stockhausen's little book on In Freundschaft is practically a recipe for making the piece.) Ives' Memos have some wonderful hints about technique as well. While much maligned elsewhere, I have long been enthusiastic about John Cage's analytic half to the the Cage/Hoover Virgil Thomson; Cage has a refreshingly direct way about discussing a piece of music, unafraid of counting notes and often salvaging useful technique from a piece that has otherwise sunk. (One of the greatest hours in my life was spent in a hotel in Houston when Cage discussed his understanding of Mozart's materials and methods; I would gladly loose a limb for a time machine and a tape recorder to recover that lesson!) Charles Shere's elegant book on Robert Erickson, Thinking Sound Music, remarkably conveys a lot of usefully concrete information almost exclusively without the use of notation. Finally, I find three examples from ethnomusicology richly suggestive to composers: Paul Berliner on the Mbira, Michael Tenzer on the Balinese Kebyar orchestral style, and Simha Arom on African polyphony.

(Here's an older item with my list of favorite books on composition.)

Creative mistakes stimulate the brain

This study of Shakespeare's linguistic innovations — neologisms, unorthodox syntax, etc. — and the brain is exciting stuff and has, AFAIC, everything to do with compositional innovation and experiment in music. As with Shakespeare, I strongly suspect that every major innovator in music has done things with sounds or their context that make the brain work more than usual and it is precisely that stimulation that keeps this music worth returning to again and again.

I also think that many of the methods, often game-like, of the Oulipo in literature, the surrealists in literature and the visual arts, and many composers, particularly experimentalists, are designed as efficient means for getting right into that more-stimulated zone, often enstranging the familiar through even the slightest shifts in the selection or character of materials or their order in time or space.

Usefully Informal

Composers, as craftspeople, tend to overemphasize the professional, the formal, the finished, and the perfected. However, a lot of useful and valuable music-making is not professional and not yet formal or finished, let alone perfected, and this emphasis can often be a distraction from opportunities for music-making — indeed most music-making — in situations, environments and on occasions which may well be informal, provisional, and yes, (cheerfully) far-from-perfect.

New music, in order to thrive, has got to go wide and deep into our musical culture, an established if dynamic presence, emphasizing not only the most prestigious occasions and institutions and requiring only the most virtuoso musicians. This means music for amateurs, music for children, music for pedagogy, and music for private use as well as civic and institutional functions.

Fortunately, we have some very good models of composers writing pieces designed to reach wider sets of players and audiences which are nevertheless integrated into their work as a whole. For example — and looking only at piano music (we could as easily look at vocal music or music for guitar or recorder or school instrumental ensembles) — the collections of small-scale piano pieces by Bartók — most famously the six volumes of Mikrokosmos — and, later, Kurtág's Játékok (Games) and transcriptions for piano two- and four-handed, or Virgil Thomson's two collections of piano Etudes and the large series of Portraits. Mikrokosmos was compiled initially as piano lessons for the composer's son, Péter, but grew to be a progressive collection, varying from sketches to substantial pieces, illustrating nearly all of Bartók's technical concerns as a composer and pianist and in many cases serving as a sketchbook for other concert works. The Játékok includes repertoire intended for private and public use by the composer and his wife, occasional pieces for friends and colleagues, and, like Mikrokosmos, preliminary and intermediate steps to major concert works (the various metamorphoses of the enig- and emblematic Virág az ember materials as particularly fascinating.) Many of Thomson's Portraits, likewise, find their way into substantial concert works, often orchestrated, but the origins, as portraits of named persons who sat for Thomson in the manner of a portrait painter, were opportunities for the composer to experiment without the pressures of the formal, finished and professionally polished, often executed in the kind of automatic writing that, despite Thomson's insistence on his professionality, indulges in the advantages of — as Buckminister Fuller put it — daring to be naive, echoes the practices of modernists in other disciplines (i.e. Stein, the surrealists), and reliably delivered Thomson his most interesting music.

Among more recent examples of the usefully informal, I would add the scores of exquisite small-scale piano pieces by Gordon Mumma (some of which are available as scores from Material Press, and the recent double cd of these, played by the great Belgian pianist Daan Vandewalle is highly recommended) and also mention Lloyd Rodger's The Black Book, a project of composing approximately a piece a day for year, in ink without edits. (I haven't seen the scores, but I believe that they are in open score form, again, a very useful idea.) This seems to resonate with Lou Harrison's suggestion, for the "stuck" composer, of composing a whole piece each day, every day: the idea is not to try and write perfect pieces, but to practice writing performable complete pieces, however small the scale or modest the ambition, to concentrate and focus and practice craft, allowing the ambitious, formal, polished, and perfected to emerge on its own terms.

The Unpredictable Elasticity of Composing Time

How is it that I can make ten minutes of orchestral music in an afternoon, but spend a week worrying over a single cross relation in a tiny piano piece? As far as I can tell, when it comes to getting a musical idea right, the compositional labor involved bears no reliable economic relationship to the scale and density of the music produced.

Great Expectations

I'm quite fond of the series of novels (four, to date) by the (pseudonymous) James Church featuring the Pyongyang-based Inspector O. On the surface, they are detective novels with an exotic setting, but just below that surface they're something rather more, with proper resolution of the police procedural seldom on offer (the North Korean system inevitably makes that impossible) yet carried by the real mystery in the motivation and character of the central figure, O, and actually quite a lot of beautiful prose, much of it so tangential to the plot that the books sometimes seem like experimental literature.

Indeed, in the third of the novels, Bamboo and Blood, there is one of strangest formal moves I've encountered in a work of fiction. At the end of a chapter, just about in the middle of the novel, O is sent to New York City. Naturally, from the perspective of a western reader, this very unusual trip for a North Korean police inspector ought to be something very important, something truly momentous, and all expectations are for a detailed account of the unlikeliest adventures in the Big Apple. However, the next chapter instead begins with O already back in Pyongyang, as if nothing momentous at all had happened and, indeed, the fragments of information we receive in the rest of the book about the New York visit add up to very little. Church not only makes a surprising formal move, disappointing our expectations for significant, plot-driving action, he plays with expectations based upon our deepest biases. It's our conceit that we simply expect a North Korean police inspector to be impressed, if not overwhelmed by the city that never sleeps. Instead, from what we can gather, the inspector was so much more annoyed by the interference in his quiet and careful life at home and in the office — not to mention the possible personal risks associated with the opportunities of foreign travel — that O simply refuses (a) to let much happen in New York and (b) to register much about the city that he might take home in memory subject to interrogation.

In the play of expectations in a musical work, an example like Inspector O's laconic trip to NYC is a very useful one. A satisfying piece of music is not necessarily about satisfying musical expectations. It's also not necessarily about holding back material or an event (a lot of 12-toners made a big deal about "saving notes", often confusing a useful tactic with an all-too-obvious strategy; let me be clear: saving a note is a musically useful notion, but it's inadequate to sustain an individual career, let alone a repertoire*). But it can be about seriously disappointing expectations and offering something totally outside of the framework we had assumed the piece was operating within. And that moment in which we suddenly become aware that our assumptions weren't even wrong is a wonderful one.

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* Paradoxically, perhaps, the opposite strategy, of allowing all the marbles to fall from the very beginning, allowing all material to be available — the gamut-based pieces of Cage come to mind — can be powerfully disarming to expectations. You think that you know all of the furniture in your living room, but switch the positions of the sofa and the coffee table and it might feel as if the earth has shifted just a bit on its axis.

The Lute and the Incongruent Bicycle Bell

Reading Errol Morris's new blog series has reminded me of my own introduction to Thomas Kuhn, in an seminar on the Sociology of Knowledge in Santa Cruz taught by Harry Eastmond, an extraordinary figure, a lecturer both more sharper and more animated and deeply funny than nearly anyone I've ever encountered, Barbados-born, seldom without sunglasses, driver of very fast cars, who took his office hours at the Space Invaders game in a downtown disco, and who was not to last very long in academia, even at the supposedly progressive Santa Cruz. I was a freshman and clearly over my head with the material, but I can still vividly recall how, eventually, the course turned on questions of objective and subjective constructions of knowledge (the ever-controversial Berger/Luckman classic, The Social Construction of Reality, came into play as well), when I had the minor revelation that musicians negotiate this territory all the time. Take loudness. We can haul out a decibel meter and measure absolute loudness, from a particular source, within a particular space, etc., and this kind of information is useful. It's useful to know that a trombone can output so many decibels. It's useful to know how a room responds to such inputs. But subjective differences in loudness can be even more musically relevant: if I have a very quiet stream of music — say, a series of chords played, pianissimo, by a lute —, interrupting this stream with, say, a single stroke on a bicycle bell will be heard as startling, perhaps devastatingly, loud, although the absolute loudness of that bell is not great. There are so many elements that go into the perception of such a musical event, including the very incongruity of the interrupting bell, that even if we were to come up with some formula for adding in objective measures of all these elements, the efficiency of the subjective perception in both approximating the objective and adding in the strictly intuitive seems to me to trump the objective measurement in both acuity and utility. But the main point is that, as musicians, we have it both ways, objectively and subjectively, all the time, and the musical experience is none the worse for it.

Is once enough?

When a piece of new/experimental/avant-garde/contemporary (etc.) music gets its first performance, chances are high that it will also be the last performance. In itself, this is neither a good or bad thing; while in some cases, the lack of repeat performances is definitely regrettable, in other — perhaps most — cases, it is no great loss, and in still others, the ephemeral nature of the event is actually a design feature.

Accepting the single performance can be a practical and economic decision. The supply of new musical works is large and the time and resources for proper audition are severely limited. But there can be an aesthetic, even metaphysical dimension to a decision to consciously limit the realization of a musical idea to a one-off occasion. The legendary ONCE Festival (in at least one version of the legend) perhaps put this idea in the air first. I think Philip Corner's score ONE NOTE ONCE found the condensed, koanic, essence of the idea. (Jean Tinguely's self-destructing sculptures are extreme examples of the idea in another medium.)

I think, however, a decision to affirm the transitory in a piece is a natural extension of the ephemeral character of the materials of music, the sounds themselves, dissipating, or as Marx and Engels had it, melting into air.

*****

A finished score is often only a single instance or realization of a musical idea or process, a one-off performance in the domain of composition. The decision to accept a single result over a plurality might be characterized in music-historical terms as a decision to avoid the creation of repertoire, or maybe it's just a sensible act in an age of mechanical (and electronic) reproduction. (As someone noted, the great lesson of mass reproduction is that we don't want everything to be the same, or you'd never find your own car in a parking lot.)

What interest might there be in taking a process-based piece like Steve Reich's Piano Phase, and using an alternative set of pitches to those Reich himself chose? How dependent on that diatonic-but-not-necessarily-tonal configuration chosen by Reich is the identity of that piece? Idea, instance, identity. Is it interesting or relevant that John Cage used the same methods and materials designed for Music of Changes to compose the miniatures of Seven Haiku, or (in at least one version of the story) the temporal structure of 4'33"? Are these new pieces or just left-overs? (Any composer who cooks knows the value of left-overs.)

A composer I admire very much, Andrew Culver, assisted John Cage for many years and part of his work involved writing small computer programs to answer, through chance operations (or, more precisely, effective simulations of the same) questions which Cage had assigned to such decision-making processes in his pieces. When Cage died, Culver had the tools require to generate an unlimited number of new works using Cage's own algorithms. But Culver did not do this, recognizing that Cage himself had the same possibility but had always accepted a single realization of a score. (This is not to discount the fact that Cage did, indeed, often use a lot of trial and error in adjusting his questions until they yielded the broad kinds of results which interested him. Walter Zimmermann's analysis of Quartets I-VIII in the Anarchic Harmony volume describes an example of this working process.)

Recently, when working with some young people, we spent some time with the score and realization of Cage's Williams Mix. An astonishing piece involving a plethora of source sound recordings and a hugely difficult-to-realize score requiring thousands of tape splices in wildly variable but breathtakingly precise dimensions and orientations. I don't know if there have been subsequent realizations of the piece to that made by Cage and colleagues in 1952/53, but Cage, with the publication of the score, explicitly suggests the possibility of new realizations. And now, it seems eminently realizable, in real time, as live computer music, with the computer randomly (or, more precisely, an approximation of randomly) selecting out and processing slices of sounds extracted from a stored library. An indefinite number of new realization could be made, but in doing so, are we learning or experiencing anything substantially different from that original realization?