Lost Thread

For all my engagement with formal experiments in my music, usually involving extensive planning, research, development, design, calculation etc., as often I just compose from brute force, drawing a continuous thread of music which starts someplace and goes wherever it (through that mysterious combination of habit, taste, caprice, and imagination) happens to lead.  But such unplanned excursions carry more of a particular risk than the planned journeys, as they depend — at least for me — on having a great deal of continuity in the compositional time and environment. When that continuity is broken, the thread can get lost and sometimes irretrievably so. Then you're left with fragments (which could be useful), outright abruptions (which could be useful), or fragile, tentative, questionable, or even broken continuities (which could be useful as well: think exquisite corpses.) (But could be useful is not necessarily useful.)

A broken heating pipe is never expected and the pipe (yes, it would have paid to have had copper instead of steel pipes!) that broke in our house two weeks ago unexpectedly interrupted a piece I was making that had been following precisely such a thread.  The damage to the house was, fortunately, minimized — wallpaper and flooring, and, interestingly, the 8-volume set of Wagner's writings got soaked beyond repair — and the process of repair already set into motion, and the weather has been warm enough that we could make do without heat, but all of the hectic and inconvenience of calling and organizing everyone and everything necessary to return to normalcy has put my piece in exactly that unplanned hiatus. I lost my thought. (What was I thinking?) I lost the thread. (Where was I going?) Time lost, continuity gone, no chance of reconstructing a plan when none existed in the first place.

So now, I play through the music I had made so far and wonder what to do next?  Do I file it away in the sketch box or drop it altogether? Do I analyze my own music and try to invent a plan, after the fact, from which further developments may be built?  Or do I just start when I left off, brute force after brute force, accepting whatever continuity — or lack thereof — circumstances now offer? How can I not be optimistic about this opportunity?

Martial

I was in marching band for exactly one summer, the summer before I started high school.  Although I began with high expectations for marching, as a trombonist, in the front row of the Montclair, CA High School Marching Cavaliers in their smartly tacky Columbia Blue and Black uniforms, I quickly found out that I didn't like marching and marching didn't much like me. Not yet 14 and already over six feet tall,  I was at precisely that awkward moment in pubescent motor development when control over my limbs was more a matter of random nervous system activity than the control required for marching, enough so that I was, honestly, very bad at it (once obliviously and famously marching several complete rounds of the parking lot with each sides' arm and leg in complete synchrony, just the opposite of how it's naturally — and supposed to be — done), but I probably could have gone along with the program had I actually liked the music. For each morning spent that hellish summer marching was matched by a miraculous evening at the (last) Claremont Music Festival, a season ticket to which was my parents' present to me upon graduation from Junior High.  An odd present for a 13-year, to be sure, but odder still was the experience of a morning spent playing the theme song to Hogan's Heroes over and over and over again (in between choruses of which, upper classmen from my lower brass section would take turns with pranks, a favorite of which was mooning passers-by whenever our beleaguered band director turned away (you could pretty well guess when he was coming around a corner, as he wore loud tap shoes as part of his training method) and then to hear, say, Hermann Baumann play the Brahms Horn Trio at night.  The ridiculous and the sublime, every day. Summer marching band was not a total loss, however, as the band director did manage to encourage some useful skills, one of which was spending hours in a practice room with a Conn Strobe Tuner.  Very soon, I learned that not only was it a useful skill to get that scope to stop moving, to create a precise and steady tone, it was also a great skill to select some intermediate place on the dial, between semitones, and get the strobe to freeze there, or to play very slow glissandi — both lipped and with the slide — and get those wheels to slow down or speed up.  I was an odd kid, to be sure, but it remains a more engaging experience than any video game I ever tried and probably the beginning of my active interest in matters of musical tuning. The other positive experience, in the long run, was that I composed a lot that summer, including the beginnings of three traditional marches. I was, and am — with qualifications — a serious Sousa fan, and was disappointed that our marching repertoire was largely themes from TV shows and bad pop tunes, and didn't include a single class march by J.P.S., but my more immediate model came from a pair of youthful marches on a Charles Ives recording by the Yale Theatre Orchestra.  Disappointingly, my high school band director, probably writing me off for the ineptitude of my marching, had no interest in my composing, but my junior high band director, Richard Johnson, generous shared a few hours to help me with harmony and instrumentation.  I wish I could say that my 13-year-old head, in those days with the Indochinese War still hanging heavy, was hip to the military character of the marching band and its repertoire, but no, that thought only came later to me, another story altogether.

On not being a film composer

I'm from Southern California, east of L.A. and grew up in in environment where film, no, movies had a deep presence.  I loved (and love, though parental responsibilities have slowed down the pace) going to the movies and watching old favorites or new discoveries on late night TV (for which German TV can be good.) Sometime in high school, something clicked and I suddenly had a revelation that movies could be more than just entertainment, they could intersect with the real world in unexpected ways and use the manipulation of time, sound, and image to tell me things about the world, sometimes shocking things, that I didn't know before.  The could help make the world more interesting and lively, creating opportunities for reflection and action.  Movies became almost as exciting as music.  What I liked, and like, most about watching film was/is paying close attention to details:  a line of dialogue written and executed supremely well, an uncannily timed cut, secret depths in sound design (done well, polyphonic sound design can contribute more to making the most implausible world believable than the most detailed visuals), the wallpaper in a Feuillade serial. or an obscure and curious object unreasonably situated in an otherwise unexceptional film set.  I can recall hundreds of favorite lines from films and probably as many favorite bits of editing, both sound and visual, and have some very strong opinions about how films work or don't work.  I can go on for hours about my favorite Bresson, Buñuel, Huston, or Ozu.  I can even spend a half hour trying to convince you that O.C. and Stiggs was exactly three technical mistakes short of being Robert Altman's masterpiece with a darkly paranoid subplot shared with Nashville.

Although I have, from time to time, done some sub-contracted emergency orchestration work for overdue film scores and have enjoyed the money (when it's actually been paid), I've never seriously considered trying to get a gig to write a film score.  I could make an intellectual argument (following Bresson) that I only really believe in diegetic music (the "real" music that incidentally takes place on screen), but I do really like a film score done well.  But I don't think I have the aggressiveness required to promote myself into that business and, to be honest, I'm not sure I have the composing speed to produce a score in the time frame required for a film (the score usually comes late in the process, after a director's provisional edit, and thus has to be done (= short score -> orchestration -> recording) quickly (weeks, days, quickly) and I, perhaps to my own career detriment, like to ponder, no, ruminate on, musical ideas for a good long while. The movie business doesn't pay composers for ruminating.  Also, a film composer needs to have a very rare balance between solid self-promotion on the business side and the ability to complete submit her or his ego to the fact that a film is a corporate production and the score and its author(s) have to adjust to the overall design and working atmosphere; again, although I've done orchestrating according to the strict guidelines handed me, but beyond that limited piece-work, I'm not sure I could hold my own ego back as required. 

But more than any of that, and not unrelated to the issue of holding one's ego back, although I can sometimes produced good Imitat, I probably don't have the stylistic chops to be a Hollywood composer. Hollywood film scores tend to emphasize similarities over differences and incorporate innovations only slowly  (it's interesting to note that some smaller film scenes, like Britain in the 50s and early 60s, or the GDR, actively employed contemporary composers working in idioms more akin to contemporary concert music.)  I can understand this conservatism, in that a film is a big investment and the producers have to balance risks, in this case the possible attractions of musical novelty against the security of audience-proven musical tropes. Fortunate is the composer like Philip Glass who can come into a film composing career by being sought after on the basis of his concert work. And unfortunate is that producer who turned down a Morton Feldman score for its accompanying a scene of violence with quiet strings and a celesta, likely a cold and ironic move on Feldman's part that the producer couldn't accept either because it didn't pass in the accepted catalog of film music figures and affects and was unwilling to risk the possibility that it might — and powerfully so — extend that catalog. 

My old friend Jonathan Segel recently, and correctly called out the Game of Thrones TV series on the cheap production quality of its score, although given its budget*, I find it's still, musically speaking, an improvement over, say, Lord of the Rings. Why do these pseudo-medieval fantasy films (you know the ones) always have to go pseudo-symphonic in the first place? How about imaging the kind of instruments and musical material that would have been current to the local time, place, and technology instead of trying to pull a full Korngold (which no one presently working in Hollywood has the technical chops to do anyways)?** The deep irony, of course, is that sound design, as a whole has become very interesting territory for experiment and complexity (don't believe me?  Just listen, sometime, eyes closed to Ren Klyce's sound track for The Social Network — the whole film could have been done to a blank screen and would've worked), while the musical track has declined so badly (yes, if I see the name Hans Zimmer on opening credits, a composer reliably producing yardage good labeled as music, I immediately head for the exit lights.)
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* Yes, it's TV and TV is still not film, but it is a area of some formal experimentation, particularly in the long-term series, that has welcomed some interesting music. The score for LOST by Michael Giacchino, for example, focused on ensembles of strings (often with extended techniques) and trombones,  with some airplane fuselage percussion, creating a wealth of material that extended well over the first few seasons and, in the total sound design, contrasted spectacularly well with the diegetic music.   
** Yes, there has been some diegetic music along these lines in the series, but it's not been great stuff and has not played compellingly with the line between the diegetic music and the musical score.

Kraig Grady on Erv Wilson

This is a nice informal video of composer Kraig Grady talking about his studies with music theorist Erv Wilson.  I'm also a student of Wilson's, having my first lesson with him while I was still in high school.  He lived (and still lives) in one of the oldest houses in the Highland Park area of Los Angeles, a wooden place (the stone chimney fell in an earthquake a couple of decades ago) high above Arroyo Seco, now the oldest section of the the west's oldest freeway.  The terraced garden in front of the house was planted with corn seedlings (later to be joined by chenopods) which, I would learn, he bred from wild plants and old cultivars he had gathered, to plant on his family's ranch in the mountains of Chihuahua, where he had been born. (Wilson speaks English with a slight trace of Chihuahuan Spanish.)  The inside of his house was full of guitars fretted in unusual ways, not one of them with twelve equal steps to the octave, bamboo and wooden flutes from South America and a variety of mallet instruments of metal tubes and slabs, wooden bars, and bamboo, each of them in a different tuning system.

When I identify Wilson as a theorist, it is not as the type of scholar who researches and teaches how to imitate or analyze harmony and voice leading, or counterpoint or form in existing tonal music or "set theory" in atonal music (though there is a certain relationship to the latter.)  Instead he's a speculative theorist, investigating the huge vector space of possible new musical materials and relationships and attempting to locate those with the most potential for use in new musics.*  His great predecessors were the theorists Huygens, Bosanquet, Novaro, Yasser and Fokker and he was also a collaborator with Harry Partch.  To this end, he has designed keyboard layouts and notations for these new scales and systems and a series of techniques for generating new materials and tools for visualizing their properties (Wilson's was a professional draughtsman in the aeronautics industry, among the last generation of pre-CAD virtuosi.)  I have written before that Wilson is probably the most productive collector and inventor of scales since Ptolemy, and that's not likely to be an exaggeration; aspects of his work in classifying scales and systems have been taken to further consequences by members of the tuning community, revealing some extraordinary new environments for potential tonal practice, much of which is now made practical (if not possible) only by computer-assisted analysis and synthesis.

Kraig Grady, now based in Australia, has been a far more loyal student of Wilson's than I, having made a formidable body of music in alternative tunings and most of the instruments required to play that music, much of it connected to Grady's (imagined?) island nation of Anaphoria.   (That website also hosts a formidable repository of Wilson's papers, which are not documents with scholarly expository prose but the visual accompaniments to his oral teaching and demonstrations.)  Although I have made quite a bit of music in tunings other than 12-tone equal temperament, and much of that in extended just intonation, the bulk of the music I get asked to make is in a nominal 12 equal, but the impact of an early exposure to the possibilities of intonational and tonal-structural alternatives has its way of infecting everything I do with pitches in any collection configuration, whether through unexpected modulations, flashes of harmonic or subharmonic spectra, or the play between local and global tonalities.  Thank you, Erv.
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*One of Wilson's ideas, the Moment of Symmetry, which occurs when a generating interval —let's say a perfect fifth with the ration of 3:2 — reiterated within another interval space — let's say an octave (taking octave "equivalencies") — creates symmetrical melodic patterns when closed (returning to the initial tone) by a single anomalous intervals — for example 6 perfect fifths and 1 diminished fifth in a 7-toned scale, but also for four perfect fifths and minor sixth in a 5-toned or 11 perfect fifths and a wolf fifth in a 12-toned scale  —  a property which is prescient of the attention given to well-formedness and Myhill's Property in the academic music theory community. Wilson's "scale tree" is essentially a catalog of Moment of Symmetry scales indexed by the size of their generator and the number of iterations.

Around and about

Here are a few blogs and sites that have turned up recently:

Sound Expanse, composer Jennie Gottschalk
Detemporalizing, composer & poet Samuel Vriezen, now blogging in English
Desiring Progress, pianist & musicologist Ian Pace
Composer Daniel Goode
New Musical Resources,  trumpet player & musicologist Peter Gillette
Classical Music is Boring, photo funnies
Well-Weathered Music, composer Miguel Frasconi
The Great (un)Learning, composer Christopher Shultis
Helen Bledsoe, Flutist, exactly that
Essays & Endnotes, theorist Stephen Soderberg
Divergence Press, a new web magazine

Landmarks (50)

Luigi Dallapiccola: Quaderno musicale di Annalibera (1952) for solo piano.

A set of 11 small pieces or movements, intended to be played all together in sequence, at once individual character pieces (some with particular technical concerns ("Accents", "Rhythms", "Colors") and variations or variants on/of common material (a single 12-tone row in transposition and in its classical transformations). Some of the pieces are aphoristic in length, others a bit more substantial, the whole perhaps 14 minutes in duration.

Much has been noted about the 12-tone aspects of the piece — I can recall, as a 14-year old, working out those rows as if they were the more sophisticated thing in the world, and yes, I'm a bit surprised to be including two mid-20th century 12-tone pieces in a row in this list of personal landmarks — as well as the connections to Second Viennese School (not least to piano pieces by Schoenberg and Webern*) and further back, through both the strict and not-so-strict canonic aspects (some even housed in a trio of movements identified as Contrapuncti), a recurring down-a-semitone, up-a-minor-third, down-a-semitone (yep, that spells B-A-C-H) figure and that "notebook" title to J.S. Bach, all of which is an interesting mix of the potentially useful and the possibly misleading, and none of which may actually capture much of the substance of this work.

This is in part due to playful misdirection on the composer's part.  The title, for example. Bach's famous little notebook was a collection of delightful but modest pedagogical pieces for a student (Bach's second wife, Anna Magdalena) to play. But Dallapiccola's piece, while dedicated to his young daughter, Annalibera, is sophisticated and challenging music intended not as a loose collection of teaching pieces but as a whole and integral work of concert music that is also well-suited for private use.he first piece or movement, "SIMBOLO" (symbol), is permeated by transpositions and transformations of the B-A-C-H figure, but it avoids a literal B-A-C-H cypher at that pitch level and in that direction. What he's after is something musically more significant than a alpha-musical homage and that is to use that tight semitonal cluster to anchor smooth voice leading in a harmonic environment that is not shy to suggest tonal movement, indeed even cadential resolution.

This suggestion of the tonal is something quite different from the embedding or citation of authentically tonal material within a 12-tone scheme (like Berg, for example); it is almost uniquely comfortable in its ambiguity and that's something I have always found refreshing in Dallapiccola's later music.  This did cost Dallapiccola some street cred with the serial generation on both sides of the Atlantic, with their programmatic tendency to deprecate any tonal suggestion, from objects like triads and seventh chords (which Dallapiccola welcomed, if cautiously, as products of voice leading but not of functional harmony), or processes like canons (on which Dallapiccola thrived) .  Even his admirers sometimes appear to dismiss the work as too simple or too pretty. And it is often gorgeous, but cooly (cool, not cold) gorgeous, although inspired by the almost anti-pianistic keyboard works of Schoenberg and Webern, it was written by a pianist-composer whose catalogue was mostly vocal, but who knew how to write atmospherically, often even vocally, for his instrument, understanding register, articulation, handedness, the use of the pedal and resonance in a very different way than his Viennese models, focusing on the more delicate features of the instrument. The ninth piece, "COLORE",  for example, with a gentle counter-metric swing of seventh-ish chords is very much a piece that can be located with the coolest jazz pianism of roughly the same era as not influenced or influencing but sharing aspects of a common sensibility (again: cool, not cold). 

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* Babbitt, in the lecture collection Words about Music, has some striking observations about the relationship of the Quaderno's "CONTRAPUNCTUS SECUNDUS" to the second movement of the Webern Variationen, in which the relationship between fixed pitches and intervals is exchanged.
 

 

What composers mean when we say we're "writing" music

The usual assumption is that we're producing notation, putting notes down on paper (or, more recently, pushing pixels around a screen to emulate putting notes down on paper) just like Sebastian Bach did when he adjourned to his composing room each evening, lubricated by a bottle of brandy and powered by some costly candles (the costs of those candles alone had to have put Bach among the relatively well-off in his day.)  But that's not broad enough to describe the diversity of what we do.  Composing is also "writing" when we're committing something to a text or graphic score, or programming in some language or code, or committing something to memory.  I just read an interview with David Tudor, who also used the word writing as the verb associated with pieces he made even when they had no notation at all: perhaps some tentative oral instructions (when others were involved), sometimes circuitry diagrams or often just the circuits themselves, especially when the work was for his own use. Perhaps the whole set up of Tudor's "table of electronics", combined with his practice at playing that table (both routines and extemporaneous discoveries (perhaps the best recorded example of one of those discoveries by Tudor comes in that recording of Christian Wolff's Burdocks, when the organ Tudor was 'til then rather discretely playing suddenly roared with a wonderful and shockingly unexpected stop mixture)) adds up to a kind of writing, among the circuits, on the table, in the hands, etched in the ears/brain, etc..  But I don't think that that's quite it, either.  The aspect of writing-writing which composing-writing most critically emulates is actually the production of delay (see Duchamp: a delay in glass), the movement or shift in time which stands between writing and reading. Composition is putting music into storage for future retrieval as performance/listening.  (See also Duchamp: In Advance of the Broken Arm.)  The length of the delay is, of course, a variable, as is the presence of noise in the delay line. (See also Large Glass: dust, cracks.)

Landmarks (49)

Roberto Gerhard: Concert for 8 (1962) for flute, clarinet, guitar, mandolin, accordion, percussion, piano, and double bass.

The Catalan composer Gerhard (1896-1970) was one of Schoenberg's Berlin students (an international group that included Nikos Skalkottas, Marc Blitzstein, Norbert von Hannenheim)  and his career bridged over the Second World War, giving an unusual breadth with some of his early works incorporating folk elements, his latter works using twelve tone techniques, electro-acoustic tape, and even some degrees of Cage-acknowledging indeterminacy.  Fleeing Franco's Spain, his latter career was spent in England, with some important teaching stays in the United States.

Gerhard's use of Schoenbergian  twelve-tone techniques was sensitive and sophisticated, but the twelve tone aspect is perhaps the least interesting thing about the Concert for 8:   it can say something about where the pitches come from, but this music is about far more than pitches and certainly more about where they're going than whence they've come. I suspect that it was his experience with electro-acoustic music that made the critical difference here for Gerhard.  He insisted on the advantages of a composer working in the immediacy of his/her own studio, with an individualized components and set-up without the apparatus of staff engineers and bureaucracy that went with the large continental studios hosted by state radio stations. Working with only the assistance of his wife in recording sounds, Gerhard's relationship to his material had an immediacy akin to that of the independent studios in the US (and he would, indeed, have a more positive relationship to the young composers at the Cooperative Studio in Ann Arbor than his colleagues at the University of Michigan.)*   Let's be clear: Concert for 8 is not electroacoustic music, it is instrumental chamber music for a highly unconventional, even unlikely combination of instruments (if I recall correctly, it was the result of a private commission from a musically gifted family with an unusual instrumentarium) including plucked strings, an accordion, and a large battery of percussion instruments mostly not of determined or even discrete pitches (using such percussion is frequently a challenge to a twelve-tone premise, particularly when the composer wants to go beyond accents and noisy ornaments to the pitch scheme**) but it is music that is so focused on quality of sound the formation of sounds into broad gestures that the assumption is inescapable that it has been informed by an electroacoustic experience  — that of concrete and instrumental sounds combined and placed into a continuity by the manipulation of magnetic tape.  I cannot help but hear Concert for 8 as belonging in the company of "textural" works of its era, like those of Ligeti or Xenakis (composers a good generation younger than Gerhard), yet this is music that sounds consistently and refreshingly right at both the level of detail and of broad stroke, a kind of anti-stochastic music, to the degree to which a stochastic approach can mean that one is disinterested in or even ignores the precise details so long as they sum up to the desired larger view.   

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* For a point of comparison, consider that Gerhard's colleagues working in German radio studio, would typically have to work with the mediation of a Tonmeister,  a Sound Engineer, and  a Tape Recorder Operator, who kept a protocol of each session.
** Compare Babbitt's highly rigorous use of trap set percussion in All Set.

Metre: The End of the Line

I'm in the middle of an old-fashioned exchange of letters (envelopes, stamps, mailboxes, everything but the pony express) with an old friend about poetic and musical metres. (It's a fascinating, if often confusing field, not least because poets and musicians tend to count things — metre, feet, stress, accent etc. — slightly differently (in particular, as a musician, I think I recognize an anacrusis — a pick-up —  more readily than most poets do. (Entertainingly fictionalized, and in his usual obsessive style, Nicholson Baker's novel The Anthologist treats this question.)))

I think we have reached some consensus that song and dance metres differ from each other in a fundamental way in that dance assumes, indeed requires (i.a. so that dancers don't fall over themselves trying to follow a stretch of music when a foot/beat too many or too few appears or doesn't) a continuity from measure to measure, a non-stop flight of music (the music always goes on, and sometimes its vamps to allow a dancer to come in on the next rhythmic cycle when one is missed), while the line-to-line continuity of poem and song often has got to be more flexible. A voice has to breath, after all, and the listener probably needs some time to catch the sense of the text.  So how is this flexibility realized in performance?  Will a series of, say, pentameter lines, admit either regular or occasional additions of a foot or two, whether for breath or sense or just a break in the texture, becoming hexameters or longer, or should the measure vamp (whether imagined or via some form of acoustical accompaniment) allowing the reader/reciter/singer wait for the next line to jump in?  (This happens a lot in South Indian music.)  Or do these insertions of time intervals at the ends of lines exist in some kind of "zero time" as in some of Christian Wolff's cuing pieces, a break in the continuity that literally "doesn't count"?  And what about texts which contain sentences that wrap themselves around the end of a line, ending somewhere in the middle of the next? (This is actually surprisingly rare in premodern verse/song.)

The New Division: New Music for Recorder

I'm very pleased to announce an online publication, The New Division, a collection of works by a large and international group of composers for solo alto recorder with or without accompaniment, based on ground basses found in the The Division Flute of 1706.


The Division Flute, published by John Walsh, was a collection of pieces for solo treble/alto recorder, mostly with accompaniment by continuo bass playing repeated grounds.  (The collection also included a number of unaccompanied preludes, chaconnes, and Cibells (a gavotte-like dance based on a hit tune by Lully.))  Like similarly-named collections for the viol (which has been lost) and violin, it provides one of the best insights into the state of the art of instrumental music-making — from amateur to virtuoso — in its time. The art of playing divisions — or, if you like, diminutions or variations — to an existing piece of music or over a repeating bass line and/or harmony was a central part of Baroque musical practice by both by composers and improvising performers. Sophisticated bodies of solo divisions survive for violin and viol, lute and keyboards and, among wind instruments, principally the recorder, cornett, and, somewhat later, transverse flute.

The basses used in The Division Flute includes a number which were so long and widely used that their origins are lost — like La Follia, one of the greatest hits of the 17th, 18th, and also much of the 20th century —, some are associated with particular tunes — here Green Sleeves or Johney Cock thy Beavor, and others are associated with particular musicians, including Godfrey Finger, John Banister, and Solomon Eccles (one of the most interesting personalities in English musical history.)

The New Division includes pieces offering a wide variety of styles and solutions to the elaboration of a bass as well as a Cibell for our time, with composers including (in alphabetical order) Jon Brenner, Steed Cowart, Elaine Fine, Christopher Fox, Danyel Franke, Jeffrey Harrington, Anne La Berge, Mary Jane Leach, Scott Mc Laughlin, Christopher Molla, Lloyd Rodgers, Conal Ryan, Jonathan Segel, and myself, with at least two additional items in prepation.  This includes music playable by virtuosi as well as, in some cases, very good amateurs and both music comfortably within conventions and traditions and music that cheerfully challenges those conventions. And it's all online, here.

In Our Theatre

Around the middle of the 20th century, one cutting edge of American poetry found its theatre of operations* in the line, flexible in length (sometimes brief, sometimes extending so far past the edge of the page that it is graphically split and begins again at an indent, perhaps several indents for the long-winded), perhaps tied to a speaker's breath, certainly marking phrases and junctures in the poet's thought.  (See, certainly, Charles Olson's essay Projective Verse.) The line took over the weight which it had previously shared with couplet-ed pairs, stanzas, verses. At the same time, the line in this repertoire, generally speaking, was one without any of the traditional regulatory instruments of rhyme, metre, stress, and/or accent associated with lyric (but each available in principle as an optional local feature.)

Similarly, in some music, particularly the most densely notated, the theatre has shifted from the phrase — usually identifiable by a thorough-going line of some sort and a sustained or continuous pulse and metrical pattern, to the individual measure  (& often that measure is counted in smaller units — which can be very slow indeed  —  eighths and sixteenths and smaller, rather than the quarters and larger pulses of most "classical" repertoire, contributing in many cases — and ithinks not accidentally — to a graphic impression of complexity.)

Of course, there is considerable variation around this tendency towards the measure, some of which points towards phrases rather than measures. In the early — largely percussion and prepared piano — music of Cage, the phrase systems of Harrison, and the predrawn-measures of late Feldman, the measure is the constructive formal unit, replacing the pulse, thus representing a tendency towards extension of the theatre rather than reduction. And in Milton Babbitt's time point system, the single measure, divided into twelve (or whatever) points, is simply the minimal possible space for the presentation of a complete aggregate, with sets that don't fit into a minimal statement spreading out over several measures, consequently creating a reduction in density and/or the pulsed but, in principle at least, ametrical tempo.**

If we do go in the direction of the measure, though, it's probably useful to consider (and often: make clear to performers) whether elements of the traditional pulse-metre-measure-phrase practice, in particular those regular dynamic and durational markers of metric stress, have been preserved or are, in fact, no longer operative.  Does a measure have a pulse-defined tempo and if so, does it extend beyond the single measure, and does that tempo include any pattern of regular stresses or accents (in old song and dance days, when one might have spoken of "movement".)  Personally, I like to keep some of the potential for ambiguity present in the traditional system in reserve.

I've played and sang a lot of renaissance music in which there is a background metre present, but it is not over-determinative, and barlines — often edited in with the intention of assisting musicians more used to modern notational conventions — frequently coincide only weakly with regular metric stress patterns, if at all (one of the important steps in the historical process of opening a distance between lyrical text and tune; such distance to regular patterns of dance steps appears to have come much later — no surprise, I guess because there's more immediate physical danger with missteps than misspeaks.) In my own work, I'm increasingly drawn away from the empty stage of the blank measure and attracted to both lower and higher levels of organization — metrical feet and phrase systems.  But the experience of the measure as the principle theatre continues to be powerful background radiation.

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* Yes, using a military term like "Theatre of Operations" is provocative, probably outright objectionable, and though there is a tradition (Emerson, N.O. Brown, Cage) of objecting to the militarized language to which I feel quite close, maybe it's usefully demilitarizing in itself to extend the use of a term like this to obviously non-military, indeed pacifist ventures.
** This is one of the mysterious topics, for me at least, with regard to serialism (of whatever sort, pre- and post- as well) and rhythm: how do we square the desire for a measure to be a-metrical — that is, without a hierarchy among the internal pulses — with the actual practice in which the notated metre is both a reference and frequently, an obvious source of compositional play?  If I had the time, I'd really like to examine Babbitt's synthesizer code, for example: did he give downbeats any extra intensity in his timepoint pieces? My impression — and I may be altogether wrong about this, so consider it only an impression —  is that the opening towards early music by Webern (Issac) and Krenek (Ockeghem), has not had the charge in later serial rhythmic practice that it once promised.  

Joseph Byrd re-encountered

Good news:  New World has released an album of works by Joseph Byrd, played with stylistic certainty by ACME, oka the American Contemporary Music Ensemble.  Byrd's music has long been an enthusiasm in these parts, and having these pieces from the early 1960s available goes some distance to recovering the diversity of the radical music of that era, particularly its west coast roots and branches.   Byrd connects to Young and Riley in the Bay area and later to Cage, Ono and Thomson in New York, but also to Douglas Leedy, but also should make us pay greater attention to the orbits around Barney Childs  (while we're at it, let's get some performances of Childs' Four Pieces for Six Winds, soon, with its desert-drawn gamut studies) and Harold Budd (Budd, of course, is the L.A. connection to both David Cope and James Tenney, from Budd and Childs, you also reach into the realm of Peter Garland's Soundings and Jim Fix's Cold Blue label.)

In addition to the recovery of diversity, re-encountering this music helps to strengthen the evidence that many of the musical ideas of the time were not exactly the invention and certainly not the property of individuals but were much more in the air and shared:  coming, perhaps, out of a commonly shared ambiguity with regard to serial/atonal orthodoxies (but also an equally shared distance to the neoclassical alternatives of the time) and open to the achievements of jazz, the early music movement, and the increasing contact with non-western musics; working with small gamuts and cells and of tonally suggestive materials; lots of repetition and loops; comfort with the strategic use of improvised or indeterminate elements, for example, indeterminate paths through fields of material; a preference for the extended, low and slow over the hyper-animated (that desert sound!)

Byrd is probably best-known for his work in popular music (albeit in the decided vanguard of popular music), with two very famous albums, The United States of America and The American Metaphysical Circus.  He did considerable studio arranging and producing work for others as well, often drawn from his scholarly expertise in the history and practice of American popular music — one highlight of which is definitely his arranging on Ry Cooder's album, Jazz — but this work, too, showing off aspects of the radical music as not only a compositional, but a performance practice.

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Addendum: The New Music Box has a fine review of the CD, here.

Lucier Introduces

Overthe course of four decades at Wesleyan University, Alvin Lucier taught an open-enrollment undergraduate course, an Introduction to Experimental Music, coded for the catalog as Music 109.* Wesleyan University Press has just published a book titled just that, Music 109, collecting Lucier's lecture notes for the course.  It's a highly personal guided tour through an exciting repertoire, with Lucier's notes more or less in their rough-but-ready-for-extemporaneous-elaboration original form, organized by a series of intriguing topics (from Indeterminacy and Graphic Notation to Repetition, Long String Instrument, and Words) and made more compelling for the lay reader by being told as much in the form of stories and anecdotes as in historical or analytical prose.  He doesn't attempt to analyses anything in great depth, but instead picks a feature or two from each work discussed, piquing curiosity and giving the new listener a handle onto music that might otherwise escape, and, through the course of lectures, these handles accumulate into a rich collection of listening tools.  A real advantage to such an approach is that one can acquire a feel for the scene around the music and its aesthetic without having to bring heavy technical prerequisites.   There is much of Lucier's own musical autobiography here, but that's merely the surface over which I believe he is making a more substantial argument about listening to music as an opening to the world rather than an inward turn to a received culture — and how the skill of listening can be extended far beyond the conventional assumptions about the nature, extent, and limits of the musical.

Much writing about music hovers around in a dull middle ground, in which neither individual trees nor the forest as a whole gets accounted for and I think we're in real need of more writing that deals either in deepest detail with trees — yes, I sometimes do want to learn where each and every tone came from — or in broadest overview, with forests — as Lucier does here —, in both smart and sensitive ways.  

It would be valuable to have more documents like Music 109 around.  Alvin Lucier has a number of colleagues who taught their own courses of legend in their own institutions.  For example, one of the highlights of my own undergraduate years in Santa Cruz was Gordon Mumma's History and Practice of Electronic Music course, which was perhaps more general and technical than Lucier's Music 109, but did cover certain topics reflecting Mumma's unique experiences and expertise, especially with regard to live electronic music, music for dance, and Latin American electronic music. Mumma's lectures certainly should be published.  It does seem, though, that it is experimental music which has been getting its due documentation-wise** and though I'm of the experimental party myself, I'd certainly appreciate being able to read a similar account of recent music history from the viewpoint of someone from a more academic avant-garde or from the quietist mainstream.  Just where are the lecture notes that make the historical and aesthetic case for the new music programming at the Baltimore Symphony or at Tanglewood?

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 * I wasn't a Wesleyan undergrad, so did not attend Lucier's course myself.  But one of the reasons I chose to go to Wesleyan as a grad student was the course description for the grad course he taught: 508 GP Contemporary Music. Study of selected works of Robert Ashley, John Cage, Phil Glass, Pauline Oliveros, Steve Reich, Alvin Lucier and others with emphasis on scale, chance, phase, coincidence, task, meditation, and the exploration of natural phenomena. Mr. Lucier.
** I have an argument about why this is the case — music history being made by the innovators, those who question the extent and limits of the musical, not the conservators — but that's a polemic for elsewhere. 

(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)?     
       

Finicky Rhythms

(from Brout met Flilleken for solo flute (2013))

My notational pony is more likely to scratch than show or place — let alone win — in the rhythmic complexity derby, but sometimes I do find myself  venturing into rhythms that look, on the page, if not complex, well, finicky, if not picayune. 

As a rule, this happens in one of two cases: The first is when I'm after some precise ensemble rhythmic proportions that echo the relationships found among pitches in an extended just intonation, thus twos against threes, fives against sevens, and so on.  When I require such ensemble complexity, I do it because I want to hear the specific composite rhythms; I won't do it simply to create an opaque density (there are much more efficient ways to do that!) The second case can be found in an individual instrument or voice when I'm after a supple line, a curve with a lacy edge, a kind of written-out rubato with the precision of the notation guaranteeing some crispy attacks along that curve.  An alternative approach, simplifying the notation* and writing "rubato" over it and/or some combination of accelerandi and ritardandi OR by using some spatial notation would neither give me the precision I'm after nor would it likely lead to the crispy variegation I'd like, indeed it would run the risk of becoming indistinct, even muddy.

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* Yep, in the first example above, the four triplets could have been cancelled out by the 4:3 bracket and written as a passage of 16ths with an 8th and a 16th rest at the tail, but that would have required a kludge of accents and/or breaking the beams into groups of three to get the tempo and metric foot accent sense I was after. (And wouldn't have been as much fun.) In the way I've written the measure, a possible interpretive connection is made for the player from the series of triplets to the triplet on the last quarter of the measure, with the distinction lying in a change of tempo.

Cage, Candid(e)

John Cage's 1992 Stanford reading of his last major piece of writing,  the lecture Overpopulation and Art, is on line here. Through-composed to mesostics using the letters of the title, this one of a series of summing-up statements, mostly on social themes and an argument for anarchy,  with a decided effort by Cage to write in his most optimistic voice. However, in the brief question session with which this reading ends, Cage's refusal and/or inability to answer a question reflects a more pessimistic tenor in that moment.

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.

All The Music A Clarinetist Will Ever Need.

I've written a new set of pieces for solo clarinet, 100,000,000,000,000 of them, to be exact. It's an homage to Raymond Queneau and his Cent mille milliards de poèmes, with which my set of character pieces shares the same combinatorial flip-book structure, although Queneau's poems are French sonnets (abab abab cce dde in alexandrines) and mine are English sonnets (abab cdcd efef gg in a pentameter.)  The provisional score (provisional meaning I reserve the right to make changes) is available online and it's free to download, here.  The music is diverse — from ambiguously modal to not-quite-tonal to the ornithologically a-tonal to none-of-the-above — yet should have enough connecting features to render a useful percentage of the combinations sensibly unified, another useful percentage with satisfyingly broken continuities and the remaining pieces everywhere in-between.  While these pieces are intended for concert performance, either en-bloc or scattered through a program, played by any size or combination of clarinets, there is also a degree of progressive increases in technical challenges through the collection, so they may be useful for teaching as well.  A complete performance of 100,000,000,000,000 Pieces for Clarinet would take, non-stop at the given tempo with a few seconds in-between pieces, more than 285 million years, and as such now constitutes the vast bulk of the solo clarinet repertoire, which is an audacious little factoid.  I don't expect to hear all of them, but would enjoy hearing from any player who plays some selection of them!  Thanks to Taylan Susam for asking for the pieces and to Danyel Franque for advice on matters clarinetic.

Leonardo Music Journal CD

Just a note: I curated the CD accompanying the current issue of the Leonardo Music Journal, with the theme "Acoustics."   To be honest, when editor Nicolas Collins corralled me into this project, I had major reservations (which shouldn't be surprising, given my personal differences with sound recording as a medium for transmitting music), but in this instance these were overcome by a wide ranging suite of strong exploratory pieces by the composers Judy Dunaway, Miguel Frasconi, Hauke Harder, Chris Molla, Kiyomitsu Odai, and Ann Warde, all of whom I thank profusely for their music.  Leonardo Music Journal's web site is here. 

Same and Different, again

ONE MORE THING about this fluid dynamic between identity and difference and the whole space of resemblance in-between those poles:  This can often depend upon a confusion of identities and I'm not altogether certain it's usually an honest confusion, instead it is often a voluntary entry into a contract to agree to mistake A for B.  One the one hand, this is just playing the game, agreeing, in musical terms, to hear a little more or a little less into the music so that two stretches of music fit into the same memory cache. On the other hand, this could be a little more ethically suspect, nefarious even, a suspension of honest estimation and judgment in favor of bending the evidence to suit the purpose of musical continuity or even unity, an act of some misplaced generosity, or even worse when a confusion of the kind is simply due to not listening and/or not remembering, which certainly happens much more than composers or performers ought be comfortable.

And this, too: Isn't this confusion often really, truly implausible?  There is a huge tradition in myth and literature of assumed and mistaken identities: think of Twelfth Night, or the Martin Guerre story, or any of those Hollywood films in which a thin layer of shiny latex turns person M into person N, or that classic hard-boiled detective formula in which person X mistakes person Y for person Z.   Of course the purpose of these mistaken identities is to set a target for the story which follows, and that target is the removal of the disguise, the restoration of proper identities. In some of these cases, one can well imagine that the mistaken identity is accepted knowingly (i.e maybe Martin Guerre was a creep and a lousy provider, so if this guy was affable enough and able to do the job well, well then Mrs Guerre was happy to play along) but in others, it can't really work unless there's some form of mass hysteria about (which might well be the case in Twelfth Night.) The frequency of these stories does make one wonder, however, if there wasn't once some time in which people regularly slipped into other identities and got away with it, people just accepting that you were who you said you were, even if you looked and sounded somewhat or even substantially different from how you used to look and sound (modern identity theft, which is an almost exclusively electronic information-based phenomena, is something altogether different, without any need for physical resemblance, indeed any physical presence, at all.)

So, in that space between a theme and its last variation or an exposition and its recapitulation, or along the hiccuping returns of a rondo, what is the nature of our confusion?  Do we enter in playfully, voluntary participant in a game with evolving rules, parameters, and other constraints?  Will identities be satisfactorily resolved in the end, like the denouement in a mystery, or can we satisfyingly be left without resolution?  Or do we simply all go a little bit mad when listening closely to music?

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.

The Origin of Table Manners

(This is the third in a series of items which begun with The Raw and The Cooked and continued with From Honey to Ashes).

When a rule of etiquette first appears in the historical record, it enters as a corrective, not yet a norm: an instruction to use a knife and a fork indicated that people were eating without the use of knives and forks; an injunction against unpleasant noises indicates that meals were once taken in the company of conspicuous sounds.

It's actually the other way 'round with composing.  Our rules of etiquette, found in treatises by Fux and Morley and Schenker and Hindemith and dozens of MacHoses and others even more deserving of obscurity, have to be read — if read at all — as invitations to misbehave: every rule represents a path not taken, but damn likely a path worth revisiting if we are at all to move forward.  The etiquette for table manners is all about ever-more narrowing the range of possible behaviors; the etiquette of composition, in contrast, is all about expanding the range of possible behaviors; the composer's task is to make a convincing case, within a piece of music, for doing something that was previously forbidden.

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In the back of a used book shop I recently came across a copy of Heinz-Klaus Metzger's translation of Ernst Krenek's deceptively titled Studies in Counterpoint, a pamphlet from 1940 which was probably the most widely read introduction to 12-tone technique in the '40s and '50. (I had actually read the English original, from a copy borrowed from Claremont Public Library when I was in Junior High, and even produced a set of small pieces, "inventions" as Krenek styled them, which my band director seriously didn't like, preferring that I learn figured bass from his well-worn copy of the dreaded (but, to its credit, proto-algorithmic) MacHose.  Probably just as well.)

I believe that Krenek's little book was very important in transmitting just enough practical information about Schoenbergian technique into the community of working commercial composers that at least some aspects of the technique became permanent staples of the film music menu.  Suspense? Angst?  Krenek's little book had a usable formula for accompanying scenes of extreme emotional content.

Revisiting the Krenek after all these years is, as one might expect, a curious experience. To be honest, part of the curiosity comes from the vague familiarity of reading a book I encountered in English as a teenager now in German and with a more substantial exposure to the repertoire behind me.  But the larger curiosity comes from the sense that there is now nothing particularly urgent about  the 12-tone or serial projects and there is now substantial and useful distance in any re-reading.  In particular, it has become clear that Krenek was working at a now-distant juncture between method and style and that many of the "rules" he presents  (restricting the repetition of pitch classes to the same octave, for example), can emerge, with the benefits of hindsight, as much less essential  — when not altogether unnecessary — and deconstructing (if you'll pardon my po-mo) the theory to recover the underlying style (or vice versa) is not uninteresting and — may be/kind of/sort of/possibly/absolutely not — of compositional interest.

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In contrast, Henry Brant's Textures and Timbres: An Orchestrator's Handbook needs no deconstruction as he is absolutely upfront and candid about the nature and limits of his project, which is restricted to balancing and mixing instruments.  His recipes for homogenous and well-balanced combinations can be used as is, or, perhaps more productively, as negative examples.  For me, the greatest utility of these recipes often comes less in following them exactly than in figuring out where they can be varied, whether substantially or in detail. So I have a bunch of bletting medlars in my kitchen, but no useful medlar recipes.... haul out the old copy of The Joy of Cooking and I look for variations:  medlar in place of pumpkin in pie, in place of banana in nut bread, and in place of persimmon in pudding.  Likewise, Brant's cookbook provides similar openings for innovation in the orchestra.

   

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.

Engaging

Christopher Shultis has a terrific post about interpreting John Cage's work for amplified plant materials, including a pod rattle and, typically, cacti, Child of Tree, here.  "Interpreting", in this context, means not (or, at least not in a conventional sense) following a score and eliciting some expressive content, but, on the basis of a set of verbal remarks, assembling the instrumentation and amplification, developing playing techniques, and devising a playing score, a project which begins with an apparently very open situation and develops, through practice, into a distinctive musical work with real constraints and recognizable features.  Above and beyond the attractive richness and gentleness of the piece for listeners I don't think that it can be emphasized enough how much Child of Tree is enhanced by the project-like character of its score, drawing players into discovery of its qualities, extents and limits.

The experimental tradition offers a wealth of pieces which invite or even require that players go beyond the usual level of commitment, research, discovery, development and lots of rehearsal.  Pieces which require that players find or build new instruments or significantly alter or adapt existing instruments (or voices.)  Pieces which require players to realize, within composer-defined processes or rules, scores for their own specific use.  (In my experience, this is also very much like the experience of playing early music from original notation and/or with instruments with historically interrupted performance practice traditions.)  Project-like pieces can be found in the catalogs of composers like Cage, Harrison or Cowell, or cued pieces of Wolff, the acoustic explorations begun with Lucier, and very many pieces in the verbal score tradition.  (Yes it can also be a project if one decides to read Kant alongside Beethoven, the transcendentalists for Ives or Mallarmé with Boulez, and yes, many of Stockhausen's mid-career pieces were so thickly distinctive as to require a similar level of attention.)  I guess the word that belongs here is "engagement", though which the player and piece become intimate. And while audience may not be party to that intimacy, it's been my experience that audiences can reliably recognize an engaged performance as a qualitatively better performance. And while many a Cage work will ultimately require a kind of detachment in playing (or listening, for that matter), I suspect that you can only reach that detachment through deep and sustained engagement.       

Signal & Noise

With the current election, many Americans are getting lessons in statistics these days, and the focus has obviously been on trying to elicit strong signals from noisy information sources.  Many composers also use statistical methods in our work, but it strikes me that the intention is subtly different, as it's more our interest to introduce noise into otherwise orderly circumstances.

Full Cage

There has been so much material about John Cage online of late that it is difficult to sort through it all. Let me just point to two very smart items, this, by conductor and percussionist Steven Schick, and this, by composer and critic Matthew Guerrieri. I'm singling these two out because they both focus on Cage's work in perhaps its most critical moment.  There is a tendency — due more to later Newmusicland politics than to the music itself in its own era — to disassociate Cage's project from the larger avant-garde musical project of the time, in particular accentuating the differences and distances from both the post-Schoenbergian American 12-toners and the European serialists.  Recovering those connections does not mean ignoring the differences (indeed, those differences — Cage and Eastern thought*, Babbitt and positivism, Boulez and French literature, Nono and romantic Marxism, Stockhausen and Hesse's Magister Ludi... — are the spice rack in the compositional kitchen) but helps place Cage's work in its own legitimate post-Schoenbergian context and helps to reestablish some of the sophistication, in terms of both complexity and plain musicality, of Cage's achievement that often gets lost in an emphasis on dimensions of Cage's work which are frequently misread as naive.  In a series of key works, in particular the landmarks Concert for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra and Music of Changes, Cage built upon his experience with rhythmic structures (used initially in works for percussion and the prepared piano) and modes of organizing and moving through collections of materials which clearly stem from Schoenbergian techniques, with an attitude towards gamuts of materials that equally clearly reflect the influence of his other principle teacher, Henry Cowell.  Cage's charts correspond directly to the row boxes or arrays of say, Milton Babbitt, and though very different in the character of the single elements, reflect as careful as compositional mind (being puzzled together under tight restrictions) and, often to my ears, through their exuberance and eccentricity, a more vivid musical imagination.  

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* With Cage, the Hindu and Zen strains were rather recent additions to an already rich array of spices, including his Aunt Phoebe Harvey's rhythmic patterns, Cowell, Satie, literature including Stein or Joyce or Cummings, visual artists from Tobey and Graves to Duchamp, and of course, much experience in composing and performing music for dance.

On(e) Handedness

My counterpoint teacher in college was a Nadia Boulanger pupil and, more than once when having his students play exercises at the keyboard, would hear as the excuse for a weak performance that one hand was weaker than the other. He would, in turn, respond with a Boulanger anecdote, saying that when she heard that particular excuse she would raise both hands, palms forward to the student, and declare that, "for a musician, there was no difference between the two."   Well, then, I am a sorely deficient musician by Boulanger standards.

I've recently been reminded of how profoundly right-handed I am.  A small operation on my right index finger left me almost comically disabled for the past couple of weeks.  Aside from all of the inconveniences of eating and personal hygene with my right hand continuously held high and immobile, my daily sight reading were out of the question — lacking a supply of interesting music for piano left hand and right fist; the trombone, which would appear to be digitally insensitive didn't work out because my thumb was bandaged so that it couldn't grip any of the other fingers, so no slide  —, even modest work at the computer was a chore with it — though this may be as much due to stubborn character as the passing infirmity — a surprisingly difficult task to operate a mouse with the wrong fingers on those buttons. Everyday tasks, when suddenly done in the wrong hand, often had to be done twice or thrice to correct for the interference of habitual hand motions. My signature, done left-handed, was a infantile scrawl, refusing to seat itself with any discipline when required (a bank clerk laughed aloud at my left-handed attempt to draw money from my own account.) And, of course, blogging here took a holiday, as I had neither an index finger available to point (click, drag) to interesting reads elsewhere nor could I summon the patience to transcribe (hunt, peck) any of my usual manuscript marginalia, as I was not not putting note on paper or on the screen, making a composing holiday of it all as well.

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With all due respect to Madame Boulanger, and as useful as it may be to have hands which can make music indistinguishably from each other — so that, for example, a musical line can pass smoothly between the hands —, there isn't actually very much music which depends, at a deep level, on the extreme case of absolute symmetry between the hands.  Most of the concrete examples are found in 20th century repertoire (think Webern, Bartok, for starters, Tom Johnson for another; inversion is very much a factor in earlier music, however, there it was typically restricted by the terms of the prevailing modality or tonality such that it was rarely exact intervallic inversion), but, to be honest, I'm not altogether certain that a performing style which smooths out the differences between left and right actually does these symmetries much service.  Music is just too closely tied to the essential asymmetries of passing time and a pitch spectrum which is defined by a relationship to that time.  Also this: the physical asymmetries of real people are interesting and attractive (nothing is quite as disturbing as a perfectly symmetrical face), and I suspect that when people make music, their natural asymmetries are often part of the charge of their performances.


*****

These three items belong here, too, but I couldn't figure out quite how to fit them in:

(a) Charles Chase, who owned the Folk Music Center in Claremont, California, from whom I learned much about instruments and politics and poetry, was an occasional primitive sculptor. His major pieces were a steel man and woman (the man has a full body but the woman is represented by only a face, as he wanted to avoid the typical sexualized stereotypes of the female form), still on display out back behind the shop, and it had been his ambition to partner the two with a steel hand. He never made it, though, as it was, for him, the most difficult part of the human anatomy to represent.  He made hundred of sketches, but never found a satisfactory one that captured, in frozen form, the capacity of the hand for so many varied forms of motion.

(b) If I complain this much about one finger, imagine if it had been my thumb which was temporarily disabled instead! (BTW, it was Montaigne's (the first blogger, he was) essay Of Thumbs, taught me how great expository prose could be.)

(c) ...that convention of low-to-high in pitch, mapped to left-to-right on the standard keyboard... how peculiar it is to encounter a keyboard that does the opposite...