W is for Words

(1)

Contrast:

Jo Kondo:  "I am interested in words more than in sentences, in sentences more than in paragraphs, in paragraphs more than in a whole page. Thus, it could be said that in music I am more concerned with each sound than with the phrases they create."

John Cage:  Empty Words. (Cage quotes N.O. Brown: "Syntax is the arrangement of the army"; removing syntax is demilitarizing language.)

with

Gertrude Stein: a sentence is not emotional a paragraph is

(2) 

Charles Seeger's Dilemma:  that thinking and discoursing in the "language mode of communication" about the "music mode of communication" dominates, directs and, above all, limits research about music.

I work with sounds with the same pleasure that I take in kneading dough or riding a bike or walking early mornings with daughter and/or dog in tow.  But I wrestle with words, fool persisting in his folly, and more often than not — especially when the words should have something to do with music — something fails. Do words fail me?  Or have I failed to manage the words? 

(3)

In a recent comment thread here, Charles Shere mentioned OULIPO, the famous "workshop for potential literature."  The best work associated with the OULIPO — Queneau, Perec, Mathews — is entirely comfortable with its playful approach to language.  With music, however, a playful approach is often discouraged or put down.  For some, "playing games" is supposed to be at odds with the really musical; musical compositions are criticized for having playful systems and structures.  This attitude is wrong in so many ways, so profoundly pessimistic about music, not least in its rejection, if not denial, of the potential for music to work on multiple levels, as well as the multiple and surprising ways in which these levels may interact.   

V is for Velocity

The results of research into the physics, psychophysics and neuroscience of music are often fascinating, but also, as a practicing musician, often frustrating.  This frustration is due, in part, to an inherent pessimism, in that the subject of research is typically constrained by existing musical repertoire and its material qualities and existing conditions for performance and audition. Far more interesting, for a composer like me, would be exploration of the potential and means for musicians and listeners to go beyond those constraints.   It is one thing, for example, to determine limits for pitch perception under conventional listening contexts, but it is quite another thing to investigate ways and contexts through which these limits may be expanded.  Further, there is a real frustration that much research — research in audio recording somewhat excepted — does not focus on issues of urgent compositional interest.  For example, I would really like to know more about how fast a listener can take in and process musical information. In some cases — as real musical variety encompasses both clarity and opacity —  the compositional interest is not only creating music which can be taken in and analyzed by a listener but also in making music which overwhelms the whole sensory and cognitive apparatus.  It would be very useful to have more empirical insight into this issue.  

U is for Umbrella

I am an owner and user of umbrellas.  No, more than that: I am fond of umbrellas.  A well-made umbrella is light but sturdy, mechanically stable and smooth in operation.  It is capable of protecting against rain, hail, sun, or — within reasonable limits of strength and velocity — wind. It may be used to hide from unwanted gazes or to disguise a private conversation. A umbrella can make both an excellent improvised directional sound reflector or a mute — this was a particular specialty of my days as a young trombonist — or, in a snap, it may be used as a foil to fend off attackers or to defend ones honor.  Erik Satie was said to have owned dozens of them. At one point in time, I owned more than twenty of them, and took great pride in keeping them all in good maintenance, cleaning them, lightly oiling the mechanism, straightening ribs gone askew and patiently sewing loose ends back onto their assigned ribeyes.  [Warning! Some umbrellas come with sharped tips and rib-ends; others may be sharpened by their owners.]  I once used the opening and closing of a large ensemble of umbrellas as a somewhat visually distracting musical accompaniment to a dance.  [Jo Kondo's early masterpiece of pseudo-repetition, Under the Umbrella, for five percussionists playing 25 cowbells and a gong, does not require an umbrella, but is clearly the work of a musicians who understands and appreciates the entire concept of an umbrella.]   Like a passion for this music or that, and the radical music in particular, an affection for umbrellas is not, however, universal. One of my oldest and best friends is a gifted writer who has long worked a day job in the Financial district in San Francisco. Being physically tall, he finds that he has to defend himself on rainy days against a sea of eye-level umbrella edges while attempting to go peacefully to his office.  Consequently, he is as much of the anti-umbrella party as I am a pro-bumpershootist. (As I am somewhat taller than Tom, it may be the case that I have a sufficient advantage in avoiding what, for him, would be eye-level umbrella edges, which demonstrates that some partisan differences are, indeed, more due to nature than nurture.)   To date, we have successfully avoiding scheduling our all-too-rare reunions on dates with a high likelihood of rain. When we do meet, I make a point of stashing my umbrella away from his view and we both take care to avoid talking about this controversy. Thus our friendship has remain unaffected despite the potential of these partisan differences to cause a serious rift. Many successful friendships, one supposes, are like that.  

T is for Trainwreck (short version)

The fifth volume, Music in the Late Twentieth Century, of Richard Taruskin's The Oxford History of Western Music.  

(A long version of this item will follow, but for now, let's get on with this alphabet.)

Just asking

I may well be missing some activity, but judging from the blogs I follow, there has recently been a aggregatel decline in the frequency and volume of independent classical music blogging, with the number of institutional music blogs increasing.   The pace on this blog has slowed due to some large projects elsewhere and a share of some serious self-doubts about writing.  I'm not altogether certain that the slowdown here won't be more permanent, perhaps by way of transition to some other format.   I've often thought that sharing a magazine-like format with some mix of like- and contrarily-minded colleagues might be interesting, but that starts to smack more of conventional column journalism than of the free-form made possible by the blog medium and composition, mostly a solitary activity, tends to attract folk like me who did not necessarily get good marks for "plays well with others" in elementary school.  Your ideas about this would be welcome.   In any case, how do you perceive this trend — as an Adagio between fast movements (the lull before the next storm) or a general ritardando (the great fade-out)? 

Blind spots

Charles Shere writes about Copland's The Tender Land, here.  I think Shere's characterization of the piece as "hokey and pretentious" is right on the money: the opera's music is thin and both libretto and score are unable, dramatically, to make anything particularly engaging out of its most potent theme, forbidden sexuality (which ought to work and which Copland handles so astonishingly well in Appalachian Spring, showing that the problem is compositional and not a direct function of either the materials or the style.) 

Shere also writes that:

I've always thought of Copland, Britten, and Shostakovich as an interesting triad. Each was immensely gifted and intelligent; caught in an uneasy relationship to the prevailing Modernism-Reactionism duality of the early 20th century; apparently self-assigned to a position of National Spokesman for his art. Each composed masterpieces, particularly early masterpieces, then went on to an uneven output often troubled by indecision as to whether to be Popular or Principled (with respect to personal musical style).

It is, indeed, interesting how these three became "national spokesmen", as none of three came equipped with the biography or personality which could be described as a cookie cutter for such a role and the part of the local political and musical institutions in assigning these identities was perhaps more critical than their own contributions.  While each lived through real political difficulties, on balance each showed a talent for adaption to their local systems.

Besides being the unavoidable composers during their lifetimes (as a kid, these were the three reliable exceptions to the rule of not-programming contemporary music on local radio and concerts), the members of this triad have received substantial attention of late from music historians with both scholarly (Taruskin) and more popular (Ross) projects.  I'll have to admit to having large blind spots (deaf spots?  why are we so persistently forced to use visual metaphors when talking about sound?) for the music of all three and this, collaterally, has made reading these histories a real chore.  In Copland's case, for example, the music which lasts for me are the most "difficult" early and late pieces, The Organ Symphony or even the much-maligned Inscape, for example, with Appalachian Spring being the elegant exception that proves the rule for his "mainstream" pieces.  With Britten, whose music I have really heard far too much of, the Church Parables remains impressive, and with Shostakovich, I have absolutely no patience left and now publicly pledge not to let myself get hauled once again to a new production of The Nose or Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk under the promise that "this time, you'll really like it".  No I won't. 

This is music which fails to renew the musical imagination.  But then again, maybe, the official, mainstream status of these men and the stuff they made simply precludes any such ambition.   It would have been best if we could've grouped the three into a Poe/Silliman category of a Musical School of Quietude, and let it all fade away.  But it is in the nature of such boat-not-rockers that they continue to dominate concert programs and have a decisive influence on the young quietist and careerist composers of our time.  And, unfortunately, in music, as opposed to poetry, our quietists are not restricted to the piano end of the dynamic range.  There is one, small and slightly evil joy I can take, though: these are the three 20th century composers whose names are most likely to get mispelled on undergraduate music appreciation tests. Take your small pleasures wherever you can find them, I say.

Be prepared.

That a cloud of ashes from an Icelandic volcano can cause air traffic in most of Europe to shut down is a nice reminder that redundancy can be useful and valuable when the unexpected happens.  Where rail lines and ferries can take up the slack, most travelers are inconvenienced but not stuck, but wherever airplanes have a monopoly, tough luck.   The present bootleneck is costly to the air carriers and big trouble not only for passengers but for the increasing share of post and freight that is flown.  The time advantage of jet travel is real, but shouldn't there be more travel alternatives available?  Fast and affordable passenger ships, for sure, and isn't this a good argument for a more thorough revival of dirigible airships as a more gentle mode of air travel?  

Here's the reminder: a bit of redundancy in musical performance practice is also useful. Conducting cues, for example, can often avert difficulties or rescue a performance when caution was insufficient.  Doublings and cued notes in parts are useful.  Players are wise to bring extra reeds, strings, bows, mallets, etc., the spare tires of concert life.  When electronics are in play, redundant power sources, mikes, cables, amps, speakers, recordings, computers and software can save a concert.  And in the composition itself, repetitions and doublings can serve multiple purposes, both aesthetic and a practical.   

Rote Politics

Ron Silliman points to this post with the statement Why memorizing poetry is inherently right wing.   The question of memorization is, of course, sometimes an important one for musical performance as well and sometimes we musicians also make a similar distinction between rote and "by heart" memorization.  Generally speaking, the pro-memorization camp is our conservative party and it is typical for competitions and recitals on the establishment circuit to insist that musicians play without sheet music visible on stage.  (This insistence comes with that same weird macho-but-prissy swagger that only conservative pseudo-intellectuals carry.)  While there are cases  in which getting rid of the paper is unavoidable — in opera, for example, or with some percussion instruments for which visual contact with a music stand cannot be maintained —, I side decidedly with the opposition party here.  This is because when playing notated music one can too frequently discover that notation is a gift that keeps giving; reading music is seldom a task which is completed with rehearsal and a live performance is often a valuable additional opportunity for discovery.  This possibility was brought home to me first by playing baroque music, realizing continuo and ornamentation in real time.

Addendum, 14/4/2010:  I think that I wasn't clear enough here.  My problem is not with memorization but with the insistence than musicians play without notation and the deprecation of musicians who chose to use notation.  Although my own memory is probably average, when I rehearse something well, it is almost inevitably committed to memory, but I still want to have the notation available.   And not for insurance but out of optimism, that there is still more music to be found in the act of reading.  

S is for Schematic

A performance last fall of Le marteau sans maître left me once again astonished about an unresolved tension in the piece, a tension between structural concerns — the interlocking cycles of two, three and four movements and the systematic orchestration and scoring patterns in particular — that were made explicit, expressed at the immediate surface of the music, and the note-to-note continuity, the precise sense of which was not aurally recoverable beyond the most general and impressionistic considerations — contour, registration, and to some extent pitch complementarity.  Although Le marteau is a piece which I have listened to, intently, for more than 30 years, and has some qualities — not least its notorious coolness — which I actually find attractive, the absence of a compelling connection between local continuity and global order makes for an increasingly frustrating listening experience.  Moroever, there are some scoring pattern changes and choices of instrumental register in the piece that are almost shocking in their clumsiness.

The problem here might be described as being too schematic.   A schematic diagram uses topological abstraction to present the relationship between the functioning parts of a process, system, or organism in a clear fashion by ignoring actual size, scale and precise orientation and by eliding detail.  Of course, such simplification is often extremely useful, but when the process, system, or organism is something as precious and sensuous as a piece of treasured music, then the loss of precision may very well come at the expense of those details, dimensions or parameters of the music which we value most.  

[There is a widespread misunderstanding that Schenkerian analys suffers from the same such loss.  This misunderstanding is probably due to some weak pedagogy, in which the act of analysis is seen — and, tellingly, not heard — as the production of ever-more reduced graphs, a confusion of product with process.  Schenkerian analysis can, in fact, be an excellent strategy for the recovery of detail and dimension.]

In the Left End of Newmusicland — where one might likely locate the radicals, experimentalists, & minimalistas as well as some of the complexers — the relationship between a music and its construction is a persistent theme. * But one without a persistent resolution.  In some music, it's an advantage if the way in which the music was put together is clear, while in other music, the advantage goes with hiding any traces of the compositional work.   Piano Phase and I am sitting in a room are two examples of music in which such clarity is essential, while Music of Changes is an example which finds advantage in opacity.  And still, for all the immediate aural evidence of their construction, in neither Piano Phase nor I am sitting in a room is there a lack of mystery in terms of either sonic quality or musical continuity, while in Music of Changes — the construction of which is all-but-impossible to recover — there is a prevailing sense of precisely the purposefulness and restraint one would expect in a tightly constructed work.   I think that the reason these three pieces work for me (and Le marteau doesn't) is that the clear and opaque elements are complementing and reinforcing one another in optimal ways.   The immediacy with which the constructive, procedural elements are comprehensible in the Reich or the Lucier facilitates hearing the music made possible by and above and beyond the process, while the anticipated ergodicity of Cage's surface soon reveals itself to be much more discrete and eventful than expected (it is music that really does change!) 

A bit of constructive technique that I have find useful of late involves composing with pre-determined scoring patterns.   I have sometimes combined these with rhythmic structures akin to Mr Cage's famous square root method and have found Gray codes ( and, specifically, Beckett-Gray codes) to be particularly useful scoring patterns.  Now, this probably sounds like a lot of abstraction — and even, as I later discovered, with the Gray codes, some fairly sophisticated maths — but, my goal has never been to let this become so abstract as to not relate audibly to the immediate musical concerns of a musical continuity. 

______

* Morton Feldman is here unavoidable: "It appears to me that the subject of music, from Machaut to Boulez, has always been its construction. Melodies of 12-tone rows just don't happen. They must be constructed....To demonstrate any formal idea in music, whether structure or stricture, is a matter of construction, in which the methodology is the controlling metaphor of the composition...Only by 'unfixing' the elements traditionally used to construct a piece of music could the sounds exist in themselves--not as symbols, or memories which were memories of other music to begin with."
 

 

R is for ||: Repetition :||

For a time, say '78 through '84, my music used a lot of literal repetitions, notated often between happy pairs of ||: :||s. Repetition was a useful element in music which was more immediately static than dynamic, more about being somewhere, than going somewhere. Of course, no repetition was ever precisely identical to that which was being repeated, the most careful of human performances always carried traces of subtle alterations, and even in the most mechanical repetition, the context, of time delayed and experienced, altered the identity relationship in a fundamental way.

For a time, say say '78 through '84, my music used a lot of literal repetitions, notated often between happy pairs of ||: :||s. Repetition in music was useful for creating contexts that well self-sustaining and self-similar. Canons were a particularly useful extension of repetitive techniques, as the music was simultaneously asserting something about where one was, where one had been, and where one might be going. Canons became increasingly important to me in the late 1980's, and now I can't imagine working without them, but they are increasingly loose, rather than strict, in character. Letting a voice which had been trailing gradually move to a leading position in a contrapuntal environment (John Cage, borrowing an idea about Gagaku from Henry Cowell, called this a "Japanese Canon"; Morton Feldman would brilliantly use this same idea, borrowed perhaps from simultaneous Torah recitation in the Orthodox Schul, Jo Kondo's idea of a "shape" and its "shadow" was definitely in the same ballpark) was literally like getting ahead of oneself.

Before I get ahead of myself: For a time, say '78 through '84, my music used a lot of literal repetitions, notated often between happy pairs of ||: :||s. Attracted initially by the impossibility of the exact repetition, I became more attracted to the idea of an explicitly imperfect or quasi-repetition. An example of quasi-repetition which continues to haunt me is Jo Kondo's Sight Rhythmics, in which the same piece is "repeated" six times, but from each "repetition" to the next, one element in each measure is altered, with alterations accumulating until the sixth "repetition", called a Skolion, in which the material is rewritten altogether. But the changes here always remain clearly within the territory, the ballpark if you will, of repetitions rather than variations, because the sensation is always one of sameness rather than the variety a proper variation would demand.

But I'm getting ahead of myself: For a time, say '78 through '84, my music used a lot of literal repetitions, notated often between happy pairs of ||: :||s. I've recently been writing some music in which there are lots of literal repetitions, but repetitions which find themselves in conetxts which change enough that I'm not comfortable fitting them between pairs of ||: :||, no matter how happy they might be. The context has changed the material enough identifying any of it as a repetition now seems somewhat dishonest. I suppose I ought to write something now about not dipping into the same river twice, but having come 'round to recognizing that the same river is not a particularly useful idea (as a river is more of a process than an object), let's leave it at that, and you'll have some idea of the ballpark about which I'm currently bopping. Or something like that idea, but entirely your own...

(This is a repeat appearance of a blog item from December 2006.)

The Palatka Band

This is the Palatka Band from Transylvanian village of Palatca in Romania playing at the 2010 Táncháztalálkozó in Budapest.  Not the best sound quality, but a good illustration of the multi-ethnic region's string band style and technique.  The bass, three-stringed, uses a very short bow in heavy strokes and battuto.  The viola, or kontra, also three-stringed, tuned g-d'-a, plays a chordal accompaniment. The prima violinist, Lőrincz Codoba uses, in the slow sections, the typical right-hand style, in which most expression occurs in a space in which vibrato and portamento are not always distinct.   This is also a good illustration of a traditional form of music transmission in the relationship between older and younger players.

Them words

It's a standard piece of advice for composers that we ought not set our own words.  In general, I think this is true: having two pairs of ears and eyes to monitor words and music is a sensible move and there are precious few examples between Machaut and Ashley of composers who are equally gifted as poets (in Machaut's case, it is impossible decide whether the identity as poet or composer should come first) while there are — sadly — plenty of composers who have used their own texts or libretti to sinkingly bad effect. (Does anyone seriously want to go some rounds over the libretti of Wagner or Stockhausen? Seriously?)  

(I think that this principle holds less for popular music, but I'm just not engaged enough in popular repertoire to venture a substantiable reason why, but it may just be that it is in popular music that a continuity to the ancient idea of poesis, in which the composition of words is inseparable from their metre, rhythm, accent, and tune, is still, to some extent, operative.) 

A second standard bit of advice to composers is that it is better to set a good (or, in some cases, even a mediocre) text than an extraordinary text.  Setting aside any prima-this, poi-that personal rivalries between poet/librettist and composer, the thinking here seems to be that setting a text to music requires — if the music is to be interesting on its own terms — a certain amount of pliancy, perhaps too much abuse for texts valued highly, and we are even prepared to accept a near-complete acoustical erasure of the sense and continuity of a text to the needs of dramatic and musical continuity. There is, however, so much usable room for a composer in the composition space available for setting a text between having every word clear and comprehensible and the fantastic and melismatic opposite of that, that I have to assume that this second bit of advice is not necessarily true.  It may make some music-political tactical sense to avoid setting the masterworks in favor of the merely good — for example, by playing down expectations and attachments an audience brings to familar and treasured words — but I don't think that there are any unexceptionable musical reasons for this.     

Q is for Questions

Qualms: Who wants these sounds, this music?  Is this music worth taking your time?  Is it worth breaking your silence?  What does this piece of music do that no other piece of music (or alternative activity) can do?  Quarrel: How does this music differ from other music?  Is that difference or disagreement potentially productive of more new music?  Quantity: Is there enough of this music? Is there too much of this music?  Are the internal proportions of this music right (or wrong, in an interesting way)? Quality:  Is this music well-considered, well-felt, and well-made?  Question: Have you heard something in this music that you have not heard in other music?  Have you learned something from this music?  Do you value this music, those sounds, these times?  Quiet! Does the music articulate phenomena, sounds, that are otherwise inaudible, unknown? In composing, in throwing these sounds out,  have I made it possible for you to hear something new? Is this music an opportunity for changing our habits of listening?  Can you, did you, hear that too?

P is for Presence

P was first going to be for Passacaglia, because I like writing them and they have a profound and useful relationship to other self-contextualizing musical processes (canons and loops or delay lines, for example), but as a description of my own work, it could as well have been Ground (but not, AFAIC, Ciaconne, which is another story altogether)  which would not have made it an honest stakeholder for P in this alphabet.  I then thought that P might stand for Pattern.  This sent me on a research trip, through Thompson's On Growth and Form and Alexander's A Pattern Language and through numerous but not-tawdry-enough-to-keep-this-poor-soul-engaged mathematical accounts of Pattern.   I soon realized that I know next-to-naught about Pattern.  Pattern is a very important topic and I should learn more but someone else had better handle it, perhaps in an alphabet of their own.  And then again, P could have been for Process.  Back in the days in which the label "minimal/ist/ism" had not yet so firmly been attached by the interests that be, process music (as in Steve Reich's Music as a Gradual Process, an essay and an idea that still captures ears and imaginations)  was, along with systems music and pattern music, one of the terms of art for the reduced means and media side of the radical music.  The notion of a musical process, suggests something mechanical — one of my own works-in-progress has the title Six Simple Machines — and something that is done, in a planned, ordered, timed, and measured way, to material.  Also, we usefully distinguish between closed- and open-ended processes. But no,  with patience and systemic clarity presently out of compositional fashion, this is not the moment for an alphabet with P for Process.  So, instead, this is P for Presence: too often, says I, composers get sucked up into the attractive pull of conventional musical movement and continuity while forgetting the equally powerful potential of musical sounds to establish striking, if not unique, presences in real acoustical spaces as well as the equally real — if more elusive — spaces associated with individual memory and experience of sounds.  The act of specifying this sound, at this point in time, on this instrument or voice, in this particular space can be daunting, as if one were blindly throwing a dart in a vector space of too many dimensions and unimaginable depth.  (I suspect that Luigi Nono's electroacoustic works, for example, were progressively weighed down by near-despair at the over-abundance of possible statisfactory realizations, creating a de facto indeterminacy that would have been anathematic to a dialectical materialist like Nono.)  The challenge of timing and spacing tones or arranging voices or instruments just so, and paying attention to the resonances of sympathetic bodies or room acoustics while balancing these concerns with the interests of continuity comes damn close to a decent job description for a composer.  Presence is also about ensuring that musical work is available; it is played, heard, and perhaps an object of contemplation; it might be recorded or broadcast; it is a part of and a response to a location and individuals or a community within that location; it is of a moment, it may mark a historical moment, it may anticipate moments to come. Finally, presence is not a property of the work itself, but of my/your/his/his/our/their relationship to the work, a sometimes violent break with absence, with quiet.

 

O is for Ordinary

The radical music has often been focused on the extremes — of pitch, duration, amplitude, perception, attention, memory, from the micro, minimal and miniature to the macro, maximum, and epic — but it has also always been just as much about the familiar, the middle, the ordinary. When Stravinsky reduced his written-out dynamics to piano and forte in the Octet, he was at once pointing to older repertoire for which such a binary pair sufficed but also indicating that there was a lot more music to be found within those familiar confines.  Or this: that sudden all-white-key-dominant-something-without-a-tonic-in-earshot-chord in Cage's Water Music.   Or this: those wonderful and wonderfully disconcerting post-Boulangerie pieces of Glass: Music in Parallel Motion, Music in Contrary Motion, Music in Fifths... all the way through Another Look at Harmony.  

 

It rises.

Aside from my dips into the early music world, where an A of 415 or 466 Hz is common (and, conveniently, about a half-step down or up from 440), my A of reference has always been 440. But now, with instrumentalists-in-training in the household, we can put off no longer raising the living room piano to the 443 which is now basically standard for strings and winds in much of Europe  That's a bit less than 12 cents, but still a noticeable difference.  In general, I dislike pitch inflation of this sort, which is generally promoted as being done in the name of increased "brilliance,"  an effect I find slight and even then not in balance with the cost of extra strain in upper registers for singers or brass, but if the rest of the band or orchestra is tuning up to 443, you're more or less stuck with the increase.

One great additional practical disadvantage of this comes, of course, with existing works involving combinations of instruments and electronics or using tuned percussion.  When electronic patches can be reset for live electronics or if works made in recorded media can be recreated at the higher standard without altering tempi, okay, a lot of work, but it can be done; but other classics of electronics may not be retunable and may instead require that instrumentalists tune down to the older standard.  As for mallet percussion, the tradition was to tune the bars slightly high to the standard (say 442), which tend to float down under the heat of stage lighting), and now, I suppose, it can require an even higher tuning.  A lot of unecessary bother, AFAIC.

N is for Nature

I've been stuck in the middle of this alphabet for some days, trying to write something useful about music and nature.  Without much success, as it turns out, for the terms "nature" or "natural" seem mostly more distracting than useful.

Now, the time was when a Beethoven or an Ives could treat "nature" as a musical topic.  And whether in Beethoven's pastoral bird-song imitations or in Ives' transcendental contemplations of rocks and whatnot, we don't really buy such a distancing to the natural anymore or, likewise, a division of nature from culture and artifice.   Such a distinction hinges on a segregation of human activities from the rest of natural history that is unsustainable.  Yes, there is still a charge to be found from looking to natural phenomena for new musical resources and models, but there is no more illusion that our "acts of new music" are executed in a nature-free preserve.

In musical theory and aesthetics, the distinction of "the natural" from musical artifice has been a constant if complex background presence, for example in Rameau's fundamental bass or Schenker's "chord of nature".   In the twentieth century, we had the striking contrast between Schoenberg's offense at the notion of natural (i.e. non-tempered, just) intonation, writing in a 1934 letter to Joseph Yasser that to play in a natural  intonation was tantamount to "acting natural" in public, which Schoenberg rejected with a Apollonian self-denial and sublimation worthy of his rival Stravinsky, on the one hand, and Schoenberg's student, John Cage, on the other, who employed chance operations as a means of not imitating works of nature in its effects — animal song or stormy weather — but "imitating nature in its method of operation."   I can't help but recognize each of these models as having substantial deficits as science but also having, once, substantial appeal as impulses for making new music.

Since my teens, back in the lower Pleistocene, I have used just intonation in my music and the harmonic series (and, in many cases, a subharmonic series as well) has provided an important model for the spacing of tones, voice-leading, orchestration and, to some extent, rhythm.  In some circles, particularly among the new complexity folks, the use of just intonation or the harmonic series gets read as affirming a naively naturalist position, while others understand the whole-number world of just intonation as nothing but mystifying numerology.  While either of these views may well be held by other musicians, I don't believe that either characterizes my approach which might be described as "pragmatic" or "realist",  if you need to have a label.  This is because I've come 'round to thinking of the harmonic series and just intonation as, respectively, a point of reference and one possible — and acoustically vivid — solution to an optimization problem for pitch, timbre, and textural relationships in musical ensembles.  I hope that I am under no illusions about the aspirational quality of just intonation, as tuning is a transient activity, limited by our musical technologies, perceptual apparatus, and duration of the sample; a simple frequency ratio between tones is a target, and all of the space on either side of the target is also of potential musical utility.   Tones arranged in harmonic series-spaced configurations are useful, but so are subharmonic (or, if you like, chords in which all tones share a common overtone) or non-harmonic arrangements.  But in the end, it's simply a matter of taste: Working with voices and instruments with simple harmonic spectra, the reduced interference beating as one approaches — or these increased beating as one abandons — such targeted intervals is a concrete and sensually powerful quality and too useful musically for me to leave alone.

I am particularly influenced here by Javanese shadow theatre, in which the entire transition space of a shadow, from its sharply delineated image when the puppet is held against the screen to the blurred and increasingly amorphous shadow figure formed as the puppet moves away from the screen, is in play.  Anyone who has played central Javanese or Sundanese gamelan will recognize a similar transition in the irama system, in which changes in the density of musical events occur in counter-motion to changes in tempi, with moments of repose as tempo and density lock in ensemble clarity.   As a composer, I want to be have access to an entire universe of imagery, from total clarity to its apparent opposite,  in every parameter of music.    

Shadow Diplomacy

Wayang kulit (Javanese shadow puppet) figures of Barack and Michelle Obama, commissioned by Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono from wayang artist Ki Ledyar, pictured, of Yoyakarta, in advance of next week's state visit.

Desert Plants Renewed

Walter Zimmermann's Desert Plants: Conversations with 23 American Musicians, published 1976, long time out of print, is now accessible again on Walter's website, here. 

If you who don't know Desert Plants, you should.  It's a landmark both for American experimental music and for its account of a young West German composer discovering his own musical sensibility, grounded in a relationship to history and geography, through an encounter with a musical "other", in this case a collection of American musicians who, at the time, received almost as little attention at home as they did abroad.  While several of the musicians interviewed remain less well-known or well-known only in niches, with the passage of time the music of many of those included in Desert Plants has attained a prominence that sometimes makes it hard to recall how great a challenge their music posed to the then-establishment (and, to some extent, still-institutional) avant-gardes, American and European alike.

(For the record, my opinion here is completely biased.  I was fortunate to find a copy of Desert Plants around '78 or '79 while still in High School and many of the interviews — and the music those interviews drove me to — registered like lightning, a real source of inspiration, no, better: posture, funky typos and all, alongside Cage's writings, Lou Harrison's Music Primer,  Nyman's Experimental Music and Peter Garland's magazine Soundings.  When, with my wife, I moved to Frankfurt a decade later — knowing vaguely that Frankfurt was a town in which new music was taken seriously (you know: Adorno, for better or worse and all that) — I had no idea where the Walter Zimmermann of Desert Plants might be living, but I called the only Walter Zimmermann in the Frankfurt phone book and it turned out to be the right one.  Since then, Walter has become a mentor and friend, an encouraging and nurturing presence,  and his music, alongside his sensitivity, ethical stance, musical/cultural/culinary appetite and fine sense of adventure as well as moral support, has been a constant gift.)

    

  

The Inevitable Applause-Between-Movements Post

How come the topic of concert-going etiquette — and applause, in particular — is always framed as a zero sum game?  It's as if our choice is either black ties and perfect decorum and funereal silence between and during movements or it's dress-down with cheering, beer, and popcorn like at a hockey game.  Doesn't that leave out the greater part of the field of both real and possible listening environments?  Even sporting events offer such a real range, with expected and tolerated behavior gauged to the particular features of the individual sport.  Just consider the contrast in dynamics and decorum between a snooker match and a pro football game, with golf, tennis, cricket, baseball, basketball, hockey and European or Latin American soccer lined-up, more or less, on the continuum in-between.   If a maximum of control over ambient and audience noise is what you or the music requires, there is always the privacy of your own home, whether making the music yourself or listening via loudspeakers or headphones (BTW: the explosion in individual headphone audition since the advent of the Walkman is a seriously under-explored topic of both musical and anthropological significance: dissertation, anyone?) and, in more social concert environments, it should always be possible for performers to simply signal to an audience — in the manner of golfers — that quiet is now required* and, otherwise, it ought to be standard procedure that performers and audiences come to an informal contract about the nature of their interaction, with all the direct and indirect signs and instructions that civil assemblies can use. Yes, I maintain — hope against hope, perhaps, but you've got to have your utopias, friends — that there has to be time and place for the quiet of Webern or Morton Feldman, with minimal noise from audiences or air-conditioning, but that doesn't mean discounting everything from there up to the stadium-sized monster truck show.  

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*One of the points continually thrown into these arguments about concert behavior is historical audience behavior.  The evidence, however, is far from uniform and thus gets used to justify both churchly quiet and rousing ribaldry.   Like all other aspects of historically-informed performance practice, the real topic underlying the discourse is contemporary performance practice.  Above and beyond the fact that historical audiences were probably located on ranges from lousy to wonderful very much like our own, why should we be settled with only one or two possibilities? 

 

M is for Medium

Voices, instruments, resonators, amplifiers, processors, mixers, loudspeakers, air, architecture, ambient noise, ears (auricles, canals, membranes, cavities, fluids, ossicles, cochleas, nerves), brains, bodies.*    

Memory, imagination, notation, recording, training, practice, habit, preference, style, ideology, belief, taste, commitment.  

Authority, institution, impressario, arranger, librarian, contractor, section leader, conductor, manager, bookkeeper, banker, producer, presenter, sound designer, editor, publisher, copyright holder, licensor, lawmaker, lawyer, broadcasting authority, censor.** 

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*Not to mention bone conduction, cochlear bypasses and direct electrical stimulation of the brain with transduced acoustical signals;  Maryanne Amacher advocated a "post-cochlear listening".

**Not to mention parents, teachers, scholars, reviewers, critics, polemnicists.

L is for Line

An active line on a walk: so begins Paul Klee's Pedagogical Sketchbook.  I want to write a counterpoint book that begins the same way.  The musicians' convention is that line = melody. Everything becomes melodic: Christian Wolff  (see Wolff's Lines).  So great is our rage for connecting single sounds into lines that "pointillist" or "punctual" music is inevitably heard a melodic.  Connect the dots.   Fellini's lines, beginning somewhere unlikely, ending up somewhere else improbably.  A line can describe a journey, movement from here to there.  Or a thread, a path taken or a map to be followed. La Monte Young: Draw a straight line and follow it.  Straight lines, wandering lines. The long line, a center of attention continuing through a large work, can defeat — push into the background — the most animated ensemble polyphony.  

*****

Musical lines differ from graphic lines in that they are embedded in time, which moves only one way. (Which is often reflected in local stylistic conventions, for example that of common practice harmony in which I -> IV, V, IV -> I, V, V -> I, but V does not -> IV. )  On a graphic surface, one can move in any direction, but in music you can't go backwards in time; musical reiteration, repetition, and recapitulation are replicative operations, not exact returns, and music benefits from the way in which memory (fragile memory) plays with the substance of those replications.

It's important, so we demand improvement

Pliable gets it exactly right:

A critic writing a savage review of a concert is considered to be doing his job, not being anti-classical music. But a commentator writing critically of the BBC's output is considered to be an anti-BBC heretic. Which suggests parallels between the BBC and the established Church. Both have been flattered for decades by unquestioning believers. Both are now in terminal decline. And the loss of both will be a great tragedy.

Unfortunately, it appears that this is far too subtle for the management of many of our institutions: criticism, when expressed because one finds the work or the institution so important that one wants it to be done better, simply gets heard (and used) as a vote against all such work or institutions of the sort.   This problem is far from confined to the U.K.. New music programming in German radio stations faces exactly the same problem, exacerbated by ratings competition from private broadcasters and the budget pressure put on by the extortion-in-the-guise-of-the-holy-cow-called-professional-soccer.  And let's not even get started on the US where new music has never been a presence in NPR affilliates and where slicing the schedule up to cover social or political interest groups has led Pacifica to all-but remove new music from its schedules.  So we're stuck in the awkward position of having to praise whatever does get programmed — even when it's mediocre or just plain crap — out of fear that anything other than praise will be taken as grounds for eliminating new music coverage altogether.  And — misfortune on top of unfortune — this tends to have the side effect of validating the mediocre programming instead of improving it, which just contributes to the downward spiral.   

 

Frédéric and Jimi and the ways of the hand

In this Chopin year, we're going to be hearing a lot about idiomatic instrumental composition, and in particular, the ways in which the physical, tactile acts of playing interact with aural considerations.  Most of the talk will, of course, be about the keyboard, from Bach (see here) to Chopin and on to Bartók and Ligeti (tactility is also a hot topic among the complexers).  But here is also a new article about the complex handedness of Jim Hendrix and his choice of a left-handed guitar.*

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* Playing "wrong-handed" is a minor fascination of mine.  From time to time, one hears about pianos with inverted (right-to-left bass-to-treble) keyboards, which can be emulated with a good midi keyboard and are, at turns, frustrating and fascinating to play.  Also, there is the example of the violinist Rudolph Kolisch, a close associate of Schoenberg, who played left-handed, which offered an acoustic advantage in quartet playing and some advantage in teaching as well, as he could face his right-handed students and demonstrate with a perfect mirror image.   Noticing that some old recorders came with alternative seventh holes (one of which could be filled with wax), I once spent some time learning to play with the hands exchanged, an exercise which seem to increase both physical and mental agility.**

**I am strongly right-handed.  Once, in a theory class, when having some problem executing left-hand passagework at the keyboard, I whimped out and blamed my weak left hand.  My teacher, a student of Boulanger then said that this was no excuse, telling the story that Madame Boulanger would raise both hands and say "there's no difference."  I really wanted to shout  "Of course there's a difference, and that's a wonderful, musically interesting thing!" But I refrained, knowing well that my teacher liked to slap the back of his students' wrists whenever encountering either unsatisfsactory performances or dissent.  

 

K is for Kaleidoscope

Variety, contrast, change. The liveliness of music is bound up with dynamism. La Monte Young is fond of saying that "contrast is for those who can't compose", but with all due respect to my teacher, contrast is essential — Young's own music is full of contrast — and the critical issue for composers is management of contrast, within the scale and scope of a given musical environment. To my ears, there is more dynamic variety within much Q'in or clavichord music — instruments which can never rise above the dynamic level of piano — than is available on the best made and played Steinway. The absolute range of dynamic contrast may be smaller, but the degree of differentiation, the scaling within that range, is much greater by being much more refined.* Even the most disciplined performance of Young's Any Integer (for Henry Flynt), a piece in which a single piano cluster is repeated as precisely as possible for a number (often a large number) of time soon becomes totally engaging through the discovery of the smallest possible variations.

*****

Variety, contrast, and change can come from within or without. The most familiar childrens' kaleidoscope reflects colored stones or pieces of glass or plastic or paper onto parallel mirrors sharing a viewing tube with the objects. The relative positions of the objects can be changed by moving them within their chamber, sometimes by shaking, sometimes by turning, but the total range of available shapes and colors is contained. But there is also the teleidoscope, a variation on the kaleidoscope, in which, instead of objects contained within the tube, has a lens and an open view, allowing the internal mirrors to reflect images from outside. It might be useful to think of contrast in music functioning with a similar distinction.

J is for Jetsam

Sometimes you have to just throw things away.   Notes.  Riffs.  Phrases.  Movements.  Whole pieces.  Big ideas.  Repertoires.  Let go of that impulse to save and use and reuse everything, to make everything important.  Just toss 'em.  Listen to Sinatra leave those notes out.   Or Carlos Kleiber rehearse a gesture so close to perfection that you don't have to, like, pay it any more attention.  These bits and stretches of music are more valuable — more musical — in their absence than in their presence.  Even more than that:  they are more present as music when they are unplayed, unheard, physically absent.  Every composer is uneven, not every piece is a masterpiece, and not every piece needs to be visited, let alone revisited.  Cast a cold ear.  Learn that being unsentimental, practicing unattachment, is often more musically sensitive than trying to own every last detail. 

I is for Invention

John Cage — this is from memory, so this is a paraphrase — said that "we need an avant-garde, otherwise nothing would be invented."  His tone was urgent,  it was for him a question of human survival,  and for Cage there was no meaningful distinction between physical and aesthetic survival, concerns that are made articulate in writings from his series of Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse) to the late Overpopulation and Art.  

Cage well knew inventors focused on physical survival: his father and Buckminster Fuller, for example, and he cheerfully accepted his teacher, Schoenberg's, identification of Cage as an inventor in the field of music; likewise, he was always enthusiastic about the musical inventions of his colleagues.   In Houston, many years ago, I was supposed to do a radio interview with Cage about his Ryoanji; instead, we spent an hour in his hotel room discussing the frequency response of PZM microphones and the Piano Mechanics of the Canadian composer Gordon Monahan: topics connected by an enthusiasm for invention.

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Invention, musical and otherwise, is often equated with novelty, but just as often, the more important quality is utility.  The distinction here is important as novelty is not an inherently stable identification.  Novelty can fade and the invention can become familiar, or even escape further notice.   I don't wish to discount this transient value of novelty: music is an art of the moment and sometimes we need works of art that belong to one moment and no other, that are here and then gone.   But we can't be naive about this.*  Moreover, novelty is not attached to the invention itself but rather to the perception and — ultimately — memory of the invention.  

Utility, in contrast, does not necessarily imply a connection to a single, particular work or its perception, but rather to facilitating the production of work in general.  Tools. Techniques.  Processes.  With the right set of tools, the production of merely novel results may be trivial. With the right set of tools, once can build whole repertoires, not just single works.  

*****

Some inventions are incremental, others represent leaps of imagination.  Sometimes successive inventions seem to make such narrative sense that in hindsight we forget the large gaps (consider the progression from Cowell's String Piano to Cage's Prepared Piano and then to Monahan's Piano Mechanics.)   Leaps can be elegant, but sometimes all the magic is in an incremental approach: someone — again this is my fragile memory at work — once noted that most mathematicians, when faced with the task of crossing a valley between two mountains, will suspend a bride over the valley but, in contrast, the method of the great mathematician Alexandre Groethendieck** was fill in the valley, stone for stone, until the two mountains met.  It is probably next to impossible to convey to my younger musical friends the excitement, in my minimalist youth,  that accompanied the news of each development in the music of Young or Reich or Glass or Lucier or Ashley, composers who built their music up from scratch or first principles.   (Perhaps you can still get a glimpse of this narrative of discovery and yes, invention, from Reich's Writings on Music or Lucier's Chambers.   The same goes for Cowell's New Musical Resources, Lou Harrison's Music Primer, Jo Kondo's essay on The Art of Being Ambiguous or even the first book of Stockhausen's Texte; texts by non-musicians that I find equally useful are the Pedagogical Sketchbook of Paul Klee and Lawrence Wechsler's Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin.)     

In a critical, even pessimistic tone, I have sometimes characterized our present musical moment as being one of consolidation rather than invention.  I may well be wrong.  I hope I am wrong. It may well be that my perception of a lack of useful inventiveness is more a function of my habits and memories than an honest assessment.  But the idea of invention does seem to be less valued these days than a kind of polish, just as the appearance of having an attitude is somehow more important than actually having one.   

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* Note the name of this blog.

** Groethendieck ought to be the subject of an opera.  But I digress.

 

The Báthory-Kitsz Performing Ensemble Competition 2010

This is brilliant.*  I rather hope that Dennis Báthory-Kitsz goes on to organize a similar competition for arts administrators. 

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* please note the ethical policy here — unfortunately not practiced by all competitions — of guaranteeing a refund of the entry fee should a prize not be awarded in a given category.

H is for Hush!

The late Heinz-Klaus Metzger like to quip that Webern was the "last composer before the advent of air conditioning", as Webern's music presupposed an acoustical background absent a layer of aero-mechanical noise, sometimes constant, other times punctuating events with turnings-on and -off. But Metzger's quip wasn't quite right, as there isn't a concert hall anywhere or of any age that doesn't emit creaks and groans that have nothing to do with climate control. Foundations are forever unsettled, wooden parquet and panelling crack, light fixtures give off whole concerts of their own, and all these noises are joined by the breathing and wheezing and coughing and sneezing and fidgeting and what-not made when real live people are present.

This was brought home to me Friday night during a performance by the hr-Symphonie under Lucas Vis of George Crumb's early Variazione. As is to be expected with this pairing of orchestra and conductor, the performance was accurate and elegant, but the form of the piece, with the "empty" space between the individual variations, almost defeated the performance, as concerts and concert halls abhor vacuums, with the audience, orchestra, and the hall itself soon filled the blanks with clearings of throats, adjustments of bodies, instruments, and chairs and all other manner of hard- and software, and one became so familiar with the noises of spots and fresnels and cracking oak ceilings in these intermediate pauses, that they soon became unadvoidable percussive additions to the actual music. And this was in one of the world's better halls.

Cagian that I am, I work hard to welcome chance and contingency into my musical life. I'm grown up enough to know about the reality of Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy and all about the impossibility of Silence. But still... But still... But still, I have that hope (-against-hope), that dream of a platonic ideal, that fragment of belief, of experiencing music, as imagined, without the interruptions. Silence, like anarchy, is neither "real and existing" nor an ideal (as the socialists of the past put it and the capitalists of the present may well put it), but rather a tendency and an aspiration, and the task at hand is making music while knowing full well that it is.

G if for Gnosis

Beethoven read Kant, Ives read Emerson, Boulez read Mallarmé. We all know about John Cage's interests, with their varying degrees of connection to music, from anarchism to mycology. Milton Babbitt knows tin pan alley song lyrics, baseball and beer. Non-musicological "research projects" have practically become tradition among experimentalists and high complexists. (I've probably told too much around here about my musically tangential interests.) When it comes to the interpretation of the music, whether as performer or as listener, are these factoids important to know?

David Tudor, as pianist, was willing to read his Mallarmé — indeed willing to learn French — as what he believed to be prerequisite to learning a Boulez Sonata, but he was unwilling to read Emerson as prereq for Ives's Concord Sonata (Cage said that Tudor didn't want to "become a transcendentalist"). There are, however, marvelous performances of either work by pianists who have done none of the "required reading." In these cases, I suspect that the musical text itself is adequate for realizing a musical performance or listening to the work. The question is a subtle one: does knowing this information give the player a lift or a shove or an edge in getting into the work? is there added value in having the contextual information? or might there be cases in which the added information actually discounts the work? (There is an excellent discussion 'round this topic at Johnson's Rambler, here.)

For my own modest catalog of music, I don't think that knowing about my extracurriculars is necessary for players or listeners. But then again, there is some middle ground: knowing that I am fond of croquet or poker or mumblety peg, make really good larb or bak bao or that I read nighttime stories to my children out of Finnegans Wake might be of interest, without making it necessary for players to actually take a mallet or jackknife in hand, wager on a lonesome pair of jacks, steam dough, or even laugh at the Prankqueen's misadventure. But then again, who knows?

Happiness and Wealth through Pickled Chili

(Some Friday Food Blogging)

In my never-ending search for the perfect condiment, a current strong contender is the Chili in Five Treasure Sauce sold under the Picklec Family brand.  The usual chili-flake-in-soybean-oil is here accompanied by roasted peanuts, sesame seeds, pine nuts, sunflower and pumpkin seeds, making a pumped up, crunchy base for sauces and and a usefl table condiment for those dishes that are just not hot and crunchy enough.   

Even better: the manufacturer's website comes complete with a bit of pickled vegetable mythology (accompanied by cheng music): 

In the transition from Ming to Qing Dynasty，An Bangyan rebelled in Shuixi County Guizhou Province.  When General Yang Wencong who’s a man of gentle blood had leading Army of Yang to put down the rebellion，he issued an order to offer delicious food to his officers and soldiers as reward.  It was cold weather that the cook in the army added local rare plant into all cuisines which made the army highly praising those dishes with attractive color，natural aroma，pure and tasty and also provided them gigantic appetite and fighting in a refreshing way. They all curious about the mysterious thing，so the cook said that it’s called Capsicum from foreign countries and it tastes spicy to defend against chilly outside and to stimulate appetite. Henceforth Army of Yang ate pepper all the time and thus made the illustrious battle achievement that it followed the brand “Picklec Family” and spread it until now.

Nowadays Guanqun Foodstuffs Factory has not only inherited Army Yang’s traditional secret recipe but also deduced classical food culture. What is done is to innovate unceasingly new flavor to improve condiment industry by strong R&D capacity，affluent selection of products and comprehensive service，while to provide consumers “Picklec Family” food with perfect quality and tasty, safe and reliable. Both expensive and medium-priced product are excellent value for money.

This is probably the first time that I've seen military cooking used as an advertising point, but I guess if it worked for the Army of Yang, it's got to be good.  But wait, there's more! the website also expands on the company's traditional virtues:

Our value: honest and passionate；together we create value and enjoy life.
Our prospects：Expert of prickled vegetables and condiments; the leading company in the industry.
Our quality policy：high-quality and tasty; safe and trustworthy
Our belief：Inherited traditional technique , Deduced classical cuisines
Our goal: bring happiness and value to Shareholders and customers; provide opportunities for employees; create wealth for the society.

West viewed from East

There's a nifty little narrated slide show about a current exhibit of West Coast minimal art at The New Yorker's web site, here.   Peter Schjeldahl's articles are one of the best things about the magazine of late, but jeez, his commentary here begins on the wrong foot by framing the west coast work as a reaction to that in the east coast.  This just can't be sustained given both the west coast origins of many working in New York (De Maria, Serra, Young) and the lack of familiarity on the west coast with much contemporary work on the east coast.  He then makes a distinction between the "finish fetishists" and the "light and space" artists that really doesn't hold, as l-&-s-ers Irwin and Turrell shared that "fetish" for a cherry-perfect surface.  (Also, the characterization of Irwin as a "minor" abstract expressionist painter is hard to sustain if you are actually familar with his hand-held, line, and dot paintings, which demonstrate astonishing technique and conceptions every bit as strong as his east coast colleagues.)  I realize that the view from New-York-center-of-the-known-art-universe is familiar and convenient, but wouldn't it be more accurate, useful, and interesting to talk  of a history with parallel discoveries and activities and complementary interests rather than tell stories about competing production and one-way lines of influence? 

F is for Field

At Wesleyan, years ago, I was a grad student member of a committee charged with designing a "core" sequence of undergraduate theory courses.  The program we began to develop still makes a lot of sense to me, having a nice overall shape and being connected to real (and really fine) repertoire.  The sequence began with a semester on musical materials and melody, with the focus on western chant, but taking advantage of the world music resources at Wesleyan and also examining aspects of melody in non-western contexts.  The second semester was about modality and counterpoint, concentrating on 15th century music — and especially Josquin — thus avoiding some issues of tonality that the usual focus on Palestrina would invite.  A third course was to be called Tonality, centered on the late 18th century Viennese style, and the fourth was to deal with Chromaticism and was the least developed of the four.  

None of these courses, as we envisaged them, could come equipped with any of the off-the-shelf textbooks then (or now), although Dieter de la Motte's  superb Kontrapunkt, had it been available and translated, would have fit well with the Counterpoint course.   Jon Barlow, the long-time generalist on the Wesleyan faculty and I joked about a "counterpoint book that would sell a million copies" with the Milleresque title Topic of Counterpoint, and my preferred title for the first semester of materials and melody was Field & Stream.

Of course, — being academe, even at an unorthodox place like Wesleyan — this sequence was never implemented, but that certainly doesn't mean it shouldn't be tried.

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The metaphors of Field & Stream have accompanied my work for a long time.  (Perhaps it's a fault of mine, and I'd work more efficiently and productively without them, but I seem to need a metaphor to get a hand — or ear, as the case may be — on most ideas before I can make them work usefully and musically.)   

A field, in my usage, is an arrangement of available materials.   With pitches, for example, this reflects both my work in intonation systems with the elegant graphing techniques for tunings designed by Walter O'Connell and Erv Wilson and a line of working that begins with 12-tone row boxes and arrays and then the charts used by Cage in works of the late 40's and early 50's in which the items are no longer just single tones or pitch classes but often a mixture of single tones and aggregates of various sizes in various isolate, harmonic, and melodic configurations.  To these, structured, fields I have added the open or informal fields or collections found in works of the 50's and 60's by Christian Wolff (I seem to remember Christian also describing these as reserves or pools — see, other people use metaphors, too!) .

A stream is complementary to a field, it is cut through the field, as a route of resources consumed.   (Path might be the better metaphor, but sometimes the words just stick.)  The compositional issues involved in designing such a stream are obvious:  do you allow repeat visits to positions on the field?  must all resources on a field be consumed or must some resources be held in reserve?  are moves made by choice or pattern or chance?  are the resemblances or relationships in the field to be ignored or do they create constraints on movement?   what is the relationship between single moves and the overall contour of the stream? are there simultaneous streams?  if so, how are they related?  etc..

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Some of my pieces have titles that refer directly to the idea of a field:  Field Study, ...finding the edge of the field...,  Crossing the Field, Fieldwork, Afar Afield, Farther Afield, and the unfinished The Art of Fielding.  I suspect that I'm not yet finished with fieldwork.

 

 

 

     

E is for Echo

Echo, the nymph, is a blank.  We do not know her.  In Ovid, she acts (speaks)  but is not noticed, as Ovid gives her no personality other than unconditional love and timidity, only to give herself to an unconditionally conceited Narcissus.  We know Narcissus too well; indeed there is nothing more empty in us than when we echo Narcissus.  

But echo, the sound, need not be a blank.  It carries additional information: the time and strength of the delay, the resonances of the intervening spaces.  And that additional information is key to its musical utility, imitation being the basis of some of the most elementary techniques for creating musical complexity, with timing, strength, re-iteration and additional forms of transformation available to create a field of echo-based forms, from call and response and canon to the most elaborately and densely networked and transfigured forms of imitation.

In my electronic music youth, every manner of echo (from spring reverbs and echoing acoustical chambers and tape loops to the first commercial analog and digital delay systems) was useful and exciting.  But eventually — and, not coincidentally, as everything got, technologically, much easier — some boredom set in.  Echo had become too familiar and the imagined opposite of an echo — a system with prescience rather than memory — was impossible.

 

D is for Drift

Lesson of a late January snowstorm: you can't shovel the same snowdrift twice.   La Monte Young: Drift Study:  analog oscillators slowly, naturally drift out of phase from one another, calling attention to the emergence of complexity and detail in the most reduced     Phasing in early Steve Reich, first in the analog tape works, then in gradual, player-controlled phasing.  A move (drift, even) from informal to formal methods, from continuous to striated time;  a piece like Piano Phase emulates aspects of drift, but is too controlled and directional to be drift.  There's still plenty of good music to be made in the continuum between accidental and intentional drift.  

*****

Paul Chihara: Driftwood (for string quartet with two violas): not a related process, but still a useful image.  

*****

I heard quite a good performance of Morton Feldman's Why Patterns? Friday evening, a piece that shocked a generation ago with its asynchronous barlines (read more about them here), the players inevitably, yes, drifting apart, but is now just sweet music with as variegated and eventful a landscape as Feldman ever produced. (Whenever things approached familiarity, i.e. the patterns approached articulation at the surface, some surprising move would be made, usually involving a sudden change in registration or speed of articulation.)  One concern: the glockenspiel used was a very fine, state-of-the-art instrument, in-tune and well-balanced in tone throughout the entire range of the instrument, never displaying the typical mechanical clunk produced by standard glockenspiels; the poor little glock has drifted into high quality.  Feldman wrote with that not-quite-in-tune, awkward, and clunky instrument in mind; does that make performances like this one — as beautiful as it was — unidiomatic? 

*****

The best conversations drift.  Conversations don't have the formal burdens of interviews or essays, of having direction, sustained themes and dialectical movement and all that.  Dale Pendell's Walking with Nobby: Conversations with Norman O. Brown is a nice record of the best conversationalist (and finest teacher) that I have known.


 

 

C is for Citizen

I just had a chat with a composer colleague, someone who has sent in all his boxtops and made something of a career, with a teaching job, regular commissions and a good number of performances.  After making some snide remarks about sneaking out of concerts to avoid music from across some — to me obscure — new music-partisan divide, he went on with the ritual mantra complaint about lack of an audience for new music.   After calling the guy on his lack of consistency, I probed a bit deeper and was able to establish that although he was exclusively a composer of concert music, he didn't, actually, like concerts.   I stopped my questioning before I could figure out if he actually liked music, as that would have been too depressing even for a cynic like me, but I did suggest that concert music might not really be an optimal line of work for him.  

This encounter immediately made me recall the counter-example John Cage, who, in later years with all the seniority, fame, notoriety and certainly a full desk of his own work at home, made a point of attending as many concerts as possible whenever he was at home in town and took pride, when attending festivals or conferences in skipping some discussions but attending every concert.  I remember him once saying during a festival that "I want to be one-hundred percent" and, I believe, unless he was physically unable due to illness, he usually succeeded, even in uncomfortable environments like Darmstadt.  Here was someone with well-known preferences and associations who had fought and suffered through some horrible — especially when petty — turf wars in Newmusicland, who nevertheless went out of his way to hear music that he had good reason to expect to be outside his own taste range, challenging his own habits and preferences, and he — the self-identified anarchist, thus with some honest skepticism about communities and a disdain for most institutions — managed to provide a model for participating and contributing to the community.   

Note inégale

Roughly 1 in 4 Americans is employed to keep fellow citizens in line and protect private wealth. (Read more here.)

B is for Boomlet

Music history gets told in a frustratingly elusive interplay of exceptions and the rule.  Do you point to odd and striking landmarks or do you describe more cohesive landscapes?  Take the uniform identification in the major textbooks of Pierre Boulez with the term serialism.  How much of Boulez's music is strictly serial?  The abandoned and unavailable Polyphonie X and the first half-book of Structures.   The opening of Structures 1a gets plenty of print and as much analysis as it can probably sustain, but dozens of works of the era by other composers would have been just as good, if not better, as examples (starting, AFAIC with several pieces by Goeyvaerts), yet its is Boulez who gets included, and probably on the basis of other works for which the serial turn of Structures and Polyphonie X was a necessary but non-productive cul de sac,  abandoned immediately by the composer's self-criticism within Structures itself: and students of music history are thus given a non-example as the most prominent example.   While there are certain techniques that Boulez uses in his mature works for which the strict serial experience was a prerequisite, in retrospect, Boulez's more characteristic, stylistic concerns were formed prior to that experience and — fed through his experience as a performing musician — form the greater continuity in his catalog.  Boulez's ability to re-work the clumsy, juvenile Douze Notations for piano (1945) into orchestra pieces of significant scale and even some grace more than half a century later is an elegant illustration of this.  But no, the example we continue to read about is Structures 1a.  In part, I suspect, this is plain laziness: "analysing" 1a is easy, very little more than a description or even just a list; the hard topic here is style, and that is never easy to discuss. 

A is for Alphabet

Ron Kuivila's Alphabet (1982), an electronic "setting" of the title made rhythmic, harmonic, and polyphonic by a canny use of off-the-self electronics,  is a reminder of the power of arbitrary arrangements — in this case the conventional sequence of letters — and the compositional utility of balancing the logical with the arbitrary and conventional.  Letters, in English, are themselves abstractions, holding places for collections — and often inconsistent — of linguistic sounds or constituent parts thereof, making the ordering into an alphabet an abstraction once more removed.  The sampled text is played through a pair of Casio VL-tones with their outputs going through a phase locked loop that would lock at a higher partial driven by the partials of a single oscillator, which multiplies the sampled word by small whole-numbered ratio,  creating an integrated complex of pitch, rhythm and timbre  (the integration of pitch and rhythm is not unlike the proportionate Harmonium pieces of James Tenney); the whole texture reinforces the harmonic substance of the text, itself composed of vowels with simple harmonic partials, yet selected and arranged in the word-internal ordering which tradition has given us.   A useful reminder of the how closely the organs for linguistic and musical perception and cognition are shared, yet how much musical potential can be heard in their differences.  

A Note On Composing While Under Constant Surveillance

Since Lucky has found permanent day-lodging for himself underneath my composing desk,  I've finally begun to understand Gertrude Stein's famous counter to Descartes:

"I am I because my little dog knows me, but perhaps he does not and if he did I would not be I."

Wild tones

A few years ago, having become frustrated with my own over-slow tempi and clumsy tone while reading through Stravinsky's Sonata, I just had to hear the piece played once well and at tempo.  I  forced myself to listen to one recording after another.  I was mostly disappointed by the performances, but one recording stood out, and — to me — it was a complete surprise.   It was that of pianist Earl Wild, who has just died at the age of 94.  

I was surprised becaused Wild's name was not one that someone involved in new music would immediately think of, moreover it was a name that I associated with the showy virtuoso end of the big-name classical music establishment, not territory where musical sensitivity is always valued, but that association was a mistake on my part.  Sure, he was a flamboyant stage presence and sure, he was a Liszt specialist, but he was a Liszt specialist who could handle all of Liszt, which means not just the fireworks, but also the reveries, lugubrious gondolas, and bird songs.  To handle such a range, a pianist needs not only fluency and velocity in passages of great density, volume, and complexity, but has to give those dense sections a coherent composite form and clear harmonic rhythm, and has also to be able to make single, isolated tones come alive in sparse textures at minimal dynamics, being sensitive to how each new attack influences the instrument's ensemble sound, gathered and developing under keys held open or the pedal, a near-impossible balancing act. 

What has that got to do with performance practice for Stravinsky?  The default setting for Stravinsky performance is usually "dry", but for me, Wild's recording and the experience of hearing works by Jo Kondo — whose own musical identity was very much shaped by Stravinsky — being recorded by the ensemble L'Art pour l'Art under the composer's supervision absolutely were convincing arguments that the quality in question was discretion not dryness, that single tones could and should be shaped and allowed to blossom and resonate.   (As Kondo put it “I am interested in words more than in sentences, in sentences more than in paragraphs, in paragraphs more than in a whole page. Thus, it could be said that in music I am more concerned with each sound than with the phrases they create.”)  Wild's Liszt-grown technique turns out to have been perfect for this style, giving elegant harmonic shape to passages of great velocity as well as bringing out the internal activity of individual tones.  

Wild was probably the last survivor of the great house pianists from the days when American radio stations took live classical music seriously.  His initial popularity was no doubt due to his recording of Rhapsody in Blue, but his association with American music of the mid-20th century was broader than that and, if the evidence of a Sonata which shares the Stravinsky recording means anything, he was no slouch as a composer for the piano himself, not just turning out the kitsch required for television appearances and I have also read that he was also an active transcriber, a serious musical activity in its own right, also with a Lisztian origin.  It will be interesting to hear if other pianists now  take up Wild's music.

(BTW: This chat (on YouTube) with Wild is a blast; you'll never think of knitting the same way again.)

Temporary Notes (16)

In some music, of a certain vintage — the precise vintage we'll leave to musicologists to fight out — the notational convention was that if one voice had eighth-note triplets, a simultaneous voice sounding quarter + eighth triplets could be written out as dotted-eighth + sixteenth.  At some point — again, musicologists: have at it, this is your job, not mine — this convention gave way to a more logically consistant — if less stylish — reading of both triplets and dotted note values, so that the same notated rhythmic ensemble would have the sixteenth following the dotted eighth played one twelfth of a quarter note later than the last note in the triplet.  As a piece of practical advice, consider this: Unless you specify the earlier convention in your scores, which may be musically useful, players will now expect the later reading. 

Now a piece of aesthetic advice. As always, YMMV:  be careful when superimposing additive and divisive note values. While such combinations may be useful — as a written-out rubato (a la Skryabin/Messiaen/Wyschnegradsky/Boulez), for example, or as transitional figures within some larger rhythmic process, or for adding to the contrast and independence of lines in ensemble counterpoint — there is risk, in just plopping some dotted-somethings on top of tuplets, of the combination coming out a bit clunky (see above).  I don't have anything against clunky as a possible musical topic, but you don't always want clunky and it's often easy to confuse facile clunkiness with something more interesting.   

In The Movement

A pair of sentences in a blog item by William Keckler stood out this morning:

I find it interesting that today's literary movements don't even have to be formalistically inventive. It's all done through the miracle of social networking.

With all the chatter about social networking among musicians these days, of course the first thing I did upon reading this passage was to substitute the word "musical" for "literary" and let it churn around in my brain a bit, to see if I end up with butter.  

Yes, social networking promise greater opportunities for making contacts — let's not call them "friends", buckos, as that word can still be saved for something more special — and for sharing stuff (music in some form or another, pretty pictures, tech talk, news, recipes, gossip...) and even making real public musical events happen.  But when these networks actually go into operation, all of the delights and dangers of ordinary social interaction come into play, and not all people, musicians included, like to play nice.  Familial disfunctionality, denunciations, banning, and shunning, and — ultimately — collapse of the hive tend to follow.  My impression is that this is especially the case in musical networks because (a) we have trouble being upfront about our preferences, genres or programs, our "formal inventions" and (b) we have trouble distinguishing between shop talk among musicians and our conversations with a lay audience.  We think of ourselves as open and idealistic folk, but our ideals are not always well-nourished in completely open environments; they are often fragile or not yet ripe and require some shelter in order to develop and gather some robustness.  It is quite easy to image that a social network initiated around ideas about experimental, non-amplified, scored concert music will have trouble keeping focus if the membership of the group is overwhelmed by new members with preferences increasingly tangential to these.  This is not an elitist observation.  As Ives knows, there is no significant economic or political power exercised in such a community, the creation of communities based around  alternative configurations of interests are not restricted by the existence of this one, and jeez! have table manners really declined to the point where no one learns how and when to politely and usefully join a conversation?

No, social networking is not a miracle. It is a tool and is only a useful tool when it is appropriate to the task and its proper and effective usage is understood and trained.  And, while there is a real charge to conversation and exchange with musicians with different interests — personally, I learn a lot for film composers, or band composers, or circuit-bending composers —,  the absence of a shared program of "formal invention" is not going to lead to a sustained conversation, whether about technique, aesthetics, or the everyday business of getting commissions and gigs. 

Do you remember?

... if you should see him once, you would forget what he looked like, but if you should see him twice you would forget to forget what he looked like, and that would be quite fatal. — from Tajar Tales by Jane Shaw Ward

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

Combating insomnia (again) last night, I turned on the tube and watched a bad movie. It was about five men who wake up, in various states of physical injury and/or bondage, in an industrial building apparently sealed off from the external world. None of the men knows his own identity and no one can remember how they ended up there and in the particular configuration in which they woke. A tank of gas, with a verbose warning message on the side, mentioning a "loss of memory" risk, was the device used to explain this group amnesia.

How convenient for an author to be able to control the memory of her or his characters so precisely and uniformly! All composers have got to be envious of such a state of affairs. Music — and not only tonal music — is so much about memory and fading memory and tricks of memory and the play of expectations and conjectures which musical memory invites. Every composition is, in its audition, subject to all of the individual variations in capacity and agility that each individual listener, at any particular moment of listening, brings to the experience. Some of my colleagues talk about composing for an ideal listener, presumably with a perfect memory. I think that's silly: aside from those pieces you reserve for your most private audiences, you have to compose for audiences who will bring totally unpredictable combinations of memory and forgetfulness to their experience of music. I'm not entirely certain of my logic here, but I suspect that the optimal response of a composer to this diversity is to go to one of the extremes: either that of minimal contrast and extreme continuity or that of maximal variety and eventfulness.

In any case, I can't remember, for the life of me, how that dreadful movie turned out.

Slimy tunes

Here's another free idea for composers adapted from natural science:  it turns out that slime molds can discover efficient paths through complex networks, subway systems, for example (read here, in German).  How about using slime mold paths to design melodies?  Melodies have at least two dimensions of movement (in absolute pitch and in pitch relative to harmonic references), so there is some similarity to networks like subways.  How important an efficient path may be, however, may vary with your aesthetic purposes.

Only in it for the money

It seems that the sounds of spoken numerals affects the perception of price. (Read here.)  Morton Feldman talked about using instruments in a similar way, getting really expensive sounds out of really expensive instruments, by starting a vibrato on a cello, for example, before beginning to bow, or having a certain touch at the piano, and only on a certain class of piano.  The other side of the coin — as it were — was Feldman's disdain for instruments he considered "cheaper" in quality, the recorder for instance (a judgment I don't share).   I think it will be interesting to hear how well Feldman's instrumental value judgments hold up, if some of his preferences — for that vibrato, or the use of tuba, glockenspiel, or vibraphone with the motor on — acquire a dated quality.  In any case, this research is certainly compositionally suggestive for the composer who wants to lend her or his music a certain aura of value.   

The Politics of Notation

The letters Q, W, and X are banned in Turkey.   

Not-so-casual Observation

Voice-against-voice counterpoint is very much like tying knots, specifically like tying ties.  Like a bit of two-voice modal counterpoint, which can only begin with unison, octaves, or fifths, a tie knot can only begin with the two ends outside-out or inside-out, that is to say, in the sartorial equivalent of perfect consonance.   Thomas Fink's Encyclopedia of Tie Knots is a very cool and quite useful site, and Fink's work on designing tie knots by random walks comes uncannily close to using random walks to generate counterpoint.  

Attribution

Despite the cliché of the genial composer slaving away alone in a lonely garret, many composers put their music together in more collaborative environments. Sometimes this can be a fairly egalitarian arrangement, as in the Cage/Harrison Double Music (see this item on co-composing); in other cases, a single composer is identified with the work to which other musicians contributed "work for hire." The advantages of working with such assistance can be great. Jean-Baptiste Lully was said to have composed the melody and bass line and then handed the materials on to a team of assistants who — in the manner of an assembly line — efficiently filled in the interior parts in the five-voiced string texture according to the master's specifications. Giacinto Scelsi recorded improvisations at the piano or an electronic ondioline and then hired musicians to "transcribe" the recordings into scores, work that was often highly imaginative in character.

(In many traditional music cultures, attribution to a single composer is generally unknown. In Central Java, for example, it was conventional to identify a composition with the ruler of the court with which the music was associated. I've often wondered if we are a not a bit hasty in automatically ascribing musical works in the early western canon to individuals rather than to those communities within which the individuals worked.)

Sometimes collaborative work can create controversies with regard to attribution. In Scelsi's case, one composer who had worked extensively for Scelsi as a transcriber came forward after Scelsi's death with the claim that he had been the composer of works published under Scelsi's name. However, the contractual relationship was clear — it was work for hire — and the work produced in that relationship could, in no way, confused with work the hired transcriber chose to present as his own; moreover the works in question were stylistically consistent with the work Scelsi produced with other assistants. The contribution of these assistants was not insignificant — indeed, in several cases, it approaches the virtuosic — but the constant element is clearly the conception and style of Scelsi himself.

*****

A recent weekend read was Mike Barnes' s Captain Beefheart: The Biography, which interested me because of a personal geographical connection rather than a musical one.  It turns out that the book really ought to have carried the title The Magic Band: The Biography This is because the narrative is carried more by the description of the collaboration among various configurations of musicians and producers through which the music they made was produced than by the biography of the Captain, Don Van Vliet, himself. (Indeed, much of Van Vliet's biography — and certainly almost anything about his character — is obscure or speculative and not least because he's no longer talking, and when he was talking, he was notoriously vague and unreliable.) 

My knowledge of the workings of popular music is limited, but I suspect that collaborative composition of the sort practiced in the Magic Band is a standard practice: someone brings in some text or some riffs or licks or a fragment of a tune or a sequence of chords and songs get assembled, bricolage-ishly one might say, with each of the individual musicians contributing their own takes and turns on the material. In this case, the raw material was often taken from recordings of Van Vliet pounding out some patterns or fragments on the piano (or, sometimes, singing or even whistling them) and then, working with each of the musicians, gradually working this into functioning parts of a larger ensemble continuity.  In practice, one of the musicians usually functioned as a musical director for the band, transcribing recordings and coaching the other players, to which instruction Van Vliet would provide additional suggestions, singing, whistling, or offering metaphorical expressive notes.

However collaborative the enterprise was, and how limited Van Vliet's contribution was to many details, almost all aspects of idiomatic (and, when required, extra-idiomatic) instrumental technique, and much of the basic continuity, it is also perfectly clear that Van Vliet was the composer here: it was his aesthetic at work, he defined the style, he decided what went into a piece or was left out. Moreover, he was the constant factor in a band that otherwise had several complete turn-overs in membership and the music made by band members aside from their work with Van Vliet was (an is) distinct. Yes, he had plenty of help — and superb helpers, at that — but that doesn't diminish the compositional accomplishment.