Rules: morals, games, music

A thoughtful post (here) by physicist Sean Carroll on the rules of morality and games.  His argument that rules of these sorts are not based on the laws of the universe nor handed from some deity but are nevertheless not arbitrary, invented and refined over time by real, fallible human beings is usefully applicable to music as well, with musical repertoires and styles hewing closely to the received rules but receiving a shock of  invention from time-to-time with extensions and refinements of the rule.

Now music does play against a certain immutable physical and physiological background — sensory consonance and dissonance, for example, with fairly clear correlates in physical and neurological domains — but the evidence presented by the diversity of existing musical repertoires suggests that there are plenty of alternative strategies for optimizing local musical rules to take into consideration these aspects to a greater or lesser (including no) degree. And yet, for all this diversity, there is a remarkable consistency to our ability to order an acoustical performance into broader or narrower categories of the musical and, within those categories, remark on the degree to which they follow or avoid the known rules.

Personally, what interests me most in music — "interests" here meaning "provokes my ear and aural imagination" — are those repertoires, forms, styles, pieces, parts of pieces, and moments of music in which it is thrillingly unclear whether the music is breaking the rules or discovering a new configuration or reading of those rules.  It is thrilling in the way a Rene Thom-style catastrophe or biphurcation is thrilling, a sudden and major shift due to a small change in circumstances. It is thrilling in the same way that a Wittgensteinian language game can be when suddenly, after an extended conversation, it becomes clear to both speakers that they weren't talking about the same thing at all.

From a Diary: I:xxix

An unplanned pause (caesura/gap/absence/rest/fermata/tacet...) due to an out-of-service right hand (a small operation on the index finger is scheduled, annoying and inconvenient but not serious). Ironically appropriate to the moment, I suppose, as I had planned, drafted, edited, tossed out, redrafted, and retossed a long item about John Cage's music today, as a way of filling in this curious gap between the 20th anniversary of his death and the 100th of his birth. I tried to write about my unsettling over Cage performance and reception today, the sense that there are very many very fine and spirited performances of the works and that it is very good for music in general that Cage's music has become an institutional concern and is now played at Juilliard or the Proms, representing an opening for music rather than closure and, in the best circumstances, changing the institution more than the institution changes the music, but with the reservation that many Cage performances are (and always have been) less about the music itself than about the institution or persons presenting the music. But trying to write that item coincided with the discovery that my right hand didn't want to play along, forcing me to type this with my left hand, which was both an invitation to write less rather than more and a reminder of how profoundly right-handed I am. And that was a (useful, like a kick in the pants) reminder that my musical work is not always a balancing act between ear and mind, but a triangulation between ear, mind, and the habits and capacities of my hands. A leap of an octave, for example, is imagined simultaneously as an auditory experience, a mental structure, and a physical exertion, and all three experiences reinforce one another, making each more rather than less vibrant. Lou Harrison, a very physical person (crashing down after executing three perfect pirouettes, Mr Harrison shouted "Why don't they make ballet for fat men anymore?"), criticized Cage, his lifelong friend, as being incapable of moving to music (and thus one source for the Cage/Cunningham separation of dance from music.)  But I think Harrison got Cage wrong here, because Cage, in recognition and affirmation rather than denial of the physicality of sound, found that it was not necessary to identify the physicality of music with that of dance through closely tied, even mimetic movement rather that independence (from dance or decor or film etc.) created space useful for a deeper and more engaged experience, and one which was framed (by a shared time structure, for example), not mediated by parallel activities. The line from this to both La Monte Young's idea of getting inside a sound or the social/political music-making of Christian Wolff is direct and the famous tacet piece (4'33") an example of such (in this case, time-structured) framing at a minimum.  And stop.

How it looks, how it sounds

The popular musician Beck has just released his new album. Not as a cd, nor as downloadable files. As sheet music. (To be published in cooperation with McSweeney's.)  Yep, interpretable sheet music. Notated music is the new vanguard.

*****

Composer Richard Winslow's law:  if you want to repeat some music precisely, you ought to transmit it orally, while if you want to guarantee that the music will change over time, you should write it down.

*****

The recent news of a shakeup at the owner of notation program Sibelius and a possible buy-out of the company which produces Finale has caused some anxiety over the future of both programs.  (If one of the companies goes under, for example, how will owners of the software be able to register their programs when moving to new computers?)  It has also caused some useful meditation over the nature of musical notation in general and engraving in particular.  What are the advantages and disadvantages of music notated by hand or engraved?  What do we really want in a notation program?  Should a program try to accommodate as many different repertoires as possible, or should it be specialized?  Should a program try to do both notation and sequencing well, or should its emphasis be on notational graphics alone?  Have the open source alternatives matured enough to bring the era of commercial engraving programs to a close?

I'm something of a broken record on this, but my opinion remains that having a diversity of notation options is a very good thing for music (and don't let any music professor tell you otherwise!), being able to notate by hand is a useful and often beautiful skill (in my experience, the best computer-based engravers have excellent manuscript skills), the free and open source alternatives (Lilly Pond and MuseScore in particularly) have improved very much, and we still need a good graphics-only program to supplement programs in which playback and a fairly rigid notational structure trump graphic freedom.  (Let me also add that learning to notate music well, whether by hand or with machine assistance, is something that is best done through a combination of self-instruction and feedback from real musicians and benefits tremendously from a musician's own experience playing from notation. It does not require a semester-long college course.) 

*****

Some people are seriously picayune about notation, I'm only somewhat so. But there are a few basics I find important: avoid collisions of items on the page; try to have few and, when then, good page turns in a movement; be critical of the default formatting settings in your software; try for a layout that uses space optimally (neither crowded nor too widely scattered); and try to make your scores look as if the music in them is important to you, give them a distinctive look, your own house style.  Have a distinctive layout or print on exquisite paper, bind your scores with silver thread, add illustrations, or create/choose fonts that fit your musical aesthetic.  The potential effect of a font on your scores reception or performance is, granted, a subtle one, but real and meaningful musical differences are usually subtle, and an additional visual charge can only help emphasize these differences.   Errol Morris (the best blogger of 'em all) recently wrote:  we may be at the mercy of fonts in ways that we are only dimly beginning to recognize. An effect — subtle, almost indiscernible, but irrefutably there. 

Epiglottal!

Linguist Mark Liberman of Language Log has a great post about the anatomy of vocalizing, here., including a link to John Fink's video "Glottal Opera."   This is vivid stuff; I don't think I'll ever look at a singer in the same way again.

Two Outside the Guild

Two names recently surfaced on my monitor belonging to figures who were well-represented early on in recorded electronic music, but who were not particularly close to the world of professional composers and have slipped into some obscurity.

The first name, Ilhan Mimaroglu, appeared, sadly, in an obituary (here) had academic compositional credentials but was best-know professionally for his work as a jazz producer (primarily with Charles Mingus) for Atlantic records, which distributed his own music label, Finnadar, which provided Mimaroglu the opportunity to curate a series including his own electronic and acoustic music alongside work, much of it experimental, from Cowell and Varese to Cage, Rzewski and Hays.

The second name is that of Tod Dockstader who is still alive, but no longer able to be active and to whom a new blog has been dedicated, here.  Dockstader did not have formal musical credentials, but was a professional sound engineer, a career he had entered via animation, and eventually established an educational film production company. Both Mimaroglu and Dockstader, cut off from the local academic studio (due to lack of credentials, work with jazz musicians or in commercial recording), made concrete and electronic music in the down-time in commercial audio or film studios.  Dockstadter responded to this in part by insisting on the description of his work as "organized sound" rather than as music.

Personally, I am not close to the work of either man, but then again, I'm basically indifferent (okay, I like "Philomel") to the whole corpus of music produced in the Columbia-Princeton studio, and the fact that these two were able produce significant bodies of lively music (or organized sound, if you have to) completely outside that establishment was an important precedent, alongside the music of Richard Maxfield (much also made in commercial studio down time), the Cooperative Studio for Electronic Music in Ann Arbor and The San Francisco Tape Music Center, for the lively independent scene today.

Landmarks (48)

Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber:   15 Sonatas for violin and continuo with a closing Passacaglia for solo violin, known as the "Mystery", "Rosary" or "Copper-Engraving" Sonatas (ca 1676).

With a single manuscript source, rediscovered in 1905, we do not know the composer's intended title for the sequence of sonatas other than a prefacing remark that  he had "consecrated the whole to the honour of the XV Sacred Mysteries"; we know next to nothing about the circumstances of the composition of the individual sonatas and do not know if they had been composed together as a set or had been gathered together later by the composer.  In any case, the manuscript gathers them in a sequence mirroring a sequence of devotional prayers to the rosary, here in three sets of five sonatas, each of the fifteen sonatas in a different scordatura (the first sonata and the closing passacaglia use the standard tuning in fifths.)

These pieces are famous for this uniquely rich scordatura scheme and, combined with the somewhat forbidding notational convention for scordatura playing, this has given the sonatas something of a reputation for technical complexity requiring forbidding virtuosity.  While this is indeed music for a virtuoso and  the composition of the entire sequence certainly reflects an agile compositional mind, the balance between technical demand, compositional technique and immediate musical expression is here never settled on the technical side.

What the scordatura achieves is, first of all, a unique resonance for each movement, bright and tending to the sharp side in the first five sonatas, depicting joyous mysteries form the early life of Christ, the second set of five depict sorrowful mysteries place the instrument in a darker tessitura, the extraordinary eleventh sonata, depicting the resurrection, uses the most radically retuning, crossing the second and third strings in the peg box and between the bridge and tailpiece and then tuning the strings g - g' - d' - d", perhaps the best projecting collection of tones on a fiddle but here with octaves available on neighboring strings, and the remaining four sonatas return to bright, sharp-keyed tunings, contributing to the cathartic nature of hearing the whole sequence of sonatas in order.  (The dramatic effect is real; the regret that Biber's opera Alessandro in Pietra (1689) has not survived is heavier because of this.)  Biber does take some advantage of the possibilities for novel chordal arrangements produced by the scordaturas, but tone color appears, to my ears at least, to be the immediate concern. The closing Passacaglia, without continuo, must be heard as a very individual reflection on the preceding and is justifiably regarded as the most significant movement for solo violin prior to Bach's Chaconne.

Just another ordinary piece of music: let it go.

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

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

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

From a Diary: I:xxviii

Logistics. Spent the last week painting a room and laying a parquet floor in it. Had the vague and hopelessly optimistic idea that patterns of interlocking oak might inspire me much as Anatolian rugs inspired Feldman and all those Feldmanistas.  But not to be: this particular room had to be painted and this particular floor had to be cleared of its old covering and set with the new flooring while all of the major pieces of furniture were still in the room; they could be moved about within the room, but they could not exit, for there was no external space available in which to exile them, or, in the case of a large wrought iron bed frame, there was no way to physically remove the frame from the room except out the balcony window, through which it had once entered.  Not having a crane available, the bed frame had to stay, but somewhat more compactly, on its side, amply padded so that it might be rotated.  Flooring is not supposed to be done this way, it needs to settle in all directions, so it wants a room emptied of everything. That being impossible, it became a logistical game of some complexity, doing the room in three parts and, with each new part, reassigning the bulky furniture parts so that their weight was distributed so as better to assist the settling of the parquet.  Too, as the tasks changed, from stage to stage, the tools and supplies required changed as well, and an additional logistical feature was insuring that the required tools were in place and the tools no longer required had been returned to their proper place in the workbench so that they might readily be retrieved.  It's all a bit like one of those toy puzzles in which tiles (numbered or lettered) are slid about within a frame,  all movement  made possible by adjacency to the single empty space in the frame. Composing has logistical dimensions, assigning forces, materials, within a piece, but also more practically, in the organizing ones work ahead, to make a plan that will sustain an environment still ripe for invention.  (I admire composers who have their logistics down. Cage and Stockhausen were incredibly disciplined about working to a plan.  Henry Brant's "prose reports" were precomposition designs that removed doubt from composition itself.  Babbitt, to his credit, was a composer with no logistical anxiety, and could compose to full score without sketching. In his mature output, all he really needed was an array (these being complicated to make, he often reused the same arrays and also used arrays composed by others) and a set of rules about how parameters projected the "lynes" of those arrays. The rest was extemporaneous invention, a bit like playing from a figured bass or a lead sheet.   But the real logistical heroes of music-making are the librarians and contractors or personnel managers who make sure that players are in place at the right time and place and with the correct playing materials, and while all musicians have logistical tasks (string and brass players not forgetting to bring mutes, or all the doubling instruments a woodwind player has to bring, whether owned or borrowed), it's the percussionists who have really to have logistics down to an art form, as their entire menagerie of noise makers gets plundered a different way in every piece.   

From a Diary: I:xxvii

David Antin: "the problem of architecture is not how to make it, but how to get rid of it.”   Consider the qualities of permanence, ephemerality, decay (and/or metamorphosis), sustainability, and renewal as potential fields of creative activity.  That old saw about "architecture as frozen music" misses on both counts: music doesn't move (except in some psychological sense), but is itself movement, just molecules of air pushed about and dissipating, ephemera (sound → echo → memory forgetting); architecture, on the other hand, while slow-moving, is never frozen, it is planned and built over time, and when "finished", it is never done with decay and renovation, wrecking and restoration,  ruins and excavations etc., if they are "machines for living" (Le Corbusier), they cannot be immobile.  People, things, critters, water, energy, waste, gas, information, dust, memories: they constantly move in and out, some small or large part of the building constantly moving in and out with all the traffic. The landscape around is constantly changing, even the earth below is always in shift.  Your house is like a river, you never step over the same threshold. My own caution — when not resistance — to recording is in large part a positive embrace of music as ephemera, finding joy in the life and disappearance of each sound in a particular time and place ("live" music, of course, and also this: I often can recall playing recordings in particular times and places, but not necessarily the particular music which was represented on those records (lesson: recordings can be used in ephemeral performances)). But this caution also comes from the sense that a recording, as a storage process for musical sound, has something in common with a mortgage, a means of financing the purchase of a "real" property (ownable stuff that doesn't move: German: Immobilien, French immobiliers), suspending full ownership until a debt is paid (and, as recent history amply illustrates, many debts are never paid); a mortgage is, literally, a dead pledge or dead wage. N.O. Brown:  "The dynamics of capitalism is postponement of enjoyment to the constantly postponed future." 

Between Style and Invention

Horizontal, nursing a summer cold, I've plowed my way through Daniel Heartz's Music in European Capitals: The Galant Style, 1720-1780.  It has a lot of contextual data (especially of the who-met-whom-and-when-and-where-they-met variety) and usefully covers repertoire and composers and locales that have been slighted by the standard classical musical history survey course (which tends to jump straight from Sebastian Bach to Haydn).  Useful, but jeez, it is anything but a pleasure to read, with too little analysis of the music itself and an organization by capital cities and then by composers which often requires the author to do some awkward jumping.  (Fortunately, we have Robert Gjerdingen's delightful Music in the Galant Style to make up for some of the theoretical deficits.) Moreover, it's in a graceless writing style that refuses to invite the reader into repertoire that is often, very much inviting, especially when one considers a cast of composers including Vivaldi, Pergolesi, the younger Scarlatti, Sammartini, Hasse, the Bachs CPE and JC, and Boccherini.  In order to make the book more useful and engaging, I found myself reading it via the index, selecting a person or topic of interest and chasing it through the book, even if this meant redundant readings.


As the Lattice of Coincidence sometimes permits, just as I was tracing the history of the violin concerto through Heartz's index, I noticed that Charles Shere blogged about his own violin concerto, beginning with the words:  "I HAVE ALWAYS LOVED eccentric violin concertos, by which I mean those somehow standing aside from the standard repertory." What was striking to me about this confession, in the context of reading the Heartz, was that even though we now look at much of the repertoire described in normative, even dull, terms — especially the work of composers who turned out dozens of concerti, symphonies, and sonatas — this was the very era in which these very forms were new and only in the process of establishing their conventions, and despite the enormous amount of imitation that took place — thus creating repertoires — and despite the familiarity of those conventions to us now*, this is music which was filled with eccentricities and often even the formal identification by title — as a concerto, sonata, symphony or quartet —  was not yet fixed.  Thus even those most famous concerti of Vivaldi, The Seasons, have an additive, block-by-block construction that borders on Stravinskyan assertion and push the available varieties of scoring patterns to their limit**, and the "Prussian" Sonatas of CPE Bach are harmonically and texturally experimental in ways that still surprise the ears.  For Vivaldi in the solo concerto and Bach in the keyboard sonata, the terms of art were simply not yet set and listening to their works can still provide fascinating occasions to reconsider the necessary balance between eccentricity and standard form, between invention and style, that makes a piece of music stand out among others.
_____
* To be honest, this familiarity is only partially the case. My honest assumption is that very few musicians and listeners really have anything approaching the intimate familiarity with  the galant style that allows one to recognize and interpret its figures, to improvise or criticize ornamentation within the style, or to extemporate and form expectations within its harmonic language.  It is a repertoire that is superficially very familiar, but very foreign in any detail, much the opposite of the learned style which contrasted and, for a time, competed with it, perhaps — and now I'm taking a wild theoretical leap here — because the learned style had a fractal dimension the galant syle resisted.
** That said, it's astonishing how much repertoire is based on two scoring patterns, the first with the violins in unison, viola harmonizing and a bass (cello) line, the second (often when a vocalist enters in opera) with the violins divided and the viola doubling the bass (cello) at the octave above.  A texture with four independent voices is rare and Haydn's — to our ears — modest innovation of the violins in octaves, must have sounded revolutionary.

Composing a Storm

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

*****

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

The Latest Sins & Fibs

Norman Lebrecht is raising alarms about the future of Sibelius music engraving software. Sibelius's parent company, Avid is, indeed, reorganizing and selling off other portions of its business, but, I've been in contact with the public relations office at Avid and they indicated they are committed to retaining the product  with aspects of the Sibelius unit being reorganized.  The full statement is: "Yes, Sibelius is staying with Avid and is an important part of our business going forward. We are happy with Sibelius' business. We're not commenting yet on details of the reorg out of respect to affected employees."  As I learn more about the reorganization — the questions are obvious: does this mean moving development or service outside of the UK? first among them) — I'll try to post what I learn here.

*****

I've been using computers to notate music for about 25 years. From time to time on this blog, I've given updates on my notation software practices. I have six or seven notation programs on my computer and regularly use three or four of them.  The free and open source program MuseScore continues to improve and already offers output good enough for most users. It would be an excellent program for most University music students, for example, and an especially welcome one, given the high costs of education today. But for the most sophisticated professional applications, the two most-widely used programs remain Finale and Sibelius. For many users, Fin and Sib have approximately equal capacity and the choice between the two is going to be based on which one has a more comfortable input and editing style, which is essentially a personal choice.  In general, I believe that Finale has a steeper learning curve, but it is ultimately more flexible (in terms of entry and editing methods) and powerful (in terms of the variety of outputs possible.) But this edge has been slight and many users do find using Sibelius to be more intuitive. Up until the lastest round of version upgrades, I have kept both the latest Finale and Sibelius on my two notating machines, and I have been happy to have had and used both, alongside some other programs (including my beloved orphan Graphire Music Studio and the very interesting Harmony Assistant; for kicks, I also recently took another spin with Berlioz, a program emulated the traditional engraving process.)  However, with the recent upgrades, I decided to go with Finale 2012 and not with Sibelius 7.  Finale 2012 offered one essential new feature (unicode support) and the firm which owns Finale, MakeMusic, has wisely acquired the sample company Garritan and has promised to not offer an upgrade in 2013, getting (finally!) out of the annual upgrade-by-small-increments cycle.  As to Sibelius 7, they introduced some new interface features, in particular the so-called ribbon, which they have indicated that they are absolutely committed to, but happen to make the product all but unusable for a myopic old composer like myself. So I've skipped Sibelius 7; when I have work I have to do in Sib, I'll use Sib 6, otherwise, most of my work will be done in Fin 2012. 

Downloading: Big Business, Just Not For Musicians

The business of downloading music made plain by David Lowery (him of Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker fame). Bottom line: money is being made, just not by the people who made the music, and you're paying for it on all sorts of ways, just not to the people who made the music.

Shere Songs & Such

I've quickly become very fond of these two sets of songs by Charles Shere, to texts by Carl Rakosi (here) and Lou Harrison (here).  The Rakosi-text'd pair are for mezzo accompanied by violin and percussion, the Harrison set of four for tenor and accordion.  (It's always useful to have some art song repertoire accompanied by instruments other than the piano!)  Both sets are recognizably within that uncanny valley in which Mr Shere's music seems to reside, composed intuitively in that space where the modern and anti-modern as well as the plain and the artful are superimposed.  Playing through Shere's music, as I am like to do (his Sonata ii: Compositio ut explicatio is another long-term tenant of my piano top), I've often had both (a)  the sensation of being unsure whether it belongs more to the 'teens and twenties of Stein and Duchamp and both the musical ultramodernists and Virgil Thomson (at his naughtiest) or to a somewhat more recent — and distinctively Californian — vintage, and (b) the certainty that any such distinction is, in the end, unimportant.  This is deceptively simple music, the materials edging on the commonplace, but I'd reckon that the algorithm required to re-write them would almost certainly be at least as long than the pieces themselves; this is a complexity of an uncanny and irretrievable compositional context.

Mr Shere was, for many years, also a critic, and an important one, and I am a constant reader of his two blogs, The Eastside View, which is mostly travel and cultural writing, an natural extension of his critical activities, and Eating Every Day, a faithful journal by perhaps the best-fed composer around (and one with an enviable personal and professional connection to that center of Californian cuisine, Chez Panisse), with some of his best writing around some deep aesthetic issues — quality, locality, tradition and innovation among them.  These two sets of small songs are definitely of a piece with that writing.

Loose Ends

Are you composing?  What are you up to?  In principal, yes, but there are all these loose ends... There are always several projects on my desk, in various stages of progress.  Some are compositional projects, others pre-compositional or even theoretical.  One compositional project is, in principle, finished, a piece with a very large number of possible realizations through combinatorial excess, but I've decided not to let it go until I've played through a number of those realizations to my own satisfaction, which has meant picking up the clarinet for the first time in decades and seeing if the music lies under the fingers well.  One "theoretical" project was a fictional reconstruction of tonality in which, depending upon the number of active voices, everything depended upon minimal voice leadings from the three perfectly even divisions of the octave.  My constraints turned out not to be limiting enough and the whole system fell apart under the sheer number of possible voice leadings.  Another theoretical adventure treated moves across tonal manifolds (or lattices) as optimal transportation problems, which still seems to me to be a good idea, but the math required to be comfortable with the optimal transportation literature is still beyond me.*  Such projects, even if they ultimately fall apart on you, at least keep the mind nimble and very often help, if only in details, in getting work done. (Learning about Gray Codes (and Beckett Grays in particular), for example, even though I can't really follow the mathematical literature, has provided me with a really useful formal resource which I've used in at least a dozen pieces to date, sometimes overtly, for instance to control the scoring patterns in a piece, more often hidden (you hide, they seek.)) One larger project of the past three or four years has been a search for a libretto; texts have been read and re-read, considered and re-considered as musical material, and even some sketches have been made: divisions into scenes and acts and songs and not-quite-songs, and voice types and instrumental resources. But most ideas eventually get tossed for one reason or another. I've wanted to work with an existing text in the public domain, to avoid the complications of securing rights (the librettist for my puppet opera passed away before the music was finished and working with his estate has not been particularly easy.) But existing texts have their own problems, not least because setting something dramatic to music usually requires a massive reduction in the volume of a text, to a fraction, say a third or less, of the original. Maybe one reason why literary masterpieces seldom recommend themselves to setting to music is that they are just damn hard to slim down — you want to save all your favorite lines, even when they get in the way of wherever the music needs to go.  I've made the problem harder in that I'm determined to do something comic rather than historical or tragic, and comic dialog has to move along and that I have some fairly experimental musical ambitions that I'd like to try as well.  I'm now fairly certain about the source text I'll use and have already edited the text for the first act and started sketching a pair of scenes to use as a trial balloon. Following loose ends keeps you busy and also keeps you looking forward: composing is always about the next piece.

_____
* I came across optimal transportion problems through the work of mathematician Cédric Villani and then again, when Francis Spufford's remarkably odd novel Red Plenty, pointed in the direction of the mathematician and economist Leonid Kantorovich.  

The Future, Getting Old Fast

The future just ain't what it used to be, and when older visions of the future are more attractive then the present reality, our choice is either disappointed resignation or to do the hard labor of imagining an alternative. (Personally, I'm always disappointed when I go to an orchestral concert because the orchestra, in many ways, stopped developing technologically just before the suggestive bits of preposterous steam age technology could flourish as instrumental designs...  in my heart of hearts, with my own future of music being somewhat more retro and steampunkish than, say Stockhausen's or Varese's, I really want orchestral instruments to look like Ophicleides and Marxophones and Dr. Seuss's most preposterous horns and fiddles and harps.

I expect David Graeber new article in The Baffler, "Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit", is going to get a lot of attention and it should, not as a finished argument but rather as the beginning of an urgent discussion, around the currently twisted knot of economics, states and institutions, and the limits of imagination. His point of departure is the broad sense of stagnation we currently find ourselves in, particularly with regard to technologies and infrastructure other than information technology.  I believe (and have written about it here before) that this sense is shared in the musical world as well and is perhaps more acute due to the direct and sometimes vital connections between music transmission and information technology.  (Also see this post, from 2006, A Look Back at The Future.)

When Graeber writes that, for example:

"The growth of administrative work [in universities] has directly resulted from introducing corporate management techniques. Invariably, these are justified as ways of increasing efficiency and introducing competition at every level. What they end up meaning in practice is that everyone winds up spending most of their time trying to sell things: grant proposals; book proposals; assessments of students’ jobs and grant applications; assessments of our colleagues; prospectuses for new interdisciplinary majors; institutes; conference workshops; universities themselves (which have now become brands to be marketed to prospective students or contributors); and so on.

As marketing overwhelms university life, it generates documents about fostering imagination and creativity that might just as well have been designed to strangle imagination and creativity in the cradle. No major new works of social theory have emerged in the United States in the last thirty years."

Simply substitute the name of your favorite musical institution " for "university" in the above text, and you'll get a pretty good synopsis of my own diagnosis of music's ongoing difficulties.  Music (name your genre: classical, modern, contemporary, experimental, film, pop, rock, punk, folk, country...) is not dying, it will continue always, to change over time and survive in interesting ways, but its institutional support structure is under stress and, too often for the good of music, threatens to more often silence musical creation and performance than support it.  It is particularly painful to watch the musicians take the brunt of restructuring and even dismantling of opera houses and orchestras while the managers can command ever higher salaries and bonuses.

Graeber's conclusion should be particularly vivid to musicians:

To begin setting up domes on Mars, let alone to develop the means to figure out if there are alien civilizations to contact, we’re going to have to figure out a different economic system. Must the new system take the form of some massive new bureaucracy? Why do we assume it must? Only by breaking up existing bureaucratic structures can we begin. And if we’re going to invent robots that will do our laundry and tidy up the kitchen, then we’re going to have to make sure that whatever replaces capitalism is based on a far more egalitarian distribution of wealth and power—one that no longer contains either the super-rich or the desperately poor willing to do their housework. Only then will technology begin to be marshaled toward human needs. And this is the best reason to break free of the dead hand of the hedge fund managers and the CEOs—to free our fantasies from the screens in which such men have imprisoned them, to let our imaginations once again become a material force in human history.

Locating That Yankee Sound

THE ESTIMABLE Tim Rutherford-Johnson (aka The Rambler) reviews a performance by the Jack Quartet and writes of John Cage's String Quartet in Four Parts: "The JACKs’ version has a more sing-song, almost folky quality that highlights the Appalachian pastoral thread that runs through Cage’s music..." While that "Appalachian pastoral" phrase will probably be grocked without much of a second thought by readers familiar with the Cage quartet and some of the more famous items in the American mid-20th century repertoire as referring to a certain style of writing, mostly diatonic, sometimes pentatonic, and occasionally jerked about by some tactical chromaticism,  friendly to open fifths and milder clusters (those vertical structures just on either side of a simpler triadic harmony), with some emphasis on writing for strings (and for those strings some preferences for open strings, natural harmonics, and reduced or no vibrato), and featuring a lot of shared attacks in which one or more instrument quickly drops off allowing others to sustain. This style is exemplified by Copland's score to the Martha Graham ballet Appalachian Spring.  The funny thing about this label is, of course, that Copland's music isn't particularly Appalachian (he himself said that he thought neither of Appalachia nor of Spring while writing the score which had the working title of only Music for Martha) and the musical source material Copland actually quotes in the piece (most famously the tune "Simple Gifts"*) is Shaker, and though the Shakers had short-lived settlements in Kentucky, Ohio and Indiana, they were basically an upstate New York and New England sect. (The Cage Quartet does earn some additional affinity to the Copland in that each movement is associated with a season and a place, in this case the fourth movement, a Quodlibet in which the melodic materials shared throughout the quartet are most conjunct and lively, is  associated with Spring; unfortunately I can't remember where it's supposed to be Spring in Paris or America...)  BUT WHEREVER THE ORIGINS THERE IS INDEED this particular Americana style, with plenty of precedents (from the generation of Billings onward), which became a concert music staple with two pieces of music: Charles Ives's cowboy song Charlie Rutledge, which was premiered at a Copland-Sessions concert with Copland — then very much a francophile modernist — himself as pianist and Virgil Thomson’s Symphony on a Hymn Tune (1927-28) which was first known in its piano four-hands arrangement by John Kirkpatrick. (Of course there is that other Americana style, that initiated with Roy Harris who, like Copland and at Copland's enouragement, came through the Boulangerie, but whose music is characterized by a more lushly sustained melodic style, more in debt to Sibelius than to Stravinsky, for whose music Harris had little attraction, but that is another story.)
_____
* The use of this particular tune has been much maligned, especially by those in the pro-complexity camp.  However, I'm not entirely convinced that the Shaker notion of "simple" here, in the context of a sublimating sacred dancing tune, can be readily mapped to our everyday contemporary use of the term. 

Oliveros at 80

A moment, on her birthday, to recognize the breadth of Pauline Oliveros's work and the seriousness of her challenges to the received practice of composition:

from the early work in the studio, in particular that extraordinary series of works realized in real time to the life-long advocacy for the appropriate uses of technologies, both archaic and new, a composer as comfortable with the latest digital sound enhancers as with a conch shell;

the theatre pieces, which range from the vaudevillian to the ritual (and often making no distinction between the two: usefully reminding us that many clowns are sacred and many rituals are, usefully, hilarious);

the use of physical spaces as instruments and the exploration of those spaces as a composed task to performers (In Memoriam Nikola Tesla, Cosmic Engineer); 

the ease of her negotiation between composition and improvisation, working with trained musicians and with heretofore non-musicians, as well as an ease with the format of a performance, not only in a concert hall, but out of doors, not only in a concert format, but in workshops and street festivals;

her fundamental challenge to the notion of a score as form and function, indeed to the entire masterpiece conception of scored composition, posed through the sonic meditation, her use of images (among them mandalas, electronic circuitry diagrams, and I Ching hexagrams) which do not resolve to linear presentations conventional to musical scores, and her advocacy for oral (in addition to written) transmission (I believe that the feminist dimension here is not negligible);

her invention of an alternative career path for the contemporary composer, negotiating institutions, often inventing her own:  first in a cooperative studio and then her rise, with only modest traveling papers, to tenure and full professorship in one of the more crusty and conspiratorial of musical-academic establishments, only to take the risk of giving it up for a life as an independent composer, creating her own foundation, coming back to the academy from time to time, but only on her own terms;

and yes, her life-long love affair with the accordion, an instrument which has too often faced music-institutional prejudice and has become an evolving technology for Oliveros, first getting re-tuned, in a gentle just intonation, and more recently digitized, and often fiercely so.

I'm prepared to be astonished by Pauline's music for the next 80 years!

Progressing, Rakishly

The new production of The Rake's Progress at the Frankfurt Opera is very good, the level of music-making superb.  The Rakewell/Shadow team of Paul Appleby and Simon Bailey just plain owns the wager scene in Act III, and the conductor, Constantinos Carydis, kept the pace just right, giving the evening a musical and dramatic shape that put the required focus to the two big arias that really count, Anne's (Brenda Rae) and Tom's, and that amazing wager scene, using an appropriately scaled-down orchestra that reflected well on the Frankfurter Opera and Museum orchestra's ease with both earlier and contemporary repertoire.  The decision to use the composer's authorized alternative of a piano instead of the preferred (mid-20th century "modern") harpsichord for the recitative accompaniment might be argued with, but with the aging of the HIP that's increasingly ambiguous territory.  The production was sharp, the sets modest, and presented a compellingly twisted solution to the problem of Baba the Turk's (Paula Murrihy) unique physique. (Cue song: That was no bearded lady I saw you with last night, that was my wife!)

But that's beginning to sound too much like a review, which I don't do. Let me note, instead, something about the formal strengths of The Rake as a single and tightly wound piece of music.  It progresses, in its own perversely not-quite-tonal rakishness, from the bucolic plausibility of the opening scene through the ever-expanding range of stylistic references in each set-piece, gradually accumulating snippits and swathes of melodic material and accompanying figuration, juxtaposed end-to-end and superimposed in a steady simulacrum of music you almost know, or think you might have known (the neo-classic label is never quite accurate here: there's as much suggestive of Tchaikovsky and French operetta here as of Mozart, despite the composer's own oft-stated point of departure in Cosi fan tutte (Cosi is present, of course, but mainly in the writing for woodwinds*)), but really creating an illusion space of fictive progression until that shockingly subdued and reflective climatic moment of the opera, which is not vocal, but instrumental, the prelude to the wager scene: music for strings (which happens, structurally, in a place just about equivalent to the cello solo in Don Carlo(s)) which looks something like old viol music on paper, but doesn't sound like anything other than itself, music which is moody and makes a move, progressing from an initial Bb minorish sonority to a cadential F majorish but what passes between, possibly the most unrelentingly dissonant music of the evening but also the most ravishingly tragic, doesn't really make sense, at least not in terms of any music we really do know. This is a strong indication to me that Stravinsky has succeeded, through the saturation effect of so much simulacra, in suspending our disbeliefs in improbable successions of tones,** which (as far as I'm concerned) is exactly what an opera — and opera, if anything, has to be about the suspension of disbeliefs — ought to do with tones.

The technique here is cumulative and progressive. To make that work the accretion of new elements has to be paced by some constant function.  I suspect that Stravinsky's text setting, with its improbable English diction, an unnatural and sometimes near-random assignment of rhythm and stress, actually does a good part of the work of moving things forward, with the propulsive effect of language constantly off-kilter in the recitatives and forming paradoxically lyrical but fragmented lines in the arias which float over any regularities in the accompaniments. Another strong cumulative and progressive structural element is a set of parallel lists: the stages in the Nick's corruption of Tom, the series of questions asked by Mother Goose and the chorus, and then the series of items in Selim's auction and, finally, the series of guesses in the wager scene.  Stravinsky responded compositionally to these parallelisms by, essentially, composing over them, avoiding the obvious strophic treatment, letting the text and plot hold together so the music can keep progressing, rakishly.    

_____
*  In particular, isn't the writing for bassoon throughout fantastic? And those two extended trumpet solos...!
** Perhaps the greatest utility to Stravinsky, in his later invention and adoption of the "vertical" serial technique, is that he had a ready reserve of a variety of chords with surprising doublings (and treblings and morelings), whose connections, that is, progressions (in a functional sense) were effectively obscured. 

Free & Open Musicology, Publishing, Recording

The "Open Goldberg Variations" project seems to have slipped under the professional music making and scholarship radar although it's quite possible that it is providing a substantial challenge to the traditional structure of producing and publishing performing editions and recordings of music in the public domain.  The project encompasses the production of a new edition, from source, using crowd editing, of Bach's "Goldberg" Variations, in Musescore notation format, which produces a payback-able score with audio as well as independent notation and midi files and, for this particular project, a studio quality recording of the piece by pianist Kimiko Ishizaka, all of which will be placed in the public domain with Creative Commons licenses and be available for free downloading and, as open source material, unrestricted further use. The Kickstarter page is here, the page at the Musescore site with the current version of the edition is here.

The challenge that a project like this poses to traditional score and recording publication is clear, but the challenge to musicology should also be recognized.  Although the "golden age" of the production of critical editions as a central activity for musicologists is a bit behind us, when professional musicologists are involved with editing, the old conventions of editorial territoriality and priority still tend to hold — finders keepers — just like on the playground and publishers entering into multi-year (and often multi-decade) commitments to put out expensive complete editions expect, correctly, to have some return on their investment, so they expect the exclusivity afforded by a copyright on the edition.  But opening up the entire process, as online publishing and cooperation makes possible, has the potential to change everything.  Volunteer labor has already produced a mass of performance materials available free and immediately, if not in the beautiful paper editions the traditional publishers did so well. But the quality of production outside of the traditional publishing system has improved spectacularly. And, in extreme cases, as when a significant manuscript (or, as the case might well be, an insignificant manuscript by a major composer) is first located, traditionally, the finder had the right of first edition and could usually keep the manuscript under wraps until he or she is done and only then begins the open vetting process over authority, provenance, and quality. That exclusivity, I believe, is no longer sustainable. Imagine what the process would be like if a newly-discovered manuscript image was made available to crowd scrutiny immediately upon  discovery!

This Goldberg project happens to have been funded (and actually funded well in excess of what the organizers had sought) and it remains to be seen what kinds of projects will happen in the future without such a foundation. (Personally, as nice as it is, I don't think that the sponsored audio recording is also necessary. One also wonders if the public funders, which have, in the past, supported the research that effectively subsidizes many private publications of scholarly editions, will adjust to the cost-effective sourcing of this work and actually support open-source projects as well or even instead. The open aspect here, I think is key, for it has a more natural fit to the public aspect of scholarly publication.  The serious move, chiefly among scientists, engineers and mathematicians, to boycott some private journals in favor of free and open alternatives, as those journals profit from the material and in-kind contributions of academics paid by the public hand and then turn around and sell their journals at high prices to academic libraries addresses very closely related concerns..

Eventful Words

Word Events : Perspectives on Verbal Notation, edited by the composers John Lely and James Saunders has just been published.  It's both an anthology of word/text/prose/verbal scores and a significant bit of thinking-through-writing about prose scores and the general nexus of composition-notation-performance, with writings both by anthologized composers and, in particular the substantial new introduction and essays by the editors.  The composers included encompass both the usual suspects (Cage, Wolff, Young, Brecht, Bryars, Corner, Oliveros, Johnson, Cardew, Stockhausen), many who have built upon their work (Beuger, Pisaro, Walshe, Werder, even a certain wayward Californian), and a few important composers whose works with prose scores have been unjustly neglected.  I'm particularly grateful that work of Kenneth Maue is here; so grateful, in fact, that I've decided to perform one of Maue's pieces and put my copy of Word Events in the kitchen freezer and leave it there. (But not, of course, until I've read it once more through.) 

Deprogramming the Study of Composition

YET MORE UNSOLICITED ADVICE FOR YOUNGER COMPOSERS:  If it says "Composition Program" on the office door, turn right around and leave that building as fast as you possibly can.  It's been my experience that whenever the term "program" is used in connection with the academic study of composition, in a conservatory, or a college or university music department, it cannot lead to good things.  Programs are about reproduction, not creative production, and they belong in paths of learning that are not oriented to new discoveries but to fixed bodies of knowledge or technique.  Programs also smack of mass production and efficiency, which is very different from individual creation and the idiosyncratic forms of efficiency that composition — mostly a solo effort — requires. Craft not industry. One size does not fit all: composing's a craft that thrives on smart challenges to standards and practices, not to rigid standardization.  When you leave school, your music will succeed more for its distinctiveness than for its similitudes, and these distinctions are both aesthetic and practical.  (Any composition teacher who tells you not to make scores and parts in landscape orientation because they're not standard practice — and there are really people like this in big famous conservatories — may be sharing the local secret handshake (and that may indeed win you a BMI or ASCAP student comp brownie button) hasn't actually seen a lot of real musical practice!)   As a student composer, there are all sorts of interesting and useful things to learn in any number of programs housed in a conservatory or a liberal arts college or university, and many of these interesting and useful things come packaged as programs, but the study of composition isn't one of these things. Learning Attic Greek in a Classics program, or taking a course in Southeast Asian Civilization or Pre-Columbian Mythology or Architectural History or Economics or Astronomy or Quantum Mechanics in whatever programs they come from can all be interesting and useful to a composer-in-training.  (Learning to program computers, also useful, can often be done within formal computer science programs, although every bit of computer programming I've ever learned has been done on the fly, mostly during all-nighters with friends, caffeine, and much to munch on.) You get some well-rounding and some study skills and your mind may even be provoked enough to be reliably interested, curious, questioning, and maybe even interesting for the rest of your life, whatever happens to you musically. Even in the Music Department, a good Music Education program will have those very useful courses in which you can get some basic hands-on experience with all of the major band and orchestra instruments.

SLIGHTLY RANTING ASIDE:  For the past generation or so, the "innovation" in music departments and conservatories has been to teach courses in Music Management and Marketing, even though there are really no such disciplines.  There are no universally applicable theories and skill sets for the business of music, and the micro-business of new musical composition in particular.  We're working in very small niches and everyone of us is in a unique niche, with its own context, contacts, conditions, and all of this is dynamic, in constant change, not least in terms of communications methods.  Yes, there are people who are very successful with managing and marketing music, but the most successful (who, incidentally, are unlikely to have ever been in a student in such a program themselves having, instead, happened into their careers the way music managers have done for decades) aren't going to teach five-unit courses on an adjunct's hourly wage in a music management program and even if they did, the likelihood that their skill sets are transferable to your own particular circumstances is slight.  Bottom line: beware that a music management programs may be a scam, an added profit center for the conservatory or department, an additional low-overhead course for critical masses of captive students that has the appearance of meeting pressing concerns for students looking at life after school; studying is expensive enough these days that you shouldn't waste you time and money on them. Any school that requires this of you should be avoided. If you want some useful skills in this area, take some actual business courses and, even more important, take some liberal arts courses from teachers with a reputation for helping students with their writing skills.  Grants and PR work require interesting writing and you learn writing best by writing for someone prepared to read you work closely and critically.

AND IF, FOR ALL THAT, the composition teacher with whom you want to study (and who is willing to take you on as a student) happens to be employed by an institution with a "Composition Program", try to negotiate a working relationship with both her or him and the institution, in which the institutional circumstances are most advantageous and least invasive.  If the institution offers opportunities for readings and concerts and recordings of one's work, terrific, but try to secure these with the least bureaucratic hurdles. Good libraries and studios and instrument collections and rehearsal spaces are valuable, good colleagues among the composers and players are more than valuable (extra sets of good critical ears are always useful.) And if the institution can help you with all the secret passwords, monikers, and handshakes that help gain entry into the fairy land of scholarships and awards and gigs, then bully for you.  You might, however, find it useful to establish just how rigid the local rules and requirements really are, and then be ready to test them when they appear to get in the way of your work.  After all, you're most likely paying to be there and you may also be performing services for the institution — teaching or research assisting, making recordings, stacking books, holding sectional rehearsals, etc. — at such modest wages that the institution gets much more than it's money's worth out of your enrollment and servitude. Further, you may well have to look forward to eventually leaving the institution with significant debt and modest chances for future academic employment, so to some large degree, they need you more than you need them.

AND THEN THIS:  If I know anything, more than twenty years after leaving academia with all the travelling papers I can carry, it's how much more I want to learn about music.  My studies didn't end with my last diploma; on the contrary, I think that ending a formal relationship with a university or conservatory was just the beginning of my studies.  Lou Harrison, already a mature composer and a composer whose institutional affiliations were often tenuous, dedicated his Music Primer to "my fellow students"; this item was written in the same spirit.

From a Diary: I:xxvi

There is some confusion between the radical music's minimal impulse — the elimination of distractions — and austerity.  When the PR Department at Nonesuch records effectively recuperated and coopted the label "minimalism" (dropping La Monte Young out of the Young, Riley, Reich & Glass quartet and replacing Young with a more or less conventionally tonal composer from their own stable, John Adams) the notion of eliminating distractions in order to create a frame within which ever more layers of rich acoustical detail could be heard, a form of austerity —when not acoustical poverty — was promoted.  It is tempting to identify this with the current form of economic austerity — at the cost of diversity and growth — that is widely promoted these days, particularly (but not only) by the political right.

Notation: Augmented and Interactive

Since I spend a good part of my life notating music and I often use computers to do it, I pay some attention to developments in the computer notation world. It's a very good thing that the tools available for notation are far from limited to Sins and Fibs. (BTW: If you happen to teach music theory in an institution which presently requires the purchase of Finale or Sibelius*, why not do your cash-strapped and loan-burdened students a favor and encourage them to use an open source program like Musescore? It's free and open source, can do everything that would be required in a university-level theory sequence or orchestration class, and it's constantly getting better.)

The latest item to come across my desktop is INScore, an augmented and interactive program. "Augmented" means it allows all sorts of objects — among them score notation, graphics, text, signals or triggers or sensors of various sorts — to share space (and music-notational space-time) on page or screen and "interactive" means that it can be used in real time to generate and respond to objects and events and scores can even be designed in real time.  The utility of a program like this — for live animated scores for players, triggering electronics, re-arrangeable in realtime — is obvious.  It looks to me to be in an early but very much usable stage of development and is multi-platform and open source.  If anyone reading this gives INScore a spin, please let me know what you think of it.
_____
* AFAIC the one thing worse than a music school or department requiring student to purchase a particular notation program — however good they may be (I use Finale and Sibelius myself, with a half dozen other notation programs as well) and however convenient it may be for classroom management — is giving credit courses for learning to operate one of these programs. 

Music as World Building (1)

In adding Les Troyens to my landmarks list, I forgot to note one other attraction of the opera, which is Berlioz's musical world building.  World building is usually thought-of as an element of fiction — fantasy and science fiction in particular, whether in literature, films, tv, or games — , through which just enough structure and details are presented as to make vivid the suggestion that the location of the fiction is within a larger and plausible (at least within the terms of its own logic) world 

Les Troyens is set in Troy and Carthage and is peopled by Trojans in the first two acts (Greeks are only a background presence) and refugee Trojans and Carthaginians populate acts three through five. The historical status of Troy is, well, complicated, but the myth is vivid, in both Homer and Vergil while the historical Carthage (near modern Tunis)  is much more established, but it is also the myth here, of a thriving city established in only seven years by exiles from Phoenician Tyre, that is at work.  A substantial part of Berlioz's project in Les Troyens was to project the two city-states through distinctive music and while we are now perfectly clear that his was not a reconstructive project and he was composing for western orchestra within a range the limits of which we now readily recognize (compare the range of instruments and scales/tunings Lou Harrison used to contrast Rome with Bythinia in the original version of Young Caesar),  the composer audibly pushed those limits to suggest these two states as contrasting cultures, if only in the anthems and marches he devised, with the Trojans in particular marked by major-minor contrast, unconventional functional harmony and by reminiscences of French Revolutionary music, repertoire that presumably continued to carry a marker for otherness.

There is some prehistory to this in that the ancient and exotic was a frequent and early theme in opera, but it took some time before the ancient and/or exotic actually was distinguished musically. Rameau's Les Indes galantes, presented four tableau representing non-European cultures, but these were supposed to be contemporary, fictional stories within real worlds, and the music was not strongly distinguished (if at all) from Rameau's usual style.  The tradition of imitating Ottoman military music is more familiar, particularly in Viennese classicism, and even when a composer's contact with actual Janissary music was relatively close (think of the Austro-Turkish War of 1787) this is again in the context of fictions told about real cultures.  Haydn's Il mondo della luna arguably attempts some fictional world (well, okay, satellite) building in the form of the faked moon landing, which is distinguished largely by reserving the key of Eb for the pseudo-lunar scenes.

A useful case for the potential advantages of world building as a compositional project may be found by considering Roger Session's opera Montezuma as a counter-example. Sessions made no attempt to synthesize distinctive musical styles for the two clashing cultures portrayed and I suspect that this lack of characterization contributed to the opera's failure.

From a Diary: I:xxv

Communicate?  I want music that communicates in the same way a copper pot handle communicates heat.

From a Diary: I:xxiv

A friend recently made the argument — and quite convincingly — that we're in a golden age of two media — the television serial and the comic book — that has come about entirely because of two related factors, (a) the establishment of non-mass production and distribution channels and (b) the aging into a kind of aesthetic consuming maturity of at least two generations of audience who are fully fluent with the literature, conventions, and terms of the particular art form.  This combination means that there is a critical mass of demand and appreciation for thematic, formal, and technical innovation (not the least of which is smart play with the conventions of the genre) while at the same time, the economy of the niche is adequate to sustain production, and, in the case of the US subscription television networks, Showtime and HBO and the like, provide added value, above and beyond not-quite current movies, that actually brings customers in and keeps them subscribed (yep, the weird stuff can be part of profitability.)

New/experimental/radical music may not have figured the economics out yet, but it certainly operates in a niche and has done so for a very long time. I suspect that we're just beginning to understand how important Schoenberg's establishment of the Society for Private Musical Performances (Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen) had been and just how little thinking-through that there has been for the potential for such a tactical retreat from mass presentation, in terms of audience development, cooperative organization and finance, and not least, innovative freedom.  (The most common argument against a new/experimental/radical music niche is that it is "elitist".  I don't buy this argument and believe that it is unsustainable because while new music may make demands of listeners, these demands are musical and intellectual and can be met by any potential listener willing to make the effort, and it is simply not elitist in the only meaningful sense of elitism in this world, which is a connection to real political, economic or social power.)

So, yep, it may be useful to think of the future of new/experimental/radical music more in terms of The Wire or alternative comics.

Under Construction (2)

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

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

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

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

Under Construction (1)

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

Stearns: Some Visions Are Audible

It's a frustrating imprecision in English that the word "vision" speaks directly to one sense, sight, and we don't really have the equivalent for sound (or other senses, for that matter), so when we talk about a particular kind of  imaginative experience in sound, we effectively talk through language that filters the experience through the terms of sight (and even that word "imaginative" is oriented towards vision.)

Daniel Stearns's CD, Golden Town (2011 spectropol records) has been played with some intensity in my studio for a few months now.  People who know me or read this blog know that I don't take recordings lightly, sometimes taking great lengths to avoid the medium, but Golden Town is such a striking (at turns alien, challenging, then almost familiar, almost easy)  listening experience, and one made very much for the recorded media, that I've wanted to share some words about it, but it is precisely this knot of vision/sound/word problems that has kept me back.

Stearns offers plenty in the way of liner notes, but not necessarily much helpful if you're curious about how the music was put together. Instead — and now this strikes me as odd for a work tied to the composer's own dissociative occasions — the notes are associations: among them to James's Nature Mysticism, to Charles Ives (always a background presence in Stearns's music), to the visual works of Adolf Wölfli, to the natural landscape of his native Massacusetts, and, most specifically, to a series of (to be honest, disturbing) cell phone photos taken in Stearns's new home-away-from, Slovakia.  But these associations seem to be tangential, in the way dreamwork often is, and the composer's own description of the music as dissociative has to be taken seriously.

Listening to these pieces, a set of 14 to be taken both as stand-alones and as a whole (a whole which, to my ears, has all the substance that some of those big "new complexity" compositional cycles are aiming for), is premised on giving into the visionary quality of the work, made of the stuff of trance and waking dreams rather than everyday music-making, and the listener should be prepared for the absence of reason and, yes, the darkness that can often characterize dreams.  Stearns is a real independent,  a virtuoso improvising musician (fretted strings in particular) with a microtonal bent, and is anything but an academic composer (although I happen to have become aware of him and his music initially through some rigorous work he had done in the theory of intonation).  There is a cultivated and diffident roughness to this music, with plenty of distortion and artifacts. I honestly don't know how he puts this music together, how much is planned, how much is spontaneous, or how much is hand-and-ears-on audio bricolage, and I am very curious to know more about his tools and techniques, but maybe it's enough just to recognize that these are very much recording studio products, using the distortion and artifacts and transformational opportunities of the recorded medium to frame and reinforce a music with dream-like qualities.

And this: I honestly don't know what Stearns's vision in Golden Town is about, but the presence of a vision is clear. For all the associations in his notes, Stearns keeps things cryptic and elusive, and that seems to me to be a strength here, because all the private and disturbing elements that do come across suggest that I ought not be so sure that I would even want to know what it's all about. But I do know that there is a way of listening, just letting it intrude into your own waking dreams, that I find well worth the while.

Feasible Utopias

Crooked Timber's John Quiggin asks about "the need for the left to offer a feasible utopian vision as an alternative to the irrationalist tribalism of the right."  And surprisingly, but convincingly, he focuses on the issue of house work. I recommend the read. For the moment, however, I'd like to skirt the "irrantional tribalism of the right" (and avoid another one of my rants about musical quietism) and back up to that notion of a "feasible utopian vision" by suggesting that this has been part of the experimental music project for a good long time.

It's useful, for example, to contrast the high modernist utopia of Varese, who composed (or tried to compose) a number of visionary works that so challenged the contemporary standard of professional performance technique (Ionisation was premiered by an ensemble which featured more non-percussionists than professional percussionists) or the available resources of electronic music, that his output dwindled and sometimes got stuck altogether (yes, there were other, personal, reasons for these standstills, but these technical difficulties were authentic)  with the practical modernist utopia of the younger musicians on the west coast, John Cage and Lou Harrison, and scattered others, like William Russell and Johanna Beyer who managed to make percussion music for their own ensemble of collected instruments struck by amateur players, gathering available resources themselves and making them work rather than wait for the profession and institutions to catch up to the novel demands of their imaginations.

Another example: over-notation versus pragmatic notation (a better phrase than under-notation, methinks).  There is, indeed, something positively utopian about the densely-notated score, and their is an ever-growing handful of musicians who are attracted to and thrive with the challenges of thick (and sometimes contradictory) prescription, but the utopia here is often literally a no-place, as the literal goal is unobtainable (and sometimes that unobtainability, indeed frustration, is considered to be part of the work; variation due to error may even be a feature).  However, the more technically feasible projects conveyed by more pragmatic notation are more literally opened to the variety of interpretive experiences, a utopia of variations is expected, even invited.  (And yes, look at the way Christian Wolff, for example, literally wrote performer error into some of his cued scores! Not as a hidden program of psychological frustration but as material with which to move forward.)  

And a last example:  when the largest new music research institutions were investing on a military-industrial scale in large synthesizers and computers and recording studios with all the typical restrictions on access and agency large institutions make and remarkably little in the way of actual musical output, the more productive — and more lastingly so — were the achievements in the small-scale institutions and private studios which focused instead on microcomputers, primitive networking, hardware hacking etc., all of it endlessly reconfigurable, much of it self-financed, with resources and know-how shared rather than shepherded through corridors of power. Yes, a lot of the work was, inevitably, toss-away-able, but it was productive, in many small steps closer to a real, functioning, feasible and musical utopia.

A Note on Cage and Genre

An observation: the traditional form or genre in which Cage was most innovative was not the sonata, quartet, or concerto — although he made genre-challenging examples of each — but the oratorio.  I take the word oratorio here liberally, but literally, as a musical vehicle for the elevation of a text with didactic and/or narrative character.  His own experiences as an orator began in High School, and certainly were associated his first career ambitions, to preach (his Los Angeles High School classmate, the poet Josephine Miles, told me that he had a good voice for public speaking because it was high-pitched and carried well (oh those days before universal electronic amplification)).  It followed through his own public lectures, which were very much the work of a composer, often sharing structures and methods with his musical scores, and really established itself with Lecture on the Weather, Empty Words, and Roaratorio, all works in which Cage's own performance as a public speaker treating source materials of great value to the composer are made musical in large scale.  I dodge around the issue of whether these were sacred or secular oratorios, but note that a thematic concern with nature in these pieces is shared with the work generally identified as the first oratorio, Emilio de Cavalieri's Rappresentatione di Anima, et di Corpo (1600) to a libretto by Agostino Manni.

Labor Day

Music and labor.  At one extreme, music can be a lot of work to composer, to play, or listen to, at the other extreme, it may appear to compose or play itself, and listening goes down easily as well.  But neither extreme necessarily implies anything about the pleasure and/or pain of the experience (and indeed, like the pleasure of some chili, peppers, ginger, horseradish, or wasabi, it's often sensual pain that actually seals the deal; Keats, of course: "branched thoughts new grown with pleasant pain")  and neither extreme represents a necessarily causal relationship.  I'm very fond of the idea of labor-intensive scores which yield sounding end-products which appear to the ear to be simplicity itself, and perhaps even fonder of score/piece combinations which do exactly the opposite.  Simple conditions can lead to catastrophic or chaotic results and, at the same time, there is always the possibility of music escaping an entropic arrow and allowing complex initial conditions to resolve, amiably, to the less complex. Again, there's no necessity here, but it's a rich field of possibilities.  It's Labor Day here, and that's supposed to be a day free'd up from work, but as a freelance composer, as Cage put it, there are no weekends or holidays.  So back to work, but not necessarily hard work.

The Detail That Makes The Whole

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

Landmarks (47)

Hector Berlioz: Les Troyens (1856-58)

Opera is not really a presence in this list of landmarks, although I readily recognize that opera, as conservative as it has become, was, for most of its history, the central field for musical innovation.  If something new happened with regard to tonal practice, orchestration, texture, or form and continuity, chances are that it happened first in a theatrical context while concert music, with its repertoire of fixed ensembles and forms, was traditionally the more conservative field.  It's no wonder that Stravinsky was, first and foremost, a composer for the theatre (although dance was his genre more than opera) and many more contemporary innovators, among them John Cage, La Monte Young, Robert Ashley or Philip Glass have been at their essence as theatre composers, particularly when they test the extent and limits of the theatre as well as music.  But even with such innovation in music theatre taken broadly most opera has become rather conservative and rigid, due perhaps to the inevitable costs of institutionalizing a late 19th century form of production within modern state or "charitable" contexts, focused on a core historical repertoire with attempts to get around that conservatism via ahistorical staging more itches on the wound than actual recovery from the malaise and most attempts at commissioning new opera doomed from the start by institutional demands unwilling, in a too big to fail atmosphere, to risk big money on actually new ideas.

But then Les Troyens...   Berlioz is one of the three or four composers I can reliably turn to when I want to hear something extraordinary.  Listening as a composer out to plunder, his techniques — rhythmic, tonal, contrapuntal, textural, and of course orchestrational — are marked everywhere for me by his heterodoxy, his alternatives to business as usual, his breaking the rules every music school kid is supposed to obey.  (To be honest, part of this heterodoxy comes simply from the fact that Berlioz's texts are in French, requiring very different metrics, stresses, and cadences than those found in the Italian and German repertoire that so much theory is based in.) The mileage he can get out of the inversions of a chord or by an aptly inelegant voice leading are wonderful, his wildest adjacencies and polytextural conterpoints are more than wonderful. Small details, like using bIII as the functional dominant in the March of the Trojans, make large differences by coloring the tonal fabric just a bit less familiar, just strange enough to evoke difference.  His scores, and Les Troyens being the grandest, most comprehensive of them all, are compendia of techniques with still-to-be-explored consequences.  The score to this opera is much more useful to a young (or not-so-young, like myself) composer than Mr. B's famous Treatise on Orchestration.

But then Les Troyens...  is on my landmarks not only as a useful compendium of musical stage magic, but as grand opera at its most promising, preposterous, thrilling, and, yep, beautiful.  While Berlioz is justly famous for his capacity to manage and consume musical resources on the largest scale, I find his real compositional talent is most in evidence in his restraint (I've used the Requiem in teaching orchestration, and the contrast and balance between the grandest and the most intimate moments always comes at a positive shock to students, a real lesson in musical economics); the duet "Nuit D'Ivresse" and the suicide of Cassandra and the Trojan women are strong examples of such restraint.  

But then Les Troyens...  is an opera that the composer never heard in its entirety and has only recently begun to take a place in the repertoire.  It's the great grand opera we don't know yet (and Guillaume Tell is the great grand opera we've completely forgotten!)  At the time of its composition, opera was moving in the direction of more conventional narrative continuity while Les Troyens, like most of Berlioz's musical-threatical works, remained episodic, even fragmentary, an assembly of scenes from the epic rather than attempting to account for and contain the entire story. (I suspect that part of my affinity for the opera comes from my familiary with Asian theatre forms which are presented in similar pieces and scenes rather than the impossible wholes.)  So it's an example of a historically significant opera which has never had the chance to establish itself in institutional musical life and we have the strange and wonderful phenomena of the piece receiving roughly contemporary performances in both high establishment form (at the Met under Levine) and in an historically informed style (under Gardner)(although there was never really a historical premier to refer back to). In either case, it is music that, at its best, stays new.