So much more to learn

I've recently appreciated reading composer Lauren Redhead's thoughtful blog. She makes useful connections between aesthetically deep and completely practical issues — like performing organ music for a darkened auditorium — in concrete ways that usefully suggest interesting opportunities or openings for new music.

Advantage: Blogging

I've been struggling over the past few days to write an article for a (dead tree) academic journal. I was asked to do it by a friend and it's basically impossible to say no, no matter how unenthusiastic I am about the project. In particular, it's the expected form for an academic essay that has become burdensome, and provides some evidence that the blogging form, in all its informality and (most usually) brevity is a better fit for my particular (and godsknow, limited) skill set and temperament as a writer. I completely understand that a public, refereed article needs to be backed up by a certain amount of prosaic bulk and formality and a full set of citations (as well as permissions, when need be, for examples), but academic writing is just not my main gig (and in this case, not a paying gig, which is a real condition for those of us without day jobs in academe), I'm not getting compensated anywhere for that kind of completeness, and if someone really wants more explication and the full bibliography, they're more than welcome to email me for it. Mostly, with writing, I'm just eager to be done with it and go on to the next idea, to the next urgency, and in a blog I can pace myself, while with a journal article, I'm writing to someone else's schedule, which I'm happy to bend to for a commissioned composition but less happy for an article where the pay-off is just another line in my CV. The standard, well-formed essay format, the one you teethed on in high school and training-wheeled on in college, just doesn't fit every research project or opinion piece equally well and making it fit can be pedantic, when not a waste of paper and attention. More importantly, perhaps, as a composer, I think that the blogging format offers the opportunity to experiment with form, to be as laconic or obsessively complete as the writer like. And even though most bloggers don't taken advantage of these opportunities, it's damn sweet to know that they're there.

You're the top, or at least among the top ten...

The musical blogoplan is currently under a wave of ten-best- and ten-most-influential-lists, with regard to composers and recordings. I think that best composer lists are pretty much beside the point, as composers are all uneven in the quality of their production and it's the individual piece that counts with the composer, at best, as a kind of brand name, and then more for stylistic than qualitative consistency. These exercises are useful, however, as a modest measure of the sympathies and passions of the moment and can often be useful, too, for clarifying, for example, the distinction between "best" and "most influential" or between an abstract ideal of a work of music and a single representation of the work in recorded form. Thus, Carlos Kleiber's recordings of Beethoven Five and Seven definitely make my best list (and this would be a best list that is far from limited to dead-white-European-male-made classical music) , but I'm not altogether sure that they have been particularly influential, indeed, I suspect that the performances are so good that they are close-to inimitable.

From the lists I've perused at late, it's been most interesting to see how list makers will hedge on the question of influence by including a Wagner or a Schoenberg with a huge caveat about not actually liking the man and/or the music but acknowledging the achievement. Influence is a tough topic and, to be absolutely honest, it forces us to wrestle with some strange notions. For example, weren't Fux (author of Gradus ad Parnassus, the theory textbook of generations of student musicians) and, more locally, Gedalge (designer of the French conservatory "school fugue"), in their bureaucratically pedagogical ways, more directly influential on subsequent generations of musicians than some of the big names? Influence is often a question of on whom, where, and when. Bach, as unavoidably important as he appears now, was an obscure local figure whose complete output was only slowly re-discovered, and even then through the lens of very different performance styles. Or how about that mighty influence that Wagner is supposed to have had? A post-Wagnerian music drama never really established itself, unless we count the Märchenoper of Humperdinck and Siegfried Wagner or the pair of Richard Strauss Einaktors, and Wagner's most radical chromatic tonal practice was not, in practice, that distinctive from late Verdi. Moreover, the developing variations and complex metric ideas of Brahms (i.e. "Brahms the progressive") were arguably the most forward looking technical ideas of their time. No, the lasting influence really comes from that force field of technique in which Wagner, Verdi and Brahms were all working, and eliding any one of those names would come at an unacceptable loss of musical substance. And, of course, once we've eaten up three slots in our top ten like that, it starts to become clear that any meaningful list is not going to be satisfactory with only ten names!

About those landmarks

To date, over the past almost-six years, I've written about 46 personal musical "landmarks" on this blog.  These are not exactly items in the usual "best of" list, but pieces that stand out, for one reason or another, as landmarks in a musical autobiography.  Most of the pieces I've lived with for a longer time, but some — the most recent of which is an orchestral work by Richard Ayres — are new discoveries, Eurekas! from first hearing.  With one exception (the Buckinx 1001 Sonates, of which I've only heard a fraction, as the whole lasts about 24 hours!), I've heard all the concert works live. Some I've performed myself, in most cases I've spent time with the scores, and with the electronic pieces, I've spent hours with the recordings.  Charles Shere recently reminded us on his blog of the traditional sense of the term "Discrimination has to do with specific choices, not categorical ones." And discriminatory the list is, indeed, made of specific choices, allowing complete works only in the case of Machaut and sets of works in the case of the Purcell viol music.   The only meaningful categories under which these landmarks fall is my own biography and taste, so it is a bit of an indulgence, but it seems the process of list-making has a life of its own and inevitably starts to assert its own set of rules.  One of the rules has been that I have avoiding, to date, naming a single composer twice.  This has been very hard in some cases (among them Monteverdi, Debussy, Ives, Cage, Lucier, and Young) and in one case, Berlioz, indecision over which piece, exactly, to include, has long kept me from adding a work even though it is insanely obvious that a half-dozen pieces by Berlioz ought to be long overdue for inclusion.  In a couple of cases, the personality of the composer gets in the way of a piece I treasure — is Ruggles's racism a roadblock for Sun Treader or Angels, for example? (I did put Hyperprism on the list, knowing about the anti-semitic streak in some of Varese's letters, so I'm not altogether consistent on this score.)  Finally, for all of the diversity on this list, it's definitely a western-classical-tradition-based assemblage and there certainly aren't enough women.  I can only defend myself here in that in the cases of non-western repertoire that I value highly, even with years of exposure, I don't believe that I am always able to really discriminate wisely among the repertoire. Etenraku is a gorgeous piece, one that I've known since High School, but it's the one piece people know of Gagaku when they know only one piece of Gagaku and including it would be more a marker of my ignorance of a repertoire I don't know well enough.  In the case of Javanese music, which I know much better, the more I know about fantastic pieces like Gadhung Mlathi or Gendhing Bonang Tukung, the more obvious it is how little I really know.  And then, in many other cases, for example South Indian classical music or Diné (Navajo) ceremonial music, using a term like "composition" or "work" or "piece" seems so clumsily inaccurate.   Finally, the list is getting close to the number 50; while it would be easy to name 100 or many 100s of landmark pieces, I think that an honest number — of pieces that I know well enough to stand behind them as a musician — has got to stop around 50 or 60, otherwise it's the equivalent of teenage boys bragging about the size of their record collections.  Anything more than that would be presumptuous.  Or maybe, once I reach 50 or so, the better idea would be to keep that total as a limit and then, if I decide to add anything, I have to strike something else off the list to make room...  

Writing as if Composing

Run-on and runaway sentences; hanging sentence fragments; needling repetition; odd punctuation; obscurities and neologisms;  abrupt shifts of register, both up and down; anacoluthons; non-sequitors; too much stuffed away between ellipses, brackets, braces, or parentheses (when not hidden in footnotes below); seemingly arbitrary settings of text in italic or boldface character; metaphors mixed and mashed; knowingly faulty logic; opinions presented as facts; abused rhetoric (all 38 of Schopenhauer's Arts of Being Right on display and then-some)...  Guilty as charged!  All I can ask is that you, dear reader, bear with me even if these aspects of Renewable Music's house style book grate like so many fingernails on blackboards or even more ants in a bento box on a Saturday picnic turned to thunder, lightning, rain, gentle rain, then too much rain... The idea — and there really is one, here — is that the webblog is still a new medium, and one which has not yet found its extents and limits as a form of prose (or not-prose), and one which is not yet immune to the methods of an experimental composer, thus the breathless and short-of-breath and stuttered lines, the sudden interjections, jarring accents, and ragged articulations, and all those sounds, those troubled, troubling, consoling, caring, sweet, everyday, exotic, exhalted sounds...  What could be better than to aspire to a condition of music?  My fault, my failure then, may not be the experimenting but rather the stubborn fact of not having experimented enough. 

[Except, of course, for careless errors in spelling, grammar, or typos.  The fault, there, belongs to the damn computer.]

Just asking

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

Some one thousand, three-hundred and nineteen items later...

... Renewable Music had its fifth anniversary on the 15th of December.   If you haven't yet, please check out the two anthology projects (A Winter Album with new works for piano by 15 composers and Melodica! with works for that instrument by 13 composers);  if you happen to be a composer yourself, please consider contributing to the up-coming and long-awaited A Spring Album of percussion music.  

This experiment in composerly blogging, originally just making public the sorts of notes I habitually write to myself in manuscript margins and on cocktail napkins and the backs of envelopes, has covered some interesting territory, including a month of writing a new whole piece each day and assorted forms of cogitation, agitation, and even experimentation with the blog as literary/critical form.  Thanks for reading, (cor)responding and — if you care to stick around — expect more of the same! 

Material Press Blog

My blogging has become somewhat promiscuous, as I'll now also be contributing to the Material Press blog at http://blog.materialpress.com/  Expect lots of news about new scores and performances of works by Material Press composers, including Alvin Lucier, Gordon Mumma, Hauke Harder, Markus Trunk, Douglas Leedy, Ann Warde, Jonathan Segel, and Daniel Peter Biro.

La Disparition

Some minor blogkeeping:  There have been about 1200 posts here.  Some of them have been deleted, but most of them are still available in the standard blogspot archive format, indexed in the sidebar.  About half of the entries have been tagged by subject.   I have not downloaded archival copies of any of this for myself, and am not even sure if there's a good way to do it.  

But I'm not even sure that I would actually want to keep such an archive.  These items are essentially journal entries by a working composer.   In the interest of helping New Music to have a more lively presence online,  I have made these writings public.  I would have written many if not most of them anyway (in particular, I'd like to have some record for my children to have, if they should later have any curiosity about why Dad made such odd music),  but the blog format has provided a format which encourages some useful discipline, encouraging one to write at a more regular rhythm and keeping it dressed up enough for others to read, while at the same time having neither the formal constraints and length of a journal article nor the forced brevity of a twitter.  The items here have also been written to some compositional constraints that are related to my music: I use chance procedures to determine the timing, length, and, sometimes, topic of each post.  In many cases, formal or vocabulary controls have been applied, sometimes fairly elaborate games or experiments have been attempted, but not as often as I would have liked.

While I cannot say that I have personally received any commissions or performances as a result of this blog,  I believe that the blog has been useful to the New Music community in a few ways. The first has been in contributing to some discussions of musical politics and the composition competition system in particular.  The other is the online anthology of 15 brief piano pieces, A WINTER ALBUM, here.  (A SPRING ALBUM, of percussion pieces, is still taking entries, and I will soon announce a similar project for melodica and melodica ensemble).

1200 posts over four and a half years is probably enough, if not too much, verbosity for a mid-career composer of modest reputation and ambitions.    Eventually, I will just stop and delete these pages without much ado, retiring to my orchids, bon-bons, and philately*, but for the moment, I'll keep at it, because, on the one hand, it does seem to complement my composing well,  pushing it further along into interesting areas of inquiry and, on the other hand, New Musicland online remains far too quiet.   In the end, I'm blogging because not enough other — and especialy those more verbally gifted — composers are doing it.  If we want our music to be a lively presence in the world, we have to let the world know that our work is deep, lively and available and is full of sounds and ideas to which attention is well worth paying.  Anything less conveys the impression that we do not believe this ourselves to be true.

That said,  June 2009 will be requests month.  What would you like to read about here?

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*No, I don't really have interests in either orchids or philately.  As Sen. Claghorn said, it's a joke, son.

Composition Class Blogging?

While my visits to musical academe are mostly of the hit-and-run variety, when I do visit, the most exciting activity is inevitably finding out about what the student composers are doing.   It's been surprising to me that so few younger composers are using the web to promote their work, but it's absolutely irresponsible that even fewer teachers and teaching institutions are using the web to promote their students' work.  Such a forum would be very useful to prospective students, concert organizers, and the musical community at large.   If composition training is preparation for professional work and our profession increasingly demands that contacts, materials, and work samples be available online, then learning how to place ones's work online and fashion an interesting public profile (as musician, intellectual, or all-round sweetheart) is an essential part of professional training.  

Now, it may well be objected that student work is student work, raw, in-progress, and tolerant of both experiment and failure in ways in which an eventual professional market is far less forgiving and is therefore unsuitable to wider publication.  But that is precisely why the framing of the work within the context of a website or blog associated with a composition class is so useful; such informal publication is at once a license to take risks, but also a requirement to stand out and do exciting work.  An interesting composition class is interesting not only because of an interesting and august professor, it is interesting because the students have good ideas and are executing them in ways to which attention is due.  Web publication along these lines — intermediate to in-house recitals and more formal publication — is an ideal medium for this.   

Notes on blogging SWAG

OF LATE, I've received an increasing number of requests from web sites, radio stations, concert organizers, and recording companies to mention or review a program or product on my blog.  These requests often include an offer of comp tickets or a perusal copy of a cd.  My apologies for not answering the emails, but I just don't respond to these offers, however attractive they may be.  For me to get involved in that particular exchange of goods and services, I'd have to identify as a critic, and that'd be less than honest  These blog items are the working notes of someone who writes music for half-a-living, and I prefer to write about topics connected to my immediate compositional projects.  Praise or criticism here for the work of other is thus selfishly and intimately connected to those compositional projects and, consequently, I don't have the necessary distance a critic can — and ought — bring.  (This is above and beyond the fact that I just don't have the particular set of writing chops that a critic needs.)  THAT SAID, I do really value getting to know the work of other musicians, and I treasure links to sound files and — especially — scores sent by individual colleagues.  In fact, the happiest moments in blogging have been those in which I've been able to link readers to strong online materials, connecting or contrasting in useful ways with my own work.  A perfect exchange of gifts, as far as I'm concerned. 

The Classicists

The bloglinks in the right-hand column are mostly dedicated to new and experimental music, a reader just emailed me with a request for blogs specializing in classical repertoire.   Here are some classic-oriented pages I read with some frequency, by writers I enjoy (& envy):

Think Denk (Jeremy Denk)  Reveries of the pianist and international man of mystery.

Iron Tongue of Midnight (Lisa Hirsch)  Hirsch finds just the right balance between news, opinion, and the prattling penumbra around music.  

The Detritus Review (the pseudononymous Sator Arepo & Empiricus) Reviewing the reviewers; good for an honest & regular dosage of snarkage.

A View from the Podium (Kenneth Woods) Conductor Woods is really at his best when digging into a work of music; as a composer, it's always important to encounter analysis applied to the real problems of performance, rather than as a pre-compositional exercise.

Oboe in Sight (Patricia Mitchell).  Lively notes from a working musician and teacher, a great reminder of the realities of musical life, counting measures, Nutcracker seasons, broken reeds & all.

There are many opera blogs out there (which isn't surprising given the neat fit between matters operatic and tabloidatic) but it'd sure be nice to have good blogs on dance and on early music...

NMZ starts blogging

The neue musikzeitung has a blog, here (in German). Germanophones have come fairly late to blogging in general and to new music blogging in particular. This blog doesn't count, as I'm not German and write in English (idiosyncratic an English though it may be). I started at the end of my Hungarian episode, and upon returning to Frankfurt in the summer of 2005, I wasn't aware of any other new music blogs being published in Germany. It would be swell, when there were a few more independent blogs by composers here!

Muziekplein

Here's a new blog about new music in the Netherlands. It's mostly in Dutch, which I don't really know but still take great pleasure in trying to read; it's also one of those few languages which seem to take naturally to a sans-serif font.

1001

This is the one-thousand-first posting at Renewable Music.

Item: Blogging.

Plato thought about his style; today the style of a scientific paper is decided by editors. — Paul Feyerabend

Having never really learned to type, I am prone to typos. I sometimes use a voice recognition program but that sometimes messes more things up. My eyesight isn't the best, and I like to save it for musical work, so when I attempt to edit my own text, the results can be inconsistent. Moreover, I have been known to be over-hasty in pushing the publish now button, and with an admixture of hindsight and regret I have often found myself revising or even retracting a published blog item. (N.B. if you subscribe here via a feed, please visit the actual site for the final text may seriously vary from the immature version that got fed first.)

On the basis of this poor discipline, I really ought to want an editor, but the truth is, I would never get along with an editor and have actually come 'round to recognizing some advantages in my approach. While suggestions are welcome and models are treasured, I actively dislike prescriptive grammar and style guides and I have the hope (against all hope though it may be) that the form of the blog item has not yet petrified like that of the schoolboy essay or a mainstream journalism article and is still located in a field of activity which is open to formal experiment and discovery. I like the fact that the online text is inherently unstable; it can always be revised. If I had wanted to write a formal academic essay or publish newspaper criticism then I would have done that, but the blog entry, or item (Lou Harrison's Music Primer is structured as a series of Items, imitating a style used by old Californian Cantonese newspapers in which the reader, not the editor, is free to assign a hierarchy of importance to the items gathered on the page), with its origins in the entries found in private diaries, journals, logs, and the margins of musical manuscripts, seems to be the right accompaniment to a life centered on composition in another medium.

The blog item can be as personal or private, as objective or subjective, as organized or as untidy as one likes. A blog item can be a sketch or an observation, it can be be the product of a flash of insight, a fleeting half-thought, or the hard ponderings of a good long while. A blog item can begin with or arrive at a startling thesis, yet it has none of the responsibilities of an essay to defend or defeat that thesis. A blog item can be a node in a network of links or of an extended conversation or controversy or it can be solitary, a cul de sac. A blog item can be prosaic or poetic, can be accompanied or replaced by visual or audio information. A blog item can be practical, political, confessional, or heretical. A blog item can be academic or — in the best sense of the word — amateur and, either way, can be foolish or wise. A blog item can be read and treasured or read and forgotten, or j u s t f a d e o f f t h e p a

What he said

"The history of poetry, like the history of any art form, is not a procession of its “best works.” Indeed, the well-wrought urn is, if anything, the deservedly forgotten one. Having codified and smoothed out the rough edges of any given tendency in poetry, such works are monuments to triviality and soon ignored." -- Ron Silliman, here.

One of the benefits of training in ethnomusicology is a focus on the concept of a musical repertoire — the size of a repertoire, how widely shared or segmented it is, how it develops over time, the processes through which communities comes to consensus or dissent over repertoire, and the connections, if any, between repertoire items and the values, both musical and general, of individuals and communities. Repertoire, a term which refers directly with the practice of music-making by real, existing people as musicians and listeners, seems to me to be a much more useful idea than that of a canon, a term associated more with the management of information about and access to music than the practice of music. The initial impulse for this blog (by a composer with perhaps too much ethnomusicology training) was, in part, to respond to canons and canon formation (which, despite the martial tone, is actually a phrase describing more complacency and passive consumption than dynamism and engaged performance and listening) with a more supple notion, in which repertoire change is the central dynamic -- most music, after all, will come, go, and be forgotten & AFAIC we're none the worse for that -- but up against which background there are musical works that need to be identified (and, in some case, reintroduced into the repertoire) precisely because they have qualities that continue to reward although, and sometimes because, the background has changed.

In case you've been away

((The past few days and past few months, respectively, on Renewable Music (images by wordle.net)).

Robert Schumann, New Music Blogger

Robert Schumann was both a composer and a pioneering music journalist. His journalism -- especially in Die Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, which he founded in 1834 (and is still published, if with somewhat less energy) -- would not likely fall today within the narrowly constrained portfolio of our contemporary newspaper critics, but was always written from the viewpoint of a composer who wished to strongly advocate for music in which he believed ("Hats off, Gentlemen, a Genius!"), for both new music, re-discovered music of significance, and ideas about music and its performance.

The political scientist Henry Farrell, of Crooked Timber (my favorite SocSci Blog -- if I ever do a blog exclusively devoted to orchestration, it's definitely going to be called Crooked Timbre) has recently been studying political blog readership, and his observations are not altogether irrelevant to the musical blogoplan. According to Farrell, political blog readers appear to be homophiles -- thus tending to read blogs with similar outlooks, conservatives reading conservative blogs and liberals reading liberal blogs, with the relatively few readers who regularly read a wide spectrum of opinion blogging coming mostly from the left. Political blog readers also tend to be more active participants in politics: they are more likely to inform themselves, speak out on issues, vote, work for campaigns, etc. but readers on the left are more likely to be active participants than those on the right. It seems that the left is both more energized and views its blogs as advocacy vehicles for a movement -- the whole netroots business -- while the right bloggers are in a bit of a malaise and have been less able to use the net for advocacy.

For musical blogs, I see the outlines of a similar split. It is not parallel to the political blogs in left-right political distinctions, but like the conservative political blogs, there are a number of music blogs which see blogging as an extension of the cranky-critic-printed-on-dead-trees- style music journalism, and these blogs have fallen into a malaise of their own, spending a lot of pixels on the death of classical music, death of classical music criticism, and need-for-better-music-management memes. (They also tend to spend a lot of pixels on opera. Goes with the territory, I guess.)* The other side, with which I admit to identifying, is the advocacy side. Although I have gotten cranky here myself about some topics -- in particular the superfluidity of publishers and corrupt competitions -- in advocating for new or less-well-known music and for new media for the transmition of that music, the current state of affairs of the historically large and important institutions -- concert halls, opera houses, universities, recording companies, management agencies, and newspapers -- is of far less concern. Circumstances change and institutions must change or fade or even vanish (in the peculiar way in which legal persons are allowed to expire). In advocating for particular forms of music within a more diverse musical ecosytem we have to explore and initiate the creation of new and more agile vehicles appropriate for making and distributing that music, and that includes making our blogs better, even if that means making them something quite different from newspaper criticism as well as trying to figure out how to support this work without insitutional backup (not to mention press passes, salary, healthcare, pension...).

Robert Schumann recognized the music which he valued and invented a form of music journalism that was appropriate to the task of advocating for that music. I have no doubt that were Schumann around today, he'd be blogging, but he isn't, we are, and we've got to do a better job. Hats back on, gentlepeople: we may not be geniuses but we'll work hard all the same.
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* Okay, here's my real snark -- the cranky critic music blogs, precisely like conservative blogs, such as The Corner, tend not to allow comments, and if they do, they screen them. Shutting down comments, and by extension, hiding controversy, suggests both that the matters discussed are less provocative and lively and that the blog writer is thin-skinned. Well kids, you simply can't be thin-skinned and be an effective advocate, and this is especially when the music you advocate is innovative and provocative, rather than a comforting reinforcement of the status quo.

More on China

Scott Spiegelberg has a thoughtful response to my postings on response to Chinese internet censorship and Tibet policy. Let me make it clear that I have no problem with the Olympic Games going forward, but I think we should not bother watching the broadcasts of the Games. As China censors so much information going into their country why should we be expected to consume the officially sanctioned information coming out of the country? This form of protest seems measured and if another country, including the US, was similarly censoring incoming information, I would avoid officially sanctioned information from that country as well. The free exchange of information is a basic and universal civil right, and I believe that acquiescence to China on this point (as is done, for example, by several western commercial search engines) is implicitly saying that the people of China are somehow less entitled to this right than the citizens of other states.

Others take an even harder stand: on the Tibet issue, Philip Glass advocates a boycott of the games altogether.