Achille-Claude Debussy, Six Épigraphes Antiques (1914) piano four-hands. Arranged by the composer from incidental music originally scored for two flutes, two harps and celeste, there are also versions for two hands, and for orchestra, but the four-handed version is a remarkable ensemble piece and seems to me to be the optimal expression of these little pieces. Arrangements of theatrical music for piano, two- or more-handed, are often simply a tool for accompanying rehearsals (in the absence of the larger ensemble), but a small number of these arrangements have managed to become concert works in their own rights, and the Six Épigraphes Antiques work as well in the concert hall as in the home .
It's a music appreciation cliché to identify Debussy as one of those composers for whom instrumentation and timbre are essential to the character and identity of a piece of music. This is trivially true for a lot of much. Anything well-written for horn, for example, is going to be so constricted by the playing-technical aspects of the instrument -- and more so, in the case of a natural horn -- that simply reassigning material from another instrument is seldom going to function, let alone thrive. In the best cases, like the case at hand, the transcription of a piece of music from one set of resources to another can be revelatory, and the revelations concern both the source and the medium of the arrangement.
With regard to the source, stage music for The Songs of Bilitis, the uniform timbre of the piano brings out aspect of contrasting pitch collections and pitch symmetry that continue to resonate in later music, particularly in the music of Bartok (an incubatory relationship between piano music and music for other instruments is shared by Debussy and Bartok). And with regard to the medium, in the Six Épigraphes, the composer decisively moves the piano back into the realm of percussion instruments (a move shared, albeit with alternative technical means, with the slightly later experiments of the teenaged Henry Cowell in California). But the aspect of percussion that Debussy grabs onto is not that of the noise maker or time marker, but of an ensemble character, one that he presumably recognized in his contacts with Flamenco or with the Gamelan Madenda he had heard and returned to hear at the World's Fair.* Playing the Six Épigraphes Antiques with a like-minded musician friend (you needn't be great pianists, just good musicians who can get around at the keyboard) is a delight on a par, in my book, with playing Javanese music.
_____
* Contrary to another music appreciation-land fib, there is no material evidence -- in terms of instruments, scales, rhythms, or borrowed tunes -- of Debussy being "influenced" by the Gamelan Madenda. Instead, he responded enthusisatically to a music with which he recognized some substantial shared sensibilities, and those shared sensibilities lie more within the realm of ensemble and texture than in pitches or rhythms. AFAIC, Debussy's capacity to form such a recognition is amore than adequate demonstration of a unique musical personality. Why diminish it with unsubstantiated talk of "influence"?
Wednesday, July 05, 2006
My strangest meal
The '80s. Met La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela in Schoenberg Hall at UCLA, then drove them to Clifton's Cafeteria, where we joined the then-90-something Nicolas Slonimsky as guests of Prof. Robert Stevenson (pianist, composer, and musicologist; LY's teacher at UCLA, making Stevenson one of my grand-teachers). Clifton's was (and still is) a pay-by-the-portion buffet with a menu that has not changed substantially since the early 1960's. Meat. Gravy. Scalloped potatoes. Macaroni and cheese. Carrot salad with raisins. Navy bean soup. Saltine crackers, paired in cellophane packages. Choice of Lime or Raspberry JelloTM. Assembling meals to satisfy every member of this party was somewhat difficult, but Stevenson was a patient host and an experienced guide to the mysteries of Clifton's. He recommended the tapioca, I declined and err'd on the side of salads. Stevenson had some pointed questions about the current sexual politics of the composition world. I didn't know what to say. Slonimsky was in fine form and full of questions for LY, in preparation for the next edition of Baker's. He was especially interested in LY and MZs' schedule, based on a day with more than 24 hours, thus continuously moving out of phase with the solar day. As we left Clifton's before the 7:30 pm closing time, I had the feeling that ours was a party out of phase with rather more than just the solar day.
Tuesday, July 04, 2006
Five Pieces for Independence Day
Christian Wolff, Changing the System (revised version)
Charles E. Ives, Second Orchestral Set
Robert Ashley, Public Opinion Descends Upon The Demonstrators
Pauline Oliveros, Big Mother is Watching You
John Cage, Lecture on the Weather
Charles E. Ives, Second Orchestral Set
Robert Ashley, Public Opinion Descends Upon The Demonstrators
Pauline Oliveros, Big Mother is Watching You
John Cage, Lecture on the Weather
De Profundis.
Here's a nice little item (Quicktime required) from my hometown that's either a parable about the banality of the quixotic or just another story about a guy digging a big hole in his front yard.
*****
If you ever have the opportunity to hitchhike around Ireland, I can guarantee that you will inevitably have multiple encounters with circles of four to six grown men standing around holes in the ground. From one small town to the next, it's always the same. They won't move around, nor will they converse. They are having the time of their lives.
*****
As a child, digging holes under the backyard laundry line had one of either two purposes: to make a shortcut to China, or to remove the temple at Abu Simbel, in order to make way for the Aswan Dam. (In the 60's, National Geographic ran a lot of features on Abu Simbel and the Aswan Dam). Never did reach China, but the flood plain did render the laundry line useless with some regularity.
*****
If you ever have the opportunity to hitchhike around Ireland, I can guarantee that you will inevitably have multiple encounters with circles of four to six grown men standing around holes in the ground. From one small town to the next, it's always the same. They won't move around, nor will they converse. They are having the time of their lives.
*****
As a child, digging holes under the backyard laundry line had one of either two purposes: to make a shortcut to China, or to remove the temple at Abu Simbel, in order to make way for the Aswan Dam. (In the 60's, National Geographic ran a lot of features on Abu Simbel and the Aswan Dam). Never did reach China, but the flood plain did render the laundry line useless with some regularity.
Monday, July 03, 2006
Rock stars I have babysat
I've never come up with a good, compact answer for the neighbor or person across the aisle on the train who asks: "Oh, you're a composer. What kinds of songs do you write?" or "What's the name of your band?" If I try to explain a bit about The New Music, and my relationship to old music, I get a lot of blank stares, and often the advice to "write a hit, make a lot of money, and retire so you can make the esoteric stuff you do as a hobby." Even pointing out that a lot of film scores they know are filled with music that has something to do with The New Music does not usually do the trick.
I realize well enough that for most people, popular music is the default setting for music in general (when it's not the only setting). But for a variety of reasons, popular music has mostly been peripheral to my musical life* and the music in the center of my life just happens to do something very different than popular music, and I remain at a loss when I try to explain this. Any suggestions?
-----
* Extended autobiographical footnote: My parents were both born in the Depression years, and neither of them had a relationship to rock and roll. Too young for big bands, too old for Elvis. Sure, we watched the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, but I recall that that was mostly to laugh about the haircuts. My mother had lps of musical comedies and some folkish things, my father had Cal Tjader's Latin Jazz concert (an impressive red disk, with "Nixon Go Home" on the cover), a couple of Martin Denny records, Jackie Gleason's Velvet Brass, and The Moldau, the Schoenberg Five Pieces for Orchestra backed with Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, and (my favorite) the Montreaux recording of the Rite of Spring. He also had a couple of really amazing sound effects records. He'd show off his stereo and loudspeakers by letting a steam locomotive appear to cross our living room. Mr. Johnson, the band director at Serrano Jr. High, played quite a few records for us, and I was one of the few who paid any attention. His favorite, if I recall correctly, was Respighi's Pines of Rome. Otherwise, my school music classes were dominated by patriotic and christmas songs with a healthy smattering of Woody Guthrie. In sum, I had a respectable introduction to classical music from the first half of the twentieth century, and a smattering of things that just didn't happen to include rock and roll.
In High School, I did play for a brief time in a sort of a cover band, and learned to comp from lead sheets to accompany the chamber singers in pop concerts, but I was really faking it and did so without any stylistic competence whatsoever. I eventually landed the best summer job ever in working for Charles Chase at the Folk Music Center in Claremont, helping to organize his collection of instruments, and getting a good introduction to musical instrument repair, old left politics, and integrating art-making into everyday life. Mr. Chase's daughter Ellen was repairing instruments then, and I got along well with her three young sons, whom my girlfriend, and at least one time, I, babysat. Her oldest, Ben Harper, now owns the Folk Music Center, which Ellen manages, and has an impressive musical career. (At the moment, the whole city of Frankfurt is plastered with posters advertising a concert by Ben here in November). And in College, I was friends with about half of the band that became known as Camper Van Beethoven. I was even Jonathan Segel's RA, so I suppose that that's a kind of babysitting, too.
I realize well enough that for most people, popular music is the default setting for music in general (when it's not the only setting). But for a variety of reasons, popular music has mostly been peripheral to my musical life* and the music in the center of my life just happens to do something very different than popular music, and I remain at a loss when I try to explain this. Any suggestions?
-----
* Extended autobiographical footnote: My parents were both born in the Depression years, and neither of them had a relationship to rock and roll. Too young for big bands, too old for Elvis. Sure, we watched the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, but I recall that that was mostly to laugh about the haircuts. My mother had lps of musical comedies and some folkish things, my father had Cal Tjader's Latin Jazz concert (an impressive red disk, with "Nixon Go Home" on the cover), a couple of Martin Denny records, Jackie Gleason's Velvet Brass, and The Moldau, the Schoenberg Five Pieces for Orchestra backed with Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, and (my favorite) the Montreaux recording of the Rite of Spring. He also had a couple of really amazing sound effects records. He'd show off his stereo and loudspeakers by letting a steam locomotive appear to cross our living room. Mr. Johnson, the band director at Serrano Jr. High, played quite a few records for us, and I was one of the few who paid any attention. His favorite, if I recall correctly, was Respighi's Pines of Rome. Otherwise, my school music classes were dominated by patriotic and christmas songs with a healthy smattering of Woody Guthrie. In sum, I had a respectable introduction to classical music from the first half of the twentieth century, and a smattering of things that just didn't happen to include rock and roll.
In High School, I did play for a brief time in a sort of a cover band, and learned to comp from lead sheets to accompany the chamber singers in pop concerts, but I was really faking it and did so without any stylistic competence whatsoever. I eventually landed the best summer job ever in working for Charles Chase at the Folk Music Center in Claremont, helping to organize his collection of instruments, and getting a good introduction to musical instrument repair, old left politics, and integrating art-making into everyday life. Mr. Chase's daughter Ellen was repairing instruments then, and I got along well with her three young sons, whom my girlfriend, and at least one time, I, babysat. Her oldest, Ben Harper, now owns the Folk Music Center, which Ellen manages, and has an impressive musical career. (At the moment, the whole city of Frankfurt is plastered with posters advertising a concert by Ben here in November). And in College, I was friends with about half of the band that became known as Camper Van Beethoven. I was even Jonathan Segel's RA, so I suppose that that's a kind of babysitting, too.
Sunday, July 02, 2006
Concitato
It's possible to mark the transition from the musical renaissance to the early baroque with Monteverdi's invention of the genere concitato in the astonishing Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda. While Monteverdi would subsequently reserve the concitato style to suggest battle and agitation, the style has had long-term resonance in repertoire independent of those associations, and in some very recent repertoire at that.
In the concitato style, tempi move in parallel: a slow, if not static, harmonic rhythm, a rapid instrumental figuration, and a vocal melody setting a text in a rhythm that is related to the delivery of natural , if formal, speech. It should be immediately clear that the same is going on in a lot of classic minimalism, too, and often in purely instrumental works. In The Well Tuned Piano, La Monte Young's chordal "clouds" are both rapidly rearticulated and extraordinarily slow, behaving quite literally like real clouds. In Alvin Lucier's Navigations for Strings, the notes played by the musicians in the string quartet are steady, slow, and sustained, but the resultant beats between small intervals gradually approaching a quartet unison, accelerate away from, and then slow down, returning to, a single tempo universe. In the ensemble works of Glass and Reich from around the turn of the seventies, a static background harmonic was rapidly re-articulated by instrumental and vocal figuration, but also by resultant and combination effects which cast a jagged edge upon an otherwise straight texture.
I want nothing less than to enter into a discussion of modernism and post-modernism, but will only note that as much as Monteverdi's concitato belonged to a transition from a self-consciously modern era, the Renaissance, to the post-modernity of the baroque that followed it, works of modern music which play on the same temporal ambiguities as the concitato definitely mark a similar change in sensibilities.
(On the other hand, this whole phenomenon may have a life independent of the course of Western musical history. I have noticed, for example, among Diné (Navajo) singers, that a melody which might be notated (should you want to notate it) in a simple rhythm of eighths and quarters was produced with a vocal technique which to my ears used a highly disciplined and rhythmic vibrato, made with regularity of the best drumming. I would not be altogether surprised to learn that the rhythm of that vibrato was in fact a substantial component of the music.)
In the concitato style, tempi move in parallel: a slow, if not static, harmonic rhythm, a rapid instrumental figuration, and a vocal melody setting a text in a rhythm that is related to the delivery of natural , if formal, speech. It should be immediately clear that the same is going on in a lot of classic minimalism, too, and often in purely instrumental works. In The Well Tuned Piano, La Monte Young's chordal "clouds" are both rapidly rearticulated and extraordinarily slow, behaving quite literally like real clouds. In Alvin Lucier's Navigations for Strings, the notes played by the musicians in the string quartet are steady, slow, and sustained, but the resultant beats between small intervals gradually approaching a quartet unison, accelerate away from, and then slow down, returning to, a single tempo universe. In the ensemble works of Glass and Reich from around the turn of the seventies, a static background harmonic was rapidly re-articulated by instrumental and vocal figuration, but also by resultant and combination effects which cast a jagged edge upon an otherwise straight texture.
I want nothing less than to enter into a discussion of modernism and post-modernism, but will only note that as much as Monteverdi's concitato belonged to a transition from a self-consciously modern era, the Renaissance, to the post-modernity of the baroque that followed it, works of modern music which play on the same temporal ambiguities as the concitato definitely mark a similar change in sensibilities.
(On the other hand, this whole phenomenon may have a life independent of the course of Western musical history. I have noticed, for example, among Diné (Navajo) singers, that a melody which might be notated (should you want to notate it) in a simple rhythm of eighths and quarters was produced with a vocal technique which to my ears used a highly disciplined and rhythmic vibrato, made with regularity of the best drumming. I would not be altogether surprised to learn that the rhythm of that vibrato was in fact a substantial component of the music.)
Saturday, July 01, 2006
Mr. July
Composer and hardware hacker and/or bender Nicolas Collins is the subject of this month's feature interview over at the New Music Box. If you have the connection speed, do watch the videos -- Mr. Collins really talks, in real time, exactly like he writes.
(Definitely cool to have scooped the American MusicJunta Center, on a topic.)
(Definitely cool to have scooped the American Music
Orchestras: real, imaginary, and in-between
I went to two concerts at my son's school this week. The first with his school orchestra, composed of kids from the 5th through 7th grades, with an instrumentation pretty much like a middle school orchestra anywhere else on the planet, and the second by his class orchestra. The class orchestra is composed of the students in his homeroom class, and to accompany the music appreciation class, they form an orchestra with whatever instruments happen to be at hand. In this case, it meant five flutes, three soprano recorders, a clarinet, an alto sax, two trumpets, a trombone, two classical guitars, an electric bass, tympani, three Orff glockenspiels, a marimba, piano (four-handed), two electronic keyboards, two violins, two celli, and a contrabass. They played a set of pieces arranged from the Mendelssohn incidental music to A Midsummer Night's Dream. On the one hand, this was something like the Scratch Orchestra playing popular classics, but on the other, the tutti and various sub-ensembles had such a distinctive and charming quality, that I left the hall half-tempted to write something substantial for a technically more accomplished ensemble with exactly the same instumentation.
While that particular temptation will probably remain a sin imagined rather than a sin committed, it can also be understood as a response to a fundamental irritation I have with the premise underlying the teaching and practice of orchestration. I really enjoyed Orchestration class as a college student, and I continue to be fascinated both by the history of orchestration and theories of orchestration. I enjoy finding colorful little details in Berlioz, Widor, Koechlin, Piston, or Stiller, but the premise of most orchestration texts (as well as the premise underlying most "effective" music for orchestra) is that (a) there are some optimal ways of distributing notes among instruments, that (b) these can be observed in the music of the composers recognized as good orchestrators*, and that (c) we can derive some rules-of-thumb based upon those observations. A lot of music has been orchestrated from this premise -- especially in film and the opera -- but isn't it striking that in a great part of that lot, the orchestration is scarcely noticeable as a feature? The problem with the premise is clearly that if you want to do something with instruments that will be heard as distinctive from routine music-making, then you are going to have to do something that is other than optimal, or done differently from the practice of good orchestrators, and/or violate or ignore some of those rules-of-thumb.
*****
A friend just emailed me with a quote from the film director John Waters, defining beauty as "a look you'll never forget". What is the orchestration you'll never forget? Here are a few examples of orchestration that I happen to find beautiful: Monteverdi's use of the regal to accompany Charon in Orfeo, Vivaldi's use of solo winds in Tito Manlio, the scoring patterns for Mozart's quintets with two violas, and the basset horn writing in the Masonic music (including Zauberflöte), almost any inner-voice writing by Rossini, Schumann obstinately doubling the violins with flute in the Symphonies, Berlioz's Ophicleide in the Symphonie Fantastique (substituting a tuba doesn't have the same terrifying effect), Varese's ensemble in Hyperprism, practically any film score by Alex North (many of which were orchestrated by Henry Brant) or even some Bernard Hermann, and there are moments in Hawai'ian string band music, Martin Denney, Spike Jones, that I will never forget. Sometimes I think my personal compositional heaven would be a land where every orchestra had basset clarinets and horns, natural horns, ophicleidi, and gambas at the ready. (Satie: "With six trumpets you can do anything!") But as much as, if not more than, odd instrumental combinations, it's voicing and registration that can lead to more distinctive orchestrations. There are tutti in Beethoven and Stravinsky that are totally unmistakable, totally right, and yet from a theory of orchestration viewpoint, they do everything wrong: putting instruments into odd registers, crossing lines, doubling thirds etc.. Here's an ambition: to be able to orchestrate with access to every point in the continuum of between the "effective" orchestrations of Jackie Gleason's Velvet Brass and the anarchic orchestration of Cage's orchestral masterpiece Cheap Imitation.
As a couselor at a summer music camp, I once had a few orchestration lessons with John Prince, a Hollywood/Big Band arranger. He had charts and charts showing which chord and interval combinations "worked" for each instrument or combination. One was not, for example, supposed to assign a major third to trombones below Bb-d. It could well be that a step towards a good balance between musical maturity and adventure was taken when I realised that if I had my trombones play the A-c# major third, leaving the registered where the interval "worked", something interesting might just still happen. Not necessarily something that "worked" within the narrow definition of the musically effective found in the textbooks, but definitely something with potential to be useful in the right musical context. And I suspect that there's still plenty of original orchestration to be found in the continuum between the possibilities that we're told will "work" and those we're told to avoid.
---
* Isn't good orchestrator often a kind of consolation prize for technical achievement given to composers who are not-quite great composers?
While that particular temptation will probably remain a sin imagined rather than a sin committed, it can also be understood as a response to a fundamental irritation I have with the premise underlying the teaching and practice of orchestration. I really enjoyed Orchestration class as a college student, and I continue to be fascinated both by the history of orchestration and theories of orchestration. I enjoy finding colorful little details in Berlioz, Widor, Koechlin, Piston, or Stiller, but the premise of most orchestration texts (as well as the premise underlying most "effective" music for orchestra) is that (a) there are some optimal ways of distributing notes among instruments, that (b) these can be observed in the music of the composers recognized as good orchestrators*, and that (c) we can derive some rules-of-thumb based upon those observations. A lot of music has been orchestrated from this premise -- especially in film and the opera -- but isn't it striking that in a great part of that lot, the orchestration is scarcely noticeable as a feature? The problem with the premise is clearly that if you want to do something with instruments that will be heard as distinctive from routine music-making, then you are going to have to do something that is other than optimal, or done differently from the practice of good orchestrators, and/or violate or ignore some of those rules-of-thumb.
*****
A friend just emailed me with a quote from the film director John Waters, defining beauty as "a look you'll never forget". What is the orchestration you'll never forget? Here are a few examples of orchestration that I happen to find beautiful: Monteverdi's use of the regal to accompany Charon in Orfeo, Vivaldi's use of solo winds in Tito Manlio, the scoring patterns for Mozart's quintets with two violas, and the basset horn writing in the Masonic music (including Zauberflöte), almost any inner-voice writing by Rossini, Schumann obstinately doubling the violins with flute in the Symphonies, Berlioz's Ophicleide in the Symphonie Fantastique (substituting a tuba doesn't have the same terrifying effect), Varese's ensemble in Hyperprism, practically any film score by Alex North (many of which were orchestrated by Henry Brant) or even some Bernard Hermann, and there are moments in Hawai'ian string band music, Martin Denney, Spike Jones, that I will never forget. Sometimes I think my personal compositional heaven would be a land where every orchestra had basset clarinets and horns, natural horns, ophicleidi, and gambas at the ready. (Satie: "With six trumpets you can do anything!") But as much as, if not more than, odd instrumental combinations, it's voicing and registration that can lead to more distinctive orchestrations. There are tutti in Beethoven and Stravinsky that are totally unmistakable, totally right, and yet from a theory of orchestration viewpoint, they do everything wrong: putting instruments into odd registers, crossing lines, doubling thirds etc.. Here's an ambition: to be able to orchestrate with access to every point in the continuum of between the "effective" orchestrations of Jackie Gleason's Velvet Brass and the anarchic orchestration of Cage's orchestral masterpiece Cheap Imitation.
As a couselor at a summer music camp, I once had a few orchestration lessons with John Prince, a Hollywood/Big Band arranger. He had charts and charts showing which chord and interval combinations "worked" for each instrument or combination. One was not, for example, supposed to assign a major third to trombones below Bb-d. It could well be that a step towards a good balance between musical maturity and adventure was taken when I realised that if I had my trombones play the A-c# major third, leaving the registered where the interval "worked", something interesting might just still happen. Not necessarily something that "worked" within the narrow definition of the musically effective found in the textbooks, but definitely something with potential to be useful in the right musical context. And I suspect that there's still plenty of original orchestration to be found in the continuum between the possibilities that we're told will "work" and those we're told to avoid.
---
* Isn't good orchestrator often a kind of consolation prize for technical achievement given to composers who are not-quite great composers?
Tuesday, June 27, 2006
Increasing Optimism
The Crunch is a blog by Guthry Trojan that takes the politics of music-making seriously.
SCORES/IMPROVISATIONS/TEXTS is a blog by Jukka Pekka Kervinen with many samples of graphic and prose scores. I still find prose scores to be useful in certain circumstances, graphic scores seem more an item of nostalgia than urgency these days, and I remain allergic whenever Fluxus flops in, but all things return and have potential to surprise.
(The illustration above may be an example of graphic notation, a Coptic manuscript, the interpretation of which is uncertain.)
SCORES/IMPROVISATIONS/TEXTS is a blog by Jukka Pekka Kervinen with many samples of graphic and prose scores. I still find prose scores to be useful in certain circumstances, graphic scores seem more an item of nostalgia than urgency these days, and I remain allergic whenever Fluxus flops in, but all things return and have potential to surprise.
(The illustration above may be an example of graphic notation, a Coptic manuscript, the interpretation of which is uncertain.)
What kind of American English Do You Speak?
| Your Linguistic Profile: |
| 65% General American English |
| 15% Yankee |
| 10% Dixie |
| 5% Upper Midwestern |
| 0% Midwestern |
What Kind of American English Do You Speak?
Fun little quiz, but it's a real bummer that they've not included my beloved Californian dialect.
Sunday, June 25, 2006
Confusion
I'm totally confused about putting music online. On one hand, there is a lot to be said to just putting stuff out there. Webspace is cheap and up- and download times are brief, so it all should be pretty easy. A lot of my colleagues are going the MySpace.com route, which I've just learned is part of an evil empire. On the other hand, my rights organization (GEMA, the German equivalent of ASCAP or BMI) wants to make me pay a license fee upfront if I want to put my own music online, which strikes me as circuitous and perhaps a real loss of my own rights, rather than protection. I do appreciate the fact that GEMA does a fair job of collecting fees for physical recordings, concerts and broadcasts, and I want musicians to be able to earn a fair income from any innovative technologies for reproduction and transfer, but I don't see even the outlines of a workable plan for doing this yet. I could wax a little rhapsodic legalese over the brewing conflict between 19th and 21st century conceptions of intellectual property rights, but the issue for me is a practical and immediate one. At the moment, I'm only putting scores, occasional works and juvenalia online, things not registered with GEMA, and will wait and see about the rest. But I'm totally open to other suggestions.
Thursday, June 22, 2006
An Invitation: The First Online Book of Consort Lessons
Quite a few composers write ensemble pieces in an "open" format. The instrumentation is not fixed beforehand, and can be played by a variety of ensembles. Others aspects of the work may be open as well: the form may be modular, with the order of parts, numbers of repetitions, or total duration variable; it could be composed of a single line that becomes an ensemble (think In C) or already divided into parts, equale or with contrasting ranges.
There have been collections of music in the past -- the Attaignant Dance Prints or the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book or C.F. Peter's collection of Walzes -- through which one can get a playable snapshot of musical activity in a single environment. I propose now to do the same for our contemporary consort music and to put online a collection of scores for ensembles with variable or flexible instrumentation.
So here's an invitation to send me a PDF file of a score, which will be put online at a site to be established. This is not a commercial publication offer, no commissions are offered and none will be paid, all composers will retain whatever rights that they assign to the own scores. (Advice: put a clear copyright notice, clearly identifying the title, your name, the copyright year, the name of your rights organization - ASCAP, BMI, GEMA etc. - and add some information on how to contact the composer in order to directly report any performances.) (Please send scores by email to djwolf ATTTT snafu DOTTTT de with "Consort" in the subject line.)
The purpose of this project is, first and foremost, to get pieces played, and the possibilities of reaching professional players in this way are real and serious. However, I will admit to an ambition beyond that, perhaps a naive ambition: wouldn't it be extremely cool to get together in the evening with a handful of musician friends, download some of the latest scores for open ensemble, and just play some music? Composers of "serious" music have been undervaluing amateur (in the best sense of the word) music-making lately, and the distinction between the music played by amateurs and professionals strikes me as artificial, a remnant of the 19th century masterwork ethic, with a discouraging effect on the prospects for building a repertoire that reaches across a continuum of performance conditions. If this project works out, we can think about a similar book of music for piano, or four-handed piano, or percussion, or flute, or recorder, or a book of songs or madrigals, but let's try this now and hear what happens.
There have been collections of music in the past -- the Attaignant Dance Prints or the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book or C.F. Peter's collection of Walzes -- through which one can get a playable snapshot of musical activity in a single environment. I propose now to do the same for our contemporary consort music and to put online a collection of scores for ensembles with variable or flexible instrumentation.
So here's an invitation to send me a PDF file of a score, which will be put online at a site to be established. This is not a commercial publication offer, no commissions are offered and none will be paid, all composers will retain whatever rights that they assign to the own scores. (Advice: put a clear copyright notice, clearly identifying the title, your name, the copyright year, the name of your rights organization - ASCAP, BMI, GEMA etc. - and add some information on how to contact the composer in order to directly report any performances.) (Please send scores by email to djwolf ATTTT snafu DOTTTT de with "Consort" in the subject line.)
The purpose of this project is, first and foremost, to get pieces played, and the possibilities of reaching professional players in this way are real and serious. However, I will admit to an ambition beyond that, perhaps a naive ambition: wouldn't it be extremely cool to get together in the evening with a handful of musician friends, download some of the latest scores for open ensemble, and just play some music? Composers of "serious" music have been undervaluing amateur (in the best sense of the word) music-making lately, and the distinction between the music played by amateurs and professionals strikes me as artificial, a remnant of the 19th century masterwork ethic, with a discouraging effect on the prospects for building a repertoire that reaches across a continuum of performance conditions. If this project works out, we can think about a similar book of music for piano, or four-handed piano, or percussion, or flute, or recorder, or a book of songs or madrigals, but let's try this now and hear what happens.
D.I.Y.
I heartily recommend Nicolas Collins' (1) new book Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking (Routledge 2006). This is a nice introduction to one of the paths in music experiments, one that began with independent and subversive tinkering with the remainders of the military-industrial-scientific world and has continued to be lively with the added jetsam of the digital era. Whether building useful little amps, mics, and oscillators, or laying hands on the entrails of discarded radios, this handbook is a nice way into a world where intuition and trial-and-era can play a greater role than those theory lessons you've probably long forgotten from high school Physics lab or machine shop anyways. The author's prose is sometimes a bit vivid for my tastes, managing to sustain a higher one-liner-per-paragraph-ratio than either Abby Hoffmann or Tom Robbins, but maybe that's a good thing, because the subject is one that you can probably take in best in small doses. My son (who'll turn 13 in two weeks) and I have already worked our way through a few chapters, and it sure beats the Boy Scout Manual for cool and noisy things to do at home, while matching the Boy Scout Manual point-for-point on the quality of the safety guidelines. Merit badge well deserved Mr. Collins!
___
(1) Let me get a possible conflict of interest out of the way: Mr. Collins and I were both students of Alvin Lucier. He studied with Lucier at a time, a few years before mine, when both he and Lucier shared an interest in applying electronics to their music, while by the time I got to Wesleyan, the post-analog, not-quite-yet-ready-for-prime-time-digital era meant -- for me -- that figuring out what to ask voices and instruments to do seemed more urgent. I entered grad school retired from both soldering (never solder on a pool table) and programming (nothing worse than entering Buchla hex code into a cassette recorder), and have basically avoided doing both ever since, although a certain summer project(2) looks likely to change that.
(2) More about that later.
___
(1) Let me get a possible conflict of interest out of the way: Mr. Collins and I were both students of Alvin Lucier. He studied with Lucier at a time, a few years before mine, when both he and Lucier shared an interest in applying electronics to their music, while by the time I got to Wesleyan, the post-analog, not-quite-yet-ready-for-prime-time-digital era meant -- for me -- that figuring out what to ask voices and instruments to do seemed more urgent. I entered grad school retired from both soldering (never solder on a pool table) and programming (nothing worse than entering Buchla hex code into a cassette recorder), and have basically avoided doing both ever since, although a certain summer project(2) looks likely to change that.
(2) More about that later.
Wednesday, June 21, 2006
Landmarks (13)
Johannes Brahms, Trio, Op. 40, für Waldhorn, Violine und Klavier in Es-Dur (1865)
Because I like it. (Okay, I could point out some amazing technical features, especially metrical, and those involving the problematic but rich instrumental combination, but it's really on the list becuase I like it, so that ought to be enough. I heard it in when I was 13, played by Hermann Baumann, Eudice Shapiro, and John Steele Ritter at the last Claremont Music Festival. The music was so cool that, riding back home in the dark on my bike after the concert, I realized that there was no better ambition than that of composing, and made that ambition my own. Note to my parents: You can blame Brahms).
Because I like it. (Okay, I could point out some amazing technical features, especially metrical, and those involving the problematic but rich instrumental combination, but it's really on the list becuase I like it, so that ought to be enough. I heard it in when I was 13, played by Hermann Baumann, Eudice Shapiro, and John Steele Ritter at the last Claremont Music Festival. The music was so cool that, riding back home in the dark on my bike after the concert, I realized that there was no better ambition than that of composing, and made that ambition my own. Note to my parents: You can blame Brahms).
Landmarks (12)
Alvin Lucier: BIRD AND PERSON DYNING (1975)
Lucier could have entered this landmark list several times already -- I AM SITTING IN A ROOM (can you think of any other piece from the '60s with the same staying power?), MUSIC FOR SOLO PERFORMER, MUSIC ON A LONG THIN WIRE, CROSSINGS, or NAVIGATIONS FOR STRINGS might still appear -- but BIRD AND PERSON DYNING (an audio and video version can be found here) is here noted as a landmark because it is, uniquely, music where we actually listen to a composer listening. The sweet joke of the title conveys some of the initimacy of the piece: on stage are found only a solo performer wearing binaural mics, an electronic bird call hidden in a Christmas ornament, and a couple of loud speakers. The only visible motion is that of the performer, carefully moving through the space, sometimes walking, sometimes making just the slightest move of the head (listening and moving are here inseparable). The sounds heard are that bird call, and that bird call has heard by the performer through the binaural mics and the loudspeakers, and the increasing interactions between the two. Like all intimate situations, this simple one can rapidly, no, catastrophically, turn into a complex one.
When I first heard this piece -- early in the Volcker administration -- something suddenly came into focus when I realized that one could understand a piece of music as a path through an environment -- a set of materials and conditions and relationships --, a metaphor which has usefully stuck ever since.
Lucier could have entered this landmark list several times already -- I AM SITTING IN A ROOM (can you think of any other piece from the '60s with the same staying power?), MUSIC FOR SOLO PERFORMER, MUSIC ON A LONG THIN WIRE, CROSSINGS, or NAVIGATIONS FOR STRINGS might still appear -- but BIRD AND PERSON DYNING (an audio and video version can be found here) is here noted as a landmark because it is, uniquely, music where we actually listen to a composer listening. The sweet joke of the title conveys some of the initimacy of the piece: on stage are found only a solo performer wearing binaural mics, an electronic bird call hidden in a Christmas ornament, and a couple of loud speakers. The only visible motion is that of the performer, carefully moving through the space, sometimes walking, sometimes making just the slightest move of the head (listening and moving are here inseparable). The sounds heard are that bird call, and that bird call has heard by the performer through the binaural mics and the loudspeakers, and the increasing interactions between the two. Like all intimate situations, this simple one can rapidly, no, catastrophically, turn into a complex one.
When I first heard this piece -- early in the Volcker administration -- something suddenly came into focus when I realized that one could understand a piece of music as a path through an environment -- a set of materials and conditions and relationships --, a metaphor which has usefully stuck ever since.
Saturday, June 17, 2006
In the repertoire
Today would have been Stravinsky's 124th.
A friend pointed out a review by Terry Teachout of the new, second volume, of the Stravinsky biography by Stephen Walsh, Stravinsky, The Second Exile: France and America, 1934-1971 . The review focuses on two areas, Stravinsky's relationship with his family and with Robert Craft (the man for whom we now reserve the profession of ananuensis) and the veracity of Stravinsky and Craft, a topic which doesn't interest me, and the status of the late music, a topic which interests me a lot.
Teachout writes:
I believe that the Requiem Canticles is* a repertoire item, but it is a unique member of the repertoire. It has not been and I expect that will never be played with great frequency. In part, this is due to material circumstances: it requires an orchestra, which, although small in total, requires the hiring of additional players in some sections, it requires a choir and solists with better-than-normal musicianship, and it is relatively brief for a work that requires such added resources. In other words, it costs too much. But I believe that there are also non-material considerations which weigh more heavily in this case. The Requiem Canticles is, in the end, a requiem. An odd requiem, to be sure: an incomplete or fragmented text, a text in Latin by a Russian Orthodox composer, the odd duration and ensemble. It has always been a problem to find the other piece or pieces to program with it in a concert. Or does it belong in a concert hall at all? Putting it in church is also a problem. Impossible in an orthodox church, chancy in a catholic church, and probably not appropriate to a protestant church. And the Requiem Canticles is an auto-requiem by a composer whom musicians hold in high esteem. It's one of those pieces for which we hold such high esteem that we cannot let it suffer a bad performance. So we don't play it often, but it haunts us all the time, and when we play it, we try to get it right.
"In the repertoire" does not mean played often.
---
* Should it be the Requiem Canticles are or the Requiem Canticles is?
A friend pointed out a review by Terry Teachout of the new, second volume, of the Stravinsky biography by Stephen Walsh, Stravinsky, The Second Exile: France and America, 1934-1971 . The review focuses on two areas, Stravinsky's relationship with his family and with Robert Craft (the man for whom we now reserve the profession of ananuensis) and the veracity of Stravinsky and Craft, a topic which doesn't interest me, and the status of the late music, a topic which interests me a lot.
Teachout writes:
Yet except for Agon, which survives mainly in its capacity as the score for one of Balanchine’s best ballets, none of Stravinsky’s later works has entered the concert repertoire. Nor does it now appear likely that they will be taken up by a new generation of performers. With the revival of tonality, time has passed them by.In the late works there is at least one failure (The Flood), there are several occasional and memorial pieces, ranging in quality from delightful to harmless, and there are some arrangements (J.S. Bach, Gesualdo, Sibelius, Hugo Wolf). Failures, occasional pieces and arrangements rarely have repertoire status. (Though it should be noted that the little Greeting Prelude is both an arrangement and an occasional piece, and manages to get played with some frequency). But there are four major works: Agon, Threni, Movements for piano and Orchestra, and the Requiem Canticles. Teachout and I can agree on Agon, and performances of the other three pieces are indeed rare. Threni and Movements might never have a wide audience, although the professional opinion on Movements has always been high and, in the case of Threni, has lately been part of a modest growth market. With the right players, Movements can be like fire crackers in the concert hall, so I wouldn't close the book on it.
I believe that the Requiem Canticles is* a repertoire item, but it is a unique member of the repertoire. It has not been and I expect that will never be played with great frequency. In part, this is due to material circumstances: it requires an orchestra, which, although small in total, requires the hiring of additional players in some sections, it requires a choir and solists with better-than-normal musicianship, and it is relatively brief for a work that requires such added resources. In other words, it costs too much. But I believe that there are also non-material considerations which weigh more heavily in this case. The Requiem Canticles is, in the end, a requiem. An odd requiem, to be sure: an incomplete or fragmented text, a text in Latin by a Russian Orthodox composer, the odd duration and ensemble. It has always been a problem to find the other piece or pieces to program with it in a concert. Or does it belong in a concert hall at all? Putting it in church is also a problem. Impossible in an orthodox church, chancy in a catholic church, and probably not appropriate to a protestant church. And the Requiem Canticles is an auto-requiem by a composer whom musicians hold in high esteem. It's one of those pieces for which we hold such high esteem that we cannot let it suffer a bad performance. So we don't play it often, but it haunts us all the time, and when we play it, we try to get it right.
"In the repertoire" does not mean played often.
---
* Should it be the Requiem Canticles are or the Requiem Canticles is?
Friday, June 16, 2006
Nixon in China/Reagan in Space?
John Holbo at Crooked Timber reminds us of one of those wtf? moments in American diplomatic history:
"I couldn't help but -- one point in our discussions privately with General Secretary Gorbachev -- when you stop to think that we're all God's children, wherever we may live in the world, I couldn't help but say to him, just think how easy his task and mine might be in these meetings that we held if suddenly there was a threat to this world from some other species, from another planet, outside in the universe. We'd forget all the little local differences that we have between our countries, and we would find out once and for all that we really are all human beings here on this Earth together. Well, I don't suppose we can wait for some alien race to come down and threaten us, but I think that between us we can bring about that realization."
-- Ronald Reagan, remarks to the students and faculty at Fallston High School in Fallston, Maryland, December 4, 1985
This is posted as yet one more reminder that recent American political history, as momentarily lively as it may get, is seldom the source of potentially operatic material. Had Mars actually attacked in 1984, I doubt that we'd be seeing the revivals of Nixon in China that grace our stages these days.
Wednesday, June 14, 2006
Sound Thinking
Casey O'Callaghan is a philosopher specializing in perception, and perception of sound in particular. He's got some interesting essays online. Reading philosophy is sometimes a bit alien for me, especially when the topic is one in which I have some intimacy. The philosopher's perspective, and I suppose it's necessarily so, is at once reduced and sophisticated. I can recommend O'Callaghan's essay on Hearing Recorded Sounds.
Melodica
This (Quicktime required) is disturbing, especially for those of us who neither do mornings well nor drink coffee. But, hey, you can't be anything but happy when there's a melodica involved. It's the law. Christian Wolff is probably the most significant melodica-playing composer, and Steve Reich even has a piece named after the instrument (although I believe that he actually used a melodica-knock-off toy instrument for his tape piece).
Okay, it's not the law. But it ought to be.
Okay, it's not the law. But it ought to be.
Tuesday, June 13, 2006
As long as we're on the topic
I've been posting a lot lately, but readership and response is modest, with the thinner summer readership already setting in. Should I take a break? If you find any of this worth reading, let me know (either via the comments function or email DJWOLF attttt SNAFU dotttttt DE), or I'll just hang loose for a bit, maybe compose some more or even (finally) get around to painting the window frames.
Dept. of Short-Lived Ideas
I had the notion of applying for press credentials and blogging from the Darmstädter Ferienkurs this August. But before dashing off an email, I took a look at the program (featured composers: André, Aperghis, Furrer, Hölszky, Hosokawa, Lachenmann, Mack, Reudenbach) and better judgement took over.
Okay, I might drive down to hear something by Dieter Mack, but the combination of this program (bleak, grim, bleaker, grimey, grimmer) and sweltering, dusty Darmstadt in August is just not promising stuff for a "what I did in my summer vacation" essay.
Okay, I might drive down to hear something by Dieter Mack, but the combination of this program (bleak, grim, bleaker, grimey, grimmer) and sweltering, dusty Darmstadt in August is just not promising stuff for a "what I did in my summer vacation" essay.
Monday, June 12, 2006
In the garden of secret theories
I entertain a suspicion that most musicians have -- at least within the privacy of our ateliers, rumpus rooms, redoubts and cloister cells -- rather idiosyncratic ways of thinking about what we do when we make music. With time and experience, you come to certain understandings with the muse: the terms and metaphors you use to describe music, its parts and its attributes, the habitual networks of associations with which you tie those parts and attributes together, and the external sentiments we attach to both parts and their connections.
On the one hand, this is simply the personalization of the theory that we have received through institutions and teachers, but I think that it is both more and less than that. Personalizing puts weights and values on systems and structures that come to us from "official" music theory with a certain degree of value neutrality. But a personal, private, theory is under no obligation to be either complete or internally consistant, demands that are reasonably made of public theories. (Personal theories are not validated by the truth or logical consistancy of the theory, but by the character of the works and performances they help bring into being.) And personal theories can make connections among repertoire that represent the individual's experience and taste, and that repertoire has no need to be understood as coherent in any terms other than the individual's experience and taste.
The metaphor can come from anyplace. I was told once that the composer Robert Erickson described tonal functions in terms of a baseball diamond. I could well imagine other sporting metaphors (cricket, mumblety-peg, poker, and thoroughbred racing are my preferences) or handwork or programming or even a culinary tact. Algorithms have considerable currency, and an individual algorithm has metaphoric character: given the difficulty (indeed, impossibility) of finding the shortest algorithm required to produce a given work of music, any given algorithm is going to have something arbitrary and tentative about it. (For what it's worth, I used to think about the relationship between algorithmic discipline and impromptu handwork in my own music in terms of tending header on a wheat harvester. (1)
I have a couple of theoretic notions that I keep coming back to in my work, and I like to think that I am able to keep them rich by avoiding or postponing the expression of these notions in formal terms. Perhaps at risk of public doubt of my complete sanity, I'll mention a few of these. One is the notion of a field, a space in which musical materials are assembled.(2) The space could be organized along some strict metric -- pitch height or class, a tuning lattice, a row box, or a Partchian diamond or one of Erv Wilson's Combination-Product Sets -- or it could be filled in some random way, a one dimensional list, or one of Cage's multi-dimensional charts (as in the Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra or the Music of Changes), or the pools of material found in some of Christian Wolff's "cuing" pieces. I often think of my scores as paths across such fields. These paths might be random, or weighted, or patterned, or could be forced to follow a kind of gravity. (For example, if you think of the primary, root position, triads in common practice tonality as positions in a series of fifths IV -- I -- V, common practice allows any move to the right, but only moves of one step to the left). Another notion dear to me is that of spacing -- how pitches are assembled vertically. I pay close attention to gaps and densities in the spacing, and often times the choice of a new pitch will come more immediately to me from spatial rather that functional harmonic considerations. I've come to recognize three basic spacing structures: one in which intervals get smaller as frequency increases, in this resembling a harmonic series, I call "harmonic", another when intervals get smaller as frequency descends, I call "subharmonic", and a third, in which intervals are more or less equally distributed, I call "neutral" or "equal". (It's not neccesary that these relationships be precisely harmonic, equal/neutral, or subharmonic, juat the rough characterization suffices). As this is purely a private theory, I'm not going to formalize it, but I do believe that on the basis of a spacing model, you could construct a reasonbly complete description of species counterpoint, tonal harmony (major/minor, consonant/dissonant) or even orchestration (clear/muddy, thin/dense etc.).
---
(1) Yes, it is often a good thing that private theories stay private.
(2)In my catalog, there are a number of pieces which come directly out of this : Field Study, Crossing The Field, Fieldwork (String Quartet II.), Afar Afield, Farther Afield, The Art of Fielding. Aside from sharing the notion of the field as a point of departure, these works have little in common.
On the one hand, this is simply the personalization of the theory that we have received through institutions and teachers, but I think that it is both more and less than that. Personalizing puts weights and values on systems and structures that come to us from "official" music theory with a certain degree of value neutrality. But a personal, private, theory is under no obligation to be either complete or internally consistant, demands that are reasonably made of public theories. (Personal theories are not validated by the truth or logical consistancy of the theory, but by the character of the works and performances they help bring into being.) And personal theories can make connections among repertoire that represent the individual's experience and taste, and that repertoire has no need to be understood as coherent in any terms other than the individual's experience and taste.
The metaphor can come from anyplace. I was told once that the composer Robert Erickson described tonal functions in terms of a baseball diamond. I could well imagine other sporting metaphors (cricket, mumblety-peg, poker, and thoroughbred racing are my preferences) or handwork or programming or even a culinary tact. Algorithms have considerable currency, and an individual algorithm has metaphoric character: given the difficulty (indeed, impossibility) of finding the shortest algorithm required to produce a given work of music, any given algorithm is going to have something arbitrary and tentative about it. (For what it's worth, I used to think about the relationship between algorithmic discipline and impromptu handwork in my own music in terms of tending header on a wheat harvester. (1)
I have a couple of theoretic notions that I keep coming back to in my work, and I like to think that I am able to keep them rich by avoiding or postponing the expression of these notions in formal terms. Perhaps at risk of public doubt of my complete sanity, I'll mention a few of these. One is the notion of a field, a space in which musical materials are assembled.(2) The space could be organized along some strict metric -- pitch height or class, a tuning lattice, a row box, or a Partchian diamond or one of Erv Wilson's Combination-Product Sets -- or it could be filled in some random way, a one dimensional list, or one of Cage's multi-dimensional charts (as in the Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra or the Music of Changes), or the pools of material found in some of Christian Wolff's "cuing" pieces. I often think of my scores as paths across such fields. These paths might be random, or weighted, or patterned, or could be forced to follow a kind of gravity. (For example, if you think of the primary, root position, triads in common practice tonality as positions in a series of fifths IV -- I -- V, common practice allows any move to the right, but only moves of one step to the left). Another notion dear to me is that of spacing -- how pitches are assembled vertically. I pay close attention to gaps and densities in the spacing, and often times the choice of a new pitch will come more immediately to me from spatial rather that functional harmonic considerations. I've come to recognize three basic spacing structures: one in which intervals get smaller as frequency increases, in this resembling a harmonic series, I call "harmonic", another when intervals get smaller as frequency descends, I call "subharmonic", and a third, in which intervals are more or less equally distributed, I call "neutral" or "equal". (It's not neccesary that these relationships be precisely harmonic, equal/neutral, or subharmonic, juat the rough characterization suffices). As this is purely a private theory, I'm not going to formalize it, but I do believe that on the basis of a spacing model, you could construct a reasonbly complete description of species counterpoint, tonal harmony (major/minor, consonant/dissonant) or even orchestration (clear/muddy, thin/dense etc.).
---
(1) Yes, it is often a good thing that private theories stay private.
(2)In my catalog, there are a number of pieces which come directly out of this : Field Study, Crossing The Field, Fieldwork (String Quartet II.), Afar Afield, Farther Afield, The Art of Fielding. Aside from sharing the notion of the field as a point of departure, these works have little in common.
Sunday, June 11, 2006
Free for the plucking
Prickly Paradigm Press is now putting several of its older titles online in PDF format. PPP publishes small books, mostly from social scientists, or those on the edge thereof, and I've found the PPPs that I've read to be thoughtful, playful, and a nice departure from my everyday scholarly music reading (how about some German here: Alltagsmusikwissenschaftlicheslektüre)(!), especially when there's something with which to disagree.
Saturday, June 10, 2006
A walk in the woods
from an interview, Lawrence Weschler on Norman O. Brown*:
... I took a walk with him—this must have been 10 or 15 years ago—in the forest outside Santa Cruz. And he was saying, “It’s all been a huge mistake.” I said, “What’s been a mistake?” He said “Freud, Marx, wrong, wrong, wrong.” I said, “What are you talking about.” “Chance,” he said. “I never took chance seriously enough. [John] Cage should have been my master.”
___
*I was also fortunate to have Brown as a teacher. I will forever be in his debt: he was patient with my words, he presented me to John Cage, and blessed my graduate study with a recommendation to go to Wesleyan. Officially "Professor of Humanities", and originally a classicist, in the end that which he taught his students, following the example of Charles Olson, was posture, and if composing is about anything at all, it's about posture. Try this: the next time you play or listen to a piece of music, ask yourself if the composer has posture? Has she or he taken a stance towards sounds or silence? Towards the world, towards you, the listener? Does the composer love the world enough to risk the inherently violent act of putting sounds into it in order to change it?
... I took a walk with him—this must have been 10 or 15 years ago—in the forest outside Santa Cruz. And he was saying, “It’s all been a huge mistake.” I said, “What’s been a mistake?” He said “Freud, Marx, wrong, wrong, wrong.” I said, “What are you talking about.” “Chance,” he said. “I never took chance seriously enough. [John] Cage should have been my master.”
___
*I was also fortunate to have Brown as a teacher. I will forever be in his debt: he was patient with my words, he presented me to John Cage, and blessed my graduate study with a recommendation to go to Wesleyan. Officially "Professor of Humanities", and originally a classicist, in the end that which he taught his students, following the example of Charles Olson, was posture, and if composing is about anything at all, it's about posture. Try this: the next time you play or listen to a piece of music, ask yourself if the composer has posture? Has she or he taken a stance towards sounds or silence? Towards the world, towards you, the listener? Does the composer love the world enough to risk the inherently violent act of putting sounds into it in order to change it?
Consorting
It's time to put in a good word for those composers who have put ensembles together to play their own works, and works by like-minded musicians. And special praise goes to those ensembles that respond to scores with open, or flexible, instrumentation, and open or modular structures. (I hereby propose a project: an online "Book of Consort Lessons", an open-ended collection of scores, flexibly orchestratable, and adjustable to resources at hand.)
I am a great partisan of Bratislava's "middle-class orchestra" Požoň sentimentál (sorry but their web site appears to be a bit dismantled at the moment), with a basic instrumentation of flute, violin, piano, and accordion, they are a kind of K.-&-K.-era salon orchestra, playing originals by the four members as well as arrangements of everything from salon standards to Schoenberg. A fascinating take on Kitsch and life in central Europe.
If you are fortunate to be in the LA area on the 24th, you can hear three such ensembles in one evening, those led by Paul Bailey, Jon Brenner, and Lloyd Rodgers:
TOTAL EARCANDY: PBE's LATEST FLASH-BASED MUSIC COMPOSITIONS ADDS SWEET FLAVOR TO DIGITAL MUSIC COLLECTION.
June 9th 2006
Expanding on its line of acoustic and digital music,the Paul Bailey Ensemble today announced a new series compositions designed sure to be a feast for the ears as well as the eyes and come in such tasty colors as coconut white, tropical ice blue, and licorice black.
These new products incorporate our most coveted features in a fresh design that's unlike anything in the market today," said Kelly Davis, senior product manager for at the Paul Bailey Ensemble. "They're a playful and easy way to enjoy live performance; just listening at them makes you want to smile." The compostions are easily played back using both MP3 and Ogg Vorbis music files, in addition to supporting WMA and WAV formats. They are compatible with Itunes ™ online music store and include Itunes ® software to import, manage and transfer music collections.
Becoming available at retail stores and at authorized dealers nationwide, the ensemble will be giving a special demonstration of these new products at the realnewmusic festival on Saturday, June 24th at Whittier College. Pricing is flexible, Tickets are $10.00 /$7.50 (students and seniors or anybody two for $10) .
At the conclusion of this event the ensemble will distribute an optical disc that connects directly to a PC for the process of transferring music. These discs provide up to 5 hours of continuous playback and feature a quick-change function that enables individual selection of your favorite musical products. In fact, through recent changes in our distribution system you can access any of this material online for a small fee.
info:
Kelly Davis
Hakim M. Bey
Division of Public Safety
Paul Bailey Ensemble Inc.
314-228-1700
I am a great partisan of Bratislava's "middle-class orchestra" Požoň sentimentál (sorry but their web site appears to be a bit dismantled at the moment), with a basic instrumentation of flute, violin, piano, and accordion, they are a kind of K.-&-K.-era salon orchestra, playing originals by the four members as well as arrangements of everything from salon standards to Schoenberg. A fascinating take on Kitsch and life in central Europe.
If you are fortunate to be in the LA area on the 24th, you can hear three such ensembles in one evening, those led by Paul Bailey, Jon Brenner, and Lloyd Rodgers:
REALNEWMUSIC FESTIVAL, SATURDAY JUNE 24TH
TOTAL EARCANDY: PBE's LATEST FLASH-BASED MUSIC COMPOSITIONS ADDS SWEET FLAVOR TO DIGITAL MUSIC COLLECTION.
June 9th 2006
Expanding on its line of acoustic and digital music,the Paul Bailey Ensemble today announced a new series compositions designed sure to be a feast for the ears as well as the eyes and come in such tasty colors as coconut white, tropical ice blue, and licorice black.
These new products incorporate our most coveted features in a fresh design that's unlike anything in the market today," said Kelly Davis, senior product manager for at the Paul Bailey Ensemble. "They're a playful and easy way to enjoy live performance; just listening at them makes you want to smile." The compostions are easily played back using both MP3 and Ogg Vorbis music files, in addition to supporting WMA and WAV formats. They are compatible with Itunes ™ online music store and include Itunes ® software to import, manage and transfer music collections.
Becoming available at retail stores and at authorized dealers nationwide, the ensemble will be giving a special demonstration of these new products at the realnewmusic festival on Saturday, June 24th at Whittier College. Pricing is flexible, Tickets are $10.00 /$7.50 (students and seniors or anybody two for $10) .
At the conclusion of this event the ensemble will distribute an optical disc that connects directly to a PC for the process of transferring music. These discs provide up to 5 hours of continuous playback and feature a quick-change function that enables individual selection of your favorite musical products. In fact, through recent changes in our distribution system you can access any of this material online for a small fee.
info:
Kelly Davis
Hakim M. Bey
Division of Public Safety
Paul Bailey Ensemble Inc.
314-228-1700
Thursday, June 08, 2006
Left Coasters
Here are two great resources for West Coast experimental music, that I've been meaning to post for a good long time:
The first is the Other Minds Archive at the Internet Archive, including much from the tapes of KPFA, the Bay Area Pacifica station. (I like this concert of works by composers mostly connected with the S.F. Tape Music Center (I like the Ramon Sender aquarium piece segueing into the Leedy Octet: Quaderno Rossiniano), this autobiography by Henry Cowell, and this 1947 rehearsal recording of Stravinsky conducting the Symphonies of Wind Instruments. There are also treasures by Lou Harrison, John Cage, Robert Ashley, Harry Partch and many others. It is disappointing, though, not to have anything by Robert Erickson, for a time Music Director at KPFA, a fine composer and an important teacher).
The second is a document archive collected by the late Jim Horton.
Both of these resources are Bay Area-centric. We really need some similar resources for Los Angeles, but I suspect that it would be a much more difficult topic to cover. L.A. is spread-out in all ways, centerless, and anything that isn't solid (and much of that which is) simply melts into air. But then again, that's why it's called the City of Angels.*
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* Okay, I know that it's the City of Our Lady, Queen of the Angels on the River Porciuncula but I couldn't resist.
The first is the Other Minds Archive at the Internet Archive, including much from the tapes of KPFA, the Bay Area Pacifica station. (I like this concert of works by composers mostly connected with the S.F. Tape Music Center (I like the Ramon Sender aquarium piece segueing into the Leedy Octet: Quaderno Rossiniano), this autobiography by Henry Cowell, and this 1947 rehearsal recording of Stravinsky conducting the Symphonies of Wind Instruments. There are also treasures by Lou Harrison, John Cage, Robert Ashley, Harry Partch and many others. It is disappointing, though, not to have anything by Robert Erickson, for a time Music Director at KPFA, a fine composer and an important teacher).
The second is a document archive collected by the late Jim Horton.
Both of these resources are Bay Area-centric. We really need some similar resources for Los Angeles, but I suspect that it would be a much more difficult topic to cover. L.A. is spread-out in all ways, centerless, and anything that isn't solid (and much of that which is) simply melts into air. But then again, that's why it's called the City of Angels.*
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* Okay, I know that it's the City of Our Lady, Queen of the Angels on the River Porciuncula but I couldn't resist.
Pastimes
So I happen to run into two composing colleagues in the Main Train Station here in Frankfurt. We have a few minutes to chat before the trains start to leave. Turns out that we all had something in common besides our vocation: we're all insomniacs, and we all agreed that when all else failed, there was nothing that went better with that insomnia than televised hold 'em poker at 3:00 in the morning.
Wednesday, June 07, 2006
Knowing when to stop
Remember the Magic FingersTM machine? Once upon a time, they were installed in motels everywhere, a coin operated gadget that would shake the bed for a few minutes in return for a quarter. I suppose that it was someone's idea of a mechanized massage, but that someone was probably a Calvinist of some sort who had never actually experienced a real massage. But the Magic FingersTM machine did have one great, if unintended, attribute: it felt so good when it stopped.
When everything has gone well, a composer has that same feeling when a piece is finished, especially when all the loose ends are covered: parts made, errors corrected, posted or faxed or emailed in time for the deadline. But if the composer harbors any doubts at all, the strangest, emptiest, feeling can set in. You're not sure if the piece works or not, or if you have really done all the work, or if you have gone too far, meddled a bit too much with something that was better off the way it was before you started mucking about. Or maybe the piece was no good to begin with and no amount of adjustment is ever going to fix the thing.
When I have the luxury of a far-off deadline, I like to tinker with my pieces, especially when it comes to details. I like to load up my notation program with a half-dozen scores, decide which one works least well, and then go in and work on that one first, and then a bit on the others. Then I go through, reassess the rankings, and begin again. This process has the benefit of elevating the general level of quality, but carries the risk of going to far and throwing out some good material along the way (confession: I am miserly with my disk space, lazy about saving interim versions of pieces, and have no intention of changing these habits). It also has a slight masochistic quality to it: by continuously delaying the end of a piece, I am sustaining the euphoria of the compositional experience in exchange for delaying the feeling of satisfaction that comes with completion. Some composers work fast and never revise, others are serious revisors, taking years, if not decades to finish pieces. Analyse this if you like, but I think it takes all kinds to keep our musical lives lively.
When everything has gone well, a composer has that same feeling when a piece is finished, especially when all the loose ends are covered: parts made, errors corrected, posted or faxed or emailed in time for the deadline. But if the composer harbors any doubts at all, the strangest, emptiest, feeling can set in. You're not sure if the piece works or not, or if you have really done all the work, or if you have gone too far, meddled a bit too much with something that was better off the way it was before you started mucking about. Or maybe the piece was no good to begin with and no amount of adjustment is ever going to fix the thing.
When I have the luxury of a far-off deadline, I like to tinker with my pieces, especially when it comes to details. I like to load up my notation program with a half-dozen scores, decide which one works least well, and then go in and work on that one first, and then a bit on the others. Then I go through, reassess the rankings, and begin again. This process has the benefit of elevating the general level of quality, but carries the risk of going to far and throwing out some good material along the way (confession: I am miserly with my disk space, lazy about saving interim versions of pieces, and have no intention of changing these habits). It also has a slight masochistic quality to it: by continuously delaying the end of a piece, I am sustaining the euphoria of the compositional experience in exchange for delaying the feeling of satisfaction that comes with completion. Some composers work fast and never revise, others are serious revisors, taking years, if not decades to finish pieces. Analyse this if you like, but I think it takes all kinds to keep our musical lives lively.
Sunday, June 04, 2006
Steering the customer
From my Inbox today:
Dear Amazon.com Customer,After considerable deliberation, I have decided to pass on this particular item. Nevertheless, my curiosity about Lord Andrew's contributions to extended instrumental techniques has risen from nil to slightly more than negligible.We've noticed that customers who have purchased The Contemporary Violin: ExtENDed Performance Techniques (The New Instrumentation) by Strange Patricia also purchased books by Andrew Lloyd Webber. For this reason, you might like to know that Andrew Lloyd Webber's Andrew Lloyd Webber Classics (Andrew Lloyd Webber Classics) will be released in paperback soon. You can pre-order your copy at a savings of 35% by following the link below.
What's wrong with this sentence?
Over at the New Music Box, I read the following:
Orchestra Summit 2006If that's an "industry" then it's about as advanced as the Morgan Motor Company. I mean, seriously, do we really want to speak of orchestras as industrial? That's risking a market environment in which I do not believe most musicians are prepared to compete, and I suspect that the introduction of industrial production values may adversely affect product identity. From an industrial point-of-view, it is silly that Morgan still has a woodshop, puts the wheels on first so that the cars can be rolled up and down the hill from shop to shop, and use very few power tools, but those are exactly the elements that make the Morgan's identity as a "hand-made" motorcar so charming and enduring. The endurance of the orchestra as an institution is also in large part due to charm -- evening dress with tails, horsehair bows, coughing between movements, that person in front of the orchestra noiselessly gesticulating -- and it's hard to say what a loss any retreat from these charming elements would mean.
No one denies that we all want performances of new orchestral work that composers, musicians, and their audiences will look to with pride and satisfaction. Six key industry players discuss ways of reaching that goal and the hurdles that remain in our path.
Saturday, June 03, 2006
Practicing theory
Checking up on a few Wikipedia music theory articles, I found a few discussion pages where articles were critiqued for not representing "standard music theory". While the articles in question may well have had some genuinely unorthodox aspects or even contained the -- in Wikipedia forbidden and dreaded -- "new research", this line of criticism hung, however, behind the great fig leaf of music education, the notion that there is a "standard music theory". In practice, most of what is called "music theory", even well into a university-level education, is, in fact getting command of notation and some terminology, with the goal in the best cases of attaching that notation and terminology onto real sounds as an useful ancillary to performance and perhaps some composition. Few students are made explicitly aware of the diffences between music theory as an analytic or synthetic activity, and many students are confused by the relationship between the physics of musical sounds, the perception and cognition of musical sounds, and the cultural construction known as music theory. Further, very few music students leave even a graduate education with any understanding of the breadth of music theory, whether as analytic theory (concerned how existing works of music were put together, are heard, and possibly what they "mean") or as speculative theory (concerned with how works of music might be put together or heard).
I am at best, a casual theorist (besser auf Deutsch: Teilzeitmusiktheoriekonsument), but I have found theory to be useful and even essential to my odd combination of interests, and admire serious music theory as an intellectual pursuit with depth, relevance, and unexplored potential. Writing now as a trained ethnomusicologist who has closely observed theorists in the wild, allow me to offer three observations about the practice of music theory:
(1) Music theory is parochial. Music theory is sometimes practiced within national boundaries, sometimes within networks of theorists or institutions. Comparing the best selling harmony books in Hungary, Austria, Germany, France, Russia, or the US can be a startling experience. The premises and the notations can be wildly different. (This has very practical professional consequences: without recognizing the boundaries or networks, is may be difficult for a musician or scholar to make contacts or advance professionally. Tangentially relevant aside: In my own case, I think I aced the music GRE because I happened to notice that the chair of the Music GRE Board at the time was a Berlioz scholar. Sure enough, at least one of the 100 questions had to do with Berlioz; whether or not Berlioz was worth 1% of an exam attempting to cover music theory and history with at least token references to non-western and popular music was besides the point, which was: knowing something about Berlioz is worth something on this test).
(2) Music theory is provisional. The nature, extent, and limits of music are not known, and it is far from known what criteria would a "final theory" of music would have to fulfill. We are probably stuck for the foreseeable future in the state of waiting for better theories to come along. This is an active area of research but at any given time, it has probably been explored more thoroughly through innovative composition rather than theory.
(3) Competing theories of music do not neccessarily contradict or invalidate one another. They may complement one another, filling in each others' lacunae, or tracing the alternative paths in a music which is, in fact, ambiguous, or, in many cases, they may be equivalent, alternative ways of describing the same phenomena. While there may be some institutional power to be had in forcing the hegemony of a single theory or complex of theories, I remain persuaded that having as many theoretical tools available as possible is both more sustainable intellectually, and more humble in the face of the complexity of music.
I am at best, a casual theorist (besser auf Deutsch: Teilzeitmusiktheoriekonsument), but I have found theory to be useful and even essential to my odd combination of interests, and admire serious music theory as an intellectual pursuit with depth, relevance, and unexplored potential. Writing now as a trained ethnomusicologist who has closely observed theorists in the wild, allow me to offer three observations about the practice of music theory:
(1) Music theory is parochial. Music theory is sometimes practiced within national boundaries, sometimes within networks of theorists or institutions. Comparing the best selling harmony books in Hungary, Austria, Germany, France, Russia, or the US can be a startling experience. The premises and the notations can be wildly different. (This has very practical professional consequences: without recognizing the boundaries or networks, is may be difficult for a musician or scholar to make contacts or advance professionally. Tangentially relevant aside: In my own case, I think I aced the music GRE because I happened to notice that the chair of the Music GRE Board at the time was a Berlioz scholar. Sure enough, at least one of the 100 questions had to do with Berlioz; whether or not Berlioz was worth 1% of an exam attempting to cover music theory and history with at least token references to non-western and popular music was besides the point, which was: knowing something about Berlioz is worth something on this test).
(2) Music theory is provisional. The nature, extent, and limits of music are not known, and it is far from known what criteria would a "final theory" of music would have to fulfill. We are probably stuck for the foreseeable future in the state of waiting for better theories to come along. This is an active area of research but at any given time, it has probably been explored more thoroughly through innovative composition rather than theory.
(3) Competing theories of music do not neccessarily contradict or invalidate one another. They may complement one another, filling in each others' lacunae, or tracing the alternative paths in a music which is, in fact, ambiguous, or, in many cases, they may be equivalent, alternative ways of describing the same phenomena. While there may be some institutional power to be had in forcing the hegemony of a single theory or complex of theories, I remain persuaded that having as many theoretical tools available as possible is both more sustainable intellectually, and more humble in the face of the complexity of music.
If the form fits
Over at the Sequenza 21 Composers' Forum, Jodru asked about "Relevant Forms":
The question could rather be: Relevant to what and to what ends does that relevance function?
If your song, dance, or album (now going the way of the dodo in favor of the consumer's iPod list) is "relevant" to the prevailing entertainment market, then it is probably tightly bound to the content restrictions of that market, thus maintaining the status quo, or when introducing innovations, changing it only incrementally. This is a conservative impulse, and is not about learning more about the world, or changing the way one listens to the world, but simply consuming the definition supplied by an economic elite of what music is allowed to be.
If, on the other hand, music aspires to challenge the nature and limits of our listening practice, it will fit unwell into the existing market apparatus and make substantial demands of listeners' habits. One might argue that this anti-conservative impulse demands an "elite" community of listeners who are committed, experienced, possibly learned, and always open. But this "elite" is not comparable to the economic elite in the entertainment industry: membership is open to all and is not a result or sign of economic status or influence. It is an accomplishment -- a deep and personal relationship to music -- on its own terms, but also an affirmation that music, and the world around music, can be different.
By relevant, I simply mean forms that have some sort of social significance, beyond their historical interest, and in my view, there are only two:I wrote:
Opera
The Album (and by default, its constituent element: the Song)
Non-relevant forms? Sonatas, Symphonies, Concerti, Fugues (and many many more).
The question could rather be: Relevant to what and to what ends does that relevance function?
If your song, dance, or album (now going the way of the dodo in favor of the consumer's iPod list) is "relevant" to the prevailing entertainment market, then it is probably tightly bound to the content restrictions of that market, thus maintaining the status quo, or when introducing innovations, changing it only incrementally. This is a conservative impulse, and is not about learning more about the world, or changing the way one listens to the world, but simply consuming the definition supplied by an economic elite of what music is allowed to be.
If, on the other hand, music aspires to challenge the nature and limits of our listening practice, it will fit unwell into the existing market apparatus and make substantial demands of listeners' habits. One might argue that this anti-conservative impulse demands an "elite" community of listeners who are committed, experienced, possibly learned, and always open. But this "elite" is not comparable to the economic elite in the entertainment industry: membership is open to all and is not a result or sign of economic status or influence. It is an accomplishment -- a deep and personal relationship to music -- on its own terms, but also an affirmation that music, and the world around music, can be different.
Friday, June 02, 2006
We were robbed and didn't even notice
Finally, and for a broad audience, a persuasive case is made that the official results of presidential election of 2004 did not reflect the will of the voters. I'm generally a sceptic about things like this, but if someone set forth to rig an election, this article describes just about the optimal way to do it: not through a single large activity, but through simultaneous smaller, and apparently unconnected, measures netting the desired result with sufficient leeway to allow for the possible failure or detection of any or some of the single elements.* Further, such a program could be executed with total deniability, in that the campaign management need only give the instructions to "do everything possible" to win. When the campaign has already created an atmosphere where the ethical threshold is low, independent operatives at the local level are ideally placed to define "everything possible" in a creative and effective way.
The city of Frankfurt, Germany recently had elections to the city parliament (90-some members) and local councils (up to 19 members). The ballot was a piece of paper the better part of a square meter in size. Voting in the Land of Hessen is complicated -- voters can vote straight party tickets, or mixes of parties, or for individual candidates, or if they vote for party lists, they can strike out individual names or assign more weight to individual names -- and counting the votes is almost rocket science, but it is still a paper ballot, with crosses in little boxes drawn by the voters' hands, and counted by real people one-by-one. Paper ballots work really do work, and they leave a real physical trail of voters' intentions. You have to wonder why so few people in the US are asking why there is supposed to be a need to switch to something other than paper ballots. It wasn't broke, and trying to "fix" the problem actually means trying to fix elections. Proverbs for Paranoids, 3: If they get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers. (in Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow).
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* That's exactly how orchestral tuttis work, by the way.
The city of Frankfurt, Germany recently had elections to the city parliament (90-some members) and local councils (up to 19 members). The ballot was a piece of paper the better part of a square meter in size. Voting in the Land of Hessen is complicated -- voters can vote straight party tickets, or mixes of parties, or for individual candidates, or if they vote for party lists, they can strike out individual names or assign more weight to individual names -- and counting the votes is almost rocket science, but it is still a paper ballot, with crosses in little boxes drawn by the voters' hands, and counted by real people one-by-one. Paper ballots work really do work, and they leave a real physical trail of voters' intentions. You have to wonder why so few people in the US are asking why there is supposed to be a need to switch to something other than paper ballots. It wasn't broke, and trying to "fix" the problem actually means trying to fix elections. Proverbs for Paranoids, 3: If they get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers. (in Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow).
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* That's exactly how orchestral tuttis work, by the way.
Thursday, June 01, 2006
First things first
"The first casualty when war comes, is truth" - Hiram Johnson, Governor of California (1910-1917), US Senator (1917-1945), co-founder of the Progressive Party.
I guess the present adminstration decided to cut to the chase. They went ahead and let truth fall even before the war began.
I guess the present adminstration decided to cut to the chase. They went ahead and let truth fall even before the war began.
Wednesday, May 31, 2006
Dorodango
Dorodango: lumps of mud polished into shiny spheres, made by small children in Japan.
A good Freudian would blame it on early childhood training: some musicians need to get everything perfect, every detail accounted for, every surface polished and neat; others need to leave some things unfinished, unsaid, a bit messy, uneven; most musicians probably find themselves between these extremes, balancing or oscillating. But I think that there's probably a better music-evolutionary reason for this particular form of biodiversity: it keeps our musical lives lively and interesting, full of variety, even if the basic materials available to us are all pretty much the same.
Tuesday, May 30, 2006
My literary ambition
...is, before I die, to write a text without one parenthetic phrase enclosed between commas, parentheses, brackets, braces, dashes (be they single or double), ellipses, or any other punctuation device now known or yet to be invented.
(I expect to die at a very old age, shot by a jealous and angry grammarian).
(I expect to die at a very old age, shot by a jealous and angry grammarian).
The Convivial Cage
John Cage's musical enthusiasms were broad and he enjoyed sharing his discoveries. Not only his closest colleagues -- Wolff and Feldman, for example -- got his praise, but also composers in ever-wider circles, crossing genres, borders, and generations. He was -- unlike many of his colleagues -- a faithful concert goer and in his last years, if he was in town, he'd be somewhere almost every night. When he was away at Festivals and Conferences, he tried to make a point of being (his words) "one hundred percent" in attendance. I imagine that he saw himself as a member of the community (a member, not a citizen, for the community represented no state), and his interest in that community was more than duty. From La Monte Young or Pauline Oliveros or Alvin Lucier, to the composers in the Once group or the Tone Roads group, the extended family of musicians around the Cunningham company, he was curious, receptive, and supportive. (Milton Babbitt tells about meeting Cage for lunch to discuss the Composition for Four Instruments; Cage was enthusiastic that Babbitt had not avoided triads and other configurations suggesting tonal music. Of course they were talking at cross-purposes, but the point is that they were talking!) He was sometimes critical, of Virgil Thomson (I believe that the Cage half of the Hoover/Cage monograph has some extraordiarily incisive and clear analytic writing on music, and it has been unjustly ignored (but nevermind, I guarantee that there will eventually be at least one dissertation written about Cage as a music theorist)) or Glen Branca, and sometimes puzzled, for example by Richard K. Winslow. From the composers in my own generation, I recall his enthusiasm for music by Gordon Monahan and Mitchell Clark. In later years he singled out Philip Glass, putting him in Cage's alphabetized theatre of ghosts, and Stephen Albert, for the Symphony: RiverRun, product of a shared enthusiasm for Finnegan Wake. Cage used the word "convivial" to describe Glass's music, but that word really fits well to Cage's own works, and particularly those of his last years. Not only was he an active member of his community, but he was trying to compose in a way in which the balance, between sounds and silences, and among the sounds between loud and soft, was itself convivial: a sustainable ecology of sounds, shared on the basis of non-compulsion, mutual respect, and considerable faith in the prospect that when one is open and inventive, good things can happen with even the most modest of means. Damn it, I miss the man.
Listening habits of the leadership class
The media has taken great interest in the recorded music tastes of politicians, with the Ipod listings of C. Rice and H. Clinton in particular receiving thorough scrutiny and analysis. The balances between genres and the relative political leanings of those genres are hot topics, as is the possibility that a politician may be hedging in public about the true nature of their listening habits. Is one of them purposely slanting her purported workout list to the MOR? Or is another watering down her list with pop standards so as not to appear too highbrow ?
The pointlessness of this exercise is that musical tastes are being represented by Ipod frequency-of-play lists. But don't we all know that the music we love most is not the music we utilize the most? The music that we use functionally -- to get to sleep or to exercise or to do housework by -- has to fullfill criteria quite independent of whether it is the "music we like most". In fact, it may often help that such functional music is music that we can hear without listening to it closely. And the music that we really love? Well, we tend to treasure it and take it in measured doses and only at the right time and circumstance in order to give that music all the attention it demands.
The pointlessness of this exercise is that musical tastes are being represented by Ipod frequency-of-play lists. But don't we all know that the music we love most is not the music we utilize the most? The music that we use functionally -- to get to sleep or to exercise or to do housework by -- has to fullfill criteria quite independent of whether it is the "music we like most". In fact, it may often help that such functional music is music that we can hear without listening to it closely. And the music that we really love? Well, we tend to treasure it and take it in measured doses and only at the right time and circumstance in order to give that music all the attention it demands.
Sunday, May 28, 2006
Obligato
Some people manage to summon huge reserves of anger for music that they don't like. Just mentioning the names Schoenberg or Cage or Babbitt or Boulez on a listserv can usually guarantee an extended verbal assault. On the one hand, it is a good thing that music inspires passion, and I can understand this reaction when the music is forced upon the listener, without warning, and without escape. (Personally, I like some advance warning that music will be loud, and I like to be able to leave or plug my ears if it is too loud; as far as I'm concerned it's the same as protecting the rights of non-smokers to remain non-inhalers of smoke). In general, however, our most intensive musical experiences, when the music is not incidental to advertising or background for films or tv, the experiences where we can concentrate on the music itself, are in situations where we can assert considerable amounts of choice. So in the face of that choice, this anger towards music that one doesn't like is rather more an impulse to control the music that others hear, and that's just not civil.
The arguments summoned by the angry often attempt definitions of the musically acceptable, territory explored by Plato and the emperors of the Choson dynasty with equally ugly results. Music must have a beautiful melody, remain in a certain mode, be faithful to the spoken language, be danceable, only use consonances, or admit dissonances when resolved properly to the admitted consonances, not be played at certain times, be only played at certain times, be only sung by men, or when sung by women, then not in the presence of men, be tonal, not use instrument, not use organs, not use accordions, not use amplification, only be composed of sounds with harmonic spectra and must conform to the know limits of our psychoacoustical apparatu, it must not use drums or other makers of noise, and most of all, it must entertain as the musician is obliged to the listener. (Not.)
If I want to entertain, I will pick up a tin whistle and a hat and play for Euros on the Zeil in Frankfurt, or I will dig out a coat and tie and do lunch at the Russian Tea Room, planning my papering and conquest of Carnegie Hall, or I will score a few more industrial training films or adult entertainments or space operas, or I will write radio jingles for clogged-drain specialists. But that'd be another job description for me, another career, and I suspect that I'd make a better dim sum chef. The music I'm interested in making comes without a set list of acceptable qualities. As far as my music is concerned, the extent and limits of what music is and what it might be and how it might be used are still unknown, and I'd like to explore that, at least in a modest way. And neither the angry listserver nor the waitress down at Hoho's nor the King of Zembla nor the Pope of Pittsburg nor the CEO of the Yoyodyne is paying to support my music habit, so it's none of their business. And if the angry remain angry, I'll just tell 'em to change the channel and get a life of their own.
The arguments summoned by the angry often attempt definitions of the musically acceptable, territory explored by Plato and the emperors of the Choson dynasty with equally ugly results. Music must have a beautiful melody, remain in a certain mode, be faithful to the spoken language, be danceable, only use consonances, or admit dissonances when resolved properly to the admitted consonances, not be played at certain times, be only played at certain times, be only sung by men, or when sung by women, then not in the presence of men, be tonal, not use instrument, not use organs, not use accordions, not use amplification, only be composed of sounds with harmonic spectra and must conform to the know limits of our psychoacoustical apparatu, it must not use drums or other makers of noise, and most of all, it must entertain as the musician is obliged to the listener. (Not.)
If I want to entertain, I will pick up a tin whistle and a hat and play for Euros on the Zeil in Frankfurt, or I will dig out a coat and tie and do lunch at the Russian Tea Room, planning my papering and conquest of Carnegie Hall, or I will score a few more industrial training films or adult entertainments or space operas, or I will write radio jingles for clogged-drain specialists. But that'd be another job description for me, another career, and I suspect that I'd make a better dim sum chef. The music I'm interested in making comes without a set list of acceptable qualities. As far as my music is concerned, the extent and limits of what music is and what it might be and how it might be used are still unknown, and I'd like to explore that, at least in a modest way. And neither the angry listserver nor the waitress down at Hoho's nor the King of Zembla nor the Pope of Pittsburg nor the CEO of the Yoyodyne is paying to support my music habit, so it's none of their business. And if the angry remain angry, I'll just tell 'em to change the channel and get a life of their own.
Saturday, May 27, 2006
Lost in translation
So I'm reading Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul: Memories of a City and something in his first chapter doesn't sit quite right with me:
It's that word, compassion. If he had asked the reader to bear with him, for patience, or tolerance, I wouldn't have given it a second thought, but asking readers for compassion is strange. I don't know anything about Pamuk's religious beliefs, but he is writing about Istanbul, and the word compassion has a special resonance for me in a context that is, at least potentially, Islamic. I know that Muslims address their prayers to a deity who is "merciful" and "compassionate", so compassion -- if that is the right translation -- is clearly something important to the faithful. It's important in many religions. For Christians, the deity's compassion is understood, not asserted, based in the belief that the deity became a human being, shared human suffering, and demonstrated how one should act in the face of the suffering of others. But the assertion of (and the need by the faithful to constantly re-assert) the deity's compassion in an Islamic context, without a deity who has physically shared in human suffering, strikes me as something quite different to Christian belief and practice, and I can easily imagine that that difference plays an important part in the distance between the two faiths. But then again, I may well be following an error in translation and comparing concepts which are not , in fact, comparable.
So pay close attention, dear reader. Let me be straight with you, and in return let me ask for your compassion.
It's that word, compassion. If he had asked the reader to bear with him, for patience, or tolerance, I wouldn't have given it a second thought, but asking readers for compassion is strange. I don't know anything about Pamuk's religious beliefs, but he is writing about Istanbul, and the word compassion has a special resonance for me in a context that is, at least potentially, Islamic. I know that Muslims address their prayers to a deity who is "merciful" and "compassionate", so compassion -- if that is the right translation -- is clearly something important to the faithful. It's important in many religions. For Christians, the deity's compassion is understood, not asserted, based in the belief that the deity became a human being, shared human suffering, and demonstrated how one should act in the face of the suffering of others. But the assertion of (and the need by the faithful to constantly re-assert) the deity's compassion in an Islamic context, without a deity who has physically shared in human suffering, strikes me as something quite different to Christian belief and practice, and I can easily imagine that that difference plays an important part in the distance between the two faiths. But then again, I may well be following an error in translation and comparing concepts which are not , in fact, comparable.
Friday, May 26, 2006
A road less taken
Back in High School (the late Pleistocene, on a continent far, far, away), my introduction to the musical avant-garde came mostly from libraries and radio broadcasts (especially those by David Cloud and Carl Stone at KPFK, the Pacifica station in LA, which then still had a committment to new music). Among the marvelous artifacts of the era were issues of Source: Music of the Avant-Garde. It had already stopped publication by the time I starting going through them (okay, I'm not that old), but luckily, the music library at Pomona College had a full set, and with written permission from Prof. Wm. F. Russell, long-time chair of the music department, I was allowed to leaf through them, albeit under the watchful gaze of one of the undergraduate librarians, probably certain that the kid from the wrong side of the Santa Fe tracks was going to abscond with a copy of one of those multi-colored, spiral-bound, oblong tributes to an era of extravagance already fading into the dull malaise of the times.
There is a remarkable amount of music, or musical directions, for which Source showed prescience -- Reich, Partch, Lucier, Ashley, Oliveros, Cage, Feldman -- and a few less-well-knowns that ought to be better known -- Leedy, Lentz, Childs, Hunt. But Source also had its share of misses, and one genre in particular seems to have nearly gone the way of the passenger pigeon: the theatre piece. In part, this is probably because performance art emerged as a genre with its own institutional presence and conventions, but also because a lot of theatre pieces just didn't work well or well enough on their own terms. (Theatrical elements were not the sole preserve of the avant-garde -- George Crumb would ask for masks and candlelight, as did countless Crumb-camp followers). But still, perhaps some of these pieces ought to be reconsidered. The scores to Daniel Lentz's theatre pieces are visual delights in the Source volumes, and while a bit slapsticky (i.e. a grand piano giving birth to a toy piano, an idea which could have come from a commedia dell'arte lazzi routine), sometimes a bit of slapstick is in order, and I'd really like to witness some of them someday. Kagel and his students (among them Maria de Alvear and Carola Bauckholt) have maintained a music-theatrical tradition in Germany, and it'd be a shame if the American repertoire just disappeared. I regret never having experienced Olivero's Double Basses at Twenty Paces (a duel, with referee and seconds, between two contrabasses) or Sender's Desert Ambulance.
A friend of mine in college once actually had a dream with a theatre piece by me in it, a piece I hadn't, but really wish I had, composed. If I recall correctly, this piece takes place at night, on a star-lit field, with instruments (now I'm composing: crosscut saw, horn, concertina, perhaps a viola) playing slowly against the background of a slow-moving complex of sine waves. (I was really into sine waves back then). A young woman with long hair walks barefoot across the field to a small table. On the table is a knife, a lemon, a white porcelain bowl, and a small paintbrush. She cuts the lemon in half, squeezes the juice of one half into the bowl, gently paints a line of lemon juice on the cheek of each person in the audience, and then exits, all as slowly as possible.
There is a remarkable amount of music, or musical directions, for which Source showed prescience -- Reich, Partch, Lucier, Ashley, Oliveros, Cage, Feldman -- and a few less-well-knowns that ought to be better known -- Leedy, Lentz, Childs, Hunt. But Source also had its share of misses, and one genre in particular seems to have nearly gone the way of the passenger pigeon: the theatre piece. In part, this is probably because performance art emerged as a genre with its own institutional presence and conventions, but also because a lot of theatre pieces just didn't work well or well enough on their own terms. (Theatrical elements were not the sole preserve of the avant-garde -- George Crumb would ask for masks and candlelight, as did countless Crumb-camp followers). But still, perhaps some of these pieces ought to be reconsidered. The scores to Daniel Lentz's theatre pieces are visual delights in the Source volumes, and while a bit slapsticky (i.e. a grand piano giving birth to a toy piano, an idea which could have come from a commedia dell'arte lazzi routine), sometimes a bit of slapstick is in order, and I'd really like to witness some of them someday. Kagel and his students (among them Maria de Alvear and Carola Bauckholt) have maintained a music-theatrical tradition in Germany, and it'd be a shame if the American repertoire just disappeared. I regret never having experienced Olivero's Double Basses at Twenty Paces (a duel, with referee and seconds, between two contrabasses) or Sender's Desert Ambulance.
A friend of mine in college once actually had a dream with a theatre piece by me in it, a piece I hadn't, but really wish I had, composed. If I recall correctly, this piece takes place at night, on a star-lit field, with instruments (now I'm composing: crosscut saw, horn, concertina, perhaps a viola) playing slowly against the background of a slow-moving complex of sine waves. (I was really into sine waves back then). A young woman with long hair walks barefoot across the field to a small table. On the table is a knife, a lemon, a white porcelain bowl, and a small paintbrush. She cuts the lemon in half, squeezes the juice of one half into the bowl, gently paints a line of lemon juice on the cheek of each person in the audience, and then exits, all as slowly as possible.
Invisible orchestras
Someone's come up with a theoretical basis for designing invisibility cloaks. While there might be some use for this in arranging a covert rendez-vous or slipping out of a restaurant in advance of the check, I can't imagine a better use of invisibility cloaks than in orchestration. Why? Nothing kills a surprising instrumental entrance better than having the surprising instrument visible in advance of the surprise. Imagine that an orchestra is on stage, playing an initial theme when suddenly, out of nothingness, a piano and a pianist appear to restate that theme. Or what to do about trombone sections or mighty choruses that are supposed to hang around until fourth movement finales? Cloak 'em. And opera singers with the right voices but the wrong bodies for their roles? Cloak 'em.
I just hope that someone is working on a cone of silence as well, for coughing audience members and horn players in fear of cracking their solos. Cloak 'em all.
I just hope that someone is working on a cone of silence as well, for coughing audience members and horn players in fear of cracking their solos. Cloak 'em all.
Thursday, May 25, 2006
More optimism
M. Keiser, of Music in a Suburban Scene writes:
"I have corrupted... the soft and moldable minds of fellow dorm-dwellers with my strange musics."
Which threw me into nostalgia, for Hallowe'en 1981, blasting LPs of Einstein on the Beach onto the dormitory quad at College Five, UC Santa Cruz. Prematurely air-conditioned supermarkets and all the other pleasures of a youth well-spent.
"I have corrupted... the soft and moldable minds of fellow dorm-dwellers with my strange musics."
Which threw me into nostalgia, for Hallowe'en 1981, blasting LPs of Einstein on the Beach onto the dormitory quad at College Five, UC Santa Cruz. Prematurely air-conditioned supermarkets and all the other pleasures of a youth well-spent.
Putting things in order
Faced with an awkward working schedule for the past week (dominated by a four-year old underfoot, allowing work only in fits and starts, late nights and early mornings), I decided to make a set of short pieces, twelve little piano preludes to be exact, one for each tonic, in fifths, from Ab to C#, each with a duration between 30 seconds and one minute. I wanted to make pieces suitable for home music-making, playable by students or amateurs willing to stretch their tastes and techniques a bit, and, more privately, I wanted to dip into a pool of techniques that I've poured together over the years. I made the decision that processes or systems, once begun, did not have to cycle through to completion; time was short, and they could simply remain suggestive. I had the notion that once I committed to completing a set of 12 pieces, the requirement to complete any other list was effectively revoked. The pieces could be tonal, or modal, or neither, or something ambiguously posed in-between any of these environments.
Clear enough, and I've basically finished nine of the 12, but now I'm stuck on a basic formal issue. I just don't know whether the playing order should be Ab to C# in ascending fifths or C# to Ab, descending. On the sharp side, things are more abstract, even primitive at times, while the flat-keyed pieces are more "musical" in some traditional sense, and the Ab prelude, in particular, would provide a rather sweet way to start or to end. I could leave it up to the player, but that strikes me as disingenuous, or even cute, and that's not what these pieces are about. (I do, in fact, leave plenty to the player in terms of tempi, articulation, dynamics, but that's just my view of the standing contract between composer and performer).
Clear enough, and I've basically finished nine of the 12, but now I'm stuck on a basic formal issue. I just don't know whether the playing order should be Ab to C# in ascending fifths or C# to Ab, descending. On the sharp side, things are more abstract, even primitive at times, while the flat-keyed pieces are more "musical" in some traditional sense, and the Ab prelude, in particular, would provide a rather sweet way to start or to end. I could leave it up to the player, but that strikes me as disingenuous, or even cute, and that's not what these pieces are about. (I do, in fact, leave plenty to the player in terms of tempi, articulation, dynamics, but that's just my view of the standing contract between composer and performer).
Sunday, May 21, 2006
Up Front
Composer Dennis Báthory-Kitsz is booking a year of commissions online in a project called "We are all Mozart". Whether you want a 30-second solo or an evening-length opera (or anything
in-between), he can schedule your commission into his working calendar for 2007. AFAIK, this is the most audacious and ambitious action of its kind since Pauline Oliveros was selling "cheap commissions". Báthory-Kitsz says that the project is designed to "to create new works and change the perception of the music of our time". While I share the target of completing at least one small work every day, just to keep composerly chops in practice, sucessful completion of a whole year of commissioned work will constitute a remarkable performance in its own right.
in-between), he can schedule your commission into his working calendar for 2007. AFAIK, this is the most audacious and ambitious action of its kind since Pauline Oliveros was selling "cheap commissions". Báthory-Kitsz says that the project is designed to "to create new works and change the perception of the music of our time". While I share the target of completing at least one small work every day, just to keep composerly chops in practice, sucessful completion of a whole year of commissioned work will constitute a remarkable performance in its own right.
Thursday, May 18, 2006
Making music with the instruments you have, not the instruments you want
Over the past few years, and not only out of a parent's sense of duty, I've had the opportunity to hear quite a few school music concerts, at the elementary and Gymnasium levels both in Hungary and in Germany. Instrumental ensembles in schools do not have the traditions or standardization found in US schools, they don't have rooms built for ensembles, they don't have stocks of loaner instruments, and, as ensembles as not taught as courses, teachers usually can expect one rehearsal per week. Given those constraints, they do a valliant job. Not having to have bands march certainly helps (in Germany, marching appears to be reserved for the military (which, in past-war Germany has little public presence), for Carnival-season drum and bugle corps, and the Schalmei bands associated with organized labor (increasingly rare)). But music teachers are usually stuck with the instruments that students happen to be learning privately, and without loaners for the less popular and more expensive instruments, the teachers have limited abilities to steer violinists toward violas, or wind players away from flutes and saxophones. That means that the teacher has to go into concerts with odd doublings or substitutions and either going on stage with two dozen flutes or forcing the two dozen flautists to rotate.
So, in the face of a fit of flutes, we've either got to start playing up the advantages of learning oboe or viola or horn (you'll never be lonely if you take up the bassoon!), or start composing and arranging interesting music for flute choirs, or silver-heavy orchestras. A few years back, I made a piece -- a kind of concerto -- for the Swiss pianist Hildegard Kleeb and a Spanish student orchestra. I had to take the instruments they had, which meant too many flutes. But, in retrospect, having five flute parts and a piccolo and a full set of saxophones turned out to be one of the key elements in the piece. It's certainly not a well-behaved orchestration, but it is an orchestration you'll never forget.
Being given an unusual instrumentation to work with is certainly a major constraint on the composer, but maybe composers ought to think more like escape artists, and figure out ways to convince the audience that nothing can hold us down. Figuring out what to do with two dozen flutes is surely the least of our worries.
So, in the face of a fit of flutes, we've either got to start playing up the advantages of learning oboe or viola or horn (you'll never be lonely if you take up the bassoon!), or start composing and arranging interesting music for flute choirs, or silver-heavy orchestras. A few years back, I made a piece -- a kind of concerto -- for the Swiss pianist Hildegard Kleeb and a Spanish student orchestra. I had to take the instruments they had, which meant too many flutes. But, in retrospect, having five flute parts and a piccolo and a full set of saxophones turned out to be one of the key elements in the piece. It's certainly not a well-behaved orchestration, but it is an orchestration you'll never forget.
Being given an unusual instrumentation to work with is certainly a major constraint on the composer, but maybe composers ought to think more like escape artists, and figure out ways to convince the audience that nothing can hold us down. Figuring out what to do with two dozen flutes is surely the least of our worries.
Wednesday, May 17, 2006
Awkward Choreography
I like being on the receiving end of applause as much as anyone, and I'm fond of the physical act of applauding after (and especially, between) pieces, if mainly for the chance to unwind a bit from the intensity of close listening. I even find that the high noise content of applause functions as a kind of ear cleaner, wiping away the old sounds, making room for the next.
The problem with applause as an indication of appreciation is that it is a simple sign executed by a mass. It's usually too coarse an indication of what, exactly, has gone right or wrong. With old or familiar music, it's not possible to distinguish between the piece and the performance (or between individual participants in the performance -- conductor, soloists, ensembles). When the work played is new, and the composer is present, this provides added uncertainty to the message. How do you applaud a new piece that you like despite an inadequate performance? How do you applaud a great performance of a work that is otherwise the aural equivalent of a marshmallow?
Applaus gets some disambiguation when it accompanies bowing, as the individual participants each get their turn at the stage apron. But the composer is a serious disadvantage, as she or he ordinarily has to make her or his perp walk from somewhere in the audience all the way up to the stage. That can often mean having to sustain a lengthy period of applause, and when the applause dies out before she or he has been able to bow, we are in for a shared moment of awkwardness. To avoid this possibility, it's probably best to stand and take your laurels from the auditorium, wave a hand or a hankie in gratitude to the performers and then sit right back down as soon as you can.
The problem with applause as an indication of appreciation is that it is a simple sign executed by a mass. It's usually too coarse an indication of what, exactly, has gone right or wrong. With old or familiar music, it's not possible to distinguish between the piece and the performance (or between individual participants in the performance -- conductor, soloists, ensembles). When the work played is new, and the composer is present, this provides added uncertainty to the message. How do you applaud a new piece that you like despite an inadequate performance? How do you applaud a great performance of a work that is otherwise the aural equivalent of a marshmallow?
Applaus gets some disambiguation when it accompanies bowing, as the individual participants each get their turn at the stage apron. But the composer is a serious disadvantage, as she or he ordinarily has to make her or his perp walk from somewhere in the audience all the way up to the stage. That can often mean having to sustain a lengthy period of applause, and when the applause dies out before she or he has been able to bow, we are in for a shared moment of awkwardness. To avoid this possibility, it's probably best to stand and take your laurels from the auditorium, wave a hand or a hankie in gratitude to the performers and then sit right back down as soon as you can.
Monday, May 08, 2006
Music theory: a good read?
A side pleasure in many old music treatises is their form -- a dialogue, typically between a student and a master. While the dramaturgy is usually at a low level, there is at least some literary aspiration in play, a quality seldom featured in more recent theoretical works.
Once, in a moment of admitted light-headedness, I considered the possibility of writing a pair of theory textbooks with literary ambitions of their own. I suspect that the first, Topic of Counterpoint, could have been the first music textbook to sell a million copies, albeit largely under false expectations, while the second, The Rime of the Ancient Harmonizer, might well have been the first harmony primer composed entirely in ballad stanzas.
Once, in a moment of admitted light-headedness, I considered the possibility of writing a pair of theory textbooks with literary ambitions of their own. I suspect that the first, Topic of Counterpoint, could have been the first music textbook to sell a million copies, albeit largely under false expectations, while the second, The Rime of the Ancient Harmonizer, might well have been the first harmony primer composed entirely in ballad stanzas.
Fifths, octaves, everywhere,
And all of them parallel!
Fifths of horns and voices crossed,
Learn to hide them well.
...
The sixth, augmented,
Counts its varieties internationale:
Whether Italian, German, or the French,
Each, over-used, can sound banal.
...
A dominant seventh chord, with four different tones,
Alone and complete, presents no trouble.
But when it resolves to another dominant, seventh'd,
One of the tones must now be doubled.
Tuesday, May 02, 2006
Monday, May 01, 2006
David McAllester
The ethnomusicologist David McAllester has passed away. One of the four co-founders of the Society for Ethnomusicology, his contributions to the study of Native American music, especially Diné (Navajo), were great. His books on Peyote Music and the Diné Enemy Way are classics. Originally an anthropologist, he switched his affiliation to the music department at Wesleyan (where I was lucky to be the TA for his "Worlds of Music" course). David delighted in singing and dancing, and, in his lecture hall, it was often contageous, which was a marvelous way to make the case that knowledge of the world's diversity of musics was general, not specialized, and belonged in the center of the educational experience.
David had an ethical hard core. He was a CO during the Second World War. He had been quite literally adopted by his Navajo informant family, and had become so trusted by some Native American musicians that they allowed David to make documentary recordings of sacred repertoire only under the condition that David closely supervise the conditions under which the recordings were used, a condition that he honored completely. Although most of David's work concerned traditional repertoire, his ears were always open and alert to new developments in music made by Native Americans, be they pop, country, Mormon, or "New Age". He was not imune to John Cage's (an important visitor to Wesleyan) challenges to the extent and limits of music making, and I recall his enthusiastic response to Pauline Oliveros' ceremonial opera Crow, to Stockhausen's Am Himmel wander Ich, and to David Cope's The Way.
David had an ethical hard core. He was a CO during the Second World War. He had been quite literally adopted by his Navajo informant family, and had become so trusted by some Native American musicians that they allowed David to make documentary recordings of sacred repertoire only under the condition that David closely supervise the conditions under which the recordings were used, a condition that he honored completely. Although most of David's work concerned traditional repertoire, his ears were always open and alert to new developments in music made by Native Americans, be they pop, country, Mormon, or "New Age". He was not imune to John Cage's (an important visitor to Wesleyan) challenges to the extent and limits of music making, and I recall his enthusiastic response to Pauline Oliveros' ceremonial opera Crow, to Stockhausen's Am Himmel wander Ich, and to David Cope's The Way.
Sunday, April 30, 2006
Optimism
Trevor Murphy writes really well about music.
Patrick Swanson writes really well about music, too, and much else.
I haven't heard a note of his music, but I suspect that there isn't a composer out there with either a better web site (or a more unusual career) than Gareth Farr.
Patrick Swanson writes really well about music, too, and much else.
I haven't heard a note of his music, but I suspect that there isn't a composer out there with either a better web site (or a more unusual career) than Gareth Farr.
Up against it
"Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everybody gets busy on the proof." -- John Kenneth Galbraith
Wednesday, April 26, 2006
Stearns
I think that Dan Stearns is a fine composer, and a model of uncompromising independence. He's a virtuoso guitarist (I believe he comes out of some corner of the free improv world, but I could be totally wrong about this), he does serious explorations of microtonal possibilities, and, a New Englander himself, his connections to the music of Ives strike me as both honest and deep.
Irwin articulates
Few artists are as articulate about their work as Robert Irwin, and his enthusiasm is infectious -- he's not making any compromises, he doesn't know what's going to happen next, and he's clearly having a blast. That's exactly the career I'd like to have! Here's an excellent video (streaming, RAM).
Ambition
"If you asked me the sum total—what is your ambition?" (artist Robert) Irwin told his friend and biographer Lawrence Weschler. "Basically it's just to make you a little more aware than you were the day before of how beautiful the world is. It's not saying that I know what the world should look like. It's not that I'm rebuilding the world. Basically what artists do is to teach you how to exercise your own potential—they always have, that's the one thread that goes all the way through."
(cited in an essay by Michael Govan)
(cited in an essay by Michael Govan)
Wednesday, April 05, 2006
Still experimenting
Norman O. Brown was fond of pointing out that the German translation of the Christian Lord's Prayer contained the phrase "führe uns nicht in Versuchung", which can be taken literally as "lead us not into experiment". For some reason or another, when it comes to music making I was apparently never properly instructed in the proper Christian avoidance of experiment.
I happen to have no problem wearing the experimental label. The American compositional tradition with which I most identify has often been characterized as experimental. My graduate school composition faculty was a program in experimental music (Lucier, Kuivila), my other teachers (Mumma, Young, Harrison) had no problems with the label, either.
Although my own music often has a surface that resembles some other, familiar music, it is always the result of a project beginning with a "what if" question. As Cage put it: "here the word 'experimental' is apt, providing it is understood not as descriptive of an act to be later judged in terms of success or failure, but simply as of an act the outcome of which is unknown."
The willingness to risk failure, by placing success and failure outside the project, and the detachment of composerly intention from the end result, strike me as the vital emblems of experimental musics. This is in contrast to music which has "effectiveness" as its object. I've never been comfortable with the terms of "effective" music-making: tension/release, climax, etc.. It could be that this is a deficit on my part, but I've never much like being manipulated, and perhaps that's the main reason I've been drawn to experimental music.
(And yes, I have noticed that I have appealed twice in recent posts to "comfort"; I suppose that's just a symptom of being a terminally American composer. )
I happen to have no problem wearing the experimental label. The American compositional tradition with which I most identify has often been characterized as experimental. My graduate school composition faculty was a program in experimental music (Lucier, Kuivila), my other teachers (Mumma, Young, Harrison) had no problems with the label, either.
Although my own music often has a surface that resembles some other, familiar music, it is always the result of a project beginning with a "what if" question. As Cage put it: "here the word 'experimental' is apt, providing it is understood not as descriptive of an act to be later judged in terms of success or failure, but simply as of an act the outcome of which is unknown."
The willingness to risk failure, by placing success and failure outside the project, and the detachment of composerly intention from the end result, strike me as the vital emblems of experimental musics. This is in contrast to music which has "effectiveness" as its object. I've never been comfortable with the terms of "effective" music-making: tension/release, climax, etc.. It could be that this is a deficit on my part, but I've never much like being manipulated, and perhaps that's the main reason I've been drawn to experimental music.
(And yes, I have noticed that I have appealed twice in recent posts to "comfort"; I suppose that's just a symptom of being a terminally American composer. )
Materia Musica
Given my music-philosophical sensibility, there is nothing that I would more like to do than to be able to put all of the music I care about into that big box called ephemera, and remove it from the real world forces of fads and markets and gossip and gravitation. However, when I learned that with each breath we take in, we inhale at least one molecule of the last breath of the murdered Caesar 2050 years ago -- and, by extension, we can reasonably expect each breath to also have at least one molecule of air pushed around by musicians playing in the first performance of the Monteverdi Vespers, or Beethoven's 9th, or Etenraku, or Gambir Sawit, or the Navajo Blessing Way -- my faith in an essentially ephemeral quality of music was fundamentally shaken. Sounds are real, and their effects are long-lived, if increasingly subtle.
Kuivila says
In an interview, composer Ron Kuivila says a few remarkable things about notation and more.
One phrase in particular captured my own reticence towards a lot of music from Stockhausen to John Zorn:
"appropriation is at least in part a form of virtuoso consumption"
(It's probably clear by now that, when conspicuous, I have a low comfort level with both virtuosity and consumption.)
One phrase in particular captured my own reticence towards a lot of music from Stockhausen to John Zorn:
"appropriation is at least in part a form of virtuoso consumption"
(It's probably clear by now that, when conspicuous, I have a low comfort level with both virtuosity and consumption.)
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