Looking for Libretti

There is much chatter about libretti these days and, in particular, the lengths to which composer-folk are going to mine other media for workable opera scenaria & libretti. One fashion these days is to mine novels of the nineteenth and early 20th century, another fashion is to mine films, still another is the documentary opera, with legitimate pedigree in operas based on historical rather than mythical events as well as in the oratorio, but now charged with all the possibilities of non-fiction, liberating the composer from such conventions as character & narrative.

An observable rule of thumb has long been that superb material in a given medium rarely becomes a superb opera, but interesting-but-not-quite-superb material in another medium can sometimes excel as opera. On the other hand, superb opera libretti rarely stand alone -- stripped of musical context -- as readable literature, although one can certainly make a case for anything by Da Ponte*, Verdi's Otello, some of von Hofmannstahl, or, more recently, Alice Goodman's Nixon in China.

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In the early 90s, a German composer friend & I would get together to talk shop every couple of months. The conversation would eventually turn to our parallel searches for opera libretti. My friend really needed to find a libretto, as he had not yet secured a professorship and an opera commission was a good way to guarantee paid work for two or three years. Under no illusions about my prospects for getting such a commission, I harbored the fantasy that I could nevertheless make something interesting for the stage. And, to be honest, and honestly unfashionably, the two of us shared the goal of writing a libretto that "women would like". We ended up sharing a lot of interesting reading material, but neither of us ever found the perfect libretto. My colleague finally got his professorship and I ended up doing a lot of childcare, so libretto hunts eventually disappeared from our conversations.

Since then, I've had more than a couple of ideas with potential -- The Winter's Tale, or Blake's satire The Island in the Moon, or -- following a suggestion in one of the Stravinsky-Craft conversation books -- Maximillian & Carlota, or Paul Auster's Mr Vertigo, with a perhaps too-obvious part for a yankee-English swearing treble, or (my favorite) the story of Byron the lightbulb that never goes out from Gravity's Rainbow. Lots of very good, and simultaneously very bad ideas, if you know what I mean...

Part of the problem was (and is) that I suspect that I'm probably best suited to writing a comic opera. My literary tastes are comic. I like the fact that comic opera can enjoy all of the conventions of the form without embarrassment, and I like numbered arias and ensembles, and I do think that recitative can pace and give a motoric and melodic assist to dialogue. But face it, comic opera -- with a few, very special exceptions, and even they don't always work: Von Heute Auf Morgen, The Rake's Progress, Le Grande Macabre, Europeras I & II -- has not been the leading genre of the last century. In fact, sometime after Rossini, comic opera just gave up the ghost when it came to being, well, funny. Serious music became exclusively serious and "comic" was largely left to "entertainers".

In late 1999, I stumbled upon a webpage with excerpts from handpuppet plays by Edward Gorey. I had known his small books and drawings, the stage design and costumes for Dracula as well as a ballet, and the fine details of both image and text in that work had not prepared me for the radically reduced world of his puppets and their plays. His puppet plays were essentially dances for hands, accompanied by disturbing words. His puppets were basically rough lumps of paper mache, usually painted white, with a pair of holes for eyes, sometimes a nose, and female figures sometimes had a smaller lump -- a hair bun -- sitting on the back of the bigger lumps. These heads were simply placed on top of simple hand-sewn gloves, and would, with some frequency, fall off during performances (one evening of puppetry carried the title "Heads Will Roll"; when a puppet would lose its head, the other puppets on stage would give comfort to the stump). I immediately wrote to Gorey on Cape Cod, and a few weeks later received a libretto, an "opera seria" for handpuppets in 13 scenes of rhymed verse based on the "Lake of the Dismal Swamp". The opera -- despite Gorey's label, it was definitely a comic affair -- practically wrote itself, and I found myself writing tonal music and real songs for the first time since high school. The performances, in an old clapboard hall in Cotuit, Mass. were done by local players who had worked with Gorey for years, amateurs in the best sense of the word. It had a run of good ten performances, but the performances were also, sadly, a memorial to the librettist, who -- unusually but deservedly -- got top billing over the composer.

The White Canoe, my opera for handpuppets with Gorey, is a great little piece, but I've since been reluctant to allow another performance. It doesn't require a lot: four singers, three instruments, and four puppeteers, but it has to be done right, and I can wait. In the meantime, I'm still looking for another good libretto.
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* Here's a question: Has anyone ever made an opera based on the life of Da Ponte?

[Parts of this post were mined and revised from an early post with the same title. If you can't steal from yourself, from whom can you steal?]

Crosscut

Gordon Mumma at the 1978 Saw Festival in Santa Cruz.

Become an Artist

A Public Service Announcement for the San Francisco Art Institute with Father Guido Sarducci (Don Novello), produced by George Manupelli and William Farley (1982)

At the Arditti Limit

A definition: A repertoire, score, or score segment reaches the Arditti Limit whenever its notational density is great enough that any sample of a faithful performance of said repertoire, score, or score segment will be indistinguishable from any other sample of the same repertoire, score, or score segment or, in fact, any other music also exceeding the Arditti Limit. (See also Erdodic).

As a strongly subjective characterization, the Arditti Limit is difficult to calculate precisely. If however, the amount of ink on a page of music has enough mass to move a bathroom scale needle upwards from the position of the same needle when weighing a blank page, it is reasonably safe to assume that the page has exceeded the Arditti Limit. If the page is ever mistaken for an Ad Reinhardt black painting, it is reasonably safe to assume that the page has exceeded the Arditti Limit. If a musican complains about the coffee stains on a page that has not yet been touched by coffee or any other sheet-music destroying liquid, it is reasonably safe to assume that the page has exceeded the Arditti Limit.

Typical response to the Arditti Limit, observed in Darmstadt, 1990:

Young Composer A: "How did it sound?"
Young Composer B: "Great. But like, you know, it sounded great in the same way any other fiendishly difficult piece played by Arditti sounds great."
Slightly Older Composer C: "It sounded just like any other fiendishly difficult piece played by Arditti."
Even Older Composer D: "It sounded like Flight of the Bumblebee on acid."
Really Old Composer E: "It always sounds like Flight of the Bumblebee on acid."

In the age of high complexity (ca. 1987-91), students of composition developed a number of techniques for pushing a score closer to, if not exceeding the Arditti Limit. While I was not a party to the formal discussions of the era, I am assured by informed persons that the principles governing these techniques included:

1. Insuring that each and every single note had at least one, and preferably more than one: accidental (preferably microtonal), dynamic, articulation, fingering, and playing method or special effect.
2. Insuring that each and every single note fell under at least one, and preferably more than one hairpin dynamic and n-tuplet bracket.
3. Using a basic rhythmic pulse no greater than one sixteenth note in duration. Drawing all barstems as wide as possible.
4. Notating polyphonically for each instrument, using as many staves as required to best obscure said polyphony.
5. Drafting the manuscript score in as small a scale as possible and then further reducing the score via photocopier to the smallest available size.

Go Round, Young Man!

Elliot Cole, a Houston composer, has returned from a sojourn in Egypt with a collection of rounds. He's putting them up one-by-one on his blog, Elliot's Funnel.

Rounds are very good things. I've long used Purcell and Moondog rounds in teaching (yes, even the politically incorrect ones by Purcell; sometimes I think that rounds are like limericks, falling into two categories: good ones and clean ones). I learned of the Moondog rounds, which usefully go through every key in a variety of metres, from Douglas Leedy, whose Watergate Rounds are here, at Idyllwild in '76. The ever-reliable Larry Polansky has a collection of new and newish rounds by a number of well-rounded scoundrels and songsters here.

Hey, it's summer, days are long, times and tongues are idle, so why not supply yourself with the appropriate liquid, sit down, and write someone with whom you like to sing a round?

AACM Historical

I've just finished reading George Lewis's superb history of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music. Lewis has really filled in a lot of gaps in my knowledge of an experimental musical culture that has alternated for decades between intersection and movement parallel to the experimental tradition with which I identify. His discussion of the relationship between these two experimental music communities is quite pointed at times, talking with welcome frankness about issues of race, class, and gender; I don't agree with him on many points here, particularly given the marginal economic and music-political status of all experimental musicians with regard to the larger musical world, but it is an excellent opening to a discussion that is just beginning. Lewis's balance between a scholar's objective engagement with the historical record and recollection of his own personal engagement is a model.

I would now really like to read a more detailed theoretical/analytical work on the repertoire and musical techniques developed in the AACM and the larger community to which it connects. Or, better yet, some pedagogical materials -- scores and parts, as well as aids in teaching composition and improvisation -- ought to be developed, to widen the appreciation for this tradition, as well as to better balance out the treatment of African-American music in schools, which has long emphasized a rather narrowly defined "jazz" repertoire and an even-more narrowly defined style for playing that music.

Pay for play

The following message was in my in-box this morning:

Hello, Composers!

Several of my conductor-clients are interested in performing a short piece by one of you during the coming season.

Some of you have already participated in this program and have had your works performed/recorded in Romania, Russia, and Ukraine. If you have new pieces ready for next season or wish to have the same old compositions performed in other cities/countries, please submit your application materials at your convenience.

Bear in mind that none of these orchestras are on the same level as professional ensembles in the US or Western Europe. Consequently, do not expect perfection in the performance of your works; most importantly is that your music be heard in new places.

The fee for this program includes rehearsal time for your work (appropriate to its lenght and difficulty), a DVD copy of the entire concert, and a semi-professional audio-recording of your composition in concert. If you plan to be present during the week your music will be performed, remember that all other expenses--such as travel, visas, accommodations, and meals--are your financial responsibility.

Thank you for your past business. I look forward to arranging opportunities for your music to be performed this coming season.

Here's how it works: This message is from one of several agents who contract between cash-strapped Eastern European orchestras and young conductors who want practice with an orchestra and are able to pay for it.* So far, so good: conductors need to train with orchestras and all orchestras should provide training opportunities to young talent, so long as everyone is clear that this is not resume-level professional experience. The conductor has not been selected over others on the basis of her or his artistic merits; the concert often takes place in a problematic cultural context in which the conductor is an alien actor and a problematic economic context in which neither the conductor nor the orchestral musicians are advantaged by the contract; the objectivity of any reviews of the concert will always be questionable. Presenting such a concert as anything other than practice places it into the category of vanity publishing.

This particular agent has now piggy-backed the arrangement with conductors with an offer to composers who are, of course, already at the low end of the musical remuneration feeding chain. I don't know how the money being charged to composers is divided between the agency, the conductor, and the orchestra (as well as any other middlemen -- and, having lived myself for five years in a former Soviet Block country, the assumption that there will be middlemen is a modest one), but given the fact that the countries in question return little and usually no license fees to non-local composers, this is a gig with absolutely no possibility for a composer to earn income.

Let's be clear about things: Yes, it's damn tough to establish oneself as a composer of concert music. And yes, programming decisions may sometimes be the result of bad, if not corrupt, processes. But the best programmers do try either to be objective in their selection processes or to be frank and upfront about their biases and preferences, thus selection, performance, and reviews generated by these processes can reflect upon the music itself in ways that a pay-for-play gig cannot. Moreover, as professionals, we have to insist on being paid: for the commission, for use of performance materials when required, for our presence at a first performance, and for all appropriate licenses and royalties for performances, broadcasts, and recordings. As a budget item in concert planning, fees for composers are not a lot of money; not paying any of those fees and insisting that the composer subsidize the concert is plain wrong.
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* A related topic is the outsourcing of orchestral recording gigs, especially for film scores, to Eastern Europe; but the problem in these cases is one of a globalized labor market and our responsibilities to both local musicians, in our own communities, and to musicians in other communities who may sometimes live and work under the worst imaginable conditions. Another post...

It ain't over until the cone of silence descends on the fat lady

I've been following the developments in acoustic cloaking for some time now. The utility of hiding a noisy presence on the concert stage or orchestra pit, in a recording studio or a stealth vehicle, or just for sound-proofing your garret, lair, or garage seems obvious to me. Here's a popular account of one of the most recent developments, a purely acoustic cloaking structure. Here's the research paper proper. You've got to love a physics paper discussing isotropic acoustic metamaterials and sonic crystals.

Missing Expertise

There has been an interesting small exchange on the SMT (Society for Music Theory) list* about the role, or rather lack thereof, that music scholars have been playing in recent copyright law innovations. While it appears that some jurisdictions -- Canada, for example -- have taken the input of musicologists and theorists seriously in preparing new law, in the US, the voices of creative artists and authors as well as those of scholars with critical perspectives and deep insight into both the substance and history of art forms are rarely consulted and when consulted, they are inevitably shouted out by representatives of the entertainment and entertainment technology "industries" and, unfortunately, in copyright law, it is often the case that as the US goes, the rest of the world will follow in the spirit of legal "harmonization". **

Musicians deal with copyright issues all the time, and whether it's securing a license for a recording or photocopying sheet music for classroom use, the problems are non-trivial and require increasing sophistication to navigate. The role of copyright in the history of music has long been non-trivial: from renaissance composer-publishers who had to curry royal favor to secure licenses -- and sometimes monopolies -- to print music or the ridiculous lengths required to receive copyright protection under multiple jurisdictions (the physical presence requirements needed to secure US rights to the operas is one of the most interesting parts of the Gilbert & Sullivan story).

Despite its importance, the study of music and the law -- in addition to the broader study of institutional structures and music making -- has been an under-emphasized specialty for music scholars.*** Legal scholars are more likely to be consulted on the development of new laws or policy concerning music than musical scholars, although musicologists and theorists may well have critical information about the substance and practice of music to bring to the discussion. Some legal practitioners have already recognized the value of musical scholarship to tort law: a small number of academically-trained musicians have made ancillary careers as so-called "forensic musicologists", testifying in copyright disputes as to the similarity of musical works or the contributions of individual artists to collaborative efforts. But musical academia has been relatively slow to reflect this area in their hiring practices and course content: musicologists are still mostly sought out for specializations that continue to represent the same eras and geographical regions that are reflected in course titles, and, although some specializations in cultural studies (e.g. women's studies) have been recognized, the legal and institutional history of music have not be sought-out specialties, although many eminent scholars have indeed devoted the greater part of their work to such topics. Some schools, more focused on the preparation of working musicians rather than scholars, have added faculty in the business of music, but my impression is that this has been taught entirely as a practical subject, not one with legal and historical depth, and frequently an area in which a great potential to substantially affect the production of music has been realized (for better or worse).

If I criticize music scholarship (see here, for example), it's because I treasure its accomplishments, believe deeply in its potential, and want it to be both better done and better received. At the very least the state of music scholarship is sign and symptom of how seriously music itself is taken by academe and the larger world. Music scholarship has to be more vital, present, and timely, precisely because music is important and more than just entertainment. The alternative -- in which music scholarship and the world about it blissfully ignore one another -- is not acceptable.
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* The discussion thread was initiated by Prof. David Huron of Ohio State. Allow me to quote one part of his message: All over the world, countries are faced with legislative challenges concerning copyright, cultural organizations, maintaining cultural identifies in the face of globalization, and many other challenges. Have music scholars anything to offer? Where is the policy expertise in music departments and conservatories? At the very moment when decisions are being made that will affect musical culture -- possibly for the next several centuries -- we are silent. What policies will best serve the public? Almost none of us have thought about this. The truth is, we have almost nothing to offer. Scholars in the law schools, engineering, and business have thought more about the future of music than we have.

**The pair of American legislative disasters from 1998 --the Sonny Bono**** Copyright Term Extension Act and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act -- have created a particularly unwieldy body of law which, as far as recent experience can tell, is transparent and advantageous to only to those with sufficient professional legal resources (the corporate owners of Mickey Mouse's name and image, for example). For us plain musician-folk, the benefits are not apparent, but burdens are evident everywhere, making for the worst bit of "copyright protection" since the days in which purchasers of DAT recording tape were taxed by the largest copyright owners for content, even when recording their own music. The present popular willingness to simply disregard copyright by consumers faced with laws that say you can't copy this, but being sold machines -- often by the same owners of the copyright content -- that make copying all-too-easy and evermore accurate, perhaps even beats the social acceptance of cheating on taxes or spouses, lying about age or weight, or even refusing to admit to googling one's own name.

***Huron does report that the ethnomusicologist Marc Perlman recently took a year's leave to study intellectual property at Boalt Hall. Perlman -- who was ahead of me in grad school -- is one of the sharpest music scholars out there.

**** A name I thought would never appear in this blog. Oh well, never say never. Rest assured, however, that, under the motto "once a philospher, twice a pervert", said name shall not reappear in these pages.

Three masses for the poor

Gioachino Rossini: Petite Messe Solennelle, for 12 voices (SATB), two pianos and harmonium, 1863.

Erik Satie: Messe des Pauvres, for piano or harmonium or organ and unison voices, 1895.

Cécile Chaminade: Messe pour 2 voix égales et harmonium, Op. 167

Good Enough

A Song for Fathers' Day, Groucho Marx, courtesy of the Internet Archive (here: mp3).

Harmonielehre

More than a few composers arrive at a moment when it seems useful, if not urgent, to assess their relationship to one element or another of music in a more systematic, sometimes formal way. It could be an assessment of rhythm or form or orchestration, but it's more often about pitches, and a composer's relationship to counterpoint/voice leading/harmony is not only a moment for producing teaching materials to share with others, but a moment for clarifying ones own practice and identifying resources and paths with potential for new music. For many composers, this is carried out within the context of a piece of music -- I think of Glass's Another Look at Harmony or Jo Kondo's Threadbare Unlimited (which the composer refers to as his own Harmonielehre) -- but for others, it takes the form of a written text: Schoenberg's Harmonielehre, Partch's Genesis of a Music, parts of Cowell's New Musical Resources, Charles Seeger's Dissonant Counterpoint. James Tenney's Changes for Six Harps and Klarenz Barlow's Çogluotobusisletmesi are interesting examples in which a composition and a theoretical/practical essay were produced simultaneous. Other composers who have more recently turned to major projects of the sort include Wolfgang von Schweinitz and Hans Zender.

Harmony, as a subject, is not precisely that which a scientist would identify as a theoretical discipline.* Sure, the taxonomy can be developed in a rigorous way (in fact, in many different ways), and the perception of harmonic and voice leading structures is a serious area of research in music perception and cognition, but a harmony text is more akin, in the worst cases, to an etiquette book, and, in the best cases, a cookbook, a collection of rules or recipes for describing a range of tone relationships and for replicating certain sounds or sequences thereof. There is clearly a program of taste, of aesthetics, behind every harmonic prescription. The German word that titles many a harmony textbook (and, of course, a nice work of symphonic dimensions by John Adams), Harmonielehre, captures this better than the English phrase "theory of harmony", as Lehre is teaching or doctrine as much, if not more than theory. As far as I'm concerned, the discipline of studying harmony is largely one of absorbing just enough of an existing doctrine in order to remake it -- accepting some aspects, rejecting others, introducing new concerns -- for ones own purposes. And then, as with any other form of doctrine, the greater spirits among us will proceed to ignore their own system in fascinating, productive, and yes, musical ways.
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* There is an argument that harmony is only a consequence of voice leading, a view that is taken up, for example, by James Cook at Mathemusicality. Although I am personally a voice leading oriented musician, I disagree with Cook & Co. entirely: there are many ways for composers or listeners to arrive at or to hear the same piece of tonal music, and while a strong voice leading approach may be construed as more efficient or logical or less complex than a strong chordal approach, (1) I don't believe that efficiency, logic, or simplicity are always going to be the chief criteria through which we approach or should approach music, (2) there are simply too many counter-examples of fine musicians who think in terms of sequences of chords rather than simultaneous melodic lines, and (3) there are many real musical contexts in which the music succeeds precisely because the balance between vertical and horizontal is dynamic and/or ambiguous.

An Ex-pat's Lament

Sad news: The International Herald Tribune, the newspaper of choice for all US ex-pats lounging about without any apparent means of support in Cafes and Hotel Lobbies, waiting for a rendez-vous or practicing not being seen, has given up its dingbat. Yes, this little picture,


which in approximate form has adorned the masthead ever since Christ left Chicago, filled with iconography promising all the breadth required to cover the dynamics of a world in The American Century, has been deleted in the name of "progress".

If I were drinking, I'd raise a martini high and toss it, glass, olive & all, into the waters of the Seine, and shed a tear for a grand, if odd, little graphic, now gone away.

Arranging the Folk

Joseph Drew has a review of a new Nico Muhly album. I don't do reviews and, for that matter, stay away from most recordings, but will note that I was impressed by the recording, especially for its comfort with sounds made unapologetically rough. I share Drew's assessment that the strongest work was The Only Tune, a piece which has, as a point of departure, an arrangement of a folk song performance by Sam Amidon. In fact, Muhly has elsewhere arranged other traditional material sung and played by Amidon and -- as far as I've heard -- this seems to be territory in which he is most inventive and even, to his credit, controversial. Sometimes, with the addition of the most modest of instrumental accompaniments or studio techniques, Muhly is able to venture, with a respectable lack of caution, all along the margins and borders of the repertoires framed and framing. Amidon's vocal style is, in its own way, educated, all artifice, but cultivated from traditional vocal styles well outside standard practice art song, which makes the framed and framing relationship ever more interesting.

Musical repertoires wear taxonomy uneasily. That's because a repertoire is real music that real people have gathered together and a categorizing impulse is, at best, weakly distributed among real populations, even under the strictest of regimes. People like to mix things together, even when we're well aware of conventions, etiquette, or rules that would rather have us keep things separate. Thus categories of the sacred and the secular or folk and popular and art musics are always going to be defined by usage rather than content and character of the music itself.

Nevertheless, music has often been produced in which the makers consciously both identify their own repertoire, creating a frame from which to point outside, towards some "other" music. Beginning, at least with Beethoven, the habit began of taking music identified as folk and placing it, as if between quotation marks, into the frame of an Art Song. Such an arrangement typically took collected material (or, in many cases, invented materials in the style of...) and re-formed it, through both compositional technique and performance style, into a hybrid, in which elements of the source tune were adjusted to fit a regularized pitch, metre, tempo, timbre and, frequently, given an instrumental accompaniment.

(The subject of "folk music" (and how one goes about collecting it, transcribing/notating it, publishing it, etc.) is complex and others handle the topic much better than I can. The politics of it are equally complex, so I will limit myself to noting that when identifying people as a group and identifying that group with a body of music, the music is being placed into a context which is socially and politically charged. Actually, the whole damn topic is so complex that I nearly trashed this item a half dozen times because I couldn't figure out whether or not to use the word "folk" and if I used it, whether to capitalize it, put it between quotation marks, italicize it, or color it bright green.)

Transmission Error

I'd really like words more if the actual use of language didn't always defeat me. Every lexicon is full of surprises. Consider the fortuitous pair, chance and change. Just a bit of data drip (loose tongue; lazy arm; lost bytes) and one word turns into the other. Cage's Music of Changes, adopted a method of determining answers to compositional questions through the application of chance operations associated with the I Ching, The Book of Changes.* Paul Auster's fine novel The Music of Chance is rather more about change -- in the face of torturous routine -- than chance, while his (even better) Moon Palace is an eloquent introduction to the lattice of coincidence. ** Change, for many, carries an element of risk, a departure from the known; conservatives, by nature opponents of change, will warn of the dangers of the unknown, of taking a chance. Chance is considered unserious, too playful, just a game. Reconciling to chance, to change: Alan Price, in his soundtrack to O Lucky Man*** (the only pop song soundtrack in my canon), brilliantly changes the old hymn "What a friend we have in Jesus" to "Everybody's going through changes. No one knows what's going on. Everybody changes places, but the world still carries on."

Yarrow sticks or slapsticks: A reconciliation to chance, to change, is inherently a comic jesture, accepting that one moves forward by stumbling (rather than force, will, or a fore-known and tragic fate) something that Cage recognized with his slammed piano lid in The Music of Changes, and Auster, again'n'again with his figures extracted from lost silent movies (at his best in The Book of Illusions, methinks), and Anderson, whose salesman, Travis (Malcolm MacDowell), travels to a generic territory known only as North****, dressed himself like a silent movie figure, a straight man in a territory gone crooked. But the comic is not mindless and the tragic is certainly not always mindful. Indeed, developing an ability to entertain a complex of outcomes, an essential survival skill in a world askew, whether comically or tragically, is an intelligent strategy, and composing or writing or filming or dancing your way forward by being prepared to accept a variety of outcomes rather than rely on convention or taste or an inexhorable and tragic fate, is anything but foolish.

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*I'm told that a literal translation of I Ching would be something like The Classic Text on the Simplicity, Variability, and Persistence of All the Stuff in the Universe.
**Miller (Tracey Walter), in Repo Man (Alex Cox, 1984): A lot o' people don't realize what's really going on. They view life as a bunch o' unconnected incidents 'n things. They don't realize that there's this, like, lattice o' coincidence that lays on top o' everything. Give you an example; show you what I mean: suppose you're thinkin' about a plate o' shrimp. Suddenly someone'll say, like, plate, or shrimp, or plate o' shrimp out of the blue, no explanation. No point in lookin' for one, either. It's all part of a cosmic unconsciousness.
*** Lindsay Anderson, 1973.
**** North, in O Lucky Man!, is a generic place, like the generic cans of Food and Drink in Repo Man.

Rationale

We know the world is round, but local daily life is carried out with flat-earth coordinates. Music is much the same: we navigate among our pitches and rhythms as if they were related by the simplest of ratios and proportions while knowing, all the while, that their simplicity is largely a conventional approximation, hiding all of the errors of human sound production as well as subtle compromises intended to create additional tonal possibilities. We live quite well and make music even better with our blissful decision to ignore the further decimal places of the measurable world. And yet this: the damnable effectiveness of that simplicity does make one wonder if it is in fact our execution that is flawed, the inherent error of being human, and that the music that is really real is some kind of platonic ideal.* Recent research in the neuroscience of music also seems to point to a preference, in the brain, for processing musical intervals as simple ratios, those found among the low-order harmonics of complex sounds, a capacity useful to both speech and music.


My own musical faith, however, is not that of a platonist, but something rather more constructive or intuitive. I believe that this is a more pragmatic viewpoint, one more immediately connected to the experience of music as it is made in real time. An example: in many of my pieces, beginning in the '70s, I use some form of just intonation, a term familar to many musicians. But defining what is meant, precisely, by just intonation is not an simple matter. If we define it as rational intonation, then we have the problem that every rational interval can be approximated by an irrational (and vice versa). If we want to limit our definition to ratios of small whole numbers, then we have the problem of defining "small". If we wish to define the intervals by minimal beating, then we have problems with timbres including spectra in non-harmonic relationships, which may well find minimal beating with intervals other than those of small whole number ratios. Moreover, as La Monte Young was wise to note, tuning is a function of time, and the accuracy of intonation will depend directly on the length of the sample. But the more pragmatic viewpoint is to examine the immediate musical context and worry less about decimal places of tuning accuracy or the natural wobbles of a man-made sound and evaluate intervals as the complex phenomena that they are: what is the intended relationship? what is the melodic, harmonic, and timbral context? what is the -- entirely subjective -- quality of the interval in question? In such a broader, contextual viewpoint, not only can more conventional just intonation be understood, but it is plausible that intervals and chords related by rather more complex ratios -- as are found in recent music by Young or by Kraig Grady -- are processed by the listener through attention to phenomena like the reinforcement of shared partial tones and difference tones in simple harmonic relationships.

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* Plato had us living in a cave with familiar reality being a reflection on the walls of that cave of the ideal reality from without; musically, I suppose, he'd have us in an echo chamber, in which the music we hear is the distorted echo of the ideal sounds outside.

Complete Works

I've emphasized (again'n'again) that what's important for me is not a repertoire and not a composer, but rather the individual work, and often only a moment in a work. Both repertoires and individual pieces are inconsistent in quality, and composers can be marvelously uneven, a state of affairs that troubles me -- fallible, inconsistent, uneven me -- not a bit. But a repertoire and a composer is something like a brand name, a signal about quality, and there are some repertoires I always try to pay attention to and some composers whose every work I try to follow.

Sometimes, it's made easy: some composers have written so little (Varese, Ruggles), or so little has survived of their work (Machaut, Ockeghem, Monteverdi), or their work comes in such convenience-sized packages (Wagner, Berg, Webern) that it's possible to become familiar with everything. Some (Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Mahler, Schoenberg) have had complete works sets of recordings or scores commercially packaged (isn't having the NMA or every surviving classical Greek music manuscript online a really good thing?). Other composers are trickier, but the sport of chasing down every Stravinsky or Cage, or Partch , or Feldman score is great fun, and there was a time, there was indeed a time, when it was really important to know the latest from Stockhausen or Boulez, and a bit later Reich and Glass and Adams and so on. For myself, I'm pretty much on top of the music of my teachers and many of my friends. I pay attention to every bit of news from a few contemporary colleagues and each work of Ives enters my life as if it were the work of a contemporary. I'd like to do the same for Rossini and Sibelius and there are a couple of Debussy pieces left to conquer. But, to be honest, there are composers whose brand names have not worn well, and seldom recommend further listening (names withheld, but seriously, I don't think I'd walk across the room to hear another orchestral work by Roger Sessions... well, honestly, would you?) . Some brand names have worn better than others for me after complete works experiences (i.e. Mozart better than Bach) and there are still a few composers (Telemann) for whom a complete works, in any format, still doesn't exist*, so judgement is still reserved.

But I'm probably more faithful to complete works when it comes to literature or the movies. I suspect that it's probably because my engagement with the media in question is less intense than with music, so the brand name has become an efficient tool for choosing what to read or see. My canon includes all of Joyce and Beckett and Borges and Percy, Broch and Mann are almost complete and the arrival of each new book by Pynchon or or DeLillo or Wallace is an excuse to drop everything else. Each new book by Harry Matthews, Steve Erickson, or China Mieville is a guilty pleasure and, yes, when I was 20, I collected every P.K. Dick or LeGuin novel then available and I will admit to having gone through my share of complete readings of bestselling airport novels. With movies**, my allegiance to particular directors is unwavering. I want to see all of Ozu and Buñuel, and I've managed all of Huston, Bresson, Antonioni, Lynch and several others much less impressive. Sometimes a name brand will force me to sit through a torturous film (e.g. Altman's Three Women, Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut) and sometimes I persist, hope against hope as the case may be, in insisting that something redemptive is to be found (e.g. Altman's O.C. & Stiggs; Lynch's Dune) in a work that everyone else I know and trust has a perfectly reasonable case for loathing.

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* Isn't it astonishing that there is not a complete works edition of Leopold Mozart?
**I'm from Southern California. I watch movies, not films.

What musicians want from science

Like many other musicians, I keep an ear out for recent research in the sciences on music and topics related to music. Stories about music and science appear quite regularly in the media and while many of the results are interesting, very little is immediately useful to a musician, aside from those results which get implemented immediately -- and, as far as I'm concerned, invisibly -- in commercial audio technologies. It occurs to me that the situation might be somewhat different if musicians helped to frame the questions explored in the research more specifically towards immediate musical problems. I can recognize that otoacoustic emissions or the relationship between tonal languages and the fascinating anatomy of human hearing, in which music is, at least in part, piggybacked onto organs used for language and balance, have great potential to reveal more very interesting things about music, but I, for one, would like to know much more about musical timing. What is the relationship between the "present" in music as it is played and the "present" as registered in the brain? How can ensembles of individuals coordinate rhythmically? How long are the chunks or stretches of music that our brain processes, and how does the brain sequence them back together? And, of course, as a composer, I really want to know how much I can play with these phenomena in order to make interesting new music.

Priorities

"Whilst traveling through the Andes Mountains, we lost our corkscrew. Had to live on food and water for several days!" W.C. Fields, in Mississippi (1935)

Whether composing, playing, or listening to a piece of music, serious engagement brings one ever closer to what might be called the essence of the piece, which is a quantity both more and less than the sum of the notes on the page. More than the notes, because when everything works, things happen which are never written down, cannot be written down, whether in a physical or psychological domain. Less than the notes, because notes are not yet the music and, indeed, almost any old note, if the moment is right, can just be thrown away and it's all to the better of the music.

When I'm not officially composing, that is to say composing in order to put bread on the table, I can almost always sit down and write a piece. But when the composing is real -- commission and performance already agreed -- I can't sit down, in fact, I can't even get near my desk, until I have some even vague idea of what the piece is supposed to be, the idea at its core, its essence. To get to that point, composing is often doing everything but: taking long walks, bicycling, cooking some obscurity, doing minor house repairs, taking on a difficult translation job, shuttling the kids about to sports and lessons. The more mindless the activity the better, all the better to excavate, carve, trim, and pare away at the mess of ideas that is the work in progress until nothing, no idea, is left but the right one. And once you're there, the rest of the work, which is all of the work that most folk usually think of as composing (sketching, drafting, scoring, testing, inking, computing etc.) , is just elaboration, just food and water.

Housekeeping

When faced with some long-dreaded tasks that can no longer be put off, it's often useful to alternate with a more immediately pleasurable task.

Today, I finally began to get my website in order (here) and the alternative activity was sorting and refreshing the spice rack. Here's the current inventory of the rack and the small herb bed behind the kitchen: Achiote seeds; Asefetida; Anise seeds; Basil; Bay leaves; Cardamon (black and white pods, powder); Carraway; Chiles (Cayenne, Pepperocino flakes, Green flakes, New Mexico (whole, flakes, powder), Guajillo, Jalapeno, Pul Biber, Habañero, Pequin, Pasilla); Chives; Cinnamon (sticks, powder); Citric acid powder; Cloves; Coriander (seed, powder, leaves); Cream of Tartar; Cumin (seeds, powder); Curry leaves; Dill; Epazote; Fennel seeds; Fenugreek (seeds, leaves); Garlic (cloves, powder); Ginger (root, powder); Grains of Paradise; Gumbo File; Juniper berries; Kaffir lime leaves; Mint; Mustard seeds (black); Nutmeg (Whole); Onion seeds; Oregano; Paprika powder (hot and sweet); Parsley; Peppercorns (black, white, red, green); Pimento; Pinenuts; Rosemary; Sage; Savory; Sesame seeds; Tarragon; Tasmanian pepper berries; Thyme; Turmeric; Wasabi; Wattleseed.

What's missing? Saffron, of course, and the rest of the green herbs for Frankfurter Grie Soß will have to be bought fresh. One pleasure of the spice rack is letting it be fruitful. Most of the seeds want to get planted: coriander, of course, but fenugreek is a special favorite (the German name, Bockshornklee, describes the shape of the green seed pods -- "rams' horn clover"; potatoes with fenugreek leaves are comfort food around here), and knots of ginger can grow into slender, elegant plants.

To thicken the plot: detail or fanservice?

Darcy James Argue (here and here) writes about Fanservice, a term new to me, and apparently associated first with Japanese superhero comics (about which I know nothing), in which extraneous and gratuitous content, much of it sexual in nature and frequently referential only to other Fanservice, but non-essential to the plot of the work in hand is added solely in order to provide a bonus for the long-time insider, a reward for investing ever-more time and attention to a comic series. Argue goes beyond this to generalize the term to other art forms, and stresses the insider/outside social dimension of a practice that simultaneously panders to those in the know and alienates newcomers and those who are not yet fully initiated into the local cant and code.

While there are many cases in which a broad consensus would agree that a feature is non-essential, gratuitous, and obscure to a novice consumer (and thus pure Fanservice), an extension of the term to similar features in other genres creates some real problems. Details in a work of music, or literature, or dance or film create texture, depth, and may as often be cues as miscues as to the course of the work (like stage magic, these art forms are all about misdirection).* The presence of a wealth of details help to create the illusion that the universe in the work of art is as complex, confusing, contradictory and coherent as the natural world about it (someone once asked the great question of a work of literature: is it wierd enough to be realistic?). The detective story is probably the form in which this characteristic is most essential, as the presence of detail in the story which is, ultimately, irrelevant to the solution of the mystery is required to both sustain the readers' attention to the detective work and to add to the plausibility of the scenario through enriching the texture.

In the end, whether content is fanservice or just generous detail is, I suppose, entirely in the mind of the body being serviced. There is an argument, associated with modernism, that anything extraneous and non-essential to a work should be eliminated but there is also a modernist argument that a work should be encyclopedic, emulating a universe in the diversity (and often even the obscurity) of its contents. There is no resolution to these two arguments and, just as with unresolved contradictions in music, I happen to find this a perfectly cheerful state of affairs.

(I just noticed that Tim Rutherford-Johnson opens the discussion even further, and more wisely than I, here.)

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* My friend Tom Hilton loved to point out a passage in B. Traven's The Death Ship, which bops along in an entirely plausible mode until someone mentions the town of "Chi(cago), Wisconsin", an error, perhaps, but one which nags at the reader, who at this point may wonder if the entire book has suddenly decohered from familar spacetime.

Open it up!

Bart Collins of the Well-Tempered Blog reports that a number of manuscripts have been discovered in Poland which might be "new" works of Mozart. The online stories indicate that the specialists have been gathered to render judgement on the provenance and authority of the works. That's standard musicological operating procedure ("SMOP").

However, online technology, and that of blogging in particular, offers a serious alternative to SMOP: Good images of the manuscripts can be placed online as soon as possible, allowing analysis and discussion to be carried out by as broad a community as possible rather than a select group of professionals. On numerous occasions, online communities have already demonstrated considerable competence in investigations of this sort, both confirming, complementing, and challenging the work done by professional scholars.

Such a process would necessarily require that parties most immediately associated with the discoveries have to give up a bit of their conventional SMOP rights to control first performances, publication, and even some of the authority associated with a first report in print on the authenticity of the documents. However, as scholars, isn't the greater interest in the work itself, not the collection of scholarly feathers-in-mortar-boards or in the prestige of publication by a traditional publishing house. I believe that this is the case for musical works by composers whose catalogs are otherwise long part of the public domain, and acutely so for works of substantial musical quality, for which getting the work out (published, played, heard) is more important that being the first to do so.

It may be argued that an open vetting of a question like the provenance of a musical manuscript would be a messy and inconclusive process. The famous example of the alleged military service documents of George W. Bush is frequently taken as a case in point. However, I believe that those documents are, in fact, a very good illustration of the advantages of an open process. I believe that it's fair to conclude that the open online discussion reached a consensus on two points, and a consensus that may well be familiar to scholars of music: the first point was that the documents were modern forgeries, but the second point was that the content of the documents appears not to have contradicted in any substantial way the known circumstances and events of Mr. Bush's military performance. (In other words, the documents were fake but their content was true, a combination entirely plausible in the world of music.) In both the documents and the historical context, the online community was able to bring considerable resources and expertise, far exceeding those of the news organization which first publicized the documents. Had CBS News first placed the documents online for such thorough perusal and discussion before making their prime time report, Dan Rather might still be reading the evening news, an example that contemporary music scholars may wish to examine in considering the possible advantages of an open inquiry over SMOP.

More not being there.

Sometimes when you simply let a score go off on its own into the world, very good things happen.

My School of Levitation, a set of etudes for piano with a score made up entirely of brief prose instructions (it's here, if you like), was played last Saturday in Zug, Switzerland on a program of conceptual and minimalist works including pieces by Young, Brown, Lucier, Kosugi, Ichiyinagi, Reich, Glass & Johnson (all personal heroes). I had written the etudes for Hildegard Kleeb, my favorite pianist, or more accurately, as projects for Hildegard to realize with her students. In the concert in Zug, they were played by Leandra Högger, a young pianist studying in Lucerne.



The first etude uses a very simple process, in which the arms begin crossed and slowly move to the opposite end of the keyboard, by a combination of accumulated errors in repetition and the natural relaxation of the arms. Hildegard writes that

She took a lot of time and space to play quietly and the first Etude lasted about 20 minutes.

I had never imagined a performance of that length, but now it seems exactly right.

In the third Etude, Catching Butterflies, the pianist is asked to speak a series of words into the open piano, pedal down, and then to reproduce prominent resonances of each word on the keyboard. I had left the choice of words up to the pianist, but was totally delighted to learn that, in Zug

In the 3rd etude she used names of butterflies.

The idea had never occurred to me. Now, it's hard to imagine any other text. Has anyone else ever noticed that, in no matter which language, the names of butterflies sound extraordinary?

Not. Easy.

Dennis Báthory-Kitsz responds to a post of mine from earlier this year. With all due respect and affection, I disagree with almost everything Dennis writes. Let's go through this item by item:

Music is easy.

There is no monolithic music, music is plural: while some music is blissfully easy, other music is entirely uneasy, and much music wanders with all determination in the space in-between.

Its actual content is insubstantial.

Music, the temporal art par excellence, is transitory, but it is not insubstantial. It's pushing wave fronts around in real space and in real time, and the physical impact of that motion is thrillingly real.

It is about clever noises,

Noises are not clever, but they may be used as cleverly or idiotically as one may, and our interest in those noises is precisely in their application.

and all the numerical pomp brought into it by modernists or discovered in the baroque by musicologists is as meaningless as the educational spout that claims music offers the benefits of greater intellectual acuity or physical coordination.

I don't follow this at all -- are you suggesting that music cannot have a depth and complexity to reward intellectual or physical engagement?

It makes no valuable contributions to human progress,

While I can't, personally, find much utility in the phrase "human progress", I can immediately recognize that music is one record of the current state of the human condition, and a state often -- and tellingly -- independent from political economy or technological resources.

(But if we do wish to reduce music to a "contribution to human progress", certain technical developments are directly due to music, for example the regulation of air pressure in the wind chest in the hydraulis or the opposable crank on the hurdy-gurdy. More impressively, it is entirely plausible that the material needs which were answered by the invention of the mechanical clock, in which a fixed and repeating unit of time was divided precisely at several levels, emerged only in the continent, Europe, in which musical counterpoint and its notation had been developed.)

it is pitifully self-referential,

Why should self-referentiality be pitied? Isn't there precious value in imagined worlds -- of music or other art forms, design, mathematics, theology -- in which the point of departure is the familiar, but through disciplined, internally consistent work, new worlds are constructed that are orthogonal to and enriching of everyday experience.

it is a garbled and inconsistent means of communication, it has nothing to communicate but the personal and unarguable choices of the artists, and it is hardly worth that angst brought to it by so many nascent composers.

Again, music is plural, and plural from its very origins. While music shares physiological organs and cognitive apparatus with speech and one form of music originates in and continues to be a heightened form of speech, and although music may well be held to be "garbled" when tasked with communicative acts that speech alone does with superb clarity and efficiency, music does in fact have capacities to communicate aspects of experience, and our experience of space and time in particular, that plain speech does terribly, if at all. What an astonishing continuum music occupies! On one end, nothing says I love you better than breaking out into song, while on the other end, nothing allows one to pass time better than making noises that joyfully articulate the experience of time passed.

Debate that and risk getting outed.

Risk welcomed.

There. I've said it. Music doesn't create world peace or make a better sandwich.

Here. I'll say it: One does not ask music to interact with the rest of the world in a simple causal relationship. But music can be sign and symptom of a world at peace or even well-fed. The state of music in a culture can be sign and symptom of how peace is valued in that culture, and taste in music is often usefully parallel to taste in food (among other things): certainly in the West, the coexistence of fast and slow food cultures is precisely mirrored by the diversity in quality, substance, and function of the various musical cultures. (See my post on Slow Listening, here).

But if music and the world around it are not in a simple causal relationship, I believe that valuing music and, in turn, the values one finds in music may well be a necessary precondition for a world in which peace, or yes, even just a better sandwich, is valued.

Not being there

An email came late last night announcing that a piece of mine would be played tomorrow in Switzerland. The news was a complete -- and pleasant -- surprise. In principle, everything could be dropped, a babysitter arranged, tickets purchased, bags packed, and in a matter of hours I could be in the Alps listening to my piece (it'll be a concert premiere of work intended for studio performance). But there is also a principle to just letting it go on: a score like mine can go out into the world without my further assistance, like a love letter addressed to whom it may concern. After all, I already know how it goes...

Landmarks (33)

Arnold Schoenberg: String Trio (for Violin, Viola and Cello) op. 45 (1946)

Like all of Schoenberg's strongest works, the String Trio was written in an brief and intense period of time; several of these pieces were composed at times associated with dramatic personal events, in this case a medical crisis (see here).

Schoenberg named his book of collected essays Style and Idea; the contrast between the intuitive and expressive, even precognitive, qualities implied by the term style and the formal, mental, conscious qualities carried by the term idea is ever-present in Schoenberg's music. These qualities are inevitably in tension, but in his best works that tension becomes both a propulsive and cohesive force.

I find that Schoenberg's least convincing pieces are those in which technique is speaking louder than style; this is frankly true of some of the twelve-tone works, with the Wind Quintet an especially labored example. But in the late Trio (as well as the violin and piano Phantasy and A Survivor from Warsaw), the composer found a balance between his native musical language, a heightened Wiener Espressivo, and the rigor of the twelve-tone method.

That is not to say that the work is an easy one: Schoenberg's expressionist style is, for many listeners and musicians, more off-putting than his technique (which, in principal, is abstract and can be composed-out in a variety of styles, some of them altogether different from expressionism). And although a kind of free tonal expressionism has become widely familar (at least as a fixed trope in film music) it remains a style that is as uneasy now as it ever was, and was never intended to be anything other than uneasy.

Although Schoenberg would later explain (to Thomas Mann, as reported in The Story of a Novel) that the Trio was a reflection of his psychological and physical state at the time, the work is carried by a formal structure that is ultimately independent of any simple biographical narrative. It is program music, but the more substantial narrative is musical not literal. The three parts separated by episodes of the single movement work may or may not correspond directly to autobiographical episodes, but this is inessential; what is important is that the musical continuity, the musical narrative, is gripping and convincing on its own terms.

As heightened as the expression may be, the Trio is never heavy-handed with its emotions; its tone is often clinical, and the pain and fear are observed, not pushed on the listener. Central to the tone is Schoenberg's command of string writing (he was a string player himself) and the timbral possibilities of the instruments are used brilliantly everywhere to both project the intensity of the musical narrative and to spring out of any constraints the rigorous tonal structure might suggest. The tone of the strings here is subtle, sensitive, exposed and -- especially when agitated and loud -- vulnerable, suggesting that the composer needed to use the instruments he knew most intimately to handle that vulnerability, that fragility.

Burning

Firefighters are working at this moment to put out a major fire in the Berliner Philharmonie. The fire occured during the time of an afternoon concert, which was halted and all audience and musicians were able to leave the building. The home of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, the hall was built in 1960-63, designed by architect Hans Scharoun. It has been reported that the cause of the fire was welding near the insulation beneath the roof and initial reports indicate that, barring water damage from the fire control, the concerts in the hall scheduled for this weekend should be able to take place.

Update: The fire has been controlled without injuries or damage to the instrument collection, but all concerts in the main hall have tentatively been canceled.

Whadayaknow?

What of music, and the world about music, does a composer have to know? While one generally supposes that knowing more rather than knowing less is a better default setting, there are plenty of fine musicians who get along, with music & the world, just swell on a need-to-know basis.* More than a few composers have come to art music via popular musics or film or visual art or performance art or maths or what have you, and are active and perfectly successful without a traditional command of theory or even notation. Some musicians even exercise a form of self-induced deafness, to tactically shut out potential areas of influence in order or even to insure that one's inventions are more honestly one's own.

I use the word useful a lot on these pages; in a musical scene with a lively diversity of activity, it's damn next to impossible to claim that, as in the old conservative conservatory days, there was a curriculum to which a consensus canon and code could be agreed. Instead, the only criterion is usefulness: does some bit of knowledge lead productively to interesting new work?

*****

There's an important interview (Ithinks) in the current issue of MusikTexte with James Ingram, who was Stockhausen's copyist from 1974 to 2000. Ingram was, by all accounts, not just a copyist but was absolutely critical for Stockhausen in establishing his publishing house after the composer's breakup with Universal Edition and he produced meticulous scores with a distinctive house style. This included making a transition to computer-based engraving which, in Stockhausen's case, required the development of unique fonts as well as tools for directly manipulating the score image, moreover, working within the composer's household workshop, Ingram was able to revise and edit any score in progress with a flexibility and immediacy not possible in traditional publishing structures.

Naturally, anyone with such close contact to a figure like Stockhausen will have observed a lot of interesting things (i.e. Stockhausen's preference for the manually controlled oscillators in the original version of Studie II over a later, computer-generated version, a preference which is reiterated in the realization of his late electronic work Cosmic Pulses from the unfinished Klang cycle), but one observation, or rather non-observation stuck-out for me, and that was Ingram's response to the question of How much music did Stockhausen know? And Ingram's answer, that he seldom listened to music other than his own strikes me as entirely plausible, and entirely telling. Ingram speculates that he didn't want to know other music -- it's a way of circumventing questions of influence or even claims of plagiarism** and his own biography coincides precisely with that stretch of German history in which a premise of beginning from nothing was widely shared and a precondition to this was a very careful forgetting of the past. (I believe that this premise was even more consequently applied by Stockhausen that by any of his contemporaries in the literary zero hour (Stunde Null)).

To my ears, a paradoxical effect of Stockhausen's distance to other music, and particularly to other contemporary music, is that because his own music did not enter into dialog with its contemporaries, it often does not feel modern and of the moment, but exhibits rather a kind of nostalgia for the modernity of an era past. Much as Varese's futurism or ultramodernism remained that of the 1920's, Stockhausen's was very much stuck in that of the 1950's and early 1960's. I was struck by this first with the -- altogether charming -- little set of melodies, Tierkreis (1974-75) which, especially in their harmonized versions, apply a voice leading that is comfortably located in a harmonic cul de sac right off the insection between Messiaen and Hindemith. Stockhausen's subsequent tonal practice, from Sirius through Licht, confirmed this impression with his use of the prolongation and diminution of basic melodic formulae reinforcing this quality.

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* As long as I'm at it, I think that -- all else being equal -- it's probably better that a composer have being nice rather than being a jerk as a default temperament setting, but neither quality is an automatic precondition to musical and social success. Unfortunately, Clio provides plenty of evidence that plenty of jerks rise to Parnassus and plenty of nice folk finish last. But then again, I never got an "A" in "gets along with others", so you may discount my opinion appropriately.
**It is, for example, impossible to escape the specific influence that La Monte Young's work had on Stockhausen's Stimmung and, likewise, the use of a nine-limit tonality diamond in his Sternklang must have come from Harry Partch, but in other cases, like that of a possible connection between Feldman's Intermission 6 (1953) and Stockhausen's Klavierstück XI (1956) can be more probably assigned to the realm of good ideas that are simply of a moment in which independent discovery is possible.

Presence

Last Wednesday, I was treated to an evening of music for solo string instruments, two rarities: a baroque baryton (or viola paradon) and an 'ûd kâmil-i buzurg, the scholar's lute of the later Timurid empire, played, respectively, by Roswitha Bruggaier and Danyel Franke. In advance, Franke warned us of the low amplitude of the music, noting that the small hall (perhaps 40 people in the room) was already too large, and that, in fact, the instruments were both intended to be played for an audience of one, the player him- or herself, suggesting a certain violation of intimacy in bringing the music, an improvised Taqsim, a baroque partita by Krause, (both in an historically-informed performance style) and two new solo works by Franke, to a public even as small as ours.

I think, though, that Danyel Franke's warning and intimated violation of privacy were unneccessary. While both instruments were, in terms of modern concert instruments, extremely soft, each was perfectly audible, even in a room, with glass walls facing an unquiet street, and bodied enough by live, breathing and shifting human beings, that should have hardly been appropriate to musical intimacy. But it worked just fine. After initial adjustments in bodies, ears, and attentions, every nuance of sound was simply present. It was not even a question of competing with the street or random body noises, as the sounds unfolding in musical time made by the musicians on those particular instruments were so special, so unlike anything else about us in the casual rhythms of everyday, that talk of competition would be an irrelevancy.

*****

I happen to be a great advocate of electronic sound amplification, but only when it is used as an appropriate technology. Such is our general disregard for the qualities of particular sounds that we too often assume that a sound has got to be assisted by amplified and loudspeakers in order to be heard. In the worst cases, amplification is chosen specifically so that listeners will be forced to hear something and to hear it in one specific way (in other words, a choice is made that others will have no choice). As bad as this practice may be in developed countries, it has been my experience that amplification is especially abused in the developing world, where its use is at once an emblem of modernity and wealth, but also clearly a tool for public control. The costs to the musical experience are, in my opinion, often far too high, as nuance and detail gets lost to the mix, artifacts of electro-acoustic transmission, and the social competition for a position in front of a microphone.

At one of my universities, we had fairly regular concert visits by Q'in players. The q'in, the Chinese "scholar's lute" is an instrument of even less absolute volume than either of the instruments played Wednesday evening. Inevitably, each guest musician would insist upon amplification, on the premise that their instrument could not otherwise be heard, and the faculty member responsible for the PA system would politely go through the routines of setting up mic, amp, and speakers and holding brief a sound check with the player. But during the concert -- and I observed this at least four times -- said Professor would simply turn the sound system off. And no one -- the player included -- ever complained. They was, in fact, nothing to complain about, as every sound was perfectly perceptible, even when scarcely audible, as the q'in had an acoustical presence that was both so attractive and so distinctive that it was inescapable and even, in some moments, reached a near-deafening intensity.

*****

I think sometimes that in composing, and especially in orchestration, it might be useful to get away from a focus on balancing elements and focus instead on the assertion of the individual presences of musical sounds, whether from voices or instruments. In principle, it should be possible to have, let's say, a trombone (the standard orchestral instrument with the highest possible decibel output) playing at the same time as a lute and be able to perceive both, provided the composition projects the individual characteristics of each instrument. (The late Henry Brant -- following the model of Charles Ives -- smartly used spatial separation of instrumental and vocal forces to achieve a polyphony of forces often unperturbed by unequal amplitudes).

*****

These ideas about presence are scarcely my own; they are in debt to Gordon Mumma, Alvin Lucier, Hauke Harder, and the artist Robert Irwin.

A tragedy of the common

This is the course of the world: that where we think ourselves surest, there are we furthest off from our purpose. -- Thomas Morley

I've been having the pleasure of re-reading Morley's Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke (1597), pleasure, combined with that shock, once again, of recognizing, behind the immediate difficulties of the language, a clear, systematic, and -- in my opinion -- modern accounting of an art of music and a book of ideas for potential music making (his accounting of rhythm, for example, is so rich is possibilities that Anglophones had to wait until Henry Cowell's New Musical Resources of 1930 for a substantial companion volume).

But at the same time, reading Morley is a melancholy experience, for he was writing at a moment in which a musician-scholar could meaningfully survey an entire repertoire, shared by a community of musicians and listeners. And in that community, there was a shared repertoire of whole pieces, forms, figures, & rules to be replicated, extended, & -- judiciously -- broken. The melancholy comes with the recognition that such a moment is long behind us. Now, each composer sets her or his own rules, independent of a community, and if a rule is broken, it's like the the proverbial tree falling in the forest: who's to know?

A friend, David Feldman, call this my "tragic dimension": if I understand him correctly, on the one hand, this is being aware that all is possible but that that richness of possibility comes at the cost of a loss of commonality, while on the other hand, it is the awareness that through new compositional techniques, experiments, one may come close to successfully replicating elements of familiar musics, but one may well also fail, and it's not at all clear how success and failure are distinguished, let alone predicted. I can't deny the tragic side of this, but my working premise has been that there is potential for richness to be found precisely in the tension between the common and the wider field of unexplored possibilities around the common. Moreover, adopting an experimental discipline requires that one learn to take cheer from failure as well as from success.


Treasuring the common; looking for common ground. A habit, a folly even, is collecting ground basses -- chromatic lamentos, Passamezzi antico or modern, La Folia (of course), and passacaglias and chaconnes of any length or flavor -- and they can, indeed, ground your work, allowing experiments with figures above and below, but also making a connection to the commons. Some people collect stamps or potato mashers, I collect ground basses. Having cake and eating it, too. Having archaic...

Complexity and Stuff

While there are countless conceptions or definitions of complexity, there are two sorts of complexity that are probably most relevant to music. One is basically quantitative: the impression of complexity due to the amount of stuff squeezed into a piece. The other is qualitative and due to wonder about how the stuff, whatever quantity there may be of it, is connected, within and without the world of a piece. While a composer can certainly push an extreme of quantity up or down into a state of inescapable wonder, my own taste certainly runs more in the direction of pushing quality to extremes, where wonder is an option, not forced.

Are we good?

Blogging economist Brad De Long observes that:

A good college--visible or invisible--is composed of people who (a) know stuff, and (b) think well. The best colleges are made up of people who know different stuff, who think well in different ways, and who--most important--understand that when they listen to people who know different stuff than they do and who think well in different ways than they do, they learn.

Substitute "music school" or "new music blog" for "college": maybe the new music blogs, taken in aggregate, aren't so bad after all.

Old/new quote/unquote

Donald Rumsfeld:

"Now, you're thinking of Europe as Germany and France. I don't. I think that's old Europe. If you look at the entire NATO Europe today, the center of gravity is shifting to the east. And there are a lot of new members. And if you just take the list of all the members of NATO and all of those who have been invited in recently -- what is it? Twenty-six, something like that? -- you're right. Germany has been a problem, and France has been a problem."

Kyle Gann:

"...and we agreed today that, if the old music world was France, Germany, and Elliott Carter, the new one is more typically The Netherlands, Serbia, and Downtown."

*****

The Obama era can't come fast enough. The world is a subtle, diverse, and complex place, and quality can be found anywhere, as well as disaster. We need to be more grown-up about this rather than continue to trade in petulant blanket categorizations and prejudices. The "old worlds" were never as monolithic as all that, and a failure to recognize that is just echoing the sins of those who most benefit from the monolithic image. (Need anyone be reminded that it was that "old European", German Green Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer who stood up to Rumsfeld in advance of the Iraq adventure and stated as clearly as possible that he "was not convinced"?) Yes, let's call out the old institutions and the Boulezes or Carters of the world when they play ugly musical politics, but let's also take music as music, rather than the music-political currency of a given faction or cohort, even if we risk giving the music of others more respect that was ever or will be shown in return. Yes, there are (and will always be) musical factions and cohorts, gathered by various forms of affinity, convenience, or caprice, but in the real new music world, these are no longer distinct communities primarily built around geographical borders and ethnological affinity defending a common repertoire but are instead networks of aesthetic affinities sharing information and resources with overlapping but not exclusive repertoire.

Twice-tagged

This is for Paul Bailey and Steve Hicken, who know why:

The Captain, a stranger, now enters with Arlecchino. He says he has come from Spain to find his brother, married to a woman in Rome these many years. They knock at the door of the inn.

In a Garden of Branching Websites

I spent an hour or so of procrastination time this morning trying to figure out how to travel to the Republic of Kalmykia. It's possible, in theory, but if you want to book ahead of time, you can't get there from here. Maybe that's okay, as Kalmykia, the nation that, by any modest powers of reason or imagination, ought to be the most interesting place in Europe, has been so worn down by the last century of external control and half-hearted Soviet-style modernisation, that any journey there is likely to be disappointing.

Websites, full of links internal, external, and infernal, were supposed to be the ideal medium from getting from some idea of here to some other idea of there and eventually to some completely different idea of somewhere else, but it turns out that, in practice, this capacity is under-utilized, if at all. Most websites are like simple motel rooms, with a central room leading to one or two other places, a few are like walk-through hotel suites, in which its possible to view everything in one route. Personally, I prefer web surfing to have the caprice of a Fellini film narrative in which the connection between the site first entered and the site ultimately exited is unpredictable, adventurous. Instead, the form of the website has largely become predictable: for composers, for example, there's an front, index, page and direct links from there to a biography (or cv, if the composer in question is an academic), a list of works, a press page, a small external links page, and a contact page. And that's it. For new musicians, we sure offer very little in the way of novelty, let alone surprise.

The late Edward Gorey's masterpiece among his many small books was The Raging Tide: Or, The Black Doll's Imbroglio (1987). The book has a stunning and disciplined composition, featuring characters associated with Gorey's unmade screenplay, among them the acrobatic Figbash, and is, in part, a response to surrealism by an artist who very much wanted to love surrealism but was too often disappointed. Each facing pair of pages in the book has an illustration to the right and a single sentence to the left. The sentences fall into two types: the first type has one or more characters performing an act with an object upon another character (or, in two cases, upon themselves)("Hooglyboo poured golden syrup over Naeelah."; "Figbash and Naeelah assaulted Hoogleyboo with cookie-cutters."), and the second is a simple declarative sentence ("Short sheets make the bed look longer."; "Not long ago they were destroyed by insects.") The narrative branches off at each page according to the reader's answer to a question like "If you dislike turnips less than you do prunes, turn to 22. If it is the reverse, turn to 21." or "If you want to persevere with the story, turn to 28. If you wish to correct a possible discrepancy, turn to 21." Thus, instead of a simple linear narrative, Gorey takes a trick from childrens' novelty books, and offers hundreds of possible ways of going through the book, thus guaranteeing that return visits to the book will be comfortably (or uncomfortably, as the case may be) within the same little universe, but never alike enough to be disappointing. Why can't more websites have that rhizome-like quality, with interesting things appearing via unpredictable routes?

(My own website is not good, let alone interesting; any links to model composer websites would be welcomes as well as any ideas or suggestions about how to do a better job.)

Better Websites

The good thing about an active blog is that when it is fed enough interesting and new material some readers may actually feel invited to come back again, and sometimes at regular intervals: like a weekly date at a cafe or donuts and the daily newspaper (remember the daily paper? remember donuts?). Composers' websites, on the other hand, tend to be fixed points, sources of reference materials that one visits once and returns only in a programming emergency. There are a few dedicated composer websites out their with the professional panache to actually serve as a marketing tool, but they are rare. Those colleagues who have been able to combine a blog with their website, for some one-stop musical-philosophical shopping, seem to be on the right track.

As for myself, I'm not yet on the right track: my website is not good, being neither attractive enough to get by on looks alone nor interesting enough to get by on smarts and contents. The fact that my rights organization, GEMA, makes it all expensive to place sounds on the site is a major problem (although I have begun to do a better job of putting scores online). And this blog is, well, what it is, and I haven't even managed to make a proper back-up of all 866 (eight-hundred and sixty-six) (!) posts to-date. Ideally, Ithinks, I'd like to integrate website and blog into something more composerly, a piece in its own right, if you will, and one that rewards visiting and revisiting and -- hopefully -- more performances of my music. I'm somewhat encouraged in this idea by my current reading of Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves, which -- or so I'm told -- is a species of hyper-novel, and welcome news that experimental literature has not gone the way of the Dodo and the 20th century and the nickel cigar.

Luxury Time

I dislike wearing watches, but if someone were to make me a gift of this timepiece, which dispenses with seconds, minutes, and hours, distinguishing only night from day, and does so with all the precision a $300,000 dual Tourbillon swiss clockwork can bring to the task, I wouldn't be seen anywhere without it.

More slow listening

I recommend this interview with Christopher Fox, a composer whose musicality and intelligence I value highly. The money line is the last one:

It takes time to make people hear differently and for me that’s what a composer must do.

More Practical: Feldman

One large omission from the last post was the name of Morton Feldman. Feldman's notational practice was at once a very efficient means of achieving a form of ensemble complexity and paradoxical in its relationship between clarity of means and ambiguity of ends. Whether in the scores written on graph paper or the later works in which he drew all the barlines in advance of composing the music that would fill (or empty) those bars, he was setting up a rigid notational grid, the bars of which he could then proceed to dissolve, whether in terms of pitch (in the graph pieces) or time (in the later works).

I believe that one aspect of Feldman's musical sensibility was shared with the Skryabinistes,* if not inherited directly by Feldman via his piano teacher, Madame Press, who had been personally associated with Skryabin, and that is an emphasis on rubato, and a very broadly conceived rubato at that. But not only a rubato in terms of time, but also pitch (whether in the graph scores or in the later pieces with their finicky accidentals), and possibly, in the long works, with form.

In the later works, and especially the series of pieces for small ensemble (combinations of flutes, piano, percussion, often including celeste doubling) beginning with Why Patterns?), although the barlines go straight through the ensembles on the page, the individual measure in each individual line were often assigned different metres by Feldman thus erasing any simple vertical coordination. Feldman was able to work with vertical relationships on the page that would in turn be shattered and scattered, both back and forth, in the real time of a performance. The result is an ensemble texture that is polyphonic -- in the sense used by systematic musicology -- but not of an historic polyphonic sensibility, and -- again like Skryabin, who beat Schoenberg to this -- a tonal practice in which vertical and horizontal distinctions are unclear if not entirely irrelevant.
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* Skyrabin's is a ghost-like presence and influence over much later 20th century music. Three important Skryabinistes who emigrated to France were Arthur-Vincent Lourié, Nicolay Oboukhov and Ivan Wïschnegradsky. Lourié is considered the first musical futurist, and after his departure from the Soviet Union, would make connections to Busoni and Stravinsky. Oboukhov, almost unknown, was a decided mystic, developed an idiosynchratic tonal system which, at least in part, was based upon a non-serial manipulation of twelve tone sets, composed for a Theremin-like electronic instrument, "La Croix Sonore, and devoted most of his energies to a large orchestral and vocal work titled The Book of Life. Wischnegradsky's contacts with Messiaen and Boulez -- largely written out of eithers' biographies, like the quartertones in Boulez's original version of Le Visage Nuptial -- deserve more attention.