From Materials to Music

I've been working in just intonation since my freshman year in high school, in 1975 or 76, when the music of Lou Harrison and Harry Partch first registered.  The beauty of the pure intervals was the first attraction, but soon, the whole business of organizing tones into scales and systems became an attraction of its own.  But a scale or a system is not yet music, but rather material with potential to be used musically.  The diagram (or lattice — German Tonnetz — or manifold) describing a tuning system is a static entity, rather like a map from which a useful route has not yet been discovered.  

My first lattices were all at right angles, following the models of Martin Vogel and Ben Johnston, with chains of fifths (ratios of 3:2)  running horizontally and major thirds (ratios of 5:4)  vertically.  Adding ratios of higher primes, especially 7, 11, and 13, was an on-going problem, solved with transparencies or other kludges.  I literally stumbled into a way of animating my lattices, turning the static information on the lattice into information about successive events in a score, when I came across an article by Shohei Tanaka (1862-1945), a Japanese scientist who wrote a dissertation in Berlin in the late 19th century on Just Intonation, in which he advocated a 53-tone equal temperament for the approximation of a just intonation based on pure thirds and fifths.  Tanaka used a lattice in which the lines of fifths and thirds were at a 60-degree angle to one another, and added lines indicating the minor third relationships as well, thus presenting major triads as upward pointing triangles and minor triads as downward.  This started to look more like music to me, and quickly, all of the moves that characterize smooth voice leading in tonal music started to appear as simple moves on this hexagonal lattice.  The tones connected directly to a single tone were the fifth above and below, the major thirds above and below and the minor thirds above and below.  The vertical mirror of a major triad was the minor on the same root, horizontal neighbors sharing the central tone were in a dominant-tonic relationship, and triad described by triangles sharing one face had mediant relationships.  At the same time, I started to recognized that the most compact voice leadings I was learning simultaneously in my study of figured bass realization were compact moves on the lattice, while progressions that were more exotic tended to be represented by greater distances on the lattice.

In the spring of '78, I went to San Diego to visit the Partch instrument collection then housed at SDSU under the watch of Danlee Mitchell.  I showed Mitchell my attempts at latticing Partch's scales and Mitchell said immediately that I had to visit Erv Wilson, a name I had recognized from the second edition of Partch's Genesis of a Music (Wilson, a professional draughtsman, had done the diagrams for Partch and had also suggested the layout for one of Partch's instruments, the Quadrangularis Reversum).  Wilson lived in East LA, and I soon arranged to visit his house, one of the oldest in the city, located at the edge of the arroyo into which the oldest — and now, almostly quaintly small — freeway in the city, the Pasadena, had been dug.  Wilson was in his front garden when I arrived, sorting bags of corn hybrids collected from his ranch in the mountains of Chihuahua, Mexico.   He looked through my collection of lattices and scores and at an adapted hawai'ian guitar I  had brought along and immediately took me in to his dining room, where he sat me down at the table and started to teach some more economical, elegant, and tonally suggestive ways of mapping tones on paper, or in the three dimensional models of dowels and spheres suspended throughout his house.  It was a total revelation to see how Wilson could accomodate far more than the lousy two or three dimensions I could capture on paper, as he casually drew examples with four, five, even eight dimensions represented.  But these examples were not Augenmusik, but acoustically immediate and vivid, as Wilson's house was filled with re-fretted guitars, a collection of flutes, and a number of keyboard percussion instruments, of metals, wood, and bamboo, each apparently to a different tuning system, with alternative keyboard layouts of Wilson's own exquisite and ergonomic designs.  (Wilson's ear is amazing: once, while using his scalatron out in his garage to tune up some aluminum tubing, I was periodically interrupted by his shouting out the ratios of each new tube "256/243! 16/15!, 13/12!"). 

My use of collections of pitches related by just intonation remained rather unadventurous for some time, as I was essentially replicating the most familar moves in tonal music. This was hard to square with my attraction to more experimental music.  Working with La Monte Young  provided one decisive step in this direction.  The harmonic motion in La Monte's pieces is very much understood as motion around a lattice, with formal sections of works restricted to subsets of the total collection of pitches (incidentally Xenakis is up to something similar in Herma) , but La Monte's avoidance of ratios involving the number five whether as tones used directly or as combination tones creates very different tonal environments, and a number of works allowed performers to improvise within the constraints of rules which effectively constitute the voice leading rules in these new environments.  These rules are related, also, to the "cuing" pieces of Christian Wolff, which have also been very important to me.  I made a number of pieces in which performers moved by a small set of rules through pitch materials, including a set of just intonation Mazes and equal tempered pieces, the best and most-played of which was Multnomah Riffs of 1981.  In Multnomah Riffs, the players worked through a score of four repeated measures or frames, from which pitches could be selected, and played at any time within the frame, omitting or repeating any tone so long as the sequence of tones was preserved.  My friend Jonathan Segel, known perhaps best as a member of the band Camper Van Beethoven, contributed an ostinato for celesta to keep track of the frames.

A second decisive step was provided by a small piece by the mathematician and composer David Feldman called Going Places, for two violins.   Going Places is essentially a canon for the two fiddles, chasing each other in a random walk (run, actually) across an open-ended lattice of major and minor thirds.  Encouraged by David's example, I soon wrote a number of pieces involving random walks across both open-ended and closed lattices of various dimensions, and eventually started trying different sets of constraints and changing the lattice, sometimes quite dramatically, in the course of a piece.  These lattice moves were also related to Lou Harrison's "interval controls"  (Elliot Carter, famously, uses a related technique).  

I would later encounter works by Yuji Takahashi and James Tenney that use similar techniques; I am particularly fond of Tenney's principle, in Changes for six harps, of establishing a tonic, jumping to someplace tonally distant from the tonic, and returning by the simplest possible root motion, often a descending series of fifths, thus recapitulating very familar harmonic territory.  As my own strategies for working with tonal motion had generally been symmetrical, even dualistic, Tenney's example was an important one, in that it better resembled the assymetry of real tonal musics, for example in the German tradition in which I can go to IV or V and IV to I or V but V can only go to I.   (For some great counter examples, with their own assymetries, from non-German traditions, consider the V-IV of the blues, or the extended subdominant chains in Berlioz's Marche Troyenne.)  

In Charles Seeger's breathtakingly prescient little treatise on Dissonant Counterpoint, he introduces the principle that the structure of an existing tonal system can be maintained, but the precise content be changed, in his case changing the hierarchy of consonant and dissonant intervals in a contrapuntal texture.  Following Seeger's example, in these unfamilar tonal environments, whether in just intonation or mapped to an equal temperament, there is plenty of opportunity to experiment with both the rules and material hierarchies, while still preserve qualities that are clearly tonal.  (The musical and mental agility on display in this and other examples of Seeger's writings has provided a decisive spark for experimental music for several generations past and will continue to provoke for several generations to come.  If anyone asks, I'm a card-carrying Seegerite.) 

(I haven't let go altogether of my youthful dualism:  when I come across the so-called half-diminished seventh chord in classical works (Bach and Mozart, especially), it still makes a lot of sense to think of it as a subharmonic chord, the exact inversion of a dominant seventh chord, and I think that it is sufficient that this chord is arrived at melodically, by voice leading and counterpoint (the Tristan "chord" is another example), without having to argue about the physical and psychophysical status of the subharmonic.) 

*****

At the moment, I am mostly interested in the relationship between the group of tones in play locally and globally,  and especially our sense that a tone belongs or doesn't belong to a moment in a piece or a whole piece.  Erv Wilson's ideas about moments of symmetry come into play here, in that subsets of a tune system can exhibit similar properties of coherence.   Classical diatonic tonality, with its matruschka-doll construction of chords, diatonic scales, and chromatic scales, is one example.  Recently David Feldman demonstrated that there are only a small number of distinct and connected graphs of a diatonic scale onto a 3,5 lattice.  (I'll let David publish his own result, but the number should be easy enough for you to figure out on your own.   He has also figured out the distinct graphs for sets of 12 pitches on this and on other lattices, a calculation which is not so easy).  This was very interesting to me because I have made a number of pieces that could be considered "pan-diatonic" and Feldman's lattices suggested something  more to the point, in that each graph, while preserving the letter names, had an alternative harmonic profile, much like individual moments in real tonal music.  Sometimes an A is the fifth above a D, sometimes it's the third above F, but not necessarily both at the same time.  The graphs could be realized in just intonation, or mapped to an equal temperament, or to an unequal temperament designed to best represent a particular graph or set of graphs.  Moreover, these graphs suggest particular melodic paths, rows, if you will, with built-in harmonic properties.  This line of working strikes me as very rich and, possibly, very musical. 

(from a talk in California, January, 2009).

Polychoral

I heard a very good performance of the Maderna Violin Concerto (1969) on Friday evening with the HR-Symphonie Orchester (there was also a bang-up performance of Punkte, but that's a piece that is almost standard rep for the HR-ers).  As well as it was played, the Maderna disappointed because one of the central features of the work, the spatial separation of the orchestra into several sub-ensembles, didn't really add anything to the music and maybe even detracted from it.  In the concerto, the soloist is positioned conventially, front-and-center, next to the conductor, there are two bowed string ensembles, one immediately behind the soloist and the other at a distance, there is a plucked string group (mandolin, guitar, three harps),  the brass, the percussion, and a wall-o-woodwind to boot.   The spatial distribution was limited to positions in the stage proper, everthing directly in front of the audience, with spatial distinctions largely reducible to left-right, and upstage-downstage.  

The writing for the violin solist was lovely, with cadenza-like playing overwhelming any concertante playing, which made for a pleasingly unusual concerto form.  The problem was that the music for the various sub-ensembles was rather undifferentiated, and distrubuted through the course of the concerto rather too discretely, more in sequence than simultaneously, now this then that, and rarely this against that, rendering any charge the spatial segration might have added rather muted.  (In fairness to the composer, a great deal of sequencing and timing in the concerto are decided, ex tempore, by the conductor, so an alternative interpretation might have led to a more pleasing use of resources.) 

Asking an orchestra to reposition itself for a single piece in a concert is often a stumbling block to getting a work programmed, so if you wish to have spatial elements in a piece, you have to be able to convince others of the added value of the extra effort.   It occurs to me that there might be some general principles of polychoral arrrangements that can be extracted from this experience and might assist in making the case to concert organizers for their utility, necessity, and/or attraction:  

(1) If the spatial distinctions are limited — from the audience's perspective — to a single wall, then the differences in the character of the music played by individual groups can usefully be amplified when heard sequentially.  

(2) If, however, the ensembles are more physically distinct — again, from the audience's perspective — then more subtle differences in the character of the music played by the separate groups in sequence can be usefully underlined.  

(3) If groups are playing simultaneously, however, the more proximate the groups are, the more mixed their sounds will become, thus reducing the separation and clarity of the individual streams in the result polyphony.  

And

(4) when two widely separated groups are playing similar music simultaneously, the effect of the spatial separation can be reduced.  

Setting up shop, new music style, looking for the perfect strip mall

On my last visit to California, it became clear that I had been missing something rather obvious. The Los Angeles strip mall is the distributed center of culinary innovation.   The strip mall is the low rent versatile retail property on the main drags of the city and countless suburbs and fronting residential neighborhoods, many of them centers of immigrant communities.  A strip mall is a place where commercial experiments can be tried out with the most efficient commitments of money and time, and the relatively small size of the shops allows for optimal distribution of the risks of business failure.  The combination of the strip mall as a commercial theatre, an large first-generation immigrant community of uncommon diversity,  geographical proximity to both Pacific Rim and North/South trade in foodstuffs, and well as the astonishing productivity of California agriculture makes for unprecedent variety, both in the number of traditional cusines represented or recreated in every degree of "authenticity"  (note the inverted commas: This I know, I know, for the new musicology tells me so)  and for hybrids and other forms of innovations.  (There are actually even lower levels of commerce: for years, smaller citrus crops like kumquats and mineolas were collected from backyard networks rather than groves for supermarket sales, or the Oaxaquenan woman around the corner who sells tamale in banana leaves with black mole, or the wagons that deliver edible exotica (Korean burritos, anyone?)  crisscrossing the Southland on secret schedules designed to evade health department inspection tours.)

The low-rent path to innovation takes place in music, too, but we don't yet have a precise equivalent to the strip mall.  (For recordings, the internet functions well, but I'm talking live, local performance here.)  Major institutions are simply so heavily invested in capital designed for the most traditional and prestigious forms of music-making, and thus cannot take on the financial risks that presenting music which breaks traditional patterns in one way or another may create. If you have one hall for music in town, and it seats 1000 to 2000 people — which is not uncommon in Southern California suburbs — then you will be looking for events that will consistently bring in 1000 to 2000 people, while innovative work needs the try-out in the hall that seats 50 to 100 people.  

The large institutions, by design, are limited to a small number of newer projects, carried out in slow motion, thus they will forever only be able to support a small number of artists, mostly figures who present the least risk to the continuity of the institution.   That's why, in the era of mainframe computing,  big, well-supported computer music centers were far less successful in actually turning out finished pieces that those working with solder-yourself circuitry and the first generation of personal computers.   But that's also why we won't hear Robert Ashley at the Met or the NYCO and West Coast composers in the experimental tradition are now shut out of opportunities at the Cabrillo Festival in favor of composers, mostly East Coast, who already show up regularly on major East Coast orchestral programs in the regular seasons.       

Backgrounds

The figure in a clearing is a rich musical topic or texture.  Something happens occurs before, or against, or within, a background.  That background may be somewhat atmospheric or suggestive (musically or extra-musically), but it must also be somewhat neutral, audible but not listened-to. How is such a background made in a work of music?

(1) silence (Cage's rhythmic (metrical), and — later — time bracket (ametrical) structures.

(2) a scattering of small events (Berlioz: "intermittent sounds"), distributed irregularly and unpredictably. 

(3) erdodic form (Tenney):  completely and randomly filling the available time with events, so that no orientation, temporal or otherwise, on the basis of the background is possible.

(4) events occuring in absolutely regular and preditable intervals of time, providing a strict temporal reference, possibly references for pitch, timbre.

(5) a drone, a continuous sound providing a pitch, but no temporal reference.

(6) a contrapuntally independent stream of music, speech, or environmental sounds.

I love the coincidence here of completely full and completely empty backgrounds.  [Is a blank canvas white or black?  The complete physical spectrum of light tells us one thing (white is a broad spectrum of light, black is an absence of light) while the real experience of visible light, the colors with which a painter works (with a spectrum that our mind folds back up on itself, connecting reds to blues) suggests the opposite: white is the absence and black is completely full.]  This figure usefully focuses on the issue of audibility/inaudibility. While the figure and ground idea is, at root, contrapuntal, the immediate compositional issue is whether or not the listener should be aware of the counterpoint, and this audible/inaudible quality (now you hear it, now you don't)  is determined by the material relationship, the similarity or dissimilarity, between the figure and ground.

See also these Notes on Continuity and this post on Ives and Mahler.

     

Photo of the Day

The pianist, composer, and politician Ignace Jan Paderewski playing the piano at the Paso Robles Inn,  Paso Robles, California.   My father's parents both remembered hearing Paderewski play there.  He came to Paso Robles for the hot springs and mud baths and eventually bought two ranches near the town (one for himself, one for his wife).   Aside from the famous Minuet a la Antique,  one of the staples of the Music the Whole World Loves to Play repertoire and ballet classes everywhere, I know none of Paderewski's own music.  Perhaps something to investigate.

(Also this: An article by Paderewski on tempo rubato.)

Appropriate Technology

Question for the day: Who was the first major composer to regularly transport him- or herself by bicycle?

Time Capsule

Some years ago, I rescued a pile of sheet music from my Grandmother's piano bench.  The collection included a bunch of primers and elementary courses for beginners — my Grandmother gave lessons from time to time — including a number of volumes by a prolific compiler of piano methods, John Thompson, all of which appear to still be in print.  In search of some material for my daughter, I recently thumbed through one of these, John Thompson's Easiest Piano Course, which carries  a copyright of 1955.  

While the little book is nicely laid-out, and is not badly organized as a course, including well-integrated lessons in notation, the treatment of both hands (and two clefs) from the beginning with equal emphasis, and some surprisingly adventurous harmonizations for the teacher to accompany the student, the book soon introduces material that is uncomfortably inseparable of an era gladly gone, and suprising to encounter in an educational work still in print: The Old Cotton Picker,  In a Rickshaw  (a bit of pentatonic chinoiserie accompanied by a picture of a man in a western suit and hat riding in a carriage pulled by a man in traditional Asian clothing), and The Banjo Picker (with a minstrel-style blackface caricature).

While there is no reason to suppose that Thompson's intentions were overtly racist, and it seems likely that he was just gathering arrangements for young hands of tunes with patriotic and Americana themes  (the collection also includes Yankee Doodle, The Seabees, and The Paratrooper), and he may even have intended to project a — for its time — culturally diverse viewpoint, it is hard, if not impossible, to escape the complex and often ambiguous  (minstrel shows, for example?) baggage carried by these materials, even when they were once part and parcel of American musical life.  But using these materials today introduces some heavy culture baggage into childrens' piano lessons.    

So — although it sometimes raises some ethnographic issues of its own — I'll be starting my daughter on the Bartok Mikrokosmos  instead.  For the time being, Thompson's time capsule can stay in the piano bench and perhaps, when it comes time to discuss historical topics in a serious way with my daughter, it can usefully be revisted as realia, illustrating a far different time.

  

High School Musical

I went with my son last night to his Gymnasium's production of Die Dreigroschenoper.   Popular musical theatre is not my thing, but this was an altogether happy affair: staged in exactly the right spirit, viewed in good company, and though Brecht's reworking of Gay's Beggar's Opera remains borderline Machwerk as a play, with some serious drags here and there, once again I had an opportunity to renew my attachment to Weill's songs in their original orchestration.  Too many years ago, I played celesta and harmonium and a bit of percussion in a college production, so I have some hands-on experience with the piece, which is a blast to play in as an instrumentalist.   The scoring, originally for seven players doing an astonishing amount of doubling, is mostly carried by the piano or harmonium, but lines are strategically assigned to winds, especially saxophones, which gives some of the most lyrical bits a raw surface, making the whole, in turns, rough and — surprisingly — tender, flavored with choice moments for celesta, cello, bandoneon, banjo, or Hawai'ian guitar, and the right amount of percussion: a ponderous timpani in the parody overture and otherwise, just punctuation, with a woodblock and a small cymbal, here, or a tom-tom, there. This is robust music which the band of students, with a couple of faculty ringers, handled just fine, but it can also provides interesting stylistic challenges to the best players (no less a band than Ensemble Modern has a standing gig accompanying the local professional production, and their attention to details of historical performance practice is remarkable). 

FX

When first exploring new music, I was excited and impressed by special effects or extended techniques.  As a musician, I eagerly — and to the dismay of my band director — tried to master all the tricks (many of them staples of Spike Jones's City Slickers)  found in Stuart Dempster's The Modern Trombone, especially those involved with altering the spectrum of a tone or playing broken or falsett tones, in-between the ordinary modes of resonance.  At the same time, many of the clever effects in scores by composers like Crumb or Childs got tried out in the safety of my parents' house, on and inside the piano, an old violin, my brother's clarinet, my sister's harp, or on the steady stream of other instruments borrowed from school.  A lot of this was like learning to perform a magic trick, as far as I was concerned, I just wanted to know how it was done and I had little interest in practicing enough to have the fluency required to put it onstage.  

Piano preparations, two sorts of fluttertongue, all sorts of objects to mute tubes or strings, seagull calls from gliding harmonics... wonderful stuff, and extraordinary when a good musician incorporates them seamlessly into her or his technique.   Indeed there are some techniques —  like wind multiphonics, directing the breath so that the tube vibrates at several modes simultaneously, producing a chord — that are so context-, instrument-, and performer-dependent that they are compositionally daunting to incorporate into a work and frequently best left to virtuoso composer-performers who are writing for themselves, or, as is often the case, improvising. 

At the same time, I took two warnings into consideration.  The first was from a talk by Terry Edwards of the Electronic Phoenix Ensemble, in which he remarked that EVT, or "Extended Vocal Techniques", really meant "Everyday Vocal Techniques", which I took to mean that all of these noises had a perfectly ordinary context (visit a busy playground if you don't know what I mean) and that the "standard" modes of singing had their own special status with respect to this larger context.  The second observation was a devastating single word critique I once heard in response to my youthful enthusiasm for a Crumb piece: "precious."  That critique I took as an invitation to more seriously consider the economy of sounds within a work,  a project which continues to be active. 

Recently commissioned to write a piece for a chamber ensemble known for doing all sorts of special techniques and effects,  I went into my bookshelves and dug out a number of works on extended techniques which I had eagerly studied years ago.   They are sort of like cookbooks, with recipes for one sound or another.  (My copy of Gardner Read's Contemporary Instrumental Techniques, which I bought new in 1976, had long ago fallen to pieces from overuse, just like my old copy of The Joy of Cooking.)   But I soon returned the books to the shelves and wrote a piece of some 17 minutes that uses very little more than modo ordinario, and two strategically important events in the score that could be considered special effects are essentially visual, intended to break the continuity as well as to defeat the likelihood of a sound recording.   It's not that I've lost any allegiance to these special effects, but the composition in progress never required them, and in my new piece, if things work they way I've planned, modo ordinario will be quite special indeed.

 

Events, not Waves

Current reading: Sounds: A Philosophical Theory (OUP 2007) by Casey O'Callaghan offers a — to my ears,  musically suggestive, if never musically explicit — new approach to sound and our experience of sound, based, for a change, not in the traditional models of perception derived from vision, but in a model unique to sound and framed no longer in terms of waves in a medium but rather of events in our own environment located at or near objects or events which cause objects to sound.  The writing style is lively and makes some heavy matter refreshingly accessible to non-philosophers.

Misfired Canons

An initiative for the promotion of new music based in Cologne, ON, has released a "key works list of new music."  The organizers have not been shy of the word "canon" and the list is presented as "Cologne's Guide to New Music."  The whole thing is here.  The hat tip goes to MusikTexte, the current issue of which has a fascinating review of the list and the process of arriving at it.  Gisela Gronemeyer, MusikTexte editor notes that the creation of the list was dependent upon voluntary nominations, reflects the institutional biases of the jury, includes nothing by composers outside Europe and the US  (interestingly enough, the US-Americans included are overwhelmingly experimentalists, not the major institutional figures) and, shockingly, includes no women.

Now, making lists can be useful in examining one's experiences and biases, or at the very least, fun, in the fashion of a parlor game or meme.  (I hope that my own on-going and entirely personal series of "landmarks" is understood in this way; it's not a "best of" list, but a list of works intimately tied to my own musical biography, works that changed the way in which I listen.)   List-making, in an attempt to describe a canon is, however, an inherently troublesome business, bound to reflect, on the one hand, the inevitable biases of the canon-makers's own personal experiences or professional interests, and equally bound to create complaints — many of them completely justified — at exclusions or over-emphases.  While most lists of the kind are harmless, a serious problem can ensue when a list aquires some official status, and with it, power to affect programming or commissions or other assignments of favor or material goods.  Were ON's list only an historical record of the preferences and predelictions of a single community of musicians at one point in time, it would be useful and unobjectionable as historical or ethnographic data.  But the attachment of ON's list to a program for the promotion of new music with more than personal or local ambitions is highly problematic. 

 

A Hard Day in Analysis

Here's a physicist's analysis, via FFT, of the opening chord to A Hard Day's Night.  (Hat tip Tyler Cowen.)  As the pop era's moral equivalent to the "Tristan chord" (an ambiguous event in a work of tonal music which continues to create great puzzlement and a regular stream of authoritative pronouncements), I'm sure music theorists will be busy with this for years to come.

Carrillo

Here's a new site (in Spanish), with sound files, texts, and photodocumentation about the Mexican composer Julián Carrillo, whose work was largely microtonal ("El Sonido 13"— the "13th sound") , often requiring the construction of new instruments.  

It's interesting that Mexico produced three important pioneers in musical tuning systems: Carrillo, Augusto Novaro (about whose work too little is known), and Ervin Wilson, with whom I was fortunate to start studying while in High School.

Anagrammatical

Ron Silliman pointed to these poems by Mike Smith, Anagrams of America, some striking poems made as anagrams of existing texts, landmarks of the American canon.

Anagrammatical recycling has been done relatively rarely with musical sources, perhaps due to the close association between tonal function and form and the prevailing aesthetic which maintains this association.  If I understand correctly (I know it only by reputation), Christopher Hobb's The Remorseless Lamb (1970) is a random anagram of Bach's Sheep May Safely Graze, the four voices present in any measure of Hobb's piece coming from four different places in the source.   Re-combining materials from existing sources is, of course, a strategy in algorithmic composition, the projects of David Cope, for example, but I am unaware of any such example that uses the complete rearrangement of a single source.  There are clearly rich possibilities to explore.  

Landmarks (40)

Claudio Monteverdi: Lamento d'Arianna ("Lasciatemi morire") (1623).  The only surviving music from Monteverdi's second opera, L'Arianna, the Lamento is sung by Ariadne, distraught at being abandoned by Theseus on Naxos.  This lament is composed with such mastery and emotional power that the possibility that L'Arianna was Monteverdi's best opera is a matter of lament in itself. 

Ariadne sings here in pain, anger, and despair, but ultimately confirms her love for Theseus ("it's my tongue that's spoken, not my heart").   It survives, presumably close to the original operatic version,  as a solo aria with continuo (published in 1623) as well as in two arrangements by the composer, the first, the dramatic center of the Sixth Book of Madrigals (1614),  is startling at all moments in its transfer from monody to an ensemble of five voices (to risk a bit of psychologizing,  when the text is sung by an ensemble, it is as if we were no longer listening to Ariadne's voice, but thrust directly into her head, raging with pain and conflict), while the second recycles the music of the monody but sets a new, sacred Latin text, "Pianto della Madonna" for the collection of Selva morale e spirituale (1641)  in which the Virgin laments her abandonment by her son, interesting for both the implied synchretism between the mythical and religious figures as for the implied equation of two very different kinds of loss.  (Or are they so different? Men leaving women is as old a story as any.)

I have a weakness for, no, I am totally lost to the lament style, and I am constantly astonished to encounter the style as it branched out into strikingly different contexts: as Purcell's Dido sings over and against the regularity of the ground bass, for example, or in Heinrich Isaac's devastating choral setting of Poliziano's lament on the death of Lorenzo de' Medici, "Quis dabit Capite meo aquam? The essence of the style, as far as I am concerned, is its very free voice leading  — that is to say, free in the treatment of the approach to and resolution (or lack thereof) of dissonance —  with a rather wide open tonal vocabulary,  features which were, and are, essential to opera.

     

Antitrust

Some news travels slowly. I just learned today, from the new issue of MusikTexte, that the European Commission announced in July of last year that it had lifted two monopolies which had been exercised by European collecting societies: the membership clause, in which members of one organization were prevented from choosing or moving to another, and the territorial restrictions, which prevented individual societies from issuing royalties outside their domestic territories. The collection of licenses for music is in serious transition and it is difficult to guess how this particular decision will play out. On the one hand, I like the idea that an organization with muscle, like Germany's GEMA, will be able, in priciple at least, to start collecting license fees in those countries in which the local collecting society is ineffective (some societies are notoriously ineffective at collecting and forwarding royalties for members of foreign societies, despite cooperation agreeements to the contrary). On the other hand, the experience of the United States, which has three competing collecting societies (ASCAP, BMI and SESAC) but is still unable to provide blanket coverage or collect fees at the level of Germany's GEMA, is not particularly encouraging.

Roots, Trunk and Branches

A composer's catalog ought to be straightforward, just a list of pieces, just the facts, Ma'am.  And for a small handful of composers with only a small handful of pieces (e.g. Ruggles, Varese, Webern, Evangelisti), a straightforward list works fine, whether chronological, alphabetical, classified, or graded for performance difficulty, like beef graded for tenderness.  

But not all catalog are so neat and compact, and not all pieces in catalogs were made equal or made even in the same order of magnitude and purpose.  Eventually a talented and/or lucky composer will have his South Pacific  (paraphrasing composer Ron Kuivila), the hit, or the ambitious, large-scale work intended for travel and —perhaps — destined for war horse status, but many of us will have many more, smaller pieces of less scope and ambition but made,  perhaps,  with just as much art, craft, and care as the big ones.  Add to this the backlog of juvenalia, incidental, and occasional works, some of which should stay cheerfully buried in a box in the back corner of Mom's guestroom closet, some of which was only intended for one-off usage, but others of which still carry sparks that might help recharge new work or even deserve an on-going performance life.  

In my own case, as I probably write 20 or more of these minor pieces for each attempt at a South Pacific, it would be nice to have a catalog format that more readily reflected this hierachy of roots, trunk, and branches.

(Here, incidentally, are scores to two recent branches, or even just twigs, from my catalog:  The Long March, a prose score for four melodicas, worked out during a music workshop with young people, and Written Off As A Scoundrel (& I Haven't Even Met The Wife), a small study for piano.)

 

Self-Criticism (3)

Too much continuity.  Too few rests, breaks, openings, windows, white space, disconnects, junctures.  All too full.  Too motoric.  Carrying out processes to the bitter end.   Exhaustion of lists, sometimes even gray coded.  Excess baggage from a minimal youth?  The residue of too much time spent in the electronic studio, where pulling the plug was often a substitute for figuring out a form?

 

Self-Criticism (2)

A piano is not a neutral instance; a score for piano is not written on a blank slate and cannot be arbitrarily transferred to other resources, without loss or accretion of information.  Such additions and losses may or may not be useful, interesting, or musical, but they are certainly compositionally provocative.  A score "reduced" from an ensemble of voices or instruments is not necessarily an interesting piano piece, but it may raise interesting musical issues which could lead to an interesting piano piece, particularily regarding questions of "orchestration" for the piano: registration, texture, polyphony, doublings, etc..

Curious thing, that the piano is often a default setting for composition. Yes, composers are often piano players, and yes, the piano can do some things very, if not uniquely, well  (e.g. attack dynamics, some polyphony).  But too often, we either forget or ignore the uniquity of the instrument, its unique specializations: its temperament and "stretching" of the tuning across the range of the instrument;  the radical timbral differences between registers;  the unmistakeable attack and decay; the various technical kludges that can be used to suggest — among other things — a physically impossible degree of sustain; the complex interactions among the ensemble of wires, particularly sympathetic vibration; the fact that most pianists play the instrument available for a concert — a found sound, if you will —, rather than bring their own, the one with which the relationship is most intimate.

But then again, having some form of a blank slate is VERY useful.  The "open score", for example, is  a way of gathering material while suspending judgement on the ultimate assignations of the material, keeping options open to both practical circumstances and ideals, exploring the plasticity of the material, allowing the material some productive promiscuity.   Blank & open, yes, but not yet necessarily a piano piece.

Self-Criticism (1)

"Some of the songs in this book... cannot be sung" — Charles Ives, "Postface to 114 Songs".

Not writing enough (i.e. almost no) songs.  Why?  A terrific fear of words  (sounds, meanings of words, appropriate scansion, emphasis) and not being, myself, a singer.  The last, in part, due to the highly gendered ideas about singing (i.e. boys don't, except rock stars) with which I grew up. But still no excuse.  

The still-precocious Mr. Muhly has a useful handle on songs (here, amid sensational footage), focusing rightly on their plasticity & transportability  (qualities common with currency — are songs the currency of dreamers?), their ability to survive intact in alternative arrangements.  (All Along the Watchtower, anyone?)  But still, the term "setting" is unnerving, as if one is taking words and putting them someplace so that they don't run away.  You see, I want words, like sounds, to run away, to go to all the places they can take us, and fixing them to tunes can often tie them down to one meaning rather than another, making an uneasy balance of gains and losses. Perhaps that's why the best songs are seldom settings of the best poems: the loss of textual ambiguity is made up for in the added value of the music, which might even add ambiguity of its own (are there better examples than Schumann's In Wunderschönen Monat Mai and Ives's The River?).  

Maybe the key is avoiding falling in love with a text.  The more I read of the Georgics, for example, Virgil's incredible didactic poem about fields and groves and cattle and wine and honeybees and nymphs and gods and Orpheus and everything and everyone else, the greater my trepidation of committing to one aspect and not others and of tearing into the poem with the brutality necessary to make a song.  I don't know a piece of music which contains as much of this world as this poem does, and I don't know that a piece of music can even have that ambition. And as much as I want to share my enthusiasm for these words, and am willing to be musically ambitous about it, the injury of the necessary excerpt is increasingly hard to accept.  Composers: love words, but not too much!   

New Music & Philosophers

Philosophers have only sporadically paid serious attention to the new music of their time  (let's count the names: Plato... Boethius... Rousseau... Nietzsche... Adorno...).  Even when they've paid attention, it can often be a decidedly uneven bundle of ideas and words.  Nevertheless, I'm always prepared to at least consider the ideas and words of someone prepared to take music seriously and I often get some compositional kick-back from the effort, if only to negate an idea that strikes me as profoundly off from my own experience.  (Interestingly, philosophy more in an Anglo-American positivist mode about music tends to yields results which are easy to agree with, but difficult, as a practicing musician or composer to do anything useful with).  Two more recent thinkers-about-music-now have useful web presences: the late Daniel Charles (mostly in French),  here and the very much still-with-us-and-at-us Heinz-Klaus Metzger (in German) here.

Feed & Fuel

It's reasonable to suppose that, beyond the wars and the financial crisis, the abiding contribution of the Bush years will be the total coupling of food and energy prices.  In the abstract, this makes sense, as proteins, grains and fat are just fuel for animals and the production and delivery of foodstuffs necessarily includes the expenditure of other forms of energy, so the volatility of one will have to track that of the other.  But the logic of the equation doesn't make it any less painful to economically weaker parties, whether as consumers or producers.   Here in Europe, for example, the butter price has moved in similar motion with the oil price,  with consumers hurt both at the peak prices of last summer and the reduced pocketbook of the moment while small farmers who geared up for the high export demand for China and India are now faced with surpluses and trying to stem increasing loss margins.  If you add in the connection between the nature of our food supply and the resultant medical costs directly associated with food content and quality, it starts to become clear that getting energy policy right means getting food and health policy right as well.  It's a not a matter of fixing something, but fixing everything.

An activity like new music (or dance or poetry)  isn't significant to the markets described above, although the people who make this music are irretrievably stuck inside them, so we tend to do what the system orders rather than actively resist.  But wouldn't it be more useful, to ourselves, our work, and possibly the larger system itself, to find better ways of working in the margins, the statistical insignificant underground?  Often times, the smallest irritation (like a grain of sand in the wrong place in your left shoe) can become an agent of real change.  Yes, this is the case for a vanguard or an elite, if you will, but when the whole is not functioning well, it's high time for experimentation in the parts, even the smallest parts.  

The slow, seasonal & local food movement may well be the best model for us.  In my recent trip to California, I was struck simultaneously by the huge number of fast-food restaurants, the ever-larger size of American bodies and the still-large auto sizes (people are stuck with big cars cause they can't sell them or get financing on new, smaller, ones) on one hand and the near-absence of home fruit and vegetable gardens and reduced produce sections in groceries (not to mention home solar heating or energy generation;  even worse is the news that the series of food contamination scares have driven people towards more consumption of processed foods rather than frech) on the other.  The phenomena are directly related to one another.  More garden production is not going to feed the masses more healthily and economically, but it is an irritant, a positive one, that can lead to mass producers improving both the quality and variety of their foods.  

I believe that the same goes for music.  If more new, local, and live music were introduced into life at the local level, starting from homes, schools, churches, and in community and civic functions, this would lead to a net increase in variety and quality as well as break the hold that large institutional publishers (and institutional censors, like UIL described in a recent post) and their house composers exercise over repertoire.  Moreover, the creation of bonds between creative artists and their communities can be part of a community's identity, an a more interesting part of the identity than, say, the architectural variety of local strip malls. 

See also this old post about composers and localities.

 

Earned Income

"You can make a million dollars in America," says Jim Teal, a former waiter at a high-end Raleigh steakhouse who now stays home with his 2-year-old daughter because business has dried up. "But if you're making hundreds of millions, you've screwed someone over."  (From here).

Studios

The studios of composers, writers, artists and the like are fascinating.  The re-created studio of Arnold Schoenberg in the former Schoenberg Institute in Los Angeles was full of sweet details, and the Bartok house in Budapest was one of my favorite places in that town.  (Bartok had a smallish Bösendorfer in the house, with a surprisingly gentle action,  it was impossible to get louder than a typical Steinway's mezzo forte!)  But I'm partial to the most modest spaces.  Lou Harrison, for example, built two interesting houses, but most of his composing was actually done in a small camping trailer away from the house.  And  here is an interactive page dedicated to Roald Dahl's garden hut in Buckinghamshire.   

Prescribed

The power of the Texas Board of Education over the content in school textbooks is well-known.  Given the large size of the Texan schoolbook market, publishers go out of their way to modify their books in order to satisfy the criteria of the censors there, which maked the Texan standards effective in much of the rest of the country.  Periodically, this errupts into controversies over Texan Board of Ed. members cutting something out of, or getting something else stuck into, textbooks, sometimes leading to serious reductions in the quality of those books.

Now, I'm a bit shocked to learn that the University Insterscholastic League in Texas — which, although "voluntary" in membership, effectively controls athletic, academic, and musical competitions among public schools throughout the state — maintains a list of "Prescribed Music" for in-state competitions by bands, orchestras, solo vocalists and choirs.  Sheet music publishers take listing by the UIL seriously as without it, sheet music sales to schools in Texas, one of the largest markets in the US, will be limited.  

Above and beyond the issue of whether musical competition organized along the lines of sporting events is a good idea,  a list like this is really problematic.  It's one thing to provide the service to school music teachers of grading pieces according to difficulty or of assessing the physical qualities of the performance materials or even for an organization of music teachers to share recommendations, but to make a "Prescribed" list for competitions, with exceptions allowed only under strict limitations (the work must be approved in advance, can only be a single item on the program, and cannot be the first in a school's program) , is controlling students' access to information, which is nothing other than censorship.  Yes, I think it's a problem if a choir director has to apply for exceptional permission to have his choir sing the Machaut Messe, (Texas-born) Pauline Oliveros's Sound Patterns, or any Monteverdi madrigal other than the four which publishers happened to have submitted to the list.

Musical works composed for school ensembles are not likely to be libelous, obscene, incite to violence, treat currently controversial topics in education (like maybe I should write an Evolution March or a Fantasy on Intelligent Design?) , or otherwise corrupt the nation's youth. So one has to wonder what the rationale for censorship here must be.  One appears to be to keep the competition repertoire well-within the "classical" or "serious" music domain, particularly against the great pressure to perform more popular, "entertainment" repertoire.   I understand this problem and I recognize the difficulty of precisely defining the aesthetic, technical, and stylistic qualities one wants to hear, but the difficulty of making that definition is not an excuse for making a list like this, for there is really no educationally or musically valid reason to exclude (or contribute to the exclusion) of work which would meet those qualities, so one should be obliged to do the heavy lifting and try to make definitions rather than simply point at works (in the Potter Stewart manner of identifying pornography).  Otherwise, one has to suppose that the basic function of the list is the preservation of market position for those in the know about UIL, a trade secret held tightly by publishers and a handful composers more tightly connected to school music networks.  Indeed, the criteria listed in the application for the substitution of an unlisted work for band (read it here) is strongly biases towards composers and publishers with established relationships to the UIL system.

Vices

A real composer's life being half excess and half picayune score corrections, it's come to my attention that my biography has recently been lacking in the excess side.  Perhaps I need a vice?  (I mean, in addition to swearing, gambling, jaywalking...)  Otherwise, my life be boring, dull, if domestic bliss, neither the stuff of great biographies, like Anatole France's Gesualdo or Stendhal's Rossini nor equipped with the kind of indiscretions a Wagner or Thomson would omit from their autobiographies.   

(photo: my only cigarette, taken by Megan Simpson, ca. 1982)

Evermore onward with publishing

Composer Taylan Susam, in a comment to an earlier item here, pointed to a new site with downloadable new music scores, Upload .. Download .. Perform.   It's in a Wiki format and does not involve a sales component, which makes it an interesting alternative to both traditional publishing and the site I mentioned before, ThatNewMusicWebsite.com.   The more alternatives, the better.

(This too: we urgently need a high quality Wiki to replace harmony, counterpoint, and orchestration textbooks.  Essentially, these books house a definition of terms and notation, a relatively small set of principles or "rules" derived from practice, and perhaps some more personal aesthetic observations; a large number of examples from real repertoire illustrating the principals and "rules";and some exercises illustrating the same.  Perfect for a Wiki, which when done well, could accomodate a variety of theoretical approaches and teaching styles, include a wider variety of examples than any single textbook out there, and do it for free, which in these times, with extreme pressures on student pocketbooks, is definitely a good thing. (See also this thread from Crooked Timber on the economics of textbooks.  Sure, the few professors in on the textbook racket may feel a pinch, but it's an acceptable pinch if it can help make college more affordable)). 

Before things get any uglier...

"Government sponsorship of art is ugly. Absence of government sponsorship of art is even uglier." — Ad Reinhardt

Refute or support in $800,000,000,000 or less.

Executive Compensation

With all the talk about reigning in executive compensation for corporation heads, are we going to see some downward movement in compensation for the small class of big name conductors, soloists, vocalists, and managers?  I'm all in favor of better compensation for musicians in general but, in a time of budget cuts all-around,  leverage continues to be executed in favor of those hired for prestige or as promising box office draws, with the vast majority of musicians, the locals that provide the basis and continuity in our musical lives,  increasingly direct targets of belt-cutting.   A flatter system of compensation is in order.

Seeing, Hearing, Reading Writings

Why do I get so much more of a charge (that is, an impulse to make more music) these days from reading visual artists write about their work than musicians writing about music?  Duchamp, naturally, Robert Irwin, necessarily (the new edition of Weschler's amazing book, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees), Klee's Pedagogical Sketchbook, with continued pleasure, Ad Reinhardt's Art as Art...  Although I see poorly and have no talents for producing objects which one might look at, these ideas shock and provoke my acoustical imagination.  They make me want to make noises both gentle and rough, to challenge the nature and limits of my hearing.  

Reading  Ad Reinhardt, for example, is not a matter of simple agreement but is just as often a matter of productive disagreement.   The consequent development of his work and ideas is a model, his ethical stance is admirable, and I agree with his insistance that artwork is not political (other than the fact of its existence in a polity which would rather not have it, or worse, ignore it) but that artists should be politically engaged simply because, as people living in societies, politics is a practical necessity in order to make lives better. But I disagree profoundly with Reinhardt's insistance on painting as THE Art as Art.  Music can do that just as well. Or rather, listening more critically to my most recent work, music should be able to do that just as well.   

Music Publishing Moves On

ThatNewMusicWebsite.com is a new distribution site for new music scores that seems to be doing things right. The model here contrasts with the recent experiment by UE of placing a study score online and anticipating earnings via parts rentals and the traditional publisher's share of royalties.  Composers at ThatNewMusicWebsite will keep all of their royalties and get a large share of sales, but are responsible for preparing their materials themselves, an arrangement which seems a good fit to present web technology.

Rozart, Rose Art, Ade!

Lisa Hirsch reports that Brandeis University has decided to close the Rose Art Museum. Above and beyond its importance for the visual arts, the Rose was the site for the premiere of John Cage's Rozart Mix (1965), one of the most exuberant of Cage's happening-like works, requested from Cage while Alvin Lucier was on the Brandeis faculty and premiered on an evening concert which also included the first performance of Lucier's Music for Solo Performer, a work involving enormously amplified brainwaves.

Cage's verbal score requires a large number of tape loops (Cage suggests 88 loops — the same number of keys on a standard piano), each composed of thousands of small pieces spliced together in all possible physical orientations, using any sound sources, but largely speech, played back on a large number of tape machines. Whenever a loop breaks during a performance, Cage instructs that it be repaired and then stored away, not to be reused, a bit of discipline with a zen-like flavor. Anticipating the Rose performance, Cage imagined the possibility of loops stretching over the water fountains, and perhaps requiring some amount of wading.

I had a small part in the preparations for one performance of Rozart Mix, at Wesleyan in 1987, under the supervision of Lucier, Chris Schiff and with the participation of Cage in both some of the splicing and the performance, where he sat cheerfully in the middle of 12 tape machines, each of which was run by pairs of young people with good haircuts. As is too often the case, this electronic music event was largely the labor of males, but the evening splicing and pasta sessions at Lucier's house redeemed themselves somewhat in that they took on some of the spirit and character of a quilting bee. I like to think of this as our Dr. Chicago-meets-Judy-Chicago moment.

Harvest Home Chorale

When the risk of a late frost had safely past, Alois Hartkase planted the remains of 20th century music in the turned earth of the back 40 acres.

He planted a umbrella misplaced and forgotten behind Erik Satie's piano. He planted Salome's last veil. He planted a siren used at the premiere of Ameriques and an airplane engine from the Symphonie Mechanique. He planted an echo of the riot that greeted Le Sacre, four minutes and thirty-three seconds of tacet playing, and the coughs Richard Maxfield borrowed from a Christian Wolff concert. He — very gently, mind you — planted a leather whip required for Millicent Cabbage's Donnamatrix for orchestra. He planted Schoenberg's hand-painted playing cards. He planted the last remaining Farfisa organs used for Four Organs (or were they used for Another Look at Harmony?) as well as a Moog, a Buchla, an Ondes Martinot and the KGB file of Lev Theremin. He planted the burning red end of Feldman's cigarette and a mustard smothered turnip left half-eaten by La Monte Young. He planted a ruler used by Boulanger to slap the wrists of errant contrapuntalists. He then scattered handfuls of scews, bolts, coins, erasers and weather stripping salvaged from years of piano preparation across the fields he had so carefully plowed into 12-by-12 rows.

When he was done, Alois took off his boots, sat down in the shade of of the dogwood tree just back of the well to wonder, lazily in the late afternoon sun, if the next harvest would be as rich as the last.

Thought of the day

Systemic integration always comes at the price of the diversity that emerges within isolated niches.   (Read the whole thing here).  There is something askew with the rest of the argument, but it's a beginning. 

That Vision Thing

Christopher Fox on the uncomfortable aging of (the Schoenberg-initiated) new music here.   Some responses to Fox are here.

(Elsewhere is a peculiar response from composer David Salvage, voluntarily outing himself as a mainstream modernist, to Kyle Gann's — also peculiar, for better or worse — notion of an "absolute presentism" (which, all to Gann's credit is introduced as a rather tentative term in an talk about "The Trouble with Serialism" (here.))

My own response to all of this is

(a) with Schoenberg, as well as with any number of innovative composers, the roadblock for listeners is usually described in technical terms when, actually, the roadblock is style; Schoenberg's tonal practice is not the problem, it's his heightened expressionism that alienates audiences (although, when placed in a suitable context, for example suspense or horror films, even seriously watered-down pseudo- or ersatz-Schoenberg becomes unproblematic) ;    

AND

(b) that the really valuable new music (as well as the older music worth renewing our acquaintance) is an optimistic assertion that we can change the way we listen (and, consequently, the way we live, alone or together); the conservative/mainstream/institutionalised school of musical quietude, on the other hand, is ultimately pessimistic, doubting if not denying the possibility that our ears (and, consequently, our persons as individuals or groups) can change.  

(AND,

elsewhere: there is something rather disappointing about the state of the discussion of the aging new music when access to day jobs as College or University teachers has become such a central concern.  The discussion elsewhere is between someone comfortably tenured, but still complaining about it, and someone who seems to want nothing other than to become comfortably tenured himself.  That's the "mad scramble for crumbs" (Morton Feldman), that's not music.)

AND THIS:

Jeez, am I relieved that everything went well enough yesterday.  I'm just paranoid enough that worry about these things never exactly subsides (pace Gravity's Rainbow, Proverbs for Paranoids 3. If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.)  My expectations for a new administration are limited, and I'm sure that there will be ample disappointment ahead, but if the US is to be governed at all, it is good to have the US be governed by grownups for a change.  All of which  provides a nice push to sitting down and getting more work done. I'm even looking forward to a trip to California next week, the land that's always been absolutely present, whatever that means...  

Landmarks (39)

Erik Satie: Pièces Froides (1897), piano solo.

Cold Pieces: three songs (without words) and three dances (without steps).  Familar textures are reduced to minima.  In the three Airs à faire fuir (Airs that chase away) a right hand melody hangs over an elemental accompaniment of bass notes alternating with middle register chords.  The three Danses de travers (Crossed-up dances) are each made of ascending, open fifth-at-the-bottom arpeggios with only a bare suggestion of a melody emerging from the top notes of the accompaniment.   Although notated without barlines, songs and dances alike are in unrelenting and dispassionate, indeed cold, four-quarters measures. 

But, as usual with Satie, things are not as simple as they first sound.  The regularity and familiarity described above are essentially framing elements, a dull construction upon which interesting things stand in relief. The tiny, tender melodies here are modally unstable (sometimes suggesting the chromatic genus of classical antiquity).  Harmony functions locally with absolute clarity, but the progress from one measure-long block to another and, globally, over the course of an entire Air or Dance seems arbitrary and unpredictable.  Thus while each of the constituent parts is clear, familiar, even banal, the sequence of those parts is eccentric, even complex, creating vivid little worlds in which the outlines of patterns and tunes are are stable memories but precise tonal memory is only short-term and prone to wandering.  A fine example of that which I like to call disfunctional harmony.

Parade Music

The inaugural parade is the first American parade I've seen in years, a real change from Fasching/Fastnacht parades here; I don't need the military marches, but the civilian Sousa marches and the contributions of more contemporary material by school and community ensembles have been fun.  The online CNN coverage of the parade is totally chopped up which makes for some — unintended — Ivesian possibilities in the mixture and movement.  Miking moving wind ensembles is tricky, but it would have been swell if they'd invested a bit more in sound quality.    

Poetic License

There's been much discussion around the practice — unique to Democratic presidents — of inviting a poet to read at US Presidential inaugurations.   The poems to date, frankly, have not been very good, but that's no reason to object to the practice.  The problem has been that the poems have tried to do things which contemporary poetry does poorly (historical-patriotic self-congratulation) rather than things which poetry can do well; the poets to date have failed to use the opportunity to exercise their poetic license.   It strikes me that an inaugural poem ought to take one of two forms: the visionary, daring to imagine a better state (or, better yet, a state which functions so well we no longer need it), or the didactic, daring to instruct the new officeholder to do a better job.   We've been mighty short on the visionary of late, indeed times may be so serious that we don't have the luxury of the visionary, so I'd settle this time for the didactic, going with Vergil rather than Blake, building this time on the concrete deficits and failures of Mr. Obama's immediate predecessor:  Know more.  Imagine more.  Consider the consequences of your actions.  Work harder.   

Food on TV is the new radio drama

I think that I've figured out the boom in food programming on TV.  It's more of the magic of selective sensory deprivation.  Above and beyond the obvious commercial interests and the draw both high and low cusine has on the conspicuously consumptive, I think that food on television which, deprived of taste, scent, and touch is reduced to image and verbal testimony, is actually an equivalent of radio drama, in that individual imaginations are forced to fill in missing details.  

The notion that the book is always better than the film follows the same logic, and in the days of radio drama, the book was likewise preferred to the radio play, and the radio play in turn preferred to the television program.  The aesthetic premise here is that making more and more aspects of a work explicit has an inverse effect on its interpretive richness.  

(I recently read through a number of reviews of Wagner Ring productions and recordings.   The common thread throughout is the passionate devotion of the reviewers to "the work", but the equally passionate disappointment in the actual realizations.   Because of that disappointment, you have to wonder what, precisely, "the work" is supposed to be,  when it certainly doesn't appear to actually exist in any of the concrete forms on offer.  I, for one, would be very disappointed to learn that "the work" is some singular platonic ideal.)

Works in which some aspect of the sensory experience are left open to the imagination of the audience carry with them a certain charge, not merely the suspension of disbelief required by all fiction (or theatre or film or TV), but the invitation to actively go beyond belief, indeed beyond what we know from our own experience, whether it be the taste, aroma, and texture of Basque sweetbreads, the movements of a Rhinemaiden, or the evil which lurks in the hearts of men...  

  

 

Pomp

I've been trying to write a post about music and the US presidential inauguration, but it's kept turning into snark.   I wanted to write about the John Williams commission, but it should speak for itself, another part of the deep embrace between official State pomp and the Hollywood representation of the auspicious in American today.  The society of the spectacle is your government at work.  I also wanted to write about the interesting institution of the "President's Own" Marine Band,  in practice the staff musicians of the White House, but — anachronistically, to my mind — organized as a military unit, but I have a weakness for Sousa marches and the Band does have a serious commissioning program (well, within the limits of a musical school of quietude, i.e. not yet ready to commission Anthony Braxton or Alvin Lucier).   But then, this evening, I happened upon a broadcast excerpt of the concert on the mall today, with Pete Seeger leading Woody Guthry's This Land is Your Land.  Seeger, accompanied by Bruce Springsteen, chose the verses which were ommitted from our grade school textbooks, warming this old leftist's heart and taking, if only for a moment, all my snark away:

In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,
By the relief office I seen my people;
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land made for you and me?

There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me;
Sign was painted, it said private property;
But on the back side it didn't say nothing;
That side was made for you and me.

Nobody living can ever stop me,
As I go walking that freedom highway;
Nobody living can ever make me turn back
This land was made for you and me.
 

 

Titles

A phrase recently came across my monitor, meander scar, and I know in the instant that it had to be the title of a piece.  I've got dibs on it.

I like titles, sometimes like them better than the work to which they are attached (this is particularly true for blog entries; I've thought of having a month of only titles) but I can't take them all-too seriously because a great title is never going to save a lousy piece.  A title can be a form of added value, helping during composition by capturing a mood or an image or an idea, and it can similarly help a player or listener, but it can be ambiguous and misdirecting as well, particularly when taken too literally.  But then again, ambiguity and misdirection can often be VERY useful in a performing art. (See also legerdemain, applied musical.)

Titles that identify musical forms (Symphony, Sonata) would appear to be rather neutral in character but, in fact, they carry with them all of the baggage of tradition and the expectations that come out of tradition.   In the fifties and sixties, some members of the high avant-garde used titles borrowed from maths or science, often with an intention to indicate abstraction and modernity, and clearly make a break with traditional forms.  This is a practice with origins, probably, in the works of Varese, but the belated imitators rarely had the sense of romance that Varese brought to the works and listening to many of those works today rarely has the same charge of nostalgia for a lost modernity or vanished vision of the future.

Some composers get by on just numbering their works — Richard Ayres, for example, the most gifted composer of my generation — but, as someone who is never entirely certain about whether a work is done or when it is done and is often doubtful about works that are definitely dead done, I'm extremely hesitant to grant catalogue numbers that might later need to be taken back.   And, to be honest, pieces with which I've spent enough time acquire the characteristics of persons and their characters seem to demand names more personal than one or two or three, but not as personal as Bobby Watson or Isolde Spoon.  So, The Meander Scar it will be...  

   

Real Politics

Mark Swed has a review of Arvo Pärt's new Symphony No. 4, "Los Angeles," which had been mentioned here before due to Universal Edition's unprecedented free online publication of the score.  

Swed notes that the score is dedicated to the imprisoned Russian oil executive Mikhail Khodorkovsky and reports that "The composer called Khodorkovsky a great man and said Russia would be a better country had the oligarch, once Russia’s wealthiest man, become its leader."  

I haven't spent enough time with the score to comment fairly about the music — though I did notice a number of features in common with the late works of quite a different composer, Robert Erickson — and my knowledge (indeed, everyones' knowledge) of the Khodorkovsky case is limited, but the information I do have strongly suggests that the dedication displays some real courage.  

Given the recent trend for the interests of the Russian state and of cultural activities within Russia to become more closely connected, indeed to a degree unknown since the end of the Soviet Union, one must assume that Pärt's dedication will not faciliate performances in Russia, nor by orchestras or conductors closely identified with the Russian state.  That is a rare and gutsy move for a composer in these apolitical days.

Mondays with Merce

Mondays with Merce is a new series of webcasts from the Merce Cunningham studio. The first episode, with Cunningham speaking about technique and footage of the company class and an Event performance at Dia Beacon, is up now here. I don't know as much about dance technique (nor should I, being both clumsy and very much under the sway of gravity), and music-be-music-but-dance-be-dance but nevertheless this is VERY useful stuff for composers. I believe that it's safe to say that Cunningham technique, alongside Balanchine's, is a body of discipline from the 20th century which is going to keep us, well into the 21st, on our toes, if only vicariously.

*****
NB: the footage of the 89-year old Cunningham leading the company class while it warms up to Keep You Sunny Side Up is a gentle reminder that even after more than half a century of allowing music and dance to go their own ways on stage, there is still plenty of opportunity for old fashioned piano accompaniments, while Cunningham's clear and precise setting of metre and tempo (and-a-one, two, three...) places him well within the universal tradition of the dance master, controlling motion in space by defining the rhythm. (I was reminded of a visit in Surakarta a decade ago to the home of the great Javanese dance master, Pak Ngaliman. He had suffered a terrible stroke which left him confined to a chair and only able to speak with great difficulty. Nevertheless, he continued to teach and choreograph, using the sharp drumming of a few fingers in one hand. It was enough.)

Songwriting Pairs

Patrick Swanson points out an interesting "separated at birth pair" here. At this moment, we surely could use an album of Songs of War & Love by the guy from Minneapolis to go along with the Eighth Book of Madrigals. I don't know much pop music, but I do know what I like, and that which I like sometimes pairs usefully with other music. Sometime ago, I noted a cafe conversation in which someone made a similarly surprising but electric pairing between Hugo Wolf and Roy Orbison, both songwriters with astonishing through-compositional ambitions. Another pairing on these pages was between the song cycles of Robert Schumann and the albums of Randy Newman, collections which are far from similar in lyrical topics, let alone style, but certainly close to one another in their ability to summon up place, atmosphere, and ambiguity.

not(e) on(e) method

...composing, around these parts,  is less about the production of entertainment goods than about discovery, learning more about the world through sound (and sometimes the absence of sound), an enterprise somewhat akin to science or maths, especially so when one observes— with Feyerabend — that the course of real discovery, from piece to piece, or even within a piece, is methodically less systematic than anarchic, using whatever it takes or whatever is available to go forward, aware of individual predelictions and cheerfully accepting coincidence, rather than simply following a strict research plan NEVERTHELESS this madness called composing has its methods, being employed informally, tactically, according to the immediate cause and context, and these fall into three categories or —better — styles which productively play off against one another, the first being preference (or choice or taste or habit) the second being order (or scale or structure or system or process) and the third being chance (or coincidence or circumstance or contingency) and each new composition is a unique optimization of the relationship between these three...

Further Adventures in Bedtime Stories

My daughter — six, almost seven — still expects bedtime stories.  Sometimes I read, sometimes I recollect, other times I make things up.   Like many children, she likes to have some stories repeated, and as certain passages are immutably stuck in her memory, she immediately picks up on the smallest variations from one rendition to the nest.   Luckily, I have a small supply of texts in memory.  One of my favorites, a little story from Finnegans Wake, I've mentioned here before.   Ogdon Nash's The Strange Case of the Irksome Prude is a current favorite.  Thurber's Unicorn in the Garden, of course, with ample opportunity to repeat the mantra "the unicorn is a mythical beast."  But the one Emma likes the most is the stone-sucking episode from Beckett's Molloy.  As I teen-ager, I once watched Jose Ferrer act this out, and I immediately had to learn to do it myself.  This obsessive little combinatorial exercise, compositionally perfect and a perfect entertainment, given the right moment and the right company, begins so:

I took advantage of being at the seaside to lay in a store of sucking-stones. They were pebbles but I call them stones. Yes, on this occasion I laid in a considerable store. I distributed them equally between my four pockets, and sucked them turn and turn about. This raised a problem which I first solved in the following way. I had say sixteen stones, four in each of my four pockets these being the two pockets of my trousers and the two pockets of my greatcoat. Taking a stone from the right pocket of my greatcoat, and putting it in my mouth, I replaced it in the right pocket of my greatcoat by a stone from the right pocket of my trousers, which I  replaced by a stone from the left pocket of my trousers, which I replaced by a stone from the left pocket of my greatcoat, which I replaced by the stone which was in my mouth, as soon as I had finished sucking it. Thus there were still four stones in each of my four pockets, but not quite the same stones. And when the desire to suck took hold of me again, I drew again on the right pocket of my greatcoat, certain of not taking the same stone as the last time.  And while I sucked it I rearranged the other stones in the way I have just described. And so on. But this solution did not satisfy me fully. For it did not escape me that, by an extraordinary hazard, the four stones circulating thus might always be the same four. In which case, far from sucking the sixteen stones turn and turn about, I was really only sucking four, always the same, turn and turn about. But I shuffled them well in my pockets, before I began to suck, and again, while I sucked, before transferring them, in the hope of obtaining a more general circulation of the stones from pocket to pocket. But this was only a makeshift that could not long content a man like me. So I began to look for something else ...

All over the place

A brief essay by the Romanian-born Hungarian novelist György Dragomán on creating fictional worlds out of axioms.

A review of a translation of Inger Christensen's poem alphabet, a poem based on two major constraints: the number of lines in each section increases as a segment of the Fibonacci series, and each section begins with a successive letter of the alphabet, a through n. (Not quite Walter Abish's Alphabetical Africa, but then again, what is?)  (Hat tip: Silliman)

Charles Shere writes about reading Harry Mathews, a writer who understands constraints. 

Shere cites Mathews on buying/collecting/reading books.  Across the lattice of coincidence, Frank J. Oteri, at the New Music Box, writes about his collecting habits, books and many, many, recordings. Isn't this something that could have been in one those little Borges stories?  An obsession for collecting creates such a supply of music or books that you'll never be able to listen to or read all of them.  This reminded me a bit of Edward Gorey's collecting habits.  Gorey was such a collector — everything from books and recordings to potato mashers, smooth stones, and odd sets of garage-sale porcelain —  that the weight of his books alone was causing major structural damage to his house and the abundance of interesting things in any one room would often distract one from moving to the room one actually intended to visit. 

I've now moved house too many times, crossing continents, oceans, and major borders, dealt with nasty customs agents and suffered the end of the US Postal Book Bag, to any longer afford to be sentimental about my library.  I'm resigned: books come and go, a few stay, and you can't really plan which books will stay.   I don't buy recordings, but people often give me CDs, which are like calling cards these days.  I do buy sheet music, preferring to play music as long as I still can rather than play recordings of music.  I buy many books, but all but the most prized must leave promptly when read, for space is precious here.*  If I had stayed in California, my library would have suffered no such reductions, but now, if I were to return, I'd have to reduce even more radically.   

A commenter to Charles's item points to the name Frederick Sommer, well-known as a photographer, but who was also an artist who produced "drawings in the manner of musical scores". 

_____

* Among many other ought-tos, I ought to keep a list of books I've read.  Less for the more serious stuff, which I usually can recall, more for trashy airport novels, so that I don't get two chapters into one of them before remembering that I'd read it before.   (Publishing practice includes giving the same trashy airport novel different titles in the US and UK editions as well as retitling them when republished.)  

Working, Habitually

A small item here about the working habits of philosophers. Composers can be just as eccentric and/or obsessive in their routine meetings with the muse. A rather senior composer of my acquaintance, long retired from teaching, still keeps regular hours in his college office, a courtesy of his emeritus status, taking breaks each hour only to nurse a bit on a cigar (he gave up smoking the things, on Doctor's orders, decades ago). Some composers have to get dressed up for the job — never without the right hat or a properly-tied bow tie —, while others dress down — which might mean a Hefner-esque pyjamas and bathrobe or even less, like a friend with a great glassed-in studio in a woody part of New England, who begins every working session with an hour of improvisation at his white Baldwin grand, without a stick of clothing on his ample body. (The fact that the piano is a white Baldwin seems, somehow, important. Also, I am tempted to make a comment along the lines of ample-bodied composers should NOT compose while naked in glass houses, but one should hope that rule to be self-evident). I belong to the dress-down side, black t-shirted and stocking-footed, in part to make sure I stay put by not looking suitable to travel, but mostly because it's comfortable and I'm just another American male who learned to dress at twelve and never learned any better. I can't have food or drink near my desk, or I'd consume it idly and add to my own ampleness, not to mention a dread of crumbs and spills. At Darmstadt, I once witnessed a row of four young women composing at a dining hall bench and table as if they were taking an entrance exam; it reminded me of Phantom of Liberty. Some composers work with the TV on. Others sit, manuscripts — or now, laptops — in their laps, composing during concerts. Some composers like to work in cafes and bars, but it's probably an even bet that when you start composing in bars, you're on the way out of a composing career. Like Morton Feldman, I've obsessed long about my chair; the current one, rough, wooden, and straight-backed from India has the virtue of being stable and forces me to sit upright, but a lazier style of sitting equipment may well be in my future, a small reward to my aging person. Also, like Feldman, getting the right pen is a serious issue. I cannot use pencils. Only ink. And only black ink, although it damages fountain pens. I used to use RapidographsTM for lines and an off-the-rack calligraphy pen for the rest of the notation, but now I use the computer to notate final scores and parts, while sketching on countless little pieces of paper, and only with black-inked Uni-BallTM micros, which I buy by the dozen and have everywhere accessible. Some composers need an absolutely quiet environment, others need the company of noises. Often, I compose with the radio on (talk, not music). Children are often underfoot, and my studio is full of distracting clutter (at the moment: a gamelan, Greek shadow puppets, an orange NehiTM bottle, two clandestine photos of Duchamp's Etant donnés, a number of kids' drawings and the watchful eye of St. Martin de Porres). I really ought to work everyday to regular hours or to a set minimum of music finished (in bars or seconds), but I just can't. For that degree of regularity, my friends, would be obsessive.

Temporary Notes (15)

Feet can't fail me now: Many years ago, I witnessed a Very Famous Choral Conductor destroy a performance of the St. Matthew Passion.  The choir had practiced beautifully together under the leadership of a local university choir director for several weeks.   They had good voices, were in tune and executed ensemble rhythms with real grace.  Then the Very Famous Choral Conductor arrived and insisted on re-rehearsing by singing to rhythmic syllables, One-ee-and-uh, two-ee-and-uh etc., under the slogan of "greater precision".  In the course of this precision drilling, the choruses inevitably began to drag and drag they did until all the life was sucked out of them.  By this over-attention to getting the smallest rhythmic level, all larger movement — and consequently, the music itself — was lost.

*****

There is a time and place to count those smallest units, and to get them metronome-precise.  But that time and place is not rehearsing the St. Matthew Passion with a group of good musicians. Those musicians should have already internalised the body of rhythmic patterns that can happen at that level, so that practice, in an ensemble, is about putting these patterns together in musical ways, sometimes smoothly, sometimes sharply articulated.

Here are three pages from a worksheet I have used with young musicians.  There is nothing particularly profound here;  others can certainly make up more useful or elegant layouts of the same material.  It's just a collection of patterns within single metrical feet — notated here as quarters and dotted-quarters — followed by a number of metres composed by adding these quarter and dotted-quarter feet togther.  The idea here is to practice  performing each pattern so that they can be sight-read and played or sung precisely and fluently, and then to compose and/or improvise in each of the metres, substituting in the various single-foot patterns.  This is closer, methinks, to the way musicians really read and play music then the count-every-single-subdivision model used by the Very Famous Choral Conductor.  This worksheet goes up to five-fold divisions of a foot.  For less advanced students, one might well get along with stopping at division of the foot into four, so the quintuplet patterns have been somewhat segregated on the page.  More adventurous students will most likely find their way into more complex divisions and metres without outside assistance. 

   

 

Landmarks (38)

Olivier Messiaen: Quatuor pour la fin du temps (1941) for clarinet, violin, cello and piano

The circumstances of Quartet's composition in Stalag VIII-A, Görlitz, are well-known; the subject of the piece — the end of time in Christian eschatology, made more urgent and vivid due to those circumstances — is better known, and probably most widely known among people who will never hear Messiaen's music, which, with its moments of ecstatic joy, deep melancholy, and transcendent slowness are a profound and moving reading of the Apocalypse, a world apart from the silly adventure stories of the Late, Great Planet Earth and Left Behind crowds.

While the world of apocalypse, sublime or ridiculous, is not mine, there is one moment in Messiaen's work, in the third (of eight) movements, Abîme des oiseaux (abyss of birds) that is — for me, at least — a musical landmark of immense measure.   Messiaen's abyss, for solo clarinet, is home to extremely slow plaintive melodies, focusing on half-step, whole-step trichords, fleeting bird calls, and strange arpeggios over the whole range of the instrument,  the whole punctuated a number of times by very long tones played in crescendi from very soft to very loud.  The effect of these crescendi is as much timbral as dynamic, and when well-played, the successive overtones each come into focus like a swell pedal opening on a pipe organ.  (Messiaen was an organist, an instrument which he was denied during his captivity in Görlitz, where the piece was composed and first performed.)  It is the penultimate of these crescendi that is my landmark, for it ties the whole movement together.  It begins on the lowest tone of the clarinet, e, and ascends, whole-step, half-step, to f# and g, all the time getting brighter and brighter, a single organ mixture opening-up register-by-register, quite literally opening the abyss, escaping in the manner of the birds themselves, upward.  

This Time, Next Time

Since when did they stop asking composers about the future?  It seems like only a moment ago when a Cage or Stockhausen would get asked with some regularity by big media about the future of music and matters beyond.  And now?

So this site does another one of those end-of-one-year-beginning-of-the-next surveys, asking a number of the celebrated to say something wise about the future, answering, in this case, the question "WHAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING?"  Now, I realize that they give the question an expressly scientific turn by  adding a supplemental, clarifying question ("What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?"), but I don't understand why the only non-scientists asked were popular figures like Brian Eno and Ian McEwan, neither one of whom strikes me as now being at the top of the new discovery end of the game.  There is news out there in Newmusicland, and many musicians are working in areas that are definitely game-changing —and not only for music — but if nobody's asking, it's because nobody's noticing.  That invisibility (or, more precisely, inaudibility) will, inevitably if incorrectly, lead to the assumption that the work is irrelevant.  We've got to do a better job of keeping our music present.

*****

Young, foolish, and on a student budget, my wife & I hiked and hitchhiked around the complete coast of Ireland, covering the whole coastline twice in two successive summers.    We kept getting invited to weddings and wakes by drivers who picked us up.  At one wake, in Sligo, someone pointed out that the bar across the street from the one we were in was also hosting a wake, but it was completely empty. I asked why? Didn't anyone like the deceased?  No, came the reply, we loved him, but he died in debt, so no one wanted to show up out of fear that they'd get saddled with the bill for the funeral.   

New music, especially the radical sort, ain't dead.  In fact, at its best, it's kicking like a mule with many composers and musicians doing really astonishing things.  But we — perhaps timid a bit due to the ever-precarious financial environment around experimental arts, and still shaken a bit by the tired old criticism (too intellectual, too dissonant, too noisy, too organized, too disorganized...) — act in public with much wariness and too little risk.  But that caution — that quietism, thank you Poe & Silliman — is one step short of giving up the enterprise altogether and shows a profound lack of belief, often best seen in the way young composers tend to present themselves via resumes of awards and academic qualification rather than sharing their music and ideas about music. 

We've got to do a better job, or New Music will surely have its own wake, in an empty bar, with no one showing up to pay the tab.