Intermissions with Feldman

To break up some capricious and possibly ill-advised research,* I've been filling up ever-longer intermissions with the transcripts of Morton Feldman's late Middelburg lectures  (published in two volumes by MusikTexte as Words on Music/Worte über Musik). Feldman's lecture style was famously engaging. He was a great substitute for a favorite anecdote-and-general-BS-delivering uncle, unschooled but educated, unpolished but in his own way erudite, and simultaneously vague and razor sharp.**  Even in print you tend to hang on every word, especially, it seems, when you disagree most with him or when Feldman has mixed something up or even got it altogether wrong.  The editor, Raoul Mörchen, does a great job of identifying obscurities and correcting errors, which are, sometimes, slips and, not infrequently, intentional slights on Feldman's part. (Hilariously, after a series of insults on Feldman's part about the recorder, the MusikTexte publishers themselves even step in with a footnote of their own to defend, as it were, the honor of the recorder as a serious musical instrument for new music.)  Highly recommended.     

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* Under the motto "now that serialism is all over, or at most completely unfashionable, what can be learned, recovered, or renewed?", which has led to some strange and wonderful stuff, not only from the usual suspects on either side of the Atlantic but also to works and writings by people like Golisheff, Hauer, Eimert, and Heiß.   There have been a number of musicological publications on this topic of late (see, for example, volumes by Grant, Whittall, Straus) but none of these have struck me as particularly useful for composers looking for productive possibilities in the serial residua.   If we look for elements common to all of the music which might conceivably have flown under the flag of serialism (and the flag*** I'm waving is large enough to find serial elements in Music of Changes, In C, and I am sitting in a room...), we won't find much, but two ideas fundamental to serial practice — order/series and set/collection/gamut  — are so basic to so much music, that there are certainly some historical cul de sacs with potential for new music.

**As a Californian, and hopelessly constrained by my dialect, I'm constantly impressed by Feldman's ability to do this, efficiently getting across rather pointed arguments with incomplete sentences without ever without interjecting the all-utility  "you know" into every sentence.

*** My apologies for all the flag waving around here these days. Must. Find. Better. Metaphors.

The Dynamic Crisis: Blame Michael Jackson

Three scores sit on my desk that are, in theory, almost finished, waiting for dynamics.  Just a couple of markings in bold italics and maybe a hairpin or two: loud, soft, and refinements of or transitions between these two.  It would be easy enough to either go through the score and just add them instinctively, improvisatorially, or by chance or to devise some system for using dynamics to better project characteristics of other parameters in the score,  or, even easier, just leave dynamics out of the score altogether, and identify them as a matter for the performers to decide.   But each of these possibilities strikes me at the moment as a bit of a cop-out, not making a move I can actually believe does what is best for my notes.  For some composers, the materials in their pieces are born with dynamic detail or gestures or have a prevailing dynamic mood — as soft or as loud as possible, for example — but my notes happen to have come into the world rather unemcumbered by dynamic shape and, if they have any dynamic profile at all, they seem to be both comfortable and robust enough, to my ears,  to be nestled in that almost anonymous zone between mezzo piano and mezzo forte, with only brief excursions out of the zone.  But all of the other aspects of the piece are so carefully done that just making a facile or overly broad assignment of markings risks appearing, if not actually being, insensitive and arbitrary.  

The difficulty here is actually shared by many other composers, and the difficulty has several causes.  

The first lies in the subjective, contextual, and transient nature of dynamics themselves.  What a marking of forte may mean to a performer depends upon which instrument or voice is used, and in which register(s)  and in which particular combination or passage.  It may also depend upon the physical space in which one sings or plays.   It certainly depends upon the conventions of style.  How about forte in early music, which may only recognize forte and piano (if even those)?  We certainly don't operate noewadays in an enviroment in which musicians will immediately understand dynamic markings as embedded in a particular local or historical style. What is the dynamic level of In C, for example?  Or forte in 1950's/60's serial music, in which it is assigned a theoretically distinct position in a scale of dynamics?  And if you have such a scale, is a dynamic marking absolute or relative? Are the markings to be scaled up or down for the particular set of instruments or voices in play?

The advent of recorded sound, with its necessary flattening of dynamics and the disconnect between the original sound level and the sound level the recording gets played at, has also affected our understanding of dynamics.  Electronic amplication and the the use of loudspeakers have changed our relationship to amplitude (as well as spatial position) of musical sounds in substantial ways and I don't think we're even close to understanding what this means for music. We can probably agree, however, that much of the music that makes up the acoustical background radiation in our lives is music in which the conditions imposed by electrical amplification are — for better or worse — inescapable.  From Bing Crosby to Les Paul or to Michael Jackson*, the prevailing image of musical dynamics has been to a large part determined by musicians dependent upon amplification.   While there is probably no going back to a lost (and probably fictional)  acoustical paradise in which dynamics were not constrained by electronics  — as Heinz-Klaus Metzger put it: "Webern was the last composer before the advent of air conditioning" —  there has surely got to be room for a musically meaningful use of dynamics in which the constraints of electronic sound production are not the overriding criteria.    

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* Isn't it strange that in all the discussion about Jackson's use of various technologies to modify his body that the most important bit of modification was that involving a microphone?      

The Only Way to Win Is Not to Play the Game

Lesson one for young composers: Not everyone will love your music, and some people will decide that you, too, are unloveable, because of your music. 

Lesson two for young composers: Get over lesson one and get on with your own work.

Lesson three for young composers: Should people in positions of real economic or political power within the musical community use their dislike for your music and/or person as a basis for exercising their power, then feel free to call them on it, even if the stakes are modest.  Keep cool, speak clearly and loudly about this, but do not expect lasting change and make concrete plans for the independent material and moral support of your work.

Lesson four for young composers: Having wrestled with the authorities, get back on with your own work. 

*****

The most rewarding part of this blogging experience has been the exchange and conversation with musicians and people who like music who happen to inhabit very different corners of New(andnotsonew)musicland.  I'm continually surprised by the amount of fruitful practical, technical, and aesthetic exchange I can have with someone who writes tonal music for windband or modal music for church choirs or who specializes in big bands or rock or computers or hardware hacking or is a serious student of film music or even hard-core opera fans or barbershop quartet singers. The only lasting conflicts I've encountered online have actually come from people with musical repertoire interests closest to my own.  I guess that this is sometimes just a matter of strongly territorial competition, or fear of too much oxygen been consumed in a very small space, but it's mostly just a side effect of caring so much about the music and the ideas behind it: one can come to identify with some music or have the feeling that they own it, with all the exclusive rights associated with ownership. This often leads, to my ears,  to a dangerous intolerance for a diversity of viewpoints, which is hardly the most useful viewpoint for an experimental musician.  I have myself been guilty of this, and if you find me at it again, please call me on it!

*****

If you write tonal or modal music, there will be partisans of music which is not tonal or modal who are unhappy with your work.  If you write music that is not tonal or modal, there will be those who do who are unhappy with your work.  If you write tonal music, there will be other tonal composers who are unhappy with your particular technique or syle of tonality.  If you write music which is not tonal, there will be other not-tonal composers who are unhappy with your particular technique or style of not being tonal.

If you write music, there will always be someone who is unhappy with your music for being too complex and there will be someone else who is unhappy with your music for being not complex enough.   If you use a system or method, some people will be unhappy; others are unhappy if you don't use a system or method, and still other are unhappy if you use the "wrong" system or method. There will be people unhappy if you write music with catchy tunes and rhythms or refer to any other repertoire, classical, popular, or outside of the immediate historical and cultural context.  There will also be people who are unhappy if you write music that doesn't do any or all of these things.  There are people who are unhappy with music that is not active enough or diverse enough in content or character and there are people who are unhappy if they find music to be too active or too diverse.  There are people who are only happy when music is neatly packaged while there are other people who are most unhappy when they find music to be too neatly packaged.  There are people who are only happy when music contains some intellectual, cultural, and/ or emotional depth and there are people for whom happiness only comes with music that entertains and goes away without disturbing the soul.   

If you write music for instruments there will be those who are only happy with music for voices, and the same goes in reverse.   If you use "extended" techniques with voices or instruments, some people will be unhappy; if you don't use "extended" techniques, other people will be unhappy.  If you write music using electronics, there will be souls who become unhappy anytime they see a power cable or even a dry cell in a concert hall, while there are others who are unhappy anytime they don't see an electric power source.  If you bend circuits there will be people who are unhappy because you're not using a computer, the big computer people have always been unhappy with the small computer people, and there are some people who are unhappy when you do not use the same Mac laptop model.

There are some people who are unhappy if you use an alternative tuning, while there are others who are unhappy if you do not. There are people who are only happy when they hear an accordion or a vibraphone and there are people who are unhappy when they hear a cowbell or a vibraslap.  Some people are only happy in the presence of vibrato, others are happy only in the absence of vibrato.  There are people who are only happy with live music and there are people who are only happy with a broadcast or recording.  There are some people who are only happy when music is played a certain way or by certain musicians.   There are some people who simply are not ever happy with music.

It is difficult, very difficult, when the music one makes and loves does not make others happy. But when you are in a position to recognize there are some people who will never be made happy by music and others for whom their musical happiness is predetermined by a categorical preference for this or dislike for that, isn't this an opportunity to recognize that these people are lost causes, and it's better to treasure and cultivate people who still have their ears open than to worry about, let alone make music for, lost causes?   

 

 

12 Strikes and You're Out

Amazon identifies a title,  From Chords to Simultaneities: Chordal Indeterminancy and the Failure of Serialism, as belonging to a series of Contributions in Criminology and Penology. 

The radical music will save your life. (Or at least keep you a happy camper. Most of the time. Probably.)

The weekend reading was Nicholson Baker's The Anthologist, not an exhilarating and disturbing read like Inherent Vice, but a read all the same, with enough of the characteristic Baker turns (obsessive little stories and jarring non-sequitors top my list of favorite Baker tropes) to make for lively breaks between composing sessions and some escape from a neighbor's hard-hammered house renovations.  The subject and narrator of The Anthologist is a mid-career, middle-of-the-road poet; although he's reached that particular pinnacle of American poets, being asked to edit an anthology, he's in a bad patch with writing, relationships, and day jobs, and so he fills the absences of writing, relationships, and a day job with procrastination, distraction and obsessive little lessons to reader, from the all-too familiar, all-too-slow straightening-up the office to helping a neighbor lay a plank floor to holding forth before us on poetic rhyme and metre as well as a bit of ancient poetryland gossip.  He is, it seems, in the middle of a career writing poetry he really doesn't believe in; he does seem to believe in an idea of poetry — and he can rattle on and about with some passion for a number of 19th and 20th century mainstreamers —but the talents he seems to have as a poet are not those most applicable to the poetry that he actually likes.  Rhyme, for example, is not one of his strengths.  For all of his enthusiasms for rests and enjambments, his rhythm and metre seems a little stiff, too.   But he is worried enough about rhyme and rhythm to share his worries and theories — and modest theories they are — with us. The novel, though, is a comedy, and the summer of discontent was just that; all ends well (too well, if you ask me, like the last act of As You Like It, in which the Goddess Hymen descends, suddenly and without preparation, to put everything in order) : the poet gets over his bad patch, he finishes his anthology preface, his dashes off twenty-three poems during a plane fight, and he gets some steady work, housepainting, for which he seems entirely and cheerfully suited.   But to get there, we had to spend a book-length summer listening to his signs and stories of  frustration and anxiety. All the while reading this, I couldn't help but have one thought: had Paul Chowder, Baker's narrator/poet/anthologist been an experimental poet rather than a poet of the mainstream sort  — and he is mainstream enough, for example, to worry about Poet Laureates of the US or to mention, in passing, that one of his poems got read on air by Garrison Keillor — we would have been saved reading an awful lot about the anxiety that he had for rhyme, metre or status in poetryland.  You see, that's the great advantage of experimental music as well.  Experimental musicians are interested in and work with the same questions of metre and tonality and complexity and systems and style and anything else remotely connected with music that the mainstream gals and guys use, but the detachment or distance necessary to an experimental approach, combined with the in-advance knowledge that a conventional institutional career with prizes and positions is probably not in the works (and when it happens is like an unexpected gift from gods in whom we do not believe so have no need to thank) is also a gift of Gelassenheit, letting-go-ness, an invitation to compose without anxiety.

Im/Material

Sometimes you just have to move simultaneously in opposite directions: at this point, every score I make can, in principle, be delivered in electronic format, via the magic of electrons telling other electrons to "move along!" (just like little doggies), but at the same time, an obsession with the material form of the hard copy of my scores continues unabated, with several rolls of handmade Nepali paper waiting to be cut down as coverstock, and it'll be exquisite coverstock, with no two volumes ever identical.  Heck, I even went to the hardware store this week and had plywood cut for a test run of even more substantial covers.  Who knows what's next?  Stainless steel?  Cast iron?  Concrete?  

I won't push this parallel too far, but there is something here akin to my tastes in visual arts.  I am hopelessly lost in my attachment to the works of Duchamp and Irwin, one an artist who moved the artwork away from the retina and direct perception and to the mind, and the other an artist who retrieved the sensual from the mind once again.  Coincidenta oppositorum.

 

Oh... THOSE clunkers

In Germany the subsidy program for new automobile sales has the odd enough name Abwrackpraemie, but the equivalent US program, the Car Allowance Rebate System, is better known as Cash for Clunkers, a phrase which carries a special resonance for musicians.  

If lawmakers had decided to support, instead of the automobile industry, the musical arts, then they could have kept the popular name for the program.  I reckon that a Cash for Musical Clunkers program would be a great success: who doesn't have an embarrasing old score or performance that they'd love to erase from their collections or catalogues and replace with something new? I, for one, would gladly retire several old pieces in return for new commissions.    

Schematic

If you compose according to a strict plan, concept, idea, formula, how much variation or elaboration about that  idea, plan, formula, or concept do you allow?  One aesthetic pole would have the piece stripped down to the essence of the formula, idea, concept, or plan, allowing nothing more than that necessary to clearly and decisively project the concept, formula, plan, or idea.  The aesthetic approach polar opposite to that would strive to hide any overt signs of the formula, plan, idea, or concept, or even frame the whole plan, formula, concept, or idea within a larger musical context.  Of course, most real compositions will settle somewhere in the mushy middle between these two poles, allowing the concept, idea, plan, or formula to be accessible, if dressed up somewhat in ornament or affect or flowing along in some normative musical continuity, after all, in the end, and no matter what the idea, concept, plan, or formula, we are just making music, aren't we? But then again, isn't it pessimistic to assume that making music is, as a default, defined inertially, with respect to known or involuntary habits for articulating an idea, formula, concept, or plan. Isn't there something inherently weak (half-hearted, non-commital) about the overlay of a technical scheme onto otherwise conventional musical discourse in, say, the Bartok Concerto for Orchestra or Britten's The Turn of the Screw?  I'd rather go with the clear and overt presentation of concept, idea, plan, or formula in Reich's Piano Phase or Lucier's I am sitting in a room or Cage's Rozart Mix or Monahan's Piano Mechanics, each instances of optimistic assertions of the potential for music to do much more than that which habit leads us to expect.

Compositional space

Task: Describe the space in which the activity of composition takes place.  The labels associated with the axes above are only tentative and approximate: choice is fantasy but also convention, habit, tradition; calculation is planning, process, consequence, but may be complex enough to be unpredictable; chance, which is also circumstance, contingency, may be, globally, a more predictable element than either choice or calculation.  It may be more useful to think of composition not in terms of "putting things together" but rather as placing or locating activity in such a space, with finding balance (or absence of balance, as the case may well be) among methods an increasingly central concern.

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The Orchestra, Reformed

Somehow, in these scattered postings about orchestration, I have neglected to mention a pair of musicians doing important work on the music-technical and economic/social/political problems of making music with large ensembles.

The first is composer Daniel Goode, who has a long working relationship to the Gamelan Son of Lion (see this posting on Our Other Orchestra) and additionally has, in recent years, worked with both the concept and concrete examples of a "Flexible Orchestra", a mixed ensemble including at least one instrument in multiple instances (in a recent concert, the orchestra was composed of eleven flutes, tuba, harpsichord, trumpet, and contrabass).  Such combinations have the potential to provide very striking environments for music-making, in this case including timbral and registral variety but also allowing for at least one example of the symphonic qualities or chorus-effect made available by a single timbre in mass, an efficient and even elegant distilling of some of the most characteristic features of traditional orchestral ensembles. Mr Goode's homepage includes several articles exploring these topics (see especially the "Letter from Vienna" and "How can the orchestra be more like the gamelan?".)

The second example is composer Andrew Culver's proposals for an "anarchic philharmonic".  The first concern is obviously the institution of the "obligato conductor", but the standard composition, organization, rehearsal method, and concert structure are all rich areas for exploring alternatives. Needless to say — and precisely because I'm familiar with the pitfalls of previous experiments in this direction (Cage's orchestral version of Cheap Imitation being the central case in point, and Etcetera and some of the Number Pieces indicating some possible paths out) — I'm in complete agreement with Culver.  I can't wait to see a black flag flying oover Disney Hall or the Concertgebouw.

Don't forget your melodica!

A reminder:  one month remains before the deadline for submitting pieces for the first online anthology of new music for melodica.  The nine eight pieces (by six five different composers) received to date represent a startling diversity of music for solo melodica and melodica ensembles.

The Orchestra, Deconstructed

While writing a wind quintet this week, the necessary downtime was spent finishing a pair of wonderful and wonderfully idiosyncratic books:  Thomas Pynchon's new novel, Inherent Vice, which arrived on Monday and not only read as quickly and smoothly as a Wild Turkey chaser but also carried the same emotional after-burn, and Henry Brant's orchestration handbook, Textures and Timbres.    I'll probably have more to say about the Pynchon later, but for now: damn! between it and Mieville's The City & The City, this has been the year for the weird-boiled detective novel.  As for the Brant, he is refreshingly modest and upfront in explaining the goal of the project in hand, which is achieving homogenous orchestral textures from mixtures of instruments. His method, through defining broad timbral categories, is a sound one and always based on years of empirical study.  Nevertheless, the real substance in the book comes in a number of verbal suggestions and in many of the Brant-composed musical examples, which, particularly regarding the differentiation of contrapuntal lines, go a great distance toward a more comprehensive theory of the role of orchestration in relationship to each of the other compositional parameters. This is reading a more abitious program between the lines of Brant's text, but I think that inventive orchestration is more or less always going to have to be read between the lines of existing practices, deconstructed even, and Brant's own music was never less than that.  

Although Brant is most famous for his works with spatially separated instruments and voices, he does not explicitly discuss space as a parameter here, but it's abundantly clear that clear that Brant understood orchestration as a necessary prerequisite to making spatial music actually work.   Brant's book thus follows his own insight: the recipe for a homogenous orchestral timbre also contains the recipe for its opposite and suggests the timbres which would maximum contrast for the projection of contrapuntal materials.  

Brant's book got me to thinking about the teaching of orchestration in general and, more specifically, his use of his own musical examples made me wonder which pieces of historical repertoire  I would choose if I were to teach orchestration.   There are really three approaches possible to the topic, one — and the tactic taken by the textbooks now most widely used — attempts to teach an optimal "mainstream" orchestration aesthetic based upon standardized instrumentations and ideals of contrast and balance; a second approach is essentially through teaching the history of orchestration, particularly in its luxurious change of focus from function to color; and the third approach is more analytical in nature, taking advantage on the one hand of a more contemporary understanding of musical acoustics and, on the other hand, considering scoring patterns as integral aspects of compostional technique. 

Although my own composition instincts are mostly those of the third approach, I think I would teach with an acoustically-informed historical approach.  I would skip around rather than hew closely to chronology.  I might start, say, with a Schumann Symphony or Overture, pieces supposedly suffering from poor orchestration, and try to make the case against that supposition: the continuous doubling of the violins by the flutes, for example, usually considered a textbook example of what not to do, may just reveal instead a unique timbral imagination and conception/ When one considers that the bowing technique of Schumann's time involved a shorter stroke, with less sustain and considerable decay,  allowing the near-sine tone of the flute to emerge from the composite tone lent the prevailing melodic surface of the music an edge for which the adjective "silver" is spot-on. Then, as a counter-example, I would take the Berlioz  Messe des Mortes, a piece I really treasure, to illustrate — if somewhat paradoxically — mastery in a less-is-more style of orchestral economy, in which a large reserve of forces is kept mostly in reserve and often, in fact, paired down to some strange and wonderful subsets (unaccompanied choir in the Quaerens me, the antiphonal brass, the mens' chorus, low reeds and low strings of the Quid sum miser, the tenor soli "solo" in the Sanctus...).   As an additional counter-example, I might use some Liszt piano pieces, as examples of exploiting the full palate of an instrument's resources as  "orchestration" without an orchestra.

Only then would begin the historical survey proper, paying special attention to the historical cul-de-sacs, as the orchestral styles not taken but well worth revisiting: whole and broken consorts (especially in Morley's Book of Consort Lessons, with its contrast between sustaining instruments and plucked metal and gut strings),  polychoral or antiphonal ensembles, the five-part string texture in Lully, and then trace the mainstream of orchestral development from continuo-based ensembles to the classical four part texture with the gradual incorporation of winds and percussion (the brass, in particular, represent an interesting bit of musical sociology as the horns came from the hunt, the trumpets from the military (each bringing their own drums) and the trombones from the church tower; the origins of orchestral percussion are often even more exotic) .  I would spend some time on the Harmonie (wind) ensemble and trace wind bands through their court, civic, military, and popular traditions.  Although I would pay some serious  attention to opera orchestration (especially Rossini, Weber and Verdi), I might just skip much about the "normative" large 19th century orchestra, under the motto "nice work, if you can find it (or if your name is Johnny Williams) and you can always read about it in Adler, Blatter or Kennan"  and focus instead on the contemporary chamber ensemble (with its "classical" but one-on-a-part instrumentation)  and the composer-led ensembles (with their frequenty amplified and electronically mixed instrumentation).

     

 

   

Merce Cunningham, 1919-2009

Why walk when one can leap?

                                                             Move as if you've forgotten everything you thought you ever knew about how to pass, kick, fall and run;

                                       Break everything down into independent constituent parts, recombine, overlay (simultaneous unisons that are not in unisons, duos that are not together, etc.); 

                                                                                                         Prowling.

                    Count like a dancer, steps neither in clock-time nor in musical time; 

The dance is distributed among the spines of the dancers, the dancers distributed throughout the entire available space, "front" is wherever in space each individual dancer faces;

                                                                 Aquire movement everywhere: from animals, pedestrians, the computer, stepdance, ballet; 

                                                                                              Torsos turn.

                   Events: constant interplay between practice, composition and repertoire;

                                     Dancers, musicians, artists working simultaneously but not at the same thing;

                                                       When do you ever find time to breathe?

                                                                 Feet. Can't. Fail.

Unter Regie: Under Direction and Getting Out From Under It?

A day or two ago, the German novelist Daniel Kehlmann delivered a speech for the opening of the Salzburg Festival, where he is this year's poet in residence and director of the literature program.  He decided, in an unusually personal way, to talk about contemporary theatre, in particular the established "director's theatre."  The talk was personal because Kehlmann spoke of his father, the late director Michael Kehlmann, who he describes as "a man who, before all else, saw in the director a servant of the author," yet whose career ebbed from early successes in the face of a theatre world that increasingly expected the director to place his or her ever-larger own imprint upon productions.  Kehlmann Sr. became "old fashioned" and had frustratingly fewer opportunities to do his work.   (Kehlmann describes his own decision to keep a distance from the theatre and write novels as a choice for a career field in which no one could keep him from his work).   Kelhmann's critique of the Regietheatre is rhetorically powerful because of the combination of this personal tone, especially when coming from an author who is not a reactionary, with the fact that he never explicitly names his target.  But, all the same: Bullseye.

*****

Classical music has been under its own form of direction since sometime in the 19th century. There was conducting beforehand — we all know about Lully's fatal beat-pounding — but it was a modest and constrained task in which keeping measure was frequently shared between the primarius and the continuo players or any soloists.  But in the 19th century, the profession of the conductor quickly moved from keeping a beat to directing more complext traffic patterns,  cheering forces on, scolding, swearing, swooning, through something called interpretation, and now into the odd combination of tourism and administration.   Technique for conducting has never been standardized in the way that technique for an instrument has been, and success as a conductor depends uniquely upon psychological factors, impossible to measure objectively (save, perhaps in box-office draw) and often up as "charisma".  For almost any work of music requiring more than two handfuls of players, a director is now assumed to be required.  The conductor, to the best of my knowledge, was a development unique to the West (unique at least until the advent of the pop music producer who plays a similar role in repertoire that exists primarily in recorded form). While there are indeed ensemble leaders in other musical traditions — for example the dance masters in numerous ensemble musics — they tend to make noises themselves rather than mime before their players, thus being more fully integrated into the ensemble as players themselves.  

Increasingly the conductor became a recognized professional, someone who led musical proceedings and intervened in all parameters between the composer's instructions and the ensemble of players.  The institution of the professional conductor happens, and not coincidentally, to date fairly exactly with the invention of what we now identify as the classical canon,  and while conductors were and continue to be gatekeepers on the admission of new works to that repertoire, their prime responsibility has always been to the interpretation of canonical works.  One now compares the performances of works under the batons of various conductors with the zeal of baseball fans comparing pitching records; heck, there are even some performances out there (take Carlos Kleiber's Fifth and Seventh, for example) for which one is tempted to retire the score altogether. 

Closure of a canon — whether that of German theatre (in which a very limited number of "classical" works have now dominated the serious stage programs for generations), of "Classical Music,"  or literature (of which the most familiar examples, the holy writings of the three major monotheistic religions, have been closed to a frequently tragic effect),  is inevitably a moment in which creative energies — those which would have otherwise gone into the synthesis of new works — are now chanelled into interpretation.  I believe that the problem underlying the Director's Theatre is the same which classical (and, increasingly, pop) music have suffered: not interpretation, in and of itself, but the canonical closure which  requires interpretation to impress a contemporary identity on either the plays or the music.

*****

My own response, as a composer, to the directorial culture has been akin to Kehlman's decision not to write for the theatre:  by and large, I avoid writing for orchestra.   There are some aesthetic reasons for this (I like a certain amount of detail that smaller ensembles can do better) and the practical (orchestal commissions, when costs of engraving and part extraction are added in, rarely pay off if the performance is only a one-off).   But I don't want to give up on the attractions of the orchestra altogether.  Some of my best musical experiences and certainly many of my dreams require the services of an orchestra.  I have had some good experiences with the other obvious alternative: specifying orchestra without conductor, but that is often a hard sell for ensembles with limited rehearsal time and often for those in which the conductor is, her- or himself, deciding on repertoire and is uninterested in programming works in which she or he is visibly superfluous.    

Fortunately, there continues to be a species of conductor for whom making music, and new music in particular, is a larger cause than their own ego, among them:  Jonathan Nott, Roland Kluttig, Peter Rundel, David Robertson, Sian Edwards, Lucas Vis, and Peter Eötvös.   Conductors of this quality have the ability to be faithful to the composer's text, yet coax orchestras in interpretations which bring out more than the sum of the score's qualities, surpress its weaknesses (yes, composers are fallable), and perhaps add something complementary of their own to the mix without the work losing its identity.  We are under direction, but not yet lost to it.  

 

An Orchestration Lesson from Samuel Beckett

Orchestration is a form of personel management: who plays what, when they play it, and sometime even where they play it. Composers don't always think of orchestration this way,  and it might be useful to look at other art forms in which this aspect is more explicit:  the best playwrights and choreographers, for example, manage the exits and entrances of their players supremely well.

One of my pieces-in-progress is a wind quintet, a tricky genre due in large part to the fact that continuity has to be provided by players who have to breath every once in a while, thus inviting lots of entering and exiting in a continuous stream of changing scoring patterns.  But how might those patterns be sensibly organized, in a piece, for example, in which every combination of instruments is used only once? 

I recently stumbled onto a nice solution to this suggested by a stage work by Samuel Beckett, Quad, a "frantic mime" for four players, lights, and percussion.  Beckett wanted to organize Quad on the basis of a sequence in which every combination of the four players would be used, each combination in the sequence differing from its neighbor by the entrance or exit of one player, and when a player exits it is always the player who has been on stage longest.  

It turns out that the conditions Beckett set were mathematically impossible to realize with four players (making Quad another example of an inexorable and imperfect logic at work in Beckett), but solutions to what is now known as the Beckett-Gray code have been found for other numbers, among them n = 5, which immediately struck me as an interesting premise for a wind quintet, in which the player who has played longest is most deserving of a breather.   I have long used Gray and similar codes in other pieces (I recently mentioned a piece with some "anti-gray" coding), but I'm especially taken with the way in which the Beckett-Gray can respond to particular musical problems (in this case, continuity and the need for individual musicians to pause).  I expect to use it elsewhere, and not only in orchestration. 

Something Wild

Writer Michael Chabon makes the case for the place of wilderness in young peoples' lives (here). Unfortunately, Chabon (or, one supposes, the editor who titled his piece) identifies this as a male phenomena, but otherwise I agree.  Growing up near open desert, mountain spaces, gravel pits, vacant yards, abandoned houses, and even cemeteries always meant preserves for adventure and learning empirically to deal with a measure of danger.  Building rock forts at the desert/mountain edge of Cathedral City or tree forts in Mt Baldy oak trees were probably the first unsupervised creative acts of any consequence in my life, and there's a direct line in my mind from these rough constructions to any music I've ever made.  It's a real pity that kids today are increasingly kept away from similar opportunities.  I suppose the trend to protect children from childhood misadventure is unavoidable (even in the first of the Great Brain books, set in Utah in the last decade of the 19th century, the parents decide to shut down a cave entrance to protect kids from getting lost), particularly given the shrinking spaces in which people are forced to live,  but there ought to be a place in city planning for wild spaces in which kids can learn to deal with danger in a useful way rather than be artificially isolated from it and discover playthings and playgrounds in real, found objects landscapes rather than in the toys bought, and parks built, for them.  

Lun Dun

I'm just back from a short trip to London.  Pleasure, no business, and tourism pure were the orders of the days.  I heard a concert in the Music We'd Like to Hear series, a perfect example of composerly initiative, self-reliance, and the pooling of resources, in which three composers — John Lely, Tim Parkinson, and my friend Markus Trunk (all roughly on the experimental side of the new music community) —  each program an evening of music.  I happened to be in town for the third and final even in this year's program, John Lely's evening, which was a portrait of Tom Johnson.  It was great to see and hear Tom and his music again  (Formulas for String Quartet, in particular, should be taken up by more groups) and also to hear a work of Lely's, The Parson's Code for Melodic Contours, which was a charming (and, in its way, post-Johnsonian) demonstration of the complexity of a simple melodic curve when projected simultaneously onto multiple pitch metrics.   The other highlights of London this trip were a reading by China Mieville, some decent Jamaican food,  a Punch and Judy show, a lot of pretty pictures in galleries unafraid of wallpaper, As You Like It in the Globe, and just enough rain to remind one that Britain is a good place to visit. And visit briefly. 

Brant's Progress

Sorting through some paperwork, I recently located an article from 1979, "Spatial music progress report" written by Henry Brant for the Bennington College Alumni magazine, Quadrille; I've recopied the text and scanned the images and this is now online at David Jaffe's Henry Brant homepage.  

Summer Music

This has been another summer without much summer weather, which is mostly okay by me, a person of pallor with a low tolerance for the hot and humid.   But the weather has been stifling enough that composing in long stretches is not the order of the day so, instead, I'm composing something substantial in a number of modules,  alternating with other projects, the most rewarding of which have been copying music for some friends and doing a bit of research about some more senior American composers, some of which has ended up — should the deletionists have mercy — in either new or seriously revised Wikipedia entries.

The piece I'm composing is for out-of-doors, in a garden, perhaps, with a soloist and a number of smaller ensembles around the space.  The first module is finished: At the furthest perimeter of the space, three cyclists shall lap lazily, each lap taking the place of a Cagian time bracket into which each cyclist inserts either a bell ring or nothing, with each of the laps in which the bells ring making another step in a Gray Code non-repeating Hamiltonian circuit through a graph: 123, 213, 132, 321, 231, 312.  The sequence of ringing (or silence) in each lap is notated, as is the particular style of each ring (quick, long, long-short, anapest, sustained, muted), but the pitches of the bells are not fixed (they could be different from one another or identical) and the possibilities, within a lap, for sounds to be isolated or overlapping, are endless.  This is compositional territory that I really like, with a mixture of the calculated and specific, the arbitrary, contingent and surprising, and the elements more closely related to my own taste.  

I can already hear, in advance, that this piece is going to be highly sensitive to the maintenance of certain leisurely pace, with lots of time — and space — between sounds, but still yet inviting some sounds of portent or event.  I can't wait to hear what comes next.  

 

Forward Music Ltd.?

A bleg:  I bought some sheet music in the early 90's from Forward Music Ltd., in London.  (Good stuff, too: Barney Childs, John White...)  They seem to have fallen off the planet, or at least into realms that the internet doesn't reach, so if anyone has any contact information, I'd be much obliged.

Periodically on Paper

A list of journals (a) focused on new/contemporary/experimental music, (b) currently in operation, (c) published periodically and (d) available on paper.   I have not included journals by national music information centers, publishers, or membership organizations.  This list is definitely not complete; if you know of any further journals, please let me know and I'll update this item.

English:

Computer Music Journal.

Contemporary Music Review.

ex tempore.

Journal of New Music Research.

Leonardo Music Journal.

Musikworks.

The Open Space Magazine.

Organized Sound.

Perspectives of New Music.

Search: Journal for New Music and Culture

Signal to Noise.

Sonus.

The Sound Projector.

21st Century Music.

Tempo.

The Wire.

French:

Circuit: Musiques Contemporaines

Revue & Corrigée

German:

MusikTexte.

Neue Zeitschrift für Musik.

Positionen.

The Radical Music: Fragments of a Manifesto

Sounds articulate precise dimensions in physical space; musical sounds also articulate precise dimensions in social and private spaces.

*****

Use the minimum of resources or means required. Less is often more.

Find the core question or idea in a work. Choose and use your materials to best frame that question or idea.

All musical ideas and all musical instruments (save the vibra-slap) are potentially useful. None is universally useful. (Save the vibra-slap, which is never useful.)

But having practiced the virtues of economy, allow yourself, from time to time, a bit of extravangance, some conspicuous production and consumption.   In the end, the economy of musical production is like the bellows of a concertina, expansion necessarily paired with contraction.

*****

Go to extremes, in whichever parameter you use, including extremes of moderation.

Question parameters. A parameter is someone else's way of dividing up the aural experience. Explore the edges and boundaries of and between pitch and timbre and rhythm and dynamic and form. Explore and break boundaries between music and not-music.

Music, the physics of musical sound, the psychophysics of music, and the neuroscience of music are different concerns, each with its own territory and terminology. How might they relate? How might they not relate? What unique elements of cohesion does music bring to these disciplines and how can they extend the potential for new forms of musical activity?

*****

Follow an idea in all its consequences. Find the end of a process or pattern. Push a system to its design capacity and then push beyond it.

However, if the consequences of a process are obvious, is it necessary to carry out the process in full?

Consider the possibility of multiple versions, or realizations, of a work. Or accept the first version and move on to the next work without looking (listening) back.

Break, subvert, or invert cause and effect.

*****

There is an indeterminant number of ways of arriving at the same musical surface and it's not possible to determine the best or most efficient or most elegant way.  Worrying about this is an ethical issue, not an aesthetic one.

Start from nothing, from first principles, without assumptions and build a better (sound) world from the ground up.  Or start with everything and scrape, sculpt, and erase away, making the real, existing (wise, tired) world better. 

Limits and rules: anything we compose could, potentially, be through-composed,  by taste and experience, but sometimes the alternative, carrying out rules applied to a limited set of materials, in the manner of a game (a music game, like a language game) carries much less anxiety and leads to surprises rather than the habitual.

*****

The radical music is about complexity.  But not necessarily that complexity.

Complexity is an elusive quality: It can be algorithmic complexity (for all that's worth) or the complexity of acoustical phenomena when heard in greater detail or the complexity of historical or social context.  Sometimes a highly dense phenomena can only be heard coarsely and sometimes the simplest of conditions can overwhelm the senses.  A universally applicable and acceptable definition of either "sufficient" or "over-" complexity is impossible. (To paraphrase Potter Stewart, you know it when you hear it). When people make and listen to sounds, to music, one form or another of complexity is inevitable. Don't give it a second thought. No, strike that, don't give it the first thought, but keep it well in mind as a second.

Every piece of music has an element of the improvisational, extemporaneous, accidental, capricious, prejudiced or arbitrary. Is a piece of music interesting because of this? Is a piece musical because of this?  

*****

Experiment with scale, both the smallest, most local, and the grandest, most global, as well as the most anonymous quantities in-between.

Boredom is only a function of time, and a function with several variables.

*****

Modest work done in a serious way, leavened with levity, can carry large ambitions.

History is both a playground and a minefield, and a composer can and will write and rewrite music history with reckless disregard for the difference between a playground and a minefield.

(2007, revised 2009)

Just an Old-Fashioned Melody

We went to Wiesbaden this evening to hear (and see) Lulu.   It's astonishing how much of a period piece it has become, with the touches of alto sax and bar-room piano in the orchestra, the redundancy and charateristic curves of the various Lulu tunes and — still, best of all, as far as I'm concerned — the silent movie in the middle.  I imagine that in the 1930's, anything remotely like Lulu would have been shocking, even dissonant, in the Neo-Baroque digs of the Hessisches Staatstheater, but now, and even with a highly stylized production (read: lots of wet paint), it's just another night at the opera, and a night without Otis B. Driftwood at that.

Stand and Deliver!

Like Health Care systems everywhere, New Music suffers from a poor delivery system. The route from composer to performer to listener is often capricious, improvised, and instable, and more often a product of repertorial lethargy and personal relationships than an open market in matching musical interests.  

The web ought to be a perfect route for moving our scores to performers and attracting listeners to performances, but the low-level of web activity for new music — I keep track of 35 or 40 new music oriented blogs via bloglines and sometimes several days will pass without new messages — suggests that the new music community has a far-from-optimal approach to the web as a resource.   (It is surprising to me that  the largest traditional music publishers  and the license-collecting agencies — who have an immediate financial interest in making their wares public — do such a very bad job of it;  title searches at these sites are slow and miserable, and I'm someone who actually enjoys doing library research.) 

Here is one small proposal to help remedy this situation:  How about a blog or site dedicated to publicly registring new scores?  With probably several thousand active "serious" composers in the US alone, if only a couple hundred were to join such a registry, announcing each of their new title immediately upon composition, detailing and cross-indexing the resources required and how to obtain performance materials, one would presumably have a web page with many daily updates, thus both offering a useful way of matching performers with new scores and better mirroring the liveliness of our community.

 

The Fermata

A discussion at BloggingHeads.tv between two philosophers with interests in environmental issues, Jay Odenbaugh and Craig Callender, raises some serious questions about conservation and even the re-introduction of extinct species.  A proposal to conserve or revive any particular species is a non-chronological privileging of one particular historical moment or era over others, establishing the particular constellation of climate, fauna and flora of one moment as a benchmark against which any other state is less valued. This is an enterprise which strikes me as ultimately rather arbitrary, however immediately attractive any particular configuration may appear.  (I find their example of a restored Cave Lion population roaming Los Angeles is an especially nice addition to the long tradition of destruction-of-L.A.-narratives (see Mike Davis's City of Quartz for several more)).

It occurs to me that, in the modern invention of the "classical" music repertoire, with the predominance of late 18th through early 2oth century western European music in that repertoire, that a similar experiment in privileging one era over others — including our present era — has, in fact, already been carried out.  While it is true, on the one hand, that there has been a steady admixture of new composition and historically-informed recreations of early repertoire nipping at the edge of the trunk repertoire as well as occasional tributaries to more distant traditions, and, on the other hand, one can recognize certain qualitative benchmarks in the classical style — among them in the variability and complexity of the tonal language, the flexibility of ensemble textures, and the relationship between notation, oral transmission, and individual interpretation — one can also readily imagine a musical world in which some other, perhaps very different, repertoire or slice through repertoires had gained a similar level of prestige, and that other slice would as certainly have its own set of qualities to recommend it (moreover, the qualitative benchmarks to one musician's or listener's tastes may well be heard as deficits by another musician or listener).  

AFAIC, the problem here is not in the choice of musics to be privileged but rather in the phenomena that one music can aquire such privilege — often institutional in nature, and sharing the material power of that association — to the disadvantage of other musics.  I certainly have my own preferences and distastes and I have no problem that you do, too.  (In fact, that's what I value most about you.)  But I do have real problems when the choice has essentially been made for both of us by prohibiting the successful cohabitation of a diversity of musical materials, methods, styles, and traditions through some artificial institutional constraints on musical practice.  Unlike the streets of L.A., in which a decision to allow coyotes and mountain lions — or even genetically re-engineered mamoths, sabre tooths or cave lions — will have inescapable and immediate consequences to life, limb, environment and economy, it is the inherent advantage of music that there are no neccessary disadvanges to the cohabitation of a diversity of musical forms.  

More free scores

TauKay Edizioni Musicali has a large number of free-to-download scores online, yet another example of the way the winds are blowing for sheet music.   While there will likely remain a role for sheet music printed on paper and physically delivered to musicians and libraries — and a particular niche for elegant editions — the time and cost efficiencies of direct downloads are increasingly hard to ignore.  Sheet music, on its own, for new and experimental music, is not an especially profitable business, the larger profit is in commissions and licensing for performances, broadcasts, and recordings; sheet music is an instrument in realizing performances, broadcasts, and recordings.  If traditional sheet music publishing is either slow or expensive, it runs the risk of leading to fewer rather than more performances, which makes publishing more of an obstacle than an assist to the music.

Sheet music in the form of scores and parts for choral groups, bands, and orchestras which becomes widely used (especially by educational institutions) can be profitable as a sale or rental operation.  The individual composer must decide whether he or she can handle such operations on their own, the profit expected covering his or her costs in time and materials, or be willing to share  license fees in return for allowing a traditional publisher to carry and promote their work, or to go the download route instead.  At present, I can well imagine many composers using a tactical mix of publication methods, with solo and chamber works largely issued online and ensemble works intended for institutional use promoted via online perusal/study scores but available as rental or purchase sets of scores and parts.

One reminder to performers:  if you download a work and perform it, identify the piece accurately on your program and also let the composer know about the performance directly.  In many cases, institutions pay blanket fees for to licensing organizations, so the particular performance will not cost you anything more and the main obstacle to the composer from eventually getting her or his fee is a lack of reporting.   Reporting is the least that you can do when the composer has provided the performance materials for free.

 

   

Henry Brant as composer and orchestrator for films

It's well-known that the late composer Henry Brant had an active parallel career as on orchestrator and composer for film, but a lot of his work took place under- or uncredited, which is standard practice in film music.  During his life, Brant was always modest about his work as an orchestrator for the scores of colleagues, characterizing it as always implementing the style and preferences of the composer rather than in his own.  Mr Brant's musical executor, Kathy Wilkowski, has been kind enough to share the following list of films on which he worked.  

First, his collaborations as orchestrator:

for Virgil Thomson:  The River (1937), The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936), Louisiana Story (1948; the score won Thomson the Pulitzer Prize in Music, Brant was credited as "music technical assistant".)

for Aaron Copland:  The City (1939)

for George Antheil:  The Scoundrel (1935)

for Marc Blitzstein: at least two films.

for Douglas Moore: Power on the Land (1940) , Youth Gets a Break (a WPA-related film; Brant stated: "it was for full orchestra; he left it to me."

for Alex North: The Misfits (1961), Cleopatra (1963), Cheyenne Autumn (1964),  Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolff (1966), Africa (ABC-TV documentary, 1967),  2001: A Space Odyssey (the score was not used in the released film), The Devil's Brigade (1968),  Carny (1980; includes two compositions by Brant which were organ solos extracted from Brant's 1956 opera The Grand Universal Circus), Dragonslayer (1981), Good Morning Vietnam (1987)

for Gordon Parks: The Learning Tree (1970)

Brant's own work as a film composer was also extensive, particularly for documentary and independent films.  It includes:  Playing Fields of America (aka Sport Film) (1943), Capitol Story (aka Public Health, for the OWI)(1944), the Pale Horseman (OWI)(1944), Journey into Medicine (1946), Osmosis (1946), Outbreak (1947), The Big Break (1951), Ode to a Grecian Urn (1953; an avant-garde film to which Brant improvised on dulcimer, double-flageolet, ox-bells, double-ocarina, celesta, bass recorder, and Persian oboe), The Secret Thief (1956),  Your Community (1956), Dr. "B" (1957), Endowing our Future (1958), Fibres in Civilization (1958), Peace Music for U.N. Day (1959), a “Wind quintet film” (1960), Early Birds (1961),  Fertility & the Physician (1965), Jack Levine (1966), Chartres Cathedral (1970), Marcel Duchamp (1978; improvised by Brant), The Trappers (1981), and Noch Ist Polen Nicht Verloren (1991)

See also these posts about Brant: On the Nature of Things, and Brant on Orchestration

Billiard balls made of cellulose nitrate would occasionally explode on contact

Archiving your music is not easy:  try to keep it in several media at once (as paper originals and copies, as data on permanent and non-permanent formats), make multiple copies of each, and distribute the storage (i.e. one copy at home, one copy for the safe deposit box, one sent home to Mom).   Think plastics will last forever?  Think again:  here's a new aticle  on the degrading of plastics.  

Reboot

It's time for the annual notation reboot.  In addition to setting up new template files for the new edition of Finale, my primary engraving software, I've been doing practice runs to keep up some facility with the other notation software on my computer.  In addition to Finale, I have Lilypond, Sibelius, Turandot, Graphire Music Studio, and have recently downloaded Berlioz  (a commerical program now turned into freeware) and MuseScore (free and open sourced) to try.  Each product has useful features and a distinct workflow and I find that it's useful to have several approaches available to solving the same problem.  The new Finale (2010) doesn't have any dramatic changes, but does have two features that were worth the upgrade: an easier way of working with percussion and more possibilities for the import and export of graphics.

But don't get the impression that I'm spending all my composing time with my computer: a fresh box of black uni-ball micros has arrived,  I've ultra-sounded my Rapidographs and calligraphy pens completely clean, and have even purchased a fresh Noligraph, my favorite five-lined staff writer.   I'm now ready to compose with or without electricity and on the backs of envelopes or cocktail napkins should inspiration hit.  There are no more excuses: time to write. 

 

    

Along the river

I've long imagined that music had two origins.  The first as a extension or heightened form of speech, essentially and immediately communicative in function, and the second, more absolute and aesthetic in nature, an articulation of time passing, as relief from boredom, accompaniment to work, travel, falling into sleep (and dreams).   These two causes have long been comingled in music, but I'm not altogether sure that that is a good thing.

I was reminded yesterday that not only does music articulate passing time, but it can also articulate space. It has a physical presence with a center which it fills and thresholds into which it dis- and reappears.  I went cycling with the family alongside the Nidda, a small river near our house which empties south of us into the Main.  A lightly clouded Saturday in June was a perfect day for festivals, and as we passed over the bridge in Praunheim, a cover band on could be heard from a stage some hundred metres away in the center of the village.  As we drove on, that sound steadily evaporated with distance and barriers both natural and human-made.   Further on up the river, as we approached Heddernheim, small fragments of low brass intercut with bits of snare drum begun to cross our path, eventually revealing themselves as whole swathes of tunes and countermelodies and bass lines played by the local Fanfarenzug.    With a weakness for brass bands, I swerved off the path into a churchyard to hear the wind band more closely, especially enjoying the way in which the percussion was used to provide a continuous bed of sound for the winds,  and the gradual addition of the more higher pitched (and consequently more highly attentuated by physical distance) instruments to the total mix.  Cycling onward, the process was reversed and Heddernheim receded both as a civic and acoustical location.  The next villlage up the river soon spoke for itself in quite a different way, through a peal of church bells, announcing the hour, or — for it seemed to go on longer than usual — perhaps a special event, maybe a Saturday wedding in June.   As we went further upriver,  the gently creaking sounds of the river and the whirr of other bicycles, sometimes the steps of joggers (some of whom put their iPods or mp3 players up loud enough to "share")  were only interrupted by a pair of bridges underpasses with their ignorable traffic,  a family of insistant swans at the edge of the water, and a pair of soccer matches.  Each physical space we approached, passed by or through, or departed, was as recognizeable from its acoustic signature as from its physical shapes and forms.  Having ears means time — and space — passing need never be dull.       

Copy that

At least half my training as a composer has come from copying music. Not imitating the music of others but the note-for-note copying of scores by others both as work for hire and for my own use, to play and study. (See also this post). Whether with pen and ink on paper or by pointing and clicking with an engraving program, copying invites, indeed forces, one to attend to the music in an analytic and intimate way that, in my experience, casual listening to a recording cannot replace, and to hear imaginatively, interpreting both details and larger passages in the in-and-out-of-time unique to the written score. A major part of the copyist's work is planning the project, finding the most efficient way to move notes from the original to the copying, figuring out the most elegant layout of notes, measures, systems, pages, all of which is analytical work, tracing phrases, sections, processes, resemblances and differences, identifying local tactics and global strategies of both original and transcription, as well as the inevitable and incalaculable surprises. Even deciding where to place page turns is a matter that invites analytical and interpretive engagement!

Composers have probably trained by copying music for as long as music has been written down. The tales of the youthful Bach and Mozart copying music by others are familar to many young musicians (as I remember them, these tales often include mention of candlelight and ruining ones' eyes). While it is entirely possible that copying, indeed written notation altogether, will fade even further away from widespread use, in favor of more purely aural/oral transmission, recordings, and possibly even new technologies as yet unimagined, it is hard to escape from the recognition that copying has been a useful skill, and written notation an effective and long-lived technology for moving music from here to these as well as preserving and learning about music.

An effective technology, but not a perfect reproductive technology, in the sense of a perfect digital copy of a sound file: the risk and the charm — and, to my ears, ultimately the advantage — of the handmade copy is the interjection of interpretation into the path of transmission. On the one hand, this is just another example of (Richard K.) Winslow's law at work — "if you want a perfect copy, learn it by ear, if you want to garantee that it changes over time, write it down" — but on the other, this interpretative act can be a first step in a process moving inevitably towards new composition. Each work I have copied (as a teenager, I copied lots of Webern and Machaut and Cage and Harrison and Purcell and Lully and transcribed almost every note of Harry Partch, I later earned part of my living copying for colleagues and doing ghost-scoring for films; now I do some interesting work for Material Press) has been an invitation to compose something new, as if tracing the paths of each of these pieces has made more urgent the paths not taken.

Morton Feldman, "Piece" (1950)

Landmarks (41)

Richard Ayres: No. 37b (2003/2006).  Never mind the neutral title — this is a work of symphonic dimensions and classical formal proportions. The composer — as far as I'm concerned the most technically gifted composer of our generation — is an exuberant orchestrator, inviting the orchestra here to do everything that an orchestra can do well, and the performances I've heard have uniformly showed the orchestras honoring the challenge with equal exuberance.  He has made that rare thing: new music that orchestral musicians love to play.  The writing for the brass and string harmonics is spectacular, with some passages for the trumpets in particular touching my heart with a characteristic drag that resembled something in-between New Orleans funeral marches and mariachi playing.  (In this score, Ayres has also raised the process of muting a tuba to a cooperative musical skill of the first art. )  No. 37b  is a more than a bit of a madcap adventure, comic in genre, but with the entire range of comic expression in use, from droll to intense and from gentle to slapstick.  A comic symphony is naturally more classical than romantic, and the rapid cuts and transitions never look backward, but are sometimes detoured by cul de sacs and hairpin curves, seizing that same cinematic impulse that was captured in the some of the best works of early 20th century neo-classicism.  Why isn't real movie music ever this good?

Listening for the day

Henry Cowell: Homage to Iran; Terry Riley: Persian Surgery Dervishes

Cowell's music is an homage, with a casual relationship to Persian classical music; Riley's piece has even less to do with that tradition.  But who cares?  Each piece makes an honest gesture of tribute to a valued culture.

Losing the game

Are downloading killing recorded music sales, or is it the competition from games? 

Brant on Orchestration

Very good news: the late Henry Brant's handbook for orchestrators, begun in the 1940's and completed in 2005, Textures and Timbres, has finally been released. Music Books Plus lists the book already, Amazon, SheetMusicPlus, and CarlFischer.com should have it soon.

Brant had a unique career, not only orchestrating his own extraordinary works — most famous for their use of physical space as a compositional element —, but also working in commercial music for Broadway, radio, and in Hollywood films (his longstanding collaboration with Alex North is best known, but his credited and uncredited work for film was much more extensive.)  Several of his students have described Brant's approach to scoring as uniquly empirical, practical, and rule-of-thumb systematic, but always imaginative.

[I frequently get asked to recommend orchestration textbooks. My first recommendation is to get some hands-on experience with each of the orchestral instruments, for example through an instrumental music education course. Then, go to the books: Andrew Stiller's Handbook of Instrumentation is essential (it's now available in cd format; I think of it as the successor to Forsythe's Orchestration, an underrated book with a lot of good practical information), as well as a good introduction to the physics and psychophysics of music (there are several good choices) and William Sethares Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum, Scale places timbre within a larger context. (Likewise for Robert Erickson's Sound Structure in Music). Then a good history of orchestration (Adam Carse will do) and Berlioz's classic treatise. If you have any conducting ambitions, Hermann Scherchen's Handbuch des Dirigierens is an elegant and cultivated book but it is also very useful for orchestrators. Have a look — but not too long — at Rimsky-Korsakov, Widor, Koechlin, and Piston for some distinct aesthetic approaches (Riemann's Katechismus der Orchestrierung, too, if you can read the German in Fraktur type). The most-used contemporary university-level textbooks (Blatter, Adler, Kennan), are certainly useful as one-stop-shop references, but I find none of them as good as Stiller for basic questions of instrumentation, nor do any of them offer particulary distinctive aesthetic approaches.

There is nothing in English quite like Hans Kunitz's 13 volume series, Die Instrumentation, which treats individual instruments in detail, but the last 30 years have given us many books which advise on contemporary techniques for individual instruments, including Turetsky for contrabass, Dempster for trombone, Rehfeld for clarinet, Strange for violin, Artaud or Dick or for flute, Van Cleve or Veale/Mahnkopf for oboe, and Solomon or Schick for percussion. Several books have treated contemporary techniques more comprehensively; the book I grew up with was Gardner Read's Contemporary Instrumental Techniques, but it surely ought to be updated or succeeded.]

Have Windmill, Will Tilt

... if I were to have a logo promoting my work as a composer, that'd pretty much be it.   Composing is fundamentally an act of independence (Blake's fool pursuing his folly), not doing what everyone else is doing.  When everyone else zigs, you zag.  Composing is not so much putting things together as making an act of imagination concrete (the Hungarian word for composer zeneszerző, literally a "music catcher", is so much more to the point): hearing a dragon where others hear only creaking windmills and figuring out how to make that explicit for others. Photographer Ansel Adams once said something to the effect that he never pushed the shutter until he saw an image that wasn't literally there.  Gregory Bateson advised prospective field workers to be prepared to simply sit a good long while, not to try to document everything, not to  try to take everything comprehensively in, but to wait for something interesting and important to happen. It always does.  Every new work of music, if it rises to the extraordinary, must be an error, a mistake, even wrong-doing or a violation, by the standards of the work which proceeds it and, often,  the community of listeners.  (Blake again: Error, or Creation, will be Burned up, & then, & not till Then, Truth or Eternity will appear.)   Composition is resistance against the existing social construction of the musical.

Groupwork

Composing is mostly on the solitary end of a private-public partnership.  Performing, recording, broadcasting is the public side.  Many composers carry out their end as covertly as possible, often in near- sacred spaces, our hermitages, garretts, and ateliers.  (Mostly a good thing, too: I'm not alone among my colleagues in never having gotten good marks for "gets along well with others" in grade school.) Some work privately and keep it so, other hold on to every scrap and sketch, allowing the possibility that their steps to be retraced by others (for examples, see the Elliot Carter and Roger Reynolds archives online at the LOC site)*.   

However composition is often taught in institutional settings and taught to groups of people, whether in formal courses (with exercises and assignments) or in more open seminar environments (Paul Bailey usefully points to a New Yorker article about creative writing workshops, an enterprise parallel in many ways to composition instruction, which asks good questions about the value of the enterprise pedagogically and the nature of its impact on writing itself.)  Typically, though, most composers who are taught in institutions get a mixture of group and one-on-one instruction.  My impression is that most directed composition ends with the model compositions associated with theory sequences, but directed composition assignments in groups can be very exciting (Cage's assignments to his New School classes and Stockhausen's group projects at Darmstadt are cases-in-point).  

Some composition teachers like to examine every detail in a student's work, others are most focused on the bigger picture.  Personally, I don't find much value myself in having my work edited note-by-note by a teacher.  Iin the end, I take responsibility for every note; another set of eyes canusefully help me with the editing, but they don't have to belong to my teacher and I refuse to be cross-examined on every detail.  That said, I do value highly the exchanges with teachers that focus on getting the ideas right, and the execution both clear and polished.   I was lucky to have composition teachers and fellow/sister composition students who shared that preference, but there are certainly ideal student/teacher pairs and groups who have worked and do work on a more nut-and-bolts level.   (This too: Seminar groups and private lessons can run a certain risk of turning into encounter groups and therapy sessions.  Having lived through California in the 1970's, I don't have much need for that myself, but if it's good for you, fine and dandy.) 

Composers also, sometimes voluntarily group together as professionals and sometimes get grouped together by others.**  There are a lot of good reasons for clustering or grouping — exchange and promotion of music and ideas,  playing each others' work, pooling of material resources, sharing concerts and publicity — and there are also some problems (who's in and who's out of the group?  what if the group falls apart, like a marriage? what if one member is more successful career-wise than others?  what if you now disavow a group?). (Ron Silliman has some thoughts on poets clustering).   Maybe it's wise for groups to have some form of pre-nuptial agreement, for the worst case scenarios.  My own engagement with other composers around Material Press has been both personally and musically rewarding;  the association is voluntary and  fair— like Frog Peak in the US the publisher only earns from scores sold, not demanding the usual 50% publishers' share of license fees, and the times we get together, socially or musically have always been good.  We could, perhaps, have done more in the way of promotion, but our lack of pushiness is also a matter of style.

See also this post from 2007 on Co-Composing, this on The Convivial Cage (2006) and this on Loneliness or Conviviality (2007).

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* There are three very practical and potentially profitable reasons for saving sketches: for revising or extending your own work, as material for teaching, and as salable archival materials.  I don't save my sketches, having (a) a small horror of someday being overwhelmed by them, such that I cannot do anything new and (b) some committment to the notion that there are always more than one way to create a given musical surface, with no certainty about which one is the best or most efficient way, but those are my personal quirks.  I recommend that my younger colleagues carefully save every scrap of paper and analog or digital media they make: this is your work, too.  

**The best/worst example of this being the minimalists, with the most curious moment happening when the dubious, but original, quartet of Young, Riley, Reich, and Glass got re-booted (the culprit seems to have been Nonesuch records which, no surprise, was making a heavy investment in Reich and Adams) with Young out and Adams in, albeit with Glass, Reich and Adams running as fast away from the label as they could...

The Unbearable Languidness of Institutions

If we had been limited to mainstream media this weekend, with the exception of BBC's Persian service, we'd have almost completely missed news of the events in Iran.  Traditional media institutions — aside from the fact that they never perform well on weekends — simply don't have the agility and networks of witnesses to cover stories that are not lead by releases from official sources and move faster than hourly deadlines. Internet reporting, on the other hand, while often — and wisely — having to carry caveats about verifiability, have proven themselves to have both considerable agility and a astonishing breadth of networked resources, many of them appearing nearly spontaneously.   (I'm personally amazed that two of the best sources have been diaries at the (left) Daily Kos and (conservative) Andrew Sullivan's page; new pages of photodocumentation from inside Iran and translations of twitter messages have also been very informative.)  I have no doubt that, with the weekend closing, mainstream reporting on Iran will improve, but the internet provided essential information bridging the mainstream's absence and has set a high level of quality for further reporting, changing the initial mainstream spin on the election, which essentially accepted official statements. 

*****

I didn't notice that Perspectives of New Music has — or had? — a blog.  Seems like no one else did either.  It's here but seems to have moved to a Google group here, which is just as quiet.   I'm not exactly a fan of PNM, but it has been moving in more interesting directions in the last decade or so (with features on composers including James Tenney and Pauline Oliveros; good stuff even if two decades too late), but this good news appears not to have reached a wide audience.  This is a shame, because for New Music to stay news, it has got to communicate its breadth, depth, and liveliness.   For breadth and depth, PNM could be an important component, a marker of our diversity and controversy and as a forum for the more intellectual aspects of our art form (yes, Virginia, musicians can be intellectuals), but to succeed, it has to appear lively, with a greater online present and a more rapid delivery of new information, idea, opinions, and, yes, music. I honestly hope that the inherently slow pace of PNM's paper-based journal culture does not keep it from finding a lively presence online.

*****

It was both a revelation and a confirmation for me, when as a young composer, I discovered that Europe had recognized the music I loved most — that of the American experimental tradition — as our most vital and important.   Cage and Feldman and Reich were important names here, while the American compositional establishment — the best upper set, so to speak —, the ones who got commissions and teaching jobs and other plums, were largely (and, to my ears, correctly) obscure.   In my recent listening journeys through the archives of RadiOM, I've been delighted by the realization that, in the end, we valued the experimental tradition more as well, for it has been the experimental repertoire that has survived in the archives.*  In part, I suspect that this is because the outsiders running music programming at Pacifica stations, for example, recognized both the historical importance of the radical music and its material fragility, and understood that if one was to be responsible, as journalists and citizens, that documentation was essential, not a luxury.  (Being able to rehear KPFK broadcasts by Carl Stone or William Malloch lately has been a bit like going through a second musical adolescence.)  On the other hand, where are the archived broadcasts of mainstream new music performances or interviews and the like? The programming lists of a traditional, commercial, "classical" station, like LA's KFAC, actually included a modest number of mainstreamish new music performances, but there's been no foundation created to store those archives.   I suspect that there was a form of institutional hubris at work here, not unlike that found in the large financial institutions that have fallen so greatly of late, a sense of entitlement that comes with establishment status: "we don't have to worry about archives because we're too big to be forgotten..."

*****

Don't get me wrong: we need institutions in our lives.  (Yes, Virginia, we need both the post office and the opera house).  There are just too many of us living on a small planet that somethings need to be organized on a large scale.  Efficience, reliability and redundancy all have their place. (I'm thinking now of Cage's Buckminster Fuller-inspired recognition of the essential role of "utilities" in our lives and the modest way in which it should interact with our lives.) The problem is created, however, when such institutions become bottlenecks, gatekeepers, or roadblocks, when the institution is no longer flexible enough to meet changes in supply, delivery, or demand, and particularly when the institutional will to survive is greater than its ability to recognize that it is no longer providing an adequate service.

*****

[Added, an hour or so later.]  I'd thought I was done with my institution-bashing for the day, but here's something more:  perhaps the first decent English language newspaper obituary for Henry Pousseur, who died on March 6th, appeared in the Guardian on June 11th.  

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* The survival of radical work in online archives is not a phenomena restricted to music:  check out the PennSound pages for poety, or UbuWeb for film, music, poetry, and much else.

Admission, granted

I like concerts.  I like going to concerts.  I like them to the near-exclusion of recordings from my life. But I must admit that I'm not always a perfect concert-goer.  I have, for example,  yawned during a concert. Yawning is rude and distracting to both the performers and the audience.  I shouldn't yawn during a concert.  I have also fallen asleep during a concert*.  That should probably be avoided as well. During intermissions, I sometimes move to more expensive seats that have been vacated. And, of course, as a penurious student, I did steal my way into more than one concert. Sometimes whole concert series or festivals. On occasion, I have left concerts at intermission and — albeit with somewhat less frequency — I have departed the hall in the middle of a piece.  I have coughed, to be sure.  Also sneezed.  I have made crispy plastic noises while opening packages of mints or cough drops, trying to avoid coughing or sneezing. I have sat in squeaky chairs and been unable to stifle all sqeaks.  I have worn shoes that squeak. When suffering stress, my jar has been known to crack.  Not quietly. I have dropped programs, books, sun- and/or reading glasses, articles of clothing, backpacks, briefcases, picnic baskets,  canned beverages, and — but only once — a bentō box during concerts.  I have expressed displeasure by not clapping.  But for all that, I do not talk while music is being played during concerts and I do not have a mobile phone, pager, portable music player, or wristwatch with an alarm that might go off.  Nor have I ever worn clothing so distractive as to compete with the music for the audience's attention.  To be absolutely fair, most of the things I have dropped have fallen on cushioned chairs or carpeted floors.  And while yes, a fallen bentō box is indeed annoying, but a tiffin or a schoolchild's tin lunchbox or carkeys or a handful of cutlery would be that and more so! My cracking jaw is a legitimate medical condition.   And supressing a cough or sneeze is often a hell of a lot more distracting than actually having the damn cough or sneeze and getting on with it.  And, pardon me, but I have never booed, hissed, or demonstratively exited any performance that didn't really have it coming.

In fact, I'd say that altogether, I'm just about your perfect concert-goer.   

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* I have never fallen asleep in a work of Morton Feldman's, by the way.  But I have watched three men — my father, the late musicologist and philosopher Daniel Charles, and Feldman himself — all doze off during Feldman concerts.  Charles, a large man, snored loudly — if ironically — throughout a performance of Feldman's Piano, but somehow managed to wake, as if by some form of electric shock controlled by clockwork, promptly and impressively, given his gallic tonnage, at the piece's end, rising to his feet and shouting "bravo!"

 

Genre Trouble

Once again, I'm thoroughly enjoying myself with a new China Miéville novel, The City & the City, which is a kind of late 19th century mystery story set in a wierd fictional/sci fi/fantasy universe in which the two cities in the title share the same geographical space but are otherwise essentially distinct from one another.  Miéville is a writer who clearly loves his genres, and generally respects their conventions, but not their borders (I hear echos of Kafka and Dickens here as well)  and his respect is never at the expense of getting the language right, and his language is beautifully right.  Similar in my experience to only Pynchon (and, with respect to non-"literary" genres, like legal briefs, Gaddis, or technical and commercial writing, Wallace), Miéville understands how to love a genre just enough to make it better.  If I were a 19h century romantic, I might even use the word "transcend." 

I have to wade carefully now when it comes to the subject of genre.  A post in the past which mentioned comic books casually was rightly torn in shreds by readers with a much less casual relationship to that jenre.  To be honest, with the exception of juvenile flights in sci fi and the hard boiled detective novel and the occasional but neccesary escapes into airplane novels, my reading has been mostly "literary", writing that has the conceit of being outside or even above established commercial genres.  My musical tastes, of course, are probably even more conceited.  I probably know less of or about more popular music genres — whether rock or jazz or polka or jaipongan or whatever — than most of you, and yet I am more or less convinced that the new music has a capacity — if often imperial in ambition — to both contain, critique and go beyond any other genres.  At the same time, I will note the complementary capacity of popular genres to swallow innovations whole if only to spit them out when they are done (anyone else here remember Joseph Byrd's brilliant The United of America or Stanley Silverman's Elephant Steps?  I wonder to what degree such efforts, from the late 1960's, might be considered as tales of caution for my colleagues, now, in the late years of the first decade of the 2000's, who are entering into similar cross-over projects?) (More interesting to me are the cases of composers who have parallel careers in genre musics, like Wallingford Riegger, who wrote band and choir music under a number of pseudonyms, or Jerry Hunt, who made his living largely by scoring industrial films and videos).

In his introduction to McSweeney's Mamoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, editor Michael Chabon (a writer who also knows his genres)  offers a though experiment: "Imagine that, sometime about 1950, it had been decided, collectively, informally, a little at a time, but with finality, to proscribe everyother kind of novel from the canon of the future but the nurse romance. ... I do believe that from this bizarre decision, in this theoretical America, a dozen or more authentic materpieces would have emerged.  Thomas Pynchon's Blitz Nurse, for example, and Cynthia Ozick's Ruth Puttermesser, R.N. ..."   May I suggest that any composers interested in joining our little melodica anthology project think of it in similar terms: Imagine that, sometime in the 1950s, it had been decided that the optimal vehicle for avant-garde music were the virtuoso solo melodica piece, that the melodica had had its David Tudor and Severino Gazzelloni and the Arditti and Kronos had been melodica quartets and that its repertoire had included its own Berio Sequenza, and a Cage star-chart-based etude, and an hour of Stockhausen's Klang, as well as the Steve Reich phasing piece or a Christian Wolff exercise.  (Oh wait, we have those last two. Oh well.) 

Enduring Optimism

Composer Gordon Mumma (my teacher, so I'm partisan here) has a new blog, here, and an updated webpage, here.   The greybox images on his site are particularly elegant; definitely a new trick this old dog will have to learn.

I'm delighted, also, to learn about the music of composer Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, who has a website full of scores and sound files, here.  

 

Vérités et Mensonges

For the Melodica project, I've been toying with some forgery.  The idea has been to compose the melodica pieces a few famous composers neglected to write before shuffling off.  The notion is that the world really needs a virtuoso Cage Etude and a Berio Sequenza and maybe even an hour of Stockhausen's Klang for solo melodica.  

I have discovered, however, that if you want the result to be both convincing and musical, you can't play fast and loose with your imitations or parodies, no matter how cheap or, well, funny, they might want to be.  If you want to fake a Cage Etude, for example, there's really no alternative to the discipline Cage followed, in which clear rules were established — whether for chance or choice operations — through which the notations on a star map are to be transformed into notes, intervals and chords arrayed in musical time, and then executing those rules precisely.   Forging a work that is supposed to pass as an unknown piece by a known composer requires replicating the same level of detail and depth that the composer brought to his or her work as well as using material that that is similar but not identical to material the model composer used in "real" pieces.  Anything less that that is likely to lead to an unconvincing result. The same goes, one presumes, for Ersatzstockhausen or faux-Boulez or fraudulent Ferneyhough or bogus Babbitt or counterfeit Carter or gold brick Glass or reproduction Reich... okay, you get the idea.  

One other thing:  a successful sham requires that one concocts a convincing backstory.  Like that sweet little melodica piece Morton Feldman jotted down on a cocktail napkin and promptly forgot in a booth in the back of the Cedar Tavern in '58, or that tragic work Xenakis abandoned in a foxhole while running courier services for the resistance, or that very long solo La Monte Young forgot about during one of those years in the 1960's that has long been forgotten by anyone who was really there... 

Setting the Price

A bleg:  In my sideline as music publisher, we're having some serious discussions about the price of sheet music.  We're not exactly operating in a perfectly balanced supply and demand environment, and there are real costs in materials and time in handling individually printed and shipped orders of sheet music (often with some unusual formating issues), so the calculation is far from easy.  For my own music, and the music of some others at Material Press, I'm usually happy to give away electronic copies of scores (knowing that, if all is reported correctly, I'll earn money from performance licenses), but sell paper scores to libraries or others who don't like to roll their own.  But setting the price for those paper copies is tricky, particularly (a) when a single piece has a relatively modest — by page count — size, or (b) when text or graphic scores are involved, or (c) the score is published on demand.   Peters gets 5.95US$ for a copy of 4'33", perhaps two photocopied pages in a folder.  Peer Southern sells Thomson's Piano Sonata No. 3 — 6 pages of engraved music in a folder — for five bucks.     Anthologies of smaller works by either of these composers, in an engraved and staple-bound format, range from 5 to 25 dollars.  What would you be willing to pay for a single page of instructions for a piece of music?  For a piece 5, 10, or 30 pages long?  How about a cd of recorded sound required for performance of a work?