Complexity: get over it, already.

The ever-estimable Lisa Hirsch has two items (here and here) in response to a Teachout article on musical complexity.   For music criticism, use of the term complexity is something of a blunt instrument. One has to be very specific about the materials or means or relationships which are being described as complex and even when identified as complex then there are no clear or generally accepted ways of measuring relative complexity, whether within a single work or among several works.  

Most critically, in the thick of a real musical event, it is not always clear — and this, in the best cases, is a matter of compositional design — whether composer, performing musician, or listener can catch or is supposed to be able to catch, some or all details or a more general gestalt, or even to move attention between levels of detail, or if the experience of whole and parts is designed to be ambiguous.  Most works of music which have the capacity to stay fresh on repeated listenings — renewable musics, one might say — offer a reserve of additional details and relationships.  To the extent that musical complexity is quantitative, filling a work with detail and internal or external connections, the central issue for composition is projecting and framing that content so that it can be heard.   From this point-of-view,  the most self-consciously minimalist composer is as concerned with managing complexity as the overtly complexist or maximalist;  the critical difference, I believe, lies in how the relationship between musical materials and audition is drawn.   

By my own measure, a work like Alvin Lucier's I am sitting in a room is a more effective compositional projection of an extremely complex set of internal, acoustical elements and external, and to some extent, extra-musical connections than the elaborate pitch constructions of many a high serial work which are lost to a surface which fails to project the construction in anything but the most impressionistic manner. 

Central Javanese Gamelan music, Karawitan, is  my favorite example of this: it is possible to hear a classical gamelan work coarsely, attending, for example, only to a single trunk melody carried by the loudest instruments, but experienced players and listeners learn, over time, to attend to more and more instrumental and vocal lines, learning to hear not just simultaneities but the ways in which individual lines relate to one another but also to the whole piece as well as to the repertoire and style in general.   

Never underestimate an audience

One of the most vivid musical experiences in my life was hearing Gary Bertini conduct Schönberg's A Survivor from Warsaw in the Alte Oper here in Frankfurt on a concert marking the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht.  I had never before and have not since witnessed an audience so stunned and shaken by a piece of music,  indeed struck deep to the viscera by a single moment in a piece of music, which is that when the male chorus enters singing a setting of the Sh'ma Yisrael.    The match of a piece, a performance, and a setting like this is a perfect illustration of the ability of a music to reach its audience — communication in the way that an iron handle communicates heat — regardless of its supposedly forbidding complexity, construction (it's 12-tone, and rather transparently so), or style (a particularly literal and hyper- version of the composer's Wiener espressivo).

One of the odd factoids about A Survivor from Warsaw that has stuck in the back of my head for further exploration was that its premier took place at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.  Stephen Soderberg has an interesting description and meditation on this event in his blog, here. 

Composition Today

Still Fruitful Paths

Recently, I did one of my hit and run spells of teaching "composition" (I insist on the quotation marks, as my understanding of the term is often somewhat unorthodox) to a group of young musicians. One day, one of them made some jokes about serial music (you know the kind — about music for people with 12 fingers, or asking if you take milk and sugar with your serial?, etc.) so I decided to push the issue a bit and take a quick detour through the 12-tone and serial experience.

There was something of a cod liver oil taste to this proposal, but I find, sometimes, that it is useful and surprising to take a new look at a subject that would appear to have been dismissed from further exploration. For example, in one of my reading binges, I decided to re-read as much of the sci-fi and speculative fiction I had consumed in High School and College as I could get a hold of here. As might be expected, I found most of the novels awkward and very hard-going, and was, in general, disappointed with my old enthusiasms. But a significant minority of that stuff actually held up very well, either for ideas or for writing (rarely for both, but that's a high expectation for any fiction, no matter what genre). The more "social science" fiction generally held up better than the hard science fiction and space operas, especially the big space operas. Le Guin's anthropological fiction (a really graceful writer; I like the Hainish cycle, where her writing is best, while I have no patience for her fantasy writing), for example, or Dick's more psychological (Martian Time-Slip and Time Out of Joint are my favorites, examples where he was in control of a writing habit which tended to lose control in a messy, but not reliably interesting way). Others that, books I really enjoyed coming back to included the obvious classics like Cat's Cradle, and some titles that seem to have disappeared from memory: Jeter's Doctor Adder and Billias's The American Book of the Dead. It seems to me that there is still a lot of potential for social science fiction.

The parallel voyage of discovery into all that 12-tone and serial music (AKA the stuff which was supposed to be oppressing to us experimentalists) also turned up some real surprises. Of course I like the Schoenberg String Trio and Phantasie and the Stravinsky Requiem Canticles or Movements, and Webern's vocal music is really the core of his achievement (if somewhat obscure to many musicians who focus on the instrumental music). I had always been fond of Hauer's music, having played some of the piano pieces for more than 30 years, but discovering more details of his technical achievement (the harmonic band technique, especially, which can insure a constant flow of a variety of triads with very smooth voice leading is extremely rich in suggestive possibilities) more than made up for his naivety and arbitrary quirks (like his preference for beginning or ending with minor or major seventh chords). Ernst Krenek was another case altogether; although my own introduction to 12-tone technique came, in 9th or 10th grade, with Krenek's little Counterpoint book borrowed from the Claremont Public Library, and I had actually met the man , Palm Springs tan and all, I had never actually liked any of the music, including the early tonal music, which has always left me with some suspicion that the was just not particularly musical. However, some very beautiful performances of choral works by the RIAS Kammerchor (which have made a specialty of Krenek, singing his works for decades, beautiful to hear, but somewhat disturbing to watch with the constant banging of tuning forks against their skulls to keep on pitch) and a CD by Ensemble Recherche of string trios and solo string music has changed my mind somewhat. Perhaps his music really suffered from bad performances. Perhaps choral music was his genre: the neutrality of the pitch world, mixed with a pseudo-renaissance choral style just seemed to click with the mysticism in Krenek's chosen texts. In any case, we do owe Krenek as a teacher some debt: Robert Erickson was an important composer and I am curious to hear some music sometime by Gladys Nordenstrom, Krenek's student and widow.

It was no surprise that a re-encounter with Goeyvaerts's early pieces (famous in some texbooks, but not often actually heard) was very positive, as with Lou Harrison's Suite for Piano and small opera, Rapunzel, some works of Dallapicolla and of Roberto Gerhard (especially some later chamber works: The Concert for 8 and Gemini, Libra, and Leo (what is it about twelve-toners and the zodiac?!)) All of these examples were pretty straight-forward, technique-wise, but much of the 12-tone/serial repertoire rapidly moved beyond straight-forwardness, especially with the goal of making works of significant length. In the postwar high serial era, it was precisely this issue — of creating large-scale pieces in which the order and deployment of 12-tone or serial resources was anything but arbitrary — that became a central focus, whether in Babbitt's techniques for the composition and projection of arrays or the moves of Stockhausen or Boulez into groups or constellations of elements.

The two best descriptions of the nitty-gritty of compositional technique in the high serial era I found were Stockhausen's booklet about his In Freundschaft and Lake's article about Babbitt's Fifth Quartet. I'm not a great fan of either composer, and certainly much less a fan of their respective camp followers, but each have works in which envelopes of the truly weird have been opened and the musicality of the results are abundant enough that we shouldn't allow ourselves to be prejudiced by our expectations. The key serial works of Stockhausen, for me, are the early piano pieces and tape pieces, while Babbitt really comes into his own with the move into super-array compositions, in which the dogma of 12-tones gets loosened by the so-called "weighted aggregates" and it becomes more than clear that the real substance of the work is not the pre-compositional array (indeed, he uses and reuses a small collection of arrays, some of them second-hand arrays, assembled by others) but the actual composed-out surface of the music, the notes, some of which are very nice, some teasingly naughty, and others nothing much to write home about. (Here's a homework assignment: what features of In Freundschaft share techniques associated with Babbitt? what features are shared and what are different in the arrays of Babbitt and Boulez and the charts of Cage? compare and contrast partitioning operations in Babbitt and Boulez... Okay, okay, this stuff was just built for classroom instruction...)

The music of Barraque remains very puzzling to me, as the scores are all messes, in many cases without a final, definitive form, and the proliferating series technique generates a series of rows in which there are simply no audible clues for connecting one to any other. Nevertheless, there is some real style to his writing, maybe the inexhaustible source of rows was simply an impulse to improvise while insuring a continuous circulation of pitches.

The two pieces I began my little survey with a bit of a tease, but still very close to my own sensibilities: a solo flute piece by Howard Skempton and the Christian Wolff Duo for violins, the first of which is transparently, tunefully 12-tone, the second of which uses 12 discrete pitch configurations but not 12 pitch classes; I found that these usefully and transparently illustrated a number of polar aspects of the entire 12-tone/serial project, and pointed to aspects that remain vital concerns for composers, including melody, order, variation, variety, pitches versus pitch classes, the relationship between horizontal and vertical projections of material, collections, tonality versus an even distribution of pitches, particular versus undifferentiated collections of intervals, etc..

Of course, when you start taking such a broad prospective, moving away from the "classical" four row-form technique described by, say, Eimert or Krenek, it becomes less and less tenable to speak about a uniform and hegemonic technique and repertoire. This is a good thing, on the one hand because it is much closer to the historical reality, a reality in which, for example, early minimalism came, in part, out of concerns that cannot be entirely separated from the serial project, but on the other (and more important) hand, because attending to such historical diversity can be highly suggestive of the potential for new compositional ideas.

One to Nothing

Whatever you think of soccer, or of sports in general, and even if you're ill-disposed to either country involved or think that competition between teams representing nation-states is silly, the game yesterday between the US and Algeria was a model of formal beauty: sustained activity and attention captured for 90 minutes without a score, delaying any satisfaction for the duration while aware, the entire time, of an ominous score from the parallel game, until a single goal pops elegantly in the second minute of penalty time.  Talk about delayed resolutions! Talk about saving everything for the coda!

Generating Heat, Generating Light

(An encore posting from February, 2007)

We've all heard the talk about the low-level of attention, support, appreciation, etc. for new, contemporary, and experimental music. After having spent too much of the past two weeks monitoring activity in the online new music blogs and fora, I've come to the conclusion that one problem is that we, as a community, are generating simply too little heat: too little new of interest in the way of sounds, scores, or ideas, and too little controversy or passion, and even too little in the way of intellectual challenges. But most of all, through the underwhelmingly small amount of material we present to the world, we're simply giving out the impression that nothing is really happening in little Newmusicville. At this point in time, a new music equivalent of the "Instapundit" could probably get by with a bi-weekly post delivered by burro.

It's not so much a matter of clever promotion, it's more a matter of reporting and record-keeping. More information has to be out there, and more useful information. Media are cheaper and more accessible than ever, but we hardly have a presence, and when we have a presence it's shocking to see and hear how badly we use the media. Composers' webpages are usually prefaced with lists of institutional affiliations, awards, and scholarships. Come on, children, grow up! No one cares about your diplomas and merit badges! Dare to say something about your music and yourself first (or at least pretend for a moment that you are not the in-vitro product of those institutions). And composer's blogs are rare, and usually far too timid. Why the caution? Is is fear of repercussions from hiring and prize committees? It's a composer's job to have a posture, an attitude, and opinions about music, and it's through that posture, attitude, and opinions the we make the decisions that form our work, making it distinct from the work of others. We are going to disagree, and often be disagreeable, but that's how we keep music lively. We talk about it, in and among ourselves, all the time, but why are so few willing to make it public and write it out?

In a functioning cultural landscape, there is no way that this blog by this composer ought to be in the top 50 music blogs. I could list 50 other composers off the top of my head who ought to be out there before or instead of me, with their sharper ideas and sharper words. And there are hundreds more about whose work I'd like to know more: tell us what you're writing, or about with whom you're working. Got any fresh program notes to share? How about some sound or score snippets?

There are dozens of schools around the planet with lively composition programs, with pieces being produced by the rows and rows of apt disciples. Tell us about it. There are schools with staffs of faculty composers, each with a handful of grad students: show us your work, UCSD, UIUC, Yale, Eastman, Princeton, Cal Arts, Mills, Den Haag, Berlin, Brunel! Academic activity is supposed to end in publication, and online publication is a much better service to both you and to the new music community as a whole than via direct deposit to a personnel file in a closed cabinet. A composition professor who is not encouraging his or her students to get online is not helping those students, and students who are not getting online by themselves are not helping themselves.

As people who take music seriously, who want to present work in a high qualitative standard of production and presentation, we want both heat and light. But that second quality, light, is only going to be recognized if the context is known, and, I assume for most composers, that context is one rich which is rich in experiences of sounds and ideas, precedents, contemporaries, sketches, fragments, missteps, even failures, such that it is only by keeping the volume of our recorded activities high will we ever be able to let potential audiences even begin to recognize the qualitative in our work.

Heat and light. Don't take this as a rant, but as a sober recognition of opportunity. Never before has there been such an opportunity to present ones work in its own depth, not to depend upon the received local cultural and historical context. This is an opportunity to fashion an optimal context for an encounter with your work, to share it, and yes, to promote it. For better or worse, this, my friends, is the direction that publication will inevitably go, and not taking the opportunity now carries a risk for your own work, but also for the new music community at large, and that is the risk of becoming invisible, inaudible, and irrelevant.

Known and Unknown Unknowns

Here's a prime example of why Errol Morris is the best blogger on the whole damn blogoplan. The problem of known and unknown unknowns faces every composer the moment a hen scratch or flyspeck is applied to a sheet of manuscript paper.

No greater pleasure

You won't get rich, you won't get any measure of real fame, and it's not usually a guaranteed route to love and affection, but, seriously, is there any greater pleasure than imagining a music that hasn't been made before and then making it?  I can look back now on 30 years of living like a student, countless day jobs, no paid vacations, no pension plan, and unpredictably long gaps between freelance gigs and commissions.  Wife, kids, and dog all could have lived in more luxury — having a great big fridge or going to a restaurant together more than semi-annually, for example — but they seem to support and value my music, even when they don't altogether understand it, which is a great gift, and on the whole, we're very happy. We've managed the mortgage and paid for the car and the shed full of bikes and even that supreme folly of a whole gamelan in the basement.  My music has brought me to interesting places and through music, I've met people I shall always treasure.  Riches can be lost, fame can flee, but music — ephemeral as it is, just molecules of air being pushed about — stays with you.  It really doesn't get any better than this.

Glass: Kepler: bring on another Zamboni!

I skipped the soccer game last night and instead watched a broadcast of Philip Glass's opera, Kepler. I rather like the odd and (small "b") baroque balance of stylistic forces that have come to settle into Glass's stage music: a set of harmonic patterns reminiscent of the gallant style, sometimes interrupted by moments of polytonal overlay which function here a bit like cinematic cross-fades and an orchestration style, first noticed in Glass's section of the CIVIL warS, that reminds me of Meyerbeer's, of all things, here punctuated by some startling percussion, temple blocks, IthinksIhears. Dennis Russell Davies led a well-shaped and precise orchestral performance and the choir and young soloists were all quite good. I still can't wrap myself with much affection around the solo vocal writing, but here the problem clearly begins with the German libretto, which is basically one declarative sentence after another that Glass sets as one square declarative phrase after another, parroting the punctuation of the sentences. The choral writing is both more fragmented, textually, and phrased more eccentrically. The staging, in which the soloists basically wandered aimlessly, staring here and there without much apparent reason, with Kepler's upward gazes most annoying, made one realize how good both Robert Wilson and Peter Sellars are at giving performers on stage purposeful movement in highly abstract settings. Finally, the stage setting was a pair of all-purpose sets that conveyed little or no purpose, let alone specific connection to the opera, at all. Once again, letting a Zamboni meander and gad about onstage would have been far more interesting and, in an oblique way, maybe even more relevant to the subject matter.

Live and Local

Let me out myself once more: I like live music, played by warm bodies, for warm bodies, in real rooms.   I prefer live performances of music made for live performance to recordings.  I like the spontaneity and variation a live performance necessarily brings to a work and I like the way the music dissipates in a real room or out-of-doors space, as the sound waves are absorbed and reflected into both air, architecture, ear, and memory.  A live performance of music is a unique event in time, space, audition and memory for which there is no adequate substitute.  I prefer even a clumsy live performance by an amateur but spirited group of local musicians to the best-engineered recording by the most prestigious big city orchestra.  Recordings do have definite virtues, as tangible, portable, divisible comodifications and records of a part of that experience (and, though I harbor serious doubts, I don't discount the potential of such media to have some positive economic effects), but I find them most valuable as a medium for music made specifically for a recorded format.* 

This article, by Terry Teachout, proposes a "thought experiment" (the quotation marks are Teachout's own) in which, essentially, all but the upper tier of big-city professional orchestras are abandoned and those of us in localities without big orchestras are to be satisfied with recordings. Teachout sees the minor leagues in the orchestral world as no longer performing a function they filled in the days before recordings.  This is historically wrong, as the local orchestral life in the US developed in parallel with recordings and, in the early part of the 20th century, was closely connected to immigration from Europe.  (Before that, the US had largely been a wind band country with orchestral and operatic music largely restricted to the biggest cities.)  Further, Teachout sees other locally-produced art forms as more diverse, innovative and higher in quality in offerings and the orchestra standing in a zero-sum competition for resources with those other organizations.  I believe that this is missing something important about the nature of orchestral music-making — what other archaic performance form, aside from sport regularly puts the better part of a 100 people on stage? —  with its unique relationship to a community.  

Not all concerts are perfect environments for either those bodies or the music they make or hear — far from it — but there is always opportunity to optimize the experience and, if history is any indication, the experience will change.  There are indeed survival-level-serious questions about local orchestras, but thinking about these problems from the top-down, from the vantage point of big-league orchestras is exactly wrong and in many cases, the greatest contributor to these problems has been a fixation on commuting conductors and big music management.  Local orchestras, if they are to survive, will have to recognize and capitalize on their advantages of locality, flexibility, accessibility, cost, and diversity.  They can only profit from emphasizing that they can do things that the major orchestras don't and that their recordings cannot.   The range of living composers played by the majors, for example, has been seriously restricted to coteries of "approved" composers** and the only possible solution to this cartelization of orchestral opportunities lies in the locals.  By doing business in a town like Pasadena, or Teachout's "Podunk", you have the absolute luxury not to parrot what is being done in the big town.  And this is where I agree substantially with Teachout:  the solution is not in "schlock" (Teachout's word) entertainment concerts, no Wookies-on-ice-with-lasers-meet-Benvenuto Cellini, but in an authentic extension of what they actually can do best.   I do not wish to suggest that local orchestras are doing a particularly good job of this now, but finding common cause with local musical innovators is a real part of the solution.  If serious music is to do more than survive, if it is to thrive, then it has got to be an active presence both deep and wide, from children to seniors, from amateurs to professionals, from the living room to the school auditorium or church  to the fancy endowed concert halls on campuses and in big cities.

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* Recordings have become so cheap and ubiquitous that their main function among new musicians is not as an object of commerce but as an advertisement for concert music, for the gigs where money is actually made.  We used to hand out calling cards, now we hand out cds. 

**The worst part of this is that the effect is self-sustaining: a small group gets all of the opportunities to compose for orchestra, and the ensuing lack of experience with composing for orchestra gets used against programming or commissioning composers who are outside of the group.  This is in best (worst) evidence with the present regime at the Cabrillo Festival, which is now basically a summer satellite activity of east coast conservatory composers at the expense of Cabrillo's traditional commitment to west coast experimentalism. 

Just a reminder

The radical music isn't so much a way of composing, or even a repertoire of music associated with a way of composing, but rather a way of listening.  And listening not so much to music, as for the possibility of music.

Off the Scale

Maybe it would be useful to rethink the whole topic of engagement with musical scale. I have written here previously about composers — including Ashley, Young, and Feldman — for whom issues of scale were or have been important. I suppose that obsession with larger (and evermore-larger) scales of musical production goes back really to Berlioz and Wagner (with both inspired by the example of Beethoven's Ninth, the only non-Wagner work ever programmed at Bayreuth). Thus, in music as in economics, scale became a central concern with industrialization and nationalism and remained central in the parallel developments of corporate capitalism and state socialism (still active, for example, in the military-owned enterprises in China). Attributing a thematic, ideological, or causal relationship between the lengthy works of Young or late Feldman and corporate capitalism is, of course, a ridiculous proposition and an unnecessary line of inquiry. As with Stockhausen supposedly "serving" an imperialism that couldn't give a damn about his formulae, moments, groups or points, the works of Young and Feldman as well as Ashley are essentially invisible and inaudible to the economic powers-that-be, but they are clearly dependent upon conditions of corporate capitalist life — leisure time, tax deductions for charitable contributions, rent-protected industrial lofts, the reliable delivery of electrical power etc.. I don't believe that this is a terribly profound point, and certainly not one which would constitute a major point of criticism (indeed, one may well credit these composers for resisting the imperative of corporate music production to ship everything in three minute and album-length packages), but it does make me want to listen more closely now to musical miniatures (my family is sort of obsessed with Howard Skempton's all-miniature and mostly solo accordion CD Home and Abroad) as well as pursue the idea of works with wildly variable as well as "anonymous" (i.e. not particularly either small or large) scales.

Utopia, un/Limited, or The Flowers of Progress

One of the paradoxes of the radical music is that it thrives at both extremes, at densities both close to zero and at or past the point of any perceivable order or distinction among constituent parts. A further paradox here is that, on the one hand, an ever-lower limit on materials or methods can create  ever-more mysterious and inscrutable musical objects and processes while, on the other hand, ever-more densely overlaid materials and complicated procedures can lead to sum totals which are heard as ever-more elementary surfaces or gestalts.  YET A FURTHER PARADOX is that composing under ever-more narrow restrictions or limits may yield ever-larger numbers of possible realizations while a lack of limits may force a composition into a density that is essentially ergodic in nature.  

Among composers, John Cage and James Tenney were perhaps most focused on these paradoxes, composing at both limits, but the concern is widespread: much of the music of Nancarrow and Ligeti depends on it, Alvin Lucier's string quartet, Navigations for Strings or La Monte Young's Well-Tuned Piano feature it.  Heck, Monteverdi's concitato style and Berlioz's use of spatial polyphony with very restricted pitch materials and even the Javanese irama system, coordinating material density with tempi, depend upon it, too.  And, outside of music proper, the productive use of restrictions are extremely interesting: the Oulipo, of course, or the fiction of Walter Abish, the Dogme 95 films, or even the Mundane Science Fiction movement are all good examples that limitations can focus and form work but are not necessarily limiting.

The Stuff of Legends

Composer Tim Parkinson has begun a great series of video interviews with some legendary UK experimental composers, including John White, Richard Emsley, Chris Newman and Michael Parsons, here.

The Drone from South Africa

The sound of those plastic stadium horns is a constant background presence in the broadcasts from the Soccer World Cup in South Africa. Although there must be considerable variation in the exact size and shape of these instruments with consequent variations in frequency, it all averages out in a massive example of the chorus effect into such a warmly modulating Bb that each time I pass through the room where my son is watching games, I annoy the hell out of him with an inability to refrain from launching into bits of South Indian solfege: sa ri ga ma pa dha ni sa! or some rough and ready overtone singing (betraying, among other things, definite signs and symptoms of a musical youth in early 80's Santa Cruz). Bb is a comfortable tonic sa for me and after only two games the TV looks like it's going to become my tamboura-ersatz of choice, replacing our aged fridge for the rest of what looks to be a seriouslz drone-y World Cup.

Z is for Zero

One impulse for the radical music is the notion — some would say conceit — of a music built from scratch, from first principles and their consequences rather than built within the default settings of an existing tradition or practice. The turns to minimal means or algorithmic composition or free improvisation or even the use of chance or the dense overlay of so many processes that the end result is unpredictable were or are, often, chosen precisely to follow this impulse. My own conceit is that my pieces are games very much akin to the language games in late Wittgenstein, experiments in the consequences of finite sets of materials and rules for their deployment with the potential (the Oulipo has it right with their idea of a potential literature) to emulate or even achieve the condition of music, but very much also the potential to fail to achieve that condition. The problem here, of course, is that there is an inherent conflict between the clarity of this experimental approach and the obscurity and elusiveness associated with defining the musical. Of course, one could just pull a Potter Stewart and be satisfied that one "knows music when you hear it" — after all, I spend most of my waking hours with music and music traditions I love and know with some intimacy — but isn't that just avoiding the responsibility associated with a commitment to an experimental approach to composition, which is to keep exploring and redefining through composition the extents and limits of the musical, as played and heard? Yeah, my conceit is that the piece begins from nothing, that it is only constructed (a la intuitionist mathematics), but as each sound or structure or process or pattern begins to shape that nothing into something, all of my prior experience of the musical inevitably enters in, sometimes setting rules, sometimes imposing an inexorable logic, sometimes calling on training or habit. There is a wonderful, tense, unpredictable interplay here between forces — choice, consequence, chance — that is the very source of the joy I find and recognize only in the practice of composition.

Wagner staging: bring on the Zamboni!

I heard a first class Das Rheingold this evening at the Frankfurt Oper, the first production in a new Ring cycle.  Sebastian Weigle, the General Music Director of the house, began his musical career as a horn player, and the benefits of that experience were once again clear in his ability to balance local details and ensemble balance with long-term development.  As is typical for Frankfurt, the choice of singers was fortunate all around, and Kurt Streit's Loge and Meredith Arwady's Erda, in particular, were in top form both musically and dramatically. 

The only reservation I have with this production is the set.  It's yet another variation in the Wieland Wagner brand of discs/rings, intended as an abstract and all-purpose set for use throughout the cycle.  In this case a huge computer-controlled stage machine with a central disk on a lift and four outer rings independently revolvable about the center, the whole perilously raked (the singers in LA have nothing to complain about), so that the pieces can be turned in countless ways suggesting waves and paths and caves etc..   It's an impressive piece of machinery, but damn, aren't we bored of the rings already?  Even with imaginative lighting and projections as well as discreetly added props, I'm not sure that I'm prepared to sit through another twelve hours and change of looking at this thing turn about.   

Despite the world economic crisis, there appear to be a record number of new Rings in production or planning (we'll actually be having a autobahn series of Rings, soon, as Darmstadt, a half-hour down the road, is beginning one as well), and it's been fascinating to see the bits and pieces of productions that have appeared on TV or online.  I have a particular fascination with old fashioned stage magic and have been rather disappointed that newer technological possibilities do not appear to have consistently or reliably offered improvements on the old.  A Spanish cycle televised last Winter, for example, was dominated by on stage lifts and cranes.  Nice idea, one would think, to let Gods and Goddesses float about a bit; not so nice, however, when one sees (and hears — for they never get all the creaks and groans out of these things) more of the cranes than of the crooners.  If you want stage magic, you don't want to see wires carrying Peter Pan, you don't want to see Edgar Bergen's lips move when Charlie McCarthy speaks, and you don't want to see lifts or the underbelly of a Wieland Wagner carousel.  (And why is it that some part of the audience always starts clapping when the big machine does a 180?)  I want stage magic to be magical and appropriate technology.  If there has to be large machinery on stage, I'd much prefer that they bring on a Zamboni between acts.  If we're going to see machines on stage, the proto-steam punk of the Chéreau Ring was definitely a better point of departure: by setting the work during the Industrial Revolution, it maintained a frame of reference with a sufficient degree of mythological distance to our own technological landscape; a stage technology will appear magical if it is either so ancient or so advanced as to be unfamiliar. 

The other problem with an abstract set is that abstraction necessarily means a reduction in details.  The Ring, more than other operas, thrives on its details; their presence enables listeners to engage ever more closely with relationships and cross references and to go deep from the broadest thematic connections to the most conjectural arcana.  While it is possible, Story Theatre-style, to encourage audience imaginations to fill in an empty set, it is not always a reliable solution, nor do we want to be locked into that model of audition. (Not to mention the fact that an empty set often suggests a poverty of both imagination and resources on the part of the production team and management, respectively.)  Achim Freyer's new Ring staging in Los Angeles has the virtue, no matter what you may think of his style, of filling the stage with detail and detail that is directly derived from Wagner's content, thus capable of reinforcing or bringing out more rather than less of the score.   

(My fatigue with all-purpose sets is not limited to disc'n'ring Wagner stagings.  The current Don Carlo set in Frankfurt, for example,  uses a generic castle-like set and makes two very big, very basic mistakes in scenery:  the set pieces are imitation brickwork (which always looks cheap; junior high drama club cheap) and some of the imitation brickwork, including some very large pieces of imitation brickwork (pillars, stellae, whole walls) are made to move, up and down, right in front of our very eyes, a guaranteed killer of suspended disbelief.)

Addendum: I should have mentioned the one theatrical coup through which director Vera Nemirova successfully subverts the restrictions of the giant discman:  instead of using a projection behind the set or rearranging the rings, Valhalla is represented as the auditorium itself: the lights come up in the hall and the Gods, in black evening dress, gaze upon and then enter the hall as opera-goers taking their places before a performance. A nice break in the physical frame and a useful way to identify the evening as a prelude for things to come on stage. 

Y is for Yorick

Cage/Duncan

An interesting article about John Cage and Robert Duncan, anarchy and the re-use of existing texts, here.

1/24th

An Hour is an interesting series of broadcasts by Ophir Ilzetzki featuring interview/portraits of composers working in experimental directions. Recommended.  

Passing, smartly

In the recent post about China Miéville's new novel, Kraken, I neglected to note one small but truly cool passing reference, and one which actually has something to do — if via a filial tangent — with experimental music.  It is a reference to John Cage's father.  Yes, the composer's father.  I suspect that this is the first appearance of the senior Cage, an engineer and inventor, in a work of fiction.   In the passage in question, Miéville appears to be referring to John M. Cage Sr.'s work in the design of submarines.

Addendum:  Gordon Mumma wrote:

re John Cage Sr.'s inventions, his work went far beyond
the early submarine projects. Cage Sr. held patents on
many devices and concepts, all the way through the 2nd
World War. And (composer) Cage Jr. assisted his father
with some of that research, even when it was "classified
war-work." That activity was one of several reasons the
composer Cage was not conscripted into military service.

All that above is from what Cage told me privately back
in the 1960s. Now there is excellent research underway
by Richard Brown (at USC) in which he has located
many recently de-classified documents involving patents
for Cage Sr.'s work in the 1940s. Brown gave a superb
presentation of his research on this subject at the 2009
Philadelphia American Musicological Society meeting. 

Now that I think about it, it's actually pretty surprising that the elder Cage has not been a more frequent figure or model for a character in fiction.

  

A Brief Message Regarding a Title

To the composer out there who is considering TOP KILL as the title for a new piece of music: 

Please don't.

More on the economics of the era of recorded sound

John Gruber cites a BBC interview with Mick Jagger:

But I have a take on that — people only made money out of records for a very, very small time. When The Rolling Stones started out, we didn’t make any money out of records because record companies wouldn’t pay you! They didn’t pay anyone!

Then, there was a small period from 1970 to 1997, where people did get paid, and they got paid very handsomely and everyone made money. But now that period has gone.

So if you look at the history of recorded music from 1900 to now, there was a 25 year period where artists did very well, but the rest of the time they didn’t.

That date in the late 90's coincides rather precisely with the mass introduction of cheap digital recording equipment and media as well as the widespread use of portable digital players.  The old model of radio advertising paying royalties for recorded music which were licensed cheaply for broadcast with the idea that randomly-heard broadcasts of songs were advertisements for the purchase of albums — which allowed the listener to select particular songs on their own — pretty much collapsed at that point in time.  The technological innovations leading to ever-cheaper and ever-more accurate recording and storage capacity were inevitable but the whole thing gets ugly when one considers that the firms selling the new recording technologies were, in many cases, also publishers of the music that was inevitably going to be recorded.   

And so the grand experiment in the commodification of music more or less collapsed.  While it may become possible to design some mechanisms for mass surveillance of online music consumption and to find some way of collecting fees, it seems highly unlikely that this is going to be done in any way that gets meaningful remuneration for anyone but the most popular musicians and the largest publishers, as even the most lucrative models are in terms of very small fractions of a cent for a single usage.  Although recordings and webcasts may have some advertising function, in the end, the grand experiment may leave us back where we started, with live performance the most important — and in many cases, only — opportunity for a musician to earn money. 

A Difficult Taboo

A couple of years ago, I drafted a libretto loosely based on reports of palace life in the People's Republic of Korea.  The effort soon convinced me that I was not a librettist (and that Alaisdair Gray's novella Five Letters from an Eastern Empire had treated a similar theme much better than I ever could) but I don't regret having learned a lot about that strange and — for its own people, and potentially its neighbors — tragic country.  (If you're interested in the topic, I recommend Bradley K. Martin's book, Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader and the blog North Korea Leadership Watch;  I am also fascinated by the Pyongyang Metro webpage.)   I have tried to keep up with news from North Korea and was fascinated by a recent item describing the country's National Defense Commission Reconnaissance Bureau which included this:

The general bureau now consists of six bureaus for operations (Bureau 1), reconnaissance (Bureau 2), overseas intelligence (Bureau 3), inter-Korean talks (Bureau 5), technology or cyber terrorism (Bureau 6) and for support of other divisions (Bureau 7), according to sources. There is no Bureau 4 due to a traditional Korean taboo on the number four, which is pronounced the same as “death” in Korean.

Now, the taboo against thirteenth floors in high buildings found in the U.S. is silly enough, and a sign of residual superstition in a country that has never been shy about its relationship to "faith" of one sort or another.  But it is ultimately something one can work around, as even the biggest cities have limited numbers of buildings over twelve floors high, and you can always stick a 12A or a storage space up there between 12 and 14.  A taboo against the number four, however, would have to be a more frequently encountered obstacle and is a sure sign that we're talking about a country which is definitely not being run from an entirely rational worldview.

Promising

I like to keep track of new notation/engraving programs, and here's an interesting new one: Nihavent.  It's designed immediately for notating Turkish maqam and microtonal music with appropriate accidentals and accurate playback, but the structure of the program, as a whole, even in this beta version, is very promising for general use.   Among other things, it may well have the easiest learning curve for any notation program available, with the seven page users' guide all you really need to get started; I was able to compose a small piece on screen immediately after opening the program for the first time.  [As a bonus, AFAIC, I was able to enter time signatures with non-powers of two denominators — 2/3 or 6/5, for example — and not only to space and print correctly but playback without a hitch.  Henry Cowell would have been very happy about this!]

This is a beta version and a number of additional features will be required to make it competitive with well-known general-purpose professional engraving programs, but it's a great start and — for maqam and microtonal music — already a serious player, offering capacity out of the box that the majors don't have without serious  kludges.  I recommend testing the program and am curious to see if this can developed, with feedback, in more useful ways for new music.

As Good As It Gets

In the past week, chaperoning a young supernumary, I've heard a rehearsals and two performances of Don Carlo, which has been ample reminder that, in the 19th century, opera was the principal genre for innovation in orchestration and that, among opera composers, Verdi was an orchestrator with only one major competitor, Berlioz.  (Yeah, Berlioz, I've been wanting to add Les Troyens to my list of landmarks for long, long time but have been more than a little frightened by the prospect of writing something, even something very brief, about the grandest of the grand operas; the piece, as a whole, and in so many details, is more than remarkable.)

In any case: Verdi, orchestration. Pay attention to these things: the economy of his ensemble writing, allowing for the most potent use of the entire range of scoring patterns, from solo instrument (in Don Carlo, exquisite writing for clarinet and cello in particular) to chamber-scale groupings all the way up to full orchestra, choir and soloists, a combination that registers more on the memory than actually appears in a score, then his usage of the on-stage bands to achieve very subtle spatial distinctions, and his reserve with the use of the full string section, with the weight of winds, particularly solo winds, but also the horn and trombone (agile, originally for valved instruments) sections, used as sharp points of contrast. To some extent, these are features of orchestration that we have more or less internalized as a standard of good practice, but the degree to which Verdi is responsible for that practice is either overlooked or taken for granted.

The 20th century started out blockbusters for opera orchestration, between Debussy and the two Strauss Einackters. Why then, with the exceptions of radically different pit bands for Glass or Ashley, so late in the century, did opera so lamentably stop being a genre for instrumental innovation? I suspect that the "too big to fail" scale and status of opera houses and orchestras as institutions played a major role, with considerable inertia in the composition and usage of the pit orchestra. In any case, the failure to innovate has come at a large cost to the genre as both a wider public attraction and a musical/intellectual playground.

Mit Schmalz

Once again, from the lattice of coincidence:  My daughter and I are in the kitchen planning a rainy day baking project and listening to the radio.  We settle on an oatmeal cookie recipe, on an old 3"x 5" card in my grandmother's handwriting, but attributed to one of her neighbors in Sacramento. The recipe, conspicuously, includes butter as half the fat in the recipe with the other half assigned to lard, yep rendered pig fat, an ingredient that almost shocks with its out-of-stylishness.  As we discussed whether to double the butter or even to use a substitute vegetable shortening for the lard, with a long detour into the pros and cons of rendered pig fat*, Emma began to giggle at the music coming from the radio.  It's an old recording with plenty of wobble and rhythmic surface noise and the solo violinist is using a lot of shockingly out-of-style portamento.  

The more I listened to the soloist, the more I became convinced that his portamento had been exactly right for the music.  I didn't, however, have the same confidence when baking, and the chosen substitute for lard made good cookies but not great ones, and certainly not authentic ones. 

______

* My daughter Emma, who spent her first years in Hungary, was exposed to a lot more lard than most American or German kids these days.  In addition to its ubiquitous use in cooking (most Hungarian recipes begin with frying onions in lard), a typical childrens' meal in Hungary is a slice of bread, smeared with lard and dressed with red onions and a dash of paprika.   As such, it was basically unavoidable.

Cracked

Here's a guilty pleasure: China Miéville's latest novel, Kraken.  Among many other things, it's the big squid book that someone one "i" and an accent more than the famous author of a famous book about a big whale was bound to write and it's the author's long-overdue take on the whole cult'n'conspiracy-thriller genre, from Dan Brown on down, adapting an appropriately brisk diction to rush from a recognizable London by a serious of ever-more startling leaps of imagination and suspensions of disbelief to an ever-weirder revision of the city.  It begins in the preserved specimen jar collection of the Darwin Center at the left end of the Museum of Natural History (which is the closest thing to a cathedral for non-believers as the city has, and frames the story nicely for its dynamic between science and religion) and rapidly moves into parts of town more reminiscent of Miéville's UnLunDun or even the parallel cities of The City & The City or the unmatched weirdness of Perdido Street Station's New Crobuzon (yeah, disturbing urban environments are a Miéville specialty).

Here's a small sample that could serve as a description of Miéville's methods:

"I know, I know," Moore said. "Mad beliefs like that, eh? Must be some metaphor, right? Must mean something else?" Shook his head. "What an awfully arrogant thing. What if faiths are exactly what they are? And mean exactly what they say?"

"Stop trying to make sense of it and just listen," Dane said.

(Which, now that I've typed it out, strikes me as pretty good advice about much new music as well.) 

The best thing here, though, is the fact that Kraken is a comic novel, the only possible intelligent response to such a wooden genre and in the pair of killers-for-hire, Goss and Subby, Miéville has created his most frightening creatures yet. 

The Claque

At a concert last week featuring works by a handful of younger composers, a phalanx composed of friends-of-composer-X positioned themselves across the last row with the intention of providing the loudest possible acoustical approbation for the performance of a new work by amigo X. No problem there: bringing an ample number of claqueurs to a concert is an old and even semi-honorable tradition. Unfortunately, the members of this claque also decided to use their forces to provide the loudest possible acoustical disapprobations for works by composers Y & Z. This was not good form. Further, they were unrestrained in audible comments during the performances of pieces by Y & Z. This was even worse form. The pieces on the concert complemented, even amplified one another, so there was was no competition among them, no zero sum to be protected for the net bonus of composer X, and no one would have been in the least insulted had the entire team entered only for X's piece and waited out the rest of the concert at the bar.

Landmarks (45)

Guillaume de Machaut: Ma fin est mon commencement.  

I'm going to cheat here and let this little rondeau — with all of its play of multiple symmetries and self-similar constructive wit uniting text and tunes — stand in for the whole corpus of Machaut's music, because I came to know the whole surviving catalogue more or less at once and I'm attached to all of it, secular and sacred, monophonic and polyphonic, and must refuse leaving anything out.   It may be fairly argued that Machaut's musical style is not sufficiently distinct from the surviving music of his contemporaries, but none of his contemporaries, nor his immediate successors left a body of work comparable either in size or variety to Machaut's, and none, to my ear, was his match for the shape of his tunes or sensitivity of his ensemble textures. (And, of course, his musical work was a complement to his poetry.)      

The Machaut celebratory year of 1977 was an important one for me, as discovering Machaut's music showed that music research and performance could be complementary activities, and the combination of both activities was compositionally inviting.   A summer workshop in the mountains, with a collegium led by La Noue Davenport, was an exciting introduction to the rhythmic and tonal vigor of this music and an incredible contrast to the fare in high school band or choir.  Copying out scores by hand, with the ambition of getting friends to sing or play them, was an opportunity to gain fluency in all the c clefs and try to puzzle out the Medieval French, but most importantly, to discover, for the first time and from inside-out, how a style of music, and the formal or textural variants within that style, actually worked.   In the polyphony, especially, I was drawn to the great degree of freedom that voices could have between points of resolution or cadences, an experience marvelously echoed in the elaborating voices and instruments in Javanese gamelan music, Karawitan, which come together at seleh, targeted tones at the end of formal units.   All the elements of this style — the fixed forms, some syllabic, others melismatic, the cadential formulae, the use of accompanying tenors, the use of extended syncopations and hockets — all registered, deep, in my musical consciousness, and with this a certain aesthetic ambition, that music should be able to live both in the depths, in its construction, and flow, at its surface.  

X is for Xenophile.

The New in The New Music immediately suggests an element of the unfamiliar, unusual, strange, foreign, or alien.  Sometimes this may indicate wholly novel materials, but mostly the novelty is in the deployment or arrangement of the materials (John Cage/N.O. Brown once again: syntax is the arrangement of the army).  Sometimes a rage for the new (Morse Peckham: Man's rage for chaos; biology, behavior, and the arts) is a form of criticism, a more-or-less explicit expression of dissatisfaction with existing states of affairs.  Sometimes this is an ethical judgment, other times this is simply fulfilling a need for variety.  We all have some need for variety: in music, in food, in clothing, in landscapes, in the arrangement of furniture in our living rooms. And, most likely, we have some need to manage a balance between variety and stability, between the unexpected and the predictable. (In his later years, Cage always wore the same kind of clothes, French worker's denim, so that he needn't think anymore about them.) Someone once told me that variety reminds us that we're alive, by inserting events into our lives, while repetition reminds us that we're still alive, and measures our lives by creating intervals between events.  Thus a passion for the new is not necessarily a discounting of the old, familiar, but can be a way of renewing our experience of the old, through ever-new contexts.

(N.B.: X is done, and without hiding it behind an "e" (exile, extreme, exotic), nor grabbing onto the musician's inevitable xylophone.)

 

Johannes Fritsch

News comes that the composer Johannes Fritsch has died at 68 after a long illness.  His name is probably most familiar for his days as a member, usually playing viola, of Stockhausen's touring ensemble, but should be better known for his work as a composer, publisher, and teacher, succeeding Stockhausen at the Musikhochschule in Cologne and serving for decades, with his students including Volker Staub and Caspar Johannes Walter, two very good composers.  Fritsch was the founder of the Feedback Studio and Verlag, always billed as a cooperative but basically a one-man-show.  Initially focused on sharing resources for making electronic music (very much in the spirit of Ann Arbor's Cooperative Studio or the San Francisco Tape Music Center) and some concert presenting, the focus became publishing, both of performance materials and of a journal, the Feedback Papers, all produced in a cheerfully informal manner.   Fritsch focused on issues of acoustics and tuning (via Kayser and Partch) in his music, with his work in live-electronics and improvisation representing a gentler and more pragmatic approach to that he had experienced with his work with Stockhausen.  (Although he often got lumped into the category of Stockhausen's students, his own composition teachers were Bernd Alois Zimmermann and Gottfried Michael Koenig; Fritsch's ability to balance distance and respect in his relationship with Stockhausen was, as far as I know, unique.)   I did not know Fritsch well, but each time we met it was clear that his reputation as a kind, supportive, smart and elegant guy with open ears was spot-on.

W is for Words

(1)

Contrast:

Jo Kondo:  "I am interested in words more than in sentences, in sentences more than in paragraphs, in paragraphs more than in a whole page. Thus, it could be said that in music I am more concerned with each sound than with the phrases they create."

John Cage:  Empty Words. (Cage quotes N.O. Brown: "Syntax is the arrangement of the army"; removing syntax is demilitarizing language.)

with

Gertrude Stein: a sentence is not emotional a paragraph is

(2) 

Charles Seeger's Dilemma:  that thinking and discoursing in the "language mode of communication" about the "music mode of communication" dominates, directs and, above all, limits research about music.

I work with sounds with the same pleasure that I take in kneading dough or riding a bike or walking early mornings with daughter and/or dog in tow.  But I wrestle with words, fool persisting in his folly, and more often than not — especially when the words should have something to do with music — something fails. Do words fail me?  Or have I failed to manage the words? 

(3)

In a recent comment thread here, Charles Shere mentioned OULIPO, the famous "workshop for potential literature."  The best work associated with the OULIPO — Queneau, Perec, Mathews — is entirely comfortable with its playful approach to language.  With music, however, a playful approach is often discouraged or put down.  For some, "playing games" is supposed to be at odds with the really musical; musical compositions are criticized for having playful systems and structures.  This attitude is wrong in so many ways, so profoundly pessimistic about music, not least in its rejection, if not denial, of the potential for music to work on multiple levels, as well as the multiple and surprising ways in which these levels may interact.   

V is for Velocity

The results of research into the physics, psychophysics and neuroscience of music are often fascinating, but also, as a practicing musician, often frustrating.  This frustration is due, in part, to an inherent pessimism, in that the subject of research is typically constrained by existing musical repertoire and its material qualities and existing conditions for performance and audition. Far more interesting, for a composer like me, would be exploration of the potential and means for musicians and listeners to go beyond those constraints.   It is one thing, for example, to determine limits for pitch perception under conventional listening contexts, but it is quite another thing to investigate ways and contexts through which these limits may be expanded.  Further, there is a real frustration that much research — research in audio recording somewhat excepted — does not focus on issues of urgent compositional interest.  For example, I would really like to know more about how fast a listener can take in and process musical information. In some cases — as real musical variety encompasses both clarity and opacity —  the compositional interest is not only creating music which can be taken in and analyzed by a listener but also in making music which overwhelms the whole sensory and cognitive apparatus.  It would be very useful to have more empirical insight into this issue.  

U is for Umbrella

I am an owner and user of umbrellas.  No, more than that: I am fond of umbrellas.  A well-made umbrella is light but sturdy, mechanically stable and smooth in operation.  It is capable of protecting against rain, hail, sun, or — within reasonable limits of strength and velocity — wind. It may be used to hide from unwanted gazes or to disguise a private conversation. A umbrella can make both an excellent improvised directional sound reflector or a mute — this was a particular specialty of my days as a young trombonist — or, in a snap, it may be used as a foil to fend off attackers or to defend ones honor.  Erik Satie was said to have owned dozens of them. At one point in time, I owned more than twenty of them, and took great pride in keeping them all in good maintenance, cleaning them, lightly oiling the mechanism, straightening ribs gone askew and patiently sewing loose ends back onto their assigned ribeyes.  [Warning! Some umbrellas come with sharped tips and rib-ends; others may be sharpened by their owners.]  I once used the opening and closing of a large ensemble of umbrellas as a somewhat visually distracting musical accompaniment to a dance.  [Jo Kondo's early masterpiece of pseudo-repetition, Under the Umbrella, for five percussionists playing 25 cowbells and a gong, does not require an umbrella, but is clearly the work of a musicians who understands and appreciates the entire concept of an umbrella.]   Like a passion for this music or that, and the radical music in particular, an affection for umbrellas is not, however, universal. One of my oldest and best friends is a gifted writer who has long worked a day job in the Financial district in San Francisco. Being physically tall, he finds that he has to defend himself on rainy days against a sea of eye-level umbrella edges while attempting to go peacefully to his office.  Consequently, he is as much of the anti-umbrella party as I am a pro-bumpershootist. (As I am somewhat taller than Tom, it may be the case that I have a sufficient advantage in avoiding what, for him, would be eye-level umbrella edges, which demonstrates that some partisan differences are, indeed, more due to nature than nurture.)   To date, we have successfully avoiding scheduling our all-too-rare reunions on dates with a high likelihood of rain. When we do meet, I make a point of stashing my umbrella away from his view and we both take care to avoid talking about this controversy. Thus our friendship has remain unaffected despite the potential of these partisan differences to cause a serious rift. Many successful friendships, one supposes, are like that.  

T is for Trainwreck (short version)

The fifth volume, Music in the Late Twentieth Century, of Richard Taruskin's The Oxford History of Western Music.  

(A long version of this item will follow, but for now, let's get on with this alphabet.)

Just asking

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

Blind spots

Charles Shere writes about Copland's The Tender Land, here.  I think Shere's characterization of the piece as "hokey and pretentious" is right on the money: the opera's music is thin and both libretto and score are unable, dramatically, to make anything particularly engaging out of its most potent theme, forbidden sexuality (which ought to work and which Copland handles so astonishingly well in Appalachian Spring, showing that the problem is compositional and not a direct function of either the materials or the style.) 

Shere also writes that:

I've always thought of Copland, Britten, and Shostakovich as an interesting triad. Each was immensely gifted and intelligent; caught in an uneasy relationship to the prevailing Modernism-Reactionism duality of the early 20th century; apparently self-assigned to a position of National Spokesman for his art. Each composed masterpieces, particularly early masterpieces, then went on to an uneven output often troubled by indecision as to whether to be Popular or Principled (with respect to personal musical style).

It is, indeed, interesting how these three became "national spokesmen", as none of three came equipped with the biography or personality which could be described as a cookie cutter for such a role and the part of the local political and musical institutions in assigning these identities was perhaps more critical than their own contributions.  While each lived through real political difficulties, on balance each showed a talent for adaption to their local systems.

Besides being the unavoidable composers during their lifetimes (as a kid, these were the three reliable exceptions to the rule of not-programming contemporary music on local radio and concerts), the members of this triad have received substantial attention of late from music historians with both scholarly (Taruskin) and more popular (Ross) projects.  I'll have to admit to having large blind spots (deaf spots?  why are we so persistently forced to use visual metaphors when talking about sound?) for the music of all three and this, collaterally, has made reading these histories a real chore.  In Copland's case, for example, the music which lasts for me are the most "difficult" early and late pieces, The Organ Symphony or even the much-maligned Inscape, for example, with Appalachian Spring being the elegant exception that proves the rule for his "mainstream" pieces.  With Britten, whose music I have really heard far too much of, the Church Parables remains impressive, and with Shostakovich, I have absolutely no patience left and now publicly pledge not to let myself get hauled once again to a new production of The Nose or Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk under the promise that "this time, you'll really like it".  No I won't. 

This is music which fails to renew the musical imagination.  But then again, maybe, the official, mainstream status of these men and the stuff they made simply precludes any such ambition.   It would have been best if we could've grouped the three into a Poe/Silliman category of a Musical School of Quietude, and let it all fade away.  But it is in the nature of such boat-not-rockers that they continue to dominate concert programs and have a decisive influence on the young quietist and careerist composers of our time.  And, unfortunately, in music, as opposed to poetry, our quietists are not restricted to the piano end of the dynamic range.  There is one, small and slightly evil joy I can take, though: these are the three 20th century composers whose names are most likely to get mispelled on undergraduate music appreciation tests. Take your small pleasures wherever you can find them, I say.

Be prepared.

That a cloud of ashes from an Icelandic volcano can cause air traffic in most of Europe to shut down is a nice reminder that redundancy can be useful and valuable when the unexpected happens.  Where rail lines and ferries can take up the slack, most travelers are inconvenienced but not stuck, but wherever airplanes have a monopoly, tough luck.   The present bootleneck is costly to the air carriers and big trouble not only for passengers but for the increasing share of post and freight that is flown.  The time advantage of jet travel is real, but shouldn't there be more travel alternatives available?  Fast and affordable passenger ships, for sure, and isn't this a good argument for a more thorough revival of dirigible airships as a more gentle mode of air travel?  

Here's the reminder: a bit of redundancy in musical performance practice is also useful. Conducting cues, for example, can often avert difficulties or rescue a performance when caution was insufficient.  Doublings and cued notes in parts are useful.  Players are wise to bring extra reeds, strings, bows, mallets, etc., the spare tires of concert life.  When electronics are in play, redundant power sources, mikes, cables, amps, speakers, recordings, computers and software can save a concert.  And in the composition itself, repetitions and doublings can serve multiple purposes, both aesthetic and a practical.   

Rote Politics

Ron Silliman points to this post with the statement Why memorizing poetry is inherently right wing.   The question of memorization is, of course, sometimes an important one for musical performance as well and sometimes we musicians also make a similar distinction between rote and "by heart" memorization.  Generally speaking, the pro-memorization camp is our conservative party and it is typical for competitions and recitals on the establishment circuit to insist that musicians play without sheet music visible on stage.  (This insistence comes with that same weird macho-but-prissy swagger that only conservative pseudo-intellectuals carry.)  While there are cases  in which getting rid of the paper is unavoidable — in opera, for example, or with some percussion instruments for which visual contact with a music stand cannot be maintained —, I side decidedly with the opposition party here.  This is because when playing notated music one can too frequently discover that notation is a gift that keeps giving; reading music is seldom a task which is completed with rehearsal and a live performance is often a valuable additional opportunity for discovery.  This possibility was brought home to me first by playing baroque music, realizing continuo and ornamentation in real time.

Addendum, 14/4/2010:  I think that I wasn't clear enough here.  My problem is not with memorization but with the insistence than musicians play without notation and the deprecation of musicians who chose to use notation.  Although my own memory is probably average, when I rehearse something well, it is almost inevitably committed to memory, but I still want to have the notation available.   And not for insurance but out of optimism, that there is still more music to be found in the act of reading.  

S is for Schematic

A performance last fall of Le marteau sans maître left me once again astonished about an unresolved tension in the piece, a tension between structural concerns — the interlocking cycles of two, three and four movements and the systematic orchestration and scoring patterns in particular — that were made explicit, expressed at the immediate surface of the music, and the note-to-note continuity, the precise sense of which was not aurally recoverable beyond the most general and impressionistic considerations — contour, registration, and to some extent pitch complementarity.  Although Le marteau is a piece which I have listened to, intently, for more than 30 years, and has some qualities — not least its notorious coolness — which I actually find attractive, the absence of a compelling connection between local continuity and global order makes for an increasingly frustrating listening experience.  Moroever, there are some scoring pattern changes and choices of instrumental register in the piece that are almost shocking in their clumsiness.

The problem here might be described as being too schematic.   A schematic diagram uses topological abstraction to present the relationship between the functioning parts of a process, system, or organism in a clear fashion by ignoring actual size, scale and precise orientation and by eliding detail.  Of course, such simplification is often extremely useful, but when the process, system, or organism is something as precious and sensuous as a piece of treasured music, then the loss of precision may very well come at the expense of those details, dimensions or parameters of the music which we value most.  

[There is a widespread misunderstanding that Schenkerian analys suffers from the same such loss.  This misunderstanding is probably due to some weak pedagogy, in which the act of analysis is seen — and, tellingly, not heard — as the production of ever-more reduced graphs, a confusion of product with process.  Schenkerian analysis can, in fact, be an excellent strategy for the recovery of detail and dimension.]

In the Left End of Newmusicland — where one might likely locate the radicals, experimentalists, & minimalistas as well as some of the complexers — the relationship between a music and its construction is a persistent theme. * But one without a persistent resolution.  In some music, it's an advantage if the way in which the music was put together is clear, while in other music, the advantage goes with hiding any traces of the compositional work.   Piano Phase and I am sitting in a room are two examples of music in which such clarity is essential, while Music of Changes is an example which finds advantage in opacity.  And still, for all the immediate aural evidence of their construction, in neither Piano Phase nor I am sitting in a room is there a lack of mystery in terms of either sonic quality or musical continuity, while in Music of Changes — the construction of which is all-but-impossible to recover — there is a prevailing sense of precisely the purposefulness and restraint one would expect in a tightly constructed work.   I think that the reason these three pieces work for me (and Le marteau doesn't) is that the clear and opaque elements are complementing and reinforcing one another in optimal ways.   The immediacy with which the constructive, procedural elements are comprehensible in the Reich or the Lucier facilitates hearing the music made possible by and above and beyond the process, while the anticipated ergodicity of Cage's surface soon reveals itself to be much more discrete and eventful than expected (it is music that really does change!) 

A bit of constructive technique that I have find useful of late involves composing with pre-determined scoring patterns.   I have sometimes combined these with rhythmic structures akin to Mr Cage's famous square root method and have found Gray codes ( and, specifically, Beckett-Gray codes) to be particularly useful scoring patterns.  Now, this probably sounds like a lot of abstraction — and even, as I later discovered, with the Gray codes, some fairly sophisticated maths — but, my goal has never been to let this become so abstract as to not relate audibly to the immediate musical concerns of a musical continuity. 

______

* Morton Feldman is here unavoidable: "It appears to me that the subject of music, from Machaut to Boulez, has always been its construction. Melodies of 12-tone rows just don't happen. They must be constructed....To demonstrate any formal idea in music, whether structure or stricture, is a matter of construction, in which the methodology is the controlling metaphor of the composition...Only by 'unfixing' the elements traditionally used to construct a piece of music could the sounds exist in themselves--not as symbols, or memories which were memories of other music to begin with."
 

 

R is for ||: Repetition :||

For a time, say '78 through '84, my music used a lot of literal repetitions, notated often between happy pairs of ||: :||s. Repetition was a useful element in music which was more immediately static than dynamic, more about being somewhere, than going somewhere. Of course, no repetition was ever precisely identical to that which was being repeated, the most careful of human performances always carried traces of subtle alterations, and even in the most mechanical repetition, the context, of time delayed and experienced, altered the identity relationship in a fundamental way.

For a time, say say '78 through '84, my music used a lot of literal repetitions, notated often between happy pairs of ||: :||s. Repetition in music was useful for creating contexts that well self-sustaining and self-similar. Canons were a particularly useful extension of repetitive techniques, as the music was simultaneously asserting something about where one was, where one had been, and where one might be going. Canons became increasingly important to me in the late 1980's, and now I can't imagine working without them, but they are increasingly loose, rather than strict, in character. Letting a voice which had been trailing gradually move to a leading position in a contrapuntal environment (John Cage, borrowing an idea about Gagaku from Henry Cowell, called this a "Japanese Canon"; Morton Feldman would brilliantly use this same idea, borrowed perhaps from simultaneous Torah recitation in the Orthodox Schul, Jo Kondo's idea of a "shape" and its "shadow" was definitely in the same ballpark) was literally like getting ahead of oneself.

Before I get ahead of myself: For a time, say '78 through '84, my music used a lot of literal repetitions, notated often between happy pairs of ||: :||s. Attracted initially by the impossibility of the exact repetition, I became more attracted to the idea of an explicitly imperfect or quasi-repetition. An example of quasi-repetition which continues to haunt me is Jo Kondo's Sight Rhythmics, in which the same piece is "repeated" six times, but from each "repetition" to the next, one element in each measure is altered, with alterations accumulating until the sixth "repetition", called a Skolion, in which the material is rewritten altogether. But the changes here always remain clearly within the territory, the ballpark if you will, of repetitions rather than variations, because the sensation is always one of sameness rather than the variety a proper variation would demand.

But I'm getting ahead of myself: For a time, say '78 through '84, my music used a lot of literal repetitions, notated often between happy pairs of ||: :||s. I've recently been writing some music in which there are lots of literal repetitions, but repetitions which find themselves in conetxts which change enough that I'm not comfortable fitting them between pairs of ||: :||, no matter how happy they might be. The context has changed the material enough identifying any of it as a repetition now seems somewhat dishonest. I suppose I ought to write something now about not dipping into the same river twice, but having come 'round to recognizing that the same river is not a particularly useful idea (as a river is more of a process than an object), let's leave it at that, and you'll have some idea of the ballpark about which I'm currently bopping. Or something like that idea, but entirely your own...

(This is a repeat appearance of a blog item from December 2006.)

The Palatka Band

This is the Palatka Band from Transylvanian village of Palatca in Romania playing at the 2010 Táncháztalálkozó in Budapest.  Not the best sound quality, but a good illustration of the multi-ethnic region's string band style and technique.  The bass, three-stringed, uses a very short bow in heavy strokes and battuto.  The viola, or kontra, also three-stringed, tuned g-d'-a, plays a chordal accompaniment. The prima violinist, Lőrincz Codoba uses, in the slow sections, the typical right-hand style, in which most expression occurs in a space in which vibrato and portamento are not always distinct.   This is also a good illustration of a traditional form of music transmission in the relationship between older and younger players.

Them words

It's a standard piece of advice for composers that we ought not set our own words.  In general, I think this is true: having two pairs of ears and eyes to monitor words and music is a sensible move and there are precious few examples between Machaut and Ashley of composers who are equally gifted as poets (in Machaut's case, it is impossible decide whether the identity as poet or composer should come first) while there are — sadly — plenty of composers who have used their own texts or libretti to sinkingly bad effect. (Does anyone seriously want to go some rounds over the libretti of Wagner or Stockhausen? Seriously?)  

(I think that this principle holds less for popular music, but I'm just not engaged enough in popular repertoire to venture a substantiable reason why, but it may just be that it is in popular music that a continuity to the ancient idea of poesis, in which the composition of words is inseparable from their metre, rhythm, accent, and tune, is still, to some extent, operative.) 

A second standard bit of advice to composers is that it is better to set a good (or, in some cases, even a mediocre) text than an extraordinary text.  Setting aside any prima-this, poi-that personal rivalries between poet/librettist and composer, the thinking here seems to be that setting a text to music requires — if the music is to be interesting on its own terms — a certain amount of pliancy, perhaps too much abuse for texts valued highly, and we are even prepared to accept a near-complete acoustical erasure of the sense and continuity of a text to the needs of dramatic and musical continuity. There is, however, so much usable room for a composer in the composition space available for setting a text between having every word clear and comprehensible and the fantastic and melismatic opposite of that, that I have to assume that this second bit of advice is not necessarily true.  It may make some music-political tactical sense to avoid setting the masterworks in favor of the merely good — for example, by playing down expectations and attachments an audience brings to familar and treasured words — but I don't think that there are any unexceptionable musical reasons for this.     

Q is for Questions

Qualms: Who wants these sounds, this music?  Is this music worth taking your time?  Is it worth breaking your silence?  What does this piece of music do that no other piece of music (or alternative activity) can do?  Quarrel: How does this music differ from other music?  Is that difference or disagreement potentially productive of more new music?  Quantity: Is there enough of this music? Is there too much of this music?  Are the internal proportions of this music right (or wrong, in an interesting way)? Quality:  Is this music well-considered, well-felt, and well-made?  Question: Have you heard something in this music that you have not heard in other music?  Have you learned something from this music?  Do you value this music, those sounds, these times?  Quiet! Does the music articulate phenomena, sounds, that are otherwise inaudible, unknown? In composing, in throwing these sounds out,  have I made it possible for you to hear something new? Is this music an opportunity for changing our habits of listening?  Can you, did you, hear that too?

P is for Presence

P was first going to be for Passacaglia, because I like writing them and they have a profound and useful relationship to other self-contextualizing musical processes (canons and loops or delay lines, for example), but as a description of my own work, it could as well have been Ground (but not, AFAIC, Ciaconne, which is another story altogether)  which would not have made it an honest stakeholder for P in this alphabet.  I then thought that P might stand for Pattern.  This sent me on a research trip, through Thompson's On Growth and Form and Alexander's A Pattern Language and through numerous but not-tawdry-enough-to-keep-this-poor-soul-engaged mathematical accounts of Pattern.   I soon realized that I know next-to-naught about Pattern.  Pattern is a very important topic and I should learn more but someone else had better handle it, perhaps in an alphabet of their own.  And then again, P could have been for Process.  Back in the days in which the label "minimal/ist/ism" had not yet so firmly been attached by the interests that be, process music (as in Steve Reich's Music as a Gradual Process, an essay and an idea that still captures ears and imaginations)  was, along with systems music and pattern music, one of the terms of art for the reduced means and media side of the radical music.  The notion of a musical process, suggests something mechanical — one of my own works-in-progress has the title Six Simple Machines — and something that is done, in a planned, ordered, timed, and measured way, to material.  Also, we usefully distinguish between closed- and open-ended processes. But no,  with patience and systemic clarity presently out of compositional fashion, this is not the moment for an alphabet with P for Process.  So, instead, this is P for Presence: too often, says I, composers get sucked up into the attractive pull of conventional musical movement and continuity while forgetting the equally powerful potential of musical sounds to establish striking, if not unique, presences in real acoustical spaces as well as the equally real — if more elusive — spaces associated with individual memory and experience of sounds.  The act of specifying this sound, at this point in time, on this instrument or voice, in this particular space can be daunting, as if one were blindly throwing a dart in a vector space of too many dimensions and unimaginable depth.  (I suspect that Luigi Nono's electroacoustic works, for example, were progressively weighed down by near-despair at the over-abundance of possible statisfactory realizations, creating a de facto indeterminacy that would have been anathematic to a dialectical materialist like Nono.)  The challenge of timing and spacing tones or arranging voices or instruments just so, and paying attention to the resonances of sympathetic bodies or room acoustics while balancing these concerns with the interests of continuity comes damn close to a decent job description for a composer.  Presence is also about ensuring that musical work is available; it is played, heard, and perhaps an object of contemplation; it might be recorded or broadcast; it is a part of and a response to a location and individuals or a community within that location; it is of a moment, it may mark a historical moment, it may anticipate moments to come. Finally, presence is not a property of the work itself, but of my/your/his/his/our/their relationship to the work, a sometimes violent break with absence, with quiet.

 

O is for Ordinary

The radical music has often been focused on the extremes — of pitch, duration, amplitude, perception, attention, memory, from the micro, minimal and miniature to the macro, maximum, and epic — but it has also always been just as much about the familiar, the middle, the ordinary. When Stravinsky reduced his written-out dynamics to piano and forte in the Octet, he was at once pointing to older repertoire for which such a binary pair sufficed but also indicating that there was a lot more music to be found within those familiar confines.  Or this: that sudden all-white-key-dominant-something-without-a-tonic-in-earshot-chord in Cage's Water Music.   Or this: those wonderful and wonderfully disconcerting post-Boulangerie pieces of Glass: Music in Parallel Motion, Music in Contrary Motion, Music in Fifths... all the way through Another Look at Harmony.  

 

It rises.

Aside from my dips into the early music world, where an A of 415 or 466 Hz is common (and, conveniently, about a half-step down or up from 440), my A of reference has always been 440. But now, with instrumentalists-in-training in the household, we can put off no longer raising the living room piano to the 443 which is now basically standard for strings and winds in much of Europe  That's a bit less than 12 cents, but still a noticeable difference.  In general, I dislike pitch inflation of this sort, which is generally promoted as being done in the name of increased "brilliance,"  an effect I find slight and even then not in balance with the cost of extra strain in upper registers for singers or brass, but if the rest of the band or orchestra is tuning up to 443, you're more or less stuck with the increase.

One great additional practical disadvantage of this comes, of course, with existing works involving combinations of instruments and electronics or using tuned percussion.  When electronic patches can be reset for live electronics or if works made in recorded media can be recreated at the higher standard without altering tempi, okay, a lot of work, but it can be done; but other classics of electronics may not be retunable and may instead require that instrumentalists tune down to the older standard.  As for mallet percussion, the tradition was to tune the bars slightly high to the standard (say 442), which tend to float down under the heat of stage lighting), and now, I suppose, it can require an even higher tuning.  A lot of unecessary bother, AFAIC.

N is for Nature

I've been stuck in the middle of this alphabet for some days, trying to write something useful about music and nature.  Without much success, as it turns out, for the terms "nature" or "natural" seem mostly more distracting than useful.

Now, the time was when a Beethoven or an Ives could treat "nature" as a musical topic.  And whether in Beethoven's pastoral bird-song imitations or in Ives' transcendental contemplations of rocks and whatnot, we don't really buy such a distancing to the natural anymore or, likewise, a division of nature from culture and artifice.   Such a distinction hinges on a segregation of human activities from the rest of natural history that is unsustainable.  Yes, there is still a charge to be found from looking to natural phenomena for new musical resources and models, but there is no more illusion that our "acts of new music" are executed in a nature-free preserve.

In musical theory and aesthetics, the distinction of "the natural" from musical artifice has been a constant if complex background presence, for example in Rameau's fundamental bass or Schenker's "chord of nature".   In the twentieth century, we had the striking contrast between Schoenberg's offense at the notion of natural (i.e. non-tempered, just) intonation, writing in a 1934 letter to Joseph Yasser that to play in a natural  intonation was tantamount to "acting natural" in public, which Schoenberg rejected with a Apollonian self-denial and sublimation worthy of his rival Stravinsky, on the one hand, and Schoenberg's student, John Cage, on the other, who employed chance operations as a means of not imitating works of nature in its effects — animal song or stormy weather — but "imitating nature in its method of operation."   I can't help but recognize each of these models as having substantial deficits as science but also having, once, substantial appeal as impulses for making new music.

Since my teens, back in the lower Pleistocene, I have used just intonation in my music and the harmonic series (and, in many cases, a subharmonic series as well) has provided an important model for the spacing of tones, voice-leading, orchestration and, to some extent, rhythm.  In some circles, particularly among the new complexity folks, the use of just intonation or the harmonic series gets read as affirming a naively naturalist position, while others understand the whole-number world of just intonation as nothing but mystifying numerology.  While either of these views may well be held by other musicians, I don't believe that either characterizes my approach which might be described as "pragmatic" or "realist",  if you need to have a label.  This is because I've come 'round to thinking of the harmonic series and just intonation as, respectively, a point of reference and one possible — and acoustically vivid — solution to an optimization problem for pitch, timbre, and textural relationships in musical ensembles.  I hope that I am under no illusions about the aspirational quality of just intonation, as tuning is a transient activity, limited by our musical technologies, perceptual apparatus, and duration of the sample; a simple frequency ratio between tones is a target, and all of the space on either side of the target is also of potential musical utility.   Tones arranged in harmonic series-spaced configurations are useful, but so are subharmonic (or, if you like, chords in which all tones share a common overtone) or non-harmonic arrangements.  But in the end, it's simply a matter of taste: Working with voices and instruments with simple harmonic spectra, the reduced interference beating as one approaches — or these increased beating as one abandons — such targeted intervals is a concrete and sensually powerful quality and too useful musically for me to leave alone.

I am particularly influenced here by Javanese shadow theatre, in which the entire transition space of a shadow, from its sharply delineated image when the puppet is held against the screen to the blurred and increasingly amorphous shadow figure formed as the puppet moves away from the screen, is in play.  Anyone who has played central Javanese or Sundanese gamelan will recognize a similar transition in the irama system, in which changes in the density of musical events occur in counter-motion to changes in tempi, with moments of repose as tempo and density lock in ensemble clarity.   As a composer, I want to be have access to an entire universe of imagery, from total clarity to its apparent opposite,  in every parameter of music.