Renewable Music

Summer Music

2009-07-14T17:40:00.006+02:00

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

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

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

Forward Music Ltd.?

2009-07-14T16:55:00.002+02:00

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

Periodically on Paper

2009-07-12T15:35:00.007+02:00

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

English:

Computer Music Journal.

Contemporary Music Review.

ex tempore.

Journal of New Music Research.

Leonardo Music Journal.

Musikworks.

The Open Space Magazine.

Organized Sound.

Perspectives of New Music.

Search: Journal for New Music and Culture

French:

Circuit: Musiques Contemporaines

Revue & Corrigée

German:

MusikTexte.

Neue Zeitschrift für Musik.

Positionen.

The Radical Music: Fragments of a Manifesto

2009-07-12T12:26:00.002+02:00

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

*****

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

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

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

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

*****

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

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

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

*****

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

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

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

Break, subvert, or invert cause and effect.

*****

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

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

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

*****

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

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

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

*****

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

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

*****

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

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

(2007, revised 2009)

Just an Old-Fashioned Melody

2009-07-09T22:49:00.002+02:00

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

Stand and Deliver!

2009-07-08T15:25:00.004+02:00

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

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

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

The Fermata

2009-07-06T18:02:00.005+02:00

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

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

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

More free scores

2009-07-05T23:13:00.002+02:00

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

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

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

Henry Brant as composer and orchestrator for films

2009-07-03T15:00:00.007+02:00

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

First, his collaborations as orchestrator:

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

for Aaron Copland: The City (1939)

for George Antheil: The Scoundrel (1935)

for Marc Blitzstein: at least two films.

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

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

for Gordon Parks: The Learning Tree (1970)

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

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

Billiard balls made of cellulose nitrate would occasionally explode on contact

2009-07-03T14:31:00.000+02:00

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

Reboot

2009-07-02T23:56:00.003+02:00

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

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

Along the river

2009-06-28T11:58:00.003+02:00

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

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

Copy that

2009-06-26T08:11:00.002+02:00

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

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

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

Morton Feldman, "Piece" (1950)

2009-06-24T22:09:00.001+02:00

Landmarks (41)

2009-06-23T20:35:00.003+02:00

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

Listening for the day

2009-06-20T15:13:00.002+02:00

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

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

Losing the game

2009-06-20T03:06:00.001+02:00

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

Brant on Orchestration

2009-06-20T00:59:00.003+02:00

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

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

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

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

Have Windmill, Will Tilt

2009-06-18T20:37:00.003+02:00

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

Groupwork

2009-06-16T15:28:00.004+02:00

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

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

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

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

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

_____

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

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

The Unbearable Languidness of Institutions

2009-06-15T14:24:00.005+02:00

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

*****

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

*****

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

*****

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

*****

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

_____

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

Admission, granted

2009-06-14T15:54:00.009+02:00

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

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

_____

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

Genre Trouble

2009-06-12T16:02:00.003+02:00

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

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

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

Enduring Optimism

2009-06-10T17:28:00.004+02:00

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

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

Vérités et Mensonges

2009-06-07T02:49:00.007+02:00

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

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

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