here and there

Flower

Carter: Boosey & Hawkes have posted an interview with noted composer and Elliott Carter scholar John Link, who has some important insight on how and why the composer developed his “late late” style. In addition, Mr. Link lives up to his name with several Carter resources:

www.elliottcarter.com/ 

www.facebook.com/chronometros

twitter.com/Chronometros

amphionfoundation.org/

#musochat: On Sunday evenings at 9 eastern, any interested party may join in a virtual gathering at twitter under “#musochat” to discuss contemporary classical music[1] and related subjects. Even if you can’t participate in the discussions in real time, the chats are available under the hashtag. Molly Sheridan has more at newmusicbox.

Quote:

This demure woman . . . declared that "making even one colored mark on a blank piece of newsprint should be an act of moral revolt." More than a revolt: an appeal for grace. All human beings were due a full accounting, but they had to ask for it. Art was a way of asking.

--Richard Powers, Prisoner's Dilemma, p54

---

[1] It happens that much of this past Sunday’s (16 Aug 15) discussion centered on what to call this thing of ours,* whether that matters, and why it probably does.

*The Sopranos reference is intentional, because another art form, filmed televisual entertainment, often presents its best work on Sunday nights and I believe that one way for us to engage with the contemporary world is to engage with other, more popular, art forms.

second place is the first loser, loser

Over at On An Overgrown Path, the always-thoughtful Bob Shingleton has a post about the current binary cultural paradigm "forces everything - including art - into the dualistic framework of 0 or 1, good or bad". (Links within quotes from Mr. Shingleton are present in the original.) This dynamic is one in which "[a] classical work is either a masterpieces or an also ran, and as a result audiences are denied permission to like unfamiliar music".

One of my missions in writing about concert music has been to try to open up the cultural space for our music, especially for new music. This kind of zero-sum cultural game does the opposite--it leaves room only for "winners", whatever that might mean.

Please read all of Mr. Shingleton's post. In it, he talks about how not every piece worth hearing has to be one that you want to listen to again and again. That kind of attitude really does open up the space for more music.

While writing this post, I was reminded of a recent post by the also-always-thoughtful Daniel Wolf, in which he writes in favor of writing the occasional occasional piece--that not every piece a composer writes need be an attempt at a chef-d'oeuvre or even a piece in the composer's "normal" style. It should go without saying, but I'm glad Mr. Wolf said it.

if i were king of the forest!

Keith Chaffee, proprietor of the fine LA culture (non-pop and pop) blog In Which Our Hero, has asked, in another forum, what you would do if you were Music Director of the Utopia Symphony. Here's my answer:

--shorter concerts and more concerts (the concert music world operates economies of scarcity when they should operate economies of abundance)

--no big name soloists unless they play unusual (and by that I almost always mean "new") repertoire

--frequent premieres; even more frequent second performances

--local composers, especially if they are unaffiliated

--talk about the music from the stage, with examples

--as a general rule, talk about unusual pieces as if they are familiar (I can almost guarantee that they all have effects that everyone has heard before) and the familiar repertoire as if it were fucked up (because it is)

--I would have the occasional concert or semi-staged version of certain operas; it can make you hear them differently, which is always good (NOTE: Keith had said he would not have these, as the are being produced by the Utopia Opera Company)

--give the strings a rest every now and then; the wind/percussion repertoire is rich and expanding

--I'm not sure what you (NOTE: a different poster had called for such explorations) mean by exploring the boundaries between concert and folk music, so I won't comment

--no film music unless the film is being projected behind the orchestra

--no fucking pops; I mean it

EDIT: The indispensable Lisa Hirsch programs the Utopia Opera Company here. 

Composers Circle

Every day, Composers Circle showcases a different composer. Today (30 Sep 2013), I am the showcased composer. I appreciate the opportunity provided by this site.

But the real reason I'm drawing this attention to the site is to let you know that you can hear a piece by a different composer every day. What a great way to cover part of the waterfront of today's composers. In addition to the composer of the day, all of the pages are archived.

what stays with me: john cage

John Cage entered into silence twenty years ago today. Allan Kozinn of The New York Times has a fine appreciation here. My own take on 4'33" is here.

The picture above is from this excellent Cage resource.

Tough Times

Tallahssee, Florida (June 19, 2011) -- The City Council of Tallahssee (FL) voted yesterday to attempt to balance the city's budget by removing the third "a" from the city's name. A council spokesperson said that there were numerous attempts to save the letter, but to no avail. Church leaders were happy, saying they had "never liked [the letter] in combination with the two letters after it". The change was effective immediately, but critics say most of the savings were spent changing of the books in local libraries.

Florda Governor Rick Scott, speaking in Tallahssee, said he was following the capital city's lead, and would ask the Legislature to return to Tallahssee for a special session to consider removing the "i" from the state's name. Citing the fact that many people don't pronounce the "i" anyway, the Governor also said that the new name would help foster the populist image the multi-millionaire former health care executive spent 70 million dollars in the campaign to build: "I'm a two-syllable kind of guy, and Florda will be a two-syllable state as long as I am Governor."


(h/t to Alex Ross)

Connection

Kenneth Woods wrote a marvelous post on certain passages in Gustav Mahler that don’t seem to “advance the plot”, giving some listeners the idea that Mahler may have needed an editor. Woods’ chief example is the march music (ca. six minutes long) that separates the two songs that make up “Der Abschied” (The Farewell), the last movement of Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth).

In purely musical terms, we are in the same place at the end of this march as at the beginning. It starts in a minor then quickly moves to c minor, which in Mahler’s style isn’t a distant movement. When the march has ended and the second part of the movement begins, we get the same low, soft tam-tam note we got at the beginning of the movement. We haven’t gone anywhere! But, as Woods points out so eloquently, “some profound transformations have occurred. We feel changed by what we have experienced. If I could articulate what that change is, we wouldn’t need Mahler.”

Woods discusses this kind of discursive music as just one of Mahler’s many narrative strategies, but it put me in mind of a very different kind of music, one that uses this transformative discursion/stasis as its very essence.

As an undergraduate I fell under the spell of what was then the very new and quickly developing world of minimalism. My first exposure to contemporary classical music had been the experimental music of composers like Stockhausen, Cage, and Lucas Foss (I heard his For 24 Winds at a concert in the summer of 1971 and was immediately hooked on the soundworld of the piece, which I haven’t heard since). A few years later I heard the famous first recording of Terry Riley’s In C and was immediately hooked. I loved the way it sounded and the way it moved, or didn’t move. It’s a soundworld thoroughly imagined, realized, and inhabited, and what more can we want from music?

I soon got my ears on all the minimalism I could find, which was quite a bit, and was most taken with Steve Reich, in particular his music up through Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices, and Organ. This music embodies the Mahlerian discursions Woods writes so tellingly about, with its delicate balance between process (the setting in motion of ideas and allowing them to play out) and discovery (the in-performance highlighting of the “resulting patterns” that occur as the phasing and other processes play out).

At the end of such pieces (as at the end of the march in “Der Abschied”) we find we haven’y gone anywhere in the strictest musical sense, but we have been moved and changed.

Asbestos

The great Barbara O'Brien has asked me to post a link to a blog she writes on asbestos litigation, which I'm haapy to do. The link is located in the "Links and Resources" section to the left. Some time soon, Barbara will post here about the relationship between these issues and the arts. I look forward to being able to share that with you.

Festival Days

Most new music festivals hosted by colleges and universities follow (roughly) this format. A call for scores is issued, usually listing an "honored guest composer" and/or a featured guest ensemble. A committee sorts through the scores sent in by composers and builds a program. The styles represented will most likely reflect the biases of the committee members (this can be avoided, but that's for another post), and composers will self-deselect if those biases are well-known.

The pieces chosen by the selection committe are then parceled out to faculty and student performers for preparation. At a festival at a major school, there can be as many as eight concerts in as few as three days. In situations like this, the performers feel harried and put-upon, and it shows in their performances. The audience can't pay attention the way they normally would; it's just too much in too little time. The composers are not well-served, either, because they may not get quite the performance they thought they would, and they find it difficult to make connections with like-minded composers because the music is so hard to hear, because of the forced-march schedule.

The organizers of this year's New Music Festival at Western Illinois University, located in Macomb, took a different approach to festival programming. In the past (this was WIU's 24th annual Festival), the Festival was programmed with a Call and a guest composer. One crucial difference is that it was much smaller, with three concerts in two days, so fatigue was not an issue. This year, however, each WIU faculty composer (James Caldwell, Paul Paccione, and James Romig) invited a colleague (Benjamin Broening, Jeff Herriott, and myself) to attend.

In addition to having at least one piece performed on each of two evening concerts, each visiting composer gave a talk on his music to expnaded classes. Finally, an afternoon concert of student compositions was followed by a discussion of these pieces amongst all of the composers. I found the format of the Festival to be extremely interesting, as I got to hear two works by composers whose music was new to me or whose music I had not heard in concert before. Two pieces instead of one was definitely multiplication instead of addition.

I must also comment on the very high level of performances, by both faculty and WIU students. My pieces (premieres of The River Flowing Through Me [Istvan Szabό, viola], American Song [John Mindeman, trombone], and Night Music [Michael Ericson, oboe]) were given fiercely committed, sympathetic, and expressive performances. I really don't know how they could have been better.

This was a very valuable experience for me, and I urge festival organizers around the musical world to consider the WIU model for their events.

On Criticism

My friend Leonard Pierce has written a thoughtful post on what it means to be a critic and why criticism has value, even in an age of thumbing ratings and aggregated scores. An excerpt:

Criticism can and should sometimes be a painful thing, in the same way that pain calls attention to something amiss in the body.  But it should never be about robbing people of the joy of art.  The role of the critic is to examine art closely, to see what it’s made of whether wondrous, fraudulent, or nothing at all.  Critics should never judge people by how they react to art. 

Please read the whole thing here.

On Babbitt

I never met Milton Babbitt, who died this past Saturday at 94, nor have I heard many of his works in concert,but his impact on my work was direct nonetheless.

Bill Hibbard, my teacher at Iowa, was a fan of Babbitt's music and had studied it extensively. When looking over a passage in a piece I was working on at the time (I don't remember what it was, what it was scored for, or even if I ever finished it), Dr. Hibbard seemed to sense that I was trying to do something with register (the high/low placement of notes in musical space) that I didn't have the experience or means of doing. Over the course of that lesson (which ran long) he decribed in extraordinary detail how Babbitt had dealt with registral issues in a few measure of Composition for Four Instruments (1948).

Part of the beauty of Hibbard's teaching was that he did not require or even expect me to use the specific techniques he or Babbitt or any other composer used. He wanted me to see how it's possible to use any aspect of sound to create expressive music. It's clear to me that he himself had learned that from his study of Babbitt's music.

And part of the beauty of Babbitt's music (and his writings and his work with young composers of many stylistic stripes), for this then-young composer anyway, was how it seemed to show that there are many paths to an individual musical voice.

*     *     *     *     *

Phil Freeman, proprietor of Burning Ambulance, asked me to respond to a quote from Babbitt's most notorious article. My response is here.

Top 10 Fever

Lisa Hirsch has called New York Times concert music critic Anthony Tommasini’s Top 10 Greatest Composers of (Almost) All Time project a “fool’s errand”. I’m inclined to agree, especially when I remember that the Fool is often the wisest character in the drama. The internet was invented just so that people could make lists like this; the more impossible, the more foolish, the better.

I think there can be a good deal of value to this particular exercise, as long as one keeps it in perspective, as I think Mr. Tommasini is doing. The value comes in having the conversation—after all, getting concert music back in the cultural conversation is one of the reasons many of us blog in the first place. The comments sections under each of the entries in the series are lively and engaging. People are talking.

Mr. Tommasini’s posts are (I can say “are” with confidence, because he has said as much himself) designed to expose people to composers they may not be familiar with, to try to explain why certain composers are held in the esteem they are (and the limits of that esteem), and to get listeners to think about why they enjoy the music they do. It’s this last that’s inspired me to make my own list—a list of the ten most-cited reasons for declaring a composer “great”. My criteria for making this meta-list are simple: they are criteria I’ve read or heard and one I’ve thought of myself. The rationale behind the ranking of the criteria is simple. The ones that interest me more are higher than the ones that don’t mean much to me. Here they are, in ascending order, to heighten the suspense:

10. Popularity. Just because a lot of people like a composer, it doesn’t mean they are really good. Of course, they might like the composer because the music is good, but they might also like the music because it reminds them of something that happened to them once, or it may just make them feel good about themselves.

9. Personal Preference. The best composers are the ones I like the most. Duh. Naturally, this whole process involves a certain (ok, large) amount of subjectivity, but this criterion is totally subjective, and shows an inability on the part of the list-maker to get outside himself, and if the list-maker cannot name his or her criteria, this is probably it (combined in #7).

8. Durability. The Test of Time! My problem with this one is that it decisively privileges the past over the present. I understand why Mr. Tommasini held living composers out of the running for his list, what with the need for critical distance and everything, but it really does perpetuate the idea that the past is always better. Come on, T-Dog, give it a shot! You’ve heard a tremendous amount of new music. Tell us what you think might make it. (The flip side of this [privileging the relatively recent past over the more distant past by making Late Baroque the earliest music allowed] is just as bad. Monteverdi rules!)

7. Received Wisdom/Consensus. This is really just a more educated version of popularity, isn’t it? The peer pressure that exists in elite opinion-making and scholarship is very powerful, and I think that comes into play when writers say “Well of course, X, Y, and Z are the top three. The discussion is about who comes next.”

6. Influence. Now we’re getting close to talking about music. I think using influence as a criteria for greatness appeals more to composers than to others. It’s an important factor in discussing a composer, and goes a long way towards making someone a “composer’s composer”, but it’s still a bit outside of “purely” musical considerations.

5. Variety. This is about how many different “voices” a composer has over the course of his or her career. Not necessarily style changes, but they certainly count. Some listeners (I’m including everybody in the music’s community of interest in this) will value how consistent a composer remains throughout the career, of course, but others admire a composer who changes manner or style more than once over the course of a creative life, yet the individual voice of that composer still comes through.

4. Innovation/Originality. This one can be slippery, as some listeners love a composer whose work seems to change the wider musical world with new techniques, new textures, new harmonies, forms, etc. Others like composers whose work brings to fulfillment all of the ideas in the air during the composer’s career. Originality for its own sake (this gets mentioned a lot, but I don’t know of any examples) would seem empty, but it’s hard to overrate hearing something we’ve never heard before.

3. Masterwork Critical Mass (M/C/M). When a composer has x number of works in the conversation for the best example of y number of genres, they are probably pretty great. In other words, if you’ve written (for instance) two string quartets that are at the top of the list, a symphony or two with the same reputation, an opera, songcycle, etc., you’re doing very well for yourself.

1. Tie! Breadth and Depth. By breadth I mean a mastery of a wide variety of media and genre, This goes beyond M/C/M in that the composer under discussion has important/major/great works in a fairly large number of genres. Depth appears when a composer has created an important body of works in a single genre, and if they’ve done that in more than one genre, they’re on a fast track to greatness.

Bonus Track: My favorite note is the F natural above middle C. My love for this sublime frequency (349.2Hz, midi key 65, F4, f’) may have grown from its being the first note I could really make sound good on trombone. So, anybody who can hit that note hard, really rock that shit, is aces in my book.

Burning Ambulance 3

The third issue of Burning Ambulance, a journal founded and edited by Phil Freeman, and dedicated to long-form journalism about a wide variety of popular and non-popular topics, is now available.

For the new issue Phil asked me to write an article about what it's like to write concert music, because the magazine's core audience has a good feel for what it's like to put together a rock or jazz song, but may not be familiar with how the long-hairs do it. "Facing a Blank" is the result of his request.

Burning Ambulance is available in print-on-demand form ($10) and as a downloadable file with color art ($5).

Carter 102

Today is Elliott Carter's 102nd birthday. Readers of this blog are acquainted with my abiding interest in this composer and his music. On the occasion of his 100th birthday I posted a series of short notes on the pieces that have meant the most to me over the years, beginning here. Other posts on Carter, including links to CD reviews, can be found here.

For today, I leave it to Carter himself with a performance of Tintinnabulation (2009), for percussion ensemble, performed here by the New Jersey Percussion Ensemble, under the direction of Peter Jarvis:

Meme!

Ann Powers commemorates the availability of The Beatles on iTunes by listing her 15 favorite tracks by the Liverpudlians. Alex Ross responds with his own list, and thus a meme is born. Here are my 15 favorite Beatles tracks, as least as of right now:

15. "Back in the USSR" (The Beatles). Beach Boys-influenced rock 'n' roll, with clever and darkly ironic lyrics.

14. "All You Need is Love" (Magical Mystery Tour). With its quotations and trippy, layered texture, this prescriptive anthem is almost a pop Hymnen.

13. "Getting Better" (Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band). The texture thins for most of the last verse of this plea for undertanding from a guy who's trying to change. After a list of transgressions, the band (led by Paul McCartney's driving bass) storms back in, arguing for redemption.

12. "For No One" (Revolver). Intense emotion and rigorous technique. Sounds like art to me.

11.. "I'm Down" (Past Masters, Vol, 1). Old school rock 'n' roll screamer, which McCartney does almost as well as John Lennon in

10. "Rock and Roll Music" (Beatles for Sale).

9. "Yes It Is" (Past Masters, Vol, 1). Gorgeous vocal harmonies in a song about the inability to move on.

8. "Julia" (The Beatles). Simple, direct, haunting.

7. "A Hard Day's Night" (A Hard Day's Night). As Alex said, there's that chord. Not only that, but an energetic song about being out of energy.

6. "Let It Be" (Let It Be). This entire project has been criticized for overproduction, but I really dig the prominent roles given to three very dixtinct keyboards. Make sure hear this version, because in some versions the fine guitar solos are buried in the mix.

5. "Help!" (Help!). Rounding out the trio of movie themes with Lennon's call for assistance.

4. "Something" (Abbey Road). It's always seemed to me that neither Lennon nor McCartney were half the songwriter alone as they were together. On the other hand, George Harrison.

3. "I Don't Want to Spoil the Party" (Beatles for Sale). I've always loved this song; can't give a rational defense. Note, however, the wonderful vocal harmonies.

2. "She Loves You" (Past Masters, Vol, 1). An ebullient expression of pure joy. Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!

1. "Ticket to Ride" (Help!). The percussionist in a musical organization is often the best musician therein. Ringo Starr makes his case herein. Note the different fills in front of the last two occurances of the tagline ("And she don't care") as well as how he recomposes the groove behind different verses. Also, again, the vocal harmonies.

Feel free to post your own lists in the comments (or links, if you have already posted somewhere else). Better still, some commentary on why The Beatles don't deserve the attentio would be very interesting.

Elegy

I've updated the Works page to include a piece I finished this weekend, an elegy for my Dad (who passed away this summer after a lengthy illness) called What stays with me IV: for W. E. Hicken. It's scored for bass clarinet, bass trombone, cello, and timpani. I like to think that he would have liked it, and I know he would have been amused that I tried to make an ensemble as deep as his voice.

P-P-Pages

Lisa Hirsch kindly points out that Blogger has added a feature that allows the publication of permanent pages (henceforth known as "përmapages") as part of blogs. These përmapages can contain unchanging or infrequently changing material which would, if they were as regular blog posts eventually disappear down the page into the webby mist. Lisa has posted a page recapitulating her recent series on publicity basics--something many of us will be referring to more than once.

Links to any përmapages I post will be listed in tabs across the top of the home page under the header. The first is a sinple list of my compositions. If you are interested in obtaining scores of any of these pieces, please contact me to make arrangements.

I'll post more pages as I think of appropriate material.

Mirrors and Lamps

A. C. Douglas says composers should post this quote from Schoenberg above their desks:

There is still plenty of good music to be written in C Major.

ACD includes this admonition in a post whose central point (read it for yourself, of course) that composers should be more concerned with writing the most substantial music they can, and not be concerned about being (or finding) the Next Big Thing. His point isn't, I don't think, that composers should write tonal music, but that they should be open to everything that is of musical value.

Most composers I know and that I know of aren't looking for (or to be) the Next Big Thing. Many are looking for a Next Big Idea, but I can't see anything wrong with that,) What most composers are looking for is a way to find their voice, to find a way to say in music what they want to say. A more relevant Schoenberg quote may be this:

Once, in the army, I was asked if I was really the composer Arnold Schoenberg. 'Somebody had to be,' I said, 'and nobody else wanted to, so I took it on, myself.

My personal response to Schoenberg's  C Major comment is this: no shit. Really, if anybody despairs of hearing new tonal music they aren't looking very hard, or they expect it to be delivered to them automatically. The vast majority of composers, in and out of the academy, write tonal music of some kind or another. They always have and they always will. It's easy to find, even if it doesn't get the most publicity, even though it usually does. You can't demand that the public face of the music world to offer a reflection of your tastes or that the music press feature music that isn't pursuing new ideas. It doesn't work that way in music, or in any other field of human endeavor.

Art is a lamp that sheds light on our lives; it is not a mirror offering us a flattering reflection.

Here endeth the lesson.

Prize Possession

I’ve read Greg Sandow’s recent series1 of posts on the Pulitzer Prize in Music with a great deal of interest and no small incredulity2, and I am in complete agreement with Greg about one thing: the Prize process as it exists undoubtedly privileges concert music over other kinds of American music. Maybe you don’t care about the Prize at all but maybe you do kind of care about what the bias in the Prize process is and what it means.3

Greg points out how the language in the Prize guidelines reflects how composers and others involved in concert music think, to the exclusion of how people involved in other manifestations of music think about their artifacts. Specifically, the guidelines refer to “performances” and release dates of recordings. Submission of a score in support of a nomination is optional.

I think Greg overstates how the guidelines are biased towards concert music—you could change a word here and there and there would be no bias. I think his larger point, that the structure of the Pulitzer Prize is biased towards concert music, is manifest more in its administration than in its guidelines, in who does the judging. (I think Greg’s nomination of Greil Marcus as a judge would, if it came to pass, make his idea of a ban on Prizes to concert music unnecessary.)

All of this led me to ask my son, who has a couple of degrees in American Studies, what he though of all of this. He answered, without hesitation, that “popular music and classical4 music should be treated as entirely different artforms”. I don’t know that I would completely agree with that, but the more I think about it the more it makes sense. On the issue under immediate discussion, it would be easy to administer separate Pulitzer Prizes in popular music and non-popular music. The guidelines could refer to release dates vs. premiere dates, remove instrumentation and length requirements for popular music, etc.

But what about the bigger issue? Are popular and non-popular/concert music different artforms? They share an aesthetic medium (sound/silence, like fiction and poetry share words) so there’s no brick wall between them. But, as Greg points out, there are significant differences in how they are made and in how they are distributed.

What are some of the implications of thinking of them as different artforms? Can these differences be exploited to the benefit of everybody? I think it's worth talking about.

__________________________________________________
1. The link is to the last of the series, which includes links to the first two posts.
2. How is making concert music ineligible for the Prize supposed to help it? Maybe we should be even more helpful and ban the performance of concert music for a similar period.
3. I’m pretty sure I don’t care about the Prize beyond noting who wins every year. As to the bias, read on.
4. Hey, it’s concert music, son; read my damn blog!

Picky

Tim Mangan of the Orange County Register lists ten recordings of works that serve as a newby's introduction to musical Modernism. It's a fine list, and I won't spoil it for you by reprinting it here.

In a his comment on a piece that interpolates sketches from a 19th century composer's music with the 20th century composer's original music, Mr. Mangan describes the original music as "atonal but exquisitely so". This is really picky, I know, but I wish he had not phrased it that way, unless of course he generally finds atonality less than exquisite. (The rest of the article doesn't read that way.)

I would rather have seen "exquisitely atonal" or "atonal, and exquisitely so". Again, I'm being picky, but I think it's better if we don't use negatively charged language in our attempts to promote our music.

[Edited on 8 Mar 14 to fix a typo.]