Funny Place Names: Seattle

I was just in the Seattle area for a chamber music festival. The (musical) highlight of the trip was getting a top-notch reading of a string quartet I wrote in June. It's entitled Drapery Studies and comes in two movements (one slow, one fast). The "conceit" for the set was, as the title indicates, borrowed from the visual arts. For those who don't wander into art museums all that much, drapery studies are practice works used to hone fabric rendering skills. They are primarily technical exercises, but I was drawn to something else about the setup: a surface that covers an unseen skeleton. The contours of the cloth suggest what is underneath it, but they don't give a perfectly clear picture. The surface can bunch up in places or cast confusing light. It's all you have to judge what goes on underneath, but it is an independent entity which can easily work against your efforts.

I'm happy to say that the work was well-received by the audience at the reading (at least by the people who decided to talk to me afterwards ;) ). Even though I gave them the same "abstract" explanation of the music that I put in here, they seemed to be responding mainly to the sensual aspects of the music, which is definitely my preference. I'm supposed to get a recording back in the not-too-distant future. Assuming it turned out alright, I'll try to get it up in a public place.

Some other assorted highlights from the trip:

• A sympathetic Satie biography by someone named Rollo (what would Charles Ives think?).
• On the flight out, I sat next to a short, neat, Southern pilot from the airline. After I told him where I was from, he informed me that Boston was the "rudest" city he'd ever been to.
• Indeed, whenever I get out of the Northeast, I'm surprised and confused at how goshdarn polite everyone is.
• Seattle is built on a hill, which is really fun to walk around when you're carrying two heavy bags, one of them on wheels. Also, is it me or does every city on the west coast have a mountain as part of its skyline?
• Hippie girl at the bus stop reading up on The Secret Teachings of Plants.
• Port Townsend, WA (where the festival was) is full of a lot of reclaimed buildings. The downtown is all converted from Victorian houses. One place was up on the second floor of a building around a winding hallway. One pizza place was in two small rooms on two different floors (take out downstairs, sit down upstairs). If you're ordering in, food comes up by way of dumb waiter.
• The local state park was formerly a fort. Most of its buildings were "temporary" structures put up at the end of WWII. They all come from similar Colonial-ish designs, so the complex felt a little like a housing development. Old bunkers set into the hills on the coastline are slowly getting overtaken by the foliage.
  
• Middle-aged woman who hugged me after I closed my open mike set at a local bar with "Help Me" (don't worry, I didn't try to sing it).
• The Experience Music Project, which is a church where they worship rock music. They even have relics. However, instead of a piece of the true cross, they proudly display a piece of a guitar that Hendrix smashed. Really shows how personality and style are a major part of the music.
• There I also got to see my first Trimpin piece. Imagine a tornado of guitars blowing through the main atrium of a building. Some of the guitars are played by MIDI-controlled robots. Put on headphones and hear a medley of songs in different styles. The visual component was great (you can see all the guitars getting played), but I was a bit underwhelmed by the musical experience. I think it would've been more impressive if you didn't have to put on headphones to hear it, so there was a direct connection between the visual and the aural.
• Taking the red-eye back, which disturbed both my sleep cycle and my sense of time! (wait a minute...)

With all that said, I'm through my "R&D" period of writing just piano music. Right now I'm getting into a piece for string orchestra to give me a large ensemble piece for grad school apps. How I look forward to those...

Charlemagne Palestine in Boston

Monday night was the kick-off concert for NEC's SICPP week. Stephen Drury presented Morton Feldman's Palais de Mari, followed by Charlemagne Palestine presenting his own Golden Mean. Drury's playing was very lovely. Though score for the piece is dry on dynamic markings (except for the initial ppp and some cryptic decrescendos), he tastefully added swells during some moments. Rather than evoke a Romantic sentimentality, it suggested more a shifting luminosity, the sun emerging from beneath clouds and casting a more golden light on the scene.

He really captured the piece's sense of vertical time. Listening to it is like exploring ancient ruins. One's thoughts are caught between the present and an imagined past. Time seems to bend accordingly. When you finally leave the area you feel as if you were there for only a brief moment (and accordingly, are humbled by that reality).

Though I hardly object to the number of Feldman recordings that are available, this recital was a reminder that the concert hall is really the best place to hear his music. The physical reality of the sounds permeating through space is an essential part of it. I don't mean this in a Cagean sense of taking pleasure in sounds as they are, but that this movement seems an important part of the piece's conception and orchestration. Drury evenly balanced its experimentalism with a sense of its connection to the classical tradition.

Palestine's set was begun with a little more fanfare. He was no doubt responsible for the giant crowd that was there (people had to stand in the aisles). At the beginning of the night, Drury thanked him for the best audience he's ever had. Note to hipster-seeking performers: an interview in the Dig is a sure way to round them up.

Everything you've heard about his playing style is true. Yes he has stuffed animals all around the pianos, yes he's a flamboyant dresser, yes he drinks cognac while playing. Despite his anti-pretentious habits, I was struck by his professionalism when setting up his mise-en-scène. He placed all the animals very quickly and intently.

He became more relaxed once his performance began. He opened with a few minutes of remarks, talking about the varying reception he's gotten over the years, definitely framing himself as an enfant terrible. He said he was glad to see that there was a new generation who was open to his way of hearing sounds. He talked a little about how his relationship with Feldman (the similarities end with them both being Russian Jews from Brooklyn), and made the usual comment about how much Feldman's personality differed from his music. This struck the audience as a joke, to which a surprised Palestine explained that he was just stating the facts.

He began playing by creating a drone by running a finger around one of his glasses. After a little, he sang along with it (he explained beforehand that he always got into a trance state before playing). Golden Mean begins as a motoric unison (using two pianos) and expands to a variety of other similarly hammered out sounds.

His interest seemed to be not in the fundamental pitches, but in the elusive harmonies found in the farther reaches of the overtone series. He didn't always play both pianos at the same time, though their sustain pedals were weighted down so they would always resonate. At a few points, Palestine sang in a modal fashion over the pianos, usually vocalises or what sounded like Hebrew. He cried "sound is sound!" a number of times throughout.

Palestine seems very concerned with creating a spiritual music. I think he would agree with Feldman and say that sound is his only deity, but they definitely have different notions of what that deity is. Palestine's music, despite its flirtations with Eastern thought, struck me as being very animist. All his hammering seemed like it was trying to tap the same energy reached by the man-animal deities that surrounded the pianos.

The audience's reaction to him was raging, loud and effusive (hipsters being hipsters, I suspect his swashbuckling stage manner and theatricality, with its dips into childhood imagery, had a lot to do with their enthusiasm). He shouted "sound is sound!" a few more times as he paced the stage, closing the show.

SICPP 2006

Via Sequenza21, I hear that NEC's annual new music for piano festival is going on next week. The concerts last year (featuring music of Rzewski) were terrific. I can only assume that this year's will be at a similar level. The first night looks like a knock-out, featuring neo-animist/minimalist Charlemagne Palestine performing his own music. His appearances were supposed to be getting increasingly rare, so the fact that he's appearing in a conservative enclave like Boston is pretty astonishing. On the same night, Stephen Drury is going to be playing Feldman's Palais de Mari. I can't wait to hear that one live. The full schedule for the week is up on NEC's online calendar.

Out of Context?

Just how do advertisers find the music that accompanies their work? Recently, I've been witness to "Mack the Knife" accompanying a shrimp promotion and "I Think I Need a New Heart" being used to hawk dog food. I can only imagine the conniptions that Brecht and Weill are going through, but I hope at least that Stephin Merritt's dog will never go hungry again.

These recontextualizations make me wonder how much of a piece's meaning is defined by its use. The "True Crime Stories!" (mit alienation effect) angle of "Mack the Knife" was thrown away to focus on the music's swinging sound. Really, any piece with a swing and added 6 chords would've worked. My initial reaction to the ad was "How can they not get it?!?!" Still, I can't help but be amused by the song's slippery history: agitprop to jazz standard to memory of a jazz standard. For all we know, an industrious sampler has isolated some fragment of a recording of the tune and is using it to jumpstart a new genre of dance music (it's happened before).

As performers and listeners, we are responsible for bringing the notated music back to life with each performance. By participating in this process, are we not entitled to a few small acts of re-creation along the way?

Songlines

In theory, at least, the whole of Australia could be read as a musical score. There was hardly a rock or creek in the country that could not or had not been sung. One should perhaps visualise the Songlines as a spaghetti of Illiads and Odysseys, writhing this way and that, in which every 'episode' was readable in terms of geology.

...

It was one thing to persuade a surveyor that a heap of boulders were the eggs of the Rainbow Snake, or a lump of reddish sandstone was the liver of a speared kangaroo. It was something else to convince him that a featureless stretch of gravel was the musical equivalent of Beethoven's Opus 111.

By singing the world into existence, he said, the Ancestors had been poets in the original sense of poesis, meaning 'creation'. No Aboriginal could conceive that the created world was in any way imperfect. His religious life had a single aim: to keep the land the way it was and should be. The man who went 'Walkabout' was making a ritual journey. He trod in the footprints of his Ancestor. He sang the Ancestor's stanzas without changing a word or note — and so recreated the Creation.

Bruce Chatwin, Songlines.

When will Dr. Thorpe write "Your Composer Sucks?"

Mmmm, levity. Another reminder from SA to never take anything too seriously.

Winding Down

Here I am, another blogger reemerging after the end-of-semester wrap-up. Diehard readers will be glad to know that I managed to sneak in a little extracurricular musical analysis between finals. I'd been listening on and off to William Duckworth's Time Curve Preludes for a little while now, but only recently got a chance to check out the score. In case you're not familiar with the music, they're tightly written piano pieces that rarely cross over the three minute mark. On the surface they sound minimalist, but they do not dramatize process in the same way early works by Reich and Glass do. Duckworth's music is usually classified as "postminimalist."

As the Wiki entry indicates, one of the major differences between minimalism and postminimalism is how they interface with other styles. Echoes of popular music are all over Reich and Glass, but their personal styles dominate the texture. No one's going to mistake any of Duckworth's preludes for a genuine bluegrass piece or a snippet of North Indian classical, but when other styles poke their heads out, they're allowed to stick out. The reason he can do this is because of another major difference between minimalism and postminimalism: how the structure relates to the materials.

Think about the iconic riff of Piano Phase. As it slides again itself, new harmonies and melodies emerge. Reich didn't choose any old motive. He wrote one that would react well to the phase process. The structure and materials are "codependent" in a way. Throw any old diatonic motive into the same format and the results won't be nearly as good.

Duckworth's structures are (to a degree) indifferent to the musical material. They can be seen as processes, but they operate more on durations and phrase lengths than harmony and melody (the latter two being strong indicators of style). For a moment, let's say we're not talking about music, we're talking about a special kind of poetry written using a process. Our "pre-compositional material" will be a sentence, which we'll write down on a piece of scratch paper (so we mangle it readily along the way). We then follow these steps:

1. Copy out what's on the scratch paper
   
2. Cross off the first word on the scratch paper
3. Repeat steps 1 & 2 until all the words on the scratch paper are crossed off

So if our germinal sentence is "My dog has fleas," our "poem" is "My dog has fleas dog has fleas has fleas fleas." Replace words with measures of music, and you've got the basic backbone for some of the Time Curve Preludes. The "sentence" for Prelude II looks like this:



The barlines break it down cleanly into four parts, with two of the parts being slight variations of the other two. The process for the prelude cuts down the material one beat at a time, allowing it to stretch out over a couple minutes. The poem we wrote doesn't obscure the process that created it, but the repetitions embedded in this musical material do. While one bar is getting chopped up, you hear it seemingly intact just a few seconds later. Only at the very end, when the last bar is getting taken apart, does the process become more apparent.

While the right hand works on this modal figure, the left hand plays a tala-ish accompaniment: a 20-beat pattern on Cs (similarly divided into two equal halves that are only slightly different from each other). This pattern is constant throughout the piece, lending interesting rhythmic counterpoint to the right hand's gradually diminishing phrases. The two hands finish together at only two points: after the first statement of both 20-beat figures and at the end of the prelude.

Nonken Interview

Theater blogger George Hunka has an interview up with pianist Marilyn Nonken. She's the one who did the Mode recording of Triadic Memories. I first came in contact with her playing when I heard a recording she did of a shortish Babbitt piece. She possesses the seemingly rare skill of being able to make his music poetic. The interview covers how she thinks about physically presenting herself when playing in order to make her performances more compelling. Good stuff.

Recent Reading

I think it's just a coincidence that I read Sexual Personae (Camille Paglia) and Opera, or the Undoing of Women (Catherine Clément) at the same time, but they ended up pairing very well together. Both of them discuss the sexual forces that motivate art (the art itself and its creation). They both share the pretense that they are stepping back and taking a broader look at the work they are considering than most other commentators. Clément sees misogyny from her vantage point. Lots of it. Paglia finds misogyny, but also transvestism, polyamory, vampirism, and an assortment of other behaviors that you probably don't discuss in most lit. surveys or music history classes.

To Clément, art is more or less a pissing ground for bitter, insecure men. Paglia sees a battleground for the irrational forces that society was meant to guard against. For her, misogyny is a fact of life. She isn't rushing to get the bumper stickers on her car, but she states that it's basically the reason Western civilization and culture exists. If women were in charge, we'd still be living in grass huts.

In case you haven't guessed, I found Paglia's arguments more compelling. They weren't always the most well-documented (many of her explanations boiled down to "because I'm Italian"), but when measured against my own experiences in and outside of art, they made the most sense. Clément seemed to be the truly embittered one, interminably pissed off that the operas she loved as a child turned out to mean more than she thought they did.

Perhaps less contentious ground was covered in Music Downtown, Kyle Gann's collected criticism from the Village Voice. Danny Felsenfeld did a thorough write-up for NewMusicBox on why unabashedly subjective criticism is a Good Thing, so I don't need to repeat what he already said so well. I only wanted to comment on one of the book's recurring topics. "Imagism" is Kyle's term for music that presents sonic images that stick into the listener's memory. It is a device not tied to a particular aesthetic movement: Fate knocking at the door of Beethoven's Fifth, the pure G major triads that occasionally surface in the "Thoreau" mvt. of the Concord Sonata, Stravinsky's instrumentation for the cadenzas in his Concerto for Piano and Winds (he doesn't recognize Debussy or Ligeti for their image-making abilities, but that's one feature of their music that's always stuck in my mind). Part of his presentation of the idea is that images help listeners immensely in making their way through a piece and that they're sorely lacking from Uptown music.

Feldman is cited as a preeminent "imagist," but in the process, Kyle makes an odd injunction of his Jewishness: "Within white culture, perhaps only a Jewish composer could have pulled off such a feat [reintroducing images to music]; not a hyperrationalist Jew like Babbitt, but a Talmudic mystic with respect for the unutterable" (263). Though Jews are "overrepresented" in music, Jews are less present in the visual arts. Kyle says that Christianity banished pagan images from its practices, though the stereotype of churches in my mind includes stained glass and visual depictions of the life of Jesus. I've never seen much visual art in synagogues, but I've seen more than one Torah proudly displayed for its highly disciplined caligraphy. We love words.

When you get into Jewish mysticism, as viewers of Pi may recall, words start to gain tremendous power. The golem of Prague was brought to life by writing emet (truth) on his forehead. Erasing the first letter changes the word to met (death) and puts the golem to rest. To me, Feldman's declaration of sound as the deity in his life and his desire to not "push the sounds around" are indicative of this deep respect of the power of language. Though perhaps Kyle was right to link this part of Feldman's style with his Jewishness, I'm not sure that the connection he made was quite complete. Sorry if it seems like I'm quibbling with technicalities here, but I think that's a Jewish thing, too.

One more point of comparison, on Feldman's "Jewishness":

Once there was a gentile who came before Shammai, and said to him: "Convert me on the condition that you teach me the whole Torah while I stand on one foot." Shammai pushed him aside with the measuring stick he was holding. The same fellow came before Hillel, and Hillel converted him, saying: "That which is despicable to you, do not do to your fellow, this is the whole Torah, and the rest is commentary, go and learn it."

vs.

My past experience was not to "meddle" with the material, but use my concentration as a guide to what might transpire. I mentioned this to Stockhausen once when he had asked me what my secret was. "I don't push the sounds around." Stockhausen mulled this over, and asked: "Not even a little bit?"

Performance Alert

This coming week, Eastman is playing host to a Women in Music Festival. On Monday the 27th, I will be making a contribution in the form of my piano version of Joni Mitchell's "Blue Motel Room." Since it is among her songs that lean strongly in the direction of jazz, my version will be partially improvised. I'd rather not be in the business of staging museum-quality reproductions, anyway. CD players do such a much better job at that sort of thing.

Before signing off, the theory nerd in me wishes to share a few observations about the song. "Blue Motel Room" falls into an AABA form (played twice). One interpretation of the harmonies spells some of them as triads with extensions. This style aids readability, but it disguises some of the progression's inner logic. Another way of spelling the chords uses descending parallel triads with altered bass:

Triad:	C	F	Eb	d	Db	c	F	C
Bass:	C	G	F	F	Eb	Eb	G	C

The chords make more sense as a linear descent than if you tried to attach Roman numerals to them. There is still some tonic-dominant polarity lurking about, though. The bass for the second-to-last chord jumps up to ^5 and has a clear dominant functions. The chord itself is a funny hybrid, a subdominant-as-dominant, but with ^5 in the bass.

Why is the linear descent broken up? What would happen if a d harmony was substituted for the F/G there? I have two thoughts on why she made this decision. First of all, it gives some contrast to the progression. If it was one long linear descent, you'd lose a sense of tonic after a while. The resolution to C at the end would feel like less of an achievement.

The other possibility is that the tonic always seems in danger of slipping to Bb. Bb and Eb appear in enough of the harmonies that it would be very easy to modulate there if you tried. When I was first working out the voice leading for the changes, I made some inadvertent modulations to Bb major. Sticking in the F/G chord makes it clear that, at least for the time being, the song is staying in C. The resolution to the tonic at that point feels like an act of restraint, well-suited to the insecure lyric there: "Will you still love me / When I call you up when I'm down."

The unstable tonic seems to explain why the B section opens with a BbM7 chord. With this move, the lyrics change from personal insecurities to demands and accusations directed at the unnamed lover. She's no longer holding back quite as much. The lyrics in all of the A sections stick to personal reflections on the emotional strain of being away from home and the man in question (a conflation of emotional and physical dislocations is a central theme of the album). The B sections get more specific about the relationship in question (but only slightly — still more restraint): "You and me, we're like America and Russia...", "You lay down your sneaking round the town, honey / And I'll lay down the highway."

One last thing. No fancy analysis, just my amazement at the range of expression you can get by altering the delivery of a line:

Looking for some sightreading?

I'm not anymore. Daniel Wolf posted at Renewable Music to say that Larry Polansky has a number of PDF scores available for free perusing and printing, including the massive "Lonesome Road." I wish more composers would make their music this readily available.

I've made it

Courtesy of Site Meter, I have a limited ability to see who passes through these pages and what might've led them here. For the most part, people wander in from other blogs. Searches also draw in a number of people. Because search terms are embedded in the referring URL, I can see what they were. Earlier today, a search for "blondie cartoon incest" led someone to this (what I thought) family-friendly blog. I'm assuming my earlier post on R. Crumb was responsible for this. Ignoring this visitor's sexual predilections for the moment, does it really only take one mention of R. Crumb to bring out the deviants?

Piano tuning fun has continued, albeit with a slight break for Midterm Mayhem!! Curiosity led me to getting out the library's copy of the greatest book ever (OCD sufferers are advised to stay away). Further curiosity led to some experimentation with the Thomas Young (well-) temperament of 1799. It didn't take long to realize how superior non-equal temperaments really are for playing tonal music. Keys really have distinct characters, intervals in general sound better, etc., etc., etc.

I'm wondering now about an issue in listening to tonal music: modulation. In all of my music history classes that covered tonal music, discussions of significant modulations always prompted someone to ask, "I can't hear this. Could people back in [whatever period] really pick up on it?" Each time, regardless of prof., the same answer: "Well, listeners then were much more attuned to these harmonic procedures."

Something about this answer always seemed...fishy. My current theory: it's hard to notice modulations within equal temperament because every key sounds the same. A temperament with distinct key characters makes it easy for listeners to notice modulations. When the quality of the tonic suddenly changes, you know you're in a different key. Do you even need relative pitch to figure that out? Consider the beginning of the Debussy prelude, "Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l'air du soir":

When the piece modulates to Ab major, this melody, with identical harmonization, comes back. While the modulation is handled with the utmost smoothness, modulating by semitone definitely falls outside the bounds of common practice tonality. In the context of equal temperament, though, any modulation made with enough common tones sounds acceptable. Is it significant that Debussy chose a new key that neighbored the tonic on the chromatic scale instead of the circle of fifths? If you think of modulations as large-scale dissonances, then you get keys that clash by semitones instead of fifths.

I'm guessing someone could pull out more links between equal temperament and Debussy's harmonic practices. Thinking more generally, what are other ways of "dealing" with working in equal temperament? You can...

• ...reshape functional harmony to work more effectively within the constraints of equal temperament (à la Debussy).
• ...build a harmonic system around the understanding that all 12 tones are equal (à la Schoenberg).
• ...downplay functional harmony, instead constructing music around rhythm/timbre/texture/etc. (take your pick).
  

Did I miss anything?

What makes a composer?

The latest "issue" of NewMusicBox is out, with Joan La Barbara getting the interview love this month. The article didn't have any big surprises*, but it did have an interesting quote:

So I was really intrigued by the idea of working with living composers, with people that I could have a conversation with, discuss ideas, use my brain in a very different way. Contemporary music fulfilled that for me. I could discuss [a piece] with a composer while the music was still being written and have an influence on what the piece was going to be. Actually my last vocal teacher, Marian Szekely-Freschl, said to me, "You must work with composers. You must help them because they don't know how to write for the voice." And so I really felt as if this was one of my responsibilities. And then as I was working more with composers I realized that I had ideas of my own that were not going to get heard unless I became a composer, so these things developed sort of simultaneously.

It's kind of an assumed notion that divine inspiration/in-born gifts are necessary to be a composer. It's nice when people give you that wide-eyed impressed look when you tell them you write music, but it's a shame that so many people see musical creation as an off-limits activity. Every now and then, you're lucky and hit on an idea that makes you feel like a capital C-Composer, but most of the time I see composition as something that one does either because music/sound is your native language, or because you're so opinionated about music that it was only a matter of time before you tried your hand at it.
---

* No big surprises, unless you didn't know that she was a composer as well as a singer. If this is news to you, make haste to UbuWeb and listen to 73 Poems.

What is art for?

I have the answer! Er, an answer, via Louis Andriessen, who gave a masterclass this afternoon as part of his visit this week to Eastman. He cited Kierkegaard's definition of irony (pardon me if I botch it), where actions and events have multiple plausible causes, and one is made strongly aware of this unresolvable multiplicity. He gave (wait for it...) Stravinsky as an exemplar of this virtue. Stravinsky frequently takes ideas in unexpected directions. This puts the listener in a bind, not altogether sure why this happened or what the composer's motivation for the whole thing was.

The purpose of this ambiguity is to get you to ask questions, not to provide easy answers. Andriessen said that art's role should be in reminding you to ask various important questions that you might otherwise neglect. Art focused on conveying emotion/feeling (à l'Allemand) will always reduce down to the same syrupy sentimentality.

While I don't let my internal Angst-meter give the final verdict on a piece of art, I don't hold the same level of disdain for emotional expression. Sometimes emotionality is the only tool available for posing certain important questions. The vulnerability that's in so many Kenneth Patchen poems makes you ask if you're always true to yourself. Probably Andriessen's contention was more with putting in emotion for its own selfish sake. No problem there. The world doesn't need any more whiny break-up songs.

Elsewhere on the sentimentality front, I received a startling newspaper clipping in a recent dispatch from home. In the arts section of the 2/12 edition of the Boston Sunday Globe, they devoted 3/4 of the page width and the entirety of its length to a couple features and smaller factoids on Arnold Schoenberg. Levine's decision to program a series of all-Arnie concerts was responsible for this wholly remarkable level of coverage. Further in the section, the title of one of the articles informs us that "Programming proves a boon for modernists." After this victory, what lies next for this wily lot of lunatics and rabblerousers? I'm seeing "Modernists implicated in opera house bombing" plastered across the front page.

Tuning Lesson, and more

Sorry it's been a while since I've posted. A minor wave of schoolwork, plus wanting to finish off a substantial song cycle that I've been working on for a while (more on this later) have kept me away from the ol' soapbox.

A couple days ago, I began my self-instruction in the art (definitely not a science for me just yet) of piano tuning. It seems like something all pianists should try at least once. Getting to encounter temperament as a practical rather than historical/theoretical issue gives one a much different understanding of the matter. What made the experience especially wonderful and occasionally overwhelming to me was the very intense tactile relationship I got with sound. I say tactile, because with so much of my musical life spent in front of a piano, I tend to think of music as something one interacts with through touch. Instead of "touching" a quantized set of pitches (12TET), I could push around the 12 tones to wherever I wanted them to be. It's the same as the difference between homebrewing/making your own bread and going store-bought all the time.

NB: If I post in a few months about how 12TET is unbearable sewage to the ears and how I've started composing in a new and wholly impracticable scale of my own devising, this is where it all started.

Random observation: Kyle Gann's posts on "metametrics" haven't been picked up too much by people in the (post-)classical end of the blogging world, but they've found (at least) a couple big admirers in the jazz world. Will post-minimalism and totalism find second lives among jazz composers?

The song cycle I just wrapped up sets six poems from Facts for Visitors. It's a pretty big piece (the biggest for me yet) — 18' of songs and interludes for tenor/fl/ob/hrn/bass. The texts deal primarily with "miscarriaged" relationships, damaged either through personality conflicts or something more unusual. The narrator usually involves himself in the relationship in a peculiar way. "Everything" (the first poem I set), describes a "relationship" between two people who never met. The narrator implies that they might've become close if they did actually meet, but they were both "victims of circumstance."

In the texts (particularly in "Everything"), the narrator is more attuned to the little behaviors that push around these relationships than the people who are affected by them. The way I read it, had these people been more attuned to each other, they would have been more likely to live happily ever after. The sequence I used starts off with a relationship at its most disconnectedness (description of problem), moves into the consequences of not paying attention to other people (development and climax), and finishes off with an example of two people who appear to connect for a moment (resolution/conclusion). This progression is the definition of tried-and-true, but I'd rather be understood than be clever. I initially had some structural ideas that better reflected aspects of the poetic content, but they were more easily seen than heard.

While I deal with getting this project performed, I think it's time to spend a little time in R&D (i.e., doing lots o' piano music). Big/bold/dramatic/rhetorical is fun and satisfying to put together, but now I'd like to go after something a little different.

A rose by any other name...

William J. Schafer:

[Harry] Nilsson and [Randy] Newman represent a musical literacy alien to the funky scuffling spirit of Liverpool or Memphis. Their music is basically classical—it catalogs and orders the scattered materials of pop musical culture.

Robert Ashley:

If a piece of music is under three minutes long, it's rock. Over three minutes, it's classical.

While not that useful for critical discussions, I'm in favor of Duke Ellington's system:

There are two kinds of music. Good music, and the other kind.

Completism/iPodism

Zoilus has a little round-up of articles on the influence of the iPod on how people listen to music. One of the pieces takes the issue of music as a commodity in a slightly different direction. Basically, as more and more labels release alternate tracks, old bootlegs, and complete sessions of albums, our enjoyment of the original releases is reduced.

If you're one to fetishize albums — spending hours staring at the cover art, reading and rereading the liner notes, forcing your friends to listen to the same tracks again and again — I can see how this situation would be a problem. To maintain your obsession with the album, you have to keep yourself in a perpetual state of ignorance about how it was put together. You may say you want to know "how it all happened," but by exposing yourself to the banality of the circumstances, the mystery will disappear completely.

If you give into the temptation to hear the original demos and studio sessions, you can't romanticize the process of creation any more. It becomes evident that the music you love was birthed through hard work. As the PopMatters writer pointed out, you realize that the Beatles recorded a lot of duds. When you hear the official release of SMiLE, you wonder whether it was worth the 30-year wait.

The article does not touch on the segment of the music listening population that wants to know what it takes to put out an album of legendary status. You know, wouldbe songwriters, producers, and probably a few composers. Beyond the simple lesson that hard work and dedication go a long way, you can piece apart the sessions and learn how the tracks were put together. You can examine multiple versions of songs and figure out what made the final version so great.

Artists in other media get copious opportunities to pick through the creative process. At a big retrospective exhibit of a major painter, you usually get to see sketches for his magnum opus, along with any canvases he may've done that didn't pass muster. Do people who see these "lesser works" go up the ticket window and ask for their money back? Pop music fans should be thrilled that this kind of opportunity is now available on such a large scale.

As far as the impact of iPods go, I don't think the situation is as dire as it's made out to be. Among any population of self-proclaimed music lovers, you'll have two groups: people who say they like music, and those who actually do. The people who only say so are put up to it by the same social pressure that foists any other kind of fashionable behavior on them. The other group, whether they're into it for the artist worship or the admiration of craftsmanship, will never give into a music-as-wallpaper lifestyle, no matter how much technology gets thrown at them.

Joining the Fray

Two fine bloggers have been discussing how fiction and reality bounce off each other in art. Reality shows are an extreme example of a diluted/deluded reality, but some things can build on reality without being emotionally manipulative. R. Crumb uses autobiography because it feels more real to audiences when the artist and narrator are integrated. Same with many good singer-songwriters.

Alex Ross's problem with with James Frey is that an essential truth was favored over a literal truth. The real problem is not in this shift in balance, but in the ultimate quality of the essential truth (which at least one analyst found quite damaging). Of course, the issue with my example is that Crumb's literal truths should not be taken at face value either. No one writes an autobiography without making choices about what they leave in and what gets taken out. For Crumb, however, the value of his essential truths outweighs any vagaries in the literal ones.

Also, an addict's memoir that wasn't quite an addict's memoir? Whoda thunk.

Tangle of Influences

I just got introduced to the work of R. Crumb. Anyone who has avoided his work for whatever reason needs to go and start reading it now. He's this amazing talent who just seems to have sprung up out of nowhere — no art school or formal training, no apprenticeships with big names in the business. There seem to be a lot of parallels between the careers of Crumb and Frank Zappa. Both of them are associated with '60s counterculture, despite the fact that both of them loathe hippies. They're both self-taught and work in the "low" arts, but have attracted the attention of many "high" artists. They also seem to have similar down-to-earth, no-nonsense attitudes.

One continuous feature in Crumb's work are all these old-timey cartoon archetypes: dancing movie theater snacks, people-like animals who wear shirts but no pants, the general layout and lettering in much of his work. He often transforms these stock tools of his trade into a means of cultural criticism. The targets of his criticism are artifacts of the present, though, not the archetypes which he has such deep affection for.

He maintains the appearances of these archetypes, but puts them in unexpected situations. This juxtaposition isn't made for its own sake, however. It's used to call attention to the assumptions that you may have about about these characters. These expectations fit into a broader cultural context which is usually covered with a patina of normality. When Crumb draws black people as racist stereotypes or puts together an incest story with Dick and Jane-style characters, he is suggesting that perhaps we shouldn't be accepting these images as part of the status quo.

Comic archetypes are reinterpreted in another way in Daniel Clowes's Ice Haven. It has a large-scale narrative, but it's broken down into very short strips. Basically, it's like you opened up the Sunday comics and each strip centered around an individual character, but you find they all lived in the same town and interacted with each other. The individual parts dip into the lives of their respective characters, but together, they form a larger story.

The characters in the strips are not your usual funny pages fodder, though. They're the black sheep of Dagwood and Blondie's extended family. You get six frames of a depressed kid staring at the ceiling and Family Circus-style single frames about grade schoolers contemplating murder. Clowes's work isn't a simplistic shockfest, either. He has a story to tell, but his preferred tools are usually employed in tamer settings. He takes to Sunday comics — as much of a throwaway form as you get — with novelistic aspirations.

If you check out your local comics shop, you'll notice that Crumb and Clowes aren't the only ones who like dipping into past images and forms. However, there's a big difference between the shallow nostalgia practiced by most of them and the deep love demonstrated by the much smaller group that these two fall into. The collection of images and ideas that they all chew over and redraw are the backbone of their medium's tradition. The artists even have a typical persona. They're "weirdos." They like drawing "sick" and "twisted" things.

Artistic media come attached with a set of cultural norms for the things they communicate, the ways in which they're communicated, and typical behaviors for the artists themselves (the sum of these norms usually goes by the name of "tradition."). They've got well-dressed farm animals with ukuleles, we've got polyphonic masses. As Feldman pointed out, the central point of interest from Machaut to Boulez is the construction (an observation he made to contrast music with the other arts). You can probably fill in the rest.

The question for the artist: how much of a weight does tradition bear on your work? Are you regurgitating its practices, building on them, or finding new ones (if that's even possible)? Crumb and Clowes provide examples of artists who can make new, personal work that is close to their tradition, but not close enough to suffocate it.

American Romanticism

One interpretation of history places Romanticism as a reactionary movement to the Enlightenment. After the French Revolution backfired, an elitist, anti-egalitarian philosophy must've made a lot of sense. The artist-as-prophet mentality of the Romantics has its remnants today, including the somewhat disdainful attitude that so many composers show towards their audiences.

On the other side of the Atlantic, however, the Enlightenment did not fail. For many, the American Revolution was a sign of the solidity of its ideals. Romanticism developed in this country, but its proponents (Emerson, Whitman, Ives) were raging populists. "I love to go to hear Emerson, not because I understand him, but because he looks as though he thought everybody was as good as he was." They had "prophetic" visions, but they also felt them to be within the reach of the common man.

Along with the composer-audience relationship, there is also the composer-performer relationship. The overly-exact notational habits of many 20th century composers did not help this one much. Some composers still think that it's okay to hand a performer an unplayable score and just have them "deal with it." Composer knows best. Lou Harrison on this issue: "Write what you want. Sooner or later a generation of musicians will come along who haven't been told that it's impossible to play. And they will play it!" He has some of the mindset that says that composers are only beholden to themselves, but he doesn't completely discount the capabilities of his performers. American Romantics may not believe in compromising themselves, but they never lose faith in their audiences.

High Art/Low Art

Meme of four

Four jobs you've had in your life: software tester, newspaper columnist, programmer, marketing intern
Four movies you could watch over and over: A Woman Under the Influence, Opening Night, Julien Donkey-boy, Ghost World
Four Two places you've lived: Newton MA, Rochester NY
Four TV shows you love to watch: King of the Hill, Good Eats, The Sopranos, Curb Your Enthusiasm
Four places you've been on vacation: Chicago, southern California, southern France, Gaston County NC
Four websites you visit daily: Sequenza21, Ars Technica, Wired News, my school's library catalog
Four of your favorite foods: peanut butter, dried apricots, barbequed meat (the slow-cooked kind, not the kind that pours out of a bottle), anything that requires sauteeing onions
Four places you'd rather be: is music a place?

Criticising in Context

I've been mulling over this rather extended debate going on in el blogosphere. I was having some trouble crystalizing my thoughts on the function of musical criticism, when I found a neat & tidy(ish) interview quote that did some of the heavy lifting for me:

We study the history of music as though it starts with Gregorian chant and goes to [Machaut], Monteverdi, Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Stravinsky, Schönberg, etc. But rarely do we learn when we study those things. What these people were really thinking about, aside from musical questions. We talk about them and listen to their work as though they only thought about music, and were not subject to the conditioning forces of the society in which they lived. As though that was something unimportant. Whereas, it is known in many cases that these composers were very often passionately concerned with social and political issues. Beethoven is certainly a case and point, or Chopin, or Wagner just to name a few, so it becomes a confusing question when we try to think how music, which we are accustomed to thinking of as a fundamentally abstract form of communication, how that can be a vehicle not only for feelings, but for ideas. I think that perhaps, in order to answer a question like that one has to examine not only the imminent characteristics of a piece of music, one has to imagine the piece of music as consisting not only of notes or sounds, but as a process of communication involving groups of human beings on a very basic level of course involving the collaborative activity of composers, performers, and audience, but also as a larger process of communication which involves a much larger and more general context.

(Rzewski, again)

He gives the issue a slightly political bent, but I suppose that's part of his personality. Looking at it more generally, it's an issue of context. The quote could easily be rephrased to say that we commonly neglect religion, race, gender, whatever, in discussions of music. Context is the difference between a chord with an added sixth signifying kitsch or signifying prayer.

The NYT review of An American Tragedy was itself criticized for what some saw as a slew of short-sighted omissions. What I want to know is why didn't it discuss the context of the premiere more? The first paragraph:

For a company of such international standing, the Metropolitan Opera has had an inexcusably timid record of commissioning operas in recent decades. Consequently, when the Met presents a new work, the stakes are almost impossibly high.

The context of the production isn't really touched on until the conclusion, when Tommasini does a simple tie-in to make the piece feel rounded out. What of the fact that the Met has commissioned so few new operas? Is the mantle of Great American Opera still worth aspiring to, or has it dwindled to a pointless pursuit in our present cultural climate? Is the choice of libretto significant in any way? What audience is the opera reaching out to? Should anyone else care?

Alternatively, you can go in the opposite direction and only discuss context. Pitchfork is an easy target, but a failing of a lot of rock criticism, particularly when you get into indie rock circles, is favoring "hot or not" "issues" over whether or not the music's any good. As usual, a median between the two extremes, "objective" and "subjective" reactions, is what should be pursued.

Returning to the Rzewski quote, his final point is worth taking note of: in the production of music, you witness an intersection of a multitude of extensive and interconnected social relationships. Jeremy Denk posted some thoughts on a review of a Richard Goode recital. The issue was that the critic was harsh on Goode, faulting him for making an unusual (perhaps daring?) performance. In playing the music, Goode was continuing a thread of relationships that began with the authorship of the music, led through all of his experiences with the piece, touched on whoever may've been involved in those experiences, and took a stop at his recital.

Rather than contemplate and consider this very extended train of thought, the critic (at least as Jeremy suggested) cut it off with a cold and slightly ambivalent response. Speaking from my experience as a performer, you know whether or not you played well on any given night. It's flattering and all to get compliments on how you did, but really, no one needs to tell you. Similarly, I'll know if I lost control in any spots. Saying that someone "[let] his passion surge ahead of his judgment" ... what does that really mean to a reader? I'm not being dense here; how much does that statement inform a reader's understanding of what went on that night?

Contextualizing the playing, though, talking about it in relation to the pianist's past performances, common practices on how the composer's music should be played, what kind of relationship the performer had with the audience... these comments can make up for not being at an event. They continue the discourse that started way back whenever the piece was written. They, to me, are the makings of good criticism.

Giving Up to Time

I'm an inveterate improviser. I can't sit down at the piano without experimenting with something: chord progressions, a piece I'm learning, or something new entirely. For me, the impulse to improvise is distinct from the compulsion to compose. I won't say that things I learn from one activity don't find their way into the other, but the music that arises from each is very different in character.

In an interview, Fred Rzewski distinguished the two activities by saying that when improvising, one is engaged in continuous reinvention. Composition, however, has a memory. When composing, you reference and reconsider past ideas, attempting to make them into an integrated whole. Building on this thought, the memory in composed music is in the music itself. And by music itself (here at least), I mean notation. When I contemplate this conceptual networking, I inevitably refer to what I've previously written down. This fixed, visual presence exerts its own force over the progress of a piece.

Though the final act of performance exists "in time," the work leading up to it, to some extent, does not. The idea of creating a hermetic, self-explanatory score is a false notion, but it persists nonetheless (a realization is impossible without a Western musical education and an immersion in its very specific culture). The seduction of the self-sufficient score is that the music gets placed out of time. It can be performed today, in two hundred years — whenever — using the information provided by the notation.

The act of composing is, in many ways, a resistance to the passage of time. It's saying, "You can take me, but you can't take this part of me, this music." Improvisation says, "I know you're going to take me, and I know you'll take my music, too." Defiance against time would just be completely delusional here, because its effects are so immediate. The music is gone as soon as it enters the world. Improvising has its own kind of dare and danger, but it also can allow one to face up to the realities of living in a way that is harder to achieve within the realm of notated music.

Subversive Songwriting

Randy Newman seems to me like a completely unlikely person. Whereas so many singer-songwriters work in the heart-on-the-sleeve, confessional mode, his songs are mostly cynical and distant. His voice is nothing to write home about, plus his appearance doesn't scream "big star." Somehow, these factors add to his music. His songs about sexual deviants and con artists wouldn't be as powerful if they came out of a more conventional personality.

His ability to create rhetorical distance between author and narrator is right up there with Stravinsky. A song like "Rider in the Rain" is so absorbed in being "cowboy music," but this involvement is matched by a feeling that it's all an elaborate conceit. Newman uses this rupture to test your trust in the narrator. Because the writing is so disquietingly conventional, you examine it all the more closely for the cracks in the facade. He forces you to think about how genres are used, what images are conjured up by particular instrumental forces, and the weight you give to the words of singers. His voice is that of an outsider, always shrewd and subversive.

Andriessen and Schönberger wrote in The Apollonian Clockwork about how when Stravinsky wrote a Mass or a Requiem, it became an ür-Mass or ür-Requiem, a summation and a stepping beyond of the genre. When Randy Newman writes a song, he (and the song in a way) are so aware of the genre's conventions that a similar kind of commentary is embedded in it. Tom Waits has often been described as a "meta-songwriter," but I think that Newman is far more deserving of the title.

Peter Garland: Americas

A few things are worth saying about this set of essays. Garland has a couple loose histories of the use of percussion and the piano in American music, but the majority of the collection is devoted to his journals and appreciations of fellow artists. The writers and composers featured often rejected the mainstream culture of the 20th century for a life of wandering and solitude (Paul Bowles got a pretty extensive write-up).

A number of these people, Harry Partch in particular, also tried to rekindle an animistic attitude towards religion (or as Garland would argue, religion in general). Garland feels quite strongly that religion died in the 20th century and that our collective quality of life has suffered for it. In order to revive the kind of religion that Garland thinks everyone should have, a prominent spiritual leader would have to be embedded in local communities. This person would help mediate social relations and in general make sure everyone was happy.

The key is being embedded in the community. Garland's identity as a lonely wanderer is a bit at odds with this. The tone I read in his essays suggested that he was going to set down his ideas, but that they'd be understood and implemented at a later time (beyond his lifetime?). This attitude just screams Romanticism. He's of course entitled to his opinions and how he wants to express them, but I can't help but feel he could find a means of expression more in tune with his thoughts.

Also, I would question whether or not there are other institutions today that accomplish the same social functions as his conception of religion would. When someone posts a discussion topic over at the Composers Forum or any other online forum, doesn't that act serve to bring people together and increase their understanding of one another? I'm also not sure how religious figures today fail at this role. If anything, the rabbis and ministers I've come in contact with seem more concerned at doing this kind of service than anything else. Think of the character of Eccles in Rabbit, Run. He puts an incredible amount of energy into trying to straighten Rabbit out.

The thing I really took away from the book was a better feeling of the tradition running through the American experimental tradition. It's easy to portray Partch, Cage, Cowell et al as only being united in their defiant attitudes, but Garland shows there's more to them than that. There's a full-page headshot of Varèse with his trademark I-could-kill-you-just-by-thinking-it look, but there's another shot showing him sitting next to Cowell, who's playing the shakuhachi for him. Garland shows that even though the styles of these composers are quite individualized, they influenced each other quite a bit in the development of their ideas.

A Literary Echo

From "More Light," Morton Feldman:

In effect, what I am suggesting is not that music should explore or imitate the resources of painting, but that the chronological aspect of music's development is perhaps over, and that a new "mainstream" of diversity, invention and imagination is indeed awakening. For this we must thank John Cage.

From "Oaxacan Journal" in Americas, Peter Garland:

In benign and far-reaching ways, he has helped and influenced all of us . . . Listening to any of the sets of records he edited for Folkways, Music of the World's Peoples, will give a sense of his continuing legacy: if, in this century, the past, present and future have been unlocked, and the variety of the world's cultures opened to us, we have Henry Cowell, more than anyone else, to thank.

Will blog later on this Garland book once I get through it. It's got its share of thought-provoking bits, particularly on the idea of tradition among quote-unquote maverick composers.

Garlandia

Yesterday I ended up listening to some of Peter Garland's piano music, reading some of his essays, and thumbing through some old copies of Soundings (thank you, extremely comprehensive music library!). His music is really shocking in its simplicity. "Radical consonance," the term used in the liner note bio, is an appropriate description. The shock is because the process that led to the music is a mystery at first hearing, and you're not sure if there was a high-level one going on. Music with a complex surface gives you the "assurance" that even if you don't know what the hell is going on, everything's probably very well thought-out. Alternatively, with process-y minimalism, if you don't know how the music was put together, you're just not paying attention.

With Garland's "minimalism," you become enamored by the simple beauty of the music, but afterwards find yourself asking very basic questions about it. So many things recur, chords, rhythms, that you want to know why he chose those ideas (whether or not that's a question worth answering isn't clear now). He makes no effort to hide them behind a developmental process, so they feel very exposed at all times. They're like little gifts being offered to the listener on nothing more than good faith. It's not often total strangers are so generous. You wonder, "Why me? What did I do to deserve this?"

His writing is similarly simple and generous. Kenneth Patchen's Journal of Albion Moonlight is not a completely unfair comparison. Though Patchen's work is far more lyrical and even more heart-felt, both writers are strongly attuned to an intense tragedy in everything that they see. This sense remains very tangible no matter how unclear the subject of their writing is. All in all, his work is the kind that lingers, that shoots with force into your thoughts hours after you experienced it. Definitely worth some further exploration.

Recent Listening

Cold Blue Complete 10-Inch Series

It's easy to forget about California. Aside from the occasional glamorous premiere, it's...you know... all the way over there. East coast pretensions aside, it's inspiring to see such sophisticated and flat-out beautiful music outside of the classical mainstream. Every time I hear something from Daniel Lentz, he just seems more and more like an undeservedly under-appreciated composer. That Gann guy might be onto something...

Nude Rolling Down an Escalator

Speaking of which, I finally got a chance to sit down with Kyle's Disklavier studies. I could see these becoming very popular if they were heard by people who aren't necessarily connoisseurs of 'serious' music (where's our post-classical A&R rep...or is that Kyle?). Texarkana is laugh-out-loud funny and Petty Larceny bears a freakish resemblance to the sounds in my sleep-deprived mind the night before a music history exam.

Stravinsky and Stravinsky

The wind ensemble at Eastman just did a concert bookended by the Octet and Symphonies of Wind Instruments. Among other things, it confirmed my thought that Stravinsky, perhaps more than other composers, really needs to be heard in person. For one thing, his ensemble choices often have striking presences on stage. When I first saw Symphony of Psalms, I had an experience similar to those New Yorkers who thought a UFO landed when the Guggenheim came to town. In the Octet, there was something just intriguing about the three pairs and a couple loners. Seems like a great-uncle or something to Carter's Triple Duo.

I don't know if this is a stretch, but the physical gestures needed to produce the sounds seemed linked in character to the sounds themselves. All the head bobs and 1-2 1-2 breathing felt like expressions of the same underlying idea.

Lastly, the sounds. Particularly in Symphonies. It's just full of killer sonorities. There were a couple other piecs on the program based on chorales. To my ears, their sonorities were a little off-balance. They were essentially solid, but they had a few parts which felt glued on — flute solos which got too glossy and some bass brass that overwhelmed the texture a little much. Stravinsky... when he laid down a chord the harmonic structure just felt total. Everything flowed smoothly, from the ground all the way up. Perhaps composition curriculums would benefit from the addition of a requirement in masonry...

Music as an Aesthetic Object

Composers often get asked about how they write. Most recorded answers are as ridiculous as the question itself is. Debussy said something like “I start with all the notes, get rid of the ones I don't want, and keep what's left.” Works of art are such peculiar beasts because they show so much, yet they always show it in such odd and oblique ways. The question of compositional process pokes not at the truths themselves, but why they needed to take on unfamiliar shapes. The causes aren't gossipy tales of past lovers and family turmoil, but whatever lies at the center of one's self. To explain these things would almost be to destroy them. Or as Pinter said to an actor who inquired about his character's past life: “None of your fucking business.”

Nevertheless, these causes can become quite an obsession. When I first see a score to a well-loved piece, it's as if all its secrets will finally be revealed. I half-expect angels to descend from the heavens (harps in hand) to provide proper accompaniment as I turn to the first page. I really should get over the anti-climax of it. The plain appearance of the notes in print makes them seem even more out of reach.

As I see it, there are two (admittedly exaggerated) stances to take at this point. The first is that one can come to know music by way of thorough analysis. If I tear those notes apart, I will understand how they relate, and this understanding is the music. The other point of view is that art is fundamentally non-understandable, and is at best a tool for expanding one's various comfort zones (emotional, ideological, etc.). Interestingly, these two tacks engage separate senses. Analysis is primarily a visual activity, while you throw the score aside to more fully use your ears. Of course, the reality is that you hover between these two absolutes whenever engaging music.

Try as I might, though, there are some pieces that just resist being read into. I feel deadlocked in my efforts to penetrate Stravinsky's Apollo. The writing is just so of a piece. It feels like it was conceived all at once. Its architecture can be elusive, though it does open after persistent examination. The emotional content is surprisingly generous for Stravinsky (the Pas de Deux verges on being sentimental).

Nonetheless, there seems to be an upper limit to the level of intimacy I can reach with this piece. Even when I feel secure in my intellectual understanding of any of its remarkable features, the listening experience seems to exist in ignorance to what I know about the notes. That knowledge only seems to provide a comfort (a false one maybe), a way of not being completely overwhelmed by the sounds.

What meaning this piece has seems most accessible by denying contact with these causes of construction. It has the most life for me as a purely aesthetic experience. I can marvel at its assembly or use its emotional peaks to get a better grip on my own, but the piece's only unified statement seems to be in its attitude towards music. I don't mean that Apollo should be read as a ballet “about” the major triad; I mean that it has in it a way of looking at the function of music. Stravinsky often writes with a mystical attitude, suggesting that music is as fundamentally unknowable as a religious higher being. This stance can be hard to reconcile with the concrete nature of sound and notation, but the resulting music begs to differ.

Heebie McJeebie, I presume?

Inspired by Prof. Heebie McJeebie's recent podcast, I thought I would go seek him out. Rochester music community being what it is, I'm surprised I hadn't run into him already. I went over to the Hotel Cadillac and asked for him at the front desk. Unfortunately, I was told that he was out-of-town for the weekend. Even though I missed him, I think I found his hang out.





Yup.

Music as Other Senses

There's a certain type of piece that begs to be perceived visually to me. I'm thinking of music that has such vivid textures and contrasts that you can follow it in terms of the interplays of qualities of sound. The earliest examples of this I can think of are in Beethoven, like the slow movement from the Fourth Piano Concerto or the opening of the Ninth Symphony. Ligeti has a knack for writing music like this. There are a number of examples just among his piano études. Incidentally, composers with strong ties to the visual arts, such as Debussy and Feldman, do not elicit this reaction from me. Music in which I can see a plot lurking about that's constructed in terms of sound-color synesthesia is of a completely separate nature (Messiaen, obviously).

I guess what I care about aren't these specific examples of sound to vision translation, but the idea of perceiving aural events as if they were something else, a kind of artificial synesthesia. This cross-sensory action isn't a result of an oddly wired brain (I think); it's created for "practical" reasons. The opening of Beethoven's Ninth is supposed to sound like it's creating itself, emerging out of a void. You can listen to it in terms of a straight harmonic progression, but it's more attractive to me to hear it as a kind of dance emerging from the darkness. Thinking of the kaleidoscopic counterpoint of "Arc-en-Ciel" as if it truly is light refracting through water droplets makes the music that much more vivid.

These examples seem intentional to me, as if these composers' conceptions could not be limited to one sense. Anyone else have similar listening experiences? Any composers in the audience care to share if they've explicitly tried to create such moments?

Music as a Record of Social History

Lately, I've been relistening to Whatever and Ever Amen. While I haven't done an exhaustive tour of Ben Folds's discography, it seems like it's easily the best thing he's done. Some songs on it, like "Kate," explain perfectly why pop music is essential. One thing that struck me about the album, though, is how rooted it is in mid- to late-90s apathy. While I prefer not having to acquiesce control of my emotional states to any collective consciousness, it's hard to deny that a lot of people feel similar things at the same time. Though high artists like to stick to the timeless and universal, popular culture happily reflects what's "in the air."*

While on the zero to Beethoven metric of artistic success, efforts like these can fall somewhat short, they seem rather valuable to social historians. I probably won't care very much about this album in 20 years, but if someone wants me to "explain the 90s," I'll pull it out and play "Battle of Who Could Care Less." It sums up quite economically the shared feelings of the time, how people related to one another, and how they spent their free time. I just hope I won't be asked what it means to be "dressed up all like The Cure."

---

*This is probably one reason why Folds's career has lagged as of late. His recent songs feel a little mired in the same old mix of nostalgia and apathy.

Classroom Notes

People who complete orchestration assignments with the full battery of extended techniques are like people who write papers with a thesaurus in their lap.

Chiseling Away at the Iceberg

My mother, ever patient with my musical interests, will listen to just about anything I want to play for her. She deserves much credit, for she still keeps an open ear even after hearing some pieces that had her question whether I was even playing music for her (Bartok and Carter she no like). Even after giving her what seems like a minor education in modern music, she has only cared for the following:

• Ives (admittedly his more traditionally tonal works), in particular his Second Symphony

As a card carrying Ivesian, I can hardly complain with her taste, but it is still a pretty limited list. Much to my surprise, a new member was recently admitted to this exclusive club: Rzewski's North American Ballads. What was completely unexpected was her reasoning. She wasn't caught by the folk tunes (though given her tastes, you would suspect she's a closet populist), but by the counterpoint in “Down By the Riverside.” There's an extended bit towards the end which sounds like two pianos going at once. This, she thought, was really great. I was surprised, mainly because it was the point of greatest dissonance in the piece. My initial expectation was that she'd enjoy the simple beginning and simply tolerate the rest.

If there's a “lesson” in this, it's not that people will like new music if you cram it down their throats enough (though I think this is the first time my mom's been drawn to a piece for an essentially intellectual satisfaction). My guess is that she liked the music because it met her on territory she was comfortable in. Though she hasn't touched the instrument in a while, my mom took piano lessons throughout the early part of her life. Though Rzewski's style of virtuosity was certainly new to her, she was able to relate it her knowledge of the instrument. Instead of being repelled by his style, it intrigued her.

I guess this situation speaks more to developing musical literacy than a taste for the new. Whenever non-musical friends ask me to “teach them about music,” I just tell them to listen to a lot of music (with carefully curated suggestions of course ;)). It's possible to appreciate music just out of the pleasure certain sounds bring, but a deeper appreciation comes from picking up on the practices that have persisted throughout its history. Like with any other language, the only way to gain fluency is through immersion.

My mom's knowledge of idiomatic piano writing spelled the difference, so far as I can tell, between her liking the piece and it being another instance of me playing unseemly “sounds” for her. I don't have any high expectations about further emendations to the list above, but it's nice to see that it wasn't as closed a book as I thought it was.

No Words

Recent library trip brought back my first Joan Baez album, Diamonds and Rust. I have no idea if this is a "proper" starting point for her music, but I don't think it matters. I've listened to the album several times already and have barely been able to follow the words; the richness of her voice takes over my ear. It's like one of those glasses of red wine that your tongue touches more than it tastes. I don't think the tone quality of an instrument has captivated me this much before. The Joan/Joni duet at the end is just icing on the cake.

Elaboration

I'm a big fan of examining the preliminary work that leads up to the completion of a creative project. It was a pleasant surprise to find a little collection of that work not for music or painting, but a computer program. Sitting at the bottom of this interview is a chronologically arranged set of sketches and mock-ups for Delicious Library, a media library program for the Mac. I'm stuck behind a PC keyboard, so I haven't had a chance to try it out myself, but by all accounts it's sensitively designed with a fine eye towards detail. It's terrific to get a peek at the creative process behind it.

Some Good Record Store Advice

"Would you say that this is political music?"
"No, there's not a lot of screaming about Che Guevara or anything like that."

Complexity

There have been a couple posts (no permalink, see post "Quotes") made recently on complexity. One of the defenses of yer complex high modernism is that life is complicated, so we must make music to match its complications. This is a weak defense because it entangles two unrelated issues: complexity of language and complexity of expression. Consider Milton Babbitt's extremely florid prose. His baroque diction takes some adjusting to when you sit down to read one of his articles, but after you become acclimated to it, it reads fairly smoothly. One of the reasons, I think, is that what he's saying isn't all that complicated. His style sets your mind on the defensive, ready to receive a long stream of thorny thoughts. There's some confusion when you realize that stream's not going to show up, but afterwards you can almost coast through his text. The elaborate constructions provide a kind of cushioning for your eyes. On the other end of the spectrum is Morton Feldman's prose style, where the nonchalant delivery belies the knottiness of his thoughts.

The danger is assuming that these two elements, language and expression, are tied. While the type of language you use does indeed express something, it is not the core of the expression. My perspective is that it provides a context for the expression itself. Having to acclimate to a foreign language puts your mind in a certain state, which can assist in the ultimate expression sought by the composer. I would hesitate to say that all of yer complex high modernism needs to slim down a little, because the overall expression would change significantly.

The rotten side to this is when language replaces expression. It's rotten not because nothing is expressed ("We have nothing to say and we are saying it - that's poetry."), but because it veers away from art into mere intellectual flattery. Listening can too easily become a game of connecting syntactic dots, picking out allusions, and affirming coherency. An overly complex language can, ironically, encourage intellectualizing and simplifying. While these are certainly elements in the modern world, whether they are elements that one wishes to express is a question left to the composer.

July 4th Heads-Up

WHRB gets a decent bit of attention in the blogging community for their comprehensive orgies. Tomorrow, in honor of Independence Day, their programming from 1-10pm EDT will be devoted to American music (how rare!). In the past, they've aired unusual selections like a few art songs/ad jingles for toothpaste and Virgil Thomson's ballet Filling Station. They don't touch the American experimental tradition much (the on-air announcement for the program yesterday mentioned the inclusion of modern composers like Piston and Harbison), but it's definitely an event worth tuning /streaming into. If only they didn't need a holiday as an excuse to play so much American music.

Feldman and Cassavetes

When drawing comparisons to other media, Morton Feldman's music often shows up next to the plays of Samuel Beckett. Not only do their minimal landscapes resonate with each other, but Feldman was quick to compare their work, even citing the ease with which the two got along. However, for the purpose of investigating his musical innovations, it would make sense to compare his achievements with the films of John Cassavetes (this link is maintained by Ray Carney, who does for independent film what Kyle Gann does for Downtown music).

Cassavetes's movies are marked by inarticulate characters, long takes, and rough technique. Feldman's music reveals its maker in at least one way, its myopic interest in each sound. Its striking sensuality often wins fans, even if they admittedly can't make any sense of the music. The visceral rawness of Cassavetes's work usually isn't as endearing.

Audiences often find a “rambling” quality in their work. Cassavetes let scenes run as long as he felt necessary. The suicide scene in A Woman Under the Influence is unrelenting. Similarly, Piano and String Quartet plays on each fragment for calmly extended periods. The proportions of both works are nothing like a Hollywood drama or a Classical sonata. Cassavetes's insistence on honest emotions led him to eschew simplified narratives. Feldman similarly refused to “push the sounds around.” These unusual aesthetics obscure the presence of form, but they don't deny it. Though detractors may insist their work is formless, both derive forms from the characteristics of their content.

Opening Night, at its surface, is the story of a new play moving from New Haven to its Broadway premiere. The production faces problems as its lead must reconcile her own problems with aging with those of her character. Tracing this idea more closely, one finds women's reactions to getting older to be central to the film. Viewed through this lens, just about every scene provides a different perspective on this issue. No age group is left unexamined, from the 18-year-old fan who gets killed to the 65-year-old playwright. While the film's pacing has a certain “lumpiness” that can turn off a lot of viewers, its attention to this central problem is basically unwavering.

Palais de Mari focuses on spare pitches, slowly drawn out of the instrument. The near-constant pedal draws attention to their decay, making the sounds feel both frozen in time and slipping away from it (an elegant depiction of the palace ruins of the title). In m. 18, an unusually large spacing interrupts the initial sense of stasis. The search for a balance between the initial stasis and this startling gesture creates a tension which lasts until the very end of the piece. Later fragments are heard in terms of how they relate to this problem, not in harmonic terms, but sonic ones: density, duration, and decay.



Jonathan Kramer, in The Time of Music, characterizes Feldman's music as extremely “vertical.” That is, his music is one long moment divorced from our usual perception of time. However, his dramas of sonorities reach somewhere between “moment form” and “vertical time.” The sections of similar sonorities in Feldman's late music beg to heard as unadulterated pieces of beauty (vertically), but the way they're joined together is not without causation. He wants his audiences to take away a keener appreciation of sound, but not through a Cagean all-inclusiveness. Instead, listeners should sharpen their ears to the ways that one sound connects to another.

Cassavetes approached emotion in a similar way. His unconventionally long scenes have a child-like fascination with the interplay of emotions. They refuse to measure time into neat parcels, instead letting everything take as long as it needs to. This intense focus at times negates the existence of all other moments (just as Feldman's sounds want to be “left alone”). Here too, the individual pieces are intriguing in their own way, but the greater experience comes from tying them all together.

Form, in the work of Feldman and Cassavetes, evolves out of the individual qualities of their materials. How one perceives them as emotions, or as sounds, takes precedence over higher-level divisions (character arcs and harmonic progressions). This “phenomenological form” can usually be spotted by a series of irregularly-sized episodes, linked through a single organizing principle. This form is highly elastic, always letting proportions be defined by the demands of the content. Though the priorities of these artists differ from most of their contemporaries, close examination reveals a highly rigorous technique. Though their work is often labeled as “amateurish,” it is only because Feldman and Cassavetes have the utmost sensitivity for the materials of their craft.

Rzewski at NEC

This week, the New England Conservatory is running a summer institute in contemporary piano music. Frederic Rzewski has come to coach students in playing his music; in return, several nights are being devoted to concerts of his music. Monday night featured his most famous contribution to the repertoire, The People United Will Never Be Defeated, along with a few other pieces that demonstrated the breadth of his output.

The one thread that tied the pieces together for me was their awareness of the performer. This music didn't push the players away in order to reach its ecstatic peaks. Rather, it dramatized their very presence. Having only heard Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues on recording, I only knew what it sounded like. The half-comical sight of watching Jung Hee Shin pounding away with her forearms provided bizarre counterpoint to the clangorous sound mass she conjured up.

The fragmentary design of The Road (part one was on the program) made it seem ill-suited for the concert hall. It would be interesting to hear it played by a friend in his home, letting him jump between sections and insert comments as he pleased. One of the sections featured the pianist rattling around on the piano with its lid shut. Some of John Mark Harris's gestures suggested a sped-up caricature of a piano virtuoso. If this moment was Rzewski's creation, it suggests an interesting sense of humor about the virtuoso pianist-composer tradition he falls into.

Whangdoodles was a partially improvised piece for piano, violin and hammered dulcimer (doubling on vibraphone). The piece consists of 108 segments that are freely coordinated between players. Every ten seconds or so they line up, but it is otherwise indeterminate. The instrumentation and concept would make it an interesting companion piece to Feldman's Why Patterns?

According to the notes, the piece is meant to express “the idea of an open, planetary approach to relationships of conflict: allowing real life to determine the course of action, rather than trying to force life into pre-conceived models.” In order to fully enjoy it, one must not search for a strongly-cast narrative (“pre-conceived models”), but instead be content with the sounds themselves. Listening in this mode, the happenstance moments when a clear beauty emerges are heard as simple gifts, not moments which one is otherwise deprived of. The idea of selfless listening (and ultimately acting) feels like well-trodden territory now, but the folk materials (Yiddish and Appalachian songs) which frame it provide a novel angle.

Stephen Drury presented The People United at the end of the night. His performance (from memory) was marked by a steady confidence, never distracted by the piece's kaleidoscope of styles. Despite his demeanor, he seemed to take a difference presence on stage along with each of the styles. The variations cast in a grand Romantic vein placed him on a grand stage, while those with echoes of minimalism brought a surprising intimacy to Jordan Hall.

The most striking moments occurred at the piece's moments of repose, when the virtuosity subsided into quiet, spare chords. While the rarity of these moments gave them a special poignancy, the high whistling accompanying them reminded one that even in musical moments which push towards transcendence, the audience cannot get there without the performer's efforts.

Pop Harmony vs. Classical Harmony

Harmony in popular music is often looked at by classical connoisseurs like a simple country cousin. Occasionally it surprises with a bit of deftness, but generally it is seen as a watered-down version of common-practice tonality. These two songs at first glance seem to be coming from rather different places:

Their conceptions, though, are quite similar. Both texts clash inner anxieties with the exuberance and celebration of a new season. The tension between these two emotional territories is paralleled with a tension between major and minor modes. Where they diverge in this scheme reveals fundamental differences between the harmonic languages of the classical art song and the modern popular song.

Schumann moves from f# minor to A major with great elegance. Because the modulation doesn't alter the key signature, the transitions aren't noticed until a cadence point is reached. After the four bar introduction implies a resolution to f# minor, the next bar brings in the singer and a swift modulation to A major. The harmonic rhythm is fast throughout, with no harmony sustaining for more than a single measure.

“River,” in comparison, feels a little clunky. Rather than modulate between relative keys, it presents the two harmonies side by side. The harmonic rhythm here is significantly longer. The first half of each verse is harmonized with a C major chord that lasts for about ten seconds. It only takes a few seconds to sing the first line of “Im wunderschönen Monat Mai.”

This protracted duration gives a different kind of meaning to each harmony. Since they're given time to breathe, they're able to establish a more significant presence in musical space. They feel less subservient to a larger harmonic scheme and more like contemplative objects worthy of individual appreciation. The effect is not altogether different from a piece like Music for 18 Musicians. The drawing out of a short progression over time allows the listener to “inhabit” each harmony for a while.

The relationship between singer and accompaniment is very different in these songs. The vocal line in “River” floats on top of the accompaniment. The ideal of the art song is to entangle the two, giving them similar structural and expressive importance. Much of the expression in “River” comes from Mitchell's singing. The accompaniment in the Schumann does almost as much to shape the vocal line as the singer does. The brief harmonies color individual words, while Mitchell's harmonies color vast spaces.

This key difference evolved out of another major distinction between “art music” and popular music. While one is composer-oriented, the other is driven by performers. Though it's common for performers of popular music to play someone else's songs, they usually learn them from another's performance. Since the score is the primary document for classical music, the notes must speak for themselves more. Joni Mitchell can use simple backing for expressive vocals because her performance is the final product. Robert Schumann, tied to a less forgiving tradition, couldn't take such chances.

The resulting styles use the same triadic tonality, though in slightly different ways. Longer pop harmonies dramatize change, even as slight as I moving to vi. Classical harmony is about the ultimate destination (the similarities here between popular songs and minimalism/other “ergodic” music are striking to say the least). These two “dialects” should not be belittled either way with generalizations and value judgements, but recognized as equally valid means for tackling the same problems.

Every time you hear a new film score...

...Debussy laughs.

Dynamics in Pop Music

While the study is several years old by now, a friend pointed me to this study of the dynamic characteristics of top-selling pop songs (full listing of songs here). The author convincingly connects sonogram readings with how people hear the songs. Great example of analysis done right.

George Rochberg, 1918-2005

Without even regarding his music, George Rochberg should forever serve as the paragon of artistic integrity in music. With his much-noted shift in style, he eschewed fashion in order to be honest to himself. Before I even knew his music, he had my profound respect. Once I started listening, I found his work continually demonstrated this daring attitude. Certainly people scoffed when Pachelbel's canon showed up in his sixth quartet, but how many other composers would have the balls to do the same thing with their own music? He asserted the right of the composer to make uncertain moves, showing that the honest effort has value in and off itself. While the keen confidence of so many great composers requires a certain resilience from those who wish to measure up to them, the example left by Rochberg demands an entirely different type of mettle.

Crutches

In my current theory class, the terminal course in the sequence, we're undergoing a whirlwind tour of the latter half of the 20th century. Today we compared two articles, Babbitt's "Who Cares if you Listen?"/"The Composer as Specialist" and Susan McClary's "Terminal Prestige." The latter, though written 30 years later, is essentially a response to the modernist mindset embodied by Babbitt. It struck me that both pieces fall into a similar trap, one that is essentially in opposition with the creation of art.

Babbitt's primary point was that contemporary developments in music paralleled those in the hard sciences. Postwar serialism had long overshot the public's perceptual abilities, therefore it was necessary for the university system to support composers of "serious" music (the position is essentially the same as Adorno's in Philosophy of Modern Music, though Babbitt invokes scientific research instead of a class struggle). McClary attacked this attitude, arguing that the "academic avant-garde" is writing itself into obscurity. Those circles should slacken their objective stance and examine other facets of music, such as its social function.

McClary concludes her article with a discussion of an Earth, Wind & Fire song, "System of Survival." She argues that it is sophisticated music, as worthy of scholarly attention as anything out of the university scene. The troublesome point comes here:

"System of Survival" is, in other words, a song that gives no credence whatsoever to the mind/body split or to the defensive autonomy that infects so much of Western music, especially that of the avant-garde which fetishizes intellectual work for its own sake. At the same time, it is an extremely smart piece: musically, socially politically. It draws upon and celebrates forms of sedimented cultural memory that have miraculously survived a history of extraordinary oppression and that threaten to persist indefinitely—even if not acknowledged within the academy.

A trend throughout McClary's writing is an interest in "smart," socially responsive music. While she essentially attacks academics for overvaluing music because it matches up to their arbitrary criteria (complex construction, etc.), she's guilty of the same crime. She often latches onto music because it's ironic, contorts traditional forms, or responds to class and gender "issues." The music itself may not be full of much deep thought or emotion, but if it hits one of these trigger points, it's worthy of attention from her (witness the entire chapter devoted to Madonna in Feminine Endings).

It's very important to respond to these aspects of music, but my inclination is that McClary is picking pieces to use as vehicles for her own ideas, rather than pieces that expose new ones. This is no different than locking into construction as the primary point of musical interest. The topics of discussion are decided in advance, analysis and criticism are merely used to expound on them. The thought developed through analysis and criticism is often stimulating, but it's preferable to let the approach be determined by the subject. It's difficult to find new truths and forms in art when you're busy looking for old ones. A rejection of one system shouldn't lead to a new set of equally harmful habits. Artists, too, can fall victim to this (look at "indie" film or "alternative" music). Art depends on the restless search for new modes of being. Leaning on crutches—objective stances, gender studies, what have you—only draws one away from this mission.

You know you're a theory professor when...

...your computer has seen so many German terms that AutoCorrect assumes that everything you type must also be in German.