Archive - August 2005August 30, 2005: "Gambling Away Peace of Mind for a Piece of Paper With Notes on it" August 22, 2005: "Copland House/Exploring Mystery Notes" August 15, 2005: "An Act of Creative Vandalism" August 12, 2005: "Buffeted By a Swarm of Thoughts and Emotions" August 10, 2005: "Raid on Kronos HQ" August 5, 2005: "The Relentless Click-Clack Rhythm of a Doomed Train" August 2, 2005: "First Impressions" August 30, 2005: "Gambling Away Peace of Mind for a Piece of Paper With Notes on it" I have a feeling that this is going to be something of an angry, frustrated entry—I feel a bit overwhelmed and intimidated by the work I've set out to do, so I might take the opportunity to indulge in some chest-beating histrionics. I think, however, that I'll save that for the latter half of this entry and, to start on an upbeat note, register my pleasure at finally getting set up to work! Here are some shots of my new, now-furnished pad, replete with near-worthless, H.W. Bush-era Casio funboard:
So this week I finished writing the “tune” for the piece, something I'm glad to have accomplished. I'm pleased that it seems intricately constructed, a lot of information jam-packed into a tiny space. I have some doubts that I'll doubtless drag out soon enough, but here's how it turned out so far: Last entry, I noted that I was concerned with the tension between the notes C and C-sharp in the piece and hoping that I might hash this out even in the opening tune. Something that might foreshadow the later important relationship these two notes will have with each other, and set up a conflict. I accomplished this by using a typical blues-song structure to present the two contrasting key-centers as alternatives. Recall that the typical blues verse structure is AAB. That is, three lines of more-or-less equal length, the first two of which are identical: My Pappy gone searchin' round the backyard with a gun; Un peu macabre. And loose. But it fits the bill. (And if you think that's a bit off-color, you'll have a real field-day with some of the old bluesers' more ambitious lyrics….) Notice, in my tasteful example that although the first two lines are nearly identical, they're not quite exact—a little bit of delay, or a little change-up can add just enough interest to keep our attention without distorting the obvious and intentional similarity. This last point is important, because too much excitement in line two would tend to upstage the real horrorshow third line—and that, heaven forbid, might cut into the audience's aghast moment of shock. In the musical accompaniment, too, this slight change is underscored: both lines end on the tonic chord, but the second one begins in the subdominant (a basic and closely-related chord which gives just enough relief without wandering too far away). I thought that the difference between the first two “lines” of music might be an appropriate place to play my two key centers off against each other. The difficulty lay in doing this in a way that seemed smooth rather than jarring, making the new key center feel like a logical point of rest in only four short measures. This difficulty is compounded due to the fact that C and C-sharp are very distantly-related to one another. The reason for this is a bit difficult to explain to the non-musician, but for clarity's sake let's go: In traditional music theory, harmony revolves around two main chords—all the other chords are variants of these, ornamental, or transitional. These chords are the tonic (same chord as the note name of the key) and the dominant (four letter names above the tonic). As defined by these twin poles, a key, say C Major, has other closely related keys, the most obvious being G (the key of C's dominant). Thus it's only natural that keys with letter names spaced widely apart are, in general, more closely related than keys with letter names which are very close together. So, although C and C-sharp are close on the keyboard, they are very distant keys with different key signatures and no chords in common between them. Listen to the opening of Strauss's “Also Sprach Zarathrusta” for another example of this tension—in this case, Strauss uses the extremely unrelated keys of B and C to suggest a dichotomy between humans and nature. Suffice it to say that much of my effort this week was spent achieving the end of creating the illusion of smoothness between the two poles—much as today, when I attempted (but did not succeed in) creating the illusion of smoothness as I nervously shambled through Yale orientation! The rhythm of a typical blues lyric is distinctive, as well. As of late it's become acceptable to cram any number of syllables into each line due to the oft-excessive machine-gun-like firing-off of successive syllables wherever the singer chooses; the “classical” blues cadence tends toward the loping iambic pentameter (the same da-DUM da-DUM that propels a blues shuffle). Curiously, it works quite well to take certain passages of metric verse from Shakespeare and sing them as a blues. Try it: I will not be afraid of death and bane; So on the level of rhythm I tried to capture the easy flow and pace of the blues. In both of these efforts, I think I succeed in capturing a particular flavor without making something recognizable as a blues—something which thus far had eluded me. So while I'm happy with these qualities, I do have my doubts. I'm worried that I created a song too overtly complex and full of tension, and perhaps it might be better to use a straight-up, simple song as a foil. We'll see. Also, there are two parts of the song where it kind of steps outside of itself into a less bluesy, more ecclesiastical language, which at the time I thought would be a good way to hint at the piece's later tensions between the two “worlds” of music. Now I'm wondering if those worlds are already inherent in the song itself, and since they are immediately drawn out and separated at the piece proper's inception I'm not sure if this kind of heavy-handed thing is really necessary. Again, I'll let it sit for a while as I work on the main part of the piece. So, this accomplishment aside, I've been feeling kind of low as I've gotten into working on the main body of the piece…partly because I'm unsure of myself, but also because this project is not taking the life I hoped it would from the outset. I feel very alone right now, acutely conscious of the different pressures bearing down on me and unable to deal with or exorcise them. The fact remains that most of the pressure is from myself, desires and fears relating to my own satisfaction, the quartet's enjoyment of the piece, and whether I'll use this great opportunity to produce nothing but a shoddy, high-concept work. I'm angry at myself for being so egotistical to create, sustain, and in some degree succumb to this pressure, angry that I'm not catching on to where things want to go. I think back to my second incarnation of this piece, the one based on “Sitting On Top of the World”, and am upset that I decided not to follow it. When I ultimately rejected that version of the project it was in part because I didn't see how my idea could produce anything other than a flashy barn-burner with little substance and little risk; now I'm worried that I've chosen to slog through a non-flashy bore, all the more of a waste in that I'm not sure that the level of subtlety on which I'm trying to wage my compositional argument will really provide a voice for everything that I can do. I'm hoping that it'll turn out to be the mature choice to have made and reveal something deeper that I hadn't been able to grapple with before, but it's risky. I've got so much riding on my musical argument that I fear it could fail to crystallize, leaving me with something even less than the exciting and fluffy bombast I willingly abandoned. I sit and think, try to write things down, and am not happy. What angers me most of all, perhaps, is the power I've granted to that part of myself which has gambled away my peace of mind and sense of self-worth on some stupid piece of paper with notes on it—I feel like it's all been put on the roulette wheel. Now the wheel's spinning, spinning so fast it's both dazzling and confusing, and I'm in the center of everything, not sure how to take it all back. I was having dinner with a good composer-friend of mine a couple days ago, and she did me the favor of making the important observation that it's not really my decision to make the piece good or bad. It's not, and it never will be, because all I can do is trust myself, trust all the thinking and work I've been doing, and trust that if I can just get it out of me that it will fly on its own. I normally have a hard time trusting myself, often due to the belief that over-confidence can be a tragic flaw that is usually self-defeating. My friend was quite correct, though, in the sense that one's music is one of the few things that one has to make no apologies for. I think I've been so caught up in the academic world, so caught up in criticism, that I've almost ceased to see this piece as what it is: a wonderful learning opportunity. It's a difficult place to find, that strange locus between not giving a damn about your work and doing too much over-cautious hand-wringing…I'm hoping to get there soon. In a way, then, the struggle this is all hinging on has very little to do with my piece, but mainly with myself. I hope that I'm strong enough to tune out all the noise and discover at last a quiet place where this can all come together. [Back to Top] August 22, 2005: "Copland House/Exploring Mystery Notes" So I'm finally as set up in New Haven as I'm ever going to be; haven't gotten one smidgen of work done on the piece this last week, which is just as well since it seems I still need to catch up with myself on this journal. Last entry I described some problems that soon became apparent in my newly-formed baby having to do with motivation. In short, I had a good general sense of the piece's components, but absolutely no sense of how these components might be ordered in a way that might create some kind of direction. Like this delicious bag of Swedish bridge mix I'm currently snacking on, the tasty musical morsels remained randomly stirred in a mixture -- and I needed some kind of way to, say, arrange my hazelnuts and licorice drops into some kind of pattern. This I was sorely lacking, and what's more my musical ideas were not nearly so succulent as the candy I impulsively purchased at IKEA. Copland House is a big, rustic, cabin-like structure in the Hudson valley. The situation was different from that at Montalvo due to the fact that the residency program is designed to house only one composer at any given time—meaning I had complete run of the house. As it turned out, the whole dynamic at Copland House worked out much as if I had rented the place for a month, and I got to know Peekskill pretty well as I shopped for groceries and paid perhaps too-frequent trips to a local Indian restaurant. Here are some pics, including a nice fleur from the Perlis garden, a shot of the back entrance to the house, Copland's manuscript for “Fanfare for the Common Man”, and of course a token “at-the-piano” shot of your truly looking pretty brain-dead after a particularly taxing day of work:
Copland House was not only a great environment to work in but also a real gem of a historical museum with lots of scores, recordings, and jottings to enjoy in one's spare time. Another point of enjoyment was Copland's old work table, which had been fashioned from a barn door by a local carpenter. It felt good to spread all my papers on that table and begin anew. As I evaluated my own inability to resolve the problems in my newly-birthed piece, I started to ponder heading in a different direction. Without any higher organization my piece felt sprawling and lifeless, and I searched for an alternate idea that might be more full-blooded and direct. I mentioned my interest in certain blues lyrics in an earlier entry, and I became interested in seeing if I might be able to base the piece off of a specific old blues tune, “Sitting On Top of the World”, from which I quoted on August 12th. One of the reasons I felt that my original idea for the piece was weak is that it didn't give the listener anything at the outset that could be held onto -—variations without a theme! I now envisioned something like a Bach chorale fantasy in which the tune, simply stated at the outset, would form the source material for the rest of the piece. Furthermore, the piece would be structured in a number of sections, each distinct in character and musical materials, each section relating to a particular line of text from the original lyrics. I began to sketch out this piece and hoped I could make it work, not at all oblivious to the deadline that was slowly but imperturbably marching toward me. Although this new idea was certainly attractive to me initially, I slowly became aware of many of its aspects which were less than appealing. For one thing, it seemed very easy to pull off—almost formulaic. There didn't seem to be any of the risk or wildness associated with the original idea, and so in a way this new idea seemed like a step backwards. Also, this manner of troping off of each line proved itself to feel artificial, and the piece's inner argument didn't convincingly grow out of the source material. As I prepared to leave Peekskill for Cleveland on the 21st of July, I was conscious of having taken a severe misstep, one which had cost me precious time and energy. Yet, as I mused on my red-eye, a misstep which maybe put me in a better position to deal with the looming specter of my original idea. The Young Composer's Program at CIM smashed through my life like a whirlwind, but man, was it a great time! We had a remarkable group of 15 talented teenagers this year, each of which had written a new piece for our string quartet-in-residence (informally referred to as the Harold Quartet). During the week we were occupied roughly 25 hours a day, and I put the spare -1 hour into preparing for my daily notation classes as well as two evening lectures. One of these lectures dealt with the concept of dramatic premise upon which I've already expounded, and the other dealt with the craft of songwriting, in which I somehow slipped under the radar and got to illustrate some points with examples from songs by the Beatles, Ben Folds, and the Clash! Despite the sweltering temperature everything went well, and I enjoyed getting to know each student's music better over the course of the week. Considering that many of the students were already writing substantial music at an age when I hadn't myself even begun composing, I was really impressed by their ability and hard work. Any interested parties roughly 14-19 should feel free to drop me a line via the Hopkins Center or check out Peter Gilbert's YCP page.
In its relation to my compositional struggles as well, the YCP was good for me in that it forced me to slow down for a moment and take stock of my situation. I didn't have time to sit down and write, so all my work had to go on in my mind, where you can't fidget around on a piece of paper to circumvent the real issues. Slowly and painfully, I began to modify my original idea with certain aspects of the second. First of all, I decided that making my source material explicit might not be a bad thing after all, and I decided to present my own, newly-written tune in lieu of a borrowed one. At the outset, this tune would be played on a sound system, having been pre-recorded by Kronos earlier and manipulated by myself to sound as an old, warbling 78 replete with pops and surface hiss. This tune would be in C-minor but feature C-sharp prominently as an alternate key area; as the movement proper begins, in fact, a C-sharp is the last thing we hear before the recording is abruptly clicked off to reveal two different melodic strands. These are those same two I discussed earlier, one clean, tonal, and smoothly progressing, the other violent, jagged, and distorted. These would each begin in distant key areas but would slowly move towards each other, the meeting point being C-sharp. Until the meeting point, not only would the key area of C-sharp be avoided but the note C-sharp would be utterly absent—when it finally occurs, it provokes a new course of action. This would be the end of an initial “expository” section. The C-sharp as a “mystery note” which begs to be dealt with is useful in that it provides an axis through which these two, initially distant worlds of music could be made aware of each other. The middle section of the piece, then, would deal with the two worlds fighting for supremacy, and of course it would be the note C-sharp which functions as a magical doorway of sorts: through that note, one world could be pulled around into the orbit of the other, and vice versa. Eventually this would become so frequent and intense that it would provoke something like a full scale statement (or restatement!) of that pre-recorded tune that opened the piece, this time fully real and rife with activity, as it threatens to be pulled apart by the implacable tension between the two worlds which continue to duke it out at a feverish pace. At the last possible moment, the climax of the piece would occur -- the two worlds would painfully, finally merge into one. At this moment the quartet would sop playing, but the wild, looped echoes of the climax would continue, finally fading as the last section began. In this last section, which would be predominantly slow and reflective, the pitch C would finally be arrived at as a definitive tonal center. Instead of either the distortion or clean tone randomly bandied about in the previous sections, a new blanket effect would be put over the whole quartet like a halo, one at once warm and glowing with spacious reverberation. This section would feel like a newly-birthed creature trying out its wings for the first time, finally whole and free of all the baggage of the previous sections. However, the note D-flat (enharmonic, meaning sounding the same as, C-sharp) would arise a few times and gently threaten the newfound equilibrium. Just as it seemed that this concluding section was softly winding down to a close, the quartet would fade away abruptly, and 10 seconds or so of that vinyl-sounding pre-recorded music would end the piece. It would begin exactly where it had been interrupted at the beginning, as if the piece itself were simply the contents of a colossal pair of parentheses, at once undermining the validity of the apparent resolution and suggesting the dreamlike, perhaps even unreal nature of everything that had come to pass. I liked this idea, and still do, because of the way it let me work the best ideas from my alternative plan back into the original idea and enrich its content with material that shed new light on what I wanted to do. Now what is often termed the “real” work has begun, the part where I sit down with pencil and paper and write it. I'm a little intimidated by the time frame, but I'm confident that now that I've sorted out my thinking it won't take long to put it down on paper. I bring this up partly as a rejoinder to those who think that the “work” of a composition lies mainly in the grunt work of writing it—in this case the opposite turned out to be true! Anyway, I've just begun this process and it's going well so far. I'm hoping to speak to Scott Fraser, Kronos's tech expert and on-site electronics coordinator about the logistics and feasibility of all the electronic components. By next entry I hope I'll have made some progress on the piece worth reporting and maybe will pick apart some aspects of this idea in depth. But it feels good to finally have a workable idea, so much that it's worth remembering that ideas are not music. It can be dangerous to let your music drive an idea rather than using the idea to drive the music, and my main efforts this next month will be to ensure that I've got the guts to fiddle with or even rebuke parts of this idea if they don't produce beautiful, engaging music. [Back to Top] August 15, 2005: "An Act of Creative Vandalism" In my previous entry I blabbed a good deal about the different ways in which a composer deals with his or her materials, but I actually said very little about something more fundamental: the way in which a composer lays out ideas (or “finds inspiration”, if you're down with that kind of thing) and thinks about a piece on the most basic level. I usually get a lot of questions relating to the use of the piano during the compositional proess, usually from non-musicians; mainly, I think these questions are the result of this “composer jock” kind of attitude in which it's cool or macho to do all your work strolling by brooks and such. The use of any instrument exclusively can certainly become a crutch, but in general I think the popular stigma against its use (or at least in favor of those who purportedly “don't need” the aid of an instrument) is unfounded. I've always felt that one's method of composing is extremely personal in nature and should take a back seat to the actual music produced.
One very successful composer active today writes from 9-5 with a lunch break; Aaron Copland did it in the evening; Igor Stravinsky always tried to have a piano handy; Mozart tended to have a good deal of his stuff worked out in his head; many of Bach's finest compositions evolved from improvisations over a vamped chord progression or bass line, much like successive choruses over a standard. If it feels good, go for it; just remember that, Hector Berlioz aside, good music rarely comes from opium-induced trances -- although I know a few colleagues who've made similar experiments along those lines only to discover the next morning that their elaborately-planned masterpiece turned out to be a hot load of drivel. Saying what you really mean and feel is important, and sometimes it can be tempting to try and say things you wished you felt instead. Composers for the most part don't inherit their work habits at random, but usually go through a variety of approaches, eventually settling on their own combination of procedures that best fit their own goals. When I started out, I wanted to write melodies and expand them into longer movements, often with little regard for pacing, balance, or any important events along the way; as a result, I always began at the piano, riffing off of a few melodic fragments I'd thought up and, yes, occasionally imitating gestures or techniques from other pieces I liked at the time. If my work habits have changed since then it's only because of a corresponding change in my musical goals and values. This change was gradual and even as I write is probably headed in an entirely new direction, but I can best describe my current way of working as follows: Whereas I used to be primarily interested in melody and the harmony that supports it, now I like to step back a bit and think about the entire thrust of a piece in terms of its dramatic premise; so while I haven't given up melody or the kind of craft I grew up emulating, I try to focus this craft in the service of larger gestures which will unify the work as a whole. The recording of “Black Bend” available through this site is a good example of a very early example of that kind of thinking; it's still very undeveloped, but it's already a far cry from simply slopping melodies around without any shape or dramatic thrust. Part of the appeal of this approach for me became that it permitted me to allow my large-scale idea of what I wanted determine the tiny building-blocks, instead of the haphazard alternative of giving my somewhat arbitrary little fragments such draconian control over the piece as a whole! The other appeal of this approach has to do with what is meant by musical unity. The most unified piece we might imagine would be a single note, held for the piece's entire duration -- or, to bring that up a few notches, one single melody or gesture that's repeated ad nauseam. Clearly, this is undesirable under normal circumstances, but the other extreme can be just as bothersome. A piece in which nothing ever returns, in which everything is a jumble of disconnected ideas, is little better than one of those dreams that acquaintances awkwardly relate about the frog that turned into a swan with which they then played a bout of croquet—dreams that evidently mean a lot to the dreamer but mean almost nothing to the hapless victim for the simple reason that nothing relates to anything else. Clearly, I'm getting at the need for balance in a composition, of enough spokes to connect us to the central hub but enough adventures and surprises to provide relief from that very central idea and make it relevant in new contexts. Film critic Roger Ebert once said something along these same lines when he described awful movies as unpredictable and nonsensical, decent movies as predictable and sensical, and great movies as unpredictable, yet sensical. (The position allotted to the first two types may vary depending on personal taste, but the important point is the clear superiority of the last). Now we can begin to see how this line of thought can create a need for more planning and a greater emphasis on a central premise. Take jokes, for example. Very few honest-to-goodness jokes are told these days, but consider this popular form: Q: What's black, white, and re(a)d all over? A: A newspaper. (groan) Obviously it's best to consider this verbally, but after the initial revulsion at the joke's corniness I think there's something musical to be learned here -- something that can form a paradigm for a way to not only balance unity with plurality but moreover, something that can allow these conflicting elements to actually support each other instead finding the lame kind of balance which results from half-hearted compromise. Looking at this damn cheesy joke, we can take away these observations: 1) There is an assumption or premise (“red”) which is achieved through the skillful manipulation of the exposition (black and white suggest interpreting “read” as “red”). 2) Next, we get an apparent non sequitur, a real shocker (the newspaper). 3) Last, the apparent incongruity forces a reevaluation of our initial assumption, a shift in thinking roughly analogous to a Necker Cube, and to the extent that we laugh at all, we laugh at our own gullibility and the cleverness, the craft, if you will, with which the joke was constructed. The point is that pulling off the real magic trick and achieving balance of materials within the context of musical drama requires planning, not just notes, rhythms, and harmonies. Therefore, I tend to do a lot of sketching of shapes, words, and colors on blank white paper as well as lying immobile and just thinking before I think about the parts of a composition that one actually will hear. This last statement begs an obvious question, namely why I or any sensible person would expend effort on something no one will hear rather than on F-sharps. My answer would be that although we do directly experience music on that more primal level, unless those basic elements are allowed to unfold in a meaningful way they will not be perceived, much less appreciated to their fullest extent. This is a lot of what “hook” writing in popular song is all about, and the idea is not necessarily inimical so-called “classical” concert music. That said, I was then at the beginning of January staring at a very blank single-movement piece which might be amplified—sound emanating from nothing! At this point I became concerned with filling this stark, ungainly (but fertile!) container with something that might bloom. To do so, I decided to revisit some of my previous compositions to pick up on a few strands that I didn't feel had fully reached their potential. Those who've listened to the recording of “Black Bend” will know that I've been interested in certain aspects of rock and jazz, including the looseness of rhythm, timbral complexity, and raw, propulsive energy. That piece was kind of a proving ground for those traits, kind of a study I underwent in order to see if I was capable of effectively translating and notating those ideas. Although that seemed to go very well, I had not yet broken away from the stylistic dead-end of imitating a blues or rock language, which I think I only achieved a few pieces later. My next piece was an orchestral work called “Graffiti” which was written for the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra. In this work I didn't entirely break away from using recognizable references to the American vernacular, but the overall sound of the piece isn't anything you'd ever hear on the radio. Here's an excerpt from the program notes: I've long been interested in the ways "serious" art and the vernacular interact; in "Graffiti", I was inspired by the selfsame act of creative vandalism and the musical opportunities this suggested to me. Specifically, I was interested in certain walls and even whole alleys that had been covered with so many layers of paint that they appeared more like vast, intricate murals than a rather minor form of crime. The raw, communicative urgency of these collages–each one created by many different people, often rivals from different factions suggested to me a musical landscape in which many distinct elements are thrown into violent juxtaposition with each other. I borrowed from the rough, expressive language of rock n' roll for a good deal of the material, and attempted to weave the sounds into a complex tapestry in order to create a musical metaphor for my experience. The way in which certain, newer, portions of a graffiti mural sometimes blend into, distort, or even completely obliterate previous contributions ended up influencing the development of the piece as well. I've posted two short excerpts from “Graffiti” that I hope will illustrate these points. Notice in the second excerpt the presence of a long, lyrical line in the violas which doesn't seem to fit into the prevailing musical language -- it's kind of a mistake that happens only once in “Graffiti” and which foreshadows something important that I take up again in the Kronos piece. "Graffiti" excerpt #1: "Graffiti" excerpt #2: “Psychedelic Rainbow Blues”, the piece I wrote for Antares last year, takes everything a step further, or maybe a couple of steps in different directions. First, there's more of an assimilation of the mad, wailing sound of an overdriven rock band. This is from a movement called “Eleven”: Next, and more significantly, listen to some of this movement, which is rather sophisticatedly labeled “Jug Band Jamboree”: It sounds a lot like “Black Bend” in some ways, doesn't it? The languid, open sounds of a hazy, rural atmosphere are there, along with the bluesy bends and improvisatory sense of rhythm. However, this movement was a step forward for me in that it was one of the first times I was able to reign in some of the wildness I'd always been after within the context of an overall drama without taming that same wildness or watering it down. Also, the music is sillier, a little more off-the-cuff, and I felt good about loosening up. Here's a very brief synopsis of what happens in “Jug Band Jamboree”: I started thinking about the idea of a band and how it differs from, say, an orchestra. One of the main differences is that in a band players tend to have very specific roles to fulfill, whereas in an orchestra these roles are temporary and fluid. What I set out to do in this movement was to create a set of “rules” which very clearly defined each player's role. I was interested in seeing if a few simple directives, each one clear in its own context, could give birth to startling complexity when each collided with each other head-on. It's almost as if I programmed four little wind-up toys and then let them crash into each other, the chaos in this case not resulting from what each little critter wanted to do but from what was imbedded in their nature. Notice how this idea has a lot in common with that superlatively awful joke I treated everyone to earlier. I liked this idea because, far from making things robotic, it gave me a chance to play with each player's character, and I tried to make these as vivid as possible. For example, the clarinet is something of a scared bird; he begins playing only small, pecky intervals which simultaneously ascend and expand into a raucous din of squawks. The cellist plays only long tones in natural harmonics (which resemble the static hum of distant power lines) or else the low E-flat—that's it, that's the program. The violin plays some dirty-sounding tremolo figures which are intended to be reminiscent of a harmonica, which ascend at a constant rate. The pianist, who has the oddest job of all, tries in vain to blow a good strong note on the jug (in the LA performance posted here, it was a Heineken 22 oz. -- don't ask!) and also makes some scratches on the low strings which come off a bit like a washboard. When the pianist finally hits his note he launches into a short melody in E-flat Major as the chaos continues around him. Here's the rub: I wanted something truly weird to happen, and I wanted to happen within the context of the rules I had set out for each player. That moment is near the end of the excerpt posted here, when for a couple beats everyone somehow comes together playing with the piano in the key of E-flat major. Notice that I didn't bend any rules to accomplish this—that would be like changing the first line of a joke after the fact. Rather, I structured my rules in such a way that this oddball outcome, though unlikely and hopefully surprising, was actually one of many legitimately possible outcomes inherent in the rules I laid out. Unpredictable, maybe, but sensible. A risk taken, a need satisfied. Is this starting to make more sense? I didn't have a chance to really get into the Kronos piece until the middle of June due some other commissions I had yet to fulfill as well as the demands of teaching, finishing my master's at CIM, and auditioning for doctoral programs; the last of these in particular took a lot out of me at the time, so the piece remained on the bottom shelf until I headed to Villa Montalvo for 2 weeks:
The Lucas Artists Program at Montalvo is a relative newcomer on the residency scene, but my stay there was wonderful, freeing, and productive. The staff quickly helped me set up in a roomy hillside studio, and now it was time to get to work. I got to thinking about the smash-and-bash approach I took in “Graffiti” and decided that I would try to make that kind of splicing a major component of the Kronos piece. In “Graffiti”, however, there is such an intentional plurality of materials that the listener loses focus on trying to follow a clearly delineated structure and simply becomes lost in the natural ebb and flow of rushing textures. The effect is similar to a still life (or songbook), in which unity is achieved from the balance and placement of dissimilar elements rather than from any purported inner unity. I wanted to take this idea in a different direction, with a nod to the kind of self-imposed restrictions and inner structure with which I dabbled in the “Jug Band Jamboree” movement. Previously, I mentioned a moment in the second excerpt from “Graffiti” in which, for the only time in the whole piece, a musical idea enters the scene that feels as if it comes from another world entirely. This was one of my favorite moments in “Graffiti”, and I wondered if I could make that kind of thing happen over the course of an entire piece. In order for that to happen, I thought, I'd have need of the kind of limitations that would reduce the level of musical activity to a more basic level. Listening to some old blues recordings, I got to thinking how the particular flavor of the blues, its bittersweet tension bristling with subtext, might provide a clue to something I could use to polarize my thinking about all these different musical fragments colliding with each other. In traditional blues recordings from the '20s-'40s and later, much of the lyrical interest stems from the protagonist's public posing and strutting while private defeat and sadness lurk in the background. Take, for example, this opening verse of “Sitting On Top of the World”: One summer day She went away; Gone and left me Here to stay. She's gone, but I don't worry; I'm sittin' on top of the world. Notice how in this case a sense of macho posturing is underscored by an inner vulnerability, a dichotomy which is mirrored in the basic melodic and harmonic materials of the blues itself. The particular “blue-note” flavor of this kind of music has often been reduced to the consideration of a “blues scale”, a kind of messed-up folk scale which actually doesn't occur in early blues at all. This “blues scale” is actually a watered-down way of describing two elements: the predominantly major harmony which accompanies the singer, and the singer's own minor pentatonic lament. The clash between these two worlds (to use a terminology consistent with that I've employed for my own music) is what produces the particular bittersweet whine and swagger of the blues—not the “blues scale”, which as you can see is a very misleading concept. I wondered if I might write a piece for Kronos in which the musical activity is restricted to two “worlds” of music, each with its own grammar, affect, and trajectory; these worlds would freely fade in and out, much like in “Graffiti”, creating interest and propulsive drive from their (lack of) interaction. Also, I wanted these two worlds to come together at one point, maybe become a whole thing for a while, each revealing its need for the other. The problem became how to make this work. At Montalvo I spent a good deal of time improvising and sketching out the characters and vocabulary of each world in my piece -- I even did some “thumbnail sketches”, or short go-nowhere pieces which helped me define the inner drama and, I guess, metabolism of each world on its own. But by the time I was getting ready to leave Montalvo and head east to Copland House, I felt like I had reached the end of my rope. I had a great sense of my musical materials, that much was certain, but I was faced with major problems of dramatic motivation. The piece was to begin with each world indifferent to each other, and only later would they duke it out while assuming the guise of normal chamber music rhetoric. The question remained: if the progression was from non-reaction to reaction, what would happen to provoke such a change? Also, what would happen to provoke these two worlds' synthesis into one at the climax? I didn't have any answers, and began to wonder whether the project was doomed to be stillborn. Next entry I'll provide details about my stay at Copland House as well as a few detours I took from this original premise for the Kronos piece -- detours that ultimately were necessary, albeit distracting, in that they ended up providing me with the answers I needed to move on. [Back to Top] August 12, 2005: "Buffeted By a Swarm of Thoughts and Emotions" I had my crazy three months of travel culminate in one insane weekend binge of moving to New Haven, Connecticut. It's nice to finally be (semi-)installed in my purported place of habitation for the next two years. I had a great time in San Francisco, and although I have a lot of work ahead of me to accomplish in the next month and a half I feel a great deal more confident. It was great to spend time with the quartet and staff, and it was interesting to see how such a complicated system can be made to function.
When one composes, it's useful to draw a clear distinction between two modes of thinking: the creative and the critical, loosely speaking. In the "creative" mode, my goal is to get a lot of messy, wild ideas down, without much thought as to their ultimate feasibility (see above sketch); later, I try to slap on my critic's hat and deal harshly with my pet ideas, thinking more about design and practicality. This distinction is important in that unless it is maintained, it's often very difficult for me to explore any fruitful ideas in depth since I'll often shoot them down before they get a chance to develop. Something like this distinction is integral to the scientific method as well, and I certainly observed something like it between the Kronos quartet and staff -- the dichotomy between the raw, malleable spark of invention (often from the quartet) balanced and tempered by the patience and problem-solving skills of the staffers. I mention this because I was really impressed with the way in which the diversity of approaches and abilities seems to have worked out for the Kronos organization, and it's always heartening to see that kind of thing in the service of a common goal -- there's something romantically appealing, almost utopian about it! Today I'd like to hunker down and write my first "real" entry, a longer one in which I will try to place myself back in time circa January and lay out the entire development of the Kronos piece until now. I've been somewhat loath to attempt this until now due to the amount of traveling I've undergone. I appreciate the reader's patience with my alternately tightly glib and gushingly insubstantial previous entries. Composers send out scores to all sorts of grants, proposals, and contests, and the best policy with these is to send to them and then forget about them -- that way you've got a nice surprise in the mail one day if it pans out, and you avoid the stress and effort of endlessly musing over imaginary projects while you franticly scrawl away at your own current ones! Therefore, it's safe to say that I hadn't sparked a single synapse on the piece until one day in early January 05. I forget the exact day of the month, but while I had come home after a day of teaching I realized that my phone had registered a new message but had somehow failed to ring. Listening to the message, I was positive that it was some kind of prank. It was a fairly vague message from David Harrington, and for some reason I didn't think it was likely that he would personally call me -- it just seemed too informal, too normal, too sensible. As I later realized, it was entirely in character! I was so sure that it was a prank that I didn't bother to call back for an hour or so, until finally I thought better of my oft-unreliable gut feelings and returned the call. By the end of the day I had spoken with David, accepted writing a piece for the quartet, and had a pretty good buzz -- a buzz which had to remain bottled up for another two weeks, leaving me buffeted around by a swarm of thoughts and emotions. As I settled down and got ready for bed, I turned off the light and thought, "What on earth am I going to write?" The serpentine hiss of the radiator next to my head didn't answer. One thing that's often misunderstood about composers is that they work in widely different ways. The extremely private nature of composing has done much to bring this about, but throughout much of the past these varied personal approaches have been filtered through the musical climate of the time. For example, composers of the renaissance tended to think in terms of musical lines (literally voices) which were of equal importance and similar temperment, and the relationship of any of the upper voices to each other was not so important as the relationship of each upper voice to the bass. Later on, (in the unfortunately-named "baroque" period and on), the outer voices tended to dominate and the inner voices became relegated more often to "filler" which became interpreted under the aegis of "harmony", which is a way of taking the discrete positions of all voices at any one instant as forming a vertical chord. So while composers often shared certain general assumptions through which their musical ideas were filtered, they tended to differ radically in the ways they dealt with the substance of their work. Partly this was due to the fact that travel was restricted and parochialism the norm, but more importantly it reflects the individual personalities and worldviews of particular composers, as revealed in their work. For example, Haydn and Mozart share a consistent harmonic vocabulary, lived roughly contemporaneously, and furthermore were highly aware of each other's output. Yet it's very difficult to mistake a mature Haydn composition for one by Mozart due to their particular ways of dealing with materials. For example, Haydn often takes small musical ideas, often highly rhythmic in nature, as the basis for a composition, and these form the building blocks of a larger structure. Conversely, Mozart tends to deal in long, lyrical lines, and in the progress of a work the interest is often in how these lines will be broken down or their hidden similarities revealed. Such differences have led a number of musicologists to describe Haydn's output as abounding in "outer simplicity, inner complexity", whereas Mozart's exhibits "outer complexity, inner simplicity". Again, an overgeneralization, perhaps, but it starts you out on the right track. For the non-academics reading this, you could do worse than to listen to a few works by Haydn and Mozart with an ear for these qualities, finally putting on any Beethoven symphonies (especially 6 and 7) and taking a guess as to which side of the divide he seems to be on. This long digression has been heading somewhere, I think, which has to do with the particular problem composers today have to deal with when they begin a new work. As I've said, in the past composers were often unified in their general stylistic assumptions, whereas their manner of working within those assumptions was by necessity extremely private in nature. Since maybe the middle of the last century to the present, I think we've witnessed something like an inversion of those precepts: for the composer today, the whole gamut of style and genre is available for inspiration or outright plundering, while the individual composer's personality as expressed in his or her peculiar way of dealing with those materials has, to me, become more dogmatic and limited. As you can see, I'm throwing out a lot of neat little sound bytes right now, not because I am a nefarious evil-doer hell-bent on perpetuating easily-graspable generalities, but rather because I think those generalities are at least to some degree valid and provide a useful jumping-off point. In later entries I hope to punch some holes in just these kind of trite explanations, but taken with a grain of salt they do give us something useful to focus on. The point of this whole tangent has been that when I, and probably many living composers have to face a new work, the sheer number of choices that have to be made can be daunting. Couple this with the dazzling possibilities of the string quartet in general and the Kronos Quartet in particular, and now it might be more clear why I didn't sleep that night, or the one after that. I needed to think about style, about the musical language that I would use and whether or not it would be fertile enough to express something interesting, or whether it would merely appear interesting in itself. I wanted the former, and as I mentioned in my first entry I later wrote quite a bit of music that no one will ever hear in search of a solution to that problem. I also needed to think about what that something I wanted to say was -- I didn't want it to be monolithic or moralizing, or even something discernibly literary; I think when faced with a project of this nature at this point in one's life, saying something grandiose can be a real temptation, and one that is best avoided while there's still time. I wanted to say something simple, maybe something very plain in fact, but something that would resonate in a large space and maybe, just maybe if I handled it the right way, end up filling that space in a meaningful way. But these are big questions, and sometimes getting the little stupid questions out of the way is a good place to start. I am currently finishing another commission (see above) from the Antares ensemble, which is a piece in lots of short movements that attempts to tap into the madness and energy of late '60s psychedelic rock as well as the particular formal experience of listening to a rock album. (Antares is a superb group and was a joy to work with -- and they've got a great new CD out with some well-chosen and well-played contemporary works...check it out!) Thus, my first little decision was simply to do something different and write a piece in a single extended movement. A subsequent trip to New York and an initial meeting with the quartet proved useful in that I also nailed down my desire to use some kind of amplification and live electronics in the piece, something I'd only attempted once and with dubious results. This left me with a whole bucket o' nothing, and my next step to fill this void proved to be searching through my previous works for half-developed ideas as inspiration. True to form, I've only accomplished about half of what I'd set out to do today, but I think this makes a good cadence point. Tomorrow, I'll complete the back-story and toss in some pictures from the summer, if I can find them lurking around my hard drive. [Back to Top] August 10, 2005: "Raid on Kronos HQ" Greetings, gentle readers. I'm writing this at Kronos headquarters in San Francisco. I drove up from Santa Cruz this morning, met with David Harrington and other members of the Kronos Krew, and am now relaxing for a brief moment before I fly back east for some moving hijinks.
The Kronos office is across the street from the quartet's rehearsal space, on a strip that is appropriately lined with cool restaurants and a really bully combination art gallery/coffee shop. Got to check out the tea gardens in Golden Gate Park, took a trip down to Haight St. to check out Amoeba Records, which is this totally jacked store with a really nice selection of everything from classical to electronica. I had lunch at this Japanese place with David, who seemed in good spirits, and he was eager to hear about the progress I've made on the piece, however elusive. (By the way, if my discussion of the new Kronos piece has been itself of an elusive, cursory nature as of yet, that's intentional; I've got about two months of grunt work ahead of me in which not much of interest will occur, and I'd rather let the whole thing unfold gradually against a backdrop of flashbacks). Early on I had decided to use some pre-recorded electronics and distortion in the piece, but it was only recently that I achieved the state of being able to clearly delineate my designs, so I was eager to run my crude ideas by David and discover that they are at least plausible. So in a week or so I'll be in touch with someone who handles the on-site electronics and sound design for the Kronos gigs and am looking forward to translating my grand [sic] scheme into some minute particulars. I've just now charged through the office guerilla-style and snapped some pics of the remaining Kronos staffers. The quartet has assembled a really cool group of people who work on all kinds of things behind the scenes, and I thought it might be nice to give props to them all -- or at least to the three who arbitrarily happened to be around!
This is Sidney. The man is a dynamo of organizational energy; also, as you can see from the photo, his coolness causes a distortion in the very fabric of space-time itself. This is clearly the reason that Sid is a blur in this shot. This aside, Sid has been really helpful setting up my various interactions with Kronos and dealing with all of my bitchy, high-maintenance needs as they come up (often before). He went to Harvard for a spell, still sings a mean basso when the occasion calls for it, and, as you can see, has a really big glass of water in front of him. You go, Sidney!
I didn't get much of a chance to talk with Christina, but she was the one who let me in this morning and thus in a way, she made all of this possible. I'm not sure what's on her iPod, but for sake of argument let's imagine her queuing up Thriller.
This is Anna. You can see a lot of filing trays behind her so you know that she has to deal with some pretty heavy-duty sh**. Anna's a Berkeley grad and does a lot of music journalism, and writes for some cool 'zines when she's not working for Kronos (she also showed me one particularly interesting short story that, I'm fairly certain, every U.S. law forbids me from describing in this journal. Cool stuff!) Ok, time to get my crap together and get ready for an insane two days of packing. Looking forward to getting settled in New Haven and dishing a bit about my initial work on the piece at Montalvo and Copland House. [Back to Top] August 5, 2005: "The relentless click-clack rhythm of a doomed train" Stuck in Washington-Dulles for a few hours before heading out to Santa Cruz...I smell an opportunity for another journal entry! For any interested parties, the smell is piquant, much like the unwelcome aroma of stale Cinnabons and those big soft pretzels that look good but never seem to taste good. I mean, just to select a random example. I'm heading off to Santa Cruz for the Cabrillo Festival, which is the only pickup-orchestra contemporary music festival that I'm aware of and also something roughly equivalent to the Burning Man of new music freaks, sans the survivalist streak. I'm participating in the composer/conductor workshop which is being organized by the Conductor's Guild, and along with two other talented composers will be working on recordings of works for small orchestra. I didn't have the time to compose an entirely new work for the festival, so I decided to arrange an earlier piece of mine. The piece, a short string quartet written for the AKI festival at the Cleveland Museum of Art, was one of my few short pieces which I had ever felt an urge to rearrange--rather than my usual urge just to rewrite! I think a short tangent to explain what I was going for in that piece and why it didn't happen might help explain this particular decision. Once, when canoeing in central Ohio, an elderly rental-runner related a particularly gruesome, yet strangely fascinating story to me, of which I'm still not certain exactly what proportion is truthful. There's a dilapidated, rotting railroad bridge which crosses the Cuyahoga down south, a region where the river doubles back on itself as if determined to wander lazily rather than flow like a proper river is wont to do. According to the old man's yarn, in the early part of this century the shabby wood bridge couldn't withstand its own accumulated warping and began to collapse as a passenger train rattled its beams, and the train and its contents derailed and shot right into the deep of the river like a skipped stone. Although this story had become increasingly suspect (especially due to the relative shallowness of the Cuyahoga in those parts), something about the rather macabre tale piqued my interest. In "Black Bend" (see sidebar) I ended up mining this story for inspiration, although the piece isn't intended to have a literal program by any means. Something about the relentless click-clack rhythm of the doomed train, rural setting, and the hopeless final wails of the passengers suggested to me the almost supernatural howl of the blues singer, as well as said singer's ubiquitous shuffle accompaniment. The basic thrust of the piece is a progression from an atmospheric opening in which fragments of melodic gestures float freely, unassembled, to a full-blown blues which goes pretty straight-up haywire, then crashes appropriately to a halt, only to recede again into the impersonal slog of the river. In the original quartet version of the piece, I always felt as if things didn't quite get as wacky as I would have liked them to. Part of this is simply due to the fact that one runs into a practical upper limit as to the sheer volume an unamplified quartet can generate, but a lot of it has to do with the fact that the tonal center of the work is never challenged. The music stays firmly in one key, which 1) serves to capture the rugged simplicity of the blues and 2) clarifies the "assemblage" of the opening musical fragments into a more coherent musical gesture. Anyway, in the orchestra version of the piece I brought back some of those opening fragments before the climax, which gradually grow out of control and spiral off into clashing keys. This served both to augment the massive crescendo I was trying to shape as well as to add an element of contrast, in the form of distress or irony, to the work. Oh, and one other change. In the quartet version, the ending, in which the conclusion of the blues dissolves into the atmospheric ambience of the opening, seemed too easy. I liked the idea of bringing back the opening material, but it eventually became clear to me that a literal return was kind of a cop-out; the music had undergone a terrible, inescapable change and could not and would not be forced into such a neat little package--that would be almost like trying to roll back time and ignore the tragedy at hand. With this in mind, I decided to fracture this concluding material so that the ending played more like a handful of splintered shards of its former self. In any case, the piece seems a little thin to me now, but I'm glad I brought it more up to its potential than I did in 2003 even if I've since moved on. Feel free to listen to the quartet version here--I should have the orchestrated version up in a few weeks for comparison. I'm looking over these first two entries and it's clear to me that I've been slow to warm up to this whole online-journal format, but I'm hoping that these entries will pick up some momentum as I become more comfortable and play around with what does and doesn't work. I hope to write a good long entry next soon that will tackle the sordid history of my compositional efforts on the Kronos piece. [Back to Top] August 2, 2005: "First Impressions" Hi everyone and thanks for checking out my new web journal, which is being hosted by the Hopkins Center in collaboration with the Kronos Quartet and the American Music Center. The purpose of this journal will be to provide myself with an outlet for reporting and expounding upon the process of composing a new commission for Kronos that will culminate in a January premiere at the Hop. Also, I'm hoping that the journal could serve as a convenient way for readers to get in touch with me with their own questions or comments. I hope you'll find this enjoyable/stimulating! But just who are you? Anyone? Musicians? Long-lost relatives? I think it might be useful to get my target audience and agenda out on the table. While I certainly hope that anyone and everyone will frequent this journal, I've decided to specifically direct my remarks not to the professional, the academic, or my immediate colleagues, but perhaps to the "outsider" -- that is, the interested layperson, amateur, or young composer who'd like to tear open this whole convoluted process called composing and see what makes it tick. So while I expect and fervently hope that the contents of these postings will be personal and engaging enough to satisfy career musicians and their ilk, I'd like to establish a few ground rules for myself, all of which will hopefully serve to make these exchanges intelligible to the non-initiate:
That said, I'd like to provide a quick overview of my activities of the last several months up until now, which I may freely dip into later during a slow week or even a fast week in which productivity did not turn out to be particularly interesting: At the beginning of the summer, I went off to two artist residencies in which I began work on the Kronos piece -- the Lucas Artists Program at Villa Montalvo (CA) and a Copland House residency in Peekskill, NY. Currently, I'm taking a short hiatus from composing while serving on the faculty of the Young Composers Program at the Cleveland Institute of Music, which is an exciting opportunity for younger composers ages 15-19 which I'm sure I'll be talking more about later. Until about last week, I was taking the piece in a certain direction I've since realized is not one where I'd like to head right now, and am now faced with the frightening, though, I hope, ultimately necessary travail of building everything anew from the ground up. My next entry will fill in more background on the first incarnation of the piece and should pretty much get everything up to date. I'm off to Santa Cruz for a performance at the Cabrillo Festival. I look forward to unpacking a lot of the disparate ideas I dragged in during this entry and developing them soon. [Back to Top] |
