Vessels

I'm working on a new project that will involve three tracks of decreasing length and increasing obscurity. (Actually, maybe they'll all be obscure.) To mitigate the intimidation factor of tackling long-form instrumental rock/post-rock/post-post-rock or whatever we're up to now, I decided to return to a bit of advice I got in a composition lesson one time.

(Someone should really compile a list of these sort of assignments from throughout history to counteract the old "you can't teach composition" platitudes. No one would deny that at least you can suggest approaches and build sensitivity, right?)

Anyway, this gist of this one is take a piece you admire and rewrite it in your own musical language. You could go many directions with that, but I'm thinking in terms of form: describe the form in terms general enough that I can divorce it from the type of musical materials being used and replace those materials with my own. It's like emptying the water from a vase or a creekbed and then refilling it with something else that pleases me. The question is what, in a piece of music, really remains when you remove the music. (!) If you're classically trained, the idea of isolating form seems second-nature, but actually it's quite strange, and the question of when to stop chipping away is not objective or simple.

This is especially potent in my case because the three models I'm using are so completely different. Partially due to whim and partially to conceptual interests, I picked one model each from new music, jazz, and pop: Julius Eastman's Gay Guerrilla, Dave Holland Quintet's "Global Citizen," and Sufjan Stevens' "Predatory Wasp of the Palisades" from Illinois. Everything is different here--the role of notation/improvisation/how fixed the music is, whether there are melodies, mixed meter -- consistent meter -- no meter, the role of texture... there is a lot to unpack. I'm not going to unpack very much of it. I'm going to make some formal maps and then write music without asking a whole lot of questions. But at this stage in the project it's exciting to consider the possibilities. The more time I spend with these models, the more likely it is that I can strip away the top levels and get to the bedrock that'll be easier to apply my own music to; on the other hand, the more I listen to this music, the harder it becomes to remember to write in my own musical language (whatever that is).

Paste recently named Illinois their top record of the decade. They include an interview with Stevens in which is explored his post-BQE creative crisis. He describes his musical dilemmas in language that makes them, for me, more than a bit trite ("lost my faith in the album/in the song"), but still, hearing the situation directly from the guy lends things a bit more perspective than I allowed in my recent post on the subject.