Sonatas and Interludes

Still writing

2011-03-02T18:46:00.002-06:00

I'm keeping the blog going at my primary website; but the link has changed slightly, to http://www.lukegullickson.com/blog.html.

Experiment

2010-06-03T19:27:00.002-05:00

I'm trying out a new system wherein my blog will be part of my personal website. No guarantees it'll stick, but I'm going to give it a shot! So thanks for reading, and please continue to follow me at http://www.lukegullickson.com/blog. Cheers.

Presence

2010-06-02T09:12:00.003-05:00

Frank Oteri has a beautiful article at NMBx about the printed word and real books vs. digital forms and the advantages real libraries still have. I'm so with him on this one. I am personally strongly anti-Kindle because--for me, for me--there is just something powerful about a book in your hands. A screen is still a screen. With a book there is no curtain between you and the content. It is all there in your hands, physically, undeniably. The prevalence of information in our society has made us take libraries for granted, but I become increasingly impressed by the power of walking into a library, of seeing stacks of books or scores there just waiting for you to discover them. A friend recently shared a nugget from his father, walking into a library: "I always know there is a great book in here that I'll never find." This just isn't the same on the internet; while it's always possible to discover new things on here, it's not the same as truly serendipitously, with no external influence, bumping into a new book or CD, something unpredictable, something you know nothing about. The same goes for used bookstores. That "great book in there that I'll never find" is waiting, and no one is going to find it but you. I love the initiative this demands. It asks you to take responsibility for your own edification, to seek it out. On the internet there is always someone feeding it to you. It has a different impact when you truly discover it yourself and feel the pages under your fingers.

Ghost towns

2010-05-17T22:11:00.004-05:00

Anyone in Chicago had better be at the Fine Arts Building downtown Thursday night for the Ghost Towns concert by the newly-websited Sissy-Eared Mollycoddles. They're doing an arrangement of my wanderlusty Terlingua Meditations -- Terlingua being the only ghost town on the program, I believe, which is currently occupied. There are two premieres: Eric Malmquist's The Wind that Shakes the Barley and Brian Baxter's epic Lulu City for 2 violins, guitar, double bass, drumset, and river.

I feel a special attachment to Lulu City, since I hiked there with Brian the day he recorded the river sounds. Lulu City is in Rocky Mountain National Park, at around 10,000 feet, way up the Colorado River. It's a beautiful spot. I sat by the river and read a book while Brian poked around, drew a map and looked for artifacts. (Full disclosure: almost nothing is left of Lulu City. We found an old pail, and there are a few foundations still visible. But really. Not much.)

I think the wild cross-rhythms of Terlingua Meditations will sound more satisfying with the addition of the drumset holding the meter. I'm glad they're playing it in the springtime, too: May is such a special time of year for me, this being about the sixth year in a row that I've headed west right about now. The two trips that inspired the piece were both in the spring of 2008.

I'll once again provide the Peter Garland quotation that serves as the piece's epigraph. I had actually named my movements (Stasis and Action) a month and a half before I read this passage, but when I saw Garland's words, it was a stunner. It's as though he was on the same trip to the west Texas desert and had heard the piece already. The whole thing is right here:

"The lure of traveling: its greatest magic is in the chance encounter, the road taken, strangers met, views...The surrealist writers in the 1920's walked at random in Paris and its environs in search of the marvelous encounter. And this kind of traveling is certainly similar--the call to throw away the maps and lose oneself...In the quiet hours of driving, in hiking silently through deserts, one's mind works--absorbing views, landmarks, memories, charting past correlations. Traveling as meditation/action combined--the endless unraveling of pavement, the limitless visual scroll of scenery, and an unremitting waking dialogue and waking dream..." (PG, Americas)

* P.S. There is now a beautiful recording out of Garland's String Quartets no. 1 and 2 played by Apartment House.

No more outsiders

2010-05-17T21:27:00.005-05:00

I'm just going to dive in head-first with this recent obsession with outsider art. Ok? Ok.

Chicago has a small museum dedicated to this stuff-- Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art. I'm not sure I like the moniker "intuitive art" since, well, all art is intuitive and most of life is intuitive. But I don't mind "outsider art." This phrase tells it like it is. No euphemisms here. We are interested in these people because they exist outside the normal artistic social strata, because they don't expect to make money from their art, because their training was unusual or non-existent, because they didn't have to do this art, they just DID.

(( Clarification: no one really has to do anything, but career artists feel compelled to create by forces external to themselves, get into habits that they sometimes feel they must sustain in order to keep making a living, and so on -- an outsider, generally speaking, could just stop, and to most observers the daily fabric of their lives would continue unchanged. They would keep right on working in the insurance office or mopping floors at MIT--oh wait, that's a different movie. ))

Also, Intuit somehow managed to get hold of "art.org"--so there's another reason to listen to them.

Anyway. When I visited Intuit the major exhibition was on Savannah, GA sculptor/barber Ulysses Davis. His work is extremely broad and multifaceted and, quite unexpectedly, I was most intrigued by the patriotic pieces. This is a guy who did a complete set of busts of the presidents of the United States. Each one projects an individual personality filtered through a unifying--quirky--artistic sensibility. Also, I can't resist mentioning the racial ambiguity of the faces. I mean, look at Lincoln here! Fascinating.

Then I was lucky enough to visit the Art Chicago festival and spot not only a few works by my boy James Castle, but also one or two by the totally awesome Joseph Yoakum, who literally ran away to join the circus, saw the world, settled back in Chicago with his family, and started prodigiously drawing--when he was in his fifties or sixties, depending on who you ask. He eventually produced tons of unmistakable landscapes based on his travels.

Check out Mt. Swan of Darling Mountain Range near Perth of Western Australia, 1968:

And now for The Hills of Old Wyoming in the Valley of the Moon near Casper, Wyoming

(gotta love the run-on titles):

Righteous.

Things that renew my faith in humanity, vols. 192-3

2010-05-17T10:16:00.003-05:00

192. The Great Stalacpipe Organ, included primarily for its inventor, a mathematician named--wait for it--Leland Sprinkle.

Leland Sprinkle.

193. Kcymaerxthaere and the KymaericaBlog, which detail a "global work of three-dimensional storytelling" and the exploits of Geographer-at-Large Eames Demetrios. He erects plaques around the world to commemorate important places and events in an alternate universe.

Many thanks to Atlas Obscura for these and other wonderful discoveries. AO is where most of my extra time is currently funneled.

If you'll excuse me, I need to get off the internet before I accidentally run across spoilers of the Lost finale.

Aww but hell I'm just a blind man on the plains, I drink my water when it rains

2010-04-23T14:34:00.003-05:00

My favorite Swedish troubadour of the American folk guitar, the Tallest Man on Earth, is back with a new LP The Wild Hunt. I'm not sure which is better: a new TMoE record, or watching the critics once more go through the obvious rhetorical contortion of underhandedly labeling a musician "Dylan-esque" by declaiming on the overuse of the word "Dylan-esque" by other critics.

They've both got me grinning.

sobremesa

2010-04-22T10:51:00.004-05:00

Now I'm hardly crazy about San Jose Costa Rica, but it sure beats other Central American capital cities, and the fact that it has a contemporary art museum at all goes a ways toward explaining why.

During one of my short stop-offs in San Jose I took in an exhibit at the Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporáneo, comprised mostly of video works. I freely admit to a bias against this medium. I'm not sure why, but I can't think of any particularly appealing video pieces I've seen in the context of a museum. A few possible reasons:

• Lack of tactility; I have screens everywhere in my life. As a matter of fact, I'm looking at one right now. I go to the museum to see a room that has physical objects in it. Paintings, with their much more physical presence, count in spite of being "flat" images. They respond more to perception, and besides, they get bonus points for not being screens.

• Impersonality? This is a major generalization, but it seems that video works tend to be a bit more standoffish. I suppose some would say that nothing could be more standoffish than contemporary painting, but I don't find it that way viscerally. I respond to a painting that is physically there much more than to anything on a screen.

• Preconceptions about museums-- I think I'd be much more disposed to get into a video work or any sort of art film if I saw it at home or in a theater, just because of how I'm used to having these spaces utilized. (I realize this is unfair, I'm just musing.)

I found myself asking these questions because, happily, there was one piece that did seem immediately vital and made a strong impression. This was sobremesa, by Kaoru Katayama, an artist of Japanese origin who lives in Spain. ("sobre mesa" = "on table") The video features Julio and Salud, a couple who have actually been married 38 years, sitting at a table in their living room, looking casually at one another while knocking/snapping out a flamenco rhythm together with one hand each. It's only a three-minute video and I watched it several times, taken in by the atmosphere. The kinetic energy of the rhythm was foiled by the gaze of the couple, which is initially almost bored before it yields to slight, knowing smiles. The implications of this small, focused interaction are enormous, and teasing them out verbally does no justice to seeing the video.

A word about dynamics

2010-04-21T17:16:00.007-05:00

Rant-free, I'd like to clarify a few thoughts about the use of dynamics in my musical notation.

This came up back in December when one of the SEMC players asked about Down, which didn't really have dynamics in the score. "Oh, it doesn't have dynamics," I said. Because it's rock and roll music, basically. You just play it. Classically trained musicians expect to be micromanaged. Rock/jazz musicians are more comfortable with their own instincts in this regard. (OK, a lot of rock musicians are overamplified and don't really have dynamics, but you know what I mean.)

Composers of my generation, on the other hand, have had to learn this kind of thing. A lot of our lessons have been dedicated to proper use of dynamics. It has always felt disproportionately emphasized to me, partially because as a performer I feel like it's often obvious what is supposed to be loud and what isn't. But there are some larger issues at play here that, I think, are relevant beyond my personal case.

So, two influences on young American composers that could be muddling things up.

1) rock music and the age of compression.

2) training in electroacoustic music and the complexities possible here w/r/t ADSR.

In the face of #1, two dynamic levels loud/soft become standard, and the different gradations in the ppp-pp-p-mp-mf-f-ff-fff system seem unnecessary.

Whereas #2 makes the above eight notateable levels seem naively silly and insufficient to express any real dynamic nuance.

See, opposite influences. I propose, again, that this might be muddling things up. We're simultaneously used to a flatter dynamic plane (which is not necessarily a loss -- it just leads us to perceive intensity changes elsewhere) and to a landscape of infinite dynamic complexity. In view of both perspectives, quibbling over the difference between [ mp cresc. f ] and [ p cresc. f ] or just [ cresc. f ] seem ridiculous indeed.

And in both cases, the relationship of the notation to the actual sounds seems tangential at best, a case of micromanaging that is virtually guaranteed to be unsuccessful. And what about the musicians performing it, again? What is their role supposed to be? I prefer not to view them as machines and myself as a deity; they have instincts and opinions and interpretive muscles that need space to enter the process.

I also feel compelled to address the proverbial "group in Europe" who supposedly wants to play my piece, but is incapable with communicating with me for some reason, and thus requires an infallible score with precise markings such that absolutely nothing will be left to chance and they can produce for me, with no verbal exchange, a perfect recording:

• Who are these people? Why don't they have email?

• Seriously, does this group exist? I'd love a European premiere on my CV.

• If they really don't like email, can we use Facebook? Myspace? Telegraph? Smoke signals? Umm, the phone? I'll fly there? I like traveling. Why can't we communicate?

• Even if it were difficult to communicate, or for some mysterious reason ideal not to, aren't they going to have some questions about the score? Regardless of how carefully I notate it? Has there ever been a performance in which no questions emerged for which the opinion of the composer would be helpful?

• Aren't there some of those situations in which the composer, despite his/her best intentions and orchestration-manual-reading and beard-stroking and care, was wrong, and the performers' interpretive solutions better or at least more workable?

• Has this whole situation ever occurred in real life?

Finally, w/r/t the argument that someday I'm going to die and everyone will be so distraught and need to play all of my music right away and need precise documents for how to reproduce it perfectly such that my composerly luminescence can continue to live on in this bleak world:

1) That is not going to happen.

2) Even if it did, the sans-me world can get all the information it needs from the recordings I'm going to make with musicians who are not, not, hiding on another continent, refusing to communicate with me.

3) The old recordings would be better anyway. You know they would.

••••

See, maybe as composers we want to be real people in the world, real musicians who are humans, interacting with other musicians who are also humans. We don't live on Neptune. You know how everyone always complains about the problems with Facebook and people using it too much and posting boring minutiae all the time? This is the GOOD thing about living in the Facebook era: this is what the internet is for: so that group in Europe and I can find each other and send notes about musical minutiae if we want to. And just be humans together, interacting.

I have discovered that the connections I make personally and musically working in a room with other musicians, as either a composer or performer or as both, immediately transcend and dwarf any infinitesimal considerations like [mp cresc. f ] versus [ cresc. f ].

Save the Junk

2010-04-19T17:16:00.003-05:00

Austin's Cathedral of Junk is in trouble: following a citizen complaint, city officials asked ol' Vince to either bring it up to code (not sure how a three-story backyard building/sculpture made of trash could possibly fit into said code, but anyway) or remove it. I've found articles from the Chronicle and PBS, the latter with an intriguing comments thread. A movement immediately sprung up to help: Save the Junk, which organized a massive clean-up (?) event in advance of Vince's deadline. Now he's apparently been given until the 26th to meet further requirements. The Cathedral is emblematic of a lot of things I love about Austin--the proverbial "weirdness"; the unassuming affect of its creator, who just seems surprised that anyone is interested in his bizarre hobby; and the whole grass-roots word-of-mouth quality of the whole thing, the principle of someone creating something unique for their own amusement and then letting it grow. That said, the arguments against it are not incomprehensible. I suppose.

Perfect from now on

2010-04-02T21:50:00.005-05:00

A friend who is working on a DMA in Composition recently mentioned an exam question he has received that involves essentially becoming an expert on 20 composers -- analyzing several major works by each, completing a biographical sketch, becoming conversant in the details of their lives and styles. It seems legitimate to me that a composer getting a doctorate would be responsible for understanding the work of active or recently active composers his faculty considers important. At the same time, it´s a bit interesting that musicologists aren´t required to do something like this. Not to rip on musicologists or their field -- I know most of them are keeping respectably busy, in spite of the few who are still, for example, analyzing details of Schubert´s music in search of conclusive proof that he was gay -- but only to observe that the current academic system is not requiring them to master 20 recent or current composers in the way my composer friend must. Of course, they have your own fields/eras that they´re required to master, and which they choose based on their research. The point here is,

Gist: composers these days are expected to be our own musicologists.

This is okay. We can and should speak for ourselves, our friends, and our colleagues. If others want to join in that´s fine, but we can´t be afraid to start.

---

Note re. Costa Rican keyboards and apostrophes: this [´] is the best I can do for right now, apologies for any aesthetic disturbance.

---

Explanation of title.

I don´t know why I´m thinking about Built to Spill again all of a sudden. During a hike the other day "Randy Described Eternity" popped into my head and I thought about those first lyrics (every thousand years this metal sphere ten times the size of Jupiter floats just a few yards past the earth. you climb on your roof and take a swipe at it with a single feather; hit it once every thousand years ´til you´ve worn it down to the size of a pea). Then I met a guy from Idaho today. Maybe that´s it.

Two strange things about 2010

2010-03-11T14:56:00.002-06:00

• 1 •

I'm at a coffee shop right now. I was at another one a month or so ago when my friend across table looked up from her computer, and I looked up from mine, and she said "we're really just hanging out in a house with a bunch of strangers." Which was right. "And not talking to them," I added, which was also true and strange.

It made me think about Elliot's post defending social media sites (or at least rationalizing them) as responding to a broad cultural dearth of public space. Only, in the coffee shops we don't usually talk to people -- or we do, on our computers, talk to very distant people, rather than the people in the room there with us. Strange indeed.

• 2 •

I had to go to this hostel, in Downhill, Northern Ireland, to hear about this terrific band from Austin, where I lived for two years. Admittedly, I'm so paranoid about my ears that I'm often scared to even use headphones, let alone go to rock shows. And admittedly, Austin is home to an absolutely batty number of bands. But still. Rather than hearing about Shearwater and physically attending a show, rather than ever seeing this Jonathan Meiburg character in person (despite the fact that we were probably at the Spider House at the same time at some point since August 2007), he went to Downhill Hostel and became friends with the owners, and then I went to Downhill Hostel and got to hear his LP (on vinyl, which was cool) over a dram of Coleraine Irish whiskey.

It's probably not a 2010 thing; I suppose the world has always abounded in bizarre and unexpected connections, hence the seven-degrees game and the novels of Dickens. But still.

the Real in the Unreal ; the Unreal in the Real

2010-03-10T16:51:00.004-06:00

The universe has been conspiring for a while now to get me to read Haruki Murakami, who seemed to be just crazy up my alley. After checking out Kafka on the Shore I can confirm that premonition. This sort of thing is for me as chick flicks are to most American women. It's almost too easy with this sort of postmodern surrealistic culture-referencing, messy-narrative, time-and-space-bending, mysterious-character-dressed-up-as-Colonel-Sanders shit.

Anyway, I was talking about "surrealism," which is a term I apply very broadly, and the question was posed to me to differentiate surrealism and fantasy. It was a good question for me especially, since I loved fantasy books as a kid and gradually, during adolescence, transitioned to the Lynchy stuff that I now call surrealistic art.

There are plenty of superficial differences, primarily in the realm of what these genres use as their foundations. Fantasy's foundation is in the unreal: the setting is distant and almost always fictional, the characters belong to classes like wizards and knights and other things that don't exist in our lives. Surrealism, by contrast, starts with the real. It usually takes a person whose life is normal, by our standards, and then throws the weird shit their way.

For this reason fantasy, to me, is actually kind of negative. It always reminds us of what is not in our lives, what we can't be and can't do. Surrealism, by contrasts, suggests things that might be, things not necessarily good, usually scary, but at least always interesting. Things that aren't likely or logically explicable, but nonetheless could exist around us, under the veneer of our normal lives.

The surreal may not be REAL, but I think more so than fantasy it does contain an element or two of POSSIBILITY. Maybe.

Opening invisible ozone holes into pockets of experience, suggesting previously unnoticed dimensions of our own lives that are not immediately clear, that we can't see, that we only feel. Maybe.

The Story @ JJ Smyths, Dublin, 7 mar 010

2010-03-10T16:21:00.004-06:00

You may find it ridiculous that I spent an evening in Dublin, of all places, going to hear American music courtesy of highly un-Google-friendly The Story. In my defense, 1) They're from New York and I never get to go there, either; 2) it was my last night in Ireland after a full three weeks, so I'd heard "Rocky Road to Dublin" enough times; and 3) only one of the cats was even American, the others hailing from Amsterdam, the UK, and various corners of Canada.

So, jazz it was.

Now, they're worth hearing. They don't stoke my imagination to the same extent as, for example, the Portico Quartet, who win the prize for first popular use of the hang, or Polar Bear, whose album I love in a manner so totally feverish and over-the-top that I won't begin to verbally explicate it here. The Story's playing was solid, but what flicked more switches in me was the pervasive sense that something was going on compositionally.

This is not common at jazz clubs. More so, now that so many of the hot young acts are playing original music. But the traditional jazz chart, compositionally, consists primarily in three elements: melody, harmony, rhythm. The Story's had these as well, but they got me interested because they utilized two others often ignored in jazz clubs.

1) Texture. The first tune opened with the two saxophones playing homorhythmically in counterpoint. Everyone's approach to register, timbre, and instrumental combination proved that they were thinking texturally. The keyboard has immense potential in this regard (ten fingers, two hands, big register...) which is, again, usually neglected in jazz in favor of LH chords and RH single-line playing, all predominately in the middle register. (Vijay Iyer does all kinds of things with texture, which is one of the many awesome things about his music.)

2) Form. OK, yes I'm a trained classicalish composer and effing love form. So maybe I'm a fish in a barrel when a jazz tune goes somewhere totally unexpected. It's not so difficult to do, but again, it's uncommon in small-group jazz, for reasons that go back to the very origins of jazz improvisation (they had to play, e.g. for a three-hour dance and only knew eight tunes, so they stretched them out in ways that were simple and logical and could be communicated through simple gestures during the gig such that no rehearsal was necessary). But today's jazz groups do rehearse, so it's become an easier thing to make predetermined compositional choices, and this opens up lots of formal possibilities. I loved this about The Story. Their tunes would have all these arrantly different sections, and sometimes the old sections came back and other times they didn't, and when they got to the end the end would go on forEVER, and sometimes the end wasn't the end at all.

This is just good listening, people, it's just good listening.

And as for Polar Bear, buy their record, now!

Save it.

2010-02-15T23:13:00.004-06:00

Unfortunately, I'll have to temper my praise of the eighth blackbird folks now that I've heard their composition contest has a $50 application fee.

I'm not sure about everyone else, but I'm a bit tired of sending my SASEs on expensive rides around the country. As for this argument about an app fee causing possible entrants to self-select more carefully, I don't know too many composers who are just freewheelingly throwing contest applications around. It's an expensive process even without an application fee: it takes time to prepare materials to the specifications of each contest, and money to print / bind / burn CDs / mail this stuff out.

They're not bad people, obviously. This is just a bit annoying. I'm going to go back to listening to and writing about actual CULTURE now, rather than these stupid contests that claim to support it but really just form part of this immense and overpowering system from which it can be difficult to extricate one's priorities. The 8bb cats even told us, in their masterclass the other day, that they always recommend starting with people you know, commissioning locally, working with your friends. We should all be doing that, too, instead of trying to win contests run by people we don't know. (I suppose there's probably space for both.)

Christian Carey has also written an attack on the 8bb app fee over at S21. He accuses them, quite validly I think, of using the fees to "fund" a commission. A predictably enormous comments thread proceeded.

Being a human

2010-02-13T15:32:00.002-06:00

eighth blackbird gave a really great masterclass at Northwestern this morning. They played some pieces and gave everyone some lovely and helpful and non-critical tidbits about their career(s) and how to be a musician and a human at the same time. It's lovely to be at a masterclass with people who have that aspiration. It shows. We left curious and charged-up and full of ideas, rather than pissed off and slighted, like after most masterclasses with composers who roll in and either say they like the piece or claim it isn't a composition or "this piano part isn't written for the piano," which don't even get me started on that stupid comment.

Top experience was hearing and seeing 8bb's performance of Stephen Hartke's Meanwhile, which was rife with a bunch of pleasing individual musical moments. They played the piece memorized (!, totally new experience for me in new music concertgoing) and with choreography, walking about the stage, looking at each other, interacting. I wasn't interested in the idea of the choreography beforehand, but was amazed at how much it added to the experience for me. I've always been strangely apathetic about the Pierrot ensemble, possibly because I'm bitter at all the foiled compositional efforts it has led me to, but this Hartke piece and their expert rendering made me feel like something was actually HAPPENING up there. I'm also grateful for the theatrical element because, as in Crumb's music and a Feldman solo like The King of Denmark and some minimalism and what not, it makes me feel like I'm getting a special experience by being there live to hear it, an experience I wouldn't get by just downloading it from iTunes.

I could go on about the positive attributes this group has. Some of them seem unattainable: this is a group that met as undergraduates and just "decided" to stay together, going to Cincinnati for an AD program in chamber music and then, again all together, to Northwestern to get Masters degrees. That just never happens. But most of their examples are fully imitable: memorizing the music, living with the same pieces for a long time because you believe in them, being unpretentious and human on stage. And STANDING UP when you can. I love that! They advised a student chamber group to stand while playing, and just like that, they went from being a student chamber group to a Czech dance band in a barn somewhere. Maybe it's just that subconsciously I want all of my musical experiences to take place in a barn. What does that say about my career prospects, I wonder.

Piano & piano

2010-02-10T20:00:00.005-06:00

There probably aren't that many musicians out there who fit in the middle of a Venn diagram between dedication to the piano and interest in the music of Annea Lockwood. Being a pianist usually involves an obsessive focus on one segment of repertoire. (19th-century European literature and bop/post-bop jazz language come to mind, for some reason...) Acoustic ecology, as seen in Lockwood's output, is one of the most refreshing and productive correctives to the idea of "repertoire" as a foundational idea in music. And then there's the whole piano burning thing, which certainly gained her some attention, and seems maybe an inimical statement vs. modern pianism.

But setting a piano on fire or sinking it in a lake is not necessarily about destroying The Piano. It certainly does constitute a revocation of the special elevated status it took on in Europe a couple hundred years ago, but here's the thing: that allows us to reaffirm it as just another musical instrument, another box with strings and hammers, another object that can make great noises.

The piano's association with old music has really pulled it down in recent decades. But if it can become just another means of creating special sounds, on the same level as the others we have around us, its possibilities begin to reopen.

Scope

2010-01-06T16:05:00.003-06:00

1) In a new interview, David Lang and Hilary Hahn talk about creating a world where musicians can help each other and enjoy each other's existence rather than trying to kill each other all the time. Novel, eh? Lang on winning the Pulitzer: "I feel kind of creepy..."

2) One more thing about Inglourious Basterds as compared to the typical Hollywood flick, and once again it relates to compositional space, although in a more abstract way this time. Most big movies start with all of the characters being introduced in the first four minutes or so, and then the predictable combinations ensue. In this movie key people don't emerge until later, or someone enters the stage, is central for a while, and then disappears. The psychological effects of this on me as a viewer are huge--it creates a feeling of this movie as a world where people exist even when they aren't being pictured. Where do these important characters GO when they leave the action? And additionally, you have a side element like the largely unrepresented love story between Shoshanna and Marcel. It is only hinted at, but not, as it could've been, edited out; being beyond the immediate scope of the narrative does not disqualify this plotline from mention, which contributes to the richness of the movie's world.

It reminded me, weirdly enough, of rereading The Hobbit last summer and marveling at Tolkien's constant mentions of extraneous characters and events that he would then ostentatiously refuse to explain ("but _____ does not come into this tale," etc). The reader concludes that the author must have invented these elements for a reason, even if this logic is, for the moment or for the duration of the work, denied.

A piece can be unitary, complete, and still open-ended. In Winter Music, John Luther Adams quotes a carpenter/poet friend: "Wholeness is better than perfection."

Any events

2010-01-03T20:22:00.004-06:00

Driving today, I chased a wiltingly average NPR folk band with The Magnetic Fields' 69 Love Songs (well, excerpts of it, anyway) and reflected on the difference.

Here it is: when you listen to the latter, it won't easily be ignored, whereas the former begs to be. When the latter is playing there is the palpable sense that someone else is in the car with you, that something remarkable is happening.

This seems essential.

hny-010

2010-01-02T00:18:00.002-06:00

What was the first thing I did on the internet in 2010? I'm not ashamed to admit it. I watched a man in a chicken suit playing "What Is Love" on a melodica. He has a loop pedal as well. It's quite a treat.

also, re. Inglourious Basterds, intentional but unexplained misspelling of which is clearly meant to drive people like me up the effing wall,

I find Tarantino's movies so satisfying, and after considering IB against Kill Bill and Pulp Fiction, three quite different films, I have a few ideas why. The ideas involve form. /structure. /pacing. When I think of PF I think of the drive-time conversations between John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson; when I think of KB, believe it or not, what first comes to mind is the scene at the end of vol. 2 where he shoots her with a tranquilizer and they talk about superheroes. And IB is replete with these LONG scenes, so meticulously paced--the opening vignette and basement bar scenes especially, both of which, it has been pointed out to me, could function independently as one-act plays.

Now, why do I like these so much? Maybe they're a refreshing corrective to pomo fragmentation/information overload/frenetic pace of life. IB is fragmented too, but only into large segments, these big chapters that each stand alone to a certain extent. You can consider each one independently and then place them together like five big pieces of an extremely easy puzzle. How nice is that? Movies are the ultimate medium of fragmentation. The units are so small--shots that are often seconds long that don't have to be made in the same place or at the same time--the crew takes these tiny bits and composes them in such a way as to make you feel like it's continuous when it quite often isn't.

In typical big Hollywood movies, there is never any SPACE.

A movie also takes everyone the same amount of time to watch, so pacing is to a large extent normalized. A novel, by contrast, is quite difficult to fragment. Sure it's made up of words, but it's a big heavy chunk of them and most of the time, paging through, the only superficially obvious segments are chapters. And a novel's pacing is much more irregular; it's the same word count, but some people work on the book for a year off and on and some power through it in a week or whatever.

You don't think of a novel containing space, necessarily--the reader really gets to decide a lot of that (by stopping to think about something, paging back to check a fact or a name, or putting the book down to take a break). Temporal media like music and movies have a more direct manner of manipulating space, and for me Tarantino does it so well in these long, drawn-out scenes. People talk for a while, tension rises, then they are silent, have a drink, look at each other for a second. It's a QT movie and you know there's gonna be some shit blowing up pretty soon, but regardless as a viewer I just love those lulls in conversation and action, those sumptuous cinematic fermatas.

The weird thing is, I remember having the sensation, watching the movie, that it was somehow making me feel like I was doing some of the work putting the story together. It's not really true, not nearly so much anyway as it is in Pulp Fiction. But there's at least that sense that, unlike in the big-budget movie next door, they're moving a step or two past just spelling everything out for you.

It's weird because actually Tarantino actually makes his form so clear. This is a movie with chapters--not just DVD chapters for convenience but actual chapters like with a big black screen and white letters that say CHAPTER ONE: 1940 and so on. It made me think about extended forms in instrumental music. Someone listens to you play the piano for half an hour without stopping and they think this "piece" is just one giant blob, they have no idea where the markers are. If they know how to listen to it they do, but these days most people don't know how to listen to the music that any given musician is making, especially if it's instrumental music of most but the most obvious and repetitive types, and God knows the musicians aren't helping them out by giving them any hints. And here we have a movie that is telling us CHAPTER 2: FOUR YEARS LATER. Can you imagine what some candor like this could do for instrumental music? This is what my programs are going to look like from now on. RIGHT AFTER THE GUY ON THE RIGHT TURNS HIS PAGE, SOMETHING IMPORTANT IS GOING TO HAPPEN. Obviously the players talking between movements or internal sections would break the mood in a serious way--but then, we'd usually consider a chapter-title card to break a movie's flow too, but it works for QT, he unifies it with style and atmosphere and story, why can't we?

Vessels

2009-12-16T13:03:00.004-06:00

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.

Something happy

2009-12-07T15:53:00.002-06:00

In case I've been a bit negative these last couple posts, have a couple links to some music I've been checking out lately, no diatribes attached.

Two recent forwards

2009-12-07T14:47:00.004-06:00

That deserve a bit of attention. Both are from The Score, a New York Times blog about new music written by various composers.

1stly) Five very mopey paragraphs from Mr. Glenn Branca. OK I know he was being intentionally provocative but I can't help myself. Dear everyone: no more "end of music" bullshit, please. I don't want to hear it. Get out there and buy some records and go hear some local musicians. The internet is packed with new music. A lot of it sucks. Some of it doesn't. Yes, we have an economy and a mass culture at the moment that have largely opted out of getting involved with sorting this new music, and as a result the mass of new stuff out there can be quite overwhelming. Tough nuggets. Get out there and listen and play and write and take some INITIATIVE. No excuses.

Moreover, ask yourself this question: would today's musicians really be better off if the corporate economy were more interested in what they're doing? I just encountered that old story about Thoreau getting tons of copies of Walden back unsold from his publisher and saying (at least claiming) that he was pleased no one cared about his work, because it meant he could go in any direction he wanted to. This isn't easy, but it's the situation. Anyone who claims nothing "new," whatever the hell they mean in that context, isn't being done is just lazy. I especially don't want to hear it from someone who's written 13 symphonies for electric guitars. "Nothing new" my ass. You know what you like. Get out there and find it.

One more beef: GB writes, "For more than half a century we've seen incredible advances in sound technology but very little if any advance in the quality of music." Advance? Huh? Music is supposed to be getting "better?" We're supposed to have topped the WTC and Beethoven's late quartets and Stravinsky and Ravel and Coltrane and the Beatles and whoever else you like? I'm pretty sure that's not the point. I thought we were making music because we're alive and we like music. Oh well.

Everyone knows the corporate Muzak tripe is out there, and everyone who cares about music knows that it sucks. It hasn't stopped any of the recent music I love from getting created and conveyed to me.

2ndly) A cheerier bit from Annie Gosfield re. advice for "young composers." The words "contest" and "competition" are happily nowhere to be found, and the thrust for me at least comes down to "make your music--make your music," which of course I'm down with. Not all of it resonated but this point is worth quoting at length:

"Make music, and make music happen. The more you write, play, improvise, listen to, and think about music, the better. If your grand opus isn’t being premiered by the New York Philharmonic, don’t despair. Set up a solo gig at a local venue and play your own music. Build a community of musicians and start your own ensemble, band or collective and learn from each other. Take advantage of a good-news-bad-news situation: the strict boundaries between musical genres are crumbling, but performance opportunities are decreasing. Be creative, anything can happen anywhere. Support live music and try to get to know artists that you admire."

Minor quibble

2009-12-03T09:50:00.004-06:00

I heard Northwestern University's Contemporary Music Ensemble last night and, in lieu of actual review or substantive comments, enjoyed myself. Actually I was mostly just shocked (and thankful) to realize that it was my first time hearing an ensemble piece by Morton Feldman played live. As is my wont, I will mention one ostensibly bitchy issue I had with the program layout, which is when you have a composer in their 20s, it's a bit silly to refer to them in the program by their last name, as in Relephant ••••• Jones (b. 1982), as though this Jones character is a well-known personality who is often so abbreviated and his/her first name should be so obvious to any audience member that it isn't worth including. Especially in this case of last night's concert, where one of them actually had the same last name as a much more famous composer, because that's just confusing.

This is a super small problem, but I do think it points to a larger question, which is who and what we expect our composers to do and be these days. The last name-only convention belongs to museum curator-type symphony concerts and piano recitals where the only composers represented are the ones who appeared in cheesy posters on the walls of your grade-school music classroom. Last name-only suggests an absent and canonized entity, not a twentysomething dude who's still hanging around drinking beer and exerting agency and creating new music. This is one of the tiny, apparently insignificant aspects of our classical music presentation strategy that prevent composition from seeming like a normal social activity, that keep people from thinking of composers as regular participants woven into our culture.

(n.b. I claim the title Relephant for any future works. Unless it already won a Morton Gould last year, I'll have to check that.)

Status report

2009-12-02T12:58:00.003-06:00

Location: Chicago

Listening to: Miles Davis' Nefertiti ; The Well-Tuned Piano ; and whatever's on Counterstream.

Q from above: Why is it that only perhaps 1 in every 10 or 12 composers to come around on Counterstream were ever mentioned by anyone during my composition grad degree?

Corollary Q: Who picks the programming on Counterstream? Can I walk around in their record collection for a little while?

Reading: Alfred Sanchez Pinol, Cold Skin (mysterious island + Antarctica + unnamed narrator/protagonist = shamelessly easy home-run for this reader.)

Persistent, haunting image from above: Beset by nocturnal monsters, the narrator tries to scare them off by making a big fire, which entails burning every book he brought to the island--pretty much right after he gets there. It doesn't take him any time at all to decide to destroy his boxes of great literature from throughout history; it becomes clear that his neck is in question, and he torches the stuff on night 1.

Musing about: 1) the day-to-day realities of N winter, even though it hasn't even arrived, and how nice Austin used to feel this time of year, and how I'm already readopting an attitude of Midwestern haughtiness about it. Also, the suggestive brilliance of the word "sludge." 2) Ives' assertion that true music won't be heard until "the last man who is willing to make a living out of art is gone and gone forever," and this dictum's implications for lifestyle choices in modern society (this is something that comes up often when one is making even less a "living" from his art than he was as a grad student). 3) The Fantastic Mr. Fox and its seamless porting of Wes Anderson's stylistic hallmarks from live action to animation. The critics think it works really well, and I agree, but it does raise philosophical questions, right? Directorial control v. role of actors, "humanity" of people in movies (they were never actually people to start with--screen images are just screen images), &c. 4) The difficulty of practicing piano in the city and how much keyboards just don't cut it, really. It's just not the same instrument. I heard McCoy Tyner doesn't have a piano in his domicile these days but just practices on a keyboard. Especially for someone like him, whose style is tied to the visceral power of the piano (those anchoring fifths in the bass!), this blows my mind. 5) I get to hear McCoy Tyner play next week! Badass. 6) Is it possible that my apathy re. rock concerts springs from antipathy not to noise but to amplified sound in general? I saw Old Crow Medicine Show the other week and while it was a blast, I couldn't hear. The banjo was absent from the mix and the whole sonic composite was flat and dead and uninteresting. If you don't believe me, play a chord on an acoustic guitar and hold the instrument up to your ear and listen to it decay, check out the complexity of that sound. Now put your ear right up to a speaker and listen to the same chord in a recorded incarnation. Not the same. I extend this logic to less fundamental aspects of the live music experience, like group interplay of the band up there. You can't really hear it in the same way when it's been separated, recombined, and repackaged before it gets to your ears. I've never been a big acoustic purity-/overtone series-obsessed guy, but I'm feeling passionate about this right now. Maybe if I keep going on this path I'll end up like Trimpin or Partch. I guess that would help with the Charles E. issue discussed above.

Theory: amplified sound is a necessity of population saturation and mass homogenization of culture. If there weren't a) so many of us, and if b) we weren't all interested in hearing the same 7 bands, we could still get our music the way they used to in the 19C, like in your living room with a couple friends. OK maybe I'm confusing cause and effect, but consider it. The other issue is whether our music is meant for actual listening at all or whether other social functions have become more important (of course they have, as any young American who's ever fallen asleep during a classical concert can tell you). But I believe there's a state of social listening that is possible, a music that you could hang out and even talk a bit during but still basically listen to, that some of our current models (house concerts, jazz clubs) are close to it, that we could have better listening experiences if we followed this trail further. And I believe that musicians are still important to music--laptops are instruments too, that's fine, but I never want to stop hearing a dude play an instrument, that's still what it's about, and you can write that on my tombstone.

Apology: Right, that was more than one theory and got long and utopian. But

Thesis: music is nothing more or less than listening. Listening strategies/goals/environments dictate what the music is more than chartable or dissertationable pitch content/thematic tightness or whatever other intrinsic, objective traits that you learn about in classes. We can change music for the better by changing the situations in which we receive (listen to) it. And we should.

Mind the gap.

2009-11-23T09:17:00.002-06:00

While I was in Joshua Tree I had the chance to hear Kanae Matsumoto, a pianist who teaches at UCLA, in an intimate concert at the Hi-Desert Cultural Center in JT. The room was full and the audience attentive; the playing was good, particularly the Schumann on the first half. And then, at intermission, I heard this exchange take place:

Person 1: "Fantastic!"

Person 2: "Yeah, she's amazing."

Person 1: "It's just intermission, right?"

So I think we can agree there's a problem here.

The issue is not the audience members, who were lovely and appreciative, the type of people who go to classical music concerts on Friday nights. Neither is it the venue, which is bringing classical music to their community in a comfortable setting and successfully drawing people to their events. The issue is a concert ritual that was developed for more knowledgeable audiences. Schumann and Debussy are not endemic here. At a Springsteen concert, by contrast, no one needs to explain the proceedings: millenial Americans know that rock concerts proceed in series of songs, that you can cheer whenever you want, particularly after the songs or when something exciting happens, that when the band leaves the stage at the end you should make noise because they might come back and play more. &c. But most Americans haven't grown up truly immersed in classical music and its rituals; this is not a judgment or lament, just a fact. And no matter how literate and savvy your audience is, if the concert program is in sets and no one explains the breaks or why the pieces are grouped the way they are, if no one clues people in as to which movements segue into the next and which don't, if you don't announce program changes, no one is going to know where the hell you are on the program. I don't mean to harangue Matsumoto, as she was simply following the party line w/r/t concert format, but in this case the party line woefully obviated a better experience for the audience.

See, here you have a nice, appreciative audience who is certainly capable of a higher level of listening, a deeper understanding of this music, but it's a bit tough you give them no ammunition. How much can they be expected to process when they don't even know what piece they're listening to? Or hey, the movement titles are in German: how about we provide translations, so people know the fast one from the slow one? And how about a bit of context, just a tiny amount about the composer's life, the nature of the represented genres or programmatic content, to give the people something to listen for? Today's orchestras famously attempt to do this with program notes which are nearly uniformly stuffy and ineffectual (next time I read that x composer "cast this movement in Sonata form," I will run screaming from the hall). It would seem simple for a pianist, who after all has been doused with these composers from a young age, to stand up there and say "a Sonata is a multi-movement work with interwoven, recurring themes. Listen for this and this in the first movement and this thing in the slow part." Not a full summary in the orchestral program-note style, but something, some sort of verbal information for the people to hang onto.

Otherwise, no matter how illuminating the performance, you'll get the same flat comments that I heard after Matsumoto's concert. "Amazing." "I can't believe she played all of that from memory." The venue was lovely, the playing artful, the audience enthusiastic--so was the concert a success? It felt to me like a missed opportunity. These people were exposed to some great classical music, but our old concert rituals prevented them from really picking up anything about it beyond the vaguest generalities. I'm sure many of them turned on the radio or ipod on the way home and piped in some music whose customs and rituals are not so willfully mysterious.

Weird US

2009-11-17T12:22:00.003-06:00

If you don't think Harry Partch's music is the genuine American indigenous article, a classical music truly of this hemisphere and none other, I defy you to make the same argument after doing what I did the other day, as follows. Drive I-40 East from Albuquerque to Tucumcari NM. Get off the freeway and onto highway 54, which will allow you a glimpse of "historic route 66," complete with postwar futuristic-looking motels with names like Atomic Inn--every last one boarded up, abandoned. As you leave town and the scenery before you flattens, put on Partch's And On The Seventh Day Petals Fell In Petaluma and drive on through the increasing plains. The revelation occurred for me as I passed through the mysterious non-town of Nara Visa NM, just before the Texas line: "new weird America" is here, friends, and there's nothing new about it. It's been out here in the West this whole time, tucked away in Foxpark WY and Van Horn TX and even Pierre SD, the only state capital to lie on a time zone demarcation line. And Partch saw that from the trains he hitched back in the depression, long before the Atomic Inn opened its doors, and he caught it in his music. I turned on The Wayward next and reflected on all of this as I drove through Dalhart TX, thick with the smell of manure. "Wel Come to Dalhart," said the Econolodge marquee. I went and got some ice cream at the DQ ("meetin' and greetin' place of Texas," the door read; I've met people in Texas who don't think the DQ exists outside their borders, when in reality the company is based in Minnesota), and I walked around for a moment--and I couldn't help but hear Partch's instruments ringing in my ears. We've got a big, weird continent on our hands here, friends.

Krakow snow

2009-11-17T12:04:00.002-06:00

Mark Nowakowski has an interesting and observant article over at Newmusicbox reflecting on his one-semester stint teaching music in Krakow. Especially endearing is his account of running into Krzysztof Penderecki at the mall. Nice pictures are also included.

SEMC "Self-Titled," 12/13

2009-11-16T22:20:00.004-06:00

Anyone within reach of Chicago is strongly advised to be at the SEMC concert on 13 December at Heaven Gallery, 1550 N Milwaukee. The group is playing eight premieres, including five rock-influenced pieces for tenor voice, bass clarinet, contrabassoon, cello, bass, and drum set. All five include texts written by the composers. A short "post-set," with wine, will feature three arrangements of Bob Dylan tunes by the same ensemble.

SEMC's website here ;

Facebook event page here.

See y'all at the concert.

Leaving the desert

2009-11-16T22:09:00.002-06:00

"I dream of a hard and brutal mysticism in which the naked self merges with a non-human world and yet somehow survives still intact, individual, separate. Paradox and bedrock."

--Ed Abbey, Desert Solitaire

p.s. There was supposed to be a picture in this post. But I don't have my pictures, for reasons that I'll subsume into a general exhortation for the reader to, if not doing so already, boycott Wal-Mart.

Come on, just 48 more.

2009-10-29T18:45:00.004-05:00

As mentioned in the previous post, I was losing my effing mind when I got to California a week or so ago, had been on I-10 for so long that I could barely remember a part of my life that didn't involve the freeway, and so on. Part of the solution was to put on the title track from Sufjan Stevens' Illinois record, which is like a pleasure button for me, especially while driving. Diminishing returns never seem to kick in.

My brother-in-law and I were recently discussing Sufjan and we found ourselves sadly in agreement that we may not see great work from him again. All recent indications suggest that he has kind of lost it. Strange as it seems, I was always optimistic about his quixotic and ostensibly stupid 50 States project--not that he would finish it, but just that any state record he came up with was going to be a great purchase, and that at least 4 of its 172 tracks would be solid gold. He's shown no recent signs of wanting to continue on this path, and rather than cheering him for moving in no directions, I sigh. I had really hoped to one day, as an old retired snowbird, be the lone voice among my friends at the bridge table advocating the Delaware album as his true magnum opus. But alas.

At any rate, it seems a good time to suggest a few of the strengths that make the good music in his output so astoundingly good. I've not the energy to be exhaustive, but here are a couple things that spring to mind.

1) SS is a brilliant instrumental colorist.

His fast songs especially are often a buzzing counterpoint of different sounds that I sometimes feel I can literally see. Examples: in the Illinois title track, the transition from winds in the first part to strings in the second part. The insistent guitar lick throughout the second half. The transitional section in between (talk about layers). The placement of the vibes. Listen to "Casimir Pulaski Day" again and hear those high held notes in the organ later on, something I missed the first dozen times I heard the song. Or how about the lamentlike falling 1/2 step figure in the brass in "For the Widows in Paradise."

I'll come back to color more generally in a second, but first

2) SS is a really fantastic writer of ballads.

Michigan is frankly a bummer, which I didn't like at first. I wanted a record full of tracks like "Detroit" so I could drive around with it on and feel good all the time. But listen to these ballads, their carefully chosen images and anecdotes, the space: is there anyone else who can convey such emotional subtlety along with a vulnerability that is sometimes actually uncomfortable to listen to? ("I am crying in the bathroom" in CPD, &c.) Or something more restrained, like "The Upper Peninsula": "I live in America with a pair of Payless shoes." There's a nuanced character introduction for you.

3, and this is why I really wanted to write this post)

Am I the first to compare Sufjan Stevens with Thomas Hart Benton? If so, I call it. Benton's images sprung to mind as I was listening that day. Examples:

I see a certain affinity in the colors, in the way everything is bent in or out for emphasis, in the way these figures are drawn, exaggerated, mythicized.

Regionalism, eh? Hm. Peter Garland has called for a return to it. I'm always, in words at least, extolling local music scenes and cursing homogenization, so I suppose I'm about it as well. But that's not really what Michigan and Illinois are about. These are detached perspectives, postcards from someone who is not from the places. The style is the same in both cases, it's only the content, the specific people and stories, that change.

So we come to the fork in the road. Is regionalism a style in which an artist creates affectionate portraits of various places, or is regionalism a method in which an artist, steeped in a place, creates a unique style that rises organically from it? The former is easier. Anyone can take a generic camera and drive around and take pictures. It's when the camera actually changes that we learn something new.

Mojave notes

2009-10-27T16:34:00.003-05:00

Ok,

1) National park artist residency programs are great. I've done nothing for the past week except hike, climb, read, and write music. You should really consider applying for one of these tasty things. Here is a list of parks that have programs--they're all a bit different and have their own emphases, seasons, app deadlines, and so on.

2) I become more of a desert rat all the time. First it was the bizarre geology of Southern Utah, then the bizarre people and powerful landscapes of West Texas, and now the strange and wonderful Mojave, with these whimsical Joshua trees everywhere and mountains poking up all over the place. It's never felt like home, in the same way as the dark, lush forests of the Rockies up in Colorado, because that's where I spent time as a youngster, and I've always derived so much energy from those places. But the desert is powerfully peaceful, rugged and quiet, and when I'm out here I can't help but chill out and focus on the moment. I'm not much into meditation, but when you're sitting on a rock out here you find yourself in that state. It's wonderful for creativity. The questions and challenges seem to fall away.

3) Coronado National Forest, in SE Arizona, specifically the unit just S of Chiricahua, is so fantastic, especially after a mind-numbing day of I-10. I was all alone there and it was a cool, perfect day. I couldn't believe I was in the woods again after all that desert driving. Shortly after driving past the NF borders I encountered a sign that said "smuggling and illegal immigration may be encountered in this area." Whoa.

4) Balmorhea State Park is the gateway to the West. It's amazing the way a swim in those waters regenerates my enthusiasm for everything. West Texas is full of surprises. This time it was the town of Ozona. You drive in on another nondescript ranch road, and then suddenly you're on a wide, beautiful, shady block that looks like something out of a Midwestern university town. I shouldn't have been shocked to find another perfect little town out there, I suppose, but my mouth was hanging open nonetheless.

5) It's strange to be in cities in the desert Southwest. Tucson in particular freaked me out this time. When you're from the Midwest and every city is plucked down in the middle of an endless plane of perfect farmland and you're accustomed to the land being used, supporting the communities around it, desert cities seem so illogical, the gas stations and chain restaurants so naturally at odds with the environment surrounding them. They're not wrong, it's just different. By that point in the trip I was also frankly losing my mind from solitude and insane amounts of interstate driving, and I found that sitting at Starbucks reading a book for a few minutes kept me restrained. There's nothing like a good chain coffee shop to make you feel sensible. Someone over there listening to music, looking angsty; a guy reading Madame Bovary; the new Avett Brothers record on the stereo. Phew. Despite Southern California's implicit arguments to the contrary, the world is not ending. Perhaps it already has, but it isn't in the process of doing so right at the moment, and I guess we can hang our hats on that.

6) Related note: when will America stop trying to make every place look just like every other place? I don't want to see Barnes & Noble in El Paso or Denny's in Twentynine Palms. This is an incredibly diverse country, geographically. Why aren't we okay with that? Is the spread of our commercial icons a response to these disparities? I wish different places were still allowed to be different. It's still a joy to focus in on the subtle things, the way everyone in California calls every highway "the 10" or "the 177," the way people in Milwaukee call ATMs "time machines" (actually it's "Tyme," after a major local bank, but you can't hear that in speech).

7) I don't have pictures or music to show for myself yet, but I will. I'm writing a truckload and playing a lot of guitar (this partially since my cabin's solar power system might not be able to support my keyboard--information on this front was scanty).

8) Car-trip analysis of favorite pop music to follow.

This is Water

2009-10-14T10:24:00.006-05:00

I feel compelled to state that this is kind of appalling. I hope you were lucky enough to find David Foster Wallace's 2005 Kenyon College commencement address online before they took it off to try and make some money on it. Now you can buy it for $12 in a nice hardcover volume that would no doubt look beguiling on a coffee table. It's a skinny little thing, and then you pick it up and realize that there are only ten or twelve words on every page, making it both a rip-off and an irritating physical task to read. Infinite Jest was a life-changer for me, but eventually I've grown to find his essays more inspiring. His piece on Roger Federer is, unequivocally, the best piece of sports writing I've ever encountered, and (for the moment) you can still read it online for free. As for "This is Water," it's well worth checking out, but I'd wait until it finds its way into some sort of compilation.

UPDATE: My non-existent research for this post failed to point up that the speech was, in fact, previously published in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2006, ed. Dave Eggers. I'd recommend that purchase instead: while Amazon's page is cruelly bereft of the "search inside" feature, I feel comfortable assuming that TBANR2K6 contains more than one sentence/page.

New Amsterdam

2009-10-14T09:59:00.002-05:00

All roads of late seem to lead to www.newamsterdamrecords.com ; this new label dedicated to NY composer/performers on the classical-pop divide is filling a niche for this music that could have such wide appeal if there were only someone to distribute it, to let people know it exists. First it was Darcy James Argue who directed me there, then it was Build. And then the other day I was listening to Counterstream Radio--still my primary hope for the saving of contemporary music*--and came across the music of Dan Trueman, a composer/performer/Princeton prof whose ties to New Amsterdam include the band QQQ and a project with So Percussion. Everything makes so much sense when someone just looks at a scene, puts things together, and then promotes it, right? Now we just need to do this for all the music outside NYC.

* For me, it does this by bringing me directly to LISTENING, to the music itself, bypassing the normal channels of pretentious concerts and discourse ABOUT the music. Which is a funny thing to say on a blog, right, except there's nothing wrong with musical discourse, it's just the music should come first. And that's what Counterstream does.

Cool Waves

2009-10-13T10:24:00.003-05:00

An Austin band worth hearing is Balmorhea (website, myspace), who are making some really nice instrumental music and reminding us, again, that people who actually care about music, rather than just about looking good, do not care about genre demarcations. Look: a record of instrumental music with guitars and banjos and violins and cellos; and another record, "by" the same band, of remixes of their tracks (or pieces, or whatever you want to call them) done by various people. It seems to me that these musicians could definitely refer to these cuts as "pieces" and to themselves as "composers," and the only difference would be that they wouldn't have 1500 fans on Facebook or be opening for Tortoise or touring Europe or making any sort of money at all on their music, because no one wants to hear pieces by composers (except other composers... and not even all of them, actually). In a world where new "concert" music and indie "pop" music are running awfully close together (look at Nico Muhly, a Juilliard Corigliano student whose record got reviewed by Pitchfork), calling oneself a composer is becoming nothing more than a bonehead marketing decision--unless one is trying to market oneself as a candidate for an academic job, in which case I suppose it's still safest to distance oneself from any music that's ever made any money.

I've said it before, I'll say it again: classical/pop is no longer a stylistic division, it is a socioeconomic one, and people put themselves on one side of it or the other for reasons of self-interest--because it's on that side where they think they've got a shot at making good.

And yes, I admit it, I was drawn to Balmorhea partially because they named themselves after one of my favorite spots in Texas, an atmospheric little state park out in the desert with a spring-fed pool:

Inuksuit

2009-10-06T15:55:00.002-05:00

Check out this 11-minute documentary about John Luther Adams' piece Inuksuit, which was written to be played outdoors at the Banff Centre.

14 Rivers, 14 Floods

2009-09-18T12:38:00.005-05:00

On a lot of new-musicky sites you get information about who, among the list of ten or twelve people who win awards, is winning what awards, and who, among the same list, has been signed by which publishing company. Not here. Here you get a link to some guy playing old Beck songs on a cello that he holds like a guitar. His performer info on CDBaby actually describes what his music sounds like and why he likes it, rather than providing a properly capitalized listing of organizations who have given him money.

Enjoy!

Roots

2009-09-05T22:18:00.002-05:00

Two recommendations.

1) Sparrow Quartet - "Captain"

Singing and clawhammer banjo by Abigail Washburn; three-finger banjo by Béla Fleck; and some ridiculously clean string playing by Casey Driessen and Ben Sollee. Beautiful.

2) Bill Landford and the Landfordaires - "Run on for a Long Time"

I finally looked up this original recording, which I know, and you probably do too, as the source for Moby's "Run On." This group has some killer good-sounding vocals going on, and it's interesting to hear the harmonic choices as they were. The Moby version focuses around a 1 -> b7 bass motion that is totally absent in the original. The Landfordaires are not afraid to stick on the tonic all the way through the verse.

Whispers

2009-09-04T21:18:00.007-05:00

This is what I saw when I first crossed into the Centennial State for the summer in late May.

That sign does, like the others, say "Welcome to Colorful Colorado." A bit of a stretch for that particular spot on the Kansas/Colorado border of Highway 36, but also strangely perfect. Colorado presented itself as a blank slate on which to scribble the events of the summer. I like that idea. A wide open space. Colorado, colorful because you draw it that way.

Not to say that I came here without preconceived notions. I have my version of this part of the world; I know what I look for from it. I've always loved the American West, ever since childhood road trips to the Black Hills or Estes Park where I'd first step out of the car in Big Thompson Canyon and feel that crisp mountain air and climb around on the rocks. It has an atmosphere. The Midwest is really more like an empty canvas that we write on; the land itself is everywhere in the Midwest, at least for city Midwesterners, throughly and consistently ignored. Here the land has its own presence, not just that of the roads and the structures we build on it.

But it's not just the contours of the earth. In the last few years I've come to recognize that I love the American West for its fusion of powerful natural beauty and manifest human quirkiness. Look at the Black Hills up in South Dakota. Even as a kid I think it struck me strange, on some level, that I had to reconcile the mysterious energy of those dark pine-covered hills with the Western kitsch of Wall Drug, buffalo burgers and moccasins, the gift shops in Keystone, the parking lot at Mt. Rushmore. And oh, lord, I love Grand Lake CO for this same unexpected marriage. The mornings and the twilight hours here are music. And then add the people who live here. "Colorful Colorado" is damn right.

I get so sulky when I have to leave Colorado. I stomp my feet halfheartedly and whine. I get embarrassingly touched by John Denver songs. This period of my life has been teeming with incessant beginnings and endings. I've chosen this and regret nothing, but nonetheless it makes for an awful lot of these three-day spans where I walk around a place and feel like it's whispering to me, asking why I'm leaving and where I'm going. I've learned so much from these places, and as I kick the asphalt in Grand Lake I feel the presence of this town and the people with whom I've shared it, and it presents itself to me like the opposite of that empty field on Highway 36: it is full, saturated with experience, an inscrutable lesson that I've somehow internalized.

I talked about these things in the essay that managed to score me a gig as Artist-in-Residence at Joshua Tree National Park this coming October-November. I included audio excerpts from Terlingua Meditations and On the Beach at Kantishna, and I described them as "responses to powerful places, spots where the atmosphere of nature fused with my own consciousness to create a unique synthesis." My creative work has often involved attempts to explicate the subjective, expressing the universals hidden within moments of personal experience.

Tonight, this weekend, I'm going to hold it in. I'm feeling selfish.

Terlingua: literally, "earth language." The aspens are starting to turn. Happy Fall.

Estranged contexts

2009-09-04T20:05:00.005-05:00

I've been intrigued for the past few days with the Nonsense Company, a group that "performs new and innovative works of contemporary music and theater, with an emphasis on the musical use of speech in estranged contexts and the application in theater of techniques more commonly associated with music." Their excellent website includes sound samples and more information.

House-elves

2009-09-03T17:14:00.001-05:00

Need some creative vindication? Of course you do. We all need some creative vindication sometimes. Elizabeth Gilbert's TED talk will make you feel better, I promise. And anyway you're going to have to listen to it to understand the title of this post.

New ground

2009-08-30T10:36:00.003-05:00

So, check this out:

How about that? I've barely written anything that could be classified as poetry, but at some point about a year ago, the restlessly prolific Eric Malmquist wrote a few of us soliciting anything that might make a good art song, and I happened to have three little things sitting around. I'd practically forgotten about it by the time he sent the scores along. A new experience for me, and how cool.

Eric is also starting a concert series called SONG (Singers on New Ground) in Chicago showcasing new American art songs, so if you're in the city on 23 Sept, be there, 7pm at PianoForte. Program will include music by Eric, his teacher Stacy Garrop, Libby Larsen, and Dominick Argento (oh, yeah), as well as the latest rendition of my own Sincerity, the setting of my rejection letter from the University of Michigan (score, recording). I'll play the piano, and singing will be Ben Hjertmann, for whom I wrote the song, and who also received the same letter at about the same time. Here's the Facebook event page.

Freedom Band

2009-08-28T10:55:00.003-05:00

I have an excuse for using my new Master's degree to not compose anything or do a very good job updating this blog. I think it's a good excuse. It's because I've been focusing on music like this:

(notice the antler chandelier)

Also,

(notice the sign about "Bury Manilow.")

I've been accused, due to wardrobe/accessory choices as demonstrated above, of pretending to be from Texas. Figures: in Texas I was the Iowan, in Colorado I'm the Texan. Not sure what to make of myself anymore.

Also, I'm pretty certain we're the only old-time folk band in the Front Range that can boast two MM Composition degrees in our ranks. If that counts for anything.

Coming in from the coasts

2009-08-28T10:38:00.004-05:00

You know the old truism about how trends start on the east coast, or in Europe, and have to "make it" in to the Midwest or other more culturally remote regions? Well, the Dirty Projectors have made it to new music-land. I thought I was hip because I heard of them through word-of-mouth all the way back in April (always the most approved-of way to find out about something new), but now even Newmusicbox has reviewed Bitte Orca, and the band has become the most recent pop-world entity that composers like to trot out their appreciation of without really incorporating as an influence. This practice goes back into the '90s as well: the previous batch included Radiohead and Bjork, favorite groups of many composers who liked to claim they "didn't only listen to contemporary concert music" although what they wrote sounded exactly, and only, like other contemporary concert music. I'd imagine that even back in the '80s, composers whose music was still infatuated with inaudible pseudo-modernistic pitch structures would trumpet their love of the Talking Heads to try and seem more with-it. To be fair, I've spent most of my short composing career trying to make my pop influences matter in my non-pop creations, and pretty much haven't been able to. A friend recently told me that any sort of "crossover" is twice as hard to pull off, and I think he's right.

So anyway, now that everyone else is talking about Bitte Orca (and, according to a friend who works with musicians in Brooklyn, the city of New York is now tired of the band), I won't talk about it anymore, except to say that I'm envious of the young musicians who'll get to hear this at age 15. I'll bet they get the same feeling I did at the same age when I first heard The Soft Bulletin or In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. This is a special intersection in music, one where whimsical experimentalism meets pop accessibility. It's a rich corner that has led to some beautiful results with replay value. To the youngsters who are inspired by this stuff, I say this: watch out with music school. They aren't going to understand your relationship to this music. So keep a hand in recorded music, because those people will.

Also: I've plugged them once, I'll plug them again, but another group/project that fits into this realm would be The Oracle Hysterical.

Nightlife

2009-07-26T09:55:00.002-05:00

Check out Nightlife, the new album/podcast/pop opera by friend and fellow UT composer Jack Stamps and writer John Navarro. Jack is a truly original musician who is also a candidate for best composer website. Nightlife also just received a favorable review from RadioIndy.

Clarity

2009-07-10T19:26:00.009-05:00

It's a bit disturbing that, in spite of my current existence as a pianist, I've recently gravitated so heavily toward combos with no piano. First it was the Dave Holland Quintet, who open up their sound by substituting Steve Nelson's marimba and vibes. He tends to play thinner chords than a pianist--which makes sense, because he's got what, four mallets probably, versus a pianist's ten fingers--and also just play less, and even when he does the timbre is so different, higher and again, thinner, so it doesn't seem to saturate the spectrum as much as a piano.

And now it's the Ornette Coleman quartet. I finally got one of his records because I heard the SF Jazz Collective version of "Una Muy Bonita" and thought to myself, well, I've got to hear the original of that. So I picked up Change of the Century, and holy shit that's a beautiful rhythm section! It's straight up ecstatic, in places, to hear Charlie Haden and Billy Higgins crackling around one another--the interplay is so complex but it always rings, and there's no comping instrument to muck it up. I suppose a rhythm section of a chording instrument plus one other could have a similar effect, but as a million people have said by now, the absence of comping also frees the soloists to really stretch out melodically, which results in some just damn gorgeous solos, with a terrific off-beat sense of phrasing.

I realize Coleman's records where very path-breaking for the time, but it's unfortunate that he still has such a spiky reputation. He obviously deserves to be known as an innovator, but I find this stuff extremely easy to dive into, and there's no excuse for it taking this long for me to hear it.

UPDATE: Exhaustive Wikipedia research has yielded the fact that trumpeter Don Cherry is the father of pop musician Eagle-Eye Cherry, and that this is evidently actually his real name. Charlie Haden's daughter Petra has been involved with both that dog. and The Decemberists. Also, Haden is from Iowa. How about that.

Reciprocity

2009-07-09T12:53:00.005-05:00

So, I heard "Wagon Wheel" again today. Man, that song gives me fits. The thing is, it's fantastic. Just right. And everyone knows this. It's from this album packed with fun songs, but everyone knows that it's the best one--including the band themselves, who put it right at the end, almost as if to say, "wait 'til you hear this one."

It's just I-V-vi-IV. That's all it is. And that's all the rest of the songs on the record are too. So why is it better? We cannot hope to isolate this music's quality within its objective, quantifiable traits. The formalistic aspects that academics love to use to justify their instincts are just not sufficient in this case; there isn't enough there, objectively, to make analysis profitable. So what remains?

I was struck by a possible answer to this question a few months ago when I was sitting in a coffee shop in Austin reading David Abram's Spell of the Sensuous, and Radiohead's "No Surprises" comes on the speakers. And let me tell you, I felt a physical response. This music and I have memories together. It runs deep into my personal experience. I looked back down at the book I was reading and realized the answer was right there.

See, music is not a passive object. It's not inanimate. It's another entity with which we participate, like the people in our lives, like the places and possessions that become important to us. Our experience of music, like all perception for Abram, is not a one-way street. It's flowing, dynamic, open reciprocity. "No Surprises" spoke to me, and I spoke back. It spoke to me of my past and I told it of my present. We give to one another, and each time we meet, we are both different--although, as Abram points out with respect to a clay bowl, the rhythm of change in a supposedly static, "inanimate" object, or a musical recording, differs greatly from my own. But like anything you look upon regularly and to which you ascribe personal significance, animate or not, you and that entity have a relationship, and it develops each time you give one another your attention.

The same with "Wagon Wheel." It's so excellent in part because it reminds everyone of that great spring break trip or that summer they spent working in x state with mountains. The quality is not solely a property of the music; it's also an attribute that the listener brings to the experience and receives in turn from the song. What other explanation could there be for such disparate evaluations of artistic worth?

Every time you move toward subjective conceptions of value, you run the risk of throwing the objective traits out the window entirely, of ending up in a postmodern abyss where there can be no positive statements about art. But it isn't all subjective, of course. Abram's clay bowl is in his house because he, assumedly, saw it in an artisan's shop and picked it out based primarily on its perceptible aesthetic characteristics. The music we let in, we do initially let in because of objective qualities like melodic catchiness, or whatever. But the experience is more complex than that, especially once you develop a history with a piece of art. It's relationship with you, as an entity in your life, becomes a much more potent testament to its worth than any attribute that can be drawn in a matrix or explained through roman numerals.

Self-reliance

2009-07-09T12:18:00.007-05:00

I've been meaning to post about this for a while now, but when I saw the Trimpin documentary (mandatory) back in March I was struck by a photo of Conlon Nancarrow at work. I don't remember if this is the one, but it has the same effect:

Fans of American classical music (the real stuff) have sometimes been guilty of fetishizing the archetype of the solitary artist. Nancarrow, of course, is often cited as exhibit A in this regard. There is no doubt that many, if not most, of our highly creative composers have met with widespread ignorance or hostility. I question the maverick myth, though--so many of these figures met and interacted and self-consciously developed their work with the others' in mind. Nonetheless I find something stirring in these solitary composer photos, showing these artists at work, ignoring general ignorance, just doing their thing and not giving a damn what people think. And that's so American, right? The self-made man? Transcendentalism and inner law? This shot of Julius Eastman has the same qualities, I think:

That represents more positive American qualities than fireworks, I'd say. On that note, check out Paste Magazine's list of 12 patriotic songs better than "God Bless the USA." They even include Appalachian Spring, although as usual I'm forced to advocate the lesser-known original chamber instrumentation (which I listened to this morning, actually) over the orchestral suite.

Get Rich Quick

2009-07-07T12:01:00.003-05:00

My friend Ian Dicke has posted the recording of me playing his piece for piano and electronics, Get Rich Quick. It's a very well-written piece that also has the rare and valuable attribute of being funny. Check it out.

Misc.

2009-06-28T09:41:00.003-05:00

Some interesting thoughts related to Michael Jackson: Trevor Hunter at Newmusicbox, Mark Richardson at Pitchfork.

Also on Newmusicbox is a preview of The Listen, a new book by composer and fellow IWU alum and Peter Gilbert and Christopher Jon Honett. Looks like an interesting project, I'm looking forward to reading more.

On another totally unrelated note, I thought for no reason yesterday about the "Tips for Beginners" FAQ on the Austin Symphony's website, which is a really cute, easily mocked, but also kind of well done classical concert primer. My favorite question: "Why don't the musicians smile when they play?" It also includes some good classical music links. I would, however, be happy if no one ever used the word "Maestro" in seriousness ever again. Yuck.

Summertime

2009-06-26T00:29:00.004-05:00

Grand Lake has a summer Thursday night live music series: each week, some goofy little folk group of some sort is set up in the gazebo when I arrive for call. They're constantly playing to tiny and passive audiences of around ten to twenty people, including the two guys who are selling popcorn. The effort is made yet more quixotic by the mercurial mountain weather, which has delivered rain every Thursday thus far--and not all day, mind you, just in time for the music. The first week it was in the forties out there and the few spectators were under blankets; last week the rain was insignificant enough that most of the audience was in lawn chairs. Tonight, though, was seriously wet, and only a small coterie was present, popcorn in hand, protected under the awnings of the library.

I don't know where they find these bands, but each one of them suggests a wealth of stories that I'd really like to hear--or at least that's what I think at first, before I become irritated by their music/stage banter/both and go inside. The first week it was a Christian family band from Nebraska, complete with a battery of golden-haired, mandolin-playing youngsters; tonight it was a trio of guitar, piano and drums playing "Summertime" and "Proud Mary" in the chilly mist. The primary singer in these bands is never who you expect, in fact is generally the last person on the stage you think to look at.

I'll admit it, though, my heart grows three sizes when I see these groups out there week after week. God knows where they come from or who's continued to encourage their pursuits. I wonder if all of their audiences are as vaguely disinterested as the ones here. I myself rarely tolerate much more than a song and a half, but I'm still just so glad to see those people out there. Because playing music, learning to physically play an instrument and then want to play it in front of people, rain and apathy be damned, is a weird, irrational thing to do, but there are times when weird irrationality is vital, and this happens to be a manifestation of it that I particularly believe in.

I'm thinking of the Peter Garland quotation I put on here a year ago May, describing continued human expression, in the face of the horrors of the twentieth century, as "heroic." The twentieth century, with its mass war-induced recognition of human brutality, is over. For Americans, at least, that awareness and introspection has cooled and hardened into ironic detachment--into a steady state of impassivity where pursuits, generally speaking, are often considered frivolous if not entirely futile.

There's not a damn reason to play music. It'll never be as polished as a studio recording, and you'll never be as good as the ten thousand other people who already play that instrument. And besides, there's already muzak coming over the speakers in here, don't you hear? If you start playing, someone's going to have to walk over and turn it down. All the more reason to keep playing. Just picking up an instrument is becoming an act of defiance. So pick the thing up, right now, and take it outside. Like Ed Abbey said: "Don't drop it on your foot--throw it at something big and glassy. What do you have to lose?"

Internet radio renewed my faith in new music

2009-06-22T23:44:00.004-05:00

You mean you can just listen to the stuff, and take it in, and enjoy it, without reading pompous bios/program notes, enduring (or participating in) absurd posturing, or getting embroiled in endless debates about its "quality"/relevance to society/theoretical and historical implications? Revelatory.

Counterstream Radio

Iridian Radio

Other recommendations welcome!

Keeping up

2009-06-16T09:48:00.002-05:00

I don't follow a whole lot of blogs. There are only a handful I read regularly, and a bunch more that I look at only occasionally. NPR's jazz site A Blog Supreme has recently jumped into the former category. It's easy to lampoon the weblog practice, but sites like ABS are so useful for keeping in touch with a certain scene or thread within music.

People who show up

2009-06-12T13:44:00.003-05:00

I've been checking out Dave Hickey's essay collection Air Guitar. He's an art critic who also does and writes about music, hence the title, although it's a bit misleading--air guitar is his derogatory analogy for the act of writing criticism. It's been teaching me a great deal of new vocabulary words, which is great, but also the book is worth its price only for "Romancing the Looky-Loos," which is an essay that I feel like nailing to a bunch of doors. It's about the difference between spectators and participants, those who just happen across the concert versus those who are truly engaged. Spectators, or "civilians," were "people who did not live the life--people with no real passion for what was going on. They were just looking." (148)

Listen to this. "The butterfly effects of cultural eccentricity are of no interest to spectators; they either consume, or they critique...Beyond this hegemony of corporate and institutional consensus, however, beyond the purview of uncannily lifelike blockbusters like Jurassic Park and the Whitney Biennial, everything that grows in the domain of culture, that acquires constituencies and enters the realm of public esteem, does so through the accumulation of participatory investment by people who show up." (150)

The most enthralling thing about this book has been Hickey's conception of cultural levels--there is the controlling class, which consists, interestingly, of both academia and the corporate tastemakers, and then there is this vast underbelly of actual people at actual bars making actual art/music/whatever and actually talking about it. Art coming into existence through real-life, quotidian socialization. Hickey entered this level by dropping out of graduate school and opening an art gallery (in Austin, of course), and the ideas he's developed through the experience of dealing with art from commercial, academic, and critical vantages are deep and always surprising. Each essay begins with something and then goes somewhere different and more insightful than you expect it to. He also really knows how to write.

Labyrinths

2009-05-31T23:43:00.005-05:00

1. Physics.

In A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking muses on the apparent logic of the universe. Science is full of fundamental numbers, like the size of the electric charge of the electron, numbers we have observed and recorded--and it seems that even a very small variation in any of these settings would have precluded the development of intelligent life. This seems, for many, good evidence of a creator with logic that includes us: these careful calibrations that just happen to allow for our existence indicate that the universe was, on some level, intended for our occupancy.

2. Goblin Valley State Park, Utah.

The first time I went to Goblin Valley, I was convinced it was a naturally occurring playground. The intention seemed so clear. This isolated field full of eminently climbable structures of various sizes and levels, with such whimsical shapes, the magnitude of it so perfect for lighthearted exploration... this place could not have been meant for any other end than human play. I, as a visitor there, was the recipient of a divine gift, and I accepted it without hesitation.

Then I returned last week, and realized the truth to be more complex. Goblin Valley is not a perfect playground. It has dead ends and loose ground and difficult climbs, and if you're not careful you can get yourself hurt or stuck in a tough spot. Roaming around on the goblins, I noticed, creates a huge amount of destructive erosion, and the highest plateau was covered in cryptobiotic soil, some of which I'd surely unknowingly stomped during my previous visit. I still had a great time, but I was forced to admit that Goblin Valley was not made for my use, nor anyone else's. It is the same lesson the environmental movement has gradually managed to teach us with regard to the world at large.

So the beautiful places of the earth are not truly playgrounds for our enjoyment, at least not solely or primarily. They are not labyrinths designed for us. Last week I passed through a narrow canyon in Goblin Valley, thinking it had to be a sort of back entrance to the valley; ultimately, it led nowhere, and I was forced to backtrack. A labyrinth at least has an unequivocal center, and one or more definitive paths to reach it.

3. Art.

The labyrinths we create for ourselves, the ones we are meant to walk through and gain something from. Even in the most elusive works of modernism and the most insouciant of postmodernism, there is a center. All dead ends are intentional. I suspect, in opposition to John Cage, that the center and the creator are closely linked, but this is a multivalent question.

The "imperfect" labyrinths of nature, with their glimmers of insight, their suggestions of divine logic, inspire us to create our own, embedded with meanings that we have drawn from the messy and sometimes ostensibly indifferent universe around us.

Modern walking labyrinths take one on a circuitous path, giving first a close glimpse of the center before branching off in every possible direction and traveling far before finally reaching it. Similarly, art cannot make its point too plainly or unambiguously. A certain air of mystery is required, a certain projection of what is there onto another, invisible plane. This is why I like the work of Rene Magritte, James Joyce, John Fahey, Charles Ives, and David Lynch, to name a few.

A teacher of mine once bought an abstract painting; he said he knew for sure that it was good art when two of his friends got into an argument about whether the painting conveyed exuberance or anger. A unanimous conclusion is not necessary, only the forceful impression that a conclusion is possible.

4. Another scientist.

"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious." -- Albert Einstein

The Importance of Being Sesquipedalian

2009-05-17T17:51:00.005-05:00

We're all aware by now that there is a ludicrous number of composers out there; this has not phased Richard Zarou, who in his ongoing podcast No Extra Notes provides a great snapshot of one composer each week, with brief interviews and musical samples. A composer a week seems daunting, but when they come in the digestible form of a twenty-minute podcast, it seems so reasonable. This week he features Milica Paranosic, who delightfully made the rest of us look a bit foolish by sounding, in her interview, like an actual artist. Her response, for example, to a question regarding her music's influences: "people, stories, events, children, games, languages, and my brother." What sort of music does she listen to? "I like fun music, I like music that makes me want to scream and run." I'm sure not all would agree, but to me these responses suggest artistic self-confidence. The rest of us, by contrast, hewed close to the general academic tendency of justifying our work by trying to analyze it. It's not that we weren't being honest--we just dressed it up with our best witty, erudite musings, and as a result it doesn't end up sounding as honest.

But then, I wonder, if we were all as terse as possible in describing our love of music and the reasons we do it, would all of our answers to Richard's questions be the same?

Something, perhaps, along the lines of George Mallory's explanation of why he wanted to climb Mt. Everest: "Because it's there."

capital C, capital P

2009-05-10T12:16:00.003-05:00

I closed out my MM years the last two nights with the Ears, Eyes, and Feet concert at UT, on which I played Ian Dicke's new piece Get Rich Quick for piano and prerecorded accompaniment, with six dancers onstage throwing shoes at each other. It was a blast, and I got to wear a top hat and spats--the latter being a wonderful old-school wardrobe item the existence of which I hadn't previously been aware. The greatest lessons are always unexpected, eh?

This semester culminated a general tendency during my UT years toward performance, specifically of new music and jazz, over what I've been calling "capital-C Composing." When I pulled into Austin in August '07 I was in the thrall of my most compositionally productive year--I pumped out pieces in '07 and the first half of '08 with no regard whatsoever for quality or editing. I had so many piece ideas that it was all I could do to tear through a first draft, throw it into Finale, and then move right on. I've slowed down since, probably healthily, partially because my time here has called my attention to a lot of questions that I hadn't previously considered. In some ways I consider the second year of my Master's--during which I only finished three new pieces--a running start into the leap I hope to now take.

Regardless of psychological issues, the central practical reason for my slower compositional pace was an increased devotion to playing. I have a hard time thinking I'll regret this choice; I had the opportunity to play a lot of new music with a lot of awesome performers this year, and that's not a chance I'll have as readily when I'm out of school. Composing, by contrast, I can do by myself in a shed somewhere (and plan to). But playing Eight Songs for a Mad King with the UT NME and John Duykers? Giving the second performance of Gabriela Frank's New Andean Songs? Rocking out Louis Andriessen's M is for Man, Music, Mozart with a crew of badass horn players? Spending a month combing over the details of Sebastian Currier's Vocalissimus? Not to mention doing Music for a Summer Evening with a group of dancers and a three-story set of scaffolding, and playing music by my composer friends, which is always particularly rewarding. These are experiences I was only able to have because of UT, specifically I suppose because of Dan Welcher and the New Music Ensemble, and I'm grateful for them.

One of my personal mantras has been, leaving school, that I want to regroup and develop a new approach to composing that grows organically from the playing of music. Living in Austin, where every party seems to include a jam session, has confirmed the necessity of this. For the moment it may involve moving away from scores, and toward putting together music for live performances or recordings. But largely I really don't know what the stylistic results of this new approach will be. I proceed not out of dedication to an abstract, unrealized ideal, but in pursuit of a particular energy whose ends I can't entirely envision. This is exciting.

It's also always hard to say what will happen when I get back to Colorado again. I have a history of writing big pieces in Grand Lake; my two orchestra pieces were drafted during my two summers in the mountains. Maybe I'll catch that bug again. For now, I have three pieces in the works for friends, about which more details soon. So for at least the next couple months I'll still have a foot in "capital-C composing." I think it'll feel a lot different outside the confines of school. One older composer describing my generation used the metaphor of a drunk falling asleep on a pool table, then rolling off in the middle of the night; when he eventually woke up, the room still dark, he thought he was still on the table, and so began to crawl about tentatively, feeling for its edges. It's a bizarre analogy, but for some reason I really like it.

Also, the Austin Chronicle recently did an interesting piece on our local composers, academic and non-. There has been a good amount of press recently examining our growing new-music scene, and the energy seems to be positive and productive.

I leave Austin in a few days, at least for the summer; my schedule after that is a bit uncertain. I do plan to be back here, but nonetheless things are shifting, and it is time to say thank you to everyone who has been a part of these two confusing, enriching years. I think I spent most of my time here just getting my bearings, but that's been a pattern in life, really--each phase seems to end around the time I get comfortable with it. At least this keeps me on my toes. And the seeds planted in each phase can still come to blossom in the next. Cheers to that.

Disconnect

2009-05-05T10:09:00.003-05:00

Great musical weekend in Austin. My teacher Dan Welcher's Fifth Symphony received a very successful and well-received premiere by the Austin Symphony: you can read a review by local critic Jeanne Claire van Ryzin here. She has some insightful and complimentary things to say about the piece, and also makes a crucial comment about the concert program, which also featured Sarah Chang playing Bruch's Violin Concerto no. 1, followed by Tchaikovsky's Capriccio Italien:

"If anything, this weekend’s program, while noteworthy, revealed ASO’s greater disconnect from the very musical culture of its place and time. Little if anything was done by the ASO management to specifically market Welcher’s piece to Austin audiences. It shouldn’t have had to share the limelight with a celebrated soloist. And that strategy is curious, because a premiere by an Austin composer would have been an obvious means for ASO to connect with potential new and younger Austin audiences who wouldn’t normally connect with most of the symphonic repertoire ASO typically offers."

Exactly. EXACTLY. Illustration: this was the only ASO concert that my fellow composition students and I have attended en masse, and get this--almost all of us left at intermission, after Welcher's piece. If you're not even connecting to the younger generation of composition students, forget about connecting to the younger generation of general listeners.

On an unrelated note, the following day I had a curious one-two of musical inspiration. A cellist friend introduced me to Schnittke's Piano Quintet and we listened to it and discussed it, and then immediately after, I went to hear Sonny Rollins play at the UT PAC. Man, that guy is a walking advertisement for yoga, still playing like that at age 78. The whole evening prompted some thoughts about notated music versus improvised. The advantages of one occasionally charm me into thinking that it's the ideal approach. I realized this weekend that it's much like going between the city and the wilderness--each one makes you appreciate the other. Perhaps it's not a matter of choosing one exclusively, but simply finding a balance.

Colorado

2009-04-28T10:32:00.002-05:00

The countdown is on: two more weeks in Austin, a quick jaunt through the Midwest, and I'm on my way back to this rock.

Only two concerts remain. A week from today, May 5, the New Music Ensemble plays Static and Vocalissimus by Sebastian Currier and Shot in the Dark by Travis Jeffords: webcast here. Friday and Saturday, May 8-9, is Ears, Eyes, and Feet, the collaborative concert between the UT Electronic Music Studios and dance department. I'm playing Ian Dicke's new piece for piano and electronics, Get Rich Quick.

Being compelled

2009-04-27T21:18:00.004-05:00

I've been on a fairly consistent diet for nearly three years of mostly emotionally reserved music--contemporary classical and, for the last year, more jazz. Some of this music is of course emotionally rich, but it leaves a lot more for the listener to fill in than, say, indie pop, with its anthemic I-IV rockouts which are probably, on some level, my lifeblood. I think of Louis Andriessen, who wrote once that he did not find Mahler's music compelling, because he was always being compelled by it. By comparison to the "new music" in which I've lately been immersed, the pop music of my high school and early college years comes like an injection of adrenaline. An evening of listening to this music after weeks or months of denial feels like a cup of strong coffee after a period of abstinence from caffeine: I immediately recognize the energizing power of this substance, but it also leaves me wondering if it can really be healthy to drink it on a regular basis, and I have a difficult time concentrating afterward.

The battleground

2009-04-27T19:42:00.005-05:00

I've heard composers of my teachers' generation call it "the speech"--that revelation that composers of their teachers' generation had, and that they all like to share their particular version of when they speak on their music--that moment when they cast off their modernist/serialist training to regain a relationship with tonality and the tradition.

By my teachers' generation, I mean roughly composers born in the mid-1940s to late 1950s; the composers of their generation, then, were born in the 1920s or '30s. If the great serialist apostasy of my teachers' teachers took place, say, in the late '60s or early '70s--Rochberg's String Quartet no. 3 of 1972 is often considered a landmark in this regard--this was too late to much influence the training of my teachers, many of whom were in graduate school in the '70s. Most of them now say they were forced to write serially to be taken seriously; Claude Baker tells the story of giving a class presentation on Hindemith's The Craft of Musical Composition and being booed.

My teachers found their own way, and of course now are free to write as tonally or non-tonally as they like without fear of ostracization. But it's clear that their teachers' late rediscovery of tonality, as well as general recognition of the minimalist revolution taking place concurrently outside of academia, came too late to save them--not just from stylistic funneling, but from an inculcation into the thought patterns of mid-twentieth-century musical politics. My teachers recognize today's stylistic egalitarianism, but their musical worldview was deeply shaped by the tonal-atonal battle, and this dynamic resonates in their discourse still today.

I mention this because it contrasts so drastically with the assumptions of composers of my generation--those born in the late '70s to late '80s. I've found invariably amongst my peers that, once we reach a certain level of musical knowledge and sophistication, the polarizing effect of the atonal/tonal debate simply disappears. I make the qualification about "knowledge and sophistication" because many of us responded quite negatively to dissonant twentieth-century styles when we were younger, and had to do some learning before they started to make sense. But in all most all cases, they eventually did, and now those styles sit in our toolbox with all the others, on the same level of the bookshelf, with no stigma attached to any.

In terms of stylistic opportunity, we are on equal footing with our teachers. None of us feel any compunction to write in one style or another to better fit with the general cultural atmosphere. But that underlying worldview, those deep thought patterns, these still separate us. Because our teachers, even if they no longer consider tonal/atonal a major aesthetic battleground, still organize their compositional approach around the primacy of PITCH LOGIC. I'm making an immense generalization here, I realize, and I don't deny that there have been many exceptions to these trends. I only mean to suggest that, when we eventually look back at the turn of this century, one of the things that will separate composition on the two sides of the line is the extent to which pitch structures are considered operative. My teachers grew up in a time when your chosen organization of the twelve possible pitches meant everything; my peers came of age listening to music more for form than for content in this respect, and as a result consider our building blocks to be less individual pitches than instruments, melodies, rhythmic patterns, gestures.

Or maybe it's altogether too early to speak for my whole generation. I suppose I can only speak for myself.

The musical uncertainty principle

2009-04-26T11:08:00.002-05:00

I've been working on a solo electric guitar piece which will have no score, but exist only as a recording (or, I suppose, as a live performance). It is composed of chunks which alternate at the will of the performer; only a very general overall contour is planned in advance (these few chunks, then this section, then back to a couple, but not all, of the original chunks). Writing a score entails deciding precisely a piece's position and holding it static. But what of the piece's momentum? By not writing a score, by coming to know the music only sonically and leaving a certain amount of its identity indeterminate, you sacrifice decisive influence over its position, but gain an intimate sense of its velocity. I find this an acceptable trade.

Ways people use words

2009-04-24T12:16:00.003-05:00

I just read that, according to the Word Frequency Book compiled by John B. Carroll and others (published in the early 1970s, as best as I can tell, so this information might be long outdated), the most common nouns in the English language are, in order, "time," "people," "way," "water," and "words." I don't know whether to be more mystified by the inclusion of water--I'm reminded of R. Murray Schafer, in The Soundscape: "What was the first sound heard? It was the caress of the waters...All roads lead back to water. We shall return to the sea." (15-18)--or by our apparent obsession with ourselves ("people") and our most prominent symbols ("words"). That one of the most common uses of our language is to refer to ourselves and to our language is not a surprising revelation, but nonetheless full of implications.

St. Marks Lighthouse

2009-04-18T21:55:00.003-05:00

Massively belated for no reason other than loafing, here is the first batch of recordings from my Master's recital last month: the two-movement saxophone quartet St. Marks Lighthouse. Incidentally, no, there is not supposed to be an apostrophe. Ask the state of Florida. The eponymous lighthouse does exist, and it's a beautiful spot: google image search the phrase "St. Marks Lighthouse" and see what it gets you. There's personal significance to that choice of place that informs the shape of the piece and the movement titles, but nothing that needs to be understood to hear the music.

The awesome performers are Sunil Gadgil (S), Rami El-Farrah (A), Spencer Nielsen (T), and Michael Hertel (B).

St. Marks Lighthouse

1. Ballade

2. Benediction

Hmm... how about bassoon, accordion, and harpsichord?

2009-04-13T10:03:00.006-05:00

I've been corresponding with my friend Mike Lawton, from IWU, who is now working on his master's in clarinet at the University of Kentucky. He asked if I might be interested in writing a piece for him, which of course I am, but the question that immediately sprung to mind was that of instrumentation. Recently I've gotten into the bad habit of judging pieces immediately based on their instrumentation before I've even heard them. Style is endlessly slippery, but instrumentation is immediate. In today's hyper-varied musical atmosphere, we often don't have enough frame of reference to perceive abstract musical traits when hearing a piece for the first time: it takes all of our attention and effort just to get a basic grasp on what this music is trying to do and where it's coming from. It's the big gestures we seize onto, the obvious surface, not the intricate details. Of course, these details are still there, and are still important. But it's foolish to think that a piece for four mandolins, just on the basis of the same notational system and the same set of twelve pitches, could have the same superficial musical effect as a woodwind quintet. I think of Feldman's famous suggestion--later disavowed, I know, but it contains a significant idea--that orchestration defines the piece. How could it not? I tried to take this into account when I was writing my recent saxophone quartet, St. Marks Lighthouse; I could make all the interesting harmonic, rhythmic, and formal choices in the world, but still the first thing the listener is going to notice is the fact that there are four saxophones up there on stage. My first obligation, then, to both the listener and the players, is an acknowledgment of this sound and this social arrangement. (To be fair, I'm not sure if these insights played much concrete role in the music, or at least not one more nuanced than just including big chords and trills, but eh. There's always the next piece.)

To take some stylistically thorny examples, these thoughts explain why I'm interested in Babbitt's Composition for Guitar or Boulez' Sur Incises (three pianos, three harps, and three percussion) while many of these composers' works in traditional instrumentations leave me decidedly apathetic. And, to return to Mike's piece, this is why I immediately asked if he'd be interested in some sort of unconventional trio instrumentation. There's a lot of good music still to be written in C Major, and there are certainly some badass solo clarinet and clarinet-piano pieces out there in the ether waiting to crystallize as well. But I won't be the one to write them, at least not right now, because I know how I feel when I sit down in a concert hall and see a new clarinet-piano piece on the program, versus how I feel when I see a piece for four scordatura cellos. Traditional instrumentations still carry, if not stylistic baggage, then at least a set of expectations that it's difficult to subvert. It would be difficult for me to sit down and write a clarinet-piano piece without thinking of the standard, vanilla "recital piece." Clarinet and two marimbas, on the other hand--this offers a different feel, and some more promising opportunities.

Incidentally, looseness of format and instrumentation is also what made (and makes) SEMC such an exciting project. Check out their repertoire page and look at those instrumentations.

Reminder

2009-04-08T23:58:00.005-05:00

My spring break trip to Big Bend was so thoroughly rejuvenating that I'm just now starting to revert to the constant low-level feeling that there's something I need to be doing. I think we're all familiar with this sort of irrational anxiety. In order to fight it off, I present another picture from the trip, perhaps for no one's benefit but my own.

Ahh.

Much better.

Deep Thoughts by Harry Partch

2009-04-08T23:40:00.004-05:00

I love this bit. Wrote it down in a notebook a year and a half ago and just came across it:

"I also want the musicians to be an active part, a very active part, in the whole production... I want them to be as graceful as Muhammad Ali... and I also like them to be in costume, and with a headdress, or whatever."

Well said, Mr. P.

Also, tonight, in the category of Musical Projects That Ostensibly Come From The "Rock" World But Smack Of "New-Music" Attitudes:

The Dirty Projectors, a band out of Brooklyn and fronted by former Yale composition student Dave Longstreth. Their record Rise Above documents an attempt by Longstreth to rewrite Black Flag's 1981 album Damaged... from memory. Portsmouth Sinfonia, anyone? A favorite influence of mine, The Books, lie at a similar juncture of genres. (Note that I have not disavowed the latter group in spite of their utilization by numerous Hummer commercials. A sign of my devotion.) It becomes increasingly evident that pop v. classical is a socioeconomic distinction, not a stylistic one.

Great difficulty!

2009-04-05T21:51:00.004-05:00

Someday, perhaps, blogging will go the way of jazz and, increasingly, rock and roll, and transition from a popular medium to one that requires formal teaching to pass on its principles. Should the day come to pass when classes are dedicated to blogging, they should definitely include lectures on proper strategies for ending posts. Am I the only one who consistently gets to the end of my mental outline and has no idea what to do? The traditional concept of a conclusion paragraph doesn't seem to apply. I often feel the need to tack on a short, humorous "punchline" paragraph. The only other obvious option is to simply finish my thought and leave the ideas hanging.

...

More artistic cartographers

2009-04-05T21:05:00.004-05:00

Some of my music has involved what you might call personal geography--pulling something of my experiences with specific places and using them as fuel for a piece, drawing a map with music. The isomorphism (vocab thank-you to DRH...) is abstract, as it relates only to my personal experiences and does not incorporate any real structural details about the place. Only connotative data is used. [Examples: Terlingua Meditations, On the Beach at Kantishna]

I've experienced some other artistic approaches to geography this week that inspired some pondering. Both are much more concrete than mine (and, I should not fail to mention, have behind them people far more famous than me).

1) Aural Geography

Annea Lockwood - Sound Map of the Danube

Annea was the keynote speaker at this weekend's SCI conference, and gave a refreshing talk full of eloquent enthusiasm and unique ideas. She also played us some samples of this major piece, 167 minutes in length, which incorporates recordings from 59 sites along the Danube river and 13 interviews with locals. I can't wait to hear the whole thing. One of the concerts also featured her beautiful piece Thirst, which was less as a representation of a place and more an independent piece that used place and places as a jumping-off point. Seeking to explore the relationship in our lives between tension and relaxation, Thirst features recordings from bustling Grand Central Station alongside verbal descriptions of a woman's childhood memories of her grandparents' garden.

Unfortunately, the piece was on the last concert of the conference, so I didn't get to talk to many other attendees about it. I'd love to hear their reactions and see if they enjoyed it as much as I did. I suspect I may be in the top handful in this regard, since when it comes to art of place I'm a bit of a fish in a barrel. But think about it--in visual art, place represents a dominating force, in the form of landscape painting. It required some serious cultural revolution to weaken this tradition's supremacy, and it is still the paramount genre for many, if not most, general viewers. Literature of place is similarly a major industry--we call it travel writing. This is an area of great possibility for music (/sound art/whatever).

Speaking of travel writing:

2) Anecdotal Geography

Bruce Chatwin - In Patagonia

Chatwin has done something really unexpected here: he's written a book chronicling his travels in one of the most beautiful and dramatic regions of the world without significantly discussing what it looks like. His writing style is terse--descriptive sentences are rare, descriptive paragraphs completely absent. Instead, we are presented with a plethora of contemporary and historical anecdotes: stories about, and descriptions of, people.

I should mention that the book has come under criticism from the locals represented therein. There were claims that many of the stories Chatwin relates were altered, if not entirely invented. But setting that issue aside, it is nonetheless a remarkable approach to draw an artistic map of a place using only stories of its past and present inhabitants. It is also perhaps an approach more endemic to literature, especially in the era of photographs. I don't mean to suggest that verbal description in literature is outmoded, but only that Chatwin's method has the merit of bringing the written word back to one of its original charges, that of storytelling. It is also notable that Chatwin removes himself largely from the proceedings, focusing the vast majority of his words on the people he meets and hears about, de-emphasizing his own involvement in the events.

Green chile time.

2009-04-02T19:02:00.004-05:00

I'm in the always delightful Santa Fe this weekend for the SCI National Conference, which will include a performance of Terlingua Meditations tomorrow night at the--and I think this is great, and extremely appropriate--"Late Night Wine/Cheese/Beer Concert." Immediate yes. Tonight's concert, on the other hand, opens with a piece for hammered dulcimer. Things are looking good. I'll be back with updates and recommendations soon.

In the meantime, I just left the following as a comment on Elliot's blog, in response to a post about a forthcoming Beatles cover band project.

I would like to read (or write) an article/book about cover strategies–perhaps working with five or six examples that illustrate different approaches. Anyone heard any great covers lately? As previously mentioned, I really liked Jose Gonzalez’ version of “Teardrop” at ACL. Also recently heard my friend Pat’s jazz version of Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” and didn’t even recognize the tune, in spite of my long relationship with it. Covers can really reawaken you to a composition--we should know this already from hearing different versions of music in the classical world, but for some reason we usually don’t make the analogy.

No extra notes, no extra players

2009-04-01T10:54:00.004-05:00

Richard Zarou, a fine composer and gentleman who I met at CHASM at Florida State a year ago, has been kind enough to feature me on his new podcast, No Extra Notes. Each installment features an "interview" with the composer (in my case, responses recorded on an awful laptop mic) and musical samples. It's a fun project and I'm looking forward to hearing more. Thanks, Richard!

More globally, I had a bit of a sad experience this morning: I was reading the Cowells' book about Charles Ives and came to a discussion about the reluctance of orchestras to play new American music. The authors avoid simplistic assignment of blame but rather examine the institutional hurdles preventing this music from entering the standard repertoire. The central difficulty, in their estimation, lies with the additional instrumental demands of much of this music, and the union restrictions that make it complicated to enlist a fourth trumpet, second pianist, or extra drummers. Given budgetary restrictions, the variety of players required and the extra rehearsal time required by unfamiliar pieces are significant obstacles. Nonetheless, the Cowells are optimistic:

"The impasse is a serious one, but there are forces at work on it, and the situation that now makes twentieth-century music less often played than audiences and performers would like may well change before long." (118)

This was written in 1954.

1954!

And the problems are essentially the same, and Pines of Rome is still ubiquitous, and Ives' symphonies are still rarely found on programs. As the Cowells suggest, this is no one person's fault, but simply a result of the universal structure of orchestral society. What is upsetting is that in the intervening fifty years we have not managed to significantly change this structure. It's no wonder that so many composers, particularly those who are interested in varying the orchestral format in terms of length, mood, or instrumentation, have begun to look elsewhere.

Library Logic

2009-03-29T11:11:00.004-05:00

One of the scariest things about my impending separation from academia is the prospect of, for the first time since high school, not having convenient access to a music library. One of my constant sources of fuel for the last six years has been a steady stream of piles of checked-out CDs from across all styles and eras--I run on new sounds, and derive great energy from new and unfamiliar music. The idea of having to purchase all of my musical input again is hard to face, especially as there's so much music I've heard lately that I never would've bothered buying, but only checked out because it was so easily available. When I heard about Jandek, for example, I was interested enough to want to check out his stuff, but I'm not sure that I was sufficiently intrigued to warrant a mail-order purchase. But wait--the UT Fine Arts Library had a great selection from his massive catalog. Problem solved.

Interestingly, while the UT library has around 40,000 CDs, I think I had more energizing revelations from the library at Illinois Wesleyan. While both libraries allow students to check out CDs and take them home, the UT library requires you to look up titles online and then ask for them at the desk. The catalog at IWU, while drastically smaller, was out on the shelves, so I could walk through and pull things at random. Moreover, the CDs were organized by order of acquisition, so there was little conventional logic to what was next to what; I came across so many wonderful and unexpected music that I never would've known to try and look up. The internet presents a similar problem; there's a lot of information, and a lot of music, out there, but without a way to walk around and browse at random, it can be difficult to know where to start.

Spring Break

2009-03-27T18:12:00.006-05:00

You are what you eat, they say. I strongly believe that this is true with regard to one's activities and experiences, to the social and intellectual fuel you take in as well as the physical. I've been feeling suffused with energy lately, and this condition is certainly related to the inspiring stuff I spent my spring break chewing on.

First, a revitalizing and eventful trip to West Texas, which included climbing Emory Peak, the highest point in Big Bend National Park:

and attending a pirate party in Terlingua:

Back in Austin, I took in the amazing energy that is South by Southwest. The crowds are insane, but the feeling of this town exploding with film and music is pretty incredible. One highlight was a screening on the fantastic new documentary about Trimpin, The Sound of Invention, which presents a rich and entertaining sample of the work of this composer/inventor/unclassifiable mega-genius. I love the combination of whimsy and innovation in Trimpin's work, and the film demonstrated both the amusement and the amazement of the people behind the camera.

I also caught the Nonclassical Records showcase downtown, and while I didn't love all of the music, it was great to see local composers featured and nothing short of revelatory to see a guy playing piano in a bar and have Billy Joel be not in any way involved with the proceedings. Austin's beloved Tosca String Quartet performed, along with the awesome Elysian Quartet from the UK, whose free improvisations kept us rapt in spite of the loud dance music bleeding over from the bar next door. The unexpected high point of the evening was a solo performance from Elysian's cellist Laura Moody, who sat down to play a quick tune during a set break and totally floored all of us. The material on her Myspace is representative, but the experience of listening through speakers is nowhere close to that of watching Moody up on stage producing all of those sounds with her cello and voice. She's an incredibly dynamic performer, and I can't wait to hear her again sometime soon.

What else? How about Tuvan throat singing by Alash at an intimate backyard concert? Or maybe a free outdoor party with Laura Gibson and The Tallest Man on Earth? SXSW rules, man.

I also owe a big thank-you to everyone who helped make my Master's recital happen--my professors for all of their wisdom, the performers who put in so much work and played the hell out of my music, and of course, everyone who came out to listen. I was so happy with everyone's playing, and just generally had a great time. I'll make recordings available as soon as I get them.

The news

2009-03-23T11:22:00.003-05:00

It was an amazingly enriching and refreshing spring break, rife with experiences that gave me a lot to write about. I'll have a major post detailing them all as soon as I have the necessary information compiled. For today, check out this New York Times article about the nature and success of the Austin Chronicle. Interesting stuff.

And for those in ATX: this Thursday night at 8pm in the Recital Studio at the School of Music, my MM composition recital. It's a joint concert with Travis Jeffords, and will feature three medium-sized pieces by each of us. There will be a limited-edition program, designed by Travis, as well as a professional vaudevillian clown performing for intermission. Don't miss it...

Second Quintet

2009-03-11T21:36:00.004-05:00

I realize some folks may be tiring of my current Miles kick-- but seriously... damn. And damn.

It's amazing the way this band infused their music with ambiguity, stretching forms while still maintaining their boundaries.

South of the border

2009-03-09T23:03:00.003-05:00

Oh, man. You must check out the unbelievable Henry Kaiser and his heavily documented/photographed artistic journey to Antarctica, which included recording an album about the white continent, playing his guitar using the South Pole pole as a slide, and holding a music festival called IceStock complete with a chili cook-off. The National Science Foundation has an "Antarctic Artists & Writers Program"?? And the Republicans thought the NEA was the big problem. The world really is so full of crazy, awesome stuff...

One-two

2009-03-08T23:15:00.005-05:00

I'm going to go ahead and say that we had a pretty fantastic conference here this weekend: GAMMA-UT, UT-Austin's annual conference dedicated to collaboration between graduate students in composition, theory, musicology, and ethnomusicology. We had paper presentations by great young scholars from around the country, as well as a concert featuring music of eight student composers, again from all over the place.

I normally find some excuse to play some piano at all of our Wet Ink and New Music Ensemble concerts, so it was a pleasure to sit back in the audience and hear my friends and colleagues tear up some pretty substantial rep. Amy Harris pretty much melted all of our faces with her performance of Jason Cress' solo violin piece Capriccio, which is a compendium of extended techniques, one after the next. Unfortunately Jason came down with a flu at the last minute and couldn't come down, but I'm sure he'll appreciate Amy's intensity via recording. I also particularly enjoyed Carolyn O'Brien's Electrum and Carl Christian Bettendorf's Three Anniversaries, both tense and riveting pieces. My friend Brian Baxter was also present for a performance of his brooding piano trio fireworks and the end of things. A lot of dark music on this concert, actually, but all well-communicated by dedicated performers to an appreciative audience. Great stuff, everyone.

Between that and Friday night's concert, Owen Weaver's MM percussion recital, I had about as great a musical weekend as I can expect to have in 2009. The second half of Owen's recital was Music for a Summer Evening by George Crumb, on which I had the honor of playing Piano II, with Thad Anderson and Franklin Gross filling out the quartet. Rosalyn Nasky and company provided original choreography to the whole thing--a huge piece of work for Rosalyn--under the title "Excavation," and I think their contribution greatly heightened the already evocative atmosphere of the piece. (I haven't seen much of the dancing yet, alas, because I was too focused on clusters, inside-the-piano harmonics, and developing my kalimba chops.) It was a phenomenal joy working with such dynamic musicians and with the amazing dancers, who hung off the side of that three-story scaffolding like it was nothing.

Playing Crumb was also a personally satisfying experience, because he was I think the first living American composer I ever heard, in high school, and I really didn't get it at first. Some parts of Music for a Summer Evening I adore and some I could do without, but being a proponent of music of atmosphere, I still come down strongly in favor of this work, and of live Crumb in general. Reaching those "Fivefold Galactic Bells" and starting that luminous ostinato, which the composer titled "Song of Reconciliation," was a beautiful musical experience, and I'm grateful for it.

Four more days and we're already at spring break. The desert is calling my name. I might need to add another movement to Terlingua Meditations...

Regionalism

2009-03-04T21:40:00.004-06:00

See? Even Miles Davis believed in a regionalist concept in music. I think this is a big part of what we're missing now. Local music has to come back somehow, it just has to. I refuse to believe that standardization is the way of the future, that in 50 or 60 years music will be even more centralized and standardized than it already is. I believe in pendulum swings. We're still coping with the Internet's effects on place and places in our lives, but place isn't going anywhere. It will still be there when we look away from our iPods and notice the band playing on the street, the guitar player at the restaurant.

From Miles' autobiography, reflections on two of the places where he spent the most time living:

"Any time the weather changes it's going to change your whole attitude about something, and so a musician will play differently, especially if everything is not put in front of him. A musician's attitude is the way he plays. Like in California, out by the beach, you have silence and the sound of waves crashing against the shore. In New York you're dealing with the sounds of cars honking their horns and people on the streets running their mouths and shit like that...People in New York go out but it's a different thing, it's an inside thing. California is an outside thing and the music that comes out of there reflects that open space and freeways, shit you don't hear in music that comes out of New York, which is usually more intense and energetic."

Music, like everything else we do, is at least to some extent a response to our immediate surroundings. Different places are different; among so many other things, different places and times have different primary sounds. If R. Murray Schafer and Miles Davis both say it, it has to be true.

Kind of Blue

2009-03-02T18:02:00.001-06:00

Today is the 50th anniversary of the first of two recording sessions that became Miles Davis' Kind of Blue; the sessions took place on March 2 and April 22 of 1959, and the record was released August 17 of that year. Like so many people, Kind of Blue was one of my first jazz records. I'd started to play in my middle school big band, and that Christmas my sister asked one of her friends for some recommendations for me. This friend--I still don't know who it was--evidently told her that if I was going to play jazz, I would need these two records: Kind of Blue and Giant Steps. I listened to the albums but had the sense that I didn't fully "understand" them; of course, I've learned by now that I never will, and that journey continues. Coltrane was a bit out for my ear at that point, but I immediately seized on Kind of Blue, just due to its atmosphere and sound-world before anything else. At some point I began to take the record for granted, and Giant Steps became more regular listening for me as I became entranced with the force of Coltrane's playing. But of course, at some point I returned to Kind of Blue, and it's been in the rotation a lot recently. It's one of those records you never fail to be surprised by.

I try to avoid hyperbole in discussing music, since there's already so much of it out there, and it is ultimately uninformative, a crutch that masquerades as real substantive understanding (cough cough Ken Burns cough cough). But damn it, Kind of Blue is just one of those perfect pieces of music. You can't hear those opening chords of "So What" and that famous bass line without breathing a little sigh, sitting down, relaxing, and beginning to listen again. My ears never quite get used to it. Like so many great recordings, each time you return to it a different track captures you. This morning I was caught breathless by Miles' first entrance on the alternate take of "Flamenco Sketches," by that perfect sound in the high register. You notice something new every single time. Kind of Blue is also one of those rare documents in the history of recorded music: as soon as it plays out and the last track ends, all you want to do is start it over again.

I would love to cap off this post with a quotation from Miles' autobiography, but I'm not sure I can find five words in a row that I'd be willing to say at the dinner table. Chalk one up for entertaining and humorous use of profanity.

Speaking of San Bernardino.

2009-02-28T22:22:00.006-06:00

Thank you, NewMusicBox, for informing me that today is the 70th anniversary of the birth of one of my favorite musicians, guitarist/composer John Fahey (1939-2001). Fahey's music models a profound synthesis of acoustic roots music with 20th-century experimentation and eclecticism. The result is a strong challenge that hangs over my own work. The record I return to most often is "The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death," from 1965, an early album that covers a huge amount of ground but manages to feel like one massive, conclusive statement. I saw a Leo Kottke concert not long after Fahey's death, and will always remember the way Kottke described his friend and influence, telling stories that poked fun but betrayed a deep reverence.

Speaking of those who have prioritized music making over music history.

Thesis

2009-02-27T11:10:00.003-06:00

Forgive my redundancy, but I just came across another bit of Feldman wisdom that handily summarizes nearly all of the musical complaints I've made for the past year, and neatly separates that which I've rejected from that which has made me most excited. All of my recent projects, and all the ones I have planned for the near future, can be considered a response to this statement.

"I question whether the twentieth century will be the mecca for a music no longer tradition bound. Quite the contrary. This is more an age that has been taken over by music history rather than music making."

A question of character

2009-02-27T10:02:00.004-06:00

It's been a funny experience reading the collected writings of Morton Feldman in Give My Regards to Eighth Street, since because he was the most quotable composer who ever lived, I've heard many bits of these essays before in various contexts. I have been astounded, however, with how much Feldman refers to visual art. I knew about his friendships with many of the New York abstract expressionist painters, but didn't realize the degree to which analogies of painting saturate his work. I should also add that, while I've enjoyed snickering at his witty denigration of the "academic avant-garde," it is plainly obvious that the university new music scene has vastly improved since the time of these writings. We should give ourselves some credit for that.

Everyone would be best off, I think, if I yield to the inevitable and just provide some Feldman quotations. Tasty.

"[The abstract expressionists'] movement took the world by storm. Nobody now denies it. On the other hand, what are we to do with it? There is no 'tradition.' All we are left with is a question of character. What training have we ever had to understand what is ultimately nothing more than a question of character?"

And my favorite anecdote so far:

"There is a marvelous story about Duchamp and an art student in San Francisco many years ago. Duchamp goes to this art school and he sees this kind of tough, macho San Francisco painter and Duchamp looks at this picture he doesn't know. He says to the fellow, 'What are you doing?' And the painter says, 'I don't know what the fuck I'm doing.' Duchamp pats him on the back and says, 'Keep up the good work.'"

I'll drink to that.

Yes

2009-02-25T22:18:00.005-06:00

Summer arrived today in Austin. Evidently it's not going to be sticking around long, but for the moment it feels so, so good, and like every change in season has brought with it an invitation to limpid nostalgia. Apropos, for my late-evening work session just now, with the warm breeze bringing the smell of blooming trees through my window, I put on an old summer favorite, The Sea and Cake's 2000 album Oui.

Now, I'm completely, helplessly unable to judge the objective quality of this music in any way, for one reason: I took it on a spring break choir trip in high school and listened to it at night, with everyone falling asleep and the bus moving toward Florida. So the music has disappeared into my experiences, and I will never, ever hear it without also calling up that lovely week in 2003. Isn't it strange how music, more than any other art form, so readily attaches itself to moments in time? As a result, I no longer know if Oui feels like the memory of Florida, or if the memory of Florida feels like Oui. They have become one indivisible entity. I also wonder whether I've done the record a disservice as a piece of art, if having completely deconstructed its autonomy leaves it diminished. Not to the world, I suppose, since the world does not know the workings of mind. And not to me, certainly; my experience of the music is only heightened by the personal association. So I suppose no damage is done.

I am reminded of the Pitchfork review of Oui (which, incidentally and perhaps consequentially, was released the same day as Radiohead's Kid A):

"If Oui doesn't erupt like an outright revolution, it's only because the band makes it look too easy. Great art doesn't always come like a short heard 'round the world. And maybe that's the mark of a truly brilliant work of music: it's explosive inspiration masquerading as a lullaby."

Bringing the revolution softly.

The warm weather naturally also has me thinking mountain thoughts. Today was the first 14ers.com session of 2009. I get so manic in the spring. I think of Jackson Pollock, responding to Hans Hofmann's suggestion that he paint from nature: "I am nature."

Best of/worst of.

2009-02-24T10:33:00.002-06:00

Kyle Gann's recent article describing his idea of "music of the absolute present" was an inspiring and vindicating document for me; I even sent Gann my piece On the Beach at Kantishna, which I felt (and he agreed) dealt with the absolute present in its expansive, spacious second half. David Salvage has since written a critical response to Gann's article which is worth a look, along with the comment thread it spawned.

I've been thinking about this idea of the absolute present again recently, perhaps as a result of Philip Glass' visit to Austin last weekend. This is not the only sort of music, and as Gann insisted, is not truly a style, but more a mode of listening. I find it an indispensable tool as a listener and human, and believe that music which calls upon it serves a vital function. The present moment is the thing that is hard to cope with in life. Certainly some people struggle with the implications of their pasts, but I would argue that most of our anxiety in life, or at least most of mine, stems from the constant and terrifying question of how the present moment is to be spent. I've repeatedly found that times of difficulty or of ennui, in retrospect, are easily marginalized or placed in the context of some personal teleology that justifies them. Music has the potential to call us into the present moment and force us to accept it, be absolutely conscious of it, and appreciate its fleeting and unique beauty as the present moment.

Another idea about time in our lives that I recently encountered, from Paul Bowles' The Sheltering Sky:

"... we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless."

And since I'm quoting, an unrelated nugget from Glass' interview at UT on Saturday (paraphrasing as best I can):

"The danger for a composer is to become well-known too soon. To be left alone until you're 40 is a wonderful thing."

It's in Wisconsin, if anyone's curious.

2009-02-23T10:54:00.005-06:00

I'll be presenting the technical public premiere of Rush Creek Blues on our Wet Ink Composer Series concert tonight, Recital Studio at UT, 8pm. It's a short concert for anyone who's around--and as always, it will also be webcast live. The original Praesturo recording, with guitar, celesta and piano, is up on my website. This version will feature Ian Dicke on electric guitar and Steven Snowden on mandolin. This grouping raised new questions; for example, is it important to coordinate swung versus straight eighths when playing in different tempi? Given the piece's nature and origins, it seemed appropriate to play it with fellow composers. Perhaps another rendition, with a new instrumentation, for my Masters recital next month? We'll see.

Here are the program notes:

This piece is scored for any three instruments with three metronomes clicking at different rates. I like this sound, possibly because it reminds me of the conflicting pendulum clocks in my parents' house that used to distract me from my tempo as I practiced piano. Each of the instruments plays repeating blues licks shaped for their designated tempi, and eventually a longer melody emerges above the overlapping fragments. In the words of one of the original performers, "it's like a chill day by the river with two friends... and three metronomes." This piece is dedicated to a cabin that does not exist. But it will. Oh, it will.

NME Recording

2009-02-21T12:20:00.003-06:00

The recording from last week's premiere of A Thousand Windows Opening is now up on the music section of my website: click here for download. I was thrilled with how the piece went, and owe a huge thanks to the musicians of the UT New Music Ensemble for their phenomenal playing. It was one of those rare moments that makes being a composer seem like perfect sense, and I'm very grateful for it. I'd be glad to forward a pdf version of the score to anyone who's interested.

The man.

2009-02-20T10:36:00.002-06:00

Next time you're having a bad day, check this out. (The other movements are on there too.)

It's not every day you find yourself on edge, hoping that the player takes the repeats, and are relieved when they do.

Jeffrey

2009-02-19T10:44:00.004-06:00

We were all deeply saddened last weekend by the death of Jeffrey Weng, who was a bright young musician in our composition department as well as a skilled percussionist. I've collected three of his recordings from last year's Wet Ink concerts at UT, and thought I should make them available here. The first is an anonymous piece arranged for Chinese dulcimer; the latter two are compositions for marimba. He is the performer on all three.

1. The Spirit of Shing-Jiang

2. Peaceful Tantrum

3. The Dream of the Plaid Shirt Invader

The List, vol. 4

2009-02-18T22:45:00.003-06:00

Belated but hence clarified, here is my list of inspiring musical experiences from Fall 2008. I've already mentioned almost all of these items, but I present them here together nonetheless, for the sake of continuity.

Recordings:

Stefan Wolpe - Piano Sonata #1

Julius Eastman - the three pieces for four pianos (available on Unjust Malaise)

The Tallest Man On Earth - Shallow Grave

McCoy Tyner - Extensions

"Blue" Gene Tyranny - Take Your Time

Peter Garland - Another Sunrise

Live Music:

Isaac Albéniz - Córdoba, performed by Eliot Fisk

Iron & Wine - "The Trapeze Swinger" at Austin City Limits

George Crumb - Music for a Summer Evening at the UT New Music Ensemble's election night concert

Rattletree Marimba's post-ACL parking lot performance

Peter Maxwell Davies - Eight Songs for a Mad King with John Duykers and the UT New Music Ensemble

"The great mystical clock of Aal?"

2009-02-16T09:36:00.002-06:00

Today's discovery: Kraig Grady and The North American Embassy of Anaphoria Island.

It strikes me that I need to hear about people like Grady, and at the moment the only way I ever do is by seeing their names in blog comments and Googling them--word of mouth from people I don't even know. But I suppose that's the oldest and most honored way of passing along such recommendations: you talk to like-minded people about music, and whomever they mention that you don't know, you look up.

Don't Trust the Tools

2009-02-15T21:22:00.003-06:00

I proudly subscribe to a generously broad definition of "classical music," and relish the idea of classical music not as a genre, but as an approach. Globally, across eras and across areas, a fine way of looking at "classical music" involves calling "classical" all that music which was written intentionally to be listened to, rather than that which was created to fulfill various social purposes. There are problems with this view, of course. But the only point I seek to make is that some genres, such as today's thoughtful rock music, for example, can be considered "classical" by some definitions. In this sense that music is along the same continuum as the music that composers of contemporary concert music, or whatever you want to call it, are making.

This statement leads to comparisons. I would suggest, for example, that musicians who work primarily in recorded media have some clear advantages over those of us self-identified composers whose document is not sound but notation. I found myself shaking my head over this today while listening to the Fleet Foxes album. The second track, "White Winter Hymnal," has received a lot of talk, including honors as Pitchfork's #2 track of 2008. It's a simple, well-packed little song with one verse that repeats three times. Everyone who hears the song will notice the third, closing repetition, for which the instruments fade out and the verse is delivered in tight, a cappella vocal harmonies.

If you aren't captured by the vocal arrangement, you'll surely notice something far simpler that also jumps out on first listen: breathing. The quick catch-breaths before each melodic statement are intentionally brought forward in the mix, not hidden away but accentuated. They give the moment a rhythmic drive that it may have lacked in the absence of instrumental accompaniment, and fill the rests in the vocal lines with a sound that propels forward. This emphasis of the rests also draws attention to the construction of the melody:

I was following the pack all swallowed in their coats (breath)

With scarves of red tied 'round their throats (breath)

To keep their little heads (breath)

From falling in the snow (breath)

And I turned 'round and there you go (breath)

And Michael you would fall (breath)

And turn the white snow red as strawberries in the summertime.

Listen to it and look at the lengths of those phrases, and see how the segmentation creates a flowing structural rhythm, climaxing in intensity with the one-bar phrases and relaxing again with the long phrase at the end. (Note, all breaths are on beat 2.)

I was following the pack all swallowed in their coats (2 measures)

With scarves of red tied 'round their throats (2)

To keep their little heads (1)

From falling in the snow (1)

And I turned 'round and there you go (2)

And Michael you would fall (1)

And turn the white snow red as strawberries in the summertime. (4)

A similar principle of verbal phrase lengths is at work in the Beatles ballad "For No One." Rests are not an issue due to the instrumental accompaniment, although I would argue that the emphatic descending bass line on beat 1 does serve a purpose similar to that of the Fleet Foxes' breaths. The melodic lilt of "For No One" comes from a pattern of two very short phrases, one bar each, followed by a much longer one of five measures (plus another measure of rest to complete the eight-bar unit). Incidentally, the long phrase also achieves great tension by hitting its apex on a poignant dissonance, the major seventh of the IV chord. But I digress.

The breaths in "White Winter Hymnal" represent an intuitive event. One could easily imagine the singers in the studio or in rehearsal naturally breathing rhythmically in that rest to fill the space left by the accompanying instruments' departure. It's the choice to emphasize them in the final document, the recording, that is remarkable for me as a composer of notated music. It was easy for the musicians and producer(s) to say in the studio, "let's draw attention to those breaths." Making such choices in the context of notation is more problematic; classically trained musicians would find it odd to see rhythmic breaths notated, your teachers would probably tell you not to do it, and the concept of writing such a thing down would make the act of doing the breathing unnatural for the performers. It sounds natural in the recording because it almost certainly arose naturally. I can hear the performers' and teachers' questions now: "What kind of breath sound are you looking for there?" "Why did you choose to notate the breathing?" "Maybe you should put accents and staccatos on the breaths." These questions are necessary, of course, for others to understand the composer's intentions. But they do threaten the intuitive nature of the musical choice.

There is an issue here of the tools influencing the task. By writing music with staff paper and pencils, we imply that the notes, the dots on the staves, are the primary musical units being manipulated. When we move outside that realm to other elements, such as breaths or other aspects of performance, notation begins to collapse. Our notational system was not built for the purpose of dealing with such elements. And the very use of that system makes unlikely indeed the prospect of using different units operatively: you're just not likely to think of it. For a different example, look at Elliott Smith's predilection for large string entrances more than halfway through his songs. In "Color Bars," the lush orchestral sound enters for the very last verse. It eases in during the instrumental interlude, 2/3 of the way through the track (1:30/2:19), and really asserts its presence only 17 bars from the end (1:50/2:19). That is a creative musical choice that one is unlikely to make when their tool is staff paper: seeing all those empty lines, an assiduous composer is likely to fill them in with something. If I'm writing a piece for guitar, voice, piano, percussion, and string orchestra, I'm not going to wait until 17 before the double bar to bring in the strings.

Notation has clear advantages too, of course, especially if you like to be extremely specific with dynamic and articulation (blech). I suppose the grass is greener.

A Thousand Windows Opening

2009-02-15T14:51:00.004-06:00

Once again, the New Music Ensemble here at UT will be playing my chamber orchestra piece A Thousand Windows Opening this Tuesday at 8pm in Bates. As usual, the concert will also be webcast live. Mine is the first piece after intermission. Here are the program notes:

The feelings of nature and of various sites in the mountains were the primary inspirations for A Thousand Windows Opening, and a strong sense of place flows through the music. Each variation was conceived as a tableau, as a snapshot in time, and was intended to evoke the complex sensations that arise from the experience of a particular unique place.

The music also features the real sounds of earth, air, fire, and water. My intention is that the onstage presence of these elements helps to create a unique situation of musical atmosphere: we all know the sounds of these orchestral instruments, but rarely have we heard them intentionally paired with live sounds of the outdoors. Hopefully this combination will to some extent remove the listener from the concert hall, replacing these environs with a setting less formal and more mysterious.

(And then I give the Muir quotation with the title, which is in my post below.)

Musical Observations with Wes Beachman

2009-02-10T12:15:00.006-06:00

1) If I were a more microtonally preferenced composer, I'd be analyzing the playing of Johnny Hodges with Duke Ellington and basing some pieces on that right away. The way he inflects and colors individual notes is awesome-- sometimes he never even arrives at the notated pitch, or does so for the narrowest instant before moving on.

Check it out: Isfahan from the Far East Suite.

2) I've always felt an affinity to certain early 20th-century composers such as Bartók, Ives, Ravel, and Prokofiev, the latter of which I held in perhaps disproportionate esteem as a high schooler after playing his 3rd Piano Sonata. These composers stand on the edge of a precipice, and I don't mean that they're standing on the tonal side looking out on the atonal valleys before them. The distinction is syntactical music versus imagistic music, one that Kyle Gann has written on very persuasively. I had this issue hammered home again the other night, at my friend Colleen McCullough's DMA violin recital. She played us Prokofiev's Violin Sonata no. 1, which contains a striking moment where the synactical, linguistic flow of the music stops and suddenly we are confronted with a sonic image so distinctive that everyone in the audience remembers it when it comes back in the fourth movement. This, of course, is the muted section that Prokofiev likened to wind in a graveyard, with flighty scales in the violin over a restrained chorale in the piano. I don't want to make any quality judgments here, but it's a remarkable lesson for composers to see that an audience full of musically literate listeners, performers and composers themselves, can listen to half an hour of a serious, dense violin sonata and all walk out discussing the exact same moment, the one that presents an emphatic image. I think Louis Andriessen was getting at something similar when he observed that certain moments in Ravel's music cause the audience to say, "well, yes, of course." It's the big gestures that we notice, not necessarily the well-crafted syntactical subtleties. We seize the moments that make us say, "oh yeah, that part!" This is not to say that one shouldn't write subtleties. But it's an important lesson in perception.

3) You've got to play with this pseudonym generator, which has been spitting out gold like "Jerry Cave," "Titus Overley," and "Andreas Cooch." You can set the "obscurity factor" from 1-99. My kind of website. For the record, "Wes Beachman" is my new alter-ego. I call dibs. I'm going to need that name when I get my contemporary music show on NPR.

NME Concert 2/17

2009-02-06T12:19:00.005-06:00

Mark your calendars for the 17th of the month: the UT New Music Ensemble is playing a big concert that evening, 8pm in Bates. The show will feature, among other things, my chamber orchestra piece A Thousand Windows Opening, probably the only piece they've done that required approval from the university's fire marshal. Here's a sneak preview. 215 has to be one of the best measures of my career thus far. (Click for larger image.)

It's right up there with page four of Rush Creek Blues, the piece I wrote back in January for the Praesturo 20th-Century Players:

How I do love using traditional Western notation in ways for which it was really not meant.

I'll upload the notes for A Thousand Windows as soon as I finish them. For now, here is the quotation from which the title is pilfered, from John Muir's My First Summer in The Sierra (1869):

“Oh, these vast, calm, measureless mountain days, inciting at once to work and rest! Days in whose light everything seems equally divine, opening a thousand windows to show us God. Nevermore, however weary, should one faint by the way who gains the blessings of one mountain day; whatever his fate, long life, short life, stormy or calm, he is rich forever.”

Get out there.

2009-01-29T15:37:00.006-06:00

In a 2004 New Yorker article profiling a few young composers, Alex Ross makes the following observation about American composition pedagogy:

"There have been three great academic orthodoxies in American music: the late-nineteenth-century New England School, which worshipped Brahms and rejected any résumé that lacked the words “Hochschule für Musik”; the neoclassical school, which adored Stravinsky and Debussy, and required Nadia Boulanger as a reference; and the twelve-toners, who idolized Schoenberg and his ways. In the end, the house god is always the same—a European-oriented pedant who demands that young composers “justify every note,” develop every idea ad nauseam, and rise above the vulgar herd."

He goes on to suggest that today "no single regime holds sway" in academia, which is true except with regard to the note-justifying crowd, which still includes roughly everyone. We may eventually regard the great revolution of 20th century music in the Western world as not the emancipation of dissonance, but the emancipation of composers from the tyranny of notes. This is part of the John Cage legacy, the idea that we can make classical music that does not use the note as its primary structural unit, that we can still be "composers" without justifying every sound rationally in terms of pitch relationships. R. Murray Schafer gets at the same point in The Soundscape when he suggests that perhaps Luigi Russolo was the most revolutionary musical innovator of the 20th century; Russolo threw open the doors of music and let in the noises of the world.

The trouble is that sometimes composers still want to use traditional notes, but without subjecting themselves to the old-school, European-inherited conveyor belt of rational explication. This gets them in trouble with their teachers, who see conventional notation and conventional instruments and immediately assume that the aims of the notes on the page are hence conventional. This is why so much interesting music is currently taking place through unconventional groupings and using unconventional notation (if any). Using new instruments and new groupings, and/or presenting this music in new or different venues, provides a clear and immediate break from traditional values and norms, and leads your audience (or your teacher) to expect something that isn't traditional. We need these major gestures, clear breaks from the past.

These developments just haven't made it to academia yet in force, but my hope is that when they do, teachers will be forced to address the humanistic aspects of music composition as well as its formalistic side. Literary theorists have been doing this for ages, yet musical inquiry continues its obsession with things technical. I don't mean to suggest that there isn't a great deal to be learned from the music of the past. But we must not assume that 20th-century theory, or 18th-century theory, for that matter, will ultimately have anything to do with 21st-century composition. And 21st-century theory cannot exist yet. Not before 21st-century music happens.

And 21st-century composition is already underway, of course. We may not be able to pin it down or categorize it yet, but it's out there. All we can do is join in with what we find exciting and ride it out. 21st-century music will be there. And for those who are still doggedly focused on the 20th century? (Or, more specifically, the early 20th century, which is all most academics have thus far cared to assimilate?) For them, 21st-century music will likely come from where they least expect it. From somewhere out there in the noises of the world.

along the same lines...

2009-01-19T15:49:00.003-06:00

I'm going to be a bit piecemeal here, apologies, but 2009 has been so rife thus far with delightful and unexpected discoveries (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) that I need to keep posting little tips for a while.

Important plug: Girl Talk, aka Gregg Gillis, a fantastically creative DJ/mash-up artist who fashions his continuously running albums using licks from recent pop megahits. So much recent experimental music is gimmick-based: a composer or performer whose "thing" is to do x or y, something unusual that makes their name and that they then proceed to do a lot of. Girl Talk has his gimmick too, obviously, but it's not a particularly distinctive one--collage music has been done. He just does it really well, and the end result is truly FUN music. His 2006 record Night Ripper is recommended for your next road trip.

My state tally is up to 46 (see link #1 above). Delaware, prepare thyself.

Things That Renew My Faith In Humanity, vol. 52

2009-01-19T13:19:00.002-06:00

The Cathedral of Junk, Austin, TX

Note: the pictures do not begin to do this justice.

SEMC at Uncommon Ground

2009-01-13T11:33:00.004-06:00

The Sissy-Eared Mollycoddles are playing a two-set show at Chicago's Uncommon Ground (on Devon in Edgewater) on the 29th of this month. The program will include Terlingua Meditations, which they claim to really enjoy playing, proof of their saintly nature. They'll also play Jim Klopfleisch's delightfully titled Dagon, Fish-God of the Philistines and two pieces from our recent Praesturo project: Brian Baxter's Creatures Full of Eyes and Ben Hjertmann's Dakruvoso.