composer's notebook
essays & criticism on musical matters
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Monday, September 01, 2008
No Horn Helmets
My summer project (besides daily playground-sprinkler-time with The Toddler) was to make the hypothetical Opera into something a little less hypothetical. For well over a year now my (brilliant) writing partner and I have consulted lawyers, brainstormed structures, and generally schemed our takeover of The Opera House. Then, while Gary wrote up a rough draft of the libretto, I tried to get a handle on the general sound of the piece. But after (lots of) pages of sketches I still wasn't convinced of committing to my harmonic language, and more than that - I felt that I hadn't really begun, that I was just pushing papers around, and didn't actually know how to begin.
During this I was often reminded of writing the string quartet. Similarly, it was my idea (mostly), and I was over-the-moon excited to do it, but when it came to composing the thing I found myself terrified--simply overwhelmed with the Bigness of writing for String Quartet. I mean, after Mr. Beethoven did it so well, and all.
This is a similar deal, only multiply the terror (and size of the problem) several times over. I mean, it's an opera, for goodness sake. I understand people take that kind of thing kind of seriously. OK, I take that kind of thing seriously, and I'll admit to exploiting every opportunity to scoff at the occasional unworthy schlub who thinks s/he has the goods to do what Mozart and Britten and [insert your own favorite here] did (without being brilliant at it right away). So who the heck do I think I am?
But then Gary came back from two weeks in Yaddo with a terrific new draft, and it turns out that you just kind of start. One line at a time. And now and I find myself almost happy (that's good - that's progress) with my sketch of our lead's opening aria, and I might even have a plan for the rest of the scene...
Away we go.
But I love opera too much to say that I'm not still terrified.
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Wiki Me
I think I might be one of those uptight people not completely on board with the whole open-source wiki thing. For instance, every time I see a wikipedia entry presented as a source I raise that left eyebrow just a bit, and wonder how correct the thing actually is. Of course I'm just as guilty of linking to wikipedia as the next guy, but it's clearly disingenous, because as I do it, I tell myself that I would never use it as an actual (or at least sole) information source if I ever really wanted to research something.
Of course as I sing out loud that information pooled from the world at large and not from vetted "experts" (at least I have the decency to shudder at the word) might contain (gasp) mistakes, I do remind myself that every "published" encyclopedia I've ever huddled over in a high school library was itself riddled with its own mistakes, misperceptions, biases, or outright lies—the publishers simply never bothered to own up to them.
The wikis I tend to like are the ones attempting to build a categorized reference source for a specific & interested group ... like Nikk Pilato's Wind Repertory Project. Nikk e-mailed me about this last year, and I think it's a fine idea. I've edited some of my pieces there myself, and I honestly wish Nikk success with it, because not only is it completely unbiased in its classifications, but it seems like it might be a useful source for many—in the model of the American Music Center's online library (formerly NewMusicJukeBox).
One example of the kind of open-source fuzziness that gives me pause is the wikipedia entry on Concert Band. I stumbled on this sucker yesterday while checking out the usefulness of the new search engine cuil.com1 by key-wording myself. (Yeah, that's right, I do that, too. Just like you.) So finding this entry was curious ... why would my name be in it, exactly? And then I scrolled down to the section on the Late Twentieth Century Through The Present...
John Corigliano, Karl Husa, Vincent Persichetti, and ... me? I'm clearly not important enough to have my own page though, as I know others are. (There are apparently wikipedia rules about those kinds of things ... you need to be at least this famous to ride the roller coaster.) And yet, there I am. Flippin' weird. My guess is whoever authored the entry is a) a fan, and so therefore b) someone I know. Not knowing enough about how to dig into the authorship trail on wikipedia, I'm stumped.
Of course, now that I've shown that, anyone can just go in there and delete my name. Which is kind of the whole wiki point, of course. The self-correction thing. It's also why my eyebrow is still raised.
1The verdict on Cuil isn't good, by the way. It kind of blows big chunks and is way not ready for prime time. At the very least, they need to get their thumbnails straight. As much as I'd like it to be, that is not me playing soccer.
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
It's mine It's mine
While happily researching all things mid-Century "Beat" last year, I fell in love with a book by a Swiss-born photographer and friend of all the usual Beat suspects, Robert Frank. Frank traveled the country in 1955 and 1956, and in 1958 he published the resultant photographs in a collection titled The Americans. Every single image is stunning and illuminating, and I knew when I was writing My Hands Are a City that they must be involved in the overall project somehow. The book is quite famous (I actually first saw a few of the photos at an Art Institute exhibit in Chicago), but at the time, the only way I could set eyes on the actual thing was courtesy of the New York Public Library's Mid-Manhattan Branch...reference section. I could not find this flipping book anywhere. No bookstore, used, new, online, or in Portland, had a copy, so I sat there at the big table in Midtown and enjoyed, taking care to burn the images in my head as much as I could. That evening I set an alert with Amazon to find a used copy for me, but over the last year, I never found one for less than $250. After I saw it for $500, I told myself I'd hit Purchase if a copy ever turned up for $150.
The plan of course is for My Hands Are a City to pull double-duty as the third movement in a multi-movement mammoth on the same musical (and extra-musical) themes. After I finally saw the book I thought (as any sane person would) "Well there's my second movement", and so in the last couple of weeks I've been mulling hard about what shape that might take. One day after sketching some things I went outside for a break. I got myself a gyro. I didn't want to go back up to the studio just yet, so I thought I'd browse a little at the Barnes & Noble across the street, but I couldn't bring my gyro inside so I peered at the display window while I lunched.
And there it was. Staring me in the face. A new, 50th anniversary edition. I ran right in at bought one of their last 2 copies. At full retail. And I didn't care.
It's even better than I remember. Especially 'cause I own it.
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Just browsing
It hadn't occurred to me until this morning but there are two (at least) approaches to writing music. You can sit down and write something specific -- perhaps a commissioned work, where you know the forces (ie. piccolo, tuba, and basset horn!), timing, and premiere date ("Hmm, I really need to write this because the first rehearsal is Tuesday") -- or maybe, like I did this morning, you simply sit down, write, and wonder what it is that you've just done.
You see, despite economic evidence to the contrary, these are luxurious times. Because right now business and writing have combined in a perfect storm of relaxed productivity. For one, the work of attempting to put a bullet in the 2007-8 season (requesting missing programs, listing performances for ASCAP, sending out CDs and scores of the new works, shelving returned rental sets....) moves along at an acceptable and non-time-framed (and therefore non-stressful) pace. Combine that with the fact that the upcoming writing schedule is amorphous and unconfirmed (at best), and the result is that when I sit down to write, instead of scratching away at fulfilling a specific piece, I find myself simply writing something, and then musing about whether any of it might want to be one of my varied personal projects.
Huh. This is kind of a good progression. What is this? Is this the Act I soprano aria from the opera? Maybe it's the slow movement to the multi-mvt work I've been pitching. Whatever--it all goes into the moleskin, and it's all surrounded by lovely question-marks.
This is quite liberating. I find myself being surprised by my decisions of what might fit where--often giddy with the idea that I've made the most un-obvious choice. Seems like this goes in a choral piece, right? Hah! Like fun. What if it was actually a percussion ensemble? Well, this amuses me, at least.
This sort of thing happens while writing a specific piece, all the time, of course. You go along for weeks, writing what you think is your string quartet, eventually coming to the horrible realization that it's actually for guitar and flute (or whatever). That's no fun at ALL.
Obviously, if I was teaching a student who was playing around with this particular exercise, I would advise to proceed with caution. The craft of writing idiomatically for specific instruments/forces is an essential tool, and I'd be the first one to point out that, at least I've found, music tends to come out best when you're thinking about the specific ensemble you're writing for. You should probably be writing different notes, different voicings, different registers, even different rhythms for (say) orchestra than you would for (say) wind ensemble. (Thaaaaat's right, I said it. Not everything works in transcription, people. Sometimes the giraffe doesn't fit in that doggie bed. Or whatever.) That's not to say you can't do it, and there's certainly a long and glorious tradition of re-appropriating music written for one kind of ensemble into some completely different Other (I'm lookin' at you, Mr. Stravinsky) - a tradition to which I have proudly contributed.
What I'm talking about is slightly different, though. I'm not using my bag of crafty tricks in order to Make It Work. It's more like ... dreaming. This is making something musical, and then conjuring up its realization. It's not going to work forever, but for right now it's awfully fun.
Saturday, June 07, 2008
Refresh
Not that you were curious, but the evidence of my latest Fun Spare-time Project might be staring you in the face (if you happened to be in the right place, that is). A new & improved site design is live and online, and I must say, and despite the volumes of bugs I'm sure are about to be reported, it's a major improvement.
Sure the colors are different and the boxes are a little bigger (we have bigger monitors now), but the real Big Deal is the migration of all content into a MYSQL database, all driven by my amateur (and ugly) PHP scripting. Oh, it's slick ... if you're geeky enough.
Do I want to upload a new work? I just input the new piece in the database, and POP, it simply shows up, everywhere it needs to be. Or how about that New Works page? It's a no-toucher now ... it just puts up the most recent 3 works written. Clicking on a genre? It'll take you to the latest piece in that category. Need to sort the works catalog by any criteria you can think of? Want to see what pieces are on a certain CD, and what CDs a certain piece is on? POP. All done with PHP magic. I can go on. I'll spare you.
Sure, all those old links to the individual piece pages are broken. Sure there are a few crazy Safari javascript bugs I have no idea what to do about. TOTALLY worth it. If my garage-puttering hobby-happiness can be bought with some inscrutable IF/ELSE coding, then I make no apologies. Enjoy looking around.
And e-mail me with your bug reports.