composer's notebook
essays & criticism on musical matters
commentary
Thursday, September 29, 2005
Until then
Again, frightfully negligent in my notebook upkeep. And even though the business of grant applications is stealing my writing time, I do have a decent entry in the works, so there'll be some insights coming very soon. In the meantime, I share this with you—a big bag of Funny...
Monday, September 26, 2005
Ain't tech grand
E-mail and digital audio and web browsing and internet-purchasing have all piled on top of the Music World. There they sit, occasionally seeping down into the body of the thing, but never quite fully-integrating. Granted, these currencies are, for the most part, now hard-wired into a musician's music-making-thinking, but really only up to a point. Conductors may buy their performance materials via a website, say, but never think to e-mail the composer with performance details ... Players may play a piece they love, but never search out other works by the same composer online. These are obviously self-interested examples, but I'm betting they apply to anyone, in any field, who searches to connect with others. So, for all the untapped power of the internets, for me at least, a little creative thinking toward harnessing the tools goes a long way.
Robert Ambrose, Director of Bands at Georgia State University, has just raised the bar, and with seemingly little perspiration. The sequence of events I describe below is so simple, so obvious, and yet it's the first time I've ever run into a conductor comfortable enough with the computer on his desk to make the attempt.
Bob has been rehearsing AVENUE X with his ensemble for performance this Friday, so earlier last week he recorded a run-through. Then he ripped an mp3 of the rehearsal, and e-mailed it to me. I listened while following score, wrote out a list of comments, and e-mailed him back. He printed the comments out for the players, rehearsed (I assume), recorded another run-though, and e-mailed again with the new audio.
(By the way, 150% difference ... they sound really terrific. It's going to be a hot performance.)
Honestly, I'm 900 miles away, and I feel like I've been to a rehearsal, only without all the usual groping of federalized aviation security. Why hasn't this happened for every performance I couldn't (for whatever reason) attend? Obviously, it's ideal to actually be there, there is certainly nothing like the rush of working with an ensemble on your own music, but when you're not there... Wow, does this work well.
Now, I'm self-involved, certainly, but never so much as to not grasp that many conductors would rather just leave me the heck out of it. Better Half has often vigorously expressed this thinking in the (I think analogous) opinion that despite her love for them and the work, at the first rehearsal of a new play, the playwright should just "Go. Away." (her words). So what I read as a But-What-About-ME situation should probably be interpreted more as an expression of artistic freedom. In other words: let them do what they do—you did your job, now let them do theirs.
Now I can save my opinions on the matter for argumentative-yet-fun discussions with Better Half, or I can say out loud and publicly that really, honestly, unlike Bartleby, I'd prefer to be involved, please. Composing is a solitary, and believe it or not, often silent venture ... contact with humans is cherished among my people. Trust me. So lasso those internets, fire up the browsers, and click on that "Contact" link. We're just sitting here, wondering why you haven't yet.
Tuesday, September 20, 2005
Warning
Do not play this game. You will never stop, never do anything productive, and never achieve any of your life's goals.
This is the explanation I will give, at least, when queried as to why I am living in a dumpster in Tompkins Square, hunched over a wi-fi-connected laptop. I'm just glad I was able to warn others before it's too late.
Monday, September 19, 2005
What's new, Pussycat?
iTunes has been pumping out a lot of Bacharach lately. I tend to go through phases of gorging on the Maestro, and we're deep into one right now. I'm not kidding around when I pronounce that Bacharach is one of the great 20th-century composers, and when I speak of BB, it is in the same breath as Arlen, Gershwin, Berlin, and the like. No doubt he matches the prolificness of the Pantheon of Great Songwriters, as well as serving as a benchmark of his musical time.
My folks always had a songbook at the piano, "Hits of the 60's and 70's", and whenever I visit I find myself at the keys (the book is, of course, still there), flipping through the pages until I get to the next Bacharach tune ... stopping at a certain measure every now and then, whispering "Ooh, good chord..." to no one in particular. And I think that's the rub right there: it's true, his songs aren't always melodic gems, and yes, they often aren't so very distinctive from each other—but every tune, even the doo-wop ones from his early years, always has that , "Ooh, good chord" moment.
The pride of my CD collection is a 3-disc set, released about 10 years ago when the Bacharach lovefest/retrospectives started popping up all over the place, titled: "The Look Of Love: The Burt Bacharach Collection". Tipping the scales at over 3.5 hours of songs, and spanning his entire career, it is probably just enough Bacharach for one person to conceivably want at any sitting. Another fun jewel in the crown is the CD he made from the live show, Burt Bacharach: "One Amazing Night", an evening-"celebration" featuring pop names from Chrissie Hynde (who I'm pretty sure has never crossed BB's radar before that concert) to Mike Meyers. It's not a complete winner of an effort, but it's worth it for 3 absolutely brilliant performances: Ben Folds Five covering "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head", Barenaked Ladies crooning "Close to You", and walking off with the whole show, Wynonna (surely this is where all the talent in the Judd family resides), trumpeting out the most fantastic "Anyone Who Had a Heart" you ever heard.
I also have the video of this concert. Stop laughing.
Much of my obsession stems from the arrangements. His original arrangements are so completely bizarre ... they frequently sound like they were penned on Mars. Anachronistic solo trumpets and oddly-placed glockenspiels abound—no subsequent covers of these tunes will ever quite reach the creativity of Bacharach's original orchestrations. I find myself thinking during a typical track, "Oh, out-of-tune piano, tambourine, and trombone! Sure. Totally works. Why didn't I think of that?"
So crank up the Dusty Springfield and join the party. He wrote enough Maj7 chords for everyone to get a taste...
Friday, September 16, 2005
In no particular order
Items to be excited about this year, courtesy of the annual Season Preview in the NYT:
- Tobias Picker's Metropolitan Opera commission, An American Tragedy (yes, the Dreiser novel)
- Mark Adamo's Lysistrata at City Opera
- John Adams's Dr. Atomic at SF Opera (can't go, obviously, but awareness makes me feel involved)
- Susan Marshall's Cloudless, a new work at DTW
- Bill T. Jones's Blind Date new full-evening work
- Anne Terese de Keersmaeker solo show at The Joyce. Belgian Marvelousness.
- Finland's pastoral (my adjective) composer Einojuhani Rautavaara's Manhattan Trilogy, a premiere commissioned by Juilliard for the JO's 100th Anniversary Concert.
- Steven Bryant's Alchemy in Silent Spaces, orchestral premiere, commissioned by James DePreist for the Juilliard Orchestra this spring (OK, that wasn't listed in the paper, but I'm awfully excited about it)
- Richard Rodney Bennett's opera The Mines of Sulphur -- heard terrific things about it last summer after the Glimmerglass production.
- Arvo Pärt DVD documentary, 24 Preludes for a Fugue
- The Passion of Osvaldo Golijov at Lincoln Center. Golijov doesn't know how to write bad music.
- Everything is Illuminated, Liev Schrieber's movie adaptation of wunderkind Safran Foer's gorgeous and funny novel.
- Berlin Philharmonic NY premiere of Thomas Adés's ASYLA (a marvelous piece I've never heard live)
- London Symphony does Sibelius Kullervo, another work I've never heard live.
- 378 too many Mozart 250th Birthday Celebration concerts. 147 are probably plenty.
- The Wedding Singer, the musical
- The Color Purple, the musical
- Geena Davis is President
- Legally Blonde, the musical
- Catch Me If You Can, the musical. To be fair, I'm withholding judgement on this one...
Tuesday, September 13, 2005
Berated
So I've started to receive phone calls asking if I'm OK. "OK," meaning, "Are you perhaps under a bus on 2nd Avenue?"
I suppose just because there has been a dearth of postings recently, you loyal reader(s) (and I know who you are) assume that I must be have fled to Canada. No such luck. I'm here. In my 10x10 studio on Avenue C, writing e-mails, making phone calls, and sending out scores and CDs, in a transparent attempt to scare up some work writing Music (note the capital) for the world at large. My thought now is that Well-Meaning Caller might be on to something ... since these activities don't exactly show fruit immediately, maybe the magic formula is to add a pinch more online babble.
Well, one new posting is directly below. So now I'll run out to 2nd Ave to catch the bus...
Monday, September 12, 2005
Revised
Beside the obvious benefits of a no-doubt-fantastic performance with a top ensemble, Metropolitan's premiere this Fall with the Chicago Youth Symphony provided the necessity to tackle its long-overdue revisions over which I had been torturing myself for over a year. The reading session with the American Composers Orchestra last year, while ultimately fruitful and a great experience, proved that the piece was fraught with a sense of danger (not always a bad thing). But what made more of an impression than the reading itself were the meetings afterwards. These post-game conferences were nail-biting affairs where all the composers involved sat around a table armed with scores and opinions, and while always fair-minded and supportive, proceeded to pick apart almost every single solitary aspect of whatever work was in question. Not always what you'd call an ego-boost. In my particular thrashing, my notation of certain cross-rhythm beamings were put to serious question, as were particular time signature choices, and my percussion battery construct of shared "stations". Scary and drastic measures were introduced into the discussion: "Double every value. Make all semi-quavers into quavers." ... "Re-distribute the percussion parts" ... Etc.
The proposed revisions ranged from the mundane to the extreme, and despite the fact that I thought the piece worked quite well, after that conference my sense of the work's success was muddled beyond reason. I understood everyone's point about the cross-rhythm notation, but I felt strongly about how what I chose to do (complicated, don't ask, see the score if you insist, somewhere 'round m.135) was a more truthful (forgive the adjective) way of notating what I intended, and that tampering with it, while conceivably making it easier to read, wouldn't necessarily make it easier to play, and would start pulling the threads of the piece apart, at least for me.
Meanwhile the percussion section was having none of the shared "stations" and so it was expressed that all percussion music in the work needed to be redistributed differently. Daunting, and infuriating, considering how much time I put into carefully working out the percussion initially.
The comments on the meter changes I understood. I had several groupings of 3 16th-notes tagged onto the end of what would be a simple meter under normal circumstances, in various phrases. The addition of the tag made for some complex meters (ie. 11/16 as 4+4+3), and made counting more difficult than it already was.
Oh, and everyone hated the title.
Paralysis ensued. Confronted with revision options ranging from "put a dynamic at the end of that crescendo" to "re-beam and re-measure the entire piece", I went home and proceeded to do none of them. I solicited more opinions from friends and colleagues over the course of weeks, then months, and of course, received the same range of options, leaving me exactly where I was before. I mean, I've been out of school for 10 years—I'm just not used to people telling me how to write anymore. I didn't know who to believe ... Was the piece solid, only needing the typical corrections that crop up in the complex life of an orchestral work, or was it fatally flawed, and needed to be re-thought?
Eventually I forced a close friend of mine whose musical opinion means the world to me in front of the stereo to hear a rendering from the reading session, and armed with a score, he said simply that he completely understood what I wanted with the beaming, that he had conducted along with the meters without incident, and that he couldn't comprehend what the big deal was.
And that was it. After a year of self-torture and lost sleep it clicked like a tumbler snapping in a lock. I understood that it didn't matter. I had a piece here, possibly needing some revisions, but ultimately, it was a piece, my piece, put together the way I wanted, and not the way others thought it should. That simple, and obvious epiphany, took a year to work out.
So here's what changed:
• The title. Hip+Now became Metropolitan.
• An exposed piccolo solo I've always really liked but which didn't sound as well as I thought it could have was brought up an octave, with some various octave displacements along the way.
• I re-metered all 9/16 measures (subdivided as 2+2+2+3) to a 3/8 followed by a 3/16.
• I re-metered all 11/16 measures (subdivided as 4+4+3) to a 2/4 followed by a 3/16.
• I added what I hope are some helpful notations to the complicated-beaming section, without actually changing the beaming itself.
• I re-barred the last 3 measures to include that same 3/16 kicker at the end, and inserted 4 more 16ths in the final measures before that, to counteract what I always felt was a slight abruptness in the penultimate bar.
And that's about it. I ran these revisions by the CYSO director, and got an enthusiastic thumbs up. I was relieved of a year's-worth of pressure, the piece got the working-over it needed, and I felt like I owned the sucker again. Parts were corrected and re-printed, and the sun came out.
Let the 3/16 bars fly.
Metropolitan premieres November 13, 2005, with the Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra, under the direction of Allen Tinkham, in Chicago's Orchestra Hall.