composer's notebook
essays & criticism on musical matters
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Monday, June 26, 2006
Stalling
One can't write songs 16 hours a day. Well maybe you can, but I've never been the type to to tackle compositional duties with gusto. In fact, I'll find almost anything else to keep me occupied in order to prevent me from facing my ugly, ugly demons. If you ever find yourself similarly in need of distracting activities while slowly penning masterworks of lied, here are a few I tested out for you this past week:
1. Catch up on your NewMusicBox reading.
I recommend Ingram Marshall's absolutely terrific piece on how composers define watershed moments in their careers. My head was continuously nodding up and down in agreement all the way through.
2. Follow The World Cup.
I admit, I do see the attraction. It's true, like most red-blooded Americans, I played soccer in my youth, which never translated into a love of the game. Unsurprising, I suppose, when you think about how scarring the whole 10-year-old-sports-thing was. But these guys are fun to watch, and are helping me see past the damage Biddy Soccer did to my psyche...
3. Obsessively read through Duke Ellington charts.
Amazon's latest shipment was a frivolous Warner Bros. piano/vocal of standards, which I haven't stopped playing through, in a futile attempt of pretending I'm Marion McPartland. (I'm not. Well, I'm not nearly as cool, for one.) The Ellingtons in the collection make me particularly giddy. I've been listening to these tunes since I was 14, and even took an Ellington course in grad school (taught, if I remember correctly, by the then executive director of Jazz at Lincoln Center). But I have never played the tunes solo. It's way too much fun. I believe the only time I stopped was to write this entry.
4. Peruse cool new multimedia sites.
Like Carnegie Hall's fancy Emerson Quartet seminar on the Bartók quartets. I listened to the EQ's recording of these, oh, I guess every day, in 1990 and 1991. I even went to one of their famous Bartók Cycle concerts at Tanglewood, and heard all six in one sitting (there was a dinner break). The site is designed for lay music lovers, so the commentary moves a little slowly for my taste, but it is pretty nifty to watch them play excerpts as the score goes by. It's also geared more toward interpretation, and less toward analysis, but I'll take what I can get...
Results may vary, of course, but I hope these help.
Monday, June 19, 2006
I like your song
I wrote a song last week. Not a piece (work / movement / composition / whatever), but an honest-to-goodness song. No twenty-five staves to orchestrate, no long form to negotiate, no overarching harmonic language, no sequencing software, and no transpositions. Just me and some manuscript paper, singin' at the piano. You know. Like Billy Joel.
In college I would write songs at the drop of a hat. I wrote sets of them, cycles, single songs, songs with orchestra, you name it. Partly, I think it was that I knew a lot of singers. Nowadays, not as many. I would bet that if you looked at my list of works in 1994 more than half would have been vocal music in some way. After penning a vocal quartet (setting translations of Yiddish curses), a short movement for baritone and orchestra, and a single song (for the magnificent HP) written during grad school, the vocal music simply stopped. Like a needle pulled off a record. I've had some time since then to think about why that happened, and I honestly believe that it had nothing to do with me wanting especially to write instrumental music exclusively. It just simply worked out that way. Work begets work, and one instrumental piece (eventually) meant another, and then we just moved on from there. There were, along the way, several "Oh this is ridiculous" realizations concerning the stop in the flow of vocal lines. So then I would sit down, and maybe try and put together a useful little choral piece or something. But nothing ever came of them, and they ended up in the proverbial drawer, only to be removed for repurposing.
So I've started a programmed agenda of pieces to put an end to this silliness. And I'm of the mind that it's actually better that I waited. Vocal music is so near and dear, in a way I'm glad that I've put some distance between it and myself, if only so I could figure out how I really wanted to write music before I got back to it again. Now that I do (no, really, I do), I think I can write some interesting stuff, incorporating everything I've learned about how I write from the last 10 years of composing instrumental works.
With that in mind I started writing this set of songs at the request of an old friend, and the situation couldn't be more appropriate. EM was actually the first musician for whom I ever wrote a piece. Our 1990 collaboration was a set of 8 songs of Shel Silverstein poetry, and despite the fact that I was 18 when I wrote it, it remains to this day one of the best pieces I've written. (For those wondering what this piece is and why you haven't heard it ... it's not exactly in circulation, due to multiple text-permission failures.) The new set, 16 years later, is quite a different project. This one was born out of the head of genius playwright Gary Winter (mentioned in these pages before), who, over many years, transcribed a collection of postcards he found in used book and antique stores and whatnot. The piece will be a set of these "found postcards," for soprano and piano.
So one down. And it felt great. I forgot how much giddy fun it was. Especially these, which are not exactly pure "art song", or lied, or however one would tend to categorize this kind of thing. There's just too much theater-song, or cabaret flavor in there. Writing (and playing and singing) these is just way too pleasurable to be called work.
If I follow my grand plan, after this piece will come a choral set (on 13th-Century Zen poems), and finally a huge surprise project, to be unveiled later. Just take my word on that last one, because as an idea it hasn't even walked upright, let along gotten off the ground. But it's vocal, so now it receives all the attention it deserves to make it happen.
Tuesday, June 13, 2006
Advanced Search
My shuffling around of dusty scores continues, and in the process, I've been reflecting whatever changes that have come about on my page in the American Music Center's NewMusicJukebox site. A few years ago I was a beta-tester for this online database (The good offices of the AMC requested sound and score files of some of my works to use as examples in an early offline version of the site, in order to raise funding for the project) and since then, this baby has grown up. In the AMC's own words, "NewMusicJukebox is a 24-hour 'virtual' library and listening room for new American music, with streaming sound files and encrypted score samples for listening and perusal." It's a laudable project, and one I try to participate in by keeping my works current, at least as frequently as I can remember.
NewMusicJukebox used to be made up entirely of AMC members (self-published, often younger/emerging composers, the kind who might pay attention when the e-mail invitation to participate came in), but now the site is in "Version 1.1", where they've since added, well, "real" composers (you know who I mean) by including the AMC Collection of 20th Century American Music, at The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, adding "more than 25,000 works by 4,000 composers" to the database. The idea behind this is obvious and brilliant — a search for American wind quintets of substantial length yields not only AMC member (and terrific composer) Rob Paterson's Wind Quintet, but also quintets by Lukas Foss, Chen Yi, Ingolf Dahl and George Perle, right there alongside the Paterson. This kind of equalizing is invaluable for emerging composers. For those of you in search of chamber (or orchestral) music of certain criteria, this is a fantastic tool, and it's only going to get better. Many of the major publishers have significantly contributed, and I suspect there will be more of that as the site grows. Unfortunately (and understandably), many of the newly-included works from the Public Library don't include the fun score and audio examples, but honestly, I think it's a great start to just list the works and their vital stats, at the very least.
Of course, I've been easily distracted from updating my own Jukebox page by browsing the site. It's fun procrastination, which one can easily justify as "research". In the process I've picked over quite a bit of the offerings, and actually found some really interesting stuff. A fascinating Henry Brant orchestra piece here ... a gorgeous Bernard Rands score there. Just meandering through various search results yields all kinds of great surprises, "Oh yeah! Gerald Busby! What the heck did he write again...?" And then you can see. I'd even been half-heartedly trolling around music stores for a score to Tobias Picker's Old and Lost Rivers orchestration for years, and Lo, there it is on the internets, for all to see and steal from. You can even peruse the first couple pages of the vocal score for The Ghosts of Versailles, which I'm here to tell you, is a pretty sweet-lookin' 2 pages. You could spend a week on those 2 pages.
There's not a lot of wind ensemble music on there ... the full list is only a fraction of the total orchestra pieces included. I did a search, and figured out that if I upload every one of my wind ensemble pieces, I would represent 6% of the entire listing of wind pieces in the database. I decided I didn't want that responsibility, and have included only a couple.
I do wonder how effective the database is for orchestral works. I highly doubt anyone has snagged an orchestra performance via that site. I just don't think it works like that, and I would think that the large number of orchestral works included represents some very wishful thinking indeed. That didn't stop me from including Metropolitan, of course, but I suspect that the system works best for chamber groups, where searches for varied instrumentations bring up all kinds of interesting stuff. In fact, it worked exactly like that for me once — last year I had a performance of OK Feel Good come out of NewMusicJukeBox. A new music ensemble director in Portland, who was trolling the database for what I would assume were chamber works of a certain length which fit her instrumentation, came across my piece, and liked it. That's exactly the way this sort of site is supposed to work, and I was really pleased (not only for myself for the performance) but for the success of the project itself.
[Unrelated PS—This notebook now posts an RSS feed. This is excellent news for those frustrated few of you who check frequently for updates.]
Tuesday, June 06, 2006
Aired Out
Recent activities in the past few weeks have centered around a kind of virtual inventory: the re-organizing of the Newman Catalog for promotional projects and such. And so in the midst of this housecleaning I've found myself coming face to face with several older works I've long avoided dealing with, each one teetering between full-blown promotion, and the ragged edge of destruction.
The self-absorbtion involved is staggering. And I've found that it's turning out to be less of a slash-and-burn activity than I thought it would, or at least than what I thought I'd like. I've been much more middling and compromising about the whole thing than I probably should be. Pressed to make a decision on some of these pieces, I choose, in many cases, to not make a decision. These suckers are just too personal. I remember writing them, I remember the premieres, I remember thinking they were the best thing ever penned on paper. And yet I also remember the point when I would, say, delete one from my list of works, or not include it when building my website. It's a tricky business.
The process so far has not exactly yielded any more nervous addition of juvenilia to the official catalog, but it did give one in particular the axe. Unstuck, a string trio I wrote in 1996 for a choreographer at Juilliard, was quietly taken off the website and removed from the List of Works a couple of weeks ago. No performances since the dance performances 10 years ago, no interest from those who might perform my music, and no longer any confidence in the music itself from the composer. That's not to say that other works which haven't been performed in an even longer period are going to receive the same treatment — there are just too many factors to weigh for each one.
In the Valley of the Elwy, for instance, is a work for baritone and orchestra I wrote around the same time as Unstuck, and though the work doesn't represent me as a composer anymore, it does illuminate a direction of sorts, as well as show off a particular influence (tell me that doesn't sound exactly like Barber), in what I consider now quite an adorable way. And so when I dredged the piece up during this process, I found it didn't exactly win a spot in the official catalog, but it did get to be belatedly included up on the website. I don't know why, it just seemed like that's the way it should be.
Elwy may not represent me compositionally anymore, but then again, neither does Ohanashi, a chamber orchestra work which, only because of lack of aesthetic resemblance to absolutely everything else in my catalog, has been standing on the cliff ready to be pushed off for some time. But now there is recent interest in the piece — and I find that Ohanshi may not look like me, but others might like how it looks. This brings up a fascinating question which I suspect every composer at one time or another confronts: how does one approach these older works which may or may not represent current style and aesthetic? Very likely most don't give a whit, and anything with usable performance materials is up for grabs and available to anyone who would care to perform them. I wonder, though. How would Britten feel about all his juvenilia exposed to the galaxy as it is, cataloged and published, and performed all over the place. (As a card-carrying Britten-head, I have heard some of what I just described, much of it simply awful). Or Mozart for that matter. Poor guy. Obviously, there are plenty more examples to go by, in both directions. On one hand, Brahms burned the stuff he felt wasn't up to snuff. On the other, anyone can perform Old George Rochberg, or New George Rochberg. Just pick your style. So the question persists: Do I represent myself only with what I feel is Newman at his best, or do I present the world with Newman as a Continuum — the composer finding his voice, piece by piece.
Lullaby for Munch in Hell, once considered (by me) to be my best work, is another one of these bon-bons of juvenilia facing the terrific, yet terrifying prospect of new performances. I've held out on this one — it's faced the box in the 5x5x5 locker on W. 29th St. (our storage space, where all-things-college live) more than once, and lived to tell the tale. What I'd love to do is write a new sax quartet, stare down the aging Lullaby, and retire her in favor of more mature compositional efforts. But I suspect that even if The World turns Perfect, and I get to write a new quartet, the Lullaby will remain. It may not be Me now, but Me then was a wide-eyed young composer ready to take on the entire repertoire, and I can't see myself letting him down. Besides, for all I know, it's still a great piece, and the thing holds up perfectly well against current work. I just can't tell anymore with these pieces. And now from recent mumblings, it might even get two performances next season — so maybe this is a sign that I'm actually the only one losing hope in these delicate babies.
There's yet another older chamber work for which I have a soft spot: Movement & Coda, a duo written in 1993 when I was 20 for the rather unwieldy combination of oboe and harp. It's a good piece! Really, you'll just have to trust me. I sometimes stumble on the score on the shelf and think, Damn, this kid was talented. What potential. But I see far too different (better?) a composer in those pages, and haven't yet drummed up the courage to make up a web page for it, or include it in the (now currently under revisions) chamber music section of the catalog, nor am I ever likely to. I suspect that what I'm seeing in the work now is all potential, with not enough actual music to hold my interest.
Some pieces have had less of an impressive impact after reexamination. Exclamare, a short fanfare for brass quintet, was one of the first successful works I wrote. Tight as a drum, quite rhythmically exciting, and a healthy performance life for a number of years, one would think this piece would have been saved from extinction. After all, the career as it stands now points directly at what I would imagine would be a ton of brass quintets, who would probably like very much to play it. And so with that in mind, I picked up this piece again, thinking that surely this quintet was going to be reintegrated into the catalog and have a new life. But then I listened to it again, and thought ... Eh. Maybe not so much. Perhaps what I thought was interesting in 1992 is not so very interesting to me now, and more importantly, I can't imagine it being of very much interest to anyone else. And so, despite everything it has going for it on a practical level, an eventual No.
There are, of course, other works, even one or two I wouldn't consider juvenilia, which have been hanging about on the chopping block, as well. They shall for the moment remain nameless. The fact is, it's not necessarily a matter of strength in pulling the plug on some of these, it's that I don't think I even understand what some of these pieces are. Now with a bit of distance from some of them, I am sort of baffled as to what they mean in general, and how they might best fit into the world at large. I hold out for these pieces to either click into place (revisions! cut that movement!), or (more likely) for some benevolent fairy to descend and make these decisions for me. I'm guessing that by the end of this particular inventory project, and with the guidance of the mythical fairies, I will probably consign one or two more pieces to the hypothetical drawer. I would like to think that this works well for the musicologists of the future, who will drool over finding these works exactly there, in the darkness of W. 29th St., to dust off, catalog, publish, and show off to the world as missing gems. More than likely, though, that will be it for these castoffs. Their job was completed some time ago.