Make-Up Calls

Twins manager Ron Gardenhire has won Manager of the Year in the American League, some would say more for his managing in the early-to-mid 2000's than in 2010. If hindsight is 20/20, maybe these awards should be voted on 5 years out rather than in the days after the regular season; everyone knows Gardy should have won one by this time, but as has been pointed out, once a snub is made, the make-up call pushes the next deserving candidate back a year, and a vicious cycle ensues whereby an honor supposedly tied to a specific time span becomes more like a lifetime achievement award.

The obvious comparison to the music world would be with the Pulitzer, but that horse hath been flogged. Rather, this also makes me consider the idea of "timelessness" in music, and the implications of building a value system around it. Critical, scholarly and popular fashions are fickle things: composers' legacies are at their mercy, and make-up calls are common. In some ways, we are stuck in a perpetual state of making up for our forebears' misidentification of merit in the music of their time. (It is not just mere "hindsight" that better suits later generations to this task, but also their pronounced lack of irons in the fire so far as careers and egos are concerned.) This is inevitable but unfortunate, since we could be investing that time in fighting our own era's battles, and maybe saving the next one some of the same trouble.

Esoteric composers everywhere are castigated for admitting that they're banking on receiving posthumous acclaim, but one must remember that "timeless" music reaches more listeners over time than any of us can reach during our lives. I don't think it's such a bad mindset to have, and I'm all for make-up calls in music.

Prescriptions

I've always been of a mind that prescribing repertoire for competitions, grad school auditions and other such circumstances is short sighted. One's choice of repertoire says a little bit about their technique, but a lot about their musicianship. Committees aren't ignorant of this, but rather keenly aware of it; direct comparison of players' execution of the same set of tasks is to be favored because it enables the imposition of more objective criteria in a way that isn't possible when everyone is playing different music. Personally, I don't think that's a good thing. Any conceit of objectivity in a music competition is a mirage anyway; I'd rather everyone heeded the total musical package, whatever that is to them. I know that if I ever found myself sitting on a committee where I was asked to assimilate someone else's value system, I'd certainly want to know why I was invited in the first place.

When it comes to instruments like the tuba, I wonder if committees aren't more apt to prescribe repertoire simply because there is so little of it to choose from. A tubist-composer or -arranger who creates even a merely serviceable new piece for themselves to play has stacked the deck substantially in their own favor (you'll gather from that statement that I personally consider most all of the usual suspects to be less than serviceable, if not as showcases, then as music, which is more important). On the other hand, one wonders if mediocre music is ever prescribed precisely in order to see who can make the best of it. If personalization is the goal, though, better to let everyone choose (or even create) their own music in the first place.

Revision as Conformity

Earlier this month, I wrote briefly about an old tune of mine I was reworking on short notice. It was performed last night, and seemed to go over well. I wrote this composition when I was only 19, and the original version is typical of someone that age: there are strong ideas marred somewhat by some bizarre harmonies, a few of which I didn't know how to notate and had to invent chord symbols for. The revision process essentially consisted of "cleaning up" this mess, in other words, removing everything that isn't normative in a hard bop minor blues and converting a few wild chord symbols to more standard ones. I hate doing that to my tunes, whatever the style; there are enough hard bop tunes already, and those of us living today could never do it better than the style's originators anyway. It's one reason revision is not one of my strengths as a composer. As my music gets more "original," I find revision to be more palatable because I feel a greater sense of ownership over the ideas at play. But there are several early works of mine, like this one, that I've been loathe to revisit because they are clearer imitations of historical styles, and revising the non-normative elements out of them would mean depersonalizing them almost completely. Even if the result is more palatable to my current set of ears, I often sense that there was another solution which I simply was not up to finding at the time, and that I will not find now given how different I am. The stylistically normative solutions can revive a tune, but at this point, I've written better tunes in all of those styles anyway, and again, we really don't need too many more of them at this point (I don't, at least).

Of course, composers evolve with time, but those bizarre 19 year-old ideas are always with us. There was a bar or so of my arrangement for last night that I wasn't in love with, but simply couldn't see working any other way. I can recall countless instances of the same situation going back to my earliest compositional efforts, and they continue to this day. The difference is that nowadays, they often work way better than I think they will before hearing the piece played. I think it's that sense of logic that improves most of all over time in a composer, moreso even than their technique or their knowledge of other pieces. When it comes time to revise again in another 10 years, maybe I won't have to take those parts out.

Compression

This is the promised follow-up to yesterday's post

In his lecture, Treasure asserts that compressed audio makes listeners tired and irritable, and that cheap headphones pose a greater risk of damaging hearing because listeners are apt to simply turn the volume up in order to compensate for the lack of clarity. I listen to a lot of compressed audio, usually on the cheapest headphones I can get, and to me, the listening environment has a lot more to do with the volume I listen at than the sound quality does. The middle of the day is the worst time for me to listen because that's when there's the most background noise, both outside and inside; morning and evening are much more conducive.

Whereas it has been observed that some people damage their hearing by continually turning the volume up throughout a listening session as their ears adjust to the new level, I find that the opposite is also possible. If things are relatively quiet, I'm able turn down the volume as the session goes along. I try to proceed this way whenever possible; it's not just healthier, but begets more focused listening. It also means that the levels at which I listen to highly compressed audio, while they may be higher, are not so much higher that I'm putting myself at risk.

All of this aside, the bit about our brains trying to imagine the missing data in a compressed file is laughable. The human brain is not capable of "sampling" at the rates of even the lossiest audio; if it was, we would actually hear the holes in the sound. And even if this was possible, it might be unpleasant, or it might not. It might be heard as a disfigurement of a great work of art, or it might be heard as a new kind of art. The truly dangerous aspect of what Treasure is putting forward is the direct attribution of various psychological effects to particular sounds in utter disregard of social and cultural context. If what he's saying is true, it would seem to preclude the very possibility of art music, most of which makes occasional (if not copious) use of the types of sounds he labels as inherently harmful. He's the first coming of the anti-Cage, if you will, and hopefully the last.

In fairness, Treasure had to squeeze his talk into an exceedingly small time frame imposed by TED; deep in the comments, he refers to, "the rather stressful experience of cramming a TED talk into 7 minutes" as an explanation for a minor omission. In this article, presumably not written under those kind of constraints, he's more rational, granting that different listeners will find different things soothing and irritating. Even so, his advice to avoid listening to too much rap and death metal because they convey anger is codgerly at best. Some people listen to these musics when they're angry precisely as a way to let it all out and get it over with quicker, which would seem to fit with the kinds of things he's advocating; but that point aside, I think it is, again, presumptuous to conclude that music which conveys anger and that which is made out of anger are necessarily the same thing, or that all listeners will necessarily perceive a nexus in the same works, whether there is one or not. And as I opined yesterday, the construction of a system for evaluating the healthiness of music based on something as subjective as the emotion it supposedly conveys is an outright dangerous idea, and invites 1984-ish dystopian visions in anyone who claims fealty to musical modernism.

An interesting test case here would be Messiaen, who often used birdsong he transcribed himself in his music, and whose sacred music could never be labeled as having been written out of anything but love; yet even so, there is much harsh dissonance in his music, and while it is clearly more accessible than many composers of the era, it still might as well be Webern to many people. I wonder if "good intentions" truly transcend style for Mr. Treasure?

The invocation of the term "schizophonia" is also bothersome. The "dog barking at the speakers" doesn't know what a speaker is or why it emits sound; it doesn't have a lifetime of social conditioning to help it understand when it's time for barking and when it's time for aesthetic contemplation; and it doesn't inherit an immaculate, centuries-old tradition of art music from its canine ancestors. One would think that the dissociation of sound from its original source is something humans are well-enough equipped to deal with, most especially if context is considered. Of course hearing a gunshot fired from behind you is scary! To compare this with listening to an iPod on a bus is completely absurd. Schizophonia is a big scary word that resembles the name of a common and devastating mental illness, yet it seems to refer to an exceedingly transient, externally imposed condition rather than a chronic, internal one (and one which is, ironically, imposed on us several times over in the TED lecture, notably by the crack that suddenly appears in the "schizophonia" graphic itself ca. 2:40; apparently it wasn't enough of a deterrent to warrant sacrificing some visual accoutrements). Besides, according to schizophonia's hilarious entry at Urban Dictionary, there's nothing to worry about.

Finally, consider that Treasure is a businessman. He has a book out. He runs a consulting firm. Some of this is so ridiculous that it almost seems like a publicity stunt. If you Google him, you'll see that it's working, as well as (frighteningly) finding some sympathetic followers. I'd otherwise be inclined to ignore it, but let's face it, if I in my very occasional sampling of only the most esoteric of music blogs managed to stumble on one of his lectures, then he's getting over. (And here I am giving him more publicity.) In any case, if you want to talk about making sound harmful, about abusing its properties, using it to manipulating people's emotions, or sullying its natural beauty, I can't think of a more distasteful use of sound than for the ends of Treasure's firm. It's an interesting pose he's striking.

Oppression

I'll follow up on this tomorrow, but for now, just let this TED talk soak in and see if it doesn't make your skin crawl just a little bit:



The bit about compression causing your brain to work harder to fill in the missing data is just plain funny; the bit about music which is "made with love" being beneficial is no laughing matter, though, especially when an organization as influential as TED is giving someone a platform to state it as a scientifically proven fact. It seems that there are an awful lot of people working awfully hard to come up with just about any reason they can to prove goddammit that contemporary music is the devil's spawn. It's not hard to imagine a dystopian society where such "scientific" evidence is wielded as a McCarthyistic bludgeon against musicians whose source material is judged by some bureaucrat to have been written out of hate. Let's hope it doesn't get that far.

Placeholder

This is one of those posts, of which there's sure to be at least one more yet this month, that I'm writing simply to keep the dream alive. This is my third crack at Blog Month, and where I failed miserably to post on a daily basis in previous years, to this point in November of 2010, I've held my own. So, as you could probably gather from that lead in, I don't really have anything to say today that's worth saying. I only allow (force?) myself to post under these circumstances but one month out of the year. Enjoy it while it lasts, or alternatively, take solace in the fact that there are only 18 days left in November.

Of course, it's only 10 o'clock, and most of the material this month has been posted later in the evening than that. Given another two hours to ruminate, I could surely get myself worked up enough about something or other music related to be able to write an entry that's at least thought provoking, if not actually a useful contribution to the discourse. I'm going to a concert tonight instead. I think some people might be surprised to read that, or maybe even inclined not to believe it, but I'm not making it up. I'm on my bike as soon as this sucker is published; proofreading can wait until I get home, or perhaps tomorrow afternoon, if it's required.

It's true, I do go to hear live music on occasion. I don't go unless I want to hear what's being performed, which means I go less than a lot of musicians do, and some of them think that makes me a spoilsport. Fine with me. I'd rather give better prepared performances, produce more immaculately crafted compositions, and publish more useful and scholarly blog entries than be able to say that "I was there." I don't seem to run into anyone I know at Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra concerts, or when bands like Arp of the Covenant or Behold...The Arctopus play Minneapolis. Maybe if I bitched about it to more people, that would change. More likely, though, is that those people would just go on their blogs and write something like what I'm writing right now about how their friend dissed them for not being at a concert they would have hated.

So, with that in mind, here's my admonishment to everyone to chill out with the whole "support" thing. If you go to concerts for reason other than listening, you're supporting mediocrity more often than you're supporting "the music." I go to listen, not to support, get a gig, socialize or whatever. That's my holier-than-thou retort to the holier-than-thous out there. With that, I'm off to Maude to hear Enormous Quartet. Let the record show that's what I was doing tonight instead of writing something you might have found informative. See you assholes back here tomorrow.

After Gann

There are musics that I myself utterly loathe, like those of Franz Schubert and the band Journey, that I wish I'd written, because they are accessible enough to seem predestined for wide appeal, even though it's not wide enough to include me.

North

Last month, the superintendent of the Minneapolis Public Schools recommended that North High School be phased out. I was on tour all month and only learned of this through an email from KBEM, the jazz radio station that operates out of North High, but the proposal made headlines locally, and rightfully so. Though the message stated that the radio station "continue[s] to have the support of the school board and the Minneapolis Public Schools," the thought of North High closing makes me sick regardless.

I'm a biased observer working with limited information, but there's plenty about this that stinks. A Minnesota Public Radio story from last month states that,

There were more than 1,100 students attending North High School just six years ago. This year, there are just 265, and only about 40 of those are freshman who started this fall.

and later that,

North is the only high school in the city without an attendance zone, which means it's no one's default school. Even families living across the street from North are assigned to Henry or Edison. District leaders acknowledge that, but add the enrollment problem has been around longer than those attendance zones.

To my knowledge, the attendance zones go back to at least 1996, when my parents and I decided to buck them, instead gambling on another Northside high school with low enrollment and a checkered history, Patrick Henry. (North and Henry are arch rivals, and played some wildly entertaining basketball games while I was a student. The prospect of there never being another one of those games is unfortunate by itself.) I don't know what North's attendance zone was in 1996, or if there was one, but I know for a fact that such a system was in place. Even without knowing what North's precise enrollment was in 1996, that last comment rings hollow to my ears.

It was Henry that had enrollment problems in the early 1990's, but it also had a small built-in clientele of affluent, mostly white students from the very outer edges of northwest Minneapolis bordering Robbinsdale and Brooklyn Center, as well as the city's newest outpost for the International Baccalaureate (IB) program, which was what drew me there, and what ultimately proved the school to be worth the substantial commute. They've recently started an IB program at North in hopes of attracting more students. It worked for Henry; according to this data, enrollment there topped out at 1,564 in 2003-04, which is about twice what it was when I got there seven years earlier. It seems they're not willing to give North that kind of time, though.

In the snippets of last night's school board meeting that I skimmed through today, I heard multiple references to "changing the culture" of North High in order to boost achievement. I never attended the school, and I haven't been in the building for years, so I can't speak to what kind of culture has grown up there, but the phrase bothers me anyway. It reeks of focus group naivete. I loved the culture on the Northside, though I could never truly call it my own, and I miss it in many ways. If North is a failing school, it's because the rest of us failed them. Closing the current school and reconstituting it with freshly minted focus group platitudes plastered on the walls isn't going to address the bigger issues at play here, but it's better than not having a high school on the near Northside at all, which would be criminal.

Noob Alert

When Google notifies you that your band's name has appeared in a new place on the the interweb, it looks like this:



When the person who is responsible for said band name appearing in said new place on said interweb is a real pooper, it looks like this*.


Any of you computer whizzes out there want to explain to me how this works (or take responsibility)?


*May not be work or family appropriate depending on your work or family...bet you're wishing I'd placed this statement in closer proximity to the link right about now.

Addition By Subtraction

I'm currently working on repurposing an old composition of mine to meet an unforeseen deadline. Early in this blog's reign, I wrote of my discomfort with all of the tributes one encounters in jazz, and mentioned this very tune, my first and last contribution to the cause, and one which even used this dreaded word in the title: "Tribute to Oliver Nelson."

I've certainly written better things in the intervening 8 years or so, but for reasons I won't go into, this tune is about the only thing I have that fits the bill for the current obligation, and so I'm revisiting it. There's potential here which has me questioning the assumption that I'd never play it again, which was probably more about the title than anything else. I'm going to call the new version "Oliver Nelson," as in Chick Corea's tune "Bud Powell," a tune which succeeds musically despite being sort of a stylistic mash-up, much like what I'm after. Ironically, by taking to word "tribute" out of the title, I'm now paying tribute to two, perhaps even three, musicians instead of one. Even so, I'm happier to be doing it more tactfully than I was before.

Me, Myself, and The Music I Want To Hear

Kyle Gann is a really smart guy and a fine musician, but he can say the darndest things when issues of accessibility are raised. He has this to say about composers who write for themselves:

"I write for myself" is one of those self-defeating clichés that academia acculturates young composers into, like "The music should speak for itself!" I can't imagine that any young artist starts out thinking that his work need only bring pleasure to himself.

(click here to read the entire post)

Actually, I was saying those things as a teen, before I even knew that you could major in music in college. I guess they should have given me my doctorate right then and there. Gann would like to skewer everyone who ever uttered such things by tracing their origins to an easily discredited source, but there are sources and then there are authentic reactions to social dynamics. In my case, I simply got tired of being asked what I was trying to depict in my music, which in all but the rarest of cases is nothing in particular. There's nothing to explain; I'd have to make something up, and that wouldn't be very honest of me. Besides, I hate listening to composers talk about these things, whether they're being honest or not. That's not why I go to concerts, and I didn't learn that from any institution, but rather discovered it about myself through trial and error.

I'm also not really sure how Gann gets from "I write for myself" to "I write to bring pleasure ONLY to myself and no one else can have any." Writing for oneself is nothing more than a methodology; it doesn't forbid the work from appealing to others, even if it decreases the odds somewhat. Gann seems to see a negligible semantic variation as a righteous line in the sand, assailing the saying "I write for myself" while granting that he "write[s] music that [he] want[s] to hear." He also writes that,

...I am disappointed if my music is playing and a passerby, any passerby, doesn't stop to ask, with a twinkle of curiosity, "What is THAT?"

...and thus we are introduced to the ultimate red herring in any discussion of accessibility, the universal piece of music. Gann of course goes on to hedge his bets, saying of writing for oneself that, "It's a defense to be used against having failed to engage the interest of others, which happens to us all now and then." (my italics) Actually, it happens to all of us, all the time. Much as we would all like to have created such a thing, there is not and cannot be a work which accomplishes what Gann is describing. If he wishes to explore this slippery slope, that's his prerogative, and he does no harm to the rest of us by doing so. This earlier passage takes the cake, though, and makes it hard to take him seriously:

...there are musics that I myself dearly love, like those of Phill Niblock and Stefan Wolpe, that I would never write, because they are esoteric enough to seem predestined for only a narrow specialist appeal, even though it's wide enough to include me.

How fortunate for Gann, then, that composers like Niblock and Wolpe ignored such ridiculous moralizing and created the music that they did; otherwise, his and many others' musical lives would be less rich. I'm baffled that someone as astute as Gann would strike such a pose, maintaining an abiding interest in much music of narrow appeal while seemingly expressing contempt for those who might dare to create it.

Most commentators who set musical accessibility and self-gratification in opposition the way Gann does in his missive do so in order to defend their own low-brow pandering. Clearly he is not of this ilk, concluding his entry with a characteristic call for prioritizing artistry over careerism; rather, it's as if he thinks he's staking out the moral high ground, allying accessibility with altruism and esotericism with nihilism. He's even willing to locate some of his favorite music, music he "dearly love[s]," on the wrong side of the tracks to accomplish this. The outcome is baffling on the surface, and the logic is not infallible either.

I would argue that the desire for mass appeal is more harmful than helpful to the cause of making sure everyone has something nice to listen to. The ranges of style and presentation which facilitate the kind of broad accessibility Gann advocates are severely limited compared to the diversity of work that might come from a community of just a few dozen composers. By definition, the work of artists who prioritize accessibility above all else inevitably converges, whereas the work of those who are least moved by external forces ("write for themselves" if you insist) inevitably diverges.

The desire to appeal doesn't mediate each individual artist's work in a direction unique to that artist, but rather mediates all such artists' work in many of the same directions, resulting in a greater level of conformity that threatens to exclude listeners who desire something outside of this mainstream. While each individual composer in such an environment can say that they are serving more listeners than if they simply wrote for themselves, as a group they are serving fewer. It's like volunteering to help build a fourth skateboard park in a wealthy suburb while one poor kid in the inner city goes without a reading tutor; it serves more people, but makes less of a difference.

Milestones

This is the eighth post I've written this month. Earlier this year, I wrote eight posts total between March 3 and September 27.

The Aging Process

According to last night's program, the ensemble Zeitgeist , a local new music group which hosted my ensemble C.o.S.T. as part of their fall cabaret, is planning an "Early Music Festival" for next April. The featured composer is Henry Cowell (1867-1965). Though I generally have a low tolerance for hyperbole, I think the idea of labeling work from this era as "early music" in the year 2010 is not only brilliant, but also necessary, and I'm glad someone thought to do it.

To neglect most of the great living composers is one thing; to neglect most of the great music of an entire century is quite another. I wonder if advocacy for "living composers" as a group is one way the behemoth institutions at the top of the classical music food chain get away with continually abdicating their duty. As long as composers Cowell's age are wrongly categorized as "new" or "contemporary," orchestras will continue to point to their latest commissions to middlebrow careerists as evidence of a commitment to the ever expanding tradition, when the only things actually expanding are their noses. Kudos to Zeitgeist for calling them on it.

On Analysis

It seems to me that the benefits of any musical analysis tend to be rather exclusively available to the person who performed it, and more or less unavailable to anyone who might later come upon the finished product. Think about the time that must go into preparing an analysis for peer-reviewed publication, then think about the time it takes to read said article. The author cannot possibly replicate in any reader the brute force with which such a process tattoos the material on their brain; to do so, the reader must become an analyst themselves, and they might as well start with the primary document, not someone else's reduction of it.

An analogy could be drawn to learning musical material by ear versus from written notation, the latter being more efficient because the content has in a sense been reduced, the former being presented in its purest form. To be candid, I feel that the fear of written music which prevails outside the classical world is largely irrational (maybe I'll tell you why later this month), but there's no denying that to learn by ear is to learn everything all at once, while reading, though it doesn't have to be this way, certainly enables the musician to gloss over important details that aren't on the page, often making it more difficult to add them back in than it would have been to learn them concurrently.

C.o.S.T. Gig 2nite

Keeping Up

Earlier today, I was surprised to discover that the University of Minnesota School of Music, from which I received my B.M. five years ago, now requires prospective undergraduate performance majors on tuba, trombone and euphonium to perform orchestral excerpts at their audition for admission. For all I know, this could have changed the year after I was admitted or it could have just changed this year; I haven't had occasion to check the guidelines since I applied 10 years ago, but I have a student who is considering applying and was double-checking some information for him when I made the discovery.

In any case, this wasn't something I was required to do when I auditioned, nor had I so much as smelled an orchestral excerpt before I started college, nor do I now as a private teacher use orchestral excerpts with my high school aged students. The study of excerpts is the study of perfection. You're thinking that there are all kinds of things wrong with that, and you're absolutely right, but that doesn't make the statement any less true. There's an incredible amount of groundwork to lay before one can approach even the most technically elementary of excerpts, at least with the intent of perfecting it for audition purposes. Less advanced students certainly could benefit from the process as well, even if it's clear from the outset that they have no chance of getting the excerpt audition-ready, but if that's the case, why not specifically address these more basic deficiencies, which probably effect everything they do?

This is what immediately sprang to mind when I saw the guidelines, but of course, auditioning high schoolers on orchestral excerpts has been the norm for some time at the top conservatories. On that level, it shouldn't be the least bit surprising that the universitories are beginning to follow suit. It is notable, however, that excerpts are not required for any other instruments. This would seem to indicate that this came down not from Room 200, but rather from the low brass faculty, who are all excellent and all have their heads on straight. This leads me to believe that things have changed quite a bit at my alma mater, since I can recall encountering only one freshman low brass player in my four years there who showed up on day one with a solid grasp of excerpt playing. The fact that several other players not included in that statement have gone on to great things sums up my reservations about such a requirement pretty well, but I don't run the school.

Without delving into just how great the things I myself have gone on to may or may not be, it is stating the obvious at this point to say that I was not that person either, and hence my gut reaction was distress, since I myself most likely would have been deterred from applying altogether had this requirement been in place when I was in high school. On the other hand, though, while I in no way regret choosing music as a career, it has been clear to me for some time that I would have been a much happier undergraduate if I'd chosen a degree program that afforded me more electives than a performance degree does. Lo and behold, the excerpts are not required for B.A. in Music applicants, leaving me to wonder if this requirement which on the surface would seem to have been designed to keep people like me out of performance programs might actually have saved me from myself and all but forced me into a more balanced undergraduate experience. We'll never know.

I also maintain a certain amount of trepidation about labeling some degree programs so generally ("Performance") and others more specifically ("Jazz Studies") when in fact they are often equally specialized. Many of the conservatories which have led the way in escalating these admission requirements also have much more specific nomenclature in place to indicate that a degree program specifically emphasizes orchestral performance. On the other hand, the more general labels function quite well at the more aesthetically pluralistic music schools, acknowledging that students must ultimately find their own way. Perhaps one day I'll earn a graduate degree in 20th and 21st Century Quasi-Atonal Jazz-Influenced Performance, Composition, Arranging, Transcription and Literature. Not likely, but there's a better chance it will be called that than "Orchestral Studies."

Visualizers

From whatever moment it was that I first became "serious" about music as a teen (too serious many would say) right up to the present day, few things have bothered me more than the appending of non-essential extra-musical stimuli to the listening experience. Besides the fact that I usually enjoy the experience less that way, I'm prone to take offense to any implication that music is not good enough by itself.

As time has gone on, it has become clearer to me that the problem is not necessarily with all extra-musical stimuli, but rather those which are particularly intellectually obtrusive. In other words, there are, on one hand, stimuli which distract whatever part(s) of our brains we're using to listen, and, on the other hand, those which appeal to some other available pathway, therefore truly adding to the listening experience rather than merely competing with it. For me, the distractions include language, meaning, allusion, representation, and for the most part, emotion as well (not mine, mind you, but rather that supposedly communicated by the stimulus). The enhancements, then, are exclusively limited to sensory stimuli as abstract as the music itself.

The word "visualizer" was not in my vocabulary until today, at least not in reference to software plug-ins. As it turns out, this is the term used to refer to the screensaver-like thing that some media players display while music is playing. I ran into one today and kind of dug it, which quite surprised me on one level given the hang-ups stated above, yet makes sense considering that the content was, in fact, completely abstract and clear of potential distractions. It was obviously reacting to the music that was being heard, yet whether by virtue of being well-designed or of my having reached some sort of inner detente with the extra-musical, it truly seemed to enhance rather than detract from the experience.

The conceit of unpredictability is one reason I find such things (more) successful. In a sense, this contributes to the overall degree of abstraction by undermining the development of expectations; visualizers which establish direct, consistent and perceptible correspondence between a sonic and visual stimulus have thus ventured into the realm of representation and association, which I place decisively in the distraction category. This is why I find things like Animusic so worthless, even creepy; paradoxically, it is this very correspondence between the musical and the visual that experts seem to have glommed on to as a boon to the developing brain, which more or less ensures that the bulk of such productions will take this direction.

Of course, it wasn't tough to tease out the pattern in many early screensavers, and I imagine that while technology has advanced substantially since then, a listener who spends many hours a day in front of the most abstract of visualizers would sooner or later, and consciously or subconsciously, develop associations that would ultimately undermine the element of abstraction. The specter of constantly seeking out new plug-ins to keep things fresh gives me pause when I think about making visualizers part of my listening routine, but I might try it anyway.

I also realized that, for some reason and without really thinking about it, I had developed the erroneous belief that visualizers were a PC thing, and was somewhat surprised upon looking into the matter to find that my very own copy of iTunes has them as well. It seems that the ones that come with it kind of suck, but people make their own, and you can download many of them for free. The fact that so many people would take the time to design and distribute these things speaks to the fact that music is, in fact, not good enough by itself for many listeners, and that still strikes a nerve. Even so, I may have seen the light just a bit today, and it was all swirly and neon looking.

Read This

Complexity Wars

Blog Month III

Installment #3 of the Blog Month project commences today.
Find explanations here and here.
Previous efforts are dissected here and here.
View the complete body of work here and here.

Hear, hear.

It's Not Cute Anymore

When middle-aged, middle-class, middle-brow, Middle-American people encounter a musician in their teens or twenties, they tend to look as if they've encountered a grown adult playing with blocks, or perhaps a poodle wearing a Girbaud onesie. Thanks to the physiology of the human central nervous system, the uncontrollable reflex to smile at the sight of such a thing always manifests itself a split second before the conscious mind has had a chance to register and evaluate the bigger picture. Hence, the look the young musician (or the poodle) catches out of the corner of their eye is so often precisely that moment when cognition begins to mediate reflex in quite the opposite direction. The resulting expression is an odd combination of glee and pity.

I've spent years looking forward to the day when I can give a performance without catching one of these looks before, during or after the show. That day seems to be getting farther away even as I get older. In part, this is the bed that arts advocacy's emphasis on extrinsic benefits has made for the rest of us: when our very existence as artists is justified exclusively by our art's worth to the developing brain, what use could those whose brains are finished developing possibly have for us? Music is cute, at least until it's not cute anymore. It makes kids good at math, at least until they enroll in a conservatory where they won't so much as smell a math class. It's harmless, that is until they're saddled with five-figure student debt and unable to find a job of any kind. It's good for the soul, unless, well...you know, it sounds like that gobbledygook modern stuff that no one really listens to.

We have Legos for kids to play with to help them with spatial relations and clarinets for them to blow into to make them good at math. Then, once the test scores are compiled, the measurable outcomes achieved, and the grant funding secured, the clarinets and Legos get packed away together in a polystyrene tote, whisked out of sight and mind until the first grandchild is born. At least that's how it's supposed to work. God help those of us who never learned to put our toys away.

If in your adult life a perfect stranger your age or older has ever encountered you, alone, earnestly playing with Legos and summarily shot you one of those looks before their conscious mind has had a chance to inventory all of the possible explanations for why they're seeing what they're seeing, then perhaps you've felt a small fraction of what it feels like to walk in front of an entire audience of people your parents' age and older, unpack a tuba, and do something with it to betray the fact that you've done little else for the last decade. If not, hopefully this summary of what it feels like to be on the wrong side of the smirk will help you stop the next one before it starts.

C.o.S.T. Fall 2010 Season

D-2 Mock-Up

Several months ago, it occurred to me to try using pitch shift effects to obtain notes that are out of my range on tuba. Here's my first concerted effort at it:

The "D" Series: D-2

(score here)

If you've been to a C.o.S.T. performance, you've heard this piece before; it was one of the first flexibly scored pieces I wrote with that group in mind, and so far we've played it at every show. On top of the many things that intrigue me about flexible scoring, there's the fact that by using pitch shift, I can record the entire piece all by myself (I did use Sibelius for the snare drum part, but could always have a percussionist friend overdub it later). Obviously, sound quality suffers more as you move the pitch further, but all in all, it's a far more human way to hear a piece than MIDI playback through a notation program.

I played as much of the music in the written octave as I could, and played many of the higher parts down a fourth or fifth rather than an octave so as to minimize the total amount of pitch shifting necessary. This means that most of the middle parts do not consistently use the same timbre, but in this format, it doesn't matter much (long live flexible scoring). The biggest challenge is that pitch shifting up magnifies tremendously even the slightest flaws in articulation, and I sometimes found myself trying out a few different transpositions before finding one where the right notes responded the right way.

After pitch shifting where necessary, I applied Audacity's "Noise Reduction" effect and "Columbia LP" equalization (performing these three steps out of order causes the appearance of pops and clicks in odd places). I also did more than a little bit of editing, which considering that Audacity doesn't have a built-in crossfade feature, often worked better than it reasonably well should have without it. The result is far superior to previous overdubbing projects I've undertaken with GarageBand (a program I've officially lost patience with), but could still be improved, I think, even using free software and a bare-bones set-up. More to come.

Evidence

According to Michael Daugherty's bio, he is "one of the most frequently commissioned, programmed, and recorded composers on the American concert music scene today." He studied at North Texas, The Manhattan School of Music, IRCAM and Yale (not too shabby), and currently teaches composition at Michigan (also not befitting the shabbiness department). Here he is on YouTube doing something many in his profession would like to see outlawed:



Many thoughts come to mind. Here is a renowned composer based at a renowned school who not only thinks it's permissible to work this way, but apparently does so himself, at least some of the time. He apparently is also confident enough in the results to out himself on YouTube, where pointy-headed colleagues at other schools (if they've yet learned of and figured out how to use the internet) might catch him. This is progress.

Whether or not it was intended this way, I also see this video as an advertisement for his (and, implicitly, the department's) openness to students who compose acoustic concert music using computers and software. This has to be something many prospective students wonder about when applying to a school, and it's not like you can just ask, especially if you fear the worst. Good for them for going right out and answering that question, and a further pat on the back for what is undoubtedly a shrewd business decision.

Having said all of that, I wonder if what we see here isn't also a busy composer attempting to balance a full-time academic job with a successful freelance career, and whadya know, he gets tabbed to make a silly promotional video for the university, which expects him to offer an accessible explanation of the modern concert composer's craft in less than four minutes. Who knows? Maybe this was the easiest solution to that rather ridiculous demand and he whipped out his noligraph and parchment as soon as the cameras stopped rolling. I'm not betting on it, but it's possible. You do get the impression that convenience played a role, but given the can of worms this could open with the traditionalists, I doubt anyone would venture into this territory without a slightly better reason.

In any case, the key, as he says, is that anything a composer uses to capture their ideas is a technology. All technologies have their limitations, and all composers must overcome the limitations of their tools in order to be successful. Proving notation software to be unsuitable for composition involves more than merely showing that it has limitations; rather, one must demonstrate that these limitations are insurmountable.

Dennis? Kyle?

The Tuba as New Media

It is one thing to show the tuba to be capable of more than what it is asked to do in the orchestra, but it is another thing entirely to show these capabilities to be useful. No matter how great the skill of future generations of tuba players, these generations will be stifled at every turn by any musical culture which places such disproportionate emphasis on 18th and 19th century orchestral repertoire. In order for their larger contributions to be acknowledged, those contributions must be valued, and in order for them to be valued, the musical styles and idioms in which they are made must be valued as well. The task of advocating for these new musical styles is both more vital and more arduous than that of advocating for one's instrument, yet it seems increasingly clear that the latter will not be accomplished before the former. The symphony orchestra repertoire is arguably the Western musical tradition's greatest contribution, but it has not, will not, and indeed cannot be the place where the tuba finds its voice as an equal instrumental partner in the contemporary musical landscape. That landscape will be shaped by a vast array of both traditional and experimental musical media, among them myriad settings to which the tuba has far more to offer than it does to the orchestra. Of course, any instrument has the most to offer to idioms which it helps to shape from the outset, and so the more tuba players who are active as creative voices rather than passive "musical instrument operators," the more prominent place the instrument will occupy in the future of music.

Scores -- Sonatine -- Scriabin

I've been allergic to score study my entire musical life. It's too easy to blame this solely on my education and not at all on myself, but I would at least start the discussion there. In college, conductors and instrumental teachers occasionally scolded us (collectively, and in the vaguest possible terms) for not doing more score study, perhaps unaware that we had no clue how to go about it, or that almost no one in the theory or musicology areas had touched the subject. We spent some time with a few movements from the classical piano repertoire in my final semester of tonal theory, which was a welcome departure from the Baldwell and Skankter purgatory we'd been living in for two years, but it was a fleeting and shallow expedition, adjourning well before I would have felt any better equipped than I already was to jump into something with more than two independent staves.

The next theory class I took was 20th Century Theory, where we spent the majority of the class walking through some pretty thorny orchestral works, highlighted by Schoenberg's Five Orchestral Pieces, a radical departure to the opposite extreme for which few (if any) of us were truly prepared for. For better or worse, our professor in that class held our hands and wiped our butts for us, obviously fully aware of our condition and having no intention of causing us to break a sweat. The primary analytical endeavor in that class was to name motives, sections, and other musical ideas metaphorically. This seems to be the one method of analysis endorsed by shut-in academics and anti-intellectual pop culture mavens alike, yet one which to this day I still cannot see the practical value of. Certainly in my case, it left me right back where I started, which was completely unable to hear score and lacking a systematic method for approaching in its written form the majority of the composed music that interests me. A few months later, I received a B.M. anyway and no one batted an eye.

Yes, it's easy to blame my education, but of course, I could have tried harder. I could have made score study a priority. I could have continued taking piano lessons after passing piano proficiency. I could have made it my job to perfect my sight-transposition skills. Instead, I was playing tuba many hours a day, taking as many non-music electives as the department would let me get away with, shamefully devoting and hour or two of my daily practice to jazz improvisation, and spending my weekends and whatever other slivers of time were left over frantically composing the music I didn't have time to compose while all the rest of this was going on. Given the same less-than-ideal constraints on my time, I'm not sure I'd do anything differently if I had it to do over; the skills I honed as an undergraduate have served me awfully well in a lot of ways, and if some knucklehead music school adviser would have told me that I had to learn to read score before being allowed to get down to business on these more central (at the time) concerns, I probably would have quit right then and there. Nonetheless, I've always felt handicapped by my unfamiliarity with scores, and as my general aspirations have broadened and moderated somewhat from, "I want to be the best tuba player ever," to something more like, "I want to be a compelling tuba player who performs his own compelling compositions whilst writing a compelling blog entry every couple of months and occasionally convincing his students that the music he listens to is compelling," I've finally reached the point where my desire to read score is no longer merely a consequence of blind ambition, but rather appears destined to become, if it hasn't already, a matter of necessity.

Hearing score is, admittedly, a daunting task, akin to perfect pitch in a sense, and perhaps not entirely unrelated. Even prestigious composition competitions judged by Big Name Composers® tend to require or strongly recommend the submission of a recording to accompany a score. Either this is yet another of their farcical methods for weeding out prospective entrants who aren't really "serious," or, like most of the rest of us, they can't hear score very well either and don't feel comfortable judging a piece without having heard it realized. So, while it's something I wish I could do, I realize that it's neither the most practical thing to go about achieving, nor is it necessarily the most utilitarian skill I could devote all that time to developing. To be clear, I have no intention of getting to know pieces first from scores and only later from recordings or performances. For me, seeing the score has always been a bit like discovering the Wizard of Oz to be just a little fat guy behind a curtain. I feel the same way about transcribing jazz solos, whether I write them down or not. In addition, I'm generally satisfied with my ability to pick things up by ear. I tend to end up with myriad influences in my music whose work I've never so much as glanced at in written form, and I'm often astonished in skimming through earlier works of mine at how much I've assimilated solely by ear.

I'm also weary of the notational idolatry that prevails in some circles. ("This score looks cool, I can't wait to hear what it sounds like.") I think it's important to stay grounded in sound, and avoid being seduced by the more arbitrary aspects of notation. It is both a blessing and a curse that written music more often then not looks beautiful on the page whether or not the piece is any good, or for that matter, whether the notation itself is even legible for practical purposes. I've always felt that this is merely a fringe benefit, and ought not distract us from the main event. That's why I almost never tweak any default settings in Sibelius, and have been loathe to use the jazz fonts, though I give in occasionally. Surely some will lament this loss of individuality among composers who engrave their own music; call me a sociopath, but I'm actually rather enamored of the idea. When scores resemble each other so closely in appearance as to render the musical content the most (or only) meaningful difference between them, well, congratulations, the musical content is the most meaningful difference between them. Gone, then, is any possibility of the calligraphy influencing our opinion of the work's content.


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The million dollar question, of course, is, "Where do I start?" It's a question I've been asking myself for a long time. During my last year of school, a maverick professor hipped us to a score reading text that starts with two single-note lines in familiar clefs and gradually adds staves, clefs, and transpositions to the mix until suddenly at the end of the book you're reading full orchestra music. It sounds like the most logical way to go about things, unless of course you're both pathologically impatient and a shitty pianist (guilty as charged). It certainly would be a wonderful challenge and an excellent parlor trick to be able to plop down an orchestral score and play it at the keyboard; this, of course, encompasses all of the skills I'm after, but also many others which aren't essential to my ends and would needlessly occupy boatloads of time (specifically the part about the piano). So, as an alternative, I'm starting simpler, trying instead to come up with more conceptually accessible ways of working through a score whereby each and every note is momentarily made the focal point.

Specifically, what I've come up with is (a) playing through the parts individually (on tuba), and/or (b) copying the score by hand. My theory in taking these approaches is that merely staring at a score expecting important details to jump out hasn't worked very well, and so a more active approach is in order, even if in some ways it's no more focused. No one would doubt that staring aimlessly at a full orchestral score without a specific task or outcome in mind would be a pointless endeavor, but I would argue from experience that it's no different with, say, an unaccompanied tuba solo. Of course, I've long been capable of hearing a single part in my head, especially my own instrument's part, yet I suspect that were I tasked with analyzing such a piece without being allowed to play through it, I wouldn't catch a lot of important detail. Playing is study, and I've long maintained that composers and theorists would do well to try it sometime if they really want to know what they're talking about. What I wrote about in that previous post is the experience of performing a great piece as part of a large ensemble and thus hearing the inner workings of the piece from, well, inside the ensemble. In my experience, there's nothing like it, and being, as I said, by no means discontented with taking things in aurally, I can't honestly say at this point that I expect score study or anything else to replace it. It's an irreplaceable experience, and while the quota of constant participation in large ensembles imposed by brute force on music school undergrads practically numbed me to all conceivable benefits, I do (finally) miss it a bit nowadays, mainly for this reason.

Playing through the parts of a large score individually is certainly a different ballgame, and not one which necessarily threatens to help one actually hear the full score any better once the instrument is taken away. However, it does compliment the performance experience in an essential way, which I imagine might be obtainable with just a score and a quiet room, but which for spazzes like me is better undertaken with the horn in our hands so as to help us focus better and longer. I believe it's more useful to take small sections of a piece and play through each part in succession in a single sitting than it is to play through only a couple parts at a time from start to finish over the course of multiple study sessions. Playing through parts happens more or less in real time, and so tackling complete parts from start to finish can be tough to accommodate logistically. I also have found in other areas of instrumental practice that intense focus on a small amount of material maximizes the amount of information I actually retain, and in the case of score study, the "material" (and the challenge) is vertical, not horizontal.

Needless to say this activity also puts the player through their sight-reading paces. As a tuba player, I can't imagine actually needing to sight read in tenor or alto clef as part of a professional performance, but stranger things have happened. And again, for those of us who play only arranger's piano, realizing these parts on our primary instrument is a good way to maximize information retention. (The visual aspect of the piano is also very powerful, but in my opinion moreso with polyphony than monophony. Sometimes having the other 87 keys just staring at you can be disconcerting.)

The first piece I undertook to play through in this way was Eugene Bozza's "Sonatine" for brass quintet. As there are only 5 parts to deal with, the score is not altogether overwhelming, but there's just a bit more going on than what I realistically feel like I can hear in my head, and the trombone part is almost entirely in tenor clef, which makes for a nice challenge. Coincidentally, there's also fodder here for the notation-as-art-in-and-of-itself discussion, as this is one score which is not nearly as pleasing to look at as it is to hear realized. The sloppy manuscript is legible enough to play from, but not at all pleasing to look at, and even included a stem on the wrong side of a notehead (horizontally, that is, not vertically), a minor mistake in practical terms, yet one that makes it look as if a child copied the score.

It's hard to accept that the authoritative published version of such a widely played and highly esteemed piece of music could be so poorly engraved, especially when the score and a set of 5 parts (which, mercifully, have been more or less properly engraved in LeDuc's distinctive house style) costs almost $70. Here's yet another reason that I really have to kick myself in the butt to find the motivation to sit down with a score: too often it's like looking at those tabloid pictures of scrubbed out celebrities without their precious makeup on. In any case, if you're not a brass player, you probably don't know this piece, and if that's the case, I strongly urge you to check it out. It's damn hard, but playable, and in my mind, the first two movements would be great music in any instrumentation. It's so ubiquitous, apparently, that some members of my quintet don't want to play it, this after I spent nearly a decade of my life quintetless and wanting to play this piece above all others. When worlds collide...


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In contrast to what I'm advocating above, the value of copying a score, whether by hand or with notation software, I think needs less explaining. Any technophobes out there can withhold their criticism of the software this time because, yes, I've decided to work by hand. For all the harsh words I had for the Bozza score, my own manuscript is abominable, and though I can't at this precise moment in time think of a scenario by which it might become essential for me to improve, I figure there's no harm in doing so just for it's own sake. My first score copying endeavors were, however, done with a computer when I was in high school. I may have done more than one piece this way, but memory fails me in that regard; the only one I remember for certain is the fugue from Bach's Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue. At the time, my only concern was to get the computer to play back this incredible music for me so I didn't have to beg my dad to play it on the harpsichord, which he had been doing occasionally around that time. When I told him what I'd done, he remarked that many great composers had studied that way; I don't think I let it slip out that my ends were not nearly so noble, but while I can't recite the piece from memory today, it did make a lasting impact on me, enough at least for me to quote it obliquely (without referencing the score) in one of the better pieces I wrote as an undergraduate.

Eventually, I also discovered (as most of us do with time) that you can purchase and otherwise obtain recordings of music you want to listen to being played on real instruments by skilled performers, and so the need to copy scores into the computer to hear them played back disappeared rather quickly and quietly. I do wish, however, that I hadn't completely left behind the impulse to copy, as it hit me like a ton of bricks several months ago that it might be the best first step of them all to towards turning myself into a score reader. Enter Scriabin's Fourth Piano Sonata, specifically the second and final movement. On the surface, Scriabin's early and late sonatas don't seem to have been written by the same person, and while you've probably already correctly guessed that my greatest sympathies lie with the later works (beginning with the 6th), the 4th and the 5th are fascinating in their own rights as they seem to represent the transitional period (and let's face it, transitional periods are, if not always the most musically successful, certainly endlessly interesting for those of us wonks who fancy ourselves composers and are inclined to look at things with an academic eye).

Of course, I first discovered the work by listening, and had listened to it a ton before I ever looked at a score. Not to belabor the point or anything, but boy was it a shock (not a good one; it never is) to see what all of this looks like on paper. Were a student to bring me a piece like this, I would tell them it was unplayable; many sections of the piece would have been more clearly notated on three staves rather than two, and this became, almost by coincidence, a significant component of my copying endeavor which I'll say more about later. Add to this the fact that it's in the key of F-sharp major but also takes more than the requisite number of late romantic tonal detours, resulting in several bars that I had to stare at for minutes at a time to make sense of harmonically. It's also in 12/8 time, making for some (visually) loooong bars with double sharps carrying through from beat 2 to beat 12 and other such shenanigans. In short, it's a score that has only two staves, uses key signatures, and has four big beats to the bar, and yet was an absolute bear to get my head around much of the time. This is a big reason I decided to copy it out by hand, playing through each measure (or beat, if necessary) on the piano as slowly as I had to.

The even more bizarre part of the story, however, is that I had already decided (indeed, begun) to transcribe the piece for brass, and if you know the piece, you can see why I'd call that bizarre. I can't imagine a more inherently pianistic piece of music, nor one which could more throughly defy direct transcription to most any combination of orchestral instruments. There are, however, substantial march-like sections of the piece that have suggested a brass realization to me from the very first hearing, and when I joined the CSBQ, I had at my disposal for the first time a capable quintet eager for new repertoire, and so it was time to shit or get off the pot. In stricter terms, what I'm creating is an "arrangement," since I'll have to do more than just extract 5 voices from the piano score and give those parts to the quintet. Rather, I've already virtually recomposed one section of the piece out of necessity, as well as changing many octave placements and chord spacings in order to keep the blood flowing through my trumpet players' faces. I've mostly been a curmudgeon about arranging throughout my musical life, and I absolutely stand by what I wrote in my C.o.S.T. manifesto, namely that,

"...in order for the transcription of existing music to be a valid and viable proposition, it must promise to somehow enhance the musical work in question rather than merely enhancing the professional outlook of the musician, and is otherwise an act of vanity in absence of inspiration."

I didn't have to go back and reread my own words to acquire a certain amount of trepidation about this project; I had toyed with idea in my head for a couple of years before actually jumping into it, having repeatedly decided it was not worth the trouble only to have the meekest of the voices in my head, the optimist, chime in at inopportune moments. Even after I finished the first third or so of the arrangement, things had already gotten quite difficult, and while I'd created something that I thought would sound pretty good, in all honesty, it felt to me quite a bit like "an act of vanity in absence of inspriation."

Where all this changed was when out of due diligence I began seeking out additional recordings of the piece with which to balance the impression of it I had gained from many hearings of Ruth Laredo's ravishing yet somewhat over-rubatoed version (of course, I had to look at the score to fully understand the extent of the interpretation, which speaks well for looking at scores, but also supports my claim that it's more often than not a shock and a disappointment). It was through this search that I discovered that the second movement is pretty much unplayable, or so one might be tempted to conclude after sampling the commercially available recordings. I did, however, eventually settle on a recording I found through the dearly departed Lala service by Italian pianist Antonio Pompa-Baldi, who makes great music out of the piece without missing notes*.

His performance notwithstanding, I ended up tempering my cynicism about essentially recomposing this piece for brass after realizing that it is bursting with ideas that almost no pianist can adequately realize by themselves. Such is the best justification I'm aware of for reworking another composer's music, not in the sense that the ideas ought to be changed per se, but rather clarified. The brass quintet is well-suited to some sections of this piece and horribly ill-suited to others; even so, I believe there are ideas here that threaten to both transcend instrumentation and survive reduction. Of course, a four-hands rendition would also solve the problem and be far more faithful to the composer's intent, but even so, my vanity detector is suitably placated for the moment, and I have enough confidence in my own composerly abilities and accomplishments at this point to be confident that history won't judge me as someone merely "picking the pockets of the masters" just to feed my ego and advance my career, since I have my own music with which to accomplish those goals.

Deciphering some of the denser moments in this movement was painstaking, and of course the physical act of writing occupied nearly as much time as the actual "studying" did. Nonetheless, I'm a big enough dork that I had fun, and I look forward to studying many many more of my favorite pieces this way. I stuck with three staves throughout the movement, even when two would have sufficed. Initially, I made this decision simply because, on 12 line paper, the chances of ending up with a single unusable line at the bottom of the page when alternating haphazardly between 2- and 3-line systems was at least 50%, and being the treehugger that I am, these were unacceptable odds. In the end, though, this led to an important realization that I intend on observing throughout future projects as well: rather than copying the score precisely as originally engraved, why not expand smaller scores and reduce larger ones? That way, you'll end up with two copies with different salient features, one which fits all of the information into a smaller visual area while making quite a clutter out of the individual voices, and another which isolates each voice more clearly but does so at the cost of greater demand on one's field of vision. It seems to me that they compensate for each others' weaknesses as far as suitability for study goes, and so as extreme as any given score might be to one or the other end of this spectrum, I plan on copying it out the other way and then using both copies interchangeably from that point on depending upon the analytical task at hand. Another idea I've had (though I didn't have it until after I started copying this movement) is to string the pages of the copied version together continuously so as to more closely model time in the visual configuration of the score. (Anyone out there sell rolls of paper with staves printed on them?)

A final caveat about this score which I don't expect will apply in the future: in transcribing the piece for brass, I'm taking it down a half step, putting it in the brass friendly key of F Major. There are long sections of the movement throughout which one can simply pretend the key signature is one flat rather than six sharps, but there are others where a sea of accidentals makes reading the music as is enough of a challenge, and sight transposing it all but impossible. It also truly modulates at one point, key change and all, to D Major (the bVI if you insist), but true to late romanticism, the music doesn't stay there nearly as long as the new key signature does, and that's also a pain. Long story short, I copied it out in the new key rather than the original one, which added yet another layer to the study (helping rather than hurting, I think).

Here's a passage from the public domain score available on IMSLP:



...and here's the same passage in my own hand (don't L, please, at least not OL):




*It's curious to note that this recording comes from a competition, but upon listening, it's no wonder he did so well in it. Momma always told me (yes, my mom actually has said this to me more than once) that the people to keep your eye on aren't the one's who win music competitions, but the one's who finish runner up. Perhaps this penetrated my subconscious a bit too deeply, resulting in my resume consisting of way too many Finalist, Honorable Mention, and Alternate entries and not nearly enough *Winners*. Or maybe I should just have practiced more...

Close Encounters With Permission Culture

I've just finished reading Lawrence Lessig's 2004 book "Free Culture," which is chock full of mostly demoralizing stories, observations and ancedotes culled from recent and occasionally not so recent legal and cultural history. Lessig pulls together this history in order to make a point, and he makes it convincingly, but the history is worth knowing in and of itself. The nugget that I just can't get over is ASCAP's threat to sue the Girl Scouts, among others, for singing licensed music at camp. You can read all about it here (via Lessig's helpful list of the book's online references here).

Once upon a time, as a freshly minted music school graduate eager to gain a foothold in the more business-oriented side of my chosen profession, I began looking into joining a performance rights organization, and, for reasons I've since forgotten, ultimately settled on ASCAP. Even then, I had misgivings about joining such a club, for years earlier, ASCAP had supposedly threatened action against a local venue where I and many of my colleagues frequently performed. Rather than pay the fee, the owner began enforcing a zero-tolerance policy regarding "other people's licensed cover songs" and requiring each performing group to fill out and sign a form. This made for some eclectic, original programming, and gave me a great excuse to impose even more of my tunes on my bandmates, but those trivial facts aside, there were no winners here: not ASCAP, who hasn't received a cent; not the owner, who evidently was scared shitless by the whole thing; and least of all those of us who perform there, of whom even the most radical like to play other people's licensed music from time to time, or at least know that we can if we want to.

To have one's music performed by others is not only one of the most basic artistic aspirations which many composers share, but also, the state of music publishing being what it is, increasingly the only meaningful financial aspiration as well, or so I've been reading over the last several years. I'm normally too pessimistic to plan on things like that ever happening, but have occasionally been prone to making such plans simply to put my mind at rest, and as there was no application fee, it seemed harmless enough to just send the damn thing in and forget about it until that first royalty check showed up. Nonetheless, I was never totally comfortable doing so knowing that I was also criminalizing the performance of my music in the very types of venues it was most likely to be performed in, venues where the management and the musicians alike are lucky to break even on any given night. This ultimately weighed on my mind more heavily than not being a member had before, until finally an envelope arrived from ASCAP. Rather than a welcome packet, it was my application, which was being returned to me because I had forgotten to sign one of the forms. I've never been so relieved, and to this day, the incomplete application sits buried in a file cabinet, where I anticipate it will stay for a very long time.

Conversations on Improvisation

I'm happy to be included in writer Pamela Espeland's "Conversations on Improvisation" series at mnartists.org.

Click here to read the interview.

Assemblage (Horn Chorale)

C.o.S.T.

The acronym stands for "Consortium of Symphonic Transients." It refers to a large ensemble project I started last year to provide a more vital and sustainable medium for symphonic music than those which presently exist for those of us without a major orchestra gig or international composing career. Much to my surprise, the idea is proving mildly attractive to a few people besides myself. It's even gotten me my first grant, from the American Composers Forum nonetheless, which, more significantly, also marks the first recognition of my existence by anyone who writes the word "Composer" using a capital-C. Thanks to this modest sum of money, we're holding several rehearsals and two concerts in a wonderful performance space in St. Paul called Studio Z. In addition to a healthy dose of my music, I've incited 5 other players in the group to contribute music for us to play and interspersed it with my own to create a co-composed symphony of sorts which we will perform without pause as if it were a single work. I couldn't be more excited for this project, not least because it has led me to realize quite a bit about myself, my work, and what direction I want to go in, and as any good blogger would, I thought it might be worth sharing some of that with the wider world.

The general dearth of large ensembles in my musical circles, my inability to get meaningful performances or even readings of my large ensemble music, and self-awareness of my own artistic wants and needs all played a part in my decision to initiate a large ensemble project. However, it was an exchange with a student of mine which really lit a fire under me to pursue such a thing, an exchange which I would not initially have expected to have such a profound effect on my performing and composing lives, but of course, anyone who teaches knows that you frequently learn as much from your students as they do from you. I chronicled these events in this very space at the time, so I won't retell the whole story, but in a nutshell, this tuba student had come to me over the summer specifically to study jazz only to be told the ensuing fall by his band teacher that he wouldn't be allowed to play in the jazz band because, well...because tubas do not play in jazz bands.

For obvious reasons, that hit a nerve with me, resulting rather directly in the documents linked to above. However, it took a little longer for the larger epiphany to reveal itself: what if I put my money where my mouth is by writing music and starting a group where the instrumentation was flexible? This way, membership in the ensemble could be based more on musicianship and less on instrumentation. Contrast that with the orchestral world, where there are 20 violins and only one (maybe one) tuba player employed by each group. You could be the second best tuba player in town and not have shit to do. Or, consider the jazz world, where piano trios can get hired to play just about anywhere for anyone, but a sextet with 3 horns is too big, loud, rehearsal-intensive and costly to find its way into much of anything but the occasional club date. Rhythm section players have the horn players by the balls, since a rhythm section is a band unto itself and any horn players added to it are just extra mouths to feed and parts to extract.

In light of these sorts of considerations, it seemed to me that a large ensemble of flexible instrumentation could be a very powerful antidote to many unfortunate situations that I and many around me frequently find ourselves in. If someone is a good musician with something to offer the group, they should be in, and if not, they shouldn't. If they have a conflict with a gig, they don't play on that gig, and there are no hard feelings; no scrambling for subs at the last minute, no hiring subpar players because they are the only ones available on that instrument for that price, and no heightening jealousy when a band member becomes successful as part of another outfit and begins having scheduling conflicts. A group with open instrumentation can draw more loosely on a large pool of players rather than requiring every one of them to be present at each and every event, which mitigates the primary obstacle to maintaining a large ensemble project comprised mostly of freelancers.

These are the practical considerations, and they are very powerful. For many people, however, I suspect that the artistic considerations dictated by these practical considerations would serve as significant deterrents to such a project. For whatever reason, though, the more I began to ponder the artistic consequences of this sort of "transient" ensemble structure, the more I liked them. And if you're thinking this is going the direction of "I Can't Believe It's Not Music," graphic notation, prose scores and the like, think again. Indeed, that area is probably the more vital one as far as open instrumentation pieces go, and one day, I'll start a project to explore that territory; that day, however, has not yet arrived. I'm unashamed to state matter of factly that my aspirations for this project are not nearly that ambitious. It is symptomatic of just how bad things are around here that my less exciting alternative is actually quite exciting, to myself and others. I hope that one day it is rendered unspeakably boring by a plethora of similarly constituted ensembles covering much of the same ground with greater elegance and aplomb than I've managed, but until that happens, I reserve the right to inhabit this more conservative musical space without trepidation or shame.

The cornerstone of my overall concept for this group is to apply the chorus effect to heterogeneous groups of wind instruments. Once I had committed myself to pursuing the flexible instrumentation concept, I began writing pieces where each part was conceived for a general range and character of instrument rather than for a specific instrument. I created two templates for this approach, both for winds and percussion with optional string doubling of the wind parts. One is 8-part (7 horns, 1 percussion), the other 10-part (4 brass, 4 winds, basses, and drum set) with an optional second drum set/percussion part. They are given below:





I had years earlier begun composing untitled "series" of compositions to be played in any complete or partial order, all for solo tuba and some accompanying ensemble. I labeled these series with letters to correspond to the accompanying ensemble, as in The "A" Series for Tuba and Acoustic Jazz Trio, The "B" Series for Tuba and Brass Quartet, and The "C" Series for Tuba and Chamber Orchestra. Though the flexible instrumentation pieces would not be conceived to feature me as a soloist, I nonetheless had become attached to the idea of untitled movements which could be recombined in many different orders and wanted to apply it to this project, so I gave the new series the arbitrary letter names "D" and "F" respectively.

Obviously, a general division of labor between high, mid and low is still necessary; the instrumentation of these pieces is not truly "open" in the sense that any instrument can play any part in any octave, but it is tremendously flexible even so. This, of course, constitutes a near complete rejection of timbre as a compositional device, since I have no idea which instruments might actually end up playing the parts, or how much doubling there will be. I imagine this is an unthinkable compromise to many otherwise like-minded composers, but not for me. While the art and craft of orchestration is not entirely lost on me, my affinities for harmony, rhythm and counterpoint so outweigh those for the means with which they might be realized as to render timbre a moot point in much of my symphonic music. (Paradoxically, I feel less so about my chamber music, where the timbral palette is, by definition, smaller). I simply don't regard timbre with the preciousness or sentimentality it is typically accorded elsewhere, which means I'm not doing myself any favors by writing elaborately and specifically scored music that could only be performed by a professional symphony orchestra, and hence, which I'll probably never hear. I've written in that vein before, and I've got plenty of those pieces in me yet, but I'm quite content to write for unspecified forces as well; in fact, I'm finding it strangely gratifying and even liberating to do so.

In a traditional symphony orchestra, woodwind, brass and percussion parts are performed strictly by single players, as opposed to the string parts, which are performed strictly by groups of like string instruments playing in unison most of the time. Remove the strings entirely and add a very few doublings on instruments like clarinet and tuba and you have what is typically referred to as a "Wind Ensemble," essentially collection of wind soloists with a few strategic additions to assist with balance. It is only in the "Concert Band" or "Symphonic Band" that significant doubling of woodwind and brass parts is commonplace, and even then, this is done exclusively with like instruments; one does not normally hand the same part to the Bb clarinet, Bb trumpet and Bb soprano saxophone players, even though those parts are written in the same transposition and the instruments' ranges overlap substantially. Of course, the symphonic band paradigm is the predominant medium for K-12 instrumental music education in the U.S.; it's the one I came up in, and let's just say it left its mark. My first experience playing in a 120-piece symphonic band, with 8 tubas, 12 trumpets, countless clarinets, and so on, is something that will always be with me. Much as I grew impatient with it through compulsory participation, the further I get from those experiences, the fonder I become of them and the clearer their influence becomes.

My earliest compositions were written for 2-part and 4-part templates. Some time early in high school, I settled on an 8-part template not too terribly different from the D Series template above, and in fact, the similarities between them are not entirely coincidental. To this day, I suspect I wrote far more music in high school for that silly 8-part template than I have since written for any other instrumental configuration. It certainly was a medium which suited my technical and expressive needs exceptionally well at the time: I wrote nearly exclusively for it for several years, resulting in dozens of good-for-my-age pieces which I wouldn't necessarily want my name attached to now. What has become more apparent only recently is that despite its obvious limitations, this sort of thing still suits me rather well, and I've embarked on this project not only well aware of the similarities to my adolescent years, but in fact embracing those similarities in hopes of recapturing some of the naive excitement of that time of my life, which, as most anyone reading this probably knows, can be difficult for us "professionals" to hang on to.

I always envisioned the high school pieces as large ensemble music (i.e. for the school bands I was in), but the template was more an octet than a symphony. Each of the 8 parts was designated as a unique instrument with no multiples, and I gave little serious thought to the fact (which I was by then aware of) that a "real" band score would call for multiples of most of the instruments I had used. This is not to say, though, that I hadn't planned for certain possibilities, especially when it came to instruments I had altogether excluded; I envisioned horns, for example, doubling the alto sax part, and composed with this in mind even though "horn" was nowhere to be found at the left margin of my scores. In this way, there are further similarities with the current project, where parts are conceived to accommodate substantial doubling by any combination of 5-6 different instruments, and in a way, the practical considerations that led to this decision were also similar: my high school band had only one hornist and one trombonist, so writing full band scores with 4 unique horn parts and 3 unique trombone parts seemed foolish to me at the time. Similarly, I don't work with very many flute players these days, but Part 1 in the D Series can also be covered by clarinet, oboe, soprano sax, violin, guitar, and probably more I haven't thought of because necessity has not yet intervened, and so the group is able to function without a stalwart flutist even though I envision Part 1 most essentially as a flute part (indicated by "Flute" appearing at the top of the list of possible instruments for this part).

The large ensemble music I wrote late in college and immediately after college differs substantially from that which I wrote in high school in that (1) it is scored far more conventionally, (2) I'm not ashamed of all of it, and most importantly, (3) none of it has ever so much as sniffed a performance. The elaborate specialization of function among the instruments in a traditionally scored orchestra or band piece is a substantial obstacle to getting the piece performed, since you need access to an orchestra or band that is comprised of precisely those instruments in precisely those proportions. The 8-part pieces I wrote in high school were eminently more adaptable in that, while I had specific instruments in mind for each part, I knew that the ranges for the parts I had written closely resembled those of many instruments I hadn't, and had planned from the outset that the scarce instruments (should they miraculously appear) would simply double existing parts. Even so, their absence would not pose an insurmountable obstacle to performing the piece; that's the key ingredient that I've appropriated to C.o.S.T.

Ten years, hundreds of compositions and one college degree later, I find myself consciously emulating my high school self. In every other respect, you couldn't pay me enough to go back to being in high school, but perhaps I actually did stumble on something worthwhile back then without knowing it and have just now figured it out. It was inevitable at that time that I would outgrow the 8-part template and feel the need to explore a broader symphonic palette, but while those explorations have certainly been fruitful, in the end they've mostly helped me realize how content I actually can be with a more limited template where the specific instruments (timbres, that is) aren't specified. It is precisely because this approach so closely resembles that of not just my high school self but of many naive high school age composers that I'm just a tad insecure about putting it in front of capital-C Composers, who at first blush would be likely to see only arrested compositional development. Without being privy to the intervening 10 years or so of experimentation with more elaborate scoring and the subsequent realization that, while it's nice, it's not always absolutely necessary, it's not likely that anyone interested in upholding The Profession would find this approach compelling. However, as you've probably guessed from all this self-indulgent verbiage, I do. Don't take my word for it, though; better to hear for yourself.