Archive for September, 2008

Opus 78

Tuesday, September 30th, 2008

Well, the end of another month, and I didn’t spend as much time with my Beethoven sonata as I had hoped, but there were other musical experiences taking place.  My first-year theory students are through the “fundamentals” and we can now start to talk to each other about theory–today we discussed a definition of “tonal harmony.”  On September 21, the Harrington String Quartet came to OPSU and played a fantastic concert of Mozart, Mendelssohn and Shostakovich, and last Sunday was my first premiere in Oklahoma.  Add to that a couple of football games to eat up a Saturday or two, and finishing the horn and marimba piece, and it’s been a little busy.  But mostly good work, and I can’t complain.

But the Beethoven sonata–No. 24 in F# major, Opus 78.  I did get a chance to revisit it this afternoon, knowing that I would need to write tonight.  It really is a wonderful miniature among the giants that precede it.  I’m always amazed that Beethoven wasn’t stuck on one plan or another for his sonatas.  Myself, I tend toward the three-movement fast-slow-fast structure, so much so that in this horn and marimba piece I’ve just finished, I deliberately departed from that model–it begins in a quick tempo and ends slowly (I couldn’t resist the four-mallet tremolo at the low end of the instrument, pianissimo with soft mallets).  We’ll see what the player who commissioned it thinks.  So many of Beethoven’s earlier sonatas have that “standard” sonata cycle–like a little symphony for piano–he clearly got tired of being stuck with that.

Some things I need to work out.  My second-year theory students are studying modulation right now, and it strikes me that the development section of the first movement of Op. 78 begins in the parallel minor.  Should the parallel key be added to the list of “closely related keys?”  It certainly is easier to get to than any other key–no real pivot chord is required, only a dominant function that remains a dominant function.  Something to think about.  Similarly, in the rondo, Beethoven visits the key of (yes!) D# major, and along with it, D# minor.  Where Schubert or Chopin would have changed the key to Eb, Beethoven soldiers on through with six sharps–a real stretch for an ersatz pianist like myself.  More than ever I am in love with rondo form–the last movement of Brahms’ second symphony is what I think music will sound like in heaven.

So–here’s to next month–may I get to this writing earlier and have more intelligent things to say.  Op. 79, here I come!

Last night’s premiere

Monday, September 29th, 2008

It took over a year, but I have finally premiered a new piece at Oklahoma Panhandle State University, and finally had a performance of one of my pieces in Oklahoma.  I knew, of course, that performances would be harder to come by, and to be honest, I haven’t pushed much to have things played locally, if only because there aren’t that many places to have them played.  But that rant is for another time.

Last night, Mariachi OPSU, with the help of my fantastic colleague Matthew Howell, gave the world premiere of “El Piano de Genoveva.”  This is a setting of a poem by Ramon Lopez Velarde.  I found it interesting because it is a love-song to a piano.  The speaker sings the song to the piano because the woman who owned the piano is dead.  Wonderful pathos.  I think the piece works, and the performance wasn’t perfect by a long shot (we had to put the electric guitar part on ice for this time around).  It is the first really tonal piece I have written in a very long time… since about 2001, I think.  With some reworking, it will be good to go.

It is an example of a piece that has more meaning in rehearsal, though, than in performance, necessarily.  During the process of composition (I finished it just after the middle of August), I had to come to terms with the intersection between my musical language and the somewhat orthodox stylings of mariachi, a highly traditional, extremely stylized medium.  Then, over the last seven weeks, the students and I had to learn to be mariachis in a new kind of way–there isn’t really a tradition of concert music for mariachi.  This dialogue has been extremely interesting and educational.  The Hispanic students in the class helped me with the finer points of my translation (I had high school Spanish, but the idioms are always the problem), and we met on this very interesting common ground between new music and ethnomusicology and and traditional Mexican art forms.  We had some good discussions, and everyone got to think a little bit differently about what we do in music.  Which is the point of college teaching, after all.

I should thank Jan Radzynski for dropping the suggestion to write a piece for mariachi since we have the ensemble ready to go–if he hadn’t put the seed in my mind, I probably would have been content with the old traditional songs.  Thanks, Jan, and Happy New Year!

Playing and Listening–More to Bob

Wednesday, September 17th, 2008

This is a partial response to Bob Specter’s response to my response… well… anyway.  It’s been a mildly busy week (that’s my story) and this is the first chance I’ve had to sit and think about something that stuck in my brain about Bob’s last posting.  Don’t go looking for it–I’ll just quote it:

“2) Having grown up playing an instrument in an orchestra and brass ensembles, I feel that by immersing my entire focus into my past [sic; “part” (?)] and how it facilitates the “piece”, that takes all the energy I have. It is interesting to talk to people about the Canadian Brass performance of the Barber Adagio, and not have them have a clue how hard breath control can be. Now I see that as technique, not as the musical plumbing (open sevenths, etc.), and I wonder if someone who focuses on the musical plumbing loses the ability to appreciate the variances in the performance (and performers).”

Over the last year, my opportunities to perform have dwindled significantly, while the amount of time I spend thinking about the theory of music has grown to encompass most of my working time.  On top of that, the playing I’ve done has largely been in popular styles where the “text” of the music (i.e., the written score) isn’t taken as seriously as in, say, a Mahler symphony. 

The results have been interesting.  I am “hearing” like never before, either from lack of preparation time (come in on Sunday morning, read the charts in rehearsal, go to Sunday school, go back and play the service, hoping I remember the key change after the third verse) or from being immersed in styles where “note” is less important than “feeling.”  I am literally living and breathing music theory most of the time, and it is showing in my performance–what is improvisation other than simply living and breathing music theory?

So the “plumbing” isn’t a way to deal with music that circumvents or minimizes some aspect of the musical experience.  On the contrary–once one “groks” the plumbing, it ceases to be something that one thinks about and the effect is the same, except that it now becomes possible to label and explain the plumbing to others in a more efficient way.  We could do without it–simply talk about “that moment that happens at 2:43 on track 17 in the recording by George Solti,” and this works for people who are very involved with a few pieces or for a group of people who are discussing a single, communally-understood work.  But for full-time musicians, who must often absorb a great deal of music in ridiculously short periods of time, there must be some way to generalize, to categorize, to compare and contrast the great moments in Mahler with the great moments in Messiaen, and compare them both to the somewhat cruddy moments in certain Broadway-style musicals.  The difference is similar to the way a person like myself deals with a computer  and the way a professional computer person deals with it–I can’t talk to an IT professional about computers for very long because I don’t even know the jargon; the IT guy, on the other hand, lives and breathes the stuff.

In my freshman theory classes, someone always brings up the complaint that analyzing a piece of music takes all of the “magic” (by which I think they mean “emotional impact”) out of the piece.  It is true, that I now find that I must on occasion force myself to step back and notice the beauty as well as the plumbing (of course, sometimes the beauty is in the plumbing, as with Webern or Babbitt).  For this reason, after we finish an analysis in theory class, I try to take another minute and have the class listen again to what we’ve been studying.  I imagine that visual artists and natural historians must do the same thing from time to time–after studying the way Seurat uses points of color to make other colors in Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte, it is imperative that we step back and let the beauty of the scene again wash over us.

On Sunday, we have a fantastic group of musicians coming to OPSU: the Harrington String Quartet.  Since I organized the concert, I know the program in advance, and I have already been listening to the music they will be playing.  I’ve thought about the music, and I’ve written the program note.  I’ve been looking forward to this concert all summer, and it’s going to be fantastic.  I’ve been pushing it on the students, of course, but it won’t matter if I’m the only one there on Sunday–I will enjoy it.  And I think, based on what Bob has written, that I am going to make this one of those “step back” moments and just soak up the music.

Response to Bob Specter

Tuesday, September 9th, 2008

Thanks for reading, Bob.

Your Mahler addiction is long-known, certainly understandable and more-or-less incurable.  Typically, on the first day of music theory class, I reiterate to my students (I say “re”-iterate, because they should have heard it somewhere before) that music is perceived and understood by humans in three basic ways (perhaps more, but three that we can really agree on).  All humans (hopefully) experience music on an emotional level–emotion really is what keeps us coming back to it, having arguments about it, flipping the CD back to that same track again and again (the last movement of Mahler 2, right?).  I think that anyone except the most profoundly mentally handicapped person feels music on an emotional level; not being able to perceive music emotionally is, to me, a profound mental handicap.

Then there is a physical understanding of music.  This is perhaps best expressed in dance, at least in its pure state, but without a physical understanding of music, it would be impossible to play an instrument, or sing with a group of people.  Musicians and non-musicians alike spend years trying to master the physical implications of music, from marching in step, to dancing at your own wedding, to performing a concerto or an aria at Carnegie Hall.

Then there is the way to understand music that people with university degrees in music tend to emphasize, and around which our system of music education is (supposedly) constructed–the intellectual approach.  This approach begins when we stop just reading music and begin to look for the very abstract patterns in the sound and in the notation and vocabulart that describes it–key signatures, open sevenths, sonata form, fugal expositions and the rest.

Of course these approaches overlap, and there is much gross oversimplification in my three ways to understand music.  It ignores cultural considerations like the social function of music and economic considerations like the profit motive.  But I would argue that most performers and listeners actively engage one of these three modes when dealing with a piece of music.

In teaching music theory, I occasionally hear from students that pulling a piece of music apart to see what makes it tick–identifying all the Roman numerals–takes all the fun out of it.  This, of course, isn’t the point.  We teach music theory because after a certain point, if we are to talk about, think about and delve deeply into music, we must establish a common vocabulary, and we must understand what makes Beethoven different from Mahler or Marenzio or Mendelssohn.  All four of these composers may make us feel the same way (or not), on the emotional and physical level, but intellectually, they have great differences–a fact which is obvious from even the first hearing of their music.

So–to address your question–how is the listener (or performer) who is not trained in the intellectual understanding of music deal with the technological changes being wrought on the musical world by mp3s, easy access to recording technology and the rest?

First, this is only the next step in an experiment we have been running since the development of the phonograph and grammophone.  What happens when average people gain steadily more and more access to higher- and higher-quality recorded music?  Where even five years ago most of us were at the mercy of the record companies, the Internet has made such a deluge of music available to us (both free and for a price, both legal and pirated) that no one can possibly hear it all, let alone become an expert.  It has gotten to the point where I feel, as someone with a doctorate in music, that I can’t even scratch the surface of what is out there.  My solution has been, mostly, to hide behind a “canon” of western music, and to dig deeply into that music, while hearing whatever contemporary music I can.  All the music in the world is there, but that doesn’t make Beethoven or Mahler any less great.

Second, my hope is that the availability of home recording, and access to the Internet, can do what it seems to be doing–making the means of production available to many more.  It has always been difficult to make a living from music, but few people actually stop playing music because of that.  It just becomes their hobby.  I know many medical doctors, lawyers, executives and the rest who are fine musicians–one of the best violinists I know is an optometrist–but not everyone can have that career in music.  The beauty is that there is still plenty to be had from music when it is an avocation.  More and more people seem to be realizing this, and are learning guitar, singing in their church choir, or dusting off that old saxophone and joining a community band.

Third, a certain number of people will never go toward the intellectual undertstanding of music needed to read notation or master an instrument (these are not mutually inclusive, of course).  They will continue to be surrounded by music–this apparently doesn’t bother most people the way it bothers me, perhaps because they don’t think about all the music they hear.  I, on the other hand, can’t ignore the canned music in the airport, the mall, the restaurant… my intellectual training won’t let me.  Those who merely “appreciate” music will be able to do as they have always done, only now with more choices than ever.  With a little luck, the difference will be like broadcast TV of the 1970s when compared to cable or satellite TV of the mid-2000s.  While I hate to admit it, I think TV has actually gotten better–more varied, more nuanced, perhaps even smarter.

While the record “industry” seems to be in trouble (probably just being superseded the way the sheet music industry was to a large extent after 1930 or so; I would expect that commercial recordings will always be there in some form), I think the real endangered species is silence.  Look at the money people pay for quiet cars and noise-cancelling headphones:  someone or something is always imposing on the ear.   Does that answer the question?

Reaction: The Cult of the Amateur

Sunday, September 7th, 2008

I just finished reading Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur.  An indictment of what I’m doing right this second, of course.  I may have all of my students read his section on the music business.  Keen discusses Tower Records, and I remember well going to their Atlanta store in about 1995 or 1996, and having the feeling that if there was a recording I wanted, they had it, or they could get it.  It was the last place I ever saw new LPs on sale, too.  Now, I couldn’t even tell you where the nearest good record store could be found (though I did pick up a used copy of a CD of solo piano music by Charles Wuorinen and Morton Feldman at the Hastings store in Liberal).  I order from Amazon, CDBaby, and Archiv, none of which is as much fun or as satisfying as some of the fantastic record stores (and music departments of bookstores) I’ve frequented over the years (the highlights–Barnes & Noble at Easton Towne Centre and Borders on Henderson Road in Columbus, Joseph-Beth Bookseller in Cincinnati, Tower Records in Atlanta, Used Kids and Magnolia Thunderpussy in Columbus, Streetside Records in Cincinnati) .  The BMG Classical record club has shrunk its monthly selection of classical music to four pages in an omnibus catalog–an insult, really, although as I get older there is more music that I already own, so it gets tougher to please me.

More to the point–I would respond to Keen by saying that, while the surge of technological music-copying has been disastrous for the “record industry,” it has been a boon for the “average” musician.  I would remind Keen that his precious “music industry” has–put simply–conned much of society into believing that you need a record contract and a team of professionals to make music.  For the past fifty years, Americans have been letting others make their music for them, and I see that changing now. 

Any public school music teacher or church music minister can tell you that musical talent is spread around fairly thickly.  There are many who can sing or play well enough to entertain themselves and those around them, or to use their musical skills in worship, and it doesn’t require a college degree or a big break.  It appears that the public is starting to once again recognize this. 

I never understand the person who comes to me after hearing me play or after listening to one of my pieces saying, “that’s amazing, I could never do that.”  Those people are selling themselves short.  The human mind is a flexible, resourceful thing, and it can learn to do nearly anything, given time and motivation.  I don’t believe that anyone is musically hopeless, but the music industry wants us to believe that we are.  No more!  Any teenager who has played with Garage Band for ten minutes can create a decent sounding song… not strikingly original, but an indicator of a strongly developed sense of musical taste.    To paraphrase one of my professors, Gregory Proctor, if you ask the mechanic down at the garage to come up with a song, he can do it… maybe not a good song, but a conventional song that fits the musical culture he has been steeped in.  We now hear more music than ever–it surrounds us, and compared to our ancestors, we are all probably musical geniuses.

To the end though, because it’s late, and there isn’t that much point in inflating the blogosphere with my midnight musings.  In the realm of music, technology has the potential to remake folk music–where Keen sees billions of self-taught musicians condemned to anonymity, I see the nameless, shapeless forces of true folk music, building a common culture on the backs of unremembered musical mediocrities.  Where today my students don’t have four folk songs in common, perhaps Web 2.0 will allow the culture of personal, meaningful music to be restored to the vast millions who don’t have record deals.  I don’t know what technology means for music–especially for my music.  I hope it means more live music, more amateur music and a greater importance in our culture for music as an activity that enriches the lives of those who participate.