Archive for June, 2009

Opus 111

Sunday, June 28th, 2009

Here it is… the last one. 

Two big, beefy substantial movements.  Lutoslawski justified writing one-movement symphonies by saying that Brahms’ and Beethovens’ symphonies tended toward two big-idea statements per piece, presumably the first and last movements, although it is often possible that Beethoven is trying for three or four (perhaps in the Eroica).  It would be impossible to accuse Beethoven of overreaching his grasp in this case.  The two movements are well-balanced–a muscular, decisive sonata-allegro paired with an expansive set of variations. 

First things first–the proportions of the first movement are not especially large or striking–in my (G.Schirmer) edition, the development section scarcely lasts a page.  Once again, Beethoven is not the composer of long, overwhelming development sections the way we were all taught.  A glance at the score suggests that the proportional model for sonata-allegro is largely intact.   Why do we teach undergraduates that Beethoven’s development sections are overgrown?  My experience with the piano sonatas suggests that they are not.  On the other hand, motivic development technique often appears in unexpected places–codas, transitional sections, and within themes–places that in Haydn or Mozart would be simple or sequential repetition in Beethoven are more fully ornamented.  An example is the second theme of this movement.

I have to admire Beethoven’s approach to the start of the Allegro con brio.  It is almost as though it takes three (or more) attempts to get the theme going, and the full theme doesn’t appear until after a fairly extended attempt.   There is wonderful invertible counterpoint in the transitional thematic area, and the ubiquitous fugato in the development.  Beethoven struggled in his counterpoint lessons with Albrechtsberger, but they seem to have paid off in the end, as his command of these devices is perfect.  I taught 16th-century counterpoint last semester, and we didn’t make it to invertible counterpoint.  I think that the next time around, I will take the option in our textbook (Peter Schubert’s Modal Counterpoint, Renaissance Style) to introduce it from the beginning, because of its power as a developmental tool in any style.

Stylistically, I’m a bit at odds with this movement–it doesn’t reek of Beethoven’s “late” style in the way that other pieces do.  Admittedly, I haven’t read up on current musicological ideas about this piece, but it seems as though it would fit fairly well with the Waldstein, and lacks the scope of Hammerklavier.  Note–this in no way detracts from my astonishment with this piece and my awe at its compositional greatness.

The theme and variations is masterful as well, despite some very interesting notational choices.  The tone called for by the first few notes is wonderfully dark and rich.  Finally, Beethoven has stopped writing full triads in the bass staff, an activity I am constantly telling my students to avoid.  The more open chord positions he chooses in the theme are dark but not muddy.  Has this composer finally come to terms with the more resonant instruments that were starting to become available to him?  What does it mean that, despite his deafness, he was able to figure this out?  More importantly, what does it tell the contemporary composer who must assimilate much greater and more frequent changes in technology that Beethoven could have imagined?

There is a wonderful sort of rhythmic accelerando amongst these variations.  The theme gives a basic compound-triple approach with homophonic chords.   Variation 1 now has an event on every division of the beat, and events are happening (roughly) two to three times as often.  Variation 2 is simply not in the correct meter.  6/16 implies two beats to the measure, and there are clearly three.  3/8 would make sense, if it weren’t for the marked metric modulation (eighth=dotted eighth) and/or the alternating 16th-32nd-note pattern that makes up the highest rhythmic level (highest in the Schenkerian sense of “most-complex”).  What appear as accompanying 16ths or eighths should be dotted notes… or the alternating 16th-32nd patterns should be under sextuplets… or the patterns should be dotted-32nd-64th!  What a mess!  I can only assume that in later editions to which I don’t have access, some wise editor has made a decision that clears this up.  On my reference recording, Ashkenazy plays the first and second options, at least to my ear.  The editors of my edition, Hans von Bulow and Sigmund Lebert chose to only comment on the situation rather than rectify it.

In variation 3 is another meter signature that would make my students cringe–12/32, again, not reflective of the triple-meter feel of the music.  What a mess, but the musical intent is clear enough.  The final four measures of this variation are wonderful.

In my own work, I need to accomplish what Beethoven does in the fourth and fifth variations–that is, build larger sections of single textures.  I feel like I accomplished this in several recent pieces, notably in South Africa.  It is, again, the old adage I’ve often told myself of letting the music breathe.  I have great admiration for my friend David Morneau and his cultivation of the miniature, especially in his project 60×365, but I feel that I need to cultivate a different approach.  Yes, brevity is the soul of wit, but our world is deprived of the long view, the long term and patience to understand them.  Film may be our best hope–I know so few people who really listen to music, but nearly all Americans shell out for multi-hour long movies.  All the same, music that is longer than three minutes and that doesn’t make its meaning purely through language is, I am discovering now more than ever, my big project for the time being.  As a composer, I need to be able to write a single movement that lasts 20 minutes while still saying something.  I don’t know where the commission, or even the performers will come from for this, because for the time being I’m not in the class of composers who get that type of work.  When I entered graduate school in 2004, I was writing movements of one-to-two minutes’ length on a regular basis, and a five-minute one-movement instrumental piece was a stretch.  I discovered the tactic of creating larger pieces by writing transitions–my Martian Dances is a fantastic example of this, and my Homo sapiens trombonensis has a fantastia-like form that is exciting, but lacks rigor and cohesiveness.  Nothing ever comes back.  I learned how to let a piece breathe and expand to its true length rather than simply become a rush of ideas.  Beethoven’s sonatas–indeed, the sonata principle–require that I build on this even more.  I need, simply, the right commission now, because a twenty-minute unaccompanied trombone piece just doesn’t seem like a good idea.  A string quartet, or a piano sonata.  My latest completed piece, my Piano Trio that I just shipped off to its commissioner, runs almost ten minutes in a single movement.  I’m getting there… I’m getting there.

I began my journey through Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas in November 2006 as a way to start a project that looked beyong the end of my graduate work, and I feel that I have done myself a great service–so much so that July 2009 marks the beginning of a new project on the Mahler symphonies.  I kicked around some different possibilities–Bach, Chopin, a single large work like the St. Matthew Passion or a Mozart opera, but it seems that Mahler is calling to me the most, so it will be half of a Mahler symphony each month until the end of 2010 (yes, I may decide to include other Mahler such as the 10th symphony or Das Lied von der Erde, but I’ll think about that later).   Please feel free to join me on that trip.

Library Matters, Part Deux

Wednesday, June 24th, 2009

Summer is a great time for big projects, right?  Especially if they’re a little bit tedious and time-consuming, and therefore much easier to accomplish when there aren’t as many students around.

So I’ve been getting a vast number of scores in our band library into protective envelopes, numbering and labelling the envelopes with the needed information, etc.  I’m now out of envelopes, after filling 809 of them (yes, if you order 800 envelopes, you might get 809 envelopes… how about that?).  I need about 1000 more to finish the job, but we were short on funds last spring when I made the order (but–the new fiscal year starts July 1, and I know what one of my first P.O.s will be…).  The pause gives me time to reflect, and to update the catalog we have on the computer.

If I were a librarian, I would have just done the deed, but since I’m the conductor who will be choosing repertoire from this library, it was only natural to make an assessment of each piece’s Wertung, as they say.  Overall, the Wertung was pretty low.  The story is that one of my predecessors bought out a music store that was going out of business, so there is a lot of, well, junk in there.  I’m a pack rat, like my father before me, so nothing’s getting thrown out, but if I were sifting and not just cataloging, the library would end up a lot smaller.

Don’t get me wrong–there is also a fair amount of usable music, and a good selection of great music, including several winners of the ABA/Ostwald Award, original band music and transcriptions of orchestra music by some great composers and even some very interesting looking pieces by completely obscure composers who may deserve to be better known, but got lost in the process of building the canon.

But the amount of schlock (from the German schlag, for mine-tailings, according to Neal Stephenson’s excellent book Quicksilver) is just amazing.  A medley of songs by New Kids on the Block.  Arrangement after arrangement of Christmas music (all you really need is Leroy Anderson).  How many versions of “Ode to Joy” do there need to be?  Cookie-cutter Grade 2 and 3 band pieces that are clearly written with no purpose in mind other than to provide something that will score well at contest.

I can’t even begin to fathom why some of the things I’ve seen were even published.  Calling your medley Great Sounds from Today’s Movies is just asking for irrelevance within a decade (this is of mid-1970s vintage).  And what is with medleys anyway?  Why aren’t arrangers creative enough to come up with at least a variation on a pop tune or (heaven forbid) a development section?  Music of the Special Olympics?  Really?  I mean, I have no problem with the Special Olympics–it’s wonderful.  But really?

And marches–the marches!  Composers–there are enough marches now.  The shortage is past.  We don’t need to write anymore marches in the traditional style.  We don’t need to go dig up anymore marches from 100 years ago and give them new “editions.”  It’s done.  Write something else.  Again, don’t get me wrong–the march style is one of the major heritages of the band world, and I program a march on every band concert.  But seriously… stop writing them!

The era of historical development in this chunk of the library spans (from what I can tell) about 40 years, from around 1950 to around 1990.  In that time, there seem to have been two major eras.  The 1950s and 1960s were the glory years for bands, but composition hadn’t caught up, so publishers were just putting out everything they could get their hands on.  Lots of marches, lots of orchestral transcriptions, and some absolutely fantastic original pieces for band.  Plenty of garbage, as well.  This is the raw material of the canon that we don’t see when we look at the Classical and Romantic periods.  The sort has been completed.  I would say that even up to about 1945 or so, in that band world, we have a fairly well-established canon or original works for band.

The second era is the real problem here.  In the 1970s and 1980s, we start to see the beginnings of the “synergy” model.  Most blatant, I think, are the very large media companies of this era such as Warner Brothers and Columbia Pictures (owned by Coca-Cola at that time).  It is here that we begin to see piles and piles of pop song arrangements, movie tie-ins and TV show themes.  Adorno’s Culture Industry at work.  The result–original band composition largely stagnates (yes, there are still composers like Michael Colgrass and Joseph Schwantner doing incredible work in this era–more on that below).  As middle schools and high schools give their students a steady diet of tie-in music, serious composition shifts to the Grade 6 level, aimed at college wind ensembles (and the occasional amazing high school band).  Where is the Michael Colgrass or Joseph Schwantner of Grade 3?  (Truthfully, they are out there… it just takes some digging).

If I see one more piece that begins with trumpets playing an open fifth…

It’s early to make a verdict on the 2000s, but it seems like it has been another sort of mediocre decade for bands.  Lots of good pieces; nearly infinite bad pieces; but where is the 21st-century equivalent of Grainger’s Lincolnshire Posy, Husa’s Music for Prague 1968, Colgrass’s Winds of Nagual?  Where is the music that not only is wonderful to listen to but also makes musicians think?  In the end, it probably doesn’t matter whether my students can play.  It really doesn’t matter what score a band gets at contest.  Have we used music to make musicians and audiences think?

I’ll leave you with a sobering link–C.L. Barnhouse is a major publisher of music for band, one of the three or four largest in the country.  They publish band music almost exclusively, and should be a leader in the field.  They also have a large recording arm, Walking Frog Records.  These are their Editorial/Submissions Policies.  I will be having nightmares about this for years.

Library Matters

Monday, June 15th, 2009

One of my summer projects is getting the band library here at OPSU into a little better shape.  At  some point in the past (so I’m told), a band director here more or less bought out a sheet music store that was going out of business.  As far as I can tell, this happened about 1993 or so, judging by the vintage of much of the music involved.  This music has been shelved alphabetically and cataloged, but it doesn’t have nice storage envelopes like the older parts of the library.  So, last spring, I bought 1000 envelopes and now, summertime, I’m numbering and re-enveloping much of this stuff for the first time.

I’ve completed about 200 titles, and I can tell that the number of envelopes I was able to afford won’t be enough… this may turn out to be a multi-year project.  But I’ve discovered some things:

  • It turns out that Ohio, my home state, was at one time a hotbed of band commissions from both colleges and public schools.  Capital University, Walnut Hills High School, Oberlin High School, Carrolton High School, various honor bands.  It’s kind of cool.
  • In addition, I’m amazed at how many works I’m coming across by certain composers and arrangers:  John Tatgenhorst (another composer with Ohio connections), John Cacavas, Leland Forsblad, Warren Barker.  A funny story about Warren Barker, a very, very prolific composer and arranger who somehow never registered on my radar screen in middle school, high school, undergrad or my first few years of teaching.  Then, in about 2001, I noticed that my dad’s folder from the Greater Columbus Concert Band was just stuffed with arrangements by Warren Barker.  Then, like a new word, I started seeing Warren Barker everywhere.  For the longest time, I only saw his name on arrangements, especially of pop tunes and movie music.  I concluded that there was no Warren Barker–the type of arrangement involved suggested to me that he was just a house name, and that maybe new arrangers had their first few arrangements assigned to “Warren Barker.”  Then, I hit on the idea of searching for him on the internet.  Turns out, he’s done all kinds of Hollywood stuff–remember the xylophone thing in Bewitched?  That was his.
  • One of my predecessors here thought it was alright to take all the scores but leave the parts.  Darn it!
  • I found a piece by a man, James Jurrens, who was the director of bands at Southwestern Oklahoma State Universty–not the next closest state school, but the one after that.  The piece was actually published in Weatherford, Oklahoma, by a company which I am sure is defunct.  I need to find a concert to program this piece on, or perhaps push it toward the Oklahoma Intercollegiate Honor Band.

At any rate, that’s after four-and-a-half shelves (and I’m now through the Christmas music!).  Can’t wait to see what else is there.

International Horn Symposium

Saturday, June 6th, 2009

Don’t ever forget that classical music folks live in a small world.  I was at the International Horn Symposium at Western Illinois University this week for the premiere of my piece South Africa, (about which more later) and got renew acquaintances with several people I hadn’t seen in years.  First, I was delighted to see David Amram’s name featuring prominently on the day I actually got to spend at the conference.  When I was a senior in high school and at the MENC National Conference as part of the Ohio All-State Orchestra, Renee Goubbeaux and I were wandering the exhibits.  We stopped at the C.F. Peters booth to admire the score to John Cage’s 4’33”  (yes, it’s actually available for sale), when I noticed that manning the booth was the composer of the score next to it, who happened to be David Amram.  I had been composing for all of about two years at that point, and he had some very encouraging words.  I have always carried with me his good-natured approach and good humor and genuine kindness to a stranger.  He was the first “real,” “live” composer I ever met, and it was a good experience.  (The second was Libby Larsen, the same day, and the experience was just as positive.  It was just as great to get to talk to her a few years ago.)  I of course invited David to come hear my piece later that day, and he seemed to enjoy it.

Finding my seat for the concert featuring Amram’s music for horn (who would think a piece for horn, tenor sax and bassoon could work so well?), I noticed a man who looked familiar from the back.  It was indeed Colvin Bear, who plays in the Springfield (Ohio) Symphony Orchestra.  When I knew Colvin about eight years ago, his day job was teaching at South Vienna School, where I was the band director.  We played in Northeastern High School’s musical together, and I taught his son during his senior year.

At some point, I may delve into my feelings about that job, but I know that Colvin and I agree about many things about that position, and always did.  It is easy to admire someone who does the best possible work within a flawed system, continuing to excel despite unfavorable changes.

It turns out, as well, that Colvin was one of the first horn teachers of the wonderful player who commissioned the piece I was there to hear, Nancy Joy.

Nancy and I ran into each other on a plane from Columbus, Ohio to Albuquerque, New Mexico on New Years Eve 2007.  My wife saw her horn case, and struck up a conversation.  We traded ipods, and as I was thinking that I needed to write a piece for Nancy, she was thinking that she needed to commission me to write a piece.  Eighteen months later, the result was the piece she premiered fantastically with Fred Bugbee, her colleague at New Mexico State. 

It is always a pleasure to sit and listen to good musicians perform my music.  After the rehearsal in Las Cruces last week, I knew that this would be the case in Macomb, and it was just wonderful.  I’ve learned so much from these two performers that I will carry ahead with me as I write future pieces, and the feedback I got at the conference was overwhelming.  Just a fantastic experience.

Other highlights–I got to try an alphorn, and listened to most of a session about natural horn; Richard Todd gave some fantastic jazz horn performances–who knew horn was a jazz instrument?  I had some time in Chicago, and visited the Federal Reserve Bank and my new favorite sheet music store, Performers Sheet Music in the Fine Arts Building on Michigan Avenue.  I only wish my wife had been along!  The next trip I have planned for composition is to MInot State University in North Dakota in November, and hopefully Becky will be able to come then.

Revenge of Crackpot Theories

Monday, June 1st, 2009

Yes, I am a sucker for a good crackpot theory (plate tectonics, Schenker, Julian Jaynes…), and I revisited one of my favorites over the last week.  I was in high school when I first read Generations by Neil Strauss and William Howe, which posits a fantastic theory that social history can, in large part, be explained through an examination of 20-year cohorts of the people in a society.  They identify my “generation” as Generation X, born between 1962 and 1982, and my parents as Boomers, born between 1943 and 1961.  They suggest that there is a cyclic aspect to the preferences, parenting styles, approaches to authority and values of these generations.  Here is the website for their think-tank, LifeCourse Associates, where you can read up  their theories and buy their books.  Frankly, while I’ve remembered their theories over the years, I had forgotten how compelling they are in making their case.

The best part is when a crackpot theory turns out to be true.  Over the last week, I’ve finished Strauss and Howe’s latest book, Millennials Go to College, about the shift from my generation to the next in the undergraduate population.  This book will change the way I teach, beginning with this semester.  I recognize exactly the trends they describe in my students, and their suggestions make perfect sense.  Probably only the student evaluations will tell, but I recommend that anyone associated with collegiate education get their hands on this book, now in its second edition.