Archive for January, 2013

Moving Wood

Tuesday, January 29th, 2013

When I was in high school, my father took up a new hobby:  woodcarving.  He was inspired to do so by the work of Spirit Williams, a woodcarver and artist who lived in Columbus, and whose work is, frankly, wonderful, at least in my memory.  One of her more fantastic pieces, Kenya Bush,  used to hang in the administration building at the Columbus Zoo, in a public area, and I remember it as a mural of African animals, in high relief.  I also remember seeing a work in progress, an in-the-round depiction of the Last Supper.

I was surrounded by creative people as a young person, and but my connection with Spirit was mostly secondhand–my father eventually took regular classes with her, but I spent time talking to him about his work, as I was fascinated with the way he learned to take a plain piece of basswood and use simple hand tools and his eyes (and Spirit’s eyes as well) to shape deeply realistic relief carvings.  Through my father, I learned three lessons Spirit that have served me well as a composer (and so the implied fourth lesson, that all artists can learn from other artists, no matter what the medium).

The first:  treat your materials with respect.  In Spirit’s studio, this meant that you could have a glass of water at the workbench, but it had to be a double-walled plastic cup, to avoid condensation that could drip onto the work.  In my work, this means writing always with the eventual human performer in mind.

The second:  don’t buy a new tool until you’ve done everything you can do with the tools you already have.  In woodcarving, this means don’t spend sums of money on specialized knives and gouges that promise to get you out of a jam when, with patience and ingenuity, the tools you already know how to use will serve you better.  Tools are not the answer: creativity and patience are.  In composition, this means having a “toolkit” of techniques, devices, and methods at the ready, and knowing when and how to apply each one.  To my music, it means not going for the flashy, novel, or merely schematic ideas when something more meaningful might be created through means that are more conservative, and, usually, more accessible, and–I’m out on a limb here–likely more durable in the end.  I learned this from the experience of a woman who began carving with a kitchen knife on a shelf pilfered from the closet in her bedroom–she discovered that she was able to make art with these sparse tools and materials, and in the end, it is the art that matters, not the medium or the technology that manipulates it.

The third:  sometimes you are being creative, and sometimes you are just “moving wood.”  Relief carving begins with a flat surface, and the excess material must be moved away.  It takes attention and technique at every phase, but clearing the field around the carving proper is one of the “chores” of the process–crucial, yet not as explicitly creative.  In composition, this is the endgame of my process, particularly when I’m composing for band or orchestra and switching from a short score to a full score.  In some ways, it’s the least frustrating part–predictable, full of skill as much as art, even somewhat capable of being automated by my notation software (ahh… the time saved over manuscript by the computer; in manuscript, it would be drudgery, but in the digital workspace, it is a romp).  The beauty of the “moving wood” phase of the work is that it can be done hodge-podge and higgeldy-piggledy–sessions of a half-hour can be productive, unlike the earlier parts of the process, which require either weeks of carrying ideas around in the mind, or uninterrupted hours in which to pound out the first drafts.  I currently have two projects in the “moving wood” phase, and being able to see the light at the end of the tunnel on both is encouraging, and gives me a sense that my time is being well-spent.

So, those are three things I learned from my dad’s woodcarving teacher, Spirit Williams, without ever picking up a knife.  Hopefully, they will serve others just as well.

Regaining my Sense of Snow

Saturday, January 26th, 2013

In the five years that we lived in the Oklahoma Panhandle, it only snowed two or three times, and the sheer novelty of seeing snow made me not look at it too carefully. Yesterday I went out to my car in the faculty lot at Lakeland, though, and found it covered with about another inch of snow (yes… one of the joys of living in Northeast Ohio is cleaning snow off of your car multiple times in a day). As I was brushing, I noticed that the snow was extra fluffy–if I were a skier, I would probably have loved it. Looking closer, the flakes were very large, and mostly planar, like little pieces of plastic that almost looked fake… up close they were shiny and had the six-pointed structure we associate with snow flakes, writ large so that I could examine it easily. I realized that in the six or eight times that it’s snowed this season, the flakes have been different every time. I knew this–the eskimos famously are supposed to have 30 different words for snow in their language–but the reminder was fantastic. Winter can get to be grind, but we have to remember to stop and notice the beauty of Creation whenever we can.

Film Scoring, Self-Taught

Monday, January 21st, 2013

It’s important to try new things, and I was inspired by BJ Brooks’ presentation of his silent film scores at the SCI Region VI Conference back in October.  Now that I’m conducting the Lakeland Civic Orchestra, and I can pick our repertoire, I have the chance to try my own hand at such a thing.  The orchestra at West Texas A&M, where BJ works, has been presenting silent movies with BJ’s scores every other year for the last few years, and they’ve been doing feature-length films, which is an exciting proposition.  I decided for Lakeland’s first effort to choose a shorter film (more on the difficulties of that later), but even at 13 minutes, this will be the longest single movement I’ve written for orchestra.  The film is Georges Melies’ Le Voyage Dans la Lune, from 1902, a somewhat groundbreaking piece from a groundbreaking era in cinema.

If you watch the film, you can see that Melies is operating in an era when the technology of film was brand new.  Many of the things that we take for granted about cinematography aren’t present–the movie is shot as though the action were happening on a stage, and the camera were an audience member, with no close-ups, no pans, no framing shots… some of the things that make film what we think of it today.  What is present, though, is the magic of cinema, which is not surprising, since Melies started out as an illusionist of note before switching to film.  Particularly fascinating are his special effects, which are somewhat crude, but surprisingly effective.

Composing to this has been interesting–I’ve completed the piece in short score, and will be orchestrating over the next couple of weeks.  I’m not the first to score the film–there is a score by George Antheil, and at least one uploaded to archive.org.  I made the decision early on to stick to sounds that could have been a part of the musical sound of 1902, so my score has references to Debussy, Elgar and Strauss, although not specifically.  The tricky part has been making things fit–identifying the places where the music needs to change, and making the notes change at the same time.  This is my first film score, unless you count my entry a few years back for the TCM Young Composers Competition.  Since then, Sibelius has added the ability to sync a score with a video, which has been invaluable–both in finding “hit points” and in seeing how my ideas fit the action on screen.

The style that’s coming out is different from how I usually write, which is somewhat intentional.  I’ve ended up with more repetition, and a great deal more of a “tonal” style than I’ve customarily used; in some ways, this is some of the most predictable music I’ve written.  Part of this is a decision to use the sounds typical of 1902, and part of this is knowing that I’m dealing with an orchestra and audience who aren’t expecting dissonant, angular music that might have been my first choice.

The sense of time in the music is intriguing as well.  Watching the movie with no sound, alone, as I have several times, is somewhat difficult.  A few weeks back, some of the orchestra members and I watched it together, again with no sound, and the experience was more rewarding.  But–now that I have a draft score to add to the film (which I now know very well, of course), the story seems to come to life–it will be incredible to see and hear it with live instruments!  The dimension that the music adds to the film is even more important than the “dimension” that 3-D aims to add.  Thirteen minutes that seemed to positively crawl by in silence are enlivened by the music in a way that explains why, as Richard Taruskin writes, “the movies were never silent.”

The other challenge has been dealing with the inherent flaws in Melies’ narrative–events are repeated (the moon landing, the celebration at the end), and the pre-launch events dominate the structure in a way that is somewhat unfortunate.  Melies was dealing with this brand-new idea–telling a story in moving images–so it’s not surprising that his early work moves somewhat creakily, but making my music work with this narrative has been tricky in the sense that some things go longer than I would like them to, while others peter out just as they are getting going in the score, but there are no more images for them.  Melies was really making science-fiction, which, for a fan of Star Trek and Star Wars, is exciting–he made this movie at the same time that Jules Verne and H.G. Wells were inventing the literary genre.

The premiere is in April, and rehearsals start in five weeks, giving me time to finish the scoring and get the parts to the concertmaster, if I work hard.  Look for more as it progresses.

I’ve also spent some time over the last few days helping Daniel Perttu with his new trombone sonata, which has been interesting.  It’s been interesting to consider someone else’s ideas about my own instrument (it’s almost been an education in Dan’s instrument, the bassoon, because I feel like much of what he’s written for the trombone would work better on bassoon). It leads me to wonder about how I know what I know about “how” to write for an instrument, and how best to communicate that.  Certainly part of my training as a music education major has been useful here–the chance to take “methods” classes and get to play every instrument, even if only a few notes, makes writing for that instrument a different experience.  This is why I required two instrumental methods classes when I wrote the composition degree plan at OPSU, and I would push for the same thing again if I had the chance (now that I’m at a two-year school, I don’t think it makes much sense to be thinking about an Associate of Arts in Music Composition).  I recall an incident in Jean Sibelius’ biography where he spent an afternoon with an excellent English horn player–I don’t recall whether that correlated with his composition of The Swan of Tuonela.  It’s too bad that he didn’t write any film music.

A Challenge for my Cohort

Tuesday, January 1st, 2013

2013 is my 36th New Year (and I’ve got lots of good friends for whom it is number 37).  For those of us born in 1976 in the United States, there were (at one time) about 3.1 million of us–not a particularly high number given the booms before and since (there were about a million more in my son’s birth year, 2010).  This doesn’t take into account those of us who were prevented from entering the world by contraception or abortion, but that’s only a statement–this isn’t a political blog.  There will never be any more of us, and I’m sure an actuary could give us an idea of how many are left.  That makes this post important, and I’m speaking to my cohort, specifically, but to all of us (humans, that is).

I know people my age who are dead before their time.  I know people who have essentially been lost to addiction, to abuse, to every other form of death-in-life that our species has devised for itself.  We mourn those who are gone, and of course, we help those who can be helped.

More important, though, halfway through our short lives, is that we pick up the slack they have left for us and continue to make our contributions to the Human Project.  Every one of us has some unique thing that only we can do–raising our children, improving our communities, making art, understanding our world–and we must all press on an do it.  Do it for those who have gone before, and for those who will follow.

Write that book, start that movement, talk to a lonely person, worship as you will, study that phenomenon.  Your species needs it.  You don’t have to have an advanced degree, or a huge pile of money, or enormous political power.  Whatever it is that you are passionate about, whatever you “geek out” over, this is your thing.

My fellow Bicentennial Babies (and those close by):  our time is probably ahead, not behind.  Our generation isn’t known for its amazing positive contributions, and we have often been in the shadow of our parents and grandparents, but leadership now falls to us as more and more of them pass on.  Be a part of the Human Project.  Make your impact, and if your life is too messed up to make an impact, then now is the time to get things in order.

This is not a New Years Resolution as much as it is a challenge to make the most of what we’ve been granted in this life and to make our mark on the legacy our species will leave behind.  Only you can do what only you can do.

Happy New Year!