Posts Tagged ‘composition’

Writing for Blue Streak (2)

Friday, October 19th, 2018

I’ve been digging further into the Cuyahoga River and the 1969 fire that spurred the nascent environmental movement in preparation for my new piece for the Blue Streak Ensemble. Part of the difficulty is separating myth from reality, Randy Newman songs and Mark Weingartner novels aside.

I’ve become fascinated, or remain fascinated, with the way that the river has been changed into a man-made object rather than a natural feature, at least for its last six miles. An amazing app of Cleveland Historic Maps has helped with this, as I have pinpointed the location of the fire, mapped it onto my own experience of the river over the last six-and-a-half years living near it, and begun to consider a shape for this piece. I’m amazed at how much industrial plant that was present in 1951, the year of a USGS aerial survey, is simply gone, leaving either scars or having been redeveloped. I’ve have read and heard about the decline of heavy industry in Cleveland, but to look at how it was crammed into the river valley in the 1920s and see the shape of the same places nearly a century later drives it home.

The scale of the places is just as  daunting–plants that employed tens of thousands of workers at their peak could surely ruin a river, and a lake. Little wonder that such places symbolized optimism and progress for the mid-century mind in the ways that they dwarfed their inhabitants.

I’ve also taken a page from Nico Muhly, who describes in a recent article his compositional approach. While my experience of being a composer is lived quite differently than his (I have no doubt that he won’t ever be looking to my writing or music for inspiration), I’m taking his idea of a one phrase synopsis and a one-page birds-eye view map of the piece quite seriously. My map is going to be based on a tracing of the shipping channel of the river–the lowest six miles that pass through Cleveland and that have be reshaped for the economic purposes of our species.

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Little wonder that by 1969 the river was lifeless, a murky, roiling soup of human and industrial waste–it was not allowed to be itself, from the 1820s when its mouth was recut to eliminate its final bend before draining into the lake, to the addition of steel-walls to fix the location of its banks, and straighten its meanders.

How to express all this musically? This is the problem.  I created a little sketch the other day–a mixed-meter passage that I could imagine opening the work, but I wasn’t satisfied with it, and I realized I wasn’t ready to put down notes yet, but I will need to be ready one day soon.  I still want to see the valley, the mounds of slag and ore and limestone; the enormous plants; the scene of the crime of this fire. I was hoping for a river cruise, but I have missed that window for 2018–the tourist boats have finished for the season, and it is this moment when one needs Friends With Boats, I suppose.  I spent some time on the river vicariously this morning watching video taken from lakers going to or from Lake Erie up the river to ArcelorMittal Steel, the path I would like to take, and that may have to do for now. Tomorrow, however, I will be taking Noah and Melia either to the zoo (if the weather is fair) or the natural history museum (if not). We make take some time to attempt to drive some of these areas as well, and soon, very soon, it must be notes.

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A student’s question

Tuesday, August 26th, 2014

I’ve been teaching composition to a very talented young man, Cooper Wood for not quite two years now.  This week he discovered Varese, and emailed me with a question:  

I’ve been doing a lot of listening to 20th century composers recently because I want to liberate myself from composing invariably in a tonal idiom. I’ve been listening to Antheil, Cowell, Varesé, and Hovannes [sic]. I love the sound all of them have, but every time I try to compose non tonally I get stuck and fall back on tonalism. When and how did you sort of break free from tonalism and started relying on other parameters of music to compose?

Here’s my response:

Boy, this is a big question.

We’ve never really talked about how I got going in composition. My junior year of high school, I had a free period and didn’t want to take a study hall, so my guidance counselor suggested our school’s gifted and talented program, in which about twenty of us pursued our own interests and passions, with a teacher to facilitate things (and make sure we actually did something). The year before, I had taken a class in computer graphics and sound in which we learned Encore, an early notation program, so I had developed a taste for moving notes around. Based on that, I decided that my “thing” would be composition, and I now had a class period every day to devote to it. I didn’t really know where to start, and I didn’t have very much guidance, which in some ways was a blessing, because I had to figure things out on my own. Up until this point, I loved doing music, was excited about it, and even thought of myself as rather good at it, but I had never thought of making it a profession before, and I wasn’t even taking private trombone lessons. That year, I worked through a part-writing book, practiced a lot of trombone, listened to a ton of music (the public library let you check out four CDs every week, and I had my driver’s license by that point, so I could get there when I wanted to go; they had a great selection of classical music, including a good amount of the cool late-minimalist stuff that was coming out in the 80s and 90s).

There was one other composer in the class, Renee Goubeaux, who was later my first girlfriend, and is now a cellist in the Toledo Symphony Orchestra.  We sort of spurred each other on, sharing stuff with each other and talking about pieces we wanted to write.  I had done a lot of reading, and was starting to put sounds with what I had read.  I tried to write a few pieces–I was interested in writing band music, canons, modal things that incorporated serial transformations.  We performed a couple of pieces as part of the performances that the class would put on.

The next year, my senior year, I did more of the same, culminating with my senior thesis, a concerto for trombone and string orchestra.  I played in the Columbus Symphony Youth Orchestra that year, and auditioned for colleges as a trombone performance and music education major.  I thought that perhaps composition would have some place in what I was doing in college, but I didn’t feel like I had been doing it long enough to make it my main focus.  I did take some private lessons as an undergrad with Wes Flinn, who is now on faculty at the University of Minnesota-Morris, and with Joel Hoffmann, who is still at CCM.  I immensely enjoyed taking orchestration and studying counterpoint in my theory classes, but I still didn’t consider myself a composer.

Despite all the listening I had done, I still didn’t understand that a composer didn’t have to be someone who wrote pretty melodies–I thought there had to be a catchy tune, somehow.  It didn’t seem to occur to me that what I was hearing in, say, Philip Glass, wasn’t about tune at all–it just sounded good.  In those pre-Internet days, scores were hard to come by, and I wouldn’t have necessarily thought to go looking for them, either.  So I spent years thinking of myself as an arranger, or as someone with an interest in composition but not doing much composing.

I’ve also realized that I never really was a “tonal” composer, in that I never took the time to really absorb the language to tonal music and let that be my pure expression.  Perhaps this is my background as a trombonist instead of a pianist, or just listening to years of rock music (my other favorite music), and then being dumped into the world of wind ensemble literature in college (although we played Persichetti in high school, too).  I have a real ear for orchestration and a strong rhythmic understanding of things (we’ve discussed this), but I’m not a tonal harmonic composer in my heart of hearts.

I also am not a part of what used to be called the “avant-garde,” and what these days we refer to as “new complexity.”  I don’t compose tonally, but I don’t compose in such a way as to be deliberately ground-breaking or difficult all the time.  I want to compose music that expresses what I want to express while also being something people want to hear and perform.  Sometimes I’m successful in this, sometimes not.

So–as much as I’ve been exposing you to post-tonal methods, techniques, materials, and repertoire, if you are, in your heart-of-hearts, a “tonal” composer, you need to write that way.  Study the rest, because it may come in handy someday.  What I’ve been trying to get you away from isn’t “tonal” composition, but writing that is merely a copy of historical styles.  There are reasons to write like Chopin or Mozart, but it’s difficult to be taken seriously in 2014 if that’s all you do (in fact, I’ve found it useful to engage in style copies at several different points in my career).

That trombone concerto back in 1994 was an attempt to be tonal.  I didn’t follow the “rules” very well, and as satisfying as it was to write that piece, it wasn’t very successful from a musical standpoint.  The very next piece I wrote, a song cycle, worries much less about keys and more about rhythm and the flow of melody–it was my first vocal piece, setting some of my favorite poems from high school English class.

In some ways, the important thing is to keep writing, keep listening, keep reading.  If I push you on to certain things, it’s because I think it’s my job as your teacher to try to help you get into a college program, and that means we have a hard deadline about twenty-eight months from now.  Your personal style–tonal or not–will develop as long as you keep writing, keep listening, keep reading.

I hope this helps!

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Being a “Real Composer”

Saturday, August 31st, 2013

2012-2013 was a surprisingly good season for my music–about 20 performances, all told, in a variety of places and venues, with a nice balance between premieres (Lady Glides on the Moon, Nod a Don, Le Voyage Dans La Lune and my Suite for String Orchestra) and second, third and later performances.  Some were simple–me playing Twenty Views of the Trombone at a John Cage Musicircus event at MOCA Cleveland, while others were more elaborate.  Some involved my making them happen (performances of my Piano Sonata and Moriarty’s Necktie at the SCI Region VI conference at West Texas A&M, a conference I cohosted), and others happened all by themselves (Selena Adams’ performance of South Africa on her DMA recital at the University of Colorado, right before winning a gig with the US Army Field Band.  In all, a very good year for my music, and 2013-2014 is shaping up as well, although not quite as spectacularly, but with an early start, a repeat performance of Lady Glides at the Parma Music Festival/SCI Region I conference in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, which, with a little luck, might lead to more, as always.

It makes me feel like a “real composer,” I’ve felt, along with acceptance into the Cleveland Composers Guild, for which one is elected, not simply enrolled.  March and April, in particular, felt very busy, and this fall, there will be a day (September 29) where my music is played at the same time in two cities (Dallas and Cleveland).  Another milestone is that many of these performances are happening without my being present, or even involved other than selling a copy of the sheet music through my website.  This is a big deal.  South Africa continues to be my “greatest hit,” which surprises me at times, but I’m also gratified by that fact.  I’ll be looking for a couple more sales of that piece as horn students begin to program their recitals for this year.

Going forward, the big challenge, I think, is to continue to get my music out there and build my reputation as a composer.  I have a sense that I need to become a “Cleveland composer,” which is a tougher nut, in some ways, than composing was in the Oklahoma Panhandle.   There are areas in which I’d like to see growth in myself as a composer over the next few years–handling larger forms, dealing with complexity, exploring percussion, working toward a greater depth of emotional expression in my work.  Over the summer, I had lunch with Donald Harris, my graduate advisor, and he stated that I was growing in interesting directions.  Another of my teachers, Tom Wells, heard my piece in New Hampshire and stated that he was proud of me as a student.  To have my teachers–themselves distinguished and experienced composers–feel that I have done good things years after my time with them is a good thing.

Being at Lakeland, where my tenure is not bound up in producing new compositions or having as many performances as possible, gives me the freedom to pursue projects at my own pace, and not to feel like I need to take pieces on, write another book, or submit to every conference of SCI or CMS.  Composition can be more artful now and not a part of my family’s livelihood.  My one composition student, young Cooper Wood, has been quite an inspiration this year as well, and as he enters high school, I’m hopeful that our work together will benefit both of us.

It is impossible to be without disappointments as well.  I still feel that Moriarty’s Necktie is a very good piece, possibly my best, but it has now been through the cycle of awards for band composition (Revelli, Beeler, Ostwold, etc.) without being recognized.  There will be more band music from my pen, of course.  One also does not apply to conferences and festivals without rejections; more rejections than acceptances, naturally.  While each of these hurts, my faith in my work is undiminished, and I will continue to write and submit.  I’ve been diligently informing ASCAP of all my performances, and applied for the Plus Award for the first time this year–between ASCAP and the website, it would be nice to see some monetary return, if only to cover costs, but I feel that that is probably still at least a couple of years off.

It isn’t about the money, though.  On the other hand, in our culture, money means that someone, somehow, values my music in important ways.  Money is the reason I haven’t pursued my dream project–a symphony for orchestra.  Not that I require an enormous payment, but at this point in my career, I can’t write a piece that won’t have a prospect of a performance, and so my Great American Symphony waits for a commitment.

Onward, then, into another year of being a Real Composer.

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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.

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White Heat

Friday, November 30th, 2012

For years, I’ve been telling students that they need to be composing daily, and I still believe it, but the reality of my approach to composition over the last couple of years has been something different.  I’ve become the person who doesn’t compose for weeks, then sits down and pounds out the draft of something in a few hours, tweaks it over the next few days and calls it finished.

This is not intentional, but for the last few pieces, it seems to have been working–from my Piano Sonata (composed in late 2010) forward, this has been my modus operandi, and it’s produced several strong pieces.  It’s as if in some sense I’ve paid my dues, and now the skills are just there, ready when I need them.  To try to use them every day might prove counterproductive–the result might be a dilution of the available resources (I’ve always thought of Saint-Saens in this way–he wrote so much music that the really good ideas were spread too thinly for him to be a “great” composer, and he became a merely facile one with a couple of memorable works and a lot of forgotten ones).

This new approach isn’t by choice–having a child under three and a wife who likes to see her husband regularly just isn’t conducive to consistently doing creative work once you throw in the full-time teaching position.  But it seems to be working.

I have no desire to continue this way, and I have no illusions that I’ll be able to maintain my “hot hand” indefinitely, but it’s interesting.  At some point, I’ll want to get into a better routine, but it’s thrilling right now to carry around ideas for a project in my head for a few weeks, and then pour them out into a new piece.

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Software Worries and Creative Comfort

Tuesday, November 1st, 2011

Like many composers, I rely (rather heavily) on a computer notation program to do the heavy lifting required when revising, editing and polishing my music, and also to create individual parts from scores.  The program I have used for the last decade, Sibelius, recently came out with a new version, the first since the company founded by the original designers of the software was bought out by a larger firm, Avid.  A perhaps-ill-conceived post on facebook (I try not to be negative on facebook) has led me to an exchange of concerns about the upgrade with Jesse Ayers, a fellow composer on the faculty of Malone College in Canton, Ohio.  Jesse and I had met previously at conferences but hadn’t really gotten to know each other, but somehow I found myself sending this rather personal email, and I’d like to make it an open letter:  It started out being about Sibelius and ends up being about my art and my understanding of myself.

Dear Jesse,

The linked divisi parts is a problem, and I have never liked the methods for inputing piano pedalling… I’ve suggested a solution for that, but it hasn’t been adopted yet.  Of course, I’ve learned to deal with both, and countless other quirks (so much so that I’m always surprised how many things I don’t even think about when I have to help my composition and orchestration students make their scores look presentable).  I dread the thought of changing to another program, but at some point, I’m sure that Sibelius will have run its course and we’ll all be switching over to the next thing. 

I’m at a funny age–people a few years older than me have a devil of a time with anything to do with computers, but people a few years younger than me never knew anything different–my first year of college was the same year the World Wide Web debuted; I didn’t know what email was my first term, but by Christmas, I couldn’t live without it.  In composition, it’s the same: Sibelius has become a second language to me, and I wouldn’t dream of trying to compose a major piece without it, but folks just a few years older than me completed their master’s theses in manuscript.  My first experience with notation software was with Encore on Macintosh in the early 90s, and I took away the notion that it was more trouble than it was worth and spent several years learning to write manuscript, which I think, in the end, was good experience, but after I graduated from college and got my first computer, it wasn’t long before I wanted a notation program.  I fiddled around with NoteWorthy composer for a while, and was able to make some readable but pretty cruddy-looking scores.  In late 1998, though, Sibelius came out, and I was one of the first thousand people in the US to buy it.  I read the manual cover-to-cover (a much more reasonable proposition then!) and dove in.  I was teaching middle school band at the time, and having a terrible time of it… so bad that I was looking at law schools, but having an outlet in my arranging and composition probably saved me for music (for better or for worse!). 

Sibelius is probably the reason that I’m a composer, although I’m loathe to admit that to anyone.  Just as I wouldn’t have even attempted to write the book I just finished without a word processor, I couldn’t possibly have become serious about composing without help from the computer.  I don’t think I lean on it too much–I do more sitting at the piano than I used to, especially for vocal music–but even if the first draft of a piece is manuscript, the second draft is in Sibelius.  If it goes away or changes into some unrecognizable form, I’m at the point now where I will do what needs to be done, but I will miss it terribly.  As psychopathic as it sounds, its interface has been the most constant thing in my life over the last ten years as I went through divorce, job changes, graduate school, a second marriage, too many out-of-town moves.  I would miss it like I would a friend–more than some people I have called “friend,” even.  Don’t think I’m strange about this–perhaps you understand what I’m saying–Shakespeare would miss The Globe, Bill Clinton misses the White House, a blinded astronomer misses her observatory.  Sibelius is where I work, and where what I think of as my most meaningful work of the last decade was accomplished (I hope that my students find and found my teaching meaningful, but it isn’t meaningful to me in the same way that my art is meaningful).  I was already worried by the buyout, and yesterday my worries proved correct: I’m accustomed to working with people who view Sibelius the same way I do–as a friend, as a key component of their work.  I’m sure there is some of that at Avid, but Sibelius is not their creation, not in spirit.  I worry that it will become like a superficial film adaptation of a great novel. 

Sometimes I worry about stupid things, I guess.  But this is the problem that we all face as artists in the 21st century: the means and methods by which we create our art are continually shifting around us.  For all his “agony and ecstasy,” Michaelangelo knew that marble was marble and would respond to his chisel in reasonably predictable ways.  Changing Sibelius too drastically would be like substituting a new, better, synthetic marble and still expecting David to appear.  Perhaps this is what his “agony and ecstasy” were about–the Sistine Ceiling is a masterpiece, but the powers that be forced Michaelangelo to work in a way that was more or less foreign to him.  The result was stunning, of course, but a wrenching experience for the artist.

You caught me after band rehearsal, so I apologize for waxing philosophical… someone gets this email just about every week lately!  I’m going to head home to my wife now.  I believe this is going to become a blog post.

Best,

Matt

 

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A break from Mahler

Wednesday, August 26th, 2009

A break from Mahler, just to say a few words about my own work right now.  And before I do that, I’d like to link to John Mackey’s blog entry about writing for band vs. writing for orchestra.  I don’t agree with everything, but if composition doesn’t work out for John (and it seems  to be working out nicely), he probably can fall back on humor.  At any rate, his entry “Even Tanglewood Has a Band” is wonderfully entertaining.  I’m still not sure where I land on the issue he discusses, but it was good for a laugh.

It’s been a busy few days in my composition world.  Tuesday night was the second band rehearsal for my new band-with-chorus piece, “Progress Through Knowledge.”  I haven’t rehearsed one of my band pieces from scratch in a very long time, but this one seems to be going well.  I’m happy for the opportunity to make the little changes in scoring that I knew would be necessary.  Helping this piece be born looks to be a real pleasure.  Since many of our band students are also in the choir, there will be the inevitable conversation I have to have with Joel Garber, our new choir director, about how we will share these students.  It will help greatly that our numbers are up this year in both band and choir at OPSU.  (Recession or not, we have more students and more returning students university-wide than we’ve had in twelve years.  Sweet!)

Meanwhile, while I’m taking one of my pieces very much in hand as the premiere approaches, another is getting set for a performance this weekend in a city I’ve never visited, by performers I’ve never met, for a concert I can’t attend.  This is a first experience for me.  I wrote “Passacaglia” for flute and cello on August 2 during New Music Hartford’s 60/60 Composition Contest.  My piece was selected for a premiere on Sunday, August 30 in Hartford, Connecticut.  I’m disappointed that I can’t get there, and it feels strange to have completely “let go” of one of my children.  I’ve made myself available to the performers, so if they need advice, they can call or email, but I’m not sure the piece will require that.

Last of all is the exciting collaboration I’ve started with Dr. Sara Richter, dean of liberal arts here.  She’s written a wonderful one-act play about “Black Sunday,” Palm Sunday 1935, which here in the Panhandle saw the worst dust storm of the Dust Bowl years.  I’m working on incidental music, a first for me (although I made attempts at it during my “juvenilia” era).  I’ve decided to write the piece for piano, percussion and clarinet.  More on which later, but so far it seems to be going well.  The premiere will be during Guymon’s commemoration of Black Sunday this Spring, and will be the first piece of mine to be performed outside an academic setting in Oklahoma.

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Functional Harmony

Thursday, May 14th, 2009

I have a little series of little tonal pieces that I write for use in second and third semester theory.  I got going on them because we don’t have a very large library here at OPSU, at least in the area of scores, and I needed pieces I could throw on the exam or midterm without worrying that students had seen them in piano class.  In the end, it was just easier to write something new, and it has turned out to be more fun.  It really gives me a chance stretch my chops a little bit and write in the style of Mozart or Chopin.  Here’s the latest… it took about a half-hour to write from start to finish, and the point was to provide a piece that included a sequence and all the types of non-chord tones we studied this semester but that didn’t involve secondary functions and other third-semester stuff.

The latest in a series of Itty Bitty Pieces.

The latest in my series of Itty Bitty pieces, a chance for me to practice writing tonal music.

My wife enjoys these pieces greatly, because they sound pretty and they don’t last very long, so I always make sure to play them for her, just to let her know that I can write such things.  The question has come up, now and then, as to why I don’t write such music all the time.  I mean… it’s pleasant, it’s easy to listen to, it has the potential to be quite meaningful.

The problem isn’t this music–the problem is me.  I could write lovely sonatinas and waltzes and scherzos and all the other wonderful music that Mozart and Schubert and Chopin gave us.  I might even find the work rewarding.  Over the last few years, I’ve discovered that melody isn’t really the challenge I once thought it was.  I used to think, back in my high school days, that a great melody was the key to writing great music, and I had this inferiority complex about it, because I wasn’t just brimming with melodic inspiration.  If I actually thought of a melody, I would rush to find staff paper to write it down–even getting out of bed in the middle of the night because I was afraid to lose it.

It’s not about melody, folks.  It’s about harmony.  Most melodies are fairly boring without their underlying harmony, and functional harmony has proved fascinating to our culture in a way that we are still trying to deal with.

Then there are the harmonic composers out there.  Some of my composition students over the years have got some theory knowledge in them and are set to invent the next “Tristan” chord.  “What do you think about this chord right here?” they say to me.  “It’s a blah-bitty-blah-blah-blah with an F# in the bass… isn’t it amazing?”  As I listen to them, all I can think is… it’s not about harmony either.

It’s about rhythm.  I’m prepping to teach Music Fundamentals over the summer, and as I’m rereading Duckworth’s book, I notice that he agonizes over a definition for rhythm.  I still like the definition I used to use when I taught sixth-grade general music–rhythm is “the interaction of musical events with the basic pulse.”  I’d like to know what Duckworth thinks about that.

I’ve long viewed myself as basically a rhythmic composer, feeling that the other musical elements follow.  A piece that works, to me, works first on a rhythmic level, not melodic or harmonic, and I rarely encounter problems with a composition that can’t be solved rhythmically.  For me, rhythm is what makes a piece work.

Which is why I can’t write functional harmony and consider it to be my authentic voice.  I need harmony to be subservient to rhythm, not at best an equal partner as it is in Chopin or Mozart.  I don’t know if it is my training as a bandsman, by immersion in popular styles like jazz and rock for so many years or just the way music seems to work to me.  I enjoy music with shifting meters, metric modulation, syncopation, assymetrical meters and all the rest.  I don’t reject harmony completely, but I can’t carry on writing I-IV-V-I and thinking that I’m doing something authentic–I would always be channeling some other composer, and usually doing it badly.  I think of one of my favorite songwriters, Billy Joel, who wrote a set of Fantasies and Delusions in a more or less classical styles.  Nice, entertaining little pieces, but not as good as their models.

That said, I’m glad that I can write my Itty Bitty pieces, or a jazz tune, or arrange horn parts for a rock band.  That stuff is just as important to what I do, as it turns out.  We live in this world of tonal, often functional music.  When I compose, it isn’t meant to be background for shopping at the Gap–it’s meant to be something people sit quietly and contemplate.  It’s meant to help me reach out to the rest of humanity, first through collaboration with other musicians and artists, and then by speaking to an audience.

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A long trip

Tuesday, March 31st, 2009

I’m currently stuck in Denver at the tail end of a long trip, but it’s been fantastic.

First, I went with the OPSU choirs on their trip to Chicago.  Our choir director, Matt Howell, did a fantastic job planning and executing a great trip while still keeping it within a reasonable price range for the students.  The choirs performed, but more importantly, they got to spend a week in the big city, navigating public transportation and taking in cultural things that just aren’t available in the Panhandle.  The London Symphony Orchestra gave a fantastic concert of Prokofiev with Gergiev and Feltsman–core repertoire.  The woodwinds in that group are simply astounding, and really made the Classical symphony sparkle.  I first saw Feltsman play about 15 years ago in Cincinnati, and he hasn’t lost any of his charm or technique–the Prokofiev 2nd concerto was putty in his hands.  The program ended with Prokofiev’s fifth symphony, which was absolutely sublime.

We were fortunate to get both a backstage tour and take in a performance at the Lyric Opera.  The production values and musical technique made me feel like I’d never heard opera before.  If you are in Chicago, be sure to take in the Lyric.

On our last full day, I spent the afternoon at the Art Institute of Chicago, which was absolutely worth the price of admission, even with their modern and contemporary collections currently in transition to the new building opening in May.  Then it was across the street to hear the Chicago Symphony play Mendelssohn (Italian), Prokofiev (left hand concerto), and Beethoven (Eroica).  I dare say it may have been an off night for the group… no need to mention any names.

Then it was back to Garden City, Kansas, where the choir headed back home and I hopped a plane to begin the rest of the trip.  I have now appeared in New York City as composer and trombonist.  David Morneau, Rob Voisey and Vox Novus set up a wonderful concert in the Jan Hus church in Manhattan, and I had a great time.  I played my trombone and electronic piece “Let Everything that Has Breath Praise the Lord” and my solo trombone piece, “What It’s Like.”  David, as always, had a fascinating collaboration with a dancer and a visual artist.  I only wish I was so cool.  A big “thank you” to David for making that happen.  Vox Novus does a concert at this fantastic venue on the East Side on the last Sunday afternoon of every month, so be sure to check it out.    It was a thrill to visit New York again (I hadn’t been since 1996) and to be there “on business.”  David and his wife Jolaine were wonderful hosts, and around the corner from their place in Astoria is an Italian bakery that I will remember until I die… amaretti!

So… I’m now stuck for the night in Denver because my flight home was delayed and I missed the connection back to Garden City, delaying my return to my beautiful, wonderful wife.  I still have one more stop on my “six weeks of insanity” that began with Oklahoma City in Feburary… the national SCI conference in Santa Fe.

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Writing for Piano

Tuesday, November 25th, 2008

Well, if you’ve been to my site, you know that I’m supposed to be at work on a cycle of piano pieces.  I wish I could say that I’m stuck on them, but that would imply that I’ve started–with a musical to conduct at the community theatre, the Musicircus to put together, then a trip to Nashville and a few concerts and basketball games, I have yet to write Note One.  Very embarrassing.  I paused to write a little choral piece after I finished the new horn and marimba piece for Nancy Joy, thinking that later that week I would dig into the piano pieces, but it hasn’t happened yet.

Not that I haven’t been thinking about it.  I have the first piece complete in my mind–I can hear the beginning, the ending, and have an idea about the middle.  The cycle is going to be called “Starry Wanderers” and each piece will deal with a planet.  Perhaps a more scientific version of Holst’s best-known piece (all based on astrology, which offends me as both an intellectual and a Christian, though the music is amazing in places).  The first piece is Martian Meditation, a reflection on the dry, barren, cold world that is next out from us, a reminiscence of what is to come (or perhaps what could one day have been–has humanity peaked in our exploration of space?). 

Anyone who has been in the same room while I was playing piano knows that I am no pianist.  I do what I can, and I think I play well enough for my theory teaching (although it doesn’t always feel that way).  So I’ve been casting about a little bit.  Starry Wanderers will be my first extended work for solo piano, and in some ways I’m stumped.

I’ve been working my way through the Beethoven Piano Sonatas now for over two years, and I’m starting to wonder what I’ve really learned from this exercise about the piano (I’ve learned plenty about Beethoven).  I suppose I would boil it down to this:

  • Piano music is at heart rhythmic.  The effects that Beethoven gets are often obscure on the page, and difficult to comprehend when played in “slow motion,” as I inevitably must, but when Ashkenazy takes over for me, they are there, clear as day.
  • Piano music is at heart harmonic.  The ultimate question to answer deals with what notes to push down, and this question has to be taken much more seriously than I have grown accustomed to.  First, not every note is immediately available to the ten fingers.  This is one thing that makes Beethoven so difficult–the mere density of notes means that not all of them are easy to acheive.  Second, because of the limited timbre (even compared to, say, a piece for clarinet and piano) and limitations on dynamics (the two hands can play separate dynamics, but fingers on the same hand can do so only with difficulty), the members of a chord have a certain equality on solo piano that they don’t necessarily have in other media.  As a rhythmic rather than a harmonic composer, this presents a challenge.

An additional problem is made clear at the blog Sonatas and Interludes.  This is a major problem–how to write new piano music that isn’t just more George Winston.  I don’t see myself as a “new-age” composer, and I certainly don’t want my music to sound that way.  On the other hand, there is something to some of the cliches of the form.  My first hearing of the music of Valentin Silvestrov left me very disappointed because it seemed very “new-age” in idiom.  I resolved (because I have an unexplainable fascination for all things Ukrainian) to really listen again, and beneath the surface, I have come to believe that there is more than just trying to do whatever it is that “new-age” music purports to do for performers and listeners alike.

So… this is my problem.  Tomorrow is a day off from teaching, but I will be at school, hopefully left alone long enough to get the first piece in the set down.  Perhaps an update.

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