Posts Tagged ‘Neal Stephenson’

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.

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Anathem

Monday, January 26th, 2009

For the last week, I’ve been reading Neal Stephenson’s latest novel, Anathem.  I don’t even know where to begin, but it doesn’t always happen that the book I’m reading distracts me from everything else, and I can’t remember it happening in a long time.

I’ve been reading a great deal of non-fiction the last few years.  I don’t know why, exactly, it’s just been what has appealed to me.  But this book…I was somehow drawn to it from the moment I saw an ad for it in the New Yorker a couple of months ago.  I didn’t buy it the first time I saw it in the store, but when I went back to the bookstore after Christmas, and it was half-off, I figured I’d get it.  At nearly 900 pages, plus three appendices and a glossary, it’s hefty, but that has never intimidated me.

I’d never read any of Stephenson’s books before, so I didn’t know what to expect, but I was (and am) absolutely blown away by this book.  I’m a long-time reader of science-fiction, and I wonder if this is one of those books that may transcend mere genre fiction and head firmly in the direction of literature.  There are a few others that I think of in this category–Orson Scott Card’s Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus is the first that comes to mind, as does Robert Heinlein’s immortal Stranger in a Strange Land.

As a composer, “successful projection,” (to borrow a phrase from Vincent Persichetti) is often achieved when a piece creates a world that draw the listener in and compels them to stay.  Stephenson has done much the same thing here.  The world he creates is vivid, and wonderfully close enough to ours to be relevant, familiar and cautionary all at once.  The beauty of good science-fiction is that it presents things as they might be–it is really under the same constraints of believability that all fiction labors under.

The characters begin in splendid isolation, in a university-cum-monastery whose doors open only at certain intervals to allow them to mingle with the outside world.  The flow of information is restricted–an interesting idea, as the glut of low-quality in our society is already a problem (and I would include this blog in that category).  The academics inside the monastery grow their own food and live a very ascetic life, owning everything in common, but also study advanced mathematics and physics, astronomy and, presumably, most of the other trappings of science.

Through the book, as the result of outside events, one wall after another is pulled down, sometimes literally, and our academics are thrust into the wider world with little more than their wits and their acquired knowledge, all theoretical.  What follows (in the second half of the book) is yet another variation on a very old science-fiction subject–contact by an alien civilization.  It is quite possible that the characters are prepared by their previous isolation (and its end) to deal with these events in idealized, rational ways; the second half of the book is a playing out of the ramifications of the first half.

This is not an easy book… Stephenson has a wide-ranging historical scope, and you will need to understand quite a bit of science-fact, along with a little philology (in that sense, the book is similar to Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange) and the conventions of hard-sf writing.  The author does not lead you by the hand and explain every little thing (this would get quite tedious), so I found myself checking the glossary from time to time.

I can’t overemphasize my enthusiasm for this book.  It’s story burrowed into my brain this last week, and I haven’t been much interested in anything else since about last Wednesday–it was a pain to leave it at home when I went to work (if I brought the books I read for pleasure to work, I would rapidly be unemployed).  I can’t remember the last book that pulled me in thus–the last few years, when I have picked up fiction, it has often been Harry Turtledove, whose style is atrocious and forces me to pull myself through the text to find out what alternate history he has worked out; I may be done with Turtledove.  What I need to figure out is whether I am drawn to this book because of its interest in the things I am interested in–academia, science, religion, music, cosmology–or because it is just a good book.  That is why I’ve decided to do something I hardly ever do with books I’ve picked up just for pleasure–now that I’m done, I’m going to reread it.  I can’t even remember the last time I did this with a novel; I was probably in middle school.  I know that in 900 pages there are things that I missed, and things I need to revisit in light of the entire story, though.

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