Working on Music

I had an excellent and productive day today. I spent the morning meeting with Roberto Limón, an excellent guitarist--possibly the best in Mexico and certainly the leading performer of new music. He told me that he has had eighty-five pieces written for him: concertos, chamber music and solo works. I just made a contribution myself: obviously he needs more music!

We met because he and soprano Cherie Hughes are going to be premiering six songs from my Songs from the Poets series here in San Miguel de Allende in January as part of the Pro Musica concert series. He wanted to go over some things in the songs that were novel, such as my use of a paper clip attached to a bass string in the song "Listening to a Monk from Shu Playing the Lute" on a poem by Li Po, the famous Tang dynasty poet and drunk. I used the paper-clip effect, which is quite wonderful, to imitate the sound of a distant Chinese bell. There is a trick to it, which I was happy to reveal to Roberto. Other questions about the songs had to do with tempo, where a sudden change in sonority fell and places where Roberto felt he really needed to depart from the way I had organized the slurs and accents. This was in the last-written song, on a poem by John Donne called "Song: Goe and Catch a Falling Starre". The song has a strongly rhythmic vocal line with lots of hemiola and an unrelenting guitar obbligato underneath. Roberto said it reminded him of that ferocious gigue to the 2nd English Suite by Bach, which had never occurred to me. The whole thing just popped into my head in the shower one day. But I realized that he really understood it, so was happy to give him full freedom to work out those slurs and accents as he thought best. People rarely realize that the composer is often not the best interpreter of their music. Listening to Léo Brouwer, normally a spectacular performer, play his own Elogio de la Danza in concert convinced me of that. So I am eager to hear how Roberto is going to work out that obbligato. I do notice one thing: in his copy of the score is about the most meticulous right and left hand fingering I have ever seen. Oh, here is that Bach Gigue:

I used to play that suite quite a lot with a flute-player who apparently had no need to breathe, so some of its DNA must have crept into my song.

I also gave Roberto copies of my two completed suites for guitar and fumbled my way through bits of most of the movements to give him an idea. He was quite taken with the Suite No. 2 and promises to premiere it in the second half of next year. Sounds like a great idea to me! Roberto is that rare musician who loves and understands new music. Of course, my music is very much related to music of the past; so much so that out of the nine movements of the two suites, I only made the claim that two were absolutely original and unique to the guitar: one because it is based on a kind of synthesis of 6th century chant and Chopin's fioratura and the other because it comes out of the experience of wandering around outside at dawn in a Canadian winter when the temperature is around 50º below zero--and I'm pretty sure that hasn't been depicted on guitar before.

I'll try and put together some clips of Roberto so you can hear his playing and, after January, I hope to have some of my songs in the can, performed by him and Cherie Hugues.

Wonderful stuff, music...

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Moment Form, Mobile and Night Rain

My usual position with regard to much avant-garde music is that it is less aesthetically valuable than it is usually portrayed. Every 20th century composer seems to be promoting themselves by coming up with new ways of writing music that often seem worse than the old ways of writing music! Music that is new every year, with new techniques is a lot like fashion and not much more important. But as always, it is the details that are important. While the mere fact that someone has invented a new way of writing music is not necessarily interesting, it is the case that there can be great works of music written in all sorts of different ways. UPDATE: Alban Berg, for example, showed that you could write wonderful music using 12-tone procedures.

"Moment Form" is one of the more interesting musical experiments of the 20th century. It is worth reading the Wikipedia article. The inventor of 'moment form' was Karlheinz Stockhausen whom I had the pleasure of meeting in Salzburg in 1988 when he brought his ensemble to the Salzburg Festival and gave a week of performances of his chamber music. I didn't discuss moment form with him, but rather how he incorporates theatrical elements into his chamber music. Stockhausen distinguishes between different kinds of form: moment form, strictly speaking, is a "mosaic of moments" each moment being a self-contained section. "Moment-forming" is a way of writing music that avoids narrative arc, in which the music, one might say, "lives in the now" and is not directed towards a goal. A different kind of form is what Stockhausen calls 'polyvalent' in which the components of the structure can be ordered in different ways. Others have called this kind of form a 'mobile' as the different elements are in a free relationship. Composers have been using these and related ideas to write music since the late 1950s.

One thing the different approaches have in common is that no two performances can ever be the same. This has appealed to a lot of composers and performers as it seems to free us from the horrible Procrustean bed of recording technology where, as soon as a performance is recorded it becomes frozen for all time--a very unmusical thing!

Let's listen to some examples. Here is the piece that originated moment form, Momente, written in various versions between 1962 and 1969:

Though it may seem as if there is a direction, an overall structure, that is really not how it works. There are different kinds of moments, or modular components, and different performances use different collections of them, in different orderings.

In the 1980s Anthony Genge, a Canadian composer I knew quite well and had worked with on several occasions, gave me the score to a new piece called Night Rain for alto flute and guitar. There were three 'movements'. Each movement was written on a single sheet of score. The alto flute part occupied the top half of the page and the guitar part, the bottom. Each part consisted of a number of measures of music, but each measure was a separate section and the measures could be played in any order. There were no indications of coordination between the flute and guitar. So, a musical mobile or, perhaps also moment form? The flute player that I performed this with, Richard Volet, and I noticed that there were certain recurring elements. For example, one brief melodic cell, three notes rising and falling, occurs a few times in the flute part and also comes in the guitar part. As Richard and I rehearsed the piece together we discovered that the usual issues of ensemble were simply irrelevant. We never needed to coordinate beats or dynamics or phrasing. Each part was independent. We did discover that we needed to know when each movement began and ended. But we developed no obvious signals to coordinate this. We just kept playing the piece and pretty soon we knew what the other player was doing and when the movement was over.

After we had played it for a while and performed it in concert a few times, the composer asked us to record it for him, which we were happy to do. We had gotten pretty good at it and recorded it in a single take, which took both Tony and the recording engineer quite by surprise. They had settled in for a nice long chat in the control room and we were done! Here is that recording with some photos of the west coast of Canada that seemed appropriate:

I have included right after the titles a photo of the composer, Anthony Genge and a photo of myself at the very end, but I was not able to find a photo of Richard Volet. Apologies!

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The Most Audacious Composition of the 20th Century

The title of this post is itself a most audacious claim, is it not? After all, if there is one thing true about 20th century composition it is that it consists of wave after wave of composers and performers trying to outdo one another for sheer audacity. The reason for this lies in the ideology behind the notion of modernism and the avant-garde. Art must be progressive, that is to say, each new composition must be truly new in some significant way and that has usually been interpreted as new in technique. This approach really began with the New German School of Liszt and Wagner in the mid-19th century, but it steadily accelerated in the 20th century and fewer and fewer composers were able to resist it. Perhaps the last hold-out in Western Europe was Jean Sibelius and he found his ability to compose slipping away by the mid-1920s after which he wrote no more large-scale works. One of the most important figures in the progressivism of 20th century compositional technique was Arnold Schoenberg who arrived at his final method of composition with twelve tones--serialism--by 1923. I would speculate that the fact that this coincides with Sibelius ceasing to compose might not be entirely a coincidence!

Historian Richard Taruskin captures some important aspects of modernism in music by referring to it as "maximalism". More and more, once the traditional structures were broken down and cast aside, the one sure path to the future for most composers was greater and greater and greater complexity. I'm not talking so much about length or the sheer size of the orchestra, both those were well under way in the 19th century with the operas of Wagner and symphonies of Bruckner and Mahler. No, the complexity extended to the saturation of harmonic space with acceptable harmonies containing not just three or four notes, but seven or even ten! The degree of dissonance was constantly being increased. When Schoenberg finally came upon a way of setting aside the entire concept of consonance, new ways of structuring music had to be found. Again, it was always in the direction of greater and greater complexity and ways were found to structure tone rows, those building blocks of twelve-tone music, that involved complex kinds of symmetry. New and complex vocabulary was also invented so that we can talk about mysterious things like "hexachordal combinatoriality" and be talking about a piece of music, not mathematics!

These trends just went on and on to ever higher and higher levels of complexity. That wasn't the only thing that was happening, there was also the greater inclusion of new kinds of sounds, more percussion instruments and the use of new performing techniques. But the basic trend was always toward greater complexity. You start to see the problem, I think? Just as if you throw all the colors on the canvas and mix them together, you always end up with greyish-brown, if you constantly have a high level of dissonance combined with great rhythmic complexity, all orchestral music starts to sound a bit the same. Then what do you do? People like Karlheinz Stockhausen just kept adding more: by the late 1950s and early 60s he was writing enormously complex and dissonant music for three and four separate orchestras.

Ok, that's the back story. Now I will tell you how I ran across what I think is the most audacious piece of the 20th century. As an undergraduate at McGill in the mid-70s I would sometimes go to the listening library during a free period and just try and listen to some new stuff. I would wander randomly down the shelves and grab a few discs that looked like they might be interesting. Usually they would be pieces of newer music because that was a special interest of mine at the time. I don't recall much of what I would listen to, but this would be pretty typical:

• Ligeti
• Boulez
• Stockhausen
• Nancarrow

As I only had forty minutes or so, I would often just put on the beginning and if something didn't grab me pretty quickly, I would move on to the next disc. Let's recreate the experience. First some Ligeti, Continuum for harpsichord:

Not a well-known piece, but one I was listening to at the time. Next is an excerpt from Le Marteau sans Maitre by Pierre Boulez:

Here is Gruppen for three orchestras and three conductors by Stockhausen:

Notice that the complexity level is very high for all these pieces--and if you study the scores, you will just see more complexity! But this complexity was not just restricted to big orchestral music, as we saw with the harpsichord piece. One composer managed to find a way to create music for piano that was simply too complex to be performed and he did it by directly cutting piano rolls. Here is a piece by Conlon Nancarrow:

So imagine me in the library, listening to some or part of various pieces and then, I put this on, Drumming by Steve Reich:

In a context where EVERYTHING is designed for a great degree of complexity, this is simply astonishing. I was bracing myself for -- what? And then this, a single beat on a drum? Honestly, I nearly fell off my chair. You see, doing just what everyone else is doing, but just a little more, or doing it in a different medium is just not all that audacious, now is it? But if everyone else is writing fiendishly difficult music using hexachordal combinatoriality and you go out there and hit a little drum with a little stick, well, that's audacious! I'm sorry I can't put up the version I was listening to, on Deutsche Grammophon, but it is not on YouTube. Another audacious thing is that the whole piece is one hour and twenty-four minutes long, divided in four parts. The first part is nothing but those little drums and the development of one simple rhythm. Then he does it all over again with marimbas, then with xylophones and then puts them all together. Simple. And, to my mind, absolutely devastating to the musical aesthetic that says that the only road forward is to keep adding layers of complexity.

There are rare times in music history when all should be swept aside and composers need to return to the absolute fundamental basis of music. That was what Steve Reich was doing in 1970 when he wrote this piece, the most audacious composition of the 20th century.

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Classical Cheerleading

The Guardian's series on contemporary composers by Tom Service is one of the more ambitious sets of articles about classical music to appear in recent years. Full points to the Guardian classical music section for giving lots of space where elsewhere classical coverage has been more and more squeezed. I previously posted on this series here.

But as I read the articles I notice an underlying deficiency. The articles, on an extensive group of contemporary composers, tend to be all-praise, all the time. This is not real education of the reader, this is cheerleading. We go to great lengths to avoid any suggestion of actual aesthetic evaluation these days, for fear of appearing 'negative' I suppose. But simply avoiding or denying aesthetic value distinctions does not make them go away. The issue is fundamental. Imagine you walk over to your CD shelf (or, to be more current, go to your iPod). Unless you only own one CD or only have one playlist, you have to choose what you want to listen to. On the very simplest level, you do so based solely on how you feel at that moment. But, if you own a bunch of music, as time goes on, you might discover that you keep coming back to certain pieces and listen more rarely to other pieces. In other words, you have noticed an aesthetic difference that is not just dependent on your mood. Congratulations, you have just discovered aesthetics.

A professional writer on music in a widely-distributed mainstream publication surely must have gone through this process. Perhaps they have even made some sort of formal study of music. Given this, were they not prohibited from making or mentioning any aesthetic judgments, they would surely be sharing them with us instead of carefully avoiding any hint of 'favoritism'. Oh, for Pete's sake, not all contemporary composers are equally worth our time. They are like books: some need to be read slowly and thoroughly, others skimmed briefly and still others cast aside with great force. But there is no hint of this in the Guardian series. Pauline Oliveros, whose music explores the narrowest of ideas and effects, is given the same weight and consideration as a composer of wide influence such as Ligeti. If you have no aesthetic judgement then you can't explain why J. S. Bach is a really important composer and W. F. E Bach is not.

Isn't it also true that this kind of approach puts the composer on a pedestal and keeps us from getting a real sense of what is going on in their music? There is nothing like comparing more successful pieces with less successful ones by the same composer to really give you insight into what he or she was trying to do. To give full credit to Tom Service, I notice that here and there he does get into this kind of discussion. One example is in the most recent essay, on John Adams where towards the end he writes:

To my ears, the saturation of the Chamber Symphony or a piece such as his orchestral Guide to Strange Places does not pay off, because there's both too much detail in the chromatic density of some of the harmony and not enough real complexity, and because Adams has a way of subsuming the diversity of his musical sources beneath the sheen and dazzle of his own language, so that everything sounds weirdly homogeneous. But if I'm struggling a bit with his recent work – and I found Doctor Atomic similarly disappointing compared with Klinghoffer or Nixon – there are many that would disagree.

The previous article was on Ligeti and it is rather hagiographic--perhaps with more justification. But in simply marveling at and praising Ligeti's music, the writer fails to reveal to us the very significant challenges that faced Ligeti. Unlike some 20th century composers, there is nothing of the charlatan in Ligeti. He experienced the horrors of the century at first hand and was able to communicate them in the music. The Requiem is a well-chosen example:

Tom Service describes this as "one of the darkest visions of musical terror ever imagined" and yes, it may be. But it is a traumatized vision, making it suitable for the soundtrack to horrific visions as in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Notice this about the piece: there is really no rhythm, no melody, just harmony, texture and dynamics. And that harmony is one big tone-cluster from beginning to end. This is very painful, obsessed music. And for that reason it is musically impoverished. Yes, it is fascinating to analyse, analysts tend to like Ligeti, but it is still obsessive and focused the way a nightmare is focused.

Ligeti had a terrible dilemma: he was a very gifted composer, but, because of the context of the time, he had to break away from the traditions of the past. Forced to be a member of the avant-garde by history, he was still at odds with some of its principles. This is where some of the satire in his music comes from. The piece for 100 metronomes is the perfect example. I posted on it here. In the absence of being able to compose in relation to the music of the European tradition, he looked for inspiration virtually everywhere else, from world music, to pop music, to the American 'minimalists'. I posted about some of the consequences of this here. 

But while I find the series falling short of the ideal, it is still a lot better and a lot more extensive coverage an introduction to the music of the last fifty years than we usually get. Can I give it two and a half cheers?

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The Guardian's Contemporary Classical Music Guide

The Guardian newspaper is performing the laudable task of trying to introduce its readers to contemporary music. Back in April I posted on the introductory essay and found it a bit wanting. Let's check back and see how they are doing. So far they have put up articles on nine composers. It looks quite intriguing because while some of them I know something about already, like Zimmermann, others I know much less than I should, like Pauline Oliveros and John Zorn. There is even one composer, Helmut Lachenmann, that I have never heard of! Here is his bio in Wikipedia and the guide in the Guardian.

I am very happy to find that my first impression was really quite mistaken. This is a good series and might help to introduce a lot of people to music they wouldn't otherwise know. The approach and writing style of Tom Service, that I found so annoying in his introduction to the series, turns out to be just right for the essays on the individual composers. His generalizations didn't hold much water, but his enthusiasm for each individual composer is infectious. So, my bad!

The plan is to take up a different composer each week for a year. Let's have a closer look at Helmut Lachenmann. He was a student of Luigi Nono who was both a member of the post-war avant-garde, and a very committed Marxist, much of whose music had political content. One of Lachenmann's pieces for ensemble linked to in the Guardian essay is this one:

The first half of this movement (a section from a larger work) is like a very fast gigue or tarantella. Unlike a lot of contemporary music, the rhythmic texture is quite clear and impels the music forward. What is unique are the timbres chosen. The music skitters along with squeaks and pops in a quite charming way. Oddly enough it calls to mind Mendelssohn's scherzo to A Midsummer Night's Dream:

The second half of Mouvement changes to a slow, pointillist texture that perhaps resembles Bartok's 'night music'.  Another work linked to in the Guardian essay is the first part of Lachenmann's third string quartet from 2001, Grido.

This music again focuses on timbre, with extensive writing for string harmonics and glissandi. Tom Service refers to Lachenmann's music as "extreme" and "focused" which is what we are hearing here. The idea of adding new timbral resources has been used by many, many composers in the 20th century. The difference here is that certain timbres are very tightly focused on. Lachenmann is no "kitchen sink" composer.

As a guitarist, I was particularly interested in Lachenmann's piece for guitar duo, Salut für Caudwell:

I chose this clip, of a live performance, over the complete one found in the article so that we can see the kinds of actions that create the sounds. Like Mouvement there is a very tight focus on a certain set of timbres and a fairly consistent rhythmic structure. You may or may not like the results, of course. I tried to get a look at the score for the piece both to see how it was notated and to see what the text was the guitarists speak during parts of the piece (though not in the excerpt above). Alas, I got sucked into file-sharing hell and wasn't successful. However, Wikipedia has an article on a Christopher Caudwell who died fighting in an International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War. He was a literary critic and Marxist, much of whose writing was published after his death.

Let's have one more clip, the first part of Concertini from 2005.

Lachenmann's music utilizes many kinds of sounds--scrapes, snaps and thumps--that were not traditionally considered to be 'musical'. The early 20th century composers, such as the Futurists, tended to throw a bit or a lot of noise into the music and stop there. But Lachenmann integrates these kinds of sounds into the music by focusing on them, by using them as recurring, integral 'themes'. They are no longer 'noise', but musically significant sounds. Just not pitched ones. Interesting...

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Music Journalism

Reading music journalism and watching television is like living on hot dogs and potato chips--you don't realize how bad they are until you switch to real food. I canceled my cable ten years ago and I'm glad I did. But I do occasionally stumble into music journalism if I'm not paying attention. I was sent to this article, on contemporary music, by a link from this blog.

I think music journalism must have fallen precipitously from where it was fifty to a hundred years ago. Back then people like George Bernard Shaw and Donald Francis Tovey were, respectively, writing criticism and program notes. Tovey's program notes were later collected and published as Essays in Musical Analysis. But now?

Here's how that article starts:

The music of our time is the music of all time. I've just come up with that, but it's a pretty good motto for a new strand of what you'll be seeing on this blog for the next year. Next week, we launch a new series on contemporary classical music. Each week, I'll be giving a brief overview of the life, music, and online presence of the composers who matter the most to today's musical life, who have made the greatest difference to the last century's musical history - and, to be honest, the ones that mean the most to me, and, I hope, to you too!

Once you wean yourself off this kind of writing, you start to see how annoying it is. For example, what could the first sentence possibly mean? It is like the long scene with the Architect in the second of the Matrix films that put a stake in the heart of the franchise: it sounds vaguely cool, but that is only because it is meaningless. This is the kind of pseudo-prose that would be right at home in a blue jeans commercial. Baby! The second sentence is nearly as annoying for two reasons: it tries to justify the first sentence, which is impossible, plus, misuse of the word "strand". One characteristic of journalists is that they have only a foggy acquaintance with the meaning of the words they attempt to use. The rest of the paragraph is just the usual hand-waving. Well, that was so much fun that it makes me want to 'fisk' the second paragraph as well:

Of course, a mere 52 weeks and 52 composers isn't enough time to reflect a cross-section of everything that's happening in contemporary music, but it is enough time to curate a new-music gallery that should open ears and minds to the music of today.

How does one "reflect" a cross-section, anyway? Special goggles? The very vapidity of the prose makes me want to have nothing to do with anything "curated" by this person.

What sent me to the article was the very clever phrase mongered by Alex Ross:

"Contemporary" is broadly defined as "born in the past hundred years," plus Elliott Carter....

Heh! Elliot Carter is, of course, that astonishingly long-lived and productive composer born December 11, 1908 which means he is coming up on his 104th birthday. And still getting commissions, by the way. The only person you could set beside Carter would be Jacques Barzun, born November 30, 1907, which means he is possibly the only person in the world of arts and letters that can call Elliot Carter "sonny".


The problem with music journalism is that it accepts all the current ideologies without question and mixes them with irrelevancies, personal biases and enthusiastic attacks on straw men. You come away from reading music journalism stupider and less informed than when you started. Hey, it's just like television! Do you insist on examples? Very well. Here is the head and sub-head for one of the articles in the series:

The five myths about contemporary classical music

Contemporary classical music is devoid of melody and appeal, all noise and no fun. At least, that's the cliche. But this is music that is very much at the heart of our modern world

A myth? So this tends to imply that contemporary classical music does have melody and appeal. I wonder if we could find a counter-example...

Or:

Or:

Catchy tunes! And so immediately appealing! I'll pass on fisking the article itself because I would just start citing those logical errors in medieval Latin and we don't want that. Ignoratio elenchi! Petitio principii!


 But of course, there are certainly pieces of contemporary music that are melodic and appealing:

It's music journalism that needs to be avoided, not music.

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The Composer's Role

That last post, about iconic cultural figures, got me thinking. Just what is it that a composer is trying to do? A classical composer, that is. We have a lot of husks of exhausted ideologies of the past littering the landscape of classical music. As I hinted at in the last post, there are pieces celebrating victories and mourning defeats in the 15th century; pieces showing the transcendent truth of Catholicism in the 16th; pieces that advance the principles of radical humanism in the 17th; pieces that express the truth of Protestantism in the early 18th; pieces that depict the revolutionary energy of the late 18th; and on and on. In the early 20th century there were musical ideologies that proposed wiping out the past and creating a new, more rational future. That hasn't turned out quite as they imagined! Many books could be (and have been) written just on musical ideologies, though they are often presented as the New Truth and not as just another ideology.

Given the precarious situation classical music and composers are in in the 21st century, just what role should composers be taking on today? Can they, or should they, try and express the central truths, or issues of our time? Or should they try and transcend all that? Both options have been chosen at different times in music history. Should classical music try to become popular, or should it absorb things from popular music, or should it ignore popular music? All these options have also been chosen in the past.

It's a conundrum... One thing that composers have usually done is try and please their patron, whoever is paying the commission whether it is a pope, a circle of Florentine nobles, the Canada Council (a separate body, funded by the federal government, who commissions most new music in Canada), the National Endowment for the Arts or the New York Philharmonic. In the past, doing so would usually result in music that might be of some real cultural significance. When various popes supported Palestrina, that guaranteed that his music was considered of real significance. Similarly with the activities of the Florentine Camerata. When it comes to the folks that pay for new music today, it would be an extremely interesting exercise to determine just what it is they want and why. The choices of the popes and the Florentines made sense at the time. How do the choices of the Canada Council or the NEA make sense now? What if they are calling the tune according to an obsolete ideology?

I'm putting all this in the form of questions because I really don't know the answers. What I suspect is that there are some serious fractures in our culture and, while there is music that certainly expresses this, it doesn't tend to tell us much about the nature of those fractures, and if it does, it probably does nothing to heal them.

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Tortured Music

From the ever-useful website of Norman Lebrecht comes this interesting story. Here is a link directly to the website for the recording. If you click on the samples, there are brief extracts from each piece. The one for Stress Position consists of a low register pedal in irregularly accented quick notes. A "stress position" is a kind of interrogation technique involving putting someone in various positions for extended periods of time. Simply forcing someone to stand for a long period of time can be very painful. So, depending on the variety and length of time, stress positions have been determined to be a form of torture or at least "inhuman and degrading treatment". Despite this, they have been used by the British against the Irish Republican Army, by various police forces and by the US. Here is what the composer, Drew Baker, says about his composition:

Pianists spend lifetimes alone in small rooms with antique instruments. This intimate scenario is defined by an atmosphere of confinement as well as an overt physicality. The piano receives the weight of the body and disperses sound.

These simple and rather obvious facts regarding intimacy, physicality and space are essential to my piano works. Whether addressing extra-musical and political topics or simply existing as "absolute music," every piece on this recording attempts to lay bare the visceral intensity that directly results from the act of playing.

 He is making a connection here between the self-imposed stress positions that pianists live with (and all other musicians, for that matter) and, apparently, the interrogation technique, I suppose, because he doesn't say that explicitly. On his website there is this further comment on the piece:

Throughout the duration of Stress Position, the pianist must play an unrelenting series of repeated notes at opposite ends of the instrument. This causes the arms to remain extended for the duration of the work. In addition, each hand is stretched to further extremes as pitches are slowly added.

 It seems, therefore, that he is subjecting the pianist to the same sort of, well, torture, that the US armed forces use on terrorists. Interesting idea. Again, I am assuming that the purpose of this is twofold: as he says, to involve the pianist and the listener in the "visceral intensity" of playing, and, by having us experience an analogue to the stress position torture, to developing empathy for those subjected to this kind of interrogation. There are other similar piano pieces out there that might have a similar effect. The piano part to Terry Riley's In C, for example:

Which goes on for a very long time, indeed. Or Vexations by Erik Satie:

This is just a brief extract. The whole piece, repeated 840 times, goes on for hours and hours and hours...

My question is, would someone use the same sort of aesthetic technique to create empathy for the victims of 9/11? I.e. will we be seeing a piece soon where the performers and perhaps the audience will be engulfed in flaming jet fuel?

Looking back at my piece on aesthetic virtues and sins, I wonder how many sins this piece exemplifies? Number 1 probably, perhaps numbers 2 and 3 as well.

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Young Composers

A post like this is an opportunity to praise young composers irrespective of their music, just for being. Or an opportunity to put them down because I'm in training to be a curmudgeon. Or an opportunity just to report on their existence. Instead of that, I'm going to actually tell you what I think.

Vivian Fung is a Canadian composer, born in 1975, with a doctorate from Julliard (who teaches composition there? --oh, Robert Beaser and John Corigliano among others). She cites as influences Asian music, specifically Javanese and Balinese gamelan. Let's have a listen to her String Quartet No. 2:

Was that a ragged and sloppy performance or is it written that way? Without the score I can't tell. Asian influence, yes. Underpinning it all seems to be the pentatonic theme of the beginning. But I hear a lot of Bartok. Nothing there made me want to hear more. It had the frozen harmony that perhaps comes from a pentatonic structure. The frenzied passages seemed to me merely frenzied, that is, not justified by what preceded them.

Next, Nico Muhly who has been getting commissions right, left and center. He is even younger than Vivian, born in 1981, also a graduate of Julliard in composition. His opera Two Boys just premiered at the English National Opera last summer. Let's listen to a piece from his album Speaks Volumes:

I don't hear much interesting there. I've gotten somewhat allergic to drones lately as they seem to have become a cliche. Speaking of, surely at this point in time the climax achieved by accelerando is also a cliche as is the crescendo on one note? That's what I hear: cliches. True, there is some lyricism in the high violin melodies, which is a good thing. But the form, like that of a rondo with a limp, leaves me cold. Not a very pleasurable or interesting listen.

Both these young composers seem to be composing Standard High Modernism: jagged rhythms, dissonant, the usual rhythmic and dynamic cliches. Take a chunk out of either piece and would it really be distinctive in the way a chunk out of a Beethoven or Shostakovich string quartet would be? And uh, Julliard, isn't this about thirty or forty years out of fashion? Haven't we had post-modernism since and whatever it is we are doing now?

Let's hear something by another not-quite-so-young composer:

Now that has two things the other pieces don't: harmony and a groove...

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Who Killed Harmony?

I've put up a few posts on the problem of harmony. Here, here and here. I'm putting up another one because a friend of mine just sent me an email about a concert she attended of the Del Sol String Quartet playing new music. She commented that there was virtually no harmony, everything was layered counterpoint. Yes, I think that there are two main schools of thought among composers these days. One school is still loosely following the modernist tradition begun by Schoenberg that emancipates dissonance. Without the tension between consonance and dissonance there can be no functional harmony so they relied mainly on counterpoint and canon. Serialism, with its use of a tone-row along with its retrogrades and inversions is the prime example. But even in the absence of that technique composers in this school tend to avoid any suggestion of functional harmony. The other school, often called 'minimalist', unashamedly uses consonance, but as they tend to sit on one harmony most of the time, thus making it by default 'tonic' also don't really have functional harmony. The third post linked to above discusses this in detail. Oh, one other school is the neo-classicists, but they tend merely to imitate traditional forms with "wrong notes" so their harmony isn't functional either. The result in all three cases is to my mind unsatisfactory because music without harmony is a lot less than it could be.

For the last few years I have been exploring how to write truly harmonic music again. I think the first thing composers should shed is their irrational fear of harmony. Don't worry, even if you write functional harmony it isn't going to sound like Beethoven or Brahms anyway--unless you try to parody them. What you need to do is develop a sensitivity to harmonic function and let your instincts go to work. There are two models that I think can be useful. One is Debussy as I talk about here. One thing I am surprised by is that while, on the one hand, everyone talks about the huge influence Debussy had on 20th century music, but on the other hand, everyone avoids being influenced by his music. Dig into it and you will see that underneath the beautiful 'impressionistic' surface, he is using a lot of harmonic function to structure the music. The other model is Shostakovich, anathema though he may be to composers. He is certainly appreciated by audiences and performers. And yes, he very much uses functional harmony, though of a kind that has scarcely been examined by theorists. Another composer who continued to write functional harmony was Benjamin Britten.

The lesson that most composers seem to have gathered from the paroxysm in music that happened in the 20th century is that functional harmony is no longer a possible option. But I think that music with no functional harmony is crippled both in terms of how you can structure it and in terms of the expressive content. So let's rediscover functional harmony. We don't have to follow the old rules, we can make up new ones, or just rely on instinct. Here is another piece by Britten:

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Music for Six Guitars

I was reading Alex Ross today and he mentioned that Ben Frost's Music for Six Guitars was going to be played in New York. Now I'm a big fan of music for multiple guitars, having written often for that kind of ensemble, so I had a look on YouTube. Here's one version:

Here's another version with a look at the performers:

I was going to just say "whaddayathink"? But I can't resist: this sounds like Steve Reich got mugged in an alley by Iron Butterfly with just a touch of gamelan.

Nope...

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The Part and the Whole

Someone just sent me a painting by Mark Rothko:

and commented that it looks like a tiny detail, part of the robe, from one by El Greco:

So I immediately thought, hmmm, if that is so, perhaps we could hear a piece by Steve Reich:

as being a sped-up tiny fragment from a piece by, oh, Brahms, perhaps:

Steve Reich says he never, never listens to music between Bach and Debussy, so he might not have noticed.

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Overdetermined vs Underdetermined

These words apply to how much information a composer puts into a score. Very early polyphonic compositions were underdetermined with respect to rhythm because a good system of notating rhythm hadn't been developed yet. Sometimes a composer might underdetermine a score for a specific purpose. For example, this unmeasured prelude by Louis Couperin is written entirely in whole notes because the rhythms are very free and left up to the performer.

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My piece for guitar ensemble that I put up in this post is underdetermined with regard to co-ordination of the different instruments because I wanted to see if I could write a piece that had no ensemble issues. But the overall trend for the last 500 years has been towards more and more specific details in the score such as dynamics (non-existent before the 18th century), rubato, playing techniques, accents, articulation and timbre. Here is an example of a 20th century piece, chosen pretty much at random:

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In this we see a fairly high level of determination: tempo is defined with a metronome marking of 100 beats per minute; nearly every note has a separate dynamic marking (mf); each note also has a specific articulation (. or - or >) indicating a short, long, or accented note; dynamics are often connected with hairpins indicating a swelling or diminishing sound; and later on there is a scattering of additional information such as poco pesante (a bit heavy) and poco marcato (a bit marked).

Greg Sandow has a long and illuminating review up on his blog of a Schoenberg concert in which he talks about the problems performers have with the music and how it is rarely performed both accurately and with heart (musically). I think the reason is that the music is overdetermined. Schoenberg is simply asking for too much control over how the players perform each and every note. If you want to see how truly mad this can get, have a look at a score by Brian Ferneyhough. His piece Cassandra's Dream Song looks like a very complex piece for piano, but is actually for solo flute.

At the other extreme there are composers like Morton Feldman or John Cage who intentionally underdetermine their scores. Here is a page from a piece for four pianos by Feldman:

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No dynamics and virtually no rhythms. Some graphic scores don't even indicate specific notes. There are reasons behind why a composer chooses to over- or underdetermine a score. It is up to the performers and the listeners to decide if the composer made the right choice!

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History of a Composition

I've been a composer nearly all my life, but for most of that time composition has had a distinctly secondary role. Often I composed simply because I needed repertoire for a certain combination of instruments. I have a good friend who is a fine violist and there is absolutely no good repertoire for viola and guitar so I have written a couple of pieces. I used to coach guitar ensembles and discovered that even after months or years of rehearsal, it is extremely difficult to get multiple guitars to play exactly together. Just listen to a recording of Julian Bream and John Williams. I wrote one piece that was an etude in ensemble, but that succeeded more in demonstrating the problem than in solving it. Finally I decided to write a piece for guitar ensemble that would pose no ensemble problems: the guitars would simply not be required to play together! Here is the piece:

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Click to enlarge

Let me explain how this works: there is a conductor who cues the beginning and the progress through the piece. The score is a flow-chart. You start at the top and follow the lines, therefore everyone plays the top box, but then you have a choice of one of the two boxes below. That top box is a rather odd effect where, by crossing the 6th and 5th strings over one another and holding with the left hand and then by playing rasgueado (a kind of flamenco strumming) you get a nicely noisy, chaotic sound. I premiered this with an ensemble of ten guitars and having all ten start with that is a nice shock to the audience. With the next level down, all the guitars are either playing Bartok 'snap' pizzicatos or harmonics. As we move through the piece, pitched notes gradually predominate until at the ending we hear only melody. The way I conduct it, I keep going back to that opening chaotic gesture which I bring back in by cuing one or more guitars to return to that box, threatening to overwhelm whatever is going on. I end the piece by having a few guitars move to the final box, #10, while most stay with the chords on #9. Then I mix in more and more of box #1 until the melody is lost in the chaos. Then I chop off everyone except the guitars playing the melody and let it just float around and trail off...

It is actually pretty effective in concert and, since no-one has to worry about ensemble, they can, theoretically, be more creative.

The music obviously has flamenco influences as we can see from the chords of #6 and #7. I have never analyzed the piece, it was written purely from instinct.

The original title was "Forms" which is quite appropriate as the piece can have many different forms and will be different every time you play it. It is really a kind of toolbox for building a piece from scratch with the contents laid out, but with the flow determined completely by the conductor and players. I changed the title when it was published together with two other pieces for guitar ensemble because I had this great title and the piece it was supposed to be the title of never got past the sketch stage. It was originally going to be a 'string quartet' for mandolin, guitar, harpsichord and double bass.

I have a recording of this piece and if I get a chance to convert it to a digital file I will update this post with it.

But in the meantime, comments?

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Glass vs Reich: A Music in Process

The two big names in so-called minimal or process music (even though Philip Glass now calls himself a classicist) are Philip Glass and Steve Reich. Can we compare them? Should we compare them? How could we not compare them?

Here is the first piece on YouTube by Philip Glass:

And here is a piece by Steve Reich that is as similar as I could find:

Very different, of course, but the point is to observe the differences. What about string quartets? Here is one by Philip Glass (I recommend not watching the distracting video):

Now that's interesting. It sounds a bit like Glassworks in the two against three rhythmic patterns, but here and there is a sequence that almost reminds you of Vivaldi. Now for some Steve Reich. Unfortunately we don't have a simple string quartet by him, so I've chosen the first movement of his Triple Quartet for string quartet and two pre-recorded quartets:

That is certainly more complex than the piece by Glass. It ends abruptly because it goes without pause into the second movement. How about a large ensemble? Here is the first movement of Glass' Cello Concerto:

Steve Reich does not write for conventional orchestra, but here is a piece for largish ensemble:

So what do you think? My impression, without having studied the scores to any of these pieces, is that harmonically and rhythmically Philip Glass is consistently more tied to the past, especially when he takes on larger forms. The two against three of Glassworks for solo piano, the first excerpt, is something we find in a lot of previous composers, along with the fragmentary voice-leading. Steve Reich has an approach that is less easy to find precedents for. His idea of form is additive. His harmonies tend to unfold whereas, in shorter pieces, Glass' are static. In the string quartets there seem to be more interesting, and more difficult to understand, harmonies in the Reich piece. In both the string quartet and the cello concerto, Glass tends to revert back to harmonies and textures that we might find in Vivaldi or a host of orchestral pieces. But in the pieces by Reich, it is hard to hear previous music--at least from the Western world. Additive techniques and layered textures such as in the Music for 18 Musicians remind you more of gamelan than anything else.

The conclusion? We probably have to wait at least fifty to a hundred years, but my intuition is that while both are writing some fascinating and beautiful pieces, there seems to be more substance in Steve Reich. Just a preliminary feeling...

What do you think?

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Contemporary Music Trends

This is the title of this article in Slate. I'll have some comments later after I have had time to ruminate...

UPDATE: This is an excellent article giving an overview of a lot of contemporary (and not so contemporary) music. The excerpt from the writer, himself a composer, is particularly interesting. Here is, to my mind, the money quote:

The archetypal avant-garde sensibility was captured in the dictum "Make it good or make it bad, but make it new." I suggest that it's time to take that attitude out behind the barn and shoot it. Standing in the middle of the sometimes interesting chaos and anarchy that is the scene in all the arts, I suggest in its place: Make it old or make it new, but for chrissake make it good. Over the years one has encountered too many splendidly innovative, yet boring and annoying works of art.

 Oh, heavens yes! I think this is exactly what I was saying in a few different posts. There is such a thing as good music and bad music. A composer should really be trying to write good music--doncha think? One final thought: isn't it odd that so much of the musical style of the avant-garde has found its true métier in the soundtrack to horror movies? It's a perfect fit!

UPDATE: A lot of people seem to be finding their way to this post via the Slate article. Welcome! Here is another post that you might find interesting: http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2011/07/beauty-and-music.html

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