zio davino

Hegel, Georgy Girl

2011-12-24T13:47:00.000-05:00

Way back when I was happily on sabbatical (I haven't had an unhappy one yet), I said a few things about the slow movement of Mozart's 23rd piano concerto K. 488 and things that fall out of various analytical approaches — or more particularly, one particular one. The overriding approach was to use music theory to try figure out how the tortured big-interval opening at the right became the strangely ordinary and oddly celebratory repeated C-sharps and simple tonic arpeggations of the ending (whose answer seemed to be a high D left hanging in the piano several times receives its long-term resolution at the piece's end). Go ahead and read the post. As a static blog, I'm not going anywhere.

As a teaser, I made mention of something that my dissertation's second reader suggested I check out in relation to this piece — the Hegelian dialectic. And in the post I suggested looking into it — or at least some cheap imitation of said dialectic as applied to music, and to this particular piece. It turns out said Hegelian dialectic is like a Facebook relationship status: it's complicated (I've used that joke before, and I will again).

In the intervening time, I have taught the piece again in second year theory, and have received a few more papers written about it. Also in the intervening time, I spent time in France with, among many others, a Hegel scholar. So of course I am terrified that as a mere musician, my approach, at least as far as philosophers are concerned, will be more appropriate for nine-year-olds than for grownups. What do I know from Hegel?

Hegel answers: I'm dead. Leave me alone.

Okay, so I'll speak in hushed tones.

When I talk about the K. 488 movement, it takes about two and a half hours to get through everything I have to say about it, and it's a multi-layered approach. The point, of course, is to explain why somebody like me (or somebody who is me (or somebody who me (or somebody me (or somebody (or))))) would keep going back to it — and the corollary, how in great music like this there's always more to be discovered — you just have to know how, and where, to look.

Speaking of dialectics (which I was a few paragraphs ago), let's review a little about the standard concerto dialectic: a soloist plays together with a large group, and they interact in various ways. Big duh there, pardner. Normally the group is supportive of the soloist (it was probably in the union contract for concerti), and accompanies it unobtrusively, or shares and trades back and forth musical materials. A common large scale example is the double exposition of the first movement of a concerto, in which the orchestra plays a sonata exposition that doesn't modulate, and then the soloist enters, and everybody plays the exposition again, this time with the proper modulations. I love that, metaphorically, only the soloist contains the seeds of knowledge of modulation — like that Star Trek episode where Bones returns Spock's brain to his head by wearing a big dome hat that transmits the brain surgery secrets to its wearer.

Okay, maybe I should lay off the Star Trek references. Because apparently I just called a concerto soloist a big dome hat.

This piece, though, has a concerto slow movement dialectic that is, for Mozart, unique to this concerto. The soloist plays music, it finishes with a perfect authentic cadence, and the orchestra responds, no soloist allowed, with different, unrelated music — that nonetheless stays in the home key. It's a gorgeous and passionate melody in the clarinet (clarinet!) and violins that is presented in canon with itself, with the bassoon, in a rising sequence. For the record, this is one of my favorite moments, and melodies ever, and the harmonic analysis there is powerless to tell me (or anyone else) why (the reduction also omits the string deedles in the middle register). The melody soars (metaphorically) and is constructed such that the long notes hold over the barline and seem to lean into into delicious dissonances whose correct downward stepwise resolutions are as satisfying as anything in music.

And perhaps the first ten or fifteen times I listened to this piece, it never occurred to me, lost in its gorgeousness and in the creaminess of the clarinet sound (metaphor overload alert), that what I was listening to was a non sequitur.

That's right. A non sequitur. The piano plays by itself and presents its thematic material; the orchestra responds with different music, though in the same key. And its music finishes with a perfect authentic cadence as well.

It is far more common in a concerto (as in Mozart just about always did it this other way) for the orchestra's response to a solo passage that begins a movement is to play its music back at it, except bigified. Wow, so what happens here is flouting convention! And I hardly ever get to use the word flout any more.

So, as if handing the microphone back to the soloist, the orchestra does its expected cadence and gets out of the way. And look at what the soloist does now, all by itself. It reprises its own opening, with the leap to A ornamented. But it seems to have forgotten how to get beyond the second bar of its own opening — it repeats those two bars, even more ornamented. And still it doesn't know how to follow up. So it starts the phrase a third time.

This time the orchestra has had enough. In the middle of the third iteration of this two bar phrase, it enters with a supporting modulating chord, and together the soloist and orchestra modulate to A major, just as they are supposed to. And what a tortured modulation it is, at first intimating A minor, a large leap in the piano to the piece's highest note yet (E), that E's resolution to D-sharp rather than to the correct D (sounds like Mozart was staying out of the way of that note) under an augmented sixth chord ... lawdy, this is complicated and strange. (Just to note here that this is a typical use of the augmented sixth chord — leaning into the dominant of the new key to strengthen the upbeat to the tonic of the new key)

So wait.

The piano has its own music. The orchestra responds with its own music. Is this ... thesis-antithesis? Is this ... opposition of a sort?

Well, musically speaking, yes and no. In the concerto dialectic, it is quite unconventional for the orchestra not to repeat the soloist's music back at it, so yes. In the musical sense, since both themes are presented and cadence in f-sharp minor, they belong together. So, no.

Wow. So music has layers.

But how about developing the thesis-antithesis/opposition argument? What can the orchestra do that the piano can't? And vice versa? And how do their characteristic musics reflect that? Well, the orchestra can sustain tones and crescendo on them, and their big creamy tune and its downbeat fourth species dissonances certainly take advantage of that. The piano, meanwhile, doesn't have the characteristic sustain, thus the tortured tune is more pianocentric — which is to say that the big jumps in the tune are much easier on piano than on orchestral instruments — that, and the piano gets a rhythmic motive with a dotted rhythm.

And meanwhile. The piece modulated! Torturedly so! And the music in the new key is so ... so ... so ordinary.

And the concerto dialectic is restored.

Restored? What do you mean restored? This is the first time in this movement that the soloist and orchestra cooperate, as in, a ... concerto. They pass motives back and forth, and all, and they phrase in nice compact four bar phrases with nary any controversy.

There may be a point that Mozart is making here about the key of A major. We've been there already, and in the first movement — yes, it's the key of the concerto, after all. And what happened in A major? Well ... everything. And how much fond recall of that concerto dialectic thing should we have? Well, notice how very similar the head motive of the slow movement (above right) is the opening of the entire piece (to the right).

Maybe ... and this is really pushing it ... Mozart is using the conventional modulation expected of a slow movement in minor to bring us back to the key, and thus, to a time, when the usual concerto dialectic was at play, and ... pushing it even more ... here's where the orchestra and soloist kind of remember how to play together in the same sandbox.

Okay, that's kind of heavy. Which is why I had to put it in Italics.

Fine, Davy, but where's the Hegelian dialectic? Where's opposition-reconciliation-synthesis (as some people put it) or thesis-antithesis-synthesis (as others put it)? All we've seen so far is opposition and I remember happier times in this piece.

Okay, then, let's follow through. The A major music is ordinary and kinda square and nowhere near as interesting as the F-sharp minor music (that's a Davy valu-judgment™). Why do you think it took such a tortured modulation to drag us there? So wouldn't it follow that we'd want to get A major over with and get back to F-sharp minor as soon as the, uh, underlying form allows?

Yep.

And look what Mozart does. A very ordinary two-bar modulation to a recapitulation (the second line, clarinets, are in A). Contrast that to the ten bars it took him to get to A major.

And then the entire opposition thing is restated — this being a recapitulation, how could it be anything else? Except that now, given the experience of the piece, we know at least that it is a place that is more interesting than at least one alternative. So what's the first crack in the opposition? It's the orchestra interrupting the soloist's authentic cadence where it would end with its own idea — a deceptive cadence ... which also seems to be a local dominant to the Neapolitan that so characterizes the soloist's music ... and thus the problem (see earlier blog post) of the unresolved high D is yet again put into relief, as the soloist has to repeat its cadential music.

And the orchestra allows the soloist its cadence the second time around.

After which it restates its own music, without variation from it original presentation. And thus is opposition/thesis-antithesis restated.

An ordinary concerto movement, say one by Joe Mozart, would tend to end right here. The two themes in the tonic have been restated, with just a bit of spicy variation, and both have had their perfect authentic cadences. Thus if anything else happens now, it is gravy. Or, in musical terms, the coda.

So what happens next is kinda breathtaking.

The piano plays the orchestra theme, ornamented in the way that a piano normally ornaments — all that two-note slur stuff is customary, and is a way for keyboard instruments to make up for their lack of real sustain. The earlier deedles of the violas get put into the left hand as an (pianocentric, anyone?) Alberti bass. And finally, that bassoon line — the canon with the tune that the piano is now ornamenting — is heard in the violins, in octaves.

Well, okay. Now the piano is playing the orchestra's theme, and the orchestra is supporting it, as in the traditional concerto dialectic. Thus have we come to, in a sense, the beginning of a reconciliation. But this isn't the synthesis of which we've heard. Perhaps there is more.

Well, yes. The piano has to resolve that high D, too. That's in another layer, right?

Well, what would a synthesis, in a musical sense, consist of, then? Perhaps the piano would have to become more orchestra-like, and the orchestra more piano-like.

Aha. And this is the beginning of an explanation of why the piece gets so weird now — and in the coda!

Behold.

The new piano-plays-orchestra theme spawns a strangely long dominant pedal (the longest one of the piece in the home key), thus creating a rather large upbeat to ... what I used to call the piece's strange music.

Pizzicato arpeggios for the entire string section. Pizzicato! And the piano plays long, sustained notes. And ooh! Looky there! It's the high D in the piano resolving to C-sharp, at long last!

Hey, wait. Pizzicato arpeggios. That's piano-like. And against that, sustained single notes in the right hand of the piano. That's orchestra-like.

And what of the chord progression in the pizzicati? It's a simplification of the piano's music, so there is another level of ... say it together with me ... synthesis going on here.

By the way. I still call this section the piece's strange music. But I used to, too.

And what of the final music of the piece? The orchestra gives us a stripped-down version of the first two bars of its theme, three times — hey, didn't the piano do something just like that a lot earlier?

The piano answers: Hegel is dead. Leave me alone.

And what does the piano do while the orchestra is pianifying its own theme? Those repeated C-sharps that strangely celebrate the resolution from D.

And it's worth mentioning that this sort of thematic fragmentation is a not uncommon to make ending music. So that's what Wolfie did. So the fragmentation would seem to be carrying two levels of meaning. Cool.

Man, that's a weird piece. And a strange coda. And it seems the D-to-C-sharp story complements and works together with the kid's version of the Hegelian dialectic here.

Another interesting detail — the movement that follows starts with the same gesture as this one — a passage for the soloist that finishes with a perfect authentic cadence. How does the orchestra respond? With the same music!

And there's even more. I'ma gonna listen to it lots more times and report back when I figure out how to talk about it.

Meanwhile, speak amongst yourselves with today's study question: what other ways have composers played with the concerto dialectic and/or the Hegelian dialectic? Be concise, and be sure to use bullet points.

The Davytude video turns ten

2011-12-23T08:08:00.003-05:00

On December 23, 2001, Amy drove from her parents' home in Canterbury, New Hampshire to Brandeis, to play some of these étude thingies for me (on Brandeis's own Steinway D, which we called Tubby) that she was planning to record half a year hence. I had just pulled the trigger on a purchase of a Sony camcorder to make vidoes of these pieces — because Martler had looked so cool when Marilyn premiered it, even moreso when Amy did it in Chicago — and I was getting my first experience ever as Camera Guy. Amy was only too happy to be filmed playing these things. It wasn't as if maybe in ten years time anyone with an internet connection anywhere in the world would be able to watch these movies, or link to them on their own sites.

And every one of them is spantarific.

The sound from the camcorder was about forty percent camera motor noise, so I also brought along a Sony DATman to make parallel digital sound recordings. iMovie, which was pretty new at the time, made it fairly easy to take the DATman's sound and substitute it for the camera's sound of unusual noisefulness — though it took some doing, and patience, with a MOTU 838 and a Sony DAT to get the digital sound into the computer.

And history was made. As far as history goes, that's what making it was done by. On that day, we recorded the movies below in Slosberg Hall at Brandeis, and there is Amy's mom, in the front row, following along.

As I detailed here and here, I had made the plunge of buying a camcorder just to get that Martler movie. Amy had put Martler (and the other three she had performed seven months earlier) aside in order to learn eighteen others to fill the CD. She hadn't brought her performing score of Martler with her, so I retrieved two étude collections from my Brandeis office, thus giving her four pages (out of eleven) to perform from, pretty much on spec and by ancient muscle memory. Here's how going was done by it (note pervasive camera motor noise).

iMovie also let me do really silly things to the video, like this.

Plans were also afoot at this time to record a second CD — since the thirty-four existing ones wouldn't fit on one CD — and to fill the second one I'd have to write more études! When I first met Amy, I'd written thirty-four, and we needed at least forty — maybe forty-five — to fill two CDs. Ahead forged I. Forging ahead was done by me. Le forging-ahead guy, c'etait moi. Many of the new ones were written to Amy's specs — sharp-9 chord? stride? Bach C minor prélude? Yeah, I can do that.

So if I hadn't met Amy, I might be considering writing my fiftieth étude or so, which would extend my record for piano études written by those of Polish extraction.

A large number of other pianists who have played the études said they were convinced by Amy's movies that they 1) existed, 2) were playable, and 3) were totally bitchin. And as we found out here, Amy kept pushing me beyond what was comfortable compositionally for me, and that made me a better composer.

I have now also written a piano concerto for her (we will call it the "French" concerto). We've had the sort of long-term professional relationship that people make movies about, and not just of the YouTube variety. So why aren't they? Is it my hair?

Zio Pizza

2011-12-20T16:12:00.005-05:00

Tools of the Trade

2 - cookie sheets, 16” x 10”

Rolling pin

Oven

Crust stuff

1 - package Fleischmann’s activated dry yeast

1 - cup lukewarm water

1 - tsp sugar

1 - tsp salt

1 - tbsp cooking oil

3 - cups flour

Topping stuff

12-16 - oz. mozzarella cheese

6-8 - oz. sharp cheddar cheese

some - grated parmesan cheese

1 - jar (14 oz.) Ragu Pizza Quick (do not use spaghetti sauce — it runs like crazy. If store is out of pizza sauce, buy a spaghetti sauce that conspicuously calls itself “Thick and Hearty” or whatever). Also you can mix in Ragu pizza sauce

1/2 - jar Ragu Pizza Sauce

1 – small or medium spanish onion

1 – small or medium green pepper

4 to 6 - oz. green olives or black olives

8 - oz. can of mushrooms (do not use dry mushrooms — they burn)

1 - small jar marinated artichokes

3 - links of hot Italian sausage

4 to 6 - oz. sliced pepperoni

2 - small cloves of fresh garlic

1 - very red tomato

some spoonfuls - extra virgin olive oil

Other ingredients to taste (e.g. salt, pepper, garlic powder, onion powder, oregano, dried basil to add to sauce).

Make the crust

Pour contents of yeast packet into mixing bowl. Add 1 cup lukewarm water. Stir and let stand 5 minutes. Add 1 tsp salt, 1 tsp sugar, 1 tbsp cooking oil and stir. Add 1-1/2 cups of flour and stir until consistent and goopy. Discard stirring spoon, add 1-1/2 cups more flour, mix with hands. Knead, knead, knead. Add more flour if needed. Cut dough in half. Grease the cookie sheets with Crisco or butter, spread the dough using rolling pin (or wine bottle if no rolling pin). Store in a warm, moist place.

Prepare the ingredients

Mince the onion. Cut the green pepper into quarters, then make thin slices, or diced pieces. Slice tomato thinly, cut up slices as small as possible. Cut olives in half, store in a bowl. Slice artichokes into smaller pieces. Add salt, pepper, onion powder, garlic powder, dried basil and oregano to the pizza sauce (yum!). Cut up and separate the artichokes. Mince the garlic into the smallest pieces possible. Take out the hot Italian sausage, break up onto a frying pan, and fry the sausage lightly: do not cook it enough to eat, just until there is no red color left in it: turn sausage over periodically so it cooks evenly: put sausage on a plate covered with paper towels. Open the cans of mushrooms (N.B. Do not buy fresh mushrooms! They burn on the pizza). Grate the cheese.

Cooking the pizza

In cookie sheets

By now the crusts should have had at least an hour to rise. Pre-heat oven to 425° F. Put crusts in oven for 7-8 minutes (unless you like a very chewy crust). If the crusts start to turn brown, remove them immediately.

Take crusts out. Spoon a little olive oil on top of the crust and spread with a spoon until it is even. Distribute a small amount of minced garlic onto the crust. Sprinkle some grated cheese lightly on crust. Spread sauce evenly on both crusts. Install tomato on top of sauce. Spread the cheese. Spread the onions and peppers. Spread the pepperoni. Spread the mushrooms and olives. Spread the artichokes. Spread the sausage. Put pans into oven, wait 8 to 15 minutes, until the pizza looks cooked. If the cheese begins to burn, you’ve waited too long.

Eating the pizza

Eat the pizza.

Primavera pizza variation

This is a vegan, sauceless variation. First, make one pan of the crust as above. Shred and slice a bunch of Romaine lettuce into fairly small pieces, and get a bag of arugula (Trader Joe's is the best place for that); there should be enough lettuce to cover one pan, and there should be about twice as much arugula as Romaine. Do not cut the arugula.

Dice an onion and a green pepper. Also slice up a jar of marinated artichokes, and open a 4 oz. can of mushrooms and drain it. Take two or three very red tomatoes and slice them thus: cut them in half; take each half and cut out wedges, about as thin as you can get them while staying together. Slice some olives if you want them.

Heat the oven to 425°F and put the pans in. Watch them carefully; in about 5 to 8 minutes, the crusts will begin to brown. When you see this, set a timer for two minutes, and then take them out.

Spoon some extra virgin olive oil lightly onto the pan. Sprinkle some minced garlic onto the pan. Spread the tomato slices evenly onto the pan, then the onions, peppers, artichokes, olives and mushrooms. Put the pan back into the oven for 4 to 6 minutes.

Remove pan from oven and spread the lettuce evenly. Remember that the Romaine is shredded and that the arugula is whole leaves. Cut and serve.

You may want to try different variations of lettuce in future iterations.

Pizza Stone

If you have a pizza stone (I do, and that's a very recent thing — John Mackey goaded me into getting one, and I'm glad I got it), here is what is different. I get parchment paper and rip out two sheets the size of a pizza pan. I put the paper into a cookie sheet and roll the dough on top of the paper such that it covers the entire sheet and is rectangular. I let the dough rise, on the parchment paper, while I prepare the ingredients.

The dough still should be heated for 5-8 minutes, on the parchment paper, on the stone, in a 425° oven. I try to take the crust out of the oven just before it would start browning, but it is okay if it has started to brown. Then I spread the ingredients as before, and return the pizza to the oven, on the parchment paper, and onto the stone (this is because the sauce and olive oil tend to bleed through the crust, dramatically blackening on the stone).

I can vouch, from personal experience, that the crust tastes better when it is cooked on a pizza stone. Plus, a pizza peel is a good thing to have to put the pizza in and take it out of the oven.

Made on a pizza stone

Band it, don't break it

2011-12-12T19:01:00.000-05:00

My department switched things up on me a bit. I designed, and have taught three times, an orchestration class at Brandeis, which is pretty impressive given the size of the department. It has always had the number 193, as in, MUS 193 in the catalogue and on the registrar's page.

Next year I'm on the hook to teach MUS 175 in the fall, a number that formerly did not exist for our department. I couldn't wait to access the catalogue to see what I would be teaching. Instrumentation and Orchestration, it says. Ah, I see. It's an even-numbered year in the fall, which means there's been a complete retooling of some aspect of the curriculum. And renumbering, it turns out.

So I'll be teaching Orchestration with a reduced number. If there's a joke here, I can't find it.

Since it's just a semester-long course, and in it I have to cover writing for each of the orchestral instruments, and for subsets of the orchestra small and large (not to mention explain harp pedaling a minimum of seven times), and eventually for orchestra — normally the weekly assignments are to arrange piano music of a wide stylistic and textural variety for said subsets and all. It'd be a little cumbersome to require composition on top of what is really a technique-building course.

Luckily, we have the examples of composers such as Ravel and Debussy — and even Beethoven — who left behind examples of their own piano music reimagined for orchestra. Not to mention other composers whose piano music we know better in the orchestral versions (Pictures at an Exhibition, anyone?). There is little from their teacher's own oeuvre, though, to demonstrate that hey, at least the guy lording it over you can do it, too.

But there was a time when that was about not to be the case. In February of 2004, our composition faculty got the graduate admissions finished earlier than is usual, and there I was during the February break with four available working days I hadn't counted on. I didn't have any piano étude ideas, and all the pieces on the back burner were big pieces. So it didn't make sense to try and begin one of those, since I wouldn't be able to get back to them for several months, at which time I'd essentially have to start again, anyway.

So I decided to arrange a piano piece of mine for orchestra. That's four days work, right?

I took out the score to Zipper Tango, which a year earlier had given me such fits to write (I just barely made the six-day limit imposed by he who is me), and started.

And stopped.

And started.

And stopped.

Crap, I said to myself, without using quotes at all. Carp!

The beginning unaccompanied melody doesn't fit gracefully in the register of any instrument that I'd want to use for it — or even sound right. Whoa. I'm starting to think it's a saxophone tune.

This.

Okay, it's a saxophone tune. I'm doing a band arrangement. I can do band, right? I'm the guy that wrote Ten of a Kind, and I can just take the notes out of the Finale files and put new ones it. Okay. Okay.

Okay.

So I did my arrangement in the available four days, and boy did I make some weird choices (transcribing into band instead of writing into it was a little weird — not unlike trying to write poetry in a language I barely spoke, where the rhymes were all rather awkward). But when it was done, it seemed, at a safe distance, like it wouldn't suck too much. I sent a copy to Michael at the Marine Band (they played Ten of a Kind, and they have the Finale files, too) and he said you're sending me a 3-minute band piece? Who's going to do a three-minute band piece? Arrange two or three more! Then you've got a set.

Michael speaks in Italics in the winter months, and boy I know what that's like.

So that summer while Beff and I did a summer rental in Maine, I took out three more so-called style études (or vernacular études, as all the kids are calling them now), my laptop and a mouse, and arranged them for band, too. Mostly at a kitchen table, in the mornings between about 7:30 and 10 am. before we went out to do vacationy frolic. Beff, meanwhile, was about 3 feet away, at the same kitchen table, facing me, using her laptop, and writing something as well. It was practically dueling composers.

And there was a duck that kept approaching our cabin for handouts. We complied to the extent that was possible.

We also entertained Eddie and Hayes and Susan and Denny and Liz and Geoffy and Maria and Ken and Hillary while in the rental. But still we got our morning work done. Amazeness.

When it was done, I officially notified Michael, who graciously accepted the score and parts and then shared a beer with me. We were in Vermont. It was morning.

That December the Marines were talking about reprising Ten of a Kind at the Midwest Band and Orchestra Clinic, but the stage for the concert on which they were to program it was too small. So they programmed the arrangements — now called Sibling Revelry, a title that was much less original than we thought — and I got to hear these arrangements sooner than I'd thought feasible.

So.

The Marines brought Beff and me to Midwest, and due to various snafus with airplane travel, I didn't get to hear more than a few minutes of my piece before its premiere. Yet I was charged with speaking into a microphone about it, twice, before two audiences averaging 2000 people. Thus did I introduce the piano stylings of the Marine Band!

And, you know, caldamerda piano writing transcribed for band is kind of ... goofy. Now that those performances have made it to Spotify (which you have to have to go further), I get to prove it to you. Plus, I get to embed some videos, and that is something devoutly to be wished.

So Zipper Tango for piano pretty much goes like

while its band manifestation sounds like this.

My oh-so-cool stride piece, meanwhile, was written this way

and sounds like this for band.

The hardest one to bandstrate was the bop piece, which is supposed to sound like

And was bandstrated into some pretty durn hard band licks. For the walking bass part near the end, I needed a bebop drum set sound, which I pretty much stole from an old Charlie Parker album I had in iTunes on my laptop. It sounds like this.

And finally, my Jerry Lee Lewis piece, which had yet to be performed, should sound like

And sounded like this in the band version. Oddly, the premiere of the band version predated the premiere of the piano version by more than two years.

My personal preference among those arrangements is Moody's Blues and Zipper Tango. The other two are GBB (Goofy Beyond Belief).

Best experience of these performances at Midwest? Meeting Donald Hunsberger, who introduced himself to me before the first concert, and professed admiration for Ten of a Kind. I liked that. Least good experience? My introduction to a well-known second tier band composer, who looked at my name tag and walked away without saying anything.

That was fun.

The one percent solution

2011-12-10T13:02:00.000-05:00

So I was in a composition lesson with a student who was writing a string quartet (I was playing the part of, and being paid to be, the teacher). The passage at hand had a lot of fast, zippy licks in one instrument that would frequently return to the same note, as a kind of breathing spot, or even a local tonic, inside the passage. Sometimes it would linger on that note and repeat it, and sometimes it wouldn't. One of the things I do in composition lessons is try a give-and-take by improvising and riffing — conceptually and otherwise — on the the musical materials at hand (which I also do when writing my own music, duh), and I try to find as many different ways to work with the materials as I can, to see if we can come to a concensus on places the piece in progress could go eventually.

One of the images — a rather visual one — that fell out of my reasonably strange brain was for a possible future moment where that single player doing the zippy licks would be mataphorically surrounded by the other three players, and I probably tried to frame such a passage affectively in several different ways — the player finds him/herself in the middle of a swarm of insects; the player is submersed in a benign liquid; the player is being scolded for something by the other three; the player is trying to convince the others to go along with his/her music, etc., among other things. Then I tried to illustrate, at the piano, one possible version of this passage that occurred to me where the player is reduced just to the one note, repeated fastly, and surrounded in register by a cloud of slowly-moving harmony. And just then, I got an aha! The way this potential passage fit in my hands, what with the right hand on the chords contorting just right to allow the left hand to play all those repeated notes while still being surrounded by the harmony — what a nice little ol' piano texture that is.

I remarked, "this would be a nice piano texture," to which the student dryly responded, "I think that's your department." "No, imagine a piano piece that started this way, and all the directions it could go in!" In the heat of a composition lesson, it doesn't occur to me not to end sentences with prepositions. I don't know what for. After just a slight pause, I remarked that my next piano prélude was going to begin with exactly that texture (cue shit-eating grin), and durned if I didn't do exactly that (with the hands switched). Meanwhile, that particular idea wasn't destined for the string quartet, and probably for good reason (one of them being: it's piano music).

It was a sort of felicitous mid-semester moment for me, as it had been rather a long time since I'd written a double bar — at least the kind of double bar that signifies that a piece is over. There had been little time during the semester afforded for writing (a big hunk of it got eaten by doing orchestra parts), and the compositional battery was still in recharge mode. I felt a sort of excitement about that piano texture and the possibilities I might be able to squeeze out of it, and I could hardly wait to have the opportunity and a block of time to sit at the piano and work it all out.

And to think, that idea came unbidden while I was trying to suggest ideas to another composer.

I did write the piece, by the way, and it was my first piano piece in thirteen months; it's also the only one that will ever be my eleventh piano prélude (because today, and for the foreseeable future, I am respecting the laws of ordinality). Which I now have to tell you is copyright © by CF Peters. Who knew at the time that that eentsy-weentsy little passage would start a musical argument that would eventually spawn the example to the left? (Answer: ask again later. The magic eight-ball is remarkably consistent on this)

I've written a few times in this little corner of the intertubewebs about composer process and various sorts of composer chops and all, and I've usually addressed grand questions, even though when it comes down to it, it's always about me. For one specific piece, I said that the process of spitting it out was a combination of biographical data, assignments I gave myself, and puzzle solving, and I also said in another post that often there has to be such a high level of compositional chops at work as to make the compositional chops invisible.

Call me irony guy. Okay, now stop. Okay, start again. And, and.... stop. I said stop.

I did note, though, that even though said compositional chops are the ninety-nine percent perspiration, they're ultimately subservient, in my mind, to the one percent, the inspiration, the idea. Pieces that are all chops aren't all that interesting, even when they have lots of pretty colors. See, that's me making a Davy Valu-Judgment™. And why do I prefer pieces that aren't just coasts on technique™? Apparently, I'm restless — not a big fan of standing still creatively; more pertinently, I have written a whole bunch of pieces that I no longer care for (or maybe never did care for) mostly because I am disappointed by how little of a challenge they were to write, or how they solved compositional problems in already familiar ways. Ooh, pretentio-man® is bursting at the seams here ...

Lame joke alert And since no less than the Paper of Record suggested that I have technique to burn, uh, how come when I do so, I don't get a warm feeling?

Rim shot alert Rim shot.

I also remarked in this little corner that perhaps chops can be taught, in a general way, and learned— while idea is a slippery concept that is difficult, if not impossible, to teach (and sometimes even difficult to recognize). Ideas — at least in Davy-a-splode™ manifestations — can range from the mundane to the searingly hot, and everything in between. So, since I've already entered The one percent solution as the title of this post, I guess I'll be soldiering on guy and try to make a stab at summarizing the different ways ideas have come to me. Since I have a PhD from an Ivy League University, that means I'll have a list of bullet points. Unless I don't. Incidentally, said PhD was awarded sixteen years after my original enrollment date, and that's not even the record.

A few things before I start this list, though. First, this list applies only to me, since this is, after all, my blog, and you can't have it — I know other composers, many of them really great composers, who get ideas in different ways. Second, despite any bloviating by me to the contrary, once the piece starts getting written, the wall between idea and technique is porous — especially as applied to ideas for what to do next based on what I just did. To wit, the process of collecting a bunch of things and shaping them involves both drawing on the experience of similar things already done and searching for different ways to do them. Unless, of course, you are dining with sea urchins and there is no available red wine; then there is no empirical data to support any kind of argument here whatsoever.

So I've made a brief pass through some pieces of mine that suck less than other pieces of mine, and I have tried to remember something of the ideas that got them started or continued. My personal bullet point list — in which there are many overlaps — list goes something like

Ideas that react to the music or the ideas of others
Ideas that come from the nature of the instruments or singers
Ideas that come from perceived abstract properties of musical materials themselves
Ideas that come from visual or poetic analogs
Ideas that come from a sorting of many improvised possible licks while I am otherwise idle (especially in the half hour or so after I wake up in the morning)
Ideas that come from dreams
Ideas that come from conceptual sorting of disparate musical elements already in or set to be in a piece
As an extension of the previous point, ideas that come from weird (or unweird) challenges from myself or from others
Aha! ideas that come unbidden and unexpected

Reactive ideas

By "react to" I mean a few things (and there is a bit of an overlap with the penultimate point in the list) — composers (not just young composers) do a lot of imitating of music they love, or of things that they think will get them ahead, and I certainly have done my share of that. I also mean reacting to something that was said in a conversation about a piece or a bunch of pieces — in my case, perhaps setting out to disprove a pronouncement about what something in music must be, or what cannot be. Which sounds maddeningly gooey without an actual example. So here's one.

I recall having a conversation in grad school about the all-interval tetrachords rampant in Carter's first string quartet, and in lots of his other pieces, and a colleague — obviously not a Carter fan — pronounced that all-interval tetrachords are, by virtue of containing all the intervals with exactly the same weight, not inherently interesting or viable compositional elements. He continuted with the pronouncement's corollary — sonorities with unequally weighted intervals are much more interesting to work with.

Fine. That was a personal preference from a composer's own experience working with sonorities in his own peculiar way, and since he didn't like the way the all-interval tetrachords worked in his own music, they ... won't work in anybody's. Apparently, including Carter's. I may have mentioned he was not a fan.

So I put on my Myth Buster hat (actually, I have three of them, but that's not important; this was the purple one) and resolved to write a piece in which the main materials were said all-interval tetrachords, of which there are two: 0146 and 0137 — my Oh Yes You Can moment. Then came the idea as the vessel for the disproof: a slow, sad-sounding chorale for string quartet built from phrases that started with one kind of AIT and ended with the other; within each phrase it would work out that each of the four parts would play equally-sized chromatic collections on its way to the destination note. And the overall register shape would be like (more likely, stolen from) the Barber Adagio for Strings (large scale expansion, ascent to the high register, a-splode™, return to original registral area). Immediately I got a mental picture of the whole piece. Now all I had to do was refine my compositional technique (by writing the piece) to make it work.

Thus did I write out the bare bones of a chorale with pairs of chords as to the right and above, and with that expand-and-asplode registral shape — initial phrase chords in open noteheads, cadential chords in black noteheads (there were a whole bunch, and this is just the first six). The second act of composing was writing in the chromatic collections that would connect each voice, and then putting them onto the page in a convincing and expressive rhythm.

What resulted from this initial idea and the rather cumbersome process I used to realize it was a piece I called Elegy and which sounded even sadder than I'd suspected; and it is, to my mind, my first-ever piece that works. A noisy recording of the premiere of the version for string orchestra is here. This piece is not © by CF Peters, and it has the distinction of being turned down by them twice.

In sum, then, this piece's original idea came from a nyaah nyaah impulse. Obnoxious, huh? And once I was inside the piece, in order to make it musical, I had to be sure to write rhythms that made it seem like the parts were in some sort of conversation with each other — all the parts moving at roughly the same speed would get kinda dull. That's technique, learned in this piece.

In my rather voluminous set of piano études, there are plenty of pieces that more or less respond to challenges (or requests) from others, most notably from Rick Moody. For example, when Rick suggested use Jerry Lee Lewis licks, my head first filled with an image of Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On, and then almost immediately exploded with repeated right hand chords and glissandi and possible ways I could bend them to my nefarious will. I immediately wrote down a bunch of repeated C7 chords with the third missing and the root stuck a half-step lower, and in the four days it took to write the piece (while at an artist colony) I was pretty much crazy-eyed wild guy (I remember desperately needing a break at one point, tearing out of my studio into the hallway, and almost running right into the wall). This one is crazy enough actually to embed a video. So embedding said video was done, and by me.

Thus in this case the one percent came from a strong sonic image of already existing music with a sharp profile and well-known vocabulary of licks — which was willfully bent into shapes that I liked. The process was similar for Clave, in which Geoffy had simply asked for something using the clave rhythm. At first I had a sonic image of the easy listening music my father always played with the occasional bossa nova and clave rhythm going on (in, of all places, the claves), and while munching on that, I took a page from Nancarrow's book: what would it be like to overlap a bunch of things, all happening in the clave rhythm at different simultaneous speed? Immediately there came a sonic image of the opening: sharp chords in a slower clave joined by a bass line in a faster clave. Thus would successive clave things be faster and faster, and so on. And as I was writing it for Geoffy, who originally suggested a piano bop étude, naturally some bop licks trickle right on in and party down. Woo hoo!

Nature of the instruments or singers

Perhaps taking a cue from something Berio said to me in a lesson, after listening to an early vocal piece of mine (his exact words: Why do Americans always write so faecking syllabically for the voice? Write melismas! It's what the voice wants to do!), I learned to love writing melismas for the beautiful voices of Judy Bettina and Susan Narucki — in fact, I sought out any excuse, any excuse at all, to do so.

Thus, when writing some songs for Sooozie (her actual name, as far as I'm concerned), did I ask Joe Duemer to write a brief non-narrative poem destined for melismatic singing. Specifically, I asked that the words in the poem use a lot of open vowels, because they are best for melismas; I had already decided that I wanted to write something where the melismas keep getting longer (thus becoming, in my mind, more and more beautiful). Joe delivered a gem, and I piggybacked on top of it. In fact, when I read the first line, I got an instant sonic image: Days are like grass the wind moves over suggested, immediately, a brief trill figure that slows down. Thus does this idea also fit into the poetic analogs category.

Then chops kicked in, and it was time to shape the materials around the slow trill figure and the idea of gradually lengthening melismas. It was particularly fortuitous that in Joe's poem, the first two lines are also the last two lines, thus allowing me to make the final melismas musical variations on the first ones. And also fortuitously, the open vowel on the poems last word, silence, made for a lovely melisma that just would't quit. And the end of the longest melisma coincides with a four-part harmonization of the trill motive. Cool, huh?

So here a love of vocal melisma together with a visceral reaction to a line of poetry spawned the ideas that shaped this piece. The ninety-nine percent amounted to stir to taste. Recording of the Rome performance here. Guess what? It's © by CF Peters.

One of the principal operating textures of Persistent Memory came from the number of players in each of the string sections, as was actually stipulated on the commissioning contract 5-4-3-3-1). Thus came an idea for revealing each section as a traditional section and as the bones of the section: I could split lines into chords at phrase ends in which each section member had one note. Since I was going for sad-sounding music, it occurred to me that ending phrases with the lines splitting off into chords and all might sound like a kind of extravagant sighing; thus did a bunch of numbers on a contract lead to an idea for an important way of thinking of phrases and phrasing in this piece — as illustrated to the right.

Abstract properties of the materials themselves

Elegy obviously fits into this category — there are two all-interval tetrachords, and phrases have beginnings and ends (due to the limitations of space and, especially, of time), thus the phrasing structure.

Back in the days when the properties of pitch materials were more a fuori in my compositional thinking, I fabricated an idea for a shape of a piece in which register and hexachord would unfold in parallel (Pretentio-Man™, sit down). Specifically, I had thought of the A, B, and C types of all-combinatorial hexachords (stay awake! I know you can do it!) as having sonic analogs to closed, somewhat open, and very open. The A type is a six-note chromatic cluster, thus closed; the B-type is a diatonic major pentachord plus the minor third, thus somewhat open; and the C-type is a diatonic hexachord, do up to la, thus open in sound. I had imagined a piece built from hexachords in an ABCBA form would feel or sound like it was opening and closing. Or at least that was my fantasy. On top of that, I thought a registral shape of high to low/medium to all the registers, and back, would also be an analog to the closed to open and back of the materials themselves. So far, so good.

I will agree that, bereft of any actual musical ideas, this is kind of a pointless intellectual exercise; but hey, at the time I was in my I'm making it as a part-time word processor phase, and pointless intellectual exercises was a good way to forget the parallel pointlessness of that which I was paid to type. For the record, I had had other large scale shapes based on the same sort of premises kicking around, but I don't remember any of them any more.

Then I got an idea based on material from a piece I'd just finished — machine-gun repeated notes in the piano, originally a sort of ornamental thing in the previous piece now magically transformed into the principal musical material of a new piece. I've written about this piece (E-Machines) here, too. The idea that really got it going, though, was as appears elsewhere — Martler, his ability to play repeated notes, and his tape piece Night Machines. Thus, when the sonic image developed — machine-gun notes, scamper a bit, more repeated notes, more scampering, etc. — thus did I graft that idea onto that ABCBA shape I described before. And thus would my piece — maybe — feel like tight, opening up and retightening. Note the "opening up" in the second bar above, as the notes of a chromatic hexachord are slavishly arpeggiated. It is all mitigated by the rim shot-worthy tempo marking of Allegro Troppo.

Here I acknowledge how very artificial the whole process was, but I remind again that I was in I'm making it as a part-time word processor mode. And I was willing and able to accept that form is the vessel into which substance is poured, at least for this one piece. Maybe a few more.

Aw, man. Dry heave time. Again.

Now I can report to you that the first idea for Persistent Memory was just a tune, and it came to me while I was in the shower, trying to make up a tune with a good shape to begin Persistent Memory (this is the tautology ¶). I had been spending days trying to think of an appropriate opening for a long sad slow movement, and I had finally decided to start with the 'cello section, and in a manner that would grow upward in register. Thus did a five-note tune occur, in a particular shape, arching upward and finishing with a sigh (and thus a kind of breath). I also realized right away that it had the same shape as the head of the theme of A Musical Offering — I eventually did nothing with that knowledge, except mention it in a blog post (this one).

When I first wrote the melody down, I got it wrong (I wrote A# B D# E G). I realized that for my purposes, each interval would have to be different, and it would also have to be able to function as an arpeggiation of a chord I liked. In the first draft there those were two half-steps, it sounded E-hexachordy and augmented triady, and the trusty taste filter™ said that was bad. I fixed that. As to the cello melody: the first phrase ends by sighing (the Orpheus cellists did a very subtle portamento to the A-flat despite my bowing, and I think they were right). By the time another section entered, I wanted to increase tension that would seem to "necessitate" an entrance by another section, thus the idea to invert the opening melody to close off the solo cello section; inverting would necessarily create a large upward leap where there was once a sigh, thus increasing the tension, and thus also creating a framing space for the violas when they enter. © CF Peters.

When Judy Bettina suggested I write her some short encore pieces, I had already written Three Songs of Louise Bogan for her, which were pretty slow, chewy, and full of gorgeous-machen melismas. Obviously I would want to do more melisma-machen (read earlier in this post), but also something completely different. How about scat-machen? Woo hoo! I had never done anything jazz-machen, but I knew some of the chords that people had used in jazz. And just to make this self-challenge even more difficult, I indulged myself in a little pitch-mapping. Pitch-mapping is a puzzle kind of thing, wherein you assign all the letters of the alphabet to the chromatic scale (map A to C-natural; B to C-sharp; C to D-natural, and so on) and then spell things, and use the thusly mapped notes as a melody. Thus, when I spelled JUDY and her husband JIM (destined as the piece's pianist) and BETTINA, I got the melodies as detailed to the left.

This was an incredible chops-building exercise, as admittedly the tunes that fell out of the method were as arbitrary as could be. My job as composer (should I choose to accept it) was to make the melodies make sense musically, thus imbue randomness with meaning. And, incidentally, to be appropriate for the singing currently known as scat. Wow, I didn't used to be this pretentious. So I put my brain on swing it! mode and immediately had a perfect scat singing rhythm for JUDY JIM. Then came an answering phrase, BETTINA. Then it was my job to write what came next, and what the piano would be doing while those phrases were sung. And I did! And thus was jazzness born. Soon you die. And as usual, the excerpt is © by CF Peters.

Ideas from visual/poetic analogs

I'm sure a lot of composers are like me in that they sort of "see" music both when listening and when composing. That's not interesting in and of itself; the shapes seen are personal, abstract and impossible to describe. When shapes from the real world suggest some sort of parallel musical thing, though, that's interesting. And I already described how wind blowing over grass in Joe Duemer's poem suggested a speeding up and slowing down trill motive.

And there I was, in Bellagio, Italy. Somehow, I never get tired of saying that. There I was, in Bellagio, Italy. At the Bellagio Center, with a piano trio and a clarinet concerto to begin. And did I mention, there I was, in Bellagio, Italy? I had written my second piano étude — essentially a bigger version of the first one, and this time ABCDEDCBA (it's longer, as noted earlier) — and had written it outdoors, as had been the case for the first one. Davy, you wrote piano music away from a piano? Yep, and later I wrote a solo violin piece away from a violin! Scandalous! And all of my band music was written away from a band!

A detail that isn't anywhere near germane to this narrative is that I wrote the étude under a statue of a naked flautist.

It was July, and from my vantage point I had a nice view towards some of Lake Como and the surrounding mountains. Flocks of birds occasionally flew over the lake, and the image was quite relaxing — in stark contrast to the gritted-teethness of the étude. I marveled (sometimes I do things whose verbs are comics publishers — which is why when playing through minuets I always take the DC) at how so many flocks flew in perfect formation — and once, when I was in mid-marvel, one such flock broke apart into two pieces when one bird violated the formation and carried several birds with it. In short order, the flock came back into formation.

Zot!

And zot's the way I like it (uh huh, uh huh). It occurred to me, and unsurprisingly so, that something (metaphorically) like that bird formation could happen with a tune played by an ensemble. Specifically, how about something moving in unison, that breaks into two parts, three parts, four parts, and so on, and eventually comes back to the unison? Why, I thought to myself, not? There's already an analog in Mozart opera ensembles, in which one singer becomes two becomes three, and so on.

I had been wracking my brain for good ideas for a premise to this piano trio, or at least for some opening music. It had been years and years since I'd written something that wouldn't be conducted, and thus did I embrace pulse in a way I hadn't done in, like, forever. And I wanted something appallingly virtuosic (these players were spantarific to the max) and, zot! again. An opening of quick unisons that gradually break apart into more and more parts, thus spawning the piece's first a-splode. The virtuoso thing allowed me to write quick, antsy, very syncopated rhythms that sounded to the performers like dark jazz, so thus was jazzness born again. I had the title Hyperblues in the back of my mind, as it sounded like, well, like hyper blues (note clever added space), but eventually I put it into the singular, and took the space back out.

I had gotten to Yaddo in the summer of 2006 with two pieces on my plate, and a five-week residency in which to write them. Luckily, at artist colonies, I tend to write crazy fast. One of the pieces I had to write was a piano quintet for the Stony Brook Contemporary Players, which would be destined for a great performance, rain or shine. Actually, two great performances. I didn't have any ideas for it yet, but I figured being surrounded by all that is Yaddo would get the creative juices flowing, since it always had.

I was awarded Yaddo's Tower studio, formerly an ice house, way out deep in the woods with views through a bay window into the forest and one of the artificial lakes built there more than a century ago. There was plenty of nature to surround — not to mention the occasional mouse turd encountered on a score page when I arrived in the morning — and all kinds of birds all around.

As I was setting up my printer, I saw a huge bird fly by very close to one of the windows. I rushed to the window to see what bird that was, and recognized it as a Great Blue Heron. Huge! What's more, there was another one, in the little lake, starting to take off and about to follow the first one.

The Blue Heron is such a bigass bird with ginormous wings, and the taking-off space was a bit tight for it. It looked very clumsy as it flapped and flapped mightily, mostly to no avail, and its head bobbed way up and down. But eventually, through sheer will and brute force, it achieved flight, still looking a bit clumsy, and when it reached the open space, it started to glide very gracefully.

Obviously (well, obviously to me, anyway) that was going to be (metaphorically) how my piece would begin. Tight, push-pull gestures and very close harmony, and desperate fast notes (flapping) that don't get anywhere at first, but that open up gradually into an open harmony and texture, with sustained tones in the strings, and occasional two-hand piano gestures to denote the flapping of the wings. Once I had this opening, the rest came pretty quickly. Thanks, Yaddo. The piece is called Disparate Measures for reasons that continue to elude me, and naturally, the first movement is called Flight.

Sorting and combining disparate improvised licks

I feel the need to break up the text with another video here, so here's one.

The piece in the video started out as yet another weird idea suggested by Rick Moody. As was often the case, I sent him a form e-mail (different from the foam e-mail, which is messy) with the text Time for another étude. Got any suggestions? He complied with the usual half-dozen, one of which was How about a prog rock étude? I responded Cool. What's prog rock, and how can it be the basis of an étude? He said he didn't know how to describe prog rock, much less how it could be an étude (that's your job, right?), but he did send me a CD of a whole bunch of stuff that had been given that descriptor — and the music was so different from track to track that I was completely baffled about what do.

More than a year later (or maybe four months), Geoffy was in town, and I knew he was a fan of prog (now we can simply omit the second word when we refer to it). I asked him what he would expect in a prog rock étude. His response was a nice, compact list: pretentiousness, fake counterpoint, pointless virtuosity, modal jazz harmonies, circular ostinatos, and block structures; maybe some other things, too, but those are what I remember. Thus did I have a manageable list of balls in the air for my mind to juggle (that's a clumsy metaphor, but at least I acknowledge it — and by the way, I also usually write oval-shaped ostinatos, so there was a challenge at hand).

Thus did my process for spitting this piece out become a little like one of those slot-puzzles. While walking around aimlessly, and especially while delaying the day's shower, I juggled some initial ideas into a workable bit of putty (that's a metaphor), and pretty much improvised the whole piece, left to right. The études had the no-revision rule, so it was a kind of seat-of-the-pants improvise-it thing. By the time I was ready to end, I realized I hadn't done any pretentious fake counterpoint — thus a fugato that goes nowhere to end the piece — followed by one measure copied exactly from earlier in the piece and stripped of its original context (block structure). I kind of like that.

Ideas that come from dreams

This blog's first post was about dreamed music, and there is plenty in it that I won't repeat here. But go ahead and read it until you stop. I can wait.

I had been afforded the opportunity to write a concerto for Amy Briggs — something I'd been thinking and drooling about for, well, almost a decade — and such a project started out as having the premise of the previous bullet point. I had had a long conversation with Amy about the sorts of things I'd like to have in my own personal concerto. I had written down the list, had started juggling the ideas and improvising licks in my head, and was starting to form a large-scale shape for the piece. Specifically, Amy's list had, but was not limited to

the piano texture of Martler
begin in medias res
if there's a second keyboard, how about celesta?
writing like in the Bach keyboard concertos, including ensemble trade-offs
jazz
riffs traded with the percussion and riffs traded with the brass
playing with the percussion and no others
stride piano texture

I was about to leave for the Camargo Foundation in the south of France for three months, where I was going to write the piece, and by the night before I got on the plane, I had the conceptual foundation in place.

Then, of course, I had a dream with music in it.

Carp. This.

And this music, since I could remember it, was, by statute, destined to be part of the concerto. I dreamed lush late nineteenth century harmony, much like that of Gurrelieder, with orchestra and chorus, and — get this — the chorus sang the text The postcards are traveling home. The melody was a chromatic turn figure followed by an upward leap of a perfect fourth, and the harmony was saturated with half-diminished seventh chords. Funny that I recognized that while dreaming it, and funnier still (in a non-funny way. Irony guy again) that I remembered that.

Thus did half-diminished seventh harmony and chromatic turn figures enter the bullet list, and thus were there two more balls to juggle.

And thus was the opening Martler texture sprinkled with fast chromatic turn upbeat figures — which, I think, made it more interesting (see above on left). And thus is there a richly harmonized version of the chromatic turn in the slow movement, as at the right, saturated with half-diminished seventh harmony (the turn figure is in the first violins, and click on the example to expand it). This passage quotes the harmony from the dream as closely as I could remember it; but I added a clarinet, because it is what I do. Sunny hasn't barfed today.

Conceptual sorting of musical ideas already in a piece

Sticking with the Amy concerto here for the examples. Sometimes (well, okay — almost always) narratives that you couldn't predict become part of the piece, and you hadn't planned for them. Those are fortuitous things, because they give you another hook for the story (or stories) of the piece. At least two such things entered into Amy's concerto, unbidden.

In a transitional section where I was trying to set up the playing with percussion music, I came to a sustained chord in the strings with an E at the top of the sonority. I decided to shape the color of the chord somewhat by doubling the top E in the first oboe, sculpted with a crescendo and diminuendo. It's just something I do. That became a moment with a profile in my strangely strange brain.

Half a minute later I got to another sustained sonority with an E on top, and it occurred to me to put the oboe there again, but this time breaking into a sustained three-note melody, E, up to C, down to B-flat.

Fine. There wasn't any reason for the oboe to do that, except it sounds pretty cool. At this point, though, it occurred to me that I had just begun a narrative that could even continue across movement breaks. To wit, the oboe comes in five more times in the movement, always beginning on the sustained E, and always playing exactly the same three notes, never varying. The oboe is even present at the end of the movement, playing the same thing.

In the so-called narrative of the piece, then, it's easy to see I was thinking the oboe is stuck! How does it get unstuck?, and of course I would hope an intelligent listener would catch that I was trying to create a sort of long range tension in the narrative. The slow movement follows that ending I just referenced, and it begins with a long line first in the English horn that gets passed to the first clarinet, who passes it to — you guessed it. To the oboe. On the same E.

Naturally the oboe immediately follows the E with C and B-flat, but finally — finally! — continues! and breaks into a lyrical melody with, uh, more notes in it. Logjam broken, tension resolved, in a manner of speaking. And this is about fifteen minutes later in the piece than the first oboe lick.

Looking at the example above and on the left, note that another element that I hadn't planned on weaseled its way into the piece. The playing with percussion that I was setting up so carefully somehow turned in to a repeated ostinato in the vibes, crotale and marimba, that simply repeats a falling perfect fifth — and that ostinato ended up repeating 32 times (I counted ... or I made the number up). The beginning of that ostinato is in the example.

The ostinato sounded to Amy (in the MIDI) and to others (in the MIDI) like a doorbell (in the MIDI). A doorbell that never gets answered (in the MIDI). It simply changes, eventually, into something else.

Since the sonic image (in the MIDI) had such a memorable profile (in the MIDI), it was something I could ... work with! So the third movement — ostensibly the jazz movement — begins with the doorbell by itself, into which the soloist inserts the same chords it had played with the same ostinato earlier.

So, fine. What do I do with the ostinato this time? Huh? Huh? Idea! Pile up incomplete jazzness licks while the doorbell gradually turns into faster and faster notes, and have the brass come in and obliterate it! Cool! So after the obliteration, the jazzness movement begins in earnest. And retrospectively, this whole doorbell section thus functions as a kind of introduction. Also cool. No musical example, since it's too ... big. Thus I guess I tried to create a kind of tension where that stupid doorbell would have to be conceptually run out of town on a rail before the piece could begin in earnest. And all the sort of embryonic jazzness licks that happened then became the materials of the movement (uh, actually, they were originally heard in the first movement, but who's counting?).

Bitchin. Totally.

Weird or unweird challenges

The weird challenges I've gotten from the Rickster (Writer Guy™) are documented above and here. In addition, the weird challenges that are the styletoods pretty much follow the same pattern: Why don't you write stride/bop/tango/funk?; procure recordings of stride/bop/tango/funk; listen to recordings; catalog the gestures that characterize the style mentally; do slot puzzles and putty sculpting in head with the gestures; write the piece; stir to taste. Thus is "idea" in these cases close to the conceptual sorting. Coming up with something original and characteristic is harder than this description makes it seem, though; thus does the taste filter necessarily kick into overdrive during the writing.

Other challenges and requests I've gotten involve specifics of piano technique, most of which are accessible to me only as an outsider looking in. I'm not a pianist, and even if I were, I lack the discipline and will to practice (except on even-numbered days when there is a full moon and there is no "r" in the month name). So when Amy suggested a staccato-legato étude, I wasn't in on the joke, if there is one. Okay, so there can be independent kinds of articulations happening simultaneously, and imagining music with more than one contrapuntal part isn't hard, either. It's what I do. Since I didn't actually know what I was doing, I relished the challenge.

Thus, immediately, I though such a texture would involve — at least for the beginning — a legato line in the right hand doubled two or three octaves lower by a staccato line in the left hand. Such a texture isn't interesting by itself (oh, Davy Valu-Judgment™, there you goes again), so rather quickly I imagined a jumpy type of accompanimental texture, shared in both hands in the available fingers — a kind of seasick salsa providing a jerky backdrop against which the main line, in the outer parts could push. Good! Fine! I was at Yaddo when I started this, so the notes came out pretty quickly.

About halfway through the piece, I had already been through two sections — accumulations of texture and slight shifts in texture, when I told myself the piece hadn't really gone anywhere yet (Here's what I said to myself, in silence: Hey Davy-Self®! This piece hasn't really gone anywhere yet!) and that I would either have to abandon it, or come up with some kind of focal moment toward or texture that would — uh, by definition — focus the trajectory of the piece. I had no ideas for that.

And, as I was at Yaddo, I was doing regular once or twice daily hikes around their paths in the woods. It was May, and it had been a very wet May. Thus did I wake up one morning with a tick burrowed in my chest. Aw, man, this never happened to me before. I popped it out, visited an emergency room to make sure it wasn't a deer tick, and was given a large blue pill. I e-mailed about this to Geoffy, who suggested I write a piano piece about a tick bite — parallel to the tarantella, which is a dance about a tarantula bite. Geoffy even had a title ready to go: Zeccatella, as the Italian word for tick is zecca.

Thus did the tick bite become part of the narrative of the piece. That missing focal point would be very fast licks in thirty-second notes that are, um, "caused" by my own tick bite. It's a silly story, yes, but in context, it gave me something I needed; and of course, after the dance is done, there's more staccato-legato goin' on and a big/little finish. As below.

Another weird, and extremely invigorating, challenge was the responds to jazz one. Greg Evans, who was the director of programming at Merkin Hall, was putting together a season themed around classical composers respond to jazz, and he offered me a commission to write the season's finale. He included a program of what other pieces would be performed on the same concert, and it included a set of tangos by Tony de Mare. Thus would I have to revisit tango compositionally. Woo hoo! I'd done this before! Uh, but now for ten instruments. Uh oh.

I wrote this tango movement at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy, and I recall agonizing about the opening. I didn't want it to sound stereotypically tango-ish or habañera-ish. In fact, I think I wanted it to ease on in to the tango gestures and have it start ... um, mysteriously, I guess.

Thus, working without a net (but aiming for a net result. Rim shot), and coming up with some chords, and lots of silence, that would be the referential chord progression for the piece. I wrote down a simple rock and roll chord progression (above, right), and goosed the notes until the chords sounded more like me (left).

Then a long line enters, and I can write those in my sleep (apparently, I occasionally do). Not until a minute or two into the piece is it evident that it's a tango, when the defining habañera gesture enters for the first time (right). I was pretty proud of that idea, which came off to at least one listener as deconstructing the tango. Yeah, okay. Listen and make your own decision.

So what I like about the weird challenges is how I get forced out of my comfort zone and have to imagine solutions unlike any others I've used compositionally before. Bring on the next weird challenge.

Unbidden aha! ideas

We come to the portion of our program all readers have been desperately seeking, and that is the last one. Hallelujah!

So frequently, notions, textures, contrapuntal profiles, instrumental combination ideas, or big ideas for pieces will just happen when I'm not focusing on a specific piece at hand. The example that this blog post began with, like, forever ago, was one such example. They happen when I'm walking and thinking about pieces I like, or when I'm awake at night trying to get back to sleep or — as I've already noted — especially in the time between waking up and actually getting out of bed. I improvise licks in my head (a strange image if taken literally), or imagine how an existing piece would be different if something was changed, imagine the physicality of playing something if it came to the next level (whatever that might mean), and so on. And once in a while, an idea worth using — that is, one that successfully passes through that ornery taste filter — will pop out.

Hence an idea to use the "little" C minor prélude of Bach as a starting point, add a boogie woogie bass upbeat to it, and play it over and over, while over time changing the notes in the pattern and slowly expanding said pattern — this one is the one that does that, and twice. © by CF Peters.

And there are silly what if ideas that occur. How about a concerto movement in which the soloist plays only one note? (first movement of Locking Horns) What if every movement began with the same gesture or music, but went in different directions? (Locking Horns and Piano Concerto — and by the way, Stravinsky did it in his violin concerto, too). What if one hand played only white keys and the other only black keys? (Halftone and Crazy Eights). What if a two-note figure articulating a major second just got all antsy? (Secondary Dominance, Take Jazz Chords, Make Strange).

Now that I think of it, when I'm improvising these licks, and playing around with musical slot puzzles in my head, I guess the underlying intent is how can I do something both surprising and inevitable, and/or hasn't been done exactly that way before?

I'm pretty sure I'm not unique among creative types in trying to do this kind of stuff. And referencing the title of this post — I'm pretty sure that less than one percent of the so-called possible solutions I imagine manage to make it through the taste filter.

———————————————————————

Now I know this is a long post, and self-indulgent. To quote Milton Babbitt, for the seventeenth time (at least), there's no one else I'd rather indulge. It rather went in directions I hadn't anticipated (just like music!), and I feel like I've barely scratched the surface. And I now realize that — as I said eons ago — the wall between idea and technique is porous, and that, contrary to the premise I was working with, idea doesn't take a back seat during the process of composing.

Uh, Davy. DUH.

I don't give heartening speeches about the transformative power of art — although I certainly believe in it. Apparently, given the evidence of this blog post, I'm all about the idea, its shaping in time, and different approaches — stuff you can talk about. The magic that happens when all this stuff lines up just right— well, there's no manual that tells you how to get it every time. And besides, if I agree there's magic there, I can't tell you why or how.

Whatever it is I do, I seriously doubt any secrets will be unlocked by neurobiologists and phenomenologists and cognitive scientists any time soon. Or ever. (possibly because I purposefully tell lies on the survey form — who wouldn't?) 'Cause after all, it's more fun to be I don't understand how he does it guy.

By the way. I don't understand what composers do, not really. If I did, would I tell you?

When I was in a Brandeis faculty seminar entitled Consilience, after the E.O. Wilson book, and it was my turn to present, I answered a question in the back-and-forth afterwards by saying that for me, composition was about having at least one good idea and having the chops to shape it into a piece.

Objection, your honor. Bullshit.

Wait. I have an idea.

Like a peasant

2011-11-19T13:04:00.000-05:00

Today Ross completes his sixtieth trip around the sun. I was much less famous before I met him; post hoc ergo propter hoc. Ross, as well, was much less famous when he met me. And I had a lot more hair.

For those playing along at home, and addicted to extremely slow chromatic scales — say, a semitone per year — Ross would be hitting the top 'B', five leger lines, on a portable five-octave keyboard today. Next year, he runs out of keys. Then we shift the paradigm (it would be in a clutch situation – rim shot). And brother, can we paradigm!

The paradigm responds: shift happens.

As a self-important little grad student composer, I was patting myself on the back voluminously about getting to go to Tanglewood in 1982. Come to think of it, the Tanglewood thing had a somewhat causal relationship to the self-importantness, not its anagram, the casual relationship. In retrospect, I'm sure Milton had made some calls ...

My friend Alvaro Cordero had been to Tanglewood the summer before, and he gave me the poop. I said "eww," and flushed the poop down the toilet. Then he told me what to expect. At the time, the composers were put up on the grounds of Serenak, the old Koussevitzky mansion, in the servants quarters and caretaker's cottage. Alvaro had had a corner room that he instructed me specifically to take (the light, and the quietest room). He also mentioned that a colleague of his at Brandeis would also be there that summer. A little straight-laced and he wears tweed jackets, but he's a nice guy and he writes good music. When Alvaro spoke to me in Italics, I always listened.

Thus did I recognize Ross when I first met him at Serenak, in between my own iterations, to the room-assigners, of "I want Alvaro's room." I figured I'd get more attention if I spoke in Italics, too. And at the time Ross was at the F above middle C on our imaginary keyboard. I wanted to say hi, and how did he like Brandeis, or something similarly nerdy, but I was stuck at the moment in Italics.

We composers were given a food allowance and a kitchen and had to fend for ourselves for our meals. Thus did a routine emerge: the five of us in Serenak (me (in Alvaro's room), Ross, Martler, Dan, and Nami) would write, or go to the lame-ass seminars they laid out for us during the day and congregate for meals at lunch and dinner times. Usually one or two of us would cook something, and we took turns. Thus did we discover our affinities. And thus did we listen to a cassette of The Brecker Brothers, in all its funky-disco glory, over and over. And over. And over. And over. We got quite good at singing along with one particularly badass Michael Brecker solo, though we would change octaves willy-nilly. We all liked funk.

We made as many late evening trips as possible to the only non-ferned non-touristy non-quaint joint within a forty-mile radius — it was called Mundy's, it was scruffy, there was sawdust, and dogs walked in and out at will, and there were fat smelly drunk guys on occasion. Ross, as the lone purveyor of transportation (a Dasher with license plate 606-UPU (we didn't know enough to ask about the other seven reindeer)), was our extremely generous host and driver. There was ensuement of much dwunken wevelwy.

On the evenings we didn't go out to Mundy's we went to concerts on the grounds of Tanglewood. The bug situation at these concerts was such that if you simply pressed either hand on your neck, shoulder or arm at any random time, you were guaranteed to send exactly one mosquito to its maker. Or we stayed at home and sang through the Michael Brecker solo a few dozen more times, and drank beer. Normally I was the beer procurement guy, and my taste had evolved to synchronize with that of Milton's — I liked the dark stuff. Thus about three weeks into our stay I went on a beer run with Ross, and he pointedly, almost threateningly suggested, "don't get any of those fucking heavy beers." Okay, maybe suggested isn't the word.

And did we stay up all night and talk? Yep. Not always all night, though. Those of us a tritone or a minor sixth lower on the imaginary keyboard occasionally outlasted him.

At the time Ross was a twelve-tone composer, and I was not (currently, Ross is not a twelve-tone composer, and I am not). Occasionally he and I would get down and dirty with notes, and combinatoriality, and all-combinatorial hexachords and all that. Since young student composers obsess on technique.

Ross was at work at the 'wood on an epic solo piano piece that ended up being what they called, an octave lower than these times, bitchin. It sure had a lot of notes. I had up-arranged a violin and piano piece as a concerto with about a dozen and a half instruments, and was working on adding movements to make a full-blown (okay — full-bowed) concerto. My up-arrangement was played there, and Ross made light of one particular moment (keep in mind that I didn't know what I was doing) — an oboe moving D-sharp to E under a quasi-A dominant seventh chord (I have no idea how that got in). And for the first time ever, someone (Ross) called something in my music "like the sun emerging from behind a cloud."

Hmm. Grad students didn't usually talk in such down-to-earth metaphors. To me, it was probably an ornamentation or gfornafratzification of something earlier in the piece. 'cause, like, you know, mod composition was all about the notes and its many gfornafratzifications. It's not about the sun.

Ross, meanwhile, had two-thirds of a trio performed at T-wood. Here I simply sigh about that clarinetist.

After the 'wood, Ross and Martler and I shonuff kept things up. He wrote a piece that Beff played in in Princeton, we visited, etc., etc. And he brought his dog Frieda and stayed with us for a few weeks in Princeton. At that time I was writing a complicated and chewy little opposite-of-crowd-pleaser for eight instruments, called Slange. That piece sounded pretty good in its premiere, and Ross liked it. He started singing the first tune of the piece (arpeggiating an E-type all-combinatorial hexachord, of course, because it's what I did) to me whenever possible — especially over the phone. And he insisted the piece was too short and needed another movement.

Thanks, Ross. More work is just what I need. Drat, but he was right.

Beff and I — who, by the way, were not dating or even attracted to each other (as far as I recall) at the time — moved to Boston, Beff got Ross's old apartment and Ross bought a house. The three of us and a few others went to IHOP in Brookline and started a new music ensemble! Thus did we see much of each other for a few years. And thus when we called meetings, Ross would be told the meeting time was a half hour earlier than it actually was — as Ross was always precisely thirty minutes late to every meeting.

At the time, Ross was director of the Brandeis Jazz Ensemble, and he extended no small largesse to me and Martler — we got to write whatever we wanted, for a full jazz band. And to honor that, I wrote my first and only twelve-tone piece, called Overderive. A pattern in titles began ... Martler, meanwhile, wrote a straight-up jazz funk piece called Toad in the Hole. I'm afraid my piano part, being fully notated, and did I mention twelve-tone? — was a bit much for the group's regular pianist, so Ross up and hired someone to play the part! I had feared the group would be resistant to playing some atonal funk, but Ross somehow got them at least to hold back on any hostility they would have toward the composer. And in that gig I played fourth trombone. Because, as I always say, I was worth it.

More largesse ensued. Ross was the first winner of the Hinrichsen award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a prize of which was the publication of one piece by CF Peters — the publisher with the really big names on their scores. Ross's bigass piano piece from T'wood was the piece (if I recall correctly), and Stephen Fisher, Peters's President, invited Ross to lunch. At this lunch, Stephen asked Ross if there were other composers or pieces he knew of that Peters should know about, and Ross brought up Slange. When Ross told me to send Slange to Peters, I said yeah, right, like a publisher would be interested in me. So I didn't. And then Bruce Taub at Peters wrote to ask where Slange was because they were expecting it. Sigh, I sent it. And they took it! But I said, not so fast. It needs another movement, according to Ross. And that movement was ready three years later.

Ross was the first of our group to make the quantum leap from impoverished post-grad student to impoverished faculty — he got a job at Stanford. Among his responsibilities was running the new music ensemble. For which he learned real conducting! And cues! (as a performer noted, his cues often looked as if he were offering you a plate of canapés) His confidence in his conducting and in his players developed such that he asked me to write a Pierrot ensemble piece for them. Some of the group are students, so don't write as you would write for Speculum Musicæ (I knew what he meant, since I had written for Speculum). So, keeping it simple, I wrote a piece that, at the music of unusual excitement, a torrent of repeated notes in the piano burst forth. Eventually, that passage morphed into my first piano étude.

The performance of my piece was scheduled near the end of the school year, and I came out for it. By that time, Ross had accepted a job at UC Davis, and there was no one yet in place to do his job the following year. As an example of more incredible largesse, Ross pushed hard for me to take this position — despite my lack of experience, lack of a doctorate, and thinning hairline. Ross set up an informal colloquium for me during one of his classes, at which I was supposed to demonstrate my seriousness and appropriateness for such a position. I was anything but, and no faculty showed up anyway.

And Ross had turned into an actual conductor! He had great ears, make comments about phrasing, and dealt swimmingly with the performers who thought my writing was a bit challenging ("You come and play this!", directed at me, was a notable outburst from the pianist). The performance was very good. And I had written something at least a little bit fun.

Less than a month later, on the exact day that I reached the F above middle C on the imaginary keyboard, Stanford called and offered me the job. I called Ross, dumbfounded and elated. And of course, thankingly. His first response: ask for more money. They expect you to.

So I did. And they gave me more money. Because they expected to. Yes, my first full-time job, Lecturer in Music Theory, non tenure-track, paid the princely salary of $24,000 plus benefits. It was a bit more than three times than I'd ever earned in a year (because, you see, the Slange royalties had yet up to pile).

I told myself I'd try out the academia thing for a year to see if it was something I really wanted to do. It turned out I liked doing it so much (it beat word processing, my day job of the previous four years) that I dragged myself into dissertation-writing mode in order to have the credentials to continue at it. This is apparently when I lost all my hair, as I can remember pulling it out, strand by strand, while writing 120 pages of verbal diarrhea that said nearly nothing, but had nice charts. Ross was nice enough to agree to read and comment on it (and to help me glue some of my hair back on), and when he talked about it, he danced around the central point: this is verbal diarrhea that says nearly nothing, despite the nice charts.

I did not actually learn how to write something cogent about music until I had to teach a graduate seminar — say, on 20th century music, and at Stanford — at which time I finally got it.

Although my dissertation reader at the time begged to differ. Wafa.

Ross, meanwhile, had gotten a Guggenheim fellowship and was about to take it. Unbidden, a Guggenheim application showed up in my mailbox, with a letter from the foundation: Ross Bauer suggested you apply ...

I up and got the Guggenheim. Woo hoo!

By now the reader is beginning to ascertain that, as of 1989, every time Davy gets a little bit upwardly mobile, Ross had a hand in it. Duh.

I got married. Ross was Best Man. Ross got married. I was Best Man.

Ross conducted the premiere of the newly two-movemented Slange with his group in Davis, as well as the premiere of Cerberus, with Beff as soloist, and two performances of Sesso e Violenza. And he conducted the recording of Cerberus. Which was a real trip because the recording session was at Skywalker Ranch. It was raining. Wow.

As faculty in composition graduate programs, I occasionally get to see Ross's recommendations for his students. They are very generous and particular; one in particular I remember went on for a page and a half, and instead of dealing in platitudes, got very specific — it pointed the reader to a specific piece, a page number and measure number, and commented on how beautifully the phrase was written. Right. There. I haven't seen any other recommendations — ever — that are that generous and thoughtful. I wish he'd been writing letters for me.

I've really loved new pieces like Thin Ice, Stone Soup, Ritual Fragments, Symbiosis (tonal chords at the ending!) and Split Infinitives. Not just because they sound good (they do) or they have the long line ethos (they do) or the tunes are nice (they are), or because there is real, honest-to-goodness counterpoint (who does that nowadays?). You get the sense that every note matters. Gee, I wish I could do that.

Ross Bauer, resident note pusher

I don't get to see Ross as much lately owing to the time zone issue (Eastern and Pacific and all). We do exchange recordings, and frequently, an e-mail exchange that's a little like a composition lesson (a little comment he made about space in the tango from Stolen Moments actually got me on my current kick about breathing in music) So Ross is always giving composition lessons, whether or not he tries.

Less than a month ago Ross was in town for the premiere(s) of his new song cycle The Waters Wrecked the Sky, on Emily Dickinson poems, with Lois Shapiro and Sarah Pelletier. It was some of the most varied, beautiful, sensitive writing I've heard from him — or from anyone else, for that matter. I hope to get a recording one of these days.

So every once in a while, one takes stock in where one is creatively (I think that one would euphemistically be Davy, who can't seem to get out of third person here (how could we be out of third person? Didn't we just get more yesterday?)), and come to a realization on how many people's shoulders you've been standing all these years. Would I even have a teaching job, or a publisher, if Ross hadn't gone out on a limb to recommend me? Sounds like a job for Midlife Crisis Man!

Answer: ask again later.

What a generous soul. And a true friend.

Less than a year after the 'wood, I came to Brandeis to hear the then-very-young Lydian Quartet play Ross's string quartet. At the time I had gotten to a structural break in that violin concerto and was at a loss for what to do next. A passage in tremolos in Ross's quartet was that which was stolen by me, and at the new structural section just referenced, I put in a proliferation of such tremolos. Eager to acknowledge the source of the theft, I marked the passage Alla Bauer, and brought it to my lesson with Milton. Milton remarked What do you mean "like a peasant"? And why are you mixing your languages?

Ross, happy B natural. And thanks for all the shoulders.

Parlande punte

2011-11-13T11:17:00.002-05:00

Way back on July 27 of last year, I let on that I was writing a piece for cello and strings tentatively entitled Talking Points, and when it was finished I let on that it had been finished. I do a lot of letting on, because, frankly, and you know it, I am being that which is having been worth it. See, I'm letting on that I was let off easy there. (if you'd like me to explain the joke, I will, because, you know, jokes are funnier when they are explained)

Unsurprisingly, it got performed by Fred Sherry with the Orchestra of the League of Composers last June 18, and I had to drive the five hours from New Music on the Point to the performance the day of the performance, and drive back that same night — landing back in Leicester at 3:20 am. Il secondo vento, mi ti piace.

Given the premise (as in, see piece's title), it's not one of those happy, jazzy pieces with little sprites dancing around your ears, and pixie dust exiting from every orifice. Because, like, that would be gross.

Video from the premiere just got put up onto vimeo, and among other things, it represents the first multi-camera video of anything of mine; and one of the first in which I am not the one actually operating the camera. Woo hoo! The sound quality is also on the dry side, but you expect that in Miller Theater, Le Roi du Sec. As to the multi-camera setup — it turns out that the straight-on camera is in sync with the sound, but the two side cameras' video is behind the actual sound. Rather disconcerting.

Also note that there are eight violins in the piece, but several of them get cut out of the shot like that one singer in the old Bananarama video.

The other pieces that were on the concert have also been posted, so if you want to bone up on recent Missy Mazzoli, Elliott Carter, Art Kreiger, or Shulamit Ran, just click on them there names there. Missy's piece is called Violent Violent Sea, and in the pre-piece banter with John Schafer, she was asked about titles that repeat adjectives. It occurred to me much later that she should have responded, "John, that's an excellent, excellent question." Because, you know, it wasn't.

Talking Points (Right Wing Echo Chamber) - Uncle Davy Rakowski from Manhattan New Music Project on Vimeo.

Anyone looking for a video example of lots of strings doing col legno battuto simultaneously need look no further. Anyone looking for a good cup of coffee, I can't help you right now.

Hammock time part 2

2011-09-19T07:01:00.000-04:00

Hammock time is over, and the battery is recharging, if slowly. Right around 9 pm on September 12, ideas came, unbidden; and on September 18 during a brisk walk, things seemed to fall into place conceptually. I'm ready to get back to work. Next up — a slow movement for Scare Quotes.

This joke is so dumb it has to be used again. "How about a little fire, Scare Quotes?"

And I will always entertain suggestions for piano préludes. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

How could I NOT have one? Part 5

2011-09-17T12:53:00.000-04:00

The school year has started, which means the prime time to use the Sound Machines already purchased has arrived. I even gave a green one to our esteemed Chair UV, and a red one to Scott, now up the hill. They are all the rage, or possibly just a part of it.

When ordering more to give to a friend some while ago, a new sound box, from a different company, and called Sound Bites, showed up in the amazon.com search, at a third of the price of the established models. Naturally I got more than one. And naturally, when I used it at work, at least one co-worker ordered her own copy. Faculty meetings are about to get a bit less dull.

Silence of the Whams

2011-09-17T08:32:00.004-04:00

It was at a Student Composers Concert in Williams Hall at NEC, probably my junior year of college. The piece at hand was for solo 'cello, and it began something like this.

I recall getting eyerollitis from that opening. Not because it wasn't a beautiful opening, and not because it wasn't beautifully played (it was).

The composer was, to my mind, one of the most interesting composers in the program, and I was disappointed — maybe even a bit angry — that he would choose to begin the piece in such a hackneyed and ... uh oh, here comes 1978 pretentio-Davy — common way. Aw geez, anybody with half a brain coulda wrote that beginning. Apparently in my hazy memory, pretentio-Davy grew up in New Jersey, not in Vermont. I suppose 1978 pretentio-Davy would have also said that the rest of the piece was pretty friggin predictable, given that opening.

I mean, how could there not be another fermata silence to follow, and how could the third phrase not be something like that on the right? It's a total duh thing. 1978 pretentio-Davy was not very much fun at parties, and in fact tended to retreat to a corner with his pacifier.

The problem is, pretentio-Davy was exactly right about what was going to happen in the third phrase — a slightly more complicated upbeat gesture decorating another phrase-ending agogic accent on E. And then subsequent phrases build on that, etcetera ad nauseum.

All very clear rhetoric, making perfect sense, lyrical, and grateful (not greatful, which would be another post, but more likely not) for the performer. Though it's true that the previous sentence lacks a verb and I'm too lazy to put one in. So what did 1978 pretentio-Davy have to complain about?

It was the '70s. I was studying composition on the east coast. The beginning wasn't, uh, complicated enough. I mean, where are the col legno battutos, snap pizzicatos, and audible sighs? (Does "sighs" matter?) How dare you be so straightforward? And thus predictable?

And that silence between the two identical phrases! What, I need a long time to ponder the unfathomable depth of your two-note (two-note!) utterance before you do exactly the same thing again?

Down, Sarcasm Boy. Here's your pacifier.

Being a student work, the piece was, indeed predictable, with few surprises. It was logical, and there were plenty of nice silences, and nicely timed silences, but I was, on the whole, pretty bored. Not because it wasn't beautiful — it was — but because there were no surprises. Logic isn't everything. And sometimes it's even a wreath of pretty flowers which smell bad.

Obviously I was into the more complicated stuff that was afflicting a lot of students in those days, and, just as obviously, I zoomed in on the rhetorical device of silence — at least silence used in this way — as suspect. And certainly quite common, and possibly — cheap.

Cheap?

Yes, or so I thought at the time. Many a fellow student composer would load up a piece with complications until it tipped sideways in a strangely unnatural way, and the internal phrase rhetoric, if there were any to begin with, would get suffocated in the welter of detail.

A pause as I nearly break my arm patting myself on the back for how complicated that last sentence is. In. Out. In. Out.

The Uptown music we were imitating — largely Martino and Davidovsky in my case — had a lot of hyperdramatic stuff in it, and of course, many of us wanted to be just as hyperdramatic (but not hypodramatic, because I don't know what that would be). We just didn't have much of a facility with musical syntax (uh, how the notes work together and fit together, as if those were two separate things) to support such a hyperdramatic narrative.

Therefore we did it on the cheap. Thusly: load up a phrase with complicated stuff, accumulate more detail, and just as it's about to a-splode ...

Silence.

Dastardly silence.

Dramatic silence.

Scary silence.

Profound silence.

I faked left and I went right.

And then, do it again. And again. Free hyperdrama! All you have to do is stop suddenly just when it starts getting interesting!

Down, boy.

And then a-splode for no good reason!

Down, boy.

The hyperdramatic silences became mannerisms for many of us — and thus did those silences in our music rightly earn the descriptor cheap. They were stand-ins for actual musical rhetoric, which we were too busy trying to get ahead in this bidness to learn about.

Down, boy. And why are you speaking in first person plural?

To their credit, Davidovsky and Martino did it right. There's extremely elegant voice leading and precise control of pacing and density and cadence that make all of their dramatic pauses earned ones. Since there was no one around pointing that out to us, however, we got there with the shortcut that was available to us. And eventually I kind of realized that.

Thus did I make a conscious decision — just a little way through grad school — to go completely counter to the cheap silence thing. Instead, I would endeavor (endeavour for you British Empire readers) to have no silence, whatsoever, in the pieces I would write. From the downbeat to the double bar, always sound, always sound, always sound. Always. Sound. It may have been the first really hard compositional challenge I gave myself.

Thus would I be required to — if I wanted to become a real composer (and I didn't know this yet) — figure out a lot about voice leading, about pacing, about the control of density and timbre, and especially about phrasing — to write interesting music that omitted silence from the narrative. I didn't use the words at the time, but I was teaching myself something about large-scale rhythm (about which I spoke briefly in this post), that of making upbeats and downbeats, the musical inhalations and exhalations that come about as a result of the musical rhetoric. The example that Berg set in Lulu — especially with regard to the relationship of the bass to the harmony, and the many, many, many fourth species-like moments and the internal counterpoint — weighed pretty heavily on me, as I had just gotten to know the piece and was totally smitten. Or smited. Or smote. Full of smitingness.

Thus did I begin my odyssey of all-attacca all-the-time pieces: Violin Concerto, Imaginary Dances, the pretentio-fest Symphony No. 1, Cerberus, Hyperblue, No Holds Barred, Sesso e violenza, Persistent Memory, and Attitude Problem. All of them are multi-movement pieces with no pauses between movements. Whoa, and they span 15 years. Perhaps in this time the no-silence thing itself became a mannerism? Perhaps? Hmm? Hmm?

During this 15-year so-called odyssey I was fond of saying that I always wrote bigger pieces with the movements attacca because I sucked at writing endings. I'm not sure if I said that to make people go away, or to deflect attention from the very shallow breathing that was going on within the pieces — of which I was only perfunctorily aware. For you see, using Berg as a model — his ghost was on my left shoulder for about a decade, which was a real bitch if I spilled some salt — I similarly wrote pretty thick harmony (hexachordally derived for a while, and then something freer that I will call dysomapangahee because otherwise it wouldn't have a name, and intuitively is the wrong word), usually with a pretty active, or at least important bass, and I would try to keep it pretty active. Not quite ADD, but I liked making stuff up, and a lot of it.

I wasn't aware of musical breathing so much during this time, though I shonuff am now. I was probably going for a lot of contrast and it made a lot of sense to slow down and speed up, etc., to articulate large spans of the music. And given my pathological — okay, not pathological, but user-enforced — eschewment (eschewal? eschewing? eschewfulness? Gesundheit!) of silences, it turned out that whatever articulations there were were usually pretty weak. Which is another way of saying that the breathing, such as it was, was rather shallow. Time to catch a breath? Not usually very much. Maybe a bit like breathing while jogging in 110 percent humidity.

So what did I do at those so-called thinner texture passages? I shonuff developed (or stole) one mannerism — one note in an articulative chord would be sustained, after the chord cuts off, in a single instrument; which would crescendo, followed by an accompanying chord that recontextualizes the note as out of place, and thus a resolution (most often stepwise) in that single instrument "like" that of fourth species. I loved those moments. Berg was the King of those moments. I was the Crown Prince and Heir to the Throne of those moments.

Down, boy.

Mikronimicon I ending

Mikronomicon II beginning

So did I really suck at writing endings? As it turns out, yes, but it has nothing to do with the attacca movements. After their premieres, I wrote new endings for Slange (by adding another equal-length movement), Imaginary Dances, and Cerberus, as well as the first movement of Attitude Problem. But those were mostly the whole-piece endings that got rewritten. I didn't have to write real endings for the attacca movements, nor, as it turned out, for the ends of movements that aren't ends of pieces. By the time I wrote Take Jazz Chords, Make Strange, I had stopped doing the attacca movements — I quit cold turkey! — and I went in search of ways to end movements that might motivate the movements that followed — following ... silence! Thus does, say the very end of the second movement of Dream Symphony — a phrase ending — begin the third movement — a beginning. And thus do the doubled lines ending the first movement of Mikronomicon (from 2009) spawn the ostinato the underscores the entire second movement. One can also sense in that piece that the ending of the first movement is upbeat, and though the music that starts the second movement is also upbeat, it feels, retrospectively — because of the movement break and because of the upbeat that precedes it — downbeaty. For I have spoken it.

Even without attacca movements, though, I tended to through-write movements without silences until the end. Still not bringing in the hyperdramatic silences. Or any silences, for that matter. No movement of any big piece until 2008 had any significant silences in it — save the cadenza of the first Piano Concerto — until I was responding to jazz.

And I wasn't even responding to jazz! I was responding to tango! By, uh, writing and deconstructing a tango. As a dance movement with what I imagined was potentially an accompaniment to choreography contrasting motion and stillness, it seemed to call for a musical representation of said stillness. Anybody in the audience have a suggestion for something musical to suggest stillness?

Stolen Moments, III.

No, holding a note of the chord and doing the crescendo won't do that. That's active, not still. And it's such an old Davy solution.

To the right, the opening of the movement. Look at all that space between the chords where nothing happens! It's not hyperdramatic, and it's not cheap. At least I don't think it's cheap. The silence is a fundamental part of the musical rhetoric. After my best man heard the premiere recording of the tango, he remarked that he hadn't heard space like this in my music before this piece. Best man guy is very smart. And very encouraging. And has all his hair.

Guess what? This movement breathes, and it breathes deeply. It also breathes in that shallow way at other points, but with the deep breathing as a contrast, it feels like a more complete ... oh, pretentio-guy help me out here — musical experience.

One sentence Italic paragraph guy?

I'm sorry, but I really have to go to the bathroom.

Okay, go. I'll handle this myself.

Thanks.

So I'm a details composer. I like trying to put together a lot of scrummy details that together make a kind of magic. By the same token, I love a great, say, funk groove with a lotta stuff a-goin' down; I'll put on the headphones and endeavo(u)r to identify every element coming together to make the groove. Because, of course, it may be the basis of something I'll want to steal some day. And also by the same token, it's valuable to contrast the really funky grooves with the ones that don't work as well. Since lots of notes to self about what doesn't work, and why it doesn't, go into the virtual Post-It™ part of my brain.

And as details guy, I have often given the listener just a little bit of time to catch a breath in between the parts of the music where the most stuff happens. I've always known this, and I've gotten "breathless" from more than a few listeners — but usually framed in a good way, as in "it was so inventive it left me breathless", or "breathlessly inventive", or possibly "Madonna's character in the Dick Tracy movie was named Breathless". Usually that's a different conversation.

I had heard plenty of pieces with a lot of breathing, but with breathing that got in the way, so to speak — there were so many pauses that the intensity and the trajectory of the music fell flat on the floor, not to be so easily taken back. As a reactive composer, I erred on the side of breathing too little and rather than breathing too much. Was I wrong? In reply, the Magic 8 ball says "Ask again later".

I'm back, and feeling better.

Don't need you right now.

So recently a very good non-musician friend asked for some recordings of my music, and after listening, he noted, "Your music doesn't breathe a lot." Yes, no holds barred, got it in one. The timing of the remark was good, since I was just starting to obsess about the breathing part of music — and now I'm in full Davy-obsess mode. I bring up breathing much more in composition lessons, while apologizing that breathing in music is a current obsession, sorry and I don't mind coming right out and saying this piece breathes strangely. While sitting on awards panels, I occasionally have to excuse myself to go to the window and exclaim, sorry I can't breathe because this music doesn't. Yeah, it's Davy-obsess mode, and maybe it's that childhood asthma thing finally catching back up.

So the hyperdramatic pause thing isn't particularly in fashion nowadays. Now there's a lot of continuous-sound pieces out there, both from the Europeans and the pop-influenced Americans.

So Davy's going to go against the grain of fashion again!

Thickly Settled beginning

I said I don't need you right now. And besides, I'm not that interested in what's in fashion (uh, except maybe intellectually, and for the sake of the blog). As long as it breathes. Or as long as I can listen to it and breathe.

Thus do I admit that I've come full circle on this issue and reveal the two most recent openings I've written. First, the opening of Thickly Settled (written in May), and then the opening of Fred (the celebration piece for the new President of Brandeis, from July).

Fred beginning

In both cases — what, the opening gesture was so profound that the listener needs time to take in its great profundity before it's repeated, only slightly varied, a second time? Huh? Huh?

Down, boy.

Nope. 2011 Davy likes to go to parties without his pacifier (which has been retired and is in a box in the attic). In both cases, I'm letting the piece breathe a little before going on, and easing into the rhetoric — not unlike the composer of the solo 'cello piece in 1978. And very unlike 1978 pretentio-Davy.

I just hope no one thinks those silences are cheap.

Innodate and Consolivate

2011-08-23T13:26:00.002-04:00

I got me some Spotify. The free version, with occasional commercials exhorting you to buy in to the much less free versions. If you love hearing a country and western twang a-throwin' some pedal steel guitar 'n' heartache y'all's way right after the slow movement of the Mozart K. 499 finishes, then free Spotify is definitely for you.

There is one Davy track on Spotify, (not the one by the linked artist) less than one percent the number of Davytraks™ on iTunes. But there are shonuff plenty by other composers, a large hunk of them long dead (did you know Mozart has been dead for 1540 dog years? Whoa. Kind of makes you think. When I say "think" I mean something else).

So with Spotify at first I was, like, totally like, they's not so much here for classical musicians. But I was being pretty wrong. They's plenty of Liszt and Mozart and Beethoven (delightfully pointless exercise: how many dog years combined have all three been dead?), and as it turns out, there's not a small amount there by American composers who were working in the 1950s — thanks to the Naxos American Classics series, up and running on ze Spotify. And after I read this little tidbit on NewMusicBox, I up and spent two afternoons and an evening using some Spotification to check out a bunch of toons by Walter Piston and some of the less-celebrated composers working in the so-called tonal vein around the same time: Irving Fine, Peter Mennin, Norman Dello Joio, Roy Harris, William Schuman, Harold Shapero, Roger Sessions, Paul Creston, David Diamond, and the not-dead Ned Rorem. Why would I do that?

Silly, because I'm me.

Duh.

I haven't made a firm and final judgment about the relative merits of those composers — at least not one I'm willing to share here — since the available sampling is non-scientific (except for the science it took to invent computers, stream 0's and 1's that way and reassemble them into soundwaves, etc.), but I was pleased to discover some really nice pieces that I hadn't previously encountered. Head and shoulders my favorite discovery: Sunday Morning by Ned Rorem. What a weird/strange/cool piece. And my now-retired colleague Marty Boykan has recommended other Piston pieces (Piston was his teacher) that aren't Spotified, or even available on the mighty iTunes.

I also have lots of apps on my iPhone and iPad, including no fewer than seven HDR camera apps in the iPad. What is HDR? Damned if I know, except for the acronym, which means High Dynamic Range. I've been taking lots of comparative shots — same view, different app — with them and have been learning something about how and what each one does to make those impossible magaziny photos where everything is in focus and well-lit. No sun bleaching out the sky while the landscape is too dark, etc. Some of the apps take one picture and put a funky filter on it and go TA-DA (I hope you didn't notice it was a cheap imitation...)! Others ominously tell you to hold the camera VERY STILL while it takes TWO or THREE PICTURES with DIFFERENT EXPOSURES and AVERAGES and MERGES them. While this happens, I can just go Yes Sir, Please Sir, I'd Like Some More, Are You Finished Yet?. My own preference among the apps has turned out to be iCamera HDR, which gave me stunning shots of Utah mountains and big cloudy Vermont sunsets, though in some cases the shots are not particularly lifelike. Then again, neither are magazine photographs. While I still don't know exactly what HDR is, I have at least learned the meaning of the acronym.

And why have I been doing all this in the summer, usually my most fertile creative time?

Readers of this blog know something. A month or so ago I declared hammock time (or was it Please Hammock Don't Hurt 'Em?) after about fourteen straight months of filling every single day with writing. In a normal summer, even if I had no projects to start or work on, I'd get busy with études, or, more recently, préludes. But not this late summer. Because, you see, I'd be running on fumes.

Normally summer and winter break are the only available creative times, since that day job that pays the bill, bill, bill, bill, bill, bill, bill, bill, bill, bill, bill, bill, and ... oh wait, I guess I could have simply said that pays the bills. Plurals, I love you! ... precludes there being much writing time during the school year.

Hey, wait. Études done, forever. One book of Préludes written. When the Préludes are done, I can write Precludes. Oh wait, then there would be an excuse not to play them. Never mind.

Oh. Unless I used the aigu accent. Précludes Book I. Boy, does that look like a typo.

Since I declared Hammock Time, I did manage, in four days, to squeeze out a 4-1/2 minute string quartet movement entitled Fred. I did it for several reasons: a) Brandeis has a new President named Fred 2) I've always wanted to call a piece Fred ¶) The Lydian String Quartet asked us faculty for pieces honoring Fred for their concert series ‡) I said yes. So with the Brandeis alma mater (pilfered from the Academic Vegetable Overture) and the Mozart K. 499 at hand, I wrote such a celebratory piece, combining them and the "Dissonant" Quartet. Because. I. Could. Why K. 499? It's on the same concert. See, planning ahead. And why I might, just might be listening to it on ze Spotify.

Squirrel!

And while writing it I was aware that I was, as they, and I, say, running on fumes. The piece was fun to write because I got to use a corner of my technique that usually lies dormant. But I was not breaking new ground, opening new doors, finding new elegant solutions to old problems, or making coffee for anyone that wanted it.

Fifteen months ago, though — Got notion for piece! Worked it out in head! Wrote it in a few days! Noted in Facebook status update! Zoom! Got notion for piece! Worked it out in head! Wrote it in a few days! Zoom! ... and in January: asked Amy what she wanted in piano concerto! Made list! Went Franceward! Started! Wrote and orchestrated 42 non-sucky minutes in less than three months! ... in November: decided to write sax quartet! Hit ground running! Wrote 19 minutes in three weeks!

It seems exciting in the descriptions, owing to the overuse of exclamation points — once the double bar is there, though, it's hard to remember just what a long, hard slog the entire process was for every piece and every note, for that matter. Not to mention the mountain of self-doubt that keeps getting climbed with every beginning.

Now there's a dumb metaphor. No, not dumb. Just Squirrel! ...

...overused.

The last time I had the yearlong sabbatical was 2002-3, and the same thing happened. I wrote 23 piano études during that time, a symphony, a song cycle, and a quintet, and by June I told Beff I wanted ... needed ... a hammock for my birthday. And I got one! And I used it! Alas, then someone with a pile of money up 'n' asked for another piece for dance due on an emergency basis by the end of the summer, I took the money, and wrote on fumes. And bought a Mac PowerBook, back when it was called that.

Before that, it was the Rome Prize year, same result. After a year of much writing, and a dissertation defense, I wrote a kid's ballet on fumes; that one seems to have turned out fine.

Now that I have fulfilled the rule of three, it can be seen that I am trying to posit that which one-sentence Italic paragraph guy is about to say.

Compositional, and possibly other artistic, creativity is sometimes like a rechargeable battery.

Aw, man. One-sentence Italic paragraph guy is into similes now! That's like, not cool. But I guess I have to, like, run with it.

So to many of my colleagues, I seem to write fast. One of my canned responses is to say that I build it up during the teaching season, and thus when vacation arrives, it comes out, naturally, diarrhea-like. Since that's a surefire conversation-stopper, I normally don't have to splain myself any further. So I wouldn't get to the grosser puns involving bigger pieces and thematic liquidation. Whew! That was a close one!

The other explanation is the compositional battery metaphor, in which ideas percolate and bounce around inside my head for the weeks and months when there isn't time to write, and they are more or less fully developed by the time I finally get to start. Then, as the ideas make it onto paper, the battery is expended and is subsequently in need of recharging.

If compositional battery is true, then it's less like the Energizer bunny batteries than like my laptop's battery — where it is possible for the gauge to say 69% remaining and suddenly give out completely. This is how the études got off the ground — all those big pieces where the battery was seemingly near capacity but suddenly gave out (getting tired of this metaphor) – okay, those big pieces where I thought I knew what was coming next and it turned out to be crap, and all the wall-banging with my head couldn't fix it — writing small, unrelated pieces rejuiced the brain (a different metaphor!) so there's a fresh perspective when coming back to the big piece.

It occurs to me that a similar metaphor is occasionally used by teachers of music appreciation (I was once among their number) and writers on music to explain the progress of Western music. Now, bear with me, because it can be pretty lame when done by the book. In this narrative, the great composers are divided into the innovators and the consolidators. As usual, it is binary, and as usual, the theory doesn't immediately allow for overlap in the categories. The innovators changed everything! The consolidators reconfigured and, well, consolidated, all the existing strands (including the innovations) into the exemplary music of the day. Thus were Beethoven and Haydn and Stravinsky and Schönberg innovators, and Bach and Schumann and Stravinsky consolidators.

Uh huh.

Or put another way, once a style period (we know it's a style period because it has a name) is spent and the public is yearning for something new, along come the innovators to begin a new style period, followed by the consolidators, who continue until the next innovators come along. So Bach did such a great job consolidating that there was no choice but to begin another style period!

Uh huh. And incidentally, wow.

Thus do the innovators recharge the battery of Western music, and ... oh, I'm tired of this metaphor. Let's get back to what I'm really interested in, and that's me.

The innovating/consolidating thing — it applies, in a very general sense, to the life work of plenty of artists. At the colonies I visit, I see plenty of visual artists who have had at least one single great idea about space, or light, or shapes, and then do dozens or even hundreds of canvases or sketches all visiting the idea in a slightly different way. Then they move on to their next thing, and do lots of variations on it. Think of Beethoven and his obsession with the Neapolitan in his middle period, or the style periods of Stravinsky and Schoenberg and Copland, and the metaphor almost seems to make sense.

And then I think about recharging, in a general sense, in my own music, as the pieces in which everything changed and the pieces that came after it that explored essentially the same ideas. Which is pretty wordy, I know. Perhaps a better term for the second part of the equation is the pieces that pretty much treaded water. Which I only admit when I'm being enormously self-critical, which apparently I just was. If I were really trying to structure this post well, I'd call them the innovate pieces and the consolidate pieces. But does it really have to be binary? Can't they be two great tastes? Hey, you consolidated in my innovation! Oh yeah? Well, you innovated in my consolidation!

And as an unfortunate corollary to both of these, what our cat Bly did when we first moved to Maryland and refused to let him outside. Hey, you took a shit in my shoes!

Okay, not a corollary. More of a squirrel!

Hey, since we're batting around (when I say we're I really mean I'm) binaries here, why not say innovating is the idea side of the equation and consolidating is the technique side? One sentence paragraph guy?

Innovating is the idea side of the equation and consolidating is the technique side. I have no idea what I just said.

That's two sentences.

Innovating is the idea side of the equation and consolidating is the technique side; thus I have no idea what I just said.

So technique is the 99 percent perspiration? Thus 99 percent of my music should be consolidation? Except I don't actually use deodorant, which is less of a non sequitur than you think.

Uh, I think we've gotten mired in tautology here and completely repeated the premise of that other post. Backtrack, please.

Thus do I list pieces I wrote where somethin' new for me seemed to happen, thus placing them in the one percent category: Elegy (1984), Hyperblue, Persistent Memory, Ten of a Kind, Piano Concerto, Stolen Moments, Piano Concerto No. 2. But in every one of them, there is plenty of technique at work, too. So what I made one-sentence Italic paragraph say isn't true.

Part of what prompted these particular musingnesses was reflecting, yet again, on how many pieces I wrote that did the jittery fast unison breaking into chords thing that opens Hyperblue. That, and seeing several other composers do the same thing. So, sometimes a fleeting idea is so cool, and has so many undiscovered possibilities, the idea itself recharges the battery. But if I haven't the technique to follow through on the idea ("I haven't the technique"? Oh, pretentio-guy is back), I can still write a useless piece. And perhaps some of the older ideas I've got floating around that I've used before can be recontextualized in a new way that is in itself innovative.

And that's the problem with presenting problems as binaries.

So is recontextualizing innovation or consolidation? Hee hee hee. Che scema domanda.

Thus, while I can point to nearly every large gesture in my last piece and say it's something I did before (sharp chord with trailing tremolos in several instruments — done that; long line trying to escape from busy texture — done that; hocketed long line breaking into chords — done that; syncopated homophony cuts against slower harmonic rhythm — okay, haven't done that before; desperate chord gestures cutting against big piano bass octaves — you get the point). Perhaps the piece is more original than I had originally thought. When it's performed, I'll find out.

As to the way I feel right this very minute as I am typing this. Since hammock time began, I have sincerely tried to come up with ideas for piano préludes and for an orchestra piece that quotes familiar music. Niente, nada, rien. Unfortunately, the quality filter is still on — I've actually had plenty of ideas, none of them worth pursuing, at least according to the quality filter.

Thus am I waiting for my compositional brain to recharge. And not writing anything.

Sometimes I get a little scared that a piece I've just written may be the last good one I ever write. Since, you know, the screen can go blank when it says 69% remaining. But so far, the battery always recharges.

Otherwise, start calling me Coasts on Technique Guy.

Update: It turns out they's another whole 17 Davytraks™ on Spotify, for which Marilyn has been receiving all the glory. Go here.

Empafindsamkeit

2011-07-21T07:48:00.000-04:00

Beff and Martler and I shared half a house in grad school. One late afternoon, as Martin was at the piano writing, and I was in the dining room, Beff returned from a graduate seminar, looking haggard and frustrated. Martin asked how the seminar went.

Beff said, "I just can't get any empathy for my point of view."

I responded, "I know exactly how you feel."

Eight is Enough

2011-07-19T16:06:00.000-04:00

"Be sure to get Seven Days."

Or so says Beff when I go to Hannaford's on summer Wednesday mornings when we are in Vermont. The fact that I put Seven Days in Italic clues you in that it is the name a publication (and not a local disease), and yes, one that does not strive for the least common denominator — if it did, it would be called One Week. Stretching the joke much too far, it's also not called One Hundred Sixty-Eight Hours, mostly because the title would have to be set in type too small to be seen from a distance.

The publication is a weekly — or a seven-daily — which serves as the local alternative weekly. I guess. It's free, it reviews stuff, and it tells you all kinds of things that are going on around town that seven three hundred sixty-fifths of one trip around the sun.

While looking through the reviews and advertisements in One Hundred Sixty-Eight Hours last summer, Beff encountered mention of a new restaurant given the silly name Chow Bella, on Main Street in St. Albans, which seemed to be geared towards foodies, especially those that love misspelled Italian food. Since it's in the very town where I grew up, we were (or I was) interested to try it at least once. And so we did.

Ooh, it was so shi-shi that it had a live pianist! But not just any live pianist — would you believe Verne Colburn, my band teacher in high school from thirty-five years ago? Woo hoo! Now that's bringing it all home — literally. And unfortunately, that meant I did more listening to the cocktail piano than is ever customary in such situations. I seriously wanted to ask Verne if he could play one of the Schönberg chamber symphonies, but I doubt there's a lead sheet available for those, even all these years later. And I did intend to digest my food.

I looked around the cavernous bare-brick, old wood of Chow Bella, and it didn't seem familiar. Before the shopping center two miles north of town drove all the commerce (and Quebec license plates) out of downtown, my mother used to take me downtown often for her various nefarious shopping purposes, and all the usual shopping places had disappeared long ago. Fishman's Department Store with a lunch counter? Gone in 1975. Rixon's Pharmacy? Actually, still there. But we didn't shop there.

Finally I realized. This is Doolin's! That is, this was Doolin's. Or more precisely, this is the building in which Doolin's was located! Verne confirmed that when I asked him.

And what was Doolin's? In my memory, it was a fairly large store where ladies who smelled of potpourri and had hats with lace on them hung out and bought stuff, mostly as gifts. It was also the coolest place ever, because it had suck pipes. At the cash registers, often a receipt and a bunch of your cash would be put into what seemed like a mini-time capsule — or a giant aspirin with a rubber band around it — a door would be opened on a length of exposed plumbing at the end of an elbow joint, and there would be a Perot-like sucking sound. A minute later, the pipe would be opened again to another, softer, sucking sound, and there, magically to a six-year-old, would appear another mini-time capsule with a certified receipt and correct change.

I loved the suck pipes. They were the coolest thing in my life until JC Penney opened in Burlington and it had escalators. Doolin's was also one of the few stores in town without a Nous Parlons Français sign in any window. I only add that detail because I think it's fun typing the "ç". Whee! (yes, it's true; in northern Vermont, the sound of a tire deflating is "Çççççççç....."

So what did Mom do inside Doolin's? Well, they sold potpourri (obviously), Wedgewood, tchotchkes (we didn't call them that), and fabric, and patterns. A large corner of the store was dedicated to fabric and pattern books, and I was frequently sat down at the pattern book table to amuse myself while Mom decided what to get.

Mostly, she got patterns. And material.

Then she brought them home, and she made stuff on the sewing machine. Using the material.

Material. Kind of a generic word when you think of it. Despite the Madonna song. Clothes are made from materials. Are cars? Buildings? Computer programs? Molecules? Symphonies?

Now is your chance to bookmark this post (as well as this one) in your folder of awkward segues.

First thing we might notice, despite how clinical it may sound, is that materials have properties. Cotton, rayon, wool, dacron — wait, dacron? — are made of different stuff, have different feels and looks to them, yield differently to the sewing machine and all, and have different effects on those wearing them. Why is this important? Mom gave me socks made from the material wool one day in third grade, and by lunch time my entire body had a rash, and I was itchy everywhere — especially around the family jewels. I was forced to miss half a day of school because it's hard to concentrate on school stuff when you can't stop scratching (insert random junior high string orchestra joke here). From then on, I wore cotton socks. Different material — different scratch coefficient.

Yes, I was allergic to wool, as tests later confirmed. So years later, forced to march in high school band and to wear wool uniforms, I was one of very few who wore long johns in June. Because it's hard to play trombone, and march, and scratch yourself in the family jewels. This also explains the bit of shirttail sloppily sticking out in this David is so cute in his band uniform! picture. I believe in the picture I was trying to channel The Fonz.

So yes, some musicians talk about the materials in a piece — not to mention, there are countless music fundamentals textbooks with "Materials of Music" in the title, or even the whole title. What is a material? A note? A bunch of notes? A scale? A rhythm? A tone color? A sixteenth note? An orchestral crescendo? A chord progression? A cadence? A theme? A structural section?

Aaaaa! Too much! Too much! The answer to all of them is Yeç. They are all materials.

And how much are we aware of — how much do we have to be aware of — the music's materials when we listen to music?

Hee hee. Depends. The word is so broad as to be fairly useless here. You might as well ask when I listen to music, am I aware of stuff?

So I scratched my head a bit — no, I was not wearing a wool cap — when, many years ago at an artist colony, a composer told me he hadn't started his piece yet, but he had all the materials. Okay, fine, I don't write that way, so it was intriguing to think of approaching a piece by inventing or collecting its materials, and then — as an act that can follow only when the first one is completed — putting the materials together. And on further thought, I stopped scratching my head. Yes, I work with materials. I just don't call them that (I call them Fred), and I don't wait to start a piece until I have all my materials. But why should I care about someone else's process, anyway, as long as the music works?

Slippery, slippery slope here.

So lemme splain. Or try to get a little more particular. I'm going to talk about scales as a musical material. Insert fish joke of your choice here.

Scales might be thought of as like (hey, a simile! Call me Simile Guy! Again) the Sieve of Eratosthenes. And, belaboring the simile, the scale(s) a composer uses is(are) like the prime numbers that make it all the way through the sieve. Thus, belaboring the metaphor even more, in a fairly substantial majority of Western music, the chromatic scale represents the entire spectrum of possibility (the counting numbers) and the scale a composer uses as musical materials is always a subset thereof (the prime numbers).

And so let's consider a sieve of the sort that fascinated us in graduate school until it stopped. The diatonic scale — major and natural minor scales — can be sieved out of the chromatic scale by using something like (another simile!) clock arithmetic. Chromatic scale: 12 notes; clock: 12 hours. Set your iPhone to sound an alarm every 3 hours, say, and, presuming you start at 12 o'clock, when will the alarms go off?

Okay, you're just humoring me. Sure. 3, 6, 9, and 12 o'clock, and then the pattern repeats. 3, 6, 9, 12 ad infinitum. If we want to be reminded to do something at 2 o'clock, this pattern isn't going to work. Unless we start at 11, 5, or 8 o'clock. Whoa, cosmic.

So every four hours? 4:00, 8:00, 12:00, repeat. Every hour? Yes, every possible hour. But also if the alarm goes off every five hours. Then the times are... 5:00, 10:00, 3:00, 8:00, 1:00, 6:00, 11:00, 4:00, 9:00, 2:00, 7:00, 12:00 .... repeat! All twelve possible hours! Just not in counting number sequence. Thus if we similize some more, turn 12 consecutive hours into 12 consecutive adjacent notes of the chromatic scale (i.e., one hour equals a half step) ... which themselves repeat after 12 iterations ... Uh oh, I sense you nodding off.

Let's isolate every seventh note. Similistically, this is what we already know as the circle of fifths (left), which experienced musicians know covers all 12 notes of the chromatic scale and then repeats. And to be totally nerdy about it, rewind back to clock arithmetic: the circle of fifths covers all the notes of the chromatic scale because seven is prime to twelve. See, this is a property.

Now take any slice of seven consecutive notes from the circle of fifths. Go ahead. You'll be glad you did.

The red-boxed notes represent such a slice, and comprise all the notes of the C major scale, or A natural minor scale. Similarly, the green slice — which we note has six notes in common with the red slice — is the G major scale. The blue slice is the D major scale. In tonal music theory, there is the concept of closely related keys and distantly related keys. Such relationships are easy to visualize here — the red box (C major) is more closely related to the green box (G major) than to the blue box (D major) because there are more notes in common in the slices. The purple box, meanwhile is as distantly related to C major as possible: F# major, which has only two notes (F and B) in common.

Note also that the notes that have been sieved out of any particular slice are two things: what are called that slice's (key's) chromatic notes; and they are a so-called pentatonic scale. Oooh, oooh, another musical material! The notes not in the red box? The black keys of the piano!

Note also that there are twelve possible slices, hence twelve possible keys. Bach already had the temperament to knew that.

Now let's talk about more properties of any of these slices. We already know that any slice has the collection of notes we call diatonic scales. Duh. But it also happens that in such a slice there are: six possible two-note combinations to make a perfect fourth or its inversion, a perfect fifth (adjacent notes in the slice!); five possible major seconds/minor sevenths (a slice note and the note two notes later); four possible minor thirds/major sixths; three possible major thirds/minor sixths; two possible minor seconds/major sevenths; and exactly one tritone. Those are all the possible chromatic intervals, and here comes a whopper of a property in the diatonic scale: it has a unique multiplicity of intervals (uh, as in, there are six of one, five of another, etc...).

Why should anyone care about the unique multiplicity thing? Wait, let's let one-sentence Italic paragraph guy ask that.

Why should anyone care about the unique multiplicity thing?

Well, for two reasons: it is the largest possible collection of notes in the chromatic scale with that property; and it has everything to do with the sound of music that uses the scale as a material. How the composer shapes the material given the possible sounds is, well, what makes the composer a composer. Well, that, and poverty.

There, are of course, more properties that can be, and have been ascribed to the diatonic scale. For instance, once all the notes are put into the same register, and ordered, the intervals between adjacent notes form a non-redundant pattern. WWHWWWH -- the pattern of whole- and half-steps between consecutive notes in the major scale. Yes, the sound, and therefore potentially something of the affect, of diatonic music comes in no small part from the properties of the diatonic scale. For one, you always know where you are in it — uh, unless the composer has done something clever to make you think elsewise.

So what?

Does anybody need to know this? Do composers know this, or have to be aware of it?

Nope. Yep. (both)

But let me get into a heavy metaphor here. I don't need to know how a car works to drive it — turn the key, vroom! and go. But an important property of what's under the hood — gasoline asplodes when burned, making it the perfect fuel for a piston-driven engine (which is the chicken, which is the egg?) — makes the car go, whether or not I care about that. And when your car stops working and you want to drive it again, somebody in the repair shop better know something about how the car is put together. I wouldn't trust my car to a guy who told me I dunno how make vroom go.

Go back to the slices a moment. The pentatonic scale — usually, the major scale with the fourth and seventh notes omitted — is also a slice of five of the circle of fifths. It has properties, too. That interval multiplicity thing — reduce the slice by two, thus reduce the multiplicity of each interval by two, and you get zero minor seconds/major sevenths and zero tritones. The sound and affect when there are neither minor seconds nor tritones is different when both of them are present. If you hate tritones and love perfect fifths, here is a material for you to use! And if you love, love, love the expressivity of minor seconds — stay away from this material!

Fine, fine, fine. The diatonic scale has special properties, and we hear lots of music that uses it without us being aware, or having to be aware, of the properties. What happens when composers want a different sound or affect than what they perceive is possible with — or more precisely, inherent in — a diatonic scale?

Facebook Relationship status: It's complicated.

First, we must presume that composers think of what we are calling scale materials here as actual scales — with steps and what "steps" mean to a musican or listener, and that's a lot more complicated than you might think. Pitch collections with big gaps — thus meaning say, a leap of a fourth between scale members — wouldn't act very scale-like or as scale-like. And that is only partly true, because it's complicated.

Presume — and it's no small presumption — that the composer wishes to be subtle about using different scale materials in tandem — because the composer wants a variety of affect — and then we start to see that there are other commonly used scales that have their own properties, and thus potentially their own perceived affects. We've already touched on one — the diatonic scale minus two, or the pentatonic scale. No half-steps. No tritones. Black keys of the piano is one of them. Fewer so-called active or dissonant intervals, making it quite pleasant to listen to. Hardly anything bad happens in pentatonic music.

Then there is the whole-tone scale. We know it's a scale because it's in the name. And there's nothing but whole-tones in it! Thus, no half-steps, minor thirds, perfect fourths, perfect fifths — but tons and tons of tritones! Given such a multiplicity of intervals, and the extreme redundancy of the scale ...

What do you mean by extreme redundancy? Well, let's compare the intervallic info you need to construct a major scale to the info you need for a whole-tone scale. Major scale, WWHWWWH. Whole-tone scale, W. Whoa. How do composers use whole-tone scales? Well, lots of ways, but one of the more common ways is a feeling of non-directionality, weightlessness, a feeling of stuckness. Even in a very active texture such as Debussy used in Voiles (right), whole-toneness feels as if it is not moving anywhere, the notes (actually, the gestures) pushing against a harmony that refuses to budge. It's a good scale to use to build an upbeat to a bigger moment — since the non-motion can be used to create tension in need of being resolved by such a big moment.

And in jazz, more than a few players use whole-tone scales over a dominant seventh sonority. I only say that because it's true. But read on. They use the next scale in the same context.

There is a very special scale, whose intervallic info is, simply, WH. Arthur Berger gave it the name octatonic scale in an article on Stravinsky, and jazzers know it simply as the diminished scale. Jazzers have a more pictorial language, but both names simply denote a property of the scale: eight notes, contains two diminished seventh chords.

Huh?

Let's go back to scheduling an alarm every three hours. 12:00, 3:00, 6:00, 9:00, then it repeats. Similize three hours to three half steps, and you get diminished seventh chords. With D as 12:00, look to the right to see 3:00, 6:00 and 9:00 — F, A-flat, and C-flat representing the notes successively three half-steps higher than the last.

There are only three distinct diminished seventh chords — in those four diminished seventh chords to the right, each is a half-step higher than the one before it; the fourth is the same in pitch content as the first, assuming that D and E-double flat sound the same — which on the piano they do. Now let's get slightly more cosmic with properties.

The intervallic info of the octatonic/diminished scale repeats every minor third. Thus, there must be a whole pile of minor thirds within the scale — diminished seventh chords! Furthermore, and I am skipping a few obvious logical steps: any octatonic scale is made up of the notes of two diminished seventh chords — and the scale's sieve leaves out the notes of the other diminished seventh chord from the scale.

Wow. Why should I care? One sentence Italic paragraph guy?

Why should I care?

Wait for me to pile up more properties, then I can give a proper answer! There are three distinct diminished seventh chords, thus three possible combinations of two of them (each combination leaves a different diminished seventh chord out). Thus there are also three distinct octatonic scales. So from the scale we see above, the D scale is the same as the F scale is the same as the G# scale is the same as the B scale.

Yes — and what that means it built-in ambiguity. If you hear D as a possible tonic note of the scale, it's easy for the composer to fool you into thinking F or G# or B is the tonic. Because of the extreme redundancy of the scale. For this to be a significant property, it has to be agreed that ambiguity is something a composer or listener values.

What about the intervallic thing? Well, all the intervals are possible, but there are lots and lots of minor thirds and tritones. If you value tritones — whether you want ambiguity, or you just like the way they sound — this scale is drenched with them.

But there is yet one more property to this scale that is extremely important — and which explains why composers as long-dead as Mussorgsky and Debussy valued it. And that is that is bears a lot of similarity to the minor scale. Look at the scale up there — the first four notes could be D minor. But the A that makes the perfect fifth with the tonic — denied! The tritone, G#, is the next note! Ambiguity, maybe! Dissonance, maybe! But still so familiar-sounding, while not being familiar at all.

Plus, both major and minor triads are available within the octatonic scale. Because the scale repeats itself every minor third, the triads a minor third higher and lower, and a tritone higher or lower, are also within the scale. Familiar sonorities here, but potentially used in such unfamiliar ways.

Also because of the scale's extreme redundancy, it is possible to use it for that floating feeling, and composers can use it for restful places, as Debussy did in Nuages.

So redundancy equals ... wow, many things. Lots of tritones (dissonant! scary!) lots of minor thirds (the calling motive!), floating quality (not dissonant or scary at all!), lots of strangely related triads (mommy, where am I?).

Even this little octatonic portion of Stravinsky's Les Noces below and to the right — a florid tune over an ostinato — is both floaty and rather strangely dissonant. How did Stravinsky do that?

How about — because Stravinsky was a great composer? And because there's lots of emphasis on the A to E-flat tritone harmonically?

Bartok was also a serial user of ... oh, bad word choice. Bartok ... uh, used the octatonic scale quite a lot, usually forcefully, and often in a way that sometimes called to mind Eastern European folk music. Since Bartok's music isn't in the public domain, I'm not embedding any musical examples. But listen to the string quartets especially, Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, and various other pieces, and you'll hear plenty of octatonic music in dialogue with music using other scales.

In dialogue with music using other scales.

The octatonic scale has another property that's not entirely its fault (it's hard to assign fault to inanimate material). Partly because of its properties, and partly because of the sterling example of much great music by Bartok that lots of composers wish they had written, the octatonic scale is a black hole that sucks composers in.

Composing with the octatonic sieve can be very soothing, because the composer can always feel good about the sound — it always sounds so damn great! You can have triads, you can have dangerous sounding tritones, you can get all the ambiguity you want, you can be soothing, you can be dastardly, and ... after a while, the composer can forget, or simply not care, that there are other scales — even other octatonic scales — and the sound all meshes into generic octatonicnessositudinousness, and the music grows alarmingly static. Especially if the composer is writing a string quartet, the composer loves Bartok, and the composer like scales.

Trust me. I find myself being sucked in by the octatonic scale all the time, and I've had to invent a brain switch — well, not really, but I've had to learn to be extremely vigilant about noticing when the music I'm writing is getting all octatonicky, and therefore static, and therefore ... dare I say it ... I'm getting damn lazy about squeezing out the next notes. Thirteen years ago I wrote Beff a cute little piece for E-flat clarinet that is at least ninety-five percent octatonic (and zero percent perspiration), and since it's short, I almost got away with it.

Notice my value judgment here. I suppose it's okay for the piece to be so limited and limited-sounding because it is short. But contrast and motion are valued by me (as is the passive voice), and when I write music that stands still like that, I disappoint myself. Mostly because — sigh, it's my stupid value system — which when I invoke it I know that I chose, in this piece, the easier, lazier route.

Another way of saying this — or perhaps a development of the same point — is that it takes a different, perhaps, better, composer than me to make relentlessly octatonic music sound original, captivating, and not static.

And the black hole thing? It's sucked in its share of composers. How many times have I said (rather obnoxiously) to a friend after a performance "I sure do want to hear those other four notes now."? There's an actual answer: seven. I've never said that after a piece by Bartok (usually it's more like FUCK yeah).

In my coda to this rather overly long post, I bring up that I myself do not write diatonic music, despite having a nice long list of its properties. For one, there are other composers steeped in the sound who do much nicer things than I feel like I ever could. I feel more comfortable in extended-tonal chromatic don't-let-the-octatonic-bite-ville. I suppose I've just revealed a hidden buttstik.

As to my stupid value system. It's mine, and you can't have it.

Talk the Talk

2011-07-16T14:30:00.000-04:00

Composers are their own worst advocates.

And that's not just one sentence Italic paragraph guy speaking. Beff once said that when we were graduate students. As graduate students, we went — unsurprisingly — to graduate seminars — some of which I liked, some of which I disliked — and in said seminars composers were occasionally encouraged (read: obliged) to talk about their music.

Indeedy-do. At Princeton, there was something they called the composition pro-seminar, and it was given every semester. The seminar was free-form, meaning that the subject taught, or discussed, or ignored, was at the discretion of whichever faculty was teaching it that semester. A satellite portion of the seminar was readings of student work by poorly-paid New York players, and naturally before the readings, the students were obliged to share their music.

Naturally, since this was graduate school, the strategy for sharing was to discuss how I got the notes. This is academia, after all, and every note in its place was the subtitle, or subtext, of every talk. In essence, it was one side of the composition lesson — the side that doesn't involve critical thinking, looking at the music in any detail, or pointing out contradictions. Or contradistinctions, either, whatever those are. One semester when Joe Dubiel ran the pro-seminar, he started out by analyzing our own pieces, and then assigned us to analyze each other's pieces.

We all know, of course, the root of the word analyze.

I had been at Tanglewood the previous summer, so I had a brand spanking new recording of my now barfmachen Violin Concerto movement — which was an up-arrangement from a violin and piano piece. I had thickened the texture to fit what I thought was appropriate for a chamber orchestra, and that meant adding notes to prettify the rather severe harmonies. Thus did I loosen the taut (not self-taut) note-spinning procedures, which Joe had noticed. In one place, I added a bass F that momentarily sounded F majorish, and Joe admitted being puzzled by it. Not because it didn't sound right — even though it may have been be true that it didn't sound right — but because the extra note violated the self-tautness of the note-spinning technique up to that point. My response was the appropriate nothing. Since I wasn't doing the talking. And because I liked the F — I mean, there it was, not as if I was trying to sneak it in where no one would notice it. To belabor the point a lot — the F was like a blueberries you add to yogurt. It's no longer pure yogurt, but you can still eat it. Oddly enough, the F was nothing like strawberries that you add to yogurt. I can't splain why.

I was given a piece by Jody Rockmaker for my particular analysis assignment, and I did not go first. One student had summarized another student's piece by writing out a harmonic progression that was used a lot, and we talked about that for a while. I knew Jody and his working method well, and I knew he was doing something similar. Indeed, I found a similar ur-progression working in his piece, as well as rondo-like alternating sections.

People still talk about how I characterized that form. By people I mean Beff. And maybe Jody. I said "the form is a loose ABABABABA. That's pronounced ..." well, okay, so in a juvenile way that is particularly welcome, or unwelcome, in Ivy League graduate seminars, I did that thing where you put your fingers on your lips and go a-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba (nervous laughter and glances at Joe to see if it's okay to laugh) ... And strangely, my writing down of Jody's ur-progression fell flat. Joe said surely there was more going on in Jody's music than just that. Well, yes, there was (and don't call me Shirley). I just didn't know, yet, how to verbalize it. I could only nounify. And at Princeton, there was not much talk about phrasing or phrases; it was customary to say that phrase is such an imprecise word that we shouldn't use it.

Hard as it is to talk about music — it's famously like dancing about architecture — talking about your own music is harder still. Not least because most of what a composer does — shut him/herself up in a small private place and spin out notes for private and convoluted reasons — isn't really that interesting, except at the moment, to the composer. Moi-même, I probably find the act of writing pretty intense, since I almost never remember anything about actually writing it down — not even of writing Thickly Settled, finished just yesterday. I remember intentions and ways of thinking, but I completely forget everything about the actual act of writing it down. So how can I say anything intelligent about my own music if all I remember is intentions and not the actual act of composition?

That's a rhetorical question. Let's let one-sentence Italic paragraph guy ask it.

How can one say anything intelligent about one's own music if all one remembers is intentions and not the actual act of composition?

Note how I gave one-sentence Italic paragraph guy the question in third person, utilizing the French on or the Italian si as the subject, and making it far more convoluted grammatically. The answer to the question is — I'm learning.

In this post, I talked a little bit about composer process and how difficult it is to talk about. But the talking about there is about writing liner notes. That's only one side of the talk about your own music thing. In this post I said that composers should refrain from self-describing in public. That's another side — the self-promotional copy that always gives me dry heaves when I read it. Truly any self-effacing composer would be embarrassed to have written this copy.

I am suitably embarrassed.

Though it's true! Even though I don't remember anything about using it, I do, I do, I do believe in formal rigor! Technically speaking, though, there is no talking about music there, and even less dancing about architecture.

Imagine the violinist in my piece asks, "how do you want this double-stop played?" Graduate student Davy would have either blushed and walked out of the room giggling or he might have mentioned where the two notes fit in in the prevailing trichord.

Wait — in the original Star Trek, are they seeking three-note groups whenever they explore a planet? If not, why are they carrying trichorders?

But no, I wouldn't have shown where the notes fit in. That's not interesting to a performer, or at least not to most performers. The violinist is trying to put something musical in context, and my composer job is to make it fit and to feel right within the piece. That's a complicated bunch of stuff. How do I answer the question? I try to describe whatever affect it seems I was going for in that forgotten moment. "Make it fierce. It's like you're trying to drown out the clarinetist for what he just played." Or perhaps "let it fade a bit ... there's a dissolution going on and the 'cello is about to pick it up". Or "be hesitant. The real big moment is coming up". I could go on.

Okay, so ... right. So ... talking about music, and more particularly, talking about my music. Unsurprisingly, it comes down to audience and intent — the two being inextricably linked. Also unsurprisingly, once I got out of grad school and was in the real world forced to talk about my own music, my approach changed. Plus, I started to appreciate the different needs of the different ... ooh, do I have to use this word? ... audiences.

I sense a need for some more decorative formatting here, so I'll do a bullet list of the kinds of talking or writing about music I have to do. And only because the bucket list formatting is not available on blogspot.

Self-promotional copy ("can you send a bio ASAP?")
Program notes and liner notes.
Off the cuff and on-the-fly commentary on pieces in progress, in composition lessons
Colloquia at institutions of higher ~~love~~ learning
Pre- or post-performance talks to a concert audience
Presentations to other artists at artist colonies
A-splaining affect and intention for the benefit of performers

I suck at liner notes. Well, not literally, but that put a pretty strange picture in your head, didn't it? My writing about the music of others is pretty stiff and tends to be just the facts, ma'am, even if I can wax rhapsodically and metaphorically about it live and off the cuff. My own program notes — composers get asked for them a lot — usually do the composer copout thing of delightful vignettes around a piece's origins with perhaps one technical detail. Sometimes I go on a less-is-more kick, as will be discovered if you read on. That is, if one reads on.

Here are some program notes I've supplied recently.

Current Conditions was commissioned by the US Marine Chamber Orchestra for a "Music History Mystery" children's concert, on which it was premiered last May. The idea of the concert was that someone had "stolen Beethoven's Fifth!" and a wide historic and stylistic range of composers was represented with short pieces and excerpts. The children had to identify which piece had stolen Beethoven, and which one of six possible culprits had written it. I was commissioned to be that culprit, and to that end, I also was asked to make my piece "stylistically similar" to my own piece Stolen Moments, which they were excerpting as a representation of my style. That piece had been commissioned by Merkin Hall in New York to be a "response to jazz", and the excerpt they played had highly stylized stride piano and swing in it. Thus Current Conditions has them, too, as well as a big honkin' Beethoven theft right in the middle. I finished the piece the same day my wife Beth, also a composer, finished a piece, and we resolved to title our pieces with phrases from weather.com. Hers is called "Winter Weather Advisory".

Compass is my first saxophone quartet, and it was so much fun to write that I hope it's not my last. It's in four movements that can be played in any order. "W" takes off from hocketed repeated notes; "N" (marked Calcioculo) is built around swing eighths; "S" is a slow movement built from rising gestures; and "E", marked "merda di pipistrello pazza" is the crazy movement that plays with cascading chord-building. I called it Compass because there are four movements. The players are not required to face in the direction of each movement's compass point, but it would be funny if they did.

Talking Points (Right Wing Echo Chamber) is apolitical music with a political title.

Which of the above Davys would you like to take for a beer after the concert? Which Davy do you think probably smells funny?

The talking about music of others that happens in a composition lesson — that's something I love, because I happen to love teaching. Taking it all in on the fly, gauging intent vs. actuality, trying to visualize how the whole piece will work, and constructing complicated metaphors for why I think things do or don't work — that's part of what happens in those one-on-ones, and I truly have fun. I sometimes even giggle. Composers who have taken lessons with me will recognize my stable of reusable jokes, many of which came from Ross Bauer. For instance, and only for instance, when I sense a composer trying to make a big moment, and that moment feels like it falls flat, or is not strong enough, often the reason is that the notes or the harmony at the big moment don't leap out at you — and that's usually because the notes are stale, or already in the mix, doing that which it is that notes do. The advice is usually to rid the piece of the notes just before the big moment — so that they are "fresh", so to speak — and I use Ross's joke: It's like the Country and Western song: How Can I Miss You If You Won't Go Away?

Nine of ten composers who studied with Davy just had a flash of recognition, and nodded, knowingly. And knot just because they are aware of Davy's affinity for silent k's. The other one of ten blushed, giggled, and walked out of the room slowly.

Some of the talking in the composition lesson is about possibilities. Compose a little on the fly, getting extra heavy with the metaphors about what sort of things would be interesting and/or dramatic using the existing materials. Wouldn't it be cool if there was a sudden stop here before you use this chord, so it would be like the piece was suddenly inhaling, or maybe stretching a rubber band almost to the breaking point?

My real trial-by-fire in talking about music — and that which taught me the most about how to communicate just what I was trying to do — has been in doing presentations at artist colonies. All the technical stuff about trichorders ~~and phasers~~ and priority pitches and home sonorities that cause composers to drool just a tiny bit is like so much gibberish to sculptors and writers and painters and video artists, etc. But they are like me — they shut themselves in that small private space for a huge portion of the day and make stuff. So the idea that someone can, and should, be creative, is a given. Thus did I learn how to talk about my own music not in terms of how did I write a piece (now so graduate school), but why did I write a piece.

Indeedy-doo, and I don't know why I am suddenly using that expression so much. I learned from the presentations that artists and writers gave — it takes a good talk to splain a big ol' hunk of cement with a streak of red on it — who rarely talked about their technique (except the very youngest ones — "this is my figure drawing exercise; this is my exercise in contrasting shapes...") just like it takes a good talk to splain 25 minutes of strange atonal violin concerto music. My first such talk — in the Savidge Library of the MacDowell Colony, November, 1990. I remember that I presented E-Machines and some of my violin concerto, both of which were young pieces at the time, though only one of them is still a piece I would mind you listening to. Plus, E-Machines has that funny Für Elise quote, which usually gets a laugh if it's played right.

The way I talked about E-Machines was the usual familiar story about how I couldn't write piano music, didn't want to write piano music, and pianists had asked me to write them pieces. I told them about Martler when he was our grad school roommate, the piano in the living room he composed on, how he was a jiggly kind of guy, how he was a fantastic pianist and one of those pianists asking me for pieces. I continued with the 12-tone 4-hand improvs we occasionally did, and the machine-gun repeated note thing he could do but I couldn't — being a failed pianist myself.

So far, not a thing about the music, but it's not a bad story when fleshed out. And so far, no one ever raises a hand at this point to ask, "Davy, what about the music?"

Then there was the extra six days I had on a trip to Arizona when I had unexpected working time, and I thought about Martler and his machine-gun repeated notes, about his tape piece with a similar texture, and I just started writing to see where it would go. Six days on a playground and away from a piano, and voilà! There's my new piece. I don't bring up the Beethoven quote because it's funnier when you're not expecting it.

"That's about the music. So there, smartypants."

Of course, all I said was that it had repeated notes and I said why. How would I have explained it in a graduate seminar four years earlier?

So this little piano piece I'm going to write four years from now and wait another four years to call étude #1. The main motive will be repeated notes with various interruptions. Martler's structures tend to be symmetrical, so mine is, too. It's in five sections, loosely A-B-C-B-A which is also the alphabetic signifier for the all-combinatorial hexachords that generate the notes.

"Generate" the notes? We talk funny in grad seminars, don't we?

In addition to each structural section being associated with a particular hexachord, it will also be associated with a particular use of the piano register. Thus are the A sections in the upper register, the B sections in the lower register, and the C section using the full piano. For the sake of a little humor (it's okay to use humor, right? Right?) and yet another level of structuralitositudinousness, each section/harmonic area/registral disposition has a quote in it. Hence the C section quotes Beethoven's sixth symphony, the B section quotes a tune in an unpublished piece by Martler himself, and the funny Für Elise quote fits right into the A section (the C# that completes the hexachord is in the first sonority after the quote, so put your fried egg around that note when you analyze it).

Yeah, I got a few dry heaves typing that, too, just as you did reading it. It's okay, they're easy after which up to clean.

I have in my possession three masters papers from graduate students at an august program in the midwest, all of whom were compelled to write their papers about this very piece. They are interesting to read because a) I really did that? b) hee hee, people had to write masters papers on this little trifle of a piece, c) they found most of that stuff I detail in blue and d) they found other stuff I did (or maybe didn't do) that's way more interesting than anything I just said. At least to me. Certainly not to visual artists and writers.

As to what I said about the violin concerto. I probably said the overarching story was about soloist versus the masses, struggle for control, and agreement at the end. I'm sure they knew that "struggle" was a code word meaning "it's going to be atonal, and not at all funny".

I got better at doing the presentation thing, though. For one, I got good at not taking myself so seriously (and we all know where that has led — yes, ultimately to this very blog entry), got good at breaking down the story of my own music in a way that didn't stumble over the technique, and — this part is the best part — I became a much better teacher and writer about music. Which was good, since I still hadn't finished my gfornafratz dissertation.

Though my liner notes still sucketh.

Thus, then, are the colloquia I give for other composers hardly ever about the notes (except when they are about the notes), and the same goes for pre-performance talks. After all, it's much more fun to note that there's a toy piano in my first piano concerto...

News flash. I now have two piano concertos. Concerti, whatever.

... because when I floated the idea by Marilyn Nonken, she said, "having a toy piano would effect which dress I wear" — than to note that the toy piano's first brief outburst at the end of the first movement, returns developed at the end of the second, the horns take the notes of the second movement's toy piano lick and harmonize it jazzily in the third movement, the chords of which migrate to the piano itself later in the movement, and return in the cadenza.

Though I think it's pretty cool that I did all of that, now that I think of it.

So splainin' the toy piano to a performer: "nice dress. Much nicer than the other one you could have worn". See how simple?

Just for the sake of breaking up the text again, here's I-Chen Yeh's premiere performance of the 95th étude, called "Flit".

I've never spoken publicly about this piece, nor have I written about it anywhere — though there's a paragraph about it in I-Chen's dissertation. Since there's something about all one hundred études in her dissertation. What would or should I say about it for the various different constituencies?

Artist colony presentation

This is one of exactly a hundred piano études I've written — what can I say, I'm obsessive and pianists kept asking for them — and it was written specifically for the pianist who is performing it. She wrote a dissertation about all the études and had come to Brandeis to interview me and to play a few for me — I Flipvideoed them and stuck them onto YouTube, they were so good. She is a player with a supple touch, fantastic technique, accuracy, and great expressive technique. When she interviewed me, I had only written ninety-four, and I told her she could suggest the idea for an étude, what it's about, and it would be dedicated to her. She could even have the premiere (otherwise known as the only person in the world except me with a score to it).

She e-mailed a few days later and said she really like the texture of Ravel's Scarbo and could I do something like that. I said I could try and I gave her one more task: choose one or two notes to be the most important ones, the "tonic" notes, as it were. You'll hear that the piece starts on one of them (F) and builds down to the other one (G almost two octaves lower). And I hope you like it. This performance was given at the Ohio Music Teachers Association yearly conference last year, where she was giving a paper on the études — a vastly shortened version of her dissertation. I called it Flit because a lot of the quick gestures made me think of the motion of a moth flitting around a flame.

Colloquium

This 'tude was written for the pianist on the recording, who wrote a dissertation on all hundred of them. She had played some for me and I really liked her playing — I even filmed them and threw them up on YouTube (note to self — throwing them up on YouTube is linguistically too similar to having dry heaves). Since I hadn't finished the set yet, I told her she could suggest a 'tude, and she later e-mailed that she liked the texture of Scarbo. I asked her to choose some priority pitches around which the piece would be based, and she chose violin open G and the F an octave and a seventh higher.

So the piece turned out to be more about uneven repeated notes — my first framing device in the music— than about the texture of Ravel's Scarbo, so in one respect I might have failed the assignment. I started the piece with those uneven notes on the high F, decorated by flitting fast gestures (hence the title) and slowly I build to repeated chords with I-Chen's two notes as the boundary notes. Later, the chords build back up to the same conclusion, from the bottom up. Eventually the music spans the whole piano, and when it reaches the top, it slowly ascends in gestures that must have been meant to be the moth being burned in the flame, I don't know.

Liner notes

Flit is the 95th étude, on uneven notes, likened to the motion of a moth around a flame. I-Chen Yeh, for whom it was written, suggested I write some piano textures like those found in Scarbo — a challenge I relished because I had never written such a texture. It builds in and around G3 and F5.

Pre-piece

Ravel's Scarbo, uneven repeated notes, and the motion of a moth around a flame were all in my mind when I wrote this one. I-Chen made the original suggestion. I hope you like it.

Composition lesson

Scarbo? Are you nuts? This doesn't sound like Scarbo at all! This part near the end where you repeat the downward building chords — pure brilliance. The surprise fadeaway ending — too short. The falling from the top of the piano — I know you don't revise études, but this is the most prosaic part. You should rewrite it, and make it less regular, as befits the rest of the piece.

Splaining to pianist

This part should Flit! It's the title, after all. Could we slow it up a bit at the end? Composer's fault — it's a bit too abrupt and I know it's like putting lipstick on a pig ...

Self-promotional copy

Of all the piano études that Rakowski wrote, this is one of them. It spins a magical tale of a moth flitting busily around a flame that has just enough formal rigor to amuse and delight audiences of all ages.

Dry heave.

One final thought. The more I have been obliged to deconstruct my original thinking about existing pieces for the benefit of interested, though not technically proficent, listeners, the clearer has my thinking become about how pieces go. Which comes in handy when I'm writing one and what do I next? is the most common query to myself.

I end with today's tautology, closely related to the subject at hand. Sometimes people take you more seriously if you don't take yourself so seriously.

Hammock time

2011-07-15T11:49:00.003-04:00

It took me a little while to realize that by far the most boring blog posts are the ones about work recently completed, work about to be completed, work about to be begun, and/or work floating around in them brainly synapses. Though truth be told, I do like musing about work about to be begun — okay, not musing, but saying out loud — because it sounds like work about to B.B. Gun. And suddenly all of the movie A Christmas Story flashes in front of me, and there I am, saying "Oh, Fudgggge....." But it was the Queen Mother of all dirty words ...

So on this my fifty-third blog post — on average, one per each complete trip I've made around the sun — and to commemorate a really really really thick double bar, rather than commemorate all of them, I again update on that which I have been working and completing. So there.

Y'alls already knows I wrote piano préludes and a piece for cello and a dozen and a third strings. You know that because I told you so. This is the complete Unofficial Official Davy Sabbatical Wrap-Up, and it is very unfortunate that the term ends with a preposition. What do I call it if I'm fiendishly anal about the rules of grammar? The Unofficial Official Davy Sabbatical Up I Wrap? Yeah, that'll do. Especially 'cause it's, like, you know, in red.

Technically, my sabbatical has been over for exactly half a month — since my academic contracts coincide with fiscal years (we get fiscal, just as Olivia Newton-John did), but we get summers off with the explanation, "you are on a nine-month contract with payments stretched out over twelve months." Excellent, so my nefarious plan is working.

What this means to me (and of course it means nothing to you) is that my bimonthly check autodeposited today was for my full salary and not for half of it. That means I can afford to go out to eat today, and then come back.

I know what you want to ask. Davy, how did your double bar get so thick? In an earlier, slightly more juvenile, time, I would have blurted out I fold it in half! and then I'd laugh hysterically, having to leave the room briefly and return, while you either roll your eyes at me or are simply confused.

And here's the answer! We have a nice hammock in the back yard. I like it. Even though I didn't make it, I like lying in it. I don't mind spending all day in it. Except when work calls. And doody calls. Hammock time exists when my last egrigious deadline of the sabbatical period has been fulfilled. And that time was 9:03 this morning.

Woo hoo!

Which means I get to indulge in more Moodyan list making.

Thus, since last I taught a class, here's what I have added to my list of stuff I wrote and you didn't. Starting .... now.

Étude #96 on cross-accents, Double Cross (3 min)
Étude #97 on dominant seventh chords, Quietude (2-1/ min)
Étude #98 on fast arpeggiations in both hands, Mosso (2-1/2 min)
Étude #99 on uneven alternating hands, Mano War (3 min)
Étude #100 combo étude Two Great Tastes (#100a on chromatic scales, Erdnußbutter and #100b on crescendo-diminuendo repeated chords, Cioccolato) (2 min, 2 min, 2 min)
Luccicare for 'cello solo (6 min)
Talking Points (Right-Wing Echo Chamber) for 'cello and 16 strings (12 min)
Préludes Book I for piano solo (36 min)
Compass for saxophone quartet (19 min)
Zyg Zag for flute, oboe, guitar, mandolin, violin, violoncello (17 min)
Piano Concerto No. 2 for piano/celesta and orchestra (42 min)
Thickly Settled for clarinet, violin, violoncello, piano (17 min)

Add to this list an up-arrangement I did for the US Marine Chamber Orchestra: Stolen Moments (yes, the response to jazz piece), originally for woodwind quintet, string quartet and piano.

Stolen Moments for chamber orchestra (2(picc)22(bcl)2 200 pno strings) (28 min)

Some of those pieces have received their premieres, too, so there. Namely, starting ... now.

Two Great Tastes by I-Chen Yeh and Karl Larson
Talking Points (Right Wing Echo Chamber) by Fred Sherry and the Orchestra of the League of Composers, conducted by Louis Karchin
Préludes Book I by Karl Larson
Luccicare by Rhonda Rider, many times
Stolen Moments by the US Marine Chamber Orchestra conducted by Jason Fettig
Compass by the Prism Saxophone Quartet

So obviously this morning's double bar was on Thickly Settled. Glad to oblige.

Thus are all my obligations out of the way for the summer. So it's hammock time.

And, dare I say ... blogging time, too? Hee hee, just wait and see if anything is left of the octatonic scale once I'm finished with it ...

Gonzonand eggsjaintche

2011-05-25T08:47:00.005-04:00

I think there were four of us — moi, Martin Butler, Alison Carver, and Lee Blasius — and we must have been in Damariscotta, Maine. All this is detail that doesn't support the story, but the reader may have a need to know the culprits. And the time was sometime in the mid-1980s.

There's actually a lot to do in Damariscotta, Maine. Including getting on a boat and then tarrying at a piano bar in which the pianist plays every tune in C. Obviously one of our cohort had, and still has, perfect pitch. That one was, and is, not, moi.

Whiling away the time in the gorgeousness that is Damariscotta (whose name appears once per paragraph, so far, but that number's goin' down!), we four played various word games. When we tired of the ones we knew, we came up with a new one — for which there is no name.

The game is simple, and singers — who have been trained in the teeny-weeny mechanics of every aspect of vocal production (and who are the only class of people I've encountered (so far) who use the word glottal in conversation as if it were the word the — and don't get me started on plosives and fricatives) pick it up right away and get bored with it almost instantly. Thus, none of the four of us is a singer.

And here's how you play the game: say stuff, and when you say stuff, exchange voiced and unvoiced consonants.

You can stop for a moment and wonder if the language is Orwellian (wouldn't you love to have a common adjective named after you? Whatever Rakowskian or Rakowskiage or Rakowskan or Rakowskiesque is, I want it to be really good) — in which it is impossible to be bad — only ungood — or stupid — only unsmart. Shouldn't the opposite of voiced be something a little sexier? Mute? Nah, stigma. Karific? Nah, begins with k. Tenebroso? Nah, already taken. So, voiced and unvoiced it is. Even with the stigma of my teacher was so strict, he gave me an unvoice.

So what does it mean to exchange voiced and unvoiced consonants? Singers have been taught the mechanics of vocal production, and as it turns out, consonants are part of vocal production. Plenty of consonants have exactly the same mechanics as another one — the only distiction is that one is voiced and one is unvoiced. So, for example, the "b" sound is the same mechanics as the "p" sound. But your voice box is active for the former, not active for the latter.

Thus, one rule of the game is to say "b" where "p" is normal, and vice versa. You didn't ride the bus to school, you rode the pus.

Gross, right? It gets gooder.

A more or less complete vocab of consonant sounds that exchange under these rules is thus as follows:

b <==> p
g <==> k
s <==> z
d <==> t
f <==> v
j <==> ch
sh <==> zh
x <==> gz
th (as in the) <==> th (as in third)

Consonants that, in English, don't exchange are unvoiced ones for which there are no voiced alternatives — h would have to exchange with some sort of primal axe murderer exhalation — and voiced consonants r, l, m and n, in order to be unvoiced, one has to resort to a mime act to give the sense that they are being unvoiced. I love the passive voice early in the morning.

So that thing you rode to school? Not a pus, but a puzz.

And what are the common modes of ground transportation in this game? Puzz, gar, drug, drain. In British English, lorrie is unaffected by the game. I think the Brits knew this game would be invented when they came up with the word.

Thus did we refer to Martin Butler as Mardin Pudler for quite a while after we played this game. Tayfitt Ragowsgi is a little less funny, but easier to say when you are drunk. Unlike the place to buy a whobber, Purker Gink. You can also buy a whobber with jeesse. Pud nod ad MgTonaltse. There id'z the Pick Mag.

The game is hilarious with short phrases, and has a short half-life. See how quickly tedious it gets when applied, say, to longer sentences. My koodnez, zet liddle ret writing hoot do the pick pat wolve, whad pick deeth you half! All the pedder to eed you with!

So keep it short. Pozton Ret Zoggs blay the Gleeflant Intianss doonighd. Two you hear the googoo glog?

Pie, pie now.

Swinging both ways

2011-05-22T09:09:00.002-04:00

I'm not a jazzer, but I play one on ... TV? No, wait. False start.

I've gone into nauseating — or is it dizzying? — detail here about jazz, jazziness, and the Davyness that is jazzness. Jazzness has very little relation to lochness, unless you are willing to go very far out on a limb for the joke, and say that they are both monsters that are hard to describe (tepid rim shot).

In that other post, I make a glancing reference to swing eighths. The excerpt to the right is from Scatter, the second of Three Encores (C.F. Peters), and at the head of the score I say to swing the eighths.

And what does swing eighths mean? Somewhere in the middle of this unimpeachable wikipedia entry is a garbled description. The eighths on the beats are longer than an eighth, and the offbeat eighths shorter. A jazz player steeped in the tradition knows what it means to swing, and explaining it is akin to explaining yearningness, or thirsty, or silliness. Uh, well, there's this shuffle thing, and it's like, or somewhere between these two rhythmic notations down below on the left, and there's an extra accent on the weak eighths, except when there's not, and that's all determined by context, which I can't really explain except to say you feel it. Give a saxophone section in a jazz band straight eighths, say "swing it" and they will play and inflect in lockstep. Give a woodwind quintet straight eighths and say "swing it" and you're on your own. If they haven't done such a thing before, you've added a considerable amount of rehearsal time while the constituent players discuss what "to swing" means to them. Possibly coming to blows (that was a pun, for those of you on the lookout for them).

Neither rhythmic representation is entirely accurate. And neither tells you much about feel at all — shuffle is a good start, I guess, but from the perspective of an outsider to jazz — such as a jazzness artisan like moi-même would be — the only helpful description to a performer who is also an outsider would have to do with what I perceive as an extra accent on the weak eighths when they are tied to the next beat — such as the C at the end of the first bar. From there you're on your own.

So, to explain. No, not enough time. I will sum up. If Davy is grooving on a little bit of jazzness, and he wants both to refer to himself in third person and get a performer to play in swing eighths, then either the rhythmic notation has to be straight — and thus entirely inaccurate — and he has to resort to words (swing the eighths) to describe how he wants it played; or he notates it a bit more precisely, and the appearance on the page becomes considerably more cumbersome — and it's still neither accurate, nor is it true to the desired feel of the music. Imagine a whole 10-minute piece forested with all those triplet brackets.

One possible solution — and the one I've used the most — is to notate the swingy stuff of jazzness in a compound meter. Thus the second of the examples up to the left would be renotated in 12/8 time, and the triplet brackets would magically disappear. But to this composers's third person musical metabolism, it just doesn't look as fast as it is supposed to sound. In pieces where I have used 12/8, 9/8, etc. for such nefarious purposes, the tempo in performance has always, always, always, been too slow. It's as if the notation of only quarters and eighths implies one has an interpretive license of incredible slowness. Put simply — quarters and eighths shonuff looks a lot different from all eighths.

And as I'll continue to say — the tripletty notation is also not an accurate notation either of the rhythm or of the feel.

Thus my solution has usually been to encumber the notation even more by halving the value of the note to which the pulse is given — thus separating the notation into the halves and the halve nots (slightly more enthusiastic rim shot). So this example to the right from my twentieth étude — the first of many études to be built from swing eighths — is in the very daunting-looking 12/16 time, with the pulse given to the dotted eighth note. Imagine, though, the cumberositudinousness of notating it in 4/4 with triplet brackets over every beat. Every. Beat. Forever. Well — as compared to the cumberosity of a part that simply hammers out the beat being all dotted notes.

A little bit of a caesura here as I explain that the first quasi swing eighths in this notation that I ever encountered were not in a jazz piece at all. They were in the third movement of Carter's String Quartet No. 1 (Associated Music Publishers), and, me being me (back in first person, apparently, though I've eschewed the predicate nominative), this was the part of the record (that's what they called vinyl discs) that I played the most. This, too, is notated in 12/16, since seven years before I was born. This part of the piece is both jazzy and not jazzy (in the same way that I am, at this moment, both enthusiastic and laissez faire), and the way Carter got into it and out of it is brilliant. When the rhythm returns later in the piece in a different metric context, durned if it doesn't have to be notated as triplets. And nowhere did Carter indicate "swing it". And is there a slight accent to the first sixteenth of the second slurred group? Yes, if you swing it. Is it different from the accent you'd use to begin the third slurred group? Whoa, getting cosmic. Breathe, breathe.

Another caesura. Around a hundred and thirty years earlier than Carter, Beethoven seemed to be trying to one-up him in his particular notation of swing eighths in his piano sonata Op. 111. Or perhaps it was a very early example of be-bop.

Thus have I become accustomed to writing swingy jazzness in 9/16, 12/16, 15/16 time, etc., even up to 21/16. Which is less daunting when you use your calculator to divide by three and get 7/4, except with the swinginess that only true jazzness can provide.

It does lead to a few challenging rhythmic notations, though, as to the right — note that the fourth and fifth notes of the lower two parts are on the offbeat, and the sixth note on the beat. The only indication on the score that the time distance between the fifth and sixth notes is longer than that between the fourth and fifth is that teeny-weeny little dot. Written instead in 6/4, that would be more obvious, as the penultimate rest would be a quarter, and the others eighths.

This metric notation also confuses the terminology. Are the swingy things in the top two parts "like" swing eighths? Or swing sixteenths? The answer is the same answer that (double name drop alert) John Cage gave to Judy Bettina when she asked him whether a red line in one edition of a piece of his was right, or the blue line in another edition: they're both right.

And Beethoven in Op. 111 — why, swing sixty-fourths, of course. I mean, duh.
So what if I want both straight sixteenths and swingy sixteenths in the same piece? Can music do that? Is the system of musical notation up to the task?

Yep. But, as notated repeatedly above, it's fraught with cumber. Lemme splain.

But first, another caesura. Wouldn't you notate the groove of this classic hip hop tune as swing sixteenths? It's a shuffle rhythm, fer sher. But imagine arranging it for woodwind quintet. Oh, sorry for causing dry heaves there. But going beyond the dry heave stage of the argument. There's another level to the tune, since at 2:52 it samples James Brown, and the brass rhythms lock right into the shuffle — are those 1960s brass rhythms swing eighths? Shuffle? Swing sixteenths? And when giving the bass fill at 3:19 to the bassoon in our dry heave arrangement, how would you notate it?

So I go back to the commission from Merkin Hall in which I was responding to jazz. More precisely, the concert for which I was writing was entitled Writing Jazz: An Epilogue on Influence, and it was about notated jazz (or in my case, jazzness) for so-called classical players. Fair enough. The Merkin blog described the context of the concert in the season, and my part in it.

One idea for the first movement of the piece was to separate the musical materials of the three groups (string quartet, woodwind quartet, piano), and let the piece, or the performers, gradually "discover" the jazz inherent in the materials. Well, I had to start somewhere. To that end, sometimes I had to notate in straight sixteenths and sometimes I had to cumberize with their swingy counterpart. So as in the example to the left in the woodwinds, stuff is going along in straight sixteenths, when suddenly swing sixteenths take over, if briefly, starting in the fourth beat of the middle measure, where the clarinet's little figure seems to infect the piccolo. Swinginess doesn't stick, though. And that may be the first time in the history of the English language that that sentence was typed by anyone.

Once the piece discovers the swinginess, and everyone plays in swing sixteenths, and there are lots of syncopations in and around the swingy sixteenths, then the notation becomes extremely cumbersome. Yet it's the best way to express that which it is that I wanted. Imagine everything notated as straight sixteenths instead with "swing" notated on the parts. The problem, at least conceptually for third person Davy, is that it looks the same as the music that doesn't swing, thus it is conceptually not a feel that has been discovered. Although third person Davy supposes he could overcumber the direction to "swing as if you've finally discovered swing". But that sounds like an Air Freshener commercial.

Then third person Davy gets ready for his first rehearsal and himself rehearses the line he is going to utter most frequently: I know it's hard.

Yes, that rhythm in the strings could have been made to look much easier. But second person Davy says you wouldn't have felt it the right way.

On the other hand. They're both right.

My Buttstix article

2011-02-07T11:08:00.004-05:00

Years ago I got thefabulous, if strange, inspiration to call those old compositional bugbears I’daccumulated through the years buttstix— since it was common parlance among many of my friends to utter “he’s sure gota stick up his butt about [fill in the blank]” after performances for composers whose music neverchanged. The strange part of the inspiration was actually identifying all myown buttstix, and making them …literal. As usual, I told no one of this unusual page. A blogger discovered it,and it went somewhat viral, in a limited sense, for the attention span of theinternet: about a day. Frank Oteri called me and asked me to write a humorousfollow-up article to the page, which I did. Frank and I both seem to have forgotten about it. Which was fine with me, since I wasn't really attached to it, or to becoming The Buttstix Guy. Which is what I became, anyway. Nose guy, too. As well as Étude Dude.

So what appears below waswritten in an afternoon, probably September 6, 2004 — according to the time stamp on my computer.

“… and he’s not afraid to use pulse inhis music.” I was being introduced before a colloquium at a well-knowncomposition program, and this was listed as one of my positive attributes(indeed, in context it seemed to be an amazing attribute).

Many years ago, I was at a reception in downtown Manhattan, and in talking up a European, told him I was teaching in the city but lived in a house in the country, where I was able to concentrate and get work done. His response: “You can not make great art in the country. ART IS URBAN!”

Ata conference with a lot of guest composers of every aesthetic and geographicstripe, one composer decided to use his time with the microphone to give some sageadvice: “The problem with you atonal composers is that your music doesn’t haveany tunes. You’ll never get any recognition until you write music with tunes.”

Iwas on a panel where one of the jurors stated at the outset, “anything with akey signature we reject right away.” This juror also voted to reject one of thescores because “there aren’t even any tuplets anywhere.”

Astudent of mine at Columbia had just had a piece performed on a composersconcert that ended with a long, fun perpetual motion section. After theconcert, an older student told him, “in my day, we frowned on motor rhythms.”

You see where I’m goingwith these anecdotes. Every one of these composers was enslaved to some sort oforthodoxy that limited – okay, severely limited – his or her view of what waspossible, or at least proper, for a piece of serious music in this day and age.You call them orthodoxies; I call them buttstix.

All composers havebuttstix. I have lots of them. I picked up plenty of them when I was a student,and some of them were shoved in so firmly and deeply – most of them by me – that I’m still trying to get some of them outtoday. Because sometimes I just need to make room for more.

Take the buttstick “beafraid to use pulse.” That mystified me, since the composers on the faculty ofthe school in question all write pulsed music. Why, then, would a student inthe program think that not being afraid to use pulse was a particularly, um,brave thing? I wonder if “art is urban” guy likes Beethoven’s sixth, or Haydn’sSeasons, or any of Bartok’s folkdances? Does “has to have tunes” person think that there are no tunes inSchoenberg or Davidovsky?

So I started thinkingabout how I got my own buttstix. When I was starting out, like any neophytecomposer, I wanted to write exact copies (or pale imitations) of the music thatreally got my eyes a-swirling when I first heard it. After writing lots of paleHindemith and Persichetti copies, I encountered some stuff by Boulez, Babbitt,Davidovsky, Berg and Martino – among others – that just knocked my darned socksoff. The music was fierce and strange and mysterious and passionate in waysthat were very exciting to me. And the music made a peculiar kind of sense tome, the kind you couldn’t buy in a store. I wanted to be able to write musiclike that. So to figure out how to make it mine (or to steal it), I entered acomposition program (New England Conservatory) hoping my teachers could tell meall the secrets (preferably shortcuts) about how to write this music, or atleast to get something like that kind of sound.

Now the thing is, lots ofthose composerly things we can summarize in one word – “sound,” gestalt,texture, gesture, expression, meaning – require a lot of technique. A ton ofit, in fact. So much technique so that technique itself is virtually transparentin the final product. And as a young composer with a tongue hanging out and ahead ready to be filled with whatever was put in it, I had to spend yearslistening to and studying the music that really grabbed me –getting aconservatory education while I was at it – just to get enough technique to getto first base with my own version of that music.

Guess what? My firstteacher, Bob Ceely, wouldn’t give up any compositional secrets. He told me Ihad to write and write and write until I started writing what I really wantedto hear. And to go out and listen to more music. So in order to get in the fastlane and start writing that music sooner, I made an end run and consulted (overbeers and after concerts and with “cattiness” turned up to 11) with otherstudent composers around Boston who gravitated toward the same stuff. GraduallyI accumulated a list of Simple Rules Guaranteed To Get You That Modern Sound.Here are some of them.

No pulse.

No motor rhythms.

Sevenths and ninths are yummy.

Write everything off the beat.

Justify this note.

More counterpoint is better.

Saturate the chromatic.

Keep all the registers active.

Barlines are just a convenience.

No smiling.

Shun vernacular music.

I don’t think any of my teachers ever told me any ofthese. I got them off the street, so to speak, and you know what happens whenyou get your advice off the street. Monsters appear under your bed at night andmake fun of your music. Or does that happen only with me?

Armed with (or more accurately,butted with) a fearsome array of buttsix, by the time I left graduate school Iwas able to write tremendously complicated music with lots of fierce fastgestures that identifiably put me in … a compositional camp.

Eventually I must havegotten a little weary of writing this always-intense, always-complicated music.And it was probably at this point that I started pulling out my buttstix – oneby one, and over a long period of time. “No pulse” was the first thing to go,and the music I wrote after I did that sounded just a little less like itbelonged in that camp. Every time I pulled out another buttstick while workingon a piece, I felt a little more liberated, as well as a little naughty. Not tomention, it made sitting just a little easier.

Perhaps I was lucky thatin the process of acquiring buttstix I also acquired a secure technique – astends to happen when you work so much with egregious constraints. So with a lotof the buttstix eventually gone, I had the chops to write music that was morepersonal, more communicative, less complicated, less derivative, and at timespretty cool-sounding. Of course I still have some buttstix; and the ones I canidentify I tug on once in a while. But in retrospect, I now think thatacquiring buttstix is something that can potentially be useful for everycomposer – because, like hitting your head on the wall, it feels so good whenyou stop.

Other composers whogravitated to different music than the music I did have different buttstix –“the diatonic scale is the only natural mode of expression” seems to be apretty popular one nowadays. And “content is secondary to surface excitement”has been making the rounds. “The backbeat will save classical music” is anup-and-comer, with a bullet (thanks, Danny). I imagine my old buttsix look asoutrageous to those composers as their buttstix do to me. But at least Ieventually recognized mine. And that’s the first step to recovery.

Several years ago, acomposer in the Brandeis program wrote a piece that, in the words of thecomposer, purposefully cut against the “taboos” of serious composition –including pulse, octaves, motor rhythms, and humor. But all of us who teach inthe department do those things in our own music, and we would never have toldhim he couldn’t do any of them. He picked up his taboos somewhere else. But ifthe ritual removal of buttstix, wherever they were acquired, in this pieceliberated him compositionally, then so much the better – I’ve been there.

In the last few years, Icollected my old buttstix that I’d saved, cleaned them up, labeled them, took apicture, and put them up on the web. There Frank saw them, laughed outloud, and asked me to write this silly article, as if the joke neededexplaining. So that is what I did.

The Davy Chronicle

2011-02-06T05:19:00.001-05:00

"Davy" is a four-letter word. I should know. I have a faux business card that uses that as the motto.

The other mottoes on my faux business cards are Ask About Our Daily Specials, Radiating Genius Since 1958, Where the Beef Is, If It Sounds Good I Wrote It, Where Counterpoint Still Matters, I'm Not an English Horn, and the ever-popular The Name Means Quality. That's Judy Sherman to the right, wearing that motto, along with my startling 1974 visage.

I write from the south of France, in what is by far the largest leg of my colony and residency hop, and have decided to let my colleagues know that I go by that moniker. It's usually a long process to convince others that I am serious about it, and usually I get questions about why such a serious person as moi would go by such an unserious handle.

Here's an answer! By using it, I immediately make it serious!

Yeah, I didn't buy that, either.

The answer is much simpler and less glamorous that you would think. On the other hand, I don't think it's glamorous being called Davy. Maybe holistic. Perchance to dream.

And here it is. When I was in graduate school, my sister Jane took an arts and crafts course, one of whose units was making t-shirts with letter transfers shaped like clowns. There I am with Martler wearing one of the two shirts she made for me. That one says MY STRO. Note how only four letters fit on a line.

She tried to make a shirt that read DAVID but the letters didn't fit. Thus, the other such shirt I had read DAVY. My homey Michael Pratt, who conducted me and Beff and many others in the Princeton orchestra, started calling me that because of the shirt, and within my immediate circle of friends (actually, it's more like a bean shape), it stuck. Meanwhile, Jane's husband John has a brother named David, and as uncles we were distinguished by which one was Uncle David and which was Uncle Davy. I got to be the latter.

Wait — "radiating" genius? How do you do that?

I was always amused by how silly some people sounded calling me Davy — George Edwards being at the top of that list. Milton Babbitt never joined the Davy bandwagon, though I'm tickled to think that there was ever such a thing as a Davy bandwagon. I'd buy two. Then I'd see if I could find a Davy Train.

The only feasible moniker I don't like is Dave. Thus, two syllables, please.

When my stint in Rome got me all Italophilic and stuff, I got to signing my emails zio davino, or Uncle Davy, soon abbreviated to -zd-. During that Rome year, I finally defended my dissertation, and immediately revised my signature to -dzd-, for dottore zio davino. I still use it, though on special occasions I amend it. When I was writing Ten of a Kind, I signed -dzdcpv-, or dottore zio davino compositore per venti. Yes, the pretention drips, but I have a pan to catch it all. For a few weeks after this review appeared, I used -dzdttb- for what will be obvious, if dumb, reasons.

I end with a scintillating anecdote, for which there are many scintillas of evidence. When my nephew Jason was about three or four, I had called my sister Jane (she lives in Colorado now, as she did then) to chat, and Jason picked up the phone. I said, "this is your Uncle Davy. Is your mom there?" There was the sound of the phone being dropped, and I hung on for a long time and nothing happened. Ten minutes later I called again, Jason answered again, and still no Jane coming to the phone. I waited a full half hour and called again, and Jane answered. "Oh, Jason was just talking about you!" Jane had been vacuuming and didn't hear the phone, and twice Jason bounded into the room shouting out, "It's Uncle Davy!" She thought he was just doing another one of those imaginary play scenario things that kids do...

Nothing Grows Old Faster Than a New Sound

2011-01-30T06:44:00.004-05:00

Frank Oteri asked me to write a Babbitt tribute for New Music Box. Here is the link.

New Music Box

The Big Easy, Part 2

2011-01-12T19:09:00.001-05:00

The second post of this blog was about how easy is hard, hard is easy, left is right, and beer is toilet. In it, I made the argument — near as I can recall given my advanced age and lack of prosthetic limbs — that writing music for children or amateurs, hard though it may be, is worth the effort.

And the post included a doting parent-made video from YouTube of Sam and Andrea playing the Étude-Fantasies in L.A., way back when.

Sam and Andrea were one of three duos assembled to perform the piece at the MTAC conference, and were the oldest players. Another video, and one with more stuff happening in it, has recently been posted YouTubewards, this time with the medium-age group — Jeremy and Zachary. They are brothers. Also appearing in the video are Cathy O'Connor, who was the go-to person for everything with respect to the commission, and that included the beers afterwards; and then there is me. Being as it is me talking there, I can't watch it. But that doesn't mean you can't.

At the end, I am shown collecting flowers with all of the players and other dignitaries and people with delightful blends of consonants and vowels in their names. I ended up giving my bouquet to a vendor on the elevator of the hotel. For I was to take an early morning flight the next day, and what use did I have for flowers?

Octaves roasting

2010-12-24T15:52:00.004-05:00

It being the day before Christmas, it's time to air out the old interval song, which dates back to graduate school, with various tweaks and revisions since (I think Kathy Dupuy and I made up the first version in the early '80s). Sung to the tune of Mel Tormé's Christmas song, and also available on my web page. Credit to Hayes Biggs for the second line, and maybe the fourth line, of the bridge. So get into the holiday spirit and learn your intervals. Or else.

For the uninitiated, I have put the intervals in red. Because you are worth it.

Octaves roasting on an open fire,
Major sixths nipping at your nose,
Major seconds being sung by a choir,
Chromatic alterations of the scale.

Diatonic scale.
A turkey and some mistletoe
Major sixths make the season bright.
Major seconds with their eyes all aglow
Will find it hard to sleep tonight.

There's minor sevenths on their way.
They've loaded lots of minor seconds on their sleigh.
And every minor sixth will want to spy
To see the supertonic prolonged over five.

And octave offering this simple phrase
To major sixths one to ninety-two.
Although it's been said many times, many ways,
Meet the Flintstones. To you.

How could I NOT have one? Part 4

2010-12-04T16:56:00.000-05:00

See here, here and here for earlier chapters in the continuing nerd-a-saga. I used and shared the first three at Yaddo, and the results were decidedly mixed.

Thus, when shopping on amazon dot com, I was surprised to see not one, but two new Sound Machines in my Suggestions. Readers of this blog know that in 1967 or 1968 I kept buying Batman trading cards until I had them all. In that long and august tradition, then, I obviously must have one and exactly one of all the Sound Machines machines.

Football sounds — on their way. Just arrived this afternoon — behold.

One naturally wonders how they got the rights to use all those sounds. That one is not I.