Strong Mouth, Fresh Wind

Eye-rolling time. We fifth graders had barely gotten accustomed to our new digs — Fairfield Street School, way on the other side of town — when already we were summoned to an assembly, whatever that was. We hardly ever had assemblies in first through fourth grades. This involved a regimented and highly supervised march to the junior high, where there was an actual gymnasium, with bleachers of sufficient size to seat the fifth grade class.

We were to repeat this march, but much less regimentedly, many times in fifth grade. Since our gym classes were held at the junior high, too.

This first of the fifth grade assemblies involved listening to a lecture-demo by a guy introduced to us as Mr. Ellis. From Ellis Music Company somewheres downstate. We got an entertaining lecture — verging on perky — by this Mr. Ellis Jack-of-All-Trades guy about the instruments of the band. All of which he could play and tell goofy stories about. Naturally, the tuba demo was accompanied by a story about an elephant. As I recall, the clarinet demo was largely about the Maxwell House Coffee commercials.

You gotta admire a guy whose business it is to go to all the schools in the state and play all the instruments for them. How exactly do you keep up your chops on a dozen and a half or so instruments? How do you even carry that many instruments in your car?

Conspicuously absent from the demo was the string instrument family. Not that the magical Mr. Ellis wouldn't sell you a string instrument. For you see, there were apparently no string players in town, save perhaps a jazz bassist (I believe they were known as string bassists) here or there, no string programs, no nothin'. For all I knew, the only violin in town was in my mother's closet. I took it out once and couldn't figure out where to put my hands. Maybe you had to go all the way to Burlington to find people who knew where to put their hands on a string instrument. We only went there to get day-old bread for fifteen cents off.

Mr. Ellis's demo finished with the expected invitation for the kids to badger their parents to buy instruments from him. Lessons for all the kids were free, through school! From a really old guy with an amazingly floppy gullet and cigarette breath called Mr. Bostwick. What a New England name! And another jack of all trades, of sorts.

So I made the customary pitch to the parents when I got home. I don't recall which instrument I wanted to play, and I doubt I was seduced by the coffee commercial. Long before this meeting, though, my father had decided my instrument for me: the French horn.

Keep in mind that there is no musical ability or taste on the Polish side of the family (I could apparently still be a musician if the Polish were extracted). Dad was entirely tone deaf, and had the easy listening station from Montreal playing all day. So I'm just a bit curious as to why he chose this instrument.

Fail! The powers-what-be in music said no French horning until seventh grade, after two years with another instrument. So dad said, let's get a saxophone instead. Fail again! Same parameters. Third time's a charm? Trombone? Score! Please remit one hundred and eighty-five 1968 dollars.

So Mr. Cigarette-Breath Bostwick taught us trombonists in groups of five or so, conducted the junior high band, and by the end of my fifth grade year, had me playing Asleep in the Deep as a solo/duo with the band. Probably Grade Two, even though I neither knew what that meant then nor what it means now. When I say solo/duo, I meant that Jim Farley and I played it in unison. I was the brash up-and-comer, he was the King of the Trombone Hill about to graduate. To high school.

Apparently, band music is graded, just like railroads and highways. And it runs the gantlet. I don't know how the scale works, but two is probably pretty easy, right? On the other hand, the solo part begins in sixth position ...

Once in our group lesson — by the end of the school year, I would be the last trombone standing — Mr. Cigarette Breath chewed out the whole group for lack of effort, then pointed to me as a sterling example. We didn't really hear him chew us out — we were always busy fanning the cigarette smoke away.

Me and Mr. Cigarette Breath had a sizable generation gap, as when he tried to become friendly, he asked me what I listened to at home. I replied that my sister had brought home a Chicago album, jazz-rock as they called it. He replied, and voluminously so, that Chicago jazz was famous the world over, and he gave a long list of its practitioners. I fanned the cigarette smoke.

In sixth grade, I was sent to the high school district music festival, and in seventh grade I was encouraged to play a solo in the same festival's solo competition. When I say encouraged I mean forced. I played the Grand March from Aïda, and what is significant about that was that I was accompanied by Verne Colburn in the concert, our first meeting. Really, you haven't lived until you've heard, and swooned to, the Grand March from Aïda for trombone and piano. I am pleased to report that I have lived. When I say pleased I mean something else. While I didn't win, it was probably remarked that the Aïda guy sure was little.

Eventually, dad's friend Carl Eller got me to play in two local town bands, in which Mr. Eller played saxophone — which I was now old enough to play but didn't, because I was a gentleman. Hence began my outside ensemble performing career — literally my outside performing career. Not only were most of the tunes on the concerts sight-read (at least by me, since everyone else had been playing the same tunes for about eighty-six years), but I got to savor the treat of applause by people in lawn chairs supplemented liberally by horn-honking of those listening from inside their cars. How odd that I myself have yet to go to a concert for which I stay inside my car; I rarely use my car horn to express approval of the actions of others.

By high school, there were all-state and all-New England festivals for which to audition and go to, and it's well-documented here that playing and hearing that extended tonal Americana stuff got me started as a composer, and by writing for my own high school band. I was trying to win a composition contest with my very first piece, and I reveal here for the first time its embarrassing title. I was doing junior-in-high-school pretentio-guy by imagining that, instead of stealing the best work of others, I was using music to embody the striving of the human spirit (not the Hunan spirit, which would come with hot and sour soup). That Fsus4 beginning and ending must have represented something really pretentio, as it represented ultimate striving. The piece, as submitted to the competition, was Opus 3, "The Ultimate". The quotes were part of the title.

I lost, of course — to a brass ensemble in Renaissance style with a less pretentio-title. Years later it got back to me that the judging panel liked the piece and hated the title.

The following year I wrote another band piece for the same competition, and this time it won. The new piece had five short movements — probably modeled on or stolen from the Persichetti Divertimento. It was more transparently and professionally written, and was never performed (parts would have had to be copied). The title was no less pretentio — Suite from Erehwon, which retrograded is Nowhere Morf Etuis. The second title would have been better. Or at least funnier.

So my entire musical life — by entire I mean more than half of it (I know some government accountants, and do they have stories...) — revolved around bands. I even got to be the fulcrum when the band marched.

Oh. Did I mention that all of us in band had to learn to march, too? Our jack-of-all-trades Mr. Colburn, conservatory-trained and a monster jazz pianist, had to kowtow to the locals' desire to see the local high schoolers wearing stifling wool uniforms — to which I was allergic — and marching down Main Street. So he had to teach us how to march. At the Veteran's Day and Maple Festival parades, my instrument's slide occasionally froze so that the only notes available to me were the harmonic series on B-flat.

By fulcrum, I mean to say I was the left corner of the front row, and when the band made its left turns, I was literally that — the point of the compass. The trombone at the other fulcrum, meanwhile, was the pencil on the compass, marching the fastest. At right turns, I was the pencil. We still don't know who the walrus was.

After high school, I got little exposure to wind ensemble music, despite the fact that NEC had one of the bitchinest wind ensembles in all of creation. I went to a lecture-demo when Joe Schwantner was in town for the local premiere of his then-new mountains rising nowhere — notable for the use of tuned wine glasses and chords stacked in thirds. And for how quickly it became standard rep for band.

Tuned wine glasses. Obviously the year was between 1975 and 1978. It was one of those thingies that was really cool and had a shelf life approximately equivalent to that of the Pet Rock. Roll your eyes, here come the tuned wine glasses ... again ...

Thus speaks the guy who owned not one, but two leisure suits.

I did not own a Pet Rock. Nor a tuned wine glass. Though tuned wine glasses turn out to be a nice way to get old folks acting pretty silly.

Then band music was totally off my radar for twenty-two years — equivalent to the amount of time it takes to write a hundred piano études, as it turns out.

Actually, I fib a little more than slightly. I played euphonium — euphonium! — in the Princeton Wind Ensemble for one concert, since nobody else could or would, and tuba — tuba! — at two graduation ceremonies. So make that nineteen years. Add euphonium solo in Mars to my list of who cares? accomplishments. The band also played Copland's Outdoor Overture, and Jody Rock and I put words to the three-note ostinato: I've sold out. I've sold out. I've sold out. Also to the opening tutti: I'm making lots of DOUGH!

Nineteen years and twenty-six thousand three hundred twenty-five dollars and twenty-five cents later, I got a letter and package from Mike Colburn at 8th and "I" Streets in DC. He had bought my freshly-minted twenty-six thousand three hundred twenty-five dollars and twenty-five cents CD on CRI, liked the music, said he was programming Sesso e Violenza from said CD at a concert at the Library of Congress. He also wondered if I'd be interested in writing for the band — here are some digital examples contained in the package.

Mike Colburn. Assistant Director of the US Marine Band. Son of the monster jazz pianist who had to teach me and my homeys how to march all proper. Yeah, okay, you got my attention.

I didn't know anything about writing for band, really, despite having started there. Good thing I had a bunch of examples of the band — which were later supplemented by more CDs from other bands. To me, band, wind ensemble, seemed like one of those niche worlds occupying a secluded corner of the ether, with its own passwords and secret handshakes and insider jokes and its own hero composers.

Got it in one.

Just like, say, the harp world. Go through that door and what you hear is Salzedo, Salzedo, Salzedo, why can't you write for harp more like Salzedo, and why do you not revere him as we enlightened harpists do?

By the same token, I was once obligated to keep a straight face when a timpanist friend declared that Elliott Carter's Eight Pieces for Four Timpani was great music. I'm afraid I wasn't up to the obligation.

I exaggerate what I thought of the band world — daunting would be a more apt description. And the niche is actually a pretty gigantic one. What I had remembered most about band music was all the cues in it to cover for parts that might not be available this year. For instance, I'd never encountered much in the way of double reeds in my band experience — is an oboe solo an exotic thing in a band piece and a bassoon solo exoticker? In my memory — and in the digitally-represented performances at hand — the full band playing medium to fast reminded me of the taste and texture of melted caramels. And all the cuing — can the composer really control all the instrumental colors?

These digital representations — lots of tricks, and lots of the same tricks. Aha, I had learned the first part of the secret handshake. And formal paradigms? Fast and brassy followed by lyrical slower stuff, and an abbreviated return. Most of the time.

I also thought that a significant majority of the music tossed my way was carp. I'm using an anagram here. It was this. Still with the anagrams.

Not all of it, though. Nick Maw and Warren Benson, good. 

And the band world itself? In America, something like

• 99.9% educational (middle school, high school, college)
• 0.00999% professional, associated with the military
• 0.000001% professional, not associated with the military

I may have to revise those numbers later. That last figure seems a bit high.

What I was about to find out was that my re-entry into this world was to be at the very highest level. This truly was, and is, the best band in the world. And they came and knocked on my door for a piece. The performance of Sesso e Violenza was very, very good, even worth going through two layers of Library of Congress security.

At that S&V gig, one audience member said he'd taken a course with Dallapiccola when he was at Berkeley and asked he was still teaching there. I said not since he died twenty-six years earlier. The audience member nodded in agreement.

The parameters for the Marine Band piece were pretty much carte blanche. Write your music, and please please please please don't write a band piece. We've got a lot of those already. Message received. The availability of so many clarinets led to the idea of making it a concerto grosso for ten clarinets of various sizes and twenty-nine players.

Franco Terry later asked me to write about this experience, and I did.

Mike even thought the whole thing was important enough — outlier finds comfort zone in military band world — to conduct an interview for a trade magazine. The interview was long enough to be published in two installments, and the beer flowed freely. Mike's wife Nancy commented the next day that we sure did laugh a lot, and for a long time.

Doing things the military way — not related to the music, but essential for this project. Once the commission was settled, there was the form of payment. A supply sergeant in St. Louis (I do not know why he shared with me his location) called to ask if I took credit cards. Imagine the esprit d'escalier on that response. Eventually, I had to cumber some and register as a military contractor, which as you can imagine was cumberful to the extreme. The payment was late, and because of that, I was paid with interest — enough for a nice lunch with Beff. Too bad they couldn't have paid it in 1968 dollars.

The act of writing the piece — daunting, but in the end, really really fun. I wasn't writing a band piece, so there were no roads. If instrumental combos seemed cool, I used them (bassoon doubling vibraphone in octaves with motor and a triangle roll? I own that sonority!) And complicated counterpoint? Bring it on!

Man, did they smoke that performance, and even moreso at the WASBE conference a few months later. Oh yeah — free trip to Lucerne, Switzerland. Cool, huh?

And I learned about the interesting intersection between music culture and military culture. The performers? Enlisted men and women, various flavors of sergeants. The assistant directors? Officers. In rehearsals, performer questions were prefaced with "Sir". And since there I was hangin' with the officers, they called me "Sir" as well. Force of habit, I guess. Example: your piece is really hard. But really cool. Sir. Another example. Sir, is this piece twelve-tone?

And since then? A call from a band director in Texas about how important the piece was and how soon he would be performing it (he didn't). And a performance in Norway. Well, you know, build it with ten virtuoso clarinet parts and see just how many non-Norwegians line up to play it.

Not much later, in need of a project to take only a few available days, I arranged my tango étude for band and showed it to Michael. His immediate response — who's going to do a 3-minute band piece? Arrange three more! So I did. And Mike, now the Director of the Band, did it at the Midwest Clinic. Stride piano for band? A real goof-a-thon. Hardest part about that arrangement? Writing a faux drum set part for the bop-athon. I pretty much copied the drummer on a Charlie Parker recording that was at hand. It didn't suck.

My final toe submersion in the band world was to apply for the Barlow Prize for the wind ensemble commission, which I won. Thus another band piece, likely my last. What was new this time was doing bandlike stuff — my first march ever, and a bunch of scimmiamerda drumming. Again, the Marines did a smash-up premiere and this time it sounded — to me — more professional, more like band music. For I no longer had carte blanche (four of the ensembles to play this piece are college bands). Still good, though. And still ... serious. Though mildly disappointing that I seemed to know what I was doing.

Hey, my brand was I don't know how to write for band, so I just make up shit. Now what do I do?

And of those five wind ensembles contracted to premiere the piece, still waiting on forty percent of them.

So there we have it. I came, I saw, I Concord. I know how to write for band now. Even though I still get to be an outlier. Bring on the next hard thing.

And this band music grading thing. I know there's a list somewhere made by people with advanced degrees in education who have forgotten far more big words than I will ever know. I saw my pieces listed as "Grade 6" somewheres. Is this the pinochle? After the Lucerne performance, a Swiss guy smiled and remarked "Grade Eight."

And the title of this post — a translation of a Japanese toothpaste commercial.

Hop to it

To put it in the passive voice. A colony hop has been begun by me. New blog entries will thus become very special episodes.

As I type, I am at the place of butter balls.

And am having a very nice time, thank you.

The Vessel with the Pestle

Form is the vessel into which musical substance is poured.

Whoa, excuse me. I think I'll throw up now. I'll be right back.

I'm back.

Form is the vessel into which musical substance is poured.

Cut it out! Unless you want to save the retch of, like, me.

A former colleague of mine once told me that, when observing a graduate student teaching a section of music appreciation, he actually heard said graduate student introduce musical form that way.

Well, if this is so (hold on a second — dry heave — okay, better), then music takes the shape of its container. Meaning that it doesn't actually unfold in time. It's just a bunch of stuff with a shape and hardly any spontaneity. Sort of like an administrator.

Go to the opposite end of the argument that I seem to be having with myself. To coin a double negative, it wouldn't be proper to say that there is no such thing as musical form. It is an observable fact that pieces of music — particularly those from the same style period — follow certain shared patterns of behaviour such that there are a lot of resemblances in the way the pieces get put together.

Wow, that's a really wordy way to say common practice.

The thing is — no one who's ever put notes to paper and survived would say that they were creating substance that would be shaped by a vessel. Whatever this nebulous thing we call musical form is, it certainly isn't a prescriptive list of things you must do to satisfy an a priori notion of how a piece of music goes. But neither are notes-to-paper-putters unaware of the elements of musical form and how the shapes and relationships they are creating make larger shapes and relationships.

The problem is, when we teach musical form, we more often than not teach it as a straw man. What makes Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin et al great is how they push the conventions of the form. You can't make that statement without teaching the conventions of the form. And in the classroom, it's just not that interesting to trot out a piece of music that embodies the conventions of a form for deep study, especially when it's obvious that the piece that has been aufgetrotted is there only as a straw man. Do creative writing instructors make students read completely predictable novels to serve as the control group against which the actual good, unpredictable novels are compared?

A better question is do any pieces of music exist that exactly embody the archetype? Where do we go to find the control group?

By the same token, are there any families that exactly embody the archetypes of the American family, what with 1.7 children and all? If there are, I suppose it's best to make up the 1.7 children as .8 of a child and .9 of a child. For that, you have to plan in advance. There is apparently some received wisdom about that from Solomon, as well.

As a sidebar. What of music that is specifically written to embody a theory of music? Other than ewww, the response might be — why not? Why wait the customary thirty or so years for theory to catch up with the practice? If the textbook for a whole body of music is written before any of that music is written, then its students can get the books at remainder prices.

When I taught at Columbia, there were graduate students doing theory degrees who were allowed to take the masters-level composition seminars, and I taught some of them. One of them was such a speculative theorist, as I guess they get called. His idea of combining his theory studies with composition lessons was to modify one small portion of the apparatus for writing and analyzing tonal music by changing the rules therein, and to write inventions and fugatos that would follow the new rules. Specifically, tritones and sevenths were now consonant, and sixths and thirds were now dissonant — and there were probably some other rule changes that I don't recall.

In baseball, hitting a ground ball that can be fielded by the shortstop is now a home run. Any ball hit in the air is now an out. A foul ball is worth two or three points depending on how far into the stands it lands.

You can imagine the composition lessons with the theorist, as I had to shift my brain from practice to theory while reading through the inventions and fugatos. Commentary from me as to whether it was good music would have been pointless. Instead, mostly I could either agree or disagree that this musical excerpt correctly embodies the theory.

And boy did the consonant chords sound strange.

And while I'm on the tangent, here I can recall the weirdest, most cosmic question I ever got asked by a composition teacher, obviously zonked from reading a particularly dense dissertation he'd been advising: How would your music be different if you didn't have octave equivalence?

Rather long silence.

It'd be different, that's for sure is how I broke the silence.

I do recall reading in an august music analysis publication from the 1960s that in certain music that was fashionable to write at that time, the theory and the composition are one and the same.

This is a symptom, not a cause, of why composers now can have PhDs.

Teaching a complicated thing like sonata form, though. It has to be done, because so much great music follows the so-called archetype in a very general way. Typically it's taught on a timeline, going left to right on the X axis on the blackboard, with descriptors hung at certain points. Thick lines mark sectional divisions. And of course, every section has a name. Which is, I suppose, as it should be. After all, what's exciting about a false recapitulation if there is no such thing as a recapitulation? And now, tra la and voilà! The entire form can be viewed, like a painting, instantaneously.

And therein lies the problem. We teach sonata form as a vessel into which ... I can't type the rest of that sentence. By doing so, we lose the sense of how the nature of the musical materials themselves, unfolding in time, create a dynamic, ever shifting musical experience. You don't experience a piece of music all at once.

Call me Mr. Wordy.

As a note-pusher myself, I can offer a few small observations. Composers often set out with a plan for a piece and get derailed from that plan when doing the actual writing. It's not for lack of discipline. Good composers recognize various potentials for their own musical ideas, and often a new idea comes during the act of composition that makes fulfilling the idea of form as a vessel impossible. Much more often than not, the tangential way of composing is far superior.

Think of it this way. The analysis is like looking at the maze from above, where all possible paths out and all the paths that lead to dead ends can be found out very quickly. The composition is like being the mouse going through the maze.

Let's try another metaphor. A piece of music is like a living, breathing thing, with an emphasis on the breathing. If the composer is trying to make tension and release — I am such a composer — then the living, breathing part is accomplished by various ways of building tension and releasing it, on several different structural levels. Exactly how that is accomplished is, of course, complicated. It's up to the composer to find the right combinations of rhythm, notes, colors, harmonies, etc. that makes for musical magic.

I have come to find it useful to think of these tensions and releases with pretty generic terms — upbeat and downbeat. The words themselves suggest a physicality affected by gravity, and being aware of which one you are trying to compose is very helpful. In the sonata form archetype, there is a big structural downbeat at the recapitulation, often (but not always, etc.) preceded by the tensest music of the entire piece. Thus the many recapitulations of Haydn and Beethoven that seem to slip through a crack in the door unnoticed — brilliant.

Because when they do that, it violates the archetype. When you recognize that, you can then get to a useful discussion of the character and content of the musical material that made such a thing possible, or even inevitable.

Which is useful to a composer. Because then the discussion, instead of being about the notes, starts to be about the magic.

Like a Leslie Goes

Fast or slow, like a Leslie goes.

Those seemed like familiar rap lyrics. But from what song? I could hear the heavy backbeat, the overuse of the syn-bass drum. You know what it's like, right? You hear something that is or that reminds you of music you know, and you wrack your brain to figure out exactly which piece, and nothing comes until you stop thinking about it, and you blurt out the answer in the middle of an ordinary conversation as a non sequitur.

... so then I was trying to decide between the blackberries and the raspberries, which weren't on special, and SHE'S COME UNDUN BY THE GUESS WHO! That's what it was!

I call these songs brain wrackers.

Well, no I don't. I only do now that I'm on the subject. I don't call them anything. Or I didn't use to.

Last March I went to Bard College for the first time in my life to be in the audience for a performance of several of my hand-wrecker 'tudes. Once I figured out where to park, and that things on map are much smaller than they appear, I approached what might have been the building with the concert hall, and I heard some hardass Modernist music faintly coming through a couple of windows. I got closer to the windows and heard a piano getting the crap pounded out of it — assuming there was crap in it to begin with.

It was my own Fists of Fury, which was to be performed that night.

How 'bout that? My first time at Bard, and the sound associated with it is me.

Hee hee.

The concert that night began with a big ensemble piece by John Hallé called Structural Adjustment. It was a very cool piece — a raucous affair with repeated upwardly-mobile overlapping scales and arpeggios, among other things. And it was a brain wracker. Those scales with those particular syncopations reminded me of something in some other piece I knew, but what?

At intermission I told John I thought his piece was great, and that I thought that his scale figures might have also been in an Earth Wind and Fire tune. Just which tune, I did not know. Repeated brain-wrackage yielded nothing. John acknowledged that he could have unconsciously used something in Earth Wind and Fire. Don't everybody?

I obsessed.

The next day, back at my own computer, I brought up the considerable EW&F playlists in iTunes and methodically went through them until — voilà! I found which tune it was. I hadn't heard the tune in many a year, which is probably why there needed to be so much wracking. And the scale figures are in the introduction.




And so in trying to think up a devastatingly clever title for this post, I got that little bit of rap stuck in my brain. Fast or slow, like a Leslie goes.

Aha! I thought. I often think in exclamations. It's Prince, or maybe TAFKAP in a rap break of some song. Those syn-bass drums make it kind of early, pre-lamo introspective Prince. And the voice doing the rapping was not that of Prince. Hmm, maybe NPG and Gett Off?

Nope.

Defeatedly, I googled the phrase. Bullseye. It's Love Machine, performed by The Time, and on the Graffiti Bridge soundtrack.



Beff and I actually paid money to see Graffiti Bridge in a theater in Worcester, where there were maybe six of us in the audience. The music was great. The movie was awful. It seemed like because Purple Rain practically printed money for the movie people, they let Prince have two more movies, on the house. It appears they then cut him off, and rightly so.

Good soundtrack, though.

Fast or slow is like Davy goes, too. If you have a bookmarks folder of examples of awkward segues, you'll probably want to bookmark this post.

The common prototypes for fast and slow composers are Mozart and Beethoven. Whereas Mozart would hold whole pieces in his head (if one of his letters can be believed) and the act of writing them down was a time-consuming nuisance, Beethoven labored and labored over his music, crossing out stuff and reworking it obsessively until he was satisfied with it.

A friend swears this is in an early sketch of the slow movement of Beethoven's fifth — which I can't verify since I don't have access to any of those sketches. But if it is so, looky there — that glorious singing 'cello tune with its quirky turns and fabulous shape — started as an ordinary rising sequence? Get outta town!

This isn't a binary argument; composers work at all speeds. The Mozart-Beethoven binary is often invoked to show that the speed at which a piece of music is written is not a good predicter of its quality. Mozart wrote great first drafts and rarely revised: Beethoven wrote lousy first drafts, but was a great reviser. It's also a bit ironic that Beethoven made a name for himself as an improviser, yet he slaved away endlessly at his written-down stuff. Perhaps it was the lead in his beer mug.

Schoenberg seems to have been a pretty fast composer, too — the first five of the Op. 19 piano pieces were written in one day (February 11, 1911). And Verklärte Nacht was written in three weeks. Both of them are pretty complicated stuff. In his article Heart and Brain in Music, Schoenberg uses a 2-bar passage of complicated 4-part counterpoint, containing a leitmotif together with its inversion, twice, as an example of something that was so hard to write it took about an hour. And to think, he could have had hand-crafted lenses made while he wrote the passage. Or his holiday snaps developed.

I cannot think of anyone in my circle of friends that could have written the Schoenberg example in less than four hours. Admittedly, it's not a big, big circle. More like an oval, really. With a slight bulge on one side. And peanut butter.

Compare to Webern, whose entire life's work fits on three CDs. Well, at the tempi that Boulez takes, it fits onto three CDs.

I myself have inhabited both fast composer body and slow composer body, and let me tell you they are the same body. The biggest difference between the two, in my case, seems to be two things: secureness with technique and familiarity with other music. And as a secondary factor, willingness to work without a net. Any factor can be both a laxative and a binding agent, depending on how it's used and where it's applied.

The laxative effect is also contingent on how many movements you are writing, and whether they are attacca. Couldn't resist that one.

When someone tells me hey you wrote that fast, my response is sometimes something like well, I didn't write all spring semester, so it was like diarrhea waiting to come out.

Sometimes I'm just not into the subtle thing.

Most of the time I'm just not into the subtle thing.

Both ASCAP and BMI have published handy helpful guides on how much you should be prepared to spend to commission a composer, based on duration and size of performing forces. There is no similar guide for BMI or ASCAP composers advising how long a composer should be prepared to spend writing a piece based on duration and size of performing forces. Suppose there were a guide and it said a four-movement symphony for full orchestra lasting a half hour should take eight months to write. So do I get paid half if I write it in four months? Do I get double for taking a year and a half? Why do union piano movers get paid minimum two hours wages to take ten minutes moving a piano from one side of a room to the other?

One of these things is not like the others.

My first piece (Opus 3) was written for band — my high school band, you go with what you know, dontcha know — February 16-20, 1975. Five days, seven minutes of music. I wrote directly onto the final score. The reason I could write so much so fast was that I didn't know anything. I was completely unaware of — or didn't care about — conventions, what was good, what was being stolen (all of it). I was just enraptured by the exercise of putting notes on the page. Nobody was judging me. Except, perhaps, the students who played it and hated it.

Within a month of entering college, I slowed down considerably. The ISCM World Music Days were in Boston, and school was cancelled so that we could go to the concerts. Heck, I was in one of the concerts — the chorus for Shifrin's Chronicles with the BSO and Ozawa. A whole week of just 'bout everything can certainly mess a young composer up. So I shifted gears entirely and played with motives and homely-to-ugly harmony.

Within a year I was writing a piece a week. Perhaps I was trying to get all my bad music out of the way so that only good music would be left to write, but that turns out not to have worked. I was writing solos and duos for all my friends, making checklists of cool effects I wanted to use, and every other week's composition lesson went like this. "I wrote another piece." "Is it finished?" Yes." "You don't want me to criticize it?" "No." "Lunch?"

By the end of my sophomore year, my teacher had had enough. It's time for you to start writing slow, tortured music. Be more thoughtful and critical. Let's look intensely at the music and see what could be improved.

It was good advice. I was more critical, more scared to put down something that wasn't like totally awesome. Scared, too, to revise. If I like what happens in bar 5 and bar 8 but not in bars 6 and 7, how do I rewrite 6 and 7 to make 8 still work? Because, you know, 7 8 9.

So in my junior year and the first half of my senior year, two of three composition lessons went like this. "Any new music this week?" "No." "Lunch?"

Pieces written in freshman and sophomore years: about 35. Junior and Senior years: 1.33.

But they were pretty good pieces. The ".33" is even published, along with the other .67.

Through grad school and at least six years following, I wrote very slowly. On the one hand, the example of Berg's Lulu was a pretty formidable one, and the music therein had the key to what I thought I wanted to do. On the other hand, I was attracted to the spiky instrumental writing of the so-called Uptown composers. Combining or reconciling spiky and Romantic seems to be what I was trying to do. Perhaps they really are two great tastes that taste great together? Or is it more like ginseng tea and melted cheese?

Plus, I had a pretty severe working method of using complementary all-combinatorial hexachords, and modulating from hexachord to hexachord by using common trichords. Which was a lot easier to do than it sounds. Like any technique, and like learning a language, once you've done enough of it, it's second nature.

And sometimes I played hooky from that particular method, and felt guilty.

Nonetheless, my list of compositions from about 1979 to 1991 mostly have composition dates begun and completed in different years.

I have to write my dissertation was a significant factor in that slowness. But not a huge one.

Then it snapped. After laboring eleven months over that first symphony, which I am fond of disparaging in these blog posts, I got to Yaddo with the intent of writing a celebratory piece fast, and there you go. Winged Contraption, full orchestra, 9-1/2 minutes, 23 days to write.

I had decided screw the charts and screw justifying every note — the polite connotation of screw, that is. I've got a vocabulary of harmonies that work just fine for me, and if I just loosen up a whole lot and stop fretting, I can write music faster, and perhaps it will even be better music. A-splode!

A partner to the newer, fresher, faster outlook was the étude project, which had a strict time limit of 6 days and no revisions allowed. Wow, seat of the pants stuff, refreshing, invigorating. It was as if after studying a language for eleven years, I was now speaking in it. Olé! Empfindsamkeit! Triceratops!

I also discovered how much work you get done at artist colonies. To top it all off, I began to give myself a measure quota per day while at colonies. For big pieces, 15 measures per day. For 'tudes, 20 bars per day. Always with the understanding that anything written can be discarded, of course. It turns out not much ever is.

Second symphony, 28 minutes, 3 months to write. Third symphony, 30 minutes, 2 months to write. Persistent Memory, 23 minutes, two writing bursts of 2-1/2 weeks each, 14 months apart. Piano Concerto, 34 minutes, two weekends followed by a year hiatus (I was The Chair), and two months of writing time.

Not every piece goes so swimmingly, of course. This spring, I had a Sondheim arrangement for solo piano to do — part of Tony de Mare's Liaisons project — and I convinced myself I'd get it done in a fraction of my February vacation. Nope. Once I started it I realized I was at sea. It wasn't finished in the February vacation, or in the April vacation, or by the end of the semester. It was finished a week after school ended. It is about 6 or 7 minutes and occupied me for almost three months. Talk about working without a net.

My colleagues, and some students, think I write blazingly quickly. It never feels that way. It feels more like slow and steady winning the race. Plus, there's that quota thing. And a solemn promise never to miss a deadline.

I will, however, own up to having written this one in 75 minutes. It was fun.

Davy, do you write intuitively or rationally? A subject for another blog post, not this one. But those are two more great tastes that taste great together.