Go listen to Mozart

Jan 3rd, 11 / 4 Comments

People often ask me why I don’t write music like Mozart or Beethoven. It always reminds me of something a conductor once told a composer acquaintance: “Why would I play your music when I have 300 years of masterpieces in my library?” The fact is, people have all the Mozart and Beethoven they need. Mother Earth cries every time we waste more of whatever-a-CD-is-made-of on yet another “interpretation” of a Beethoven symphony. (I don’t mean to offend my many friends who have practiced for years just so that they can re-interpret Beethoven…those poor pawns of the recording industry ;) )

Don’t get me wrong, I love Beethoven symphonies. But, I’m baffled at why people don’t realize the absurdity of what they’re mindlessly asking me. If you want Mozart, go listen to Mozart. Why do you need me to do it?

First of all, I CAN’T write like the “masters”. I haven’t listened to enough “classical” music in my life to understand the nuances of tonal harmony and counterpoint the way Beethoven, Brahms and Wagner did. They lived and breathed it from childhood. They were trained from their youth to modulate seamlessly. Me? I grew up listening to Bruce Springsteen playing his chord progressions the wrong way. I get tonal music in theory. I’ve been trained to analyze tonal styles, but I get lost in Tristan. So what? Expecting modern composers to be fluent with tonality would be like training doctors in the nuances of blood letting. I can get around a score pretty well despite having only modulated once in a song I wrote as an undergrad. Besides, I don’t even like classical music in a non-academic way.. what with all it’s phony rules and silly conventions… like keys. I should say that I am profoundly affected by it–it moves me. It inspires me. I deeply appreciate it, but I don’t keep it on my ipod.

Second, I don’t want to. The composer Mark Applebaum said once that he was tired of sounds. I get that. I’m not there yet, but I am tired of notes. I haven’t written a note in months. It’s been a nice break. (Kind of itching to get back to it now, though) I still wrote plenty of music–by the end of the month I will have had 4 performances in 3 states of new music I’ve written since October despite not having written a note. I’ve been writing shapes and sounds. That’s exciting. Who cares about notes?

For me the most exciting thing is not knowing what’s about to happen. Problem is, composers always know. By the time a piece is written, edited, proofed and performed, I’m sick to death of it. That sickness goes away. I really like the stuff I did a few years ago–my new stuff, not so much. It’s always like that. Working the unknown in, and figuring out how to control it is making music exciting for me again.

Beyond these things, I find the cult of the old absurd. Take masterpieces for what they are–products of a bygone era. If old music seems mystifyingly gorgeous and supernatural to us now, let me suggest that it’s because we don’t understand the context of its creation, not because it represents some kind of cultural pinnacle.

You really think the 1820′s represents the climax of culture? Here’s your chamber pot. Enjoy.

I’m no futurist. I’m certainly no progressive, but I do see history as an exponentially growing shared experience. We can either tap into that experience with all that history has to offer (not to mention what’s happening today in our very own era!), or we can latch onto the 1820′s as the be-all, end-all of musical culture. If you really think music stops with Mozart, you’re in luck. There’s plenty of it out there for you. As for me, I’m going to go have some fun.

Random

Data management

Sep 21st, 10 / 0 Comments

I’m working on a piece now for the free improvisation group Impulse. This is a different compositional approach for me on two levels: 1, I’m not writing notes–it’s a free improvisational environment, and 2, it’s my first major foray into electroacoustic music (Pure Data). It’s a little overwhelming, so I’m working on a data management system. Actually, I prefer to call it a script. It’s not a script in the traditional sense, in which it would dictate every action throughout the piece. Rather, it’s a series of states that the players can activate. So the form of the piece actually comes from the improvisation happening on stage. Here’s the first part of my script, data management. It’s incomplete, and it’s rather lacking in detail–but that’s the nature of works-in-progress…

Time is governed by a master clock counting seconds. This clock sends out the message “time”.  Various patches take note of the time when they begin and at when a preset or gaussian number of seconds have passed, the patch shuts down. The main program also times the sections. The first section will be put in ready-to-end mode after a gaussian time has passed. Once the section is ready to end, other performance factors (described below) will trigger the movement from one section to the next.

Audio files are divided into 4 categories: pads, loops, rhythms, and gestures. Pads are lengthy (~1 min) of ambient sound and are triggered by group performance data. Loops are files designed to be looped until certain performance events occur and are triggered by group performance data. Rhythms are also longer files, but designed to establish a meter or a groove and are triggered by group performance data. Gestures are anything from a single note to around 15″ melody. Gestures are divided into groups by instrument (violin, sax, accordion, guitar) and are triggered by individual performance data. Pads, loops and rhythms belong to a super category of global accompaniments that are triggered by group performance data. As such, only one of these files can be played at a time. Gestures, however, can be played simultaneously with global accompaniments. Only one gesture at a time may be played per performer. In theory, a total of 4 gestures and one global accompaniment might be heard at any given time. However, audio files will probably not be played very frequently throughout the performance. They will generally be played during times of sparseness.

There are 3 to 5 sections (states) (this can be preset before a performance depending on the amount of time available). They order they come in and their exact durations are determined by performance events. Once a section has been performed it becomes unavailable for selection by the program.

Sections:

The section names come from the way I hear an imagined performance. However, these names should in no way dictate anything regarding performance style to the performers. Also, again, these come in no particular order (except for the initial state, which is fairly passive), but are triggered by a combination of time and performance events.

How to parse kinds of musical data:

Pitches, harmony — computer will keep track of the 3 and 5 most frequently played pitches over the past 5, 20 and 60 seconds (list of raw data)

Dynamics — 3 dynamic levels (raw data): p is less than 0.3, m is 0.3-0.6 and f is more than .06

Tempo — number of new notes over the past 5, 20 and 60 seconds (raw data)

Phrase duration — four groups–shorter than 2″, 2″-5″, 5″-10″, longer than 10″– (raw data)

Register — Average MIDI note value, converted to frequency, compared with the instrument’s range (in frequencies), and scaled to 0 (lowest note of instrument’s range) to 1 (highest reasonable note). Output data is 0-1. Parsed in 3 groups–hi (0.7-1), medium (0.4-0.7) and low (0-0.4).

Accents — Number of accents over time (raw data)

Silence — Seconds of silence over time (raw data)

Individual player data messages (to look at for computer’s behavior within states):

$1-3p-(5, 20, 60) — list of the three most frequent pitches in the past 5, 20, 60 sec.

$1-5p-(5, 20, 60) — list of the five most frequent pitches in the past 5, 20, 60 sec.

$1-dyn-(5, 20, 60) — average dynamic level over time

$1-tempo-(5, 20, 60) — average tempo (based on density of new notes) over time

$1-phrase-(5, 20, 60) — average phrase duration over time

$1-reg-(5, 20, 60) — average MIDI notes over time (scaled to instrument’s range, so all players will send out 0-1)

$1-accent-(5, 20, 60) — measure of intensity as the number of accent over time

$1-silence-(5, 20, 60) — total number of seconds of silence over period

Global Messages (to look at for state changes):

g-3p-(5, 20, 60) — list of the three most frequent pitches (global) in the past 5, 20, 60 sec.

g-5p-(5, 20, 60) — list of the five most frequent pitches (global) in the past 5, 20, 60 sec.

g-dyn-(5, 20, 60) — average dynamic level of the group

g-tempo-(5, 20, 60) — average tempo (based on density of new notes over time)

g-phrase-(5, 20, 60) — average phrase duration

g-reg-(5, 20, 60) — average register (scaled to instrument’s range, so all players will send out 0-1)

g-accent-(5, 20, 60) — measure of intensity as the average number of accent over time

g-silence-(5, 20, 60) — total number of seconds of silence over period (multiplied by number of players)

Composing

The Inspector gets Biebered

Sep 21st, 10 / 0 Comments

I’ve been messing around with PaulStretch, the time stretching algorithm made famous for making Justin Bieber sound interesting.

Here’s a fun little snippet that was “improvised” by Patrick Peringer of Impulse.

Go go gadget slowdown.

Random

Rotating Intution

Jun 26th, 10 / 0 Comments

I think I’ve come up with a way of generating pitch, rhythmic, and textural rotation in the brass fanfare I’m working on while repressing my own intuition (which can’t always be trusted!). I started with the harmonic series–like I’ve been doing a lot lately. I created a chord that looks kind of like the harmonic series, although it is crammed into equal temperament (at least for now) to make it more manageable for a microtonal novice like me. So, this chord begins with wide intervals in the lower range and proceeds, as one would expect, to smaller intervals as the pitches get higher. (Without looking at my notes, I think the pitches are C2, C3, G3, C4, E4, G4, B-flat4, C5, E-flat5, F-sharp5, G5, A5, and D6).

I decided to go a little Messiaen and assign each pitch in this chord to a certain rhythm. Initially, I simply made the harmonic’s ordinal number the denominator of a fraction of the lowest note’s duration. In other words, C3 would be half the duration of the bottom note C2, G3 would be 1/3 of C2, C4 1/4, etc. This presented the practical problem of dealing with 13 against 12 against 11 against 10 against 9, etc. Of course it wouldn’t phase a composer like Ferneyhough, but with a deadline looming I just didn’t have the stomach for it today. I adjusted the rhythms to a simpler (think Ligeti) model of native subdivisions with a triplet and quintuplet thrown in for good measure (no pun intended). So now each pitch in the chord is assigned a value that corresponds to it’s place in pitch space (the lowest note being the longest, the highest note being the shortest). That seemed intuitive to me, but intuition often leads to dull and monotonous, so I devised a system of rotation.

I collapsed the chord into a stepwise 8-pitch (not octatonic) C scale (C, D, E-flat, E, F-sharp, G, A, B-flat). I then rotated the first pitch to the end of the scale (D, E-flat, E, F-sharp, G, A, B-flat, C) eight times and transposed each rotation to begin on C (C, D-flat, D, E, F, G, A-flat, B-flat). Thus I had eight C scales that each have a different pitch content. If you look at each of these scales, they are out-of-order transpositions of the first scale. For example the first rotation above is tonally analogous to the original scale, but transposed to B-flat. In other words, all the pitches in the first rotation correspond to the pitch B-flat in the same way that the pitches in the original scale correspond to the pitch C. So I’m thinking tonally here–the original scale is “in C” and the first rotation is “in B-flat”.

In the original, the tonal relationships are root, 9th, sharp 9th, 3rd, sharp  11th, 5th, 6th, 7th. This is important because durations are attached to the note’s relationship with the active root. The root (bottom note in the original scale) is the longest duration, etc. In the first rotation (in B-flat), the tonal relationships are 9th, sharp 9th, 3rd, sharp 11th, 5th, 6th, 7th, root. The root is now at the top and the 9th is on the bottom.

Don’t forget that these scales are only pitch collections which will be ordered differently in the actual music.

So, here’s the important outcome of today’s work. As one chord morphs into another in the music, individual voices will move to the closest pitch in the new collection. That means that the bottom voices will probably stay on C throughout. The tenor voices might change to a D-flat or D occasionally and so on. But, the durations will change according to the operative collection at any given moment. So if C is the “key,” the B-flats, for example, will be about 1/7 the duration of C–fast notes. But, later, when B-flat collection takes over, the B-flats will be longer and the C (now functioning as a 9th) will be much shorter. But, the actually pitches won’t move much. The C’s will still be in the low voices and the B-flats in the high.

The basic result will be a texture that has the fast-moving lines slowing rotating through the ensemble. This system will force the tubas to play fast and the trumpets to play slow, or in other words, counter to my intuition of duration related to position in pitch space. Rather, now duration is attached to harmonic relationships which will constantly change.

OK–now gotta write this sucker.

Composing, fanfare

The definitive version…

Jun 11th, 10 / 0 Comments
The last post touched on having too many versions of works. I don’t think John Cage would have cared about having too many versions. In a 1986 interview with Richard Kostelanetz, Cage described the process of cutting and splicing tape to create his landmark Williams Mix. During the course of the interview it became clear that the 1958 recording of Williams Mix wasn’t an 8-track recording, but eight mono tapes played live by different machines. In other words, this was just one version of the piece because the eight tapes could never be synchronized in the same way again. Each performance would be different. This seemed to surprise Kostelanetz who begins the following line of questioning.

RK: So, therefore, the version on that record is not definitive.

JC: I’ve all along spoken against records at the same time that I’ve permitted their being made and have even encouraged it; but I’ve always said that a record is not faithful to the nature of music.

RK: Which can only exist in a live performance situation.

JC: Right. I’ve always been a proper member of the musicians’ union, in favor of live music.

RK: And what is your instrument of virtuosity?

JC: I’m listed in the union as a pianist.

I have eight versions of the Rolling Stones’s “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” on my hard drive. Fans cherish all those versions–electric, acoustic, slower, faster, with choir, without. People really seem to like when a new version contains unique text or even a new verse (remember the scandalous secret verse of “Friends in Low Places”?). But these differences are not at all like when eight different orchestras record their interpretations of Beethoven’s 9th. I can’t imagine anyone changing the instrumentation, keys or rhythmic structures of the Beethoven (or moreover, adding a verse to Schiller’s “Ode to Joy”). Sure, you get different dynamics, tempi, accents, balance among parts, and rate of change, but every recording will generally conform to the definitive, or “authentic,” version–i.e. the score (or is it?).

The Stones don’t use scores, but Cage does. He is able to craft a score that can be performed in countless expectationless ways. The Williams Mix score is a graphic score that shows “staves” that represent the tape and lines and shapes for cut marks. Here’s an excerpt from the unpublished score:

In 2001 composer Larry Austin completed his piece Williams [re]Mix[ed] using Cage’s score. I haven’t heard it, but at 19 minutes, it’s nearly four times longer than Cage’s version. On the [re]Mix[ed] website, Austin writes, “On the last page of the score for Williams Mix, Cage inscribed, ‘(4 min. 15 sec. +) End 1st Part. N.Y.C. Oct. ’52 Splicing finished Jan. 16, 1953.’ Dare I imagine that John’s spirit is slyly laughing now, asking the oracle, ‘Is this the 2nd Part ?’”

Aesthetics

Jun 9th, 10 / 0 Comments

I made it to the end of a brass fanfare today. There’s still a lot of editing to do. It’s about a minute and a half, which is only enough room for one idea, but I’ve got two and I can’t decide how they fit together. The first is an embellishment of a small brass motive from The Wanderer, over low clusters in the tubas and euphoniums. It’s ok, but the more interesting idea is a composing out of a technique I started working on last fall. Last fall I wrote a PD patch that would play random pitches from the overtone series of whatever pitch the computer heard. (I really need to write a piece that uses that patch!) For this fanfare I’m thinking of the low notes as the fundamental pitches and letting muted trumpets play “random” notes from the overtone series. The effect–a cloud of soft overtones–would really be enhanced in an especially reverberent space.

I think the next step is expanding on the overtone cloud and minimizing or eliminating the Wanderer rehash.

Composing, fanfare

On the immortality of the artwork

Jun 9th, 10 / 0 Comments

A little more with regards to the Wagner quote below.

I renounce all fame, and more especially the insane specter of posthumous fame, because I love humankind far too dearly to condemn them, out of self-love, to the kind of poverty of ideas which alone sustains the fame of dead composers.

The concept of an “immortal” artist is a relatively recent mythology. One that ironically coalesced around the time Wagner wrote so melodramatically about Beethoven. Prior to the advent of a museum culture in the 19th century, concerts did not usually include music from the previous generation. Even Bach had slipped from popular consciousness by 1800 (50 years after his death).

Of course this isn’t to say that a museum culture doesn’t serve a valuable function (and that it has been made possible by fields like musicology, improved research methods, technology, etc.), but museums have to have holdings, and this establishes a canon of “classic” artworks–even if inadverdently. Inevitably, the larger the canon becomes, the more rigid it becomes. New works have a hard time competing with old ones simply because there’s a bias toward the canon (which is, or course, sufficiently inclusive!). There’s nothing inherently better about Wagner’s operas than Alban Berg’s or Ligeti’s. It’s just that Wagner is older.

The canon has become so large and powerful that for over 100 years we’ve built conservatories and universities to train musicians to play only the canon. We’ve built a classical music record industry and subscription-based orchestra system that can only accomodate Bach through Debussy. To escape from boredom we have to rely on new interpretations of old pieces. And then, when there is a new interpretation, old, dusty people argue about how authentic it is. Amazon.com lists 376 mp3s when you search “Beethoven 5th Symphony.” If the human eye can only discern 100 different shades of gray (at least that’s what my high school art teacher told me), how can the ear discern 376 shades of the same Beethoven’s 5th? And how could anyone profit by that kind of monotony?

In about 1477 Johannes Tinctoris summed up the attitude of his day by saying that “only the compositions of the last forty years are worth listening to.” That would be refreshing!

Aesthetics, HIstory

On the immortality of the artist

Jun 8th, 10 / 1 Comment

There’s nothing easy about understanding Wagner. His music, his prose, his politics–let’s just call them thorny subjects. The other day I ran across the following quotation from the Gesamtkunstwerk composer:

I renounce all fame, and more especially the insane specter of posthumous fame, because I love humankind far too dearly to condemn them, out of self-love, to the kind of poverty of ideas which alone sustains the fame of dead composers.

If you can’t see the irony here, check out the Met’s 2010-2011 season. Surprise! They’re doing Der Ring des Nibelungen! Again. According to the Met’s website they have performed at least part of the four-opera cycle over 400 times since 1889.

Of course so many performances is a testament to sublime in the work, but one wonders how many versions of the The Ring we need. One also wonders if Wagner was being overly modest. Not only did he leave us so many operas, he left us many volumes of prose writings on philosophy, music and politics. He also left us Gesamtkunstwerk (total art work) which generally combined dramatic, visual, literary and musical arts, and specifically included many theater conventions that we take for granted today (e.g. a quiet audience, dimming the house lights and hiding the opera orchestra under the stage). His orchestrations alone required Richard Strauss to update Berlioz’s classic Treatise on Instrumentation. Strauss parodied Wagner, Debussy railed against him, but everyone was affected by him.

At the risk of sinking this post, I’m going to quote some more Wagner prose, from “Artwork of the Future”:

Yet in Nature each immensity strives after Measure; the unconfined draws bounds around itself; the elements condense at last to definite show; and even the boundless sea of Christian yearning found the new shore on which its turbid waves might break. Where on the farthest horizon we thought to find the ever made-for, never happed-on gateway into the realms of Heaven unlimited, there did the boldest of all seafarers discover land at last,—man-tenanted, real, and blissful land. Through his discovery the wide ocean is now not only meted out, but made for men an inland sea, round which the coasts are merely broadened out in unimaginably ampler circle. Did Columbus teach us to take ship across the ocean, and thus to bind in one each continent of Earth; did his world-historical discovery convert the narrow-seeing national-man into a universal and all-seeing Man: so, by the hero who explored the broad and seeming shoreless sea of absolute Music unto its very bounds, are won the new and never dreamt-of coasts which this sea no longer now divorces from the old and primal continent of man, but binds together with it for the new-born, happy art-life of the Manhood of the Future. And this hero is none other than—Beethoven.—

It seems ironic to me for Wagner, who renounced the immortality of the artist, to resurrect Beethoven in such a grandiose way. I don’t want to offer an explanation–I don’t think I have a good one. It’s just another difficulty in understanding Wagner.

I want to speak more about the first quotation, but I’ll save it for the next post.

Aesthetics, HIstory

Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise: Ligeti sings!

Jun 7th, 10 / 0 Comments

Here’s a link to a post Alex Ross’s The Rest Is Noise companion site that contains a recording of György Ligeti singing Purcell’s Dido’s Lament from Dido and Aeneas.

Random

Sketching

Sep 20th, 09 / 0 Comments

Got down to making some firm decisions on a new work I’m composing for wind ensemble.  To avoid rewriting a summary, here’s an email I just sent the conductor of the ensemble planning to premiere it next spring.

The form and generative/governing concepts are fairly clear to me now.  It is all inspired by the Blue Ridge Mountains and the folk music traditions of the southern Appalachians. . . .  I have transcribed a recording of “Wayfaring Stranger” made in Beech Mountain by Horton Barker, as exactly as possible.  The oddities of that recording (asymmetrical meters, accidental/incidental microtonality) will generate some of the music.  I also plan on using that transcription later in the piece.

I also want to incorporate some abstractions on Appalachian instrumental music, especially variations on traditional banjo and fiddle conventions.  I want to emphasize, however, that I do not want to compose a “bluegrass” piece for band, just abstracting and reworking some hallmarks of that music–like fiddle portamentos and clawhammer banjo rhythmic gestures.

These ideas are perhaps tangential, however, to the main thrust of the piece.  I am fascinated with the timbral possibilities of the wind ensemble and plan to exploit timbre and texture, sometimes to the obscuring of melody and rhythm.  I am planning to include a fair amount of improvisation in order to achieve the kind of intricate textures and independent playing that I want (3 to 5 notes in a box, or melodic fragments played independently of the tempo, etc.).  The harmonic interest will come from a conflict between E min. pentatonic and the octatonic scale C, Db, Eb, etc.  At the end, I plan on using timbre and wide separation in pitch space to help these two harmonic worlds merge naturally.

To help bring together all these inspirations floating around in my head, I got a sketch pad and went to work.  I sketched a few shapes intuitively, with no thought of any concrete ideas.  The top portion of the sketch, which I decided to make my guide for percussion timbres, textural density and volume, is clearly mountainous.  The right side, especially, reminds me of the Blue Ridge Mountains with ribbons of fog below and stars above.

I’ve sketched out pieces before, but this is more graphic than I usually do.  There are, of course, some words and, on the left, some notes on staves, but it’s mostly visual.  There is also a lot of empty space.  I kind of know what’s going to come there, and didn’t feel the need to fill up all the available space.  I found this very useful to me (I’m a visual person) to organize my ideas.  It makes perfect sense to me–the visual representing the aural.  I realize it doesn’t for many people, but I’ve always found it very easy to compose a sculpture or a painting…  makes me wonder why I don’t do it more often.

Of course, the visual doesn’t mean the same aural for everyone (and vice versa).  I’ve often thought it would be a good exercise to give several composers the same sketch and have them write a piece from it.. just to see all the different outcomes.

sketch

After sketching, I notated a more detailed version of the first minute.  It’s convenient that the first minute is so sparse.  Of course there will be a lot of details to work out for the final version, but it will come faster than the more dense textures that come later–and fast is good right now (I want to do a string quartet as soon as this piece is finished).  As the initial sparse clusters/tectonically-slow melody give way to a churning rhythmic section that begins the buildup to the climax, there needs to be a bridge or a transitional section.  For now, I have several 3-5 note motives that can be rhythmicized in many different ways.  These will be building blocks that I could use as improvisatory cells or work out and notate exactly.  They will begin in isolation, then combined into duets and trios, etc.  Either way, it’s too much for today.  I thought about going on to the rhythmic section that will come next, but I want it to evolve organically from the transition, so I need to do that first.  I might start working on the chorale, though, later this evening.

Composing, The Wanderer