Sometime during the long hours I spent working on my most recent piece, it occurred to me that if I were to keep the score to myself and provide the performers with detailed verbal instructions about what to play, I could probably get almost the very same result as the conventionally notated score might produce: In other words, the most meaningful dimensions of the piece aren’t contingent on notated musical particulars in the score that come from me.
By the time of her death in 1953, Florence Price had completed over 300 pieces of music, among them the very first symphony by a black woman ever performed by a major symphony orchestra in the United States. Yet after her death, performances waned and, aside from a few of her spiritual arrangements being championed by Marian Anderson and Leontyne Price (no relation) who sang one at the White House in 1978, there was only a single disc devoted to her music which is now out of print. But now a new Albany CD devoted to Price attempts to right that wrong.
As I mentioned last week in this space, over the winter holidays I experienced a period of relatively severe burnout that left me unable to complete any task requiring more than a modicum of intellectual commitment. One of the chores that I set for myself in order to feel somewhat useful was the digitization of my entire music library.
Choirs have been using the internet for years for communication, promotion, and networking. but now video is increasingly being used to connect choirs, singers, composers and audiences.
As weeks go, this one has been none too quiet for the symphony orchestra. What I take away from these various and sundry items is that, for as much as folks like to say otherwise, the symphony orchestra is not going quietly into that good night just yet.
On Tuesday, January 10, I attended the NEA Jazz Masters 30th anniversary award ceremony. As in previous Jazz Masters events, the awards’ presentations alternated with performances by select past Masters that occasionally included “emerging” artists considered worthy of inclusion.
Hearing performers breathing can add intensity to a recording, not to mention serve as reminder that the music is coming from a human. I have come to like hearing performers breathing in recordings, and that is probably a good thing since I seem to gravitate towards the big breathers anyway.
If I were allotted only a single question to ask any composer about their music, I’d make sure to ask the question that most consistently seems to reveal a composer’s fundamental character, namely: What is your attitude toward revision?
As a child I spent hours banging on the piano while holding down the sustain pedal, played with the sounds my voice could make, and, when I eventually took up the cello, spent more time experimenting with it than learning proper technique. It wasn’t until I went to college—where I learned about the many composers creating works using sounds not traditionally considered by the mainstream to be “music”—that I learned I wasn’t completely crazy.
As bloggers about and fans of contemporary music, we can do the most good by supporting the people and institutions that produce it, regardless of whatever internecine beefs we may harbor. As serious music people, however, we’re obliged to identify problems. On the face of it, this sounds like a destructive, negative mission statement, but au contraire.
The path through Alexander Berne & the Abandoned Orchestra’s Flickers of Mime—paired here in a 2-CD set with his equally fascinating Death of Memes—weaves in its course. Beginning with an ambient base layer of sound out of which distinct sonic events emerge and retreat, Berne creates the sensation that we are watching the landscape of a foreign country through the window of a moving vehicle, the sights only half glimpsed and even less concretely understood.
At unpredictable intervals I enter periods in which I remain inexorably and unequivocally incapable of work. Sometimes a glut of good fortune can leave me working beyond my constitutional capabilities. Then, suddenly and without warning, I realize that my sources of energy have been reduced to mere embers. I find myself in the state of burnout.
A plaque at the Palmer House describing its opulent ceiling declares: “Its sheer size alone qualifies it as a masterpiece.” If you give it much thought such a statement seems utterly ridiculous, and yet there’s a strange logic to it which—ultimately untrue though it may be—permeates the way so many people think about art and success.
I’ve never had a piece played to such a large audience before. The energy of the crowd felt overwhelmingly positive; there were a lot of different ages of people, and you got the sense that everyone was excited to be there and anxious to hear what was going on in new music for orchestra.
My personal perspective about writing music and having it played feels addictive: those first rehearsal glitches, where your piece is still unknown to the players cause a certain amount of terror in a composer, but once you start to hear them smooth out, and the piece start to assemble itself into the entity you created, you get a burst of energy like nothing else.
One of the vestiges that I have clung to from my pre-teaching days is the idea that I can compose at any time during the year, regardless of what else is going on in my life. I’ve prided myself on the fact that I could “turn it on” when I found time and could write effectively well into the night. As you might imagine, such habits are not exactly healthy.
The first half of January 2012 at The Stone is being hosted by Stefan Winter, who founded JMT records in 1985. Besides launching the recording careers of Steve Coleman, Greg Osby, Cassandra Wilson, Robin Eubanks, Gary Thomas and Jean-Paul Bourelly, JMT (now called Winter and Winter) also championed many “downtown” artists, such as Tim Berne, Mark Feldman, Mark Dresser, Bob Stewart, Craig Harris, and Herb Robertson.
After meeting and mingling with the donors, board members, and the commissioning club who were all in attendance, the six of us participants each got to say a few words to everybody.
In particular, the last decade has seen a number of significant groups, festivals, and events pop up here in town that share little with their popular cousins except a zip code, and my plan for 2012 is to feature these groups in and around Austin as they ply their wares.
A thoughtful blog post by composer Daniel Wolf addressing the concept of “public” spaces (which, as he points out, are not actually as accessible as one might suppose) has got my brain churning about musical performance in unrestricted places. By that, I mean the sort of place where unsuspecting folks would happen upon a musical performance (or whatever sort of performance) and pause to check it out, or run away screaming, or… well something.
I initially approached composing for electronic media with the same habits acquired through years of notated composition for traditional instruments, which yielded mostly disastrous results. As of the new year, I’m starting an electroacoustic work that is giving me the opportunity to reflect on lessons learned since my first hesitant foray into electronic music.
The six of us participating in this year’s Composer Institute all met at 5:00 p.m., scurrying as quickly as we could across the block of chilling Minnesota winter from the hotel to Orchestra Hall. Most of us had not been acquainted with one another prior to this evening, but the experience of critiquing and receiving criticism for something so intimate as a creative act is probably one of the most intense and speedy ways to get to know others.
As I’ve mentioned once or twice before on NewMusicBox, I’m getting ready to teach a month-long continuing education course on radical American music before World War II. To that end, I recently checked Carol Oja’s Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s out of my university library.
New Year’s resolutions, while frequently focusing on the physical–going back to the gym, revisiting that diet, getting out the running shoes–can also bring singers out of hiding and into audition rooms. When January 1 comes around each year, audition requests start to trickle into choirs’ e-mail boxes as singers set new goals and plans for the year, and as groups broadcast audition details for the spring season.