Composer and NewMusicBox correspondent Missy Mazzoli has flown her Brooklyn coop to catch this past weekend’s marathon celebration of Steve Reich at the Barbican Centre.
I got a call from the owner of my favorite improvised music venue in Brooklyn, Puppets Jazz Bar, who informed me that, due to financial problems, the club was going to fold that night and would I like to attend the last rites.
When it comes to the topic of revising one’s music, there are a great many different concepts and attitudes towards what can and should be revised, and discovering how one composer revises their works can offer a great amount of insight into their mindset when they are composing the work to begin with.
The cabbie interjects, “So that’s Chadwick’s orchestra piece; he wrote five string quartets, you know—I’ve played all of them.”
I need to generate a lot of ideas without stunting their early growth with too much specificity (and with nary a thought to their feasibility in performance), but I also need to be ruthless and shrewd in dispensing with (and editing) ideas that don’t make the cut even after I’ve allowed them their best shot.
There seem to be two issues chiefly at stake here: first, control (over who has the scores, who can perform them, etc.); second, monetization.
At its core, Sean Griffin’s intermedia opera Cold Spring is an attempt to bring museums and archives together with performing institutions and local artists for mutual self-reflection and appreciation of each other as cultural thinkers. The work initiates and empowers an active interpretation of our lives as they relate to science and our notion of what constitutes meaningful progress.
Sometimes “soundtrack” CDs can invite a degree of skepticism, in that often the music composed for film or video does not stand alone as effectively as when paired with its accompanying medium. However, the second release from Austin, Texas-based composer and sound artist Mike Vernusky is an example of such a format that does not suffer from being presented as audio alone. This is a collection of music composed both for film and “electro-theatre,” defined as music for live actors with electronic sound, which creates a vivid radio play-like journey through sculptural forests of sound.
In my own experience, the works that risk the most invariably (and paradoxically) have been those that have been the most successful, whether artistically or practically. The piece that represented my first foray into systematic microtonality remained unheard for several years. The delay in its premiere caused me to question this compositional direction, until I finally did hear my own creation and realized that it was by far the best music I had composed to that point.
Kronos Quartet and Patti Smith have been named the winners of the 2011 Polar Music Prize Award, which comes with a cash award of one million Swedish Crowns (approx $165,101 USD).
Concerts devoted exclusively to the work of a single composer are all too rare occurrences. Even the mythified composers of centuries past rarely get the full-on treatment with the bizarre exception of all the ongoing Beethoven cycles done by groups ranging from solo pianists and string quartets to symphony orchestras. Even the Mostly Mozart festival doesn’t feature a whole lot of all-Wolfgang Amadeus programs. Yet so-called “portrait concerts,” like the pioneering series at Columbia University’s Miller Theatre, are an ideal way to be exposed to an individual’s particular sound world.
The Rethink Music conference enjoyed some heavy aegis: Berklee, the music trade fair organization MIDEM, the Harvard Business School, Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. The nominal ambition was similarly impressive: “To talk about solutions to moving the music industry forward,” according to conference Executive Director Allen Bargfrede; to “foster creativity and a thriving music industry,” according to the conference website. Roger Brown offered as inspiration the British government’s 18th-century Board of Longitude and its competition to solve that problem of marine navigation. Since we now cross the Atlantic 360 times faster than they did in the 18th century, we should be able, Brown said, to solve the problems facing the music industry “360 times faster than it took to solve the problem of longitude.”
Composer and drummer John Hollenbeck seems most content when faced with musical uncertainty. In this article he discusses his composing process, the challenges of organizing tours both in the U.S. and abroad, his thoughts on genre definitions, and the role of spirituality in his music.
In late 1965, I believe, when he filled in to teach the graduate electronic music course at Columbia, Max Mathews was asked what he envisioned for the future of computers in music; he said, “I look forward to the day when a plumber can come home from work and instead of watching television turn on his home computer and make music with it.” That response was taken by many in the class as whimsical at best, if not downright unrealistic. Of course Max’s vision would be completely realized by the early 1980s.
Decisions are often made in the witch’s cauldron of the recording studio about what takes, or parts of takes, to include in a final product; more often than one might imagine (or admit) the result is an entirely new work, almost unrecognizable from the original versions that were butchered to construct it
There is no pattern when it comes to successful composers and their online interactions. Where you can find one instance of someone harnessing the Internet with all of its social networking glory to magnificent effect, you find someone else who eschews anything more advanced than e-mail—and they both have thriving careers.
As we all know, the internet can be a wonderful, amazing thing for a composer, musician, or artist of any sort. But it can also become your very worst enemy, depending on how you use it. I know that for me it has been incredibly useful, and my career would not be close to where it is without it. It has also taken a few years to figure out how to use it in a way that feels comfortable for me.
Now that Peter Lieberson’s gone, one of my biggest regrets is that I so seldom expressed my admiration to him. I’ve generously expressed it to others, yes, but there was something for me about his impeccable musical pedigree and naturally aristocratic bearing that prevented me from telling him.
Nowhere is the current Wild West of promotional norms more apparent than the internet, which, while vastly improving our ability to communicate, often diminishes the quality of the resulting communication. For composers (a breed not always noted for our tact!), it’s incredibly important to learn how to navigate it, especially as so much of what we do or type on the internet is permanent, and a hastily-scribed caffeinated rant can continue to make its impression felt for years to come.
Even a crowd of new music specialists generally sympathetic to one another’s orientation—and who are, moreover, friends!—might have diametric reactions to a new piece.
If we follow the lead of Cage, whose final definition of music is “sounds heard,” it seems that one could infer that music is not merely a human creation or experience; sounds—all sounds, any sounds—created by humans and non-humans alike, exhibit a kind of music.
Chambers took his experience of these gravesites, particularly a visit to The Old Burying Ground in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, and set a collection of epitaphs and new poems reflecting the suffering and the peace he found there.
I’ve found the experience of airing my thoughts in this forum to be enjoyable and humbling
What has usually brought on my several bouts with compositional writer’s block over the years has been the fear that what I was attempting to compose was somehow irrelevant, out of touch with the zeitgeist, too experimental, or not experimental enough.