Category: Analysis

Philadelphia’s Changing Opera Landscape

Phaedra

Soprano Tamara Mumford (kneeling) and soprano Elizabeth Reiter in the Opera Company of Philadelphia’s U.S. Premiere of Henze’s Phaedra in 2011. (Photo by Kelly & Massa Photography)

This week, Opera America will hold its 2012 conference in Philadelphia, with a focus on new works and innovative strategies. It is fitting that this conference should take place in Philadelphia, which in the past few years has become a center for new opera in the United States. This is a significant change for a town long known for its conservative musical tastes. It was not that long ago that German and French repertoire was considered exotic in an environment which equated opera with traditional Italian fare. Performances of 20th and 21st century opera had been even more of a rarity.

Over the past two seasons, however, the Opera Company of Philadelphia (OCP) made international waves when it presented two operas by the iconic German composer Hans Werner Henze and announced a plan to present ten new American operas in the next ten years. In 2011, they launched an innovative collaborative Composer In Residence Program, together with New York partners Gotham Chamber Opera and Music-Theatre Group, funded by a Mellon grant of $1.4 million over five years.

Why this burst of new opera? David Devan, OCP’s general director, decided to steer the company in this direction when he came on board as managing director in 2005. His first task, he said, was to consider the role opera should play in Philadelphia. “It is the original American city, in that the United States started here. Opera has to embrace the ethos of the community in which it is performed,” so American repertoire would be a natural fit. Furthermore, “in my work on the board of Opera America, I subscribe to the idea of ‘churn’: that the genre must stay alive through the creation of new work, to prevent the music industry from stagnating.”

Margaret Garner at OCP

A scene from Margaret Garner, an Opera Company of Philadelphia co-commission from composer Richard Danielpour and librettist Toni Morrison which debuted at the Academy of Music in February 2006. (Photo by Kelly & Massa Photography)

The OCP team developed a plan to keep opera viable in the dense Philadelphia music market. With the Metropolitan Opera a short drive away, and opera companies in Baltimore (until 2009) and Washington, D.C. within striking distance, Devan said OCP decided that opera in Philadelphia must take a “diverse and different path,” and that the company needed to curate carefully to provide offerings that would give audiences different choices and draw them in. Then-General Director Robert Driver started OCP on this new path by bringing to fruition the company’s first commission in 25 years, Richard Danielpour’s opera Margaret Garner, which received its East Coast premiere at OCP in 2006. The Opera Company underwent a strategic analysis process in 2007-08 and decided to adopt a new branding key for OCP. Informally, Devan describes it as a shift from the company serving as the Turner Classic Movies of opera to being its HBO.

Just when the plan was going to be implemented, however, the financial crisis of 2008 hit. “Funding dropped in all areas, but it was important to us to make it easy for people to keep opera in their lives,” Devan said. To weather the recession, OCP engaged in an act of “creative destruction,” eliminating one production from their regular season in the Academy of Music (the home of the company), and adding the new Aurora Series at the more intimate Perelman Theater in the Kimmel Center. At 650 seats, the Perelman seats less than a quarter of the audience of the 2900-seat Academy of Music, but it enabled OCP to stage newer and experimental works at half the cost. According to Devan, productions in the Academy of Music cost around $2 million, for five performances, while those in the Perelman total around $1 million for three to five performances. The Aurora Series, which has included performances of Berg’s Wozzeck, Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia, Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra, Janacek’s The Cunning Little Vixen, and Henze’s Phaedre and Elegy for Young Lovers, has seen strong ticket sales. Devan reports that the mean age of OCP’s audiences has dropped over the past five years, and though such demographic trends are difficult to track with certainty, he attributes this to the Aurora Series reaching out to new audiences, more design-driven productions on both series that showcase a diversity of artistic aesthetics, and an emphasis on emerging talent: singers, composers, and directors.

Barber Anthony and Cleopatra

A scene from the Curtis Opera Theatre’s production of Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra in 2010, performed in association with the Opera Company of Philadelphia and the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts at the Perelman Theater. (Photo by Pete Checchia)

Devan noted that international media attention to OCP has increased exponentially due to several factors, starting with the Composer In Residence Program, which has drawn significant attention in the field. Other companies are following Philadelphia’s lead by creating training programs for composers. OCP’s announcement about producing ten new American works, starting with Jennifer Higdon’s Cold Mountain and Theodore Morrison’s Oscar, co-commissioned with Santa Fe Opera, also boosted the buzz, as did the fact that the 2012 Pulitzer Prize was awarded to Kevin Puts for his opera Silent Night, slated for the 2012-2013 season. In addition, OCP will present Nico Muhly’s Dark Sisters, a co-commission with Gotham Chamber Opera and Music-Theatre Group, this month.

OCP traditionally fosters the careers of young singers who emerge from Philadelphia’s top opera training institutions—the Curtis Institute of Music and the Academy of Vocal Arts (AVA). OCP’s partnership with the Curtis opera department, which began in 2008 with a performance of Osvaldo Golijov’s Ainadamar, has also made possible the mounting of newer operas performed by Curtis’s talented and versatile student singers and orchestra. Mikael Eliasen, director of Curtis’s opera department since 1988, explained how this partnership, which provides OCP with lower costs while enabling Curtis students to perform at the Perelman, came about. Normally too expensive for Curtis to rent, the Perelman has a bigger pit than Curtis’s regular venue and therefore allows for more adventurous, experimental scorings. Eliasen had worked closely over the years with Robert Driver, who assumed the title of artistic director of OCP last year, after 20 years as its general director. Together, they had created an unofficial relationship in which Curtis students would sing small roles in OCP productions, prior to the official partnership. In fall 2011, Eliasen was appointed artistic advisor to OCP, in which capacity he assists in selecting the Composer In Residence, further solidifying the close artistic ties between OCP and Curtis.

Ainadamar

A scene from the Curtis Opera Theatre area premiere of Golijov’s Ainadamar in 2008, performed in association with the Opera Company of Philadelphia and the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts at the Perelman Theater. (Photo by David Swanson)

Curtis’s opera singers regularly perform new American opera under the guidance of Mikael Eliasen. He considers learning new opera repertoire to be of tremendous importance in the careers of young singers and during his tenure he has programmed John Adams’s The Death of Klinghoffer, Copland’s The Tender Land, and Argento’s Postcard from Morocco. A recent Curtis alumnus, bass-baritone Eric Owens, has built a brilliant career in which he is known for his singing of John Adams as well as the canon.

OCP’s relationship with the Academy of Vocal Arts (AVA) is less formal and less focused on new music than its partnership with Curtis. As Denise Stuart, AVA’s director of marketing and public relations, pointed out, the school emphasizes standard repertoire for its students rather than training them to sing new music specifically.

Training Young Composers of Opera

As for young composers who wish to write operas, Eliasen says, “My big beef is that they may want to write an opera but they don’t know opera; 90% of them don’t know the major 20th century operas – Pelleas et Melisande, Peter Grimes, Dialogues des Carmelites, Wozzeck, Lulu – so there is nothing to inspire them.” As artistic advisor to OCP, he will encourage the young resident composers to study operatic repertoire and learn how to write for the voice in this context. Jennifer Higdon also advises young composers to study as much opera as possible in preparation for writing their own. She has been meeting with Lembit Beecher, OCP’s first composer in residence appointed in 2011, and will be seeing his work and sharing excerpts of her own opera score with him during his residency.

As David Devan noted, many young composers who try to write operas fail, as American music schools leave out training in writing dramatic vocal music. Kyle Bartlett, OCP’s new works administrator, agrees that young composers usually have no idea how to write for the stage, even if they have experience writing vocal music. OCP is currently in the search process for its second composer in residence, who will join Beecher in the program. They are looking for composers with some experience writing vocal music and a dramatic impulse, but not composers who are already so successful they do not need support, such as composers with publishers or numerous commissions.

Defining the “New” and the Future of Opera

Philadelphia is also home to another professional opera company specifically devoted to new works, Center City Opera Theater (CCOT), founded by Andrew Kurtz in 1999. According to its mission statement, the company is “the only professional opera company in the United States whose primary mission is the creation and production of new work.” The company gave the world premiere of Lowell Liebermann’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Paul Moravec’s Danse Russe, and regional premieres of Mark Adamo’s Little Women and Carlisle Floyd’s Of Mice and Men.

Dorian Gray

Jorge Garza as Dorian Gray in the Center City Opera’s production of Lowell Liebermann’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (Photo courtesy CCO)

When asked how CCOT defines its role in a city with so much new music and now new opera, Kurtz replied that “our mission is unique. New work. New artists. New audiences. AVA and Curtis do fine work, but they are still schools, their musical choices are still bound by the students they accept. OCP is still grand opera. I am thrilled they have made a commitment to new work, but it isn’t their primary function, rather they consider it a “product line.” It also represents a smaller percentage of their focus. And while they are partners in these new works, the primary developmental work isn’t being done in Philly by OCP professionals, but other partner companies. For CCOT, we have carved out a national niche of creating new work.”

Dark Sisters

Soprano Caitlin Lynch stars as Eliza in the OCP’s latest production, Dark Sisters, by Nico Muhly and Stephen Karam, which tells the story of a woman who desires to leave a polygamist marriage. (Photo © 2011 Richard Termine)

Devan thinks that “we are at an evolutionary point in opera which will lead to the increase in original material.” Higdon also sounds an optimistic note, calling opera “the area of most growth in classical music, with lots of commissioning and therefore an intensive financial commitment. Orchestras are backing away from contemporary music for fear of financial stress, but opera is charging ahead.”

Mikael Eliasen, however, sees ominous signs for the future of opera in America. While it looks like opera is thriving with commissioning activity, “opera in a way is slowly being killed off.” He describes American opera as “unrelentingly conservative” and thinks that American composers are writing opera based on what they think audiences and boards want to hear, and that boards are constantly shying away from experimental sounds in fear of declining ticket sales. Eliasen successfully urged OCP to present Thomas Adès’s Powder Her Face as part of the 2012-2013 season. He cites Adès, who is British, and the Italian composer Salvatore Sciarrino as examples of people creating more adventurous operas in Europe, and whose works are seldom staged in the United States. He thinks opera companies should take bigger chances, trust their audiences more, identify and reach out to the right audiences for each work, and understand that this process will take time and skill from marketing departments.

It was clear in speaking with the leaders of Philadelphia’s opera ecosystem that what constitutes “experimental” and “adventurous” repertoire is highly subjective. Ultimately, it becomes a question of definitions, as each of the opera experts has his or her own take on these terms. Not only do they disagree on aesthetic and stylistic grounds, but the question of perception is crucial. What do administrators and boards think the audience wants to hear? How do they serve loyal subscribers as well as seek out new audiences? Do the people commissioning and programming new American opera put the artistic vision first and rely on marketing to bring in audiences, or do they let considerations of audience and funder taste drive the artistic decisions? These are the questions being asked in all areas of the music industry. In Philadelphia, a city quickly becoming a center for new American opera, these questions are being posed for the first time. The more new American operas that are born in the city, the more opportunities there will be for the issues facing the genre to develop and evolve alongside them.

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Mimi Stillman

Mimi Stillman by Steve Anderson Photography

Philadelphia-based flutist Mimi Stillman, is the founder and artistic director of Dolce Suono Ensemble. A Yamaha Performing Artist, she performs internationally as a soloist and a chamber musician. A writer on music and history, she is a graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music and holds an MA in history from the University of Pennsylvania. In the fall of 2011, Odyssey: 11 American Premieres for Flute and Piano, her 2 CD set recorded with pianist Charles Abramovic, was released on Innova.

Great Expectations: The Challenge of New Music In New Spaces

Context can have a powerful impact on perception. A few years ago, my good friend Stuart Sims blogged about hearing Frank Zappa’s music performed on Baroque instruments by Ensemble Ambrosius. Stuart had always been ambivalent about Zappa’s music but the Ambrosius album, with its completely new textures and timbres, allowed him to hear the music in a new way.

It was interesting on a lot of levels, but for me, it really laid bare Zappa’s writing. By translating his music into a completely different sound world, a new idiom, it was actually revealed more clearly to me. I was able to pay attention to the composition itself without all of the idiosyncrasies of style and performance that Zappa and his musicians brought to the original recordings—and I loved it. So I’ve since gone back and re-listened to several of those Zappa albums that used to grate, and now I really like them. Go figure—hearing his music on 17th century instruments helped me hear it on 20th century instruments better.

Like a change of instrumentation, a change in venue can also be an effective tool for recontextualization. Beethoven is inspiring in the concert hall but a potent teenage repellant in public spaces, for example. Many preconceptions associated with a performance in a traditional venue (concert or recital hall, etc.), such as concert etiquette, the separation of performer from audience, or passivity on the part of the listener, can be subverted by performing the same music in a different context because the preconceptions are in part attached to the setting itself. And because performing in a venue that normally features a non-classical genre imparts expectations for that concert experience, those expectations—informality, more interaction, beer—also come into play, possibly leading to a new experience for the listener. Just as the same music on different instruments made all the difference for my good friend, the same music in a different space can open ears as well.

When new music groups perform in rock clubs and other similar venues they are counting on these spaces to recontextualize what they do. By placing themselves in the environment of more popular genres, they are declaring that the music they play is as much a part of their city’s musical culture as any other. Playing in a club or bar for a new audience is exhilarating—the communal atmosphere, the closeness to the crowd—but it’s also about an evolving tradition grappling with change, and participating in a broader musical culture and feeling connected and relevant. But what about the venues that make this recontextualization possible? How do their priorities differ from those of more traditional venues? They are an essential part of this trend, but do they know it?

There are many for-profit venues that host new music performances in the Bay Area, though very, very few do so with any kind of regularity. Non-profit spaces tend to host more concerts, and some of the Bay Area’s longest-running new music series take place in galleries and other multi-use spaces. One musician who has experience playing in both these types of venues, as well as house shows and other impromptu spaces, is composer and guitarist Brendon Randall-Myers. His guitar-drums duo Grains plays both improvised and original compositions, as well as arrangements of works by other composers like Glass and Reich. For Grains, getting gigs at different venues can sometimes be a matter of framing. “Booking Grains as essentially a weird hardcore band has had the most success, and most of our shows have been in punk-friendly venues. Operating within the rock club scene, it seems like style is maybe less important than draw, since at this point there’s precedent for basically anything.” Draw, of course, is the ability to draw a crowd, and is extremely important to clubs and other for-profit venues. Unlike large concert halls that charge rental fees, clubs rely on a combination of ticket sales and concessions—food and beverages—to cover fixed costs like bouncers, sound techs, and bartenders. These people get paid the same amount whether the night’s show draws one hundred people or only one, so a group’s proven ability to market themselves and draw a thirsty crowd can, for many clubs and even non-profit venues, have a big impact on whether or not they get booked or invited back.

A group’s ability to draw a crowd is a central concern for Nicole Rodriguez, one of the founders of Subterranean Art House in Berkeley, and she sees a general lack of marketing savvy in many new music groups. “I believe that the bands haven’t learned how to promote themselves well enough to bring people out,” she says. She enjoys having new music shows at Subterranean, a non-profit teaching and performance space near the UC Berkeley campus, and feels that there is an audience for new music programs. In order to be booked, though, Rodriquez says groups need to demonstrate that they can reach out to their fan base and reliably fill the house. “What would help booking these shows is having the confidence that bands can bring people out to see them. Bands in general can always learn more ways to promote and begin to build a strong network of people interested in hearing this music.” She suggests developing ways to connect with fans directly—basic DIY tools like email and social networking sites—but also emphasizes the importance of marketing each show as a unique musical experience. “The main point is that everyone in the band needs to do this promotion for it to work. If they don’t, then places like ours will suffer from and remember low attendance, making it challenging to rebook a group.” She notes that shows involving new and experimental music are poorly attended and generate less revenue through concessions.

A basic understanding of how venues operate is important, says Jason Perkins, managing partner of the Parish Entertainment Group, which operates Brick and Mortar Music Hall in San Francisco. When asked what groups could do to make themselves more bookable, Perkins replied simply, “be knowledgeable about the business side.” This includes being flexible about when you’re looking to perform. A new group without an established fan base is not going to be booked in prime Friday or Saturday night spots, but probably during the week (when, incidentally, it’s more difficult to draw a good crowd). Additionally, bookers usually want a range of possible performance dates, and don’t appreciate it if you schedule gigs at other venues in the same time frame as it can affect draw. Being knowledgeable about the business side also includes realistic expectations for pay. Most clubs split the door (i.e. ticket sales) with performers, and percentages can vary. Musicians expecting a fixed fee regardless of the show’s turnout will be disappointed.

Brick and Mortar books new music shows only sporadically. Classical Revolution hosts concerts there from time to time, and Redshift performed their Arctic Sounds program there last year. It’s a dark, inviting space with a small stage in the corner, an open space in the center, and a few tables and a bar on the perimeter. Large windows look out onto Mission Street and offer glimpses of local color for which the neighborhood is famous. According to Perkins, Brick and Mortar’s mission is to serve the community by presenting acts that reflect the neighborhood’s diversity, even if not all of them are profitable. He says that while events put on by Classical Revolution have been successful—”We’re proud to have the show,” he said of a recent Musical Art Quintet concert—he agreed with Rodriguez that, on the whole, new music shows have smaller turnouts and slower bar service. An even trickier issue, he says, is audience expectation. The seating in Brick and Mortar is limited to stools at the bar and a few tables; at the Redshift show most of the audience ended up sitting on the floor. Background noise from the bar, from conversations, and from outside is unavoidable, too. “People are expecting a classical music hall experience,” he says, “but we’re not that.”

Jamie Freedman, a writer, booker, and vocalist based in the Bay Area, says that matching music to venue can factor into a show’s success. “You know what to expect,” she says of the standard classical concert. “No matter where you are in the world it’s going to be a similar experience, so if you take people out of that context I think it freaks them out a little bit.” In other words, groups branching out into clubs should keep their audience in mind when considering venues, and know just how far out of their comfort zone they can lead them. Freedman suggests that musicians consider options like seating or ambient noise before booking a venue. Audiences generally don’t like to mill around during mellow or contemplative shows and will often sit on the floor, so the punk rock club with the sticky floors might not be the best choice for an all-Feldman show.

Freedman, who has a master’s degree in musicology from the University of Texas, is the San Francisco Field Representative for hearitlocal.com, a user-generated site that allows Bay Area artists and venues to connect directly and book shows. (The site also has a nifty crowdsourcing feature that enables someone booking a group for a private event or house party to raise money in advance, ensuring that artists get paid.) She is aware of only a few “classical” groups—used as a catchall term here—using the site, though she is reaching out to the community in an effort to change this. She also doesn’t see much interest from venues or bookers either, which she attributes the to the lingering perception that classical music is somehow “out of their reach.”

Taking a chance on a new music group is a tough decision for venues that mainly present popular genres, for both financial and “comfort zone” reasons. An array of confusing terms—classical, new music, alt-classical, indie-classical—doesn’t help. For example, if a new music group, perhaps looking to simplify things in an effort to get a gig, approaches a venue as a “classical” group, what will that venue’s booker expect? Maybe the Three B’s, maybe Yanni, or maybe no confusion at all. If this same new music group decides instead to get specific—”dedicated to the performance of post-minimalist and totalist American composers”—will that be any clearer? For example, Grains regularly collaborates with the chamber ensemble Nonsemble 6, and Randall-Myers says that booking these more classically oriented shows can be difficult. “It’s not so much the fact that it’s ‘new music’ that seems to be the problem, but rather that it’s an unorthodox combination of styles, instruments, and volumes,” he says. “I think we’re all excited about the idea of playing this music in clubs, but it’s a tough sell because we’re not ‘established’ and we’re playing music that’s hard to pin down on the rock-to-chamber-music continuum.” Most bookers and venue operators are extremely musically literate and familiar with a wide variety of musical styles ranging from folk to scream, so familiarizing them with as much music as possible—available streaming on a groups website, for example—is key.

In March Grains performed on the weekly New Music Series at the Luggage Store Gallery, a non-profit gallery located on a gritty stretch of Market Street that perpetually smells of weed. The series is curated by Outsound Presents, a non-profit, volunteer group of musicians that supports and promotes the Bay Area’s diverse community of experimental musicians performing “avant-garde jazz, found sound, noise art, musique concrète, minimalism, and the unnamable.” The Luggage Store Gallery is a wonderfully gritty, well-worn, no-frills space and Outsound’s website informs potential performers of the basics: “There is no guaranteed payment, no guest passes, hotel accommodations, transportation, no acoustic piano, no sound person.” You arrive via a narrow stairway whose walls and ceiling are completely covered with graffiti. On most nights you’re greeted at the top of the stairs by Rent Romus, one of the founders of Outsound Presents, and a regular curator of the series. “Welcome to the new music underground,” he says.

Luggage Store Gallery: Stairway

Romus has been active in the Bay Area new music scene for over 20 years, and has been booking new music shows and curating regular series for nearly as long. As a saxophonist and bandleader he explores the outer limits of experimental jazz and improvisation, and as a curator he books musicians with a similar aesthetic. “Our purpose is to support those bands and artists which have either a harder time getting bookings at mainstream or “indie” clubs because they are too outward bound, or don’t fit the bar scene and are playing either all original or fully improvised music.”

The Grains show certainly feels like an underground scene. Folding chairs are set up as the gallery gradually fills up with young people, many of whom seem to know each other. Several gents, employing varying levels of surreptitiousness, sip beers they purchased elsewhere, while Romus enjoys takeout. The Grains set this night includes both composed works and improvisation. Much of the improvisation has an arid feel, where plaintive guitar tones are juxtaposed with frenetic drum riffs, as if drummer Marc Deriso transcribed an epic drum solo then played it back in random, ametric fragments. Long stretches were captivating. One of the composed pieces, Goat Teeth, had a powerful, propulsive energy and riffs that would be at home in any prog rock song. Another, Face, was originally composed by Deriso for chamber ensemble then arranged by Randall-Myers for the duo. “I distilled all the melodic and harmonic material into a single guitar part,” he said, and the result was a jet engine blast of low, regular guitar notes beneath shifting, irregular drum rhythms and an ever-changing perceived downbeat. Tapping your foot along with Face is like playing musical Whack-a-Mole, although a young man a few rows up had no problem simply headbanging to his own steady pulse.

Today, this music would be as fitting in a film or TV score—see Michael Giacchino’s music for Lost, for example—as it is here in this experimental setting. The composed pieces sound wildly exuberant and free, yet are rigorously structured and notated as any avant-garde new music. As Randall-Myers suggests, framing the same music differently for different contexts is more important to booking a gig than the music itself. Grains’ music is of a post-genre world, but many venues still identify, both in the minds of their operators and their patrons, with the same familiar—perhaps broader, but still easily identifiable—musical styles.

Concert flyer

The LSG series is popular with musicians and is booked up to three months in advance. Keeping such a regular concert series up and running is difficult work, and promotion is an always an issue. “Most of the time local mainstream press and radio will not cover new music shows even though such modern exploration has been going on for many decades in the U.S.,” Romus says. Outsound also lacks permanent office space, which makes establishing a regular presence difficult, though Romus feels fortunate to have found a regular performance space at the gallery. “The owners of the Luggage Store Gallery, Laurie [Lazer] and Darryl [Smith], are both avid supporters of new forms of art,” he notes, “and they have given our community a regular, safe location to present for over twenty years.” Admission is a sliding scale depending on what you can afford, though no one will be turned away for lack of funds. The proceeds from the door are split 70/30 between the performers and the gallery. Romus says the take at the door varies widely, but that no one makes much money. Outsound Presents doesn’t take a cut and all its members, including Romus, volunteer their time.

Luggage Store Gallery

Luggage Store Gallery

As far as the nuts and bolts of booking groups, Romus says it’s important for him to know a bit about a group before inviting them to perform, and that having music available on sites like Soundcloud or Bandcamp is a big help. “What I like to see is an introduction of their music and some information about the artists, web links, and/or links to hear music samples,” he says.  He also says that that groups looking to play the New Music Series should do a bit of research before requesting a booking. “It’s always nice to know when they are available and/or looking for a gig, and that they know a little about the series they are asking a gig for.” The website for Amnesia, a San Francisco bar known for its regular jazz and bluegrass jam sessions, offers prospective performers similar advice and stresses the need for promotion.

In your booking request please include vital information about your project including links to your music, websites, bios (when informative), usual band draw and prospective date ranges you are interested in for a show. If we book a show with you, help us help you by helping us promote it. The more people you bring down the better it will be. Get us a poster and we’ll put it up, get us some flyers and we’ll pass ‘em out, send out an email but don’t wait until the day before to promote your great show!

In a way it seems that this whole discussion of venues is already moot. Classically trained musicians have moved on, branched out, and are equally comfortable in the club or in the concert hall (coming to a bio near you). Local music scenes will continue to become more integrated as new music groups simply learn the language of the for-profit venue. While this may seem like a foregone conclusion we should remember that this is a two way street and a whole lot of other people, necessary people, have to share this view. Many bookers pay lip service to the idea of hosting new music, but a glance at their calendars will reveal weeks or months between new music shows. Meanwhile, old standbys like churches and college campuses continue to be the more popular options.

It will be interesting to see how this trend plays out, not only in the Bay Area, but across the country. Will it grow to alter the musical landscape, remain a persistent, if infrequent occurrence, or devolve into cliché? The outcome depends in part on the ability of new music groups to dependably draw crowds, to become “established,” and also on a critical mass of listeners who consistently turn out and support new music. More regular performances can lead to a larger audience, but before that can happen clubs and bookers need to feel more confident about what exactly it is they’re booking, and that audiences will show up to hear it. It’s like the old adage about finding a job: a job is needed to gain experience, but experience is necessary to get a job. New music groups won’t be welcomed simply because they’re willing.

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Dustin Soiseth is a conductor and co-founder of the Loose Filter Project. He lives in Oakland.

Some Recent Silences

It is 60 years ago. We are in a little concert hall just outside Woodstock, New York. The back wall of the hall is open and overlooks the Catskill Mountains. Onto the small wooden stage walks the pianist David Tudor. He sits at the piano, glances at a stopwatch, and closes the lid over the keyboard.

In No Such Thing as Silence, Kyle Gann asks the following questions of John Cage’s 4’33”:

How are we supposed to understand it? In what sense is it a composition? Is it a hoax? A joke? A bit of Dada? A piece of theater? A thought experiment? A kind of apotheosis of twentieth-century music? An example of Zen practice? An attempt to change basic human behavior?[i]

Maverick Hall and grounds.

Maverick Hall and grounds, setting of the premiere performance of John Cage’s 4’33” on August 29, 1952. Photograph by Dion Ogust. Used with permission of Maverick Concerts, Inc.

Or might it be none of these? 4’33” is often regarded as an end, a philosophical cul-de-sac, but over the course of six decades the negation of music has proved fertile ground for many composers. This appears to have been particularly true in the last 20 years or so, as though the noise of the avant garde’s war of words had itself to subside into silence before we could appreciate 4’33” on its own terms.

This article attempts to survey some recent silent compositions, but it can only hope to provide a brief overview. For a start, I am interested in the legacy of 4’33” as a composition (not a piece of sound art, a Zen koan or a proto-Fluxus happening). For all their merits, I find these latter forms somewhat insensitive to silence’s rhythmic, dynamic, expressive and structural possibilities. Sound art and happenings are capable of many things, including a reconsideration of time and duration of which Cage may well have approved,[ii] but retaining what Christoph Cox calls “the protocols of performance and composition” has its advantages too, and it is these I want to investigate.

Program from the premiere performance of Cage's 4'33" at Maverick Hall.

Program from the premiere performance of Cage’s 4’33” at Maverick Hall. Used with permission of Maverick Concerts, Inc.

The three movements of Cage’s score undoubtedly present a structured event and demand a listening situation with a defined start and finish, and a degree of internal differentiation. Cage later described that the internal structure of each movement had further been composed by adding together silent durations determined by the I Ching. The only difference between 4’33” and a “regular” work, then, is the absence of notated sound to articulate this form, but this is just a matter for the performer’s interpretation. A lot of emphasis is placed on the fact that 4’33” is the opening up of music to the non-intentional. This is undoubtedly one aspect of it, but my starting point is how these small intentions give unique shape to this particular silence.

Since Cage, silence itself has proved a remarkably resilient and heterogeneous material. The Swiss composer Jürg Frey has spoken of “many different silences: silence between sounds, before you hear a sound and after you’ve heard a sound. Silence which never comes into contact with the sounds, but which is omnipresent and exists only because sound exists.”[iii] The potential variety of silent composition is easily demonstrated by comparing two scores (both available online) by another Swiss composer Manfred Werder and the Russian composer Sergei Zagny: Werder’s 20061 (of 2006) and Zagny’s Metamusica (of 2001). Werder’s describes, in three short lines, a performing/sounding situation; Zagny’s is written as though conventional piano music, with clefs, staves, bar lines, rhythms, articulation marks, etc., but no actual notes. The former seems to be directing its attention to how the music should be realized; the latter to the what.

Zagny belongs to a generation of Moscow-based conceptual artists, poets, and experimental musicians that includes the poet Lev Rubinstein, the artist Dmitri Prigov, and the director Boris Juchananov. Through the late 1990s and early 2000s he composed a number of text-based or graphical scores that deal with musical performance practice. Metamusica confronts such concerns in typically radical fashion. The look of the score recalls absurdist pranks like Erwin Schulhoff’s “In futurum” (part of which may be seen here), but closer inspection reveals that it is a copy of Webern’s Variations for Piano, op.27, just with the notes removed. In fact, Zagny leaves only holes—not even rests—where Webern’s notes should be. It’s a Webern-shaped space, with all the Webern taken out. When read “correctly,” according to its time signatures and so on, the score is incomplete and not really performable. Instead, it is meant to be projected on a screen to an audience, who fill in the gaps and realize the music mentally. The rhythms and dynamic markings (and the presence/absence of the Webern original) are clearly meant to direct those realizations.

A more high profile counterpart to Zagny’s conceptualism may be found in Stimmen…verstummen… (“Voices…fall dumb”) by his Russian contemporary, Sofia Gubaidulina. The complete ninth movement of this orchestral work is a cadenza for solo conductor. The rhythm conducted is a reduction of the work’s overall form, and Gubaidulina places an almost mystical emphasis on this movement. It is, she states in the score, “the real main theme of the symphony, its inmost sense.” Answering the question of whether this movement can be recorded, she answers in the affirmative: “If this higher sense is really being realized [that is, the higher sense created by the conductor’s silent gestures], the tape machine will surely record and reproduce it.”

Examples of musical “dumb theatre” can be found in considerably more complex musical circumstances, and even the very densely notated scores of Klaus K. Hübler and Aaron Cassidy contain miniature pools of silent music within rich sonic surroundings. Their scores notate different performing actions independently—so fingering separately from breath and embouchure on a wind instrument, for example. As a consequence, fingers may be operating in the absence of breath to sound the instrument. (See Benjamin Marks’s performance of Hübler’s Cercar for trombone for an example.) A discourse is set up between sounding and non-sounding notes, both of which act on a level playing field as far as notational intention is concerned.

This brings us to the halo of silence that surrounds any performance act. Brian Ferneyhough’s Unity Capsule for solo flute (1971) begins with 15 seconds of “absolute silence and lack of movement” (to quote the score), and many works by Gerhard Stäbler similarly load their silences. In White Space for voice and string quartet, for example, the musicians silently prepare a single gesture, before holding themselves in an extended state of anticipation. We are back to that Woodstock theater and the tense atmosphere that must have been created as the audience waited, fruitlessly, for Tudor to play a note.

The works described above all rhythmicize a silence, but in his Némajáték (Veszekedés 2) (Dumb-Show (Quarrelling 2)) for piano, from Book 1 of the Játékok series, György Kurtág goes further than all of them and gives it a dynamic shape too. So this short piece begins with three notes played forte, followed by a double-sforzando cluster chord, despite the fact that the accompanying rubric specifies that the piano’s keys should be touched only very lightly, “without moving any of them.” “The gesture is very important, just beyond the sound (a gesture for the crescendo, another one for the accelerando…),” Kurtág has said of this piece.[iv] This is an extension of the idea that every performance act takes place within the context of the surrounding silence, with which it partners in creating an artistic sound.

The pieces of Játékok are full of indications that are either unrealizable or unsoundable, but nevertheless precisely demanded—crescendos under sustained piano notes, needlessly crossing hands, single notes played by two hands at once, and so on—Dumb Show is an extreme example of Kurtág’s habit of bringing the physical gestures of performance to bear on the music’s interpretation. Incidentally, modern day performances of Schulhoff’s “In futurum” replicate Kurtág’s model, even though Schulhoff’s piece was composed nearly 60 years previously. (One such performance may be viewed here.)

Tudor quietly raises the lid of the piano, and lowers it again. The second movement begins, and rain begins to fall.

The composers so far mentioned have approached composition of or with silence from a relatively conventional point of view. That is, through the creation of a score, which is to be realized within a relatively standard performance context (that is, in a concert hall or similar space, with close attendance to the events described by the notation) or with the composer retaining control of the musical content of the work. One of the better-known lessons of 4’33”, however, is the extension of musically valid sounds beyond this arrangement. Werder has concerned himself more than many with composing the situation within which music—or at least sounding events—may take place.

Since 2005 he has devoted himself to works that are titled only with a year, and a superscript number for each piece within that year. For convenience, I will call these “date pieces,” although there are few connections between them other than the titling convention and their notation as short, aphoristic texts. The first, 20051, is perhaps the simplest in conception (although not necessarily in realization), and the closest to 4’33”. Its score simply reads:

place

time

 

( sounds )[v]

In subsequent works, Werder refines this conception, in the process proving its potential subtlety. 20062 adds just two letters, but in doing so radically changes the possibilities for realization:

places

a time

 

( sounds )

In contrast to the freedoms of 20051, two possibilities are narrowed down: several events (places) occurring simultaneously (a [single] time); or a single event that takes place across a series of performance spaces—perhaps processing between each.

20061, on the other hand, is almost Baroque by comparison. Not only is the performance space quite specifically designated, but for the first time the presence of a performer(s)—and hence a divide between stage and audience—is specified:

a place, natural light, where the performer, the performers, like to be

a time

 

( sounds )

Werder’s later works in this series introduce specific sounding objects (as in 20086), or short literary quotations that hint similarly at musical possibilities. As an ongoing project they represent a virtuoso set of variations on some of Cage’s original premises.

Werder belongs to a group of mostly Central European composers associated with the Wandelweiser Edition publishing house and record label, without whom no discussion of silence in contemporary composition would be possible. Members of the group include Antoine Beuger, Jürg Frey, Eva-Maria Houben, Michael Pisaro and, among its founders, Kunsu Shim. For many of them, composition is an exploration of the region that asymptotically approaches silence. Houben, for example, refers to music existing “‘between’ appearance and disappearance, between sound and silence, as something ‘nearly nothing’.”[vi] The score of Werder’s for one or a few performers simply stipulates “a lot of time. / a few sounds. / for itself simple,” which he describes as “a framework focusing rather on an acoustic exploration of the surroundings…I think the sound events operate primarily as articulations affecting the listener’s quality of perception of the surroundings.”[vii]

In his history of Wandelweiser, Pisaro describes Shim’s understanding of 4’33” and its importance to the development of the Wandelweiser group:

For Kunsu, the music of Cage, and of those who worked with him and followed in his wake was felt to be more radical and more useful than the writing: because it had so many loose ends and live wires still to be explored (something I would also later encounter with other Wandelweiser composers). Thus 4’33” was seen not as a joke or a Zen koan or a philosophical statement: it was heard as music. It was also viewed as unfinished work in the best sense: it created new possibilities for the combination (and understanding) of sound and silence. Put simply, silence was a material and a disturbance of material at the same time.

In their different ways, the Wandelweiser composers have devoted themselves to following those loose ends, often much further than Cage might have expected. Pisaro refers to Shim’s expanding space in limited time for solo violin (1994), for example, which requires bow movements of such slowness that they truly produce sounds on the edge of audibility. In one two-hour performance of the piece, Pisaro reports, it was 20 minutes before he could make out any sound at all; after which his sense of hearing had become so attuned that those sounds that were produced began to take on an extraordinary richness. Realizations of Werder’s for one or a few performers have taken place over days, bringing the musical performance far closer to the passage of real life than the four and half minutes performed by Tudor in 1952.

LISTENING PIECE IN FOUR PARTS (2001)

Los Angeles, Downtown, 4thStreet / Merrick Street, Parking Lot Images (above and right) from Peter Ablinger’s Listening Piece in Four Parts (2001). The composer states: “I performed the 4 parts on 4 different days during December 2001, mostly alone with my wife Siegrid by putting 20 chairs on 4 different places. The chairs have been removed after about 2 hours at each place. But the 4 places remain – now as a piece of music – for all who are aware of this fact.” Images and text provided courtesy of Peter Ablinger.

Although not a member of the Wandelweiser group, Peter Ablinger was a sympathetic friend and has explored his own path around silence. Whereas most Wandelweiser music (at least that I am aware of) begins from a performance situation, and extends this to extreme lengths in order to interrogate our listening experience, Ablinger starts from the other side of the proscenium arch, with the listeners themselves. Much—perhaps all—of his varied output across multiple media may be thought of as tackling the circumstances of listening. Those works grouped under the title “Seeing and Hearing” are explicitly described as “music without sound,” for example, and consist of series of abstract photographs arranged in related groups. Two-Part Invention (2003), from this group, exists as a set of directions (a score?) for creating and displaying a set of 32 photographs. “Seeing and Hearing” exists within a larger subset of works, titled “Listening Pieces.” These include “transition pieces,” such as Passing a tunnel (2011) and Listening Piece in 2 Parts, in which the listener is required to listen to “the change from the large room to the small one,” and then “the change from the small room to the large one.” Others are “chair pieces,” in which ordered arrangements of chairs are set out in specific locations: the auditorium-like arrangement invites attentive listening, but no further directions are provided. “Not the sound, but the listening is the piece,” states Ablinger. The place of the work becomes important: the surrealistic use of chairs in spaces such as parking lots, fields, or beachfronts has an effect on place similar to that of Cage’s durational framing on time: the space where the chairs are (and hence the sonic environment that can be heard while sitting in them) becomes separated from the adjacent spaces and sonic environments, and thus sounds differently.[viii]

By aestheticizing and compositionally organizing the sonic environment, Ablinger’s transition pieces cross into the territory known as soundwalking. This is another large field, and can only be summarized in this article.[ix] Broadly, it involves the composition and notation—through sets of written instructions, maps, etc.—of walking journeys through or among acoustically significant spaces, and instructions on what to listen to and how in the environments encountered. (In fact Werder’s 20062 might be interpreted as a soundwalk.)

In the work of Hildegard Westerkamp, soundwalking overlaps with the political and social values of acoustic ecology: “Unless we listen with attention,” she states, “there is a danger that some of the more delicate and quiet sounds may pass unnoticed by numbed ears and among the many mechanized voices of modern soundscapes and may eventually disappear entirely.”[x] The importance of acoustic ecology, that is, the preservation of endangered natural sounds, was recently explored in a New York Times article by Kim Tingley, and a greater awareness of our sonic environment is undoubtedly a legacy of 4’33” and those who have picked up its ideas.

Tudor lifts the keyboard lid one last time, and his performance is over. The rain has stopped, but sounds from the Catskill Mountains outside the auditorium can still be heard. The applause begins.

In her article “Soundwalking,” Westerkamp provides instructions for her reader to take on their first soundwalk. Towards the end of these, she writes:

So far you have isolated sounds from each other in your listening and gotten to know them as individual entities. But each one of them is part of a bigger environmental composition. Therefore reassemble them all and listen to them as if to a piece of music played by many different instruments. Do you like what you hear? Pick out the sounds you like the most and create the ideal soundscape in the context of your present surroundings.[xi]

Cage’s silence, and his opening up to environmental sounds was undoubtedly radical but, as we have seen, the possibilities for further exploring the composition of silence may be limitless. David Dunn, a composer and renowned acoustic ecologist, has developed the idea of composed listening to one logical conclusion. Beginning once more from 4’33” and its implications, he writes:

What has seldom, if ever, been discussed is the actual meaning of the composition as a cognitive process and its literal implications for music and its epistemological foundations as a human discipline. …What I have been imagining is that beyond the event horizon of 4’33” is a different universe of musical perception where composition might be based upon or at the least inclusive of an awareness of the primacy of mind, where an emphasis is placed upon the processes of perception and not materials. Purposeful Listening In Complex States of Time is my attempt at exploring the boundary of this concern for composition as the organization of perception rather than the manipulation of the material basis of sound.

Sample page from Purposeful Listening In Complex States of Time for solo listener.

Sample page from the score for Purposeful Listening In Complex States of Time for solo listener. Provided courtesy of David Dunn.

Purposeful Listening in Complex States of Time (1997–8; score here) contains no sounding events, in spite of its great level of detail. Instead, it specifies and orchestrates the cognitive listening state of its performer/audient. The following parameters are specified: level of attention (sky, body, ground), direction of attention (left, right, forward, behind, all round), proximity of listening attention (adjacent, near or distant), and time of event listened (present, past/remembered, future/imagined, non-specific). Further marks indicate the duration of each respective listening state (moving between them at a relatively fast tempo), and transitions between states. This is clearly an extension of the soundwalking idea (and that of Zagny’s Metamusica), in that the score’s instructions are directed towards the listener. But Dunn pushes those instructions beyond the level of an amateur or casual audient to professional-level engagement. The complexity of Purposeful Listening’s notation demands dedication and rehearsal. The level of aural attentiveness it elicits is far greater than that achieved by 4’33”, no matter how carefully one listens during that work. Its cognitive richness (and perception and organization of the sounding environment) is correspondingly far greater. Silence may take many different forms, but Dunn’s may be the most compositionally sophisticated and multi-layered of them all.

*


i. Kyle Gann, No Such Thing as Silence (Yale University Press, New Haven: 2010), p.11.


ii. On this point, see Christoph Cox: “From Music to Sound: Being as Time in the Sonic Arts,” originally published as “Von Musik zum Klang: Sein als Zeit in der Klangkunst,” in Sonambiente Berlin 2006: Klang Kunst Sound Art, ed. Helga de la Motte-Haber, Matthias Osterwold, and Georg Weckwerth (Heidelberg: Kehrer Verlag, 2006), pp. 214–23; Eng. trans. available here.


iii. Quoted in Dan Warburton, “The Sound of Silence: The Music and Aesthetics of the Wandelweiser Group,” available here.


iv. Sleevotes to Nicolas Collins: A Call For Silence, Sonic Arts Network, 2004.


v. Many of Werder’s date pieces may be downloaded from Upload .. Download .. Perform . Net.


vi. Houben, “Presence–Silence–Disappearance,” available here.


vii. James Saunders, ed., The Ashgate Research Companion to Experimental Music (Farnham, Ashgate: 2009), p. 354


viii. On a related theme, please see Chris Kallmyer’s “Sonic Cartography and the Perception of Place,” available here.


ix. A good introductory history is John Levack Drever, “Soundwalking: Aural Excursions into the Everyday,” in Saunders, ed., The Ashgate Research Companion to Experimental Music.


x. Hildegard Westerkamp, “Soundwalking,” Autumn Leaves, Sound and the Environment in Artistic Practice, ed. Angus Carlyle. Paris, Double Entendre: 2007, p. 49. Available here.


xi. Westerkamp, “Soundwalking.”

***

Tim Rutherford-Johnson

Tim Rutherford-Johnson writes on contemporary music for the Guardian, INTO, Tempo, and his blog, The Rambler.

A Federal Case for the Arts

“Science and literature are of no party or nation.”—President John Adams

Mount Rushmore

The arts patron and friend of composers, the violinist and music collector, the art critic, and the opera fan.

Presidents’ Day just passed and it got me thinking. Is the idea of government support for the arts un-American? On the contrary. It is as American as apple pie. In the early years of the republic, were our political leaders rubes when it came to music and other arts? Look again.

Our iconic founding fathers Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, and many of our subsequent presidents had signal public relationships to music and the arts. Francis Hopkinson, one of the 56 signatories of the Declaration of Independence, was the first notable American art music composer, even earlier than William Billings. According to American music historian John Tasker Howard, “A study of Hopkinson’s life and writings shows that music was appreciated and enjoyed by the colonies; and that the people of that time had access to the best of contemporary music literature.” Other signers of the Declaration like Elbridge Gerry and George Clymer publicly promoted support for the arts in the newborn nation. Even Christian clergymen of the colonial era took up the arts standard: “Why may not a Republic of Letters be realized in America as well as a Republican Government? Why may there not be a Congress of Philosophers as well as of Statesmen?” asked Jeremy Belknap in 1780, adding that the new country of America ought to “shine as Mistress of the Sciences, as well as the asylum of Liberty.” Belknap (1744-1799) was a Congregationalist minister and Revolutionary War chaplain. And General Washington himself averred the following, in a letter to Lafayette in May 1788:

Men of real talents in Arms have commonly approved themselves patrons of the liberal arts and friends to the poets, of their own as well as former times. In some instances by acting reciprocally, heroes have made poets, and poets heroes.

Composer, organist, and harpsichordist Francis Hopkinson represented New Jersey in the second Continental Congress, and under President Washington he served as judge for the United States District Court in Pennsylvania. On December 11, 1781, Hopkinson’s oratorio The Temple of Minerva was performed in Philadelphia with General Washington in attendance. Hopkinson later dedicated his Seven Songs to “His Excellency George Washington, Esquire.” In return, Washington told Hopkinson that the “honor of my Country” obliged him to believe that Hopkinson’s songs could “melt the Ice of the Delaware and Potomack.”

Hopkinson Dedication

The dedication page from the original publication (1788) of Seven Songs by Francis Hopkinson. (The collection actually contains eight songs, but the final one was added after the title page had already been engraved.)

According to historian Gordon Wood, George Washington loved the theater and thought it the duty of the American president to be supportive of art and music even in cases where he himself didn’t understand it. Washington “was an active patron and friend of music. He loved the fine things of life, and as a gentleman of culture he had the rare gift of knowing how to get the most from his leisure. He was a frequent attendant at concerts, and ….heard the ballad-operas of the day. At Mount Vernon there is still preserved the harpsichord he bought for [his step-granddaughter] Nelly Custis,” wrote John Tasker Howard in Our American Music. In Philadelphia in June 1787, General Washington attended the first known American four-hand piano recital.

In the popular mythology, American presidents tend to be lumped together as tone-deaf, as per U. S. Grant’s apocryphal statement that he knew two tunes, “One is Yankee Doodle, the other isn’t,” and President Eisenhower’s remark to Leonard Bernstein at the White House in 1960: “I like music with a theme, not all those arias and barcarolles” (which phrase Bernstein lifted to title one of his last compositions). But the historical truth about our 18th and 19th century leaders is that many of them liked music and art, and political actions toward support for music and the other arts were more common than is imagined. Even Richard Nixon played the piano and wrote music.

Lest we forget: among the enumerated powers given to Congress in Article I, Section Eight of the U.S. Constitution is the power “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.” Details about the White House occupant’s attendance at the Presidential Box at Washington’s Kennedy Center are not disclosed to the public for security reasons, though the Kennedy Center acknowledges that visiting heads of state and even cabinet members (Condoleezza Rice) have occasionally taken the seats.

“Any critic who says that government support of the arts is un-American and contrary to our national tradition is not aware of the facts,” wrote theatre historian Dorothy Gillam Baker (1916?-1990) in the early 1960s, a few years before President Lyndon Johnson established the National Endowment for the Arts. (Prof. Gillam Baker, by the way, served in the military in World War II as a lieutenant in the Coast Guard.) She added, “Government responsibility for the arts was expressed in constitutions and other documents of the Colonies, prior to the Declaration of Independence. Before the close of the 18th century, government leaders of individual states recognized this responsibility and attempted to establish a government theater. It failed to pass only because of other more urgent needs of the youthful country. The movement for government support has been almost continuous since that time, parallel with our awareness of the inadequacy of our commercial theater by comparison with the state-supported artistic activity abroad.”

Even during the height of the Revolutionary War, American painters found themselves in demand, the beneficiaries of “new government commissions for commemorative works,” according to historian Kenneth Silverman. Not long after the War ended, in 1785, the Pennsylvania legislature debated a proposal for a government-supported theater. In the debate, war hero “Mad” Anthony Wayne not only asserted that “a well regulated theater was universally acknowledged to be an efficient engine for the improvement of morals,” but declared that “a theater in the hands of a republican government, regulated and directed as such, would be, instead of a dangerous instrument, a happy and efficient one.” Continental Congress delegate Cadwalader Morris was among those who seconded General Wayne’s view, warning his colleagues that “people will find out amusements for themselves unless government do it.” George Clymer, who signed both the Declaration and the Constitution, sided with Morris and Wayne. They lost the cause when an anti-theatre act was passed, but in February 1789 the act was repealed when William Temple Franklin (1760-1823), grandson of Benjamin Franklin, submitted a brief that argued that “the same authority which proscribes our amusements, may, with equal justice, dictate the shape and texture of our dress or the modes and ceremonies of our worship….[it is] contrary to the principles of a free government to deprive any of its citizens of a rational and innocent entertainment….” Other signers of Franklin’s brief included General Anthony Wayne and Robert Morris, the “financier of the American Revolution” who also signed both the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, and later was a U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania. Later that same year, Elbridge Gerry, another Declaration of Independence signatory and later a U.S. vice-president and governor of Massachusetts, wrote a letter to Samuel Adams to persuade him to favor such a bill in Boston. Gerry had lived in New York, liked the theater, and expressed the opinion to Adams that establishing a theater would help in “forming the national character.”

Benjamin Franklin, as the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians notes, played the harp, the guitar, and the glass dulcimer. He wrote a short treatise on musical aesthetics and printed three books of hymn tunes in the 1730s. (A weird open-string string quartet long ascribed to Benjamin Franklin is now judged misattributed by most scholars.) But most famously, Benjamin Franklin invented a musical instrument: the glass armonica. Writes biographer Walter Isaacson,

It was based on the common practice of bored dinner guests, and some musicians, of producing a resonant tone by moving a wet finger around the rim of a glass. Franklin attended a concert in England of music performed on wineglasses, and in 1761 he perfected the idea by taking thirty-seven glass bowls of different sizes and attaching them to a spindle. He rigged up a foot pedal and flywheel to spin the contraption, which allowed him to produce various tones by pressing on the glass pieces with his wet fingers….Marie Antoinette took lessons on it, Mozart and Beethoven wrote pieces for it.…

Ben Franklin Glass Armonica

According to Benjamin Franklin, “Of all my inventions, the glass armonica has given me the greatest personal satisfaction.”

The range was a chromatic three octaves. It was pressure-sensitive, and once tuned never needed retuning. Franklin himself played it. Franklin’s invention, the nested glass harmonica, is still played today and can even be seen and heard on YouTube videos.

Thomas Jefferson “was already a competent fiddler” by the age of fourteen according to biographer Willard Randall. He taught himself to read music and could play both by ear and by sight reading. As a student at the College of William and Mary, Jefferson still found time to play the violin, sometimes with his violin-playing roommate, John Tyler, father of the U.S. president of the same name. While he was still studying law, Jefferson played violin in a consort with cello, flute, and harpsichord at weekly chamber music concerts at the Governor’s Palace of the Virginia Colony. (He was engaged to do this by the Lieutenant Governor of the Virginia Colony, Francis Fauquier, who like Jefferson was an all-around politician-intellectual who dabbled in music.) In his twenties Jefferson frequently attended plays at the playhouse of the Virginia Company of Comedians. On his many visits to the colony’s capital city of Williamsburg, according to Randall, Jefferson

paid to hear music of any kind played by a chamber orchestra or by an organ grinder or on a glass armonica….In the afternoons, in the evenings, he searched out music or played it on his fine fiddle, and according to one of his servants, when he rode or walked, he loved to hum minuets or sing. An overseer recalled, “When he was not talking, he was nearly always humming some tune or singing in a low tone to himself.” Added his manservant, Isaac, “Hardly saw him anywhere but what he was a-singing.”

In 1779 Jefferson welcomed captured Hessian prisoners of war into his Monticello home. One of them later wrote back in Germany, “As all Virginians are fond of music, [Colonel Jefferson] is particularly so. You will find in his house an elegant harpsichord, pianoforte and some violins. The latter he performs well upon himself, the former his lady touches very skillfully….” Jefferson collected a large library of music from which he and others performed. In a 1778 letter to Giovanni Fabbroni, an acquaintance in Paris, Jefferson called music “the favorite passion of my soul” and told of his grand aspiration to build a live-in band at Monticello. Ever the chronic overspender, Jefferson mused aloud to Fabbroni how he might be able to afford his passion for background music. He came up with an 18th century version of the idea of a home audio system: importing a domestic staff from Europe “to gratify his appetite as a listener”:

I retain for instance…a gardener…a weaver…a cabinet maker…and a stonecutter….In a country where like yours music is cultivated and practised by every class of men I suppose there might be found persons of those trades who could perform on the French horn, clarinet or hautboy and bassoon, so that one might have a band of two French horns, two clarinets, & hautboys & a bassoon.

John Quincy Adams, unheraldedly one of our most cultured presidents, kept a daily diary for 69 of his 80 years and was one of only two presidents who could proficiently speak or read five languages other than English (the other was Thomas Jefferson). Quincy Adams was also a devotee of both the theater and the opera. He opposed the banning of theater in Boston in the early 1790s and wrote vigorous defenses of the stage in newspaper articles. While in London in 1816 Adams and his wife attended Don Giovanni, which he thought “delicious to my ear.” On March 23, 1816, he heard a performance in London of Beethoven’s notorious orchestral potboiler Wellington’s Victory, and wrote discerningly, “Bad music, but patriotic.” After serving a single term as president, John Quincy Adams served as a congressman for 17 years. In his 1838 diary he praised a Washington D.C. production of Rossini’s The Barber of Seville and characterized another of Bellini’s La sonnambula as “delicious.” He also liked Norma and I Puritani (“Momento!” he wrote in his diary) and heard Norwegian violinist Ole Bull on his American tour.

Quincy Adams Flute Music

A page of flute music copied by John Quincy Adams when he was studying the flute during his student days at Harvard University (1786-87).

One of the more curious footnotes in Composers-at-the-White-House annals belongs to Anthony Philip Heinrich (1781-1861), an avant-garde (for his era) and overweeningly ambitious composer emigré to the United States. John Hill Hewitt (1801-1890), an American songwriter and journalist, knew both Heinrich and President John Tyler and wangled a White House visit for Heinrich. The composer was a kind of pioneer American Stockhausen. Perhaps seeking White House backing, he proposed to dedicate a large choral/orchestral work to the president entitled Jubilee. Hewitt later wrote of this unique meeting in his 1877 musical memoir Shadows on the Wall.

We visited the president’s Mansion, and were shown in the presence of Mr. Tyler, who received us with his usual urbanity. I introduced Mr. Heinrich as a professor of exalted talent and extraordinary genius. The President…readily consented to the dedication and commended the undertaking. Heinrich was elated to the skies, and immediately proposed to play the grand conception. The composer labored hard to give full effect to his weird production…occasionally explaining some incomprehensible passage, representing, as he said, the breaking up of the frozen river Niagara…the thunder of our naval war-dogs and the rattle of our army musketry. The inspired composer had got about half way through his wonderful production when Mr. Tyler arose from his chair, and, placing his hand gently on Heinrich’s shoulder, said: ‘That may all be very fine, sir, but can’t you play us a good old Virginia reel?’

James Buchanan may be a near-unanimous choice for history’s worst president, though he had the most extensive resume of government service of any candidate ever elected to the job. Still, he in 1859 became the first president ever to appoint an NEA-like organization, the National Commission of Fine Arts, based on a petition signed by 127 American artists. The Commission was abolished a year later because Congress regarded its request for appropriations to carry out its plans exorbitant (and untimely perhaps, given the impending national crisis of the Civil War). The hostess of the unmarried Buchanan’s White House was his niece, Harriet Lane, who was dubbed the “First Lady” (the first time that sobriquet was applied in our history). The young and vivacious Lane was the Jacqueline Kennedy of her time, frequently inviting artists and glitterati to White House events, and she surely must take a share of the credit for her dour uncle’s arts activism.

Yet even with the Civil War raging, Abraham Lincoln went to concerts, theater, and the opera during his White House years. According to biographer David Herbert Donald, “After 1863, when New York opera companies began offering a special Washington season, the Lincolns were regular patrons. They attended performances of Gounod’s Faust, Weber’s Der Freischutz, and Flotow’s Martha, [and The Magic Flute] among others.” Creepy fact: on at least one other occasion before April 14, 1865, Lincoln attended a play featuring John Wilkes Booth in the cast.

Government arts activism only increased during the postbellum Gilded Age, according to Dorothy Gillam Baker: “Mild, perennial agitations in Congress for a National Conservatory of Music, which should make our country musically independent of the rest of the world, began about 1879. In some instances, legislative bills for a National Department of Fine Arts accompanied the Conservatory bills. By 1891 the Conservatory lobbyists succeeded in putting through Congress an act providing for the incorporation (as a National Conservatory) of a music school, founded a few years earlier in N.Y. by Jeannette Thurber. The bill became law with the support of President Benjamin Harrison. In 1897, the Public Art League of the U.S., with some 500 members, was formed for the express purpose of sponsoring a bill for the creation of a national office of the arts. Presented that year, the bill did not come to a vote in Congress; neither did McKinley’s 1896 campaign promise to back the establishment of a national theater.” After endowing what became Carnegie Hall, many Americans expected that Andrew Carnegie would similarly endow a national theater. Carnegie’s reply: “On the continent of Europe many theaters are subsidized by the government….It would be an experiment here, and, if to be made, should be by the government, as in Europe. It does not seem a proper field for a private gift.”

Krehbiel

Music critic and William Howard Taft look-alike Henry Krehbiel

During the 1890s William Howard Taft and his culturally climbing wife Nellie established the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. Later Taft, a “severely conservative” Republican president, kept a Victrola in the Blue Room of the White House and frequently played 78 rpm Enrico Caruso records and, according to his son Charles, also enjoyed ragtime. The Pianola Company sent Nellie Taft a piano which she put in the Blue Room. Taft apparently knew Henry Krehbiel, dean of American music critics at the turn of the century. As I wrote in my 1998 book Maestros of the Pen: A History of Classical Music Criticism in America:

In the popular iconography of the day Krehbiel was regarded as a ringer for President William Howard Taft. Both were of immense girth, especially seen in profile. A 1910 article in the New York Telegraph reporting a personal meeting between President Taft and Krehbiel described the pair as the “two Dreadnaughts.” The “separated at birth” connection helped make Krehbiel a national celebrity: both men were natives of Cincinnati and about the same age. When President Taft spoke at the Yale commencement in 1909, where Krehbiel was given an honorary Master of Arts degree, Taft said, “I say, we know music in Cincinnati,” and added that Krehbiel in his career there had “never feared to tell people whether some of their efforts in the musical line were up to the proper standard, even if he had to flee for his life because of it.” According to the New York Telegram of February 17, 1912, the two men were so similar looking that patrons at the Metropolitan Opera frequently tipped their hats upon seeing Krehbiel and greeted him aloud as “The President”; Krehbiel was in the habit of dutifully returning the salutation “with characteristic good nature and a keen sense of humor.”

Although Taft’s predecessor Teddy Roosevelt was less interested in classical music, Roosevelt’s wife Edith brought Casals, Paderewski, and other such musicians to perform at the White House. According to Dorothy Gillam Baker, “in 1901 a new bill was introduced into Congress, again for the creation of a national office of the arts. It did not pass, but the movement helped to lead eventually toward the 1909 establishment of the National Commission of Fine Arts–the first official connection between the government and the arts. The limitation of its functions caused President Theodore Roosevelt to set up (additionally) a Fine Arts Council. President Taft was obliged to abolish the Council shortly after his inauguration because Congress refused to appropriate funds for its maintenance.”

Famed sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens remarked that Roosevelt was “probably the only president with any knowledge of art and artists.” Roosevelt asked Congress in 1904 to create a National Gallery of Art. In his post-presidential years Roosevelt visited the famously avant-garde 1913 Armory Show in New York City.

[At the 1913 Armory Show, John] Quinn ushered TR around rooms filled with paintings by European modernists including Paul Cezanne and Paul Gauguin and Americans Arthur B. Davies, Walt Kuhn, and John Sloan, and sculpture by Gutzon Borglum. Roosevelt thought much of the show was “Bully!,” especially the American art which depicted scenes of American subjects. He was not yet ready to endorse wholesale a modernist revolt against stilted traditions.

Quinn urged the ex-President to write about the show, which he did “with surprising sympathy,” in a magazine article entitled “A Layman’s Views of an Art Exhibition.”

Bacall Truman

Just two months before becoming President of the United States as a result of the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Vice President Harry S. Truman accompanied Lauren Bacall at the National Press Club Canteen.

In Post-World War I days, shortly after the Armistice, the creation of a Fine Arts Department was promoted as a “reconstruction measure” and endorsed by Joseph Pennell, the National Federation of Art, and the College Art Association. In 1925 three Fine Arts bills were introduced into the 68th Congress. Of course, Franklin Roosevelt’s administration saw the creation of the WPA and other government-financed arts agencies, a subject too large to cover here.

While the American public knew that Harry Truman played “The Missouri Waltz” on the piano, the full extent of Truman’s involvement with music was less well known, though during his administration Life magazine did run a feature article showing the president playing classical music records on the family phonograph at the White House. In 1962 Truman told author Merle Miller:

When I was about seven or eight years old, we had a piano in the house, which wasn’t unusual at that time, although my mother played. We had a piano, and I wanted to learn how to play it. So I took a great many lessons on it and finally wound up with one of the great instructors in Kansas City. Her name was Mrs. E.C. White, and I took two lessons a week and got up every morning and practiced for two hours….Mrs. White had studied with a man, one of the great teachers of the world, a man named Leschetizsky, who was in Vienna and who was the teacher [sic] of Josef Lhevinne and Paderewski.

Paderewski was in Kansas City when I was about twelve or thirteen and Mrs. White was giving me lessons on various things, and I was studying the Chopin waltzes. Chopin’s A-Flat Opus 42 Waltz is one of the great pieces of music for the piano, maybe the greatest, and I played that, although never as well as I wished….And I was studying the Minuet by Paderewski. And when he got through with his concert—which was a wonder—he played that Chopin A-Flat Waltz, Opus 42, which has always been a favorite of mine. And he played the waltz rendition of the ‘Blue Danube,’ and so on.

When we went back behind the scenes, Mrs. White took me with her, and it almost scared me to death. She told him I didn’t know how to make ‘the turn’ in his minuet, and he said, ‘Sit down,’ and he showed me how to do it. I played it at Potsdam for old Stalin. I think he was quite impressed.

That same year TV talk show host David Susskind interviewed Truman on his program Open End and said to the ex-president, “‘Missouri Waltz’ isn’t really your favorite song, is it?” Truman replied, “No, no. My favorite number is Chopin’s A-Flat Opus 42 Waltz.”

Like Truman, Jimmy Carter was a knowledgeable classical music fan with a substantial record collection. He often commented that “as a midshipman at the U.S. Naval Academy, he had spent whatever extra money he had on recordings of classical music.” When Vladimir Horowitz was invited to play at the White House in 1978, the pianist noted that Carter’s conversation with him convinced him the president hadn’t been simply prompted on what to say. “The President knows his music,” said Horowitz.

Truman did not like abstract modern painting, but he did like the old masters–Frans Hals, Rubens, Leonardo da Vinci, and Holbein in particular. While he was Senator from Missouri he often visited the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. During a trip to Europe in May 1956, Truman and his wife visited the great American expatriate Renaissance art connoisseur Bernard Berenson (1865-1959) at his villa in Florence, Italy. (Berenson had done more than any other individual to educate the public about the greatness of the Renaissance painters.) “He took us all over the house and explained to us what to look for in a painting. And we got to those museums in Florence and elsewhere, we knew a little about it” commented the ex-President. Give-‘em-hell-Harry later wrote a letter to Berenson, telling him, “I wish the Powers-that-be would listen, think, and mock at things as you have.”

For his part, Berenson wrote in his diary of their meeting:

Harry Truman and his wife lunched yesterday….In my long life I have never met an individual with whom I felt so instantly at home….Ready to touch on any subject, no matter how personal….Now I feel more assured about America than in a long time. If the Truman miracle can still occur, we need not fear even the McCarthys.”

In fact, Harry Truman, exceptional as he was as a leader, was emblematic of many middle Americans at the time for whom a grounding in classical music, painting, and other arts was a staple of primary public school education. That was the all-American default mode until recently. (Biographies record that even the savagely tough baseball player Ty Cobb occasionally visited art museums.) What has happened to our political and social culture since to change this paradigm so greatly that education in the primary schools omits the classical arts entirely?

And the very notion of aid and comfort for the arts is considered vaguely un-American? Tell that to arts-loving and/or arts-supporting George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln, the next time you visit Mount Rushmore.

***

A compact disc of Mark N. Grant’s music will be released this spring on Albany Records and his new opera-in-progress The Human Zoo will be performed by the Center for Contemporary Opera on March 27 in New York City. Several real-life (but non-presidential) American historical figures from the 19th century are featured in the composer’s original libretto for that opera. U.S. presidents have, however, played a role in Grant’s own life story. According to him: “I have shaken hands with three U.S. presidents, all Democrats who had some affinity with music: saxophone-playing Bill Clinton (with whom I briefly discussed crossword puzzles) in 2006; Jimmy Carter, during his campaign for the office in 1976; and, as a little boy, I shook hands with Harry Truman inside New York’s Grand Central Station in 1960. He was walking through the station with his wife Bess, and nobody but my grandmother was bothering him or taking notice of him.”

The Cycle of Get

The Cycle of Get

Mozart never went to Kinko’s.

In an often-cited letter to his father, Mozart complained about working all night to transcribe Die Entführung aus dem Serail for winds before less-operatic pirates could claim the royalties. However, Mozart never paced in shops redolent of toner fumes while his scores were prepared the night before a postmark deadline. Similarly, Haydn never submitted a portfolio of major compositions to receive his honorary doctorate from Oxford, but simply recycled a symphony (Hoboken 1/92) previously commissioned by Count d’Ogny.  Beethoven had no transcripts sent to Albrechtsberger in advance of his studies.

The 18th-century composers received training and pursued careers in a small, guild-like network that was considerably less formal than their waistcoats. Modern composers confront a bewildering array of career paths.  Because of the confluence of the concert season and the academic calendar, many of these opportunities begin with an application submitted in the spring.

April is truly the cruelest month, during which established composers anticipate the awarding of the Pulitzer Prize, the Rome Prizes, and the Guggenheim Fellowships.  Emerging composers learn whether or not they have earned one of the ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Awards or have gained a placement in a summer festival or artist colony (knowing they will still contend for the Bearns Prize and the BMI Student Composer Awards, both announced in May). Most composers in higher education will be consumed with admissions or applying for teaching positions.

The first day of May is circled on many calendars because it is both the NACAC-approved deadline for responding to college admissions offers and last day for colleges accredited by NASM to hire faculty teaching at other colleges without negotiation.  In short–and in the sadly more-familiar jargon of sports–May 1 is both the day that students sign letters-of-intent and the faculty trade deadline.  What follows is a denouement of mortarboards and Elgar: that bottomless cup of trio.

THE LONG SHADOWS OF SUCCESSFUL OTHERS

Some composers will thrive in this market of opportunities. For them, spring will seem as orderly as the cadential rhetoric in a sonata, with the supertonic six-five of interviews giving way to the tonic six-four of an obvious choice. A few others may find themselves suddenly ennobled by an unsuspected windfall.  For them, spring is like a perhaps handout, raising the flats of outrageous fortune into a Picardy third. Or so it would seem.

In fact, those who prosper will almost certainly tell their stories differently.  Any accomplishment in music requires sustained and dedicated effort.  When the spotlight of recognition lights upon an achievement–be it an award, a job, or a fellowship–the achiever will often take pains to explain the unglamorous hours spent in pursuit of the goal.

The personal narratives of the accomplished and recognized may be moving and even inspirational, but they are largely disregarded.  Work is not sexy. Luck is sexier. Effortlessness is the apotheosis of sexiness.  Music–even music in the academy–is a world that trades on the fantasy of talent: the divine right and manifest destiny of artistic triumph.

From our earliest encounters with music, we are told tales of extraordinary accomplishment by musicians: stories so magnificent that no musicologist could hope to put them into context. It is absurd to think of Mozart applying for graduate school, but we scarcely question a cinematic portrayal of him dictating the Requiem from his deathbed.

ACCOMPLISHMENT & RECOGNITION

I have been facetious in pursuit of a specific and uncomfortable fact of life:  the ongoing dialectic of accomplishment and recognition.

Accomplishment is a subjective measure of achievement. Given the solitary nature of composition, the sense of accomplishment is largely self-assessment. Others may say, “Wow, that piece was quite an accomplishment,” but the composer is more likely to sense accomplishment months earlier when looking up from the staves and proclaiming, “Wow, that is one sweet-ass lick of counterpoint!” Only the composer can truly make this assessment because only the composer can put the accomplishment in the intertextual context of his or her idiomatically indexed library and inner-iPod.

Recognition is the acknowledgement of accomplishment. As a matter of logic, everything described in the previous paragraph is recognition: the individual recognizes his accomplishment.  However, in our workaday vocabularies, recognition is the observation of the other, where the other may be a performer, teacher, audience, Pulitzer board–even Jaye P. Morgan, mallet in hand, poised to end your appearance on The Gong Show.

The difference between accomplishment and recognition, as here defined, is as obvious as it is fraught with danger.  In short: what the artist values may not be what the other observes.  Indeed, these two observations may be so different as to not even intersect.

Everyone knows that accomplishment and recognition are two different things, but anyone who has achieved accomplishment without recognition forgets the difference.  It creates a wild imbalance to the ego and the sense of aesthetic propriety, and we tend to project the inverse of that imbalance on the individual who is recognized in our stead.  If I have accomplishment without recognition, then clearly the talentless hack that wins the job, commission, prize, or admission offer has recognition without accomplishment.  Whew.  [Mop brow.] Balance is restored.

Projecting our disappointment by challenging the selection process is a first-line defense: easy, natural, and more readily available than bourbon or Mahler. But when the hurt and anger passes, and the last acquaintance says the final reassuring platitude–perhaps accompanied by a graphic that features a kitten Photoshopped into implausible peril–there are things to consider about what may have happened in an elsewhere beyond our ken.

There are significant differences between applying for a degree program, a prize, or a job, much less a summer festival or commission.  Since I am largely concerned with the deliberation and outcome, I have adumbrated these differences.  In what follows, the composer that applies for anything is an applicant or candidate; the people tasked with making a decision are the committee or adjudicators.

THE APPROACH

We apply with a view of the big picture, fearlessly not sweating the small things.  Sometimes score readers–especially young score readers–obsess over details.

For example, when I began teaching orchestration, I insisted my assignments be done with impeccable precision in placing dynamics and a careful measurement of hairpins. As if channeling a Victorian schoolmarm, I wanted every assignment “neatly lettered.”  About a month into this reign of prissy terror, I had an unwelcome epiphany:  notation is easy to grade; evaluating orchestration is difficult and time-intensive.

I lead with this confession to note the difference in the kinds of judgments that inform a selection process: the measurable quantities and the subjective qualities.  We all sneer at rules and guidelines as so much administrival drivel.  But regardless of our private thoughts about recommendations, transcripts, or anonymous submission, anyone applying for anything should take pains to observe the rules.  Whether or not a portfolio of compositions will crown the composer as the voice of a generation is a matter of aesthetic judgment.  Whether or not the portfolio arrives in three bound copies by the postmark date is a simple binary decision.

I do not mean to suggest that a score of unimpeachable brilliance would be summarily dismissed for a breach of protocol. Just as gravity bends light, extraordinary musicianship will scramble the best-laid plans of orderly conduct. Rather, I am suggesting that in matters of application, a poor first impression may prevent unimpeachable brilliance from getting past the first round.

A careful aggregation of statistics from multiple resources has led me to conclude that there is … like … a metric buttload of composers out there. A college teaching job will draw dozens of applicants.  A competition will draw hundreds of scores.  Any application for anything will likely be received by an assistant of unknown musical aptitude. These score-wranglers have the thankless task of making sure the rules are observed, for the sake of good faith and best practices. But even the greatest musical minds and sharpest score-readers may overlook brilliant music in a badly rendered score, considered in haste.  And the early stage of a selection process is often characterized by haste.

THE UNWONDERFUL WINNOW

The adjudicator may enter into a selection process with any number of lofty goals and forward-thinking aspirations, but the moment the process begins, there is one immutable fact:  there is an awful lot of good music on the table surrounded by an awful lot of less-good music.  The sheer volume of applications is daunting.  It is the perfect time to panic.

The first round of evaluating a large sample of applications is typically a cursory scan that results in a binary decision: yes or no. These tend to be snap decisions: the kind of thin-slicing Malcolm Gladwell explores in his book Blink.  Given the urge to purge, any aspect that must be qualified or nuanced with explanations–i.e., any element that slows the process–may result in elimination.

There is an unpleasant irony in considering such snap decisions. The worst-case scenario conjures a situation wherein the extremes of originality are discarded for the comforting heterogeneity of the middle.  In short–and thin-slicing is the epitome of “in short”–it is survival of the safest.  Unfortunately, the history of musical innovation is a record of extremity. One wonders if a committee empaneled in 1942 would have even considered Cage’s “The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs” a song with piano accompaniment.

Brilliance shines through blinders and brilliant adjudicators will bend to accommodate irregularities attending innovation.  But only if they see it.  Thinking outside the box is better saved until one actually gets invited into the box.

DECISION BY COMMITTEE

Berlioz believed that a unison part played by fifteen average violinists sounded markedly better than the same passage played by four first-rate violinists.   While he may have been overly optimistic about the chorusing effect, he was right about one thing: a large sample blends variance and cancels extremity.  A committee considering an application is a small sample: every voice is heard and must be considered.

When three people enter a room to make a decision, they are likely to make a decision that none of them would have made as individuals. The nightmare scenario is well known:  one adjudicator has his heart set on one applicant, while another adjudicator keeps patiently explaining the logic of her choice.  When Twelve Angry Men becomes three adjudicators at an impasse, sometimes the only way forward is a compromise that crowns the candidate acceptable to all parties.  While the expression “compromise candidate” is pejorative, that candidate is not necessarily less worthy or less deserving.  Indeed, a different committee may very well have unanimously selected the compromise candidate. The committee itself may be comprised of compromise selections. For just as the committee may be confined to submitting the top three choices, the overseeing organization may be confined with selecting three judges in an effort to cover a broad cross-section of styles and aesthetics.

THE PLURALITY OF STYLE

In his seminal essay “New Music, Outmoded Music, Style and Idea,” Schoenberg wrote, “It is very regrettable that so many contemporary composers care so much about style and so little about idea.”  In Schoenberg’s formulation, style comprises the elements of a composition that reflect the composer; the composer does not affect this style but is rather concerned with the development of the idea:  the germinal and generating gesture that is mapped-out over the compositional whole.

Of course, Schoenberg was not the first to express concern about varied kinds of music. Indeed his Verklärte Nacht was, by his own admission, an attempt to merge the style of Wagner with the developmental technique of Brahms. (The merger involved an inverted ninth chord: an irregularity that made the score-readers of the Vienna Music Society reject the sextet in the search for safer fare. Accomplishment with recognition deferred.) Similarly, a self-conscious use of style was hardly novel.  Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte is an object lesson in polystylism.  Schoenberg realized that these topics, which had been largely the shop-talk of composers, were increasingly communicated to audiences in an unsophisticated way.  A preoccupation with style became a fashion, and composers were reported to be making style the agenda–the idea–of their compositions.

Policy statements of modern composition departments reflect Schoenberg’s sentiment, if not his taxonomy. Professors are eager to relate that discipline and technique are learning objectives, that they do not admit students or hire (or tenure) colleagues on the basis of style.  Music directors and foundations are similarly tolerant, if less precise, speaking to the transcendence of artistic vision.  From the faculty mixer to the Polar Prize, modern music is a big-tent coalition.

We needn’t tax the angels of our better nature to embrace a variety of styles: our earliest exposure to music was an ad hoc mixtape of the polished and profane.  There are no Darmstadt lullabies, no fight song from dear ol’ IRCAM.  No pianist credits her “mad chops” to hours of drill-it-and-kill-it with a tattered copy of Fluxus Fingerpower!. At every stage of our musical training, and even our basic socialization, we are inculcated with a mesh of musical styles.

A cursory glance at the programs for any ensemble reveals our variegated listening diet. A new music concert might span works from 10 to 100 years (always gerrymandering Webern into the contemporary). An orchestral concert can easily span 250 years back to the middle period of Haydn.  A musician who plays the recorder may have a working repertoire spanning 500 years, including “Stairway to Heaven.”  And then there’s the internet. Spotify is poly-style porn.  One recent evening, I was embarrassed to be caught red-handed, listening to the American Top-40 Countdown from 1979.

The guilty pleasures of our listening habits betray us. But to listen is not to compose.  Composition asks more of us.

Composing music will not bring fame to most. Or riches.  Composition will not make us more attractive or desirable. (At least while we are alive.) In short, but in words too romantic by half, the only reason to compose is to scratch the itch that attends not composing.  We may seek variety in listening. We may support colleagues and students in their choices. But we compose as we think we ought.

PEDALING FOR POINTS

Thus far, I have treated applications to school, jobs, and competitions from a safe, ironic distance, as if they were the occasional pursuit of some people, unsatisfied with accomplishment and desperate for recognition.  In fact, submitting scores is the constant work of the professional composer.  Some people who compose may sell insurance, conduct the Wiener Hofoper, or even be an Associate Dean, but the composing profession, in the inglorious abstract, is the acquisition of opportunities.

For most composers, this will involve successive roles in academic life, from graduate student to emeritus.  In a fantastic article in The Musical Times–which everyone should read if only to learn how composition may be a “FUBU discipline” (#respect)–Jonathan R. Pieslak writes about the measure of composers as professors.  Professors advance through the tenure ranks by publications and research grants, but:

…because these criteria are not immediately apparent aspects of music composition, academic administrators seem to have been forced into developing different norms to evaluate the quality of a composer’s work. Books and articles are now commissions and performances, and an increased emphasis is placed upon awards, recognitions and honours. A steady stream of performances, high-profile commissions and honours from reputable professional associations symbolises success, and this means that the music itself is seldom evaluated on its own terms. A work is only as good as the commission that funded it, the group who performed it, the reviewer who acclaimed it and the professional organisations who awarded it.

The Musical Times, Vol. 146, No. 1890 (Spring, 2005), 51.

That sounds suspiciously like work. Unsexy work.  We may imagine Beethoven strolling down a country lane pondering the rise of Napoleon and the subversion of E-flat major with a C-sharp, but the modern composer must seek such insights in spare moments of the Cycle of the Get:  get into school, get a prize, get a job, get another performance, etc.  And each acquisition, while a momentary rush, is little more than an opportunity: a berth to compose in the service obtaining the next opportunity.

These are high stakes, and the stakes increase with each success.  The big tent of modern music begins to narrow.  I might like my colleague.  I might respect his work ethic and technique. But when my colleague is selected for the opportunity I sought, my thoughts become uncollegial and complicated.  The great irony of these situations is that the conflict is real and visceral: a threat to future success and even one’s livelihood.  But the conflict is expressed in terms of aesthetics:  They hired that guy?  Dr. G-flat ninth chord? Not even inverted?  Our accomplishment without recognition makes us doubt the accomplishment of the recognized.

Most composer-on-composer crime in the university happens in private meetings.  These are personnel issues in which the participants are sworn to confidentiality.  Sometimes these ethical bonds are so strong, it takes both gin and tonic to dissolve them. We’ve all heard the stories, spread with suspicious annotations like the fingerings in cheap editions of Mozart’s sonatas.  But when these matters do not concern employment, public speculation and second-guessing is only inhibited by tact.  And tact, it turns out, is a poor inhibitor.

Consider the Pulitzer Prize.  The amount of ink and kerfuffle attending the annual announcement from Columbia seems wildly disproportionate to the actual cash prize: a mere fraction of the amount awarded for the other prizes, but given the broader exposure in the mainstream media, specialist publications like NewMusicBox are obliged to chronicle the “hum near Harlem.” The sudden rush of colloquy and calumny rapidly floods the narrow channels we frequent for community and advocacy.  Feedback and hullaballoo ensues.

The “problem” with the Pulitzer Prize–and may we all have such problems–is the problem with every prize: there is only one to give. In any given year, a committee might find “distinguished musical composition” in five pieces in three different styles by ten different measures. Somehow, the committee must find a way to relate the achievement in one style with the achievement in another style. The metrics of that comparison are idiomatic: one doubts they are truly shared by all members of the committee. But the committee does share the burden of making a decision that will have significant implications.

Uncomfortable questions follow. Should the committee consider the results of previous years? Has the award historically privileged one style over others? Does the list of prior laureates show an awkward homogeneity in gender, or race, or the pedagogical lineage of Roger Sessions? And if so, should the current committee make amends?

These are awful questions, the very asking of which presumes an inequity. That these are necessary questions may be inferred from the fact that too many readers are now too carefully considering which Pulitzer recipients may have studied with Sessions and his students.

Such are the high stakes of a solitary recognition. Given the broad colloquy about the Pulitzer and routine expressions of dismay, the winner is often put in the awkward position of minimizing the importance of what should be a crowning professional recognition.  Why would anyone consent to join a committee tasked with making such a decision? And how is the final decision made?

UNCONSONANT CONSENSUS

Otto von Bismarck famously observed that people shouldn’t see how laws or sausages are made. We might add that people should not see how final decisions about admissions, applications, and prizes are made. (Unfortunately, there’s no evidence that von Bismarck ever said his famous bon mot. John Godfrey Saxe wrote it in the Daily Cleveland Herald, 29 March 1869: accomplishment without recognition.)

Let’s take the segno to the coda: the last stage of adjudication.  Fade in on the weary committee at a shabby table. The easier work of thin-slicing the applications into a more-manageable group must seem like ages ago.  In each subsequent pass, the decisions are more difficult for each individual and far more difficult for the entire group.  In the periphery of each exchange between committee members, there is a meta-conversation, a subtle give and take about what might be ideal and who might be acceptable.  Nothing is too adversarial, and there’s undoubtedly a genuine sense of respect among the adjudicators.  And yet, the committee also has skin in the game.

An admissions committee will reflect the interests of the individual faculty. Naturally, teachers want to place students into situations where they will succeed, but students define the working life of a teacher.  Perhaps the teacher wants variety. Perhaps the teacher wants ease.  But whatever the case, the teacher recognizes the commitment that comes with a student and the degree to which the student/alumnus will reflect on the teacher in an increasingly interconnected network of schools and performers.

A faculty search committee, at its best, will reflect the needs of the students.  Unfortunately, the “needs of the students” is a moving target.  Students will come and go; their needs will change.  But the hired colleague will likely be around for some time to come.  Once again, the working lives of individual teachers are at issue. A faculty search committee would be foolish not to consider the collegiality of a candidate.

The prize jury is the most difficult group to read. Their motivation is ideological.  Sometimes judges agree to serve because of their commitment to an institution.  Sometimes judges are eager to contribute to the musical discourse of society. But ultimately, judges agree to judge–and are probably cajoled to judge–as a way to pay it forward.  The sense of obligation we feel to our teachers, we owe to our students. What we learned from the past, we share with the future. The Cycle of the Get is recursive at the Cycle of Intergenerational Debt.

The varying agendas and responsibilities I have suggested are most manifest in the large middle of a selection process, spanning from “this is going well” to “how will we ever decide?” The very last work of the committee is profoundly mysterious. There have been various studies of musicians adjudicating performance competitions.  That method of judging is easier to evaluate because the individual judges make an independent evaluation in real time.  A collective decision is very difficult to study.

I once took minutes for the final meeting of a faculty search that was about to implode.  The report of that final meeting is an amazing document: it reads like the transcript of a basketball game. Without officials.  In a prison yard.  I make the comparison to a basketball game in part because the participants were sweaty and cellblock-indelicate in their choice of vocabulary.  But mostly I refer to the fact that, like many basketball games, you only really needed to see the last five minutes.  Nothing in the preceding ninety minutes predicted the outcome of the final vote.

I don’t mean to suggest that hours of work were negated by the random outcome of a final vote.  Rather, I think that the final minutes of that committee’s deliberations–of any committee’s deliberations–involves a kind of decision-making that is ineffable. And even if those decisions were effable, the participants might be unwilling to eff them: the decisions might be inconsistent with their personal preferences and professional postures.  The unrepentant serialist might go secretly gooey for a well-placed D-flat major seventh chord.  The pedantic professor might be enlightened by the genius who is too ecstatic to follow the lesson plan.  In the end, we plan for the good; the great we can only behold.

After the detailed and principled work of each successive stage, the committee is reduced to the highly cultivated intuition of artists.

REGRETTING TO INFORM YOU

Independent of a commitment to composition, a commitment to the composing profession includes a lot of applications.  All that applying will get you a lot of big fat “no.” Get cozy with rejection: it is the baseball card clicking the spokes on the wheel of the Cycle of Get.

Many of these rejections can be taken in stride. Some are potentially devastating. When your current teachers do not accept you for a graduate program, it hurts.  When your colleagues do not select you for the teaching job you are occupying on an interim basis, it is embarrassingly disappointing. At such times, we are not ourselves. Even the proud and private should seek advice while carrying on with dignity. Public rejections cripple the ego.

At such times in my own career, I try to return to the work I have done with fresh ears.  Often, what I find is that my aspiration was based on a self-assessment that was inaccurate. Sometimes I gave insufficient attention to a quality I considered a strength only to find that it was a liability. Perhaps, in retrospect, that sweet-ass lick of counterpoint might need some textural space to bloom. Perhaps my glib answer to a question about remedial studies did not reveal my extensive experience in this area and offended the committee member committed to outreach in at-risk communities.  In either case, and in many others, what I prized as accomplishment was poorly presented and thus, not recognized.  Difficult and unproductive hours follow, with satisfaction hard to come by.  But those schools that did not hire me? They are never getting their staplers back.

I note one last time that throughout this piece, I have treated the issue of applying for schools, jobs, and prizes at a cool, ironic distance.  These are weighty matters.  Even the idea of “a career in music” is fairly abstract.  The topic I have been discussing–the topic to which we should address ourselves–is nothing less than the way we will spend most of our waking lives.  Will we compose on a cycle of semesters or in the five-to-nine complement of a nine-to-five job?

Hard work attends such questions, work that will drag through a summer of Sundays and into the next year. And as one works through those questions, it is useful to separate the practical need for recognition from the immaterial appreciation of accomplishment.  Recognition may be beyond our grasp.  Recognition may require work we do not care to do.  But the sense of accomplishment is always nearby.  You may have begun a composition with visions of recognition, but what has sustained you through hours and hours of work is the sense of accomplishment.

*

Footnotes:

Berlioz, Hector. 1948. Treatise on Instrumentation. Enl. and rev. by Richard Strauss. New York: Kalmus. http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/3303374.

Gann, Kyle. 1998. “Breaking the Chain Letter: An Essay on Downtown Music.” Kyle Gann. http://www.kylegann.com/downtown.html.

Ginsburgh, Victor. 2003. “Awards, Success and Aesthetic Quality in the Arts.” The Journal of Economic Perspectives 17 (2) (April 1): 99-111. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3216859.

Gladwell, Malcolm. 2005. Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. New York: Little, Brown and Co. http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/55679231.

Hartke, Stephen. 2004. “And the Pulitzer Prize for the Best Apple of the Year Goes To—an Orange!” NewMusicBox (July 1). http://www.newmusicbox.org/articles/And-the-Pulitzer-Prize-for-the-best-apple-of-the-year-goes-to-an-orange/.

Kaplan, Fred. 2006. “Sour Note.” Slate, April 19. http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/music_box/2006/04/sour_note.html.

Kosman, Joshua. 2004. “VIEW / Pulitzer Board Will Regret Changing Eligibility Rules for Music Prize.” San Francisco Chronicle. http://search.proquest.com/docview/411656186?accountid=11752.

Kozinn, Allan. 1992. “A Pulitzer Dispute: Should Music Prize Be Left to Experts?” New York Times. http://search.proquest.com/docview/428472108?accountid=11752.

Pieslak, Jonathan R. 2005. “The Challenges of Plurality Within Contemporary Composition.” The Musical Times 146 (1890) (April 1): 45-57. http://www.jstor.org/stable/30044068

Reich, Steve. 2008. “Comments by Steve Reich, Judge.” OperaCity.jp. http://www.operacity.jp/en/concert/topics/080525.php.

Sandow, Greg. 2004. “Pulitzer Follies.” NewMusicBox (July 1). http://www.newmusicbox.org/articles/Pulitzer-Follies/.

Schoenberg, Arnold, and Leonard Stein. 1975. Style and Idea: Selected Writings of Arnold Schoenberg. New York: St. Martins Press. http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1543041

Shaw, David. 1980. “Generalists Judge the Arts Amid Doubt.” Los Angeles Times (1923-Current File). http://search.proquest.com/docview/162638521?accountid=11752.

Silverman, Adam. 2000. “Keep Your Ears on the Prize: A Hyperhistory of American Composition Awards.” NewMusicBox (June 1). http://www.newmusicbox.org/articles/Keep-Your-Ears-on-the-Prize-A-Hyperhistory-of-American-Composition-Awards/.

Suzuki, Dean. 2003. “View From the West: New Hope for the Pulitzer.” NewMusicBox (August 1). http://www.newmusicbox.org/articles/View-From-the-West-New-Hope-for-the-Pulitzer/.

The Pulitzer Prize Board. 2004. “The Pulitzer Prize for Music: It’s Time to Alter and Affirm.” http://www.pulitzer.org/files/musicchanges.pdf.

Sonic Cartography and the Perception of Place

I found myself driving halfway across Los Angeles from the slowly gentrifying Northeast to the already gentrified Culver City.  When I arrived at the local park, I ditched the car and entered on foot—not knowing that the event I was covering would ultimately be held in a parking lot. So in a way, my experience of Nat Evans’s Assemblage (for sunset) started with a hike.

Evans is a composer from Seattle who has been creating a series of pieces for sunrise and sunset. The music—made from field recordings, bells, and traditional instruments—is coordinated with the changing light of the sky at dawn or dusk and is inspired by his studies in Zen meditation. Evans also cites the time-specific characteristic of Indian Ragas and site-specific pieces by Robert Moran and Stuart Dempster as strong influences.  Naturally, the works have to be experienced outside and at a precise time of day.  This is how I found myself on a tiny, trashy pad of asphalt on top of a hill in Culver City.  There I met Evans and a small group of listeners with media players in hand.  At Evans’s signal, we all sat on a retaining wall facing the Los Angeles basin, donned our headphones, and hit play at the same time, just ten minutes before sunset.

Nat Evans's Assemblage (for sunset)

Crowd gathered for Nat Evans’s Assemblage (for sunset)

These actions set in motion a change in our sense of the parking lot as a non-place to a special kind of focus on our humble hillside.  This began with the set up to Evans’s piece, which required a pause in movement; listeners sat down, turning off phones and committing themselves to the experience for the duration of the work. The group’s stillness and Evans’s sounds enclosed the space, transforming it into an intimate environment and giving it a rooted sense of place.  Listening on headphones rather than loudspeakers made the broad vista before us seem close at hand, even intimate.  Headphones also allowed the urban din to seep into the piece, effectively filling “silences” with the prevalent external soundscape. The co-production of site and sound made this piece work and created a focused sensibility you might expect to find in a church, but Evans produced it in a parking lot.  Outdoor works tend to frame the more mundane aspects of our everyday existence.  In Evans’s piece, small things took on weight and gravity.  Never have planes seemed so stunning and ponderous, or the counterpoint of city lights so poignant. The event’s locale was impermanent–not a brick and mortar building, but a transitional place: a parking lot.  So when the piece was over, the sense of place floated away, slowly removing itself as I walked back to my car and drove home.

This experience of Evans’s work dovetails with a recent interest of mine in human geography. As it is related to the subject of music performance, such study creates an awareness of our spaces, and the relative effect that they can have on a listener’s presence in that space.  It has led me to believe that the reason people enjoy music is not for the sonic aspects alone, but for its ability to create an environment where we feel closer to one another. Sound in space creates a platform of increased intimacy and connectedness. A consideration of human geography can help us understand how we can best engender effective concert programming and create a strong sense of place with the presentation of new and experimental works in new or traditional contexts.

Sunset

HUMAN GEOGRAPHY, A PRIMER

There are two main branches of geography: physical geography which studies the processes found in the natural environment, and human geography which studies the world, people, and cultures in the built environment. Physical geography is a natural science while human geography is a social science.  The knowledge set found in human geography has broad-ranging applications in analyzing the way people experience the performing arts. Furthermore, our performances and installations serve as living realizations of long-held theories in the field.  If we could organize geographers on a spectrum from deterministic to poetic, we would be dealing here with the poetic ones.

“Until the 1970’s most human geographers considered space to be a neutral container, a blank canvas which is filled in by human activity.”—Phil Hubbard and Rob Kitchin [1]

Before the mid-20th century, human geographers would comprehend space much like the physical geographers: as a concrete measure of Euclidean geometry (with an x, y, and z axis).  Spaces were viewed as static containers where human activity transpired, but thinkers like Henri Lefebvre began to see geographical space as fundamentally social.  Geographers (specifically the humanists and Marxists) now understand that people construct their own sensibilities of space based on events, memories, and experience—and that spaces are defined and understood by lived experience.

I think we comprehend this pretty well in music: We know our concert halls are fundamentally social, with the rules of engagement built into the architecture and ethos of the space.  For as much as we see spaces as dynamic and social, however, we tend to falsely understand our halls as blank canvases for the focused presentation of sound. To alter this assumption, I would like to stretch Lefebvre’s sentiment to the concert experience via John Cage and his landmark “silent” piece, 4’33” (1952).  The work unveiled the concert hall (supposedly a neutral container) as a discrete sonic environment.  With Cage’s 4’33” we change our relationship to the concert space—in recognizing the existence of a music already present over which we perform works.  Put another way, a human geographer like Lefebvre might look at the concert experience as a co-production of the social experience (social space) and the music presented in that environment.

Sunset

PLACE AND SPACE

Space and place are often regarded as synonyms in referring to landscape, region, or other distinct areas.  For geographers, however, these terms have more nuanced definitions.  Their meanings and surrounding theories can be employed to make sense of our performance environments; identifying the qualities of our concert spaces, and helping to establish platforms for new and experimental works.

“Space” and “place” are familiar words denoting common experiences. We live in space. There is no space for another building on the lot.  The Great Plains look spacious.  Place is security, space is freedom: we are attached to the one and long for the other. There is no place like home. What is home?  It is the old homestead, the old neighborhood, hometown, or motherland. . . Space and Place are basic components of the lived world; we take them for granted.” —Yi-Fu Tuan [2]

Space is a more abstract concept than place. Space is undifferentiated, open, and potentially vast.  In contrast, place is enclosed and humanized space—space with value.  Anyone who experiences the limitless horizon of the sea can feel its spaciousness.  We establish place when we stop to make a fire for warmth, or share a tent with our partner on the sands overlooking this expanse. We feel the stability of this encampment (place), yet sit on the cusp of freedom and threatening openness (space).  They are not concrete terms, but poetic concepts that perhaps ring truer to artists than to cartographers.  As Yi-Fu Tuan says, we long for spaciousness and the unhindered movement that it affords us. It is this movement that we surrender to achieve the comfort and safety of place.

“Place is a pause in movement. . . The pause makes it possible for a locality to become a center of felt value.” —Yi-Fu Tuan [3]

If we experience space by moving through it, then we experience place by ceding this freedom and resting our body and mind.  Consider the arrival to an event such as a traditional orchestra concert; the movement from a busy street bustling with urban activity to a stationary seat in an enclosed and quiet concert hall is an exercise in two dynamically different environments.  One calls you to be aware of your peripheries and the sounds around you, while the other asks you to surrender movement and focus on the organized sounds in front of you. Our halls are set up like this for a reason; we take refuge in their comfort and value their stillness.  There was a presumption in human geography that we could only “take place” as humans, but more recently the field theorizes that we actively participate in creating place with memory, experience, and actions like a pause in movement.

“Immensity is within ourselves. . . As soon as we become motionless, we are elsewhere; we are dreaming in a world that is immense.  Indeed immensity is the movement of the motionless man.” —Gaston Bachelard [4]

Our spaces do not have to be immense to conjure deep and reverberant sentiments in a listener.  We carry immensity within us, and it is accessed while daydreaming, experiencing art, listening to music, etc. Bachelard goes on to explain that thisinner immensity” is what gives meaning to our experiences.  We can engender this “sense of the terrific” in listeners with volume and close proximity.  Unfortunately, this is why the orchestral environment often doesn’t capture visceral sensations of immensity in all listeners: the distance is too great, the volume too ineffectual. Although the performances are beautiful, the vast spaces of Avery Fisher, Disney Hall, and their ilk can drain the immediacy from a performance leaving some in the audience untouched.

“Permanence is an important element in the idea of place. Things and objects endure and are dependable in ways that human beings, with our biological weaknesses and shifting moods do not endure and are not dependable.” —Yi-Fu Tuan [3]

Our brick and mortar concert halls, clubs, and galleries are the principal places for our musical community.  Avery Fisher Hall, which has stood since 1962, holds a weight that a more temporary structure would not have.  This permanence makes it a guarantor of meaning and a locus for identity.  We see ourselves as belonging to these places and linked to those people who have gone before.  The same could be said for an institution like an art museum, a house of worship, or a dusty oft-frequented pub. Repeat visits to a place create memories that resonate and expresses the same attitude and environment with each return.  These permanent structures allow us to discover and rediscover with each visit; perhaps our first time in a space yields delight, the second comfort, the third contentment. 

In contrast, an event held in a temporary place, like a parking lot or stretch of desert, creates a different experience for the listener. Because the environment is ephemeral, you can’t visit and revisit the place because the place will be gone.  After a momentary structure is dismantled, all that is left is an open space, the memory of the event and the human warmth felt during that time.  These temporal structures (both social and physical – public and private) should not be considered “less-than” a more permanent structure; they can be created more casually, more idiosyncratically, and are therefore more strongly affixed to a particular time and place.

Darkness

“Intimacy between persons does not require knowing the details of each other’s life; it glows in moments of true awareness and exchange.  Each intimate exchange has a locale which partakes in the quality of the human encounter.” —Yi-Fu Tuan [3]

We all hope to have intimate and genuine encounters with those around us, and in our best moments as musicians we encourage an intimate experience either between the audience and performers, or amongst the audience members themselves. The locale of our performance plays a large roll in the nature of this closeness. If we are sitting in a recital hall watching a great pianist perform Chopin’s preludes, it is possible that we could have a warm and human experience with the pianist. Empathizing with Chopin’s sense of nostalgic loss, we can have an intimate (indescribable) moment with a long-dead composer.  Entering a dispersed, environmental sound installation, or a work like Nat Evans’s, the interactions are more social, dynamic, and serendipitous.  A piece with many focal points (or none at all) creates a dense web of exchanges that are not controlled by sound, but made available by the platform or context of the event.  Yi-Fu Tuan offers another gem of advice regarding intimacy and the potential arena for human interaction.  He says that “one can no more deliberately design such places than one can plan, with any guarantee of success, the occasions of genuine human exchange.” [3] There is no science to composition, performance, or curation.  However, considering the relationship between sound and space can help us in framing poignant experiences, which will happen by accident and happy chance over the duration of a work.  As musicians, we can merely fill this time with sound and silence in the hope of dressing up intimate moments that would otherwise escape our attention.

Perhaps this is our humble aspiration: to create platforms for potential warm human encounters. When creating places and events for the presentation of sound in space, we can design environments of heightened intimacy and exchange by sonically framing an environment.  No one system for doing this is superior, but different contexts inspire disparate experiences for the concertgoer. They offer different kinds of intimacy, or a complete lack thereof. I often wonder in what ways can we make art music more real to people, providing a potential for true awareness and exchange.  I believe that we have to draw our own conclusions and might do well to look to our peers in relevant fields like design, urban planning, food, aesthetics, visual art, and human geography for guidance toward discovering new answers.

*

Footnotes:

1. Hubbard, Phil, and Rob Kitchin, eds. Key Thinkers on Place and Space. 2nd ed. Los Angeles: Sage Publications, 2004. 4.

2. Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977. 3.

3. Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977. 138-41.

4. Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press, 1958. 184.

***

Chris Kallmyer

Chris Kallmyer performing on a bison horn for a bison dinner at the Museum of Contemprary Art Denver. Photo by Alex Stephens

Chris Kallmyer is a performer, composer, and sound artist living in Los Angeles, California, who works in sound installation, composition, trumpet, and electronic music. He has presented work at the Walker Art Center, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, the Hammer Museum, the Getty Center, REDCAT, and other spaces in America and Europe. His work is influenced by a sense of place, architecture, field recordings, and outdoor listening.

Thanks to Andrew McIntosh, Ken Ehrlich, Mark Allen, Katie Tate, and Chris Rountree for their time, energies, and ideas about this piece.

Stravinsky Outside Russia

Leon Botstein

Leon Botstein conducting the American Symphony Orchestra. Photo by Matt Dine (courtesy Sacks & Co.)

[Ed. Note: The following is a slightly modified version of an essay, reprinted with permission, that will appear as the program note for an all-Stravinsky concert performed by the American Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Leon Botstein this Friday, January 20, 2012, at Carnegie Hall. The program will include two rarely performed compositions written during Stravinsky’s final three decades in Southern California: Canticum Sacrum and Requiem Canticles. Botstein will additionally lead a performance of Stravinsky’s most famous work The Rite of Spring, written long before he arrived in the United States, as part of the ASO’s Classics Declassified series at Symphony Space in New York City on February 26, 2012.—FJO]

It has become all too commonplace to negotiate the complex and tangled fabric of artistic life in history by constructing an artificial hierarchy—lists of the “best” or “most famous” personages—as if painting, writing, or composing were Olympic contests, adequately judged by a single objective criterion. In reality, at any given time there are many inspired and imposing figures who, despite their ambitions, jealousies, and rivalries, themselves never worried about any top ten or top fifty rankings. And the nature of art-making resists such blunt instruments of evaluation. Nevertheless, for most of the 20th century (if there were indeed to be a contender for the status of the “greatest” 20th-century composer) the honor, as a matter of public perception both in the general public and among professional musicians, would most likely have fallen on Igor Stravinsky. Stravinsky, who, unlike Paul Dukas or Felix Mendelssohn, seems not to have suffered from modesty, self-doubt, or excessive generosity to others, would have been only too pleased. Perhaps the best way to think of Stravinsky’s standing during his lifetime and for several decades after his death in 1971 is to compare him to the place his contemporary, Pablo Picasso, came to occupy in the visual arts as emblematic of the 20th century.

Stravinsky on Porch

Igor Stravinsky on his porch in Southern California. (Photo © Boosey & Hawkes, Inc., reprinted with permission)

The reasons for Stravinsky’s prominence and dominance are many. First and foremost are the range and quality of Stravinsky’s output, sustained over a very long and productive life. Second, Stravinsky was a shrewd and effective promoter of his own music and career. Third is the variety of styles and genres in which the composer worked, from the stage to small chamber music works. Fourth—and perhaps most intriguing—are the prominence and influence he managed to achieve in three very disparate and discrete public spheres and contexts. The first was his native pre-revolutionary Russia, into which he was born in 1882. The second was French-speaking Europe, in France and Switzerland, where the composer lived and worked for nearly three decades before World War II. Stravinsky started his career outside of Russia as a Russian working abroad, and then as an exile. But he ended up as an exponent of contemporary “French” music. Stravinsky spent his final three decades (from 1939 on) based in the United States, where he was regarded initially as partially Russian, but equally French as an exile. Ultimately, by the early 1960s, he came to represent American music, at home in the United States and abroad.

Stravinsky’s career began in Russia, where he studied with Rimsky-Korsakov and where he formed a deep and lifelong artistic and spiritual attachment to Russian folk traditions, the Orthodox religion, the Russian language, and the Russian cultural heritage in music, the visual arts, and literature. The “Volga Boatmen” arrangement for Chaliapin gives evidence of this. In Paris, where he befriended Claude Debussy, Stravinsky exploited the rage for presumed exoticism of all things Russian, and rose to international fame through the success and notoriety of his ballet scores written for the Ballets Russes.

One single date has come to serve as an historic marker for the explosion of modernism onto the cultural scene—a moment in time that seemed to bring the 19th century to a close and usher in the 20th: the May 29, 1913 premiere of The Rite of Spring. In his years in France, Stravinsky came to dominate the musical and cultural scene, taking his place alongside Valery, Gide, and Cocteau (forgetting Coco Chanel in this context) as a luminary. Through Nadia Boulanger, arguably the most important single teacher of a younger generation of composers, many of them Americans, Stravinsky influenced the course of American concert music. In his American years, Stravinsky’s fame and reputation continued to grow, not as an outsider (the way other émigrés, such as Schoenberg, saw themselves), but as an insider in the American scene. In part through his association with Robert Craft, who would become his chronicler and assistant, in his last years Stravinsky was astonishingly productive, writing in a new way, adapting modernist techniques developed by Schoenberg and Webern.

From Stravinsky Requiem Canticles

A passage from the score of Requiem Canticles which demonstrates Stravinsky’s idiosyncratic adaptation of techniques developed by Schoenberg and Webern.
Requiem Canticles by Igor Stravinsky
© Copyright 1967 by Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers, Ltd.
Reprinted by Permission.
All in all, therefore, one can locate roughly three distinct stylistic periods in Stravinsky’s career. The first was an unmistakable “Russian” phase; Russian influences are obviously audible in the Firebird, for example. This gave way to a form of self-consciously international neo-classicism, not dissimilar from a parallel development in architecture, particularly the work of Le Corbusier. The high point of that period was reached during the late 1920s and early 1930s in Paris. In the years of transition from Russia, great works that mirror the trajectories forwards and backwards in time were written, such as Les Noces (1914/1917) and The Soldier’s Tale (1918). The legacy of neo-classicism formed the basis for the third period (the most audibly modernist period, that of the 1950s and 1960s) when the composer was in the United States, where he wrote among other things, together with W.H. Auden, his operatic masterpiece The Rake’s Progress (1951) and an opera for television, The Flood (1962).

At the same time, just as in the case of Picasso, the shifting stylistic surfaces in each period never masked a consistent distinctive character and quality to Stravinsky’s music. A set of proverbial fingerprints, revealing a unique musical imagination and personality, can be located in all of Stravinsky’s music. Central to Stravinsky’s aesthetic was the belief that in the end music was separate from language, and demanded a formal economy, a structure, and rigorous logic all its own. At the same time, Stravinsky understood his audience and the public. He had an uncanny sense of the theatrical in music and an elegant sense of humor and irony. There was a clarity, transparency, and lightness to his music reflecting a deeply felt aversion to Wagnerian grandiosity and Mahlerian metaphysical pomposity. A lucid rhythmic originality, vitality, and complexity inhabit many of his scores, but the asymmetries and surprises all seem seamless and natural. The discipline of writing for dance taught the composer that the overarching architecture of a work, its musical flow and narrative, could not be obscure. Stravinsky used musical time with uncanny effectiveness, rarely if ever wearing out his welcome with his audience or his fellow musicians. His command of instrumental and vocal sonorities was equally impressive, as was his capacity to make his material memorable. Stravinsky’s extensive output was startling in its consistency in terms of rigor, invention, and quality.

Yet, like Picasso, although Stravinsky’s name and reputation remain in tact, the interest of the public has shifted away from much of his work. The three great ballet scores, The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911/47), and The Rite of Spring, are cornerstones of the orchestral repertoire. Many later scores are still heard, but far fewer than one might think or wish. This is especially the case with Stravinsky’s later works. Indeed, many of his mid-career and later works survive on the public stage as a result of his friend Balanchine’s choreography, including pieces not intended for dance, such as the Violin Concerto (1931).

If there is tendency to simplify how we approach the history of music by constructing lists of the “top ten,” there is a parallel allure to the idea that there is some “essential” identity to each composer in terms of his historical roots, so to speak. Bartók becomes quintessentially “Hungarian,” Copland “American,” Debussy and Ravel “French,” and Sibelius “Finnish.” As a result, we turn to Americans for the “best” performances of Copland, Hungarians for Bartók, the French for Debussy and Ravel, and the Finns for Sibelius. This makes marketing easy and lends some hint of authenticity to our experience as listeners, as if there might be some secret spiritual or national bond, framed by blood, language, and soil, between a composer and his music, requiring decoding by someone who shares that bond.

Stravinsky

Igor Stravinsky in his study. (Photo © Boosey & Hawkes, Inc., reprinted with permission)

Even when this might plausibly apply to a composer (e.g. Musorgsky as Russian or Smetana as Czech), it assumes some fixed generalized category—Russianness and Czechness that seem to transcend historical change. But what do we make of Stravinsky? Despite his evident identity as a Russian émigré after 1917, this reductive assessment violates not only his own views about the nature of music, but the facts of his career and the range and variety of his compositions. Recourse to the notion of exile, in the case of Stravinsky, only complicates the problem. Rachmaninov was also an exile after 1917. For him the experience of being separated from his homeland was traumatic. He sought to insulate himself in an environment marked by nostalgia. He tried to recreate the atmosphere of his native land when he was in America, England, and Switzerland. Prokofiev, who like Stravinsky found himself abroad when the October Revolution happened, and like Stravinsky sought to make a career in America and France, in part because he felt always in Stravinsky’s shadow, returned to Russia in the mid 1930s. But Prokofiev, unlike Stravinsky, had no spiritual ties to the Orthodox Church and was never a virulent anti-Communist. Stravinsky fit in, in France and America, as a leading and successful participant at the center of musical and cultural life, and never at its margins.

Vladimir Nabokov reinvented himself and became one of the greatest writers in English and one of the most trenchant observers of post-War America. Stravinsky managed to reinvent himself too, not once, but twice: first in France and then in America. Like Nabokov, he used the position of exile to forge a synthesis with his new circumstances and reach in new ways various new publics. The link to the past was never hidden or disavowed (as Kurt Weill attempted). Stravinsky, fortunately for him, unsuccessfully tried to keep his music in circulation in Germany after 1933. Displacement and the necessity to adjust may have been unwelcome but they could still be understood as acts of practicality, not fear or conscience. Exile provided Stravinsky with new remarkable sources of inspiration.

Stravinsky was, above all else, a composer’s composer, for whom music can function in the world in a manner that resists facile typecasting, and whose character reflects a dialogue with the composer’s immediate environment. His ambitions, craft, and influence were international and his identity shifted, at different phases in his career, to transfigure distinct milieus and contexts.

Chiming In on the Relationship Between Noise, Sound and Music

[Ed. Note: From November 6-10, 2011, the Music Critics Association of North America (MCANA) held a Critics Institute focusing on new music at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. Highlights of the institute included hands-on training on audio editing and recording with composer and Syracuse faculty member Douglas Quin and a concert by the Kronos Quartet featuring the world premiere of Quin’s Polar Suite. In addition, Karissa Krenz moderated a panel discussion about the porous relationship of music, sound, and noise featuring composers James Welsch and Nicolas Scherzinger plus New York Times music critic Vivien Schweitzer. As a preface to a transcript from that discussion featured below, we asked Ms. Krenz to offer some additional thoughts about the ever shifting aesthetics that shape the way we listen to things. In addition, we’ve included a brief Q&A with Douglas Quin by Leah Harrison, a student in Syracuse’s Goldring Arts Journalism Program, about working with Kronos and his singular approach to sound. – FJO]

Karissa Krenz (Photo by Brian Keeler)

When does noise/sound = music? It might just be one of the trickiest, most thought-provoking discussions in contemporary music.

The art music community has discussed this subject for ages. John Cage, of course, pushed the issue in the face of traditionalists decades ago, while bands in the rock world took the concept and ran with it, taking their willing audiences along for the ride. “Classical” purists seem to merely avoid the topic, while countless composers for film and television have changed the way millions listen by literally including all types of “sound” into their “soundtracks.”

In light of composer and sound designer Douglas Quin’s new work for the Kronos Quartet, Polar Suite, which premiered at Syracuse University on November 9, 2011 [ed. note: see a transcript of a talk with Quin below], a few of us gathered to discuss noise/sound/music as part of that week’s MCANA workshop at the SI Newhouse School of Journalism’s Goldring Arts Journalism Program. Could four of us—composer Nicholas Scherzinger, composer/conductor James Welsch, journalist Vivian Schweitzer, and myself (a composer turned editor/writer)—shed any sort of new light on the topic? From the definition of noise to explorations of personal experience, we barely scratched the surface of this vast, multi-faceted series of ideas.

What does each of us consider music? What did we listen to or experience that opened our minds? Did we have to learn to listen to noise as music? How do you teach noise as music? How does culture impact perception? Why does the brain process sound the way it does? Is it easier to believe noise/sound is music when it’s presented as part of something else, like as a soundtrack or in a work of art? Can these questions really ever be answered?

Music, for each of us, is a very personal thing. As we grow and learn, tastes evolve and change. When we’re born, our brains are virtually a blank slate; we don’t even know what music is, per se. It’s not until our family, our friends, our teachers, and the music industry tell us what “music” is that we decide what we think it’s supposed to sound like.

When I set out to define potential topics for this discussion, I thought about my own unique definition of music. I was raised around Western European music—we had my grandfather’s beautiful grand piano in the house, and since my father is a Lutheran pastor, plainchant and the music of J.S. Bach were in my repertoire from the get-go. But I was always a bit off-key as far as my own personal exploration of sound and noise went. 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. I also lived in the middle of the woods, and I loved to just sit and listen to the sound of our little waterfall, the call and response of the crickets, and the way the trees creaked and moaned in the wind. But as I lived in a small town in the United States, I never knew that any of my experiments could be considered music.

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. I started composing what I now call “sound art” and continued my listening explorations, most importantly discovering that the sounds other cultures used in their music could be dramatically different than those in the Western European tradition.

My own personal definition was cracked wide open. Anything, to me, could be music. And it turns out my three compatriots on the Syracuse panel all had similar experiences.

From a composer’s perspective, as Nicholas pointed out, part of what one does when writing music is study how people react to certain sounds. And while much of that is cultural or experiential, some of it is physiological, as well, and over the last few decades, scientists have devoted countless studies to how the brain processes sound, noise, and music. From studies on the healing powers of music to how the brain reacts to chord progressions, we now know that sound affects startlingly vast regions of the brain.

One recent study that caught my eye just before the panel looked at why most of us cringe at certain sounds, like fingernails on a blackboard. The frequency of the noise and the shape of our ear canals, combined with various psychological elements, create a perfect sound storm that ultimately sends nerves over the edge. Perhaps most interestingly—as far as the noise/sound/music discussion goes—the frequencies of these particular sounds do cause a physical reaction, but when subjects were told it was music, the response wasn’t as negative. (Which explains the outcome one of my own childhood experiments: I decided to desensitize myself to the sound of fingernails on a chalkboard, and I succeeded fairly quickly.)

Regardless of how scientists, academics, or critics break down the “what is music” idea, it is important to remember that “music” exists because we are all living, breathing, thinking humans participating in a process. Composers decide what sounds comprise their music. Performers interpret the score and bring their own perspective to the piece. The audience experiences and processes the sound. We are all part of the equation, and each of our perceptions is unique.

Ultimately, our discussion kept returning to the same point: Our individual definition of music is a value judgment. Our culture, our media, and our peers affect that decision-making process, but ultimately, how we listen, what we listen to, whether or not we like it is up to each of us to decide on our own.

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Karissa Krenz: I think we should just start by introducing ourselves and where we lie in this noise, sound, music world. I was oddly born into this in a weird way. I ended up studying music history and I was composer for a while before I became a music writer/editor. I’m currently working as an editor, writer, producer, but I would have gone into sound art had I continued on my compositional road.

Nicolas Scherzinger: I’m a composer up at Syracuse University. I’m also a saxophonist, so that’s noise. I also teach electronic music and computer music, so this is very much up my alley. I think that’s enough for now.

James Welsch: I also teach up at Syracuse University: theory, composition, and conducting. I have a background in theory and composition from Stetson University where I learned all the basic stuff, but then moved on from that and went into conducting. I was introduced to a lot of new music during my time of graduate study at Syracuse University. I’m very excited to participate in this. We’ll be talking in circles, I’m sure, and I’ll be happy to contribute to the confusion.

Vivien Schweitzer: I’m a freelance writer. I write for The New York Times and The Economist and whoever else will take me. I’m a classically trained pianist. I went to Eastman and after that I decided I didn’t want to be a concert pianist, so I didn’t finish the degree there. I went to a liberal arts college in England where I heard a lot of trance and techno, because that was a big scene in the town I went to, so that was an interesting musical shift after Eastman, but I now hear a huge variety of music in the concerts that I cover.

KK: I thought we could talk a bit about what our definition of music is. We probably each have a personal definition of what noise is. We’re talking sound and noise, but I think people hear sound in a very different way and noise can be a positive thing or a negative thing. To a punk band or—I was going to say young person—noise is a really awesome thing. We’ve all gone through that phase where we just want to listen to crazy stuff, and to other people it may not be. I think I personally go through phases of liking to listen to really crazy stuff and then not being able to handle it. I think also, as I age, my tastes change. I have tinnitus, so that also plays into how I perceive noise.

NS: I think everything we’re talking about tonight is subjective. It depends on your background and your definition. I’ve taught courses here where we get into definitions of what is or isn’t art, what is or isn’t music. I guess we have to be there to hear the sound, but that’s a different question.

KK: We can talk about that, too.

NS: I remember a transformation that happened for me as a composer was as a classically trained musician. I mentioned I was a saxophonist. I studied classical saxophone and jazz at the same time. Jazz and classical are very structured. There are scales and modes and we talk about music and rhythm and all the elements of music, and as I started to compose more, I composed with those elements, so to me, that was music. Then when I went to grad school, part of the things I had to do was take an electronic music course. My teacher was Allan Schindler, who is at Eastman, and it totally blew me away because all of a sudden I was dealing with just sound. I didn’t have to think about rhythm or even pitch. I could simply take a sound and make music with that. So after spending a couple years working like that, when I came back to writing instrumental music, it changed how I wrote it. All of a sudden I was thinking about the orchestra or even the solo violin in a very different way because I was thinking about, not just the traditional sounds that I could get from the instrument, but all the other sounds that are possible. That’s often the case now when I play saxophone. What kind of sounds can I use to construct a piece of music? So, it’s a fascinating question. Where does sound and where does art—music—begin? I don’t know. To me maybe the interesting thing is the gray area in between and trying to live in there.

JW: This very broad question is devastatingly personal—our understanding of sound and how we order it, especially those who may be creating or recreating the sound itself, is very different from those experiencing it as audience members. I think in terms of sharing, we all have some sort of thing that we look back on in the development of our understanding of sound and how that plays in to larger ideas.

James Welsch

James Welsch

I, too, thanks to a liberal arts education, had to take a computer music class and I found it awful. We were working with earth and sea sounds. Even though I was a composer, it was just not the medium for me. I wasn’t making this what you could do with a sound, taking a very basic wave and being able to manipulate it into many different things. Then I found composers who upheld similar ideas that I had in terms of regular old classical serious music, or whatever that was. Composers like Jonathan Harvey and James Tenney appealed to me. So from that point I found that gray area and reconsidered what sound was. I’d grown up in a band program, so I assumed music was band music. Over time you’re introduced to several different things and you’re forced to consider many different aspects of the motion of sound and space around you.

VS: I was thinking when we were talking about this about Georg Friedrich Haas, who is an Austrian composer associated with the spectral school. I interviewed him recently and he said he likes a lot of his works to be performed in complete blackness. This sounds like it could be a little bit gimmicky, but he said there are so few times when you are sitting in complete darkness—without a street light, without anything—and that that changes how you hear the composition itself, so instead of listening to his music, you’re listening to it more as sound. That’s what he wants. He creates these massive soundscapes. There’s no melody, no rhythm, nothing like that; it’s just this completely unfolding panorama.

JW: I’ve sat many times in a student composer recital. We urge them to write an electronic piece and have that on their recital. Often times it was very difficult for me to get into their sound world so early or to understand what they were projecting in ordering the sound in a particular way. I’d look over and see Nick with his eyes closed. I was like, well, maybe I should try that. Maybe I should try shutting my eyes and just listening to the formation of sound. It may be gimmicky, and I don’t know to what extent we do that to the music that we hear, but maybe it’s a step for music that’s not easily grasped.

VS: It also affects how you hear everything else. I remember really distinctly after the first time I heard it [Haas’ music] and then I walked outside Miller, in the area around Columbia [University], suddenly all these street sounds were higher. Sirens and cars honking and all the noises you hear a million times a day on the street suddenly took on this really startling significance, which is really strange, but I think after an hour sitting in the pitch black just listening to this incredible piece, my ears had become really attuned to every sound—every noise—in a different way. It didn’t blend in; it all jumped out.

KK: That kind of begs the question: do you need to learn how to appreciate sound as music? I grew up playing with sound all the time. I grew up in the middle of the woods with not a whole lot to do, so I’d be hanging off the couch and humming and doing crazy stuff or I’d bang on the piano with the sustain pedal down and listen to it. I got to college and I learned I wasn’t insane. There were people that actually appreciate this. We had a workshop with Pauline Oliveros and I learned her deep listening stuff. That time with her changed everything. We’ve all been taught or have taken the time to appreciate these things, so we think people can just go in and appreciate it. But I know a lot of people that will say if I went to such and such type of concert that I’m completely insane.

JW: I don’t know. There’s another school or often-debated question about those that are teaching improvisation. Is improvisation something that you can teach, or to what extent do you teach that? I think to some extent, that’s bull in that that’s really not the question. It’s more a question of considering sound in a different way and—along the lines of Pauline Oliveros—understanding how being sensitive to the environment shapes the sound around you. You can’t apply the same sort of listening tactics that have been thrust upon you before with things like this. Pauline usually performs for an hour and then at some point she’s listening to the space and becoming aware of what’s around her. Once she heard fire trucks moving and decided to incorporate them into her performance. People came up to her afterwards and said something like, “So, how did you get the fire trucks to come here? You must have had a hand in that.” But it was something as simple as considering the sound and allowing it to be a part of the performance. I don’t know if that can be taught. I think that’s something that would have to be programmed.

KK: So have either of you taught or tried to teach it?

NS: Yeah, and I think one thing is when I’m teaching composition, and whether it’s composition and the student’s writing a string quartet, or if that composition is electronic or a computer-generated piece or would be a free improvisation, for lack of a better term. The big thing we learn as composers is how we react to sounds. The sound could be a chord, it could be a rhythm, or it could be a sound of something. I think Vivien brought up an interesting point—how you reacted after the concert. That’s what a composer does, or someone who constructs some kind of piece of music, whether it’s based on—again, for lack of a better term—traditional musical elements or sound elements, the techniques are somewhat related in terms of how I’m going to react and build.

Nicholas Scherzinger

Nicholas Scherzinger

I’ve always asked this of my students: define music. What makes music? What is music as opposed to some of the other art forms? One of the things we always come up with is time. That music is an art from that exists in time. There are other art forms that exist in time. One of the great things about being able to go to New York City is going to the Museum of Modern Art and seeing everybody going in there because they can go in and leave right away, whereas if they’re going to go hear the latest John Corigliano piece, you’ve got to stay there for the whole thing. You can’t say, “Oh, that was nice; I think I’ll leave now.” You’re going to make a scene.

It becomes this thing about reacting and how to react, and can composition be taught? Yes and no. I remember sitting in my composition lessons with my electronic music teacher and playing something for him and him going, “You’ve got this stuff happening way up at 12,000-13,000 Hertz, and I was going, “What are you talking about?” So, just learning how he heard, how he could listen to a cacophony of sound and pull things out the same way that I can listen to a Beethoven piano sonata and hear something different after the twentieth time, then hear, “Oh, my gosh, this mode is related to that. Oh, that’s really neat; that’s really cool.” Or “Wow, that sound that was happening way over there is now over here but it’s more and there’s form and there’s shape.” How to teach that? I don’t know. Maybe it’s just an awareness, beginning with an awareness that it actually exists, then that becomes something that opens up a whole new world of possibilities.

JW: I think to some extent, we expect art to do that for us, to help us constantly reconsider the way that things, perhaps, have been ordered before and to reconsider if they were put on paper, how performance can affect that. It can affect your understanding of the piece later and, in the case of Vivien, showing up at the concert being hypersensitive to the things around you as a result of experience. That is something that you hope for or you would expect from art, to some extent.

KK: When pieces of yours are being performed that take a lot of audience effort, should we say, to listen to and to appreciate, maybe, if it’s not a typical audience, do you kind of get a vibe from the audience? Can you feel how they’re reacting, Vivien, if you’re at a show that is asking a lot from the audience?

VS: There’s definitely a sense of rustling and checking watches, checking programs and texting. Then in some rare cases—it doesn’t matter what people are playing, whether it’s new or basic—you can sense the entire auditorium is actually listening. Some performers actually draw in an entire hall and get people to stop fidgeting and stop doing whatever they’re doing, checking their phone, and actually listen. But often the harder the piece, which is also the case with a contemporary composition, then the rustling and distraction is pretty intense.

JW: Then there are composers that really embrace that sort of aspect of it and include it or consider it part of their composition. That’s part of the experience for them. Some of that, I think, might be a write off; some of them don’t get around to it. They’ll come around. There is a ritual associated with all of this that we can’t forget about. It is hard for people to experience things in a sense of newness every time that it’s going on. To go to a premiere of something that is jarring or different to you and to turn yourself off of the preconceived notion in order to consider it in the moment as it is happening is a hard thing to do.

VS: When I think noise, I think that type of work has always been hard for the vast majority of people to listen to. There are things that are purely noise: no connecting rhythm or melody. Audiences tend to get the most distracted if it’s a 25-minute abstract piece and there’s nothing to grab on to. If there’s nothing connecting the noises, if that’s all it is.

KK: There’s also the psychological and physiological aspects of all of this, too. When it’s a 25-minute abstract crazy piece, there’s something about the brain. They’re doing all these scientific studies now about how to heal through music, doing CAT scans and seeing how the brain is responding to sound. I read a news story in which some German university, I can’t remember which, did a study about our aversion to the sound of nails on a chalkboard; it sets off a string of processes that our brains just can’t handle. But when I was kid I decided that I was not going to let the chalkboard thing bother me and I did it enough until I got used to it and I didn’t have that reaction.

NS: In electronic or computer music, one of the first things I teach is when we take a sound of the piano and get rid of the attack, it doesn’t sound like a piano. If you just take the first three-tenths of a second or something, you just kind of fade in and it sounds like a trumpet. You can’t distinguish the sound. So I wonder if you took the scraping and you edit it or mix it with other kinds of sounds, you may not actually recognize it for what it is. It’s funny how we make associations all the time and what we associate is our experience. I have some friends who are such extreme avant-garde improvisers that when they perform here, at the end of the night, there are only three people in the audience. Then they go to Europe and the people are like, “Oh, that was nice. That was lovely. That was mild.” It’s the context of the audience sometimes. I thought that way about sometimes going to a Mozart concert. You’re like, “Mozart again?” But it’s also really dependent on the performer as well. It’s funny that we’re talking about electronic music and spectral music and stuff, and yet it’s that there’s that human element somehow in here. It’s the person who has created the sounds or who has constructed or found the sounds, who has somehow been attracted to them, that also makes the difference.

JW: Definitely. The audience itself is a living, breathing organism. I think that’s the allure of electronic music. People can manipulate sound in certain ways, being able to experience things that have been so ordered for us for such an extended period of time that we’re able to reconsider that in a different way and order things differently, to experience sound in a different way, which is altogether frightening and scary of the possibilities, but also really exciting.

VS: I think when people are listening, most people need something. It doesn’t have to be that you’re looking for a melody or it doesn’t have to be that you need rhythm, but you need continuity or some kind of momentum. What I particularly like about some of the spectral composers is it’s not that there’s something melodic or rhythmic, but there’s something to latch on to. You have these incredible sounds and there is some kind of momentum to it, so it doesn’t sound like it’s just literally completely random sounds.

KK: Maybe that’s why people can listen to some crazy music that doesn’t seem to make any sense if it’s in a soundtrack. Like what Bernard Herrmann did in Psycho—it’s insane scraping, but everybody’s fine with it and those sounds are now in the lexicon.

NS: Sometimes you’re really just in that mood. I remember the first time I heard Black Angels; it was shocking. The piece has been around now for many years since the moment that I first heard it, and sometimes now I’m really in that Black Angels mood. Sometimes you really want to hear Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach. Really, what’s to that, other than one, two, three, four? One two, one, two, three, four. One, two, one, two, three, five, six, seven. But sometimes you’re in that mood. Even though it is grating and it does something to us, we, as humans, I think we want to experience those things, but maybe not all the time.

JW: The first time I played Black Angels, I stared it and I had a cockatiel named Babette and a very bright sound system. The first sounds came and the bird literally went ack and fell off her perch to the bottom of the cage. I have never seen that before.

NS: I guess I recreate this every year when I ask my freshman theory students to go listen, to introduce them to new pieces. One of the pieces is Black Angels. I have them listen to it after Cantus in Memoriam of Benjamin Britten by Arvo Pärt. They all have a similar reaction. It’s a cruel thing to do, but I hate to lie to them.

KK: Another study I read once claimed that you have to listen to chords a certain number of times before it becomes pleasurable for the brain. Any chord that’s unusual, our brain has an issue with the first time we hear it; it takes a few listenings for it to connect to us as something which hopefully is eventually pleasurable.

Audience Member: It’s like right now. There are fans going in the room, so there’s lots of white noise in here. When I first came in, I was really attuned to that. I was really hearing all these high frequencies, and as we’ve been talking and sitting here, those sounds are almost gone. Now we’re probably all aware of it again, right? There have been studies about this, about how our brain will just tune out certain sounds. This is a fascinating thing.

But noise for one person is sound for another person. Nick knows my two boys, Joshua and Christopher. Joshua, when the decibels are more than 60, it’s noise to him. Christopher, when it’s less than 60, he can’t hear it. It has to be loud in order for him to experience it. At the same time, Christopher will make this sort of a guttural humming sound. The first time I asked him what he was doing, he said, “I’m making music.” I said, “What music are you making?” He said, “I’m making the music of the sound of the garage door when it opens and you come home.”

So everybody has different qualifications and to a young, untrained mind, there’s a perceptibility and a fluidity that allows noise and sound to be both. I think that over the years, we’ve become so conditioned and so trained and so architecturally structured that it takes some time for us to delineate and to perceive clearly the differences between noise and sound.

My two boys are very flexible in finding their own interior monologue, as it were, that helps them to determine whether that sound is sound or whether the noise is noise. I’m just curious, Nick, have you found the same thing with Noah? Have you seen the same sorts of things with him?

NS: Yeah, and the associations are amazing and he’s not a trained…he’s almost four. He’ll be four in two weeks. He’s had this fascination with trains. We took him to New York when he was six months or so, and he loved the subway. From there, “bing bong,” the [subway] door sound. My wife has been playing the piano and when she plays that interval, he immediately associates it with the subway. When she does those exact pitches in other pieces, he runs from the room and says, “Subway, subway! Do that again.” It’s amazing how we’re wired and how the filters, then, they’re still going to clog up. We still have to learn more. It’s like we become open to less in a way.

JW: We call it sophistication, but I think it becomes reduction somehow. I wish that weren’t the case. I wish that we continued to expand using a sound, whether it’s Beethoven or Schubert or whoever it is and wherever you start, but as a leaping-off point for something new and dramatic as you go forward. I was lucky because I had Robert Helps and several other people to bring to me the Stockhausen moments of my life. I would hope that we would continue to open those doors and endeavor to expand listening ability and fluidity to maybe going back to being four and five years old.

KK: How we interpret noise and sound is also cultural. Different cultures use different sounds and different organizations of notes and things like that and it really depends on where you are. You were talking about how in Germany people perceive something completely differently. My parents went to China and they were taken to opera and it was the worst part of their trip. It was the worst two hours of their lives listening to Chinese opera. We really are shaped by what people tell us to like. Maybe that’s not the greatest thing.

JW: You mentioned that it takes some time for a new chord to really reach the pleasure area of our brains. I hope to speak to some extent about why some music, noise, sound, or whatever you want to call it, might be ineffectual. The listener is not going to hear it the exact same way as we would, maybe, the ordering pitches in a Brahms symphony. We can put on many different recordings and listen to that over and over and over again and eventually, for those that begin to accept it, might end up very much liking Brahms First Symphony or whatever the case may be. But there’s a tremendous gray area in music that is either improvised or has many different ordering of sound that may or may not be created that way again and becomes, therefore, difficult for us to find that pleasure moment with it.

VS: I think sometimes, also, if it really is something that’s more about sound, you’re listening to it more. It’s less about a passionate listening experience and more something that’s interesting or intriguing. You can have lots of really cool sounds with cactuses, which people like John Cage has done stuff with. Any found object can be turned it into an instrument and it’s really, really cool. They create all these funky different sounds. But I’m not going into it to be swept away like I may perhaps, in a Beethoven symphony. It’s more of an interesting, mind-opening experience as opposed to one of letting yourself go, like with Brahms or something you’ve heard before.

JW: Right, it’s forcing us to reconsider.

NS: It’ll still be a fascinating question in 50 years.

Vivian Schweitzer

Vivian Schweitzer

VS: Also, one thing I kind of wonder is there seem to be two roads, perhaps. I mean, there are more than two roads, but there’s the art/music road and noise and sound is pretty well embraced in the popular music world and the masses are listening to things that the traditional classical music audience, if we would bring it to them using the same kind of noise, sound, whatever, would be like, “No, I’m not listening to that,” or, “That’s horrible.”

But, there are people going to clubs and selling—well, they’re not selling that many records anymore—but they’re having successful careers beyond what a person working in the art music scene would have. Why do you think that is? I guess there are people who are conditioned to like it in another kind of way.

NS: You said the word condition. I think we just keep coming back to value judgments. Bob Morris, who was a professor of mine when I was in grad school, writes these crazy outdoor pieces. He’s this kind of serial composer, writes very twelve-tone, it’s not very audience-friendly kind of music. It’s not Mozart, let’s just say. He’ll present these pieces where 100 musicians are in a forest and they’re all playing in all different kinds of places and it’s all mapped out. It’s very, very controlled. If my father was there, who’s not a musician, he’d say, “This is garbage. This isn’t music.” Yet every time I’ve gone to those kinds of performances, because they’re often in public places, any children there are fascinated and they love it. They haven’t built up those prejudices, so they’re totally amazed by this. They’re like, “Wow, those are such great sounds.” They’re not thinking about music versus not music. But as you get older, you start to see the parents kind of going, “Ugh.”

VS: When kids are banging on the pot, it’s like, “Shhh, stop banging on that, you’re making too much noise.” But the kids don’t care.

JW: It’s forcing convention on you. I think in a lot of ways, our labels have been so detrimental to considering things. Just the other day in preparation for this, I was reading a book edited by John Zorn called Arcana and in his forward he mentions these isms: serialism, modernism. These sorts of things put us into neat little pockets so that we can identify things more easily. We can put them into a pocket.

Then from that, it really forces us not to be able to describe it more easily, but rather to stop describing it. We put it in a pocket. We know what its listing points are, but much further than that, we don’t consider much, so we know what Stravinsky sounds like and we can put him in an area, but we would rarely consider instruments in a different way.

A lot of that has to do with marketing capability. You put it into a place. Where does this band fit? Okay, retro funk, or whatever subsidiary of dance music, whatever. There are so many. But it’s so silly to even try and do that. It’s just not enough to simply talk about music and enjoy it in that way. I think our labels, really, have been so detrimental in us –

VS: I think people like the labels to some degree.

NS: We do that with everything. That’s our nature. I’ll go, “I think I’ll have Thai food tonight.” I kind of know what to expect when I see a Thai restaurant or a fast food restaurant. We tend to want to do that. I think it might give an audience some comfort to think, “O.K., the romantic works.” I may not know, it could be Brahms, it could be Mendelssohn. I’ve got a sense of what that could be as opposed to hip-hop or whatever. But, if I just saw “Music,” I’m not going to go; it could be anything.

Audience Member: I’m just curious from the panel the kinds of experiences that have helped to determine the turning point. In literature, we don’t want to keep our masses at the comic book level. At some point you want them to experience a great novel; you want them to experience a classical Shakespearean moment. You want to elevate them and you want them to have an understanding of sophistication. Not that you can’t get that in comic books, but in music we know that there’s a point at which there’s a flip of a switch that occurs that elevates something to an art form as opposed to a popular form where—I don’t know what it is. Why do we have to categorize it? Why is that imperative? At some point, I believe that we need to validate somehow those moments that are important to us. For me it was my first encounter with Strauss that made a difference. I’m just curious for you in today’s musical voices and in the people who are leading the charge and who are making the statements, I’m just curious for you who they are, where they are, and what those moments have been like for you.

VS: I think the music or events that I’m really gelling with these days are actually people who are working in the popular world who are exploring the art world. They made names for themselves in rock or alt or electronica, but then are partnering with somebody in art music and crossing over that way. I personally think that’s a great way to get more people to listen and get them listening to different things and think about things.

KK: Also, why is popular bad? Sometimes, yeah, Justin Bieber makes my head explode, but then that’s just me. Really, why is he bad? There are millions of people that love him, so again, it’s a value judgment. I think it’s great when somebody goes from popular to art or works together to make great music and great art.

NS: We do gather consensus. There is a sense that we can all agree that Mozart was a great composer; somehow there’s something that he did that was unique and special. There were hundreds of composers alive at exactly the same time, if not thousands, who did exactly the same thing that we know nothing about that sort of disappeared into oblivion. That’s the case today and in any time in history. It’s a fascinating question. To me, the answer has always been the voice. It’s always been, for some reason, Stravinsky had a voice. Maybe it was him not afraid to confront his fears and just be able to just say, “Okay, this is it.” When you think about great artists of any discipline, that’s often the thing. I think about Steve Reich, the guts to do what he did and to just, “This is it.” To just let it out. What comes from that is this unique voice. Then there’s everyone else that tries to imitate or there’s some other agenda, but again, this is just my own personal observation and conversation I’ve had with other people, but there are these people all of sudden that you just feel like they’re in this because there’s nothing else they can do.

I remember my very first composition teacher telling me, “Nick, if you can walk away from music, do it.” I’ve tried my whole life. I try all the time and I always end up coming back. Maybe someday I will walk away, but I always keep coming back to it. I think that’s something that somehow, why it is that we do things? Those become the interesting questions that then make something stand out. Specific details, that’s the hard one.

JW: I think in terms of electronic composition, working with acoustic sounds and infusing them with original ones, Jonathan Harvey really does it for me. The way that he works with the voice, the actual voice, is miraculous. Then Ligeti. Ligeti is somebody who lived in his own camp. Nobody could touch him. Nobody could emulate that because it was all too original. It was all done in this sort of vacuum. Outside influences, yes, but that’s incidental to how he ordered things in such really different and amazing ways. Of course there are others. So many composers name Messiaen as their important influence. Vivien, what’s happening in New York City these days? If it’s not Paris and it’s not Berlin, New York is where things are happening. What’s it like there?

VS: There’s a massive range of things right now. Compositionally you’ve got people on absolutely every end of the spectrum doing pretty traditional tonal orchestral works, you’ve got people doing much funkier atonal-type things on the other end. You’ve got a whole bunch of composers that are just completely unclassifiable using bits of pop, bits of rock, some classical, electronica. He’s not based in New York, but Mason Bates who is writing works for string orchestra with him DJing. There’s every possible imaginable genre going on. There are composers who are not even really classical composers in the sense they have so many pop and rock influences. You’ll hear a lot of this music downtown in places like (Le) Poisson Rouge, which is a place in the West Village.

Audience Member: I think one of the people who has best described this is Kyle Gann who has been writing about this as totalism, since we’re talking about –isms. That’s an –ism that actually is an anti-ism. It’s a great way of thinking of it because there is a new generation of composers that forego all sounds and all types of genres in music, high/low is gone. Up and down, laterally, and in terms of size. All those sounds are available for their palate. I think totalism is a very interesting idea. We can talk about, especially, as the aesthetic movement has developed in the last 15, 20 years.

VS: There are groups that specialize and play absolutely everything like eighth blackbird. They really will play pretty much everything from a hardcore Milton Babbitt, Elliott Carter-type thing to something that’s essentially pop and everything in between. And they do it really, really well.

JW: They’ll be in Syracuse January 24th.

VS: They’re a great show. Everything they do, they play fantastically well; it’s really theatrical. They sound like they really believe in every spectrum of the compositional spectrums.

Audience Member: To some degree, eighth blackbird and a lot of these other groups are sort of like bands. They’re really a cross between a rock band and an ensemble and that, I think, is a really fabulous development. As far as the phrase “bad music”, that’s a really bad phrase because there really isn’t any such thing as bad music. There’s music that you cannot stand to listen to, but that doesn’t make it bad.

KK: Yeah, somebody likes it somewhere. The person who wrote it likes it.

JW: I hated Bartók when I first heard it. He’s one of my favorite composers, but when I first heard it, I was like, ugh. It’s so subjective.

NS: That’s aesthetics. That’s a personal instinct that develops over time. We can’t influence other people. Well, we can influence, I suppose, other people’s aesthetic, but we certainly can’t listen to music for them. That’s something that I think develops over time as you get older and you experience more.

Audience Member: Don’t you think that the listener has a certain obligation? How important is it to be willing to meet the composer halfway? That’s probably 50% of the issue when it’s music that is, quote, “hard to listen to”. I don’t think people know that there is a certain effort, work, on their part that needs to happen in order for them to appreciate it.

Another Audience Member: I agree.

NS: They have sound and noise. It’s not a new thing. When Varèse wrote a piece for just percussion that was in the ‘30s. That was 80 years ago. People think about John Cage formulating his ideas, but this was brewing in the air—Debussy listening to a gamelan ensemble and being influenced by it, all those different things that when cultures clash and there’s exchanging of ideas.

I remember having a conversation with Libby Larsen and she’s convinced that the end of the romantic period actually happened in 2000. The beginning of contemporary music or the next big break in music is going to happen now, and it’s true. It’s so easy now to make sound sculpture with computers, where it’s almost instantaneous. It’s a matter of milliseconds. It’s imperceptible to most people that I put sounds in the computer. We have iPhones and things that do those types of things. We have apps that can do that now that didn’t exist ten years ago, let alone five years ago. I think about when I was in grad school 10-15 years ago and the computer processed my sound overnight. I had to program it and I’d leave because it would take ten minutes for it to reverse the sound. We put it into a queue. You’d come in the next day to hear it.

All that’s happening instantaneous now. Conservatories and schools of music have people who are getting trained in sound and music-making who have no training in music. These people are going to become important movers and shakers in music. It’s a really fascinating time, actually, to think about all these kinds of issues and to think about where we’re going to go and how we’re going to deal with this as audiences and creators of music. With the Internet, it’s really amazing to think about. Some people talk about the recording studio and then the computer becoming the revolutionary thing now in this 21st century and that’s going to become the fundamental twist in how we think about music.

KK: And the people that are doing it are changing. I go to so many art installations now that sound is an important part of them. Visual artists are now composing or making sound art or whatever you want to call it, so that’s a whole new thing. And like I said, I think that’s where I would have ended up, ultimately, had I continued composing. Also, I think the Internet and technology is giving everybody more access to everything. There aren’t any laws. You can listen to whatever you want and be influenced by whatever you want. I think that’s a game changer that didn’t exist ten years ago.

JW: It’s fascinating that in New York [City] you have so much stuff out there. You have those groups that are focused on particular kinds of music and then you’ve got other groups doing all kinds of different stuff. Then we come back to those same questions about what is great art? Is that really important? I don’t know.

Audience Member: The other issue is the, quote, “taste-makers”, speaking of music critics, that they’re really where the standard is. Who’s going to tell people what they should listen to or what they shouldn’t? That’s a whole other issue.

JW: You find that at a wine tasting. My goodness, whatever the case may be.

NS: Create this very easy separation between this and that.

Audience Member: I wanted to direct this partially to Vivien and what we do as music critics. Vivien, clearly from what you’re saying, you spent a lot of time going to a wide diversity of music, so that your ears are constantly open. At the same time, I’m listening to panelists who are composers who talk about the first time I heard Bartók, “Arghh” or the bird with Crumb. That takes you to the whole issue of what happens when we as music critics hear things that are in a different realm than we’ve been in before, what language we use and how we present it to people in a way that opens the hand rather than closes it?

VS: I have to say I dislike aspects of reviewing premieres, which is not because I dislike listening to new music, because I like listening to new music usually, but what I dislike about reviewing a premiere is I feel like you’re so focused on actually trying to just follow it. You know, what is the woodwind doing? What is that percussion doing? You don’t have any time to actually process it. Half the time after I’ve heard something new, the first thing I think is now I’d like to hear it again now that I’ve actually sat there and tried to hear what’s going on without really just taking it in. I think it is hard. It’s like the first time if you’re just learning a new language and you hear a conversation spoken really fast in the language, you’re kind of on edge. You can’t really figure what’s going on. Then maybe six months later you can sit back and relax and understand what they’re saying.

With anything, especially if it’s a more—as they say—“audience unfriendly” piece, it’s really, really hard to critique it on one listen. I think a lot of critics, unfortunately, you end up doing a kind of play by play of, “And then the violins came and this is what happened and the percussion is doing this,” which is not actually that interesting to read, if I can be honest here. I think it’s just because you haven’t had a chance to absorb it. All you’ve had a chance to do when you’re not only listening to it the first time, but trying to frantically take notes so you can remember what’s happening, is all you’re getting is a play by play without being able to just sit back and actually just absorb it and listen to it.

I think ideally, and I guess it would probably never happen, is that critics should go to a premiere and then go again and review the second concert, which I think would be a lot fairer to the composer and be more interesting to the audience but of course this doesn’t always happen because the premiere is often the only time it’s ever done.

It’s really, really hard to write about. I found myself when I read my review, I’m like, “That sounds so boring; it doesn’t do it justice.” It does end up being this tedious sounding play by play of what I heard, not any overarching feeling, just because I was trying so hard to listen to what the composer was doing. I couldn’t listen to it like I would if I’m listening to a Beethoven symphony I’ve heard 3,000 times; I know what’s happening and I can assess how I’m feeling about it.

Audience Member: I sometimes talk my way into dress rehearsals. When I reviewed Heart of a Soldier, which is hardly challenging music, before they even invited all the critics to the dress rehearsal, I asked to go to the dress rehearsal so that when I finally wrote the review I had seen it twice. I was clear on a lot of things.

VS: We’re not exactly invited in. I think that’s because people are still rehearsing and they don’t really want a bunch of critical types sitting there listening to it, which is fair.

Audience Member: I also want to say that one of the hardest things about reviewing a premiere for music is that unless you have the score, you’re not entirely sure what’s being played. I’ve heard lots of new music, first-time performances where they were very approximated and I feel horrible for the composer because the performance, as much as we’re trying to get it and understand the language hearing it, so are the musicians.

VS: History is littered with disastrous premieres of great pieces.

Audience Member: Musicians know how Beethoven symphonies go and they’ve played it a million times. They’ve heard them, they’re raised on them, and they have that language. So, they’re also presented with a new language that they’re trying to rehearse, usually with limited rehearsal time. Then you go to a new premiere and you hear a real approximation of a new score. It’s even harder when you’re reading the score trying to hear what the score would sound like at the same time you’re listening to the approximation and you’re trying to come up with an assessment. It’s really difficult.

VS: I think new music has to be played better. Your run of the mill, vaguely competent pianist who plays some Chopin, it’s going to be at least pleasant unless they’re literally banging wrong notes, it’s going to be fine. But, your averagely competent pianist cannot pull off a whole evening of Schoenberg. They have to be better than average to do that. If you have averagely talented, let’s say, pianists, that could have pulled off a Beethoven sonata and they’re playing some complicated 21st century music just okay, it’s ten times worse than if they’re just playing Beethoven, because at least you know Beethoven. So I think new music is done a terrible disservice if it’s not played really well. Schoenberg is obviously not new music. But I remember hearing several works—I can’t remember which—several times live and being so bored. Then suddenly I heard them at a different concert played by someone who obviously really believed in the music and it was a completely different experience. I think you have to have performers that so believe in it and ideally have more than 20 minutes to just run through it.

I think none of it is really ideal, neither the rehearsal process nor the reviewing process. Speaking of reviewing the concert after the premiere, the sad fact, as you know, is when there is no concert after the premiere. The work is premiered and then it’s lots of fanfare and then you don’t hear it again or you hear it again eight years later. You’ve also then described this piece that no one can hear and the record company may or may not record it, and if they record it, it might be released three years later and by then the buzz is long dead.

JW: I think it’s a fascinating question, then, too, to think about. I’ve been fortunate to have a few pieces performed more than even ten times and let’s say even by the same group. It’s amazing to then hear musicians talk about the process they go through, so none of them are just going through rehearsal and premiere, but then performance, performance, performance, performance, performance, and then, finally, “Oh, I get it. I know this piece now.” That’s an interesting thing to think about, the tenth, the twentieth, the thirtieth performance.

The jazz pianist Bill Evans said that he would take a year to learn a piece. Every night he would play it in a different key and he would only decide after a year of playing it, “Well, this one feels best in E flat.” That’s when he finally would learn a piece of music, when he finally felt like he knew a piece of music—a year of playing it day in and day out. I forget the piece, but I heard Menahem Pressler perform a Beethoven sonata. I’m embarrassed I don’t remember the opus number. He’s been playing this piece he’s said for every day for the past 30 years. He knows the piece like nothing else in the world and to have heard him play that was just amazing because we could have been sitting in his living room. It was this beautiful sense of, “Wow, that’s amazing.”

Audience Member: I had a professor who had worked for RCA Victor in the 1930s and ‘40s and wrote programming notes for 78 RPMs. He went to rehearsals and performances of a lot of RCA’s materials. He went to one of Toscanini conducting Beethoven’s Ninth. It was an actual recording session. He said it was just breathtaking. It was, I think, the fifth time that Toscanini had recorded and they played it everywhere since. He said at the very end, Toscanini got off the program, walked out, walked past him and said, “Well, that’s the best I can do with it.”

KK: Well, with that, I would like to thank the panelists for their time.

***

Douglas Quin

Douglas Quin

Q & A with Douglas Quin
By Leah Harrison

Leah Harrison: How did working with the Kronos Quartet influence your composition? Would you have written the piece differently if you were writing it for a different group?

Douglas Quin: Working with Kronos is a very unique prospect because of the way they hear the world; it was truly magical at every stage of the process. Because we were using the new K-bow by Keith McMillen and his company, we were entering into uncharted territory. There was a sense of partnership. It wasn’t me so much giving them a score to perform, but rather arriving at a common language, a common understanding of human technology interface. This could lead audiences to new places of listening and new ways of experiencing a concert as a community (and also the subject matter of the polar experience—from the Artic to the Antarctic, places and spaces that are certainly the subject of rhetoric in the news, or subject to mythologizing in the public imagination), to connect people with a visceral sense of those places.

For the quartet, I think, their wonderful embrace of technology, of sonic adventure, and willingness to think of composition and music not simply as a form of entertainment but as a form for discussion, a form for communal experience, gave us latitude to work together in a different way—a partnership, a collaboration, an extended conversation with Keith McMillen (who invented the K-bow). I always think of this as us all holding hands at the deep end of the pool and just jumping in together. There was a strong dynamic between all of us as we negotiated the technology and explored the wonder of sound, creatures, and phenomenon that describe the Poles of this planet. Working with Kronos on this piece really allowed us to grow, to question, and to really try to weave together an experience for our audience that was something new. The focus was not so much on novelty, but to allow the conversation to go in a different direction about the nature of performance, the nature of the concert hall, and how we connect to the natural world beyond our buildings and our clothing and everything else. A lot of what we were really looking to shape and form through this was a collaborative conversation.

LH: Tell me about the marriage of raw, natural sound and advanced technology. Why do two seemingly juxtaposing elements work well together?

DQ: When we experience natural sound, there’s a directness to that. For me, my interest in natural sound is that this is the music and resonance of our world. Whether you’re in an urban situation or out in the country, the soundscape is a kind of living, breathing aspect and resonance of life on earth, life in the universe. The universe is oscillating in the big bang and I think sound is just a fractal of that original big bang, in a sense. For me, there is a cosmic dimension to the experience of natural sound. But we are nature, so natural sound is also a park, it’s downtown Manhattan, it’s the Santa Monica freeway at rush hour. This is the nature of which we are a part. I’m particularly interested in other creatures, finding them where they are, and learning about sonic function and their voices, and how we relate.

For me music becomes an intermediary, a point of translation, of one experience of a place and another voice and a way of understanding, through music, and intimating what might be going on in their minds.

Technology is this mediating aspect to those experiences—we record the sounds. There’s nothing more beautiful than waking up at three in the morning, going out and just sitting in a forest and listening to everything come alive; it sort of affirms your own liveliness and vibrancy. Over the last hundred years or so, we can now capture these sounds with recording devices. We can revisit them in a way that wasn’t possible. As I negotiate the technology and relationship to natural sound, and soundscape into music, to me there’s a continuum of the music of the spheres. By working with music, it allows me and the people I’m working with—like Kronos—to understand some of the fabric of that, the connective tissue that binds us all together as living creatures and beings on this planet. The excitement is that technology gives us access to a realm of sound that in real time goes by so quickly. We can hold it in our mind’s ear for a little bit longer. We can revisit and reflect in a way that simply wasn’t possible one hundred years ago.

LH: For you, is there a boundary between music and noise, and if so, what is it?

DQ: I guess I’m very much a child of my time, but for me, the boundaries between noise and music were really effaced beginning with Luigi Russolo and the Futurists a hundred years ago. When you think about The Art of Noises—what a phenomenal essay. And then John Cage’s Credo in US brought that into another framing. We’ve been liberated from that distinction, and to me, it parallels the effacing of the boundary between nature and man. We are nature, wherever we are, we are part of nature, not apart from it. In that continuum—music and noise—I think it’s a question of perception and intention, and it’s been tremendously liberating to arrive at a different reckoning of the sounding world around us. It isn’t limited to instruments; it’s about a broadening of perceptions about relationships in the world and the cosmic resonance that’s out there. I feel that I’m singularly fortunate to have been born in this time, to have inherited the legacy of people like Luigi Russolo, of John Cage, of Karlheinz Stockhausen, who opened the doors for the rest of us to explore and think beyond “Is this music or is this noise?” There was a conversation last night with Kronos about “high art” and “low art”; art music and popular music. Music is music. Those are social and class distinctions, really, that have nothing to do with music. Similarly, noise to music—again, it depends on your intentionality around a sonic experience.

LH: Can you give me an idea of the timeline for Polar Suite? Was this piece the reason you went to record, or was the piece conceived after that?

DQ: Polar Suite is the outgrowth of more than 15 years of work around polar soundscapes. It goes back to my childhood—I grew up in Sweden, Iceland, Canada, and Northern Scotland, so I’ve always been part of that cold experience, like Glenn Gould’s idea of “North.” That’s been my life. I had always been interested in Antarctica from the time I was a child, reading Mr. Popper’s Penguins. (Never underestimate the power of childhood enthusiasm.) Then I had a teacher in 6th grade who used to read to us after lunch, and one of the books she read to us was Alfred Lansing’s account of the Shackleton expedition, the ill-fated endurance voyage. And that piqued my interest. It took another 30 years or so for me to get to the ice, to figure out a way to get down there. But I’d always been interested and intrigued by natural sound—possibly because we moved a lot, my father was a diplomat. So that’s the preamble.

I went down with open ears and was excited by listening and recording.

Certainly as a composer, I was always thinking this would be wonderful musically somehow. I think when I heard Weddell seals for the first time, their underwater calls, it was not only an epiphany, but a crossroads in my life as a composer. I’d been dedicated to the studio and electronic music to arrive at new sounds and sonic textures, and then, my gosh! You hear these creatures and it sounded like old-school Stockhausen from the ‘50s. I was reminded of works like Kontakte. So I had some thinking to do, I had arrived at a place where I found (on the ice and under the ice) sounds I would never have imagined in a studio. In my mind’s ear I’d always had strings somehow; I had built wind harps when I was on the ice.

I’d been a Kronos fan since the ‘80s—I think that’s the first time I saw them live. I’d always had in the back of my head: wouldn’t it be great if we could do something. It was really a coincidence. David Harrington had picked up my Antarctica CD and used it when he was doing DJ work—a sidebar to his life with Kronos. He’s remarkably energetic and intellectually curious and does all sorts of things. He called me one day out of the blue and we had a wonderful conversation about the nature of music and nature. And he said we should do something together. The years kind of drifted by, and then the opportunity coalesced around my appointment at Syracuse University—the timing and synchronicity with the interest in a broader cultural level with the International Polar Year a couple of years ago, and the interest in climate change. One thing led to another, and Polar Suite evolved as a conversation over the last couple of years.

In earnest, we began when I met Keith McMillen through David Harrington in March of 2010 when the quartet was doing a residency at Carnegie Hall. Keith gave a demonstration. Then it was really David who orchestrated the relationship. He said, “One thing we were thinking about your work in electronics is that you should meet Keith McMillen, who’s developed this new bow. Wouldn’t it be great if we all worked together on this.” And that was the genesis on it.

There was a process of refining what Keith had been developing over the course of five years with this bow—65 iterations to the bow you heard in performance the other night, and that’s how it evolved over the period of the last year and a half. So there was the composition side, the tech side, but all of these went hand-in-hand. I manipulated the hundreds of hours of field recordings I have from these places to arrive at a palette that suited the quartet and through a series of rehearsals, several days—I’d fly out to San Francisco when they came off tour, we’d work for a few days in the studio, and we’d play. Remember, we play music. I think it’s an important thing, often an oversight, and without that serious playfulness, it would have been a very different process. We were finding each other, and finding that common ground with respect to the material. So that’s how it evolved over time, fairly intensively from March up until the premiere. Whenever we could regroup, Keith and his designers would madly rework software based on every rehearsal. The conversation was really this wonderful 3-way triangulation of energy and sensitivity that brought the piece to fruition. That’s the long and the short of it.

Digging Deeper: Singing the Music of Elliott Carter

Elliott Carter Applauds his Birthday Concert

Elliott Carter applauds the performances of his music during his 103rd birthday concert at the 92nd Street Y in New York City on December 8, 2011. (Photo by Cory Weaver, courtesy 92nd Street Y)

From a singer’s perspective, Elliott Carter’s works are challenging. Yes, there is a whole bag of tricks a singer can employ in learning this music, from extensive use of Dr. Beat, to charting out pitch relationships, to practicing against pedal tones—all of which are important techniques to learn. And so I try to impart these tools of the trade to my students, hopefully to positive effect. However, it seems to me that the crux of the matter in grasping this difficult and satisfying music lies not in conquering its inherent and unavoidable technical issues. What’s crucial is finding the broader context in which those challenges can be seen not as obstacles to successful performance, but rather as essential musical materials that upon close investigation reveal important information about the nature of Carter’s music itself, its structure, aesthetic, and intent.

Even amongst skilled performers, a commonly heard knock against Carter’s vocal music (and that of other modernist composers) is that the writing for voice is unidiomatic. (Exactly what constitutes idiomatic vocal writing is a topic for a different article. Suffice it to say that to my way of thinking, Berio’s Sequenza III is more closely aligned with so-called “natural” vocal expression than is Mozart’s “Dove sono.” Perhaps Carter’s vocal lines have more in common with the latter.) But the very notion of idiomatic writing, for any instrument, is usually unconsciously tied to the familiar, historic repertoire for that instrument. Having embodied this repertoire, performers sometimes conflate threads of stylistic musical requirements with those of technical efficiency or “performability.” One conclusion frequently drawn from this conflation is a tenet that there exists an idiomatic paradigm for each instrument. Not surprisingly, these paradigms almost always fall within brackets of one or two narrow styles (that differ according to instrument). All of which prompts me to ask: are the virtuosic piano works of Liszt really “pianistic,” or has the repetition of these works, coupled with Liszt’s cemented place in history, colored our view? Does the bel canto approach to singing really result in the optimal vocal sound? Besides, isn’t bel canto a style? And what does that style have to do with the music of Elliott Carter?

Well, not much. And so in approaching new works (or old ones, for that matter), I find it absolutely necessary to forgo such habitual fixations in order to better examine the essence of musical style from the bottom up, for every composer, and in each discrete piece of music. Ultimately, every work deserves to be addressed on its own terms, and performance as a whole undoubtedly benefits from such a modus operandi.

For example, one broad exploration of stylistic essence encompasses how we performers are asked, by the music itself, to handle the passage of time. Musical time seems to manifest itself on a continuum between objective and subjective—that is, between clock-time and our internal experience of time. An extreme example of music that is constructed so as to depend on the performer’s adherence to objective time would be Conlon Nancarrow’s player piano rolls. At the opposite pole, music that structurally hangs on the performer’s mastery and manipulation of subjective time is the gesture-driven music of György Kurtág.

It could be said, for a variety of reasons, that Elliott Carter’s music is firmly planted on the objective side of the time continuum (more on this soon). Conversely, the canon of so-called idiomatically written vocal music (think Italian opera and late-romantic art song) leans decidedly to the subjective side of the time continuum—that is, it allows for and even depends on tools such as rubato and tenuto for its success in performance. And there’s the rub, when it comes to the singer’s approach! Let me illustrate a bit further.

Upon examination of Carter’s vocal music, certain elements stand out which reveal it to be rooted in objective time. Carter’s pervasive contrapuntal cycling of rhythmic material is emergent in the instrumental complement (be it chamber ensemble or piano). The vocal line participates in this rhythmic play to a lesser extent, but when it does, it almost always cycles at a more protracted rate than do the instruments. Acoustic balance is achieved by the clearing of small spaces, often less than a sixteenth-note’s duration, in which the singer must precisely place text. For this element alone, it follows that an accurate rhythmic performance insures better intelligibility of the sublime poems employed (including those of the great Americans Elizabeth Bishop, Hart Crane, John Hollander, Marianne Moore, and Ezra Pound). The use of rubato in Carter is, in most cases, intrusive to both the progress of the music and to tight ensemble.

In addition to these micro-rhythmic intricacies, there is another important characteristic that influences the perception of Carter-time on the macro-level. Rarely virtuosic, Carter’s vocal lines are often slowly unfolding arches that stand in contrast to the concurrently bubbling instrumental lines. Taken alone, the vocal line progresses in regular rhythms. Seldom is there a tuplet to be found. Many “football notes” appear; indeed, the text is sometimes sustained to the point of obscuring meaning (intelligibility of text is, in part, dependent on the listener’s ability to discern the rhythmic properties of language). Perhaps this high-flying, sustained approach to setting text can be viewed as Carter finding yet another way to manipulate the experience of time towards the objective pole.

So, here we have two factors in Carter—the limited practicality of rubato and the deliberate distortion of natural speech rhythm—that pose a conundrum to the well-trained singer, who has absorbed the message that idiomatic (i.e. “musical”) compositions allow for a flexibility in rhythm that will assist her in clearly delivering the text. It’s no wonder that in the face of this incongruity, she resists the apparently fatal barriers to expressiveness and instead bends the music to the familiar paradigm! The result of doing which, unfortunately, might be a performance that either is redolent of Brahms or that betrays the discomfort of waking up in a musical straitjacket.

Finally, then, how is the singer to tease “natural” expression out of music anathema to the bending of time?

One answer lies in unpacking the text to expose another facet of espressivo not always explicit in musical notation: timbre. Think of music as it exists on three axes, where x = time, y = pitch, and z = timbre. On the two-dimensional page of printed music, the inflective instructions of the z-axis appear rather sparse and general when compared to the specificity found in the representation of rhythmic and pitch structures. This is true of all notated music; Carter’s is no exception. However, the presence of a text provides the advantage of a limitless supply of timbral tools for all attending musicians to draw upon, in addition to any specified phenomenal accents and dynamic indications. The expectation is that all performers (singing and non-singing) extrapolate from the inherent sonic material of poetry generated by methods—onomatopoeia, alliteration, anaphora and rhyme among them—that variegate timbre and texture, thus animating the z-axis.

Perhaps the most coloristic components of language reside in consonants, which, in the pedagogy of singing, regrettably are regarded as the ugly stepsisters of vowels. Yet deft management of the shading, rhythmic placement, and duration of an initial consonant (so long as the ensuing vowel starts on time) can highlight a word more meaningfully than any fermata (always placed over a vowel!) could ever hope to do.

Clear diction without rhythmic aberration requires quite a bit of dynamic and coloristic flexibility, especially with regard to stressed and unstressed syllables in artificially sustained phrases. Further, encoded in the syntax of the poetic phrases is a dynamic shape that Carter has clearly absorbed and provided the framework for in both his selection of intervals and rhythmic relationships. This dynamic shape is far more detailed than could be represented by hairpins and accents. Take for instance the first stanza of Hollander’s poem “High on our Tower,” the text for the opening song in Carter’s cycle Of Challenge and of Love:

High on our tower
Where the winds were
Did my head turning
Turn yours,
Or were we burning
In the one wind?

In his setting, Carter indicates an accent (>) over 16 of the 25 syllables. Certainly that does not mean 16 equivalent attacks!

Score Excerpt from Elliott Carter's Of Challenge and of Love

Of Challenge and of Love
Elliott Carter and John Hollander
(c) Copyright 1995 by Hendon Music, Inc., a Boosey & Hawkes company
International copyright secured. All rights reserved
Play sample audio: Elliott Carter: Of Challenge and of Love I. “High on Our Tower”

Sung by Tony Arnold, soprano, accompanied by pianist Jacob Greenberg from the CD The Music of Elliott Carter, Volume 5 (Bridge 9128). Courtesy Bridge Records. (Order from Amazon or download from iTunes.)

This is a clear example of the limits of notation when it comes to timbre. Even when those accents occur in relationship to a specified dynamic shape, it is the text that can singularly elucidate how to execute each discrete accent. Three instances:

1. Exaggerating the [hw] and [w]’s of the alliterative and onomatopoeic line “Where the winds were” immediately evokes wind. Whether it is to be a breeze or a gale is at the discretion of the singer, fully informed by the musical materials that encircle that image.

2. Carter highlights the anaphora of “turning, / Turn” by placing the second “Turn” one half-step above the first. The singer can further reinforce this by intensifying the articulation of [t], especially in the context of the soft dynamic specified in the score.

3. Carter discloses his personal take on how the poem should be read through the sudden rhythmic diminution of the final two lines of the stanza. This coupled with the insertion of both a rest and a large intervallic drop between “one” and “wind” results in a rush of urgent questioning: “or were we burning in the ONE… wind?” Again, the alliteration of two [w]’s appears, but this time requiring a decidedly different affect via both literal meaning and positioning as the final cadence of the stanza. The singer must adjust the energy and texture of those juicy consonants accordingly.

This is but a slice of the rich world revealed by digging deeper into the sonic properties of text. Any singer who continually broadens her timbral palette can free herself of what might otherwise feel like a wooden adherence to objective time. The tightly wound rhythmic structures found in the music of Elliott Carter deserve to be complemented with the utmost creative investment in the oft-neglected parameter of timbre. In doing so, the myriad expressivity embedded in his musical language is unearthed. As in the words of John Hollander, set by Carter in Of Challenge and of Love:

But when true beauty does finally come crashing at us through the stretched paper of the picturesque, we can wonder how we had for so long been able to remain distracted from its absence.

Sounds Heard: The Beach Boys—The Smile Sessions

The cover for the Smile Sessions featuring the original cartoon drawing of the entrance to "The Smile Shop"

Purchase:

It might seem somewhat incongruous for the following musings about an album recorded more than 45 years ago by one of the biggest (and most financially lucrative) musical acts of all time to be appearing within this web magazine devoted to new American music that is outside the commercial mainstream. But The Smile Sessions—a total of 144 tracks (in its most complete available form) from the 80 sessions recorded by The Beach Boys between 1966 and 1967 for the never-issued LP SMiLE, finally officially released commercially on November 1, 2011—contains some of the most provocative musical ideas of the last half-century in any genre of music. Although these were recordings for an album by what was—for all intents and purposes—the most successful popular music group of its day, the project morphed into something quite other. Randall Roberts, in one of several pieces on The Smile Sessions that ran recently in The Los Angeles Times, has stated that “every library of American recording history needs this; university composition departments, music professors, budding recording engineers and composers should study it.”

In the extensive hardcover booklet that accompanies the collector’s edition of The Smile Sessions, Beach Boy Bruce Johnston boasts that back in 1967 he was wondering if The Beach Boys’ record label Capitol would realize that the music contained herein should be released on Capitol’s classical division, Angel Records. Of course, it was never issued in 1967 on Capitol, Angel, or anywhere else for a complex web of reasons that are still not completely clear at this late date. But these 144 tracks of music, many of which will be brand new to listeners despite their age, deserve an extensive explication or at least an attempt at one, so here goes.

Wouldn’t It Be Nice…

A photo of master tapes for various songs from SMiLE.

A tantalizing photograph of the original master tapes for SMiLE which is featured on the cover of the LP-sized digipack that holds the 5 CDs contained in The Smile Sessions.

The Beach Boys’ album SMiLE, scheduled for release in 1967 but never issued, has been touted for decades as one of American music’s ultimate what-ifs: the most momentous might-have-been in music history, the musical road not taken which would have irrevocably changed music’s subsequent direction. For decades it has inspired voluminous conjecture comparable to speculative fiction like Philip K. Dick’s classic The Man In The High Castle, a novel not about the future but rather an alternative present which was the result of the Axis powers winning the Second World War. Over the past nearly half-century, knowing about SMiLE’s existence made you part of a cadre of arcane music cognoscenti. There was particular satisfaction in being part of the minority who had been let in on the secret that this group—frequently dismissed even by those who believed that popular music could aspire to a level equal to anything coming from so-called high art—had actually created something that was perhaps even more full of high art aspirations than anything else done at the time.

Like Scott Joplin’s first opera A Guest of Honor, whose performance materials no one saw fit to preserve, or Charles Ives’s Universe Symphony, which some of its champions have vociferously asserted can be completed from his surviving sketches while others (equally vociferous) claim was nothing more than a patchwork of unfinished and unrealizable sketches, SMiLE has become the stuff of legend and its legend has become larger than it or perhaps any work of art can ever be. Its pedigree certainly puts SMiLE in league with those Joplin and Ives pieces, as well as such music history would-that-they-weres as an opera by Giuseppe Verdi based on Shakespeare’s King Lear, which according to some accounts Verdi threw into the flames as soon as he completed it, or Sibelius’s Eighth Symphony, which its composer struggled in vain with for the last thirty years of his life and also ultimately destroyed. (Although some provocative fragments from what might be Sibelius’s 8th finally got their first performance in October 2011). Or closer to home, Charles Mingus’s Epitaph, which its jazz bassist creator was only able to record a portion of in 1962 and whose score was long thought to be lost, but which resurfaced in his papers after his death in 1979 (and only received its first hearing when Gunther Schuller led a performance of it a decade later in 1989).

The legend surrounding SMiLE also includes burning work, the release of less-than-complete portions of work, the music haunting its principal creator (The Beach Boys’ principal songwriter and musical arranger Brian Wilson) for decades, reconstructing a finished product long after that, and lost elements that miraculously resurfaced still later on. So what exactly is the story?

I Know There’s An Answer…

The cover for The Beach Boys LP Pet Sounds showing band members feeding animals.

The somewhat lighthearted cover of Pet Sounds doesn’t really reflect the serious music contained on the album.

In a nutshell (though admittedly one for a rather large nut), by 1966—when the recording sessions for SMiLE began, The Beach Boys were at the top of their game. Their now platinum-selling album, Pet Sounds, which took full advantage of studio recording techniques and was filled with dense contrapuntal layering and elaborate orchestration, was released in May of that year. That album was the first piece of evidence that The Beach Boys, and Brian Wilson as auteur, were capable of a lot more than just churning out teen fare marrying layered vocal harmonies (from low bass to high falsetto) reminiscent of contemporaneous East Coast groups like The Four Seasons to a somewhat less edgy, though way more popular, approach to the regional surf rock subgenre from their native Southern California pioneered by Dick Dale. Pet Sounds earned Brian Wilson respectability and offered concrete evidence that he might actually be—as the band’s acolytes believed and Capitol Records’ marketing department had promulgated—a musical genius. Among its most celebrated fans was Paul McCartney of The Beatles (who had yet to complete the recording sessions for their album Revolver, which was issued in August 1966). By McCartney’s own admission, Pet Sounds heavily influenced him and directly led to the creation of The Beatles’ subsequent LP, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (released on June 1, 1967), the album that has frequently been credited with the birth of the progressive rock genre as well as album-oriented rock overall. Pet Sounds is a clear precedent. Among its tracks are the astonishing songs “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” “God Only Knows,” “I Know There’s An Answer,” “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times,” and (the Brian Wilson solo) “Caroline, No,” whose ending (also the end of the album) is a barrage of sound effects. But despite the sophistication of these songs (whose lyrics also mostly eschewed the Boys’ previous summer fun fare thanks in part to Brian Wilson collaborating with an outside-the-band wordsmith, Tony Asher) and the album’s two equally surprising instrumentals, Pet Sounds was ultimately still a pop album.

Brian Wilson wanted to prove he could create something more significant than that, a fully integrated opus that demands to be listened to as a multi-movement composition containing various permutations of the same thematic material throughout, a project he at one point began describing as “a teenage symphony to God.” To further prove his seriousness, he enlisted the help of even more high-minded librettist—the erudite singer/songwriter Van Dyke Parks—to fashion lyrics for him that would be even further away from the boy-meets-girl and let’s-go-surfing fodder that had dominated the lyrics of most of The Beach Boys’ repertoire. The other members of The Beach Boys—Brian’s two brothers, Carl and Dennis, a cousin, Mike Love, high school classmate Al Jardine, and Bruce Johnston, who had just joined the group in 1965—were frequently baffled by the new direction and Love was often openly hostile to it.

Before his collaboration with Parks got underway, in February 1966, Brian began recording an additional song—originally intended for Pet Sounds—that became so elaborate that he was not able to complete it in time for that album’s scheduled release. He ultimately worked on the song, “Good Vibrations” (whose infatuation-themed lyrics were, incidentally, by Mike Love), for more than six months thereafter. To perform his ornate arrangement of the song, Brian assembled an ensemble far larger than any he had put together heretofore which, in addition to the members of The Beach Boys included some of Los Angeles’s most in-demand studio musicians, such as Al De Lory on piano and harpsichord, Jesse Ehrlich on cello, Hal Blaine on timpani and other percussion, and—perhaps most memorably—trombonist Paul Tanner on an electronic musical instrument of his own invention. (Tanner’s instrument, which he had previously played on the Pet Sounds song “I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times,” has alternately been named the tannerin—in his honor—and the electro-theremin. As a result of the similar name and a somewhat similar sound, Tanner’s instrument, which is played by controlling a knob attached to a slider with string, rather than hand movements over antennae, has been frequently misidentified by theremin discographers; “Good Vibrations” does not use a theremin.) Perhaps more importantly, “Good Vibrations” was not performed in its entirely from start to finish during these recording sessions, but rather in modular sections, each with different instrumentation. It was later seamlessly layered and pieced together in the studio from a purported grand total of 90 hours of recordings. As a result, “Good Vibrations,” which was released independently as a Beach Boys single on October 10, 1966, and was slated to also be included on their next full-length album (SMiLE), sounds like no other pop song that had been recorded up to that point.

Brian’s approach to the recording of “Good Vibrations” would serve as the blueprint for how he would record everything that was planned for the SMiLE album. While no other track intended for the album had such an extensive production history, some of his arrangements were even more elaborate, such as “Heroes and Villains,” alternate parts of which were recorded on October 1966 and February 1967. All in all, the remaining sessions for SMiLE (excluding the earlier “Good Vibrations”) occurred over the course of 13 months from May 1966 until May 1967, during which time Brian Wilson grew more and more despondent due to clinical depression and drug abuse.

Smile Cover

The original Frank Holmes cover illustration for SMiLE which has graced the cover of countless bootlegs which attempted to reconstruct SMiLE over the years and which was finally officially released as the album’s cover in November 2011.
Finally, the album was shelved despite heavy advertising and Capitol Records printing over 400,000 LP covers with an image that nevertheless became iconic. (This cover image, of a store selling smiles by Frank Holmes, is also the source of the typographical strangeness of the album’s title; it would have been among the earliest covers by a popular music group to feature original, specifically commissioned artwork rather than a photograph of the performers.)

The illustrated LP cover for The Beach Boys 1967 LP Smiley Smile.

The Smiley Smile cover also does not feature a photograph of the band, but rather a cabin in the middle of a forest that presumably contains the contents of SMiLE.

In order to fulfill their contractual obligation to release something in 1967, the remaining members of the group wrested artistic control from Brian and cobbled together an album containing “Good Vibrations,” “Heroes and Villains” (which they truncated somewhat, re-recorded parts for in June 1967, and issued as a single in July 1967), and several other (but not all) intended SMiLE tracks. That LP, officially released on September 18, 1967 under the name Smiley Smile, is still quite fascinating and frequently extremely odd. (One of its most notorious tracks, “She’s Goin’ Bald,” even speeds up The Beach Boys’ voices in a rare example of musique concrète in the band’s oeuvre, a feat which undoubtedly, along with the electro-theremin and the extensive electronic manipulations on the aforementioned “Good Vibrations” which opens Side Two of the LP, earned Smiley Smile a place in the discography of Paul Griffiths’s seminal A Guide to Electronic Music published in 1979.) Yet the end result is far less ambitious than Brian’s original plan and Smiley Smile proved to be their least commercially successful venture up to that point. (Van Dyke Parks, his input rejected by the other members of The Beach Boys, embarked on his own solo debut album, an inter-related collection of his own music as well as words, tellingly called Song Cycle, in November 1967; it’s a very nice record and it launched his successful career, but it never reached the kind of an audience that SMiLE would have.)

Here’s the official version of the story being told now…


God Only Knows…

As the time when Brian Wilson attempted to realize SMiLE and forever change the history of American music—popular or otherwise—recedes further and further into history, it becomes increasingly difficult to separate actual facts from the mythology that has come to surround that era. The 1960s remain a watershed period in the history of music of all genres. In classical music, it was the time when many composers desiring to keep up with the zeitgeist were torn between the rigors of integral serialism and the process-oriented experimentation of indeterminacy and conceptualism, while performing musicians began seriously recreating the sound world of earlier eras (the de-facto birth of the so-called period instrument movement). It was also the decade that spawned minimalism as well as a time when electronic music became a viable performance and compositional possibility—Wendy Carlos’s Switched-On Bach was the most commercially successful classical album of its day, Morton Subonick’s Silver Apples of the Moon, released in 1967, was the first electronic composition created expressly for release on a commercial recording (on Nonesuch, which was then a budget label devoted almost exclusively to contemporary and early music), and Charles Wuorinen’s Time’s Encomium, another Nonesuch release from the end of the decade, was the first all-electronic piece to win the Pulitzer Prize. In jazz, the chord changes that had underpinned musicians’ solos from the earliest recorded manifestations of the music up to bebop and beyond, had already given way to modality inspired by non-Western musical traditions as well as completely free improvisations, but this music grew further and further out as the decade progressed. Rock and roll, ostensibly a music associated with youth culture, grew even more rebellious but also more sophisticated, morphing forever into rock and eventually myriad subgenres. Rhythm and blues, which was basically a racially charged code name given to the rock and roll-type music being made by African Americans, evolved into soul and later funk, also getting more and more experimental in the process. Even composers of film music and Broadway shows somehow seemed to be aesthetically tilting toward the avant-garde, or at least toward a consciousness that went far beyond Western musical traditions. And music from all parts of the globe—from North India and the Far East to Southern Africa—not only profoundly influenced much of music being made in the West but it too became available to the general public in the West through commercially available recordings as well as live performances by some of its greatest practitioners who finally were given opportunities to tour.

We will never know all the music that Brian Wilson had heard up to the point where he began work on SMiLE and how much of it influenced the new music that he was trying to invent. He has acknowledged his indebtedness to Glenn Miller and much has been made over the years about how Paul McCartney’s admiration for Brian Wilson was not only mutual but also competitive. Brian saw himself in a race with The Beatles to create the great rock record. He also fancied himself a latter-day George Gershwin since he, too, as a teenager had become a world famous songwriter but by his mid-20s aspired to be something more—a serious composer, though one working in a thoroughly vernacular American idiom. (In recent years, Brian Wilson even secured the rights to complete some of Gershwin’s unfinished compositional fragments and recorded them in 2010.) Rumored among Brian Wilson’s earlier compositions is a piano sonata that he never completed, another musical holy grail. According to comments made by the late Dennis Wilson, Brian’s brother and the drummer for The Beach Boys, Brian had heard Beethoven’s Symphony No. 4 at some point and was completely floored and humbled. But could he have also heard Charles Ives’s Symphony No. 4, a work that finally received its world premiere in 1965, eleven years after the death of its composer, and a work that—all practicality be damned—was trying to redefine the symphony in much the same way that Wilson was attempting to redefine the popular song and the record album?

It would have been impossible for Brian Wilson to escape hearing the theme music for the TV show My Favorite Martian, which also featured Paul Tanner on the electro-theremin. As a Southern California native who knew many session musicians, he was probably also aware of Samuel J. Hoffman, who had recorded on an actual theremin for numerous film soundtracks including Bernard Herrmann’s score for The Day the Earth Stood Still. But could he have possibly also heard Honegger’s 1935 oratorio Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher or Olivier Messiaen’s massive 1948 Turangalîla-Symphonie, both of which use the ondes martinot, another early electronic instrument, similarly to the way Brian eventually used the electro-theremin on “Good Vibrations”? What about John Cage, the composer who completely redefined music, making it more inclusive than anyone else had acknowledged it to be previously? At one point during his work on SMiLE, Brian Wilson considered recording an entire album of various sounds to accompany the album of songs that would make up SMiLE, but this idea never got much beyond the conceptual stage.

Listening with 2011 ears, Brian Wilson’s experiments in 1966 and 1967 seem normative of the kinds of things most interesting musicians in any genre were up to at that point and even tamer than some of them. The blurring of boundaries between musical genres was pretty much commonplace at that time, as was the attitude, however real or imagined, that just about any musical undertaking was somehow an expansion beyond anything that had come before it. In October 1966, John Cage mounted performances of his Variations VII, an all-encompassing live electronic music environment which included the amplification of sounds received from ten telephone lines which had been distributed in locations ranging from lost dog holding rooms at the ASPCA to the press room of The New York Times. By 1966, La Monte Young, now acknowledged as the father of musical minimalism, was exploring extended duration drone installations that lasted for months. In 1966, Meredith Monk gave the first public performance of her music, 16 Millimeter Earrings, a work involving her now signature extended vocal techniques as well as tapes. Across the Atlantic, German serialist-turned-electronic music guru Karlheinz Stockhausen (whose face is among those portrayed on the cover of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s proving that they knew who he was) created Hymnen, a Wagnerian two-hour magnetic tape composition based on national anthems from all over the world.

Among the jazz community, John Coltrane was in Japan mesmerizing a live audience with an hour-long interpretation of the Rodgers and Hammerstein standard “My Favorite Things” in addition to his own expansive compositions. In Chicago, Roscoe Mitchell was joined by fellow members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians on the first recording of his free-form music, a forerunner of the group that would soon be known as the Art Ensemble of Chicago. On the East Coast, Cecil Taylor assembled his largest group to date to perform his gnarly atonal charts, and Albert Ayler was terrifying the denizens of the Village Vanguard with his otherworldly skronking. Before Miles Davis pioneered the fusion of jazz and rock in New York, another trumpeter, Los Angeles-based Don Ellis, outfitted the entire trumpet section of his latter-day big band with quarter-tone trumpets, fed his own instrument through a ring modulator, and made quintuple, septimal, and even higher prime-based rhythms sound perfectly natural. Around the same time, a seventeen-year-old trombonist Willie Colón went into the studio to record his first album, El Malo, blending Cuban and Puerto Rican music with jazz and soul, a style that would soon be universally described as salsa. For his score for the motion picture Wait Until Dark, released in October 1967 (but to this day never released on a separate audio soundtrack album), even the then dean of Hollywood composers, Henry Mancini, whose scores were tailor-made to please mainstream tastes, included two pianos tuned a quarter-tone apart in his orchestration.

At the same time, rock music seemed equally poised to break beyond listener expectations. Almost every other pop song from that time seems to include either a harpsichord or a sitar or some kind of oddball-sounding electronic manipulation. San Francisco-area bands like The Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane were already crafting musical statements that went on much longer than three-minute songs, as were groups in England as diverse as Pink Floyd and The Who. Hair, the first evening-length rock musical, debuted on Off-Broadway the same month that Wait Until Dark opened in movie theatres across the country and would move to Broadway the following year. Jimi Hendrix proved the electric guitar could be the vehicle for virtuosity as intense as on any classical or jazz instrument. Even rock’s premier poet-songwriter Bob Dylan (who was a role model to many aspiring wordsmiths at the time, undoubtedly including Van Dyke Parks) released a side-long track, “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” on his 1966 album Blonde on Blonde. And La Monte Young’s extended drones found their way into rock music via The Velvet Underground, a group whose original line-up included Young’s former musical collaborator John Cale (who several years later recorded a tribute song to Brian Wilson). Groups like Chicago and Blood, Sweat and Tears would soon be crafting rock albums scored for almost symphonic ensembles. (BS&T’s debut album, released in February 1968, is coincidentally titled Child is Father To The Man, after a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, but its title is also eerily similar to “Child is Father Of The Man,” one of the key songs recorded for SMiLE that had never been officially released.)

Bigger, longer, and stranger was all the rage. While Frank Zappa’s band The Mothers of Invention arguably advanced rock music further than anyone else at that time, scores of now-forgotten groups across the country, who sometimes only recorded one single, were making music that sounds even more eccentric. Record collectors to this day scour the bins for these rare, unknown psychedelic rock recordings hoping to track down the ultimate transformative musical experience. What has gone down in history as the breakthrough, however, is The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Soon after its release, everyone seemed to have an artistic response to it, from The Rolling Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request to even Zappa and The Mothers’ We’re Only in It for the Money. Sgt. Pepper’s—with its eclectic mix of music hall, harpsichord, sitar and tabla, string quartet, and musique concrète—embraced a much larger musical language than most listeners thought possible in rock music. And since they were so famous, it made a statement that everyone heard. The only band that was anywhere near as famous at the time and poised for similar accolades from a broad audience was The Beach Boys. (They, like The Beatles, were even admired by Leonard Bernstein.) Despite how remarkable Sgt. Pepper’s was and still sounds 44 years later, had SMiLE actually been released, that honor probably would have, could have, and should have been accorded to it instead.

Heroes and Villains…

Undeniably the wide proliferation and relatively easy acquisition of a variety of mind-altering substances was part and parcel of the rampant experimentation that seemed ubiquitous in the music of this time. That many of these great ideas could ultimately not be sustained and developed into more substantive efforts is the creative chasm that the abuse of these substances took away from some extremely talented musicians; some fared worse, dying tragically young. Brian Wilson survived but nevertheless was one of drug addiction’s unfortunate casualties.

From Smiley Smile onward, Brian Wilson was no longer the de-facto leader of The Beach Boys. Although he still recorded with them and wrote new songs for them to perform until the early 1980s, he rarely appeared with them in live performance. Some of the subsequent Beach Boys’ albums have some interest, musical or otherwise. (Their 1969 album 20/20 actually includes a song that Brian’s brother Dennis co-wrote with the notorious Charles Manson as a result of Dennis hanging out with the “Family.”) But these efforts overall were rather lackluster compared with the band’s earlier output. Nevertheless, some of these albums occasionally contained a very unusual song which had invariably been intended for SMiLE. The bizarre closer of the December 1967 album Wild Honey, “Mama Said,” was originally created as a break for the SMiLE song “Vege-Tables” (released sans break on Smiley Smile). “Cabin Essence” appeared on 20/20 as “Cabinessence.” A less-than-SMiLE-monumental version of “Surf’s Up,” which Brian Wilson has described as the best song he ever wrote with Van Dyke Parks, served as the title track of a 1971 LP release.

The cover for SMiLE, featuring a cartoon drawing of a "Smile Store."

Many of the SMiLE bootlegs that surfaced from the 1980s onward sported some version of the iconic Frank Holmes cover. The cover above, interestingly, does not call attention to the song “Good Vibrations.”

Throughout the ’80s and ’90s, a variety of bootlegs of variable sound quality attempted to re-create Brian Wilson’s original SMiLE (based on the printed materials that had survived, such as ads and track lists) using unfinished masters that had leaked, plus the songs that had been released on Smiley Smile and other later Beach Boys albums. By that point in time, The Beach Boys had become mostly a nostalgia act, playing their famous early ‘60s hits for their aging fan-base, and Brian Wilson’s further degeneration and the exploitation of him by a megalomaniacal psychiatrist would occasionally make newspaper headlines.

The cover for the 2004 Nonesuch CD Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE.

The cover for the 2004 Nonesuch release Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE does not feature Holmes’s artwork, but nevertheless sports a similar font-style to the original.

Eventually Brian Wilson overcame his demons and embarked on a solo career which over the past decade has put him in the headlines for something other than his personal travails. In a live concert in 2002, he performed the entire Pet Sounds album accompanied by a group of ace players from a band called the Wondermints (and no one from The Beach Boys). Then in 2004, nearly 40 years after its original conception, Brian Wilson completed and performed SMiLE with many of the same players in front of a live audience and also recorded it for, of all labels, Nonesuch Records on an album titled Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE. It sold widely and appealed to listeners across generations; iTunes actually describes it as “indie rock,” a genre for which SMiLE indeed is ultimately the progenitor. Mike Love tried to sue Brian Wilson for performing the music without his permission; Love lost. Everyone thought that was the end of the saga, until earlier this year.

I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times…

Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE is a wonderful album, but it is also not quite right. It is not and can never be a substitute for SMiLE, even though it might have originally been intended to be just that. By the time he recorded it in 2004, Brian Wilson was 61 years old and was a completely different person from the seemingly totally possessed (by drug addiction as much as by passion and genius) Brian Wilson who was only 23 years old at the beginning of more than a year of sessions for SMiLE. The young man who attempted to corral his sometimes reluctant brothers, cousin, and other bandmates into going along with his crazy musical ideas got noticeably different results than the Brian Wilson of Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE, a revered elder statesman whose assembled session musicians were willing and prepared to do every last iota of his bidding. Whereas Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE was the realization of a dream finally come true that came after decades of hardship and a great deal of hindsight, the original SMiLE was an innocent dream filled with youthful naïveté and vulnerability. Admittedly that original dream ultimately turned into a nightmare, but you can never quite dream the same dream again after you wake up.

Perhaps more importantly, the world into which the album Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE was released was a very different world than that of 1967. True, since the beginning of the 21st century there have been tons of people creating album-oriented music that mines the borders of rock and, for lack of a better term, contemporary classical music idioms—e.g. the music of Sufjan Stevens or Joanna Newsom, groups like Animal Collective, Dirty Projectors, The Fiery Furnaces, Flaming Lips, My Brightest Diamond, and just about the entire discography of New Amsterdam Records immediately come to mind. And the LP, a format that requires sequential listening from start to finish, has been resurgent. But the zeitgeist (at least according to the pundits who control the spin) favors quick listening fixes packaged in non-corporeal files that get shuffled at the whim of their listeners. This is the antithesis of listening to an album which commands and demands attention for approximately an hour, sometimes longer. The very idea of an album is considered by some members of the my-laptop-contains-my-whole-life generation as needless clutter, the ultimate anachronism, and—perhaps worst of all—a quasi-fascistic attempt to force listeners to listen to what you want them to listen to rather than to rightfully allow them to determine that for themselves. SMiLE, to quote a lyric from Pet Sounds, just wasn’t made for these times.

But that didn’t stop Capitol Records (a subsidiary of EMI) from one-upping Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE by finally releasing on November 1, 2011 The Beach Boys’ actual recordings from the original SMiLE sessions in a variety of packagings, including what is destined to rank among the most lavish boxed sets in record history. For casual listeners, The Smile Sessions has been issued on a single CD or—for those who want to recreate a more authentically 1967 listening scenario—two LPs. This version attempts once and for all to present the album that would have come out back then, and throws in a few additional bonus tracks of out-takes for good measure. (The 2-LP package, like the 1980s vintage Original Jazz Classics reissues of classic Prestige and Riverside albums from the ‘50s and early ‘60s, attempts to eschew anything that might reveal it to be an artifact of now rather than then; it features Capitol’s originally album cover design and even their intended matrix number for it—T 2580—on the side of the sleeve jacket!) But folks wanting a broader context can get a 2-CD deluxe set containing even more out-takes from those sessions which reveal some of the real-time performances from which this music was assembled.

A wall of vinyl LPs with the Smile Sessions box lying horizontally on top of it.

The unshelvable collector’s edition box of The Smile Sessions stands out even in a large record collection.

For die-hard completists, however, Capitol released a massive collector’s edition that comes in a huge box sporting a three-dimensional simulacrum of the original SMiLE album art on its cover. Inside the box are the two LPs, presented as described above, as well as the single CD, giving listeners both options. Plus there are four additional CDs containing all the fragments released in the deluxe set as well as—they claim—every other sliver of audio that survives from those 1966-67 sessions, some of which are as long as eight and a half minutes, others as short as 24 seconds. (It’s actually not everything; a strange track called “George Fell Into His French Horn” which appears on several widely-circulated SMiLE bootlegs is missing.) The box also includes two vinyl 7″s containing what The Beach Boys had intended to release as singles during the time of The Smile Sessions (the songs “Heroes and Villains” and “Vege-Tables”), a poster, and finally a lavish hardcover booklet filled with discographic annotations, essays, lyrics, and photographs taken during the session. The box is approximately three-inches wide and is slightly more than 13 by 13 inches in length and height. It doesn’t quite fit on standard record shelves and calls attention to itself wherever it winds up being put. Its unabashedly unapologetic thing-ness is an object of wonder in our era of non-corporeal sycophancy. The box is not cheap: it comes with a hefty triple-digit price-tag. But if you weren’t aware of SMiLE before reading this essay thus far and you’re still reading it, you’re probably well on your way to becoming a SMiLE enthusiast (or at least I hope so) and you should therefore at least consider the possibility of acquiring the whole thing. (Admittedly, all 144 tracks contained in the five CDs have also been made available as individual mp3s or bundled together as an album at a significantly lower price than the physical box which is yet another option if you completely can’t bear the thought of owning things.) Even if you already own Smiley Smile, or one of the various SMiLE bootlegs that sometimes surfaces in collector’s shops, or even the Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE CD, there will be something new for your ears herein. While SMiLE did not get to be the first piece of album-oriented rock, The Smile Sessions is perhaps poised to be the last (although I hope not).

Wonderful…

The Smile Sessions’ attempt to recreate SMiLE is actually extremely convincing and sounds remarkably fresh, even after having heard all the other versions of this material over the years. The transitions from song to song (and the occasional instrumental interlude) feel completely natural, confirming the veracity of the track order of Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE which served as a roadmap with the original recordings for The Smile Sessions’ version of SMiLE. (The track order on the back cover of the aborted 1967 LP is of no help since it instructs listeners to see the disc’s label for the correct playing order.) While at times the performances are not as polished as those on Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE, the occasional pitch or timbre gaffes I perceived make this feel all the more like a real 1960s album by a young rock band, rather than a perfected rendering realized by seasoned professionals.

As soon as the needle drops on the first side of SMiLE, however, it sounds nothing like most rock records. The opening track, “Our Prayer,” is an unaccompanied wordless chorale. The music is reminiscent of Bach and even earlier polyphonists, but the voices are The Beach Boys and there’s something about the music that is vaguely reminiscent of the backing vocal tracks of “Good Vibrations,” a song you would have already undoubtedly had heard before, even if this disc came out in 1967 as planned. Here “Good Vibrations” comes at the very end of the album, so the thematic relationships between the two function as bookends for the record. It isn’t actually terribly different from the way an opening chorale prelude and a final chorale are thematically related to one another in many of the Bach cantatas. However, before you have an opportunity to completely absorb the ethereality of “Our Prayer” something very down-to-earth occurs as soon as it ends: an almost scat-like coda (separately tracked herein and called “Gee”) which leads directly to “Heroes and Villains.”

On Smiley Smile, “Heroes and Villains” is a remarkable chain of somewhat unrelated fragments which baffle and amaze for sheer audacity. (“Good Vibrations”—however remarkable—sounds like just a warm up compared to this modular collage of different instrumentations and textures.) Here it also baffles and amazes, but even more so because all the disparate fragments somehow fit together. They actually fit together even more cleanly on Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE, but perhaps there they fit together too cleanly. “Do You Like Worms” (a.k.a. “Roll Plymouth Rock”) flows directly out of “Heroes and Villains,” continuing and further developing some of the same musical material.

“I’m In Great Shape,” “Barnyard,” and “My Only Sunshine” (a.k.a. “The Old Master Painter” / “You Are My Sunshine”) all come off as somewhat fragmentary, but seamlessly flow into one another and feel like harbingers of the much longer, subsequent “Cabin Essence.” Next up is “Wonderful” which is a truly beautiful song, with some great harpsichord riffs, that deserves to be a standard in its own right. But what follows is perhaps more awe inducing: “Look (for the Children)” and “Child is the Father Of The Man” form a completely integrated two-movement exploration of counterpoint and elaborate orchestration.

“Surf’s Up,” whose title seems a throwback to early Beach Boys fare, turns out to be nothing of the sort. It contains some of the most perplexing lyrics in the entire album, such as “columnated ruins domino,” and the leaps and disjointed rhythms of the melody Brian Wilson created to match Van Dyke Parks’s words is perhaps the most difficult thing he ever composed. In almost every other version I have heard of this song over the years, it never quite comes off. Particularly jarring for me has always been the setting of the following lines:

The glass was raised, the fired-roast,
The fullness of the wine. A dim last toasting.

In the various bootlegs of this I had previously heard, as well as the only official previously released version by The Beach Boys (on the 1971 album Surf’s Up), the group doesn’t quite sound together during those lines. And on Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE, though the ensemble is spot clean, Brian’s diction is somewhat garbled. Yet on the recording included for these Smile Sessions’ completed SMiLE, it all comes off without a hitch. It’s a musical miracle that alone justifies acquiring this recording. (Test this yourself: on the recordings of “Surf’s Up” that appear on both Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE and the first CD of The Smile Sessions, this line occurs from 2:06 to 2:10.)

Then comes a brief, somewhat jazz-tinged instrumental accompanied by various sounds of hammers and other tools (“I Wanna Be Around” / “Workshop”), another of the album’s more experimental tracks. I wish it would have been longer, but I’ll take what I can get. Then comes the delightfully goofy song “Vege-Tables,” a song about the joys of eating vegetables containing a variety of appropriate sound effects worthy of the Vienna-based Vegetable Orchestra (which would not be founded until 1998). The inclusion of the song’s original break (the aforementioned “Mama Said” found on Wild Honey) is the only immediately discernible difference here from the song as it appeared on Smiley Smile (under the less typographically obtuse title “Vegetables”). The brief track called “Holidays” which follows foreshadows a melodic motif that will later re-appear as a countermelody in “Good Vibrations”; it also serves as a prelude to “Wind Chimes.” The arrangement of “Wind Chimes”—which is much the same as the versions on various SMiLE bootlegs, as well as on Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE—features some really nice mallet percussion. But for me it is one of the few instances where I actually prefer the less elaborate arrangement that was released on Smiley Smile. There it’s a sparse and somewhat creepy sounding track featuring vocals by brother Carl Wilson who whispers and at times clearly strains as he attempts to sing the tune Brian had composed for his own voice.

“The Elements: Fire” (a.k.a. “Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow”) is another peculiar instrumental with occasional wordless vocals. It was supposed to have been one of the movements of a four-movement Elements Suite that Brian eventually abandoned. Again, it shows a level of compositional and performance sophistication that few listeners are aware this group was capable of. Then another short fragment, “Love To Say Dada,” leads into the concluding “Good Vibrations,” a track which admittedly is difficult to listen to with fresh ears. But despite how extraordinary, as well as famous, “Good Vibrations” is and how some of its inner vocal lines parallel SMiLE’s opener, “Our Prayer,” which make it a fitting bookend for the entire album, it doesn’t quite sound right to me as the closing track. Brian Wilson was actually worried back in 1966 that “Good Vibrations” didn’t quite fit in with the rest of the album, even though it was created in much the same way and contains thematic allusions to other SMiLE songs. He asked Van Dyke Parks to write a new set of words for it (perhaps triggering the overall antipathy of Mike Love toward SMiLE), but Parks refused and the version with Love’s lyrics was released as an advance single. At one point, Brian tried to cut it from SMiLE, but it was so popular after it was released that Capitol Records insisted it stay on the album, so he opted to put it at the very end. But perhaps the fact that it doesn’t quite work as a finale to Brian Wilson’s sprawling sonic landscape leaves SMiLE perpetually sounding incomplete, which perhaps makes following it with tons of out-takes from those sessions the best of all possible worlds. The completed SMiLE fills three LP sides and a three-sided record would have been unthinkable in 1967. (Such things inevitably happened later on, perhaps most notably Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s 1975 The Case of the 3 Sided Dream in Audio Color!) So even the LPs include some out-takes. And, as stated above, the CDs include (almost) every last one of them.

These bonus tracks are admittedly, for the most part, not the kind of things that will wind up in heavy rotation even on my playlist, with the possible exception of a wonderful jazz jam involving some of the session musicians but ironically not Brian Wilson or any other of The Beach Boys, here named “I Wanna Be Around” most likely because some of it, or some other version of it, later was used as one of the ingredients in the aforementioned unusual SMiLE album track “I Wanna Be Around” / “Workshop”. But listening to every one of these fragments is revelatory nevertheless. There’s almost an entire disc devoted to various scraps that became “Heroes and Villains” and another collecting the bits and pieces from which Brian Wilson assembled “Good Vibrations” (though only about an hour’s worth, as opposed to the 80 hours that were said to have been originally recorded). These musical shards offer up many of the secrets of Brian Wilson’s recording processes, his aspirations, and his attempts (not always successful) to realize what he was hearing in his head with physical musicians in real time—there was no written score for any of this music and remember, in 1966 and 1967, there were no computer consoles and no ProTools. That more than 80% of the deluxe collector’s edition of this never-completed album is devoted to unfinished pieces of songs is perhaps the most appropriate way for this record to finally enter the official discography.

I Wanna Be Around…

A close up of a row of LPs on a shelf showing The Beach Boys' Smile alongside albums of Bartok, Basie, The Beatles, and others.

At least in my own home, the faux-1967 SMiLE LPs from The Smile Sessions have taken their rightful place on my wall of vinyl alongside the music of Bartók, Count Basie, The Beatles, and everyone else.

So will the release of The Smile Sessions and its carefully reassembled reconstruction of the lost SMiLE album finally earn Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys the same pride of place in American music history held by other great innovators like, say, Ives, Gershwin, Cage, Coltrane, James Brown, etc.? Sadly, probably not. But this has more to do with the vagaries of reception history than with actual history.

For many people, The Beach Boys will always be perceived as a light-hearted party band that drooled over “California Girls” while on a “Surfing Safari.” That image of the group has not been helped by the endless recycling of their greatest hits on recording compilations, their latter-day cover-band-version-of-their-former-selves concert appearances, and the lasting presence of these early songs as the soundtracks for countless commercials over the years encouraging revelers to have some “Summer Fun.”

I personally can’t remember the first time I had heard The Beach Boys. Their early pop hits were all around since before I was born, seemed ubiquitous when I was growing up, and have remained with us ever since. The first time I seriously thought about The Beach Boys was back in 1983 when a political brouhaha erupted after then-U.S. Secretary of the Interior James Watt cancelled an appearance by them at the National Mall claiming that their music encouraged drug use and alcoholism. Watt subsequently apologized after then Vice President George H.W. Bush claimed that The Beach Boys were his friends and that he liked their music, and then President Ronald Reagan and Nancy Reagan claimed they were also Beach Boys fans. After all, they were the all-American band; what was Watt thinking? Maybe James Watt had heard Smiley Smile or knew about the Manson Family connection. Perhaps he even knew about SMiLE.

I did not, so I couldn’t stop wondering why this wholesome—and to my mind innocuous—music had triggered such a strong reaction from a mainstream social conservative since the music of The Beach Boys seemed to me to be everything that interesting rock music was rebelling against. They were not counterculture rebels; he was picking on the wrong guys, hence the embarrassing apology. Then I read Paul Griffiths’s book, ostensibly to learn more about Stockhausen, and wound up reading about Smiley Smile. I tracked down a then out-of-print LP. It blew my mind. It truly was revolutionary. I gradually picked up their earlier recordings—if they had made something this interesting, the seeds for it had to exist in their earlier work. I became more open to those early songs; there are a lot of interesting voicings in the music that accompanies even the most insipidly worded narrative about meeting pretty girls at the beach. I even fell in love with their 1964 Christmas Album, which I pull off my shelves and spin every December without fail. Eventually I tracked down Pet Sounds, which to this day I think contains some of the most hauntingly beautiful music ever recorded. But then I learned that there was other music that Brian Wilson created in between Pet Sounds and Smiley Smile, music that was supposedly the most advanced music Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys had ever done. In an era before the internet, I scoured libraries and used record shops for more information, tracking down articles, and eventually a couple of bootlegs of attempts at reconstructing SMiLE, both of which sported the album’s planned Frank Holmes illustrated cover. I became one of those arcane musical cognoscenti, talking about the album whenever the subject of 1960s rock came up, or even whenever people talked about stylistic fusions between musical genres. To me, all the latter-day folks who thought that they were creating a new kind of music by fusing all of these disparate elements together were merely going down the path that Brian Wilson tried to take music to. But now, thanks to this ostentatious boxed set (or even one of the less complete manifestations of it now currently available from Capitol Records), you can be taken there as well.