Category: Analysis

The work of child psychologist Jean Piaget describes the gradual unfolding of the perceived world as a youngster ages. After a year or so, the baby begins to grab things and soon walks, talks, and covers even more space. The mature adult is fascinated with the lives of others as well as the heavens and the rich interior distances of the psyche where immediate physical circumstances may drive one less. In some systems of thought (e.g., Buddhism) this gradual opening of the spatial sense itself (as non-relativistic “presence” per se) becomes an aspect of enlightenment.

There is an almost irresistible psychological imperative to move the body toward the source of any sound, especially those within the frequency range of a human voice (e.g., the so-called Cocktail Party effect where you are able to pick out your name whispered across a crowded, noisy room). Throughout history many instruments and vocal styles were invented to transmit such attention-getting signals across acoustic distances: Alpine and Tibetan horns, yodeling and rhythmic shouting, the marching tympani of Roman armies and Joshua’s legion of trumpets that allegedly brought down the walls of Jericho, community vocal call-and-response styles throughout the world including the hymn- and chant-outliner and his congregation, African log drumming, hunting horns, church bells, various off-stage effects in operas, etc. Of these, call-and-response, with its point-to-point implied spatial movement, is the important starting image for the discussion here.

Musicians became fascinated with imitating and utilizing the behavior of sound arising from such point sources as they projected into open and closed, natural and manmade environments: behaviors such as multiple echoes, reverberation, and the vast range of amplitude, frequency, phase (location comparison), and time delay modulations that were later formalized by the Austrian physicist and mathematician Christian Johann Doppler (1803-1853) as the Doppler Effect. This has resulted in a large repertoire of music which in some ways exploits the resources of space antiphonally as well as music which engages in spatial narratives. In some compositions, the audience becomes part of the spatial journey and in others the very location of the work is an integral component of the music. Still other works explore more subtle applications of spatial concepts through the investigation of audio illusions and interior space. Technological advances have led to still largely uncharted applications of spatial concepts using telephones, radios, the Internet, satellites, and even interplanetary music transmission via satellites.

Whether media down the road will involve communication across space-time manifolds, or at subatomic levels through anticipating quantum gravity flux, or through meta-languages and the seeding of “memes”, or trans-species or nano-technological or psychometric signaling, etc., many concepts remain to be explored. For example, John Cage invented the possibility of indeterminate interactions of an “ensemble of soloists” in works from the 1950s onward such as Atlas Eclipticalis, the Concert for Piano and Orchestra, the mind-bending Variations IV, and the Waltzes for the Five Boroughs. The same concept of individuals freely making sounds in space was also applied to the sounds themselves in his early Music of Changes (1951) for piano. Cage wrote in 1952, “The sounds enter the time-space centered within themselves, unimpeded by service to any abstraction, their 360 degrees of circumference free for an infinite play of interpenetration … ” SparkleDog recently posted to a music message board, “Cage had the Internet down only he didn’t name it.” Of the billions of people on Earth with different things in their heads at any given moment, millions use the Net, so developing still other venues and methods for highly individual and splendidly social expression and spontaneity seems to be a compelling aesthetic imperative.

Inner Pages:

• Antiphonal Space
• Spatial Narratives
• Walkthroughs, Street Events, and Audience Participation
• Environmental Space
• Audio Illusions and Interior Space
• Electronic Space: Telephone, Radio, Internet, Satellite, Interplanetary Transmission

The two leading English-language reference works on composers of classical music, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, brought out new, vastly expanded editions in 2001. Nearby library shelves are sagging with smaller, more specialized recent books offering information on American composers living and dead. An unprecedented amount of information on the composers of our time lies but a paper cut away.

And much of it is worthless.

The problem is not really who’s in and who’s out, although even that situation is unsatisfactory. I have recently surveyed 17 books of differing scope, as well as a couple of websites, and if you’re an American composer over 40 there’s a good chance that you’ve been immortalized somewhere, even if only with a three-inch entry in the omnivorous Baker’s“. If you’re under 40, though, you’d better get busy registering your website with various search engines, because nobody’s going to find out about you by reading a book.

As I flipped through the pages, many of them still smelling of fresh ink, I paid special attention to entries on a small group of representative composers. In the historical category were Charles Tomlinson Griffes (1884-1920) and Aaron Copland (yes, he’s history: 1900-1990). A group of elder statesmen consisted of George Perle (born 1915), Ben Johnston (1926), and Charles Wuorinen (1938). I included three composers of three different generations whom I happen to know because they live in Tucson, where I do: Robert Muczynski (1929), Daniel Asia (1953), and Dan Coleman (1972). Topping off my list is Annie Gosfield (1960).

I wasn’t trying to play Stump the Encyclopedia with these last four composers; all ought to be in the books. Muczynski has a solid catalog of rhythmically compelling Neoclassical works behind him, and his Time Pieces is becoming a clarinet staple; it has been recorded at least four times, and it’s not even 20 years old. Asia is a co-founder of the New York ensemble Musical Elements, was composer-in-residence with the Phoenix Symphony a few years ago, has been widely performed by musicians and orchestras of some repute, and is privileged to have had his piano concerto and all four symphonies, among other things, recorded. Coleman, though the youngster of this group, is already well established, having spent several seasons affiliated with Boston’s Metamorphosen Chamber Orchestra and written chamber works for the likes of Ida Kavafian. Gosfield is an engaging Downtown composer with Bang On A Can associations; a few of her works have been commercially recorded, as have some of Coleman’s.

As you’ll see if you persevere, Gosfield and Coleman fared poorly in my survey (Coleman didn’t make it into any of the texts), the others had mixed but not entirely dismal results, and Copland, of course, was everywhere. This is not surprising, given reference books‘ necessary emphasis on those who are well entrenched. What is distressing, however, is the quality of the available information.

Unfortunately, entries for living American composers who do get into books—and not just my test group—are little more than bare-bones curriculum vitae. Typically, there’s a full list of academic appointments following the usual name-dropping of “teachers” (including, no doubt, gray eminences who merely gave a single lecture to some class the subject attended). Then comes the itemization of awards and grants. This may have some small value to cultural statisticians, but it’s absolutely useless to anyone seeking information about the composer as a creator of art. One sentence or two—for major, older composers, perhaps a fuller paragraph—may try to encapsulate the subject’s approach to music, but only superficially.

What a curious idea that listing a composer’s education and employment history, as well as grants and awards, tells us anything useful about that person’s music. All we’re offered is the composer’s position in society, not an aesthetic stance. What patience would we have with an encyclopedia listing for J.S. Bach that merely itemized his appointments in Cöthen and Leipzig, gave a nod to his directorship of the Collegium Musicum, and concluded with the observation: “He was a prolific composer of cantatas, organ fugues and instrumental suites in a distinctive though rather old-fashioned style”? We expect better for Bach, and we should demand more for contemporary composers.

Whether the presence of composers in the American academy has been good or bad for music (and for the composers themselves) is a topic for another day, but the skewed balance of information in current encyclopedia entries suggests that an academic career takes precedence over the creation of music. If this is not true, then a whole lot of reference-book editors and contributors need to start again from scratch.

What we need is an interview-based encyclopedia of 21st-century American composers, preferably online. Each entry would be approached as if it were a very compact magazine article on a composer’s life and work. So a composer says he studied with Bernard Rands. OK, the question becomes, “What did you learn from Rands? Or what did you rebel against?” The subject submits a list of commissions and grants. Don’t stop there; ask, “Did these commissions redirect your work in a way you hadn’t expected?” Most importantly, what does the music sound like? How does it work? And if this is online, how about a couple of representative audio files? (Oh, boy! This means fun with publishers and musicians’ unions!)

A skilled interviewer and an articulate composer could cover this ground in a 30-minute phone conversation, and in a halfway comprehensive reference source, that would add up to a huge investment of time. But it would create a work that is truly informative. The entries wouldn’t have to be long, either. You can say a lot about a composer and his or her work in 300 words, if they’re the right 300 words. That means, for the most part, not the words in the current ready-reference books, which are useful to only three people: those on a composer’s promotion and tenure committee.

Inner Pages:

• Baker’s Dozens
• Shady Grove
• Looking It Up
• Cooking the Books
• Surf’s Up

Guy Livingston

Writing from Paris, in the beginning of the new millennium, the city of light seems pretty tame compared to its awesome role a century ago. From about 1880 until World War II, Paris was the rarely-contested center for new and avant-garde music, painting, and writing. This cultural hub attracted vast numbers of foreigners, most particularly Americans. The story of Americans abroad in the 20th century is thus primarily one of Paris, but also one of London, Morocco, Rome, and more recently Amsterdam and Berlin.

What is it that has so strongly attracted Americans to Europe? What was so intriguing about European culture (particularly in the 1920s) that made Americans eager to pack their bags and rush to board the next ocean liner? Was it the food, the music, the poetry, the modernism, or the tradition?

America invented her politics and economy first, and culture much, much later. ‘American’ music existed before 1910, but those who performed it (except for religious music) were minstrels, bandleaders, folk musicians, and other performers relegated to the fringes of society. ‘Cultured’ music in America was defined solely by its relevance and closeness to European models. Pre-1900, the European education was the only choice for any serious composer, and the grand tour of Europe the only possibility of developing a refined musical background for American romantics Gottschalk, MacDowell and their fellow artists.

At the turn of the century, the situation began to change. However obscurely, composers like Ives were defining a homegrown American music, and patrons and critics were beginning to encourage a search for idioms separate from the European tradition. Ives, Cowell, Ruggles, and a few others developed ruggedly individualistic Yankee styles without leaving home, but they were too far outside the system to get significant attention. Meanwhile, more mainstream American composers were coming back from studies in Paris and Rome, full of fresh ideas for an “American Music.”

In the late 1920s, George Antheil, Virgil Thomson, and Aaron Copland returned from Europe with a splash, writing new and vivid music. Ragtime, early jazz, and African-American musicians were becoming popular in Europe and were being recognized for their artistry on both sides of the Atlantic. Crossover Broadway/classical artists like Gershwin began to mix jazz and European music. And by the ’30s and ’40s, mainstream U.S. composers were producing 100% ‘American Music’ for newly receptive symphonic audiences. No longer was the European model necessary to America: the U.S. had gained musical independence.

Not that composers stopped going to Europe. On the contrary: after World War II, the reasons to go abroad had changed, but the pull was still strong. In the ’50s there was the new attraction of Darmstadt, and in the ’80s the glistening underground IRCAM electronic music center. Here, composers could devote themselves entirely to new electronic and serialist idioms, without fear of a hostile or uninformed public (or sometimes without fear of any public at all).

The US-Vietnam war caused many Americans to seek anonymity or peace abroad. But it also made them extremely unpopular throughout Europe. In Rome, recounts composer Richard Trythall, the war and the changing economy “sent a lot of composers back to the States or elsewhere in Europe.” After IRCAM and Darmstadt became institutionalized and gained a reputation for bureaucratic academicism (which didn’t take long), the Dutch improvisation and new music scene exploded in the late ’80s, attracting composers from South America, Scandinavia, and the States. By the ’90s, established Dutch iconoclasts like Louis Andriessen and younger experimentalists like Richard Barrett and Ann Laberge, themselves foreigners, had turned Amsterdam into a major new music center.

Most recently, the burgeoning rave and techno scenes in London and Berlin are having a major international impact. For many young American composers and DJs, West Berlin, with its wealthy and hip audience, is now the place to be, while East Berlin still offers cheap food and accommodations. London balances a familiar language with sky-high rents and explosive growth.

Inner pages:

• Life Abroad: Myth and Reality
• Paris Before World War II
• Post-War Paris
• Pining for Rome
• Germany and Austria
• Holland and Belgium
• Northern Europe
• Beyond Europe
• Paper Sources and Resources

with Paul D. Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

Paul D. Miller’s Preamble:

In an era of intensely networked systems, when you create, it’s not just how you create, but the context of the activity that makes the product. Operating systems, editing environments, graphical user interfaces—these are the keywords in this kind of compositional strategy. During most of the spring of 2002 I was working on an album called Optometry. I thought of it as a record that focused on “the science of sound—as applied to vision.” Think of it as a kind of “synaesthesia” project navigating the bandwidth operating between analog and digital realms. Optometry was constructed out of a series of audio metaphors about how people could think of jazz as text, of jazz as a precedent for sampling—of jazz as a kind of template for improvisation with memory in the age of the infinite archive. In sum, the album was a play on context versus content in a digital milieu using sampling as a “virtual band” of the hand. Flip the situation into the here and now of a world where file swapping and peer-2-peer bootlegs are the norms of how music flows on the Web, and Optometry becomes a conceptual art project about how the “hypertextual imagination” holds us all together. Seamless, invisible, hyper-utilitarian.

What’s new here? In 1939 John Cage made a simple statement about a composition made of invisible networks that was called Imaginary Landscape. The piece was written for phonographs with fixed and variable frequencies (consider that there was no magnetic tape at that time), and radios tuned to random stations. The idea for Cage was that the music was an invisible network based on “chance operations.” As Cage would later say in his famous 1957 essay “Experimental Music,” “Any sounds may occur in any combination and in any continuity.” The sounds of one fixed environment for him were meant to be taken out of context and made to float—think of it as audio free association, and you get the first formalist ideas of the origins of DJ culture. But what does this have to do with jazz?

In a speech before the Library of Congress, Ralph Ellison would flip the mix and build a template for a new kind of literature—that’s the echo of “Imaginary Landscape” that intrigues me. “So long before I thought of writing, I was playing by weather, by speech rhythms, by Negro voices and their different timbres and idioms, by husky male voices and by the high shrill singing voices of certain Negro women, by music by tight places and wide spaces in which the eyes could wander…” Again, the invocation of an imaginary landscape made of the hyper-real experiences of living in a world made of fragments of experience. The idea of being made from files of expression put through places that are not spaces, but code. Gesture is the generative syntax, but once the sounds leave the body, they’re files. And that’s the beginning…

When computers communicate over a network, they do so through sound. Before information can be sent over wires running between computers, it must first be translated into tones. The composer Luke Dubois, of Columbia University’s electronic music department, has described the static you hear when a modem connects as a hyper-accelerated Morse Code, a billion dots and dashes sung each second, too fast for the human ear to discern. This has been true since the dawn of networked computing. When the first two nodes of the Internet, at UCLA and Stanford, were brought online in 1969, Charlie Kline at UCLA famously initiated the connection by typing “login.” After keying the letter “l” he received the appropriate echo back along the phone line from Stamford. The same with the letter “o.” But when he hit “g” the system crashed; the audible reply from Stanford never reached its destination.

In 1972, Ray Tomlinson modified a program meant for ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet, that would let people send each other data as small “letters.” He chose the @ sign for addresses for a simple reason: the punctuation keys on his Model 33 Teletype made it easy to type; it was a convenient way to lend a geographic metaphor to an otherwise abstract place made up of data and people’s interaction with the nodes that hold the data together. In one fell swoop, Tomlinson signaled that data could be both a place and a linguistic placeholder for digital information as a complete environment. By using the @ symbol, he restated what modernist artists and composers had been pointing out for over a century: when information becomes total media in the Wagnerian and the Nietzschian sense, we arrive at the “Gesamkunstwerk” or “the total artwork.” The Situationists referred to this as a “psycho-geography.” Antonin Artaud wrote an essay about it called “Theater and It’s Shadow;” for him it was based on the interaction of different forms of alchemy. When Artaud coined the term “virtual reality” in his 1938 essay “The Alchemical Theater,” he anticipated a realm where signs, symbols, letters, and ciphers were all placeholders in the rapidly changing landscape of a society that faced the surging tides of industrial culture’s mad race to become an information culture. It was a phrase to describe a mind trying to make sense of the data road kill on the side of the information highway being built in the minds of artists whose dreams punctuated an immense run on sentence typed across the face of the planet as technology carried the codes out of their minds and into the world. In the 20th century, one symbol—”@”—ushered in a new world linked by the intent of people to communicate. This is a world of infinitely reflecting fragments, vibrating, manifesting a hum, making music.

The connection between sound and networked computing is more than the product of technical convenience. It can be traced to the first visionary articulation of the digital age. In his seminal essay from 1945, “As We May Think,” Roosevelt’s science advisor, Vannevar Bush, proposed the creation of a device he called the memex, which provided the inspiration for what later became the networked personal computer. Bush’s memex system had the ability to synthesize speech from text, and, conversely, to automatically create text records from spoken commands. He wrote enthusiastically of the Voder, which was introduced at the 1939 World’s Fair as “the machine that talks.” “A girl stroked its keys and it emitted recognizable speech,” Bush wrote. “No human vocal cords entered in the procedure at any point; the keys simply combined some electrically produced vibrations and passed these on to a loud-speaker.” Bush also discussed another Bell Labs invention, the Vocoder, an early attempt at a voice recognition system. Central to his vision of the memex was the notion that sound would circulate through the system, available for easy retrieval and manipulation.

Today that ease of access and malleability is transforming the way musicians conceive of and make music. It is now simple to convert sound into digital streams, so it can flow anywhere across the computer network, to be manipulated by a continually growing array of software. Real time collaborations between musicians across the Net are becoming common. Online collaborations that are not real time are commonplace. The combination of databases (for storage), software (for manipulation), and networks (for interactivity between databases, software, and musicians) is challenging many long held notions of what music making can or should be. Established boundaries are blurring.

This blurring comes from a basic premise behind computing: that all information can be translated from its original form into binary code, and then re-articulated in a new form in a different medium. Texts can be stored in a database as ones and zeros, and later output as images or sounds. Ted Nelson, the man who coined the terms “hypertext” and “hypermedia” in the mid-1960s, was among the first to appreciate the full range of o
pportunities that networked computers make possible. In 1974, he proposed the playful idea of “teledildonics,” a computer system that would convert audio information into tactile sensations. Why should music only enter the body through the ear? Why not through the skin, or through the eye?

Artists have been using computer networks for collaboration at least since 1979, when I.P. Sharp Associates made their timesharing system available to an artist’s project called “Interplay.” Organizer Bill Bartlett contacted artists in cities around the world where IPSA offices were located, and invited them to participate in an online conference—essentially a “live chat”—on the subject of networking. At the time this technology was rare and expensive; artists had no access to it. “Interplay” is often referred to as the first live, network-based, collaborative art project.

Around the same time, the innovative use of satellites by artists such as Nam June Paik, Joseph Beuys, Douglas Davis, Kit Galloway, and Sherrie Rabinowitz were connecting performers across great distances in collaborative, interactive pieces. A dancer in New York would improvise to music played in Paris, while video of the two would be edited into a single performance for broadcast in, say, Berlin. Although these pioneering telematic works did not make use of networked computing—bandwidth and processor speeds were not yet great enough to allow for it—they set precedents for the real time network-based interaction between artists that became possible in the 1990s, as the technology improved and costs came down.

Online collaboration today takes many forms. Using Web-based music technologies, artists are working together to create new music. There are online studios that connect artists across great distances, and Web-based jams between musicians who have never laid eyes on one another. At the same time, even more popular are “collaborations” between artists who are not even aware that a “collaboration” is taking place. Referred to as “remixes” or “bootlegs,” digital files of a wide range of recorded material are being cut up and manipulated into entirely new works of art—blending distinct and unlikely source materials into singular creations. Of course, this kind of unsolicited collaboration challenges some long-held notions of intellectual property, and an artist’s unique affiliation with his or her own output. But at the same time, it brings back the idea of a shared folk culture, where creative expression is the property of the community at large, and can be shared for everyone’s benefit. Digital technology may be a route that reconnects us to aspects of our tribal roots.

As new as these techniques are, however, they retain a continuity with pre-digital compositional approaches. The network simply allows musicians to perform together online, replicating the experience they have always had when jamming in the same room. At the same time, the mixing of distinct aural elements certainly does not require digital technology; analog sound mixing dates at least to John Cage’s 1939 performance of Imaginary Landscapes, which featured a mix of turntables and radios. From this perspective, computer networks simply contribute to long-standing tendencies in composition that preceded the digital era.

However, some composers are exploring a wholly original, uncharted musical terrain, one that is unthinkable without networked computers. In these works, the sound experience is created through the real time participation of the listener in the making of the performance itself. These online sound art pieces rely on the interactive engagement of the listener, who helps to shape the specifics of the performance through personal choices and actions, which are communicated to the music-making software over the wired network. In this way, the traditional distinction between “artist” and “audience” begins to melt away, as the “listener” also becomes a “performer.”

Inner Pages:

Composing with Software

Interacting With Intelligent Networks

Daniel Felsenfeld

“I wanna bite the hand that feeds me…”
– Elvis Costello

Since there have been artists, there have been critics. It’s all part of a great dialogue between the practitioners, who advance their disciplines (and change the world from time to time) and the thinkers, who codify and explain the “new” for future generations to better understand what came before. This is the purpose of criticism. Period.

Music criticism in particular has changed the most severely over the years. From the beginning of music there have, undoubtedly, been available cognoscenti. I even imagine cave people, pounding away at their rocks, while someone nearby criticized the nuance of their pounding, their conversion to slate, or mentioned that the previous evening’s rock banger had more soul, more insight into the whole idea of banging. Perhaps the ancients benefited, perhaps it even aided in the “development” of western music, a dialogue rather than a necessary evil, a means to an aesthetic end.

The impulse to criticize is a teacherly one—call it scholarly, academic, or enlightening, critics are there to explain. They can help us select a recording or attend a concert (or inform us of what took place at an event we the readers were unable to attend) but can also define a trend, draw conclusions, or introduce us to material we might not otherwise know. The same can be said of a gifted teacher; they serve the same cultural purpose.

The first music critics, Boethius and his Ancient Greek crew, wrote musical treatises, and approached music as an abstraction, another discipline on the road to purity through knowledge. As Arthur Koestler details (quite brilliantly) in his momentous The Sleepwalkers, music itself was actually the first known mathematical constant. Pythagoras figured this out, that “…balance and order, not sweet pleasure, are the law of the world.” Suddenly scholarship took music—most specifically the “…Pythagorean discovery that the pitch of a note depends on the length of the string that produces it…”—and admitted it to the highest realm of study, the realm of science. All of this from an ancient form of criticism: scholarship.

At some point, in music (as well as film) criticism and scholarship separated. A new beast was born—the professional “reviewer.”

As with everything else, times have changed. Critics are much different animals than the ancient scholars, and even the first professional thinkers about music—schools of thought still ebb and fold, countless words have been read on these topics, schisms and battles have been waged. But there is now, more than ever, a need for effective criticism. In the ancient world little existed, unlike the modern age. Scholars, teachers, and, yes, even critics are necessary in order to make sense of it all. Gone is the abstraction, it’s taken a turn to the real.

Inner Pages:

• Acceptable Criticism
• Today’s Crisis in Criticism

The Feet of Jennifer Dunning Photo by Melissa Richard

The relationship of composer to choreographer had its certainties late in the 19th century. Ballet told stories. Both composer and choreographer had only to tell those stories of enchanted maidens, death-dealing vampires, and hapless princes with dependable dance rhythms and sufficient atmosphere. There were the Salieris, among them Adolphe Adam, the established ballet composer who created the score for the ballet classic Giselle whose music today lives primarily to serve the dance. Then there was Tchaikovsky, whose music for ballets like Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty, and The Nutcracker stands on its own as musical storytelling colored by symphonic grandeur and depth of emotion. It didn’t hurt that those scores were by a composer whose major work was intended to be interpreted by a more traditional kind of musical instrument than the human body.

Music for dance began to shed its inferiority complex as dance began to turn away, early in the 20th century, from storytelling and toward pure movement or dance for its own sake. The shift began formally with the groundbreaking experiments of the Russian impresario Serge Diaghilev, his earliest resident choreographer, Michel Fokine, and, most of all, George Balanchine. Performances by Isadora Duncan in Russia in 1909 had opened the eyes of Diaghilev and Fokine to the possibilities of natural rather than artificial movement. The point of almost no return came when Diaghilev commissioned The Rite of Spring in 1913 from a young Russian composer named Igor Stravinsky. Fifteen years later, Stravinsky and a young Russian choreographer named Balanchine established one of the great artistic partnerships of the 20th century, expanding the notion of dance and dance music in the process.

A few dance scores by Aaron Copland, commissioned by Agnes de Mille, Martha Graham, and others, helped to shape a short-lived genre of dance that focused on a mostly sunny view of frontier, bedrock America. But collaborations were beyond the economic reach of most choreographers and dance institutions, hauled out on occasion as a usually suspect marketing device as the century spooled on. And as Balanchine’s exploration of the nature of ballet became more influential in the development of American and European dance, the move away from artifice grew stronger. Dance began to be seen as an art sufficient unto itself.

Sit in front of a monitor at the Dance Collection of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center and scan the screens to the left and right, earphones firmly in place, and you will make an eerie and astonishing discovery: hiphop struts sync to Brahms, rhythmic beat to beat. A Duncan dancer—or Rudolf Nureyev or Martha Graham—looks perfectly at home moving to music by Prince or Wuorinen. We can see that today, in part, because of modern dance’s desanctifying of music for dance.

Music was intrinsic to Balanchine’s notion of ballet. American modern dance began, early in the 20th century, with a decided shrug toward musical accompaniment. Ruth St. Denis and her protégées could talk of “music visualizations,” but almost any tinkling musical score seemed to be agreeable to St. Denis, so long as it helped her to evoke the exotic fantasy places and times of many of her dances. Duncan had appropriated most of the great classical composers and was angrily criticized for setting tawdry dance to their exalted music. But St. Denis ushered in three decades or so of music by mostly dreary nonentities or worthy pot-boilers. Does anyone today remember Arthur Finley Nevin, brother of Ethelbert, or Harvey Worthington Loomis, or even Wallingford Riegger?

Choreographers, among them traditionalists like the modern-dance great Doris Humphrey and ballet’s Jerome Robbins, discovered that dance could be successfully performed without any sort of music. And Merce Cunningham decided that dance need not depend at all on music for its essence. His notions of dance, as ground-breaking as Balanchine’s, developed with the avant-garde experimentation of John Cage, his life companion. (Similarly and as unusually, the quietly iconoclastic dance of Erick Hawkins owed much to vivid, propulsive music supplied by his wife Lucia Dlugoszewski, also a composer in her own right.)

Cunningham essentially gave equal value to the possibly extrinsic elements of dance production, like design and music, by commissions to be created separately from the dance. Music was never an afterthought, but its creation had nothing to do with Cunningham’s choreographic process. Famously, Cunningham dancers did not hear the music they were to move to until the first performance. One of the very minor pleasures of a Cunningham evening used to be the sight of his once-solemn dancers trying not to laugh at fortuitous events like an electronic groan coinciding with a leg rising slowly and heavily into the air.

The postmodernists of the late 1960s and ’70s tended to dismiss music. Need some kind of aural landscape for a dance piece? How about a little ambient sound? A tape collage put together by a non-musical friend? The important minimalist work of choreographers like Laura Dean and Lucinda Childs found the perfect musical counterparts in the early modular music of Steve Reich and Philip Glass, in a much less intensely focused partnership than that of Balanchine and Stravinsky but one that helped define the work of all four artists and their time.

Increasingly, just about everything was fodder for a score, with New York choreographers haunting Tower Records and returning to the studio with wildly eclectic armloads of possibilities. Twyla Tharp brought the streets onto the proscenium stage in the mid-1970s, setting choreography flavored by popular dance forms to music by jazz, rock, and pop composers who had never before been associated with dance. Paul Taylor progressed from a recorded telephone time signal used as a musical score in the late 1950s to recent dances which utilized music that ranged from Depression-era popular songs and tangos by Astor Piazzolla to pieces by Handel and the 18th-century English composer William Boyce. Taylor’s new “Antique Valentine” was set to Bach, Beethoven, and Chopin performed on music boxes and player pianos.

Inner Pages:

• Pas “Pas De Deux”
• Sound and Space
• A Pattern of Collaboration

Linda Dahl’s Secret Garden Photo collage by Serena Spiezio

It should no longer be news that women have written popular songs and jazz since these forms first began to take shape in the late l9th century. Still, it remains important to review their accomplishments. They not only serve as an inspiration, but as a reminder of how difficult it was for women to get equal time and recognition in virtually every aspect of music making— composition being no exception.

On the one hand, the bandstand – the very place that has been the logical, specific inspiration for so much jazz composition – was long much more a fraternity or “boys’ club” than an open shop. (The same could be said of professions including music publishing, song plugging, record producing, artists’ management, and so on.) On the other hand, however, composition has had advantages during earlier times when women were pressured to confine themselves to the roles of wife and mother. It was and is an art form, but it can also be viewed as a cottage industry.

At the turn of the century, the determined woman who could claim a room of her own (or at least a corner of a room), who could carve out time away from the demands of housekeeping and children, might produce music, not unlike her sisters who kept journals, wrote poetry and novels, or painted. Given the lingering Victorian value system, creating songs was a far more acceptable and practical route in the eyes of greater American society than adopting the freewheeling life of a performer.

African American women, far less likely to be among the middle class at the turn of the century, worked more frequently as musicians and learned the rudiments of writing for a variety of instruments in the rough school of the road. Tent shows, minstrelsy, circuses, vaudeville, family bands, and territory bands provided constant entertainment around the country at a time when live music was the backdrop for so many shows, as well as an integral part of political events and social gatherings of all kinds.

Boy and girl children in family bands were rigorously trained. With a constant need for new material, women often contributed arrangements and original works. Such was the case in the Young band, which began the careers Lester, Lee, and Irma Young, and the Hampton band. (Slide Hampton worked alongside his mother, father, five brothers, and fours sisters, some of whom are still active as arrangers today.) The women sometimes left the family bands, typically with spouses or other family members, to work in a variety of these other contexts.

The moment we start to consider women who have written music in the invisible book of jazz and its precursors, we run into difficulties. What do we include and what do we leave out? To some extent it is a matter of taste, but speaking broadly from a historical perspective, a range of material has risen to the top, like the cream in milk, and found a place in the jazz book. This includes the better songs from all the genres of popular musical entertainment, beginning with minstrelsy and the blues, incorporating a touch of the spirituals and gospel, through vaudeville and Tin Pan Alley, to musical theater and film music (not to mention the wonderful imports from other countries that spice up the American musical melting pot and create new hybrids, Afro-Cuban and Brazilian being perhaps the most significant).

Women have contributed enormously to songwriting in the past 120 or so years, including well-known gems that have been played and sung across the country by millions of people: from parlor songs like “I Love You Truly” by Carrie Jacobs Bond to ragtime songs and vaudeville numbers like “Hello Ma Baby,” co-authored by Ida Emerson, and “The Bully,” by performer May Irwin. Ann Ronell’s “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” and Doris Fisher’s “Tutti Frutti” (with Slim Gaillard) counted among popular “novelty” tunes. Dana Suesse’s “You Oughta Be in Pictures” became a radio hit, as did Maria Grever’s “Besame Mucho” and Mabel Wayne’s “Ramona.” These tunes were often clothed in jazz-flavored arrangements in the record studio, radio broadcasts, or on the dance floor.

Some of these songs entered the jazz musicians’ repertoire and eventually became standards: Ann Ronnell’s “Willow Weep for Me,” Kay Swift’s “Can’t We Be Friends?” and “Black Coffee” (for which she was sued by Mary Lou Williams, claiming successfully that it too closely resembled “What’s Your Story, Morning Glory?”), Maria Grever’s “What a Difference a Day Makes,” Irene Higginbotham’s “Good Morning Heartache,” Ruth Lowe’s “I’ll Never Smile Again,” and Doris Tauber’s “Them There Eyes.” Although many of these women songwriters have been neglected, their songs continue to enrich the American songbook.

For women who came from within the tradition of jazz and blues, their careers as performers have tended to overshadow their legacies as songwriters and composers. “Blues Queens,” such as Gertrude “Ma” Rainey and Bessie Smith, wrote a substantial portion of their own repertoire (often with collaborators like Lovie Austin). There has also been a small, but continuous and significant thread of women singers who have written their own material: Ella Fitzgerald penned some of her best-known songs as did Billie Holiday. Betty Carter and Abbey Lincoln have followed in their footsteps.

Aside from the realm of songwriting, the role of female instrumentalists as jazz composers likewise runs the length of the music’s history, beginning with Lil Hardin Armstrong’s involvement in New Orleans style jazz. The works of pivotal figure Mary Lou Williams (who also composed songs) embodied the encounters of jazz and “art music” by the middle of the century and also provided an early indication of women’s proclivities to lead and work with large performing forces (often instead of ranking among their performers). Toshiko Akiyoshi, Melba Liston, Amina Claudine Myers, Carla Bley, and Maria Schneider have also followed this path and been on the cutting edge of big band composition.

A technical, but vital, point: many composers of both popular songs and jazz failed to secure the rights to their own works, typically out of simple ignorance of the procedures. The travail of Mary Lou Williams as she later tried to untangle copyright problems dating from her Swing Era compositions is but one example.

For men and women alike, problems with copyrights were not unusual; it was not unheard of for song publishers, agents, and managers to help themselves to an artist’s copyright, and subsequent royalties. Evidence is largely anecdotal but compelling on this score. The less powerful the songwriter was vis-à-vis the virtual cartel of song publishing, the more vigilant and downright tough he/she would have to be to secure what was rightfully hers. (Isaac Goldberg provides a valuable overview of this subject in Tin Pan Alley: A Chronicle of the American Popular Music Racket).

To get one’s song published, connections could be crucial; everything from working as a song demonstrator (that is, playing sheet music for customers of a music store, as did Hardin Armstrong), as a secretary to an established songwriter (as in Tauber’s employment by Irving Berlin) or apprenticing oneself to a composer (as in Swift’s relationship to George Gershwin) could help. Other women often had a parent or relative in the business to clear the way: Fisher was the daughter of songwriter Fred Fisher, and Irene Higinbotham, the sister of musician J.C. Higinbotham. Last, but definitely not least, was the time-honored connection of romance or marriage, Lil Hardin Armstrong’s to Louis Armstrong being perhaps the best known. Irene Wilson Kitchings was married to pianist Teddy Wilson for a time.

Issues still remain regarding the authorship of songs and jazz compositions: has it at times been erroneously assigned and have women been properly credited for collaborations? Have those whose works which a
re part of our oral and recorded traditions been properly acknowledged? These questions will be the basis for important historical work in the future and continue to establish women’s contributions as songwriters and composers within the jazz tradition.

Inner Pages:

• Keys to Success
• Non-standard Standards
• Lady Writes The Blues
• The Whole World in Her Hands: Big Bands, Large-Scale Works and Beyond

Marilyn Shrude Photo by Mark Bunce

We’ve been criticized for perpetuating a system that exists only to sustain itself. The sagacious Milton Babbitt said it around 1947: “It’s a mad scramble for crumbs.” Yet year after year and in ever-increasing numbers, eager young musicians seek admission to graduate and undergraduate composition programs. What attracts them to a pursuit that promises hard work, a decent amount of frustration, and limited financial rewards? And how does one nurture the gift that only a few possess?

It is nearly impossible to extricate the teaching of composition from the earliest history of music. A look at the more salient aspects of music instruction before 1600 will perhaps shed light on this obscure topic. The little evidence we have affirms the belief that the art of composition was centered in private study with various music courses and experiences rounding out the training. Sound familiar?

My attention after 1800 turns to the U.S. and the remarkable development of music programs in higher education. We struggled our way through the “transplanted European” syndrome and gradually forged a musical culture that reflected the diversity and richness of a hybrid society. The critical issue of “formal training” has been a cornerstone in building our personal identity. The singing schools of the 1700s, the growth of conservatories in the 1800s, the establishment of music in the academy in the latter part of the 19th century, and finally the flowering of outstanding programs in the 20th century—the study of music has a strong foundation and can assume its rightful place beside traditional academic pursuits.

Enter 2002! We take the pulse of today’s artistic community with the comments and musings of composers (students and professionals) and other creative artists. What do people value as they make art? What is it about past experience that creates a climate for creativity? What are the most important things in a collegiate composition program? What is an alternative to study in the US and its significance for American composers?

And finally—the future—many questions, but few answers! Predictions are dangerous and prescriptive behavior antithetical to the artistic personality. Thankfully, variations to traditional models exist; teachers and students continue to break new ground in the studio and classroom and look for healthy solutions to a changing musical lifestyle. That’s exciting and precisely why I refuse to see a bleak future. My trust is in the “20-somethings” who are grappling with their own futures. And I believe they will figure it out—much differently than we did—but in their own exciting ways.

Inner Pages:

• Our Tangled Roots—Sizing Up the Past
• Reaching Maturity—The American Recipe
• Words of the Wise—Taking Our Pulse
• A Look at the Data—Weighing In
• Americans in Paris/or is it Amsterdam? Changing the Recipe
• Up Close and Personal—Nourishing Creativity
• Into the Future—Diet and Exercise