Category: Articles
Martin Boykan:What role has theory played in your compositions and how important is it for people to know the theory behind the music in order to appreciate it? Julia Werntz
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Because I write microtonal music and spend a lot of time with other people’s microtonal music, there is a lot to try to figure out—microtonality is still new, even over a hundred years after Julian Carrillo began experimenting with it. So in addition to composing, I’ve written a few articles exploring microtonality and have done some teaching on the subject. Still, music theory is useful for me only in two contexts: with the practical matters that are directly related to how I put my own music together (which really should be called “compositional technique” rather than “theory”), and with my attempts to understand the inner workings of other people’s music through analysis.
With regard to the compositional technique: many composers do have well-developed theories in place before they begin composing. Every mind works differently. I would feel paralyzed if I knew so much about how my music was supposed to work before I even composed it. I begin with musical impulses and some simple ideas about how I’m going to get where I’m going, and build upon my experience with past pieces. As each piece evolves it eventually becomes pretty complex. But if I set out from the beginning with such complex plans I would probably fail to achieve them.
As for understanding the music of others: the importance of knowing the theory behind the music depends on the music. Obviously if the music is strongly centered upon some extra-musical concept, the listener will be in the dark without some explanation. Concepts and theories involving psychoacoustics, gender, culture, even class, abound. Some of them are based on beliefs about what people want or need to hear, while others are concerned with changing the way people hear or think about music. Personally, I am not moved by much heavily conceptual music; I come to music to access that part of people’s minds I cannot access during conversation.
In the case of pieces that are not so conceptual, but which may simply be harmonically and rhythmically complex or busy, many people mistakenly perceive this sort of music as something “too theoretical” which cannot be enjoyed or appreciated by people without a theoretical background. This is silly. It is not a matter of theory. If such music is written and performed with inspiration and skill, then the listener needs nothing more than two simple things to appreciate it on a purely artistic level: an open, curious mind and repeated listenings—both of which are often in short supply, unfortunately.
That said, it is true that the more a listener examines a piece (including getting some background on the composer’s point-of-view, if possible) the deeper his/her understanding will be. The continuum of understanding begins with the open mind I mentioned and progresses through increasing levels of fascination and inquiry. If I am really grabbed by a piece of music, then I will be eager to analyze it, to try to figure it out. We can call that “theory”—”my theory about how that piece works.”
[Ed. Note: A CD with three of Werntz’s compositions and three by John Mallia will be
released later this year on the Capstone label.]
Theory Schmeory: The Dangers And Delights Of Music Theory
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Blame it on Pythagoras. When the old, ancient Greek discovered the relation between musical intervals and numbers–leading to notions like the “hidden structure of the universe,” “music of the spheres,” “mathematics of the soul,” and whatnot–that was the beginning of music theory. Now we’re stuck with it. And there’s no way out.
I don’t mean to start off on such a negative note. Actually, theory can be beautiful and illuminating (as opposed to complicated, obfuscating, quagmired, self-important, self-absorbed). And nothing could be more human: the desire to create systems out of chaos or near-chaos is a natural and (usually) noble expression of humanity’s ability to reason. (Well, there are irrational pseudo-theories about race, which pose, as rational and lead to nasty things such as slavery and extermination.) And there are theories about everything: Goethe had one about color, Einstein had one about gravity, Eisenstein had one about film montage, Brillat-Savarin had one about eating (in The Physiognomy of Taste), Tarkovsky had one about time-pressure in cinematic images (in Sculpting Time), Lakatos had one about numbers, Foucault about sex, Wittgenstein had one about language, Derrida about writing (or should I say écriture), Freud about dreams. Darwin even had a pet theory (literally). People kill each other over theories (i.e. communism vs. capitalism). And there are countless anti-theories, counter-theories, meta-theories, theories à la mode (pun intended). The list is endless. You probably have one or two yourself.
But music theory is surely the strangest. That’s the burden of trying to make sense of the most ethereal, ephemeral, abstract–one could argue the most free–art form. In a way, from a certain point of view, music needs theory. And the theorists themselves? Most of them bear a striking resemblance to the creepy and slimy Gollum in The Lord of the Rings. Well, that’s just a theory…
The problem with theory arises when it does not–and is not willing to recognize that it cannot–explain the most interesting aspects of a piece of music Problems arise if theory becomes a litmus test for the greatness of a piece of music, as in the great “organicist” theories of the West which leave out non-western musics and focus on a small group of pieces, which come out of the Dead White Boys Club of the Austro-Germanic School–”masterpieces” churned out by “geniuses.” They were definitely a talented bunch. (Postmodern theory has tried, with varying success, to take these terms off of their pedestals.) The problem with compositional theory is when, in the wrong hands, it seems to be the sole generator of the compositions, when actually the real music-making must come from a different place (something called imagination and “life”).
Theorists can be freestanding, but there have also been many famous theorist-composers from Rameau to Babbitt. Two of my favorite American theorists, Edward Lowinsky and Edward T. Cone, were both initially trained in composition. [Ed. Note: Cone remains active as a composer who has constantly guarded against making generalizations and then feeling that they ought to be applied to his own music.]
Of course, new theories continue to be churned out. Some are profound, some are shallow… The show goes on, so to speak. For the composer, it’s best to take Ned Rorem’s advice, “Compose first, worry later.” And for theorists, “listen first, theorize later.” And really listen. If it ain’t got that swing…
Inner Pages:
Focusing on Our Architecture
We are all familiar with those program or liner notes that are a step removed from generalized music theory and are about as stimulating to read as a legal brief or a software manual. When I was an adolescent and music was my heartthrob, I just didn’t get how something so sensuous could be intellectualized in such a dry way. Thankfully, in college I was awakened to the wonders of musical analysis, and of how dissecting a score could be as exciting as an expedition into a wilderness. And over the years, whether I am preparing my own compositional materials or studying a work so I can conduct it, I’ve come to appreciate what a wonderful job music does of surviving whatever constructs we assign to it.
Certainly, overarching cultural attitudes and conceptions have always influenced how composers have conceived their music and how others have critically interpreted it. The dominant music theories of the last century, and the overall gestalt of what we regard as music theory, were forged in the western rationalist tradition. 
In recent decades, the limitations and modalities of rationalism have been heavily debated, but I tend to think that composers and the art of music have long been a model for going beyond the rational, giving us the integration of the rational mind and the intuitive, art and science, spirit and matter. And I might need to whisper this so some of my friends don’t hear me say it, but yes, I think this is even true for some of those twelve-tone guys.
Today, I’m not sure if some of our most well-known composers have particularly innovative or deeply-conceived theory in their work. However, the theories of music that exist today or might be opened up, are not as cut and dry as what once dominated textbooks. I’ll give Harry Partch and his revolutionary tome Genesis of a Music some of the credit for that, and in showing how looking deeply inside music can open it to the heavens…a magnifying glass becomes a telescope, and it’s all about focus. Speaking of which, which one of you geniuses will help us discover the relationship of the overtone series to the structure of the universe?
Grand design such as that is everywhere in music, in its little microcosms and compositional jewels, even when it is not always unified or perfect. Music is a sublime kind of architecture, and learning how to build with new materials, without flaunting the materials for their own sake, is what distinguishes new music. The architectural dimension of music is also why the focus of music theory is so gratifying and worth more emphasis, and why we might expand our notions of music theory to examine those places, beyond the page, that music goes. For how we analyze something tells us as much about ourselves as does the result of the analysis.
Maybe if music theory is something that as composers, we haven’t been talking about enough, it’s because many of us took a step back from it. So tell us what you think Ð even if it’s only in theory.
A Theory of Relativity
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One of my favorite things to say to cheer myself up is: “Everything happens for a reason.” This might seem somewhat metaphysical coming from a devout secular humanist, but it reflects a lifelong love of patterns and analysis, which are at the heart of music theory.
As a composer as well as someone who writes about other people’s music, I have always been obsessed with analyzing music. For me, the ability to articulate what’s going on in a piece is almost as important as the piece itself. It’s funny, for years critics of so-called uptown music have derided it as too “theory driven” yet so-called downtown music can be just as theory driven, if not more so, and it was the theory driven aspects of that music—audible processes, phase shifting, alternate tunings and their mathematical justifications—that first attracted me to it. After reading Harry Partch’s Genesis of a Music and Steve Reich’s “Music as a Gradual Process,” there didn’t seem to be enough theory in uptown music. Now I realize that this is not true and I am able to find a great deal of theory in everything, from the most austere music of the new complexity school to the drones of ambient techno music in clubs. However, I also know full well that if music theory is not rooted in actual musical practice it accomplishes nothing.
As a grad student in music at Columbia, I was drawn to the writings of Edward T. Cone before I ever knew that he was also a composer and before I realized that he rejects the term “theory” since it implies something separate and apart from actual practice. Robert Hilferty explores this relationship between theory and practice over the past two centuries in his provocatively titled HyperHistory, “Theory Schmeory.” We asked a group of nine composers, the largest ever queried in an issue of NewMusicBox, to describe the relationship between music theory and their own compositions. Many of the composers, including Fred Lerdahl, George Russell, Julia Werntz, and Tom Johnson, have been as widely known for their theories about music as their own music, yet all see a clear separation between the two. We ask you if music theory is still relevant to you.
Following another favorite catch phrase, “It’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission,” you might think that anything could be explained away in a theory after it exists. And it’s interesting that some music analysts believe music that cannot be analyzed isn’t music. My retort is that you should be able to come up with a theory to analyze anything. And, if you can’t, it probably doesn’t exist. Although, that said, there certainly seem to be many things that don’t exist that have been explained in great detail for millennia.
If all of this sounds a bit hyperbolic, it comes nowhere near the prose of a great many music analyses that so many students of music are forced to read. And therein is perhaps the root of the bad rep of music theory. The best writing about music is integrally related to the music it’s writing about, and the best music is well served by such writing.
What role has theory played in your compositions and how important is it for people to know the theory behind the music in order to appreciate it? Martin Boykan
Nobody becomes a composer out of a need to express himself or out of a wish to affect the course of music history. We all begin by falling in love with a piece and wanting to make something just like it. With the passage of years, the urge to imitate disappears, but most of us continue to be nourished by the study of music.
The importance of theory is obvious. You cannot really understand Bach unless you have internalized the syntax of functional harmony along with the principles of long-range voice-leading. And the various techniques of extended tonality, free atonality, or serial construction are equally important for music of the 20th century. But no way of thinking about pitch or rhythm provides an automatic advantage; theoretical constructs are only useful as a source of opportunities. What interests us in a piece we care about is the particular occasion, how technical procedures are placed in the service of a musical narrative that is uniquely compelling.
[Ed. Note: Flume, a new CD featuring four of Boykan’s chamber music compositions was recently issued on CRI.]
In Conversation with Mark Eden Horowitz
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An interview with the author of Sondheim on Music: Minor Details and Major Decisions
Amanda MacBlane: I know that this book is part of a larger project that you’ve been working on at the Library of Congress and I was wondering if you could start by explaining how this book came about from the other work you’ve been doing.
Mark Eden Horowitz: Well, that’s not really true, or it’s not exactly how I would put it. Part of my job here at the Music Division is to work on both acquiring and processing special collections, which are usually the papers of either a composer or a performer. My specialty is American musical theatre so most of the collections that I’ve worked on have been those collections, and I’ve been talking with Sondheim for a long time about his papers coming to the library. He had agreed, and the plan is that they will be bequest to us. It occurred to me that in preparation for someday (hopefully many, many years in the future) when the collection comes to us, I really wanted to have some explication from him about it—when people are looking at his manuscripts, what they should know about his process and what the things meant. So that was when I applied for a grant to do these interviews and I got it and he agreed to participate. We’ve never really done anything exactly like this before and I don’t know if we’ll ever do anything exactly like this again, although a colleague now has done something similar with Roger Reynolds. I think Reynolds has also planned to give us his papers—in fact, he’s started to—and I know that my colleague has done a series of interviews with him and I think that was inspired, at least in some part, by my project. So it would be great if we could do more things like this, but I don’t know that there are a lot of musical theatre composers who require this, where it would be as fruitful as it is with Sondheim. I’ve worked on the Richard Rodgers collection here and as much as I would’ve loved the opportunity to interview him, I don’t know that he thought about the process with the same intellectuality that Sondheim does.
Amanda MacBlane: After all, we have to remember that Sondheim is a Babbitt student! He definitely has a strong base in theory.
Mark Eden Horowitz: Yeah.
Amanda MacBlane: So how did you go about preparing for these interviews?
Mark Eden Horowitz: I spent three days in New York and was given free access to his manuscripts and I went through them a box at a time and made notes and photocopies as I saw things that I was curious about. It was literally, “I wonder what that meant?” or “I think I know what that means, but I’m not sure” or things that looked interesting or surprised me—anything like that. So that was the first step, and then I came back and started organizing what I’d done and started coming up with questions. I also wrote to several people soliciting their input, people who I thought were the kind of people that I hoped that ultimately this book would serve—musical directors, conductors who specialize in musical theatre. I guess one of the surprises was that I got very little response from that. But in the end, I had about 25 pages worth of notes (mostly questions) that I took with me when we went to do the interviews, and I would spend probably an hour each morning before we started pulling the boxes and using post-its so the manuscripts would be ready as we started and so I could go as quickly as I could through the things and find them. Then I just did the interview. But I think the thing that I did best was listen. As I think I said in the intro, if he had something that he wanted to say, I would do my best not to interrupt and I would just sort of nod encouragingly and try and get him to talk as much as possible. So much of what was said had nothing to do with the questions that I prepared, or sometimes things came out of what he said or if I didn’t understand or wasn’t clear I would try to get him to clarify something. So that was the basic process. Then, when I came back to the library (there was no idea that this would be a book) but wanted to transcribe them, just because I thought it was important to have a transcription. And the more I transcribed the more I thought that this was information that would be of value to a wider range of people. My greatest hope is that it will be read by a next generation of composers who will be inspired and try different and new things because of this. Then I found a publisher and Sondheim agreed. And the best thing then was that he was wonderful at going over the transcripts and improving them.
Amanda MacBlane: Yeah, I liked all the little notes that he would write in. “After reflection, I feel that this note actually meant this.”
Mark Eden Horowitz: [laughs] Well, most of that stuff was actually at the time, most of the corrections are very specific things that, if he couldn’t remember a certain word, or just wanted to make sure that what he was saying was as clear as possible. So it was sometimes things like, “you could read these notes as _____” is what he said, and in the corrections, “You can read down these notes as _____,” just so it’s clear what direction you were going. I mean some of it was just very minute stuff like that, just to make sure that it was absolutely understandable. And I think there’s no better copyeditor in the world, he also added and deleted commas and things like that.
Amanda MacBlane: And certainly for a book that is so heavily theory-based it reads so smoothly. This book is incredibly complete in a lot of ways. For the interviews, I know that you said that you weren’t able to get to the earlier works just because of time and resource restraints, but they really are dealt with in a lot of ways. And the details on the shows you do address are incredibly rich. Now, the “Songs I wish I’d written” list is something that is really fascinating to me. Where did the list came from?
Mark Eden Horowitz: The story is actually kind of interesting. In our Coolidge Auditorium here we have quite an important concert series that has gone on for many decades and we’ve done many premieres. We did the premiere of Appalachian Spring here and, in fact, it was written specifically for our space. And as the library’s relationship with Sondheim had grown we started talking to him about the idea that we’d like to do a concert and we’d kicked around some ideas and when we were finally trying to narrow it down, we decided we wanted to do something for his 70th birthday. One of the ideas that he had initially been very responsive to was a sort of “Sondheim Introduces…” concert. It was going to present the next generation of songwriters, because we know he’s involved a lot with ASCAP and other organizations and sees things that the younger people are writing. He seemed enthusiastic at first about adding his weight behind some new people that he thought were exciting. So that was an initial idea that he was excited about, when it came time to do the 70th anniversary concert he had decided that there really weren’t enough new, young people that he was excited about to warrant a concert. So, then the idea began morphing to sort of a “desert island” concert. I mean, there’s been so people just doing Sondheim greatest hits events, and we knew that he sat through so many of those that we wanted to do something that would be more pleasurable for him, that he would enjoy. This seemed to be something that he enjoyed and he got involved and just started faxing me with some songs and I started compiling them. He was the one that came up with the title of “Songs I Wish I’d Written” and then decided to add, “at least in part,” and he was very excited about that. So, ultimately, it was a list of 55 total and we selected 15 of them for the concert. So
he would give me song titles, and I would get the information about the composer, the lyricist, what show it was, and what year it was and I made this nice listing. What was somewhat frustrating was when the article ran in The New York Times, Sondheim said, “The New York Times asked me if you could send them this list,” which I did and then they published it! So I kind of felt like they stole our thunder a little bit, but that was the source for it. And I think he in no way intends for it to be a complete list, but it’s certainly an interesting one.
Amanda MacBlane: And what choices were you most surprised by?
Mark Eden Horowitz: There were certainly songs on there that I would not have guessed at. There were some that didn’t surprise me at all. I knew he was a big Arlen fan and most of those were great songs, but some of the funnier, lighter songs I was surprised by, like Cy Coleman’s “Real Live Girl.” It just wasn’t what I would’ve associated that with him.
Amanda MacBlane: You’ve obviously been involved in many aspects of Sondheim’s work. You’re trained as a composer, right?
Mark Eden Horowitz: I was a music minor in college, I was a theatre major and I did write a couple of musicals. I mostly studied musical composition, but I regret to say that now I write very little. I think I wrote the first thing in a long time last year, so I don’t want to pretend I’m a composer, but…
Amanda MacBlane: But you certainly have the background to be able to understand this from a composer’s perspective and I am sure that you’ve looked at Sondheim’s music before.
Mark Eden Horowitz: Oh, constantly!
Amanda MacBlane: And I also know that you were involved in putting together productions of his works before you came to the Library of Congress. So after spending three days with him, what new perspectives did you gain on his work, his shows, his ideas, and how he goes about things?
Mark Eden Horowitz: I think that I always knew that there was far more thought and intellect that went into the work than most people realized, but the thing that surprised me—which is that other side of that, which I really hadn’t expected—was when he talks about the unconscious and the subconscious and how that makes things happen or puts things together. That surprised me. I knew that each of his scores had a unique sound, but the idea had not occurred to me before that, as he puts it, he lives in that one world or that one universe for a year or whatever it takes to write a score and he tries to avoid distractions. And it’s hard for him to go back and revise a show because it’s hard to get back into that world and musical language that he had been living in while he was writing it. I found that fascinating and surprising.
Amanda MacBlane: You mentioned before how a project like this might not work with other musical theatre composers, but you’ve been involved as an archivist for a number of composer collections of the biggest names in American musical theatre. Why does something like this work best with Sondheim, and what other steps have you taken with other composers.
Mark Eden Horowitz: The collection I’m working on now and which I’ve been working on now for a few years is Leonard Bernstein and that probably comes closest to what I’ve seen in Sondheim in that there really are sketches that are theoretical. I don’t know if there’s a better way to put it. For most of the other composers’ music manuscripts I’ve seen, the sketches are mainly melodic with occasional notes about harmony, but with Sondheim what seems very unusual is the amount sketching, the amount of accompaniment figure sketching, the amount of playing with ideas and concepts in the sketching. Lenny’s the only one who sort of seems to come closest to that and the surprising thing is there really isn’t that much of it in him. It’s only in certain works that I really find that there is a lot of sketching and playing with musical ideas. Most of his sketches tend to be fairly melodic based. In one of his ballets that I was just working on, there was just page after page of working with rows and with themes, things that I was surprised to see, that I had not seen much example of before in Bernstein. Most theatre composers don’t seem to think about it as intellectually. Most of the sketching—and in no way to belittle it—is just different.
Amanda MacBlane: I really like the point in the book where Sondheim points out that he’s not just the composer and the lyricist, but he also conceptualizes the entire show and he gets frustrated with lyricists and composers who don’t put the accents on words in the proper places. He is so completely involved in all of these shows. He’s really an auteur, which makes him standout in the American musical theatre tradition…So, looking to the future, do you have any more projects that you would like to work on with Sondheim’s work?
Mark Eden Horowitz: [laughs] Well, I plan to keep up with this whole list and discography. Any encounters that I have with him have always been fascinating and revealing. I am trying and hoping to get related collections, so for instance, we’ve been in discussions with Jonathan Tunick, so that hopefully his papers and manuscripts will come to the library. Actually this summer I did a series of videotaped interviews with him. But they are a different kind, so I don’t think they would work as a book, but I think they will be of interest to people who come to study Tunick, including his relationship with Sondheim. I just hope we continue to do more.
Amanda MacBlane: And of course Sondheim’s not done yet…</p
GOING TO WAR
Friends, colleagues,
Today is another one of those days – which seem to be coming with altogether too much frequency – where we might question the relevance of our art and the subjects discussed here to what goes on in the world.
It seems our most proud historical and cultural foundations are being usurped. In our cultural ecology, artists and teachers have a critical role in ensuring that intellectual diversity is sustained, and that humanistic ideals do not become an endangered species but are sustained as cultural resources for future generations. Artists must serve this function, creating space in the social dialogue where we demonstrate the utter necessity of art to the human spirit and intellectual plurality, at the same time that we understand art as a privilege and a gift. Like William Carlos Williams, “to believe proudly in love as a law and to stand for this clear intellectual belief permanently, so that a form be given to the reality in your own person.”
This forum is perhaps not necessarily where our voices are most needed, but the space should exist here for the voices of individual artists to express what they feel in another age of anxiety.
View From the East: Oblique Writing
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Take a break.
You know you’re in trouble when you sit down to write, ask for some advice, and in reply get the three words above. And it’s even worse when the subject of your piece is the source of the advice—which for me, today, is Brian Eno’s “Oblique Strategies.”
And what are “Oblique Strategies?” A deck of more than 100 cards, devised by Eno and Peter Schmidt, a painter, and sold in limited editions back in the ’70s in a handsome black box. Each card has a black back, and each offers advice on how to do art or any art-like activity. Or anyway that’s my interpretation. You’re stuck doing your work; you pick a card; you take its advice. Eno’s own notions amount more or less to what I said, but are more, well, oblique, as well as more thoughtful and detailed. You can read them on the “Introduction” page of the Oblique Strategies website. Originally the strategies were thoughts both Schmidt and Eno used to break through their normal routine, especially when they were under deadline pressure. They assembled all these thoughts, had them published in a deck of cards, and suggested that you use them either as possibilities to sort through or else as a kind of oracle, as I’ve long done. If you do that, Eno says (in an interview quoted on the website), “The card is trusted even if its appropriateness is quite unclear.”
Which is exactly the delicious dilemma I had when I drew my first card today, from a deck I’ve had since the ’70s. “Take a break.” But I have a deadline! And I’m reluctant to get to work, so the card almost seemed to taunt me.
It provided, though, a fine lesson about life and about how to use these cards.
Remove specifics and convert to ambiguities.
Oops.
I was about to tell a story, about my old friend Linda Sanders, who succeeded me as new music critic for The Village Voice then quickly quit (she didn’t care to be a critic, though she was wonderful), opening the way for Kyle Gann. She started musical life as a violist, and at one point gave a wonderful solo concert, in which she played a John Cage piece. I think the piece was Variations IV, but I’m not sure my memory is right. In any case, the score was simply a transparent plastic sheet with dots on it. You make a map of your performing space and lay the sheet on it. You see where the dots fall and perform something everywhere you find a dot.
Linda gave the concert twice. The first time, she used the Cage piece as intermission. She put toy instruments and noisemakers everywhere the dots were, and encouraged people in the audience to make noises on them. The result was chaos and not an interesting kind. So at her next performance, she started with the Cage. Everywhere she found a dot she stood and read excerpts from books on how to play string instruments. This worked wonderfully. It eased her into the performance, let her gently laugh at any stage fright she might feel, and entertained the audience.
For me it was a lesson on performing Cage. He gives you, in this and many other pieces, no direction about what, specifically, to do. Once you’ve placed the dots, you do anything you want. But that doesn’t mean that everything’s acceptable. You’re thrown back on yourself. What feels like truth to you? That’s what you should look for, and Linda’s work with this Cage piece both illustrates how you move toward it and how Cage helps you. (Because I’m happy with other thoughts I’ve had on performing Cage, I’ll link to my own Village Voice piece, “The Cage Style,” on my own website.)
Linda’s work with Cage also shows how one way to work with Oblique Strategies. My first card said, “Take a break.” I had no time for that. But there were things I have to do, to write this piece, that (mercifully) aren’t writing. I had to find out how someone now can buy the cards, for instance. So I took a break by going on the Web to look that up, using (or so I thought) the card’s suggestion in a most helpful and constructive way, since originally I’d thought I’d do this chore at the end of my work and add the information to the end of the piece.
But now I’d better give the information here. The edition I have has long been out of print, but there’s a new edition, published last year (and much more colorful), that might still be buyable. I also found computer versions of the cards, free to download, for Windows, for the Mac, and for the Palm. Or you can consult the cards right on their website, or at least they claim you can; it didn’t work for me, even after I tried it in two PC browsers, Mozilla and Internet Explorer. A Windows version worked, though you have to install a special file it comes with, VBRUN300.DLL, and it doesn’t tell you how. You put the file in your Windows/System directory (and yes, for those up on arcane computer stuff, this ancient Visual Basic program—identifiable as such by the VBRUN file—works as smooth as cream on Windows XP).
But now (especially with that last parenthesis) I might be taking too long a break. What about the cards? And what about the challenge that last card threw me? I was about to relate a long list of specifics, and I’m afraid I’ve done so. The card said not to do that. Or did it?
Would anybody want it?
That’s the latest card I’ve drawn, always from the physical deck. I’m far more attached to the tangible cards than to the computer versions, though I’ll be glad to have one on my Palm. The Windows version, though, did give me this: Assemble some of the elements in a group, and treat the group. And that’s going to work for me just fine, because I think I need to tell you, right about now, more about what the cards say. I can, or so I think right now, quote some samples of the cards and generalize—or generate some ambiguities—from there.
I’ve found these cards very useful in writing music. One that I think I remember from the ’70s said, more or less, “If you think you’ve got too much of something, do even more of it.” It’s amazing what good advice that is (unless, that is, you’re fatally addicted to moderation). Sometimes something in your work sticks out and seems to be excessive, because it hasn’t found its proper place in what you’re doing. The timid wisdom of moderation might suggest you prune it back, but maybe you’ll have more fun and be both more honest and more convincing if you let your rogue elephant run wild. Maybe then it won’t stick out. It’ll simply be the texture that once it seemed so foreign to.
At this point I could sift through the deck to find this card, which of course my memory (after all these years) could simply have concocted. Or I could read through the code of the computer version (if I still have a program that can do that), looking for the text.
But what fun would that be? Not much, especially when I’m converting those specifics to ambiguities. One ambiguity can be whether this c
ard I love in fact exists. Besides, I’d rather find examples in the spirit of the cards, by browsing the deck at random.
And the first thing I see is the last card as the deck is stacked right now, Be dirty. Which makes me sigh and also laugh. This deck survived a fire, and—amazingly—that last card alone got dirty. It’s very slightly thickened by water from the fire hoses, and from the smoke (perhaps), it’s marked with gray spots:
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But now I’ve just noticed that the card above that is also just a bit discolored. That means I’d better pay attention to it.
Allow an easement (an easement is the abandonment of a stricture).
That might free me from the ban on specifics or rather the injunction to turn them into ambiguities.
But why am I hung up on bans and injunctions? These cards should free me. So here’s another meaning of that second dirty card: The cards are just suggestions, not commands. So here’s another way to turn specifics into ambiguities. These cards can’t tell me—or you, or anybody—how to compose, or make art in other ways. They only ease us away from any rule we think we should believe in—which even could include following these cards.
Would anybody want it?
That again! And what a helpful cue for a summary, and ending…
Would anybody want Oblique Strategies?
I want them. I’ve loved these cards for more than 20 years, and I was thrilled that they survived the fire. Other people seem to want them—the website talks about how rare they are and how buyers (allegedly) bid jillions of dollars to buy them on Ebay. (Reality check: Currently two people have bid around $500 for a deck signed by Brian Eno, and two normal decks have asking prices—with no bids yet—of $59.99 and $69.99). But I can well believe the cards are now collectibles, however obscure. Eno’s famous, and the deck itself had lots of cachet in the new music world back when I bought it.
Would you want these cards? Depends, maybe, on your response to (all these chosen at random):
- What are you really thinking about just now?
- What would your closest friend do?
- Accretion.
- Go outside. Shut the door.
I can only say that I love them—and that they made writing this column ridiculously easy.
It is quite possible (after all).
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(Guarantee: I picked every card I quoted here, except the two dirty ones, completely and utterly at random.)
What can make or break a residency experience? John Duffy
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Three things attracted me to The Mesa:
1. I was offered a fee to come and compose.
2. The Mesa offered a quiet house, car, and weekly stipend for groceries.
3. The Mesa arranged three lectures at local schools and opportunities to rehearse my music with local singers, all of which brought me into communities in and around Zion.
Before my residency, it had never occurred to me to go to an artist colony, as I work at home, being around people was ideal. But something about Utah touched a chord in me. Like angel dust in the air.
At Zion, I found nature of such majestic beauty, of such transforming presence, that my heart rejoiced. My soul took flight, and music and literary writing poured out of me. Much of this, I attribute to a change in landscape from Maine and Manhattan and also to the beauty of Zion, which is beyond possession.
Local people invited me into their homes, their churches, coffee shops, and community centers. I felt like Bach roaming around his hometown. The Mesa board and staff were warm, helpful, but never intrusive.
The mayor of a small evangelical Mormon community granted me a rare invitation to lunch and a Harvest Festival. The idea of a composer being around seemed exciting and an honor wherever I went, though my time and privacy were respected. I was so filled with creative energy and could have stayed up all day and night writing. Each day, I bolted out of bed.
The Mesa is gold, and I imagine countless works will be created there and like the radiant sun moving over Zion’s majestic peaks, travel around the globe. What a magnificent thing… to have a rare colony dedicated to the arts.