Category: Articles

Dean Suzuki Photo by Ryan Suzuki

As the academic year gets underway, it serves as a time of reflection for those who are teaching the next generation of musicians and especially composers. What is it that we (I use the rhetorical “we” being a music historian, not a composer) are to pass on to them? What musical or compositional values do we lay out for them? Regarding composition, it is clear that the tradition has been to focus, in some cases, almost exclusively, on formal considerations, i.e. structure and especially pitch relations.

This mindset and bias is underscored and made manifest in courses which are universally called “music theory,” coupled with classes in musicianship or ear training. What we call music theory is really no such thing. Rather, it is a theory of harmony, of pitch relations. There are dozens and dozens of music theory texts and treatises, but the focus is squarely on pitch relations and nothing else. We have no theories of rhythm, timbre, articulation, dynamics, or even orchestration. Orchestration courses and texts abound, but they are not based on any theoretical foundation, rather according to tradition and prevailing taste. Is there anything inherently wrong with scoring for one trombone as Chopin did (and which he has been reviled for) in one of his piano concertos?

Of course, the teaching, learning, and understanding of the basics of music is foundational and important. We think of the many great composers who studied with master teachers, always learning the ins and outs, the mysteries of musical construction. Arnold Schoenberg analyzed the works of the great masters, tearing apart the note relations in search of the genius behind the music. Nadia Boulanger, whose memory lives in infamy as a harsh task master, put her charges through the paces, often in a brutal and humiliating fashion, as they struggled to learn the rules and finer points of harmony and counterpoint. After suffering through her courses, students such as Aaron Copland, Lou Harrison, Elliott Carter, and Philip Glass had a thorough, even flawless understanding of harmonic procedures that served them very well indeed.

As we all know, the great artists almost always have a firm grasp of the fundamentals. While much of Picasso‘s work looks as though executed with a childish and untrained hand, or the monochromatic, nearly industrial minimalist planes of Ellsworth Kelly seem devoid of technical ability, both artists were highly skilled draftsmen. Technique was not a problem for them and it undoubtedly was of value in the creation of their work. However, neither was it the focus of their work.

On the other hand, Schoenberg declared to his student John Cage the following: “In order to write music you must have a feeling for harmony.” Cage told his teacher that he had no feeling for harmony. In response, Schoenberg warned that a failure to learn and embrace harmony would set up a musical roadblock, a virtual wall through which he would never be able pass. Cage retorted, “In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall.” Of course, Cage did not “devote his life to beating his head against the wall.” He simply went around the “wall.” Harmony remained of no interest and no use to Cage.

Cage’s concept of the creation of music was not bound by tradition and rules. Morton Feldman recalls his first meeting with Cage:

I brought John a string quartet. He looked at it a long time and then said, “How did you make this? I thought of my constant quarrels with Wolpe and also that, just a week before, after showing a composition of mine to Milton Babbitt and answering his questions as intelligently as I could, he said to me, “Morton, I don’t understand a word you’re saying.” And so, in a very weak voice, I answered John, “I don’t know how I made it.” The response to this was startling. John jumped up and down and, with a kind of high monkey squeal, screeched, “Isn’t that marvelous. Isn’t that wonderful. It’s so beautiful, and he doesn’t know how he made it.” Quite frankly, I sometimes wonder how my music would have turned out if John had not given me those early permissions to have confidence in my instincts.

We teach our students, but do we give them permission, indeed, do we encourage them to follow their muse? Or do we shuttle them in the direction of our own preferences and biases? We teach them about techniques, the craft of composition, but do we teach them about the art of music making? Perhaps we would do well to consider this morsel by Feldman: “Yes, remember, my definition of skill is to do exactly what you want.” Carl Ruggles may have had a more refined or extrapolated version of Feldman’s maxim. After pounding out a chord which he was considering for use in one of his compositions over and over for more than an hour, he replied to Henry Cowell‘s inquiry as to what he was doing:

“I’m trying this damned chord to see whether it still sounds superb after so many hearings.” “Oh,” I [Cowell] said tritely, “time will surely tell whether the chord has lasting value.” “The hell with time!” Carl replied. “I’ll give this chord the test of time right now. If I find I still like it after trying it over several thousand times, it’ll stand the test of time, all right!”

Thus, Ruggles brought together his skills as a composer, followed his instincts, and finally evaluated the product. Technique was not the standard, rather it was art which set the standard and technique was a means of achieving his goal.

In addition to teaching the fundamentals of music to our students, we must also give them license to discover their artistic muse, rather than stifle and suffocate it under the iron fist of the rules and regulations of proper voice leading, pitch relations, or some other mechanical process of relating one note to the next. In fact, as Claudio Monteverdi concluded and subsequently argued so well in his polemical exchange with Artusi, the rules of yesterday may not apply to the aesthetics of today. We cannot and must not judge new work according to the criteria and values of older work, however recent.

Until very recently, I had not seen music by Cage included in any music history score or recorded anthology aimed at music majors. And even then, it was limited to his prepared piano work. It is easy enough to describe the prepared piano, reducing Cage to mere gimmickry. Yet a quandary remains: how and why would a teacher pass along the concept and me
aning behind chance operations to his/her student? In reality, the question might properly be, how can we not teach chance operations? Is composition a form of math or a form of art? Should not ideas about the meaning of music and art be at least broached by the instructor?

Composition is not merely a process of assembling a series of formulae, no matter how sophisticated, complex, and elegant. There is more to creating music than gaining a command of musical syntax. Syntax may be a means to an end, but end is the semantics of music, its content, its meaning. Just as we all know that virtuosity and chops are no substitute for insightful interpretation in the making of great music in performance, so too is music more than its syntax. Too often, somehow, composers, teachers, and students confuse musical syntax with musical semantics.

If Cage was correct and the purpose of music is to (1) quiet and sober the mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influences and (2) imitate nature in her operation, why then all the fuss over technique, or better, why not more fuss over the art of music?

Laurie Spiegel Photo by Joel Chadabe, courtesy Laurie Spiegel

Certainly the two media coexist extremely well, because they are complementary in many aspects of compositional process, realized result, socio-economics of availability, presentation venue, etc.

If you have an orchestra, why would you need electronic sound sources? To do whatever an orchestra can’t, because by now they are cheaply available to all, or because you want to work on and interact with actual sound the way a painter or writer does on the final work rather than writing a complicated set of instructions in a limited imperfect descriptive language, or to explore sounds unheard.

If you have electronic sounds, why would you need an orchestra? For love of these sounds, to be part of a great tradition, to do music as part of a social framework instead of alone, to attain the professional “legitimization,” or because of the subtlety and refinement that only centuries of evolution of an artistic medium can produce.

The few times I’ve tried to combine the two media, I have not personally found any aesthetic benefits not more easily attained within either medium alone, but that is strictly a subjective experience. For other composers there may well be very good reason to put these media together.

Just as some people work best in words without music, others in music without words, and others are at their best combining text and music, in the case of the combination of acoustic and electronic sounds, as in most other aspects of art, the best work is that which is entirely true to the character, needs, and visions of the unique individual composing it. In every way that the variety of music means can be increased, there exists more opportunity for the individualistic and personal to be accommodated and for a wider range of inner experiences to be explored, authentically expressed and communicated.

Alvin Lucier Photo by Amanda Lucier

Composers have traditionally mixed electronic sounds with instrumental ones to extend the range of timbres and textures available to them and to dramatize the differences between the “human” and the “technological.” Often the sounds of one seem to grow out of the other, causing a confusion of identities which creates intense listening moments for the audience. Varèse does this in Deserts by interweaving recorded material with live instrumental sections. In Boulez‘s Répons, computers transform the live sounds in real time.

I have written two orchestral works, which include pure (sine) wave sweeps (glissandi) against which players sustain long tones creating audible beats. In Crossings (1982-84) a single pure wave sweeps up through the entire range of the orchestra at a constant rate of speed. The players sound tones across the rising wave, producing beating patterns which slow down and speed up as the wave approaches, reaches unison with and passes beyond the fixed instrumental pitches. In Ovals (2001) two waves “draw” an oval shape over the course of 18 minutes. The strings, divided into two sections, outline a similar oval at a 3-minute time lag. In each work the interaction between the electronic and acoustic sounds is physical; it causes the beating. The rate of speed of the sweeps determines the tempo, as well as the rhythms of the works. The shapes of the sweeps are structural; they outline the forms.

Joshua Cohen Photo courtesy Joshua Cohen

To intermingle the orchestra with electronic sound or not to intermingle is not the question. At least not the question that interests me. The discussion may better be framed in the context of compositional choices rather than aesthetic territory.

Any composition is the result of choices made; at any level of involvement ranging from improvisational writing through total integral serialism. A choice implies an evaluative effort — a weighing of factors where the willingness of the evaluator to ask questions of compositional integrity engages a process as much as it seeks an answer. This process of compositional inquiry and the integrity implicit within it anticipates that anything ìbelongsî together so long as the decision to unify/destroy by comparison and contrast is one that is wholly informed by the compositional process — by the material itself — and not by a prefabricated decision made exterior to the musical discourse — namely a decision informed by fashion or novelty.

All music, all sound, begs treatment. It is our job, as composers, to provide that context. Wild dogs urinate to mark their territory — we don’t have to. We should kennel our dogmatic tendencies.

Deborah Borda Photo by Michael Childers, courtesy Los Angeles Philharmonic

There is no question that the Internet, electronic manipulation of orchestral sound, and multimedia presentation are issues that symphony orchestras must explore. At the LA Philharmonic, we have experimented with sophisticated electronic sound design in working with John Adams, we have added film and other visual elements to our recent Stravinsky festival concerts, and we have collaborated with video artist Bill Viola. And of course, the question of online delivery of our musical content is an issue we are all trying to navigate. However, for each step taken, I always ask the question, ‘Will this make for a better musical experience? Are we going to enhance that experience without compromising the core of what we do?’ The orchestra and the music it makes must remain at the heart of these experiments; otherwise, we are just using technology for its own sake. As long as we keep to this principle, I think that the use of technology in conjunction with a symphony orchestra can indeed create new ways for composers to create works of unpredictable sonoroties, structure, and drive.

Frank J. Oteri Photo by Melissa Richard

For years, I’ve entertained a fetish for being in spaces that took me away from the present day: walking through ancient ruins like Macchu Picchu in Peru or Volubilis in Morocco, sleeping in Colonial B&Bs in the Northeast or Antebellum homes in the Deep South, or even drinking in 19th-century Manhattan saloons where the encroachment of things like television sets and cell phones seem tantamount to desecration. Yet escapism into the past has never been what has drawn me to music and has never been my experience in the concert hall, even when hearing an orchestra.

It has so often been claimed by both the orchestra’s defenders as well as its detractors that the overriding purpose of an orchestra is to function as a repertory company, curating the “great works of the orchestral literature” to make them available to present and future generations. But knowing something about the history of the orchestra has always made such a viewpoint somewhat suspect to me.

For starters, the orchestra as we know it today is really not a very old institution. While large groups of musicians playing together on heterogenous groups of instruments have been a basic social enterprise in cultures throughout the world for thousands of years, what most people think of as an “orchestra” is much more specific and much more recent. The modern symphony orchestra evolved out of a central European tradition that only goes back to the 17th century, if that. The instruments most standard orchestras play, even when performing music of the 18th century, kept evolving through the orchestra’s short history and were not in fact standardized until late into the 19th century. And so did the repertoire.

But then, sometime in the 20th century, a fundamental shift occurred. New instruments stopped being added to the orchestra, instruments in the orchestra stopped evolving, and new repertoire created for orchestras, though more plentiful than that of any other century, was programmed less and less frequently. The orchestra was marketed as representative of the high culture toward which we should aspire. (Of course, the problem with the concept of aspiration is that it implies never actually achieving.)

This latter day interpretation of the role of the orchestra, however, not only contradicts what an orchestra was historically but does a disservice to the historical repertoire it attempts to serve. If the entire history of orchestral literature prior to the late 19th century is presented through the filter of what the late-19th-century orchestra was, how does that help us to better understand the music of the 18th century, or even the early 19th century. And if, in fact, the point is not to understand the music of those times on its own terms, but rather to make the music of the past meaningful for the present, then why present it with instruments of the past? Why not continue to evolve both the instruments and the repertoire to reflect the present?

Well, in fact, not only did the repertoire for the orchestra receive its greatest bounty in the past century, but instruments continued to evolve and these further evolved instruments play an important role in much of this repertoire. And, as a majority of the evolutions of the 20th century were in the realm of electronics, so too have they been in music.

This October, the American Composers Orchestra embarks on a bold endeavor, a decade-long Orchestra Tech initiative that will involve concerts, symposia, and long-range strategic planning. In collaboration with the ACO, we present a special issue of NewMusicBox devoted to the intersection of the orchestra and technology. We present a heated discussion between technology guru Ray Kurzweil, composer Tod Machover, and Gil Rose, Music Director of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project. Elliott Schwartz reveals the whole secret history of electronic incursions into the orchestra over the past 100 some odd years, and we’ve supplemented that with a lengthy list of repertoire to explore. We’ve asked composers Alvin Lucier and Laurie Spiegel as well as Sequenza21 contributing editor Joshua Cohen and L.A. Philharmonic Executive Director Deborah Borda to speak about the feasibility and desirability of the words of orchestra and electronics coming together, and we ask you to share your thoughts on the positive and negative impact of such a union.

In addition, this month’s NewMusicBox includes profiles of Golan Levin, composer of a recently premiered work for a huge ensemble of cell phones (hopefully never to be performed in a 19th-century Manhattan saloon!), and Mark Adamo, who has gone back to Ancient Greece to find the inspiration for his latest opera. Dean Suzuki ponders what composer training should be, and Greg Sandow examines the role that music can have in the wake of the horrible tragedies of September 11th. We also offer audio shapshots of 27 new recordings as well as information about even more concerts featuring American repertoire (both technology-infused and not) all over the map.

Of course, thanks to technology, this map gets smaller and smaller as we progress further into the 21st century, and hopefully continue to find the common ground between Macchu Picchu, Volubilis, Vermont, and Charleston in our ever-shifting musical landscape.

What is “American” classical music? For one thing, I suppose you had to be born in America to write it? Well, what if you were born in another country, moved here and became an American? O.K., let’s say you were born in the U.S. What makes your music distinctly “American”? Perhaps, the lines are so blurred that it isn’t possible to tell anymore. Someone said to me that Europeans try to write jazz elements into their music but they don’t do it well because they weren’t born here. Most of us have listened to and studied European composers and theory as part of our education to become composers/musicians. Is there a way to sort out what is American from what isn’t? Is the world of today’s classical music becoming homogenized?