Category: Articles

When Everything Utterly Sucks

Posted on December 5, 2017 by - Articles, Commentary, NewMusicBox

Explore all the posts from NewMusicBox’s 5-Day Creative Productivity Challenge here.

Somewhere in the homestretch of writing a new composition, I inevitably become convinced that the entire piece is garbage. By now, when I start a new piece, I know that this Day of Utter Suckitude is coming; it happens no matter how much I’m loving the piece, or how smoothly the writing has gone thus far. I become convinced—temporarily, falsely—that not only is there nothing redeemable about this awful piece, but that composing itself is meaningless, I’ve committed myself to a worthless career, and I’m a bad composer. I become briefly convinced that perhaps I should seek out another job, one where at least I’d be getting free health insurance.

I know exactly how ridiculous this all sounds written out, but that doesn’t help me reason it away in the moment. This feeling usually lasts 24 hours, or at most a couple of days. Each time, it feels like I’ll never escape

The Day of Utter Suckitude is different from the small, nagging instinct that a section of music would be better if I re-wrote it. That voice can be trusted. You can recognize the Day of Utter Suckitude because it encompasses an entire piece, finds nothing good about any of your work, and sends you into an anxious tailspin. Sometimes the Day of Utter Suckitude manifests so suddenly it gives you composing whiplash; you’ll wonder how a piece that seemed brilliant a week ago has become something you’re now certain you should destroy as quickly as possible.

“I’m pretty sure this piece is my last commission ever, because who would ask me to write anything else after hearing this garbage?”

During the Day(s) of Utter Suckitude, someone you know will ask how your writing is going. Because you have chosen this career—you got yourself into this mess—you may not respond truthfully. You’ll want to say: “Terribly! It’s going terribly. The piece sucks, and I’m pretty sure that everything I do is devoid of meaning.” You’ll want to say: “I’m pretty sure this piece is my last commission ever, because who would ask me to write anything else after hearing this garbage?” You’ll wonder if this is the curse that comes with having your dream career: that for a few days during the creation of each new piece, you’ll loathe everything about your work. You don’t feel as if you can confess any of this to another person, however, unless you’re talking to another composer who is also a very good friend, so you grit your teeth in response. You say something like, “It’s… going. It’s fine.”

Even writing this essay, I can feel it coming; tomorrow, when I re-read the current draft, I will decide that it, too, is the worst thing I’ve ever written. I know that later, by draft four, I’ll have moved past that feeling; I’ll have revised a great deal, and it’ll feel like it belongs to me again. This particular brand of panic always passes, and the piece pulls through every time. When I’m done, it may not be my favorite thing I’ve ever written, but I’ll have fallen back in love with it.

Sometimes when I’m stuck in the worst part of my composing process, I think about the start of Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion ride. You enter a dark room and a door slides shut behind you. As the room lowers—it’s secretly an elevator—a narrator explains that the room has no windows or doors, which “offers you this chilling challenge: to find a way out!” Of course, he says, “there’s always my way.” You look up to discover that the ghostly narrator has hanged himself from the ceiling rafters—dark for a children’s ride, no?—but then a hidden side door opens, and you’re free to move onto the actual ride itself.

Give yourself a moment and then search for a solution, and that door you couldn’t see at first, a way back into the piece, a way to move forward, appears every time.

This is the goal when we’re stuck: to find a way out. Even if I’ve convinced myself that I write bad music and no matter how much I temporarily loathe whatever I’m working on, that hidden door always opens. You don’t need extreme measures, either. You give yourself a moment and then search for a solution, and that door you couldn’t see at first, a way back into the piece, a way to move forward, appears every time.

Each Day of Utter Suckitude is like anxiety: it mimics the feelings of actual physical pain and actual disaster, but it isn’t any of these. It can’t be solved, at least not immediately, by pushing yourself harder. Like anxiety, it may not have a permanent antidote and there may be no quick-fix solution. The only way out is, usually, to acknowledge the feeling, to greet it like an old acquaintance you don’t particularly like—“Hello, good to see you, but now I have to excuse myself”—and then to step away.

Step away from the desk

Step away from the desk
Photo by Taduuda

Right now, I’m in the thick of this with a piece I’m writing. I have the sensation that what I’m working on is not very good, is in fact maybe the worst thing I’ve ever written. I know that after I’ve fleshed it out and revised the orchestration, after I’ve edited it multiple times, I’ll have changed my mind. The first rehearsal I attend will be like greeting an old friend I actually like: I’ll see all of its flaws, sure, but I’ll also love it in a way that can’t be erased.

But here, right now, I hate this piece with all of my being, and as usual, that makes me wonder if perhaps I’m very bad at writing music. I have to remind myself that this is the process. In my non-composing life, too, I experience anxiety, but I’ve learned to remind myself that I am in anxiety when it happens. It is temporary; it will pass. Here, writing this piece, I am not the process; I am in the process, I am passing through it, and it is passing through me.

I am not the process; I am in the process, I am passing through it, and it is passing through me.

Instead of letting “bad” days derail the composing process altogether, I’m learning to recognize when to push through and when to be gentle with myself and let the piece rest. Whether I push myself to keep composing or decide to take a break, my process is not disrupted. One bad day won’t derail the process; it is the process, and a single bad day or even a bad week of composing doesn’t ultimately have any bearing on how good a finished piece will be.

Embracing a routine where you hate your own work seems a little ridiculous. You may want a book on getting rid of the doubt entirely, a list of “10 Ways to Be Productive” that leaves no room for days where you loathe what you’re writing. You may reason that if you just optimize your time, determine an ideal morning schedule, and make a really effective to-do list, you should be able to skip over the stage where it feels like everything you write is wrong.

But composing, or any artistic pursuit, is a practice. In this kind of practice, as any musician knows, there is a stage where you’re confronted with your own inadequacy, followed by a stage where you meet your own faults without resistance. That’s the sweet spot, and that’s where you begin to improve. In the practice of composing, that brief, late-game feeling that everything we’ve written is garbage might have a purpose after all. It can lead us to finish the piece strong, to shore up its weak spots and make our way confidently to the double bar.

So much of our instinct when we’re stuck is to want to push through, to work through the doubt as fast as possible, to try to outrun it. But once you’ve learned your process, you’ll know what’s coming. You’ll know when to push through and when to give a piece 12 to 24 hours to marinate on its own before you return to it. I can’t drag you out of the really bad days with good advice. I can only tell you to trust your process, even—especially—when the process feels like doubt, like failure. This, too, is part of the process, but you know what comes next. You know what follows feels like falling back in love. You know that if you wait here just a moment longer, you’ll always find a way out.

Creative Productivity Challenge Dec 4-8, 2017

Posted on December 4, 2017 by - Articles, NewMusicBox

How is it that some composers and performers are simply more productive than others? Why are some artists able to get so much more done? Is it a matter of genes? Of motivation or confidence? Of how our brains are wired?

We all grew up with stories and examples of wildly prolific artists—Mozart, Picasso, Joyce Carol Oates. What’s worse, interviews with artists tend to glamorize the first flash of inspiration and the finished masterpiece, avoiding the often protracted slog in between: the setbacks, self-doubt, wheel spinning, wrong turns, and all the attempts to give up.

When our work is stalled, we may blame it on our lack of time and support, our distractions, negative self-talk, perfectionism, procrastination, and fear. (Or at least I do.)

And it’s easy to imagine that other artists have all this figured out and that for them, creative work is a joy and ideas and solutions come easily. While this may be the case for some lucky bastards, all too often, artists struggle alone and isolated.

Creative productivity is a topic that’s often avoided because it’s connected to other sensitive mysteries such as talent, inspiration, self-esteem, and potential. Some folks don’t want to look too closely at their creative work habits for fear this will bring up the very demons they turned to music in the first place to avoid. One way or another, we all have demons that need to be faced.

This week, we’re courageously diving into the deep end to examine how artists get creative work done, despite inner critics, day jobs, and low self-esteem.

This week is your opportunity to explore strategies to help you work at your best and access the flow state more often. We’ll be focusing on ways to organize ourselves, our time, and our ideas to make more room for the muse to show up. We’ll look at how we tap into inspiration and how we get past what Steven Pressfield terms Resistance, the force that can prevent us from realizing our potential.

News flash: there’s no magic bullet, no “one size fits all” solution. But there are tools and resources and we’ll be sharing them—along with stories to illustrate our common struggles and triumphs.

During NewMusicBox’s Creative Productivity Theme Week, join us for a special 5-day challenge to help you boost your artistic output, get more done, and make the new year your best yet. A host of writers are contributing posts this week and we’ll have a daily FB live discussion (12 noon ET, 9 am PT) to focus on key challenges and the strategies many artists have used to overcome them.

We’ll be looking at mindsets, focus, and work habits that help boost productivity, creativity, and confidence. But the conversation needs YOU—your participation. We’re crowd sourcing a creative productivity toolbox so tune in and speak up! Let’s help each other as a community of creatives.

As we head into a new year, this is an ideal time to get real about the obstacles that have held us back. It’s time to re-tool. Let’s set ourselves up to make 2018 a year of creative breakthroughs.

Let’s get our creative productivity on!

As in our previous theme week iterations—focused on education, mental health, creativity, and music and money—we’ll be exploring broadly.

We hope you and lots of others will get involved in Creative Productivity week: reading, thinking, commenting, sharing, discussing.

New posts and video coming every day this week! Check back here for the full index.

Here’s A Plan

Posted on November 30, 2017 by - Articles, Columns, NewMusicBox

Over the course of my first three essays this month, I’ve offered my perspective on our new music enterprise during a tumultuous period that has pushed me to ask some pretty fundamental questions. How do we keep developing our work in the face of challenging circumstances? What kind of career options can we hope to have upon reaching mid-career? And what future is there for a composer whose drive for independence keeps his or her work outside the mainstream, institutional systems of support? It certainly is a puzzle, and this process of writing and sharing has helped me start putting some of my pieces together. In this fourth and final essay, I will try to sketch out some possible paths for continuing, and even renewing, a rewarding artistic practice for this next phase of life.

“Music is under threat, and any opportunity we have to fight back is an opportunity well worth pursuing.”

A couple of weeks ago I asked a friend, who is a jazz critic, for some advice. I was considering taking on a substantial writing project that paid almost nothing and seemed only tangentially related to the rest of my musical life. I had in fact pitched this project, but I had my doubts: Why would I want to spend hours writing a lengthy piece about a kind of music I am not directly involved with, for little to no compensation? What would I stand to gain? His response was illuminating, and I think it speaks to the conditions under which many of us, myself included, continue to labor as composers of new music. Here was the jazz critic’s response: “We are in a battle! Music is under threat, and any opportunity we have to fight back, to promote the good stuff that’s happening, is an opportunity well worth pursuing.”

Suffice it to say that I accepted the assignment, just as I continue to accept the self-assigned task of composing my own “new music” through good times and bad. With or without a proper career or support system, we must go on. The health of our culture depends on it. Among the many useful items of insight and advice to be found in Lou Harrison’s Music Primer, which the composer wrote in 1970 is this:  “As one American foundation report expressed the matter, the composer himself subsidizes the art of music. It is only common sense then for the composer to find out for himself exactly how much he can afford.” Like it or not, for many of us this observation is as true today as it was in 1970. And it would seem that, given the increasing downward mobility of the majority of our population, since at least 1970, we are able to afford less and less. What can we do?

While we can’t bring back the cheap rent, abundant loft spaces, and free time that helped us to form our own independent ensembles, we do have the internet. One of the most compelling and timely music projects to have crossed my path in recent years is composer Eve Beglarian’s A Book of Days. Though she began the project in 2001 as a kind of practice through creating a piece for each day of the year, over the last two years she has been transmitting the diverse works in this collection via email and the web to friends and subscribers. Some of the works are short, some are long. Some are electronic, others are acoustic, and some include video and imagery. While her style and approach may not appeal to everyone, the format and transmission of her work in this way seems to me an excellent, and economical, example of effectively using the tools of our time to both shape a compositional practice and transmit it to an audience. There are many other creative and compelling uses of the internet that can help serve new music, and this must continue to be a point of focus.

We have it within us to adapt and invent in miraculous ways.

Another recent project that suggests an alternative model is Craig Shepard’s On Foot. Upon moving to New York and quickly confronting the twin obstacles of lack of workspace and lack of free time, the composer came up with a novel solution. Recognizing that he spent a good deal of time every day commuting to and from work, he resolved to walk to and from work each day, thereby creating three hours of usable creative time to compose. It worked, and this routine eventually grew into a practice that formed the basis of the larger project known as On Foot that included outdoor public performances, lectures and multimedia presentations, and the publication of a book and CD. In this way, Craig responded to his circumstances and found a productive way to continue his work, despite the obstacles.

What these two examples suggest above all, is that we have it within us to adapt and invent in miraculous ways. This doesn’t mean we can’t continue to write and present according to traditional models. In fact we probably have more accomplished performers to potentially work with today than ever before. But increasingly, the expense and initiative of a major composition falls directly to the composer, who must figure out “exactly how much he can afford.” Here again we have the internet to help, with all of the fundraising tools it offers. While you didn’t learn this in music school, you can learn to be your own fundraiser, and succeed. You should try, and you should support others who use these tools. I know in the beginning of this new era I found it difficult to accept that all my friends wanted my money to help make their concert happen. But gradually I have come to accept that I must help, however I can. We are in a battle and we need to support one other more than ever. Next time you get a Kickstarter email from a colleague, pitch in a few bucks. It might make all the difference, and with luck, that support will return to you when you need it.

Music is who we are, and we must keep fighting for our right to create it.

In sum, invent! Music is who we are, and we must keep fighting for our right to create it. For my own part, I am beginning to find my way towards a new musical practice that I hope will sustain me into middle age. It’s a mix of new technologies and old ways, and is the product of a lot of listening and writing and talking about music. It’s not exactly what I imagined when I was a young composition student, and it may not be what you would call a career, but it’s my music and gives my life meaning, and right now, I can afford it.

On Big Questions of Creativity and Intention

Posted on November 28, 2017 by - Analysis, Articles, NewMusicBox

or: How I learned to stop worrying and love Zuckerberg’s machine.

As with other areas in the many realms of public discourse these days, there are times when, for me, taking a gander at the old quotidian chit-chat stream on Facebook has just become unbearable.  It’s OutrageBook in these trying times, or LookAtMeWinningBook, which it’s now been for years, with a cast of players who are more or less successful in navigating the subtle side of the #winning game that varies depending on your own feed.  Once in a while, still, it’s DesperationBook, with an alarming call for help nestled in there after LookAtWhatBabyFedPuppyBook posts (that might just be my very helpful personal algorithms at work, knowing what I will definitely click on), but we’re in an era of savvy self-marketers who are constantly improving our posts Content™ and protecting our online fake persona Brand™.  Facebook is not for musings on self-harm (or even, yes, suicide, back in the day) anymore. Now we know better, somehow: that’s just not what our friends? Audience™ wants to see.

Too cynical?  Sure it is.  Also it isn’t really the point of this missive.  We each have our own way with each of these soc med platforms. Twitter has turned into Land Of Dark Thoughts Quickly Typed in recent months, for example, although I don’t deny the geniuses in our midst. But it has seemed that for the entire 2010s thus far, Facebook has been a place for composers and co. (whether to chat, laugh, share work, share opportunities, discuss musical issues, discuss politics, fight like hell) to come together.  The same is true for actors, string players, academics, doctors, and bankers, to some extent, I’m assuming.  But for composers, or for the several hundred spread over six continents whom I’m FBfriends with, at any rate, it has functioned as one of the relevant gathering places for those of us who couldn’t make it to the show last night. Our lot, as a rule, doesn’t congregate.  The quartet or troupe or surgery team needs to be in the room, together.  We work best alone, no matter what TV comedy writers have to say about the creative process, and we know that from years of trying to write with a hangover.  We don’t, en masse, otherwise come together.  Maybe this place is our water cooler.

For composers, Facebook has functioned as one of the relevant gathering places for those of us who couldn’t make it to the show last night.

For me personally, I can safely * though not proudly * say that a day going by without me checking FB has been a rarity in the last five years.  I’m a freelancer who works from home, and so in that time, my days of not leaving the house or speaking to another person (esp. while in deadline/work-trance mode) have outnumbered my no-social-media days by the dozens or hundreds.  I say, without too much embarrassment, that most of my hours are spent in solitude, never more so than in the past few years since I’ve moved to a new city.  I go on Facebook and the like to dial in.  I very much suspect that I’m not the only professional scribbler to do so.   Even so, this recent sour mood at the virtual party felt like just too much, so several weeks ago and a bit on a whim, I quit, cold-turkey style, for a full seven days.  Apps off phone, bookmarks flicked away.  I realized what an incredible habit I’d acquired, but also that after three days, I felt just fine about what I didn’t know about everyone else.  I missed #metoo and #notallmen entirely.

A lower case f (the Facebook logo) surrounded by a collection of pills and tablets.

But what to do when it was time to log back in?  I headed straight for one of my old personal standbys, SnarkBook, announcing that I was back and did you miss me and that I was so happy not to have missed anything!  Since then, I’ve not reloaded apps or pages so as to make them easy to get to, and have remained pleased with my Newly Distant Daddy involvement.  But on day two, without really giving it too much thought, I went to an old trope in terms of my posts:

A screenshot of a Facebook Post by Sean Shepherd from October 25, 2017 at 5:25pm. The full text of the post is printed directly below in the body of the article.

Here’s a composer question for composers:

Looking back on all of your work, and trying to be objective about it*, do you feel that the pieces that had some special emotional significance to you while you were writing them resulted in (objectively*) better music?

Are the ones we want to be the best really the best?

*understood as probably not possible

I find that the “composer question for composers” post pops up every few days, somewhere on my feed, although sometimes in statement form.  Generally, it’s coming from a fairly personal place for the author, although some like to rouse the rabble and say something #controversial once in a while. Although as I say, I read a lot of outrage from people who appear to agree with each other these days, so the “Beethoven(/Brahms/Mahler/Boulez) sucks” comments, being too hot to touch (even if they are about dead people who really can’t hear them) have been on the dwindle.  Instead, they range from shoptalk to the downright philosophical in terms of content (the threads that veer into style can turn into 500-comment monsoons and are just downright poisonous. Sad!).  My occasional forays into the genre seem no different.  Whether off the top of the noggin (“Just heard Copland Dickinson Songs – still genius! I’d forgotten. Had you?” or a musi-business bone-to-pick thing), or a strongly worded, fiercely grandstanding COMPOSED POST about gender and programming, I realize: Okay, yes I do want to talk about this stuff sometimes.   And whenever that seems apparent, from anyone, it seems like the group is eager to jump in.

I found the response to my composer question for composers, after a week away from AngryBook, to be unexpectedly delightful.  In addition to the many composers, those who could relate—writers, performers, and others—also joined in, almost immediately.  I asked and ran—never really offering my own thoughts—and returned after some time only find a whole world of perspective.  Over the next 24 hours, there were more than 50 comments, from the casual “Nope” to the poetic, with sprinkles of the typical self-congratulation and snark we can surely expect from any bunch of composers so gathered.  Yet, it has also dawned on me: never have I been in a seminar or lecture room where so many would speak so freely.

Never have I been in a seminar or lecture room where so many would speak so freely.

This was especially interesting to me in this case, given my hasty choice and inclusion of several words that I know very well will shut a room full of composers right up.  Words like “objective,” “best,” and “emotional” are hot, hot words amongst us, a group that would disagree as to their meaning before even getting into their usage.  Had I really formulated a Serious Question for Serious Thought And Conversation, I would have likely afforded myself the time to, well, basically dodge the question.   Aye!—there’s the rub.  Facebook isn’t the place for formal questions and stilted answers, both designed to impress our colleagues (and besides, I’m well out of grad school. * taps mic *  Is this thing on?). These words were about me—me, a composer.  Hey, you, a composer, what are your thoughts?  And hi, it’s your old pal Sean. Use all the dangerous words you want; it’s only Facebook.  Let’s communicate, right here in public.

A tasseled graduation cap atop a blue box containing a white lower case f (the Facebook logo).

“Best” in music is a danger word.  My conservatory education, which at times consisted of preposterously idiotic nuggets—such as “Brahms is the best and also Tchaikovsky is not the best”—presented as some kind of acceptable canonic knowledge, is a constant reminder for me of danger words like best.  Six minutes after my post, John Glover, who I’ve known since he was 18 and I not too much older, was on to me.  “Asking to make the ‘best’ is usually a recipe for disaster. The only thing I find consistently helpful is maintaining a feeling of softness and curiosity.”  Andrew McManus soon sought further clarification: “Do you really mean ‘the best’ piece, or ‘the most successful at accomplishing the goals of that particular work’?”

It occurred to me: yes, “best” is a dangerous word, and I don’t often use it when talking about other’s work.  (Is Daphnis Ravel’s best work? Yes. Is Gaspard Ravel’s best work? Yes. Useless, even to throw opinions around with.) But also: yes, I most definitely mean “best” when I’m talking about my own.  I have a best piece (perhaps, but not necessarily, my most significant piece), and that is how I choose to think about it.  I’m thoroughly aware that within my own body of work, I can point to “good” and “bad” moments as I choose to see them, and for the sake of my work, I most certainly apply scrutiny and criticism to everything I make.   I do let it bog me down, I do wish I could be better at the job, and I most certainly wish my best was better—I’m an optimist in the hope that my best does in fact get better.  It’s an important part of my daily working process—making “good” work to feel good about the work I make.  But I’m also old enough to see that we eventually just become more aware of our own limitations.  And yet I hear John’s message and Andrew’s context loud and clear—a little softness and curiosity could go well with all that awareness.

Predictably, though, throughout the discussion, the hotter, deeper buzzword-topic—that big one—was emotion.  Again, my minds drifts back toward my education—music and emotion; emotion and music—this could get out of hand so very quickly!  I also think of the 15 years that I sat in seminar rooms with mostly straight white men and all of my years of weekly lessons with teachers who were nearly all straight white men, and how comfortable I felt in discussing my emotional world and its connections to my attempted artmaking.  Which is to say: I was not.  Usually they, also, were not.  But I was lucky with those men. Once in while we were able to open up, and I could talk about what I was really talking about. Thank god for that.  But much more often there were other things that were easier to discuss—for Xenakis, design, for Messiaen, harmony, etc. Talking about the Greek War of Independence or a deeply held Catholicism could get messy and speculative and VERY not-objective.  Let’s look at the notes!

For a performer, dealing with emotion is an intrinsic part of one’s education. On stage, emotion will not be denied.  We each have seen all manner of trajectory in front of our eyes—from good to great to sublime, from bad to worse, general lethargy, general mania—guided simply by responding to a performer’s emotional state in live performance.  Their training in channeling the energy for the better begins as soon as they pick up a bow.  But as a general topic of interest to composers, it’s one of the (many) uncomfortable subjects we, in general, choose to leave off the syllabus.  As a result, when a composer says they are not emotionally connected to the work they make, I tend to believe them.  Emotion is for others. We’ve just been diligently putting notes on a page, by ourselves, for months. Please, anyone else, emote away!  With passion, please!

Emotion is one of the (many) uncomfortable subjects composers, in general, choose to leave off the syllabus.

On the question of a personal emotional connection to the music during composition, there were great guns in the conversation threads throughout, first from Dalit Warshaw: “I find that one’s perspective toward one’s music is constantly in flux, and that—when revisited after a respite of (even) years—new wisdoms, about one’s self, the nature of one’s writing, continually emerge… Re your question: I’ve wondered the same thing, and do tend to think it may be the case, perhaps because, when deeply in touch with one’s emotions, one is perhaps also more in touch with one’s creative intuition and inner freedom. The trick, I think, is to be like a Method actor in finding the emotional sincerity in every work one writes.”  Alan Fletcher agrees with the idea of flux over time, writing “very often the pieces I doubted most in composition reveal themselves to me as better than I thought—not always, though. And pieces I am enthusiastic about during composition come to seem too obvious, or something…. I’m not talking about the motivation for the work, just the impression I have of how well it’s going. But I do find a correlation with works written from a deep emotional impulse and works that end up satisfying me in the end.”

Reynold Tharp is acutely aware of this turbulent connection.  “My best pieces are the ones in which I had some kind of strong emotional engagement with the compositional process and the desired affective or expressive character,” he says.  “Also often they’re the pieces during which I oscillate the most between thinking they’re great and thinking they’re awful as I’m working on them. If I don’t have an emotional connection with the idea of the piece or what I feel I can do within the limits of the project or medium, it will almost always end up being a weaker piece. Of course, even the more strongly felt pieces all have their flaws too…”  John Mackey has found his balance by looking outward, writing, “I think my best two pieces are the two that I wrote about loss—but not my own. Putting myself into an empathetic place about somebody else’s loss gave me just enough distance to still approach the pieces with craft first, rather than simply emoting on the page.”

For Clare Glackin, the process is not easy to pinpoint, saying, “I think it comes down to what I call “essence”—kind of hard to define but I use this word to describe the soul of a piece—the specific mood or aura or thing that the piece is expressing that’s hard to put into words. The things I’ve written that have been most emotionally significant to me have stronger essences. And to me a stronger essence almost always equals a better piece, as long as the composer has the skill to realize their intention. Without a specific essence, the music might be decent but it is more generic and boring than it would be otherwise.”

I do believe the stakes change with the task/piece at/in hand, and Matthew Peterson’s comment resonated for me and brought the conversation back to earth a little: “I always have to like and be enthralled in some way by what I create, but it’s hard to write a funky, weird baritone sax solo ‘from the heart’ or some sort of inner investment.”  It reminded me that we can’t always be sure what we are or aren’t saying or how from the heart we really are.  I recently heard a piece for the first time in years, one I finished in 2011 in the wake of a mutually devastating breakup with a longtime boyfriend.  In no way connected in my mind at the time, the first thing that occurred to me upon hearing it again: “Whoa Nelly, that is some real Breakup Music™!”  Jefferson Friedman hit that nail on the head:  “Not to be reductive, but honestly all the best ones were about a girl.”

Are the pieces we want to be the best really the best?

And what of the answers to my million-dollar question?  Are the pieces we want to be the best really the best?  A sea of noes flooded the comments early on.  Marcos Balter went further: “Actually, my best ones are almost always the ones I composed the fastest, without thinking much of them.”  But the yeses began to balance the scales; Felipe Lara wrote that, for him, “my favorite ones of mine are the ones I work on the hardest—sort of opposite of Marcos.”  Felipe and I also share the same attending secondary fear.  If the answer is yes, that the pieces we are the most ambitious about, or attached to, confused/rattled by, are in fact for us, the (non-objective) best—is it only because we want them to be?

A group of seven rectangular box-shaped crayon sticks in different colors (from left to right: red, orange, yellow, light green, sky blue, dark blue, and purple); a white lower case f (the Facebook logo) appears on the front of the penultimate one (the one in dark blue).

Like others in ComposerBook land, I wrote the post simply because I was confronting the question myself.  I was going through something (part of a bigger story for me as I’ve struggled with blocks and with finishing “special” pieces for special occasions for several years now).  I reached out into the ether and found more perspective and commiseration (including from those I’ve barely met in person, or haven’t seen in many years) than I should have reasonably expected.  Social media, as it’s slowly morphed and grown up and changed, has guided our online behaviors as well.  This was a normal day online in 2017, yet wouldn’t have been possible even in the FB of 2009, when it was five years old.  For all the aggravation Facebook can cause, and I’m not stepping anywhere near the global/political issues that are coming into focus here, I can see that my relationship to this community of my colleagues is partially facilitated by the daily feed.  If I were pressed about it, I’d say: yes, I’m glad it’s around.

For all the aggravation Facebook can cause, I’m glad it’s around.

In the end, did I find an answer for myself?  No.  I don’t know if the pieces I truly want to be good really are good simply because that’s what I want.  However, I know that for me it’s not about what others like or don’t about it.  I definitely am okay with holding the outsider opinion on a piece of my own (and yes, many of us certainly have), whether it’s thumbs up or thumbs down.  I like the Mies van der Rohe line, “I don’t want to be interesting, I want to be good.” It fits my temperament and ideas about why I should do this and not some other thing with all the remaining solitary-ish days of my life.  Best, though, is yet another category.  If we really only have one best piece, or moment, or gesture, or note in our whole lives, then the likelihood of us writing it today is low.   How relaxing—what a relief!  I’ll do as well as I can today and try (and fail) not to obsess too much about it. Then I’ll just click right here and see what’s new on Netflix…

Sean Shepherd, an occasional contributor to New Music Box since 2006, is currently in deadline/work-trance mode on a piece for the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Delays as Music

Posted on October 12, 2017 by - Articles, Columns, NewMusicBox, Toolbox

As I wrote in my previous post, I view performing with “live sound processing” as a way to make music by altering and affecting the sounds of acoustic instruments—live, in performance—and to create new sounds, often without the use of pre-recorded audio. These new sounds, have the potential to forge an independent and unique voice in a musical performance. However, their creation requires, especially in improvised music, a unique set of musicianship skills and knowledge of the underlying acoustics and technology being used. And it requires that we consider the acoustic environment and spectral qualities of the performance space.

Delays and Repetition in Music

The use of delays in music is ubiquitous.  We use delays to locate a sound’s origin, create a sense of size/space, to mark musical time, create rhythm, and delineate form.

The use of delays in music is ubiquitous.

As a musical device, echo (or delay) predates electronic music. It has been used in folk music around the world for millennia for the repetition of short phrases: from Swiss yodels to African call and response, for songs in the round and complex canons, as well as in performances sometimes taking advantage of unusual acoustic spaces (e.g. mountains/canyons, churches, and unusual buildings).

In contemporary music, too, delay and reverb effects from unusual acoustic spaces have been included the Deep Listening cavern music of Pauline Oliveros, experiments using the infinite reverbs in the Tower of Pisa (Leonello Tarbella’s Siderisvox), and organ work at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in NY using its 7-second delay. For something new, I’ll recommend the forthcoming work of my colleague, trombonist Jen Baker (Silo Songs).

Of course, delay was also an important tool in the early studio tape experiments of Pierre Schaeffer (Etude aux Chemin de Fer) as well as Terry Riley and Steve Reich. The list of early works using analog and digital delay systems in live performances is long and encompasses many genres of music outside the scope of this post—from Robert Fripp’s Frippertronics to Miles Davis’s electric bands (where producer Teo Macero altered the sound of Sonny Sharrock’s guitar and many other instruments) and Herbie Hancock’s later Mwandishi Band.

The use of delays changed how the instrumentalists in those bands played.  In Miles’s work we hear not just the delays, but also improvised instrumental responses to the sounds of the delays and—completing the circle—the electronics performers respond to by manipulating their delays in-kind. Herbie Hancock was using delays to expand the sound of his own electric Rhodes, and as Bob Gluck has pointed out (in his 2014 book You’ll Know When You Get There: Herbie Hancock and the Mwandishi Band), he “intuitively realized that expressive electronic musicianship required adaptive performance techniques.” This is something I hope we can take for granted now.

I’m skipping any discussion of the use of echo and delay in other styles (as part of the roots of Dub, ambient music, and live looping) in favor of talking about the techniques themselves, independent of the trappings of a specific genre, and favoring how they can be “performed” in improvisation and as electronic musical sounds rather than effects.

Sonny Sharrock processed through an Echoplex by Teo Macero on Miles Davis’s “Willie Nelson” (which is not unlike some recent work by Johnny Greenwood)

By using electronic delays to create music, we can create exact copies or severely altered versions of our source audio, and still recognize it as a repetition, just as we might recognize each repetition of the theme in a piece organized as a theme and variations, or a leitmotif repeated throughout a work. Besides the relationship of delays to acoustic music, the vastly different types of sounds that we can create via these sonic reflections and repetitions have a corollary in visual art, both conceptually and gesturally. I find these analogies to be useful especially when teaching. Comparisons to work from the visual and performing arts that have inspired me in my work include images, video, and dance works.  These are repetitions (exact or distorted), Mandelbrot-like recursion (reflections, altered or displaced and re-reflected), shadows, and delays.  The examples below are analogous to many sound processes I find possible and interesting for live performance.

Sounds we create via sonic reflections and repetitions have a corollary in visual art.

I am a musician not an art critic/theorist, but I grew up in New York, being taken to MoMA weekly by my mother, a modern dancer who studied with Martha Graham and José Limon.  It is not an accident that I want to make these connections. There are many excellent essays on the subject of repetition in music and electronic music, which I have listed at the end of this post.  I include the images and links below as a way to denote that the influences in my electroacoustic work are not only in music and audio.

In “still” visual art works:

  • The reflected, blurry trees in the water of a pond in Claude Monet’s Poplar series creates new composite and extended images, a recurring theme in the series.
  • Both the woman and her reflection in Pablo Picasso’s Girl Before a Mirror are abstracted and interestingly the mirror itself is both the vehicle for the reiteration and an exemplified object.
  • There are also repetitions, patterns, and “rhythms” in work by Chuck Close, Andy Warhol, Sol Lewitt, M.C. Escher, and many other painters and photographers.

In time-based/performance works:

  • Fase, Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich, is a dance choreographed in 1982 by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker to Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians. De Keersmaeker uses shadows with the dancers. The shadows create a 3rd (and 4th and 5th) dancer which shift in and out of focus turning the reflected image presented as partnering with the live dancers into a kind of sleight-of-hand.
  • Iteration plays an important role in László Moholy-Nagy’s short films, shadow play constructions, and his Light Space Modulator (1930)
  • Reflection/repetition/displacement are inherent to the work of countless experimental video artists, starting with Nam June Paik, who work with video synthesis, feedback and modified TVs/equipment.

Another thing to be considered is that natural and nearly exact reflections can also be experienced as beautifully surreal. On a visit to the Okefenokee swamp in Georgia long ago, my friends and I rode in small flat boats on Mirror Lake and felt we were part of a Roger Dean cover for a new Yes album.

Okefenokee Swamp

Okefenokee Swamp

Natural reflections, even when nearly exact, usually have some small change—a play in the light or color, or slight asymmetry—that gives it away. In all of my examples, the visual reflection is not “the same” as the original.   These nonlinear differences are part the allure of the images.

These images are all related to how I understand live sound processing to impact on my audio sources. Perfect mirrors create surreal new images/objects extending away from the original.  Distorted reflections (anamorphosis) create a more separate identity for the created image, one that can be understood as emanating from the source image, but that is inherently different in its new form. Repetition/mirrors: many exact or near exact copies of the same image/sound form patterns, rhythms, or textures creating a new composite sound or image.  Phasing/shadows—time-based or time-connected: the reflected image changes over time in its physical placement with regards to the original and creating a potentially new composite sound.   Most of these ways of working require more than simple delay and benefit from speed changes, filtering, pitch-shift/time-compression, and other things I will delve into in the coming weeks.

The myths of Echo and Narcissus are both analogies and warning tales for live electroacoustic music.

We should consider the myths of Echo and Narcissus both as analogies and warning tales for live electroacoustic music. When we use delays and reverb, we hear many copies of our own voice/sound overlapping each other and create simple musical reflections of our own sound, smoothed out by the overlaps, and amplified into a more beautiful version of ourselves!  Warning!  Just like when we sing in the shower, we might fall in love the sound (to the detriment of the overall sound of the music).

Getting techie Here – How does Delay work?

Early Systems: Tape Delay

A drawing of the trajectory of a piece of magnetic tape between the reels, passing the erase, record, and playback heads.

A drawing by Mark Ballora which demonstrates how delay works using a tape recorder. (Image reprinted with permission.)

The earliest method used to artificially create the effect of an echo or simple delay was to take advantage of the spacing between the record and playback heads on a multi-track tape recorder. The output of the playback head could be read by the record head and rerecorded on a different track of the same machine.  That signal would then be read again by the playback head (on its new track).  The signal will have been delayed by the amount of time it took for the tape to travel from the record head to the playback head.

The delay time is determined by the physical distance between the tape heads, and by the tape speed being used.  One limitation is that delay times are limited to those that can be created at the playback speed of the tape. (e.g. At a tape speed of 15 inches per second (ips), tape heads spaced 3/4 to 2 inches apart can create echoes at 50ms to 133ms; at 7ips yields 107ms to 285ms, etc.)

Here is an example of analog tape delay in use:

Longer/More delays: By using a second tape recorder, we can make a longer sequence of delays, but it would be difficult to emulate natural echoes and reverberation because all our delay lengths would be simple multiples of the first delay. Reverbs have a much more complex distribution of many, many small delays. The output volume of those delays decreases differently (more linearly) in a tape system than it would in a natural acoustic environment (more exponentially).

More noise: Another side effect of creating the delays by re-recording audio is that after many recordings/repetitions the audio signal will start to degrade, affecting its overall spectral qualities, as the high and low frequencies die out more quickly, eventually degrading into, as Hal Chamberlin has aptly described it in his 1985 book Musical Applications of Microprocessors, a “howl with a periodic amplitude envelope.”

Added noise from degradation and overlapped voice and room acoustics is turned into something beautiful in I Am Sitting In A Room, Alvin Lucier’s seminal 1969 work.  Though not technically using delay, the piece is a slowed down microcosm of what happens to sound when we overlap / re-record many many copies of the same sound and its related room acoustics.

A degree of unpredictability certainly enhances the use of any musical device being used for improvisation, including echo and delay. Digital delay makes it possible to overcome the inherent inflexibility and static quality of most tape delay systems, which remain popular for other reasons (e.g. audio quality or nostalgia as noted above).

The list of influential pieces using a tape machine for delay is canonically long.  A favorite of mine is Terry Riley’s piece, Music for the Gift (1963), written for trumpeter Chet Baker. It was the first use of very long delays on two tape machines, something Riley dubbed the “Time Lag Accumulator.”

Terry Riley: Music for the Gift III with Chet Baker

Tape delay was used by Pauline Oliveros and others from the San Francisco Tape Music Center for pieces that were created live as well as in the studio, with no overdubs, which therefore could be considered performances and not just recordings.   The Echoplex, created around 1959, was one of the first commercially manufactured tape delay systems and was widely used in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Advances in the design of commercial tape delays, included the addition of more and moveable tape-heads, increased the number of delays and flexibility of changing delay times on the fly.

Stockhausen’s Solo (1966), for soloist and “feedback system,” was first performed live in Tokyo using seven tape recorders (the “feedback” system) with specially adjustable tape heads to allow music played by the soloist to “return” at various delay times and combinations throughout the piece.  Though technically not improvised, Solo is an early example of tape music for performed “looping.”  All the music was scored, and a choice of which tape recorders would be used and when was determined prior to each performance.

I would characterize the continued use of analog tape delay as nostalgia.

Despite many advances in tape delay, today digital delay is much more commonly used, whether it is in an external pedal unit or computer-based. This is because it is convenient—it’s smaller, lighter, and easier to carry around—and because it much more flexible. Multiple outputs don’t require multiple tape heads or more tape recorders. Digital delay enables quick access to a greater range of delay times, and the maximum delay time is simply a function of the available memory (and memory is much cheaper than it used to be).   Yet, in spite of the convenience and expandability of digital delay, there is continued use of analog tape delay in some circles.  I would simply characterize this as nostalgia (for the physicality of the older devices and dealing with analog tape, and for the warmth of analog sound; all of these we relate to music from an earlier time).

What is a Digital Delay?

Delay is the most basic component of most digital effects systems, and so it’s critical to discuss it in some detail before moving on to some of the effects that are based upon it.   Below, and in my next post, I’ll also discuss some physical and perceptual phenomena that need to be taken into consideration when using delay as a performance tool / ersatz instrument.

Basic Design

In the simplest terms, a “delay” is simple digital storage.  Just one audio sample or a small block of samples, are stored in memory then can be read and played back at some later time, and used as output. A one second delay (1000ms), mono, requires storing one second of audio. (At a 16-bit CD sample rate of 44.1kHz, this means about 88kb of data.) These sizes are teeny by today’s standards but if we use many delays or very long delays it adds up. (It is not infinite or magic!)

Besides being used in creating many types of echo-like effects applications, a simple one-sample delay is also a key component of the underlying structure of all digital filters, and many reverbs.  An important distinction between each of these applications is the length of the delay. As described below, when a delay time is short, the input sounds get filtered, and with longer delay times other effects such as echo can be heard.

Perception of Delay — Haas (a.k.a. Precedence) Effect

Did you ever drop a pin on the floor?   You can’t see it, but you still know exactly where it is? We humans naturally have a set of skills for sound localization.  These psychoacoustic phenomena have to do with how we perceive the very small time, volume, and timbre differences between the sounds arriving in our ears.

In 1949, Helmut Haas made observations about how humans localize sound by using simple delays of various lengths and a simple 2-speaker system.  He played the same sound (speech, short test tones), at the same volume, out of both speakers. When the two sounds were played simultaneously (no delay), listeners reported hearing the sound as if it were coming from the center point between the speakers (an audio illusion not very different from how we see).  His findings give us some clues about stereo sound and how we know where sounds are coming from.  They also relate to how we work with delays in music.

  • Between 1-10ms delay: If the delay between sounds is used was anywhere from 1ms to 10ms, the sound appears to emanate from the first speaker (the first sound we hear is where we locate the sound).pix here of Haas effect setup p 11
  • Between 10-30ms delay: The sound source continues to be heard as coming from the primary (first sounding) speaker, with the delay/echo adding a “liveliness” or “body” to the sound. This is similar to what happens in a concert hall—listeners are aware of the reflected sounds but don’t hear them as separate from the source.
  • Between 30-50ms delay: The listener becomes aware of the delayed signal, but still senses the direct signal as the primary source. (Think of the sound in a big box store “Attention shoppers!”)
  • At 50ms or more: A discrete echo is heard, distinct from the first heard sound, and this is what we often refer to as a “delay” or slap-back echo.

The important fact here is that when the delay between speakers is lowered to 10ms (1/100th of a second), the delayed sound is no longer perceived as a discrete event. This is true even when the volume of the delayed sound is the same as the direct signal. [Haas, “The Influence of Single Echo on the Audibility of Speech” (1949)].

A diagram of the Haas effect showing how the position of the listener in relationship to a sound source affects the perception of that sound source.

The Haas Effect (a.k.a. Precedence Effect) is related to our skill set for sound localization and other psychoacoustic phenomena. Learning a little about these phenomena (Interaural Time Difference, Interaural Level Difference, and Head Shadow) is useful not only for an audio engineer, but is also important for us when considering the effects and uses of delay in Electroacoustic musical contexts.

What if I Want More Than One?

Musicians usually want the choice to play more than one delayed sound, or to repeat their sound several times. We do this by adding more delays, or we can use feedback, and route a portion of our output right back into the input. (Delaying our delayed sound is something like an audio hall of mirrors.) We usually route only some of the sound (not 100%) so that each time the output is a little quieter and the sound eventually dies out in decaying echoes.  If our feedback level is high, the sound may recirculate for a while in an endless repeat, and may even overload/clip if new sounds are added.

When two or more copies of the same sound event play at nearly the same time, they will comb filter each other. Our sensitivity to these small differences in timbre that result are a key to understanding, for instance, why the many reflections in a performance space don’t usually get mistaken for the real thing (the direct sound).   Likewise, if we work with multiple delays or feedback, when multiple copies of the same sound play over each other, they also necessarily interact and filter each other causing changes in the timbre. (This relates again to I Am Sitting In A Room.)

In the end, all of the above (delay length, using feedback or additional delays, overlap) all determine how we perceive the music we make using delays as a musical instrument. I will discuss Feedback and room acoustics and its potential role as a musical device in the next post later this month.

My Aesthetics of Delay

To close this post, here are some opinionated conclusions of mine based upon what I have read/studied and borne out in many, many sessions working with other people’s sounds.

  • Short delay times tend to change our perception of the sound: its timbre, and its location.
  • Sounds that are delayed longer than 50ms (or even up to 100ms for some musical sounds) become echoes, or musically speaking, textures.
  • At the in-between delay times (the 30-50ms range give or take a little) it is the input (the performed sound itself) that determines what will happen. Speech sounds or other percussive sounds with a lot of transients (high amplitude short duration) will respond differently than long resonant tones (which will likely overlap and be filtered). It is precisely in this domain that the live sound-processing musician will needs to do extra listening/evaluating to gain experience and predict what might be the outcome. Knowing what might happen in many different scenarios is critical to creating a playable sound processing “instrument.”

It’s About the Overlap

Using feedback on long delays, we create texture or density, as we overlap sounds and/or extend the echoes to create rhythm.  With shorter delays, using feedback instead can be a way to move toward the resonance and filtering of a sound.  With extremely short delays, control over feedback to create resonance is a powerful way to create predictable, performable, electronic sounds from nearly any source. (More on this in the next post.)

Live processing (for me) all boils down to small differences in delay times.

Live processing (for me) all boils down to these small differences in delay times—between an original sound and its copy (very short, medium and long delays).  It is a matter of the sounds overlapping in time or not.   When they overlap (due to short delay times or use of feedback) we hear filtering.   When the sounds do not overlap (delay times are longer than the discrete audio events), we hear texture.   A good deal of my own musical output depends on these two facts.

Some Further Reading and Listening

On Sound Perception of Rhythm and Duration

Karlheinz Stockhausen’s 1972 lecture The Four Criterion of Electronic Music (Part I)
(I find intriguing Stockhausen’s discussion of unified time structuring and his description of the continuum of rhythms: from those played very fast (creating timbre), to medium fast (heard as rhythms), to very very slow (heard as form). This lecture both expanded and confirmed my long-held ideas about the perceptual boundaries between short and long repetitions of sound events.)

Pierre Schaeffer’s 1966 Solfège de l’Objet Sonore
(A superb book and accompanying CDs with 285 tracks of example audio. Particularly useful for my work and the discussion above are sections on “The Ear’s Resolving Power” and “The Ear’s Time Constant” and many other of his findings and examples. [Ed. note: Andreas Bick has written a nice blog post about this.])

On Repetition in All Its Varieties

Jean-Francois Augoyard and Henri Torgue, Sonic Experience: a Guide to Everyday Sounds (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014)
(See their terrific chapters on “Repetition”, “Resonance” and “Filtration”)

Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind (Oxford University Press, 2014)

Ben Ratliff, Every Song Ever (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016)
(Particularly the chapter “Let Me Listen: Repetition”)

Other Recommended Reading

Bob Gluck’s book You’ll Know When You Get There: Herbie Hancock and the Mwandishi Band (University of Chicago Press, 2014)

Michael Peter’s essay “The Birth of the Loop”
http://preparedguitar.blogspot.de/2015/04/the-birth-of-loop-by-michael-peters.html

Phil Taylor’s essay “History of Delay”

My chapter “What if your instrument is Invisible?” in the 2017 book Musical Instruments in the 21st Century as well as my 2010 Leonardo Music Journal essay “A View on Improvisation from the Kitchen Sink” co-written with Hans Tammen.

LiveLooping.org
(A musician community built site around the concept of live looping with links to tools, writing, events, etc.)

Some listening

John Schaeffer’s WNYC radio program “New Sounds” has featured several episodes on looping.
Looping and Delays
Just Looping Strings
Delay Music

And finally something to hear and watch…

Stockhausen’s former assistant Volker Müller performing on generator, radio, and three tape machines

Progressive Chamber Music

Posted on October 11, 2017 by - Articles, NewMusicBox

[Ed. Note: Later this week (October 14-15, 2017), Sirius Quartet will present their second annual Progressive Chamber Music Festival for two nights at the Greenwich House Music School in New York City. We asked the quartet’s four members to tell the story of the evolution of the group into a post-genre ensemble and why they decided to create their own music festival. Founding violist Ron Lawrence describes how the quartet came into being and the underlying aesthetics that inform what/how the group plays as well as the music festival they curate. Second violinist Gregor Huebner explains how the quartet evolved into a group of composer-performers. Cellist Jeremy Harman, the quartet’s most recent addition, describes why he joined the group seven years ago. And first violinist Fung Chern Hwei explains how the idea for a festival emerged over a conversation between the four of them while they were on tour in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Along the way, each describes their own personal musical journeys and the directions those journeys have taken as a result of playing music with each other. As with the four separate parts that seamlessly weave together in a string quartet performance, whether it’s pre-composed or improvised, their four independent narratives inform and enhance each other.-FJO.]

The members of the Sirius Quartet standing in front of a wall.

The Sirius Quartet (from left to right): Fung Chern Hwei, Jeremy Harman, Ron Lawrence, and Gregor Huebner.

Ron Lawrence

The conflict/merging of the sacred and the profane has been a major theme in western culture since the rise of Christianity.  In the modern world, one expression of this conversation has been the gradual breakdown of the barriers between contemporary academic music and popular and folk music traditions.  The aesthetic of the Sirius Quartet and our Progressive Chamber Music Festival is an expression of this ongoing blending.  We created the festival to be an annual opportunity to showcase the diversity and depth of the community of like-minded composer/performers.  On a more prosaic level it is an attempt to create a new “bin in the record store” for this mulatto style (perhaps labeled “omnivores’ delight”).

The Sirius Quartet revels in the musical smorgasbord that the digital tidal wave has brought to the internet.

The Sirius Quartet revels in the musical smorgasbord that the digital tidal wave has brought to the internet.  With a few taps on a keyboard, anyone can access the entire canon of humanity’s musical experience.  The opportunities for cross-fertilization of musical styles, performance techniques, and creating new social contexts for musical performance are abundant.  The Sirius Quartet has been dedicated to exploring this new world, and the artists we’ve presented during the Progressive Chamber Music Festival for the past two years all embrace and explore these possibilities.

However, there are dangers in the digital tidal wave that has washed over the new millennium.  Beyond the obvious steering of a complacent audience into the “if you like that, you’ll love this” cul-de-sac, the configuration of the software programs and their default settings creates a huge temptation to allow the machines and plug-ins to make crucial aesthetic decisions.

Without making a conscious decision, the medium can become the message.  For example, the editing process can dictate what should be musical/emotional decisions.  The click map is a wonderful tool when writing music to picture, but expressing rubato is time consuming.  It’s easier to just loop some cool beats and lay it on the click map.  The technology has dictated the musical style. Plug-in technology is also insidious.  Rather than make a conscious decision about the color palette, the composer/producer will just plug in the funky ’70s Fender Twin bass sound from his or her library.  It would take hours of painstaking listening to get under the hood and tweak the software to find an original sound. Once again the technology has preemptively dictated choices, homogenizing the style. The composers/performers of Sirius and our colleagues use improvisation and the spontaneity of extended techniques to combat this homogenization.  We want our music feel homemade and give the audience the sensation of “fresh from the pot.”

I think my personal journey to becoming a creative musician began while driving around Michigan as a teenager with my car radio blaring rock and roll. I reveled in the breathtaking tonal and emotional palette of the electric guitar. When I arrived in New York in the early 1980s, the classical conservatory training of instrumentalists was increasingly specialized and recording techniques were creating a style and sound that worshiped velocity and close-miked sizzle over warmth and soulfulness.  There was a “correct violin sound” and one’s education and technical training focused exclusively on producing that timbre and emotional quality.  I yearned for that wider palette of the electric guitar. As a listener, I was as drawn to Sonny Boy Williamson or Bata drumming as I was to Babbitt or Boulez.  New York, always a nexus for the melting pot of cultures, gave me the opportunity for an almost anthropological exploration of the roots of popular and folk music styles.

Playing with a few charanga and tango bands taught me that each particular style has its own unique technical challenges distinct from the classical tradition.  Not only does each folkloric tradition have a unique rhythmic feel, but one’s physical approach to the instrument must be flexible enough to step outside of the classical concept of “good violin” playing.  As a performer and composer, choices of bow distribution, quality of attack and decay, and tonal variety inform the rhythmic feel and emotional content of any style.

Eventually, I was asked to join the Dave Soldier Electric String Quartet.  As a mainstay of the downtown, Knitting Factory music scene, Dave introduced me to that diverse, eclectic collection of urban, postmodern creative “folk” musicians.  Here was my wider palette.  When the Soldier Quartet disbanded, I founded the Sirius Quartet as a vehicle to continue these explorations for composers/performers.

Gregor Huebner’s reharmonization of Lennon & McCartney’s “Eleanor Rigby” performed by Sirius Quartet

Gregor Huebner 

I joined the Sirius Quartet around 2004, shortly after I started working with jazz pianist Richie Beirach.  Richie and I recorded the albums Round about Bartók and Round about Federico Mompou, which were very much about exploring the intersection of composition and improvisation in more of a jazz context.  At the time, Sirius Quartet was really focused on contemporary classical and avant-garde jazz composers.  As a player and a composer, this was a perfect group for me to explore my own musical identity and ideas.  I started composing pieces for Sirius which included both the extended techniques of the contemporary classical “language” as well as the spirit of improvisation from my jazz experiences with Beirach, Randy Brecker, Billy Hart, and George Mraz, with whom I play in a quintet.

These days we are a string quartet which writes its own music and incorporates improvisation in many different forms.

When Jeremy and Chern Hwei—two fantastic composers and improvisers—joined the quartet, it felt like focusing on our own music was the way forward. So these days we are a string quartet which writes its own music and incorporates improvisation in many different forms.  That is my own personal definition of what we are calling “progressive chamber music” as it applies to Sirius and we can stretch that term very broadly to include all kinds of creative small ensemble music, which is the focus of our annual festival.

Jeremy Harman’s composition More Than We Are performed by Sirius Quartet

Jeremy Harman

I grew up spending equal amounts of time immersed in classical music via cello lessons, playing in my school orchestras, and playing in a quartet with high school friends, as well as the rock/metal world, which was a very different circle of people, most of whom were self-taught and were more focused on writing original music.  I always felt equally at home in both worlds, and at the same time, maybe like in each world that I wasn’t able to fully be myself as a musician due to both collective and personal misperceptions that these two were incompatible.  Throughout my life, I’ve sought to bridge this gap on a personal level, and when I auditioned for Sirius Quartet in 2010, I found some like-minded string players who each came from a pretty unique background of musical influences, but who shared my desire to build bridges between genres, and more specifically to blur the lines between supposed high-brow and low-brow art and music.  We all have a classical background, but each of us have spent our lives reaching beyond that in our own ways, which have included exploring various types of improvisation, from soloing over chord changes to playing completely free with no premeditated musical goals or expectations, exploring alternative and extended techniques of playing to widen our sonic palette, and composing our own music which we hope reflects our unique identities as both individuals and as a quartet.

Each of us have spent our lives reaching beyond our classical backgrounds.

With seven years in the group, I am still the newest member of the Sirius Quartet, and most of its history predates me.  Initially the quartet came out of the Soldier String Quartet run by violinist Dave Soldier in the late ’80s as Ron has already mentioned, but as the resident “rookie” here, I think they did some very interesting work as part of the early Knitting Factory/“downtown” scene, working with artists such as Elliott Sharp and Nick Didkovsky and playing a lot of music that was more on the experimental side.

As has been said, in recent years, the quartet has focused more on original works by members of the quartet itself and has leaned more toward the jazz side of things, collaborating with a lot of phenomenal musicians including Linda Oh, Steve Wilson, Richard Sussman and Rufus Reid who all have written really incredible music incorporating the string quartet into more traditional jazz ensembles and instrumentations.

As a quartet, I think we occupy a somewhat unique position in the New York City music scene. So we wanted to put together a festival that brings together musicians from the various corners of the musical worlds we occupy.  There are already some fantastic music festivals in the city, but we thought there was plenty of room for another one.  If there were a Venn diagram that existed and each of these festivals occupied their own circle, I think that the circle that the Progressive Chamber Music Festival would occupy would have significant overlap with all of them.

Violinist Fung Chern Hwei playing with other members of the Sirus Quartet.

Fung Chern Hwei

The genesis of the Progressive Chamber Music Festival happened one fine October morning in 2015.  The place was Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where we were on tour and had a day off.  Before the sun displayed its full equatorial glory, we were enjoying breakfast at a South Indian-Malaysian roadside food stall—more commonly known as a “mamak” stall.  Words were exchanged over a topic as old as the quartet’s two-decade long career: How does one define the musical direction the quartet is taking? How does that fit into the current musical landscape of the music scene in New York and elsewhere?  Many of our fans and listeners would agree, it can be difficult to place the group in a certain category.  Sirius has a fascinating lineage of former members who have developed their own projects writing and/or performing contemporary classical music and/or various non-traditional genres—Todd Reynolds, Meg Okura, Jennifer Choi, Dave Eggar, just to name a few.

The current incarnation of the quartet is primarily focused on music that is internally written, as three of the four of us are composers.  We all compose in different styles and methods, since each of us came from a slightly different musical background.  The end result is, I think, an eclectic body of music that pulls listeners in many directions and hopefully both challenges and intrigues them.

We don’t rule anything out.

We don’t rule anything out in the music we write: tonality, atonality, groove, form, etc., and we like to incorporate improvisation in various ways to achieve various goals in our music.  This could range from creating vamps in the midst of otherwise through-composed music (to bring about a change of pace or vibe) to finding ways of embellishing or improvising on a previously written part in one of our pieces, to linking various movements and/or pieces together with free improvisation, which we’ve found can create a nice heightened sense of focus in the audience since what is composed and what is improvised becomes less and less distinct.

We have had the absolute pleasure to work with accomplished creative jazz musicians like Uri Caine and John Escreet, both of whom in their own way share our affinity for line-blurring. They have each written some amazing music that we have performed together over the years which consists of very interesting mixtures of composed and improvised material.  I certainly don’t think this is unique to our quartet; I think there is a growing movement of creative musicians of all stripes blending these elements in a myriad of really interesting ways.

Getting back to our breakfast in Kuala Lumpur, we didn’t necessarily come to any explicit conclusions when talking about our place in the larger world of creative music, but we found the discussion to be really enjoyable and it gave us a chance to reflect upon and really appreciate the musical community that we are a part of.  New York City has long been an incubator for cross-genre pollination and experimentation in all corners of the music community. It is not difficult to find artists and groups, many of them personal friends of ours, who fall outside of the mainstream categories of “concert” or “art” music.  So someone probably half-jokingly mentioned putting together a festival with a bunch of friends and colleagues whose music resonates with us and who we respect very much as artists, and we thought it actually sounded like a good idea!

Currently the festival is a total DIY operation, but the goal is basically to give each artist the chance to do solely what best represents them and their creative identity without having to compromise anything.  The name “Progressive Chamber Music Festival” retains the ambiguity of the types of music presented, therefore giving musicians absolute freedom of expression, while at the same time it clearly defines the philosophy that I think we and our musical comrades stand for—progressiveness within but also regardless of convention.  We hope to challenge the common notion of what chamber music should be, while inviting old and new voices to partake.

Ron Lawrence, Gregor Huebner, Jeremy Harman, and Fung Chern Hwei standing in back of empty chairs.

Notes from the Custerdome: A Jazz Appreciation of Steely Dan

Posted on September 20, 2017 by - Articles, Commentary

“We play rock & roll, but we swing when we play. We want that ongoing flow, that lightness, that forward rush of jazz.” – Walter Becker in 1974 (Rolling Stone)

The death of Walter Becker—the bespectacled and bearded guitarist, bassist, composer, lyricist, and one-half of the legendary duo Steely Dan—on September 3, 2017, ended a fifty-year friendship and a four-decade-old partnership with his co-collaborator, pianist, vocalist, and composer Donald Fagen. They were, to borrow a phrase used by Duke Ellington, “beyond category.” Simply put, from their debut LP, Can’t Buy a Thrill (1972), to their last studio CD, Everything Must Go (2003), Becker and Fagen existed as their own genre and played by their own rules. After a less-than-satisfying touring experience early in their career, they quit the road and focused on the studio until the ’90s. They were famous (or infamous) for their penchant for retakes until they achieved perfection. They named themselves after a steam-powered marital aid from William Burroughs’s novel Naked Lunch, and wrote cynical, and dystopian songs about L.A. drug dealers (“Glamour Profession”), prophylactics (“The Fez”), class and immigration (“The Royal Scam”), mid-life identity crisis (“Deacon Blues”), incest (“Cousin Dupree”), middle-age lust (“Hey Nineteen”),  and relationships (“Rikki Don’t Lose that Number”), along with hippie-fied, spaghetti-western ditties (“Here at the Western World”).

Steely Dan proved that pop music could be harmonically complex and quirky.

They proved that pop music could be harmonically complex and quirky in the early to mid-’70s, when the then-new FM format allowed for longer cuts, and more expansive playlists, genre-wise. In my hometown of Wilmington, Delaware—about 30 miles south of Philadelphia, where almost all of our television and radio stations broadcasted from—I heard black artists such as Howard University’s BlackByrds, Barry White, Isaac Hayes, and Billy Preston on WAMS-AM, a white station, and the powerhouse black station WDAS-FM played Elton John, David Bowie, Chicago, Rare Earth, Seals and Crofts, and Steely Dan. It was on WDAS that I heard their early hits like “Rikki…” and “Do It Again.”

Then, in 1977, they dropped their masterpiece LP, Aja. I completely and utterly lost my sixteen-year-old mind when I heard the first track from that LP, “Black Cow,” on WDAS.  The track swung, with a lean, finessed funk I had never heard from them before. Who could make a song about a malt drink sound so funky? The music had “swagger,” with its perfect, in-the-pocket bassline, rock-steady drumming, laced with pithy, yet powerful horn lines, Becker’s twangy guitar chords and Fagen’s gravelly and unmistakably Brooklynesque, New Yawk/North New Jersey vocals. That station played other dynamic cuts from Aja, from the mid-tempo, Muscle Shoals-Motown-Beale Street beats of “Home at Last,” a paean to Homer’s The Odyssey, and “Josie,” a shout to a woman who “prays like a Roman with her eyes on fire,” to the cunningly lingual “I Got the News.”

In addition to the way the music sounded, thanks to Gary Katz’s excellent production, I wondered why this album spoke to me in the way that their earlier LPs did not. I got my answer on the title track: seven minutes and thirty-seven seconds of pure, musical nirvana. It wasn’t a cut or a tune, but a true composition of poetry, passion, and propulsion about some far away, Eastern exotic locale located on “a continent of the mind,” as the voice of Eartha Kitt purred on the TV commercial promoting the LP, where “angular banjos” sounded good to them.

Then, after Becker’s snaky arpeggios at four minutes and forty seconds into the song, “Galactus” a.k.a. Wayne Shorter, unfurls one of the most unforgettable tenor saxophone solos in rock history. Packed with the density of a white-hot dwarf star, Shorter writes his sonic signature on the epidermis of Becker and Fagen’s exquisite musical canvas with his concentrated, Coltranesque solo, which is powerfully pulsated by Steve Gadd’s vivid and volcanic drumming, paralleling Billy Cobham’s thunderous drumwork with the Mahavishnu Orchestra. This was jazz fusion in its finest form.

“We had this piece [‘Aja’], which had this long modal section,” Fagen proudly told me in my interview with him in 2013 for Wax Poetics magazine.  “And we thought, ‘who would be the ideal person for the track?’ And we said, ‘Wayne Shorter.’ On the first try, he said no. But we knew someone who knew him, and he asked him, because he didn’t know who we were. So we sent him the track, and he liked it and decided to come in. And he nailed it on the first take. That was one of the best moments for us.”

This is the same Wayne Shorter who co-founded the jazz fusion group Weather Report, and the same Wayne Shorter who played with Miles Davis and Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. And there was also the keyboardist/vibraphonist Victor Feldman, who delivered a gorgeous, stop-time solo on “Black Cow.” He also played with Miles in the ’60s. And there were other jazz stars on Aja: keyboardists Don Grolnick and Joe Sample of the Crusaders; guitarists Larry Carlton, Dean Parks, and Steve Khan; drummer Bernard “Pretty” Purdie (who hailed from nearby Elkton, Maryland), bassist Chuck Rainey, and saxophonists Tom Scott (on lyricon) and Pete Christlieb, (who delivered an impassioned, one-take, swinging solo on “Deacon Blues”) to name a select few.

This is the source of Steely Dan’s signature sound: their incorporation of the jazz aesthetic in every aspect of their already broad musical conception.

This is the source of Steely Dan’s signature sound: their incorporation of the jazz aesthetic in every aspect of their already broad musical conception, from the time they met at Bard College in 1967. With this realization, I dug into the crates of their early hits with a new divining rod that could detect their jazzy nuggets. I heard their perfect, note-for-note take on Duke Ellington’s 1927 classic “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo” from Pretzel Logic (1974). I learned that the intro of “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” was inspired by pianist Horace Silver’s “Song for my Father.” I dug Phil Woods’ Charlie Parker-sweetened, alto saxophone solo on “Doctor Wu” from Katy Lied (1975). I loved Khan’s aquiline guitar lines on “Glamour Profession” from their Aja follow-up, Gaucho (1980), after which they disbanded for two decades. (Becker moved to Hawaii and Fagen stayed in New York, with both releasing solo projects.)  I was also astonished by Chris Potter’s blistering, nearly four-minute tenor sax solo on “West of Hollywood” from their comeback CD, Two Against Nature (2000), which was released twenty years after Gaucho.

Covers for all 9 Steely Dan albums arranged chronologically.

Steely Dan’s nine studio albums

Their love of jazz extended far back into their childhoods, as Becker and Fagen grew up in New York and New Jersey. Again, from my Wax Poetics interview with Fagen:

Well, my mother was a professional singer when she was young, from the age of five to fifteen. She used to sing from a club in the Catskills. She was a swing singer, although she didn’t stick with it. She sang around the house. So I heard a lot of standards as a kid, which is essentially the life force, the lingua franca of jazz—aside from original jazz tunes. So I was familiar with most of those tunes. And when I started playing the piano, I picked out those tunes on the piano. And then I had a cousin named Barbara, who was older than I—she was a good-lookin’ chick! She used to go into the Village and go to clubs. She actually became friendly with Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk, and so on. And she had a great record collection. When we’d go over her house, she’d bring us down to her basement and play those great records: Thelonious Monk and Johnny Griffin live, and so on. I was nine or ten. I loved it, and I listened to a lot of radio broadcasts out of New York. That’s how I got into jazz.

Through the years, jazz musicians got into them.

And through the years, jazz musicians got into them, as evidenced by Ahmad Jamal’s bumpin’ version of “Black Cow,” from his album One (1978), Woody Herman’s big band take on the song “Aja” on his LP Chick, Donald, Walter & Woodrow (1978), and bassist Christian McBride’s ebullient rendition of the same song for his CD Sci-Fi (2000), as well as the long out-of-print LP Hoops McCann Plays the Music of Steely Dan (1988).

Today, to paraphrase Bud Powell, the scene has changed: a generation of young musicians, some of whom weren’t even born when Aja was released, play with the same, jazz-centric fluency that made Steely Dan unique, including the sidemen who played on their live gigs, which resumed in the ’90s. I reviewed their performance in October 2016 at New York’s Beacon Theater, where they performed the entire Aja album, for DownBeat. Fagen may be the frontman, but it was Becker who turned it out, instrumentally, effortlessly blending Grant Green, T-Bone Walker, and Johnny Guitar Watson into his own silken sound. At one point in their greatest hits segment, during Becker’s banter on “Hey Nineteen,” he said, motioning toward Fagen, “Can you believe I’ve known this guy for fifty years?”

The answer is an emphatic yes. And their music is all here—just like the song says—all done up, in blueprint blue.

Orientalism in American Classical Music

Posted on September 7, 2017 by - Analysis, Articles

I’m rebellious, I’m hardworking, I’m obsessive, I’m competitive, I’m solitary, I’m sporty, I’m cerebral, and I’m passionate. These characteristics are the top reasons why I self-identify as a classical musician—these particular character traits make me highly compatible with the classical music profession. However, these adjectives aside, what I fail to mention is that I am visually perceived to be of East Asian descent. This descriptor, often conjured by others without a prompt of my own, resurfaces in association to my identity as a classical musician in the United States, over and over and over and over and over again. Being of East Asian descent bizarrely “explains” to people why I am a classical musician, usually at the expense of overlooking the personality traits that form my identity, and thus my profound compatibility with classical music. After 30 years of shrugging off this racialized identity, I feel it is finally time for me to address what I’ve grown accustomed to when making classical music while East Asian.

Being of East Asian descent bizarrely “explains” to people why I am a classical musician.

Simply put, my perceived Asianness is a reproduction of Orientalism. In this article, I will focus on three statements in particular that reproduce Orientalism upon my body, here in the West: 1) otherizing excellence (“The Chinese play with such discipline…it’s like a martial art to you.”), 2) obsessive focus on technical precision (“Oh my, you have great technique!”), and 3) marking otherness as a collaborative quality (“Our ensemble is not that white, because we have you.”).

In this article, I will be reading the three Orientalist statements specifically within U.S. classical music. This is not to say that comments like these do not occur in contexts outside of classical music—they indeed apply on a much larger scale. But since American classical music is where I have come to intimately know these types of comments, I will limit my focus to this scene.

Firstly, we must understand Orientalism as a historically racist, colonialist ideology; Orientalism as it manifests in 2017 is naive at best, racist and neo-colonial at worst. In the groundbreaking 1970 book Orientalism, Edward Said disarmingly defines “the Orient,” positioning it necessarily within a duality that ultimately has little to do with the Orient itself:

Orientalism is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between “the Orient” and (most of the time) “the Occident.” Thus a very large mass of writers, among whom are poets, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists, and imperial administrators, have accepted the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point for elaborate theories, epics, novels, social descriptions, and political accounts concerning the Orient, its people, customs, “mind,” destiny, and so on. […] The value, efficacy, strength, apparent veracity of a written statement about the Orient […] relies very little, and cannot instrumentally depend, on the Orient […] Thus all of Orientalism stands forth and away from the Orient: that Orientalism makes sense at all depends more on the West than on the Orient, and this sense is directly indebted to various Western techniques of representation that make the Orient visible, clear, ‘there’ in discourse about it. [emphasis mine]

With Orientalism defined, let’s now address each of the following statements individually and explain why they are harmful reproductions of Orientalism.

Statement #1: “The Chinese play with such discipline…it’s like a martial art to you.” When a person makes this statement, it is not intended to start a conversation about martial art. Martial art is an East Asian activity considered exotic in the West, and it is conjured precisely because it is exotically viewed. The exoticization of a commonplace human characteristic is an Orientalist notion, and like Orientalism, explains nothing about the exoticizable identity (Chinese people, martial artists) nor the exoticized element (discipline). Although discipline is indeed a desirable quality for a classical musician, this statement says nothing about discipline nor classical musicians. What it does manage to express, is two unrelated observations: 1) I notice that you are a classical musician, and 2) I notice that you are Chinese.

Statement #2: “Oh my, you have great technique!” (Great) technique is desired by all classical musicians. But, as Pablo Casals puts it, “the most perfect technique is that which is not noticed at all.” When a person states that my technique is good, as the sole observation of my playing, it puts focus on the very thing that is only good if you do not have to focus on it. Although the racial element of this comment is often not explicit, it nevertheless conjures the stereotype of a submissive Asian classical music student, exhibiting technical excellence while differing to a Western master for interpretative guidance. The prototypical manifestation of this particular type of Orientalism is the documentary film From Mao to Mozart: Isaac Stern in China (1979). In the film, violinist Isaac Stern, director Murray Lerner, and executive producer Walter Scheuer portray the Chinese classical music students as diligent, hard working, but ultimately incapable of grasping the profound essence of classical music without brief, shallow contact with a Western master. Telling enough is the most upvoted user submission on the film’s IMDb page: “scgary66” remarks on the “lack of skill development among many of the young [Chinese] musicians and the emphasis on technical skill rather than artistic interpretation.” “Scgary66” in fact proves my point: sole focus on technique, even as a compliment, diminishes the achievements of artistic interpretation. It begs the question, is it the Chinese that are focusing on technique over interpretation, or Western people in their Orientalist views of the East?

Statement #3: “Our ensemble is not that white, because we have you.” While facing occasional discrimination from stereotyping within classical music, I also have been valued for being a classical musician “of color.” This is a unique form of Orientalism because it reflects an incentive for American classical music organizations to obtain monetary funding, as well as social capital, through “achieving” racial “diversity.” I find comments of this type linked directly to multiculturalism as a prevalent, unquestioned ideology within classical music.[1] As a BIPoC, I can by no means solely represent the multitude of black, brown, and indigenous peoples that comprise this mark of identity. However, when I am valued simply for being of color (“Our ensemble isn’t that white, because we have you”), most often acting as the only person of color, I am asked to play an impossible role. This is an oversimplification of identity, and oversimplification is a form of erasure.

More broadly, the biggest flaw of valuing my otherness, whether it is about my “discipline” or “technique” or apparent affinity for “kung fu,” is that it reasserts the flawed notion, in the first place, of my otherness. I was born and raised in the United States. I’ve never been to China and I don’t speak Chinese fluently. Given my background, you can imagine the confusion, annoyance, and anger when confronted with such racially motivated comments.

Recall the things that do define my identity in classical music: rebellious, hardworking, obsessive, competitive, solitary, sporty, cerebral, and passionate. What do these words have to do with race? Not much. Does this mean race has nothing to do with my identity in classical music? Not necessarily. Each racial minority, and each person within each minority, has to come to terms with that question individually.

rwy crosshatch

Acknowledging racism in the U.S. past and present, I often struggle to not let this weigh down on my soul. But part of staying mentally healthy as a person of color in a predominantly white profession is to avoid the denial of ugly truths. The perpetuation of Orientalism is alive and well in U.S. classical music circles—whether it is through an Orientalizing of musical talent, fixating on technique, or nuanced manifestations under multiculturalism—and it needs to stop. These modern iterations of Orientalism, though slight, enable fundamental, mainstream racist practices to continue within the American classical music scene, distracting from the profound emotional and spiritual potential of the art form.

I love classical music and I love being a classical musician. The notion of race does not enable this love (as the Asian stereotype suggests), it only distracts from it. The same way I pity the audience member who can’t see anything but my (Oriental) “technique,” my (Oriental) “discipline” or my (Oriental) “affinity for kung fu” after a 2.5 hour solo piano recital of Western classical music, or the chamber partner disillusioned by multiculturalism who values me for my vague otherness, I pity any American who can’t see past their own racism to truly appreciate music.

Amongst the brutality of racism in the United States, Orientalism in classical music is a relatively small bone to pick. Nonetheless, the subtleties of this unique form of racialization help us better understand the systemic tendencies that favor white people at the expense of those who are not white. This is not meant to create divisions between white and non-white classical musicians, or white and non-white people in general, but rather to acknowledge that Orientalism, and any other similar, xenophobic ideology, has already created these divisions.

The aim of this article was simply to educate, or to borrow Paulo Freire’s term conscientização, to raise consciousness. The more conscious we are of our words and actions, the more likely we are to replace them with more humanizing gestures, in hopes of a kinder, more tolerant world.


1. I define multiculturalism as a dominant ideology that enables contemporary manifestations of Orientalism. There is nothing inherently wrong with the celebration of multiple cultures, as a literal reading of the word suggests. However, multiculturalism as a dominant, largely unquestioned ideology is problematic. In other words, it is good to be multicultural, but problematic to support multiculturalism. Multiculturalism in arts organizations is a mechanism through which racism plays out in classical music. Competing for resources (funding, audiences), American arts organizations are keenly aware of the importance of exhibiting an affinity for diversity and inclusion as concepts. However, though well intentioned, the way in which these concepts are “achieved” is deeply flawed.

Shi An Costello

Shi An Costello

Shi An Costello (世安) is a classical pianist, composer, writer, actor, and activist. They regularly write and report for Family Court Nightmares and the media/communications team at Asian Americans for Advancing Justice-Chicago; they have contributed articles to FOCI Arts, chicshifter, Riksha, and Performance Response Journal on the topics of economy, fashion, and the intersections of race and gender. As a writer, Shi An is interested in articulating politics, activism, and law as performance. As a musician, Shi An is currently on the piano faculty of New Music School in Chicago. They regularly perform in both solo and chamber settings across North America. They hold a B.M. from Columbia College magna cum laude, and an M.Mus from Schulich School of Music at McGill University. Shi An served as a visiting artist in the composition department of Boston Conservatory from 2013-14 and has run the Morton Feldman Chamber Players since 2014. His solo debut CD will be released with Blue Griffin Records in the fall of 2017, featuring preludes and fugues of J.S. Bach and Dmitri Shostakovich.

New Horizons, Old Barriers

Posted on August 30, 2017 by - Analysis, Articles

Over the next few months, we’ll be sharing case studies that illuminate networks of support for new American music, as presented by a panel of musicologists at the third annual New Music Gathering this past May. The full series is indexed here.

In 1983, the New York Philharmonic presented two weeks of new music programming focused on a single question: “Since 1968, A New Romanticism?” The first of three major Horizons festivals, “The New Romanticism”—curated by the Philharmonic’s composer-in-residence Jacob Druckman—was a major box office hit, fueled by a wave of publicity, extensive coverage in the press, and performances of new and recent works by Druckman, David Del Tredici, John Adams, and Luciano Berio. But the significance of Horizons was not only in its examination of the emerging aesthetic trend of neo-Romanticism. Funded by the organization Meet The Composer, the festivals represented a major shift in how new music was supported in the 1980s, as composers newly embraced the orchestra, turned away from academia, and entered the classical music marketplace.

The Horizons festivals represented a major shift in how new music was supported in the 1980s, as composers newly embraced the orchestra, turned away from academia, and entered the classical music marketplace.

I’m currently in the midst of researching a book project that situates the Horizons festivals within the larger institutional landscape for American new music in the 1980s and early 1990s. When I presented some of my work in Bowling Green at the 2017 New Music Gathering, it centered on the relationship between Horizons and Bang on a Can, an institution that is central to my book. But for this essay, I’d like to shift focus to talk about what Horizons offered, and did not offer, as support for composers entering a new musical marketplace. My brain is a bit too full of information on this topic right now—I’ve spent most of my summer digging into archival collections related to Horizons and interviewing folks who participated in it—but I will try to make this less of an info dump and more of a critical analysis.

Horizons-83

Meet The Composer

The three Horizons festivals—presented by the Philharmonic in 1983, ’84, and ’86—were a key component of one of many orchestral residencies sponsored by Meet The Composer, an advocacy and granting organization established in 1974 by composer John Duffy. Beginning in 1982, MTC established a nationwide composer-in-residence program. Modeled in part after the successful collaboration between the San Francisco Symphony and John Adams, the MTC residencies aimed to, as Duffy told EAR Magazine in 1986, create “visible ways to re-introduce and re-invigorate the whole world of the composer and orchestra.” The organization’s substantial funding was representative of the Reagan-era shifts in support for the arts: it combined public support from the NEA and state councils with foundation money from the Rockefeller Foundation, as well as corporate financing from Exxon. In comparison to the present day, MTC’s imprint was huge; in 1990, The New York Times reported that it gave on average $2.5 million to composers per year; in contemporary buying power, that is more than four times the amount of grant support that New Music USA, MTC’s successor, provides annually today.

The growing presence of MTC significantly shaped the marketplace for new music in the United States and deeply informed the idea of a non-academic “market” to begin with. One of the most startling discoveries in the course of my recent research—and this may not be casual knowledge among younger readers of NewMusicBox—is that, as recently as the 1970s, American composers frequently were not paid at all for commissions. Complaints about writing music “for exposure” were likely as common in the ’70s as they are today; orchestras often got composers to write new works simply by telling them their music would be played, not that they would be financially compensated for their efforts. As an organization, MTC argued vigorously that composers deserved to be paid. The institution’s significant fundraising and financing of the orchestral program—which included a full-time salary for resident composers—provided a more widespread understanding that a commission came with money, not just a guarantee for performance.

Complaints about writing music “for exposure” were likely as common in the ’70s as they are today.

This notion extended into their advocacy work writ large: in 1984, MTC published “Commissioning Music,” a pamphlet for composers and patrons that included guidelines for potential commissioning fees; in 1989, the organization published a handbook titled “Composers in the Marketplace,” with basic information on copyright, performance, publishing, recordings, royalties, and promotion. Soon enough, major funding organizations were taking their cues from MTC; the New York State Council on the Arts’s 1990 program booklet based its commission fee guidelines off of research conducted by the organization. As composers entered the marketplace, MTC helped determine how much they would be paid.

Horizons and the New Romanticism

As part of his MTC residency with the Philharmonic, Jacob Druckman was selected to compose music for the orchestra, advise music director Zubin Mehta on programming, and supervise the large-scale Horizons festivals. For the first festival, he proposed “The New Romanticism,” a curatorial theme steeped in his belief that, since 1968, new music had embraced “sensuality, mystery, nostalgia, ecstasy, and transcendence.” It was a tagline from which the Philharmonic could easily benefit, as subscribers perhaps otherwise fearful of dissonant and disarming contemporary work might relax at the notion that it maintained some continuity with the 19th-century music that typically brought them to the concert hall. Indeed, one Philharmonic advertisement promised “[t]hree weeks that could just change your mind about the meaning of new music.” And a big and provocative theme like “The New Romanticism” was catnip for music critics: dozens of articles were published examining just what this new romanticism might be, and whether it represented a sea change from the academic serialism that was perceived (often stereotypically) as dominant in the world of American composition.

Over two weeks in June 1983, the Horizons festival boldly seized this moment, with six concerts of orchestral music, numerous premieres, several symposia, and a glossy program book. It was a box office phenomenon, with hundreds of people lining up outside Avery Fisher Hall to buy tickets on opening night. An internal memo in the Philharmonic archives noted that the festival “attracted a younger audience—a way of replenishing the audience” and that the success of the festival “OBLITERATES NOTION that no one cares about new music and there is no audience.”

It was a box office phenomenon, with hundreds of people lining up outside Avery Fisher Hall to buy tickets on opening night.

Importantly, Horizons also offered a model for young composers to enter a new orchestral marketplace. The then 23-year-old Aaron Jay Kernis was selected by the Philharmonic to have his work dream of the morning sky read by the orchestra. In front of an audience of hundreds, Mehta took Kernis to task for his tempo markings and scoring. At one point, fed up with the criticism, Kernis apparently replied, “Just read what’s there.” The audience cheered on behalf of the composer; as the tiff was more widely reported in the press, it served as a kind of parable for the newfound power and opportunity that composers might have in the American symphonic world. An internal Philharmonic memo in the wake of the ’83 festival reports that Druckman said in a meeting that “composers now see that they can write for full orchestra and expect to be performed.”

The young composers Scott Lindroth and David Lang were also hired as assistants to Druckman for preparing the ’84 and ’86 Horizons festivals, which shaped their outlooks as recent graduates from the academy. (It is not a coincidence that these composers all attended Yale, and that Druckman taught there; I’ll be addressing this connection in more detail in my book.) In a 2014 interview with me, Lindroth said of the Horizons festivals that “when composers began to realize that this too might be available to them—and that it wasn’t all about the Pierrot ensemble plus percussion—we were all very, very excited about that: there might be another way to move forward as a composer.” Horizons represented the emergence of a new kind of “middle ground”—and audience—for young composers primarily familiar with either an “uptown” world of chamber ensembles and electronic music within academia, or a “downtown” world of improvisation and DIY ensembles within alternative venues.

And although Lang was himself writing orchestral music in the mid-’80s, his takeaway from working with the Philharmonic was that this particular corner of the marketplace was not for him. He saw the orchestral world as insular and claustrophobic; as he said in a 1997 interview with Libby van Cleve as part of Yale University’s Oral History of American Music project:

It also was very demoralizing and a very good indication of how narrow the world was, and how for any composer who was saying to himself or herself, “Oh, the secret of my future will be to write one orchestra piece. Every orchestra will play it. I’ll be world famous,” it just showed how impossible, or how narrow, or how unsatisfying that experience would be.

The first Bang on a Can marathon, in 1987, was brainstormed as a direct response to Lang’s dissatisfaction with Horizons. The composer and his compatriots Michael Gordon and Julia Wolfe had spent their days in the mid-’80s hanging out at dairy restaurants on the Lower East Side, drinking coffee and complaining about institutional negligence towards contemporary work, before deciding to do something about it. But even if it seemed to offer a model for everything that the scrappy Bang on a Can would attempt to avoid, Horizons did provide new institutional connections that facilitated the upstart organization’s funding: Lang cultivated a relationship with John Duffy during his work for the Philharmonic, and MTC subsequently became the earliest major financial supporter of Bang on a Can.

Lang & Druckman

The Limits of Horizons

In the 1980s, MTC’s advisory board included a significant number of female and black composers, and more diversity than many institutions today.

From my vantage point today, one of the strengths of MTC under Duffy was its broad purview in terms of who was considered a composer and the resources that they thus commanded. In the 1980s, the organization’s advisory board included a significant number of female and black composers, and more diversity than many institutions today. Duffy’s strong advocacy for underrepresented voices was confirmed in my recent interview with Tania León, who served on the MTC board and worked with the Philharmonic as a new music advisor in the early ‘90s. (I haven’t gotten a chance to transcribe this interview yet, so again, stay tuned for the book.) In a 1993 questionnaire assessing MTC’s jazz commissioning program that I found during recent archival research at New Music USA, the composer and violinist Leroy Jenkins wrote of his MTC grant that “the very audacity of the idea of writing for a classical organization…has given inspiration to me and my contemporaries.” I was also struck, at a memorial service honoring Duffy in 2016 at Roulette, that Muhal Richard Abrams, a co-founder of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, performed in his honor.

But because MTC partnered with existing institutions and established composers with their own blind spots, this push for diversity did not extend into the 1983 Horizons festival. I raise this issue because, in a recent blog post about the 2017 New Music Gathering at which I presented on my research on Horizons, the composer Inti Figgis-Vizueta pointed out the absence of diversity among conference attendees and, importantly, that very few panels addressed the systemic biases that plague the world of new music today. They suggested that “there needs to be an overhaul of our ethics to require more diverse voices in new music and that starts with each participant in our gathering truly self-criticizing and understanding their own intersections of privilege and power.” As a musicologist, I believe that such an overhaul can also benefit from telling and retelling historical moments in which underrepresented voices were silenced, and in which powerful institutions were subsequently reprimanded for the same reasons they are critiqued today.

The seven orchestras that participated in the first round of MTC residencies were free to choose their own composers: all of the composers they selected were men except for Libby Larsen, who partnered with Stephen Paulus to work with the Minnesota Orchestra, and all were white except for Robert Xavier Rodriguez, who collaborated with the Dallas Symphony. Druckman was known as a non-doctrinaire figure, and the programming of the ’83 Horizons festival was impressively catholic, bringing together distinct musical styles and a wide array of composers from Del Tredici and Adams to Wuorinen and Schuller. But even as it may have included a praiseworthy “diverse” assembly of musical idioms, diversity in terms of race and gender was almost nonexistent. Only one work by a female composer, Barbara Kolb, was presented in 1983; no works by black composers were performed. This issue was raised by the singer and author Raoul Abdul, who accused the orchestra of discrimination both at the festival and in the press; in a column in the New York Amsterdam News, he wrote that “when I asked the question ‘Where are the Black Composers?’ at the opening symposium at the Library of Performing Arts last Wednesday evening, it was greeted with hisses and boos from some of the 300 people present. Philharmonic Composer-in-Residence Jacob Druckman, who put together the festival, refused to address the question directly by saying he couldn’t include everyone. He lumped Blacks in with women and other minorities.”

Understanding the fact that Horizons did not present any works by black composers in 1983 can help us understand the mechanisms that shape how and why underrepresented voices continue to be excluded in the world of new music in the present. Given the dozens of scores that were mailed to the Philharmonic by hopeful composers—the New York Public Library’s Jacob Druckman papers include many, many letters from composers submitting their work for his examination—the composer-in-residence and the orchestra certainly had access to music by African Americans, but they did not program it. And it was an issue that the organizers were aware of beforehand: when actually planning the ’83 Horizons festival, as a document in the Philharmonic archives reveals, Druckman said in a meeting that “two areas have been of concern to Meet The Composer: getting more high-power soloists; and programming a work by one of the minimalists (Reich or Glass) and by a woman or black composer.” There is much to praise in Druckman’s visionary promise of a new Romanticism and the Philharmonic’s wholehearted embrace of contemporary music with Horizons, one that might even eclipse Alan Gilbert’s worthwhile recent efforts. But declining to properly represent the diversity of the American musical landscape was one of its failures.

press conference for Horizons

León mentioned in her interview with me that in the wake of the Abdul protest, Duffy marched over to the Philharmonic’s offices with a stack of scores by black composers to deliver to the orchestra. The second festival, titled “The New Romanticism—A Broader View,” addressed this injustice by including performances of music by George Lewis, George Walker, and Anthony Davis, as well as Diamanda Galás, Thea Musgrave, Laurie Spiegel, Joan La Barbara, and Betsy Jolas. But observers still pointed out the underrepresentation of women and black composers in the public forums that Horizons mounted. As reported by Johnny Reinhard in EAR Magazine, at an opening symposium for the festival in June 1984, an audience member asked of a panel of composers—which included Hans Werner Henze, Milton Babbitt, Roger Reynolds, Greg Sandow, and Druckman—“Why aren’t there any women represented here?”

“The response was an incredibly pregnant silence,” Reinhard wrote. The discussion continued to unfold awkwardly, as someone else asked, “What about Ornette Coleman?” As Reinhard described:

Mr. Sandow fielded the question by pointing out how interesting it is that Jazz musicians prefer to be kept separate from what was being represented on the Horizons series when New York Times music critic John Rockwell cried out, “That’s not true, Gregory!” It appears that Mr. Coleman had told him otherwise. “Maybe it’s because he’s black,” suggested Brooke Wentz timidly.

In 1983, a festival that embraced a new diversity of compositional idioms under the umbrella “The New Romanticism” neglected to include women and black composers. And in a subsequent festival that attempted to rectify this imbalance, a panel consisting of white male stakeholders could not fully account for the biases that those in the audience easily perceived. Meet The Composer and Horizons helped introduce composers to the marketplace, but this marketplace belonged to the institutional world of classical music, entrenched with long histories of racism and sexism that we must continue to fight against in the present day.

William Robin

William Robin

William Robin (@seatedovation) is an assistant professor of musicology at the University of Maryland. He completed his PhD at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a dissertation focused on indie classical and new music in the twenty-first century United States. His research interests include American new music since the 1980s and early American hymnody. As a public musicologist, Robin contributes to the New York Times and The New Yorker, and received an ASCAP Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award in 2014 for the NewMusicBox article “Shape Notes, Billings, and American Modernisms.”

Amateur Hour: Karin Rehnqvist, The City’s Choir, and the Gift that Kept Giving

Posted on August 23, 2017 by - Analysis, Articles

Over the next few months, we’ll be sharing case studies that illuminate networks of support for new American music, as presented by a panel of musicologists at the third annual New Music Gathering this past May. The full series is indexed here.

In 1977, one year after Karin Rehnqvist arrived in Stockholm to attend the music education program at the Royal College of Music, she was given the opportunity to lead a newly formed amateur choir Stans Kör (The City’s Choir). Its members were young—the oldest was 26 years old—and Rehnqvist herself was just turning 20. She had virtually no experience leading a choir, although she had been an avid choir singer in her small hometown of Nybro since early childhood. Hardly any of the members had sung in a choir before, and no audition was required. As one former member put it, “We were a bunch of people that you randomly could have picked off the street.” Only a few members could even read music; scores were used almost exclusively for learning the text. Rehearsals were time-consuming, as Rehnqvist typically first sang or played each part on the piano, and the singers imitated her. The members were so inexperienced in following a conductor that it wasn’t even possible to perform a ritardando or an accelerando during the early months of rehearsals.

The choir’s culture set the foundation for an artistically adventurous existence.

Despite its musical shortcomings, the choir had its strengths. The choir’s culture emphasized personal engagement and support—members socialized and some, including Rehnqvist, even found their future partners in the choir—and the choir was also democratically organized, with its members taking an active part in decision-making. The choir’s culture set the foundation for an artistically adventurous existence during the fourteen years Rehnqvist led it. The group was willing to try just about anything and, as it turned out, there was a huge advantage to the tedious rote-learning approach that their lack of musical background required: by the time the members were ready to perform a piece, they had it memorized. Most of their performances came to incorporate theatrical elements and should be better understood as shows than concerts. Although a musically far-from-excellent group, the experience would have an enormous impact on Rehnqvist’s compositional output for the rest of her career. At the time, she had no idea, as her early plans did not include becoming a professional composer. She just needed a job and took advantage of an opportunity.

Karin Rehnqvist

Karin Rehnqvist conducts her own Here Is the Music! for the inauguration of the new Royal College of Music buildings in 2017. Photo by Lena Tollstoy.

Here’s a brief example of what a Stans Kör show looked and sounded like by the late ’80s. It’s from Tilt&Mara,[1] given in multiple performances in the Stockholm House of Culture (Kulturhuset) 1988–89. The first excerpt is from a romantic choral piece that’s part of virtually every Swedish choir’s repertoire, Killebukken by Wilhelm Peterson-Berger, which sets a Norwegian poem by Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson about a child with a pet lamb (with the morbid ending “gain weight, mom wants you in the soup”). Sweden has a strong choral culture, encompassing church choirs, university choirs, and a few professional or semi-professional groups linked by a common aesthetic: a work like Killebukken is to be performed in a standard mixed-choir set up, standing still on a podium focusing on the intonation and the perfect, homogeneous choral sound, and of course, there’s typically no humor. Stans Kör performed it differently:

As you can hear, even after ten years in existence, the choir sounds far from perfect, but it has something else—an attitude and an artistic vision. The Tilt&Mara show attracted a larger audience than virtually any other choir in Stockholm at the time and received multiple newspaper reviews.

Another example from the same show illustrates the group’s creativity in their choice of repertoire and their ability to create stunning results with limited means. In their performance, Rehnqvist’s interpretation of Francesco Cangillo’s futuristic poem “Canzone pirotecnica” (which was intended to be performed and even includes dynamic markings, but no rhythmic notation) was enhanced by employing flashlights and stage lighting.

Such an adventurous choir attracted creative musicians over the years—not only singers, but also composers, arrangers, and instrumentalists, and several connections and ideas would stay with Rehnqvist throughout her career. (A career that’s still going strong by the way; she’s turning 60 this year and is as productive as ever, having recently completed commissions from the German contemporary music group ensemble recherche in Freiburg and the Kronos Quartet’s Fifty for the Future pedagogical commission project.) Her style has been consistent through the years, firmly anchored in Swedish folk music—an interest shared by virtually no other Swedish composer born after 1945. Her collaboration with numerous women folk singers made her adapt the style and mode of performance in an innovative manner—for example, the non-vibrato sound production and use of micro-intervals—as in her breakthrough piece Davids nimm (1984) for which she transcribed a Swedish traditional song, a polska, backwards and expanded it into a three-part composition for three women (two sopranos and one alto). She has also embraced motherhood in her work and emphasized how important her three children have been to her compositional output, including composing songs to texts by them. Other works are explicitly feminist, in particular Timpanum Songs—Herding Calls (1989) for two folk singers and percussion. In this piece she quotes misogynic Finnish proverbs about women to turn them into powerful feminist statements.[2]

Through her work with Stans Kör, she also learned to see performances as complete units—not just as arrays of pieces.

In a large number of her works—both choral works and chamber compositions, for professionals and amateurs alike—she continues the practice of staging the performances, often by very simple means, such as employing a lighting designer or requiring simple choreography or acting from the musicians. Through her work with Stans Kör, she also learned to see performances as complete units—not just as arrays of pieces. An approach she took a few times with great success was to combine existing works, add a few connecting movements, and present a staged performance. Till Ängeln med de brinnande händerna (To the Angel with the Fiery Hands, 1990–2005), for example, is a collection of choral compositions to which she added a few new pieces featuring voice and instruments. As with the Stans Kör productions, the choir had to memorize the repertoire for this almost hour-long performance. The result is visually quite striking, as in Ling Linge Logen, performed by the choir La Cappella, conducted by Karin Eklundh.

One of her most innovative works, När korpen vitnar (When the Raven Black Turns White, 2007), for folk singer and chamber group, is also semi-staged with very simple means: the instrumental ensemble has to memorize a few sections so that they can become active participants on stage, as they join together with the singer to depict the witch hunt process in Sweden during the 17th century—one in particular during which 91 people, mostly women, were decapitated and burned in the biggest peace-time execution in Sweden’s history. In this work, she connected her strong feminist strand with her interest in folk singing and folklore.

Movement 2 “Recitative for a downhearted cow” from When the Raven Black Turns White. Ulrika Bodén, voice, The Nordic Chamber Ensemble.

This piece was part of a larger outreach project, Häxbrand (Witch Fire, 2008), in which Rehnqvist collaborated with folksinger Ulrika Bodén, the Nordic Chamber Orchestra in Sundsvall, and students from Mid Sweden University. The students—who were education students and not music students—came up with ideas such as “The Witch’s Flight Theme,” which were translated into musical gesture and arranged into a complete work. The reason for engaging future teachers was to awaken their interest in music. The idea was that if art music and other cultural institutions are to reach the children in schools, teachers’ attitudes toward culture are crucial. As Rehnqvist put it, “The idea is that composition is not a divine intervention but a craft and that the teachers should take the child’s way of working.”

There is another important effect of Rehnqvist’s many years of outreach, beyond developing her own creativity: she gained a reputation as being an approachable team player, which resulted in a number of commissions, including several for children’s and girls’ choirs—especially her work with Adolf Fredrik Girls’ Choir, a choir at the Adolf Fredrik music magnet school in Stockholm—in which she was able to develop her feminist approach into an expression of girl power, as in the ironic introduction to Hörru Veckorevyn, a piece that mocks the body-image obsessions in teenage magazines: “Don’t kill love by eating chocolate, have licorice. Leaner thighs, eat algae. Do you also want a sexy ass, take a cold shower.” In her children’s opera Sötskolan (The Beauty School, 1999), the main character—eleven-year-old Bella—has to overcome demands to become well-behaved and pretty in time for her mother to remarry.

In several works, the results went beyond the theatrical and political: In the musically stunning Light of Light (2003) for girls’ choir and symphony orchestra, the clear, shimmering, perfectly-in-tune and vibrato-free choral sound set to texts from the Book of Proverbs and the Swedish hymnal contrasts the dark orchestral texture. This is simply a type of work she would not have written without her collaboration with children and young adults. In her work for children she shows that she takes them seriously; she believes they are able to deal with difficult existential questions, often about life and death.

Rehnqvist also received a large number of other engagements, such as guest lecturing and leading composition workshops with children and high school students. One such workshop, which became particularly well known, included a capstone experience of students writing for the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra. These engagements were much needed since she worked exclusively as a freelance composer until 2009 when she became professor and head of composition at the Royal College of Music, a job she secured to a large extent thanks to the experience she gained through her large-scale projects and teaching outreach. During her time there, she has continued to develop the composition curriculum through projects and interaction with professional and amateur ensembles and musicians inside and outside the institution. Virtually everything the composition students produce is done with a particular ensemble and a set performance date in mind.

She didn’t have to prove herself and knew she had the skillset to write for amateurs and professionals alike.

The amateur path Rehnqvist started on became an ideal schooling in outreach and entrepreneurship. And in contrast to her generational colleagues, she was never afraid of being labeled a composer for amateurs (nor was she afraid of being labeled a feminist). On the contrary, she is proud of it. After numerous commissions from professional ensembles and international performances, she didn’t have to prove herself and knew she had the skillset to write for amateurs and professionals alike.

Given that Sweden is a country with a population of only some ten million and an extensive public network of public support for artists, it’s difficult to make meaningful comparisons between Sweden and the United States. But two of the main takeaways that could be applied to both countries are that: 1) there can be immense benefits to working outside the institutional framework of a major arts organization or a university; and 2) there should be no stigma associated with working with amateurs. Creative impulses from outside the “classical” mainstream can be liberating. In Rehnqvist’s case, her on-going collaboration with Stans Kör contributed to the development of an artistic vision tied not to virtuosity and musical perfection, but rather to accessibility and engagement. These ideals are evident throughout her career, notably in her embrace of the idea of writing for a range of specific rather than idealized performers and ensembles.

Indeed, the Rehnqvist case suggests that success feeds success and support can go both ways: composers who embrace and support their own communities can gain something incredibly valuable from it.

Per F. Broman

Per F. Broman is professor and associate dean at Bowling Green State University, College of Musical Arts. He has published extensively on Swedish music, including the chapter “New Music of Sweden” for New Music in the Nordic Countries (Pendragon Press, 2002), a monograph on composer Sven-David Sandström (Atlantis, 2012), and an article about the reception of ABBA during the 1970s (Journal of Popular Music Studies, 2005).

A shorter version of this text was originally read at the New Music Gathering at Bowling Green State University on May 7, 2017, in a session titled “Support.” It incorporates material from my forthcoming biography on Rehnqvist, published in Swedish by The Royal Academy of Music and Atlantis.

[1] The title alludes to two pieces performed, Rehnqvist’s TILT and Mara Mara Minne by Arne Mellnäs.

[2] See Rebecca Sleeman’s dissertation “Feminist Musical Aesthetic in the Choral Music of Karin Rehnqvist” (University of Iowa, 2002) and Per F. Broman, “Gender, Ideology, and Structure: Pedagogical Approaches to the Music of Karin Rehnqvist,” College Music Symposium 44 (2004): 15–27.