Category: Articles

Matthew Shipp Photo by Laurie Stalter

The only experience I have had with a major was with the David S Ware Quartet on Sony. It was horrible. You could never get anyone on the phone. When you got someone’s secretary you were told they were out getting hot chocolate. A month after the record was released we noticed we were seeing no airplay—we found out they had never serviced any radio stations. Also, it took us about six months to get paid. We were told the paperwork was processed right after the recording date. After not getting paid for six months we found one nice lady at Sony who did a trace and found out the paperwork was never filled—and of course the person who was originally supposed to file the paperwork was mad we went behind his back. I wonder how he would feel if Sony had forgotten to give him his $200,000 a year salary for doing nothing? Independents are much better because they actually care about the music. I record for an independent that has great distribution.

Connie Crothers Photo by Alison Gordy

In today’s market-driven, commodity-oriented record business, the desire to release music that truly fulfills the musician is one of the most important reasons to choose the independent path. In 1983, Max Roach and I recorded duo. When no one was interested to produce the record, he asked me if I would want to form a record company to release it. New Artists was the result. Our record, Swish, got a four-star review in Down Beat when it was first issued on LP, and another four-star review in Down Beat when it was reissued to CD, inferring the value of the music to the general jazz audience.

Soon after, Max worked out an independent-producer agreement with Soul Note. Richard Tabnik, the great alto saxophone player, asked me to record on the label with him. I thought of the idea of forming a cooperative record company. My concept was that each musician would own an equal share of the company and receive 100 percent return on investment on any project. With the label identity being jazz improvisation, I wanted all musician-owners to have creative independence. The owners would share yearly expenses and ongoing work. At present, there are fifteen of us. Because we have not had to consider what a producer would think is marketable, our only criterion for selection is the music. The result is that there is a lot of variety and originality. It is exciting, often deeply surprising. I also feel that some of the greatest music on CD is on some of our releases. On this label you can hear the incredible pianist Liz Gorrill.

When considering whether to record for a commercial record company or form your own, any musician might consider that any commercial release is paid for entirely by the musician. As good as it gets is an advance on royalties. Then, after the record company has recouped its production costs, the musician can receive, perhaps, 10% of any money that comes in from sales, providing that the company is honest. Besides that, unless you lease your music, the record company owns it. They can take it out of print. They can refuse to release it at all. When you own your own production, you have creative control, and you can get 100% of the money that comes in. The major problem, of course, is distribution. We have a shifting picture here. I believe that distribution over the Internet, while it will dent profits, will eventually augment the availability of original music. Perhaps, in place of such an emphasis being placed on profits from CD sales, the emphasis will go over more to performance, with people able to find their way to musicians who would be passed over by the commercial companies.

It’s July and we’re again celebrating that quintessential and sometimes amorphous sense of American independence. And another perennial activity that we always need to be doing in the music world is examining how individual or independent artists, of all kinds, are faring in advocating and presenting their work in the shadow of whatever the mainstream happens to be. Even the mainstream of the avant-garde or new, because surely, we see fashions of a particular moment overshadow other new work of great integrity. We try to always keep this in mind in our work at the AMC, and I’m heartened that in recent NewMusicBox articles, columns, and forums, there brews a larger discussion of the identity of the new music field, and its relationship to the “mainstream”. Because the “we” that is all artists creating new work, needs to always be mindful of our independence at the same time that we may seek more broad acceptance.

Greg Sandow’s recent columns and the resulting forums have vigorous discussions regarding new music’s place in the realm of the classical music industry. The questions raised almost tread into the realm of cultural assimilation, and the positives and negatives of what is lost and what is gained when the “mainstream” catches up to accept a part of the new. And this month, jazz and improvisational artists have much to say about sustaining their art outside of support from mainstream record labels.

It is fair to say that the jazz artists discussed in this issue are not the AMC’s core membership. To many of them, the kinds of things we usually talk about here may represent another kind of musical mainstream. Of course, I would like to convince them that we have much to learn and gain from each other, and that by adding their voices to an alliance of creative musicians, we deepen the credibility and power of all new and alternative music.

And to composers of a more post-classical orientation, there is really a lot to learn from the independent and entrepreneurial approach our brethren in jazz are somehow forced to adopt. It is in part about capturing the moment, and a deep commitment to the risks of live music-making and celebrating the results. And perhaps we see this in the new music labels of John Zorn and Tzadik, the BOAC folks and Cantaloupe, and Jim Fox and Cold Blue.

No matter the genre, there are many aspects to the fault line between independent and mainstream: artistic purity, access to creative opportunity or commissions that are not proscribed by the funder, marketing of one’s work, and the benefits of forming or joining an ensemble or composers’ collective. This discussion always returns to our work, and how we can share it with the world when it seems there are not enough resources to help us. What are the ways that you think independent artists can help each other? What do institutions in the field need to be doing? How can we continuously transform and rejuvenate the mainstream?

It is hard for me to read this month’s issue and its consideration of composers thinking big for large ensembles, without the back of my mind drifting to the well-publicized troubles of our symphony orchestras. Certainly, there is a bit of a tired refrain at work, and the latest foldings or cutbacks are nothing we haven’t seen in earlier years and economic cycles, only to see orchestras resurrected and resume their patterns of activity. But perhaps the tired refrain is telling us something, which is that too many of the people involved in orchestras take their mode of operation for granted and seem to struggle with finding the courage and vision for change.

By their very nature, and in spite of the best efforts of Adorno, Cage, Cardew, and others to offer alternative visions to the totalitarian model of orchestra social structure, orchestras function with a top-down leadership dynamic. But in reality, they are one of our most shining models of interdependency, of absolutely vital constituent parts which learn to function as one organism. A stick helps make these parts go, and shape their way through time, but without these parts—these people—the stick is silent. The social problem identified by those aforementioned 20th century thinkers who saw the conductor/orchestra relationship as totalitarian is passé. Rather, the social problem of orchestras in the 21st Century is how this extraordinary model of interdependency, of music-making, can evolve to have a truly vital role in society.

It can happen if we create a climate where the role of orchestra musicians is understood as absolutely vital to the creation of new work. These are people who have dedicated their lives to realizing the work of composers, of playing music someone else has written. Their virtuosity and dedication are cultural resources that will dwindle if we do not advocate for their role in our creative process. It is absolutely tragic that we are seeing orchestral activity in this country decline at the same time that we have a rising talent level of musicians who seek to dedicate their lives to playing in orchestras. While conservatories have long trained people for jobs that are scarce (how much money did you make today composing?), we are at a juncture now where the scarcity of orchestra work and the resulting competition has focused orchestral training to very high levels of virtuosity.

I’m writing this from the Spoleto Festival USA, where I have the pleasure of being one of the people who auditions and conducts the spectacular Festival Orchestra, which is comprised of advanced students and young professionals. It is not hyperbole to say that for the four weeks that this orchestra plays together, it can proudly know it is one of the best anywhere. But it breaks my heart to think that many of these young people may not be able to make this their life’s work.

The long-term issue here is not the oft-repeated aesthetic debate over whether orchestras are obsolete. They will be obsolete only when musicians—when people—become obsolete. Orchestras need to be re-envisioned as flexible ensembles of musicians, rather than monolithic beasts dedicated to a very narrow repertoire. Our American orchestras need to be led by people who when choosing a redemptive work that speaks to the soul of their culture, will pick Copland’s Third Symphony instead of Beethoven’s Ninth. People who will make it their business to see that every sixth grader in their city knows that “Fanfare for the Common Man” is part of this symphony, and that it belongs to them. We need people who know that contemporary music is not scary to audiences, and that scary is having no contemporary music.

The orchestra model of the future is on our doorstep and it is not so very difficult to envision. Musicians, composers, and audiences seem very ready for this, and making it happen doesn’t require waving a magic wand. Perhaps we can help those in charge pick up the tempo. Isn’t that what orchestras have always had to do?

Frank J. Oteri Photo by Jeffrey Herman

When I first started to think seriously about being a composer, I thought that the best thing I could do was write for the orchestra. And, as a listener first truly plunging in to “classical music” as a teenager, I thought that orchestral music was the ultimate medium.

Nowadays I’m not so sure…

While every seven years or so, I’ll feel the itch to compose for orchestra, I rarely follow that muse and to this day nothing I’ve written for orchestra has ever been given a performance. I have no sour grapes about this; I’ve never submitted a score to an orchestra so, technically, I’ve never been rejected. As a listener, while I turn to orchestral recordings now and then, I’m usually drawn to works for smaller forces. As a concertgoer, I rarely attend orchestral concerts since the only concerts that excite me enough to make me forget my crazy schedule and attend are concerts featuring new works, which are rarely orchestra gigs. Sadly, many listeners and composers of my generation share this view.

I say sadly because, despite my own personal aesthetic and creative ambivalence toward the orchestra at this point in my life, I know intellectually that the concept of an “orchestra” is one of mankind’s greatest artistic expressions. It is music’s version of landscape architecture; beyond the arts, it is the closest music comes to being a metaphor for a society, and therefore could be the best way for a composer to address larger socio-political issues. I can think of few musical experiences that are more moving than the late large-scale number pieces of John Cage that require the coordination of sometimes up to 100 musicians scattered all over the place, which is perhaps a closer analogy to our own society than the almost Brave New World-esque division of the standard symphony orchestra where the strings are the alphas and the percussionists the epsilons…

But no matter what the make-up of an “orchestra”, orchestral music can only be successful when an entire group of people comes together and therein lies its greatest sociological implications. But, since so many people are required to make orchestral music, it is often difficult to get a consensus.

Frequently the composer is trapped in the middle between the orchestra’s administration and the unions representing the players, an often-adversarial tug-of-war that results in a misunderstanding of the importance of working with living composers, inadequate rehearsal time for new pieces, and, worst of all, composers being denied recordings of their own premieres, the lack of which perpetuates the stillbirth of so-much new music. And, of course, given the lack of new music at orchestral concerts and the generally conservative nature of much of what little new music there is, a socio-political music is something of a pipe dream.

All that said, one composer who hasn’t given up on the orchestra as it is currently structured and who has even been able to make important statements within it is David Del Tredici, who confesses that, despite the medium’s conservative conventions, “they have the cookies I want to eat!” Of course, in the early 21st century, the Western classical orchestra is just one of many options for composers who “think big”: there’s the jazz big band (jazz’s own orchestra with its own history of conventions), the gamelan (which is attracting more and more American composers), idiosyncratic large ensembles and even MIDI realizations. We asked a group of 8 composers, who create for all different types of orchestras, to explain their methods of orchestration.

A discussion of the relevance of the orchestra right now seems particularly timely given all the recent gloom-and-doom reports of orchestras going out of business all over the country. I’m sure it is something that will be on the minds of everyone attending the American Symphony Orchestra League Conference this month in San Francisco as well as the conference of the Music Critics Association of North America (also, as luck would have it, in San Francisco). Greg Sandow, who last month addressed the seeming lack of new orchestral music programming, this month suggests that the impending “death of classical music” should be at the top of the music critics’ agenda. But, the success of Minnesota Public Radio’s new American Mavericks series, which Dean Suzuki profiles this month, suggests a slightly different scenario. This exciting radio series and even more exciting website, which celebrates great American composers whom most orchestras would never perform, should be required listening and surfing for the staff and players of every orchestra in America. John Kennedy wonders if the preservation of the orchestra in 21st century America will require us to completely rethink its role in our musical culture. What do you think?

At this pivotal moment in our society, which is also a pivotal moment for our musical history, perhaps it is more important now than ever to remember Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s famous comment from his first inaugural address is 1933: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Just as the fear of dissenting opinions can destroy a democracy, the fear of new music is destroying classical music.

But, all is not yet lost. Now is the time to make the case for new ideas before it is too late. Perhaps it is time for all the reluctant composers out there, myself included, to reconsider writing for the orchestra!

Barbara Benary

On Orchestrating for the Gamelan

I began playing Javanese gamelan in graduate school at Wesleyan University in the late ’60s, and about a half dozen years later began adapting my indeterminate and process type pieces for the instruments. Soon after I began composing new pieces specifically for those instruments. My first instinct as an ethnomusicologist, and thus preserver of traditions, was not to mix things up. But with much encouragement by the participation and interest of composers Philip Corner and Daniel Goode at Rutgers, I soon let those barriers fall, deciding that no tradition was in danger of being lost or dishonored because of experimentation. The result was the birth of Gamelan Son of Lion as a new music composers’ collective and repertory ensemble in 1976.

Ever since we have continued to perform and to encourage both the composer-performers in the group and friends in and out of the gamelan world to add to our repertoire. Each composer deals with the gamelan in his/her own way, with individual choices as to how much of the traditions of Indonesia, Europe, or elsewhere to mix into a piece. We have a huge variety of styles as a result: everything from minimalist to melodic (maximalist?) to indeterminate and random to chordal to electronic, not to mention pieces built more out of the inspirations of Eastern Europe, Bali, India, etc.

The instrumentation of Gamelan Son of Lion covers a little over five octaves and is keyboard based, primarily mellow metallophones. But since different instruments handle different octaves, it doesn’t work to pretend it’s just a great big piano or vibraphone. There are timbre differences across the range; tunes that cross octaves have to be assigned carefully to different keyboards, or perhaps rethought to fit the range of the instruments that are there. Additional timbre differences are also available in the knobbed gongs and in various panerusen or elaborating instruments: wooden keyed xylophone, zither, tuned bamboo rattles, bowed string rebab, bamboo suling flutes, etc.

One major factor in gamelan composing is that the tuning is not diatonic at all but based on two flexible scale prototypes called slendro (5 tone) and pelog (7 tone). Not only do these scales not match the Western conventional instruments, but they need not even match a different set of gamelan instruments somewhere else. As a result we often find ourselves “shoehorning” a tune we hear in our heads with our Western ears into a scale that isn’t quite there. This can be a good or a bad experience depending on the effect desired. Our gamelan is a double set: two keyboards for every instrument type, one in each of the two scales. Often our composers have broken with the Javanese tradition of one tuning per piece and combined the 12 keys (actually 10 different pitches in our case) to widen the modal or harmonic possibilities. This involves adapting playing techniques and physical placements to accommodate what has been written.

Also the gamelan has historically been a syncretic kind of orchestra. Javanese can and have added to the core of metallophones and gongs everything from Indian-derived barrel drums and near-eastern rebab fiddle to an occasional diatonic brass section borrowed from the colonialists. In the synchretic spirit, Gamelan Son of Lion frequently makes use of the traditional skills of any orchestra-type musicians who happen to be with us. Violin and viola adapt well as gamelan additions, as does trombone of course, and saxophone with a little pitch bending. Flute bends with a bit more difficulty and clarinet has more trouble. (We had a specially tuned one made for the band). Matching pitches with trumpet is nearly impossible. But chorus and voice work well with gamelan, providing the singers have good ability to adapt to what they’re hearing.

Lou Harrison was a master of writing gamelan pieces with Western instruments added. He did, however, write these for a gamelan of his own design based on a just-intonation tuning, which tends not to be as radical as the indigenous tunings my own instruments use. The assumption is to try to have the solo instrument be in tune with the gamelan. However some composers deliberately use our western add-ins in unaltered diatonic tuning to produce heterophony with the gamelan. A couple of examples: I made this a focus of my piece Aural Shoehorning for gamelan and percussion quartet a few years ago with the idea that it could be played by any gamelan and be just as out of tune. And this year we enjoyed playing I.M. Harjito‘s piece “Sekat” for gamelan and highland bagpipe, intonation fall where it may!

In terms of notation, most of our musicians know the traditional number or cipher notation called kepahitan, which is used in Java. But because we are oriented to the concept of downbeats (kepahitan uses end-beats), we often do a rhythmic transposition and write our pieces with the downbeat on the first of every group of four. Other pieces in our repertoire—particularly those from our founding minimalist period—are often in the form of diagrams and instructions rather than notes. In recent years as more of our composers have taken the plunge to Finale literacy, we increasingly use a staff notation with the nearest equivalent diatonic note for each slendro or pelog pitch and the number-name written below

There is no doubt in my mind that a gamelan is an orchestra. But it’s an orchestra of a different type with its own history and its own limitations on its flexibility and hence on its repertoire. We don’t do Beethoven (just as Garfield doesn’t do mice). I don’t think we’d even want to try unless a comic or programmatic effect was intended. (I have done a couple of ragtimes and a tango, for instance). On the other hand, those of us who want to can use gamelan to evoke harmony of the western type, just as Harrison, Cowell, and McPhee evoked gamelan with piano and symphony orchestra. It is one of many possibilities, but not our main intent.

What we can do, and what I most prefer, is to continue to explore all the stylistic possibilitie
s that can be made to happen with gamelan instruments. We individually synthesize what we know of the gamelan, or discover by playing it, with whatever is rattling around in the musical history of our heads. The result is a delightful ongoing exploration enriched by all the composers who jump in and take part in it, and all the music pieces, theatre, dance, or puppetry projects we undertake.