Category: Columns

A Thousand Thoughts

A few weeks ago, I saw an advert online that mentioned the Kronos Quartet was going to be in town to accompany a documentary at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio. After writing an email to my students more-or-less stating, “You need to go to this—please GO!” (and hyperlinking their infamous stint on Sesame Street), I excitedly purchased a ticket myself and offered to drive any student who needed a ride.

The documentary was about the Kronos Quartet members themselves. After a consortium of arts organizations (including the Wexner Center) commissioned filmmaker Sam Green to create one of his “live documentaries” (which pair film footage with the live performance of the soundtrack and narration from the stage), he approached the Kronos Quartet and asked if he could not only make a live documentary about them, but also if they would perform a compilation of their greatest hits while the film about them was playing in real time.

How meta.

Kronos thought this was a brilliant idea.

A Thousand Thoughts chronicles the Kronos Quartet’s 45-year history through Green’s live narration, archival footage, and interviews with various (now) well-known composers and musicians. It tells the story of their early days in San Francisco and all their efforts to transform the stodgy string quartet into something hip and cool. David Harrington, the co-founder of the Kronos Quartet, sums up both the quartet’s mission statement and the thesis of the film in this way:

I’ve always wanted the string quartet to be vital, and energetic, and alive, and cool, and not afraid to kick ass and be absolutely beautiful and ugly if it has to be. But it has to be expressive of life. To tell the story with grace and humor and depth. And to tell the whole story, if possible.

While I was watching this live documentary, I realized that the Kronos Quartet was not only hip and cool, but also absolutely relevant and meaningful.

How did they do this?

While watching the film and being completely captivated by the wonderfully interwoven live narration, music, and interactions with the audience, there came a point in the story during which the quartet was hit with a slew of devastating tragedies. Cellist Joan Jeanrenaud, who had been with the core quartet for a good 20 years, left the ensemble in 1999 when she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Violist Hank Dutt lost his partner to the AIDS epidemic in 1993. And in 1995, David Harrington, the fearless leader of the group, suddenly lost his son during a hiking trip with his family. If the 1990s weren’t bad enough for the quartet personally, they too experienced the tumultuous 2000 presidential election, the 9/11 attacks, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In fact, after the devastation of the losses Harrington and his quartet weathered, and with another controversial war brewing (one that had similarities to the Vietnam War, a war that he protested in his youth), he wondered why he was playing in a string quartet and if making music was worth it.

At that moment in the documentary, I wanted to shout to both the on-screen David Harrington and the on-stage David Harrington, “This is how I felt about the Iraq war too! This is how I feel now! We’re still supposed to make music, right? Please say yes?” And it was at this point that I paid very close attention to the film because I was hoping to discover what I needed to do as a composer when things got rough, depressing, or downright heartbreaking.

I was hoping to discover what I needed to do as a composer when things got rough, depressing, or downright heartbreaking.

In his search, Harrington had an opportunity to chat with Howard Zinn, historian and civil rights activist, about his true purpose in life. He asked, what was his role? What can a normal person (or even an artist person) do in this time to fulfill the needs of other people?

Zinn simply advised Harrington to create something beautiful.

Now, you may have heard something similar to this before. I’m certain that unavoidable Leonard Bernstein quote has resurfaced 11 times in this year alone, the one where Bernstein responds to the assassination of John F. Kennedy by stating, “This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.”

However, I’m not only talking about violence or politics here, per se. We should create beautiful and ugly music no matter what—that is our mandate. In fact, we composers and performers have always been commenting on everything and anything that inspires and influences us. Granted, we’ve been indirectly commenting on political things, too. And whether you know it or not, we are always creating a reflection and reaction to the political environment around us.

I just want us all to be aware of it. I want us to be more woke.

How I Got Here (Making New Music with Japanese Instruments)

The first time I tried playing a shakuhachi, it was an epic fail. It was the spring of 1979. I had just attended my first performance of traditional Japanese chamber music. I was quite taken with the incredible virtuosity and commanding technique of all the players but paid particular attention to the shakuhachi, the instrument that was closest to my own. There was an incredible richness to the sound of the bamboo and an unexpectedly wide range of color and dynamics, which I found captivating.

“As a classically trained flutist, surely it should not be so difficult to make a sound on an open tube of bamboo,” hrrumphed the arrogant 22-year-old that I was. I tried again, and again, repeatedly, until much to the delight of the three Japanese members of the ensemble, I handed the instrument back to its owner—frustrated but with quiet respect.

Record stores occasionally had a small section labeled “International.”

At the time, to me, the nascent term “world music” meant Ravi Shankar and Babatunde Olatunji. And record stores occasionally had a small section labeled “International.” It was only years later that I realized how incredibly rare it was to encounter a concert of Japanese instruments, and to attend a performance like the one I had just heard in of all places, an apartment in New York’s famed Dakota building. I related this story to the contemporary flutist Harvey Sollberger, with whom I was taking some lessons at the time, and he replied that he actually had a shakuhachi but had given up on it because he couldn’t make a sound. (I began to see a pattern.) Would I like to borrow it? Well, of course I would, and over several days, with concerted effort, I began to make a sound.

A local cliché is that you can find anything in New York. Well, true to form, I found a shakuhachi teacher in short order and began what was to become a lifetime obsession with learning, teaching, performing, and composing music for the Japanese bamboo flute. The late Ronnie Nyogetsu Seldin was my first teacher. My initial approach to practicing was casual, to put it kindly, but over time (decade number one) I began to get better. And as I learned more and more about Japanese traditional music and musical culture, and made multiple trips to study in Japan, I became more and more fascinated. I observed that the rigor of the training, the complexity of the music, and variety of musical genres required a deep understanding of a highly sophisticated and complex tradition and that each had a parallel with that of classical music training for Western instruments. After years of study it became clear to me that while Japanese classical music bears no relationship whatsoever to European music, the rigor of technical mastery and knowledge of performance practices are remarkably on par.

Fast forwarding through the 39 years following my first, singular experience with the recalcitrant bamboo—countless lessons, performances, teaching, and three degrees of certification later—I have at last developed a decent technical ability on the instrument. I humbly lay claim to a fairly comprehensive understanding of both the traditional solo and chamber music repertoires, and I have moved beyond the traditional into the world of contemporary and new music for Japanese instruments.

As my composer courage grew, I thought, “Why not bring my professional training in Japanese and Western music together in my work?”

My latent composer genes began to surface in 1997. I began by writing original music for shakuhachi, and then ensembles of Japanese instruments with koto and shamisen. My personal influences of rock, the blues, and Western classical music seeped in and colored my explorations. As my composer courage grew, I thought, “Why not bring my professional training in Japanese and Western music together in my work?” I took the plunge in 2006 and wrote Quintet No. 1 for shakuhachi and string quartet. Three years later, my pursuit of this idea led me to brazenly complete and perform my first concerto and to found Kyo-Shin-An Arts, a contemporary music organization that commissions and presents new music combining Japanese and Western classical instruments. I wanted to play Western-style music again—this time on the shakuhachi—and the repertoire needed to be helped along. Through KSA, the last decade has brought the great joy of bringing some remarkable composers to the Japanese well, convincing them to attempt a work outside of all previous experience, and shepherding the premieres of quite the trove of fantastic music.

In homage to a daring and intrepid bunch of wonderful composers who have joined me in my journey this past decade, my gratitude goes out to Victoria Bond, Chad Cannon, Ciara Cornelius, Douglas Cuomo, Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez, Daron Hagen, Matthew Harris, William Healy, Takuma Itoh, Kento Iwasaki, Mari Kimura, Angel Lam, Daniel Levitan, Gilda Lyons, James Matheson, Paul Moravec, Mark Nowakowski, Thomas Osborne, Charles Porter, Yoko Sato, Somei Satoh, Benjamin Verdery, Aleksandra Vrebalov, Donald Womack, and Randall Woolf.

Spell No. 8 composed by Aleksandra Vrebalov, a Kyo-Shin-An Arts commission, performed by Jennifer Aylmer (soprano), Jennifer Choi (violin), Wendy Law (cello), Kathleen Supové (piano), and James Nyoraku Schlefer (shakuhachi) on November 19, 2017, as part of the concert “Exploding Chrysanthemums” at the Tenri Cultural Institute in NYC.

All the Rage: When Is Music a Political Action

There was a brief time in my life when I no longer wanted to be a composer.

This wasn’t because I thought writing music was difficult and laborious (it still is) or because my music wasn’t being performed at the time (it wasn’t); it was because I briefly believed that writing and creating my music was absolutely pointless and worthless. My insecurities may have ignited a quarter-life or existential crisis at the time, but I truly believed that writing and performing concert music was absolutely self-serving.

Yes, I felt selfish.

I bet you’re wondering what life-changing event made me suddenly question my supposed vocation.

When I went to college at the turn of the 21st century, I was thrilled to learn all things musical, but I didn’t know this would include so many things experiential. I was 19 when I was able to vote in my first presidential election and watched with naive bewilderment the news of Florida’s voting booth irregularities and recounts. I was 20 when I woke up on a Tuesday morning and witnessed on television the South Tower collapse in real time. I was 22 when the Iraq War began. I was incensed. I questioned everything. I donated to Greenpeace. I went to my first anti-Bush protest. I wasn’t an activist per se, but I thought I was being active while continuing on my quest to become a composer.

It wasn’t until I saw a documentary about the aftermath of the September 11 attacks and the policies that followed that I questioned my future career.

It was 2004, one year after I graduated from college. I decided to take a few years off and move way across the country to Vermont (much to the chagrin and bewilderment of my parents), a place that is both literally green and Green Party-leaning.

One of my favorite pastimes during my post-college self-deemed “study abroad” was going to the Merrill’s Roxy Cinemas on Church Street in Burlington and seeing independent films with my then-partner. When the newest Michael Moore film was released, we didn’t hesitate to see it.

Fahrenheit 9/11 is a film that covers a slew of monumental events that marked the turn of the century. It covers the 2000 presidential election (suggesting that George W. Bush’s election was won due to voter fraud), the September 11 attacks, the corruption associated with trying to construct a natural gas pipeline through Afghanistan to the Indian Ocean (which may have been a contributing factor to the war in Afghanistan), the spread of fear-mongering post-September 11 and the creation of the USA PATRIOT Act, and how the Iraq War upended and devastated Iraqis and young American veterans alike.

I wanted to set something on fire.

I wanted to do something.

I no longer wanted to be a composer.

I thought:

Is producing music pointless? Is writing concert music selfish? What does writing and performing concert music do anyway? How does it help people? How does it feed them? How does it fix greed and corruption? How does it prevent an unnecessary war? How does it stop teenagers from fighting in combat and dying?

After the last incendiary and helpless thought left my brain, I decided to write music again, but what was the point? Composing does not bring virtue nor ethics to our corrupted society, right? It does not make me or others more noble, so why do it? I accepted that I wrote music because I like manipulating time and evoking feelings, but I decided that my music would not in itself fix anything. I thought maybe my singular role in the universe would be to someday earn enough money to donate to organizations, to maybe volunteer to work at a voting booth, or to attend a good protest here and there. These are active ways to make the world a better place, I thought, and writing my music would be my way to exist and self-indulge.

I could teach a future generation of students how to write and analyze music, and while music doesn’t literally prevent wars and killings, I would be helping young adults form opinions and think for themselves.

I eventually took a steady job in Ohio in 2012 where I thought I was getting closer to my goal of being political in a more active way. I finally had a steady income stream, so I could donate to other causes. I could attend localized marches in Delaware or Columbus. I could even be on stage with Michelle Obama during a political rally. But most importantly, I could teach a future generation of students how to write and analyze music, and while music doesn’t literally prevent wars and killings, I would be helping young adults form opinions and think for themselves. This was my accepted activist role: I wouldn’t be an official activist, but I could be politically active while still indulging myself by writing my music.

It wasn’t until I met a colleague (The Chaplain) at my institution that I started to question my initial assumption that music isn’t important.

Here is what you need to know about The Chaplain: he is the most affirming person on this planet. He is genuinely thrilled to see you. After meeting him, I would run into him on campus and he would thank me profusely for writing music and sharing it with others. He would say that my music was a great service to the community. I would sheepishly say thanks, but I thought he was merely doing his job by helping me feel good about myself. Doesn’t he realize that I write concert music? That I’m not a singer-songwriter who writes protest songs?

And yet, maybe he was onto something. I merely wrote music about how I was feeling at the time, but maybe I had lots to say? Was I saying what needed to be said through my music? Does writing an opera about Paula Deen choking on a donut and dragging two angels to hell with her make a statement about our socio-political problems? Probably not. But maybe writing a couple of satires about the housing bubble and Big Oil does? Or how about writing about the importance of the Cincinnati Streetcar and the future of the Brent Spence Bridge? Maybe I had something to say and I am saying it. Maybe through my actions and music, I was being politically active in ways I couldn’t fully see. And maybe because we composers reflect on our surroundings, we often (directly or indirectly) make commentary about the political environment around us.

The Genesis of a Return to Concert Music

I’m writing these words from my basement studio in a peaceful sector of Harlem, New York, looking west out over the trees of Riverside Park.  The word “peaceful” is, of course, relative, because this is Manhattan, which buzzes with energy wherever you are, any time of day or night.  But compared to Midtown, where I had four studios over the past 25 years, this is an oasis: a raw, stone-walled space with gentle, refracted afternoon light, filled with old sofas, oriental rugs, artwork, my Chickering baby grand, and the “brains” of my production activity—the workstation.  I needed a place which I could really call my own, where I wouldn’t have to worry about the sublet ending and would have enough space to correspond with all the spaces in my mind devoted to film scoring, concert composing, and teaching—a home where I could park my music library and my instrument collection, and could set up stations as needed for multiple simultaneous projects without losing my mind.  It’s not without its challenges, especially the street noise, but I find myself embracing that: periodically throughout the day people stroll past my four Riverside Drive windows, blaring boom boxes—usually salsa or reggaeton—and often singing loudly in accompaniment.  The stereo movement is like its own timekeeper, slowly sweeping from one side of the studio to another. It’s a gentle reminder that life goes on outside my urban retreat, moving in its own never-ending cycles.

The largest space in my mind lately has been taken up by the revising, rehearsing, recording, editing, and mixing of several chamber pieces that are slated to be released on CD this spring on Innova Recordings.  Two of the pieces—my string quartet Chthonic Dances and my percussion quartet with live electronics Hall of Mirrors—were composed in the last few years, after almost two decades of focus on media scoring.  The third piece, Into Light for clarinet, viola, and piano, pre-dates my film music years, yet connects conceptually to the later pieces.  One of the reasons I rented this uptown space was to gain the focus to finish the CD.  As of this writing, the finish line is clearly in sight; it’s a good moment to take a breath and consider where this CD fits in my artistic trajectory.

Frankly, I’ve never understood why there has—until recently­­—been such a demarcation between genres in music.  As far back as I can remember, I’ve been enormously responsive to music, independent of genre.   I know I’m not alone in this, especially in today’s eclectic musical environment, but for many people, classical music’s vaunted tradition excluded an appreciation of popular or folkloric forms—and heaven forfend that any classical composer should write something as shallow as film music!  Fortunately, my open nature allowed me to at once love rock ‘n’ roll, jazz, Brazilian samba, and South African popular styles such as mbaqanga (township music), and hold a particularly reverent fascination with Indian forms, while immersing myself into the vastly diverse realms referred to as concert or classical music.  I believe this enabled me to survive the shark-infested waters of the classical establishment, especially at Columbia University, where I received my doctorate in composition, and Tanglewood, where I studied with 12-tone icon George Perle.  Of course, these institutions weren’t fatally dangerous, and I basically ignored any insinuation that my love of “non-classical” forms was a kind of intellectual or artistic weakness, because they were wrong: it was a sign of creative strength and somehow, in my heart, I knew it.

American society wasn’t built to accept an artist who crossed between such divergent musical fields.

So it was not really that much of a leap for me, soon after completing my DMA at Columbia, to move into film composition.  I knew that I was taking a career risk, and that American society wasn’t built to accept an artist who crossed between such divergent musical fields.  It was not like Japan, where composer Toru Takemitsu was revered as a deity in the film community and equally worshipped for his stature as a concert composer; nor was the USA like France, where composers from George Auric to Jacque Ibert and Arthur Honegger moved seamlessly between the movie house and the concert hall.  Yes, there were notable exceptions, such as Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson, but their film scoring activity was seen more as a diversion from their classical music career than as an integral part of their artistic output.  And some highly acclaimed concert composers, most prominently Arnold Schoenberg, tried to make a go of film composing and fell short; he legendarily met with MGM producer Irving Thalberg in 1935 to discuss a possible scoring assignment for a movie based on Pearl S. Buck’s novel The Good Earth.  Schoenberg devised themes and composed some sketches for the story, but ultimately was turned down by the studio; some anecdotes recount Schoenberg’s feeling of relief that he was off the hook.

So I knew that I was venturing into somewhat unknown territory when I decided to throw my hat into the film scoring ring.  But one thing I was pretty sure of was that I would not be sacrificing my artistic soul in the process.  I knew that certainty may be tested, but because of my conviction that ultimately both activities would be drawing on the same creative source, I felt that I could maintain my identity as an artist no matter which direction—film or concert—I was pulled in.

This is not to say that there are no differences between film and concert composing.  The point is, it is all composing.  Nonetheless, let’s discuss some of those differences—and similarities­—here.

One difference is that media scores are often made up of small snippets, sometimes only a few seconds long.  When woven together, as they were in my recent soundtrack Emmett Till for the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, they may constitute a longer entity (see my first post in this series, “Requited Music: Anatomy of a Scoring Gig”), but as often as not, a film cue makes its brief statement and is gone.

I felt that I could maintain my identity no matter which direction I was pulled in.

This discussion of the difference between film and concert music brings up a question: what defines concert or classical music? (You can see that I’m using the terms interchangeably.)  For me, it has nothing to do with style, musical language, or instrumentation, and everything to do with structure.  In classical composition, works tend to be in forms long enough that they are able to take you on a journey within a structure that is integrated unto itself, unfolding with a feeling of inevitability and providing an ending that brings one to a sense of completion.  Of course, one can go to any number of new music concerts where these traditional elements are subverted or avoided.  Or, one can find uncounted pieces of music from any other system or culture, be it hip hop or bebop, that can be said to fulfill those expectations.  But hey, that’s the trouble with definitions, especially in music—they define, they de-limit.  So, I’m speaking here in generalities, and I’m happy whenever a creative person redefines the parameters.

But as I indicated in “Tearing Down The Wall,” concert music develops out of its own materials; it unfolds and transforms from its first statements forward.  Even music written for dance, opera or art songs will usually follow the conventions of Western composition, taking the listener on a transformative journey within the musical plane, and in those cases, music’s role is typically much more prominent than the subliminal role it often plays in film.   Conversely, the structure of film music must be responsive to a myriad of stimuli: the sound, pitch, and rhythm of the dialog and Foley; the narrative that is being depicted on the screen (and the feelings that go along with it); the lighting, editing, even the overall tone and mood of a film are contributory to compositional decision-making.  In addition, there may be stylistic considerations for the composer to adhere to.  Thus film music includes techniques not normally taught in composition class: selections may end on an unresolved harmony—in fact, they usually do. There are abrupt, unprepared key changes, and/or changes of texture, instrumentation, and rhythm. Depending on the situation, there may be no development at all, just…sound.  Some say film music should not have more than three layers going at once; the observer’s mind can’t apprehend any more than that at any given time, what with picture, dialog, and story flying by. True or not, it is something for the film composer to be aware of.

Film music also has its own conventions, its own tropes.  I’m sure you’ve all heard the ubiquitous use of the Lydian mode in Hollywood scores, used for every sentiment from wonder to quirkiness. Perhaps in this way film music is similar to concert music, which, depending upon which world you live in, has its own conventions and clichés as well.  They’re just different from film music clichés, for the most part.  And although I tend to avoid cliché in any of my music, concert or film, I realize that you can learn from them, and if the scene really calls for it, try to make them your own.

What do the fields of film and concert music have in common?  Primarily, the essence of the compositional process.  In both, you are imagining and creating themes, harmonies, rhythms, meters, and orchestrations.  You are functioning, musically, at a very high level, with a heightened sense of time and flow.  To reiterate the Michael Giacchino comments I paraphrased in “Tearing Down The Wall,” what’s ideal is when film music can achieve the sense of formal integration that one finds in the most compelling concert pieces; therefore, the film composer, at his or her best, is working with antecedent/consequent phrase and sectional relationships, with a global sense of registral and harmonic direction, flexibly moving in the moment while keeping an eye on the whole (and all in service to the film).  A good film score will connect thematically and structurally from the beginning to the end as an integrated piece, as does a good concert score.

But for every item on my list of what film and concert music should or shouldn’t do, one can give examples of the opposite.  There are some extremely short concert pieces (such as Webern’s Op.11, #3 for piano and cello).  Some concert composers operate according to structural concerns that may be foreign to the classical canon.  Who says a concert piece can’t have unresolved harmonies or unprepared key changes? Who says it has to be integrated and have a sense of directionality?  Why can’t a concert piece just…be?  Can a composition just be a texture or a rhythm, with no real beginning or end?  Steve Reich or Dan Deacon may have interesting answers to that question.  (Dan Deacon, by the way, scored Francis Ford Coppola’s last feature film, Twixt.)

My point is that as one goes deeper into any musical realm, one discovers artists who break the traditional modes and who are crossing beyond genre with their own statement, their own voice.  Jonny Greenwood is a legitimate contemporary composer who is also the guitarist for the band Radiohead; his first score for director Paul Thomas Anderson, There Will Be Blood, was like a marriage between Penderecki’s Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima and Takemitsu’s soundtrack to Women in the Dunes, with disturbing textures of crisscrossing string glissandi.  Today there are many more examples of concert, rock, and jazz composers working in film than there were 20 years ago; I do not feel like so much of a standout any more.  In fact, in terms of pure creativity, I feel that we are living in a golden age of musical composition—and storytelling.  I’m hearing more individual musical voices in film and television music, especially via such border-bashing platforms as Netflix and Amazon, than I heard even five years ago—and I’m also witnessing an extraordinary explosion of activity, beyond genre, in the new music world. And I think there is a reason for that: a deep, atavistic human need for fresh, cutting-edge music that reflects and relates to our current lives.

Film music’s freedom allowed me to often write and produce music that I truly loved.

So when I returned to concert music after years of just working in film, that was not too much of a leap either.  In fact, I came back to it stronger than before.  Doing film music, I’d spent a large percentage of my life developing musical and production skills that are not taught in the DMA program at Columbia.  And film scoring brought about a new sensitivity to how music acts on the unconscious, showing me some different perspectives on how to structure concert music.  Film music’s freedom from the expectations of concert form allowed me, as a film composer, to often write and produce music that I truly loved—at times with a rocking, cathartic groove.  And that freedom carried over into my return to concert composition.  So in the end, the names we assign to the different forms of music wind up being less useful than understanding that there is an interaction between musical forms on the societal level, and in my case, the personal level as well.  And that diffusion creates new languages, which are tools for communication—for bringing people together.  That is what is actively happening in music right now, and I’m lucky to be part of it.

Here is an excerpt from Hall of Mirrors, with Jeremy Smith, Brian Shankar Adler, Christian Lundqvist, and Brian Shank on percussion; Rick Baitz on laptop and MIDI controller:

Implications of Polychromatic Music

The development of new musical languages (like any language) provides a conceptual framework for the discovery and expression of an expanding awareness of the world. And like the chicken/egg paradox, the process of exploration and discovery itself often creates a need for the development of new language.

The polychromatic system is intended to remove some of the practical difficulties associated with the exploration of the expansive and integrated worlds of micro-pitch and harmony—exponentially increasing the tonal resources available to musicians and composers. Optimally, it can facilitate a seamless assimilation of diverse sonic pitch-palettes within the pitch continuum.

The experience and practice of polychromatic music brings to auditory awareness new harmonic interactions and multidimensional spatial effects. Additionally, the increasing auditory perceptual discrimination developed in the practice may lead to innovations in ‘hearing’ research models and methodologies within science.

Randomized studies do not help elucidate the vast, uncharted potentials of human perceptual development.

Perceptual (psychoacoustics) and medical (audiology) research is conventionally based on randomized studies. Implicit in this methodology is a delineation of statistically significant, average responses. Unfortunately, this methodology does not help to elucidate the vast, uncharted potentials of human perceptual development which could be demonstrated by the intensive study of trained and exceptional (nonrandom) subjects. It seems intuitively obvious that a great deal of qualitative information regarding color perception would be gained by research conducted with painters and visual artists—those who have the intensive perceptual practice and development, as well as a vocabulary to express their qualitative awareness. Unfortunately, medical research tends to be based on quantitative (measurable) data and statistical analysis, and as a result, immeasurable aspects of qualitative ‘data’ lie beyond its scope. And yet, it is precisely these qualitative aspects of perception which are the greatest strength of Art. This suggests an integrated sense of Art and Science as complementary (qualitative-quantitative) perspectives.

My practice and experience with high pitch-resolution scales (72 and 106 equal divisions of the octave) within the polychromatic system has made me aware of the lack of integrated models of ‘hearing’—expanding beyond the ears to include the perceptual limits and qualities of sound/vibration, sensed through active touch, the skin, and teeth/bones, etc. Medical science models are still rooted in anatomical concepts which segment the senses by organ: sight/eye, hearing/ear, touch/skin. Yet, the perceptual effects of polychromatic music (harmonic interactions, sensations of dynamic, multidimensional auditory structures, physical resonance, etc.) inspire my curiosity about the perception of sound through an integration (gestalt) of conceptually separated senses. I also wonder about the scientific and aesthetic innovations possible with the practice and development of integrated visual/auditory associative synesthetic awareness.

I am curious about the impact of ultrasonic (> 20 KHz) harmonic interactions which create audible effects within our audible range. Rudimentary examples of audible harmonic interactions are found in the perception of combination tones (sum and difference tones). The definition of combination tones is revealing of the current conceptual framework of auditory perception: “a psychoacoustic phenomenon of an additional tone or tones that are artificially perceived when two real tones are sounded at the same time.”

Here is a musical example of this type of artificial perception of pitch:

Because the qualities of perceptible combination tones are not measurable by technology and do not fit into theoretical hearing models, their presence is relegated to a category called auditory “distortion products”. In other words, the anomaly is conceptualized as a deficiency in perceptual awareness rather than a deficiency in the theoretical model of perception.

Rather than thinking of the ear/hearing as a passive organ/process involved in receiving/decoding the sounds of the world, it is important to recognize that the ear (cochlear apparatus) produces sound as well. These phenomena are recognized by science as otoacoustic emissions and are poorly understood. Otoacoustic emissions are defined as low-level sounds generated by the ear as a natural by-product of the hearing process. They can occur spontaneously or in response to incoming sound stimuli. They have been documented scientifically by small microphones placed within the ear canal. Thus far these microphones are detecting only sounds within a limited frequency bandwidth. The impact of ultrasonic frequencies generated by the ear and the resulting perceptual effects of their interaction with incoming sounds would be an amazing area of research.

Further intensive research into human perception of the effects of these types of ultrasonic harmonic interactions may provide a basis for the future development of high-resolution audio technology which implements frequency response capability, end-to-end, extending far beyond 20 KHz.

The wider impacts of polychromatic music as a practice and system of artistic expression are compelling in our era of increasingly pervasive technology and artificial intelligence. New perspectives of reality, meaning, and individual responsibility are emerging in response to a world of virtual and augmented reality, robotics and beyond. The human impacts of these emerging technological perspectives are worthy of reflection.

The active interactions and unique expressions of the individual are increasingly impeded in the converging, highly routinized, and homogenizing tendencies of a society oriented toward efficient conformity. Standards of practice, procedures, and algorithms are implementations of mechanical processes on human activity and behavior. In this context, the unique expression and development of each individual’s potential is minimized and sometimes actively invalidated.

As artists, our gift is a catalyst, meant to be shared.

The arts provide nourishment to the creative, imaginative, intuitive, and emotional aspects of human existence. As artists, our ‘gift’ is a catalyst, meant to be shared, in the hope of igniting these innate characteristics of full and vivid living awareness, in all who are receptive to the opportunity to openly experience and interact with art.

We also have choices about how we express creativity through technology. Will we efficiently conform to the processes defined by the software and creatively work from that baseline and within the limitations of that framework? Will we inefficiently find workarounds to make technology do things it was never designed to do?

The trajectory of progress seems to move us further into the role of passive consumers of technology. Our essential purpose as artists may be to rekindle human imagination, intuition, and creativity from within a technological culture which tends to make these qualities irrelevant. Art exists to catalyze the growth of aesthetic awareness and recognition of meaning, values, and purpose in a detached world of consumption, diversion, and ‘progress’.

The process of creation and interaction with art provides a context for the practice of sustained concentration and active conscious engagement in an era of increasing distraction, passive entertainment, and decreasing attention spans. Passive engagement with change and technology develops only further passivity. And a vivid engagement cannot spontaneously emerge when creative interaction is not actively pursued and practiced. Patience is the essential lesson from the study of music and is all-important in an era of instant gratification. The more challenging something is to attain, the more rarely it is developed. By recognizing value in the practice and in patience, our orientation to and interaction with nature and each other can be transformed into a more expansive perspective of value, purpose, and meaning.

Passive engagement with change and technology develops only further passivity.

In our modern era, with its immense and quickening expansions in knowledge, collaboration is essential for pushing each dimension of aesthetic expression to its farthest potential. This collaboration becomes an integrated creative expression, one of interacting individuals with diverse areas of expertise (music, technology, science, design, visual art, etc.); a new creative context of synergistic influences beyond the segmented and arbitrary divisions of art and not-art.

The enduring value of authentic art has nothing to do with commodity value, yet this is the overwhelming message of our era. It is essential for artists to see the importance of their role in society: in catalyzing inspiration, imagination, intuition—those immeasurable human qualities that are essential to a vivid life experience filled with growth, meaning, and active engagement.

The idea of ‘simulated’ art in an era of computers and electronic music describes a tendency toward artworks with an increasing magnitude of technologically assisted and generated content. Simulated music would describe recordings of music created without any actual musicians (samples, loops, sequencing, etc.) as well as an increasing pervasiveness of technological compensation and enhancement of human musicianship – i.e. with autotune (melodic quantizing), harmonizers (harmony quantizing), sequencers (rhythmic quantizing) – in a sense, recreating a ‘clockwork universe’ aesthetic in music. Perhaps in the future, art will become categorized on a scale indicating the extent of authentic human creation/performance content. No value judgements are intended here, just a search for descriptive distinctions regarding the relative degree of direct human involvement in the creation of modern art.

Technology is now presenting us with captivating simulations of experience. Our choice and responsibility is to determine what role, value, and importance we place on technological simulation in our creative and expressive processes.

The immeasurable human qualities of creativity, imagination, and intuition are not only elements that make us most vividly human, but may ultimately be what distinguishes us from increasingly sophisticated technology.

[Ed. Note: Dolores Catherino’s talk above was given at a TEDx event in 2016 using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community.]

Becoming Real

In the spring of 2001, I found myself in a battle for my career. I was composing the soundtrack to a feature-length film version of the stage play The Vagina Monologues for HBO.  My contact there was the film editor, with whom I’d had a successful collaboration the year before on another HBO show, Life Afterlife.  The editor had assumed oversight of music responsibilities for The Vagina Monologues because HBO and the director had recently parted ways due to conceptual differences.  As a result, the film had no director, and there was a two-week deadline for the music.  The editor told me that Eve Ensler, who’d written the play and starred in the film, liked urban and gritty music, so I went for a kind of late Miles Davis vibe—sort of hip-hop jazz, with sultry female vocals.  As I churned out cues daily, working in 16-hour stretches, HBO’s producers sent back approvals, telling me they “loved” my music.  It was going smoothly until I was about ¾ of the way through the score and the executive producer called, saying that Eve Ensler did not like the music and that I really needed another approach.  He asked me to start over. The editor suggested something more upbeat—in fact, she came to my studio and we spent a day re-conceiving the music, working to picture.

But we were at the deadline and I was pretty nervous.  This was the most visible project I’d worked on, and I felt like my career was riding on it.  The film and theater community in New York is extremely interconnected and everybody knows one another.  My reputation was at stake.  Trying to keep the panic at bay, I latched onto something I was very familiar with—a kind of rock/African township hybrid, major key, dance-like, and driving.  Again, I FedExed videocassettes of my cues to HBO every night.  For a while I was getting approvals, but then: silence.  After 13 cues my phone rang: it was the executive producer again, this time calling from London.  Eve Ensler didn’t like the music, and he once again asked me to start over.  The HBO people were very nice, and it was a difficult situation for everyone.  They agreed to increase my pay, and I requested that they send Eve to my studio so there would be no more intermediaries trying to convey what they thought Eve wanted.  At first I was told they “would not subject” me to that; the producers evinced some discomfort around Eve because she was so willful. (Even though she was right pretty much most of the time.)  But a couple days later I got a call from HBO: “We have a good idea. We’d like Eve to go to your studio.”  We set that up for the next morning.

I was anxious about this meeting; time was running out and failure was not an option.  About a half-hour before she was to arrive, I sat down to meditate.  And before I even began to control my breathing, I heard a voice in my head: “She’s your friend.”  Then Eve walked in, leather from head to toe, and said, grinning, with a strong New York accent, “So what’ve you heard?”  And I heard myself say, “Should I tell you what they told me to say, or should I tell you what I’ve really heard?”

And from that point we had a fun session, just listening to different rock songs and evaluating how they fit to picture.  She wanted some “celebratory, rhythmically infectious, warm-voiced chick-rock.”  She particularly liked how Annie Lennox’s “Walking on Broken Glass” worked with The Vagina Monologues’ opening scene. I thought Lennox was a bit icy, though.  My favorite was Chrissie Hynde and The Pretenders, but at least we had some common ground, finally, to work with.

The next day—the last day, really, before I probably would have lost the gig—I got lucky and woke up with a rocking guitar theme in my head.  I mocked it up and Eve—and HBO—liked it.  I was granted another two weeks and got the composing done. All that was left was to put together a rock band of session-level players and record the cues.  The one uncompleted task was to find a singer who could read and had a killer rock ‘n’ roll voice.  A friend suggested that I check out Cathy Richardson at The Village Theater, where she was playing Janice Joplin in Love, Janice.  I did, and Cathy’s voice utterly stunned me.  I felt that if you could match her voiceprint to Janice’s, they’d be identical. After the show, I approached Cathy on Bleecker Street and asked her if she’d like to sing in the HBO version of The Vagina Monologues. “Hell, yeah!” she answered.

For the session, I’d printed out everybody’s music, including the vocalist’s, but Cathy preferred that I sing her the parts, which were wordless.  She learned them fast and sang them note-perfect.  After a couple of takes, I asked her to just take my written melodies and “do her thing” with them.  And she really let it wail, at which point everybody—the musicians, the engineers, the assistants, and I—were just sitting there helpless like the guy getting blown away by the speakers on that old Maxell tape commercial.  And I had my soundtrack.

Here’s a compilation of the three opening cues, with Kevin Kuhn on guitars, Tom Barney on bass, Tommy Igoe on drums, me on keys and MIDI percussion.  Mick Rossi mixed and mastered the session.

(By the way, Cathy Richardson is currently the lead singer in Jefferson Starship, having taken over the Grace Slick role.)


This essay is about the challenges of being an artist.  And, hopefully, about the process of finding the internal resources to keep going when things are really tough and to pick yourself up off the mat when you get knocked down (and everybody gets knocked down).  It is about the variety of ways composers can survive and the joys, rewards, and responsibilities of being an educator.  And finally, it’s about accessing a part of your being that is larger than the individual self: the unconscious—both personal and collective—and channeling that into musical creativity.

I try to limit my activity to three things: concert composing, film composing, and teaching. (That’s already a lot.)

The music business, in all its guises, is notorious for being difficult to navigate.  Through trial and error—and a lot more error—I’ve found a few rules that have helped me carry on.  One: it’s always a balancing act between focusing on a single activity, like composing, versus several activities, like engineering, copying, arranging, and/or teaching.  Right now I try to limit my activity to three things: concert composing, film composing, and teaching.  (That’s already a lot.)  But over the years, I’ve used my studio as a place where people could record, working as an engineer and producer. I’ve also worked as an arranger of folkloric recordings for educational CDs. And, for a while, I kept getting calls to compose and produce people’s meditation CDs and DVDs.  My advice, especially if you’re scrambling to keep your head above water, is to be open to multiple activities.  You always learn from working in any kind of musical role, whether it’s educational, performing, or using your tech and musical chops to produce other peoples’ music.

There was a time when I did become disenchanted with trying to survive as a composer-on-command; I had encountered a series of difficult situations (including the Vagina Monologues gig), and it started to feel like the norm to me.  I saw that some of my actor and writer friends were surviving by doing legal proofreading on the side.  I decided to give up my studio and reduced my rig down to a laptop on a folding table at home, and I signed up for the proofreading course.  I thought I could de-link my musical and financial lives for a while.  But as I approached the school’s location on 57th Street in Manhattan, I began to feel a strange darkness well up inside of me, like kryptonite had infected my bloodstream.  However, since I’d paid for the course, I pushed myself forward and attended the multiple two-hour sessions required to gain certification as a legal proofreader.  The teacher liked me and afterwards recommended me for several jobs, none of which I took.  Something inside was not letting me make the move away from music; perhaps unconsciously I knew that the diversion from that path would be too hard to return from.  Yet somehow, just being willing to get off the treadmill of the constant job-search, taking any gig that came my way, seemed to release something in the universe and I began to get calls for film scoring jobs with really smart, musically knowledgeable, creative, and compassionate directors. I do think people can sense your anxiety, which can create a repelling energy.  It’s always worked that way for me: when I stop worrying about money is when I make it.

When I stop worrying about money is when I make it.

Back in the 1980s and ’90s, I used to regularly go to artist colonies. At one, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, I met a poet who later introduced me to the filmmaker David Petersen.  David introduced me to another pair of filmmakers, Rose Rosenblatt and Marion Lipshutz, who needed a composer for their new documentary, Live Free or Die (about a doctor who performed abortions, legally, in a conservative community in New Hampshire).  I was at the earlier stages of my scoring career and decided to embark upon an experiment to compose one sketch for every cue in the film: mock it up, warts and all, and don’t edit or revise; go with my first idea.  I challenged myself to do this for the entire movie in about a day and a half.  The next day, Rose and Marion came to see my work, and nervously I explained my experiment and played the whole score for them, including mistakes.  To my surprise, they were astonished that I’d scored their whole film so fast—and they liked the music!  It took a few weeks to refine, revise, and finalize everything.  Subsequently, this gig led to a series of jobs: Rose and Marion’s The Education of Shelby Knox (which won best cinematography at Sundance); Body & Soul: Diana & Kathy, which Rose edited; Power & Control: Domestic Violence in America, which the director of Body & Soul recommended me for; and Who Cares About Kelsey?, which Rose also edited; and – through the sound editor for Who Cares About Kelsey?, the entire sequence of soundtracks I completed in 2017 for Monadnock Media (featured in my first essay of this series).

Keith Lentin (bass), Rick, and Steve Holley (drums) at a recording session for Who Cares About Kelsey?, 2012

Keith Lentin (bass), Rick, and Steve Holley (drums) at a recording session for Who Cares About Kelsey?, 2012

There are a couple messages here.  The self-imposed challenge to go with my first impulse and record a sketch for every cue in Live Free or Die was a prescient act; nowadays, composers have much less time to complete a score than they did 20 years ago.  Back in the ‘90s, I usually had a month to six weeks to do a 30-minute score to a 50-minute National Geographic documentary; now you may have 10 days or less to complete it wall-to-wall.  So developing the chops to work so fast that you can compose, record, mix, and master a cue on the first pass is recommended.  Another object lesson, albeit obvious, is that it’s really good to get out of the house and hang with people.  If I hadn’t gone to the Virginia Center, I would never have gotten those gigs.

Here’s the opening to Body & Soul: Diana and Kathy. It’s about two women whose strengths and disabilities (Down syndrome and cerebral palsy) complement one another, and who live together and take care of each other.  The music is meant to be unobtrusive, gently dancing with picture and dialog, then redolent of technology as we learn about Kathy’s computerized talking wheelchair.  Vicky Bodner played oboe, Joyce Hammann played violin, and I played piano and synth.

In my previous essay, I discussed my relationship with a beloved mentor and employer, Buryl Red, who oversaw the music for Silver Burdette’s educational CD project Making Music, consisting of 160 CDs, revised every five years.  By 1994, I made his studio my film scoring home, staying there until 1998.  By that point Buryl had rented three adjacent apartments in midtown Manhattan and had several production spaces going at once.  In early 1998, I found myself in the midst of a challenging gig: Heart of Africa, a three-part National Geographic mini-series. Meanwhile Buryl, a driven, exacting, brilliant musician and businessman, had decided to break apart a wall in the tiny room I was working in—equipped with floor to ceiling modules, mixing consoles, computers and other gear—and open the room to the apartment next door, all while I was under tight deadline.  People were drilling and hammering in the 10-by-10 space while I was composing.  Although at Buryl’s studio I had learned to ignore people talking in the same room where I was composing—a total abdication of the expectation of solitude I’d depended upon as a classical composer—the loud construction noise exceeded my ability to concentrate.  I managed to complete the assignment, bringing on another composer to help out, but afterwards was determined to find my own studio where I could have some self-determination.  This was not an easy decision, but a necessary one; Buryl and I had a close, somewhat father-son relationship, and he was not at all pleased when I “rebelled” and moved out. Eventually, he got over that and we continued our collaborative musical friendship, closer than before.  Meanwhile I found a wonderful shared space, with private studios, on West 30th Street with an old friend, composer and sound designer Dan Schreier, as well as a couple of filmmakers, Thom Powers and Meema Spadola, who had garnered some attention for their film Breasts, about breasts, and who were now working on Private Dicks, and you can guess what that was about.  (Coincidentally, Thom and Meema later were contracted to film the backstage interviews for The Vagina Monologues.  We were both working on it in the 30th Street facility at the same time, but had been hired by different parts of HBO’s production team.)  Eventually, Thom and I wound up collaborating on several other projects, including the PBS documentary Guns & Mothers.

We kept that space until 2004, and when the lease was up I moved to another shared studio, the Manhattan Producers Alliance.  One of the reasons I’d chosen the MPA was that the composers in residence there were actively working in children’s film and television, and they were well-versed in the business side of things; I felt that influence would increase my game, professionally.  Also, this was the advent of the transition to streaming audio, and the MPA composers were on top of that; I wanted to be around people who were more technologically advanced than I, who I could learn from.  That all happened, and I also had a team to work with when necessary.  For The Education of Shelby Knox, I hired MPA composer Wade Tonkin, a wizard guitarist and producing ninja, to turn my sketches into completed cues, which he did as fast as I could send him the standard MIDI files.  As usual, there was a severe deadline here: the film had been accepted to Sundance, which was to start in early January 2005; we had the month of December to complete a country rock score.  We recorded a live band just before Christmas, with Kevin Kuhn on guitars, banjo, lap steel, and mandolin, Wade on guitar, MPA members Kevin Joy and Don Henze on bass and drums, and virtuoso Kenny Kosek on fiddle.

Rick and Wade Tonken mixing the score to The Education of Shelby Knox, 2005

Rick and Wade Tonken mixing the score to The Education of Shelby Knox, 2005

Here is a cue from The Education of Shelby Knox:

The messages here are multifold: as an artist, sometimes you have to be protective of your environment, even if may appear to threaten a working friendship.  It’s good to have a team available, consisting of people you trust, because ultimately no one can do everything alone.  And always get the very best musicians.  It wasn’t until after I’d gotten my doctorate at Columbia and started scoring films that I had the budget to consistently hire the best players in New York and get high-level recordings of my music. A wonderful side effect of that is that it expanded my family of musical collaborators; it is a great source of personal happiness to be a member of this community.

Wherever possible, keep the copyright and publishing rights to your music.

Both in Buryl’s studio and at the Manhattan Producers Alliance there were law books on the shelves involving entertainment contract law.  I studied those chapters and photocopied the salient ones: those on work-for-hire.  I operate by this principle, and so should you: wherever possible, keep the copyright and publishing rights to your music. (And be very hesitant about giving up your writer’s share.)  It is true that in 2018 the means of production, distribution, and payment for music has changed drastically from even five years ago, but this bottom line still applies: in a work-for-hire—as virtually all media composing gigs are—the default ownership of copyright and publishing goes to the producer, in the absence of an agreement to the contrary.  And that’s the operative, legal phrase; so if you can, get that agreement to the contrary. I always request copyright and publishing. I’m not always successful, but it doesn’t hurt to ask.  Often it takes multiple, patient explanations on the composer’s part, as producers and filmmakers usually don’t understand the royalty structure at all.  But know that if you control the publishing, you double your broadcast and performance royalty, and you can control later use of your music.  So learn the law and get good at explaining it.  Note: sometimes, by offering to share publishing with the producer, they may be willing to relax their hold on your music; more often than not, they have no plan for further exploitation of it, and if you are motivated to market your music down the line, they’ll make a few bucks off it, too.  So actually it’s a win-win situation.

One day while I was busy toiling on an animation score at the MPA, the string quartet Ethel showed up to do some recording.  Ethel’s co-founder, violinist Mary Rowell, was an old friend I’d met years before when she was performing student compositions for Columbia University’s doctoral program.  Over the years she’d played my chamber, orchestral, and film music, and it was a joy to run into her that day.  “Write us a piece, man,” she said.  And this was my gateway back into concert music, after a hiatus of almost 15 years.

Soon afterwards I was asked to join the faculty at Columbia College Chicago’s newly minted MFA program in film scoring and to take over the directorship of their undergrad composition department: a double assignment.  I spent the summer of 2007 re-reading my original composition textbooks from when I was a conservatory freshman: Percy Goetschius’s The Homophonic Forms and The Larger Forms of Musical Composition, as well as Arnold Schoenberg’s The Fundamentals of Musical Composition.  (They’re all great books, and the Goetschius volumes are downloadable; I assign them to my students to this day.)  Every day that summer I read the Goetschius and Schoenberg in tandem, doing all the exercises in each.  After 15 years of film scoring, I’d developed new compositional reflexes, but I didn’t have the old vocabulary to describe music at my fingertips the way I’d used to—and I had to teach it.  So I reviewed my old studies, now with the experienced eye of a professional. As I began my academic year, commuting every week between Chicago and New York, I also started studying film scoring intensely.  Like most film composers, especially from the time when there were few educational opportunities for aspiring film scoring students, I was essentially self-taught.  Teaching at Columbia Chicago gave me the opportunity to pour over actual scores, analyzing them as if they were Beethoven symphonies.  And I began to develop a new understanding, a context, for what I had been doing intuitively all these years: film scoring as a manifestation of the unconscious.  I began to understand that film music operates at a symbolic, semiotic level, activating memory, sensation, idea, and emotion in correspondence to picture and narrative.

Film music activates memory, sensation, idea, and emotion.

The combination of teaching film and concert composition, all while composing a string quartet, was a potent moment for me in that it helped me begin to integrate the seemingly opposing forces that made up my musical life, from the Brazilian and African influences to my classical training and commercial experience.  I believe the act of teaching—of organizing my thoughts and having to verbalize them—helped me consciously understand the elements of my own creative voice. Meanwhile,  my memories of my own teachers began to re-emerge from the buried recesses of my mind with surprising clarity: as I stood in front of my string quartet composition class at Columbia Chicago, I found myself visualizing my undergrad form and analysis professor, Ludmilla Ulehla, talking about “directional tones” and Schenkerian structure.  In my creative work, I had embarked upon a large-scale string quartet that integrated African, Brazilian, and other grooves into a refracted sonata form, and I was encouraging my diverse student population to “write what they know and love” as well; so my Greek student was putting Greek folk music into his quartet, and the North African composer incorporated maqam modes into hers.  As my old composition teachers came out from under their hidden sectors of my psyche, I realized that many of their teachings were still influencing my compositional process, to positive effect.  For instance, Mario Davidovsky, who had pioneered the integration of electronic sounds with live players, used to say, “I’m the grandson of two rabbis.  You know what a mitzvah is, right?” (Its literal meaning, from the Hebrew, is “commandment,” but is also used to mean a good deed or a gift.)  Mario would continue, “Every piece should be a mitzvah. Every measure should be a mitzvah.  Every note should be a mitzvah!”

Another one of Davidovsky’s aphorisms that influences my composing and teaching to this day, is this: “The intensity of the energy of creativity must be constant at all times, including silence!”  Whether or not you agree with this edict (which I don’t, exactly), it does point to the compositional technique of compensating for stasis in one element with activity in another.  For example, how do you keep music interesting if it has no harmonic motion?  (A lot of African music may fit that bill.) Well, one way may be through rhythmic, metric, and timbral interest, not to mention the community element, the storytelling—and the stimulus to dance, which is an emotional healer.

A development that I did not anticipate was the influence of film music on my concert composing. Composer Mychael Danna’s 1997 score to The Ice Storm is one example. By employing Native American flute and Indonesian gamelan as backdrop to a story about the discontented residents of an American suburb, it resonates on a more mythic and spiritual level than the specific tale the movie is telling. The Indian flute points to historical transformation; the cyclical patterns of gamelan may activate a semi-conscious awareness of nature’s larger cycles, from birth and death to the movement of the planets. This principle can be applied in non-film music as well—a process I explore in a recent percussion quartet, Hall of Mirrors.

Back in New York in the fall of 2008, after a year commuting between New York and Chicago, I was asked by Doreen Ringer-Ross, head of film music for the performing rights organization BMI, to create and teach a film scoring workshop and mentorship program under BMI’s auspices.  Thus began “Composing for the Screen,” which recently completed its 10th season.  There I emphasize the unique, individualized quality that characterizes the work of some of the most interesting film composers.  We analyze scores, study composers’ influences, and see if we can channel some of their techniques into our own creativity.  Most of all, the participating composers learn by doing, writing  music for a variety of situations, using multiple musical languages, from romantic jazz to 12-tone to post-minimalism and electronics. Rather than teaching students how to parrot other composers, though, I want to inspire a kind of sensitivity to how film music works, and for the students to apply that knowledge to their own voices.

Recording the final project for BMI’s Composing for the Screen, 2017, at Shelter Island Sound, NYC. L-R: Owner/Engineer Steve Addabbo, Rick, and composer Mandy Hoffman

Recording the final project for BMI’s Composing for the Screen, 2017, at Shelter Island Sound, NYC.
L-R: Owner/Engineer Steve Addabbo, Rick, and composer Mandy Hoffman

In 2011, I also began teaching composition at Vermont College of Fine Arts, an intensive low-residency graduate arts college in Vermont’s capital city of Montpelier.  I had the privilege of serving as chair of the MFA program in composition from 2012 to 2016.  This small school is playing a major role in the development of composers: it is completely progressive in that it is post-genre.  Its extraordinary faculty is experienced and successful across platforms, and provides mentorship in contemporary composition, songwriting, music for media, jazz, and electronic music.  Many of the students cross between arenas within their pieces, which I think is an accurate reflection of how today’s musical culture is currently evolving.

As a teacher, one has a tremendous influence on our students, sometimes more than we are aware of.  A word can make or break a fledgling artist’s confidence.  While at Columbia for my DMA, and even as a Tanglewood fellow, I felt at times in conflict with a field that promoted a kind of cerebral competitiveness as a marker for artistic strength, rather than the kind of nurturing that supports the discovery of an authentic musical voice.  My teacher Jack Beeson at Columbia once said to me, “I think you’re terrifically talented.” It was only then that I finally felt I wasn’t alone in the compositional firmament. So I urge those of you who are teaching to judiciously and carefully choose your words, and to encourage your students to discover themselves through their music as they discover their music through self-knowledge.  Help them find themselves, and give them the encouragement to move forward when confusion reigns or insecurity strikes.

And with your experience and perspective, you may offer them the guidance to be patient with themselves.  After all, the very commitment to the artist’s life is itself a victory.  It involves a soul-deep involvement in your work; the heart to move forward in the face of adversity; and a continual, renewed sense of becoming.  And for that, you have to allow yourself the space to grow.

I thank my friend Doreen from BMI for posting this quote on occasion, as a reminder to all of us who are in the composition game for the long haul:

“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

― Margery Williams Bianco, The Velveteen Rabbit

Creating Music with the Polychromatic System

The creation and development of the polychromatic system came as part of a process of practicing and exploring musical possibilities with the Tonal Plexus keyboard. The Tonal Plexus is a microtonal keyboard controller with 211 programmable key-switches (buttons) per octave, designed and manufactured by Aaron Hunt of Hpi Instruments.

I needed to find an intuitive and efficient way to work with 106 notes per octave.

After creating different ergonomic note layouts for the buttons and programming the pitch values for each note assignment, I needed to find an intuitive and efficient way to work with 106 notes per octave. Rather than create another chromatic notation with an overwhelming number of pitch modifier symbols, I expanded chromatic notation into the micro-pitch color dimension and generalized the idea of pitch-color so that it could be used with any pitch division method. As a result, I can use the same polychromatic framework for my practice with 106 and 72 equal divisions of the octave—the values, in Hertz, of each pitch-color vary with each pitch derivation method, while the foundational system remains the same.

The layout of octave (with 106 steps differentiated by color) on the Tonal Plexus.

The layout of octave (with 106 steps differentiated by color) on the Tonal Plexus.

The next task was to explore different note layout configurations to simplify the technique required to gain a musical proficiency in playing hundreds of key-switch buttons. An option I decided on, was thinking of the keyboard as several horizontal multi-note regions. So, a region (module) of five key switches could be thought of as a kind of ‘string’ on a violin, with each pitch of the module transposed up a fifth from its vertically adjacent module. This is more clearly described in the video below:

This layout pattern greatly expanded the possible fingerings for scales and chords and made more intervals accessible within the reach of a hand span. The Tonal Plexus layouts I use have an advantage of redundant chord/scale fingerings (like the multiple position patterns of each scale on the guitar). These options allow for increased technical flexibility.

The Microzone u648 is built by Starr Labs and has 72 hexagonal key-switches per octave, It is a highly programmable microtonal keyboard which supports overlapping and uniquely shaped ‘zones’ of note layout. However, the type of redundant polychromatic note layout structures that are possible on the Tonal Plexus can’t be implemented on the Microzone u648 without severely limiting its pitch-resolution (i.e. 36 edo with two sets of 3 note ‘modules’, programmed a fifth apart). Instead, I program the Microzone with a simple note layout of stacked chromatic scales. This layout is far easier for conceptualizing the polychromatic system and transferring standard keyboard technique. But it is much more restricted in terms of playing technique, flexibility, and scale/chord possibilities within the hand span.

Keyboard layout on a Microzone u648

Keyboard layout on a Microzone u648

Once a note layout is created for the keyboard, I have to create a pitch layout for each note. To create the micro-pitch tuning layouts for these keyboards, I use the Custom Scale Editor (CSE) software developed by Aaron Hunt. The CSE provides an intuitive user interface with many diverse modes of micro-pitch programming functionality (i.e. ratios, Hertz, cents, user definable algorithms, functions, and constants). I have been using fractions in my tuning layouts—so, 72 edo would be programmed as a sequence from 1/72…72/72.

So far, I have been primarily focused on the exploration and composing process and have not had the time to delve into the expansive areas of sound design and MIDI editing. Currently, my primary sound sources include Omnisphere (with 8 channels of channel-independent pitch bend per instance/track) and Kontakt (with 16 channels of channel-independent pitch bend, per instance/track, in omni mode). I edit the sounds I use to have rich harmonic content without sounding brittle or harsh, and to be relatively free of modulation and detuning effects. I do like the sound of a very slow LFO (low frequency oscillator) because, at times, it seems to intensify the qualities of micro-harmonic interactions and structural movement.

My Composing Process

The immensity of new musical possibilities can seem overwhelming.

The immensity of new musical possibilities within the polychromatic system can seem overwhelming. My approach to working within this new paradigm is to continue mastering chromatic rudiments (intervals, scales, chord voicings), and then use this as a basis to begin exploring the vast pitch-color modifications possible within the polychromatic system. I also make sure to practice in all 72 keys so I can continue developing better pitch discrimination, technical fluency, and a sense of the unique qualities of each key.

In this early exploration stage, I orient my polychromatic compositions toward bringing out the sonic qualities of micro-pitch combinations and harmonic/overtone interactions within a musical context of integrated harmony/polyphony and contrast. This is achieved by focusing initially on complex harmony/harmonic qualities over rhythmic, melodic, and sound design/timbral complexity.

As I am working on a composition, I use pencil and paper to transcribe my musical ideas and develop the piece. This handwritten sketch is what I memorize for audio and video recording of the composition. After the performance is recorded, I use Finale notation software to transcribe it into a monochromatic score. Finale only supports the assignment of a single color per pitch, per score. Because of this, I need to export the score as individual image files into Illustrator, a vector graphics editor, to create the polychromatic pitch and symbol coloration of the composition. Finally, these colorized image files are exported into PDF (portable document format) for publishing the polychromatic score on the internet.

I don’t think of polychromatic music as an enhancement of monochromatic music. It is a new musical system and aesthetic that uses the older chromatic framework as a point of departure. The point of these polychromatic explorations is to develop a new, expanding aesthetic within which, the monochromatic framework is only one tonal perspective of many.

Trying to explain what specific new emotions polychromatic music expresses is like trying to describe the color indigo to a person who has never seen it.

I have been asked what specific new emotions or auditory experiences polychromatic music expresses. Seeking an answer to this seems similar to the inevitable difficulty of describing, in words, a process that must be experienced perceptually. It’s like trying to describe the color indigo to a person who has never seen it: maybe as a color ‘in between’ blue and violet. But this, in turn, presumes a prior perceptual experience of blue and violet as well as an understanding of a conceptual color-space which frames the idea of ‘in between’.

So I try to express the new perceptual experiences of polychromatic music by using elements of monochromatic tonality as a foundation to diverge from and contrast with. My composition process is intuitive and guided by exploring new audible qualities and dynamic structures. The ear guides the process, with the secondary assistance of conceptual musical forms and theory. In this sense, monochromatic training, practice and theory are an important foundation and can be effectively used as a starting point – a musical basis to expand from. This is part of the process of expressing new experiences by comparison and through contrast. An established context (tradition) of understanding seems essential as a ‘bridge’ toward expanding musical awareness, perceptual experiences, and paradigms of understanding. And in a larger sense, the awareness, insights, and understanding gained through artistic exploration and expression of micro-pitch music and sound design may also assist in the development of new awareness and insights in the sciences.

In the next and final article in this series, we will explore potential implications of the polychromatic system – for future developments in music, technology and science.

Tearing Down The Wall

All of us, as composers, have origin stories.  For some, it may have been one cathartic moment when the light bulb snapped on and you knew what you were going to be.  For others, it may have been an accretion of experiences, of formative musical events that added up to being a composer.  Or, if you’re like me, it may have been a series of revelatory moments, like an unseen hand guiding you down a path—to where, you may not have known until you got there.

Baitz playing a guitar and leaning on the back of a van in Durban in 1972

Baitz in Durban in 1972

In 1972, when I was seventeen, I got a job as a deckhand on the Bontebok, a dredger operating out of Durban Harbour in South Africa.  I’d moved to Durban from L.A. with my parents and younger brother earlier that year; my dad was transferred by his multinational employer, the Carnation Company, to manage their South African branch.  From the start, South Africa seemed completely bizarre.  From the moment we stepped off the plane, with “slegs blankes” (whites only) signs directing you to the terminal, every single action and interaction reinforced the impression that this was a country consumed by a collective mental illness.  Apartheid, a kind of race-based slavery enforced by a byzantine series of laws, governed every aspect of everyone’s life.  It was illegal for “Europeans” (their term for whites) to socialize in any way with “non-whites,” comprising tribal Africans, “Coloreds” (those of mixed race), or “Asians” (those of Indian or Pakistani ancestry).  Strangely, though, since non-whites made up the enormous working class that supported the Europeans’ comfortable lifestyles, there was a lot of interaction between races—although most of it was governed by our economic and social positions.  I felt uncomfortable all the time there, especially having spent two years, from the age of 14 to 16, living in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, which, although by no means free of racial inequity, was as miscegenated and passionate a culture as South Africa’s was segregated and repressed.

On my first day on the Bontebok, a Zulu deckhand who spoke almost no English was assigned to show me the ropes.  The black deckhands actually lived on the boat; the whites showed up at a launch on Durban Harbour at 6:45 a.m. every morning to be ferried across the bay to the dredger, which would cast off at 7:00 a.m. on the dot, to spend the day on the water, dredging the seaways so that larger ships could pass into and through the harbor.  My silent teacher showed me how to place the fenders that hung from the side of the boat, to put the giant anchors on the foredeck into gear and operate the motors that lowered them to the sea floor, to swab the deck, to paint (and re-paint) the chimneys and vents that were placed throughout the boat, and tie a bow-line, which I had trouble with.  Nonetheless, a day came when I had “graduated,” and instead of continuing with his instruction, my maritime mentor stood to the side and just stared at me, waiting.  I remember asking his supervisor—the boat-tribe’s Zulu “chieftain” named Silas—what I should be doing, and he said, “Tell him what to do.”  Now that I knew the job, my role became that of the boss, and my responsibility was to order my former teacher to perform the tasks he had taught me.  That’s how distorted that place was.

Up on the foredeck, I was put in charge of the anchors, which was kind of a big responsibility.  I would spend my free time there, while we were out in the middle of the harbor dredging, watching Silas, who carried a whip, cursing and pretending to whip the Zulu deckhands, while they would pretend to run away from him in fake terror.  They knew how to have a good time on that boat.  But mostly, I was alone up there at the front of the ship, surrounded by the sea with the hills of Durban in the background, watching the gulls battle for air supremacy and the dolphins frolic in the waves.  It was during one of those solitary moments when I had a kind of auditory epiphany.  We were anchored in the middle of the harbor for a few hours, sucking up clay from the seabed.  I was sitting in the sun.  On the shore, miles away, the dry dock’s ceiling cranes whined in a kind of overlapping polyphonic stereo filter sweep; nearby, the gulls were singing their war cries; and on the boat, the Zulu workers were hammering in a strange, repetitive, asymmetrical syncopation.  It was a true, 360-degree multi-textured composition, replete with ambient motion, polyrhythmic grooves, and exotic melody.  Of course at that time I had no vocabulary to describe it—I’d not yet heard of John Cage—but I sat in sensory amazement, thinking, “This is music!”

When not working, I spent most of my time with the Fataar family, playing rock ‘n’ roll.  Steve Fataar had recently arrived back in Durban after several years in L.A., leading his rock band The Flame, made up of himself and his two brothers Ricky Fataar and Brother Fataar, and Durban musician Blondie Chaplin.  The Fataar family are Malay—yet another racial distinction, stamped “M” in their passbooks—and lived in the “Colored” section of Durban.  (All non-whites were required to carry a “passbook” at all times, declaring their race and what neighborhoods they were allowed to enter.)

The Flame had made it about as big as you could in South Africa—in fact, they were kind of like the Beatles of South Africa in the late ‘60s and had decamped to London where they were discovered by Carl Wilson of the Beach Boys.  The Beach Boys took the Flame to L.A. and set them up in a big house at the top of Outpost Drive in the Hollywood Hills.  The Flame became the Beach Boys’ opening act and toured with them, recording on their label, Brother Records.  When The Flame broke up, Ricky and Blondie joined the Beach Boys (about 1971); Steve Fataar moved back to Durban where I met him in early 1972.  We hit it off and suddenly I was breaking the law with every breath I took, hanging out in the Colored district with Steve and a group of amazing musicians of all races  and playing music all day.

Baitz with Steve Fataar in Durban, 1972

Baitz with Steve Fataar in Durban, 1972

This friendship continues to the present day.  When I came back to the States I became friendly with Blondie and Ricky, and as I became a composer, have been fortunate to be able to work with them from time to time, occasionally contracting Blondie—in between his tours with the Beach Boys, the Rolling Stones and most recently, Brian Wilson—to play guitar and/or sing on my theater or film scores.  He’s got those African styles down cold.

Here’s the theme to Heart of Africa, a National Geographic mini-series I scored in 1996, with lyrics (in Swahili and Kirundi) sung by Blondie Chaplin:

Later in 1972, I made my way to Georgetown University, where the Jesuits fed me loads of science, philosophy, and theology (and where I learned about Taoism and Buddhism for the first time; it was worth it just for that)—but no music.  So finally, at the age of 20, I hit the reset button, ending up at the Manhattan School of Music where I got my bachelor’s and master’s in composition.  There, I began to feel the barest inkling of an aspiration that animates my creative energy to this day: that of becoming a whole musician.  By “whole musician,” I mean one who can function in multiple settings: the chamber ensemble, the recording studio, the orchestra, the jazz ensemble, the rock band.  One who can compose in varied idioms without diluting the authenticity of his or her own voice.  One who has professional skills as a player, producer, arranger, editor, orchestrator, engineer, even as a copyist and composer.  And whose music is meaningful and provocative in all situations.  Of course, this goal is the journey of a lifetime: the joy of being a composer is that you never really get there.  Or perhaps better put: the journey is the destination.  And in that sense, it’s a gift to be a composer.

The joy of being a composer is that you never really get there.

As an undergrad at MSM, I scored a few short films, but ultimately got caught up in my conservatory studies and left film music behind in 1980.  I had a fledgling voice as a composer, very much trying to process the cathartic feelings I’d had in Brazil, hearing 100,000 people playing and dancing samba in the streets during Carnaval, and in South Africa, with its earth-rumbling, emotionally transformative percussive, vocal and township music.  But as a classical composer, studying with the ambient electronic composer Elias Tanenbaum, then with Charles Wuorinen and Ursula Mamlock, and later with George Perle at Tanglewood, and Mario Davidovsky and Jack Beeson at Columbia, I was pretty much surrounded by modernism, which intrigued me for its coloristic and harmonic complexity and variety. I was open to everything, yet most, if not all, of my concert music had Brazilian and South African patterns in it, even the serial pieces.

Starting in the late 1980s, my younger brother Jon Robin (“Robbie”) Baitz, who is a playwright, invited me to provide incidental music to several of his theatrical productions.  Like me, he was processing his expatriate childhood in his art and several of his plays took place in Africa and other tropical locations.  This gave me a chance to directly channel many of the influences that I absorbed while living in Durban and Rio.  Here’s the overture to his play A Fair Country, produced at New York City’s Naked Angels Company in 1994; kudos to the amazing mbira playing of Martin Scherzinger, Thuli Dumakude’s heartbreaking Zulu vocals, and Cyro Baptista’s tasteful percussion work:

In 1991, just as I was finishing my DMA at Columbia, I scored Robbie’s PBS teleplay Three Hotels (which won the Humanitas Award, and was later produced as a stage play at New York’s Circle Repertory Co.).  By then I was really getting the bug for composing for drama, especially the screen, and that year I took the BMI Film Scoring Workshop in Los Angeles, taught by the eminence grise Earle Hagan (who had not only composed, but whistled, the theme song to The Andy Griffith Show).  And I came to a couple big decisions.  Despite my newly minted doctorate, I hadn’t gone to Columbia for the teaching credential; I’d actually gone to learn and be inspired. In fact, this was at the height of the updown-vs.-downtown culture wars, and I wasn’t completely at home with the judgmentalism that at times hovered around the new music world.  Even though my composition teachers mostly gave me space to explore my own path of integrating folkloric elements into concert music, most of them just didn’t really speak that language.  Inasmuch as my concert music was, and is, formally within the classical tradition (and was suitably complex for my teachers’ cerebral inclinations), I received some encouragement, but—with a few notable exceptions—true nurturing was hard to come by.  Instead, I sensed a kind of repressed disenchantment within academia, as if its composers secretly regretted that the world didn’t shower them with acclaim and riches. So while finishing my doctorate, I wasn’t sanguine about the prospects of battling for academic stature as a life path, and I was enjoying scoring for film and theater.  I determined that I would go all-in, throwing my hat into film music and seeing if I could survive.

I sensed a kind of repressed disenchantment within academia, as if its composers secretly regretted that the world didn’t shower them with acclaim and riches.

The other important decision I made, contemporaneous with my first TV broadcast of Three Hotels, was to join BMI.  I will not, in this forum, belabor the eternal debate in our community about whether ASCAP or BMI (or SESAC) is the better choice.  Honestly, after all these years, no one has been able to definitively say which one will support you more or make you more money.  I do know this: at about that time, Ralph Jackson, then the head of BMI’s concert music division, took me to lunch and said, “I don’t care which one you join, but just join one, now.”  And that is what I tell everyone who asks me the same question. I know people in both organizations and they are all really cool.  At the time I took BMI’s film scoring workshop, I began to develop close ties with the people within their film and concert music divisions, and they have remained extraordinarily supportive throughout my career.

For example, while hanging out at BMI’s L.A. offices in the spring of 1991, Doreen Ringer-Ross, head of their film music department, suggested that I return in August of that year, and she would introduce me to people in the film music industry.  But when I showed up in August for my meetings, Doreen was nowhere to be found.  Even the people at BMI didn’t know where she was.  I cooled my jets for three days until I found out that she was in the hospital giving birth to her daughter Chelsea.  When she heard I was in L.A. for my meetings, she dictated 10 letters to studio music department heads and music supervisors from her hospital bed, signed them and had them faxed out.  And I had my meetings.

Rick Baitz and 12 others at the BMI Earle Hagen Film Composers Workshop

Rick Baitz (far left bottom row) at the BMI Earle Hagen Film Composers Workshop in 1991. Also pictured (L-R, bottom) are: Bruce Babcock, Earle Hagen, and BMI’s Doreen Ringer-Ross, plus (top row) Jonathan Sacks, Steve Chesne, Danny Nolan, Ann Moore, Wyn Meyerson, Steve Edwards. Daniel Freiberg, engineer Rick Lindquist, and Jim Legg.

In 1991, I knew that being a composer for media would entail a huge learning curve, and I would have to devote myself to it pretty much exclusively if I wanted to get anywhere.  It was not that I was giving up concert music, but that I was ready to bet on myself to the extent that I could afford to take a hiatus from concert composing while building my film music career.  I also knew that I needed access to the technology and to a studio.  Fortuitously, right around that time I met a composer with a very extensive studio, who needed arrangers for a huge recording project he was producing.

Buryl Red was a unique person; in one side of his life he was a luminary in the Christian music community as a vocal and orchestral composer and conductor—but he wore many other hats.  He had worked as an orchestrator, and eventually, a producer, on Broadway.  And in his capacity as a music producer, he was directing a massive educational recording project of ethnic folk songs for children, Silver Burdette’s The Music Connection (later called Making Music): 160 CDs worth of songs; 1600 tracks in all, with new editions every five years.  Buryl put together a team of arrangers and producers, and built up a studio that wrapped around three apartments at the top of a midtown Manhattan skyscraper.  There, we worked non-stop, churning out folkloric recordings from every locale on the planet.  Along with Jeanine Tesori, Mick Rossi, Joseph Joubert, and other talented musicians, I learned how to arrange, record, engineer, edit, and mix music, and worked on hundreds, if not thousands, of tracks from 1992 into the early 2000s.  Buryl also tossed us some film work that came his way, allowing me to further hone my film scoring chops.

Meanwhile I embarked on an intense self-study, choosing several composers whose work interested me: Thomas Newman (whose score to The Player was like lightening striking), Jerry Goldsmith (what a joy to revisit Our Man Flint, Chinatown, and Basic Instinct), and many others.  I kept a sketchbook where I transcribed themes and took notes on the films I watched. I was particularly taken by alternative, non-traditional approaches to film scoring, from Zbigniew Preisner’s scores to Kieślowski’s Three Colors trilogy, to Tôn-Thât Tiêt’s atonal Vietnamese soundtrack to Scent of Green Papaya.  Even back in the 1990s, I found that there were examples of composers who brought a fresh, original approach to film scoring—and a significant number, like Toru Takemitsu, who maintained careers in both film and concert music.  I counted Takemitsu, whose music I love, as my model on how to live as a composer.

In between deadlines researching, arranging, and producing recordings of folk tunes from Africa, the Middle East, East Asia, Polynesia, South Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Native America, I took on several short films to score, mostly pro bono, just to learn.  One such collaboration was with Caroline Kava, who I had met at the Edward Albee Foundation in 1983 when she was in residence as a playwright.  She also had a successful career as an actress for stage and screen, but had returned to school for an MFA in film; in fact, she was at the Columbia University School of the Arts, as I had been.  The film division was right downstairs from the music division, although in typical siloed fashion, the two programs didn’t talk to one another.  After graduating, I returned to the School of the Arts to put up signs at the film division, asking if any graduate filmmakers needed a composer, and Caroline got back in touch.  Our first of three collaborations, Polio Water, won her the IFC Grand Prize and the Princess Grace award.  It was about a girl who grew up above a funeral parlor during the polio epidemic of the early 1950s.  This is an example of a partnership with a filmmaker who really understood music.  Caroline taught me, among other things, that you could have random-length, aperiodic sustained tones as background; that the Bach cello suites make great getting-stuff-done music; and that the Agnus Dei of a Requiem Mass just repeats the same text over and over.

The film division was right downstairs from the music division, although in typical siloed fashion, the two programs didn’t talk to one another.

Here’s the Agnus Dei from Polio Water, with Beth Blankenship’s heavenly vocals:

Between the music for my brother’s plays and films, the short films I was scoring, and, especially, the ethnic folk tunes I’d been arranging, by 1993 I had a strong demo reel to pass out to filmmakers.  That year, Doreen Ringer-Ross came to New York for the Independent Feature Film Market (now called IFP Film Week), which takes place every fall.  There, she passed on my cassette tape to a film music supervisor who happened to be married to a National Geographic executive producer, who happened to be looking for a classical composer who could do African music.  Suddenly, I had my first high-profile gig: Nat Geo’s upcoming special, The New Chimpanzees.

At that point I began to almost live at Buryl’s studio (much to the ambivalent tolerance of my wife, who was still getting used to my insanely long hours).  Sometimes I would leave the studio and walk around Manhattan, or sit in a coffee shop, trying to invoke some kind of inspiration and drum up a music cue in my head.  It was during one of those walks that I started imagining a guitar theme, based on a repetitive slowed-down version of a Buddhist chant my older brother Jeff used to do.  (Inspiration can come from strange places.)  I turned my memory of that sutra into an African guitar pattern, and I had a start on The New Chimpanzees.  Much of the film took place in Congo, and I listened to a lot of Central African music as preparation and inspiration.  I hired the great New York session musician Kevin Kuhn, who had played guitar on virtually all of the songs from Buryl’s project, to handle the guitar parts.  But as my deadline approached, I wasn’t quite done.  I had one more day, and it was going to take an all-nighter to make it.  As I worked into the night, Buryl periodically came in to see how I was doing.  Eventually I realized he wasn’t going home either—Buryl stayed in the studio all night just to give me moral support.  The next day, the director called and told me that she’d bought me yet another day.  It turned out I needed it.  The music was very detailed and completion was coming too slowly.  I worked throughout the next day, and into the night, on no sleep.  I realized I was going to have to pull another all-nighter to get this thing done.  So I did: I pulled two all-nighters in a row.  And, amazingly, Buryl stayed the next night too, hanging out in his office, occasionally stopping into the little garret studio I had made my home, giving an approving listen.  At 6:00 a.m. on that last day, he finally saw that I was going to be all right and headed off to catch some rest.  And I made my extended deadline.

Buryl Red’s and Doreen Ringer Ross’s acts of good will are examples I carry with me every day.  Those moments were turning points in my career.  And I learned, and re-learned, that nobody can do this alone.  We need help to move forward in life.  Now, as an educator, a mentor, and an experienced composer, I pass on Buryl’s and Doreen’s generosity to the next generation, and try, when I can, to go that extra kilometer for those who need it.  I know that such a gift is priceless.

Nobody can do this alone. We need help to move forward in life.

I found, over time, that composing for film is as personally rewarding as writing concert music, although film music has definite unique challenges.  You have to have strong studio skills for film music jobs, including being able to sing or demonstrate your intentions to players, if, for some reason, they’re not apprehending its intent on the written page.  (Or, if they don’t read music.)  It’s helpful to have lots of harmonic, metric, and rhythmic tools in your toolbox; a delicate and unerring sense of timing; and the ability to adjust to the demands of multiple styles.

One example: in 2000, the director Geoffrey Nauffts asked me to quickly score the opening to his short film Baby Steps, starring him and Kathy Bates.  The directive: a funny, slightly Latino version of the James Bond theme. (Thanks to the amazing violinist Todd Reynolds and extraordinary sax player Andrew Sterman):

At its best, film music transcends any distinction between genres.

I once mentioned to the composer Michael Giacchino, who I met while sitting in on a scoring session for the TV show Lost, that while the form of concert music is self-generating, in that a composition develops out of its own materials, the form of film music is governed by the structure of the film itself.  “Yeah,” he answered, “but the best thing is when it can do both.” And I agree. While there may be formal differences between film and concert music, the challenge of film music is to make it work as music.  As Giacchino said, at its best, film music transcends any distinction between genres.  From Bernard Herrmann’s 1958 score to Vertigo, whose bitonal opening arpeggios in contrary motion, with polymetric texture, pre-date minimalism by years, to Mica Levi’s layered electric viola clusters in 2013’s Under The Skin, film music is a place where unique musical juxtapositions have a home.  And I have found that it is a place where I can do what I love, getting my music played, recorded, and heard by many in the process.

Understanding the Polychromatic System

We seem to be at an accelerated phase in our musical evolution, where isolated methods of music practice are rapidly multiplying without a framework of integration and orientation for musicians and listeners to grasp. The polychromatic system is one framework of integration for the various scale configurations of micro-pitch music.

Isolated methods of music practice are rapidly multiplying.

The polychromatic system is oriented toward exploring the outer limits of micro-pitch awareness and its expression in music, from a perceptual rather than conceptual (i.e. mathematical, theoretical, analytical) perspective.

The polychromatic system is based on principles of associative synesthesia: learned associations and conceptual/perceptual integration of audible pitch with visual color. Recent research has shown that associative synesthesia can be developed with practice. Music is an optimal area in which to extend the possibilities and potential of synesthetic awareness, both aesthetically and scientifically.

Intentions:

  1. To simplify and encourage musical curiosity—exploration and discovery of infinite             possible pitch scales and their sonic combinations (intervallic or other).
  2. To open new worlds of musical expression, experience, and composition.
  3. To aid in the development of new ways of ‘hearing’ sound/music and the world.

The standard 7-white, 5-black key layout of keyboard instruments.

Imagine a chromatic keyboard where each key is split. The front half of the key plays the conventional chromatic semitone pitch while the back half of the key plays the quartertone in between each front-key pitch (24 pitches per octave). We could distinguish these pitches clearly by assigning the quarter tones at the back of the key to a pitch-color (let’s say violet).

A keyboard layout for a polychromatic system of 24 equal divisions of the octave.

Moving up to 36 edo (equal divisions of the octave) brings new complexity. Now we can imagine a pitch-color above (say, blue) and a pitch-color below (say, red) each chromatic pitch. One way to describe them would be to say that, in the key of ‘C’, C-red is flat-ish and C-blue is sharp-ish relative to the chromatic pitch. The problem here is that the terminology of flat and sharp are embedded in the chromatic language both as a pitch definition (Db, C#) and as a pitch modifier (bb, x). By applying the concept of pitch-color, we can avoid both the confusion in terms and extreme notational complexity (countless, incompatible pitch-modifier symbols) ‘bolted-on’ to chromatic black and white notation.

A keyboard layout for a polychromatic system of 36 equal divisions of the octave.

This describes how I proceeded in trying to work with very high pitch-resolutions. The polychromatic system evolved to allow the creation of a simple notation and theoretical language for writing, learning, and memorizing micro-pitch music within a pitch division scheme of 106 and 72 edo.

A keyboard layout for a polychromatic system of 72 equal divisions of the octave.

The pitch-color concept is not absolutely defined, so the values (in Hertz) of C-red are different depending on the scale division method used. In this way, the language says remains generally consistent, while being adaptable to any conceivable pitch scale. Unique pitch definitions are defined at the beginning of each composition. This enables an efficiency of learning and possibility of using of multiple pitch scales (simultaneously or via ‘modulations’), all under a unifying and intuitive pitch-color concept.

The pitch-color concept is intuitive by way of an easy association of micro-pitch to the visual color spectrum—from infrared to ultraviolet. A simple association can be made with a continuum of flatness to sharpness for each reference pitch (chromatic or other) to the visual color sequence we already know from the experience of seeing rainbows and other light diffraction phenomena.

I use equal divisions of the octave as a method of pitch division because it is a rudimentary and self-explanatory element to begin from in my early explorations of auditory limits of pitched-sound differentiation. My approach is to use the highest possible edo scales within each new keyboard design.

While there is one option for a major 3rd in a chromatic system, the polychromatic system offers several pitch-color variations of that interval.

With regard to intervals, the polychromatic system uses relatively defined pitch-color definitions and is based on an idea of intervallic relativity. So, while there is one option for a major 3rd in a chromatic system, the polychromatic system offers several pitch-color variations of that interval. This intervallic flexibility has audibly compelling implications and effects when exploring variations of each component within increasingly complex harmony.

When listeners hear microtonal music as ‘out of tune’, this impression arises from a chromatic frame of reference. A new foundational frame of reference or perspective needs to be established in order to appreciate microtonal music on its own terms and not in comparison to the macro-pitches of the chromatic system. This foundation is what I have been seeking in developing a polychromatic system. In general, microtonal music can seem extremely abstract for unprepared minds and ears, especially without a new framework of understanding (for reference and comparison).

The polychromatic system builds upon the fundamental concepts of the chromatic system (note definitions, harmonic principles, and music theory) as a common point of reference – and departure. From this common framework, increasingly refined levels of micro-pitch discrimination can be explored within a known system of musical understanding. As greater refinements of pitch and harmony recognition are developed, increased awareness can enable the recognition of further pitch-colors, as entities in themselves, without trying to force them into the conventional frame of reference: a coarse pitch-resolution, chromatic system.

In analogy, imagine the chromatic system as an old monochrome (black & white) dot matrix printer, with its chunky, quantized images. If you input a high-resolution image into that framework, it is ‘processed’ into a chunky, quantized image. The foundational framework of the coarse resolution, dot matrix system design must be addressed first.

A Low resolution dot-matrix image showing very pixellated letters as well as a very pixellated photo close-up of an eye of an animal

Paradoxically, ‘tradition’ has vital importance in the creation of new musical systems. Here, we are talking about tradition as our accumulated experience of the past, a shared frame of reference, an implicit basis and context of listening to and composing music—and not in the sense of calcified conventions of the past and present.

Paradoxically, ‘tradition’ has vital importance in the creation of new musical systems.

Polychromaticism is an approach and practice which uses chromatic music theory as an initial basis for conceptual anchors. In this way, extensions of established tonal and harmonic principles assist in the understanding of the new possibilities and implications of the polychromatic system. This creates a conceptual and perceptual bridge between our current and many future systems of music.

The use of chromatic conceptual anchors comes into play when I am trying to memorize a piece for performance. Using the conceptual anchor of a dominant 11th chord, I remember the constituent pitch-colors of the chord as minor modifiers within this larger conceptual structure, instead of having to remember each pitch-color individually.

My composing process is much more intuitive than analytical. As a result, I have neglected doing harmonic analyses, after the fact, to determine possible new theoretical models. My hope is that others with a passion for analysis will create new music theory models to aid in teaching the polychromatic system more efficiently. Philosophically, I see this as part of a larger 21st-century process which is based on collaborative innovation in music, science, technology, and the sound arts.

As a musician, it seemed impossible to gain a fundamental grasp of microtonal music because it consisted of so many discrete pitch-scale methods, all separately existing without a fundamental, underlying system.

With a polychromatic basis in notation and generalized pitch-color concept, any micro-pitch language could be quickly assimilated without having to relearn scale-specific notations. The current expansion of esoteric and fragmented micro-pitch scale methods, of reinventing-the-wheel (in notation) with each, can make wide exploration within microtonal music intimidating and difficult.

The use of non-chromatic color schemes:

A diagram of various hex-color schemes.

While the color schemes here are different, my impression is that these are examples of a modally optimized layout – in the sense that adjacent keys are 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th intervals rather than chromatic minor 2nd’s (or smaller) intervals. In the polychromatic system there are multiple pitch-color variations of each interval, rather than the single fixed-interval value in these layouts. Why be limited to just one major 3rd interval, when multiple intervallic pitch-color choices—singularly or simultaneously—could be available?

Ultimately, the polychromatic system exists to make the process of micro-pitch exploration and creation easier. And just as the polychromatic system has evolved from the chromatic system, it too will eventually become a (legacy) reference and conceptual point of departure for many increasingly sophisticated (non-chromatic) music systems of the future. The polychromatic system is one way of making the musical evolution toward triple-digit, pitch-scale resolutions easier to understand and create with.

As a musician and a listener, I experience music as a dynamic and evolving process, a creative interaction that we choose to engage in. Ultimately, the meaning and value of music comes from the quality and depth of this creative interaction.

Art doesn’t come to us, we must come to art.

The possibilities of growth and awareness gained through our engagement with art remind me of the idea that art doesn’t come to us, we must come to art. This idea expresses both a necessary receptivity to new perspectives as well as an active personal involvement which engages the listener’s creativity and imagination, in a similar way to that of the composer. In this process, the listener becomes a receptive-artist interacting with the compositions of the expressive-artist (composer). If we become what we practice, then exposure to, and interaction with challenging art can help us expand our integrated perpetual/conceptual awareness, and expose us to new dimensions of emotion and insight beyond the limits of spoken language.

In the next article, I will describe technical (physical technique and technology) aspects of my approach to polychromatic music, as well as some discoveries and implications that I have become aware of in my early explorations.

Requited Music: Anatomy of a Scoring Gig

I’m writing this in mid-December, on Opening Day of the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum.  The museum has been in the news a lot recently.  Years in the planning, developing, and building, it takes visitors on a comprehensive voyage through the devastating, sobering and yet at times uplifting stories of those who dedicated their lives to the fight for equality for all Americans, regardless of race.  Some, such as Medgar Evers, sacrificed their lives. The Mississippi Civil Rights Museum is a place to learn the history of those who preceded us in the ongoing struggle against racial tyranny and to pay homage to their courage as we continue the battle to this day.

Monadnock’s style was about the closest marriage between music and picture I’d encountered in over two decades of film composing.

In July 2016, I received a call from Monadnock Media asking if I’d be interested in scoring one of their short films intended for the soon-to-be-opened museum.  I had, in May 2016, completed my first assignment for Monadnock: the score to a film to be perpetually screened in the media room at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park, New York.  That film, titled 24 Hours That Changed History, is intense, with multiple simultaneous images flashing by for a few seconds at most; it is a concentrated, informative history of American military conflict from WWI to the present, with the attack on Pearl Harbor as the centerpiece. The entire story flies by within seven minutes.  My work was highly detailed and quite precise, and it was subjected to multiple layers of revision before a total meeting of the minds between composer and producer was established.  But the collaboration was ultimately a success.  It was a process for me to learn Monadnock’s style, both in terms of scoring and in terms of filmmaking.  Scoring-wise, it was about the closest marriage between music and picture I’d encountered in over two decades of film composing.  Notes and phrases had to fall within pauses in the voice-over, and the music had to dance in lockstep with the constantly transforming, evolving narrative.  Even the tightly scored National Geographic specials I composed in the 1990s and 2000s—with the rustling of the African trees accompanied by similarly sibilant-sounding cymbal crashes—could not compare with the molecular detail this assignment required.  As a film, the piece felt like a cross between documentary and branding: moving at speed, but telling a true story with a strong affective undercurrent, every note a signifier for the shifting emotions of the story.

Here’s an example of the FDR project. (There’s a moment of my music after the Space Race song.)

So after the FDR film, by the time Monadnock offered the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum gig, I figured I pretty much knew the lay of the land. But this assignment was a new world entirely.

Monadnock Media occupies a big barn in Western Massachusetts.  There, they develop and mock up dozens of projects, designing media rooms and creating films for locations around the country—from the Boston Science Museum to the Choctaw Cultural Center in Durant, Oklahoma.  Their approach is unique, with images projected on multi-faceted screens, often consisting of geometrical forms of varied shapes, sizes, and depths.  This allows them the flexibility to project as many as five simultaneous images on different planes, or several repeated images—or just one.  The voice-over and the music are often the elements that lend consistency and continuity to what is at times an almost non-linear visual narrative structure.

The new project that Monadnock asked me to score was the story of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African-American boy who, while visiting rural Mississippi from Chicago in 1955, was brutally tortured and murdered for allegedly whistling at a white woman.  The story follows Till’s kidnapping and lynching, through the funeral, worldwide publicity, the trial and acquittal of the accused, and the ensuing national outrage, with boycotts and protests that led to what many consider the origins of the civil rights movement.  The producers and I shared the unnerving sensation that this piece of history is, sadly, very relevant today.

To prepare my compositional work for the Emmett Till project, I spent a few days in the summer of 2016 immersing myself in Mississippi Delta Blues.  I re-familiarized myself with some of the great singers, songwriters, guitarists, and harmonica players I’d heard all my life: Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, James Cotton, John Lee Hooker, Mississippi John Hurt, and many more.  I reviewed how the blues of the Mississippi juke joints evolved, through migration, into the harder-driving electric blues of Chicago, and how some of the greatest artists of the rock ’n’ roll era—from the Rolling Stones to Bonnie Raitt—are living legends of that legacy.  I was reminded of how Mississippi gave birth to so much of the soundtrack of our lives.

The soundtrack of Monadnock’s Emmett Till story was not, however, a blues score per se.  Monadnock asked for a sparse soundscape, painted with drones, punctuated with rhythm—almost sound design, with a few precise hits on key moments.  The role of the blues was—again—a signifier, a recurring resonance of place and time, and, in a deeper way, of the emotion we as a culture associate with that sound: the bitterness of loss and suffering; the sweetness of moments of redemption. In this score, the blues surfaces as a kind of bloodletting, dropping into the texture as a subliminal reminder that you have to let yourself hurt in order to heal.

As it turned out, the score was not sparse, in the sense of spare; it was virtually wall-to-wall.  But it was truly underscore, lying beneath the voice-over and other sound effects, and emerging in moments of breath and cadence.  To avoid somnolence and animate the long tones that underpinned much of the story, I populated my drones with an active, shifting overtone structure; it was in the froth of harmonics that the real interest lay. In consort with the growing intensity of a scene, I allowed the overtones to emerge like the entrance of a violin section, subtly detuning some, emphasizing others, weakening the fundamentals.  This averted stasis and kept the score dynamic.

I kept a running compendium of re-usable themes: the “Emmett Till” theme; a “danger” theme; the “kidnapping” theme; a “mother’s grief” theme; etc.  I also kept my eye on the overarching harmonic development of the score.  Its basic key is in G minor, but it moves up through A minor, Bb minor and C minor and, at times of setback or resignation tinged with hope, down to Eb major.  (I’d toyed, for a moment, with the idea of structuring the show’s long-term harmonic progression to mirror, at a deeper architectural level, the blues, but the picture didn’t call for it so I’ll have to leave that conceit for another project.  However, the thought did increase my awareness of how the evolving keys related not only to one another, but to blues form as well.  With the key centers most prominently moving around a Gm-Bbm-Cm axis, there’s a tinge of that sub-structure in the score.)

Attach your ego to the collaborative process, not to how cool your music is.

Process-wise, this was also a close collaboration with the producers, which meant constant tweaking, many re-writes, and revision, sometimes requiring shifting on a frame.  Fortunately, mutual trust had been established through the FDR project, and through a strong opening cue I’d composed for the film.  So I didn’t worry too much about revisions.  The producers, director, and editor have a vision for the project; it’s the composer’s job to learn their perspective, and adjust when the music’s energy isn’t quite right.  And for the aspiring media composer, I would not say, as some do, “Abandon ego all ye who enter here”; rather, attach your ego to the collaborative process, not to how cool your music is. If you’re successful, the marriage of picture and story to sound is a greater high than the sum of its parts, and like requited love, returns to you, the composer, a sublime satisfaction in having given of yourself in the creation of a multi-dimensional, multi-sensory entity.

A screenshot of the final revisions of Rick Baitz's score for Monadnock's multi-media Emmett Till presentation at the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum

A screenshot of the final revisions of Rick Baitz’s score for Monadnock’s multi-media Emmett Till presentation at the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum

Composing (and revising) the Emmett Till music took me into the fall of 2016.  Once we had a score that the client (the museum) was satisfied with, the project was set to the side until the final voice-over could be recorded. Meanwhile, I began work on a second film for the Mississippi museum: Freedom Summer, about the summer of 1964, when activists in Mississippi battled voter suppression by bringing in civil rights advocates from all over the country to help register local citizens to vote. Again, the sacrifice was unfathomable, with several people losing their lives. Yet the national attention that was brought to bear on Mississippi’s Freedom Summer helped lead to the passage of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Although there were similarities to Emmett Till, the Freedom Summer project had many new components.  The screen was set up in the shape of a church, with images projected on different parts of the altar.  The film itself began and ended with licensed recordings of gospel songs, with 11 songs interspersed throughout the film.  Because there was so much African-American music already in the film, the use of blues elements in my score was minimal; my role was to move the story forward and, moment-to-moment, embody the sentiment of the scene.  Again, I was asked for a sparse, drone-based score, punctuated with percussive pulsations, discreet melody, and in one case, my own gospel-inflected tune.  For continuity, I created a harmonic map, listing the keys of all the pre-recorded songs in the film, and carefully composed in relation to them.  My first cue follows a hopeful song in A major called “Welcome Table” featuring the refrain: “I’m gonna be a registered voter one of these days.” I enter in the relative minor, to images of intimidation and violence.  Although the entire film doesn’t cohere harmonically quite as much as Emmett Till, there is a lot of continuity, with the key centers of Ab and F#, and their close relations, holding the most sway.  Here, I roll with the story like a musical narrator, again with an active overtone presence, emerging into sonic prominence in moments of emotional intensity.  And again, there was strong hands-on involvement from the producers, with many detailed revisions.

By the way—on the business side—by this time a clause was added to my contract that increased my pay after a certain number of revisions; the producers recognized that their process required a lot of extra work on the composer’s part. This clause was invoked after the voice-over was finally recorded on both Emmett Till and Freedom Summer—more than a year after Till had been put to one side.  Monadnock managed to contract Oprah Winfrey for the voice-over in the summer of 2017.  After editing Oprah’s contribution, both shows were sent back to me for final musical tweaks, in which almost every single cue needed some adjustment.  Sometimes one note got moved seven frames (about a quarter of a second), so everything had to be carefully shifted from that point on.  This took a couple of weeks to get right.

Meanwhile, I was sent one more film to score: Why We March.  This was meant to be a short assignment featuring two songs, upliftingly celebrating the power of peaceful protest.  This project, as unique as the others, is shown on S-shaped tabletops that are actually video screens that curve through the room, where kids can sit and watch the images roll by.  I will confess that this was the hardest of the four projects I’d done for Monadnock.  Perhaps I was burnt out. I had just moved my studio from New York’s bustling Midtown to a huge space facing Riverside Park in upper Manhattan, and had dozens of boxes to unpack.  I had also just finished recording three chamber and electronic pieces for inclusion on a CD to be released by Innova Recordings, and I was working nonstop on the mixes.  I had family responsibilities.

Plus, there was a temporary score in place that had to be overcome.  Also known as a “temp track”, it is often inserted by the director to give the composer an idea of what musical approach is desired by the film’s creators.   At its best, it provides the composer with an accurate guide, but it also can be deceiving.  Maybe the director intended it to give an idea of the rhythmic drive desired – but the composer mistakenly interprets the temp track as an instrumentation guide.  Sometimes the director drops it in as a placeholder, just to say, “we want music here,” so the composer has to be aware that he is not meant to musically emulate the temp cue. Film composers speak of the challenges of “temp love”, when a filmmaker is so attached to the temporary score that nothing the composer does is right. In the case of Why We March, the producers had differing ideas on what music would serve as a good model for what would work.  This is part of the collaborative creative process, and it eventually led to a mutual understanding.  Until then, approval for my songs was slow to materialize, and they each took several tries before I got them right.  I stuck with it and Monadnock stuck with me, for which I’m grateful.  And in the end, the client was happy.

Driving back from a 2017 summer residency at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, where I am a faculty member, I stopped in at Monadnock’s headquarters in Hatfield, Massachusetts.  At that time, I had not yet performed the final revisions on any of the Mississippi projects.  To my amazement, Monadnock had prepared all three projects for screening via virtual reality (with binaural sound).  They plopped the goggles on my head and the headphones on my ears, and I was transported, virtually, into the media rooms at the Civil Rights Museum, with my music prominent in the mix. When they showed the mock-up of Why We March in VR, I was literally inside the museum space, looking down at the tables that snaked across the room.  This was one of the trippiest, most immersive artistic experiences of my life—and it really let me hear how my music was going to sound in the museum.  In fact, I instantly recognized some weaknesses in one of the Why We March songs; it needed more oomphiness at the beginning and end. So I revised it immediately upon returning to New York.

Successfully completing any collaborative composing project requires substantial craft, persistence, and access to the great well of inspiration that resides in intuition.  In the interest of honesty, I’ll reveal here that at the beginning of the whole Mississippi process, with Emmett Till, I was relying more on craft and persistence than inspiration.  I’ve felt, ever since I began composing film music seriously, that my axe, so to speak, is my ability to emotionally empathize with whatever story I’m composing to.  I tell my students to imagine themselves in the scene, whether it’s under a tree in the African forest for a National Geographic film on chimps, or in the quiet kitchen of a pair of disabled women in Illinois, getting ready for their day, for a POV documentary.  And even though I’m experienced enough to know that craft will bring emotion along with it, I’d never personally had the experience of violent discrimination to the extent that I was seeing in the Emmett Till film, and I wasn’t sure I was feeling it enough.  But after uncounted viewings of that and the other films, the utter tragedy seeped into my psyche, and I felt tremendous sadness for the victims whose stories I was living with, and embodying musically, day after day.  And although I can’t say I could ever really know the extent of their pain, I did, finally, become much more emotionally connected to the story I was telling, and a circuit was completed.

The entire process of the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum project reminds me of the title of a novel by the Argentinian author Manuel Puig, Blood of Requited Love.  Somehow, it took a lot of hard work—musically and psychologically—to get there (isn’t it often so), but the reward is what the work gave back to me: a deep experience, albeit painful and eye-opening, of the reality of our country and world.  A challenging journey, but a tremendously fulfilling one.

[Ed. note: Additional video excerpts of the Monadnock Media presentations for the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum scored by Rick Baitz are available at the Monadnock Media website.]