Category: Columns

Follow the Music

Posted on May 4, 2017 by - Columns

When the phone rang four years ago, I was asked if I would be interested in moving to Bangkok, Thailand to teach music theory and composition.  I said yes. It was one of those moments in life when one embraces the possibilities, even without knowing what will happen.  I can admit that, due to my patchy-at-best understanding of global geography, it was not too long after the phone call ended that I decided to look again, this time more carefully, at my map of the world to find out where exactly I was going before a celebratory trip to the bookstore.  Even though I did not know precisely where I was going, I had to honor the important rule of my life: follow the music.

Following the music had been the story of my life up to that point. Years before the phone rang, in the senior year of my undergraduate studies, this rule helped guide me through a decision to move my concentration away from voice (an area that had previously defined my musicianship) towards composition. While I was transitioning towards becoming a composer, it was tremendously unclear what would happen. I had invested so much time and attention into singing that composition really came to me as a surprise. Thankfully, I had a very supportive group of teachers in both voice and composition who encouraged and inspired the process.  Although it was difficult at the time, this change towards making music in a new-to-me way led to being able to learn more. In order to follow the music, I have moved more times than I can count—along a general path from my home in Texas through Michigan and then on to Bangkok. Through so many changes, music has always been what has held it all together.

Ironically, the steadiness and predictability I sought became available to me only through a great dislocation.

Before the phone call, I had been considering two things. One was the potential to enrich my composing by pursuing new experiences, and the other was my desire to teach and interact with musicians.  After finishing my degrees, I had been teaching private lessons and working a day job while I composed in my free time, but I found that much of my time was actually being used in the drives commuting back and forth from one area to another.  I enjoyed having writing time and teaching students, but did find the day job difficult.  The chance to work abroad would allow me to consolidate my work into one place. I liked the steadiness of the idea. I did not know at that point how long I would be interested in living there or how long I would even be able to last overseas, but a steady life was something I wanted for myself. Ironically, the steadiness and predictability I sought became available to me only through a great dislocation. As I packed my bags, I did feel scared to be leaving but was more excited about the possibilities that might come as a result.

A twilight view of Mahidol University.

With a time zone thirteen hours ahead of my home, the sprawling capital city of Thailand is strategically located on what, geographically and culturally, seems to be the other side of the Earth! Bangkok is an intense collage of colors, sights, and sounds. Downtown the whole city buzzes, temples glitter with mirrored tiles (even in the moonlight!), taxis and tuk-tuks line the street beside outdoor markets and cranes loom overhead. Food stalls are tightly packed with families and friends enjoying fresh meals. Boats chug and swoop along the Chao Praya River, the city’s oldest expressway. I had travelled quite frequently prior to moving to Thailand but had never stayed anywhere internationally longer than a week or two. Life as an expatriate is a completely different experience than just passing through as a tourist. Unlike a temporary visit, successfully living abroad requires a gradual and pragmatic approach towards adaptation. By investing my time and musicianship here, Bangkok has become my home.

Nevertheless, navigating this new terrain demanded focus and dedication. When I arrived, I did not even know how to greet people properly. During the course of my daily walks those first days, I waved and smiled back at every smile I received, something that I only know now was completely inappropriate. (My well-intended waves looked alarming. The smile was okay, though.) In the first weeks, the priorities were very basic: find a place to live, get a telephone, get a handle on what is happening with Wi-Fi, successfully get a taxi, try to go somewhere specific on purpose, see what happens. In the beginning, it took a great deal of patience to observe what needed to be learned and to follow through. Each day required a high level of attention and intention. Research done beforehand had warned of the possibilities of initially experiencing culture shock; this can happen when days (weeks and months) go by without the personal ability to complete a task with accuracy. I did not want this to happen to me.

Soon enough I met with other international colleagues at the College of Music at Mahidol University (where I would soon begin working) and listened carefully to a much-needed flood of instructions regarding the skills I would need to learn. The learning curve was quite steep at first.  When you are moving to a new country, it can be difficult to anticipate some of the side effects that can result from needing to re-learn how to do what in the past have been simple tasks. That said, gradually moving towards a more complete set of geographic and cultural navigation skills is very important. This process has been very revealing for me and is one of my favorite aspects of deciding to come here—I’m so glad I did. The joy that living here brings is something I had never experienced before either. Even though I was quick to pick up the hand technique for a proper wai greeting that normally accompanies a verbal hello, over these past years I’ve still been continuing to develop my wai, making sure to be mindful that my elbows don’t stick out so much.

A frieze of musician playing a baritone saxophone outside the Mahidol University music department.

My activities here are centered around music-making—something which has always felt like home to me.  As chair of the composition and theory department I interact with the creative and administrative aspects of musical teaching and development. My goal here is to make more space for composition and creativity for the next generation to enjoy. I teach a studio of composers as well as a wide variety of lecture courses ranging from music theory, orchestration, form and analysis, electronic music, and 20th century literature, as well as help organize new music events for young composers such as the Young Thai Artist Award and the Thailand International Composition Festival. Most of my free time is spent exploring Bangkok and the surrounding areas.  When I am not composing or teaching, I particularly enjoy walking through the city while I practice using my language skills to find local recommendations.  My favorite activities are touring the many street markets, taking photos, relaxing with a Thai massage and visiting the Buddhist temples in and around the area.

Following the music took me far away, but has also guided me towards the music I was called to discover.

Following the music took me far away, but has also guided me towards the music I was called to discover.  Taking a path open to possibility can lead to enriched depths of craftsmanship, creativity, comprehension, performance, and perspective in deeply meaningful ways. As I will discuss in later posts, the impact of living in the collage of sensations Bangkok has to offer has gradually come to influence my music. Similarly, my own process of learning and the growing awareness of how to cultivate development would come to inform how I approach teaching and learning. In the next article in this series, I will talk more about the variety of options available for musicians abroad, Thai traditional music, and the appetite for contemporary music within the region.

Judy Bozone

Judy Bozone’s music is as eclectic and vivid as the composer herself. She is currently chair of the composition and theory department at Mahidol University’s College of Music and enjoys following her love of music while reaching out for new experiences.

A Fine Mess: An Emerging Opera Composer vs. the American New Opera Machine

Posted on May 1, 2017 by - Columns

By the time you read this, I will be nearing the culmination of Fort Worth Opera’s “Frontiers” showcase—a major step into the American new opera scene for an emerging composer. In these essays, I intend to chronicle my experience preparing for, and participating in, this opportunity. As a point of entry, I’ll detail how I got myself into this mess to begin with.

I live with opera, literally.  I regularly perform as an opera chorus member and supernumerary, I’m married to a coloratura soprano whose career has led us to a European address, and opera takes up the vast majority of my current workload. I was led to embrace the art form by my father, who unwittingly instilled in me what would become the two pillars of my musical aesthetic—jazz and opera. He was a “dance band” bass player in his New Jersey youth who later became the middle-aged man sitting in his recliner and sobbing along with La Bohème during the Met radio broadcast. He took me to my first opera—Carmen, presented by the now-defunct company in Baltimore—where an old man directly behind me mercilessly booed the Toreador, planting the seed of my fascination with music for the stage and the effect it could have on those listening.

After college, I laid out a ten-year plan to develop the skills I thought I needed to write opera.

After college, I laid out a ten-year plan to develop the skills I thought I needed to write opera.  Beginning with the voice, I wrote and sang choral music and art song, learning how singers thought and operated (no small feat). Next, I worked my way from solo instrumental pieces to chamber music to full orchestra, settings songs for voice and chamber instrumentation and simulating Puccini arias and duets along the way.

About six years into this project came an opportunity. Axe 2 Ice Productions was an alternative theater troupe in Boston whose mainstay was Bent Wit Cabaret, a monthly mashup of burlesque, spoken word, performance art, musical numbers, and other oddities.  The music director, a colleague of mine, asked if I would write a seven-minute opera for a “mystery” themed show.  Of course I said, “Yes! What could possibly go wrong?” and quickly settled on Edgar Allan Poe’s story, “The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether,” with its maniacal asylum proprietor, a melodramatic sense of foreboding, a slew of fantastic side characters, and an unpredictable—yet inevitable—climax that could only have come out of the mind of Poe.

Time being very short, I surgically cut away at Poe’s original text, coalescing the action into a single scene with a brief introduction and afterword.  The original version came to 15 minutes with piano accompaniment.  I trimmed it down to around 8 minutes for Bent Wit and scored it for their house band.  A year later, Boston Opera Collaborative presented the original 15-minute version on a program that was aptly titled “Opera Goes to Hell.” Three years later, I expanded the work in order to realize a more complete adaptation of Poe’s story, resulting in a three-act, 90-minute piano/vocal score.

Oper Koeln Neuen Staatenhaus

Good for me…now what?

I soon learned that cold-shopping an out-of-the-box stage work is a thorny, if not downright impossible, proposition.  In the autumn of 2015, I reached out to roughly 200 small- to medium-sized American opera companies. In a 100-word email, I introduced myself and asked for a five-to-ten-minute phone conversation about trends in the commissioning and production of new opera (a subject that obviously interested me but was benign enough for an initial discussion). I received about 40 responses and eventually spoke with representatives of around 20 companies. My lone question was: “What conditions would need to be in place for your company to consider commissioning a new work, or producing a recently composed work?”

Cold-shopping an out-of-the-box stage work is a thorny, if not downright impossible, proposition.

Along with the wealth of information I received on a wide range of topics—including the desire to produce new works in line with the needs and wants of the constituency, the lack of new female roles, the challenges of the heavy subject matter of many new works, and the industry-wide discussions surrounding successfully raising funds for commissions—it was said in almost every conversation that relationships are paramount to developing new works. None of the companies I spoke with would consider premiering a completed opera from a composer with whom they had no relationship, and most would opt for the chance to build a project from the ground up.

Sidebar: In my experience over the last four years working in German opera houses, it appears that many of the same rules apply for a composer trying to break in, particularly the development of a relationship with administrators to foster a work that resonates with the particular audience of the commissioning house. Beyond that, the opera culture—not to mention the new opera scene—is rather different from that of the USA in a number of ways. Germany is, for better or worse, a bit of an opera bubble. Its undeniable opera tradition can weigh heavily on itself (sometimes to the point of ignoring the obvious contributions of other cultures), but it’s generally not afraid to take risks in presenting new works or new concept-driven adaptations of the repertoire. This is simply part of their opera culture, and they have developed an audience for it. On the other hand, the interest in new works in Germany still favors very dense, difficult, and abstract composition (in some ways, the train never left Darmstadt), and newly commissioned works from non-Germans have been extremely rare. One thing in my favor, however, is that Germans love competition winners, and mentioning my being selected for the Frontiers showcase at Fort Worth Opera has given me a few second chances already.

The need to be heard and venues in which to be heard are precious few.

One of my calls in 2015 was to Darren K. Woods (the then-General Director of Fort Worth Opera) who encouraged me to apply to Frontiers, which is one of the few new opera development programs with an unrestricted public submission process. This in and of itself is at the heart of the struggle I have felt as an emerging opera composer: the need to be heard and venues in which to be heard (outside of a sheltering institution) are precious few but, in the course of my phone calls, I learned that being aggressive in attacking these opportunities doesn’t necessarily lead anywhere. Realistically, however, in no way are these opportunities a silver bullet. They are, at best, a chance to meet with decision makers in the field and to present my best work: that which, for me, demonstrates my understanding of the repertoire, of the voice, of dramaturgy, and of a sincere compositional aesthetic.

Seven years after the first phrases were written, I am enjoying the opportunity to work with singers and the music staff at Fort Worth to bring twenty minutes of my Poe opera to life. I am days away from the showcase and the opportunity to present my work and interact with decision makers from all over the country.

Next week: How did I prepare to present myself to the opera world? Or, “Does this tweed make me look like an opera composer?”

Frank Pesci writing music.

Frank Pesci’s compositions have been performed across North America and Europe. He has written nearly 100 works for the concert stage, including forty choral works, eleven song cycles, nearly twenty chamber and concert scores, and five operas. He lives in Cologne, Germany.

Commemoration Music: Narrating 9/11

Posted on April 27, 2017 by - Columns

Steve Reich’s WTC 9/11 was commissioned by the Kronos Quartet in 2009, separately from their 9/11 memorial program discussed in my previous post. Now one of the best-known post-9/11 works, it was not initially intended as such at all. The original request was for “a piece using pre-recorded voices,” following up on the idea behind Reich’s Different Trains, which the quartet had commissioned in 1988. The idea of using recordings from 9/11 only came to the composer several months later.[1] In its use of speech and concrete sounds to create melodies, harmony, and rhythm, it is similar to Different Trains. (In addition to Reich’s familiar speech melody technique, in WTC 9/11 the beep-beep-beep of a phone left off the hook provides both the tempo and an underlying harmonic pedal for the work’s first movement.) The structure of WTC 9/11 also resembles another Reich piece based on documentary material, the video opera Three Tales.

Different Trains, Three Tales, and WTC 9/11 all contain a two-part structure that moves from representation (of a traumatic event or events) to reflection, with an additional third part at either the beginning or the end. In the case of Different Trains, the trauma of the Holocaust represented in the second movement is prefigured in the first and reflected on in the third. In Three Tales, two traumatic events are represented: the explosion of the Hindenburg and the removal of indigenous inhabitants from Bikini Atoll. “Dolly,” the third part, considers the phenomena of genetic engineering and artificial intelligence, using them as an opportunity to reflect on the merits and risks of technological advancement as described in the first two parts.

WTC 9/11 begins immediately with representation: after the beeping phone, the first recorded sounds heard are the voices of NORAD air traffic controllers tracking American Airlines Flight 11. They are joined by recordings from the New York City Fire Department and, in the second movement, testimonies from witnesses and survivors of the attacks. In contrast to Different Trains’ structure, now it is the third movement rather than first that extends the representation–reflection dyad, the third movement here evoking the realm of the spiritual with chants from the Psalms and the Torah, as well as the voices of two Jewish women who helped sit vigil (shmira) over the bodies of the Twin Towers’ dead until they could be identified and buried.

Robert Fink has shown how the repetitions and cyclical structures of minimalist and post-minimalist music resemble those of commercial television.[2] This is even more true of 24-hour news broadcasting, in which a finite amount of actual footage and information must fill long periods of air time: on September 11 itself, news channels even resorted to looping what little footage they had to make it fill the large amount of time the event’s importance seemed to demand.

Reich follows this pattern of repetition, sequencing, and flow, but applies a heavy editorial hand to his sources and their setting to construct an unambiguous emotional and affective narrative.

In WTC 9/11, Reich follows this pattern of repetition, sequencing, and flow, but applies a heavy editorial hand to his sources and their setting to construct an unambiguous emotional and affective narrative. This is especially clear in the first movement. The chosen samples broadly narrate the events that took place on September 11, 2001: planes hijacked, towers hit, emergency services scrambled, towers fall. This sequence is now extremely familiar, but in his chosen samples and his translation of them into music, Reich adds several layers of musical intensification: the retelling of the events themselves runs in parallel with a movement from speech to noise, an increase in harmonic dissonance, and an increase in rhythmic complexity. Each of these heightens the psychological and physical tension of the music, taking it into increasingly uncomfortable sonic territory. Two more narratorial devices further heighten this tension: the words themselves become increasingly panicked and personalized (from “It came from Boston” to “I can’t breathe”), and there is a steady shift of viewpoint from the air traffic controllers remotely observing the aircrafts’ movements to individuals trapped in the rubble of the towers.

All of this narrative exposition sets up movements two and three, in which the emotional aftermath is explored. In turning themselves to matters of shock, grief, understanding, and commemoration, these movements occupy similar territory to many 9/11 memorial works, including some of those I have discussed in this series of posts. What is unusual about Reich’s piece is that its emotional territory is given such a clear frame through the first movement’s recounting of events. For his One Sweet Morning (2010), commissioned by the New York Philharmonic to mark the tenth anniversary of the attacks (and written only a year after Reich’s piece), John Corigliano resolved to avoid any possibility of specific recollection, which might conflict with the recollections of his listeners. “So many in the audience of this piece will have images of the frightful day itself … burned into their retinas … How could I instruct the audience to ignore their own memories?”[3] WTC 9/11 contains no such ambiguity: its signs and their meanings are clear; its control of affect is complete.

If we turn back to Erika Doss’s categorization of monuments vs memorials described in my opening post,[4] we can see that WTC 9/11 occupies an unclear position in relation to that schema. The spiritual and emotional spaces opened up in its second and third movements are contemplative and memorial-like; they also focus on forms of private response, through the testimonies given in movement two and the vigils of movement three. However, the first movement unavoidably colors our response to the later two, so strongly does it determine the work’s emotional palette. This side of the work is more monument than memorial. There are aspects of heroism—the voices of the firefighters, for example. Its realistic presentation is more traditional, too. Most significant to this interpretation of the work are its overt emotional management, through the devices described above, and its shaping of a single historical narrative.

On this analysis at least, Reich’s musical language in WTC 9/11 represents an inversion of Michael Kimmelman’s diagnosis that minimalism (within public art) is the aesthetic best equipped to convey emotional ambiguity and flexibility. By drawing on the vocabulary of 24-hour broadcast news and using gradual processes to support a particular narrative drive, WTC 9/11 creates a sort of minimalist realism rather than an abstract space for contemplation. These tendencies have long been latent in Reich’s music and aren’t necessarily features of all minimal or post-minimal musical commemorations, but the case of WTC 9/11 suggests that musical responses to 9/11 can differ greatly from those in the visual arts. The success that WTC 9/11 has enjoyed suggests also that there remains a desire—in music at least—to seek stabilities and certainties within a musical and memorial landscape that can often prioritize transience, impermanence, and fluidity.


1. http://www.kronosquartet.org/projects/detail/steve_reich_new_work.


2. Robert Fink, “Going with the Flow: Minimalism as Cultural Practice in the USA since 1945,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music, ed. Keith Potter, Kyle Gann, and Pwyll ap Siôn (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 201–18.


3. John Corigliano, program note for One Sweet Morning (2010), www.johncorigliano.com/index.php?p=item2&sub=cat&item=120.


4. See also Erika Doss, Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America (University of Chicago Press: Chicago and London, 2010).

Self-Plagiarism and the Evolution of Style

Posted on April 24, 2017 by - Columns

I recently set a poem for SATB a cappella chorus that ended in the word “sun.” This music should have come easily to me, but I’d already set another SATB a cappella piece that ended in the word “sun” just a few months ago. Both sentences used the word to end their respective poems in an uplifting, redemptive gesture. They called for similar music, but I didn’t want to write the exact same music twice.

To what extent, as a composer, are you allowed to plagiarize your own music? Sometimes, of course, we do this unconsciously, realizing only belatedly that we’re repeating ourselves. How do we know when this is a terrible idea, and when it’s a great one? After all, there’s a long history of composers ripping off their own music, borrowing ideas and recycling whole measures—or sometimes whole movements. Even Bach did it. But given that repeating our past ideas can read as flat-out laziness, when, if ever, should we self-plagiarize?

Hitchcock once said, while defending the repeated use of certain filming techniques within his work, that “self-plagiarism is style,” and I think his philosophy holds the answer to when and how we should imitate our past compositions.

Some composers write in a style so recognizable, we need only hear a minute—or even a measure—of their music to know exactly who wrote it. Musicians occasionally criticize these composers for writing music that “all sounds the same,” but it takes skill to settle on a style that works consistently. A composer’s style becomes distinctive not only because certain ideas are present in many of their compositions, but because that composer has made compelling artistic choices deliberately and repeatedly across their body of work.

A composer’s style becomes distinctive not only because certain ideas are present in many of their compositions, but because that composer has made compelling artistic choices deliberately and repeatedly across their body of work.

In the evolution of artistic style, there’s a crucial distinction between “self-plagiarism” and “plagiarism.” Replicating the specific elements of gesture and orchestration that define another composer’s style is a tricky matter; do it without identifying your source material, and your work may be written off as derivative. Perhaps it’s best to avoid the most distinctive indicators—unless expressly doing so in homage—and to seek out whatever will come to define our own work.

There’s a difference between realizing you’re organically writing music similar to what you’ve done in the past versus purposefully trying to recapture the style of your previous work, too. The few times I’ve tried to write a piece similar to one of my older pieces, I’ve found it absolutely maddening; it’s impossible to recapture who you were and what mindset you were in when you wrote an older piece. Perhaps counterintuitively, it’s nearly always easier to forge ahead with a new work rather than intentionally re-create the style of an older one.

Are we responsible for creating our own “style” or should we simply write the music we want to write, let it evolve naturally over time, and allow others to decide what defining factors unite our complete body of work? On some level, our own style may always remain unknowable to us, recognizable only after we’ve written everything we’re ever going to write. We are, though, in charge of how we choose to imbue our music with meaning. Here’s where I think “self-plagiarism” does define style: rather than imitating old ideas or forcefully repurposing them into new pieces, we can view a creative lifetime as a chance to create our own musical vocabulary.

Consider a few moments in Thomas Newman’s film scores that sound similar. In several films Newman has scored—including American Beauty, Revolutionary Road, and White Oleander—Newman favors a sparse orchestral texture, with sustained strings and a simple melody in the piano. He uses this approach in so many different films that the repeated use of this texture must be deliberate. Often, these similar themes highlight moments in each movie when the presence of beauty creates a stark contrast to darkness or death. By writing similar themes for each of these different films, Newman strengthens the purpose and value of each individual theme. This music is recognizably written in his “style,” yes, but beyond that, it functions as a sort of life-long leitmotif within his work.

Even outside of film scoring, it makes sense for composers to use similar music to underscore parallel moments within different compositions. I considered this as I wondered how to set a second poem ending in “sun.” I’d already solved this musical problem once; if I solved it the same way again—with a different approach, but the same harmonic progression leading up to the final “sun” chord—that moment could effectively link both pieces together.

Applied to a life of composing, this intentional repetition could create a library of motives, gestures, and orchestration that defines our work. As we encounter words and dramatic moments similar to ones we’ve scored in a previous piece, we can purposefully link these pieces with the same vocabulary—adapted so that it will reflect whatever surrounds it—so that anyone who encounters both pieces will hear these pieces linked across time. For listeners who take the time to know our body of work, these moments will feel almost like an inside joke: a reward for speaking our language.

Commemoration Music: Working Out What’s Going On

Posted on April 20, 2017 by - Columns

Speculating in 2002 on what a memorial at the former World Trade Center might look like, The New York Times’s architecture critic Michael Kimmelman took a guess. “A memorial, as part of a mixed-use project, will in some way turn out to look Minimalist, Minimalism, of all improbable art movements of the last 50 years, having become the unofficial language of memorial art. What used to be men on horses with thrusting swords has morphed more or less into plain walls and boxes.”[1] And his prediction has proved largely correct: Michael Arad and Peter Walker’s Reflecting Absence is part of a mixed-use project (a memorial park and museum), with a minimalist aesthetic.

There is no real equivalent in music to the mixed-use space of public art, but the aesthetic of minimalism has been evident in musical memorials to 9/11 as well. Although an accidental tribute, perhaps the most well-known example is William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops. Created a few months before September 2001 (and based on tapes recorded much earlier than this, in the early 1980s), Basinski’s recording of slowed-down Muzak, looped onto tape and then played back as the magnetic coating of the tapes (and the sounds it stored) began to disintegrate, seemed to capture perfectly the emotions of that day. Having not known what to do with these recordings of sonic collapse and decay since making them in July 2001, Basinski brought them out on the afternoon of September 11, opened the windows of his Brooklyn apartment, and played them as a soundtrack while he and his neighbors watched the plumes of smoke over lower Manhattan and “tried to work out what the hell was going on.”[2] In the evening he filmed the still-smoldering buildings as the sun set, later setting the footage to the first in The Disintegration Loops series, dlp1.1. The film was eventually purchased by the 9/11 Memorial Museum.

The Disintegration Loops are classic minimalism in a late-’60s style, even if their aesthetic of sentimental ruin and melancholic introspection is more 21st century in flavor.

Looped and layered, with a processual form that, once begun, is left to run its course, The Disintegration Loops are classic minimalism in a late-’60s style, even if their aesthetic of sentimental ruin and melancholic introspection is more 21st century in flavor. Other compositional tributes have been less minimalist in their approach, however. In contrast to trends within the visual arts there have, for example, been a large number of neo-Romantic responses in which emotional registers are more specifically articulated: among them John Corigliano’s One Sweet Morning, Robert Moran’s Trinity Requiem, and Karen Walwyn’s Reflections on 9/11. Even those works by composers of an ostensibly minimalist background have been rather more mixed in their style and aesthetic. In last week’s post I referred to how John Adams used harmony and orchestration to color his piece’s recitation of names, giving each a particular identity and providing his work with an overall emotional arc. In this post and the next, I want to look in detail at two more memorial pieces, both of them by minimalist (or at least post-minimalist) composers and both of them string quartets: Michael Gordon’s The Sad Park (this post) and Steve Reich’s WTC 9/11 (next week).

Both pieces were also commissioned by the Kronos Quartet. In 2006, having been asked to play a concert at the Herbst Theatre where the founding charter of the United Nations was signed, and to do so on the fifth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, the quartet devised a program that brought together the world’s music in an attempt to better understand it after 9/11. That program was arranged into three sections. The first comprised traditional music from Iraq, Iran, and Central and Southern Asia. The third drew more on the contemporary classical sphere, moving its geographical focus to Europe and North America. The second, and the concert’s heart, featured Gordon’s The Sad Park (as well as two works not directly related to 9/11: John Oswald’s Spectre and Kronos and Paolo Prestini’s arrangement of ‘Armenia’ by Einstürzende Neubauten).

In 2001, Gordon’s (and Julia Wolfe’s) son Lev attended nursery school in lower Manhattan, just a few blocks from Ground Zero. Shortly after the attacks, one of his teachers, Loyan Beausoleil, began to make recordings of the children’s recollections of that day, and Gordon uses four of these (for example, “Two evil planes broke in little pieces and fire came”) as the basis for the four sections of his work.[3] Like Basinski on the roof of his apartment, these kids were trying to figure out the meaning of 9/11—albeit from a very different position of understanding—and this becomes the theme of Gordon’s piece.

Varieties of digital sound processing are applied to the four speech samples: in Parts 1 and 3 the samples are progressively time-stretched until their individual sonic grains can be heard (the first section of Part 3 also loops different fragments of the original sample); in Parts 2 and 4 different granular synthesis techniques are applied that compress or fracture the sample. In Part 4 the sample is also looped and given a stuttering, shaking effect. In all four instances, the original speech is taken in or out of recognisability using audible processes that morph it into sounds evoking howls or multitudes of anonymous, unrooted points of sound. Rather than—in quasi-surrealistic fashion—uncovering hidden, unconscious meanings within the original samples, the effect is to dwell on the psychological changes that take place in the course of repetition and recollection, in the obsessive rewriting and overwriting of memory that takes place immediately after trauma.

The effect is to dwell on the psychological changes that take place in the course of repetition and recollection, in the obsessive rewriting and overwriting of memory that takes place immediately after trauma.

The relationship between the sound samples and the string quartet writing is oblique. Although the strings are not an orchestration or transcription of the vocal sounds, there is a certain amount of harmonic complementarity between the two, placing both layers of the work in the same musical space. There are also some loose rhythmic correspondences. In Part 1, for example, the string music gradually slows in parallel with the sample’s gradual stretch, although it does so by stepwise shifts in meter rather than a gradual ritardando, and at a different pace to the electronics. (In Part 3 something of the reverse happens, with the quartet music becoming busier as the sample slows.) Gordon’s music also provides a general emotive palette that is, for the most part, tense, agitated, and anxious. Even when the music and speech act in direct dialogue (as in certain moments in Parts 2 and 3 when the music drops out for the speech to be heard clearly, before stepping back in), the emotional intent is relatively unspecified.

Nevertheless, the work is undoubtedly programmatic in its choice of samples: the references in the children’s speech are clear, even if made through the imprecise and uniquely inflected recollections of kindergarten children (“I just heard that on the news that the buildings are crashing down”). Yet beyond basic statements about the event, Gordon’s chosen texts impose no narrative, and neither does his music, which is minimalistically abstract in its use of disengaged processes and static tableaux. Only in Part 4 (“And all the persons that were in the airplane died”) do the musical cues become clearer. The shuddering looped sample (evoking sobs?) is set against dissonant rising glissandi, which give way to a furious final three minutes of heavily accented sawing, an unfettered release of energy, a final thrash, a question shouted into space, unanswered.

Unlike most post-9/11 works, The Sad Park is barely a memorial at all: its tone is not that of reconciliation. It is not a requiem, nor is it a “memory space” like On the Transmigration of Souls, with all the implications of security and psychological processes of acceptance that term suggests. Rather, it attempts to process the attacks’ immediate aftermath through simultaneous layers of mediation: the reactions of children too young to understand but old enough to recognize fear in the adults around them; the electronic processing that transmutes those words into any number of sonic symbols; and the extrapolation of this into a harmonic and rhythmic palette. What’s left is a rare portrait of doubt, anger, anguish, and bafflement that stands apart from the calming tone of official memorial style.


1. Michael Kimmelman, “Out of Minimalism, Monuments to Memory,” New York Times, January 13, 2002.


2. John Doran, “Time Becomes a Loop: William Basinski Interviewed,” The Quietus, November 15, 2012, http://thequietus.com/articles/10680-william-basinski-disintegration-loops-interview.


3. More of Beausoleil’s transcriptions are documented at www.youngestwitnesses.com.

On Being a “Choral Composer”

Posted on April 17, 2017 by - Columns

female chorus

When I finished graduate school for composing nearly six years ago, I decided to structure my life and livelihood around the pursuit of a full-time composing career. I took stock of where I’d had the most success with composing, and at that time, I was selling the most scores and hearing the most performances of my choral music. Maybe assessing the commercial viability of my music sounds crass, but my motives weren’t purely financial. Writing vocal music comes fluidly and enjoyably to me, for the most part, more so than writing for (non-vocal) instruments. Given how much I love working with language in music, too, I often find vocal music the best medium for what I hope to express through my composing. I find an easy grace in writing for the voice—and by “easy,” I mean this: all composing is still work, of course, but this is the work I most love to do.

Structuring my life post-grad school, then, it made sense creatively and financially to focus on writing for voice, and more specifically on writing for chorus. I knew I’d eventually return to writing for instruments; I just didn’t know when or exactly how it would happen.

In the years since I decided to pursue writing for chorus, I’ve been asked if I consider myself a “choral composer.” I do, and I don’t. I’m happy to use that label if I’m in a situation—say, a choral conference—where I’m pursuing more opportunities to write for chorus. Other times, I find myself resisting the term, defensively reminding someone that I write for other instruments, too. Sometimes I get the impression that contemporary choral music is perceived as “lesser” than new instrumental works, at least within the new music community. When asked what kind of music I write, I usually mention my instrumental writing first and add that I compose often for voice, almost as if there’s something shameful in being defined primarily by my choral writing.

Over the last six years, I’ve written more than twenty-five works for choral ensembles, ten or so art songs, two pieces for voice with chamber ensemble, one piece for speaking chamber ensemble—there’s text, yes, but not singing—and five pieces purely for instruments, with no vocal element whatsoever. I wrote three of these non-vocal works within the last six months, in an effort to return to writing chamber music, and the transition has been a bit rough. Writing instrumental music doesn’t come quite as easily to me as writing art songs and choral works. My chamber music is not as well-known as my choral writing, and to be perfectly honest, sometimes I wonder if it’s not as good. To be fair, at some point in the process of writing every one of my compositions, I’ve been convinced that the piece in question is absolute garbage—it’s an unfortunate part of my process, not a reflection on the music itself.

All of that said, do I regret structuring my last six years around writing almost exclusively for chorus? Not a bit. I’ve accomplished the goals I set for myself when I graduated: several of my choral pieces have been accepted by and are now available from major publishing companies, and I’ve found viable ways to self-publish my other works as well. I’ve worked with several professional choruses and excellent conductors and released an album of my choral works. I know how to negotiate a choral commission, and I feel confident in my rate and the value of what I write. All of this feels like success.

I’d urge any other composer contemplating a full-time composing career to ask the same questions I considered six years ago: What work do you most enjoy doing? What work of yours have others already recognized as excellent? What medium or mediums stand out as the best fit for the ideas you feel compelled to express in your music?

For me, the answer to each of these questions is still choral music. It’s only when I find myself working on several pieces with a similar instrumentation in a row—say, three pieces for high school-level a cappella SATB chorus, all four to six minutes long—that I start to question my decision to focus so intently on choral composing. I’m sure I’d have the same feeling writing two works of similar length and style in a row for orchestra or for string quartet. Worrying that I might be repeating myself within my work and running low on innovation is what feels tiring, not the genre itself in which I’m composing.

As a result, I’ve found “niching down”—composing in one specialized field for a number of years, in order to build up a reputation and career in that field—to be a solid career choice, yes, but also a complex one. The question of whether to settle in one genre for a year, for a few years, or for an entire career comes down to this, I think: There’s only so much room to grow in your art if you’re not continually pushing yourself.

To avoid burning out and for my work to evolve, I need to seek out projects that don’t conform to what I already feel most comfortable creating. It’s good to stay a little uncomfortable when it comes to creativity. I need to look for variety in the projects that I take on, staggering similar projects across a wide span of time. And as long as I feel compelled to write vocal and instrumental music, I need to do both.

I’ve been considering all of this as I set long-term goals for the next few years, too. I very likely can’t continue to build a career as a “choral composer,” write and record an album’s worth of solo piano music, and compose two new works for orchestra at the same time, or even during the same year. Over the span of a few years, or a decade, or even a whole life spent writing music, though, there’s more than enough room for all of these goals to co-exist. We can focus on one field of music, then branch out to another. We can “niche down,” and we can embrace one identity (“choral composer,” “band composer,” “film composer,” etc.) for however many seasons that identity serves us, as long as we remain open to whatever music—in any genre—calls us to write it next.

Commemoration Music: Commemorating 9/11

Posted on April 13, 2017 by - Columns

If one were looking for an official “monument” among musical responses to 9/11, one might expect to find it in John Adams’s On the Transmigration of Souls. Commissioned by the New York Philharmonic early in 2002, it was written to be performed at a concert scheduled for September 18 that year, very close to the first anniversary of the attacks. The timing was a coincidence: the concert had already been planned with an original program of Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Yet on realizing the date, the orchestra wrote to Adams to request a commemorative piece to replace the Stravinsky. (The fact that September 2002 also marked the official beginning of Lorin Maazel’s tenure as the orchestra’s music director only added to the significance of the occasion.) The orchestra had already found a public role for itself in the wake of the attacks, offering consolation to the people of New York in a remarkable performance of Brahms’s Ein Deutsches Requiem on September 22, 2001, that replaced the scheduled gala opening of the 2001-02 season with a benefit concert for the families of firefighters, police officers, and rescue workers, and in the actions of individual members, who had given ad hoc performances to mourners at the Ground Zero site.

Yet for all this, Adams’s piece is far from a typical monument. It may have garnered all the prizes available to it from the American musical establishment—including the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Music, and (in its recording by Maazel, the New York Philharmonic, New York Choral Artists, and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus) the 2005 Grammy Awards for Best Classical Album, Best Orchestral Performance, and Best Classical Contemporary Composition—but it sets itself apart from the declamatory, official statement. Instead, On the Transmigration of Souls turns toward the listening subject, opening up a contemplative space that seems to serve the needs of a mourning, traumatized listener more than to offer narratives of heroism, national redemption, or even vengeance. The attacks themselves—although present in many other examples of 9/11 music—are conspicuous by their absence; the closest allusion is the text “I see water and buildings,” the last words of one of the attendants on American Airlines Flight 11, which crashed into the North Tower.

The piece turns toward the listening subject, opening up a contemplative space that seems to serve the needs of a mourning, traumatized listener more than to offer narratives of heroism.

The work’s construction is well documented but worth reviewing. As well as the orchestra, Adams uses a chorus and a pre-recorded soundtrack. The text, which is divided between the singing chorus and spoken recordings on the soundtrack (made by Adams’s friends and family), is compiled from the handwritten missing persons signs that sprang up in huge quantities around Ground Zero in the days after the attacks (photos of which were taken by the New York Philharmonic’s archivist, Barbara Haws), and the short “Portraits in Grief” obituaries that the New York Times ran every day for more than a year after, each one a miniature of someone who had died in the towers. The soundtrack contains a further layer: recordings of New York, made by Adams in the early hours of the morning walking round the city. This is played back through speakers placed around the audience, mixed with the sounds of the orchestra, to create an immersive musical experience that surrounds its listeners rather than simply broadcasts to them from the stage.

The tone of Adams’s work—contemplative, non-dramatic, focused on absence rather than presence—prefigures Michael Arad and Peter Walker’s Reflecting Absence memorial park, opened on the World Trade Center site on September 11, 2011, two vast square pools with surrounding waterfalls, sunk 30 feet into the footprint of the original towers. It also echoes Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC (1982), one of the most successful of all contemporary memorials. Cut into the ground, giving it a minimal vertical profile, Lin’s memorial comprises two long wedges of black granite (each around 250-feet in length), which meet at their widest edge at an angle of about 120º. The black walls are highly polished and reflect the image of their viewers. They are inscribed with the names of the 58,253 US veterans killed in the war, arranged in chronological sequence.

The immersive style of Adams’s piece also relates to Lin’s memorial. Much like Lin’s mirror-like granite, Adams’s field-recorded, spatially distributed soundscape folds the listener into the work. Spatiality radically subjectivizes music, since (unlike the flatter, theoretically “even” projection from the stage) everybody’s experience will genuinely be different depending on their seating position. There is no “ideal” position from which to hear, and therefore no projected ideology of right or wrong, definitive or flawed. (It’s worth noting, however, that in practice this aspect of the piece initially troubled Adams: of the work’s premiere he writes that “some listeners found themselves uncomfortably close to a loudspeaker while others, being too far away from the nearest one, barely could make out what was coming from them.”[1])

Likewise, there is no “right” way to engage with Lin’s memorial. Too large to take in at once, it must be viewed in a combination of detailed attention and generalized scanning. To witness the whole thing is to take part in an active experience that requires at minimum a walk along its 500-foot length. Despite the inclusion of a 60-foot flagpole at the memorial’s entrance and Frederick Hart’s bronze sculpture Three Fighting Men (both mandatory additions not included in Lin’s original design), Lin’s memorial does not privilege one reading over another: part of its success lies in the fact that it can be read as both an indictment of war and a tribute to its fallen heroes.

The use of names is important in both contexts. As Erika Doss suggests, within a memorial context, naming first and foremost creates a sense of social unity: “to be named is to be acknowledged.”[2] Lists of names are a prominent feature of contemporary memorial art, and great attention is paid to matters of sequence and inclusion or exclusion. (Should attackers be listed among the dead, for example? They aren’t in On the Transmigration of Souls.) Inclusion of a name can personalize a work of memorial and deepen its affective power. But names also enable lists, which provide a neutral ordering logic that can counter the “shattering disorder” of atrocity and trauma and that claims those names as a unified body. Adams steps gingerly between these poles. His soundtracked text, softly looping and layering names and appellations (“My sister,” “My brother”) echoes minimalism’s history, from the counting patterns of Glass’s Einstein on the Beach to the looping speech of Reich’s It’s Gonna Rain, Come Out, and My Name Is. It also recalls the recitation of names that takes place on occasions such as the anniversary of 9/11. But Adams’s music is not completely passive: it responds to those names, giving them individual identity through changes in harmony and orchestration, so that they are not subsumed into an undifferentiated mass.

It is a quietly complex work; its underlying concept is, I believe, one of Adams’s most sophisticated.

The idea of the mass remains part of the aesthetic of Adams’s work, however, just as it is part of Lin’s. He has described how his initial difficulty in beginning the piece was overcome after watching amateur footage of the New York attack and seeing the clouds of paper falling from the top of the towers: “an image of millions and millions of pieces of paper floating out of the windows of the burning skyscraper and creating a virtual blizzard of white paper slowly drifting down to earth. The thought of so many lives lost in an instant—thousands—and also the thought of all these documents and memos and letters, faxes, spreadsheets and God knows what, all human record of one kind or another—all of this suggested a kind of density of texture that I wanted to capture in the music, but in an almost freeze-frame slow motion.”[3] This is almost an image of the sublime, in which the sheer number of documents and the mass of data they contain overwhelms and, in turn, becomes a means to absorb and come to terms with the horror of that day. This sensation is reflected in Transmigration’s use of document masses—the missing persons signs, the Portraits of Grief obituaries, the list of names—and its orchestration, “refracted and rendered into particulate matter.”[4]

Adams’s combination of soft orchestration, gentle harmonic palette, slow tempo, and steady intonation of phrases—“We will miss you … We all love you”—can verge on the sentimental: the mass can become too personalized. And the composer himself has expressed misgivings about the success of the work’s surround-sound element, something that may have been better achieved through more radical means. Nevertheless, it is a quietly complex work; its underlying concept is, I believe, one of Adams’s most sophisticated. Its greatest success lies in its adaptation of minimalist tropes of immersion, massification, documentation, looping, and repetition to create a neutral space that can record without moralizing. My next posts will prise open the function and limits of minimalism to commemorative music by comparing two contrasting but closely related examples.


1. John Adams, Hallelujah Junction (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008), p. 266.


2. Erika Doss, Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America (University of Chicago Press: Chicago and London, 2010), p. 150.


3. New York Philharmonic, “Interview with John Adams,” available at https://www.earbox.com/on-the-transmigration-of-souls/ (originally posted to New York Philharmonic website, 2002).


4. Adams, Hallelujah Junction, p. 266.

Bringing a Residency Home

Posted on April 10, 2017 by - Columns

I’ve attended a different artist residency every year for the last four years, and at each one, I’ve learned something new about how to structure my life and my approach to composition.

The time at a residency feels sacred, and for that brief period, your life is centered around the pursuit of creativity. I find myself wondering how to take it all—the feeling of having enough time, ample creativity, and room to establish new routines—with me when I leave. Last year was the first time I felt that maybe I’ve finally answered that question. I found myself utterly homesick at a residency last spring, wondering what I was doing there that I couldn’t be doing at home. I realized that, over the last four years, I’ve created a life that has a lot in common with an artist residency.

Time is abundant at a residency. Because your life is suddenly structured around nothing but composing, you learn to confront any anxieties about the act of writing music or about not being good enough. In this way, a residency can serve as a sort of pressure cooker for any self-doubt or habitual procrastination already present in your everyday life. You’re not going to feel like composing every day, but in a place where life revolves around being creative, what do you do when you’re feeling burnt out?

Day to day, you realize that it’s almost less important what you’ve composed than that you have composed at all.

You learn to keep sitting back down at the piano or the desk, which can seem so difficult in ordinary life, with its many distractions: the computer, the phone, other people. Here you learn to just sit down and write. You learn to stop thinking about whether you’re writing the “best piece of your career,” and you learn to stop weighing your measly string quartet in the context of thousands and thousands of other, better string quartets that have come before. You learn what’s most conducive to getting work done, and you learn to abandon what isn’t. Day to day, you realize that it’s almost less important what you’ve composed than that you have composed at all.

At the residency, you’ll have a new workspace. Often, there’s a proper desk: a sturdy, large wooden desk, with room to spread out scores. There’s a piano, or there should be. It should be better than your piano at home, but if it’s not, you find a way to appreciate this piano because, at least temporarily, it’s yours.

Every day offers a new reminder that this is not your ordinary routine. Maybe you’re eating every meal with the same group of other artists, like you’re back at sleep-away camp. You go for a daily hour-long walk, or take up running again for the first time since high school, or find yourself hiking for eight miles on the residency property. You realize that you need to re-think your relationship to exercise at home; namely, you need to do more of it—walking, running, hiking—because you’re much stronger than you thought.

At a more social residency, you realize you’ve had a drink (or three) with dinner every night for the last two weeks. You compose for nearly six hours straight and skip lunch. Maybe one night, you find yourself singing karaoke in a bar in Wyoming. You seek out new things: new cafes, new hiking trails, the seventh-highest bridge in the United States. Maybe one of the other residents teaches you all how to play poker, and you stay up later than you’ve stayed up in months.

Other than when to eat meals, there’s no implicit structure here. Your new routines may barely resemble the ones you’re used to, or they may incorporate the best of your work habits at home with extra room to get things done. You learn what needs to be done to take care of yourself when there is no one else to take care of, and no one to take care of you.

You learn how to structure your days. Going straight from an undergraduate degree into grad school, I’d mistakenly thought I thrived on deadlines. Residencies have taught me that that’s a lie; in fact, I’m happiest when I build my day around one- to two-hour bursts of productivity interspersed with breaks and when I stretch out writing a piece over months, not weeks. I’m happiest when I’m at least a little bit productive each day and when I finish projects far ahead of schedule, with ample time for editing. This realization has completely altered how I compose back at home; now, I start projects as far in advance as I can, and I try to build in space for doing a little bit of work at a time and letting it unfold slowly, unhurried.

I’d mistakenly thought I thrived on deadlines. Residencies have taught me that that’s a lie.

At a residency, you’re confronted with being either “the most productive you’ve been in your life”—notes flowing freely and abundantly, six movements of a 35-minute piece drafted in just two weeks—or completely uninspired. You’re forced to define productivity to yourself and to accept that sometimes, when you’ve been productive enough, you need to figure out what to do with your free time.

I struggle so much with this at home. Even on a day when I’ve gotten plenty of work done on the business side of composing and taught a few piano students, I’ll catch myself complaining about my “horribly unproductive day” just because I didn’t also compose. This is something I’m clearly still working on: defining which work qualifies as “productive,” and trying to expand that definition to “all of it.”

At my first few residencies, I was the most productive I’d been in my life. I accepted “absurdly productive” as my default state at residencies until I found myself at one where, for two weeks, I had no desire whatsoever to compose. I’d met two big deadlines right before I left for the residency, and it was the wrong time to isolate myself for a month with the pressure to write even more.

That was a useful experience, though; I realized that timing at a residency is crucial. I cancelled a residency that I would have attended this spring, because several months ago, looking at the schedule I’m living right now, I realized the timing—just after several deadlines, a conference, and an album release—would have been wrong again. I’m glad I cancelled when I did. Here I am, months later, in desperate need of a guilt-free composing break and ready to take one.

That brings us back to free time. At a residency, you can’t possibly spend every waking second writing music; you can certainly try, but it’s not sustainable. You suddenly have more free time than you’ve had in years. How do you spend it?

I love to read, and I read fast; when I was younger, I devoured books daily. More recently, aside from reading in bed every evening for 10, maybe 20 minutes at most, reading novels for fun was a habit I’d stopped. It wasn’t until I started attending residencies that I learned to return to books when I needed a little break, or, if I was feeling uncreative, for entire days.

At home now, setting aside an hour or an entire afternoon to read still feels like a luxury. I haven’t yet learned to do it without a small, nagging part of my brain asking whether I shouldn’t be doing something more productive. But at a residency, there’s plenty of time to walk, to listen to podcasts, to watch movies, to listen to music, or to read an entire book in a day. I’m trying to give myself the same permission in my at-home life: to sit still long enough to let myself completely relax, and to spend several hours with a novel without feeling as though I’m neglecting something more important.

At a residency, your relationship with yourself changes. If there are other artists there, you see yourself reflected through your interactions with them. If there’s no one else there, you learn to be alone with yourself. You learn whether you enjoy spending time with yourself. You learn that whatever you don’t like about yourself is with you all the time, not just here; all of it rises to the surface. You learn to live with yourself, and you carry that home with you. If you enjoy spending time alone, you learn to make that a priority when you return home, too.

Here’s how my life is different, four years after I went to my first artist residency. I try to walk most days, and I try to hike at least once a month. When I accept a commission, I set a deadline with time built in: time to compose slowly, with room for the inevitable day or week when I’m feeling creatively stalled. Usually, though not always, I finish in advance of that deadline.

“It’s a luxury,” Ellen Sussman says, “when daily life is what I yearn for.”

I spend a comfortable amount of time by myself, even living with a partner. I am getting better at spending an entire afternoon doing nothing but reading, although when I do, I still check my email roughly every ten minutes, and then I feel guilty about that. I seek out more new experiences in general; I’ve sung karaoke in front of friends here in Los Angeles, not just strangers in Wyoming. I’m aware of what I’d like to change about myself, but in looking back at who I was before my first residency, I can see that I know myself better now; I like myself more.

Writer Ellen Sussman, whom I met at a residency, said something in an interview that has stuck with me ever since I read it. “It’s a luxury,” Ellen says, “when daily life is what I yearn for.” At my residency last year, I realized that I’d finally structured my life so that I already have at home nearly everything I want from a residency. I longed to be back with my boyfriend, my cat, and my piano.

This summer, I’m going to do a week-long residency about an hour and a half away from where I live in Los Angeles. At that very brief residency, I’ll be seeking what I truly can’t find at home, at least not now: isolated natural surroundings that are almost painfully beautiful; a piano that’s better than my upright at home; a span of time during which I truly don’t have to worry about anything other than writing music.

A residency is as close as we may get to living a life in service of nothing but creativity, and for that reason alone, I’m likely to keep going back. Someday, I dream of having my own private “artist residence”—a small house somewhere remote, with an excellent piano and a massive wooden desk. For now, though, I’m going to embrace what I’ve already created at home: a daily life I yearn for.

Commemoration Music: Memorials and Monuments

Posted on April 6, 2017 by - Columns

The final years of the 20th century witnessed a huge growth in public memorial art: what the Villard Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, Andreas Huyssen, called a “memory boom.”

Huyssen, in the 1999 essay “Monumental Seduction” in which he uses this term, is referring in particular to practices in Germany—where, he argues, “a memory-mania of truly monumental proportions” focused on Holocaust monuments and memorial sites has taken place—but his words carry a much wider resonance. This recent “obsession with monuments,” he claims, “is only part of a much larger memory boom that has gripped not just Germany and … is much wider in scope than the focus on the Holocaust would suggest.”[1]

While a “memory mania” of similar scale may not have overtaken music over the same period—and in any case the function, meaning, and reception of music, even when commissioned by “official” institutions such as major orchestras or opera houses, differs greatly from that of public art—it is clear that musicians have been similarly fascinated with memory and commemoration over the last twenty years or so. In this short series of posts, I will look at some ways in which this has been expressed by American composers in the last couple of decades, what those expressions might mean, and what they might, in turn, have to say about the way in which we conceive of, articulate, absorb, and understand some of the difficult emotions associated with traumatic loss.

What might these works say about how we articulate and understand the difficult emotions associated with traumatic loss?

To begin with, I’d like to suggest some theories on what led to this increased interest in memory and commemoration, not just in music but in the other arts too. General pre-millennium anxiety played a part certainly, but more specific factors can be identified as well.

Often, just the simple passage of time was enough to activate renewed considerations of past traumas from artists born later or not immediately affected by them. This is a clear element of much public art and architecture: one thinks of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.; Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin; and Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, also in Berlin. Yet its effects were also felt in music. Two notable examples, both dealing with the legacy and memory of the Holocaust from the perspective of Jews who are either too young or were too far away to have experienced it firsthand are Chaya Czernowin’s Pnima … ins innere (inspired by David Grossman’s novel See Under: Love) and Steve Reich’s Different Trains. Related to this, the growth in social liberalism that took place at the end of the 20th century forced encounters with contested pasts that activated new forms of commemoration. Two American memorials that might stand as examples are the Indian Memorial designed by John R. Collins and Alison J. Towers with sculpture by Colleen Cutschall at Little Bighorn National Monument in Montana, and Carla Stetson’s Clayton, Jackson, McGhie Memorial in Duluth, Minnesota, erected in memory of Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, and Isaac McGhie, three black men lynched in the town in June 1920.

There were also technical and aesthetic reasons for the resurgence of memory into contemporary culture. The shift from analog to digital media through the 1990s and 2000s, for example, certainly encouraged reconsiderations of cultural stability and the permanence (or otherwise) of the work. This has been a particular issue within music and is foregrounded in works such as Philip Jeck’s Vinyl Requiem or William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops. Gérard Grisey’s Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil, another major work of the late 1990s, can be considered under similar terms: the anxiety here is not about the decay of media, but the slow death and disappearance of civilizations, yet the musical language of melancholy and disintegration is remarkably similar. Object permanence is also a theme of one of the most iconic visual artworks of the period, Damien Hirst’s “pickled shark,” The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. Finally, music’s postmodern manifestations—ranging from the music of Helmut Lachenmann to that of John Zorn to the more recent adoption of remix practices—undermined the inherited norms of Western art music: the unities of the instrument, a legible stylistic history, and the fixed identity of the work itself. All of these contributed to preoccupations with transience and permanence, fluidity, and stability that were manifest and expressed in music in a wide variety of ways and that provided new musical vocabularies and aesthetics with which to confront trauma and commemoration.

Music’s postmodern manifestations contributed to preoccupations with transience and permanence, fluidity, and stability that provided new musical vocabularies and aesthetics with which to confront trauma and commemoration.

The art critic Erika Doss tracks many of these changes as they relate to public art in her 2010 book Memorial Mania.[2] In it, she juxtaposes the “memory boom” of the late 20th and early 21st centuries with the “statue mania” of a hundred years earlier, when between the 1870s and past the end of World War I thousands of statues and monuments were erected across the US, an obsession that eventually led the American Magazine of Art to complain wearily, in 1919, of “the plague of war memorials now sweeping over the land.”[3] With the later “memorial mania,” coming as it did after radical developments such as pop art, land art, and minimalism, Doss observes a shift in emphasis in such works from monuments to memorials. A precursor of this distinction is Oskar Hansen’s unrealized proposal (1958) for a memorial at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Eschewing the vertical, declamatory structure of traditional monuments, Hansen proposed a horizontal tarmac path, slicing diagonally and precisely across the former camp, heedless of any buildings or other obstacles in its path. Untended, the rest of the camp would slowly fall into ruin and out of memory, but Hansen’s indelible scar, black, harsh, and confrontational would remain, demanding explanation, for decades.

Doss’s distinction between monument and memorial rests on the difference between history and its subjects. The former privileges grand narratives (of great men, military victories, national mythologies), the latter private affect. The former articulates and regulates an official history bestowed from the outside, or from above; the latter opens a space for the viewer to enter and negotiate their own relationship with that history. It’s a distinction between cold, hard facts and the feelings of real people: memorial art, reflected Michael Kimmelman of The New York Times in 2002, “is therapeutic, redemptive, and educational.”

While 9/11 drew artistic responses that were both official and/or traditional, most works made in reference to the attacks or their victims took the form of emotionally open-ended, even ambiguous commemoration.

As I have said, many of these elements were in place in both music and art long before the end of the 20th century. Yet it was an event of the early 21st that drew many of them together into sharp and terrible focus: the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. While 9/11 drew artistic responses that were both official and/or traditional, most works made in reference to the attacks or their victims took the form of emotionally open-ended, even ambiguous commemoration: Kimmelman above is writing in January 2002, on proposals received for the World Trade Center site in New York.

Music was no exception to this mode of response, and many compositions written in the wake of the attacks have taken the form of memorials rather than monuments, to adapt Doss’s terminology. Heroism is rarely a feature, although there are exceptions, among them Christopher Theofanidis’s 2011 opera Heart of a Soldier, based on the true story of Rick Rescorla, a Vietnam veteran who was second vice president of corporate security at Morgan Stanley, and whose World Trade Center evacuation plan is believed to have saved almost 2,700 lives that day. Neither are overt narratives of national identity or forms of emotional management. Although he uses the term “memorial” slightly differently to Doss, John Adams’s declaration about his own response, On the Transmigration of Souls, is representative: “I want to avoid words like ‘requiem’ or ‘memorial’ when describing this piece because they too easily suggest conventions that this piece doesn’t share. If pressed I’d probably call the piece a ‘memory space’.”

In my next posts I will look a little more closely at some of these musical responses, and it is to Adams’s piece that I will turn first.

Tim Rutherford-Johnson is author of Music after the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture since 1989 (University of California Press). He edited the most recent edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Music, and blogs about contemporary music at johnsonsrambler.wordpress.com.


1. Andreas Huyssen, “Monumental Seduction,” Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, ed. Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1999), pp. 191–206.


2. Erika Doss, Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America (University of Chicago Press: Chicago and London, 2010).


3. Charles Moore, “Memorials of the Great War,” The American Magazine of Art, 10(7), 1919, p. 233; quoted in Doss, ibid., p. 28.

Living a Long-Form Life

Posted on April 3, 2017 by - Columns

As a living composer, I’m faced with my birth year in nearly every concert program. Every time I see that number—and usually it’s listed alongside composers with a death date, too—I’m aware that my time, and what I can compose during it, is limited.

I recently finished my longest work yet, a 35-minute piece for chorus made up of several 2- to 4-minute movements and one 8-minute movement. Writing a 35-minute piece could be intimidating, but writing a 3-minute movement is not. That’s largely how I approached the piece; I’d work on one shorter movement, then another. Lately, I’ve been thinking about how to apply this strategy on a much broader scale: to break into movements not only compositions, but everything I want to achieve in my life and career, approaching a life in music as one would approach writing a long composition.

A long-form piece is judged as a whole; there’s no need to express what you want from the piece in a single movement. If we apply this to a lifetime, then one composition doesn’t need to contain everything you have to say, sum up your feelings about the current state of new music, or succinctly capture your worldview. Over a life-long body of work, there’s room for subtlety and nuance; we don’t have to demonstrate in 4 minutes, or even 35 minutes, that we know how to write music.

There’s no need to express what you want from the piece in a single movement. If we apply this to a lifetime, then one composition doesn’t need to contain everything you have to say.

Not every piece has to be perfect, either. The music you’re writing now may have flaws that you’ll later want to change, and there’s room for that, too. Not every piece even has to be good; some works may be more like prototypes, allowing you to try something out and potentially fail while honing that idea for a later, better piece. There’s time to let ideas unfold, and there’s room for rest.

A career functions much the same way. We don’t need to imagine that one big performance or one big award will be responsible for making our entire career. Instead, we can ask ourselves what we’ll try to achieve over the course of a life spent composing. If we view our writing as part of a life-long body of work, then when we set goals for what we’d like to accomplish, we can stop aiming for things we have no control over—like, say, a particular ensemble programming our work next season—and instead ask what we’d like to have happen during our lifetime. How will we pace ourselves over thirty, or sixty, or eighty years of writing music? What music do we want to write, and what will we express with that music?

Given the current political climate, most composers I know are asking ourselves whether every piece of work we compose should now express our political views. Moving forward, should every one of our pieces advocate for social justice? Maybe so, but I’m not sure that every piece we write needs to do so in a big, dramatic way in order to make a statement. Think of a longer composition; we’re able to recognize the larger themes in that work even if those themes aren’t present in every single movement. We take the work as a whole.

Bear with me on a brief tangent: I’ve been a vegetarian for fifteen years. On a day-to-day basis, it doesn’t feel like my personal decision is affecting the world in any huge way, or in any way, period. By not ordering chicken for lunch last Wednesday, I know I haven’t directly saved some hypothetical chicken’s life. If I cast my decision over the course of a lifetime, though, my attitude shifts completely. What sort of impact can I make over a lifetime of choosing not to eat meat?

This concept extends to the current need for representation of more composers who are not white and/or male and/or dead in classical music programming, too. A single concert with a non-white or non-male (or non-dead) composer on the program may not initially come across as advocacy, but if an ensemble regularly chooses to program this way, over the course of many seasons they’ll expose thousands of audience members to the concept that not all composers are dead white men. This, I’d argue, would make much more of a lasting impact than any single concert dedicated to this purpose.

In your creative lifetime, what are you going to accomplish with the music you choose to perform, write, or program? Looking back on the work that you’ve created in the past, what patterns are already present? You don’t have to be an activist in every piece, the same way that your 8-minute piece for solo violin doesn’t have to include every possible extended string technique. But if everything you do advocates for even a small aspect of what you believe, what kind of impact will you create over the course of your life?