Category: Columns

For me, the instrumental reliquary can be updated, revitalized. It’s better to work at the piano with pencil and staff paper than to keep scrapping your last computer or to be tempted by the latest big-budget action flick playing on the big-screen T.V. now replacing the keyboard in so many affluent living rooms. I’d take a quiet room with a piano (not a synthesizer) any day. I think it’s worth salvaging the piano, making it sing and drum in new ways. Admittedly, it’s a box with metal and wooden moving parts, that’s all. A coffin or a hearse isn’t a bad analogy. But then again, what will we do with all the cars and SUVs when oil becomes prohibitively expensive and they’re all scrapped? How about using these former dictators’ tools as new instruments? In like fashion, the piano, with all its limits, sits around silent way too much. And as composers, we must thrive on limits: to sing, drum, or create imaginary vibrato on the piano is not deadly; it can represent a form of survival.

And, incidentally, has there been a better orchestra-in-a-box created for the use of composers? Orchestration at the piano can be a rich exercise in limits and subtle possibilities. I can’t imagine turning my back to those potentials, and since pianos are rejected or sold inexpensively throughout the world, it has become more affordable to obtain a decent one than to upgrade a computer.

Like it was for Byron Au Yong, the piano was an escape for me as a child. And it was also my best form of resistance to the very despotic elements with which Byron associates the instrument. I could thumb my pianistic nose at my materialistic, stultifying home environment by brewing massive chords or sculpting tortured lines (late at night, so my parents couldn’t sleep). And nobody complained: I was making “classical” music instead of watching T.V. or taking drugs!

I continue my fascination with the piano as both composer and performer. It is not necrophilia, but perhaps cardio-pulmonary resuscitation. There’s life yet in those keys, strings, sound boards. Let’s coax more and more life out of them.

I’m outta here early this week, kids, so a safe and fabulous Christmakwanzahanukkah to you and yours. We’ll be back here with more new music hijinx in the new year. Hell, do something crazy enough to find its way onto the Internet, and you could find yourself in the first post of 2006. Happy Holidays!

• Truly there are not enough superlative levels beyond “best” to describe Webhamster Henry’s Top 10 Imaginary Recordings of 2005. [via BeepSnort]
• What would it sound like if Santa turned on us? Brian Sacawa gets a taste.
• Josh Hammond was a GoodHumor ice-cream man! Ian Moss watches The O.C.! Get to know the interesting biographical bits behind the music this holiday season. And be sure to introduce yourself.
• Feeling unprepared to deal with the stress of this year’s holiday gatherings? A big glass of Aunt Ruth’s eggnog and this CD should do the trick. [via Music For Maniacs]

It’s the same every year. The X number of shopping days left until X-mas dwindle past until the very last minute, which, as it turns out, is the exact same moment you realize that you don’t have a clue what to get anybody. If this year’s gift list includes a composer, let me help you procrastinate by offering some irreverent, impractical, and impossible gift ideas for the musical auteur in your life.

• Know any composers who take themselves a little too seriously? Unleash their inner Sarah Silverman by enrolling them in a stand-up comedy class. Yes, it’s time to grab one of those Learning Annex brochures.
• If “I get my best ideas in the shower” sounds familiar, why not set up a workstation for them, complete with waterproof markers and sketchpad? You can get really creative with this one. Just think, no more brilliant ideas will disappear down the drain.
• Tired of seeing that same 20-year-old black and white headshot turn up in the papers? Give that composer a professional photo shoot. Fear of photographers? No problem. Hire an artist to draw a cute little caricature. Please, anything but that over-recycled photo.
• La piece de resistance: The complete abolition of transposition. Really, it’s the gift that will keep on giving, benefiting countless future generations of composers and musicians. Think about it. Beginning in 2006, a grandiose New Year’s resolution—from this point forward all music is taught in “concert pitch.” Hey kid, that trumpet that we told you was in Bb, forget about it. No, that’s not an F#, it’s an E. Yeah, same goes for you too, clarinet. Oh, god, you poor violist, no wonder nobody ever writes anything for you! Kiss that silly alto clef goodbye.In all seriousness, wouldn’t it be great. Granted, the immediate learning curve would be painful, but after the normalization process is complete, everyone will wonder why this wasn’t the way things were done in the first place. Of course I don’t want to be the guy in charge of transposing all the orchestral warhorses into the new universal transpositionless system. Someone please run with this idea, especially if you have a snappy surname. I’d hate for this great idea to end up with an unfortunate name like the Nordschow System. And while were at it, is anyone up for the metric system? It makes so much more sense!

In this past Sunday’s Los Angeles Times, Reed Johnson described in detail how and why mainstream popular culture has ceased to exist in the new millennium. ArtsJournal.com Editor Doug McLennan made this provocative article the top “Ideas” link yesterday and has been making similar arguments as well, claiming that this phenomenon might ultimately be beneficial to the less-commercial arts.

But of course, we in the new music community have had the rest of the world beat when it comes to the “narrow casting” paradigm. It’s basically how music outside the commercial mainstream has always survived. Long before there ever was an Internet, we had self-produced concerts, recordings, publications, you name it. Therefore you’d think we’d be better positioned than folks without such traditions.

One passage in Johnson’s piece particularly grabbed me:

An enterprising anarchist-death metal band, say, can make a video, post it on MySpace, sell its home-pressed CD off the Web and develop a base of fans who chat, post reviews and forward the video link to friends…. Maybe they sell only 10,000 CDs. But so what, says John Battelle, co-founding editor of Wired magazine. If you have 10,000 ardent fans who’ll buy whatever you record, and those fans can find you directly on the Internet, you don’t need a label…

In the niche market that is contemporary classical music, even with a major record label backing you, moving 10,000 units is an overwhelming success that will have you riding high on the Billboard Classical Music chart. Ditto for jazz. But is a world where no one can have mass success really a better place than a world where only we can’t? Being resigned to having limited reach somehow seems like giving in.

As I sit in front of my computer at home today, unable to trek downtown thanks to the subway strike in New York City, I’ve been feeling nostalgic for the recording strikes of the 1940s which brought the music industry to a virtual standstill. The idea of such mobilization now seems quaint and almost naïve. But to this day I’m trying to track down recordings that Sarah Vaughn made with a group of vocalists imitating all the instrumentalists who refused to show up at the recording studio—a creative solution that could only happen in a world where we’re all in it together.

Considering Kyle Gann’s recent run-in with the law—the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, to be exact—for playing multi-movement works on his Postclassic Radio on Live 365, I’m beginning to wonder why composers created movements in the first place. Okay, back in the Middle Ages dance suites may have been all the rage, but now they’re just iTune anomalies demanding to be reckoned with one way or another. Eh, why bother? Besides, I’m relatively satisfied hearing just one movement from a Beethoven piano sonata. The experience doesn’t leave me with any feelings of incompleteness, and really, it’s not supposed to.

Fast-forward a couple hundred years, and we find composers are still writing multi-movement works. In addition, it seems both composers and listeners alike have evolved into hardliner completists, with zealous record collectors leading the charge of this, er, movement to experience everything in its absolute entirety. To my own detriment, I’ve never been one to toe the line. So here it is, confession time: I’ve never written a multi-movement work. Honestly, I really don’t understand the need.

I’m not against saying the same thing a few different ways in immediate succession, or discovering connections between juxtaposed materials, or whatever the function of different movements within the same piece of music might be. I just find it puzzling. Even more perplexing are those pieces out there with several movements marked attacca. So let me get this straight, there’s no interruption in the music, but an entirely new movement is necessary because… ?

Okay, I understand the need for high concept and design in new music, or whatever it’s called, but aren’t we being a little too fussy about certain things? Before you start that next movement, just take a tiny second to think about how complicated it’s going to be to catalog in your potential listener’s iPod. And there you have it, a thought that never even crossed Beethoven’s mind.

• Composer David Rakowski adds a few words to the lexicon. Try out such terms as “OLAMBIC” at your next concert reception.
• Is your drummer getting on your nerves again? Meet Haile, a “robotic percussionist that can listen to live players…and use the product of this analysis to play back in an improvisational manner.” He also never drinks your beer, steals your girlfriend, or shows up late for the set.
• The Telegraph‘s Ivan Hewett reports that composers are “a shy and clean-living lot.” [via ArtsJournal] As Bugs might have interjected, “He don’t know us very well, do he?” Still, we do have limits. No one I know of in new music has attempted steering a 30-ton boat around the globe on some mad quest for inspiration.
  

  Photo: Business Wire

• The iconic “blown away” guy from the ’80s ad campaign that seduced us into buying expensive home stereo equipment will be making it back into the marketing fray. Though originally it was Wagner’s power knocking him back in his chair, no clue if that aspect will be tampered with in the update. Might we suggest some Maryanne Amacher?
• Has your latest CD been remaindered? Don’t sweat it. The bargain bin just might be the place you get your next big break.

Semantically, you can’t really be a composer of “classical music” if you’re alive, even though that hasn’t stopped the music industry from using this term. (Although that semantic disconnect might be part of why living “classical composers” are so far off the radar of the general public.) But you also can’t be a composer of “new music” if you are no longer living.

One of the historical inevitabilities of “new music” is that, at some point, it will no longer be new. Of course, the hope is always that the best of what is new will take its place in history, and that subsequent “new” work of later generations will either build from it or define itself in opposition to it. All too often, however, when new work ceases to be new, it resides in a cast-off limbo, no longer welcome at the table with the new and not yet embraced by the avatars of the tried and true.

For every Morton Feldman—who was largely ignored during his lifetime but whose music seems to gain even greater relevance and resonance every year since his death—there are others whose work might even have been presented to rave reviews at the Metropolitan Opera or Severance Hall while they were alive, yet nowadays you can’t hear a note of it. There are still untold others deserving of a place in our canon whose music barely made it onto anyone’s radar, either before or after death. Julius Eastman’s music might never have made it onto CD were it not for Mary Jane Leach’s persistence and New World Records’ commitment to promoting the breadth of American music. For many composers, there isn’t even a living family member who can be a torchbearer at this point. This problem has been gnawing at me quite a bit these past few months following the deaths of several acquaintances whose parents wrote important music that has yet to gain the advocacy of 21st-century champions.

Some recent conversations I’ve had with music industry types only confirm a sad reality: as difficult as it may be to get a performance of a new work, it is even harder to get a performance of a work by a lesser-known composer who is no longer living. This hurdle takes on even greater significance this week as the new music community mourns the deaths of three composers, each of whom were at very different levels of fame: Stephen “Lucky” Mosko, Soong Fu-Yuan, and Donald Martino. Without champions loud enough to keep their music heard now that they are no longer with us, how will their work ever reach the audience it deserves?

• Perhaps no longer getting a kick out of his death grip on the pop music market, Clear Channel Founder Billy Joe McCombs has ventured into the concert hall. McCombs agreed to narrate Symphony No. 4, “American Visionary,” by Dan Welcher (commissioned for the U of T Wind Ensemble) after Robert Freeman, dean of the College of Fine Arts, let the businessman choose the theme of the symphony himself. “The symphony ‘doesn’t compare at the moment with roping goats,’ [McCombs] said, ‘but it was fun.'” Shudder. [Chronicle of Higher Education]
• It’s MTV Cribs—New Music Style! Daniel Bernard Roumain invites the Village Voice up to his Harlem Brownstone studio. Also, keep an eye on the Sunday NYTimes for a peek at the piano that won composer Lisa Bielawa’s heart and immediately asked her to move in.
• Note to self: “Explode stereo mix into quad and layer canonically. Manipulate pacing with some secret splices.” O.K., that’s actually Dan Visconti’s note, as he’s blogging his way through his Kronos Under 30 commission.
• Conductor Simone Young follows up her landmark Vienna Phil appearance with similar woman-on-podium stunt in Berlin. Berliners offer three ovations and Germany reports sky still not falling.
• Tired of fumbling when people ask what sort of music you like? Try wiz-kid Jason Freeman’s sonic solution: the iTunes Signature Maker (a commission from Rhizome). Here’s mine.

The Met is wrapping up the first week of Tobias Picker’s new opera, An American Tragedy. You may have heard about it. To be brief, the reviews in the papers and those overheard in the lobby have been decidedly mixed, rarely gushing or especially damning. I was going to post a huge annotated round-up of the media coverage so far, but Charles T. Downey of the Washington culture blog Ionarts beat me to it with this lovely compendium.

If I were to highlight anything from among the thoughts of these gentlemen, (And almost all of the critical commentary on offer in print is from the male quarter. Heidi Waleson apparently added her two cents, but that review is shuttered behind the WSJ‘s pay-to-read wall.) I might point out that much of the chatter has involved holding the opera up to other 21st-century vehicles—from Broadway to the Sopranos. I went into the theater with a similar modern-culture bias and a relatively recent viewing of A Place in the Sun coincidentally under my belt, and a whole lot of excited anticipation for this rare event—as one woman in the lobby noted, “you mean, it’s an American opera?”, as if such a nationalistic concept would never have otherwise occurred to her.

I admit things got off to a difficult start for me. The lyrics and characters felt awkward and clichéd, and I couldn’t help but compare the action on stage with the pacing and style of the film. As a result, I was having trouble staying in the moment and experiencing the performance unfolding before me as its own, self-contained event. I managed to get a hold of myself during intermission and came back fresh to hear the second act. I was rewarded quickly with the two loveliest moments in the score, culminating with the three lead characters all powerfully expressing their greatest desires for the future.

Picker’s opera is not on some quest to be edgy or radical—it’s an opera, in the conventional sense of the art form. We might argue about what it feels like it’s lacking because of invention in other sorts of entertainments, but then we’re arguing about the parameters of writing new opera in this day and age, not with Picker’s success working within this format in the service of the traditional institution that commissioned him.

The set, which consisted of three levels of moving panels, was a high mark of the production which sadly those who tune in to hear the live broadcast on Dec. 24 will miss. But the A-list cast will be quite audible. It should be an interesting opportunity to focus on the score at a further remove from all the easy criticisms a lavish production of a classic story is automatically opened up to. I definitely need another pass at this one.

This week’s big debate in the Box has been triggered by Mark Gresham’s latest Radar report in which he describes how Robert Pound recently got his music played by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra but received zero financial remuneration for his compositional efforts. So is Pound a… smart gambler who is now on the map? (And don’t you wish it was you?) …victim? (How dare an organization with so much money not even offer him a small token fee?) …opportunist scab? (Isn’t he devaluing all new music and making it harder for any of us ever to get a dime for our latest symphony next time round?)

Welcome to the not-so-secret dirty little secret economics of music that exists outside the commercial mainstream but must operate within a capitalist society.

Let’s tackle each of these opinions one at a time. First the scab comment. It’s a sad reality that the supply and demand ratio for new music in this country is extremely disproportionate: more composers are writing today than could ever hope to earn a living at it. Without in any way begrudging the fabulous but all too few composers who miraculously have found a way to make a living doing what they want to do and nothing else, long ago I realized that I would not be one of them for a variety of reasons. Chief among them probably is that there are plenty of other things I like to do besides writing music and luckily some of those things allow me to earn a living. When I opted to do graduate work in ethnomusicology instead of composition, my mind was opened to the concept of a society where everyone made music rather than just a professional elite. Is that such a bad thing? Perhaps if even more people were composing and performing music in our society, we’d have an even stronger and committed audience for new music. And, as far as writing for free being bad for the market goes, if you’re writing orchestral music, your primary competition is not other living composers, but rather Mozart, Beethoven, and all the other great dead and free (i.e. public domain) composers.

As far as being a victim goes, I’d hardly call getting your work done by one of the best orchestras in the country in front of a large audience a pitiable sacrifice. Sure, in a perfect world you’d get paid a decent stipend for whatever you do, but if no one is willing to pay you to do something does that mean you don’t do something you love? In a capitalist society, everything is judged by its potential market value. But in a society that rarely gets exposed to certain forms of art—e.g. contemporary American orchestral music—how can you even begin to assess what it’s worth? Yes, I know, there are guidelines for what orchestras should pay for a new work from a composer. I can see the letters coming in and the phones ringing off the hook for days now, but until a composer can create a market for him or herself, why not take any opportunity that comes your way?

There are also other ways that a piece of music, once created, can earn something after its birth. Might another orchestra be more inclined to rent parts of a piece that was a huge success in Atlanta, rather than rent parts for a piece that has no performance history? Isn’t one of the reasons they play Mozart and Beethoven all the time the fact that this music has a proven track record? Then there are possible sync rights, record sales (hey, I can dream right), etc. And maybe, just maybe, one day you just might snag that elusive six-digit commissioning fee: it’s happened before.

But I would argue that if the only thing that’s driving you to write this music is the commission, you would do well to consider another profession that’s much more lucrative. Please don’t take this to mean that I believe a composer’s work should go uncompensated—far be it from me or any composer to advocate for a composer earning even less money—but I do think that a financial quid pro quo is not always the best incentive to spur on inspiration. Would I make such a not-so-Faustian bargain with an orchestra? You bet!