Category: Commentary

Kitty Brazelton Photo by Judy Schiller

Performance is dialogue. So every performance must be different. I may start with the same message but I don’t say it the same – to different people or in different environments. And I expect the same skill in flexibility from my musicians. “Listen” to the room, its shape, its attitude, and the ears and minds you’re playing for. Assume nothing. Don’t hide within the intention of your composition – it’s just a starting place, no more.

Recording is making a self-contained conversation. It will become a conversation but you don’t know who will be on the other end and when, how or where they will be listening. So you better think about what you have to say and make it balanced in shape, complete in detail, and as passionate as possible, so it can live on without you. Recording is more like painting, less of a time art, than live performance.

Nick Didkovsky Photo by Pamela Farland

The venues I perform in do not affect the set list I put together for my band, Doctor Nerve. I usually do that on the train on the way to the venue. If we make last minute changes, it’s usually due to a management request like, “We’d prefer two sets instead of one, so we can sell drinks.” As for the performance itself, it can be pushed a number of directions based on a lot of environmental factors, including the space itself. We played under the Brooklyn Bridge, in the anchorage spaces there, for example. Acoustically it was a disaster, but musically it was extremely inspiring. I think I react more to the vibe of a place than the acoustics.

Audience reaction is definitely an influence on how we play. A polite, quiet audience, for example, is not a neutral audience; it can be detrimental to the energy on stage. It’s best when the audience is working as hard as we are to make the event happen. Especially when we improvise, the audience can be very present in the performance.

Recording is a radically different experience than performing live. The realtime experience is necessarily different than an experience where you have non-time-based control over content. The music we make in 60 minutes on stage takes exactly 60 minutes. The same amount of music made in the studio can take hours, days, weeks…

The biggest problem I have with concert halls is looking off the stage at the audience, and my eyes have to cross a vast gulf before I can barely make out shadowy faces in the distance. That’s not a lot of fun. With the Fred Frith Guitar Quartet, at one point I suggested we turn the house lights up for the second set. Audience loved it. Everyone had a much better time. We play for people, not shadows.

Jonathan Sheffer Photo by Stephanie Berger

My musical education began at the Westport School of Music, where as a preschooler I was taught the basics of major and minor scales, and began piano lessons. I recall we were rewarded often with candy. The next most important influence in my musical education was the Bernstein Young People’s Concerts. Only now do I realize how much I took from those programs, which opened a window to a much larger world.

Also I recall a school trip to a Saturday matinee of Carmen at the Met. I misbehaved and had to be put out in the hall.

Nonetheless, my training was lovingly supervised by public school teachers and private teachers, such as Frank Brieff on viola. These things remain in my memory, and in my music-making.

Frank J. Oteri Photo by Melissa Richard

Ten years ago I was a high school teacher in the New York City Public School System and since then, I have often described that experience as “my version of time in the peace corps.” It was simultaneously life affirming and extraordinarily frustrating. It was life affirming, because like few activities in today’s world, through teaching you can actually see first hand how you make a difference in others lives. Frustrating because you realize there is so much that needs to be done that no individual can ever accomplish.

People have said the classroom is a microcosm of society so many times that it has become a cliché. But like most clichés, the message rings true and is all too often ignored. Just as ignorance is blamed for many of the problems in the world today, the charge of ignorance is also frequently evoked to explain the problems facing the development of audience for classical music and new American music in particular. People looking at the crises facing the world today might counter that the cause of new American music is ultimately a low priority, but an appreciation and involvement in the music of our time and place can be an excellent way to channel a variety of important intellectual and social skills that can advance citizenship and a sense of purpose.

That is why we have decided to devote the December issue of NewMusicBox to education and new American music. We went to the home of Maxine Greene, one of the world’s most important proponents of arts in education, and were joined there by Hollis Headrick, Executive Director of the Center for Arts in Education, Polly Kahn, Director of Education for the New York Philharmonic, and Richard Kessler, Executive Director of the American Music Center to talk about how arts education can be better served by new American music and how new American music can be better served by arts education. We’ve asked Stefan Weisman to compile a “hyper-history” of the treatment of new American music in the nation’s top music conservatories. We’ve asked Jonathan Sheffer, Annie Gosfield, Elliott Sharp, Joshua Cody and Amy Rhodes how their educations effected their attitudes about music, and we’d like to know what you think about students learning to read and perform music in school.

Arts in education is also in the news this month with the release of an extensive report presents groundbreaking evidence of the impact of arts on learning. Sadly, however, the top news items this month are the deaths of three important American composers: Paul Bowles, Lester Bowie and Robert Linn. I count myself lucky to have met Paul Bowles in Tangier last year. To honor his memory, we have included the transcript of our brief meeting along with RealAudio samples of his timeless music. Of course, there are also RealAudio samples on all the recordings featured in this month’s SoundTracks. And, since it is December, we’d like to know what your favorite recordings of new American music were for this past year. But, of course, the music is ongoing, as you’ll see from our plethora of concert listings.

Annie Gosfield Photo by Nola Lopez

I was taught the importance of creativity and individual expression early in life at a progressive elementary school that had classes for children in music and theater improvisation. As a teenager, private study with jazz pianist Bernard Peiffer taught me to bring my own interpretation to any music that I played. College not only provided me with a traditional musical education where I was able to develop necessary compositional skills, but also placed me in a more conservative environment, which gave me a healthy urge to rebel and seek my own sources of musical education outside of the constraints of traditional academia. The most critical moments of my musical education took place not only in the classroom, but in seedy clubs, concert halls, recording studios, and my own home.

Amy Rhodes Photo courtesy Fine Arts Management

My traditional education did not really affect the way I think about music. In fact, I went to college and majored in Asian Studies and International Relations because I think I unconsciously needed to get away from music for a while. I learned about classical music completely at home. Being the daughter of two classical musicians, I grew up humming Beethoven Quartets and Mozart Viola Quintets as well as learning how to sing particularly difficult passages of Hindemith Sonatas and Carter Quartets that my parents were always practicing. My sister and I used to enjoy bursting out with a quote from a Babbitt Quartet at the dinner table just to see the expressions on our parents’ faces. At college, I learned about music, not in the classroom, but in the dormitory. I learned from friends about music outside the classical realm and broadened my horizons. For most of my friends, broadening horizons meant learning to enjoy listening to symphonies, opera or chamber music. For me, it was learning about Bob Dylan, Phish and Ani DiFranco as well as about John Coltrane, Herbie Hancock and Charlie Parker. I felt like I was learning things backwards. Now, I am learning about all types of music everyday, working at Fine Arts Management. Family life, friendships and my professional life are the things which have affected my thoughts and opinions about music up to now.

Elliott Sharp Photo courtesy Elliott Sharp

As a young child, I loved the music of Liszt, Chopin, Beethoven, began piano lessons at age 6 and was performing by 7 1/2, but at a price: the pressures of practice from parents and teacher plus a rigid and uninteresting approach to the general knowledge of music killed my enthusiasm and gave me asthma (I’m convinced.) More music (clarinet studies) became a chore with only infrequent glimpses of real musicmaking. Composing was something that was done only by long-dead Europeans. The sciences became my major love and interest. Occasional music classes during my first college attempt only cemented my bad feelings towards a stilted and stifling approach to music. The basic theory and history could easily be obtained from books and records and concerts – “education” should be something more.

It took getting an electric guitar and simultaneously exploring on my own the ideas of Cage/Xenakis/Stockhausen as well as the world of improvisation and jazz that brought me to the possibility of composing music. Later, Bard College offered me the freedom to structure my own learning activities (which encompassed electronics, jazz, formal music, esthetics, information theory, and ethnomusicology.)

In graduate school in Buffalo, further studies with Lejaren Hiller, Morton Feldman, and Charles Keil were more about interaction and feedback than they were about the transmission of information – there was a ‘scene’ around them that attracted people interested in the exchange and ferment of ideas, as important as “teachers” and resources.

Joshua Cody Photo courtesy Sospeso Ensemble

I studied with several very gifted composers at Northwestern University, where I was also able to study some literature and philosophy. I’ll always feel uneducated-learning is an ongoing process. Of course the deeper one’s knowledge of the repertory and of the history of music, the more opportunity for depth and richness in one’s own compositions. Still, I feel the artist’s relationship to the corpus of knowledge will always be different than that of, say, a lawyer’s. As Harrison Birtwistle told me, “I use whatever I have and whatever I’ve got.” Or as Picasso said, simply, “When I run out of red, I use blue.”

Samuel Adler photo by Katherine Cumming Courtesy of Samuel Adler

In a 1926 speech, Aaron Copland said of Howard Hanson:

“Hanson and Sowerby’s sympathies and natural proclivities make them heirs of older men such as Hadley and Shepherd. Their facility in writing and their eclectic style produce a kind of palatable music that cannot be expected to arouse the enthusiasm of the ‘elite’, but does serve to fill the role of ‘American music’ for broad masses of people.”

In the same context, he praised Hanson for his important American Music Festival in Rochester, but thought that it was quite insular in its outlook, promoting mostly the ‘safe’ or conservative composers rather than the more exciting avant-garde of the time. The latter remark was rather unfortunate and not really true to fact, since Hanson, especially in the early years of the Festival, did perform works by all kinds of composers whether he liked the music or not.

The remark and the general tone of the sentiment angered Hanson and he wrote a letter to the forum at which Copland had spoken and attacked these remarks by saying: “No matter what one does, one can never satisfy the “elite New York establishment.” This ‘dig’ was interpreted quite harshly, and might have even been perceived as an anti–Semitic slur. However one may interpret it, the relations between Copland and Hanson, never very warm, cooled considerably, and though they collaborated on several projects during the years, they remained friendly adversaries from that incident on.

In 1975 I was chair of the composition department at the Eastman School, and suggested to our then director Robert Freeman that we give an honorary degree to Aaron Copland on the occasion of his 75th birthday. He immediately agreed with that suggestion, and Copland accepted our invitation. The date was set, and I felt it would be important that Howard Hanson, for so many years the ‘spirit’ as well as the director of the School, invest Copland himself. This would certainly add great meaning to the event and also possibly ‘break the ice.’ I wrote a letter to Hanson asking him to officiate, and he immediately called me and enthusiastically accepted the task.

Three weeks later, I received a lengthy letter from Hanson with all kinds of documentation stating that he cannot make it on that particular date because he was being given an honorary doctorate on the same day. However in the letter he enclosed a sealed envelope which he asked me to present to Copland before the actual ceremony on that Sunday afternoon. In his note to me, Hanson said how truly sorry he was about this and that he hoped I would understand. I did understand of course and the honor bestowed on Hanson on the same date was an important one.

Well the actual day arrived, and in the robing room, I handed Hanson’s letter to Copland who opened it immediately. His face brightened, and yet there were tears in his eyes as he read the letter. He was so moved by the content, which by the way he never shared with me, that he asked that we delay the start of the convocation so that he could sit down and write a letter answering Hanson. Of course we delayed the ceremony a few minutes and Copland handed me a letter which I later transmitted to Hanson.

The ceremony was a beautiful affair, and the highlight was when Copland accepted the degree which read that he was the Dean of American composers. His speech began:

“Ladies and gentlemen, I may be the Dean of American composers in other places, but not here at Eastman, where my friend and colleague Howard Hanson has established this most important school which has served American music perhaps better than any other institution of its kind. I gladly take second place to him.”

From what I learned later, this convocation and the letter exchange smoothed the way to bring the two great composers together again for the few years that both were alive, and I was happy to have aided in helping to repair the breech.