Category: NewMusicBox

You Study, Practice, and Improve

Last Sunday, I flew from New York City to Minneapolis. I boarded my flight and almost immediately fell asleep. When I woke up mid-flight (just in time for the drink cart to arrive at my aisle), the woman seated next to me commented, “You’re very quiet!”

I almost responded with “You’re welcome,” but I thought that might come off as a little snarky. Instead, I nodded and smiled and hoped she’d leave me to enjoy my lukewarm coffee. Much to my chagrin, she started asking questions. Am I from Minneapolis? From New York? Traveling for work? For fun? Blinking vigorously and rubbing my eyes in an attempt to re-moisten my contact lenses, I answered her questions, and I didn’t make a single thing up (as I usually do). I told her I was flying to Minneapolis to participate in the Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute.

“A composer!” she gasped. “Wow. Just, wow. That is a true gift. Wow.” She then proceeded to barrage me with unsolicited, ill-informed career advice, which I won’t get into here. But, to return to her initial reaction–this kind of statement isn’t uncommon. Composing can be a mysterious thing to both musicians and non-musicians, and many people describe it as a “gift,” as if we composers possess special powers. Others simply say, “Composing? That sounds really hard.”

Much of composing, though, is just like any other skill or ability: you study, practice, and improve. I’m sometimes tempted to answer the question of “So, do you know how to play all the instruments?” with “Why yes, I do.” But, learning how instruments work and what is idiomatic is a long process that involves a lot of trial and error. Countless rehearsals and performances over the past ten years or so have taught me what works, what’s risky, and what fails. And I’m still learning! Every rehearsal and performance experience compels me to reexamine what and how I write.

Learning how instruments work and what is idiomatic is a long process that involves a lot of trial and error.

Orchestral writing can be particularly tricky because opportunities for readings and performances can be few and far between, especially for “emerging” composers. This past year, I’ve been incredibly fortunate to have worked on Likely Pictures in Haphazard Sky with three different orchestras: the Yale Philharmonia, the American Composers Orchestra, and most recently, the Minnesota Orchestra.

Hilary Purrington with score in hand discusses a detail in her score with Osmo Vänskä during a rehearsal with the Minnesota Orchestra.

Hilary Purrington with score in hand discusses a detail in her score with Osmo Vänskä during a rehearsal with the Minnesota Orchestra.

Directed by composer Kevin Puts, the Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute lasts for five full days and includes workshops, rehearsals, and meetings with conductor Osmo Vänskä and musicians from the orchestra. The program culminates in the Future Classics concert on the final day of the program. The Institute is comprehensive, and each composer’s work receives thorough and generous rehearsal time. We were all astounded by the speed at which the musicians of the Minnesota Orchestra learn and understand new pieces. By the second rehearsal, Maestro Vänskä and the orchestra musicians were no longer assembling the pieces and figuring out how they worked; rather, the ensemble had shifted its focus to musical and artistic decisions.

Throughout the week, the seven participating composers met with representatives from each of the orchestra’s sections. The musicians gave us honest feedback regarding our writing for their instruments and how we chose to notate and format our music.  Similar themes reappeared throughout these meetings. The musicians repeatedly reminded us that they have very busy musical lives and are responsible for learning massive volumes of music. Given the limited amount of practice time a musician has for a single piece, it is vitally important that our writing is as clear as possible and simple to put together. For very practical reasons, no performer wants to be responsible for solving a complicated puzzle.

Musicians also assume that everything they see in their part will be heard. It can be disappointing to find out that a technically demanding passage is either completely obscured or “just an effect.” The “just an effect” issue is a common problem, especially when extended techniques are involved. Certain effects may work well in chamber contexts, but they don’t necessarily translate well to orchestral writing. Many extended techniques are quiet and subtle, and their effects are lost because they are obscured or simply can’t carry through a large hall.

Certain effects work well in chamber contexts, but don’t necessarily translate to orchestral writing.

The musicians of the Minnesota Orchestra also stressed the importance of clear notation. Several individuals pointed out that modern notation created with computers can lead composers to make overly complicated parts. Rather than providing clarity, “over-notated” passages only cause confusion and frustration. In many instances, it can be better to use words to convey the composer’s intentions. But, don’t use too many words. One of the musicians asked me to use fewer adjectives and descriptions. So, you can’t necessarily please everyone, but it is helpful to consider the many perspectives and opinions of individual orchestra members.

For me, one of the most fascinating aspects of the week was the opportunity to learn my colleagues’ music. The seven of us (Saad Haddad, Andrew Hsu, Peter Shin, Nina Young, Dan Schlosberg, Charles Peck, and myself) have very different musical instincts when it comes to composing for orchestra. Observing the choices that other composers make—whether musical or notational—and how these decisions impact rehearsals performances is both educational and inspiring.

An open program for the Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute showing photos of the seven composers featured in November 2017.

It was also incredibly clear to us how important the Composer Institute is to the Minnesota Orchestra. Rather than handing the concert off to an assistant, Music Director Osmo Vänskä studied, learned, and conducted all of our pieces. He gave thoughtful feedback and criticism, and made us feel as if our music is just as important as the repertoire of any standard concert. The orchestra musicians, rather than sight reading in the first rehearsal, had actually taken the time to practice their parts; many had even contacted us beforehand with specific questions.

The Orchestra’s communications team worked hard to promote the concert, and it showed. The turnout for the performance was remarkable: the hall appeared almost full, and Orchestra Hall is not a diminutive space. During the intermission and following the concert, audience members sought to speak with us, and their enthusiasm for new music and the Minnesota Orchestra was more than apparent.

And, regarding the performances themselves, Maestro Vänskä and all the musicians were thoroughly invested in the music. All of our pieces were performed thoughtfully and musically. The Orchestra’s performance of Likely Pictures in Haphazard Sky was flawlessly executed and beautifully paced, and I couldn’t be happier with how it sounded.

Hearing my own work is always informative. Rehearsal and performances reveal if my choices were correct or highly questionable. But, my experience at the Composer Institute went beyond the typical rehearse-then-perform process. We received thoughtful feedback from the musicians and the conductor, and we had the opportunity to learn one another’s works and witness how our colleagues’ compositional decisions played out.

We can’t experiment without hearing our music rehearsed and performed by live ensembles.

Compositional skill develops with study and experimentation; however, we can’t experiment without hearing our music rehearsed and performed by live ensembles. Experiences such as the Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute give composers much-needed opportunities to hear works realized. I learned so much this past week, more than I can sum up in a blog post. I’m back in New York City now, and I’m excited to work and write and apply what I’ve learned.

The Minnesota Orchestra onstage at Orchestra Hall performing in front of a near capacity audience.

There was a nearly full house for the Minnesota Orchestra’s Future Classics concert on Friday, November 10.

Going it Alone

In my essay last week, the first in a four-part series, I discussed what it means to be a “mid-career” composer in today’s musical landscape. This week I am going to explore the world of “unaffiliated” composers. By unaffiliated, I mean composers who have no particular ties or responsibilities to academia or other cultural institutions that strongly shape musical careers. New music composers have always been a tiny minority within the larger society, but merely a generation ago, the unaffiliated or the “freelance” composer was a more common phenomenon in new music. With a more reasonable cost of living in culturally active cities such as New York City or San Francisco, composers could more easily build their lives around the pursuit of their craft, while earning a modest living doing a part-time side job. Just ask Philip Glass who, reflecting back on his early career in the late ’60s and early ’70s during a 2012 Village Voice interview, said, “You could work three days a week loading a truck or driving a cab, and you’d have enough money to live off of, but that’s not true anymore.”  A look at musical life in the cities of today reveals a considerably different picture. It’s not only the rising cost of living that’s eroding our musical communities, but also the continually diminishing financial support of the arts and the increasing commercialization of all facets of cultural practice.

Much of the now legendary American new music of the previous era was largely the work of unaffiliated freelancers.

Much of the now legendary American new music of the previous era was largely the work of unaffiliated freelancers. Going back even further, one of our culture’s greatest new music traditions is that of the so-called “American Maverick”—those composers whose non-conformist temperaments lead them to shun mainstream and academic pursuits in favor of rugged individualism and often self-imposed exile. Think Conlon Nancarrow hiding away in Mexico City, or Harry Partch living the life of the wandering hobo, or Lou Harrison camped out in the coastal forests of the Santa Cruz mountains. As Harrison himself observed in a 1945 essay titled “Ruggles, Ives, Varèse,” “American music, like so much other American art, is almost completely the product of amateurs. Its finest thinking and finest writing practitioners have for a long time been amateurs. And it is no disgrace to a country that its expression should arise out of a need of the private citizen.” Whether you agree with this assessment or not, the fact remains that new music and the arts overall have become increasingly professionalized in America, to the point where it has become nearly unthinkable that a young composer might forego graduate studies and an eventual Ph.D. and simply go it alone. This is not to disparage academic music or film and theater composers. The problem is that professionalization is becoming the only game in town.

Given where we are today, what options actually are there for a composer with a more independent, unaffiliated profile? Here in New York City, though it is increasingly hard to locate, we do still have some vestiges of an independent new music syndicate. Small arts organizations that host new music still exist, but with ever-diminishing budgets and programming. Beyond that, an informal ecosystem of venues and spaces nurture some vibrant musical activity, though again, without meaningful resources. Nonetheless, a culture persists. But it’s a decidedly different culture than the one of previous generations. Again, here is Philip Glass:

It was very common to find a loft in the East Village . . . empty synagogues and that type of thing…You could find a loft for $150, $200 a month. Now, that’s impossible.

It was this type of environment—one with ample space that was relatively inexpensive to either own, lease, or simply book time in—that allowed Glass and others to form entire ensembles, with an extensive original repertoire, and to rehearse, weekly! Today this is mostly impossible, and thus an entire musical model—a model which incidentally, went on to largely define the new music landscape of the past fifty years—has essentially become extinct. Today’s underground landscape favors simple setups, usually solo, and lots of improvisation. Who has time and space to practice and develop actual compositions?

I’m not advocating here for a broad return to minimalist chamber ensembles in downtown lofts, but some flexibility in our capitalist, consumerist, straitjacketed landscape would surely lead to more musical experimentation and innovation, and that would be good for our musical culture.

Independent composers still form collectives, write new works, and organize concerts.

And yet we persist. Independent composers still form collectives, write new works, and organize concerts. Others delve more deeply into computers and electronic music to satisfy their artistic impulses, avoiding the more difficult challenge of finding a way to get an ensemble work or a string quartet actually performed. Still others give up composing entirely, in favor of the aforementioned freeform underground improv model. For my part, I’ve been recently involved in some of each, with varying degrees of satisfaction. Having reached mid-career, as I wrote in my essay last week, and feeling that many of my long-term compositional projects have run their course, I am desperately seeking a new and productive working model that would allow me to continue to grow as a composer and to realize some of the many latent ideas I carry within me. I’m determined to find it, as the “unaffiliated” composer that I continue to be, but I’d be lying if I told you that I wasn’t feeling dispirited.

Next week I will try to explain why, given all the difficulties, anyone would continue to pursue the path of composing a type of music that is so little heard and even less understood outside of a small circle of friends and colleagues. It’s a question we’ve certainly asked ourselves many times over, possibly even on a daily basis, but it can become an even more poignant question upon reaching mid-career.

The Late Elliott Carter

There’s an old quip that if you’re a composer, the first five years after you die are the worst. Whether or not that’s true, a composer’s posthumous reputation does sometimes veer off surprisingly from its earlier course. In some cases, a giant is laid low; in others, interest skyrockets. Paul Hindemith was routinely spoken of in the company of Schoenberg and Stravinsky during his lifetime but has not fared well of late, while a quarter century after his death John Cage is more influential than ever. Yet the hierarchies of departed composers are fluid. In the 1920s, Harvard students joked that the exit signs at the Boston Symphony meant “this way in case of Brahms.” J. S. Bach, Schubert, Sibelius, and Mahler all have had their ups and downs, and as often as not one generation’s lion is another’s goat (and vice versa).

If you’re a composer, the first five years after you die are the worst.

Now that the fifth anniversary of Elliott Carter’s passing is upon us (he died on Nov 5, 2012), there’s been no push to rename the exit signs at Symphony Hall, but neither has there been universal canonization. The case of Elliott Carter stands apart from the usual pattern of posthumous appraisals, not least because Carter lived to within a few weeks of his 104th birthday, and kept composing almost to the end. He may be the only composer in the history of Western music to have done so. Rather than leaving us just a handful of unusual works that slot neatly into the dotage thought inevitable before the Romantics or the transcendence Adorno heard in late Beethoven, Carter wrote dozens of pieces in a wide variety of genres. If Aaron Copland’s experience of composing (or rather not composing) in old age was like the turning off of a faucet, Elliott Carter’s was like whitewater rafting. He rode an extraordinary wave of productivity in his last decades, far exceeding that of his youth and middle age. If we measure in minutes of music, the midpoint of his catalog comes out to be after his 80th birthday, and the compositions for which he is best known (the first three string quartets, the Double Concerto, Piano Concerto, and Concerto for Orchestra, even the vocal works of the 1970s) are closer to his early forays into Neoclassicism than to the “mature” work of his 90s and 100s. Carter’s unprecedented combination of longevity and productivity, together with the unflagging quality and variety of the music he produced, upends the standard narrative of a composer’s career—juvenilia; mature work; final decline or apotheosis—and leaves us with a bounty of “late music” that stretches over more than three decades.

Some of this music will be familiar to NewMusicBox readers. Most of Carter’s compositions of the 1980s, including Night Fantasies (1980) for piano, Triple Duo (1983) for the now-standard “Pierrot-plus-percussion” ensemble, and smaller pieces like the 4 Lauds (1984-1999) for solo violin and Esprit Rude/Esprit Doux (1984), for flute and clarinet, have become familiar presences on recordings and in the concert hall. Carter’s two “capstone” projects of the 1990s—the 40-minute orchestral triptych Symphonia—Sum Fluxae Pretium Spei (1993-96), and his one-act comic opera with Paul Griffiths What Next? (1997-98)—have had numerous performances, and excellent recordings of both are available. And a range of later works, from the perpetuum mobile Caténaires (2006) for piano, to the wind quintet Nine by Five (2009), have established themselves quickly and securely in the repertoire. But five years on, a good deal of the music of Carter’s last half-decade is still not widely known. “Fine print” editions of several scores are still in preparation, and almost a dozen late compositions await commercial recordings and widespread performance.

Carter in 2005

Carter in 2005
Photo: Malcolm Crowthers

Help has recently arrived in the form of a new release from Ondine with premiere recordings of five pieces Carter composed between 2005 and 2012. (Full disclosure: I wrote the liner notes.) The performers include Carter stalwarts such as Oliver Knussen (one of the best Carter conductors out there), pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, and percussionist Colin Currie, but also more recent converts. To listen to Aimard play Carter’s last composition Epigrams with violinist Isabelle Faust (recent Gramophone “Recording of the Year” winner for her set of Mozart Violin Concertos) and cellist Jean Guihen Queyras (whose Bach suites win high praise) is to hear new music rendered as vividly as the masterpieces of the 18th or 19th centuries. No less persuasive are the accounts of five concertante works from the “aughts” and beyond: Dialogues (2003); Soundings (2005); Interventions (2007); Dialogues II (2010); and Two Controversies and a Conversation (2011). Soloist plus ensemble was an ideal medium for Carter. Its musical reflection of the individual in society aligns perfectly with his idea of counterpoint as human interaction. The newer works join an illustrious group of solo concertos for oboe, violin, clarinet, cello, piano, horn, flute, and bass clarinet. But they also introduce new relationships and modes of interaction between soloist and ensemble—from the piano’s Greek chorus-like framing of the orchestra in Soundings, to the studied indifference that the piano and orchestra pretend to have for each other in Interventions.

Such quasi-literary conceits will be familiar to long-time Carter listeners. They are the product both of Carter’s background in the liberal arts—which always counterbalanced his French conservatory training—and his engagement with contemporary poetry, which had roots going back to the 1940s but really took flight 30 years later. Carter’s 1975 cycle of six poems of Elizabeth Bishop, A Mirror on Which to Dwell, has become one of his most widely known pieces (thanks in no small part to the advocacy of Pierre Boulez), and Tempo e tempi (1998-99), on Italian poetry by Montale, Ungaretti, and Quasimodo is another favorite. In Carter’s last years he made song composition a special priority. From 2006 to 2011 he composed at least one major vocal work every year, applying the techniques he had developed in the 1970s to a kind of survey of the great modernist poetry he most admired in his youth. He set Stevens, Baudelaire, Pound, Zukofsky, Moore, Cummings, Eliot, and finally Stevens again, creating vivid yet deeply nuanced settings that animate and enrich the vastly different styles and voices at work in the poems. More than any other genre, Carter’s late vocal music is underrepresented on recordings and concerts. Although all of his late compositions have now been premiered, the rights of first recording for several late song cycles have not yet been exercised, although plans are underway. We won’t have to wait too long for these marvelous cycles to become widely available, and when they do they will no doubt find performers ready to take on their interpretive challenges and share their delights.

American composers rarely come to prominence via their orchestral music.

It is no accident that American composers rarely come to prominence via their orchestral music, and Elliott Carter was no exception. When reminded in 1994 that most of the music he composed between 1948 and 1992 is for small forces, Carter responded not by explaining his fascination with chamber music but by describing the limitations on rehearsal time imposed by American orchestras. It was only in his later years, when conductors like Boulez and Knussen, as well as Daniel Barenboim, Michael Gielen, James Levine, and David Robertson began to program his works regularly that Carter felt he had enough support to devote sustained attention to writing for orchestra. Although he is perennially labeled “uncompromising,” Carter’s hard-won experience with his Piano Concerto (1965) and Concerto for Orchestra (1969) led him to tailor his late orchestral music astutely to the needs of contemporary American orchestras. Gone are the unconventional seating plans, complexities of rhythmic notation, and thickly layered counterpoints of his orchestral music of the 1960s and ‘70s—techniques aimed at overthrowing what he once called “the orchestral brontosaurus.” Instead, Carter wrote to the orchestra’s strengths, in mischievous reimaginings of the orchestral tone poem, as he inherited it from Liszt, Berlioz, and Richard Strauss. The largest work on the new Ondine recording is Interventions—in an electrifying performance by Aimard and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, with Knussen conducting—and it is a sensual pleasure as well as a thrilling ride. Carter never wavered in his belief in the power of music to enlighten the complexities of human experience, but his music makes thought a joy. That his late works show off the virtuosity of contemporary orchestras to such good effect, and make such a vivid impression on audiences, should encourage their appearance on concert programs and recordings well into the future.

Carter in 2002

Carter in 2002

Likewise, the future of Carter’s chamber music seems assured. Pieces like the Cello Sonata, which once were beyond the reach of all but the most virtuosic performers, are now standard rep, appearing routinely on programs by professionals and students alike. Longtime Carter champions the Juilliard String Quartet chose Carter’s String Quartet No. 1 to take on their first tour with a new generation of members, and a wide range of quartets, including the Arditti, Brentano, Chiara, JACK, Mivos, and Pacifica quartets all have embraced Carter as well. Soloists and small groups looking for shorter works also have plenty to choose from. Surveying his 60-year career, Carter in his last years wrote dozens of “thank you” pieces, many uncommissioned, for the musicians and patrons who were his friends and colleagues. Many are short and quirky, making the category of the instrumental miniature—which Carter mostly avoided earlier in his career—something of a late specialty. In addition to two brief Fragments (both for string quartet), there are a host of short solos, duos, and trios, among them six solo Figments (two for cello; one each for double bass, viola, marimba, and oboe), and five Retracings (one each for bassoon, horn, trumpet, tuba, trombone)—each of which extracts an ensemble part from a larger piece as an instrumental solo. The modest dimensions of these pieces contain a wealth of invention and a streak of whimsical humor; like their longer siblings, they reward virtuosity and celebrate individuality.

The future of Carter’s chamber music seems assured.

Looking over all this music, it would seem both premature and false to come to any conclusions about which of Carter’s pieces will continue to resonate with the next generation of musicians and music lovers, and which ones will be cast by the wayside. What sets Carter’s music apart is its consistent focus on human experience—what it’s like to breathe in and out, be in love, lose a friend, succumb to vanity, feign indifference, become enraged or bewildered or overwhelmed, hesitate to come forward, or face death—and more often than not to contend with several of these experiences at once. Like every composer before him, Elliott Carter’s popularity has waxed and waned, and one doesn’t need to be clairvoyant to predict that it will continue to do so going forward. But I expect there will always be listeners who will recognize and respond to the fundamental humanity of Carter’s music, and ensure its future as they take it to heart.


Throughout November 2017, NewMusicBox is marking the fifth anniversary of Elliott Carter‘s death with a series of posts exploring his life and legacy. This content is made possible with the generous support of the Amphion Foundation‘s Carter Special Projects Fund.

Composing and Revising Likely Pictures in Haphazard Sky

For a while, I’ve claimed that clarity is the most important aspect of my music. I want musicians to know what’s going on so they can musically react and interpret their part, and I never want an audience member to feel lost or perplexed. For me, a large part of growing and improving as a composer involves learning how to more effectively communicate with both performers and listeners.

There are two sides to this. Musically, I strive to create narratives that both performers and listeners can follow. On a more practical level, I carefully edit my scores and parts so that performers and conductors know what I’m looking for. As simplistic as it seems, I’ve learned to notate my music so that it will sound exactly the way I want it to.

The process of writing and revising has been transformative.

The process of writing and revising Likely Pictures in Haphazard Sky for orchestra has been transformative for my writing. It’s my third orchestral piece, and it’s the only one I’ve been able to revise for subsequent performances. In its current form, the work is the product of important previous experiences and careful revisions.

I’ve been fortunate to attend schools that give composition students opportunities to hear orchestral works read and sometimes performed. In the summer preceding my second year at Juilliard, I began working on my second orchestral piece. I planned to apply to doctoral programs and, knowing that a reading at Juilliard would be my only chance to make a decent recording before application deadlines, I intended to compose something that could function well with very little rehearsal time. It needed to be simple and straightforward with the potential to sound polished by the end of a brief reading session.

This became Extraordinary Flora (2014). Composing a delicate, straightforward piece forced me to carefully consider how I presented and orchestrated my musical materials.  If I had composed this piece earlier, it would have felt counterintuitive, as if I was wasting the ensemble’s potential. But, this experience taught me that writing for orchestra with a sense of restraint can actually be more effective. Carefully controlling the energy of a massive ensemble allowed me to harness and focus it for moments that really mattered.

I began thinking about my next orchestral piece, Likely Pictures in Haphazard Sky (2016), early in the summer before my second year at the Yale School of Music. In a continuation of what I had discovered while writing Extraordinary Flora, I wanted to create delicate, chamber-like moments that would contrast with expansive, more “orchestral” sounds.

The opening texture of Likely Pictures was my first significant idea; before anything else, I knew how I wanted the beginning to sound. I imagined a dry, sparse introduction with solo pizzicato notes sounding from within the strings section. Then, I wanted a slow, simple melody (unison piano and vibraphone) to soar over the pointillistic activity. A low, indistinct rumbling noise (tremolo basses, very low piano, and rolled bass drum) would slowly emerge.

And then I had to figure out the rest of the piece. This is how I usually begin writing: I compose the opening, and then pause to consider what happens next. On a large sheet of paper, I create a timeline and draw out the trajectory of the piece, determining proportions and how important moments will occur. I continue to refer back to these initial, basic sketches, often changing my mind and adjusting my plan.

During the first phase of composing, I always write by hand, usually at a piano. I improvise and sing and play until I find what I’m looking for. I compose with paper and pencil until it feels counterproductive to do so—that is, when it becomes apparent that I’m notating, not composing. I then begin organizing my materials into notation software. For me, notation software allows for greater flexibility as I alter and rework. And, I like the idea that the final barline is always there, waiting for me to meet it at the end of the piece.

I think it’s important to experience the passage of time like an audience member might.

At a certain point, playback becomes valuable, and I know many composers who would disagree with me on this. But, I think it’s important to experience the passage of time like an audience member might. Playing through the music at the piano, or singing, or conducting, or just closing my eyes and imagining—these exercises force me to actively participate in the music, and this participation drastically alters my sense of time.

When school started in the fall of 2016, I had notated a nearly complete draft of Likely Pictures in Haphazard Sky. I brought what I had to my teacher, Christopher Theofanidis. In initial drafts, the piece was very episodic, and Chris advised me cover these seams and create smooth, elegant transitions between sections. This transformed the work’s continuity and overall cohesion.

We reworked individual sections as well. For example, I had initially imagined the solo pizzicato gestures of the opening section as coming from players within the section. Chris convinced me that the drama of seeing the individual players was important, especially as these subtle sounds recede. At a certain point, an audience member can’t quite hear the pizzicato notes, but he or she can see them. Visual cues can smooth over transitions, too.

Two months after the piece’s premiere with the Yale Philharmonia, I found out that I had been chosen to participate in the American Composers Orchestra’s Underwood New Music Readings. I took this opportunity to make some revisions, as I realized that my notation wasn’t always as clear as it could be.

The most significant and time-consuming change I made was to tie over sustained notes so that the pitch stops on a sixteenth note. Throughout the first section of Likely Pictures in Haphazard Sky, I ask the first violins to crescendo through sustained tones. I noticed that many of the players seemed to back away before the completion of the note value, causing a sudden decrease of energy. Tying these notes over to sixteenth notes conveyed that I wanted the sound to persist and grow for the duration of the pitch. It’s not the most visually elegant notation, but I think it better conveyed my point, and I was happier with the ACO’s treatment of this gesture.

A passage from Likely Pictures in Haphazard Sky

A passage from Hilary Purrington’s Likely Pictures in Haphazard Sky showing how she notated sustained notes in a way that maintained energy for their entire duration.

I made other, far smaller adjustments. Yale’s music library had returned my parts, so I was able to consider the performers’ notes. Aside from small notational changes, deciding exactly what to revise was tricky. The Yale Philharmonia usually performs in Woolsey Hall, Yale’s largest performance venue. Visually, the hall is an ornate, dramatic space; acoustically, however, it’s not unlike an empty water tower. Although I was happy with the performance and the recording, the muddiness and other acoustic peculiarities made it difficult for me to decide what actually needed to change.

The Underwood New Music Readings took place in the DiMenna Center. Aside from clarifying some notation, I wanted to leave many elements of the piece untouched because I was curious as to how Likely Pictures would sound in a drier venue. The change in acoustics made an incredible difference; – staccato notes were actually staccato, for example. Each performance had its strengths, and I don’t think I could say that I substantially prefer one recording over the other.

One of the most valuable experiences was receiving direct feedback from the musicians.

One of the most valuable experiences of the Underwood New Music Readings was the opportunity to receive direct feedback from the musicians. As regular performers with the American Composers Orchestra, these musicians have seen and played an unbelievable variety of new works, and they are quick to catch on and understand a composer’s intentions. The instrumentalists gave the same advice to all the participating composers: Make an individual musician’s purpose clear. And, beyond this: Make it clear that the musician’s role is necessary and valuable. If a passage is particularly tricky, at least make it gratifying for the player.

Hilary Purrington receives feedback from Underwood mentor composers Derek Bermel and Trevor Weston. Hilary Purrington receives feedback from Underwood mentor composers Derek Bermel and Trevor Weston (Photo by Jiayi Photography, courtesy American Composers Orchestra)./caption]

For me, generating material is the most straightforward part of composing. Using Western notation and occasional words to describe an abstract idea and a musician’s role within that is often a complex task. In November, I have the opportunity to workshop Likely Pictures in Haphazard Sky yet again, this time with the Minnesota Orchestra as part of the Minnesota Orchestra’s Composer Institute. The skill of effective and efficient communication can only be sharpened by experience, and I’m very grateful for another opportunity to continue learning and improving my craft.

Announcing Event Pages

For years, we’ve heard from new music folks all over the country about the need for a centralized new music events calendar. Over the last year, we’ve been working to address this need, and today we are excited to announce the full launch of event pages on our platform. These pages give artists the ability to create and promote their events and offer audiences the ability to discover upcoming events they are interested in attending. Showcasing the breadth of new music creation around the country in a way that promotes artists and develops audiences is the driving mission behind event pages.

An example of an event page.

An example of an event page.

How Do I List My Events?

Anyone on our site, regardless of whether or not they have received a grant award, can create an event page. To create an event page, log in (make sure to register first, if you haven’t already) and navigate to the My Events page. You can get there by hovering over your name in the right corner of the navigation bar above and selecting “Events” from the dropdown. Next, click “Create an Event!” This takes you to a form where you can add all relevant information about your event such as a description, an image, a location, a link to purchase tickets, as well as tag anyone else who is part of the event. Once you’ve filled out the form, you can preview and publish your event page.

Start listing your events.

What Happens After I List My Event?

Once your event page is published, it becomes visible on your profile and the profiles of the other users you’ve tagged as part of the event. Your event page also appears on the Browse Events page of our site. Here, anyone can explore event pages based on location and keywords. Upcoming events also appear in the “On Our Calendar” content stream on our Explore page.

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What Does It Mean To Be A Mid-Career Composer?

It’s a challenging time to be a new music composer. Not that it has ever been easy, but with the particular mix of economic, political, cultural, and ecological instability that’s descended upon us recently, one has to wonder how much of our national musical enterprise will survive, and for how long. How do we composers navigate the current conditions so as to continue growing our artistic practice?

With that as a backdrop, I have recently arrived at a kind of personal and artistic crossroads, highlighted by having recently entered my 50s and having just sent my one and only child off to college. Reaching these two major life milestones has led me to reflect in a new way on my life as a composer, reviewing what I’ve done thus far and considering where I might go from here. And, as has happened before at other major life junctures, I have a strong drive to radically reinvent myself artistically. In reaching this life moment, I am—like many of you, perhaps, whether in your past, present, or future—reflecting on and appraising my choices and accomplishments, and in these four short essays I will try to reveal as openly and honestly as I can what it looks like to be pursuing a life as a composer at this time and place, from my particular station in life. In this first essay, I want to explore what it means to be a “mid-career” composer.

Being a “mid-career” composer can be a somewhat confusing designation for many of us.

Although there doesn’t appear to be a precise age attached to it, mid-career generally seems to refer to someone who has spent a good number of years pursuing their vocation following their formal studies, but is not yet approaching old age and retirement. This can be a somewhat confusing designation for many of us who, like myself, have followed non-linear and non-traditional paths and for whom traditional career milestones have come at odd times, if at all. In my case, I didn’t start serious musical training until I was in my twenties, having already had a brief career as a rock musician, and I didn’t really begin my current career as a new music composer until I was around 30. I did enjoy a brief period of being a younger, so-called “emerging” composer, where there was tangible interest in my work and where it might go. I was offered performance opportunities, some recording deals, offers to submit proposals for festivals and commissioning programs, and overall seemed to possibly have a career on the rise. But alas, a true “career” never did materialize—that is to say, my musical profile never developed to a point where it could actually support me financially and fill my calendar with engagements. The musical output of my emerging years certainly grew and developed, and to a large extent I reached a degree of artistic fulfillment, but in a professional sense, I never fully emerged. So now I find myself in my early 50s, at mid-career, having pursued many musical threads to their logical conclusion, and am now wondering: what next?

One of the more vexing questions for me has to do with the fact that, for the most part, I feel that artistically I have achieved much of what I would have hoped to by my early 50s. I’ve developed a coherent body of work, my music has been performed consistently, there have been several recordings released of my music, and I’ve accumulated press clippings. And yet, there it sits, 20 years worth of work going largely unnoticed. Is it merely a matter of timing? And if I just keep doing what I’ve been doing, will an actual career eventually develop? Or is it that my work to date is just not interesting or marketable enough to build a career around? Or, alternately, is the notion of a true “career” in new music even a realistic thing? Obviously in some cases it is, but these success stories seem more the exception than the rule. This is, I think, a key conundrum for many of us:  Do we keep plugging away with a defined style and identity in hopes of finding some form of conventional success, or do we keep exploring new ideas and interests without regard for being noticed or recognized? Having a consistent style and profile can, over time, help establish a career, but as an artist, it can be frustrating and limiting.

When you’re younger, the tension between artistic pursuits and tangible outcomes matters much less.

When you’re younger, this tension between artistic pursuits and tangible outcomes matters much less. After all, you have your whole life ahead of you, so you can experiment as much as you like. But at mid-life, the future is not all still ahead of you. Given your somewhat limited time remaining, what is the best use of the time you spend on artistic pursuits? Can you even afford to keep making music without a successful career? And, perhaps most importantly, do you have anything to say about the vital musical-artistic questions of the moment?

I’m not sure I have the answers, at least not yet, but over these next few essays I hope to arrive at some form of resolution to some of these questions. In the next piece I’m going to explore what it means to be an unaffiliated composer, one who has no particular ties or responsibilities to academia or other cultural institutions, a freelancer, a DIY-er, a “maverick”—in short, a composer who seemingly answers only to his or her own muse.

fallen leaves on a series of steps

Christopher Cerrone: Everything Comes From Language

There have been many composers who have been deeply engaged with literature. Perhaps the most famous examples are Anthony Burgess and Paul Bowles, whose novels overshadow their nevertheless formidable achievements in musical composition. While composer Christopher Cerrone has not written any original prose fiction or poetry, at least not that he’s shared with the outside world, he approaches his own musical compositions in much the same way that a writer weaves a literary narrative.

“I try to have people learn how to hear the piece via the order of events,” Cerrone explained when we visited his book-filled Brooklyn apartment. “The more it goes on, the more it’s about the memory of the thing. I lean more towards the linguistic as a composer in that I’m interested in language that’s understandable, perceptible, and followable. If I’m not following my own story musically, then it’s not interesting to me.

Aside from offering a model for his compositional syntax and aesthetics, literature is also the primary inspiration behind almost every piece of his music. In addition to the work that has garnered Cerrone his greatest amount of attention thus far—the site-specific multimedia adaptation of Italo Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities, which was a finalist for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in Music—he has created solo and choral works derived from texts as diverse as Tao Lin, E.E. Cummings, and the 18th-century Zen Buddhist monk Ryōkan. But even the lion’s share of his instrumental output has been triggered by literary references—a stanza by Erica Jong fueled his single-movement violin concerto Still Life; a passage from a poem by Philip Larkin provided the title and something of an abstract program for High Windows, his concerto grosso for string orchestra; and a quip by Bertolt Brecht inspired his 2017 orchestral work Will There Be Singing premiered this past May by the LACO.

“It’s always so funny what comes out of texts,” Cerrone exclaimed. “The most pretentious way I ever put it is that verbosity is ontology for me. It has to be heard as words, and thought of that way, for it to exist.”

Given Cerrone’s profound empathy for language, it’s somewhat surprising that he chose music instead of literature as the outlet for his creative impulses.

“I don’t have that kind of keen observational sense or that keen psychological sense that I think really great writers have,” he acknowledged. “As much as I love words, the ability of music to have the emotional, the visceral, and immediate pre-psychological impact won out.”

Still, he makes an effort to pick up a book and read at the start of every day before he settles in to work on his musical projects.

“We all probably wish we read more, but I try to put an hour in in the morning, whatever’s going on. And the periods where I do that are the really fecund creatively for me, and they always affect how I think in a really great way. Days when I wake up and check my email and check my text messages and go on Twitter are probably less creative.”

September 27, 2017 at 1:00 p.m.
Christopher Cerrone in conversation with Frank J. Oteri
Video and photography by Molly Sheridan
Transcribed by Julia Lu

Frank J. Oteri:  It seems to me that words are almost as important to you as sounds.

Christopher Cerrone:  I’m a very verbal person. I grew up thinking I was going to become a writer before I decided to become a composer.  I was always surrounded by books as a child, and I was read to constantly.  I remember my mother used to not just read to me as a child, but also just make up stories.  So I think that perceiving the world through words is just very deeply embedded inside of me, both in my music and in my notion of how music should work.

FJO:  But even though you thought you’d be a writer, music ultimately won out.

CC:  The genuine answer is that it became very clear to me that I had more of a talent for music than words.  I loved words and I loved writing, but I wasn’t a fiction writer. I’ve noticed that my fiction-writer friends are unbelievable observers of people.  It’s almost a little scary to have a fiction-writer friend, because you’re like, “When am I going to wind up in one of those stories?”  I never was that kind of person.  I loved reading and I loved observing things, but I don’t have that kind of keen observational sense or that keen psychological sense that I think really great writers have.  At the same time, I was constantly obsessed with music, always listening and curious about what made the music work.  I remember taking a music theory class in high school and thinking it made so much sense.  As much as I love words, the ability of music to have the emotional, the visceral, and immediate pre-psychological impact won out.

“The ability of music to have the emotional, the visceral, and immediate pre-psychological impact won out.”

FJO:  Nicely stated.  But, of course, if words are all about their meanings, and they mean specific things, how can they not provoke an emotional reaction?  They’re all about being comprehensible.  Whereas music isn’t, and yet it is, on another level.

CC:  I remember reading somewhere that a different center of the brain processes words in song and words that are read. This kind of makes sense. One of my favorite scenes from the movie Annie Hall is when [Woody Allen]’s with that Rolling Stone reporter played by Shelly Duvall and she quotes “Just Like a Woman”: “She breaks just like a little girl.”  It sounds so trite.  If you listen to Dylan, your heart breaks because it’s such a beautiful song.  But if you hear someone say it, it sounds dumb.  So I think that combination was always what was interesting to me: the meaning of text and the meaning of words, but also the ability to process it in purely emotional terms.

FJO:  The thing about music is that it gets its meaning only by the associations we attach to it.  Words operate much differently. Right now we’re talking to each other and every single word we’re using is a word that each of us has said before many times and have also read and written many times, which is why we’re able to understand each other.  You can’t do that with music.

CC:  I think you can.  I was teaching a composition lesson a couple of days ago in Michigan. I had this student who is very talented, but to me the music sounded too much like other music I’ve heard before.  So I said to him that all music exists on some kind of spectrum, from something that involves nothing you’ve ever heard before to music that sounds exactly like everything you’ve ever heard before. I think all great music exists somewhere along that.  In music, you’re speaking a language of things heard already.  You’re just rearranging it in a way that is unique.  You use sonorities that have been heard before, like I use major chords.  But even if you don’t use major chords, everything is along the lines of some kind of reference.

FJO:  But curiously I think that with language, and by extension literature, the spectrum is slightly different. You can’t really have something that functions in a literary way that’s completely new words that you’ve never heard before, even though the Dadaists and later experimental writers attempted this.

CC:  Right.

Two bookshelves filled with books.

FJO:  The big revolutions that sent shockwaves through all the artistic disciplines in the 20th century are related to each other. In visual art, it was about escaping representation. And in music, it was the so-called emancipation of dissonance. In literature, the parallels to those developments would be things like stream of consciousness, automatic writing, concrete poetry. While a lot of people like to say that contemporary music didn’t catch on with a large audience because most people didn’t want to hear those dissonant sounds, those sounds are much more a part of our collective culture at this point than a novel like Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans.

“All music exists on some kind of spectrum, from something that involves nothing you’ve ever heard before to music that sounds exactly like everything you’ve ever heard before.”

CC:  Yeah, it’s a rough read.  I’ve not finished it.  It’s so true.  I think that’s interesting because it gets to the idea that works of art teach you how to experience them. My favorite works of art are works that teach you through the process of seeing them.  This is what I try to do in my music through the course of forms. I try to have people learn how to hear the piece via the order of events. The more it goes on, the more it’s about the memory of the thing. So yeah, it’s funny, I think I lean more towards the linguistic as a composer in that I’m interested in language that’s understandable, perceptible, and followable.  If I’m not following my own story musically, then it’s not interesting to me.  Not that there can’t be moments of surprise, but the surprise is also part of the language.

FJO:  Well that’s the thing.  Surprise comes because if you know these chords and it suddenly goes somewhere different from progressions you’ve heard before, that gives the music an element of surprise.

CC:  I also think it’s interesting to be a composer and to have grown up in an age where that’s all happened already, all the revolutions. The Berlin Wall has fallen and so has the musical Berlin Wall, so you’re sitting there and you’re like, “Okay, there is nothing I can possibly imagine that could be accomplished through just the act of radical revolution in music.”  Maybe it’s possible, but to me that’s not what’s interesting.  There are so many things that are built totally out of noise, out of a completely impossible to understand vocabulary—or not impossible to understand, but that wall had already been pushed up against to such a point even within the aesthetics of modernism.

People are more interested now in theater and things that are actually more familiar. I remember seeing [Helmut] Lachenmann give a lecture in New York. Apparently every time he meets some player, they’re like, “Oh, Mr. Lachenmann, hear this sound.”  And it would be like krrr-krrrr-, and he’s just like, “Okay, that’s great.” Even he thought it was silly that people would walk up to him and give him new weird sounds.  This isn’t what I do as an artist.  I’m not just trying to make the weirdest sound possible.  I’m trying to make music and art, so I think as a composer I’m much more interested in building a language that is as broad as a linguistic thing. I have so many things in my vocabulary as a composer, which are all syntheses.  How much can I import into my language as a composer and still have it be consistent?

FJO:  I came across a piece of yours recently which I had not before that I was floored by—the Violin Sonata. But it’s somewhat of an outlier in your output.

CC:  Is it an outlier?

FJO:  Well, in the most obvious way, it’s an outlier because your pieces are almost inevitably inspired by literature and have these beautiful evocative titles. Whereas calling something a violin sonata merely tells listeners about the form and instrumentation of the piece.

CC:  That’s a good point.  The funny thing about it is I almost feel like it’s poetic.  The poetic reference of a violin sonata is what the point of that is, more than anything else.  It’s obviously not a sonata in the classical sense. It has sort of a superficial resemblance to it but, to me, what was interesting about that whole thing was the idea of the poetic notion of these two people on stage playing these instruments.  That’s why I called it a sonata more than anything else.  I do know though that there was a concert program recently that was all my music, and I was like, “Oh, you should have included my Violin Sonata.  It would have been a nice thing on that concert.” And [the person who put the concert together said], “Oh, I hate sonatas.” So I think that the piece turned off at least one person by having that title.

FJO:  Wow!  Yet he might have had a completely different reaction had you given the piece some beautiful, unique, evocative title, because words automatically trigger previous associations.

CC:  Right.

FJO:  But the words “violin sonata” also trigger associations. It gave him a very specific message, and that message was the history of every other violin sonata that’s ever been written by every other composer.  And had you previously written three other pieces that you called violin sonatas and you called this the fourth, those words would immediately reference the fact that you had done this same kind of piece three times previously.

CC:  I can’t even imagine that.  It was definitely a one-off calling something a sonata.  It was really funny, I remember my friend Timo Andres had a piece done at the New York Philharmonic, a piano concerto, and it’s just called The Blind Bannister. Apparently the New York Philharmonic insisted upon stylizing it Piano Concerto No. 3, “The Blind Bannister.”

“It just felt almost oddly romantic to call something a sonata.”

I think most composers are a bit reticent to throw out these titles.  But for me it was actually very much about the poetic notion of a sonata and writing a piece for these two people who happen to both be—more than most of the people I write for—immersed in the classical repertory in a really specific way.  It’s not like it’s ironic.  It just felt almost oddly romantic to call something a sonata.

FJO:  I didn’t know that story about Timo’s piece; that’s really interesting.  I see the title Piano Concerto No. 3, and I am immediately curious about the earlier two if I haven’t heard them yet. So, for me, giving something such a title is as much autobiographical as it is associative with previous music history. It makes you want to know the pre-history of where the composer came from for that piece, almost to the point that it can’t live independently the way a piece with a beautiful title can.

CC:  I almost feel like calling a piece Violin Sonata was maybe unfair to an audience because it’s almost like me saying, “If you know all my works, you know I never give titles like this.”  I don’t have a bunch of sonatas.  I have literally one sonata.  Since every other piece has an evocative, poetic title, you almost know that on some level that this title has a kind of layer of evocation as well. This is unfair because obviously not everyone knows all my pieces, or any of my pieces.

FJO:  I tried to get to know them all over the past couple of weeks.  We’ll see how far we get talking about all of them!  But the other thing I thought about, before we move on from the Violin Sonata, in your notes for it you wrote that you’ve avoided calling pieces sonatas because you didn’t want to be part of that chain of influences.  Your music exists outside of that, but once you give a work such a title, it forces the comparison.

CC:  I felt like it was time for me, that I felt comfortable. To sort of side swipe your answer, there was this interview with Morton Feldman late in his life, and I found it to be such an interesting interview because he talks about Steve Reich. He was at that point in his life when he finally came out admitting that he sort of loves Steve Reich, but he talked about the instrumentation. I wouldn’t say it was disparaging, but Feldman’s thing was that the instrumentation is the piece.  A Feldman piece might be for piano, flute, and percussion. It will have this incredible combination, and it’s so beautiful and it achieves an otherworldliness. Whereas Reich is like, “Alright, I’m finding an ensemble.  It doesn’t matter.  No one cares about me anyway.  So there’s going to be two clarinets, and four singers, and a million percussionists, so it’s going to be amplified.”

I think that that Reich tradition is the one that I felt more comfortable in initially as a composer because of the lack of history and being able to find my own combinations. Importing ideas into more classical ensembles is something that I’ve done more lately.  It’s somewhere my career has gone.

A wall filled with framed pages of scores by John Cage

In addition to admiring Morton Feldman, Cerrone also has a great fondness for another New York School composer, John Cage, and an entire wall of his apartment is lined with framed pages of Cage scores.

FJO:  There’s also the practical matter of writing for a so-called classical ensemble; these tend to be ensembles that there are many of.  If you write for your own particularly created ad-hoc group, it’s possibly the only group that has that specific instrumentation and can therefore be the only group that can play the piece.

CC:  That’s true.

FJO:  How many ensembles are there with two clarinets and lots of percussion? By necessity, Steve Reich formed his own ensemble and worked with musicians he knew, but later in his life, he also began writing for more standard ensembles. The piece of his that won the Pulitzer, Double Sextet, is a piece for a “Pierrot plus percussion” sextet. Of course, he doubled all the parts, which is the thing he does, but it’s a standard ensemble. When people now want to put together a performance of, say, Music for 18 Musicians, they have to put a special ensemble together, whereas there are tons of “Pierrot plus percussion” ensembles out there already; Double Sextet can be played by any of them.

CC: I’m sure there’ve been a million performances of Double Sextet.  On the other hand, I think he was really smart in the pieces that were for these larger combinations.  He more or less wrote evening-length works.  So you can justify doing Music for 18 [Musicians], because that’s the concert.  If it was an eight-minute piece for the Music for 18 Musicians instrumentation, I think it would never get performed.

FJO:  It’s interesting that you bring up Feldman when you talk about the Violin Sonata because, as you said, the instrumentation was the piece for him, and toward the end of his life the titles he gave pieces would just be what the instruments are.

CC:  Oh yeah, like Piano, Violin, Clarinet.  Well, that’s the thing I was tapping into almost with the sonata thing.  It’s a poetic thing about these instruments—the poetic potential of just sound.  A big part of the spectrum of where I sit as an artist is the sound thing from Feldman plus this allusive thing in literature. Get those two things together and you more or less have my music.

FJO:  But the other thing about your sonata is that I think it’s very carefully not referencing other sonatas.  That’s not what it’s about.

CC:  No.  Definitely not.

FJO:  It’s about referencing the techniques required by virtuosos who play together and referencing this idea of a duo.  This might have not even been a conscious thing on your part and perhaps it’s even something I inferred that isn’t even there, but the only thing that I heard in the Violin Sonata that associates it with any other music is at some point toward the middle of the end of the first movement, I heard things that sound like ‘80s power pop chords.

CC:  Yeah.  Totally. I always call it the Springsteen section.

FJO:  Ha!  How did that wind up in there?

CC:  It was really funny because I remember Rachel [Lee Priday] at the premiere introduced it that way, and I thought, “Don’t say that.”  But it’s so true.  I think I should just own it.  More and more I’m interested in bringing everything in my world as an artist into my music, and that includes pop music for sure.  I grew up on a diet of it.  I recently discovered the Björk album Vespertine, which is amazing and maybe my favorite now. But I had never heard it, because when I was 18, I decided I was going to become a composer, so I decided to only listen to classical music and never listen to any pop music ever again.  The extremism of the 18-year old, I think, is kind of a funny, beautiful thing.  But I realized I’d never heard that album because between 2002 and 2005, I didn’t listen to any pop music; I sort of just immersed myself in classical music entirely.  And then I was like, “Wait a minute.  This is dumb.  I love all this music.”  I was just being really absolutist and silly, but I have holes from that period.

“When I was 18, I decided to only listen to classical music and never listen to any pop music ever again.”

Anyway, I think that for me the thing is to bring in as wide as possible a reference of things that I love. It’s not ideological.  It’s just like the whole piece sets up that moment; it’s an extremely stretched out version of just three pop chords.  You’ve got all these natural harmonics.  They’re all sounding pitches on the violin, open string harmonics.  They’re all super tonal because harmonics on the strings of an instrument that’s tuned in fifths are going to be tonal.  So when you compress them all into a single moment, it just becomes one, four, and five chords.  It’s literally just chords that came out of the overtone series on a violin, but I love the idea of the reference to kind of a pop song, too.

FJO:  I want to unpack your decision to avoid listening to pop music in the early years of the 21st century. By then, the schism between so-called pop and so-called classical music was less pronounced. It seems like those walls were coming down, certainly in terms of what other composers were writing.  So it seems weird that you were putting the walls back up.

CC:  I went through a series of musical rebellions in high school.  I studied piano, classically from a young age, and I played jazz. I was starting to compose, and I played electric guitar and bass.  I played a lot of music of all different kinds; I was very immersed in all kinds of music.  I think that there was this weird thing where I just had the ultimate rebellion into conservatism by accident, because I’d heard all this post-noise, post-rock music. I was listening to Godspeed You! Black Emperor in high school and at some point, I thought this is actually kind of like classical music.  As I went further and further into long form things, I weirdly wound up back at the other end. I think it was also that I grew up on Long Island, which feels like I grew up in basically a cultural wasteland.  There was no culture really at all.  Capitalism fills the holes of the suburbs with more capitalism, so there was commerce and there was popular art, which I’m not denigrating at all, but there was no sort of serious visual arts because it’s a place that’s sort of cut off, other than from New York City, and it sort of relies upon New York City. It has never developed a culture of its own really, except for a few odd places here and there.  So, unless you go to New York City, you don’t see orchestras, you don’t see classical music.  You don’t go to museums, and you don’t see theater.

FJO:  Even though the Hamptons has this big gallery scene?

CC:  Yeah, I guess so. But I wasn’t sophisticated enough as a 17-year old to know about the gallery scene in the Hamptons.  But I was literate.  I think that’s actually why I have this great love of literature; it was the one thing you could really get deep into since you could get books.  There was actually a great independent bookstore in my town which was my favorite place. Amazingly, it’s still there and it’s still an independent bookstore.  Anyway, I think that the notion of becoming a classical composer was this gigantic rebellion against Long Island and the American notion of suburbia. So I think as a result of that gesture, I went really far with it. I was an insufferable, pretentious 18-year old who was like, “I only listen to Beethoven.”  Then I chilled out a little bit and became a little bit less insufferable and learned to remember that I love all kinds of music.

Three superimposed scores are propped up on Cerrone's piano, Stockhausen's Klavierstucke XI, an original composition, and a Beethoven sonata.

FJO:  So when you cut everything else off, were you only listening to older music?

CC:  I was discovering at that point.  As an 18-year old on Long Island, access to contemporary music is extremely limited.  My library had a couple of Kronos Quartet CDs, so I do remember hearing the first tracks of that famous Black Angels disc.  I was like, “What is this?  This is so discordant.”  But I think the first music I really loved was actually more like the neo-romantic tradition. I still think there are some really great pieces in that tradition.  And then I discovered Lutosławski and Ligeti. What I loved about that music and what I still love about it is its mix of influences.  And I discovered minimalism.  Then I discovered Cage and European Modernism, and I went backwards from there. I had teachers who were encouraging me to discover more and more; that was really, really lucky.

FJO:  Did you listen to music from other cultures at all?

CC:  I think that was an even later thing, the period where people were just dumping stuff from hard drives onto hard drives. I think probably somewhere through the middle of college I discovered gamelan and then I discovered gagaku and West African drumming. That was all probably later in my development, but it was obviously hugely influential.  I discovered American shape-note singing.  It’s such an incredible tradition.  It really sits with me.  And I discovered Sardinian music. That moment when you could just dump anything from a hard drive onto another was an amazing moment.  I mean, it also ruined the music industry, but there was a moment where you just could discover anything.

FJO:  Getting back to the comparisons between how music and language function.  We’re saying all these words to each other in a language we both grew up speaking and the words flow naturally without us having to consciously stop and think about each one. Certainly that happens in music when people immersed in an idiom improvise together and respond to each other’s phrases in real time. But when you’re alone writing a novel or creating a notated musical composition designed for other people to perform, there’s a lot of pre-meditation that goes into that process even though a lot of what comes out is also the result of a subconscious absorption of things you have either read or heard or both.

CC:  I feel that way absolutely.  I’ll come up with something and it will feel really original, and then I’ll realize it’s just a half-remembered version of something I heard 15 years ago.  I think that 18-to-22 period is such an important period. I read somewhere that your brain is the most malleable at that point.  It’s like a sponge, and you just absorb everything. I was genuinely very curious, but I was also very lucky to have access to a lot of stuff. I remember my teacher in college, Nils Vigeland, would give me a list every single week with 15 pieces.  I’d run to the library and study everything.  That was the moment for me to discover a ton of stuff.  And I think all that is subconsciously in my vocabulary as a composer.

FJO:  You’ve actually composed a piece that seems like an attempt to turn into musical sounds the way our brains process memories—Memory Palace.

CC:  I’m surprisingly un-premeditated as a composer.  I don’t plan as much as you might think.  I just sort of keep going, and then I work backwards to make it seem that I planned it.  That piece is for no real traditional percussion instruments.  They all have to be made.  So since I was stripped of the possibilities of traditional instruments, I thought I guess I better, like, think back on all the times that I didn’t really have an instrument and had 12 beer bottles left over from a party and filled them up with different amounts of water and we made a song out of it.  It started as improvisation with a friend and electronics, and it just kind of went from there.

FJO:  I think it really captures what you described earlier as a pre-psychological, emotive moment. But, because of the indeterminate elements you’ve put into this score, the fact that performers must make their own instruments in order to realize it, it becomes very personal and very specific to whomever is interpreting it. So I wonder how divergent performances have been and how representative you feel they have all been of your intentions.

CC:  How do I put this?  There’s a moment when pieces stop being something you wrote almost and they start to become part of the repertoire. That is the most amazing feeling, but it’s a very strange feeling when you see something so far from where you conceived it.  It’s a surprisingly fixed piece in terms of the pitch choices being notated, but I think that the sounds, the colors, are the most interesting part—the timbres.   I remember one person, his house was being demolished.  He moved and he saved all the wood from his deck and took the wood for that piece out of it.  That’s so cool.  And I was at this party recently, and this guy I happened to have corresponded with, whose son is a percussionist, came up to me and said, “I want to thank you.  My son played Memory Palace and we made the instruments together.  We don’t really have that kind of relationship.  But since he had to do it, I helped him and it was this really big bonding experience.” That is probably one of the more meaningful things that anyone has ever said to me about my music.

“It’s a very strange feeling when you see something so far from where you conceived it.”

FJO:  That’s beautiful.

CC:  It’s something I’m sure I’d do with my own dad, although we argue when we build things together.  [The electronic component of] that piece literally had a set of wind chimes I recorded that are in my parents’ house still.  I was digging really deep with that piece. I think that that’s been the process for me as an artist, generally speaking. The thing that’s really hard is to emotionally strip yourself down to exposed places, but that will yield something powerful.

FJO:  Interestingly, the two pieces we talked about in detail so far, the Violin Sonata and Memory Palace, are both very much about you having an idea and then running with it.  Those ideas were not things you got from somewhere else, although as we’ve been saying, nothing exists independently; everything comes from something.  Still, you had no guide to take you on a path; whereas, with the majority of the pieces you’ve written—obviously all of your vocal pieces but even many of the instrumental ones—the inspiration will come from something that is concrete that already had existed in literature, whether it’s a novel or a set of poems.  So I’m wondering, in terms of what you just said about stripping yourself down emotionally to find this essence, how do you work within something that already exists to find the thing that’s you?

CC:  I think it’s as simple as the way you read a book and you relate to it.  You don’t have to be like that person to relate to it.  I’m reading this book by Teju Cole right now, and he’s a Nigerian-American writing about his experiences. Obviously that’s not an experience I relate to, but I still relate to the book.  And I still relate to the things he says and does in the book.  I think that’s true of most of the texts I’ve dealt with. I’m sure I have a very different experience than most of the writers I set. You can still relate to them, and they become about you anyway. People have commented on how my interpretation of works tends to become about me.  It becomes about how I feel when I read something, and so I think it’s the same kind of emotional thing.  It’s just filtered through someone else’s text.

A paperback copy of Teju Cole's novel Open City rests on top of a page of Cerrone's music manuscript.

FJO:  So I want to dig deeper into reading and its importance for you—how much you read, where you read, what you read, how you find things to read, and when that moment comes and you start pondering whether or not you can turn it into a piece of your music.

CC:  I try to read in the mornings, as much as I can, but it varies, honestly.  We all probably wish we read more, but I try to put an hour in in the morning, whatever’s going on.  And the periods where I do that are the really fecund creatively for me, and they always affect how I think in a really great way. Days when I wake up and check my email and check my text messages and go on Twitter are probably less creative.  People usually recommend things to me, and I’m always lucky to either hear someone or, as I’ve had some really great experiences of late in different residencies, literally meet the author, get to know the works of my author friends. I have a lot of very literate friends, and I grew up in a family that reads a lot.

“Days when I wake up and check my email and check my text messages and go on Twitter are probably less creative.”

Starting from there and then outward, it’s always just some sort of random connection. Some people say it’s so much easier to write a piece based on a text because you have that guide structurally and that’s half true.  But the part they don’t talk about is the volume one goes through to find a source text. The research aspect of it is insane. For every poem I set, I read 500 poems.  This one is too long, or this one doesn’t quite get the feeling right.

FJO:  So what’s the “Aha!” moment when you’re reading something?  Is it the very first reading and you’ll say, “Oh, this really grabs me.  I hear things in my head; I hear sound.” Or will you come back to something after reading it a few times and internalizing it, and then decide you can do something with it?

CC:  More often than not, it’s usually pretty immediate.  When you read a poem and you’re like, “Oh, okay, clearly.”  And it’s usually the length.  “This is short.  Great.“ So that’s often the “Aha!” moment.

FJO:  Like those peculiar Bill Knott poems you set, which I knew nothing about before I heard your Naomi Songs, even though Knott had posted them all online. How did you discover his writing?

CC:  I have this friend who’s the most crazily literary person and he dumped a ton of stuff on my hard drive that he found on the internet.  Those Knott poems are so great, right?  I found them, and he died a year later, and it was like, “Oh God, how am I going to get the rights to these?  Who even executes his estate?” But I found the person who had written his obituary in The New Yorker and he managed to put me in touch with his executor, and he was super nice about it.  Then there are certain authors. For example I love Lydia Davis, but I feel that so many composers have done such brilliant things—David Lang, Kate Soper.  There are just all these great pieces with Lydia Davis texts. I don’t need to be the fifth person to write one. She’s brilliant and great, but there’s something about the discovery; one hopes that in the world that we’re in, the texts I use are often discoveries for people.

“One hopes that in the world that we’re in, the texts I use are often discoveries for people.”

FJO:  I remember when I first learned about Lydia Davis. I was the music person on a multi-disciplinary panel many years back, and the literary person on that panel was trashing the short stories of Lydia Davis because they’re way too short and undeveloped. This person seemed to treasure long, dense work. But that negative reaction actually made me want to seek out her work and read it, and when I did I instantly fell in love with it, too. At that point, nobody in the music community seemed to know who she was, and in the back of my head I thought it would be really cool for her writing to be set to music.  Then everybody else did it!

CC:  Poor Lydia probably gets these emails every week: “Can I use your text?” I learned about Lydia Davis because I heard Kate Soper’s piece, and I thought, “Oh my God, this writing’s amazing.”  But maybe since I had my moment with that already through music, it was less interesting to me to try to do the thing again.

FJO:  Then why Italo Calvino?

CC:  Yeah, he’s well known.

FJO:  Very well known, definitely not a discovery. And yet his writing inspired several pieces of yours.  Most obviously Invisible Cities, your weird, wacky, magical, wonderful piece that’s more than a setting of this pre-existing thing, but which was obviously inspired by it.

CC:  Calvino to me is so inspiring as an artist, and I think he was the person who helped me discover how to become the composer I wanted to be, much more than any composer. He’s such an amazing writer obviously, and I read quite a few of his books.  Some were funny or cute. Well, not cute.  That’s the wrong word.  He would have hated that.  But they have a lightness to them.  He loved the word lightness and talked about the word lightness a lot.  Invisible Cities had that, but it also had a little bit more depth and a little more emotion to me.  It read very emotional to me.  I don’t know if others read it that way.

I cared and still do care about structure so much—interesting, complicated structures. But I’m also interested in writing music that hopefully people think is beautiful and sensuous and lyrical. So I read that book, and I thought to myself that this is a writer who can accomplish lyricism and also complexity, but not how complexity has come to mean unpleasant somehow.  Not that people actually think that, but I think there is this sort of subconscious subtext with difficulty.

“To me, Calvino’s complicated and complex, but he’s not difficult.”

To me, Calvino’s not difficult. He’s complicated and complex, but he’s not difficult.  To me, he’s effortless, and giving the illusion of effortlessness was so important.  So I read his books, and I’m like, “This is what I want to do as a composer.”  It was such a moment for me.  And so I definitely wanted to make things out of his amazing works.

FJO:  So the idea of doing a piece that’s experiential, that sort of breaks the fourth wall and takes place in multiple locations, breaking the space-time-proscenium continuum of how we experience music theater pieces, where in the process of creating this did that become how it was going to be done?

CC:  Well, I was writing this piece obviously through grad school, and I didn’t really know what it was going to be in a sense.  I knew that the text was sort of the anchor. The text is all based directly from the novel. But I knew that this was not an opera in the sense of we’re going to go ahead and tell a traditional story.  This was a piece that is a meditation.  And I knew it needed something very, very unconventional.

I had applied for the VOX Workshop at New York City Opera, and it was accepted into it. That’s where I met Yuval Sharon and we became friends. We did this workshop, and that was the culmination of me realizing what it was. It was originally scored for orchestra and it had all these opera singers, and it was just not right.  I knew there was something there and I kept going with it, but I knew that the version of the piece was not the right version at all.  So I pared it down to a chamber ensemble—a sort of unusual chamber ensemble in the Reich tradition of having multiple pianos and percussion in the group.  And it sort of kept going and I still didn’t know what it was. I had this workshop at this thing called the Yale Institute of Music Theater; Beth Morrison was producing it at the time.  She literally said something along the lines of “I don’t know who would be the right person to direct this.  It would have to be someone with a crazy, out-there vision.  Maybe someone like Yuval.”  It was really funny.  I’m like, “Well, that would be great.” And so when he moved out to L.A. and he called me, I had come to the conclusion that this should not be a staged piece.  It should have people all over the place, all over throughout the hall.  It was going to be amplified, and it was going to have movement, and that’s all I had at that point.

So Yuval comes to me with this idea, “What if we do it in the train station with movement and using headphones so you can hear everything perfectly, but the experience is flexible?” I think I said yes immediately.  Then I can do all the sound design stuff too, and I can have all sorts of crazy amplification ideas.  That’s where my work was going already anyway.  The idea of the train station was entirely his, but it seemed perfect. I think it was actually sort of at the behest of Chad Smith from the L.A. Phil.  They had done the overture and Yuval was sort of casting around what to do, and Chad suggested what about this piece.  And Yuval’s like, “Of course, I know this piece from VOX.” And it was kismet!

FJO:  You mentioned sound design, which is interesting given your years of avoiding listening to pop music. After all, so much of what pop music recordings are about is their sound design, whereas people whose work comes out of the so-called classical music tradition rarely think in terms of shaping recorded sound objects and bringing certain things out in the studio.

CC:  Something that was revelatory for me was that when I went to graduate school, I was randomly assigned to work in the recording studio.  I didn’t really know anything about electronic music at that time.  I got a C in electronic music in college.  It was my only C and was sort of a badge of honor.  But then I started working with microphones, and that was the moment where everything started to spill back into my life in terms of technology. I got really interested in technology and sound design.  I realized that I sort of hate how classical music has been recorded, one mic 50 feet away from the orchestra, no EQ-ing, incredibly loud and incredibly quiet at different times.  That was the moment where we started doing Invisible Cities. So I’m working with Nick Tipp, our sound designer, and I was like, “Oh, let’s compress this and let’s have these really quiet moments be really loud.” There’s whispering, and the whispering’s super loud.  I got to make a studio album live, and it was incredible to me.  Actually learning how to do it was incredibly important.

FJO:  That surrealness of loud whispers mirrors the surrealism of Calvino.

CC:  Absolutely.

FJO:  So you were able to put your own stamp on it, but that text is what guided you.

CC:  Yeah, 100 percent.  Everything in the opera comes out of the book.

FJO:  So what happens when you set a writer who is completely different, like Tao Lin, whose poems are the basis for your song cycle I Will Learn To Love A Person? Or maybe in your opinion, he’s not so different.

CC:  He could not be more different.

FJO:  Yet his words speak to you as well, and they’ve brought out music from you.

CC:  I spent more or less three years in and out working on that opera. My identity was formed around it as an artist and as a composer. So for the next vocal piece—it was literally the next, it was the first vocal piece I wrote after that—I was like, “Okay, I love Calvino; he’s a genius.  But I need the complete opposite now.”  Calvino is semi-contemporary; the book is from the ‘70s. But I wanted to do something written, like, last year.  I’ve noticed that whenever composers set texts, they always tend to refer to something much older. If they’re not setting Auden or Whitman, they’re setting 20 or 30-year old things.  I didn’t really know anything about contemporary poetry, and so I sort of dove in.

I had this friend of a friend who was a poet.  She’d written this article about this movement called the New Sincerity.  I think the term New Sincerity came out of this David Foster Wallace article called “E Unibus Pluram.” It’s the opposite of E pluribus unum. He was talking about irony and postmodernism and how television absorbs it. I think he was very ahead of his time in that regard.  I see the internet as the same thing.  TV was not a big deal compared to how crazy the internet is in our culture. The final rebels will be ones who dare “single-entendre principles.” I love that quote so much.  That was where that movement sort of took its “Invictus” from.  I was very interested in that movement, because it was something I was really relating to at that time in my life, writing music that does not have a sheen of a postmodern irony around it.  I wanted something that was very direct.  So my friend Jen Moore wrote an article on two poets, Matt Hart and Tao Lin.  And I saw these Tao Lin poems and I was like, “Oh, this is perfect.”  They’re basically song lyrics.  Sometimes people struggle with the tone of his poems, which is very hard to pin down—sort of ironic, but also funny, sweet, and sensitive. There is this one poem, which I love and I almost set. I decided against it. The last line is “I AM FUCKED,” existentially in capital letters, 43 times in a row. I loved how Tao Lin was just really direct and really honest.  I loved how he exposed himself in those poems emotionally, so I thought isn’t this kind of wildly rebellious to have a song cycle where people actually discuss deep-seated fears and pains, but not in a sophisticated way.  Just like, “I am this.”

FJO:  I know his novels more than I know his poetry.  His novels are so twisted.

CC:  Oh, like Eeeee Eee Eeee

FJO:  My favorite one is Richard Yates, which appropriates names of teen stars for its main characters but isn’t actually about them.

CC:  Oh yeah, Dakota Fanning.

FJO:  And Haley Joel Osment. The whole novel is basically a G-chat between these two characters whose names seem to just be there for the sake of irony. Because of that, I find it somewhat incongruous that he gets lumped in with the New Sincerity. To me his novels seem completely ironic.

CC:  I would say that that’s somewhat true.  Taipei, his most recent book, is, I think, the closest to being emotionally direct.

FJO:  I haven’t read that one yet.

CC:  It’s super good.

A paperback copy of Tao Lin's novel Taipei is on the top of a stack of books.

FJO:  But another one of his novels, Shoplifting from American Apparel, is also super ironic.

CC:  Yeah, definitely, I think he’s still grappling with irony. I think everyone’s grappling with irony all the time.  The poems are the most direct thing he wound up writing.

FJO:  You mentioned David Foster Wallace and I see Infinite Jest on your bookshelf.  That one’s hard to hide because it’s so huge.  But you’ve not set him.

CC:  There are tons of writers I love who I did not set.  They tend to be verbose.  And they feel complete.  I don’t think there’s anything you can do.  The thing about writers that I set is that there has to be room in the text for more.  Another poet who I feel that way about, and he’s one of my favorite poets, is Frank O’Hara.  I don’t know if there’s anything you could do to a Frank O’Hara poem that would make it any better than what it is.  It feels complete; everything’s there.  So I wouldn’t want to set his poetry, even though I love it, you know.

“There are tons of writers I love who I did not set. They tend to be verbose. And they feel complete.”

FJO:  And besides, if you were setting David Foster Wallace, what would be the musical equivalent of a footnote?

CC:  We’ll come back to this later!

FJO:  Literature has obviously been key to the pieces of yours that have texts, but it has even informed many of your completely instrumental pieces like High Windows, the gorgeous string orchestra piece you wrote for the String Orchestra of Brooklyn, which you named after a line from a poem by Philip Larkin.  How did that play out?  Did you read the poem and decide that, instead of setting it, it would influence you musically in other ways?

CC:  Usually there’s some kind of synchrony.  Titles come at all different points in the composition process.  Sometimes it’s like, “Bam, that’s it.” Then sometimes it’s like, “This was what I was doing.”  That is often an equally powerful thing to me. And sometimes you’re just desperate and you really need a title.  Usually it’s pretty rare that I have a really clear premeditated notion of what I’m doing when I’m starting a piece.  Usually it finds itself over the course of a piece.

FJO:  So how did the title come about for Will There Be Singing, particularly leaving off the question mark?

CC:  That was really funny.  I remember I got a number of questions about that. Is there a question mark?  And I’m like, no.  “Will there be singing.”  Not, “will there be singing?”

FJO:  But that also comes from somewhere—from Bertolt Brecht, though obviously in translation. Although he’s the guy who also came up with the line “Is here no telephone?” in English for Mahagonny.

CC:  And “Oh, don’t ask why.”

FJO:  I think there’s a question mark in Brecht’s original.

CC:  Yeah, and I think the Brecht line is actually: “Will there also be singing?”

FJO: It’s interesting that the source was Brecht, since it’s essentially making a political statement about our time. There’s a famous anecdote about Brecht in East Germany after the war.  He’d written plays that were censored and couldn’t be staged, and someone from the West interviewed him about it and asked, “Since you’ve always been a force for freedom of expression, how can you live in this society where they’re censoring your work? “ And he said, “Well, that means they read it!”

CC:  Oh, Brecht.  So clever.

FJO: So what’s the actual story with the title?

CC:  That one was pretty clear from the beginning.  I started writing that piece in January 2017 when the world felt like it had fallen apart.  I knew that quote and I emailed it to Martin Bresnick the day after the election.  This has to be the mantra.  It was really funny because this is also how I know Yuval and I are artistic soul mates: he was obsessed with the same quote, and sent out something about that quote in a newsletter with The Industry.  So we’re clearly in the same zone.

The piece starts with chords that are me feeling anxiety about the world.  They are just harsh chords and it goes from there.  But it doesn’t feel like a political statement because I don’t know if I’m interested in making political statements. If you haven’t made your mind up about Donald Trump, I don’t think my orchestra piece is going to convince you one way or the other.  It’s more just a reflection of the times that we’re in and who I am as a person at this moment.

FJO:  It’s now almost nine months later and the world still feels like it’s falling apart, but it does seem like there will still be singing no matter what.

“Verbosity is ontology for me.”

CC:  Seems that way.  I’m starting this new piece right now. It’s always so funny what comes out of texts.  The most pretentious way I ever put it is that verbosity is ontology for me. It has to be heard as words, and thought of that way, for it to exist. There’s an inscription that was an epigraph to another book of poems by this writer John K. Samson by this guy named Tom Wayman: “Weak things have power.” Democracy can only exist when we are weak, when we are fragile, because then we want it to be democracy and not autocracy.  It’s something I’ve been really connected with lately. What is the opposite of Donald Trump?  It’s someone who admits their fragility.  This is a person who can’t ever admit fragility, and the response to any kind of thing is anger.  In a sense, while I deeply empathize with the anger of so many people in the world right now against him, admitting your own fragility as a person is the political statement that I want to make.  I’m a flawed person, and I want to express it. I have fears. I have anxieties and I have pain.  That, to me, is the way forward.  The way forward is not people screaming at each other.

Christopher Cerrone talking in his apartment.

From the Machine: Conversations with Dan Tepfer, Kenneth Kirschner, Florent Ghys, and Jeff Snyder

Over the last three weeks, we’ve looked at various techniques for composing and performing acoustic music using computer algorithms, including realtime networked notation and algorithmic approaches to harmony and orchestration.

Their methods differ substantially, from the pre-compositional use of algorithms, to the realtime generation of graphic or traditionally notated scores, to the use of digitally controlled acoustic instruments and musical data visualizations.

This week, I’d like to open up the conversation to include four composer/performers who are also investigating the use of computers to generate, manipulate, process, and display musical data for acoustic ensembles. While all four share a similar enthusiasm for the compositional and performance possibilities offered by algorithms, their methods differ substantially, from the pre-compositional use of algorithms, to the realtime generation of graphic or traditionally notated scores, to the use of digitally controlled acoustic instruments and musical data visualizations.

Pianist/composer Dan Tepfer, known both for his expressive jazz playing and his interpretations of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, has recently unveiled his Acoustic Informatics project for solo piano. In it, Tepfer uses realtime algorithms to analyze and respond to note data played on his Yahama Disklavier piano, providing him with an interactive framework for improvisation. Through the use of musical delays, transpositions, inversions, and textural elaborations of his input material, he is able to achieve composite pianistic textures that would be impossible to realize with human performer or computer alone.

Composer Kenneth Kirschner has been using computers to compose electronic music since the 1990s, manipulating harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic data algorithmically to create long-form works from minimal musical source material. Several of his electronic works have recently been adapted to the acoustic domain, raising questions of musical notation for pieces composed without reference to fixed rhythmic or pitch grids.

Florent Ghys is a bassist and composer who works in both traditional and computer-mediated compositional contexts. His current research is focused on algorithmic composition and the use of realtime notation to create interactive works for acoustic ensembles.

Jeff Snyder is a composer, improviser, and instrument designer who creates algorithmic works that combine animated graphic notation and pre-written materials for mixed ensembles. He is also the director of the Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk), providing him with a wealth of experience in computer networking for live performance.

THE ROLE OF ALGORITHMS

JOSEPH BRANCIFORTE: How would you describe the role that computer algorithms play in your compositional process?

KENNETH KIRSCHNER: I come at this as someone who was originally an electronics guy, with everything done on synthesizers and realized electronically. So this computer-driven approach is just the way I work, the way I think compositionally. I’ve never written things with pencil and paper. I work in a very non-linear way, where I’m taking patterns from the computer and juxtaposing them with other patterns—stretching them, twisting them, transposing them.

I have to have that feedback loop where I can try it, see what happens, then try it again and see what happens.

A lot of my obsession over the last few years has been working with very reduced scales, often four adjacent semitones, and building patterns from that very restricted space. I find that as you transpose those and layer them over one another, you get a lot of very interesting emergent patterns. In principle, you could write that all out linearly, but I can’t imagine how I would do it, because so much of my process is experimentation and chance and randomness: you take a bunch of these patterns, slow this one down, transpose this one, layer this over that. It’s very fluid, very quick to do electronically—but hopelessly tedious to do if you’re composing in a linear, notated way. My whole development as a composer presupposes that realtime responsiveness. I have to have that feedback loop where I can try it, see what happens, then try it again and see what happens.

FLORENT GHYS: That’s very interesting, because we don’t come from the same background, but we ended up with algorithmic music for the same reasons. I come from a background of traditional acoustic music composition: writing down parts and scores for musicians. But I realized that the processes I was using as I was composing—canons, isorhythms, transpositions, stretching out durations—were very easy to reproduce in Max/MSP. I began by working with virtual instruments on the computer, fake sounds that gave me an idea of what it might sound like with a real ensemble. It was fascinating to listen to the results of an algorithmic process in real time—changing parameters such as density of rhythm, rhythmic subdivision, transposition, canonic relationships—and being able to hear the results on the spot. Even something as simple as isorhythm—a cell of pitches and a cell of rhythms that don’t overlap—writing something like that down takes some time. With an algorithmic process, I can go much faster and generate tons of material in a few minutes, rather than spending hours in Sibelius just to try out an idea.

DAN TEPFER: I’ve used algorithms in a number of ways. I’ve done stuff where I’ve generated data algorithmically that then gets turned into a relatively traditional composition, with notes on a page that people play. I’ve also experimented with live notation, which is more improvisationally based, but with some algorithmic processing in there too. And then there’s the stuff I’ve been doing recently with the Disklavier, where the algorithms react to what I’m improvising on the piano in real time.

With the live notation stuff, I’ve done it with string quartet, or wind quartet, and me on piano. I did one show where it was both of them together, and I could switch back and forth or have them both playing. I have a controller keyboard on top of the piano, and I can play stuff that gets immediately sent out as staff notation. There’s some processing where it’ll adapt what I’m playing to the ranges of each instrument, doubling notes or widening the register. Then there are musical controls where I can save a chord and transform it in certain ways just by pushing a button. At the rhythmic level, there’s usually a beat happening and this stuff is floating above it, a bit of an improvisational element where the musicians can sink into the groove.

JEFF SNYDER: I’ve got two main pieces that I would say fall into this category of realtime notation. The first is called Ice Blocks, which combines graphic notation with standard notation for open instrumentation. And then another one called Opposite Earth, which uses planets’ orbits as a graphic notation device. There are ten concentric circles, each one assigned to a performer. Each musician is a particular planet on an orbit around the sun. As the conductor, I can introduce vertical or horizontal lines from the center. The idea is that when your planet crosses one of those lines, you play a note. I have control over how fast each planet’s orbit is, as well as the color of the lines, which refer to pitch materials. There are five different colors that end up being five different chords. So it sets up a giant polyrhythm based on the different orbits and speeds.

Each planet can also rotate within itself, with additional notches functioning the same way as the lines do, although using unpitched sounds. That basically gives me another rhythmic divider to play with. I can remove or add orbits to thin out the texture or add density. It’s interesting because the piece allows me to do really complicated polyrhythms that couldn’t be executed as accurately with traditional notation. You might be playing sixteen against another person’s fifteen, creating this really complicated rhythmic relationship that will suddenly line up again. This makes it really easy: all you’re doing is watching a line, and each time you cross, you make a sound. You can do it even if the players aren’t particularly skilled.

PERFORMANCE PRACTICE AND USER EXPERIENCE

JB: I’m really interested in this question of performer “user experience” when working with realtime notational formats. What were the performers’ responses to dealing with your dynamic graphic notation, Jeff?

JS: The piece was played by PLOrk, which is a mix of composition grad students, who are up for anything, and then undergrads who are a mix of engineers and other majors. They get excited about the fact that it’s something different. But I’ve worked with more conservative ensembles and had performers say, “I’ve worked for so many years at my instrument, and you’re wasting my skills.” So people can have that response as well when you move away from standard notation.

With PLOrk, I was able to workshop the piece over a few months and we would discover together: “Is this going to be possible? Is this going to be too difficult? Is this going to be way too easy?” I could experiment with adding staff notation or using different colors to represent musical information. For me, it was super valuable because I wasn’t always able to gauge how effective certain things would be in advance. None of this stuff has a history, so it’s hard to know whether people can do certain things in a performance situation. Can people pay attention to different gradations of blue on a ring while they’re also trying to perform rhythms? I just have to test it, and then they’ll tell me whether it works.

JB: There’s always that initial hurdle to overcome with new notational formats. I’ve been using traditional notation in my recent work, albeit a scrolling version where performers can only see two measures at a time, but I remember a similar adjustment period during the first rehearsal with a string quartet. We set everyone up, got the Ethernet connections between laptops working, tested the latencies—everything looked good. But for the first fifteen minutes of rehearsal, the performers were all complaining that the software wasn’t working properly. “It just feels like it’s off. Maybe it’s not synced or something?” So I did another latency check, and everything was fine, under two milliseconds of latency.

DT: So the humans weren’t synced!

It’s just a new skill. Once performers get used to it, then they don’t want it to change.

JB: I reassured them that everything was working properly, and we kept rehearsing. After about 30 minutes, they started getting the hang of the scrolling notation—things were beginning to sound much more comfortable. So after rehearsal, as everyone was packing up, I said, “Is there anything you’d like me to change in the software, anything that would make the notation easier to deal with?” And they all said, “No! Don’t change a thing. It’s perfect!” And then I realized: it’s just a new skill. Once performers get used to it, then they don’t want it to change. They just need to know that it works and that they can rely on it.

But beyond the mechanics of using the software, I sometimes wonder whether it’s harder for a performer to commit to material that they haven’t seen or rehearsed in advance. They have no idea what’s coming next and it’s difficult to gain any sense of the piece as a whole.

FG: I think you’re touching on something related to musicianship. In classical music, the more you play a piece, the better you’re going to understand the music, the more you’re going to be able to make it speak and refine the dynamics. And within the context of the ensemble, you’ll understand the connections and coordination between all the musicians. So the realtime notation is going to be a new skill for musicians to learn—to be able to adapt to material that’s changing. It’s also the job of the composer to create a range of possibilities that musicians can understand. For instance, the piece uses certain types of rhythms or scales or motives; a performer might not know exactly what it’s going to be, but they understand the range of things that can happen.

KK: They need to be able to commit to the concept of the piece, rather than any of the specific details of the narrative.

DT: I think a key word here is culture. You’re seeing a microcosm of that when, in the time span of a rehearsal, you see a culture develop. At the beginning of the rehearsal, musicians are like, “It’s not working,” and then after a certain time they’re like, “Oh, it is working.” Culture is about expectations about what is possible. And if you develop something in the context of a group, where it is understood to be fully possible, then people will figure out ways to do it. It might start with a smaller community of musicians who can do it at first. But I think we’re probably not far from the time when realtime sight-reading will just be a basic skill. That’s going to be a real paradigm shift.

I think we’re probably not far from the time when realtime sight-reading will just be a basic skill. That’s going to be a real paradigm shift.

JB: How do you deal with the question of notational pre-display in your live notation work, Dan?

DT: It happens pretty much in real time.

JB: So you play a chord on your MIDI keyboard and it gets sent out to the musicians one measure at a time?

DT: They’re just seeing one note. There’s no rhythmic information. The real difficulty is that I have to send the material out about a second early in order to have any chance of maintaining consistency in the harmonic rhythm. It takes some getting used to, but it’s surprisingly intuitive after a while.

JS: That’s something I wasn’t able to address in the planets piece by the time of the performance: there was no note preparation for them, so lines just show up. I told the performers, “Don’t worry if a line appears right before your planet is about to cross it. Just wait until the next time it comes around again.” But it still stressed them out. As performers, they’re worried about “missing a note,” especially because the audience could see the notation too. So perhaps in the next version I could do something where the lines slowly fade in to avoid that issue.

JB: I have to sometimes remind myself that the performers are part of the algorithm, too. As much as we want the expanded compositional possibilities that come from working with computers, I think all of us value the process of working with real musicians.

KK: With these recent acoustic adaptations of my pieces, it was a whole different experience hearing it played with an actual pianist and cellists. It was a different piece. And I thought, “There is something in here that I want to pursue further.” There’s just a level of nuance you’re getting, a level of pure interpretation that’s not going to come through in my electronic work. But the hope is that by composing within the electronic domain, I’m stumbling upon compositional approaches that one may not find writing linearly.

COMPUTER AS COMPOSITIONAL SURROGATE

JB: I want to discuss the use of the computer as a “compositional surrogate.” The premise is that instead of working out all of the details of a piece in advance, we allow the computer to make decisions on our behalf during performance, based on pre-defined rules or preferences. There’s an argument that outsourcing these decisions to the computer is an abdication of the fundamental responsibility of being a composer, the subjective process of selection. But I’ve begun to see algorithm design as a meta-compositional process: uncovering the principles that underlie my subjective preferences and then embedding them into the algorithmic architecture itself.

KK: Right. There’s a sense that when something works musically, there’s a reason for it. And what we’re trying to do is uncover those reasons; the hope is that some of those rules that are affecting our aesthetic judgment are able to be discovered. Once you begin to codify some of that, you can offload it and shift some of the compositional responsibility to the computer. The idea is to build indeterminate pieces that have a degree of intelligence and adaptation to them. But that requires us to understand what some of those underlying mechanisms are that make us say “this is good” or “this is bad.”

For me, something might sound good one day, and another day I might hate it. I don’t know if you’re ever going to find a “rule” that can explain that.

FG: I don’t know. I’m a little skeptical. For me, something might sound good one day, and another day I might hate it. I don’t know if you’re ever going to find a “rule” that can explain that; there are so many factors that go into musical perception.

JB: A dose of skepticism is probably warranted if we’re talking about machines being able to intervene in questions of aesthetics. But to me, the beauty of designing a composer-centric framework is that it allows you to change your preferences from day to day. You can re-bias a piece to conform to whatever sounds good to you in the moment: a different tempo, more density, a slightly different orchestration. I’m not sure that we even need to understand the nature of our preferences, or be able to formalize them into rules, in order to have the computer act as an effective surrogate. Economists have a concept called “revealed preference,” where instead of looking at what consumers say they want, you look at their purchasing habits. That kind of thing could be applied to algorithm design, where the algorithm learns what you like simply by keeping track of your responses to different material.

KK: I’ve had a similar thought when working on some of my indeterminate pieces—that you want a button for “thumbs up” or “thumbs down.” If you could record the aggregate of all those decisions, you could begin to map them to a parameter space that has a greater chance of giving you good outcomes. You could also have different profiles for a piece. For example, I could do my “composer’s version” that contains my preferences and builds the piece in a certain direction; then I could hand it off to you, hit reset, and have you create your own version of the piece.

FG: In a lot of the algorithms I’ve been designing lately, I have a “determinacy-to-randomness” parameter where I can morph from something I’ve pre-written, like a melody or a series of pitches, to a probabilistic set of pitches, to a completely random set of pitches. With the probabilities, I allow the computer to choose whatever it wants, but I tell it, “I’d like to have more Gs and G#s, but not too many Cs.” So, weighted probabilities. We know that the random number generator in Max/MSP, without any scaling or probabilities, sounds like crap.

KK: It needs constraints.

JB: Finding ways to constrain randomness—where it’s musically controlled, but you’re getting new results with every performance—that’s become a major compositional concern for me. As an algorithm grows from initial idea to a performance-ready patch, the parameters become more abstract and begin to more closely model how I hear music as a listener. At the deepest level of aesthetic perception, you have things like balance, long-range form, tension/resolution, and expectation. I think probabilistic controls are very good at dealing with balance, and maybe not as good with the others.

FG: Yeah, when you deal with algorithms you go to a higher level of thinking. I’ve done things where I have a pattern that I like, and I want the computer to generate something else like it. And then eventually I know I want it to transform into another pattern or texture. But the tiny details of how it gets from A to B don’t really matter that much. It’s more about thinking of the piece as a whole.

NETWORKED NOTATION

JB: Jeff, I wanted to ask you about something a little more technical: when dealing with live notation in PLOrk, are you using wired or wireless connections to the performers’ devices?

JS: I’ve done live notation with both wireless and wired connections. In any kind of networking situation, we look at that question on a case-by-case basis. If we’re going to do wired, it simplifies things because we can rely on reasonable timing. If we’re going to do wireless, we usually have issues of sync that we have to deal with. For a long time, our solution has been LANdini, which was developed by Jascha Narveson. Recently, Ableton Link came out and that simplifies things. So if you don’t need certain features that LANdini offers—if you just need click synchronization—then Link is the simpler solution. We’ve been doing that for anything in which we just need to pulse things and make sure that the pulses show up at the same time, like metronomes.

JB: In my notation system, there’s a cursor that steps through the score, acting as a visual metronome to keep the musicians in sync. So transfer speed is absolutely critical there to make sure there’s as little latency as possible between devices. I’ve been using wired Ethernet connections, which ensures good speed and reliability, but it quickly becomes a real mess on stage with all the cables. Not to mention the hundreds I’ve spent on Ethernet adapters! Perhaps the way to do it is to have Ableton Link handle the metronome and then use wireless TCP/IP to handle the notation messages.

JS: That’s what I was just about to suggest. With Link, you can actually get information about which beat number you’re on, it’s not just a raw pulse.

JB: Does it work well with changing time signatures?

JS: That’s a good question, I haven’t tested that. I have discovered that any tempo changes make it go nuts. It takes several seconds to get back on track when you do a tempo change. So it’s limited in that way. But there are other possibilities that open up when you get into wireless notation. Something I’ve really wanted to do is use wireless notation for spatialization and group dynamics. So say you had a really large ensemble and everybody is looking at their own iPhone display, which is giving them graphic information about their dynamics envelopes. You could make a sound move through an acoustic ensemble, the same way electronic composers do with multi-speaker arrays, but with a level of precision that couldn’t be achieved with hand gestures as a conductor. It’d be easily automated and would allow complex spatial patterns to be manipulated, activating different areas of the ensemble with different gestures. That’s definitely doable, technically speaking, but I haven’t really seen it done.

BRINGING THE COMPOSER ON STAGE

Do you think that having the composer on stage as a privileged type of performer is potentially in conflict with the performers’ ownership of the piece?

JB: With this emerging ability for the composer to manipulate a score in realtime, I wonder what the effects will be on performance culture. Do you think that having the composer on stage as a privileged type of performer is potentially in conflict with the performers’ ownership of the piece?

FG: Bringing the composer on stage changes the whole dynamic. Usually instrumentalists rule the stage; they have their own culture. Now you’re up there with them, and it totally changes the balance. “Whoa, he’s here, he’s doing stuff. Why is he changing my part?”

JB: Right, exactly. In one of my early realtime pieces, I mapped the faders of a MIDI controller to the individual dynamic markings of each member of the ensemble. This quickly got awkward in rehearsal when one of the violinists said half-jokingly, “It seems like I’m playing too loudly because my dynamic markings keep getting lower and lower.”

DT: It’s like Ligeti-style: you go down to twelve ps! [laughs]

JB: From that point, I became very self-conscious about changing anything. I suddenly became aware of this strange dynamic, where I’m in sole control of the direction of the piece but also sitting on stage alongside the musicians.

DT: You know, it’s interesting—come to think of it, in everything I’ve done with live notation, I’m performing as well. I think that makes a huge difference, because I can lead by example.

KK: And you’re also on stage and you’re invested as a performer. Whereas Joe is putting himself in this separate category—the puppet master!

FG: I wonder if it’s not also the perception of the instrumentalists in what they understand about what you’re doing. In Dan’s case, they totally get what he’s doing: he’s playing a chord, it’s getting distributed, they have their note. It’s pretty simple. With more complex algorithmic stuff, they might not get exactly what you’re doing. But then they see an obvious gesture like lowering a fader, and they think, “Oh, he’s doing that!”

DT: Something nice and simple to complain about!

FG: Otherwise, you’re doing this mysterious thing that they have no idea about, and then they just have to play the result.

KK: This is why I think it’s really important to start working with a consistent group of musicians, because we’ll get past this initial level and start to see how they feel about it in the longer term as they get used to it. And that might be the same response, or it might be a very different response.

DT: Has anyone taken that step of developing this kind of work over a couple of years with the same group of people? I think then you’ll see performers finding more and more ways of embracing the constraints and making it their own. That’s where it gets exciting.


Well, that about does it for our four-part series. I hope that these articles have initiated conversation with respect to the many possible uses of computer algorithms in acoustic music, and perhaps provided inspiration for future work. I truly believe that the coupling of computation and compositional imagination offers one of the most promising vistas for musical discovery in the coming years. I look forward to the music we will collectively create with it.

Comments and questions about the series are very much welcome, either via the comments section below or any of the following channels:

josephbranciforte.com // facebook // twitter // instagram

Resonating Filters: How to Listen and Be Heard

I have been writing all this month about how a live sound processing musician could develop an electroacoustic musicianship—and learn to predict musical outcomes for a given sound and process—just by learning a few things about acoustics/psychoacoustics and how some of these effects work. Coupled with some strategies about listening and playing, this can make it possible for the live processor to create a viable “instrument.” Even when processing the sounds of other musicians, it enables the live sound processing player to behave and react musically like any other musician in an ensemble and not be considered as merely creating effects. 

In the previous post, we talked about the relationship between delays, feedback, and filters.   We saw how the outcome of various configurations of delay times and feedback is directly affected by the characteristics of the sounds we put into them, whether they be short or long, resonant or noise.   We looked at pitch-shifts created by Doppler effect in Multi-tap delays and how one might use any of these things when creating live electroacoustic music using live sound processing techniques.  As I demonstrated, it’s about the overlap of sounds, about operating in a continuum from creating resonance to creating texture and rhythm.  It’s about being heard and learning to listen. Like all music. Like all instruments.

It’s about being heard and learning to listen. Like all music. Like all instruments.

To finish out this month of posts about live sound processing, I will talk about a few more effects, and some strategies for using them.  I hope this information will be useful to live sound processors (because we need to know how to be heard as a separate musical voice and also be flexible with our control especially in live sound processing).  This information should also be useful to instrumentalists processing their own sound (because it will speed the process of finding what sounds good on your instrument, will help with predicting outcomes of various sound processing techniques). It should especially helpful for preparing for improvisation, or any live processing project (without the luxury of a long time schedule), and so too I hope for composers who are considering writing for live processing, or creating improvisational setting for live electroacoustics.

Resonance / Filtering in More Detail

We saw in the last post how delays and filters are intertwined in their construction and use, existing in a continuum from short delays to long delays, producing rhythm, texture, and resonance depending on the length of the source audio events being processed, and the length of the delays (as well as feedback).

A special case is that of a very short delay (1-30ms) when combined with lots of feedback (90% or more).  The sound circulates so fast through the delay that it creates resonance at the speed of the circulation, creating clear pitches we can count on.

The effect is heard best with a transient (a very short sound such as a hand clap, vocal fricatives “t” “k”, or a snare drum hit).   For instance, if I have a 1ms delay and lots of feedback and input a short transient sound, we will hear a ringing at 1000Hz.   This is how fast that sample has been going through the delay (1000 times per second).  This is roughly the same pitch as “B” on the piano (a little sharp).  Interestingly, if we change the delay to 2ms, the pitch heard will be 500Hz (also “B” but an octave lower), 3ms yields “E” (333Hz), 4ms yields another “B” (250Hz), and 5ms a “G” (200Hz), and so on in kind of upside down overtone series.

Karplus-Strong Algorithm / Periodicity Pitch

A very short delay combined with high feedback resembles physical modeling synthesis techniques, which are very effective for simulating plucked string and drum sounds.  One such method, the Karplus-Strong Algorithm, consists of a recirculating delay line with a filter in its feedback loop.  The delay line is filled with samples of noise.  As the samples recirculate through the filter in the feedback loop, the samples that are passed through the delay line create a “periodic sample pattern” which is directly related to how many samples there are.  Even though the input signal is pure noise, the algorithm creates a complex sound with pitch content that is related to the length of the delay. “Periodicity pitch” has been well studied in the field of psychoacoustics, and it is known that even white noise, if played with a delayed copy of itself, will have pitch. This is true even if it is sent separately to each ear. The low pass filter in the feedback loop robs the noise of a little of its high frequency components at each pass through the circuit, replicating the acoustical properties of a plucked string or drum.

If we set up a very short delay and use lots of feedback, and input any short burst of sound—a transient, click, or vocal fricative—we can get a similar effect of a plucking sound or a resonant click.  If we input a longer sound at the same frequency as what the delay is producing (or at multiples of that frequency), then those overtones will be accentuated, in the same way some tones are louder when we sing in the shower, because they are being reinforced.   The length of the delay determines the pitch and the feedback amount (and any filter we use in the feedback loop determines the sustain and length of the note).

Filtering & Filter Types

Besides any types of resonance we might create using short delays, there are also many kinds of audio filters we might use for any number of applications including live sound processing: Low Pass Filters, High Pass Filters, etc.

A diagram of various filter types.

But by far the most useful tools for creating a musical instrument out of live processing are resonant filters, and specifically the BandPass and Comb filters, so let’s just focus on those. When filters have sharp cutoffs they also will boost certain frequencies near their cutoff points to be louder than the input. This added resonance results from using sharp cutoffs.  BandPass filters allow us to “zoom” in on one region of a sounds spectrum and reject the rest.  Comb filters, created when a delayed copy of a sound is added to itself, results in many evenly spaced regions (“teeth”) of the sound being cancelled out, and creating a characteristic sound.

The most useful tools for creating a musical instrument out of live processing are resonant filters.

The primary elements of a BandPass filter that we would want to control would be center frequency, bandwidth, and Filter Q (which is defined as center frequency divided by bandwidth, but which we can just consider to be how narrow or “sharp” the peak is or how resonant it is).    When the “Q” is high (very resonant), we can make use of this property to create or underscore certain overtones in a sound that we want to bring out or to experiment with.

Phasing / Flanging / Chorus: These are all filtering-type effects, using very short and automatically varying delay times.  A phase-shifter delays the sound by less than one cycle (cancelling out some frequencies through the overlap and producing a non-uniform, but comb-like filter). A flanger, which sounds a bit more extreme, uses delays around 5-25ms, producing a more uniform comb filter (evenly spaced peaks and troughs in the spectrum). It is named after the original practice of audio engineers who would press down on one reel (flange) of an analog tape deck, slowing it down slightly as it played in nearly sync with an identical copy of the audio on a second tape deck.  Chorus, uses even longer delay times and multiple copies of a sound at longer delay times.

A tutorial on Phasing Flanging and Chorus

For my purposes, as a live processor trying to create an independent voice in an improvisation, I find these three effects most useful if I treat them the same as filters, except that since they are built on delays I can change, there might be the possibility to increase or decrease delay times and get a Doppler effect, too, or play with feedback levels to accentuate certain tones.

I use distortion the same way I would use a filter—as a non-temporal transformation.

DistortionFrom my perspective, whatever methods are used to get distortion add and subtract overtones from our sound, so for my live processing purposes, I use them the same way I would use filters—as non-temporal transformations. Below is a gorgeous example of distortion, not used on a guitar. The only instruction in the score for the electronics is to gradually bring up the distortion in one long crescendo.  I ran the electronics for the piece a few times in the ‘90s for cellist Maya Beiser, and got to experience how strongly the overtones pop out because of the distortion pedal, and move around nearly on their own.

Michael Gordon Industry

Pitch-Shift / Playback Speed Changes / Reversing Sounds

I once heard composer and electronic musician, Nic Collins say that to make experimental music one need only “play it slow, play it backwards.” Referring to pre-recorded sounds, these are certainly time-honored electroacoustic approaches borne out of a time when only tape recorders, microphones, and a few oscillators were used to make electronic music masterpieces.

For live processing of sound, pitch-shift and/or time-stretch continue to be simple and valuable processes.  Time compression and pitch-shift are connected by physics; sounds played back slower also are correspondingly lower in pitch and when played back faster are higher in pitch. (With analog tape, or a turntable, if you play a sound back at twice the speed, it plays back an octave higher because the soundwaves are playing back twice as fast, so it doubles the frequency.)

The relationship between speed of playback and time-stretch was decoupled in mid-‘90s.

This relationship between speed of playback and time-stretch was decoupled in mid-‘90s with faster computers and realtime spectral analysis, and other methods, making it possible to more easily do one without the other.  It is also now the norm. In much of the commercial music software my students use, it is possible to slow down a sound and not change its pitch (certainly more useful for changing tempo in a song with pre-recorded acoustic drums), and being able to pitch-shift or Autotune a voice without changing its speed is also a very useful tool for commercial production.  Each of these decoupled programs/methods (with names like “Warp”, “Flex”, etc.) are sometimes based on granular synthesis or phase vocoders, which each add their own sonic residue (essentially errors or noises endemic to the method when using extreme parameter settings).  Sometimes these mistakes, noise, and glitch sounds are useful and fun to work with, too.

An example of making glitch music with Ableton’s Warp mode (their pitch-shift with no time-compression/expansion mode).

Some great work by Philip White and Ted Hearne using Autotune gone wild on their record R We Who R We

Justin Bieber 800% slower (using PaulStretch extreme sound stretch) is a favorite of mine, but trying to use a method like this for a performance (even if it were possible in real-time) might be a bit unwieldly and make for a very long performance, or very few notes performed. Perhaps we could just treat this like a “freeze” delay function for our purposes in this discussion. Nevertheless, I want to focus here on old-school, time-domain, interconnected pitch-shift and playback speed changes which are still valuable tools.

I am quite surprised at how many of my current students have never tried slowing down the playback of a sound in realtime.  It’s not easy to do with their software in realtime, and some have never had access to a variable speed tape recorder or a turntable, and so they are shockingly unfamiliar with this basic way of working. Thankfully there are some great apps that can be used to do this and, with a little poking around, it’s also possible to do using most basic music software.

A Max patch demo of changing playback speeds and reversing various kinds of sound.

Some sounds sound nearly the same when reversed, some not.

There are very big differences in what happens when pitch-shifting various kinds of sounds (or changing speed or direction of playback).  The response of speech-like sounds (with lots of formants, pitch, and overtone changes within the sound) differs from what happens to string-like (plucked or bowed) or percussive sounds.  Some sound nearly the same when reversed, some not. It is a longer conversation to discuss global predictions about what the outcome of our process will be for every possible input sound (as we can more easily do with delays/filters/feedback) but here are a few generalizations.

Strings can be pitch-shifted up or down, and sound pretty good, bowed and especially plucked.  If the pitch-shift is done without time compression or expansion, then the attack will be slower, so it won’t “speak” quickly in the low end.  A vibrato might get noticeably slow or fast with pitch-changes.

Pitch-shifting a vocal sound up or down can create a much bigger and iconic change in the sound, personality, or even gender of the voice. Pitching a voice up we get the iconic (or annoying) sound of Alvin and the Chipmunks.

Pitch-shifting a voice down, we get slow slurry speech sounding like Lurch from the Addams Family, or what’s heard in all the DJ Screw’s chopped and screwed mixtapes (or even a gender change, as in John Oswald’s Plunderphonics Dolly Parton think piece from 1988).

John Oswald: Pretender (1988) featuring the voice of Dolly Parton

But if the goal is to create a separate voice in an improvisation, I would prefer to pitch-shift the sound, then also put it through a delay, with feedback. That way I can create sound loops of modulated arpeggios moving up and up and up (or down, or both) in a symmetrical movement using the original pitch interval difference (not just whole tone and diminished scales, but everything in between as well). Going up in pitch gets higher until it’s just shimmery (since overtones are gone as it nears the limits of the system).  Going down in pitch gets lower and the sound also gets slower. Rests and silences are slow, too. In digital systems, the noise may build up as some samples must be repeated to play back the sound at that speed.  These all can relate back to Hugh Le Caine’s early electroacoustic work Dripsody for variable speed tape recorder (1955) which, though based on a single sample of a water drop, makes prodigious use of ascending arpeggios created using only tape machines.

Hugh Le Caine: Dripsody (1955)

Which brings me to the final two inter-related topic of these posts—how to listen and how to be heard.

How to Listen

Acousmatic or Reduced listening – The classic discussion by Pierre Schaeffer (and in the writings of Michel Chion), is where I start with every group of students in my Electronic Music Performance classes. We need to be able to hear the sounds we are working on for their abstracted essences.  This is in sharp contrast to the normal listening we do every day, which he called causal listening (what is the sound source?) and semantic listening (what does the sound mean?).

We need to be able to hear the sounds we are working on for their abstracted essences.

We learn to describe sounds in terms of their pitch (frequency), volume (amplitude), and tone/timbre (spectral qualities).  Very importantly, we also listen to how these parameters change over time and so we describe envelope, or what John Cage called the morphology of the sound, as well as describing a sound’s duration and rhythm.

Listening to sound acousmatically can directly impact how we can make ourselves be heard as creating a separate viable “voice” using live processing.  So much of what a live sound processor improvising in real-time needs to control is the ability to provide contrast with the source sound. This requires knowledge of what the delays and filters and processes will produce with many types of possible input sounds (what I have been doing here), a good technical setup that is easy to change quickly and reactively, and it requires active acousmatic listening, and good ear/hand coordination (as with every instrument) to find the needed sounds at the right moment. (And that just takes practice!)

All the suggestions I have made relate back to the basic properties we listen for in acousmatic listening. Keeping that in mind, let’s finish out this post with how to be heard, and specifically what works for me and my students, in the hope it will be useful for some of you as well.

How to be Heard
(How to Make a Playable Electronic Instrument Out of Live Processing)

Sound Decisions: Amplitude Envelope / Dynamics

A volume pedal, or some way to control volume quickly, is the first tool I need in my setup, and the first thing I teach my students. Though useful for maintaining the overall mix, more importantly it enables me to shape the volume and subtleties of my sound to be different than that of my source audio. Shaping the envelope/dynamics of live-processed sounds of other musicians is central to my performing, and an important part of the musical expression of my sound processing instrument.  If I cannot control volume, I cannot do anything else described in these blog posts.  I use volume pedals and other interfaces, as well as compressor/limiters for constant and close control over volume and dynamics.

Filtering / Pitch-Shift (non-temporal transformations)

To be heard when filtering or pitch-shifting with the intention of being perceived as a separate voice (not just an effect) requires displacement of some kind. Filtering or pitch-shifting, with no delay, transforms the sound and gesture being played, but it does not create a new gesture because both the original and the processed sound are taking up the same space either temporally or spectrally or both.  So, we need to change the sound in some way to create some contrast. We can do this by changing parameters of the filter (Q, bandwidth, or center frequency), or by delaying the sound with a long enough delay that we hear the processed version as a separate event.  That delay time should be more than 50-100ms, depending on the length of the sound event. Shorter delays would just give use more filtering if the sounds overlap.

  • When filtering or pitch shifting a sound we will not create a second voice unless we displace it in some way. Think of how video feedback works, the displacement makes it easier to perceive.
  • Temporal displacement: We can delay the sound we are filtering (same as filtering a sound we have just delayed). The delay time must be long enough so there is no overlap and it is heard as a separate event. Pitch-shifts that cause the sound to play back faster or slower might introduce enough temporal displacement on their own if the shift is extreme.
  • Timbral displacement: If we create a new timbral “image” that is so radically different from the original, we might get away with it.
  • Changes over time / modulations: If we do filter sweeps, or change the pitch-shift that contrast what the instrument is doing, we can be heard better.
  • Contrast: If the instrument is playing long tones, then I would choose to do a filter sweep, or change delay times, or pitch-shift. This draws attention to my sound as a separate electronically mediated sound.  This can be done manually (literally a fader), or as some automatic process that we turn on/off and then control in some way.

Below is an example of me processing Gordon Beeferman’s piano in an unreleased track. I am using very short delays with pitch-shift to create a hazy resonance of pitched delays and I make small changes to the delay and pitch-shift to contrast with what he does in terms of both timbre and rhythm.

Making it Easier to Play

Saved States/Presets

I cannot possibly play or control more than a few parameters at once.

Since I cannot possibly play or control more than a few parameters at once, and I am using a computer, I find it easier to create groupings of parameters, my own created “presets” or “states” that I can move between, and know I can get to them, as I want to.

Trajectories

Especially if I play solo, sometimes it is helpful if some things can happen on their own. (After all, I am using a computer!)  If possible, I will set up a very long trajectory or change in the sound, for instance, a filter-sweep, or slow automated changes to pitch shifts.   This frees up my hands and mind to do other things, and assures that not everything I am doing happens in 8-bar loops.

Rhythm

I cannot express strongly enough how important control over rhythm is to my entire concept. It is what makes my system feel like an instrument. My main modes of expression are timbre and rhythm.  Melody and direct expression of pitch using electronics are slightly less important to me, though the presence of pitches is never to be ignored. I choose rhythm as my common ground with other musicians. It is my best method to interact with them.

Nearly every part of my system allows me to create and change rhythms by altering delay times on-the-fly, or simply tapping/playing the desired pulse that will control my delay times or other processes.  Being able to directly control the pulse or play sounds has helped me put my body into my performance, and this too helps me feel more connected to my setup as an instrument.

Even using an LFO (Low Frequency Oscillator) to make tremolo effects and change volume automatically can also be interesting and I would consider as part of my rhythmic expression (and the speed of which I’d want to be able to control in while performing.)

I am strongly attracted to polyrhythms. (Not surprisingly, my family is Greek, and there was lots of dancing in odd time signatures growing up.) Because it is so prevalent in my music, I implemented a mechanism that allows me to tap delay times and rhythms that are complexly related to what is happening in the ensemble at that moment.  After pianist Borah Bergman once explained a system he thought I could use for training myself to perform complex rhythms, I created a Max patch to implement what he taught me, and I started using this polyrhythmic metronome to control the movement between any two states/presets quickly, creating polyrhythmic electroacoustics. Other rhythmic control sources I have used included Morse Code as rhythm, algorithmic processes, and a rhythm engine influenced by North Indian Classical Tala, and whatever else interests me for a particular project.

With rhythm, it is about locking it in.

With rhythm, it is about locking it in.  It’s important that I can control my delays and rhythm processes so I can have direct interaction with the rhythm of other musicians I am playing with (or that I make a deliberate choice not to do so).

Chuck, a performance I like very much by Shackle (Anne La Berge on flute & electronics and Robert van Heumen on laptop-instrument) which does many of the things I have written about here.

Feedback Smears / Beautiful Madness

Filters and delays are always interconnected and feedback is the connective tissue.

As we have been discussing, filters and delays are always interconnected and feedback is the connective tissue.  I make liberal use of feedback with Doppler shift (Interpolating delays) for weird pitch-shifts and I use feedback to create resonance (with short filters) or I use feedback to quickly build up of density or texture when using longer delays.  With pitch-shift, as mentioned above, feedback can create symmetrical arpeggiated movement of the original pitch difference.   And feedback is just fun because it’s, well, feedback!  It’s slightly dangerous and uncontrollable, and brings lovely surprises.  That being said, I use a compressor or have a kill-switch at hand so as not to blow any speakers or lose any friends.

David Behrman: Wave Train (1966)

A recording of me with Hans Tammen’s Third Eye Orchestra.  I am using only a phaser on my microphone and lots of feedback to create this sound, and try to keep the timing with the ensemble manually.

Here are some useful strategies for using live processing that I hope are useful

Are you processing yourself and playing solo?

Do any transformation, go to town!

The processes you choose can be used to augmenting your instrument, or create an independent voice.  You might want to create algorithms that can operate independently especially for solo performing so some things will happen on their own.

Are you playing in an ensemble, but processing your own sound?

What frequencies / frequency spaces are already being used?
Keep control over timbre and volume at all times to shape your sound.
Keep control of your overlap into other players’ sound (reverb, long delays, noise)

Keep control over the rhythm of your delays, and your reverb.  They are part of the music, too.

Are you processing someone else’s sound?

Make sure your transformations maintain the separate sonic identity of other players and your sound as I have been discussing in these posts.

Build an instrument/setup that is playable and flexible.

Create some algorithms that can operate independently

How to be heard / How to listen: redux

  • If my performer is playing something static, I feel free to make big changes to their sound.
  • If my live performer is playing something that is moving or changing (in pitch, timbre or rhythm), I choose to either create something static out of their sound, or I choose to move differently (contrast their movement moving faster or slower or in a different direction, or work with a different parameter). This can be as simple as slowing down my playback speed.
  • If my performer is playing long tones on the same pitch, or a dense repeating or legato pattern, or some kind of broad spectrum sound, I might filter it, or create glissando effects with pitch-shifts ramping up or down.
  • If my performer is playing short tones or staccato, I can use delays or live-sampling to create rhythmic figures.
  • If my performer is playing short bursts of noise, or sounds with sharp fast attacks, that is a great time to play super short delays with a lot of feedback, or crank up a resonant filter to ping it.
  • If they are playing harmonic/focused sound with clear overtones, I can mess it up with all kinds of transformations, but I’ll be sure to delay it / displace it.
When you are done, know when to turn it off.

In short and in closing: Listen to the sound.  What is static? Change it! Do something different.   And when you are done, know when to turn it off.

On “Third Eye” from Bitches Re-Brewed (2004) by Hans Tammen, I’m processing saxophonist Martin Speicher

Suggested further reading

Michel Chion (translated by Claudia Gorbman): Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (Columbia University Press, 1994)
(Particularly his chapter, “The Three Listening Modes” pp. 25–34)

Dave Hunter: “Effects Explained: Modulation—Phasing, Flanging, and Chorus” (Gibson website, 2008)

Dave Hunter: “Effects Explained: Overdrive, Distortion, and Fuzz” (Gibson website, 2008)

Vireo, My Tenacious Muse

Having grown up in a house full of composers, I hit my college years with a heavy dose of curiosity about what else lay out there besides new music. At Yale, I was not required to declare a major right away, and I took many courses in music while also falling slowly and deeply in love with the literature major. It was 1986, the heyday of American poststructuralism, and – unlike the composition faculty – the department’s pantheon of literary theory superstars was strikingly diverse: Harold Bloom (father of the Theory of Originality), Shoshana Felman (French-Israeli feminist deconstructionist), bell hooks a.k.a. Gloria Watkins (proto-postcolonial poet and theorist), and pioneer queer theorist (and nascent opera librettist) Wayne Koestenbaum. It was rigorous and nerdy and glamorous all at once. I was hooked.

Eventually, much to the chagrin of my music professors and some of my family members, I left the music major behind, thinking perhaps that I was turning my back on the “family business.” I embarked on a massive senior thesis in the literature major, with Wayne Koestenbaum as my advisor, entitled “Signed, Sealed and Delivered: Originality, closure and reproduction in the collaborative discourses of psychoanalytic hysteria and Surrealism.” Here is a bit of nostalgia: a paragraph from my dot-matrix prospectus in 1990 that articulates, for the first time, a phenomenon in Western cultural history that ended up haunting me for the next 27 years:

Vireo: PROSPECTUS

Here are some images used in my essay and in the research for Vireo:

Vireo-Salpetriere

Painting: Une leçon clinique à la Salpêtrière. Pierre Aristide André Brouillet, 1887
Dr. Jean Martin Charcot, Parisian neurologist, demonstrates the symptoms of hysteria for a roomful of male students. Charcot was Freud’s teacher.

Vireo-Hysteria

Le Cinquantenaire de l’hysterie
Louis Aragon, André Bréton
1928: The Surrealists celebrated “The 50th Birthday of Hysteria” as “the most important poetic discovery of the 19th century,” with images of Dr. Charcot’s patients

Little did I know that this discovery was the seed of what would later become my most ambitious compositional endeavor: Vireo: The Spiritual Biography of a Witch’s Accuser.

Stream Vireo: The Spiritual Biography of a Witch’s Accuser on-demand at KCET.org.

I got an A on the essay, I graduated, and I disappointed my literature professors (there is a pattern here perhaps) by not going on to graduate work in comp lit but moving to New York City to couch surf, audition for singing work, and write music. I became the vocalist in the Philip Glass Ensemble and went on the 1992 world tour of Einstein on the Beach. But all the while I also kept reading and reading, about these girls whose fits and starts were the subject of assiduous study by groups of ministers and magistrates in Colonial America, priests in 15th-century Italy, neurologists during the Great War. My essay had focused primarily on psychoanalysis and surrealism, but my fascination with these visionary women continued and the scope of my research expanded. My library grew. Today my bookcase dedicated to this area of inquiry is bursting with wide-ranging works from multiple disciplines and centuries:

Vireo BOOKS

In 1993 I was accepted into a two-week program at New Dramatists in NYC called the Composer-Librettist Studio. Four composers and four playwrights created new opera/music theater scenes in a compressed round-robin workshop environment, and brave singers sight-read these scene-lets into being. One of the playwrights was Erik Ehn, whose writing seemed to trigger something in me that made the music write itself. I was in love with his writing, and so I approached him at the end of the session and asked him, with sweaty cold palms, if he would consider working with me on something bigger. I felt like I was asking him to the prom.

We began corresponding, mostly by fax, and I started to send him hefty packages of source materials from my research into young visionary women and the male authority figures who used these girls’ visions and behaviors as proof of their own various theories.

Vireo: RESEARCH-FAX

In a rush of dot-matrix pages came the first draft of a libretto for a traditional opera about a young girl named Vireo: “A fourteen year old girl genius. Lives in the 16th century, born in the 19th, does forward roll into the 20th.”

Vireo: ERIK LETTER

Erik had integrated and assimilated this vastness of source material and created one girl. And on page 29 of this libretto draft, she sang an aria called “The Bat” that seized me immediately:

The Bat.

(Vireo alone in a dark cell, walking circuits. At first she bumps into chair, bed, bucket… but gradually grows accustomed.)

VIREO

In the morning in my house
Before it’s light
I can walk as if the light
Were shining through our
High windows

If in the dark a chair has moved
I can move around it
I know the room so well
There is no out of place

I am not out of place in a jail cell
I close my eyes and cross to make
A breakfast fire
I remember very well and
Solitary suits me
Decorative as a memory

(To the dark, speaking.)
How well do you remember? Are you going to stop?

Here is the very first sketch of music for Vireo from 1993. This eventually became the aria that opens Episode 9 – Alcatraz:

Vireo: BAT SKETCH

My own singing voice was still very young then, and when we went into the studio to record the few songs and arias that I created in that first year, I sang the title role myself, with a variety of archaic sampled instruments accompanying me. This was a cutting-edge MIDI demo in 1994!

The Bat 1994 Demo Recording

Erik and I revised. I kept composing. We went into the studio again. We created packets with synopsis, budgets, and cassette tape work samples (with baritone Gregory Purnhagen as The Doctor, a role he would develop further with terrifying precision 20 years later). I applied for every grant I could find. I sent packages to every opera company in the country, with a letter of support from the then-president of the board of the San Francisco Girls Chorus, of which I was an alumna. The SFGC had given me my first performances and my first two commissions, and they took special interest as I began work on this ambitious undertaking.

Vireo: SFGC LETTER

I followed up my mass-mailings with phone calls, leaving message after message. But I was just 25 years old and had almost no track record of professional performances of my music. A few kind souls offered bland encouragement; most simply ignored us. After a year and a half of dedicated partnership-seeking, it was clear that Vireo was not finding a home. It wasn’t her time.

I told Erik that I couldn’t foresee any project of this size happening before I built a professional life from the ground up. I felt we needed to shelve Vireo for the time being. He and I both undertook other creative endeavors, sometimes in collaboration on smaller-scale projects. Many years passed, during which time I wrote many, many hours of music – solo, chamber, orchestral, chamber opera, and music theater. Commissions and opportunities grew, and slowly the scale of my projects ramped up. I created massive public-space works for up to 800 professional, amateur, and student musicians. My community of collaborator colleagues grew and deepened: Kronos Quartet, American Contemporary Music Ensemble (ACME), Alarm Will Sound, cellist Joshua Roman, violinist Jennifer Koh – these musical friendships sparked with possibility.

In all this time, the two years of sketches I made for Vireo lay largely untouched. Correspondence, research, grant applications, and drafts were boxed up. Life took its twists and turns; the box and I moved from the Bronx to Queens, then from Queens to Manhattan. I never “mined” these musical materials for other works, but I always felt their presence at the back of my mind.

The internet came to be. Collaborations unfolded over email instead of fax. Research exploded online, rendering my weeks buried in the Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale a kind of nostalgic curiosity. In 2009 I made a simple setting of “The Bat” aria for solo English horn, for a series of 15 short works I wrote, each bearing a six-word title. I titled it “I Know This Room So Well.” Vireo was coming back into my consciousness. The remounting of Einstein on the Beach found director Charles Otte, who had been Robert Wilson’s assistant director in 1992, and me back on the road together again, talking about new opera, film, and new media on the bus. In 2013 I became the artistic director of the San Francisco Girls Chorus, bringing my artistic focus back to the voices of exceptional young women.

Meanwhile, I had started exploring new project ideas as artist-in-residence with the Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana. GCAC’s Chief Curator and ED John Spiak introduced me to a wide range of potential partners to help generate ideas for how I might make work that could catalyze new relationships in Southern California. He introduced me to Juan Devis, chief creative officer of KCET in LA, and Maria Lazarova, then director of the Classical Voice Conservatory of the Orange County School of the Arts, one of the premier public charter arts schools in the nation. A coin dropped in my mind – here was a school full of young women with superb classical voice training. Maybe Vireo was here! And KCET was at the forefront of arts streaming programming. What if we made a TV/internet series that was an opera? What if that opera was Vireo?!

Things moved forward very fast then. Kronos wanted the pilot. KCET signed on as a partner. Charlie Otte brought a visionary concept and design. The box came down from off of my top shelf, and I excavated.

Dragon-and-Girl

A page from “The Box”: from Draft 1 of the libretto, with notes scribbled during a collaborative meeting between Erik & me in 1994.

It was like seeing the work of a student – a student full of promise but also in way over her head – and yet this student was a younger me. All of the musical ideas felt familiar yet strangely distant. Major structural reworking of the libretto ensued, to embrace the new episodic format. I sifted through the original musical sketches and discovered that I had taken at least a cursory stab at melodic or harmonic material for slightly less than half of the opera. Sometimes I just kept the essence – a harmonic color, a certain phrase, a rhythmic figuration – and other times I started over.

Vireo: SCHOOL

I lifted this one phrase out of early sketches. From it grew the whole “Birth of Caroline” scene in Episode 6, in which you can hear this exact phrase in a whole different setting.

In a few cases, like “The Bat,” I revised only lightly and honored the original. I let the obsessive energy of my earlier self inhabit me, and I felt the power of 20+ years of experience serving to bring the piece to its deserved epic scale. And I let the prodigious gifts of young Rowen Sabala, just 16 years old and a junior at OCSA, breathe new life and inspiration into the role of Vireo.

I would never have dreamed, back in 1990 as a literature major at Yale, or in 1993 when I spent so many months back and forth between the fax machine and the piano, that Vireo would eventually find such complete fulfillment. Now, 350 cast members and musicians, 400+ participants including designers and crew, 12 episodes and over 250,000 viewers later, I feel a certain wonder at the delicate thread that kept the project alive in the back of my mind, in a box at the back of my closet, for so many years. Its protracted latency period gave Vireo the opportunity to feed off of many life lessons, relationships and maturations. Her metamorphosis is complete.

Kronos Quartet with composer Lisa Bielawa

Kronos Quartet with composer Lisa Bielawa
Photo by Remsen Allard