Tag: collaboration

Sebastian Currier: Reversible Time


A conversation at Currier’s Harlem apartment on September 6, 2012 — 2:00 p.m.
Video presentation by Molly Sheridan
Transcribed by Julia Lu

Considering how deeply composer Sebastian Currier has thought about time, and how important time is to music (according to him, “music is […] really nothing but time and air, literally”), his own relationship to time, at least in the chronological sense of music history, is somewhat ambiguous. While the myriad details that are crammed into his scores are reminiscent of the elaborate layers found in the Romantic music of the 19th century, and his detailed conceptualizations for pieces seem as thoroughly plotted as those of a post-War total serialist, Currier writes music that very much belongs to our own less certain times. It doesn’t fit neatly into any particular rubric and—in terms of both the ideas that inspire it as well as the actual way it sounds—it clearly relates to the here and now.

The sonic information overload that is contained in so many of Sebastian Currier’s pieces is perhaps attributable to a childhood spent completely immersed in the standard repertoire. His father was a concert violinist, and his mother Marilyn and brother Nathan are both active composers to this day. Young Sebastian and Nathan at first gravitated toward rock in their youth, but their heroes were Emerson, Lake & Palmer who, in turn, were inspired by composers like Mussorgsky. After a while, they were both much more attracted to the larger forms and listening modalities that were more clearly associated with classical music.

As much as I loved rock music, I felt this other thing had this breadth where you could go anywhere. It seemed to be so rich in terms of motion, character, whatever word you want to say. It was about that sort of travel. A pop song sets up a parameter, and it sort of is what it is. It sustains that and there are minor articulations. But with a piece of orchestra music, if you’re talking about Mahler or something like that, you get on here and you get let off over there and taken all around in between.

However, like most composers in the century since Mahler died, Currier carefully molds his music’s journey in a highly idiosyncratic way. In his particular case, that molding is very elaborate. It’s no surprise that during his formative years, his principal composition teachers were Milton Babbitt and George Perle, two of the towering figures of American twelve-tone music. Yet Currier’s sound world most of the time is very far removed from modernism. In fact, it’s sometimes downright anti-modernist as well as anti-traditionalist. In both so-called common practice-era tonality and in the highly organized serialism that reached its zenith in the middle of the last century, a goal oriented approach was often a driving force. For composers of Currier’s age and younger, that kind of overarching directionality—whether a resolution toward a clear tonal center or a combinatorial approach to a specific chromatic aggregate—carries much less weight. In fact, many of Currier’s pieces seem like multiple answers to the same question, and none of those answers offer the certainty of absolute correctness.

We live in a multifarious world. I don’t like and don’t respect […] the sort of closed feeling that […] it’s this way or the highway. It just doesn’t make sense to me as a conceptual framework for the way the world is.

While he has amassed an impressive catalog of orchestral, solo, and chamber music compositions (he is the only composer ever to receive a Grawemeyer Award for a piece of chamber music), in recent years Currier has also been involved in several multimedia projects which offer a whole new array of expressive possibilities. (In November 2012, the American Composers Orchestra will release a digital download of Currier’s apocalyptic post-Katrina inspired Next Atlantis for string orchestra and pre-recorded electronics created in collaboration with video artist Pawel Wojtasik.) But whatever he is working on, whether he is creating something that will be coupled with constantly shifting images or setting a text, what always comes first and foremost for him is the music. In that sense, he is a very old-fashioned composer, and it is in the company of the music of the composers of the past that his music most frequently lives. Among his most ardent champions is the German violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter who is most often heard playing Beethoven, Brahms, and Mendelssohn; in fact, Currier is the only living American-born composer whose music she has recorded with an orchestra. More recently, his music has been performed by the Berlin Philharmonic, again a rare occurrence for a composer who is both living and from the United States.

But in the end, despite this very clear link to the past, his music and the way he creates it is very much a phenomenon of the present. The most prominent objects in his Spartan apartment are his computer and his electronic keyboard.

I have no nostalgia. I think computers help me […] to work broadly, and then to zero in. [… If] you meet somebody you don’t know and they ask you what you do. […] It’s a funny thing. Here I am in my 50s, and I still don’t know how to deal with that question. When you just say classical music, it tends to sound like a throwback. […] I feel connected to that, but I think when you say that there are also some associations that may be can give the incorrect feeling, too, because it’s all about doing something new, but relating to something from the past also.

*
Frank J. Oteri: Whether it’s an orchestra piece, a chamber piece, or a solo piano piece, there is such incredible detail in everything you’ve written. To my ears that detail belies a very deep and thorough understanding of past music, the so-called common practice standard repertoire of classical music. Yet at the same time, the music still sounds like it couldn’t possibly have been written at any other time except now. Still I find that deep immersion striking, because it’s something I don’t hear in very much contemporary music. So it made me wonder how important it is to you that a listener be familiar with that tradition in order to fully understand how your music is, in some way, a response to it.

Sebastian Currier: That’s hard to answer. I’m going to agree with everything you said. I grew up listening to Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, Scarlatti—just endless hours. It’s something that’s in me. Though it is something I do less of now, I did it obsessively at certain times and I think the level of detail does relate to that. I also think sometimes that maybe I am too detailed, because a lot of music written today isn’t, and it leads to a different type of listening. When you have the detail that I do, it’s sort of more like reading a novel. You need to follow it through. You can’t just let it pass by. So I agree with all that, but whether a listener needs that background—I’d like to think they didn’t, but maybe they do. It’s hard for me to know about that. And I’m not surprised when people don’t respond to my music; that tradition is something that doesn’t mean anything to them. So in a negative way, I see that those two things are related.

FJO: So do you embrace the term classical music to describe what you do? Is that what your music is?

SC: You know, you meet somebody you don’t know and they ask you what you do. What kind of music do you write? It’s a funny thing. Here I am in my 50s, and I still don’t know how to deal with that question. I think the answer is yes, I feel connected to that, but I think when you say that there are also some associations that maybe can give the incorrect feeling, too, because it’s all about doing something new, but relating to something from the past also. When you just say classical music, it tends to sound like a throwback, and it doesn’t point to things like different new media stuff, as I’ve done in the last eight years or so. That would seem to be not included in that sort of description. So I guess I’d say I reluctantly accept it, but it doesn’t seem really perfect.

FJO: We don’t really have a good term.

SC: It always seems to be symptomatic of the slight awkwardness of our place in society that there’s not a name. Even “new music” is something that’s been appropriated to pop music quite a bit. People use that term, or modern music.

FJO: So to get back to those folks you mentioned who don’t respond to your music who you feel might not be grounded in classical music and therefore perhaps don’t quite get what you’re doing in your music. I think this might be about the commitment to listening that it requires. The more concentrated and more focused you are on the details, I think the more someone can get from listening to your music. But by the same token, when you mention that the multimedia stuff doesn’t connect to classical music, I wonder if there’s a lack of comprehension that goes the other way. For people who are so versed in classical music, and the specific tradition of how they experience it, to be suddenly confronted with visual input can be a distracting information overload.

SC: I haven’t found that so much. That seems to be something people readily embrace, the allure of the image and the projection and video as something of our time.

FJO: But I’ve so often heard some people in the classical music community grumble that when there’s a video it interferes with the listening experience. They don’t need to see these things to imagine what the music is. They want to be able to imagine what it is for themselves and let their minds create their own images, especially when video is projected to go along with performances of standard repertoire pieces.

SC: Well that certainly is true, but doesn’t that relate therefore to just what’s being done, and how it’s being done. I mean, if it was done in a thoughtful way that did expand it, they probably wouldn’t say that. But obviously it can seem gratuitous, without a doubt.

FJO: I’d like to return to your multimedia pieces a bit later, but first I want to take it back to what you were saying about growing up being immersed in classical music. Your personal story is somewhat unique—your mother being a composer and your father being a professional violinist. Your brother is a composer also. That’s a competitive environment to grow up in: three composers and a performing musician. How do you create a unique musical identity within that kind of family dynamic?

SC: You mentioned it’s competitive, but it’s also the opposite. It’s also sort of nurturing. You have this common element. I think the competitive part obviously deals more with my brother than my mom, who’s from a different generation. But it happens more coming from the outside, not internally. At a certain time, you’re applying to the same things. [My brother and I] were at Tanglewood together and we went to Juilliard at the same time. So that is where that sort of stuff happens. But otherwise, growing up, I think that was a great thing, because we’d be sitting there talking about and listening to music. And when we were quite young, maybe 10 and 11, my brother and I had this rock band.

FJO: Who started writing music first?

SC: I think we probably both did, and it related really to, again, the pop stuff, because we wrote our own stuff. Whereas, you know, when you’re young with classical, you start to learn an instrument. We liked bands like Emerson Lake & Palmer that had this mix of classical stuff. I remember us waiting outside a big performance space in Providence after an Emerson, Lake & Palmer concert. My brother had a score of something he had written for them, and we gave it to them in their limousine at the back. They were very sweet. I’m sure they were looking at us like, who are these little kids, you know. But that might have been one of the first compositions, between the two of us.

FJO: What did your parents think of your interest in rock?

SC: Well, they supported us in a lot of ways except the fact that we had these big Marshall amplifiers, and the police came, and that’s stuff they could have done without. Otherwise I think they were pretty open.

FJO: But you gave up rock.

SC: Yeah. I gave up.

FJO: Why?

SC: No precise reason, except I remember this very, very well. I played violin when I was very young. That didn’t take. We were into rock stuff; we were totally into it like kids are, just all day all night, totally obsessed. But there were all these records in my parents’ house of classical stuff. You know, Beethoven, Brahms, whatever, and contemporary stuff—a whole bevy of stuff. And I remember us starting to listen. My brother and I sort of happened at the same time to be listening to this stuff. And as much as I loved rock music, I felt this other thing had this breadth where you could go anywhere. It seemed to be so rich in terms of motion, character. It was about that sort of travel. A pop song sets up a parameter, and it sort of is what it is. It sustains that and there are minor articulations. But with a piece of orchestra music, if you’re talking about Mahler or something like that, you get on here and you get let off over there and taken all around in between. So I was very taken with that. Again, when you talk about detail in my music, those were the things that I think were very formative for me, that feeling of what this music, whatever we want to call it, does.

FJO: It’s interesting hearing you describe exposure to classical music being about learning to play an instrument whereas rock was about creating your own music. The idea of coming up with something original is something very attractive for a creative mind, but often people will get exposed to classical music and think this is just music by all these dead guys and they do not get exposed to the fact that such music kept going into the present time and that there are living composers who are still doing this stuff now. But your mother’s a composer. So how much of an influence did she have on the music that you eventually wrote?

SC: I’m not sure that much, but maybe some. Obviously in the sense that we grew up with it, there was the model right there for sure. In terms of the actual music, I’m not sure you know. Maybe yes, maybe no. I think I’d need an outside assessor to figure that one out. Have you heard any of her stuff?

FJO: No, but I would very much like to hear it. I do know your brother’s music, but I don’t know your mother’s music at all.

SC: Some of her stuff uses jazz in a way. That’s sort of not my world to do that.

FJO: Except that I’d argue that your Piano Sonata is very jazzy.

SC: O.K. There are elements of it in the rhythmic nature of it, I guess.

FJO: I was listening to it back to back last week with some Herbie Hancock recordings, so maybe it helped me make a connection.

SC: That’s interesting.

FJO: But as long as we’re talking about the Piano Sonata; that’s a title that clearly relates it to classical music. Terms like piano sonata, concerto, string quartet, or symphony are loaded with historical associations. Say the word symphony, and people will immediately think Beethoven, Mahler, etc. So when you use such a title, you’re automatically connecting yourself to those precedents. You subverted it a bit when you named a piece Microsymph. You were saying that you’re attracted to music that takes you on this long journey. Here’s a piece that takes you on a journey, but it does so very quickly…

SC: Exactly. Mahler for modern times, right?

FJO: So why reference those titles now?

SC: Well, the Piano Sonata is an early piece—I think I did it in ‘88 or something like that. I think I wanted to reference, not just going back to Beethoven, but also obviously there’s the Barber Sonata, there’s a contemporary American practice that relates to that, too, or Prokofiev sonatas. I think it came from a kinship with that. However, in the case of the Piano Concerto, that was more of a conscious choice to do that when I’ve mostly had titles that referred to some conceptual component of the piece. There I wanted to banish that and just work within this simple tri-partite structure. That sort of seemed the logical thing to do. But I had alternate titles that I considered that I can’t remember now.

FJO: Yet you’ve written many pieces for soloists and orchestra over the years and you don’t call any of them concertos; each has a unique name, like your most recent one for harp and orchestra which you titled Traces. So is that piece somehow not a harp concerto?

SC: It is a harp concerto in structure, I think. That’s a complicated thing, the history of the concerto in the 20th century—really great pieces that are sort of un-concertos or something like that, like the Ligeti concerti where the instruments aren’t meant to have this 19th-century heroic stance of the individual to this mass and so on. To me, if you’re writing for a soloist with orchestra, wanting to undo that or to totally negate that is a little perverse. It’s about finding a new way of relating. And, of course, the case of harp is interesting because harp with orchestra is so problematic acoustically. So I wanted to find my own way for that. And the way I looked at it for Traces is that harp, in its sheer volume, can never win over the orchestra. But what it can do is lead the way. I have the harp being the initiator of everything. I thought that was a new way to deal with that relationship of the one to the many.

FJO: While the harp can easily get drowned out, if you orchestrate a certain way, it cuts through. That’s how it was traditionally used in the orchestra, as a punctuation that cuts through just now and then, but you’ve made that cutting though the focus of the piece.

SC: I know. Exactly. And it was a matter here of having this incredible opportunity to work with the Berlin Phil, but I also felt I had to sort of act with restraint. So I set up the framework of the piece such that that aspect of it would happen to some extent more naturally.

Currier-Traces

From the score of Traces by Sebastian Currier.
© Copyright 2009 by Boosey & Hawkes, Inc. Reprinted by Permission.
(An excerpt from a performance of Traces, which includes this passage from the score,
is featured in the Cover video above.)

FJO: And if you get asked to write a piece for Anne-Sophie Mutter, as you did, even though you called it Time Machines and not “violin concerto,” you certainly wouldn’t write an un-concerto for her.

SC: Indeed, and I wouldn’t want to.

FJO: So how did you get connected to her?

SC: It’s a totally random thing. And it just goes to show you can never predict the way things happen. Do you remember—I’m sure you do, but many people wouldn’t at this point—the Friedheim awards?

FJO: Yes.

SC: I had a piece there, and it was sort of a little bit like Survivor. There are four people, and then they ranked you there, and you won or didn’t win and got sent packing. So there are four pieces, and I was three of four, so it wasn’t total humiliation, but it didn’t feel like the greatest night. And it was my violin and piano piece Clockwork. One of the jurors was Lambert Orkis, and he came up to me afterwards and he said, “I quite like that piece; I’d like to send it to Anne-Sophie Mutter whom I play with.” And I thought, “Sure, right.” You know, it seemed so unlikely. But I sent it to him like he asked. And then a few months later, I got an email from Anne-Sophie’s secretary saying that she didn’t want to play Clockwork; she’d like to commission a new piece instead. So that’s how we started the association. It turned out—even better—she never even told me, once we had the commission in place, she actually played Clockwork in Asia. It was also this fortuitous thing where the year that she was playing the piece I wrote—which was Aftersong—I was in Rome. I was close by in Europe, so I said, “Can I come to the concerts?” And she actually had me come; I came around to almost all of their concerts. Later she admitted that she wondered if it was a wise idea. Like, you know, was I total nut or whatever. But we actually had a great time, and she’s been really important to me in so many ways since then. It was really one of those things that no amount of planning would make happen; it was a very important, fortuitous chance thing.

FJO: It’s invaluable to have the advocacy of such a world-traveled European soloist who doesn’t play a lot of American composers since she’s really not exposed to what’s happening here very much. So you have your foot in the door in Europe in a way that is extremely enviable for a composer. And Traces just got done in Europe. I don’t know if there’s a direct correlation.

SC: I think there’s probably some. As you know well, it is a very different world. But sure, I am getting played there. She just did Time Machines with the Stuttgart Radio Orchestra, which was really great. So one can hope that will continue on.

FJO: There’s another aspect of your pieces for soloists and orchestra that I’d like to touch on here, specifically Traces and Time Machines. You used the name “Piano Concerto” for your piece for piano and orchestra, and when you mentioned why you did so you talked about it having a “simple tri-partite structure.” Three movements is standard concerto form. But these other pieces, which you did not call concertos, unfold quite differently. In both of the pieces we’ve been talking about, you really do an experiment with the form by having many smaller movements and tying them together and having material from one movement be interpreted in a different way in another. It’s a very different approach to form. So in that sense, also, they’re really not concertos.

SC: Right, but except for an early piece like the Piano Sonata, I’m not sure I came from that sort of literalism. When you’re talking about a concerto, yes, there’s a three-movement structure, but there is also that broader idea of what does it mean to be a concerto, which you don’t need to really think about in terms of the three-movement structure, but more the dynamic relationship. I think actually the history of the word itself comes originally from sort of a cooperation. When you think of the Baroque concerto, it’s a very different relationship than the classical one, which is when a sort of a proto-Romantic concerto happens.

FJO: Another loaded genre name is the string quartet. I love the two pieces you wrote for the Cassatt, neither of which you called “string quartet,” but you actually composed two pieces before those, which I’ve never heard, that you did name string quartets. I find it interesting to call something String Quartet No. 2, because it not only gives listeners an association with Mozart or Shostakovich, but it also ties to your own history. You know, what about String Quartet No. 1? But you didn’t call Quartetset—the first of the pieces for the Cassatts—“String Quartet No. 3.” You view it as something other. And I’m curious about what that other is.

SC: Well, the First Quartet is so old, but I felt like I needed to acknowledge it and call the other one the second. But those aren’t pieces that I [now] have played; I was learning at that time. By the time of Quartetset, I was sort of in a different place. We are talking about titles now, it relates to how a title helps you get into a piece and relates also to the concept that surrounds it. At a certain point, I ended up using that as a method most of the time.

FJO: But it’s interesting, because Quartetset is still sort of a generic title, even though it’s a title only you’ve used—well, you and Lou Harrison, who wrote a piece he called String Quartet Set. But calling it a set perhaps calls attention to its having many shorter movements, just like Traces and Time Machines.

SC: Right.

FJO: Yet when you wrote Quiet Time, which is ostensibly your de facto String Quartet Number Four, if I may, it has a similar structure. Like Quartetset, it has seven movements. And, in fact, you have described it as an attempt to go back and create the same kind of piece a decade later, so I’m curious about what your two approaches were to writing the same piece.

SC: I’ll answer that, but to go back to Quartetset, I think that’s one of the few cases where I sort of got distracted in terms of the title. Usually I conceptualize what a piece is, and I generally end up doing that. You know, of course, it’s always sort of T.S. Eliot—between the idea and the reality there’s a shadow, stuff changes. But that was a case where what I really wanted to do, which I mean I think I should have done but I didn’t, was to write a bunch of short pieces. It seemed to me that string quartets [ensembles] only have string quartets [compositions]. So I wanted to write the equivalent of Chopin etudes, or preludes, or mazurkas, things that could be excerpted that were short pieces that made a collection, hence the name Quartetset. But then I got going on it, and I got these sort of expansive movements, and it ended up being more like just a quartet. It sort of morphed. I remember I had problems writing that piece. For some reason, it was a little bit tortured to get it to happen.

FJO: When you talk about movements existing on their own, I can’t imagine any of them doing so except for maybe the sixth movement, which is so hauntingly beautiful.

SC: It is being done as a dance thing.

FJO: The viola seems to have an extremely prominent role throughout Quartetset, but particularly in that sixth movement. It leads in a way that the viola rarely does in the string quartet literature.

SC: I can think of places now that you mention that, but I don’t know if that was intentional. Maybe. My father was [also] a violist. He played viola more later in life, so there was a lot of viola around.

But getting back to how Quiet Time and Quartetset are related, there is an answer to that that might not be apparent. I always thought of Quartetset as part of a group of pieces along with Vocalissimus and Entanglement and Theo’s Sketchbook that sometimes I talk about as music in the third person. When you read a novel—even if there’s a first person narrative—you don’t assume it’s the novelist. It’s somehow distant. And obviously, there’d be other novelists that would have many different points of view, even maybe characters that serve as narrators. In music, however, there’s sort of a presumption—I think—that it’s a first person thing. It’s like memoir all the time. And so I wondered if that needs to be true, or if there’d be an advantage from stepping back from that a little bit. That’s very clear in something like Vocalissimus, where it’s 18 settings of the same Wallace Stevens poem so it becomes very much about that. Entanglement is sort of a basic concept for a piece that two composers have, but they’re very different, so it’s borne out in different ways. Theo’s Sketchbook is a compilation through the lifetime of a composer, so it gives a sense of a narrative arc—a lifetime of a composer’s music.

Quartetset is more abstract, but I suppose follows that in some way. I don’t think I executed it that well, but I thought of it as somehow the past and the present being the two voices. When the piece begins, there is this sort of almost Viennese little thing that it begins with and the violin comes in on this one note, and it crescendos to this note, and when it gets to the top of the note, it moves to the next note, and a chord comes in. You really feel like, right before you, it sort of morphs between two worlds. I don’t think I did it extremely enough, or consistently enough through the piece, but that was my idea. So in Quiet Time, I was following the idea of this sort of dialogue between two things, but that dialogue was between natural and artificial sounds. The beautiful full-bodied sound of the quartet, then the things one does in digital signal processing—some sort of filtering, some sort of harmonic thing, pitch shifting or remodulation, compressing time or expanding time, resonances like reverbs and delays. So basically my dialogue was between the natural quartet sound and then these, in my mind, processed versions. So I somehow related that dialogue to being like the past and the present for Quartetset. But it’s not something that is very readily apparent when you just listen to it.

Currier-QuietTime

An example of the strings recreating the sound of “digital signal processing” in a passage from the score of “Time’s Arrow,” the second movement of Quiet Time by Sebastian Currier.
© Copyright 2004 by Boosey & Hawkes, Inc. Reprinted by Permission.

FJO: This idea of writing in the voice of another imaginary composer is a very strange one, I think. But what’s interesting is that each time you’ve explored that idea in a very different way. Entanglement isn’t a sonata for violin and piano; rather it’s two sonatas fused together.

SC: Exactly. Right.

FJO: But obviously both composers are you.

SC: Right.

FJO: In a way, every composer is writing toward a specific musical solution that works for whatever idea they may have for a piece in advance, whatever the style or compositional system. In these pieces, you question that process by offering multiple solutions. In Entanglement there are two, in Vocalissimus you offer a total of 18, which is weird. So how are these hypothetical composers you’ve created not you? How would you have done things differently?

SC: Isn’t it reflective of you to say there’s one solution? If you went back to the 18th century, that would be pretty apparent. But since the 20th century, I’m not sure that would be apparent. We live in a multifarious world. So I think that’s part of it. There’s a certain strain today even in European modernist stuff. I was at Columbia University, and there’s [some modernist] music I very much respect and like. But what I don’t like and don’t respect is the sort of closed feeling that that’s the only way, that it’s this way or the highway. It just doesn’t make sense to me as a conceptual framework for the way the world is. All of these things, going back to the different characters, can reflect that point of view. And I don’t know how weird it is. It’s not weird at all to ask that question if there’s a character in a novel. It’d almost be absurdly naïve to say that a character has nothing to do with the author. The relationships that are set up are all from the author, and the story that’s being told as a whole is the author’s, right?

FJO: I take your point, but this is music. I think the piece where it’s the most apparent is Theo’s Sketchbook. You’re creating this world of a composer from his juvenilia to the last piece that he writes, and you’re saying this isn’t you. You’re saying that if you were the composer writing all of these pieces, they’d be much different than this.

SC: Right.

FJO: So, to get really specific, how are you a different composer than Theo?

SC: Well, to get really specific, I’m mid-career, he’s done his thing. One of the things in that particular piece that was the starting point for me was whether we can hear maturity; that’s an attribute that we hear in music. An early Mozart piece sounds different than a late Mozart piece. We feel something. You don’t even need to be told that much. You figure that out. And the question is, why? What is it? So that’s what the impetus was for scoping out that piece. And that just seemed like a way. How else would I do it, but to distance myself and have that sort of fictional narrative?

FJO: It’s funny that you mention Mozart who died at 35.

SC: Right, but Bastien et Bastienne or something like that is different from—

FJO: —the Jupiter Symphony or the Requiem.

SC: Exactly. Yeah.

FJO: But can you write the music of a 70-year old if you’re not 70?

SC: Well, can a male writer take the voice of a woman? Sure. You can, but it is fiction; it’s posed in some way. Everybody knows it’s the nature of fiction; we know we’re reading a book that’s not real. It’s about entering into that world and having that relationship between the actual and the imaginary, right? So I’m asking the same thing. I think you could say that yes, I think I have pieces that maybe in some ways are program music, but that I don’t want to have be program music. So this adds that element, because you’re having to imagine this relationship.

FJO: Let’s continue this analogy of a novelist writing in someone else’s voice. An extremely effective novel written in such a way which immediately comes to mind is Robert Graves’s I Claudius, which is a first person narrative by the Emperor Claudius, somebody from 2,000 years ago. Graves had to get into the head of this guy, who’s not 100 percent likeable at all times, but he has to find a way to make him sympathetic. Graves really had to deeply empathize with Claudius and get into his head and make the reader believe in him somehow. How did you become Theo? How do you get into that zone where you write music that’s not you, to write the music of a teenager again, or, even more difficult, to write the music of an old man decades before you’re one yourself? How did you get to that place and say, this is Theo’s music, for yourself, to make it work?

SC: I don’t know. I think I did that relatively intuitively. There wasn’t that much thought in a way—it’s disappointing to say—in terms of that. But part of it was setting it in the Northwest and there’s Eskimo music in it. As a composer, I generally don’t do that sort of thing. So that sort of allowed me to try it on, within the context of stepping back a little bit. The other thing was having something sort of childish that seems to sort of blossom into something and then move into something else; that was part of the whole formal nature of the piece because it dealt with the full arc of a lifetime.

FJO: I love this idea that writing this piece allowed you to write music you were interested in writing but which you felt you couldn’t write as yourself.

SC: Not music I couldn’t write but don’t write, and that I could maybe dip into in a way that I wouldn’t normally. Maybe I will someday. Who knows?

Currier-Theo-EskimoSong

An example of music by “Theo” that would not have been written by “Sebastian Currier”:
The “Eskimo Song” from Theo’s Sketchbook by Sebastian Currier.
© Copyright 1992 by Boosey & Hawkes, Inc. Reprinted by Permission.

FJO: Could this be a way to go back to writing for rock band, say, writing a piece that’s in the head of a guy who stayed doing rock?

SC: There we go, my next piece. You never know. But I should say, because we’re talking about it a lot, that idea was sort of a passing thing. I haven’t done that in some time, but it interested me for a while. It really started with Vocalissimus and with the particular idea of text setting. Actually, because I heard some I thought god-awful setting of Blake’s “The Tiger”—

“Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night”

—and thought why would anybody set that like that. I’m sure that composer, who luckily I’ve forgotten, had reasons for why he did what he did. But that made me realize that when we set stuff, it’s sort of like a mirror of ourselves. We think we’re interpreting one thing, but in fact we’re really more reflecting who we are. So that was the core of where I started. And then Vocalissimus branched out from that. Finding, I thought, a cubist point of view to a text. Then that gave me the idea that I can scope this out in other ways.

FJO: So is a listener going to be able to get that from just the music? How important is it to you that listeners know what the idea is that generates the piece?

SC: I think anything should work. I often go to a concert and I don’t read the program notes. I just want to hear the piece. Maybe if you’re interested, you’ll explore stuff. The one thing I would say, if you’re hearing Theo’s Sketchbook and you know nothing about it: You hear this childish little thing, you hear it change, by the end it sort of broadens out, and then you hear something that sort of is a much more mature version of this childish thing you’ve heard before. I think that would give you signs of something going on. You don’t need to know the rest, but that’s sort of inherent in the shape without having to know any sort of extra-musical, textual thing. I would hope that every piece I do has some conceptual component. In Quiet Time, you might not know that it’s a dialogue between natural and artificial, but once I told you that, you could think, “Oh yeah, I heard that first phrase like this, I heard that same phrase again, but sort of like it was weird and twisted in a way that I guess I can imagine was remodulation.”

FJO: Obviously when you add a text, you’re adding something that people get instantly: the words, unless you’re setting randomly generated words or maybe late Gertrude Stein texts, which are their own wonderful universes. But, as you said, people think they’re being pure to a text but often they’re just reflecting their own aesthetics. Two vocal pieces of yours handle this situation very differently from each other: Sleepers and Dreamers, your new piece for chorus and orchestra, and Vocalissimus. In Vocalissimus you’re setting the same line, over and over again, each time in a different way. It’s a strange idea; you calling it cubist is a very interesting way to describe it. In a way it totally subverts this notion of serving a text in a certain way and the music being a vessel on which this text lies. Instead, the text became a workshop for a wide variety of compositional approaches.

SC: That’s true, but it is something that I set up particularly for that piece. And it took me some time to get the right text, because I think one thing it needed was a certain openness and ambiguity and obviously brevity, too, to make that work. In that piece, it becomes more about the process.

FJO: So you had the idea for how you were going to set this text before you actually had chosen the specific text?

SC: Yeah. I was looking at another Wallace Stevens poem with the phrase “Look at the terrible mirror of the sky,” which seemed totally appropriate because I’m talking about sort of a mirror of oneself. But that phrase was set in three stanzas and I thought, I can’t do this; it was just going to be too long. So I kept looking for a long time until I found that very brief poem by Wallace Stevens that I could set many times.

FJO: Susan Narucki is just stunning on the recording. She takes on these different identities so effectively, which raises an interpretative issue. It’s not about having one sound and you really have to be kind of deliberate in order to deliver it.

SC: But I think that when you’re thinking about the performative aspect of it, that gives a singer something that’s sort of enjoyable to do. It extends what I said about my doing something that I ordinarily wouldn’t do. It’s the same thing in a way. It invites the singer to do things that would be out of her comfort zone and, as a matter of fact, I think the better performances are where singers are more willing to do this—to sing with a voice that they would not want to be heard, one that’s totally flattened and maybe child-like in [another] one, something like that. It allows you to try different things. I’m like giving you that license to do it.

Currier-SomnambulistFromVocalissimus

In the “Somnambulist” movement, Currier takes a very dreamy approach to the setting of a line by Wallace Stevens. From Vocalissimus by Sebastian Currier.
© Copyright 1991 by Boosey & Hawkes, Inc. Reprinted by Permission.

Currier-ScientistFromVocalissimus

However, In the following movement, “Scientist,” the text is declaimed by the singer and accompanied by the ensemble much more methodically. From Vocalissimus by Sebastian Currier.
© Copyright 1991 by Boosey & Hawkes, Inc. Reprinted by Permission.

FJO: In tying this back to our earlier thread in this conversation about interacting with the tradition of classical music, Vocalissimus connects with a specific legacy that’s 100 years old at this point: Pierrot Lunaire. You use the same instrumentation only with percussion as so many composers have done over the course of the last century. I wonder if the ghosts of those pieces were hovering over you in any way. Schoenberg has certainly been a huge ghost over all of 20th century music. He was a great figure, but he’s also been kind of used as a dart board by people who have certain attitude about what contemporary music should be. He’s the guy that gets accused of making music ugly and being cliquish, creating things that only a few people could understand. I wonder if in some way this piece was about exorcising those ghosts.

SC: The thing with Schoenberg is you have his importance, and then you have his music, and there are few pieces that I like a great deal and then a lot of it I’m not interested in. It doesn’t interest me that much to sit down and listen to a great deal of his stuff. I actually like Pierrot and I love the Five Pieces for Orchestra; the early stuff I like. But after that, I’m not sure it matters that much to me. But maybe you’re asking the question more broadly—what he stands for. The generation before were obsessed with it. It’s not really important for me.

FJO: Well, in terms of your formative years as a composer, your two principal teachers were Milton Babbitt and George Perle, both of whom were direct extensions of Schoenberg. Babbitt was taking Schoenberg’s ideas to their logical next level and Perle’s initial misinterpreting of Schoenberg led him to a whole new way of reconciling twelve-tone thinking with tonality. So I’m curious about how their musical ideas filtered through to you.

SC: Well, in the case of Milton Babbitt, he was, as I’m sure you know, an incredibly smart guy and he very much prided himself on letting people do what they wanted to do. So I enjoyed working with him, and I learned a lot. But his projects and the implicit project of the follow through of dodecaphony and the picayune sort of relationships with pitch and collections of pitches, that didn’t mean that much to me. Pitch is very important to me, but the way things are worked out in this pre-compositional mathematical way wasn’t ever that important to me. So I don’t think in terms of him. I don’t have a feeling of much influence. In terms of Perle, maybe just in terms of his trying to start from the ground up and look at other ways of looking at pitch structures was kind of interesting to me at a certain point. The very basic idea of interval cycles is still something that, I think, does play a role.

FJO: That’s interesting. I’ve immersed myself in many of your scores. I haven’t done too deep an analysis of it, but following along with the score as I was in listening to Broken Consort, it really did seem influenced by twelve-tone music.

SC: I know exactly what you’re talking about, but that’s from a different point of view. The whole idea of having some jagged line that’s moving around and uses all twelve pitches and is sort of complicated sounds great, right? But the feeling that you’re going to take that, and that it matters that later you have one hexachord that you’ve transposed up a fifth, that is the stuff that doesn’t interest me that much, to focus in on that. But yes, there are definitely elements of the sound world that are appealing to me.

FJO: And obviously, the listener is invited to conjure up that sound world from certain types of gestures, and I would contend, certain instrumental combinations, or more specifically certain ways of combining them. To bring it back to Vocalissimus and the ghosts of Schoenberg and Pierrot LunairePierrot Lunaire wasn’t a twelve-tone piece, but the Pierrot instrumentation became the sound world for so much twelve-tone music.

SC: Absolutely, but maybe it’s not always a choice. One just ends up writing a certain amount for that because one’s asked and so on. Static was written because Copland House came to me, and there might have been some wiggle room, like you could not use the flute or not use the clarinet, but it all sort of clustered around that type of combination.

FJO: The Pierrot ensemble has actually been very good for you. Static won a Grawemeyer and you’re the only composer ever to win for a piece of chamber music.

SC: There you go. So my hat’s off to Schoenberg on that one.

FJO: But in a piece like Static, there wasn’t the conscious choice of your saying, “I’m going to write a piece for this ensemble since there are so many of these ensembles around.”

SC: Exactly. But in other cases it might be more a gray area. For Vocalissimus, I did choose that.

FJO: Specifically to conjure up Pierrot?

SC: No, I think more because it was a practical thing that I wanted in terms of getting performance opportunities.

FJO: Sleepers and Dreamers is a lot more ambitious in terms of instrumentation. But again, it’s a very unorthodox approach, I think, to setting a text. It’s a piece for chorus and orchestra, but you’ve set a first-person text. You don’t even have any vocal soloists; it’s always the full chorus.

SC: When you say first person, you mean many different persons.

FJO: Yes, but all the “I”s are being sung by “we”—always.

SC: Right. For the nature of the concert, that was partially practical. It wouldn’t have worked with soloists. And there’s no reason why a chorus couldn’t take on these different characters, it seemed to me, and to make that happen musically.

FJO: I found it interesting that one of the characters is named Sebastian.

SC: Well, I’ll tell you the story. I worked with Sarah Manguso, who is, I think, an amazing writer and a good friend. We did a piece that’s being done in Houston, Deep-Sky Objects, a then we did this piece. The concept was mine. I said basically what I want is the objective signs of sleep and I want to counter that with the subjective world of dreams. And so she gave me a text. I really liked the first part a lot; it’s what’s there now. But her dreams just weren’t right. I think there’s a thing with writers and dreams, because there’s so much license and one would tend to over compensate the other way. I needed the opposite. I needed the basic components of dreams: the exaggeration, the fear, the strangeness. So I ended up not using her text. There are these big dream databases for sleep research in California that I was going to use. I started to look for stuff there, but in the meantime I would just ask my friends, not necessarily about the dream they had last night, but dreams that they remembered from a long time ago. And I got so many good dreams that I ended up using them. So everybody in there is somebody I know; they’re all real people and real dreams. There was something obviously fun about that. I knew these people, but also I just thought they were great dreams.

FJO: So Sebastian is you.

SC: Indeed, Sebastian is me. There’s one where I change it around. Only one. The rest are all real people. Actually there were two that were mine, but I named one after my father instead.

FJO: The dream of yours you chose to include in the piece and put your name on deals with your own body, which is a very private matter.

SC: I’m not that private. It’s a bizarre dream.

FJO: But to have something so personal, whether it’s your dream or anybody else’s, become de-personalized in a way by having it sung by a group of people, rather than by one person, seems like a very unusual approach, at least to me.

SC: Yeah, maybe so. From a personal stand point now, or more of a compositional one?

FJO: Mostly compositional.

SC: It’s funny, I didn’t really even think of it beforehand. In rehearsals, I wondered if there would be joking. But it was fine, it never even came up really. It’s just what it was about. It doesn’t seem to me that it’s sexual. It’s personal, but it’s fine. I thought it was a weird dream, so I was proud of it from the standpoint of how weird it was.

FJO: But I’m noticing a similar attitude to the one you took with Vocalissimus when it comes to how you approach text setting. You had this idea for a vocal piece before you had the text. So the text didn’t inspire the setting. Instead, the setting you wanted inspired finding the texts.

SC: Correct.

FJO: So it’s much less about trying to find a common ground between a text and your own music and more about sculpting the language to fit your specific musical goals.

SC: Absolutely. Originally, the way the project happened, I was getting pressure to have a writer involved. I actually didn’t want one when I first started for that reason. I’m about to work on another project where I’m sort of avoiding that. I mean, it’s using other people’s text, but I’m dealing with it, because, yes, I think there is something to be gained from having total control or last minute control. If you’re just confronted with a text and setting it, there’s something that has been set up already. I think different things happen musically if you don’t have to have that environment. It’s funny because the other thing that can get in the way is simple legal stuff, like copyright, because you have to ask permission in advance. You can’t suddenly just change something on the fly, although I wish you could. So yes, you’re absolutely right that that interests me—to be able to make things with text where I’m making those choices in a way that is immediately responsive to musical things, rather than the other way around.

But I want to follow up with what you said about the chorus singing “I.” You’d probably know better than I do, but in terms of convention that probably happens a certain amount in choral literature anyway. But there was another maybe Jungian aspect to this piece. The first part is sort of a scientific, objective part. The second part—the dreams—alternates between vocalize—I think proportionally, in terms of time, more than half is simply singing on vowels—and these little moments where these dreams are. The reason I did that is obvious, it’s a night of sleep; it sort of duplicates in some way the process of sleep. Obviously it’s compressed. In 90-minute cycles, you move through deep sleep into stage three and sometimes stage four, and then you come up into REM, and then that repeats and so on. I wanted to duplicate that so when you think of it, in a way the whole thing is one night’s sleep. But then it’s all different people’s dreams, so there’s sort of a morphing of the collective with the singular in the nature of the way it’s put together. It is saying we all have our individual dreams, sure, but it’s also this basic component of being human, that we share in our own ways. And nobody really understands it.

FJO: So then how important is it to you that the words of the text are understood when an audience hears them sung? Is that even an issue for you?

SC: It’s very important. And with chorus, it’s hard. What I really want, and I hope in subsequent performances I can have it, is supertitles. I think the text is really important and I think the enjoyment of the piece will be increased by having it. I did my best with the comprehensibility. Maybe not totally, chorus is limited; it’s just the nature of chorus, particularly if you’re having anything that’s not totally homophonic. At that point it becomes very hard. There’s a history of that, too. Often the text is not as important in, you know, a mass, because it’s stuff that’s known already. Phrases get repeated a lot. The Kyrie is just six words total. The history of choral music is about dealing with that in different ways. I try to find my best balance of that.


An excerpt from the world premiere performance of Deep-Sky Objects (2011). Music by Sebastian Currier, text by Sarah Manguso. Performed on September 22, 2012 at the Hobby Center’s Zilkha Hall in Houston, Texas, by Karol Bennett, soprano, with Musiqa. Videography by Bill Klemm, courtesy Anthony Brandt / Musiqa.
FJO: In a collaborative work, there’s always a danger that one element will overshadow the other. Music can be overshadowed, too, especially by visual stimuli since we are largely more acculturated to paying attention to what we see more than we hear. You’ve now done quite a few pieces that involve multi-media components, which, potentially, could distract people from the music. So I wonder in those contexts how much of the music you write is shaped by what your collaborator is doing with the video, or how much control you have to shape the images and make it work with your music the way you do with text.

SC: The answer is actually very variable. In the case of Next Atlantis, that’s actually a very complicated story. But the way it is now, I wrote the music entirely, and we edited the video images on top of it. So it wasn’t in any way dictated by the images. We’re used to music in film becoming subordinate. With Nightmaze, the whole idea was to set up something that had a rhythm of attention with a visual aspect. Most of the time, it’s this very neutral thing, you’re just going down a road and then these signs loom up and there’s suddenly attention towards that visual component. I wanted to have some way that you could let the music and sound predominate mostly. I was definitely conscious of that issue. And in terms of that, it doesn’t even exist as a video. It uses a program called Watchout; it’s basically a complicated queuing system. I did this to prevent having to use a click track. I was controlling when stuff would happen. It was predetermined, but not from a video. It was actually from a text of a friend of mine—Tom Bolt—one chapter of an experimental novel of his. I felt I had the space to do what I wanted, but I was also being directed by the images or the narrative basically.

FJO: The images of driving down a highway in Nightmaze fit really well with your music. Of course, driving and music really are an effective combination which is probably why all that music Bernard Herrmann wrote for Jimmy Stewart’s long drives in Vertigo work so well.

SC: Those are great scenes. I’ve even thought that the nice thing about driving is it’s about motion which also relates to music which is about motion, too. There’s definitely a good connection.

FJO: And of course, music is—more than anything else—about time, which has been a recurring inspiration for the titles of your pieces over the years. In the booklet notes for one of the CDs, you made some really fascinating comments about music existing in time, and how you want to capture time.

SC: In [the notes for] Time Machines, I was just saying that obviously any performative art unfolds through time. But music is even more simply made out of time because pitch is a function of time. And therefore, it’s really nothing but time and air, literally. A cycle of time, in the case of pitch, and then the time thing that we’re more used to, personal time unfolding.

FJO: And timbre of course, and harmony…

SC: Obviously all of those, hence my last movement is called “Harmonic Time,” and indeed, all of them are extensions of time, which we normally don’t think of at all. It’s sort of removed from our senses, but indeed it is made that way.

FJO: The very last area I want to talk to you about, and this again comes from just having been immersed in your scores, is that all the scores from the 1990s are these beautiful, hand-written manuscripts and that is how they are published. But the pieces from the last decade are all computer engraved. I see a computer hooked up here, and obviously you’re now using some kind of notation software. I’m wondering if you feel that’s changed your process in any way, especially in terms of working out details, to take it back to the very beginning of our conversation.

SC: I have no nostalgia. I find using a computer is great for all that. But I definitely write differently post computers. But I don’t usually copy a piece until the very end. That’s the last stage. That’s like draft seven, let’s say, or something like that. And not having to deal with musical notation that much until that point, I find very liberating. One thing that’s helped me over time is I’ve learned to sketch. And I think maybe it takes time. You need to know what you do to sketch. It’s always that sort of chicken and egg thing. But I think there’s something very difficult about—and I used to do this—having to notate stuff. You end up working very hard having to make local decisions of details early on. And then you’ve spent a week on this thing, and you suddenly say, wait a second. That doesn’t work. And yet you spent all this time. You make better decisions about local things when you know how it fits in the whole, and to have to make a local decision early on is hard. There was this show of Gehry at the Guggenheim a while ago and they showed all his models. Have you ever seen a Gehry model when he starts? It’s the most horrible looking scrunched piece of paper. There’s a piece of balsa wood that’s been sort of cracked in half, and you look at it and you think, “What’s that disgusting thing?” And then you look; that’s Bilbao! Because he would start with the idea you just need to get the form. He knew he’d figure out the beauty of the particular curve later, but he’s working to sort what the basic layout is. And once you get that, then you model it with a little more detail. So that’s how I work now. And I think computers help me do that, to work broadly, and then to zero in, and all the end decisions are when I copy it into Finale.

FJO: That’s certainly very different from the way composers worked in previous centuries.

SC: Indeed it is. Well, I think it is. Why do you say that?

FJO: Well, Beethoven didn’t have a laptop. Neither did Brahms or Chopin or Scarlatti. Some composers kept extensive sketchbooks, but I think that’s quite a different way of working than what you’ve just described.

SC: Beethoven sketched things. People improvised things and then sometimes half improvised a performance and then wrote it down. So just the presence of musical notation, let’s say if you went back pre-computer, that doesn’t mean that’s the same as before, either though, right? Those things relate to overall musical practice in a broad way. So sure, it’s changed, for sure.

The Notation of Friendship and Formality

Over the summer, I spent a lot of time thinking about notation. (Preparing parts for a full orchestra according to MOLA standards will do that to a person.). The process of slogging through an excruciating amount of notational detail brought into focus the idea that, beyond notions of “over-notation,” “under-notation,” or what is or is not called for in different styles of notated music, it seems to me that in many cases music notation serves as a measure of the level of familiarity shared between composers and performers.

Music notation is a language—it is intended to communicate information to musicians, who will then translate that information to the listener. It’s a great big old-school game of telephone. In speaking or in writing any language, there is a tendency to speak differently to friends and family than to a stranger or a professional colleague. With friends one might use more slang or more colloquial phrase structures than the more formal language we kick into gear with say, a potential boss or someone we have just met at a dinner party. The same applies to music. If a composer is writing a piece for his or her own ensemble, or for musicians with whom s/he is friends, the notation could be minimal, or graphic, or even ridiculously over-the-top complicated (or maybe there wouldn’t be any notation at all), because everyone knows one another, and presumably there is at least some time to work out the details of the music, ask questions, experiment, and so forth. An ensemble that is larger and has less firmly established relationships between composer and performers has different notational needs in order for the music to be communicated effectively. With an orchestra there are a multitude of issues at play, but add to those the fact that the composer may be a stranger to the orchestra—and a stranger bearing strange music at that—and that there is usually frighteningly little rehearsal time to prepare that strange music. If the notation isn’t crystal clear and presented for those musicians in a way that they can translate effectively within the scope of the available rehearsals, chances are the music will not come out according to the composer’s wishes.

For example, I don’t know the third horn player who will be playing my orchestra piece personally. Chances are I will not meet the third horn player. If s/he has a question during a 30-minute rehearsal that stops things for even ten seconds on the clock, that is rehearsal time lost. It won’t carry on ten seconds longer than scheduled. It’s just…poof. So am I going to notate very clearly the dynamic and the type of attack and the specific mute needed for the third horn player’s first note? Yeah, you bet I am, and everything about every other instrument at every necessary point in time. Because if I don’t, someone may ask about it. And unfortunately, that exchange, as much as it will be helpful and establish at least some tiny bit of personal connection between myself and that musician, doesn’t fit into the timetable of an orchestra rehearsal.

On the other hand, this same orchestra piece has a significant part for drum set, and I happen to know my drummer quite well. Because this drummer does not read music (it’s complicated), we have spent time together working out his part. We have also met one another’s families, drunk beer together, shared car rides—the line has crossed into friendship. His part (as it is) for the same piece conveys a totally different kind of information. It includes some extra data, like clock times so he can follow along with a mockup recording of the piece. In some spots there is much less detail than one might expect, such as a predetermined “skeleton” beat structure upon which he can expound as he sees fit, or one short passage with a basic rhythmic structure over which I have noted, “As far as I’m concerned you can go completely nuts here!” We have established a musical connection, we trust one another, and we have already dealt with questions and explorations, so that by the time we get to rehearsal, all there is to do is play the thing.

Whatever type of notation we use—minimal, maximal, standard practice, or completely made up from scratch—it is not only a road map to bring sounds to life, but it also often tells a parallel story of the lives communicating those sounds.

The Compositional Collective: Crowdsourcing and Collaboration in the Digital Age

crowdsourcing

Image from Bigstock

From the “Festival in Two Worlds” hosted in the virtual environment Second Life to Eric Whitacre’s captivating crowdsourcing project Lux Aurumque and “telepresent” concerts hosted by Pauline Oliveros and the Deep Listening Institute, new music enthusiasts and composers alike can explore the outer limits of collaboration in the digital age. Music technology explodes exponentially in the third millennium.

Composers have historically explored and exploited the latest tools to meet their own ends, quickly incorporating the printing press, the phonograph, and circuitry in their own musical creations.  Today, advances in internet development, robotics, virtual reality, and social networking usher in with them the next generation of compositional methods. Most of these tools require nothing more than a high-speed connection and a little bit of time to learn and use. The possibilities feel limitless.

Technology in contemporary music, however, also poses unique challenges—logistically, technically, and aesthetically.  Directly speaking to the challenges of crowdsourcing and technology in collaborative projects, co-founder of the Princeton Laptop Orchestra and founder of the Princeton Soundlab Perry R. Cook points out:

As with much technology-based music and art, the demand that each new piece be absolutely novel, or nearly unique, is higher than with acoustic/traditional art. Nobody would demand that a new string quartet use new technology and sound completely different from all other past string quartets, but an art piece that uses new technology seems to carry an extra burden that it use really NEW technology.

In the mad dash to explore new technical heights and dimensions, complaints about the musical value or even sheer purpose of works created solely to exploit technology come to light. The challenge for composers lies in creating lasting works that move past sheer novelty, although there is value in experimentation for experimentation’s sake.

What follows is a brief exploration of several collaborative projects which challenge conventional definitions of composition, and some of which would be impossible using only traditional means.

Crowdsourcing and Opera by You

For those unfamiliar with the concept of crowdsourcing, imagine the inner workings of a high-functioning beehive. Each member works on a specific task towards a collective goal. In the same way, artistic efforts involving crowd-sourced talent assign each member a specific creative task that benefits the collective efforts of the whole. Each musician works towards the final project.

Although primarily designed for independent film projects, Wreckamovie has sections designated for operas and music videos. A project leader sets up a free online account and posts images, video, and a blog about the opera. Then he or she designates individual tasks for writers, artists, musicians, and other key roles. Participating members join the production and upload materials for each task. While some productions require members to sign a talent release form, the Wreckamovie website includes legal text that specifies the voluntary nature of collaboration on the site. The majority of productions are based in Finland, but international productions like music videos and indie slasher films also use the service.

While collaboration at a certain level is integral to large-scale productions like opera and film, the creators of Opera by You produced an opera entirely created through crowdsourcing. The project was the brainchild of a group of Finnish artists including Markus Simon Fagerudd, Samuli Lane, Iida Hämeen-Anttila, Jere Erkkilä, and Päivi Salmi, and they used the website Wreckamovie.com to create an opera from scratch exclusively using crowdsourcing with the support of the Savonlinna Opera Festival. From concept to score to costume design, each element was tasked out to the Wreckamovie community and then completed by volunteer composers, artists, writers, and actors. Participants in the 400-member online crew each receive credit for their contributions.

Opera by You challenges ideas surrounding intellectual property and musical ownership. Several composers worked with Markus Simon Fagerudd on developing themes, orchestrating music, and editing scores.  The libretto is an eclectic mix of Dante’s Divine Comedy, political commentary, and cameos by famous historical figures like Mozart and Oscar Wilde. While Hämeen-Anttila finalized the libretto, the community developed plot ideas and twists, and literally put words in each character’s mouth. All community members signed a formal license agreement giving the Savonlinna Opera Festival property rights to Opera by You.

Free Will by Opera by You – record

21.7.2012

 

Opera by You premiered July 21, 2012, at the Savonlinna Opera Festival in Helsinki, Finland. The festival has also embarked on a new children’s opera called The Seal Opera, which has a libretto selected by the public using an online voting system. According to a 2011 press release, the winning libretto was created by elementary school children at the Helsinki European School. Over 6,000 participants voted for it online.

YouTube Collaborations

In 2008, YouTube, the London Symphony Orchestra, composer Tan Dun, and even the Hyundai Motor Company played key roles in a virtual experiment. Using YouTube.com as an online auditioning platform, aspiring amateur musicians competed online with professional musicians for a spot in the YouTube Symphony Orchestra. In the end, thousands of musicians auditioned, and 101 instrumentalists made their way to the Sydney Opera House for a live performance.

The end result of the YouTube Symphony Orchestra seemed to be a mixed bag, with reviewers balking at the choice of program and lack of nuance in the performance.  In a March 21, 2011, review in the Los Angeles Times, Marcia Adair compared the final YouTube Symphony Concert to band camp concerts where the emphasis is on the experience and not the music. The YouTube Symphony Orchestra suffered from a lack of cohesiveness of sound that a few hasty days of rehearsal could not resolve.

Not all collaborative efforts using YouTube have involved willing participants. In 2009 Israeli composer and activist Ophir Kutiman developed the innovative ThruYOU online video series. Kutiman created video mashes using clips of musicians and vloggers on YouTube. Videos such as My Favorite Color and Mother of All Funk Chords involved dozens of short video clips tightly edited by Kutiman. The composer created complex musical compositions with each clip, using slick editing techniques and jazz arranging skills. Kutiman scavenged YouTube for each original clip, including everyone from bashful moms playing the organ to seasoned pros showing off their drum chops. Old rules regarding copyright were blatantly ignored, making the experiment controversial in some circles. The end result is raw, refreshing, and unique.

Ophir Kutiman continues to use technology as a means of expression and activism. His more recent 2011 video work, This is Real Democracy, demonstrates his trend towards political activism and shift away from purely musical pursuits.

Perhaps one of the most popular contemporary works using crowdsourcing and technology to date involves choral composer Eric Whitacre’s Virtual Choir and the viral rendition of his Lux Aurumque. Since his first successful YouTube video hit the internet, Whitacre has followed up with other Virtual Choir projects. The sleekness of production, the lush musical beauty of the works, and the gargantuan scope of a collaboration involving over 185 voices from a dozen countries have all helped launch Whitacre into a world of online stardom.

In a 2011 TED Talk, Eric Whitacre explained the simple beginnings for Virtual Choir. A choral student named Britlin Lucy uploaded a fan video for his work Sleep to YouTube. Inspired by the intimate sound and setting of the video, Whitacre uploaded a recording, sheet music, a piano track, and conducting video for Lux Aurumque to his blog and YouTube with a call for fifty singers to participate in a virtual ensemble video. The online auditions involved singers from all over the world.

Producer Scott Haines volunteered to cut the video and clean the audio, inserting clips of Eric Whitacre conducting the virtual ensemble, which is somewhat reminiscent of a scene from Superman 2. The high production quality of the first Virtual Choir project, in HD no less, does not compare to the second version, Virtual Choir 2.0 which involved over two thousands singers performing Whitacre’s Sleep in a virtual computer generated universe of interconnected spheres with a lone Whitacre at the epicenter.

More than a musical experiment, Whitacre’s Virtual Choirs explore and redefine community from a 21st-century perspective. Members experience a connectedness with strangers through this project. They reveal the possibilities of a more integral communication phenomena through social networking and technology that has only been imagined in the past. The musicians connected through space and time, if not through touch. During his Ted Talk, Whitacre described his virtual singers as “souls all on their own desert islands…sending electronic messages in bottles to each other.”

Telepresent Performance and The Telematic Circle

The concept of international “telepresent performances,” or collaborative performance occurring in tandem from different locations, has its beginnings in the late 20th century when the internet first reared its digital head. A paper by Ajay Kapur, Ge Wang, Philip Davidson, and Perry R. Cook called “Interactive Network Performance: a dream worth dreaming?” discusses the beginnings and practice of complex networked performances, including the projects like the GIGAPOPR, remote Internet 2 media events at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), and experiments at the Electrotechnical Laboratory in Japan. The article describes in detail earlier efforts to create global telepresent concerts such as work in the 1990s at Chukyo University of Toyota in Japan and at the USA/Japan Inter-College Computer Music Festival in Tokyo. Both of these efforts seem primitive compared to today’s sleek smartphone, virtual world, and multimedia video collaborations. For a technically detailed description of a few key collaborative projects like VELDT (Networked Visual Feedback Software) and The Gigapop Ritual, “Interactive Network Performance: a dream worth dreaming?” is a read well worth the head-scratching and technical wonder.

A quick look online will reveal that the concept of telepresent performances in real time has captivated the hearts, minds, and efforts of a number of composers and artists. The Internet2 community, a consortium of academic communities and researchers, has used technology for artistic pursuits like Trespassing Boundaries between Tel Aviv and New York University and the cross-continental simultaneous live performances of InterPlay: Hallucinations. Multicasting or webcasting has become popular not only in the Internet2 community but with independent musicians through publicly accessible live streaming sites like UStream.com.

Composer Pauline Oliveros first experimented with telepresent performances using an Internet2 connection. A performance in 2005 involved dancers in California and France interacting with Pauline’s improvisations at RPI. As Pauline improvised, video was simulcast to France and California. Dancers improvised with Pauline’s musical gestures and with each other. Several challenges—including latency and issues with a firewall in France—threatened the performance until the day of the concert. At the premiere, Pauline serenely began her dream-like improvisation, natural percussive instruments in hand, as dancers flung far across the globe interpreted her musical gestures with their bodies.

Today Oliveros’s Telematic Circle involves universities, musicians, and composers throughout the world and facilitates telepresent concerts with minimal latency using both the latest technology and what Oliveros describes as “low tech audio.” The group utilizes a combination of tools including Internet2, Apple’s iCHATav, Skype, and other audiovisual means of communication. By working together, the various institutions hope to learn how best to overcome technical issues regarding latency, logistics, and teleconferencing limitations that limit real time musical performance.

Vox Novus 60×60 and Macrocomposition

Inspired by musical efforts like The Frog Peak Collaborations Project and Guy Livingston’s Don’t Panic, composer and director of Vox Novus Robert Voisey developed the 60×60 project as a means to expose audiences to new music. The project utilizes technology and digital collaboration to create a unique concert experience that has had hundreds of performances globally, and, on its tenth anniversary, has presented music by more than 2,000 composers.

The concept for the 60×60 project is simple: Combine sixty one-minute electronic compositions into an hour-long new music concert experience.  With minimal funding, 60×60 survives directly as a result of pooled talent from composers from all walks of life. More than a random mix of works, 60×60 involves macro-composition, which Voisey describes as, “the act of creating a musical work incorporating several fully formed ideas or complete works.” And just as “ballet, operas, and movies are all perfect examples of many artists contributing to a greater artistic whole orchestrated by the ‘macro-artist’,” says Voisey, the Vox Novus 60×60 project involves this multi-layered method of composition in the same way with sixty smaller sections sifted and sorted musically by a macro-composer.

Technology plays a key role in contacting and recruiting musicians for 60×60. Vox Novus members send out numerous calls both on the 60×60 website and through active music groups like the International Alliance of Women in Music (IAWM) listserv and social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Participating composers submit their one-minute works using an online submission engine. The 60×60 project has a number of mixes each year, and each mix typically generates hundreds of submissions. This type of large-scale collaborative project involving thousands of composers from every corner of the globe is only possible through contemporary methods of Internet communication.

Other Collaborative Projects

Random Acts of Culture

Supported by the Knight Arts Foundation, Random Acts of Culture combines flashmobs and social networking with classical music. While not a means to create new forms of music, Random Acts of Culture has used social networking to expose unsuspecting mall-goers to spontaneous performances of “O Fortuna” from Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, works by Verdi, and Handel’s “Hallelujah” chorus. The performances are meant to create a sense of community as unsuspecting participants join in the performance, tweet live about the experience, or simply grab a few snapshots with their phones.

Bicycle Built for 2000

Using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, an Amazon site that essentially serves as an online marketplace for microtasking, project designers Aaron Koblin and Daniel Massey commissioned over two thousand people from over seventy countries to make vocal recordings of a brief excerpt of the song Daisy Bell for the price of six cents a recording. The participants did not have prior knowledge of the grand end-scheme. The final result of Bicycle Built for 2000 may seem a somewhat nightmarish version of the original tune, but still stands as an interesting experiment of grand scale crowdsourcing.

And even more…

Crowdsourcing musical talent reaches outside the realm of experimental electroacoustic wizardry, with popular examples like Smule’s Glee, Thounds.com, Kompose.com, and collaborative projects in the virtual world of Second Life by composer Alex Shapiro. For those that have a love for Karaoke, I warn you that Smule’s Glee can get quite addicting.

Practical Applications

More than just a digital playground for the curious, the internet provides an exciting engine for creativity and change.

As a composer of limited resources, producing a full-scale opera seemed impossible to me, but the Internet provided the talent and resources needed for my current virtual opera project. Websites like Music Xray, Blogger, Twitter, and OurStage were ideal for setting up online auditions. Sites like Wreckamovie, LinkedIn, and Moviestorm added talented artists, graphic designers, and animators to the film crew. Unlike a traditional live performance, Libertaria: The Virtual Opera is animated with Machinima, an animation style using virtual actors in a computer graphics environment first popularized by the video game Quake. Minor animation tasks are set up for crowdsourcing through Wreckamovie, while a core group of “Machinimators” will work together on major scenes. The cast rehearses using Opera Rehearsal Album downloads at Bandcamp. Each Opera Rehearsal Album comes complete with scores, an updated libretto, and click tracks. The film crew has never met. Typically this type of production would be prohibitive for a single composer to write, compose, and produce. By tapping into the vast resources available online, previously impossible things are achieved.

The key to many crowdsourced collaborative efforts lies in making a cohesive and understandable musical experience out of the amassed materials. Like the macro-composer in the Vox Novus 60×60 Project or the designers for Bicycle Built for 2000 and Virtual Choirs 2.0, a master artist assimilates each individual entity into the final whole. In this way, even a project involving thousands can have a single purpose, a single concept.

The technology described here is already moving towards the realm of digital antiquity. The point is to create incredible music with the resources at hand, not to exploit the latest digital gadgetry for the sake of shock and awe. Technology invaded music centuries ago.

What are some practical ways you can use today’s technology in your next musical project? You can crowdsource your next opera, flashmob the local grocery store with a new oratorio, conduct international auditions through YouTube, or premier a string quartet virtually in Second Life. Use Thounds.com, Google+, or Twitter to bounce your musical ideas off of other musicians, or improvise a telepresent jazz concert in real time using Skype or your iPhone. Connect to musicians a hemisphere away and find the talent you are looking for. Contemporary technology opens new doors to musical creativity.

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Acknowledgements:
A special thanks to Pauline Oliveros, Robert Voisey, Päivi Salmi, and Perry R. Cook for providing additional insight into this topic.

Additional Resources:
Adair, Marcia. “Music review: YouTube Symphony Orchestra’s final concert.” Los Angeles Times. March 21, 2011.

Ajay Kapur, Ge Wang, Philip Davidson, and Perry R. Cook, “Interactive Network Performance: a dream worth dreaming?” Department of Computer Science (also Music), Princeton University, Music Intelligence and Sound Technology Interdisciplinary Center (MISTIC), and the University of Victoria (2005).

Pauline Oliveros. “Reverberations: Eight Decades.” 2012. Abridged version in upcoming Journal of Science and Culture (2012).

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Sabrina Peña Young

Award-winning composer, author, and obsessive sci-fi buff Sabrina Peña Young composes multimedia works that have been presented throughout Asia, the Americas, Australia, and Europe. Her music has been heard in international film festivals, radio, electronic dance clubs, random boom boxes in France, and as not-so-pleasant-background music. Young’s recent projects include the post-apocalyptic Libertaria: The Virtual Opera, the Afro-Cuban multimedia oratorio Creation, and film scores including Rob Cabrera’s animated short Monica and Sean Fleck’s time-lapse film Americana. Young’s works have been heard at the Beijing Conservatory, ICMC, SEAMUS, Miramax’s Project Greenlight, Art Basil Miami, the New York International Independent Film Festival, Turkey’s Cinema for Peace, the Pulsefield Exhibition of Sound Art, London’s Angel Moving Image Festival, and other international arts venues.

Instruments for Playing Water

Recently, I’ve been working closely with the artist Katherine Kavanaugh as she has designed and built a sculptural installation using bamboo, water, a plexiglass pool, and copper. On Saturday, I’ll perform a new composition at the installation’s official opening that I’m creating along with three fantastic musicians: Jacqueline Pollauf and Noah Getz of Pictures on Silence, and Peabody student composer Benjamin Buchanan.

My concept for the musical performance involves playing the water and other parts of the sculpture directly, and also moving throughout the space in order to evoke a ritualistic sensibility and to involve the entire gallery in the staging. As part of our collaboration, Katherine and I spent a great deal of time considering what tools we would utilize to create the musical sounds. Although we never officially voiced this constraint, we decided to limit ourselves to further manifestations of the materials contained within the installation itself. Bamboo cut to various lengths functions as mallet, trumpet, resonator, and even bubble producer; copper bowls become percussive devices and tone generators; crystal goblets (standing in for plexiglass) add another pitched element and the ability to create melodies.

Last weekend, all the musicians gathered in the VisArts gallery in order to explore the completed installation for the first time. As we physically examined the sculptural materials in order to see what intriguing sounds could be generated from the objects at hand, our varying sensibilities and proclivities allowed each person to produce unique ideas that would eventually be woven into the final sound world. Our united efforts quickly began to merge into a composition that hopefully has a discernible shape and structure and will allow visitors to experience the art in a new light. The curator tells me that she plans to display a video of the performance running on a loop in the gallery in hopes that patrons will continue to conceive of the sculptural display as engendering sonic ideas through time.

Although in our discussions, Katherine and I had agreed that she would leave the performance implements visible in the gallery as part of the overall whole, I was delightfully surprised to find them officially displayed, complete with a tag identifying them as “Instruments for Playing Water.” Yes, that’s exactly what they are. And yet, I found that the mere act of affixing this label to the wall had elevated these devices—which had seemed so utilitarian to me only days earlier—to an integral part of the installation itself. I had once seen these objects as tools, but now in my mind they metamorphosed into sculptures. Of course, I still needed to use them in order to create music, but my relationship with these little devices had been inextricably altered. All because of a little sign on a wall.

Just as I aspire to use sound in order to enhance visitors’ perception of the sculpture, the installation itself intensified my sense of the meaning behind its constituent elements.

Making The Face

Face Rehearsal

The Face in rehearsal on August 21, 2012. Photo by Peter Godfrey-Smith.

The Face, my new multidisciplinary chamber opera premiering in Los Angeles on August 25, 27, and 28, has been in the works for more than seven years and involves an international team of creative artists. Most operas these days—especially new ones—have lots going on, so to call an opera “multidisciplinary” isn’t exactly surprising. In The Face, though, “multidisciplinary” is intrinsic and fundamental in several crucial ways. The principal extra-musical elements—poetic text, choreography, and film—are not intended as laminations but rather built deeply into the structure from the ground up. The Face is an intimate, intense psychological drama with a tightly woven musical narrative.

The libretto is by the poet David St. John, a colleague of mine (and now a good friend) at the University of Southern California. The text comes from his novella in verse, a cycle of forty-five poems also titled The Face (Harper Collins, 2004); it is indeed highly poetic, just what I was looking for. The language is concise, emotionally charged, colorful, and downright beautiful. I had previously set two of David’s poems in a piece commissioned by the Hilliard Ensemble (The Village: Two Poems of David St. John), and I had also been interested in his poetry for a number of years, so exploring the idea of a libretto from David St. John felt somehow inevitable. After the premiere performances of the Hilliard Ensemble piece in Europe, I approached him about collaborating on an opera. We had a meeting in late 2005 at which he proposed several possible ideas. His first choice by far was to use his recent novella, and he gave me a copy of the book to read. Both the poetic language and the dramatic possibilities immediately struck me, so I agreed. David created the libretto by following one of several narrative paths through the novella, a path which, in eleven scenes, focuses on the main character, a poet named Raphael, as he struggles with the recent loss of his lover and muse while juggling the demands of a Hollywood movie being made about his life and his increasing notoriety. A crucial element in the process of creating the libretto involved David asking me to identify passages in the cycle of poems which contained language that I, as the composer, was especially drawn to—and lines that David fashioned into a stunning libretto. David St. John has been an ideal librettist, a dream to work with.

Not surprisingly, quite a number of people in my world knew I was hard at work on an opera and that I was on the lookout for a stage director with a theatrical vision suited to this project. A young singer with whom I’d worked in Los Angeles, the French soprano Myriam Zekaria, was touring France in a revival of the opera Les Enfants Terribles (Philip Glass/Jean Cocteau), and she urged me to see the show in person. On a whim, I followed her suggestion and traveled to Paris and Lyon to experience the work of the theatrical production company—Heliotrope—who were working on this project. I was bowled over by the power of their artistic vision and promptly arranged a meeting with two members of the company: Paul Desveaux (director) and Yano Iatrides (director/choreographer). The meeting resulted in the birth of an artistic collaboration on The Face between two organizations separated by a large ocean—Heliotrope (based in Paris) and Firebird Ensemble (based in Boston). We subsequently decided that Paul Desveaux would create the dramatic and film concept for the work and that Yano Iatrides would direct and choreograph The Face. In addition, we added another two members of the Heliotrope team—Laurent Schneegans as lighting designer and Amaya Lainez as assistant director.

One of the things that engaged me most about the work of Heliotrope was their ability to fuse various elements onstage (lighting, dance, staging, poetry, and film). Many productions take a layering approach to multidisciplinary works, but I wanted to create an opera which integrated the elements in an organic way. Working with performers who do not come from a classical dance background fascinates Yano Iatrides. (She frequently choreographs works involving actors, street artists, singers, and comedians.) Her uncanny ability to instill in them an approach to movement, of “dancing the staging” in a way, is in part how she communicates her very unique dramatic vision on stage. This is far beyond blocking; our four singers embody the discipline of dance while singing new opera. Rehearsals each day start with an extended and rigorous session of movement training as the singers embark on a process of physical and emotional exploration of themselves and their characters. Stage direction and choreography follow naturally from this starting point as Yano begins working through various scenes from the opera. Breaks tend to feature what are evidently her three staples: coffee, cigarettes and air. Yano is intense, to be sure, but we all find her to be very lovable.

The process of obtaining visas for our international group of artists has been a huge hassle, to be sure, and several experienced opera people pointedly suggested sticking with a domestic team. We needed O-1 and O-2 visas requiring peer review from American professional unions, signed contracts, and extensive evidence of “extraordinary ability” in order for U.S. immigration to approve the applications, even for only temporary employment on our project. This required more than six months of work, and the seemingly inevitable procedural delays necessitated the considerable help of senatorial offices in Boston so we could get our team into the United States on time. (My advice: begin the process well in advance, use an immigration lawyer if possible, and keep pushing.) As it turned out, Yano Iatrides’s paperwork was completed in time for her scheduled flight from Paris, but Amaya Lainez was delayed six days. Our lighting designer is coming in on time later in the rehearsal period. The three weeks preceding our first day of rehearsal in Boston were quite harrowing as we, and especially our producer, Kate Vincent, were waiting for final visa approval and processing. In spite of all this, I don’t regret a minute of it, and that exploratory trip I made to France over spring break a few years ago to experience their work was well worth it.

Last but certainly not least in the “multidisciplinary” aspects of The Face is the film element. In this opera, Raphael’s lost beloved and muse Marina—a crucial character—is a silent role on film. Marina died in some terrible, unnamed catastrophe, and Raphael is unhinged. I knew from the beginning that Marina would be a “home movie” character and made space for her in the music, but neither David St. John nor I knew exactly how this film element would play out. Enter Anton Nadler, a young filmmaker who is active in New York and Los Angeles. Our story is set in Venice Beach and the movie-making world of Hollywood, so Anton seemed to me a perfect choice. The film of Marina can be imagined as a collection of home movies made some years ago by Raphael, and Marina plays to him and his camera in casual and intimate scenes. Anton Nadler shot the film in and around LA during a preview/residency of the opera at the University of Southern California on its Visions & Voices series last April. Jane Sheldon, the young Australian who is our soprano (Cybele) in The Face, also plays the silent role of Marina on film and adds to the poet Raphael’s (the British tenor, Daniel Norman) very considerable emotional confusion. The results are quite striking; the camera loves Jane, as they say. From early in the rehearsal period begun in Boston in late July, Marina was a presence on stage, a fifth character intrinsic to the staging.

A decidedly-not-insignificant aspect of this project is the fact that The Face has been produced outside of the world of traditional opera companies by Boston’s Firebird Ensemble and its founder and director Kate Vincent. I had worked with Kate and Firebird in recent years on several projects, including a recording, and Kate decided to take the opera on as a new adventure for her ensemble with Kate herself producing. The Face has an acoustic score without electronics and whiz-bang sound effects (though I admit we do have an electric guitar), so Firebird, with its superb musicians and chamber music ethos, was for me the ideal choice. Gil Rose, founder and artistic director of Boston Modern Orchestra Project and a respected champion of new music and new opera, came on board as music director.

In addition to creating this production of The Face, Kate Vincent and the Firebird Ensemble wanted to develop a significant educational component for the project. This has been achieved through the creation of an internship program for young people in the theater and music fields. We have given a group of students from theater schools, colleges, and universities from across the country the opportunity to assist and be mentored by the professional team. These students are now functioning in assistant roles for the stage director, producer, stage manager, repetiteur, film crew, and costume designer; three talented young singers serve as covers for the cast during the production.

One inevitable result of the Firebird Ensemble taking on The Face was that it has more than tripled Firebird’s operating budget for its tenth anniversary season. Los Angeles, where David St. John and I are based, seemed to be a logical choice for the premiere run. (We will do an additional concert performance in Boston, Firebird’s hometown, on August 31.) Working independently from an opera company is both challenging and freeing. A big company has a significant infrastructure and the financial resources to handle production, stage and musical direction, casting, and promotion, while a new music ensemble has to build this from the ground up. On the other hand, while a major opera company tends to focus on a full season of standard favorites with perhaps something from the 1940s onward and just maybe a premiere added in, a new music ensemble or small independent production company can dream and create independently. In addition, the scope of a project like this for a small organization such as the Firebird Ensemble has resulted in an enormous artistic investment on their part. On the production side, I as the composer have had direct input into the choice of the stage directing team, the cast, and the music director. I’ve been involved in decisions about staging, set, costume, publicity, marketing, lighting, personnel, travel, and myriad other details. While this process might not be for everyone, my deep involvement in every aspect of this opera and the experience of working with a passionate and exceptional collection of artists, singers, and instrumentalists from all over the world is an experience which I would not trade for anything. The Face has taken me seven years to create, and I want to follow its every step to opening night on August 25.

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Donald Crockett

Donald Crockett

Donald Crockett is a composer, conductor, and chair of the composition department at the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music where he also directs the USC Thornton Contemporary Music Ensemble. His chamber opera, The Face will be performed at Los Angeles’s Aratani/Japan America Theater on August 25, 27, and 28, and at Boston Conservatory Theater on August 31, 2012.

Remembering Marvin Hamlisch (1944-2012)

Hamlisch,Carnelia,Lithgow

Composer Marvin Hamlisch (left), lyricist Craig Carnelia (center), and actor John Lithgow during the recording sessions for the original cast album of the Broadway musical The Sweet Smell of Success. Photo by Chris Ottaunick, courtesy Craig Carnelia.

[Ed. Note: The unexpected death of Marvin Hamlisch earlier this month sent shock waves through the music community. One of only two people ever to receive an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony, and Pulitzer Prize (the other was Richard Rodgers), the New York City-born, Los Angeles-based composer, conductor, and pianist created scores for dozens of Hollywood motion pictures, as well as for five Broadway musicals (including the revolutionary A Chorus Line), and was also a mainstay on the podiums of symphony orchestras across the country. Lyricist and Former ASCAP President Marilyn Bergman, who together with her husband Alan Bergman first collaborated with Hamlisch on the theme song for the film The Way We Were, remembers Hamlisch as someone who “always had a smile on his face and in his heart […] He’d sit at the piano and his musical ideas would tumble out of him—one after another—a shower of notes.” We asked fellow theatre composer Craig Carnelia—who served as Hamlisch’s lyricist for two musicals, including Hamlisch’s last production on Broadway, The Sweet Smell of Success—to tell us more about what it was like to work with this important American music creator.—FJO]

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So much has been written and will be written about my friend and collaborator, Marvin Hamlisch, that I have decided to write a piece that focuses on those recollections that are private, moments when we were alone, or if with others, situations where we were a team of songwriters or a pair of friends.

The Way We Worked

I met Marvin in the summer of 1997. We were introduced by producer Marty Bell, who was assembling talent to create a musical version of Sweet Smell of Success, a team that already included playwriting John Guare, and would later include director Nicholas Hytner.

At our first meeting, Marvin told me he wanted to write another “serious score” and that he preferred working “music-first.” I was delighted to hear both, and since I tend to work music-first when I write my own music, this method was most familiar to me. Marvin felt he was a better composer when not limited by the structure and cadence of a whole lyric before starting to compose. He preferred to free-associate and invent musically, using a few phrases of lyric, which then leaves the lyricist the job of matching all the rises and falls of pitch, intensity and nuance in the music that the composer has put there. I’ve always loved this part of lyric writing, and working with Marvin’s music, after so many years on my own, I was endlessly surprised by the game.

What “music-first” actually means is, we would have an idea of where a character should sing and why. Then I would explore how the character might express him or herself in words, usually a verse, or a few lines, at least a title. Often, I would come to a meeting with two or three different ways of approaching the same moment. Then we would sit together at the piano with a tape running, usually for an hour or so. But don’t let me mislead you. Marvin was the only one with his hands on the keys. I would sit on a stool to his right, most often with a cup of tea, made by Shirley, Marvin’s longtime housekeeper.

Marvin had the single most limited attention span of any adult I had ever met. But these hours were unique. When he was inventing music, his focus and concentration were extraordinary. He would look at the words I had brought in for 30 or 40 seconds and hear something in his head. His hands would then take over. After that initial “idea” phase in the composing, there seemed to be no time-lag between his continued musical impulses and his ability to simply play them. I would call it “confidence,” but even the presence of confidence would seem to acknowledge the existence of insecurity. It was something more primal than confidence that I saw in Marvin in these sessions, more like raw instinct. There didn’t seem to be any brain involved in this work, and along with that omission, a lovely lack of self-doubt and second-guessing. The first attempt wasn’t always his best, but it very often was. When it wasn’t, he or I would say, “Let’s go again,” or “I/you can do better,” and the second try would invariably be the one.

I would then go home, catalogue the tape, find the best variations and begin writing to them. We would then come back together to deal with structure, lyrics, refinements, questions, additional music, whatever was needed. I would go away again, finish the lyric, and we would have a song.

But in those first hours, when Marvin was inventing, I saw him at his finest. Focused, serious, happy, doing what he was undoubtedly put here to do.

On The Road

By the time I met Marvin, he was as famous for his concert work (solo concerts and “Pops” conducting with major symphonies) as for his composing. So I would often travel to wherever he was and stay with him for a day or two to work. About a month into our collaboration, he was conducting with the Pittsburgh Symphony and I spent two days with him there to work on a song. In the afternoon, we worked at the concert hall, but as evening approached, we walked back to the hotel for an early dinner and for Marvin to prepare for the concert. He was getting into his tux in the bedroom while I was writing on the couch in the living room.

Without warning, out leapt Marvin in his underwear, doing West Side Story-style ballet, shouting “Jerome Robbins!” After ten seconds, he switched styles: “Bob Fosse!” Then, the big finish: “Michael Bennett!” Then, he disappeared. Nothing in my life up to this point had prepared me for this floor show.

The Boys at the Beck

When you do a big show, it’s seldom the big moments that end up bringing you the greatest pleasure or sticking in your memory as the peak experiences. Sweet Smell of Success had peaks in abundance, but the finest of them was an afternoon when Marvin and I went to scout out the pit at the Martin Beck Theater to see if it was going to be large enough for the orchestral numbers and combinations he and orchestrator Bill Brohn had in mind.

We were let into the theater by the stage doorman. There was no one else there. No one. There were some general lights on in the house and, of course, a work-light on the stage. We first went down to the pit where we measured some dimensions. We talked about the optional extra musician (a guitarist) that Marvin and Bill were considering. We ended up not using a guitar for the show, but added one when Marvin and I produced the cast album for SONY. Then Marvin was imagining where each player would sit and how much space each instrument and all the doubles and triples would require. I became superfluous, so I took my superfluous self up to the stage.

We didn’t speak for the rest of our time there, probably ten minutes. I was looking out at the house and Marvin was “all business” in the pit. But we were happy, both of us, with the professions we had chosen, the show we were working on, and the partnership we had found. We tried to acknowledge as much as we walked together afterwards. The acknowledgement may have lacked the full understanding I’ve expressed here, but it had an immediacy and an impact that was unusual.

The New York Yankees

Many of you know that Marvin was a huge Yankees fan. Well, as it happens, so am I, and we were in the thick of our collaboration from 1997-2002, which were glory years for the team. Marvin had gotten Joe Torre and his wife some ringside seats for the heralded Streisand concert he had musical directed and this had cemented their friendship.

So when we would go to a game together, it usually included some dazzling perks, like sitting in the dugout for batting practice, or having the best seats for play-off and World Series games, or having dinner with Joe Torre.

But the best was Game 5 of the 2001 World Series against the Diamondbacks. 9/11 had just happened, you could still smell the burning in the air. There were warnings that the World Series was a likely “next target.” “Did I want to go?” “Hell, yes! I’m going.”

Ninth inning, Yankees down by 2, one man on, Scott Brosius hits a game-tying home run. The stadium went wild, as did Marvin and I. The Yanks went on to win the game in extra innings.

Marvin loved the Yankees, but what isn’t as widely known is, they loved him back.

The Ride

At our first meeting with director Nicholas Hytner, Nick made it clear that he was going to join us on Sweet Smell of Success. Also at the meeting were producer Marty Bell and bookwriter John Guare. After they all left Marvin’s apartment that day, he called me into the kitchen and opened a bottle of his favorite wine (the only time I ever saw Marvin drink). He poured a bit into 2 glasses, gave me one and proposed a toast: “Let’s enjoy the ride.” I can honestly say that on Sweet Smell of Success, we did just that.

And yet, I choose to close these remembrances with a lyric from our second show, Imaginary Friends. The song was never used in the play, but was to have been sung by Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy near the end of their lives.

I had a unique experience when writing this lyric. I was enjoying my time with Marvin’s music so intensely that I made the process of completing the lyric take two days longer than it needed to. I didn’t want it to end.

There is nothing clever
I have left to say
You and I
My oh my
Words fail me

Every past endeavor
Every livelong day
So much fuss
So much us
Words fail me

See the legends disappear
With a whisper
“I was here”
“I was here”

No more ties to sever
No more debts to pay
No more chat
‘Magine that
Words fail me

Will I be remembered well?
Did I matter?
Time will tell
Time will tell

Time to face whatever
Time to make our way
Catch the light
Say goodnight
I’m through here
I’m new here
Words fail me.

“Words Fail Me” lyric used by permission Copyright © 2002 A. Schroeder Int’l

Performing As Art

Over the past two weeks, I’ve been discussing how my recent adventures in music performance have engendered growth in my compositional vision and in my ability to advocate for myself. Before finally moving on to other topics, I’d like to consider one additional advantage I’ve reaped from this focus on playing live music: an enhanced connection to other art disciplines.

Ripple 2 by Katherine Kavanaugh

Ripple 2 by Katherine Kavanaugh

I’ve always been fascinated by the visual and literary arts—yes, I’m one of those people who has, in the words of Michael Cunningham, “swooned over sentences” (just as I trust that writers exist who have leapt with joy at harmonies)—and I consider music an integral part of the greater intellectual community. I frequently garner creative sparks for new pieces from works in other disciplines, and I find that the obsessions of non-musical thinkers often can provide incredibly fertile soil for germinating compositional ideas. Despite this willingness to engage with visual art works, I’d felt stymied in my abilities to collaborate across fields. On those few occasions when I’d been able to work with poets, choreographers, and visual artists, the relative slowness with which I compose had forced me away from true co-creation into an ultimately unsatisfactory exchange of final products. Instead of collaborative works, we found ourselves piecing together completed ideas from our different home fields in hopes that the juxtapositions might somehow create a coherent whole.

My current engagement with performing began as a way of overcoming these barriers to interdisciplinary collaboration. By responding to artistic impetuses with sounds that I was able to physically produce in the moment, I was able to share in the genesis of installations and events. My music became an integral part of the process of conceiving these artworks and the resulting creations felt truly collaborative. Currently, I’m happily working towards a September gallery opening at which I’ll be directing a team of musicians as we perform on a water-based gallery-sized installation by Baltimore artist Katherine Kavanaugh. As you can see from these photographs, the visuals will be stunning!

Ripple by Katherine Kavanaugh

Ripple by Katherine Kavanaugh

I’m finding that thinking as a performer in these types of situations can be liberating. If I were thinking solely as a composer, at this moment I would be physically nauseous at the thought of having about two months to produce an hour-long composition on an instrument that doesn’t exist yet. As a performer, I’m looking forward to exploring new sounds that can’t possibly exist in the concert hall and to interacting with an audience of art lovers in a unique setting. As an artist, I’m very excited to be able to create a new piece in collaboration with someone whose work I greatly admire, and I’m thankful that my newfound path has led me to these sorts of opportunities.

Between Sound and Science

The more I hang out with scientists and engineers—and this seems to happen more and more often these days—the more I feel like an incorrigible composer. No matter how much knowledge and lingo I absorb, it sometimes seems that our goals or areas of concern are fundamentally different. As a staunch proponent of collaboration between the arts and the sciences, this bothers me a great deal, and I’d like to get to the bottom of it if I can.

There are certainly artificial barriers between the two domains, built up over the years by mistakes and misconceptions. I’d like to place most of the blame for this on pop science journalism, usually created by people who seem to know little about science or music. For just a couple of recent examples, here’s one about pop music getting sadder and here’s one about the distribution of chords in more than 1300 popular songs. I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to properly deconstruct these. Okay, fine, a couple prompts: 1) Are “Paperback Writer” and “Help!” really happy songs? 2) What kind of insights could be gained from an examination of the distribution of words in more than 1300 popular novels?

I’m being a little flippant here, but the point is that most musicians are probably less dogged and stubborn than me, and have better things to do than nitpick an argument, or look up primary sources to see how they’re misrepresented. So musicians tend to believe that this is representative of how scientists look at music, resulting in a great deal of skepticism and mistrust.

Conversely, researchers in music often ignore music theory on the grounds that it’s not rigorous or verifiable. But many of these researchers have not experienced firsthand the explanatory power of theory for all kinds of musical events, and spend much of their time developing sophisticated methods to reverse-engineer theoretical understanding, occasionally with very strange results. For example, automatic music genre classifiers that do well on certain data sets can be thrown off by small tweaks in equalization, suggesting that they are paying more attention to surface features like production or mastering, and not what we actually hear when we distinguish disco from country. A little music theory here could go a long way; just because it wasn’t created with scientific research in mind doesn’t mean it can’t be incorporated into a scientifically rigorous model or experiment.

Even if we bridged this gap, however, I’m still not sure musicians and researchers would see things the same way. Geraint Wiggins argues persuasively that scientists are in fact creative, but I wonder if they’re a different species of creativity. Put simply, scientists are interested in directed creativity that tackles a particular research problem or goal, whereas artists are interested in exploratory creativity where the destination is much less certain. These are not hard and fast categories, and there’s certainly some bleed-through; it sounds like Wiggins believes that scientists could stand to be a little more broadly imaginative, and artists would never finish anything if they weren’t narrowly focused at least part of the time. (This comes through in writing style, too; I can never seem to get into the idea of stating my thesis up front, preferring for it to develop gradually over the course of several paragraphs.)

Perhaps this is the greatest benefit to be had from collaboration between scientists and artists, this productive clash of perspectives. Even now, though, it’s hard to imagine what this collaboration should ideally look like. Should scientists be technicians, making cool stuff to artists’ specifications? Should artists be subjects, providing data for scientists’ publications? Both of these approaches are valuable and valid, but neither of them builds respect and trust. Should scientists and artists educate each other until we’re all comfortable in both domains? If so, are the end products of these collaborations still research projects and/or works of art? If they are something else instead, what are they? I’d be curious to find out.

The Procedural Hows and Theoretical Whys of SoundCloud.com

Part A: In Good Company

Sound Cloud LogoThe website in question is where you, right now, can go to listen to live recordings of New York’s Alarm Will Sound ensemble performing original commissions at the Mizzou New Music Summer Festival, including work by composers Clint Needham and Liza White.

It is where CHROMA, the London-based chamber-music group, posted the world premiere of Rolf Hind’s piece for featured clarinet soloist, “Sit Stand Walk.”

It is where the Brooklyn-based Sō Percussion made available excerpts from its Creation series of collaborations, including pieces by Tristan Perich and Daniel Wohl.

And it’s where London’s Barbican Centre has uploaded numerous Beethoven recordings by the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, under the baton of Kurt Masur.

It is not the website of a leading classical publication. It is not the online culture section of The New York Times or the London Guardian. It is not a digital offshoot of WQXR or NPR, or of big-eared KCRW for that matter.

No, it is SoundCloud.com, and it has quickly become, with good reason, the default go-to site for music hosting by all manner of musicians, not just aspiring pop stars and bedroom beatmakers, but also those involved in new and experimental composition and performance. The following overview is intended to provide an introduction to making use of SoundCloud, including some tips for maximizing one’s efforts, as well as some passing contextual and tactical thoughts on why SoundCloud has proved as popular and functional as it has.

Part B: Crash Once, Twice Shy

New music makers have numerous reasons for wariness before taking the time generally necessary to master yet another online music-hosting platform.

Why even try, when so many services have let you down before? All that fine-tuning of a personalized MySpace page, only for the user base to up and leave it like a ghost town? All that effort in uploading a project to Archive.org, only to discover that the tag processing is unwieldy? All that work getting music into iTunes, only to have track previews limited to 30 measly seconds, and to be left wondering how, other than linking, you might actually promote your music?

The issues with music-hosting platforms are cultural as much as they are technological. Viewed as a whole, the variety of barriers to having proper online representations suggest something akin to a digital-era conspiracy to keep complex music off the Internet.

Here are some of the hassles:

There is sound quality. At least since iTunes debuted and introduced a particularly low-grade format (128kbps) as an audio standard, the sonic compression of digital music has not suited the dynamic range of most music that doesn’t fall within the broadly defined realm of “pop.” Over time, the standard MP3 file sizes have, thankfully, enlarged (320kbps tends to be the norm), but online streaming is currently supplanting MP3 files, and frequently that means, indeed, a low-fidelity presentation of recorded sound.

There is categorization. Few if any online services handle the taxonomy and typology of adventurous music well. Most music websites have a field for the artist and a field for a song, and little to address the informational void. The sites are already living in a post-album world, and they do little to make nice with recordings in which things like composer and conductor and performers and soloist are important. On a particularly bright and cheerful day, one might consider the Internet a fascinating and massive experiment in New Criticism, every piece of music floating out there virtually free of context.

And there is the basic typographical matter. It’s something that so-called desktop publishing presaged, a situation in which corners are routinely cut in favor of oversimplified—and thus meaning- and pronunciation-altering—decisions regarding haceks and accent marks and umlauts.

SoundCloud.com doesn’t solve all these problems, but it does offer a solid and adaptable foundation for musicians to use to share their music.

Part C: Setting Up the Account Is Just the First Step

Here are some simple instructions on setting up and making use of a SoundCloud.com account.

Step 1: Sign up. You can do this by associating your new account with your Facebook account, or you can create an account directly on SoundCloud.com. The latter is recommended because there’s no significant benefit to the former. You can always associate the accounts later.

Step 1

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Step 2: Fill out your basic profile. The fields (City, Occupation, etc.) are straightforward. Here is one suggestion, though: strongly consider using a single word, or a phrase with no spaces, as your “profile” name. The profile name serves various purposes, including being your SoundCloud account URL. To join SoundCloud isn’t simply to access virtual real estate. It’s to participate (more on which in Step 5), and having a single memorable identity is key to making your presence on SoundCloud effective.

Step 2

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Step 3: Fill out your “Advanced Profile.” Keep your Description brief, maybe 200 words, tops—and consider using rudimentary HTML tags, such as <b></b> to bold key words and to structure the text. Enter URLs for essential web locations, and don’t overdo it. Your website, Twitter, and Facebook are likely sufficient. Enter too many, and your listeners won’t know where to click. You can use the <a href=”URL”></a> tag in your Description if you want to, for example, link to a record review or interview that appears on another website.

Step 3

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Step 4: Upload tracks. As with the creation of your account, the uploading of a track will require you to fill in various fields. They’re pretty straightforward (Title, Image, Type). There aren’t multiple fields for participants. However, the Description field allows for simple HTML, so you can use that space not only to list participants (performer, composer, etc.) but to link to their SoundCloud accounts or websites or both. Make note of that “Show more options” button: it pulls up a whole bunch of additional useful fields, including simple ways to add commerce links so you can sell the track or related material. The easiest way to go about this all is to set the track as Private until you’re happy with all the text and other details, and only then make it public.

Step 4

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Step 5: Participate. That bears repeating: Participate. Even if you’re employing SoundCloud primarily as a promotional tool, think of it as a party—you’re not going to meet anyone if you just stand there (unless you’re wearing a funny T-shirt, or blessed with remarkable cheekbones). These things take effort.

To begin with, “follow” people—follow musicians you work with; follow musicians you admire. Some will follow you back, and that will be the start of actually communicating on and through SoundCloud. You’ll find, in time, that you will look at the Following/Followed lists for people you like, and take a cue as to whose music to look at. Furthermore, the people whose music you do follow show up in your SoundCloud home page, so you will be kept abreast of their activity—not just what they post, but what they have commented on.

Also, embed your tracks elsewhere (on your blog, for example), and encourage others to do so. One of the beautiful things about SoundCloud is that it has elegant “players” that you can use to embed a track or a set of tracks into a post on another website. For example, the track below is from a project I recently completed, in which I got over 60 musicians to remix the first movement of the Chamber Symphony, Op. 110a, by Dimitri Shostakovich. The original recording was by the fine Los Angeles ensemble wild Up, who graciously provided the source audio for the project.

And, finally, be sure to comment on other musicians’ uploaded tracks—that is, see SoundCloud for what it is, not just a music-hosting platform, but a platform for communication and collaboration. Comments come in two forms: standard and “timed,” the latter of which appear at a distinct point along the chronology of the track. You’ll see the “timed” comments along the track just above.

Step 6: Dig in. There is far more you can do on SoundCloud. The coverage above is intended simply as an introduction. For example, you can create Sets of tracks that provide additional context. You can join Groups, which in addition to collating tracks by some semblance of shared cultural activity (field recordings, serialism, toy piano) provide for discussion beyond the confines of a single recording. There are Soundcloud apps that allow you to do additional things with and to your tracks. Everything described above is free, albeit with a space limit on data storage, but you can elect to pay for a premium account and access additional resources. (The limits to SoundCloud are worth noting. For one thing, this is all “fixed recordings.” If you specialize in algorithmic music, you’ll be posting finished recordings, not live generative sound. Also, SoundCloud is a business, and as such monitors what is posted; it is especially attentive to copyright violation, so if you tend toward the aggressively plunderphonic, be prepared to have your track removed—or your entire account for that matter.)

Step 7: Make it new. The structure of SoundCloud suggests itself as a neutral space. In many ways, it has defined itself as the anti-MySpace. Where MySpace became overloaded with design elements, SoundCloud keeps it simple. This simplicity suggests SoundCloud less as a place and more as a form of infrastructure—if MySpace was a city that never slept, SoundCloud is the Department of Public Works. Its elegant tool sets provide structure but don’t define or fully constrain activity. For the more adventurous participants, SoundCloud is itself a form to be played with. Some musicians have used the “timed comments,” for example, to annotate their work as it proceeds. Others have fun with the images associated with their tracks, posting sheet music or workspace images. Some create multiple accounts for different personas or projects. Others have used the limited personalization options to colorize the embeddable player and make it look seamless within their own websites and blogs.

It’s arguable that the most productive users of SoundCloud recognize the fluid nature of the service and post not only completed works, but works in progress. They upload sketches and rough drafts and rehearsals: this keeps their timeline freshly updated, helps excuse the relatively low fidelity of streaming sound, and further invites communication with listeners—many of who are fellow musicians themselves.

Ready to make some noise?

You can use platforms like SoundCloud to participate in NewMusicBox’s “Sound Ideas” challenges and easily share the music you create. Craft responses to prompts from:

John Luther Adams
Ken Ueno
Sarah Kirkland Snider
Sxip Shirey

Selections from submitted tracks will be featured in an upcoming post.

***

Marc Weidenbaum founded the website Disquiet.com in 1996. It focuses on the intersection of sound, art, and technology. He has written for Nature, the website of The Atlantic, Boing Boing, Down Beat, and numerous other publications. He has commissioned and curated sound/music projects that have featured original works by Kate Carr, Marcus Fischer, Marielle Jakobsons, John Kannenberg, Tom Moody, Steve Roden, Scanner, Roddy Shrock, Robert Thomas, Pedro Tudela, and Stephen Vitiello, among many others. He moderates the Disquiet Junto group at Soundcloud.com; there dozens of musicians respond to weekly Oulipo-style restrictive compositional projects. He’s a founding partner at i/olian, which develops software projects that explore opportunities to play with sound. He lives in San Francisco in a neighborhood whose soundmarks include Tuesday noon civic alarms as well as persistent seasonal fog horns from the nearby bay. He also resides at twitter.com/disquiet.

Old Friends

I was pleasantly surprised to open up NewMusicBox a couple of days ago and see James Falzone staring back at me—his face marking a great feature article about him written by Devin Hurd. The surprise was not only because it was a much-deserved spotlight on one of the special musical talents from Chicago, but also because I’ve known James since we were both undergrads at Northern Illinois University playing in the sax section of the Jazz Lab Band. He was a monster clarinetist, saxophonist, and composer from very early on, and I don’t think anyone back then would be surprised at how successful his career has become.

This has got me thinking about one of the well-worn mantras that I find myself continually repeating to my own students—you can’t have enough friends, especially while you’re a student composer. Speaking from experience, looking only towards the future and forgetting to take advantage of the opportunities that surround you in the present is an easy trap to fall into at any point in your life, but most of all during your student years. When you get to know someone over pizza and beers, as well as in late-night study sessions, it’s hard to imagine them—much less yourself—being a successful professional colleague with whom you can collaborate. Too often we focus so much on where we’re going that we forget that we’re already somewhere and miss opportunities that are literally sitting right next to us.

From the composer’s standpoint, it’s obvious that the performers around you (at any point during your career) are your best bet to write for, but the same sentiment is true for performers, who are often so focused on learning repertoire that they forget about the composers down the hall and the opportunity to have new music written for them early in their careers. Many of the professional composers I’ve talked to see this concept as a basic fact of musical nature—you may get a chance to work with other professionals down the road, but the colleagues who surround you early on will be the springboard for those future collaborations.

My own career as a composer would not be where it is if not for several friends who liked my music and took the chance to commission me to write for them. One commission by a trombonist friend of mine from undergrad days, Tom Stark, set in motion a series of works that have really expanded my career in the brass field, and just this evening I’ll be treated to the world premiere of a new work written for the violist Aurélien Pétillot and contralto Elizabeth Pétillot, for whom I have written numerous compositions and who have remained staunch advocates for my music. These relationships are so valuable, so necessary for any of us to not only gain recognition within the music community but to continue to work and thrive as creative artists that we neglect them at our peril.

Do you have any stories of collaborations with school friends that ultimately turned out to be much more down the road?