Counterstream Radio is your online home for exploring the music of America’s composers. Drawing upon New Music USA’s substantial library of recordings, our programming is remarkable for its depth and eclecticism. The station streams influential music of many pedigrees 24 hours a day. Keep listening and discover the sound of music without limits. Click here to open Counterstream Radio.
Although it was a long time ago, it’s easy for me to recall the anxiety, tension, and sheer terror of being alone in the dark as a young child. As any former children reading this might attest, what makes the experience so frightening isn’t the darkness itself, but rather the darkness’s ability to thrust us into an indeterminate state where ghosts, monsters, and bogeymen might be swarming under the bed. As children we were still open to these kinds of possibilities, and the sense of sight which might have disabused us of these fears had been dimmed with the lights out. As an adult, I’m pretty sure there was never anything under the bed, but it was the belief in ghosts—not the existence of ghosts—that gave the experience of being in the dark such power.
Likewise, I feel that many of our problems as composers are self-created byproducts of something that is not actually there. For me, compositional ghosts often assume the form of teachers, peers, idols, or competitors, although they can also come to embody the opinions of panels, foundations, or imagined groups of critical people that may not in fact have a sound basis in reality. Oftentimes, our compositional ghosts are constructed more out of our own fear and anticipation of disapproval, absorbed through a strange form of social osmosis rather than handed down from an authority figure on high. We internalize expectations from friends, enemies, and mentors without full awareness of having done so; we believe everyone else’s tall tales, and this gets in the way of writing our own story.
Composer David Rakowski’s duly celebrated buttstix are a way of making compositional phantoms tangible and, moreover, just as ridiculous as they really are. I was never a student of Davy’s but always identified with his desire to see what he, figuratively, had a stick up his ass about. As Rakowski points out in his excellent NewMusicBox interview with Frank J. Oteri, we all have different hang-ups and assumptions and habits and fears and contentments that make us who we are, and sometimes it is the case that certain “buttstix” do provide us with useful tools or at least the discipline of having negotiated a particular rigidity; it’s just that, unexamined, a composer’s buttstix can inhibit personal and artistic growth. Some of Rakowski’s own buttstix include “serious music is slow music” as well as “improvisation is not composition.” In an official buttstix follow-up post on his blog, Rakowski relates how each time he discovered (and occasionally, extracted) a new buttstick, his music began to seem less a part of the “camp” he currently identified with and more like, well, himself.
Examples of buttstix, courtesy of David Rakowski.
I can’t help but think that Rakowski’s buttstix have done more pedagogical good than a whole four years of masterclasses with impressive prize-winning composers. The process of identifying and removing myriad buttstix is comparable to the terrified child turning on a light: in both cases, the phantom Unacceptable Act is easily cut down to size, or even revealed as entirely imaginary—but as long as they reign from the shadows, the phantoms are able to exert a terrifying influence.
Bringing our assumptions and hang-ups into the light of day can put them in their place, whether we view them as ghosts to be dispelled, buttstix to be yanked, or as just a few of the many available channels on the satellite TV of reality.
As another academic year begins, I have a few college visits planned and have been thinking about the compositional ghosts that most often haunt today’s generation of young composers—including assumptions and dictums about the process of composing, an area of composing rarely afforded the attention it deserves in today’s undergraduate curricula. Below are ten of the biggest, baddest ghosts that seem to be influencing many young composers today, and which we would do well to examine. The following precepts should be questioned and challenged just as forcefully as the belief in supernatural creatures lurking under the bed:
1. Measures of music generated=progress made (corollary: erasing measures is a shameful step back).
2. Studying works we laud and admire is more beneficial than taking a closer listen to works or (genres) which we dislike.
3. Composition is a “career.”
4. The presence/absence of any one award/accomplishment is, in itself, capable of making/breaking a composer’s chances.
5. More care and forethought always produces superior work (corollary for teachers: more writing on the blackboard=clear evidence that teaching has occurred).
6. Composition should reflect the results of conscious deliberation, rather than communion with the hidden unconscious.
7. The main point of school is class and the assignments/learning/social relationships acquired therein.
8. Explaining why you made a musical choice is equivalent to justifying that same choice.
9. The type of attention we bring to music is irrelevant to how that music is experienced.
10. Writing new music for old instruments isn’t in any way funny.
What compositional ghosts have haunted your nights? And what caused you to invest them with so much power?
I’m always interested in how various artistic communities deal with the looming specter of experimentalism. With any art form, there’s almost inevitably some resistance to the experimental, leading to a reactionary defensiveness on the part of the experimenters. (“You can’t fire me, I quit!”) From my mostly-on-the-sidelines, grass-is-greener vantage point, the indie video game community seems refreshingly free of these trappings. Lately I’ve been wondering why this is, and what the new music community might learn from this.
One immediately striking thing about indie video games is that the line between experimentalism and commercialism is often fuzzy at best. If you look at it as a spectrum, it can be hard to figure out where the poles are even located. Lots of game developers—Stephen Lavelle, Andrew Plotkin, Anna Anthropy, and Terry Cavanagh, just to name a few—seem to dabble in both worlds, and even they can’t always predict which side of the fence a particular project will land on. Cavanagh’s Super Hexagon, an iOS game with a minimalist visual aesthetic and punishing difficulty, seemed like a niche effort even to its creator until it became a surprise hit.
Part of this is certainly due to a different sort of market. At least right now, people seem more willing to pay for games than to pay for music, which allows for a little more leeway in what developers choose to work on. At the same time, these developers deserve at least a little bit of credit for creating this environment and inspiring such devotion. In particular, I’ve been impressed so far by the openness of this community, not just in the diversity of the things they make but also in their encouragement of others. In Rise of the Videogame Zinesters, Anthropy argues that anyone should be able to make games, regardless of what kind of background they have in the field.
This is quite a contrast to the world of concert music, where performance and composition are regarded as elite professions that demand decades of highly specialized training. I don’t want to minimize the importance of this, but I do wonder what it would be like if we were a little more welcoming to others outside of the profession, not just as audience members but as potential creators. I sense that there is a fear among some that this would be like opening the flood gates—the derision that greets any new tool that makes it easier to make music is a pretty clear indicator here. But what if, instead of regarding them with suspicion, we viewed them as stepping stones to other kinds of musicianship? How could we help bridge those gaps? Instead of diluting the craft and rigor of concert music, new perspectives would enrich the field, and a more musically literate population would mean more fans who appreciate the effort and talent that goes into the act of making music.
As far as what this radical audience participation might look like, I’m not sure yet. But I’d like to find out.
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.
*
Acknowledgements: A special thanks to Pauline Oliveros, Robert Voisey, Päivi Salmi, and Perry R. Cook for providing additional insight into this topic.
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).
***
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.
Oliver Knussen conducts fellows of the Tanglewood Music Center in Castiglioni’s Inverno In-Ver. Photo by Hilary Scott.
Just prior to the start of the Sunday night concert of this year’s Festival of Contemporary Music at Tanglewood, a couple slipped into the seats just in front of me. They were older, but in that good-looking, nonchalantly well-put-together way that suggests affluence; I’m guessing they were tourists on a getaway to the Berkshires. I imagined they had been at Tanglewood for the weekend. They had heard Pinchas Zuckerman, they had heard Yo-Yo Ma, they had heard Beethoven’s Fourth. And now they were in Ozawa Hall to hear Inverno In-Ver, Niccolò Castiglioni’s 1970s magnum opus.
Across the festival’s six concerts, festival director Oliver Knussen had programmed three works by the late Italian composer, as a kind of fill-in-the-historical-gap exercise. Castiglioni’s sound-world is more singular than most, and Inverno In-Ver is one of the most singular examples. The timbre is almost painfully bright—a classically proportioned orchestra, but one in which the bass instruments are almost always pushed precariously into their high ranges, one in which the strings are playing harmonics more often than not, one in which the glockenspiel and celesta and triangle are the main ingredients, not the garnish: a monstrous Sugar Plum Fairy run amok. The melodic language is almost quaintly tonal, neo-classical, but the melodies either run all over each in bright profusion, or else are buried under a dense foil of high clusters and trills—like trying to glimpse Pergolesi through the scintillating scotoma of a migraine. It’s extreme music, the ping and waver of a music box blown up to Godzilla size.
The couple in front of me was not buying it. Give them credit: they stuck it out. But they were perplexed, annoyed, contemptuously amused. The husband made disbelieving jokes in an unwittingly loud voice (probably because he was wearing a hearing aid—I can only imagine how much more bonkers Castiglioni’s music must sound through a hearing aid). The wife was fully engrossed by the program book before too long. They left at intermission.
***
I’m sometimes amazed that there’s any overlap at all between the audiences for the Shed concerts and audiences for the festival. (After a couple of tentative efforts under James Levine’s tenure, programming overlap has atrophied as well, the Boston Symphony Orchestra returning to its pattern of marking the festival with but a token novelty—this year, it was André Previn’s Music for Boston, one of three BSO commissions to mark Tanglewood’s 75th anniversary, conducted by Stéphane Denève on Saturday night, and channeling neo-classical Americana in a manner that alternated between divertingly odd and bafflingly odd.) Think of what, these days, the annual Tanglewood programming stalwarts are: James Taylor; Tanglewood on Parade, a day-long happening somewhere between a gala-of-unusual-randomness (a Tanglewood specialty) and a funfair; Film Night at the Pops; the traditional season-ending iteration of Beethoven’s Ninth; and the Festival of Contemporary Music. One of these things is very much not like the others, a sense amplified by being at Tanglewood itself, both a shrine to music and a place that, at every turn, gives permission for the music to recede into a pleasant background.
This is not always a bad thing: there are a lot worse ways to hear a Beethoven symphony for the umpteenth time than barefoot on the lawn, with a bottle of wine. But, on the other hand, Tanglewood does have that sacred reputation, and, increasingly, it seems like the FCM is one of the main events tasked with protecting it. It would certainly explain why people have tended to get so exercised about it over the years, about its breadth—or lack thereof.
Recent festivals directed by Augusta Read Thomas and Charles Wuorinen were such conscious anthologies—diversity for its own sake, attempted snapshots of the full landscape—that it was a bit of a cold-water splash that this year’s lineup was so restricted, almost all British and American composers, almost all with similar musical DNA: not necessarily atonal, but with the complex, texture-driven density of atonal modernism as a starting point. Part of this I understand; Thomas and Wuorinen are composers, but Knussen is a composer and a conductor, on the podium for much of the festival, and it’s a big difference between believing in a piece enough to add it to a program and enough to learn it, rehearse it, and present it to its best advantage in performance. For better or for worse, the majority of the works were ones that Knussen felt a strong personal and/or professional connection with. And, it should be noted, even with such a hemmed-in playing field, the festival still had at least a bit more stylistic variety than the Bang on a Can marathon I heard last month. But nothing on the FCM ventured close to the BoaC aesthetic, and even hints of a larger minimalist umbrella were sensed only in passing moments. It was a return to the Recent-Developments-In-Transatlantic-Modernism days of festivals of old.
Oliver Knussen and Peter Serkin with the TMCO at the final FCM performance. Photo by Hilary Scott.
Even within that limited focus, the programming was further focused to mini-surveys of a handful of composers. Harrison Birtwistle was one—four works, including the curtain-raising Sonance Severance 2000, which opened Monday night’s Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra concert under Knussen’s baton: a wine-dark sea of sound, an inexorably churning mass. George Benjamin was represented by three works, and a hint of stylistic restlessness, as in Duet, a compact 2008 piano concerto (also on Monday’s concert, conducted by Knussen, with pianist Peter Serkin) that hones the lushness of Benjamin’s earlier works into sharp steel. The piano opens in clanging, jittery two-part counterpoint, which gives way to a chain-of-custody negotiation of textures and ideas: brusque brass, rustling strings, a harp-driven, quasi-Reichian accompaniment pattern. Gunther Schuller, longtime director (and lightning rod) of past festivals, was back, both conducting a Saturday concert devoted to the perennially provocative Charles Ives and offering a new orchestra piece, premiered earlier this summer and reprised on Monday: Dreamscape (conducted by Knussen), which seemed to revisit the old Schoenberg-Stan Kenton Third Stream style in unlikely guises, be it a Tex Avery-style Scherzo, a noir-Bartók Nocturne, or a finale, “Birth—Evolution—Culmination,” that portrayed the life cycle as a pilgrim’s progress through a burly, dissonant, jazz-romantic big city landscape.
The TMCO presented Gunther Schuller’s Dreamscape Photo by Hilary Scott.
I had reviewed the first four concerts of the festival for the Boston Globe, hanging that all-too-brief recap on a division between older composers, experienced enough to indulge their own obsessions, and younger composers, still cloaking their more idiosyncratic compulsions in an effort to impress the listener. It was a bit of a journalistic convenience, but still, on Monday’s concert, one sensed some sort of doorway through which the younger composers had yet to pass. It is both a compliment and a mild criticism to note how much Helen Grime’s Everybody Sang sounded like a fifth Sea Interlude from Peter Grimes; the craft and confidence were on that level, but, as with Sunday’s performance of her Seven Pierrot Miniatures, I also felt like I had heard this sort of piece many, many times before. But the reality is that, as a thirty-something composer, these sorts of requests (Everybody Sang was commissioned by BBC Radio 3) come with the unspoken pressure to demonstrate that one can Handle The Orchestra, that one has the competence and flair to justify the money and rehearsal time. That sort of advertised professionalism was a prominent feature of other festival composers at a similar career point. The American composer Sean Shepherd’s These Particular Circumstances, a chamber symphony performed on Thursday’s concert, was superbly engineered, but the engineering was so elaborate and prominent—every instrument, every range always in play—that it felt hemmed in, like the music didn’t have enough space to go exploring.
But all composers have to go through this in order to make a career, I suppose. Craft is important, and the demonstration of that craft is, in a lot of cases, what gives composers the wherewithal to, eventually, have the chance to fully explore the sounds that really compel them to create. (Maybe Grime and Shepherd are already doing that, and it’s my failing that I don’t find those sounds as compelling as they do. I don’t know.) Part of the postgraduate work of any composer—the process often annoyingly referred to as “finding your voice”—is reconnecting with more extreme musical impulses; one perhaps shouldn’t fault Grime or Shepherd or Luke Bedford (another young-ish composer given a spotlight on this year’s festival) that the current institutional landscape either allows or demands that such a reckoning come later in life than it did in, say, Beethoven’s day. Bedford’s Monday night piece, Outblaze the Sky (conducted by TMC fellow Alexandre Bloch), was really interesting on this point. It was unusually monothematic, a long orchestral crescendo built solely from gradually shifting harmonies and lobbed-arc glissandi (imagine, if you will, the introduction to “Keepin’ the Dream Alive” extended out to six minutes and given a modernist sheen). In the end, though, it’s a piece that almost-but-doesn’t-quite work, never quite going into the over-the-top, propriety-challenging orchestrational overdrive that the build-up seems to promise. Brilliant failure or cautiously partial success? The boundary between the demands of the muse and the demands of a career was anything but clear.
Alexandre Bloch leads the TMCO in Bedford’s Outblaze the Sky Photo by Hilary Scott.
Like a programmatic vault over that boundary, Outblaze the Sky was followed by Happy Voices, one of the orchestral interludes from David Del Tredici’s evening-long Child Alice (conducted, with enthusiastic stamina, by Asbury). I will admit that I’m not really a fan of Child Alice; unlike its predecessor, Final Alice (which I adore), here the neo-Wagnerian tonality feels more like the end, not the means, with a certain amount of resulting bloat: short ideas sequenced or repeated four and five times when three would be plenty, a lot of over-the-top modulatory delaying tactics without any long-line melodic or contrapuntal strategy to sustain them. But as an example of a composer reconnecting with extreme impulses, it is choice. Earlier in the festival, Alexander Bernstein had played Del Tredici’s 1958 piano solo Soliloquy, a craggy and expressionistic entry in the modernist ledger. It was a reminder of what Del Tredici cast aside in favor of the cheeky joys of diminished chords and deceptive cadences—but also a reminder of how much time and talent he had lavished on the other style before he was ready to make the break.
***
Stephan Asbury leads Knussen’s Higglity Pigglity Pop at Tanglewood. Photo by Hilary Scott
On Sunday night, Inverno In-Ver was followed by a semi-staged version of Knussen’s Higglety Pigglety Pop!, his other Maurice Sendak opera, considered something of a companion piece to his better-known Where the Wild Things Are (which was on the 2009 FCM). Sendak’s original book—an anticipatory requiem for his dog—has usually been interpreted as a wry commentary on the artist’s life: Jennie the terrier (Kate Jackman in this performance, ably negotiating the part’s musical demands, though sometimes not quite translating that into a full vocal characterization) leaves the comfort and security of her home, feeling that (as the opera’s subtitle emphasizes) “there must be more to life”; she encounters a series of somewhat suspicious characters and increasingly surreal adventures, culminating in a showdown with a hungry lion, the result of a failure to make the human baby she has been employed to take care of eat anything. Jennie’s seeming tragedy—hungry, abandoned, alone—is transformed into triumph, as she is made the leading lady of the World Mother Goose Theater.
The performance could best be described as a high-level mixed bag: orchestrally thrilling (Asbury conducted), vocally solid if intermittently cautious, theatrically efficient (Netia Jones contributed a modified version of the video she produced for the Aldeburgh Festival, animating Sendak’s drawings). But the work itself was perfect for the festival. It might not be a perfect barometer, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that, if you like Higglety Pigglety Pop! better than Where the Wild Things Are, you might just be a composer—or a pursuer or survivor of some other similar creative vocation. I can’t think of another piece that so acutely channels the fundamental absurdity and loneliness of creative activity, the frustration of working toward an ever-receding goal, the difficulty of communicating the nature of that work to anyone outside the bubble. And most of that is the music: Sendak’s perspective is gentle, but Knussen’s score—concentrated in its span, but immense in its volatility of color, every passing mood expanded into a deep-focus panoply of fanatical instrumental detail, even subliminal images rendered in IMAX HD—amplifies everything into almost overwhelming immediacy, the moment-to-moment highs and lows of the creative process translated into fluid music. The great thing is that it’s done without a hint of false pathos or rose-tinted romanticizing: Jennie is the heroine, but she’s also foolhardy and stubborn and even clueless. The opera manages to be simultaneously madcap silly and deeply poignant throughout.
Higglety Pigglety Pop! rather ingeniously recapitulates the life of the composing mind—but, then again, thanks to its strange relationship to its setting, so does the Festival of Contemporary Music itself. It produces an annual, temporary, vibrant community—at times, it feels like a new music networking event with added concerts—but one set apart from the customary Tanglewood crowds. It’s genial to outsiders, but also prone to bewilder them. It sails at an angle to the prevailing Tanglewood winds, but it still sails nonetheless. It’s the creative predicament made manifest: it’s there but it’s not there. Even an ex-composer feels at home.
In a recent New Yorker magazine profile of Bruce Springsteen, David Remnick quotes Springsteen’s longtime friend and guitarist Steve Van Zandt as he describes their early attempts to cover the pop songs they were hearing on the radio:
“Bruce was never good at it. He had a weird ear. He would hear different chords, but he could never hear the right chords. When you have that ability or inability, you immediately become more original. Well, in the long run, guess what: in the long run, original wins.”
As someone who grew up with a pair of weird ears, I found this description to be heartening.
When I began exploring music, I experienced difficulty in playing the music of others. My inability to remember exactly what I had heard caused me to warp the tunes that I tried to copy. As I consistently failed in my attempts to replicate a style or a specific song, I began to realize that I actually preferred the new sounds that resulted from these missteps. I was unable to clone the pre-existing styles and this lack of skill became the basis for everything that followed. My music sounded original because I was constitutionally incapable of creating anything else.
Throughout my student years, I attempted to embrace my special background while simultaneously working to gain the skill-set shared by most other musicians. Although I didn’t need to worry that my compositions would mirror my favorite pieces from the repertoire, I also felt that there was a great gulf between the sounds I wanted to create and those that emanated from my earnest attempts at notation. Performers found that my compositions presented them with odd challenges and that they tended to be difficult to learn in inexplicable and unpredictable ways. Originality was never a problem for me, basic facility was.
Decades of training allowed me eventually to gain aptitude in typical musicianship; however, as my weird ears matured, they continued to resist strolling along the primrose paths prepared by others. Once I finally was able to clone music of the past, I began to see new possibilities for exploration that had been closed to me before. Having become somewhat competent at fully processing equal temperament chords and metronomic pulses, I realized that my musical ideals existed outside these systems. When I began, I was equivocating between the sounds I knew existed and the ones I wanted to hear; the training allowed me to understand that I had always sought something distinct from the music surrounding me. I had always assumed that my weird ears were a handicap; they turned out to be an advantage.
As a teacher, I try to keep this lesson in mind. Some students operate on a different level from the others, hearing music in unique ways. I believe that it’s important for them to fully grasp the typical theories, if only so that they may understand the enemy against which they someday will rebel. But at the same time, I try to learn from the way that they approach the repertoire, to hear the connections that seem obvious to them but evade the rest of us. These exceptional people can provide insights that have eluded the millions of normal ears that have previously assessed these compositions. The performers with weird ears can create innovative interpretations, and the similarly endowed scholars can refresh our analytic viewpoint.
It’s easy to award accolades to students who walk the straight and narrow path, who excel within the parameters established by their professors. It can be difficult to determine whether a new idea represents a brilliant re-thinking of centuries of precedents or a simple misunderstanding of the foundations of the field. People with weird ears generally try to function normally within society, but are unable to be anything other than original. Hopefully, Steve Van Zandt is right and in the long run original wins.
I have a bit of a tendency to tip towards obsessiveness. (At this point, I probably should pause for a moment to ask those people who know me well to stop guffawing at my understatement. Okay? May I continue?) When a restaurant joins two tables, I’m the sort of person who finds it difficult to sit down until I’ve assured myself that the corners match perfectly. I can find myself distracted while attempting to converse with certain people unless I’m aligned correctly with them. I react viscerally against documents with two spaces after each period, and spend a great deal of time and fruitless energy encouraging my students to employ one-inch margins in their papers. In short, I enjoy exploring the minutiae of arcana and believe that exactitude is a virtue.
At times, I believe that this character trait helps my composing. I enjoy spending the time necessary to align all the elements in my scores, and I treat the process of eradicating engraving errors as a moral imperative. I attempt to take the care necessary to consider the physical nature of the instruments for which I’m writing in order to ensure that every gesture can be produced. When I am able, I question the basic assumptions of our musical tradition, including our tuning, notation systems, and performance practice.
More often, I find that my obsessiveness detracts from my attempts at artistry. While following any specific musical path, I can focus on what’s directly in front of me without seeing the opportunities beckoning on the periphery. As I direct my ideas to flow easily from one point to the next, I lose the ability to surprise and delight. Inevitability begins to function like a juggernaut, crushing all obstacles as it proceeds inexorably towards its goal. When I was younger and was attempting to compose fast groove-based music, I kept finding myself creating rhythmic drive by placing attacks consistently on a single rhythmic level so that once I established (for example) a sixteenth-note pulse, an event would occur at every sixteenth-note interval until I reached the ends of phrases. Although I knew that the pulse would remain firmly established in the absence of such specificity, I continued to build these unrelenting lattices throughout those compositions.
As I grew more aware of my innate tendencies, I began to build the opportunity for serendipity into my compositional process. If I make a copying or transcribing error, I question whether the pattern alteration should be construed as a mistake or as an improvement. Duchamp considered his great glass “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even” unfinished until movers dropped and shattered it, and he painstakingly glued the shards back into the frame. With visible cracks now veining the entire piece, he felt that the design was finally completed. I attempt to channel the spirit of Duchamp in order to accept even those accidents that seem disastrous at first blush as possible windows opening towards new opportunities.
Moving beyond fortuitous mistakes, recently I’ve begun teaching myself to infect my materials. After indulging my initial tendency to build a progression by obsessively revoicing a single interval, I now might take the resulting fragments and mutate it. At first, I can subtly add one or two sonorities that appear to play by my harmonic rules, but with a second interval now creating a genetically modified chord. This new creation can then reproduce either naturally into other similar harmonies, or can undergo further transgenic manipulation, creating ever-newer chords. Simple manipulations that alter a single characteristic of a gesture suddenly open up entirely new worlds populated with musical organisms that might sound alien to the initial idea, allowing me to move along paths that my obsessiveness might have otherwise eschewed as unrelated to my initial ideas. In so doing, I’m hoping to awaken the possibility for delightful surprise.
I tend to be a late adopter of technology. As I learned electronic music in the mid ’80s, I avoided the new sampling keyboards in favor of the antique Minimoog, and kept splicing tape long after nearly all my peers had jettisoned their razor blades and replaced them with sequencers. I remained attached to LPs and CDs (in turn) long after most people had shifted their musical collections into the new preferred formats. And I finally bought my first smartphone within the past year.
As I began to program this new device, I found the interface to be a little counterintuitive—things tended to flip when I wanted them to swerve and they scrolled when I wanted them to jump. I slowly transferred my contacts and calendars into this useful little computer, gradually getting a feel for how to manipulate it. After about three days, I began to have nightly dreams that I was programming my phone. During this time, I could sense new neural pathways developing as my brain began to attune itself to how it would need to function in order to unleash the power of the device. As I was adjusting, I’d enjoy little serotonin kicks when I’d properly navigate through a computing sequence. After about a week, I’d become fully acclimated to the new technology and it began to feel like second nature.
Although I recognized this process from several prior occasions, the period during which the smartphone controlled my dreams felt simultaneously gratifying and disturbing. It seems that whenever I attempt to learn a new skill quickly and obsessively, the process seeps through several layers of my subconscious during the period in which my brain adapts to allow success at the new task. When I began to dream of Tetris, I knew that I had crossed the line into tetrisoholicism and that I needed to quit cold turkey. Indeed, this ability for video games of all sorts to penetrate deep into my subconscious is the main reason why I avoid them, despite my belief that they can provide an extraordinarily fruitful platform for artistic exploration. Conversely, when as an adult I had to learn how to sight-sing and to take dictation of tonal music, I welcomed these somnambulistic practices as a sign that I was beginning to make connections between the sounds that I’d always heard and their theoretical labels. I could feel the shape of my brain adapting to be able to associate the visual phenomenon of how a V7 chord is represented on the page with its visceral need to resolve—an imperative that I still don’t feel when I hear Mm7 chords as part of blues progressions.
Our brains are remarkable in their ability to change their shape in response to stimuli. As we undergo these mutations, we become different people. I no longer hear tonal music in the same way that I did prior to my advanced training, and I cannot recreate my prior mental state. In a certain way, this ability has transformed me into a new person, someone who accepts the basis of Western tonal music and who feels that these tools are a central part of the aural experience. While I believe that this change has allowed me to gain more than I’ve lost, it’s important for me to recognize that I no longer hear music in the same way that I did before embarking on this path.
As I train myself to use new technologies, musical or otherwise, I need to bear in mind that each adaptation changes who I am at a very basic level. Each new neural pathway that I create makes me approach my art in a different way.
Sometimes, I envy my composition students. I loved being a student. I remember sleeping in until noon. That was awesome. I remember the excitement of learning new things about new music things, and writing new things at all hours of the day and night. I remember we ticked away on malleable composer-clocks. That was fabulous. Time felt easily scheduled and free. In 2002, I left school and somehow continued to write things; yet I wrote under a new umbrella of anxiety and discomfort. I did not have a hold on how I could control and shape my writing time.
Over the course of the last decade—a path that runs through a handful of adjunct teaching jobs, having a kid, living and freelancing in New York City, and now nearing my fifth year on the other side of the desk as a full-time faculty composer—it became necessary to snap my Dali-glob of a composer-clock into a strictly delineated circular grid. Apart from the time we take for performances, networking, promoting our work, etc., I am fascinated by how we composers inhabit our composer-clocks. Writing time: where is it, when is it, how is it.
In 2004, I had a late-night drink with composer Betsy Jolas after we had gone to hear the St. Petersburg Chamber Choir present Rachmaninov’s Vespers. Betsy spoke of the first time she met Stravinsky, her summers at Tanglewood, and her children. I asked her, “How did you find time to write while caring for young kids?” She explained: First, one makes time to write; second, she had a special attic, all her own. She would sneak upstairs at 3 a.m. and write until the children awoke. She called it “my precious, protected, space and time with my music.”
surest sign *someone* living in this loft sprinting toward deadline: place is a hurricane. Odin is six. he has no deadlines. #thatleavesme
I grew up in beautiful Boulder, Colorado, in a house built into a hill nestled beneath the Flatirons. Along with a perfect view of the south side of I.M. Pei’s stunning National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) building, our house had a funky, small, modernist layout. The “yard” consisted of multiple levels with rock steps leading to little curious outside-spaces to explore. I often awoke at night to one cricket singing, deer rustling, aspen leaves twinkling in the breeze. It was quiet.
The most dazzling place I knew as a kid was my mom’s parents’ house in Northern Indiana’s Dune Acres, on the shore of Lake Michigan. With architectural characteristics of Bauhaus and the International Style, its layout was supreme funkytown: cool angles everywhere, half-walls, a bewindowed breakfast nook that jetted out over trees, a “yard” of multiple levels with rock steps leading to secret, small, side patios. I often awoke at night to the steady waves whispering on the beach. It was quiet.
I love visiting friends’ and colleagues’ “places of work.” The way we as individuals shape the environments devoted to our creativity is telling. Our spaces are windows into who we are as creative thinkers: precisely where the piano or keyboard is placed; if there is a writing table, its size, shape, and location; what, if anything, one chooses to hang on walls. Compelling among these spaces are those in New York City—workspace design gets mighty quirky in minimal square-footage. (Mine was seven-feet by three-feet when I lived there.) There is also a fun-ness in our dealing with our “stuff”: some studios are so pristinely organized they verge on being hermetically sealed; some have scores of scores, books, sticky notes, instruments, electronic gear, piles of paper seemingly strewn haphazardly. We all have our ways of organization, organized chaos, or preferred chaos here.
Throughout the apartment-hopping days of college to today, I have meticulously laid out my writing spaces. I also obsessively studied the history of architecture. I wrote, and still write, music inspired by buildings. I now understand the symbiosis of all of this: a thirty-eight-year evolution of a cognitive comfort zone, deeply rooted in, and informed by, the architecture of the spaces I inhabit. To ease the struggles of writing, I devote varied compositional activities to specific locations. These days, the writing time I have in my office at school, or in a coffee shop, is devoted to proofreading, editing, and making to-do lists. Large- and small-scale imagining, choosing notes, pacing while considering what comes next, I do best in my tiny home studio. It is a nook; it looks west over the Ann Arbor treeline, and its walls form a funky-angled trapezoid. The space feels easy.
typically when up b/f errbody on a trip I jump into bonus getsomeworkdone time. I didn’t bring work. I’m reading a magazine. & I feel weird.
In 2007, I caught up with composer Chen Yi over lunch. She was immersed in a busy season full of travel. I asked her how she manages to keep up her writing with her packed schedule. She told me she often writes on planes, and lit up at the possibility of the middle seat being empty, allowing her to spread out her work.
Whatever we have, whatever we choose to do, fills our lives. Composers with kids are no more busy than those without, composers who teach are no more busy than those who do not, and composers with multiple converging deadlines are no more busy than those with lengthy stretches of time between. Each of us is simply different-busy. The obesity of to-do lists ebbs and flows in seasons of varied intensities for everyone.
Student composers are a particular sort of different-busy, in part because they are still gaining a multi-textured self-awareness, one not limited to their evolving creative capacities, but also including the development of time-management skills. When a student opens a lesson with, “I didn’t have time to write much this week,” we talk about what that means: Are they scheduling writing time? Are they able to stick with that schedule? Do they protect their writing time from external interruptions (e.g., turn the phone off)? How are they using that time?
I believe it is important, particularly for young composers, to commit to a diligent habit of writing every day. Seth Godin has a great blog post about every-day writing, and what applies to writers of words is also relevant to writers of music. Godin’s blog is primarily focused on small-business marketing strategies. I like his posts because they are short, interesting, and frequently contain little gems of creative wisdom that resonate with an artist’s life. I often check @ThisIsSethsBlog on Twitter first thing in the morning, which one day revealed this delicious irony.
Over the last few years, my primary writing time has settled into fairly consistent spans of late night or early morning hours, which was not merely born out of a necessity from “much else to do” during the day. Although managing my own different-busy—I parent, I compose, I teach—my choice of these wee hours for creative focus is also informed by the sonic spaces and thinking-time of my youth; a propensity as a kid to enjoy awake-time when everyone else was asleep, and possibly most importantly, my efforts to carve out a specific space with a veil of silence: I need silence to write. Within the mountains of emailing, meetings, proofreading, editing, phone-calling, and even fun-having, I am comfortable allowing for interruptions. Given that which fills my life, my wee hours are best suited for the kind of writing that warrants its own, protected, space and time.
that 4:46am writing time when she contemplates trumpets. there aren’t trumpets in this piece; yet still: trumpets are #awesome.
The term “writer’s block” should be stricken from the universe as a term. Composing is a multifaceted activity, one which requires the use of thinking-muscles, and one must figure out how to use those muscles in comfortable, useful ways. It troubles me to hear young composers express fear that creative thinking-muscles might atrophy. They get this notion from someone somewhere, and it can be paralyzing. In addition, telling a young composer they should write every day for at least an hour, and leaving it at that, can be equally paralyzing.
What is writing time, and how does one fill it? If not feeling particularly note-y or conceptual-y, take a walk for twenty minutes and think about titles. This is writing. Have a pile of empty bars waiting to become a contrasting section? Hit a coffee shop for an hour and make a list of adjectives describing how it can, or cannot, sound. This is writing. If staring at the blank page when starting a piece, unsure of what to do: relax, settle in some place comfortable, and simply imagine what it can be, how it can sound. Over and over, imagine it, without putting anything on a page. This is writing. An afternoon roaming a museum pondering visual likes and dislikes: this is writing. Spending fifteen minutes on a bus considering what piece one would write if one could write anything for any forces: writing.
Mentors, friends, and books suggested some of the above to me when I was a student, yet none put it like so: Make time for your writing; vehemently protect it; set a timer if it helps; find or create spaces solely devoted to writing; pay attention to how your writing sensibilities change, and respond to them; during your writing time you are available only to your creativity. P.S. Turn off your phone.
when I wake still torqued a/b certain newmusic-y things on internets, I shld remember this isn’t what my 6yo wants to discuss o’er pancakes.
Holy smokes the world provides a lot of input. In some ways it is super cool. Our ability to rapidly disseminate information is mind-blowing, and can be useful. I love reading composers’ blogs, many of which explore our efforts to “filter out the noise” as we navigate the layers filling our different-busy schedules. The most poignant shift in my daily composer-clock ticked into place in 2005 with the birth of my son. Turn-on-a-dime time, people. Baby asleep = hurry up and write / Baby awake = stop writing. While I have little memory of choosing the notes I chose for the first two years of my son’s life, it was a tremendously informative time in shaping how I write now. Time to write = writing time. Period. I am still working on filtering out the noise during non-writing times; yet I am grateful that at least I am aware when the noise is fading in.
that 3:32am writing time when this string of viola harmonics smells like 17 bells hanging from trees.
I wrote my first music at my grandparents’ Dune Acres house. We visited there most summers of my childhood. When the weather held, we spent long lazy mornings at the lake. After lunch, while others napped, I would sneak outside to my secret side patio. I made up songs, sang with the crickets, waves, and trees. It was the beginnings of my precious, protected, space and time with my music. Sometimes, I went out alone in the rain.
That 4:10am writing time when she’s dappling in a pile of melodies with the gorgeous quiet rain.
Composer Kristin Kuster “writes commandingly for the orchestra,” and her music “has an invitingly tart edge” (The New York Times). Kuster’s music takes inspiration from architectural space, the weather, and mythology. Recent CD releases include Two Jades with violinist Xiang Gao and the UM Symphony Band, and the title work on the PRISM Saxophone Quartet’s New Dynamic Records CD Breath Beneath. Kuster’s music has received support from such organizations as the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Sons of Norway, American Composers Orchestra, the League of American Orchestras, Meet The Composer, the Jerome Foundation, the American Composers Forum, American Opera Projects, the National Flute Association, and the Argosy Foundation. Born in 1973, Kuster grew up in Boulder, Colorado. She earned her Doctor of Musical Arts from the University of Michigan, where she now serves as Assistant Professor of Composition.
My interest in language and linguistics achieved laser focus a few years ago while I was living in Barcelona and learning Spanish (actually the locals would insist on Castilian) “on the job,” so to speak. It was extremely interesting to learn (or rather, improve to fluency) a foreign language as an adult, well past the “prime time” childhood years when language attainment happens more simply and fluidly. (Aside: parents, one of the best things you can possibly do for your child is to raise her or him in a bilingual environment.) Even though I always did well in language classes in school, I had to work at this. Never will I forget the day that a stranger on the street stopped me to ask a question, and I answered back without even thinking about the words. Progress!
One benefit of going through these motions as an adult was having a high degree of self-awareness of the process as I experienced it. For instance, I discovered that the “Foreign Language Department” of my brain is not connected to the “Native (English) Language Department.” Whenever I had trouble thinking of a particular word in Spanish, an alternative would pop into my head, never in English, but rather in Italian or German, even though I speak only a little bit of each. Similarly, at a certain time in the evenings, especially after a long day of much talking (People in Spain talk a lot. A LOT.), my “Foreign Language Department” would literally shut down, and I could barely muster even English words. The most interesting side effect of these adventures in foreign language acquisition occurred on days when I was heavily steeped in composing. If interrupted from working on a musical project—such as if someone were to come to the door—I was barely able to summon any Spanish language at all! It would take everything I had just to give a basic response to whatever was needed. Thank goodness for friendly and patient neighbors.
Over the past few weeks, I have been experiencing similar conflicts between my internal “Music Department” and my “Creative Writing (of words) Department.” That is, the more time I am spending in the thick of an orchestra piece, the more challenging it has become to write words. It’s as if all the blood flow to my brain is being diverted to the part that deals with musical language (and I would argue that learning to write music is very much like learning a foreign language), leaving only a tiny trickle going to the prose section. Although I have experienced this before, it is hitting me with greater force this time around, presumably because this is by far the largest composition I’ve written to date. It’s not exactly writer’s block, because I’ve got about four blog posts in various states of development; interesting topics, but the sentences are just not gelling quite right.
With that in mind, I’m taking a breather from these weekly blog posts—both in order to devote more time to behind-the-scenes NewMusicBox activities, and to conserve energy that will help me complete this musical project, which is so close to done I can taste it. If something comes up that wants/needs writing about, I will most certainly make that happen. Thanks, and see you again soon!
A few years ago I had an “Aha!” moment with a work of literature; Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town. Growing up, I must have seen this play three or four times, produced by my school, by other schools of childhood friends, summer camp—it’s a classic. But it never grabbed me; I found it melancholy, boring, and grew to rather dread the possibility of yet another production of the thing. So of course, on the day I arrived for a stay at the MacDowell Colony in 2008, a few of the writers in residence had scheduled (for after dinner entertainment) an informal reading of Our Town, which Wilder had worked on at MacDowell in 1937. Although at first I cringed at the thought, I got sucked in (friendly people, nice wine, these things happen), and a group of us sat around a roaring fireplace with our glasses of wine, picked character names out of a hat, and read the play out loud from start to finish.
By the end of the play I was speechless and near tears, having finally realized how beautiful and utterly human the work was. How could I possibly not have appreciated this before? The power of the story, which we had tapped into that night, had not faded a bit in the 70 years since its creation. When we were finished, we all sat in silence for a minute to let it all soak in. Being inside the play and reading those words out loud helped me “get it.” I don’t think I will ever forget that experience. From there I became more interested in Wilder’s other works, and I especially treasure a wonderful book of letters illustrating the—what seems quite unlikely—friendship of Wilder and Gertrude Stein.
Given that it took several rounds to fully appreciate a work of art written in my native language, it seems reasonable to suppose that there are times when it might require a similar, if not greater effort to find a doorway into a work of music. Andrew Ford makes this point (among several) in his wonderful recent essay “Why We Need Music.” That the rungs of the ladder to fully appreciating the abstract art of music include spending some extra time with music that one might not “get” upon first listen, so that it can reveal its secrets. This doesn’t work every time, and it’s perfectly fine to not “like” a piece of music if it has been given a chance and still not worked out. However, you never know unless you try. What if you just weren’t ready to discover what is special about that work until now?
Music, like literature, visual art, and so on, is the way some of us tell our stories and share our experience of life. It is not always laid out in a way that others want, or that anyone expects. Whether it is constructed from a 12-tone row or a three-chord chorus played on electric guitar doesn’t matter. In the end, the issues that we tend to fuss and fume about (at least in this space) melt into insignificance at the realization that regardless of how it is measured or evaluated, music is a form of communication. As those who choose to tell our stories in this very conceptual medium, we can be examples to others who may not experience it quite so directly by being open to, and making an effort to accept the creations that cross our paths. Regardless of our own feelings about whatever that work might be, there is bound to be someone out there—probably more than one person—who can relate to that story, or experience their own “Aha!” moment. Who knows, that person might be you.
