Tag: style

The Aftermath

Posted on August 27, 2019 by Josh Armenta - Articles, Columns, NewMusicBox

People often say that your life and your experiences affect your art and your inner voice. I don’t know if that’s entirely true. I think it’s more accurate to say that your experiences connect the dots that had always been there. At least, for me, that was the case.

Out of everything that has transpired over the past three years as I have processed the end of an abusive marriage and rebuilt my life in music, the most important thing that happened for me was reconnecting with myself. It was in reconnecting with myself and learning to listen to my intuition, my inner voice, and my own vision that I was able to rediscover and accept who I was, who I am, and who I will become.

As a result, the control over my writing has become profound. I have started to value myself as an artist where before I only saw deadlines and assignments. I started turning down projects that I didn’t see value in as a citizen-artist. I started only taking projects that I felt connected to.

For the first time, I have started requesting compensation for work.

For the first time, I have willingly talked to the press when asked.

I have started to attend conferences, to network, to sell my work the way that I should have been doing for years.

All of these things have led to more opportunities in the past three years than I had ever hoped to obtain. I have come to realize that conservatories can teach counterpoint, orchestration, instrumentation, and style, but what they can’t teach is what life taught me in some of my lowest moments.

When your life falls apart, you learn to build a new one. Likewise, when your vision collapses, you learn to see things through a different lens. Having to get out of my own head required a change in my artistic vision. I’m not quite sure why this was. Maybe it is because I was not allowed to express myself for so long, maybe because as a queer victim of domestic violence I felt completely alone, maybe its nothing more than my old defiance, but I have begun to embrace citizen-artistry with a new found defiant zeal.

Being voiceless, being treated like a non-equal, and facing discrimination for so long has caused me to want to address these topics in my work: inequality, discrimination, interpersonal violence, and giving a voice to the voiceless. Including Fear no more, my work addressing domestic violence and consisting of Sháa Áko Dahjinileh (Remember the Things They Told Us), Sonetos del amor oscuro and Ice Shall Cover Nineveh; all of my latest works have dealt with “voiceless stories” in some way. Evocations, which will premiere this year in Baltimore and Mexico City, uses integrated film and chamber ensemble to speak to the rampant inequality in Latin American society. In remembrance of the 40th anniversary of the first diagnosis of HIV/AIDS in North America, I am working on three works which deal directly with texts by and about HIV+ artists and writers. Death Will Lift Me By The Hair, my concerto for harp and large ensemble is based on fragments by the poet Tim Dlugos. Lessons from Provincetown will seek to preserve the stories of queer leaders, drag queens, and activists who passed during the 1980s HIV crisis by setting their stories to music. Mise en croix, which is being written for Peabody Conservatory’s Electronic Music Department will also deal directly with this topic.

It was ironically in the wake of a tragedy that I rediscovered my artistic direction. While I had been able to regain my voice, I knew that I was lucky. People do not always escape domestic violence. I was fortunate to do so alive, and I felt a responsibility to use my art to bear witness, give a voice to the voiceless, and call towards justice and social action in the small way I can.

Rediscovering myself was not only artistic, but personal as well. I lost over 100 pounds. I found a healthy, loving relationship with a wonderful man. I’ve settled into my life in Mexico and planned out my next two seasons. I still have hard days, but they are becoming few and far between.

As with any move, six months after relocating to Mexico City I am still working my way through boxes. Just a few days ago I opened a box that hadn’t been opened since 2016 and I came across three notebooks that I used for sketching. By chance, two of them happened to be for Remember the Things They Told Us and Sonetos del amor oscuro. I flipped through them, expecting to laugh at the poor choices I’d made when my life was in chaos and to be self-congratulatory about ultimately rejecting the material. Instead, I was actually quite shocked to see what, even subconsciously, made it into the final versions of those two works.

Underneath these notebooks I found my treasured score for Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring, which I hadn’t held since I was packing up my Baltimore apartment three years prior with a sheriff’s deputy standing guard to ensure my safety.

Appalachian Spring was the first work of symphonic music that I ever heard live, at the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra when I was 7 or 8. I had known in that instant that I wanted to be a composer.

I reflected on these findings for a moment. Even before I became who I am today, even before the last three years, part of me always was artistically present, and that was visible to me in these works.

I put on my favorite recording of Appalachian Spring and read along with the score, reflecting on who I was, who I have become, and remembering the things this work had told me.

When your world falls apart, you learn to build a new one

Posted on August 5, 2019 by Josh Armenta - Articles, Columns, NewMusicBox

A tunnel with a blue sky peeking out of the end

I’ve always been a bit of a defiant person.

When I was eight years old, I squared off with a soccer coach. “Who do you think is in charge?” he asked. “I am,” I replied. Next soccer season, my parents decided I should stick to music.

When I was in high school, I signed up to take the AP Music Theory test. The school told me no one in my district had ever passed, and they wouldn’t run a class nor offer me an independent study. So, I got myself a beat-up, out-of-print edition of Tonal Harmony and taught myself. I took that exam anyway, and passed.

When I was finishing my undergraduate work, I was told I was too young to write an opera. I did it anyway, and even took it to the Capital Fringe Festival in Washington, D.C. It got mixed reviews but taught me more than I ever learned in school about what Sondheim referred to as the “art of making art.”

When I applied to graduate school, a student colleague told me I’d never get into Peabody. My teacher died the day of my audition. My mom called to tell me and said she thought I should reschedule. “No, he’d want me to do this,” was my response. I was accepted.

In 2014, when I was applying for doctoral programs, however, I was told by my then-boyfriend that the school that had accepted me was too far, too cold, too “Midwestern.” I withdrew my application.

In 2015, I accidentally bounced a check at a Walmart outside of Baltimore. My partner had been taking money out of my account without my knowledge. When I confronted him about it, he slammed my head into a concrete wall. I didn’t confront him about money again.

In 2016, when I was in the emergency room with a concussion after a violent fight and a sexual assault, my then-husband told the doctor I had slipped and fell. They didn’t believe him. I was too delirious to confirm.

What I didn’t realize was that I had become so distracted by following the rules across my whole life that I had lost sight of who I was, artistically and as a human being.

It’s amazing to look at how much has changed since July 16, 2016, the 71st anniversary of the Trinity nuclear test at Alamogordo and also the day my ex was arrested and charged with domestic abuse. It’s interesting to me to see what has evolved and what has intensely remained the same.

Much of my work during graduate school was marked by an increasing interest in counterpoint. I wrote dense fugues, long structures, much of which was heavily derived from set theory and mathematics—ironic, as that was a subject I had always hated in high school. I had once despised following rules, but now, during graduate work, as it was in my home life, rules were providing me with the structure I relied on to stay alive, both literally and artistically.

To me, my writing became nothing more than an experiment, a scientific proof. I would postulate that a line could be spun out over five minutes, or that a Chebychev polynomial sequence could be used to synthesize long flowing lines of multilayer synthesis, and then I would do it. I would work late at night, after at least two jobs, and the work that I created at the time I see as nothing more than a distraction in retrospect. A night spent at an analog synthesizer until three in the morning was a night that I didn’t have to go home to verbal or physical abuse. If I was in the library copying out dense parts on a Saturday, then I was not at home to clean up the mess that my out-of-work partner had created during the week. A Sunday night in front of a chalkboard calculating matrices and sets on the fourth floor of the old building at Peabody was a Sunday night that I was free.

What I didn’t realize was that I had become so distracted by following the rules across my whole life that I had lost sight of who I was, artistically and as a human being. What I saw initially as pushing my craft forward was actually a way of shielding myself from myself. If I wanted to write honestly and openly as I had in the past, I would have to acknowledge myself for who I was as a gay Latino man. And, in doing so, I would have to acknowledge a hard truth: that I was, and had been, in an abusive relationship for the past five years.

My father’s family is Chicano. My great-grandfather was a composer and a troubadour in the Sonoran tradition and used this craft to feed his large family. The family still lives on a large land grant outside of Albuquerque, in what was originally Mexican territory prior to the Gadsden purchase. When you are driving or walking through the small village where my grandparents were raised, you hear a mix of English, Mountain Spanish, and Navajo. Due to the proximity of our village to the Navajo Nation, this language, culture, and spoken literature has always been fascinating to me.

I don’t remember how exactly I stumbled across the work of Luci Tapahonso, a poet laureate of the Navajo Nation, but somehow, probably in the fifth-level basement of Eisenhower Library at Johns Hopkins, I discovered her poem “Remember the Things They Told Us” and decided to work on a setting.

The piece, the first in the set of three, took me seven months to write—seven months for a five-part ensemble and twelve minutes of music. It would later become the first piece I had finished in three years.

The first three months of writing the work were torture. Draft after draft with no significant progress and endless blank pages in a notebook. During these months, I also was testifying at my ex’s trials, dealing with attorneys, family court advocates, and the Special Victims Unit. (Spoiler alert: Olivia Benson isn’t real, and the SVU detective assigned to my case couldn’t be bothered with actually talking to me.) For years, the only time I had felt even remotely like myself was during the moments when I could escape into the world of writing, and at this point, that didn’t even work.

Every contrapuntal trick I had failed me. I wrote OpenMusic patches to generate pitch-class sets, and every one was just wrong.

After four months, in a fit of rage, I threw out all the material I had generated as worthless and started to write from the heart, by hand in pencil, a process I had always hated.

I finished the first movement in five hours.

It was not much, but it was the beginning of something for me.

About a month before my ex-husband was arrested, the Pulse massacre occurred in Orlando, and I had wanted to do a piece of queer defiance. One of the longstanding rules in our relationship was that I was not to do anything to acknowledge my queer identity in public, as he was concerned someone would steal me from him (though, as he constantly reminded me, he could replace me in a second). So when I mentioned off-handedly that I was working on a queer work, he immediately told me to stop working on it and tried to destroy my notebooks. I would shelve the work for a while.

In one of my last lectures at Peabody in 2017, I told the students that I had gotten to the point in my work where I didn’t necessarily care what anyone thought. They looked stunned as I played an older work of mine from a more methodical, research-oriented time in my life and explained that while the piece got played often (and still does), I wasn’t going to work like this anymore, because I didn’t need to prove anything to anyone. I told them that I needed to write what I felt, and what I felt was a sense of emboldenment. I had stood up to someone who had been a nightmare in my life for five years and I was done taking orders from anyone, especially artistically. It was in that moment that I made the subconscious decision that rather than allow myself to be defined artistically by the difficulties and struggles in my life, I would use those struggles and difficulties to chip away at my artistic defenses and create a large work that I could truly be proud of. I didn’t realize it at the time, but that lecture would become absolutely pivotal in the next steps of my artistic life.

If you believe you are a victim of interpersonal violence, call the National Domestic Abuse Hotline in the United States to be connected with resources. Advocates are available 24 hours a day at 1-800-799-7233. You may also visit www.thehotline.org to be connected with resources in your community.

Self-Plagiarism and the Evolution of Style

Posted on April 24, 2017 by Dale Trumbore - Columns

I recently set a poem for SATB a cappella chorus that ended in the word “sun.” This music should have come easily to me, but I’d already set another SATB a cappella piece that ended in the word “sun” just a few months ago. Both sentences used the word to end their respective poems in an uplifting, redemptive gesture. They called for similar music, but I didn’t want to write the exact same music twice.

To what extent, as a composer, are you allowed to plagiarize your own music? Sometimes, of course, we do this unconsciously, realizing only belatedly that we’re repeating ourselves. How do we know when this is a terrible idea, and when it’s a great one? After all, there’s a long history of composers ripping off their own music, borrowing ideas and recycling whole measures—or sometimes whole movements. Even Bach did it. But given that repeating our past ideas can read as flat-out laziness, when, if ever, should we self-plagiarize?

Hitchcock once said, while defending the repeated use of certain filming techniques within his work, that “self-plagiarism is style,” and I think his philosophy holds the answer to when and how we should imitate our past compositions.

Some composers write in a style so recognizable, we need only hear a minute—or even a measure—of their music to know exactly who wrote it. Musicians occasionally criticize these composers for writing music that “all sounds the same,” but it takes skill to settle on a style that works consistently. A composer’s style becomes distinctive not only because certain ideas are present in many of their compositions, but because that composer has made compelling artistic choices deliberately and repeatedly across their body of work.

A composer’s style becomes distinctive not only because certain ideas are present in many of their compositions, but because that composer has made compelling artistic choices deliberately and repeatedly across their body of work.

In the evolution of artistic style, there’s a crucial distinction between “self-plagiarism” and “plagiarism.” Replicating the specific elements of gesture and orchestration that define another composer’s style is a tricky matter; do it without identifying your source material, and your work may be written off as derivative. Perhaps it’s best to avoid the most distinctive indicators—unless expressly doing so in homage—and to seek out whatever will come to define our own work.

There’s a difference between realizing you’re organically writing music similar to what you’ve done in the past versus purposefully trying to recapture the style of your previous work, too. The few times I’ve tried to write a piece similar to one of my older pieces, I’ve found it absolutely maddening; it’s impossible to recapture who you were and what mindset you were in when you wrote an older piece. Perhaps counterintuitively, it’s nearly always easier to forge ahead with a new work rather than intentionally re-create the style of an older one.

Are we responsible for creating our own “style” or should we simply write the music we want to write, let it evolve naturally over time, and allow others to decide what defining factors unite our complete body of work? On some level, our own style may always remain unknowable to us, recognizable only after we’ve written everything we’re ever going to write. We are, though, in charge of how we choose to imbue our music with meaning. Here’s where I think “self-plagiarism” does define style: rather than imitating old ideas or forcefully repurposing them into new pieces, we can view a creative lifetime as a chance to create our own musical vocabulary.

Consider a few moments in Thomas Newman’s film scores that sound similar. In several films Newman has scored—including American Beauty, Revolutionary Road, and White Oleander—Newman favors a sparse orchestral texture, with sustained strings and a simple melody in the piano. He uses this approach in so many different films that the repeated use of this texture must be deliberate. Often, these similar themes highlight moments in each movie when the presence of beauty creates a stark contrast to darkness or death. By writing similar themes for each of these different films, Newman strengthens the purpose and value of each individual theme. This music is recognizably written in his “style,” yes, but beyond that, it functions as a sort of life-long leitmotif within his work.

Even outside of film scoring, it makes sense for composers to use similar music to underscore parallel moments within different compositions. I considered this as I wondered how to set a second poem ending in “sun.” I’d already solved this musical problem once; if I solved it the same way again—with a different approach, but the same harmonic progression leading up to the final “sun” chord—that moment could effectively link both pieces together.

Applied to a life of composing, this intentional repetition could create a library of motives, gestures, and orchestration that defines our work. As we encounter words and dramatic moments similar to ones we’ve scored in a previous piece, we can purposefully link these pieces with the same vocabulary—adapted so that it will reflect whatever surrounds it—so that anyone who encounters both pieces will hear these pieces linked across time. For listeners who take the time to know our body of work, these moments will feel almost like an inside joke: a reward for speaking our language.

A Universal Music

Posted on October 11, 2016 by Aakash Mittal - Columns

“I hear what you are going for,” Hafez said to me. “You have clearly worked on this music and developed these Indian ornamentations within your improvisation.” It was my first week at the Banff International Workshop for Jazz and Creative Music in 2013, and I was fortunate enough to get a lesson from saxophonist, composer, and conceptualist Hafez Modirzadeh. I had just played a solo saxophone piece that I had developed over the previous couple of years and my adrenaline was pumping a little more than usual. Hafez’s recordings were frequently on my playlist, and I was excited by this opportunity to study with him. After a slight pause to think about my solo, he suggested, “But you know the goal is to move beyond ethnic stylizations towards a concept of universal music.”[1] Universal music? No ethnic stylizations? That blew my mind. “That’s not even my idea,” Hafez continued. “John Coltrane said that.”[2]

I felt the thrill of the unknown. Prior to this lesson, I was fervently driven by a personal mission to express the hybridity of my biology and experience as a half-Indian/half-Euro-American person within my music. The search for stylistic confluence manifested itself in numerous trips to study in India and four recordings of original music that explored Indian concepts, environments, and sounds within my jazz quartet. Despite my commitment to an ethnic-identity-driven music, Hafez’s words resonated deeply within me. On an intuitive level, I knew that this was the next step in my journey. I had a deluge of questions. How is universal music possible? Is not music, like language, born of culture and environment? Is not each musical style a unique expression of place and experience? For years, ethnic stylization had been one of my favorite aspects of music. I treasured the diversity of forms music seemed to take across cultures. Could I really abandon an idea so integral to my identity? In a sense, Hafez’s challenge threw into question everything I believed in artistically. The nature of music itself—what it is, why we make it, and its function in our lives—may not be what I was conditioned to think it is. It was a life-changing moment that sent me down a path of inquiry, exploration, and creative destruction that I am still traversing to this day.

Hafez’s call to action was only the first of many revelatory experiences during that opening week in Banff, Canada. Composer/pianist Vijay Iyer gave me the first building block I would use to develop my ideas surrounding universal music. In a room full of workshop participants, he said something akin to, “Genres don’t exist. They were invented by record companies to sell albums. Genres are an attempt to categorize a community of people who come together and create something.”[3] Once again, I was confronted with a paradigm shift. My musical training, rhetoric, and artistic upbringing had been a world of categories, styles, and genres hinged together. I thought of the countless hours spent trying to play a style correctly and how often I seemed to fail in that goal. At that time, I was already bothered by the mentality that our musical ancestors had somehow received the divine right to invent and that all the rest of us could hope for was to imitate. Yet I was encumbered with the popular notion that I needed to “learn the rules” before I could “break them.” At what point were the rules learned and the breaking could begin? The goal of stylistic execution was perpetually in conflict with my interest as I attempted to occupy both worlds. I embraced Vijay’s comment. He was giving me the words I needed to articulate what I believed and felt all along.

I also tried to untangle myself from some of the ideas about art that hold us back from reaching our imaginative and creative potential.

Over the past three years I have thought long and hard about Hafez and Vijay’s words. It is a topic that I am always eager to discuss with the artistic communities I encounter in my work. Through this series of essays, I am excited to share the recent odyssey that changed the way I conceptualize and create music. Though the story begins in Banff, Canada, it crosses the globe to Kolkata, India, and lands in New York City. Inside these environments, I played music with numerous people and gathered experiences that would contribute towards a concept of universal music. I also tried to untangle myself from some of the ideas about art that hold us back from reaching our imaginative and creative potential. However, before I could start building a model of universal music, I had to remove a large obstacle that was in my way: the genre.

Genres Don’t Exist

As I ruminated on my Banff experience, I began to understand that the idea of musical genre is an illusion that ignores the plurality of ideas, experiences, and sounds that exist within a community. When a sonic experience is reduced to a category, we establish boundaries that inhibit creativity with notions of stylistic correctness. This approach creates myriad problems that throw into question the objectivity that is inherently placed on genre. Among these problems are two issues that I feel are of particular importance.

The concept of genre divorces music from the people who create it.

First, the concept of genre divorces music from the people who create it. In order to define a style, we homogenize seemingly congruent elements across people and time to assemble a grocery list of digestible characteristics. Jazz is reduced to a collection of ride cymbal patterns, walking bass lines, seventh chord voicings, and improvised chromaticism. Hindustani music becomes a modal jam within odd time signatures peppered with exotic ornamentations. Music that was once riding the crest of mutative feedback loops becomes frozen in time. What is left is a shell of compiled theories, historical patterns, and reductive features often devoid of the processes and unquantifiable elements of creativity. The genre now exists abstractly. It looms over us large and menacing as we struggle to determine if this composition is ambient or minimalist and if that improviser is playing hard-bop or post-bop. In our desire to identify the sound, we lose the nuance of each performance that made the music so powerful in the first place.

In his paper “On the Convergence Liberation of Maqam X,” Hafez Modirzadeh addresses the problem of defining and abstracting music:

Essentially, musical systems are neither bound to nor described completely by fixed, geometric abstractions (including scales or tunings), for they are developed qualitatively, through a personal relating to acoustical properties and organizing principles of sound not fully understood through a quantifiable lens.[4]

In this statement, Hafez touches on several critical points. To truly understand the art experience, we need to embrace the unknown. Much in the same way the ancient Greeks resisted the mathematical concept of zero in order to protect their certainty in a static universe, we depend on genre to bolster fixed artistic beliefs.[5] Modirzadeh acknowledges the existence of musical systems while simultaneously liberating them from the world of “fixed, geometric abstractions.” This embrace of the infinite offers an alternative viewpoint to the one fixed by idiom. The unknown allows us to focus on the infinite processes of creativity.

When examining art through the lens of style, we are immediately bombarded by another problem: what person or which group of people has the privilege of defining a genre and its characteristics? In the history of music, the role of the definer becomes a political conflict. Within North Indian communities, the term classical was often attached to raga music as a way to equalize their own complex and highly structured sounds in the context of colonial rule.[6] Definitions of jazz often illuminate racial polarity and social movements in the United States, while European classical forms often frame class and patronage systems. Who has the power to define music? The critic? The academic? The audience? The artist? In the book Forces in Motion, Graham Lock shares Anthony Braxton’s view on definitions of jazz:

The problem with jazz, and this is a point I’d like to stress, is that they’re defining the music in such a way that you cannot do your best. So there’s something inherently wrong with how jazz has been defined. They have it defined now where, if you think of writing a piece for 500 saxophones, you’re looked at as having nothing to do with jazz. Or if you practice your instruments to where you really gain the kind of facility you need, and create the kind of language that expresses that, they say it’s not jazz. Take rhythm. How many articles have I read about the fact that my music doesn’t “swing”? Yet all of the masters have developed their own relationship to forming, to rhythmic contours, etc. The situation now is designed so that jazz is framed in a little box and if you don’t follow in someone else’s footsteps, someone who is so-called jazz, then you’re automatically excommunicated. But all the masters followed their own steps, so it’s a contradiction in terms.[7]

Anthony Braxton immediately challenges the act of defining jazz and the limits these definitions put on creative work. As soon as a category gains specific criteria, such as the common phrase “jazz must swing,” the problem of definitions continues. What is “swing” and who gets to define it? Braxton aligns himself with the masters who “followed their own steps” as a reference to his creative process. This emphasis of process over product further contests the role of the definer as one that is actually removed from the history of the music, rather than upholding it. Ultimately, the act of establishing a genre risks becoming the act of one group of people defining the identities of another group of people.

Our society loves the illusion of a lone genius. When we dig a little further, we uncover the reality that creative work is born of collaboration and community.

Once genre was out of the way, it became easier for me to understand that music is about communities of people. People making sound, people listening to sound, people moving to sound, people navigating sound, and even people trying to ignore sound. In place of static and definitive categories what we have are people. And people are messy. People have fluid identities, can be unpredictable, and are trying to navigate an existence they do not fully understand.

When I started looking at music through the lens of human interaction, what emerged was a world of collaborations. I realized that my favorite works of art were born of very specific relationships that existed within a flowing spectrum of social dynamics. One of my favorite polymaths is J.R.R. Tolkien, whose friendship with C.S. Lewis was pivotal in his work. Tolkien once said of Lewis, “The unpayable debt that I owe to [Lewis] was not ‘influence,’ as it is ordinarily understood, but sheer encouragement. He was for long my only audience. Only from him did I ever get the idea that my ‘stuff’ could be more than a private hobby.”[8] Similarly, Vincent Van Gogh’s brother Theo acted as patron and critic to the artist in addition to his familial role.[9] We could list creative dyads for the rest of this essay: Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway, Pandit Ravi Shankar and Ustad Alla Rakha. Individually these people are certainly hard workers and creative thinkers, but what struck me was the realization that their work was always collaborative. Our society loves the illusion of a lone genius re-inventing genres within a vacuum. When we dig a little further, we uncover the reality that creative work is born of collaboration and community.

Hafez Modirzadeh student ensemble at Banff International workshop, August 2013.

This emphasis on human relationships brings into question the idea of artistic tradition. Tradition implies groups of people sharing behaviors over a course of history, so wouldn’t it be simple enough to replace the word “genre” with the word “tradition”? Yet this also falls into the same trap of categorization. While traditions encompass human activities, it is still too easy to define them as collections of static practices and performances devoid of the immeasurable nuance of artistic process. Traditions fall prey to the same questions that confront styles. They often take on a life of their own and are subject to the politics of definition. Every tradition was at one time a new idea, previously untried and wholly experimental. The process of someone teaching another person how to create a sound will always mutate the practice and performance of that sound.

What is left now that we have crossed out the words genre and tradition? Rather than upholding a tradition, I argue that we are really contributing to a continuum.[10] The continuum implies a process that includes the past, present, and an undetermined future. Instead of working towards a fixed arrival, it allows us to be the next segment of an indefinable shape. The continuum acknowledges that we wouldn’t be in our present state without what has come before, establishes the importance of the present moment as the only one that exists, and allows for a future of unlimited possibility.[11]

In this argument against genre, I am not suggesting that we eliminate the words bebop, minimalism, or dhrupad from our vocabulary; rather, I am advocating that we change the way we think about and use these words. These words represent people who lived in a very real place and time. They navigated the struggles of life while creating, discussing, disagreeing, and influencing each other. Yes, past communities of people shared musical vocabulary, but each person’s use of that vocabulary was ultimately unique. This recognition that traditions and genres are simply people engaging in the exact same creative processes we have today is liberating. We are no longer obliged to contain our creativity within someone else’s box, and we can take the “greats” off of their pedestals and bring them back down to earth.

Aakash and Julius at Banff Recording Studio

Aakash Mittal and Julius Schwing in the Banff Center recording studio. August 2013.

What Music Can Be

What is left when we have eliminated the terms, groupings, and rules of style? Sound.

This break from categorization and genre towards communities and relationships reveals a universal thread that ties musical continuums together. What is left when we have eliminated the terms, groupings, and rules of style? Sound. It is so simple and yet is so profound. Hafez and Vijay were not trying to tell me to abandon all concepts of ethnic identity. They were encouraging me to see past the illusion of static categorization towards the reality of our nature, which is that we are making sound as part of a spectrum of human relationships.

This emphasis on sound was further clarified for me in a letter the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Luther Adams wrote in response to the chairman of a graduate composition program. “My traditional background is sound—an intense love for sound and very little else. The power of sound will always be more important to me than any techniques, conventions or traditions.”[12] Adams’s prioritization of sound over genre allowed him to create imaginative works such as songbirdsongs and Strange and Sacred Noise that blur the lines between the categories that societies use to define art. His music often explores the liminality between sound and noise. Within his music, I hear rigorously composed designs that could be improvised or aleatoric. The process that Adams uses to reach the sound is secondary to the sound itself.

I was similarly struck when the mythologist Joseph Campbell said that “sound is the transcendent unknown”[13] during his interview for The Power of Myth. In simple terms, Campbell is addressing the importance and weight of the sonic experience without reference to genre, style, or even music. The word transcendent implies a journey “beyond ordinary limits,”[14] which can also be viewed as a “bottom-up” approach, whereas genre purports to fill the void with definitive answers where they don’t exist, which could be conversely thought of as a “top-down” approach.

The bottom-up model is a continuum that starts with fundamental elements and experiences that build in complexity and direction over time while moving infinitely towards the unknown. The top-down model starts with a definition or arrival point and works backwards establishing a concrete path towards the destination. The top-down model is useful for many things in life, but all it takes is one hiccup along the way to remember you are actually traversing a continuum.

Without the boundaries of style, we are only limited by our imagination, patience, and stamina.

It is easy to confuse this denunciation of category with the abandonment of rigorous study and hard work. Where would we be without the hours spent practicing etudes, transcriptions, and paltas (north Indian scale patterns) that are so often tied to the concept of genre and tradition within music study? I am not encouraging a rejection of the theory and systematic practice that frequently accompanies the study of a genre. These elements are very important to numerous people’s creative process. Theories often provide tools, logic, and systems for creation. Rather, I am advocating that we prioritize human connections and sound when embarking on a creative endeavor. We can keep theories theoretical and open them up to examination and reinvention. This will allow us to explore the process from which systems emerged and use that process to create our own methods. Let us remember that at the core of our musical traditions are sound and people.

This viewpoint gives us an opportunity to enter a new dimension of creative potential. Without the boundaries of style, we are only limited by our imagination, patience, and stamina. Other people become fellow creators and sound makers rather than members of musical castes. These relationships create landscapes of human activity that generate dynamic and meaningful work. When this work is divorced from top-down constraints, it has the potential to resonate within our primordial being as well as design futures previously unimagined. When we let go of the need for genre and embrace the plurality of sound experiences and human relationships, we become open to “not just what music is but what it can be.”[15] We also take a step toward creating a universal music.

Notes

1. This is how I remember my conversation with Hafez Modirzadeh.

2. Specifically Coltrane said, “If you want to look beyond the differences in style, you will confirm that there is a common base . . . take away their purely ethnic characteristics—that is, their folkloric aspect—and you’ll discover the presence of the same pentatonic sonority, of comparable modal structures. It’s this universal aspect of music that interests me and attracts me; that’s what I’m aiming for.” Quoted in: Porter, Lewis. John Coltrane: His Life and Music. Porter, Lewis. John Coltrane: His Life and Music. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998. pp. 211

3. This is how I remember Vijay’s talk at the Banff workshop.

4. Modirzadeh, Hafez. “On the Convergence Liberation of Makam X.” Critical Studies in Improvisation, Vol. 7, No. 2. 2011, Criticalimprov.com pp. 1

5. Seife, Charles. Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea.. Penguin Putnam Inc. 2000. pp. 46

6. Banerjee, Prattyush. “North Indian Classical Music: Traditional Knowledge and Modern Interpretations.” Lecture presentation at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. March 20-22 2014. In south Asian languages it is called Hindustani raga music.

7. Lock, Graham. Forces in Motion: The music and thoughts of Anthony Braxton. Da Capo Press, 1988. pp. 91

8. Carpenter, Humphrey, Tolkein: The Authorized Biography. Ballantine Books, 1978. pp 165

9. Suh, Anna H. Van Gogh’s Letters. Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, 2006. pp. 9

10. The idea of thinking in terms of continuums was introduced to me by reading Anthony Braxton’s interviews and writings.

11. I chose to represent continuums linearly for the sake of this essay. In reality, I believe they are even more webbed, curved, and more complicated than my simple drawing.

12. Adams, John L. Winter Music: Composing the North. Middletown, CT. Wesleyan University Press. 2004. pp. 31

13. Campbell, Joseph. The Power of Myth, with Bill Moyers. Anchor Books. 1991. pp. 121

14. “transcendent”. Dictionary.com Unabridged. Random House, Inc. 21 Sep. 2016. Dictionary.com

15. This is another Vijay Iyer quote that I remember from Banff.

Aakash Mittal

Hailed as “A fiery alto saxophonist and prolific composer” by the Star Tribune (Minneapolis), Aakash Mittal is emerging as an expressive artistic voice. His self-released album, Videsh, has been regarded as, “point[ing] toward new possibilities in improvised music.” (The Denver Post) As a composer and improviser, Mittal employs colorful dissonances, meditative silences, and angular rhythms to express environments and spaces ranging from the American west to the dense streets of Kolkata.

Acknowledgments

Teresa Louis, Matt Moore, Jayanthi Bunyan, and Meera Dugal for reading and reviewing these essays. Molly Sheridan, Frank Oteri, and NewMusicBox for giving me this opportunity and your ongoing support of the new music community. Hafez Modirzadeh and Vijay Iyer for their ongoing support of my artistic growth. New York City Public Libraries for providing a quiet and air conditioned space in which I could work.

Chicago New Music as assemblage; or, why are we doing this?

Posted on October 4, 2016 by Michael Lewanski - Analysis, Articles

I realize that there is an imbedded irony in a person who lives and works in Chicago new music making this observation, but I’ll do it anyway: it seems like people outside of Chicago talk a lot about new music in Chicago. Why is this?

From my vantage point—the lives-here, works-here one—I want to guess at an answer by saying tentative things, stutter while I do so, and use the shrugging shoulders emoji at the end of what I say. I want to make a weak claim, not a strong one; I don’t want to assert that what is happening in Chicago is truly unique or mystically special or importantly revolutionary. I don’t have the expertise to be able to make such a claim (and, actually, a suspicion of expertise is a strain in a mode of artistic production here). What I want to hypothesize is that Chicago is a particularly concentrated expression of confluences in current culture, and that the evidence of this is both the explosive energy of the city’s new music community in recent years and also how hard its characteristics are to pin down. This essay (in both senses: “a piece of writing,” but also “try” or “effort”) is one of a number of attempts I’ve made to theorize Chicago new music, and inherent in these attempts is—as an axiomatic presupposition surely, an ever-present anxiety maybe—an awareness that I could be wrong. Going a bit further: my tendency to theorize, my hypothesizing impulse, my weak-claim-making, is a very Chicago-new-music-esque characteristic.

What comes to mind when I describe the character of Chicago new music are words like “provisional” and “transient”and “conditional” and “contingent” and “fragmented.”

What I want to hypothesize is that Chicago is a particularly concentrated expression of confluences in current culture.

A quintessential work of Chicago new music is something like George Lewis’s Assemblage, which he wrote for Ensemble Dal Niente (which I conduct) in 2013. It’s quintessential to Chicago new music because it was written for the Bowling Green New Music Festival by a Chicago-born improviser/scholar/composer/computer musician living in New York for a new music ensemble started ten years ago by a bunch of mostly students without jobs, composed in a style that references many other musics, and cast in a form that encourages the listener to “catch the bus and go along for the ride.” Thus, the city of Chicago is essential to the work’s creation, but its presence cannot be readily pointed to. The essence of its Chicago-ness, if one may say so, is the not-exactly-there-ness of Chicago. George was born in Chicago, cut his teeth as an experimental musician in the AACM, left to go elsewhere (Yale and Paris and San Diego and New York), has turned to notated composition only in relatively recent years. Ensemble Dal Niente (literally, “from nothing”) was initially a bunch of musicians—mostly from Michigan or Indiana or Texas or Georgia or Canada or Kentucky, and not too many of whom were actually born in Chicago—just trying to make stuff work because existing things didn’t satisfy. The Bowling Green New Music Festival is sort of close to Chicago I guess, kind of. “Both the title and the content of Assemblage refer to a type of visual artmaking that recombines and recontextualizes collections of natural and human-made objects,” writes George. Everything about the piece—its composer, the musicians for whom it was written, the form, its external references, the listener’s experience, the circumstances of its production—is provisional. It is the instantiation of the contingent, if such a thing isn’t a contradiction in terms.

To be less slippery, I buy a basic Marxian approach to culture (articulated and developed by, for instance, Adorno and other Frankfurt School theorists) that “means grasping[…] forms, styles and meanings as the products of a particular history” (to quote Terry Eagleton), as the results of a set of socio-economic conditions. It’s not merely that works tend to be about their place and time, or that composers consciously engage with political issues (say, the Eroica symphony or Shostakovich’s wartime works or John Adams’s On the Transmigration of Souls); it’s that every facet of culture creates the conditions for a piece of music, and this happens on many levels, including (and especially importantly) unconscious ones. We have a particular and peculiar situation in Chicago: it’s a very large city—the largest in a large region—that attracts intelligent, talented young people from this region and beyond. It has famous performing and visual arts institutions with histories of being famous. But these same institutions suffer from a certain second city-ism that makes them anxious about their own prestige and causes them to look to more famous arts institutions (in other cities) for art, and thus, they have only recently started paying close attention to the local new music scene. It doesn’t have many presenters, so the venue situation is often difficult. (Sure, there are a few staple places where you might go to sample various flavors of experimental music, and plenty of it: Experimental Sounds Studio or Elastic Arts or the Hideout, say; or famously, Constellation, for instance; this is mostly due to the hard work of an amazingly dedicated staff led by the inexhaustible Peter Margasak.) It’s hard to find funding. And while it’s not hard to make a living (it’s not as expensive as many East or West Coast metropolises), it’s hard making a living in music in Chicago. There are only a few universities and full-time orchestras, and there are a lot of people.

Chicago is simultaneously highly cosmopolitan and deeply provincial; this can be, depending on how you parse it, a painful contradiction to live in or a fruitful tension with which to engage.

Chicago is simultaneously highly cosmopolitan and deeply provincial; this can be, depending on how you parse it, a painful contradiction to live in or a fruitful tension with which to engage. Either way, these oppositions prompt the asking of a basic question: why are we doing this? Put another way, or perhaps to offer a provisional answer: if we have an intelligent community of musicians, audience members, and composers, yet the possibility of creating a sustainable, full-time career seems remote, we’d better do something that is really meaningful to us rather than exhaust ourselves chasing a phantasmagoric notion of “accessibility.” The financial stakes are often low. This is neither to promote a romanticized starving-artist mythos updated for the 21st-century US nor to suggest that well-funded art here can’t be authentic; it is to say that the fact that people here mostly aren’t either a) stringently competing for a place in a saturated PR/marketing landscape or b) doing all they can to scrounge up the most minimal, indifferent, bewildered of audiences, has a defining impact on the character, structure, and style of the art that’s made. The drive to specialize in order to compete, to niche-ify, is less urgent; people seem free to develop authentically.

This pushes a group like, say, Mocrep to play their instruments less and pursue performance art more. It pushes a group like Dal Niente in all kinds of different directions (a collaboration with Deerhoof, a portrait album of George Lewis, the performance of work by as many local composers as we can manage, plus lots of recent European music). Third Coast Percussion has begun writing pieces collaboratively, somehow finding time to do so amid a nomadic touring schedule. Spektral Quartet has made an art of the low-culture/high-culture juxtaposition with its Sampler Pack series. The Chicago Arts Initiative is a group of high school students who perform and compose collectively, founded by Dal Niente guitarist Jesse Langen. I read the work of local tape label/performance collective(?) Parlour Tapes+ as partially a non-high-culture re-imagining of the historical avant-garde (meant in Peter Burger’s sense). Chicago composers explore stylistic ideas of dizzying dissimilarity; the Northwestern doctoral composition recitals from November 2015 to May 2016 alone are a worthy dissertation topic. (If you don’t believe me, do check out the head-spinningly diverse aesthetics of David Reminick, Jenna Lyle, LJ White, Alex Temple, Chris Fisher-Lochhead, and Katie Young.) Do you find the prospect of exploring this series of links daunting? If so, welcome to my world.

[I have an impulse to put here some sort of “full disclosure” statement about who of the above are personal friends about whom I cannot be objective, but the truth is I know all of these people. This is not just okay, but actually great; I do not feign a non-existent objectivity or an impossible and undesirable disinterest.]

Eliza Brown wrote Prospect and Refuge (video here) for Quince Contemporary Vocal Ensemble in 2015. Here we go again: Eliza is a Chicago composer in the sense that she is from Philadelphia, teaches at DePauw in Indiana, but attended Northwestern and worked in Chicago for many years. Quince is a Chicago(ish?) group in the sense that only one of its members actually lived in Chicago at the time of this work’s writing but many of them are in Chicago often. “The result is an experimental music-theater piece, primarily intended for re-purposed or non-traditional performance venues, that depicts four private individuals meeting in a public space. The dramaturgy of the work—how it is interpreted and staged by the performers—is to be adapted according to the social history and/or function of each performance space,” says Eliza. This is a Chicago piece in multiple senses: it is written by and for Chicago musicians (“Chicago” as just described), and it has at its structural core a provisionality (can a core be provisional?). But paradoxically, it’s also just deeply structurally concerned with the place and time of its staging. This is not a work that is reproducible and commodifiable: you can’t find it in a Starbucks in Houston; rather, you might, but it would be a different piece. That Zach Moore wrote a similar piece for my DePaul School of Music group, Ensemble 20+, just months before, is telling. About the piece, “???” (Zach says, “I’m bad at titles”; I’m not sure I agree), he says:

I got into it for the obvious reason that a piece takes places at a specific time and place, and that is obviously a huge part of the piece (what the venue is like, who is there, what exterior sounds and movements are happening) yet they are somewhat uncontrollable, so to do it again would be a “different” piece. […] I don’t see reproducibility as any part of my practice. So, when I do a piece that’s performed once, I feel like it acts as a community event, more so than the premiere of “my” piece.

In March 2015, my friends Seth Brodsky and Philipp Blume held an enormous festival of the music of mathias spahlinger (spahlinger writes in militant lower-case letters) for his 70th birthday, in which I participated with my DePaul orchestra and Ensemble Dal Niente. It was a typical Chicago effort, mixing the DIY with the institutional. The Goethe Institute and the University of Chicago and DePaul University were among the kind, supportive sponsors, but we made every dollar count. The festival included an ambitious string of performances, a thoughtful symposium, and an elegant program book. This was an event that was simpatico with the experimental, make-it-work character of our new music scene; perhaps a proposed resistance to a commodified concert-going and -making, a different way of doing things expressed in the work of a composer with many years experiencing thinking about precisely that question. Says spahlinger about his doppelt bejaht (“doubly affirmed”): etudes for orchestra without conductor:

artworks too are manufactured and distributed according to the conditions of the market, and more to the point: their innermost constitution is itself dependent on the means of production, inculcated in power relations and their corresponding patterns of thinking. […]
playing instructions for doppelt bejaht were devised with the aim of focusing the musician’s attention and responsibility on the whole—a whole which, since it involves new music, can only be contradictory, open whole, changeable in itself and actually changing itself.

spahlinger is an exciting figure to me not because he’s a Famous German Composer^TM, but because he’s a person who has simply been granted the time and means to work on these various issues in depth. What drew me to him is that his life’s work does a more thorough and complete job of approaching cultural problems in our world and recent past than my own analysis does. His critiques of commodification are penetrating and moving as musical experiences.

The festival was roundly criticized in the Chicago Tribune for not having been well-enough advertised.

so, why are we doing this? music (not: is, but) can be a way to communicate (and to understand by ourselves), what we are, want to be, and will be by finding out, what is our way.

spahlinger wrote to me after the festival, in response to certain of my soul-searching queries:

you ask some first and last questions and i take this very seriously by saying: try to give yourself preliminary answers[…]
so, why are we doing this? music (not: is, but) can be a way to communicate (and to understand by ourselves), what we are, want to be, and will be by finding out, what is our way. [Author’s note: read this sentence a few more times; it’s worth your while.]
sorry, this is not very specific.

Here I feel that I have reached a satisfying conclusion; I have sketched the essence, or the rather, the process, of Chicago new music’s transient state. Yet I must say more. On the one hand, everything I write above is consonant with my experience and so deeply felt that I’ve restlessly redefined my career trajectory because I feel inspired by the exciting work I see on a daily basis. I feel that I have theorized in a nuanced, sympathetic, friendly manner the work of my colleagues. On the other hand, it’s painfully clear that there’s an awful lot I’m leaving out. I’m aware that I haven’t mentioned a number of Chicago new music organizations: Chicago Composers Orchestra, Fulcrum Point New Music Project, Eighth Blackbird, Contempo, CSO’s MusicNOW. I recognize that, even in the list of organizations I’m leaving out, still more remain left out. What I initially called “a weak claim, not a strong one,” is shown to be all the weaker. There are vast numbers of complicating factors, and only the embrace of these will give us a fleeting glimpse of the reality of the situation: that there is not a unified whole to be grasped.

Chicago new(?) music is no longer emerging, it is emerged.

I said earlier in this piece that “[famous arts] institutions […] have only recently started paying close attention to the local new music scene.” This is true. Ensemble Dal Niente, Third Coast Percussion, New Music Chicago have just entered their second decade. Those groups are no longer new; Chicago new(?) music is no longer emerging, it is emerged. Famous arts institutions are beginning to pay attention to local new music (for instance: CSO’s MusicNow, led by Samuel Adams and Elizabeth Ogonek, has commissioned Katie Young, Kyle Vegter of Manual Cinema, Marcos Balter, Sam Pluta—all current or former Chicago residents). Thus, my analysis here can also be described by all of the adjectives I initially used to describe Chicago new music: Provisional. Transient. Conditional. Contingent. Fragmented. This is a scene entering a new phase of existence, and the socio-economic circumstances will—unavoidably—alter its style, forms, media, and contents. I don’t know whether it will be for better or for worse, and I don’t know if the categories of “better” and “worse” will make sense as analytical tools. Honestly, I just have no idea what’s going to happen.

Michael Lewanski

Chicago-based conductor, educator, and writer Michael Lewanski is conductor of Ensemble Dal Niente and assistant professor of Instrumental Ensembles at the DePaul University School of Music. He wishes to thank Deidre Huckabay for her help refining ideas in this essay.

Style Points

Posted on August 27, 2014 by Matthew Guerrieri - Analysis, Articles

Sometimes, you go to a concert—or you go to a movie, or you read a book—and it feels a little like the whole thing has been engineered to appeal to your own proclivities and penchants. Back on August 7, my wife and I had a date night, and we went up to Rockport to hear The Bad Plus—pianist Ethan Iverson, bassist Reid Anderson, and drummer Dave King—joined by saxophonist Joshua Redman. (The official billing was “The Bad Plus Joshua Redman,” a nice, opportunistic asyndeton with kind of a Who’s Next feel.) It ended up being a 90-minute plunge into one of my particular obsessions: musical style. Redman’s usual style is a lot more straight-ahead post-bop than The Bad Plus, which tends toward something akin to a romantically lush lyricism filtered through a box full of Rush and King Crimson records. The styles mesh, though: the trio lending a deep, power-chord foundation to Redman’s twistier flights, Redman sailing through the trio’s modular pulses with squalls of virtuosity. And all four share a tendency to continually cross-examine their own styles, as well as everybody else’s. This was the first concert of a brief tour, so, especially on new material, the stylistic negotiations were still ongoing—never contentious, but noticeable. The pleasure of the experience—the excitement of the experience—was that of investigation and query more than that of gloss and consensus. Which is, of course, a style, and a stylistic decision, in itself.

I think about style a lot. I always have. And I tend to think about it in a somewhat interrogatory fashion—poking at it, messing with it, taking it apart and putting it back together. So I tend to like music, and musical performances, that do the same thing. And I’ve come to realize that it’s a bit of an odd thing to like.

***

Throughout the concert, I kept flashing back to another piece of music, very different music: Lukas Foss’s Solo, a piano work from 1981. When I was studying with Foss, he liked to bring out this piece for group seminars; I heard him analyze his way through it at least twice. It’s great for that sort of thing, at least on the surface: all the gears are in plain sight, as it were. And yet it is also elusive. Most music, fast or slow, loud or quiet, presents itself, makes itself the focus of at least some kind of attention while it’s being performed. But Solo, every time I’ve heard it, seems to hang back from that sort of engagement, just sort of strolling around the periphery of my musical cognition. And a lot of that has to do with how the piece alternately engages and ignores style.
Solo opens with a 12-tone row, played twice so you’ll get it:

And, almost immediately, the serial structure begins to unravel with a bit of misdirection:

Those bell-like tones in the left hand are a feint: for three notes, they reiterate the row, but then go on their own way. The right hand is doing the opposite—Foss starts reordering the row, bit by bit, beginning with the first two pitches. The first section of Solo ends up filled with rearranged and almost-but-not-quite row forms, little tweaks of pitch order so that seemingly same initial conditions produce different results. Eventually, the stream of notes starts yielding verticals, almost always certain intervals: fourths and fifths, seconds and sevenths:

Those intervals sound an awful lot like the sorts of intervals that pop up in a lot of phase-based minimalism, the friction of diatonic motives as they swirl and collide. They’re supposed to. Just as, at the beginning, Foss references serial modernism without really writing any serial modernism, now he’s referencing Reich-style processes without any such process—and in a chromatic context.

After building up to a keyboard-spanning climax, Foss drops in three theatrical coups. The first one is the most hidden, and maybe the most outrageous: the music turns around and backs up through ten pages’ worth of pitch material, rearranged among the hands and the piano’s range, but otherwise scrupulously retrograde. You want a row operation? Here’s a row operation. The bulk of the structure is a massive symmetry, but the musical surface betrays none of it—or all of it, as it blithely churns along, the notes ever-circling but the rhetoric placidly constant.

The second comes after that long mirror exhausts itself and the original row-theme returns in polyrhythmic guise. Suddenly, the music’s motor keeps seizing on thick, jazzy chords, finally giving in to them with a quirky little groove:

This bit of pop music—that’s how Foss thought of it, and referred to it—is the arrival point for all that has come before, and yet it feels almost defiantly casual, impulsive.
The last coup comes at the very end—or, as Foss would have it, after the very end:

The final chord hits, but in its echo, we get that opening row one more time. Let Foss explain:

The score has the word ‘Fine’ written a bar before the end: the last bar is like an appendage or an error—the piano playing on without its master or the phonograph needle returning to the opening automatically, as the engine stops.

Foss, I remember, was exceptionally pleased with this ending. He was always proud of particularly clever or provocative things he had come up with, but this one went a little further, I think. Because Solo, in a way unlike any other piece I know, is a piece about style—modernism, minimalism, classical, popular—but written from an eclectic’s standpoint, outside style. The music is semiotically backwards: the stylistic signals show up too late, after the music is already going. It’s like those row forms in the piece’s opening section, constantly rearranging themselves in an attempt to keep up with the tonal allusions Foss wants to make, the theory trying to chase the music down. To listen to Solo is to experience that, but in the arena of category. Our sense of style is always playing catch-up to our sense of sound. Which is why that extra bar is, maybe, the key to the piece. It’s all twelve chromatic pitches, ready to spin out again. It could go off in some completely different direction. It probably will. The whole piece, Foss seems to say, the whole of music, is always there, outside of ourselves. We catch glimpses of it, and we call it style.

Redman and The Bad Plus were doing something of that, too, enough to trip my amygdalae into conjuring up memories of Foss and his tricks. The group ended up going in a few Foss-like directions, even—that “pop” progression at the culmination of Solo is not too far from the sort of power-chord-but-then-again-no changes that Bad Plus originals often feature. But mostly it was a common attitude, the kind of generously restless curiosity that easily slips back and forth across the line between celebrating a style and subverting it.

That sounds great, doesn’t it? In fact, it can be deeply uncomfortable.

***

Societally speaking, this summer has felt awfully polarized. It seems like all the old dichotomies—black/white, rich/poor, right/left, east/west—have reared their heads in earnest. It seems like it, anyway. Maybe it’s just, confronted with an acceleration of the continual parade of the human capacity to behave abominably toward each other, we fall back into perceiving those dichotomies, because they give us something to hang on to. They let us make sense out of what, if we’re being really honest, we ought not to be considering as sensible. Even the ones that are closer to the truth than not can be a little too comfortable, providing a seemingly ready explanation that can obviate necessary action. Like so many other games involving language and categories, such categorization gives the illusion of absolving us, just enough.

I would hardly put musical stylistic categories into that, um, category. They can be somewhat useful. They can be undeniably fun. They can also cause undeniable trouble, but it’s relatively minor trouble, in the grand scheme of things. And it would be ridiculous to make any utopian claims to their existence or elimination.

But I will propose that there is something particular about style, and stylistic boundaries, that’s going on in contemporary culture. I don’t think it’s robust enough to call it a rule. A tendency, maybe. But it’s this: as style has become more pluralistic, it’s become less subtle. Looking around, listening around, culture is as stylistically non-hegemonic as I’ve ever experienced, anyway. But parallel to that is a kind of greater semiotic compartmentalization: the vast majority of cultural artifacts I encounter keenly announce their stylistic allegiance early and often.

This has been going on for a while. I was recently re-reading Retromania, Simon Reynolds’s study of the increasing weight of pop-music history, and he touches on this sort of thing in his discussion of the rise in the 1980s of what he calls “record-collection rock.” “Most really interesting bands have a map of their taste buried within their music for obsessive fans to dig out,” Reynolds writes. “But what was different was that the taste map was getting ever more explicit and exposed, to the point where the aesthetic coordinates were right there on the surface of the sound.” I would say that’s become a prominent feature of all cultural media. And non-cultural media, too. Remember the early days of the World Wide Web—when the evangelists were so sure that having more viewpoints and more voices would reduce extremism and promote consensus? Yeah, that didn’t happen. Instead, philosophies attained traction in as much as they could be efficiently signaled. Too long; didn’t read. Having that many voices meant that we could find the ones who agreed with us and hunker down.

Maybe that’s why I think that music that goes beyond mere stylistic pluralism, music that actually unscrews the back of the stylistic box and starts ripping out the wires, is getting more rare—and is a harder sell. The Bad Plus are pretty much their own brand now, but they got a fair amount of grief in their earlier days, just because no one could put a clear label on just what it was they were doing. Jazz? Rock? Ironic? Sincere? That it could be all of that and more took some time to sink in. A lot of the sort of new music we talk about in this space is in the same boat. Foss’s music, for instance: stylistically speaking, what do you call something like Solo, beyond a catch-all like “eclectic”? And (not incidentally) when was the last time you heard it?
It’s fascinating to hear the recording of Foss himself playing Solo. Looking at the music on the page, one might assume that it called for a steady, mechanically even performance, in line with the minimalist-ish textures and repetition that make up so much of the piece. (There’s a six-page stretch of the score that’s completely devoid of phrasing, articulation, dynamics—any expressive markings at all.) Foss, though—it’s ruminative dynamics and rubato all the way, the music and the tempo undulating almost throughout. The effect is somewhere between an early-Baroque prelude, a high-Romantic character piece, and a wayward Errol Garner introduction.

Foss probably wasn’t trying to make those connections; then again, such connections were second nature to him. You could always count on him to hone in on the avant-garde surprise in the oldest repertoire and the thread of tradition in the newest—finding, in the nuts-and-bolts pleasures of craft, the common ground between disparate musics. That seems like an attractive goal, but it also runs right into every psychological defense we have. Because it’s a reminder that a lot of other things we think of as inevitable, as set in stone, as just the way things are, really aren’t—which means the onus is on us. The music doesn’t make the style. We do. And that goes for the rest of the world as well.

Finding a True Name in a Post-Genre World

Posted on August 7, 2014 by DeanCMinderman - Columns

Photo by Quinn Dombrowski, via Flickr

Writing just this week in The Daily Beast, Ted Gioia includes among his “Five Lessons The Faltering Music Business Could Learn From TV” the advice that the industry should “resist tired formulas.”

Now, no one’s really speaking up in favor of tired formulas as such, but reading on, it turns out what he’s really against is classifying music by genre. Observing that programs like The Sopranos and Breaking Bad became critical hits in part because they broke the predictable conventions of TV genre shows about cops, doctors, or lawyers, Gioia notes that “every album and song nowadays is marketed as part of a genre—rock, hip-hop, country, jazz, etc.

“But the very decision to sell songs to targeted genre fans has turned into an aesthetic straitjacket,” he continues, suggesting that the music business should “emulate the boldness with which the leading pay TV networks have sabotaged genre recipes.”
Still, even as Gioia correctly notes that there already are plenty of people making excellent music that doesn’t fit easily into a particular category, and even if you agree with the premise, the post-genre future remains at best, to borrow a phrase from the speculative fiction writer William Gibson, unevenly distributed.

Parts of it undoubtedly are widespread already. Thanks to technology, musicians and composers have access to a lot of useful new tools; computer-enabled formal ideas like the mash-up have emerged; and musicians are able to collaborate across time and space in ways that previously were impossible. There’s also the notion that by making it easy to find people with similar interests all over the world, the internet provides an alternative way to form musical communities that theoretically can make music scenes tied to geographic location less important.

Of course, the internet also can “silo” people into self-selecting groups that only reinforce their existing ideas and beliefs, which isn’t exactly broadening. And when geography isn’t the determining factor bringing musicians together, how do they find each other online? More often than not, it seems to be through shared fandom, often of specific artists but sometimes entire genres. (For handy examples of this, just consult the “musician wanted” section of your local Craigslist.)

Technology also has made the process of music discovery much easier. When I was a teenager in the 1970s, one might follow a reference to a previously unknown band or musician found in liner notes, Rolling Stone, or Down Beat to a half-dozen record stores and the library, and still come up empty handed. Now, anyone who wants to find out more about Sun Ra or John Cage or Edgard Varèse can simply type their name into a search engine, and in seconds the internet will deliver biographies, photos, journalism and critical opinion, and most important, audio and video.

So with the internet letting us hear just about any music and see any musician any time we want, for a comparatively low cost of entry, in theory it could provide an ideal opportunity to get rid of genres. Unfortunately, one thing technology can’t do is make the day longer than 24 hours. There’s more information, and more music, more easily accessible to more people than ever before, but no one actually has time to read or listen to more than a fraction of it. So we still must rely on gatekeepers and sorting mechanisms, one of which is musical genre, and radio, retail, presenters, and media all continue to categorize music according to whether it is rock, pop, hip-hop, country, R&B, classical, blues, folk, jazz, and so on.

While some musicians embrace genre labels for marketing purposes, others are understandably reluctant, or even antagonistic, toward having their music pigeonholed, or just want to make art for art’s sake. Nevertheless, presenters, labels, and media want to grow their audiences, for all the obvious reasons, and even musicians who claim to be unconcerned with commercial success still want their music to be heard. As long as that’s the case, genre labels seem likely to persist.

For evidence of that, look at what’s known broadly as “electronic dance music,” touted as a major growth area of the industry and one that seems to spin off hyper-specific sub-genres at a dizzying pace. Wikipedia’s list of electronic music genres contains 22 major sub-categories, each containing at least a half-dozen sub-genres, totaling more than 200 different varieties. Outsiders may be hard pressed to distinguish among, say, two dozen different varieties of house music, yet to those on the inside, the distinctions are critical enough to warrant coining new terminology.

If nothing else, this proliferation of sub-genre names should give listeners in the know a fairly specific idea of what to expect, and it also gives musicians and composers a wide variety of specific channels or identities that can be used to get their music to the public.

Given this example, I wonder if, rather than anticipating an end to genre designations, perhaps new music needs to cultivate a whole lot more of them, since much of the terminology currently in use is overly general at best, and vague or misleading at worst.
In marketing speak, it’s called “segmentation,” and it can serve a useful purpose in helping sellers identify potential buyers and buyers to find things that interest them. For music that’s distributed online, specific sub-genre designations could be particularly useful and can serve as keywords or metadata, helping listeners locate music of potential interest.

Even the umbrella term “new music,” while well understood by the readers of this publication, often is interpreted by others in terms of the plain English meanings of its component words, which can lead to some convoluted explanations.

In the 1990s, when I was a board member and later an administrator for New Music Circle in St. Louis, I was also playing blues and rock gigs, and I’d get into conversations with other musicians or fans in which I’d mention that I was working for New Music Circle, putting on concerts. Inevitably, they’d ask me some variation on the question, “So, what kind of music do they do?” and twenty years later, I find myself having similar conversations trying to describe the Mizzou New Music Initiative, with highly variable results.

Calling music “avant garde” or “experimental” seems to have a polarizing effect, immediately attracting interest from some while repelling others. “Contemporary classical” and “post-classical” are descriptive enough in one sense, but even setting aside the former term’s unfortunate oxymoronic quality, at least some of what we call new music doesn’t really have any relationship to classical music, so these terms are of limited use. On the other hand, the evocative term “creative music” may suggest something about the intent of those who are making the music, but doesn’t do much to locate it in terms of any specific sound, tradition, or genre.

Comparative recommendations—“If you like X, you may also enjoy Y”—can be useful, but only in those cases when you already know something about the person’s interests and preferences. That’s easy for Amazon or Google, but in casual conversation, or for a musician or composer trying to describe her latest work in liner notes, a news release, or a one-sheet, it can be little more than guesswork or wishful thinking.

Does new music necessarily need more than 200 sub-genres? Probably not, but if genre designations are going to be with us for a while, perhaps some imagination and some more colorful language could make them work to our advantage.

***
Dean Minderman is a writer and musician in St. Louis, Missouri, and the founder and editor of the website St. Louis Jazz Notes. As a consultant with the firm Slay and Associates, he currently works with the Mizzou New Music Initiative and other music-related projects of the Sinquefield Charitable Foundation, assisting with publicity, marketing, and strategic communications. A graduate of the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism, he has experience as an arts administrator and consultant, advertising writer/producer, music journalist and blogger, publicist, and event producer; and as a performing keyboard player and singer, composer/arranger, and bandleader.

What Counts as Borrowed Material?

Posted on January 9, 2014 by Alex Temple - Columns

Four years ago, I wrote a chamber orchestra piece called Dayglo Attack Machine. It wasn’t nearly as good as its title.

The piece explored territory that I’ve come back to many times: intentional cheesiness, shiny orchestration, references to 1960s advertising and film music, and the blurry line between cheerful and alarming. It even included a percussionist popping colorful balloons with knives. But in the end, it wound up seeming pretty tepid and uninspired, and I was left wondering whether I should pursue a different direction in my work. Discouraged and frustrated, I asked a bunch of friends for their honest opinions of my music. Reading the criticisms I got wasn’t always pleasant, especially since I agreed with some of them. But the response I wound up thinking about the most is actually one that I didn’t agree with. It was from a composer who said that while she liked my music’s collage-y, turn-on-a-dime syntax, she wished that I would use my own materials rather than borrowed ones.

I can see why someone would react that way to my work. I make a lot of allusions, and often very obvious ones. But here’s the problem: what kind of material wouldn’t count as borrowed? If Dayglo Attack Machine had used atonal harmonies rather than major seventh chords, nested tuplets rather than 4/4 syncopations, and sul ponticello string overpressure rather than doubled flute and vibes, most people wouldn’t describe that as using “borrowed material”—but it would be. I didn’t invent that language any more than I invented the language of 1960s advertising . And in fact, those materials are further removed from me culturally than the ones I used: not only do all of them go back at least to the 1960s, but they’re also European rather than American in origin.

I’m not sure why so many people can hear young American composers using mid-century European avant-garde ideas and not think of it as borrowing. It’s as if people think of the European avant-garde as something like an “indigenous culture” or “native language” for contemporary classical music. But few if any of us grow up surrounded by Stockhausen and Penderecki. I first heard them as a teenager, long after my brain had already been filled with the shiny, cheerful/alarming sounds of American TV and movies—and many people don’t hear them until later than that.

I don’t mean to pick on the composer who made that comment. She was responding honestly to a question I had asked, and she actually wound up changing her mind after we talked about it. But over the years, I’ve continued to think about that conversation, because I keep running into the same ideas. For example, Garrett Schumann recently posted on Twitter that composers who use common-practice tonality should do so “thoughtfully” and “deliberately,” and be aware of the “historical and socio-political assumptions” involved in making that choice. I’m all for thoughtfulness and historical awareness, but what strikes me is that I never hear anyone calling on composers influenced by Saariaho or Lachenmann or Ferneyhough to be thoughtful and deliberate in their use of pre-existing ideas. It seems to be taken for granted in many new music circles that anyone who composes in a European modernist idiom is doing so because they’ve thought about all the possible options and made a historically informed decision to go with that one, but that anyone who composes in a tonal idiom is doing so naively. The funny thing is, the assumptions that people make actually contradict each other. If atonality, extended techniques, ultra-complex rhythms, and non-repetitive syntax really are the “native language” of contemporary classical music, then you can’t take it for granted that anyone who uses them is doing so after years of rigorous aesthetic soul-searching. They might just as easily be doing it because it’s the norm in their musical subculture.

Just to be clear: I’m not disparaging modernist music, and I’m not saying that American composers have to use materials that originated in America. What I’m saying is that the whole question of what counts as borrowed material is a red herring, because any material you use already has a history. It’s not that there’s no such thing as an original artistic voice; it’s that having an original artistic voice has less to do with creating materials from scratch than with which pre-existing materials you choose and what you do with them once you’ve chosen them. So let’s not perpetuate a double standard that asks tonal and pop-influenced composers to justify their language, while assuming that modernist ideas come pre-justified. As any future historian will some day be able to tell you, we’re all building on what we’ve heard.

***

Alex Temple

A sound can evoke a time, a place, a cultural moment, or a way of looking at the world. Alex Temple writes music that distorts and combines iconic sounds to create new meanings, often in service of surreal, cryptic, or fantastical stories. In addition to performing her own works for voice and electronics at venues such as Roulette and Constellation Chicago, she has also collaborated with performers and ensembles such as Mellissa Hughes, Timothy Andres, the American Composers Orchestra, Fifth House Ensemble, Cadillac Moon Ensemble, and Spektral Quartet. Temple earned her bachelor’s degree from Yale University in 2005 and her master’s from the University of Michigan in 2007; she’s currently working on a doctorate at Northwestern University and writing a podcast-opera about TV production company closing logos and the end of the world.

Troy Herion: Sonic Imaging

Posted on May 15, 2013 by Frank J. Oteri - Conversations, Spotlight

The concluding work on coLABoratory, the American Composers Orchestra’s April 5 Zankel Hall concert, was an extremely effective symbiosis of music and film called New York: A City Symphony by Troy Herion. Throughout its roughly fifteen-minute duration, audience members occasionally gasped or laughed—not a frequent occurrence at a performance of contemporary classical music. I know I was at the edge of my seat for most of it. And at the end, the audience gave the most resounding applause that I had ever witnessed following an ACO performance. So was that reaction due to the music, or was it because they were watching a movie? Ultimately, it was a little bit of both.

Admittedly, it is not out of the ordinary for films to make us laugh or cry or to keep us completely riveted as we anticipate what will happen next. But often part of what makes the cinematic experience so effective is the musical soundtrack that accompanies the visual images we are watching on the screen. The most celebrated motion picture directors were extremely aware of this and chose the composers they worked with very carefully—think Eisenstein and Prokofiev, Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann, or Federico Fellini and Nino Rota. In more recent times, it would be difficult to imagine Stephen Spielberg’s adventures being as quite as epic without John Williams’s exultant orchestrations or David Lynch’s narratives being nearly as creepy without Angelo Badalamenti’s deceptively serene harmonies. Peter Greenaway famously cut his films to the music that Michael Nyman wrote for them and, in that reversal of the usual process, further solidified the painterly quality of his work. Directors from silent era icon Charlie Chaplin to horror filmmaker John Carpenter occasionally created their own music for their films, further heightening how crucial the sonic element was to their particular cinematic visions, and French nouvelle vague pioneer Jean-Luc Godard’s approach to sound in his films has been so idiosyncratic that he has been frequently dubbed a composer in his own right as well.
Troy Herion, however, approaches this creative fusion from the other direction. When we visited him in his Brooklyn apartment, a pair of vintage keyboards immediately caught my attention as did piles of CDs. Other than an extremely well-crafted table, a large provocative painting on the wall, and an art object that was a cross between a camera and a can of soda (a gift from a friend), there was little evidence that this was the pad of someone who made films in addition to making music. Largely self-taught as a filmmaker but heavily trained as a composer (he has an MFA from Princeton and is currently enrolled in the Ph.D. program there), Herion’s interest in making movies grew directly out of making music. It was a way to further extend the possibilities of what music can be:

I definitely think of myself as a composer first. I’m a composer who works with sounds and images. I’m learning the techniques of a filmmaker, but I work 95% with the instincts of a composer….I start with the musical impulse and everything else comes from that, even though they end up affecting one another. If I have a musical impulse that makes me think of an image, then I capture that image and it’s different from what my imagination was. So the real image will then change the music that I originally thought of and it becomes this feedback loop….By doing it myself, things stay in this intuitive state….But I think that music can be really anything. It’s an attention to a certain type of balance, a certain type of consonance and dissonance of material….Anything can be a musical appreciation; it’s how we direct our attention.

The first large-scale manifestation of Herion’s concept of “visual music” is his Baroque Suite, in which a group of dancers filmed in a series of tableaux that evoke Baroque-style paintings is fused with similarly Baroque-inspired music, albeit scored for a band including synths, electric guitar, and drum kit. As a result, although its five movements sport such period titles as “sarabande” and “gavotte” and were derived from these centuries-old dances, the work feels very contemporary, particularly in its sonic kinship to neo-prog rock. A signature device in Herion’s musical language that comes directly from his immersion into filmmaking is to subvert expectations by playing with people’s familiarity with various musical genres.

One of the things I ask myself—I’m critiquing my work as I go forward—is, “Do I care what happens next?” Even though I don’t know what happens next yet. This is something that I think that makes syntax very important. If you’re working in a style, you have an expectation of what will happen next. But if you don’t have any syntax from a previous style that people have already become accustomed to—Baroque music or classical music or rock music or whatever it is you are using—you have to generate your own, generate some sort of momentum so people can predict what’s going to happen next and then you can divert or fulfill that….I’m influenced by cliché almost. I look for opportunities to set up a cliché on purpose. I’ll try to make something almost boring. Boring is when you know what’s going to happen next but it takes too long to get there. I try to find that point right before you tune out, but you have an extremely strong projection of what’s going to happen next. At that point I feel like I have a common experience with the audience, and that’s when I like to twist it. And I think that resembles a joke, but it’s really something that holds your attention.

Despite Herion thinking of himself as a composer who makes films, some of his recent films have featured the music of other composers. He and his girlfriend Elan Bogarin fashioned what could best be described as a music video around the pianist Michael Mizrahi’s recording of Marc Dancigers’s The Bright Motion. The Dark City, a poignant rendering of the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy (also created in collaboration with Bogarin and which was featured in The New York Times’s Metropolitan Diary), used Franz Schubert’s music.

“I’m interested in advocating for music,” Herion explains. “It was really exciting for me to take Marc Dancigers’s music and Michael Mizrahi’s playing and create a film around that that was interpreted by a musician and composer—I felt it was an analysis of the music visually. While I didn’t generate the music, I felt that I was very close to the music and I put on my composer hat [to think] about the deeper meaning of phrases. Those are the details that are often not prioritized by people who are just filmmakers and not musicians.”

New York: A City Symphony is clearly the most ambitious synthesis of his musical and cinematic ideas thus far. For him, the visual and sonic elements form a seamless whole and are really not intended to be experienced independently. Even his use of the term “symphony” is multidisciplinary. Though the term carries significant weight in music history and Herion’s symphony calls to mind such elaborate programmatic works as Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique or—closer to our own time and place—Michael Daugherty’s Metropolis Symphony, Herion is also very mindful of the tradition of “city symphonies” made by filmmakers around the world since the 1920s:

Using a term like symphony I realize is a loaded term. It means a lot of things in the musical world and I sacrificed a little bit of what it means in the music world for what it means in the cinematic world. A city symphony is a whole genre of filmmaking. Why did filmmakers in the 1920s call their films symphonies? Was it for the epic quality of their films, because they were associating that with the term symphony, or was it because they were trying to conjure a musical interpretation?

The other tradition that Herion had to make peace with was New York City itself. Originally from Philadelphia, he’s only been living here for the past three years. At first, being a relatively recent transplant made conveying New York City seem too daunting a task, but eventually his enthusiasm for his adopted home took over and it shows. New York: A City Symphony captures simultaneously the overwhelming grandeur and non-stop energy of this town in ways that only a handful of other pieces of music do—scores by Gershwin and Bernstein, perhaps, or Charles Ives’s Central Park in the Dark.

“I was nervous when I was making the piece,” Herion confesses. “I’d go back between being very confident—that’s a really great shot, I nailed it—and then another part of me would be like, ‘How dare I comment on that! I’ve only been in New York for three years; I don’t have enough New York cred to get into the dirt here.’ But there is a whole culture of New York which is immigrants. Everybody’s an immigrant to some extent. So I focused on the idea that anyone is a New Yorker as soon as they get here. Nobody cares how long you’ve been here. If you’re taking up space, you’re a New Yorker almost. And the other thing I tried to focus on was how impressive New York is when you haven’t lived here so long that it starts to melt into the common experience. It’s spectacular to your senses—the architecture, the sounds, the activity; it’s almost maddening if you pay too much attention to it, so it’s in our interests to tune it out a bit. But I tried to say, ‘Let me keep this heightened awareness for as long as possible.’”

That heightened awareness of visual images as well as sound and how these two sets of sensory information can feed off each other makes Troy Herion’s creations some of the most interesting “music” I’ve heard (and seen) in quite some time.

The Good, the Bad, and the Experimental

Posted on July 11, 2012 by Isaac Schankler - Columns

Recently I was asked to create a couple arrangements of the music of Ennio Morricone for wild up, a wonderful new music collective in Los Angeles. Morricone has had an astonishingly prolific career as a film composer, having scored over 500 films in the last 50 years, but he’s still probably best known for his iconic work on Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Westerns, like A Fistful of Dollars, Once Upon a Time in the West, and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Working on these arrangements has been a great excuse for me to watch a bunch of amazing movies for “research purposes,” but it’s also been a chance to get better acquainted with some of the more obscure aspects of Morricone’s history—namely, his long association with the Italian avant-garde even before he started writing for film. It’s been fascinating to listen to his film music with that in mind, searching for traces of the experimental in his grandiose tonal harmonies and immediately hummable melodies.

Morricone’s theme for The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is almost certainly the most recognizable piece of music that he’s written. It’s been referenced and parodied so many times that it’s become easy to take for granted, and harder to hear just how strange and original it is. Morricone was a member of the experimental improvisation collective Gruppo di Improvvisazione di Nuova Consonanza, and it’s not hard to imagine that the musical discoveries made in that context had an impact on the way he thought about musical timbres. The theme’s unusual mix of whistling, vocalizations, assorted percussion, plus instruments like recorder, harmonica, and electric guitar, created a unique sound that was Morricone’s signature for many years. It was also quite different from most orchestral film scores at that time; in some ways, it’s closer to electronic music or musique concrete. The format also allowed him to adjust instrumental balance in ways that would be impossible in a live setting. While it’s true that composers and producers often artificially adjust the balance of recordings, Morricone calls attention to this process in an extreme way that’s impossible to ignore, blurring the distinctions between loud and soft, large and small, near and far. Is it too much of a stretch to relate it to Leone’s visual direction, which juxtaposed sweeping vistas with extreme close-ups?

Of course, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly showcases Morricone’s great gift for melody as well, including a brilliantly economical twist on the Wagnerian leitmotif. Instead of using different themes for the various characters, Morricone uses the same two-note theme for all three main characters. Supposedly this was to show that the three were really one character; that in spite of their circumstantial differences, they were all driven by the same desires. Variations of this idea crop up in other places; in Once Upon a Time in the West, Morricone intertwines two motifs, a menacing fuzzy guitar melody and a plaintive chromatic harmonica riff, to create one theme for two characters: Henry Fonda’s blue-eyed villain named Frank, and Charles Bronson’s mysterious man-of-few-words called Harmonica (naturally). This clues the viewer in to the fact that the characters are somehow intimately connected, even though they don’t share screen time until late in the film. When they finally do meet, it’s like a musical revelation.

Morricone was a master at creating these revelatory moments, and Quentin Tarantino, a huge Leone fan, often borrows Morricone’s music at crucial or climactic moments in his own movies. The music from the final duel of Il Mercenario (released as A Professional Gun in English) also appears in Tarantino’s Kill Bill Vol. 2 as The Bride punches her way out of a coffin. Here the music seems at first to be a fairly straightforward bolero, until the trumpet enters with a new, exuberant melody that dramatically changes the character of the scene. At the peak of the melody, the trumpet lands on an A-flat over a B-flat major chord, also recontextualizing the harmony! In Tarantino’s coffin scene the music announces The Bride’s seemingly inevitable triumph, but in Leone’s duel the emotional content is more tense and ambiguous, since the question remains: whose triumph?

Perhaps the greatest strength of Morricone’s music is his ability to seamlessly integrate this traditionally tonal language with the eerie effects and rigorous processes of avant-garde music. It’s something Morricone himself rarely talks about (maybe because no one asks), but he does address it briefly in an interview with The Quietus:

Let’s say that what I did was quite unique because I used tonal music which you might call melodic music. And I used this style and into this type of music I sneaked in some styles of avant-garde music and this was unnoticed. No-one really realized I was doing this directly. At this time I was a student of the School Of Vienna. It was a unique historical process that I did at this time. And I just wanted my work to be based on that because I just thought that it was very interesting and important for me to be following this process. And this resembled a clock going backwards because I was taking new things and adding them to very old ways of doing things. It is not very easy to explain this process! To give you an example for your reference, if you watch the opening credits to A Fistful Of Dynamite, in that particular score you will be able to definitely understand what I am talking about, being a student of the School of Vienna and the rest of it.

The “School of Vienna” undoubtedly refers to the Second Viennese School of Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg, and the music he refers to appears as “Inventions for John” on the soundtrack to A Fistful of Dynamite (also known as Duck, You Sucker or Giù la testa in Italian). But unless you were already listening for it, you might never imagine that this gorgeous, dreamy interlude was inspired by the thorny serialism of Schoenberg and company. On closer inspection there is a relationship, perhaps, in the pointillistic texture, recalling Webern’s klangfarbenmelodie. At any rate, this process allowed Morricone to create something that sounds absolutely nothing like anything else of its time—it’s almost as if he invented post-minimalism 20 years early!

Isaac Schankler

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