Tag: titles

Para-composition

Posted on October 19, 2015 by - Columns

a Soviet space dog

A Soviet space dog (source)

Jeffrey Edelstein, critic:  In our last blog post we discussed titles, but we didn’t address any titles you are thinking about for your own music.

John Supko, composer:  That’s right—and a good thing, too.  We could have written a book about the titles we did manage to discuss.

Edelstein:  I don’t think we have a book about titles between us, although I did once read Anthony Grafton’s The Footnote: A Curious History.

Supko: Babbitt’s alone represent every major category of title I can think of.  There’s a book in that.

Edelstein:  Or a footnote… But am I right that you often start a composition already knowing its title?  Perhaps we can approach your thinking as a naturalist might, which in this case would mean looking at the social aspects of composing.

Supko:  Sure, but what do you mean by social aspects?

Edelstein:  I mean the iterative, social activity that allows a composer to mull over their music with some detachment even as they are in the midst of composition.  It might be as straightforward as asking a performer about notation or the range of their instrument, or it might be a subtle and intricate conversation about something that seems far afield.

Supko: You mean sort of like this conversation?

Edelstein:  Yes, but I’d give it a sexy name: para-composition.

Supko: Sexy?  Um…did you ever suggest titles to Babbitt?

Edelstein: Fair point.  You mentioned that you are weighing various titles for a new chamber work inspired by the Soviet space dogs.

Supko:  That’s right.  My emotional response to this story is quite complex.  I feel a deep sadness when I imagine these trusting creatures in their capsules, obediently making voyages so dangerous their human masters wouldn’t attempt them. Then I can’t help but smile at the quaint futurism of the era, seen in everything from cartoons like The Jetsons to the heroic realism of Soviet space propaganda.  That smile is diminished slightly by the sinister residue of Cold War hysteria, the suspicion and apocalyptic foreboding.  But I also marvel at the colossal adventure of space exploration, an enterprise still in its infancy, yet begun more than half a century ago.  I would hope that a title could suggest some of these things, however obliquely.

Edelstein:  It sounds like your title and your music will be drawn from the same wellspring of thoughts and emotions.  What titles are you considering?

Supko:  The first title that occurred to me was Dog Requiems, because I imagined writing something like a secular requiem, but it bothered me; it didn’t have the ambiguity I was looking for.

Edelstein:  I can see that.  It’s general and misleading.

Supko:  Then I remembered a brief, untitled poem by Robert Lax about an encounter with a dog.  Lax’s ultra-minimal poetry fascinates me.  It’s courageously elliptical and repetitive in a way that could easily fall victim to parody, yet it communicates so much.  The text I borrowed from Lax is: “only a visitor.”

Edelstein:  That’s much better.  “Only a visitor” evokes many things in what will be the context of your piece.

Supko: I still haven’t written a single note of the piece, but I’m sure that this thinking about titles is part of the composition process.

Edelstein: That’s my sense of how you work—and really of how many composers work without thinking about it.  May I suggest a title?

Supko: Okay.

Edelstein: It’s taken from Wordsworth’s Prelude (Book 12, line 208): “spots of time”—there’s the joke of course, but there’s also the “renovating virtue” of memory.

Supko:  That’s funny.  The cartoonish banality of “spots,” calling to mind the catchphrase “See Spot run!” makes the first impression, but then “time” renders it more ambiguous.  Still, I’m not sure, perhaps because I haven’t read the Wordsworth poem.  It conjures many associations—Romanticism, self-knowledge, virtue—and I need my own time to think about them.

Edelstein:  The Prelude is far from Lax’s brevity, but it might be valuable to read now—here’s the passage I’m considering:

There are in our existence spots of time,
That with distinct pre-eminence retain
A renovating virtue, whence, depressed
By false opinion and contentious thought,
Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight,
In trivial occupations, and the round
Of ordinary intercourse, our minds
Are nourished and invisibly repaired;

In the context of your piece, “spots of time” evokes many of the inspirations you’ve spoken about.

Supko: That may be—and I can’t help thinking Babbitt missed out on “ordinary intercourse”—but the question of emphasis remains.  Do I want the poignant ambiguity of Lax or the improbable resonance of Wordsworth?  You’ve given me lots to think about.  Does this mean we’re collaborating?

Edelstein:  I’ll bet Babbitt left “ordinary intercourse” for Sondheim.  And no, we’re not collaborating.  But you’re not sitting alone putting notes on a page, either.

Perhaps we can talk about some of the ways composers draw upon colleagues and friends as they compose, say, the way Chopin’s friend, Charles Hoffmann, suggested the soft, spare opening bars of his Etude Op. 25, No. 11.  I can’t imagine the piece without this introduction.  It says something about the nature of inspiration and craft: sometimes it’s a highly social activity.

Supko:  Hoffmann’s introductory idea is similar to your Wordsworth suggestion. Both have to do with the weight given to certain details.  It’s a little more than editing, a little less than composing.  In the etude, Hoffman convinces Chopin to fix a spotlight, however pale, on his modest skiff of a melody before he sends it into the raging sea.  As a result, the music acquires a more vivid narrative element—arguably becomes more communicative—implying things like boats and waves.

Edelstein: That’s a lovely way to describe an etude more commonly known by the nickname Winter Wind.  Both metaphors—roaring wind and raging sea—are useful to some and unnecessary for others.  But our discussion of your title, Chopin’s friendship with Hoffmann—and another friendship we might have touched upon, Brahms and Joachim—suggest a way of working.  It’s difficult to believe that creative work is often completed in isolation.  The prefix “para-“ seems the right one for the subsidiary and the assisting:  all the things a composer might find talking about their ideas, emotions, and music with colleagues and friends, and yes, by reading critics on their work.

Supko: I’ve never responded to the nickname Winter Wind. It seems only to address what I hear as Chopin’s undulating sixteenth notes.  But I know the nickname is shorthand for something much richer.   This distinction reminds me of Kenneth Koch’s poem One Train May Hide Another:

One invention may hide another invention,
One evening may hide another, one shadow, a nest of shadows.

There is undoubtedly a social dimension to the composer’s creative process, but we tend not to discuss it because of prevailing romantic notions about the solitary artist.  I agree that a network of friends and colleagues can provide a necessary escape from the cul-de-sac of the imagination.  A title suggestion or a bit of technical advice from a performer might very well change the direction of a piece.  But whether that direction leads to a destination or a detour is anybody’s guess.  “One idea,” Koch understood, “may hide another.”

[Title]

Posted on October 13, 2015 by - Columns

Beethoven Eroica manuscript title page with Napoleon scratched out

Beethoven Eroica manuscript title page with Napoleon scratched out

Jeffrey Edelstein, critic: I wonder how the history of titles helps to shape the thinking of composers? Why do some titles seem to help you hear a piece and others do not? Why do some magnify the mood of a piece and others do not? Why do I remember some titles and not others? What are the mysterious attributes of a great one? Some titles are urgent—Frederic Rzewski’s The People United Will Never Be Defeated!—and others seem to take on meaning more slowly—David Lang’s statement to the court—and yet both resonate with their times. A title may be literal and poetic simultaneously—Michael Gordon’s Rushes. And a title may be literal and allusive—Georg Friedrich Haas’s In iij. Noct. Titles may seem evasive, ironic, or serviceable, but I am not always sure how composers think about them. I can smile along with some of Milton Babbitt’s titles—The Joy of More Sextets—but then the music starts…

John Supko, composer: A good title will tempt listeners to invent the meaning of a piece for themselves. This is a fine thing, if you ask me, but it’s difficult to know who benefits more—composers or listeners—from this hard-won ambiguity. Composers slogged through centuries in which titles were little more than taxonomy: Sonata, Fugue, Mazurka, Passacaglia. With marvelous economy, historical titles supplied quantities of structural information to audiences about the music they were going to hear. A title for earlier composers was like a blueprint, implying a set of instructions to follow, a collection of expectations to satisfy. The expectations were the listeners’ and they could be extremely precise and technical, concerning the number and treatment of melodic themes, the harmonic trajectory, the roles of instruments, the time signature and rhythmic material, the use of repetition and even register, to name a few that spring to mind. Composers who survived the scythe of history distinguished themselves not simply by their dexterity in fulfilling the expectations of listeners but by doing so through the judicious use of those acceptable anomalies we have come to call personal style. The same roiling audacity that led Beethoven to expand sonata form eventually bubbled over and engulfed the entire concept of form itself. After a while, there were no longer names for the forms composers were fashioning except those they themselves dreamed up. What, after all, is the form of Liszt’s Nuages gris but that of a flock of drifting clouds?

Today, in the absence of formal conventions, titles are more important than ever before. They often represent the audience’s first contact with a composer’s work, and thus their first attempt at understanding it. But now a title can be anything, from elegantly suggestive, such as David Lang’s death speaks, to unpronounceably opaque, as Georg Friedrich Haas’s “….” appears to be. In deciphering the latter title, perhaps it would help to know the title of another Haas work, in vain, from which to intuit a potential affinity with Beckett. Could this elliptical title bear some relation to the gaps that proliferate—or at least the feelings they elicit—at the end of Watt?  These thoughts might slide through our minds upon finding “….” listed on a concert flyer, and we might be wrong on the particulars, but we can nevertheless develop a vague sense of the aesthetic territory the work inhabits. Somehow we feel sure that this work will not be a Neo-Romantic tone poem. Nothing about the title, however, would suggest that it was a double concerto for accordion and viola.

The titles you’ve mentioned track my own initial thoughts about what titles can mean and do. As it happens, I also thought of Milton Babbitt, but not of any particular piece. It was rather the great discursive range in his titles that intrigued me, from the dead serious (Three Compositions for Piano) to the downright goofy (Septet but Equal). I thought about the public’s image of Babbitt as the severe wizard of musical modernism, and how easily even a cursory perusal of his titles would demolish that fiction.  But I also wondered, like you, about the obvious disparities in, let’s say, tone of voice, between Babbitt’s titles and musical language. Four Play is a 16-minute work for clarinet, violin, cello, and piano, and it’s as spiky and serious as anything Babbitt wrote. The work’s title can be overlooked by the inattentive, but its reference is clear. Surely it’s significant that such an unremittingly sober composition should have a salty double entendre for a title. This collision of sex and serialism may have been Babbitt’s most magnificent dissonance.

Four Play contains no obvious humor, much less sensuality, in its musical material, so the title doesn’t seem to provide any clues to prepare the listener beyond signaling that it is a quartet. Is Four Play‘s mischievous title meant to soften the sharp edges of its musical argument? Perhaps it willfully undermines the work in the manner of Satie’s Airs à faire fuir (Songs to Make You Run Away and Préludes flasques (pour un chien) (Flabby Preludes for a Dog)?  Or does such a title represent a general disregard for the importance and utility of titles? We can only observe that Babbitt’s title tells us something his music doesn’t.

Rzewski's War Songs

The first page of the manuscript of War Songs, another urgent title from Frederic Rzewski.

Edelstein: Sometimes a title touches me, stays with me, and allows me to be moved somehow more deeply by a work of music (along with the performance and production). I remember feeling this way about Milton Babbitt’s Philomel and about David T. Little’s Haunt of Last Nightfall. And I remember feeling this way about Steven Mackey’s Heavy Light and Barbara White’s The Wound and the Eye. It must matter that I’ve spoken with or know these composers: I can hear their voices and feel something of their personalities in their titles that I also hear in their music.

But I have never met Philip Glass or Robert Wilson, and perhaps no title means as much to my grasp of the music as Einstein on the Beach. The title Einstein on the Beach concentrates a simple, straightforward meaning for me—as our idea of the universe was transformed from Newton’s conception to Einstein’s there yet remains one fixed point: human love. But the expressing of this meaning—or more precisely, the feeling of this meaning—involved a long, complex, and ambiguous work of art in order that I felt the movement from stability to instability, felt the theory of special relativity, and felt gravity and grace in human love. One detail particularly illuminated the title: the seashell at the front of the stage with a spotlight on it. It’s Newton’s “I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” At least one of Newton’s biographers says that he never actually saw the seashore.  A character in the opera picks up and listens to the shell and, I imagine, hears Einstein’s roaring, unstable, endless ocean of truth. And, in the end, a bus pulls up and we don’t drown. I do not think I would have felt the coruscating music and crystalline production in quite this way without the title.

Drowning By Numbers

Posted on August 13, 2012 by - Columns

I must confess that my listening proclivities are driven by a quixotic desire for completeness perhaps even more than by my insatiable desire for new experiences. Quixotic, because I know deep down that completeness is not only impossible, but also that it’s not desirable—if I actually was able to listen to everything, then there would be nothing new left to hear. It would be the end of music, certainly the end of new music. But that’s a rationalization, and most human drives operate on levels that transcend reason.

There are few things that gnaw at me more than partial experiences of something. I want to experience it all. So I am still extremely frustrated that I only got to sit through three hours of Christian Marclay’s The Clock, which means I only saw one eighth of the footage, even though I know the work is not meant to be experienced for a full 24 hours and even were I to sit through it all, it is a continuous loop with no intended beginning or ending point. I actually tried to see more of it right before the end of its Lincoln Center Festival run. But on the afternoon I showed up, the line was around the block. I was told that it would be at least 2 1/2 hours before I could get in (which is almost as long as the time I had spent experiencing The Clock). It’s hard to believe: some New Yorkers are actually willing to wait that long; this one isn’t.

On a somewhat more mundane level, it is perhaps even more frustrating for me to listen to a piece of music whose title declares it to be part of a sequence of works and then not be able to hear the rest of the works in the sequence. For example, when I encounter, say, someone’s third symphony, my immediate reaction after hearing it (and sometimes even before hearing it), is to seek out that composer’s first and second symphonies, etc. It gets to be quite a listening project with very prolific composers like Joseph Haydn, who wrote 104 numbered symphonies. (Actually a total of either 106 or 107 Haydn symphonies survive, depending on whether or not one considers his Sinfonia Concertante to be a bona fide symphony.) There have now been several complete recorded cycles of Haydn’s symphonies, so hearing the whole lot is a possible–albeit extremely time-consuming—listening project. (I’ve done it.) However, there have yet to be recorded cycles of the complete symphonies of some of our own most prolific contributors to the genre: Roy Harris (13), Gloria Coates (15), Henry Cowell (21), or Alan Hovhaness (67!). Worse still, though William Schuman composed a total of ten symphonies, he withdrew the first two. There is an archival recording of a radio broadcast of Schuman’s Second Symphony with extremely poor audio fidelity lurking in a private collection, which I’ve actually heard, but I probably will never get to hear his First Symphony.

Despite my interest being immediately piqued by this numbers game, I do find it somewhat puzzling that a composer would want to title a composition in a way that immediately refers back to earlier compositions, especially a work the composer has disavowed. With the exception of a Second Piano Concerto written as a teen (it and its predecessor are now pieces I don’t think very much of) and a Piano Sonata No. 2 (even though I never completely finalized my Piano Sonata No. 1), I have never titled works this way and I doubt I ever will in the future. Employing such a titling scheme doesn’t allow a work to be heard on its own terms. It also implies a kind of evolution: a composer’s seventh string quartet should somehow be better than his or her sixth. I’ve long eschewed such evaluative notions, yet it still irks me to hear a work so numbered by someone else before hearing its predecessors. Again, I’m fully aware that this is not completely sane on my part.

Perhaps titling works this way is a form of promotion. If someone likes your No. 5, there will probably be four other works they will like as well. The folks in the publishing and record business have certainly capitalized on such a mindset when they’ve issued multiple volumes over time. In fact, legend has it that some record labels in the 1950s issued their “volume two” of a product before issuing “volume one,” thus insuring sales for the first volume upon its eventual release. After all, how many fans are capable of possessing volume two of something without also acquiring the first volume?