Don’t Quit Your Day Job. Yet…

Posted on April 1, 2000 by - Analysis, Articles



Kenneth Goldsmith
Photo by Melissa Richard

Conventional wisdom says: Don’t quit your day job yet. Stick it out until you are sure that the opportunities and cash is plentiful enough. Then quit. It could be a long time. Let’s face it: day jobs suck. Or do they? I’ve recently spoken to 5 composers who have not only loved their day jobs but felt that they have actually enhanced, influenced and informed their composing. Perhaps among artists, attitudes toward work are changing. During my last job, one of my co-workers was a famous novelist who made scads of money lecturing, writing articles and publishing books. When I asked her why she was working 10-7 as an online strategist instead of being the glamour queen that she was, she replied that being home all day alone drove her crazy; she missed the interaction with other people (which fueled her writing in the first place) and felt like the world was passing her by.

Innovative artists, on the other hand, generally don’t find themselves in the glamorous spotlight too often and if they do, it’s often only after working for a long time in obscurity. While their more conservative peers often find themselves swamped with commissions for everything from operas to car commercials, those who fall on the more experimental side of things usually have to do something to make ends meet. Unfortunately, history has confirmed this: in the late 1950s, well into his career and just before fame struck, John Cage worked as a designer for the textile firm of Jack Lenor Larsen; Virgil Thomson scribbled as chief music critic for the New York Herald Tribune; Charles Ives raked in the dough as an insurance exec; and Marcel Duchamp served his time dealing art and living off a family fortune for decades until the culture finally caught up with him in the 1960s.

While it might sound like a drag, the composers I spoke with have created their own agendas and made choices that seem to suit them. In fact, some of these composers could very well make a living off their own compositions, but stuck with their day jobs for reasons other than money: Morton Subotnick‘s 4 decade-long infatuation with electronic music and computers has led him to writing software, CD-ROMs and websites that teach kids how to read and compose music; David Soldier‘s day job as a scientist directly influences his conceptual-based musical projects; Joan La Barbara, by performing other’s compositions, has led her to develop a vocabulary of her own; Stephen Vitiello, had he not worked in the artworld, would have still been a rock musician instead of a noted improvising experimentalist; and David Behrman did god’s work by helping his fellow avant-gardist’s recordings to find their way into the hands of the mainstream back in the 60s when he did a stint at Columbia records as a producer.

I suppose my old-fashioned notion of what constitutes an artist’s pride made me approach my subjects gingerly. With each interview, I almost apologized for prying into the nuts and bolts of one’s financial life and made sure to ask if they felt absolutely comfortable discussing this subject with me. No one seemed to mind and several were surprised at my timidity. In the end, I was taken aback by the strange reversal of common knowledge; what emerged from this series of interviews is an overall positive attitude about employment, rather than the usual tired notions of work as enslavement. But in hindsight it makes sense: all of the composers I interviewed refuse to see their work – both art and employment – in conventional terms. In the end, I discovered that it was I who was holding on to dogged notions of what employment means.

What other jobs might you be interested in if you weren’t so busy writing music? Michael Daugherty

Posted on April 1, 2000 by - Articles, Commentary



Michael Daugherty
Photo courtesy 21st Century Music Management

If I was not a composer I would either run a used book store or be a lounge cocktail pianist. I have always loved the smell of old books and enjoyed rummaging through the stacks never knowing what I might come across.

For years I was a lounge pianist and enjoyed playing all over the globe during my student years. One meets many interesting and strange people at the gigs. My most unmemorable lounge gig: Ramada Inn, New Jersey Turnpike, Exit One.

John Luther Adams Remembers William Colvig

Posted on April 1, 2000 by - Headlines, Ledes



William Colvig with Lou Harrison and John Luther Adams
Photo by Dennis Keeley

Musician and instrument builder, engineer and mountaineer William Colvig died on March 1, 2000 in Capitola California, at the age of 82.

Born in Medford, Oregon on March 13, 1917, Bill grew up in Weed, California at the base of Mt. Shasta where he developed his lifelong passion for the mountains and learned to play several musical instruments. At the College (now University) of the Pacific and the University of California Berkeley, he studied both music and electrical engineering. He later combined his musical and technical talents, designing and building with composer Lou Harrison the first complete American Gamelan. Over the years, Colvig and Harrison built many other instruments based on models from around the world, tuned in just intonation and other acoustically-perfect tunings.

In addition to being musical collaborators, Bill and Lou were life partners. At a time when gay couples were still largely invisible to the straight world, they openly and tenderly showed their profound love for one another. Their thirty-three years of shared life and devotion is a model and an inspiration for all couples.

Over the years, as their flowing beards and hair turned white, Lou and Bill grew to resemble one another more and more. But Bill’s lithe frame, the spring in his step and the twinkle in his eye also gave him a more than passing resemblance to John Muir. Like Muir, Bill was an ardent advocate for wilderness, who passionately loved the Sierra Nevada and led many trips into the Range of Light for the Sierra Club (founded by Muir). As he wanted it, Bill’s ashes will be scattered among those rugged mountains.

Along with Lou, Bill always warmly welcomed younger composers and musicians into the beautiful home they shared overlooking the Pacific. Over the years, Lou and Bill hosted me for several memorable visits. In 1988, I had the great pleasure of welcoming them to Alaska, for a residency and concert with the Fairbanks Symphony. This was Lou’s first visit to Alaska. But it was homecoming for Bill. In the late 30’s he had left Berkeley to live for several years on the rough and ready frontier of Alaska and the Yukon, and he was thrilled to be back in the North again.


William with Gamelan
Photo by Dennis Keeley

For their concert, Lou and Bill brought with them the Sundanese gamelan degung, Sekar Kembar. As far as we can tell, this was the first time a gamelan had been heard “live” in Alaska. Bill played various instruments in the ensemble, and he was featured as soloist playing the suling flute in Lou’s tunefully-sunny Main Bersama-sama for horn, suling and gamelan.

After the concert, Lou and Bill came out to my cabin for a party. My place was deep in the woods. I had no running water and heated with a wood stove. The temperature in the boreal forest that night was well into the forty-somethings below zero. Accustomed to warmer climes, Lou was good-humored in his forbearance. But Bill was in his element. The colder it got, the better he liked it. The aurora borealis dancing in the sky that night was the icing on his cake.

Bill Colvig was one of a kind — a true original’s original. His impish grin and mischievous laugh, his irrepressible enthusiasm and unbridled joy in living will remain always in the hearts of everyone who knew him. The beautiful instruments and the rich life he created with Lou Harrison will be his enduring musical legacy to the world.

When Bill’s spirit left his body, Lou was at his side, holding his hand. “It was a peaceful death”, says his soul-mate. “He was so beautiful. Like a beautiful animal returning to Nature.”

What other jobs might you be interested in if you weren’t so busy writing music? Daron Hagen

Posted on April 1, 2000 by - Articles, Commentary



Daron Hagen
Photo courtesy Carl Fischer Inc.

If I could spend one hundred percent of my time composing I would. Now in my twenty-third year of thinking of myself as a composer, I have worked up to being able to spend eighty percent of my time pushing notes around. I’m proud of that.

While I was in conservatory I worked as a music copyist. (Interesting fact: Now that Finale, Score, and Sibelius rule the day, I am a member of the last generation of concert music composers who shall have moonlighted as professional hand music copyists –quill on vellum!– for their mentors and colleagues. Question: how long will the elite Broadway hand copyists be able to hold out?) I still treasure my Local 802 card: hand copying is a deeply honorable profession now gone.

Then, for ten years, the other twenty percent was filled first with a faculty position at Bard, then occasional stints filling in for David Del Tredici at CCNY, then a brief spell on the faculties of the Curtis Institute of Music and Princeton University.

Finally, about three years ago, I took the plunge and quit teaching entirely. That was a scary step. The dreaded other twenty percent is now spent (in descending order): giving composition master classes, pre-concert talks, doing website design (writing HTML), and (when things get really bad, which they do) music proofreading for a cherished ex-student’s Broadway copying house. Three years ago, I worked for two weeks as a Coffee Comrade at Starbucks. Last week, I also painted a colleague’s office! I do not feel entitled to a career composing music, but I will continue to work at it with all my heart.

What other jobs might I be interested in if I weren’t writing music? My second great love is to conduct my own theater music. I have begun stretching my wings in that direction – have just conducted the full-recording of my opera “Bandanna” in Nevada for ARSIS Audio, will conduct Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutte for Ohio Opera Theatre in November and the full-recording of my opera Shining Brow next year. Every time I conduct my own music I learn dozens of incredibly important new things that I write down and bring to the next compositional assignment. I have since high school been extremely comfortable in the pit, both as a conductor and pianist. I adore the theater’s ennobling tradition of Communion and delight in the responsibility that a theater conductor has to not just control the flow of the entire production but also to protect and uplift the singers while helping his orchestra to shine. I am thirty-eight years old. By the age of forty-five, I would like to be spending sixty percent of my time composing and forty percent conducting revivals and premieres of my own operas. I can think of no greater honor than to spend the balance of my days balancing these two activities.

If fate tears me away from my first and second loves, I would try to write prose. As a passionate lover of the written word, I have the amateur’s enthusiasm for writing fiction. I’d like to think that I would be pretty good at it – certainly, I would enjoy myself for a while. But, as a career? No. Words are in a way too specific; I would always crave music’s ability to discuss the all-too-personal in an abstract and curiously universal fashion.

What other jobs might you be interested in if you weren’t so busy writing music? Jeffrey Mumford

Posted on April 1, 2000 by - Articles, Commentary



Jeffrey Mumford
Photo courtesy Theodore Presser Company
  1. I would love to run a radio station that plays REAL music, that does not compromise (whatever style, just intensely good and focused). It would have a live format incorporated wherein there would be performances and interviews. There would also be live panel discussions on matters of musical aesthetics (I can dream!). One of my dreams is to convene a huge stylistically diverse panel (from Charles Wuorinen, Milton Babbitt, Elliott Carter, Donald Martino through La Monte Young, Philip Glass, “Blue Gene” Tyranny, George Lewis and all in between) to have a no holds barred aesthetic free for all! Also regular calendar updates, Concert links from other countries. An IRCAM show etc. A course/show on orchestration taught and moderated by Bernard Rands AND John Adams. Shows on Black composers (in its HUGE variety from Olly Wilson to William Banfield to Tania León); on women (from Augusta Read Thomas to Ellen Zwilich to Jennifer Higdon to Pauline Oliveros) the world is wide open. Just one man’s dream.
  2. Another would be to be a tennis correspondent with assignments all over the world. To be able to cover Wimbledon, the Australian Open and the French Open IN PERSON would be a real kick. Plus getting to hit with and get free lessons from anyone I want from the tour.
  3. Run a coffee house/art gallery with my wife (who is a painter) and get the best art and music exhibited and played continuously.
  4. Paris bureau chief for almost anything!

What other jobs might you be interested in if you weren’t so busy writing music? Melinda Wagner

Posted on April 1, 2000 by - Articles, Commentary



Melinda Wagner
Photo courtesy Theodore Presser Company

In the field of music, if I weren’t so busy, I would return to teaching. I’d also really like to coach chamber music or conduct.

Outside of music, I’d really enjoy working in a library, however one that is pre-computer! I love to work with file cards. I would also enjoy making furniture. Of course, I don’t know how; but I’d love to learn.

If I had even more time, I’d be an athlete. I used to run long distance but then family and professional obligations just took over. I would run marathons. Of course, I’m running one now, aren’t we all!

What other jobs might you be interested in if you weren’t so busy writing music? Stewart Wallace

Posted on April 1, 2000 by - Articles, Commentary



Stewart Wallace
Photo by Steve Sherman

I’d make things with my hands like a sculptor or a painter. Things that I could touch. Things that would be done when I was done. Where the thing was the thing itself – not a roadmap to be interpreted, not dependent on the skills of the interpreter. Or maybe I’d be an architect. With building codes and zoning laws and construction workers and corporate patrons, this seems to me even more of a headache than being a composer writing an opera.

It’s About Time

Posted on March 1, 2000 by - Analysis, Articles



Matthew Tierney
Photo by Melissa Richard

When musics from all cultures of the world are considered, rhythm stands out as most essential. Unfortunately, rhythm, despite its musical importance, has been less studied than melody and harmony, the history of Western music being primarily a history of pitch. This neglect has been especially unusual because with music being a temporal art, rhythmic information is, if anything, more fundamental to musical understanding than pitch information. To study rhythm, however, is a difficult task because an accurate, generally accepted definition of rhythm does not exist. It has been further complicated, especially in the 20th century, by theorists and composers who have individually preferred to acknowledge only one of the many aspects of rhythm due to their own personal aesthetic.

Plato, in The Laws, arrived at his own general definition that rhythm is “the order in the movement.” This order may by conceived (rhythms comprehended mentally) or perceived (rhythms that originally resulted from human activity). Usually it is recognized that there is rhythm when the listener can predict based on what is perceived, anticipating what will follow. Essential in the rhythmic concept is that the perceiving of early events in a succession creates anticipation concerning later events. The paradox, of course, being that one can more or less prepare for what is to follow in both rhythmic and arrhythmic music. At one extreme, there is the successive repetition of a simple pulse or ostinati patterns, and at the other, a series of random, or seemingly random, patterns or long static episodes. The anticipation is associated with the organization within the duration. Therefore, musical rhythm, in its broadest sense, can be regarded as everything belonging to the temporal quality or duration of the musical sound.

By the twentieth century, Western musical conventions of rhythmic organization were increasingly disregarded, and the drastically diverse approaches by composers throughout the century have not led to a reamalgamation into a common rhythmic practice. The expressive rhetoric and goal-oriented organization of European nineteenth century music were no longer considered the only standards. In America, during the first two decades of the twentieth century, composers, like the early mavericks Charles Ives and Henry Cowell, developed a national musical awareness and a sense of independence from their European colleagues. Their approach to complex rhythms and rhythmic organization established an experimental trend that has defined most of American music in the twentieth century. Perhaps distrustful of the self-indulgent impulsiveness associated with romanticism, composers by the 1920s became more interested in the actual processes of the creative act especially the control and manipulation of the materials through precompositional planning.

During the 1950s, two opposing methods of composing were firmly established: integral serialism and indeterminacy. The twelve-tone method of the Second Viennese School had become widespread, and by the 50s, in both Europe and America, the concept on which it was based was applied methodically to all musical elements. The result was an extremely complicated, rhythmically intricate music and sounding, ironically, quite random and arrhythmic. It was criticized incessantly because the logic behind the piece, which was supposedly the most important aspect of the composition, was not discernible; its intricate metrical procedures concealed. Indeterminacy attempted to remove a composer’s intentions from a composition. Rhythmic events for the most part did not observe any metrical pattern. Within a designated duration, the composer could arrange events in time to any degree of spontaneity, irregularity, or complexity, or encourage the performer to take the responsibility for decisions about the temporal placements of sounds. Indeterminacy was seemingly the antithesis of serialism but produced basically the same results: complexity and confusion; the further disruption of pulse as a perceptible means of rhythmic measurement; and the renouncement of subjectivity, personal choice, and intuition.

With progress, there is a tendency to create a high density of musical events within a relatively short musical time frame, to saturate musical space and meaning. Serialism and indeterminacy can both be considered the mannerist style of twentieth-century Western musical progress, and history has shown that after a period of rhythmic complexity and disorder when additional embellishments seem impossible, there is a desire to start over with the basic elements of musical composition. The reaction to the rhythmic attitudes of both serialism and indeterminacy resulted in minimalism, which was equally modernistic and experimental, and whose fundamental characteristics, by way of conceptualism’s limited approaches, were in place by the early 1960s: repetition, regular pulse and a drastic reduction and simplification of means. What began as a strict approach to regular pulse has prospered into a highly adaptable method of composition that has had a profound and continuing impact on musicians of the past three decades up until the present day totalist composers. Most totalist composers continue to apply minimalism’s and rock’s regular, driving pulse, on which they build a complex set of polyrhythms. The audible conflicts between the polyrhythms and the steady beat are essential and not obscured by rigid, objective compositional devices.

The first century in the evolution of jazz, a music which inhabits a realm somewhere in between America’s concert hall and popular traditions, parallels many of these developments and the various sub-genres within jazz are largely definable by their different approaches to rhythm.

While the differences between these different musical ideologies have divided musicians, critics and listeners throughout the past century, similar conceptualizations largely based on a new attitude about rhythm, point to a distinctively “American” approach to the creation of music.

 

Inner pages:

American Music’s "Elder Statespeople" Comment on the Future of Music Henry Brant

Posted on March 1, 2000 by - Articles, Commentary



Henry Brant
Photo by Kathy Wilkowski, courtesy of Henry Brant

What is happening in music may be compared to the current degradation of the natural world environment. Most music today emerges from loudspeakers, rather than from acoustically natural sources. In the United States, public interest is largely confined to commercial popular music. Genuine indigenous music worldwide is disappearing, especially through admixture with the clichés of Western music. It appears probable that all these trends will continue in the foreseeable future.

American Music’s "Elder Statespeople" Comment on the Future of Music George Perle

Posted on March 1, 2000 by - Articles, Commentary



George Perle
Photo by Johanna I. Sturm. Courtesy of George Perle

I have been offered 100 words to reply to the question, “What is the future of music?” but I need only three: “I don’t know.” I can, however, answer another, related question: “What sort of future would you like for music?” Every new piece I write attempts to answer this question. My starting point is the revolutionary challenge to traditional tonality inherent in emblematic works composed at the beginning (1908-13) of the last century by Skryabin, Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Stravinsky, and Bartók. In spite of the disparity in their idioms and compositional methods, what unites these composers is more important than what separates them, and looks forward toward an authentic contemporary tonal language as the vehicle of contemporary musical expression.