Though I have been a professional musician since my teens and a classical musician for nearly all of that time, and always interested in composition, I never took my own composing seriously until a few years after I moved to Mexico. Musing over this recently I'm wondering if there were not some class issues I was not consciously aware of.
My parents both left school at the Grade 8 level and I was the first in my extended family to attend university--in the 1970s. I think we would be lower-middle-class at best. Of course, as soon as I started considering myself a musician, i.e. artist, I declared myself to be outside the class system. And besides, there are no classes in modern Western democracies, right? Oh how silly of me. Of course there are and I, in all respects other than my expertise as a classical guitarist, was still lower-middle-class. And not just because I was poor (as a classical musician I typically made between $20,000 and $25,000 CDN a year in earnings)--I also had some basic cultural attitudes associated with the lower-middle-class. Both I and my English professor might wear a t-shirt and jeans to class but for him it was inverted snobbery and for me it was just the costume of my class.
All of this got very confused because of the 60s, of course, when the costume and attitudes of the lower-middle-class became universalized. But over the years I succeeded in expunging much of the 60s madness from my mind. And, as I became more thoroughly ensconced in the classical music world, taking positions as chair of the guitar department at the conservatory and sessional lecturer at the university, I became more harmonized with the culture of the international classical music fraternity. Greatly accomplished musicians regarded me as a peer, for example.
But there still was a corner of my consciousness that thought as a member of the lower-middle-class and members of that class might be popular musicians or traditional musicians (like my mother), but they were not composers. Every member of the composing class in Canada that I am aware of comes from an upper-middle-class or higher background. This is possibly true in the US as well, though I haven't done any research.
So, while I composed in small increments throughout my career, I did not regard it as a serious artistic activity. Moving to Mexico seems to have changed my basic attitudes. Here I am a member of the expatriate class and hence truly out of the Mexican class system. This particular enclave is one heavily weighted towards the arts. So these factors together with my inherent interest in composition led me to start composing in a serious way some fifteen years ago. Now I have a substantial body of work and while I am unsure of its real quality I am sure of one thing: I am actually a composer! And, I suspect for the first time in my life, really not in the class system.
If you listen to much Morton Feldman you will develop a whole new sense of the word "minimal." Take this piece for example, De Kooning from 1963:
Next to that anything by Philip Glass or Steve Reich is going to sound horribly cluttered and "busy." But austere, spare music like this has its unique appeal.
Amongst fellow musicians I am known for being succinct as a composer and yes, I do tend to prefer to use fewer notes where others might use more. But compared to Morton Feldman I feel positively prolix. Some music, like some sauces, is greatly improved by reduction. We are so often tempted by more: more notes, faster tempos, higher notes and louder notes. But given that those have been the trends for a couple of hundred years now, surely there is more to discover on the other end of the spectrum, among the quiet, few, scattered notes. At least, that seems to be the message from Morton Feldman.
Listening to the music of Feldman is like a new kind of ear-training. You find yourself straining to remember exactly what the pitch of that previous note was. And is the new note really a fourth higher?
That scene from the movie has stuck in my mind for years and years because it always seemed to me to capture something about the creative "process." And by the way, I hate the word "process" in that context because that implies something you can plan and outline and design and so on. But really, I don't think that real creation is like that. A metaphor Jordan Peterson used once comes to mind: an artist is someone who leaves the warm, comfortable circle by the fire and goes out into the darkness, the wilderness, to find ... what? Who knows? Something. It's not so much a process as it is a journey of exploration. The metaphor is important.
Now don't get me wrong, yes, there are processes later on, but not in this stage of actually creating something new. Once you have something: a germ, a seed, a vision, something, then you have to figure out what it is and how it can be used. That has process-like elements if you are an experienced artist. Likely, as you become more and more established, you may rely on certain processes and procedures to generate the finished artwork. But the more you do that, the more you court mediocrity. A good artist is always willing to make that journey again, to strike out into the darkness. We can see it in the stages that many artists seem to go through. When things become too ordinary, to settled, you have to delve into what is not ordinary and not settled.
Shostakovich at fifty-six years of age set out to write a symphony unlike any previous one: it was not only musically unusual in using a bass soloist and male chorus, it was also a little risky politically as it used poems by Yevgeny Yevtushenko. This is the Symphony No. 13, subtitled "Babi Yar" because it is a denunciation of anti-semitism, as well as a denunciation of the cruelties of Soviet life: deprivation, anxiety and corruption. Setting poems by Yevtushenko was not the safest thing either as he was something of a thorn in the side of the Soviet leaders. We can measure the courage involved here by noticing that not one major composer in North America or Western Europe actually does real criticisms of the systems that they are part of. Is John Adams likely to write something criticizing the "Climate Change" hysteria? Not likely. But this symphony really does strike out into new territory, and for a composer in his fifties, that is not so usual.
A composer like John Cage, whether one enjoys his music or not, was genuinely creative through his whole life. Were the final products of much musical interest? Well, that is actually a different question, relating to aesthetic value. You can wander out into the surrounding darkness and not come back with anything terribly worthwhile--in fact, that may be the usual result.
But sometimes, you have the case of a composer who isolates himself in a tiny 8' x 8' room with just a chair and an upright piano and several months later walks out with the score to the Rite of Spring under his arm. And he didn't get there by following any kind of creative "process" because there ain't none!
Let's listen to that symphony. This is Symphony No. 13 by Dmitri Shostakovich in the recording by Valery Gergiev and the Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theater.
I just ran across a pretty interesting quote from Bob Dylan about songwriting. The link to the original seems to be broken, but here is where I read it. And here is the quote:
Dylan leans over and picks up the acoustic guitar. “Well, you have to understand that I’m not a melodist,” he says. “My songs are either based on old Protestant hymns or songs or variations of the blues form. “What happens is, I’ll take a song I know and simply start playing it in my head…I’ll be playing Bob Nolan’s ‘Tumbling Tumbleweeds,’ for instance, in my head constantly — while I’m driving a car or talking to a person or sitting around or whatever. People will think they are talking to me and I’m talking back, but I’m not. I’m listening to the song in my head. At a certain point, some of the words will change and I’ll start writing a song.”
He’s slowly strumming the guitar, but it’s hard to pick out the tune. “I wrote in 10 minutes, just put words to an old spiritual, probably something I learned from Carter Family records. That’s the folk music tradition. You use what’s been handed down. ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’ is probably from an old Scottish folk song…
No, no, no,” Bob Dylan says sharply when asked if aspiring songwriters should learn their craft by studying his albums, which is precisely what thousands have done for decades. “It’s only natural to pattern yourself after someone,” he says, opening a door on a subject that has long been off-limits to reporters: his songwriting process. “If I wanted to be a painter, I might think about trying to be like Van Gogh, or if I was an actor, act like Laurence Olivier. If I was an architect, there’s Frank Gehry.
“But you can’t just copy somebody. If you like someone’s work, the important thing is to be exposed to everything that person has been exposed to. Anyone who wants to be a songwriter should listen to as much folk music as they can, study the form and structure of stuff that has been around for 100 years. I go back to Stephen Foster.”…
“I always admired true artists who were dedicated, so I learned from them,” Dylan says, rocking slowly in the hotel room chair. “Popular culture usually comes to an end very quickly. It gets thrown into the grave. I wanted to do something that stood alongside Rembrandt’s paintings.”…
“To me, Woody Guthrie was the be-all and end-all,” says Dylan…his curly hair still framing his head majestically as it did on album covers four decades ago. “Woody’s songs were about everything at the same time. They were about rich and poor, black and white, the highs and lows of life, the contradictions between what they were teaching in school and what was really happening. He was saying everything in his songs that I felt but didn’t know how to…
“I had read a lot of poetry by the time I wrote a lot of those early songs,” he volunteers. “I was into the hard-core poets. I read them the way some people read Stephen King. I had also seen a lot of it growing up. Poe’s stuff knocked me out in more ways than I could name. Byron and Keats and all those guys. John Donne…
“I’m not that serious a songwriter,” he says, a smile on his lips. “Songs don’t just come to me. They’ll usually brew for a while, and you’ll learn that it’s important to keep the pieces until they are completely formed and glued together…I’m not thinking about what I want to say, I’m just thinking ‘Is this OK for the meter?’ “But there’s an undeniable element of mystery too. “It’s like a ghost is writing a song like that. It gives you the song and it goes away, it goes away. You don’t know what it means. Except the ghost picked me to write the song.”
There are a number of interesting things in that interview. When he says he is not a "melodist" and that he bases his songs on old Protestant hymns and Woody Guthrie, this makes sense. It also makes sense that he says he has read a lot of poetry. Dylan is really a great writer of song lyrics and his musical settings are very traditional in many ways. There are no fancy melodies in his songs. This is probably as articulate as someone like Dylan is ever going to get about how they write songs.
The reason is that these kinds of questions, "how do you write your songs", like asking a writer "where do you get your ideas", are questions that artists often regard as "centipedal" ones. That comes from an interview with Glenn Gould. He tells the story of the centipede who, when asked which of his hundred feet he started with when he walked, became so perplexed that he couldn't move and fell over and died. Gould, for one, does not want to think about how he does something for fear of disturbing the automatic intuitiveness of it. Similarly, questions about creativity are often uncomfortable for artists to answer--they really don't want to think about it!
The other problem is that talking about the process of writing music in detail is impossible because it is a musical not a verbal process (though I'm not sure how that would apply to a writer talking about writing...). This quote gets pretty close:
I’m listening to the song in my head. At a certain point, some of the words will change and I’ll start writing a song.
"Listening to the song in your head" and sensing it change into something else is sort of what goes on. When I am writing, once I have some sort of germ or fragment, I am trying to hear what "comes next". In music it is a lot about what comes next. Where is this going? Getting more specific means talking about details. The only place in popular culture where I have seen this almost happening was in the scene from Amadeus where Mozart re-writes Salieri's march. But, of course, it was so brief and sketchy that you don't get any real idea of what happened. A better exposition was in the movie La Belle Noiseuse where we get to watch the painter sketch his model. That hesitant and scratchy exploratory process is the closest I have seen to the creative process being depicted.
When Dylan talks about "the ghost" I think I know what he means. Sometimes a little musical idea just pops into your head. That is just the beginning, all the work is yet to come because you have to figure out what to do with it. One morning Paul McCartney got up and the whole song "Yesterday" was just in his head. All he had to do, according to the story, was figure out the chords. Mind you, there were no words. It took him months to figure them out. In the beginning he just called the tune "Scrambled Eggs" because that went with the opening:
Click to enlarge
Yes, I contributed the rest of the first line!
Schoenberg's comment to a student that the eraser end of the pencil was the most important end is also good to know. Sometimes--pretty often, actually--what you need to do is throw something out completely. I had the beginning to a nice little fugal scherzo in the string quartet I am writing right now until I realized how unsuitable it was and tossed it out.
How do you learn or study composition? Just listen to a lot of music and study a lot of scores and absorb whatever else you find creatively stimulating and then just let your mind freewheel. If you are a composer, things will start occurring to you! Then you can start to work hammering them into a piece of music.
As the writer Gene Fowler once said of his creative process: “Writing is easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.”
Or you could sell your soul to the devil like Robert Johnson...
I think that I studied with a student of Robert Beaser, a composer named Robert F. Jones, from whom I commissioned a guitar duet in the late 1970s. I believe the cost of the commission was a bottle of Johnny Walker Red Label. In any case, here is an interesting essay by Robert Beaser on the odd vocation of being a composer at this point in history:
I was just looking over my monthly statistics and I noticed an interesting thing: out of the top ten countries that visit this blog, six of them are non-English speaking. Here are the top ten in order of number of page views:
United States
Russia
United Kingdom
Mexico
France
Canada
Germany
Australia
Japan
Sweden
I don't think that we can assume that everyone is reading the posts in English either as I installed a handy translation gadget on the right hand side of the page. If you haven't noticed it, give it a whirl. You can translate the whole blog into most languages with one click, thanks to Google Translate.
So I just want to say "welcome" to all those non-English speakers out there. Apparently we all speak the 'language' of music!
I have some news for you as well. I just found out that my song cycle Songs from the Poets for voice and guitar will be receiving a double premiere in January. On January 18, 2013, it will be premiered at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City in the Sala Manuel M. Ponce, and the next day will be premiered (deuxiemed?) at St. Paul's Church in San Miguel de Allende, part of the Pro Musica winter concert series. The artists are the duoCherie Hughes, voice and Roberto Limón, guitar. I want to thank these gifted artists in advance for what I'm sure will be a great performance. UPDATE: If you don't know the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, this is what it looks like:
I'm also going to start preparing some of my own recordings of guitar repertoire for occasional posting on the blog. In the world of performers there is a tendency to keep people you meet on 'probation' until you have actually heard them play--only then can you judge what sort of musician they really are. So I will put up some of my own recorded performances so you can do the same.
But in the meantime, let's hear a bit of the voice and guitar repertoire. In this clip, the beginning of the song is cut off, but I like the performance. "The Herd Boy" from the cycle Songs from the Chinese by Benjamin Britten:
Originally for soprano and eight cellos, this arrangement of Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5 is by the composer, Villa-Lobos:
This lovely song is by the Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis, performed by Maria Farantouri and John Williams. It is from a 1974 album loooong since out of print. The sound quality of this clip is far from perfect, but I think the music is worth it:
Just some samples from the huge repertoire for voice and guitar.
There is a long-standing connection between composers and the countryside. Mozart was born and raised in Salzburg, Austria, a beautiful small city, yes, but lying just a few kilometers to the south is the northern part of the Alps so close that the northernmost, the Untersberg, is actually on a Salzburg city bus route. Here is the town:
And the Untersberg, the nearest alp, viewed from just outside Salzburg (I've been up it, there is a cable-car that lifts you most of the way):
Haydn spent most of his career employed by the Esterhazy family who built a magnificent estate, a rival to Versailles but with more bathrooms and several concert halls, also in the countryside.
Beethoven was a nature-lover, who spent a great deal of time in walks in the countryside around Vienna. His Symphony No. 6, known as the "Pastoral", is one of the fruits of this time in the countryside. Here is the second movement, titled "Szene am Bach" (Scene at the brook).
Though born in the port city of Hamburg, Brahms moved to Vienna as a young man. He spent several summers at Lake Thun in Switzerland, during the last of which he composed the songs op 106 and 107 and the third violin sonata. Here is Lake Thun:
And of course, in 1893, Mahler, in what seems to be a developing pattern for composers at this time,acquired a retreat at Steinbach, on the banks of Lake Attersee in Upper Austria, and established a pattern that persisted for the rest of his life; summers were dedicated to composition, at Steinbach or its successor retreats. Here is his little composition hut:
I must admit that I have fantasized about something similar. When you are trying to compose, what you need above all else is solitude. And quiet. Nothing but the sound of little waves lapping, perhaps the occasional bird...
I love these odd stories about music that appear in the popular media. Here is a story in the Huffington Post about how "Georgia Tech Scientists Use Star Data To Create Tune." They took observational data from a binary star, the "Kepler 4665989" of the post title, and used "Sonification Sandbox" software in the university's Sonification Lab (which seems to be in the department of psychology) to create a brief melody. A reggae band, Echo Movement, is going to use it to create a song.
Well...
I tried to embed the tune, but you will have to go to the story and follow this link to hear it:
I took a minute and wrote it down in conventional notation. Here it is:
Click to enlarge
Honestly, you couldn't get a duller tune if you tried: a four measure phrase in F major, one measure dominant harmony, one measure tonic harmony, one measure dominant harmony, one measure tonic harmony. So, in what sense have "Scientists have created a melody that's truly out of this world, turning numerical data from two stars in our galaxy into music for a reggae-rock band."? Bruce Walker, a professor in Georgia Tech's school of psychology, said in a statement. "It’s not often that we have a chance to help an actual star compose music." Only in a world where almost no-one knows anything about music would a statement like this make any sense.
Way out there in the galaxy somewhere Kepler 4665989 is alternating between dim and bright as its companion star crosses between it and the Earth. The data gathered from this is "cleaned up" somehow and given to the folks at the Sonification Lab where they feed it into their Sonification Sandbox software. Someone has programmed this software to take whatever you feed into it and turn it into trite tunes. The 'composer' here is whoever programmed the software. You can just tell that the Sonfication Lab doesn't have any contact with actual composers, can't you?
So here we are again: another bit of pseudo-science passed off as having something to do with music.
Please, all you evolutionary biologists, psychologists, and astronomers out there, either stop doing these extremely dumb experiments and even dumber 'compositions' or learn something about music.
I think it was Robert Graves, the English poet, scholar and historical novelist (he wrote I Claudius which was made into a very successful TV series) who described the activity of poets with a metaphor. A poet is like an oyster into whose shell a grain of sand has intruded. The oyster, in order to ease the irritation, slowly encloses it with layers of nacre and the result is a pearl. Yes, the implication is rather narcissistic if viewed unkindly. But there is no reason why many readers cannot enjoy the final result. Music composition used to be more widely social than this and there are several reasons for that. All a poet needs is a sheet of paper and a pen and a little time to contemplate. A composer needs a lot more: performers willing to learn to play the music, a concert impresario willing to schedule a performance, a suitable concert venue and above all, an audience. Much of this is still available, but the audience seems to be fading away. This is brought home by a statistic revealed in an interview in The Guardian with the composer George Benjamin. Here is the relevant excerpt:
When we meet he is in some despair over a statistic related to him by his publisher concerning the Performing Rights Society. "The PRS is responsible for collecting all the royalties for all types of music in Britain, and the royalties involved are immense, something like £600m a year. And, apparently, the whole of classical music within copyright – so from Strauss and Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Britten, through till today – is responsible for only one third of 1% of those sums."
He opens his eyes wide and waits for the statistic to sink in. "I'm not talking about difficult or challenging contemporary music, I'm talking about the last hundred-and-so years of music, including Bartók and Vaughan Williams and Messiaen and Copeland and Gershwin and so on. I know it's a dry, statistical fact, but it does say something. It says that, for a huge number of people, classical music is just closed: it's a very peripheral activity within our society, I fear."
One third of one percent... Including all the 'classical' music written in the last 100 years. I suppose that must be accurate, because all of classical music has been estimated to be about 3% of the whole music business. The whole interview is worth reading as it traces Benjamin's career from the early days when he was caught up in the heyday of the avant-garde, studying in Paris with Messiaen and exploring the world of microtones. But he ran into a wall and his early productivity fell drastically. As he says:
"At the end of my teens I felt rather lost. You see, you're free as a composer today, which means that a huge amount is possible – a colossal, terrifying amount. You write one note, and there's not only 12 other notes (or more if you write in microtones) for the next note, but you think of different registers and timbres. The choices multiply to the billions within a few notes and, obviously, that's impossible to work within."
As Taruskin points out, a large part of the avant-garde project was maximizing resources. In that sense it followed on certain aspects of 19th century trends. But maximizing resources to what end? I was in a seminar once on experimental music and a composer had presented a piece he wrote for percussion in which the rhythmic structure was derived from the irregular overtone structure of the percussion sounds with a mathematical transformation. Once I thought I understood how that worked I asked, "that is the syntax, but what is the semantic?" I meant, ok, I see how the grammar works, but what is the meaning?
I think audiences go to concerts and listen to music not so much for the delights of the structure, but for the thrill of the sounds and their expressive content. This was the iceberg on which the avant-garde foundered. The structure was everything, the expression nothing, or incidental. Let's hear some of George Benjamin's music. Here is a piece from 1980, when he was twenty years old, a setting of the poem "The Snow Man" by Wallace Stevens for soprano and chamber orchestra. I chose this same poem for a very modest song for voice and guitar.
Here is a more recent work from 1998-99.
What sort of listener can enjoy this music? One with a sensitivity to the sounds, familiar with the 'language' (music isn't a language, but it does have a kind of grammar to it), with the ability to focus on the long-term structure and development and do so in an interrupt-free environment. Given all this, it should be quite possible to listen to this music with real enjoyment. The problem is that there are very few listeners these days possessing these qualities! According to the statistic, one third of one percent in fact. Not of the population as a whole, but just of that part of the population that seeks out and enjoys music.
So if you are a composer, I think you need to be asking yourself, what do you want your music to do? Who do you want it to reach? And how in hell are you going to compete with Lady Gaga? Or Mozart? This is the result of a multi-media, iPoded world of an infinite variety of music.
Perhaps all a serious composer can do is, like the oyster, enclose a few grains of irritating sand with a few layers of beauteous nacre...
UPDATE: Just minutes after posting this, I ran into some information that says that the numbers aren't nearly so bad for classical music. Well, good! Andy Doe at Proper Dischord points out that:
Page 5 of the IFPI‘s 2010 Digital Music Report says the digital music market was worth $4.6bn, or 29% of total trade revenues. That means the global recorded music industry was worth $15.9bn, not $12bn. These are wholesale numbers. Total retail numbers are almost exactly 50% higher.
The article estimates classical music’s share of the market to be 0.3%, or $36m. This is even less accurate. You have to pay to see the IFPI’s 2010 genre figures, but Music & Copyright show similar numbers here. They put classical music’s share of the global market at 5.5%, or $1.4bn retail (2009 wholesale numbers here).
He is critiquing a different article than the one I quoted from above. But no matter. I like 5.5% much more than I like a third of one percent.
Isn't that an interesting question? It's obvious, right? You teach harmony and counterpoint and one day the student just starts writing original music. No, wait... Well, you do teach harmony and counterpoint, I suppose. But why? I mean that's all historic, obsolescent. No-one writes fugues any more and I read somewhere that harmony, tonal harmony at least, was all over. Isn't it all atonal now? Wasn't dissonance, uh, "emancipated" in the musical civil rights act back in whenever it was?
OK, so you can't actually teach anyone to compose. Silly idea. But then what are all these composition teachers getting paid for?
Let me be serious for a moment. The idea of teaching composition is a bit odd, which doesn't stop anyone from doing it. And of course you start with basic theory and teach harmony and counterpoint because that is how composers have learned to be composers for hundreds of years. But it seems odder now than before because in the 20th century there were so many fractures and breaks with the traditions in music. Many of the composers of the 20th century, when they didn't regard themselves as the summit of historical necessity, thought they were breaking entirely new ground. Schoenberg managed to think both, simultaneously! Many 20th century composers, like John Cage, seemed to come to what they came to by completely ignoring every tradition and rule of composition.
So how do you teach composition in the 21st century? I think that since most of the musical traditions seem to be still there, despite the best efforts of the avant-garde to erase them, we should still teach harmony and counterpoint. You really can't teach someone to write 4:33 of silence, so don't bother. I also don't think you should be teaching anyone a specific method or ideology of composition, which I think a lot of composition teachers did in the 20th century. The Darmstadt summer courses, which were an important center of composition just after the Second World War, did this with a vengeance. There was but one Truth in music: serial composition and Webern was the prophet! Heaven help you if you were not a zealous dodecaphonist!
Here are some wacky ideas I have had about teaching composition, embodied in the form of some exercises:
Write a parody of a minuet by Haydn or Mozart. You could copy one aspect, such as phrase structure or harmonic structure and write entirely new themes. Or you could use the same themes and create a new phrase or harmonic structure.
Write a song in style of John Lennon around the mid-60s (i.e. Help or Rubber Soul --pre-psychedelia)
Write a piece for solo wind instrument using ideas from either Gregorian Chant or gospel (or, both).
Write a piece in 13th century hocket style.
Recall a visual memory of a landscape or an event or a moment in time and write a piece that reflects or captures it in some way.
Write a piece in the style of your favorite dance genre: pavane, gavotte, waltz, polonaise, mazurka, polka, can-can, jig or dub-step.
Write a piece to appeal to a member of the opposite (or same) sex.
Write a piece in the style of Philip Glass around the mid-70s.
Write a theme and variations on it.
Write a piece that cannot be written in conventional notation and explain why.
Just a few exercises that ought to spark something. Some of these I have tried, but others I haven't.
Reading Norman Lebrecht's blog this morning--the place to go for the latest music news--I see an item about the fate of EMI. This gets me thinking about the intersection of music and business. I wrote one post about the economics of composition here. But there are other interesting questions. Why, for example, do so many musicians have so much trouble with the business side of things? Leonard Cohen is a well-known example. He has had a successful and multi-faceted career for many decades. He retired in 1994 to a Zen monastery in California where he spent the next five years. In 2005 the story broke that his management had allegedly misappropriated nearly all the money from his retirement account. Cohen says this is why he went back on the road for his 2008-2010 world tour. Many famous musicians have ended up broke.
Here is why I think that the business world and the music don't co-exist very well. It actually relates a bit to my last post on the interrupted Mahler adagio. The modern world, which is pretty much the world of business, is interrupt-driven. You have to respond to investors, clients, partners, suppliers, employees and so on and do so in a timely fashion. The world of music, which is a time-art, requires focus. In order to do musical work, you need time and a space where you will not be interrupted. The Finnish composer Jean Sibelius gives us an example. On the website associated with his home Ainola, now a museum, we read this comment on his working environment:
Daily life at Ainola revolved in all respects around the composing and other work of Jean Sibelius. Silence was an absolute necessity for this work, upon which Sibelius often focused at his writing desk. It was only at the finishing stages that he would take his manuscript to the grand piano, and so for much of the time Ainola remained a place of great silence.
Piano practice was a source of problems at Ainola. When Katarina received permission to practice for a couple of hours at home, Jean Sibelius made a special note of this in his diary. Often the girls would go to a neighbour’s home to play...
Musicians of all kinds seem to seek out a secluded environment where they can work free from interruption. In the 19th century the possibilities of interruption were a lot less than they are now. But even then Wagner complained that with his rented apartment being across the street from an iron-monger he didn't see how he could finish an opera. The multitude of electronic devices we have now makes the 19th century seem like a peaceful time. In order to shield themselves from the constant interruptions of the business of music musicians like Leonard Cohen rely on management. This, of course, leaves them open to being taken advantage of by their management.
But the alternative, closely monitoring your own career and being responsive in all the ways this requires, seems problematic. Not for everyone, perhaps, but for many. I suspect that there are certain kinds of work, ones that delve deeply into certain kinds of aesthetic problems, that absolutely require isolation. The great pianist Arthur Rubenstein withdrew from concert life for several months in 1932 when he felt the need to completely rebuild his technique. As for composers, as every important new piece is, in a sense, a rebuilding, a delving down to the foundations, it may also require real isolation.
Music that is transcendent in some way, that tries to evoke the sensations of eternity (and, ironically, does this by shaping and manipulating time) is crafted in silence and tranquility. The full reception of this music may also require a silent backdrop, as, for example, the Mahler adagio that was interrupted by the iPhone alarm.
So that's why I think many musicians have trouble with the business world: their most important work, the music itself, often requires that they separate themselves from the usual interactions of daily life in order to focus completely on the music. But business requires instant responsiveness and communication. The two worlds are really at odds with one another.
Here is whole of the 2nd Symphony of Sibelius. Imagine, if you will, the kind of concentration it took to assemble this composition:
I mentioned a few posts back that I have been struggling for months to complete a piece for solo guitar. It finally happened a couple of weeks ago. I was getting out of the shower and suddenly a phrase popped into my head. I sat down at the computer and a couple of hours later it was pretty much finished. Along with the opening phrase the idea of an interpolated chord came to mind. It is just two pages and is the last movement of what has turned out to be a five-movement suite for guitar. In many years of composing--sporadically--this is the first music for solo guitar that I have been really happy with. Most of my compositions have been for various chamber ensembles (two guitars, voice and guitar, flute and guitar, violin, viola and guitar) or guitar orchestra. Writing something that would be both satisfying musically and enjoyable to play has been a challenge. Here is a previous post on another movement of the suite, though at the time I thought I was writing a set of bagatelles!
So, I had an opening phrase and a chord that punctuated it. Oh, what chord? Well, I wanted something pungent so the "Jimi Hendrix" chord came to mind. This is a chord that Jimi uses in the song "Purple Haze". It appears around the 23 second mark:
This chord is usually described as a dominant seventh with a raised 9th, but of course it has no such function! It is simply a chord, in this case the tonic, with a major third, a minor seventh and an augmented ninth. Did I say simply? It is a great chord on guitar with a great clangy, spicy dissonance. The song "Purple Haze" has crossed over into the classical world already. Here is the Kronos Quartet performing it:
It would not be very interesting to just stick that chord into a piece, so when I wrote the piece, I let it help me create a harmonic structure. I wanted the chord to be functional. One way of looking at the chord is as a "split-third" chord, meaning it has both major and minor thirds. But you could also look at it as a minor chord with a diminished 4th. The diminished 4th was the favorite interval of Shostakovich. It sounds like something cheerful and major, but in context, you realize that it is not! It is actually something dark, something tragic, perhaps... Here is my piece:
Click to enlarge
No recording, sorry, I'm just learning how to play it myself. So there you have it: a new piece for classical guitar influenced in equal parts by Jimi Hendrix and Shostakovich. My kind of piece!
UPDATE: I just ran across this remarkable speech by Leonard Cohen in which we find the words:
"Poetry comes from a place that no one commands, that no one conquers. So I feel somewhat like a charlatan to accept an award for an activity which I do not command. In other words, if I knew where the good songs came from I would go there more often."
I put this here because the piece above came from that mysterious place, that as Leonard Cohen says, no one commands. I encourage you to listen to the whole speech; it is a moving speech by a remarkable man, and a remarkable songwriter and poet.
The quality of mercy music is not strain'd, It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
A professor I had in university quoted that to us just before saying that extensions to deadlines on papers were NOT going to be given. It is a quote that has always stuck with me. I'm adapting it today because it reflects, somewhat obliquely, on the question of quality in music. Perhaps I am just a monomaniac, but to me the question of quality underlies just about everything in music. It comes out in different fashions and contexts, but the origin is the same. There is a great anecdote about Schoenberg. He was teaching composition and, pointing to the eraser end of the pencil said, "this end is more important than the other end". Why is that? Because what makes good music (and good prose) is often what you eliminate, what you edit out, the fluff, fat and fatuousness that you remove on second thought. As a composer you must be your own gatekeeper, censor, quality-control inspector. This is why I found the recent story about the "re-discovery" and performance of a movement from a Beethoven quartet troubling. He had thrown away a movement from a quartet and replaced it with another. But these guys had dug up the one he threw away and insisted on putting it back in. You'll be getting a letter from Beethoven's lawyer in the morning, I wanted to say.
Another story? From 2008 to 2010 I wrote a big cycle of twelve songs for voice and guitar. I hope very much that they stand up to some of the other sets of songs for guitar. In most cases, as soon as I stumbled across a suitable poem (they are all settings of poems by great poets such as Victor Hugo, Rilke, Roethke, Li Po and Aristophanes) the music almost wrote itself. So for the next project, I decided to write something for solo guitar, something I had always found very difficult. In order to make it playable, the texture has to be very limited. I have always found it easier to write for multiple guitars or for guitar with other instruments. But I was determined, so... At first I thought, why not a sonata? So I tried parodying a Beethoven sonata. I use 'parody' in the old sense of the word--a composition based on another composition. But that didn't work out. I decided that I just didn't have the compositional skills to write that kind of piece. So I decided to work in a smaller form and write a set of six bagatelles. Lots of freedom there as 'bagatelle' isn't a defined form. I did manage to turn out a few, but kept getting bogged down and ended up sketching several pieces that I threw away. Then, last Sunday, as I was getting out of the shower, the whole first phrase of a piece popped into my head and I sat down and wrote the whole thing in a couple of hours. It was a pretty good finale. So I looked at the other pieces and realized I didn't have six bagatelles, what I had was a suite for guitar in five movements:
Bagatelle
Elegy
Air
Chant
Finale
My point is that sometimes music, like mercy, droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven.
You just have to be ready to catch it. And a very important corollary to this is that you have to be able to recognize when you are sketching out crappy music and be willing to throw it away.
Here is a particularly nice song for voice and guitar by Benjamin Britten from the Songs from the Chinese:
Now those are two words to send half my readers into a deep sleep and the other half into an anxiety attack! But music theory, looked at in the right way, is absolutely fascinating. Metaphorically speaking it is grammar, plot and pacing. It helps us figure out why something is working. As a composer, when I listen to a piece of music it usually either grabs me or doesn't. Sometimes it takes a while to grab me. Or after a while, I realize it no longer grabs me. But the reasons why are often mysterious. I don't say that theory can always figure it out; but sometimes, often, it can.
The thing is that we need a lot of different theories, but what we have, mostly, is a pretty well developed theory that deals with music from about 1600 to 1900. This we call the 'common practice' period and our theory is largely based on the music of Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and extends to roughly fit the music of Schubert, Chopin, Schumann, Brahms, Liszt, Wagner and Mahler. Before Bach, we try to look at things a bit historically, taking our cue from theoretical treatises of the time. But the workings of modal counterpoint and harmony are not as clear to us as we would like. Since 1900 what we have are a lot of manifestos and propaganda about various progressive or avant-garde composers' methods. They are biased by the needs of promotion so not terribly useful. In the case of, for example, serialism, the theory is really a workshop in how to construct a piece, but is of little use in trying to decide whether the piece is successful or not. I think that valuations are a significant goal of theory. We can certainly use theory to investigate why, say, a particular piece by Beethoven has the kind of effect it does. We should be able to do so with a piece by Webern, if we had a workable theory. But I don't think we do. Vector analysis is not really that helpful as it seems it is neutral between a very good piece and a very bad piece. Yes, I believe that modernism produced quite a number of very bad pieces and it would be interesting to talk about how and why.
I don't think that any music is beyond being examined critically and theoretically, though not all music is worth the effort. But, given a significant repertoire, whether it be of Indian ragas, Javanese gamelan, mbira from Zimbabwe, motown from Detroit or pop from Liverpool, we ought to be able to look at it and see how it works. Same should be true of Ives, Partch or Cage. Though I can see a lot of headaches in the attempt! Heck, I would be happy if someone would figure out how some of Shostakovich's or Stravinsky's music works. Yes, I know that there are various attempts, but a lot of them seem rather unconvincing. It took a long time to really come to understand the Beethoven late quartets, I'm sure it will take just as long to figure out what is happening in the Shostakovich symphonies.
For example, I don't think you can just explain away this piece, the first movement of Shostakovich's 9th Symphony, by calling it "extended tonality". I think you really need to figure out the structure and talk about things like how and why the little duet between piccolo and trombone is so funny. Shostakovich was a funny guy, not the least because he decided to make his 9th Symphony so comic, going against the long tradition, started by Beethoven, of making one's 9th Symphony particularly portentous.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that good music theory includes aesthetic judgment.
Alex Ross put up a post on a new recording of Charles Ives the other day. Hilary Hahn and Valentina Lisitsa have recorded four violin sonatas. I'm pretty fond of both artists as I posted here and here. But I'm of two minds about Charles Ives. Listen to the piece, the "In the Barn" movement from the Violin Sonata #2, excerpted by Alex Ross in the post.
Back in the late 60s and early 70s when I started listening to classical music, Charles Ives was one of the big recent discoveries and a number of recordings of his music were issued by major artists such as the recording of Three Places in New England with Michael Tilson Thomas conducting the Boston Symphony in 1970. Now there are an enormous number of recordings and even entire festivals devoted to his music. He stands at the beginning of the American 'experimental' music movement that continued with Henry Cowell, Harry Partch, Conlon Nancarrow and John Cage. There is a lot to be said for this approach as it acknowledges no barriers or rules. Let's have a listen to music by each of those. First Henry Cowell:
This is from a 1968 documentary about Harry Partch. He wrote quite a bit about his theories of tuning and scales. That reference to a "true major third" at the end of the excerpt alludes to the fact that in modern equal-tempered tuning (developed in the 18th century) all intervals are actually slightly out of tune. Equal-tempered thirds, for example, are all slightly sharp. The reason the equal-tempered tuning was developed was that without it, modulation to remote keys like A flat is impossible. Partch developed a 43-tone octave to solve the problem. Actually, I think what that does is create even greater problems! I had the great good fortune a number of years ago to visit the collection of Partch's instruments that were stored at the time in White Plains, NY. I got to try out a couple of them and I can attest that the giant bass marimba is a truly amazing instrument.
If you ever want to make a pianist really uncomfortable, just play them some Nancarrow. In these studies for player piano he worked by incising the notes manually. A player piano works by reading a roll of heavy paper in which slots have been cut. Each slot produces a note. By using a special cutting mechanism, a performance could be 'recorded' on a roll and played back. Here is an early ragtime performance:
But what Nancarrow did was to create compositions by cutting the slots manually into the roll. This meant that he was not restricted in any way by the limitations of an actual performer. So what a pianist hears in Nancarrow are things that are simply impossible!
Now for some John Cage:
I suspect that the book on this tradition has yet to be written and a lot of the basic research probably hasn't even been done yet. But we can make a few observations. First of all, the idea was to throw away all the past traditions and discover entirely new ways of making music. This goal was certainly achieved! Charles Ives, at least in some of his music, took the tunes, chords and rhythms he heard all around, like the fiddle tunes in "In the Barn" and did a kind of 'mash-up' of them. Cowell, inspired by some mystical ideas, created some great atmospheric music by using the piano in entirely new ways. Harry Partch went back to some very ancient Greek ideas about tuning and combined it with a Bohemian sensibility. Have a listen to his piece called Barstow for an example. Nancarrow took a unique approach that prefigured and paralleled some of the work others were starting to do with tape and computer music. He eliminated the performer in the process. John Cage summarized all that had gone before and took things to their logical conclusion.
This is all fascinating, of course, but if you set out to experiment and break all the rules, most of the time what you end up with is harmonic incoherence, rhythmic chaos and melodic confusion and that is what we mostly hear. After all this experimentation has been done, someone has to come along and find out what new musical principles have been discovered and try to make music with them. What principles of structure and harmony do we find underlying the music of Charles Ives? Or Harry Partch? Or Conlon Nancarrow? In the case of John Cage, he purports to have made sure, by means of chance procedures, that there aren't any.
Well, that's too bad... I suspect that a lot of experimental music re-invents the wheel or wants to un-invent the wheel, or is just incoherent. But somewhere in there are some genuinely valuable new approaches.
I had a post a while back about what I called "overdetermined" vs "underdetermined" scores. Here it is. There was a steady trend towards more and more precision from minimal scores that barely showed the rhythm a thousand years ago, up until the insanely overwritten scores of the 1950s and 1960s. Total serialism demanded an excessive complexity in the score. I say 'excessive' because that is what I think. As I was saying in the previous post, overdetermined scores over-control the performer. There was a reaction to this, that I also mention in the previous post, toward scores that allow the performer extreme latitude. Of course, that raises all sorts of problems of performance practice. This is the weakness of bare or graphic scores--you really need direct contact with the composer to know if you are on the right track.
But I think there is another issue lurking behind here and that is that an overdetermined score is an attempt to control the performer, to allow him little or no latitude for musicianship. A good example of this was Stravinsky. In a famous series of reviews of recordings of his music in a magazine back in, I think, the 60s, he was scathing in his dismissal of any departure, no matter how slight, from the exact metronome marking, dynamic or any other feature of the score. The words "narcissistic control-freak" come to mind. Other composers see themselves in a kind of creative partnership with the performer in the realization of the music. The composer is where the piece begins, but certainly not where it ends.
After all, no matter how much you try and control performers, they always have the last word. And if one day, at the end of a concert, a pianist offers to improvise on a theme from the audience (as many did in the 19th century), he might get a request to play the Rite of Spring in the style of Mozart. Nah, that couldn't happen...
First, have a look at this post and the comments. Composition and improvisation are, I think, fundamentally different things. By 'composition' I mean the process, sometimes very lengthy, that ultimately results in a fully realized piece of music. By 'improvisation' I mean the spontaneous performance of music that is sometimes undertaken within a fairly strict set of boundaries, such as when a jazz or blues musician takes a solo for a specific segment of a piece or when a completely free group improvisation is performed--or anything in between. I think these are different things requiring different skills, but with some overlap.
Let's take some examples. On a few occasions I have had a musical idea and sat down and written it out in one session. This has happened with fairly short pieces and the flow of ideas is largely without much cogitation. On other occasions I have wrestled with a piece for days or weeks before finding a final realization. Let me cite a couple more examples of the intersection of improvisation and composition. The first is J. S. Bach. In May 1747 Bach paid a visit to his son, C. P. E. Bach who was court composer to Frederick the Great. Here is an article on that occasion. Frederick the Great had recently purchased six pianos and he gave Bach a chromatic theme on which Bach improvised fugues on each of the pianos. But two months later, after returning home, Bach sent to the king a fully-worked out set of pieces, known as The Musical Offering which included a six-part fugue on the theme. The implication is that while Bach was capable of improvising a fugue on a given theme--something few could do today--in order to achieve the finest musical results, he had to return to his studio to work out the details. Another example is from Beethoven. He was well-known as an improviser on piano, but at the same time he is also known for struggling for months and years to hammer out his compositions, sketching and re-sketching themes and harmonizations many times over.
I think that the conclusion must be that while some greatly gifted and knowledgeable musicians can improvise to an extent that is astonishing, the spontaneous nature of it is inherently limiting. In spontaneous creation one falls back on certain familiar patterns and techniques that would be avoided if you had the time to do so. Sometimes when improvising, one may come across by accident a novel idea which might later be worked out in a composition, but much of the time, improvisation probably results in fairly conventional patterns and structures. In jazz, for example, learning to improvise probably involves learning what sort of patterns fit within what harmonies.
I think the fundamental principle that separates composition from improvisation is what we might call a musical "Occam's Razor" --don't multiply entities needlessly. In improvisation, the tendency is to spin off phrases with abandon, which must often result in ideas that clash with one another. In a spontaneous context, no great matter. But in a composition, this is exactly what one avoids as it dilutes the focus of the piece.
These are obviously just my musings on the subject and I would love to hear contrary opinions from those who have more experience in the world of improvisation.
Here is the crown of the Musical Offering: a six voice fugue that Bach composed after his visit:
Could Bach, or anyone, have improvised this? Even Bach didn't think so. I'm amazed that a six-voice fugue can even be played on a keyboard by a single player.
UPDATE: There are some interesting observations in the comments and one reader emailed to me the following: "I hope you (both) will pursue the question what characteristic (known retrospectively, of course) of a piece is especially recalcitrant to improvisation but more amenable to composition. Process theory, as far as I know, is also lacking in such an explanation (structural ontology)."
The phrase "structural ontology" itself makes me break out into a cold sweat because I almost understand what it might mean. But let me try and answer this because it is an interesting question. I would attack it by asking myself where the musical idea comes from? When you are composing, I have no idea. I have had ideas come to me at completely random times, though the shower seems to be a favorite place. Ideas just come. Then you have to sit down and work on them. That is a partly free-wheeling, partly thought-out process that is difficult to untangle. Now with improvisation, I think there is a lot of somatic involvement. Your fingers (in my case as a guitarist) just want to go to certain places. I suppose it is a kind of amalgam of somatic and auditory. In plain English, your fingers (or lips or whatever) have certain inclinations based on many hours of playing and this combines with what you are hearing either in what has just been played by you or others, or what you sense might be about to be played, and that comes together...
On reflection I see that I completely failed to answer the question which was, what characteristic(s) are recalcitrant to improvisation? I think the obvious one would be, as my anonymous commentor notes, "a complex structure that must fit at multiple scales requires composition: St Matthew's passion has structure at all time levels, from 3-second phrases to palindromic patterns at the "30-minute" level. " Yes, this kind of complexity really cannot be improvised. But why? I think the answer is that the only way to create a successful complex structure extended over a significant amount of time, is to have total control over every detail so that those details do not interfere with the unfolding of the structure but rather enable it. In other words, the design of a large piece of classical music depends on oppressing the improvisatory creativity of the musicians playing it. Heh! You don't want the flute taking a little solo during the rests in Beethoven's 5th Symphony.
