Large Repertories

This is one of those posts that does not fit comfortably into any particular category, so I should start with a definition. By a large repertory I mean a large collection of works by a single composer in a specific genre. The locus classicus might be the five hundred and fifty-five single movement sonatas for harpsichord by Domenico Scarlatti. Another prominent example is the one hundred and four symphonies by Joseph Haydn. A lesser-known collection would be the three hundred and seventy-one symphonies by the Finnish composer and conductor Leif Segerstam.

Of course we would want to include the three hundred some cantatas by J. S. Bach. And there are some smaller collections that are also well worth looking at such as the two hundred and thirty some pieces for harpsichord by François Couperin gathered into twenty-seven suites or Ordres. Another spectacular collection is that of the two hundred and fifty-two madrigals of Claudio Monteverdi, collected in nine books. Mind you, over the course of the composition, Monteverdi made radical changes in the very nature of the genre and from Book 7 on there is a wide variety of versions of the form using different kinds of  poetic texts, different vocal combinations and especially different instrumental combinations to the extent that some of the longer examples are like miniature operas--a long way from our basic conception of the madrigal.

What fascinates me about these large repertoires is the astonishing creativity involved. Imagine sitting down year after year and composing over and over again short sonatas for harpsichord, overwhelmingly in binary form and each time coming up with something new and fresh. Or doing the same with the symphonic form, though there you have instrumental variety as well as contrasting movements to work with.

What is required for these repertories to flourish is not only the creative genius of the composer, but also the availability of musicians to play the works and a venue and sponsorship to support performances. Of course Scarlatti could count on the patronage of Philip V, the King of Spain and Haydn that of the wealthy Esterhazy family. Bach was employed by the city fathers of Leipzig and Monteverdi by the Gonzagas and the Serene Republic of Venice. So what you really need is decades long support of some wealthy patrons, something we don't really have these days.

How could I possibly introduce these repertories in the context of a blog? Not very easily, I'm afraid. The topic is not only too big for a blog, it is also too big for a series of hefty books. Because of the extensive nature of these repertories, many of them have not even been examined in a thorough way in monographs. And when they have, as in the massive three-volume book on the Italian Madrigal by Alfred Einstein, they are often many decades old. So, basically, it can't be done! So what can I do? Well, I can certainly give little tastes of them, call it a "repertory sampler" which might encourage you to explore this music. I think it is really worth your time because here we tend to have pure creativity unaffected by commercial or ideological considerations--and wouldn't that be a relief!

So I'm going to pick up on a post I put up not long ago and delve into the Monteverdi madrigals to start with. I'm going to pick one madrigal from Book 3, one from Book 5 and one from Book 7 that I hope will enable me to illustrate the shift from Renaissance style to Baroque style in one composer in just a few years.

Artisanal Music

From Wikipedia:

An artisan (from French: artisan, Italian: artigiano) is a skilled craft worker who makes or creates material objects partly or entirely by hand. These objects may be functional or strictly decorative, for example furniture, decorative art, sculpture, clothing, food items, household items, and tools and mechanisms such as the handmade clockwork movement of a watchmaker. Artisans practice a craft and may through experience and aptitude reach the expressive levels of an artist. 

The adjective "artisanal" is often used in describing hand-processing in contrast to an industrial process, such as in the phrase artisanal mining. Thus, "artisanal" is sometimes used in marketing and advertising as a buzz word to describe or imply some relation with the crafting of handmade food products, such as bread, beverages, cheese or textiles. Many of these have traditionally been handmade, rural or pastoral goods but are also now commonly made on a larger scale with automated mechanization in factories and other industrial areas.

I've been away from the blog over the holidays, but I'm back and it feels like a new phase in culture so let's talk about it. I've made critical comments about a lot of the trends in popular music such as miming in concerts, industrial production, songwriting by committee and just generally a decline to repetitive mediocrity that we can see in rhythm, harmony, melody and lyrics.

In classical music the criticism clusters around accusations that it is elitist, obscure, outmoded and just generally irrelevant. And when artists like Yuja Wang try to make it more relevant by, frankly, dressing like a hooker, it becomes a caricature of itself.

So it feels like time to refresh and renovate both popular and classical musics. Before I start sounding like a caricature of Ted Gioia (who by the way did an interesting post recently on Anna Akhmatova) let me get to the specifics. The fine arts and the marketplace always have an awkward relationship. I genuinely believe that producing music for entirely commercial purposes is a mistake--at least I am quite certain that it holds no interest to me whatsoever. This is why my career as a concert guitarist was never entirely successful. Careerism, the single-minded focus on advancing one's career, never seemed to have anything to do with music as such.

Of course, musicians live in the world just like everyone else and they have to pay the bills. So one does need some financial security as an artist. In the past, patronage was common, but today, apart from the unreliable support of government, artists find they have to enter the marketplace or an educational institution. For many, it seems this results in a kind of endemic mediocrity.

What still attracts me to classical music over popular music is that so much of it is still artisanal. Aspiring musicians still have to, in nearly all cases, apprentice themselves to a maestro to learn the trade. Often these maestros are found in musical institutions though those are also inhabited by many careerists as well. Playing your instrument is a lifelong hands-on task as is being a scholar or historian. Composers may find themselves seduced by the myriad technologies of music production available today, but that feels to me very like the deal Mephistopheles offered Faust: infinite knowledge and magical powers at the cost of your soul.

A musical experience is for me is one where one hears a performer playing an instrument with no technological processing. This rules out nearly all current popular music, which is ok with me. The reason one wants to exclude technological processing is that it reduces (almost to nothing in some cases) the actual human agency of the artist. A music performance, in order to be aesthetically valuable, has to involve all the subtle shades and nuances that come directly from the artist. Popular music also used to be largely like this.

I feel that one of the strongest urges behind the growth of early music performance is precisely this: it puts the individual human artist at the center, playing instruments that are themselves handmade. The total opposite of this, of course, is the use of Artificial Intelligence to compose and perform music. For human listeners, let's have human performers and composers.

Speaking of Anna Akhmatova, years ago I set this poem of hers:

Music

There is a magic burning in it,

Cutting its facets diamond clear,

And it alone calms me in minutes

When others do not dare come near.

When my last friend cast down his eyes,

It was at my side at the grave,

It sang as thunder in spring skies

As if all flowers started raving.

Here is one of my favorite examples:

A Composer's Manifesto

I've been reading a large collection of theories of art which comprises a great number of artist's manifestoes. This has led me to wonder just what I might write that would constitute a manifesto: what it is that I am trying to do when I compose music. As I have no discernible public career as a composer--or a very, very tiny one--I believe I can speak with complete honesty. If anyone is in a similar boat, it might be of some use. So here goes.

I have to give a little background: I was born and lived my early life in the far north of Canada, an area sometimes described as "taiga." We lived in quite a number of very small towns and even in the wilderness itself. In the farthest north of these if you dug down ten or so feet at the end of the brief summer, late August, you would find the ground still frozen--permafrost. So while I was very aware of nature, it was not until we moved to Vancouver Island in my mid teens that I encountered something you might call "culture." The one exception to this was my mother, who was a country fiddler.

Living in the relatively well-populated west coast of Canada I encountered popular music first, then later classical music (in the form of old, scratchy LPs) and finally, Asian culture (in the local library) and Asian music (at the listening library of the university). I only mention things that had an impact or influence. So my initial model of a composer was derived from reading the biographies of people like Beethoven, Schoenberg and John Cage. Later I read a large number of biographies and listened to many hours of music by these and many other composers, but these were the ones I encountered first. Thinking back, I think the first composer I really loved was Claude Debussy.

While I was playing popular music I wrote a lot of songs, probably the main inspiration for these was Bob Dylan. Later, when I became a classical guitarist, my early attempts at composition were influenced by poetry as much as music. Later people like Ligeti and Steve Reich were important. Many years later, after I had retired as a performer, I again returned to poetry as an inspiration and my first serious attempt at composition was a series of songs. Here is one, setting a poem by John Donne:

And another, on a poem by Li Po:

As you can hear, the musical "language" is very different and in a relationship with the text.

Moving to instrumental music, the problem of style was very difficult for me. Here is something manifesto-like: what I want to do is create something with a real, individual character, because that is, for me, a crucial element for something to be an artwork. It doesn't have to be in the current popular style (whether that be serialism or ethnic-derived or ecologically correct), it doesn't have to be initially well liked, it doesn't have to express my inner suffering or whatever--it just has to have a real aesthetic character because that is what I hear when I listen to music I admire. Whether it is Bach, Berg or Steve Reich, what I hear is an artwork with a real, individual character. I would say a characteristic beauty, but as we all know, "beauty" is impossible to define, besides,  aesthetic beauty usually contains elements of ugliness as contrast. Dissonance is essential for us to hear consonance.

So where I am now, is in the position of taking tiny hints from things I admire (and trying to conceal their origin!), trying to allow some influences to inspire other ideas and finally, trying to hew out something that has real character. Not many successes amid quite a few failures, but this piece for violin and guitar is not altogether bad (the reference there is to a comment Beethoven made about one of his finest pieces: he said it was "not altogether lacking in fantasy..."):

So there you go.

Unspoken Water

One of our long-time commentators, who comments with the nom de plume "jives," was one of the featured composers in the California Festival that we mentioned a couple of times. His piece Unspoken Water was premiered by the Symphony of the Redwoods in November. Jeff just sent me the link to the recording which I would like to share with you:

https://soundcloud.com/user-525724510/unspoken-water-sor-1118

Good stuff! Let's have some comments. 

From Vancouver

I'm in Vancouver and my String Quartet No. 2, which should probably be nicknamed "Landscapes," will be premiered tonight in a concert in North Vancouver. Getting here was a bit of a mess, though. Flying to either Canada or Europe I always fly out of Mexico City because there are direct flights avoiding having to travel via the US. It is just a five hour flight to Vancouver so I anticipated an easy travel day. Alas! or as they say in some Italian madrigals "Ohimè!" Normally it is about a three and a half hour drive from where I live to Mexico City. My flight was at 9am so I arranged for my driver to pick me up at 3am which should have put us at the airport two and a half hours before the flight--plenty of time. This has always worked before, but this time we were very unlucky! Just minutes into the drive we ran into the first obstacle. Our lane was blocked by some transit officials to allow passage of an oversize semitrailer with a huge machine on it. No big deal, it just put us ten minutes behind schedule. But this was just a harbinger. We were taking the main north/south highway and about an hour into our journey we ran into a serious traffic jam. Surrounded by trucks and semis we ground to a halt and did no more than inch along for the next two hours. The end of the tale is that I missed my flight by about 20 minutes. This was the only time in my life I have ever missed a flight except for thirty years ago when I actually got the day wrong!

So I had to go to the Aeromexico office where the worst offenders are handled. The bad news was the next flight was at 1 am Saturday morning, getting into Vancouver about 6am. Ok, I was still going to make the dress rehearsal at the cost of a night's sleep. The worse news was that I had to buy a whole new ticket, not just for this leg, but for the return flight as well. The policy was that if you miss one leg of a return ticket, you lose the whole thing. Airlines are a lot less forgiving than they used to be.

Stuck with having to spend the whole day with nothing to do I got a hotel room and had a nap. The flight was fine and the weather in Vancouver was lovely and sunny when I landed. I got to my AirBnb and had another nap! Speaking of, I have now used AirBnb apartments in four different countries (Spain, Austria, Germany and Canada) and in every case the experience was excellent. Here is the living room and garden of the apartment I am currently staying at:

The apartment has everything you need and the host even stocked the kitchen with essentials. While hotels have many advantages, booking an apartment through Airbnb is definitely the solution for economical longer stays.

In the afternoon I attended the last rehearsal of the quartet for the concert tonight. The ensemble is the Pro Nova Ensemble and here is their website: http://www.pronova.ca. The members are Shin-Jung Nam (cello), Ju Dee Ang (violin), Barbara Irschick (viola), Hyunsil Lucia Roh (violin). In this photo they are, from left to right, Lucia, Barbara, Shin-Jung and Ju Dee.

We will be recording the last concert so I will post that later on. It was immensely enjoyable finally hearing the piece. I think I was able to make some good suggestions. I wrote this using my music software with its playback capabilities and while that is enormously useful, I am convinced that pencil, eraser and paper is the best way to work until the piece is pretty much in its final form. I wrote most of this music three years ago before Covid hit and caused concerts to be cancelled. I completely re-wrote the first movement this year and it is much better as a result. The quartet players seem to be having fun with the piece, especially the last movement, and I will talk more about it when I post the recording.

My McCartney Moment

The story goes that Paul McCartney fell out of bed one morning with the whole melody of "Yesterday" in his head. He was sure he had heard it somewhere and kept asking people if they knew the tune, but no-one did. Of course, the story might have been embroidered a bit: maybe he only had a piece of it and the rest came to him over a few days.

I'm writing a guitar piece right now, improvising and sketching in pencil every morning and one day I just had this little fragment of a melody pop into my head. It seems obviously Latin-American and I seemed to recall it from somewhere. But I looked around in some obvious places: Venezuelan waltzes, an anthology of Latin-American folk tunes, Barrios, but I didn't see it anywhere. So I put it to the readership: do you know this tune?

Current Compositions

Yesterday I sent off the score and parts to my String Quartet No. 2 to the ensemble in Vancouver. They will be giving the premiere in three concerts in the third week of May. Gives me an opportunity to visit Vancouver which I haven't done in a long time. Last week when I was booking my airbnb the host messaged me that the weather would be nice then. I thought that was an odd comment out of the blue. Then I checked the weather and saw that at that very moment it was snowing in Vancouver!

After quite a few struggles with the first movement, which I rewrote a couple of times, I am reasonably happy with the piece. Or less displeased than I was before? With new music, you kind of put it out there and see what happens. The piece might be nicknamed "Landscapes" as the three movements each are inspired by my experiences growing up on Vancouver Island. The first movement is "Mountain with Birdsong," the second "Moments in the Forest" and the third "The Surrounding Ocean." I should be able to post a recording of it in early June and I will look forward to your comments then!

So I decided to start a new piece that has been on my mind for a while. The piece will be called "Hecate" as that was the inspiration. Hecate was a Greek goddess, a minor one I suppose, though quite popular in some regions. This is a sketch of how she was often depicted:

She has three bodies and this statuary would typically be placed at a junction of three roads where she would face in three directions. She was the deity of crossroads, of the underworld, of the passage to the afterlife but also of light, night, the moon, keys and, oddly, dogs. She is a liminal being, the goddess of boundaries, thresholds and borders. She mediates between different realms and therefore suggests disorientation and ambiguity.

This is going to be a piece for solo guitar, which I haven't written for in quite some time. I don't find the guitar an easy instrument to write for, but that challenge is itself a kind of inspiration.

Years ago, when I was a student, I workshopped an early guitar piece called Tesserae for the English composer Stephen Dodgson. He hated the very idea of the classical allusion of the title and I think he pretty much disliked the piece as well! He probably wouldn't have liked "Hecate" either. But who knows, it hasn't been written yet. I'm still at the rudimentary pencil sketch phase... Incidentally, Gilbert Biberian, who just passed away, was also at that workshop and I think he rather liked Tesserae.

Creativity and Personal Expression

 A recent comment got me thinking because I realized that I didn't agree with the underlying assumption which was that creativity was closely tied to personal expression. This struck me because I am just starting a new composition and it is at times like these that I find myself confronting the basic problem which is, what am I trying to do? It seems odd to say, but I am not trying to express anything personal at all. In my earlier life, I was pretty convinced that this was the job: express yourself. Of course, this immediately leads to the very frustrating question of why would anyone want to hear it? This is the fundamental issue I have with jazz and most pop music which really is about expressing yourself.

I was talking with an old friend yesterday and I described in a few words what is hard about music composition: you have to start by just sitting in front of a blank sheet of paper, staring at it, until something occurs to you. This might take minutes, hours, days, weeks or in extreme cases, years. I've been staring at a particular page in my notebook for nearly a year now and only in the last couple of weeks have started to get somewhere. 

I started to think about a new piece for guitar in January, but got nowhere until this month. Slowly some ideas started to emerge and they led to other ideas and so on. Right now I am just considering some basic structural outlines, some pitch materials and relating this to the Greek myth of Hecate. I find that finding a way of relating these three things is a way of generating a musical fabric.

What does this have to do with my personal life and feelings? Nothing, really. This is an act of exploration in an aesthetic universe. It doesn't have anything to do with my personal life as the goal is to go somewhere I have never been.

This immediately brings up the question of why would anyone else want to listen to the resulting music? Well, if it is dull, boring, painful for no reason, or just weird, then, no, I can't think of a single reason. But the goal is actually to come up with something dynamic, stimulating and fresh, so that would be the reason to listen.

I described how Stravinsky composed the Rite of Spring, in a tiny village in Switzerland over the course of around eight months, spending every day in a tiny 8' X 8' room with nothing more than a chair and an upright piano (and the notebook and pencil, of course!). Speaking of notebooks, the one shown above is my favorite: a Moleskine A5 Music Notebook. I'm not a fan of Moleskine in general as their paper quality seems to have gone downhill, but for my purposes this is perfect. The left hand page is blank and the right hand page has blank music staves so you can jot down both general ideas and diagrams and specific musical ideas.  The pencil is also a favorite, a Graphgear 1000 in .5 HB.

Yes, you do have to have some creative spark, which really consists in being able to let your mind freewheel and open to whatever may drift by. But the big challenge is the determination to sit there until something does drift by and the understanding and craft of how to work this idea out and come up with a finished composition. That's really all there is to the "creative process" which is why it is so impossible to teach (though, mind you, nearly every music department has at least one staff member with that job description: professor of music composition. I'm just not sure what they do exactly. Chat about it, I guess. But the important thing is really to provide composers with some sort of regular paycheck!

Let's listen to the fruit of Stravinsky's stay in that little village in Switzerland. This is a recreation of the original costumes and choreography with Valery Gergiev conducting the Orchestra and Ballet of the Mariinsky Theatre:

Composition and Influence

The discussion about the Canadian Indigenous Advisory Council that we are having in the comments section to the Friday Miscellanea raises all sorts of interesting questions and issues. It got me thinking about my own musical identity. By the way, if you follow the link that Ethan provided:

https://cmccanada.org/indigenous-advisory-council/

I don't think it will make you any more comfortable with the work of the council:

“The history of Canadian classical composition is a colonial history. Since Confederation, composers have resourced the songs, stories, and cultural wealth of Indigenous Peoples as part of an expansive nationalist impulse to define an authentic Canadian music” (from the background section o the IAC Terms of Reference). From 1885-1950, the Potlach Ban made it illegal for Indigenous communities to perform songs and hold ceremony. Shortly after this, composers were encouraged to look for a “so called authentic Canadian sound”. Fostered by the government, people were pushed to do assimilation and theft of the material. There was misappropriation, but there was also annihilation of language and culture.

The Canadian Music Centre was founded in 1959. It was established in the context of violent state policies targeting Indigenous communities including the Potlatch ban, the 60s scoop, and residential schools. These policies were not part of some dark chapter that has ended and is in the past, as injustice and violence against Indigenous people are ongoing: missing and murdered Indigenous women, the (disproportionate) incarceration of Indigenous people, the defunding of Indigenous-led education curriculum, and many more well documented forms of systemic violence.

The CMC is committed to equity, diversity, inclusion and decolonization in its governing structure and activities. The Accountability for Change Council was established in 2020 to support these goals. For more information about the CMC’s work for change, please visit Accountability for Change.

This seems to me to signal a political struggle between the First Nations and the Government of Canada with the government trying to provide symbolic relief of indigenous concerns without actually decolonizing Canada. What would that actually involve? Given that the history of French and British colonization of the Canadian part of North America is not actually going to be undone in any real way, the only thing left is symbolic gestures, of which the Indigenous Advisory Council project is one.

But back to my musical identity. I am descended, not from "settlers" exactly, but from lower-class English people forcibly deported to Canada in the mid-18th century for poaching. Yes, not all the criminals went to Australia. My family were poor prairie farmers and slowly moved westward until my branch ended up on Vancouver Island, as far west as you can go. I was the first member of my family to attend university. There I encountered the full force of the history of Western civilization in terms of art, music, philosophy and literature. In addition to my courses in music history and theory I also took German, linguistics and English. But I read extensively as well: Dante, The Divine Comedy and Copleston, History of Philosophy were high points. I also listened to a prodigious amount of music as for the first time I had access to a real listening library. I may have listened to some indigenous music, but it was drowned in a sea of music from Western Europe going back a thousand years as well as music from Japan, Indonesia, India, Africa and other places.

Looking back, the music of my actual ancestors, the jigs and reels that my mother played on the fiddle, were among the least influential on my musical development. My musical identity was constructed out of things that influenced me, music that I liked, in other words. Ravi Shankar and Javanese gamelan music were at least if not more important than English music. This process has continued throughout my life. Discovering the music of Stravinsky and Steve Reich were big milestones as well. Every musician in a sense, chooses their ancestors and influences. If you fall in love with the music of an obscure Saxon organist (Bach) there is not much you can do about it. Similarly, if I had fallen in love with the music of the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest, there would not be much I could do about that either and its influence would inevitably appear in my compositions.

This is why this whole project, and especially the underlying assumptions, just seems completely wrong-headed to me. It is a kind of symbolic genuflection and hence fake.

Syntax vs Semantics

If you listen to a lot of different kinds of music you might notice that there are two fundamental elements. This is on an abstract level, not a concrete one. The two elements are syntax and semantics, both words coming from ancient Greek. So do the words melody, harmony and rhythm, by the way!

Syntax is the way things are put together. In language it is the way sentences are constructed and the subject of grammar. Semantics is the meaning of the words and sentences. In music this distinction is often referred to as form vs content, but I want to get away a bit from that historical approach.

I see composers as falling into roughly three groups: the syntax composers, the semantics composers and the ones who manage to balance them both. For example, a composer like Steve Reich, in his earlier works, was a purely syntactical composer. Drumming is about nothing more than rhythm, downbeat, hemiola and phasing which is just the incremental shifting of rhythmic patterns. There is literally NO semantic content. Early Philip Glass is similar, for example his Music in 12 Parts has no extra-musical content but is just about patterns and pitches. But we also have earlier examples. Bach's Art of Fugue is a purely syntactical piece as is his Well-Tempered Clavier and the two and three-part inventions.

The program music of the 19th century starting with Hector Berlioz' Symphonie fantastique was an attempt to focus on the content rather than the form, color rather than contour in visual art terms. French composers, starting in the 17th century, made rather a specialty of making pieces about their extra-musical content. Of course, once you integrate referentiality into a piece of music then that becomes part of the music. There are innumerable examples from the French clavecinistes in which they fill conventional forms like the rondeau with all sorts of referential content. The tombeau, for example, is nothing but an allemande with special reference to the death of someone.

Then there are composers who manage a real synthesis of form and content. Bach is a great example of this as well in his cantatas, passions, masses and so on. Haydn is another good example. In many of his symphonies and string quartets, which are primarily syntactical forms, i.e. "pure" music, he infuses referential content. Some examples: the "Farewell" Symphony, the "Rider" String Quartet and so on. In Beethoven there have been many efforts to uncover or elaborate on referentiality in the symphonies and piano sonatas, some of them encouraged by Beethoven himself. The association of the Symphony No. 3 with Napoleon and the nicknames attached to some piano sonatas like the "Tempest" or "Hammerklavier" are other examples. But in all of these works, the syntax is equally involved, it is not a question of merely dumping content into a conventional form. That is why I refer to these works as syntheses.

Mind you, there are lots of examples of pieces that have such an evocative atmosphere that they have acquired a nickname that is not related to anything the composer did. The "Moonlight" Sonata of Beethoven had no associations with moonlight in Beethoven's mind.

These categories survive in the music of the present day, Caroline Shaw, for example, uses a lot of traditional musical syntax in constructing new pieces with often ambiguous titles: Boris Kerner for cello and percussion, for example, uses a very traditional harmonic and melodic syntax combined with contrasting percussion. Become Ocean by John Luther Adams is the opposite in that the referential atmosphere predominates and it is difficult to discern any traditional syntax.

There is a kind of progression from the mind of the composer to the mind of the ultimate listener. The composer often thinks in terms of syntax because that has a lot to do with how the music is written. The listener however takes the opposite approach and asks themselves "what does this music mean to me?"

Interestingly, jazz also seems to have these two fundamental elements. There are lots of referential pieces that draw on popular song forms like Louis Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World" and many other examples, but there are more purely syntactical pieces like "So What" by Miles Davis or "Giant Steps" by John Coltrane. In popular music, however, the purely syntactical seems not to exist outside rare examples like Deep Purple's Concerto for Group and Orchestra.

Here is the Tombeau sur la mort de M. Comte de Logy by Sylvius Leopold Weiss played by lutenist Edin Karamazov.

The Composition of Simplicity

Richard Taruskin in his Oxford History of Western Music talks about the move toward compositional complexity in several phases, the last of which, in the last half of the 20th century, he calls the "New Complexity" though the phrase was actually coined by Australian music theorist Richard Toop (Oxford History, volume 5, p. 475). Of course the move from simplicity to complexity is one that has seen a number of manifestations. Take, for example, the movement from the simplicity of stile recitativo monody of around 1600 (replacing the complexities of late Renaissance counterpoint) to the complexities of the High Baroque as exemplified in the Art of Fugue by J. S. Bach.

There is a kind of predisposition in historians and theorists toward the valorization of complexity as a musical good. Indeed, the phases in music history when radical simplification occurs are often sold in terms of their innovation. Discussion of Giulio Caccini's expressive monody stresses the new importance of passionate expression. Alongside this we might cite the radical simplification of Philip Glass and Steve Reich. The radical innovation there was the return of a steady rhythmic pulse, something that had nearly vanished from musical composition in the post-WWII avant-garde.

But the truth is that what Caccini (and Monteverdi) were doing and what Glass and Reich were doing was a radical simplification, one of the consequences of which was a new sort of musical language. In other words, the simplification was a necessary prolegomena to the new style. First you simplify, clearing away the underbrush as it were, then you find places to innovate.

The New Simplicity, if I could coin an alternate phase, is much more than what is often called "minimalism"--mistakenly, I believe. Reich calls what he was doing early on, "process" music, which is more accurate. We could add to the list of composers who pursued various kinds of simplification the names Galina Ustvolskaya, Arvo Pärt, John Adams, Sofia Gubaidulina, Morton Feldman and a host of others. These seem to come from different places, traditions and schools, but they all focussed to some extent, in some pieces, on the idea of simplifying the musical texture.

Ever since Beethoven, the business of composition has often been to develop, to expand, to enrich and a variety of other verbs that more or less add up to "make more complicated." This process, by fits and starts, continued throughout the 19th and into the 20th century. We find Schoenberg taking several years just to orchestrate his mammoth Gurre-Lieder cantata. To illustrate the complexity of the pendulum swing between complexity and simplification, he took time off to compose his first, quite brief, atonal piano pieces.

The neo-classical phase in music history, between the World Wars, was another bid for simplicity and an ideal example is Prokofiev's Classical Symphony, an astonishing simplification after the enormous ones by Mahler:

But the next phase of complexification was an intense one: after WWII the total serialists and their successors reached new heights of complexity. A fine example is the score to this piece by Brian Ferneyhough for solo flute:

Click to enlarge

I've often thought that the perfect foil to this piece, also written in 1970, is Drumming by Steve Reich, which begins with isolated beats on a small drum. You can't get any more simple than that (though the meter is more complex than it seems).

Click to enlarge

Throughout the 70s and 80s and continuing to this day, a whole raft of composers are approaching the act of composition by asking themselves, "what can I take away?" "what can I remove?" This recalls a remark Schoenberg made to a pupil once, pointing to the eraser end of the pencil he said, "this end is more important than the other end."

What comes from experimentation, intuition and improvisation is often a welter of ideas and motifs. Composition these days, for me at least, is partly about finding the underlying simplicity there and organizing it into a musical structure. I sometimes think that Morton Feldman was doing something similar. His very long, but also simple, chamber music from his later years is just being discovered. The Salzburg Festival program (if it goes ahead) has a focus this year on some of Feldman's music. Here is his Triadic Memories from 1981.

Composer's Composers

As someone who became a composer late in life (though I have always done a bit of composing throughout my career), I am always discovering new things about this activity. One of them is noticing how some composers are particularly interesting to other composers. I don't necessarily mean influential, though this may be the case, instead I refer to certain qualities that some composers have that tend to attract the interest of other composers.

Here are some examples: Domenico Scarlatti, J. S. Bach and Joseph Haydn. What these three composers did that is of particular interest to other composers was to take up a particular style or genre and explore in great depth, all the possibilities it offered. This is a kind of pure creativity that is quite rare. Instead of the idea that creativity consists in exploring all the areas, materials and genres, this concept of creativity suggests that you define particular boundaries and work within them.

The 1960s were a time when the idea was popular that a composer might be best advised to throw everything including the kitchen sink into a piece. It was the era of "happenings" and "multi-media" and long, self-indulgent pieces that often are unlistenable today. The idea of focussing on one particular medium or style is to go in the opposite direction.

As an extreme example, Domenico Scarlatti wrote sonatas for the harpsichord in two repeating sections and kept doing it until he had written five hundred and fifty-five of them. To a composer this is an astonishing feat because not one of these pieces is boring! The pieces are fairly short, ranging between two and six minutes long, but while they all have a similar structure, every single one is different. This is an astonishing compositional feat.

The symphonies of Joseph Haydn are another example. There are one hundred and six and again, while they share a certain structural similarity he solves the problems of variety and unity differently in every one.

And, of course, Bach. I started out doing a post on each of the preludes and fugues from book one of the Well-Tempered Clavier on the supposition that looking at them as a whole would reveal just how remarkably different they all are, even though they all stay within the boundaries of the style and genre. The idea of taking up the same basic problem and doing it in every different major and minor key is the kind of thing that is fascinating to a composer.

Another remarkable thing is that, over time, all this music has become very popular with general audiences. I think this is simply because, in the long run, quality will out.

The only way to really realize just how remarkable these compositional projects are is to go through them, having a close look at each piece in turn. I did that with a lot of the Haydn symphonies a few years ago and now am doing it with Bach. But I don't think I will do it with the Scarlatti sonatas! Just too darn many of them...

Here is Scott Ross playing a hundred of the Scarlatti sonatas:

Intuition

 Yesterday I ended my post The Rôle of Tradition (and notice that here I snuck in a very old diacritical mark over the "o" as a bow to tradition) with Palais de Mari, a piano piece by Morton Feldman. Here I want to talk a little bit about that piece and the rôle of intuition. A while ago I put up a post titled Chance and Creation and I think that when I was talking about "chance," what I was really referring to might better be described as "intuition."

Let me quote from a paper on Palais de Mari by a music theorist, Frank Sani titled "Morton Feldman’s Palais de Mari: a pitch analysis." It begins:

Much to the disappointment of the analytical mind, a piece like Palais de Mari defies explanation. To be negative about it, therefore, would be tempting, especially after hours of investigation leading nowhere; however, it is more fruitful to take this as the triumph of a composer who allowed the irrational to penetrate a precisely notated score.

"Defies explanation" is quite an admission from a music theorist whose very bread and butter is nothing but explanation!

That Feldman took an almost improvisational approach to his compositions, akin to Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings, must be kept in mind at all times: it is an irrational approach, where pitch notation serves as mere editing, where sound-shapes are pictorial and serve no tonal precept or structure. If anything, the use of pitch in late pieces like Palais de Mari may have been influenced by the colour variations observed by Feldman in the weft-and-warp of the Anatolian rugs he collected.

Perhaps Feldman was inspired by the patterns in Anatolian carpets as Sani mentions. But the really interesting point here is that Feldman is following primarily his intuitions whether they are deep or fleeting. What Sani ends up doing, instead of uncovering a plan or structure for the composition, which seems not to exist, is offer some catalogues of what he calls "group classes" or clusters of pitches which recur:

So, not terribly illuminating. Going back to the piece, what we hear are a lot of subtle pitch and rhythmic variations (Sani doesn't deal with the rhythmic or metric aspects of the score) along with some interesting voice-leading. For example, movement by step, especially by semitone, is always a strong voice-leading gesture and we find a lot of them here: the F to E at the beginning, repeated, the E to D# immediately after, also repeated. Later on (mm 36 et. seq.) we find high grace note Gs followed by high grace note F#s, also repeated. The repetition underlines and emphasizes the voice-leading.

But I don't want to get into offering my own theoretical analysis of a piece which Sani correctly identifies as "refractory to analysis." Instead I want to commit the even greater sin of speculating about Feldman's thought processes! Hey, I was trained as a musicologist, not a theorist.

I suspect that this piece, along with most of Feldman's work, was composed primarily through intuition. That is, you sit down and either pick out notes or hear notes or imagine a skein of notes and rhythms and then try and put them down on paper. It is a kind of mental improvisation. Incidentally, precisely this method was the one pursued by the Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi who improvised on a piano or ondiola. Many of these were recorded and later transcribed by musicians who worked with him. This is music that comes from the intuition or subconscious or trance state or transcendent plane.

In my previous post it was this sort of thing that I, rather inaccurately, described as "chance" because that is sometimes how I think of it. Something just comes to you: a note, a rhythm, perhaps just a timbre, and then you sit down and try and work with it. People like Feldman and Scelsi want to just let whatever it is flow to wherever it wants to flow to. But that language seems to assume the existence of something metaphysical, the "it," which puzzles me.

Here is a piece by Scelsi, Natura Renovatur for 11 strings:

Instinct and Intellect

The activity of composing music is always a battle between instinct and intellect with each as a check on the other. I don't know about other composers, but one lurking concern with me is always whether I have not, inadvertently, managed to compose something that is very like another piece of music. If I have unconsciously plagiarized someone I hope that it is Prokofiev and not Prince, Salonen and not Scriabin. Paul McCartney went around for months, sure that "Yesterday" was a melody he had heard somewhere as his instinct had produced something so well-crafted it was hard to believe it was not already composed by someone.

It is one of the functions of the musical intellect to examine what you are composing for traces of another's work. But you have to start with instinct because that is what can explore the unknown. For many composers they access instinct through improvisation, but that usually doesn't work for me. In my case, ideas sometimes just wander through my mind and inspire me to follow them up, on an instrument, in a pencil sketch, or with music software.

The intellect also is of considerable assistance in working out the form and structure of the piece, though my sense is that I need to access a lot more instinct in that area as well. So, instinct and intellect, both essential to the compositional process.

One thing I have been enjoying lately is allowing my instincts free rein in the area of sketching. I got some colored pencils recently to add to the graphite ones I have been using and, almost without thinking about it, the first thing I did was to create a small abstract sketch, followed by several more. These are pure instinct and quite fun. Here, I will, risking great personal embarrassment, put up a couple.

Now, of course, there is virtually no technique or craft involved, I am just fooling around with pens and pencils, but that is the whole point. It is nearly 100% instinct. An idea, with a contrasting idea. But I rather like them and I like creating them. Now I know why Schoenberg spent a significant amount of time learning to paint. It develops different creative channels.

I have been a musician for over fifty years, so I have so many layers of listening and playing and so many years of studying music from every conceivable angle that it is pure pleasure to do something, notionally creative, that is completely unconnected to music. And that hopefully will feed back into my musical creativity.

Craft and Creation

I might have mentioned that I have taken up some new hobbies: fountain pens, sketching and journaling. That last one, "journaling" is a relatively new, though very popular, hobby. It used to be called, "keeping a journal" or "writing in a diary", though those are rather out of fashion. I did keep a journal decades ago when I was going through some emotional turmoil. That is not the case, now, I just wanted to do more non-digital things and writing in a journal with a fountain pen, as well as sketching, fulfills that need quite well. Writing haiku seems to have crept in as well.

Working with these new hobbies, which we might glorify by calling them new avenues of creative activity, has caused me to notice some interesting things. In all creative activities there is a balance or division between the craft of the activity and the creation in the activity. For example, I am a complete novice at sketching so nearly all the effort is devoted to simply learning the basics of the craft. Risking personal embarrassment, I will share a couple of still-life sketches:

As you can see, I am struggling to achieve a rudimentary realism. So here is a little chart of creative activities with my estimates of how much effort or time goes into simply working on the craft and how much into actually creating something:

Craft/Creation

Haiku: 10/90

Playing guitar: 70/30

Sketching: 90/10

Music composition: 30/70

Are these numbers surprising in any way? Not the sketching or the haiku, presumably. In playing guitar, after fifty years on the instrument, I find that I have to spend about half my time just trying to preserve and slightly improve my technique and a good part of the rest of the time, when I am playing pieces, is also devoted to technical issues. My creativity in interpreting music on the guitar was probably all worked out decades ago and now I am just trying to keep my hands in shape.

Music composition is an interesting division. I have been a musician over fifty years, as I said, and in that time I always did a little composition. But I have only composed in a serious way in the last ten or twelve years. So I still spend quite a bit of time on the craft, by which I mean basic organizational activities. In fact, it is pretty hard to tell where craft leaves off and creation begins in music composition. A big part of creativity these days consists in making discoveries in the area of what might be called "craft" or using craft in new or unusual ways. And, ironically, some of the most so-called "advanced" musical ideas, such as extended techniques, can often sound very dated these days because they were so overused in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. Of course "over-used" is one of those phrases that is applied so subjectively that it doesn't tell us too much. It is largely a matter of aesthetic taste.

Speaking of "taste", is the having and deploying of aesthetic taste more craft or creation? I guess it could be either. And I would love to hear your thoughts on the matter.

For a suitable envoi, here is a piece for solo guitar I wrote a long time ago when I was still puzzling over the craft of composition. I was also puzzling over how to do a suitable video! This is "Chant" from my Suite No. 1 for guitar. In it I was simultaneously assimilating the influence of Gregorian Chant and Chopin.

Musing on Pencils

 Speaking of pencils, I just got a couple of nifty Japanese mechanical pencils. When it comes to anything stationary related like pencils, pens or paper, it is usually the Japanese or the Italians who are the best. And then, of course, the Chinese are copying them for less!

When I got my new pencils, one in .7mm and one in .5mm I noticed that I had an old mechanical pencil that was always my favorite: a Staedtler Mars Micro .5mm, still going strong. I have had it so long I don't even remember buying it. But it was at least thirty-five or forty years ago. Apparently good mechanical pencils, like good fountain pens simply don't wear out. This one even has the original eraser:

Click to enlarge

If you click you should be able to see the brand name. When it comes to mechanical pencils it is either the Japanese or the Germans. This is a German brand. I went on Amazon and you can still buy this exact pencil in exactly the same color on Amazon for $9.

https://www.amazon.com/Mars-Micro-Mechanical-Pencil-Width/dp/B000GPI5XI/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=staedtler+mars+micro&qid=1601912481&sr=8-1

Here is my vintage Staedtler with my new acquisitions, Pentel GraphGear 1000 which are really nifty pencils, but cost between $12 and $20 depending on where you order from.

Click to enlarge

I will obviously be passing all these along to my heirs...

Musing on Composition

I have to say that my new approach to composition is working pretty well. What I have done is gone back to a much older system of basic conception, followed by pencil sketches, followed by tryouts on the keyboard and finally putting it into Finale. For a long time I just defaulted to Finale, but it was always a double-edged sword: one side benefit, the other side restrictions. Oftentimes I would just be wrestling with the program to get the idea into a form the notation would accept. Or struggling to get the playback to sound like I wanted it to. This is all distracting from the actual job of composing. But a pencil doesn't distract you at all!

In any case, the piano piece, tentatively titled Remembering What Is to Come, is coming along quite well. The only thing I am really puzzled about is the harmonic structure. But that is just my usual headache.

There is this short story by Jorge Luis Borges, as I recall, that says something about every writer creating his own predecessors and influences. I heard a Japanese piece for piano about forty years ago that has really stuck in my mind, though I can't recall the composer. It for sure was not Takemitsu. But in the absence of that composer I am going to say that my new piano piece is not influenced by Takemitsu, because I don't even recall what any of his piano music sounds like. I am listening to one piece right now, Piano Distance, and I can definitively state that it is not influencing me. Well, hardly at all. But there is a Japanese sense of flow that does have an influence on what I do.

Here is that piece by Takemitsu, which I say again, is not an influence.

Or, as the Vorlon ambassador once said in Babylon 5, "knowledge is a three-edged sword."

A Course in Composition

If ever I have to give a course in music composition--hey, stranger things have happened--then I think this is how I would organize it.

First we need some history; you need to know the context and background of the artform. Second, we need some theory. We should not be accused of not teaching the basics. Third, we need some aesthetics for inspiration and guide. Then you have to do a lot of work, figuring out just what sort of composer you are.

I. History

I would go right back to 12th century Notre Dame and the music of Léonin and Pérotin because often it is the older music that can be most appealing to young composers fearful of being influenced by the Latest Thing.

In a university context you should be able to count on your musicological colleagues to teach a lot of this, but absent that, we should have a look/listen to Guillaume de Machaut:

A little Renaissance sacred music:

And something secular:

Then some French Baroque:

J. S. Bach, of course:

Haydn:

The nearly-cancelled Beethoven:

Berlioz:

All that should take a while because I would want to talk about what these composers were doing and how they were doing it. Now I know that this kind of instruction fell by the wayside during the Crazy Years of modernism. Someone like Steve Reich, for example, hardly studied any of this. He was a drummer in his early years and then became a philosophy major at university. Then he studied African drumming and Javanese gamelan. His first years as a composer were spent with tape machines. He refers to the 19th century as being dominated by "brown varnish" music or words to that effect. Philip Glass was different, though. He had a solid education in music at Peabody, the University of Chicago, Juilliard, and studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. You don't get more establishment than that.

Part of my sense that the education of a composer should involve exposure to the traditions of Western European music comes from the experiences of a friend of mine. He did a BFA at a Canadian university during the years when the visual arts were in the throes of "concept art." Instead of doing things like learn how to draw, perspective, life drawing studies, all that stuff, they did projects like figure out how to wrap an egg so it could be dropped two stories without breaking. Oh, and etchings, I'm almost sure they did etchings. In later years he complained bitterly about not getting a decent education in the basics of art and would sardonically refer to his credential as a "bachelor of f**k all." So if I have the opportunity of teaching composition students at some point, they are going to come out of it actually knowing something about music!

Theory and Aesthetics to follow in future posts.

Structure and Non-Structure

 I'am now 37% of the way through Marcel Proust's massive shaggy dog of a novel, In Search of Lost Time and I took a break for a couple of days to read a much shorter novel, Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. At only 162 pages it would barely make a chapter for Proust. He, Proust, has been accused of writing a novel with no structure and that is certainly the feeling one gets. He seems to wander around with no plan except whatever digression comes to him. The Calvino on the other hand is all about structure. Wikipedia describes the novel as having a "rigorous mathematical structure" and provides a table to show how it works. Here is how the Wikipedia article describes the structure of the novel:

The matrix of eleven column themes and fifty-five subchapters (ten rows in chapters 1 and 9, five in all others) shows some interesting properties. Each column has five entries, rows only one, so there are fifty-five cities in all. The matrix of cities has a central element (Baucis). The pattern of cities is symmetric with respect to inversion about that center. Equivalently, it is symmetric against 180 degree rotations about Baucis. Inner chapters (2-8 inclusive) have diagonal cascades of five cities (e.g. Maurila through Euphemia in chapter 2). These five-city cascades are displaced by one theme column to the right as one proceeds to the next chapter. In order that the cascade sequence terminate (the book of cities is not infinite!) Calvino, in chapter 9, truncates the diagonal cascades in steps: Laudomia through Raissa is a cascade of four cities, followed by cascades of three, two, and one, necessitating ten cities in the final chapter. The same pattern is used in reverse in chapter 1 as the diagonal cascade of cities is born. This strict adherence to a mathematical pattern is characteristic of the Oulipo literary group to which Calvino belonged.

That sounds a lot like a discussion of form in Stockhausen! Have a look at this article for an example.

Proust reminds me more of a symphony by Allan Petterssohn: it just goes on and on and on, exploring several themes from every possible angle, but in a kind of formless way.

Here is a clip of the piece Plus-Minus by Stockhausen:

And here is the Symphony No. 7 by Allan Pettersson:

The Compositional Road

I have only been a serious composer for twelve or so years now, though I have composed music for the last fifty years. Excluding the forty or so songs I wrote before I converted to classical music, I have been composing, in a not serious manner, since the mid-70s. It wasn't until I moved to Mexico and around 2008 finally sat down and wrote settings for some poems by Robert Graves, something I wanted to do for years, that I decided that what I wanted to do was compose music in a serious way. I think that no-one at university ever took me aside and said "you should study composition" because I was good enough at guitar to be able to plausibly contemplate a career as a soloist. That ultimately proved to be only half-true. I achieved quite a lot of success in Canada, but despite being the first Canadian guitarist to do an international debut at Wigmore Hall, did not quite manage to build a real career beyond that.

So I got around to composition quite late in life! At first I composed purely through intuition as is evident in my song cycle Songs from the Poets. Some of those songs are not bad, but while I was doing something, I didn't actually know what I was doing. I had read Schoenberg saying that he had the whole plan of the piece in his mind before he started to write it down and that made no sense to me. I just wrote when I had an idea and an urge and there really wasn't much of a plan.

I kept on like this for a several years, but with an increasing frustration as I realized I didn't know what I was doing. Slowly I started building a personal musical "language" often based on ideas from Russian composers, don't ask me why, I just liked what they were doing. I started doing more and more experimenting. The piece that was really a breakthrough for me was "Dark Dream" for violin and guitar which took a couple of years to finally come together. I re-wrote that, from scratch, about five times!

My Quartet 2 continued this process, but I began to be able to plan out the piece as a whole, though the first movement, again, took extensive re-writing. My Quartet 3, on the other hand, really came together and I had a sense of the overall form from the beginning.

I am just starting to write a piano piece for the local chamber music society and I am doing nothing but pencil sketches until the whole thing is clear, then I just have to write it down. This is sounding more and more like what composers do! The piece will be titled "Remembering What Is to Come" which is a line from a poem I wrote a long time ago. It will be about six minutes long and will use the Locrian mode. It will also have a lot of harmony! I have pages of melodic ideas and harmonic ideas already.

Here is "Dark Dream" that was a big step for me: