virtual music

I decided to keep my trusty M-Audio portable 88-key MIDI controller in its box back in the office while I’m out here in the Bay Area this week, so I’ve been doing some work on two new (and brief) synthesizer improvisations in Reason 4.0.1. I’ve finally figured out how to add measures to sequencer data I’ve inputted previously using the keyboard, so that I could make some minor tweaks to the improvisations. I’m thinking that these will not be notated conventionally nor intended for acoustic instruments; for a change, I’m going to leave these as essentially electronic pieces. I suppose I could post the Reason or MIDI files, and might do that.

Anyway, the first piece found its way into my last work  zichron, but started life as a synthesizer improvisation, and that’s how it will end up. The second piece I improvised last week on my Ensoniq synth back home in Wyncote and am tweaking now in Palo Alto so that hopefully it will be ready for JC Combs’ great ImprovFriday event on twitter/facebook/blip.fm later this week.

another year, another birthday

I’m not a big fan of birthdays. They remind me that I’m getting older, not necessarily wiser, and I end up lamenting all the things I still haven’t accomplished. But whether or not I care to admit it, every year at this time I gain another year in my chronological age. Yes, our new Wii indicated that my fitness age is really 39, but I’m not sure it’s good policy to listen to a video game.

So I’m spending my 48th birthday on the left coast taking care of work and spending evenings working on a new piece for saxophone quartet that Brian Kauth requested. Now that I’m older and presumably a tad wiser (or at least more honest), I am willing to admit to myself that I don’t really like to write for woodwinds. Even brass instruments, as much as I like the bass trombone, give me pause. It was easier to write for winds back when I wasn’t writing music that was pulsatile, at times continuous, since I have to reconcile my ”mature“ style (now that I’m nearing 50, I probably qualify as mature) with the fact that wind players have to breathe. I’ve made this mistake at least twice—my brass piece for arielle victoria and alto flute work for roger copland will probably never be performed by human beings because few brass and flute players do circular breathing. I have yet to see any brass or flute player who didn’t look at those two works and instantly declare them impossible to play without suffocating, all while silently thinking to themselves that I’m either an idiot or an asshole for writing such unidiomatic music for their respective instruments.  

That’s not to say that both works aren’t cool pieces. And I really do think they’re performable. Just not by the average brass or wind player with too little time to learn new music. But even if they just aren’t performed or simply can’t be performed by 99% of wind/brass musicians, both have been realized electronically, and sound pretty acceptable to my ears. I figure, if Nancarrow could get past the rhythmic limitations of human beings by composing rhythmically hypercomplex works for player pianos, why isn’t composing works for brass/wind instruments that transcend or exceed human limitations? Still, it would be nice for them to be performed by human beings. I’m just not holding my breath. I’ve thought of arranging for roger copland for two alto flutes, but I’m not sure that would have the proper end result. I could easily arrange brass piece for other instruments, such as strings (the third section has already been recast for string quartet as the piece mf), but that would make it even more unlikely that the work would ever be performed as originally written, although at least it would be more likely that the entire work would finally be performed in some fashion.

Which brings me back to my saxophone quartet piece, still in progress and still untitled. It’s going well, considering that I’ve been somewhat lacking ideas lately and I really don’t feel as comfortable writing for winds as I do pretty much anything else, even voice. So I’m looking at it as a matter of discipline, taking into account the possibilities as well as the limitations of the instruments. I like saxophones, but the last time I wrote for one was back in the late 70’s, and my music then was nothing like what I compose nowadays. It’s not going to be a short work, and perhaps not a really long work (”really long“ for me is two hours or more). I’m taking some of it from some recent improvisations I did using Reason 4.0, and that’s part of the problem, since I’m trying to adapt what I did on a keyboard to something that is idiomatic and feasible for a saxophone. It seems to be working so far, though, and what I recently showed Brian Kauth was considered performable, so I haven’t written anything impossible as of yet.

Now I also have to think of a title. I’d love to do something that references the current tragedy in Gaza, but I try to avoid writing political messages into my music since it might detract from the music, and most political compositions I can think of have great social/political messages but forgettable music. The only exceptions I can think of are several works by Rzewski (I still love Coming Together, which is all about Attica) one or two by Nono and Steve Reich’s Come Out. Then again, these are pretty good works of music, so maybe I need to get over my aversion to political messages in my compositions. I recently read a great article in Ha’aretz by Gideon Levy entitled “And there lie the bodies,” so maybe there’s a title there…

up the academy

It’s been awhile since I’ve had a good brawl on sequenza 21.But there comes a time when you have to defend your principles, and this was one such occasion. The question was put out there: “Does Going to Julliard, Yale or Harvard Make You a Better Composer?” Rather than posing the question of whether or not formal composition education is really helpful, it was a given that it is; rather, the question referred to whether one is a better composer for having gone to an impressive school instead of a lesser one.

My personal feeling is that it’s the wrong question being posed here. The better question is “Does it matter at all if you get formal composition training in a conservatory or academic music department?” I would definitely answer “No.”

To make a long story short, the brawl really came into effect when someone opined that composers with nonacademic backgrounds, like Nancarrow and Zappa, tend to lack self-criticism, and really would have benefitted from “some quality editing” by their peers in a music conservatory. Sorry, but those of us who are more or less self-trained in composition really don’t like the idea that we would have been “better” composers had we only gotten a graduate composition degree. 

I can think of very little innovative music that came out of an academic music department. Okay, make that none. Zero. Bupkes. I like a lot of Ralph Shapey’s music, but despite his academic wannabe-ness during his career at the U of Chicago, Shapey didn’t have so much as a high school diploma, and his music was anything but academic. Feldman taught at SUNY-Buffalo, but was largely self-taught in terms of composition and was shunned by academia during his lifetime. Conlon Nancarrow, Harry Partch, and even Charles Ives were largely self-taught. Their music could never have been generated in an academic environment. Even Glass and Reich found their major influences outside of the academy (Indian music and jazz/African music, respectively). La Monte Young was certainly university-trained and wrote 12-tone music, but gravitated towards jazz and finally made his teacher, Seymour Shifrin’s head explode when he wrote his novel Trio for Strings in 1958. Most folks in Southern California academic music circles thought Young had lost his mind.

I get it; studying in a formal setting provides great networking opportunities and the ability to work with fellow musicians. All of that is invaluable. But it’s a Faustian bargain, since one also potentially loses one’s individuality and creative spark. There is a trend towards maintaining a status quo. And that goes against real innovation.

I really dislike the idea that those of us without significant formal training in composition are less skilled or self-critical than those who go to Yale or Juilliard or Curtis. And I also don’t understand the notion that if someone goes to a less-well-known music school, he or she is not as well trained as a composer, or has appropriate performance opportunities. As Paul Bailey pointed out on Twitter, it isn’t the school that does the education—people do the education. But really, both high-end and low-end schools provide the same outcome: composers who play it safe and who cannot innovate unless and until they find inspiration outside the academy.

Finale turns 20

Above: Finale 1.0 running under an emulated System 7.5 in OS 10.5.4.

I’ve been a longtime Finale user since version 3.2, and while there have been speed bumps along the way, it is still my notation program of choice. It is now 20 years old, and it’s interesting to see how much it’s evolved over the many years. I’ve been a beta tester for the past few years and have been running Finale 2009. Quite a difference from the 1.0 days:

Finale is a lot more powerful. And complicated. It took me a year before I felt truly at home with 3.2 and later versions. While Finale can handle pretty much any notation issue I throw at it (although it still can’t easily handle some things, like big time signatures that replace those on individual staves, or truly independent tempi and time signatures), playback still is more a matter of karma than anything else. I say this after spending several hours last night in my hotel room tweaking an old 2-hour piano work to sound presentable, and I’m still only halfway through it since some things don’t playback reliably. Hoping to have these things resolved before flying back to PHL.

But faults aside, Finale has come a long way, and without it, I’d still be using paper. While handwriting can handle any notation challenge, I’d like to think we’re in the digital era. And unlike the old days, there are far fewer dialog boxes to navigate when using Finale. I’d hate to have to do all of this to enter a simple dynamic or other expression:

Very strange to be running System 7.5 on a MacBook Pro. It’s deja vu all over again.

questions about composing from james combs

The composer James Combs shot me an e-mail yesterday asking some interesting questions, such as when did I start composing, how do I find the time (I don’t—it finds me), etc. and he was kind enough to post it on his blog. James is based in Seattle, and has also done a nice interview with my friend Steve Layton. Anyway, James asks some very good and difficult questions, and I’m not sure I had the best answers for them. One question he didn’t ask, and I’m glad he didn’t, is why did I start composing in the first place? I definitely don’t have any good answer for that one, and suspect most of us don’t have any clue why we developed this compulsion.

James gets it. His music, which one can find on his MySpace page is really nice stuff, and one of the valuable attributes of the Web is its ability to enable fellow travelers to find one another’s work. There is no way that James or anyone else in the new music community would likely have found my music without the Internet, and vice-versa. Makes me wonder if the music of Ives or Scelsi or Nancarrow might have received earlier and more widespread listeners had the Internet existed in their eras.