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In this installment: My personal favorite of the cycle, Sequenza VII for oboe, and it’s alternate for soprano saxophone. VII is special for a couple of reasons. First, it is one of the handful of “alternate” sequenzas in the collection. It was originally written for oboe, but do to the nature of oboe literature (and the nature of oboists–ZING!), it’s more frequently performed on soprano saxophone as Sequenza VIIb. Additionally, VII is one of only two sequenzas (along with X for trumpet) that has a second “part.” Berio asks for a drone to sound on any instrument (or voice) throughout the work on the pitch B.

I’ve seen the work performed a few times, and I’ve heard of the drone being produced any number of ways: a digital tuner, a pre-recorded loop of the soloist, a group of other players, and even asking the audience to hum the B. Humming the B sounds cool, but I think I’d get tired of it by the sixth or seventh minute of the piece.

YouTube offers us many complete recordings of some very impressive performances of VIIb, but only a few excerpts of VII. Saxophone friends have told me that they have heard that Berio himself grew to prefer the piece played on soprano saxophone. However, in doing research on the piece, I was not able to corroborate this. Personally, I prefer it on oboe. Here are a few Sequenza VII videos.

First, we bring you the incomparable Alex Klein, principal oboe of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. You can hear the audience humming in this one.

This next video features another excerpt from the beginning section of the work. This time, the drone is being passed around a group of oboists.

Berio’s use of the drone is one of the things that first draws the listener in at the beginning of the piece. The soloist begins with a sharp, short B, and the audience initially hears the drone as an ethereal reverberation. The next half-minute or so is controlled by the soloist playing the same B with different fingerings to get slightly different timbres and tunings, and the drone is thoughtfully provided as a reference point to compare each new sound as it is introduced. Throughout most of the piece (leading up to the climax, near the “golden section”), the range of the oboe is gradually expanding in both directions from that B. The ending of the piece features some instrumental calisthenics and some timbral heroics, thanks to some really cool multiphonics. I like the bright, piercing quality of the oboe multiphonics, but the equally harsh, fuller-sounding multiphonics on the soprano saxophone are nice, too.

In conclusion we bring you a very thoughtful and enthusiastic performance of Sequenza VIIb played by Taimur Sullivan. Also, this one is the whole work, so you get to luxuriate in Berio’s formal design.

Guido, let’s put Sequenza VII up on the Big Board! The fightin’ VIIth!

Here’s one I saw recently:

My teacher is trying to convince me that what my next piece really needs is some kind of extra-musical concept to tie it all together. A program, a story, a poem, an image, a character, a game, an object. I don’t buy such things. They’re fine for other people if they want to organize their thoughts, but I’ve never listened to Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring and thought to myself, “Hey, that sounds just like the rolling hills of West Virginia and parts of twelve other states.” Have you? I just got home from the premiere of my friend Matt Schoendorff’s wind ensemble piece The Standard Model, which is a set of character pieces inspired by the standard model of particle physics. It was an incredible piece, but never did I think to myself, “Wow, so that’s what the Higgs boson would sound like if it existed!” (+5 nerd points if you got my quantum physics joke). I think of music as a complete abstraction. There are exceptions, obvious among them are songs with words. But in general, I think the only thing music is “about” is music.

I have a piece being played by the incomparable h2 quartet on their program Thursday night at 6:00 in the MSU Music Auditorium. If I had a concept like Aaron’s or Matt’s program notes would still not be easy, but at least I’d have somewhere to start. Compounding my problem is the way I come up with titles. I write most of the piece, and then I think to myself, “You know, this kind of reminds me of …” and I come up with titles like Falling Up the Down Escalator and Inner/Outer Monologue (which for about a year, my mother thought was Inner/Outer Mongolia).

The first of those titles is the piece being played this week. I can’t say, “This piece is about some guy falling on an escalator that is moving down, but somehow he’s falling up it, against gravity.” I can’t say that because 1) It’s not true, and 2) It doesn’t really make much sense. Here’s the problem: if my music is as I posit, an abstraction, how can I write meaningfully about it in a program note? It’s not impossible, but it’s very very tricky. Considerations of audience are key. No one wants to read a theory paper in their concert program, not even a theorist. Also, you don’t want to spoil any surprises. My piece has a section (which for the sake of mystery, I will not name or describe) that I like to think of as a social experiment, but it wouldn’t really work if the audience knew it was coming.

Here’s what I came up with for the note. It’s short, but I think it’s solid:

Falling Up the Down Escalator was influenced by jazz, blues, and contemporary concert music. My hope is that the piece will reorient the listener’s concepts of what is musically “comfortable.” The piece presents musical ideas that are generally considered uncomfortable (groupings of 5 notes, for example) and uses them as though they are not, in some ways, inverting the senses of consonance and dissonance.

So, how do you feel about extra-musical concepts? What do you want to read in your program? Tell us in the comments!

I shall henceforth number my composition students in this blog to protect their anonymity. Student 4 came in last week with the beginnings of a piece. He had some very promising material. It had some of the typical fingerprints of a young composer: lots of material in short period of time, very busy. We talked about those issues, but the whole time we were doing that, I was trying to think of a way of saying, “You can write in any style you want. No, don’t write like that.”

The thing is, I don’t want him to write like me, I want him to write like him. However, I also want him to write something that’s a bit more harmonically adventurous. It was clear that this guy knew his theory, but there wasn’t anything in his tonal language that really grabbed me by the horns. I suppose this would have been ok if something else had grabbed me so.

One of my favorite teachers at Missouri once told us, “If you studied Beethoven really closely and learned to write music that sounded just like Beethoven, who would play your music instead of his, the original?” Or more colloquially, “Imagine a Rolling Stones cover band. They could practice all day and night and sound exactly like the Stones. They’d be a great bar band, but nobody would buy their CD when they could buy the same music by its originators.”

I told my student these two stories, the Parable of the Zealous Theorist and the Parable of the Bar Band. But as I told all of my students from the beginning, at the end of the day, I’m just the composition teacher. He’s the composer. He is ultimately responsible for the sounds in his music, and he is free to ignore any advice or suggestion that I give. We’ll see how the music looks next time.

[The much more experienced composer and pedagogue Kyle Gann presents his thoughts on similar issues in a recent post called "The Outside-One's-Ism Student" in his excellent blog, PostClassic]

I feel like composition is a thing I know how to do, but how do you teach someone to write music creatively? I have four students, all of whom I teach on the same day. A couple of weeks ago, we had our first lessons.

My first student is a very ambitious Ph.D. music education student who is also teaching grade school general music. He tells me in the first lesson that he wants to write an original musical for his first graders to sing and play based on Where the Wild Things Are. I have two nearly simultaneous thoughts: 1) That’s the coolest thing I’ve heard in a while, and it could be an amazing piece. 2) Holy crap. I don’t know anything about writing for 1st grade singers and Orff instruments. We talked about some of his plans, and I sent him away for the week to work.

Then, student two comes in. She would like to work on a sample-based electronic piece based on a character from Japanese manga. Again, two thoughts: 1) Could be another interesting piece. 2) She’d better know how to use whatever software she needs, because I won’t be able to help her with that at all. We talked about some of her ideas. I tried to sell her on interactive computer-based electronics; she didn’t want any of it. I tried to sell her on a visualization, since the manga is such a visual inspiration; I’m still waiting to see if she decides to tame that particular beast.

I went to lunch after these two lessons not knowing really what to think about my expertise in composition. Can I really help any of these composers even though I have next to no background in the media they are wanting to use? I suppose that remains to be seen. Updates to follow.

I’m confident that I can help them through some of the more general compositional and conceptual steps of their process, but I still worry that these two pieces may be missing that one thing that can take them to the next level because I didn’t know what to tell my students about filter sweeps and formant values. On the other hand, as a composition teacher (and not the composer of the works in question), is it really my job to tell these composers about such things? I’m still not sure. Here’s hoping these guys do a lot of listening.

It’s true. We here at the Guidonian Hand offices took some time off. Summer came and went. We went to Tahiti but have now returned as fresh as ever. Look forward to more insightful writings about music, art, school, technology, design, and whatever else strikes our collective fancy. We’ll get back to Wandering in the Wilderness and Better Knowing Sequenzas in short order.

Oh, and just because you’re you. We got you a little something. Here you go: