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Wandering in the Wilderness Vol. 3: Totalism
I suppose I should begin this blog entry by apologizing for my absence. It has been a while since my last post on the Hand, partially because I was caught up in the academic doldrums of the summer, and partially because I was launching my new video blog, The Brazen Drum. While the video blog is my shiny new toy, I plan to continue blogging here as well because: a) I enjoy writing, and b) I see these two mediums as serving different (yet complimentary and possibly overlapping) purposes.
Well, now that that’s out of the way, let’s go wandering in the wilderness again and explore another topic in new music: Totalism. While sometimes used in political terms as a synonym for totalitarianism, totalism in music refers to a specific branch of post-minimalist music which developed in the 1990s. Indeed, while I was listening to Pearl Jam (Vs. is by far their best album, don’t try to argue with me) and scouring the local Goodwill for the perfect flannel shirt, a group of young composers in New York were developing their own brand of post-minimalist music.
The “total” in totalism (as noted by Kyle Gann) does not refer to the music itself, but to the intended audience. The driving force behind totalism is pairing an accessible surface (usually through familiar harmonies or rhythmic activity), which the casual listener is able to grasp, with a deeper structural complexity, which reveals itself to the more sophisticated listener. If I may offer a metaphor, consider the ocean. The surface of the ocean, vast and beautiful, is accessible to any viewer. Occasionally, marine life near the surface give glimpses of what is beneath. To the well-equipped, however, there is a depth and complexity which we are only beginning to explore with modern submarines and diving apparatus.
While it’s not an essential trait of the genre, totalist composers often draw on rock and pop music influences. While the surface harmony is often accessible to the casual listener, these pieces are generally more harmonically adventurous than traditional minimalist music.
Now, a few representative examples:
“Sun Dance” from “Custer and Sitting Bull” by Kyle Gann
This excerpt is from Kyle Gann’s musical drama, “Custer and Sitting Bull.” Gann is, among other things, a microtonal composer. In lay terms, this means he uses intervals small than a half step (the smallest on tonal music). This accounts for the “out-of-tune,” disorienting surface harmonies.
Please pardon the self-promotion, but this example, taken from my last recital at MSU, features a piece by totalist composer Joseph Waters. This piece is based on rhythms taken from Cuban Santeria rituals. This piece exhibits and exciting, accessible surface, but is structurally complex in it’s use and development of rhythmic motives. There are often several layers of the same rhythm, played at different tempi.
I wanted to include this piece because Maya Beiser is a bad-ass cellist, and because Michael Gordon is a major player in the totalism scene. Note how the video in the background can represent a metaphor for totalism: a very active surface, but with a complexity that eludes the viewer.
Finally, this beautiful piece by John Luther Adams. The active surface of this piece is provided by the piano and percussion, while the strings and winds play complex, slowly developing harmonies. Many people believe that Adams’ sparse, sprawling textures evoke the barren plains of Alaska where he currently lives and works.
This concludes this foray into the wilderness of totalism. I leave you with a few questions. Which of these pieces did you enjoy? Which did you dislike? Why?
For further reading, checkout this excellent article by Kyle Gann.
Until next time, keep wandering…
25 Magnificent Modern Day Movie Illustrations (Repost)
I stole this link from a friend. It highlights modern artwork interpretations of movie posters and novelizations of some famous movies. Check it out:
http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/25-magnificent-modern-day
Ghost Busters and The Dark Knight posters, reimagined
Better Know a Sequenza (part 3)
In an effort to share the music of Luciano Berio with the world, we here at the Guidonian Hand bring you part two of our fourteen-part series, Better Know a Sequenza.
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!
Twistori
Ok, I know I just posted a piece of Twitter-based web art last week. Since I discovered that, though, I’ve come across another one that I like even more. It’s inspired by We Feel Fine, which we showed you a few months ago. Twistori compiles new tweets with the words “I love,” “I hate,” “I think,” “I feel,” “I believe,” and “I wish.” You can select any of those six, and tweets will roll by. The presentation is simple and elegant. My favorite that I’ve seen so far is “I wish I were a llama in a great big llama world!!!” Check out Twistori!
Twyric
Yes, that’s a made up word, but I didn’t make it up. The Christian Mähler at Twyric.com did. Twyric is one of many web art projects that are taking advantage of the rapid pace of the creation of new, personal content on blogs and websites like Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, and others. Mähler’s program constantly combs through new Twitter posts in search of poems (by looking at hashtags). Then, it looks through the words of the poem, and tries to find tagged images on Flickr that it thinks pair appropriately with the poem. The results are mixed, but I kind of like that the poems and pictures don’t always make a clean connection or that either the poem or the picture (or both) might not be very good. Check it out for yourself: http://twyric.com/. It can also be your screen saver. You can even customize it to look for specific kinds of Twitter poems (like haiku) or Flickr images.
Here’s one I saw recently:
Program notes for tonight’s performance…
I find one of the most difficult things a composer can be asked to do—right up there with starting a new piece and coming up with a title—is to write program notes for his or her music.
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!
You can write in any style you want. No, don’t write like that.
Not that long ago, composition teachers were primarily interested in developing students who would write music that sounded like theirs. If you went to study with a Serialist, you were expected to write serial music. With very rare exceptions, this is no longer the case. You can study with a minimalist composer and write aleatoric music if you want. In general, you can write in any “style” that you want.
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]
Catharsis
When I visited the St. Louis Art Museum as a kid, this was always one of my favorite pieces. Now, thanks to their eMuseum, I can share it with everybody. I liked to think of Paganini sawing a way so hard and fast that his violin exploded and was somehow captured in a kind of three-dimensional photograph.
Paganini's Soul
| Paganini’s Soul 1979 |
| Arman American (born France), born 1928 |
| charred violin in plastic |
News, Views, and a bit of Therapy for the Muse
Greetings Guidonians of Bloglandia! It has, indeed, been a good while since I posted anything here. The present is as good a time as any to rectify the situation. Much has happened between my cherry-popping freshman outing as a blogger and now. The biggest event, though, is that I am now a doctor of music composition. It’s a goal I have wanted to achieve ever since I was fifteen. I always thought how cool it would be to be able to put the “Dr.” title in front of my name. Granted, it is kinda cool. But it doesn’t really occupy a large part of my day-to-day thought processes (at least not after the first week or so of graduating), nor does it satisfy and fill any given void. So far, the biggest difference since graduating is that I miss being a grad student. I got good at that. REALLY good. Ah well, what is life if not constant change?
I’ll tell you what it is: an opportunity for shameless plugs! One great thing about being a doctor of composition is that the dissertation document is – *drum roll* – a composition! (Convenient, eh?) My document ended up being a three-movement set of character pieces for wind band based on the standard model in particle physics. Appropriately enough, I named it The Standard Model. If you are anywhere in the Lansing area on Tuesday, Sept. 29 at 7:30pm, please come by the Cobb Great Hall in the Wharton Center to hear the MSU Wind Symphony premiere it under the direction of Mr. Jamal Duncan. Jamal is a life-long friend of mine and one of the best musicians and conductors I know. It’s gonna be an awesome premiere! (shamless plug #1)
Anyway, reading the previous post (Dave MacDonald’s post regarding the teaching of composition) got me thinking. I had to address this very issue in a chapter I wrote for Composers on Composing for Band, Vol. 4. (shameless plug #2) Since I already had to give this a lot of consideration, I thought I’d take the opportunity to excerpt and paraphrase some of my own thoughts:
Admittedly, my experience in teaching composition is limited. While I still (and probably always will) consider myself a composition student, I have noticed a few stages that developing composers do go through. I went through these stages, and I am sure many fellow composers will recognize them as well. A good composition teacher will also recognize these different levels of development and approach students at these different stages appropriately. Young composers just starting out usually have a lot of enthusiasm, but not enough experience to optimize their enthusiasm. They should begin by learning the basics of music theory. Now, it is certainly true that great music can be written without a firm grasp of its inner workings. Sometimes people just have the gift. They can hear something in their head and find ways to translate it into notes on a page…and it will sound really good! But the rest of us mere mortals can benefit from knowing the tools of the trade.
I think of theory in the same way that a carpenter probably thinks of his hammer and screwdriver. True, you can build a shed without great knowledge of how to do so or even how to properly use a hammer and screwdriver. But it will be a long and frustrating process. Knowing the tools and how to use them provides shortcuts to finding exactly which harmonic progression, rhythm, orchestration, developmental technique, etc., will work best in a given situation. Young composers should study theory and do A LOT of listening and score study. Imitation of great music reveals what makes it great, and research does pay off in the long run.
The next stage of composition I dub the “sophomoric stage.” Basically, at this stage, the composer has had some success. He or She has discovered that, by writing down instructions in the form of music notation, people can play it, and the composer can hear the music come to life! It may sound obvious, but it’s a complete revelation the first few times it happens. It is easy for the composer to feel a little bit of power in “controlling” such a strong force as music, and a so-called god complex may develop. In other words, the composer’s train of thought will go something like this: “I am AWESOME! What do you do? You’re a biology major? Well, I am a COMPOSER! Yeah, take that.” I have noticed that this stage kicks in sometime in the later undergraduate years.
Then, the composer will reach graduate school and suddenly realize, “Wow…I have NO IDEA what I’m doing! Why didn’t anybody tell me this before?!?” (Chances are, somebody DID tell you, but you were too busy being the big fish in the little pond. You were just too damn full of yourself at the time to let the words of the wiser fish from the bigger lakes and oceans sink in.) Humility sets in. The composer realizes that to be the consummate musician s/he thought s/he was, there’s going to be
a lot of work and study and trial-and-error in the future. However, it is also during this period that the composer tends to develop an original voice and a unique style of composition.
Once the composer begins to develop this original voice and has a firm background and degree of experience in music theory and composition (ability to write a fugue and analyze a Beethoven piano sonata, for example), then this composer is best left to his/her own devices to follow individual paths of interest. At this point, the composer needs less instruction from a teacher. Rather, the teacher should become a wise and experienced sounding board (a “Yoda,” if I may…) for the composition student’s ideas, and make suggestions where appropriate to help focus the ideas. The composition teacher’s end goal should be to become obsolete. If, at some point, the composition student has outgrown instruction from a teacher, then the teacher has successfully trained the student.
Finally, how DOES a teacher deal with such an elusive subject as music composition? Honestly? I don’t know. Since the compositional decisions students may make are entirely dependent on the context of the medium, current project, etc., these decisions are rarely black-and-white wrong-or-right. Instead, they occupy a vast gray area of musical possibility that must be explored ultimately by the student. I liken it to therapy (bear with me here…). Consider the student as a patient with a pathological music composition “disorder.” The teacher is then the therapist guiding the student through the various obstacles within their own minds to help them complete a composition, thereby curing a specific set of neuroses. (Example: “So, <student>, you decided to address the rhythmic patterns that showed up in our earlier sessions. How does that make you feel?”)
I meant that as an analogy. But now that I reflect on that last paragraph, I’m not so sure…
Teaching what I know and what I don’t
This is my fourth year as a graduate teaching assistant here at Michigan State. Each year, I’ve gotten a different teaching assignment: freshman theory, sophomore theory, theory for non-majors, and now composition. I’m starting to get the theory teaching thing down, but composition is a very different animal.
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.
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