Posts Tagged composition
Premieres of New Music…right here!
Normally, we don’t advertise individual concerts much here on Guidonian Hand. You, dear reader, could be anywhere when you’re reading this…well, maybe not anywhere. I’d say there are at least…four…no, five different places you could be right now. Anyway, we don’t mention these events because the chances are not good that you’re going to be near enough to stop by. Now, if you are capable of reading this sentence, you are capable of seeing a live performance of new music.
That’s right, tune in here on the blog, or over at UStream.tv for a live webcast of Premieres of New Music by Michigan State composers at 7:30pm EST tonight (Tues., 20 Oct, 2009). No signing up or logging in required either here or at Ustream!
We’d also love your feedback here in the MSU Composition Channel Chat, or on in the comments field on our UStream.tv page
Enjoy!
(NOTE: To watch the webcast, you’ll have to load this page AFTER we’ve started broadcasting. If it’s getting close to showtime, and you don’t see anything, try clicking your browser’s “refresh” button.)
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]
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…
Wandering in the Wilderness Vol. 2: The Sound of Silence
And the sign said,
“The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls
And whispered in the sound of silence”
- from “The Sound of Silence” by Simon & Garfunkel
In this installment of WitW, I would like to discuss the use of silence as a compositional tool. I don’t mean short, dramatic uses, such as the GP commonly found in classical music, but significant spans of time devoted to silence for compositional reasons. To this end, we will explore three distinct approaches to silence by three different 20th/21st centuryAmerican composers. Any discussion of silence as a compositional device, of course must begin with John Cage’s 4′33″.
4′33″ is the infamous piece of silent music, whose entire score consists of three movements of indeterminate length, each marked “tacet” (the movements are traditionally, but not necessarily, marked off by the performer in some way). For Cage, any sound was music. He is quoted as saying that he would rather listen to the sounds of traffic than to the symphonies of Beethoven (I’m paraphrasing from memory, although I’m pretty sure that’s the essence of it). 4′33”, therefore, is a framing device. It sets a certain boundary, and says, “anything within this boundary is art, pay attention to it.” Consider the following images:
"Fountain" by Marcel Duchamp
Some urinals
Both images are of urinals. The first, however, is found in an art gallery, while the second image is from a public restroom. While both objects are essentially similar, the context, or the framing, of these objects significantly impacts the way we think about these objects. With the first, we may think of questions like “Is this really art?” or “If I pee in this, where would the pee go?” or “Would I get arrested if I tried to pee in it?” or “Why did I let Ty drag me to this modern art museum?” With the second, this is a context in which we (at least those of us who are male) are used to encountering urinals, and little thought is given to them (with the exception of special rules which apply to public urinals). Anyways, back to John Cage. The brilliance of 4′33″ as a framing device is that any sounds that arise during these boundaries are unintentional, the sounds that are normally blocked out or ignored during “normal” performances. It provides a new context for listeners to consider sounds which would normally be dismissed.
While a recording of 4′33″ is not necessary (one only needs a stopwatch to perform the piece in the comforts of one’s own home), I couldn’t resist linking to this performance, which I find particularly compelling.
Another interesting use of silence is found in the music of Morton Feldman. Feldman once said that the most beautiful thing a sound ever does is decay. In his works, the textures are often very sparse, so that you can appreciate the sound in its entirety, decay and all. Feldman’s counterpart in the visual art world is Mark Rothko, who uses simple designs to invite the viewer to appreciate the subtleties of color and texture in the works. For an example of Feldman’s use of silence, check out this recording of “The King of Denmark” for solo percussionist:
In “The king of Denmark,” the sparse textures isolate individual sounds and allow the listener to appreciate their qualities more fully than they might in a more dense musical situation.
The final composer I will discuss in this post is Thomas DeLio. In addition to being an influential composer, DeLio is also one of the foremost scholars in contemporary music, with a special interest in the music of Morton Feldman, John Cage, and Iannis Xenakis. The most striking characteristic of DeLio’s music is his use of long periods of silence. In a few of his pieces, the total duration of the silences is greater than the total duration of the musical material. The reason for this is that DeLio approaches silences functionally in a way that is fundamentally different from that of Cage or Feldman. For Cage, silence was a framing device to invite the unintended; for Feldman, it was a blank canvas on which individual sound colors are accented. DeLio’s use, however, is to frustrate the listener’s memory. The natural tendency of listeners is to process sounds by putting them in the context of sounds which proceed and follow them. This is a natural process, and most music relies on this contextualization to create coherent musical ideas. DeLio, however, attempts to isolate musical material by use of silences, so that each sound or gesture can be appreciated individually. The listener hears a gesture, followed by a long span of silence, and by the time the next gesture occurs, the listener has forgotton what the preceding gesture had sounded like. This music can seem strange and even unsettling to the casual listener; such long spans of silence are very uncommon in music, and create a certain amount of tension between the audience and performer. To give you an example of DeLio’s music, here is a performance of this author performing DeLio’s wave/s for solo percussionist:
This concludes my look at three different composers and how they use silence in unique ways. I hope you have found this interesting and that it gives you another point of view as you approach contemporary music. See you next time, when we’ll explore…something. I don’t have a topic picked out, and I am open to suggestions. Peace.
For the Composers
7th INTERNATIONAL COMPOSITION COMPETITION “ROMUALDO MARENCO”
A) COMPOSITION FOR BAND
Entrance fee: 60,00 Euro - One Prize: 5.000,00 Euro
B) COMPOSITION FOR SOLO INSTRUMENT – EUPHONIUM
Entrance fee: 30,00 Euro - One Prize: 2.00,00 Euro
Artistic Director: M° Maurizio Billi
Deadline: 31st July, 2009
INFORMATION (Dott.ssa Patrizia Orsini)
Tel +39 0143 76246 – Fax +39 0143 72592
e-mail: concorsomarenco@comune.noviligure.al.it - http://www.comune.noviligure.al.it
The Standard Model
Greetings music and science fans! I am a D.M.A. candidate in Music Composition at Michigan State University and have just completed my dissertation. It is a set of character pieces for wind band based on the standard model of particles in particle physics. It was inspired by my brother George. He is a Ph.D. candidate in Physical Chemistry at the University of Iowa in Ames, IA and works for the U.S. Department of Energy at the Ames Laboratory. The following is a brief introduction to the standard model George provided for my dissertation, followed by my program notes for the piece:
The Standard Model: A brief (and vastly oversimplified) introduction:
The standard model of particle physics comprises all the known subatomic elementary particles regulated by the theory of quantum mechanics. It is similar in concept to the periodic table of the elements. While the periodic table arranges the order of the different atomic elements, the standard model catalogs the particles that make up these individual atoms and other exotic forms of matter. This model classifies these subatomic particles according to strangeness and spin. Wave-particle duality is a feature of quantum theory, whereby all matter exhibits properties consistent with both particles and waves. The concept of spin requires the particle to be described in terms of a wave. (Specifically, it relates to the number of times a particle’s wavefuction must rotate about an axis to recover the original wavefunction.) Particles with an integer spin are called bosons, and those with a non-integer (or fractional) spin are fermions .
The fermions account for the majority of the standard model. They comprise the familiar aspects of the atom and follow the Pauli exclusion principle. According to this principle, no two indistinguishable fermions may occupy the same quantum state (i.e., physical space) at the same time. This principle largely explains the constitution and behavior of matter in our universe and conveniently allows for existence as we know it!
Fermions are divided into two classes known as the quarks and the leptons. Quarks combine in groups of three to form the protons and neutrons found in atomic nuclei. The most common of the quarks are the up and down quarks, which have a charge of 2/3 and -1/3, respectively. There are other quarks, too, that are identical to the up and down quarks, except they have larger mass. These massive analogues of up and down are charm and strange. There is yet a third group of quarks that are even more massive called the top and bottom quarks . Thus nature provides three versions of the fermions, each version differing only in its mass. This replication of particles into more massive successive generations is known as strangeness, and particles containing the heavier versions of the fermions are “stranger” than normal matter (consisting of only the lightest versions of the fermions).
The most familiar of the leptons is the electron. It has a -1 charge and is the basis for all chemistry and electrical applications. The other main lepton is the electron neutrino. It has no charge and nearly negligible mass, making its interactions the weakest in the standard model. As with the quarks, leptons also have two additional degrees of strangeness. The analogues of the electron neutrino are the muon neutrino and the tau neutrino, and the analogues of the electron are simply the muon and the tau.
The bosons in the standard model regulate fermion interactions and consist of force carrying particles responsible for transmitting three of the four natural forces: electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force. The most familiar of these is the force carrier for the electromagnetic force, the photon. It regulates interactions of charged particles, and the emission of this particle is the source of light. The boson associated with the strong nuclear force is the gluon. It is responsible for holding together the positively charged nucleus of an atom. A manifestation of the strength of this force is evident in nuclear reactions. The other two bosons in the standard model are the W+/- and Z bosons. Together, these are responsible for the most enigmatic of the forces – the weak nuclear force. This force is what regulates radioactive decay, where, for example, an up quark will change to a down quark (or vice versa). When this happens, the resulting interaction involving the W+/- boson emits an electron. The Z boson is associated with neutrino emissions.
It should be noted that there is no boson associated with the fourth and final known force, gravity. Currently, gravity is best described by Einstein’s theory of relativity. Since the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics are incompatible at the subatomic level, there is no force-carrying particle for gravity. There is one more boson in the standard model, but it has yet to be observed. This is the Higgs boson (the so-called “God particle”). It is believed to be responsible for a particle’s mass. Confirmation of its existence would be the smoking gun that validates the standard model.
Thus, all matter is composed of these seventeen particles: the four force carrying bosons plus the Higgs boson (not yet observed), and the twelve fermions – six quarks and six leptons, each characterized by their charge and strangeness.
George Schoendorff
April, 2009
My program notes for the piece for wind band:
The Standard Model is a set of character pieces for wind band based on the standard model of particles in particle physics. The work is divided into three movements, corresponding to the three subsections found in the standard model: the two sets of fermions and the set of bosons.
The first movement, I. Prologue – Quarks, begins with a prologue that represents particle creation at the beginning of the universe in the Big Bang. This is followed by characterizations of the first set of fermions, the quarks. Quarks are always found as corresponding pairs: up/down, followed by the heavier and more exotic versions charm/strange and top/bottom (formerly known as truth/beauty). Because of this, the quark characterizations are represented simultaneously in the music as progressive pairs. The music reflects the names specific to each quark pair and uses a simple melody supported by block rhythms and harmonies to represent quarks as the basic unit of matter in atomic nuclei.
II. Leptons characterizes the second set of fermions, the leptons. Unlike the quarks, leptons do not group together. Rather, they exist as individual particles. Therefore, the basic leptons (the electron neutrino and the electron) are not represented simultaneously. Characterizations of the electron neutrino and its heavier muon and tau versions are presented first, followed by the electron and its heavier muon and tau versions. This is accomplished with a simple two-part contrapuntal framework, which is then realized differently for the electron neutrino and the electron to reflect the differences between their interactions. Both realizations are rhythmically active, but the music for the electron set has more forward motion. As an analogy, think of the electron neutrino and the electron as twin siblings at a party. While the electron would be the life of the party, one would find the electron neutrino sitting in a corner as the classic wallflower.
Finally, the bosons are represented in III. Bosons – The God Particle. This is the longest movement, as bosons are the heaviest particles. Each boson’s musical characterization reflects both its interactive level and the fermions with which it interacts through motivic, rhythmic, and orchestrational devices found in the previous two movements. The movement ends with an epilogue, a characterization of the Higgs boson. However, since this boson has yet to be confirmed, its nickname, The God Particle, is used. This allows for a tidy conclusion for the piece, referencing God as the instigator of particle creation in the Big Bang. Consequently, the music is a glorified plagal “Amen” cadence, providing a somewhat traditional coda to the work.
Matthew Schoendorff
April, 2009
Why?
Last summer, a friend of mine asked me, “Why do you write music?”
It seems like the sort of question for which I should have a stock answer ready, like “What instrument do you play?” or “Where are you from?”, but for some reason I had never really thought about it. Maybe that’s because I kind of got into composition by accident. I started college as a trumpet performance major. I really wanted to be the next Phil Smith. Then, I took a beginning class in composition with Stefan Freund, mostly because it would count as a theory elective for me. I liked it enough to take the second semester, and before I knew it I was taking comp lessons more seriously than my trumpet lessons.
It seems odd to address this issue for the first time as a doctoral student. There must be some reason I’ve taken my composition studies this far, right? After that conversation with my friend, I spent a few weeks thinking about it. Here’s what I came up with:
- I like the intellectual challenge. I also like a good crossword or sudoku puzzle. Intellectual challenge isn’t unique to music, but I think music presents it in a compelling way. It is a challenge that I pose myself. I suppose the challenge is also posed indirectly by performers, audiences, and teachers. The challenge is to create something both comforting and jarring, intuitive and logical. Balancing those ideas in an intellectual challenge that I haven’t found in many other places.
- I like to try new things. Again, new things aren’t unique to music. But for me, there is a special reward in experimenting with new sounds, new ways of combining material, and generally speaking, new means of musical expression. Writing music gives me the opportunity to try new things every day.
- I like hearing my music played. This may seem painfully simple, but it’s true. The mental act of composing is really cool and fun, but the act of actually writing out the score and all of the things that go along with that kind of sucks. It’s a lot of sitting in a room by yourself doing the same thing over and over and over. But it is worth it — a bargain, even — to hear the music played by talented and passionate people. This is really one of the only times that I feel that ooey-gooey Romantic crap about music. I’ve never had a feeling like the one I get when this abstract concept that has been in my head for so long becomes a real, acoustic thing.
Why do you do what you do? Have you ever thought about it? Drop a note in the comments.
