Posts Tagged school
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.)
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]
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.
The Arrogance of Creation
Every Friday afternoon at 2:30, all the student composers here at Michigan State get together to discuss music. Sometimes it’s our music; sometimes it’s somebody else’s. Sometimes it’s fun; sometimes it’s excruciating; sometimes it’s both. We call it composition studio class, and it has been known to instigate some rather heated debates.
To be a composer, you have to have strong enough opinions about music (and a high enough opinion of yourself) that you think people should spend their valuable time listening to your music. Not only should they listen to you instead of your colleagues, but also instead of Beethoven, Bach, Prokofiev, Coltrane, and the Beatles. And not only should they listen to you instead of all those people, but they should listen to you instead of doing literally anything else at all!
I call this “the arrogance of creation,” because it is certainly not limited to composers. Performers are taking part in the arrogance of making music. Artists, actors, poets, filmmakers, and dancers all demand your attention for a certain amount of time to receive their art. This is not to say, however, that artists have disdain for their audience (though, of course, some do). On the contrary, the arrogance of creation is balanced by a respect for the audience. In fact, a creator’s respect for his or her audience is often directly proportional to their creative arrogance. The struggle to balance these two ideas is the cause of a great deal of insecurity and neurosis in the artistic community. If you haven’t met a neurotic, insecure singer or actor, then you probably haven’t met any singers or actors.
Composer Johannes Brahms was famously struck with a horrible bout of insecurity after having been deemed the intellectual and cultural heir of Beethoven. Robert Schumann said that he would be the next great composer, in the tradition of Beethoven. Brahms basically went crazy trying to live up to this impossible standard.* I think this was the result of his respect for his audience, who all new and loved Beethoven’s music, outgrowing his arrogance. Eventually, Brahms did, by most accounts, become the next great composer. Thankfully for all of us, though, he was not the last great composer. Since his time, musicians and artists have continued to struggle with the balance of arrogance and respect.
What do you think? Is there an inherent arrogance in the act of creation?
.
.
* Brahms, however, had the last laugh. He was known to be quite fond of Schumann’s wife, and historians are divided as to how that all played out…
Virtuoso
I’m taking a jazz history seminar class right now called “The Avant-Garde in Jazz.” Sounds pretty cool, right? For the most part, it is. However, one thing that constantly bugs me is the reactions from some of the less adventurous ears in the class. When established mainstream players like John Coltrane and Miles Davis started playing “out,” they were generally accepted, but when new musicians like Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor hit the scene when they had not already made names for themselves as mainstream players, they were rejected. People said, and some of my classmates still say, that they played crazy sounds on their instruments because they couldn’t play straight-ahead bebop.
I disagree. I think Cecil Taylor used the technique that he used because he wanted to make the sounds that he made, not the other way around. So what if Ornette Coleman couldn’t play “Giant Steps” like Coltrane? He wasn’t trying to do that. These are issues that the art world had been wrestling with for decades before this. Pablo Picasso and Piet Mondrian were painting representational art before they investigated abstract art, but others did not. Jackson Pollack got the same sniggers and raised the same eyebrows as Ornette. The question then arises: What does it mean to be a virtuoso? How do we measure virtuosity?
It’s not being able to play “Giant Steps” or paint a bowl of fruit better than anyone else in town. Virtuosity is having the technical facility to achieve your creative goals. Through technology, it’s becoming easier for people without advanced training to achieve their creative goals, and that is what scares traditional virtuosi so much. “Ornette didn’t pay his dues, man.” Forget the dues, he’d be playing bebop if he had paid his dues. He wants something else.
This definition of virtuosity is not without its problems. If the creative goals define virtuosity, why not set creative goals to what is readily achievable? After all the tears have been shed, the most positive result of the controversy of technique is that when virtuosity is made subjective — that is to say, considered in relation to artistic goals — the art itself becomes the primary subject of discussion. It no longer matters that Cecil Taylor can’t “play the changes,” so what do you think of his music? Virtuoso Bob Ross can paint happy trees all day, and I don’t care. Virtuoso Norman Rockwell can recreate “Leave it to Beaver” in as many permutations as he can think of, and Wynton Marsalis can relive 1940s New Orleans as long as he wants. I’m not moved. I don’t care how you say it, but please say something.
For your consideration, the music of Cecil Taylor:
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
