Tomorrow, Wednesday, June 16, stop what you’re doing at 10:30pm France time (4:30pm EDT, 1:30pm PDT, etc.) and turn on France Musique and listen to Couleurs du Monde. At some point during the show, they’re going to play Thibaut Frasnier’s, Alvaro Martinez’s, Fabrice Richaud’s, Gabriel Rigaux’s, and my arrangement of Algerian songs. Perhaps they will even announce our names, though this is far from certain. In case not, mine, Yelha Wurar, is the up-tempo, crowd-pleasing number that they’ll probably play at the end?

If you’d like to avoid any confusion with the France Musique site, go straight HERE.

Do motives that gain their power from a tonal context work in a mostly-atonal setting?

I’m onto the second straight piece in which I have to confront that question.

The opening bars of Omie Speaks go like this:

(listen here)

See that A-sharp in the first chord and that A-natural in a different voice in the second? (a voice is defined by its left-to-right motion and how high it is) That’s called a cross-relation. (more…)

I brought the tentative instrumental opening of the saxophone quartet + electronics that I’m writing to my computer music class on Wednesday. My teacher and my classmate each had a look and both said, this looks a lot like that recorder quartet.

I guess I’m to take this as evidence of a personal style forming? That’s good on its face, as an individual voice is supposedly what we’re all looking for out here in composition land. I hadn’t meant to write another wedge, but as soon as they said it, I realized I had, though this time it moves by skips instead of chromatic steps, and it covers an octave-and-a-half instead of only a perfect fifth, and it’s shorter.

But then I look at that and think, well, I should do something different. At least formally - I’m sick of starting each piece with a bare-bones statement of a small geometrical fragment that “is the root material for the whole work.” No way to get around the first bars being the root material, but in the piece after Omie (that’s what the sax quartet’s called), I’m planning to kind of start with a bang, throw it all out at once and break it down as the piece continues instead of building up.

I guess that’s called “growing,” but as I’m about to post in another ramble, it’s weird to feel the need to rebuild from scratch each time. But I also don’t want to get predictable, I mean, I’m only 30, there’s no reason to start repeating myself yet, and I’ve already written two long pieces based on a wedge shape…

Lisa Pham did a little profile of me over at Colours of Bohemia.

Isn’t that cool? I get to go to beautiful Croatian Istria, and it’s a business trip. I’d say that of the places I’ve gotten to travel as a composer, it’s the top so far - Berlin and NYC aren’t bad, but Berlin’s a little cold in winter, and New York is familiar; it doesn’t so much feel like a vacation. Croatia’s sure way better than the Hague.

Anyway, the point of all this is to announce the impending premiere (and seconde) of Rising, the tentative title for the piece I referred to back here and here. The piece is a gloss on the Sanctus in Hebrew, Old Church Slavonic, and Arabic, sung in a quasi-Gregorian chant style, accompanied by an active drone, just about any instrument will do. The premiere is planned for June 20, as part of a street performance festival in Groznjan, and it we’re also planning to perform it on June 23 in Izola - still Istria, but across the border in Slovenia. The project was commissioned and abetted by Jane McMahan, who runs her International Vocal Arts Workshop in Groznjan. I’m particularly excited that this piece is being presented outside of the confines of the concert hall, and will reach an audience of locals and random, unsuspecting vacationers.

I’m glad that other bloggers have also been a bit uninspired recently. Myself, I’ve been to plenty of things that should have stimulated me to write something - Rossini (go Mr. Continuo Player for the inspired Pink Panther Theme when Basilio enters), student concerts, mostly excellent piano music at the Bouffes du Nord, Pascal Dusapin’s attractive new opera (though it was more of a staged monologue), Medea, Pascal Dusapin’s not-quite-right sound installation with Richard Serra’s sort of overwhelming sculpture at the Grand Palais (why do neither Serra nor Dusapin have websites???), but nothing was quite worth writing about. I even went to see J Mascis playing drums for some band called Witch, but, well, they were terrible. You get what you pay for at the Fleche d’or, which is to say, nothing, right?* (more…)

I neither endorse nor repudiate Mr. f.m’s music. It’s an interesting idea - pop music with string quartet backing instead of electric bass. I’m not a fan of his approach to Blondie (too cold and scientific), but his original music sounds pretty neat, and sometimes has some really nifty, crunchy harmonies.

But this guy is not entirely unrelated to my post about post-rock.

But am I the guy on the couch, or the strange man with a French horn head?

More fallout from my lecture at Stony Brook.

One of the students responded to the music I played them - 2 of the Preludes for Harpsichord, for Baroque Trio by comparing the sound of the harpsichord to horror movie music, or even better, to the music in the haunted houses or the especially the castle worlds in Super Mario Bros. This took me totally off-guard, but as soon as I heard it, it was pretty obvious. The harpsichord at the beginning of the first movement - high dissonant chords in funny rhythms kind of like screaming - does everything it should to fit the part.

The fact that I didn’t think of the harpsichord’s connotation in the popular imagination as a spooky instrument beforehand makes me nervous. I thought about The Doors, even though I sort of hate them, and of course I know the classical literature from the Baroque to Ligeti etc. But how did I miss the most basic contemporary cultural allusion that the instrument implies? (more…)

I’m back from New York. It was a long trip, and a good one. Two premieres is always a good thing. I also got to give two talks about my music and came back with a litany of new projects to work on.

The first of the talks was a nearly-impromptu affair for a first-year seminar at Stony Brook. The professor, who is running Stony Brook’s big premieres festival and for whom I used to TA, wanted me to come in and talk about the creative process. So, obviously, the conversation turned largely to a discussion of humor in music. Why not?

But the most interesting thing happened after the talk, when I got an email from one of the students in the class. The student asked me if I knew any “instrumental post-rock,” particularly Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Mogwai, and The Red Sparowes . Of course, I’d heard of Godspeed (how could you forget a name like that?), but I’d never delved into the genre. In fact, I didn’t really know there was a genre called post-rock. I knew there was stuff kind of like this, but I didn’t know it had a name…

So I gave each of the above a listen. The first thing that surprised me was how bright each band sounded, not including Godspeed’s spoken word material. I was expecting something little more like Judas Priest or Pantera - relentless loudness and darkness - but found that especially the latter two were producing textures more like Nico Muhly, whom, as we all know, writes too prettily for his own good. (I don’t know why precisely so much of my blog seems to involve Nico, whom I’ve never met. I find his blog very engaging, and when the New Yorker writes a feature about you, you have to expect some snarky references, but that doesn’t explain it entirely…)

The second, well, not-exactly-surprise, was the extent to which I have a hard time hearing this music as “rock.” Which I guess makes it “post-rock.” But at what point does the pendulum swing far enough to make this stuff into genre no longer affiliated with rock? It struck me that there’s a parallel between the idea of post-rock and Kyle Gann’s concept of the post-classic. (more…)