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 should have put this up earlier: my friend Marc (violinist, Brahms, that’s him in the red sweater) is a finalist for the YouTube Symphony, so go vote for him. Today, because today is the last day. (Watch out for the incredibly cheesy video that starts up, and go straight to the Vote button, and search for his instrument, name, and/or composer, and hit the green thumbs-up button)

Beyond just looking out for my friends, I do think he’s the best performer amongst the Brahms choices. He has the clearest, most consistent interpretation, the cleanest sound, and the most rhythmic precision (and for what it’s worth, the best reverb, which sort of points out the problem of this whole thing: it’s pretty hard to compare the dude playing in the hall of his conservatory with the cello section playing scales behind him with the girl in her dorm room…)

But we have what we have. I was checking out the violas, and was really astonished that they all sounded horrible. But it’s the repertoire that was picked for them. The orchestral excerpts, like the development from the finale of Mozart’s 40th Symphony (starting on page 41), are all representative. But because of that, they’re not particularly showcases for the instrument. The viola’s problem, always, has been one of size: it’s too small to make the notes it’s tuned for, and as a result, it not only has a nasal sound, but it’s also very quiet (only the double bass has a worse problem in the string section).

The Mozart and Brahms excerpts, and even more the Rossini, and also the Beethoven’s Fifth to a lesser extent, show how composers have dealt with the problem when they need the viola to sound out. (more…)

“Imperfection is the mother of style.”

From My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk.

See also last month’s post and this one, too, for context.

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…

I reacted to Doctor Atomic, which I’m very happy to have seen at the Met, well, a long time ago (Nov. 8, specifically), now, in three main ways, which I’ll explore in the next three posts:

1. As politics
2. As music, with a digression on the nature of genius
3. As theater, or more specifically, as words as they relate to music, plus a conclusion

These will appear soon, I swear! They’re 3/4s written already! [note: given server issues, well, maybe they won’t, or rather, it’ll be shorter]

—

I persistently remember the title of this post as “unfaithful” - Batter my heart, unfaithful God. Or sometimes, it’s “three-fingered.” What does that mean?

I got back from my sojourn in Grožnjan, Croatia on Wednesday, and I don’t know where to start my post about the place. I guess the logical place to start would be with my experiences with the piece that I wrote for the International Vocal Arts Workshop, since that’s what brought me there in the first place – but maybe I’ll try to talk about the setting a little bit first. Grožnjan is a hill town in Istria that seems to have been walled by the 12^th century, and which was part of the Venetian empire from the 1400s until the Napoleonic Wars, when it passed into Austrian hands. It’s full of mostly unpainted stone buildings and dark wooden doors and tiled roofs separated by narrow cobbled streets and small piazzas with flowers and vines bursting from the surrounding windows, balconies, and roofs. It interests me that the church and old municipal buildings are at the top of the village and not in the middle. The village commands an incredible view of the verdant (I don’t like that word, but I can’t think of a better description) valley beneath, and in the not-so-distance, the Adriatic Sea. The area is abundant with olive trees and grapes vines, and most other types of tasty vegetation. And truffles, they say, though I only saw them as part of dinner. (Sometimes it pays to be vegetarian: the meat eaters got polenta with a meaty stew, we got a truffle-cream sauce on our cornmeal.) They have managed to keep almost all signs of modernity, besides electric lines and a public phone, out of sight, so once you leave the parking lot on the outskirts, you can try to forget when you live. Surveying the view outside the dorm window, I got to thinking pretty quickly about how muchlittle the scene has changed in the past 800 years.

This was the backdrop for the street theater performance that I wrote Rising for. To recap, Rising is in a quasi-Gregorian chant style but using texts related to the Sanctus in Hebrew, Old Church Slavonic, and Arabic. The piece was written as an experiment, both in notation and in sound. The idea of the piece was to have three completely independent vocal lines singing in separate modes, each with a different final,* all surrounding a D-natural drone. But instead of creating total chaos, I wanted to have a few points where the lines sort of lined up – not in pitch, but in character. I composed each part separately, but planned the piece out by dividing it into larger “melismatic” sections and shorter “recitative” sections.** That way, there would be breaks in the texture when the recits connected. The tension of the interlocking lines would give way to brief moments of repose when not quite so much would happen. (more…)

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…)

Since I got back from New York, I’ve been listening to Piano and String Quartet by Morton Feldman. It’s been like coming home. When I first listened to Feldman back in the summer of 1999, it was transformative - all that stillness that was still beautiful and evocative and completely gripping - but somehow I’ve gone pretty much from then until now with just one CD of his music. (that I could get rich off of if I decided to sell it?????)

I found this Feldman quotation about the nature of his super-long pieces:

As soon as you leave the 20-25 minute piece behind, in a one-movement work, different problems arise. Up to one hour you think about form, but after an hour and a half it’s scale.

Piano and String Quartet is only an hour and twenty minutes, so it doesn’t quite reach the proportions he’s talking about, but it has such form. It’s a microscopic form, a form of gestures. (more…)

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…)