PostClassic

Kyle Gann on music after the fact

Caution, Slow Listener

That my readers’ defenses of Dvorak are falling on deaf ears says something about my own compositional technique which has been on my mind lately. It’s not that I don’t find Dvorak’s music well crafted, but that his unit of craft is too often the one- or two-measure phrase, bounded by bar-lines. In my own music, I am obsessed with making the bar-line disappear. I don’t have a lot of particular things I pick on students about, but a passage like the one I quoted from the New World Symphony, if a student had brought it to me, would drive me nuts. When I see a kid composing in units of measure, measure, measure, with a new impetus, new phrase, new harmony on every downbeat, I start in with my wheedling tone (every experienced composition student will recognize the sound): “How about a triple upbeat to start that melody off a little more gracefully?” “How about we vary the harmonic rhythm here?” “You think the audience can’t hear where your bar-lines are if you don’t accent every one?” 

Perhaps because it deals with floating bodies, The Planets is, even more than most of my music, about obliterating the bar-line:

 
Venusfives.jpg
I don’t think it’s often in my music that the listener can feel sure what meter is being used, and I appreciated Daniel Webster’s reference in the Inquirer to my “intricate metrical joining.” I like nothing better, in fact, than to start off in clear 2/4 or 3/4, and then start throwing in five-beat phrases, or change harmony on odd 8th-notes, or to simply omit rests in the melody that a regular phrasing would imply. In rehearsal last week Douglas Mapp, Relache’s bassist, started pointing out “groove-inhibiting factors” in my music, and I picked up the nickname “The Groovebuster.” It’s not really at all that I don’t like regular rhythms, but that I think written music should aim to efface the page, to sound so fluid that the listener forgets that the music is written down, and especially that it springs from obvious formulas like 1 + 2 + 3 + 4-ee-and-a. Of course, Elliott Carter’s Double Concerto obliterates the bar-line too, but I do prefer in my music (and this is the essence of Totalism) to have recognizable metrical patterns for the ear to grab onto and follow – I just don’t want them slavishly dictated by a recurring bar-line. 
Plenty of great 19th-century music satisfies me in this regard. It’s not so much about contradicting the groove as having a meta-metrical sense on a larger level than the measure. The opening of Brahms’s First Piano Concerto projects an open-ended hyper-measure, grouping phrases through its descending drone bass-line into a striking accelerando; and then the quiet second theme sustains a dazzling tightrope-walk of metric ambuiguity. The soaring, minute-long opening theme of Bruckner’s Seventh lifts you to a meta-metrical height that makes the measure look like a petty unit indeed. In a grad-school Rhythmic Analysis course I chose the Adagio of the Bruckner Seventh to analyze because its rhythm fascinated me; and sure enough, I found its key in phrases that would begin a new tonality in mid-measure, delaying the resolution of rhythmic tension for minutes at a time until, at that big cymbal crash (added later and controversial), the harmonic rhythm and the phrase rhythm finally match up, resolving a subliminal but long-standing metric dissonance. Even in Mozart, I feel, however unconsciously, a satisfaction in the 15- or 17-measure sections he creates by overlapping the last measure of one phrase with the first measure of another, sounding perfectly normal but never quite letting you anticipate. 
I hear these things without trying. I have a long attention span, and I listen to music in slow, spacious units. First time I heard The Well-Tuned Piano live, La Monte ended after six hours and I looked up and thought, “What? Over already?” Music that keeps reminding me of its bar-lines and meters strikes me as fussy, like the composer couldn’t stand back far enough from his music to hear it on a multiplicity of levels. I’ve known all nine Dvorak symphonies since I was a teenager, and they’ve made all the impression on me they’re going to. His scherzos are sometimes rhythmically interesting; I’m fond of that in the Eighth, which falls effortlessly into ten-measure phrases, and exhibits more than his usual variety of large-scale phrasing. As with Tchaikovsky, I think he’s freer, more graceful, when he’s not struggling with sonata-allegro form. The world will not be altered in any respect by my finding Dvorak fussy, and meanwhile I have Bruckner, Brahms, and Mahler to remind me what glorious arcs of sound can be made by an orchestra playing in common meters. Dvorak will have his revenge, too, for the flip side is that a lot of folks probably can’t hear the larger rhythmic level into which I pour the cream of my creativity.
By the way, you want to know the secret to voluminous blogging? Insomnia. I’m up at 4 AM probably because I took some Benadryl, which is supposed to make one sleep, and things that make most people sleep tend to induce insomnia in me. I’m just built different.

Sic ‘omm!

A site is now up for the Second International Conference on Minimalist Music that David McIntire and I are directing at the University of Missouri at Kansas City September 2-6. You can register, find out about performances, make housing arrangements, and so on. We’ll be adding more details to the site as we firm up the schedule.

Procrastinating with Percy

I don’t care what the airline authorities say, Joe Biden is right. I walked onto the plane in Albany feeling fine, and walked off in Chicago two hours later with a cold. And I heard the guy sneeze behind me, big. Second cold this month, and I always get one when I fly. The dean’s office is waiting for my final grades, but it’s a beautiful summer day out on my screened-in porch. Which raises the question, how do people without blogs get out of doing the work people are expecting from them? Poor excuse-less schmucks must have to keep their noses to the grindstone, even while sneezing their heads off.

Meanwhile, there’s an old, frail copy of an “Analytic Symphony Score” piano reduction of Dvorak’s New World Symphony, which I found at a wonderful little used book store in Great Barrington, sitting on my piano, edited by Percy Goetschius, Mus. Doc. I’m a big fan of Percy Goetschius, Mus. Doc. – I’ve even got the same degree. I collect his theory books, published in the late 19th century (I first found one years ago in Trimpin’s library), and love reading them. They’re bracingly, menacingly hard-core. The fourth scale degree always resolves to the third, the seventh must rise to the octave, a iii6-4 chord can only follow I, and if you brazenly start a modulation with the I (one) chord of the new key as your pivot – well, may God have mercy on your soul, that’s all Percy has to say. In my dreams I imagine teaching a beginning theory class with Percy’s The Theory and Practice of Tone-Relations (1892), but the students would feel like they were on a chain gang. Every piece of music they look at would break Percy’s iron-clad rules, and I’d have a hell of a time finding suitably strict musical examples. And yet, reading him, the reasons music is the way it is fall into place, and random-looking conventions come to seem inescapably logical. There is a reason, generally, to avoid the I chord as a pivot. Probably 98 percent of iii6-4 chords follow I with passing motion in the bass. The essence of music shines forth, isolated in the tight little net of Percy’s mandates. This is a real man’s theory, with none of your current-day liberal mollycoddling.

New World Symphony makes me wish I had taught the piece in the 19th-century course I just completed (the one whose papers I have yet to grade). I’ve never taught Dvorak, not having much use for him (I prefer the 5th, 6th, and 8th symphonies to the 9th, at least), but playing through it, I realize that the first movement of the New World is the most pedantically clear Romantic sonata-allegro I know of. Every melodic phrase is four measures. (Percy says every melody is four measures at heart: maybe two if it’s slow, or eight if it’s fast, and other lengths have to be accounted for by extensions or elisions. It’s easy to see why he liked the New World.) Every four-, two- or one-measure unit gets repeated. Sometimes the tune is the same and the harmony changes, sometimes the notes change but the rhythm is repeated, sometimes the rhythm changes but the pitches are retained, but there’s a fanatical insistence on leading the ear from measure to measure. No measure comes as a surprise, or almost even a contrast.

NewWorld.jpg

Really not so far from early minimalist practice, only less gradual and with conventional chord teleology. It’s a smooth, smooth piece, didactically so; a child could make sense of it on first hearing. Its popularity with audiences couldn’t be more explainable. Infinitely inferior to Brahms: one would almost wonder why Brahms so promoted Dvorak’s career, except that it is the immemorial habit of composers to champion other composers whose works are in the same general style as their own but not as good. (An entire history of music could be written elucidating that one principle, especially in the post-WWII era when composers came to run the new-music performance scene.) But the New World – little more than a harmonic progression articulated by repetitious motives – would make a wonderful teaching piece, a template for composing large-scale forms by monotonous formula. The subtle continuities of Brahms, Bruckner, and Mahler are a little too creative and elevated for undergrads to understand, but the New World is right at their level, and assimilating it would make those other composers shine even more brightly. – Kyle Gann, Mus. Doc.

AAAAAAACHHOOOOO!

 

My Fictional Professor

Thumbnail image for Thumbnail image for Immunity.jpgA new novel by Lori Andrews called Immunity contains a character named Peter Gena, a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, who creates computerized programs that turn the DNA sequences of various diseases into pieces of music. Although Peter is not truly fictional: in fact, he was my composition teacher in grad school at Northwestern, and he really does make a wide variety of scintillating pieces for Disklavier and other electronics from DNA sequences. Andrews heard about him through a mutual geneticist friend whom Peter collaborates with, and mentions him twice in the book, on pages 9 and 41. Immunity is a kind of action novel about a sexy geneticist named Alexandra Blake who tries to unravel an epidemic caused by someone infecting drinking water with a toxin that makes people fatally allergic to man-made substances. Blake listens to DNA sequences through Gena’s program to try to hear dissonances that alert her to problematic viruses. It’s a very fast read that comes off like a would-be film script, with all the characters using the same kind of curt, snappy dialogue. I spent a lovely weekend with Peter the last couple of days, and realized again what a felicitous meeting of minds we were, and how lucky I was to have studied with him. (Among hundreds of happy coincidences: I’ve been meaning to listen to Saint-Saens’s Third Symphony because McLaren recommended it to me in a recent comment. Peter put on a CD to show off his new stereo components. “What is this?,” I asked. It was Saint-Saens’s Third Symphony.) Thank goodness Peter wasn’t merely fictional.

Delayed Gratification

…is my middle name. Lucky I have a glacial attention span. After 15 years of working intermittently with the Relache ensemble, I finally got to hear the rest of my Planets last night, and I’m so happy with them. I’m posting mp3s for all the movements, at least until the recording comes out in the fall. There are a few patches from rehearsal takes due to note flubs and one violent stream of audience coughing:

Sun
Moon
Venus
Mars
Jupiter
Mercury
Saturn
Uranus
Neptune
Pluto

The whole piece lasts 70 minutes and change. I recommend reading the program notes to understand how the process of each movement depicts the astrological force involved. The 35 MB score, if you’re that interested, is here.
I’m tremendously grateful to the Relache ensemble for keeping faith in the project for as long as I did. Four of them – oboist Lloyd Shorter, bassist Douglas Mapp, bassoonist Chuck Holdeman, and keyboardist John Dulik – were in the original ensemble I worked with in Seattle back in 1994, and it’s been fun every few years to pick up where we left off as though no time had passed. None of them seem to age, though I certainly have. The newer members are flutist Michele Kelly, violist Sarah Sutton, percussionist Chris Hanning, and saxist Bob Butryn, all dynamite players and a pleasure to work with. I must also say, though I shouldn’t, that I’m pleased and relieved at the consistency of quality and style of movements written from 1994 to 2008; from the beginning I had a pretty firm idea how each movement would go, and I never swerved from my original conception (see long attention span, above). Aside from the two completed chamber operas of my Hudson River Trilogy (one of which hasn’t yet been performed), it’s my longest work to date. It’s difficult to get a ten-movement work performed. I guess they don’t do Turangalila very often, either.

“Motel rooms had lost their punch for him…”

ashley2.jpgIt’s official: my next book will be on the life and works of Robert Ashley, one of my favorite composers, and one of my favorite people on the planet. It’s for the University of Illinois Press’s series on American composers, the first two of which are excellent books on John Cage (by David Nicholls) and Lou Harrison (by Leta Miller). I’ve gotten sucked into the short-book industry. I’m still grinding away on that Music After Minimalism book, which is a huge project and keeps changing shape, but it has seemed professionally expedient for me to get a few books out quickly, so I’m reluctantly letting myself get sidetracked. But what an inviting sidetrack: every time I hang out with Bob Ashley (which I’ve been doing since 1979) I get a buzz off of his laidback enthusiasm. Great man, great composer, vastly misunderstood, so I’ll get to add a lot more new information to the world than I did in John Cage’s 4’33” (coming out in the fall).

Online Articles Lost to Memory

Chicago critic Marc Geelhoed nicely noted my upcoming return to Chicago, and in so doing, noted that some eleven of my articles for the Chicago Reader, starting from 1987, are available online. I had no idea. In fact, I’d forgotten that I continued writing for the Reader so long after I joined the Village Voice, up through spring 1989 – just three months before I left Chicago for good. I’ve linked the available articles from my web site (scroll down a little, the titles are in green) – interviews with Harold Budd, Peter Gena, Elodie Lauten, Nicolas Collins, Henry Gwiazda, Neil Rolnick, and others. Not of much interest to others after 20-odd years, but the Reader always makes me sentimental. In some ways I always thought it was the best organization I ever worked for, and my editor there, Pat Clinton, was a saint. 

The Art of Humiliating Dead Composers

A student, preparing for her senior recital, asked me how to write program notes, and I knew just what to tell her. I’ll pass on my recipe. You need three kinds of sources. First, copy (assuming you can computer-access it) the entire article on the composer from Grove Online, just so you have the accepted skeletal facts in front of you and won’t go astray. Next, assuming the composer is moldy enough, check out books of two kinds: an old-fashioned biography, pre-WWII if possible, of the conventional myth-making variety, and then a more recent revisionist book of articles by musicologists, such as the Cambridge guides, or Bard’s “So-and-so and His World” series. Then you find the date of composition of the work in question, and look through the old-fashioned biography for some colorful event in the composer’s life immediately preceding, if possible, or at least proximate to the piece’s creation – say, Saint-Saens’s baby falling out of a window, or Brahms jilting that woman he was supposed to marry. Naturally, you lead with that event, not, “Cherubini lived from 1760 to 1842,” or “Giuseppi Verdi was the towering figure of 19th-century Italian opera” – both deadly. If the biographical event has some actual connection to the work, all the better, but if not, proximity will do. You then play up the contemporaneous events found in the myth-making biography, but contrast them with some point of revisionism from the recent musicology book, so that you can get credit both for indulging the reader’s need for heroism and romantic detail, and also for showing that you’re not taken in by the démodé illusions of conventional hagiography. For instance, you mention the famous story of Alkan’s being crushed by a bookshelf, before letting the reader know it never happened. 

Here’s the opening of my program note for Cincinnati’s Nutcracker Suite. I hate the f-ing piece, and the thought of it turning millions of children against classical music forever turns my stomach, but I found in it a connection to things I actually give a damn about:

There’s a story from Tchaikovsky’s last years so good that you’d think it’s apocryphal, but it appeared in a 1912 Moscow newspaper, and none of the principals involved ever contradicted it. In December of 1890, Tchaikovsky’s opera The Queen of Spades was premiered. He felt it was his greatest work, but he interpreted the audience reaction as cold, and, after the performance, wandered the streets of Petersburg despondently. Suddenly he heard music from his opera in the street, the first-act duet between Liza and Polina. He investigated, and found three students, who indeed had acquired a piano score before the performance and attended it, and were now enthusiastically singing through their favorite parts. Their names were Sergei Diaghilev, Alexandre Benois, and Dimitrii Filosofev, and they would become friends of Tchaikovsky for the brief remainder of his life.

Sergei Diaghilev (1872-1929), of course, was to become a great choreographer and impresario, a supreme figure in the world of ballet. Alexandre Benois (1870-1960) became a painter, graphic designer, and theater designer. All three men were associated with a movement to become known as Mir Iskusstva (The World of Art), which would start its own magazine in 1899 and usher in a new, 20th-century sensibility in Russian art.

What does this have to do with The Nutcracker, that simple staple of Christmas celebrations? According to Russian cultural historian Arkadii Klimovitsky, The Nutcracker (which Tchaikovsky wrote a year later in 1891/92), was the first “opera of miniatures,” and its evocation of puppetry, its underlying dark symbolism, its mixture of humans and toys, and even its imitations of 18th-century music were all inspirations behind the aesthetic of Mir Iskusstva. Without The Nutcracker, it is unlikely that Diaghilev, Benois, the dancer Nijinsky, and the composer Igor Stravinsky would have gone on to create the puppet-show ballet Petrushka, one of the seminal ballets of the modern world. Now that we in the West have more open access to Russian scholarship, Tchaikovsky appears to have more direct ties to the formation of 20th-century aesthetics than his reputation as one of the 19th century’s great sentimentalists would have suggested.

Tchaikovsky’s reputation has changed in other ways, too. In 1891, the same year Tchaikovsky made a tour of America, a Carnegie Hall program presented Brahms, Saint-Saens, and Tchaikovsky as the three greatest living composers. By the end of the century, rumors of Tchaikovsky’s homosexuality began to circulate outside Russia, and he came to be thought of in the English-speaking world as a dark, tortured individual, one who may possibly have even committed suicide to avoid scandal and exposure. Recent attention to Tchaikovsky’s letters and diaries, however, shows that while he was certainly a deeply sensitive individual, uncomfortable in all but fairly intimate social situations, his sexual orientation was not nearly the burden on him that inheritance of a Victorian moral outlook would lead one to assume.

While homosexual acts were officially illegal in 19th-century Russia, the laws were virtually never enforced, and potential scandals even among the highest nobility were simply overlooked. In 1876, however, at the age of 36, Tchaikovsky decided that his sexual decadence was a bad influence on his likewise homosexual brother Modest, and he decided to marry. Conveniently, he started receiving love letters for a former student, Antonina Miliukova, and after some courtship, they were married on July 6, 1877. The composer quickly realized that he had made a terrible mistake, and that his sexual preference was not something he could change at will. After 21 days, the marriage still unconsummated, he traveled to see his sister, and when he came home in September, he stayed only 12 more days before leaving Antonina forever. (It might correctly be inferred that Antonina had a couple of screws loose, and she indeed ended her life in a mental institution.)….

Of course, I go on to Tchaikovsky’s mysterious patroness Nadezhda von Meck, and the guy died soon enough after Nutcracker that I could end by throwing in the allegation about him committing suicide by drinking cholera-contaminated water – before telling the reader that it never happened. 

Another effective ploy is to throw in some criticisms of the composer, contemporaneous or current. This has the double effect of making it seem that the composer labored heroically against a lack of appreciation, as all of us do, and also takes classical music down off its pompous pedestal and makes it seem OK to criticize it. The reader can then sympathize with the composer, and is primed to find the music not as bad as people say. For instance, here’s what I had fun writing about Saint-Saens, a composer I heartily loathe:

The life of Camille Saint-Saëns spans ancient and modern France. [Disappointingly conventional start, but it’s a setup.] At the age of 12 he played for the “Citizen King” Louis Philippe, yet he lived to write a cantata about electricity, the first film music by an established composer, and music in praise of the aviators of World War I. Liszt pronounced him the world’s greatest organist, and he astonished Wagner and Hans von Bulow by his ability to sight-read the orchestral scores of Tannhauser and Lohengrin at the piano. Thanks in part to their influence, in youth he was more famous in Germany than in France – his opera Samson et Dalila, widely considered his greatest work, was produced in 1877 in Weimar, and not performed in France until 13 years later. In old age, England and America considered him France’s greatest composer long after his reputation had begun to fade in his own country. 

In short, Saint-Saëns stands astride French music like a colossus, but a frail one, and everyone seems to find fault with him. He was a child prodigy who composed at six and played Mozart and Beethoven with an orchestra at ten, leading the older French musical giant Hector Berlioz to remark, “He knows everything but lacks inexperience.” Unlike most Romantics – Schumann, Chopin, Wagner, Liszt – Saint-Saëns wrote best in the sturdy classical forms of sonata, symphony, and concerto, yet George Bernard Shaw dismissed his music as “graceful knick-knacks and barcarolles” (the barcarolle being a piece that imitates the songs of gondola drivers). The advent of the Impressionism of Debussy and Ravel made Saint-Saëns seem like a dinosaur at the end of his life, and he railed against Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune: “I’d soon lose my voice, if I went round witlessly bawling like a faun celebrating his afternoon.” Ravel returned the compliment: “If [Saint-Saëns] had been making shell-cases during the war, it might have been better for music.”

Perhaps Saint-Saëns’ difficulty in playing nice with others is responsible for the steep decline in his posthumous reputation. It’s difficult to decide even how French he seems: extremely so in languorous melodies like “The Swan” and his fairy-like schrezo textures, the least so in his devotion to sonata form and full-bodied contrapuntal textures. (Gounod dubbed him “the French Beethoven.”) He did fit, however, into a long and illustrious tradition of French organist-composers, most recently embodied in the late Olivier Messiaen…. 

And so on. Of course, if the composer is living, it’s more difficult, because the only good biographical incidents are either dirty or humiliating, and no living composer will admit to them; in fact, few composers’ lives today seem to have much of the really disgusting stuff that makes for good program notes. For Jennifer Higdon I once had to content myself with the fact that she once caught 41 fish in an afternoon’s fishing. But I do often get compliments for writing livelier and more absorbing program notes than average, and the tricks I use are easily appropriated. It’s a good thing for a young musician to know how to do. Too bad the thought of writing books about conventional repertoire bores me to tears.

Post-Rehearsal Musings

Big rehearsal for The Planets today. “Mercury”: lightning fast, ripping atonal scales, constant meter changes from 3/4 to 15/16 to 11/16, different tempos at the same time like 8-against-9 – went great, sounded perfectly secure. “Saturn”: slow, plodding pulse, rhythms in quarter- and 8th-notes – had a hell of a time pulling it together. I remember this from my early days as a competent pianist: difficult music is a lot easier to play than easy music. Scriabin’s fiery D#-minor Etude, with its relentless triplets and huge leaps, used to just fall under my fingers, while the Lento final movement of the Copland Sonata was a minefield of wrong notes. Why is that? Is it just because we practice hard music 20 times as much as easy music, or is it psychological, or what? Too much time to think in-between the notes?

It’s like, someone recently wrote a book about traffic (titled Traffic, I think), and a review quoted the fact that there are fewer accidents at roundabouts than there are at regular intersections: because we all think roundabouts are dangerous, so everyone drives extra carefully. If you want to make people drive safely, you make driving conditions visibly unsafe. If you want music played well, make it horrendously difficult. Whatever effect you want to achieve, aim for the opposite. Reminds me of that Seinfeld episode in which one character decides to do the opposite of his usual impulse at every step, and everything starts to work perfectly for him.
Another rehearsal-inspired thought: you can write a piece in notation software and the MIDI version sounds like crap, making you doubt your sanity; then the performers play it and it sounds just like you imagined, even more glorious. I’m used to this because for the first half of my career I wrote in pencil and had to hear all the music in my head. But today’s young composers who work in Sibelius from the beginning: how will they ever learn to trust their inner ears?

Roll Over, Holst

Planets.jpg

I’ll be on the road and in the air all week, first Philadelphia and then Chicago. Thursday night, as the above poster indicates, will be the culmination of a 15-year dream – though the official premiere of all ten movements won’t come until September. The Planetarium has arranged some awesome-sounding outer-space video to accompany my pieces. Sarah Cahill nudges me that I missed mentioning two recent performances: on May 8 she played my War Is Just a Racket again among the works in her “A Sweeter Music” project on the Wayward Music Series at the Chapel Performance Space in Seattle; and Aron Kallay played some of my microtonal keyboard works at the May 10 Microfest at Pomona College. Even though after the fact, I list them here because, as I’ve said before, when I come to redo my resumé this is the easiest place for me to keep track of my goings-on. Late April and early May are so hectic at Bard, with lots of 14-hour school days, student concerts, student boards, and student crises, that the rest of the world usually slips out of my grasp for awhile. It’s great to have it all over. Sitting on my porch in the world’s most beautiful weather, I lurched back into composing almost without realizing it.

The Orchestral Mystique

I’m not one of the composers who’s allowed to write for orchestra much, so I don’t teach orchestration. But I do have my own little orchestrational experimentation sandbox, which is that my composition students write orchestra pieces that get played when they graduate. So for a year they double clarinets with oboes, and voice brass chords with the horn on top, and ask me what I think, and I mumble things like, “I dunno,” “Looks good to me,” “Yeah, that might work.” And you know what? Almost everything works. I heard two of my students’ pieces last night, and all the things we’d agonized over worked just fine. We were afraid the violins wouldn’t be heard above the brass chords: well, they weren’t at first, and the conductor just told the violins to play louder. One student, god bless ‘im, had a long quotation in the winds and brass of “The Internationale” – a tribute to his deceased Communist father – doubled and tripled in 15 different combinations. Some were smooth, some were rougher, but the rough ones had their charm, and everything was clear and audible. He went through and revised some dynamics after hearing the rehearsal, which is the kind of thing Mahler did after hearing his symphonies, too. You need some common sense, and experience of instruments. I know better than to rely on high flute notes pianissimo, and that trumpets are louder than horns, and that the contrabass’s lowest notes can sound flabby. I check the voicing of brass and wind chords to make sure they’re well spaced. I’m sure there’s a level of really exquisite orchestration one can develop with enough experience; but to orchestrate adequately is just not rocket science. I’m convinced that most of what critics praise as “superb orchestration” in new music is merely the colorful use of obscure instruments in music that has nothing more substantive to comment on. And I resent that composers get turned down for grants and commissions from lack of orchestral experience, because it’s just not that big a jump from chamber ensemble to orchestra. If orchestration was some arcane technique that required loads of special training, then over all these years my students would have fallen into numerous traps and had disasters. It hasn’t happened. 

(Years ago when I had an piece played by a sub-professional orchestra, I showed the score first to a famous orchestral composer and asked for advice. This esteemed personage suggested three changes – two of which didn’t work out in rehearsal, and I had to retract them.)

The problem of writing orchestra music is the same as writing any other kind of music: fashioning a continuity in which the ideas make themselves clear, take time to breathe, and lead from one to another with a plausible logic, resulting by the end in a meaningful and satisfying large-scale shape. Errors in these areas get writ large in an orchestral format, but the orchestra also provides lots of colorful toys to compensate and distract with. Places where the orchestration seems awkward are almost always places where the musical idea wasn’t well thought through, and wouldn’t have worked any better in a string trio. Writing orchestra music requires a ton of work in checking parts, deciding whether to go solo or “a 2,” and so on, but the common idea that only those in some upper echelon with special experience should be trusted with an orchestra is ridiculous.

Silence as Pretext for Pizza

The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago has an ongoing art exhibition called “Several Silences,” and they invited me to lecture in connection with it Sunday, May 31, at 2:00. Here’s their description of the exhibition:

Titled after an essay by the late philosopher and literary theoretician Jean-Francois Lyotard, Several Silences is a group exhibition exploring various kinds of silence. As a discourse, the aesthetic of silence has been thoroughly domesticated within the visual arts. Although silence as a discourse in art arose out of conditions calling for the negation of art, it has subsequently become familiar subject matter no longer operating as the avant-garde ideal it once was. This is not to say silence has lost significance. If anything, it has become a more potent antidote to a culture of distraction. Silence, however, is not the absence of communication. It is dialectically opposed to communication, so that one sustains and supports the other. Inextricably bound to communication, which it tacitly evokes, silence itself is a form of communication with many meanings. There are voluntary and involuntary silences–some comfortable, others not. There is Cage’s silence, which calls for the distinction between clinical and ambient silences. There is silence as conscious omission or redaction. And then there is memorial silence.

I’ll be speaking, surprise surprise, about Cage’s 4’33”: mostly excerpts from my upcoming book, though with a little more latitude for opinion, theorizing, and anecdote. 
After 12 years of living in Chicago, and six of writing there, I left in 1989, and I’ve only been back once, for a friend’s wedding. I can’t wait to have some authentic deep-dish pizza, which left me with a permanently jaundiced view of all other pizza in the world. Of course, the University of Chicago, down in Hyde Park, was “the other Chicago,” not the one I lived and worked and misspent my student years in, though as a young critic I did orbit around Ralph Shapey down there periodically. Musically, we used to refer to the U. of C. world as “Uptown,” even though it was down south, back when people used such words. It’ll be a trip to go back.
Return to top of page

an ArtsJournal blog

This blog published under a Creative Commons license