Dolphin Kazoo

Damn this Business

2016-03-07T13:51:00.002-05:00

I hate rejection, but let's face it, it's part of learning. I got a rejection letter last week and I'm like "what did they want? a more oboe-oriented concerto?" Well, of course they did - it's a fucking concerto, Einstein. I realized exactly where the cadenza and additional melodies needed to go and rewrote it - it's tons better now. Or at least I think so.
What is it about finishing a piece, writing that double bar, only to revisit it in 2 weeks and rewrite everything? What foul deception causes me to think a piece is done before it is? Is it that I can hear the potential in passages without actually finishing them? Am I using placeholder melodies without turning them into actual good melodies? Am I not seeing/hearing the piece from the listener's / performer's viewpoint? Is it the computer making it sound too good too early?

Probably all of the above. It's just that I'm old, and I should be good by now - I should have an established voice that is original and respectable. I shouldn't need to get rejected in order to figure out what a piece needs. But it'll do - Hell, that lesson only cost me $35 - I've paid more to get less!

I am pleased that a wonderful singer and a talented sax quartet are waiting for me to write them pieces. I think I can probably get choral versions of Baudelaire and Ni Pioniraj performed locally. Gotta do the work, learn the business, and not be afraid to write. My actual, real world career as a composer is doing fine.

Album projects are not worth it. Don't need an expensive business card. I can figure out how to record pieces that are ready to be recorded, promote them on YouTube, and sell them on BandCamp. All for a lot less than printing digital coasters. Prestige is an ego trap. I don't want a university job, I want to hang out with university people. I want great performers to play my music - and so far they have been nappy to. I simply have to believe in my talent, my work, and my worth, and soldier on without joining the poser crowd. So many of us want to be *known* as composers instead of actually being composers. And audiences are worse - they don't want to understand and appreciate classical music, they want a lifestyle experience. Program notes and sources of derivation are the most important ways to make audiences feel smart and classy. That's all they want, most of them.

What I like: counterpoint, aching beauty, powerful rhythm, fascinating timbre, nobility, honest sentiment, quality. Why am I doing this? Because it's real. It gives me purpose and meaning. It connects me with the ground of life.

Note to Self

2015-12-23T13:59:00.000-05:00

I don't know what I'm doing this for.
I don't know how to feel good.

I want to win, in general, and this inclines me to enter the commercial music business and succeed. The music that has worked best for me in the past year has been tonal. I can write school music, commercial film and video music, even jazz and pop music. I don't know if that will make me happy or whether the cutting edge music I'm trying to write will continue to be a labor of love. The worst thing would be to start playing the politically correct game of trying to write popular avant garde music. Cue the toy piano and hipster ensembles. This is more importnt than University politics or popularity in the vanity press/ blogosphere.
Those who can, do. Put up or shut up. The fakers and posers will always be there, promoting themselves, cutting you down, winning the grants, avoiding actual musicianship, and telling everyone they're special. Rewarding projects for their diversity rather than their merit. Complaining about bullshit in the music world is just another way of wasting time and avoiding failure.
How to avoid failure - look at the facts: you're not going to fail, because there's nobody to impress. This has a long trajectory. Other people are lucky enough to have an easier trajectory, a place in the world, a gig.
There is a way.
Study the pieces that you actually like and admire. What do they consist of? Fred Lerdahl, Marcos Balter, Dieter Amman, Unsuk Chin, Augusta Read Thomas, Wuorinen, Wolpe, Debussy, Stravinsky, Boulez, Scriabin, Milhaud. Write down how they structure the pieces over time. Ives. Figure out how they use tension and release, rhythmic, timbral, harmonic. Elliott Carter. Only the real musicians. Play Webern, Schoenberg, other piano music. Play it slowly and crappily, but get inside it.
Stop PR-ing and make it happen for your voice. Your voice is simply whatever it is you like to hear. Exciting, harmonically intense, lyrical, colorful, tight music. What's great about the best big pieces. the best tiny pieces?
I'd like to dream big, write big - the first piece I wrote was for orchestra, not a flute solo. A secular requiem to play at my funeral. "Tha Passion According to Saint Nobody." Orchestra, Chorus, soloists, electronics. Sometimes bigger is better. The Messiah gets performed all the time, so does the 9th symphony. Not the keyboard works of Handel or the Middle Quartets.
Bar pieces, too - "Acid Trips" - collages with live vocals, instrumental soloists, lights, dance, fx. Amplified stuff, processed, intense. Varese with MIDI.
Piano pieces and big stuff, and unfinished song cycles. "Autumn songs" and "Baseball songs."
Chromospheres II and III - a symphony.
Then another set. Simple, direct, but yet sophisticated and deep.
Those first composers I mentioned - that's all chamber music. A lost art. What about large scale stuff - what does the intensity expand into - not dumbing down, but scaling up. Take control - you are not at the mercy of some contest, some ensemble looking for pieces, some school of thought. Your own mind is the only school of thought. School of rock. Beauty speaks through your mind.
Esa Pekka Salonen, Bruce Adolf, Mitsuko Ushida, Yehudi Weiner, Gabriel Kahane, Takemitsu, Shostakovitch, Galina Ustvolskaya, Dominico Scarlatti.
What do they have in common - what do they do that I can steal? What is unreasonable for me to accomplish? What is reasonable? Among the reasonable options, which one is the most badass, affecting the hearts of the most people, potentially changing the world?
Facts: I know enough about music already; I have listened to enough good music; I have studied enough scores; I know enough about counterpoint and orchestration; amd, I have all the equipment I need. Fuck all those great composers, fuck theory, fuck expectations, and fuck harmony - just get in bed with the notes and make love.
2016 here I come.
Music can change the world.
Music can change the world.
Music can change the world.

*update: Sat down and started writing the oboe concerto today: 2 minutes of solo on paper, sounds nothing like I imagined it.

Working Backwards from Rhythm

2015-12-17T08:25:00.002-05:00

Watched a fascinating documentary on Strvinsky last night. The subtitles were in Swedish or something, and parts of it were in French, German and Russian, but I got the gist of it. He revisited the studio where he wrote Le Sacre, and said that all he cared about at the time was rhtyhm and intervals - no theory was followed, just his ear. After theorizing about rhythmic dissonance in our century, I think that starting with rhythm might not be a bad idea - the rhythmic dissonances and pulses show you where the cadences are, where the harmonic doissonances go, and where the colors need to be heightened.
Using intervals instead of a harmonic system kept Stravinsky's sonorities simple* and easy to follow because they matched the rhythmic grammar. This is basically how we do a beat in modern pop music, right? Get the drums going, add bass to show the phrases, then sweeten the mix with background color and accents. I'll be going for something like an asymmetric drums/bass track.
So with this new piece, in an effort to break the "thrilling" barrier, we're gonna have rhythm first, and then build up the textures, and then see what melodies may come. At least for one movement. I do still think that melody drives lyric movements, although a case could be made that lyrical passages are just as much driven by rhythm, just slower and not as periodic.
Reading a good book by Fred Lerdahl that sort of says the same - the thesis is that music depends on groupings and sub groupings of cognizable fragments, like language. Linguistics as music theory. He seems to be solving the issue with atonal music that it doesn't say anything. I mean, if you listen to Beethoven, the overriding joy of it is that it is always going somewhere - which is also kind of a rhythmic feature. It plays with your sense of cause and effect, predictably and satisfyingly, or deceptively and devilishly. After writing a lot of atonal music, I can tell you it is frightfully hard to get that kind of compelling momemtum going without harmony and melody.
The most easily accessible atonal music is spacey like Takemitsu/Feldman, timbrally kaleidoscopic like Boulez/Stockhausen, or mysteriously noisy like Xenakis or Ligeti. None of these are bad things, but they don't follow the western classical music tradition. It could be that we don't think the same way anymore and our classical music no longer mimics the egocentric heroic ideal of the Imperial age.
It sucks to be such a wimp, though - I wanna rock.

*The famous chunky chord that is repeated 58 times is not a simple sonority per se - what I mean is that it is not used functionally as harmony. And I'm not saying he couldn't write harmonically; the Firebird is a masterpiece of melody and gorgeous chords.

Music has its own rules - PC sets come after Melody

2015-11-13T14:14:00.002-05:00

Since pitches are meaningless in isolation, the only functional purpose of a pitch class set is to act as a collection of intervals. Intervals to be used in creating some kind of musical texture. I have heretofore been trying to write polyphonic textures with 12 PC sets and smaller sets. The result has been unrelated collections of interesting sonorities. I have then used repetition and elaboration to render them somewhat narrative. Melody has been lacking.

What gives 12 tone music its atonal effect is the illogical sequence of intervals and the illogical simultaneities not the fact that all 12 pitches are being used in any particular order. What makes it annoying is the equal treatment given to pitches, when their sequence always gives them unique meaning. Pitches are not numbers. They take on meaning in combination with certain other pitches. 4+5 = 9 and 6+3 = 9, whereas a fourth and a fifth in sequence sounds a lot different than a sixth and a third in sequence. ditto as simultanaeties (chords).

In music, the number of times a pitch is repeated or appears in a piece is of no consequence. It is how the pitch is repeated and against which other pitches that makes the difference. I am reading Xenakis and the emphasis on pitch centricity through numerical superiority is falling on my deaf ears. It just don't work that way.

The basic unit of narrative in music is Melody. A better approach might be to write a melody, then, just as you would traditionally do, cast it in different rhythmic and harmonic contexts in your imagination. Pick the best ones, write connective material, make it end and you're done. Continuity and form is all about melody.

Does a melody tell us anything about the way it wants to be harmonized? It will usually suggest a traditional harmonization. Part of the drama of your piece will be the fact that you're working against this traditional harmonization or going along with it. Because of our modern ears' tendency to include compound chords, extended chords, sevenths, ninths and elevenths in our harmonic thinking, fugal treatments like Bach are no longer really possible. Modern chords have so many internal dissonances that it is impossible to have internal voices that feel like they are using suspensions, appoggiaturas, and other non-harmonic tones. You are left with homophony. Jazz changes dance around the melody of the tune in a way that is more natural to modern ears. They will change mode, use substitute chords, increase or decrease the rate of harmonic change, and build entire chords on passing tones and neighbor tones. The difference between Gershwin and Debussy is largely a matter of syncopated rhythm versus classical rhythmic textures. They were using the same chords and the same homophonic approach. The addition of dissonant (syncopated) rhythm allows the Gershwin to work despite less adventurous harmonic language.

So the oboe concerto will tell a story with Melody; however, the harmonization may or may not follow what is indicated by the melody (Debussy), and it may or may not be tonal (Schoenberg).

The relationship between the implied harmony of a melody and what you instead chose to accompany it is part of the drama of the piece. It is uniquely musical drama, not analogous to any form of literature or storytelling. A logical extension of what Wagner, Schubert, Beethoven, Chopin, Debussy and Bartok were doing within tonality is to take substitute chord to the extreme and reharmonizes a melody as you see fit as many ways as you want, perhaps resolving to a more natural harmonization at the end (or not).

Revisiting the Oboe

2015-10-22T14:11:00.000-04:00

I have decided to enter a call for scores for oboe and chamber ensemble. I used to play the oboe. Long story. I started on clarinet in 4th grade and they switched me to oboe. I never practiced and I was terrible. At that age, I expected to be great at everything without any effort. Grades came easy so why shouldn't music? Music has since humbled me considerably.

Anyway, I am excited to revisit my old friend. Normally, I would shun an instrument with a 2.5 octave range with limited timbral possibilities that can't do jagged leaps very well. But a challenge is a challenge. It appears that this contest is being run by adventurous musicians who actually want new music, not bullshit. The available instruments are flute/picc, clar/bass clar., trumpet, horn, bone, piano, percussion and strings (quartet). Duration under 15 mins. Music school faculty playing plus pro soloist.

So I listened to the Berio Sequenza for oboe and the Mozart concert in C. The oboe cuts through everything nicely. Strings are in. I've been digging on Cage's Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano lately, so I want in on that too.

What I decided on was oboe/english horn solo, piano, percussion and strings. That way I can channel Cage with piano & percussion imitating preparedness, and also Takemitsu with string orch sfx. The oboe / e.h. will have the lead (it's a concerto), and piano accomp will be expanded timbrally by the percussion and strings. I'm thinking metallophones to emulate prepared piano: vibes, gongs, triangle, cowbells, brake drums, steel drum. And bongoes bc fun. The flute just distracts everybody and I hate the clarinet. Brass I think would over power the oboe. Without other winds, the oboe is the only one singing - strings are bowing, piano and percussion are hitting. And all the metal should make the oboe sound warmer by comparison. The only problem is, no bass. If I could add double bass, I would. It'll have to channel Boulez' Marteau sans Maitre as well . . .

I think with performers available who are on the ball, I will use non-pulsed sections to let them play at their own pace - 4 voices: the quartet, piano, percussion, soloist. Marked off in seconds, use a conductor to start different lines overlapping to create a quasi improvised collage. There can also be pulsed parts of course. I like the way the Berio does this in an even sequence of time markers. Hopefully I can achieve an Ives-like out-of-sync synchronicity. Get them to play off of one another.

I like Augusta Read Thomas' approach to melody and line. Her music is meaningful because of the melodic writing. I want to mix that with the Berio in writing the oboe/ e.h. parts. Her architectures are a little indistinct, though, so maybe a little more pre-composing this time. She writes at the piano and puts a lot of thought into her melodies - I want to do that mostly, by ear, for the solo part, and maybe abstractify the accompaniments.

The Theory of Everything

2015-09-22T09:41:00.001-04:00

I finished Paul HIndemith's book "A Composer's World" over the summer and wrote this note: "Hindemith's book agrees w me. Natural composition is the act of morally and whole-heartedly fitting in to a human community using music. Originality is the graceful way. Technique and style drawn from your collective experience will naturally differ from others in a mysterious miraculous way.
There is a moral component. Your music should elevate the listener to her better self. Noble, engaging, and meaningful music will never fail."

I did one of those puzzles the other day where a long paragraph is reprinted with the first and last letters of each word correct, but the interior letters jumbled up. Music is like that as well. Pitch relationships are nonsense - music is not about pitch relationships or intervallic control music is about energy. It's about beginning and ending points. It's like in chromatic Russian music where the phrase is going along and you know where it's going and between one energy point another there's a jumble of nonsense chromatic cords. It doesn't matter what they are. Bach does this too - in service to line, harmony goes haywire for a moment.

For music to happen energy needs to be controlled in a meaningful manner. Audio energy. Sound. This is first revealed in Bach, where counterpoint rules are broken in the service of phrases that are moving independently toward a common goal. Bach didn't know the counterpoint rules. He knew that lines are energy patterns with beginnings and destinations. A tonal system helps these lines have destinations by observing natural harmonic relationships. Atonal music can only be music if lines exist that are identifiable - that have beginnings, and that clearly have destinations of some sort. This is why Ruth Crawford's music works. She makes the lines identifiable through contour, articulation, and register and gives them destinations based upon differences in register, dynamics, rhythm, density, whatever.

This is why Ives' music is so enjoyable to me; the lines are identifiable, they have nothing in common with each other, except that they are serving the same set of destinations. It's not a collage, it's lines moving toward independent destinations in counterpoint.

This also explains how Debussy can use substitute chords in the middle of a tonal line that has a destination. The chords along the way don't matter: in fact, they kind of tickle because you know what the destination is and they're suggesting a departure from the destination. Bach did it too.

Getting back to Hindemith, our best music doesn't come from us, our ego, it comes from the larger universe through us and is a way to connect and be joyful with others. It's the feels - even for complex music. Think about great players: their main concern is focusing all their skill on expressing the noble spiritual motivation behind the phrase, the special essence of the melody. How can a great player perform if the composer has no such intent, no substantive spirituality? Great players need great music from great minds. What is there to interpret if the mind and soul of the writer are barren? Composers must have the brain of an engineer, the ears of a conductor, the heart of a lover and the spirit of a shaman. To demand that we master the wiles of a salesman is impossible. Incompatible. Insulting.

In my most recent work, Composition in Two Parts, I started with a PC set and came up with a main rondo section. Then I extracted licks from the passage to use in writing the contrasting sections B C and D. Then I went back and made it all swing a little more, adding little pulsed riffs here and there ala Stravinsky, as filler. I am reminded of the dead space in a Monet still life that contained dots of color from the main figures. Kind of like these two, there are quasi-representational figures, but also abstract space, and the pieces work because of the overall counterpoint of color, line, and perspective:

So the new piece is an effort to make counterpoint work in atonality - actually I should stop using that word - abstraction is better. New interesting tonalities are possible with abstract music and that's why it rocks. It helps if all types of counterpoint are employed: rhythmic (syncopation), melodic (species alternation of dissonance and consonance) and timbral (emphasizing phrases with color). These three disciplines are what we need to study, and the past informs us. The USA is up to its neck in interesting rhythms derived from African drumming, the European tradition is a miracle of melodic counterpoint, and Spectralism has continued the 20th c preoccupation with raw sound as sonic material.

The thing is, you don't have to be a savant and completely master syncopation, fugues, and FFTs - you just have to blend a working knowledge of all three into an effective musical language that will be more than the sum of its parts. Beethoven was not a great orchestrator, McCartney didn't use a lot of counterpoint, and Debussy's music doesn't always swing - they blended each of these dissonance management techniques.

The Theory of Everything: Dissonance allows for beauty in music. Its management is called counterpoint: rhythmic dissonance management is called syncopation, melodic dissonance management is called harmony, timbral dissonance management is called orchestration. Sound is only frequency and amplitude over time. How does it become music? Frequency becomes pitch, Amplitude becomes timbre and Time becomes rhythm. Composition is a blending of these three disciplines whether you're composing a simple melody or a complex symphony.

Tao the Ching, chapter 2:

When people see some things as beautiful,
other things become ugly.
When people see some things as good,
other things become bad.

Being and non-being create each other.
Difficult and easy support each other.
Long and short define each other.
High and low depend on each other.
Before and after follow each other.

Melody

2015-05-06T15:20:00.002-04:00

Melody is different than line. A line is a cognizable series of pitches that share a quality, usually timbre, or a pattern of energy perceived as linear. A melody is a line that has emotional meaning, direction, and form. An artistic line.

Melody is what truly holds great music together and unifies it, because a piece of music comes from the melody. Tempo is relative to the pace of the melody. Form is going to, coming from, development of, intro to, coda to, melody. Harmony and disharmony is defined by the pitches of the melody, either sui generis or in the context of a tonal mode or sound world.
This has been the overriding problem with my 12 tone music. For all its benefits in facilitating atonality, the system is too restrictive of melody. Unless the row itself can be made into a melody, which, while possible, is self-defeating. There is no magic to 12-tone writing that creates engaging music without melody. You get lines, but not melodies. You get textures that are cool, but no heartfelt anything. Unless you cheat, and everywhere I cheated has been the best parts.

Pieces write themselves once you have a melody. I've been using "placeholder" lines instead of melodies and this is going about it the wrong way. Dr. T told me to clean up several melodies in the orchestra piece and not to stop until I was in love with each note.

So now what? Back to square one, but wiser and better. I recently finished Chromospheres, which has a rather nice cello melody at the end. I think I need to write pieces starting with melodies and adorning them using my ear and wits in order to create an authentic, heartfelt sound world. Which, BTW, will resemble the abstract stuff because I like it and my ear will be the arbiter. But it will hopefully make more sense.

Will it be tonal? Yes, in a way, but hopefully a sophisticated tonality that fits our times and ears. Maybe atonal at times, but on terms that enhance the melody and its inferred sound world. Spectral analysis may play a part, and if so it will be digital media doing the quarter tones, not instruments if I can help it. It's futile trying to get players who have mastered proper intonation to play "badly." Computers do it better, more precisely and more consistently. Let players be good at what they're good at - interpreting melody. Putting in those micro deviations of rhythm, pitch, timbre and tempo that make melodies even more compelling.

Coming up: Jazz piece for clarinet - piano pieces - women's choir and string quartet - women's choir and ensemble. Songs. Songs. Songs. Maybe one everyday. Baseball songs. Choir version of Threnody - - - - -

Program Notes for April 26 Recital

2015-04-08T11:43:00.000-04:00

David Brighton
Graduate Recital for Masters Degree in Music Composition
GEORGIA STATE UNIVERSITY
April 26, 2015 8:00 p.m. Kopleff Recital Hall, Atlanta GA Reception to follow (Green Room)

Original Chamber Music 2012-2015

Haiku for Oboe, Guitar and Marimba (2012)*

1. Furu ike ya
2. Interlude 1
3. Kawazu tobikomu
4. Interlude 2
5. Mizu no oto
duration: 6:25

This sonatina for oboe, guitar and marimba is in three sections, with a short prelude and two short interludes between the movements. The oboe doesn't play during the interludes. The titles movements 1, 3, and 5 are the 3 lines of a famous haiku by Matsuo Basho (1644-1694): "The old pond / A frog jumps in — / (The sound of the water)." The last line is not really translatable - it is an indication of a "plop!" sound. The music begins with abstract, wandering fragments of melody, representing the random sounds of a quiet place in nature. As the piece continues, the mind becomes focused inward, and enlightenment is triggered by the simplest of natural events: a frog jumping into a pond. The final movement is rhythmic and joyful, the natural result of meditation and centering.

Here is the audio file to play on your cell phone. Turn the ringer OFF, so the phone doesn't ring. It should still let you play audio. People on the ends of the rows start at the beginning. People in the middle wait until the oboe stops playing (first interlude) and then start. Keep the volume about half-way:

Sonata for Violin and Piano (2012)*

1. Allegro Moderato
2. Adagio
3. Vivace
duration: 12:00

The violin and piano in this piece explore more traditional musical gestures and textures than "Haku." The first movement opens with a dramatic statement, followed by music in triple meter: 6/8 and 3/4. About half-way through this movement, it switches to duple meter - straight eighth notes and sixteenths - and builds to a mad climax. The second movement is dreamy and evocative, featuring strange sustained sonorities in the piano and warm violin passages played on the lower two strings. It builds to a desperately violent climax and ends with an unresolved chord. I imagine a lonely scene when I hear this, like a person stranded in a life raft hoping to be rescued, seeing a plane, failing to get its attention, and sinking back into despair. The last movement is completely uptempo and crazy, featuring wild fluctuations in harmony, mad violin playing and fist cluster chords on the piano. The entire violin part to the third movement is a palindrome (halfway through it goes exactly backwards to the beginning), although the piano part is not. I entered the third movement by itself in the 2012 Hilary Hahn "Encores" contest. It didn't win, but Atlanta composer Mark Gresham had a piece selected, so Atlanta was represented!

Divertimento for flute, violin and cello (2013)*
duration: 5:20

In 2013 I discovered the music of Stefan Wolpe (1902-1972), a German serialist composer who emigrated to New York City in 1938. Wolpe's music uses repetition and regular rhythms, unlike the composers of the Second Viennese School generally did (Schoenberg, Berg, Webern). He gave me the idea that it was OK to cheat when writing 12 tone music. Elliott Carter is quoted as saying that Wolpe "did everything wrong but it came out right." This piece was inspired by Haydn's chamber music, especially his many Divertimenti. I wanted to write a light-hearted piece that was rhythmic and used repetition, in an effort to make the dense harmonies of 12 tone writing easier to comprehend. My favorite parts are actually the soft sustained chords that interrupt the piece several times and form the unexpected coda at the end. My future music is going to have a lot more of that kind of timbral expression.

Piano Trio (2012-14)*

1. Prelude
2. Adagio
3. Toccata
duration: 10:00

The music of Anton Webern (1883-1945) is an enigma: it is more precisely controlled mathematically than most other serialists, yet it is, to me, the most emotional and colorful. His String Trio, Opus 20, gave me the idea for this piece. The first movement started out as an expository section featuring strict 4 note patterns against 3 note patterns - very geometrically regular, as Webern might have done. I then wrote variations on this opening using 5-beat rhythms, and then 6-beat rhythms. After writing the middle (slow) movement and the finale (Toccata), there was a lick that I came up with that simply had to go at the beginning. After adding that lick, the first section seemed out of place, so I rewrote it. I compressed the strict geometric patterns into wads of interesting sound echoing the energy of the opening lick. The original geometric "theme" now comes at the end of the first movement, after all of the "variations." The second movement is slow and dreamy. It actually includes some major chords - I was curious as to whether they could be used in atonal music without interrupting the abstract nature of the music. It has a symmetrical A-B-A form, and forms the centerpiece of a symmetrical 3 movement work: each movement is about 3 minutes long, Fast - Slow - Fast. I cheated a lot on the twelve tone method in the last movement, but I felt like imitating Bartok a little because I adore his String Quartets. A Toccata is normally a keyboard work featuring energetic rhythmic passages. This one features difficult energetic rhythms and a frantic ending that brings back the opening lick to close out the piece.

(intermission)

Pomegranate (2015)*
duration: 3:00

I wrote this in my car while sitting in traffic (a work habit that is probably common among Atlanta composers). It is a silly fugue scored for three random groups of singers. The score calls for talking like a pirate, beat-boxing, using a British accent, and various other nonsense. Among the crew are members of the 2013 University Singers with whom I enjoyed the best trip of my life touring France, plus my daughter, Phoebe (22) and my son, Gordon (19). Pretty special for me, I'm not gonna lie.

Tango for Oboe, Violin, Cello and Piano (2013)*
duration: 5:20

I generally think that forcing atonal music into traditional dance forms is a horrible idea. It almost always ends up sounding like a bunch of wrong notes, because you're expecting tonal harmony when you hear dance rhythms. This piece suffers somewhat from that problem, but Tangos are just too much fun. I love the way an entire romantic relationship is often acted out during a single Tango dance, and I have a lot of respect for the Tango tradition in music. I like to break up my pieces by varying the tempo - this piece has lots of stops and starts, like in a traditional folk dance. Plus there's the start-slow-and-get-incrementally-faster thing at the end, like some folk dances do. When I heard this in rehearsal I was very happy - the only version I had was computer-generated, and computers can't dance. These guys do it justice.

a woman holding a small god (2015)

1. bird (Skittish, like a sparrow on meth)
2. jesus (Painfully slow, as if troubled)
3. tiki (Deliberately, like a solemn aboriginal ritual)
duration: 8:30

I heard the poem “why i feed the birds” by Richard Vargas on a podcast, and it inspired this piece. It reads:

once
i saw my grandmother hold out
her hand cupping a small offering
of seed to one of the wild sparrows
that frequented the bird bath she
filled with fresh water every day
she stood still
maybe stopped breathing
while the sparrow looked
at her, then the seed
then back as if he was
judging her character
he jumped into her hand
began to eat
she smiled
a woman holding
a small god.

I thought of two other images of a woman holding a small God: old paintings of the Madonna and Child where Jesus was an infant, and the Brady Bunch episode in Hawaii where Marcia held the tiki idol Peter found (a small God). . . so those are the three movements: bird, jesus and tiki. The writing in the first movement is asymmetric but rhythmic and jagged. This is the way American composer Charles Wuorinen (1938- ) says to write 12-tone melody in his book "Simple Composition" (1979). I agree - atonal counterpoint really pops out when it is non-scalar and non-pulsed. The second movement reflects my complicated relationship to God and is tortured and non-committal. Do I respect the Madonna because she represents the divinity of the feminine in all of us, or do I reject the mythology as superstitious and archaic? I say "Yes" to both. The movement therefore ends with three "Ave"s but a most unsatisfied final note. The last movement is ridiculous. No pitches, just special effects on the flute (pizzicato, jet whistles, beat boxing, guttural flutter tongues). The Bradys have upset the tiki god!

Still Life with Three Unknowable Objects (2014)*

1. Lento Espressivo
2. Forcefully
3. Andante
duration: 10:00

This piece is in three parts, slow - fast - slow, performed attacca. In the first section, I was (again) experimenting with trying to incorporate familiar chords, and even temporary tonal areas, within an atonal piece. In the second section, I used a lot of sharper dissonances and violent rhythms. The last section is dreamy abstraction. I really wasn't thinking of any particular emotional framework for this music, but after it was finished I was thinking that the beginning reminded me of someone trying to deal logically with an injustice; the fast section was the person getting angry and frustrated over the injustice; the last section was the person resigning himself to the situation reluctantly and allowing his soul to suffer. The title doesn't fit that description. I know. But it's a badass title.

The Nothing of Roselight for Viola, Sax and Jazz Combo (2013)*
duration: 4:00

While this piece invokes some of the phrasing and rhythm of jazz, it's not jazz. It is a 12-tone piece with no improvisation. The opening is supposed to paint a picture of a smoky, dark club with musicians warming up and eventually starting a tune. I was trying to explore whether atonal music could employ jazz chords with 9ths and 13ths. If they happen organically within an atonal sound world, that's fine. The temptation, however, is to use them the way Duke Ellington did, which was typically within a tonal context. I wrote the piece for Jan Berry Baker (sax) and Tania Maxwell Clements (viola), two incredibly competent musicians who go above and beyond the call of duty in promoting classical music in Atlanta, especially new music. The title comes from the Persian mystic poet Rumi (1207-1273):

"Death comes, and what we thought
we needed loses importance.

"The living shiver, focused
on a muscular dark hand,
rather than the glowing cup it holds
or the toast being proposed.

"In that same way love enters
your life, and the I, the ego,
a corrupt, self-absorbed king,
dies during the night.

"Let him go.
Breathe cold new air,
the nothing of roselight."

* indicates a premiere performance.

Thanks to Stuart Gerber and Bent Frequency, Phillipe, Jennifer, and Daniel, the Bodhi Buddies and everyone at GSU with whom I have had the pleasure of making music, studying music and laughing about anything and everything.

Leave a comment below. Tell me what you thought of the music.

If you or your ensemble would like to commission a piece from me, I usually don't require payment, just a commitment to a public performance or professional quality recording. Leave a comment and I'll contact you.

New Orchestra piece: Chromospheres

2015-03-13T19:27:00.004-04:00

This piece marks a departure for me. Instead of using a twelve tone set throughout, I based the music on the analysis of a single trumpet note on F natural. From there I mimicked the partials of that sound in the orchestra, and also an artificial sound I created with FM synthesis. The piece contrasts these two "themes" in a capricious manner. I also derived a "scale" from the order in which the partials appear in the analysis of the F natural note. I approximated their pitch to come up with a series of 8 notes that are arguably related to the spectral analysis. The first "interval" produced by the analysis was a Major 7th, so that figures in the elaboration of the sound. The rest of the compositional process was fairly intuitive and random. If the sound needed something I added it. I tried to reuse signature sonorities, like the timpani lick, the flutes/clarinets cluster, and the portamento string cluster. The spectral simulations come at the climax of the piece around 3/4 through. It is still in progress, and the ending I originally had with big brass chords went in the trash. Although I like it and it would make a good band piece. I'd like to enter this piece in various orchestral contests/ calls for scores and hope to actually hear it someday.
The idea of augmenting my abstract textures with sonority-based gestures seems to be where I'm going. I think it's a good thing. I am still skeptical of composers who write using only sound effects and no sense of developing harmony. Ligeti impresses me more than Xenakis, Berio impresses me more than either. He came from serialism.
The sun's thin atmosphere is called the chromosphere due to the colors it gives off, at least during an eclipse. I wouldn't go trying to breathe it.

Harmony as color

2015-03-09T11:12:00.003-04:00

Maybe harmony is color. I've been considering harmony to be separate from timbre, but I think I've been wrong.
When you first hear a V-I cadence or a minor iv chord as a kid, before you knew how to label them, what did you think? Chances are, you just knew it as that final-ish sounding thing, or that majestic ending, or that sad part. Then you learned all these labels for chord progressions and enjoyed being smart.
But the reality didn't change - harmonies resulting from combined pitches are nothing but colors, and perhaps the diatonic triads are the primary colors in our expanding overall sound palette.
Debussy famously said all music is color and rhythm. I think I know now what he meant - our basic tonal harmonies allow for a recurring syntax of melody and counterpoint. But color comes first - the color of a harmonic chord progression. Really - I mean how is a melody written? you start with a harmonic world and write a line that is resonant with it or cuts against it, or both. The color comes first. Either on the piano or in your head.
Rhythm is the timing of colors, which is where all the expression in music is.

Both color and rhythm have consonance and dissonance, tension and release. Pitches don't, except in relation to one another, while reflecting a color. A line of melody must infer a harmonic color in order to be expressive. That's why atonal melody is so hard to write: it can't infer a tonal harmonic color scheme. I think the best 12 tone composers come up with colors and then form melodies organically from them, enhancing the expressive content through orchestration and voicing.
When Ernst Krenek tried in 5 easy pieces to emulate traditional dance patterns w 12 tone music it fails - why? because the lines don't imply a known color the way traditional tonal melodies do. Wuorinen is right to insist that 12 tone melodies avoid all semblance to traditional tonal forms by being jagged and rhythmically asymmetric. It's necessary, given the baggage that most sophisticated listeners carry around.
12-tone music creates new colors (harmonies) and puts them in new sequences (rhythms). Pitch-based colors in the abstract. Done correctly, attention is paid to the colors being created, not the numbers. Then orchestration techniques are used to enhance those colors. One really has to listen carefully and tweak the registers, articulations, dynamics, etc to create worthwhile colors and excessive sequences.
Most composers don't want to be bothered with pitches when it is easier to play with timbres using computers or special effects. Plus you can just use rhythm and noise and have a lot of fun. Or expand on tonal pieces using the new timbres available through processing and extended techniques. Or just write wrong note music to be clever, adding an oh-so-clever Lydian version of a melody, or two keys at once. Yawn.
To me, the $64K question is: is there a knowable system of harmony in "atonal" music? Or are we stuck mucking around in the dark, like 5 year olds, enjoying sonorities we'll never have labels for? Are there cadences that use alternative harmonic systems that we aren's trained enough to recognize?
If there were a harmony of timbre, why not study it by studying the noise and complex timbres we now incorporate into tonal music? What did Xanakis, Ligeti, Takemitsu, Grisey, and Penderecki teach us about noise, complex timbres, etc? What does modern pop music tell us about artificial complex timbres? guitar distortion, EDM, sub bass, sweeteners, effects like phasing, chorusing, compression, delay, enhancement? What does the ear find "tonal" about certain unclassified timbres? When does the ear reject them? What role does rhythm play?
These are the doctoral theses that need writing.

If you turn to Debussy's music, you learn to play with alternative pitch-based colors carefully, using disconnectedness as a formal element. Dreamy, fantastic, random, mysterious, capricious - these are words used when music won't behave in standard ways; when the colors being used are out of sequence or hitherto unknown. A minor 9th chord proceeding by 3rds or half-steps - that's not a traditional progression, but it's beautiful.
Certainly our ear is the arbiter of whether a progression of colors, pitch based or otherwise, has expressive content. One can use pitches and avoid tonality, or one can use noise and unpitched material (microtones, foreign scales, synthetic timbres, clusters). As long as you are not implying a traditional progression, you can even use major chords - it's about sequence and causality, not individual pitch combinations.

Painting is a great analogy - look at the artists in the 20th c who placed colors side by side in certain orders, who did the monochromatic works, and who distorted traditional color schemes. The same thing was going on in post-impressionism. Perpective, realism, line all being blurred in an effort to establish new expressive idioms. And they succeeded. Abstraction works really well on canvasses. Why not in sound?
Bottom line - if you're gonna use pitches, use 12t methods or some way to avoid tonal implications. Then enhance what harmonic colors you invent with orchestration. Perhaps limiting the information flow is a good idea - explore different voicing of a sonority you come up with, different instrumentation, different rhythmic settings. Takemitsu started with serialism and expanded the pitch-based colors he found into settings with un-pulsed rhythm, extra noise, unpitched material, and the results worked. He was a student of Debussy and Messiaen. This is all connected.

Freedom and Control in 20c Music

2015-02-24T10:34:00.001-05:00

I have an assignment to compare and contrast several 20th century pieces for the purpose of discussing freedom and control in 20c music composition. I chose the following three pieces for my argument:

1. John Cage "Imaginary Landscapes #4" for 12 radios (1951)

2. Milton Babbitt "Composition for Twelve Instruments" (1948, rev. 1954)

3. Toru Takemitsu "November Steps" (1967)

Most people think of serialism as the ultimate in control, and Cage's dabbling with the i ching as the ultimate freedom. I beg to differ. Both works exemplify the overall theme of the 20th century - to break with the past. What started with the impressionists and adventurous chromaticists as an artistic movement to break with the egocentric bombastic late-romantic heroics of Wagner, Tchaikovsky and Verdi intensified once Fascism rose up. What was a polite argument about aesthetics became a desperate dash away from German music which became associated with Hitler and Italian lyricism which was tainted by Mussolini.

A parallel can be drawn from the American experience. After 9-11, the producer of Saturday Night Live, Lorne Michaels, opened a show with the mayor of NY at the time to ask if it was OK to be funny. The mayor was given the best line of the night when he said "Why start now?" Point being, we all felt it inappropriate to be sarcastic, funny and tasteless in the wake of a terrorist attack. I imagine this is what Germans and Italians felt like after Hitler rose to power - how could they write like Beethoven while reading about gas chambers? People like Stockhausen, Wolpe, Nono, Berio, Dallapiccola, Hans Werner Henze - they had to break with the past and the present as forcefully as possible. To stay human and sane.

Serialism is a negative control that facilitates a break with the past, with tonality as we are used to it. Hence it was embraced by European modernists. In America, it was embraced by academics, but for different reasons. It was accepted on its own merits by Babbitt, as a means of managing abstract music. This is how Schoenberg initially saw it, as a means of bringing analytic comprehensibility to highly chromatic atonal music, which had been in flux.

Once the serial techniques are applied, however, there is freedom. The remaining choices are where the artist can express himself - arranging the predetermined elements according to your musical taste. Total serialism was rarely total - in Composition for 12 Instruments, Babbitt used tone rows and rhythmic serialism of a kind, but chose which instruments played which notes, and what the articulation would be. His method of rhythmic serialism (durational rows) allowed him to choose how long the note would be - the timing of the beginning of the note was all that was predetermined. He kept to no more than 3 simultaneous notes throughout, and assigned dynamics according to his taste. The result is a beautiful abstract flow that resonates with the trained listener.

Cage used complex methods of determining pitches, rhythms, tempi, dynamics and timbre in "Imaginary Landscapes #4" in an effort to remove his ego and control from the creation process. Part of the revolt against fascism was a revolt against individual egoism in art, and Cage was a Buddhist. In addition to this aleatoric method of arranging the musical materials, the radios used in each performance will of course pick up different signals, rendering each performance unique.

There is no freedom where the artist makes no choice. Ironically, Cage's efforts to remove himself from the equation of producing music restricts his expression far more than serialism ever limited Babbitt, Boulez or Wuorinen. The I Ching processes were another negative control used by Cage to break with the Romantic egocentrism of Western music.

Until late in his career, Toru Takemitsu never liked to use folk music from Japan or folk instruments from Japan, his native land. He repeatedly said that this music reminded him too much of war, specifically WWII. By the time he wrote "November Steps," however, he had decided to make room for the instruments and music of his youth, after hearing a particularly moving performance of Japanese music.

This is where we are today. We have enough distance between us and the first half of the 20th century to approach Beethoven and Wagner objectively and accept them on purely musical terms. We can return to the search for beauty and meaning in music - the angry tantrums of early 20th c artists seem unnecessary to us now. We can, in hindsight, appreciate that abstract music has certain challenging and expressive qualities, and aim to make it tender and natural rather than violent and raw.

Takemitsu's orchestral writing is precise in "November Steps" - he notates precise tempo fluctuations, exact articulation parameters, special effects, dynamics, and exacting note durations. The solo writing, however, is graphic, less precise, and, at one point in the cadenza, consists of a set of 11 short passages to be played in a sequence chosen by the performer. The effect is a stark contrast between the large, precise ensemble gestures and the soloists' intimate, spontaneous dialogue. It is not important to Takemitsu what the soloists play, or in what order, so long as this contrast is brought out. The nature of folk music is that it is largely improvised and casual; the use of random melodic fragments and vague notation suits these instruments and their role in the larger form.

Takemitsu's harmonic language is atonal, but not serialized; having been exposed to serialism, he is free to borrow from that sound world to create an abstract harmonic language of his own. The use of chance operations is not the basis of the piece or part of some theory he is trying to prove; it is a technique that happened to suit this concerto. The orchestral gestures owe something to those composers assembling textures and timbres with no regard to harmony or pitch (Ligeti, Varese, early Penderecki, Xanakis), but Takemitsu uses pitches intentionally and with a sense of tension and release.

November Steps is an example of 21st century attitudes toward the Modernist era (albeit in 1969). The revolutionary break with classical music history, especially nationalistic romantic music, is no longer a thing. We can take from the 20th c what worked and leave the tantrums behind as an artifact. Cage's elimination of the ego seems excessive to us, as does total serialism. Those trends left us with valuable compositional tools and lasting insights. They inform a new aesthetic sensitive to the needs of previous generations but freed from the responsibility to react to an horrific geopolitical landscape.

Atonality and Meaninglessness

2014-12-25T08:50:00.001-05:00

A post I read on Taoism disputed the common view by taoists that the universe is simply meaningless and purposelessness and that this is the final truth. The writer said that Chinese people don't think this way - that the emptiness of existence is like an empty vessel for each of us to fill with meaning on our own terms. Perhaps meditation is a reconnection with substance, not nothingness.
Interesting in light of the debate on tonality. Even though tonality is a natural force like gravity that doesn't mean it has inherent meaning. Mozart imbued this system with meaning, but it doesn't have any inherent meaning. Random tonal triads are meaningless, and logical chord progressions aren't found in nature. Birds sing sweetly but not in melodic passages that mean anything to us.
So it is with 12 tone music or any other method of writing - the system has no inherent meaning or purpose; it's just a way of writing music that one must imbue with meaning. Working backward, one must know that he or she has meaningful art to share and find the system that best allows it to be shared. It's not about finding a voice, its about choosing a microphone for the voice you've had all along.

"Looking Back on the End of Time" performed at Erickson Clock

2014-12-06T10:27:00.001-05:00

My chamber motet, "Looking Back on the End of Time" was performed brilliantly by Bent Frequency with Wanda Yang Temko on December 3 at Erickson Clock in Atlanta. From Mark Gresham's review in ArtsATL:

David Brighton’s “Looking Back on the End of Time” is a 12-minute piece for expanded “Pierrot” ensemble — in this case soprano, flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano and percussion. The text is taken from “La Infana Rasa” (“The Infant Race”) an epic humanistic poem written in Esperanto by Scottish poet William Auld, itself heavily influenced by “The Cantos” of expatriate American poet Ezra Pound.Brighton’s music is unabashedly in the mold of the American serialist movement, which had its heyday in 1970s academia. Lest that categorization scare off the listener, let it be said that “Looking Back on the End of Time” is a well-crafted work, and its abstract style suits well the somewhat abstract Esperanto text. The soprano part is wide ranging and angular, and occasionally downright lyrical.For this world premiere, Bent Frequency percussionist Stuart Gerber stepped into the role of conductor. His clear, no-nonsense style was well-suited to the music, leading an adept performance by soprano Wanda Yang Temko, with instrumentalists Clements (this time on violin), cellist Sarah Kapps, flutist Sarah Kruser Ambrose, clarinetist Ken Long, pianist Peter Marshall and percussionist Zack Webb.

Wanda Yang Tempo singing "Looking Back on the End of Time"

Conclusions; rejection of conclusions

2014-11-28T12:44:00.000-05:00

Conclusions:
1. Atonal music can sound very cool.
2. Atonal music fails to deliver an emotional payoff.
3. Many composers and fans of atonal music seem to have issues with emotion
4. Audiences do not.
5. Composers can write for themselves and ignore audiences, but that is retarded.
6. Composers can pander to audiences and write meaningless kitsch: also retarded.
7. Music gets emotional how? By using the gravity-like unavoidable push and pull of tonality. Nature seems to have given us this field where music patterns react with emotional presets in Western peoples' minds. Certain strains of music are perceived as beautiful. What is beauty in music? We know it when we hear it.
8. Atonal painting - abstract painting - seems to succeed where abstract atonal music fails.
9. Tonality must be reconstructed from within. 12 tone writing imposes a geometry upon music that has no basis in psycho-acoustic reality. Spectralism at least tries to work with reality.
10. Rhythm has its own counterpoint - syncopation against the pulse. This alone can make music beautiful and natural sounding. But not emotional. African music features amazing rhythm but also vocals - thats where the emotional payoff is.
11. Adding text/vocals to atonal music also greatly enhances the chance of success bc emotional payoff.
12. Atonal writers like Ruth Crawford Seeger used contour, dynamics, register, and other cognizable features of lines and built up textures - this led to clusters and shape/timbre music (Ligeti, Xanakis, Penderecki, Crumb) some did it with collage using tonal fragments and percussion (Ives, Varese, Berio). None of the 12 tone composers has a hit, a piece that has resonated with audiences emotionally. Meanwhile, pop music in numerous forms has been enormous and has mastered emotional payoff and lasting appeal. Everybody plays pop songs over and over, unlike classical.
13. Clusters and timbre music depends on orchestras and choruses - chamber music like this devolves into special effects and virtuosity. The new complexity pieces are only interesting because someone is in the room in front of you wailing. It's a freak show.
14. All of the above is a cop out because beautiful atonal textures can be crafted that have an emotional payoff. You just have to keep it simple, honest, amazing and human. Smart people need smart music. Counterpoint moves music forward; without it, something else needs to move music forward. Go back to work fathead.

Spectralism Redux

2014-10-23T19:22:00.000-04:00

I'm beginning to think that Spectralism may hold an answer to my problems with atonal music. It cannot be denied that the sonorities in Grisey's music, plus the way he handles them over time, are engaging. I played Partiels for some fellow students last week and noticed that it started out with a pitch center of E natural and migrated to a Bb pitch center towards the middle before returning. I hesitate to say key, because I don't think spectral harmony works the same as a major-minor key area does. Different rules.
I think that the exploration of upper overtones and their extraction into pitches could form the integration of pitch class collection composition with timbral funhouse pieces - what is lacking in a lot of texture based music like Ligeti, Xanakis, and early Penderecki is any kind of harmonic causality, any harmony whatsoever. These color studies are engaging in spite of their use of pitches not because of them.
And the issue with 12 tone and highly chromatic music is that any structure underlying the surface notes is not comprehensible and therefore wasted. At least the noise compositions have a start a middle and an end. I love Wuorinen's music but it doesn't tell a story and it is awfully dense to have to take in. Again, Schoenberg and Webern both started out writing very short pieces in 12 tone style - I think because they realized form was impossible without repetition and memorable themes, and also because the gestures stood out more if they were presented in miniature. It's like why some really dense foods are served in small portions.
Music is expected to either develop, grow, or change over time. Schoenberg even said comprehensibility was the key. He thought that his 12 tone system provided comprehensibility due to the recurrence of the ordered intervals of the row, but people can't hear that. Not even trained people.
The good news is that there is a new level of engaging, sophisticated harmony in the upper overtones of sounds, and the Spectralists have found a new organizing principle - not a set of pitches, not even pitches, but the partials included in a sound.
And I think the music has to go slower so it has time to develop and grow and explore itself. It seems to me that the pieces that work, including Partiels, consist of sections of sonority exploration of approximately 2-5 minutes each, in series. Which corresponds to the amount of time Beethoven or Mozart spent in a tonic or dominant or development section of sonata-allegro form. It's the length of successful passages in musical storytelling.
Now, completing the analogy, perhaps a movement should consist of an expository sound area, which is explored in a [preliminary way, followed by a contrasting sonority that engages in interplay with the first, resulting in a final, conclusory sound area that feels like an ending, a denouement, an arrival point.
I just finished a wind ensemble piece called All Hail the Glow Cloud, in which I used some spectral chords with quarter tones, etc. Now I think I need to actually employ the philosophy and create a hovering beautiful set of sonorities for choir and tape called "In Love's Godlike Breathing."
Challenge: how gorgeous can I make it and still not utilize traditional chords?

The Rules (subject to immediate complete revision)

2014-09-21T09:51:00.003-04:00

Information overload in 12t music: it exists. People can only take so much - they need reflection time. That’s why Schoenberg & Webern wrote short pieces in the beginning.

Also, different timbres helps keep people from thinking in terms of lines. Lines (melodies) in 12t music always sound like wrong notes. Because in a tonal system they are. And listeners are preloaded with tonal software.

Also, this whole thing is an ongoing integration of eastern ideas into western art.

Takemitsu rules - notice how he uses color washes and figurations alternatingly, in a natural flow that is not hard to follow or tiring to the ear.

Timbral gestures are like studies in color in a painting - 12T passages are like figures - abstract figures. A balance is preferable - spectralism often has too much color study and no rhythm. Wuorinen is hard to consume because it is all figuration all different all the time. Intensity benefits from rests - actual silent space, but static harmonies/patterns as well. It is acceptable bc the 12T parts are so intense. Rothko Chapel - Spread them out, use whatever sonorities you wish as a pallatte cleanser, but heed Takemitsu - no straight major chords, blend in noise and overtones, be an orchestral experimenter. Use spectral shit.

Balance.

Beauty means balance, not consonance.

Nature seeks balance, so does music.

Use your aesthetic instinct to create balanced music.

present magical sounds that have tension and release

those sounds can be comprised of pitches or non-pitches

there is no form. there are just series of interesting sounds. Form says I, the human, am in control. No mystery. Form says, I have something important to say. Form says, I know how the universe is built. All lies.

beauty is the goal. beauty implies imbalance. The 12 tone row is too balanced and equal. We knock it out of balance. The opposite of major-minor tonality. That's why your black belt in ear training is now useless, and you have to resume the position of humble beginner. hard on the ego. (Zen and Archery)

the tritone in debussy, half steps, inharmonic overtones, whatever - the perception of beauty requires both dissonance and consonance - the outer voices in tchaikovsky romeo and juliet - passion

harmonic overtones, combinations that balance

sonorities that are content, balanced. based on context.

if piece is full of dissonance, when will beauty be perceived?

when nature is imitated, when a connection is made reinforcing the feeling we each have of being part of a larger being - staring at ocean, mountaintop view, pondering a crystal, walking in woods. this is beauty - looking upon a beautiful nude, smelling apple pie- life - affirmation, holiness.

music that has a visceral sublimity usually reflects the balance of forces in nature.

"Lost, but Free" for String Quartet

2014-09-11T23:25:00.004-04:00

Freya Quartet performing "Lost but Free" in Charlotte, June 28 2014.

Falling in Love with the Process

2014-07-23T15:17:00.002-04:00

Imagine you're a runner and there is no finish line. Imagine you're playing a sport and no one ever keeps score - there are no runs, points, goals, standings.
Imagine that the only motivation to keep running is that you like running and want to do it well.
Imagine kicking a soccer ball around a field for 90 minutes just because you like running, kicking and passing the ball.
This is what it's like to be a composer of classical music.
There are no goals, no milestones, certificates of achievement that mark the end of a successful career. No Wimbledon, no Super Bowl, no Tour de France. The prizes are all bullshit.
Everything about the life of a composer is a breeding ground for isolation and misery: your work can fail, but it can never be good enough. You can study your art (in fact, you have to), but you can never totally understand it. You can finish a piece, but you're never really sure that it's done.
The only way to survive is to fall in love with the process itself, putting notes on the page, sculpting sounds until they hit you in the gut and seem right somehow.
It's a grind.
I'm beginning to think that I need to absolutely treat it as a job and not a magical playful calling - I think I hide behind the mysterious magical badge of "composer" as an excuse to not work. Set up a time when work starts, sit down with the coffee, plug away at whatever shit you are currently working on, and stop after you meet your quota. It seems to me that an awful lot of writers and musicians operated this way and left us with a lot of work to enjoy.
The fact is we have a moral obligation to do the work and it's a sin to procrastinate.
The fact is that when I do a little bit every day for a week I always end up with a pretty good piece.
The only goal is to put in some work today. Same goal tomorrow. reach those goals and a body of work will emerge. After a long time, the work will be great.
Maybe. There are no guarantees. We could all just be pissing in the wind.
Yay.

Stop succeeding, stop being productive, stop improving.

2014-07-13T11:24:00.001-04:00

Music composition is an ever-ongoing, incomplete process. Focusing on becoming lost in the process instead of having goals and dreams. Can you play me any of Brahms' dreams? How about the Eb Intermezzo?
Happiness, for us, is doing the opposite of what America and academia tells you.
Stop succeeding, stop being productive, stop improving.
Success is money, fame, respect. Success comes when someone else is impressed enough to value (in their mind) something you did. Money represents what other people think your work is worth, not necessarily its actual value. Fame happens when someone else wants to use you to make money. Respect is subjective and therefore dependent on the opinion and intellect of others. Success makes you a slave to someone else.
The passenger pigeon once flourished in North America, in the plains. There were reports of flocks so large that they would fly over and block the sun for ten minutes. Millions of these birds, maybe billions. They were successful as a species. Since there were so many of them, however, people decided to hunt them for food. They were plentiful, and therefore cheap. They were hunted to extinction in 1914.
That's what success brings you.
Composers complain that they don't have an audience and can't get multiple performances. If you asked Giacinto Scelsi, he would say this is the perfect environment. He is known to have avoided photographs, and really only wanted his pieces played once. In practical anonymity, he created singularly beautiful, unique and individual music.
Writing a lot is important, but not productivity. Productivity implies achievement towards a material goal or the approval of others. The correct attitude is play; you should play a lot because playing is fun and fun is the meaning of life. When you write for fun you have all your skill, and will ironically make amazing honest progress and your output will increase.
What do children do when they play? They explore, find something interesting, use their imaginations, all in an effort to entertain themselves or trip out on something. Adults who do this are condemned as lazy hippies. Every instinct we have as Americans tells us to stop playing around and be productive. This is the death knell of art.
How will we ever improve, then? There's no need to improve, only to be more honest. We in America very much want art to be a contest, like sports, or business. It's not. It's a celebration of who we already are. Nothing left to become. You can take lessons for 10 years and write a piano concerto that has complicated notes, or you can record a cat's meow, process it with free software in ten minutes and make great art. Doesn't matter. No one's going to give you a medal for practicing your ass off. Actually, they might, but only if it serves their purposes.
It's not fair. Art is indifferent to effort, work, character, or any of the boy scout traits. A smarmy pedophile like Britten wrote amazing music. So did Michael Jackson. An eccentric like Satie wrote great music. Zappa, in all his sophomoric arrogance, wrote great music. In each case, the music is great because it is honest, playful, and individual.
You can certainly improve certain technical skills like counterpoint, orchestration, and notation, but improving art - impossible. All you can do is get shit out of the way, uncover the art, let it emerge more honestly. People who create art well have a unique connection to the void that lets them see and hear visions clearly. That's the only difference between us and normal people. Many of us feel an obligation because of this ability to use it for good - to share the beauty we have access to. This is, I think, the correct moral stance of the artist.
The only thing motivating you should be an honest compulsion to understand yourself and share the beauty you discover with others, so that they begin to realize how good and beautiful they are. Efforts to produce more, succeed in the world, and improve your music are most often toxic distractions from this noble aim.

The Composer's Prayer:

Immortal God,
as I sit before this blank manuscript paper,
tell me you love me right now, exactly as I am.
Help me to forget about the music business,
forget what people think of me,
forget success, forget discipline, forget craft,
forget the past, forget the future,
and play.
Just play - let me walk through the door into Your backyard and play.
I promise to write down the best of what you let me hear
and skillfully share it with all those other people you love.
Until the day I walk through the door and never come back,
Amen.

Composer Camp in Charlotte

2014-06-28T10:48:00.002-04:00

When an archer is shooting for fun
He has all his skill.
If he shoots for a brass buckle
He is already nervous.
If he shoots for a prize of gold
He goes blind
Or sees two targets –
He is out of his mind.
His skill has not changed,
But the prize divides him.
He cares.
He thinks more of winning
Than of shooting
–And the need to win
Drains him of power.

-Chuang Tsu

"The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns ... instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink." - Orwell

American classical music is basically bullshit.
What I hear them saying is, "The goal of art is for you to gain a NATIONAL REPUTATION. Good artists become POPULAR BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY. Don't say no to an ass-kissing opportunity. Don't color outside the lines. Don't offend the paying audience. Get a website, practice networking, not piano."
Yeccccch.
I had two lessons in Charlotte and both men were kind and helpful. Each steered me toward simplifying my music so that there would be a narrative - start with a recognizable idea that repeated while undergoing changes, by way of either standard musical development or by being presented again with a change of some sort. I think they were both correct that my music would be more accessible that way. One or two ideas. Mozart and Haydn did it. It's been a thing. The audience can follow one or two ideas as they are manipulated. When you do this, they say you have "craft." You are a skilled writer. You are controlling the narrative.
I have been guilty of this. I like pieces that have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Pieces that have musical gestures and counterpoint because its crafty and makes me look good. Maybe traditional form is bullshit, though - sooner or later you’re writing Appalachian Spring.
So I listened to Boulez and Stockhausen last night as a palate cleanser. And Bruno Maderna. And Scelsi. There is a divide between the music Americans write today and the great European abstract tradition. The classic music of the 50s and 60s was unconcerned with audience appeal and standard form. Music just did what it did. There was no meeting halfway.
So I'm doubling down on the weird shit.
If I, with my musical theater background, wrote licks and developed them and told a little story, it would eventually lead me back to lame American tonal music. I mean, once you’re writing a motif to be followed by the audience, why not rewrite Sibelius poorly and call it Blue Cathedral? You’ll sell a lot of copies and then you’ll be POPULAR. Someone will ask you to the PULITZER PROM.
American classical music = bullshit. We brought it on ourselves by rejecting true mind-expanding spirituality and self awareness in exchange for mo' money. And public safety. The mind and soul are satisfied in America when you are consuming something with cheese and not being killed. That’s all we need. No practical American needs to wonder about anything. Imagining things is boring compared to Transformers III or "So You Think You Can Eat a Bug?"

The American music scene consists of academic composers, on the one hand, writing either tonal commercial drivel or incomprehensible intellectual horseshit in order to gain a National Reputation and thereby tenure (money). On the other hand are a bunch of rock and roll guitarists and drummers who want in on the classical thing and try their hand writing bad Peter Gabriel songs for the local mixed chamber ensemble. Sometimes the big-name colleges hire the rockers after they gain a National Reputation. It's hilarious.
Why did Spectralism never gain popularity here? Because capitalism that’s why. Orchestras can sell Adams and Higdon because they write 8th grade band music mixed in with drum circle jams. Spectralism requires original thought to appreciate. Can’t require that of our audiences. And there’s no government arts support, which seals the deal.
IMHO Spectralism was new and interesting. Most American contemporary classical music is not.

take me to your Lieder

That’s not to say it’s boring or poorly written, it’s just not new. The path forward does not involve going backward and morphing the Grateful Dead into Mahler. Or writing a piece based on god awful Baptist hymn singing. With echo. (looking at you, guy whose name I can't remember)
When we eliminate tonal harmony, we don’t eliminate harmonic energy patterns (tension and release) when we eliminate tonal melody we don’t eliminate linear energy patterns (counterpoint) when we eliminate pulse we do not eliminate rhythm (phrases). Each of these elements is critical to effective honest expression; in fact, it is harder to use them freely than to rely on ancient patterns. The ancient patterns don’t work with free music. Free music can’t be bothered. But free music requires a high level of musicianship.
Sure, on Earth, to us, tonality is like gravity - it’s the law. But our tiny planet with its laws of physics is a fleeting chimera - part of a huge energy process that cares not for our laws. Why not write using the instinct you had on Venus 8 billion years ago as a microbe? Perhaps your current instinct is unimportant. Write from the point of view of a Higgs boson.
I can see now why some guys use graphic notation to describe energy patterns they want in their music. I get why Stockhausen used those boxes in Carre. The sound needs to be freed of convention, not boxed in.
New idea: musicians that walk around with miked instruments and portable sound gear: little battery powered amps, processors, etc. taped to them or in their clothes. That would be totally fun. You could do it outside. It would be like a mobile sculpture - changing sonorities based on where you were listening.

Listening to Stockhausen as I write this - it’s so liberating. No way to predict the next event. Yet I hate Cage. I guess what I like is when a first rate musician like Boulez, Stockhausen, Carter, or Wuorinen writes freely in a non-traditional idiom. It makes a difference that the composer actively engages all of his training and experience with art music in writing the work. Chance is boring. It’s not enough to just let the work be and call it music. It's not music.
In that regard, what does it matter what materials are used if you have trained to a high level? - perhaps spectralism is like sculpture and 12 tone is like painting or vice versa - both something a good visual artist can do whenever. Boulez is certainly concerned with color and developing timbral gestures. Webern was. Energy patterns in pitch enhanced by timbre enhanced by rhythm enhanced by counterpoint enhanced by harmony.

Note to self: Be honest. Be fun. Practice piano. Share amazing shit you come up with.

Gounod's "Ave Maria"

2014-05-08T22:06:00.001-04:00

A professional musician I admire posed this question today: "Does Gounod's adding a melody ('Ave Maria') to ride atop Bach's Prelude in C from WTC I display an excess of imagination or a lack of it?"
While the question coyly invites a verdict on the artistic skill and personal character of Charles Gounod, my answer would be that Gounod's adaptation evidences neither a surfeit nor a deficit of imagination, but was a sincere attempt at modernization.

Before directly addressing the proffered question, I cannot help but address some preliminary points, so please forgive me:

Preliminary Point Number One: The Ave Maria is the most important prayer to kabillions of Catholics. Gounod had some pretty big stones to set it over music written by a diehard Lutheran composer just after the Protestant Reformation. France, at the time, was complètement catholique.

Preliminary Point Number Two: In Gounod's version, the "Hail Mary" is being forcefully sung at the top of the singer's lungs over a meticulously crafted jewel of a prelude. Bach would not have countenanced this, and, had he been present for the premiere, may have kicked Gounod's ass.

Preliminary Point Number Three: Gounod's adaptation of the Bach prelude and transformation into Ave Maria (The (freaking) Wedding Song) is perhaps the most popular piece of classical vocal music of all time. Also, listen to Gounod's Romeo et Juliet before you tell me he couldn't write. If you're reading this, and you're a composer, you're not as good as Gounod.

Preliminary Point Number Four: Besides being popular, Ave Maria is an emotionally compelling, well structured, beautiful piece.

Preliminary Point Number Five: So is the C-major prelude from the WTC Book One, without the side of fries.

My acquittal of Gounod on the charges of both over-indulgent imagination and artistic laziness comes down to the fact that there are different types of beauty. In Roger Scruton's book, Beauty, differences between perceptions of beauty are identified and contrasted. Without leaning on labels like "Romantic" and "Baroque," it can be safely asserted that the C-major prelude has a singular beauty, and so does the Gounod Ave Maria. The Bach has a mystical, spiritual beauty based upon a succession of chords presented in a graceful repeating arpeggio pattern, elegantly anchored by a chromatic descending bass line. It is a masterful understatement and therefore powerfully moving in its own demure way. If Gounod's work can be described as a passionate appeal to the Virgin Mary to intercede on the singer's behalf for the forgiveness of sin, Bach's prelude is, by contrast, a quiet, modest prayer, whispered by a child with absolute confidence that God is listening.

The specific question, is, of course, whether Gounod's adaptation evidenced either an abundance or failure of imagination. I cannot convict Gounod of an overactive imagination. He did not materially modify the Bach at all. A Romantic composer guilty of an overindulgent approach would have overemphasized the diminished seventh chords, extended the suspensions over the dominant pedal point at the end, and perhaps modified the arpeggio pattern to make it more florid (which some god-awful arrangements of the piece actually do). An over- imaginative Gounod might have inserted accelerandoes, rallantandoes, dramatic pauses, or fermatas. He might have added additional verses, a tacky introduction, or a vocal cadenza at the end.
To the contrary, Gounod showed respectful restraint in his adaptation. The reason the adaptation works so well is that the serene, confident, spiritual underpinning provided by the Bach prelude within a static registral space contrasts the dramatic contour of the vocal line. One feels that the Gounod (when sung in tune) is a fervent yet sincere expression of faith.
Many Romantic arias are like bad birthday cake from Publix: lousy yellow cake with elaborate colored frosting and cheap festive baubles on top. The Gounod is actually more like good cake, with modest, yet delicious icing. A over-imaginative composer would have brought us a "Hello Kitty"-themed travesty.
I cannot accuse Gounod of a lack of imagination, either. It is no easy task to write a coherent, convincing melody over an existing piece of music. Gounod's tune reaches a climax at the right spot - the tonic chord in I64 position after the vii of V over the pedal point. The melody builds evenly from the opening of the piece, it reinforces the text, and it captures the spirit of fervent prayer. This took imagination and skill. It's not just an arrangement. A lyrical line was extracted from the chords of the C major prelude and engineered to be singable and emotionally effective. I would challenge you to write an effective, modern melody over, let's say, Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings and do as good a job as Gounod.

My answer to the query must therefore be "none of the above." I cannot accuse Gounod of a surfeit of imagination or a deficit thereof.
I believe that, as a 19th-century thinker, he liked the Bach piece but thought it inadequate. Yes, I actually think he believed he was improving on the C major prelude. I don't think this was arrogance on his part; I think that 19th-century Romantic composers held that good music was necessarily emotional and dramatic. Most of them would have dismissed the Bach prelude as a quaint, ancient keyboard étude that had some potential if you added some pizazz. (from Ger. pizzatzen)
Was Gounod gilding the lily? I think so, because I love the C-major prelude exactly as it is. I can tell you when I first heard it. I had no early keyboard training, so it was not until I was taking a college theory class in Danbury, Connecticut during my senior year of high school. I initially thought it was a modern piece. I thought the chord progression was jazzy; there were Major 7th chords, interesting dissonances, and a modern style arpeggio. When I learned it was Bach, I was very impressed and ran off to learn more Bach. For a simple piece that any intermediate piano student can play fairly well, the C major prelude has remarkable staying power. To this day, I love sitting down and playing it just to relax.
Why is it, then, that I don't also feel that the piece is unworthy of serious consideration as art? After all, western art music since Gounod has been even more complex and emotionally visceral. The answer is that we have come full circle to a neo-Baroque era. Musicians today rarely chastise a simple, beautiful piece for being unworthy. Nineteenth-century thinkers, on the whole, did not respect folk music; they did not see the simple as sublime. They believed that Man improved on everything by making it big and glorious. Gounod's age was an age of imperialism, when classes of people believed themselves honestly to be better than other classes of people. Why? Because they had more complicated stuff, their engineering was better, their literature was better, their government systems were better, their manners were better. They had more money. Superior people in the age just after Napoleon in Europe expected music that was overtly dramatic, enjoyable upon the first listening, programmatic, and emotionally athletic. Mysticism was seen as Oriental and inherently inferior.
Most of us no longer think that way. I call my atonal music "neo-Baroque" because it is abstract; that is, it is expressive for its own sake, on its own terms. It is not neo-Baroque because it imitates the harmonies in Bach and Vivaldi; it is neo-Baroque because of its spiritual orientation and disdain for overt emotional outbursts and sentimentality. It is not devoid of emotion; its emotional space is that of wonder, rooted in our modern knowledge of our place in the universe. It's the feeling of awe provided by the Hubble Space telescope or the Large Hadron Collider.
It is very different from music of the Classical style (in the Charles Rosen sense), which was concerned with the orderly, polite compartmentalization of themes, counter themes, and development sections common in Mozart, Haydn, and CPE Bach. I cannot box in music with hedges and fences like a French royal garden; I do not pretend to understand music well enough to control it in the least.
Gounod and his 19th century contemporaries may have thought that Man's purpose was to control everything and that it was pleasing in the eyes of God when we destroyed nature to make way for glorious industrial achievements and slave plantations, but I do not think that way, and neither do my learned contemporaries. Gounod was an innocent product of his time; I am a product of mine.
What Gounod did to Bach was appropriate for the 19th century. What Bach did was appropriate in his era. What we do today must draw on the genius, good taste, and hard work that these composers put in, but we must also be honest to our own worldview. In my opinion, our contemporary reverence for the universe and its wonders - the immense and microscopic - is akin to Bach's reverence for God. If we play our cards right and work devotedly, perhaps our music will approach the sublime heights of the first Baroque.
If not, it will at least be honest.

So Language is Not About Communication

2014-05-01T13:04:00.000-04:00

Here's the thing about Noam Chomsky - I think he's brilliant, and I agree with his politics, but he speaks no louder than a whisper. That's kind of a nice break from all the screaming blowhards in the world, but I have to turn my iPhone way up to hear what he has to say, which can be inconvenient when I switch back to music or whatever. Ow.

On this particular YouTube, Chomsky was asked a linguistics question. One forgets that he is a linguistics professor at MIT, not History or Politics. He said that the consensus, after careful study, was that human language did not evolve as a means of communication, but rather as to tool for making sense of the universe. This changes everything.

Here I was all worried about how atonal music can form a narrative, tell a story, mimic language in an effort to communicate meaning. Perhaps I was chasing a red herring down the wrong rabbit hole while barking up a glass tree gathering no moss. Maybe the meaning we get out of music is not a message communicated through the performer by the composer, but a self-referential note to self, enjoyed by the performer and listener as an extra added bonus.

That's certainly what it feels like while I 'm doing it.

Chomsky said that language also serves the purpose of communication, but not very efficiently. We use it to understand ourselves mostly. Animals who are taught to use language don't do this - they warn each other about danger and share info on food and mating opportunities - things you would expect to give them an evolutionary advantage.

So what of form and structure, if the purpose is not to facilitate communication? It made me think about form in Bach - there really isnt any if you think about it. He routinely starts out establishing the key with a I - ii - V7 - I passage of some sort - or - states a fugue theme that likewise establishes the key. After that, he is as capricious as any impressionist or improviser. No modulation is taboo to Bach. Temporary flirtations with other keys, mostly related, sometimes not - sometimes ending in a different key - there's no structure except what the music suggested to him at the time. Just like Debussy.

After Bach, of course, the polyphony was largely jettisoned in favor of strict courtly control and sanity. Ego took over. Then with Romanticism, emotion took over. Music went from Superego (Baroque) to Ego (Classical) to Id (Romantic), and these changes were reflections of the changes in the world view of composers, which reflected the mindset of people in general.

Which means we are in a neo-Baroque phase. Our knowledge of the Universe has expanded to outstrip human existence, human control, and human heroism. Once again, we know ourselves to be at the mercy of much larger forces. This time, it's black holes, deep space and the speed of light instead of God. We are submitting our selves to the mystery of spacetime, and our music will continue to reflect this. Music about music is coming back - free of cultural subtext, human pleasure or pain, free of ego. Beautiful in its natural mystery. Takemitsu, Murail, Wuorinen, Saariaho, Wolpe, Boulez, Babbitt - this is unique music that resists analysis - as does Bach.

Neo-Baroque pieces start when they start, establish their notch in spacetime and then just go, will-nilly, capriciously, wandering in directions dictated by what sounds amazing. Without the need to communicate, music is free to be music, to be a contrapuntal mess that makes sense only on its own terms. The composer is its servant, and it explains his own brain, soul and universe to him. Others are invited but not required to participate.

As a corollary, such music works best when the composer is honest - not trying to put on a false face musically and imitate another or describe something or emote something. Music is interesting enough without our egos getting in the way. The composer who gets her ego out of the way can write the music of the spheres.

Atonal Tension and Release: it's still a thing

2014-02-25T11:13:00.004-05:00

Had an epiphany yesterday.
Atonal music can have harmony if you broaden the definition of harmony to tension and release by any means.
What is harmony, but a pleasing flow of tension and release, dissonance and consonance? Over different contexts, it remains essential to music: in Jazz, different chords are considered restful than in Bach, but there's just as much tension and dissonance - it's just subject to different local rules. A major 7th chord can be tonic in Jazz but not in Bach. In Debussy a dominant 7th chord is not always a V chord as in Schubert or the Beatles. And again, different local rules apply with respect to parallelism, tritones, modulations, and cadences.
Point being, harmony, in a larger sense, means something more than diatonic tonality. It means you are using pitches in a manner that creates meaningful tension and release in a given context.
What if you could just construct phrases that start from a resting place, go through tension and return to rest, but with abstract harmony. Then you would have atonal harmony. Conceptually - and perceptually - you would be going from rest to tension back to rest, but you wouldn't be doing it in the context of C major.
I think this is what makes Webern's music so good - he shapes those short phrases. So does Takemitsu, and he even expands the idea of tension to other parameters: what is rhythmic tension and release? what is timbral tension and release? what is textural tension and release? What is tempo tension and release? Hell, one long note can have tension that resolves into peacefulness. Dynamics, expression, special effects, all these things can be thought of as dissonance or used to create tension.
Pulsed rhythm going to asymmetric rhythm is tension building and releasing. Sul tasto going to sul pont and back again is tension and release.
So just as Ives taught us meta-counterpoint, perhaps we atonal writers need to embrace meta-harmony. Use 12 tone methods, but be informed of how the phrases are shaped - make them breathe and express things by being aware of tension in its many forms. Shape phrases with articulation, rhythm, timbre, pulse, dynamics, timbre and harmonic density.
Frankly this concept carries over to spectralism as well. The more successful pieces by Grisey, Murail and Dufort are studies in transformation of timbre from restful natural harmonics to what they called inharmonic sonorities and back again. When is that music effective? When it takes you on a color journey through a chord or texture that fascinates but then resolves and forms a breathing pattern.
Who to study to perfect this theory? Webern, Bartok, Stravinsky, Wolpe, Wourinen, Schoenberg, Takemitsu, and Gerhard. Ives, maybe. What makes a phrase or passage musical? Not the chords, but the flow. The flow needs to make sense. If you are using pitches, the intervals and counterpoint need to accomplish an alternating tension and release that resonates with the listener.

New Music is not Comfort Food

2014-01-30T20:45:00.000-05:00

Music lovers are like patrons at a restaurant. Some order comfort food - Mozart, Schubert, Tchaikovsky. Mac and cheese, a cheeseburger, meat loaf. Cooks know how to bring out the flavor in these foods and make them delicious. Conductors and performers know exactly how to bring out the best in this amazing music.

But as good as pizza is, you have to try something new and exotic once in a while. Yes, it might suck, or it might not be to your liking. That doesn't mean all food you experiment with will suck. It's worth the risk to maybe find an amazing, mysterious new flavor like curry, or babagnoush, or paella.

We can't make new music into comfort food - a Beethoven Symphony - and that's a good thing. Our job is find exciting new flavors, fusions, pairings, and prepare them with all the skill we have. Give us a chance - you realize how long people have been making meat loaf? Of course they've got it down to a fail safe recipe. My new recipe will take time to get amazing, too.

I truly believe that the problem with acceptance of atonal music is simple lack of exposure. I have pretty good ears, and it took me a long time to get into chromatic abstract music. Now it makes perfect sense to me. I listen to it for fun. And for longer than 10 minutes.

Sushi should not try to be meat loaf, and new music can't be diatonic. It needs to be true to its own nature. Our music cannot lapse into sentimental tonal passages. First, there's too much baggage that comes with a plain ol' melody, which distracts the listener from the structure and content of the new music. Second, it can only fail - it can only sound like wrong notes, because you're gonna gussy up that Gershwin-esque piano riff with a few dissonances to make it fit your texture and people will only think of how much better Gershwin is.

Simple Composition advocates asymmetric surface rhythms and wide leaps. The hard part about that is that performers rarely have enough time to practice your difficult rhythms that they can't feel, and they practice scales all day, not minor 9ths. I envy those of you with access to talented professionals and semi-professionals, but the folks that agree to play my stuff for free don't budget more than 45 minutes to practice it. My choices are therefore: write simpler music, pay professionals to play the hard stuff, or write the hard parts for computer and give the soloist easy, expressive lines. And the problem with that is - simple atonal music is really hard to make sound good, I'm not made of money, and computer realizations of parts that humans should be playing are uninspiring.

Wuorinen's music sounds amazing, but have you seen those parts?? If I handed any of my friends a piece like String Sextet or New York Notes, they would never speak to me again.

The new piece, "Still Life with Three Unknowable Objects" came out great. I wrote it for a call for scores from a Portland, Maine Chamber Music Festival. It uses a derived set based on 342, and I set up the movements to be 3, 4 and 2 minutes long (9 total) (turned out to be 9.5) I'm beginning to try and integrate timbral oddities as part of a search for sonorities that go beyond pitch combinations. Takemitsu was so good at that, also Messiaen. Pitches contribute to the novel sonorities, as does noise, texture, articulation, and rhythm. But music does not live by pitch alone. I think that 12 tone rows can be used as source material to create compelling colors just as much as anything else. And I need to make peace with color as part of the sound object gestalt - it contributes to meaning and beauty.

In the last piece (Flute Trio) I went a little overboard breaking the rules toward tonal passages. This time, the row was very half-step-ish, and I went for complex unknown sonorities instead of teasing out a pretty major seventh chord or whatever. I need to improve on this and learn how to expand an effective sound-object-gestalt. How to write its compliment. How to keep the ideas identifiable and simple (Stravinsky!!). Spectralism has nothing on Takemitsu and Messiaen, who used notes and expressive performances to create meaning and depth.

The Flower-Arranging Theory of Music Composition

2014-01-07T12:16:00.001-05:00

I got turned on to Stefan Wolpe this month. It seems he addressed abstract music the way I do - starting with 12 tone ideas but then developing them musically, without regard to pitch counting or strict serialism. The result is music of stunning musicality and enjoyability. I think it represents a happy medium, the kind of rapprochement I have been seeking.

1. Music starts with a germ, or seed, either tonal or atonal;
2. That material is nurtured by developing it according to what it seems to want to do (intuitively);
3. The results are pruned - edited for usefulness, beauty, contrast;
4. The remaining flowers are prepared for arranging by suiting the material to instruments and what they can do;
5. The developed material is arranged in a form suggested by the flowers themselves (abstract, geometric, symmetric etc.)
6. The arrangement is trimmed to fit in the basket and look nice.

I think what is most important is the initial gestalt of motivic recognition, rather than any pitch content per se. People recognize a lick based on its energy and shape, not what particular intervals to contains. That shape, that contour, that expression of musical gestalt will be recognized in its development if allowed to grow organically. I keep using the plant metaphor, because I feel it when I write - proper ideas for extending, contracting, playing around with a lick come to you by inspecting it, playing it, toying with it. If you impose your own ideas upon it, you fail. It sounds wrong.

This theory is universal, it covers tonal, atonal and electronic timbral music. The brain finds meaning in objects that evolve. The sound-object resonates with the heart, and changes to the object affect the heart. Growth is something we recognize and appreciate. The clash of contrasting sound-emotion-objects is the most compelling. That is what Wolpe sought - conflict, dialectic contrasts in his music. Drama. A force being affected, evolved, through it interplay with a second force, a contrasting sound-object. True of the two themes in a Mozart Sonata-Allegro movement, true of the tunes in Prelude de l'Apres-midi d'un Faun, true of the motives in the Fourth Bartok Quartet. True of Webern's Op 27 Piano Variations.

I like pure abstract music like Babbitt, but the brain perceives it as a single abstract sound field, rather than a drama. The most engaging music is dramatic, narrative, discursive. The way to achieve this with abstract music is to start with an atonal seed, or perhaps two contrasting sound-objects, one pitched, and one of indeterminate pitch - whatever - and develop the two ideas over the course of a reasonable period. The brain of listeners will latch onto the seed and follow its development and interplay with the other sound idea(s).

For me, in order to write chamber music that players will be able to put some feeling and intensity into, the rules of 12 tone (to the extent there are any) have to be bent and occasionally tortured. Instinct plays a very important role in developing these sound objects. It has to reign supreme over intellect for that part of the process.

My latest piece was an initial experiment with these ideas - it uses a row, a friendly row with thirds, but after I write a few pages of licks and stuff, I played around with what I had with the intent of keeping it pulsed, light, and easy to play. I had heard a delightful Haydn flute trio and wanted that kind of feel. I think it worked in ways, but is also a bit too tonal. But I don't mind a little of that if it is warranted by the sound objects, the initial material. And I think in this case it was. I think my music is better if I'm just allowed to play with it without worrying about repeating notes, octaves, using the whole row, etc.

12 tone methods are a tool. I get to use the tool however I want. Nobody cares which screwdriver was used in building a toaster or assembling a statue. The end result is all that matters. The end result might be representational (tonal) or abstract (atonal to some degree). The most effective modern music has been somewhere in between. It has used pitches, not microtones. It has used interesting clusters of pitches in an expressive, musical way that performers can enhance.

Think of the difference between Stockhausen's electronic work and that of others. Why are his soundscapes so good compared with the rest? KS developed ideas musically, even though they were abstract ideas involving tape manipulation or graphic squiggles for a percussionist to flesh out. It wasn't the material, and it wasn't the scales or chords used - it was the organic development of recognizable musical gestures. If the listener recognizes the initial sound-object, hears it grow, follows it as it interacts with other forces, and enjoys the ride, boom.