How to Tell if You’re a Professional Composer

David January 25th, 2012

Earlier this month I was asked by a man who identified himself as an amateur composer to play his “Variations on Happy Birthday” for a videotape to be given to a friend of his as a birthday present. As he was paying, and I had the time, I agreed to do it. Over the several days I spent practicing, I had plenty of time to think about what it might mean to be an “amateur” composer.

Can we all agree that, in this culture, “professional” definitely has it over “amateur”? And yet, while I’d definitely consider myself a professional-level composer, I can’t say I’ve made much of my living at it. I know lots of composers with benches on that same boat. So…?

Well, the “Happy Birthday man” (as my wife referred to him) didn’t read music—this whole fifteen-minute piano solo had been transcribed by a colleague of mine, who had in turn referred him to me. Reading music is not a requirement, though—exhibit A is Irving Berlin, of course, one of the best-selling composers of all time. And, without having any idea of the actual statistic, I’d venture that there are lots and lots of people making and selling music without being able to read a note these days—maybe more than can read music.

But these variations were variations “in the style of”—mostly late romantic and early 20th-century music. I heard (and he and I talked about) Chopin, and Brahms, and Prokofiev and Copland, and I’m pretty sure I spotted a little Lizst, and who knows, maybe Shostakovich. This is what “Happy Birthday man” listened to, and this is the music he wrote.

Well, that must be the difference. We professional types are all trying to carve out individual sounds, to find our own voices.

Except—

When I was in school in the early 80′s, there was a definite orthodoxy about what kind of avenues you could travel down in search of your own voice. I distinctly remember being told not to try and write a rondo; being scoffed at for presenting a piece with a key signature; and generally being made aware that Real Composers didn’t write tonal music. I also remember our teacher addressing the composers’ symposium on the subject of the heretic George Rochberg, who had recently, after an perfectly respectable atonal career, begun writing music that sounded a lot like Brahms. His final comment: “I hope none of you grow up to become little George Rochbergs.”

As I understand it, this attitude has pretty much all gone away. While the imperative to find one’s own voice is still there, tonal centers, and even keys, are admissible parts of the toolkit. It was with this in mind that I recently decided to write a sonata for cello and piano. It uses sonata form only in the broadest sense of two theme groups, a development and a recapitulation; having gotten to this age and weight—and developed my own voice thus far under the influences I have—I’m not about to start modulating to the dominant. But it’s been a strangely liberating experience.

Except of course, if I wear my other hat—my musical theatre songwriter hat—I have no idea what the fuss is about. In that culture, yes, it’s a good thing to have an identifiable voice—except that if a show demands it, and many do, pastiche is the order of the day. While we were mixing the demo of All About The Kids at PPI studios, Chip, the engineer, an old friend, was teasing me about the various past-their-glory rockers I was obviously channeling. (Chip has recorded and mixed my music for over two decades, from my attempts to write for Muzak to my Emily Dickinson songs for string quartet and soprano. But his favorite sessions were the ones to record and mix my songs for Country Critter Jamboree, a big-headed-costumed-character show for a now-defunct amusement park in Massachusetts. To this day he refers to me as “Mr. Critter.”)

In closing, a cartoon I clipped years ago on the subject (the stains are not part of the original; this is what happens when something gets kept on my desk for years):

Maybe it’s not so bad to be an amateur after all…?

 

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Words With Friends, Calligraphy & a Mystery

David January 4th, 2012

I recently started playing “Words With Friends,” the hit online game that got Alec Baldwin in so much trouble. A high school classmate challenged me to a game, and since it was the holidays, I thought, “Why not?”

I was astonished to learn that it is a direct ripoff of Scrabble. The bonus squares are laid out on the board differently; some of the letters have different point scores; and you can’t bluff or challenge (the computer just rejects any word not in its dictionary). Other than that—identical. Presumably, just different enough to avoid a lawsuit. So the question immediately arose: why has this game so thoroughly outpaced the online version of Scrabble?

Having now played both a few times, both on a computer and on my phone, I can report that Words With Friends has a noticeably better playing experience. Rearranging tiles is easy (and well-animated) in WWF, difficult in Scrabble. The chat interface in WWF works as you’d intuitively expect it to; the iPhone’s Scrabble app is the only text-using app I’ve encountered that doesn’t use the iPhone’s autocorrect feature, and scrolls your chat comment out of the single-line text field as you’re typing it. Frustrating! (Scrabble does get a point for allowing you to turn the sound effects off.)

All that—plus marketing—probably explains the old stalwart’s defeat at the hands of the challenger. Structurally, they’re nearly identical as games. The surface is different though, and a more appealing surface will beat out a lesser one any day. I would rather listen to any given piece of music performed by a string orchestra than, say, a kazoo choir, no matter how gifted the kazooists.

I have been working on structuring my music more consciously; I’m currently half-way through a sonata-shaped piece in four movements for cello and piano, and I think the whole piece is going to revolve around tension between B and C, with the different movements having different tonal centers in relation to those two pitches. I’m quite happy about this scheme, because it gives me a way to tie the whole piece together, gives an arc to it, and lays down something I can push against to get restarted when I get stuck writing it. But I’m trying to keep in mind that that’s unlikely to be at all noticeable to the vast majority of listeners who don’t have perfect pitch. That can’t be what the piece is about, in other words. The structure has to be taken for granted from the listener’s point of view, as though the piece were a building. “Wow! I sure appreciate the way the walls hold up the roof!” is not something an architect expects to hear.

By way of further illustration, I’m offering the piece below, Calligraphy Circle, my submission to a competition for one-minute pieces  for clarinet and piano (a MIDI realization). The competition specified that the pieces should in some way be about Japan.

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Hopefully something like the spirit of the image to the left came across. Knowing that the clarinet part uses the five notes of a Japanese pentatonic scale, transposed all the way through the circle of 5ths from the beginning of the piece to the end, and the piano part does the same thing backwards, doesn’t make the piece sound better, does it? Now, the fact that the rhythms in the clarinet part gradually change from very short and very long notes at the beginning of the piece to middle-duration notes in the middle and then back, that you might have heard and appreciated. (If so, thank you! I put that there.)

 

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On an unrelated note—looking at my website’s statistics for the year, I notice that my song “Our Lady of the Interstate” (from Dreamhouse,  words by Barbara DeCesare) has been streamed more than eight times as much as its next nearest competitor. Eight times!  That’s not quite going viral, at this level—going vaguely bacterial, maybe—but I’m desperately curious to know what that’s all about. Why that song? Who are these hundreds of people who have listened to this song? Or is it one person who’s listened to it hundreds of times? (In case anyone other than that one person is curious, here it is below:)

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Toy Toy Toy!

David December 10th, 2011

Last Saturday night I descended into the bowels of the DiMenna Center in New York City to see my piece Twinkle, Dammit! being played as part of the 3rd night of the 1st ever UnCaged Toy Piano Festival. (It featured the 4th annual competition winners, but it was the 1st festival. I don’t know if it’s going to be repeated, or if so how soon.)

The lobby featured toy piano exhibits such as this one:

and this one (the Edible Toy Piano, or Resistor JelTone):

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What you hear in the background is a robot toy piano by playing Erik Satie’s Vexations (“to save wear and tear on valuable human pianists”). Both the Edible Toy Piano and the Vexbot are by Ranjit Bhatnagar.

The real action was inside the hall, though. When the doors opened, we saw four different toy piano “stations” positioned across the stage floor, one for each of the four artists performing, one with the toy piano on a table, the others one the floor with tiny stools next to them. Scattered among them were laptops, microphones and other sound gear, and toy drums, a melodica, a toy glockenspiel, a rattle, a rubber hammer, a jack-in-the-box—the theme of this year’s festival was “Toy Piano and other Toy Instruments.” The lighting was low and the house lights stayed on for the concert; a couple of the performers played barefoot, all of which which gave the evening an informal feel of which I heartily approved. (Barefoot concert music is new to me, which probably just means that I hang out uptown too much.) It was far better attended than a lot of new-music concerts, too.

First up, Takuji Kawai played three Japanese pieces. Perhaps this is just a cultural divide at work, but to me they all three seemed overly serious and self-indulgent. Besides which, the toy piano he played, a very different model than any I’ve heard before, had a very pure sine-wave-like sound; compared to the slightly raucous sound of the toy pianos everyone else was playing, it was distant and unengaging.

Phyllis Chen, the competition and festival’s founder, was up next. Highlights of her set included this year’s competition winner, Rusty Banks‘ Babbling Tower to Tower for toy piano and cell phones (the program note pointed out that this was either the world’s cheapest or most expensive live audio processing, depending on whether you count just the cell phones or the towers and networks) and the 2009 competition winner, Toy Toccata by Fabian Svensson. I have to say that my reaction to hearing Toy Toccata  was one of open-mouthed envy; it isn’t often I hear a piece and think “Damn! I wish I’d written that!”, but I did this time. It’s a virtuosic tour-de-force on a very simple concept, with a terrific shape and build, and Phyllis played it like her hair was on fire.

David Smooke played his improvisation Water/Ice/Steam, a piece which was performed almost entirely inside a toy piano (with portions of the sound looped electronically), bowing the bars with fishing line, hitting them sticks, vibrating them, rattling them. It was a fascinating sonic landscape which, however, went on far too long, gradually losing impact until I was just waiting for it to end. (It was greeted with enthusiastic whooping and hollering, though, so maybe it was just me.) David raised an interesting question in introducing his piece: he said that although he didn’t know why, it was important for him that the audience know that the electronic gadget under the toy piano was only recording and playing back the toy piano sounds, not providing any others. I think that has to do with issues of authenticity, which is a fascinating can of worms to open in the context of an instrument that is a “toy” version of another instrument. Not to mention what it says about the use of electronics in live music performance. But I digress.

Then it was Margaret Leng Tan‘s turn. I really liked Für Enola by James Joslin, for toy piano, jack-in-the-box and spinning top (winner of the competition’s Most Ingenious Combo award)—the jack-in-the-box and top were a brilliant new spin (sorry) on indeterminacy, which went with the I Ching-inspired musical organization of the rest of the piece. Another standout was Phyllis Chen’s gorgeous Carousel and Cobwebbed Carousel; the first added to the toy piano a hand-cranked music box with a custom piano-roll-type punch-card; the second used the same punch-card, but fed into the music box backwards. The strange, slightly-out-of-tempo feeling given by the hand-cranking of the entirely mechanical punch card was creepy, haunting and lovely all at the same time, and Margaret mirrored it perfectly in her playing.

And then there was my piece, Twinkle, Dammit! (An Obsessive Variation on a Well-Known Children’s Song), one of two which Margaret presented as part of her explorations into becoming a “sit-down comic.” (The other was Jed Distler‘s One Minute Ring, which is probably much funnier if you know Wagner better than I do.) I’ll leave you to judge my piece; I’ve blogged about the process of working on it with Margaret here. All I’ll say is you can hear the audience laughing… (I stopped the video before Margaret’s thunderous and richly deserved applause because I had to put the camera down on the floor to go join her onstage. But believe me, it was there!)

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I hope to visit The Land of the Toy Pianos again—it’s a strange and wonderful place.

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Twinkle, Dammit!

David November 29th, 2011

Last summer, on a whim, I wrote a piece for a competition. The competition was for music for “toy piano and other toy instruments:” the 4th Annual UnCaged Toy Piano Competition and Festival. My piece didn’t win, but it drew the attention of one of the judges: Margaret Leng Tan, “the queen of the toy piano.” She decided that the piece, “Twinkle, Dammit! An Obsessive Variation on a Well-Known Children’s Song,” was perfect for the new performance direction she’s exploring, which she calls “sit-down comedy.”

That was how I found myself in Margaret’s music room the Monday night before Thanksgiving, along with her two grand pianos, umpteen toy pianos, and one of her many dogs.  The toy piano she’d picked for this piece was sitting on the floor between the two grands, and she sat on a (very) low stool behind it, with the music photocopied to one-quarter size so it could rest on top of the toy piano. She offered me a (full-size) piano bench to sit on, which I tried, but eventually chose the floor.

She had come up with a scenario (which she had told me about in a previous phone conversation). She had substituted a rubber hammer and a squeaky rattle for the rubber duck and train whistle I had specified in the score (which she had asked permission to do when she first contacted me). And, as it turned out, she’d also changed tempos, chopped rhythms in half, and added a left-hand part to a passage I’d written for the right hand alone.

Gulp. Was this still my piece?

Did I care?

Margaret’s vision of the piece is personal, idiosyncratic, and self-consistent. And very funny. Everything she’d done, she’d done for a reason—and by the time we got done rehearsing an hour and a half later, we’d made more changes, some of them her ideas, some of them mine. I’ve had a fair amount of experience collaborating in theatrical situations—and that’s what this was. I did my best to clarify what I thought she was trying to do, some of which involved musical choices and some of which involved physical/visual choices. (It’s not often I feel the lack of puppetry experience in my life, but I did that night.)

There are plenty of composers who have seen, and applauded, radical reinterpretations of their music. (I’ve even had it happen to me before; see Tamra Hayden’s acoustic guitar version of Song for an Accident). (She gets some of the chords wrong, but it’s still pretty cool.) But I haven’t heard any stories about that happening for the first performance!

I don’t know whether I’ll ever hear Twinkle, Dammit! the way I wrote it. (It’s not as though there are a lot of concert toy pianists out there.) I suspect that if I did, at this point…I might find it dull.

The 4th Annual UnCaged Toy Piano Festival is happening THIS WEEK in New York City. My piece is being played on Saturday night December 3rd, 8 pm at the DiMenna Center, 450 W. 37th St. Come if you can! If I can get a video, I’ll post it here as soon as I get it. In the meantime, please check out the edible toy piano (which will be featured at the concert).

 

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Imaginary Music

David October 24th, 2011

When I was in elementary school I was obsessed with Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. It was the first piece of classical music I fell in love with. I first encountered it in Ravel’s orchestral version, as I think most people do, and was astounded to learn, years later, that it had been originally composed for piano solo. I borrowed the music from my piano teacher and tried to learn to play it in high school, despite the fact that it was far beyond my technical abilities at the time, an adventure which ended when I tripped and slid while running while carrying the score, tearing holes in both the score and the skin of my hands. I bought a replacement score to give back to my teacher, which turned out to be a piano reduction of the orchestra version (!), but which my teacher graciously accepted anyway.

And then many years later, I discovered a version of Pictures for—solo guitar. That blew my mind. Playing what, to me, was still at bottom an orchestral piece on the piano was weird enough—but guitar? There are only six strings! How was that even possible?

Here in the age of YouTube, that question is easily answered:

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But  now I’m more interested in the ways that the “real” versions of music shadow the other versions that so many of us make or listen to. I’ve been thinking about this because of my new job at Pace University, as a staff accompanist/coach in their Musical Theatre Department. The students I’m working with are practicing musical theatre literature; but instead of a pit orchestra, they have me. And I’m not even playing a piano, but an electronic keyboard; a pretend piano, if you will.

Musical theatre accompanists are different from classical accompanists in that we often make up large chunks of our accompaniments on the fly, adapting them from what’s on the page; but any pianist playing a reduction is in the same boat. You’re pretending to be a whole orchestra (or band). What a strange thing, to be pretending while you’re making music. The singers or instrumentalists we’re playing with are pretending too, maybe even more than we are; and that strikes me as even stranger.

Whether you hear the “original” version somehow behind or in-between the pretend version depends on how well you know each version. When I first heard the guitar version of Pictures at an Exhibition, every moment was a comparison, since I had long since memorized the orchestral version. I still can’t quite listen to the guitar version on its own terms. There are a lot of musical theatre songs that I learned from playing auditions—or, in the case of songs from shows my parents didn’t own the cast albums to, from the piano/vocal arrangements in Broadway songbooks. To me, those piano versions are  the original versions, so when I run across an orchestrated version of one of them, as happens from time to time, that’s a shock.

Things are even weirder in the pop world, where bands cover other people’s songs all the time. There’s a Beatles cover band called The Butties (“together 4 times longer than the Beatles themselves”) that I once heard play a Beatles tune that I’d somehow never encountered before. That was disorienting. And I listened to Jonathan Coulton’s version of “Baby Got Back” before I heard the original. (I know, I know; I live under a rock.)

I keep hearing it said that all music is in dialogue with other music; I always imagine stately halls where the pieces (wearing robes and sandals) talk to each other in hushed and dignified tones. But all that dialogue really takes place in people’s heads, which means very little of it is hushed or dignified, and there are as many dialogues as there are people. And if every piece of music other pieces of music looking over its shoulder and breathing down its neck, then maybe all music is pretend music to some extent.

You’ll excuse me. I have to go play some show tunes on an electronic keyboard now.

 

 

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Hidden Treasures

David October 4th, 2011

I grew up in the 70s, when Pong was a novelty, and then was followed in quick succession by Asteroids, Frogger, Galaga and their brethren, all games that you had to go to an arcade to play, on a dedicated machine the size of a washer/dryer combo. I loved them. I was saved from addiction only by the facts that 1)I had too many other things I liked doing too and 2) I wasn’t very good at them.

My fourteen-year-oldson has neither of those handicaps, and so he spent large chunks of the summer playing a pair of computer games called “Portal” and “Portal 2.” Toward the end of August, he inveigled me into sitting down to play through it myself—with him beside me, so that rather than the wandering explorations that I understand are typical of the genre now, I had more of a guided tour.

This isn’t the place for a detailed explanation of or exegesis on the games; suffice it to say that they are involving, beautiful and narrative-driven. I was surprised at how much. They’re first and foremost puzzle games, so in between the narrative elements are long stretches of puzzles of increasing complexity. They’re not complex narratives compared to, say, a novel, or even a good dramatic movie. They reminded me more of Broadway musicals, where  plot has to be relatively simple to accommodate musical numbers (the puzzle sequences in this case).

But what stays with you are the characters, and the little touches, many of them only obvious only on repeat play (but which were pointed out to me by my helpful tour guide), which hint at a larger world outside the confines of the game, and tie its various parts together. These were plentiful enough and rich enough that they started to remind me of musical structures, where one aspect of a piece has significance only because you’ve heard it before and were not expecting to hear it again (or were). A hint dropped early on in the game turns out to be important at the end. A recurring theme is transformed into something unexpected, which drives the plot in an entirely new direction. The climactic scene is a recapitulation of an early confrontation (just like Beethoven!), and the denouement sequence (or coda, if you will) recalls elements from both games, including scenes that you would only see if you spent time exploring the gameworld off of the path that leads you to completing the prescribed goal.

As a time art, though, video games have the handicap that the authors can’t really control the flow of time, since they have to allow indefinite time for the player to complete the puzzles at their own pace. (In my case, that usually involved my character’s dying several times on each level and having to start over.) Still, if you take the time to get to know the game inside out, as my son did, and can hold the whole thing in your mind at once (as musicians do with a score they know well), it’s obvious that the appreciation of the game holds many of the same rewards offered by music, movies and and other forms as well (illustration? poetry?).

Speaking of holding entire pieces in your head at once, I’m having opportunities this fall to do something I Don’t Usually Do, which is perform my own pieces—excerpts from my solo piano suite Seventeen Windows. Here’s a video of Windows 6 & 5:

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I’ll be performing Windows 1-4 on Sunday October 9th at 1 pm as part of the Composers Voice concert series at Jan Hus Church (351 East 74th St, NYC). And at 3 pm that same day, soprano Karen Jolicoeur will include my lullaby Like Water on her recital “Turn, Turn, Turn – the cycles of life in song, from the Belle Epoque to the present” at Klavierhaus Concert Hall – 3:00 p.m. 211 W 58th St. NYC Call (212) 245-4535 to reserve your $25 tickets.

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What Was I Expecting? (Part 2)

David September 7th, 2011

Like everyone else on the East Coast, when it came time for Hurricane Irene to hit my neighborhood, I hunkered down. (I had the urge to hunker up, instead, but caution won out.) The bathtub was full; there were fresh batteries in the flashlights and food in the cupboards. We settled down to wait, expecting high winds and driving rain. We were pretty sure the Upper West Side of Manhattan wouldn’t be getting the worst of it—the storm surge wouldn’t come anywhere near us, and all those skyscrapers would prevent the formation of any tornadoes— but it was supposed to be bad. Possibly there would be glass flying, or flash flooding. At the very least, the gutters would overflow and loose garbage would be flapping up the street like demented bats.

Instead, we got rain. A steady, twelve-hour rain, with no wind to speak of. It was a relief, but also a letdown, complicated in the ensuing hours and days by the realizations that

  • there had been some high winds, and not too far away—there were huge trees down in both Central and Riverside Parks, a quarter-mile away from my apartment
  • lots of people and places in the city had gotten clobbered
  • lots people and places far away from the city had gotten really clobbered, including the Weston Playhouse (where I was music director for nine summers) and plenty of other people I knew.

My expectations had been thwarted, and yet they had come to pass. I didn’t witness a major storm at firsthand; I witnessed a major disaster unfolding through news accounts and Facebook posts. Hurricane Irene played a deceptive cadence for me; instead of the minor thrill of watching a violent weather event, I got the sobering awe of having dodged a bullet that had hit people I knew.

The thwarting of the expectation of a particular occurrence and replacing it with something different but just as satisfying is a major goal of music, and probably of most art. So from my view in the cheap seats, Irene had the makings of a great piece. From seats down front, of course, the music was way too violent.  And that’s the difference between art and life… art doesn’t generally flood your basement or wash out roads.

Sometimes you get a pleasant surprise from life, too. Like many composers, I enter competitions from time to time, sending in pieces I’ve already written which are appropriate for the competition, or rewriting them so they are, or sometimes writing new pieces from scratch. I wrote a new piece this summer for the Toy! Toy! Toy! competition for new pieces for toy piano with other toy instruments. My piece was called Twinkle, Dammit! An Obsessive Variation on a Well-Known Children’s Song. It didn’t win the competition. It didn’t get an honorable mention, and it didn’t get included in the 4th Annual UnCaged Toy Piano festival. And I thought to myself, “Well, poop.” Because what the heck was I going to do with a piece like that? It’s not like I can arrange it for clarinet choir or something.

And then I got an email from one of the competition judges—Margaret Leng Tan, no less, the “queen of the toy piano”—saying she really liked the piece and wanted to perform it. I was not expecting that!

This is actually the second time something like that has happened to me this year; the curator of another competition I didn’t win (this one for a piece for band) wrote to me a couple of weeks after the rejection emails had gone out and asked if one of her university’s students could perform a percussion ensemble piece of mine.

If it happens again, I’m going to start smiling every time I lose a competition, and just sit back and wait for the surprise email to come in. At which point, no doubt, since I’m expecting it, something else will happen instead. But of course now I’m expecting that…

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Tell Me A Story!

David August 17th, 2011

I spent much of last week as the accompanist for the Acting Your Song classes at Making It On Broadway‘s intensive summer workshop, taught by the very wonderful Jose Llana. Jose admonished the students, repeatedly, to tell a story when they sang a song.

Jose’s emphasis when he coaches is a little different than mine; he’s an actor, I’m a writer (of music, but still a writer). But what struck me is that dramatic writing is exactly what actors are doing when they prepare a song; the playwright’s building blocks of Event, Desire, Obstacle, and Action—the ingredients of narrative—are the same kit that Jose was trying to get his young students to learn (although he didn’t use those terms). In an audition song, of course, the specifics of the actor’s story may have very little to do with the words of the song, which probably don’t even tell a story, at least not in the 32-bar audition cut. The drama, the story—what the auditors get out of a good auditioner’s performance—is a story without words, the story behind the words—a story made of yearnings, frustrations, joys and disappointments.

We humans seem to have a hardwired need for stories. The idea of narratives has become a huge part of politics in recent decades; a recent New York Times editorial laid out the case that it’s Obama’s failure to lay out a compelling narrative that is to blame for our recent governmental, ahem, difficulties.  Parables—stories—have always been a staple of religious teaching. Stories are the mainstay of most forms of entertainment and art.  And, of course, we all tell ourselves stories about ourselves to make sense of our lives. And then there’s music.

Can music, by itself, without words, tell a story? It can as much as an auditioning actor can, telling his real story behind the words he’s singing. It was my piano teacher, the late James Tannenbaum, who introduced me to the idea that there needed to be an impulse of some kind behind every note you played. Now, he was talking about Beethoven (when I brought in a piece by Roger Sessions to my lesson a couple weeks in a row, and accidentally left it behind one day, I’m pretty sure he threw it out so I’d have to work on something different next week), but the same thing applies elsewhere. Humans find stories everywhere, the same as we do other patterns, so if a performer is generating a story behind the notes, a listener will get a story as well. I’d venture to say that in music that doesn’t ask the performer to put themselves and their impulses into it—John Cage’s music, say—it’s the listeners who supply their own stories that enjoy it, and those who don’t that do not. (Remember, I’m not talking about a literal, plotted narrative here—it’s the ability to endow sounds with meaning that can come from either performer or listener, or both.)

Music only tells stories in the hands of a good performer, though. As a composer, if I want to tell a story, I’m going to use words: I’m going to write a libretto. I wrote a 10-minute opera this spring inspired by the story of Kea Tanakawa, who built an ark in the parking lot of a church in Newark in the 1980s. I’ve tried a couple of times to make a full-length musical out of it over the decades since, but the villain in the real-life story is the zoning board, which just doesn’t lend itself… The moment I used for the opera was the pastor of the church confronting Kea (Maya in my version) and saying, “What is all this lumber doing in my parking lot?”

Grethe Holby’s company Ardea Arts presented an informal reading of the piece (Maya’s Ark) last month, and we’re talking about ways to get it performed somewhere this fall, maybe as part of National Opera Week. I’ll keep you posted!

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What was I expecting?

David August 1st, 2011

I’ll admit it: until this week, I hadn’t been to a live concert, in a concert hall, by a professional orchestra, in a very long time. (The disclaimers are necessary to exclude concerts in the park, or in churches by amateur orchestras, both of which can be very rewarding, but Just Aren’t The Same.) Largely it’s been a matter of not being able to afford it when I’m not working, and not being able to schedule it when I am, but there’s also been an element of laziness involved—orchestral recordings are convenient, and chamber concerts are cheaper!

And then this week, I went to two. The Royal Danish Orchestra played at Alice Tully Hall, and there were half-price tickets for the cheap seats, and so I went. And then the Mostly Mozart festival gave away free tickets to a “preview” concert, and I was lucky enough to get one of those, and so I went to that too. It was like coming back home after being away for a long time—I practically lived at Severance Hall when I was going to school in Cleveland—but “you can’t go home again” turned out to apply here as in so many other situations.

Both orchestras were terrific, and it was a joy to hear live orchestral sound again. But when the Royal Danish Orchestra walked out on stage, something seemed strange. It took me a while to place it: they didn’t look like what I remembered an orchestra looking like—there were so many blondes! Not only that, there was none of the black hair that goes with the significant Asian membership of all the orchestras I’ve ever seen.

Well, I got over that easily enough. But then at Avery Fisher Hall two nights later, the setup was different from anything I’d ever seen—the basses were on the conductor’s left! The brass was on the right instead of at the back! There was a section of audience behind the orchestra, and two more on the sides! When did that happen? That’s like having Tuesday come after Wednesday! That’s like having the steering wheel on the right!

I got over that, too, actually, and enjoyed the orchestra enjoying Mozart. But not all thwarted expectations are as easily recovered from; when you’re the composer (or the performer), the line between different and just plain wrong is a narrow one. You give a concert or put on a show, and you expect the producers or presenters to get some butts in the seats. (Ouch). A performer commissions a piece from you, you expect that performer to learn the piece, or at least tell you if it’s too hard to play. (Whoops!) You elect Congressional representatives, you expect them to govern the country. (Zing! But I digress.)

Zen Buddhism would tell us that it’s not the thwarting of our expectations in situations like this that causes the frustration, disappointment or stress, it’s the expectations themselves. If you’re not attached to a particular outcome, then whatever happens is fine by you, right? Non-attachment is far easier said than done, of course. And attachment is part of the human condition, at least where music is concerned.

One of the principal things composers (and performers) do is manipulate expectations. The chord progressions of tonal music are so potent because they both tell you that something is about to happen and then deliver it—or something different and better. One of the holy grails of composing for me is the moment that’s both totally unexpected and yet inevitable: an instantaneous shift of expectations. A lovely surprise.

There’s plenty of music that eschews the manipulation of expectations: John Cage, Pauline Oliveros. And plenty of music that’s so clichéd that its attempts to do so fall flat. And expectation, as always, is dependent on the individual listener: if you’re a naïve listener you won’t have expectations of nuance to be fulfilled or not. If you are a sophisticated listener you may overlook the surface appeal, the broad strokes.

Any piece of music that’s new to you has the potential to be better, worse, different, stranger, more ordinary than you expect. And speaking of new music: the demo recording of All About The Kids, the “homicidal soccer mom” musical I’m writing with Erik Johnke, is now up on my website. Give it a listen!

 

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Musical Nutrition

David June 27th, 2011

I have just returned from a cross-country road trip. My mother-in-law passed away last December, and after months of sorting, decisions and packing on the part of my wife and her sister, it was finally time for us to load up a rented SUV with boxes and drive it from Iowa back to New York.

We had chosen to drive only 5 or 6 hours a day, so it took four days. Driving through the Midwest is pretty monotonous, particularly if you’re staying on the Interstates, as we were. We looked forward to the meal breaks, as a touch of variety to the day. But it became clear pretty quickly that the meals were their own kind of monotony.

Why should that have been? Well, there’s a pretty small selection of restaurants that are accessible from the highways; a subset of those are the ones accessible to hotels that are accessible from the highways. That was our initial selection. That was cut down even further by the fact that we were trying to eschew fast food; while my son wouldn’t have minded a few days of living on Burger King, my wife and I were trying to eat healthier than that. Particularly, we were hoping to find places where we could find salads and vegetables.

That proved to be a pretty vain hope. While there were usually two or three salads on any menu, one of them was always Caesar and the others were loaded up with bacon and cheese, as if to blunt the unpleasantness of eating lettuce. Cooked vegetables were available only as sides with entrees, and were only a tiny part of a plate otherwise dominated by potatoes. Usually, they turned out to be corn.

This was frustrating, of course, but now—after we’re home, and feeding ourselves again—I’m wondering why I found it monotonous. It seems I interpreted “not what I wanted” as “boring”—no matter how much variety there was in all the stuff I didn’t want to eat. Or, to put it another way, everything that wasn’t what I wanted to eat had its variety erased and was lumped into the same category: “not my cup of tea.”

It seems I’m much less eclectic about food than I am about music.  I have reasons for this—my musical choices are unlikely to give me a heart attack, or make me somehow musically obese. However, I confess that the food snobbery I’m exhibiting here would be unappealing if applied to music. Is there such a thing as musical nutrition? What is the musical equivalent of a vegetable?

 

In honor of the US Government’s finally getting rid of the outdated food pyramid, here’s the new “myplate” diagram:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And here’s my version of it, modified for musical (listening) nutrition:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Horribly biased, and insupportably overgeneralized, not unlike the government’s version. (“Contemporary Classical is an oxymoron!” I can hear outraged voices shrieking, just as they’ve been shouting, “What do you mean, ‘protein?’” at the poor old USDA.) But a pretty good reflection of my own listening habits, which I consider a balanced diet. I’d be curious to hear other opinions.

…all of that was a sideshow, of course to the real event of the week. In honor of what my wife and her sister have been going through in the aforementioned months of  sorting, packing and deciding: one audio selection. “The Bustle in a House,” my setting of Emily Dickinson’s poem known by that name, from my song cycle Songs from Breath.

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