Orchestration and Unicycles

David June 21st, 2012

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I got a unicycle for my birthday about three months ago, and I’ve been sporadically trying to learn to ride it ever since. The video above shows about how far I’ve gotten: I can ride a few feet along a wall, and a few fewer feet out in open space. Then I fall off. I’m getting better at it, although it has been brought to my attention recently that I’ve let the tire go a little flat, and that’s probably making it easier.

One reason I asked for a unicycle for my birthday—a unicycle is not the kind of thing I generally get for my birthday unasked for—is that I’m trying to cultivate my own willingness to make a fool of myself. Since  you can’t ride a unicycle indoors, at least not in a New York City apartment, my practicing has to take place on the street. And since I can’t really ride it yet, it has to take place outside my own building. My neighbors and the building’s doormen have reacted generally with bemusement. Occasionally a passing parent will seize the occasion to instruct a small child (“Do you think he’s missing a wheel, Ashley?”). Sometimes people walk by suppressing grins. Often they ask if I’m going to join the circus. But, of course, this being New York, mostly they ignore me.

I’m also in the midst of orchestrating for a seven-piece pit band for the musical National Pastime, by Al Tapper and Tony Sportiello, a terrifically fun little show which will play 16 performances in New York this August. I am anticipating making somewhat of a fool of myself in that endeavor, as well.

National Pastime is set in the 1930s, you see, and the music mostly references the popular styles of that decade, with occasional excursions into the 40s and 50s. And while I’ve spent some time researching the music of the era, I’m not much farther toward a real knowledge of the subject than I am toward being able to ride my unicycle around the block. Add to that the fact that the various styles of music the show uses require mutually exclusive instrumental forces, none of which resembles the ensemble I’ve got, and you begin to see how I am feeling as though I could tip over in any direction.

So for the “mountain music” or “western swing” numbers—these styles were the first commercial forerunners of what would become Country-Western music—I’m relying heavily on my guitarist to take the instruction “Comp!” and turn it into something that will get the idea across. For the numbers evoking a more Big Band sound, well, I spent a fair amount of time today trying to figure out ways to make one trumpet, one tenor sax and a violin sound like a horn section.

Luckily, I’ll have a couple of rehearsals with the band before anyone else hears it—with any luck, enough time to work out any kinks, or even go back to the drawing board if I’ve blown it completely. And the band rehearsals will not take place outside my apartment building. (“Ashley, do you think he’s missing the necessary feel for Depression-era popular music?”)

 

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Loooong babies

David May 23rd, 2012

When my son was an infant, one of his favorite games was “Long baby, short baby,” in which you would grab his feet, pull his legs out to their full extension while intoning “looooong baby,” then push his feet back up to his body so his knees were up at his chest while squeaking “short baby!” Giggle, repeat.

I wrote about short babies last month, in the guise of one-minute pieces. Today I’m writing about loooong babies. Not that I’ve ever written a really long piece—not counting scores for theatrical productions, the longest piece I’ve written weighs in at about 25 minutes, and of course that’s a multi-movement work. I’ve never been a huge fan of long pieces; I remember listening to a 90-minute Mahler symphony (required listening) in the Cleveland Institute of Music library while I was in school and thinking, “Man, if I can’t say everything I have to say in a piece in 35 minutes I’m going to quit composing.” And that was a multi-movement piece too! On the other hand, I have sat rapt through performances of hour-long pieces like Stockhausen’s Stimmung and Terry Riley’s In C.

Theatrical scores last longer: an opera or musical can be anywhere from ninety minutes to four hours. The addition of visual and dramatic elements seems to make a difference (although these scores are typically made up of shorter pieces).

There are pieces that are longer than that. This Wikipedia page lists piano pieces ranging from 4 to 11 hours; most of them, needless to say, are not often or are never performed in their entirety. And then there’s John Cage’s As Slow As Possible;  a performance planned to last 639 years is currently in progress. I think it’s safe to say that that’s more conceptual; barring major advances in medicine in the next few years (and that’s a phrase one doesn’t often get to use in a music blog), no one’s going to be able to hear the entire thing.

There are longer forms out there, but they’re not musical: they’re narrative. Multi-season TV series. Fantasy, science-fiction and mystery novel series. Movie franchise series (think Star Trek). Some of these run to dozens of hours. With the exception of the Ring Cycle, there’s nothing I know of in music that comes close.

Of course, most of those narratives were not originally intended to span as long an arc as they wound up doing; a TV series gets picked up for a second season, and the writers start thinking about how to take what exists and play it out over the long term. A novel sells well, the author writes a sequel, that sells well, and suddenly an arc that plays out over several or a couple of dozen books is required. (Harry Potter, of course, is a notable exception.)

The appeal of these long-form narratives is largely the chance to revisit the characters, who have become friends. I can testify that by the 10th or 11th book in a series, the plots begin to blur together; it’s the developments in the characters’ lives that stand out and stick with me.

I wonder what a series of symphonies all based on the same motive would be like? What if Beethoven’s 6th, 7th and 8th had all been based on the further adventures of “dit dit dit DAH”? Would audiences have come back breathless to find out what had happened to their beloved motive this time?

 

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One minute of fame

David April 29th, 2012

I just returned from Jan Hus Church, where the Composer’s Voice series (presented by Vox Novus) is presented two Sundays a month at 1 pm. Today’s concert featured the West Point Woodwind Quintet playing their “Fifteen-minutes-of-fame.” One minute of those fifteen was mine.

“Fifteen-minutes-of-fame” (hereinafter FMOF) is the brainchild of Rob Voisey, the founder of Vox Novus, and Douglas DaSilva, the curator of the Composer’s Voice series. It’s an offshoot of Rob’s hugely successful “60×60″ project, in which he stitches together “mixes” of 60 one-minute recorded pieces submitted by various composers into hour-long concerts. FMOF consists of fifteen acoustic one-minute pieces, usually on a theme, all composed specifically for a given performer or ensemble, and selected from scores submitted to those performers. They are then performed on a Composer’s Voice concert—and wherever else the performers want to do them.

So for the composer, it’s a little competition—you write the piece without having any idea whether yours will be selected or not. My record so far is two for five—besides the West Point Woodwind Quintet, the Piercy/Hickman Duo (clarinet/piano) selected my piece Calligraphy Circle and performed it earlier this month. My entries for harp, violin/cello duo and marimba/flute duo were (sob) passed over. I haven’t yet found a use for these orphaned miniatures; perhaps someday they’ll be the seeds of longer pieces.

Hearing your music played in this context is a slightly surreal experience. Today, for instance, my piece Hurrah!  was tenth in the West Point Woodwind Quintet’s set. (The theme they had specified was “the Civil War,” in honor of the sesquicentennial of same.) They played the pieces back to back, pausing only to turn pages or switch instruments between pieces. There’s no applause until the end—and although the names and composers of all the pieces are printed in the program, in order, human memory is such that it’s virtually impossible to keep them all separate in your mind. Unless your piece is first, or last, or has a  gimmick of some sort (such as Born Equal by Juan Maria Solare, in which the players spoke, dividing two five-word sentences among them), it’s not going to carve out its own individual identity.

So in essence you’ve contributed to—what? A medley? That’s not quite it, because there are silences between the pieces. A folio, perhaps. I’m reminded of museum exhibits devoted to schools or movements, in which an artist might have one painting hung in a roomful of work by other people. The analogy’s not exact, because museumgoers can linger by a painting, whereas concertgoers can’t linger by a piece. The point is that it’s different than the usual ritual for a composer, where the piece has your name on it, and whatever small glory is refracted from the performers is yours to bask in after a performance. When the members of the quintet acknowledged the composers after the performance, five people stood, and of course no one had any idea who had written each piece. Which was fine, because (as I mentioned before) most likely no one remembered much about any of the individual pieces anyway.

But you can hear Hurrah! all on its lonesome right here:

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Music & Metaphors

David March 25th, 2012

I am in the midst of reading a book by Christopher Johnson called “Microstyle: The Art of Writing Little.” The book is ostensibly about the new culture of micro-writing, as in Twitter posts and Facebook updates, and how it relates to the ongoing culture of headline writing, ad slogan writing and product and company naming, and how to write better for all of these media. However, Johnson manages to work in fascinating tidbits about semiotics, cognitive linguistics, hierarchical categorization and the like—pretty highbrow stuff for a book on how to write a better Twitter post.

One chapter that really caught my attention was the one on metaphor. Metaphors are a basic part of language, and a pretty basic part of the human toolkit: we use something we can think about easily to help us think about something a little more abstract. The former is probably something from physical experience, which after all is what our brains evolved to cope with; the latter can be, well, anything. “Don’t swap horses in midstream” (Abraham Lincoln’s re-election slogan) is the example Johnson uses. The most fascinating item, though, is the notion that there are two kinds of metaphor: the kind we’re all familiar with from our high school English classes, and then a more basic, nearly invisible kind referred to as “primary metaphor.” The example here is the equation of moving forward in space toward a goal with progress toward any type of goal, as in “we’re getting there” or “we’re making great strides.” Johnson gives a list of primary metaphors taken from researcher Joe Grady’s dissertation:

Affection is warmth
Important is big
Happy is up
Intimacy is closeness
Bad is stinky
Difficulties are burdens
More is up
Categories are containers
Similarity is closeness
Linear scales are paths
Organization is physical structure
Help is support
Time is motion

…there are more, but you get the idea.

This got me thinking about whether we use metaphor in music. Lyrics are full of them, of course; too obvious to comment on. How about titles? We 21st-century composers have a few options when titling our pieces. One is the old standby which simply describes the piece’s forces. “Music for 18 Musicians.” “Concerto for Orchestra.” “Sonata for Cello and Piano.” Another is made-up or unfamiliar words. “Turangalila.” Another is scientific-sounding words or phrases, which may or may not tell you something about the way the piece was written. “Structures.” “Intersections.” And then there are the descriptive ones: “Eating Living Monkeys.” “Time Flies.”  This last group, I think, invites a listener to treat the title as a metaphor for the piece (or maybe vice versa), and/or the piece as a metaphor for…something.

What can music be a metaphor for? Program music is a metaphor for narrative. Music that evokes emotions or other felt states could be seen as a metaphor for the life experiences that produce those emotions or felt states. Some music can be seen (heard? felt?) as a metaphor for physical, bodily experiences—running, jumping, falling, dying (I’m thinking here of a performance of Mahler’s Ninth by the Cleveland Orchestra I heard as a young man which I characterized at the time as probably being as close to knowing what dying was like as you could get without actually doing it).

Possibly this whole line of inquiry is stretching the definition of “metaphor” to the breaking point, but I can’t help thinking that a lot of music has something in common with the idea of “using something we can think about easily to help us think about something a little more abstract.” Art is often spoken of as a metaphor for life, of course (“Art holds a mirror up to Nature”), but somehow I, at least, hadn’t ever thought of it as applying to music in this way.

To close out this post, here’s a video of the premiere performance of my piece Recurve by the Gotham Ensemble a couple of weeks ago at the Cornelia Street Cafe. The title probably straddles my 2nd and 3rd categories above; “recurve” is an unfamiliar word for most people, but if you’re an archery aficionado it will evoke a particular type of bow. The title came long after the piece was written—I’d been calling it Quartet for Gotham—but I liked the way it sounded, and that it might evoke an image of an arrow in flight, or being released, was a bonus. Sort of a retrofitted metaphor.

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Maya’s Ark

David February 26th, 2012

This week I began coachings for the world premiere of my 10-minute opera, Maya’s Ark, which Ardea Arts is presenting to the kids at Children’s Village on March 5th (and then in a Salon in their Soho studio on the 6th), featuring Michael Lofton and Guadalupe Peraza and directed by Grethe Holby.

Maya’s Ark was inspired by the story of Kea Tawana, who built an ark with salvaged materials in the parking lot of a church in downtown Newark in the mind 1980s; it was hailed as a major and inspirational piece of folk art, but she was eventually forced to tear it down because of zoning regulations. I’ve been wanting to write a musical about this for years—tried twice, only to run aground on the fact that the villain of the piece is the (yawn) zoning board—but, when I was looking for a subject for a ten-minute opera, one scene of the story jumped up waving its little hand and saying, “Me, me!” It’s the (totally imagined) moment when the pastor of the church asks Kea, “What’s all that scrap lumber doing in the parking lot?” If you’d like to know more about either the actual story of Kea’s ark, or about Maya’s Ark, please check out the impressive page that the Ardea Arts staff has put together about the piece (scroll down until you see the link for Maya’s Ark on the lower right, I can’t link directly to that page.

Why would anyone write a 10-minute opera? How could such a thing be performed? There’s a company that presents an evening of 10-minute operas every year, which I will not name here for reasons which will become clear shortly. I am friendly with the directors of the company, and they had told me that if I wrote a piece for them, they would include it—they couldn’t promise what year, but they’d do it eventually. So last spring I wrote Maya’s Ark and sent it off to them. They didn’t respond, but hey, they’re busy people.

Meanwhile, Grethe Holby, to whom I’d shown the libretto, offered to do an informal reading at the Ardea Arts space in Soho in July. We did that—sung by Lars Woodul and Judith Skinner—and it was most encouraging. Grethe got the idea that it might be something we could market and license to churches, and then handed me the most thorough, detailed and dead-on critique I’ve ever had of something I’ve written. (Truly: the marked-up score, with its annotations in different-colored pencils was a thing of beauty in its own right.) It took me several months to get the time to rework it, but finally that was done (it’s this version which we’re doing in March) and I also sent the revised score off to the UnNamed 10-Minute Opera Company.

A few days later, I got an email saying that they didn’t think the piece was appropriate for their audience. That rocked me back on my heels: the story takes place in a church; there’s no sex, violence, profanity or partisan politics; as the Ardea Arts website puts it, it’s “an investigation into the nature of faith with something to say to almost any audience.” The plot involves the rekindling of the pastor’s faith inspired by Maya’s quixotic ark-building project. I asked what on earth they could possibly be talking about. The reply to that was, “Maybe it’s just us—we don’t get it. And if you’d like to talk to us about it, we can talk—in April.”

Oooookay. Now I guess I know what it feels like to be a misunderstood artist. I’m still mystified as to what could possibly be troubling them about this, but it doesn’t matter now—I have three performances of the piece coming up, and a company that’s going to try to get more.

Is there a moral to this story? Maybe not yet. While I’m waiting for the punch line, though, I’m writing another 10-minute opera on a faith-related subject: the Rapture. Last April, when dozens of people were striding through New York City street fairs carrying signs informing us that the Rapture was coming at 6 pm on May 21st (and the world would end five months later), I thought, “Oh, to be a fly on the wall when six o’clock comes and goes.” That’s the inspiration for this new piece, which I’m calling (surprise) Rapture.

I’d been thinking it could be a sister piece to Maya’s Ark, maybe something else that could be marketed to churches. But Grethe’s response after reading this libretto was that it was not at all suitable—whereas Maya’s Ark is uplifting and inspirational, Rapture is, well, a bit of a downer, and shows faith in a bad light. (The Rapture never actually happens, you see.) So perhaps the moral of the story is a post-modern one: that one never knows how one’s creations will be viewed. I suppose they’re a bit like children in that regard…

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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:

YouTube Preview Image

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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