Blogging for the MCE: Evidence of Compositional Activity

Before I trot out the evidence that I have, in fact, been writing music for the MCE as well as reading the newspaper and then blogging about it, there's just one more quote I would like to share with you that relates to yesterday's topic (integrity of musical idea versus the practical concerns of performability).

Of course I did and do maintain that it is possible to keep your authentic voice while still writing music that is performable.

Wuorinen's distinction is not quite the same—he writes about the difference between entertainment and art. Here's the quote:

"In any medium, entertainment is that which we can receive and enjoy passively, without effort, without our putting anything into the experience. Art is that which requires some initial effort from the receiver, after which the experience received may indeed be entertaining, but also transcending as well. Art is like nuclear fusion: you have to put something into it to get it started, but you get more out of it in the end than what you put in. Entertainment is its own reward, and generally doesn't last."

Charles Wuorinen, b. 1938

Oh no, I just allowed this blog to mention transcendence, which can be rather a large ideal to live up to. Let's do an about-face and talk about something more mundane, like music engraving. Here's what happens when I import a preliminary version of the first two pages of the new MCE piece into this space ... this is page 1:

Yes, it's tiny. I apologize. I did select "large" when asked to choose image size, and I got what you see above. I then tried to drag the edges of the box to make it larger, but then everything got blurry ... so if you want to see what's going on, and you're really, really obsessive compulsive, you may have to print this entry out and blow it up on a photocopier. I'm sorry. Seriously.

Note that this is in no way a final version, but I thought you might enjoy seeing what happens when I sit in Starbucks for a couple hours typing in notes and telling Finale how much I loathe Times New Roman and begging it to put everything in Pristina or Garamond instead ... we now have the template for this piece, and a few measures of what will be a recurring motif, and all sorts of good things. Let me know your thoughts, questions, and other comments of note!

Here's page 2, comprising three measures of cheerful compound melody:

Blogging for the MCE: Integrity vs. Performability

Here’s a quote for your consideration:

“Art can’t just press your pleasure buttons and sell itself to you. It can’t need to care whether you like it—that’s the space where new ideas are born.”

I love those words. I would love to live them, not just in all the art that I make, but in every gesture I make in real life. Worrying about being liked just distracts from things that really matter, such as authenticity in one’s creative voice. And when making art, I would never want to pander, or to condescend to my audience.

But on the other hand, there are practical concerns. A composer is not flying solo. He or she is writing music not only “for” listeners, but also “for” the performers. It’s the musicians who bring the work off the page and into the concert hall (or studio or iPod or wherever the listeners are). And if the work has a lot of integrity but is unperformable, that’s a problem.

So I spend a lot of time writing vocal music that conforms to certain rules. For your benefit and mine, here’s a few things that make music more singable:

Rule 1: Voices like to move (thank you, Dave Bieri). With all due respect to certain Minimalist colleagues, long sustained chords or repeated figures that all stay on the same note are very tiring and wear out the voice the same way that pacing on a rug wears out the pile. Check out Steve Reich’s Tehillim for a great example of Minimalist writing that works for singers. Because the voices move.

Rule 2: Voices like to hang out in an easy tessitura. Visit the extreme highs and lows for drama, but don’t make the voices live there.

Rule 3: The higher they go, the harder it is for voices to make recognizable words. Keep rapid text confined to the middle and low register, and in high registers, use melismas to allow voices to soar freely. Melismas, by the way, work best on open vowels such as “ah”, “aw”, and “uh” (and the “o” in the word “hot”). You can read all about this in Caccini’s preface to “Le Nuove Musiche” of, oh, some year in the first decade of the 1600s. If you read Italian.

Rule 4: Voices need a little rest now and then. Make sure all voices get multimeasure rests at regular intervals throughout the piece. Bonus: it helps you vary your texture.

Rule 5: When writing fast passages, try to choose notes that fit into a recognizable diatonic scale (thank you, Nathaniel Lew). Of the two measures shown below, the first is sightreadable, because it fits neatly into the key of D major. The second? Well, I can’t read it. Not fast, anyway. You have fun trying.



Basic rules aside, here's the question: can I write music that is performable but still fresh, engaging, and challenging when it needs to be? The more I write, the more the answer seems to be yes. But it is always a precarious balance.

The quote I started with, by the way, comes from Cintra Wilson, the Times’ Critical Shopper, who shops at cool stores and then writes about them in the Thursday Styles section. The quote appeared in the paper on 10 September 2009, in her review of the Comme des Garçons boutique at 520 W. 22nd St. (near 10th Ave.). The full quote is more colloquial, funnier, more of its context, but the ideas, fleshed out, are important:

“America hasn’t quite grocked the idea that civilization is desirable; that culture is the cornerstone of civilization, and that a thriving culture supports unfettered—read: occasionally offensive—art.

“Art can’t just press your pleasure buttons and sell itself to you. It can’t need to care whether you like it—that’s the space where new ideas are born. It can’t just ‘think outside the box.’ For art to do its job, it has to fill the box with yak dung and get as far away from it as humanly possible.”

I’m not writing anything involving yak dung for my current piece with the MCE. It’s for Christmas, so I’m planning to use beauty. But sometimes I feel guilty for going too far in that direction.

I will be writing new music soon, with strange sounds and the occasional moments of ugliness. Stay tuned. And thanks for reading!

Blogging for the MCE: Publication!

Quick update:

I just really want to thank Dale Warland and the good folks at G. Schirmer and Hal Leonard for this:

http://www.schirmer.com/Default.aspx?TabId=2419&State_2872=2&composerId_2872=3239

It's my first publication with one of the major houses. It's a very short choral setting of "The Lord Bless You and Keep You," easy and tuneful, not some magnum opus, but today when I opened the package from Hal Leonard with the first actual copies of the choral octavo and pulled them out and looked at them and saw they were real, I burst into tears.

More about the MCE Xmas piece soon; it's coming along well, but to share what I've done since my last entry, I'll need to engrave examples. Stay tuned.

Blogging for the MCE: Nuts and Bolts (and Strings and Pedals)

Here is a blog entry for the people who don’t want to know where the composer’s inspiration comes from. It’s for those who want to know what the process of writing is like. I can only answer for myself, of course. I remember reading Ned Rorem’s diaries and snickering at the bit where he gets in trouble in a hotel in Utah because a guest in another room complains about his sitting in his room, with the window open, orchestrating in the nude.


That’s not a part of my process. But I respect it anyway.


So, not long ago I am sitting on the train and looking at the text “What Cheer?” as a good place to start writing this carol cycle. I know I want the music in general to sound icy, silvery, exalted. I also know that William Walton set this text, and that I find the chorus in his setting vaguely irritating. In his version, everyone sings the words “What Cheer?” homophonically, starting with a pickup from which the high voices leap up a third, followed by a half-step descent. The music is in 6/8 time throughout. I decide to change things. I will start on the downbeat, do a big leap up followed by no descent at all, and, rather than have everyone sing the rhythm the same way, I will stagger the entries. Also, why not make the music in 7/8 time, which basically creates three pulses per measure instead of two? I end up with this:

So far so good, at least as far as the women go, and at least for two measures. Questions remain: do the men do exactly the same thing an octave lower? Do they do something else in the same rhythm? Do they enter after the women and echo them? I haven’t answered those questions yet. Stay tuned.

We are assuming for now that the accompanying instrument is a harp. The first thing I do is imagine the general sound and feel of the instrument. This gives me a sense of what the rhythm might be like, and I come up with this gesture:

I’m still on the train and need to figure out exactly what pitches I want to have happen on those rhythms, but I can’t quite get the music going in my head, so I write a couple notes to myself, including: “careful not to do unworkable repeated notes” (because you can’t really pluck a string well if it is still vibrating) and “check Mark Adamo’s blog about writing for harp” (which is fascinating, because Adamo is very wise and expresses himself well). This is the link, btw:

http://www.newmusicbox.org/printerfriendly.nmbx?id=5095

And then I was at my stop.

Later, I played around on the piano and came up with the following harmonies to enjoy underneath the “What Cheer?” vocal bit:

They sound pretty cool, especially the unexpected shift to A-flat major underneath the chorus’ sustained Dmin7 chord (it makes an A-flat 13 chord, for those of you into extended tertian harmony and jazz chords). Unfortunately, there is a problem. When a harpist has to change the accidental on a note, she (or he, but much more often she) has to use a pedal. And in the measures I wrote, she’d have to change both the E and the A in a 16th note’s time. This would be bad enough if the two pedals were on opposite sides of the harp, but no, they’re both on the right, as we know from the mnemonic, “Did Columbus Bring | Enough Food Going (to) America?” (the pedals on the left are DCB, those on the right are EFGA) … there’s no way in heaven or elsewhere that any harpist could make the change fast enough.

So, that sketch presents music that won’t work. So I’ll write something else, or tinker with what I’ve got …

Many, many constraints shape what you do when writing music;
composing requires a little bit of inspiration and a whole lot of negotiation.

More later. Please tell me what you like about this blog, what you don’t, and which of the carol texts you’ve seen so far interest you the most! Remember, I will buy beer for MCE members who express opinions … and I know you actually have opinions. I’ve heard them …