Saturday, June 25, 2005
ChickenEggChicken
I’m in the final stages of composing a seven-minute trio for flute, horn and piano, which is a challenging combination of instruments to blend effectively, to say the least.
But now comes the really difficult part -- coming up with a title.
Sometimes I write the music first, then make up a title. Sometimes I start with a title and try to write music that suits. I’ve even, on occasion, written a piece, come up with a title, then written another piece that fits the title more closely.
Aren’t titles annoying? The sad truth is, for most listeners the title means much more than it should. There are great pieces of music that suffer from bland titles, and other works whose spiffy titles have shot them into notoriety.
I wonder how my composer colleagues feel about this. Do you write the music, then make up a title? Do you start with the title, then come up with the music? Do you have any pieces that are better known for their titles than for their musical interest? Do you prefer stock titles (symphony, concerto, sequenza, etc.) or do you feel that every part of your corpus deserves a unique headstone?
posted by Lawrence Dillon
7:28 AM
Thursday, June 23, 2005
Go away for a few days...
Jerry says it's quiet, but I left on the 13th to visit family, drive over a lot of Alabama, and spend a morning at the Library of Congress xeroxing music by Marc Blitzstein (the vocal scores of I've Got the Tune and Nightshift) and Earl Robinson (a Soviet edition of songs with texts in Russian and English--If you've ever wanted to know where you can get the lyrics to Joe Hill in Russian...) and more stuff happened since then than I can keep up with--wiki and all.
Anyway, I just want to register the fact that I have, as of Tuesday, read all of the Taruskin Oxford History of Western Music. (Sometimes I think about a blurb that Virgil Thomson wrote about some book: "I read it. Every word of it. I could have put it down, but I didn't.") I read it to review for Tempo, so at some point there will be something there about it. It's in many ways infuriating, but I have to say that reading it is in many ways an equivalent experience to reading Proust or hearing The Ring.
posted by Rodney Lister
9:24 PM
The Elements of Style
With all due respect to our pal Jerry, I think there's actually an interesting distinction between style and voice.
Style is a generalized (and generalizable) label for musics that share, as I've mentioned a few different places, certain salient superficialities. Take, Reich and Glass as two convenient and often cited examples. Yes, they use different compositional techniques -- Glass does a lot of additive processes and jarring-yet-smooth meter changes; Reich does a lot of cannons, from his early phasing work to the augmentation cannons in pieces like Three Tales and Proverb. To the knowledgeable listener Reich and Glass are nearly impossible to mix up (in fact, I recently heard some music that was obviously not merely a minimalist ripoff but a Glass ripoff.) But style is not about the details, it's about having broad but functional categories for identifying music that can reasonably be lumped together for superficial reasons. And style is based on the ways in which our brains take in music anyway -- if someone tells me that he enjoys the music of Philip Glass I have a pretty good chance of being right that this same person would like the music of Steve Reich. I have a far smaller chance of being right that this same person likes Boulez, or Shania Twain. We make the distinction anyway, so why not use names for the groups? I don't think style is a "necessary evil" as David does -- I think it's a useful tool that we need to be careful not to use for tasks to which it's unsuited. Is Beethoven a classicist or a romanticist? Both! Neither! Who cares?! Asking the question yields a lot of interesting information, and he is clearly somewhere in the classical/romantic category regardless of how precise we can be -- I've never heard anybody ask "Is Beethoven classical, romantic, or 80s hair band?" (I can just imagine Ludwig Van opening for Def Leppard. . . and ther was that band Camper Van Beethoven, but I don't think they were a hair band. . .)
I'm less clear on exactly how "voice" works, but here's a tentative suggestion: Voice is an individual composer's technical predilections. "I like cannons." "I like to follow leaps of a minor sixth with a fall of a half-step." "I totally dig the third retrograde inversion." Most composers won't know what most of their own predilections are -- these are the kinds of choices we make instinctively -- but as an agragate they form a voice. Furthermore, we clearly think of "voice" as seperate from "style" since we often note how even though he went through several stylistic periods, Stravinsky's music always sounds like Stravinsky.
I haven't yet mentioned "genre" which I think is seperate from "style." Maybe "style" is a subset of "genre"? I think we use the terms somewhat interchangeably. It might also be that "style" is the manifestation of "genre." Or perhaps "style" is the intent to ally oneself with a particular "genre?" I do think, however, that we could reasonably propose to use "style" to describe the intersection of "genre" and "voice." Thus, when Stravinsky moved from the neo-classical genre to the serialist genre his style changed but his voice remained the same.
These are unscientific terms, so really "voice," "style," and "genre" mean what ever people mean when they use them, and we probably all have our own personal definitions that match up enough that we can communicate when we don't need to be precise. And this isn't something we need to be precise on all that often, so we get by. On the other hand, I know some people who are putting together an on-line music dictionary, so maybe this is my chance to step in and lay down the law. . .
UPDATE: For some reason Blogger has switched to attributing this post to my username rather than my actual name, which it never used to do. Jerry, is this something in the blog settings?
-Galen H. Brown
posted by Galen H. Brown
2:44 PM
Sounds that bug me!
Title gotcha, did it ?
As composers we're sensitive to all sounds, not just notes ... so here are two pronunciation boo-boos that get me every time:
Folks who don't use the (correct) citation form for the article when it precedes a word beginning with a vowel. Correct form is 'thEE' and 'aN' (not "thUH" and "UH") in instances such as "the Internet" , "the article", "an alternative", "an orange", "the awfully good", etc.
Folks who don't pronounce the second consonant in the unit "NT" -- saying "Innernet" for "InTernet"; "counny" for "county", etc. But on a whimsical note, I relish the alternate pronunciations that often occur when juncture is misapplied.
(This linguistic feature helps us to get the difference between a place to grow plants -- a green-house -- and a lime-colored building -- a green house.) My husband picked up a wonderful instance of this on NPR during the Aldrich Ames brouhaha, where a commentator spent his 5 minutes dissecting " a spice candle" (spy scandal).
On a similar note, I relish the Emperor's personalization of how he speaks of foe Luke -- hissing the enemy's name (Skywalker) as "S-s-s- (h)ky - wahker".
posted by Judith Lang Zaimont
11:57 AM
Wednesday, June 22, 2005
Meet Me at the Wiki
Hey, everybody, we're all over at the Sequenza21 New Music Wikipedia today. It's kind of like a barn-raising. Everybody chips in and later on we have some fried chicken and mashed potatoes and gravy and collard greens and maybe a big slice of Aunt Emma's peach cobbler. With a little bit of patience and reading the instructions, you too can have your very own page that looks something like this or this or this. Everybody welcome--performers, groups, critics, busybodies, geeks with time on their hands. We can build the best damned new music resource on the Web if everybody pitches in. The strategists among you can leave suggestions here or over at the Wiki community center.
posted by Jerry Bowles
3:58 PM
Tuesday, June 21, 2005
Style vs. Voice, Gnarly vs. Smooth
If you're coming to this page directly, shame on you. You should always look at the frontpage first to see if I've written anything good. But, seriously folks, don't miss the first post on conductor Carmen Helena Téllez' new S21 blog because it deals with the importance of "voice," which--I'm assuming, perhaps incorrectly--is what David Toub means by "style" in his post below. Carmen also recounts some adventures with the notoriously gnarly Ralph Shapey.
posted by Jerry Bowles
11:30 AM
Monday, June 20, 2005
style? we don't need no stinkin' style...
After revisiting a lot of Bartok, Stravinsky and Ives that I hadn't listened to in some time, I got to thinking perhaps too much about what we mean by style. I went ahead and posted an overly long blog piece about it, and came to the conclusion that style is a bit hard to pin down, and is probably not that useful in describing one's music. In the end, I think that if one is honest with oneself and writes with integrity, you'll sound like yourself regardless of what technique you use (including no established technique). In other words, one might have one's own style all to his or her own, and that's okay. There is no "minimalist" style or "neo-romantic" style since that is just not adequate to convey differences between composers who are, for better or worse, classified together. Does John Adams really sound like Steve Reich? Does Terry Riley sound just like LaMonte Young? I don't think so, and probably neither would they. Personally, I don't like classifications and categorizations anyway, although sometimes they may be a necessary evil.
So is the general notion of musical style overblown? Does it matter? How does/should one define one's own music when asked the dreaded question "so, what style do you write in?"
posted by David Toub
11:49 PM
Sunday, June 19, 2005
Matter over Mind
While Kyle Gann is sending you to his post on separating art from politics (below), I’m also interested in the intriguing review of his new CD he’s written, where he discusses his early attempts to give voice to Heidegger’s vision of human consciousness. Heidegger described cognition as a kaleidescopic affair, as opposed to the sustained trains of thought and emotion portrayed in premodern music and literature.
I too have flirted with composing works that reflect this view of a fragmented, nonlinear thought process, but have found my efforts ultimately unsatisfying on several levels. Consequently, I’ve become more interested in probing traditional narrative processes with an awareness of Heidegger and others.
Which brings me to my question: how much can/should music try to reflect actual thought patterns, as opposed to modeling idealized thought patterns?
Or, related questions: Is there something inherently dishonest about traditional narrative? Conversely, is there an artistic value to accurately capturing the mind at work, in all of its complexity?
posted by Lawrence Dillon
5:23 PM
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