Jay C. Batzner

I am wondering about the etiquette of reapplying for something in which you weren’t successful before. A few years ago I applied for a composition commission and received Honorable Mention. I was happy with the recognition but now that the commission opportunity is coming up again, I’d like to reapply.

The problem is this: the way that the competition is structured, I don’t really have any new material to send them. What I’d be sending would be, with maybe one exception, exactly what I sent in before. The judge panel seems to rotate annually, but am I “honor bound” to send in new works? Or, if They didn’t like me well enough the first time, would they like the same pieces another time?

If it was a festival performance, I wouldn’t think twice about sending the same works. Since this is a small portfolio evaluation and the portfolio is to be constructed of specific kinds of pieces, I’m afraid I’ll be bounced because I’m essentially selling the same goods they weren’t buying in the first place.

Any thoughts from you, oh Wise and Learned Internet?

I’ve been batting this idea around in my head for a few weeks and I think I can blog about it now. I’ve really gotten into Buddhist and Zen thought over the last few years and it has really changed how I approach everything: parenting, composing, teaching, you name it. I listen to a few Buddhist podcasts each week and I find a lot of what is said in those talks very enlightening to who I am and where I am right now.

One thought that came up in a podcast a few weeks ago was that the reason meditation is so hard is because we are afraid of being still and really getting to know ourselves. This struck me instantly as something that impedes my composition students: they don’t know who they are yet. Often they spend a lot of time and energy writing music that they might think they are supposed to write but they haven’t really found their own voice. Maybe they are mimicking stuff they like, or what was successful for them in the past, but they are really just starting their path of self discovery. They aren’t sure who they are yet so their music can be muddled and problematic.

Assume whatever qualifiers you need to in all accounts, of course.

Over the last few months, I’ve had some real struggles writing certain pieces. In my opinion, that is a sure-fire sign that I’m “doing it wrong.” My attention was going towards what people WANTED me to write instead of writing what I actually write and being who I am. My energies were outside of myself and not focusing on what was genuine to me. Once I attended to who I really was, the music came easily. I was simply in the way.

None of this means I advocate mindless adherence to a schtick or voice, of course (and that is a great article). I expect my voice to change and worry when I get fixated on too narrow of a view. What it means is I need to listen to myself and write that music.

It gets easier when I really attend to the Buddhist sense of “no self.” Since there really isn’t an “I” that can be found, all that is left is the music. Without the self, it flows pretty freely and usually sounds pretty good, too.

2012 has obviously begun and my teaching load suddenly lightened with the cancellation of a course. I was a bit bummed because I was looking forward to teaching that class but I have two other courses that I’m really digging. Remember how much I love teaching counterpoint last semester? Sure you do. Well I’m teaching Form this semester (it is what makes up our Theory IV class) AND I’m teaching “Contemporary Compositional Techniques” to boot. That course is a grad level class and I’m like a kid in a candy store.

Form is no big deal to prep, we are still using the standard theory textbook they’ve had for the past 3 semesters, but the content is so much more fun! I spent 45 minutes discussing 16 measures of Mozart today. Not even really interesting Mozart, just the theme of one of his variation movements of a piano sonata. I’ve got 30 students in the class and they are all on the ball, they’ve had classes with me before and know my modus operandi and we seem to be clicking. It is going to be great.

The contemporary techniques course is going be a lot of fun, too. We are offering a contemporary analytical techniques course this semester, the hour before my class, and we decided to use the same text (the anthology of the Roig-Francoli post tonal book). And heavy supplementation, of course.

I am determined not to turn my class into a set theory composition seminar and not to give undue attention to the whole twelve tone system. Will we talk about it? Sure. Will they write some serialized music? You bet! The R-F book is really, REALLY interested in set theory and serialism whereas I want students to interact with lots of composers not in the anthology. And we’ll talk about multimedia composition, too.

I’m also going to have them read the Babbitt “Who Cares if you Listen” article, the Zappa address to ASUC, the intro to No Such Thing as Silence, and other fun thought provoking reads.

I teach beginner courses quite often and I’ve been teaching them for so long that I really get fired up to get into deeper content. There is a lot to enjoy about teaching beginners but I feel like I stagnate. I need to constantly shake things up or else I’ll stagnate. I never teach my intro to music tech course the same way because I’ve been teaching it since the fall semester of 1997 and I think I’ll be teaching 2 sections of it every semester at CMU until I die. I need to keep myself entertained. This semester, I get two new courses to keep me going.

It’s going to be awesome! I’ll have more fun than my students. That is the sign that I’m doing it right.

In the era of social media, how does one really create a community? So much of the social technology is supposed to encourage connecting with others but oftentimes what happens is unidirectional bloviation. Lots of people are talking at once but is anyone really connecting or even listening? Facebook encourages has a menial acknowledgement system of “likes,” of course, and you can comment on posts. How often, though, does a commenter merely continue to talk about themselves, just in another venue?

An interesting experiment in music making via Twitter has recently wrapped up. The group #Armada (pronounced Hashtag Armada) gathered a community of composers (26 in all) to write piano piece via an “exquisite corpse” mechanism communicated via Twitter. Each composer writes a single measure, then tags another composer in the list and describes (in less than 140 characters) what their measure did. The fine people at #Armada collected the composed measures (sent in by the composers and not constructed via their 140 digits) and recently compiled the score.

The end result is a thoroughly entertaining journey that has its own twisted internal logic. It is a kind of like “Double Music” meets Didkovsky’s Zero Waste. What is fascinating is to imagine what a composer envisioned when he/she was “tagged” and how they interpreted the events of the preceding measure. Or if they paid attention to it at all. Hard cuts and non sequiturs blossom into other jumps and bumps in an amusing sort of way.

Twitter has been used for some interesting music making in the past. Steve Hicken was creating compositions in 140 characters or less a while back and last year the album sc140 was made by 22 composers writing 140 characters of Supercollider code.

Personally, I like Twitter as a social platform. It does feel more like a fluid conversation of many different streams instead of a wall being constantly papered with materials. I don’t know what #Armada has in store for the 2012 project but I’m on board. You should be, too.

No, not running or public yoga or anything like that. I am a big fan of the poetry of Bill Knott and have been since I encountered his works in an anthology I got for Santamas in 1992. He has a blog and while he shares a lot of his poetry on it he also shares his working-out process. The several drafts he puts in this public forum show how he smiths words and works out ideas. I don’t work well with words (those who have read my CD reviews can attest to that) and I am fascinated by those who do. While most wordsmithing I encounter is working with University Bureaucratese, it is refreshing to see how an artist carefully crafts poetic ideas and how greatly these ideas are affected by swapping a single word or switching the order of two words.

I think a lot of composition students think that their first idea is enough. Far from it. All ideas need to be massaged, worked, thought about, and carefully considered. I’m a fairly intuitive composer these days but I still check my pieces against a certain sense of “rightness” and am always fiddling and tweaking with durations, rests, phrases, etc. Seeing other people do this, and doing it publicly, is refreshing.

Okay, Wise and Learned Internet, I need some help. There are times when calls for scores and other opportunities are looking for a proposal for a composition. Not a completed work but a work that Will Be Done. My students are encountering these, too.

So what do you do? How do you describe and talk about a piece you haven’t written? Or might not write if the application is rejected? What do you say? How detailed do you get? How do you format such a thing? Just write a paragraph or two that functions like a precog program note? Have a meticulous formal plan? List your general inspirations and guide the reviewers towards your representative compositions?

I’m interested in any feedback you might have. Especially if you have been successful getting a proposed piece turned into an actual piece…

This being 11/11/11, you’ll see the Nigel Tufnel goes to 11 clip a lot today, I’m sure. This clip has been important in my composition pedagogy for quite a while. I believe that since music is such an abstract experience most unsuccessful pieces simply fail because they didn’t go far enough and didn’t exaggerate their intentions enough. What we think we are communicating isn’t stated directly enough and the subtlety obfuscates the real point of the work.

No, I’m not bashing subtlety. My music is decidedly unsubtle right now but you shouldn’t take that as a stance against nuance. I tend to listen/hear the “big picture” stuff first. Texture, gesture, shape, density all make their presence known on first hearing. Subtlety is for repeat listening. There are composers who pretty much demand that the audience hear and experience the work multiple times before it makes any sense. I prefer the works which are compelling on the surface first and draw me into the nuance (like David Lynch, for example).

I also think that a lot of the subtle and nuanced things that we find in other people’s music was put their subconsciously. I think Schenker sketches would infuriate Beethoven if he ever saw them. Bartok would certainly acknowledge folk influences but I think he’d be rather surprised to read the Antokoletz book on his music. This isn’t to say that the nuance and relationships aren’t there, I just think that our theory teaching model makes young composers think that their music should be so thought out and nuanced from the get go. I think we should just write and make sense of it as we go along.

The “going to 11″ clip is important because, in its own tangental way, it addresses the need for exaggeration. When Nigel is talking about being on 10 all the way across and asks the question “Where can you go from there?” I find myself asking composers the same thing in their own music. If they have already maxed out the range of an instrument in the first 30 seconds of the piece, where does the piece go from there? If you are assuming a traditional dramatic shape to a composition (and many people do) then how do establish a high point of a 6 minute piece if you’ve already maxed your dynamics and range in the first minute? Where do you go? How do you make the piece’s high point the actual high point? If you are using a different dramatic shape, how are you articulating that shape so you don’t undercut your basic intentions?

And yes, I use the phrase “push over the cliff” in my lessons. My students will attest to that. I almost always think that climactic points need to be higher/faster/louder and that quiet points need to be softer/thinner/less. I’ve blogged about that before.

Whatever you do today, do it to 11.

During my undergrad, when I would tell people I was a composition major they would respond with “What is your instrument?”

“Composition,” I would say.

I treated composition as if it was an instrument and I believe firmly that composers must do this. We practice instruments, we spend time with them, we spend inordinate amounts of time on tricky pieces/passages/measures/fingerings, so why not do the same when it comes to composing? I’ve written etudes that need never be heard by an audience and I developed my craft by doing so, just as a performer would woodshed a particular etude for application in a different piece. The amount of time I spent composing and listening was usually in excess of what my performance counterparts did. I worked on my composing the same way that others works on performing so my “composition is my instrument” answer was never intended to be flip and sarcastic.

I find many students come to composition as an afterthought and, even when they are composition majors, their performance studio still takes the bulk of their time. I think it is important for composition students to maintain some level of performance facility but all too often their time and energy goes towards their instrument and not their writing. I understand that balancing these two areas can be tricky and that composition will sometimes fall behind when there are recitals and whatnot coming up. Yet I must say I’ve rarely, if ever, seen a week where a composition student has neglected their performance studio because they were composing so much.

My education allowed me to focus on composition and did not have rigorous performance requirements. When I encountered performance requirements, I always looked at how to spin them towards my compositional interests. I took lessons on instruments I had never played before (viola, harp, organ, gamba, voice, guitar) not so I could perform on them but so I could write better for them. Composition came first. It was my major and it was what I wanted to do.

All too often I’m seeing composition studies take a back seat to performance. It severely hampers my students’ abilities to make progress in their craft. It is a difficult situation to balance, I am aware of that. It is something we all face. My life as a composer is balanced by being a teacher of music technology and music theory. Most days the pendulum swings far away from me being a composer. On those days I grab the pendulum by the chain and whip it back towards composing. I hope the student composers out there will do the same.

October is a month of travel. There are a ton of festivals and events that get scheduled for this month and I’m usually fortunate to be included in many of them. The upside is the gratification that people are interested in my work. The upside/downside is the travel. The downside is having to say no to some things while saying yes to others.

In October I traveled to Kansas City for Electronic Music Midwest, an annual festival of electroacoustic music that is in either the Chicago or Kansas City area. I’m on the board for this festival, I program the concerts, and I help adjudicate the entries. I have to be there, I want to be there. EMM is a great community and, as one of our performers noted “It is like Comic-Con for composers.”

This past weekend I went to Richmond for the College Music Society’s national conference. I presented a paper, was on a panel, chaired 4-5 sessions, and did 3-4 career mentoring sessions. It was a busy few days. I like CMS and enjoy being an active member.

Both EMM and CMS have the requirement of attendance, meaning if you can’t be there then your music/research won’t be presented. This is typical and understandable for most academic conferences. I prioritized travel to these events since my absence would cost me my participation. Unfortunately, I’ve had to say no to some pretty damned cool stuff.

I wrote a paper on Mikel Rouse’s album Recess which was accepted at the 3rd International Conference on Minimalism this past month. In Belgium. Due to funding issues (which I won’t go into but have something to do with the faculty of CMU picketing on the first day of classes) I wasn’t able to attend. Another member of the session read my paper, though, so my ideas were still put out there.

Today my piece Slumber Music is on the Sequenza21/MNMP/ACME concert. Would I love to be there? Absolutely. Could I afford (monetarily, pedagogically) to go? Not a chance. Next month the Kansas City group newEar is playing Goodnight, Nobody. Would I like to be there? Of course. But I won’t/can’t for the same reasons.

While I thoroughly enjoyed the travel I have done, I gotta say I have some regrets as to the travel I’m not doing. I’m torn. On the one hand, I need to not travel all the time for family and student reasons. On the other hand, my successes are going to benefit CMU, my employer, even if they don’t think they should compensate me for it all. I get some funding, yes, but it never covers all my expenses.

So there it is. If you are going to the concert tonight, I’m sorry I won’t be there. I’d really like to be there and meet you all. It sounds like a lot of fun and a great opportunity. I’ll make the next one.

We are transitioning from species work to analysis in my counterpoint class. Today I tried to, in a fast-forward kind of way, connect the dots from the late Renaissance to the early Baroque. In my mind, you can’t just drop from species counterpoint into Bach. Bach doesn’t make sense, from a Fuxian point of view, without going through Monteverdi madrigals, opera, and the expressive use of dissonance.

We ended up with Purcell, talking about “Dido’s lament” for the last 10-15 minuts of class. I didn’t want to race through it but we were running out of time. I figured we’d do a taste of it today and hit it again on Wednesday (although I might not and assign it to one of the students as a final project).

Fortunately for me, I grabbed the wrong CD when I left the house and didn’t have my recording of the opera on hand. Why fortunate? Some of you might remember what happened the LAST time I played this track for a class. Instead we sampled the Naxos Web Radio’s recording (perfectly respectable with Susan Graham as Dido). Since it wasn’t “my” recording, I was left with acres of goosebumps but no tears.

Don’t know what I’ll do on Wednesday. I’ll keep you informed.