This month I became a Runner. I’ve been running intervals, alternating between running and walking, on and off for a few years. A few weeks ago, I stopped walking and just ran. I’m surprised how much I enjoy it. It turns out that I am built for distance running. I want to run for a long time; I do not want to run fast. As of right now, I’m running a fairly short distance (about 3.5 miles) but I can feel that I can do so much more. Part of my limitation is that I’m running barefoot. I’m getting used to that as well as getting used to being a Runner.
So what is the point? My music habits have also turned towards endurance. In my composition, my tempi have been slowing down for the last decade and I constantly find myself inserting more material and more space throughout the piece. Shorter music has become harder for me to write. My definition of “shorter” has also been changing, making things even more unfair. Three minutes used to be my limit 15 years ago. Now I can’t even seem to get started before that much time has passed.
A friend of mine sent me a “work in progress” which was 25 minutes long. After 18 minutes, I felt like the piece was opening up and hitting its stride and could go on for another 20 minutes without being dull. On one hand, it scares me to think that I could generate a work of similar duration. On the other hand, it thrills me.
…but I wonder if any of you perceive a difference in composers who
A) know exactly what they want to write and write it
or
1) gets out of the way and lets the piece write itself
I’ve waffled back and forth between these to poles and I am a capital 1 these days. I suspect that Carter is an example of an A. I don’t think it matters, I’m not about to quantify one camp as being better than another (you can write perfectly awful music in a wide variety of ways). When you are listening to a piece, do you think about this? When you are writing? Does it matter? Can a composer be both?
I guess I see it more as a factor of wills. Does a composer create a piece or is the piece already there?
And yeah, yeah, this is an artificial arbitrary yadda yadda yadda more of a continuum blah blah blah. Sure. Got it.
I’ve been talking with Tom, my father-in-law, who is an amateur musicologist in the best sense of the word. He listens to and loves classical music, opera, etc., and often has very interesting questions about how/why modern composers do what they do/did. I gave him a copy of The Rest is Noise, which he loved, and Robert Carl’s book In C, which he’s less crazy about since he doesn’t care for the piece.
Tom doesn’t like listening to In C and wonders what kind of audience it was written for. I told him that, as a composer, I don’t really think about the audience because I’m never sure who is listening. That is the typical composer dodge. The Audience is just as helpful of a stereotype as Americans or String Quartets or Volvo-driving Vampire. You can say things about each group but, of course, each individual is its own unique blah blah blah bliggety blah. When I write a piece for saxophone and electronics, I can pretty much name the venues where it will be heard and I could probably give you the names of a modest percentage of the audience attendees.
Still, I must say, I don’t think much about the listener when I’m writing. I want the work to make sense but that is about it. My music needs to have a through-line, a trajectory (to use the word that I overuse in lessons), and I hope that everything in the piece points to that trajectory. Big picture stuff is easier for me to communicate.
The idea of The Audience and Composers Not Writing For It got me thinking. Do performers think about The Audience? I seem to find a lot of people who enjoy playing instruments as long as people aren’t listening. Most of the students I’m around don’t want to be heard. My wife is playing her flute again but she won’t play it for you. I’ll play piano under extremely limiting conditions. Tom was playing guitar for a while but I’ve rarely ever heard him.
So do performers do their performing so audiences can hear them? I’m sure that they program works based on audience tastes, I remember the hullaballoo when the Pacifica Quartet was asked NOT to play Carter during a tour a few years back (which is a shame, since this member of The Audience wanted to hear some effin’ Carter), but do performers think about The Audience when making their interpretive choices? When they play, is it for themselves or for others?
I’m starting to think that almost nobody thinks about The Audience. I’m not convinced that this is a problem. Should I? Other than selecting what music is presented, how much does anyone really care about those who are listening?
Lots of contradictory thoughts here, so bear with me.
There comes a time when my focus shifts from doing something towards doing that thing well. When I started composing, I just wrote what sounded good. I didn’t worry about good or bad, just if I thought it all worked or not. Then I started Studying. Then I started trying to Make My Pieces Better. The focus shifted from composing to Composing Good Music. After a rather toxic decade of that sort of behavior I am now right back where I started. Just composing. When I try too hard, when I focus on Composing, my music loses whatever it is that makes it truly mine.
I find the same holds true with every activity I do. My first batch of beer was great. I didn’t know what I was doing. Then I started Learning and the quality dipped. Now I sit back and don’t worry about it so much and the beer turns out better than ever. My recent sewing escapades are starting to exhibit a similar trend. I made three simple projects and dove into a whole Wonder Woman costume for my daughter. I just enjoyed Doing it. Recently I started seeing flaws, learning how to correct them, then focusing too much on the corrections and not on what I was actually doing.
I’ve blogged about this recently. While I have nothing against improvement and striving towards a better whatever, I find it damaging when I lose focus on the greater good. When we just focus on the improvements, we lose the joy in creating. The things we make before we know what we are doing were constructed with a sense of joy that we were simply Doing It. Then we change gears and try to reach some stupid Platonic ideal and cast away the joy that comes from participating in the activity.
I equate this to the golf tactic of asking your opponent if he/she inhales or exhales on their backswing. Then the golfer thinks about that minutia and not on the swing. The golfer forgets the saying of Basho: “A flute with no holes is not a flute. A doughnut with no holes is a danish.”
I’m revamping my website and splitting off the portion that contains scores and recordings. My question is simple: should I leave the PDFs and MP3s as separate downloads or should I archive both files as a single ZIP for easier download. Over course there are benefits and limitations to each strategy.
I’m leaning towards the ZIP archives. Is that wrong? When you are looking at scores and recordings from someone’s website, do you view/hear everything in the browser or do you prefer to download everything and look at it later? Does it matter to you?
Tomorrow afternoon I fly to Kansas City for my annual obligation of judging entries for the Electronic Music Midwest festival. We have something shy of 200 pieces to review and it will occupy the better part of two days. We all sit in a secluded living room, listen to the pieces, then each judge assigns points (1-10) in response to the piece we just heard. We pick a “cutoff” score after all the pieces have been heard and everything above that cutoff is accepted for the festival. The best thing about the experience is the communal aspect. All of the judges are in the same room and we talk. A lot. We’ll banter about differences in opinion, we’ll petition to change people’s minds, and also just catch up since we haven’t seen each other in several months. There is a fair amount of name calling, too (among ourselves). We strive for as equitable of a process as possible. Rowdy, but fair, is perhaps the unofficial motto of EMM.
If you haven’t done any adjudication of any kind, you really should. We bitch and moan about Unfair Judging and how they Already Knew Who Was Going to Win and so forth. Yet, after you’ve stared down a stack of entries and can only pick a few, you develop some respect for the process. I don’t grumble about my piece not getting accepted anymore. Whoever was looking at it didn’t see what they wanted. Someone else might see what they want. Tastes are different, festivals are different, you can’t account for all the variables. There is a luck/kismet factor about which one cannot grumble.
The five of us who judge EMM are not paid to do so. Submission is free but attending the festival requires a modest registration fee. We are giving of our time, some of us traveling from out of state, to come together and survey the entries. We take it seriously even if we are a bit lighthearted and get slap-happy towards the end. We want to program the best music that fits the goals of the festival. And we want to be able to present that music as well as we possibly can. Anyone else would do the same thing.
So, if you find yourself bitching about judges, put out a simple call for scores. You’ll get overwhelmed with the number of entries and you won’t be able to program EVERYTHING (you probably won’t want to program everything, too). Suddenly you become the Bad Guy in the eyes of other composers. You make choices that will be as equitable as possible but will no doubt seem arbitrary to others. Then you will see that we are all in this together. The next judge you complain about could be yourself.
The semester is over and I’ve been dealing with an interesting thing; a number of students have expressed gratitude towards me as a teacher. The students who were freshmen when I started teaching at UCF are now graduating and a few have stayed in contact with me and thanked me for being their teacher. Heck, even some students who have only known me since I started at CMU this year have done it. This is not something that I am used to nor am I comfortable with it. I’m used to students treating me as if I am deliberately wasting their time. Don’t worry, I’m not about to launch into some ego-frenzy because of these messages and comments. All I seem capable of is dwelling on the blunders that I’ve made. I carry around my mistakes and assume that anything good was a fluke. When a student tells me otherwise, it feels pretty darned good.
This experience makes me wonder if I’ve ever expressed gratitude towards some of the educators in my past who have made a huge difference in my life. I might have but in some cases I honestly can’t remember. Some of these people might not know how profound and important their influence was on me and how much I value my experiences with them. I’m going to start correcting that.
This weekend I caught myself in pure hypocrisy. Talking about Lady Gaga, I said that her videos were problematic because there was nothing that unified the song with the video. Granted, I make this claim having seen only two of her videos. ”Bad Romance” works because the distorted visuals tie into the lyrics.
“Telephone” doesn’t work because what do cell phones on the dance floor have to do prisons and poisoning a diner full of people?
Maybe it is my generation, but I hold this as the gold standard.
The song and the video are unified. What happens in the visuals feeds/is fed by the song itself. Not to say that all videos must be slaves to their songs a la Literal Video Versions, but that there is a verisimilitude in the world of the song and the world of the video. There are plenty of songs with seemingly unrelated videos that I like. For example:
or the even more impressive Rube Goldberg video (which I honestly do NOT prefer)
Here, though, I have to call out OK Go. The videos are impressive. Damned impressive. The songs, however, are pretty forgettable. I don’t have any songs by OK Go on my iPod but I have three of their videos. Their videos are never related to their songs. What song could inspire swamp monsters and Rube Goldberg? ”Here It Goes Again” could be sloppily tied to being on a treadmill, but come on…the treadmill dance that made them icons really has nothing to do with the song. In some ways, their best video could be “Do What You Want.”
Why talk about this? Because I seem to be stuck in a bit of hypocrisy. I like music videos that relate to the songs. Except for good videos that DON’T relate to their songs unless in some abstract way. If the video matches the energy of the song, in almost any way, then I seem to be okay.
Case in point. I love this video. Love it. It captures something beyond what the song already contains.
But why is this okay and “Telephone” not? Why are the Beastie Boys compelling me to watch their cop parody but Lady Gaga can’t interest me with her actual storyline? Why are OK Go videos “ok” if the songs are forgettable pop? And, most importantly, do I need any consistent justification? Can I just like what I like because I like it and leave it be?
I’ve been attending a 3-day grant writing workshop here on my campus. It has been interesting, not because of the information that the presenters are giving, but mostly as I compare needs/wants with some of my peers from other disciplines. I don’t want grants to do “research” the way that the physicists and educators want to do research. Besides, there is absolutely zero money for funding someone like me in my “research.” What I am trying to do is bring people to campus so we have high-caliber musicians for next year’s New Music Symposium.
When I tell my peers at this workshop what I want to do and how much money I need to do it, they think it is rather funny. ”Awww,” I can almost hear them say, “isn’t that cute! You have to write to 4 different sources to ask for a total of $3500? That is just so precious. I’m working on one NSF grant that will provide $850,000 for a three-year research project. Have fun with your proposals.”
At times, this workshop is very empowering. I get a vision, a picture of making something Really Big and Cool, and then I start hitting the obstacle that nobody wants to fund Things Like That. Then I get another idea of the Really Big and Cool and hit the same issues. It has been an emotional up and down over these last few days. I feel like I could accomplish so much if I just didn’t need money to do it.
Besides, I’m an artist. I’m not supposed to be doing this for money, right? That would make me a sellout. Except, in all honesty, isn’t art what people’s money is for? What do these educators and scientists spend their money on when all the basic needs have been met? Aren’t they buying music? Going to movies? Watching television? Playing video games? Aren’t they spending their money on things that bring them joy and happiness? They aren’t doing research in their spare time, too, right? They use my stuff as an escape from their own.
Yet arts funding keeps getting cut. The researchers don’t want to research all the time. We artists, though, want to be doing art all of the time. If they would pay us, we would!
As one of my composition teachers said, “Someone had to go kill the bear so someone else could stay and paint on the cave wall.” In this day and age, though, I have to do both.
Progress never seems to come about without some measure of moving backwards first. I’ve seen this in my composition, cooking, beer brewing, and most recently sewing. Right now I’m backsliding in just about every one of these areas and the only thing I can do is tell myself that I’ll be better on the other side of it. I have a certain amount of beginners luck with things. My first batch of cheese turned out quite well. Then, after I learn more about it and try to make it better, it gets worse. The techniques I’m using to make a better product (like flat fell seams in sewing, recently) actually destroy my projects until I’m good enough at the technique for it to be a help and not a hindrance.
But hey, I’m a musician. Practicing is what we do.
With composing, I’ve never considered myself “stable.” I’ve never been one to identify a style and then write in that style. Each piece is a new thing, each idea calls for its own way of thinking. I can’t just push the “on” button and crank out music that sounds like me.
There are times when I develop certain fetishes or seem to chase certain aesthetics. Sometimes I make an abrupt shift in my style, usually after whatever fetish I’ve been working with just Stops Working. Then, as I start to scramble on a new path, it is like learning to compose all over again. The pieces aren’t quite successful and I get frustrated. I get to a point where I was really good with fetish A but once I put it down for fetish B it is as if I’ve never composed before. What is worse is that I can’t pick up fetish A again. It just doesn’t work anymore. Then, after a few pieces with fetish B, I develop a stride. Things start clicking and music making doesn’t seem like work. I like my music again. Not long after this point, cracks start to show in fetish B’s surface. Tricks and techniques stop working and I need to find something else.
Maybe I should have stayed in Kansas where evolution is outlawed.
Anyhow, I’m backsliding right now. I’m unsure of where I am heading but I move forward anyway. I only wish that my musical backslide was accompanied by backslides in damned near everything else that I do. When the slides are over, though, I’ll be stronger. Until the next slide starts.
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