So, this whole Lied Time thing has crashed and burned. I severely misjudged the amount of time I would have to do something like this right now and it has, to be frank, bit me in the ass. After 6 attempts, I’m throwing in the towel.

So what did you learn?

I still enjoy writing things quickly and I enjoy writing short pieces. I love dealing with text, pushing against it and reflecting my own interpretation. Writing melodies is something I really dig, writing harmonies, especially ones with a sense of functional tonality, is still something that doesn’t come easily to me.

You clearly failed in doing this for any substantial length of time. How did you succeed?

I made a few good songs. I wouldn’t say that I posted anything that I’m not happy with or anything that I don’t want to have performed in public. And most of the stuff I want to hear again, too. I really like that last haiku. It gets stuck in my head some days, which I can only take as a good sign.

I also learned that I can apply for a course release and a New Research Initiative at CMU. What would I do with such release time and funds? Write More Vocal Music. I can directly cite this blog as a reason for me to get a course release in order to write more vocal music and build vocal composition at CMU. I can also cite the fact that my regular creative output time is being eaten up with instrumental/electronic composition commitments so I simply need more time to develop this genre.

Why did it work last time?

You mean the Unsafe Bull Podcast? First of all, I had a significantly lighter teaching load in the spring semester of 2007. As my output built up more steam, the quality of the podcast began to suffer. I probably did it longer than I should have (86 weeks).

Which brings back the problem of goals and Why I Don’t Like to Do Them. The tail wags the dog. Is Lied Time really a failure? Just because I didn’t write something every week? Just because I didn’t get to the arbitrary duration that I put on myself for no real reason? Nope. Not a failure. The goal was arbitrary, the achievement of it equally so.

I’ll still crank out some short songs over the next few months. Just watch me.

As promised, I’m making up for lost time. I’ve taken that melody of Eight O’Clock by A. E. Housman (Titan Housman, I call him. Never mind.) and provided a harmonic accompaniment.

And here it is: Eight O\’Clock

What I like: I don’t do harmony very well but I like these chords. They have the usual crunchiness that I look for. I don’t really have a functional tonal voice so chords are usually a combination of fourths with some grinding dissonances as the glue. These deliver.

What I don’t like: Have you ever heard the term “pitch support?” Clearly I have not.

Okay, so last week didn’t go so well. I didn’t get a new piece together and I failed you all. So, to make amends, I’m going to post two this week. The first is a choral setting that I’ve been wanting to do for a while and had sketched out but never completed. Now it is complete.

The poem is by Bill Knott, a poet that I’ve really enjoyed for a long time. It turns out he even lives in my town but I’m too chicken to actually call him.

Dear Advice Columnist

What I like: Pretty much everything.

What I don’t like: It is too short so I don’t feel like it would get performed unless it was a set of several pieces. I have a very hard time repeating text and my tastes for poetry run on the shorter side. This means I make really short works which aren’t meaty enough to stand on their own. I should address these weaknesses somehow. Soon.

It is only today hitting me what I did in a composition lesson yesterday afternoon. I actually took a student’s work, crumpled up the paper, and threw it in the recycle bin. Actually, I missed the bin, it fell short, but I still took my student’s work and threw it in the trash.

It seems pretty hardcore, right? Like those stories you hear about really crotchety composers who don’t like a piece and throw it out the window while the student is playing it on the piano. Well, true, I didn’t toss the piece in the trash because I liked it so much. The thing is, the whole act was done out of respect for my student. It wasn’t an insult, the student agreed with me that the work was not very good.

I am, in general, very kind in my composition lessons. I’ve never ripped a student’s music apart. Never said things like the things that were said to me during my undergrad (You can change this all day and it is STILL going to suck). I try to teach from a sense of compassion but sometimes the most compassionate thing to do is to tell someone that they need to do things differently if they want different results.

So why do it? The student was too attached to notes and rhythms and it was simply killing the music (this piece in particular and the student’s music as a whole). The student was frustrated. The ideas were there but creating an actual score was too cumbersome. We talked about how the student could create an environment for the performers to make the music the student wanted to hear. The student didn’t want to enforce an artistic will upon the performers but rather wanted to create shapes in which performers could play.

We talked about graphic scores. We talked about how to set up an environment for performers to play in. We talked about not using Finale. The student sounded liberated, like what they wanted to do was somehow forbidden and I was saying that it was really okay.

So I threw my student’s work into the trash. I still think it was for the best.

Today, in counterpoint, I think I had a breakthrough. Someone asked about chromaticism and, after talking about how chromaticism will be brought in as an ornament to the diatonic structures which underlie species counterpoint, I started talking about how late Romantics just used the chromaticism and assumed you’d fill in the diatonic underpinnings yourself. It was assumed, like how my students understand that kthanxby isn’t a real word but a reference to other words not being said.

Then it hit me: Late Romanticism is like sex on television. A whole lot of energy is devoted to people actually doing it but you, the viewer, never see it happen. You assume it does based on the surrounding situations but the fact that you didn’t actually see the act doesn’t change anything.

Believe it or not, I make these analogies up as I go…

I’m a sucker for potential. I see it everywhere and get all optimistic about what fantastical things could be wrought from something base and common. Deep down, I believe that each of us could be the greatest fill-in-the-blank that we could be.

Potential is something I see in my students’ compositions. They bring me seeds and I see how they could flourish into a multitude of flora. There are so many possibilities sometimes! I try to tell my students what potentials I see in hopes to unlock whatever potential they see.

In my own work, though, I’ve been trying to shun potential, at least once the piece is going. I view multiple options as a problem. It scatters the energy of the piece, fractures it, and I want my pieces to be…inexorable, I suppose is the word I’m looking for.

When I see potential in something, a poem for example, there aren’t a multitude of options for me to compose. There is only one. Other people can see different potentials in the same poem, and they should, but there is only one “right answer” for me.

I used this analogy with a student recently and I think it illustrates my point: Imagine someone coming up to you and saying “Hey, I’m going to Shin’s for lunch. You want to come?” Your reaction and conversation is very different than if that same person says “Let’s go get some lunch. Where do you want to go?” Suddenly, in the second scenario, you have choice. Then you have to think about what sorts of places you want to go, what kind of food you are in the mood for, negotiate those tastes with your friend, and finally end up someplace that doesn’t really satisfy either of you.

For me and my music, there aren’t choices. If I’m listening carefully to my piece, really attending to what it is and what it wants to be, then there is no potential. All I have to do is let the piece be what it is. Seeds have potential, yes. But rose seeds aren’t going to produce oak trees. I need to be sensitive enough to my music that I understand what can grow where and then just enjoy the flowers that bloom.