"There are no two points so distant from one another that they cannot be connected by a single straight line -- and an infinite number of curves."
Composer Lawrence Dillon has produced an extensive body of work, from brief solo pieces to a full-length opera. Partially deaf from birth, Dillon grew up in a bustling household with seven older siblings. He began composing as soon as he started piano lessons at the age of seven. In 1985, he became the youngest composer to earn a doctorate at The Juilliard School, and was shortly thereafter appointed to the Juilliard faculty. Dillon is now Composer in Residence at the North Carolina School of the Arts, where he has served as Music Director of the Contemporary Ensemble, Assistant Dean of Performance and Dean of the School of Music.
Dillon's music, in the words of American Record Guide, is "lovely...austere...vivid and impressive." His works are recorded by Albany Records, Channel Crossings and CRS, and published by American Composers Editions. He is represented by Jeffrey James Arts Consulting.
William Bolcom was in town last week for the premiere of his Four Piedmont Choruses. The Piedmont Chamber Singers, some twenty strong, commissioned the piece for their 30th anniversary. Besides the commission, PCS sponsored a competition for young composers in honor of the occasion, which my student James Stewart won, so the evening also featured the premiere of Stewart’s The Desert.
Bolcom’s piece was performed twice, which is always nice in a premiere, but it was particularly nice this time, because Bill was the pianist in the first performance, and sat in the audience for the second (Ivan Seng, PCS’s regular pianist, played beautifully in the encore). Four Piedmont Choruses uses wonderful texts by Kathryn Stripling Byer, who was also present. The music is classic Bolcom – craftsmanship, versatility, wit, beauty -- all in fine proportion.
Stewart wrote most of The Desert as he was completing his Master’s here a year ago, so it was nicely familiar to me – I felt like a long-lost uncle encountering his successful, grown-up nephew. James’s music is courageous; he’s not afraid of taking aesthetic risks, and he has the good taste to find elegant ways to present his most unusual ideas. The piece is very strong, but I couldn’t help noting one small weak spot, sending him an email the next day with a gentle suggestion – which I know he is mature enough to accept or ignore.
I spent a lot of time with Bill Bolcom five years ago, when we commissioned his eleventh string quartet to commemorate the opening of our new chamber music hall. I’m still not sure if his social awkwardness is general, or if he is especially uncomfortable around other composers. I suspect it is a combination – he is always a little stiff with me, but comments he’s made about unpleasant encounters with other composers back up the impression that he is on his guard, protecting himself from attack.
The program was all American works: Billings, Beach, Dello Joio, Chadwick, Hadley, Bolcom, Stewart and local composer William Stevens, whose Three Not Very Old Ballads was very attractive. The mayor was on hand to issue a proclamation in honor of the PCS’s 30th anniversary, and the chorus responded with well-wrought performances of challenging rep.
A number of years ago, I found myself in a situation that called for legal advice. I met with an attorney and explained my situation. After listening in blank-faced silence, he launched into an incomprehensible response, full of jargony legalese. I tried to follow what he was saying for a couple of minutes, but it was impossible, so I stopped him and asked if he could please start over in plain English. He gave me a look of utter disdain, and in that moment, I thought, “Wow, is this the way my audiences feel when they hear my music? Are they trying to understand my ideas through a jargon that can only be grasped by taking years of music courses?” And I resolved never to let my language choices get in the way of the ideas I was trying to convey.
I went through a period of writing pieces in which I was absolutely clear about what I wanted to say, determined to find the simplest, most direct way to convey the central concept of a piece to an engaged listener. Although I’ve moved in many different directions since then, that motivation still has strong resonance for me.
I just have no desire to baffle anyone who wants to understand me.
The secret of poetry is never explained— is always new. We have not got farther than mere wonder at the delicacy of the touch, & the eternity it inherits. In every house a child that in mere play utters oracles, & knows not that they are such, 'Tis as easy as breath. 'Tis like this gravity, which holds the Universe together, & none knows what it is.
-- Ralph Waldo Emersonposted by Lawrence Dillon
6:44 AM
Saturday, April 26, 2008
Culmination
We have our end-of-the-year student composers’ concert tonight. Here’s the program:
Organizing all of these bodies to show up in all of the right places for rehearsals has been one of the great pleasures and great challenges of my week. I’ve also learned, day before yesterday, that I will be conducting one of the pieces. Dress rehearsal starts in three hours. I think it’s going to be one of the best student composer concerts we’ve done here – some very ambitious pieces, a lot of deeply committed performers.
Randall Woolf was in town much of last week. For those of you who are unfamiliar with him, there is a good reason: Randy is one of those composers whose artistic development has been pretty focused, but whose professional profile is all over the map – which is to say that he can’t easily be pegged within a particular milieu.
Whether he is composing for members of Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, orchestrating the film American Psycho, or creating works for the children’s ensemble Tales and Scales, Randy’s music occupies a terrain both familiar and yet fresh. His preferred medium seems to be the combination of sampled sound and live performers.
Listening to Woolf’s music is akin to looking at a familiar photograph in which each pixel has been magnified. You recognize the sources, but your attention is deepened and blurred through the detailed treatments. He likes to take vernacular styles – anything from hip-hop to country western – and mix them into metrically complex textures, feeding on their inherent energy while simultaneously commenting on that energy and its cultural context.
Imagine Steve Reich focusing his lens on the fine details in life instead of the grand scheme and you have a glimpse of one important facet of Woolf’s world.
Ransom Wilson led our orchestra in a performance of Woolf’s Hee Haw on Saturday night. Scored for chamber orchestra, two singers and sampler, Hee Haw subjects square dance music to sudden shifts in tone and perspective, from the caller’s exhortations to an extended passage of twisted fiddling. It’s funny and invigorating. I couldn’t help thinking, halfway through, that the shifting perspectives and angles ended up producing a cubist -- rather than a square -- dance.
Randy played a lot of his music for us in Composition Seminar on Friday. Go check out his work on myspace. I enjoyed all of it, but the piece that killed me was Everything is Green, with Rinde Eckart reading a story by David Foster Wallace accompanied by sampled sound and a live flute-and-piano duo. Much of Woolf’s work bristles with layers of energetic activity, but this piece let its poignant story unfold with a lovely balance of intricate yet transparent commentary.
Some composers wage war against the Classical canon, seeing it as an obstacle to their own artistic fulfillment.
Others decry pop music for dominating the collective conscious with easy-to-swallow formulas.
Still others vent their spleens at complicated, cerebral music, for fostering a general mistrust of new work.
All of these stances are based on reasonable causes. Unfortunately, when we align ourselves with any of these causes, we can end up spending more time pointing fingers than finding solutions.
In a remarkably complex and beautiful essay called Hot Air Gods,* Curtis White described the challenge of “translating beliefs,” of finding commonalities in traditionally antagonistic parties. He cites the recent “turn of Christian evangelicals to a politics that includes environmentalism” -- which they call “Creation Care.” In other words, previously antithetical belief systems – the religious right and the environmental left – have found a language through which they can achieve common objectives. Through “Creation Care,” as White notes, the world becomes “if not something holy, then something that ought to be the object of great and abiding Care.”
Can we imagine a similar approach to help us transcend adversarial stances in the music world? After all, all of us want the same thing – enhanced artistic experiences.
Finding the language to bridge these chasms is no easy task, though, and probably one that will take constant tweaking.
Making it even more difficult is our own seemingly boundless enthusiasm for pointing fingers. As White puts it, “Unhappily, we have very little interest in the challenge of translation, largely because we very much wish to remain cordially at one another’s throats.”
For me, the creative act is not unlike being an athlete. If you're in shape, things tend to flow, and if you're out of shape, it takes some patience and effort to get back in. If I've been away traveling for two or three weeks, I can often have a difficult, stubborn time getting going again.
