Forum

For all you composers big and small who still think that a big publisher contract is the bee’s knees: composer John Mackey blogs in a nicely lucid way about why the deal is nowhere near as good as the dream, and how you can and should be taking control of the full fruit of your labor. This is stuff that, to me, is every bit as fundamental to a young composer as learning I-IV-V-I (& maybe more, these days). Yet it’s rare that we ever see a “Basic Music Business 101″ course — not the first year, not the fourth, not even the sixth or eighth.

Or at least write the music for one?  Just a couple posts earlier we were talking about composer Chris Becker’s work with dancers. If this is always something you’ve thought about doing, and you happen to be in NYC, a fantastic opportunity is just waiting for you to respond:

Every year, the Joyce Theater Foundation presents “Free Advice”, a series of seminars for dance companies and choreographers spanning a wide range of management and presentation subjects. As part of their schedule this year, on Monday June 22nd at 6:15pm they’re hosting a Choreographer/Composer Meet and Greet, where they promise you can mingle with choreographers who are eager to work with composers, chat each other up, and trade work samples and contact information.

It doesn’t get any easier or better than this, y’all. But word from Joyce SoHo is that they’ve got way more choreograpers signed on than composers. So here’s your chance to take a chance, step up and represent our end of the artistic deal. It’s free, but you do need to RSVP with the little form on their webpage. Joyce SoHo is located at 155 Mercer Street, between Houston and Prince. So put on your walking shoes and pack along some CDRs; you might just find your next big work waiting to happen.

As artists in music, what are we worth? And I’m not talking about prize tagging. To put it in Frank Zappa’s words: “what can you do that’s fantastic?”

In one way or another most of us here make music, but it’s not like the only-plumber-in-town scenario. There’s an ungodly number of musicians out there (a lot of whom call themselves artists).

So what’s our worth? What is it that makes us truly stand out from each other? Is it a matter of business or a matter of art? Is it a matter of power? Are we expecting something from music or are we trying to give something to it? What should the question be, is it worth it or am I worth it?

Some of the reasons I pose these questions are:
- I try not to take art for granted.
- The evident standardization of people, even so-called artists.
- The current state of the world; a world degraded by overemphasizing economics, and which tries to heal itself exclusively through those same means.
- The current state of the place I live, the North of Mexico, where Culture (with a capital C) is literally being assassinated.
- Because I like teasing you.

With JiB’s annual weeklong festival about halfway through already, I thought I’d suggest the festival as a topic of conversation on the composer’s forum. Who’s been to June in Buffalo and would like to share some memorable experiences?

 Here’s one I posted on my blog (www.sequenza21.com/carey) earlier this week:

June in Buffalo Memory: Pinch hitter

In 1999, I was invited to June in Buffalo for a second time. My string quartet was slated for premiere by the Cassatt Quartet: an excellent opportunity for a composer at any age, but particularly exciting for a young pup still in grad school!

The piece mixed aspects of 12-tone writing with swing-era jazz, and finding the correct balance between these two different demeanors was a tricky compositional and interpretive challenge.

Fortunately, the Cassatt members were very generous with their time. I met with them in New York City to rehearse the quartet, and things went quite well.

But when I arrived in Buffalo, I learned that their cellist had fallen ill and wouldn’t be able to play on the concert; the festival’s opener. While having any ensemble member cancel is concerning, it was particularly worrisome that the cellist was unavailable. I’d written the quartet in such a way that the cello served as the de facto ‘rhythm section’ of the piece, frequently articulating the pulse with walking bass lines.

But into the breach stepped Christopher Finckel; an excellent new music player who was also playing at the festival. Chris learned, rehearsed, and performed the quartet in one day. His pinch-hitting rescued the concert and earned a young composer’s lasting gratitude.

Being myself a composer who’s worked a LOT with dancers, I can say that there’s not much more synergistic a musical experience. While the communication can sometimes be strange and strained, with mutual openess and patience all of that gives way to a work where both arts can penetrate and change the other in remarkable and surprising ways.

Composer Chris Becker (whose wonderful CD Saints and Devils got a lot of play on my stereo last year) is right now collaborating with choreographer Sasha Soreff on a piece for an upcoming performance in late June. As he works through it, Chris is going to try to blog a bit about the whole process. It promises to be an informative read, so check in there regularly.

With most musicians the obsession of Brian Eno tends toward the analogy of driving on the highway: anyone driving faster than me is insane, and anyone going slower than me is an idiot.  I’ve done more than my share of eye-rolling as it seems nearly any musician will pledge some allegiance to ‘Brain One’ no matter how tenuous the connection, yet it is undeniable how pervasive an effect Eno has had on the world.  From his early work with Roxy Music, then moving on into a solo career where he largely created the ambient movement (along with significant contributions to progressive rock and world music) we could stop there and have a significant figure to consider. Then of course we would be leaving out, world-renowned producer, visual artist, writer, and visionary thinker who helps found organizations like The Long Now Foundation. Author David Sheppard acknowledges that on the highway of Brian Eno, he drives in the unrestricted lane of the autobahn. I drive pretty fast myself, so I was quite excited to encounter this book.

The biography of a renaissance man (truly an apt description here) must be one of the harder tasks in telling the story of a life.  There are so many avenues to walk down it would be easy to lose focus. Sheppard starts off, “You couldn’t make him up.  Or at least if you did no one would quite believe you.”  The density of Eno’s multi-varied accomplishments is something that Sheppard is acutely aware of and are enumerated with humor and appropriate awe in his opening chapter.  Indeed there are so many facets to Eno that Sheppard could only hope to build a frame around him and “try to fit a skyscraper into a suitcase.”  Nonetheless with this book we are treated to a wonderful framing of an inconceivably accomplished life.

Of course this biography is destined to be incomplete as Brian Eno is alive and well (61 today), but we are left with a detailed tent pole chronology that gives us an excellent portrait of the man up to very recent history (Spring 2008).  While the opening chapters provide a warmly detailed account of Sheppard’s interest in Eno as well as the years of his upbringing, the bulk of the book deals (understandably) with his professional life.  There is a dizzying plethora of material on Eno as so many love to explore every inch of his output.  Certainly this is in no small part due to Eno’s enthusiasms for being interviewed and giving talks, but Sheppard has been exceptionally detailed in finding choice interviews and quotes from Eno’s many collaborators.  Beyond that, he had the handy cooperation of Eno himself and his wife Anthea to provide new and revealing detail.  While Sheppard is clearly a fan’s fan, he manages to temper the honorifics and hyperbole with a critical eye to give us much better than what could have been a gushing tome.

While Eno’s published diary gives us a personal insight and Eric Tamm’s book gave us a detailed musicology, Sheppard’s biography fills a much needed space in providing a fabulous and engrossing bridge between the two.  He gracefully merges groundbreaking collaborations, ideas, and music with an intimate portrait that is equally fascinating.

“On Some Faraway Beach: The Life and Times of Brian Eno” by David Sheppard, 2008, hardcover: 480 pages, $18.45 on Amazon, ISBN 978-1-55652-942-9.

So I’m finally crawling out of the black hole that is the academic Spring Semester and looking forward to a summer chock-full of composing, preparing for classes…and figuring out what to do with my Composer Next Door project.

Three years ago I was marooned in central Oklahoma with few job prospects, so to keep my mind distracted I threw myself into a project that I’d always wanted to try – creating a radio show based on contemporary concert music. The folks at KCSC-FM on the campus of the University of Central Oklahoma were kind enough to give me an hour slot and within six months I was making radio shows on my laptop with a decent USB microphone and a healthy collection of CDs kindly donated by composers across the country.

Things seemed to go quite well until my teaching & composing career improved to the point where I had to impose a six-month hiatus on the project – it had been getting increasingly more difficult to give it the time that it needed while tending to small distractions such as finishing commissions and revamping curricula. Now that I’ve taken said hiatus, I’ve finally gotten things at work more-or-less organized and my commissioning schedule seems to have spaced itself out well enough that I can get back to TCND and figuring out what’s best for it.

My conundrum is what medium and format would be best for such a project. Radio is a safe way to go about it but unless you’ve got a national syndication, you’re limited to a local audience (online simulcasts help with this, but you’re still limited in terms of how often someone can listen in). Podcasting is tempting but the copyright limitations/royalties issues are daunting, especially if one wants to focus as much on label-affiliated CDs as on self-produced works. At the speed at which new opportunities come about, I wouldn’t be surprised if a third option hasn’t come about recently that I’m not aware of – I’ve also thought about working video into the mix (giving due props to John Clare who seems to do everything right these days). All I do know is that this is still an important project and that I’m sure there’s a viable way to make it work (either on my own or in conjunction with others).

So…if you were in my shoes, what would you do?

The photos to the right show where I make all of my music; the top is from the early 1990s, the bottom from 2007. The equipment has changed drastically but one thing remains a constant, in every workspace I’ve had going back to the mid-’70s… See the single sheet of paper tacked on the wall with an image of a piano keyboard, a long row of notes from low to high, and lots of lines above that? It’s a photocopy of a chart from a book I once owned, on the ranges of all the orchestral instruments. It also includes the frequency in hertz, as well as the naming convention of each note. Michael Urich in La Porte, TX has even been kind enough to offer an exact copy of it online.

Recently I spotted another by Charles Houghton-Webb over at BWMusic, that I think will become the new candidate for my wall; in addition to all the original has, this one extends the range, color-codes some stuff, and adds the standard MIDI note numbers for each pitch. It’s also a PDF file, so the print quality’s a bit better (the PDF is password-protected, but Charles offers the password right there on the page). Plenty of this information has long been internalized, but it’s still something I glance at almost automatically a few times during the composition of any piece.

So how about it? Do any of you have some little, almost-totemic item that stays at your own workspaces, no matter when or where?

Peter Gillette is studying trumpet — and of course all manner of other things seriously musical — over in Iowa City. Like so many of us he also keeps a blog, and I just couldn’t help passing along a link to his wonderful little post, “A Brief, Entirely Clear Thought Upon Reading Milton Babbitt“. An excerpt:

This evening, was read by me, which is to say having been read as one reads if read one must call it (that is, that which must be read or has been itself read) several articles by—or, rather, at the limits, if a name apply it we must, Milton Babbitt; eminent theorist insofar as theory itself ascribes eminence, ascribed insofar as ascription can itself be ascertained through paragraphs of two or more sentences at once, it can be said, resembling this one it can be said at its own very limit, both within and beyond that which is under and about (as far as we may be certain enough to say)…

On 7 November 2008, Kyle Gann posted a provocative article on his blog condensing and expanding upon remarks he made at a new music festival at Sacramento State University. In the piece, Gann calls for more respect to be accorded to an aesthetic he (with some reluctance) calls “music of the Absolute Present.” The Pantheon of Absolute Presentist composers is defined by a “maverick” bunch who had to fight against the musical establishment for any ounce of respect. Among these composers are Erik Satie, John Cage, Morton Feldman, and the early minimalists. Absolute Presentism takes its aesthetic bearings from Zen Buddhism and strives to make music free from memories of the past and premonitions of the future so that the “absolute present” can be accessed unmediated. Absolute Presentist composers like Gann write music “in measure 185 [that] doesn’t commit [them] to writing anything particular in measure 202″; they “avoid musical karma” and are inclined to “move from one thing to the next without any causality.”

Gann opposes Absolute Presentism with nineteenth-century Romanticism, an aesthetic which hogs the respect of the musical community. Romanticist composers “aim in their music for a kind of organic emotional curve whereby the music spends most of its time crescendoing or decrescendoing in intensity, with some sense of climax and often resolution, often symbolized by increasing dissonance or complexity.” Interpreting the term broadly, Gann labels composers like Brahms, Bartók, and Corigliano “Romanticists,” even though their affinities with historical Romanticism are not easy to pin down. Basically, by “Romanticism” Gann means “organicism,” and such an organicist orientation describes much of what we know as the standard classical repertoire. While I will continue to use the term in Gann’s sense, I would like to register one objection up front: the standard classical repertoire is neither musically nor aesthetically monolithic; neither Satie’s music nor Cage’s is a virgin birth, however much devotees of these mavericks might like to think so.

Gann probably feels about Romanticism how I feel about Absolute Presentism. I would never quarantine all Absolute Presentists south of Fourteenth Street; nor would Gann banish Romanticism from the universe. I like In C, and I’ll bet he likes Beethoven; certainly both Terry Riley and Beethoven count as “mavericks.” I consider myself as open-minded as the next guy, and I have no reason to believe Gann is any different.

Nonetheless, I find Gann’s remarks highly unsatisfactory. His take on the aesthetic politics of music is skewed and hagiographic, and his Absolute Presentism is undernourishing as an aesthetic. Viewed through any sensible frame of reference, Gann’s Absolute Presentists are not as marginalized as his post suggests, and there is nothing in Absolute Presentism which obliges anyone in a position of power to concede its equivalence with Romanticism and set an “equal time” agenda accordingly. In the end, Gann’s post is just the sort of exercise in arbitrariness he suggests is behind Romanticism’s privileged status. Read the rest of this entry »