Composers Forum

 A Matter of Publishing

Putting on a work like De Materie is a COMPLICATED endeavor!  In order to perform this piece Great Noise Ensemble will have to expand its ranks from its core of 16 musicians to a whopping 59 instrumentalists.  This is not counting the eight part chorus, two solo singers and two narrators required to perform the work.  That’s a total of 71 people!  Then there are all of the myriad percussion instruments (among the rare—and expensive—to find items required: car bumpers, boo-bams and about 11 nipple gongs), two synthesizers and—rarity of rarities—a contrabass clarinet.  At 100 minutes of music—but only four movements long—the piece is also rather difficult to rehearse, requiring an expanded rehearsal schedule from that which we usually adopt.

All of that is, apparently, child’s play next to actually securing the performance materials.

I first placed an order with Boosey and Hawkes, publishers of Louis Andriessen’s music in the United States, in late May.  After answering a slew of questions about the nature of the ensemble, our annual budget, etc., all of which is pretty standard and easy enough to do on their web site, a contract was issued.  Just as that contract was on its way to me I received a phone call from Boosey and Hawkes informing me that their initial estimate and quote had been erroneous and that, since the work is technically an opera it requires a grand rights license and an entirely new agreement would have to be issued.

Now, Andriessen himself considers this a concert work.  “I believe it is much safer to see it as a very large instrumental, symphonic work,” he writes in his book (co-edited with Mirjam Zegers), The Art of Stealing Time (p.191).  “The only thing is, there is a lot of singing in it and that is not so often the case in a symphony. “  The idea of staging it wasn’t even Andriessen’s!  It was, rather, the director of the Netherlands Opera who suggested staging the work and hiring Robert Wilson to direct its first performance. 

So, because of that, the work is considered an opera and we must first secure a grand rights license to perform it.  So I spend the better part of the next week (during which I receive the original license agreement, now moot!) renegotiating the terms with Boosey and Hawkes to be able to secure performance materials in time for the chorus master to hire appropriate singers and for our principal percussionist to figure out where to find all of the necessary players and instruments to be handled and the soloists to receive their scores with plenty of time to learn this often challenging music. 

“Those Mahler symphonies in which there is singing,” Andriessen continues in the passage quoted above, “are a rare example.  That man should simply have written operas.  But, due to a confluence of circumstances, that didn’t work out (he probably didn’t have a good librettist).  He also hated the opera ‘business.’”

I can’t imagine why!

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  (To be fair, Boosey and Hawkes was extremely gracious and helpful throughout the process, which was completed just a few hours before I wrote this on June 7.  So, really, while it was somewhat tedious to have to start the process over again, it was nowhere near as complicated or difficult as I thought it would be thanks to Boosey’s courteous and excellent staff. )

II. Every Journey has a First Step…

The road to October 24 has been a long one. My first proposal to anybody about the project that would become the Great Noise Ensemble performance of De Materie came in late 2006, when I approached the cultural liaison at the Dutch Consulate in New York (at the time a man named Cees de Bever, who has been an extremely supportive advocate for this project, but who has moved on from government work to take on a position in The Netherlands) about organizing a festival of events (I am nothing if not ambitious!) around the commemoration of Louis Andriessen’s 70th birthday in 2009. Obviously, a festival did not materialize (no pun intended—okay, maybe a little) but a seed had been planted. When, in 2008 the Music Center at Strathmore, a major performance venue in the D.C. suburbs announced a call for proposals for its 25th anniversary season, Great Noise Ensemble proposed a performance of De Materie. Unfortunately, because of the economic realities that hit while that contest was taking place, the Strathmore decided to go with a more commercially viable project, but they informed us that they liked our proposal very much and would like to keep it on file for a later season. We then explored the possibility of taking it on in 2010-11, but their projections for ticket sales for such an event were not encouraging and they, unfortunately, had to decline De Materie at this time, booking us instead to do a performance of music by Marc Mellits in their more intimate performance hall in January, 2011.
My dream of performing this piece sometime around Louis Andriessen’s big birthday year seemed to be slipping away from me. Then, I mentioned the project to the head of the Music Department at the National Gallery of Art, who has been a great supporter of Great Noise Ensemble for a number of years now, and who found that he had room in his schedule and his budget, given the pledged support from the Dutch consulate, for this project.
The road I’d embarked upon now had a clear destination.

In October, 2010 Great Noise Ensemble and I will be presenting the first performance by a professional American Ensemble of Louis Andriessen’s seminal work of music theater, De Materie.  In the coming weeks and months until then, I hope to update you on the progress of this complex endeavor in these pages.  Today, a bit of an introduction into my obsession with this piece.

I. Confessions of an Obsessive

Louis Andriessen changed my life. 

Not him, personally.  I’ve had very little personal contact with him, and that mostly at formal talks and the like until very recently.  No, it is his work which has had a long and lasting effect on my own work as a composer.  I am neither unique nor premature in this. 

Still, Louis Andriessen’s music changed my life.  Specifically one piece of his changed my musical outlook: De Materie (“Matter,” 1984-88). 

De Materie is a two hour long work in four parts structured loosely as a choral symphony but often staged as an opera.  It is very tightly constructed, with a number of pre-compositional formal/acoustic decisions informing its organization.  These are numerous, and vary between each of its four parts, but there are two, basic organizational principles that bring unity to the whole: tempo is used as a structural procedure (at a ratio of 8:6:5:4) and the so-called “1-2-3-4” chord (F-B flat-C-E), which informs the harmony throughout each of De Materie’s four parts.  There’s a lot more to it than that, of course (the elements of popular music included in the third part, “De Stijl,” are a big one with composers of my generation in particular), but these organizational principles showed me a way to organize large scale pieces in a logical way while still utilizing both tonal and post-tonal procedures. 

  I did not compose the same way after that first encounter as a graduate student.   It was, in short, a revelation.  I have been obsessed with this piece since then.

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Now, I am not only a composer but a conductor, albeit one whose performing activities are often tied to his compositional interests.  These activities, coupled with my obsession with De Materie instilled in me the desire to bring about a performance of this piece for some time.  Because of its gargantuan size and the enormous forces required to perform it, De Materie is not performed very often in its totality.  The first American performance of the piece did not take place until 2004 (almost 20 years after its completion) and that by the same Dutch ensemble, Schoenberg/ASKO, that premiered it in 1988.  As soon as I’d started my own ensemble, Great Noise, I had wanted to plan a performance of De Materie and be the part of the first performance by a group of American musicians.  I was beaten to this by the ensembles of Williams College, who performed the piece in 2008.  In October, however, I will lead the first performance of De Materie by a group of professional American musicians at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. with Great Noise Ensemble and the Vocal Arts Ensemble of the National Gallery.  This is an event that, for me, has been almost four years in the making.  In the coming weeks I hope to document as best as I can the preparations towards this momentous occasion.

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Friend of S21 Alexandra Gardner blogs this week on why she composes.  Her answers are simple and to the point and pretty much sum it up for me: it’s fun (even when it’s frustrating), I have to (I’m reminded of  Olivier Messiaen’s somewhat precious but beautifully apt answer  to this question when the author Claude Samuel posed it to him: you may as well ask why an apple tree produces apples!  I simply don’t know how to do anything else), and sometimes my music reaches someone, be it a performer or an audience member, in a way that other music reaches me.  That is a truly precious and beautiful gift to be able not just to give, but to receive (it is a humbling gift to know if a work of mine has meant something to just one person). 

One other reason that I compose (and created and conduct an ensemble) is that I think it is important, culturally, aesthetically and politically.  It is said that the health of a nation’s soul is measured in its art.  In our nation it is very easy to be discouraged by the lack of importance given to the arts, particularly new art music.  In a time when making a living solely as a composer, let alone reaching a wide audience, is a near impossibility for most of us it is a patriotic act to be a composer PRECISELY because we are apparently so unimportant to the culture at large.  What we do IS important.  What we do has GREAT VALUE.  For what we do is make music that ideally goes BEYOND the three minute pop song; music that acknowledges the intelligence of its audience, rather than take it for granted; music that challenges our ever decreasing attention spans and asks its audience to be transported beyond mundane reality to comment upon it or perhaps even at times transcend it.

At least that’s why I do it.

Pardon the pasting of a call for scores directly, but I thought some of you fellow composers out there might be interested in the following:

After wrapping up Great Noise Ensemble’s 2009-10 concert season last Friday and wrapping up the academic year this week, my thoughts are a little rambling.  So, here are some nuggets I’ve been thinking about which, while not providing the basis for long essays, necessarily, I hope will generate some interesting discussion:

    In conversation with California based percussionist Chris Froh last week we both realized that the west coast, particularly the bay area, once the bastion of countercultural art music, where minimalism was born and where John Adams migrated in order to escape east coast modernism, has become the bastion of…east coast modernism.  Meanwhile, if you want to hear rock/jazz infused post-minimalist/totalist music, you go to…Princeton?  When did this switch happen and how?

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   I’ve had my theory students finish up their last semester of undergraduate theory by reading Evan Ziporyn’s 1991 article, “Who Listens if you Care?” (a copy of which can be found here: http://www.arts.rpi.edu/century/AC/Ziporyn%20Who%20Listens%20if%20You%20Care.pdf) and confronting the issues he raises (before the internet, no less!) about ownership, copyright, appropriation, multiculturalism, the mainstream vs. the “Other”  and the nature of success as a composer.  Is one a composer if one practices what Ziporyn calls “Marxist Music” (or what the composer John Oswald calls “Plunderphonics”)?  Should, as Ziporyn asks, simply “shut up and listen?”  (Well, sometimes, yes.)

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Oscar Bettison’s “O Death” (which Ensemble Klang recently recorded and have made available for sale or stream here: http://music.ensembleklang.com/album/o-death-oscar-bettison) may be the most viscerally stunning piece of music I’ve encountered in a long time.  I’m not usually drawn to music like this, but this piece’s power is undeniable (and I’m not just saying that because Oscar–full disclosure– is a colleague).

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   Why do we compose?  The most succesful composers among us (think Phil Glass and John Adams, although John Williams, whose audience is, ostensibly, much bigger, still could fit in this question) doesn’t reach the kind of audience that even a mildly succesful pop/rock/indie/world/non-classical act reaches, let alone someone like Lady Ga-ga.  Is it important to reach a wide audience, or is it just a matter of reaching somebody, ANYBODY, even if it’s only ourselves?

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   Scott Spiegelberg over at Musical Perceptions asks a very interesting question in reaction to a recent comment by composer Stephen Hartke on eighth blackbird’s blog regarding the differences in the pop vs. classical concert experiences (http://musicalperceptions.blogspot.com/2010/05/great-artpop-divide.html).  Is there a difference?  What do you guys think?

[Ed. -- An early joiner at s21, composer Armando Bayolo has been off on his own personal career adventure for a while now. Firmly planted in Washington D.C., teaching and running his own ensemble, we asked if he'd like to share some of his recent experiences, and maybe give us an occasional D.C. update.  Armando has kindly penned this introduction:]

I am a composer.

That doesn’t mean what it used to mean, however.  Webster’s Online defines “composer” as “one that composes; especially: a person who writes music.”  This is certainly true; a composer writes music.  But a composer, at least if  s/he expects to have anything like a career as a composer, is often, if not always, forced to be many things.

What are we as composers?  Besides writing music — which is the central and most important activity to my own work as a musician — I teach music theory at one of the east coast’s oldest conservatories, I am (or was, as this activity has unfortunately taken a back seat recently) a pianist, a conductor, a writer and impresario.  I have also had to take on a role as a manager and publisher for my own work (If I am not for myself, as Rabbi Hillel said, who will be for me?).  This is nothing new, of course, as composers going back at least as far as Beethoven complained about all of the activities essential to being allowed to make music for a living that inherently get in the way of the process of making music (and this is certainly not exclusive to composers!). One role that is perhaps less common which I’ve undertaken in the last five years is that of advocate for other composers through my work as conductor and Artistic Director of Great Noise Ensemble.

In 2005 I found myself at a bit of a crossroads.  Throughout my student years I expected my career to follow the more typical route of settling into an academic position after finishing my graduate studies.  After a brief stint as a visiting professor in Portland, Oregon, and thanks to various factors finding myself without a regular teaching job, my family and I resettled in suburban Washington, D.C. where my wife grew up.  The early years before the move weren’t unproductive, but they were a critical and difficult time — a time, I now know, which every creative artist faces at one point or another.  In my case I realized that, rather than waiting to see “where I would land”, I’d try founding a new music ensemble (something I’d been wanting to do since graduate school) within the context of an academic program. Why not look for like-minded people in the area, see if we could put together some concerts and see where that would take us?

In the summer of 2005 I placed a classified ad on Craigslist.com with a sort of loose vision, a list of composers I would like to perform (Andriessen, Adams, Ligeti, etc.) and the idea that we should treat it a bit as a garage band and see where it would take us.  About seven people answered that ad, of which about four or five came to the informational meeting a month later… Except that those four people had spread the word and brought friends, so we had more like nine people at the first meeting.  The same thing happened at the next meeting and, in the end, we ended up with a full sinfonietta of about 16 instrumentalists plus two singers.

Great Noise Ensemble is about to wrap up its fifth season on April 30.  Our sixth season begins in October with the most ambitious project we have ever undertaken, a rare performance of Louis Andriessen’s 1984-88 “opera,” De Materie.  Great Noise will be the first ensemble of American professional musicians to perform this piece.  It was a dream and a hope of mine to do this piece, and, frankly, I never thought we would be in a position to perform it so early in our history.  The rest of the season will see performances of large and small works by established AND emerging composers, as well as readings of works in progress by students at the Catholic University of America (where we’ve been in residence since 2008).

Great Noise Ensemble has become as central to my work as a musician as my own composition and I see it, along with my teaching activities, as an important responsibility of being a successful American composer.  (This notion of being a successful composer is itself odd and one with which I have yet to come to terms, since success as a composer is not necessarily linked, in our world, with financial/material success.  But that is a topic for another essay.)  It is not just my music that matters.  All contemporary concert music (or art music; I don’t like the label “classical” and, while I’ve been lumped within the “alt-classical” movement by certain critics, I’m not 100% comfortable with that term either) is important.  It reflects the soul of our nation, even while remaining largely hidden behind much more commercially viable musics.  Composers (and performers) are all in this together.

I see my role in American music, such as it is, as being similar to a guerrilla fighter.  I operate under the radar, merging between concerts with the (academic) mainstream only to emerge, every six weeks or so, to strike another salvo on behalf of contemporary art music.  In this small way I hope to be part of the change I see happening (that must happen if our musical institutions are to survive) in American concert music every day.  And so I co-opt a phrase from one of recent history’s most polemically polarizing figures when I say, “hasta la victoria, siempre!”

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.