MusicMaker (JLZ)

Time Travel in 2012

I’ve started work on the “Pure, Cool (Water)” Symphony No. 4 full score.
[ Word came in just before the holiday that the UnitedStatesArtists Project to provide foundation funding for this stage of the symphony’s development had funded successfully - actually surpassing its goal by a comfortable margin. Lucky…]

It’s pure heaven being in lock-down, pushing all else aside for 4 or 5 days at a time in order just to immerse myself in the *hard joy* of solving a myriad of acoustic/logistical puzzles in order to get the music out!

Ah – but the rhythm of the outer world can’t be denied forever….
It’s something composers deal with all the time — the reality that our internal attention is focused on the *next* music, the *next* premiere, the *next* recording, and the necessity to divide attention from what’s transpiring today. “Today” – today’s performance, lecture, masterclasses, etc – is already a done deal mentally by the time it actually rolls around.

On most of my residencies in the past 10 years or so I’ve taken along the score of the piece I’m actually working on – something due for premiere 6 to 16 months out. It’s a constant mental / temporal juggle, but an easy rhythm to maintain once you’re used to it.

Who says Time Travel is only possible in Science Fiction??

Side-note on Style

Our local Maricopa Music Circle is now planning its Winter Recital. One of the pieces violinist Zhenenyeva Ehrbright and I plan to perform is a Nocturne by Medtner. Meeting his Three Nocturnes was a total treat for me – he is the real deal.
Pianists are the ones who may know Nicolay Medtner the best. His many solo Sonatas and the Concerti are legendary for pianists who care to go just one step past the tried and true. (This was his own instrument, after all, and he writes for it so the music will always sound and also feel right under the hand.) But he’s in the shadows to the public at large, bearing the ‘stigma’ of forever being thought unfashionable. (A bit like Dukas – also an educator as well as composer, and tireless editor of his own music.)
He’s a transitional figure in Russian music (dying in England in the 1950s – !), who sounds at times hints at the harmonic formulations of Scriabin or Rachmaninoff, with touches of Mussorgsky and Tchaikovsky. But the music has soul, and an abundance of elegance and thought in the crafting, so that its shapes beautifully fulfill the length of their statement – they never natter, prolong, or bore. That’s an accomplishment.
I’m positive we pay too much attention to the “fashionable-ness” of any artwork. – If a piece or a picture is quite au courant, that seems to go a long way in how we evaluate it. Being on a current wavelength can in the moment make up for a work’s actually being thin, or rather uninspired, or just plain poor.
But the test of time is significant. Magnificent art is, in part, art that is durable. It speaks meaningfully to different audiences over various eras. The further away from the composer’s lifetime we are, the truer the test of the music: It then becomes possible to consider the work primarily on its own terms, on its individual premise, divorced from any fashion of the moment.

Taking a Flyer

I’m experimenting with a trial balloon in crowd sourcing.
UnitedStatesArtists.org has now listed a project involving one development stage for my new big piece: Pure, Cool (Water) – Symphony No. 4.

Why this project?
It’s a piece close to my own heart – five movements for large orchestra, c. 33 minutes long – the newest piece aligning my continuing fascination with phenomena of the natural world with a family focus of long standing centered on environmental preservation: enhancing water quality control and preserving this crucial natural resource.

Equally important to the project coming forward in this way is the truth that artists can get typed.
Demand doesn’t always subsume to our creative visions for the future:
Commissions frequently are based upon an acquaintanceship with a composer’s existing music, primarily the works for a particular medium. Commissioners don’t always track the trend of a composer’s fresh imagining, nor perhaps be quite ready to support a brand-new vision; and it’s especially difficult if the new piece is in a medium for which the composer has written relatively little so far. Since my chamber music and solo pieces are better known than the orchestra works, the current Symphony seems an intriguing, and honest, way to try out a relatively new method for garnering support.
(Plus: If this support does materialize, the contributions from orchestra co-commissioners can be kept to a modest level, resulting in greater number of performances right off the bat, across the country.)

Why this method?

I often whisper in the ear of musicians about to go onstage with their first performance of a work of mine “Take the Dare!”
– With the new Symphony, I’m taking my own advice.

Why this portal?

Unlike other portals, USArtists Projects sets a relatively high bar for vetting the artists they invite in – a credential already in place such as a Guggenheim, or Bush Foundation Fellowship. In addition, they include a fair number of foundations among long term participants. And the project presentations themselves are elaborate, involving video, audio, images and plenty of text.

The project is titled Developing the Full Score of “Pure, Cool (Water)” Symphony.
It will run for one-and-a-half months and can be viewed under my name at unitedstatesartistsprojects.org.

A bit of nice news —

My recent 2011 Navona CD “Eternal Evolution” is on FANFARE magazine’s Want List for 2011 ( Nov./Dec. issue). The expanded CD includes 4 of my chamber pieces in wonderful performances by the Harlem Quartet and Awadagin Pratt.

(The magazine’s current Sept./Oct. issue carries an interview with me, plus two reviews of this disc and of my Naxos orchestra disc of 2010.)

Hearing Fast = Shallow Content [?]
first of two posts

A week ago Friday I attended a concert at Arizona State University. (The program closed with a super-hot performance of my sax quartet, Parallel Play – I couldn’t ask for a better delivery!)

What stuck out from the program at large, though, was that the music by the younger composers programmed seemed built according to pretty different expectations of just what audience members were meant to get from their listening experience:

Acceptance that this hearing would in all likelihood be their one-and-only encounter with this piece – and therefore the music’s goals / contents / ambitions needed to abide by reduced dimensionality so that everything possible to glean would be doable in one pass through the piece.

Because I operate from a very different premise, I was struck by the thinness of content – by and large – in the works built accordingly. And their markedly slow harmonic rhythm. And their relatively shorter length.

Don’t get me wrong: There were striking sonorities and hooks aplenty – but they were primarily found in the very opening bars where they serve to capture the ear, and set up the listening presumption that some variation on the first material might occur – but also that that’s all there would be /could be. It makes for a tidy presentation, but (for me) is a curiously lifeless way to sustain originality in any artistic statement.

– Sure, we want the basic materials of a piece actively refreshed to our ear from time to time; that’s what Recaps (and Developments) are for. (Not to mention the essence of fugue.) Affirmation and confirmation are for sure important signals in crafting comprehensible forms.

But, by the same token, shouldn’t there be the delight of un-expected discoveries, un-anticipated adventuring in the music? If not these, then how can a piece be memorable? — something savored so much in retrospect that – like a good book – you just have to seek it out for repeated encounters.

Six years back I participated in a panel discussion with 2 other composers of wind ensemble music, and the youngest guy there confided to the room that he builds his movements by the following formula:
Present three distinguishable bits, then toss them about for the movement’s length. Is this today’s industry standard??

~~

Shana tovah ! to everyone.

Returning now to the world (after being sidelined for three weeks by an ailment that persisted), I’ve begun to get my piano chops back, practicing 1-2 hours per day. What’s striking to reconsider is how some composers write every time out with the understanding of how a piece feels to play (as well as sounds).

I pulled up as exemplars 3 pieces I’d enjoyed playing in recital in years past: Bach Italian Concerto, Chopin Ballade in F minor, Ravel Tombeau de Couperin. While all three were still ‘in the fingers’, the Bach was relatively swiftly recovered, and the Ravel just purled out straight from my artistic center.

The Ballade was another story, though: It was a feat of will to keep the passage-work clean as both hands lifted, directly repeating the same pattern over (and over) – but one octave higher each time.
Your weight then shifts with each iteration; the positioning of the hands relative one to another also alters; and even the spot at which you strike the key changes, moving front to back. There’s a ‘choreography’ to delivering the music easily, and that was the last thing to be recovered.

It led me to mull again why certain pieces just feel right from the get-go. Bach is sublime this way: Your hands balance beautifully; much of the time you need to assume a very slight ‘grasping’ position to let the notes fall under the fingers perfectly – but when you do, the music feels as natural as sunshine. (For a treat from time to time, I’ll read all the way through the Toccatas, or English Suites – they just flow without knots.)

But the Ravel is in a class by itself. Not only does it fit the hand perfectly, but the balance of activity levels from moment to moment by each hand in turn, or cooperatively, lets you remain oriented by feel alone to the precise weight balance + positioning of the trunk of the body in relationship to the keyboard. Once you do this, playing these passage is as close to effortless as piano music is possible to get.
– And the movements of Tombeau de Couprin have plenty of places where the choreography of the inter-relation of the hands is delicious: Try untangling the inner pages of the Fugue, the chordal melody crossing its lacey accompaniment in the trio of the Menuet, or positioning all those piston-attacks in the Toccata (both soft and plenty loud). It’s an intricate dance whose steps are fascinating and absorbing for each player to work out!

As a composer who has written a fair bit for my instrument — but who waited to open this chapter in my catalog until I felt I had something particular to contribute — I tip my hat to the masters of the past who write with skill and imagination, and yet feeling within themselves what really works for the instrument!

MusicMaker (JLZ) #32

When I’m deep into a piece everything changes – what I read, what I eat and when I eat, how I experience time. Breakfast often at 2 or 3 o’clock in the afternoon (very sparse) and dinner if I remember.

The music at hand is all-consuming – it becomes my world, and everything else falls away. (Gary’s wonderful: he keeps his own counsel, immerses himself in his current artwork and knows not to try to chat in the morning.)

At night, however, I do keep up with the world – long talks, phone, news and other TV, reading. But even the recreation is geared to problem solving: cop shows, crossword puzzles, and mystery writers who know how to engineer good plots, like Michael Connelly, Jonathan Kellerman, James Lee Burke. Dorothy Sayers too.
And all my reading at these times is  fiction: I like to visit around in other people’s imaginations.

       What do you read when you’re composing?

       Read the rest of this entry »

String-forward folks in the New York area might like to know that my String Quartet ‘The Figure’ is programmed next Sunday at the Summergarden concert at The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden of the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. The exciting program will also include the New York premieres of Louis Andriessen’s Facing Death and Carson Cooman’s Four Aphoristic Inventions, Tombeau-Aria and Estampie,and the Western Hemisphere premiere of Jiří Kadeřábek’s Barefoot Boy! Performers will be members of The New Juilliard Ensemble – David Fulmer, violin, Rebekah Durham, violin, Jennifer Chang, viola and Avery Waite, cello.The July 24th 8:00 PM program is free and seating is on a first-come, first-served basis.

My two-movement String Quartet ‘The Figure’ was written in 2007 and has since been recorded for a Navona CD of my more recent chamber music for strings and piano by the Harlem Quartet (the premiering ensemble), with pianist Awadagin Pratt.

I consider the Quartet to be a very representative piece, so I’ll be in New York for a quick weekend visit .
            — If you get to the concert, let’s say hello in person!

July 4th and JLZ

Yesterday the Milken Archive posted and Tweeted about the connection between my Sacred Service and our nation’s birthday.
MilkenArchive
#4thofJuly means reexamining Judith Lang Zaimont’s ‘Sacred Service for the Sabbath Evening.’ Here’s why: http://bit.ly/lS5LvT #musicmonday

= The 70-minute work for baritone solo, chorus and orchestra is an American Service setting – largely in English — and was a bicentennial commission.

Click forward to a longer interview discussing all of the music on the Naxos CD that, along with a large excerpt from the Service, includes the dramatic cantata Parable – A Tale of Isaac and Abram, and two smaller texted pieces, A Woman of Valor for mezzo and string quartet and the choral Meditations at the Time of the New Year .
(Full interview at http://www.milkenarchive.org/articles/view/a-woman-of-valor )

We touched a bit on the activity of composing itself:

MA: What aspects of composing have been especially gratifying to you?
JLZ: Funny, the first answer that pops out is the fact that what I do takes place in time, out of time. That is, I can spend as much time on a measure, on a figure, on a moment in the music as I need to, to get it absolutely right. What am I comparing this to? Through my teens, and into the first part of my 20s, my sister Doris and I were a duo piano team [as The Lang Sisters]. We toured around the country, we constantly made recordings, we were on radio and television. The Lang Sisters were getting a pretty fair reputation, with lots of experience. But what I found was that the performing almost never was satisfying for me.
MA: Why is that?
JLZ: Things come and go. The passages are there and then they’re gone. You can’t call them back and fix and correct them. And in composing, you can do that. You can live with the moment for as long as you need to make it right.

I try to keep my hand in as a pianist, and have been fortunate to help start a local music group that rehearses almost every week. Our Maricopa Music Circle is made up of performers who studied on either East or West Coast in the US or in Russia, and who are active professional performers, retired music teachers, and dedicated amateurs who love classical music.

Our sessions are marathons, often lasting more than four hours, and encompass a wide, wide variety of music – in addition to composer ‘regulars’, our rep. is a moveable feast, including everything from A. Scarlatti through Cui, Bonis, Reinecke, Howard Hanson, Cole Porter, Jobim, etc. You name it, we’ve played it.

Our instrumentation is eclectic – high and low strings, flutes, baritone horn, sometime clarinet and guitar, and piano — so we do a fair number of tailored arrangements. We gather in 2 different rooms, rehearsing smaller-forces pieces, then come together for up to 2 hours of ensemble music. Last Friday’s rehearsal was a good cross-section:

6 of Prokofiev’s Visions Fugitives arranged for vln and pno
Adagio from Korngold’s Violin Sonata
Bach E major violin Concerto, mvt. 1
Brandenburg No. 4
Poulenc Sonate (pno. 4 hands)
Debussy Petite Suite, two mvts.
Mendelssohn Midsummer Night’s Dream arr. for 2 flutes
Dvorak Slavonic Dance Op. 46 no. 2 (from orch. version + 4 hands original)
Brahms Intermezzo Op. 118 n. 2 original arrangement
Fauré Sicilienne (from orch.version + pno. solo)
Lerner and Loewe “Almost Like being in Love” org. arrangement
Free improv
Messiaen “Le merle noir”

We are faithful visitors to the web’s IMSLP/Petrucci Library and neat discoveries there include works like the Niels Gade Piano Trio, Mel Bonis Serenade, Ippolitov-Ivanov violin Sonata. A terrific side benefit has been to play and discuss what could be considered potential pairs of pieces, like Felix’ and Fanny’s Piano Trios in d minor.

We’re passionate about all music, fearless in what we attempt — and have a good time!