Creature Feature

I just realized how many of my pieces seem to incorporate (or be) portraits of animals! There are multiple pieces about frogs, various lizards, crocodiles, butterflies, moths, snakes, birds, fish, turtles, squirrels, pangolins, and snails. I have also written pieces featuring a single cricket, a camel, a rabbit, a reindeer, a condor, a dog, a raccoon, an armadillo, a whale, and a musky rat-kangaroo.

And, of course, there are mythical creatures like a unicorn, a dragon, the bird phoenix, and a grelling (a Millhauser-imagined creature).

You can find 'em all here. (Don't forget to click on "older posts" at the bottom off the page).

SPEAK, MEMORY . . .

Yesterday I started work on a setting of a poem written in the voice of character in Homer's Odyssey, and last night I had a "working" dream that must have been influenced by Fred Hersch's dream that I wrote a post about yesterday.

In my dream I was attempting to do some kind of dance-related expressive movement, and was taken aback when I saw Augustin Hadelich, wearing maroon Dansko clogs, going up on pointe. And then I noticed a group of small children sitting on the floor. They were all listening with great attention to a six-year-old Augustin reciting (from memory) a part of the Odyssey in English.

I was so inspired by this dream that I got to work immediately after breakfast today, and have been at it all day. I might even finish the song tomorrow.

Fred Hersch's Dream

Last night Michael and I went to a concert that featured the pianist Fred Hersch. It was a marvelous concert. I was particularly impressed by a story that Hersch told about the dream that inspired his "Dream of Monk," which you can hear him play with Esperanza Spalding here.

He told the audience about finding himself in a small cage, too small to fit in comfortably, and then seeing Thelonius Monk in another cage that was too small for him to fit in. A guard came in with some manuscript paper, and told them both that the first person to write a tune would be set free. Hersch scribbled out a tune as quickly as he could, and handed it to the guard. Then he saw that Monk hadn't written anything.

When writing the tune inspired by this dream, Hersch used a kitchen timer to give himself the kind of time constraint that he had while dreaming about writing it.

Interesting.

My armchair psychologist's take on this dream would be that the thing that most composers want most when faced with writing something is a set of constraints. A cage that you write your way out of is such a great visual image of this need. And it is a need. The world of pitches, harmonies, registers, tempo, meter, dynamics, instruments, voices, and timbre is vaster than vast. And finding a path through the possibilities for a creative person with some kind of an abstract feeling to express is really difficult without a good set of guidelines. I imagine that this is the case for any kind of creative person doing any kind of creative thing.

The telling thing for me is that Hersch saw Monk, one of his heroes, as not being productive in a cage.

Perhaps it was because Hersch was looking for perameters in order to begin the song he wanted to write (inspired by the title of Monk's Dream). Perhaps it was because Hersch used Monk as his "cage" in real life (given the musical language of the song), and believed (at least in his unconscious mind) that Monk didn't benefit from any kind of artificial constraint when he wrote.

I wonder what kind of dreams Thelonious Monk had?

The Grelling in Its Lair

Michael and I spend every day with Steven Millhauser's imagination, which is, thankfully, readily available in his books and stories.

In the title story of his 1990 collection, The Barnum Museum, Millhauser refers three times to the "grelling," an imaginary creature that is on display.

A search for "grelling" lets you know that there is no such creature outside of Steven Millhauser's imagination. But Kurt Grelling, of the Grelling-Nelson paradox comes up immediately. The juxtaposition of the paradox and the naming of an imaginary creature compelled me to make a musical portrait of the grelling in its lair for bassoon and piano.

You can listen here:

You can find the music on this page of the IMSLP.

Violin Scale Tales and Advanced Violin Scale Studies

I'm so excited to finally be able to share these collections of scale pieces to my friends in the musical blogosphere!

Here's a description of Scale Tales:

The etudes in this book offer students a musically and intellectually satisfying means of practicing scales in all major and minor keys, even while remaining in first position. Although presented in the traditional order of the circle of fifths, this is where similarities to other violin scale-oriented books end.

Of course, the etudes can be played using a mixture of positions by more advanced students. The studies also resonate very well on the viola if played at pitch. These are instructive etudes and can be played as appealing solo pieces. The stepwise motion in the etudes makes intervals between pitches easy to hear, even in keys with many flats or sharps.

Both the book and etude titles refer to names of animals that have scales, so you will see natural and harmonic minor scales named after various moths, and major scales named for unusual reptiles, birds, and mammals throughout. The author hopes that in addition to experiencing more enjoyable scale practice, students will be inspired to learn more about these amazing animals or even write scale studies of their own.

Here's a description of Advanced Violin Scale Studies:

Although the practice of scales is essential to building and maintaining strength, technique, tone, and agility—it is very easy to slip into the habit of playing them automatically, without paying attention to how they sound or even being aware of what scale we are playing. The 29 single-page studies in this book are designed to combat that tendency as they are musically, intellectually, and rhythmically challenging.

The first 24 studies proceeded through the circle of fifths and address all minor and relative major keys; the last 5 pieces were individually conceived, i.e., apart from the circle of fifths. Occasional fingerings or position guides are suggested but these are largely left to the student or their teachers. No metronome indications are given so that the etudes can be played at individually comfortable tempos—with or without a metronome, or freely as concert etudes. It is the stepwise motion and octave leaps of the etudes that makes the intervals between pitches easy to hear, even in keys with numerous flats or sharps.

Just as in Elaine Fine’s more basic scale etude book, Violin Scale Tales, the names of the etudes herein refer to various animals that have scales, including insects, fish, birds, reptiles, a few species of squirrels with scales on their tails, and the solitary pangolin, the only known mammal whose entire body is covered with scales. Again, the author hopes that in addition to experiencing more enjoyable scale practice, students will be inspired to learn more about these amazing creatures, or even write scale studies of their own.

You can find both books on this page of the Mel Bay website. They are available as e-books and as physical books.

I made video recordings of the first ten pieces in Scale Tales which you can hear on this playlist.

Composing as a Craft

During one of the many conversations I had with Seymour Barab over the years, he referred to his composing as his "craft." I was kind of startled at the time, but now I completely understand why he used that term, because so much of composing is craft. The act of composing is, in essence, taking (or making) materials, and assembling them in a pleasing way. Part of the craft of composing comes from removing the stuff that doesn't work, and reassembling the stuff that does work so that it can work better. It involves moving pitches around, expanding and contracting meter so that the music at hand is easy to read and easy to play or sing, once you get the pitches and rhythms learned. It involves manipulating textures (articulation) and dynamics, so that the musical lines you or I have drawn have a map to follow. It is important to keep the journey interesting. Like any journey it should have a clean start, interesting experiences along the way, time for reflection, motivation to continue, and it should come to a satisfying end.

I have been assembling material (arranging music) for half my life now, and only started working with my own material in the last twenty five years. I must have had a "backlog" of material rolling around in my unconscious from all of my playing and listening experiences, because melodic and thematic ideas kept bobbing to the surface demanding that I play with them. At that point composing felt like art, and I was kind of intoxicated with inspiration. My life with busy with school (I was studying composition), work (I had a graduate assistantship which involved a lot of grading, and had CD reviews to write), family (Michael and our two growing kids), practicing, quartet playing, and orchestra playing, but I got up very early in the morning and chain-wrote a lot of music.

People seemed to like what I wrote, but I can't say that people took my work very seriously. I guess I was writing lyrical music during a time when minimalism and/or avant-garde looping were the new-musical fare. Or maybe it was because I was a woman working in a field that was so dominated by men. Maybe it was because I lacked craft (you can never have enough craft), or maybe it was because I didn't (and still don't) live in a cosmopolitan place, or that I never went beyond a Master's Degree, and therefore, other than teaching at a community college, I am not part of the academic hierarchy.

Being an "outsider" does have its perks, though. I have had to make my own way, and seek out my own challenges. But most of all I have had time to develop my craft. Now, at the age of sixty-one, I feel like I can rely on my craft to do just about anything I want. Craft has been a nice companion during this Covid-19 isolation. It has allowed me to be able to work out feelings through the music I write, and I feel like I have a larger community of musicians who live in cosmopolitan places, but are also isolated.

So I have been writing music for musicians to play and sing at home. People do need new music to play, and I'm happy that my craft is sufficient to write music that people like to play and sing.

In my virtual world of Facebook and Twitter, I see that a lot of performing musicians have been writing their own music during this isolation. Some of them create their own publishing companies, and some sell their newly-written music through their websites, which, for the business-minded musician is the only way to make any money from writing music. I put almost all of my newly-written music in the IMSLP because it is an easy way to get music to people who need it (or want it) now. It provides a sense of instant gratification and a feeling of connection with other musicians, so it works for me.

I do have eighty pieces of music published by commercial publishers (some of it forthcoming), so anyone who wants to buy my published music can. My published music isn't my property, and I only get royalty checks every few years, because ASCAP doesn't issue checks that amount to less than $25.

I have written a lot of music these past few weeks, and feel almost like the reverse of the way I felt during my first bout of chain writing between 1999 and 2005. Now I am intoxicated by craft. Ideas come, and I can write them down in a coherent form fairly quickly, and it is in the craft of working with them that I get my jollies.

Nicola LeFanu talks about writing music

I enjoy what Nicola LeFanu, the daughter of Elizabeth Maconchy, has to say about writing music. And I like listening to her music.

Four Visits to Brügge

Stefan Zweig's work is now in the public domain, which means I can freely share these new settings I made of his four "Brügge" poems.

You can find links to the IMSLP entry and to computer-generated audio files on this page of my thematic catalog blog.

Who is the music for anyway?

I was working with a teenage student on a Handel sonata the other day. While trying to get her to make things musically exciting during periods that did not have fast-moving notes, I mentioned that Handel wrote the piece for her enjoyment and as a vehicle for her to express herself. Of course Handel didn't know my student, but he knew the "audience" for his published music would be musicians looking for music to play with their friends and families. He was writing this music for people just like her.

[I also told her that I think of the notes on the page as my slaves. I can choose the tempo and the spirit. I can line the pitches up they way I want. I can decide which notes are more important, and which notes have less importance. I can also change my mind.]

Lately I have heard teachers try to inspire students to play with expression by telling them that it is their job to project the composer's intentions to the audience. There is nothing really wrong about this way of thinking, but there is something odd about it. People do write music that is concrete and programmatic (Beethoven's Sixth Symphony, Vivaldi's Four Seasons, for example). Instructions can be given as text, or pieces can be written in genres with certain expectations (nocturnes, waltzes, marches, lullabies, etc.) Programmatic references are necessary when writing music for opera, ballet, and movies, because the music needs to support what is happening. It also serves as a practical way to maintain the pace of the narrative. I suppose music with a text (a song, a song cycle, or a choral piece) or a tone poem would fall into the programmatic category.

I believe music for the stage is written for the benefit of the audience (as well as the benefit of the composer). A person watching a drama ideally wants to "turn off" the drama in their own lives and "escape" into the drama of the production. Sometimes composers do too.

It is different when the music at hand is not programmatic. When I write non-programmatic music I don't think about the specific emotions I want an audience to feel, but I do think (constantly) about how I want the people playing the music to feel. I want them to feel comfortable expressing themselves, and I want them to feel comfortable interacting with one another. I find that when passages do not sit well on any instrument, a lot of expression is lost, so I strive for physical comfort. I also work to organize the music so that the people who play it remain interested and engaged.

In the case of non-programmatic music, the melodic and harmonic material, tempo indications, rests, slurs, articulations, and dynamics can be written into the music. All the stuff that remains (i.e. the music making itself) belongs to the people playing the music. People listening can decide what to pay attention to. If a performing musician wants to call special attention to something in the music and people in the audience notice, that can be a good thing. Or not.

[Music involves all the senses: the sense of sight in both the mind's eye or the physical eye, the sense of hearing in the anticipatory inner ear or the physical outer ear, and the sense of touch. I think the sense of smell mixes with memory. I remember the smell of the euphonium I played one afternoon in elementary school, the smell of the pitch pipe that my elementary school music teacher gave me as a present, the smell of my flute, and the smell of the closet where I practiced in junior high. I remember the smell of deteriorating music paper, and the cigar-smoke-infused mud floor of the music shed at Tanglewood. I remember the smell of the Tanglewood practice cabins too. I remember the smell of rosin, and the way the inside of my 3/4-size violin case smelled. Taste is musical taste, of course. But it is still a sense.]

We often listen to music to be entertained, and we often play music to entertain ourselves and share with others. If a professional musician has had a lousy day, his or her negative feelings and pesky "self talk" are imperceptible to the audience. Nobody can hear the words that are in your head while you are playing, and nobody who is playing can "hear" the thoughts of the audience. Imagine the distracting extra-musical cacophony that would happen if you could.

But if the chatter in our heads is redirected towards the music at hand, people who are playing together can connect with one another in very intimate and inexplicable ways through the music. In doing so, they also connect with the other people who are in the room, and those people can feel connected with one another in the music.

And, for some people, their inner chatter might slow down. Or even stop.

These are the moments musicians live for. I aspire to write music that makes these moments possible. I imagine a lot of composers share that aspiration.

New Year's Greeting for Three

As is my custom, I have been spending this earlier part of New Year's Eve writing a short piece to greet the new year. This one is a bit austere, but it really can't be helped.

Here's a link to an audio file (with yours truly playing the violin part and the oboe part on the violin), and a link to the music (which is also on this page of the IMSLP).

La Soleá from Cante Jondo played by Rebecca Johnson and Cara Chowning

This is the fourth piece "Cante Jondo" (five pieces based on poems of Federico Garcia Lorca) performed by Rebecca Johnson and Cara Chowning.



Here is Michael Leddy's translation Lorca's "La Soleá"

Sad Andalusian Song

Cloaked in black
she thinks the world small
and the heart immense.

Cloaked in black.

She thinks the tender sigh and cry
disappear
in the wind.

Cloaked in black.

She left the window open
and dawn emptied out
the whole sky there.

Ah, ah,
cloaked in black!

Composing music and exercising free will

I enjoyed listening to the November 16th edition of the This American Life podcast called "Where There is a Will". In the last segment producer David Kestenbaum and neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky discuss the question of whether or not any of us actually has free will, and that got me thinking about the idea of exercising free will when writing music.

Speaking as a composer of music, I really have no idea how anybody writes a piece of music. Even me. All I know is that, whether I like it or not, I rely on a lot of subconscious activity when I find myself writing something.

It's not that the music writes itself, but once I string a few notes together, either horizontally or vertically, they set the tone (no pun intended), the feeling, and the vocabulary of what will come after. They also lay the groundwork for material that will be written later and inserted into the piece.

As soon as I have the thematic material in hand, it becomes the leader. It tells me what must be done, and lets me know what doesn't work. I can try expanding or contracting the material. I can fit the material into this or that meter, and I can manipulate it so it slides into another mode or key. I can set it to avoid tonality if I want. I can choose which registers it will inhabit on which instruments or groupings of instruments. I believe that I have the free will to make any choices I want, which makes me the master of my musical domain. While I am moving my tin soldiers around their battlefield or the stage of their theater, I feel all powerful.

But that feeling doesn't last because some of the choices I might have made in my illusory state of power haven't turned out to be as good as they first seemed to be (and some turned out downright lousy). My thematic material, which, by this point has taken on a life of its own, will not allow itself to be put in compromising situations (like being buried in less-than-resonant parts of an instrument or being awkward or uncomfortable to play). If something I do with the material doesn't work, it becomes obvious. I sometimes spend hours trying to fix a deficient phrase. Sometimes the best solution is to scrap a section altogether.

When musical material makes its way into situations where there is conflict, it demands resolution. And that resolution needs to be paced and voiced so that it is satisfying. These things keep me up at night. Sometimes they loop through my dreams. Sometimes I feel like my unconscious mind takes over and "does" what my so-called free will would have done if I could rely on it.

Then there are wrong notes that have to be replaced with better ones. After the wrong notes have been replaced, there is the question of phrase direction. I find that durable themes often proscribe fairly obvious phrase directions, so it becomes my job to make sure I put the slurs and articulations in the right places. It's my job to make sure that the dynamic levels on the page correspond to the dynamic levels demanded by the ebb and flow of the material.

It is at this point when I wonder if I have exercised any free will at all. I console myself by realizing that my job is finished once all the notes, dynamics, and articulations are in their best of all possible places. It is up to the people playing the music to make choices about how it should be performed.

Maybe once we begin to create something (music, poetry, a drawing or painting, dinner, a game, a party, a relationship, a blog post like this one) the idea of free will evaporates, and the thing itself takes over. And a piece of music has the possibility of having many lives that are all quite independent from the life of its "creator."

Hannukah Latkes

Back in 2009 I shared this song with my friend Seymour Barab, and he told me that it should be on the "hit parade." I laughed. And he said that he was serious.

I always wanted to write a Christmas song, but my heart has never been in it. Hannukah, however, is a different story.


December 11, 2009

The music is available here.

Leap Frog and New Year's Greeting

Here are both pieces in their full glory played by Scott Slapin and Tanya Solomon:



Now THIS is something to be thankful for. Happy Thanksgiving to all.

Excerpts from the Slapin-Solomon Duo Concert in South Hadley, MA!

Yesterday the Slapin-Solomon Duo played a concert that included my "Leap Frog" and "New Year's Greeting" for two violas. They put a short "collage" from the concert on YouTube, and I'm sharing it here.

La Lola from "Cante Jondo" played by Rebecca Johnson and Cara Chowning

Here's the third piece in "Cante Jondo" (five pieces based on poems of Federico Garcia Lorca) performed by Rebecca Johnson and Cara Chowning.



Lola (La Lola)

Under the orange tree
she washes cotton underthings.
Her eyes green
and her voice violet.

Ah love,
under the blossoming orange tree!

The water in the ditch
filling up with sun,

in the olive grove
a sparrow singing.

Ah love,
under the blossoming orange tree!

Soon, when
the soap’s gone,
the young bullfighters will come.

Ah love,
under the blossoming orange tree!

[English translation by Michael Leddy]

"El Grito" Performed by Rebecca Johnson and Cara Chowning

Here is Michael Leddy's translation of the Lorca Poem this piece is based on:

II. The Cry (El Grito)

The ellipse of a cry
goes from mountain
to mountain.

From the olive trees
it will be a black rainbow
over the blue night.

Ah!

Like a viola bow
the cry has made
the wind’s long strings sound.

Ah!

(The people in the cellars
light their lamps.)
Ah!

"Canción de Jinete" performed by Rebecca Johnson and Cara Chowning

This piece for flute and piano is based on a song I wrote for countertenor and piano to a poem by Lorca. Here is an English translation by Michael Leddy of the poem.



I. Rider’s Song (Canción de Jinete)

Córdoba.
A long way alone.

Black pony, big moon,
and olives in my pack.
Though I know the way
I’ll never reach Córdoba.

Across the plain, through the wind,
black pony, red moon.
Death is watching me
from the towers of Córdoba.

Ah what a long way!
Ah my brave pony!
Oh that death waits for me
Before I reach Córdoba.

Córdoba.
A long way alone.

My Very Good Composerly Day Yesterday

I might remember September 25, 2018 as the best "composerly" day of my life so far. It began with a rehearsal and then a performance of three pieces for four violas and bass that I played with my fellow violists Jiyeon Schleicher, Anne Heiles, and Robin Kearton, and bass player Margaret Briskin. I recorded the performance, so you can listen through these Dropbox links:

Red Hot Dots
Pasticcio
Mary Jane Waltz

After the concert I went to listen to a rehearsal of "The Collar" that its dedicatees Ronald Hedlund and Barbara Hedlund are performing next month. Ron is a truly great opera singer, and an equally great actor, and Barbara is an excellent cellist who is willing and able to participate in the dialogue between narrator and cello as a dramatic equal. They had wonderful ideas, asked interesting questions, and found what I hope is the last typographical error in the text.

Then I returned home and found an email message from the conductor of Nicholas Yee, who conducts the seventh- and eighth-grade string orchestra at the Orange County School of the Arts in Santa Ana, California. He and his students made a recording for me of a run-through of my Scarborough Fair Fantasy, which they are performing on Friday at Symphony Hall in Santa Ana. It was so heartfelt a reading that it made me cry. Really.

I'll see if I can share a recording from the concert.

My Musical Half Lives

My life motto has always been that half of life is learning, and half of life is sharing, but the empty spaces in my cup that runneth over can feel particularly empty if I am not actively engaged in learning or actively engaged in sharing. My family and the friends that are close to me graciously accept my gifts to them, and that helps to defer emphasis away from those empty spaces. With the impersonal and fleeting communication-based relationships that the internet makes possible, my circle of acquaintances has both broadened and become more remote.

Sometimes I think that my contact with the outside world would feel more "conditional" if I were to engage in commerce, but I have a deep aversion to commerce when it comes to my work as a composer and as an arranger. I prefer not to sell my work. I would rather share it. The problem that I face is that in our culture when something is offered for free, it is valued less than something that is assigned monetary value.

I think differently. There are things that I feel are priceless. I can't put a price on love, for example, and I can't put a price on nice weather. I can't honestly give monetary value to a piece of music.

I suppose you can put a price on time: I charge students for lessons because that is time that I spend dedicated to making them into better musicians. If I didn't charge, they probably wouldn't value what I teach them, and they probably wouldn't practice. I am happy to be paid for the time I spend traveling to orchestra rehearsals, and I am happy to be paid for the time I spend rehearsing. I am happy to be paid for playing music for weddings and parties for people I do not know. I also don't mind accepting money when somebody I don't know asks me to write something. I think of it as the price of my time to meet the needs of another person.

But once the music is written the last thing I want to do these days is to hand it over to a publisher. I say this because I have a lot of music that is published. I have no idea where, when, or if my published music gets played. Royalty statements, which reflect sales, come very rarely because the publishers have to wait until there is enough in the way of royalties to justify writing a check. Publishers are also in the unique position, once they "own" your work, to do what they want with it. If that means ignoring it and burying it in their catalog without doing any kind of promotion for it, then I can be sure that the music will not be played. And in the event that someone seeks out a piece and buys it through the publisher or through a distributor, the composer makes 10% of the price of the piece of music. If a piece of music sells for $20.00, the composer makes $2.00 in royalties.

It is worth that $2.00 to me to have a piece of music that I write have the possibility of being played and being readily available for free to someone who seeks it out.

I suppose you could say that I am an outlier. I grew up in a family of brilliant musicians, and though their instruction in the practical aspects of navigating the world might have been lacking, their example of what is important in music was a gift of such magnitude that I feel that it would take another lifetime to "pay it forward." I have never "wanted" for excellent instruments, and though my education at Juilliard was sorely lacking, I always had older friends who, for whatever reason, would teach me for free. Aside from my Juilliard tuition, the money that my parents gave me for violin lessons and flute lessons when I was growing up, the four or five baroque flute lessons I took in Boston, and a year or so of violin lessons that I had in Illinois as an adult, I have not paid a cent for my musical education (tuition was free when I studied recorder at the Vienna Hochschule, and I had an assistantship for graduate school).

I had the opportunity to remake myself into a string player in my 30s, and to devote an enormous amount of time to composing in my 40s and 50s. I live in a comfortable house in a small-yet-musical town where my husband and I raised two children who have become great adults and live respectable lives in their respective major cities (one on either coast).

Life is good. Life is great.

I have books to read, and a great husband to read them with (we have a two-person reading club). I have Bach (and other great composers) to study. I have ample time to practice. I have great students that teach me how to teach. I have time to practice and people to play with. I have this blog to vent both my heart and my spleen, and another one that serves as a nifty way to catalog the music I write. I hear, from time to time, that people play the music that I make available in the IMSLP, and that makes me happy.