Found myself this morning shaking my head over the arguments between musicians in the '80s and '90s over "pre-composition." So funny! And so sad, really.
Pre-composition in those days meant setting up interval sets, integer series, rows of rhythms, structural diagrams and such that would guide the music. The process had become somewhat elaborate in response to the new possibilities opened up by serialism in the mid-century.
The argument was that such pre-compositional decisions restricted or even denied true musical impulse and left the resulting music chained to a completely logical, rational ideal that had no link to emotional expression. What those who argued against pre-compositional practice were saying was, in effect, your music sucks. Probably it would have been better to simply state it like that.
I can't think of a way that musical composition can't involve pre-compositional decision making. Even with the idea of found sounds, even setting up a microphone on a street corner or standing in the middle of a crowd and saying THAT is music. That's a choice, it's not a purely intuitive form of expression. An improviser—any worth listening to—will have studied and have reams of such choices in their head before they play a note. They may not know what they're going to play, but what their going to play is to some extent predetermined by their training and their interests and their emotional state and their choice of scales and chords or modes or whatever—and so on.
The argument was never anything other ridiculous. The use of integer series, interval sets, row forms for any aspect of the music or whatever else, is all a musical process. Perhaps no sound results as you're doing it, but it is musical in its intent and, for a good composer, the result will a unified, highly expressive musical experience.
I mean really, the things people get upset about .... The argument was never about the practice of composition really. It was about people taking sides over musical aesthetics and trying to "prove" their point with tangible goods. All in vain. Such efforts only make enemies out of friends, needlessly muddying the water of the spirit in which we all swim.
Each fall, I teach a freshman seminar at The College of New Jersey titled, "Music and the Natural World." TCNJ's freshman seminars are each a semester long, and designed to expose students to interesting research and scholarly pursuits across disciplines. Topics range widely and include lots of topics that might spark the interest of recent high school grads, while giving them an entry to scholarship.
The course is a gas and I'm looking forward this fall. We read essays and articles in philosophy, musicology, physics and biology, ancient history … And we listen to a wide range of music, most of it outside the Western classical canon.
One figure we talk about each semester is Pierre Schaeffer and his work in musique concrète. So I was delighted to find this online article posted on the Vinyl Factory site that has an annotated listening guide, with complete works, as well as a good overview of his early career. The line between Schaeffer's work and sampling and hip-hop seems plain and straight to me, but my students have a harder time seeing it. Having this explanation in hand may help.
Plus there's a lot of stuff here I hadn't heard before. Spending part of my afternoon listening to the creepy and beautiful 1953 opera Orphée 53.
A separate work by Schaeffer colleague Pierre Henry, written the same year and on the same subject, Le Voile de Orphée II, features the first recorded use of the phonogene, shown above. A precursor of the simpler Mellotron, it featured multiple tape heads and a one-octave keyboard controller that could create a wide range of effects using prerecorded tape. The phonogene is mentioned in the Vinyl Factory article as one of the technological innovations created by Schaeffer and Henry in their time at the Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète.
Blackstar (2016) was David Bowie’s last album, released just two days before he died after years of struggling with heart attacks and a cancer diagnosis. For a long time, listening to it was simply too painful. I would listen, but I wouldn’t hear, exactly – I couldn’t turn on my usual listening skills.
A friend told me once how weeks after a serious car crash, he went to the lot where his now totaled car was. Turned the key and the battery still activated – the cassette that had been playing when he crashed was still on, the same spot, and the whole, horrifying memory of accident came back to him with the sound of the music.
My experience with Blackstar was like that. Overwhelming. Too real.
Two years on, and I am listening again, attentively – and I get it. What was confusing to me then through that veil of grief is clear now.
Of course, the album is almost exclusively about the experience of mortality, taking the mature recognition of death and personal suffering that we heard in The Next Day (2013) a step further. Where it gets thorny is in the depth of that personal experience and the pastiche of symbols that he uses. Not content to just say “it hurts to leave,” Bowie carves this incredibly rigorous and painful illustration of solipsistic isolation around the final, terminal, individual human experience and the way we recognize it in others through the invention of rituals. It's me that suffers in the only way I can, it seems to say, just like everybody else.
The song “Blackstar” that leads off the album and its accompanying video show us the entire argument. As the “blackstar,” the dying artist is recognized, but unknowable, a blip against the background of dark-space existence. The image was used by one of Bowie's heroes, Elvis Presley, in the exact same way, as a reference to the individual experience of death.
After a vignette of a death ritual in the opening verse (“In the villa of Ormen / stands a solitary candle”), a few lines tie the personal to the universal, merely by emphasizing that he is simply one in an endless chain – “something happened on the day he died / his spirit rose a meter then stepped aside / another took his place and bravely cried, ‘I’m the Blackstar’.”
In the central section of the 10-minute song’s three-part structure, he is the voice of a trickster God who tells us that his purpose is unfathomable, “I can’t answer why / Just go with me / I’m-a take you home / Take your passport and shoes / your sedatives too / you’re a flash in the pan / I’m the great I am!”
In the video, he is also a prophet for this isolationist religion, standing alone holding up the bible with a black star on the cover, symbolizing his own isolated experience; or standing at the doorway to a passage where dancers shake in rituals of individual suffering and death – involved in their own experiences. The jewel-encrusted skull that becomes the centerpiece of a new ritual shows how the deaths of other travelers are miracles that speak to us across the gulf that isolates us from one another. (The space suit by the way it is a reference to son Duncan Bowie’s film, “Moon” – such a dad move). The choreography borrows from butoh, the Japanese post-war style of modern dance that trades in suffering, fragility, infirmity.
The song’s free jazz allusions back this up: free jazz is a kind of ultimate individual expression, yet performed together to make a whole sound both predictable and unpredictable, knowable and unknowable. It is the solipsistic experience recognized through ritual as a collective phenomenon. The A-B-a structure itself represents transformation, with the final third (a) a repetition of the opening (A), but inflected by elements of the second third (B).
And there you have it. The rest of the album follows suit, with “Lazarus,” a meditation on his unique life and his legacy-as-a-resonance-as-after-life, the dark murder theme of “Sue,” the self-saturated and vainglorious teenage decadence of “Girl Loves Me” (with lyrics in Nadsat, the made-up slang dialect of Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange), the timeless and darkly threatening, teasingly obscene nonsense of “Tis a Pity She Was a Whore” (based on a 17th century play of the same name about incest), the dirty nostalgia and regret of “Dollar Days” (“don’t believe for just one second I’m forgetting you / I’m trying to / I’m dying to”). And of course, the more or less self-explanatory cryptograph “I Can’t Give Everything Away” (it's not just won’t – he really can’t).
In the dance of death we are individuals, chained in isolation, but linked together. I should be so lucky if my someday shuffle off this mortal coil could possess half the value, the truth, the grace of this example – it would be worth its weight in gold stardust.
A new work of mine and eight other premieres, duets by
living composers, will be performed at 7 p.m. Monday, Sept. 18 at William
Paterson University’s New Music Series, on a program titled “Terrible Twos.”
The music was commissioned by Composers Concordance, a group
of longstanding currently led by Gene Pritsker and Dan Cooper that regularly
performs commissions and performs works by its members. This concert is the
first event of Composers Concordance 2017-18 season.
The program
is mostly duets, split between performers Gene Pritsker and Greg Baker,
electric guitars; Keve Wilson, oboe, and Kathleen Supové, piano; and Peter
Jarvis, multi-percussion and Michiyo Suzuki, clarinet/ bass clarinet. They’ll
be performing work by Randall Woolf, Gene Pritsker, Peter Jarvis, Greg Baker,
David Saperstein, Dan Cooper, John Clark, and myself. The concert finale will
be “a large semi-aleatoric piece” that will include all three duos performing
as a sextet.
My contribution will be in the
clarinet and percussion duets, along with new pieces by John and Peter. The
title of mine is “Lunatic,” as it was started before the recent total eclipse
that captured the attention of all of North America. The event seemed to
underscore what feels like a surreal time in American life and culture, one
where we’re wrestling with a kind of national psychological complex related to who
we were and who we are as a country and a species. The overlay of that
superficial fixation onto the underlying forces of creation, symbolized by the
eclipse, reveals a colorful, dark landscape of anxiety.
Admission
is free. The concert is in Shea Center for the Performing Arts, William Paterson
University, 300 Pompton Road, Wayne, NJ 07470. I hope everyone can come and
support both the Composers Concordance and the university’s New Music Series.
Both deserve high praise for their relentless efforts to promote new music in
high quality performances.
Reading this article from AAAS, it suddenly occurs to me that the common argument about machines vs. humans in
music is flawed. As I note in my last post about Liza Lim’s “How Forests
Think,” we naturally hear the sounds of the forests as music – it is a human
response. We turn the sound into music because we’re musical creatures that
come from the forest. That small insight, applied here, provides the key to
understanding our future role with technology and the arts. Music isn’t necessarily in the
making – deciding which notes and rhythms go together – but in the human
response to organized sound, the enjoyment and participation of in the making
and listening. That makes AI seriously less threatening. Will machines make
music equal to that of humans in creativity, complexity, even spiritual depth?
Sure! Will it matter? Nope. Because, after all, what’s the point? We ultimately will be able to teach
computers how to respond to music like we do. And they will be capable of
making music on par with a human composer or performer. But the musical experience
itself is human and the need for humans to make music and to appreciate the
music that is made, will never, ever go away. Machines are just us – an
extension of us and an extension of that musical impulse. This idea actually extends a slim
hope for the economics of music – a weakly floating board to cling to amid the
shipwreck of the music industry. As far back as Marshall McLuhan, students of
culture have noted that it is only when an object’s use becomes obsolete that
we, as a culture, begin to fully appreciate it. The value of paintings and
appreciation for the skill of the illustrator increased with the advent of the
photograph. Tape and LPs became highly prized when that had been eclipsed by
CDs and digital downloads and streaming. We are seeing a rather sudden
appreciation of the physical, printed book, separate from the books we read
online (the scores of George Crumb and the rise of the graphic novel are just
two examples that spring to mind). Once its usefulness is eclipsed, the human
achievement of the old medium becomes the thing itself, a source of admiration
and appreciation. That’s where we’re headed with the
use of live performing musicians for entertainment. Already it has become a
kind of status symbol – only the poor wedding will have no live music. Musicians
now can make a living as cover bands, some focusing on famous old acts like Led
Zeppelin and the Beatles, but some just cranking out the tunes at parties, human
juke boxes – whether imitating artists or rendering them in a more personal
style, doesn’t matter, so long as they’re not
recordings but flesh and blood, communicating the rhythm. It is common, too, to see live
performance transcriptions of works never designed for live performance, like
Frank Zappa’s “G-Spot Tornado” at the 1990s Yellow Shark concerts, or the
Beatles’ “Revolution 9” by Alarm Will Sound, or the endless MIDI scores
composed for video games performed by orchestras. The subtext there is clear:
music is better with living human
beings making the sound. Not better because humans do it
better; simply better because human. It will be no surprise when a
future sophisticated robot (like Data in “Star Trek: The Next Generation”) can
play Paganini perfectly. But because it’s no surprise, it will also be less
valuable than a human achieving the same goal. A player piano can execute
rhythms and counterpoints impossible for a human to play. The only reason to
care is because a human dreamed up those impossible compositions. Music is part of our evolution into
the creatures we are now and technology is part of that. But the connection
between our music and our biology is deep, and it exists now with or without
technological aid, offering us immediate union with one another and with the
world. We will carry that forward, come what may. Let’s admit that the Turing Test is
merely a landmark on the horizon, and that there will come a day when we
literally can’t tell the difference between humans and machines, or the part of
us that is human and the part that is machine – no matter how well we know the
hybrid. That day is a long way off, but when it comes, the confusion will be
best expressed in a song.
The International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) performs “How Forests Think,” 7:30 p.m. Monday, August 14 at Merkin Concert Hall, Lincoln Center.
The program – part of Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart summer festival – takes it’s name from a work for 10 musicians by composer Liza Lim. (Perhaps coincidentally, this is also the title of an interesting book about interconnected rhythms of life experienced by Amazon forest natives.) In addition to Lim’s music, the program includes Pauline Oliveros’s “Earth Ears,” and Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s “Aequilibria.” The ensemble will be conducted by Baldur Brönnimann and musician Wu Wei will perform on the sheng, a Chinese mouth-blown reed organ.
The thread of the program, obviously, is the connection between music and nature, something that is very much on my mind as I prepare for the course, Music and the Natural World, that I teach each Fall for freshman at The College of New Jersey. The topic runs deep and crosses all lines of human investigation, including biological and physical sciences, philosophy, religion, politics, the visual arts, dance, psychology and sociology.
The reason for this blurring of lines is the root of music is deep in prehistory – it prefigures and shapes many aspects of human activity that reason would typically try to parse into separate channels for analysis. Music doesn't parse. Any part of it interconnects to any other part. (Try defining harmony, for instance, without talking about pitch, time and esthetic impressions.) Music organizes people like . On the one hand it lifts individuality and makes us conscious of time; on the other, it submerges our individual identities into the pool of the communal response, which holds all of the past, present and future in one bowl.
Those realizations are apparent with very little investigation – just an open set of ears and a heart tuned to an old song. Lim's composition uses for its model the life of the forest itself, the activity, growth and structures that define it. We hear forest sounds as music – is that because an ancestral association of good emotions with the sound of the forest? Or are we anthropomorphizing those sounds, turning them into human-style communication, reflecting our humanness back onto the non-human forest? Or is it because our understanding of music emanates from there, so we are ourselves manifestations of the forest? (Answer: yes. Mark this spot on the map in your brain: this is the approximate place where words stop, while the landscape of music keeps right on going.)
Sō Percussion’s Summer Institute begins Sunday, July 16 in Princeton and continues through the end of the month. The group (shown above in a press photo from its website) has eight performances scheduled at various venues on and around Princeton University campus, including a 7:30 p.m. Thursday appearance at Small World Coffee – a typically crowded Witherspoon Street hangout where singer/songwriters and other small ensembles perform.
In particular, the Princeton Composer Concert, 7:30 p.m. Saturday, July 22, at Matthews Acting Studio, Lewis Center for the Arts, 185 Nassau St., Princeton, will feature the work of seven graduate student composers. The Composers Guild of New Jersey – where I am a board member – has commissioned works by composers selected by Sō Percussion Summer Institute, with the goal of encouraging young New Jersey composers. CGNJ also donated money for other expenses related to the performance, including videotaping.
Donations of nonperishable food, toiletries, and diapers for the Trenton Area Soup Kitchen (TASK) will be collected at specific Summer Institute concerts, including the July 22 performance. Audience members may place their donations in the designated boxes outside the performance space.
