Composing

Ah, my love of third-hand information: Someone told me once that they had learned (somehow) that Xenakis believed a particular thing--and that thing is this: that all music is one music, one song, one essential field of beauty that already exists and that composers are merely bringing to light in its particular, local aspects.

I haven't read enough Xenakis to verify this and it may be totally erroneous--but on the surface at least, it doesn't seem out of line with what I know of his views about approaching "the one", the union or totality of artistic and scientific experience.

I was thinking about that as I was working on a new piece for percussionist Peter Jarvis. Xenakis pioneered the use of highly advanced algorithms and statistical distributions to discover new music. It wasn't necessarily the computations that attracted him, but the fact that the math could lead to a new approach, a new unexplored aspect of the infinite. He had already seen this at work in his architectural designs and it made sense to apply it to music.

I don't pretend to be uncovering anything radically new in my music and my forays into the abstract are far simpler, relying on the interplay of simple proportions or short integer sequences. But these days my understanding of the spirituality of the composing experience is linked to that idea: everything we think we have to say is already said and laying there, waiting to be uncovered. More and more I feel that music writing is a question of uncovering the inevitable, no matter to what degree it jibes with or runs contrary to stylistic preconceptions.

In that way, composers are more like archeologists, uncovering and presenting the bones and artifacts of the universe itself, a contour map of the underlying unity that binds all of us, musician or otherwise.

Such ideas don't preclude the role of skill of course--some archeologists are better than others, more able to recognize and preserve both the grand design and the glistening detail. The rest of us just do the best we can. And they don't preclude the role of personality or ego--although I'm all for damping that down a bit. We are individually and inescapably conduits for the information we find and we shape that information accordingly as it passes through.

I have had that story about Xenakis in my head for years--decades in fact. But until recently, I always regarded it as an absurd belief, one of the eccentricities of a great artist. Maturity brings humility and maybe a grain of wisdom, here and there.

--C.
http://www.theandofone.blogspot.com

Holiday TAG

Wilbo Wright is holding a TAG Night at Joe's Mill Hill Saloon, Broad and Market streets, Trenton, 8:30 p.m. Wednesday, Dec. 16. The theme of the night is holiday music and he's invited a whole host of experimental musicians.

"We've all gotten into that stuff [holiday music] at some point," Wilbo said on the phone with me recently. "We've all had ideas we've written down, you know, 'wouldn't it be great to do that.' We've got sheafs of those ideas laying around."

So Wednesday will be a chance to bust out a few of those. The performers will be a crowd in themselves in the small pub and each performer will be doing something short, only a few songs. So socially and musically, it should be a gas.

--C.

New Operas in Brooklyn

Get the most bang for your night at the opera at Galapagos Art Space, 16 Main St. at Water Street in the Dumbo neighborhood of Brooklyn, on Saturday, Dec. 12. American Opera Projects with Opera on Tap are presenting three new works, including a staged workshop of the chamber opera Semmelweis by Raymond Lustig, winner of the 2009 Chariles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Also on the program are Marymere, a chamber opera in one act by Matt Schickele and scenes from Sucker, a work in progress by composer James Barry.

As if those weren't enough names and titles, the entire trio of operas is billed as part of the series "Opera Grows in Brooklyn." Tickets are $20, $15 for students and seniors, and are available at www.smarttix.com.

--C.

www.theandofone.blogspot.com

Three Rooms

Saturday morning, Nov. 14, I got the news that my newly completed CD, Three Rooms, is officially available for sale on CD Baby. You can order copies of the CD in a jewel case or download the mp3s individually or as an album. In the next few weeks, CD Baby will make the digital version available on iTunes and several other sites as well.

The songs on Three Rooms were all written over the course of a few months last year, and I spent a lot of time since then arranging and recording. I've gotten some very positive feedback about the production and the arrangements, as well as the songs themselves.

A storm swept through New Jersey on Friday 13th--a good omen for the end of a long creative project.

--C.
www.theandofone.blogspot.com

Chamber Music in Lincroft

Violinist Joel Dewitt and pianist/composer Julia Muench present a concert of chamber music Saturday, Nov. 7 at the Unitarian Church, 1475 West Front St., Lincroft. The program will include Mozart, Brahms, Poulenc, Albeniz and Rachmaninoff. Tickets are $20, $15 for students and seniors. Checks payable to the church will be accepted at the door. Call 732-747-0707 for more information.

--C.
www.theandofone.blogspot.com

Upcoming at Historic Christ Church

Historic Christ Church, 5 Paterson St., New Brunswick, will be holding three noteworthy music programs in the coming weeks. The first is a presentation at 9:30 a.m. Saturday on psalm singing, accompanying, and improvisation as they are practiced in the Netherlands. The demonstration will led by retired Professor Thomas Spacht of Baltimore's Towson University.

Prof. Spacht and the choir will then perform the second program this Sunday, as part of the regular Evensong and Organ Recital at 4 p.m. The choir and organist Thomas Spacht will perform Johan Bernhard Bach's Ciacona in B-flat, Psalm 91 of Klaas Bolt, Psalms 116 and 138 of Margaretha Christina de Jong, Psalm 42 of Sietze de Vries and "Jauchz, Erd', und Himmel, juble!" of Max Reger.

The third is a Jazz Vespers at 4 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 1 in honor of All Saints' Day. Mack Brandon, Benny Barksdale and an ensemble will perform.

For more information on these programs, visit the church's website.

--C.
www.theandofone.blogspot.com

Kucera 80th Birthday Tribute

On Wednesday, Oct. 21, at 8 p.m., guitarist Dr. Stanley Alexandrowicz will be performing at Goucher College in Baltimore with members of the Music Department Faculty in a program dedicated to the 80th birthday celebration of Czech composer Vaclav Kucera. On the program will also be a world premiere of mine, a fantasy for solo guitar called In Perilous Seas that Stanley commissioned from me last year.

Stanley is a great performer, a former student of Manuel Barrueco, a graduate of Manhattan School of Music and an Albany recording artist. I've known him since the mid-80s and he has always been a relentless explorer of the guitar literature, turning up scores and composers that have, in turn, become major influences on me and others of his contemporaries.

Kucera is a great example. A remarkably original and inspired composer, he is not well known in this country and I would know nothing of him were it not for Stanley's research. Of Kucera's works, the birthday program will present a U.S. premiere, with a string orchestra conducted by Goucher's ensembles director Elisa Koehler, of the Concierto Imaginativo „Homenaje a Salvador Dalí” and the Maryland premiere of his solo Diario: Omaggio a Che Guevara. The program will also include work by Ernst Bacon, Brian Fenelly and Eric Sessler.

Stanley will be repeating elements of this program at the Composers Voice concert Nov. 29 at the Jan Hus Church in New York in the last week of November and I'll post information on that concert as it approaches.

--C.
www.theandofone.blogspot.com