A proper tour of my liv­ing sit­u­a­tion, on the eve of my 5^th anniver­sary in situ, and my immi­nent move to another bor­ough, is over­due. I came here as a baby baby com­poser, got schooled in this cocoon, and I must pay proper dues to Mar­cia Brody mak­ing it pos­si­ble. She been essen­tially giv­ing three spe­cial rooms in her home for decades to stu­dents, and like many before me I must move on!

Mar­cia had the remark­able fore­sight to buy this place as a young teacher when the UWS wasn’t so much old Jews as pink cadil­lacs and dealins. The place was a legit board­ing house, in which who knows what went down. There remains one ancient per­mit on a door:

The whole expe­ri­ence is a lit­tle like inhab­it­ing a model Vic­to­rian apart­ment at the Amer­i­can Wing at the Met; like, exactly where you’d expect a com­poser to reside. But there’s also Marcia’s son, Gothic Hang­man, an influ­en­tial goth/surrealist artist; you get a cou­ple glimpses of the house on his episode of MTV’s True Life. And Marcia’s hus­band, Stephen, who col­lects Every­thing and places lit­tle duck­ies and crys­tals Just So, and lis­tens to Lib­er­tar­ian radio on the stoop unceas­ingly. And Marcia’s Indian rubble/Asian masks/19^th cen­tury Amer­i­can polit­i­cal doc­u­ments, which give you night ter­rors, and fas­ci­nate you, and turn lug­gage mov­ing into a tax­ing cer­e­mony. And no run­ning water in the kitch­enette on my floor. Or A/C.

To give you a bet­ter sense of the whole thing, I made a lit­tle video tour of the house. It begins with the carved faces of the orig­i­nal occu­pants from 1887 on the front stoop and ends in my room. The music is a Scia­r­rino Capric­cio, some­how cap­tur­ing my dreami­est arrivals home.

Great har­mony is great Jenga.

 

Many peo­ple who watched Andrew Stanton’s TED talk (writer, Wall-E, Find­ing Nemo etc.) were made aware of a hith­erto obscure quote by the Victorian-era drama critic William Archer, which suc­cinctly describes drama as “antic­i­pa­tion min­gled with uncer­tainty.”  It feels apt, though it has more to do with the expe­ri­ence of drama than the mak­ing of drama. For a com­poser, it prob­a­bly holds more water than def­i­n­i­tions deal­ing with char­ac­ter goals, con­flicts of inter­est, tri­umph, defeat, dénoue­ment, cre­ative writ­ing sem­i­nars… As it per­tains to music, the quote also reminds me of Robert Jourdain’s pop-science music per­cep­tion book, Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy, in which Jour­dain defines great lis­ten­ing expe­ri­ences as a process of nav­i­gat­ing anticipation—the com­poser sets up antic­i­pa­tions, vio­lates them, rewards them later.

If the Archer quote is true, you can test for the absence of drama. It sort of works: if you’re cer­tain about how the piece will unfold, you don’t feel the need to expe­ri­ence it; if you can­not antic­i­pate any­thing, you get lost. Inci­den­tally, get­ting lost is the some­times goal for par­tic­u­lar artists, but maybe that’s not drama.

Not a rule; use­ful, maybe.

I can­not over­es­ti­mate the impor­tance of breath­ing, grow­ing plants to my healthy psy­che. A fluid cre­ative life depends on the pres­ence of vital plants, for when I am glum I look at them and think, at least some of us are grow­ing; when I am exhil­a­rated, I think, we flower together; and when I seek solu­tions, I think, this spearmint needs to be cut DOWN for it is gan­gly, like­wise the B sec­tion in this piece. Pic­tured: Cof­fee I am grow­ing from the seed of my par­ents’ wed­ding tree, Spearmint clipped from Alaska, a dor­mant Hoya Rope, a vine, Basil, Thyme, and a Venus Fly Trap. He inspired me to steal & assim­i­late. A vine embell­ishes exist­ing struc­tures, which is hugely rep­re­sented in Abid­ing Shapes. The cof­fee is steady, resilient, and makes effi­cient use of lim­ited light with enor­mous glossy leaves. So I aspire.

I saw a paint­ing in a lobby, a black fill whose charm lay entirely in the color-splintered frame-border. So why would the cura­tors see fit to frame it fur­ther? It looked like this:

framed thus:

What might have been a win­some piece of min­i­mal­ism is now a post­mod­ern absur­dity. For the seeker of jux­ta­po­si­tion, there are many daz­zling pos­si­bil­i­ties bet­ter than this gaudy approach. Robert Bringhurst, my favorite typographer-poet, addresses the sub­ject from his camp:

Con­sis­tency is one of the forms of beauty. Con­trast is another. A fine page, even a fine book, can be set from begin­ning to end in one type in one size. It can also teem with vari­ety, like an equa­to­r­ial for­est or a mod­ern city.

Bringhurst, The Ele­ments of Typo­graphic Style, 102.

Hence an obsessively-focused study works as well as a diverse sam­pler, though each has sep­a­rate require­ments. If the point is to illu­mi­nate vari­ety, pick a com­ple­men­tary frame. If the focus is nar­row, seek the force­ful, dogged border.

Tawdry fram­ing abounds in music, too, in con­cert pro­gram­ming and multi-movement works alike. Imag­ine, as an extreme exam­ple, Orff’s weepy earnest, “O For­tuna” and Bernstein’s satir­i­cal bloody, “Auto da fé” fram­ing John Adams’ sub­lime “Cho­rus of Exiled Pales­tini­ans” from the Death of Kling­hof­fer. I wince as I embed this monstrosity:

Con­trast is engag­ing, but con­sis­tency of tone is for­ever, and it’s mem­o­rable. If you’re going for blood orange, fill it through with crim­son until we all bleed:

Speak­ing of con­sis­tent tone, look at what I got when I searched Google with the above image (you can do this by drag­ging an image onto Google):

  

Queer burg­ers!

Com­mis­sions, as acts grown from respect and gen­eros­ity, are good karma for every­body, and when­ever pos­si­ble we should give them in every form, to set design­ers, vibe-creators, sculptors…pastry chefs. But know that your artist must endure a funny back­wards process to ful­fill a com­mis­sion for spe­cific cir­cum­stances; it’s kind of like get­ting a Jeop­ardy ques­tion, where one must fur­nish a ques­tion for the pro­vided answer. John Corigliano is unbe­liev­able at this process. Given “a flute con­certo,” he pro­duced, “What is the best way to make a piece about the Pied Piper?” Offered a “huge col­lege wind-band con­sor­tium” he answered, “Who could pos­si­bly afford the time and expense to mount an over­whelm­ing piece relat­ing bar­baric Roman enter­tain­ment to our own?” Pied Piper Fan­tasy and Cir­cus Max­imus both turned out pretty well, so the lengthy causal approach was worth it for him.

Other artists avoid it, pre­fer­ring to make a big mess, sort out the trash, and come up with the work, rel­e­vant ques­tions in hand. Call it the tele­o­log­i­cal approach, exem­pli­fied by direc­tors such as Peter Sel­l­ars. David Lynch employs a sim­i­lar, though tidier, process. Here he talks about mak­ing Inland Empire, not a com­mis­sion, but a project like­wise filled with bud­getary and per­son­nel constraints:

DL: I had a script [for Inland Empire], but not a fin­ished script. So I would script a scene and then go shoot that scene, then write another scene and go and shoot that scene, not know­ing if there was going to be any­thing more than just that scene, or those scenes. There was no impro­vi­sa­tion at all. Impro­vi­sa­tion means you don’t know what you’re doing, and you go out and try to get a bunch of peo­ple to do some stuff. Inland Empire was all scripted, scene by scene, but there was no indi­ca­tion of a fea­ture film. Each scene was spe­cific, had to be a cer­tain way. Then, after five or six scenes, another whole bunch of things started com­ing, reveal­ing the pos­si­bil­ity of a feature.

David Lynch, inter­viewed in Reverse Shot

I absolutely can­not do this, but nei­ther can I tor­ture myself for weeks with­out work­ing with mate­ri­als. I like the crossword-y chal­lenge of “find­ing the cause” for a work, but I go back and forth between exper­i­ment­ing, impro­vis­ing, writ­ing; and think­ing about the big shapes. Either way, the dead­line forces one’s hand and one’s muse, so it must always ride shot­gun with the commission.

I am, as I write this, pur­chas­ing Bringhurst’s The Ele­ments of Typo­graphic Style, because I can­not remem­ber the last time I read prose with such delight. Bringhurst com­ments on the typog­ra­phy of an 18^th cen­tury British anti-witchcraft bill:

The func­tion of typog­ra­phy, as I under­stand it, is nei­ther to fur­ther the power of witches nor to bol­ster the defences of those, like this unfor­tu­nate par­lia­men­tar­ian, who live in ter­ror of being tempted and deceived. The sat­is­fac­tions of the craft come from elu­ci­dat­ing, and per­haps even ennobling, the text, not from delud­ing the unwary reader by apply­ing scents, paints and iron stays to empty prose. But hum­ble texts, such as clas­si­fied ads or the tele­phone direc­tory, may profit as much as any­thing else from a good typo­graph­i­cal bath and a change of clothes. And many a book, like many a war­rior or dancer or priest of either sex, may look well with some paint on its face, or with a bone in its nose.

May we all aspire to such prose, filled with sur­prise, dash­ing with the momen­tum and grace of a skier. And, the kicker:

Typog­ra­phy is to lit­er­a­ture as musi­cal per­for­mance is to com­po­si­tion: an essen­tial act of inter­pre­ta­tion, full of end­less oppor­tu­ni­ties for insight or obtuseness…Typography at its best is a slow per­form­ing art, wor­thy of the same informed appre­ci­a­tion that we some­times give to musi­cal per­for­mances, and capa­ble of giv­ing sim­i­lar nour­ish­ment and plea­sure in return.

Isn’t that what we’ve always wanted to say about great per­for­mances and their power to reveal great compositions?

This, from the 6 AM flight, the air­port in Chicago, and the friendly, mid­west­ern home­land secu­rity voice, likely a for­mer Bears announcer.

The threat level is at orange
today; And I have back pains;
And you are a sin­ner;
And we are going to die soon;
Do not leave your bags.
unre­quited love, dimin­ish­ing prospects, can­tan­ker­ous
mother, phi­lan­der­ing hus­band, expen­sive diesel, culture-deep
iras­ci­ble worry; I am going
to that great big place
in the sky where
the threat level is at green
always; And you can give
your bag to a stranger.

Richard Zarou pro­duced a pod­cast inter­view with me on his grow­ing pod­cast series, No Extra Notes. The pod­cast fea­tures a cou­ple pieces—Ceil­ings in Your Eyes and
Pin­ning Music—and some inter­view ques­tions. Check it out!

This new poem, from me, trans­lated by the iPhone dic­ta­tion app Dragon Speech:

Got Robert­son says don’t see the doc­tor
Brady James five pray to Pat
Robert­son, and all your health
prob­lems be solved. He will be built
Brady James thought
bub­bles good dog blue
tooth peo­ple read the Bible

___________________________

Lee and I cre­ated this while wait­ing to walk through the fan­tas­ti­cal Big Bambú at the Met. I have no idea what we orig­i­nally said. I think these are lyrics to a Rick James song.

I made a mockup (I used orches­tra sam­ples to ren­der a syn­the­sized per­for­mance) of a sec­tion of Swan Lake, for a cue in Dar­ren Aronovsky’s Black Swan. And, to my delight, it was even more fun than hang­ing out in that new twisty rooftop park at Lin­coln Cen­ter that reminds me of Go, Dog. Go!

Orches­tra mock­ups under­lie a con­tem­po­rary malaise among pro­fes­sional musi­cians. And there’s good rea­son for that: it’s harder for pro­fes­sional musi­cians to get gigs today—especially in  film, tele­vi­sion, and com­mer­cial music—because there are fewer record­ing ses­sions, and because those Broad­way orches­tra pits keep shrink­ing. Com­posers, direc­tors, and audi­ences have grown com­fort­able with sam­pled instru­ments, which are often mixed with live instru­ments to cover their weak­nesses. But the com­poser isn’t all to blame! Com­posers work with fewer live instru­ments and more sam­pled instru­ments because it is pos­si­ble, and an effec­tive way to stay in the bud­get and on sched­ule. The ancient pro­por­tions remain: a few good artists con­tinue to make dis­rup­tive, inspir­ing work, while James Horner cre­ates the abom­inable score for Apoc­a­lypto.

I sym­pa­thize with futur­ists and lud­dites equally. On one level, I can’t get enough. I mean, I’ve learned how to code this web­site, record music in my room, do lots of audio pro­duc­tion,  do graphic design when I feel like it, & make all my own key­board short­cuts for Sibelius. I bought an iPod in 2003. I dig tech. But some­times I’m super wary of dig­i­tal tech­nol­ogy. I pre­fer the direct­ness of phys­i­cal things: acoustic instru­ments, face-to-face social inter­ac­tion, rock col­lec­tions, grow­ing cof­fee. On days when I’m most techno­pho­bic, I go into the guest room at the end of the hall, sit at the awe­some antique account­ing desk, and write music with a ruler and pen­cil sharp­ener; or I kayak in the Hudson.

This lud­dite ten­dency is prob­a­bly why I chose to ded­i­cate my artis­tic energy to live instru­ments, and my music to paper. It’s there­fore impor­tant to know that mak­ing a good score (which is a set of instruc­tions) and mak­ing a good mockup (which is the sound itself) are very dif­fer­ent tasks. I haven’t done much in the way of mock­ups, because I spend most of my time on projects mak­ing detailed and clean scores. I have spent very lit­tle time and energy mockup-ing my music.

But I had to make one today, and I real­ized that con­duc­tors would have a ball doing this! You get to make tiny adjust­ments to the place­ment, length, artic­u­la­tion, and vol­ume of every note. Your musi­cians are lit­tle pup­pets, and you get to freeze time and com­mand each player to do your exact bid­ding. It’s pos­si­ble that doing this could make you a bet­ter musi­cian. You can adjust the bal­ances in the orches­tra precisely—less 2^nd flute, less clar­inet, more 3^rd horn, slight ritard. before the third beat, & etc. In that way, it’s like run­ning conductor-practice rehearsals with an orches­tra. I found, too, that you can learn a lot about style by exper­i­ment­ing with a phrase. If you just cut off a few notes slightly before the beat, the phrase sud­denly projects greater clar­ity. Or use another instru­ment to artic­u­late a note, and then quiet the inner voices to cre­ate a trans­par­ent sound in the winds. It makes you feel like Gus­tav Mahler, whom you can vir­tu­ally hear yelling at the orches­tra just by look­ing at his scores.

Here is a live orches­tra (Boston, I think), play­ing Swan Lake No.13c, mea­sures 81–100, as well as my mockup of the same passage:

Swan Lake 13c Real
live orches­tra.
Swan Lake 13c Mockup
sam­pled orchestra.

That sec­ond clip is my per­for­mance. I am the con­duc­tor because I made the per­for­mance deci­sions from Tchaikovsky’s score, same as if I had made them in a room of musi­cians. You’ll notice the sound is tin­nier, the vio­lins are maybe a lit­tle loud, and that the clar­inets are louder on the stac­cato chords at the end of the pas­sage. How­ever, my winds are more together on those chords, and the vio­lin melody is a lit­tle clearer. The point is, orches­tra mock­ups are use­ful to musi­cians, too. Fur­ther­more, there are some con­duc­tors in the world who should switch careers and start deal­ing with sam­pler orches­tras. The live play­ers will be thankful.

I saw the Green­wich Music Festival’s impres­sive pro­duc­tion of Hans Warner Henze’s El Cimar­rón last night in Green­wich, Con­necti­cut, fea­tur­ing a singer, four dancers, and the Inter­na­tional Con­tem­po­rary Ensem­ble. Is it bad that I was inor­di­nately impressed by Claire Chase’s stun­ning vir­tu­os­ity, fash­ion sense, and melod­ica skills? The girl was jump­ing up to play per­cus­sion, run­ning back to her flute sta­tion while mak­ing click­ing and pop­ping sounds with her mouth, and blow­ing my mind with her bass flute. The rest of the ICE play­ers were of course amaz­ing, too. Dan Lip­pel bowed his gui­tar and pro­duced the most gor­geous tone dur­ing his solos;  Nathan Davis on per­cus­sion was insane-incredible; and Robert Ains­ley was a sharp con­duc­tor and charm­ing lec­turer to boot.

This piece is about the Cuban, cen­te­nar­ian, ex-slave Este­ban Mon­tejo, who lived through every major polit­i­cal change in Cuba in the late-19^th and 20^th cen­turies. Eugene Perry, as Este­ban, was cap­ti­vat­ing. He nar­rated the story, speak­ing at times, singing at oth­ers and speak-singing a lot.

That vocal qual­ity makes some peo­ple think it’s not an opera. Henze him­self called it a recital for four musi­cians. Fine. But to my mind, this pro­duc­tion counts for a sim­ple rea­son: the piece is pre­sented as a nar­ra­tive music-drama, and  the music, not the direc­tor, paces the drama. That to me is the major qual­i­fier. For instance, the dis­tinc­tion between book musi­cals and opera isn’t style. Style is a red her­ring. The prac­ti­cal dif­fer­ence is in direc­tion: the direc­tor just does more for the pac­ing of a musi­cal than she does for the pac­ing of an opera.

And it’s not that Eugene didn’t sing in Cimar­rón. Esteban’s sung lines were gor­geous, par­tic­u­larly when he sang about lone­li­ness and the kind­ness of coun­try peo­ple. It was espe­cially lovely because he didn’t use his La Scala tone: he made every effort to com­mu­ni­cate the words at all times. 10,000 points to Mr. Perry. How­ever, I grew frus­trated with the arbitrary-sounding, sprechtstimme-style text set­ting of parts of the nar­ra­tion, if only because Henze—and the Eng­lish translator—emphasize the strang-EST syl-a-BOWLS, obscur­ing the mean­ing of the words.

And I really wish that Henze would give Este­ban actual melodies at cer­tain spots. If I remem­ber right, he obliquely refers in the voice to folk-ish melodies in a bunch of places, but it’s like. Just do it. Give me a real melody in the voice where it’s appro­pri­ate, even in this awe­some uni­verse of clicky for­est spirit sounds. Henze does this more directly in the instru­men­tal music. He cov­ers an enor­mous range of style in the instru­men­tal music, inge­niously con­jur­ing Cuban, African, and Span­ish music through instru­men­ta­tion and rhythm. Plus, it’s so sat­is­fy­ing when he gives us a moment of a sim­ple flute melody over cycling gui­tar chords. So I just wanted a more direct ref­er­ence to folk melody in the voice.

The dancers also made direct cul­tural ref­er­ences, each in their own ways. Oh my gosh I loved the con­trast between them. Tall white boy. Man with dreads. Beau­ti­ful woman. Ado­les­cent boy. The dif­fer­ences among types and among move­ment styles were stunning.

How­ever, the best thing about the dancers was the ver­sa­til­ity of their roles. I absolutely loved chore­o­g­ra­pher Zack Winokur’s abil­ity to intro­duce the dancers as pan­tomime char­ac­ters to whom Este­ban referred, and then to morph them into abstract, sup­port­ing fig­ures as the action moved on. They would assume new char­ac­ters, allude to ear­lier char­ac­ters, all while their move­ment styles con­tin­ued to evolve with the story.

Yeah for every­body serv­ing the story! Yeah Zack and Ted! Yeah Andrew, Manelich, Yara, and Jose! Cheers ICE and GMF!

I feel strongly that bad ring­tones make our lives worse. And that fun, well-suited ring­tones can at least be charm­ing in inap­pro­pri­ate sit­u­a­tions. That should be the min­i­mum goal.

Mobile providers haven’t thought this through. Ver­i­zon, AT&T and (God for­bid) Apple have setup ring­tone cre­ation ser­vices by which one can excerpt part of a Glee cast record­ing track for a ring­tone. This is a bad idea sim­ply because phones have tiny lit­tle speak­ers that pro­duce a lim­ited range of fre­quen­cies; these songs sound hor­ri­ble on them! It’s like Tay­lor Swift turned into a Brook­lyn noise producer.

So what are the require­ments of a good ring­tone? The length’s got to be right: let’s say 7–15 sec­onds long. And the sounds have to be suited to the speak­ers of a phone—this is actu­ally a basic orches­tra­tion con­cept. Cell­phones pro­duce only a nar­row band of fre­quen­cies well. Think back to radio orches­tras, or Max Steiner scores. Film and radio com­posers of the 30s adapted their writ­ing for the record­ing tech­nolo­gies of the time: the strings would be writ­ten in four octaves much of the time since the mics would dull the strings. Sub­tlety in orches­tra­tion was pretty much out, in favor of mak­ing the orches­tra sound as full and crisp as record­ing tech­nol­ogy allowed.

We’ve got to make the same con­sid­er­a­tions for phones. Here’s one I wrote called Bounce which uses pri­mar­ily a sin­gle octave (plus piano dou­bling, and a cou­ple chords at the end):

Bounce

Bal­ance is impor­tant, too. When somebody’s hear­ing this thing in tran­sit, you’ve got tele­graph the mate­r­ial. Here’s one where the fore­ground ele­ment is a gui­tar, mixed way above the other instru­ments. This was the first one I made for my friend Ike (He didn’t like it because I dropped a beat in the middle).

Ike No. 1

Some­times the best ring­tone mate­r­ial is very high reg­is­ter. Xylo­phone attacks, high piano, high syn­the­sizer, etc. hav­ing a way of cut­ting through a lot of noise, or purses, or hip­ster pants. Here’s the sec­ond one I made for Ike, fea­tur­ing mal­let per­cus­sion and piano (He liked this one).

Ike No. 2

You don’t have to sac­ri­fice com­plex­ity either. I use this ring­tone often because there’s more to hear than just the fore­ground melody. The mid– and back­ground mate­r­ial con­sists of revolv­ing, syn­co­pated chords, which con­tin­u­ally change posi­tion in rela­tion to the melody. It’s simple—only two ele­ments (plus some back­ground percussion)—but it’s enough to keep me from want­ing to destroy my phone after hear­ing it 1,000 times.

After all, mate­r­ial is the pri­mal con­sid­er­a­tion. It’s got to stand up imme­di­ately and be attrac­tive enough to with­stand thou­sands of hear­ings. A good ring­tone theme should be like a shoe that fits the first time you wear it and doesn’t fall apart after a month. Rain­bow san­dals aren’t good enough; they take too long to break in. This ring­tone, MJ, also com­prises two main ele­ments, though it’s com­pletely dif­fer­ent in tone from Ike No. 2. It’s for Michael and apes sev­eral ten­den­cies of his recent style. It’s a lit­tle long for a ring­tone (0:24) but it’s chill, spa­cious, and the mate­r­ial deserves the time.

MJ

You can also be a masochist and write a ring­tone that stabs your ears with fork prongs. Per­haps your com­po­si­tion teacher asked you to do this, for instance, and then attempted to sell it through Schirmer.

Grotesque Red Vio­lin

My for­mer piano teacher, Mary Epper­son, turned 88 yes­ter­day! Her age demys­ti­fied. What?! I should be ashamed for reveal­ing her age, but I am too astonished.

This woman has for many decades been at the cen­ter of ‘art-world’ in my hippy-fisherman home­town of Homer, Alaska. She was the first great music teacher in my life, even though I think she should have got­ten on me more about rhythm. Here she is look­ing impos­si­bly adorable:

I can still hear her voice fret­ting over my deci­sion to fish with my dad. “Oh but Con­rad, what about your hands? Some shark may bite your fin­gers off, and what then?”

————————

A related thought:

I received a Mor­ton Gould Award from the ASCAP Foun­da­tion this year. What a great group of com­posers! The won­der­ful Deniz Hughes snuck a pic­ture of me and emailed it to me.