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/19th 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.

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.

clips from the premiere by Cadillac Moon Ensemble, 3.2.12, at Symphony Space

When I studied film scoring in my first grad days, I took an audio processing class and converted bit rates and listened to a lecture by John Chowning (the legendary man responsible for audio synthesis by frequency modulation, all your MIDI sounds, and collaterally, everything by Mannheim Steamroller!) that both overwhelmed and fascinated me. Audio synthesis and frequency modulation are processes by which one creates sound molecules from atoms; you add sine waves to square waves, multiplied by triangles, etc… I haven’t actually done that much with electronic music since, but I have always been fascinated by these simple wave forms and feel an irrational affection for their shapes.

So I made this piece, called Abiding Shapes, as a sort of pageant about these simple waveforms with sections devoted to sawtooth, square, and sine waves.

Japanese-translated chart. Nobody calls it a “ramp wave”

I tried, as much as possible, to imbed little dynamic triangles, sines, and squares (loud-to-silent, soft-loud-soft, etc.) into bigger ones to honor these shapes at every level.

NoiseBox premieres the piece at the Gershwin Hotel on January 12, 2012

In the land of unpitched percussion (instruments of indefinite pitch) dynamics and pitch contour prevail. Here, each player has a collection of five primary instruments, outlining an even, low-to-high pitch contour; the drums occupy the low register, and the wood instruments occupy the high register. Though none of the instruments used in this piece is “pitched,” the entire collection constitutes a wide, graded pitch spectrum—from the deep kick drum to the piercing deskbells—suitable for recognizable themes.

Light and competitive, Rounds & Bells begins with a theme stated in perfect unison by the players, which is then subjected to all sorts of canonic imitation. First come the rounds, led by alternating players at various distances. This is followed by desk bells, almost like boxing bells or ringing chess clocks, which the players use to strike at each other. Later come further, polyrhythmic canons, in which one player runs circles around the other, tapping out the theme in a different tempo, leading up to a photo finish.

Commissioned by the New York Choreographic Institute. Studio recording made by Aaron Thomas Patterson, s.sax, Jay Rattman, a.sax, Elizabeth Derham, vln., Isabel Gehweiler, vc., Çağdaş Özkan, celesta.

Set in three compact movements, this ballet, choreographed by Justin Peck, adapts qualities of the cuisine and design elements of three distinct restaurants in New York City. Momofuku Ssäm Bar is built on simple combinations of unusal elements, WD-50 deploys opposites to trick the senses, and Roberta’s revels in the earth and the recycled. The title, Mise-En-Place, is a culinary phrase, meaning everything in place.

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:

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!

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.