A New Kind of Course

Introspection. The word encapsulates 2020 for me. This year brought out inner tendencies that are seldom tested and proved. The circumstances unearthed underlying fears and anxieties along with more heroic resilience and compassion. At a societal level, deep-rooted tensions were brought to the fore as ideological battles ensued over how to deal with a quick-spreading silent killer. A reawakening to inequalities that have persisted for generations at systemic and individual levels compounded the impetus for reflection and action.

What does this have to do with music? It requires a framework to understand. For well over a century, musicians have been taught according to one theoretical tradition. This study includes a robust dive into historical tonal harmony, often accompanied by ear-training exercises based on tonal progressions. The intense study of a tradition reveals truths only found by digging deep. However, in a time of introspection such as this, it’s hard to not think what might be different.

For a layperson or budding musician, musical training should try to reach to the core of what music is and why it has such an effect on us. Doesn’t our listening experience lift our mood, make us think, inspire us to dance, enlighten us spiritually, and/or help us socially bond? A solid pedagogical method would use all the resources possible to understand why, even if fraught with paradoxes and unknowns. It would be interpret music of many varieties with traditional and contemporary theories.

A cursory glance over music theory materials reveals that much is missing. Some glaring omissions include:

1. Concert music happening today. 10 weeks (or less) out of a 60-week curriculum discusses 20th-century music, and usually music after 1960 receives 1 week (or less!).

2. Other styles of Western music. There are exceptional programs (Frost School of Music), but most see the Western classical tradition the only history worth tracing and manner of musical construction worth considering.

3. Non-western traditional musics across the world. While it would be wrong to pretend that all music theorists know the nuances of Indian raga or Balinese gamelan, it would be worth at least acknowledging similarities and differences that lead to further insights.

4. Musical elements besides harmony, counterpoint, phrasing, cadence, and meter (as it pertains to harmonic changes). What of melody, rhythm, timbre (tone color), instrumentation, texture, articulation, dynamics, and register? And what of noisiness, pitch nuance, spatialization, quotation (sampling), semantics, and gesture? What of the harmony, counterpoint, and cadence material outside the Western classical tonal tradition?

So what? The current system develops nuanced voice leading skills for powerful tension and release mechanisms through careful counterpoint. Most composers extrapolate these ideas to a broader context. The systems also give a deeper understanding and appreciation for Western tonal music and some post-tonal idioms.

But is it representative of Music? The tradition is of a time long past and a place far away. The archeological dig is fascinating but overlooks nearly all music, especially excluding minority groups. Only a number of composers and performers from Central Europe from 1750-1900 were women and/or non-white. Many try to uncover the exceptions of the past without acknowledging the omission of the much larger diversity of voices today. Simply said, a traditional curriculum marginalizes most people and their associated musical styles. Is that an honest approach to a class considered “core” knowledge for every musician to know?

Let’s reimagine music theory. I did so. It took starting from scratch. I wrote out my values—the most important lessons I learned through today. I asked friends to evaluate their most treasured musical values. What similarities and differences were there? I identified enough groundwork to gain vision of a new kind of course. Some of that foundation includes the following principles:

1. Music is perception-based. The best learning environment is experiential and thus psychological.

2. Music has everything to do with repetition, variation, and contrast. Our brain seeks after patterns and requires consistency for comprehension.

3. Music must first set expectations. Without expectations, how does the brain make sense of what is to come? The presentation of the music before, during, and after the music itself also sets expectations and can enhance or alienate the audience.

4. Musical ideas need cadence/breath to them. The brain needs to segment information to remember it.

5. Musical speak is metaphorical. We leap, skip, step, run, articulate, fall, rise, go high, go low, etc. Sounds are rough, smooth, gritty, dirty, clean, open, pinched, full, empty, weak, strong, etc. Embodied cognition theorizes that music empathetically connects to our bodily lived experience. So interpretative dancing does have something going for it after all…

6. Good musicians train their intuition to increase in sensitivity to musical relationships. Their interpretation of phrasing, dissonance, pacing, rhythmic placement, etc. comes from careful and unwritten experiential understanding. The notes we read rarely capture the music brought to life by an excellent performer. Ears govern musical interpretation.

7. Music is about community and sharing. It requires open, candid discussions of taste. Hard questions are good questions and welcome new perspectives.

8. Music is about relationships, and music is enhanced by layers of relationships called counterpoint. Good counterpoint sensitively mediates musical elements. It adds multi-faceted meaning to music and heightens artistic expression. In its purest sense, counterpoint crosses cultures and is the process of collaboration with other arts.

9. Every musician should be well-versed in technology. They should be able to record and use a DAW. Musicians should make basic videos to promote themselves online. They should then be confronted with this uncomfortable question: If you can give someone a perfect listening experience on headphones, then why should they come to your live concert?

10. Music is about the human experience, so rawness and vulnerability are common and prized expressive qualities. Because we all are built from different experiences, it would be tragic if there were only one right interpretation of the notes on the page. A musician only intent on playing the music right might miss the music...

I framed The Musician Certificate Program with these and other values. Students explore core musical questions grounded in psychological and practical concepts. They listen to music of many styles and train their ears to analyze music through their perception. Musicians outside the university get to experience it starting in January. Learn now and/or enroll here.

I’d also love to learn about your values and ideas. Comment or send me a message, and let’s talk.

Multimedia Production from the Musician's Perspective

October brings the premiere of two pieces that have deep personal meaning to me. Next week is the premiere of The Story of Our Journey, written about earlier and detailed more here. And at the end of the month Lo! premieres, thanks to a grant from the Brigham Young University Group for New Music. The thing they have in common? Both include a carefully constructed video to complement the music.

I finished the music for The Story of Our Journey in May 2020, yet little did I know how much work still lay ahead. I admit to a serious misperception of the amount of painstaking work that goes into making video, especially to make something as artistically satisfying as the music itself. Our volunteer video director from Their Story is Our Story, Esther Michela, was tasked to make the entire 51-minute video by herself while we battered her with constructive criticism in a push towards a July deadline that, if we had been honest with ourselves, was a complete impossibility. In a state of emergency, TSOS sought out additional help for Esther (realizing that most productions of this stature have an entire team!). They were able to recruit Garrett Gibbons and David McAllister, who provided additional insights and helped with the other movements. Even then, we had too much work to do and after the passing of another impossible deadline (August 1st), we resolved on the first realistic goal of October 16th. I am grateful we waited because the project is now something that has revolutionized the way I want to approach the presentation of my music. Video and music, when properly balanced, are more powerful than when separate. Especially when only online performances are readily consumable, a good video is everything.

How does one balance video and music? This is a question of counterpoint, which is normally a term used to describe the interaction between musical lines. The principles are similar, for there must be a relationship between the two elements that allows for one to not overpower the other. On the one extreme, a video of a live performance from one camera angle is all about the music and relegates the video component to simply a captured moment that probably would have been much cooler live. The opposite of this is film music, where the music always lurks in the shadows while the visuals drive the narrative (especially in Hollywood films). Musically sensitive film directors and composers are able to navigate good counterpoint with the music, and you know this when you remark on the music and the film. The best counterpoint between video and audio would include some sort of interaction between video and audio that allows both to “speak,” which means that there needs to be some crossover in traditions.

The Story of Our Journey captured the happy medium between the two in ways I did not initially consider. Crucial to the music are the interview clips; in fact, every melody in the clarinet and synthesizers—almost every musical note in the entire piece—rises out of the speech patterns and even the background noises (especially a distinctive truck horn) in the interviews. When the video team matched the interview content with its fragmented audio counterparts in the music, it created additional opportunities for interaction. Video effects caught the grittiness of my noisy synthesizers inspired by desert sands from the narrative. The energy of the oceanic electronic rushes became a literal dive underwater with the refugees crossing the Mediterranean. A complex web of relationships were either clarified or compounded onto what the music alone had to offer, and I feel like the image complements rather than conquers the music, which would have been tempting to do. Our clarinetist Csaba Jevtic-Somlai keyed the term Gesamtkunstwerk for this perfectly balanced collaboration. I am grateful to Esther Michela and Garrett Gibbon’s enormous efforts to make such a wonderful and equal counterpart to the music.

The process inspired me to try my hand at video-making, which became important for my commission by the Brigham Young University Group for New Music. I wanted to have complete freedom and safety in my video-making, so I took historical public domain footage from the Prelinger Archives, specifically old television advertisements and a short-lived game show. Again I took the audio from this archival footage and made it central to the music, and I put a thick layer of noisy gestures to complement the video clips’ rough sound quality. It was surprisingly intuitive to work with video editing software because the abstract development of materials is still the same. I found the ideas of opposition, fragmentation, juxtaposition, large-scale evolution through variation, and so forth relatable in terms of color and audio effects. With the help of a friend Erin Jossie, I was able to capture nature imagery for the end of the piece and edit it to feel natural (going through a variety of shots instead of developing material was less natural to me, and I definitely needed the counsel!).

Despite my best efforts, the video was much improved by my brother Michael, a professional multimedia artist. He was able to express the noise in the audio in a way I could not and added some visual consistencies that helped unify the work. He did countless micro-edits in addition to some major reconstruction and still managed to keep my original vision and feel intact. I learned that I have much to do in having the technical capabilities, the imagination, and the eyes for top-grade video editing, and I look forward to collaborations very soon to continue learning.

It’s hard to go back to setting one camera down at a performance after considering how video changes the viewer’s experience. We love to simply listen to music as musicians, but video done artfully adds a visual perspective that approaches both a depth and immediacy hard to achieve in music alone, especially when estranged from its live venue. Here’s to much more video work in the near future.

Music Alive: Resources and Curation for a 21st-Century Listener

To continue and answer in part a question from the last post (Baby Mozart), I ask here: If Mozart, Beethoven, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Berio, and Boulez are all outdated, then where is the classical art form? What is happening in the 21st century for performers, composers, and most of all, listeners? There is excellent news: the tradition thrives in a way perhaps unheard of in centuries past. Thousands of composers and tens of thousands of performers, all trained to a professional level, play with ensembles around the world, write, produce, and arrange music in both the concert, film/media, and popular scenes, teach, advocate, and spread ideas through sound. The number of composer training programs, competitions, grant opportunities, music-based residencies, and calls for scores that repeat yearly or every few years numbers over 800, and many organizations see music as an avenue to promote messages of social advocacy for good. The sheer amount of opportunities for composers today is promising, but where is the music? Why do orchestras seem completely unaware of what surrounds them? Why do so many orchestras still carry a museum culture?

Perhaps awareness is difficult because it takes time to seek after great music in the riffraff of so many aspiring artists. Certain musicians do rise to the surface though. For example, an orchestra is looking for music with lots of style and excitement—why not commission Valerie Coleman, James Mobberley, or Christian Asplund? Or something thrilling and virtuosic like a piece based on the idea of video games from Andrew Norman or a percussion concerto from Chen Yi? An atmospheric, otherworldly exploration of sound? George Friedrich Haas or Kaija Saariaho would do. Something passionate, deeply personal, and timely? Lansing McLoskey or Alvin Singleton would be marvelous options. Or something simply beautiful and immediate by Hannah Lash or by recent Pulitzer Prize-winner Mary Ellen Childs (not all their music fits in this category, but orchestras seem to like the very accessible)? Or Stephen Hartke, Silvio Ferraz, Gabriel Bolaños, Augusta Read Thomas, Dave Rakowski, Amy Williams, David Felder, Panayiotis Kokoras, Mark Applebaum, Louis Karchin, or so many others? These are already accomplished composers who have been fortunate enough to get some big-name performances, so imagine how many younger composers also have something to offer if these were the highlights of the concert with young composers as the openers!

How do orchestras currently program their concerts? Let’s take a look at an unnamed symphony orchestra’s concert season for an example:

1. First, “Beethoven for the Generations” features only Beethoven to celebrate the legend’s 250th birthday. Of course, one concert is not enough to celebrate: this season will feature ALL nine symphonies and much more from him.

2. The next concert is titled “Beethoven, Brahms, and Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto.” There are four pieces: Brahms, Mendelssohn, [Vivian Fung], and Beethoven. Oh, there was a piece by a living composer, but our embarrassment of the piece left it out of the concert title and hid it in the middle of a cozy program of pieces heard so much that many in the audience have it memorized.

3. Next, “Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra, Ax performs Beethoven.” This begins with Louis Andriessen’s The nine symphonies of Beethoven. Even invoking the name of Beethoven as a living composer doesn’t make the cut for a concert title…

4. “Zukerman plays Beethoven’s Violin Concerto,” and Beethoven overshadows Janacek (early 1900s) and even our beloved Mozart.

5. “Beethoven’s Mass in C” has a Haydn and Beethoven sandwich with some James MacMillan (living composer) hidden inside.

6. “Schumman’s ‘Rhenish’ and Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto” is the concert title that excludes Samuel Barber, indisputably one of the most popular American composers ever.

7. “Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony and Midori Plays Dvorak” features the two listed and, oops we forgot Anna Clyne (recent Pulitzer Prize winner).

8. The only mention of a post-1945 composer happens in a celebration of a violinist who played a modern piece by Dutilleux, but wait… “Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, and Tree of Dreams.” At least the piece title is catchy enough to hide a composer’s name that some wouldn’t recognize (and during the concert, Dutilleux’s piece is sandwiched between the big shots from on average 150 years ago).

To sum up the entire concert season’s promotion: yikes.

One solution for this serious issue is the concept of curation. The word has popped up lately among composers and performers, and it deserves further investigation. To curate is to borrow the model that art museums use to showcase their works. A museum sets expectations for the experience, organizes its art into logical categories, provides historical context, and includes knowledgeable historians and other specialists to answer questions. Each museum has a different standing collection and rotates through visiting exhibits. One could consider the standing exhibit the pieces that museum uniquely owns. Could this not translate into the musical experience? Let’s try a new concert season:

1. It’s Beethoven’s 250th birthday! Let’s celebrate with “Regards to Beethoven by the Great Masters of Today.” We commission three composers (or find composers who have already written pieces about Beethoven, like Louis Andriessen), and have a night of homages to our historic forefather. To give some context, the first piece is by Beethoven, followed by the three new pieces (none of them are too long because we all have shorter attention spans these days…). Oh, and no more Beethoven after this—this concert will sell out because Beethoven is the visiting exhibit.

2. “20/20 Vision: Looking to the Future.” We can start with some Messiaen piece with a religious looking forward or maybe one of the Futurists from the early 1900s, then go with two pieces about social issues of today such as climate change or a more equal society. Could music be relevant to today by speaking on issues that matter today?

3. “America, the Beautiful.” It is shocking to me how little investment our orchestras have in playing music written by composers within our own country. Do we really need to import so much culture that is alien to our own? Charles Ives, Elliott Carter, Milton Babbitt, Steve Reich, Phillip Glass, John Cage (not 4:33 unless they really want to do it), John Adams, Augusta Read Thomas, and Jennifer Higdon are easy choices that orchestras need not dig deep in their libraries to find. But let’s add some lesser-known yet highly influential voices in there. Most of the composers I listed at the top can showcase craftsmanship in the United States.

4. “The Fast and the Furious: Concerto Night.” One night of some of the most aggressive, hardcore, virtuosic pieces with the top soloists. A world premiere would build the hype if both the composer and the soloist had a reputation for it.

5. “Stealing Styles: Jazz, Rock, and Pop in the Orchestra.” We’ll give them some Gershwin and then switch it up with some more contemporary music that incorporates popular idioms into concert music (and there is lots of this nowadays).

6. “Who We Are.” This concert will consciously represent the diversity of contemporary composers who are of top caliber. This is not an affirmative action-type event but a realistic showcase of American musical identity. We have fantastic composers of many backgrounds writing in many styles, and this concert clearly shows the influence. This could even be a goal for a concert series…

7. “Deep Listening.” For the mindfulness people, John Luther Adams’s Become Ocean could launch a concert that focuses on color. And audience members could be encouraged to really relax and make the experience comfortable and meditative (lie on the floor?).

8. “The Grand Finale.” It’s the end of the season! The ballet and the local chorus join the orchestra for a world premiere closer with two or three epic pieces to lead into the work. This concert is intended to be the shot heard ‘round the world. People will know about this concert on the news and then look back to see that the entire concert season was filled with exciting projects with lots of documentation for publicity. As the next season is prepared, people will plan to travel for miles, donors will be caught in the excitement for doing something different, and music will seem like a living art form much more than a rusting, disorganized museum.

Is this too idealistic? To further support this vision, people need to know what they are getting into. The advertising hits YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and elsewhere with up-to-date advertising. Bite-size musical excerpts float around everywhere with cliffhangers. Members of the orchestra are the ones being interviewed in promotional materials (not the conductor every time) and speak about how exciting it is to be part of something different and bold. Photos of the composers pop up on all visuals, showing the selection of contemporary composers that the listeners will hear. Marketing connects with different demographics than the 70+ by considering popular topics (orchestras so missed a great opportunity several years ago with the zombie craze, for example! We have so much music about the undead and the macabre!!). At concerts, members of the orchestra stand in the concert lobby afterwards to meet the guests and talk about the music experience (again, in addition to the conductor). The pre-concert experience has video footage playing while people get into their seats that shows the promotions that got them there in more depth: interviews with performers, composers, the conductor, etc. (starting a half hour before showtime). The videos are setting the stage for the concert experience, just like a movie theater prepares its viewers by getting them immersed in cinema before the movie begins. People outside the door are trained musicologists and theorists who answer questions about the concert program, with visible identification such as a name badge or even a visitors information booth. And right after intermission, the conductor gets podium time to welcome everyone to the concert, ask how far people have traveled to the concert, and to set the mood for the last piece with some artful prose (not a lecture). Music presented in such a natural context, without apologies before genuinely valuable new art, would change the atmosphere of orchestra life.

In an age that prizes the new, orchestras would have something to offer. Listeners, performers, donors, academics, and composers would all thrive off the energy of this new concert experience. There is no catch; this is all reasonable. The technology is easy, the resources are waiting, and, most importantly, an eager audience can be reached that would genuinely love this concert experience. Yes, not every piece would be loved by the audience. But with so much context and preparation, they will at least appreciate the vision of the artist. Nevertheless, chances are that as orchestras redefine the concert experience, listeners will redefine theirs. They will broaden their idea of what music is. It is more than notes on a page or structures in major and minor. It is the fingerprint of one human experience, the embodiment of a time, place, and culture, the study of sound in time, the expression of humanity, the vision of something more, the dream of something that was or could have been. It is a deep connection to the spiritual and subconscious, sometimes seeking in sound the deepest of mental and emotional states. It is vulnerability and severity at times, and though uncomfortable at first, the most beautiful experience can be had in sailing in the imaginations of the artists who live the same digital-age life as the listener and share or differ in the perspectives and problems of the current age. Music of this caliber has worth, more than any previous age’s artwork can. Let museum orchestras handle the 19th-century Germans. Bold orchestras will accept a true challenge to upgrade to the 21st century listening experience.