On Classroom Repertoire

As calls go out for greater diversity in concert repertoire, certainly the same call should resound in music classrooms. Every student deserves the opportunity to see themselves as a professional composer, theorist, performer, educator, therapist, etc. as they are, and repertoire is a powerful way to help students feel belonging. Furthermore, the inclusion of composers from a variety of backgrounds tells the truer, more complete story of music.

Yet, we can’t cover everything. An undergraduate curriculum cannot cover every music tradition in the world nor can it even cover every notable genre of music in the United States in depth. It isn’t even possible to capture the Western music tradition from the Medieval period to now without serious omissions due to a student’s already packed schedule. Equally difficult is the race to cover Western concepts of tonality and harmony along with good ear training in 3-5 semesters. So, how do we choose what to cover, and how does this relate to repertoire?

Some might say it has always had to do with repertoire. The reason we study history is to know of the “masters.” The chronological approach to history shows the indubitable influence of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Debussy, Stravinsky, and Schoenberg on where we are today: case closed. The reason we study theory is to better understand the music of the “masters.” The system of tonality as we know it received perfection in their hands, and it’s the portal into their minds. Such veneration of a select few composers is obvious when perusing outdated theory anthologies, and even today’s anthologies still represent Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, and Dvořák far more than anyone else.

To continue in this framework and include a more diverse repertoire, we must expand the list of “masters.” To do so, we must decide on what defines a “master.” Does it come from the number, length, or intricacy of symphonies, operas, or sonatas written? Must the composer have a large output? Does it come from the ability to analyze a piece of music in the same way as the traditional “greats?” But we deal with some realities:

1. Composers who did not enjoy the same privileges as white men (specifically Austrian or German men) truly did not have the same privileges. They could not get regular orchestral performances unless they had favor of the right people. They did not get patrons as easily as their competitors.

2. The preservation of repertoire from the composers considered “masters” came from people dedicated to that cause. The lack of preservation of works from underrepresented composers skews our knowledge of their output, which might have been greater than we imagined. Or, records show repertoire that existed, and we have yet to find them. Side note: Many of the original manuscripts from underrepresented composers in the public domain are not on websites like imslp.org and can only be found in expensive Urtext editions. I love the professional editions, but keeping public domain documents out of reach from others does not reflect an inclusive approach to scholarship…

3. Some composers wrote impressive music that simply does not follow “the rules” as stringently, though many actually do. And every disgruntled composer or theory student has found solace in the fact that “even the masters broke the rules at times.”

So, the expansion of “masters” to fit some standard, or even a focus on showcasing masterpieces at all, might not best solve the repertoire and curricular issues. There might be a better venue for such showcasing (and it need not be showcasing every masterpiece in every 5-year orchestral cycle, though there have been great improvements recently).

So, perhaps there is a more pragmatic approach that puts aside the “master” label. Following the counsel of my dissertation adviser, I did a post-graduation memory dump. Everything that was extraneous to my overall understanding of music was left behind (or at least placed on an external hard drive deep in the back of my mind), and the principles that stuck became my professional foundation. This led me to experiment with core theory curricula. Over the past years, I have learned the following:

1. Students learn chord progressions faster in groups of 3-4 chords rather than identifying chords individually. These are taught through historic partimento patterns or through Laitz’s harmonic paradigms (which are more focused on just basslines). Such progressions also simplify part-writing, reveal potential harmonic implications in 2-part compositions, and even guide students to improvise over a bass line. The voice-leading rules of four-part writing become more about the natural and instinctive flow of the music.

2. Students understand tonicizations and modulations better when taught in conjunction with structure. Structural concerns give such deviations from a tonal center purpose.

3. Chromatic harmony is all about style and character in music. Neapolitan and augmented 6th chords add weight to predominant function harmonies, as do modal mixture passages. Applied chords (secondary dominants) lift into the next chord, as do common tone chords in many settings. A composer’s style in terms of harmony does depend on their use of these chords.

4. Students like to understand how a piece comes together, and this requires a narrative. Basically, an overview of the flow, structure, and stylistic developments in a piece of music ties together the loose ends and makes for a satisfying conclusion to an analysis (it’s what we do in analytical papers, though not necessarily in a start-to-finish manner).

So, my framework became centered on what I call “pillars of craft.” And a focus on craft in this way does not favor one set of rules that best applies to a specific style of music. The parlor music and music published for amateurs can be analyzed for these elements without any need to compare with the three B’s. I also learned that such a focus gave me a way to reduce the Western theory curricula’s length for room to include full units on jazz and on popular idioms. And finally, the tangly issues of analysis in the Romantic era are much easier to comprehend with a solid craft-based framework.

How does one know if they have achieved diversity in their classroom repertoire? One goal is to avoid tokenism. For example, an undisclosed textbook has exactly one women composer at the starting of each workbook chapter. While a great effort, this still ends up being a vast underrepresentation of current student demographics (in which most theory classes are at least half female). Guidance from the Institute for Composer Diversity suggests 24% representation of equity-seeking composers (broken into subcategories). This takes serious effort because, unlike the “masters,” many pieces from the common-practice period by such composers have not been analyzed, do not have a neat score, or do not have a recording. Great work done by Expanding the Music Theory Canon, Music Theory Examples by BI-POC Composers (spreadsheet), and Diverse Music Theory Examples are all helpful in finding historical repertoire for the theory classroom. Part of reaching the 24% is the exclusion of some of the masters. They are so easy to use because they’re prepackaged in anthologies, workbooks, and textbooks and are intimately known by so many professionals, but they are not essential to the theory curriculum.

A careful framework for a course, much like a thesis statement, has further allowed me to craft more diverse repertoire into a curriculum. And what an opportunity educators have in a class like an introductory orchestration class! My orchestration class’s framework relies on the scientific aspects of timbre and how those inform idiomatic writing. So, the goal in the repertoire search is to simply find idiomatic music for each instrument, analyze chamber music with said instruments, and then showcase good orchestration in large ensemble music. It took time, but I am stoked to teach the course with a compelling repertoire list representative of diverse backgrounds and aesthetics among contemporary composers.

Because of the openness of repertoire opportunities for Orchestration, I decided to match the demographics of the United States in terms of representation. So, 50% of the music is from female composers and 42% of the music is from BI-POC composers. This required a few hard decisions to exclude some of my favorite works for various instruments, but the choices made to replace them might become new favorites in a short time (there’s so much great music out there!). Some resources that helped me reach this goal were: the UMKC Music Library’s Shining a Light: 21st Century Music from Underrepresented Composers and lots of instrument-specific lists such as the ones Bret Pimentel’s Woodwind Music by Composers in Underrepresented Groups and Last Row’s Diversity in Brass Music. Unlike historical works, many of these works are not in the public domain. I hope to present these works in a way that is exclusively for educational purposes while encouraging, by virtue of the high quality of music, students and others to perform music from the composers. Curating a class like this also gives impetus to how to better stock a university library.

As musicians strive to seriously and permanently diversify repertoire in the classroom, the next generation of musicians will have a much easier time at programming and championing composers from underrepresented groups. And there will hopefully be an equally robust group of new composers from whom further repertoire can be chosen. But why wait? It’s a great time to be part of something big—something that noticeably does affect people for good, does not take an inordinate amount of time (it’s a summer project), and builds a truer sense of the expansive repertoire choices available to musicians today.

Happy repertoire finding!

*Note: It is difficult to truly ascertain gender identities of many historical composers, especially prior to the 20th century. LGBTQ representation among living composers is easier to identify if a composer chooses to publicly announce sexual orientation in a biography or other public document (a program note or interview), yet many composers who identify as such do not do so professionally. All this being said, about 7.1% of people identify as LGBTQ in the United States and 20.8% of Gen Z identify as such, which offers some benchmarks.

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.

The Gestalt Musical Experience (Something to Say Pt. V)

In the early days of psychology, two opposing views of the world emerged, gestaltism and structuralism. Structuralists theorized that we perceive things in pieces that come together to form a whole. Gestalt thinkers believed (and many still believe) that a complete object is perceived different than its parts. Some Gestalt psychologists were able to prove that the brain indeed processed an entire event in a way that superseded its parts through optical illusions. To put it differently, one can create something that transcends its parts.

Musicians have been long fascinated with the transcendental experience. Stemming from a religious tradition, classical music has its roots in a yearning for something greater than a group of choir boys and later horse hair over gut strings. But even at a more fundamental level, the brain processes music as a Gestalt experience. How does the brain know that the steps of a scale go together? There are infinite notes between each half step, yet the mind only chooses certain frequency distances to qualify as a step. Something smaller sounds like the same note detuned, and something larger sounds like what we call a leap. How does the brain decide to process notes sounding together as chords and the simultaneous movements between chords as a such thing as “progression?” How can music sound like it is going anywhere at all without the aural illusion of movement from one place to another? We take these premises as granted, and we excel in playing different scales and forming harmonic progress through which the brain can create something much more than the independent notes played.

A composer does so much more than manipulate pitch for the transcendental experience. Music flows through time, and the composer uses rhythm and meter to create different expectations or groupings for the mind that give complexity and flow to the music. Different combinations of instruments and tone colors create illusions of continuity or freshness. Many modern composers focus on gestural writing, by which a mixture of rhythms, pitch events, and instruments are fashioned to create one sonic idea with its own character and nuance (which is then developed in transformations).

What happens if a composer decides to extend this idea to styles? Popular musicians like to explore fusion genres such as trip hop, bossa nova, country rap, gypsy punk, and reggaeton. The combination of two former genres comes together in a new sound, audibly influenced yet independent from its parts. Concert music composers have a history of fusing styles together to either be part of a new sound, make something fresh, or to invoke the mystery of a culture they did not understand (whether they cared to understand might be a different story…). However, with the influence of postmodernim, mixing many cultural styles together to create their work of art, including those of popular music, is normative and well-accepted today. Countless compositions in the 20th century bring in a dosage of jazz harmony and rhythms into their music, and quite a few current composers are mixing elements of EDM and metal into their sound. Others reach to the past, reinterpreting principles from Medieval music or reach across the world to other music cultures, such as India’s raga tradition or Balinese gamelan and even write for the instruments of that culture (and again, the subject of cultural sensitivity is a different topic). The combinations and possibilities are endless.

The results of sonic combinations, mixed with their cultural implications, create a rich tapestry of meaning and freshness to contemporary music. And living composers have the opportunity to develop a contemporary voice with the sounds that inhabit the present as well as connect to the age-old tradition. Rather than have many mangled medleys or exotic stereotypes, we have aural alloys that speak to the increasing global interactions we have as we come to understand and have an intercultural dialogue. Those of diverse cultures can and do blend their traditions with the ever-loosely defined Western music tradition that seems to accept more and more cultural variety in its reach. Perhaps we will arrive at a point where we acknowledge that while much of the influence of concert music comes from a Western tradition it ultimately transcends its past. But we have much learning to do of the cultures around us before we can confidently accept this task. Until then, we joyfully take the best we see to make something powerful and interesting.

Guilty by Association (Something to Say, Pt. IV)

A big topic in recent music inquiry is that of cultural appropriation. The viewpoint is that when a composer borrows musical elements that do not belong to their culture, especially when displaying them as exotic, then the result is a sort of cultural imperialism. The classical tradition has taken music from its original context and taken advantage of its merits, in a way deeming it subservient to some Austro-Germanic heritage we keep perpetuating. The claims of this argument perhaps have merit when we look at infamous examples such as Paul Simon’s use of African musicians who were basically paid nickels of the millions of dollars earned on his record Graceland. But to condemn musical borrowing is to condemn most if not all traditions in music, for it is the great melting pot and dialogue of world culture. It is very possible to assert that most music traditions of today were influenced by other cultures and that many explicitly borrowed from others, whether it be violins in India, timpani in Western Europe, African drumming styles in Steve Reich’s music, didgeridoos in electronic music, and so on. The issue becomes much more complex when we realize that the bagpipe is not only a Scottish instrument, the harp not only of the Irish, and the fiddle the “national” sound of many countries of Europe and the United States. Then we find that music in Latin America often includes at least three influences in all its music: European music, African music, and pre-Columbian music (in that order). And to ignore that fact that most popular music styles today take elements of folk, jazz, blues, R&B, and so forth (which have been blending, mixing, and matching throughout the last century) is untenable. We would especially have to condemn hip hop and its offshoots for taking and remixing actual samples of music, including some from classical music in addition to early jazz and contemporary artists. Some say that everything is a remix, and this means that everything is so-called cultural appropriation.

Nevertheless, for the conscious composer, borrowing of any nature carries associative baggage, for better or for worse. When a listener hears a melody or rhythm from another artist, style, or tradition, their mind will conjure up some image (be it aural, visual, or a Wikipedia entry on the topic) that paints their perception. For example, every augmented second emphasized in a piece will conjure up some association, which might be Spanish, or Jewish, or Egyptian, or Middle-Eastern, or Eastern European or… (you get the point). Pentatonic-based music makes for an even wider catch of associations, with the most subtle nuances moving one’s mind from China to Bali to Native American to Morocco (the Peer Gynt Suite’s “Morning Mood” is about Morocco!). A composer with a courageous ear—having heard the world over (popular, classical, world, experimental, etc.)—will know the connotations of their music and be sensitive to how they either jump all in or keep cultural shading subtle. With great talent, the fusion of disparate musical elements creates a synthesis that further empowers the virtues of the individual styles in a whole that transcends the parts. While the idea of cultural appropriation might be taboo (and I am all for respecting cultures that are not my own and have quite a bit of experience with wonderful friends from around the world and from very different circumstances than mine), I happily express my guilt by association. I steal (or have stolen) from the following (with subtlety or overtly): Stravinsky, rock, prog. rock, some Classical aesthetics, some Romantic aesthetics, jazz, Debussy, electronic pop music, new wave, Medieval and Renaissance motets, Berio, Latin dance musics (including African drumming patterns), Tom-and-Jerry type music, church hymn music, Kodaly, Mongolian folk music, minimalism (only a little bit), every teacher I have studied with, experimental trends, Haydn (especially in wit and silence), and so on. May we all continue a fruitful musical dialogue built on the shoulders of the rich cultural associations across the globe.

Culture and Music-Making (Something to Say Pt. III)

Music-making throughout history was almost always associated with social or religious events. Music accompanied private parties, dances, public celebrations, story-telling entertainment, processions, masses, devotional events, and so forth. In the Western tradition, the music we chart out as the "classical" tradition, is rooted in the Christian polyphonic style, which emerged from music intended for the mass and other religious ceremonies and rites. Rather than include congregational singing, specialized choirs participated in these ceremonies and very quickly took on the virtuosic challenges of their composer contemporaries. This style branched out to a secular strain of "classical" music, most often heard within the courts of kings and lords. We must not forget that during this time, traveling musicians presented a more folk-like tradition of music. Surely hundreds of thousands of songs were also not recorded in these times when notation had yet to reach its current state.

With the formation of opera, music attained a new role in coordination with theater. While sacred music dramas existed earlier, opera swept quickly across Europe as a predominant strain of music. To accompany this spectacle, large groups of musicians were often hired, being the foundation for the modern orchestra (coming from the Greek word for the space reserved for musicians in ancient Greek dramas). Churches and kingly courts took up the orchestra, and between the opera hall, church, and courts, much of the so-called "masterpieces" of music were formed during the Baroque and Classical periods.

Nevertheless, a strange shift occurred as the orchestra approached the stage. At some point, orchestral music took a life of its own, becoming the highlight of the stage itself. Also, as printing costs reduced considerably with the printing press, a strain of amateur music-making began that opened up a new possibility for music to be a private experience, as it was for the king. While the latter likely remained a familial or friend-centered social experience at this time, the orchestra in isolation on the stage became a peculiar situation. Music was not accompanying an event; it was the event. Western music started to develop its own culture and following, creating its own rules and expectations. This trend developed incredibly with the freelance work of composers such as Beethoven, who placed music itself as the powerhouse of meaningful experience.

The market for this "music for music's sake" launched the careers of the most-celebrated Romantic-era composer/performers. Liszt and Paganini in particular took their skills, booked concerts, and created a musical experience for their audiences. Orchestras popped up in the main music centers of Europe, and many other cities followed suit to keep up. These cultural roots still bear hold in places such as Berlin, where music of this tradition (including the 21st-century strains of it) are constantly performed.

Then came the 20th century with its innovations. By this point, some orchestras included around 100 members to tackle Wagner and Stravinsky, and small ensemble music, including a strong tradition of art song and piano music, was commonplace. But the invention of sound recording created another dramatic turn for the musical experience. The recording enabled the listener to have a completely private experience as a listener, detached from both the social and performance aspect of the art form. The cultural context of the concert hall or of amateur music-making provided a social setting for the musical experience, but listening to a gramophone recording provided a unique experience. At first, people who could not afford to attend the real concert dressed up to attend a gramophone concert, sitting in front of this piece of technology as it played a distorted version of the real experience. But technological advances allowed for mass reproduction and gave each person their own little orchestra (and later on their own Louis Armstrong or Elvis Presley). The radio then could transmit this same experience across the nation, providing a private experience extrapolated from a public event happening elsewhere or as abstracted studio recording event. At some point, stores and restaurants began playing music, cars could catch radio signals, audio devices became really small and portable, and music's cultural context became not only for a special event but for every second of every day, even if not willed.

With the changed and minimized cultural context of music, it becomes difficult to ascertain the music concert's value. Why should someone go to a concert hall if they can hear the music at their home, with a seemingly perfect recording? One method concert music organizers have used is a museum approach. They will perform the classic (so-called) masterpieces from 100-400 years ago so as to culture their audience. This post-modernistic approach to music-making is one of the most bizarre cultural experiences we have. We go to a concert hall to listen to something written hundreds of years ago, intended for a specific audience who lived in a very specific time and place with its own cultural implications, and we attempt to somehow pretend that the orchestral experience is innovative and up-to-date with society (is this considered part of the taboo cultural appropriation of today?).

Sure, the museum approach is a great way to celebrate our heritage, but it seems to be a music experience isolated from the outside cultural reality. Thousands of good composers live today across the globe, and they write music that ranges from accessible to complex, all being highly intellectual and emotionally powerful (I am talking about the "good" composers, however you may define it). These are people who live in our society today and write music within the fabric of our culture. Folk traditions influenced classical composers throughout the history of our tradition; what do we miss when we exclude music that is influenced by jazz, rock, electronic, pop, hip hop, or even rap music from our concerts? And what of the contributions of non-Western musical elements to this tradition? Excellent composers have incorporated these stylistic features in highly nuanced ways that both continue the classical tradition while maintaining a cultural relevance today. Orchestral programmers know that the current film and video game concert series are among their best ticket-sellers, so why not trust that carefully chosen contemporary composer concerts, that comprise even half of a concert series, would gain new, young, and vibrant audience? Yes, I believe that music can be enjoyed for its own merit, but if we isolate it from its cultural context, we lose a great deal of meaning. 

Musicking and Improvisation

I was reminded of the concept of "musicking" yesterday, which is the late Christopher Small's term to help people think of music as an action rather than a thing (though adding a "k" to a word makes it feel archaic so I use the term warily). Thus, listening to music is musicking, performing music is musicking, and creating music is musicking. Sheet music or recordings themselves are not music until someone engages with them. While he goes in depth on this topic in his book Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening, I would rather talk about how musicking as brought life to the music around me.

I recently joined UMKC's Imp Ensemble, a free (not necessarily jazz) improvisation ensemble. Several years ago at BYU I was part of a similar group called GEM (Group for Experimental Music). Both these ensembles provide a creative outlet where I am invigorated to musick without the restrictions of societal convention. I believe that we should strive to engage with our culture by putting forth our best contributions to the art, I also believe in what Ned Rorem termed "the distortion of Genius." It helps to step outside the bounds of classical concert music culture to reassess one's work and musical purpose. Next month, the Imp Ensemble will be performing at West Bottoms as part of the West Bottoms Reborn initiative. More details here.

This upcoming Tuesday, my work Improvisations VI: Just, Plane, Natural will be performed by Gabbi Roderer, an amazing flutist (see the event details here). This is the third in a series of improvisation pieces for soloist and live electronics that I originally wrote for myself as a way I could continue improvising outside of a group. But now they have become a fascinating means of collaborating with performers as musicians, tapping into fellow performers' intuitive abilities to musick, not according to the societal norms of their repertoire but according to the dictates of their ear in response to the electronics (which are wholly dependent on the performer's playing).

These improvisations are free for the performer, but while this sounds liberating, it actually invites the performer to solve their own compositional puzzle. The piece only progresses with a tap of a pedal that initiates a change in the electronics. These changes provide the overall structure of the piece while leaving pacing up to the performer. The puzzle for performers is to effectively navigate these changes to achieve their artistic vision. In this manner, the performer also becomes a creator and sculptor of sound in time. The performer also must engage carefully in listening. It is a perfect example of musicking to a composed work without the strings attached.

This work is a joint effort, a true collaboration. Rather than the composer acting as dictator or even as visionary, the composer becomes the facilitator and architect, providing a space and flow to accentuate the performer's work. While the composer is not active on stage (though I can easily code in my own laptop part and devise the form in real-time), the contribution of the electronics provides a unique mark that, while at times sounding very different in each iteration, infallibly remains. The contributions of composer and performer are equal; the electronics can only be engaged by the performer's input and the performer must engage with the electronics to play out the work. Through this partnership, the new work is born every time, and I love this sort of relationship. 

If you are a musician and want to musick with these Improvisations or have insights or comments on these concepts, I'd love to hear from you. Feel free to comment below.