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.

Baby Mozart

In an effort to legitimize music education through “facts,” scientists set out to prove the intellectual, emotional, and even physical benefits of participation in music experiences. Rather than trust that the organized sound that accompanied humankind from the beginning had in it some inherent strengths, figures and statistics assuage policy makers. And once numbers get involved, we get interpretations of data and initiatives that lead to a plethora of potential truths and obvious misconceptions about what music is and what it does for the everyday person.

And thus Baby Mozart was born.

Infants who listen to classical music may become smarter and more emotionally mature. This would be a wonderful result of the sonic art form that has intrigued our forebears for countless generations. But when do children listen to Baby Mozart? Parents often use the music to put their children to bed. And if not, the music is administered in doses as if a supplement to the anxiety-ridden broccoli-feeding and diaper change. In my family, Baby Mozart was the new age music from the early 1990s. I later learned that my father used them because he believed they were so boring they would put anyone to sleep. Does this translate over to the treatment of classical music at-large?

I had two completely different experiences with classical music as a child. The first were recordings of Bernstein conducting Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet, Marche Slav, and the 1812 Overture. Also in the room was a CD of Mozart’s Symphonies 40 and 41. These energized me, akin to the Sound Test options on Super Nintendo videos games, which conveniently played atmospheric or intense music on endless loop. These experiences likely drew me towards music-making.

Then, there were the dreaded CDs titled “Meditations.” Six volumes of the most bland moments of classical music history were obviously intended to knock one out or at least nullify the mind. And then that famous CD Chant . I tried many times, even as a child, to survive that CD to secure some form of personal musical depth. As cited by Wikipedia, “it was strongly marketed as an antidote to the stress of modern life.” I actively work against achieving this Meditation CD status.

How do the majority of people perceive classical music today? Is the orchestral hall a place of liveliness or is it an extension of the fuzzy reclining chair in the living room? And if it is a place that people envision falling asleep, why would the average person spend money and time to attend? To many, the perception of classical music is that it is simply boring. And concert programmers have a knack of feeding into this stereotype without realizing it.

To gain young audiences at concert halls, the concert experience should feel lively. The real Mozart felt this excitement in his day as he traveled from place to place. The 1780s were an unusually active time for music throughout Europe and especially in Vienna. He marveled to his father about amazing performances and complained about dull ones. Mozart especially loved the new technologies in music. The piano was relatively new technology, and instrument makers continued to finesse its sound during his lifetime. Mozart also loved the inventive basset horn, which soon after became the clarinet. The time also saw an increase in size and accessibility of performing groups. The orchestras, typically reserved for the court, entered the public square as part of the Enlightenment. The Mannheim Orchestra specialized in creating magnificent rushes through intense, long crescendos. And Mozart did not only involve himself in music but collaborated with theater, poetry, and visual arts through his operas. Though opera was already a longstanding tradition, Mozart revolutionized the art form by bringing the energy of his time into something that had become stiff on the one end or cheesy on the other. He also merged the musics of Italy, France, and Germany into his sound to form a cosmopolitan vibe. These circumstances and activities came together to create an exciting atmosphere from which the famous Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven rose to prominence and bore out a lasting legacy.

So, shall we bring back more music from Mozart’s time period and recreate this fervor? Surely Mozart would roll in his grave at such a suggestion! While the great composer looked back to find inspiration, he and his contemporaries did not believe in preservation projects. But we can certainly learn from him. Four major focal points came together in that day that also seem to be the best received in our day as well. First, technology cannot be ignored. Electronics do things that purely acoustic instruments cannot. Even with one microphone channeling an instrument’s sound, a new sonic world can be explored. One of the greatest trends in contemporary classical music is the use of software, especially interactive digital technology to create music. Second, theatricality and interdisciplinary work takes music to a higher plane. Opera is in the process of a major revival because it provides a multi-sensory experience. Important new music ensembles, such as Eighth Blackbird, include a visual or staged component to their work. Dance collaborations are particularly welcome. Third, genre plurality and diversity create a more relevant and comprehensible music. To completely ignore the access we have to music throughout the world and to dismiss the popular idioms of today as points of dialogue in classical music ignores the almost constant strain of external influences that fuel the art form. The most important artists had a way of bringing many forms and styles together to create a new path. And fourth, a recontextualization of past styles; in other words, an acknowledgement and play on tradition, seemed to be essential to the First Viennese School. Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven all have a sense of humor in their music as they look to the past, and we have so much more history to deal with.

This last point brings the great caveat: we recontextualize the past, and we do not live there. The current state of music is, in effect, proof of its death. Orchestras that play 90% repertoire from before 1900 are like the rare stumbling on a live website last updated in the 1990s. It is fascinating, curious, and nostalgic, but the average person will not visit the site ever again. Music written hundreds of years ago does not carry the same relevance as music written today. A living art form would include 90% repertoire from after 1990, and museums would take in the rest. The museum orchestra would play Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven. It would also play Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Xenakis, Cage, Takemitsu, Berio, La Monte Young, Milton Babbitt, and Pierre Boulez as pieces of a distant history. What then is there to listen to—even the edgy avant-garde music is irrelevant?! That is the serious discussion to be had to maintain a living, thriving, and relevant art form. More next time…

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. 

On Universals (Something to Say Pt. II)

As I mentioned in the previous post, the first rule of academic writing is to avoid superlatives at all costs. "Always" and "never" are almost always asking to be rebutted and almost never help an argument. This especially rings true in music. Sounds are intangible, and we as listeners largely perceive music based on prior experience and learning. Some ethnomusicologists assert that it is almost impossible to understand the music of a different culture because the preconceived notions we carry with us permanently taint our perspectives. Each person will comprehend and enjoy music of any style and variety based on their upbringing (and surely some of that nature that accounts for individual personality differences).

Despite this strong argument, I cannot help but point to certain universals that underpin any sonic experience. These, in and of themselves, are not emotional, but they do have potential to "play with the heartstrings." In fact, some composers treat the compositional process like a game or a riddle to solve, and many musicologists would point to Beethoven as one of these in how he treated musical form. The primary universal (and the only one I feel confident about) is that there is an opposition in all things. The most basic sonic opposition is between sound and silence. Composers must deal with this question, and different cultures take it in different ways. Balinese Gamelan avoids silence during the performance due to traditional beliefs, and Western music emphasizes silence. Indian Carnatic music abolishes silence altogether with a continuous drone that sounds before the first audience members enter the room. While each culture treats silence differently, there is, at the very least, the potential for this opposition to become a factor in the music.

Carnatic music demonstrates the essential opposition between stasis and activity. Our brains are designed to give attention to the most active parts of our surroundings. Hopefully, the music at a concert performance takes this active role the moment the baton falls. Yet, after some time, some aspects of the music take on a passive role due to sameness. Composers and performers, in response to this natural phenomenon, must ensure that their music contains enough variety to sustain interest. Every variation to the music arises out of opposition to something else. High or low, loud or soft, fast or slow, clarinet or violin, muted or overblown, consonant or dissonant, major or minor (or whole-tone or octatonic), choppy or sustained, groovy or floating: these are some of the tools musicians work with. This game of oppositions becomes as simple or as complex as the musician desires it to be, and each culture deals with opposition in its unique ways.

Nevertheless, a caveat exists in this game. When is there too much variety? The brain can only process so much information before the music becomes incomprehensible. Novice composers may vary their music to the point that the variation becomes sameness (and thus static and boring). A good friend pointed out that perhaps the key to writing music is establishing a sense of consistency and tactfully working to build in musical surprises. I believe in this principle as well, and I also believe that the more familiarity one has with a style of music, the more attuned one is to the subtle surprises at play. For example, a Western musician may have great difficulty hearing the difference between common scales in the Middle East because of the melodic limitations of a twelve-note collection. Also, people from non-Western cultures may not find much satisfaction in Western music's harmonic flow because their primary musical style sustains interest in other ways. Repeated, active listening attunes the ear to some of these differences.

To me, an understanding of how opposing forces interact in music is essential for anyone who engages in music as a musician or listener, even if at a subconscious level. It easily maps onto the human experience, in which each of us deals with variety and sameness (the brain is wired this way). So, from this angle, can someone enjoy music, despite its origin and their understanding? Definitely. Will some education help them enjoy it more? Surely. Will a product of one's immediate culture have the greatest impact? Perhaps. But they can certainly enjoy other styles too.

Pacing Pt. II

I briefly wrote about the importance of pacing a few weeks ago. Here are some additional thoughts as I write my work Disconnect for saxophonist Chi Him Chik and percussionist Derek Frank with live electronics.

Writing a piece that includes both performers (who read notated music) and electronics (that do not fit nicely into our notation conventions) creates a unique challenge for perfect pacing. The way we notate music to fit into time is through strict rhythmic divisions within a meter. The notation system normally divides notes into halves (whole, half, quarter, eighth), but we can mark different divisions of notes in relationship to larger beats. For example, we can divide a quarter into 7 sixteenths by putting a 7 and a bracket over them. These all are to fit into a meter, which implies an emphasis (downbeat) and basic rhythmic framework (this is a simplification). Yet many natural sounding rhythms cannot be notated with precision because of our method. Some composers have invented ways to achieve more fluid rhythms, but they often cause great confusion for the standard performer.

Electronics, while they may be synced to one of these meters, are much more easily thought of in absolute time (minutes and seconds). With modern Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs), I can line up different sound files at just the right millisecond. I realized in this project that the best method for my piece was to work in absolute time and then place the live performers within that frame rather than deal with the electronics in a metric framework. To pace the performers within the ammetrical sound world, I first juxtapose standard meter in their music against the electronics, calculating about how many beats of rest are needed between entrances. For longer waits, I have a foot pedal attached to a computer to trigger the next major electronics entrance or shift.

As my piece progresses, however, I take the sax and percussion music away from strict meter. The first thing to go is the meter itself. The standard rhythmic configurations will exist, but without the meter, it implies that there is room for rhythmic flexibility. Then, I introduce reactionary gestures, which are sets of notes that will be triggered by something in the electronics or from the other performer. Soon after, I introduce imitation gestures, where instead of notation, the performers imitate something they hear from the other performer or in the electronics. Later, I give free improvisation with a contour, drawing lines that squiggle through their music to tell the performer only pitch content with a note on the general feeling of the line. And finally, they are given completely free improvisation within certain time frames, with expressive prompts for inspiration. As the structure of the notation loosens and leads into free improvisation, the musicians align themselves more with the spontaneity of the electronic music. As the piece progresses, I have less exact control over the pacing because of the loss of meter and exact rhythms; however, I place trust in the performers' developed musical senses and the implications from my electronics to make this a successful piece.

More on pacing later! This work Disconnect will be premiered at the Exchange of Midwestern Collegiate Composers (EMCC) on April 7th at the University of Iowa (Iowa City) at 7:30. See the performance page for directions (more details will be posted soon)!

The Language Metaphor

Common for both musicians and perhaps the public-at-large is to remark that music is the universal language. If that is the case, then it communicates poorly! An effective language conveys specific meaning that both parties understand while music plays with emotional/spiritual feelings that in only the rarest instances are shared by all listeners and performers (and composers). Of course, language may be fashioned to focus on its linguistic and musical nature as in poetry, which is a fascinating art in that it conveys literal and additional meanings, but music seems hard-pressed to cross its boundaries (tone poems often miserably attempt to do so). When John Cage said, "I have nothing to say, and I'm saying it," I do not believe that he was trying to blot out the fact that music engages others but that music very rarely (if ever) can say something, something the composer grappled with throughout his long career.

The metaphor does work, however, in some cases. While communication is not as precise as language, feelings come in a way that may exceed language's ability. But the musical information, like in language, is comprehended to the extent that certain patterns are followed. To understand something, I will need pauses to capture everything. I may need context, including an ear attuned to different dialects. I need a way to structure the information I receive. I need patterns. Many composers use small combinations of pitches, rhythms, or other ear-catching devices to create their own "language." Mostly fitting under the term "motif," a small bit of musical information can be comprehended and then expanded on throughout a piece. Popular music may use melodies that hook a listener in, but even more prevalent for comprehension is the underlying groove, which becomes the structural foundation upon which the rest of the music is built. Other music (lots of other music) may defy both of these methods. But just like in language, comprehensibility comes from there being certain principles that guide the listener from the beginning to the end (without being boring because we all have experienced conversations where our interest wanes...). Of course, some music seeks to border incomprehensibility, but the majority of pieces throughout all genres and all time seek to give us a comprehensible message, even if we can't decide on what it is.