The Fredösphere

I realized that, as I wrote yesterday's post, my thoughts drifted from the real point of the Cult of the Composer, which is not about Historically Informed Performance so much as a simple submission to the music as it appears on the page. In fact, I feel that the Cult, even in that reduced form, is not completely without problems.

I'll use Randall Thompson's Alleluia as an example, since I'm familiar with it and the controversy surrounding it. Written as a horrified response to the rise of fascism and European war, Thompson indicated a tempo of lento for the piece . . . which almost everyone ignores. Here's a (not outlying) example:



Sometimes, performances of this Alleluia are shockingly brisk. Is Thompson right, or the mob? Well, if by the mob you mean a very large group of highly-trained and talented choral conductors, I answer: the mob!

Alleluia simply doesn't work slow. Thompson made a mistake; it's just that simple. His emotions, while perfectly valid, do not translate to the piece. His dread is an artifact; an accident that has no bearing on the music, however strong both may have become entangled in his mind. Nobody thinks of invading Nazis when they hear this piece except the composer, and he was wrong. Wrong! Compounding the problem is the work's problematic key and register, which cause unaccompanied singers to loose pitch, especially at a slow tempo—but that's a secondary issue; the real point is, doing it slow is just wrong!

Whew. And now, some bonus goodies:

What do you get when you combine a big dumb object with retro-futurism and Nazis, and shake them for one minute? Atlantropia, that's what:



And finally, John C. Wright informs us that officials in Saxony want all Germans to obey the law and pay for the television license, and that means all Germans, even Friedrich Schiller!

Labels: Architecture, Choral, Composer, Futurism, VideoClip

How is it I made it to my forty-nth birthday (yesterday) without knowing it (almost) coincides (probably) with the birthday of the guy I was named after?

Bonus material: check out this truly horrifying bit of Prohibition History and the role of musicians in in predicting the future.

Labels: Composer, Culture, Futurism

I see my old voice teacher, and now executive director of the American Choral Directors Association, Tim Sharp has recently conducted the premiere of a work for chorus and orchestra. Good for him, promoting new music and all that. The work's harmonic language belongs solidly in the Common Practice period, and indeed, shows no influence whatsoever of any of the various schools of experimental music of the last 100-plus years. Yet there is no disputing the craftsmanship on display; this is not the work of an amateur. (Follow the subsequent link for a brief video excerpt.)

The composer, by the way, was some guy named George Frideric Handel.

Labels: Choral, Composer

Why do we read a composer's biography? I know I'm supposed to appreciate each composer's body of work as an artifact utterly divorced from its context, but close readers of the Fredösphere (hi Mom!) already know I take a dim view of that Absolute Music mentality. The fact is, each composer's bio I've ever read has helped me enormously in understanding music. Intent is revealed, and a sympathy is built that gives me the motivation I need for close listening.

Fine. But that leads to another question: what about composer autobiography? John Adams has written his, called Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life, and I feel a strange curiosity: if you can write music really, really well, why turn to prose?

It all turns on the composer's abilities as a self-observer, and a prose stylist. It's likely most of my readers (hi, Aunt Virginia!) understand music composition, self-awareness, and writing prose are three nearly-orthogonal vectors. Granted that John Adams' life is worth studying, it does not follow that John Adams is necessarily the best guide to John Adams' life and work.

Well, I can say at the least the prose is no problem. Adams expresses himself very well, negotiating the shoals of a family with more than its fair share of, uh, colorful characters. (The Adams family produces bohemians, most of whom have little talent for making a living.) I admire the delicacy with which Adams describes his formative years, and the environment his parents created for him to develop as an artist and a man.

Someone—was it C. S. Lewis?—has opined that the first chapters of any biography are always the most interesting. Certainly they are there to answer the question, where did this strange, remarkable, miraculous personality come from? Yet, I don't think we get that question answered here. At some point John Adams begins playing a clarinet (his father's instrument) and very soon, he's the concertmaster of the local wind ensemble, outplaying his fellows 4 or more times his age. Modesty, or something else, prevents him from digging deeper into this mystery: why do some kids take to an instrument like a dog to a bone and worry wonderful music out of it?

Labels: Composer

Forrest Covington has returned to the blogosphere. Rejoice.

Labels: Composer

Mahler's 6th Symphony caught my attention a while back when Alex Ross mentioned the big box constructed especially for the Redwood Symphony, to be used in the symphony's final movement.  Something in Alex's description moved me, especially when he wrote "to produce the famous hammer blows in Mahler's Sixth, the orchestra deployed a large wooden box that matched Mahler's original specifications."

Oooh, that got the latent speculative fiction author in me thinking.  The resulting story is still gestating and will continue to do so for a while, as fiction writing is my third-ranked hobby (after composing and bread baking) but I may finish the thing eventually.  Meanwhile I am loathe to give away all the details, but I'll mention that the story will feature a black hole, a skeleton orchestra sawing away on their violins with femurs--or something--and will definitively explain why Mahler was never comfortable with that last thud at the end of the fourth movement.

The thud whereof I speak is one of three (later revised to two) thuds Mahler specified in his score.  He did not, however, specify the means, asking only that the sound be loud but dull, and non-metallic, "like the stroke of an ax."  They were meant to be three blows that fate delivers on the heroic protagonist of the symphony.  Alma Mahler famously described these blows as prophetically depicting Gustav's own coming disasters:  the death of his daughter; his forced resignation from the Vienna opera; and the diagnosis of his (eventually fatal) heart condition.  (Keep in mind that, for whatever reason, almost anything Alma has said about Gustav and his music is generally treated as dubious.  And one critic has pointed out her oversight in mentioning another hammer blow of fate: her own infidelity.) Various orchestras have devised ingenious devices--usually big wooden boxes or giant bass drums--of varying thuddiness in an attempt to carry out the composer's wishes.  Mahler himself was doomed to frustration with his thudders, never finding a satisfying instrument.

For more information on Mahler's 6th and its tripartite thuddiness, do listen to Benjamin Zander's superb analysis of the four movements, and his decision to restore the 3rd thud in the recording he made with the Boston Phil.  (The mp3s are available at the link; I'm told the files of the symphony itself are low-res, but those of the discussion disc are crystal clear, and feature the most awesome, phattest thuds imaginable.)  Meanwhile, Ionarts has a good comparison of the various recordings of No. 6.  I've enjoyed Iván Fischer's Budapest recording, even though he chooses Mahler's second (and final, apparently) thoughts on both the thud numbering (only two) and the ordering of the middle movements (Andante, then Scherzo).  I lean heavily toward Mahler's original concept, although I'm hardly ready to call myself an expert on the work.  (I can say I also bought Lenny Bernstein's reading as a bargain from Amazon, but the recording seems veiled; perhaps a failing of the original engineers, or a mistake in conversion to a compressed file format.)

Finally, let me leave you with a quote from David Hurwitz, writing in The Mahler Symphonies: An Owner's Manual: "There has been more nonsense written about this symphony [no. 6] than any other work by Mahler."  As I sketch the outline of my story, to be titled Mahler's Box, I can't tell you how much I am looking forward to this opportunity to contribute yet more nonsense to the pile.

Labels: Composer, Fiction, Spooky

The Vocal Arts Ensemble of Ann Arbor, they who lately gave me my latest premiere (of The Moon That Dreamed of Earth) are performing Menotti's The Unicorn, the Gorgon and the Manticore on May 9.  The piece is a bear and illness has left them desperate for more baritones.  In spite of that, director Ben Cohen asked me to join the group for this performance, something I was overjoyed to do.

I first became aware of TUTGATM through the miracle of modern television, believe it or not.  It was years ago, at my parent's home; I suppose that must mean I was in my late teens or early twenties.  No doubt it was a PBS station airing a performance, one that included dancers as is commonly done.  I was blown away by the spastic athleticism of the score (obviously Menotti was not taking his Ritalin) and the theatricality of the whole production—the semi-operatic work needs singers and dancers with a flair for drama.  After that magical night in front of the teevee it would be years before I heard of the piece again (and only lately that I purchased my first recording of the piece, downloaded via iTunes) but I never forgot it.

As you can see from the poster reproduced above, VAE will be joined by People Dancing.  Ben has told me some of his ideas for the performance, which includes dancers interacting with the singers on some level (I'm a bit fuzzy on those details, as was Ben at the time we had our conversation) and I can't wait to see what he comes up with.  You'll also notice Bill Bolcom will get a premiere in this concert also, Lady Liberty.  This will be my first chance to sing something written by the ol' Gorgon himself.  (And I say that with the greatest of affection.)

Labels: Choral, Composer, local

So I'm surfing the web today and everywhere I turn something's making me laugh?  When did they start allowing humor on the internet?  The change must be the result of one of those zany end-of-administration executive orders that presidents always indulge in.  Anyway . . . .

Soho the Dog gives us Superlenny and his arch-nemisis Igor in graphic novel form.

Colby Cosh finds life imitates TV comedy in one of those connect-the-dots moments that Cosh delivers reliably on a regular basis.  Superjuice!  Unbelievable.

My own modest contribution to the Gross International Amusement Index was my Nixon Et Messiaen post.  It received an Alexplosion of traffic (for which I am grateful) but it is old news by now.  What is new news is that several people were sucked in by the post's seductive alternate history and believed (no doubt wanted to believe) in a Nixon whose paranoia was all-embracing, even including the machinations of modernist French composers.  See the first comment of the post, which hints at credulity, or go to the blog Dazzleship Potemkin of my new friend "Maréchal TULIP" and read his full confession.

Labels: Composer, fun

That's right, just keep telling yourself that these things are "clouds."  Yep.  Clouds.  That's what they are.

Alex Ross dreams of a Messiaenic inaugural, conveniently forgetting just how Nixonian presidential fixations on dowdy, devout French modernists can be.

I got this video from A Cappella News.  These guys make Anglican chant sound actually attractive (ooh, that was snarky):

Labels: Choral, Composer, fun, Spooky, VideoClip

So much information became known about the major scandals of the Nixon administration during the release of the Oval Office recordings, many fascinating sub-plots got overlooked.  Today is an appropriate day to draw attention to Nixon's long-term obsession with Olivier Messiaen.  Nixon consistently loathed and distrusted the French musical avant garde as personified by Pierre Boulez, but his relationship with Messiaen was more complicated.  Privately, he found Messiaen's music bewildering and decadent, but Messiaen's traditionalist religious outlook encouraged Nixon to view Messiaen as a "wedge" who could be used to divide and confuse his enemies.  The following are key excerpts from the Nixon recordings:

-- On July 1, 1971, Nixon instructs Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman to have someone break into the Darmstadt School, which refers to a group of like-minded European composers (e.g., Boulez, Stockhausen).  Apparently Nixon believed the Darmstadt School had a physical location; the school was named for a series of summer courses that ended in the early 1960s:

NIXON:  "I can't have a high-minded church organist ... I want a son-of-a-b----. I want someone just as tough as I am. ... We're up against an enemy, a conspiracy that will use any means. We are going to use any means....  Get it done. I want it done. I want the Darmstadt School cleaned out and have it cleaned out in a way that has somebody else take the blame."

-- On April 4, 1972, Nixon discusses Messiaen with Haldeman:

NIXON:  "Return the calls to that poor dumb bastard ... who I know is our friend. Now do it ... We made the same mistake [Dwight] Eisenhower made, but not as bad as Eisenhower made, because he sucked the American Guild of Organists too much ... G-d damn it, don't talk to them for a while.  Will you enforce that now?"
HALDEMAN:  "I'll try."

-- On May 18, 1972, Nixon talks to Henry Kissinger about the National Security Adviser's meeting with Ivy League composers regarding Messiaen's oratorio La Transfiguration de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ:

NIXON: "The Ivy League composers? Why, I'll never let those sons-of-b------ in the White House again. Never, never, never. They're finished. The Ivy League schools are finished ... Henry, I would never have had them in. Don't do that again ... They came out against La Transfiguration when it was tough ... Don't ever go to an Ivy League school again, ever. Never, never, never."

-- On Nov. 14, 1972, Nixon talks with his aide Charles Colson about his successful attempt to prevent Pierre Boulez from becoming President of France:

NIXON:  "What in the hell did you think of Boulez's statement on the election? Wasn't that the sour grapes crap again?"
COLSON:  "Well, it's unbelievable, the arrogance of the guy ... God, what a bad man. Just awfully glad we got him buried and put away for good. I think he is."
NIXON:  "Oh, he's buried. He's buried."

UPDATE:  Please see this explanation if you are tempted to take the Higher Truth of this post too literally.

Labels: Composer, fun

"Try googling Britney Spears intellectual rigor and see how many hits you get."  Our conversation ended with this sentence, but it began--last night, in our living room--with me telling the Wifeösphere about Hexachordal, a rising internet meme and renaissance Brit.  Youtube pointed me to Tom Milsom (his real name) a few months ago; yesterday, aworks reminded me of his existence, and informed me of his remarkable awareness of 20th classical music history, via this video:



Notice Milsom's suggested starting points into the avant garde maze:  Cage, Berio, Stockhausen, Berg, Schoenberg.  Not the advice I'd give to neophytes, for personal or pragmatic reasons, but hey, you've got to be glad a kid like this is paying that much attention.  Besides his youth, his astonishing skill at writing and performing pop tunes seems an improbable trait to combine with geeking out on 12 tone and musique concréte techniques.  Here's him singing Indigo:



Very good, don't you think?  I confess to multi-multiple listenings yesterday afternoon.  I haven't overdosed on a song like that since I discovered Polyphonic Spree.  I would like to see Milsom rework the 2-voice counterpoint during the 7th inning stretch, but otherwise, it's got a great beat and you can read your thesaurus to it.  (Yes, it's mostly a list.  You see Milsom use that approach in other songs to less effect, but with Indigo he seems to have struck goldenrod. And anyway, Walt Whitman wrote a lot of lists and nobody complains.)

Pop tune talent; appealing looks and non-threatening affect; and some intellectual chops in the music theory department:  a triple threat.  Jupiter is aligned with Mars.  A rare, magical combination.  Hoo boy, do I hate him.

Labels: Composer, VideoClip

So, what's modernism good for, anyway?  Gas stations, definitely.  (Hat tip to Design Observer.)

I have the unusual pleasure of owning one of the few (the only?) anti-MacArthur-Grant rants referenced by a future grant recipient.  Congratulations to Alex...although, I'm a little confused; you are neither a hack, weirdo, or fraud, so by process of elimination you must be a subversive, but that doesn't seem quite right either.  Maybe I need to reevaluate this whole Genius Grant racket.

Michigan composer Michael Daugherty gets a mention by Charles T. Downey, but that picture I barely recognize.  A bit of my father's family seems to be sneaking into Daugherty's looks, which may hint at a long-forgotten, distant relationship.  Cousin Michael ... I should be so lucky.

Labels: Composer, Culture, Design

As with so many musical jokes, the concept is way funnier than the execution.

Labels: Composer, fun, SoundClip

It's opera and it's science fiction, so you'd think I would be compelled to comment, but I've been avoiding linking to news of The Fly since I figured out the show included nudity.  I'm not exactly one with a finger on the pulse of the opera world, but isn't new opera pulling a Britney/Janet/Jennifer and turning to skank to shore up the sagging popularity?  Anyway, now that we have a review, and it has turned snarky ("The Fly is a dog" is not what he said, but what he meant), I almost feel sorry for poor David Cronenberg et al.  Okay, I don't feel sorry at all.  And the review contains a bit of truly wonderful advice that could have helped more than one recent would-be opera composer:

"The Fly" isn't even an interesting failure. It's just amateurish. It isn't even good enough to be offensive. Shore, noted for composing music for such films as "Ed Wood," "The Lord of the Rings," and, yes, "The Fly," has no business writing an opera. But how could he know until he tried, you ask?

Well, he couldn't, but you don't try it out on an audience at the Chatelet in Paris, where it debuted in July, and then take it to Los Angeles Opera. You write a scene, get a graduate seminar class at some music school to give it a run-through, and then go back to the drawing board, humbled by what you've heard. Opera is hard. A man's got to know his limitations.

(When Matel comes out with its very first composer doll, and you pull the string, that's what you'll hear it say:  opera is hard.)

Well, my very first opera was a huge critical and popular success, in the sense that no critic panned it because there were none present, and the audience, which consisted of the good folk of Bronson, Michigan, pop. 3000, sitting in the gymnasium of the local jr. high school, seemed to like it well enough, or at least acted mightily impressed that a teenager could write 12 minutes of reasonably conherent music and still have enough friends to stage the thing.  But now that I think of it, my experience tends to confirm the wisdom of the above advice.

(I do like idea of the chorus singing the part of the computer, however.)

Labels: Composer, Opera, sci-fi

Jessica Duchen found this video of Messiaen, talking about birds.  After all, what else is there to talk about?



Close readers of The Fredösphere have figured out that Messiaen is my gateway drug for eep-op-ork-ah-ah modernism.  At the urging of Alex Ross I have softened my resistance even to Des Canyons Aux Etoiles.  What I learned from this video, the first I've seen of le maître, is that his personality is not the super-serene one of my imagination, but rather that of a high-energy enthusiast.  I detect the faintest whiff of Asperger's, and why am I surprised?  A life-long obsession with bird calls was supposed to be evidence of ... what? I ask myself.  I was gazing on the haloed icon; I didn't suspect that Saint Olivier might be a bit of a nutcase.  And believe me, I use these terms with the greatest possible affection, even admiration.  Those who know me will testify that I tell the truth.

Labels: Composer

Allow me to introduce a young composer named Philip Rice.  Philip is the long-lost cousin of John, one of my closest friends.  A recent family funeral brought the two together, and Philip's background is so freakishly similar to mine, John introduced us via email.  Philip comes from a religious, home schooling family and has been interested in composing from childhood.  He even lived for a while in Coldwater, Michigan, the county seat of my ancestral home.  He now studies composition at Central Michigan University.  He has a myspace page that dazzles, although I speak as one with embarassing memories of how much (that is to say, how little) thought I put into self-promotion when I was that age.  I should mention his technical mastery compares favorably to that of my 20ish self as well.  To top it all off, according to the photos of him online, he kind of looks like me, or more precisely, a considerably improved version of me.

I hate him.

Specifically, I hate him in brief, unguarded moments, but that hasn't stopped me from offering him my complements.  We'll be trading scores and advice in the future if my usual laziness in such matters (i.e., relationships) can be mastered.  CMU is several hours away from Ann Arbor, but my dream is that he could visit and sit in on a meeting of the Creativity Study Group that I'm organizing.  Wait:  I haven't blogged the CSG yet?  I guess I'll have to--in a future post.

Labels: Composer

Linking to Daniel Wolf has become my new bad habit, but only because of the immoderation with which I do it.  Nevertheless, here I am again to tell you about his 12 Kleine Præludien which he is offering as a free download in pdf.  I must mention it because one of the movements is dedicated to ... I blush! ... li'l ol' me.  This is one of those very cool, very unexpected pleasures that come along in life all too rarely.  I get the key of A; hmmm, what does that imply about my character?  Let's go to the ultimate guide to such matters, and see what terribly detailed, nuanced description for A Major we find there:

A Major:  Happy

Ooookay, I guess that fits me, as far as it goes.  But wait, the key Daniel chose is only A, not A Major.  What does A Minor mean?

A Minor:  Pure

Uuuuh, yeah.  Looks like that ultimate guide ain't quite so ultimate.

Labels: Composer, Keys

If I were a Dead Russian Composer, I would be Igor Stravinsky. Known as a true son of the new 20th Century, my music started out melodic and folky but slowly got more dissonant and bizzare as I aged. I am a traveler and a neat freak, and very much hated those rotten eggs thrown at me after the premiere of "The Rite of Spring." Who would you be? Dead Russian Composer Personality Test

Labels: Composer, fun

Cobly Cosh thrills to the news that a near-complete print of Fritz Lang's Metropolis has be discovered in Argentina.

USB wine.  Le wow.  Also, we speakers of English may be losing control of the language--oh frak!  And those alien spacecraft just keep getting bigger and bigger.

Steve Hicken's fantasy life is pretty similar to mine, and I mean more than just the win-the-lottery part.  He's got the musicians, the new compositions, and even the bathtub filled with chocolate pudding.  At least, that's the way I remember it.

Labels: Composer, fun, movie, sci-fi

Hangin' with Meridith Monk:  M. C- has the story.

Labels: Choral, Composer

Composers, watch out!  Tell your congressman to include you in the next round of protectionist legislation.  You're about to be replaced by a computer!  And, talk about matchstick men--via SF Signal, it's the Matchstick Minas Tirith.

I attended a composers' forum at the University of Michigan School of Music last night.  It's the first time in several years that I've gone.  I used to find these concerts painful, but last night's show boasted a few genuinely well-written pieces, and even the dogs had something to recommend them.  Is it possible that the kids are better than they were in the good old days?  I definitely recall the forums from way back, from the time I was a student there, were very informal and low on the spit & polish.  Not much was taken seriously back then.  Now, the kids seem terribly sophisticated--sophisticated in a real way, as though some of them are already moving beyond youthful gestures of pseudo-profundity and pointless complexity.

Either the UMSM composition department is recruiting better these days, or maybe I'm getting better at listening.  I suspect the answer is, some of both.  No question I have finally begun to learn how to pay attention to what is not immediately compelling.  I'm still bad at listening, but I now realize I was absolutely, dreadfully terrible at it in my younger years.  (Having a son with the same tendency has made me more aware of the problem.)

While I was at the forum I reintroduced myself to Evan Chambers, who recently emailed me to thank me for blogging his new work, The Old Burying Ground.

Labels: Composer, LovableOddballs

Everyone's linking to the amusing BBC interview of a couple of European critics attempting to take down a notch Alex Ross' beautiful book The Rest Is Noise.  Kyle Gann has an elegant and gracious (gracious to Alex, anyway) rebuttal, and he quotes Alex's cool line about the German music tradition now resembling a crime scene.  Sequenza21, where I first saw the link, has a more varied discussion in the comments section.  It's all fascinating; it is a crime scene itself.

Have I commented on the book yet?  If I haven't, well, I liked it so much, I even recommended it to the Wifeösphere, who has only so much time and interest for classical music (beyond my own, of course).  Nuts to detailed descriptions of the music; we don't need more of that whole Dancing About Architecture stuff; inspire us to curiosity, then let us go directly to the music itself.  This, Alex has done.  He's even made me want to give Messiaen's thorny Canyons another try.

Labels: Composer, Culture

A few days ago, my daughter, the Maharincess, determined to launch her composing career.  I sat her down at the computer, gave her a few instructions in how to use Finale, and turned her loose.  The ol' Himebaugh genes kicked in, and like her brother before her, she has produced a bold masterpiece of singular brilliance.

Like all uncompromising geniuses, she cares nothing for the whining criticisms of performers locked in old-fashioned notions of what is "performable" or "practical."  So, as we expect, the Maharincess pushes instrumentalists beyond all bounds.  Unlike other experimentalists, however, she explores new territory in her pronounced bias in favor of treble sounds.  At first, I suspected this was caused by the position of the MIDI keyboard relative to the computer, which makes the low notes hard to reach for a six-year-old's arm.  But no:  upon listening to an early version of this piece, the diminutive maestra insisted on replacing a line of low-lying notes with high ones.  She knows what she wants, and she knows how to get it.

The Maharincess seems to have a special animus for the expectations of trombone players.  I am no Freudian, yet I cannot help but speculate that latent feminist resentments lurk in the mind of the budding young composer, expressed by unprecedented demands on a orchestral section known for its high proportion of male players, players with a reputation for chauvinism.  I will refrain from the more shocking terminology employed by feminist theorists, and simply invite the reader to imagine for himself (or herself!) the psychological effect on a male trombonist as he is subjugated to a passage wherein he must "sound like a girl."

As happened when I revealed my son's genius to an appreciative world, I expect this new work, Flowers in the Wind, to be greeted by embarrassingly effusive critical acclaim.  After all, my little Maharincess deserves no less.

Labels: Composer, fun

Via Sequenza21, Kenneth Woods has tips for composers working with performers:

2- Don’t bring antagonism towards anyone else’s music into gatherings that include anyone but you.
In any “us vs. them” match up, whether it is “new vs. old,” “tonal vs. atonal,” “US vs. Europe,” academic vs. self supporting, you, the composer, lose. More importantly, it creates unbelievable resentment among everyone whose support you need. You may hate Beethoven or Schoenberg in the privacy of your own home, but no matter what you hate, someone in the orchestra or the audience loves it, and if you convince them that you don’t listen to music with open ears, they won’t feel they owe you the same courtesy. More to the point, you may hate Mozart or Ligetti now, but someone in the building knows how much you could learn from them, and you’ll only embarrass yourself by criticizing their music.

By the way, have I mentioned lately how much I adore the music of Mozart?  He's my favorite composer.  And Ligetti.  Definitely Ligetti.

Plus, I love synaesthetes.  Just can't get enough of the little dearies.

Seriously, the tips are valuable and entertaining.  The one piece of advice that seems to be controversial has to do with the use of Italian expression markings.  The argument is, when Czech or Korean musicians sit down to play my music, the lingua franca will save them time.  I should be so lucky to be in a position to waste the time of Czech or Korean musicians.

One commenter reminds you (not me, I already knew) that choirs are not the same as orchestras:

Just some observations from the choir side - choirs are finicky beings, they don’t read well or learn fast (unless they are professional - and even then - the most avant-guard music does not come quickly). Avoid false-relations within a part, and don’t expect singers to be able to sing every interval - stick to one accidental when ever possible, (don’t write an augmented 5th when a minor 6th will do fine) Know the choir you are working for, and write for their ability and make-up. I’ll never forget the year the my chamber choir commissioned a work from a student composer, as a way of supporting the composition program by way of commission “scholarship”. The composer and I met and I explained that our 24 voice choir had only 3 tenors, so divisi should be limited in all parts, and avoided completely in the tenor if possible. We didn't care about the language, but would prefer some kind of suitable “themed” poetry, and it could have atonal elements, but should be listenable for our audience base, so some tonality would be good once in a while. Plus, we only have four rehearsals to learn it, so keep 8-10 minutes would probably be a good length. He came back six months later with a 30 minute work for 32 part choir (up to six divisi within each part) with graphic notation and nonsensical text. Needless to say, we couldn't perform it, and paid for nothing.

...and worth every penny!  Reminds of the time as a graduate student, I was asked, as a favor, to sing in an ad hoc men's vocal quartet.  I found out late in the game that the organizer paid for an "arrangement" by a student "composer" none of us knew, even though the organizer knew I had composing experience myself.  The music was a textbook case of what not to do:  no coherent base line, just dense chords following the melody up and down, centered around the C an octave below middle C.  In other words, a dense, growly, thoughtless mess.  It was completely unusable, so in our brief rehearsal time, I and the other singers rearranged and simplified on the fly, doing what we had to do to avoid disaster.  It still makes me mad.

Labels: Composer, Synaesthetes

Ian Moss has a new blog, with an emphasis on arts management to go along with the composing.

Dark Roasted Blend has one of its gallaries of gorgeous retro-future art.  This time the subject is cities.  (Hat tip Gravity Lens.)

I've been looking for a good video of the Four Bettys for a while now.  I found one with them singing "So Happy Together," but they really deserve something with better sound quality.  Meanwhile, enjoy.  Female barbershop quartets use a two-staff system with treble clef on the top for the tenor and lead and bass clef (transposed up an octave) for the baritone and bass.  This way, arrangements for men's groups can be adopted effortlessly by women's groups, and vice versa.  One more factoid:  as best I can tell, the term "beauty shop quartet" has become moribund; perhaps stillborn is the better metaphor.  One is inclined to be impressed by the female bass (really, a female with something like the range of a male tenor) but don't overlook the difficulty of singing the soprano part, which can get very high, but must always stay under the lead in terms of volume.  Unlike with men's groups, there's no falsetto to solve that problem.

Labels: BarbershopHarmony, Composer, Futurism

Hosanna!  My buddy Alan gave me the news.  Carol Barnett's The World Beloved:  A Bluegrass Mass has been recorded by VocalEssence.  Give the Sanctus a listen.  (Stephen Paulus' The Day is Done and Eric Whitacre's Water Night have sample tracks available as well.)

Labels: Composer, OldTyme, vocal

Conductor Kenneth Kiesler chose a theme of death and rebirth implicitly in his marriage of Evan Chambers' new song cycle The Old Burying Ground with The Rite of Spring in last night's concert by the University of Michigan Orchestras.  Chambers' premiere was a thrilling experience, with fine performances by soprano Jenifer Larson and Nicholas Phan, the latter with a surprisingly potent tenor voice.  Folk stylings were supplied by Tim Eriksen, whose reedy tones brought the right kind of melancholy to this setting of tombstone epitaphs.  Vocally, he fit right in; visually, he seemed uncomfortable.  Eriksen looked like a man who was still trying to figure out how a folk singer ought to behave on a classical concert stage.  No doubt he'll sort things out by the time they take the show on the road.

At half time the wifeösphere and I realized it would be impossible for us to stay to the end of Le Sacre, so we declared victory and pulled out.  It was a painful decision, and with it I felt the last reserves of my bohemian cred leaking away, but we simply could not expect the family watching our kids to stay up so late.  So we left, with the words of the old spiritual "Ain't got time to be reborn" in our heads.

Last night's concert was a clubby affair, since we sat next to our friends Victor Volkman and his wife Marian, and behind Michelle Mustert and her husband Jen Canlas.  Michelle is the daughter of Merle Mustert, a long-time force to be reckoned with in the choral music scene of Grand Rapids, Michigan.  Michelle introduced us to her friend Midori Koga, who accompanied Evan Chambers on piano for the chamber premiere of The Old Burying Ground.

See my prior post for more information about Evan Chambers.

Labels: Composer, vocal

Composer Evan Chambers came to the Ann Arbor library last night to talk about his new work, The Old Burying Ground.  He's the chair of the composing department at the University of Michigan, and his work will receive its premiere this coming Monday by the UM Symphony Orchestra and three vocal soloists.  The featured performer will be a folk singer known for his singing in the movie Cold Mountain and whose name is...is...aw, shucks, I can't remember if it was Tim Eriksen or one of the others.

For last night's presentation, Chambers sang a few songs himself, accompanied by his wife, the pianist (and ethomusicologist) Suzanne Camino, and poet Keith Taylor, who was commissioned to write a poem inspired by the epitaphs which make up the text of Chambers' work.  Chambers apologized in advance for his untrained voice.  Indeed, his intense vocal production--inspired by folk singers from Ireland, Albania, and the American South--left him hoarse after only a few songs, so it would seem no singing career is imminent.  Nevertheless, the audience found his singing compelling.  He inhabited the music in a way that is rare, using his composer's advantage to the fullest.  It's thrilling, really, to find a composer of high-brow music who sings; Samuel Barber was another, and who else?  One expects a composer to be a pianist first and foremost.  (Evan Chambers also plays the Irish fiddle, and was raised in a home steeped in 60s folk music.)  Chambers' website has sound files of him singing these songs.

After next week's program (which will also include The Rite of Spring) the orchestra will take the show on the road, culminating in a performance at Carnegie Hall on February 28.  I hope Alex Ross is marking his calendar.

Labels: Composer

Last night, the University of Michigan hosted composer Edie Hill for a lecture on the business of composing.  She's in town for the premiere of a new work commissioned by the U-M Men's Glee Club.  I showed up in the basement lobby of Hill Auditorium a few minutes before the lecture, noted that only a few others were there, and looked forward to a nice, intimate setting with many opportunities for Q&A.  Moments later the sound of a stampede announced the arrival of the entire membership of the Glee Club (probably 50 or more guys); it turns out they were having a rehearsal at Hill, and the lecture was scheduled during their break.  Ah, well.  They must have planned a photo session also, because they were dressed in white tie and tails.  All in all, this was not the ambiance I was expecting.

Edie Hill has a website for her composition business, as well as Hummingbird Press, which she runs.

UPDATE:  Welcome to all the Glee Club dudes who noticed this post, and sorry for my tone which came of as more of a complaint than I intended.  My disappointment was not meant to be a criticism, and I'm grateful your event was open to the public.  Meanwhile, there's one fascinating detail about Edie Hill I forgot to pass on:  due to problems with dyslexia, Hill did not learn to read music fluently until her undergraduate years.  Her success as a composer is doubly impressive.

Labels: Composer

It's art!  Do yourself a favor and do not watch the video of the robotic cow tongue.  Really.  Don't watch it.

We got the music angle, the sci-fi angle, and the local angle covered, right here:  Tom Smith is an Ann Arbor "filk" singer who performs at sci-fi conventions.  SciFi.com reviews his comic opera, The Last Hero On Earth.  It is, apparently, funny.  Smith has another project in the works:  Lovecraft:  The Musical Comedy.  Hoo-boy.

Labels: Composer, fun, sci-fi

Blogging is light as I prepare to lead my website to a new server, one with a decent amount of disk space.  (Thanks to my friend Jeremy for letting me squat on his territory.) It appears that Comcast will stop hardening its heart and let me go, now that the Angel of Death has taken the first-born of every Comcast family.  Or maybe it was the frogs, or the rivers of blood -- but in any case, I've done bumping my head against the 20-meg limit that Comcast imposes on this website they gave me free (with the purchase of a cable modem, of course).  Maybe I should of known better, but I never guessed a collection of mere html files could grow so big after three years.

One very nice benefit of moving is that my domain, fredosphere.com, will at last persist in the navigation bar at the top of your browser after the redirect, so when you change your bookmarks, it will be (I hope) the one and only time you'll ever need to do it.

I should also mention the other reason I am not blogging so much lately.  I have spent a lot of time lately completing my first serious forray in fiction writing.  It seems the prose bladder inside my mind is emptied when I work on my story, leaving nothing for this site. One topic I would like to consider here relates to the motivation I am feeling for my new artistic outlet.  Is it the thrill of the new? Are the tools for cranking out prose (keyboard, word processor) better developed than those for creating music manuscript?  Or -- frightening though it may be to consider it -- did I miss my calling by pursuing music composition? All I can say is, I find writing a story to be about ten times easier than writing a choral piece.

There are lots of possible reasons.  I write choral music with plenty of counterpoint. Maybe I would have an easier time if I wrote songs for soloist and piano.  (But I don't want to.)  Maybe I make things unnecessarily complex emotionally with my music; I do know I am weirdly free of aspirations to greatness in my story writing.  (I'd be happy to be labeled a pulp sci-fi author.)  Maybe I'm not a natural musician; certainly, reading a book is fun for me, but practicing an instrument (or -shudder!- performing) is work I tend to avoid.  Again, maybe there are too few composers to justify the development of good music-editing tools (or maybe I haven't found them).  Maybe I'm not as experienced criticising prose as I am music, and I'm living in a fool's paradise.  Or maybe -- just maybe -- those who can, compose, and those who can't, write prose.  (And I am finding out I am numbered among the can'ters.)  I do know that, after 90 minutes of writing prose late at night, I feel like I'm just getting started; after about 45 minutes of composing, I'm looking for excuses to quit.

This situation is disturbing.

Labels: Composer, Creativity

Michael Blowhard may be the most important composer working today.  This bold, uncompromising visionary refuses to traffic in notes of any kind; instead, he writes music...without music.  It's a daring answer to the challenge implicitly given by Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words:  Michael Blowhard's Words Without Songs.

I hesitate to single out any one paragraph by this emerging master, since they are all brilliant, but this passage I found unusually moving:

I've been an artsfreak since the late '60s and have been reading criticism since that time. Some bloggers strike me as being as articulate and slick as the pros -- Alan Sullivan, Jon Hastings, and Architecture and Morality's Corbusier, for example. Some other bloggers strike me as people who could be pros if they wanted to. If Fred Himebaugh (of the Fredosphere) were doing music criticism, he'd be my favorite music critic. John Massengale routinely gets off descriptions of places, buildings, and architectural controversies that are clearer, more vigorous, and more engaging than anything you'll find in the slick architecture magazines.

I've been pounding the music criticism beat for many years, and I thought I had seen it all.  Thank you, Michael, for bringing a tear of joy to this jaded critic's eye once again.

Labels: Composer, Culture

Another collaborative filtering site, RatingZone, bites the dust.  Weep and wail -- although I must admit I disliked its results, which were too recent-blockbuster-centric for my taste.  Probably it never attracted enough users to unskew its database.  Still, a sad day.

Which sadness is only compounded greatly by James Lileks exasperating news.  Yes, we now learn his reassignment is in the context of a major layoff.  But still.

I other news, I found Michael Kaulkin's shameful confession exhilarating.  I, too, have found myself in rehearsal confronting a flow-interrupting question which I could not answer because I just didn't care about the music to that level of detail.  Kaulkin puts it nicely:

I’m R&D and the orchestra is Sales. Are they adequately selling the piece to the audience? That’s what really matters.

Finally, a teaser:  it looks like I may leave all you loser musicians without a backward glance and take up a new, much more lucrative, career.  As a sci-fi author.  Details to come.

Labels: Composer, sci-fi

Homeless no more:  my friend and very occasional guest-blogger Joshua Shank has launched a new website.  Among other things, he's keeping us informed on his premieres.  So many premieres ... so young, yet so successful ... don'tcha just hate 'em?

Meanwhile, I suggest you hum the song "You're the Queen of my Double-Wide Trailer" softly to yourself as you have a look at this.  Also seen at Gravity Lens:  retro-futuristic postcards circa 1900.  As someone put in in the comments section, all speculation about the future "describes the present, with tailfins."

Labels: Composer, sci-fi

My mind was duly blown by the Craigslistlieder of Gabriel Kahane, found by Alex Ross.  Go to the kid's website and have a listening session right now.

This Friday I'll be hearing the University of Michigan Chamber Choir perform a piece by my old classmate Mark Kilstofte.  I see he likes the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins -- most unfortunate, as I recently added Hopkins oeuvre to my list of settable texts.  Darn it:  Must.  Quickly.  Discover.  New.  Poets.

This is old news, but I enjoyed the ironies in the story of Nine Inch Nails' viral marketing campaign, which was a huge success until a bunch of mindless jerks at RIAA decided to cut it off at the knees.

Finally, once you consider the french horn's origins as a hunting accessory, you realize it would be odd if a symphonic horn player did not have guns and explosives in his possession.

Labels: Composer

Golijov is coming to town this Friday for a talk and I will be in attendance, osmotically absorbing all the composerly wisdom I can.  In the meantime, this guy has the same problem as me, and his blog has one of the strangest tag lines I've ever seen.

Labels: Composer

Der Drübermensch, still shy of his seventh birthday, asked for permission to play around with Finale, the music manuscripting software I use.  Naturally I jumped at the chance to let him compose, even though I suspected his interest was on the level of "one more way to have fun manipulating stuff on the computer screen," which is his most favorite activity.

I now present to you the result of this burst of creativity, which he entitled Drew's First Piece.  As you look through the score (click on the image for the whole thing in pdf) you will no doubt realize, as I did, that we are in the presence of a once-in-a-generation musical genius.

You might think that Der Drübermensch's artistic intent is focused on creating a musical score as its own, self-contained aesthetic artifact.  The dismayingly unplayable notes would lead you to think that.  It's an artistic choice that is not exactly unprecedented, yet this example is noteworthy for the courageous rigor of its application.  The difficultly goes well beyond the decision to give a high A to the tenor's first entrance in measure four; by measure seven, he calls for three tenors to sing a cluster on 64th notes at the extreme upper end of their tessitura.  I wonder if Der Drübermensch could find three tenors in the entire state of Michigan willing to take on these parts.

It gets worse; by measure eleven, the tubas are also playing impossible leaps, occurring on 64th notes, which are brutally difficult if we assume a moderato tempo.  (It would seem the 64th note is a signature of the young genius' emerging style.)  We haven't seen such boldness in writing for this instrument since Alex Ross' ground-breaking work.

Go back to the previous example:  notice the "useless" rests in the double bass part.  Can we be so sure they have no function?  Who is to say what subtle difference the counting of those rests would have on a live performance?  Indeed, this is where I begin to suspect my son is engaged in a game far subtler than we can imagine.  So what if we are decades or centuries away from producing virtuosos capable of playing this score?  If Der Drübermensch hears an ending of great dramatic power, he's going to write an ending of great dramatic power, and the tuba players can go suck eggs if they can't play it:

(Low brass players have a reputation for wussiness anyway, so we can discount their whining.)

I am ready to conclude that this score reveals to us the most uncompromising artistic visionary in the history of the world.  I am deeply humbled to have fathered and trained this young maestro.  It is clear he has nothing more to learn from me or anyone else.  I hereby release him to the world.  No need to thank me.

Labels: Composer, fun

How appropriate that the first image out of my new scanner was a portrait of J. S. Bach.  The father of modern music!

It was my first piano teacher that turned me into a musician, a woman who also happened to be my mother.  She probably doesn't realize it, but one used book she picked up at at library sale somewhere provided the starting point for all my musical efforts, such as they have been.  The book was titled A Child's Book of Famous Composers, and it contained brief biographies of about a dozen composers.  Only the very greatest musical geniuses made the cut:  J. S. Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven, Stephen Foster, you know, guys like that.

The Three Bs:  Bach, Beethoven and, uh, Bfoster.

Each composer got his own chapter, with a full-page portrait and a unique tag line that encapsulated his place in music history.  Mozart was "The Wonder Child."  J. S. Bach was "The Father of Modern Music," which to my mature judgment seems remarkably off-mark.  Bach's influence was subtle and slow to develop, and stylistically he was retrograde, so he never had a Rite of Spring moment and never formed the vanguard of any movement, which is what "father of" seems to imply.  Oh well, I'm paying way too much attention to an obscure, unimportant kid's book that went out of print decades ago.

Except it is not unimportant to me, because as soon as I read that book, the mantle of my destiny settled upon my shoulders:  I knew it was my life's mission to make future editions of that book include a chapter about me.  For a moment, let's overlook that I don't have a chance of making the cut.  Let's overlook the problems we cause when we label a handful of composers as "great" and forget the rest.  Let's especially overlook that this obscure book never had a snowball's chance in Albuquerque of getting a second edition.  The main thing is that I received a life mission that day, all those years ago.  Because of it, sometimes I have made foolish choices and dreamed foolish dreams, but for the most part it has been a blessing, a charism.  Thanks, God.  Thanks, mom.

Labels: Composer

Der Drübermensch had graduated from improviser to composer.  He's been making up melodies on the piano for a while, but now he has done something special:  he played this tune one day, then played it again the next day, exactly the same way.  (Did I mention he's only six?)

Having finished with the exposition, he has now moved on to the development section:  he's playing it in Dorian and Aeolian modes.  I can't wait to find out how he works his way back to the recapitulation.

Ah, the power of the notational tradition in western classical music:  find some beautiful, living object -- and embed it in Lucite for all eternity!  I love it!  These exclamation points signal my irony and ambivalence!  Causing you to wonder what my real point is!

Labels: Composer, CuteKid