i'm not dead

It's been a while, I know.

Some reasons I've been failing to blog a lot recently:

1. There is a lot going on in the world right now a bit more important than anything I can contribute. Because I was too young to fully grasp the collapse of Soviet Communism in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and because Western media whitewashed the Balkan wars in the mid '90s (and widespread Internet access and a 24-hour news cycle were still in their infancy), I have been paying a lot of attention - perhaps too much - to the events in recent months in Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Libya, and elsewhere in the Middle East and north of Africa. Watching history unfold before one's eyes - veritably watching the world transform (and, yes, Western diplomacy and treatment of aforementioned regions will have to change in order to keep the world peaceful and stable) - in a sense takes precedence over my fumbling discussions of music or politics, and I cannot offer any compelling commentary on topics which do not have my full attention. This is not to say I've been glued to AJE or the BBC, but the bottle of glue has been on my desk since January 25. There's also that perpetual issue of that fucker in Wisconsin and my continued disappointment with this incarnation of the Democratic party and this administration and my secret wish for a progressive-populist Primary challenger and Faithless Electors for 2012.

2. I have been doing a lot of traveling. In the past several weeks, I have been to Detroit, Memphis, Greensboro, and elsewhere for conferences, performances, or (gasp!) job interviews. To be fair, only one interview so far; I should hear back within the week. I won't bore you with details, but it's fair to say that I really want the job and I think (well, finalists for such positions always think so) I'd be a great fit for the position. Otherwise, conferences and performances take time - travel, attendance (I am someone who pays undivided attention to the topics being presented, even if I don't fully understand or agree with what's being discussed - to hell with breaking out the laptop or the smartphone during someone's talk!), getting my bearings, working with performers, and networking. I've met and have had the pleasure of working with numerous fantastic performers over the past month, many of whom want me to compose works specifically for them. While I have a few weeks of downtime before the next bout of conferences and performances, it won't be long before I'm on the road or in the airplane again meeting fantastic people across the country - and right in my figurative backyard.

3. I have been writing, or trying to. I have a backlog of projects, and still many older pieces that need retouching before I release them into the world and put them in the hands of performers. A lot of my time recently has been used to organize older sketches, continue work on a piece for sax orchestra and get a sax/MAX and tenor/trumpet/organ works underway, and come up with a 15-month plan (arbitrary but not) for organizing and beginning/finishing projects. Naturally, when I meet one of the best violinists I've ever heard who asks me to compose a piece for solo violin, that project gets bumped ahead of projected larger chamber or orchestral/wind band works. Imminent performance is a much better motivator than a 1 in 500 chance of getting an ACO orchestral reading.

4. I have been applying to practically every composition or theory/composition posting I see. While I've only received three bites - well, one bite and two nibbles - this cycle, this is all in all a better hiring/job cycle than last year's, by a long shot. I think at this point I have applied for 44 academic or para-academic positions, skipping only five positions I knew about (Wesleyan, because, well, no way in hell I can replace Alvin Lucier; two community colleges; Towson, because it was clear they wanted a senior god faculty; and a religious college I won't name that asked if I smoked/drank/had premarital sex and why¹). One interview out of 44 positions, though not enviable, isn't bad by this industry's standards (where there are as many as 200 applicants per position), but given this is almost twice as many positions as opened up in total last cycle - and the cycle still has a few months of life in it - I feel a little better about my chances this year. As such, though, tweaking and rewriting cover letters, tweaking and updating vitas, running scores and CDs, and filling out online applications (which, let's be honest, should be streamlined and centralized into a common app!), soliciting or ordering reference letters to actually finding the job postings: all of this takes time. Some weeks I've completed as many as 6 applications, and, granted each app can take up to 6 hours to prepare, this can be time-consuming. This does not take into account my fruitless searches thus far for temporary, legitimate employ in the interim, which brings its own troubles and time-consumption.

4B. Interview prep brings its own troubles and rewards. In the spirit of rather being overprepared and having to scale back than being underprepared and appearing foolish, many days in February were devoted to researching (and relearning) some aspects of my field and making sure I was ready: from proper question-phrasing, to cogent teaching methods, to remembering what I wrote in my supplemental docket, I made sure I was well-prepared to do as well as possible in my interview without it being forced or inauthentic. The interview itself had its twists and turns, but I ultimately felt in some sense a bit overprepared, which is probably for the best. At any rate, learning piano pieces and doing my own analyses (before raiding JSTOR for pre-existing analyses), creating presentations, and practicing speaking in front of a mirror (because, god love 'em, the hogs on the farm just don't appreciate Bartok) also takes time away from blogging. My druthers are clear.

5. I have been ill. Those of you who know me well know that I have a chronic (though rare-to-manifest and generally negligible) neurological impairment. It has been acting out a bit more these past few months, and in the spirit of the ailment, I have had numerous migraines and have had some occasionally severe kidney problems since mid December. Don't fret! I'm by and large fine, but the unpredictability has thrown me curveballs at unfavorable times. While resources are slim, I have visited with doctors and I do have a modicum of medication to assist when needed. It's kept me at bay occasionally, but a few of my longer previous posts and a fair amount of musical sketches happened from my bed (this sounds like I am forever bedridden: yes, if two weeks total out of 10 is your definition of bedridden; it is not my definition). However, and this is the public service announcement, water is your friend - and, driving at night on a poorly-lit highway with a migraine aura is not your friend. (To those of you who get here from Facebook or other social media: it's much easier to throw a link up or type 100 characters mindlessly about something than it is to discuss in earnest a complicated topic. Don't be fooled by my prolific stature elsewhere!)

So, hopefully, for those of you coming back often to see if I'm still breathing, I am. Just, as I'm sure you understand, other things take precedence. As much as I like rambling about things or writing about music (not mutually inclusive), my creative agenda is first and foremost composing and striving for performances, and my financial/personal agenda is getting back into higher ed after a short (LONG!) hiatus from it.

Don't begrudge. I'll put things here occasionally. Maybe soon an update on my piece progress and new/exciting piece/project developments. Joy!

***

1. This is not a boast, but my answer to all three is "yes." Rather, while I understand a private, sectarian institution can (and will) maintain ties to its principles and challenge its applicants to do the same, I find this unethical for a variety of reasons and places the applicant on the defensive for what are, ultimately, personal choices that rarely, if ever, have bearing upon performance in a classroom or other academic setting. I listen to Judas Priest and Opeth. Does this make me more likely to engage in ritual human sacrifice? Hardly. I'm a vegetarian. Have I ever slapped the turkey out of someone's sandwich? Never. Does having a beer with dinner once every few weeks make me an alcoholic? Clinically and socially, unequivocally no. Does this application in question at least open the door for inference? That is, by answering yes, will the committee think I'm an alcoholic, and addict, a satyr? This is laughable and absurd monochromatic thinking, and puritanical approaches are responsible for a lot of blood. By answering yes, will it point me out as someone who engages in risky behavior? Well, yes, on all accounts, but, come on. I'm a composer - I'm already engaging in risky behavior. The rest is just filler.

thoughts on process

Note: I've taken a break from posting new entries over the past week as my time has been equally split between composing and watching Al Jazeera's coverage of the Lotus Revolution (or so it has been dubbed by Saad Ibrahim) unfolding in Alexandria, Cairo, and Suez. Watching a populist revolt and all-but-overthrow of a tyrant takes precedence over slathering my nonsensical musings all over the Internet.

Nonetheless, I don't want it to look like I've abandoned this blog (again), and I'll bring you a few more entries this week. The first one deals with process, or, rather, my process of late when composing multimovement works. Later this week, I'll bring you such nuggets as a long-overdue record review (haven't written one in a while), and a comparison between 3D video technology, air traffic control, and electroacoustic music. Other entries, of course, ad libitum, including more thoughts on multimovement work.

I write long pieces. Let me just get that out there. Granted, not all of of my works are long. I have a fair number of works that clock in under the industry-standard (and contest-standard) ten-minute mark. I just happen to be a composer who, despite idolizing Ravel's music in my early years, never took to heart Ravel's repeated statements railing against - gently or not - excessive development.¹ There are some reasons for this, but I won't get into all of them here. The biggest reason, perhaps, comes out of my process: I envision multimovement works much more easily than I do single-movement forms.²

Part of this is associated with my process, or one that I've seen develop over the past few years regarding multimovement works. When I started composing, and for the next eight or so years until an epistemological and stylistic shift about five years ago, I started working on a piece from the beginning and went straight to the end. I collected my sketches, started at the first measure of the first movement and progressed linearly until the very end of the piece came about. Over my last few multimovement works (the viola concerto, inflection points, and so forth), I have noticed a trend: after sketches get set down, the sketches becoming more like fragmentary pieces of a jigsaw puzzle to reconfigure and reshape - is it cheating to cut off the nibs and corners? - I tend to start writing chunks of the first movement, and then set it aside and start working on the second or other internal movements, leaving those sketches somewhat fragmentary. Typically, the final movement is the first movement to come to fruition in full without serious immediate revision or clean-up; the interior movement(s) ends up being the one I work on last. Somewhere in the middle remains the first movement. Gone are the days of writing perfectly linearly and going back to repair the damage, linearly. (Please note that I do remain faithful, largely, to primordial conceptions of form and design in pieces and that I do typically conceive of a structure - which I treat as fairly liquid - before I put the piece together.)

This does a few things conceptually and intellectually. Intellectually, it seems to make the piece much more organic and holistic, and creates a stronger sense of unity across movements. By using materials derived from a chunk (typically the opening) of the opening movement, the final movement presents all of the possible materials in a largely developed form, and I can take those materials - including those established on the fly for transitional or contrasting passages - and use those to create the interior movement or movements, as well as presenting prototypical (or developed) forms of the material in the opening movement.

The problem I had with composing linearly was that I didn't know where to go: I didn't know how to finish a multimovement work, and I doggedly, indefatigably kept up writing in the start-to-finish manner that seemed too formulaic and seemed to exhaust me. Moreover, looking at my earlier multimovement forms in depth (which I am not wont to do, believe me) shows a sort of thematic wandering: pitch systems may remain the same, rhythmic mottoes may remain if only subtly, but new material would pop up in the first movement that wouldn't show up anywhere else; or, worse, new material would arise in the final portion of the work and seem to be unrelated or only tangentially related to other material, which often made the work seem unfocused or unpolished.

Since I'm prone to writing multimovement works - and am at work at several such pieces simultaneously at the moment - the new system I fell into intuitively seems to work much better: the finished works seem much more unified, and the dramatic arc of the work seems to be much more satisfying: there's a greater sense of departure and return.

This process seems to do something else as well: it limits me from going overboard with material. When composing fully linearly, I had the tendency in early drafts of pieces to just, well, take off in a straight line, tornado-like, gathering up more and more and more material and dispensing with too much, too liberally. Oddly enough, this is not at all how I approach electroacoustic works. With the exception of critical mass, my giant 40-minute-plus fixed media sonic rant, my entire goal is to use as few source materials as possible when composing a stereo, quad, or 8-channel work. My intermedia pieces (so far) rely only on the sounds made by the performer, whether recorded or processed live. There's plenty I can do with a seventeen-second sample of a garbage truck. When writing acoustic or conventional music, in the days of old, I would fill sheet after sheet of staff paper with ideas and try to pick and choose. Perhaps it's discipline, perhaps it's something else; still, it's always been easier for me to derive from extant material, to expand small pieces of material and ideas, than it is to pick and choose from a plethora of ideas and considerations.

Retrospectively, this seems like a no-brainer: approach composing like a trade-paperback suspense novel. Come up with a solid opening; using these ideas and themes, arrive at an ending that seems to tie up all the loose ends. Go back and fill everything else in. But, I don't think a lot of composers, especially younger ones, know or understand that they can write pieces "out of order". So far, it's worked well for me. Best of all, it seems to help expedite composing: the pieces of that jigsaw fall into place much more easily, but not in a formulaic fashion, and much more quickly once the pieces gather inertia.

Thoughts? I've thought about the idea of trying to write a piece starting from the middle, or pulling a Steven King and writing backward. I also have other ideas using sheer process procedures to create forms, but perhaps later: the primary consideration is creating a musically sound (no pun intended), appealing, smart piece that challenges everyone in the room. Once I manage to do that, I'll start toying with different means of creating works.

*****

1. Despite his own objections to developing themes and motives, and while he was a strident formal classicist, I can't see repeated thematic presentations and reorchestrations of themes in Daphnis et Chloë, at the very least, as anything but forms of development. But that's an intellectual conversation for another time.
2. I plan on talking about multimovement forms and their place and necessity later on. Stay tuned! Maybe?

who are you, and what are you doing here?

When I meet someone new, and they ask what I do, and I respond that I'm a composer, the conversation typically takes an awkward turn, if it doesn't simply go moribund at that exact moment.

The following are mentally-noted excerpts of initial conversations I have had with countless people.

Case Number 1:

I'm a composer.
Oh... So, you write music?
(taken slightly aback) Yes... Yes, I do.

[if the conversation continues here, this is usually what happens]

So, are you in a band?
No.
Then... How do you write music?

Case Number 2:

I'm a composer.
Oh, you write music?
Yes.
What sort? Classical?

[there are far too many reasons at this critical juncture to explain the semantic nuance of the word "classical" to a person, typically lay, but I generally make that mistake, anyhow]

-OR-

What sort? Classical? Like Beethoven?

[At this point, I can't fault people for what they know. Music education in this country is abysmal, at worst, and routinely undersupported and underappreciated, at best, so I cannot hold these answers against the responders, even if I feel superbly cantankerous that day and really, really want to. The responder, in most circumstances, is at least a little earnest and attempting to meet me halfway - but can't, for reasons I theorize later.]

Case Number 3:

I'm a composer.
Oh, so... What do you play?

[see bracketed statement above]

Once in a while, I've made the conversationally-fatal mistake of doing the following:

I'm a sound artist.
[suppressing a chortle, grimace, or other facial expression as a means to remain polite] (quizzically) So, you... paint... with sound?
Well... Yes and no...

[and by this point in the conversation, I've lost them forever, unless it's that one person in 982,000 who is interested]

Composers and sound artists are the only creative artists who, I believe, have this problem of nomenclatural proportions. We are the only ones whose tasks and crafts are not etched permanently within the minds of the laypeople. What I mean is this: a person will have a general idea about what an artist does. Most visual artists I know differentiate: I'm a photographer; I'm a filmmaker; I'm a painter; I'm a sculptor. (Rarest of all species is the wily videographer.) Individuals have an exact knowledge already borne in their minds from experience with visual media about them in their daily lives and from the education obtained - typically informally - over their lifespan. The same could be said for the literary arts: individuals make automatic, instantaneous connections, conscious and unconscious, and cognitive leaps to envision what it is a writer does, what a playwright does, what a poet does, what a journalist does. There is even a prompting for differentiation from the uninitiated party: they may, and frequently do, ask the "writer" if they write fiction or non-fiction, short stories or novels, biographies, or (erroneously) poems or plays. There is a kernel of truth within every reasonably-educated person's mind about what each of these occupations entail.

The biggest problem, I think, is not that composers don't reach out to audiences: I think the problem is visual, primarily. This isn't to belittle other things, but from a purely cognitive standpoint, it's major. We have etched into our brains and popular imagination via film and TV and museums the sight of Jackson Pollock painting. We have the sight of photographs themselves - we don't need to see Avedon or Ray, but we have their work. We have footage of visual artists creating, of filmmakers peering through their viewfinders, of sculptors turning pottery wheels or wielding welding torches or chiseling away at stone. Obviously, humans are much more visual animals (unfortunately) than sonic or auditory ones, but that's really subservient to the idea that we have very little footage of composers in the process of creation. The few we have are iconic but all staged: Stravinsky peering into a score, Bruno Maderna poring over a score while chain-smoking and listening to a rehearsal. The most famous portraits of Ravel, Debussy, and Ligeti, for example, may have them at the piano, but this is mere suggestion - and at least in Ligeti's case, many of his famous photographs are emblematic of the typical visual representation of composers: wholly divorced from the act of creation, clad in a cardigan or suit, in the company of other composers, or at some symposium, or in a context removed in sum from the act of composing. I know of no footage that has made it into the pantheon of artistic documentation that shows a composer actually changing pitches or trying out motives on a violin. Of course, the fact that those few (though elaborated) portraits of composers at work exhibit composers with lines of strain in their faces, hunched over score paper in what looks like dim or unforgiving conditions does us no favours, either. Admittedly, my favorite depiction of Hindemith is one of Papa Paul playing viola - not composing; it goes without saying, too, that the most remembered and easily-comprehended visual renditions of Mahler are those of his conducting - despite being the last great post-Romantic voice.

There is, too, paradoxically a visual element that completely does not work in our favor: that is to say, a printed score. Without invoking the hoary discussion of whether it's a universal language, printed music in the Western tradition is an elitist language: it's the Latin of art forms. Few can read it passibly, and fewer still can tease out all of the nuance and delicacy in an interpretive manner that commands respect. I want to make clear that I am speaking of the entire Western population as whole, and the actual reading of music - not performing or the auditory transmission of music. I want to democratize the ability to reach a literacy level in music, as do music educators everywhere, but our resources are meager and our ability to make inroads is kept constrained. So, the ability to read music beyond a very rudimentary level still belongs to only a comparative few. While I bemoan the fact that we still in 2011 do not have universal literacy, 99% or so in the United States ain't bad. And, yes, many of the same problems of subtlety and intricacy exist in written language, but there are a few sociolinguistic and developmental factors at play: there is constant speech around us; we all have a base-level literacy and, evolutionarily, are much more easily adapted to learn and relearn spoken language when confronted with a visual analog if and only if there has been adequate exposure before a certain age; words, despite the many ways can be wielded, have exact definitions that are made contextually clearer in writing; everyone is taught to read (under normal circumstances); everyone is taught to write.

There is, of course, a visual-accessibility component, as well, which is fairly obvious: transmission and mutability. I can pick up a pencil and write a poem. It will most likely be awful. Same deal as with a short story. But I have a base level knowledge of rhythm, diction, syntax. I can write. I can pick up a book and read it. I can take the book with me anywhere. I put the score for Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra in my father's hand, and he can do nothing with it until he hears the recording or performance - and even then, the score does him no good.

This lack of visual-cognitive stimulus is even more pronounced when we get into electroacoustic music - a subject too big for this blog post. (Though not for a future one!)

We also - collectively, as trained musicians in the Western tradition - lack a vernacular common to experience that will allow us to communicate succinctly and efficiently without either speaking beyond the layperson's knowledge or experience, or - worse - insulting them by toning down and diluting how we describe what we do, why we do it, and what sort of art we make. Say what you will about untrained folks discussing visual art - I count myself among these - or, even better, film: there is an accessibility level of describing some technical aspects (I will not say all) that arises organically, almost generically, from repeated contact and experience and from limited visual art education or bits and pieces learnt along the way. I see brushstrokes on a canvas and can describe them as such; I may not know the proper technical terms beyond "vanishing point" in a landscape painting, but I can remark on something approximating it. At the very basic level, the elementary particles of visual art can be discussed almost universally. We don't have that ability in music or sound art. We end up with onomatopoeia or end up discussing visceralities or emotionalities rather than the sounds or music themselves. Certainly, these reactions are valid - but if we're talking about a Miró painting, we have exact language to describe it. Exact language in the world of music happens to be argot.

Debatable to an extent, the dimension of time itself is the only plane of existence for music and sonic art. We create a representation of thought which in turn becomes a simulation of a representation in performance or on a recording; divergent as those two could be, they are essentially the second status of removal from origin; we have the listener's memory, whose variety is mathematically wild; we have the retransmission from the listener in some fragmentary manner. And it all exists within primarily the realm of time. We have the object (score or recording or...) in our hands, but it is indeed just an object-intermediary. The visual aspect has zero bearing. The auditory aspect does have bearing, but it is not frozen in dimensionality, not firmly rooted to a place or a singular moment - a painting, a sculpture (especially a mediocre one), a visual referent: this is something permanently etched and tied to a place, a moment, a history. It can exist anytime; I can recall them at will now, and now, and now. A Takemitsu chamber work? It has to unfold. It takes time. And that's all it takes.

Which leads me back to why I decided to muse over this initially. There is no set visual re-cognition of the composer, her craft, or her process, or her end result. Aside form the transmission issues, lack of more holistic education about what composers do, lack of exposure of of newer - much newer - artistic trends in art music, and lack of visual elements in the composer's art, what else am I missing?

Other than the composer himself, who may or may not be able to communicate effectively what he does, regardless the pseudo-romantic images a layperson may see, regardless the naive and hurtful stereotype that a small but vocal minority has about composers (and musicians in general) being deadbeats, the responsibility doesn't lie completely with the lay audience or everyday people: it lies within the musical community as a whole to, without exoticization, exhibit composers as often as possible¹, encourage composers to take more active roles in orchestras, schools, and the like (there is only so much composer-fostered groups of composers can do, for obvious auditory-transmission reasons), and (this is the killer) somehow place composers alongside writers and visual artists in the public eye (pun intended) (and with no intent to disparage or remove renown from artists in different media) and allow them to receive respect and due credit - first, from the musicians who perform their work (I think here of a relatively recent orchestra commission where the composer was given billing far below a featured soloist, no headshot, no introduction or pre-concert talk - way to go!); secondly, from educators (and this is not accusatory to educators, but pleading for those who shape curricula); thirdly, from an investment by listeners and the general public; and, finally, from composers ourselves. It's hard to make listeners and audiences believe us, understand us, support us, tolerate our existence, and appreciate us when we have to explain exactly what it is we do in an almost-defensive manner. It's hard to justify our existences when a wide swath of Americans don't know we exist to begin with and are then skeptical of our cultural place.

I know I leave out a lot in this discussion, but something tells me we're not done discussing this yet. I am, right here and now, but as a culture, we've got some speaking yet left in front of us.

I would like, though, in the future, to have a conversation with someone new and not have to explain what it is that I do as a defense mechanism or to clarify doubt; I'd like to explain it meaningfully, beyond eradicating uncertainty, and allow it to just be part of my identity - and not a conversational or interpersonal liability.

***

1. But not in ways that force the composer to spend down the entirety of his savings account when, without the composer, there is no performer, and there is no audience, and there is no art.

this might take a while

I've been thinking for a while on the subject of revising pieces and what the process of revision, for me, entails, but didn't start crystallizing my thoughts until I read a recent piece by my colleague Joe Eidson.

Stravinsky revised works - despite any grandiose claims to the contrary - in order to stay ahead of copyright law curves. Brahms was a frequent reviser of completed works, predominantly in order to rectify juvenile indiscretions, as he put it, and clarify rhythms. Messiaen rarely revised works, favoring a process of slow, complete, thoughtful work that would be satisfactory. Villa Lobos never revised - it is a shame he and poet Frank O'Hara never crossed paths. Duparc would revise the same work for years before releasing it to the wider world. Other extreme examples are in the forms of Sibelius or Barber, who burned earlier works or demanded unsatisfactory works withdrawn. Hovhaness went so far as to destroy every work he composed during his student period, dissatisfied with his output and criticisms from peers and teachers.

Upon reflection, I safely do not belong to any of these camps. Revising, for me, has a peculiar twofold definition: the first dimension of this is the perennial divide - and internal battle between - of "pencil" versus "engraver;" the second aspect is a consideration of when, and how, or if, a work becomes complete.

Like every composer who started writing before home computers and cheap keyboards became commonplace, my first works were wrought by paper and pencil, and the final version (or in intrepid days, the first!) became ink and paper. Moving forward fifteen years, all of my pieces still start life on paper, but very few end their lives that way. Still, I have a handful of works - primarily solo or small chamber works - that are not performance-ready as they are still in my admittedly disheveled handwriting, and they have remained on the shelf for years. I have returned to a few of these, and in the process of entering them into engravers in order to create a legible meekness as opposed to an illegible tawdriness, I have made changes to content, motives, pitches, or rhythms; in a few extreme examples (see this post of mine, especially regarding a future "violin and piano" work), I have completely reworked the material, or added a substantial amount in order to radically alter the scope or focus or purpose of the work. This has been the case, though, for a few direct-to-engraver works of mine as well: every few years 'round submission-time for contests, I'll see some glaring, if only cosmetic, errors in a work in need of correction.

This opens up a few questions for consideration: what needs correcting? what am I comfortable releasing to the wider world? is there a window of time acceptable as a difference between when the pencil first hits the paper and when a performer receives the score? Obviously, cosmetic blemishes need attention: a slightly-misplaced dynamic marking, adding additional performance directions, shifting the placement of a hairpin... these are all small things to take care of (I'm not big on tedium.) Whether a melodic line needs resculpting or a harmonic sentence needs clarification is far less immediately apparent and much more intuitive, and this depends upon how much time I spend in the process of putting lipstick on a pig. I do have a number of works that have sat in "completed" pencil-sketch form - works I'm sure I could pass in front of performers and enjoy performances without having to wrest away the sounds - for many years, some as old as 8 years. Should I just withdraw these works and pretend they never happened? No: in short, this would deny I ever attempted to create the work; further, there may come the time when I finally do have the necessity to edit or "complete" the works electronically. Yes, this inhibits my ability to get some performances - but not tremendously so, and with odd combinations like harp, flute, percussion, and piano, my performance chances are only slightly diminished by having a penciled-in score rather than an engraved PDF. This is not to say, however, that even works completed in Finale are veritably complete.

So, what is complete? Is it, as I was taught to think, that a piece is complete when I am satisfied with the shape, the pacing, the dramatic curve, the orchestration? Or is it finished when every dynamic marking is 8 pixels south and 3 pixels west of its corresponding notehead; is it finished when every solitary machination of engraving is done? Is it complete once we have a performance and are satisfied that there is nothing to rectify or redo? When is it possible to set aside the score and assume that lessons learned from Piece A should be applied to Piece B instead of taking said lessons and reinserting them to fix the errors, small as they are, in Piece A? Idiosyncratically, complete is when I get tired of fidgeting with the details of the work, when it is clear to me that the energy spent in rectifying some perceived sonic or notational injustices would be better served working on some other project. This varies, piece to piece, considering many of the factors above as well as the plain intangible of how proud I am of the work, especially if I'm privileged to hear a performance of it or work closely with its performers. Dealing with electroacoustic music, there is a bit of a difference - all of the work aside from loose sketches happens within the machine, and revisions are more concerned with how I control and use the space - there's no going back on source material or re-producing sounds - with a few attempts in my time to retrofit stereophonic works for 4 or 8 channels (but never in reverse).

I also routinely, casually, and perhaps cavalierly apply the term "revision" to practically any piece underway (this can number from 5 to 20, depending on how honest I'm feeling that day) that has lain dormant for more than a few weeks, so there's that.

As I've previously mentioned, each of my pieces that comes to some sort of finality of presence is like one of my creative offspring, and at some point I have to let go, no matter how disappointed I am in how it turned out. For this reason alone, I may end up either the world's best or worst parent.

What will I compose in 2011? Good question: I'm not sure, either.

Project Status Update, January 2011

It appears as though the last third of 2010 did not see as fruitful a finish as I had hoped. I encountered numerous stumbling blocks regarding composing, and I maintained a rather active schedule of applying to full-time teaching positions (trust me that this is somewhere between a part and full-time job in itself) and made applications to numerous contests, festivals, and conferences, with fair to middling success.

At the end of September, I completed seven selected snapshots of a lingering spectre for violin and piano (score available here - click on Works > Chamber), but am still waiting on finding a venue for performance as well as performers. I have a few leads, but the future remains unwritten.

From October through the end of the year, I bounced around between a number of chamber works, a few orchestral works, and some electronic pieces. Among the completed works were deep cover, a piece I have previously discussed here, a 13-or-so-minute electroacoustic work (October; check website under Works > Fixed-Media Electronic), mage for trumpet and Max/MSP (which I will no doubt revise and make available later this year), and talking in circles before the radio explodes, a one-minute electroacoustic work composed for the 2011 VoxNovus 60x60 entry (I plan on putting this online soon).

However, that was it. It may be a symptom of not having the right material in my head, or not having concrete goals toward which I could work. Like every year, and like every composer, and dripping with some amount of cynicism, this is the year that I will catch up on my workload, both for deadline-driven works and works underway simply because I want to compose them. I haven't done a tally of works completed in 2010, but I plan on exceeding it - somehow! - in 2011.¹

So, for 2011, the following are currently underway or are shortly underway. The first collection of pieces are those I am actively working on, including deadline-driven works. The second group includes works I began last year (or earlier) and aim to complete or revise this year, after I've cleared out the deadlined works or more pressing pieces. The third group incorporates the leftovers - the "I'll get to them when I get to them" pile.²

1: SAXTET. for saxophone sextet (or orchestra, 6 parts - Soprano, Alto I, Alto II, Tenor I, Tenor II, Bari)
näck och huldra (tentative name) for solo cor anglais
the bunyip for alto sax and Max/MSP
untitled, piano/violin/clarinet
untitled, piano/violin/viola/cello

2: gravity express for orchestra
l'arbre solitaire du Ténéré for bassoon quartet
elementary particles for violin/cello/flute/clarinet (possibly piano)
los desaparecidos for orchestra
untitled, for orchestra
string quartet #1

3. trans-neptunian objects for chamber orchestra
noncey nelbly for mixed choir, text entirely nonce words
la chemin du Jerusalem for string quartet (possibly string orchestra)
untitled, work for flute choir
untitled, work for clarinet choir
vox populi, possibly multimedia, definitely fixed-media, initially
untitled (formerly "gyre"), wind ensemble
untitled (formerly and possibly "romp machine"), wind ensemble

And there you have it. That's my year ahead. And a very, very full one.

Now all I have to do is convince a college or university that my music is worthwhile, and that in exchange for stability and teaching duties, I'll crank out the pieces...

*****
1: It should be noted that during 2008 I started or revised a large number of works, but did not technically complete one. Anything is better than that - literally.
2: I wish, I wish, I wish I had enough room to list the too-many-to-count older pieces I have stacked up (still!) awaiting revision. I really have to learn how to let go and accept that some of my children will, in fact, be complete and total disappointments.

the neglected realm of contour

An area of musical theoretical analysis that does not seem to garner much press in the "serious" academic realm - unless it's paired up with a lot of quasi-fictitious mathematics and corresponding metaphysical argot - is the idea of contour. Despite the slowness of radicalization of contour within the musical academic community, there is a considerable amount of literature on issues of pitch and harmonic contour, though largely rooted in the Western canon of Common Practice. Looser motivic contour, though a touch more abstruse, has been discussed in fair amounts dealing with 20th and 21st Century music. Still, contour seems relegated to the margins of acceptable academic society. I would like to slowly facilitate changing that. In some ways - and in many ways, especially when dealing with electroacoustic music¹ - contour is the second-most recognized feature of music to a lay listener or experienced musician alike, typically behind rhythm. Listeners have a much easier time understanding when a sound moves "up" or "down", or the overall shape of a melody, than they do hearing counterpoint, harmonic rhythm, spectral density, textural shifts, or many of the other hefty details.

Ironically, perhaps, my areas of curiosity have nothing to do with pitch contour, or very little to do with it, but more to do with the more recondite aspects of music. In the coming days/weeks/whichever, I'll hopefully enter in some essays here discussing various contour approaches dealing with (at least) three specific issues, how to interpret them, and how to assess and disseminate the measurements - if possible. The key facets are as follows: spatial contour, including stereolocation, aural proprioception and kinetics, and depth perception, as both an effect and determinant in (at least) electroacoustic music; timbrel (or spectral) contour - not to be confused with harmonic contour - tracing the activity levels of "tone color" change, not least through orchestration, not most through a reappropriation of spectral density;² and, third, and possibly not last (and possibly least obscure or meta), the idea - often overlooked, I've found - of rhythmic contour: to be clear, I won't be venturing into far-too-wordy diatribes about Time, but, rather, looking at rhythm as temporally decontextualised (I know, the mind boggles, given the "standard" - often misnamed - definition of rhythm), as though waves, or as though putty that can be stretched and reshaped, and divorced from the organizational prison known as "metricization." (That's putting things in a meter or time signature.)

I really can't say how reader-friendly these essays will be; I have yet to write them. I've been thinking about these ideas for years, and, well, why not codify them now? I promise there will be pictures, pretty pictures (maybe), that do or do not have anything to do with what I'm talking about at the time. I can state with certainty that they will be long - I may or may not break them into parts.

So, in short, my apologies for leading you all on with a "coming attraction" - but with any hope, these will be good pieces of writing, and, maybe, just maybe *tears of hope in my starry eyes and oh who am I kidding I'm embittered and salty* I can eventually turn these into standalone, readable academic articles that a journal may want to publish. That is, if they're looking to put themselves out of business. ZING!

***
1. I plan on writing about problems of interpretation and analysis of electroacoustic (fixed media) work later on once I've set upon paper the beginnings of my myriad thoughts upon it. Never fear!
2. I have coined somewhere in my history the term "orchestrational velocity" and its fraternal twin "spectral velocity." I have yet to Google-search these terms to see if someone else has used them academically, and I don't care to. Just plan on seeing these terms a lot after I define them later.

in which I give too much credence to the History Channel

I’m taking a short break from what will hopefully be more posts on music and music-related matters to enter a piece of dismay toward a select population of human beings. I try not to dwell upon the foibles of my fellow sentient, carbon-based, hairless ape bipeds, but there is one in particular that is nothing more than irascible: the idea or suggestion that humans are not responsible for such things as the Pyramids, Machu Picchu, or other ancient wonders of the world, but alien beings, extraterrestrials, are.

On cable television and upon the lips of many a conspiracist there is spoken speculation rife with “proof” hailing from ancient texts that the technologies, drive, will, and inspiration to create early technological wonders and architectural feats of derring-do came from “above.” Prophets of old spoke of visions where they encountered “flying machines” or beautiful creatures that could not appear to be human upon first glance, and many a modern person has taken this out of the original contexts and decided that extraterrestrial visitors imbued us with the knowledge to break the surly bonds of earth. Stonehenge, the Pyramids, the Hanging Gardens – but especially the Pyramids – were, say these modern charlatans of human ability, not just divinely-inspired but extraterrestrially-wrought, with beings from beyond Gaia and the Solar System instructing us how to cut stone blocks precisely, fit them precisely, and orient them precisely in order to serve some astrological or astronomical purpose and to simultaneously fill our fellow human beings with an awe and reverence at the might of rulers.

The bases the current speculators have for these extra-cosmic pedagogues are thin: primarily, the absence of proof of extraterrestrial intervention, in a coup of detournement, becomes the open door for proof that it could have happened. This is akin to stating that because Toronto did not burn to the ground in 1837 does not mean there is no proof that it did not burn down in 1837. Speculators also point to the continual reverence of Sky and Solar deities across early civilizations, be they Egyptian, Vedic, or Indian. The problem here is a lack of grounding in Jung and Campbell: every early civilization created and subsequently revered solar, lunar, and celestial deities. These are universals across Civilization for the very simple reasons that solar, lunar, and celestial cycles were less understood than other natural phenomena. It sounds daringly trite, but the sky was the last unexplored (in a sense) territory of the human condition only until Montgolfier and the Wright brothers: we as a human society could not conquer it, nor tame it, nor show dominion over the actions. As early civilizations slowly progressed, more was learned about the placement of stars, the movement and phases of the moon, and so on – early mystic and mythological associations were attached to Equinoxes and Solstices, to New Moons and Full Moons, and, especially, to eclipses – which, at least with the ancient Babylonians and Chinese, were eventually categorized and compiled into cyclical predictor charts which have proved largely correct. Otherwise, it is easy to understand the naïve logic of veneration for the celestial: to use Mongolian animism as an example, the Sky itself is the overlord deity – it is largely uniform in color, has a predictable cycle, and is the only natural entity that seems to be ever present, unchanging; the only deity from which a human cannot hide. Conflating, however, the mythical mystery of the sky with the notion that physical bodies came from beyond it to give us knowledge is a grotesque denial of our own shared humanity: ingenuity.

The Old Testament and Vedic Scriptures collectively discuss visions of chariots coming down from the sky with people of import on board, sharing ideas of flying machines or tools or prophecies to which humans must heed. The prophets who wrote down or communicated otherwise these visions, these incidents, must be questioned here as well: long before the days of the FDA and NIMH, food and drink were largely replete with toxins, and those with physical or mental medical problems were, if they were from important families or high breeding, treated as prophets or mystics or soothsayers. Today, we would know these conditions by name: dementia, epilepsy, food poisoning, toxemia, and otherwise. (If they were of low breeding or not of nobility, the result is the same as today: a perceived rambling madman occupying the streetcorners of society) The visions are highly figurative, lucid or quasi-lucid hallucinations brought on by poorly-cooked food, spoiled wine, rancid water, or cerebral degeneration, and, with the floridity of the bastardization of translation and reproduction, we cannot take any of this writing literally unless we too are prepared to subscribe to vindicating and verifying occurrences and conversations had on the brink of ephemeral or permanent insanity as utter and complete truth. Those speculators who search out the early Flying Machines in Vedic scriptures supposedly wrought from the gods (confused with Aliens in this case) are as dangerous, intellectually, as Fundamentalist Dogmatics following the Abrahamic traditions. Those speculators’ mission is not far off, either: convince as many nonbelievers through the use of skepticism applied to logic as a transformative means to permanently embrace and sanctify myth as proof. We have no room for that in the study of history, theology, or science.

As already mentioned, the primary source of irksomeness I see in all of this is the absolute denial of the capabilities for human ingenuity and advancement pro se. To state as though fact and believe it as such that Alien creatures visited human beings in order to instruct them in the ways of creating ancient, massive monuments both subtly and overtly points to a fundamental difference in how I and these speculators approach humanity. We are capable of detecting patterns – even domesticated and wild animals detect and sense patterns – and figuring out ways of prediction. We are capable of demonstrating mathematical and technological advances as means to improve our lot as societies. We are capable of creating a culture and lifeways that record and exhort our past and present. It took a few hundred thousand years, but humans eventually figured out how to create fire. It took tens of thousands of years after that, but after generational observations of growth rates of plants and water cycles, we began cultivating our own food and domesticating animals. It took a while, but we developed mathematics. It took a while, but we figured out how to shelter ourselves from the elements. It took a while, but we eventually started assigning mythical and mystical meanings to the world around us – only after we were able to come up with free time and grow to a critical mass that would allow for a creative class of human beings. To suggest that we as a Civilization would never have the ability to create architectural wonders, be they in total vanity or for sacredness, or make technological leaps, to sanctimoniously state that we needed help, has wide-ranging ramifications on our status as human beings now, providing us with an escape mechanism to blame esoteric entities for our perceived, short-term failures as a society, enabling us to think that we are not capable of discovery and innovation, and giving credence to a mental subjugation that has held back advancement and which allows human beings to settle for less. The centralized message, in a sense, is to be espied no differently from core messages of Organized Religions: you are powerless, and you are simply too stupid to solve your own problems and too naïve and cognitively bankrupt to create anew, because The Beyond is the only realm from which inspiration and safety come. The most disturbing and underlying thought here is that humans are not responsible for their own creations. The implications of this statement are all-encompassing, exempting us from any sort of obligation to ourselves, each other, or our own world. This is a powerful sentiment that allows a belief in the anarchic, an allowance for coldness and total detachment from our own actions, an allowance for complete and total disillusionment and despair in the capabilities of humanity.

This is not to begrudge belief – or, rather, Belief. I do not deny the power of it: it is a powerful solace, one that allows us to seek momentary refuge from the antipode of human innovation and creation: destruction and misery wrought by ourselves against ourselves. No matter how rationally and logically grounded we may be, we encounter moments of pure, visceral, incomprehensible pain or worry or loss – our natural instinct is to find answers, to engineer explanations, to invent solace for ourselves during the darkest moments until we are settled enough to reunite with our cogency. But the dependence upon Belief outside of these austere confines promulgates the acceptance of an unseen, indiscriminate authority through which all our actions must be judged and all our movements monitored. Supplication to this perpetual surveillance in an unhealthy manner again permits us to bolt shut the doors of belief in other human beings, the notion that humans can (and do) work jointly in order to solve, engineer, create, and progress.

As such, it is important for those who yield to the blind authority of extraterrestrial speculation to understand that their common ancestry with irrational Religious Fanaticism is pernicious – both rationally and scientifically. To hear the statement “aliens did not teach the Egyptians how to build the Pyramids” and retort “who is to say they didn’t?” is the basest, lowest form of illogic, of creating proof out of the absence of proof. To elevate extrasolar interventionism as the means of our Civilization’s developmental grace is to adhere to statements precluding our ingenuity and reasoning, and is to allow philosophical bases of anti-humanism to take root. It denies our past as problem-solvers, and our future as problem-solvers.

But, then, maybe the little green men will come back and tell us how to fix all our current broken systems since we’re having a difficult time, collectively, correcting the errors and uniting Civilization to correct the errors, despite plenty of evidence pointing to eventual disasters regarding climate, politics, wealth, access to water, and so on. In the meantime, let’s kick back and wait for outside assistance.

in which I awkwardly tackle the awkward analogues of dating and academic job-hunting

Anyone who has found themselves in the befuddlement of dating a new person knows the sentiments too well: a racing mind, loss of verbal dexterity, awkward small gestures that seem to be ill-timed. We are at our most vulnerable, in a way: we are anxious to please, to impress, to flatter and be flattered. We put ourselves on display, unlike we would in everyday life. We speak either haphazardly or in gaseous bursts of verbosity, out of synchrony with the cadence of normal verbal relationships with everyone else in the universe. We festoon ourselves (metaphorically, one hopes) with every award and merit we have earned, and shrink and recoil in horror once the chink in the armour is found – when that happens (note that I did not say “if”), we launch into damage-control overdrive: deflection, denial, denunciation. We have to be the best. We tell ourselves so. We want to believe it. We neither want to be lugubrious nor overly garrulous on the date. We want to somehow, if things seem like they would work out well, continue this relationship. If we really covet the potential relationship, it makes interactions with others who share our interest in the objet d’amour difficult, if not awkward.

Some things happen before we get to that point, before we get to the BBQ restaurant only to learn they’re a vegetarian – or, worse, from Lexington. We try to learn about the person as much as possible from friends, family, Facebook, other web presences. The diaphanously fine line between “Stalking” and “Earnest Interest” haunts us. We want to know with whom we’re dealing, with whom we’re speaking, at this momentous (or, typically, not-so-much) event. We ask around. We submit ourselves for approval, beseeching all mutual acquaintances to promote us as fine candidates, as wonderful picks, as someone whose interests will match theirs.

When we encounter an announcement for a faculty position, we automatically start reading everything the institution displays about itself through its propaganda machine: FTE counts, mission, values, history, vision, master plans, sanitized student experiences. We also seek out – something we seem to rarely do leading up to a date, but should – the accounts of students and personnel who have a less rosy view of things, or, anyhow, a much more substantially thorough experience. We craft, or attempt to if this is the 90th letter of the cycle, a cover letter painting us in vibrant, glowing hues, lavishing praise upon the college or university and finding ways to paint, in subtle tints, our ways into the hearts of the search committee through how our mutual interests meet up. We create a CV specific to the position, highlighting as many successes as possible without looking like a peacock without feathers attempting colorful braggadocio. We try to strike a balance between looking like we have potential (if we aim for junior faculty positions), and showing some maturity and modesty (if we have 5 or more years of teaching behind us and are aiming more toward tenure-track). We submit samples of our work as a means to talk ourselves up to the committee – which, while it should be liberating, is often the most frustrating and panic-inducing part: our creative work reflects the deepest traits of ourselves, and to face rejection based upon that is a feeling none of us ever wants to experience (again) (for the 73rd time). We do not readily see our own faults unless we ardently seek them; those objective committee members – our courtship guardians – see the flaws immediately.

And, we do this multiple times a season if we are actively seeking a faculty position. At current, I have applied to 37 positions since September 2010. Thirty-seven times I have opened myself up to complete and total criticism, where, as in a crowded bar or rock show, the guy to my left has a just-slightly-nicer lantern jaw, and the guy to my right has slightly-more-piercing blue eyes. The guy behind me makes no secret of his love affair with his Bowflex and wastrel P90 workout videos; the guy in front of me has a just-so-slightly more loveable laugh and more richly modulated voice. I stand no chance with the adorable Tina Fey lookalike next to me. And, like the desperado for work that I am, I submit myself to the approval of dozens rather than one, with hopes that, honestly, one of them has some semblance of pity in me, or some sort of psychic connection takes hold before reality sets in.

This is not to say I personally am without merits. My vita sports some high marks, both academically and professionally. My teaching record is solid and I can produce course evaluations, both quantitative and qualitative, that prove to some measure that I largely know my way around pedagogy. While in grad school and undergrad, I was a highly-decorated student. I’ve had unsolicited performances in three continents. My vita continues to expand, albeit slowly. But – and I can say this with certainty as this was the case with at least one position – there is always that one person just slightly more advanced in some way than I am, that one person who either exudes perfect confidence without besmirching decorum, or has just a little something more on their vita that makes them a little more attractive. Aviator glasses versus stylish RayBan frames; a pullover versus a cashmere sweater; two articles published versus three; someone without a firm dissertation defense date versus an ABD applicant with a defense looming near. One position for which I applied saw me rejected on the basis of having, precisely, one fewer publication than the ultimate candidate – other than that, our vitas at the time were identical.¹

Then there is awkwardness that comes from the elephant in the room: you and everyone else in your discipline, if they are end-stage PhD candidates or fresh doctors or unhappy in their current adjunct position, are applying for all the same positions. At the very least, the same 90% of them. Accosting this in conversation is delicate and recalls the discomfited stammering chat with a close friend on Monday morning: “Oh, so… you dated her, too? Are… are you going on a … you know, another? Because, well… you know…” We all know it. I completed my doctorate in the Spring of 2010, along with a host of colleagues and acquaintances. There are ABD students nipping at my heels who will leave the combine either this May or next December. Yet we act as though we all are applying for separate positions. The same Southern Ohio College position I apply for just can’t be the same one Bill or Jack is applying for. Just. Can’t. It is indeed a weird position of denial in which to find oneself, but it’s a very-much-true position. We don’t discuss it, either out of respect harvested from the fields of our own misgivings and notions of inferiority, or out of disinterest in yielding to a head-on onslaught of competition. I breathe a sigh of relief when I find out a colleague isn’t applying for the same position I am; I start muttering and figuring out how I’m going to survive the cut if a friend states they applied for a position I really covet. The worst awkwardness comes when one party reveals they’ve been advanced to the next round – a second date, another chance to wow and impress and charm – and the other party received a form letter wishing them well in their job search. It feels akin to betrayal, yet is a necessary betrayal, and, it goes without saying, not a betrayal upon which that person had any direct influence.

Then there’s the interview – if we get lucky. Without resorting to crassness, the interview is a chance at a form of intimacy, of being invited to the inner sanctum, the professional form of being invited up for coffee: seeing up close and personally the foibles, quirks, and inner workings of the institution, to really demonstrate one’s own individual talents and personality, and a chance to see just how dysfunctional and in need of therapy the institution, the department, and the other faculty are. One interview I had was, retrospectively, awful. It was as though Tina Fey’s Liz Lemon character was shepherding me through the department and meetings, neuroses and all – that is to say, I learned directly and indirectly far too many tiny flaws and oddities in the program, things that could have been prevented or better left unsaid or undone or rethought. I did not receive the full interview itinerary until the evening before the interview. My meetings with the department head kept getting rescheduled the day of the interview. My tour of the campus grounds was not led by a music faculty or staff or student, but by an adjunct Art professor. The department head could not have been less interested in my artistic vision. The division head – the department head’s dean – was outgoing at the end of the year (retiring, that is) and made no effort to mince his words about it, or about the realities and practicalities of the Tier 3 school. The position called for designing a new major and creating curriculum, but I learned in the interview that they already had curriculum created and a few courses in place. About the only thing that was done well on their end was the speedy travel reimbursement.

This is not to say I was without fault. I asked repeated questions about interdisciplinarity when the position was clearly a narrow-focus one. I misspelled a common word in a PowerPoint slide. My laptop lost battery charge partway through another presentation. My cat destroyed my valise a few days before the interview, so instead of looking dapper, I looked like a bedazzled hipster: a messenger bag and a Geoffrey Beene pinstripe suit. I had no handouts for the teaching portion of the interview (but, to be fair, I learned the night before that I’d be teaching). Even beforehand, the telephone interview was stock and lull, not shock and awe. From both sides.

Those lucky enough – or those with enough job-landing skills or friends in high places who can talk us up really well – eventually settle in to tenure-track positions. I’ve been on the hunt for three years, one post-doctorate. I’m slowly approaching 100 rejections since mid-2008. As a matter of course, I haven’t had an interview since May, 2010 – right around the same time, oddly, that I went on my last date. On my last date, the woman I was with thought that when I was referring to Michael Eric Dyson² I was talking about “the vacuum-cleaner guy.” Thus endeth my quest for love. Around the same time, I was hired verbally by a small college but a few weeks later given the grim budget news that no one at said college would be hired for the ’10-’11 term, and, in fact, positions were going to be lost. But those who stick with it, so I’m told, find love in the form of another human being, and find happiness in the form of job security, patronage, academic freedom, and the joy of teaching. Furthermore, from what I’ve been told, when either and/or both happen, the likelihood of a lasting, productive, well-matched relationship is at least 50%.

For the ages, I can state unequivocally that I’m not much to look at right now, but if we really like each other, and if we think mutually there’s a lot of potential for greatness, then I’ll be damned if I’m going to purposefully muck it up or leave unless things are completely unsalvageable or dysfunctional beyond any repair. So, colleges and universities: I am still available. Call me.

I'm desperate.³

***

1: I'm happy to report that my vita is now slightly more impressive than the other candidate's. Too late to help me now, though.
2: The first time it happened with a different significant other, I forgave it. The second time it happened, with an avowed civil rights activist, I couldn't forgive myself.
3: Relatively speaking. For instance, I still expect a paycheck and overtime for teaching an overload.

if it's all been done already, go do something else.

Perhaps one of my most ardent intellectual and artistic pet-peeves is the statement “everything that could possibly be done has been done.” It may surprise you to know that at one time I held court with this thought as an avid worshipper of the sentiment and its relatively shallow meanings on a daily basis. I called that the first year of graduate study, the daunting, rigorous clanging of hitherto unknown (or only in passing) innovations of the 20th Century reverberating in my ear, creating an inferiority complex that has taken a decade to mitigate, an inferiority complex rampant among many of the most talented – and perhaps least-“accomplished” – composers.

The initial reaction I have to the statement now is, “so, what?” What of it? Is there a quantifiable measure of techniques and harmonic styles and technical details and tedium down to the last sixteenth rest and string voicing that definitively proves that every single thing possible has been composed? And if, by some fiat of magic, we were to unequivocally receive an affirmative response to the query, what would that fundamentally change? Would that prevent artists from creating art, from attempting new techniques and finding new ways to connect – intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually – with themselves, their performers, and their audiences? Would ultimate intellectual knowledge that there can be, essentially, “nothing new under the sun,” preclude any sort of artistic work in any field?

In a sense, it did, as far as I was concerned. When I began graduate study, I would compose religiously and steadily, and in seminars and through peers I was quickly introduced to worlds of innovation and compositional techniques and abstractions of the sonic realm that initially supercharged me but rapidly made me shrink back into an intellectual corner. I would compose a piece or set out with some new ideas, thinking they were peerless (I blame this primarily on naïveté and lack of book-learnin’), and then be, for example, introduced to Giacinto Scelsi’s works of ultra-Klangfarbenmelodie, or to Berio’s collage works, or Lachenmann’s or Pape’s bizarre and successful takes on extended technical writing for strings. I would abandon the ideas I formulated, as – truthful or not, verifiable or not – I would see them not as personal innovations or simply additional techniques I could use, but as tawdry, juvenile carbon copies of the Masters. While I was in college, I had the opposite problem: when first exposed to Messiaen’s early period, all of my music took on an 8 pr 9-pitch modal harmonic language populated by tritones; when introduced to Sessions’s symphonies (and when I finally understood them) I wrote loosely dodecaphonic and unapologetically dissonant work; when studying Bartók’s middle period, all of my music appeared to have Hungarian and Romanian rhythmic elements for no apparent reason. And, clearly, I reveled in this – I relished the idea that I could write things approximating my idols, and, brazenly, thought I could improve on their techniques. Getting my hands on a copy of Messiaen’s Technique of My Musical Language one Christmas, for a hot minute, made me think I’d absorb all of Olivier’s secrets and become the next, better Messiaen. A fundamental shift occurred when I realized that the music I needed to be composing was supposed to be mine and not the legacy of others – the anecdote of when Roger Sessions was playing a student work of his on the piano for Ernest Bloch with the latter screaming at Sessions each of the influences heard is a constructed scene that started on an endless loop once I was thrown into the much larger, much more competitive world of actual professional composition. In order to compete, in order to thrive, in order to succeed and be above the fray, I would have to innovate and unleash my own voice.

The only problem, though, is that I had no idea what that was, no idea how to attain it through the current methods of loving mimicry, no external impetus to hunt for it. As a means to justify writing whatever I wanted as a student, which oddly enough centered around a relatively developed and mature rhythmic-harmonic language, I decided to make “everything has already been done” as a sort of mantra, and I’m sorry I ever did. Rather than allow knowledge of trends and ideas and styles inculcate my musical vernacular and inspire and challenge me, I allowed it to have dominion over me, to intimidate me. The end result was a young, tenuous composer purposefully trying to innovate, making a concerted effort to pioneer new sonic realms. What I had long feared, retrospectively, came true: with increased knowledge came increased sorrow, when, rather, the truth should have set me free.

Innovation rarely happens purposefully in the arts. Innovation seems to arise spontaneously in collective leaps forward while artists are merely attempting to solve critical problems through methods other than ones they have been taught or know very well. I will go so far that innovation in artistic technique is accidental, with intellectual leaps being more like sudden lurches after all the happy accidents. (Not to say none of us knows what we're doing - quite the contrary - rather, change comes like a snowfall, not lightning: gradual, silently, sometimes violently) Picasso, Mies van der Rohe, Klee, Mondrian. Debussy, Stravinsky, George Antheil, Erik Satie. (Well, to an extent, Debussy purposefully attempted to be an innovator, but he had been composing for more than 25 years before he started to seriously refer to himself such) Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henri. La Monte Young. They did not – so far as the historical record and their biographies show – wake up each morning with the words “I will change music and/or art today.” Their to-do lists did not include, after a light lunch and before afternoon tea, “Shake Up World With Groundbreaking New Timbres/Forms/Etc.” As a quietly terrified student, this was all to which I could cling. I did not realize – and only within the past few years have I finally accepted – that innovation of any sort in the arts comes slowly, unwittingly, and after much trial and error. Often, failures themselves become innovations long after the fact of their creation, long after their inception. Le Sacre flopped as a ballet, as a staged work; nearly 100 years later, both the choreographic and musical aspects are seen as hugely pivotal artistic developments, the disastrous premiere itself seen as the fulcrum upon which the weight of 20th Century art shifted away from the Weltschmerz and Wagnerian/Mahlerian ultra-Romanticism of the 19th Century.

Indeed, I was slow to realize this - a charade used to distance myself from questions of worth as I was coming of age. I abstractly knew this, certainly - but it was not a prevalence or truth that I breathed every morning.

For a growing number of currently-working and often largely successful composers, the standard of “there is nothing new under the sun” seems to be the words exhaled through a yawn both when they rise from slumber and when they end their day with drowsiness. This population believes this sentiment, if not reifies it as a daily maxim actively and nonchalantly brandished. My question to this is: why? Why do these composers continue composing? Why continue working? Why create art or attempt to create it if what one writes is nothing but mere, sheer mimeograph? Why, especially, are so many of these people engaged in teaching - and maintain these teaching positions in earnest? Patronage, but for what reason? Educating new composers and musicians, but to what end? The ramifications here are wide ranging: why perpetuate any artform of any sort? Why train performers? Why simply sit stationary? This thinking, this very insistence that Everything Is Done, is the primary intellectual rationale those suspicious of the Arts point to as a means of decrying art and support for its creation and performance; the tenet of Nothing New Can Happen is the very thinking that keeps young people and tenuous musicians and critics viewing the symphony hall as nothing more than a museum, a concertmaster or conductor nothing more than a docent. The statement is monochromatic and incontrovertible; those who adhere to it should, frankly, either eradicate adherence to the mantra and grudgingly create passionately and earnestly, or leave the business of art and music, the institutions to teach art and music, and the life of a creative artist and find a new profession immediately, else those persons who stay entrenched be labeled frauds, or worse. I cannot, honestly, see how one can entertain this notion that their art is, essentially, without intellectual and by extension artistic justification, while composing daily and honestly, thoroughly encouraging young composers and musicians. They are mutually exclusive. One can deride innovation, or be suspicious of artistic intent, in their own music, or in the music of others - but to outrightly deny that innovation can ever occur again and to imply that all music is dead is shortsighted and laughable.

I have nothing much to say - at this moment. I will, however, attempt to make a more concerted effort to update this regularly and actually - gasp! - write more. Ideally, I'd like to shape this more toward writing about - gasp! - music, in a fairly cross-disciplinary manner, but that doesn't necessarily preclude me prattling on about other matters in which I take either ephemeral or lasting interest. Never has, really. So, fundamentally, nothing much will change, with the hopeful exception of actually putting more words to digital paper here. And, cynics, take heart: this isn't some New Year's resolution, but rather a longtime peripheral to-do on some to-do list of mine somewhere. Maybe.

Maybe.

For whatever I do put here, though, I ask you to engage me. Comment. Challenge me. Agree with me. Help me see something beyond my limited perspective, even if it's evident I am trying to see beyond my vision. Tell me what I'm missing; tell me what I'm discussing too much. Hell, tell me when I have typos. I'm just one guy, you know? Trying to make my way in this crazy world, etc...