Roger Bourland
writes about music and life

This term, I will be starting each class with a folk song. We will sing, say, four verses; and with each repetition, I will expect the harmony to be richer and richer. I will give them pointers of how to learn to harmonize to any song. My fantasy is that by the end of the year, every student will have the courage to and knowledge of how to harmonize by ear.

This week we will be singing: “Skip to My Lou”, “Joshua”, “Tom Dooley”, and “Drunken Sailor”.

[Punctuation note: I have officially abandoned the homely American habit of having the comma or period inside the quote of song titles. To me, it just looks bad, and detracts from the integrity of the title. The title should be cited as "Skip to My Lou" and not "Skip to My Lou,".]

We spent a week in North Andover, MA last week. The day before we left we got socked by a big snow storm. As the snow began falling, I raced out and snapped this Christmas card picture of the back yard. The beauty of the snow was beautiful. I don’t miss the 2 degree weather.

I have just read (finally!) Lynne Truss’s terrific Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. This book is a must-read to anyone who wants to understand punctuation.

In it, Ms Truss discusses an old punctuation source that tries to differentiate how commas, semicolons, colons and periods (full stops) are different. This particular writer had a rather musical approach to the difference: a comma is a one-count pause; a semicolon is a two-count pause; the colon, three; and the period, four. She points out how ridiculous this really is, and that who in their right mind would really do this. Later she admits that the gist of it might hold some truth. Punctuation, after all, was originally created to aid actors in their presentation of texts.

My composer buddies all remember how Karlheinz Stockhousen, at various points in his life, serialized rests (of course). George Crumb and many other ’70s new-music-notation-revisionists created various sizes of fermati (so-called “birdeye”), and hybrid symbols that all indicated various degrees of pausing. Most of those symbols have faded away and we are back to a traditions fermata, a comma, and the double-slash “railroad tracks” sign. I would bet that if composers expanded the comma line to include semicolons and and colons, performers would understand them. On second thought, fermati give performers more flexibility.

In the book, she continues to point out what a hopeless party-pooper Gertrude Stein was with regards to punctuation: she considered all but the period to be useless – which reminds me of a joke:

How many lesbians does it take to change a light bulb?
Only one, and it’s not funny. (Told to me by a lesbian btw.)

Yesterday, after referring to Daniel as “my husband”, a family member asked me “does that mean you are the wife” to which I assured them that I was also a husband, not a wife. He then said that he was confused when he referred to his (female) friend and her friends as “girls” because she insisted she was “a woman”. I explained: “Girls are either ages 0-12, and 75-100. All the rest are women.” He replied: “Yeah, but she is 76.” Without losing a beat I explained: “…and a lesbian: ALL lesbians are women, and only lesbians can call each other “girls”. He now understood feminine appellation.

RB at Haleakala

What a year!

The highlight of my year had to be the premiere of HOMER IN CYBERSPACE, my new musical written with Mel Shapiro. I don’t have the interest or connections to try to send it to Broadway, but am certain it could have a huge audience if put in the right hands.

A trip to Hawaii with Daniel, Mitchell and Mark was thrilling. We loved it so much we are considering getting a time share on Kauai. Prices are lower than ever with people trying to sell theirs with the downturn in the economy.

I got married to Daniel Shiplacoff, and after the passage of Proposition 8, I guess we are still married but I’m unclear what our legal status is. I’ll keep it as married.

This year Daniel took a job at Palm Inc. (of Palm Pilot fame) and is working on some mysterious new things that will be announced at the Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas in a few weeks. I wasn’t sure how his commuting back and forth from Sunnyvale would work. I had visions of our marriage falling apart but it just got stronger. It gave both of us concentrated time to do our own research, and could look forward to spending quality time together over long weekends.

I have enjoyed seeing the growth of social networking resources like Facebook and MySpace. It is especially gratifying to reconnect with old friends, and to follow my own students in their post-graduate lives.

This year my brother Andy’s health went into a final decline. He is now in a hospice in Reading MA. Yesterday we had a wonderful birthday party there for his daughter Hannah. We were a noisy bunch and were a bit worried that we were disturbing the other people there but the nurses assured us that it was welcome. Andy couldn’t have been happier. He got his picture taken with everyone. This may be his last party, but who knows. He’s been an amazing survivor. He has faced his imminent death with courage, grace, intelligence, and candor. He has been good to finish the unfinished business in his life. His blog and especially, his recent posts have elicited a remarkable response from the many people who have known him in business and life.

I was upset about being excluded from a top 50 Classical Blog list because I write about other things than classical music. I am a composer, and composers have lives, but as far as this anonymous blogger is concerned, I don’t belong. Fine. I dealt with it, but I find myself wanting to start another blog where I can write about things that may not be appropriate for the Chair of the UCLA Department of Music to write about, like “sex, drugs, and rock n roll.” I keep putting off posts in this category to my retirement when I can write without worrying about what my students’ parents (or my parents, who are faithful readers) might think. To that end, I’ve decided to start a new blog in January where I will be anonymous.

I have rejoined the new music scene in LA after some 15 years of avoiding it. I am thrilled to go to these concerts and see a new audience. I have been somewhat baffled by the rise in single, often widowed, retired women who flock to hear new music. The wilder the better for them. Whodathunk? I refuse to change my musical language so that my music can be programmed by Esa Pekka and Pierre Boulez. I am more than happy with who I am musically, and have seen how my music touches people.

I finished my first year as Chair of the UCLA Department and anticipate I will continue in this post for several more years. I find it challenging and rewarding. I am happy to be at the helm during our transition to becoming the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music. I have enjoyed working with our Deans and with Tim Rice, the school’s director. Designing a radical new curriculum has been exciting and long overdue.

I am amused to see the world’s enfatuation with texting. It seems all I see are people shuffling down the street texting or looking at their cell phones like zombies. Young people can’t hold concentration to have real conversations, preferring to check out and text with some other bored friend. I’m ready for this technology to move to eye glasses, and for a return to real conversation, but I know texting is here to stay. (I text regularly.)

I am thrilled to see the Bush era end and for Obama to become our new leader.

I, along with many other music teachers, am puzzled as to the lack of passion and obsession in young composers with regards to learning new music. Why, in my day, I remember trudging home from the music library with oversize scores in my arms, spending hours poring over the notes, the orchestration, the invention, the craziness. I would be obsessed over a composer and listen to everything they had written: Ives, Stockhausen, Boulez, Berio, Stravinsky, Webern, Schoenberg, Berg, and the rest. Nowadays, young students barely know who these composers are, and don’t really seem to care. Where has all the passion gone?

I am horrified that young people today don’t know folk music. People from my generation grew up on it and know thousands of so-called folk songs. Young mothers are singing rap and hip hop to their infants. I just find that weird.

I’m fascinated by the widening gap between theists and agnostic/atheists especially in young people.

I have no interest in pursuing more involvement in composing film music. I am happy to help train young composers who ARE interested, but scoring one every so often is fine. That being said, I’m thrilled to see the rise in interest in film music, worldwide. I dare say film music is far more popular (and perhaps relevant) than most of the so-called classical music being written today. For young film composers, studying metal music today is just as important as studying Bach harmony. I’m puzzled to see that USC is now offering a BM in popular music. Why? Since when does one need to go to school to learn how to be a pop/rock musician or songwriter? None of the songwriters they will be studying did, so why should anyone else?

I am fascinated to see the old world order crumble — politically, ecologically, economically, musically, and socially — and feel fortunate to have been alive during the period I’ve been alive. I wish I were optimistic about the way the world will be in 100 years. I hope I’m wrong. I hope the world can begin acting like a single, mega organism. I wish that corporations will learn to have a heart. I hope the world can learn to become more tolerant of social diversity — that it should be assumed that other people are not like you, and that that is ok, and normal.

[Photo by Mark Carlson of RB at Haleakala, in Maui]

One aspect that much of the old Christmas music has is good voice leading. In lay terms, this means if you have four people all singing together, each part flows smoothly and doesn’t jump all over the place. Most of the songs have four parts and are adeptly harmonized. It is exactly this kind of harmonization that we like our first year music theory students to know how to do.

So in a world where voice leading is somewhat of a lost art, I love the voice leading in Christmas music. It makes you want to be with people, harmonizing closely.

One of the best four part harmonizations is “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.” Here, is that song with only a melody over a drone — an interesting variant of the original and hauntingly updated by Loreena McKennitt.

This a a piece I fell in love with after I heard Ruth Laredo play it. I took it to my piano teacher (Carroll Chilton) who said it was beyond my ability. I said I didn’t care, he said “you ARE stubborn, ok, try it.” And I learned to play it. All the luscious inner voices and cross rhythms were intoxicating.

I stumbled across a recording of Scriabin playing it himself. The recording is scratchy, and at best a document, but the performance IS interesting.

What a find! Here is a video with brief pictures of various women who have worked in [classical] electronic music. There are a LOT of women missing, young and old, but hey, it’s a start, and an interesting document. The music is by DELIA DERBYSHIRE and is called “The Wizards Laboratory” (1972) — quite catchy I think, but you might want to be ready to adjust the volume if it doesn’t fit your ears quite right.

I called Martha Stewart a while back and told her that what she really needed to do was to invite Rufus Wainwright onto her show. In fact, why not the whole family. So I was thrilled to find that she followed through on it. Here’s what turned out, in two parts. (And don’t play them at the same time.) You also will see a very healthy and happy looking Kate McGarrigle, Rufus’s mom.

This is a very old map outside the Los Angeles Courthouse. Sometimes maps age and need to be replaced. In this case, it has, in my view, become a work of art and no longer functions as a map and therefore needs to be replaced. It seems like a symbol of our world today. As beautiful as the old one is, the current map isn’t working and needs to be replaced.

[Photo: © 2007 by Roger Bourland]