On a stormy morning in LA, and with summer right around the corner it seemed like a morning for Keith Jarrett. Rain and tornadoes in late May in LA? Hmm, did another chunk of ice fall off Antarctica?
A new responsibility has now been put on my plate as a teacher of composition. Now that UCLA has an MA in Visual Media and I am part of the faculty, we train young film composers. We expect them to know as much of the same things we expect of our traditional composers.
Part of the new reality is that students come into their lessons with the locked print imported as a Quicktime video within Apple’s Logic 7 or 8. We turn down the lights and watch the movie in progress on the laptop. Laptop speakers are notoriously lousy, so I invested in a headphone splitter, so we both watch the film on a laptop with headphones. This is the same technology I am using for providing the orchestration for HOMER IN CYBERSPACE. I also used it for the various POSSUM DEATH SPREE movies as well as CAGES, so I know the software well. Sometimes the students are using the electronic libraries they own, and sometimes it is a mock up for a live session that will be taking place soon.
The mockup is primarily used to show the director how the music lines up with the film for his/her approval. Gone are the days where the composer sits at a piano emulating an orchestra with tremolo chords at the piano in a dark smoke filled room with the projector showing the film in progress. A composer can put the mockup on a private website where the director can access it at their convenience. They can meet in person, video chat, or talk on the phone. Email is even better because you have a record of everything.
The other day Nick and I were working on a film he is scoring, and the solution to one passage was to move the music up an octave. For a whole variety of reasons, that seemed to be the best solution — it was out of the range of the room tone as well as the dialog. Often a solution for an awkward passage will be to “do what you did back here; you set this up to mean this here, and it still means this now, so do it again” and this organic solution works.
I love this brave new world!
The term polyphony means many voices and is traditionally used in reference to a kind of musical texture where each voice has a certain amount of independence. A canon and a fugue are good examples. You heard Ketjak last week as an example of polyphony in other cultures.
Yesterday a visiting scholar spent an hour and a half in my counterpoint class, giving me a break from endlessly having to shape students in a Baroque mold which I would just as soon break. He spoke to us primarily and briefly about several of his passions: the Beatles and Georgian polyphony — that is from the country, not the state or the late Beatle. He had the class sing some lovely examples of crunchy harmonies generated from each member having only to sing a few notes, but at an interval of a second from each other. As he explained Georgian harmonic theory, early Stravinksy choral and vocal music all of a sudden made a lot more sense, as did the music I have heard from Bulgaria. He referred to the great classical choral tradition as but one of the great European (and Asian) choral traditions — a humbling and sobering view I thought. He described a rare vocal tradition in the mountains in Afghanistan and a small lute instrument tuned in a whole tone cluster — C, D, E, and F#. No chords, all there songs just strum that chord and have melodies over them.
He also pointed out that polyphony as a social musical tradition, is dying out around the globe. Pygmies and counterpoint classes seem to be leading the charge of keeping polyphony alive, but I have to tell you that I have not much interest in teaching too many more classes on how to compose in the style of Bach. He was dying to go on and tell us more, and we wanted him to, but my students had been in class all day, and I had to go home and get back to revisions.
This scholar is a man trained as a musician in the Classical tradition, his area of expertise and scholarship is Georgian music, and the music he loves most is the Beatles. He has a circle of friends where they play Beatles music for 4 to 6 hours a week. Before class I sat down and asked him to give me some songs to play. “Martha My Dear” was his first selection. I couldn’t remember the key, but played it. He laughed and said “You are playing it a half step lower than it is.” We determined that either my piano was out of tune when I learned the song, or that my turntable was slow. Amazing. I asked for another. “Lady Madonna” and I obliged. He laughed again. “What?” I asked after playing through it. He said “This time you are playing it a step higher than it was.” He confessed that learned a lot of Beatles songs in the wrong key as well because his parent never tuned the piano.
I regretted that he was returning to Australia today as nothing would make me happier than to play Beatles music all night with him. But deadlines are deadlines. Sigh….
No, it’s not the Beatles song, it’s a new one. O is bragging about his son, Telly. Here you just get to hear the accompaniment.
MP3: Play audio file (21b-this-boy.mp3)
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“This Boy” (from HOMER IN CYBERSPACE)
Music by Roger Bourland
Lyrics by Mel Shapiro
(Accompaniment only)
Last night we ran the whole show with my orchestrations. You’ll remember, the orchestra is all prerecorded by me using Apple’s LOGIC 8 software. I use a lot of electronic sounds because of the “cyberspace” aspect of the title. To balance that side of the sound, I use a huge array of stringed instruments — it’s my bluegrass roots showing I guess — mandolin, lute, guitars (acoustic and electric), banjo, balalaika, oud, guzhen, hammered dulcimer, dobro, sitar, ukelele, koto, and more. It’s a great sound.
The singers have not been given their wireless mikes yet, so they were singing with a temp sound system which consisted of Jeremy playing back the musical cues from his Mac, cued by Lindsey. No more just singing with the piano-vocal score, this was the real thing, and the actors are finally starting to see how the music will REALLY sound. And as far as I can tell, they love it even more. I have had many touching moments already where an actor will tell me how moving my music is for them to sing and hear. At the end of rehearsal last night, I had conversations with several of them discussing how NOT to cry. The closing duet is a killer. I was so touched to look over and see three rows of beautiful college students listening and watching, with their eyes filled with tears, and the room was filled with sniffs and noses being blown. A good sign.
Mel continues to tweak and edit the story making it better and better and the actors are remarkably adept at learning the new lines. Yesterday I had to recast four measures of choral writing that had different rhythms and words: the actors learned the changes that day and had them memorized by the evening. The musical talent of the group of actors has been thrilling to observe and appreciate.
I still have five more transition cues to compose, a few numbers to slow down and a couple to speed up, as well as a huge amount of the score to update, and all about half of the cues still need to be exported for our sound crew. In that the show opens a week from Thursday, I know there is an end in sight, but whew! it’s been a busy time here.
Innovative “Homer in Cyberspace” breathes new life into ancient heroes
by David Chute
Getting Aphrodite Off the Ground
In the surreal virtual universe of Mel Shapiro’s “Homer in Cyberspace,” the gods of ancient Greece have been deposed, “shrink-wrapped and imprisoned” by a new race of digital/electronic deities known as the iGods.
Struggling to return home to his loyal wife Penelope, the wily war hero Odysseus (”O” for short) has been condemned to wander aimlessly for years, his punishment for blinding the one-eyed bully Sy, the iGod son of La Belle and Bernie Klops.
Obviously, the epic poet of ancient Greece has been put through a few changes on his way to UCLA’s Macgowan Hall Little Theater, where radically modernized simulacra of Odysseus, Penelope and Telemachus will make their singing and dancing debuts.
“Homer in Cyberspace” will be presented at 8 p.m. on May 29, 30 and 31 and on June 4, 5, 6 and 7, with additional 2 p.m. performances on May 31 and June 7. Ticket and parking information can be obtained by calling UCLA’s Central Ticket Office at (310) 825-2101 or visiting www.tickets.ucla.edu.
[From UCLA TODAY, 5/15/2008, read the entire story here.]
And now for something completely different. I love how, in the first transition, he slaps the lower manual to emulate a drum. He keeps WATCHING me through the whole piece, feels almost creepy.
I wonder what the history of performers playing 2 keyboards at the same time is? People around in the 1970s remember Keith Emerson playing an entire stage of keyboards. Here Korla Pandit amazes us with his multi-keyboard virtuosity and exotic scales and sounds.
On Sunday, Daniel invited his uncle and aunt, Tita [aunt] Eden and her husband Nelson, their sons and daughters and their children to our house for the afternoon. We had a dozen kids under the age of 13 here and I have to say they were the best behaved children I’ve seen in years When Eden spoke, the child would stop in their tracks and mind their grandmother. No talk back, no sass, no disrespect.
They are also very devout Catholics. I gave them all extra bonus points for not giving us that “I’ll be nice to you pervs, but you know you are going to hell” look. When they all left, Daniel gave them all hugs, and I gave them all adult hand shakes.
At the end of the party, even though I was as exhausted as our dogs who had been overworked by the three and four-year olds, I decided to sing them some songs from HOMER. The kids who were downstairs watching TRANSFORMERS, paused it and came up to listen. I was thrilled to see that they all were with me with every song, from age three to seventy-something.
This part of our extended family has always been nice to me, but I don’t think they knew who I was or what I did until Sunday. I felt that Daniel and I had risen in status in their eyes after I stopped singing. Those of us in big cities forget that acceptance of gays and lesbians still is not universal, by any stretch. So every little victory is worthy of celebration.
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I checked in with my mother yesterday who is supercharged after moving into their new home last month. My dad was off at the clinic dealing with a malady that I had to deal with last year. Sigh, aren’t genetics fun?
This just in from Prof Waterman. Get down, but not too much.
In 1976, America was all excited about being 200 years old and many of its major orchestras participated in consortium commissioned works. One of those works that I loved was called “Final Alice” by David Del Tredici. In fact it wasn’t only I that loved the work, the piece got standing ovations no matter where it was performed by large orchestras across the US. It was that catchy, tonal hook (the major 6th) that we couldn’t get out of our head.
I’ll never forget when he came to NEC and played that obsessive part of the piece on the piano for us. We were hooked. Or at least I was.
“Final Alice” appeared several years after George Crumb’s “Ancient Voices of Children” and George Rochberg’s Third String Quartet, and eight years after Terry Riley’s “In C” and Steve Reich’s “Come out” so I don’t see this as a trail blazing work in terms of the return of tonality. Tonality seemed to be returning anyway. The day of the Darmstadt power was coming to an end. At least for me it was. Even Leonard Slatkin agreed:
“Final Alice changed the face of music in this country overnight,” recalls Leonard Slatkin, the National Symphony Orchestra’s music director, who was in the Chicago audience that night. “It destroyed all conceptions of what ‘new music’ was supposed to be, and many composers will tell you that they were now liberated to write how they felt. It was the start of a revolution.”
What was odd to me was that after the LP of “Final Alice” disappeared, it never got released on CD, so a whole generation of post-death-of-the-LP composers and music lovers, never got to hear the piece. Too bad. Even now, I can’t find anything except for a bit torrent download of the piece. anywhere (I’ll try to rip part of the LP so you can hear it. If anyone knows whether this has been released, let me know.)
Why the neglect of such a terrific AND popular piece? Is David too gay? Too tonal? The musical figures too obsessive? Too catchy? I’m always baffled that Ades, or Carter, or Birtwhistle can get anything recorded, but a piece that changed our world, even if only for a few years — why has no one released it? I guess it will just have to be a mystery.
Three cheers to Mr Slatkin who brought back the work again to bring it to Washington D.C. last weekend. Stephen Brooks wrote a terrific article letting everyone know.
you go girl
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