This weekend we spent the weekend with friends in Mill Valley (CA) as well as some time on a sunset boat ride around Belvedere, Tiburon, and that general [San Francisco Bay] area. Also on the boat was a Hollywood producer with whom I hit it off, who wants to introduce me to some directors looking for composers.
I also met with a well-connected friend who wants to collaborate on an opera that could have a major premiere. I know it’s bad luck to talk about things that are only possibilities but I came home charged thinking that my life could take a major turn if either of these possibilities actually happen.
I confessed to both that I’m an excellent composer who loves to collaborate, but that my weakest suit is promoting myself — my blog is about it. When I finish a commission, I am horny to get on to the next project — not spend time promoting it. The producer blew it off saying — “ah, that doesn’t matter. What matters is that you do great work, on time, and come in on or under budget.”
To date, I have been unsuccessful in predicting things that happened in my life. In 1972 I had no idea that ten years later I would go to Harvard, get a PhD and my composition selected as best piece of the year by the Boston Globe; in 1982 I had no idea that in 1992 I’d be a tenured UCLA Professor, touring America, attending performances of a cantata I wrote about a health epidemic that decimated gay men; in 1992 I had no idea I’d be writing a two hour oratorio about two apparitions of the Virgin Mary, become Chair of the Music Department, and get married to my male partner.
I look ahead to the next ten years and sense possibilities. I could wind down as Chair and Professor and ease into a well-deserved retirement; I could get a career as an opera composer and compose operas for the rest of my life; Hollywood could realize what a catch I am, and spend the rest of my days scoring films; or it could be a blend of all of the above.
I’m optimistic, but not fatalistic. I’m skeptical about the “it was meant to be” line of thinking. I think one has to set things in motion, try, make an effort, and most importantly WANT something, in order for it to happen.
Operas take a herculean effort to compose and mount. These big blockbuster films with thousands of notes per square second are also a huge amount of work. Do I really want that? Hmm, only time will tell.
Last night, Vox Femina hosted a reading of my new work for women’s chorus, HEALY MADRIGALS, based upon the poetry of Eloise Klein Healy. Iris Levine, the director, welcomed the small but warm audience and explained what was about to happen. I got up and spoke about the commissioning process as well a bit about composing. Then Eloise got up and spoke about her work and her own creative process.
Then, the chorus ran through each number. Eloise read the poem. Vox “read” the piece (they had had only one run-through), and then I got up and commented on each piece, making changes in almost every number and throwing one out — much to the delight of the audience.
People seemed to love the experience–watching the collaborative process in action. I was happy that everyone responded to the pieces so well. As I said, Eloise’s poetry brought out a different side of my musical persona, which felt good. I was so happy to hear from the women of the chorus that they were thrilled that I was writing them a new piece. How fortunate I am!
Today Volker Hauschka stopped by to chat about an upcoming collaboration with me on a new film by Graham Streeter (of CAGES fame). Volker is taking the prepared piano into a new realm, and it is quite often transcendent, hovering, beguiling, pretty to listen to, and original. His career seems to be taking off. Seeing this career explosion made me think about my own, and how life takes you in so many different directions.
Collaboration between two composers can be a tricky proposition, but we chatted and were direct about parameters, scenarios, royalties, and the creative freedom.
After a week of crafting possible cuts to our department’s budget, I drove up to the beautiful Lake Arrowhead area to attend an annual meeting, whose sole purpose is to give seed money to innovative curricular ideas. We arrived on Friday night; had cocktails and a lovely dinner, followed by a short meeting, and then we all retired to our rooms to finish reading the 36 proposals. Saturday morning and early afternoon were spent sitting around a large square table discussing each one.
As we finished early, I called Ronnie Rubin to see whether, by chance, she was in Palm Springs. I was tired of being cold and in the mountains. To my delight she was free and single. We went out for a lovely dinner, strolled down the main drag, I bought a new very cool rubber and stainless steel bracelet, and we drove home. I drove back to LA early on Sunday; Ronnie stayed to watch two more movies and returned at night.
I returned to grading 51 analyses by my students of pop songs of their choices, along with the YouTube link. I found I could only grade around 8 or 9 at a time, as listening, analyzing, and grading each song was exhausting. I have to admit that I loved the opportunity to assign and grade this project. The students learned from it as well.
At the same time, the midterm project for the class was to record and perform an original composition that features a falling bass line. It could be for (and was) for any instrumentation, and in any style. Then, they had to convert the file to an mp3, upload it to the class website, and then comment on each other’s pieces (which they did). Then in class this week, we listened to them all, and I gave brief critiques to each of the students. This was a delicate process as for most, this was the first time they had ever had a performance in front of peers. I consoled them before we began: “I know that for some of you, today might be like those dreams where you are naked in front of the class (or workmates) and can’t do anything about it. But hang in there.” The comments that the students made on the website were always helpful, collegial, encouraging and friendly.
I found out from several Chairs from other departments that I am teaching a heavy load for a Chair. One said she taught one course a year, another two courses: I teach 3 big classes along with 5 – 6 private composition students per term. I know that may sound light to some, but trying to do that and go to all the meetings one has to as Chair, can be overwhelming.
I am thrilled that I seem to be catching up. My To Do list is shorter. I think I can take this weekend off. Oh wait: I have a new choral piece to compose for the City of West Hollywood!
Today in my “music theory” class, composer and colleague Paul Chihara spoke to us about working in Hollywood, and showed four stages of the evolution of a musical cue. The cut the director gives the composer that will have SMPTE time code on it and little or no sound, nor sound effects; a version with a synthesizer mockup that sounds damned good already; a third version that has the full orchestral (no synth) version with no dialog or sound effects; and then the final version that has it all. He annotated it as we went along. Paul is charming and lovable, referring to himself as “an old man” (b.1938), but in spirit, he was likely the youngest one there.
I may be wrong, but I can’t help but wonder whether John Williams wrote this cigarette commercial and then recycled it for Indiana Jones. N’est ce pas?
For the first week of my music theory course, we have focused on songs with falling bass lines.
Today, we started with the so-called air on a G string by J.S. Bach. As an amusement, I quizzed what a G string was in context of a strip club, and Marcos correctly answered that it referred to a slim garment etc. I thought is odd that actually the thinnest string on a violin is an E string, so why don’t they call them E strings?
J.S. Bach: Air on a G string
When I grew up, the almost cartoon-like figure of a black-cloaked man with wild white hair as conductor was most likely created by Leopold Stokowsky, who conducts in Disney’s FANTASIA. Listen to the bass line that repeats over and over. That is what a passacaglia is: it is a variation form. The composer composes the bass line and jams over it. This orchestration is by Leopold himself, here rather elderly.
JS Bach/Stokowski: Passacagila and Fugue (Passacaglia only)
There are famous falling bass songs from the 1960s that people my age know, and you may hear from time to time on oldies radio stations. The most famous are:
Because my class is full of so many students of different backgrounds, their first assignment may be in any style for any instrumentation. But it must feature a falling bass line.
Today I introduced the ground bass. While I listened to this next performance by Jessye Norman, my t-shirt was wet from tears. I pulled it together to play it for my class, and let many of them cry instead.
There are three types of requiems: a Type One requiem is performed by a symphony orchestra with chorus and soloists as a part of an orchestra or chorus’s concert season, that is really just another piece of classical repertoire that commemorates no one in particular; a Type Two Requiem is programmed to celebrate the death of a well known public figure or group (JFK, astronauts, air crashes, bombings, war victims, holocaust victims, AIDS, and so forth); and a Type Three requiem is used in a church service to honor the death of a member of the church.
Christ Church in Andover, a medium-sized Episcopal church, held a funeral for my brother last Saturday, and the choir came in on a Saturday to sing the John Rutter REQUIEM. The choir, with a single soloist, was able to put it together quickly, and perform it with only a solo flute and an organ. The Rutter Requiem is truly the common man’s requiem. There are not too many other requiems that can be put together so quickly with such small forces with such a huge impact.
The Stravinsky and Ligeti Requiems, which I love, are really art requiems, and not practical for a traditional funeral, and are really Type One requiems. Both works require professional instrumentalists, capable of interpreting modern music, and singers with perfect pitch, or terrific ears. The average church choir could never perform these works, and I doubt the composers would even want them to. An average congregation would be puzzled, if not offended by programming these pieces. [On the other hand, most new music aficionados will turn up their noses at the Rutter.]
The Mozart and Verdi requiems, though not as difficult as the Stravinsky and Ligeti, require a good orchestra, professional soloists, and a talented and dedicated chorus. These requiems can be either Types One or Two. Occasionally, excerpts from the Mozart can be performed with solo organ and be used in a Type Three venue. The problem, in my opinion, is that the common man, especially these days, doesn’t always relate to classical music. For this reason, I hope that composers will consider composing simple, accessible works honoring the dead and consider not using the [Catholic] requiem mass, and have a contemporary poet or lyricist supply the words.
My requiem, “Hidden Legacies” (text by John Hall), was written when AIDS was decimating gay men, and gay choruses who needed a musical vehicle to process and exorcise their anger and horror. The piece served its function for that period and I felt honored to have helped so many. The topic, instrumentation, difficulty, and musical language was appropriate for that time and only that time.
Requiem-type pieces can benefit from musical language that speaks to people of its time. Although, if “High School Musical” is any indication of what the American musical is evolving to, may God strike me dead.
Last week I got an email from a student conductor who is performing a piece by John Adams, needing a synthesizer, specifically a Kurzweil K2500 or 2600. I knew that Robert Winter had a K2500 in his studio, otherwise I had no idea what to recommend. I asked him to tell me what patches the score called for, thinking we could come up with some generic sounds that would come close to what John wanted. The problem is that both synthesizers are no longer in production, and, although there are still some used ones around, there probably won’t be any in a few years.
Our world-famous composer is now tasting a bit of what I experienced: investing time and energy in writing music for instruments that are dead.
Between 1992 and 1994, I wrote three cantatas for gay choruses whose core instrumentation included three or four live synthesizers: “Hidden Legacies”, “Letters to the Future”, and “Flashpoint/Stonewall”. The synthesizers I used were the Yamaha DX7, the Yamaha TX802, the Roland D50, and the Kurzweil K2000 — all now long dead. I still own these synthesizers, but there is no software available that can download the sounds into them. I have held onto old computers with old operating systems in hopes that someday I can resurrect them. Many of the sounds that I used were sounds I designed myself that have no equivalent in traditional orchestral instruments or synthesizers, so there really is no substitute for these old dead sounds.
An alternative is to create a recording of the accompaniment in a kind of Music Minus One format. The problem here is that conductors are control freaks: they are opinionated about tempo, balance, and dynamics. They don’t like being a slave to a click track or the shackles of a prerecorded accompaniment, and for this reason alone, this doesn’t seem to be a viable option.
Synthesizer manufacturers treat their products like cars: they are hot for a year, then they take them out of production and replace them with a new, updated, better and improved version. These are financial decisions, not artistic decisions. So, composers who have composed music for them, and I mean notated music in the grand classical tradition, are just out of luck. What does John Adams plan to do about this? or his publisher, Boosey and Hawkes? Will the piece die because of this problem?
I have always hoped that someday a Glass Bead Game-type instrument would appear one day where one could punch in a number and have any historical synthesizer available at their fingertips. The problem seems to be that Roland owns its sound architecture, and Yamaha owns its, and so on.
Recently, virtual synthesizers have replaced physical ones. But the problem has been that we can’t access ANY of the sounds we created on the original instruments, much less import our old sound libraries into them. What good was that? Why has no one tried to update Opcode’s librarian software, or its suite of programming software designed for individual synthesizers? Part of the answer may be that certain sounds sound dated: but since when has that stopped a musician? We have a panoply of “early instruments” carefully maintained and used to faithfully reproduce the old traditions of performance and repertoire, but new music gets relegated to the chopped liver category.
Musicians who work in popular media use synthesizers for a CD, and then use them on the tour. After that, they move on to the next album. Their final product is a CD, not a score. But for those of us trained to be composers who create scores, so that people can re-create our music in years to come, we are out of luck.
With this current reality, I would advise all composers to NOT write for synthesizers in the traditional way, meaning notating music with patch changes and specifying synthesizers. Rather, they should specify “Synthesizer” and use generic terms that describe the kind of sounds you have in mind.
The instrumentation of the orchestra is closed. The only section whose instrumentation still evolves is the percussion section. Sure, you can put synthesizers in your score, just as you can a sitar, or erhu, or koto, but there is no guarantee that, in the future, anyone will be able to play those parts.
Thanks to Gary Philo for finding this most interesting interview. (Halsey Stevens is the interviewer.)
One of the interesting confessions here is that Schoenberg refers to himself as an “amateur painter” with no technique; and that he is, as of this interview, no longer a painter.
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