Last night, sitting around on the porch shooting the breeze with Gareth’s dad (Gareth and Jenny are getting married today), he spoke of his love for the blues scene in London in the late 60s. I told him that I had just taught the 12-bar blues form to my students this week. He continued to wax nostalgic about how Brits really “got” the blues — Americans would come over and try to do the blues but failed. I responded: “I’ve never been a blues guy. Blues is for straight guys. And I say that because I’ve never met a gay man that liked the blues: its’ a straight guy thing. And being a composer, I love harmony, and in the blues, there are only 3 chords — BORING. Yes, I understand that the blues is a perfect venue for improvising, but I am just not interested.” He looked mildly surprised but smiled and acknowledged our difference.
It occurs to me as I watch many musicians perform expressively, that this behavior might be perceived as a similar act to being erotic with one’s lover. The caress of a breast, the touch of a finger on a key; the approach of a kiss, raising your instrument high in the air and letting the melody go; the magic of entry is not so different from a musical modulation or arrival; the ebb and flow of one’s breath; the look of ecstasy on the face of a performer as they play; the interchange between musicians and lovers as they coordinate their next move; and the smile or devastation on our faces at the end. It’s a good idea IMHO to tap into this connection as a performer. No other art form can emulate love making quite so beautifully.
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.
Two nights ago, I had the privilege of hearing the “We’re not the UCLA Faculty String Quartet, String Quartet” perform with selected students at a private fundraiser for the new FRIENDS OF STRINGS at UCLA. Oh My God! They sounded amazing. What a joy to have such talent as colleagues and students. Their’s was the best performance of the Ravel String Quartet I’ve ever heard.
Tonight I get to hear Opera UCLA perform The Marriage of Figaro, and I’ll be going with our viola teacher, Richard O’Neill. And in case you haven’t heard of him, here’s a video.
OMG! Greg Brown (the fiddle player in this photo) just sent me this picture. It is the Yahara River Valley Boys, a bluegrass group I played with from 1972-4 in Madison Wisconsin. The photo looks vaguely like the Flying Burrito Brothers. Are these wholesome lads or what?
L-R: Roger Bourland, Ed Fyffe, Jamie Shelton, and Greg Brown.
OakWebWorks Tickets published a Top Ten Classical Music Blogs list recently, with an interesting selection. Yours truly came in at number three. The company that made this list sells tickets to all kinds of events around the US. Here is the criteria, as listed in my notification email:
How frequently the site is updated
Features
Quality of the writing
Originality
Relevancy
The age of the site
Unique information offered & overall usefulness
Other factors & our own personal opinions
I’ve reblogged their top ten list here for your information.
Sequenza21
It’s easy to read and easy to navigate. Sequenza21 has the tagline “the contemporary classical music community” and the blog is updated by a team large enough to be a community. It’s a great place to learn about everything that’s going on in the world of classical music.
The Standing Room
The Standing Room tackles classical music with a well designed blog that has lots of links, lots of information and a sense of humor. Their reading room is a great feature.
RogerBourland.com
Roger Bourland is a composer and music professor who does a little blogging on the side. Granted, his status within the classical music community elevates his blog (which can stray off topic) but there’s enough information and great videos to make up for it.
The Omniscient Mussel
Colorful and energetic, The Omniscient Mussel features several entries on some of the world’s greatest classical music. In some ways it’s what you might have seen had the internet be around in the times of Brahms. The blog has tons of features and links, including a weekly contest.
Thirteen Ways – Adventures (In New Music) With eighth blackbird
Thirteen ways is a blog written by eighth blackbird, a Grammy award winning chamber music sextet. Their simple blog contains news, behind the scenes action, reviews of their concerts, as well as observations and musing on other topics from the world of classical music. It’s a very fun blog.
Parterre Box
Parterre Box is stylized and glamorous, but still a very informative blog about opera. It’s billed as a “queer opera zine” and is updated by La Cieca, the site’s “cultural doyenne.” The highlight of the blog, besides La Cieca’s witty writing, is a section called “unnatural acts of opera.” Check it out.
Classical Convert
Classical Convert features the tagline, “classical music for non classical people.” This is the blog to start with if you’re new to the classical music world. Blogger Ben is a solid writer and among his blog’s many features are primers to classical music. Only a subpar design keeps this blog from ranking higher.
Jason Heath’s Double Bass Blog
Yes, it’s a blog dedicated to the double bass, but it’s full of great features like double bass news, stories, downloads, podcasts, and history lessons. Jason’s friendly and inviting blog is a good read whether you play a double bass or not.
Think Denk
Jeremy Denk is a concert pianist and while his blog is fascinating and insightful, his entries are few and far between. Apparently, he spends most of his free time practicing instead of blogging—what’s up with that? Still, his blog is a wonderful glimpse into the life of a world famous classical musician.
Oboeinsight
Patricia Mitchell blogs in a conversational style and she does so very frequently. While Patricia is an oboist, her site encompasses the entire world of classical music, not just the oboe. She admits her site is cluttered, but even so, Oboeinsight is a good read with lots of information, features and links.
The aforementioned blogs are worthy of a visit and a bookmark. Each site has a different design, each site approaches classical music from a different perspective, but all the sites have one thing in common… a passion for classical music.
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.
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.
Every once in a while a magical correspondence happens. Sometime back, I posted a YouTube performance of Arnold Schoenberg conducting the first movement of his PIERROT LUNAIRE. The flutist on this recording was Leonard Posella. The other day I received this letter from his son, Nino, who gave me permission to reproduce his letter here.
Mr. Bourland:
Out of the blue I was sent a copy of the November 10th, 2008 Schoenberg conducts Pierrot Lunaire (excerpts) link to the YouTube recording of Pierrot Lunaire you provided in the article I believe you authored. The moment I heard it I was haunted, unexpectedly transported back through decades of memories and music, and then I knew I was listening to the unique sound of my father on the flute. I began to do some digging and discovered the article from which the link came. My ears did not deceive me. The flute and piccolo was credited to my father.
I have very few recordings of my father, Leonard Posella. Most of what I hear is from old Warner Brothers movies and of course, Looney Tunes cartoons. Dad did all the flute work from about 1940-1969 or 1970. I also just recently found a six record set of the Schoenberg, conducted by the composer himself. The set was in some boxes I had been hauling around for years after my father’s death, not really knowing the contents. They were from Ferde Grofe’s collection as my father and he were very close. I have not as yet been able to play them as they are either 78’s or 33 1/3 and I have no turntable. I will eventually attempt convert them to digital as I think my father was the flutist on that particular recording.
Interestingly enough, I have a letter to my father from Schoenberg, thanking my father for his work on Schoenberg’s music. I believe the Pierrot piece was included in Schoenberg’s gratitude letter, although not specifically. Anyway, I was thrilled to hear the music and take the journey on which it sent me. I also still have the ebony piccolo with the sterling head joint on which he played for the Schoenberg recording. The flute was either his platinum Powell (later stolen from his locker at WB), the Louis Lot or his Haynes (made by “old man Haynes” as he used to refer to him). I still have the Haynes and the Lot as well.
If you have any other recordings that you may know of with my father on them, I would be grateful to hear them.
Regards,
Nino Posella
Nino: Our librarian assures me that these recordings have been digitally made available. Whether they are still in print is another question. Many thanks for sharing this story about your father with me and my readers.
[Image from "Pierrot lunaire in Studio and in Broadcast" by Avior Byron, published in the Journal of the Society for Musicology in Ireland, 2 (2006-7), p. 69]
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