This week in Music History, Culture, and Creativity, our students must compose, record, convert to mp3 and upload their compositions to the class website. Their compositions are to feature a drone (a sustained bass note throughout a section or an entire piece of music), or pedal (as in when an organ holds down a PEDAL, a low note, while other music happens on top) with a melody. It may be for any instrumentation and in any style.

For inspiration I played several music videos from YouTube illustrating a wide variety of musics that use drones or pedals.

In Stevie Wonder’s “Too High” both the opening tonic vamp and the dominant pedal are short drones.

Influenced by Ravi Shankar and Indian ragas, the Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows” lays down a complicated drone thoughout.

The Habanera from Bizet’s Carmen has a bass line ostinato that changes chords throughout, but the bass line refuses go anywhere.

“Scotland the Brave” is a perfect example of a memorable melody over a drone. But, to paraphrase Stravinsky, the monster never breathes.

Some of you may remember Moondog. I saw him both performing in the streets of Manhattan, but he came to the UW Madison School of Music and had an all-day residency. He wrote a round called “N-O-S-I-D-A-M” which is Madison backwards. I still remember the tune if anyone needs it. I may have a copy somewhere as well. But this is an example of an invention with one note, played by several instruments.

Here, John Coltrane tells the bass player in “Giant Steps” to sustain an E flat pedal. I don’t get it but this video/transcription is maddeningly brilliant.

Here Seal whoops up the audience over his drone song “Crazy.”

These songs represent a wildly diverse range of music inspired by drones and pedals.

After decades of wishing, the composition program at the UCLA Department of Music now has a Composition for Visual Media track in its Masters degree. In its second year, we have started slowly and accepted only two per year–although we plan to expand to eight or so.

And after decades of wishing, we now have a very nice bridge between the Department of Music and the Department of Film––as it should be, but for years, it was out of commission.

Today I met with the Chair of the Film program who has two terrific projects funded by major donors (I’ll let her reveal that information when it’s time). The first project involves eight, three-minute animated films on various themes funded by a well known animator; and the second is about global education, told in three-minute films, made by the UCLA Grad students in film, and UCLA student composers.

These relationships are so important in the growth of both artists––learning how to collaborate. For composers used to the dictatorship of the classical world, we must get used to rewrites: “Sorry Roger; it’s a lovely piece of music, it just doesn’t work for this scene. I need you to try again.” Composers must smile and get to work without attitude.

If the director is not especially music-savvy, and he has met a composer with whom s/he is simpatico, very often, they stay together. Think: Henri Mancini and Blake Edwards; John Williams and Steven Spielberg; Tim Burton and Danny Elfman, and so on.

Tossing your students together like this, knowing that something fabulous is going to happen, is one of the great joys of teaching.

Last week in our MUSIC HISTORY, CULTURE, AND CREATIVITY class, we talked about musical embellishments. Robert Winter spoke at length about melodic embellishments in classical music–a rich resource to be sure. As A.J. Racy has been demonstrating Arab melodies for the past few weeks, virtually every phrase is filled with embellishments, and ones that are quite different than western embellishments. We closed the class with yours truly pointing out vocal embellishments in selected pop/folk music from America: The Carter Family singing “Wildwood Flower,” Doug Kershaw playing and singing “DIggy Liggy Lo,” kd lang singing Roy Orbison’s “Crying,” the riveting performance by Jimi Hendrix of “Star Spangled Banner” at Woodstock––LOTS to talk about there, and closing with Beyonce’s video of “SIngle Ladies”––”gentlemen, stop paying so much attention to the video and more on the melody!” Yeah, right.

The students in our fab new Music History, Culture and Creativity class have a challenging assignment this week. They are required to compose and record a one minute melody that includes microtones.

Last week one of the three teachers, AJ Racy, was on the stage with three students, a bassoonist, a bass clarinetist, and a violinist. He would play them a phrase that included some non-Western notes (ie microtones), and the students would try to imitate it. It was actually kind of funny watch students who have worked so hard for so long to TRY to play in “tune”. The fingerings that use for the notes don’t work for these “new” notes.

I told the students: define the mode you’ll be using, practice playing it so that you become used to the new intonation, then start improvising with the mode. Now, write a melody. I didn’t require that they notate the tune, but have encouraged them to do it for ease of learning and in case they have someone else play it. After they compose the melody, they must record it, convert it to an MP3, and then upload it to the class website so that their classmates can hear and comment on them.

A really interesting assignment, and a damned tough one too!

In an area known as “Music Education” which, for Schools, Conservatories, and Departments of Music means K through 12, there appears to be a national problem. Potentially gifted teachers may not always be the best performers: sometimes yes, sometimes no–and vice versa. So the question arises: if instrumental lessons are required of all future K-12 teachers, from who can they study? Teachers have limits on the size of their studios, and insist on the best student performers; taking a music education “major” who is below the level of many students that were just denied due to lack of space, seems unfair to all those that were rejected, but better performers.

One solution is to have music education majors come from the performers already admitted who are already at a high performance level. Another is to have doctoral students teach the undergraduate MusEd majors. The problem with that is the perceived “upstairs-downstairs” of it all. The best solution is to just hire more teachers; but if you add one more for every instrument in the orchestra, that is a LOT more faculty–That is quite a challenge in slimming-down times.

There are stories of famously fabulous teachers who never performed, and amazing musicians or composers who are terrible teachers.

It’s a puzzlement.

[A commercial for my students.]

This is National Coming Out Week, also known as LGBT Awareness Week. Coming out is short for coming out of the closet, meaning bringing out into the open something that has been hidden away. I encourage my students to be compassionate when a friend “comes out” to them–coming out is very traumatic for some people; for others it’s not an issue.

The empathy muscle used in supporting a friend coming out as a gay or lesbian person, is also put to use in other personal confessions that have nothing to do with sexual preference. Imagine the following confessions that one person might make to another:

“I’m pregnant.”
“I’m going to get married.”
“My husband is cheating on me.”
“I have cancer.”
“I didn’t get into Harvard.”
“I love you.”

Each of these scenarios is a type of coming out. As the person listening and as a good friend, you’ll be there for them, realizing how difficult it must have been to make this confession.

On the other hand, coming out feels good–letting the world–or perhaps just a close friend–know who you are. As my old pal and collaborator John Hall wrote in our “Flashpoint/Stonewall:”

“Your difference is your strength, you see.
Come out! Come out! for all to see.”

[Illustration by Keith Haring]

This week I have been lecturing about the technique and rules regarding music notation. The angles, shading, background, lengths, proportions and stem direction. I explained the ever fascinating and source of the way music notation looks, the crow quill pen.

Sadly, I had to emulate the flowing nature of that great pen with a magic marker for a white board, which was frustrating at best. I promised them that we would move to computer notation soon enough, but I wanted them to know how to notate by hand.

There I was on the stage, lecturing 90 students with my round glasses, drawing notes and clefs and other musical symbols on the board–hmm, some day that will be quite a quaint image.

This is what the crow quill pen looks like in the hands of J.S. Bach.

This week I had several meetings planning our new class for all incoming Music, World Music, and Music History students. It will be a one year class, team taught each quarter by three full professors: one composer (me, all three quarters), a musicologist, and an ethnomusicologist. Next quarter I will be teaching with Jihad Racy and Robert Winter — two brilliant scholars, musicians, teachers, and people.

We sketched out the 10-week term along with written and compositional assignments. The course is called MUSIC HISTORY, CULTURE, AND CREATIVITY and is the brain child of the Director of our school, Timothy Rice.

We are very excited about this new direction in teaching musicians about music. On Monday I will be meeting with my collaborators in the Winter term Susan McClary and Helen Rees. I will reveal more as it becomes clear.

Some of my colleagues were standing around grousing about something yesterday. I joined them and found them complaining about students.

“I can’t believe that these kids have only come to 50% of my counterpoint class! BW just texts during class and it drivesme crazy. When I was in college, I NEVER missed classes.” Another joined in: “I’m having the same problem with my graduate students. Some have missed 4 of 10 seminars.” “My students just don’t read. I assign reading for class and very few of them are prepared.” “I didn’t make my students buy any books so as to save them money during this bad economy. They STILL don’t read.”

I encouraged them to give them bad grades. We went on:

“Why, I remember going home from school every day with an arm-load of musical scores. I couldn’t wait to learn about some new piece of music. Kids today don’t seem to have much of that fire. They do, barely, what is required and not much else.” Another piped in: “I couldn’t believe how unsupportive of each other they are. They don’t attend each others’ recitals. Few of them attend performances of their teachers’ work.” “I rarely see them at new music concerts.”

Is it the fluoride in the water? Were they spoiled rotten by their pampering baby-boomer parents? Or has the autism spectrum widened to include total boredom that doesn’t somehow relate to Facebook, talking on the phone, texting, or partying?

I’m afraid it’s the Entitled Generation.

Today Prof Steve Loza visited our class to share is passion. Of Mexican heritage, he studied classical music in college, but wanted more and became profoundly curious to learn of his own heritage, and ultimately became an Ethnomusicologist, but keeping his feet in performing and composition.

He spoke of the blend of indigenous, Spanish, and black cultures intermarrying in Latin America, and that it really became a new race. Besides the historical accounts of the blending of the different races and cultures, he stressed that one can hear the mix in the music. He played examples and quizzed the class as to what they heard, and their ears were well-tuned.

As there are no pure races any longer, it was refreshing to hear a professor embracing being Mestizo or Hapa, or, as Americans call them, mutts. (I prefer the Mexican appellation.)

Making the connection between musical languages, race, and culture tickled my brain.