Roger Bourland
writes about music and life

When a plant dies does it think, “Ok I’m going to die now, or I am dying, or I’m about to be killed”? Or is there any “I”. Has anyone updated that fun book “The Secret Life of Plants” where the author attached various plants to EEG and/or EKG and did various things to it or in front of it and allegedly got responses from the plant?

I don’t ask this because I need something else to feel guilty about, but it makes me think about different kinds of life forms, one that spreads itself around, but there is no “I” and the other where there is an “I” like a fish, or a dog, or me.

Old memories.

I’ll never forget when Henry Mancini told us that composing is very much like being a plumber. “It’s a job, I get hired to write music for a film and I do my job.” The vision of the composer on a mountain top conversing with the gods is a cool one, but not at all what happens.

Ideas come to us in a variety of different ways. It can be that the text evokes and demands that a melody be written in such a way. Or a melodic idea may come first. Who plays that melody can come with the idea or be a separate one. Sometimes a rhythmic idea pops into our head and drives us into action. Sometimes a series of chords inspires us. There may be a melody on top of those chords, and maybe not.

There are things like variations, inventions, falling bass lines, rondos, sonatas, song forms, and such where pre-fab composition can take place and we flex our technique and developmental muscles. For me, at least in vocal music, the text ALWAYS comes first. My job is to make sure that the people in the back can hear the text. I don’t repeat texts over and over as Handel would, I use it conversationally and in a declamatory fashion, meaning I want the words heard and respected. The rhythm of the sentences should be believable, and if not, eccentric for a reason.

So the text causes the rhythm and the melody to come into existence. Once I have my melody, I create a scaffolding throughout the song. Along the way I may write in bass notes, or accompanimental ideas, complete or partial. I also usually write out that main line in pencil, unless I’m in a rush, as I have for the past 10 months. Most of the melodies of the songs in Act 1 of HOMER IN CYBERSPACE were written in pencil and then transferred to the computer (I use Sibelius for notating my music).

Yesterday I had to get a lot of music written. Luck was on my side as I got a huge amount done. I had three scenes where music is sounding in the background (underscore) very much like film music, and four numbers where there was some kind of dancing going on. None of the music involved singing. The work rhythm that I used was as follows:

Read, savor, and imagine the scene.
Compose until you get the number done.
Lie down and read the next scene, fall asleep for 10 to 15 minutes.
Get up, have a snack, throw the ball for the dogs.
Repeat until you decide to stop.

Today is a school day, so I may have an hour this afternoon, and a few hours on Saturday and Sunday morning. The end of music for HOMER is near, after this weekend it should just be a little “snip, snip here, snip, snip there and a couple of tra la las.”

But as Mike always says: anything following the word “should” is usually BS.

I have the day to try and catch up as I still have seven numbers to finish: 4 dance numbers, and 3 underscore cues.

There will be more edits and tweaks over the next few weeks.
If you are planning on attending one of the eight performances, get your tickets now as it will sell out.

The UCLA Department of Theater Presents

Homer in Cyberspace
The Ray Bolger Musical Theater Production

Book by
Mel Shapiro and Daniel Keleher

Music by Roger Bourland

Lyrics by Mel Shapiro
Additional lyrics by Daniel Keleher

Direction by Mel Shapiro

UCLA’s Little Theater, Macgowan Hall
May 29th, 30th, 31st, June 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th @ 8:00 pm May 31st, June 7th @ 2:00 pm

$17 general admission, $15 seniors/faculty/staff/alumni
$7 students, group rates available
For tickets: 310.825.2101
or www.tickets.ucla.edu
Parking available at Structure 3 ($8)

SB defended his dissertation today. His aesthetic includes a musical score on a screen that includes well thought out symbols cast in motion graphics that represent musical improvisational activity. The symbol we focused on was the ourobouro, or the snake eating its tail. Musically this activity seemed to imply cyclical action, or in musical terms, repetition of some musical parameter.

For SB, there is a group of musicians who improvise according to a motion graphic score that each player either watches on a monitor, or projected on a screen. My objection to this liberating idea was that the whole ensemble would look like deer in the headlights as they stare at the score. This is dramaticallly just weird looking. It occurred to me that if everyone had computer monitors in their glasses, they would be free to walk around and look natural.

When we go to live concerts, we DO like watching the orchestra. And as Dudamel has shown us, orchestras can be SEXY.

I provide this background only to report an amusing discovery. In improvisation, he claims, and we agreed, there is the idea, or the seed, and developing the seed. This principle is true in classical music, and literature as well. SB then fessed up to these principles being male and female. I tried to lead the discussion another direction:

“Might you not consider it akin to Nietzsche’s notion of the Dionysian persona — the bold idea, the main theme in a nutshell, a simple discovery, the raw throbbing idea there on the table is unformed but beautiful — as opposed to the Apollonian persona who takes this jewel in the rough and turns it into a beautiful diamond, or works out all the ramifications of the single discovery.”

“McClary would have been proud I” I thought to myself.

“No, masculine and feminine is IT” he calmly insisted.

I glanced down at the page and saw that some scholar pointed out the the first two numbers of our number system are the ur-male and ur-female symbols. I will never look at the number 10 again without a little flush in my chest.

Yesterday was a stressful day. Why? Because in my mind, there were so many things that needed to get done but simply not enough hours in the day, nor enough energy to get them all done even if there were.

I watched my body as it tensed up, and all other physical manifestations of stress kicked in. Then I took a big breath and realized all I can do is put one foot in front of the other and get through the day, and not worry about what isn’t being done. I have no choice, so let it go. As much as I try, I can only do so much in one day, and that’s the way it goes. Life will go on, as ol’ George used to say “within you and without you.”

[Stress grounding complete.]

I was puzzled to see the name “Scarlatti” on my calendar this morning for an eleven o’clock. My assistant, who can be a mongoose when it comes to scaring away people that I don’t need to see, said it was impossible to deny this man. She said he was a man with a strong Italian accent and finally agreed for a half hour appointment.

I began to think whether I’ve had students whose last names were the same as composers. I couldn’t think of any. Beethoven, Mozart, Berlioz, Stravinsky, Puccini, Verdi, Stockhousen, Berio, Josquin, and so on. Although I hear there are a pair of Bartok twins who are famous in porn, and of course Wagner is rather common. Poor John Adams’ google rankings have probably plummeted since the John Adam mini-series aired this season. But Scarlatti was in the first category. Could this be a great-great grandson of THE Domenico Scarlatti? Pshaw, of course not.

Promptly at 11 am, the door burst open and an elderly gentleman, or wait, he has a powdered wig and as he raced towards me with his hand extended, a waft of stench came over me that made me involuntarily wince, and then went into auto-correct mode and smiled and shook his sweaty hand. It was Domenico Scarlatti.

He began speaking in Italian at a fast clip until I grabbed him and told him that I don’t speak Italian. He smiles, and raised both arms in the air as to embrace me, and then spouted out what was probably five single spaced pages of text, seemingly without a breath. I blinked. My memory is not good enough to remember his exact words, but the gist of it was the following.

“I have become the Salieri of the Baroque. It was JS Bach who was the pinnacle of that era in the opinion of the present day, and this is unfair. We teach our students Bach this and Bach that as if no one else mattered. Listen to this.”

He sat down and dashed off one his little binary firey sonatas with great passion and power.

“Now tell me THAT is not worth studying!”

My mouth was still open, and I realized that I was staring at him. I snapped out of it.

“Mr Salieri, er, Scarlatti, I agree whole-heartedly that you SHOULD be taught and valued more. Why, I could imagine an entire class to playing, arranging and studying your work.”

He looked at me, and his face became a huge smile. Once again he raised his arms as though gesturing towards the heavens, and he disappeared.

The door opened and my assistant came in and said, “Your 11 o’clock is here shall I send him in?”

And in came my student for his weekly composition lesson.

“Should I come back?” he said.

“No, no, I was just daydreaming…”

My annual trip up to Lake Arrowhead was a pleasant one. I left early on Saturday morning and just flew up the mountain. It is always fun to spend time with my committee buddies deliberating over proposals for curricular improvement.

Lake Arrowhead seems bone dry, ie, a water shortage. The front page confirmed my suspicion on Sunday morning. They seem to have a plan. Good thing.

I returned to a very hot LA on Sunday. I celebrated by turning on the air conditioning. I spent the afternoon working on last minute Homer in Cyberspace additions and edits.

As it cooled down, we drove to Venice, to Highways, to attend Allistair McCartney’s book signing and reading. I loved it, in fact his new novel has given me new ideas about directions to go on this blog. (Stay tuned.)

We are about half way through our final term here at UCLA and I know that I’ll blink my eyes and it will be over and summer will be here. The premiere of HOMER is four weeks from this Thursday and I still have some music (underscore) to compose. I had told everyone I was done and the pressure is off, but there is still some work to do.

By the way, please remember Daniel’s maxim: ALL HARD DRIVES WILL FAIL. Plan on backing up your work at your earliest convenience. He had set up a great backup system for our files, where my complete works are mirrored on two drives and then backed up again on a third drive. Sounds great doesn’t it? Well, all three drives failed. We managed to get one drive working (he put it in the freezer for 10 minutes - sic) and I was able to retrieve my complete works which were almost lost. I now have a new copy of all my music and will make a few more so that this kind of thing doesn’t happen again.

A word to the wise is sufficient.

Dear Sister Alex Shapiro has tagged me in a game of e-tag with the following meme:

Oy––

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

Here is my quote, taken from Aaron A. Fox’s REAL COUNTRY:

Hoppy’s conclusion powerfully emphasized this point. Drawing on a trope that is yet another of the myriad parallels between country music song texts and working-class verbal art, Hoppy completed his narrative with a sudden “freezing” of temporality in a lyric image of time as a cycle of perpetual, predictable return. Here, as always, Sam eventually finds himself “eating off the same table” after a woman has ditched him.

Tag to my father, my brother Andy, my brother Peter, Andy’s wife Jeanne, and Elijah.

Today I go to Malibu (May’s Landing) again for a retreat with colleagues from the Departments of Musicology, Ethnomusicology, and Music to discuss curricular ideas of a core offering that could work for all three departments.

The three departments were at war within one big department when I arrived in 1983 and finally divorced in 1989 into separate departments — musicology went to Letters and Science, the others stayed in the School of Art and Architecture.

First my theory was that we split because of title issues (performers couldn’t be professors), or from personality issues, but I’m of the opinion that we split because each area is really so different, and IMHO, it works better this way. Enter the Herb Alpert Foundation who will be giving us $30 million dollars over the upcoming three years, and we are still happy with our organizational autonomy.

At the core of this gift is money to help the student — scholarships, seed money for projects, facilities, and so on — but as far as the curriculum is concerned, money flows to projects and courses that involve interdepartmental collaboration. The process is really fun to watch, and today promises to be an exciting culmination of our work.

Our Director, Tim Rice broke the work group into teams of three people each, and each was to come up with their own proposal of how a core curriculum could exist involving the three departments.

Being in Malibu for these retreats is like those Doonesbury images of Malibu: it’s really like that. It makes for a very relaxing space to let your hair down and feel free to converse with your colleagues away from the office.

—

The retreat was a great success. Even the skeptics who didn’t want to haul their asses all the way to Malibu admitted that it was a great place to meet and that is was a productive retreat, Each group added something unique to the project and all felt valued. The opinions of what we are about to do ranged from the best music program in the world to dumbing down our curriculum, the majority leaning toward the former. It is always a risk embracing a new philosophy or weltanschauung and it can seem to some that we are abandoning the tried and true for the unknown. I, for one, am ready.

Now, at 5:30 in the morning, I’m driving up to Lake Arrowhead for my annual retreat with the committee for UCLA’S Office of Instructional Development. This time I have to remember to NOT speed down the mountain, you may remember last year this time I got a ticket for speeding back to LA from on up the mountain, listening to music and feelin’ fine when rrrrrrrrrr — the police pulled me over for going 85.