Happy Fourth of July

Yesterday was the best day yet at the Oregon Bach Festival Composers' Symposium. It was what I called "OBF Part II." We had the first day of gamelon, improvisation, and our workshop series.

I particularly enjoyed the improvisation group. Our leader had us working in duos. I played with a clarinetist from Atlanta. It was only 45 seconds, but a lot happened. I let her start. I countered her playing with consonant sounds and then went all the way up and sat on a high G for a few seconds. Then, we looked at each other and ended, all without conducting or saying a single word. During our duo, I wasn't thinking about "What do I need to do next?" I was watching, listening, and responding to another musician. Our eyes locked as we concluded our duo to a wonderful a niente ending. What a trip.

Afterwards, we listened to Dr. Kyr's oratorio called "A Time For Life." It was over an hour and thirty minutes. It was a great piece. His music strikes me as very similar to the music that came out of the early Renaissance and also has other facets that make it very gorgeous. There's more there, though, than just the notes on the page and the sounds...there is the very essence of music making.

The question that has been circulating around my mind a lot over the last year is, "What do we do with music?" There has been the job hunt and other things, but really, I've been asking the wrong question. I should be asking "What can we be with music?" Music seems to be this doorway to our inner selves and a nexus to other things that answer more enticing questions.

"A Time For Life" had some really cool things going on in terms of texture, voicing, and pacing. Most of the music is very slow moving. It has this slow moving texture in the strings and the text seems to be moving all around you. Also, the orchestration technique of overtone reinforcement made the string trio feel much larger than it really was.

I had a very good experience of the piece. After a while, I started wondering, "Where is the fast music that is going to counter this slow music." I got what I needed right when I asked that question. Part III of the oratorio has a significant section of a passage from Ecclesiastes, hence the "Dance of Life." This passage had the fast music that created the fulfillment I needed from this beautiful oratorio. We were listening to the oratorio in the Collier House. The lights were off and it was just about ten to thirteen of us who were listening to the music. When we were done with the piece, we had a discussion with Dr. Kyr about just a bunch of spontaneous things that the piece evoked in each of us.

Gangnam Style? Gamelan Style

Today, the Composers Symposium entered a new phase, what I call OBF Part II. There are a lot of different things going on over the next five days that I look forward to participating and observing. Today, I participated in the festivals's gamelan ensemble.

The University of Oregon has an extremely nice Balinese gamelan set. It has all of the necessary instruments to make a complete ensemble. Today, we focused on making music as a community. One of the many themes explored at this festival is community, and the gamelan was an extension of this.

One of the things I thought about was the paradigm of instrument vs. ensemble and vice versa. One of the challenges associated with playing in a gamelan is making sure that everyone strikes their instrument and dampens at the exact same time, ensuring that a cacophony of metal does not happen. I thought it was pretty cool how when everyone started thinking about the corporate sound, well, the individual strikes disappeared and the ensemble produced a sound together.

As individual players, if we try and feel the big overall picture, we eventually end up losing ourselves in the essence of the large sound. By contributing our individual identities selflessly, we all made the ensemble work. I think it's pretty neat how being selfless contributes to the overall sound of the gamelan "instrument."  The gamelan ensemble is essentially our instrument.

A kind of reverse picture exists with the notion of Bach's solo works for violin and cello. In a lot of these pieces, we find that each of the chords might have four stems. The individual player focuses on making an ensemble sound from a solo instrument. This "I" approach, while not bad or good, is somewhat incompatible with the gamelan approach, as gamelan is prefaced on the "we."

I'm too tired to write anymore, and it's improv time. See ya'll tomorrow.

Some Thoughts On Orchestras

Today, our Symposium Director gave us an outstanding lecture on his music and the themes that drive his music. I have a lot of feelings about those themes that I'll save for a later blog. I wanted to take this moment, though, and talk about one of my favorite things...orchestration.

I asked a question about a technique that he uses in his music called "overtone reinforcement." This is a very cool concept. Not only does it imply that certain partials will give the sound more thickness, but it also implies that there is another counterpoint and voice leading schema at play. 

My approach to orchestration is backwards to that of most composers. I write highly chromatic two-part counterpoint in a lot of my music that is frequently supported by chords. Orchestrating counterpoint is really hard. I'll usually pick a pitch that is central to the counterpoint and support it in the instrument above it or below it that sounds just right. This gives my compositions a particular edge.

Orchestras are a problem in today's world. We don't have a lot of them left and a lot of them don't like to do new music. Therefore, composers have to write flexible instrumentation. We have to provide versions of our pieces that might be able to work for different ensembles, too. By adding more meat to the sound, we can make a smaller orchestra sound like a larger ensemble. 

I also wanted to write a little bit about how composers and conductors can work together in order to solve the orchestra problem. If you're a graduate student writing an orchestra piece, the sad fact of the matter is that it is probably never going to get performed.

I tried a crowd sourcing strategy about three months ago in order to publicize my orchestra piece. I looked up several small colleges and universities and sampled recordings of their orchestras. I then emailed their directors and shared my music with them. I got very mixed responses. Some expressed concern that their ensemble might not be able to handle a new work. That's understandable. There was one conductor who sent me a very agitated email. It came across as, "How dare you ask me to use my orchestra!" I don't know...he was probably having a bad day. 

Across the country, composers are being deterred from writing for this ensemble because their piece will probably just sit on the shelf of some dissertation pantry. This is unfortunate. Composers should write for orchestra because it is a wonderful ensemble. Conductors should try and program new music because it helps their performers grow. As a result, we all get to share a richer music making experience. 

This is a big theme at this festival...community. Musicians can no longer afford to be institutionalized, compartmentalized, and individualized. It's about collaboration of composers, performers, conductors, and all types of musicians...with an emphasis on community. 

Maybe, it's time for us musicians to start thinking differently about the orchestra situation. I know it's a problem, but maybe if we started thinking about solutions rather than emphasizing the problem, we might start getting somewhere. Is it just me, or is there something really convoluted about a composer saying, "I shouldn't write for orchestra because it will never get play," or a conductor saying, "I shouldn't program new music because I just don't have the budget or resources to do it," or, "I shouldn't program this music because my populace will hate it?"

I'm lucky that I've gotten three opportunities to use the orchestra at my institution over the last three years. There's other colleges and universities though where we have those conductors who don't like to program a lot of new music. Anyways, I have to go conduct some business before later. Please feel free too share your thoughts and feelings as a comment in response to the orchestra situation. 

What Makes Us Not Like a Piece?

What I remember when I first encountered the music of Brown, Cage, and Wolff, among others. Something about that experience triggered something inside of me that made me feel extremely uneasy about the music of these composers. Perhaps, I had spent so much of my life writing music with a certain attention, a type of music that had a different intention startled me. Since then, I've tried to think about music differently. Rather than liking or disliking a piece, I started trying to listen to music in a manner that answered the question, "What can I take from this piece?"

I had my focus group with our Composer-In-Residence today. There were four of us composers in there with a wide variety of backgrounds and experiences. All of these pieces had things to appreciate. Also, all of these pieces had needed improvements. Some of us may choose to incorporate those criticisms into revisions. I usually don't revise past editions of my compositions. That being said, there were some criticisms that I heard today that echo previous criticisms of other pieces. Those things, I will change.

One of the things that moderately amused me was how our work in lessons plays out over the long term. I used to be too square in my compositions. I started tying across the bar line a LOT in order to be less square. Needless to say, bar lines are good because they are things to arrive at and depart from.

The question used to entitle this blog is a valid one. I don't think I have the answers. Do we have to like a piece? I don't think so. Sometimes, however, I think that we aim our dislike of a piece at the person who composed it, sometimes unintentionally. Everyone has the right to try composition. Not everyone is going to be good at it. Sometimes, it is okay to tell someone that composition might not be their thing. I think it is important to understand that everyone comes into something at their own time and place. That is part of the human experience. I think that when we deny another person their first small steps we forget our own. I mean, isn't that what learning is all about?

I think that we musicians often forget that, well, we are all human beings. Over the course of the week, some composers might not get to have a piece performed on one of the concerts. There's a certain amount of frustration that is totally normal. It's important to realize that there are only a few hours on each concert and only ten days of the festival. A few of us have shared scores at this festival, and well, let's just say this...I haven't seen a horrendous score.

As a composer, when something doesn't win a contest or doesn't get programmed on a concert, well, that's life. That should be a great opportunity to say, "Let's revise." Or even more so, if you feel the piece is good, tell yourself, "There is this contest coming up that I think that this piece might be a good fit for."

Maybe, the act of composing, and ultimately the act of music making, is one of revision. Something can always change in order to make a better composition or performance. We can ultimately draw parallels to what we're working on and adopt a livelihood for revision, learning from something that we might not ultimately like or consider.