taking direction …
At the MacDowell Colony for four weeks … arrived Tuesday, now it’s Friday night. A studio of my own in the woods, with nothing to do but work. I’m fed well, can ride my bike to town if I need anything, and have to walk to a little library to use the internet. Quite heavenly. Have immediately finished editing together a version of Numb, and have begun writing more musical material for the rest of MONO … and hope to have the piece structured and plotted out before I’m done here. Also, of course, I need to prepare for concerts in China next month and a write a paper to deliver in Shanghai … but I think MONO is my main job for the month. Tonight or tomorrow I’ll post another call for collaboration in the form of stories, after I post links to Numb and MONO Prelude.
One of the things one does here is talk to other resident artists about your project, so now people are aware of my history with hearing loss, and what I’m doing with it, on some level. This is what we talk about at breakfast and dinner. But this evening, back in the studio, I had a little reminder of my reality.
I’m in the studio, listening to the recording of Numb I’ve been editing together (picture of the ProTools file above). I suddenly become completely paranoid that the stereo imaging isn’t happening. I spend about a half hour sending tones through one speaker then the other … and it doesn’t really matter which one I’m sending it through, I really can’t tell which one it’s coming from. I can see it on the meters on the computer and in the mixer, but it sounds to me like all the sound comes out of both speakers. I finally calm down enough and do some simple diagnostics to convince myself that the sound I’m sending through each individual speaker is what I mean to send there, but it’s an intellectual exercise in debugging. I can’t hear it.
So, if I can’t hear it, why do I care if the stereo is working for other people? On the one hand, it seems antithetical to everything I believe about how I write music: for years I’ve striven to write what I really hear, not what I think I’m supposed to hear. But this seems different. In fact, the rest of the world takes great pleasure in the spatial movement of sound, the separation of sources and their isolation and distinct identity. I can imagine it, but I can’t hear it. That is, I hear it internally, but not with my ears. So trying to realize it seems as important as it did when I had two ears, but now I can’t just deal with it intuitively and with my senses. I now have to treat it as a kind of intellectual task, something I need to do and to trust that it will work as I imagine it.
my ears 33 years ago …
Last week I had the opportunity to hear a graduating percussion student at NYU perform my piece Ever-livin’ rhythm in his senior recital. The student, Garrett Lanzet did a great job, though he was a little shaken by syncing up at the end … makes me think that I should really go back to the piece and put a click track on it, so that the player can really know where he is all the time. But that never crossed my mind when I wrote the piece.
What was interesting for me, though, was how similar and how different the piece is from what I write now. It was my first piece for computer sound … and then, as now, I rejected the idea of writing “for loud speakers” and felt compelled to include a performer, so that the piece could be a performance.
I wrote the piece in 1977 … so that’s 33 years ago. I can hear in the piece places where I tried to make the music a little more abstract that I would if I were writing it now. I also am very aware that the musical themes are directly taken from the old Folkways LP recordings of the Ba Benzele pygmies which I was listening to a lot at the time, trying to understand and get a handle on their polyrhythmic world. And I was fascinated then, as now, with the idea of using the computer to create a kind of magic in the realm of timbre and sound and coordination which the player alone can’t do.
I recall that the electronic crashes in the piece, which seem to echo and compliment the cymbal crashes, are actually made up of a chaotic pile of the little rhythmic motive, but at a speed of quarter note equals about 3000 beats per minute. I don’t think anyone will ever hear that little compositional tid-bit. And today I might try something like that, but if I couldn’t really hear its significance, I’d probably chuck it in a minute.
More successfully, the ways the bowed vibes and the FM-synth melody interact in the middle are really lovely, as is the complex poly-rhythm built by the combination of percussion & tape at the end. However, I feel as though I know a lot more about writing for performers today than I did then … and either through the use of real interaction, or with a click track, I’d have been more careful to help the player find their way in the piece, so that they’re not searching for the sync pulse, as Garrett was at the end of the piece last week.
And of course … I remember that the piece actually made some interesting use of stereo effects, with the sounds swirling about the percussionist some. Unfortunately, I can’t hear that anymore … I presume it was at the performance last week, but I have no way of telling. THAT is very strange, still.
What’s also a bit strange is that there’s an element of my musical language which has persisted in all this time. Even in 1977, the music was focused on melody. And there are real harmonic and rhythmic anchors. I spoke afterward with Jonathan Haas, Garrett’s teacher, and the one who turned him on to the piece. Jonathan and I hung out at Aspen in 1975, and again I think in ‘78 when Ever-livin’ Rhythm was played at the festival there. We haven’t really seen each other in the many years since. He praised the piece, and said he tried to get all his students to play the piece, but Garrett was only the second who had really taken it on, because it’s so difficult. He compared it to Berio’s Circles or Stockhausen’s Zyklus … classic 20th Century percussion tour de forces using a huge set up for a single players, as does Ever-livin’ Rhythm. My response was that, indeed, those had both been models for me, but that I needed mine to groove as well. That wasn’t an issue for either Berio or Stockhausen. But it still is for me, even after all these years.
autobiography …
Played both MONO Prelude and Numb on Sunday, and seemed to get an enthusiastic response. After the show, there was a brief Meet-The-Composer discussion with the composers on the program, led by Cornelius Dufallo. When he got to me, Cornelius commented that he’d now played several of my pieces in different contexts and was struck by the references to events in my life in all the pieces. He asked how I thought about the autobiographical nature of my work.
It was a great question, and caught me a bit off guard. My answer was that starting about a decade ago I had stopped “editing” myself when I wrote, and that this is what has emerged. While that’s right, it’s not very clear, and doesn’t really address the heart of what he was asking about. So I’ll try again here.
Much of what I hear and read about music theory talks about process, about the analysis and organization the materials of music, about the exploration of unusual sounds, about use of improvisation, about the use of algorithms to generate structures and sounds, etc. All very interesting, and all certainly stuff I’ve spent time studying and thinking about. But ultimately, not things I find terribly relevant when I sit down to make music. What really happened about 2002, when we moved to the the City full time, and I dropped work on the musical theater piece I’d been working on for about 5 years (The Rise & Fall of Isabella Rico), was that I re-thought why I write music.
In some way, having spent 5 years working on something as un-hip, un-avant-garde as a musical theater piece, which had been aimed at Broadway or Off-Broadway, had a huge liberating effect on me. For the decades from the mid-1970s through that time, I think I had been snared by my history at IRCAM, and then by my position directing iEAR Studios and my growing engagement with the engineering culture at Rensselaer. Pre-Rico I was really thinking about everything I did both as music and as some kind of research. Research could mean using game algorithms for composition in real time, or exploring new techniques for processing or synthesis, exploring new interface devices, finding ways to use computers to direct improvising players, working with network-distributed performance ensembles, etc. All very interesting … but requiring me to spend more time thinking about technical issues than focusing on why I write music.
What I learned working on Rico was to write songs which were meant to express the specific feelings of a specific character in a specific situation. More than that, a song in a musical theater piece has to mark a change or transformation in a character: the character enters the song with a conflict or question, and the song provides a way to resolve it. Of course, what was wrong with the work on Rico was that I needed to dumb down the music over and over again, in order to meet the demands of production meetings with producers, writer, music director, director, dramaturg and anyone else who was around. I’m very good at churning out those songs, but not so good at accepting the aesthetic limitations which the musical theater medium imposed on me. Which is why I eventually walked away from the project, with a resolve to never again put myself in a position where I am not in control of decisions about music.
Which put me in the position of asking myself: if I’m in control, what is the music about? And the answer I having been coming up with for the last 8 years or so has been that it’s about translating what I’m experiencing in my life into sound, into music. When I was young, despite numerous attempts to do something with my life other than write music, I always ended up with long hours where I’d get completely lost in just playing the piano. Either playing music by others, or just wandering through improvisations alone, wherever they took me. And I did that because it seemed to express something about how I was feeling … and somehow it transformed me and healed me in ways nothing else did. So if that’s what music does for me, then the best I can do to make music I can believe in is to get in touch with my feelings over the time I’m writing a piece, and transcribe them. So the Shadow Quartet was about my father’s passing, and Extended Family is about the time of my mother’s passing. The iFiddle Concerto is about my first grandson Jake’s birth, and Uptown Jump is about Jake and his family moving from Brooklyn to my neighborhood in northern Manhattan, making the extended family.
I’d have a hard time pointing out specific programmatic points in any of these pieces which describe particular events in a narrative. But I think they each do depict the emotional state I was in over a given time, focused on a particular series of events. So, in response to Cornelius’ question, autobiography is very key to my sense of my music. In fact, on some level, I think that all I can really offer as an artist is the chance to hear the world through my ears … which is a bit more ironic now that I only have one working ear! Nonetheless, the focus on making what I write expressive in some concrete way which relates to my experience feels like it’s breathed new life into my music. I’m still interested in using technology, in thinking about different sounds, working with different ways to instruct players or give them freedom to improvise … but all of that seems important or useful only in as much as it helps me get at the expressive goal. Which, at least for the moment, is very personal, if not autobiographical.
And, as I dive into expanding my thoughts about the entire MONO project, I’m now going back to some of the ideas I had in Rico, about using music to explore the emotional profiles of other characters, since MONO isn’t just about me. It needs to contain its own world of characters with their own unique perceptual limitations.
