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.
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