Music vs. Theater

Time to put the game face on. It’s about to get real. I’m goin’ big or goin’ home. (Continue with the conspicuously out of place sports phrases at will.)

Very proud to announce that the string quartet I composed in Paris this past summer as part of the EAMA program ”Do A Little Dance” was selected as one of sixteen pieces to compete in the String Quartet Smackdown presented by Golden Hornet Productions on November 3 in Austin, TX.

And what’s a String Quartet Smackdown, you ask? It’s kinda brilliant. Sixteen pieces, each four minutes long, are paired off. The first minute of each piece is performed (by the Tosca Quartet) and the audience votes with their mobile devices to determine which pieces they want to advance. The remaining eight pieces go to the next round, when TWO minutes of the piece are played. Then four pieces get THREE minutes played, and finally two pieces are played in their entirety. The winner gets a valuable cash prize and bragging rights (and hopefully some big ornate trophy thing or maybe even a giant belt).

Looking at the lineup of other pieces, I’m in some pretty formidable company. Ruben Naeff‘s piece was written for the JACK quartet, Simon Fink has done work with eighth blackbird, Steven Snowden will have the home advantage, hailing from Austin himself, but there’s a chance he’ll actually be in Portugal on his Fulbright to work on interactive motion capture systems for large installations, which would even the playing field a bit. But there’s no denying, this is the big leagues. And no matter the outcome, it’s an honor just to share the stage.

If you happen to be in Austin on November 3, please go and support our team. And by ‘our team’ I mean ‘independent new music’.

Jeffrey Parola sounds kinda bummed in his latest blog post. He outlines the all too familiar plight of the contemporary concert music composer (no appreciation, money, and little hope of either). He then earnestly asks: Why do we bother?

In my mind the answer is simple. Creation of music that didn’t exist before HAS to be its own reward, devoid of compensation, recognition, or praise. If that drive for creation for its own sake doesn’t exist, I might humbly suggest that a composer should just stop.

Praise is nice, and earning a living doing something that you love is great, but just because you love something doesn’t mean you can make a living at it. And just because you wrote something doesn’t mean anyone should care. Money and acknowledgement have to be secondary concerns for a composer.

Of course we should try to capitalize on our work. Self-promote, market, try to get people to listen, care, and support . But that’s not WHY you should write. You write because no one else will create the things that you will create. And ideally you will love what you’ve written so much that promotion will be easy and enthusiasm will be contagious. But even if it’s not, you should like what you’ve created so much that even if no one else seems to care, it was worth the effort.

Perhaps that sounds kinda glib and self evident. But there’s a real nugget in there. A composer should think about the music they love and why they love it. They should think about how they feel when they listen to it. Then they should listen to their own music, and if they don’t feel similarly, maybe they’re doing something wrong. After all, if you don’t love listening to your own work passionately, why should anyone else?

And if you DO love listening to your own work, what else do you really need? Perhaps money and adulation will follow, perhaps it won’t. But you’ve made music that you love and that you love to hear. Strive for those things that we associate with success, but don’t let those goals ever be mistaken for the real reason you write music.

(By the way, you should listen Jeffrey’s work. It’s some really lovely stuff. All of it. And then maybe go write some of your own.)

If you’re in San Francisco tonight and interested in hearing some brand new music, swing by Counterpulse at 7:30 to hear a brief excerpt of the latest from my solo opera Failing That.

The section I’ll be performing was composed in the past few months and shows the early scenes involving a middle school student struggling to survive his physical education class.

The music is truly straddling opera and musical theater with a bit more emphasis on the musical theater tradition than I expected. And the good news is, even after listening to it non stop for a week, I really like it. There are equal parts Sondheim, Stravinsky, and (if you know my tastes, you’ll know how shocking this part is) even Rachmaninoff!

I have to credit Bruce Pachtman for encouraging me to sign up for these workshops at regular intervals. They force me to write new music and also forces the work to get up on stage before an audience. This gives me a chance to see how it works as theater, whether some parts are slow or confusing (or really hard to memorize). The next workshop will be in mid January as part of Bruce’s Solo Sundays series at Stage Werx, and if I can stay focused throughout the holiday season, I may be able to perform the first 50 minutes of the opera in its entirety!

But first things first. I’m going to spend the rest of the afternoon memorizing and rehearsing for tonight. Hope to see you there.

Words First at Counterpulse

1310 Mission Street

Wednesday Nov 2, 7:30

Buy tickets

After a full evening of writing music, I am proposing a new unit of time. The Wagner (abbreviation Wg). One Wagner is equal to one thousand minutes, approximately the length of the entire Ring Cycle. Here are some useful conversions:

1 day = 1.4 Wagners

1 year = 511.35 Wagners

1 minute = 1 milliWagner (1 mWg)

This unit will be particularly useful for superficially evaluating the works of other composers:

The entire works of Anton Webern can be contained on about 6 compact discs with a total running time of 36 centiWagners.

Or making us composers feel crappy about our own productivity:

After sitting at the piano for the entire evening, I realized that I was only able to compose about .5 milliWagners of usable music. Furthermore, my maximum rate of composition rarely breaks the 1 mWg/h mark.

Anyone know anyone over at ISO?

Happy monkey is happy (and NOT a hypocrite)

Fantastic news here in Music vs Theater world! The San Francisco chapter of the American Composer’s Forum has seen fit to award me a Subito grant to help produce this weekend’s premiere of my song cycle (and other works)!

This is a huge deal, not only will it make it much more likely that we’ll be able to cover all the expenses (as well as pay the musicians closer to what they deserve), but with any luck, it will pave the way for future grants.

But, looking for the grey cloud behind this silver lining in this particular horse’s mouth, it looks like it’s time for me to revisit my post whining about how hard it is for new-ish composers to get arts grants. After all, can I still maintain that arts funding does more harm than good in the face of this new award?

Unfortunately, I kinda think so. Read the rest of this entry →

The string quartet is DONE! Actually, it was done a year ago, but now it’s been premiered, recorded, annotated, and released to the public.

The third movement Off the Rails is finally available for listening and downloading and reading about and whatnot.

So what happens now? Hmm. Good question. I’ve already submitted it to several competitions to little effect, but those are pretty much crapshoots (and the only recording at the time was a sub-optimal midi realization).

Well, what do composers really want? To create music and to have people hear the music they’ve created. So, in no particular order, here are things I can actively do to try to further these goals:

• Network to get the piece introduced into an established quartet’s repertoire.
• Keep entering competitions and festivals.
• Give away the audio tracks to whoever wants to hear them.
• Make some youtube video with potential for virality.
• Advertise the piece using Google AdWords. (Paying to give something away for free!)

So, dear reader, if you have any other ideas to suggest, or a desire to help with any of the above mentioned action items, PLEASE feel free.

John Adams just wrote a very funny blog post about master classes.  I happen to know he just gave one over at the San Francisco Conservatory last week, so the timing of this blog entry is probably not a coincidence.

It’s a little nerve wracking reading through it. How does my string quartet match his description of “eighty percent of all student compositions”?  If you replace his tritone that “expresses life’s eternally unresolved mysteries” with my minor second that expresses the unresolved desire for unity… ummm… gulp.

Hilary Hahn!

Well… Kinda.

Actually it was Jennifer Higdon who won the Pulitzer for a violin concerto written for Hilary Hahn. Most folks have never heard of this composer, but if you followed the links from my earlier post about Hilary, you may have stumbled upon her interviews with this now Pulitzer Prize winning composer.  It’s almost like I broke a story!  Kinda.

Maybe this video will get more than 3000 views now that she’s won a Pulitzer. Or maybe the piece will sit in limbo for ten years…

OK.  Now I gotta stop writing about Hilary Hahn.  I’m starting to sound like some sort of fan boy or something. I mean, it’s not like I’m writing a bunch of violin music, secretly hoping that she’ll champion it or anything. Nope. Not like that at all.

The second movement of my string quartet has been mixed and edited and the program notes have been written up.

http://musicvstheater.com/wordpress/works/string-quartet-no-1/tango-a-la-peachy/

And if you haven’t yet listened to the first movement, check it out here:

http://musicvstheater.com/wordpress/works/string-quartet-no-1/on-the-rails/

The third movement is mostly finished and will be released very soon.

You heard me. P. Diddy.  Songwriter? Or Composer?

Perhaps I should back up…

After yesterday’s  composition lesson with David Conte, he mentioned an upcoming radio interview with NY Times blogger and critic about town Chloe Veltman.  (The interview will air next Friday, on her VoiceBox show on KALW). He thought that one of the topics would be the difference between composition and songwriting, and asked if I had any ideas to share.

My first thought was that songwriters have an inherently simpler task since they’re working within a well defined form.  In song there is the expectation of a verse, refrain, chorus structure, some division of discrete chunks of material, and the songwriter “simply” (sic) needs to fill those well defined modules with appealing enough melodies, harmonies, hooks, and grooves.  I’m hard pressed to think of any exceptions.  On the other hand, music composition, especially in the modern era, has few if any expectations of form or structure.  It is up to the composer to impose or realize a form appropriate to the material he or she imagines.

But the difference is less clear when you look at pieces in the classical era.  Forms were still quite well defined, and while composers were remarkably inventive within those forms, there was some amount of connecting the dots and following prescribed structural practices.  It wasn’t until Beethoven and the romantic era that form was subjected to the will of the composer in the name of their efforts to express the ineffable self.

Then what is the difference between composition and songwriting in the classical era?  It doesn’t feel right to call Shumann or Schubert songwriters, even in context of their art songs. They didn’t just write those songs, they COMPOSED them.

David’s feeling was that pop songs, the product of songwriters, are less about the material and more about the expressive abilities of the performer.  As evidence, he cited the dozens of covers of Beatle tunes in various styles, while there are no convincing reinterpretations or adaptations of Schubert songs or, arguably,  classical pieces in general, Wendy Carlos and Emerson, Lake, and Palmer notwithstanding. (Actually, a college friend is writing a rock opera where all the songs are opera arias re-imagined as rock songs, so perhaps I’ll have to amend this argument.). A Schubert song is meticulously through composed, every note in the accompaniment and the voice is meaningful.  You can’t change the notes, or alter chords or timbres without nullifying the end result.  Pop songs, on the other hand, can survive any number of transformations, inflections, or outright re-harmonizations and still retain their essential character. There is something about the stuff of pop music, the melodic and harmonic choices that lends itself to such transformations.

This is another facet of the Definite vs Formless Content distinction.  Pop songs are largely Formless while Schubert’s art songs are Definite.  (Note that in this context, “Formless” means a very different thing than the structural forms of the classical era).

What about pop songs which are less dependent upon harmony and melody? Songs more reliant upon an arrangement of sounds and samples are not easily covered or transformed.  Is it possible to cover a rap song, (other than ironically)? Do techno producers re-interpret the works of other techno producers to add their own personal expression of thumpa thumpa? If untransformability (ie Definite Content) is your metric, is it appropriate then to say that these untransformable works are more composed than written?  Does this make P Diddy more of a composer than a songwriter?

So. Like I asked. P Diddy.  Songwriter or Composer?

I’ll check in with David to see what he has to say…