Jumping the firearm of your choice

In light of today's news, I'll look forward to receiving the Grawemeyer for my yet-to-be-written viola concerto any day now.

Sunday preview

Tomorrow evening in Espoo, Helsinki's western suburb, the Olaus Petri church choir, under Peter Peitsalo, premieres my new Swedish psalm setting Du kröner året (You crown the year) in a bilingual Michaelmas Mass at our fair city's contemporary church music festival. (Link in Finnish only.) I'm looking forward to this in the extreme. The piece turned out completely diatonic, white notes only, veering between atmospheric clusters and functional triadic harmony. It's quite a departure from my earlier choral pieces, aesthetically, rhetorically, and texturally. The text, from Psalm 65, is a thanksgiving prayer, and I wanted to imbue the piece with a feeling of fullness, bounty and ease, a mood I think I managed to capture. I hope it will provide an appropriate, memorable interlude in the celebration, all the while allowing the liturgy to flow around it without drawing too much attention to itself.

Later that evening, I'll be appearing as a guest on BBC Radio 3's The Choir. Host Aled Jones and I discussed my move to Finland, my other move toward a form of postminimalism, Cyrillus Kreek and other hot topics in the choral world. They'll also be featuring a number of tracks from HOL's new CD. Tune in and listen as my motor-mouth does its best to keep up

Dem agog

I recently gave a talk on my music, as well as on living and working as an immigrant composer in Finland, for a friend's Rotary Club branch. I tried to maintain an accessible, if not populist tone, doing my best to engage intelligent, cultured people who were not necessarily musically inclined, at least toward my branch of music. One of the things I said was that it didn't really bother me when audience members told me they didn't like a piece of mine. (It's happened, though not often.) Note that I say audience members, as in general listeners, not specialists. There are maybe five composers/musicians in the world who are allowed to tell me they didn't like my piece without getting the business end of my hair-trigger temper. Composers tend to react along ideological lines. Audience members, who aren't usually party to the aesthetic discourse surrounding a new piece, generally approach it with fresher ears. If they like it, so much the better. If not, they're free to tell me about it.

One of the questions I was asked after the talk was how I dealt with the situation when it happened. I responded that I generally asked questions back, like why the person disliked the piece. If they can give me specifics – a type of texture they didn't enjoy, it was too loud, too soft, too repetitive, too uneventful – I can offer a different way of listening, or offer them a tidbit about the piece's background story (there's always one of those) that may give them something to hang onto. If they just state a general dislike, there's not much you can do, except wish them well and hope they don't discount all new music because of your piece. It's usually out of a deep-seated conservatism, fed by timid programming and worship of the master canon, that makes people expect all music to sound and behave a certain way, and that's hard to argue with. But for far too long, composers have indulged themselves in the conceit that dislike of a piece indicates lack of understanding, with the partial result that listeners have been cowed into a state of submission where they feel unable, or unwilling, to express an opinion on a piece of new music. So they don't react for fear of being labeled an ignoramus, or at best respond with polite if bewildered approval. Audiences should feel that, within reason, they're allowed to have an opinion on works of art. By the very act of placing a work before an audience, we ask for their opinion, and there's a certain humility required in dealing with the reaction, positive or negative.

However, there's a line that occasionally gets crossed, against which a stand should be taken. A friend told me yesterday about this vile "review" published in a blog by a local independent newspaper (Finnish only, apologies). The writer, a local conservative politician, took Kalevi Aho to task over the Helsinki Festival performance of his flute concerto. Calling it a "crazy concerto" – it's actually a breathtakingly sophomoric play on the Finnish words for "flute" and "crazy" – he attacked the scare-quoted "music" ("musoc"?) as cacophonic and horrifying. How he arrived at this conclusion is beyond me, as the piece is question is largely quiet, meditative and highly lyrical, a gentle piece by a gentle, self-effacing man. New music doesn't get more listener-friendly than this, in the best possible sense of being thoroughly accessible while remaining challenging, invigorating listening.

But beyond that, he proceeds to engage in the worst sort of ad hominem criticism, calling into question the adequacy of Aho's oxygen intake, wondering why trained musicians are made to play such awful stuff, attacking the people responsible for commissioning it, the programmers for defiling a concert otherwise filled with masterpieces, and going on to generalize that if all new music is like this, surely the people (read: the "taxpayers" so beloved of populist demagogues) have been ripped off.

Yes, it is a man of small character who would engage in this sort of public denigration of a humble artistic offering. But it points to a larger belief in the Western world among politicians and voters of a certain stripe that, in order to debate the idea of public arts funding, art itself must be attacked, bought down, made to appear ridiculous, objectionable in its very being, so that artists who receive any kind of public stipend for their work can be labeled as charlatans, tricksters, feeding at the public trough and having a good laugh at what they managed to pull over on the unsuspecting public.

It goes without saying that I've never met anyone involved in the arts, in Finland or abroad, who thought they were getting away with murder at the public expense. Yes, I've met artists whom I thought were full of shit, and heard work whose need for being I don't understand, but not one of those people wasn't extremely serious about what they were doing, thought they had something valuable to contribute to their society, and knew exactly how lucky they were to get to do something for a living they felt so passionately about. So it's particularly galling when this type of celebration of know-nothingism attracts even a modest public platform – and lord, isn't the unfiltered sewer of the internet great for that – reveling in its ability to cause damage and bring low a well-meaning person. It's the standard conservative line of debate when they set their sights on arts funding. I like to think it's out of a feeling of jealousy of people with abilities they don't understand, and a way of looking at the world they can't access and don't view as valuable because a dollar figure can't be attached to it. No artist makes art as a way of making a quick buck; it's too much bloody work. There are plenty of other ways of making cheap money off an ignorant public. Politics, for instance.

I foster no illusions that this man has serious issues that need working out, and that his voice carries little to no weight in the world beyond his little clique of lowbrow panderers. I thank every known deity on a daily basis that I live in a country whose people, by and large, recognize the contribution art has to offer and are willing to defend it against all comers. But people of this hateful, boorish type are loud, and proud of their ignorance and intolerance, and just keep coming, and must be made to look as foolish as they are, if we as creators are to have any hope of making contact with an audience still willing to listen to us. So by all means, dislike a piece. It's allowed. Tell the composer about it, and let them tell you why they made it the way they did. Engage. Talk. Trade ideas. Then if you still didn't like it, go drown your sorrows in a beer and don't ever listen to that person's work again. But do us the courtesy of basic civility, in private and in public.

"Among the Leaves" without the wait

HOL's critically acclaimed CD "Lehdellä – Among the Leaves" is now available in mp3 format from ClassicsOnline. Get your copy here!

Spaced out

Last night we managed to get a babysitter and get out a little, a rare event in our lives in the past three months. The destination? The Helsinki Philharmonic's performance – complete with asteroids and downgraded planetary bodies – of Holst's The Planets, one of my favorite orchestral works of all time. Hell, it's my absolute favorite. I've never heard it live, always seeming to miss it whenever it came to a concert hall near me. It was the first recording (Dutoit and MSO, natch) I wore out from repeated listening, the first orchestral score I ever bought as a teenager, and the one that still lies within arm's reach on my desk whenever I'm working on an orchestra piece. "How did Holst do it?" is the question I ask most frequently when orchestrating, and that score, with its clear, diamond bright sounds, always provides an answer. It's the piece that made me want to be a composer, before I even knew that people still did that these days. (Shut up. I grew up in a small town.) I know it well, probably every note of it, except a few, as I discovered last night. More about that in a bit.

It was an event happily populated by youngsters brought by their music teachers, as well as the Phil's more usual audience, and a few living composers as well, come out to hear the add-on pieces before the warhorse, a series of "asteroids" commissioned by the Berlin Phil to fill out a Planets evening, and a new one by local composer Kimmo Hakola. Also featured was the addition of "Pluto" by Colin Matthews, perhaps the only composer I can think of who could have acquitted himself of that unenviable task so elegantly, and without trying to out-Holst Holst. The draw for the students, I imagine, was the video projections thoughtfully provided to make the music more interesting, a concept I have yet to see really take flight in concert. Apparently designed to follow the music's atmosphere and form, the graphics had an unfortunate screen-saver-like quality that prevented them from contributing much to the performance and, judging by post-concert conversations, were generally ignored. Unignorable, however, was the incessant coughing of what seemed like nearly everyone in the audience, at three-second intervals throughout the concert. Soft sections after climaxes seemed especially attractive to the hackers – no doubt thinking they had a few more seconds to finish their fits – none of whom were apparently at all concerned with muffling their outbursts.

So in light of this, I compiled this brief guide to coughing etiquette at concerts:

Don't cough at concerts.


I also prepared a helpful FAQ to accompany the guide:

Q: But what if I can't stop myself from coughing?

A: Yes, you can.


Q: What if I'm sick, can I cough then?

A: No. If you're sick, you probably shouldn't be at a concert. Swine flu and all that.


Q: Can I cough in loud parts? Nobody can hear me then.

A: Yes, they can. See guide.


Q: Can people really hear me in loud parts?

A: Yes. Aside from being audible, the related risk of sudden pianissimo exposure is significant.


Q: What about between movements? Can I cough then?

A: See guide.


I hate to go all musoc.org on concert-goers, and love and defend all attempts at audience building and outreach, but something's gotta give. I've had several concerts in the past year utterly ruined by this bad habit (and that's what it really is), the most memorable being last year's celebratory performance of Elliott Carter's Symphonia at which a patron judged the appropriate moment for a single hack to be three seconds before the end of the final movement, which had spent ten minutes wafting gently upward, disappearing incrementally like a vapor trail into a single pianissimo piccolo note. Seriously. It's disrespectful to the players, who are giving their all, and to the other audience members who paid good money to sit and listen to you cough. Stop it. Right now.

Anyhoo, Holst. As I said, I know The Planets extremely well, every rhythmic punch, every tutti brass chord, every bit of percussion glitter. With the exception of "Saturn". That was the one movement that didn't really speak to me when I was younger and fancied myself an old-fashioned Romantic. I used to routinely skip it, preferring the more obviously directional, big-line, big-event forms of "Mercury" and "Jupiter". The subtleties of the slow, static processional of "Saturn" were utterly lost on me, to the point where I'd forgotten how it ended. So I got out my score again today for a listen, and was transfixed by the simplicity of what Holst achieved in this piece. The planing whole-tone flute-and-harp chords of the opening, whose unvarying voicings nonetheless seem to shift in the light, the simple rhythmic intricacy of the syncopated climax, further distorted by the resonance delay of the tubular bells, making one feel thoroughly ungrounded in the pulse, the magnificently patient working out of that initial treading theme, it was all a revelation brought about by familiarity breeding contempt.

Most striking was the ending, a shimmering field of uninflected, rhythmicized yet pulseless, completely diatonic loveliness whose existence I had somehow overlooked, ever so slightly linear in its drive toward the final cadence, but sustained by nothing other than its unchanging orchestration. The line between the final minutes of "Saturn" and John Luther Adams' In the White Silence, another piece I've been studying lately, is short to the point of non-being. It's as if Adams took a chunk from the middle of Holst's texture – before it resolves, however inconclusively – and stretched it into the infinity the aesthetics of Holst's time would have frowned on in a concert piece. In a similar vein, I've been working with Mahler a lot lately, and the end of Das Lied von der Erde strikes me as occupying that same category of late Romantic invocations of an otherworldly stasis that would have to wait for a movement like minimalism to truly reach its potential, rather than remaining the inklings they are, a vision of a time to come reached by the logical, linear temporal drive of the nineteenth century. Mahler as proto-minimalist? I may be lost in my research, but it doesn't seem like much of a stretch to me. Hmm...

So Holst, Mahler and Adams are now on my desk as I start sketching my upcoming "concerto" for horn and strings, a piece that doesn't seem to want any fast music. I'm not quite sure what the result will be, but with this combination of disparate models, I'm kind of looking forward to finding out.

Summer psalms

One of my smaller summer projects is a commission for a pair of hymns in Swedish, of all languages. No, I don't speak a word of it. The basic grammar is similar to English and German, and the verbs are familiar enough if you know something about the pronunciation, but adjectives are almost always unintelligible – which makes it hard to tell if that reviewer in the Swedish-language daily liked your piece or not.

Nonetheless, I'm wading in as best I can. The source texts, which I chose from a small selection given to me, are psalms from a newish translation of the Bible. As best I can tell, it seems to be one of those modern, plain-language versions that treats the texts less as poetry and more as document. It's so far creating problems with meter and flow, trying to create a simple, single-idea musical world that both keeps the words as clear as possible and, more difficult, illuminates them through a setting that's more than just functional. The excerpts I'm working from also don't contain an "Alleluia!" or "Amen!" to work towards as structural goals, so I'm having to get creative in the treatment of the lines to create a form that works.

It's a completely different way of working with text for me, top-down, as it were. Usually when I set a text in a choral piece, it's because I had a flash of music for it the first time I read it. In fact, I find it very difficult to approach words that aren't backed up by that spontaneous feeling of just how I want to treat them. The add wrinkle of setting explicitly Judeo-Christian words has me at a bit of a loss in the sincerity department. So for inspiration, I've been turning to what is probably my favorite collection of psalm settings ever, by the Estonian composer Cyrillus Kreek.

Kreek is a much beloved figure in Estonian choral music, a Bartók-like composer/musicologist who painstakingly collected and documented hundreds upon hundreds of his homeland's folk tunes, with a special emphasis on religious folk melodies, which formed the basis for his own arrangements and original settings. His Psalms of David (Taaveti Laulud) were encountered early in my tenure in Finland, when I joined a tour of Germany with the Sibelius Academy chamber choir. The music was all Finno-Ugric, and in addition to current godfather of Estonian choral composition, Veljo Tormis, four of Kreek's psalms were on the program. I'd never heard of him or his work, but immediately fell in love with his settings, all the while trying to get my tongue around the language.

The tunes, while modal, aren't specifically or self-consciously "folky". The harmonies tend toward diatonicism, but the various pedals and held-note textures create a web of gentle dissonance that creates interest without drawing attention to itself. The unusual emphasis on the low end of the choral tessitura is a marked feature of Kreek's choral music, featuring multiple divisi rather than the standard SATB configuration, no doubt to take advantage of those wondrous, dark Estonian alto and bass voices, for which their national choral sound is justly famous. The sopranos tend to be added only for a bit of brightness here and there, with the main weight of the music placed in the middle and low registers. The female voices are frequently silent or limited to the melody, with the divided men's choir providing a rich harmonic palette.

There's also the way his tunes wend their way through the often-asymmetrical rhythms of Estonian so naturally, fitting the cadence of the words like a glove, treating them polyphonically, but allowing the tutti choir to alight in unison on the most meaningful words, highlighting their significance in the structure. (It must be said that Estonian is a singularly singable language once you get past the vowels, much more so than Swedish, with its general thinness of hard consonants for rhythmic emphasis. Ever heard Estonian bossa nova? Now that's a treat.) Above all, the object lesson for me is the way Kreek's settings seem to exhale the entire text in a single breath, one long melodic gesture that carries the words along to their conclusion, no matter the rhythmic hiccups. It's deep, expressive, moving music. If I manage to reach that level of simplicity and directness, I'll consider it a job well done.

Judging by the collection of performance videos on YouTube, these songs have acquired a viral popularity in the choral world despite the hurdle of an obscure and difficult language, which speaks loudly to their musical merit. Therefore, I humbly offer some psalms for your summer morning before I go make omelettes:



Another:



The King's Singers, doing their best with the pronunciation:



And the one piece that makes me cry without fail:

So's yer face!

I've been having a brief read through at the (un?)intentionally hilarious new site that got the classical critics so exercised this past weekend, musoc.org. I won't bother linking because I don't need the grief. I don't intend to spend much time on this, but it's the type of site that attracts my attention as one who seeks greater tolerance in most aspects of life. Suffice it to say, if it's for real, it's run by the type of person I went on about in this post a few months ago. It's already drawn responses from the Guardian's Tom Service and WaPo's Anne Midgette. Although I sympathize with musoc's point about a greater need in modern society for silence, or at least freedom from musical noise pollution, the greater part of the site reads like the mission statements of any other high-culture jihadist, and basically comes down to "Anything I don't like is illegitimate." I'd love to take the time to refute their points one by one, but I'll leave that for someone who doesn't have a fussy baby in the background. Anyway, as we learned soon after starting this blog, trying to engage people with a mindset like this usually just gets our intelligence questioned or generates responses only slightly more mature than, "I know you are, but what am I?" Case in point:

As Midgette expediently points out, 'classical' music (to use her preferred anti-elitist terminology) is "responsible, like any field, for some singularly vapid outpourings."

How very true!

Now if you'll excuse me, I have another wailing infant to deal with.


UPDATE: One of the reasons I didn't bother addressing their points is that 'musoc' was obvious Sohothedog bait. I'm pleased to see Matthew Guerrieri – who's wicked smaht, and way more articulate than me anyway – enter the breach and prove my intuition right. You get the feeling he wrote it while cooking a seven-course meal and analyzing the recession, too.