tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7658135342395581382024-02-08T04:13:43.194+02:00The Short Road to NirvanaA blog by composer Matthew Whittall. Classical music, contemporary and otherwise, with assorted digressions.Matthew Whittallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10587564978686509794noreply@blogger.comBlogger99125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-765813534239558138.post-35692490343781565382012-05-15T15:30:00.001+03:002013-01-06T15:28:54.591+02:00forgetting me, remember meI've been absent from the blogging world for a long time, for a variety of reasons. Mostly, I've just been too busy and fried from the weight of responsibilities on me to make sense of my thoughts. But I come out of my silence for what might be the most important of reasons.<br />
<br />
Last summer, <a href="http://alexfreemanmusic.com/">Alex</a> and I were talking about our early experiences learning composition, and the people who influenced us in our youth. I started telling him about my harmony teacher at Vanier College in Montreal, Robert Jones, who had been my earliest compositional influence. Robert was a composer of incredible talent, a keen ear, wide-ranging tastes, open-minded, supremely irreverent about music and music-making. He was the greatest possible teacher for a young person with composing ambition, however inchoate. Deeply involved in his community, Robert taught full-time with endless energy and enthusiasm, while finding time to compose the most beautiful, moving, stylistically diverse music you've ever heard, for whatever forces he could get his hands on. Friends, school faculty, church choirs, anything. He was a terrific pianist, too, performing constantly on student recitals and faculty concerts, always involved in the making of living music. If any example set me on the path I currently walk, it was Robert's.<br />
<br />
Did I mention irreverent? He was beyond funny. Once we were walking down the hall and heard two pianists rehearsing Mozart's two-piano concerto in the concert hall. Robert snuck in and started playing the accompaniment, from memory, a half-step higher, on a third piano. Another time, we read through the Britten Serenade together, with Robert playing the piano reduction and singing a pitch-perfect impression of Peter Pears. His music was that way, too, a wildly eclectic mix in which fake Brahms abutted tone rows and all manner of musical gestures from all periods. Once, in his series of organ preludes, he found a single, unbelievably irritating stop on his local church organ and wrote a whole piece for it. The very next piece was the most shockingly spot-on tango you've ever heard, lewd, swaggering and funny as hell coming from a huge pipe organ, and a massive relief from the pain that preceded it. He was the type who would giggle if you told him his piece was annoying or grating. In all likelihood, he'd meant it to be. All in the cause of good fun.<br />
<br />
As I struggled to put into words all that Robert had meant to me, Alex said, "You should write him a letter and tell him all this. I bet he'd like to hear it, and people never say this stuff until it's too late." I'd lost touch with him over the years, and touching base again seemed like a great idea. So I went home and wrote Robert a long letter. While trying to find his address online, I came across references to a recent illness, and the huge oratorio he'd written during the recovery period. It added a sense of urgency to the whole thing, so say what I had to say before it was too late. But as these things go, the letter went unmailed. I couldn't get an address for him, I couldn't get anyone at the school to answer my e-mails, and so on. I could have, should have tried harder.<br />
<br />
And now, it's <a href="http://www.montrealgazette.com/life/Vanier+College+Robert+Jones+composer+mourned/6410477/story.html">too late</a>. Robert died a few weeks ago, and I only found out today. All the things I wanted to say to him went unsaid, and I'll never get the chance to tell him what he meant to me. It's a regret I'll have to live with, if only out of pride. Robert was so good at what he did, and touched so many lives, that he couldn't have been unaware of just how important he'd been to his students, and I'm only one of them. But as a tribute to my teacher, the man whose example I try to live up to every day I wake up to do this, I offer the letter I wrote to him, lightly edited of more personal details, in the hope that a few people will read it and see how much one person's life can affect another's.<br />
<br />
Rest in peace, Robert. You will be sorely missed. The world with you in it was a better, less oppressive place.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
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Dear Robert,<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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I hope this finds you well. I’ve been thinking about writing
this letter for a long time, but for some reason never made myself sit down and
do it. I’ve often wondered how you were since I left Montreal, what you were up
to, what music you’d written. Occasionally I’d see a comment of yours on
somebody’s blog and smile, if for no other reason than that it was good to know
you were out there. I suppose the catalyst for writing this was a recent
conversation with an American composer friend about the people who’d had a
strong influence on us in our early careers. I told him about you, and the
things you’d done that had an impact on my life, and he said, “You should put
that in a letter and send it to him. I bet he’d like to hear it. People never do
that until it’s too late.” So I thought to finally do it. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Naturally, the first thing I did was Google you, and of
course I found out about your recent oratorio, and your illness. To say it hit
me hard would be an understatement. I can’t imagine what it must have been like
to go through that, and I hope you’re recovering your health. I was amazed to
hear that you’d kept composing during that time, and a huge piece at that.
Reading the descriptions of the music, how eclectic and moving it is, I thought, “Of course that’s what the
piece is like. It’s Robert’s.” I wish I could have been there for the premiere,
and hope it went well for you. Then again, your music was always well received,
as I remember.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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A bit about what’s happened to me in the past fifteen or so
years. I’ve been living in Helsinki, Finland for the past decade, since I
bailed out of the academic world Stateside after doing my Master’s at Stony
Brook. I’m married, six years now, to a lovely Estonian musician who plays a
chromatic zither native to the Baltic region. You’d love the sound of it, as
well as her sense of humor. We have a wonderful, bright, exasperating
two-year-old son named Oliver whose mission in life seems to be to make my head
explode. I work freelance as a composer, having given up the horn many years
ago, and in addition to writing about music for various local festivals, I
teach part-time at the Sibelius Academy, where someday I hope to stagger across
the finish line of my doctoral degree. The one hurdle left is my thesis, in
which I’m writing about how the idea of nature manifests in Mahler’s <i>Song of the Earth</i>. I do a lot of amateur
choral singing, as there’s a particularly good culture for that here, and it
keeps me in touch with real music-making. It’s a good life, with my family,
good friends, and lots of terrific musicians to work with. After being
virtually unemployed for the first few years and doing odd jobs, my career somehow just took off. The Finnish radio orchestra
is premiering my viola concerto in March, and I’m currently working on a piece
for the Helsinki Philharmonic, a setting for soprano and orchestra of texts by
Hildegard of Bingen.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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The reason I’m telling you all this is that when I think
about how I got here – the ideas that fascinate me, the kind(s) of music I
write, my approach to composing, even the notion that I became a composer at
all – it always seems to lead back to you. Years ago, I had to write an essay
in my application to some big school – I think it was Julliard, but whatever, I
didn’t get in – about the musician who’d had the greatest influence on me. I
wrote about you. I’m not even sure what I wrote, but as I try to recall what it
was that made your presence in my life so important, I struggle to keep up with
the flow of memories.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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I probably never told you this, but my studying music was
pretty much a fluke. I had no ambition other than to get away from my hometown
and do something I enjoyed for a change. If I hadn’t gotten into music school I
probably would have ended up in languages or history and never looked back. To
say my parents were confused at first would be putting it mildly.
Considering I barely knew one end of the horn from other at the time, I can’t
say their skepticism was misplaced, but they’ve since come to understand why I
decided to do it. I’d had no training, little support, and came to Vanier
knowing nothing about music, barely able to even read it. Some people, as I recall, was always eager to remind me of that, and thought I showed very little talent, which I suppose I did back then. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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But I wanted to learn. Anything. As much as I could, as fast
as I could absorb it. That’s where you came in. You were one of the few people
in those first couple of years who took me seriously. You encouraged me in so
many ways large and small that I can’t recall all of them. I remember you
randomly bringing me scores and tapes of things I’d never heard of, just so I
could hear them. Once I mentioned that I was writing a paper about Stravinsky,
and the next day you came in with a stack of scores and tapes it must have
taken you hours to copy, just to help me out. I also remember you bringing me Mahler’s 3<sup>rd</sup>,
which I took home and listened to immediately. I didn’t get it. Not then, not
until many years later. But I eventually got it, and as Mahler grew into a
sizeable influence on my own music, I always thought back to that day, when you
brought me Mahler’s longest, weirdest, most out-of-this-world piece, something
I had little chance of understanding, and let me have at it. A therapist once told
me that I consciously make things difficult for myself because it’s the only
way I can learn. He traced it back to my being put in a French-only
kindergarten class at age five, not speaking a word of the language, and having
to figure it out through a fog of incomprehension. Thinking back to that now,
the way you taught me was the same. You threw me in at the deep end,
unprepared, knowing nothing, and let me figure it out. The people who tried to
hold me back, make me “patient” and learn little things always failed, but you
gave me huge ideas to swallow whole, maybe because you knew that was what I
needed most: to learn everything, right now. On whatever level, conscious or
simply intuitive, you understood me. You accompanied me at recitals, in
competitions, dragged me into rehearsals of whatever was going on in the
building, gave me advice on my first scratchings of composition, and listened
to me talk and complain and boast and grandstand like the clueless kid I was.
The most moving part is that you didn’t have to do any of it. Your only real
responsibility toward me was teaching me harmony a couple of times a week, but
you took an interest in me and my development that few others did, before or
since.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Less tangible was your influence on my music. Again, I don’t
think I ever told you this, but with the exception of a few terrible high
school band pieces, yours was the first contemporary music I ever heard, and
you were the first composer I ever met. I didn’t even know people still did
that. (I grew up in a <i>very </i>small
town.) I even remember the piece, <i>Sangeet
III</i>. I was completely knocked sideways by it, and it was probably that
moment where the idea, however inarticulate, of being a composer got into my
head. I wanted nothing more than to create something that beautiful, that
moving. Sometimes I think I’ve spent my life since then trying to live up to
the example you set for me in that piece, and failing miserably. But in the
trying I’ve written some nice stuff, which I suppose is the point. In a sense,
your music saved me from the influence of a lot of well-meant but destructive
teaching later on. Before I got to university, it never occurred to me that I
couldn’t still write tonal music if I wanted to, or mix it with atonal music,
or write a single chord, or that simplicity was something to be apologized for.
None of that academic dogma ever got to me, no matter how hard they tried to
push it, because I had your music to show me the way, to let me know I could do
whatever I wanted. Although I’ve been through several of the usual artistic
crises over the years, wondering if I should even be doing this for a living,
if I’m any good, I always seem to come back your principle of total freedom to
follow my instincts and not care what others think. It’s served me well. Anecdote: a couple of years back, I stumbled on a Vanier web page that had
a bunch of your pieces on it and listened to them. <i>The Solace of Fierce Landscapes</i> schooled me once again, and changed
the way I think about chamber music. Whenever my vision faltered, yours was
there to guide me.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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I should probably wrap up this ramble in the interest of not
boring you to tears. This whole missive has just been a long way of working up
to saying, “Thank you.” For taking me under your wing, for giving me what I
needed most, for giving me the courage to be myself without apology, I owe you
more than I can express in these few pages. If you ever doubted that you had a
strong influence on your students, don’t. You taught me to think, to listen, to
make serious art without taking myself overly seriously, and to be irreverent when
needed. Your light-hearted cynicism about competitions and awards and your
community involvement taught me that there are other paths to, and other
definitions of success as a composer than through the institutional channels. Whatever success I’ve enjoyed in Finland came from
following your example and being a community member first, and jockeying for
status second. In my darkest hour, after I could no longer play due to injuries
and was writing terrible music, wondering if I should walk away from music
altogether, I’d think of you, and know that if someone like you had believed in
me, I must have something to offer. You made me a better musician, and a better
teacher.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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I wish you all the best for your return to good health, and
hope I’ll be able to think of you out there somewhere for many years to come.
The world – my world – is a richer place with you in it. I don’t make it back
to Montreal much these days, as my family’s all moved on, but I hope we’ll meet
again someday sooner rather than later. I’d love to have a chat and learn some
more.<br />
<br />
Yours,<br />
Matt</div>
Matthew Whittallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10587564978686509794noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-765813534239558138.post-77438606062286099362011-10-28T19:56:00.002+03:002011-10-28T20:04:21.275+03:00<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOTykDkZpSXcIZkc0-ZPCaK7vauoebkv6X1nRqDcPGA7XpRsP2vDy5aUXz7iE-VpZGowm72NADR5vaTfbnMiK8_uXXidDPSoqe9cKfJ6TVGL0f92R5K42w87Buoits3PP03XRzlDrthGy3/s1600/Leaves+Cover.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOTykDkZpSXcIZkc0-ZPCaK7vauoebkv6X1nRqDcPGA7XpRsP2vDy5aUXz7iE-VpZGowm72NADR5vaTfbnMiK8_uXXidDPSoqe9cKfJ6TVGL0f92R5K42w87Buoits3PP03XRzlDrthGy3/s200/Leaves+Cover.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5668588157495620978" /></a>I've been swamped with work and worry again, but I'd be remiss in my self-promoting duties if I didn't mention tomorrow's big event: the release on the <a href="http://www.alba.fi/kauppa/tuotteet/4871">Alba</a> label of my first "solo" CD. The music in question is my hour-long cycle of piano pieces, <i>Leaves of Grass</i>, played by Risto-Matti Marin, a great pianist, and my great friend.<div><br /></div><div>The release concert itself is being sponsored by the <a href="http://www.pianoespoo.fi/esittely_marin.html">Espoo International Piano Festival</a>. The highlight of the concert will be readings of the poetry that inspired the music by the renowned Finnish actor Hannu-Pekka Björkman. This will be the first time most of the twelve-odd poems will be heard in Finnish, and the translations were commissioned by the festival as a set from composer and translator Jaakko Mäntyjärvi. Between the three of us, we evolved a structure to the performance that turned out to be powerful and quite moving. I'm really excited about this, as you can tell. The CD will be on sale, in both hard copy and download form, in the coming days. Watch this space!</div>Matthew Whittallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10587564978686509794noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-765813534239558138.post-57458506087897661542011-08-12T10:16:00.004+03:002011-08-14T17:26:26.408+03:00Après-MIDII've been mulling over topics for new posts, many based on conversations with other composers, students and performers about how composers are taught, how we learn, the many ways in which composers produce music. But one topic jumped out at me in the last day, and I bring it up here as a way of pondering its significance for my compositional process, and perhaps that of others.
<br />
<br />A Finnish composer friend who now lives Stateside came over for dinner last night. He's a very articulate, very opinionated guy, just my kind of discussion partner. As usual, we immediately got into an evening-long debate about aesthetic values, composition training, repeating oneself artistically, and other topics we always seem to gravitate toward. Comparing our recent projects, I mentioned that I was currently about two-thirds of the way through a new piece for the <a href="http://www.zagros.fi/index1.htm">Zagros</a> ensemble, and it was the first time I'd composed a piece entirely with MIDI. It's an experiment I'd been conducting to see how I fared using this newfangled tool. I've admitted in the past, and proudly so, to being a very old-fashioned composer. Until now, I've hardly ever touched the playback feature on Finale/Sibelius while in the act of composition. I usually write everything by hand, from sketch to full score, using the computer for engraving only, much to the amazement of a lot of my colleagues, and especially my students. It's not so much a matter of habit, as that I feel I actually work faster this way, especially when I'm orchestrating. Being able to see the entire page, or twenty of them in a row if I want, being able to move my hand around freely and just scribble notes as the mood strikes me, gives me more freedom. While I enjoy working this way for the most part, I do admit to a certain amount of envy at the technical fluidity of my younger colleagues, who all seem to compose directly into the computer these days. To them, I imagine I seem quaint dragging around my huge architect's portfolio with my hand-written scores in them. (If you want to know real fear, carry your only manuscript tabloid-size copy of a 35-minute orchestral score around a city on public transportation.)<div>
<br /></div><div>There are other reasons for my stubbornness and reluctance when it comes to integrating the computer into my composing routine. I've always looked at computer-based composition of acoustic music with a jaundiced eye. First of all, there was the sound quality of the playback. When Finale first came along, the sound was so bloody awful that I couldnt' stand it. So bad, in fact, that I couldn't even bring myself to use it to check the pacing of a section with it, because the tinny, awful approximations of acoustic instruments just ruined my sense of the harmony (back when I used such a thing), articulation, phrasing and dynamics. It was like trying to read with a strobe light in your face. Now, of course, the built-in sounds notation software packages come with have vastly improved, with some of them, woodwinds especially, being quite convincingly lovely. If they could just kill the James Galway-esque vibrato on the samples, I'd much appreciate it. Although I've recently divorced Finale, I admit that its human playback feature is pretty helpful in some circumstances. But still, as I grew to incorporate a modest number of extended instrumental and vocal techniques, and to use freer types of notation in realizing a texture, the software didn't. I was therefore left with no choice but to just feel my way by ear toward the result I wanted.</div><div>
<br /></div><div>Then there's the impact of notation software on the compositional process itself, and the playability of the result. In my experience, one can usually tell when a composer uses the software to compose directly. There tends to be a marked favoring of cut-and-pasting of entire sections of music, entire patterns, wholesale transposition of harmony in favor of voice-leading. Not that any of these devices is bad in and of itself, but the medium tends to encourage a kind of compositional laziness in terms of creation and manipulation of material.</div><div>
<br /></div><div>A side-effect of using MIDI playback in composing, I've noticed, is a lack of real-life playability of a lot of the rhythms. I've even noticed it in my own use of it. You can make a computer play back whatever you write accurately, but this can lead to the creation of irrational rhythmic layout whose goal is accurate playback by an electronic processor, not by a human. Of course, any decent composer will know about and correct this, but many don't. In this last piece, I've gone through it with a fine-toothed comb looking for things like downbeats that I wrote as offbeats to get the pacing right on MIDI, fast rhythms that might be better interpreted as grace notes, strict, complex rhythms in melodic writing that would be easier to read, and sound better if I were to relax and simplify them.</div><div>
<br /></div><div>In the field of playability, instrumental or vocal idiom is also an issue. However good the human playback protocols of whatever program you're using, they just can't replicate the subtle difficulties of the physical technique involved in playing an instrument. Although such features can be useful in reminding one just how long it really takes a contrabassoon to sound its lowest notes after the initial attack, they can't tell you about how it feels to play through a difficult passage. The computer will happily play back whatever you tell it to, irrespective of whether or not it's really possible, which can lead to radically overestimating and instrumentalist's or singer's ability to realize what we write for them, disregarding their comfort in the realization of our compositional vision. Again, any composer worth their salt will compensate for this. Far too many don't.</div><div>
<br /></div><div>Then there's the more intangible category of MIDI's effect on the inner ear, the composer's sense of instrumental or vocal sound. Frequently, when listening to a new piece, I can tell if it was orchestrated on MIDI. First of all, instrumental balance in MIDI is not, and probably never will be anywhere close to reality. When a piece of chamber or orchestral music has balance problems, it can usually, in my view, be attributed to its having been scored on MIDI, where any problem of volume or attack can be overcome by giving it more cowbell on the mixer. Learning orchestral balance takes a lot of time and experience. Not having had a terrible load of experience writing for orchestra early on, I attribute my success (so far) in the medium to my previous life as an orchestral/ensemble performer. Those years sitting at the back of the band with a score were the best education a young composer can get as to the inner workings of the orchestral beast, how a section of strings sounds at various dynamics, what kind of articulations produce the best results in the brass, etc. Sitting in choirs since I gave up instrumental performance has been equally beneficial to my choral writing. Spending years working with an ensemble from the inside, as a performer, has given me a bone-deep sense of what works and what doesn't. None of that is possible working on a computer with synthesized or sampled approximations.</div><div>
<br /></div><div>Subtler still is the <i>quality</i> of orchestration MIDI yields. Again, when a piece has been orchestrated on MIDI, I can usually tell, because there's a marked lack of invention in the orchestration. (This is not to accuse anyone who works this way of being unoriginal, it's more of an indicator of my inability to come up with a better word.) MIDI, however much it's developed over the last decade, is still a very traditional, hidebound orchestral tool, meant largely for writing commercial music with simple orchestral solutions. Working directly into MIDI as an orchestrational tool encourages, in my view, obvious solutions in distributing orchestral material. The resulting music <i>sounds</i> like MIDI. It behaves like MIDI. The interaction of instruments is less idiomatic and timbre-based, and more about how easy it is to move material around in an electronic setting. There's very little sense, frequently, of the composer <i>reaching</i> for a sound, and as a corollary, there's less risk of failure, and failure at realizing an idea is a major component in creating a new or fresh sound. This is, in my opinion, the worst aspect of working directly with MIDI, the way it seems to dampen the imagination in terms of sound creation. What MIDI can't ever replace is a sense of "what if?". What if I did it this way? Wow, I've never heard muted piccolo trumpets and piccolo together, I wonder if that would work? How would the texture sound if I had a harp behind that string tremolo? These things are replicable to a certain extent in the computer environment, but will never sound real enough to give an accurate impression, so we're left to simply imagine it, to write it down and hope it works. The risk of utter failure has to be part of orchestration. As one of my previous teachers said, if you write an orchestra piece and it doesn't turn out exactly the way you expected and you're surprised by that, you're a fool. And if it does turn out the way you expected, you're a lucky fool. I'll take luck over certainty any day. "Huh, that didn't work out the way I planned, but it's still pretty cool."</div><div>
<br /></div><div>Which brings me to my own recent inclusion of MIDI in my process. I started using it a lot to make quick mock-ups of sections of my viola concerto to check pacing of rhythm and pitch-field turnover, as well as to check the heterophonic counterpoint of a large section of polytonal melodic writing. The reasoning behind this move was that it was a huge piece, and a huge, very public opportunity, and I didn't want to mess it up when I could have checked these basic things in a controlled environment. I'm not too proud to admit that MIDI saved my ass at several points in the piece when I just couldn't work out things on paper, or had radically underestimated the pacing of a series of phrases. But I never – and mark this – ever turned to the computer until I'd figured out the entire pitch content and essential texture of a section. In a sense, the music wasn't composed at the computer, only arranged there. Wondering why I resisted integrating the computer into my routine so much, I realized that it was because I usually do a lot of the initial pitch work at the keyboard, or on whatever instrument I'm writing for if I can get my hands on one, and if I didn't have an instrumental interface, I lacked the confidence to just throw notes around on the screen. I'm not the sort of ultra-musical prodigy type who has music pouring out of every orifice and seems to just conjure things out of thin air with blindingly fluent technique. I'm man enough to admit the very real limits of my talents, and my very real attachment to sound in music rather than its technical or linguistic features, and make allowances in consequence. Getting the notes right, even if it's just five pitches, is a huge, time-consuming, doubt-ridden, long-dark-night-of-the-soul part of the process for me.
<br />
<br />So as an experiment, I decided to buy a small MIDI keyboard and write this current chamber piece directly into the computer, just to see if I could adapt. So far, I'm finding myself comfortable doing it. It's certainly very handy to have quick access to all the instrumental sounds through the keyboard. It's an odd ensemble I was asked to write for: flute, clarinet, bassoon, harp and string quintet. There are tricky balance issues in play, made more so because they asked me to somehow spatialize the material so the wind players could move around the art gallery where the premiere will take place. But as a group of single instruments, the balances sound more realistic on MIDI, so it seemed like the right forum to conduct this trial in. </div><div>
<br /></div><div>The resulting music is quite simple, very much like Feldman's <i>Rothko Chapel</i> in the way the materials relate. Not wanting to create a kind of mini-orchestra, or the obvious mini-concerto for harp (the ensemble is basically an extended version of the one in Ravel's <i>Introduction and Allegro</i>, which I know well from hearing my wife learn it last year), the instruments never play together at the same time. It's more a non-linear sequence of solos and ensembles, quite simple for the sake of coordination across a big space, but also because I'm deliberately keeping it simple for myself as a compositional exercise. I did, however, do some things I would never have had the guts to do on paper, like a section of Ivesian multi-stylistic counterpoint, where the wind trio babbles in rather banal atonal counterpoint over a diatonic bed of strings. I wouldn't have tried it without the playback as a guide, because while I could guess that the general effect would work, I couldn't be sure it would sound right. As I don't have a particularly good ear for contrapuntal structures, MIDI gave me more confidence in working out the idea, a greater sense of certainty, and allowed me to get the notes right where I couldn't have done it by ear on paper.</div><div>
<br /></div><div>And that sense of certainty is what brings me back to my conversation with my friend. I told him that usually at this stage of a piece, my insomnia has gone into overdrive, with ideas looping in my head on infinite repeat as my mind works on the material, where to go next. But this piece isn't keeping me up at night. I attributed this in our conversation to my just being tired and a little burned out creatively. A part of it, to me, was the non-linear nature of the ideas. I'm not thinking about causal connection or development or transition because I don't want there to be any. I just sit down in front of the computer every day and think about where I want to go next, on a very basic, very intuitive level, like putting together an art exhibit rather than a single piece. My friend was kinder, offering that maybe it was because I've gained sufficient control over my process and critical detachment from the work that I'm able to walk away from it more easily, confident that I'll find my way back in if I don't think about it all the time. This has a certain validity to it.</div><div>
<br /></div><div>But as I was brushing my teeth after yet another uncharacteristic night of sound sleep, the thought suddenly hit me: what if I'm not pondering this piece because in the very act of using MIDI playback as a tool, the music no longer holds any sense of mystery for me? I know the pacing of ideas is right because it sounds right, here and now. I don't wonder how two layers of contrasting material will sound because I know how it sounds, and it works. I don't need to worry about how my disconnected, stream-of-consciousness series of little episodes works because I know (or at least think) it does. What if the worst thing MIDI does to us as composers is kill our sense of fancy, our need to worry over the result? Why worry about a piece if you already know it's going to be successful? Working in real time, with a reasonably approximate result of our work available to hear at the click of a button, do we lose a sense of possibility? Do we lose our ability – our willingness – to <i>fail</i>?</div><div>
<br /></div><div>I should follow this <i>Sex and the City</i>-style voiceover with the caveat that I don't think using MIDI as a major compositional tool is in itself wrong, or that it yields bad results, or that it inherently makes composers lazy. If nothing else, it makes bad or already lazy composers think composing is easier than it is. (This applies to other software as well. Open Music, it strikes me, is equally dangerous, albeit more sophisticated in its cut-and-paste, idiom-negligent potential.) Any good, sensitive, musical composer will be aware of these problems and correct them. In the end, there is no right amount of computer use in composing. Everyone has a different ratio that suits their needs. I've found a few limited ways of making it useful to me. I don't think I'll ever transition to full computer use in composing, especially in orchestral music, because I know that my ear and experience with the orchestra are pretty reliable, and generally more fine-tuned. But in the integration of computer playback into a compositional routine, do we become reactive rather than proactive in shaping the outcome of a piece, of a sound? There's a slippery slope here, one which I find myself sliding down despite my best efforts to remain aloof. Yet the lure of total certainty is a powerful narcotic. I wouldn't be the first ascetic to succumb to Bacchic debauchery in the name of maintaining the appearance of infallibility. And that's what the canonization of "great" composers and the music marketing world teaches us, that we need to appear infallible, assured, demigod-like in our creative powers? Where is the point of no return? I suppose that's for another day. For now, I still need four minutes of music on this thing.</div><div>
<br /></div><div>Click.</div>Matthew Whittallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10587564978686509794noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-765813534239558138.post-21254495784167238582011-07-15T13:33:00.007+03:002013-05-10T20:45:17.512+03:00Surfacing<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiz8BGFZlUVaNdC8fjElcTPCkhLpahEL7DxIP0WpQIY5tGsHjg5yuObtrJ-TbPP56ZtMKs5Z5qB0QQRB82dz503F0Nd8zdDXWFQUBN-jdUUPYRmqFtJVLahyphenhyphennH4F6D36ujWSs4j-t3Cqhar/s1600/Trout1.JPG" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"></a><br />
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Well, I guess I'm back from my hiatus. Forgive the awkwardness of the blog's appearance, I just discovered Blogger's new templates and am experimenting with a new layout. I'm usually loath to change things about the way I work once I find something simple and elegant that suits my purposes, but it's been a season of change.</div>
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Much of my long silence had to do with the unending process of getting my viola concerto ready for printing. I thought I'd gotten over the worst of my crippling doubts about composing, or at least had learned that the pressure of incessant project deadlines was a good thing, in that it kept me from getting stuck in my head for too long, getting overly precious about my ideas and material. As such, the piece itself was relatively easy writing. It flowed well, I didn't get too attached to my ideas if I found they weren't working, and the piece assumed the shape it wanted, which ended up being quite distant from my initial conception in many ways. More about the music momentarily.</div>
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What I hadn't anticipated was all the peripheral concerns that would assail me one after another during the process of writing the stupid thing. First, I suffered a months-long litany of health problems that would bore the most sympathetic (or sadistic) reader. Suffice it to say that between August and February, I spent an awful lot of time bedridden for one reason or another. Then came the perhaps the biggest shock to my family's collective system, the decision to buy an apartment in Helsinki, and all the busy work associated with that simple act: bank meetings, mortgages, the move itself, light renovations, etc. Then Finale had a complete meltdown during the copying part of the process, necessitating weeks of polite but terse back-and-forth with tech support to resurrect my poor maligned piece. Then the trouble with the parts started. Once again, I won't bore anyone with the details, but the end results of the constant malfunctions and other work intruding were that 1) a piece that was finished in December (on deadline, if I may boast a little) took until June to be copied and delivered, and 2) I was finally pushed past my breaking point and left Finale for good, a process documented lightheartedly <a href="http://theshortroadtonirvana.blogspot.com/2011/06/breaking-up-is-hard-to-do.html">here</a>, and not so lightheartedly elsewhere.</div>
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Naturally, seeing the end of this work season necessitated a little time off. So after a couple of weeks of leisure, moderate intoxication and travel, I'm back. Another part of the long hiatus between posts was a simple dearth of productive things to say. It was an immensely bleak, depressing winter, a season of which I'm normally a huge fan, but this last one was just brutal: dark, unutterably cold, buried under feet of snow all the time, the kind of winter the North serves up once in a blue moon. </div>
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It was bleak for other reasons, as I watched the politics of my now-twin homelands take an alarming turn. First Finland's elections produced tears, anger, and so small amount of introspection in electing the odd True Finns (I shall not link to them. Fie!) with a whopping 20% of the vote. The resulting parliamentary negotiations ended up producing a much more palatable government than anyone had a right to expect, but it was white-knuckle time there for a while. The worst outcomes were the rise of euphemistic campaigning in Finland, where an openly racist, pseudo-intellectual pinhead is described in the media as an "outspoken immigration critic", as well as a rise in cowardly attacks on people perceived as outsiders, notably visible minorities and immigrants. There's always been an undercurrent of xenophobia in Finnish society, but everyone, myself included, allowed themselves to think it a minor problem in an otherwise tolerant people. The whole upswelling of anti-Other hysteria culminated last week, for me and mine, in the brutal assault of a very Finnish-looking colleague by a group of young men for making the mistake of stepping into the local in his new neighborhood for pint. In the long run, it's perhaps a good thing to air out these issues now, before they get worse, but it doesn't make it any easier to watch.</div>
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Then Canada, my dear, dear Canada... Oh, Canada! Maybe I'm feeling more and more distant from the land of my birth, geographically, psychologically, even spiritually. Watching the recent elections there from afar – barred as I am from participating in them as an expat – was painful, to say the least, as a government of snide, parochial bully-boys that time and time again displayed open contempt for the populace and ran a campaign that amounted to little more than "Coalition! Ooga-booga!" was rewarded with a majority stake in Parliament. Worse still, people absolutely gloried in the debasement and humiliation of a good, well-meaning, worldly, patriotic man for the crime of having spent a few years outside the country. People complain that career political hacks have too much power, and that our best and brightest should seek office, but when they do, they're derided for not being slick career political hacks. The hypocrisy is astounding, no? (Hmm, overidentifying, much?) The state of the CBC just seems to echo the mood of the land, where people aren't citizens anymore, they're just taxpayers, and everything comes down to money and what's in it for me, right now. Ironically, this all stems from a politician actually keeping a campaign promise. Our Prime Minister is right: I don't recognize Canada anymore.</div>
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Perhaps the buying of a house here is symbolic of my increasing attachment to Finland, a land where I can do my work and still hope to live in reasonable comfort. As far as colleagues in Canada tell me, things aren't going to get better anytime soon for the arts, so here is where you'll find me for the foreseeable future. It's a funny thing to live as an immigrant in the global age. Cutting ties to a place perhaps but for a letter now and then, the virtually inevitable result of moving to a new continent and starting a new life, is now virtually impossible. Our homelands haunt us, our home cultures ever-present rather than simply remembered. The dissonance of living in a foreign culture (and Finland does feel very foreign some days, even after ten years – ten YEARS!) never resolves, it just hangs in the air, Debussy-like, a hazy background against which one's current identity is always projected.</div>
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Nonetheless, here I am, back at work, with many more things on my mind that I feel are worth sharing. What's changed? Home, space, life, family. Finishing the viola concerto, with its constant references to past ideas and forays into different temporal worlds, felt like a closure or sorts. I found out a lot of things about my ways of working, and unintentionally succeeded in a long held ambition of mine to write a large-scale piece that relies entirely on heterophony rather than harmony for its structure. It wasn't until I finished it that what I'd done hit me. Harmony, that little devil on my shoulder for years, the notion of music moving through time in a linear fashion, finally gave up the ghost in this one, leaving a sea of pure melody, endless and ruminating. I also changed my work habits quite a bit, coming to rely on my computer to a greater degree. (I know, I know.) I'm man enough to admit the damn thing saved my life in a few sections of this piece, where I would have made a hash of things trying to do it by hand and trial and error. It's an interesting development, and I'm trying to find new ways of integrating the computer into my routine as a compositional tool rather than simply a copying one.</div>
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Much to do, much to say, little time to do it all. I'd remiss, however, if I didn't note this upcoming <a href="http://www.moritzburgfestival.de/english/shop_moritzburgfestivalcds.html">CD release</a>, a quirky little project I got involved with through the pianist Antti Siirala. Track 8 features him solo, playing a tiny piece of mine based on the famous theme from the infinitely more famous, much larger preceding work. Note the incongruity of my present career profile and the label. I'm a bit chuffed.</div>
Matthew Whittallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10587564978686509794noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-765813534239558138.post-70785991012918828212011-06-06T20:20:00.005+03:002011-07-15T13:50:59.718+03:00Breaking Up Is Hard To Do<div>Dear [name withheld],</div><div><br /></div><div>By the time you read this, I'll be gone. It shouldn't come as a shock to you, given how we've been growing apart the past few years, but I know how out-of-it you can be at times, so I've taken the trouble to spell out exactly how I came to this decision. What it mostly comes down to is that I've changed; I grew up, became more sophisticated, and developed different needs, and you didn't. It's taken me a long time to come to this realization, but I deserve better. I deserve to spend time with someone who knows my needs and wants, who doesn't take me for granted, who treats me with respect. I've been faithful for years, but I can't do it any longer.</div><div><br /></div><div>Part of the problem may be that we got together when we were both so young. I was new to everything in this life, and you were so fresh and attractive, I was blind to the potential downside of committing to someone so early. It's been nearly twenty years, and I've never known any other way of being. Looking back now, though, I see clearly the problems that have always been there, and I recognize that I can't fix them, and I'm tired of trying. Things used to be so simple and elegant, but you overcomplicate everything now. You're more difficult to talk to than you used to be, and when you don't outright ignore me, I still have to repeat the simplest requests over and over to get you to do things, when you even do them. (And don't think I haven't noticed that passive-aggressive thing you do where you rearrange stuff I put in specific places when I'm not looking.) I'm sorry, but I can't live with someone so indifferent to me.</div><div><br /></div><div>The thing I feel most embarrassed about is the years I spent defending you to everyone in my life. My friends have been telling me to leave for years, get out, start over, find someone more compatible, more generous, less emotionally abusive. They wanted only the best for me, but I pushed them away. I'd been with you so long. I knew you better than they did. You could change. You'd improve. But we both know that didn't happen. My father was the only one who saw the potential in you, kept telling me to give you another chance, keep making that investment. I guess since he steered me in your direction in the first place, he felt he had a stake in our relationship.</div><div><br /></div><div>And the money he gave me in our early days together! The money Dad spent helping me try to help you was the biggest waste, even after I had my own money to give you. He keeps offering to pay for your mistakes, did you know that? I kept throwing money at you, hoping you'd return my faith in you by making yourself better, but all you did was run after fads, buying trinkets and fancy accessories to woo the young kids, living it up at my expense and giving me nothing in return except the same old contempt. (Here's a tip: those kids you're trying so desperately to impress all think you're over the hill, a relic, too old and inflexible to even be interesting. You're practically a joke to them.) </div><div><br /></div><div>And still, I defended you. You were seductive and charming, and I admit it got the better of me, got me to ignore my own instincts, that nagging feeling that you weren't ever going to change for the better, and that even your best traits were withering away, making it less and less worth my while to stay. But you kept coming back, saying you'd cleaned up, that you'd gotten yourself off all that stuff, that you were on the straight and narrow for good. But it was just an act, wasn't it?</div><div><br /></div><div>So I've decided I need to move on, start fresh, make a new life for myself away from you. It may be too soon, but I should tell you I've met someone else. It's still very new, and I'm not yet sure it's for the best, but anything has to be better than this. I'm tired, and being with someone younger, who's more malleable and is more in tune with my needs and desires can't be a bad thing, can it? I'm sorry it had to end this way, so abruptly, but the way you ruined yesterday for me was the last straw. I have to go. It will be hard, I don't doubt. At my age, with my lack of experience with anyone but you, I'm going to need to learn a lot of new ways of doing things. But I think it will be invigorating in the end. A rebirth, of a sort.</div><div><br /></div><div>So see you around, <a href="http://www.finalemusic.com/default.aspx">Finale</a>. Have a good life. If you need to reach me, I'll be staying with <a href="http://www.sibelius.com/home/index_flash.html">Sibelius</a> for a while. Maybe for good. At least until I decide what's right for me. If I've learned anything from our time together, it's that I should always take care of my own needs first.</div><div><br /></div><div>Ciao,</div><div>Matt</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>Matthew Whittallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10587564978686509794noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-765813534239558138.post-66547949443936421632010-08-10T10:55:00.011+03:002010-08-11T11:41:44.839+03:00Your regularly scheduled programMy feverish son is home for a couple of days, which means that my studio is keeping its nighttime job as his bedroom for the moment, leaving me with a bit of time to read and blog. I should be reading Mahler, but I got sidetracked by my wife's gift of Anthony Bourdain's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Medium-Raw-Bloody-Valentine-People/dp/0061718947/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1281427090&sr=1-1">latest</a>, an all-too-absorbing account of his post-fame life. As an enthusiastic home cook and armchair food critic, I just can't resist this stuff. No, I won't be auditioning for Finland's upcoming version of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MasterChef_%28UK_TV_series%29">MasterChef</a>, though less due to of lack of time than out of a proper sense of shame at the raised eyebrows from my degree supervisors should I choose to go on a reality show instead of finishing my thesis. Also, I couldn't hack the restaurant lunch shift challenge.<br /><br />I've also been distracted by my addiction to news, and yesterday <a href="http://beta.wnyc.org/shows/soundcheck/2010/aug/05/listening-pleasure-skip-program-notes/">this story</a> about a study on the usefulness of program notes was the source of much online chatter. In that charmingly sensationalist manner of much latter-day American journalism, the headline boldly announces that program notes aren't helpful in experiencing music, which of course makes me <a href="http://culture.wnyc.org/articles/music-hub/2010/apr/15/some-notes-program-notes/">bristle</a> as a freelance program annotator. Based on the actual conversation about the study, it would seem that the conclusions it reaches, and the implications thereof, are far more prosaic and diffuse. I can't access the full study from here, but it seems to me that it shows largely that purple prose about an isolated passage of music isn't helpful to 16 undergraduates in Arkansas with no musical training, far from a black-and-white assertion that program notes are a hindrance to the enjoyment of music. Far more interesting and complex would be to hear how different types of program note affect the experience of music for different types of listener, the content-vs-context part of the equation. That's something I find more fascinating than the reductive approach seemingly used here. Any takers?<br /><br />However, critiquing a study I can't read in full isn't my purpose. I'm more reacting to the radio conversation than anything else, and am sure the full study is far more nuanced. The real point is to address in some way the various functions program notes can have for the people involved in the creation and reception of music. It's a difficult balancing act, what to say, how to say it, which aspects of a piece to focus on, which to leave out. It goes without saying that you can't ever say everything about a piece in a program note, no matter how much space you're given. The type of piece – contemporary or classic, warhorse or historical curiosity – as well as the intended audience also influence what can and should be said. Writing about music that is familiar on some level to most listeners changes how you can approach it to a program note. An unfamiliar or brand new piece requires a different tone.<br /><br />All this is obvious, but I think of program notes differently depending on which hat I'm wearing at the time. Of course, my most extensive experience wearing any of them is with new music. However, as a concert-goer, I tend to glaze over and snore whenever anyone writes about structure, form, thematic development, or focus too closely on tiny details of material elaboration. Likewise, I chafe when composers talk endlessly of philosophical mumbo-jumbo that has precious little to do with the actual sounding experience of the piece at hand. (Kyle Gann mercilessly <a href="http://www.artsjournal.com/postclassic/2004/08/but_what_does_it_sound_like.html">parodied</a> this type of note in a post a few years ago, though I regret his use of a Finnish-sounding ersatz composer name, as program notes here tend to be humble, self-effacing and overwhelmingly focused on formal aspects rather than airy-fairy post-structuralist aesthetic ideas.) Tell me a story about the composer's life while writing the piece, though, and I'm yours. I could care less about motivic elaboration in Julian Anderson's <span style="font-style: italic;">Symphony</span>, but I loved finding out that the compositional process was catalyzed for him by viewing an Akseli Gallèn-Kallela <a href="http://www.nationalgallery.co.uk/shop/Art-Posters-Prints/Art-Postcards/830302six">painting</a> of Lake Keitele at the National Gallery in London. The fact that I had a similar experience with that same painting only adds to the piece. Did knowing this create expectations about the music? Sure, but I would have like the piece regardless, and only found this tidbit clarified some of his choices for me. In the local context of Finland, that information would be helpful to a lot of people, since pretty much everyone knows that particular painting (and would dearly like to see it come home, I think, but that's another story).<br /><br />Dealing with an older, more widely known piece, I don't want to read about the thematic processes at work in Mahler's second symphony, but knowing that the sacred atmosphere of the end was so important to him that he went and bought a set of church bells for the premiere is the stuff of listener dreams for me. In short, I don't want to be guided through the temporal process of listening to the piece, to be told what to listen for and when. That does ruin the experience for me as an average listener, to be walked through it in a linear fashion, because it disrupts the non-linear, atemporal aspect of music's communicativeness, the way it bombards you with meaning and experience on so many different sensory levels, independently of temporal flow, creating associations through memory and subtle triggers of pitch, rhythm and timbre, leaving some things unsaid. What I want to know is what the piece can be said to mean. I don't care that it may not mean the same thing to me, but I want to know what <span style="font-style: italic;">someone</span> thinks of it. It's not that I need to be told how to think of it, but I appreciate having a window into the music from someone else's perspective. Having a foil against which to form my own opinion is helpful to me, as I suspect it is to many others.<br /><br />And that's really what a program note is, a window into an artform that many people have difficulty approaching and orienting themselves within because of the temporal nature of the experience. Give me something to hang onto, an idea to give me some direction, not as to the structural detail of the piece, but to what the piece is trying to articulate – assuming it's trying to be articulate.<br /><br />Which is why, as a program annotator, it drives me into fits of blind rage when composers refuse to say anything about their pieces, and won't supply information to those who try. Don't want to say anything about your piece? Fine, but let others write about it as they wish. (You may laugh, but I've seen program notes stating plainly that composer X doesn't describe their music. Now <span style="font-style: italic;">that's</span> unhelpful, and frankly lazy on the part of the annotator. What's the composer gonna do, <a href="http://www.artsjournal.com/postclassic/2009/07/creep_into_the_oh_forget_it.html">sue you</a> for writing something about their work? Respect the creator, but also respect the listener by giving them something to chew on.) If I'm writing notes for an orchestra concert and can easily access your score and a recording, I'll of course give your piece a hearing and come up with something on my own that's meaningful to the average listener – always my intended reader when I write notes. But if I'm writing an entire festival book and have 70 words to devote to your piece on one concert? Sorry, but you're S.O.L. If you refuse to provide me with material, I won't write about your piece. To suggest that music can't be encompassed in mere words is simply facetious. If a listener wants to know what you think of your piece, wants to get to know you through means other than hearing your music, why would you deny them that opportunity? It seems niggardly, a hoarding of meaning unto oneself, and makes no sense to me, unless non-communication is your goal, which I sincerely doubt.<br /><br />I might as well come clean and say that, as a composer, I consider program notes extremely important in the compositional process, a part of communication that I'm unwilling to forsake in the name of not shaping people's opinion. I consider them so important that I frequently write them before writing the piece. It's odd, I know, but it helps me form an idea of what I want the piece to be. I edit them as I go, but reducing what I'm trying to say through the piece to a short text helps crystallize the ideas for me. If it's such an important part of my creative process, why would I suppress that to the listener, placing on them the sole responsibility of figuring out something I barely understand myself? Of course I'm trying to shape their opinion of the piece. I <span style="font-style: italic;">want</span> people to like my music. I like writing, and on my better days I'm pretty good at it. I think long and hard about what to say about my pieces, and what I think people would like to read about them. I fancy that people read them, enjoy them, and it adds to their experience of the piece and helps them get a little more into it, and a little more out of it. I've been won over by a program note before, why shouldn't others? A tune I might otherwise consider schlocky may be more palatable if I knew the composer had just become a parent. I know the feeling that brings, why shouldn't I relate to that in a piece?<br /><br />Ultimately, though, my window analogy holds up. That's all a program note really is, a glimpse into the world of the piece, and no more relevant to the experience of music than that. It can be helpful or not, depending on the individual listener as much as on the note. You can write whatever you want, but in the end listeners can't be told what to think about a piece unless they let themselves. But to deny the importance of program notes, or worse, to reduce it to an equation free of context, if <span style="font-style: italic;">x</span> then <span style="font-style: italic;">y</span>, is simplistic. Not that the above study does that. It's more of an effect of the reductive tendency of media exposure than any conclusion the study itself reaches, a point alluded to by its author, and unfortunately glossed over in the editing. I'm sure some people find program notes a hindrance, just as some people find <a href="http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2010/08/09/harper-long-form-census-scrapped.html">filling out a few questions</a> with the goal of better governance intrusive. But I'd wager that, in this age when musical literacy and familiarity with the repertoire are declining even in highly literate places like Finland, audiences will appreciate any lifeline thrown to them in their attempt to orient themselves within our work. And I will always be happy to throw it to them, in any form they find helpful.Matthew Whittallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10587564978686509794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-765813534239558138.post-6432764024924870632010-07-19T14:35:00.005+03:002010-07-19T16:34:32.169+03:00Out of timeWell, I'm back. I've been home for about a week now, but now I'm back mentally as well. Not much of what I've done over the last six weeks or so has been restful. Between planes, trains, cars, visits, endless jet lag and intermittent work of various kinds, I can't really say I've had much of a holiday. Nevertheless, my mind's been disconnected from its daily grind long enough that I'm starting to chomp at the bit of my viola concerto, still worried about it, still just cautiously feeling it out, but it's a good place to be in right now.<br /><br />During my travels I was gifted with <a href="http://www.ensemble-nomad.com/concert/index.html">three</a> <a href="http://www.musiikinaika.org/136_4.html">wonderful</a> <a href="http://www.kuhmofestival.fi/programme.htm#12">performances</a> of pieces from the more meditative side of my output, from three very different groups, one in Japan and two here in Finland. (The <a href="http://helsinkichamberchoir.fi/">Helsinki Chamber Choir</a> concert featuring my <span style="font-style: italic;">ad puram annihilationem meam</span> and an amazing premiere by my colleague Sampo Haapamäki can be streamed online <a href="http://areena.yle.fi/audio/1139640">here</a> until August 11th.) All three were prepared to a very high technical level, and the performers gave deeply committed interpretations, letting the long phrases breathe fully, feeling the weight of the pauses, paying full attention to the sound of each note – in short, taking their time.<br /><br />I'm used to having to do a certain amount of work with performers to get them into the temporal feel of the music, the way it flows through time. There's a tendency to rush on from one idea to the next in Western music, and it always takes awhile to overcome that deeply ingrained impulse to always press onward. It's particularly problematic in pieces like the ones mentioned above, where boxes with pitches and approximate time durations vastly outnumber notated rhythms, and the long boxed figures and fermatas, even the pauses tend to go by much more more quickly than I'd planned. One could say it's my fault for not fully notating the durations I want, but the notation I use in such cases is only meant as a guide to the proportional values of the gestures. The real point of the exercise is to get the players to feel the tension of the moment, to relax into the beauty of a texture, the feel the <span style="font-style: italic;">rightness</span> of moving forward into a new section or gesture, independent of any specific temporal duration. In most cases, it's simply a matter of drawing people's attention to the pauses, getting them to count out the durations and feel how long ten seconds really is. Once the performers catch on, it's rarely a problem. The feel and pace of the music are established, and the interpretation grows in leaps and bounds. Case in point is the Helsinki Chamber Choir, now on their third performance of <span style="font-style: italic;">ad puram</span>, and the piece just keeps getting more expansive, more centered, its fragmented structure more cohesive as a result.<br /><br />So imagine my surprise when, after my sole rehearsal with the Japanese musicians who played The wine-dark sea, I suddenly realized I hadn't had to go through that routine. I hit me on the trip back to my hotel that the issue of pauses or phrases "breathing" hadn't come up at all, everything had just flowed the way I'd signaled through the notation. There were other small issues to deal with, the normal things one faces in coaching a performance like tone quality, dynamics and articulations, but the temporal unfolding of the piece wasn't one of them.<br /><br />Don't worry, I'm not going to make any broad-brush statements about the Japanese mindset and how they have a natural appreciation of stasis and repose – especially given the head-spinning speed at which Tokyo operates. Although I've been fascinated by Japanese culture for a long time and done my share of study on it, I don't know it intimately enough to make such claims. But there did seem to be an unspoken understanding between the players about how the piece should go, how long a pause should last, when the next event should occur. The product of good rehearsal, no doubt, but there was something in the room, a feeling that ran deeper than simple professional musicianship, an attitude of rightness about how things should proceed that the players brought to the piece independently of my notational choices. I don't think it's going too far into generalization to note that Japan's culture has, of course, been shaped by Buddhism, and Zen in particular, whose values have affected my attitude toward time as well. And even Tokyo, whose activity level never seems to be at less than fever pitch, somehow manages to room for genuine peace and reflection in its hectic, multi-layered design, such that passing through a gate into someone's tiny garden completely transports one out of the urban condition and into timelessness. (I was lucky enough to be staying in such an oasis)<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiK67wx8i6Z4k7-S-EaDAzxmxBHh_Iih4JZHiMqaJlDMSgQ_Xx0AKRXn24sBJgJeUpcA7KEb-iq2mWGEqbx9HqLG5AlZIZ6T7ruHGPC7JcnbRiIZazI1TNl8AK-I0jZWeBbmTLDnWQwUWsT/s1600/PA300233.JPG"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 240px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiK67wx8i6Z4k7-S-EaDAzxmxBHh_Iih4JZHiMqaJlDMSgQ_Xx0AKRXn24sBJgJeUpcA7KEb-iq2mWGEqbx9HqLG5AlZIZ6T7ruHGPC7JcnbRiIZazI1TNl8AK-I0jZWeBbmTLDnWQwUWsT/s320/PA300233.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5495604888857612226" border="0" /></a><br />One of the few books I've made time to read this year is <span style="font-style: italic;">Time</span> by Eva Hoffman, a thought-provoking if not especially rigorous or cohesive essay [pot, meet kettle] on how various cultures construct and experience time. Although concerning a culture unrelated to Japan, this passage did jump out at me (italics mine):<br /><br />"[...] in each culture, the temporal order is so deeply bound up with the wider matrix of values, with the conception of the human and its place in the cosmos, as to be tantamount to an existential topography. <span style="font-style: italic;">For the Balinese, a sense of spacious stasis is clearly foundational</span>, and infiltrates every aspect of life in ways which seem very opaque to an outsider."<br /><br />If this is true – let's say it is for now, I'm not convinced it's that simple – and cultural constructs of time are binding and so deeply ingrained that getting outside them requires a supreme conscious effort, it may go some way toward explaining why Western performers need to make a conscious effort to surrender to stasis in a piece, whereas Japanese musicians do it more instinctively, despite their training in Western music. By the same token, in striving for timelessness in my music, am I fighting a losing battle with my cultural conditioning? It certainly feels like that sometimes, as I struggle to hold back the pace of events, restrain the development of a pitch field, relax, enjoy a sonority, a chord, a pair of oscillating notes.<br /><br />I've been aspiring to the condition of timelessness for as long as I've been composing, but the conscious act of abandoning linear/teleological time in my music took two acts. First, I stopped wearing a watch. It was driving me crazy, making me segment up my music and count every bloody beat and subdivision, using it to clock through every bar and phrase, trying in vain to get every gesture timed just right. Second, I joined a choir that performed a lot of Renaissance polychoral music. As I got into that repertoire, the way it ebbed and flowed without regard to barlines, settling where it wanted to, forsaking harmonic tension and resolution for modal euphony, I began to see a way out of the temporal labyrinth I'd constructed for myself in grad school, a way in which I could free myself of counted, segmented time, harmonic development, form – in short, step outside measured time. The pieces where I've managed to do this, to create stasis without any conscious exercise of will or discipline on my part are generally the pieces I consider my best work, the ones where effort and ordering of time give way to artless flow. I wonder sometimes why I bother with striving, except that artlessness isn't something you make happen, it happens on its own, independently from, perhaps even in stark opposition to creative will.<br /><br />This is all by way of noting that the tension between striving and stasis seems to be coming to the fore in my latest piece, the much-maligned viola concerto. True artlessness has so far seemed to me like a world apart from that of ordered musical time as we understand it in the Western sense, a place outside pitch sets and formal development, rarefied and unyielding to invitations to blend into a symphonic discourse, like a noble gas. I've had to give timelessness its own space in order to let it fully expand. But this piece is different, wanting, demanding to contain both, not only as part of its formal course, but also in the relationship between the solo viola, which is always seems to be trying to crawl out of its skin, constantly pushing at its harmonic surroundings with new pitches, and the orchestra, which so far just wants to <span style="font-style: italic;">be</span>. It's a fascinating tension, one I can't say I've seen much in the concerto format, but one I'm keen to explore and see how it pans out. More rambles to follow on related topics, this is one blogging idea I'm not planning on letting go of for a change.Matthew Whittallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10587564978686509794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-765813534239558138.post-84955163744617288202010-05-22T11:24:00.009+03:002010-05-22T17:38:18.140+03:00Old dogs, new questions (and mixed metaphors)It's fitting somehow that my hundredth post, whatever its significance, should fall on this particular topic. For the last couple of weeks, I've been swamped with freelance work writing the program book for the Viitasaari <a href="http://www.musiikinaika.org/4_4.html">Time of Music</a> festival this coming July. I've had performances there the last three years running, but haven't been able to make it up for reasons of travel and childbirth, so I'm looking forward to a few days spent with family and colleagues and some music.<br /><br />The guest this year, whom I've been getting to know via what I could hear of his music, as well as via e-mail, is Italian composer Marco Stroppa. It's funny how you can come to someone's music as a total neophyte and, charged with writing a profile of their life and work, and program notes for their concerts, you become an ardent defender of their views. I think it's incumbent upon program annotators to become champions for living composers in a way. It's not that you have to suspend your critical faculties per se, but that in order to write a convincing piece about someone for what is essentially a marketing tool and not necessarily a critical document, you need to become passionate about their work.<br /><br />I admit it wasn't as difficult to become sold on Stroppa's ideas as with some other composers, since his music is very coloristic and follows a rhetorical course I can identify with. It's very much in the tone of French spectralist music à la Murail, Grisey, etc., but more satisfying and intricate on the melodic level to my ear. However, I might not have thought too hard about his ideas had I not been doing this job, just lumping him in with the post-Messiaen school of the late-twentieth century. But I found myself writing quite forcefully against some of the criticism, or perhaps misunderstanding, I had read and heard about his work, principally concerning the relative simplicity and spareness of his chamber music as opposed to his larger ensemble works. I personally had no problem with the difference in tone, and in general prefer more intimate expression in chamber music. But whereas I might otherwise have simply overlooked the disparity in tone and complexity, it became one of the central points in my profile of him. I found myself needing to understand where he was coming from, why his music is the way it is, which should be of principal concern in documenting an artist's work rather than how it fits into a certain aesthetic tradition. It also helped that Stroppa was extremely communicative about his ideas, and refreshingly unpretentious and un-technical in describing them given his background with Ircam and that circle, where French philosophical obfuscation and techno-geekspeak seem to dominate the discourse about music. Maybe it's because he's Italian. In any case, while my heart still lies very much with American music, the continental European end of things gives me more food for thought in the wake of this assignment.<br /><br />The real reason for this post, though, is to ponder briefly the integration of old information and new information. I've been kept away from my viola concerto (or more accurately, my pile of disconnected viola concerto sketches) for a couple of weeks. So far, as usual with the early stages of a piece, it's not going very well. I usually liken the beginning stages of a big new piece to the early rounds of a boxing match. It may surprise some people who know me, but I love to watch boxing. Despite the brutality, I find it fascinating how the competitors circle each other strategically, throwing out a punch here and there, feeling the other guy (or girl) out, testing for points of entry into their defense. Smaller pieces don't cause me quite as much anxiety, nor do even bigger pieces where I'm working within a very limited pitch world. When I decide to go completely diatonic, I can churn out huge passages of music in a very short time. (I'll write more about speed later this week.) But this piece is a very different animal.<br /><br />Part of the problem is physical and psychic exhaustion. It's been a long, busy season of work with no real focus. My non-family life for the last six months has consisted of a multitude of different tasks: teaching, editing, writing, composing one smallish chamber piece, and dealing with performances and the energy and career fallout that result. (The dirty little secret of finding whatever small measure of success we're allotted in our lives as composers is that what having an active career does most noticeably is limit your ability to compose.) So I'm tired, and looking forward to a trip to Canada with my family for my son's first birthday, followed by a few days in Japan for a <a href="http://www.ensemble-nomad.com/concert/index.html">performance</a>.<br /><br />But there's another layer to the difficulty in this particular piece. As I mentioned earlier., I've been sketching this one off an on for years and thought I had a good handle on it. But it turns out much of the concept came to be when I was a very different, much less self-assured composer – which is saying something given my general insecurity about my way or working. But I've come to accept and integrate certain latent tendencies in my music in a much more thorough manner, and as a result my older concept for this piece is falling apart before my eyes, everything once again open to questioning.<br /><br />The biggest problem for me is virtuosity, a necessary element on some level in a concerto, specifically perceptible virtuosity. I kind of sidestepped the issue in my horn concerto by writing a horn part that's extremely difficult for the performer, but not in a visible way. There is no fast passagework, very few dramatic registral leaps, none of the stuff that usually brings audiences to their feet. It's more of a virtuosity of tonal control across a huge tessitura, as well as endurance. But the viola piece seems to want a certain amount of pyrotechnic display, and passagework of this nature is, I think, largely a function of harmony. Look at any great concerto, and the most virtuosic passages have a strong harmonic underpinning. Of course, in a good concerto, the passagework will also have a very strong melodic profile, if a disguised one. Look at the fast movement of Walton's viola concerto, for instance, how his scalar passagework picks out all the right notes, forming a kind of meta-melody supported by the orchestration. This kind of melodic virtuosity is the kind I'm most interested in, the type Mozart specialized in, where the volley of notes never loses the singing thread. Compare a Mozart concerto with, say, Spohr, and see how quickly the melodic coherence in Spohr's figurations dissolves. This is a problem with too many contemporary concertos, which are full of rhythmic and technical flash, but contain no fundamental melodic impulse. Having realized that my music's main animating force is heterephony, not harmonic rhythm, this is a major stumbling block so far. How to overcome that hurdle without devolving into simplistic pseudo-minimalism? How to have a perceptible virtuosity that is primarily melodic in nature without the harmonic underpinning?<br /><br />A side-issue of the virtuosity question is fast music. Although I'd written some fairly successful fast music in the late nineties, I started questioning the need for it soon after. Why must a piece contain fast music? How much should there be? Is it really necessary to write fast music? It always seemed that the composing of fast music was 1) a sort of macho proof of chops, not an a priori rhetorical necessity of good music ("You've gotta write fast music," one of my early teachers told me, as if it were gospel), B) a knee-jerk response to the Western fear of stillness, and C) a way of filling time when you run out of ideas. Furthermore, much of the fast music I hear in contemporary works tends to be based on one of two things: dead rhythms from a previous aesthetic era and repeated notes. The "new notes on old rhythms" issue is one I've written about before, and is a blind alley as far as I'm concerned. There is no way of reinvigorating straight-up 6/8 and have it not sound like some lumpen redux of Beethoven. So if one wants to create a sense of fast, regular forward rhythmic drive, minimalism's repeating pulses seem to be the answer, but how far can one take that before it becomes impersonal, in a piece with a solo instrument that begs to have its personality unearthed?<br /><br />How much fast music is also a question, as in how much fast music does it take to create a sense of dramatic realization in a piece? My horn concerto, with its predominantly static textures until the last two or three minutes, was an attempt to take on that issue. It turns it doesn't actually take too much fast music to make a piece rhythmically satisfying if you put it in the right place. I was unsure of how it would work at first, but on the day I finished the score, I heard a radio broadcast of Anders Hillborg's flute concerto, which features about 15 minutes of daringly slow, simple music, capped off by a lightning-fast, two-minute coda, and it's devastatingly effective. Nevertheless, in a 30-minute piece like the one I'm taking on, one needs to increase the proportion, especially if you don't plan to put the fast music at the end.<br /><br />Perhaps the problem that's the most difficult to nail down is the temporal dislocation of a lot of the material for the piece from my present outlook. I'm a different composer than I was in 2003, more sure about certain things, less sure about many more. There are fewer certainties, nothing I can take for granted anymore as being "right" in terms of the decisions to be made, only gut feeling to follow. The first few minutes of the piece haven't changed much, and the concept is still solid, and indeed looks forward to some of the ideas I worked out in my chamber music over the intervening years. The end is still open (I'm toying with the idea of writing three different codas, which can be chosen in performance depending on the mood of the soloist and conductor), but the section that precedes it has been carved in stone since the beginning. To complicate things, that section features material I wrote in 1996 for a piece for wind orchestra, a great idea from a very naive young composer's piece, captivating in itself, but inarticulate within its larger context. It's an odd thing to try to integrate very old ideas into a new piece, to try to re-imagine the material, fix the things that went wrong without overcomplicating it in its new version. But looking at the idea, it's the most "me" of any music I wrote previous to settling in Finland, and not so different from the stuff I've been working on recently. In fact, one could say I've spent the last 15 years trying to recapture the spirit of this bit of music.<br /><br />Over the whole project there's a heavy sense of awareness about the whole thing, as if this piece has to be the statement of a career, a manifesto or sorts, of everything I hold dear. Some would say I take too much weight on myself, and should just lighten up. I'm fully cognizant of the arrogance of the idea. In a decidedly marginalized art form, who really cares what I have to say in the public sense? And yet, I'm offered this huge, rare, precious public opportunity, and one cannot help but feel the pressure of it, to create something that people won't mind being locked up in a room with for half an hour.<br /><br />I no longer believe in the masterpiece meme at all. Although I'm a passionate advocate for the orchestra as an institution and mode of expression, and love hearing it and writing for it, I'm more and more aware of the tendency toward conservatism inherent in the medium, the restrictions that rehearsal time place on composers trying to innovate, the need to hew fairly closely to tradition in the interest of not pissing off the players and conductor. While I find the limitations stimulating, making difficult things sound good on the cheap with notational tricks, I understand why some composers chafe at them. I have loved the concerto format for as long as I can remember, and yet when it comes to writing them, I find I have no aptitude for, nor interest in the standard tricks that make a concerto "work". So I'm not trying to write a masterpiece in the common sense of a work that lives up to the greatness of an arbitrary "tradition". But I am keenly aware that on some level this piece is a masterpiece for me in the old meaning of the word, a piece where one gains a degree of mastery of one's craft and integrates many strands of inquiry, and god, do I have a lot of those.<br /><br />I do take too much upon myself, but from here it seems like everything I've done for the last ten years, the stylistic disjunctions, the foray into total stasis, the landscape music, the heterophony, prog/art rock heroism, has been directed toward this piece as the crucible for it all, and I can't stand the weight of it.<br /><br />So I'm going to tour the world for a few weeks, and will hopefully come back lighter.Matthew Whittallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10587564978686509794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-765813534239558138.post-37806285949865061862010-04-29T11:29:00.008+03:002010-04-29T13:30:54.059+03:00Have You No Glass?Vappu, or May Day, is traditionally a labor holiday in parts of this continent, with parades and political speech. However, in Finland it's a day of fun and frivolity, the latter of which I appreciate, while avoiding the local manifestation of the former. In the spirit of the occasion, I offer a <span style="font-style: italic;">sub rosa</span> exchange picked up on yesterday's wires, with names redacted for security reasons. (Hat tip to Capt. H below for the title.)<br /><br /><blockquote>Dear Member [sic] of the XxxX teaching staff,<br /><br />Apart from the academic overkill of 'Love To Love You Baby' and 'I Feel Love' by Donna Summer, 'Music Is The Answer' by Danny Tenaglia, and 'Out There Somewhere?' by Orbital, did you or did you not (either directly or via one of your associates) also infect the minds of Our Youngest and Most Innocent with the 1987 CBS recording of Philip Glass' "Akhnaten" (M2K 42457)? Think carefully before answering, and please be honest.<br /><br />If 'yes', you have left behind something we don't need, at the nearby Auditorium. Please pick it up (either directly or via one of your associates) at the Xxxxxxxx Academy Command Centre ("Reference Library", 5th floor). Note that we are closed on Kaatripäev (1.5.), and close already at 4pm on Walpurgisnacht (this Friday). Apart from that, normal visiting hours apply.<br /><br />We would like to remind you that we know where you live and we have eyes on your kid.<br /><br />Most kindly,<br /><br />capt. H.<br />Xxxxxxxx Academy<s> Library</s> Command Centre<br />The "Stiftskapitel Modernismus" Project<br />Star Year 20100428-1346</blockquote><br />The ominous reply:<br /><br /><blockquote>From: M. <mxxxxxxx@xxxx.fi><br />To: H. <xhxxxxxx@xxxx.fi><br />Subject: RE: Have You No Glass?<br /><br />Dear Sir,<br /><br />You have in your possession documents of a classified nature belonging to one of our associates in the Minimalist Underground, an off-book government-sponsored organization. How they came into your possession is irrelevant. Failure to immediately surrender the aforementioned documents back into our possession, and to sign a non-disclosure agreement restricting your rights to divulge any information contained therein, will result in the severest penalties, as detailed in Minimal Law no. 413, Par. 48b, Subsection 4. Previous violators have been subjected to days of continuous diatonicism, in accordance with approved interrogation practices. The results have not been pretty.<br /><br />Our Dear Leader will personally collect the documents in question on Friday by no later than HH:MM local time (GMT +2). Until such time, the documents shall be kept secure by you in a non-recyclable plastic pouch, vacuum sealed and date-marked, with such mark's authenticity to be notarized. Failure to do so will result in penalties under ML no. 418, Par. 15, SS 4'33", or the so-called "Reich treatment".<br /><br />Finally, as neither you nor any of your associates have ever been to our Headquarters, we doubt the veracity of your surveillance claim. However, given the events of the past weekend, if you would like to remove our firstborn from our care, we will not stand in your way.<br /><br />Sinisterly,<br /><br />Mxxxxxx Xxxxxxxx<br />Co-chair<br />Committee for Minimalist Re-education<br />Finland Chapter</xhxxxxxx@xxxx.fi></mxxxxxxx@xxxx.fi></blockquote><mxxxxxxx@xxxx.fi><xhxxxxxx@xxxx.fi><br /><br />Followed the next morning by the offender's panicked missive, and the organization's response:<br /><br /><blockquote>From: N. <nxxxxxxx@xxxxxxxx.fi><br />To: M. <mxxxxxxx@xxxx.fi><br />Subejct: please read this<br /><br />Dear M.,<br /><br />Please understand this is highly confidential. I need help.<br /><br />Today I received two extremely ominous messages. Curiously, they were brought to my attention by one H. <xhxxxxxx@xxxx.fi>, and - ever stranger - they seem to be picked up from your FaceBook pages. The documents concern a recording of the "opera" Akhnaten by the "composer" Philip Glass, a CD which apparently has been found in the auditorium where I gave a lecture last Friday. The tone of the documents was nothing short of threatening, and they contained hideous accusations and insinuations. M., you know me and my music. You know that I am not now nor have I ever been a Minimalist! My 'Urbaner Nachtstück' contains a dodecaphonic inversion canon! The only phase shifting in my music has been the result of the bloody violinists not managing to stay together! I don't know where the measure repeat sign is in Finale! I. I was. I was. I was educated. I was educated in. I was educated in the. I was educated in the Xxxxxxxx. I was educated in the Xxxxxxxx Academy. How dare they! How dare they! How dare they! How Now?<br /><br />M., I'm afraid things look bad for me. Because it's true: I did in fact play a bit of that Glass "opera" during my lecture but this was only to demonstrate that it's nothing more than brainless disco music with lyrics in Akkadian. I'm afraid there's more. In April, 1987, I paid a short visit to Glass's studios in New York, precisely at the moment when they were mixing the said CBS CD. But I swear this was only because my then girlfriend needed to use the bathroom there. OK, I might have talked a little bit to Mr. Glass. Yes, I might even have written something about that but this was largely incomprehensible, in Finnish, and in a musicology students' magazine. They can't have found about that, can they?<br /><br />I'm scared. They mentioned the Reich Treatment. I believe that's the one that involves Reed Phase. That would be the end of me. Please help. What should I do? Should I do as instructed and pick up the CD from the Xxxxxxx? Or do you think it's a (pitch class) set-up?<br /><br />N.<br /><br /><br />From: M. <mxxxxxxx@xxxx.fi><br />To: N. <nxxxxxxx@xxxxxxxx.fi><br />Subject: RE: please read this<br /><br />Dear Brother,<br /><br />Your worries are well-founded, but ultimately groundless. Had you still been involved in minimalist-type activities, or any other activities that could be construed as aesthetic threats toward the dominant national order, you would indeed be in line for serious penalties. However, given my status as double agent within the administration, I was able to convince the authorities that you have, in fact, reformed, that your modernist credentials are valid and your convictions deeply held. There was some doubt, but I was able to make them believe that you pose no threat at this time. Your earlier public flirtation with forbidden stylistic elements and pamphleteering was, they came to accept, a youthful indiscretion.<br /><br />As to the return of the incriminating documents, I believe it to be safe for you to meet with the contact for the Row Police who has them in his possession. The Reich Treatment (known to include, but not be limited to the playing of Four Organs at high volume) will not be applied to you, as you have confessed to your earlier failings and have come to accept the Truth of the Old Order (equally truthful in retrograde inversion, if almost unrecognizable). This extreme form of interrogation is reserved for the unrepentant. However, if you still have concerns for your safety, I can and will make the meeting tomorrow and return the evidence to you, whereupon I highly recommend that you destroy it for the sake of our personal safety, and that of the movement.<br /><br />Fear not, young soldier, the Revolution is at hand. Glorious will be the fall of the Old Order, and history will sing our praises in four- to eight-bar repeating modules for all eternity.<br /><br />Minimally,<br /><br />Mxxxxxx Xxxxxxxx<br />Co-chair, etc.</nxxxxxxx@xxxxxxxx.fi></mxxxxxxx@xxxx.fi></xhxxxxxx@xxxx.fi></mxxxxxxx@xxxx.fi></nxxxxxxx@xxxxxxxx.fi></blockquote><nxxxxxxx@xxxxxxxx.fi><mxxxxxxx@xxxx.fi><xhxxxxxx@xxxx.fi><mxxxxxxx@xxxx.fi><nxxxxxxx@xxxxxxxx.fi></nxxxxxxx@xxxxxxxx.fi></mxxxxxxx@xxxx.fi></xhxxxxxx@xxxx.fi></mxxxxxxx@xxxx.fi></nxxxxxxx@xxxxxxxx.fi></xhxxxxxx@xxxx.fi></mxxxxxxx@xxxx.fi>Matthew Whittallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10587564978686509794noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-765813534239558138.post-6070145853342881442010-04-20T12:04:00.010+03:002010-04-21T10:51:13.917+03:00America's Next Top Model?April, the cruelest month indeed, as per my last post, has found me busy with all manner if productive if not actually germane tasks. The main thing I should be turning my attention to at this point is "the big one" I referred to obliquely in <a href="http://theshortroadtonirvana.blogspot.com/2010/03/spring-cleaning-of-mind.html">this post</a>. Despite my excitement, I've been somewhat reluctant to speak of it to anyone except my family and some colleagues, mostly out of a sense that to say it is to make it real. It's a 30-minute piece for the Finnish Radio Symphony, to be premiered in 2011-12 in Helsinki's new <a href="http://www.musiikkitalo.fi/en.php">concert hall</a>, which is starting to resemble something other than the hole in the ground it's been for years. It's the biggest, most high-profile gig I've ever been offered, exactly the type of commission I've been hoping for since I was a lowly undergrad dimly aspiring to be the next great orchestral master. I had almost total freedom of form and instrumentation, so I suggested a viola concerto, a piece I've been thinking about and sketching on and off for years. It's everything I've ever wanted as a composer.<br /><br />So naturally, I'm absolutely terrified, and am looking to all manner of distractions to keep from thinking about it. Luckily, the semester is winding down and students require paper input, lectures need refreshing, and new music needs to be listened to. I have a sheaf of choral pieces coming up for publication next month and the score and parts of <span style="font-style: italic;">Northlands</span> to clean up for submission to various places, and the editing work, normally a task I despise, is somehow a welcome occupation right now. Anything to keep me from having to look at that blank score page, with only the viola's opening minute of solo music written down.<br /><br />Another thing I've been spending time on is the search for compositional models for the piece. I never usually go with a single piece as lead inspiration, probably partly out of fear that whatever I'm writing will too closely resemble my object of admiration, but more out of a magpie-like tendency to collect a lot of disparate ideas at once, sorting through them over time through the act of putting my piece together. For <span style="font-style: italic;">Northlands</span>, it was a range of things from Icelandic folk songs to Sigur Rós, Vaughan Williams, Mahler and John Luther Adams. This time, though, the pickings are a little slimmer. It might be that what I'm planning is a more abstract, more stylistically unified piece than <span style="font-style: italic;">Northlands</span>, less palpably connected to other types of music, less a narrative of changing styles and modes of expression. Above all, it's going to be more closely connected at the rhetorical level to the concerto tradition than its predecessor for horn. Why this should be is unclear. The viola has just as little history as a concertante soloist as the horn, and just as slim a tradition either to be bound by or rebel against. I think that's why I went with the idea: it's a totally open field, nothing to stop me doing whatever I want.<br /><br />And yet, I'm still casting around for ideas. The viola repertoire has yielded up some useful models, first among them the Walton concerto. This piece has been a particular favorite since my horn-playing days. (That should have been my first inkling that perhaps the career of orchestral brass player wasn't for me.) Even if Walton's wistful tunes and heady harmonies aren't your style, if nothing else the piece is a valuable lesson in how to orchestrate a viola concerto without burying the poor soloist. It's worth nothing that Walton drastically revised the orchestration many years after he first wrote the piece. Especially telling is his reduction of the number of upper string desks playing at the same time as the soloist. Also a productive study has been Luciano Berio's <span style="font-style: italic;">Voci (Folk Songs II)</span> for viola and double chamber orchestra, a marvelous, lyrical, tragically underperformed piece.<br /><br />Other than that, it's been slim pickings. Not that there's a dearth of viola concerti, just a dearth of interesting music in the genre. I've never found the sainted Bartók concerto to be a particularly convincing piece in any of its completions, and while many of the other viola concertos I've listened to have their moments, they don't ever seem to take flight as soloist vehicles, to gain the lyrical and technical brilliance that seems to come so effortlessly to the violin and cello, no matter how dull the music they're playing may be. (I'd love to hear violinist/composer Grazyna Bacewicz's essay in the genre to see how it fares, but I can't get hold of it in any form, print or audio. If it's anything like her contemporaneous Violin Concerto no. 7, it should be quite a ride.)<br /><br />A significant part of this problem may be the viola's dusky, muted tone, which may explain the general tendency of viola concerto composers to go with the more soulful, intimate side of the instrument, sometimes at the expense of drama. Walton certainly lays on the bittersweet, but also manages to write highly convincing technical passages that show the instrument's timbre off at its best, in whichever register. Another reason for my lack of interest in the viola output is form. Far too many are either multi-movement pieces in that traditional three-plop service, to borrow a culinary term, of fast-slow-fast or something close thereto. What I have in mind is an episodic single-movement form, virtuosic neither at its start nor probably at the end, but definitely in the middle, which leaves me with precious few options. Feldman's gorgeous but decidedly un-concerto-like <span style="font-style: italic;">The Viola in My Life IV</span> doesn't really seem to fit in anywhere. Finland has produced a surprising number of single-movement viola concertos that deal with the issue in vastly different ways. My former teacher Eero Hämeenniemi's piece mostly eschews the virtuosic for a quiet polyphonic dialogue. Jouni Kaipainen's concerto actually integrates the viola's projection problems in virtuosic writing into the work's narrative, playing on the lack of communication between soloist and orchestra, only allowing the viola to peek through the dense texture at the end. Kalevi Aho surmounts the difficulty by pairing a highly virtuosic viola part with a tiny chamber orchestra that sounds full without beating up on the soloist.<br /><br />Stuck for models of virtuosity matched with strong formal structure and audibility of the soloist against a full orchestra, one of the pieces I recently latched onto as a subject of study is William Schuman's Violin Concerto. Dimly aware of its existence, I stumbled across it only recently after reading this <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/03/arts/music/03schuman.html?scp=3&sq=william%20schuman&st=cse">review</a> of a performance in New York. Schuman isn't a composer I'd previously paid much attention to, though many people I respect admired his music. I'd only known him through his ubiquitous <span style="font-style: italic;">New England Triptych</span>, in the repertoire of every college band Stateside. I was expecting something similarly quaint, and so was unprepared to encounter the brawny, ballsy Violin Concerto head-on. Having listened to it several times over, I'm more and more convinced that it's the great overlooked violin concerto of the twentieth century. It's everything a concerto should be: lyrical, heroic, dramatic, insanely virtuosic, dazzling in its orchestration. Why people aren't lining up to play it is beyond me. Attuned to a certain anti-New World prejudice in the Eurocentric classical music business, especially where warhorse orchestral genres like concerti and symphonies are concerned, I naturally assume its greatest crime was to have been composed by an American, but that's not the only problem with it. It does lack a certain catchy tunefulness that seems to get concerti their spot in the hall of fame. Despite his strong lyricism, Schuman doesn't possess the melodic felicity of say, Barber, to name a contemporary whose contribution to the genre is played all the time. The orchestral part sounds ferociously difficult, which is probably another strike against it, but no more so than Sibelius, Walton or Szymanowski's First, all of which get played regularly, and are terrific pieces to boot. All in all, the Schuman concerto would seem have crowd-pleaser written all over it, and yet it's obscured in history and performance by mediocrities like the Tchaikovsky, endlessly trotting out glitzy new orchestrations of the same banal themes, developing nothing, going nowhere.<br /><br />Most shocking about the Schuman concerto, though, is its form. Judging by what I read, this aspect of the work gave Schuman the most trouble, going through several incarnations from its premiere in the '40s before reaching its final version in 1959. And you can hear the years of thought that went into it, for there's nothing obvious about this piece. No three-plop concerto, or my cop-out single-movement landscape alternative, it's a complex, surprising two-movement piece with – here's the kicker – no slow movement. Both movements are highly episodic, share a similar dramatic charge, and have slow, lyrical sections, but neither indulges in long flights of slow romantic rhapsody. Schuman isn't afraid to relax the texture and let the violin sing out, though, by any means. In fact, I think where his concerto stands out above other pieces in that mid-century American style is in its willingness to allow simplicity and directness into its post-Hindemithian contrapuntal framework, shunning the restless, perpetual polyphony of lesser talents for something more intimate and emotionally complex. Nobody's sissy, Schuman is nobody's curmudgeon, either, avariciously covering the windows of his edifice to keep the sunlight and fresh air out. There's a surprising degree of humor, too, as when the first movement suddenly veers into a circus-like, tongue-in-cheek music, itself skilfully hinted at earlier, and lurches to a hasty close. Just when you think Schuman might have succumbed to an easy, throwaway ending to satisfy the gallery, the second movement opens with a chorale of dense, loud, oracular chords that emphatically state, "Do NOT underestimate me. This isn't your grandma's concerto." The end of all ends hits like a tidal wave, perfectly prepared but totally unexpected, satisfying and cathartic but never cheap. In all, it's a great piece, invigorating, overwhelming and touching in equal measure, deserving of a place in the standard repertoire and unjustly neglected.<br /><br />As one may expect from the effusion of gonzo prose above, I'm waiting impatiently for the score of it I ordered (along with the magnificently tragic Eighth Symphony) so I can tear it apart and see what makes it tick. I may have found what I was looking for for my own piece. I have no doubt my viola concerto will sound nothing like Schuman in the end, but the formal working-out in his violin concerto is addictive and intriguing, and its lack of obvious solutions combined with passages of simple affectiveness is something I wish composers, myself included, would try out more often. Tough nut to crack, but I'm looking forward to it in the extreme.Matthew Whittallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10587564978686509794noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-765813534239558138.post-38916581937666155692010-04-17T15:51:00.002+03:002010-04-17T15:57:18.487+03:00Irony, thy name is EyjafjallajökullHere in Tampere, Finland, the eruption of a volcano in Iceland caused the cancellation of my flute and piano suite titled... wait for it... <span style="font-style: italic;">Ash-Wednesday</span>. Add me to the list of the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/17/arts/music/17musicians.html?ref=music">"little known"</a> musicians affected by Mother Earth's bout of indigestion. Still many good things left to hear at the Biennale, though. And I did get to jump in a frozen lake at 9 am. So life is good.Matthew Whittallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10587564978686509794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-765813534239558138.post-25865937475872337532010-04-12T11:23:00.004+03:002010-04-12T11:29:24.796+03:00Album of the Year!<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiztqu9VAS0iYuo_4Sjf32znrByhVVueJ1WzKFAGg0QrsXNZCnbUaPsI-07467OjM9SCvOhqNSoFHzNDPxBFp6DKk2bnzCNaK5t6AlAv4jTbHbCTfo_j_MLaXzNAcBY0CkbHedwk93_BJGo/s1600/HOL_lehdell%C3%A4_cover_small.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 314px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiztqu9VAS0iYuo_4Sjf32znrByhVVueJ1WzKFAGg0QrsXNZCnbUaPsI-07467OjM9SCvOhqNSoFHzNDPxBFp6DKk2bnzCNaK5t6AlAv4jTbHbCTfo_j_MLaXzNAcBY0CkbHedwk93_BJGo/s320/HOL_lehdell%C3%A4_cover_small.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5459164776134537874" border="0" /></a><br /><a href="http://www.alba.fi/en/shop/products/4326">"Lehdellä–Among the Leaves"</a> voted Choral Album of the Year for 2009! Congratulations to HOL for their hard work!Matthew Whittallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10587564978686509794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-765813534239558138.post-37320401497414090382010-03-28T17:17:00.013+03:002010-03-29T01:07:36.826+03:00Spring cleaning of the mind"If you have time this weekend," said Hedi on her way out the door to Estonia with the baby, "It would be great if you could vacuum." That's how all this started. I pulled the damn vacuum out of the closet.<br /><br />For the past two weeks I've been basking in the warm glow (read: total exhaustion) of a really good premiere. The piece in question was, of course, my horn non-certo <span style="font-style: italic;">Northlands</span>. Tommi was amazing, soldiering through the piece's technical difficulties – mostly the extreme endurance and tonal control the piece requires – without even breaking a sweat. That his performance was also warm, intimate, and touching is as much as any composer can reasonably ask for. The 19 players of the Ostrobothnian Chamber Orchestra also poured their hearts into the performance, after overcoming the surprise of having to shift stylistic gears so many times in the course of one piece.<br /><br />The best part of the process, as always for me, was that magic moment when the orchestra as a whole suddenly figures the piece out, how it works. This stage comes just before the premiere, and is preceded by 1) an initial, stark shock of terror brought about by confronting the sounding reality of the music you'd only previously heard in your head, at which the inexperienced panic and the experienced confront with grim determination; 2) the critical period of micromanaging dynamics, articulation, and the many cool things you put into the score that simply don't work, and 3) the cautious hope that your piece may not, in fact, be a steaming pile of excrement.<br /><br />After all that, once everything is worked out and the players have had the piece in their ears enough to pick out the thread (or lack thereof, in some cases), there's an audible, palpable instant in which the piece just seems to lift off the ground, finally running under its own power. It's a moment that always brings a smile of mixed relief and utter joy, one which is more perceptible in orchestral music than in chamber or choral music. I think it has to do with the intense nature of orchestra rehearsal, and the way in which composers participate in that process. With other types of music, we generally come into the preparation of the piece at a much later stage, when most of the technical work has already been done and all that's left are small corrections and interpretation work. With the orchestra, though, we're generally in the room for the entire thing, from the bloody carnage of the first reading to the final product. (I actually went home and cried after the first reading of my first big orchestra piece.) It's thrilling and soul destroying in equal measure, a combination that takes chunks out of my life expectancy, yet which I find intoxicating. Some types of music-making can be more rewarding – I think here especially of working with amateur choirs, and feeling the singers develop a sense of pride and ownership of a piece during the longer rehearsal process. But there's never been a greater thrill for me than working with an orchestra, and as I find myself moving into a phase of writing a lot of music for the medium (more about that anon), I'm reminded of why I wanted to do it in the first place.<br /><br />The reception of the piece was more positive than most anything I've written. Rather than being put off by the stylistic shifts and, let's face it, the length – 26 minutes is awfully long for a horn concerto – people seemed invigorated by it. The reviews were equally positive, although the recurrent criticism of my polystylistic pieces – too many ideas – came up again. It's almost always a minor comment buried in a generally approving context, but it's irksome nonetheless. First off, it's an easy line to write if you're looking for something to critique: too many ideas, the piece might have been better with fewer of them. (I always hear Tom Hulce's Mozart in my head asking, "Which few did you have in mind, sir?") I imagine the obverse, too few ideas, plagued the early minimalists just as much. It's a critique that deals with a surface aspect of the piece that's generally immaterial to the average listener. Really, if too many ideas were a legitimate weakness, the Rachmaninoff 3rd piano concerto wouldn't be so popular, would it? Second, with regard to my music, it's patently inaccurate. Unfortunately, one needs to go beyond the surface to see it. The stylistic spectrum in my pieces of this type is just an illusion. All the surface mannerisms are derived from a single cell or collection of them. I've always said I'm a mainly tonal composer who thinks like a serialist, and it's true. I'm fanatically obsessed with motivic derivations, something I think I absorbed from studying Mahler, who similarly used motivic and gestural connections to bring a sense of unity across the wildly diverse range of styles he appropriated for his works. So the thought that I have too many ideas crowding into a piece is just wrong. There is always and only one idea. Everything else is smoke and mirrors.<br /><br />All that said, it was a terrific experience all around, one of my best premieres ever, and I hope there will be more performances. The piece, especially in its pop-influenced slow movement, achieved a balance between simplicity and density, and extroversion and naive intimacy, that I've been trying to strike for some time. Returning to Earth afterward has been a process of some weeks. My mind has been cluttered lately, as has my work desk, which goes from spartan cleanliness to slovenly disorder as each new project progresses. As I had multiple things going during the <span style="font-style: italic;">Northlands</span> process, it got even more cluttered than usual. CDs, photocopied journal articles, books, scores, score printouts, bits of text for choral pieces, and magazines all pile up until the table's legs are the only visible sign that something is supporting the whole mess. If one's environment is a reflection of one's mental state, I was in a state of total mental chaos this past month.<br /><br />So after breakfast I decided to honor my lovely wife's request before digging into the pile of articles I'd successfully avoided yesterday. She should have known better than to ask me to accomplish a simple household chore. There's a line of manic obsession that runs in my family, especially as concerns house cleaning. With the exception of dishes, I can't do just one small thing. I get into these fugue states in which everything has to go, the dishes, the laundry, the dusting, vacuuming,you name it. Dusting the office/baby's room turns into a blur of desk-clearing, filing, organizing of receipts and general mayhem. "Gee, those hall-of-fame wine bottles from dinner parties past are taking up a perfectly good shelf on the bookcase, I should move them to the top of the case and make room for all my library books..." "Hey, I never moved the Post-Its from the library copy of Strickland's <span style="font-style: italic;">minimalism</span> to my own copy, I should do that and return it..." And so on.<br /><br />The end result is a clean house and a clean desk, with all the scores I need to <s>steal from</s> study for my next piece laid out, all the Mahler articles I need to get through before Easter put together, my materials for my next analysis class unearthed from the heap. It's a dusting of the mind as well, a product of the scattershot Zen discipline of maintaining my household from time to time, the quiet pleasure derived from doing a simple task with a predefined goal. My mental slate is cleaned and wiped down, purged of all thoughts from previous projects, ready to take on something new.<br /><br />So what's next? The Big One, that's what.Matthew Whittallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10587564978686509794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-765813534239558138.post-31401899650078233962010-03-08T15:40:00.005+02:002010-03-28T18:41:54.449+03:00A family affairI'm getting ready to leave for Kokkola on Wednesday for the première of <span style="font-style: italic;">Northlands</span>, and with my family away visiting grandparents and the house empty, I'm more at leisure to put down a few thoughts. I just spent a week doing little more ambitious than answering e-mails and playing with my son. After months of being constantly sick while still trying to meet deadlines – thanks to my little mobile virus incubator – it's been a relief to feel energetic again, and to be able to use that energy for things other than work.<br /><br />The project I just finished is a chamber piece for Hedi's next doctoral concert, which features a setting of a poem by composer George Rochberg's son, Paul. It came about in the kind of odd series of six-degrees coincidences I love, and which form the backbone of most of my pieces, especially vocal ones. I'd planned this piece for years as part of my ongoing collaboration with flutist Hanna Kinnunen. It was originally supposed to be a cycle of miniature songs, settings of Japanese haiku from various periods I'd collected in English translation. But when it came time last spring to start at least thinking about the piece while working on other things, I had clear ideas about everything except the vocal part. The poems, while beautiful and moving, just didn't sing to me. Stuck, I put the idea aside, more out of necessity than frustration. My son was born just as I'd finished my last big project of the spring, and my attention was going to be focused elsewhere for a while.<br /><br />We ended up spending three nights in the hospital after the delivery, in a private family room with a dedicated pediatric nurse helping to talk us down during the day. (This is the sort of warm-fuzzy experience of new familyhood the Nordic countries' medical systems specialize in.) Isolated in that surprisingly quiet ward for a few days, with little to do during down periods – I was too wired and stressed from the birth and the previous weeks' work to sleep much – I whiled away the time reading Rochberg's recent memoir, <span style="font-style: italic;">Five Lines, Four Spaces</span>. I'd always had a fascination with Rochberg's music, and more so with his writing. I first encountered him through his series of essays <span style="font-style: italic;">The Aesthetics of Survival</span>, and found his polemical, uncompromising embrace of his individuality a balm for my worried mind. I'd been wrestling with the macho culture of academic modernism for a couple of years, trying to figure out how some of its ideas could fit my music without driving out the lyrical sensibility I figured out early on was the best, if not the only thing I had going for me as a composer. Rochberg's thoughts on composing, teaching, artistic voice and sounding musical surface reassured me that, while my music was far from trendily kickass in terms of expression, what I had to say had value, and should be pursued.<br /><br />But where <span style="font-style: italic;">Aesthetics</span> focuses purely on the composer as individual in the world, <span style="font-style: italic;">Five Lines</span> is a much more personal, if still musically centered piece of writing. For obvious reasons, I found myself especially drawn to the brief passages in which Rochberg touched on the subject of his poet son's untimely death from cancer at the age of twenty. Lying in bed with my own newborn son sleeping a few feet away, I was moved by the pain in Rochberg's words as he dealt with the subject in a away that suggested a loss he would never recover from, a grief that was still fresh and undiminished after forty years. Equally enlightening was his discussion of his conversion from twelve-tone composition to his more aesthetically open later music. I'd always suspected the popular tale of his rejection of twelve-tone orthodoxy following his son's death was oversimplified, a Hollywoodized version of the more complex reality pounced upon by detractors and supporters alike. His apostasy to the academic modernist cause could be pooh-poohed away by claiming he'd been overcome by grief and fallen off the true path. Or it could be justified in terms of his having found the twelve-tone language insufficient to express himself after so great a loss, necessitating a turn toward a more emotionally generous music.<br /><br />But Rochberg goes to great pains to make the point that he was already moving away from the strictures of twelve-tone writing before Paul's illness. In short, the move just made artistic sense to him, and the coincidence of his loss was just that. Shattering and life-altering, to be sure, but not responsible in itself for his aesthetic choices, only perhaps a catalyst for a shift that had already taken place in his mind. I find myself much preferring his version. In the popular tale, Rochberg is a victim of circumstance, reactionary, a hollow vessel through which the music pours, unable in his grief to control his baser (or nobler, depending who you ask) impulses, letting his emotional distress control the shape of his art. In Rochberg's own telling of it, though, he retains agency over his art, making decisions about it, reacting to the changes in his life, incorporating them and allowing them to shape his language, but still acting consciously to determine the outcome and its meaning. This, I think, is the more courageous path, to exert one's will upon one's material and yet allow it to take the shape that makes the most sense.<br /><br />If that shape includes a Beethovenian/Mahlerian set of variations, as in the String Quartet no. 3, so be it. And what a movement it is, a core of pure, unadulterated tonal loveliness in the midst of a work that is otherwise tough, thorny and tense. The miracle of it, though, is that it manages to be so without coming off as nostalgic. It is most definitely a look backward, but one gets the sense that the gaze is not a longing one, wistful for a bygone time. Rochberg's isn't trying to revive tonality with that movement, in my view. He means to honor it, display its undiminished beauty, like polishing off a prized, long stored-away antique and putting it on the mantelpiece. See, see how lovely old things can still be? It's not a new introduction of tonality. It's the last truly tonal piece anyone would write.<br /><br />There's a sense of loveliness amid strife about much of Rochberg's music. Reading his words, I came away with an impression of a sensitive but unsentimental man, one of essentially positive character, who had simply seen and lived too much awfulness to not let it infiltrate his artistic expression. His wartime service would have left a lasting mark on him, and if that alone had rendered it difficult for him to give voice with the clear-eyed optimism of a Copland, the death of his son certainly would have made it impossible. Dying as he did in 2005 at the height of what he saw as his country's jingoistic decline, it's easy to imagine Rochberg indulging in bitterness. And yet, at the core of even his toughest, most strident works lies contemplative beauty in one form or another, the tonal oasis of the Third Quartet, to return to a previous example, or the amazing, extended four-note fantasia for the horn section in the middle of his storm-tossed Fifth Symphony, a beauty that requires its dark surroundings for its protection, but also that it might speak more clearly through the contrast. It is an unforced, inborn beauty inherent in his character that no loss could strip away, but perhaps is rendered all the more intimate and touching by loss.<br /><br />Reading Rochberg's descriptions of his son's poetry, testimonials from Paul's teachers and mentors of his being a prodigy, it's easy to come away from it thinking him simply a proud father fondly recalling his lost child's exploits. Lord knows I think my son is the most brilliant, most advanced, handsomest child in creation. (I happen to be right, though.) So I was quite unprepared to encounter Paul's work in the raw. Several weeks after writing <a href="http://theshortroadtonirvana.blogspot.com/2009/06/morning-thoughts.html">this post</a> quoting one of Rochberg's thoughts on artistic voice, I went into school to check my mailbox and found a very kind letter from Rochberg's widow, Gene, thanking me for my brief attention to her husband's words. A friend had mailed her a printout of my post. Through subsequent correspondence, I came to know her as a classy, highly cultured lady of the type of refined, gracious manners one rarely sees these days. One day last September, I found a large padded envelope from Mrs Rochberg in my mail, containing a book of Paul's poetry she and her husband had had published at their own expense. I sat down and read.<br /><br />Although I have yet to get through the entire book, I can say with some confidence that the kid really was that talented. Having read – and written – a lot of bad teenage poetry in my time, I found none of the usual self-loving gaze in Paul's work. His images are terse and diamond-bright. There's not a word wasted or overwrought in his poems; they're almost haiku-like in their conciseness, another aspect that made the shift from the Japanese idea easy. Sensuality is handled with surprising maturity. There's the same sense of meditation amid frenetic energy and angularity as in his father's music, and again sometimes the beauty is allowed to stand on its own. The poem I chose is one such example:<br /><br />There is a world<br />That is only dreamed<br />When your eyes<br />Are a thousand stars<br /><br />Reading it, and the romantic, surreal images of the subsequent verses, I forgot completely about the Japanese texts, knowing I'd found what I wanted. It reminded me a great deal of Octavio Paz, another favorite poet of mine, and the talk of <a href="http://theshortroadtonirvana.blogspot.com/2008/04/decisions-decisions.html">stars, sleep and night</a> was all it took to make the shape of the piece clear. Mrs Rochberg graciously gave me permission to use the poem – it may have been her wish in sending me the book, and for that I thank her – and the result will be heard next month. It's a very simple form, a rustling, nocturnal prelude for alto flute, viola and zither, followed by a song for mezzo-soprano. The soundworld is of a piece with my three previous pieces involving a flute, sitting contemplatively on the tonal/atonal fence. In a hat tip to Rochberg, the music is largely twelve-tone, a fact you wouldn't notice if I didn't point it out, though it draws more on the lyrical Japanese-influenced chamber works of his later period than on his earlier twelve-tone pieces. As an added bonus, it's being premiered on a program with Rochberg's lovely flute-and-harp duo <span style="font-style: italic;">Slow fires of autumn</span>, a major influence on my series for flute and plucked string instruments. Feldman's ghost circa <span style="font-style: italic;">The viola in my life</span> series also makes an appearance. (I've been describing the piece to friends as Rochberg and Feldman having a very quiet, good-natured disagreement about aesthetic values.) The piece also showcases the new five-octave chromatic zither Hedi is having built and will unveil this spring. It's a major advance in the development of her instrument, and I'm honored to get to write for it first.<br /><br />All in all, it's been one of the most rewarding projects I've had lately. The intersection of the musical and the personal, work and family, the intimate and the universal, of so many lives in so many different places and time periods, is one of the greatest things art can bring about. I wish George Rochberg hadn't had to endure such pain. I can only hope I did his son's work justice, and that it honors both their memories.Matthew Whittallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10587564978686509794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-765813534239558138.post-8919385055751852352010-02-17T10:54:00.003+02:002010-02-17T11:52:18.962+02:00[Ahem] Toot, toot...Tomorrow night kicks off a surprising number of performances of my music in the coming months. I have to say I'm rather humbled by the interest. For anyone who'd like to come hear something:<br /><br /><a href="http://www.siba.fi/fi/konsertit/ohjelmisto/?id=33002">Feb. 18 at Feeniks Club, 10.00 pm</a>: <a href="http://www.thegoldenhorns.com/The_Golden_Horns/Quartet.html">The Golden Horns</a>, sandwiched into their usual fun, wide-ranging program, give the first performances in Finland of my antiphonal fanfare <span style="font-style: italic;">Anthem II</span>, as well as a set of four Georgian (as in "Republic of", not "State of") folk songs I arranged for them last year. Both pieces are being released on their new CD this spring.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.orkesteri.kokkola.fi/pagefi.asp?luokka_id=41&main=1">March 13</a>: <a href="http://www.thegoldenhorns.com/The_Golden_Horns/Tommi.html">Tommi Hyytinen</a> (of Golden Horns fame) gives the world première of <span style="font-style: italic;">Northlands</span>, for horn and string orchestra. The performance is in his hometown of Kokkola with the <a href="http://www.orkesteri.kokkola.fi/index_uk.asp?main=3">Ostrobothnian Chamber Orchestra</a>, conducted by Juha Kangas.<br /><br />March 21: The <a href="http://www.olauspetri.fi/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=5&Itemid=5">Olaus Petri Church Choir</a> and Peter Peitsalo give the première of my new psalm setting, <span style="font-style: italic;">Sion, prisa din Gud (Zion, praise thy God)</span>, as well as a repeat performance of <span style="font-style: italic;">Du kröner året (You crown the year)</span>.<br /><br />April 8: My long-time collaborator, flutist <a href="http://www.siba.fi/fi/konsertit/ohjelmisto/?id=33374">Hanna Kinnunen</a>, gives her fourth doctoral concert at Helsinki's German church. The program features the première of <span style="font-style: italic;">A world only dreamed</span>, for alto flute, viola, mezzo-soprano and chromatic zither, to a text by Paul Rochberg (son of composer George), as well as works by Takemitsu and Rochberg himself. Violist Riitta-Liisa Ristiluoma, mezzo Jutta Seppinen and my lovely wife Hedi Viisma, who commissioned the piece, fill out the ensemble.<br /><br />April 15: The <a href="http://www.mikkoikaheimo.fi/helsinki_guitarduo.php">Helsinki Guitar Duo</a> perform <span style="font-style: italic;">The wine-dark sea</span> on their concert at the <a href="http://www.tamperemusicfestivals.fi/biennale/lang/fi/ohjelma/helsinki-kitaraduohelsinki-guitar-duo">Tampere Biennale</a>.<br /><br />April 17: Also at the Biennale, flutist <a href="http://www.mariocaroli.it/">Mario Caroli</a> and pianist Keiko Nakayama <a href="http://www.tamperemusicfestivals.fi/biennale/lang/fi/ohjelma/mario-caroli-keiko-nakayama-sonia-turchetta">perform</a> my T.S. Eliot-inspired suite <span style="font-style: italic;">Ash-Wednesday</span>, in a huge program featuring works by Sciarrino, Jukka Tiensuu, and my teacher, Veli-Matti Puumala.<br /><br />May 10: <a href="http://www.siba.fi/fi/konsertit/ohjelmisto/?id=33382">Risto-Matti Marin</a> gives the first complete performance in Helsinki of my hubristic, hour-long piano prelude cycle <span style="font-style: italic;">Leaves of Grass</span> at the Sibelius Academy, in association with the DocMus department.<br /><br />May 11: Accordionist <a href="http://www.kujala.info/Veli/">Veli Kujala</a> performs my Zen-quiet <span style="font-style: italic;">being the pine tree</span> on his <a href="http://www.siba.fi/fi/konsertit/ohjelmisto/?id=33384">final doctoral concert</a>, again at the Sibelius Academy. This piece has a rocky history of either being performed in a great acoustic but not making it onto tape, or being recorded in a terrible space. Hopefully this time we'll get both in order. Also on the program is my great friend <a href="http://www.blogger.com/www.fimic.fi/fimic/nuorvala+juhani">Juhani Nuorvala's</a> deliciously titled accordion trio <span style="font-style: italic;">What's A Nice Chord Like You Doing In A Piece Like This?</span><br /><br />May 25: Hedi gives her <a href="http://www.siba.fi/fi/konsertit/ohjelmisto/?id=33388">second doctoral concert</a> at Helsinki's beautiful <a href="http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&hs=Ssg&q=temppeliaukion+kirkko&oq=temppeliaukio&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=hrh7S5q1NM_2-Qa7-9XgBQ&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ct=title&resnum=4&ved=0CCgQsAQwAw">Temppeliaukio Church</a>, performing <span style="font-style: italic;">A world only dreamed</span> once again. The program features Finnish and world premières of chamber works for chromatic zither by Märt-Matis Lill and Ilari Kaila, as well as Hedi's own arrangements of chamber works by Debussy and Ravel. The concert will be recorded for broadcast on Finnish radio.<br /><br />June 21: <span style="font-style: italic;">The wine-dark sea</span> receives its Japanese première in Tokyo, on a concert of Finnish music by <a href="http://www.ensemble-nomad.com/">Ensemble Nomad</a>. I very much hope to make it over there.<br /><br />July 12: The <a href="http://www.kuhmofestival.fi/indexen.htm">Kuhmo Chamber Music Festival</a> hosts the world première of <span style="font-style: italic;">pine tree, dreaming (being the pine tree II)</span> for string sextet. The <a href="http://www.quatuorenesco.com/?lang=fr">Enesco Quartet</a> does the honors, with Aurélie Deschamps, viola, and Tomas Djupsjöbacka, cello.<br /><br />July also features a performance by <a href="http://www.schweckendiek.org/">Nils Schweckendiek</a> and the <a href="http://helsinkichamberchoir.fi/">Helsinki Chamber Choir</a> of <span style="font-style: italic;">ad puram annihilationem meam</span>, a piece they continue to make entirely their own, once again with dancer-choreographer <a href="http://www.ninahyvarinen.com/">Nina Hyvärinen</a> bringing her quiet grace to the proceedings. Details when the program is published.Matthew Whittallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10587564978686509794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-765813534239558138.post-7695922446337116882010-02-11T17:05:00.006+02:002010-02-17T11:58:46.571+02:00Details, details"It looks very... brave," said my friend, referring to my <a href="http://www.fimic.fi/fimic/fimic.nsf/smlnewworks?readform&cat=sheet_music_library">recently completed pastorale-concerto</a> for horn and strings, <span style="font-style: italic;">Northlands</span>, which he'd just done me the favor of proof-reading. (I have a limited ability to see mistakes in my own work, so I send my orchestral scores to this eagle-eyed friend, who can look past what's there and divine through sheer observation of compositorial quirk what <span style="font-style: italic;">should</span> be there. It's quite an amazing ability, really, one I wish I had.)<br /><br />His comment struck me as a milder version of what I'd been thinking myself, staring at that score, which is that I'd completely, finally lost my mind. He was probably referring to the blatant stylistic schism that happens halfway through the piece, where long-held chromatic clusters and unrelieved tension in the string mass give way suddenly to pure, unadulterated D major, and a literal pop song for the soloist, later turning into straight-ahead, 8-bar G major pop progressions at the end. Although that was in part intentional, the two poles had started out being more blended. Over time, though, as these things tend to go and one sees the potential of the ideas evolve, the tonal material all ended up on one side of the central agogic divide of the piece, with the atonal stuff on the other. It's an odd piece that way, risky from my perspective, but one I think will ultimately work. I do admit that I'm curious as to how the final effect will be perceived: is the progression from one to the other organic, or will the rift turn out to be a jarring one? (I hope it's the former.)<br /><br />Whatever courage may lie in that act of stylistic juxtaposition, my friend may also have been referring to the score's general lack of what's become one of the bugbears of contemporary compositional practice, a vague catch-all term I have yet to see conclusively defined, yet which seems to trip up many a well-intentioned composer when its absence is perceived by others: detail. I should probably admit that I hate the word and its use in application to music. It tends to be used as a cudgel to beat down music perceived as insufficiently crafted or manipulated, formally naive, rhythmically unchallenging, or lacking in visual complexity on the page. The category of "detail", a term casually thrown about, is usually used to confirm that, at the very least, if a piece is "detailed", the composer has passed the test of Protestant work ethic, having obviously slaved away writing down tons of notes, or made a beautiful, eye-catching score, or kept all his/her instruments busy with figuration, guaranteeing that the players will have to practice hard. So venerated is the idea of detail that it has become an independent compositional virtue, praiseworthy in its own right. I once had a highly respected Canadian composer note positively the orchestrational detail in one of my pieces before proceeding to denigrate every other aspect of it, stylistic, aesthetic, rhetorical, formal, and question how I'd ever gotten into a doctoral program writing this kind of backward-looking drivel. At least it was detailed, though. In a more positive experience, I once asked a teacher of mine in the States if I should send my saxophone sonata to a competition that specifically forbade the inclusion of audio of the submitted scores. I thought it was weird that the judges didn't want to hear any of the pieces, the sounding result being the point, or so I thought. (Ah, the naïveté of youth.) He responded that, yes, I should, because the level of detail in the score would be obvious and get the piece noticed. I sent it in. I didn't win anything.<br /><br />And yet, if pressed, I bet neither of them could narrow down exactly what "detail" is, and why it's so valuable on its own that music perceived to be less detailed looks poorer in comparison. I've been puzzled by this question not only because it's an issue I struggle with on a daily basis both conceptually and notationally – how much is too much? too little? – but because I'd always firmly believed that the working out of a piece on whatever level, harmony, rhythm, notation, orchestration, is entirely contextual, and the degree of detail depends on the needs of the piece, the performer, the occasion. Even those factors aren't real arbiters of detail. One of my most complexly-notated choral pieces was written for amateurs, one of the simplest, for professionals, because the pieces just needed to be that way. Many of my "undetailed" pieces are among the best I've written, far higher in my affections than the sax sonata mentioned above. (I wrote that one in part to show I could do the academic modernist/serialist thing, and make it sound better than the people being held up as models for me at the time. But I still like the piece and very much wanted it to be the way it is.)<br /><br />Some of my favorite pieces by others, some minimalist, many not, are marked by a lack of perceived detail. Would we describe a Morales motet as lacking in detail? Definitely not on the contrapuntal level, but on the level of dynamic shaping and registral variety, probably. We can rant about historical notation practices all we want, but the visual appearance of Morales doesn't in the least alter the music's quality. The same could be said for a Mozart piano sonata with infrequent dynamic markings, or a recent post-minimalist score dealing only in white notes. Is Bach's first prelude from WTC detailed? Not especially, no. Is the quality of that piece versus the time that probably went into composing it – I'm guessing minutes – a subject of debate? Detail is not a marker of craft, or work ethic, or sophistication, or experience, or quality. It's a marker of detail, period.<br /><br />All that said, the category of detail, despite its slippery-to-nonexistent definition, has a you-know-it-when-you-see-it quality to it. I have a natural penchant toward more detail rather than less. But here I sit, staring at my score feeling vaguely uncomfortable, despite a couple of moments where all 19 string players go off on their own tangents, at how much of the piece just seems to hang there, a field of footballs on the page, no dynamic shifts, no change to the harmony, no variety in the notation, little inner motion within the textures... no detail. Some little solo bits and boxes over the top make it less unrelievedly blank, but overall it's a series of static fields, with little to no bass function, and the strings shift around in masses rather than sharply defined lines. When it gets rhythmic at long last it just sort of chugs along in unison eighth- or sixteenth-notes, not trying to get anywhere or develop, largely dependent on the horn for whatever direction it acquires. If it's brave at all, it's perhaps because I strung out the uneventfulness over a longer span of time than I normally would, in order to make the somewhat naïve conversion to all-out pop music at the end more dramatic. I meant it to be this way, and yet I find myself sincerely hoping it's all going to work out the way I intended, and that the devil is not, in fact, where he is said to be.Matthew Whittallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10587564978686509794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-765813534239558138.post-25102484349341054272010-02-03T10:17:00.003+02:002010-02-05T10:46:14.510+02:00Among the starsTomorrow I'll be attending Finland's annual <a href="http://www.emmagaala.fi/2010/">Emma gala</a>, where HOL's <a href="http://www.alba.fi/kauppa/tuotteet/4326">recent CD release</a> "Among the Leaves" is up for <a href="http://www.emmagaala.fi/2010/ehdokkaat/klassinen-albumi">classical recording of the year</a>, the only choral CD selected. It's quite an achievement for an amateur group to even be nominated in such company as Pekka Kuusisto and Soile Isokoski, especially for a quiet, reflective 60-minute program in which not much happens. Unlike the North American recording awards like the Emmy and Juno, the Emma tends not to go with the splashiest or most complex new orchestral work, but the recording that represents the richest addition to the recorded classical literature. Last year's winner was a CD of contemporary music for solo viola da gamba. So we'll see what happens. Whatever the outcome, it calls for some serious partying.<br /><br />Update: As we kind of expected, we didn't bring home the prize. (And due to the virus currently violating my body, no partying was done.) The statue went to another Alba CD of symphonies by the recently departed Finnish composer Pehr Henrik Nordgren. However, the nomination itself was a strong vote of encouragement to amateur musicianship, and the heights achievable by people through their passionate dedication to what is, for all intents and purposes, just a hobby. It was a fun event, marked by an obvious slant toward the more commercial forms of music in terms of the number and somewhat redundant variety of awards presented in the popular categories. But being included at the party is always nice, as noted by presenter Kare Eskola in his invocation of the devoted listeners of "that art-shit" (a line that's funnier in Finnish). Congratulations to HOL for all their hard work!Matthew Whittallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10587564978686509794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-765813534239558138.post-3714714160271010492010-01-10T12:16:00.002+02:002010-01-10T12:19:00.638+02:00Cry me a riverSerious posts, soon, I promise, but a quote from <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/arts/music/10boulez.html?ref=music">this article</a> pricked my irony meter this morning (italics mine):<br /><blockquote>"Written in 1981 for six soloists, chamber orchestra and live electronics, it is the first major work he wrote using the electronic-music institute in Paris, Ircam. But it has rarely been performed, <span style="font-style: italic;">just a few dozen times</span>."</blockquote>Matthew Whittallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10587564978686509794noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-765813534239558138.post-8465780652007774112009-12-12T11:12:00.002+02:002009-12-12T11:21:19.752+02:00Overheard in a noodle shopI'm planning to end my self-imposed silence now that the semester's drawing to a close and I've met my deadlines. In the meantime, a brief cell-phone conversation between me and <a href="http://www.alexfreemanmusic.com/">Alex</a> about a wonderful novel he'd lent me, set in a Midwestern university in first half of the last century:<br /><br />M: "It was amazing, gorgeous. Lyrical and tragic in a very understated way. I want to turn it into an opera!"<br /><br />A: "Yeah, I thought about that too, but it's so quiet and internal. There's almost no dialogue, and nothing really happens."<br /><br />M: "Dude, you just described my ideal opera scenario."Matthew Whittallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10587564978686509794noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-765813534239558138.post-7663194748092053092009-10-09T20:14:00.001+03:002009-10-09T20:16:24.279+03:00Jumping the firearm of your choiceIn light of today's <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/10/world/10nobel.html?hp">news</a>, I'll look forward to receiving the Grawemeyer for my yet-to-be-written viola concerto any day now.Matthew Whittallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10587564978686509794noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-765813534239558138.post-9882598773287956972009-10-03T09:58:00.004+03:002009-10-03T11:24:38.906+03:00Sunday previewTomorrow evening in Espoo, Helsinki's western suburb, the Olaus Petri church choir, under Peter Peitsalo, premieres my new Swedish psalm setting <span style="font-style: italic;">Du kröner året (You crown the year)</span> in a bilingual Michaelmas Mass at our fair city's contemporary church music <a href="http://www.tapiolanseurakunta.fi/fi/5303">festival</a>. (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.<br /><br />Later that evening, I'll be appearing as a guest on BBC Radio 3's <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00n1n04">The Choir</a>. 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 upMatthew Whittallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10587564978686509794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-765813534239558138.post-38803230914041768332009-09-03T22:35:00.005+03:002009-09-04T10:37:45.052+03:00Dem agogI 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />However, there's a line that occasionally gets crossed, against which a stand should be taken. A friend told me yesterday about this vile <a href="http://maxotto.blogit.uusisuomi.fi/2009/08/28/kalevi-ahon-musiikki-oli-kamalaa-kuultavaa/">"review"</a> 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.Matthew Whittallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10587564978686509794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-765813534239558138.post-21246278236223378222009-08-31T10:36:00.003+03:002009-08-31T10:40:27.239+03:00"Among the Leaves" without the wait<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEga5CKsxUBPJulPYvirwsstQ804ocHmSjk2mxuexf9_XLcwQqCsxa58zXSdndKlhfxi15-y8fgS7oHJ-3UeNdPVOcsJZsiOj3owDu6Qd11piPZ8QonVjkz3458jjW2IJRBeJ3tRZg-jBW2w/s1600-h/HOL_lehdell%C3%A4_cover_small.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 314px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEga5CKsxUBPJulPYvirwsstQ804ocHmSjk2mxuexf9_XLcwQqCsxa58zXSdndKlhfxi15-y8fgS7oHJ-3UeNdPVOcsJZsiOj3owDu6Qd11piPZ8QonVjkz3458jjW2IJRBeJ3tRZg-jBW2w/s320/HOL_lehdell%C3%A4_cover_small.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5376029295537896018" border="0" /></a><br /><br />HOL's critically acclaimed CD "Lehdellä – Among the Leaves" is now available in mp3 format from <a href="http://www.classicsonline.com/">ClassicsOnline</a>. Get your copy <a href="http://www.classicsonline.com/catalogue/product.aspx?pid=820598">here</a>!Matthew Whittallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10587564978686509794noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-765813534239558138.post-45992683815187633112009-08-27T13:57:00.005+03:002009-08-27T22:05:32.857+03:00Spaced outLast 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 <span style="font-style: italic;">The Planets</span>, 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.<br /><br />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 <span style="font-style: italic;">Planets</span> 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.<br /><br />So in light of this, I compiled this brief guide to coughing etiquette at concerts:<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Don't cough at concerts.</span><br /><br /><br />I also prepared a helpful FAQ to accompany the guide:<br /><br />Q: But what if I can't stop myself from coughing?<br /><br />A: Yes, you can.<br /><br /><br />Q: What if I'm sick, can I cough then?<br /><br />A: No. If you're sick, you probably shouldn't be at a concert. Swine flu and all that.<br /><br /><br />Q: Can I cough in loud parts? Nobody can hear me then.<br /><br />A: Yes, they can. See guide.<br /><br /><br />Q: Can people <span style="font-style: italic;">really</span> hear me in loud parts?<br /><br />A: Yes. Aside from being audible, the related risk of sudden <span style="font-style: italic;">pianissimo</span> exposure is significant.<br /><br /><br />Q: What about between movements? Can I cough then?<br /><br />A: See guide.<br /><br /><br />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 <span style="font-style: italic;">Symphonia</span> 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 <span style="font-style: italic;">pianissimo</span> 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.<br /><br />Anyhoo, Holst. As I said, I know <span style="font-style: italic;">The Planets</span> 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.<br /><br />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 <a href="http://www.johnlutheradams.com/">John Luther Adams</a>' <span style="font-style: italic;">In the White Silence</span>, 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 <span style="font-style: italic;">Das Lied von der Erde</span> 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. <a href="http://2ndminimalism.org/">Hmm...</a><br /><br />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.Matthew Whittallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10587564978686509794noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-765813534239558138.post-7783784863871502522009-07-16T10:59:00.003+03:002009-07-16T13:07:27.572+03:00Summer psalmsOne 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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 <a href="http://www3.sympatico.ca/alan.teder/CyrillusKreekLPnotes.htm">Cyrillus Kreek</a>.<br /><br />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 <span style="font-style: italic;">Psalms of David</span> (<span style="font-style: italic;">Taaveti Laulud</span>) 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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 <a href="http://helinmari.trio.ee/">Estonian bossa nova</a>? 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.<br /><br />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:<br /><br /><object height="340" width="560"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/KillgvOGW_c&hl=en&fs=1&"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/KillgvOGW_c&hl=en&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="340" width="560"></embed></object><br /><br />Another:<br /><br /><object height="340" width="560"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/DZvM93FAjbU&hl=en&fs=1&"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/DZvM93FAjbU&hl=en&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="340" width="560"></embed></object><br /><br />The King's Singers, doing their best with the pronunciation:<br /><br /><object height="344" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/zXjZmBJF4nc&hl=en&fs=1&"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/zXjZmBJF4nc&hl=en&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="344" width="425"></embed></object><br /><br />And the one piece that makes me cry without fail:<br /><br /><object height="344" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/hHdxLTctv-E&hl=en&fs=1&"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/hHdxLTctv-E&hl=en&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="344" width="425"></embed></object>Matthew Whittallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10587564978686509794noreply@blogger.com0