The Short Road to Nirvana

2011-10-28T19:56:00.002+03:00

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 Alba label of my first "solo" CD. The music in question is my hour-long cycle of piano pieces, Leaves of Grass, played by Risto-Matti Marin, a great pianist, and my great friend.

The release concert itself is being sponsored by the Espoo International Piano Festival. 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!

Après-MIDI

2011-08-12T10:16:00.004+03:00

I'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.

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 Zagros 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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Subtler still is the quality 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 sounds 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 reaching 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."

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.

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.

The resulting music is quite simple, very much like Feldman's Rothko Chapel 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 Introduction and Allegro, 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.

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.

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 fail?

I should follow this Sex and the City-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.

Click.

Surfacing

2011-07-15T13:33:00.007+03:00

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.

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.

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 here, and not so lightheartedly elsewhere.

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.

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.

Then Canada, my dear, dear Canada... Oh, Canada! Maybe the source of the bile in my last post re: the CBC and its failures was occasioned by 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 hapless Prime Minister is right: I don't recognize Canada anymore.

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.

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.

Much to do, much to say, little time to do it all. I'd remiss, however, if I didn't note this upcoming CD release, 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.

Epic FAIL

2011-06-16T10:10:00.002+03:00

Please forgive the catch-phrase title, but really, the subject of the invective below deserves no greater thought or originality. One of the things I try to do from my perch up here is keep up with what's going on in the music scene in my native Canada. It used to be easy, what with radio broadcasts of Canadian concert music being plentiful, and the excellent music shows of the CBC easily streamable. Now, alas, the best shows are no more, with genial and self-effacing hosts like Sheila Rogers and Jürgen Goth put out to pasture in favor of programs of top-40 classical pap hosted by lightweight has-beens of the classical business, and broadcasts of new music are so thin on the ground as to be non-existent. Broadcasts of orchestral concerts are virtually no more.

But this story really takes the cake. Not the story itself, but what the it lacks. Malcom Forsyth, one of Canada's greatest living composers, was commissioned to write to an "iconically Canadian" work for chorus and orchestra. He was, I was dismayed to learn, diagnosed with pancreatic cancer last fall, surviving against all odds to complete the piece and attend the premiere in Ottawa. Forsyth, with the zeal perhaps only an immigrant can bring to the task of paying homage to his country, has been steadfastly singing the beauty of the Canadian landscape for decades in a series of well-crafted, probing, supremely accessible works. (Other such poets include another emigré, the late Harry Freedman, and our great native voice, R. Murray Schafer.) The work apparently sets that wonderful tear-jerker of a poem every Canadian child learns for Remembrance Day, "In Flanders Fields", a solemn memorial for the soldiers who died for our country, and the liberation of others.

This premiere has all the hallmarks of a major Canadian cultural event, with the exception of one conspicuous absence. Let me spell it out for you: national artist commissioned the National Arts Centre Orchestra to write a great tribute to the nation. Reading the story, I found myself desperate to hear it, hear what Forsyth had to say, his perspective on the piece, what effect his deteriorating health had on the music, his attitude toward the poetry, all of it. I wanted it documented for posterity.

So where in the name of Glenn Gould was our so-called "national" broadcaster? Why was the nation not permitted to hear this work? Why, when so much time, effort and pain has gone into bringing this music to life, is the witnessing of it restricted to a few thousand (maybe) people in Ottawa and Edmonton? Why are the people who fund your organization not allowed to hear what will likely be the last song of one of our senior composers? What about this event failed to meet the criteria of your mandate (cf. clause v.)? What abject failure of vision, integrity and patriotism led to the decision not to pick up this event for broadcast in any form, television, radio or internet, so that the people it pays tribute to could hear it (beyond this meager coverage)?

Even from the most amoral, heartless, capitalist perspective that holds sway in the cultural offices of the CBC these days, the marketing materials for this one bloody well write themselves. Dying composer's final work, a vast hymn to his adopted country, completed against time and medical prognosis, with the creator in attendance? The second half of the concert even featured Beethoven's 9th symphony, in case you were wondering what the catch was. Come on! An idiot could sell that. So why didn't you?

Hang your heads in shame, CBC. Continue down this road, and I may find myself agreeing with the heinous government that's trying to kill you. Continue to fail us again and again in the exercise of your duty to be the voice of the people, and you'll deserve no better.

Breaking Up Is Hard To Do

2011-06-06T20:20:00.005+03:00

Dear [name withheld],

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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?

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.

So see you around, Finale. Have a good life. If you need to reach me, I'll be staying with Sibelius 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.

Ciao,

Matt

Your regularly scheduled program

2010-08-10T10:55:00.011+03:00

My 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 latest, 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 MasterChef, 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.

I've also been distracted by my addiction to news, and yesterday this story 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 bristle 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?

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.

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 parodied 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 Symphony, but I loved finding out that the compositional process was catalyzed for him by viewing an Akseli Gallèn-Kallela painting 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).

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 someone 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.

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.

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 that's unhelpful, and frankly lazy on the part of the annotator. What's the composer gonna do, sue you 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.

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 want 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?

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 x then y, 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 filling out a few questions 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.

Out of time

2010-07-19T14:35:00.005+03:00

Well, 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.

During my travels I was gifted with three wonderful performances of pieces from the more meditative side of my output, from three very different groups, one in Japan and two here in Finland. (The Helsinki Chamber Choir concert featuring my ad puram annihilationem meam and an amazing premiere by my colleague Sampo Haapamäki can be streamed online here 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.

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 rightness 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 ad puram, and the piece just keeps getting more expansive, more centered, its fragmented structure more cohesive as a result.

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.

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)

One of the few books I've made time to read this year is Time 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):

"[...] 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. For the Balinese, a sense of spacious stasis is clearly foundational, and infiltrates every aspect of life in ways which seem very opaque to an outsider."

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.

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.

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 be. 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.

Old dogs, new questions (and mixed metaphors)

2010-05-22T11:24:00.009+03:00

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 Time of Music 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 performance.

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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

So I'm going to tour the world for a few weeks, and will hopefully come back lighter.

Have You No Glass?

2010-04-29T11:29:00.008+03:00

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 sub rosa exchange picked up on yesterday's wires, with names redacted for security reasons. (Hat tip to Capt. H below for the title.)

Dear Member [sic] of the XxxX teaching staff,

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.

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.

We would like to remind you that we know where you live and we have eyes on your kid.

Most kindly,

capt. H.
Xxxxxxxx Academy ~~Library~~ Command Centre
The "Stiftskapitel Modernismus" Project
Star Year 20100428-1346

The ominous reply:

From: M.
To: H.
Subject: RE: Have You No Glass?

Dear Sir,

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.

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".

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.

Sinisterly,

Mxxxxxx Xxxxxxxx
Co-chair
Committee for Minimalist Re-education
Finland Chapter

Followed the next morning by the offender's panicked missive, and the organization's response:

From: N.
To: M.
Subejct: please read this

Dear M.,

Please understand this is highly confidential. I need help.

Today I received two extremely ominous messages. Curiously, they were brought to my attention by one H. , 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?

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?

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?

N.

From: M.
To: N.
Subject: RE: please read this

Dear Brother,

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.

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.

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.

Minimally,

Mxxxxxx Xxxxxxxx
Co-chair, etc.

America's Next Top Model?

2010-04-20T12:04:00.010+03:00

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 this post. 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 concert hall, 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.

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 Northlands 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.

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 Northlands, 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 Northlands, 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.

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 Voci (Folk Songs II) for viola and double chamber orchestra, a marvelous, lyrical, tragically underperformed piece.

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.)

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 The Viola in My Life IV 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.

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 review 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 New England Triptych, 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.

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.

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.

Irony, thy name is Eyjafjallajökull

2010-04-17T15:51:00.002+03:00

Here in Tampere, Finland, the eruption of a volcano in Iceland caused the cancellation of my flute and piano suite titled... wait for it... Ash-Wednesday. Add me to the list of the "little known" 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.

Album of the Year!

2010-04-12T11:23:00.004+03:00

"Lehdellä–Among the Leaves" voted Choral Album of the Year for 2009! Congratulations to HOL for their hard work!

Spring cleaning of the mind

2010-03-28T17:17:00.013+03:00

"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.

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 Northlands. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Northlands 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.

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 minimalism to my own copy, I should do that and return it..." And so on.

The end result is a clean house and a clean desk, with all the scores I need to ~~steal from~~ 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.

So what's next? The Big One, that's what.

A family affair

2010-03-08T15:40:00.005+02:00

I'm getting ready to leave for Kokkola on Wednesday for the première of Northlands, 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.

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.

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, Five Lines, Four Spaces. 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 The Aesthetics of Survival, 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.

But where Aesthetics focuses purely on the composer as individual in the world, Five Lines 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 this post 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.

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:

There is a world
That is only dreamed
When your eyes
Are a thousand stars

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 stars, sleep and night 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 Slow fires of autumn, a major influence on my series for flute and plucked string instruments. Feldman's ghost circa The viola in my life 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.

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.

[Ahem] Toot, toot...

2010-02-17T10:54:00.003+02:00

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:

Feb. 18 at Feeniks Club, 10.00 pm: The Golden Horns, sandwiched into their usual fun, wide-ranging program, give the first performances in Finland of my antiphonal fanfare Anthem II, 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.

March 13: Tommi Hyytinen (of Golden Horns fame) gives the world première of Northlands, for horn and string orchestra. The performance is in his hometown of Kokkola with the Ostrobothnian Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Juha Kangas.

March 21: The Olaus Petri Church Choir and Peter Peitsalo give the première of my new psalm setting, Sion, prisa din Gud (Zion, praise thy God), as well as a repeat performance of Du kröner året (You crown the year).

April 8: My long-time collaborator, flutist Hanna Kinnunen, gives her fourth doctoral concert at Helsinki's German church. The program features the première of A world only dreamed, 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.

April 15: The Helsinki Guitar Duo perform The wine-dark sea on their concert at the Tampere Biennale.

April 17: Also at the Biennale, flutist Mario Caroli and pianist Keiko Nakayama perform my T.S. Eliot-inspired suite Ash-Wednesday, in a huge program featuring works by Sciarrino, Jukka Tiensuu, and my teacher, Veli-Matti Puumala.

May 10: Risto-Matti Marin gives the first complete performance in Helsinki of my hubristic, hour-long piano prelude cycle Leaves of Grass at the Sibelius Academy, in association with the DocMus department.

May 11: Accordionist Veli Kujala performs my Zen-quiet being the pine tree on his final doctoral concert, 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 Juhani Nuorvala's deliciously titled accordion trio What's A Nice Chord Like You Doing In A Piece Like This?

May 25: Hedi gives her second doctoral concert at Helsinki's beautiful Temppeliaukio Church, performing A world only dreamed 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.

June 21: The wine-dark sea receives its Japanese première in Tokyo, on a concert of Finnish music by Ensemble Nomad. I very much hope to make it over there.

July 12: The Kuhmo Chamber Music Festival hosts the world première of pine tree, dreaming (being the pine tree II) for string sextet. The Enesco Quartet does the honors, with Aurélie Deschamps, viola, and Tomas Djupsjöbacka, cello.

July also features a performance by Nils Schweckendiek and the Helsinki Chamber Choir of ad puram annihilationem meam, a piece they continue to make entirely their own, once again with dancer-choreographer Nina Hyvärinen bringing her quiet grace to the proceedings. Details when the program is published.

Details, details

2010-02-11T17:05:00.006+02:00

"It looks very... brave," said my friend, referring to my recently completed pastorale-concerto for horn and strings, Northlands, 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 should be there. It's quite an amazing ability, really, one I wish I had.)

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.)

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.

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.)

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.

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.

Among the stars

2010-02-03T10:17:00.003+02:00

Tomorrow I'll be attending Finland's annual Emma gala, where HOL's recent CD release "Among the Leaves" is up for classical recording of the year, 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.

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!

Cry me a river

2010-01-10T12:16:00.002+02:00

Serious posts, soon, I promise, but a quote from this article pricked my irony meter this morning (italics mine):

"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, just a few dozen times."

Overheard in a noodle shop

2009-12-12T11:12:00.002+02:00

I'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 Alex about a wonderful novel he'd lent me, set in a Midwestern university in first half of the last century:

M: "It was amazing, gorgeous. Lyrical and tragic in a very understated way. I want to turn it into an opera!"

A: "Yeah, I thought about that too, but it's so quiet and internal. There's almost no dialogue, and nothing really happens."

M: "Dude, you just described my ideal opera scenario."

Jumping the firearm of your choice

2009-10-09T20:14:00.001+03:00

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

Sunday preview

2009-10-03T09:58:00.004+03:00

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

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

Dem agog

2009-09-03T22:35:00.005+03:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Among the Leaves" without the wait

2009-08-31T10:36:00.003+03:00

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

Spaced out

2009-08-27T13:57:00.005+03:00

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

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

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

Don't cough at concerts.

I also prepared a helpful FAQ to accompany the guide:

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

A: Yes, you can.

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

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

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

A: Yes, they can. See guide.

Q: Can people really hear me in loud parts?

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

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

A: See guide.

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

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

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

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

Summer psalms

2009-07-16T10:59:00.003+03:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another:

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

And the one piece that makes me cry without fail:

So's yer face!

2009-07-06T11:39:00.006+03:00

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

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

How very true!

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

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

"Leaves" now online

2009-07-03T18:53:00.003+03:00

Here's a link to the radio broadcast of my Leaves of Grass, played last weekend by Risto-Matti Marin, followed by August Stradal's transcription of Liszt's Les Préludes. (Click the link, then "Avaa radiosoitin" on the next page.) It takes a few minutes to get through the preamble, but while waiting you can bear witness to the rare event of me doing an interview in Finnish. I'm the guy with the accent.

Performance order for Leaves:

Book I (2005)
- Tears
- Lingering last drops
- Sparkles from the Wheel
- Twilight

Book II (2009, premiere)
- The voice of the rain
- On the beach at night
- A noiseless patient spider
- Thou orb aloft full-dazzling

Book III (2009, premiere)
- Out of the rolling ocean
- Apparitions
- Song of the universal
- A clear midnight

Enjoy! I'm on thesis retreat for the next two months, which I'm actually looking forward to. Too many notes this year, and a break is much needed. Blogging will continue, don't be surprised if the topic is frequently Mahler.

La Patrie

2009-07-01T13:43:00.003+03:00

It's Canada Day today, an event I notice less and less as the years go by, unless I happen to be there at the time, or until one of my conscientious Finnish friends texts me with wishes for the holiday. I don't do much to celebrate it here – although we did dress Oliver in red and white today as a tribute, even though we haven't begun the long, onerous process of acquiring Canadian citizenship for him yet.

I bring this up as a segue to a topic that's been much on my mind in the last few weeks. More and more people have been asking me lately if I miss Canada, and whether I plan to go back there someday. I suppose it's because people see me putting down roots in Finland, developing something of a career, having a family. The latter question, about my possible return to my homeland, isn't something I can answer at this point. It's not in the cards at the moment, but it's not possible to rule it out, either. But I always answer the former with a smile and a "Not really." And it's true for the most part. I get to see my immediate relatives once every couple of years at the most, and we correspond via e-mail and Skype regularly, so the contact is there. I left Canada so long ago, almost fifteen years now, that I have very few friends there, and no professional contacts to speak of. Everything that's most important to me – my work, my wife and son, my closest friends – is here. The weather in Finland is more or less the same as where I grew up in Québec's Eastern Townships, and though I miss certain things, like real Asian cuisine at affordable prices and beer that doesn't taste like gym socks, on the whole I don't miss Canada all that much.

The thing I don't usually tell people about is the rare occasion when I do find myself missing it, in a way that cuts much deeper than simple nostalgia for bygone things. The most desperate occasion relates to the final stages of composing my four-seasons choral cycle Shiki for HOL in 2006-07. It was in late February of a dark winter, toward the end of an extraordinarily busy season of writing, teaching, and festival management. I was already worn out, and was trying to finish the four tape preludes to each setting of a seasonal haiku by Santōka Taneda. The preludes are very simple, almost documentary-sounding concoctions using only three elements each: the sound of water, a field recording of birdsong, and a lightly processed acoustic sound from a variety of metal instruments like a waterphone, a prayer bowl and a Christmas angel bell thing owned by my wife's uncle.

For the birdsong, I used a species local to southern Finland at the start of each season: blackbird for spring, thrush nightingale for summer, hooded crow for fall, and Bohemian waxwing for winter. I wanted them to sound as local as possible, with one exception. I found an old LP fragment of the wail of a common loon, and decided to adapt it to fit in the background of the fall prelude. It was intended as a kind of private joke, a tiny, wistful reference to my fervent belief that one's national identity can't ever be fully suppressed, no matter how one may thrive in a new pot.

The loon's wail is a haunting thing, speaking of still, misty lakes and vast spaces, a sound most Canadians are familiar with from birth or soon after. It's not that they're everywhere, it's just that the wail has become something of an anthropomorphized sonic currency (as opposed to the literal one), a patrotic emblem of the sound of Canada, heard everywhere in NFB films and mini-documentary ads about Canadian heritage. When I was a kid in the 70s, there was a fashion on CBC radio for long, static nature soundscapes – I think my fascination with nature imagery and structural stasis can be traced back to these – many of them inevitably containing a loon wail, that ever-so-evocative aural calling card of the True North. So I messed around with the sound file, adjusting the EQ, copying and reshaping the sound; there were only a couple of wails, with the ultimate effect of the constant pitch shifting and elongation to create diversity of material making it appear as if the call were being warped, becoming more distant and alien to the sonic landscape.

What I wasn't prepared for was the effect my semi-casual compositional decision would have on me psychologically. When I uploaded the sound into ProTools the first time, it hit me like a sword through the ribs, making me more homesick than I'd been in years. That forlorn-sounding wail engendered a bone-deep feeling of loss that had nothing to do with childhood or a long forgotten meal or seeing old photos of family. Or rather, it had everything to do with it, and nothing at the same time. The loon's call, despite being just a bird call, and in reality no more expressive in human terms than a tree or a blade of grass, a thing that just was, sounded like everything that was most Canadian to me, and in an instant I felt more alone, further from home and more alien in my adopted land than I ever had before. I keep trying to come up with a less melodramatic turn of phrase, but the truth is that my soul ached for my country in a way I have difficulty overcoming even as I write about it two years later. I sat there, alone in that darkened studio, tired, stressed, embarrassed at my tears and relieved that nobody was there to see them. They were brief, in any case.

I write this just to make a small point about how sonic memory strikes at the most unexpected times, and carries with it a sometimes overwhelming weight of associations. It also forms the core of what I'm writing about in reference to Mahler, the ways in which landscape and social memory are manipulated into anthropomorphized beings, and the effort it requires to see past that to the truth of the human-nature relationship. A bird's call, through the careful manipulation of memory, upbringing and national sentiment, can cut through distance and years in a second, reconnecting one to a lost past, a wealth of feelings long suppressed, and undermine one's very notion of self and place. I've since come to love living in Finland more and more, and rarely if ever have those pangs of homesickness, since my home is here in an increasingly real sense. But one's ultimate sense of home can never quite be done away with, and reasserts itself at the strangest times, as I discovered.

So do I miss Canada? No, not really. Except when I do. Happy Canada Day.

Les Préludes

2009-06-30T14:18:00.004+03:00

I'm back from nearly a week at the Mänttä Music Festival, where my huge, more than a little hubristic cycle of twelve piano preludes after Whitman's Leaves of Grass received its premiere last Saturday, played by the inimitable Risto-Matti Marin. Risto-Matti is an incredibly dedicated, often critically underappreciated pianist in the local music community, though much beloved by those in the know. I imagine his taste for oddball, non-canonical piano works – especially Golden Age transcriptions and paraphrases by virtuoso pianists, and for placing these works on his programs and recordings alongside new music and a warhorse or two – makes him hard to pin down. He doesn't specialize in any one thing, doesn't make all-Bach or all-Chopin CDs, and generally challenges accepted notions of what a modern pianist should do. He plays tons of new music, and is a fierce advocate of the composers he works with, but isn't really a "new music player". His work in transcribing everything from Romantic staples to heavy metal makes a case for the transcription as an ever-evolving art form, and he constantly proves the worth of his aesthetic choices by making a convincing case for pieces generally thought to be less valuable than the Top 100 Hits of the piano repertoire.

So imagine my delight at getting to write something this far-reaching for him. That he learned and made it through a solid hour of challenging, largely brand new piano music would have been enough. But that his performance was formally integrated, poetic, colorful, and energetically focused from beginning to end was more than any composer could ask for. Much of the last book of four pieces has only existed for a few weeks, and he played the new ones with total command, especially my sprawling prog rock tribute Song of the universal, which takes off from the texture of Chopin's "Ocean" étude in C minor and doesn't let up for ten minutes. Every time I thought his energy would give out, he just got better. Then for good measure he came out and played August Stradal's Himalayan transcription of Liszt's Les Préludes. One hell of an encore. The radio broadcast is Thursday, I'll post a link for it when it becomes available on demand.

In all, it was a great experience to bring to fruition a project like this, and getting to work with someone with a similar taste for large-scale forms. Over the last week, I kept thinking back to a comment made by my former teacher at Stony Brook, Perry Goldstein. He'd just heard my first tape piece, and quipped, "Wow. Even when you're working in electronics it's epic!" It's true. I have an unfortunate tendency to think in epic terms when I start composing, and it gets me in trouble occasionally when a piece runs over length. (On the other hand, nobody's ever complained about not getting their money's worth when they commission me.) What starts out as a few minutes of music usually ends up being a cycle of some sort, lasting twenty minutes or more. I had a great conversation about this at the festival with Kalevi Aho, a composer with a similar tendency toward big statements.

Even in grad school I wasn't much good at the seven-minute piece, preferring to work in large, multi-movement or multi-sectional forms. Not that all my work back then was particularly successful – and I went through a period a while back of writing shorter pieces while trying to figure out some aesthetic problems – but I think my formal predilections were evident from the start, if not as well executed as I would have liked. Now, however, I finally feel like my chops are able to keep up with my ambitions, and am consistently happier with some of my longer essays. I still have trouble with the long line of musical argument, the large-scale symphonic logic popular hereabouts, but I'm getting better at stringing smaller things together into a convincing narrative, I think, and creating a kind of formal unity through juxtaposition of disparate things rather than linear development.

Another pleasant aspect of the week was the festival itself, ostensibly a celebration of the piano with some chamber music thrown in. As a composer, I often find myself on the outside looking in at new music events. There's a level of appreciation of certain aesthetics that I just can't get to, a taste for some types of music, notably loud, noisy, grating ones, that I can't cultivate no matter how hard I try. I thought it was a phenomenon restricted to composer circles that I'm not really part of. Imagine my surprise to find a similar underground cult in the piano world, devoted to extremes of virtuosity, sound production, technical execution and stage flair. The organizers and performers in Mänttä, vibrant and driven people, with a few exceptions all quite young, had prepared a program very much by and for piano enthusiasts, exploring corners of the repertoire I'd never really paid much attention to. The taste for the epic was much in evidence, case in point being Henri Sigfridsson's titanic undertaking of playing the complete Transcendental Études of Liszt in one sitting. Not all of it was to my taste, but I couldn't help noticing that the proceedings were colored by something all too often absent from new music events: a relaxed sense of fun. There was pure joy in the air at all the concerts, a feeling that radiated off the stage, joy at the chance to play, at taking on huge, risky, virtuosic pieces, joy at making music together. It was infectious, and my window into this little corner of piano geekdom gave me a vantage point from which to appreciate the goings-on of a passionate community in my business, but outside my field.

One reads frequently in newspapers abroad of the miracle of the Finnish music system. The same questions keep coming up. How do they do it? Why are there so many musicians here? What's their secret? Let me tell you: the summer festivals are a huge part of it. In few other countries that I know does a resource like this exist. At the beginning of June, music in the cities ceases completely, and the musical lifeblood of the country rushes out to the extremities, with almost every one-horse town hosting a music festival of some sort. The locals are intensely devoted to attending, the organizers extraordinarily competent at putting together big programs on limited budgets, with the result that people get to hear music being made on the highest possible level without having to go far for it.

On the last night in Mänttä, I commented to festival director Niklas Pokki, who helped build the festival from the ground up eleven years ago, that I was still unsure how I'd managed to become a professional musician, given that nothing like this festival existed where I grew up. I never heard a professional orchestra until university, despite being an hour from Montreal, nor a real professional performer on any instrument. (Niklas mentioned that one of his primary motivations for creating the festival in his hometown was a similar musical starvation as a child.) I somehow stumbled into being a musician despite the disadvantages of no early training and limited technical abilities on my instrument, probably due equally to stubbornness as much as whatever talent I may have.

But imagine being a child in a town like this, who gets to hear high-caliber performances early on, be inspired by it, and with access to a system of music schools whose primary purpose is to identify talented kids and get them playing. The educational system here does have its advantages, but if you ask me the real glory of the Finnish musical world is the summer festivals, which reach out to "real" people, as opposed to industry insiders in the city, bringing good music, old and new, to their communities – affordably – and embed the art form in their lives. Seriously, can you imagine many places where an unknown composer would get a platform for a 60-minute piece on a small town summer program? That's why classical music survives here, and will hopefully continue while other countries, beset by endless budget cuts and philistinism, slowly strangle the life out of their music.

When it rains...

2009-06-11T17:29:00.005+03:00

I meant to do a few different posts in the last few days about things that have been rolling around in my head, but that I haven't had the time to write down coherently. Events, as it happened, intervened. Starting Thursday, I was elated to find out that my Night, sleep, death and the stars was nominated by Finland to the International Rostrum of Composers. As an immigrant whose permanent residence is still pending, it's a great honor to be so noticed. Then HKK and dancer/choreographer Nina Hyvärinen gave a stunning, intensely expressive performance of ad puram annihilationem meam in Tampere, which was followed by HOL's triple-gold-medal-winning presentation of Sora/Mizu from Shiki, subsequently broadcast on radio from the festival's final concert. The choir was amazing, and rightly won the highest place in the mixed choir category of the review. I was later pleased to learn that Short Road has been singled out by Gramophone for their "Blog Roll" segment in an upcoming issue (specifically, this post), another unexpected honor, though it may mean that I have to start taking this blogging thing seriously. I see my Mahler thesis vanishing before my eyes...

Not losing a beat, I managed to crank out the last bars of the remaining piece from Leaves of Grass ahead of a preview performance on Tuesday, leading to the big premiere on June 27. I hit the "Send" button, breathed a massive sigh of relief, and poured myself a generous drink. Sipping my gin and tonic (Hendricks, in case anyone cares), I thought about the things I needed to get done in the coming days when a certain chain of events started earlier than expected, and led to my best coda ever:

We named him Oliver Ralph (see this post for pronunciation guide). I've had about as much excitement as I can stand. (Photo by Esko Kallio)

Popping in

2009-06-03T19:52:00.002+03:00

Tomorrow at the Tampere Vocal Music Festival, the Helsinki Chamber Choir performs my ad puram annihilationem meam, which I wrote for them last year, at 20.00 in Tampere Cathedral. Percussionist Tim Ferchen does the honors on bass drum this time. The program includes the Finnish premieres of works by Kaija Saariaho and my countryman Claude Vivier, who out-weirds me without even trying. Friday, at the festival's choral review, HOL performs Sora/Mizu (Sky/Water), the fall movement from Shiki from our new CD, as well as works by Selim Palmgren, Einojuhani Rautavaara and Brahms. Welcome to anyone who happens to be in central Finland this week.

Morning thoughts

2009-06-02T11:15:00.005+03:00

As I prepared to start my work day, digging into the final section of the last remaining prelude from my Leaves of Grass cycle, I read a few pages from my recent acquired copy of George Rochberg's wonderful, inspiring, supremely readable memoir Five Lines, Four Spaces, and one quote gives me pause:

"I continued feeling the music in me as alive in itself, a substance that would go on living beyond itself, something yet to be born. But another tendency operated. As often as not, I consciously and determinedly frustrated this afterlife by going in a direction completely opposite to the qualities and characteristics of the last work done; I had a positive abhorrence of merely replicating what I'd already written, of falling into the habit of repeating gestures, figures, designs. In this I was fully aware I was rejecting outright a process of self-replication I heard and saw all around me in the successive new works of composer colleagues [...] for whom self-replication had become a way of being and functioning. I marveled that composers and artists of the avant-garde persuasion had fixated on self-identity via single, consistently recognizeable style-idea as his or her trademark and signature."

Better than good

2009-05-24T14:24:00.007+03:00

As I write this, I'm on Spotify listening to some music by the British composer Nicholas Maw, who died recently, a bit of news I only came across yesterday. I never met him, and only knew him by a few of his pieces, and yet I am inexplicably saddened by his passing. Maybe it's that he was the same age as my father, and hadn't struck me as being old or infirm, not least because his vigorous music never seemed to lose its energy and drive as he aged. Perhaps it's out a sense of solidarity with an expatriate composer who apparently had some initial difficulty making his way in his home country. More, though, it's out of a sense that he never quite received the respect he deserved, especially toward the end of his life. Many of the obituaries mention an onset of dementia, not helped by depression in the wake of the critical drubbing of his opera Sophie's Choice, which I have yet to see. Whatever the merits of his work, it's sad to hear of a penetrating creative mind like that wasting away.

Make no mistake, it doesn't seem that he was treated unfairly during his career, or maliciously sidelined in favor of composers writing in a more fashionable aesthetic. He was granted, and took notable advantage of opportunities that most composers would love but likely never come close to. He got high-profile gigs writing for major musicians, and had champions. It just seemed that the critical reaction to his music never appaeared to lose a snide edge, as if it were completely acceptable to respect his craft, but poo-poo his musical language. I find this tends to happen to composers who hew more closely to traditional practices. It's much easier to compare a more mainstream-sounding piece to the centuries of canonical works it resembles than it is to dissect the work of a more sui generis artist, one with a less palpable connection to the canon of their discipline. With music like Maw's, that dared to go up against the weight of tradition explicitly, it always seems much easier to declare a piece overlong, sentimental, retro, or simply a flop.

Maw's music is indeed well-crafted, dramatic, logically constructed, brilliantly orchestrated stuff that generally stays close to the linear drive of the fin-de-siècle music it most closely resembles. In my limited experience with his work, it was always satisfying, rewarding listening, with no holes or obvious compositional flaws. It's good music. But it's not just good. It's surprising. And that's the highest compliment I can pay any music. Even in Maw's most conservative-sounding pieces, you can hear a composer straining against the boundaries of his technique, always mining his material for hidden corners of expressive meaning. It's abstract, but never impersonal or rhetorically generic in the way that a lot of contemporary heart-on-sleeve music can sound, and I always got the impression that, whatever the dimensions of the piece, formal decisions never came easily for him. His pieces take surprising turns, carrying one off in unexpected directions that nonetheless make the journey more interesting, kind of like taking time on a long road trip to take the slower, but infinitely more scenic route down a particularly lovely bit of coastline. Such moments in Maw tend to be genuinely touching, deeply moving, not in that saccharine, sentimental neo-Romantic way, but proceeding from a place of dramatic and emotional honesty, a kind of rigorously prepared artlessness, that enabled him to get away with it. Indeed, there was nothing "neo" about Maw's music, if by that prefix we mean the revival of an idea whose time is gone. He was the real deal, a man practicing a tradition that never died. Many of the obits also reflect this.

It all speaks of a composer willing to take risks, to always write at the outer limit of his technique and dramatic concept, and it's the trait that I find makes interesting most of the music I really value. Creating big, logical forms is a great thing, and admirable thing, but the willingness to defy logic, to suspend the working out of a large-scale idea for a dramatic side trip – a single chord, a fragment of melody that seemingly doesn't belong, a tiny, gentle interlude – that may technically weaken the structure, but nonetheless adds untold dimensions of emotional weight to a piece, strengthening its argument. Although Maw tends to be mentioned in the same breath as Bruckner, I find his outlook to be more of a piece with Mahler, a similarly risk-taking composer. Both tended to grapple with big ideas, sometimes at the risk of formal cohesion, but if you can deliver an argument with sufficient expressive weight, it makes more superficially integrated, organic music seem ascetic in comparison. As I recently told a student who asked me about some of his music, I'll always respect well-made, tightly woven music – even to the point of jealousy – but music that assumes a great degree of structural and expressive risk is the stuff I love.

I've been reluctant in the past to take on so-called "big ideas" in compositional debate, mostly because I like to do my thing and be let alone, and generally only come out swinging when some camp or other tries to deny my right to do that, or the possibility that an opposing aesthetic may actually have something to contribute. My deepest aesthetic convictions are private and instinctive to the point where I find it difficult to articulate them, hence my blogging silence lately. But in one of the recent articles on Maw, I found a big idea I'm happy to sign on to:

"What I want to do is sing the great song of our existence on this planet[...]" "It's a ludicrous ambition, but it's one of the few that are worth trying."

Rest well, Mr Maw. I and others will do our best to carry that torch.

It's about time

2009-04-21T08:35:00.003+03:00

A hearty "Congratulations!" to Steve Reich on his long overdue Pulitzer win. I have yet to hear the piece in question, but as with the Oscars, the Pulitzer isn't really for the piece that got the nomination, is it? This is a belated but still welcome lifetime achievement award that goes back to Music for 18 Musicians and Tehillim, masterpieces I could listen to until the day I die without getting sick of them, and earlier works that helped to redefine the experience of musical time. May the younger composers – of all ages – who followed in his considerable wake someday reap rewards so rich.

Music of changes

2009-03-28T16:40:00.004+02:00

Winter is in its death throes up here this week, with Southern Finland plunged into "takatalvi" or "back-to-winter" in local parlance. (As with so many Finnish expressions, the lack of foreign etymology gives it a bluntness and lack of abstraction I find appealing.) Sitting with a cup of tea after what may end up being my last woods walk during a snowfall this year, having finished a piece today, I have a few minutes of leisure time to blog. Since returning from vacation at the end of February, I've again been immersed in composition work, specifically the long-delayed conclusion of my cycle of piano preludes based on Whitman's Leaves of Grass, the completed set of which Risto-Matti Marin (link in Finnish only, apologies) is premiering in June. He commissioned the first book of four in 2005 for a concert at the Mänttä piano festival, and we've been plotting to fill out the cycle of twelve at the same festival for the last couple of years.

I admit to a certain amount of trepidation in returning to this project. The first book was hell on wheels to compose. At the time, I'd virtually shut down, afraid to put a note on paper because I hated the sound of everything I wrote. I didn't even manage to write all four pieces in time for the premiere. I ended up giving an older piece from 2003, Rain/Fall, a new title and including it in the set – though in fairness that piece had always been intended as part of this cycle, I just hadn't thought I'd ever get a chance to write it all. I labored over the three I did write fresh for the better part of six months and was, for a while, only mildly satisfied with the results, although people seemed to like them. (As a side note, pianist Matilda Kärkkäinen performs the first book this coming Tuesday, an experience both timely and educational for me.) Having more fully embraced certain tendencies in my writing since the first set, most especially the minimalist ones, I anticipated a significant stylistic disconnect between the older pieces and the newer ones.

So on returning from Paris I steeled myself for what I expected would be a tough three months of work, trying to finish some 30 minutes of piano music, already a difficult proposition, while balancing everything else. To my surprise, I've had nothing but smooth sailing (knock on wood). In the last four weeks, I've managed to get four of the remaining eight done, although two were already laid out in sketch form in late 2007. Maybe I've become less critical of the choices I make, more accepting of the stylistic melting pot I'm drawing from. A huge range of stylistic ideas is even appropriate, considering the breadth of Whitman's output, and the variety of poems I chose as background material. Overall, the new pieces are pretty consistent with the first ones, despite the strides I've made in integrating certain new aesthetic ideas. Looking at the result of the piece I finished today, it also seems that I wasn't quite done with the key of E-flat.

There's a sense of anticipation in getting to complete a huge project that I never seriously contemplated until relatively recently – though the idea for it was sparked when I moved to the US in 1995 and discovered Whitman, after a mostly French education to that point. The music is new, but the ideas have been cooped up in my head for years and are fighting to get out. I'm excited about this piece, about getting it done, and I think that excitement is manifesting itself as an unusual ease of composition. Unlike other recent pieces, I also have quite a luxurious production schedule for this one, which reduces the stress factor considerably and makes decision-making less laborious.

There's also a feeling of compositional momentum gained in the last couple of years. For the first time ever, I'm hitting a comfortable stride in my production where the work feels neither too easy nor unnecessarily difficult. One of my former teachers, Dan Weymouth, once warned me about thinking I had it all figured out, that too much ease could be a sign of suspended critical faculties, but this is something different. I'm working well because I like the music I'm writing, and it makes the process fun. I think this momentum is also a product of many years-long projects coming to fruition over the next year – compositional, professional and educational – and some new things starting. Really though, there's no substitute for forming a habit of regular production, however you define that according to your own work habits. Doing a lot of work makes it easier to do more work. Having reasons and time to do the work helps even more.

All things being equal, it looks like I'll have the two new books done in good time, with the process thus far more enjoyable than for any piece I've done in the last year and change. And finally getting to clear this huge tree of a piece out of my mental forest will make room for much new growth. I just have to wait out the snow now.

Among the leaves

2009-03-22T13:52:00.007+02:00

I haven't been much in a blogging frame of mind lately. After Musica Nova last month, my increasing inability to concentrate on anything necessitated some time off from real life. After a brief but much needed and well-earned vacation with my wife in Paris, I returned home refreshed and ready to work again, and immediately descended into a composing fog. More on all this later. I did want to break the silence, though, to shamelessly promote the following:

It's HOL's new release on Finland's Alba label, Lehdellä – Among the Leaves, the product of three-odd years' work, not counting the composing time for all the music. (The CD will be up for sale through Alba's online store soon.) In addition to my own settings of Octavio Paz and Santōka Taneda, including my much-blogged-about but never heard Shiki (Four Seasons), the CD also features Alex Freeman's and Juho Miettinen's evocative, jewel-like settings of the early Finnish modernist poet Aaro Hellaakoski, as well as a tiny piece by Jarmo Parviainen, HOL's conductor in the 1950s. I'm extraordinarily proud to have been involved in this project, not least because of the high quality of the singing, production, and sound engineering.

It's also a community effort in a very real sense. The visual design and translations all done pro bono by members of the choir – the advantage of singing in an amateur group is that its members have useful real-world professional skills – and most of the photography was done by our multi-talented director, Esko Kallio. There's scarcely an unfamiliar name in the production credits. The essay on the music, written by pianist Risto-Matti Marin (whose own new release on Alba appears today), is wonderful. Rather than edit together a bunch of disparate composer-written program notes and self-inflating biographical material, we wanted a text that would draw all the music together into a seamless whole. Risto-Matti's introduction, instead of dwelling on how the music sounds, how it behaves, how the words are set, gets into the trickier territory of what it all means, that crucial larger context for juxtaposing all these contrasting approaches to choral setting. It doesn't hurt that he knows me, Alex, Juho and Esko very well. The end result is a product that glows with the love and attention given to it by the people who made it.

In a way, it's appropriate that my first commercial recording is this one. My very first piece was for choir, and it's always been to the choir, to voices and text, that I've returned over the years when I wanted to figure out something about my music, to push myself in a new direction. It's also important that this release is done with this choir, the one that commissioned, protected and performed my music when few other people were interested. They've played a central role in my career thus far, not just as a composer, but as a total musician. It wasn't until I joined them that I realized just how much I'd missed performing in an ensemble after I quit the horn – the social, collective side of music-making – and I think I've become a better composer as a result of having this group as a performing outlet. They've been my workshop, my promoters, and best of all my friends for the last six years. I've been lucky to have some unbelievable professional opportunities come my way since I started out on this path, but this is without a doubt the best thing I've ever been part of.

Hearing anew

2009-02-09T10:59:00.006+02:00

Helsinki's ex-biennale, then annual, once-again-biennale new music festival, Musica Nova, is on this week, with New York as its theme. We've so far had film, two chamber operas and a taut performance in a first-of-three series by New York's International Contemporary Ensemble. Though I'm not going to chronicle the festival, or review any shows per se, I had to post one commentary on the opening concert, as little will probably be said in the English-speaking world otherwise. The program last Saturday night took as its focus the urban landscape and city life, and although Steve Reich and John Cage were perhaps the most recognizeable names, the spotlight was firmly on the long-awaited première of music from Juhani Nuorvala's as-yet-unstaged Andy Warhol opera Flash Flash, with a libretto in pitch-perfect pop English by Juha Siltanen. (The performance will be made available online for a month. I'll post a link as soon as I can.)

I should add the disclaimer that Juhani is a close friend and colleague, so anything I write about his music is obviously going to be heavily biased. His opera, if that's what it really is, has a bit of a history, and took far too long to make it to the stage in any form – we got to hear the middle act of three. Flash Flash is a crazy piece of work, not so much "about" Warhol as it is set around the idea of him. It's written in just intonation, highly rhythmic, and highly lyrical, with heavy use of stage projections and lights. It was populist high art, manic and meditative, tasteless and touching, superficial and probing, all at once. Although rooted in pop idioms, one never lost the sense that it was all being guided by a highly-trained, intelligent hand, much like Warhol's art. That it managed to walk that line so well is a part of its success as a piece, I think. Above all, though, it was human, and grounded in a heartfelt emotion that seemed to resonate deeply with the audience.

What struck me most was the sense of occasion about the performance, that rare feeling of being witness to something important. It's the word I kept coming back to, and the one I used in describing my reaction to Juhani afterward. It's important music, not just in terms of what it accomplishes vis-a-vis its interaction – or lack thereof – with the conventions of the operatic genre. (It has more in common with the passion play than grand opera, really.) It's important to Finland on the local level, and to the continuing development of its ever-expanding, ever-diversifying musical tradition. It's comforting and thrilling to know that there's someone in this country writing music like this, music that sounds like nobody else's, yet is still very recognizeably Finnish in its sense of craft and architecture. It's a small community here, where everyone basically knows each other and their work. Our community just got a bit richer through this new niche in our art form. Let's shine a light on it, and get it to the stage in the form it deserves as soon as possible.

Nordic Rhapsody no. 1: Blue Moment

2009-01-31T15:44:00.003+02:00

I'm sitting at my desk after a walk, eating a Runebergin torttu with my tea. (How many national literary figures have their own tasty treat marking their birthday?) Outside, it's one of those cold, clear, snowy days that make living up here through the winter worth it. The sun is sinking below the horizon, and it looks like the sky is gearing up for one of my favorite Nordic sights: the blue moment – "sininen hetki" in Finnish. It's an exclusively late winter phenomenon at this latitude, when the twilight sky turns a shade of indigo so deep that if you saw it in a photograph or painting, you'd think it fanciful. I won't bother linking to photographic evidence; it's impossible to capture it on film. But until you've seen it, you might believe that nothing naturally occurring could be so blue. It's one of the first things I came to love about living in Finland, and one of the rare sights that never seems to get old. (White nights are another.)

The aspect I love most about blue moments – and this is what sets the experience apart from white nights – is their evanescence. It only lasts a few minutes, so you have to be out at the right time to see it. There's a paradoxical quality to the moment, in which one perceives an extraordinary, deep, deep calm, and at the same time, the sky seems to to be trembling with potential energy. It's moments like these, hovering on the edge of non-being, in which the linear flow of time that shapes our days and lives seems to slow and even stop, that most fascinate me in nature, and in art. Not coincidentally, those are the precise values that inform much of the art that inspires me, especially Japanese art forms like haiku poetry and sumi-e painting.

Form, linearity, architectonics: these are strong, beautiful, admirable things, and led to some of the greatest art humanity has ever created. But the spontaneous capturing of that fragile, exquisite moment, and the feeling of stillness and utter peace and boundless energy that accompany it, the telescoping of the experience beyond its natural duration, making eternal that which is transient, these goals will always be much more interesting to me than another masterful essay in the ordering of time. Time flows by itself without our help. Stopping it would seem to be a much neater trick to pull off.

A few years ago, I was tasked to write several classically structured 5-7-5 haiku for a Zen aesthetics class. The goal of the exercise, as with all Zen arts, is to be spontaneous yet controlled, to freeze the import of a moment in time through the free, yet studied and rigorously prepared use of minimal materials. The problem is, after the first couple of attempts, self-consciousness tends to take over, and you find yourself trying to outdo your earliest poems in the Zen-ness of their content, leading to kitsch. Try though I might, I couldn't come up wth anything better than my first haiku, so I only submitted that one, which I now offer here, whatever its value. Then I'm going to go out and have my moment.

bare winter birches
twilight sky unearthly blue
evenings not yet come

Six degrees

2009-01-28T14:00:00.004+02:00

After recovering from an extended bout of illness over the holidays, I'm finally struggling to the top of the heap of work I was unable to do during that time, including a set of horn quartet arrangements of Georgian folk songs, a new version of a piece from last year, also for horn quartet, revisions to my flute and harp duo for performance next month, and starting the piece for HOL's 80th. Hence, there's slightly more time to blog.

Since everyone else is weighing in on the matter of John Williams' inaugural composition/arrangement (bizarre category there, I tell you) Air and Simple Gifts, I feel I ought to add my two cents. While I found the treatment of the Shaker tune itself skillful but too close to the Copland original to be able to set itself apart (I guess that was the "arranged" part, pace Copland estate?), the tone of tender aspiration in the outer sections and general absence of breast-beating triumphalism were a welcome touch. The addition to the ceremony of any classical music, especially the intimate medium of a small chamber ensemble, was classy in the extreme, though I think an equally Copland-tastic piece for the same combination, like my pal Alex Freeman's lovely Intermezzo – the Copland thing is his descriptive, by the way, not mine – would have fit the bill better for being a fresh take from within the same aesthetic, instead of the rather pale echo we heard. Was Jennifer Higdon booked? The Obama campaign used Judd Greenstein's beautiful piece Folk Music in an online venture, was an occasional arrangement/excerpt of that not thought of?

Anyway, the choir piece is going swimmingly, thanks in large part to the experience with O Night! at Christmas. The performance, after a rocky rehearsal, went extremely well, and made its effect in much the way I'd planned, although the choral mass was even thicker than I expected. The sequence of stops Susanne designed for the performance had to be cycled through much more quickly than I anticipated just to be audible over the voices during the first half of the piece. The data absorbed from the event was invaluable in planning its successor, Love is little. The main difference between the two is the absence of the organ (duh), by which I mean the effect of the constant registration changes and subsequent resonance patterns, and the progressive crescendo, were pretty much all that O Night! was based on. Any time I felt the texture becoming impenetrable, I could throw in a new spatializing effect with the multiple choirs or call for a new stop sequence on the organ to alter the timbre. Thin gruel to feed a piece on, really. Without the instrumental backing, it makes it much harder to define and shape a saturated diatonic space in the same way. A relentless crescendo is out of the question, as there's a dynamic wall forty-odd singers just can't go beyond after a few minutes. Thus, I'm paying far more attention to contrast between soundmasses and harmonic emphasis within the 6-tone diatonic pitch collection (E-flat major with no D), as well as military-grade strategic deployment of new elements, in this new effort.

It's all relatively new territory for me. I've done single-harmony, single-dynamic pieces before, with diatonic pitch sets. The most extreme is Sakura (Cherry Blossoms) from my choral cycle Shiki, which uses a single F-minorish sonority for some five minutes, very softly, and relies on a constantly shifting surface to create form. The bald, obviously scalar diatonicism I'm working with at the moment is something it took me a fairly long time to be interested in, surprisingly. Minimalism wasn't something that came easily to me. A long string of teachers had little good to say about the aesthetic, and it wasn't until I came to Finland and gained a measure of creative independence that I realized I was, in fact, very much a minimalist in many ways, and had been from my earliest sketches and pieces. I'm ashamed to admit to some very loud, very ignorant statements in the past about a music I have since come to adore. (It's like that, isn't it? You spend years railing against something you secretly know is part of you, suppressing the evidence and acting out, until you're caught in a Minneapolis airport restroom foot-tapping Clapping Music with the guy in the next stall.) Still, total diatonicism isn't something I've ever been comfortable working with until now. It's very liberating to be in such limited, rigorously defined territory, having your decision-making curtailed in this way. It forces one to think differently about the way one handles material and form, and invites creative solutions to a new set of pitfalls.

Of course, starting a new piece, and the accompanying fear of the blank score page has me finding all sorts of things to waste time on. Today I got it into my head to listen to a bunch of Michael Colgrass on the CMC's Centrestreams. Colgrass was an early, if minor influence on me, dating back to my participation in a performance of his enormous wind orchestra piece Winds of Nagual during my time at UMass-Amherst. I remember admiring the way in which he juxtaposed or superimposed radically different stylistic elements in his music while maintaining a sense that it was all goal directed, rather than done just for the fun of crashing those things together – although there's certainly an element of fun in his work.

While rocking out to the strains of his clarinet concerto Arias, I checked out Colgrass' website, and the item that caught my eye (under "Writings") was a letter exchange with a young composer, in which Colgrass offers some sound advice regarding finding one's voice, surviving as a composer, and the difficult relationship between composing and teaching. (Steve Reich offers similar thoughts in his collection Writings on Music.)

Here's the six-degrees thing: the young composer in question is David Maslanka, with whom I had a similar correspondence in the late nineties, just after I moved Stateside. (I'm fairly sure that a couple of excerpts in a similar section on Maslanka's own website were from letters he wrote to me during those years.) David was, and is, one of the best, kindest, most generous people I have ever known, an earthy, non-aloof mystic, a shamanic personality who loved life and people and art, and made you love them too. I haven't been in touch with him for lo these ten years, but his words still ring in my ears as I work.

David came to UMass during my first year there to supervise a performance and recording of his wind ensemble piece Tears, which I played in, and gave a couple of talks and private meetings for students. At the time, I was just beginning to compose, and was completely taken by the way he seemed to recognize no boundary between composing and living, how deeply he felt the need for communication and community and accessibility in his work. He was very patient in dealing with his young admirer – truth be known, it was the first instance of hero worship I've felt toward another composer. A letter from him was always an event, sure to contain valuable advice not just on composing, but on being a composer, living the life of the artist as opposed to just doing the work. He was one of my earliest guides on the path I was about to embark on, both professionally and spiritually, and his experience helped me chart a course through the thickets of grad school, aesthetic dogma, career options, learning to be myself as a composer – still working on that one – and, most importantly, how to live it all in a way that worked for me, independently on what others told me I should want or reasonably expect from my life and career. He always had kind words about my music, and occasionally some hard criticism that forced me to re-examine my ideas. I took some of the advice and it improved my music and working methods. (His mantra of "Write what you know, then write what you don't know" became one of mine.) Other comments I thought about and then ignored, because what I'd done just seemed right to me, no matter what anyone said, also a valuable lesson.

The point of this ramble is that it's eye-opening to be able to trace the oral lineage of the wisdom David imparted on me from Colgrass, a composer I like, who likely got it from some other figure I'd have great respect for. Although he was only the first in a line of composers to offer me guidance in this way, in many ways he had the greatest impact on me, and advice from subsequent mentors has tended to be along the same lines, which I suppose shows that I seek out this specific type of person rather than that all advice is the same. I hope I get the chance someday to pass on these thoughts and be of help to someone else. Maybe I already have. I certainly don't have it all figured out, but I've made some headway, thanks to people like Colgrass and Maslanka, who were willing to take the time and effort to help someone with less experience in life come to terms with what they wanted to do with themselves. This, I think, is the fundamental difference between teaching and mentoring. One treats the student as an object to be filled with ideas. The other deals with him or her as a person already full of ideas who simply needs help in bringing them out. While both are valuable and necessary in learning to be a composer, it seems to me that the teaching of the whole person is the most rewarding of the two experiences for those involved.

'Tis the season

2008-12-18T17:21:00.003+02:00

I've been silent again, busy with work, and various other forms of writing that have kept me from saying anything of import here. However, now that my teaching semester and Christmas concert season are both over, or nearly there over, I can relax a little and write and do some less essential things. I've already spent hours this week playing with the Canadian Music Centre's new online toy, Centrestreams. It's delightful, and will undoubtedly become a thorn in the side of the wider world's ability to continue ignoring Canadian music.

It seems we're in for another so-called "black Christmas" this year. (I suppose Finns would call it green if there were enough daylight to see the ground – or if they weren't Finns.) Last winter was the worst I've experienced since moving here, with no snow at all and a heavy cloud cover that kept daylight out for weeks on end. If not for my month in Seaside, Fla, I might not have made it through the S.A.D. – never an acronym more appropriate, by the way. This year, though, the weather trends and bird migrations seem to be pointing toward a more normal season. With the addition to our home furnishings of a full-spectrum sunlight lamp, and hopefully a little skiing, I may survive this one.

It's also the season of endless Christmas gigs, both as a performer and audience member. I keep thinking I'll get sick of Christmas music, but I haven't yet. It's the one remainder of my Anglican/Catholic upbringing that I haven't left behind. I love the season, the mood it brings out in people, the pageantry and especially the music, from all periods. My choir did a Schütz motet this year, "Die Himmel erzählen die ehre Gottes", that knocked my socks off, and aroused interest in a composer I hadn't paid much attention to previously. Another recent highlight was the première of my friend David's new piece Resonance, for violin, strings and two horns, an evocative, soulful, warmly diatonic piece full of Celtic undertones, which I'm going to pay him the respect of stealing ideas from in my horn concerto next year. In terms of my own music, it's also been a more active season than usual. My carol In the bleak mid-winter, written last year, will be broadcast across Europe and North America as part of the Finnish entry in Euroradio's annual Christmas concert series, in a performance by the Helsinki Chamber Choir and my friend Nils Schweckendiek (info here, here and here). The December 21st concert date is a pleasing coincidence as well – in the actual bleak mid-winter.

I'm very much in a choral phase at the moment, trying to get an 80th anniversary piece for HOL off the ground and done by the time our rehearsals start again in January. I was a bit wary of taking on yet another choir piece this year, feeling kind of tapped for new textural and formal ideas. When the request came while I was working on, say it with me, a choir piece in Seaside last winter, I toyed with the idea of setting a favorite E.E. Cummings poem as a 40-voice motet, just to give myself something unusual to think about. In the end, though, I decided I couldn't get my head around the text well enough at the moment and needed a few more years to think about it. However, it was ultimately another experience this past summer that drew me away from Cummings more forcefully.

My wife and I spent a month crossing Canada and the U.S. visiting family and friends for the first time in several years. One of our stops was Amherst, Massachusetts, where I spent three of the happiest years of my life as a student at UMass. Our hosts there took us on an extensive tour of rural Western Mass, which was a delight. The landscapes in New England are much the same as where I grew up, just north of Vermont, and it felt like a return home in many ways. One of the places we visited was Hancock Shaker Village, a former Shaker community-turned-museum which I'd heard of, but never been to before. During the day, we heard a demonstration of Shaker worship songs, including the very famous Simple Gifts, most memorably used, of course, by Copland in Appalachian Spring, and which I made an arrangement of a couple of years ago for HOL. The most affecting song I heard, though, was a much more modest one called Love is little:

Love is little, love is low
Love will make my spirit grow
Grow in peace, grow in light
Love will do the thing that's right

It was on permanent loop in my head for weeks afterward, so I figured I'd been given a gift that would form the basis of the new piece, a sort of fantasia around the tune. The melody itself is so perfect that any harmonization would be a travesty, and given that it has no climax per se, I didn't want to impose a linear narrative on it. Given what we were told about the Shakers repeating songs over and over during their ceremonies, much like the way I couldn't seem to turn off my mental fixation with it, the idea that occurred to me for a possible setting was a deconstruction of the tune achieved by slowing down various melodic fragments, constantly creating new layers that gradually move off into different speeds, ultimately giving every singer their own part.

It's not particularly new, and I've been intrigued with this sort of sea-of-voices textural idea for years, since a friend and I accidentally caused a feedback loop of a Palestrina motet while copying course tapes in the music library at Stony Brook late one night. (Later that year I used a fragment of the same motet, "Sicut cervus", looped over and over itself, in a tape piece.) Another formative experience was my first hearing Brian Eno's Three Variations on Pachelbel's Canon in D about ten years ago, which begins with a few bars of a very Romantic interpretation of the famous Canon, but in which all the parts quickly slow down in increasing proportion to the depth of their register.

The other appeal in this type of process was allowing myself only the pitches of a diatonic scale. After writing a pretty dissonant chamber duo in the summer, I've been leaning further toward total diatonicism this fall as a counterweight, and the Eb-major scale has been particularly attractive for choral music: not too high or too low for amateur singers, it allows for maximum use of the choral tessitura. However, establishing interesting, varied textural ideas within those restrictions presents a problem. I don't use MIDI much for vocal music because the timbres deaden my inner ear, and I figured working blind with thick layers of diatonic clusters could potentially lead to unexpectedly turgid results. So I decided to conduct a little experiment.

Using a 250-voice choir and one of the biggest organs in Helsinki.

Allow me to explain. Every year, the university club choirs gather for a massed Christmas concert in Helsinki's Kallio church, the biggest, most cavernous worship space in town. Each group presents a few minutes of its own selections, interspersed with traditional songs and carols sung by the audience. It's a relaxed, fun, family event that almost always sees the church packed. The final number for the massed choirs is usually something traditional, the Hallelujah chorus from Messiah or some such, but this year I asked to contribute a similar-minded deconstruction of a Christmas tune for the group to perform, a kind of semi-improvised piece around something the audience would be familiar with.

The whole idea came to me in the type of rare, late-night flash that popular culture seems to think is how artists actually work most of the time, and which hardly ever happens to me. I'd been playing around with a setting of Adolphe Adam's "Cantique de Noël", known to the English-speaking world as "O Holy Night". I'd wanted to do a simple four-voice setting using only the diatonic pitches of the E-flat scale (plus an A that occurs in the middle), but one that was still quite dissonant, if not non-tonal as a result. It worked for a while, but I quickly got bored with the texture and, swtiching my Clavinova to "Strings", started smearing the notes of the final cadential 6-4 progression together. Throw in a recent listening to Charlemagne Palestine's Schlongo!!! daLUVdrone, a piece which moved me to blog last year and voilà, instant inpiration!

The choice of "O Holy Night" is another personal story. I've loved this carol for as long as I can remember. As far as carols go, it's pretty bombastic in that nineteenth-century French way. It's also one of the great tunes ever written, on par for mastery with Schubert's "Ave Maria", but it's been done no favors by countless cheesy arrangements, bellowed out every year by big-voiced pop divas and operatic tenors. And yet, I have an abiding affection for it, so I decided to scrape of the decades-old patina of Elvis, Mormon Tabernacle Choirs, Perry Como, Pavarotti and Dog knows what else to see what lay beneath, if that tune could be rehabilitated into something more insightful than a stadium anthem.

I'll leave judgment on the "insightful" part to others, but so far I'm quite pleased with the result. After a verse and chorus of my initial four-part setting, the final cadence stretches out infinitely, becoming a pianissimo hummed cluster. The organ enters, slowly building a cluster held down with bits of cardboard, à la Palestine, and the organist starts pulling out stops. The choir, meanwhile, starts playing around with fragments of the tune and its hamonization, varying in density and tonal emphasis, getting louder all the while. The organ's bass spends a lot of time osciallating around C rather than E-flat, and when it finally resolves up to E-flat near the end, the effect is pretty impressive at maximum volume, for all its obviousness. My friend Susanne Kujala graciously agreed to play the organ part. Having just recorded a CD on the organ at Kallio, she knows the instrument like the back of her hand, and is so far rocking the house, quite literally.

I still haven't heard it all performed together, as the one and only rehearsal with both singers and organ is tomorrow just before the concert. There are bound to be issues, but the improvisational, box-structure of the choral part, not to mention the total diatonicism of the piece, allows for things to go wrong, even encourages it. I'm looking forward to it in the extreme. I've wanted to write something like this for a long time, and Christmas provides an unmissable opportunity to thumb my nose at critics and colleagues alike, write with no regard to aesthetics or form save making a piece I want to hear, and hopefully make a few people joyful at the same time.

Best wishes for the season, to any and all who read this!

Oh, Canada!

2008-10-02T14:03:00.002+03:00

A brief pause in musical discourse for some political action. For those not in the know, there's an election looming in Canada, which presents an opportunity for house cleaning that it doesn't seem like my fellow citizens are likely to take, at least not in sufficient numbers to have an effect. With the increasing ridiculousness of the party leaders making it harder to take them seriously, and polling in my home district not looking good, I'm left with very little choice as to how to vote. Below, the text in full of the letter to my current MP – scribbled in a hasty e-mail and replete with the redundancies that seem unavoidable in political correspondence – detailing the issue that has taken over my consciousness, and what I view as being the key to repairing our "dysfunctional government", in the words of the current occupant of Sussex Drive:

I am writing as a Canadian currently living abroad of my intent to cast a vote for Mr X in the coming election. As a supporter of the NDP, I have been dismayed by recent actions by that party and its leader, especially the move to exclude Green leader Elizabeth May from the debates. Although they have since reversed their position, the NDP's decision to run an unqualified candidate in my riding makes it impossible for me to cast a vote for them. With current riding polling indicating that the Conservative Party candidate and Mr X are running very closely, it is all the more important that I cast my vote for the Liberal Party to keep the seat from going to the Conservatives.

However, I have made this decision under extreme duress. While I honour Mr X's service in government and agree with him on many issues, he still does not seem to support one major issue that faces the way our country is governed: that of proportional representation in Parliament. Current seat projections indicate that while the Bloc Québécois and Green Party are polling the same numbers, their projected seat count after the election stands at 47 for the Bloc and 0 for the Greens. While extreme, this example clearly illustrates the fundamental unfairness of our first-past-the-post parliamentary system. It is unfair that the views of a minority of regionalist separatists such receive such a huge share of parliamentary power versus the same number of people whose primary concern is the environment. Proportional representation should be the single biggest issue facing 21st century Canada in the area of governmental structure. Proportional representation – as for example practiced in my current country of residence, Finland – is vital in creating broad consensus through coalition government. It furthermore limits the needs of larger parties to cater in their platforms to fringe elements within their own party, such as religious fundamentalists and regionalist spoilers, thereby lessening extremism. It is also fair, in giving the views of supporters of a party a direct, measurable percentage of parliamentary power to speak for them.

Are we to continue suppressing the voices of smaller political parties by this undemocratic practice? It is long past time that the parliamentary structure of Canada was reformed. It should be debated in Parliament, given broad support by MPs and put to a national referendum, where I believe it will find support among the electorate. The current intiative to enact proportional representation in British Columbia would seem to be a first step toward a federal reform. To date, though, only the NDP and Green Party explicitly support proportional representation at the federal level in their platforms. I can only assume that the major parties (Liberal and Conservative) and the Bloc Québécois do not support this reform out of fear of losing power in Parliament, as the current system massively favours them. Nonetheless, it is unconscionable that in the 21st century Canada should continue this undemocratic practice.

While this single issue will not affect my support for Mr X in this election, I would underline that this support is strategic, and not whole-hearted. The issue of proportional representation must be brought forward and given the fair hearing it deserves. Only one of the major parties can accomplish this. A joint motion by the Liberal Party and NDP would surely be the best way. The ensuing debate would and should frame the issue as one of building a stronger democracy. I cannot imagine even the staunchest opponents of such reform casting a public vote against greater fairness in our system of representation. It is the right thing to do, and it is time to do it. I strongly urge Mr X to bring the issue of proportional representation to the Liberal caucus and persuade his fellow Members of Parliament of the justness of this reform. I furthermore urge him to add the issue to his platform and support it whole-heartedly. Until I see such a measure in the Liberal platform, any support of your policies will only be contigent, and in the best interests on the country as a whole, which are not being safeguarded by the current government. Good luck to Mr X; I hope he will prevail and contribute to a fairer, more equally represented Canada.

Sitting quietly, doing nothing

2008-09-26T12:08:00.004+03:00

After a short period of reflection and doubt, I'm back in action this week, with a renewed sense of purpose. Maybe I'm buoyed by the knowledge that, if this composing thing doesn't work out, my proximity to Russia makes me eminently qualified to serve as Vice-President of the U.S. Or maybe my piece is just going better now. At a concert last week, a stopped to chat with a colleague, and he asked me archly, "So what happened?" I must have looked puzzled. "With your piece! I'm dying to know." I find it comforting that, if nothing else, I at least provide some mild entertainment for my peers.

Whatever the case, I feel like it's back on track. As I explained to him, making a public admission that your piece sucks and you intend to scrap it makes it much harder to continue down the wrong path. Taking the piece down to its simplest components had the benefit of revealing something about those materials that I hadn't seen earlier: a fundamental rhythmic incompatibility that was blocking the music's progress. I was trying to reconcile two completely different sets of ideas under a single rhythmic impulse, and it wasn't ever going to work, at least not the way I was doing it. On the one hand, I had a set of very free, floating, quasi-diatonic ideas that, while rhythmic and repetitive, were non-periodic in their repetitiveness. On the other, I had very rigid, diatonic, periodic materials. Although constructed around the same 16th-note pulse, I was never able to make one become the other, because while the rigid material offered the possibility of change, the free materials were completely static, objects that offered no way of turning into anything else, and in combination with the developmental materials, had the effect of the stopping the piece in its tracks every time I introduced them.

This contrast between static ideas and developmental ideas, and the recognition of which is which, is one of the central difficulties of composing for me. Unable to reconcile the two in this piece, I decided to just render all the materials static, to not develop any of them in a linear way. Rather, they're constantly rearranged and juxtaposed differently, changing the perspective on each idea as it encounters another set of objects. The result thus far is like a sonic mobile, with blocks of ideas floating around freely between the two players. They sometimes play together as a sort of meta-guitar, with the Baroque guitar acting as an extension of the theorbo's upper register, sometimes they circle around each other freely. The whole thing has a kind of "suchness" to it – an unhurried, aimless sense of balance, an absence of need to change the materials in any way, their true nature having been revealed – that I find appealing at this moment in time. It turns out that I really wanted to write yet another slow, meditative piece.

I also have the troublesome Baroque guitar at my disposal for the next couple of weeks, so I can get my head around its odd tuning: five courses of strings in a re-entrant tuning (reading top-down) of E-B-G-D-A, where the D and A sound in the same register as the E minor triad. This cluster tuning creates some difficulties in imagining voicings, so having it around to experiment with will make things easier.

In line with the idea of "suchness", I took up a friend's invitation to join him last night at the local Zen center to sit zazen and hear a teisho, a teaching speech, by a visiting sensei. It was a new experience for me, as I'm mainly a solitary practicioner and consider religious expression a deeply private matter, to the point where I found a short group recitation of text mildly alarming. I found it very reassuring to hear some of the things I've been working on in my own time confirmed, and may just continue with the idea of group practice. I definitely enjoyed the feeling of being one person among many sitting in silence, doing nothing.

There's a "suchness" to life here, a feeling that each day, no matter how busy, spirals inevitably toward silence and stillness in the end, even in the city. It's embedded in Finnish culture, the value of silence ("silence is gold"), and conversations have a way of settling into enjoyable, unplanned lulls that don't require breaking. In fall especially, there's a drawing inward that happens – to people, to the earth, to the air – that makes one especially aware of silence and its place in life. (Verlyn Klinkenborg recently wrote a beautiful NY Times piece about silence in boreal Finland.) Some, myself included, would say that this craving for silence and privacy can manifest itself in extremes of social non-interaction, but it's still nice to be part of a culture that places such great weight on the importance of silence as a counterpoint to activity.

Resistance is futile

2008-09-15T22:42:00.002+03:00

I've been trying valiantly to work on a new piece the past few weeks, a shortish duo for Baroque guitar and theorbo, the first notes I've set to paper since finishing a biggish flute and harp piece in June. It's been tremendously difficult for some reason, not least my lack of familiarity with the instruments. I came up with a pretty chain of nine chords that oscillate ambiguously between A minor and B minor... and then proceeded to write some of the dullest music I've ever come up with. Every note has been a trial, and the whole process is getting slower and slower, which means that I've hit the wall with this particular line of inquiry.

One of my old teachers (and what is the study of composition but a years-long accumulation of choice quotes from teachers past?) once told me in an e-mail that mental resistance was a sign that you've taken a wrong turn. I've been banging my head against the wall with this one, hacking out what started as pretty patterns of even, running sixteenth-notes within my chords. The intent was to create a sort of pulsing, minimalist chaconne of seven variations, with an intro and extro of slightly different music.

But it's not working. The rhythmic structure isn't holding together, the patterns aren't that interesting, and the textural difference between the variations just isn't great enough. Sometimes it takes weeks just to get to the point where you admit that an idea isn't viable, or that you just can't get your head around it at the moment, for whatever reason. Maybe you're pressed for time, or the concept isn't as clear as it seemed when you started, or wasn't as developed as it should have been. I have a tendency to overcomplicate things at first, which may have happened here. I also thought I should write something rhythmic for a change, but perhaps the piece wants to be yet another slow, meditative one. Whatever the case, I now need to start over with something simpler and more direct. The chords will probably remain, as they're the one spontaneous element that I feel has real potential. They arose in a moment of improvisation at the keyboard, when I was getting used to the tuning of the instruments, and I have a sense that those chords are the piece, just not in the way that I thought.

My next attempt will be a series of boxes, with the two parts in independent rhythms, floating figures creating a more ambient soundworld. I'd planned on amplifying the players and experimenting with some live reverb and delay, and the technological aspect may take on a greater role. I'm definitely a stranger in a strange land here: unfamiliar instruments, unfamiliar processes, a much simpler harmonic language than anything I've used in the past. The whole experience feels very foreign, far from my usual mode of working, which is actually quite apt. I'm calling the piece The wine-dark sea, after fond memories of my honeymoon trip to Crete last year (see here for the precise moment of inspiration, if that sort of thing holds any appeal). At the time, I wrote about being surprised that the landscape there didn't resonate in a musical way for me. Still, I felt I needed to address some aspect of the experience, and I latched onto the sea as a catalyst, especially its ever-changing shades and densities of blue, which these chords, shifting slowly and gently from one to the next, seemed to evoke. However, what started as a tensely rhythmic piece may become a blissed-out dream recollection of a wonderful trip.

It's also a possibility that I'll return to the original idea and discover that I was right all along, but I doubt it. I went for a walk to clear my head, and thinking the matter through, I realized that my mind had given up on the idea a long time ago, and I've been flogging a dead horse. Despite being more or less back at square one, and with a deadline looming in a few weeks, that decision is a powerful one in the act of composition, a gut-level recognition that tears you away from a mistaken concept and gets you closer to the truth of the material, and thus the piece. There's a sense of liberation in walking away from an idea that, if I just pushed it to its conclusion, would do the job but nothing more, in order to find something special, different, memorable. Within reason, the goal of art should be never to settle for anything less.

Tuesday, Bloody Tuesday

2008-09-14T23:47:00.002+03:00

A sauna with friends, followed by Raclettes; drunk on two bottles of Riesling, a bottle of sherry, some Glenmorangie and that SNL video of Tina Fey playing Sarah Palin, I look at my schedule for Tuesdays this semester and it reads thus:

12:00 METH

15:00 ANAL

18:00 HOL

I'll leave it to you to decide the first two; the last is choir rehearsal. Props to David at The Late Review for the post title. Serious thoughts to follow this week, I promise.

Emerging, composer?

2008-08-04T14:46:00.005+03:00

My summer hiatus ended up being much longer than originally planned. I started a post about compositional process, but ended up not being able to formulate it clearly enough for my own liking, though I'll get it figured out sooner or later.

My new piece for multiple flutes and harp (see post here) sucked up most of my free time and head space in the last couple of weeks of its composition in June, with the final movement causing me no end of headaches; one section in particular had to be redrafted upward of ten times before I was able to trim the fat off it and figure out its function in the form. I finished the score literally hours before getting on an overseas flight. Despite the rush, the July 19th performance went extremely well. Hanna and Lily, as expected, went above and beyond in their preparation, getting right to the heart of the music. As a result, the piece generated a lot of positive attention and good feedback, and I found myself feeling more satisfied with Night, sleep, death and the stars than I have been with any of my previous chamber works. I feel like I'm finally starting to draw together the diatonic/minimalist side of my writing with the more serialist/atonal. Though the extremes were still present in the piece (they tend to be more obvious in my chamber music, where I feel more at liberty to try odd things, than in my orchestral and choral pieces) they came into closer contact than ever before. The setting was perfect, too: a still, clear Nordic summer night, a late concert starting at nine, and an old, resonant church with a star field painted on the white ceiling. Overall, a positive experience. After trimming the fourth movement, in which I lost the thread a little in the rush to finish it, and tweaking the middle section of second to allow more time for harp pedaling, I think I'll have a strong piece.

The real reason for the long silence, though, was an extended trip to the States and Canada to visit friends and family. It had been far too long since I've trod the ground of my home continent, and it was a real pleasure to be there. We started in western Massachusetts, the seat of many fond memories from my university days, in the easygoing company of one of my old professors and her family. From there, Ottawa and the larger part of my immediate family, ending with the Canada Day celebration in the capital, which is always a fun occasion. The last leg brought us, at long last, to the West Coast and Vancouver. I'm slightly ashamed to admit I've never been to that end of Canada before – the furthest west I've seen is the Rockies – but in my defense, it's a big damn country, and you really need a reason to go out there. Luckily, my brother recently moved out to the Pacific coast, providing us with a neat excuse.

Vancouver is a lovely city, laid back, cool, scenic, really an idyllic location. There's a strong sense of being "somewhere else" out there, a vibe unique in Canada. And finally a city with enough green to rival Helsinki! Long walks through the coastal rain forests were simply spectacular, in any weather. We had a three-day side excursion to the wine country of the Okanagan valley, which turned out to be a pleasant surprise. More beautiful country, of course, but the wine, which you don't see a lot of outside the province of British Columbia, was world-class.

We spent most of our time around the smaller, start-up wineries in the south of the region, near the U.S. border, where I tasted a degree of dedication and passion in the winemaking that's hard to come by. Some standout products included the aromatic whites of See Ya Later Ranch, which also produces an excellent Brut sparkling wine with a yeasty, buttered-toast nose. Their Riesling and Pinot Gris (blended with a tiny amount of Gewürztraminer) were especially memorable. Burrowing Owl, in addition to its highly photogenic namesake and sharp, well-run restaurant, produces the best single-varietal Cabernet Franc I've ever had. Blue Mountain's refined, age-worthy Pinot Noir, Gehringer Brothers' powerful Riesling icewine and a Gewürz from Wild Goose were also eagerly packed for the trip home, but pride of place went to Golden Mile's incredible "Black Arts" Syrah, blended with Viogner in the Rhône style, simply the best wine I tasted there, perhaps the best I've had all year. The aftertaste of dried fruits and spice went on and on for minutes, always developing, always bringing new layers to my attention. Truly remarkable! Even in the slicker, more corporate north of the valley, where the wines had a designed-by-committee feel (though Mission Hill earns significant points for beauty of location), there were rare finds, the most notable being the lovely light, fresh, low-alcohol icewines at Sumac Ridge. Even amid such travel opulence I found it hard to turn off my irony filter, noting that all the wineries seemed to be named after some beautiful, ancient feature of the landscape that was plowed under to make room for vineyards. Oh well. If I ever move there, they can put me in commercials for B.C. wine; there would never be a reason to buy a bottle made out of province. Forget Napa!

The visit was all too short, and I sincerely hope to make it back to that part of the world again very soon. However, the North called, and home we returned. Truth be known, I found myself feeling homesick for Finland, which is a first. I've put down roots here, both personally and professionally, and despite the difficulties inherent of living in a faraway place as a foreigner, Finland is very much my physical and spiritual home. It seems to have become such without my noticing, too. Go figure.

And now comes a time of transition. My thesis, and with it my degree, is spiraling toward completion, though whether it's an upward or downward spiral remains to be seen. My three-year teaching contract at the Sibelius Academy came to an end this summer, and although I'll be continuing in an adjunct capacity for the forseeable future, my focus will turn toward composition as principal activity. Following a year of significant career developments, I now know more or less what I'll be doing with my composing time for the next three years and change (more about that later, as things become official). It's all terribly exciting, not to mention a little frightening, which is why I find comfort in hedgehogs. (Whatnow?) Yes, you read right. One of my Nordic fancies is this lowly creature, unremarkable to locals, but thoroughly enchanting for foreigners who grew up without them, in much the same way as my wife loves raccoons. The hedgehog has become something of a totem animal or spirit guide for me in my years here, rarely sighted in the city, but deeply affecting when seen. Quietly fascinating, calm in a paradoxically high-strung way, they counsel patience (try out-waiting a bundled hedgehog sometime to see what I mean), and I'm unfailingly reassured by their sporadic appearances, made to feel as if whatever's on my mind will work itself out. I've seen them more frequently this summer, and hope they bring me good tidings.

A small milestone I failed to notice is the first anniversary of this blog. I've been remiss in writing, partly from lack of time, partly from a desire to figure out exactly what this space is for me and my work. One thing I've resolved to do with my writing from this point is to be more proactive in my topics and less reactive. It's always much easier to write a riposte to someone else's thoughts than to take the time to formulate a positive, meaningful discourse on one's own views. Part of the reason for this is that much of what I do proceeds from a highly intuitive sense of "rightness" that's difficult to articulate in a conscious artistic credo. However, if this blog is to have any meaning at all, I believe it must be as a contributor of positive, informative thought about the process of composition, and about the role of artistic intuition in creation. There are plenty of blogs of the reactive kind, so I'll strive to do less of that this year.

Thanks to all who have stayed with me this far, and I hope I'll justify your reading time into the future!

Post-North America visit reading:
Kyle Gann, Music Downtown
John Luther Adams, Winter Music
Maria Peura, trans. Hackston, At the edge of light

Listening:
John Luther Adams: Earth and the Great Weather
Sigur Rós: Med sud i eyrum...
Charlemagne Palestine: Schlingen-Blängen & Strumming Music
Neutral Milk Hotel In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
Le Vent du Nord: Les Amants du Saint-Laurent

The Age of Aquarius

2008-05-21T13:14:00.007+03:00

In reading Mark Swed's recent piece on tough times calling for thorny music, I'm kind of at a loss as to how to react – beyond my initial gut expression of, "Grr, arggghhh, Hulk SMASH!!!" I agree with certain of his criticisms – like the overprogramming of new orchestral music that too closely resembles old repertoire in the harmonic and gestural sense – and disagreeing violently with certain other statements, which may have more to do with Swed's wording than his actual meaning. For instance, he writes, "When times get tough, as in America during the Great Depression and the Second World War, music gets soft. The times, surveys say, are once again tough, and they're likely to stay that way. A sustained period of stylistic regression is thus a possibility."

Forgetting some tough, strident works from the WWII period, like Barber's Symphony no. 2, to stay within the symphonic genre, Swed's statement, at least as written, upholds the notion that artistic "progress" (whatever that is) is linear, and that change in art follows a scientific line of development based on previous advances, and not that the outward trappings of an artwork are just as subject to the whims of fashion and public taste as clothing and vernacular speech. Not that I think he's saying new music should be rooted in modernism and complexity exclusively – in fact, he goes out of his way to say New Complexity is done, what else ya got? – but it's hard to escape the historical-inevitability tone of the Boulez-Stockhausen generation in phrasing it this way, and comes off as minimizing the importance of other trends in classical music concurrent to modernism, and their relation to the society of their time.

The main object of his article seems to be the American New Romantics, as exemplified by what he labels the "Atlanta School", meaning people like Jennifer Higdon, Christopher Theofanidis and Michael Gandolfi.

"The only thing that allows such squishy music to be called modern, however, is a limited eclecticism, one that says different styles need not conflict, just so long as none of them resemble Modernist rebellion. Getting along is the value system. Minimalism and the New Romanticism and folk styles and various aspects of pop are all welcome in the mix. The Atlanta orchestra takes pride in sending its listeners home happy, having been given a big sonic hug and assured everything will be all right."

Aside from the fact that there's nothing wrong in wanting music to perform this function, how exactly does this work not reflect its times? Is it unreasonable for people facing difficult times to want something beautiful in their lives? Not that artists and art institutions should cater to this whim exclusively, but why shouldn't there be room for this type of work? I generally prefer superhero movies to big, serious epics (Iron Man was fantastic), because I like to be entertained by film. It's my one area of cultural consumption where my tastes are unashamedly populist/commercial. It's not that I don't want to be exposed to the grimness of No Country for Old Men or There Will be Blood, it's just that with limited time for this particular activity, I prefer lighter fare. I don't think it makes me less intelligent or blind to the reality of the world; it just means that I, like many other people, need some escapism now and then. An artist's production is not, cannot be the full measure of their engagement in the world. My work may not overtly reflect my attitude toward the state of the world, but it doesn't mean I'm not hella outspoken about it in other parts of my life. My work is just that: one part of my life. A major one, to be sure, but no more than that. Would we measure people in other fields by the same standard just because of their career choices? No. So why are artists somehow held to the higher moral yardstick, bearing some vague responsibility to enlighten their audiences to some great Truth?

Furthermore – and to go beyond Swed's article – in terms of art being reflective of its times, I think there's a sharp line to be drawn between artworks that trade largely on the rhetoric and gestural languages of the past (imitating the rhetoric of, say, a Rachmaninov piano concerto or a Shostokovich symphony), music so firmly rooted in its models that it sounds second-hand, and music which simply builds on that tradition. For the record, I'm not a big fan of Higdon, generally like Theofanidis, and know nothing about Gandolfi. What I've heard of their work makes it simply a bit conservative in my mind, but it definitely sounds as if it couldn't have been written in any other time period. Even the hypothetical imitation Rachmaninov and Shostakovich have their place, if that's what people in a certain locality want to hear. For better or worse, art can't help being of its time in one way or another. A good friend of mine who runs classical and jazz programming for an NPR station is fond of saying, "If it's out there, and successful, it must mean someone wants it." Which is not to say, again, that consumers of art should be fed on an exclusive, unchallenging diet, but that the fact that this type of work is out there suggests a need for it in the zeitgeist, on both the creative and receptive ends. And really, what's wrong with something whose primary purpose is to be beautiful and make people feel good? It seems disingenuous to suggest that all art should strive for more than that, when so noble a goal is being accomplished already. Going beyond that is an option, not an obligation. I don't for a minute believe these artists are taking the easy route; they're doing what makes sense to them. I firmly reject the notion that an artist's – or an audience's – depth of engagement with the world and society in which they live can be gauged by something as simple as artistic taste, especially when that taste is calibrated along the ever-sliding scale of so-called "complexity".

On top of that, just because a certain stylistic trait isn't exhibited in an artist's work doesn't mean it hasn't been considered. In all likelihood, it has, and been put aside as something that doesn't fit that artist's way or working or thinking. Ultimately, art has no particular responsibility to reflect any one aspect of the tenor of the times. I could just as easily use the same argument against someone who insists that music should only be beautiful and make people feel good. If there's one thing we can learn from Beethoven, the example par excellence of the artist as individual, it's not that artists should be free to innovate and shock and challenge their audience, it's that artists should be free to say what they have to say, period. In practice, whether I like a piece of art or not, I find that it all has a place somewhere, whether it's gritty and hard-hitting, reflective of a troubled time, quiet and meditative, forcing one to pay very close attention, or just escapist fun. As a practicing artist, I lay claim to all aesthetics and languages, but reserve the right not address them all in my reflection of the world around me. Michael Tippett, in his wonderful philosophical ramble Moving into Aquarius, has a quote that has resonated with me since first reading it as a teenager, and I think it's apt in this context:

"I have been writing music for forty years. During those years there have been huge and world-shattering events in which I have been inevitably caught up. Whether society has felt music valuable or needful I have gone on writing because I must. And I know that my true function within a society which embraces all of us, is to continue a tradition, fundamental to our civilization, which goes back into pre-history and will go forward into the unknown future. This tradition is to create images from the depths of the imagination and to give them form whether visual, intellectual or musical. For it is only through images that the inner world communicates at all. Images of the past, shapes of the future. Images of vigour for a decadent period, images of calm for one too violent. Images of reconciliation for worlds torn by division. And in an age of mediocrity and shattered dreams, images of abounding, generous, exuberant beauty."

Face/Off

2008-05-10T12:43:00.002+03:00

I'd like to draw attention to an article on NewMusicBox in which Aspen Festival president Alan Fletcher wades into the murky, like-dislike waters of post-tonal music and emerges more or less unscathed. I do question his attitude of doubt toward the actuality of the mid/late-century hegemony of hard-core atonality in Western music, but he makes some extraordinarily well-worded points about some of the issues I've been trying, and mostly failing, to articulate here. His final paragraph in particular stands out:

"Some have a wish for music to be primarily an antidote to existential loneliness. When music fills this role, it's lovely, but the idea that this is music's primary function is so limiting as to be just bathetic. Music is a powerful, temporal art, and it needs to fulfill all the functions of art—to challenge, to celebrate, to excite intellectually and spiritually. To draw an ineffectual line called 'tonality' in the sand, and demand that none shall pass, will not work."

Reading this piece brought a certain comfort on a day when I finished a movement of my resolutely near-atonal, ruminative, distant flute-harp duo, and sketched the pulsing, pop-harmony driven coda of my eventual horn concerto. Although this back-and-forth between high consonance and middling dissonance still bugs me, especially when consecutive pieces seem to pull toward the extremes rather than a middle-ground synthesis, I've gotten used to it being a part of the way I think, and worry about it slightly less. I think the turning point, as with many of these things, came in the form of a single sentence from a composer I took a lesson with a couple of years ago, who faced similar issues in his music: "I gave up trying to ask "Why?" years ago. I figure that if all these different things come out of my head and feel right and honest, there must be some connection there. It's just not up to me to find it."

May Day menu

2008-04-30T13:43:00.005+03:00

It's Vappu in Finland, or May Day, during which the entire country becomes a huge prub crawl. The results aren't usually pretty, especially when it's this nice out, but it's always interesting. In that spirit, and due to the lovely weather, a wine dinner menu for friends tomorrow:

-Freixenet Extra Brut Cava with Crème de cassis (aka poor man's Kir Royale)
-Green salad with goat cheese, pine nuts, pears and wasabi-ginger vinaigrette (Bründlmayr Grüner Veltliner '06)
-Chicken sauté with green olives and preserved lemon, ratatouille and couscous (Clos de Coulaine Savennières '01 – opened a day earlier)
-Meditation: Camille Giroud Volnay Premier Cru Champans '78(!), brought by a wildly generous friend
-Yogurt panna cotta with winter figs and honey (Tállyai Muskotályos Aszú Tokaji '95)
-Cheese & fruit plate (Gustave Lorentz Kantzlerberg Riesling Grand Cru '99)

Hauskaa vappua!

"Doin' it like a lady..."

2008-04-28T09:36:00.001+03:00

In the category of badly misheard lyrics, via an old friend:

From the birds

2008-04-24T14:57:00.006+03:00

I should be working on tomorrow's Mahler lecture, but the sun is shining, the air is warm (for Finland), and my exercise-starved body, after weeks of work, illness and fouled-up scheduling, was screaming for some movement. So I took myself outside for an hour or so to participate in the curious local pastime of Nordic walking. It's ridiculous to behold from the outside, a formerly deeply held prejudice to which I admit shamefully. Since nothing I ever say seems to convince people of the worth of the activity, all I can offer in its defense is to swear that if you try it, you'll soon find yourself hooked. It's a quick, easy workout that can be done close to home and still leave time for other pursuits during the day.

It's made easier in my neighborhood by the close proximity of Helsinki's crown jewel, the Keskuspuisto, or Central Park, which should be more famous than its New World namesake, as far as I'm concerned. Helsinki may not be a breathtakingly lovely city in that cozy, Disney-ish way one expects European cities to be – indeed, it has more than its fair share of cookie-cutter suburban nightmare housing and high-rise Hell-on-earth. It may not be the most happening , vibrant place, either, but it is unpretentious and above all, it is a green city, with more trees, parks and wilderness areas than any city I've ever been to, perhaps more than any city in the world. The Finnish approach to residential building, by and large, is to leave as much existing green around buildings as possible, instead of cutting everything down, putting up houses and planting those funny little front yard trees that never seem to grow thereafter. "Park" is a misleading term as applied to Helsinki's: it's barely controlled wilderness with miles upon miles of bike paths and ski trails and public gardening plots, all of which are heavily used by the populace.

Spring is my favorite time to go there, what with ample signs of life, of the earth waking up. The tiny, colorful wildflowers that carpet the Nordic woodlands this time of year are starting to appear; the huge forest anthills are teeming with movement, which means I'll have to break out the bug spray to keep the critters from overrunning the house. (I'm all for sanctity of life, but it kind of goes out the window when you come home at 1 a.m. and find your studio crawling with hundreds of winged queen ants.) I even saw a bumblebee. Best of all, birds are singing again, or more species than the few that winter over in Finland. My absolute favorite, if not the most original, is the blackbird. Its song, more than any other, is the sound of spring. Hearing the first one is an irrefutable sign that winter is ending, and fills me with hope – mercifully, after the non-winter we've had. Many other species are returning, including chaffinches, which are among the prettiest to look at and listen to – although the hands-down winner in that category is the rarely seen, migratory Bohemian waxwing – and will soon be followed by that virtuoso of the Nordic woods, the thrush nightingale. They're the familiar sounds of life here, and of changes in the seasons, so much so many of their songs found their way into the tape part of my choir piece Shiki last year – based on the stunning, crystal-clear field recordings of ornithologist and birdwatching tour guide Hannu Jännes, who provided the soundtracks used on the web page I linked to above.

Listening to birds always gets me thinking about music, natch. One of the pieces I come back to every year in my 20th-century analysis class is the first movement of Messiaen's Quatuor pour la fin du temps, "Liturgie de cristal". It's a fun exercise for students in analyzing independently structured parts, from the rigidly isorhythmic piano and cello parts, to the limited, recurrent motivic material of the violin, and the free, almost improvised clarinet. Once we get past that layer, it's always productive to talk about the relationship between the musical characters present in the movement. The most eye-catching one is, of course, the dialogue between the two "soloist" players, the violin and clarinet. There's a joyous cacophony to their interaction, one which I've always found attractive, but didn't fully understand until an experience in impromptu birdwatching a couple of years ago.

My wife and I were taking an evening walk near our old apartment when we witnessed something extraordinary: two male nightingales perched out in plain sight, both singing at top volume, unbelievably loud for such small creatures. (One nested next to our bedroom window in 2003, which is when we discovered that "nightingale" is not just a clever name. We got very little sleep that summer.) Nightingales are famously hard to sight. They're very nondescript-looking, small and grey, and blend in well with the tree canopies where they hide. They tend to start singing at twilight, and if you come within about twenty feet of them, they shut up, so seeing two of them out in the open is rare.

The thing about the nightingale's gorgeous, highly complex song is that it's a territorial marker. You never hear two of them singing within hearing distance of one another. You can often tell the relative age of a bird by how long, non-periodic and complex his song is. In this case, one of the birds was clearly older, and a much more experienced singer. It would pick up elements of the younger bird's much simpler song, incorporate them, riff on them, then vastly embellish them in long, cadenza-like phrases, interrupting his opponent brusquely and drowning him out. At one point, the older bird flew into a pile of underbrush left by city park managers a couple of weeks earlier. I thought he'd just been hiding from us, as we'd gotten very close at that point. But I realized after a moment that he was using the pile of dried branches as a makeshift resonator to amplify his song. It was a fascinating display of territorial competition. Sure enough, the older bird's song was the only one we heard after a couple of days of this. The younger one, clearly out of his league, had moved on.

It wasn't until months later, when working through the Messiaen again with my class that I figured out the fundamental quality of the relationship between the birdlike violin and clarinet parts: one of competition or territoriality. I'd been accustomed to thinking of chamber music as a participatory, communal activity, where all the parts contribute to a unified whole at one point or another. But that doesn't seem to be what Messiaen was aiming at in this movement. Not only are the parts structured according to four completely unrelated systems, it would seem that two of the characters aren't really cooperating at all, they're trying to outclass each other. It's a difference in conception that adds an extra psychological layer to the music, both as a listener and, I imagine as a performer. I'd be curious to find out whether performers of this piece conceive of it in this way, or if any research has been done into this type of relationship in Messiaen's music, other than just cataloging transcriptions of birdsong. With the Messiaen centenary in full swing, I may have just figured out what I'll be doing with my summer.

Decisions, decisions

2008-04-17T11:20:00.008+03:00

With my teaching semester winding down, I'm putting down sketches for a piece I'm calling Night, sleep, death and the stars (after Whitman) for multiple flutes and harp which, counting an overlong student effort for solo alto flute, makes this my fifth piece casting the flute in a prominent role. It's the instrument I've returned to the most often, though there's really no special reason for this focus, given that I'm an ex-horn player. The flute has just always seemed to be in my life in one way or another, either by being friends with a flutist, dating one, or discovering an old instrument in a closet of a room I was renting and messing around on it, trying out a few sounds. I've learned enough fingerings over the years that it's become the only instrument aside from the piano that I can sort of hack my way through my own pieces on, so I have a better-than-average understanding of how it works compared with, say, the bassoon.

One of the truisms of being a composer that I've discovered in recent years is that if you manage to write a successful piece for an instrument or ensemble, people have a maddening tendency to keep asking you to write for it, again and again. And one feels flattered, of course, and obliged to accept, no matter how inspired, or not, one may be to write for it. It's happened to me with choir music, and again recently with the flute. In such cases, I have to take some fairly extraordinary steps to keep things fresh for myself, finding ways to make the experience new, and to avoid retracing my steps.

This flute/harp duo proved particularly tough in the conceptual stages, though, in that a couple of years ago I wrote a piece called Sketches before a storm for flute and kantele, the zither-like Finnish national instrument, which for all intents and purposes works exactly like the harp: it's a diatonic instrument on which chromatic pitches are provided by tuning levers (instead of pedals), so if you move the C lever to C#, all the Cs change. It's a ferociously difficult instrument to write for. It's frequently impossible to follow your ear, because the instrument's technique may not allow a certain harmonic shift, or at least not without audible pitch bends, which sound extremely cool, but only when the gesture is composed in. The fact that the tuning changes are done with the hands instead of the feet adds an extra wrinkle, so that the retunings need to be choreographed into the music in order to allow the player time to execute them. (There's nothing more distracting than watching a kantele player's hands flail back and forth wildly as they play very slow, quiet, ruminative music that's too chromatic for the instrument.)

Nevertheless, had that commission been for flute and harp, I would very likely have written the same piece, with a few minor changes. I've even been thinking of making a flute/harp version of it, what with the number of kantele players in the world being somewhat limited. The question for me in this new piece is how to keep from repeating myself in the most literal way. Facing this kind of challenge, it's helpful to make a little rulebook for myself before starting, something that limits my options in certain areas and forces me to think outside the box; that, or add something unusual to a familiar texture to make me think harder about the choices I'm making. For example, in my last two big choir pieces, I added tape and percussion parts, respectively, which helped enormously in keeping me from falling back on the same set of tricks.

In this case, I'm using both specific rules to guide the composition as well as new elements. The harp is a different instrument from the kantele in many ways, much louder, wider range, etc, but the texture itself is essentially the same. Therefore, the flute part was the logical locus of conceptual changes. The first decision I came to, in consultation with Hanna Kinnunen, the flutist, was to use several members of the flute family for coloristic variety; she especially asked me to give her an excuse to play her new alto and bass flutes, a pair of instruments so sexy-sounding they should be illegal. With the four distinct images in the title, it was an easy leap to include the piccolo and write four separate pieces, one for each member of the family.

The next idea was to treat each image in a way that purposely goes against what, to me, at any rate, would seem the most obvious "depiction". The "sleep" movement is going to be super-fast and very twitchy; the alto flute is the most timbrally similar to the harp in its middle register, and at fast tempi, unison canonic music should sound especially good, making it hard to tell who's playing what at times. The registral implications of "death" and "stars" are reversed, with the piccolo invoking the former and the bass flute the latter. We also decided that the higher the flute, the less virtuosic the music would be, so that the piccolo movement consists exclusively of quiet, long tones, and the bass flute piece will be ridiculously virtuosic, replete with extended techniques. These aren't going to be quiet, distant stars, but more like a Van Gogh-style depiction, burning hot and surrealistically exaggerated. The C flute of "night" won't be allowed to make any conventional sounds, only extended ones involving voice, key clicks, whistle tones, etc.

Mixing it up in this way is making the initial stages of composition a lot of fun, cataloging sounds, putting phrases together, coming up with different relationships between the instruments: registral, gestural, etc. It's more like generating material in an electronic studio than paper-and-pencil composition at the moment. In response to the variegated flute sounds, the harp part is becoming the static element in the piece, the unifying agent across all four movements. (Despite all this back-patting talk of "innovation", I have no doubt the flute part will sound a lot like its great-grandfather, Debussy's Syrinx. It always seems to come back to Syrinx with the flute.)

It helps to be working all this out with two of the best musicians of my acquaintance. The harpist, Lily-Marlene Puusepp – in addition to having the greatest name, like, ever – is a consummate experimenter, ready for anything, and convinced that nothing is impossible to play. This is the first time we're working together on a new piece, though she played in the orchestra for my violin concerto a couple of years ago. Although this is my first piece specifically for her, Hanna and I go way back insofar as my time in Finland is concerned, to her giving the European premiere of my flute/piano duo Ash-Wednesday in 2003. I've been blessed over the years to write for some truly excellent flutists who have steadily increased my knowledge of the instrument and its technical and expressive capabilities, but Hanna just gets my music, on an intuitive level that's very rare in composer-performer relationships. It's been that way from the very start; I hardly ever have to tell her anything about how to play something, which tone color to use, articulation, whatever. It all just comes out pretty much exactly the way I imagined, and frequently better.

I'm lucky, I think, to have this in my life. At one time or another, I think composers tend to find someone whose sound and musicianship embody their ideal for that instrument; indeed, composer catalogs are littered with streams of pieces written for the same performers. Even if you do compose for someone else, you're still writing for your favorite flutist in a way. My concept of flute sound is raw, airy, almost vibrato-less, steely and tough, yet transparent, light, almost like a shakuhachi. It probably comes from my playing it badly for years, and this type of sound isn't widely favored in flute-playing circles, based on my anecdotal observations. Imagine my delight, then, when I met a player who took those very elements, those fringe characteristics, and made them positives, whose core musical values were exactly mine. We'll be collaborating on two other projects over the next couple of years, and far from dreading the prospect of returning to the same instrument time and again, I'm looking forward to it.

Strange bedfellows

2008-04-15T11:54:00.005+03:00

Excellent article in the Vancouver Sun about the CBC Radio Orchestra fiasco, bringing up some very pertinent issues, and breaking down the CRO's budget to a cost of $0.02 per Canadian, which is revealing in the extreme. On this matter, if the comments sections following many such recent articles are to be believed, I find myself in bed with a class of people whom I'd normally decry, that quasi-jihadist sect of snobs who loudly insist that classical music is the only legitimate musical art, and everything else is garbage. That argument, it goes without saying, hurts the CRO's cause more than it helps, and I have no doubt that most of these people would be quick to denounce the greater part of the music I and other living composers write as tuneless, formless crap. And yet, we're forced onto the same side by this issue.

Anyway, Janet Danielson of the Canadian League of Composers asks some tough questions about the CBC's new classical policy, or lack thereof, but the lines that most stuck in my mind were the following:

"Have we really reached the point where to voice a preference for classical music is to disenfranchise oneself?

Then there is the question of genre. The CBC website breezily assures us, "we'll be drawing from a broader, richer and diverse spectrum of music: classical, jazz, folk, world, R & B, singer-songwriter and roots.

Breaking down music into categories of genre is not as clear-cut and fair-minded as it might seem.

Why have "classical" as a single genre -- why not Renaissance polyphony, 19th century art song, French baroque opera, serial music, and minimalism, just to name a few?"

The CBC's much-touted (by the CBC) new aim of being more inclusive of other genres flips the supposed elitism of classical listeners by cramming centuries of musical art into a catch-all category, making it much easier to dismiss. To be honest, I was never entirely thrilled with the classical programming on the CBC, or many NPR stations in the US, for that matter, with their broad over-reliance on 18th- and 19th-century warhorses and kleinmeistermusik from the same period. Any modern/contemporary music you'd hear in time slots before 10 p.m. tended to be "safe", i.e. highly accessible. My "classical" listening tastes are overwhelmingly centered on music from before 1600 and after 1900, arguably the least represented periods in classical radio programming. My listening preferences are/were not really being met, yet if I argue to preserve classical programming, am I trying to suppress other genres in the eyes of the CBC brass?

I'm not a connoisseur of many genres outside my field, though I do try to listen to – and understand – a lot of different kinds of music. I'll freely admit that I couldn't tell you the difference between folk and roots. That probably makes me elitist in the eyes of some, though I prefer the term "specialist". But what is the lumping of minimalism, French baroque opera and Renaissance polyphony into the same category of "classical" music, then shoving it aside in favor of other, much more specifically defined genres within popular music, but the same ignorance and snobbery in reverse?

Uselessness

2008-04-07T10:07:00.002+03:00

"[…] wildness has been perceived as a dangerous force that confounds the order-bringing pursuits of human culture and agriculture. Wildness, according to this story, is cognate with wastefulness. Wild places resist conversion to human use, and they must therefore be destroyed or overcome."

–Robert MacFarlane
The Wild Places

A bang or a whimper?

2008-04-06T17:12:00.002+03:00

This isn't going to be one of those posts about the supposedly sacrosanct position of classical music in Western society. I don't have the time or energy to mount an argument as to why classical music should get public financing at the expense of other forms of music, because honestly, I can't rationalize that disparity, except to say that I think it's important to keep creating big-budget, large-community, unprofitable art like classical music, just because we can, and that very act of making something that is of no real use or benefit to the commercial market is a powerful statement about our values, and our value as a species.

However, when a national broadcaster abdicates a significant part of its mandate to support the culture of its country on specious grounds of profitability, the gloves have to come off. The CBC's ridiculous decision to terminate North America's last remaining radio orchestra is a final, public slap in the face to Canadian music from an anti-intellectual, anti-cultural government that is trying to stamp out creativity in my native country. The CBC's new management have been systematically shutting down outlets for classical music, especially contemporary, for going on two years now. Radio shows of broad popularity have been cancelled, classical music moved to inaccessible late-night time slots, and now they cut an orchestra with an infinitesimal budget, part of whose stated mission is contribute to Canadian culture by spurring the creation of new music by Canadian composers. The CBC Young Composers' Awards, which the CRO served admirably for years in the orchestral category, died a quiet, shameful death a couple of years ago, leaving emerging Canadian composers with one less high-profile way of getting some attention.

Read this, and note the bureaucratic doublespeak in the CBC mouthpiece's answer, rife with material from the Department of Redundancy Department. "Existing music organizations"? To my knowledge, the CRO is an existing music organization, or was until a few days ago. This is not a budget decision, it's a political one originating with the philistines in both the CBC management and the government that appointed them, yet another shot across the bow in a long line of attempts to eliminate quality and originality from Canadian art, thereby reducing the demand for it, and providing grounds for cutting off funding. Be sure to follow up your reading with this, a run-down of other attempts to stifle artistic and intellectual diversity. (I particularly love Bill C-10, an attempt to legislate the censoring of homegrown film productions by revoking tax credits, while allowing foreign productions to do whatever they please, as long as they spend their money north of 49.) Protest this. Write letters. Sign the petition to save the CRO. Make some goddamn noise, and vote these uninformed bumpkins out of office at the next opportunity.

I have yet to fully process why this single issue makes me so angry, given my geographical and temporal remove from Canada. I've been away for a long time, I'm comfortably settled in Finland, and love the work I get to do here, and the local community that has accepted and supported me. But Canada has always been, and always will be my ultimate home. I will not argue that classical music holds some inviolable, all-hallowed place in our culture. It was always a tradition planted in shallow soil in North America, and constantly under threat as a result. But in Canada, it's a small, thriving industry, one that could blossom into a powerhouse like Finland's given the right attention and funding. To see our national broadcaster abrogate its responsibilities so flagrantly, to watch the government my countrymen voted for trying to dismantle my art form piece by piece, makes me deeply sad.

The Eagle has landed

2008-03-19T15:02:00.003+02:00

Without a doubt the coolest thing I've ever owned.

Sunday dinner redux

2008-03-16T16:51:00.003+02:00

More to come about Mahler in a day or two, but for now, a slow-food menu for friends:

-Cauliflower and Jerusalem artichoke soup with bacon, black pepper and olive oil ('06 Sancerre "Les Baronnes", Henri Bourgeois)
-Braised lamb shank in red wine reduction sauce, chèvre risotto with thyme, roasted Brussels sprouts ('01 Château d'Aurilhac Cru Bourgeois)
-Cheese & fruit plate
-Lemon custard tart with wildflower honey whipped cream ('05 Lenz Moser Trockenbeerenauslese)

It's a bit odd to match Sancerre with creamy soup, but I quite like the contrast between the stony, acidic wine and the smoky smoothness of the soup.

Laid bare in the deep midnight

2008-03-14T01:57:00.002+02:00

I'm up far too late for a school night, alight with a fire I haven't felt in a very long time. Against my usual habit as a recovering insomniac, I was doing some late-night listening in preparation for tomorrow's lecture on Mahler's 3rd, with accompanying digressions into Klimt and, Unnamed Deity help me, a bit of Nietzsche. I'd intended to just brush up some ideas about the Midnight Song movement, I ended up going right through the last half of the symphony.

And I am broken by it. Shattered. Wrecked.

Some unseen force has been holding me back from working on my thesis. Inertia? Fear? Who knows? But struggling under the weight of teaching this massive topic, all the details, the amount of history nobody can hope to master in a single semester, and at the end of my degree no less, I think I'd lost sight of why I wanted to do it in the first place. But listening to the close of that radiant Adagio movement, I find myself brought full circle by the sheer humanity of Mahler's utterance, reminded why I wanted to be a composer in the first place: in the hope of being able to touch people the way he did, to someday make that kind of contact with a listener, be it someone known to me or not. Beyond the biographical minutiae, the politics surrounding Mahler's life and music, the analysis of his character and ample personal flaws, the raging egotism, behind all that there's a soul so great, so all-embracing, harboring a love of the world so vast that he couldn't contain it, had to let it out in such a glorious effusion. For me, such music stands as a gauntlet thrown down, a line drawn in the sand for all who dare participate in this art form, as if Mahler were saying, "I dare you, double dare you, triple dog dare you to give so much of yourself."

A century on, I'm not naïve enough to think that one can return to that language and hope to find it fresh. Much as I'm a fan of George Rochberg's music, the slow movement of the 3rd Quartet is a look back, not forward, and as such doesn't register with the same emotional force as Mahler's Adagio. And yet, I'm forced to wonder if, over the course of the last hundred years, we as composers have abdicated a significant part of our emotional palette to whatever technical and aesthetic ideologies grabbed our attention. Is it still possible to express oneself in such direct emotional terms, with utter sincerity, without sounding bombastic, nostalgic or merely empty? I hope so, because if I should ever manage to write something so monumentally touching as the end of Mahler's 3rd, I'd consider my life's work done, and done well.

And now, to bed.

Concert life

2008-03-09T16:35:00.004+02:00

For whatever reason, there's been a dearth of live music in my life lately. Either there hasn't been much to interest me in Helsinki this season, or I just haven't felt like going out. Whatever the cause, I've made up for it in spades this past weekend. It started with a concert of music for Finnish kantele on Friday, in which my good friend Juhani Nuorvala participated in an improv piece for microtonally tuned kantele and synth, with live electronics. Lovely music, very restful, and redolent of Brian Eno's Music for Airports. My only complaint, which I voiced to him, was that I wanted it to last all evening instead of just fifteen-ish minutes.

Later that same night, I ended up at a concert of Czech music for strings put on by players from the Finnish Radio Symphony. I'd gone along with my friend David, of The Late Review, nominally to hear Janacek's String Quartet no. 1. It was lovely, as expected, and I can think of no other piece quite like it, the way it just seems to start in the middle of a drama, with no preamble or context. The real discovery of the night, though, was Erwin Schulhoff's String Sextet, a predominantly quiet, slow, obsessive, repetitive, magnificently bleak piece that took my breath away. I've usually liked Schulhoff's music when I've encountered it in the past, but have tended to find myself entertained rather than gripped. Knowing the composer's eventual fate, it was easy to picture the Sextet as his final utterance before being taken away to the concentration camps. Imagine my surprise, then, to discover it was written in the 2os, around the same time as the other Schulhoff piece on the program, a fun, if not especially deep set of dances for string quartet, light years away in mood. Glancing over the available recordings, I'm amazed the Sextet isn't more popular. Clearly a major statement, one that will hold up to repeated listening, I think.

Just this afternoon, I ended up at the Finnish première of Rhys Chatham's Two Gongs, in a performance held in an art gallery downtown. It was an impressive piece, all the more so that Chatham wrote at in his teens. Such an idea would never have even occurred to me at that age, and I wouldn't have seen the sense in it even if I'd heard the piece back then. Leaving aside the various problems I had with it as a composition, most of them having to do with the teeth-rattling dynamic levels, it was phenomenal. The waves of sound emanating from the gongs made a hard-hitting, physical impact. The semi-randomized patterns of harmonics and pulses resulting from various playing techniques were endlessly absorbing. Even jamming my fingers into my ears to preserve my hearing produced fascinating textural results. Overall, I'm glad I went. And yet…

It should have been the perfect environment for this music: a high ceilinged, resonant chamber with plenty of natural light filtering in, a few chairs for the audience, and some pretty paintings hanging on the walls. But the performance was endlessly marred by the attitude of the museum-goers who weren't listening to the concert. People, mostly middle-aged and older, strode around the gallery where the concert took place, looking at paintings, fingers stuffed theatrically in their ears, even deliberately crossing the space between the audience and the performers, staring us down with defiant, fuck-you expressions on their faces, as if to challenge our willingness to sit there listening to this horrible music, saying "we paid to get into this exhibit and see these paintings, and we're not going to acknowledge that there's any kind of performance going on, so deal with it." They'd leave the room and immediately begin having loud conversations just outside the open doorway. It made it impossible to focus on those slowly-evolving, iridescent patterns, which was the entire point of the piece.

I'm not one of those people who insists on absolute silence in concerts. I generally like quiet for performances, and hate when people fidget, rustle papers, or start clapping before the last note of a piece has finished ringing, but I'll willingly revise my expectations of quiet, depending on the occasion and setting. In a museum space with open exhibits, one can't expect or demand total silence, or require people to stay still. Two Gongs isn't going to be everyone's cup of tea, and one should expect and allow for walk-outs, as well as encourage people to walk in from adjacent rooms if they're interested. To their credit, the gallery did post warning signs about the extreme volume, and requesting a minimum of noise for the barely hour-long duration of the concert. But it truly was ridiculous to be part a group of people trying to have an experience, with another group of people who don't understand that experience doing their level best to keep us from enjoying it, for whatever reason. If I don't like a concert, and can get out without making a big scene, I'll do so. But to disrupt the proceedings for people who are clearly into it, because of some animus I might have against the music? Boorish, shameful, and antisocial in the extreme.

Oh my dear Lord...

2008-03-09T00:14:00.002+02:00

There are some things in the world that are so bizarre as to defy description. I can't look away.

Come again?

2008-03-03T21:19:00.002+02:00

A quote from a Wall Street Journal article delving into the secrets of the Finnish education system:

"Ask an obvious question and you may hear "KVG," short for "Check it on Google, you idiot.""

Assuming I'm reading that acronym right, that's not quite what it means. The closest English equivalent I can think of would be "RTFM". But YMMV. IMHO.

"I'll be there with bells on..."

2008-03-02T20:45:00.003+02:00

I'm now the proud owner of an oceanharp, also known as a poor man's waterphone, the sound of which is famous from sci-fi and horror movies everywhere. Even if you never knew what it looked like, you've probably heard it. I've always wanted one, but with no real reason to make such a frivolous purchase, it remained a fond wish, and nothing more. However, my orchestra piece Of aspens, hills and shattered dreams has a prominent part for waterphone in the final section, and the Helsinki Philharmonic was understandably not all that enthused about buying an otherwise useless instrument, what with a tiny, tiny handful of pieces calling for it. The sound can be replicated (badly) with a bowed cymbal, but the waterphone's entry is really the cherry on top of Aspens as far as I'm concerned, so I gleefully pulled out my credit card. It's a silly thing to have, really, what with its uses being limited mainly to 1) sound source for electronic music, and 2) sitting exotically on my office shelf and making my students think I'm cool.

While prepping last week's lecture on Mahler's Symphony no. 2, though, I was pleased to discover that I'm in rather exalted company, if not quite in the same league, in buying odd instruments for a single performance. It seems Mahler didn't like any of the commonly available orchestral bell sounds, and actually went out and bought a set of church bells for the final moments of the 2nd.

I bet the shipping charges were brutal.

Taking a breath

2008-02-20T16:33:00.002+02:00

I've been silent since coming home from Seaside, dealing with jet lag and struggling out from under the vast mountain of work that was waiting for me on my return. In the past two weeks, I've copied my new choral piece ad puram annihilationem meam, which the Helsinki Chamber Choir is premièring in April, and of which a rehearsal tape needs to be cut so the dancer/choreographer can start working on her part (more on that later). True to form, I was unable to not volunteer to create more work for myself, and it seems I'll be doing some radiophonic work for that concert as well. I've been getting my Mahler seminar off the ground and planning my writing and composing work for the next few months, but the thing that's been dominating my life for the last week or so is the orchestra parts for a performance by the Helsinki Philharmonic of my earlier orchestra piece Of aspens, hills, and shattered dreams, which I wrote for my Master's degree at Stony Brook, and which was performed there in 2001.

The parts needed a fairly onerous amount of revision, and to compound the problem, when I imported them from an older version of Finale, in addition to the notes, the program brought all the problems I vividly remember from the last time I dealt with this music. However, they made on deadline, and I can now return to a normal sleep schedule. As the performance was added to the orchestra's calendar quite late, it kept me from tinkering with the piece too much. Although I'm still quite proud of it, and am ecstatic about my pro orchestra debut in Finland, going through the piece again was pretty traumatic. Knowing way more about orchestra writing than I did eight years ago, I was aghast at some of the ridiculous, awkward things I did in Aspens, and the temptation to mess with it was hard to resist, but for the tight schedule. If I'd had a couple of months, I'd probably have taken the whole thing back to the drawing board.

In retrospect, though, it's probably a good thing I can't work too much with it. It can be counterproductive to constantly revisit one's older works. The urge to smooth out the rough edges, reduce outward signs of naïvety, make stylistic influences less obvious, can easily rob the music of what made it special to you in the first place. At some point, I think, you just have to let a piece be what it is, if it works on its own terms, and damn the embarrassment of long, wordy titles, Romantic outbursts and ungainly bits of orchestration – that nevertheless produced unexpectedly cool effects. Listening to the recording from 2001, which I haven't done in quite a while, brought back some of the feelings I put into the piece, and makes me think there's something in it that I should revisit, a depth of emotion I haven't gotten to in a very long time in my pursuit of a leaner, cleaner, if not necessarily meaner sound; a humanity, however unsubtly expressed at the time, that's perhaps been lacking.

Part of the reason for this shift in focus is that I'm just a happier person than I was back then, more fulfilled, less anxious – if marginally – and don't feel the need to write myself little utopias anymore, or take the weight of the world on my shoulders. A not insignificant part of it is location, which I think has a huge effect of the way one makes art. I live in a less outwardly emotive culture, and it's had its effect on me, a positive one as far as I can see, since the emotional temperature of my music definitely needed cooling when I moved here, although that process had already begun before I left the US. I've been hitting some shades of expression in the last three years or so that weren't available to me when I was younger. But through the trifocal lenses of time, greater maturity and improved technical mastery, it's all too easy to be caught up in the new things you can do and lose sight of the expressive core of your art. It's something I need to bear in mind in the coming year, with anywhere between three and five projects in the offing, that it might be time to come full circle and admit that naïvety back into my expressive palette, as something to take greater pride in.

Listening:

Schreker, Chamber Symphony
Mahler, Das Lied, Chinese language version(!), Singapore Symhpony with Lan Shui

Not shown to scale

2008-01-30T19:26:00.000+02:00

I've been in the composing zone (read: total freakout) for the last two weeks and change, hence the silence. I've finally got the frame of my new piece ad puram annihilationem meam up and working, and can now hang some pretty things on it. As expected, it ended up being quite different from what I set out to do. I was asked for a meditative piece, which I was able to provide in part, but Teilhard's words steered me to a rather odd place in terms of the emotional content. I was aiming for total stasis, with a quiet, effortless transcendence toward the end. What I got was a fervent, fragmented, almost primal prayer rite, pleading for an enlightenment that never really happens.

Part of it was the difficulty I had in quieting my mind during the writing. The text was exceedingly difficult to approach from the musical perspective, what with it being an edited series of excerpts from Teilhard's writing with no true poetic form of its own, causing me no end of difficulty in connecting the events. Another issue was the obvious polystylism of the material. This is something that happens to me every so often, when a piece just fractures into shards of various styles that end up competing for dominance, or just agree to sit uneasily next to each other. It occurred in my violin sonata-cum-Requiem a few years back, and last year in my horn trio, which I later realized is a travelogue charting my journey from New York to Finland, both geographical and mental. It's quite terrifying to be confronted with material that I can't control, yet wants to be in such a powerful way that I can't ignore it or leave it out, but I've come to accept that it's part of who I am, and something I need to say. In a way, these pieces are what my old mentor Fred Ward called "everything I ever learned" pieces. Looking back over the ones I mentioned above, they look like summations, a catalog of impressions and ideas I've picked up over the years, crowding into the same piece to see which ones really are for me, and which ones I can safely leave to the side afterward. The resulting music may not be formally organic, if by that we mean in the stylistic/material sense, yet I've felt satisfied with the dramatic flow of disparate events, which creates a kind of cohesive narrative of its own through powerful juxtaposition rather than logic.

Nevertheless, they're taxing and confidence-sapping pieces to write, and I'm glad to be done with this one. It's light years from the self-contained, single-idea worlds of my previous choral pieces, with a sort of updated Hildegardian chant butting up against chorales of augmented-seventh chords, passages of whispering, speaking and shouting, and a final, minimalist illumination supported by an enormous Thai gong. In a decidedly immodest, Straussian moment, I even caught myself quoting... myself, with bits of my last three choir pieces floating to the surface. The chorales, my favorite choir composing bugbear, arose out of a need to keep the words as intelligible as possible, and French, it turns out, is a frightfully difficult language to set in anything other than a syllabic way. The chains of augmented seventh harmonies are a chicken-and-egg question I haven't been able to answer yet: are they there because the piece is in French, or because I listen to too much French music?

All in all, it's been a terrific month in Seaside, with a lively, intelligent, diverse group of people to trade ideas with, and it's rare to see so much beautiful art being made right before my eyes. I've also fallen deeply in love with the cuisine of the American South: simple, hearty, yet intensely flavorful, prepared with consummate craft and care. One dish I had recently, in fact, registers as one of the best, most perfect things I've ever eaten. It was a plate of creamy, smoked gouda cheese grits, topped with a sauté of finely chiffonaded spinach, bacon, mushrooms, shallots, white wine and cream, the whole thing completed by spicy grilled shrimp and fried sweet potato filaments. The flavors in this heart-clogger were simply electric, but the real glory of the dish was its scalability. It could function as an appetizer, a lunch, or an extremely filling dinner with equal ease of preparation, and fit anywhere in terms of the composition of a meal.

This, of course, got me thinking about music, and the idea of compositional "voice", which I've blathered about before in this space. One of things that that creates a sense of voice about a composer's work, at least on the most superficial, immediately perceptible level of the listening experience, is scalability of material, the extent to which the composer changes their approach from one ensemble to the next. Of course, any good composer will adapt themselves to the medium they write for; this is all part of being sensitive to the unique nature of an instrument or ensemble. Some composers, however, have a more consistent approach to the generation of raw materials, and bring a coherent, well worked-out, largely predetermined harmonic world with them to each new piece. This is what I mean by scalability: not that a saxophone quartet by a given composer could just as easily be an orchestra piece or vice versa, but that the material itself, and the composer's way of working with it, is identifiable and more or less consistent from piece to piece. I tend to go the other way and write non-scalable pieces out of materials – gestural, harmonic and otherwise – that proceed directly from the sounding nature and playing technique of the instrument itself, thus making these materials less adaptable to other media, and less stylistically consistent from one piece to the next. Part of it, I suspect, is my easily distractable nature, although a more significant part of the motivation for doing so is a deep-seated, quasi-Buddhist conviction that in order to express myself authentically, the approach must be renewed every single time, as if starting from scratch. (Sometimes, enlightenment is within easy reach, and at others, the road to it is more circuitous, running through unknown territories, and cannot be planned out in advance.)

This isn't to say that either approach is more valid than the other, nor does one guarantee the writing of superior music, or even freshness, but I do think that identifiability of voice, in this sense, is a function of where you get your material, and the number and nature of the predetermined ideas you bring to the table in starting a new piece. It's an idea that I'll probably return to in the future as I start to make sense of it myself, but for now, I promised to sous-chef for a painter who's going to teach me, at long last, to make real Louisiana-style gumbo. C'est bon!

Value Added Tax

2008-01-16T18:06:00.000+02:00

"If everything is judged by how 'useful' it is – useful for staying alive, that is – we are left facing a futile circularity. There must be some added value. At least a part of life should be devoted to living that life, not just working to stop it ending. This is how we rightly justify spending taxpayers' money on the arts. It is is one of the justifications properly offered for conserving rare species and beautiful buildings. It is how we answer those barbarians who think that wild elephants and historic houses should be preserved only if they 'pay their way'. And science is the same. Of course science pays its way; of course it is useful. But that is not all it is."

–Richard Dawkins
Unweaving the Rainbow

One could just as easily exchange "arts" and "science" in any clause and still end up defending both.

Bliss

2008-01-08T19:47:00.000+02:00

I haven't been blogging lately, not so much due to not having anything to say, but rather owing more to the tendency of the holidays to lessen the burning need to say anything. I was also trying to clean up a lot of unfinished business before leaving Finland for the month of January. I'll be spending the next four weeks as an artist-in-residence at The Seaside Institute in Seaside, Florida, the New Urbanist community on the Gulf coast where The Truman Show was filmed. (I had to suppress the urge to check my bathroom for cameras when I moved into my cottage.)

I'll be giving a couple of lectures while here and doing some work in the community, but the main purpose of my visit is to complete (after starting) work on my new choral piece, which just hasn't been getting anywhere at home. It's a long way to come to do it, but the removal from my daily life seems to already be having an effect on my mindset. All I hear are the waves, and the quiet in my normally overactive mind. This is a new experience for me. Much like Jerry Seinfeld's protestations of not being an "orgy guy", I've never thought of myself as an "artist colony guy" (not that there's anything wrong with that). As mentioned in the past, I'm the worst kind of homebody, shutting myself up in my house for days at a time. I love my studio space, with all its clutter, piles of books and twenty different open scores. For lack of a better word, the room has my aura in it, and that familiarity with my space helps me write, and I've never felt the need to go away from home and isolate myself in order to work. I tend to get stuck in my various compositional neuroses easily, and not having my wife and colleagues around to talk me down when I freak out about the piece I'm writing isn't usually an appealing prospect. For whatever reason, though, I've been unable to really focus for the past few months, so when this incredible opportunity came up, I jumped at the chance and packed my bags happily, hoping to get the entire 15-minute piece in one month so the choir can cut a practice tape for the choreographer.

The irony is that I've come to this little corner of paradise, with its blissful weather and warm, kind people, to write something stark, ascetic, ritualistic and meditative. And it forces me to think about what fires my imagination. I've written some about Nordic landscapes, and what it is about life at the top of the world that I find so appealing. I'd thought that landscape in general was the prime source of my work, and that any beautiful corner of the world would translate musically. But in a recent experience with a new environment, I was confronted with the possibility that I'm northern by more than just birth and residence.

After a tough year of work, my wife and I took a long-delayed honeymoon to Crete early last summer. It was something of a homecoming for me, as my dad was born and grew up on the Mediterranean, and used to tell me all kinds of stories from his youth, rhapsodizing about the light, the warmth, the taste of fresh figs, and above all, the "wine-dark sea" (great title for a piece!) that looms so large in the literature and culture of the region. When I got there, I was indeed impressed by it. I was reminded of the music of William Walton more than anything else, those beautiful, shimmering textures from after his move to to Ischia, like the Violin Concerto and Troilus and Cressida. It was gorgeous, by any standard.

But it wasn't inspiring. At least not to me. I found the folk music of Crete, with its wailing voices and virtuosic use of a fiddle-like instrument called a lira, extremely appealing, and bought several CDs for the trip home. But the landscape, as beautiful, varied and extreme as it was, from desert to wine-growing valleys, didn't make music for me, I think because it just wasn't mine, part of my consciousness, the landscape I immediately conjure when I think of nature. For me, it's birch trees, crystal clear skies, and that dark, silvery Nordic sunlight that become music. Finding myself in this place presents a challenge, to not succumb to the gentleness of the climate, and let the piece become too sunny, too comforting, when what I'm really after is something burning, purifying, detached, and ego-less.

Or perhaps coming here will turn in the piece into what it's really supposed to be. After years of trying to fight my material, I fairly recently came to the realization that most of the time, it's best to just let the piece be what it wants to be. Material takes on a life of its own after a while, and resistance to it just creates misery. And who needs misery in weather like this? I prefer margaritas.

trad. Canadian

2007-12-22T11:11:00.000+02:00

Today is Christmas dinner. Not the official one, I suppose, but the one I look forward to most, when we get together with our various expat friends and their Finnish spouses (spice?), whoever's in Finland around Christmas, and cook a huge, decadent feast. It's become a tradition in the last few years, and it's our turn to host, which pleases me greatly. There's very little I like so much as making food for sharing with the people I care about. It's a fairly conventional affair, eggnog, turkey and such, with a few adaptations of the old-style dishes. Instead of stuffing, I made a bread pudding, and the usual heavy Christmas pudding, which I gave up on because local ingredients don't adapt well to my recipe, has been replaced with an absolutely heart-stopping steamed toffee pudding. Can't wait for dessert.

Preparing a meal like this, I inevitably find my thoughts drawn back to my family's Christmas table in Canada, and how it reflects my/our interpretation of tradition. Over the years, especially as my siblings and I got older, we developed a routine of two family meals, on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, with slightly different rules. Christmas dinner itself, which is usually my mother's domain, is everything you'd expect of from a largely Anglo-Saxon family: turkey with all the trimmings, mashed potatoes, gravy and plum pudding, the recipe for which has been in the family for the better part of a century, a sort of poor-man's pudding made of cheap ingredients, concocted during World War I and handed down from my Scottish great-grandmother.

I always enjoy this dinner, with its relative formality and consistent elements, but for my money, the meal most accurately reflecting my family's makeup is on Christmas Eve, when all the quirky bits of our heritage come out. Sitting side-by-side with lasagna (the presence of which is more or less inexplicable, since there's not a drop of Italian blood anywhere in us) and New World desserts like New York-style cheesecakes, you'll find Greek dishes like spanakopita and dolmades, family favorites that come to us from my maternal grandfather's family. Then there are the French Canadian dishes my sister-in-law makes: baked beans, tourtière (meat pie) and occasionally the majestic six-pâtes, a huge, heavy dish made of layers of game meat stews and pastry, baked for hours and fed a steady diet of meat broth for the potatoes to absorb. Heavenly, and deadly. This is serious lumberjack fare from the colonial days.

What I love is the eclectic nature of it all, the fact that all this stuff is brought together on one table for no other reason than that it all tastes good. You don't even have to eat all of it, just take whatever strikes you as appetizing. And this, I think, is the essence of what it means to be of the New World, and from an immigrant family, indeed, nowadays, as an immigrant myself: tradition is no more or less than what you bring with you. There's a pleasing absence of blind obeisance, of doing things a certain way just because that's the way they're done, and have been for centuries. Traditions are patched together from what you know, the parts of your historical makeup that make the most sense to you, with very little reference to consistency or received wisdom.

Not that there's anything wrong with long traditions. They're common in the part of the world where I live, as in many parts of the Americas with long-established communities, and they give people a deeply rooted sense of who they are and what makes them that way, one you mess with at your peril. It's admirable, and it makes me slightly envious, coming as I do from a mixed heritage of cultures, without a long attachment to place or community to provide structures and attitudes. The Scottish and Greek come from my mother; my father is of largely British extraction, but of a family that settled in – wait for it – Turkey in the 18th century, and came to Canada via a detour of some years in what is now Zimbabwe.

Being a first-generation citizen on my dad's side, I spent a lot of time as a kid trying to figure out what, exactly, I was. Living in a small town away from the large immigrant groups, we had no particular attachment to the Greek or Scottish communities, and even English Canada was a little distant from my experience, growing up as I did in the French-speaking community, and perhaps picking up more of their traditions and cultural structures than any others. (I think my fondness for French music is attributable to simply understanding it, the way it speaks, from the start.) Living in the borderlands between many cultures can be unnerving, really having nothing that can be taken for granted as an essential part of your selfhood. Everything must be questioned, its relative value assessed on an individual basis.

Gradually, though, I came to realize that this could be a source of strength, that a lack of received wisdom is liberating, exhilarating, even. Not having a tradition to uphold, you're free to pick and choose what suits you best, what works at a given time, and to discard the structures that don't mean anything to you, or just don't fit the way you think (sonata form, indeed, form as a preset concept, is one of these things for me). It sounds like I'm endorsing some sort of postmodernist pastiche approach to life and art, which isn't really the case. Juxtaposing things only works for so long, eventually becoming self-referential. Rather, the idea is identify those structures which are strongest, figure out what they have in common, and graft them together into something that makes sense to you.

Being neither entirely of the New World or the Old, ultimately, I don't feel a responsibility to either uphold or reject any particular aspect of my heritage, only, I think, to try to sort it all out coherently and present it to the world and hope somebody finds value therein. I've long since left Christianity behind, but Christmas dinner remains, this relic of my upbringing, a paradoxical reminder both of how far I've moved away from my roots and how close I still am to them and, more than anything else, a symbol of tradition and its endless ability to adapt, incorporate new elements, and take on new and ever more valuable meanings.

Horning In (with apologies to David Rakowski)

2007-12-20T17:23:00.000+02:00

With my semester finally over – not that it's been an unusually heavy one, but still – and the Christmas choral season more or less put to bed, I'm free to put down a few ideas over the next couple of weeks. It's a nice feeling to know that, despite the fact that this blog is still mainly a way of avoiding any real academic writing, I don't have too many other pressing things that I really should be doing.

Browsing the NY Times, as I do on daily basis, I was bemused by a review of a chamber concert by Allan Kozinn. I don't usually read too many reviews unless they have to do with new music, but the mention of "horn" in the title caught my former brass-jock eye. After distancing myself from my ex-instrument for about ten years, I've suddenly found myself writing for it a lot lately, with a recent trio with violin and piano, a fanfare for three horns, and an upcoming concerto. There truly is no escape.

Anyway, Kozinn writes of the concert:

"The first oddity, Schumann’s Adagio and Allegro in A flat (Op. 70), is a rarity for the soundest of reasons: It is scored for French horn and piano, and horn writing as expansive and exposed as this is too perilous to attract many takers. David Jolley is as good a hornist as you’ll find in New York’s chamber music world, but the Adagio largely defeated his efforts to stay firmly on pitch and avoid cracked notes."

I was uncharacteristically quick to overcome my initial, deeply ingrained bristle at the description of one of the central works of the horn repertoire – if not the Everest, than at least Anapurna or K2 – as an "oddity", one that, I might add, is regularly pilfered by many other instruments ranging from the violin, viola and cello to [shudder] the oboe. I was mostly amused by his noting that David Jolley had trouble with the Adagio movement, to which my only reaction is that nobody has an easy time with this piece, ever. Even if they do it perfectly, they nearly had a heart attack trying. I still have nightmares about the woefully exposed high C in the Adagio, and get cold sweats about running out of "face" at the end.

My friend Tommi, the most simultaneously Zen and kamikaze horn player I know, performed it last year on one of his doctoral recitals, and I nearly passed out. Literally. Listening to it, I found myself uncomfortable, tense, short of breath. Absently noticing my spasmodically clenching and unclenching left hand, I realized I was fingering the damn thing right along with him, fearing the worst as high notes approached, knowing all the spots in the Allegro where a tiny, desperate breath can be caught before diving headlong back into the fray. It really is that hard. So I tip my hat to anyone with the guts to go out and play it, legend or not. A few slips on the final ridge still gets you to the peak, right?

The other quote that caught my attention concerned the Brahms trio:

"The balance problems born of putting a horn in a small ensemble were evident as ever (here’s a piece that works better on recording), but Mr. Fleisher and Mr. Laredo were able to wrest the spotlight more often than not, and in the two fast movements, their energetic, mercurial playing was offset by Mr. Jolley’s evocation of a hunting horn, which gave the performance an agreeably earthy quality."

This is an important observation: balancing this ensemble is almost impossible. When I wrote my trio last year, it started out being a compact, nicely behaved little piece, with the horn safely in its corner, but I still ended up calibrating the whole thing in one way or another to the horn's overpowering personality. No matter how careful you are, there are always spots where the horn just buries the other two instruments, and of course, you don't get to find this out until you hear the piece. It's especially perilous in the Brahms, where the horn part is an integral part of the contrapuntal texture, every bit as important to the piece as a cello would be in one of his piano trios. This is the miracle of this work, in fact, that Brahms refused to condescend to the instrument, relegating it to a few hunting horn riffs while the violin hogs the spotlight.

It's all the more remarkable that Brahms actually specified that a natural horn (i.e. valveless) be used. The composer had a well-documented preference for the timbre of the unadorned instrument, I'm guessing because early horn valves were leaky, marring the tone, and the mechanism was noisy. However, the natural horn is a bit of a specialty these days, and the players who have truly mastered it sadly don't get heard in a high-profile settings much of the time. So hearing the Brahms trio on a modern instrument is par for the course, with all the inherent balance problems.

And yet, one has to wonder if there has indeed always been a balance issue with this piece, if it was problematic in Brahms' day as well. It turns out, I discovered fairly recently, that the answer is an emphatic "No". On another of his epic concerts this fall, Tommi performed the trio on natural horn, and decided to make it a period affair, with the violinist playing on gut strings, and an 1893 Érard piano, a rare instrument owned by the Sibelius Academy that was reconditioned for the occasion. (I have a sentimental attachment to this instrument, being the same type of piano Debussy owned, and whose veiled sound is the archetype for his late piano works.) With this ensemble, the Brahms trio sounded much gentler than one would expect. Because modifying the pitch on the natural horn requires a multitude of different hand positions in the bell, some more muffling than others, the overall tone has to be softer in order to avoid having random notes jump out of a melodic line.

The misty sound of the Érard, combined with the gut strings and the oddly distant-sounding horn, made the piece feel much more intimate, less extrovert, even in more dramatic passages, as if the music were enveloped in a warm, sepia glow. It was like hearing an old phonograph recording, a relic of another time, when instruments weren't so loud, and one occasionally had to lean in to catch all the details. It was magical, hearing it played as Brahms might have , indeed, how he probably wanted to hear it.

The point remains: horn, violin and piano is an extremely tricky beast to write for, and composers who take it on do so at their peril. Those who have navigated it successfully often come up with original ways of working the horn into the group, like Ligeti's trio, where for much of the piece the horn inhabits its own world, or a more recent work by Marc-André Dalbavie, in which the horn is only introduced about four minutes in, a novel idea with the effect of making one initially forget that the horn was supposed to be there at all. But hearing the Brahms trio as nature intended was significant proof that the mere fact of adding a horn to an ensemble doesn't require clearing the furniture, or at least it didn't always.

Soul food

2007-12-14T15:09:00.000+02:00

In the spirit of the season, which is to say, excess, I offer one of my favorite comfort food recipes, for when the richness of holiday cooking gets to be too much. (Apologies for the mixed measures.)

Matt's Penne with Chèvre, Sundried Tomatoes and Basil

2-3 tbsp olive oil
4-5 cloves garlic, minced
1-2 pinches chili flakes, to taste
1 cup sundried tomatoes, chopped
2 14-oz. cans Italian tomatoes, chopped
2-3 tbsp tomato paste
150 g. (6 oz.) chèvre (soft goat cheese), room temperature
1 large bunch basil leaves, chiffonaded
3 chicken breasts (optional)
500 g. (1 lb) tricolor penne
salt and fresh ground black pepper

Season, grill or sauté chicken breasts, if using, slice thinly and reserve. Heat olive oil in medium-sized saucepan over medium heat. Add garlic and chili flakes and fry until garlic is soft but not browned, 1-2 min. Add sundried tomatoes and continue to cook, stirring, for another minute. Add canned tomatoes, tomato paste and black pepper to taste. Reduce heat to low, cover and simmer for 20 min. Bring a large pot of salted water to the boil, add pasta and cook to al dente. Drain and return to pot. Season sauce with salt to taste and gently reheat chicken. Pour hot sauce over pasta, add chicken and chèvre, and stir to melt the cheese and thoroughly coat the pasta. Stir in the basil chiffonade at the last second to keep from wilting too much, and share out among 4 plates. Garnish each serving with cracked black pepper and a basil top.

Serves 4

This can also work as a baked dish. Undercook the pasta a little, mix with sauce, cheese and basil, spread into a baking dish and add extra dollops of chèvre on top. Bake until cheese is melted and the pasta is cooked through.

And this is a problem because...?

2007-12-10T10:29:00.000+02:00

Yesterday's NY Times featured an article by Charles Rosen about his friend Elliott Carter, whose 99th birthday is tomorrow – the same day as my wife's 28th, I'm inexplicably tickled to discover. Rosen writes very sympathetically about Carter's life and music. Although I've never been a big Carterhead, I appreciate some of his early works like the cello and piano sonatas, and find that his music is becoming ever more appealing as he approaches his centenary. However, it's not so much Rosen's tributes to Carter's music that caught my attention as his mild slam of an unnamed piece in a contrasting aesthetic. He relates the story of his first meeting with Carter at an ISCM concert in 1956:

"One generally went to the society’s concerts to see friends; only a small amount of the music played there was attractive, since most contemporary music, like most of the music of any other period of history, is of little interest."

Hmm, whatever. But go on...

"On this occasion, if I remember correctly, one work was a single note on a solo violin to be sustained for 1 hour 20 minutes (but the performance was abbreviated to 40 minutes)."

Ack! Shock!! Horror!!! A piece that only employs a single pitch! For a very long time! What a laughable, ridiculous idea! Seriously, though, how does one write a credible criticism of a piece, even a pithy one, by citing a work's very means of articulation as a pejorative? Rosen's comment proceeds from the offhand, a priori assumption that the very concept of this piece is unworthy of consideration. Nothing else is revealed about it, no other factors taken into account. What was the nameless composer trying to achieve with the piece, and was he/she successful? Was it performed by a sympathetic musician, or did the violinist treat the piece with contempt and play it badly? Was the piece well programmed, or did the other works on the concert not leave it enough space to be received in a favorable light? These and many other questions could be asked before dismissing a piece, but its use a single pitch (a trick that, I might add, is deployed to great effect by Carter himself in Four Études and a Fantasy) and long duration seem to be grounds enough to treat it as inconsequential. If it's not even worth asking these questions, why comment about said piece at all, except to score cheap points for your side of a largely no-longer-relevant aesthetic debate?

This post once again reveals my tendency to blow tiny comments way out of proportion, but I think Rosen's flippant attitude toward this mystery piece is indicative of a larger contempt held by certain proponents of mid-century modernism for any piece that does not aspire to their particular brand of complexity and ambition, and is therefore by its very nature flawed. But to criticize a piece based solely on its means of construction is no criticism at all, really. A similar thing happened to a colleague of mine last spring. She had composed a piece for the Finnish Radio Symphony, a ballsy, uncompromisingly repetitive work that sounded like Morton Feldman's Coptic Light on steroids. It was a very risky thing to do for her first big orchestra commission. I thought it was incredible: beautiful, powerful and stirring. I ended up being one of a tiny minority of people who liked it. It was, as I recall, vocally disliked by many, and even booed by a few. The review that appeared a day or two later, though, based its criticism on the fact that the percussion section carried most of the musical argument in the early stages of the piece, as if writing extensively for percussion in an orchestra piece is in and of itself a bad thing. No further comment necessary.

It's okay to make choices as an artist. I generally think that holding to strong beliefs about the "rightness" of one's aesthetic choices creates art that speaks urgently and convincingly in most cases, and that the idea that everyone should like everything is somewhat naïve. But one can and should remain open to meeting the composer halfway. A good critic, professional or armchair, knows how to check their expectations at the door and be receptive to what an artist is trying to accomplish, and evaluate a work on the success or failure of its particular project. Perhaps the piece Rosen is so dismissive of was indeed a failure. But the way he comments about it implies that such an idea is destined to be a failure from its very inception, and should be given no further consideration. Good criticism – of one's own work and that of others – needs to be based on more than knee-jerk positions, taking into account myriad factors that go into the creation and presentation of an artwork. Simply pushing it aside in this way diminishes the discourse and the critic both.

Cud chewing

2007-12-07T14:00:00.000+02:00

One of my upcoming projects is a concerto for horn and strings for my friend Tommi Hyytinen. I'm not planning on starting it until the fall of 2008, but as is my habit with big pieces, I'm preparing for it far in advance, working out ideas, basic sonic concepts, mood, etc. Horn and strings is a very clean, cool soundworld, one I have an abiding fondness for. I played Gordon Jacob's concerto some ten years ago, sadly not with orchestra, and love the bleak melancholy Nordic composers bring to the combination, as in Kurt Atterberg's quirky essay in the medium, which also includes piano and percussion, and Lars-Erik Larsson's brief yet satisfying Concertino. The première of my yet-to-be-written concerto will be given in 2009-10 by the Ostrobothnian Chamber Orchestra, based in Tommi's hometown of Kokkola, on the west coast of Finland. I've been listening to their recordings to get an idea of the group's sound, and I'm struck by the rough-edged, yet highly lyrical approach to everything from Mozart to new music. I'm informed that their playing style is rooted in Ostrobothnian folk music, especially the fiddle tradition, which explains much about their unique sound.

With this in mind, I've been thinking about the overall mood I want to convey with the piece. Pondering on the ideas of folk music, nordicity, and such, I found myself drawn back to a piece I hadn't heard in years: Vaughan Williams' Oboe Concerto in A minor, which uses as lush a string orchestra as you'll hear anywhere. Vaughan Williams, as with many other composers I've blogged about here, was a youthful discovery of mine. One of my early mentors, the Missouri-born Montreal playwright, poet, actor, artist and all-around Renaissance man Fred Ward, was a huge fan of old Ralph, and through him I heard most of RVW's works in my late teens. Although I tend to like most everything of Vaughan Williams', I was particularly attracted to the so-called "pastoral" works like the Oboe Concerto, 3rd Symphony, and the lovely Hymn Tune Preludes – "Eventide" is a particular favorite. I pulled apart a score of the Tallis Fantasia when I was about 19, and later wrote a piece for trumpet, cello and string orchestra that, viewed dispassionately years later, is tinged with a certain English-folk-music-meets-Ives quality. That sound of massed choirs of strings was very seductive, and it left its mark on the way I think of ensemble sound in general.

As with most youthful enthusiasms, Vaughan Williams eventually gave way to the more outwardly sophisticated music of Tippett, and later Britten. Living in Finland, one doesn't get to hear a lot of English music, especially of the cowpat variety, though the Radio Symphony is performing the Tallis Fantasia later this spring, which pleases me greatly. I hadn't heard Vaughan Williams in a good ten years until last year, when my good friend David Searle conducted the 5th Symphony with the Helsinki University Orchestra as part of a program of English music which included another favorite of mine, William Walton's Viola Concerto. I was utterly taken aback at how fresh Vaughan Williams' music sounded, how effortlessly alive and breathing, and reflected on how rare it was these days to hear such honest, unaffected lyricism in a big symphonic work. The slow movement especially touched me deeply, an anthem-like meditation in which you'd swear that identifiable snatches of English hymn tunes surface momentarily before morphing into something else.

Building on that experience, the Oboe Concerto seemed like the right place to start, what with its gentle mood and un-concerto-like lack of obvious virtuosity. So, as an excuse to put my new toy to use, I downloaded a recording, got a score, and am once again quite taken with a piece of rather neglected music, in a where-have-you-been-all-my-life sort of way. The first thing that leaps out at me is how smoothly and effortlessly, not to mention how simply Vaughan Williams sways back and forth between fast music and slow, rhapsody and concision, stasis and motion. It's arresting to hear a headlong forward lunge give way suddenly to slow, polyphonic textures, yet none of the transitions ever seems forced, or any of the individual sections too short. The music progresses so naturally from one idea to the next, it's almost as if a gentle breeze were carrying the piece along on its gusts and lulls.

Another remarkable facet of the piece is how little truly fast music it contains. Though there's no official slow movement – the traditional slow middle movement is replaced with a short, cleverly jaunty minuet rife with hemiola – slowness and stasis dominate the piece, interspersed with faster episodes that provide contrast, yet don't overwhelm the lyricism of the slow music. Vaughan Williams upends the concerto tradition by neither writing anything particularly flashy, nor providing much in the way of virtuosic climaxes. Passagework tends to dissolve into stasis rather than lead to anything conclusive. The solo part is obviously very difficult, if the audible clicking of the oboe's keys is any indication, and one is left with the impression of having heard something exciting, but not of having heard a musician work very hard to achieve that excitement.

One of the most difficult things in contemporary music, in my opinion, is the writing of fast music. I rarely hear fast, non-minimalist, yet still pulse-driven new music that I feel works. Often, it's almost as if you can hear the gears in the composer's head churning as they work out their ideas. Very frequently, you come across music that I like to describe as "new notes over old rhythms", that is, a modern pitch content laid over an 18th- or 19th-century rhythmic framework, which is just awkward-sounding a lot of the time. (How many galumphing, mixed-meter octatonic/12-tone scherzi have you heard in your lifetime? I've written a couple, sad to say.) The default cliché for solo wind instrument and string or small orchestra is the churning motor rhythms and note-spinning melodic writing common in the lesser derivations of neoclassicism. Wanting to avoid that as much as possible, if not entirely, Vaughan Williams' Oboe Concerto is becoming an object lesson for me in how to approach the concerto from a fresh perspective, without a lot of the baggage we've come to expect of the form in terms of showy finger tricks and gallery-playing dramatic highlights. Long may that gentle breeze continue to blow.

My thing

2007-12-03T16:40:00.000+02:00

This past weekend, I went to the Helsinki Chamber Choir's second concert of the season. They were performing Britten's A Boy Was Born, so I wasn't about to miss it. Also on the program was Thomas Weelkes' When David Heard, which sounded surprisingly contemporary for a 17th-century piece, very much like Gesualdo is its quirky harmonic turns, as well as the Finnish première of Jonathan Harvey's How could the soul not take flight?, a setting of Rumi for double choir that ends in a clangorous unison F, with added Thai gongs and tubular bells to boot. Insanely effective, and refreshing to hear such minimal use of instruments in choral music. (One of my choral conductor friends was once heard to utter, "I'll take my choir straight up, thanks. Hold the piano.") In fact, those gongs just might end up in my new choir piece. The concept already includes simple parts for bass drum and tuned glasses, but may be open to other additions.

The crux of this post came about in a conversation with some friends afterward. I was describing the concept for the new piece, and mentioned that the choir had requested something calm, ceremonial and meditative (in French), and that the more I thought about it, the less I felt like writing another calm, spacious piece – this despite the fact that it's more or less ready to go in terms of its formal layout. One friend then asked, "Well, isn't calm and meditative your thing?" It was kindly meant, coming from someone who knows me and my music very well, but it brings up a significant problem with contemporary music.

It often seems like the world tries to impose categories on composers for its own convenience. Consistency is one of the hallmarks of Western music, and people frequently expect you to display a sort of Brahmsian approach to composing, working within well-defined areas that are identifiable from piece to piece. Do what you do well, stick to it, don't stray off the path. The twentieth century encouraged these perceptions, with its steady stream of "isms" and proprietary musical languages. More often than not, when people talk about a composer's "voice", this consistency is what they mean. Some composers do it extremely well, like Magnus Lindberg, whose music is instantly recognizable as his and nobody else's, and depressingly good pretty much all the time. Reich, Feldman and Takemitsu also come to mind as examples. Others, though, aren't so lucky as to have found such a rewarding sound world, or aren't as comfortable staying in one place, so some other aspect of their music becomes their "thing". It's one of the stamps that allows the rest of the world to identify you, to know what to expect from you. It sure makes it easier to brand and market your music. (Arvo Pärt, anyone?)

For me, apparently, it's "slow and meditative", and not without reason. I've been doing a lot of that lately. Having trained under a series of teachers who liked to see fast music and harmonic variety, when I moved to Finland and became a little more independent creatively, I started indulging my fascination with long, slow harmonies, static clusters and deep breaths to its fullest. I freely admit it's a corner I've painted myself into, and happily so. But I don't consider it my area to the exclusion of all else. I very frequently change focus from piece to piece. Last year, after completing a 30-minute essay in stasis for choir and tape, I let loose with a big, loud, fast, colorful concert opener for orchestra, and it felt great.

Part of it is not wanting to get bored. I have a short attention span when it comes to my musical interests, and work in accordance with that, because it keeps me at my best. Another part of it is a death fear of repeating myself, which may appear to the outside world as an inability to commit to anything – and was reviewed as such by one critic after a concert last spring. But again, it's not uncommon, even among the composers thought of as the most consistent. Beethoven wrote his 5th and 6th symphonies concurrently, which puts the lie to the "fate knocking at the door vs. redemption" story, and shows that even composers with burning, irrepressible things to say like variety in their working lives.

None of this is a complaint, mind you. I'm happy to write within certain specifications, and as far as limitations go, these aren't onerous at all. In fact, they're geared toward my compositional comfort zone. The choir was entirely reasonable in expecting such a piece from me, and I'm fairly confident that I'll find a way to keep it fresh, for myself and for the performers. But I'm afraid, as are many other creative artists, I think, that at some point I'll start constantly falling back on an established set of tricks and, worse still, won't be able to tell the difference between having found "my thing" and just being in a creative rut. And everyone knows that's no place to be.

The north speaks

2007-11-14T18:46:00.000+02:00

"When I went to the north, I had no intention of writing about it, or of referring to it, even parenthetically, in anything that I wrote. And yet, almost despite myself, I began to draw all sorts of metaphorical allusions based on what was really a very limited knowledge of the country and a very casual exposure to it. I found myself writing musical critiques, for instance, in which the north – the idea of north – began to serve as a foil for other ideas and values that seemed to me depressingly urban-oriented and spiritually limited thereby."

"Something really does happen to most people who go into the north – they become at least aware of the creative opportunity which the physical fact of the country represents, and, quite often I think, come to measure their own work and life against that rather staggering creative possibility – they become, in effect, philosophers."

–Glenn Gould, notes from The Idea of North

Better late than never

2007-11-13T09:55:00.000+02:00

Steve Hicken's quiz over at Listen gave me some real posers. Late to the party, as always, but here are my answers, in no particular order:

1) What five operas would you most like to see performed?
Schreker, Die Gezeichneten
Berg, Lulu
Janacek, Katja Kabanova
Tippett, The Midsummer Marriage
Saariaho, Adriana Mater (I'll get my wish on this last one over the winter.)

2) What five pieces would you most like to hear performed?
Adams, Harmonium (or Harmonielehre, I'm not too picky)
Feldman, Coptic Light
Mahler, Symphony #2 (Again, first time next spring.)
Palestine, Schlongo!!!daLUVdrone
Tippett, A Child of our Time

3) What five living performers would you most like to meet?
Christian Tetzlaff
Sigur Rós (came close a few weeks ago)
Yo Yo Ma
The Dixie Chicks
Marc-André Hamelin

4) What five living composers would you most like to meet? (This one's tough, because I've actually met a lot of the ones I'm interested in, sometimes just in passing. Nevertheless...)

Steve Reich
Terry Riley
Sally Beamish
György Kurtág
Marc-André Dalbavie

5) What five living musicians (composers, performers, writers, scholars, etc) would you most like to play three-on-three basketball with/against?
We: Me, Poul Ruders (very tall), Gustavo Dudamel (seems very energetic)
They: Richard Taruskin, Philip Glass, Andrew Clements

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark...

2007-11-12T19:29:00.000+02:00

After a weekend spent at an intensive rehearsal session with our choir, I'm back in the city grading papers and doing the laundry, trying to avoid looking outside. The winter is setting in, when pundits like to trot out suicide statistics and other fun topics. I read somewhere – I can't be bothered looking up such depressing things – that most suicides in northern Europe occur toward the end of winter, when people just can't take it anymore. But as far as I'm concerned, the greatest endurance test living in southern Finland is the six- to eight-week stretch between November and late December. It keeps getting darker, with no relief. It rains constantly, and the impenetrable, ever-present cloud cover makes it seem like the sun never rises. (True story: my first year here, I saw the sun exactly twice during November – flying to Germany and back.) There's no snow to brighten the landscape, and the weather gets into your head like a fog. You're tired all the time, and every nerve in your body screams when your alarm goes off in the morning. It's a time to draw family and friends close, talk, laugh, drink, and get each other through it.

I think it's part of the reason the recent Jokela school massacre has hit the populace so hard. Make no mistake: people are well and truly rattled here. Such things are generally thought of as happening "over there" – a generic location meant to describe anywhere but peaceful, law-abiding Finland. Anytime such a tragedy occurred, it would have cut Finns to the heart, but for it to come at this darkest time of year doesn't help. There is a great pain in the air that will take time to heal, and won't be helped along helped by inane commentary based on clichés and non-sequiturs that passes for news analysis in some circles, nor by a smug, condescending follow-up to perfectly justifiable outrage. There's been the predictable response: shock, mourning, calls for limiting access to handguns, or an outright ban on them, entirely reasonable to an anti-gun person like myself. And then there's a tabloid media awash in pictures of the leering, self-appointed "natural selector" who perpetrated this unthinkable deed, and precious little mention of the victims. All of it set against that dark, dark backdrop.

I was selfishly glad to get out of the city, then, to a place that holds a special significance for me. Our choir retreats there for the weekend before each big concert to work up our repertoire, and it makes a huge difference, giving people the intensive workout big pieces require, and letting the singers relax and bond in a way that's not really possible during the normal work week. It's an old farming estate cum course/concert center owned by the Sibelius Academy in the town of Järvenpää, on the shore of Lake Tuusula just across a field from Ainola, Sibelius' country house. (It's also close to Jokela, a fact not lost on anyone in attendance this past weekend.) I've been going there regularly since I moved to Finland in 2001. It's a Sibelius Academy tradition to take its incoming foreign students there for a weekend in the fall, and it's where I had my first authentic experience of the Finnish landscape.

Some friends and I had walked to Ainola, discovering to our dismay that it was closed for the winter. Deciding to explore the surroundings, we met a man in his fifties walking a trio of identical, fluffy pocket dogs who, hearing us speak English, asked (the man, not the dogs) where we were visiting from. When we mentioned the Academy, it immediately sparked his interest. He seemed to know an awful lot about Sibelius and Ainola, and the history of the area, and asked us many questions about our interest in Finnish music. Puzzled, we finally asked about the source of his information, and he told us he was Sibelius' grandson. With a shock of recognition, we all realized why he'd seemed so familiar. His eyes were identical to his grandfather's: that same piercing, blue gaze, friendly on our new acquaintance, but austere and slightly discomforting in the late pictures of the composer. We thanked him for the chat, said goodbye and went on our way, but there was another shock waiting for me.

Early the next morning, unable to sleep, I went for a walk near the lakeshore, a short distance away across farming fields. Despite a small highway cutting through the landscape and houses along the edges of the fields, I imagine it looks very similar to the way it did when Sibelius and the visual artists of the Järvenpää group were living there a century ago. It was very quiet, and a heavy mist hung in the air, making the pine trees by the lake appear as shadows. I couldn't see the lake itself, but I could hear birds out on the water, their calls echoing in the utter stillness of the morning. All of a sudden, in a completely instinctive way, it hit me that I was literally looking at the beginning of Sibelius' violin concerto, at the moment when the plaintive violin melody, supported by quietly murmuring strings, is finally answered by a lone clarinet that disappears back under the strings almost immediately. I knew this in a way that had nothing to do with research, without knowing where the piece had been written – I still don't know if the concerto was composed at Ainola – only that this view was undoubtedly the origin of a music that had haunted me since I first heard it as a teenager. I'd thought of the violin concerto as being about a composer's love for his instrument, a drawn-out, adoring tribute to the violinist he never became. I realized then that it was also about a deeper love: that which Sibelius held for his landscape.

It's very rare to perceive such a strong connection between nature and music, and I get the sense very often that even overtly depictive pieces – Respighi or Strauss, or places like the opening of Mahler's 3rd, famously connected to the cliffs near his summer house – have more to do with an idealized amalgamation of landscape features than any specific scene. Yet here was this thing confronting me, the connection obvious, in an uncomfortably inexplicable, yet deeply thrilling way. It wasn't that the music depicted the landscape, it was the landscape, this landscape, at that very moment; the two were inseparable. I still can't hear or see one without calling up the memory of the other. It was like a private conversation between me and Sibelius, much like the experience with Debussy I blogged about earlier, in which the composer revealed something that was for me only to know. It know this sounds terribly self-aggrandizing, but somehow, learning this intimate thing about Sibelius, and about his connection to the land, made it my landscape too, and made Finland my home, months before I consciously made the decision to stay. He was of the north, so was I, and I'd stay and write about this land, this sky, those trees, all so similar to Canada, until I felt I'd gotten it right. (The best, most moving compliment I've ever gotten came from an expat Finnish composer friend who lives in the US, who said that my music always made him think of home. I was a little verklempt.)

Going back to that place is always comforting, knowing that even if the weather's different, I can call up the image of that morning at will. It reminds me that, no matter how alien the culture may be at times, how far I am from the place of my birth, how I need to get a better command of the language if I want to call myself a Finnish composer, this is my home. And it makes the darkness lighter, more bearable. So does turkey stew with biscuits.

Guns don't kill people. Crazy people with guns kill people.

2007-11-07T21:25:00.000+02:00

A moment of silence for the victims of the high school shooting in Jokela, outside Helsinki. Between the weather, my being under it, this event, and the news broadcast about it playing Sibelius' Andante festivo, Finland's Barber Adagio, it's all a little too much for me today.

You can't say that!

2007-11-05T11:22:00.000+02:00

Every so often, I read a program note for a contemporary piece or hear an interview with a composer in which they'll spout something that you really shouldn't say about your own music: "My music really has its own voice," "My vision is..." "I think this piece is very of its time," and so on. These are judgments that we don't, as creators, get to make about our own work. Describe the work, by all means, tell us fascinating, illuminating things about it, but it's not up to us to say where our music fits into a tradition or a zeitgeist, even whether or not our voice, if we indeed have one, is individual, and whether it actually comes out in the music. Even if such a statement is written in the third person, you can always kind of tell if the composer themselves wrote it. Thankfully, this kind of writing is generally frowned upon in Finland, and if anything, composers here are much too modest about their work, focusing more on structure or process instead of aesthetics or philosophy.

Which is why it's nice to have someone else say this kind of thing for us. I went to the Helsinki Chamber Choir's season opening concert yesterday, a group with which I'm lucky to have a growing relationship. They sang at a concert of my music last spring and are premièring my new piece ad puram annihilationem meam in April. Their new director, my erstwhile partner-in-crime, conductor Nils Schweckendiek, asked me to write something for the season program book about Swedish composer Anders Hillborg, whose piece muoaiyoum, a real tour de force of choral minimalism, was on the program yesterday. In turn, another colleague and friend, pianist Risto-Matti Marin, was asked to do the same about me. It's a relief to read someone else's text about my music and realize that, yes, in fact, all those crazy things I think about are apparent to others, seemingly consistently so, and that they're willing to write it down in a way that I can't – or won't allow myself to do. Most of the composers I really respect take this attitude toward their work, sticking to the piece itself and letting others do the fancy talking about its place in the world.

So getting to write about Hillborg, one of my favorite living composers, was a special treat, because he doesn't say much about his work otherwise. I discovered Anders' music a few years ago, got to meet him at a summer festival in 2005 and had a lesson with him. I say "lesson", but it was really a therapy session. I was in full crisis mode at the time, not having written anything substantial in a couple of years, trying to figure out why I was writing modernism one minute, minimalism the next, why they never seemed to come together, and yet both seemed to be honest expressions. I heard in Hillborg a satisfying mix of most of the ideas I was grappling with, and thought it might be comforting to talk to him about some of the issues weighing on my mind.

Boy, was it. I walked out of the room completely blown away that an older, much more experienced composer dealt with many of the same problems as me, and accepted that they were just part of his process. Composing is such an isolating activity sometimes that it's easy to think you're in it alone, and that everyone else but you has a clue. It's valuable, necessary even, to be reminded on occasion that others face the same difficulties, even the people who seem to have it the most together and to be working at their peak. If nothing else, it's always nice to have a composer you respect tell you they like your music, right? Talking to Hillborg flipped a switch in my head, and I was able to work again, at a much more productive rate than ever. As thanks for that, it was an honor to be asked to write the following ecstatic tribute:

Where light in darkness lies

My first encounter with the world of Anders Hillborg came a few years ago, through a recording of his Violin Concerto of 1991-92. After being utterly seduced by its luminous, pulsing opening, a headlong post-minimalist rush that still somehow manages breathe in deep, Sibelian phrases, the rug was cruelly pulled out from under me, the wonder of the moment obliterated at a stroke by a grotesque march, the long-limbed melodic line twisted into a limping, wheezing caricature of itself. This experience is, in a nutshell, the essence of Hillborg's work, which occupies a place of perpetual possibility – or perhaps of infinite improbability, to steal a phrase from Douglas Adams. As I came to know Hillborg's music better, it occurred to me that the more unlikely was an event's occurrence within a given context, the greater the chances that it would, in fact, happen. Moments of timeless beauty are abruptly cross-cut with sneering, chattering, hyperactive music that seems to tear at the very idea of aesthetic beauty, calling into question the artifice behind it. A major chord will slowly appear out of a sea of chaos like a guiding star to show the way home.

It would be easy to say that such contradictory impulses reveal a deep ambivalence. Indeed, Hillborg's preoccupation with stark contrasts can appear as a refusal to commit himself to a particular set of aesthetic values, which it is to a limited extent. While certain complex surface textures and background harmonic progressions are generated using simple pitch matrices, in the manner of the twelve-tone school, the composer archly dismisses any rigorously systematic approach to composition (even in his own early works) as a need for "safety in numbers". All languages and gestures are permitted, nothing is ruled out a priori. But this most open-minded of composers is no polystylist, despite his loud collisions of disparate ideas. (If anything, the title of a recent orchestral work, Exquisite Corpse, betrays a Surrealist delight in the absurd, in the placing of a familiar, even clichéd object in an alien landscape.) There is no mere post-modern acceptance of uncertainty in Hillborg's work, no living with insecurity, nor any meaning in simply presenting the choices of our time in some orgy of endless variety and consumption. Rather, by engaging the act of choosing head-on, he enters into an epic battle for truth.

And how victorious is he! In the end, there is wonder, even amid the raucousness, made all the more valuable for having been tested. In fact, if one surveys his work as a whole, there is far more beauty than not, some so exquisite as to not even permit the questioning of it. The work HKK is performing this season, muoaiyoum, is an example of such. Another is his vocal work …Lontana in sonno…, which I saw render a row of mildly doctrinaire young composers speechless, so transfixing was its beauty. In such works, the states of suspended animation Hillborg conjures have the effect of telescoping time, making irrelevant any idea of duration. To this day, I have no idea how long …Lontana in sonno… lasts, nor do I want to know. Such music exists as the end point of a celebratory, cautionary heavenward ascent worthy of Dante – another source of inspiration for Hillborg – in which the composer gleefully fills the role of guide. Such unquestioned faith in the existence of a place of perfect beauty is rare enough in this age of cynicism and prevarication that, in my mind, it merits Hillborg a title so overused in modern art as to have been largely stripped of its value, yet which undoubtedly applies here: that of visionary.

Multitudes contained

2007-11-04T14:19:00.000+02:00

I'm a regular reader of The Guardian's music coverage, and although they've unfortunately drastically scaled back their online offerings of reviews and articles, it's still one of the best sources of information if you're interested in the British music scene. There's an article by composer Steven Stucky today on the dearth of American music heard in Britain. It's well worth a read, and sheds light on some possible stumbling blocks in the reception of American music that don't just apply to Britain. Speaking for myself, and in the broadest terms, the overt populism of a lot of American music is viewed with a certain amount of suspicion on this side of the Atlantic, and is often infuriatingly mistaken for naïvety by artists and critics alike. To that end, Stucky also takes a mild swipe at The Guardian's Andrew Clements, whose dislike of a large swath of American music is well documented, culminating in my mind in his nasty, vitriolic review of Christopher Theofanidis' Rainbow Body at the last – in every sense of the word, apparently – Masterprize competition a couple of years ago, which was, for better or worse, a populist endeavor meant to bring visibility to new music of broad appeal.

Stucky accurately points out that the music of the European composers he mentions, mostly Britons and Finns, are a regular feature of the American musical landscape, but that the reverse isn't true, with the exception of a few big names like Reich, Adams and Carter. And yet, one can't help but notice that the Americans he cites as being in want of greater exposure in Britain, as well as the Britons played Stateside, are all from a very narrow range of orchestra-circuit people like Christopher Rouse, Shulamit Ran, John Harbison, etc, etc. This is not to say that I have any particular problem with these people, and as was seen during the "essential minimalism recordings" fuss at the NY Times a while back, it's the easiest thing in the world to poke holes in a list like this.

But if we're talking about Americans who should be heard more abroad, shouldn't we cast a broader net? Where's Lee Hyla, who is to my mind one of the most original and tragically underappreciated American composers? His music is some of the most beautiful, well-constructed, surprising stuff around, and yet he gets little attention, perhaps due to his working largely with chamber and small orchestra groups. Where are the non-Adams postminimalists? For that matter, where's the other John Adams? Meredith Monk? The Bang on a Can composers? And while we're at it, why is there nobody on the list under the age of 50? The music of 30-something Brit Thomas Adès rates a mention, as does the deliriously beautiful output of Julian Anderson, but on the American side there are no younger counterparts. Judd Greenstein? Nico Muhly? Lisa Bielawa? Belinda Reynolds? Even if we stick to the orchestra circuit, there should be sufficient young names to offer up, like Theofanidis, Jennifer Higdon, Kevin Puts or Michael Hersch. My mentioning any of these names signifies neither approval nor opprobrium (okay, I obviously like Anderson a lot), but rather that they're significant names that are part of a much broader, more varied scene than the one Stucky puts forth. And that's just the living composers. When was the last time Morton Feldman's strange, genre-challenging orchestral works were programmed at the Proms? (According to this, Feldman's music of any kind has only ever been performed there once.)

I don't mean any of this as an implicit criticism of Stucky's view of American music. Everyone has their taste, and he works in a rather rarefied stratum of the business. But in presenting a cross-section of one's native musical culture in the mass media, which tends to have a simplistic, highly reductive, context-free editorial approach toward complex issues like art scenes, movements and ideas, I think it's important to include as much detail as possible within those constraints. Listing only the most visible, lauded names from a small subsection of a much larger, infinitely more complex landscape doesn't advocate for American music at its most diverse, at its most different from European music, which is, to me, the entire point. Because Stucky is dead on in his final statement about American composers, something that can't be repeated often enough:

They suggest, instead, a range of intellectual and artistic engagement as messy, as difficult to pigeon hole, as maddeningly impure and as wonderfully ambitious as American culture itself.

Odds & Ends

2007-11-01T20:57:00.000+02:00

Now that I've gotten Tauno Pylkkänen out of my life, I'm free to waste time again. Naturally, this is one of my first stops. My headspace isn't cleared out enough to make any serious statements, so in no particular order, while my carrot-ginger soup simmers:

Interesting article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (via Artsjournal) about PhD degrees and studio art, and whether artists should be made to do doctoral work in order to be considered qualified to teach at the university level. That one hit a little close to home, for a variety of reasons, most of them having to do with my being in the "why am I doing this?" stage of my own studies.

Gordon Ramsey was in town promoting a new book and was given a tasting of some of the blander Finnish "delicacies" by a local morning show hostess, and was apparently Not Very Nice. Having seen the video (2nd from the top under the 31.10 dateline, it goes into English a minute or so in), I won't even bother to defend him. He acted like a boor. However, inviting a guy like Ramsey into your studio and then claiming to be shocked – shocked! – when he does what he's famous for is a little disingenuous. Being confronted with a stone cold Saarioinen Karelian pasty covered in margarine/egg whip at the crack of dawn probably wouldn't bring out the best in me, either. That said, anyone from the land of haggis has no business comparing another nation's foodstuffs to excrement, even if it does look like mämmi. There's been a mild uproar about it reminiscent of the time Conan O'Brien visited Canada and had Triumph the Insult Comic Dog say some very unfunny things about French Canadians. A tempest in a teapot, to be sure.

And, last but not least, I've finally joined the ranks of drones I see walking around everywhere, shutting the world out and barring any form of social interaction. The siren call of not having to carry tons of CDs proved too powerful to resist.

I could justify it by saying that I'll be away the whole month of January (more on that later) and will need to make my Mahler collection more portable if I'm going to prepare my class, but who am I kidding? It's unbelievably cool!

Listening:

Param Vir: Between Earth and Sky (recorded from the BBC website with iRecordMusic, the greatest software on earth.)
Glenn Gould: The Idea of North (The Solitude Trilogy, Part 1)
Sigur Rós: Agaetis Byrjun

In LUV

2007-10-19T01:01:00.000+03:00

After hearing so much about this piece during the knock down-drag out fight over the NY Times minimalism record lists last month, I finally ordered a copy of Charlemagne Palestine's organ improvisation Schlongo!!!daLUVdrone. I'm a little ashamed to admit that I've never previously heard any of Palestine's music, especially given that I taught a course on minimalism last year. I can only plead ignorance and bad time management. I just plain ran out of research time and discovered a number of things far too late. Anyway, the disc arrived Tuesday, and I let it sit on my desk for a couple of days before putting it on for some late night listening.

There are no words that adequately cover it. But I'll try to manage a few.

Awesome. Shattering. Uncompromising. Humbling, certainly. It makes me feel small, which is the highest compliment I can pay it, and yet at the same time it feels like I'm big enough to contain the universe. I love writing long, resonant diatonic cluster chords, but Palestine takes the idea to its furthest extreme. This is the music I'd write if I had the guts, and if I didn't care if people thought I was crazy. I indulge myself in many conceits, one of them being the notion that I'm not confined stylistically, but the truth is that I'm extremely sensitive to the issue. I live in a country where modernism is still the ruling aesthetic, and even though my music is different, I draw on modernism as an influence, and willingly so, because it informs what I do as much as minimalism. As a therapeutic exercise, I'll hold a white-note palm cluster down on my Clavinova for minutes on end, but I'd never do it for an hour and call it a piece. (Palestine doesn't do that either, but the point remains.) My Western modernist training wouldn't allow it. I'd think I was a charlatan, too lazy to compose a real piece. And yet, here it is, the thing that, if I'm honest with myself, I've secretly been wanting to write my whole life, on my CD player.

Every so often, you come across a work of art that shakes you to your very foundation, that makes you question everything you hold dear as an artist, your very method of creating. This morning I woke up thinking of myself as, if not an iconoclast, then at least as having my moments of aesthetic courage. Tonight, I go to sleep in the happy realization that I know nothing of any value, especially about the meaning of courage.

Coming up for air

2007-10-18T14:54:00.000+03:00

In between performances of kantele music, all of which went extremely well, endless shifts working on Bathseba, negotiating text setting rights and bemoaning the current state of politics in my homeland*, I've been thinking a lot about instrumentation lately . I'm now two-thirds of the way through the opera project and the end is in sight, praise be to Unnamed Deity. I'm relieved that I'm finally in a groove with it, having become more familiar with Pylkkänen's language and orchestration. The music is reminiscent of the big Cecil B. deMille-type film epics, lots of big gestures, brassy jolts and the like. Not all of it is memorable, but it meanders pleasantly between lyrical and rhapsodic, has some very nice tunes, and makes an undeniable dramatic impact.

A big stumbling block at first was the ensemble: 13 players with single winds, two horns, trumpet, single strings and percussion, with a small harp obligato that my wife will be covering on kannel. (The opera is set in Estonia, so the national instrument seemed like an appropriate choice. Also, how the hell do you replicate the sound of a harp with an orchestra? You don't, that's how.) I don't write for mixed ensembles very much. Actually, looking over my output, I don't ever, it seems. My single, only partly successful attempt in the genre was a small piece for flute, viola, vibraphone and harp, which I chose because there were areas of clear timbral convergence that I could work with.

Since my instrumental approach is mostly derived from the music-formerly-known-as-minimalism (tip of the hat to PostClassic there), I need groups of matched instruments to get the hazy, heterophonic effects I'm going for. I can handle a solo instrument or a solo-"accompaniment" texture, but anything smaller than a full symphony orchestra that combines more than two different timbres gives me the heebie-jeebies. In the States, where everybody and their dog wrote a Pierrot or Pierrot + percussion piece in grad school, the very idea terrified me. (I wrote a string quartet instead.) I've come to better terms with mixed ensembles in the last few years since discovering Spectralism in a big way. That kind of integral, timbre-based way of writing makes a lot of sense, but I think I'm still a long way off from writing an effective piece for such a group.

So working with a precariously balanced ensemble like this is daunting, to say the least. This kind of scoring has the potential to sound almost like a full orchestra, or just horribly overdone. Certain things, like Pylkkänen's tendency to always write matched winds in thirds, make things even tougher. "I'm using that clarinet to fill out a 4-horn chord, but that damn flute tune needs the third below it, and the oboe will just bury it in that register." "That violin tune needs to come out over the brass, but the winds are busy and I can't thin out that brass chord, because then it would stop being a dominant seventh/added sharp fourth/whatever chord." (My first music theory classes are coming back to me with a vengeance: "Drop the fifth, even the root, but not the seventh!")

Logistical problems like these, combined with constantly having to comb through the parts to find gestures that aren't in the vocal score, make for long days. But I'm excited to hear how it's going to sound, almost as much as if it were my own piece. I'm more at home writing for orchestra than with any other ensemble, except perhaps choir. I take great pride in my orchestration, and this has been an entirely new challenge, one I stand to learn a lot from. Few people get to write a full-blown opera for their first outing, and besides, I find it very hard to relate to grand opera as a genre. Realistically, if I ever get to write the 1-hourish, one-act opera I've had in mind and would like to do in the next five years, it will be for these instrumental forces, or something close thereto. Hearing how the layers and densities I've written interact, even in music that's pretty far from mine in every respect, will probably be invaluable. So fingers crossed, I head back into it, to be heard from no more, or at least till November.

*(Pop quiz: How, as a minority government that was elected with just over 30% of the popular vote, do you avoid ever having to compromise on your dubious agenda in Parliament? Answer: Make every proposal a confidence motion! That way, if the government is brought down, the opposition heads into an election with labels like "uncooperative" and "obstructionist" tied around their necks. Governance by schoolyard bullies.)

An embarrassment of riches

2007-10-08T17:41:00.000+03:00

This fall boasts an unexpected number of performances of my music, something I'm not really used to. This coming weekend, the Sibelius Academy kantele studio celebrates its 20th anniversary with a concert festival. October 13th features two of my pieces, starting with Sketches before a storm in the afternoon, with Hanna Kinnunen on flute, and Eva Alkula on the Finnish electric kantele. On the evening concert, my lovely wife, Hedi, who plays the fully chromatic Estonian version of the instrument, performs the piece I wrote for her in 2002, The Snow Watcher, after the eponymous poetry collection by Chase Twichell. November sees the Finnish premiere of my recent solo accordion piece, being the pine tree, which I wrote for the incredible Veli Kujala. And in December the choir of which I'm a longtime member, the Hämäläis-Osakunta Singers, give the première of my carol In the bleak mid-winter. Getting your work played by top-notch musicians is always great, but getting it played by top-notch musicians who also happen to be dear friends and family is even better.