I end up rather conspicuous, hunched over large manuscript paper with my automatic pencil and straightedge. I suppose it’s natural that some would be curious and come over and ask me what I’m doing. The first question is usually, “Are you writing music?”.  I’m always tempted to say something snarky like, “No, I’m scrambling eggs,” but I never do. I just say yes, which is in almost every case enough to elicit awe-struck bulging eyes or a “wow….”. It reminds me just how few people there are that actually do this (not composing – but specifically writing notes on staves).   I think, if the guy at the table next to me were sketching designs for a building, I’d feel the same way. It wouldn’t matter whether it were any good. I’d just be amazed to see someone with those faculties at work, because they’re so mysterious to me.

The usual follow-up is, “What kind of music do you write?”. This is a tricky on for me. How do I explain what I do to the (probably) uninitiated? “Classical,” to most people, means Mozart. “Electronic” means Ace of Base. “Experimental” means nothing, except perhaps the vulgar stereotype of the performance artist wearing scuba gear and angel wings and peeing on the American flag while reciting Shakespeare sonnets in binary code. Give me a minute or two, and I can explain it pretty well, but I feel that that’s giving them more than they bargained for. I usually end up just telling them in very broad strokes about the piece I’m currently working on, often no more than the instrumentation. Again, this tiny piece of information is met with wows and impressed expressions. (I wish it was this easy to impress audiences and my peers).

In any case, today, it was an elderly woman who asked me the above questions. I explained that I was working on a piece for 3 drumsets and electonic sounds, to b played in the Make Music NY festival next month.   Her response: “It’s not that metal, is it?”. I assured her it wasn’t metal, and she said, “Good. That stuff’s just too much. No one wants to hear that.” I smiled. She asked when the concert is, and then said she’d try to come. I really hope she does, although if so, I may feel compelled to lower the threshold on my limiter.  No one wants shouts of “Keep it down!” during a premiere.

The premiere will be June 12 at the CD release party for the electric guitar quartet Dither. The party starts at 7 at The Invisible Dog in Brooklyn (map). You must check Dither out – they are incredible.  The lineup for the release party includes a ton of amazing performers, including Mantra, Kathleen Supové, Elliott Sharp, Nick Didkovsky, Loud Objects, Love Like Deloreans, Matthew Welch, Redhooker, and The Deprivation Orchestra of NYC (and, of course, Dither themselves).

Mantra are then playing the piece again 9 days later, June 21, as part of this year’s Make Music NY.  Other works on the program are by Xenakis and Mantra percussionist Mike McCurdy.  I will update shortly with exact time and location and other details.

I am aware among my peers of a general desire to find new ways to engage an audience, to get out of the  you sit-we play-you-clap mold.  For some this has meant writing more pop-influenced music, for others it’s meant playing in more relaxed venues where people can drink and chat and move around, for still others it’s meant using technology to make their music interactive.  For the asphalt orchestra, the plan is one of elegant beauty: move from place to place and play music so great that people want to follow you in order to hear it. Walk away from the audience, around them, right into them, parting them with a trombone slide like Moses did to the red sea with his staff. Seriously, I wish I had a bird’s eye view of this concert I just saw, throngs of people clumsily getting out of the way of a charging tuba player, rearranging themselves as they try to predict what the best vantage point for hearing the music will be when the players come to a halt. People were involved!

But don’t get me wrong. This was no novelty act. These were 12 trendous musicians playing intricate, gorgeous arrangements of unusual music.  Their rendition of conlon nancarrow’s study no. 20, composed for player piano because the composer deemed it too rhythmically complex for human fingers, was a rare musical moment, at once tender and delightfully off-kilter.  I’m looking forward to hearing more from them, including more newly commissioned stuff (Goran Bregovic’s Champagne was aptly named – a celebration!)

Oh, and I’d be remiss not to mention the outfits.  A picture’s worth a thousand words:

Very interesting idea. My first crack at it:

FILL IN THE GAP

You could arrange this succession of frequencies over time for cell phone beeps and it would still be aching and melancholy. Even the most virtuosic performer can only make a good piece better or make a shitty piece suck less; the composition is the thing.

I think that it’s true (and not trivial) to say that glucose is sweet because we like glucose, we don’t like glucose because it’s sweet.   In other words, because there is something our body has evolved to need, the sensation of getting that thing has evolved to be pleasurable. My hunch is that if one were raised by wolves from birth, hearing a human baby cry would indicate to that feral person that the baby needed attention.  It’s important to have the idea that sound is a signal of other nearby events ingrained very deeply in our consciousness. As an example, think about how sudden, loud noises are startling: if something big enough to cause that sound is going on nearby, the likelihood that it’s dangerous is high enough that we have evolved a reaction in which we take our attention away from whatever it was we were doing until we are either calmed enough to return to what we were doing or frightened/alerted enough to take action.

Music may in many ways be a way of taking advantage of our built-in tendency to react to sound; at this point, it’s complex and abstract enough to have moved away from being just some atavistic “me scared big thunder” caveman thing (though that’s certainly there in the cannon of the 1812 overture).

So what is the fucking deal with the Moonlight Sonata?  Why in the world am I so sure that this abstract succession of frequencies over time would elicit a strong emotional response even when rendered in simple electronic beeps? This is not to discount the importance of performance; I would probably prefer the sound of a well-played piano to the simple beeps’ sounds whenever given the choice, but the “meaning” of the piece would come through even if crudely played.

I knew I knew the answer to my friend’s question, but it took some thinking to articulate it.  I think I eventually did, though.  Here’s my response:

on “successions of frequencies over time”:

It’s an interesting thought, and I definitely agree with your assessment that the composition is “the thing”, as opposed to the performance.  It seems, though, that you’re going further than that, saying that a shitty arrangement of the sonata (say, for cell phones) will still be transporting, thanks to something inherent in the “succession of frequencies over time”, which brings up the question of just what it is we mean when we refer to “the composition” (or perhaps, what it is about the composition that makes it “the thing”).  Your analysis works reasonably well for classical music of the so-called “common practice era” (roughly 1600-1900), and for much popular music.  Piano pieces can be orchestrated, piano reductions can be made of orchestral pieces, rock and folk songs can be covered, and so on.  With perhaps a little transposition, some slight tempo adjustments, and various practical measures to take into account the idiosyncrasies of the instrument(s) being arranged for (wind players need to breathe, nylon-stringed guitars can’t sustain a pitch, etc), all such compositions are capable of being abstracted as pitch relationships arranged according to time relationships.  Think of a score.  Now take away all the words on the page, leaving just the notes and other markings. Actually, go ahead and get rid of the other markings, as well as the key signatures, and even the clefs, leaving just the noteheads and stems.  What you have left is pitch relationships (intervals) and time relationships (rhythm), capable of being stretched or squeezed to fit any given amount of time, and transposable to any key and/or any octave.  You essentially have a bare-bones standard MIDI file.  And I could be wrong, but I think that’s what you mean by “the thing”.  “The thing” is that about a composition which remains the same no matter the arrangement.  It’s the reason we have Switched-On Bach, orchestral arrangements of Metallica, and this.  Depending how far you’re willing to go, “the composition” is something even less specific than particular time and pitch relationships, which is why different singers sometimes have wildly different interpretations of the same song.  It’s why some arrangements “swing“, and it’s why from time to time you hear minor versions of songs originally written in major. I have some friends who founded a band called alice, and what they do is take popular songs, strip them of everything but the melody & lyrics (even the chords) and create new pieces with them, using their own mood, their own chords, their own instrumentation, their own tempo, their own key, etc.  I don’t think you can rightly call what they do arranging – they go so far in their re-imagining of the song that it becomes something entirely new.  The fact that it has the same melody and lyrics as another song winds up being as incidental as a Mozart string quartet having the same instrumentation and form as one by Haydn.  They’re just parameters which the pieces happen to share, like any others.  In other words, there’s a limit to how much you can distill a composition and still retain its essential qualities.  (I guess homeopathy doesn’t work in music, either.)

But composers don’t write MIDI files.  They write all the stuff on the page (well, at least since the 18th century they do).  As time has gone on, in fact, they’ve written more and more and more stuff on the page, to the point of articulating (and even orchestrating) every part of every note’s spectral envelope (as you might imagine, this led in some cases to fewer notes [yes, that's all 6 movements in 4:12]).  By the mid-20th century, some composers were dispensing with the abstraction (the score) altogether and sculpting sound directly with electronic tape and synthesizers.  In those cases, “the thing” is the whole damn piece.  A version for cell phone just doesn’t make any sense.  But even among composers dedicated to writing instrumental music, there was (and is) a substantial movement shifting its attention away from melody, harmony, and counterpoint (the stuff of MIDI files) and towards timbre and texture.  If you want to re-imagine Ligeti’s Atmospheres, for example, for an ensemble other than full orchestra (good luck with those 55 individual string parts), the last thing you’re going to be thinking about is preserving the precise pitch and rhythm information.  Or, take an earlier piece like Pierrot Lunaire, which does rely for its emotional impact on discrete melodic gestures and has few enough parts that it could more readily be MIDI-fied (more readily, but not readily).  Again, though for different reasons than with Atmospheres, cell phone beeps will not work to convey it.  Even if you take a brilliant performance, replacing the instrumental timbres with cell phones but preserving every other aspect, the piece will be lost because the drama and wonder of the piece is so intrinsically tied up with the distinct sound colors of the instruments it was composed for, particularly the vocal part.  Is it because the succession of frequencies over time is inherently less moving?  Well, maybe it is.  But the piece isn’t.  What does that say about the fidelity of abstraction, at least as we’ve defined it here?  It may be that for some pieces the abstraction is something other than a series of frequencies over time, for example an array of behaviors or a succession of timbres.

on the interplay between music and primitive instincts:

None of this is to dispute your idea that the crudest arrangement of the Moonlight Sonata would still convey something essential about the piece.  I agree, it probably would.  I agree, too, that we have evolutionarily-programmed responses to sound.  However, there’s an inherent disconnect between those two ideas, which goes to the heart of your question: the abstract pitches and rhythms are not the sound of the piece.  The sound involves everything Beethoven put on the page, including the articulations, the note durations, the pedal markings, and the word “Piano” to the left of the grand staff.  The “succession of frequencies over time” is an intellectual abstraction, and does not interface with the “loud thunder me run away” area of our reptilian brains.  It interfaces with the highest-order functions of our human brains, the parts that are in charge of pattern recognition, problem solving, memory, and narrative.  These are of course survival-related as well, but are entirely separate from our fit-to-survive responses to sound.  The reason you would respond to Nokia Beethoven is that music acts on the intellect, and the intellect then in turn acts on the emotions, taking into account all the caveman stuff, but also all our cultural conditioning, our own personal histories, our current state of mind, the whole thing.  Music does not act on the emotions directly, like sound does, but only through the medium of the intellect.  You would prefer the original piano because it conveys more information.  But you still appreciate the cell phone because the abstract pitches and rhythms do convey some.

Last year, when I was working full time at Electronic Music Foundation, I was briefly involved with trying to find a commercial home for Auracle, Max’s online interactive improvisation tool.  Go check it out.  You have to download a plugin called JSyn to make it work, but it’s pretty fun and easy to get started.  I know there are other tools out there like this, but I’m pretty sure Max’s was one of the first.