A recent red-eye from LA to Philadelphia gave me a few fitful hours to muse about a concert in REDCAT I had just attended.  On the program: five works from the last fifteen years, performed by the Idyllwild Symphony.

There is a lot I could say about the concert, the performances, the audience.  But I want to focus for a moment on the five works by Peter Askim, Vijay Iyer, Pierre Jalbert, Aaron Kernis and me.  Here are sound-byte encapsulations, necessarily leaving out a lot, but fairly accurate within themselves:

• Askim: Still Points – muscular, poetic concerto for trombone and orchestra
• Dillon: Figments and Fragments – fantastical reimagining of past musics
• Iyer: Interventions – gorgeous blend of spectralism, electronics and jazz
• Jalbert: Les espaces infinis – ethereal, rhapsodic evocation of spaciousness
• Kernis: Too Hot Toccata – frenetic, virtuosic dance

Five pieces, five different attitudes toward the orchestra and what it can do.  What they all have in common is a high level of skill and imagination in handling the orchestral medium, and the devotion their composers and the orchestra showed in bringing them to life.

As much as these five pieces diverge from one another, they don’t even come close to covering the range of work being created for the orchestra in our time.  Thumping film scores, peaceful ambience, retro serialism, retro Romanticism, noise – you name it, somebody is doing it, and doing it well.

The beginning of the 21^st century has been filled with pronouncements about the death of the orchestra.  For artistic and economic reasons, the orchestra is often portrayed as an artistic medium unsuited to our times, quickly losing relevance and on the verge of extinction.

These pronouncements are backed up by the data.  Audiences for orchestra concerts are declining.  The cost of mounting an orchestra concert is far out of proportion to most other forms of music-making.  And the orchestra as we know it was devised to serve societal suppositions that can no longer be taken for granted.

So, is the orchestra on its way out?   It’s a good question, and not one I can pretend to answer.  For me, the death of the orchestra is a scenario I can readily imagine – but it’s only one of several possible outcomes from the current scene.

Setting aside predictions, though, let’s seriously consider for a moment that the orchestra as we know it is now breathing its last.  Let’s assume that the enormous variety and vitality of music being produced these days for the orchestra is a sign of its imminent demise.

If this is how the orchestra dies, then let it be a lesson.  We are all faced with death, and faced with the question of how to die well.  Do we go out kicking and screaming?  Do we fade slowly from sight?  Are we cut down unaware and unprepared?  Do we give up the last beat in our brows with a grateful smile?

The richness of music being created now for orchestra far surpasses that of any period from the past.  If this is how the orchestra dies, then I envy the orchestra.  I would like to die like this, flaming in full crimson, like the maple leaves in autumn, stunning the senses and imagination with infinite variety and splendor before dropping gently to feed the ever-hungry, impassive soil.

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.

The following image is a page from my newest piece, Study no. 1, for amplified acoustic guitar.

This is my first real foray into the world of graphic scores.  I have long been making unconventional scores, but they’ve always been essentially staff-based.  The Study uses a kind of staff, but the horizontal lines are not staff lines, but rather the strings of the guitar.  On the left are the tuning pegs, on the right the sound hole and bridge.  Time is not represented in the score – events are instead defined by space.

I didn’t jump right into this notation.  I tried more traditional ways of expressing the sounds I was making and the ways I was making them, using the horizontal dimension to represent time, and filling it with symbols to represent the different sounds, but I found that ultimately not to be really expressive of the piece.  When I hit upon this, it seemed actually to represent the sound much better, and sacrificing control over the order of events seemed a very small price to pay (that would be the micro-order – the above is page 5 of 6, and the pages do have to be played in order).

Also, it’s fun to play with colored pencils.

There was an agreement among journalists after about 1970, when America took a sharp turn to the right, to call all music that did not use traditional instruments – the orchestra or combinations of orchestral instruments – “experimental.” This was a greater disappointment to me than most things that journalists do, because it showed a deep misunderstanding of the way things were. There were noble aspirations among a few younger conductors to revive the relationship between the composer and the orchestra, but there were no orchestras to speak of… there were no commissions of the sort that might be valuable to the composer, in the sense that a commission involves some sort of discussion between the composer and the orchestra; and most important of all, there was never any rehearsal time, in case an idea did not work. Orchestra commissions of the time always sounded like they were being sight-read, which in fact they were. I am sorry to say that this is still largely the case….

I think that even for the best composer (better than I am), ideas don’t always work. That is why the orchestra pece without lots of rehearsal is in some way doomed. And dreaded by the composer…

[A] friend told me that a distinguished violinist told him that in his youth he had played La Mer with Ernest Ansermet’s Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, and had remarked to Ansermet that the violin part was not the same that he had known with other orchestras. Ansermet replied that Debussy said that he had always regretted the published violin part, and so with Ansermet’s approval had written a new violin part. (Which one do we hear now?)

So, in this situation it is actually the American orchestra music that is truly “experimental.” When you have thought about other kinds of musical ideas, and worked with, say, electronic music for most of your composing life, the composition is anything but experimental. It is the epitome of expertise. It may be aleatoric or purposefully unpredictable in its specific sounds, or purposefully exploratory of a sound, but experimental is the wrong word, and its use has more or less divided composers among themselves….

It is a problem to write orchestra pieces that can be played after one or two rehearsals. I can’t even learn my own compositions in a six-hour rehearsal. (Recently I was listening to a performance of La Mer on the radio and remarking to myself on its difficulty and it occurred to me that is a composer wrote La Mer today, no orchestra could play it. Not enough rehearsal time.) If it were not for this drastic restriction, orchestras and orchestra literature would not be in such dire straits. And there would probably be a very different idea about electronic music, and so probably a different kind of electronic music….
- Robert Ashley, liner notes to Superior Seven, 1995

In 1997 the American Composers Orchestra, urged by board member Tom Buckner and with evident reluctance, commissioned Bob to write When Famous Last Words Fail You, for singers and orchestra. The orchestra members in the piece are cued by the lead singer’s words, so the conductor merely adjusts volumes, as at a mixing board. Dennis Russell Davies ran through the piece Thursday morning before a Saturday performance. The parts had just been handed out, so everyone was clearly sight-reading. There was a planned meeting afterward to discuss the technique of the piece; that was canceled. There was a scheduled dress rehearsal; that was canceled. The performance was the second run-through of a piece that had never been rehearsed, and sounded awful, not at all the way Bob imagined it.

A classical music world that treats great composers that way deserves the worst that can possibly happen to it.

HAUSCHKA – Eltern // live in the Berger Kirche from realiction on Vimeo.

There are many neighborhood fixtures.  One is Marie.  Marie is (or looks) in at least her mid 80s.  As far as I can tell, she lives alone.  She’s always sitting out on her stoop.  When I pass with my son, who’s almost 10 months old, she can’t get enough of him.  “Aw!”  “Look at ‘im!”  “Ain’t he cute?” “Aw, he’s happy.  He’s smilin’.”  “He’s friendly!” “What’s his name?”  “Ain’t he cute?”  “Lookit ‘im smilin’!” “Oh, he’s a doll.”  She always asks me what his name is, every time we pass.  Sometimes more than once.

Marie is old and weak.  But every day, several times per day, she gets up from her folding chair, descends her stoop, shuffles the block and a half to the corner bodega a few feet at a time, buys a can of soda, and returns.  I’ve taken recently to sitting out on my stoop with Ben (the aforementioned 10-month-old), pointing out cars and dogs and squirrels and birdies and other babies, etc, so I’ve watched Marie do her rounds many times.  The whole trip takes about 20 minutes.  Sometimes she just walks the half block to her corner and stands there, holding onto her neighbor’s iron gate and looking around.  When she does so, she always lingers there several minutes before turning back and returning to her stoop.  I see her there sometimes, and I can’t tell if she’s confused or just taking a breather between laps.  I see her in the bodega sometimes as well.  Akin to her interactions with me, she always has a menagerie of sweet one-liners and rhetorical questions for the bodega owner as she fishes out crumpled dollar bills from the pocket of the black coat she’s always wearing.  There are other people she stops and talks to, too.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen her with someone, though.

Another fixture in my neighborhood is a middle-aged, chubby, homeless guy with a Keith Hernandez moustache whose name I don’t know.  As homeless people go, this guy seems pretty stable.  He’s been here as long as we have – longer I’m sure.  The only interaction I’ve ever had with him, though I see him all the time, was one horrendously freezing, blustering winter night when I gave him what I figured was enough for him to get a room for the night somewhere.  He looked at the cash, then at me, and said, “Hey, thanks man.  Wow.”  He seemed pretty lucid and with-it.   I’ve never, in 9 years, though I see him most days, given him anything else, spoken to him, or maintained any length of eye contact with him.  It’s just by he sheer number of times I’ve walked past him (pretty much every time I’ve gone to the block near my house with all the shops and the subway stations) that I feel I know anything about him.  I’ve never seen him beg – the money I gave him that night was unsolicited – but I’ve seen him doing odd jobs for people and local businesses, sweeping the sidewalk and that sort of thing.  By far the most common situation in which I encounter him is sitting next to the side door of the bar on the corner, listening to his radio (often a game).

He strikes me as someone who’s sort of “figured out” street living.  He has his possessions, his territory, his routines (eg, I frequently see him having coffee outside the same stationery store).  He’s even got a specific place that he goes and sits and freaks out, which is very orderly, too, in its own way (and not that frequent): talk a bunch, breathe into paper bag, drink a sip from a 16 oz Budweiser, breathe into paper bag, talk a bunch, etc, all while remaining seated, always on the same bench (I’ve witnessed this 4-5 times over the years).  I like to think that if reality were a Mark Twain novel, he’d be called “Homeless Joe”, and he’d have his own sort of eccentric wisdom to impart to unemployed 30-somethings with masters degrees and babies and loans to pay back.  Then I remember that he actually goes minute to minute trying to find things to eat, places to sleep, places to shit, and ways to divert his mind from his unlucky circumstances, and I feel terrible for romanticizing him.

I think of Marie and the mustached homeless man as two of many “loops” that comprise the ambient piece that is my immediate neighborhood.  Lots of more fleeting “musical episodes” happen on the surface, but those two, and many others (upon whom I may expound at a later date), form the static motion against which these are “heard” and understood.

it has come to my attention that the URL of an old site of mine, which i canceled the registration for, came to be purchased by a purveyor of some pretty sickening filth.  what’s worse, the URL is a slightly different form of my name.  so now there exists a site with my name as the URL, the content of which is really beyond the pale in its perversion, and i’m certain that if i try to contact the new owner to correct that problem, he’ll gladly offer to sell the domain back to me for the reasonable price of $1287456012394781028734.

the lucky thing is that google searches of my name in its various forms do not return the offending site, and i’ve already contacted and heard back from many of the other sites that had linked to it, and they’ve updated their links to lead here.  and those that i haven’t been able to reach are all blog posts from over 2 years ago, so i’m not too concerned about them getting much traffic.

just a word to the wise: if any of you out there have links to my site from yours, please make sure they link here and only here, lest you inadvertently direct your readers to some exceptionally offensive text and images.

thanks!

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.