Tomorrow (Monday, 6/21), Mantra Percussion is performing if when without itself, for 3 drumsets and (wii-controlled) electronics as part of the annual Make Music NY festival (the performance is in the archway under the Manhattan Bridge in DUMBO, and starts at 5pm.  More info here.)  They’ll also be playing their KILLER arrangement for drumsets of Xenakis’s Okho.

Then on Wednesday, 6/23, choreographer Tzveta Kassabova, a frequent collaborator these last few years, is premiering her new dance/multimedia work, Memoria, as part of the Source festival in Washington, DC, for which I composed several 2-4 minute sound pieces.  The piece will play again on Friday, June 25.

Also on Friday is my good friend Barry’s wedding.  Barry was a classmate during my undergrad years at Connecticut College, and is now a lawyer and successful blogger.  Check out his blog, Is it Luck?, where he mixes awe at the natural world and the universe with awe at the stupidity of the American religious right, using equal parts sincerity and humor.  I’m a huge fan of his writing, as are more and more people – if you haven’t clicked, yet, click.  Now.  Anyway, I wrote a string quartet for his wedding ceremony, which I’m thrilled will be performed by Joanna Frankel, Guy Figer, Erin Wight, and Yoed Nir.  Sorry not to be able to invite you all to this one, but I’ll put up a recording later this month.

Lastly, on Sunday, my old friend and classmate from MSM, fellow composer Ronna Na Rong will be playing a short movement for piano which I wrote a couple years ago while in residency at MacDowell.  It’s a small piece of which I’m fond, and which I wrote for no particular occasion (probably why it’s never been performed yet).  This performance will be during the New York Composers Circle monthly salon, in the Symphony Space Thalia Rehearsal Studio on Sunday, 6/27, at 3:30 pm.  I’m curious about this group – seems like an interesting network of musicians, and they invite any and all NY-based composers to present a work at their monthly salons.  Jacob Goodman is the coordinator, and has been great to work with so far.  We’ll see how it goes.  (you can check out their site here)

Looking forward to a busy week of performances, then a short rest, and then diving into three exciting projects that are happening in the fall (which ought to occupy my entire summer).  More on these soon.

I was too quick, though, in dismissing the more essential point of the post, namely that composers of new music work really hard for very little recognition. Widespread public recognition is essentially off the table from the get-go, but recognition from critics and even one’s peers is hard to come by as well. Given the essentially non-commercial nature of the work a lot of us do, what keeps us going is the chance to have great ensembles play our music, to collaborate with (for example) a video artist we admire, even just putting out a record (leaving aside profiting from it), taking part in interesting festivals, getting to a point where we’re taking the gigs we want to take, not just every gig that comes along. I am at a point in my career where some of these things are just starting to happen for me. I have an amazing 22-month-old son, an incredible wife who does work that just blows my mind, and for the first time since starting a family, things are beginning to pick up for me, compositionally. From my perspective, in other words, the new music scene (and life, generally) is full of exciting potentialities, some of which are beginning to be realized. Gann’s perspective, though, which he fleshes out a bit in his responses to several commenters (I encourage you to read the whole thread), is totally valid, and is based on decades of experience I don’t have, so I should not have dismissed it. He writes in the comments, “I thought that with enough work, what Malcolm Gladwell calls a tipping point was going to arrive, at which time everything would be no longer uphill.” I can certainly identify with the upward-looking nature of being a composer in this environment. It is unbelievably oppressive, and I would imagine the higher one climbs, the harder that next rung is to reach.

One thing I consciously strive for (and it’s a different kind of striving – more inward – than striving for recognition) is to get to a point where I can compose entirely for myself. I of course don’t mean no longer interfacing with the rest of the music world, but writing the music I want to write because I want to write it, without thinking so much about what anyone else (audience or critic) will think about it. I’m convinced that whether the recognition comes or not, I’ll be happier if I’m able to do that.

In short, I do think Gann was painting with a bit of a broad brush, and that there is a lot that is gratifying in composing new music, but I wanted to offer a small mea culpa for painting his post with an equally broad brush.

[PS Thinking about all of this, it strikes me that maybe what we need when we get down about the tough lot we've chosen for ourselves as new music composers is Alec Baldwin's character from Glengarry Glen Ross, berating us: "Money's out there. You pick it up, it's yours. You don't, I got no sympathy for you. You wanna go out on those commissions tonight and compose, COMPOSE. It's yours. If not you're gonna be shining my shoes. And you know what you'll be saying - a bunch of losers sittin' around in a bar. 'Oh yeah. I used to be a composer. It's a tough racket.'"]

“We have three markets. There’s a commercial market, entirely determined by huge corporations whose sole interest is money. We’re never going to make a dent in that one. There’s an orchestra-music circuit that you have to enter young, and it’s all about who you know, and the music sucks. And there’s an academic market, which demands a healthy respect for the Schoenberg line and a suspicion against anything populist.”

First of all, as Gann himself points out, this is coming from someone who has had success, by every reasonable measure.  He’s a widely-known figure in the new music world, he’s the respected author of several books (and not unknown books one can only find in niche online stores – I’ve seen his 4′33″ book on the shelf at Barnes and Noble), he teaches at Bard (not a bad gig for someone so down on academia), and has an active composing career, not to mention a successful blog.  But, he writes, “People meet me, and I’m not the composer, I’m not even the author, I’m the blogger,” and, “why do I do anything but blog?”  Poor guy.  What an unfortunate circumstance, to have so much recognition and success that he can’t choose which of his pursuits gets recognized the most.

More to the point, though, Gann is being unnecessarily gloomy about the choices facing those of us devoted to new music.  First of all, I don’t think terribly many composers on the downtown/experimental/electronic spectrum (or “uptown” for that matter) get into this particular line of work with the expectation of signing a million-dollar record deal, so even to list that as something we’re unable to make a dent in seems a bit of straw-man.  I don’t know enough about the orchestral market to respond to his comment on that point, but I suspect he’s right about having to know the right people and start young.  His sweeping indictment of the quality of the music, though, is inappropriate, disrespectful, and stupid.  Lastly, academia, imperfect though it may be, gets treated really unfairly.  In my experience, academia has every kind of composer you can think of. The ivory-tower, we-only-respect-serialism thing is at best out-of-date, and I suspect that it was never really as pervasive as it gets credit for having been.  There are just too many schools in too many places with too many composers working in them to be such a monolithic force.

I reject Gann’s pessimism.  The new music scene is really exciting right now.  There are too many amazing ensembles to mention, and it seems like every single night there’s a concert I wish I had the chance to go to.  I wish I could keep up with all of the opportunities out there for composers.  I look at my friends and colleagues, at the amazing work they’re doing, the prizes and commissions they’re winning, and I’m incredibly excited to be working right now.  It’s easy enough to moan about not having a gold record or a bunch of orchestral commissions, but the opportunities don’t end there.  A lot of composers I know don’t even have those things on their radars, so not achieving them isn’t much of a disappointment.  There’s simply too much else to do.

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.

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.

- Charles Ives

I’m very grateful to know, though, about Anestis Logothetis, who’s score is the canvas for the piece below.  Beautiful score.  I want to get my hands on a copy.

I was gratified, too, that despite leaving the session with a little less of his thumb, James seemed to enjoy playing the piece.  I certainly enjoyed hearing him play it.

Here’s an mp3 of the recording. Section 5, which can be viewed in my previous post, runs from about 4:42 to 6:42.

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.