The Fredösphere

Composers, watch out!  Tell your congressman to include you in the next round of protectionist legislation.  You're about to be replaced by a computer!  And, talk about matchstick men--via SF Signal, it's the Matchstick Minas Tirith.

I attended a composers' forum at the University of Michigan School of Music last night.  It's the first time in several years that I've gone.  I used to find these concerts painful, but last night's show boasted a few genuinely well-written pieces, and even the dogs had something to recommend them.  Is it possible that the kids are better than they were in the good old days?  I definitely recall the forums from way back, from the time I was a student there, were very informal and low on the spit & polish.  Not much was taken seriously back then.  Now, the kids seem terribly sophisticated--sophisticated in a real way, as though some of them are already moving beyond youthful gestures of pseudo-profundity and pointless complexity.

Either the UMSM composition department is recruiting better these days, or maybe I'm getting better at listening.  I suspect the answer is, some of both.  No question I have finally begun to learn how to pay attention to what is not immediately compelling.  I'm still bad at listening, but I now realize I was absolutely, dreadfully terrible at it in my younger years.  (Having a son with the same tendency has made me more aware of the problem.)

While I was at the forum I reintroduced myself to Evan Chambers, who recently emailed me to thank me for blogging his new work, The Old Burying Ground.

Labels: Composer, LovableOddballs

Everyone's linking to the amusing BBC interview of a couple of European critics attempting to take down a notch Alex Ross' beautiful book The Rest Is Noise.  Kyle Gann has an elegant and gracious (gracious to Alex, anyway) rebuttal, and he quotes Alex's cool line about the German music tradition now resembling a crime scene.  Sequenza21, where I first saw the link, has a more varied discussion in the comments section.  It's all fascinating; it is a crime scene itself.

Have I commented on the book yet?  If I haven't, well, I liked it so much, I even recommended it to the Wifeösphere, who has only so much time and interest for classical music (beyond my own, of course).  Nuts to detailed descriptions of the music; we don't need more of that whole Dancing About Architecture stuff; inspire us to curiosity, then let us go directly to the music itself.  This, Alex has done.  He's even made me want to give Messiaen's thorny Canyons another try.

Labels: Composer, Culture

A few days ago, my daughter, the Maharincess, determined to launch her composing career.  I sat her down at the computer, gave her a few instructions in how to use Finale, and turned her loose.  The ol' Himebaugh genes kicked in, and like her brother before her, she has produced a bold masterpiece of singular brilliance.

Like all uncompromising geniuses, she cares nothing for the whining criticisms of performers locked in old-fashioned notions of what is "performable" or "practical."  So, as we expect, the Maharincess pushes instrumentalists beyond all bounds.  Unlike other experimentalists, however, she explores new territory in her pronounced bias in favor of treble sounds.  At first, I suspected this was caused by the position of the MIDI keyboard relative to the computer, which makes the low notes hard to reach for a six-year-old's arm.  But no:  upon listening to an early version of this piece, the diminutive maestra insisted on replacing a line of low-lying notes with high ones.  She knows what she wants, and she knows how to get it.

The Maharincess seems to have a special animus for the expectations of trombone players.  I am no Freudian, yet I cannot help but speculate that latent feminist resentments lurk in the mind of the budding young composer, expressed by unprecedented demands on a orchestral section known for its high proportion of male players, players with a reputation for chauvinism.  I will refrain from the more shocking terminology employed by feminist theorists, and simply invite the reader to imagine for himself (or herself!) the psychological effect on a male trombonist as he is subjugated to a passage wherein he must "sound like a girl."

As happened when I revealed my son's genius to an appreciative world, I expect this new work, Flowers in the Wind, to be greeted by embarrassingly effusive critical acclaim.  After all, my little Maharincess deserves no less.

Labels: Composer, fun

Via Sequenza21, Kenneth Woods has tips for composers working with performers:

2- Don’t bring antagonism towards anyone else’s music into gatherings that include anyone but you.
In any “us vs. them” match up, whether it is “new vs. old,” “tonal vs. atonal,” “US vs. Europe,” academic vs. self supporting, you, the composer, lose. More importantly, it creates unbelievable resentment among everyone whose support you need. You may hate Beethoven or Schoenberg in the privacy of your own home, but no matter what you hate, someone in the orchestra or the audience loves it, and if you convince them that you don’t listen to music with open ears, they won’t feel they owe you the same courtesy. More to the point, you may hate Mozart or Ligetti now, but someone in the building knows how much you could learn from them, and you’ll only embarrass yourself by criticizing their music.

By the way, have I mentioned lately how much I adore the music of Mozart?  He's my favorite composer.  And Ligetti.  Definitely Ligetti.

Plus, I love synaesthetes.  Just can't get enough of the little dearies.

Seriously, the tips are valuable and entertaining.  The one piece of advice that seems to be controversial has to do with the use of Italian expression markings.  The argument is, when Czech or Korean musicians sit down to play my music, the lingua franca will save them time.  I should be so lucky to be in a position to waste the time of Czech or Korean musicians.

One commenter reminds you (not me, I already knew) that choirs are not the same as orchestras:

Just some observations from the choir side - choirs are finicky beings, they don’t read well or learn fast (unless they are professional - and even then - the most avant-guard music does not come quickly). Avoid false-relations within a part, and don’t expect singers to be able to sing every interval - stick to one accidental when ever possible, (don’t write an augmented 5th when a minor 6th will do fine) Know the choir you are working for, and write for their ability and make-up. I’ll never forget the year the my chamber choir commissioned a work from a student composer, as a way of supporting the composition program by way of commission “scholarship”. The composer and I met and I explained that our 24 voice choir had only 3 tenors, so divisi should be limited in all parts, and avoided completely in the tenor if possible. We didn't care about the language, but would prefer some kind of suitable “themed” poetry, and it could have atonal elements, but should be listenable for our audience base, so some tonality would be good once in a while. Plus, we only have four rehearsals to learn it, so keep 8-10 minutes would probably be a good length. He came back six months later with a 30 minute work for 32 part choir (up to six divisi within each part) with graphic notation and nonsensical text. Needless to say, we couldn't perform it, and paid for nothing.

...and worth every penny!  Reminds of the time as a graduate student, I was asked, as a favor, to sing in an ad hoc men's vocal quartet.  I found out late in the game that the organizer paid for an "arrangement" by a student "composer" none of us knew, even though the organizer knew I had composing experience myself.  The music was a textbook case of what not to do:  no coherent base line, just dense chords following the melody up and down, centered around the C an octave below middle C.  In other words, a dense, growly, thoughtless mess.  It was completely unusable, so in our brief rehearsal time, I and the other singers rearranged and simplified on the fly, doing what we had to do to avoid disaster.  It still makes me mad.

Labels: Composer, Synaesthetes

Ian Moss has a new blog, with an emphasis on arts management to go along with the composing.

Dark Roasted Blend has one of its gallaries of gorgeous retro-future art.  This time the subject is cities.  (Hat tip Gravity Lens.)

I've been looking for a good video of the Four Bettys for a while now.  I found one with them singing "So Happy Together," but they really deserve something with better sound quality.  Meanwhile, enjoy.  Female barbershop quartets use a two-staff system with treble clef on the top for the tenor and lead and bass clef (transposed up an octave) for the baritone and bass.  This way, arrangements for men's groups can be adopted effortlessly by women's groups, and vice versa.  One more factoid:  as best I can tell, the term "beauty shop quartet" has become moribund; perhaps stillborn is the better metaphor.  One is inclined to be impressed by the female bass (really, a female with something like the range of a male tenor) but don't overlook the difficulty of singing the soprano part, which can get very high, but must always stay under the lead in terms of volume.  Unlike with men's groups, there's no falsetto to solve that problem.

Labels: BarbershopHarmony, Composer, Futurism

Hosanna!  My buddy Alan gave me the news.  Carol Barnett's The World Beloved:  A Bluegrass Mass has been recorded by VocalEssence.  Give the Sanctus a listen.  (Stephen Paulus' The Day is Done and Eric Whitacre's Water Night have sample tracks available as well.)

Labels: Composer, OldTyme, vocal

Conductor Kenneth Kiesler chose a theme of death and rebirth implicitly in his marriage of Evan Chambers' new song cycle The Old Burying Ground with The Rite of Spring in last night's concert by the University of Michigan Orchestras.  Chambers' premiere was a thrilling experience, with fine performances by soprano Jenifer Larson and Nicholas Phan, the latter with a surprisingly potent tenor voice.  Folk stylings were supplied by Tim Eriksen, whose reedy tones brought the right kind of melancholy to this setting of tombstone epitaphs.  Vocally, he fit right in; visually, he seemed uncomfortable.  Eriksen looked like a man who was still trying to figure out how a folk singer ought to behave on a classical concert stage.  No doubt he'll sort things out by the time they take the show on the road.

At half time the wifeösphere and I realized it would be impossible for us to stay to the end of Le Sacre, so we declared victory and pulled out.  It was a painful decision, and with it I felt the last reserves of my bohemian cred leaking away, but we simply could not expect the family watching our kids to stay up so late.  So we left, with the words of the old spiritual "Ain't got time to be reborn" in our heads.

Last night's concert was a clubby affair, since we sat next to our friends Victor Volkman and his wife Marian, and behind Michelle Mustert and her husband Jen Canlas.  Michelle is the daughter of Merle Mustert, a long-time force to be reckoned with in the choral music scene of Grand Rapids, Michigan.  Michelle introduced us to her friend Midori Koga, who accompanied Evan Chambers on piano for the chamber premiere of The Old Burying Ground.

See my prior post for more information about Evan Chambers.

Labels: Composer, vocal

Composer Evan Chambers came to the Ann Arbor library last night to talk about his new work, The Old Burying Ground.  He's the chair of the composing department at the University of Michigan, and his work will receive its premiere this coming Monday by the UM Symphony Orchestra and three vocal soloists.  The featured performer will be a folk singer known for his singing in the movie Cold Mountain and whose name is...is...aw, shucks, I can't remember if it was Tim Eriksen or one of the others.

For last night's presentation, Chambers sang a few songs himself, accompanied by his wife, the pianist (and ethomusicologist) Suzanne Camino, and poet Keith Taylor, who was commissioned to write a poem inspired by the epitaphs which make up the text of Chambers' work.  Chambers apologized in advance for his untrained voice.  Indeed, his intense vocal production--inspired by folk singers from Ireland, Albania, and the American South--left him hoarse after only a few songs, so it would seem no singing career is imminent.  Nevertheless, the audience found his singing compelling.  He inhabited the music in a way that is rare, using his composer's advantage to the fullest.  It's thrilling, really, to find a composer of high-brow music who sings; Samuel Barber was another, and who else?  One expects a composer to be a pianist first and foremost.  (Evan Chambers also plays the Irish fiddle, and was raised in a home steeped in 60s folk music.)  Chambers' website has sound files of him singing these songs.

After next week's program (which will also include The Rite of Spring) the orchestra will take the show on the road, culminating in a performance at Carnegie Hall on February 28.  I hope Alex Ross is marking his calendar.

Labels: Composer

Last night, the University of Michigan hosted composer Edie Hill for a lecture on the business of composing.  She's in town for the premiere of a new work commissioned by the U-M Men's Glee Club.  I showed up in the basement lobby of Hill Auditorium a few minutes before the lecture, noted that only a few others were there, and looked forward to a nice, intimate setting with many opportunities for Q&A.  Moments later the sound of a stampede announced the arrival of the entire membership of the Glee Club (probably 50 or more guys); it turns out they were having a rehearsal at Hill, and the lecture was scheduled during their break.  Ah, well.  They must have planned a photo session also, because they were dressed in white tie and tails.  All in all, this was not the ambiance I was expecting.

Edie Hill has a website for her composition business, as well as Hummingbird Press, which she runs.

UPDATE:  Welcome to all the Glee Club dudes who noticed this post, and sorry for my tone which came of as more of a complaint than I intended.  My disappointment was not meant to be a criticism, and I'm grateful your event was open to the public.  Meanwhile, there's one fascinating detail about Edie Hill I forgot to pass on:  due to problems with dyslexia, Hill did not learn to read music fluently until her undergraduate years.  Her success as a composer is doubly impressive.

Labels: Composer

It's art!  Do yourself a favor and do not watch the video of the robotic cow tongue.  Really.  Don't watch it.

We got the music angle, the sci-fi angle, and the local angle covered, right here:  Tom Smith is an Ann Arbor "filk" singer who performs at sci-fi conventions.  SciFi.com reviews his comic opera, The Last Hero On Earth.  It is, apparently, funny.  Smith has another project in the works:  Lovecraft:  The Musical Comedy.  Hoo-boy.

Labels: Composer, fun, sci-fi

Blogging is light as I prepare to lead my website to a new server, one with a decent amount of disk space.  (Thanks to my friend Jeremy for letting me squat on his territory.) It appears that Comcast will stop hardening its heart and let me go, now that the Angel of Death has taken the first-born of every Comcast family.  Or maybe it was the frogs, or the rivers of blood -- but in any case, I've done bumping my head against the 20-meg limit that Comcast imposes on this website they gave me free (with the purchase of a cable modem, of course).  Maybe I should of known better, but I never guessed a collection of mere html files could grow so big after three years.

One very nice benefit of moving is that my domain, fredosphere.com, will at last persist in the navigation bar at the top of your browser after the redirect, so when you change your bookmarks, it will be (I hope) the one and only time you'll ever need to do it.

I should also mention the other reason I am not blogging so much lately.  I have spent a lot of time lately completing my first serious forray in fiction writing.  It seems the prose bladder inside my mind is emptied when I work on my story, leaving nothing for this site. One topic I would like to consider here relates to the motivation I am feeling for my new artistic outlet.  Is it the thrill of the new? Are the tools for cranking out prose (keyboard, word processor) better developed than those for creating music manuscript?  Or -- frightening though it may be to consider it -- did I miss my calling by pursuing music composition? All I can say is, I find writing a story to be about ten times easier than writing a choral piece.

There are lots of possible reasons.  I write choral music with plenty of counterpoint. Maybe I would have an easier time if I wrote songs for soloist and piano.  (But I don't want to.)  Maybe I make things unnecessarily complex emotionally with my music; I do know I am weirdly free of aspirations to greatness in my story writing.  (I'd be happy to be labeled a pulp sci-fi author.)  Maybe I'm not a natural musician; certainly, reading a book is fun for me, but practicing an instrument (or -shudder!- performing) is work I tend to avoid.  Again, maybe there are too few composers to justify the development of good music-editing tools (or maybe I haven't found them).  Maybe I'm not as experienced criticising prose as I am music, and I'm living in a fool's paradise.  Or maybe -- just maybe -- those who can, compose, and those who can't, write prose.  (And I am finding out I am numbered among the can'ters.)  I do know that, after 90 minutes of writing prose late at night, I feel like I'm just getting started; after about 45 minutes of composing, I'm looking for excuses to quit.

This situation is disturbing.

Labels: Composer, Creativity

Michael Blowhard may be the most important composer working today.  This bold, uncompromising visionary refuses to traffic in notes of any kind; instead, he writes music...without music.  It's a daring answer to the challenge implicitly given by Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words:  Michael Blowhard's Words Without Songs.

I hesitate to single out any one paragraph by this emerging master, since they are all brilliant, but this passage I found unusually moving:

I've been an artsfreak since the late '60s and have been reading criticism since that time. Some bloggers strike me as being as articulate and slick as the pros -- Alan Sullivan, Jon Hastings, and Architecture and Morality's Corbusier, for example. Some other bloggers strike me as people who could be pros if they wanted to. If Fred Himebaugh (of the Fredosphere) were doing music criticism, he'd be my favorite music critic. John Massengale routinely gets off descriptions of places, buildings, and architectural controversies that are clearer, more vigorous, and more engaging than anything you'll find in the slick architecture magazines.

I've been pounding the music criticism beat for many years, and I thought I had seen it all.  Thank you, Michael, for bringing a tear of joy to this jaded critic's eye once again.

Labels: Composer, Culture

Another collaborative filtering site, RatingZone, bites the dust.  Weep and wail -- although I must admit I disliked its results, which were too recent-blockbuster-centric for my taste.  Probably it never attracted enough users to unskew its database.  Still, a sad day.

Which sadness is only compounded greatly by James Lileks exasperating news.  Yes, we now learn his reassignment is in the context of a major layoff.  But still.

I other news, I found Michael Kaulkin's shameful confession exhilarating.  I, too, have found myself in rehearsal confronting a flow-interrupting question which I could not answer because I just didn't care about the music to that level of detail.  Kaulkin puts it nicely:

I’m R&D and the orchestra is Sales. Are they adequately selling the piece to the audience? That’s what really matters.

Finally, a teaser:  it looks like I may leave all you loser musicians without a backward glance and take up a new, much more lucrative, career.  As a sci-fi author.  Details to come.

Labels: Composer, sci-fi

Homeless no more:  my friend and very occasional guest-blogger Joshua Shank has launched a new website.  Among other things, he's keeping us informed on his premieres.  So many premieres ... so young, yet so successful ... don'tcha just hate 'em?

Meanwhile, I suggest you hum the song "You're the Queen of my Double-Wide Trailer" softly to yourself as you have a look at this.  Also seen at Gravity Lens:  retro-futuristic postcards circa 1900.  As someone put in in the comments section, all speculation about the future "describes the present, with tailfins."

Labels: Composer, sci-fi

My mind was duly blown by the Craigslistlieder of Gabriel Kahane, found by Alex Ross.  Go to the kid's website and have a listening session right now.

This Friday I'll be hearing the University of Michigan Chamber Choir perform a piece by my old classmate Mark Kilstofte.  I see he likes the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins -- most unfortunate, as I recently added Hopkins oeuvre to my list of settable texts.  Darn it:  Must.  Quickly.  Discover.  New.  Poets.

This is old news, but I enjoyed the ironies in the story of Nine Inch Nails' viral marketing campaign, which was a huge success until a bunch of mindless jerks at RIAA decided to cut it off at the knees.

Finally, once you consider the french horn's origins as a hunting accessory, you realize it would be odd if a symphonic horn player did not have guns and explosives in his possession.

Labels: Composer

Golijov is coming to town this Friday for a talk and I will be in attendance, osmotically absorbing all the composerly wisdom I can.  In the meantime, this guy has the same problem as me, and his blog has one of the strangest tag lines I've ever seen.

Labels: Composer

Der Drübermensch, still shy of his seventh birthday, asked for permission to play around with Finale, the music manuscripting software I use.  Naturally I jumped at the chance to let him compose, even though I suspected his interest was on the level of "one more way to have fun manipulating stuff on the computer screen," which is his most favorite activity.

I now present to you the result of this burst of creativity, which he entitled Drew's First Piece.  As you look through the score (click on the image for the whole thing in pdf) you will no doubt realize, as I did, that we are in the presence of a once-in-a-generation musical genius.

You might think that Der Drübermensch's artistic intent is focused on creating a musical score as its own, self-contained aesthetic artifact.  The dismayingly unplayable notes would lead you to think that.  It's an artistic choice that is not exactly unprecedented, yet this example is noteworthy for the courageous rigor of its application.  The difficultly goes well beyond the decision to give a high A to the tenor's first entrance in measure four; by measure seven, he calls for three tenors to sing a cluster on 64th notes at the extreme upper end of their tessitura.  I wonder if Der Drübermensch could find three tenors in the entire state of Michigan willing to take on these parts.

It gets worse; by measure eleven, the tubas are also playing impossible leaps, occurring on 64th notes, which are brutally difficult if we assume a moderato tempo.  (It would seem the 64th note is a signature of the young genius' emerging style.)  We haven't seen such boldness in writing for this instrument since Alex Ross' ground-breaking work.

Go back to the previous example:  notice the "useless" rests in the double bass part.  Can we be so sure they have no function?  Who is to say what subtle difference the counting of those rests would have on a live performance?  Indeed, this is where I begin to suspect my son is engaged in a game far subtler than we can imagine.  So what if we are decades or centuries away from producing virtuosos capable of playing this score?  If Der Drübermensch hears an ending of great dramatic power, he's going to write an ending of great dramatic power, and the tuba players can go suck eggs if they can't play it:

(Low brass players have a reputation for wussiness anyway, so we can discount their whining.)

I am ready to conclude that this score reveals to us the most uncompromising artistic visionary in the history of the world.  I am deeply humbled to have fathered and trained this young maestro.  It is clear he has nothing more to learn from me or anyone else.  I hereby release him to the world.  No need to thank me.

Labels: Composer, fun

How appropriate that the first image out of my new scanner was a portrait of J. S. Bach.  The father of modern music!

It was my first piano teacher that turned me into a musician, a woman who also happened to be my mother.  She probably doesn't realize it, but one used book she picked up at at library sale somewhere provided the starting point for all my musical efforts, such as they have been.  The book was titled A Child's Book of Famous Composers, and it contained brief biographies of about a dozen composers.  Only the very greatest musical geniuses made the cut:  J. S. Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven, Stephen Foster, you know, guys like that.

The Three Bs:  Bach, Beethoven and, uh, Bfoster.

Each composer got his own chapter, with a full-page portrait and a unique tag line that encapsulated his place in music history.  Mozart was "The Wonder Child."  J. S. Bach was "The Father of Modern Music," which to my mature judgment seems remarkably off-mark.  Bach's influence was subtle and slow to develop, and stylistically he was retrograde, so he never had a Rite of Spring moment and never formed the vanguard of any movement, which is what "father of" seems to imply.  Oh well, I'm paying way too much attention to an obscure, unimportant kid's book that went out of print decades ago.

Except it is not unimportant to me, because as soon as I read that book, the mantle of my destiny settled upon my shoulders:  I knew it was my life's mission to make future editions of that book include a chapter about me.  For a moment, let's overlook that I don't have a chance of making the cut.  Let's overlook the problems we cause when we label a handful of composers as "great" and forget the rest.  Let's especially overlook that this obscure book never had a snowball's chance in Albuquerque of getting a second edition.  The main thing is that I received a life mission that day, all those years ago.  Because of it, sometimes I have made foolish choices and dreamed foolish dreams, but for the most part it has been a blessing, a charism.  Thanks, God.  Thanks, mom.

Labels: Composer

Der Drübermensch had graduated from improviser to composer.  He's been making up melodies on the piano for a while, but now he has done something special:  he played this tune one day, then played it again the next day, exactly the same way.  (Did I mention he's only six?)

Having finished with the exposition, he has now moved on to the development section:  he's playing it in Dorian and Aeolian modes.  I can't wait to find out how he works his way back to the recapitulation.

Ah, the power of the notational tradition in western classical music:  find some beautiful, living object -- and embed it in Lucite for all eternity!  I love it!  These exclamation points signal my irony and ambivalence!  Causing you to wonder what my real point is!

Labels: Composer, CuteKid