The apartment in Williamsburg where I've lived for nine years is quite unmemorable. Some have remarked that it has "personality" (isn't that usually a synonym for 'ugly'...?), but if that's true I've never noticed. There's wood paneling on the walls, a heinous blue carpet, a bed-room (New Yorkers will know what this means...), an elegant drop ceiling, and a blinding fluorescent light in the kitchen. Outside, warehoused trucks belching clouds of exhaust mix with the endless glockenspiel of the Kool Man ice cream truck and a pre-recorded faux-carillon of a nearby church, as the relentless jackhammers, bulldozers, and cranes drone incessantly, toiling to meet the impossibly bloated housing needs of this newly yuppified neighborhood. All this and more in Williamsburg, Brooklyn: the 'it' place to be.
My buddy Michel van der Aa, who hails from olde Amsterdam, loves New York. Michel is one of those composers whose music seems to be constantly seeking; it has a unique and pungent, often unsettling flavor, mixing acoustic and electronic components in unusual and highly personal ways. A few years ago, Michel had an itch to stretch his mind and his creative vocabulary. He decided to abandon composing for several months and study filmmaking in New York. I was living in Rome for the year, so he proposed renting my classy digs for a semester.
When I arrived back in the States that summer, Michel confessed (somewhat guiltily) that he had shot a 10-minute film in my apartment as a final thesis for his course at the New York Film Academy. He had written the screenplay himself, taken out an ad in the theatre magazine Backstage, and hired an 80-year old actor to play the lead - and only - role. He had then cleared much of my clutter into a corner, lugged cameras and lights up the steep staircase (Dutch folks are experts at negotiating impossibly narrow staircases), and sent my landlord into a panic by blowing several fuses while gathering footage inside my apartment and on my stoop.
Upon my return, Michel allowed me an exclusive V.I.P. screening (on my computer) of the film, Passage. Witnessing my drab apartment transformed into a cinematic backdrop was, to say the least, surreal. The protagonist's bizarre habits - capturing jars of steam from a kettle, dressing up for his own funeral, and freezing in one-eyed hallucinations - utterly transformed my habitual living environment. Suddenly my abode seemed to be a sinister, living presence, reminding me that I was living only one mundane life out of a million possible alternate existences.
Contemplating the multiple possible incarnations of my shabby apartment catapulted me back to my waylaid astronomy studies. The existence of simultaneous universes is inferred by M-theory (a theory that encompasses various realizations of superstring theory). The concept that our three-dimensional existence is one of an infinite number of posited 'shadows' thrown by an eleven-dimensional universe is in fact a very plausible - if mind-boggling - possibility to ponder.
When I was a kid, I was enthralled by those fascinating old TV shows in which Leonard Bernstein demonstrated alternate versions of the exposition in the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth. Bernstein had written out several realizations, each of which began with the famous opening motive. But they quickly moved in wildly different directions. And Bernstein would explain, "Now, see how Beethoven could have done this"... "or this"..."but Beethoven finally did this," the dramatically divergent incarnations revealing the endless possible versions of melodic and harmonic invention from which the composer chose.
In any case, I heartily recommend allowing a filmmaker (doesn't necessarily have to be a composer/filmmaker) to transmogrify your living space into an alien landscape. For me, familiar objects were suddenly objectified, coming to life with startling vigor. And a sense of spontaneity and mystery was restored to a space that had long ago been rendered bland, inert, and pedestrian.
A bizarre footnote: I hadn't thought about Michel's movie in a while, but last week the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble sent me their concert program for the summer. PNME is a group that was recently radically transformed by its new artistic director, Kevin Noe, into a group that presents multimedia works of all stripes. Lo and behold, they had unconsciously programmed my piece Tied Shifts on the same concert as Michel's infamous Passage. So on July 21, my music shall be reunited with the very rooms in which it was written; and the audience will have a chance to witness the haunting apartment-doppelganger through the twisted, nefarious lens of director Michel van der Aa.
Monday, July 10, 2006
Friday, June 30, 2006
False Cognates
During the summer of 1992, I spent four months in Northwestern Ghana studying the Lobi xylophone with Ngmen Baaru and Richard Na-Ile. The small village of Lawra was located in the northern corner of the Upper West Region, a two-day bus ride from the capital city Accra. In that part of the country the borders were porous; folks crossed to and from the ‘French Side’ (Burkina Faso), which was only a few miles away. I had a fellowship which allowed me to pursue an ‘independent study’ over the summer; the cash was just enough to get me to West Africa and back.
Having fallen in love with the sound of Malian music, especially the kora – a West African harp – I had originally intended to travel to Bamako. Unfortunately, Mali was in the throes of a civil war, so I decided that Ghana was a wiser choice. I called the magnificent percussionist Valerie Naranjo, who gave me Na-Ile’s address at the Lawra Ministry of Culture. Ministry of Culture? An African village may have dirt roads, mud huts, and no electricity or running water, but you can bet that it will have a healthy bureaucracy, thanks to its rich colonial history.
The Daghati people are split between three countries: Ghana, Burkina-Faso and Côte-d'Ivoire. Their main instrument, the ‘gyil’, is an ancestor of the Western marimba, and is ubiquitous in the society; it is played inside and outside, at festivals, funerals, ceremonies, and church services. Several times during my stay Baaru traveled on foot to a nearby river; there he gathered materials, which he later hand-crafted into xylophones with his nephews Kuulinsu and Maanibe.
The gyil has fourteen- (or eighteen-) keys and is constructed from tuned slabs of carefully carved mahogany wood, bound with animal hide to a sturdy wooden frame. Each gyil key has its own gourd resonator; crushed and flattened spider-webs are seared with rubber over holes carved in the gourd, creating a buzzing membrane as the keys are struck. The process of making a xylophone takes several months, because the wood needs to be “cooked” and dried. Matching gourds must be found for each key; they could be up to a foot in length.
In performance practice, two xylophonists play along with a drummer, and it is not uncommon for a gyil player to sing and play the same song for over an hour; phrases might be repeated twenty or thirty or a hundred times. The harmony is pentatonic, without octave equivalence, and with several of the notes falling "in-between" pitches of the Western chromatic scale. Throughout the piece a “dance beat” often surfaces in the high register of the xylophone, revealing a strong tie to the bell pattern and to the movements of the dancers. The link between dance and music is absolute; the two genres are inextricable, musicians cueing dancers and dancers signaling to musicians, back and forth.
The virtuosity of the players (and the dancers) is staggering, and their sheer stamina is extraordinary. In one of the most distinctive and challenging rhythmic techniques I learned from Kuulinsu and Maanibe, one gyil player mirrors the other's melodic improvisations one sixteenth pulse behind. Try it at home some time!
It took quite a while to get accustomed to their way of learning. I would bring my cassette recorder to lessons, then retreat for several hours to a hut to practice passages slowly on the xylophone, continually checking to the tapes. The gyil players in Lawra – most of whom were farmers during the day – found my “loner” approach amusing; they would stop by to watch as I practiced in solitude, fascinated to observe me learning in this bizarre way.
For them, learning was a communal activity and therefore took place in a social environment. In contrast with our TV-saturated generation, aspiring xylophone players in Lawra, Tumu, and other towns where I stayed – some as young as four – would quietly sit watching older musicians for hours. Only after the adults were finished playing would the kids reverently approach the gyil, tentatively grasping the thick, rubber-wound sticks. Instead of practicing specific licks slowly, determinedly, and in solitude – as I did – these young players stripped a melody down to its core, recreating simple, skeletal versions of the tunes, usually in strict tempo.
Learning the gyil was alternately inspiring and frustrating; misunderstandings abounded, as in any cross-cultural scenario. When I first heard the funeral song “Kukur Gandaa Bie, Kuora Gandaa Bie” I felt sure it was in 4/4 time, with occasional half-note triplets thrown in here and there. But one day, while practicing the tune on the xylophone, I noticed – out of the corner of my eye – one of Baaru’s wives dancing to the music; she was dancing in 3/4! This fleeting experience forced me to reconsider the building blocks of the music and to adjust my rhythmic orientation; what I had perceived as a broad triplet rhythm was actually the basic pulse.
Most of my initial mistakes stemmed from hearing the music as dependent on bass motion, when in fact the structure was rooted in the bell pattern. I was often seduced by hearing shifts in harmonic rhythm, a Western sensibility of hearing from the bottom up that was very difficult to shake. Because our ‘functional’ hearing is so grounded in tonality, it is hard to fully grasp music that is grounded on bell patterns. Those who like Salsa music might argue that Latin music is also based on cascára, but its Afro-European hybrid nature allows Westerners to hear its tonal grounding as primal. In a funny way, most of us probably hear Latin music 'wrong'.
West African music is most certainly bell-oriented, and on the xylophone those bell patterns manifest themselves as short melodies played and embellished in the upper register. If I had been more attuned to the bell pattern, I would have had an easier time intuiting the correct architecture of the music. For example, when I first began to learn “Luba Pog Nung Wa Da Bin Kobo” (“The Lobi Woman Bought Feces for One Penny [at the market, thinking it was food]”), I had no doubt that the melody began in the middle of the bar. Weeks later I realized suddenly that it started at the beginning of the bar. Once again, my sensibility became flipped on its head.
One day I sat down to play a string of songs in ‘Bewa’ style (including one of my favorites, ‘The White Man Cannot Eat the Green Leaf Soup’, the awful truth of which was revealed to me after several nights with a roiling stomach). After I finished playing, Na-Ile said to me: “You have done well. But, if you play more low notes, the people will enjoy the music more, and they will dance.”
I was confused; Na-Ile’s statement seemed to contradict what I knew about building energy in gyil music; from what I understood, higher pitches - outlining the bell pattern – were used to ramp up the intensity of the musicians and dancers. Perhaps I was wrong. “Can you show me?” I asked.
Richard sat down at the xylo to demonstrate, and played for about ten minutes (a short excerpt often lasted at least that long, which is why I requested demonstrations only when I had a burning question). I listened closely, but aside from the fact that he sounded much more fluid, Richard was playing much like I had. In fact, it seemed as if he was hitting more high notes – not low ones – than I had. I still felt puzzled as he handed the sticks back to me.
“More low notes, you say?” I confirmed uneasily, taking my seat on the tiny stool.
“Correct,” he said.
I began to play, adding abundant low notes. As I understood the Lobi aesthetic, low notes were generally employed to demonstrate virtuosity (rather like flourishes in the upper register in virtuosic passages by Chopin or Ysayë). “I can say that a master xylophone player shows his strong left hand,” the local truckdriver and consummate gyil player Borre had once remarked, commenting on Baaru’s mellifluous playing style, “He demonstrates his skill on the xylophone by the fine elaborations he makes with his left.”
So I laid off the top keys a bit and concentrated on adding more variations in the left hand, ornamenting bass patterns on the bottom several keys. Na-Ile listened politely, waiting until I had finished. He did not look convinced. “Let me show you again,” he said calmly, moving toward the xylophone. You are playing some nice melodies, but the people will not dance….”
“Then maybe instead of those bass notes, I should play the dance beat up on the high keys instead…?”
“Yes, play the dance beat, but play it low. Always low.”
I was flummoxed. “Low? I don’t understand. You taught me to play the dance beat with my right hand.”
“Yes, of course, you should play with the right, but always low!” he exclaimed.
“You mean you want me to cross my hands?” I asked confusedly. I had never seen anyone play like this, though I supposed it was possible.
“No, let me demonstrate,” and he played for another ten or fifteen minutes, the last few minutes looking at me intently while strongly accenting the dance notes in his right hand.
I fidgeted until he finished, feeling immensely impatient. “But you’re playing the high notes, with your right hand! I don’t understand. You’re not playing low notes.”
“But Mr. Derek, of course I am showing you the low notes! I can even say that I play them with more presence!”
“No, you were playing them high, up here…” and I pointed to the upper notes of the xylophone.”
He glanced where I was pointing, then back at me, smiling. “You say ‘high’, but you are pointing to the low notes!” he insisted, smiling, a hint of annoyance creeping into his voice.
“Low? You call these…these notes…low? But these are the highest notes on the xylophone…” I was dumbfounded.
“Of course we call them low! How else can we call them?”
Then what do you call these notes?” I pointed towards the bottom few notes of the xylophone.
“Look at the xylophone!” He stared at me in exasperation, and a moment of complete incomprehension passed between us. “Those notes are not low. They are high. And deep,” he added.
“High…and deep?” I muttered, eyeing the gyil's wooden frame. The hugest keys, all the way on the left side, needed bigger gourd resonators, so the large gourds were congregated near the ‘deeper’ notes. The keys and frame of the xylophone therefore curved upward to accommodate the gourds, making the 'deepest' notes farther from the ground, or…higher.
I laughed. Of course. Our use of the word “high” is a description from physics, meaning (more exactly) “a higher frequency of sound wave cycles per second.” This association had trumped all my other possible descriptions of how a pitch might manifest itself as “low” or “high.” Na-Ile’s was a clear representation of height, in inches off the ground.
It all depends what your definition of “is” is. Perhaps if I played cello or bass, the high/low mix-up would have been clear from the start. Several cellist friends of mine have remarked that adult students generally encounter great difficulty with the downward direction of the hand’s motion as the pitch moves higher on the string, and vice-versa. Young children, less sensitized to the “high-low” verbal cue, make the leap with little problem.
When we consider how divergent vocabularies can be, it is no wonder that great discord exists in the world. So much basic comprehension is subjective and so many so-called ‘universals’ are culturally determined. It can be eerie to contemplate how terminology programs and transforms the fundamental facets of perception. In that sense we are prisoners of our cultural context and vocabulary.
Yet viewed through a different prism we are also transmitters of a unique cultural perspective, avatars of our own language in a particular place and time. That uniqueness is something to treasure and nurture. And in those rare moments of epiphany, when a wide chasm has been bridged, I have felt an overwhelming joy as a mysterious and evasive truth was suddenly, dramatically, revealed.
Having fallen in love with the sound of Malian music, especially the kora – a West African harp – I had originally intended to travel to Bamako. Unfortunately, Mali was in the throes of a civil war, so I decided that Ghana was a wiser choice. I called the magnificent percussionist Valerie Naranjo, who gave me Na-Ile’s address at the Lawra Ministry of Culture. Ministry of Culture? An African village may have dirt roads, mud huts, and no electricity or running water, but you can bet that it will have a healthy bureaucracy, thanks to its rich colonial history.
The Daghati people are split between three countries: Ghana, Burkina-Faso and Côte-d'Ivoire. Their main instrument, the ‘gyil’, is an ancestor of the Western marimba, and is ubiquitous in the society; it is played inside and outside, at festivals, funerals, ceremonies, and church services. Several times during my stay Baaru traveled on foot to a nearby river; there he gathered materials, which he later hand-crafted into xylophones with his nephews Kuulinsu and Maanibe.
The gyil has fourteen- (or eighteen-) keys and is constructed from tuned slabs of carefully carved mahogany wood, bound with animal hide to a sturdy wooden frame. Each gyil key has its own gourd resonator; crushed and flattened spider-webs are seared with rubber over holes carved in the gourd, creating a buzzing membrane as the keys are struck. The process of making a xylophone takes several months, because the wood needs to be “cooked” and dried. Matching gourds must be found for each key; they could be up to a foot in length.
In performance practice, two xylophonists play along with a drummer, and it is not uncommon for a gyil player to sing and play the same song for over an hour; phrases might be repeated twenty or thirty or a hundred times. The harmony is pentatonic, without octave equivalence, and with several of the notes falling "in-between" pitches of the Western chromatic scale. Throughout the piece a “dance beat” often surfaces in the high register of the xylophone, revealing a strong tie to the bell pattern and to the movements of the dancers. The link between dance and music is absolute; the two genres are inextricable, musicians cueing dancers and dancers signaling to musicians, back and forth.
The virtuosity of the players (and the dancers) is staggering, and their sheer stamina is extraordinary. In one of the most distinctive and challenging rhythmic techniques I learned from Kuulinsu and Maanibe, one gyil player mirrors the other's melodic improvisations one sixteenth pulse behind. Try it at home some time!
It took quite a while to get accustomed to their way of learning. I would bring my cassette recorder to lessons, then retreat for several hours to a hut to practice passages slowly on the xylophone, continually checking to the tapes. The gyil players in Lawra – most of whom were farmers during the day – found my “loner” approach amusing; they would stop by to watch as I practiced in solitude, fascinated to observe me learning in this bizarre way.
For them, learning was a communal activity and therefore took place in a social environment. In contrast with our TV-saturated generation, aspiring xylophone players in Lawra, Tumu, and other towns where I stayed – some as young as four – would quietly sit watching older musicians for hours. Only after the adults were finished playing would the kids reverently approach the gyil, tentatively grasping the thick, rubber-wound sticks. Instead of practicing specific licks slowly, determinedly, and in solitude – as I did – these young players stripped a melody down to its core, recreating simple, skeletal versions of the tunes, usually in strict tempo.
Learning the gyil was alternately inspiring and frustrating; misunderstandings abounded, as in any cross-cultural scenario. When I first heard the funeral song “Kukur Gandaa Bie, Kuora Gandaa Bie” I felt sure it was in 4/4 time, with occasional half-note triplets thrown in here and there. But one day, while practicing the tune on the xylophone, I noticed – out of the corner of my eye – one of Baaru’s wives dancing to the music; she was dancing in 3/4! This fleeting experience forced me to reconsider the building blocks of the music and to adjust my rhythmic orientation; what I had perceived as a broad triplet rhythm was actually the basic pulse.
Most of my initial mistakes stemmed from hearing the music as dependent on bass motion, when in fact the structure was rooted in the bell pattern. I was often seduced by hearing shifts in harmonic rhythm, a Western sensibility of hearing from the bottom up that was very difficult to shake. Because our ‘functional’ hearing is so grounded in tonality, it is hard to fully grasp music that is grounded on bell patterns. Those who like Salsa music might argue that Latin music is also based on cascára, but its Afro-European hybrid nature allows Westerners to hear its tonal grounding as primal. In a funny way, most of us probably hear Latin music 'wrong'.
West African music is most certainly bell-oriented, and on the xylophone those bell patterns manifest themselves as short melodies played and embellished in the upper register. If I had been more attuned to the bell pattern, I would have had an easier time intuiting the correct architecture of the music. For example, when I first began to learn “Luba Pog Nung Wa Da Bin Kobo” (“The Lobi Woman Bought Feces for One Penny [at the market, thinking it was food]”), I had no doubt that the melody began in the middle of the bar. Weeks later I realized suddenly that it started at the beginning of the bar. Once again, my sensibility became flipped on its head.
One day I sat down to play a string of songs in ‘Bewa’ style (including one of my favorites, ‘The White Man Cannot Eat the Green Leaf Soup’, the awful truth of which was revealed to me after several nights with a roiling stomach). After I finished playing, Na-Ile said to me: “You have done well. But, if you play more low notes, the people will enjoy the music more, and they will dance.”
I was confused; Na-Ile’s statement seemed to contradict what I knew about building energy in gyil music; from what I understood, higher pitches - outlining the bell pattern – were used to ramp up the intensity of the musicians and dancers. Perhaps I was wrong. “Can you show me?” I asked.
Richard sat down at the xylo to demonstrate, and played for about ten minutes (a short excerpt often lasted at least that long, which is why I requested demonstrations only when I had a burning question). I listened closely, but aside from the fact that he sounded much more fluid, Richard was playing much like I had. In fact, it seemed as if he was hitting more high notes – not low ones – than I had. I still felt puzzled as he handed the sticks back to me.
“More low notes, you say?” I confirmed uneasily, taking my seat on the tiny stool.
“Correct,” he said.
I began to play, adding abundant low notes. As I understood the Lobi aesthetic, low notes were generally employed to demonstrate virtuosity (rather like flourishes in the upper register in virtuosic passages by Chopin or Ysayë). “I can say that a master xylophone player shows his strong left hand,” the local truckdriver and consummate gyil player Borre had once remarked, commenting on Baaru’s mellifluous playing style, “He demonstrates his skill on the xylophone by the fine elaborations he makes with his left.”
So I laid off the top keys a bit and concentrated on adding more variations in the left hand, ornamenting bass patterns on the bottom several keys. Na-Ile listened politely, waiting until I had finished. He did not look convinced. “Let me show you again,” he said calmly, moving toward the xylophone. You are playing some nice melodies, but the people will not dance….”
“Then maybe instead of those bass notes, I should play the dance beat up on the high keys instead…?”
“Yes, play the dance beat, but play it low. Always low.”
I was flummoxed. “Low? I don’t understand. You taught me to play the dance beat with my right hand.”
“Yes, of course, you should play with the right, but always low!” he exclaimed.
“You mean you want me to cross my hands?” I asked confusedly. I had never seen anyone play like this, though I supposed it was possible.
“No, let me demonstrate,” and he played for another ten or fifteen minutes, the last few minutes looking at me intently while strongly accenting the dance notes in his right hand.
I fidgeted until he finished, feeling immensely impatient. “But you’re playing the high notes, with your right hand! I don’t understand. You’re not playing low notes.”
“But Mr. Derek, of course I am showing you the low notes! I can even say that I play them with more presence!”
“No, you were playing them high, up here…” and I pointed to the upper notes of the xylophone.”
He glanced where I was pointing, then back at me, smiling. “You say ‘high’, but you are pointing to the low notes!” he insisted, smiling, a hint of annoyance creeping into his voice.
“Low? You call these…these notes…low? But these are the highest notes on the xylophone…” I was dumbfounded.
“Of course we call them low! How else can we call them?”
Then what do you call these notes?” I pointed towards the bottom few notes of the xylophone.
“Look at the xylophone!” He stared at me in exasperation, and a moment of complete incomprehension passed between us. “Those notes are not low. They are high. And deep,” he added.
“High…and deep?” I muttered, eyeing the gyil's wooden frame. The hugest keys, all the way on the left side, needed bigger gourd resonators, so the large gourds were congregated near the ‘deeper’ notes. The keys and frame of the xylophone therefore curved upward to accommodate the gourds, making the 'deepest' notes farther from the ground, or…higher.
I laughed. Of course. Our use of the word “high” is a description from physics, meaning (more exactly) “a higher frequency of sound wave cycles per second.” This association had trumped all my other possible descriptions of how a pitch might manifest itself as “low” or “high.” Na-Ile’s was a clear representation of height, in inches off the ground.
It all depends what your definition of “is” is. Perhaps if I played cello or bass, the high/low mix-up would have been clear from the start. Several cellist friends of mine have remarked that adult students generally encounter great difficulty with the downward direction of the hand’s motion as the pitch moves higher on the string, and vice-versa. Young children, less sensitized to the “high-low” verbal cue, make the leap with little problem.
When we consider how divergent vocabularies can be, it is no wonder that great discord exists in the world. So much basic comprehension is subjective and so many so-called ‘universals’ are culturally determined. It can be eerie to contemplate how terminology programs and transforms the fundamental facets of perception. In that sense we are prisoners of our cultural context and vocabulary.
Yet viewed through a different prism we are also transmitters of a unique cultural perspective, avatars of our own language in a particular place and time. That uniqueness is something to treasure and nurture. And in those rare moments of epiphany, when a wide chasm has been bridged, I have felt an overwhelming joy as a mysterious and evasive truth was suddenly, dramatically, revealed.
Saturday, May 27, 2006
Revisionist History
Rimsky-Korsakov insisted that the act of creation could not be taught. Bartók felt the same way, so fervently that - even when desperate for money - he declined an offer from Columbia University to teach composition, preferring instead to teach piano or undertake ethnomusicological research. Even Feldman, an academic himself, warned that composition departments were merely “teaching teachers to teach teachers.”
During my years in school, I often heard uttered the following refrains: "he/she is a lousy teacher" or "he/she doesn't know how to teach." Rarely did I hear "I’m a terrible learner." Dismal teaching is a cinch to lament, but the sorry state of learning is often overlooked. Ultimately the students - not the instructors - are the losers in this game.
So how can one learn better? A helpful mantra might be "ask not what your lesson can do for you, ask what you can do for your lesson." Intuition tells me that most artists are inherently cognizant of the problematic aspects of their own work. It is therefore prudent, before seeking advice from others, to delve into one's own works, seeking to identify the weak links and formulating our insecurities into clear questions. Sometimes just initiating this process leads to a solution, allowing more time to address more refined issues in a lesson. I had been composing for 10 years before I began ‘studying’ composition; after only a few lessons I began bringing a list of questions, which steered the conversation towards the compositional choices with which I felt most uneasy. For certain mentors, such a 'pro-active' approach from the student yields very fruitful results, bringing the teacher's instincts - as opposed to their pedagogical skills, to the fore.
About ten years ago, in Den Haag, I was chatting about the thorny process of revision with my friend Peter Adriaansz, a fellow composer whom I hold in high regard. "I am a chronic reviser" he said. "It's my curse; I'm never satisfied with a piece. I rethink and rewrite until I'm absolutely satisfied. It can take years. And some of my pieces I just won't release again until I make all the necessary revisions."
I thought Peter overly dramatic. "Why don't you just write a new piece, with these insights in mind?" I asked. I showed him an orchestral score I had written recently; the work had already been performed twice, and I still wasn't entirely happy with the last section. However I had decided to leave it unrevised, as a document of my compositional mindset at the time; I explained to him my feeling that returning to that piece and reinterpreting it within my current aesthetic would be anachronistic and untrue to the original conception.
Peter smiled. "I suppose you and I are just different kinds of composers", he murmured wistfully.
His pronouncement left me feeling unsettled. What did he mean, "different kinds"? Was he passing judgment? Sure I revised, a bit, here and there. But not obsessively. Not laboriously. What did that imply about my integrity as a composer? Peter’s words resonated with me, activating a nerve in my brain.
We composers can manufacture good rationales for choosing not to alter our works once they're 'finished' (or perhaps I should say abandoned); it can be fascinating to look back on individual works as markers in the timelines of our creative lives; thus the 'documentation' rationale. And there are dozens of other possible reasons not to revise – stubbornness; superstition; a reluctance to acknowledge weakness; a fear of the great unknown; laziness; depression. But those rationales are meaningless for the dissatisfied audience member who must endure hearing our work.
I like Bill Bolcom's terminology; he refers to a weak spot as a 'sag'. Be it tonal, temporal, formal, or spiritual, a sag is a sag. And whatever the reasons for letting those sleeping sags lie, we the composers must resist the temptation; we must train our ears to recognize and correct them. For it is we – better than any teacher or critic – who are uniquely equipped to identify where weakness lies in our own works. We alone know intimately our tendencies, our proclivities, the distractions which seduce us, the habits upon which we fall back.
Around the time of my encounter with Peter, I was writing a piano piece, which I called Turning. One reason I gave the piece that title was because I could sense my compositional process beginning to shift; I had determined that I was most satisfied as a chronic reviser. These days, to the chagrin of my publisher, I tend to revise after virtually every performance. I recall my encounter with Peter and I find it hard to identify with the composer I was then.
We live in an era of marketing makeovers, in which politicians deny their mistakes, change original rationales to suit the polls of the moment, and take credit for events and trends that have nothing to do with their own policies. If politics is rooted in appearances, perhaps art (with a small ‘a’, just to be safe), is the other side of the coin: truth-telling. Such truth-telling must of necessity start with oneself, and painful questions follow: Why write this? Is this interesting? Does it go on too long? Not long enough? Is it clear? Is it muddled? Is it pretentious? Simplistic? Someone else can – and probably will – answer those questions for us, but we only become good composers when we answer them ourselves, and then make appropriate changes.
Boulez writes about the study of composition, "teaching is only a beginning; it is teaching yourself that is important." One can provide a solid foundation for composers by setting forth the essentials - harmony, analysis, counterpoint, musicianship. But the actual process of composing itself is cloaked in mystery: it is a combination of seeking and heeding one's own inspiration and making painstaking, personal decisions. Few, if any, can teach that.
During my years in school, I often heard uttered the following refrains: "he/she is a lousy teacher" or "he/she doesn't know how to teach." Rarely did I hear "I’m a terrible learner." Dismal teaching is a cinch to lament, but the sorry state of learning is often overlooked. Ultimately the students - not the instructors - are the losers in this game.
So how can one learn better? A helpful mantra might be "ask not what your lesson can do for you, ask what you can do for your lesson." Intuition tells me that most artists are inherently cognizant of the problematic aspects of their own work. It is therefore prudent, before seeking advice from others, to delve into one's own works, seeking to identify the weak links and formulating our insecurities into clear questions. Sometimes just initiating this process leads to a solution, allowing more time to address more refined issues in a lesson. I had been composing for 10 years before I began ‘studying’ composition; after only a few lessons I began bringing a list of questions, which steered the conversation towards the compositional choices with which I felt most uneasy. For certain mentors, such a 'pro-active' approach from the student yields very fruitful results, bringing the teacher's instincts - as opposed to their pedagogical skills, to the fore.
About ten years ago, in Den Haag, I was chatting about the thorny process of revision with my friend Peter Adriaansz, a fellow composer whom I hold in high regard. "I am a chronic reviser" he said. "It's my curse; I'm never satisfied with a piece. I rethink and rewrite until I'm absolutely satisfied. It can take years. And some of my pieces I just won't release again until I make all the necessary revisions."
I thought Peter overly dramatic. "Why don't you just write a new piece, with these insights in mind?" I asked. I showed him an orchestral score I had written recently; the work had already been performed twice, and I still wasn't entirely happy with the last section. However I had decided to leave it unrevised, as a document of my compositional mindset at the time; I explained to him my feeling that returning to that piece and reinterpreting it within my current aesthetic would be anachronistic and untrue to the original conception.
Peter smiled. "I suppose you and I are just different kinds of composers", he murmured wistfully.
His pronouncement left me feeling unsettled. What did he mean, "different kinds"? Was he passing judgment? Sure I revised, a bit, here and there. But not obsessively. Not laboriously. What did that imply about my integrity as a composer? Peter’s words resonated with me, activating a nerve in my brain.
We composers can manufacture good rationales for choosing not to alter our works once they're 'finished' (or perhaps I should say abandoned); it can be fascinating to look back on individual works as markers in the timelines of our creative lives; thus the 'documentation' rationale. And there are dozens of other possible reasons not to revise – stubbornness; superstition; a reluctance to acknowledge weakness; a fear of the great unknown; laziness; depression. But those rationales are meaningless for the dissatisfied audience member who must endure hearing our work.
I like Bill Bolcom's terminology; he refers to a weak spot as a 'sag'. Be it tonal, temporal, formal, or spiritual, a sag is a sag. And whatever the reasons for letting those sleeping sags lie, we the composers must resist the temptation; we must train our ears to recognize and correct them. For it is we – better than any teacher or critic – who are uniquely equipped to identify where weakness lies in our own works. We alone know intimately our tendencies, our proclivities, the distractions which seduce us, the habits upon which we fall back.
Around the time of my encounter with Peter, I was writing a piano piece, which I called Turning. One reason I gave the piece that title was because I could sense my compositional process beginning to shift; I had determined that I was most satisfied as a chronic reviser. These days, to the chagrin of my publisher, I tend to revise after virtually every performance. I recall my encounter with Peter and I find it hard to identify with the composer I was then.
We live in an era of marketing makeovers, in which politicians deny their mistakes, change original rationales to suit the polls of the moment, and take credit for events and trends that have nothing to do with their own policies. If politics is rooted in appearances, perhaps art (with a small ‘a’, just to be safe), is the other side of the coin: truth-telling. Such truth-telling must of necessity start with oneself, and painful questions follow: Why write this? Is this interesting? Does it go on too long? Not long enough? Is it clear? Is it muddled? Is it pretentious? Simplistic? Someone else can – and probably will – answer those questions for us, but we only become good composers when we answer them ourselves, and then make appropriate changes.
Boulez writes about the study of composition, "teaching is only a beginning; it is teaching yourself that is important." One can provide a solid foundation for composers by setting forth the essentials - harmony, analysis, counterpoint, musicianship. But the actual process of composing itself is cloaked in mystery: it is a combination of seeking and heeding one's own inspiration and making painstaking, personal decisions. Few, if any, can teach that.
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