Today we recorded the pieces from yesterday’s rehearsals. Each piece was permitted two hours of intense scrutiny from both the composer and performers. It is interesting to see how a composer may be satisfied with the sound, but the performer not and vice versa.
My rehearsal was today and it was a great experience. There was a discussion about how I could have gotten away with some sections a little easier by not including bar lines, which is something to consider. It seems I need to work on giving better feedback to the performer because I was satisfied with the first run of the rehearsal and the violinist, Rolf Schulte, didn’t feel it was the best it could be, but couldn’t tell me what about it was puzzling. Since I thought the performance was great, except a few details that I mentioned at the beginning, the rehearsal came to a few awkward pauses. The pauses then gave way to a discussion of aesthetics and where the line blurs when taking performers’ advice to change passages. There was a concern with the length of my piece and Mr. Schulte thought some ideas occurred too often for too long, where I thought it may be too often, but the length was the intention.
What I have a hard time with is that these issues brought up were intentions behind the piece, but if an exceptional new music interpreter has a difficult time with the conceptual aspect, could the piece cease to engage the performer and thus disengage the audience? Could it be one man’s opinion due to background and taste preferences from that background?
Some could say Feldman’s music is too long and doesn’t go anywhere, but to me, the isolated sounds occurring in space is what is captivating about Feldman. Is it that what I’m trying to do with these concepts are purely conceptual and lack the strong musical convictions required to convince a performer and through him/her, the audience?
These are things that I’m sure will be made apparent after the conference and once I get time with the recording and the score.
With the first day at an end and the second to begin shortly, a few things came to my attention yesterday during the first stretch of rehearsals. One was the incredible amount of musical diversity shown between the eight of us. There are people writing “neo-romantic” works, others built on sets, and the coming days will show more styles. Regardless of style there were a few things in the rehearsals that stood out.
One being the importance of a detailed, performance ready score for the rehearsal. A lot of time was committed to clarifying intentions and better word use for musical directions. This was extremely helpful to hear because I strive to produce very detailed scores and I sometimes feel it can be a bit fussy. Not the case. The more detailed, the better because great performers like to have clear direction. These performers here are world class, and it is such a great feeling to see that they know our pieces intimately and can truly bring the music to life.
I will be excited to hear these pieces in the recording session.
The past two months have been hectic between moving to Brooklyn and getting a job or two, but I will soon be getting relief. Monday, July 13, I will be flying out to Cleveland for a recording session of my solo violin piece, Cataclysm. This is an extremely exciting opportunity since the performers hired are all incredible and have worked with composers such as Elliot Carter and Milton Babbitt, to name a few. I am also excited to be able to talk about my music at a presentation during the week as well. I hope to make some great connections with some of the other composers there and maybe start a new project or something.
The session will last five days for each of us eight composers, so at the end of each day, I will be reporting/commenting on the performers, composers, music, recording process, etc. There will be many new pictures posted and by Friday, July 17, hopefully a commercial quality recording of Cataclysm will be up to enjoy.
On the work side of things, I’ve completed the chamber piece for trumpet percussion ensemble, and toy piano. All that is left is to type-set it and make small revisions as necessary as well as start sending it out to interested parties. I have also made some connections in the NYC theater scene, so quite possibly there will be more music for dance and other theater works in the near future.
I just completed one of the most hellish journeys in driving a UHAUL truck from Texas to Brooklyn, my new home. So far it has been very stress filled as I try to get things together and unpack boxes, so it’s impeding my writing time. In about a month I will have a new recording of Cataclysmon the music page.
As for my new life, I hope to make many connections and collaborate on some interesting projects as well as go see some mind blowing performances.
Soon this blog will be covered with concert reviews, thoughts on new pieces, and upcoming news.
On June 22, 2009, Le Poisson Rouge will host a Pulitzer party for Steve Reich. The night promises to be filled with excitement and celebration as Signal will play the U.S. premiere of Reich’s Pulitzer-winning piece, Double Sextet. In addition to Double Sextet, the group will also play the original 1984 Sextet. Two pieces on the program would be enough to satisfy any Reich fan, but it has been announced that Reich will personally be there as well! Tickets are only $25 in advance and $30 at the door, but I don’t expect there to be any tickets left at the door. I just bought mine today, so check back for a write up over the party.
Each year, the Composition Department at Cleveland State University hosts the Composers’ Recording Institute. During this five day workshop, composers present their works, work closely with the performers which will record their work, and be directly involved in a two hour long recording session. This program attracts many of today’s most talented interpreters of contemporary music.
I have been notified that I will be participating in this unique program from July 13-17. My solo violin piece, Cataclysm will be performed by violinist, Rolf Schulte. Mr. Shulte has enjoyed a quite successful career by premiering a number of works by composers Elliot Carter, Milton Babbitt, and Gyorgy Kurtag, just to name a few.
I could not be more excited to have my work not only performed, but recorded by such a legendary contemporary music figure. I will directly assist the recording engineer in producing a commercial quality recording. With June in Buffalo and the Recording Institute going on, this summer promises to be not only productive, but also a valuable learning experience. I am looking forward to growing from these events as a composer this summer.
In David Bundler’s interview with Gerard Grisey in 1996, Grisey explicitly defines what “spectralism” meant for him. Towards the end of his life, Grisey drifted away from the strictly physical analysis of sound spectrums and relied on other means to convey his state of mind. This interview appeared in the March 1996 issue of 20th Century Music.
GG: Spectralism is not a system. It’s not a system like serial music or even tonal music. It’s an attitude. It considers sounds, not as dead objects that you can easily and arbitrarily permutate in all directions, but as being like living objects with a birth, lifetime and death. This is not new. I think Varese was thinking in that direction also. He was the grandfather of us all. The second statement of the spectral movement — especially at the beginning — was to try to find a better equation between concept and percept — between the concept of the score and the perception the audience might have of it. That was extremely important for us.
DB: How do you achieve that?
GG: I think it’s important to know our perceptive limitations as human beings. I started in the late ’70s with an extremely basic attitude towards sound — thinking, “What is an octave? What is a minor third? What is a dissonance? What is a consonance? Why do we have periodicity? Aperiodicity?” And in dealing a little with acoustics and psycho-acoustics, there were a few taboos that were thrown away in that period. The taboo of using dissonance/consonance. There was a period when people tended to say, “Well, there is no such thing as a dissonance and a consonance.” But you can reconsider the question and see that they basically do exist on two levels. The first level would be a rather physical one. It’s true that we have sounds that are more complex than others. It’s true that we have timbres that are more in a state of fusion than others. It’s true that our ear reacts differently to different stimuli. So it’s true that we have an array of possibilities that goes from the most simple to the most complex. Now, what is cultural is what function you give to those poles. The first attitude considers that I have this array of possibilities from simple to very complex, and my ear won’t react to a minor third as a minor second or whatever. It will react differently. We will react physically differently. Now the function you decide to have within the music is cultural.
Grisey’s emphasis on spectralism being a form of thought rather than a system of composition would seem like a relatively new concept for the 20th and 21st centuries. Much of the recently composed music stems from Schoenberg’s system and undergoes other systematic modifications, and to have a composer reject any system in order to “rediscover the hierarchy,” has a certain originality to it. However, it is not new and Grisey acknowledges this, but the main focus and inspiration for the spectral movement is to extend time in all directions and experiment with psycho-acoustics. This attitude also brings the audience back into the picture because the extended form of this type of writing has a transparency about it that allows the listener to follow closely and hear the intentions of the composer.
By scientifically deconstructing a sound and extending time so the deconstruction can be studied, Grisey has displayed an intimate understanding of sounds and acoustics. This knowledge, however, has not created a stale admiration for sounds, but rather a sound world of more beauty than could be arrived at without the use of scientific means.
In composing the latest project for trumpet, toy piano, and percussion ensemble, it’s been a relatively quick process. From the initial sketches to a solidified form to writing it down has taken no time at all. Now that I only have one more section to complete, I’ve hit a roadblock in a way. Where earlier in the piece, I could spend one hour writing a unified, coherent one and a half to two minutes of music, I am now spending that amount of time on three to six measures at a time.
It could be a number of things such as the texture is dense enough to require this amount of effort, or distractions such as relocating to Brooklyn this summer or preparing for June in Buffalo. My goal is to have the piece completed by June, and I’m confident I can, but this slow going can be a bit discouraging.
The results are in and I have been selected to participate as an auditor in this year’s June in Buffalo! What this means is that I will be able to attend the festival and meet performers, other emerging composers, and hang out with the faculty composers. Although I won’t get to participate in masterclasses or have music performed, the fact that I made it in at all is viewed as quite an accomplishment and a huge step in a professional career. As mentioned in my January post about the festival, it is from June 1-7 this year and I will be going to performances, rehearsals, lectures, and sitting it on other peoples’ masterclasses, so I hope to learn a lot.
I will be posting everyday of the festival on the different events, so check back often for those posts! Thanks for everyone’s support out there!
I could say a lot about how great this piece is and how Berio is easily one of the most influential composers of the 20th century, but Flavio Gabriel’s performance of Sequenza V says it all.
