From the Composer's Hermitage

Recent conversations with composing students and colleagues have refreshed my awareness of the composing process. I believe I've written similar things before on this blog, and that just goes to show how true to my experience these things are.

1. Composing is a discipline, just like practicing or performing. You don't really know and understand about it until you are regularly working at it. Also, the dynamics of the process can be forgotten rather quickly during a hiatus from daily composing work.

2. Thinking you're writing for posterity or comparing you work with the great music you already know while you're trying to write it is a fast track to writer's block.

3. Sometimes, you need to write a lot of a thing to get it out of your system and move on to some stuff you might think is better.

4. Instead of trying to compete with Beethoven's finished works in one's sketches (!) think of your work as student work or experimentation. Explore lots of ways of generating material to keep from getting locked up: set a text, improvise, choose an existing model for some aspect of your work . . .

5. What you really need is a very clear assignment. Sometimes, you get stuck because the assignment you have given yourself isn't detailed enough.

6. And there is that stage in composing during which you feel like you're just spinning your wheels. This might happen with every work you write. There are minutes, hours, days, etc., when it seems like you've wasted your time, that nothing of worth has come out. For someone who isn't regularly involved in the discipline, this can be very discouraging.

How should you deal with this wheel-spinning time?
A. Know it's normal.
B. Have composer friends who can let you know it's normal.
C. Be a trouvere. That's an old word for "composer" that comes from the same root as the modern French verb for "to find." The point is that composing is a search in sonic and spiritual realms which usually involves some wandering and some groping about.
D. Know that those tedious times might be more than just a hassle to endure. They appear to be necessary for actual productivity. As John Cage put it, "the way to get ideas is to do something boring. For instance, composing in such a way that the process of composing is boring induces ideas. They fly into one's head like birds." 

7. Think like even more of a genius than you are. Notice, for example that Beethoven edited his pretty rudimentary materials into greatness. You, too, should try editing. Also, particularly important for developing well-rounded complete works is  thinking like Mozart, Hindemith, or Britten: have a vision of the whole. Carry it with you away from your usual composing station. Develop the habit of recognizing and moving along the continuum between your big ideas and actual notes on the page.

8. Pay attention to the engineers of other structures. They are your company, too. For example, 2000 years ago, Vitruvius declared three facets of architectural expression - "commodity, firmness, and delight." These aspects are indispensables of the composer's construction work,too. You must take into account your work's use. You need to apply excellent craft. And your basic impulse is probably to create something with aesthetic appeal. In terms of use, knowing who you are writing for is a big part of the clear assignment. Beyond that, when the current use and cultural context have become things of the past, the quality of craftsmanship will still be apparent. And we all want to touch and move the audience.

9. There's a wonderful moment when you have passed through the basic discovery of materials, the tedium, and the conceiving of the overall structure. In that moment, you finally see the big picture and have filled in enough details to know how the rest of the work is to be composed. And you know how to do it! That's the climax. From there on in, it's smooth sailing. After you have a few pieces under your belt, you actually develop an appetite for the work that gets you to that vantage point. I think it's then that you realize you really are a composer.

10. Finally, a word on inspiration. Some of the greatest composers have prayed for it. I have, at times, too. That prayer is a challenge and involves a bit of trepidation. It requires trusting that God will provide something through the process and suggests that you would dare try to intermingle your conscious human efforts with some mysterious mission above your own. Doing the work of composing as a follow-up to that prayer is a blessing that can build your faith.

Summer 2014

It has been three months since I've blogged. I'm happy to be getting back to it.

During those three months, my time has been filled with learning the ropes of coordinating aspects of our department from adjuncts to budgets to concerts to dates to educational materials to . . . okay, I'll stop there. Teaching and performing have continued, but time to reflect and express what has been coming out of those activities has been non-existent. I hope to catch up on those things during the summer months.

Summer has begun with several fun Florida wildlife encounters -
crossing paths with a rat snake while hiking with Brian Blume,
passing rather closely to a roadside alligator while driving with Wesly Hulin,
and noticing my first young little blue heron while walking with Kathy Hulin at Lake Hollingsworth.
(The photo above is an egret we saw in the same location back in January.)

Summer has also begun with some diverse music making this very morning at All Saints' Episcopal here in Lakeland -
improvising some pre-service meditative music following the ringing of the great bell,
a hymn arrangement with one of our young saxophonists,
a gospel anthem with our youth choir,
and some lovely music by Stefan Waligur sung by the children during communion.

Each of these works I was privileged to play functioned differently and drew me into a different mode of musicality and experience. The gospel piece, for example, took me to a place of joy with the rhythms and waves of its structure and its spiritually encouraging text.

The varied workings of pieces of music often get lost in the shuffle as we seek to instill a musicality that almost seems to have an existence independent of the details of specific works. (An interesting question to ask one's self, musicians, would be: What works have shaped my musicality?)

Phrase endings taper. Melodies are clearly projected. The flow goes over the bar-line. These are all good habits, but they are mere shadings, as I believe Stravinsky stated. To be experienced as significant human moments, works of music require engagement and expression at the level of their essence. Their specific structure and feeling need to prevail.

I find myself thinking of the first movement of Schubert's Sonata No. 16 in A Minor, Op. 42, D. 850 which I am currently exploring with a very good student of mine. This work by one of the very greatest writers of tunes is far from a simple expression of tunefulness. That generalized musicality I described a bit of above might be adequate for a series of well-behaved charming phrases. But this is not that. This is a churning, heaving structure. It is a drama unfolding through tones and silences. To play it well, to play it truly, I think one must sense something of the strangeness of Schubert's material, his obsessiveness with it, and the process he creates out of it.

We piano teachers sometimes wax poetic with images of the woods and bears and references to "The Telltale Heart," etc. This isn't because the music is particularly about these things but because that way of talking tunes us into the tone and process of works like these that require us to recognize and be in the drama as we share them.










    

March 6 - 12

A complex, rich, intense week -

Friday: NACUSA national conference at Chowan

This involved many fascinating works and performances including

an airy trio by Harvey Stokes full of scales for all the instruments

my own "Chowan Etudes" played in one of the buildings they are about

Scott Brickman's "Sketches of Maine" which is a musical landscape that grows on me more and more

Andrew Cole's computer music piece "Staring at the Sun" that is a concerto for ping pong ball and also "Sound, Timbre, and Density III" in which the flute (played exquisitely by my friend Jeremy McEntire) wanders through a garden of textures and takes on new hues and moods in each new setting

Jim Guthrie's "Electro-Sonata No. 3" with a speech-derived first movement, bubbly second movement, and an uplifting finale

Joe Alexander's piece for tape and tuba "Infamy" that develops from Roosevlt's famous statement

A fascinating slur technique etude for guitar composed and played by my colleague, Christian Loebs

John Allemeier's "Quiet Music" in which Dillon Savage tamed a cantankerous instrument with the grace and dignity of a real musical gentleman

Jeff Prillaman bringing my new songs to life and making them really work

performing some songs with haunting motives - "A Child's Garden" by Benjamin Williams - with Jeff

and much more

Saturday:

department of music strategic planning retreat

followed by birthday party with non-music colleagues

Kathy fixed chilli and lime tarts for this.

Sunday:

a new sense of vocation as a church musician

and an organ recital by Chowan alumna, Faye Monroe. This was a great reminder of how good some tunes are like Bach's "Be Thou But Near" and "Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring."

Then, revival services at Lasker on Sun, Mon, and Tues nights with Chowan students playing special music for the services.

During those days there were edifying and interesting theological views shared:

Lloyd Lee Wilson, a Quaker and our registrar, discussed a technique for learning to listen for God's voice - identify a voice that is not God and tune it out. Then, your life is quieter, and it's easier to discern the next voice that is not God, etc.

Another theologian I know also shared his view of Jesus and the disciples. For various reasons involving the historic and cultural context, he thinks the disciples may have been younger than we tend to picture them - as young as 8 to 10 years old even. These would have been considered young men apprenticing in their fathers' businesses and studying with the rabbi for their bar mitzvahs. It may be a hard idea to accept, but it could explain various misunderstandings and behaviors in the gospels.

Also thinking about practicing these days-

I once heard a mockingbird practicing, I think. Late at night, the bird was rehearsing its repertoire of songs. On each of several repetitions, each song sounded better inflected and more authentic to me. Maybe that's how we people should practice.

A lesson today on Bach E minor Toccata - Classical music is different from most of the music we hear in that it is long term music. It unfolds its ideas over a large span of time. Thus, to play it well, we need to follow the musical argument as it develops. The introduction to the toccata presents an idea which is lifted up and viewed from various angles, and then developed until it culminates in a new idea - the crux of the passage.

All this amidst students and friends struggling, and layoffs all around. It's a good time to pray for everybody.