Calypso Round – for orchestra

In the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, Minimalism was the rage of Classical Music. It was the “rage” in both senses of the word, anger and an enthusiastic fad. I was curious about it, though not really tempted by it until I heard some of the later music of Steve Reich, which I found absolutely infectious. It was right about 1980 when I started to experiment with some minimalist ideas. I worked with these ideas for about 8-12 months before deciding to not pursue it any further, but by then I had written several pieces.

To me, I didn’t see Minimalism as a style, but as a novel and somewhat non-linear approach to musical organization. Those who saw minimalism as a style tended to emphasize the repetition, but I was more interested in the organization of the changes. Traditional musical structure is organized like a story, in sequential blocks. But music can have several different levels of activity going on at the same time. Though traditional music has this capacity as well, Minimalism’s use of repeated material allows these different levels to be very clearly defined. I was interested in using Minimalist techniques to create a large-scale hierarchical structure with different levels changing at different speeds. The idea is similar to how an Indonesian Gamelan works, with some instruments playing every eighth note while some larger gongs are playing only once every eight or sixteen bars. My interest in this aspect of Minimalism actually aligns me more with John Adams than Reich, Phillip Glass, or Terry Riley, but I didn’t hear any of Adams music until about six years later.

The work below was an early attempt at this technique and sounds quite Minimalist. Each instrument plays nested patterns of different lengths (cello 2 beats, viola 4 beats, Violin II 8 beats, and Violin I 16 beats). Pattern changes occur at the level of Violin I. Every 16 beats one of the four instruments changes its pattern. The changes are organized in a large-scale hierarchy like a Gamelan. If you were to listen all the way through, you would hear that the final collection of patterns is the same as the beginning.

String Quartet 1980

Calypso Round is one of my later works following this Minimalist path. I originally wrote the work for Flute, French Horn, Marimba, Harp, and Double Bass. I wrote a concert of chamber works with various combinations of these instruments, and Calypso Round was supposed to be the finale. I found, however, that the music I had written seemed to be very difficult. I cancelled my plans for this particular concert and massaged my approach so that it was more generalized and forgiving (and therefore easier), eventually writing a concert for two violins and double bass.

Though most of the other works I wrote for the original concert were eventually performed, Calypso Round remained unperformed for twenty years. It was partly due to the difficulty of the work and partly due to its unusual collection of instruments. In 1999, I decided to orchestrate the work and showed it to Robert Moody, the resident conductor with the Phoenix Symphony, who programmed it for the next year. (The original performance was done with some dancers from Ballet Arizona.)

The difference between Calypso Round and the String Quartet is that I liberate the musical material from the instruments in which it is introduced. The result is that some of the musical patterns are tossed between different instruments, often sounding like imitation, or even a round, hence the name. Since the patterns can sometimes occur in instruments of different registers, they lose their identity as “levels” of sound, becoming instead just musical ideas or motives. This makes the piece sound less like Minimalism and more like normal dance music. Eventually in my investigation into Minimalism, I started to add free material and variations to the patterns, which dissolved the effect even further. at which point I just absorbed what I had learned from the experiment and moved on to something else.

Calypso Round is scored for a lavish orchestra – 2 Flutes, 2 Oboes, 2 Clarinets, 2 Bassoons, 4 French Horns, 3 Trumpets, 2 Trombones, Bass Trombone, Tuba, Timpani, 3 Percussion (Mallet Instruments – Marimba, Xylophone, Glockenspiel) (Non-pitched Percussion Instruments – Quijada (Jawbone), Triangle, Timbale, Slapstick, Bell Plate) (Drum Set), Piano, Harp, and Strings. It is the only orchestra work I’ve written which includes a drum set, and I found it to be a lot of fun.

Calypso Round

Sound and meaning

For the most part, I feel that the ascension of recorded music has been positive. It preserves performances and non-written music, and gives everyone access to music from everywhere. But one of the main downsides is that it has turned most of the world into listeners instead of participants. Whereas most people used to sing or play if they felt the need for music in their lives, now they just push a button, turn a dial, or swipe. Some people now listen to music for a large majority of their life – at work, at home, driving, shopping, walking, everywhere, but they never actually participate in any of it.

This easy accessibility comes with a price. Aside from the missed social opportunity, there is just a lack of any sort of first-hand musical experience. A lack of any understanding of what it actually feels like to make music. Though there are probably more people who consider themselves musicians now than ever before, the actual consumption of music has become completely passive. Michael Tilson Thomas, music director of the San Francisco Symphony, composer and new music advocate, once said that he thought that because nobody sings anymore, people have been losing contact with the emotional significance of the notes. As a result, he thought that many people now heard music as a collection of sounds, turning all music into percussion music. This doesn’t mean that the music is devoid of expression or nuance, but it does mean there is a general apathy toward tonal nuance.

This, I think, is most apparent in pop music, dance music, hip-hop, rock, and most commercial genres, but it is also apparent in Classical music. Minimalism, though no doubt chemically inspired initially, quickly became a serious discourse. Its popularity was also derived from its urban roots. John Cage talks about all the (urban) sounds around him, with a special love for the sound of traffic. This background hum of electrical, mechanical and other activity seems to be the very essence of Minimalism. Not much tonal nuance in traffic though. In fact, the numbing trance-like sameness of Minimalism is almost the antithesis of emotional nuance, though there is a cumulative aspect to the music that can be quite powerful. The pan-diatonicism and pan-metricism with which the style began quickly became highly structured multi-leveled hierarchies. Composers quickly saw the potential in the style for the organization of pure sound. Multiple layers of minimally changing sound ideas allowed composers to organize on several metric hierarchical levels at once. John Adams, for instance, has used Minimalism to create huge, intricate, almost “maximal” compositional structures. Composers essentially turned meter and texture into the new tonality. Specific sounds became structurally significant simply by when, where, and how prominently they were used.

Italian Traffic Conductor

But this kind of use of sounds, both musical and nonmusical, has a drawback; it demands meaning. A musical representation of an urban milieu is not enough reason to group random sounds together. There has to be a reason to choose which sounds are played together, and which ones aren’t. Why start here? Why end there? Do the sounds clash? Do they blend? Composers can’t really write what used to be called “pure music” with sound. It demands justification, otherwise, it just “is.”

Because of this, many composers started to use certain sounds for their cultural significance. This included using styles or direct quotes from other composers. One of the first (and still one of the best) uses of this technique appeared in the “Scherzo” movement of Berio’s Sinfonia (1968-9), which is a masterpiece. But recording artists have been using “samples,” “mash-ups,” and “remixes” now for over thirty years. This may solve the problem of meaning (and can be really interesting), but it doesn’t provide the same kind of direct emotional involvement that people are used to enjoying from the music they listen to.

This quandary of meaning and expression is not a problem facing only Minimalism and other sound-based music; it is a problem with all music constructed in “layers.” Composers have always composed in layers to a certain extent, but I am talking about independent layers. Today, composing with layers of music has become the norm. It started with multi-track tape recorders. That methodology was brought wholesale into computer sequencing and digital recording, and has worked its way into written music as well. Composers have toyed with the idea of juxtaposing unrelated musical materials for hundreds of years. Take the offstage band in Mozart’s Don Juan, the converging marching bands in Ives’ Decoration Day, or the unrelated layers of his Unanswered Question. Of course, Mozart’s layers are perfectly integrated harmonically, even if they are in different meters, but the Ives’ layers are unrelated in every way except meaning.

Stravinsky is another composer who explored the idea of compositional layers early in his career. The opening of the Rite of Spring and in fact, the entire Part One, is a textbook example of compositional layers. (Part Two is much more linear.) It is also very effective and some of my favorite music! I have always felt, however, that the reason Stravinsky abandoned this approach was not because he had to escape through a back window, and not because of World War I and the fact he was broke, but because he saw the limitations of this approach both structurally and expressively.

One of the most interesting parts of this phenomenon deals with popular music. Popular music has always been rhythmic, but since the emergence of rock and the infusion of blues and other African influences, the music has adopted a more ethnic cultural outlook. Music in Western countries generally tends to be well integrated, with melody, harmony, and rhythm working together as a whole. Music in much of the rest of the world tends to be set up as a vehicle for individual expression set against a rather static and unchanging background. This could be a drone, a repeating rhythm or pattern, or a combination of the two. Popular music genres seem to be adopting this modal more and more. Vocal lines and solos are where all the expression is; the instrumental parts are the big bad unchanging world. This is a huge exaggeration, of course, but it seems to be one of the common and most successful answers to the problem of creating music with sound and not notes. And the music is even more rhythmic today. Hip-hop has become an art of sound collage. Of course, pop music always has words. There is never any doubt what it is about.

The drawback is that instrumental music is increasingly being pushed into the background. On one hand this has led to some very imaginative music for TV and Film, but on the other, it has led to some less than thrilling attempts at Classical music. New sound-based Classical music does well when it has an exciting soloist grabbing the audience’s attention, and has had success with new opera, dance, and video, but it is struggling getting its audience to pay attention to sound-based instrumental music in its own right. I don’t have an answer for this. But it would be a good idea for a composer to remember that a sound collage is exactly what the audience hears everyday when they step outside. In order to get an audience’s attention these days, composers must have something in the foreground. If not a soloist, or even a melody, then at least something front and center – electronics, whale songs, video, dance or some other “hook!” Otherwise, to the audience, the music sounds just like their real world and there is no reason to listen.

Does anybody care about tonal organization anymore?

 

Atonality, as a replacement for tonality, I consider to be a failed experiment for the most part. Today for someone to criticize music as atonal seems rather archaic. It’s not that composers are writing more music that is tonal or atonal (though some indeed are doing so), but it is more that composers are just no longer very interested in that sort of organizational manipulation. Composers organize their music, of course, but not in the same way as composers writing in the great age of tonal music, or atonal music for that matter. In general, music today seems less linear and more environmental. Composers still tell stories, but it is usually done more as background music rather than with an interaction of musical characters.

Tonality developed at the beginning of the Baroque Period in response to the need for a way to organize instrumental music. Until then, written music was primarily vocal and was organized around the text. Though Renaissance music was tonal “sounding,” its sense of key (and musical structure) was entirely based on the emotional (and sometimes literal) impact of the text. Baroque composers writing instrumental music decided, with no words to fall back on, to make the music about the key and gradually developed a large interrelated structure of key relationships. Then they also borrowed from Classical Rhetoric and created “musical subjects” upon which they could expound.

Though the Rhetorical characteristic has remained nearly to the present day, the tonal aspect was challenged early in the 1900’s and remained a source of contention among not just composers, but all musicians. Though composers were at first interested in finding a replacement for the system of tonality, gradually the approach to pitch became just another original aspect of how an individual composer would organize his or her music. Often the approach would vary from piece to piece by the same composer.

But still, the way we listen to notes and their relationship to each other has not changed much, even if composers are using and organizing them in different ways. I believe it is possible to treat pitches as sounds, in the same way you would write for a percussion ensemble, for instance.   But the composer must be careful to keep the pitches identified as individual units, which is not easy. The (pitched) music of Edgard Varése is probably the best example of this that I can think of, but still, you hear a (tonal) relationship between the pitches he uses, even if they are treated as static sounds. I don’t think you can change the way people hear the relationship between the notes themselves.

Serialism, music using the twelve-tone method, tried to organize music in a different way. It tried to replace a tonal relationship with one based on order. I have no problem with the effort; I just don’t think it worked. It was a very versatile technique, and fed directly into the creative imagination of several composers, but it now seems rather dated. Its problem was that it was, at best, only barely detectible in the music. Because you couldn’t hear the ordered relationships of twelve-tone rows, you tried to hear the music the way you normally would.  Listeners still try to hear tonal relationships.  If the method was more obvious that might not be the case, but it just isn’t.  You can take tonality out of the music, however, you can’t take it out of the listener.

In many pieces, serialism seems to neutralize tonal relationships with speed. The composer seems to circulate through the twelve tones so quickly as to cause the listener to experience tonal vertigo. I think it is this overloaded tonal dizziness that most listeners associate with atonality. It is like a cat in a speeding car; he is born to detect motion, but the whole world is moving!

An interesting and somewhat quaint description of tonality and serialism appears in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, by the Czech author Milan Kundera. A character in the story, who happens to be a pianist, relates how his father had taught him tonality. The tonic was the king, and the dominant and subdominant are his right-hand men. All the other notes were members of the court, and each had its own relationship to the king. But each note also had its own court, with its own relationships. A composition, therefore, was a drama played out among all these players with intrigue and romance, and even occasionally the threat of treason. He then goes on to criticize twelve-tone music as being like Socialism by trying, and not succeeding, to make everybody the same. Kundera was not a big fan of Socialism.

It’s my opinion that one of serialism’s fatal flaws is its blind acceptance of enharmonic equal temperament as truth. Declaring all F#’s and Gb’s as identical severely restricts the variety and scope of tonal possibilities available. It also clearly ignores how Western ears hear tonal color.

Even on an equal-tempered piano, we hear pitches as being a sharp or flat based on the context in which they appear. This is often demonstrated melodically (C# moves to D, Db moves to C, etc.), but is also true harmonically. If you play the two chords below, alternating back and forth, the F# and the Gb are clearly different notes, even though they are exactly the same frequency!

The first chord opens outward as the resonance and surrounding notes create a clear F#. In the second chord, however, the Bb and Eb clearly redefine the target note as a Gb, which seems to contract back toward the same C major chord in the left hand, creating a completely different effect.

Even though the pitch is the same, how we perceive the pitch is different because of the surrounding environment. Most atonal writing either ignores this, or tries to neutralize it by making the music so dissonant that the relationships are of little consequence. Making tonal relationships moot can be very effective, in, for instance, the early music of György Ligeti or Krzysztof Penderecki. But writing tonal relationships and then ignoring them is a questionable compositional practice that promotes listener confusion and frustration. It is a practice that a composer uses at his own peril.

 

Changing music from events to processes

I first became aware of the role of emotional oscillation in music sometime around 1980, through the work of Manfred Clynes. (See my blog post on Music and Emotion.) His research suggested emotion was expressed through music using very specific oscillations of intensity and release. After becoming acquainted with his work, I challenged myself with the question of how this was accomplished in music.

Oscillations, or waves, form the very basis of music through sound, but how the music is performed or created to convey a specific emotional oscillation is a little different. Sound by itself does not possess these qualities though, of course, the voice, for instance, is very inflective. I had to examine the relationship between sounds to find the amount of motion necessary to express waves of emotion, which can vary from less than a second to over five seconds. To express these relationships you need at least two dimensions. One is of course time, but the other would need to be a musical field or parameter which has defined polarities, i.e., high and low registers or loud and soft dynamics. Oscillations could take place on single notes (i.e., crescendo/diminuendo or a glissando) but would primarily take place through the comparison of the relationship between separate events. This is not usually perceived consciously by the listener, and often falls more into the realm of performance rather than composition. But still, there are oscillating parameters that are commonly manipulated by composers. In fact, once I started to look for them, I found so many that it quickly became apparent I would not be able to keep track of them all at any given moment.

I began to think about the possibility of creating music using verbs instead of nouns.

Music is traditionally analyzed and organized according to its identifiable items: Keys, chords, motives, rhythms, etc. These items are given status or function (i.e., primary, secondary, cadential, etc.) and are often organized into hierarchies. Some hierarchies are traditional and enveloping, such as tonal and metric hierarchies, and others are set forth by the composer relating directly to the structure of a specific work. But my search for oscillating parameters had me now looking for processes instead of items. I began to think about the possibility of creating music using verbs instead of nouns.

If you are organizing music around specific items, you must of course play and use those specific items. Oscillating parameters, however, are in use all of the time. Sometimes they are prominent, sometimes they are more neutral, but they are always available! A structure using these parameters would consider which ones are being used prominently and when. It would also keep track of the types of emotional content being expressed. This is not only a very broad spectrum of possibilities; it is also a very different kind of spectrum. The expressive parameters will be changing quite a bit, but the structural parameters will likely be those that remain static for a while (i.e., upper register, very soft or loud, all the same articulation, all the same color or chord or scale). In a structure of this type, the actual items of musical material carry less importance, though they can be organized traditionally, if that is preferred.

I also turned to improvisation because it is honest! The music I am playing, and emotions I am expressing, are actually being experienced.

My interest in musical processes eventually led to my exploration of process in both philosophy (i.e., Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne) and Eastern Religions (Buddhism and Taoism). I don’t profess to have learned a great deal about any of these subjects, but my inquiries did turn my artistic activity in a different direction, namely, toward improvisation. Improvisation, being a realtime activity, allows for a much more acute awareness of these emotional oscillations. In fact, they are a constant source of inspiration. It also allows for continual exploration of identified oscillating parameters. The realtime free flow of ideas itself is the epitome of process and the artistic antithesis of constructivism. I also turned to improvisation because it is honest! The music I am playing, and emotions I am expressing, are actually being experienced. Not every musical listener will be necessarily interested in the emotions I am expressing, no matter how well they are expressed. However, I am much more comfortable expressing real emotion than conjuring up a contrived feeling through the manipulation of a musical magic show.

Listening to music as a process allows you to focus on small-scale momentary expression and yet make a note when new parameters come into play. You become more aware of increases and releases of intensity and their interplay, expressed often simultaneously in different parameters. In fact, music allows for multiple expression of the same parameter in different voices. There is never a lack of things to listen to, but it is not the same kind of listening. It is not a matter of keeping track of ideas and their manipulations; it is a continual unfolding of expressive creativity. It is not the usual intellectual exercise; it is a sequence of emotional experiences. It does not always have a point, but it is often well worth knowing.

When Improvising, Music Theory Becomes a Verb

I knew I wanted to be a composer when I was in Junior High School. My parents found me a couple of teachers my last couple of years of high school. They were both well respected composers. The first teacher showed me Hindemith’s Theory of Interval Hierarchy on the first lesson. The second teacher waited until the second or third lesson, but then brought me a short treatise on Information Theory. Though I was totally baffled, these two events were actually a pretty good introduction to how many composers think about music.

Music composers and theorists have riddled music with a litany of systematic hierarchical structures. Tonality and key, harmony, meter and rhythm, form, and many more complex all-consuming theories are all systems of organized structures meant to impart logical meaning to emotional content. It is an idea borrowed from writing, and it is a visual concept. A large written work is organized into parts, chapters, sections, paragraphs, sentences, words, and finally letters. Each letter and word has its own function and meaning, and this becomes extended to sentences, paragraphs, etc., until every part has its own place and role. Most composers think of their music in the same way, with each note, phrase, or layer having a special function and meaning, and playing a part in a larger whole.

But it is impossible to retain this kind of detailed attention to multiple levels of musical structure while improvising. You can keep track of what is going on for a while but at a certain point you reach the Too Much Information point and things fall apart. With no pre-planning, the amount of information, levels, and functions add up until you are overwhelmed. At that point, you just give up and think about something else, because, after all, you are creating everything on the spot, not just the structure.

So when improvising, the amount of actual musical information you can pay attention to is limited. This is why many improvisers prefer to improvise on given themes or motives, because when doing that, the emphasis shifts to creative manipulation for which improvisation is excellent. But all of traditional musical theory treats music as information, so when freely improvising, you have three choices: 1) limit the amount of information you keep track of, 2) not care, or 3) keep track of your music in a different way. Choice No. 1 very quickly becomes a precondition. Limiting means making choices, usually in advance. This is how most of the world improvises, with limits of key or mode, tempo, meter, harmonic choices, etc. It narrows the playing field so that the improviser can concentrate on expression and creativity. Choice No. 2 pollutes the imagination and eventually becomes a choice. I believe that a lot of Free Jazz or Improvisation has become like this, where making an organizational choice of any sort becomes taboo.

It is not the music itself but its relationship to the surrounding music that gives it meaning.

I found that, as a composer, the only choice open to me was Choice No. 3 because I didn’t want to make pre-conditions and I did care. So instead of treating bits of music as information, I started treating them as relative values on the sliding scales of several simultaneous musical “fields” or parameters. Every bit of music I improvise is louder or softer, higher or lower, faster or slower, darker or lighter, more or less resonant, more or less dissonant, denser or more open, flatter or sharper, etc. than the music which is sounding simultaneously or adjacent to it. It is not the music itself but its relationship to the surrounding music that gives it meaning. Because emotion is perceived as a specific oscillation of intensity and release, and oscillation in many forms is a fundamental component of music, these relationships make excellent expressive tools while improvising. Most importantly, because their focus is very specific, they become tools that are actually possible to use while improvising in an intelligent way.

Because music has multiple dimensions, and these dimensions can be creatively manipulated simultaneously, the creative possibilities are nearly endless. An improviser can also create his or her own expressive parameters just by juxtaposition (i.e. more temple block and less triangle). Thinking about oscillating parameters encourages an improviser to concentrate on what he or she is doing at any given moment rather than creating the mental distance it takes to keep track of specific information over a longer period of time. This is exactly the mental attitude it takes to improvise well!

Of course, identifiable ideas do emerge. But instead of treating them as informational Legos to build things with, I treat those ideas as relational focal points that are altered and changed at every appearance. The information relates to itself. Large-scale structures do emerge too, but I don’t often think about them consciously. Sometimes I will deliberately bring back an idea from earlier within an improvisation if it is particularly prominent (and I remember it). Sometimes I will bring up an idea from a different improvisation or even another piece. But I seldom find that when I do it has any real or special impact. I find I can use and trust my musical instincts to control large-scale shape, contrast, and function. In other words, I play it by ear. It usually works. If it doesn’t, oh well, I’ll try again next time.