kimberlyyeo010198

While writing a wind quintet this week, the necessary downtime was spent finishing a pair of wonderful and wonderfully idiosyncratic books:  Thomas Pynchon's new novel, Inherent Vice , which arrived on Monday and not only read as quickly and smoothly as a Wild Turkey chaser but also carried the same emotional after-burn, and Henry Brant's orchestration handbook, Textures and Timbres .    I'll probably have more to say about the Pynchon later, but for now: damn! between it and Mieville's The City & The City , this has been the year for the weird-boiled detective novel.  As for the Brant, he is refreshingly modest and upfront in explaining the goal of the project in hand, which is achieving homogenous orchestral textures from mixtures of instruments. His method, through defining broad timbral categories, is a sound one and always based on years of empirical study.  Nevertheless, the real substance in the book comes in a number of verbal suggestions and in many of the ...

Why walk when one can leap?                                                              Move as if you've forgotten everything you thought you ever knew about how to pass, kick, fall and run;                                        Break everything down into independent constituent parts, recombine, overlay (simultaneous unisons that are not in unisons, duos that are not together, etc.);                                                                                                           Prowling.                     Count like a dancer, steps neither in clock-time nor in musical time;  The dance is distributed among the spines of the dancers, the dancers distributed throughout the entire available space, "front" is wherever in space each individual dancer faces;                                                                  Aquire movement everywhere: from animals, pedestrians, the computer, stepdance, ballet;                                                        ...

A day or two ago, the German novelist Daniel Kehlmann delivered a speech for the opening of the Salzburg Festival , where he is this year's poet in residence and director of the literature program.  He decided, in an unusually personal way, to talk about contemporary theatre, in particular the established "director's theatre."  The talk was personal because Kehlmann spoke of his father, the late director Michael Kehlmann, who he describes as "a man who, before all else, saw in the director a servant of the author," yet whose career ebbed from early successes in the face of a theatre world that increasingly expected the director to place his or her ever-larger own imprint upon productions.  Kehlmann Sr. became "old fashioned" and had frustratingly fewer opportunities to do his work.   (Kehlmann describes his own decision to keep a distance from the theatre and write novels as a choice for a career field in which no one could keep him from his work)....

Orchestration is a form of personel management: who plays what, when they play it, and sometime even where they play it. Composers don't always think of orchestration this way,  and it might be useful to look at other art forms in which this aspect is more explicit:  the best playwrights and choreographers, for example, manage the exits and entrances of their players supremely well. One of my pieces-in-progress is a wind quintet, a tricky genre due in large part to the fact that continuity has to be provided by players who have to breath every once in a while, thus inviting lots of entering and exiting in a continuous stream of changing scoring patterns.  But how might those patterns be sensibly organized, in a piece, for example, in which every combination of instruments is used only once?  I recently stumbled onto a nice solution to this suggested by a stage work by Samuel Beckett, Quad , a "frantic mime" for four players, lights, and percussion.  Beckett wanted to orga...

Writer Michael Chabon makes the case for the place of wilderness in young peoples' lives ( here ). Unfortunately, Chabon (or, one supposes, the editor who titled his piece) identifies this as a male phenomena, but otherwise I agree.  Growing up near open desert, mountain spaces, gravel pits, vacant yards, abandoned houses, and even cemeteries always meant preserves for adventure and learning empirically to deal with a measure of danger.  Building rock forts at the desert/mountain edge of Cathedral City or tree forts in Mt Baldy oak trees were probably the first unsupervised creative acts of any consequence in my life, and there's a direct line in my mind from these rough constructions to any music I've ever made.  It's a real pity that kids today are increasingly kept away from similar opportunities.  I suppose the trend to protect children from childhood misadventure is unavoidable (even in the first of the Great Brain books, set in Utah in the last decade of the 19th...

I'm just back from a short trip to London.  Pleasure, no business, and tourism pure were the orders of the days.  I heard a concert in the Music We'd Like to Hear series, a perfect example of composerly initiative, self-reliance, and the pooling of resources, in which three composers — John Lely, Tim Parkinson, and my friend Markus Trunk (all roughly on the experimental side of the new music community) —  each program an evening of music.  I happened to be in town for the third and final even in this year's program, John Lely's evening, which was a portrait of Tom Johnson.  It was great to see and hear Tom and his music again  ( Formulas for String Quartet , in particular, should be taken up by more groups) and also to hear a work of Lely's, The Parson's Code for Melodic Contours, which was a charming (and, in its way, post-Johnsonian) demonstration of the complexity of a simple melodic curve when projected simultaneously onto multiple pitch metrics.   The oth...

Sorting through some paperwork, I recently located an article from 1979, "Spatial music progress report" written by Henry Brant for the Bennington College Alumni magazine, Quadrille ; I've recopied the text and scanned the images and this is now online at David Jaffe's Henry Brant homepage .  

This has been another summer without much summer weather, which is mostly okay by me, a person of pallor with a low tolerance for the hot and humid.   But the weather has been stifling enough that composing in long stretches is not the order of the day so, instead, I'm composing something substantial in a number of modules,  alternating with other projects, the most rewarding of which have been copying music for some friends and doing a bit of research about some more senior American composers, some of which has ended up — should the deletionists have mercy — in either new or seriously revised Wikipedia entries. The piece I'm composing is for out-of-doors, in a garden, perhaps, with a soloist and a number of smaller ensembles around the space.  The first module is finished: At the furthest perimeter of the space, three cyclists shall lap lazily, each lap taking the place of a Cagian time bracket into which each cyclist inserts either a bell ring or nothing, with each of the lap...

A bleg:  I bought some sheet music in the early 90's from Forward Music Ltd., in London.  (Good stuff, too: Barney Childs, John White...)  They seem to have fallen off the planet, or at least into realms that the internet doesn't reach, so if anyone has any contact information, I'd be much obliged.

A list of journals (a) focused on new/contemporary/experimental music, (b) currently in operation, (c) published periodically and (d) available on paper.   I have not included journals by national music information centers, publishers, or membership organizations.  This list is definitely not complete; if you know of any further journals, please let me know and I'll update this item. English: Computer Music Journal . Contemporary Music Review . ex tempore . Journal of New Music Research . Leonardo Music Journal . Musikworks . The Open Space Magazine . Organized Sound . Perspectives of New Music . Search: Journal for New Music and Culture Signal to Noise. Sonus . The Sound Projector. 21st Century Music . Tempo . The Wire . French: Circuit: Musiques Contemporaines Revue & Corrigée German: MusikTexte . Neue Zeitschrift für Musik . Positionen .

Sounds articulate precise dimensions in physical space; musical sounds also articulate precise dimensions in social and private spaces. ***** Use the minimum of resources or means required. Less is often more. Find the core question or idea in a work. Choose and use your materials to best frame that question or idea. All musical ideas and all musical instruments (save the vibra-slap) are potentially useful. None is universally useful. (Save the vibra-slap, which is never useful.) But having practiced the virtues of economy, allow yourself, from time to time, a bit of extravangance, some conspicuous production and consumption.   In the end, the economy of musical production is like the bellows of a concertina, expansion necessarily paired with contraction. ***** Go to extremes, in whichever parameter you use, including extremes of moderation. Question parameters. A parameter is someone else's way of dividing up the aural experience. Explore the edges and boundaries of and between pi...

We went to Wiesbaden this evening to hear (and see) Lulu .   It's astonishing how much of a period piece it has become, with the touches of alto sax and bar-room piano in the orchestra, the redundancy and charateristic curves of the various Lulu tunes and — still, best of all, as far as I'm concerned — the silent movie in the middle.  I imagine that in the 1930's, anything remotely like Lulu would have been shocking, even dissonant, in the Neo-Baroque digs of the Hessisches Staatstheater , but now, and even with a highly stylized production (read: lots of wet paint), it's just another night at the opera, and a night without Otis B. Driftwood at that.

Like Health Care systems everywhere, New Music suffers from a poor delivery system. The route from composer to performer to listener is often capricious, improvised, and instable, and more often a product of repertorial lethargy and personal relationships than an open market in matching musical interests.   The web ought to be a perfect route for moving our scores to performers and attracting listeners to performances, but the low-level of web activity for new music — I keep track of 35 or 40 new music oriented blogs via bloglines and sometimes several days will pass without new messages — suggests that the new music community has a far-from-optimal approach to the web as a resource.   (It is surprising to me that  the largest traditional music publishers  and the license-collecting agencies — who have an immediate financial interest in making their wares public — do such a very bad job of it;  title searches at these sites are slow and miserable, and I'm someone who actually enjoy...

A discussion at BloggingHeads.tv between two philosophers with interests in environmental issues, Jay Odenbaugh and Craig Callender, raises some serious questions about conservation and even the re-introduction of extinct species.  A proposal to conserve or revive any particular species is a non-chronological privileging of one particular historical moment or era over others, establishing the particular constellation of climate, fauna and flora of one moment as a benchmark against which any other state is less valued. This is an enterprise which strikes me as ultimately rather arbitrary, however immediately attractive any particular configuration may appear.  (I find their example of a restored Cave Lion population roaming Los Angeles is an especially nice addition to the long tradition of destruction-of-L.A.-narratives (see Mike Davis's City of Quartz for several more)). It occurs to me that, in the modern invention of the "classical" music repertoire, with the predo...

TauKay Edizioni Musicali has a large number of free-to-download scores online, yet another example of the way the winds are blowing for sheet music.   While there will likely remain a role for sheet music printed on paper and physically delivered to musicians and libraries — and a particular niche for elegant editions — the time and cost efficiencies of direct downloads are increasingly hard to ignore.  Sheet music, on its own, for new and experimental music, is not an especially profitable business, the larger profit is in commissions and licensing for performances, broadcasts, and recordings; sheet music is an instrument in realizing performances, broadcasts, and recordings.  If traditional sheet music publishing is either slow or expensive, it runs the risk of leading to fewer rather than more performances, which makes publishing more of an obstacle than an assist to the music. Sheet music in the form of scores and parts for choral groups, bands, and orchestras which becomes widely...

It's well-known that the late composer Henry Brant had an active parallel career as on orchestrator and composer for film, but a lot of his work took place under- or uncredited, which is standard practice in film music.  During his life, Brant was always modest about his work as an orchestrator for the scores of colleagues, characterizing it as always implementing the style and preferences of the composer rather than in his own.  Mr Brant's musical executor, Kathy Wilkowski, has been kind enough to share the following list of films on which he worked.   First, his collaborations as orchestrator: for Virgil Thomson:   The River (1937), The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936), Louisiana Story (1948; the score won Thomson the Pulitzer Prize in Music, Brant was credited as "music technical assistant".) for Aaron Copland:   The City (1939) for George Antheil:  The Scoundrel (1935) for Marc Blitzstein: at least two films. for Douglas Moore: Power on the Land (1940) , Yo...

Archiving your music is not easy:  try to keep it in several media at once (as paper originals and copies, as data on permanent and non-permanent formats), make multiple copies of each, and distribute the storage (i.e. one copy at home, one copy for the safe deposit box, one sent home to Mom).   Think plastics will last forever?  Think again:   here's a new aticle  on the degrading of plastics.  

It's time for the annual notation reboot.  In addition to setting up new template files for the new edition of Finale, my primary engraving software, I've been doing practice runs to keep up some facility with the other notation software on my computer.  In addition to Finale, I have Lilypond, Sibelius, Turandot, Graphire Music Studio, and have recently downloaded Berlioz  (a commerical program now turned into freeware) and MuseScore (free and open sourced) to try.  Each product has useful features and a distinct workflow and I find that it's useful to have several approaches available to solving the same problem.  The new Finale (2010) doesn't have any dramatic changes, but does have two features that were worth the upgrade: an easier way of working with percussion and more possibilities for the import and export of graphics. But don't get the impression that I'm spending all my composing time with my computer: a fresh box of black uni-ball micros has arrived, ...