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This is one last reminder to send in your scores (PDF format, to djwolf -AT- snafu -DOT- de) for the first international online anthology of new music for melodica solo or ensemble.  This is shaping up to be a remarkable collection, to say the least. [Addendum: If you're thinking of making a late entry, here's one idea I had, complete with title, but couldn't quite make work and you are free to use it: HAND TO MOUTH , for one melodica, two players, one of whom is assigned to the keyboard while the other manages the mouthpipe, allowing for some rhythmically complex cross-articulations. ]

Alex Ross has a very good article on traditions of improvisation (ornamentation and cadenzas especially) in classical music.   The article is subtitled "reviving the art of classical improvision" and Ross means it literally, as in bringing back the dead.  And there really is a sense that the improvisatory tradition is not only moribund, but was murdered: Ross quotes conductor Will Crutchfield's characterization of a Caruso cadenza so widely duplicated as to have become the canonical cadenza for the aria into which it is inserted as the “death-of-tradition”  and Ross himself describes Beethoven's written-out cadenza for the Mozart d minor Concerto as helping to "kill" it.    I'm of two minds about improvisatory elements in music.  I agree that they can make a performance more fresh, more lively and, in effect, open up the musical text, but that doesn't remove the composer's responsibility to compose a score that is, on its own terms, fresh, livel...

The Feuilleton in today's Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung led with an article about the phenomena of audio guides in museums.  The article closely mirrors the discussions online and elsewhere about Twittering realtime program notes during concerts.   The critique of concert twittering has mostly centered around annoyance that audience members might be looking at their cell phones instead of "really paying attention" during the concert.  I think that critique is somewhat misplaced, as the deeper issue is not the degree to which Twitterers and those who sit next to Twitterers are distracted but the degree of uniformity and control which the particular narrative medium reinforces.  For popular museum exhibitions, the most important function of the audio guides is probably their ability to regulate the speed of visitor traffic, as earplugged visitors do tend to move to the next room whenever the little voice tells them to move.  I like traffic jams as little as anyone and so ...

(1) "... nothing wrong with failure.  Experimental music is all about accepting the risk of failure.  And I'm not just talking John Cage-experimental.  You want to know an experimental musician who failed?  Wagner failed, that's who.  Wagner failed bigtime. He wrote music dramas that are unsingable and unstageable.  You don't believe me?  Name one production in which the singing and staging get all-round praise.  I'm talking praise from card-carrying Wagnerites.  When the vocal and orchestral writing demands voices that don't exist, and probably, without some form of amplification, will never be able to exist and the staging requires old-fashioned stage magic that no one believes in anymore, you've got a big recipe for failure... ...being a Wagnerite, even a Perfect Wagnerite , means not just the ordinary operatic suspension of disbelief, it means the perpetual suspension of complete satisfaction, the Tristan chord extended forever, having to be satisfied ...

A pleasant surprise sometimes repeats itself: while working on one piece, I discover that I have actually made at least one more along the way.  Recently, sketches and ideas for a quintet soon leaked or mutated into or revealed themselves to be better suited for another ensemble, another piece, in this case a small trio for woodwinds, tentatively named Came and Went , in which a three-player scoring pattern (not quite a Beckett-Gray code, as a B-G code where n=3 is impossible) is played six times, so that all the possible assignments of each instrument to a line in the pattern are used, but the whole is interrupted by moments of repose, not-yet-tonal harmonic passages like that above, which contrast with the patterned passages, which are more ambiguous harmonically (disfunctional-but-not-yet-atonal as is my want) but also more clearly melodic, albeit with a melody well-distributed among the instruments, a gentle hocket.  The quintet is still not done, but — dreaded dynamics aside — Cam...

I sometimes think that catches, like limericks, divide into two categories: clean ones and good ones.(Click image to enlarge.)

Mr. Cage had difficulties with orchestras, because orchestras tended to have members who found it difficult to be responsible when asked to distinguish between freedom and license. Performances of Atlas Eclipticalis and Cheap Imitation by very well-known orchestras turned out very badly because of this. Nevertheless, in spite of these experiences, Cage, the optimist, persisted in trying to get orchestras to do more rather than less, and to mature as social organizations while doing it.   Etcetera , a piece in which players not only volunteer to be conducted*, get to chose which conductor they are conducted by, and many of the late works return to the conductorless ideal, most of the time substituting the use of the neutral — and egoless — stopwatch for a conductor.  As an indication, perhaps, that this optimism is still an active force in the radical music, I'd like to point out a pair of recent works for orchestra without conductor. The first is Samuel Vriezen's Local Orches...

To break up some capricious and possibly ill-advised research,* I've been filling up ever-longer intermissions with the transcripts of Morton Feldman's late Middelburg lectures  (published in two volumes by MusikTexte as Words on Music/Worte über Musik ). Feldman's lecture style was famously engaging. He was a great substitute for a favorite anecdote-and-general-BS-delivering uncle, unschooled but educated, unpolished but in his own way erudite, and simultaneously vague and razor sharp.**  Even in print you tend to hang on every word, especially, it seems, when you disagree most with him or when Feldman has mixed something up or even got it altogether wrong.  The editor, Raoul Mörchen, does a great job of identifying obscurities and correcting errors, which are, sometimes, slips and, not infrequently, intentional slights on Feldman's part. (Hilariously, after a series of insults on Feldman's part about the recorder, the MusikTexte publishers themselves even step i...

Three scores sit on my desk that are, in theory, almost finished, waiting for dynamics.  Just a couple of markings in bold italics and maybe a hairpin or two: loud, soft, and refinements of or transitions between these two.  It would be easy enough to either go through the score and just add them instinctively, improvisatorially, or by chance or to devise some system for using dynamics to better project characteristics of other parameters in the score,  or, even easier, just leave dynamics out of the score altogether, and identify them as a matter for the performers to decide.   But each of these possibilities strikes me at the moment as a bit of a cop-out, not making a move I can actually believe does what is best for my notes.  For some composers, the materials in their pieces are born with dynamic detail or gestures or have a prevailing dynamic mood — as soft or as loud as possible, for example — but my notes happen to have come into the world rather unemcumbered by dynamic shape an...

Lesson one for young composers: Not everyone will love your music, and some people will decide that you, too, are unloveable, because of your music.  Lesson two for young composers: Get over lesson one and get on with your own work. Lesson three for young composers: Should people in positions of real economic or political power within the musical community use their dislike for your music and/or person as a basis for exercising their power, then feel free to call them on it, even if the stakes are modest.  Keep cool, speak clearly and loudly about this, but do not expect lasting change and make concrete plans for the independent material and moral support of your work. Lesson four for young composers: Having wrestled with the authorities, get back on with your own work.  ***** The most rewarding part of this blogging experience has been the exchange and conversation with musicians and people who like music who happen to inhabit very different corners of New(andnotsonew)musicland.  I...

Amazon identifies a title,   From Chords to Simultaneities: Chordal Indeterminancy and the Failure of Serialism , as belonging to a series of Contributions in Criminology and Penology . 

The weekend reading was Nicholson Baker's The Anthologist , not an exhilarating and disturbing read like Inherent Vice , but a read all the same, with enough of the characteristic Baker turns (obsessive little stories and jarring non-sequitors top my list of favorite Baker tropes) to make for lively breaks between composing sessions and some escape from a neighbor's hard-hammered house renovations.  The subject and narrator of The Anthologist is a mid-career, middle-of-the-road poet; although he's reached that particular pinnacle of American poets, being asked to edit an anthology, he's in a bad patch with writing, relationships, and day jobs, and so he fills the absences of writing, relationships, and a day job with procrastination, distraction and obsessive little lessons to reader, from the all-too familiar, all-too-slow straightening-up the office to helping a neighbor lay a plank floor to holding forth before us on poetic rhyme and metre as well as a bit of ancien...

Sometimes you just have to move simultaneously in opposite directions: at this point, every score I make can, in principle, be delivered in electronic format, via the magic of electrons telling other electrons to "move along!" (just like little doggies), but at the same time, an obsession with the material form of the hard copy of my scores continues unabated, with several rolls of handmade Nepali paper waiting to be cut down as coverstock, and it'll be exquisite coverstock, with no two volumes ever identical.  Heck, I even went to the hardware store this week and had plywood cut for a test run of even more substantial covers.  Who knows what's next?  Stainless steel?  Cast iron?  Concrete?   I won't push this parallel too far, but there is something here akin to my tastes in visual arts.  I am hopelessly lost in my attachment to the works of Duchamp and Irwin, one an artist who moved the artwork away from the retina and direct perception and to the mind, and the ...

In Germany the subsidy program for new automobile sales has the odd enough name Abwrackpraemie , but the equivalent US program, the Car Allowance Rebate System, is better known as Cash for Clunkers, a phrase which carries a special resonance for musicians.   If lawmakers had decided to support, instead of the automobile industry, the musical arts, then they could have kept the popular name for the program.  I reckon that a Cash for Musical Clunkers program would be a great success: who doesn't have an embarrasing old score or performance that they'd love to erase from their collections or catalogues and replace with something new? I, for one, would gladly retire several old pieces in return for new commissions.    

If you compose according to a strict plan, concept, idea, formula, how much variation or elaboration about that  idea, plan, formula, or concept do you allow?  One aesthetic pole would have the piece stripped down to the essence of the formula, idea, concept, or plan, allowing nothing more than that necessary to clearly and decisively project the concept, formula, plan, or idea.  The aesthetic approach polar opposite to that would strive to hide any overt signs of the formula, plan, idea, or concept, or even frame the whole plan, formula, concept, or idea within a larger musical context.  Of course, most real compositions will settle somewhere in the mushy middle between these two poles, allowing the concept, idea, plan, or formula to be accessible, if dressed up somewhat in ornament or affect or flowing along in some normative musical continuity, after all, in the end, and no matter what the idea, concept, plan, or formula, we are just making music, aren't we? But then again, isn...

Task: Describe the space in which the activity of composition takes place.  The labels associated with the axes above are only tentative and approximate: choice is fantasy but also convention, habit, tradition; calculation is planning, process, consequence, but may be complex enough to be unpredictable; chance , which is also circumstance, contingency, may be, globally, a more predictable element than either choice or calculation.  It may be more useful to think of composition not in terms of "putting things together" but rather as placing or locating activity in such a space, with finding balance (or absence of balance, as the case may well be) among methods an increasingly central concern. .  

Somehow, in these scattered postings about orchestration, I have neglected to mention a pair of musicians doing important work on the music-technical and economic/social/political problems of making music with large ensembles. The first is composer Daniel Goode, who has a long working relationship to the Gamelan Son of Lion (see this posting on Our Other Orchestra ) and additionally has, in recent years, worked with both the concept and concrete examples of a "Flexible Orchestra" , a mixed ensemble including at least one instrument in multiple instances (in a recent concert, the orchestra was composed of eleven flutes, tuba, harpsichord, trumpet, and contrabass).  Such combinations have the potential to provide very striking environments for music-making, in this case including timbral and registral variety but also allowing for at least one example of the symphonic qualities or chorus-effect made available by a single timbre in mass, an efficient and even elegant distilling ...

A reminder:  one month remains before the deadline for submitting pieces for the first online anthology of new music for melodica.  The nine eight pieces (by six five different composers) received to date represent a startling diversity of music for solo melodica and melodica ensembles.