Composition Time Machine

Composition Time Machine

By Frank J. Oteri
When does editorial tinkering with an older piece of music cross the line into revision, and do such revisions misrepresent the time the piece was written?

Written By

Frank J. Oteri

Frank J. Oteri is an ASCAP-award winning composer and music journalist. Among his compositions are Already Yesterday or Still Tomorrow for orchestra, the "performance oratorio" MACHUNAS, the 1/4-tone sax quartet Fair and Balanced?, and the 1/6-tone rock band suite Imagined Overtures. His compositions are represented by Black Tea Music. Oteri is the Vice President of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) and is Composer Advocate at New Music USA where he has been the Editor of its web magazine, NewMusicBox.org, since its founding in 1999.

Last weekend, I scoured my apartment searching for a manuscript of a score that I had completed 28 years ago but which has never received a public performance. It’s been on my mind again for the first time in many years, perhaps as a result of mining my brain for fodder about how, when, and why people’s personal compositional aesthetics take hold but also because there is now actually a strong possibility that a performance of it will finally take place.

I’ve always thought of this old score as something of an Opus One of sorts, not that the work was ever published or that I actually bother assigning opus numbers to things I write. And certainly there are pieces I had composed prior to that, quite a few of which had been performed. But while I don’t completely hate those earlier pieces (I try not to hate anything), they don’t really feel connected to what I’ve done in the decades since then. On the other hand, this “Opus One” piece does feel like it’s my music, even though it is not completely what I would do now.

Anyway, I couldn’t find the manuscript even though I keep a pretty meticulous archive of everything I’ve ever done. It’s something we all should do, since someone’s got to, right? After many hours, I happily managed to track down, stuffed in an envelope along with other stuff from decades ago, a photocopy of most of the piece. A few pages are mysteriously missing. Since then I’ve chanced upon a few leads on other hopefully complete copies of it that might still exist in case the original really is nowhere to be found.

Not to take any chances about what may happen in the future, I started digitizing what I have of the piece and managed to already input about more than a third of the entire composition. While it currently feels like flawlessly reconstructing what is missing from decades-old memories is close to impossible, spending time with the piece as I’m inputting it has actually returned me to the mindset of where I was compositionally a very long time ago. But it has also raised some debates in my own mind about editorial hindsight.

Though I’ve already alluded that I don’t think the piece is totally perfect, I have no interest in rewriting it. However, as I’ve been keying it into Sibelius, I’ve corrected a few things that seem like out and out mistakes, added things that seem like unintentional omissions, and eliminated the metronome markings (some of which seem unreasonable). I’ve also made changes to some of the durations which would not really affect a listener’s perception of the piece, but rather the possibility for a satisfactory performance of it, e.g. shortening the lengths of certain notes from whole notes to dotted-halves to make room for some much needed rests here and there. And one rhythm I changed because it just seemed too embarrassingly clunky, although I changed it to a rhythm that I had previously used in music from that same era so as not to force my current aesthetics onto something that is clearly from an earlier time.

But when does such editorial tinkering cross the line into revision? The extremely humble Anton Bruckner constantly revised his symphonies years after they were written to the point that the jury is still out on what the definitive versions of these pieces actually are. Some scholars have accused Charles Ives of adding more dissonances to his scores decades after writing them in an attempt to position his music as being more ahead of its time than it actually was. I’ve never wanted to believe these attacks on Ives even though I ultimately don’t think they are relevant since his pieces are so wonderful and playing the “who did what first” game just opens a Pandora’s Box that stifles individuality and creativity. But that said, not to put my own efforts in the same league as those of Bruckner or Ives (both of whom I deeply admire), I do feel that this old piece of music of mine is a by-product of 1982 and I want to keep it there. So how much 2010 tinkering would it take to unmoor it from then?