Take 76 Trombones, Make New
Several weeks ago I came home from a performance by two regional concert bands and wrote a withering indictment of the wind ensemble as a concept that NewMusicBox’s editorial staff wisely suggested I not share with the world. (It exists now in a version so heavily redacted that it makes George W. Bush’s Texas Air National Guard records look like The Dirt.) At any rate, the topic of concert band music has been on my brain since then, and I recently started making tentative steps toward a piece for that instrumentation.
In conversation with concert band aficionadi, it often comes out that such groups tend to program relatively conventional music because more experimental music requires more rehearsal time and places greater technical demands on the ensemble. While this is undoubtedly true of some new music, it’s not a fair generalization: What about all those pieces for indeterminate experimentation, pieces with graphic scores, etc.? That’s not really the direction I feel like pursuing for this piece, but it doesn’t have to be. Have you heard those Japanese middle school bands? They do unbelievably complicated music, by wind ensemble rep standards, and they usually do it with surgical precision. And they’re, like, 14-year-old girls!
If we take traditionally notated parts for a traditionally constituted ensemble as a given, the challenge of being radical without writing anything prohibitively difficult in any one part is a compelling one. It requires me to clamber over several mental barriers regarding composition that don’t usually have to be crossed: First, I have to find a way to deal with the ensemble in a way that’s not predicated on the narrative integrity of each instrumental part. (This has a political dimension that remains my number 1 reservation about working on the piece.) Second, I have to find a way of relating material and form that allows simple-ish parts without producing a simple-ish experience. I’d prefer to avoid tropes from sound-mass or minimalist music.
Taken together, these are really two ways of asking the same question: Can I write a piece of critical music without asking any one player to do anything too weird? Maybe, maybe not—but I think the question is a potentially valid starting point, and even if I don’t answer it satisfactorily, it might position me to make something nobody would expect to hear from a concert band. And that, for the moment, will be enough.