Category: Analysis

“To morph or not to morph – that’s the question.
Whether ’tis nobler for the Muses to suffer
The stings and ouches of outrageous artistic alteration,
Or to litigate against a sea of liberties,
And by opposing, end them”

(with apologies to Will Shakespeare)

How far can you bend a piece of music before it breaks? Photo by Trevor Hunter

How far can you bend a piece of music—whether through subtle interpretation or outright improvisation—before it, or its composer, breaks?

This is a brief overview of the liabilities inherent in such undertakings, as well the author’s best shot at sharing what may be a genuinely viable solution for reconciling the seemingly irreconcilable contradictions that have riddled this controversial territory for, well, centuries, if truth be known.

On November 14, 1929 the legendary Toscanini premiered Ravel’s Bolero with the New York Philharmonic. The critic of The Morning Telegraph shared, “When Bolero had completed perhaps ten minutes of sinuous way, I gasped and prest my heart, which pounded. When another five minutes had passed, one thought possest me:

‘Marvelous, miraculous music; fundamental, simple, primitive, low-down, earthy, but the essence, the pure residue, the actual metal.’ . . . I do not recall any premiere to have been received with such a reception as was given it by the emotion-loosed audience. The yells and hand-clapping came down like an earthquake. It did not subside. And even after Toscanini had tapped for the next opening, the applause broke out afresh. No music anywhere in the city has been acclaimed in this season in such manner.”

It’s clear that the gentleman was harpooned by the performance, and, from all reports, that the irrepressible audience was taken as well. On top of that, another critic went on to say that Toscanini had made Ravel into “almost an American national hero”. And, of course, Bolero has occupied perennial hit-list status ever since.

A pretty strong case for the power of Ravel’s art, no?

But, what’s this, can it be? The Maestro turns and beckons to the hall to give its author acknowledgment when none other than the composer himself, the very object of their adulation, registers his disenchantment with the performance by refusing to take up Toscanini’s invitation, remaining seated throughout.

After the concert Ravel informs Toscanini, “It’s too fast,” to which Toscanini responds “It’s the only way to save the work.” According to another report, Ravel said, “That’s not my tempo.” Toscanini replied, “When I play it at your tempo, it is not effective,” to which Ravel retorted, “Then do not play it!”

So, however many enthralled listeners it had left in its wake, Bolero‘s premiere was emphatically not a success from where its creator listened.

Fast forward to April of 1962, when the arcanely gifted pianist Glenn Gould’s take on the Brahms First Piano Concerto was so counter-traditional that the then conductor of the New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, felt it necessary to offer a public disclaimer of sorts to his audience before the performance:

Don’t be frightened. Mr. Gould is here. He will appear in a moment. I’m not, um, as you know, in the habit of speaking on any concert except the Thursday night previews, but a curious situation has arisen, which merits, I think, a word or two. You are about to hear a rather, shall we say, unorthodox performance of the Brahms D Minor Concerto, a performance distinctly different from any I’ve ever heard, or even dreamt of for that matter, in its remarkably broad tempi and its frequent departures from Brahms’ dynamic indications. I cannot say I am in total agreement with Mr. Gould’s conception and this raises the interesting question: “What am I doing conducting it?” I’m conducting it because Mr. Gould is so valid and serious an artist that I must take seriously anything he conceives in good faith and his conception is interesting enough so that I feel you should hear it, too.

But the age old question still remains: “In a concerto, who is the boss; the soloist or the conductor?” The answer is, of course, sometimes one, sometimes the other, depending on the people involved. But almost always, the two manage to get together by persuasion or charm or even threats to achieve a unified performance. I have only once before in my life had to submit to a soloist’s wholly new and incompatible concept and that was the last time I accompanied Mr. Gould. But, but this time the discrepancies between our views are so great that I feel I must make this small disclaimer. Then why, to repeat the question, am I conducting it? Why do I not make a minor scandal — get a substitute soloist, or let an assistant conduct? Because I am fascinated, glad to have the chance for a new look at this much-played work; Because, what’s more, there are moments in Mr. Gould’s performance that emerge with astonishing freshness and conviction. Thirdly, because we can all learn something from this extraordinary artist, who is a thinking performer, and finally because there is in music what Dimitri Mitropoulos used to call “the sportive element”, that factor of curiosity, adventure, experiment, and I can assure you that it has been an adventure this week collaborating with Mr. Gould on this Brahms concerto and it’s in this spirit of adventure that we now present it to you.

(transcribed by Mary Jo Watts)

Whereupon, these two agreeing-to-disagree musicians went on to deliver a Brahms concerto nearly twice its usual duration.

Leonard Bernstein, Glenn Gould and Igor Stravinsky; Photograph: Picasa 3.0/Public Domain

In the new millenium, and with centuries of scholarship under its belt, the issue of what, in the old days, was termed “musical fidelity”—faithfulness to or violation of a composer’s original intent and a work’s innate spirit—still remains as seismographically sensitive as ever; perhaps more so now, in light of technology’s unimagined proliferation of the permutational potentials in musical performance.

While most composers, performers, and listeners would probably agree that there is a wide and flexible field of possibility available in bringing a piece of music home creatively and with its dignity still intact, they would also be quick to add that there are distinct limits—parameters, if you will—beyond which the native sense and spirit of a musical creation undergoes rapid self-destruction and loses its core identity.

True, it may, even successfully, become a new and altogether different entity, a “horse of a different color,” so to speak, and have an unsuspected impact upon its listeners in its new incarnation, however many have kept the faith and remained in their seats. But we are no longer speaking of the piece tradition and the culture-at-large have bequeathed us.

For example, would even a note-perfect rendition of Brahms’ lullaby reeled off, say, at a metronome marking of 188 to the quarter be anywhere near the composer’s emotional intention? Or a lugubriously slow “Happy Birthday to You”? How about the bassoon solo opening The Rite of Spring at double-speed? Or the once-scintillating prelude to Le Tombeau de Couperin at a leisurely lento? Or perhaps Barber’s Adagio for Strings in a hurry?

Unless one is a musical Martian, or has somehow completely lost it artistically, there will be clear and no-nonsense outcries to each of these insolent suggestions. And why? For the same reason we might snatch a child away from the path of a speeding car, or prevent a vandal from spray-painting a Vermeer: to preserve the life and integrity of a living being, a thing of beauty, a joy—one hopes—forever.

But creative and radical experiments are seldom satisfied by fingers pointing to the past, or to such mantras as “tradition,” “practice,” and “scholarship.” They want fireworks, lightning bolts. And, who knows, maybe they can just manage to find some undiscovered angle, a certain spin that might bring the whole thing off brilliantly. But if disfiguring departures from the artistic essence of a work are its death knell, how can any of us presume to know how far—and in what direction—our ingenuity can be permitted to go? Must all scripted music be declared off-limits and untouchable? Or only those pieces which are allowed by composer-consent?

And what of very differing performances and alternate versions of the same work composers themselves have made? And all the wonderful jazz takes on classic ballads and even some classical pieces, none of which are note-perfect, because no self-respecting jazz-person would ever dream of being so? Mustn’t there be some way around the logjam here?

After having pre-meditated, meditated and post-meditated on this dicey issue both from the point of view of a composer (perhaps my most abiding role), as well as that of performer and of pure listener and lover, I’ve come to some curious and unexpected conclusions that may spark some further possibilities in similarly eccentric minds.

When we speak of the “artistic essence”—”the native spirit” of a work—we’re not always referring to its technical topography. Surprisingly, perhaps, or at least counter-intuitively, it appears that the musical soul of a piece, a popular song, for example, can not only survive, but even thrive, when extracted from its specific notational grid, provided certain other less tangible dynamics are observed and respected.

Or take many of Ravel’s most beloved orchestral works—not a few of which entered life as works for solo piano. While far from their original haunts, few even musically literate listeners ever complain that their transliterations into orchestral format belittle or betray their radiance; in fact, opinion often runs in quite the opposite direction. Ma Mere L’Oye, Rhapsodie Espagnol, and Le Tombeau de Couperin are most often remembered and regarded as exclusively orchestral experiences, the predating keyboard versions considered almost as afterthoughts.

Why might this be the case? Why, as Ned Rorem asked, do so few complain about Ravel’s art, in any form?

The answer is not very difficult to find: Ravel seldom if ever set his hand to something without endowing a great enhancement upon it; his output is a precious, finely distilled archive of masterworks, almost all of which have remained consistently in the repertory since their inception, works over which their creator labored with mind-boggling exactitude. He made every note, every moment, count and also had the uncanny ability of zeroing in upon and magnifying the quintessential character of whatever music by others happened to inspire his creative attention at the moment. Only through such self-abnegating, wizardly co-identification with his source-piece could such an original genius have, with confidence, shared his—to some, audacious—intention to someday re-orchestrate so revered a masterpiece as Debussy’s La Mer; the man was actually convinced that he could relieve his colleague’s version of some needless awkwardnesses and miscalls, and to illuminate its aesthetic intent even more fully than its creator had.

“Arrogant!” some might understandably decry. Perhaps, but only someone fully conversant with the genie-like brilliance of the soul that lived inside the façade of the inscrutable Maurice Ravel—through deep study of his work and his remarkable musical prescience—would be in a position to appreciate the immense possibilities it harbored.

Unlike Schoenberg, Stravinsky and similar others who could not seem to repress their innate musical proclivities when making arrangements of the music of others, Ravel achieved the virtually impossible—and managed somehow not to “Ravelize” the music which fell into his hands, rare as those instances may have been. He came to that task with the self-denial of a scholastic monk, and the inspiration of a true amateur—that is to say, “a lover of.”

His Pictures at an Exhibition is a case in point, a re-creation which has long since become the accepted version of Mussorgsky’s masterpiece. And, once having heard the Ravel, it is not so easy to remain content with the earnest strivings of the original version piano solo, which is, to be sure, deeply original, unique in flavor, arresting and fascinating in its exploitation of the keyboard, but both in its climaxes and in its subtleties simply asking more of the poor piano than it is able to deliver, even under virtuosic hands. Indeed, it feels to be something of a Sleeping Beauty awaiting resurrection by some future Musical Prince Charming, or an Ugly Duckling not yet become a swan.

Nor is this merely a matter of “bigger is better.” Nothing reveals the inherent impoverishment of a mediocre piece of musical more than an unwarranted inundation into orchestral format – such as, perhaps, various Liszt Hungarian rhapsodies; and nothing violates the virginity of pieces already perfect-fits for their genre such as the Satie Gymnopedies or the Chopin preludes than abuse-by-orchestra.

The point here is not to explore the pros and cons of original versus transliterated or reworked, but to demonstrate that when revisiting a work results in an enhancement and a deepening of its essential spirit, there is no outcry and no complaint; we sense, almost instinctively, that both the composer and his musical child are being cared for and respected. Those occasions which cause head-on artistic collisions, fireworks, and lawsuits are the ones in which the mutation, the upstart, has been offered as a viable replacement for the original. This is when the fur flies. And this is why few gripe about far-out jazzifications of classical works; they’re so far afield from the original that the issue of challenging the authorized version is virtually out of the question.

Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain which features a Gil Evans arrangement of Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez

Joaquin Rodrigo was more than happy to see the spontaneous combustion of the exquisite slow movement of his Concierto de Aranjuez for guitar and orchestra into every imaginable form—a popular song and a Gil Evans arrangement for Miles Davis classic Sketches of Spain—without so much as a murmur of protest because he knew that the original stood untouched and untouchable, at the heart of the repertory, as the archetype from which all its spinoffs emerged, and to which they all paid homage. But in the case of the Gould-Bernstein-Brahms concerto, it was a situation of pawning off the performance as Brahms’s very own love-child—indeed a possible impostor usurping the rightful throne and a slap in the face to a century of scholarship and performance wisdom.

When countless jazz players intone their own takes, spins, and bluesifcations—and Boston Pops arrangers their high-browsinizations—of Gershwin’s lullaby, “Summertime”—the peerless soprano solo leading us into the musical drama of Porgy and Bess—we feel no sense of moral outrage because none of them ever dreamt of purporting to replace or improve upon Gershwin’s original aria.

Indeed, long familiarity with Porgy has indelibly imprinted its uniquely lovely and artful chord-voicings into the spirit, converging lines which are virtually never reproduced by any of its improvisers or arrangers, and which, to my ears, contain the secret of the original’s magical potency to move us, beyond any virtuosic elaboration spun off by hot fingers.

Again, the original stands safely out of harm’s way.

But, as a composer of both many concert works and many theater and neo-folk songs, I have no problem with any number of barely-skilled amateurs playing their self-styled versions of my neo-folk songs, even with a substantial percentage of its critical (and, it must be said, ingenious!) harmonic infrastructure lacking, as long as the tune and the lyrics ring true of Marcello; but I find far less room for such latitude in renditions of my musical theater works, which fall—when push comes to shove—not too far short of art song in their delineation of line and voicing; and alas, no wiggle-room whatever in my musical soul for the slightest transgressions of note-choice, tempo, and phrasing for my solo, chamber, orchestral, and other concert works.

The reason? Simple: the “folk” or “pop” song venue is largely the creature of unspoken mutual agreement, a common practice or cipher—as it were—whereby it is tacitly understood that, provided critical harmonic flavors are respected, these musical ice cream cones may be served up in any number of ingenious ways—from No Frills to Extra Fancy—without treading on any sacred toes of content and musical meaning.

But in more highly choreographed, please-don’t-touch creations, we’re trying to keep the contours (after all, “morphe” means “shape” in Ancient Greek) and, perhaps above all, content of who and what it is we truly feel ourselves to be artistically and spiritually. Do we really want anyone to mess with that?

Probably not. But then again, if done, well, brilliantly, the answer could very well be an unreserved “Yes!”

A true story comes to mind about a well-known American composer who happened to encounter the elderly Stravinsky at a social gathering in the former’s home; in the course of their composerly shop-talk, the old master made it clear that he had the uncanny skill of being able to identify the stylistic hallmarks that were responsible for producing the identifiable “voice” or “sound” of a given composer, and to amplify and enhance that unique voice. Expressing astonishment, the composer asked Stravinsky if he could do that with anyone’s work, to which the latter replied in the affirmative, inviting him to bring the Grand Old Man a piece of his choosing for instant Stravinskyization. This was done. Stravinsky studied the score for a few minutes, making occasional marginal notations on the manuscript, and then played the result for his host. The man was amazed and dumbstruck. “I had to admit,” he said, “that the piece sounded more like me than I did!”

Far from being mere grandstanding—and a good anecdote for after-dinner raconteurs—this vignette demonstrates a little-perceived artistic truth that many of us might well choose to avoid: we all—almost to a man or woman—like to believe that we possess both the self-knowledge and the artistic prowess to express who we really are and how we truly feel in our chosen medium, whether that be music or any other venue; but in fact we may have far to go in both departments, like each of the seven blind men thinking the part of the elephant he touched was the definitive one.

If and when an unexpectedly probing and profound executant comes along who, somehow, has spontaneous access to the inner sanctum of musical resources and skills, who can see, sense, and feel the intent beyond the crude roadmaps of printed score, dry scholarship and accepted performance practice, perhaps miracles can happen, miracles by which an only partially manifested artistic intent can at last be fulfilled, perhaps even re-invented. Certainly the thrill that this composer experienced as a result of Stravinsky’s seemingly magical intercession was no disappointment, no merely intriguing dalliance with his music, but an essential and qualitative enhancement, a giving of himself to himself, in short, a gift of spirit, albeit a humbling one. Unlikely as it may seem, there may actually be someone out there who can express the song of our inner Muse—gasp—better than we can.

The past has bequeathed us many stories testifying to the transmogrifying interpretive genius of such as Mozart, Beethoven, and Liszt (pianists seem the rule here, exercising, as they do, the capacity to control linear and horizontal dimensions of music simultaneously. And perhaps guitarists run a close second.) Such performers have walked the earth, and do even now exist. Among those who come to mind of my immediate acquaintance are two magnificent Polish-born classical-to-jazz pianists, Leszek Mozdzer, a still-young prodigy of Lisztian prowess, and Adam Makovicz, who could easily give the legendary Art Tatum a run for his money; then there is the “trans-classical,” beyond-category phenomenon of Gabriela Montero, who can morph any piece on-the-spot into and out of any period style with a skill consummate enough to convince you that you were only dreaming.

Gabriela Montero

To be honest, possibly even heretical, sometimes these and other gifted performers turn in takes on hallowed originals that result in an unimagined expansion of their inherent glories. While die-hards may insist that this is simply not possible without violating sense and symmetry of that original, again, there is no conflict if one does not enter into the dichotomy of an either/or scenario; i.e., one proclaimed authoritative and the other sentenced to annihilation.

It is as if, in the infinitude of compositional possibilities which so daunted even as great a composer as Stravinsky when he faced the pregnant void of unmarked score paper, there are many possible—and equally successful—ways in which the same piece, containing the same core thematic, harmonic, or motivic material, could be realized. Ravel said as much to Roland-Manuel when the latter sought to penetrate the secret of achieving the perfect orchestrational solution to a given passage, telling him that there were many successful ways in which the passage in question might have been orchestrated effectively. This, in the face of Ravel’s seemingly unimprovable musical choices, stunned and bewildered the young Roland-Manuel.

It is almost unthinkable for most of us who have bonded with various works and performances through the decades to, in hindsight, hypothesize how even more prescient and penetrating evocations versions of such old and dear friends could ever exist, yet it does not lie beyond the range of possibility. A hearing of selections from Leszek Mozdzer or Gabriela Montero’s classically-based evocations, reveals a deepening exploration of Bachian, Chopinesque, and other musical dialectics in moving creations which completely respect their namesakes, yet which break exciting new ground.

Well, it’s clear we can’t turn back; as long as musicians draw breath there will be experimenters upon experimenters, versions upon versions of just about every musical genre; which leaves only one viable solution: we must allow for the simultaneous existence of multiple creative dimensions, coexistent musical universes, none of which replaces or interferes in the least with its other-dimensional counterparts, so that contemporary creativity can flourish without restriction, and without the illusion that it can ever, in the least, threaten the dearly-forged infrastructure of centuries of Western musical invention and loving labor.

So then, here’s to a profusion of glories, a grand-tiered hierarchy of parallel kingdoms in which all art forms may freely consort, for ever and ever, without remorse or endangerment:

a) The Kingdom of Engraved-in-Stone, Never-in-the-Slightest-to-be-Altered-Upon-Pain-of-Excommunication inspirations of Palestrina, Bach, Ravel and the other apostles of Eternal and Unchanging Beauty. (We worship them and will happily endure Eternity with them Just the Way They Are, thank you.)

b) The Kingdom of Passionate Metamorphosis, in which beloved works are evoked, brought to life, and engage in artistic intercourse, producing often attractive, sometimes stunning love-children unmistakably resonant of both parents—yet clearly in no danger of being mistaken for purebreds. (We too worship them, but, well, we just get a kick out being miraculously surprised and delighted now and again, even against our own best expectations, beyond our pet attachments and at the risk of a dud now and again.)

and

c) The Kingdom of Incredibly, Infinitely Free Creation, where no exploration, no experiment is off-limits, and where, if anything you hear sounds remotely like something illegally procured from the other two kingdoms, you may count it, like the whole of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a pure fantasy, nothing more than a musical free-fall in which—who knows?—we may find ourselves in an as-yet unimaginable realm of beauty that steals the souls from out our very breasts. And if, in the journey, your beloved old friends seem to have been mishandled, take heart—no true harm has been done; they still exist, stainless and perfect, in Musical Eternity. (We love it all, good, bad, and all that lies betwixt. And if, perchance, eternal musical damnation is the price we free-thinkers and full-feelers must pay for such illicit experiment, then we say “Amen!” Life is short, and the magic is more than worth the risk!)

A toast then, to our shared musical credo: “Let us—all of us—to the marriage of True Muses, not admit impediment.”

***

Joseph Marcello directs Music for Life Studios atop three pine-clad acres in Northfield, Massachusetts. Recipient of the Delius Award for Composers, he is a published author and, in addition to chamber, choral and orchestral works, has written both libretti and scores for three operas and some dozen stage musicals, with an opera about Terezin, Hitler’s “Designer Concentration Camp”, in progress.

Elie Siegmeister in 1943

WQXR commentator Robert Sherman called him “one of our giants.” Nine years younger than Aaron Copland, nine years older than Leonard Bernstein, Elie Siegmeister, who died of a brain tumor on March 10, 1991, would have been 100 years old on January 15, 2009. Proclamations declaring Elie Siegmeister Day have sprouted from the Brooklyn Borough President to the Village of Massapequa Park, the Towns of Huntington and Oyster Bay, and the Counties of Nassau and Suffolk. Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy personally paid tribute to Siegmeister at the Suffolk County premiere of his most important choral work, the cantata I Have A Dream, on January 19, 2009.

On March 29, 2009, there will be at least four concerts featuring his music in different parts of the country: Siegmeister’s Piano Sonata No. 2 will be played by his son-in-law Alan Mandel (the work’s dedicatee) at the National Gallery in Washington DC; baritone Marcus DeLoach will sing “The Ballad of Adam and Eve” at Colgate University in central New York state; the choral work Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight will be performed by the Providence Singers in Bristol, RI; and an entire afternoon of Siegmeister will take place at Long Island’s Hofstra University, featuring songs, arias, and duets, plus a piano solo and the world premiere of an arrangement for piano and synthesizers of his orchestral children’s piece, Dick Whittington and His Cat. Siegmeister taught at Hofstra from 1949 until his retirement in 1984. Founder and conductor of the Hofstra Symphony, he became the university’s first composer-in-residence. Efforts are underway to have NY Governor David Paterson (a Hofstra alumnus) and President Barack Obama sign proclamations recognizing Siegmeister’s achievements that day.

The author with Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy who issued a proclamation honoring the musical legacy of Elie Siegmeister Photo by Jean Uhl

Like his colleague Marc Blitzstein (1905-1964), who studied with both Nadia Boulanger and Arnold Schoenberg, Siegmeister had a bit of both German and French, as well as Russian and Jewish influences in him. His great-grandfather had been taken in by a German doctor (whose name he took), to avoid the draft, in which Jews had to serve the czar for 20 years. His father and mother had each emigrated from Pahust, Byelorussia, but met in New York; they gave their son the French name for the prophet Elijah.

After graduating from Columbia University at 18, Elie was encouraged by his composition teacher Wallingford Riegger and a letter from his piano teacher Emil Friedberger to go to Europe to study with Schoenberg. Stopping in Paris, he was persuaded by Israel Citkowitz and Roy Harris to study instead with Nadia Boulanger, with whom he remained for three years. A friend and colleague of Darius Milhaud, he would however largely reject the French influence as “too raffiné,” and come under the spell, at least for a while, of the militant Hanns Eisler, whose lectures he translated from the German at The New School, where he also taught (in addition to Brooklyn College). Charles Seeger (Pete’s father and Ruth Crawford’s husband), who knew him through the Composers Collective of New York, had recommended him for a teaching position at Brooklyn, which he kept, until an unexcused absence to march in a May Day parade caused his contract not to be renewed. May Day was the title of his first successful orchestral work, introduced by Henry Cowell and premiered at The New School on October 16, 1933. In 1939, though, he changed it to American Holiday, under which title it has had numerous performances: under Fritz Mahler in Connecticut; Albert Tepper at Hofstra (11/10/1972); the late Lukas Foss in Brooklyn (2/15/1976); and, most recently, Leon Botstein with the American Symphony Orchestra (8/20/2005).

Born in Harlem, for which he always felt an affinity, Elie set more of Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes’ texts than any other composer (including his only unproduced operetta, The Wizard of Altoona). Moving with his family to Brooklyn in 1914, there he met the man who would become the borough’s first poet laureate, Norman Rosten, and set more of his poetry than any other composer (including the delightful cycles For My Daughters and City Songs, and his only unproduced opera, The Marquesa of O). In all he wrote 159 songs, not counting individual numbers for 20 stage works, 41 orchestral works, 14 for band, 38 choral, 34 chamber pieces, 40 for piano, half a dozen for radio and TV, one feature film score (They Came to Cordura) and hundreds of choral arrangements for the American Ballad Singers, which he founded and conducted on tours around the country. His books included A Treasury of American Song (with Olin Downes), which became the basis for the Broadway musical Sing Out, Sweet Land! starring Alfred Drake and Burl Ives; The Music-Lover’s Handbook (a Book-of-the-Month Club selection); the updated New Music-Lover’s Handbook; The Joan Baez Songbook; and Harmony and Melody, a textbook in two volumes and two workbooks.

Leonard J. Lehrman (standing) and Elie Siegmeister in 1978 Photo by N. S. Lehrman

In 1954 he moved to Great Neck, Long Island, which is where I first met him and where I began studying composition privately with him in 1960. (Among his other students over the years were Pulitzer Prize Winner Stephen Albert, Michael Beckerman, Tom Cipullo, Herbert Deutsch, Daniel Dorff, Barry Drogin, Naomi Drucker, Gerald Humel, Stephen Lawrence, Roger Nierenberg, Dana Paul Perna, Joseph Pehrson, Michael Shapiro, and Richard White.) Great Neck honored him this year with not one but two concerts: January 4 at Great Neck House; January 11 at Great Neck Library. The Great Neck Choral Society, which commissioned his “In Our Time” in 1965, premiered the choral version of his “Nancy Hanks” December 7, 2008. And it was in Great Neck that he wrote what he told me he felt were his most important works: the Third Symphony (of nine, all of which have been performed except for the Seventh) and The Plough and the Stars, a three-act opera based on the eponymous play by Sean O’Casey with libretto by Edward Mabley.

The opera had a tumultuous history. Beginning as a singspiel titled Dublin Song, it previewed at Washington University in St. Louis. A visiting Broadway producer, hearing a rollicking bar-room ballad by the comic lead, asked the composer: “Where’s the melody?” leading to the conclusion that the work was not, alas, for Broadway. Peter Paul Fuchs conducted the premiere at Louisiana State University in March 1969. A year later, the Grand Théâtre Municipal in Bordeaux, France, presented the work in a very successful French translation by David Noakes. Turned down repeatedly by New York City Opera, the New York premiere finally came in 1979, conducted by the composer, presented by the New York Lyric Opera at Symphony Space in Manhattan.

<P=SMALL>Siegmeister’s Elusive Discography<P=SMALL>Acquiring recordings of Elie Siegmeister’s oeuvre is a frustrating endeavor since many of his most significant works have never been commercially available and many important recordings made of his music during the heyday of the LP have yet to be re-issued in a digital format. The Elie Siegmeister Society recently released a Centennial CD (Original Cast Records OC 6235) featuring 28 songs, arias and duets never before recorded on CD (including 3 Lehrman completions) sung by Helene Williams, Lars Woodul, and The Metropolitan Philharmonic Chorus. Louisiana-based pianist Kenneth Boulton has recorded two discs for Naxos devoted to Siegmeister’s estimable oeuvre for solo piano, which includes five sonatas (Naxos American Classics 8.559020 and 8.559021). Those five sonatas have also been recorded for Premier Records by Siegmeister’s son-in-law Alan Mandel for Premier Records, but the disc is currently out-of-print. An all-Siegmeister “American Masters” CD, originally issued on CRI and featuring 23 songs (including Esther Hinds singing “The Face of War” accompanied on the piano by Alan Mandel), is now available burned on-demand by New World Records. <P=SMALL>Tracking down Siegmeister’s larger scale works is even more problematic. The final scenes from Siegmeister’s opera Lady of the Lake, featuring the Seattle Symphony conducted by Gerald Schwarz, were recorded as part of the Milken Archive of American Jewish Music (issued on Naxos), and excerpts from five of his other stage works are available on Capstone and Original Cast Records. But an excellent recording of the Third Symphony featuring the composer conducting the Oslo Philharmonic, which was originally issued on LP by CRI and briefly re-issued on CD by Citadel, is currently unavailable. There have also been recordings of Siegmeister conducting both his Flute Concerto and Clarinet Concerto (issued on LP by Turnabout/Vox) but they have yet to be re-issued. However, the Czech National Symphony Orchestra has made recordings of both the Flute Concerto (conducted by Paul Freeman with soloist Mary Stolper for Cedille) and the Clarinet Concerto (under the direction of JoAnn Falletta with soloist Robert Alemany for Albany). And Vox has re-issued a recording of the Western Suite with the Utah Symphony conducted by Maurice Abravanel. Leonard J. Lehrman and Kenneth Boulton have compiled a complete discography of available Siegmeister recordings, but one can only hope that the centennial might encourage a spate of new recordings.—FJO <P=SMALL>LISTEN to Elie Siegmeister’s 1941 composition “Anne Rutledge” performed by Helene Williams and the Metropolitan Philharmonic Chorus conducted from the piano by Leonard J. Lehrman (from The Elie Siegmeister Centennial CD, Original Cast Records 6235).

Another Mabley-Siegmeister opera successfully presented in Europe was a one-act commissioned by the American Wind Symphony in Pittsburgh, The Mermaid in Lock No. 7, premiered by them July 20, 1959, also conducted by the composer, starring Chester Ludgin and Leila Martin. The Vlaamse Opera in Antwerp, Belgium presented it in 1972, in Flemish. There were also productions at Hofstra and in Harlem. The Opera/Musical Theatre Special Interest Group of The Naturist Society presented the French premiere July 13, 1989 at a Naturist resort in southern France. When Elie saw the photographs (some of which are posted on the internet), in which the mermaid wore seashell earrings, and nothing else, he exclaimed, “Lenushka, this is the definitive production! This is the way it should always be done!”

Another important Siegmeister stage work is the one-act folk opera Darlin’ Corie, premiered at Hofstra in 1954 (broadcast on Canadian television in 1956), with a libretto by Lewis Allan, a.k.a. Abel Meeropol, the man who wrote the song “Strange Fruit” and the lyrics to Earl Robinson’s “The House I Live In.” Siegmeister and Meeropol collaborated on several delightful songs, including “The Wind,” “Autumn in My Heart,” “The Lollypop,” “The Snowman,” “The Moon,” and “John Reed,” the last of these probably for a concert of the American Soviet Music Society in 1945, on whose board Elie sat, along with Copland, Bernstein, Blitzstein, Serge Koussevitsky, and Morton Gould. (Gould would later get him to join the board of ASCAP.) It was during this period that Dmitri Mitropoulos premiered and recorded Siegmeister’s Ozark Set, Arturo Toscanini premiered his Western Suite, and Leopold Stokowski commissioned and premiered his First Symphony. Siegmeister told Leonard Bernstein he was busy writing the work for Stokowski when Bernstein inquired as to what he was doing, clearly interested in premiering a Siegmeister work with his City Symphony. Then came the Cold War. With one exception, Bernstein never approached Siegmeister again—a loss for both of them, and American music.

That exception was the 1933 setting of Michael Gold’s poem, “The Strange Funeral in Braddock,” premiered and recorded in 1935 by baritone Mordecai Bauman (re-released in 1996 on Bear Family Records), choreographed by Anna Sokolow, and taken up by Henry Cowell for New Music Editions, becoming Siegmeister’s first published composition. A powerful narrative about a steelworker killed in an industrial accident, inspiring calls for proletarian—or perhaps anarchist—revenge, it was revived successfully in the 1960s. Around 1950, when Bernstein expressed interest in doing it, Siegmeister turned away in fright: Congressional committees were knocking at his door, and the only way he could save his livelihood, and his integrity, was to deny knowing anything about anyone. Aaron Copland’s 1953 testimony before Senator Joseph McCarthy makes harrowing, moving reading. So does Siegmeister’s account of his testimony, as transcribed in an oral history, taped June 25, 1975, available at Columbia University (p. 169):

“‘I don’t know any people who are members of the Communist Party.’

They said, ‘Well, how about Mark [sic] Blitzstein? Wasn’t he a member?’

I said, ‘He may have been, but he never told me and I never asked him.’

‘There’s someone who claims that you were a member of the Communist Party and is prepared to testify against you.’

‘Well, let him testify. If he’s testifying [to that], he’s perjuring himself.'”

When asked about Olin Downes, Serge Koussevitzky, and Leonard Bernstein, he said:

“‘I don’t know. Maybe they are. Maybe they aren’t. I don’t know what their religions are, whom they sleep with, or what their parties are. I’ve never asked them.”

The last time Siegmeister saw Bernstein, in the 1980s, they teased each other:

LB: “Elie Siegmeister! Weren’t you just a bit pink in the old days?”

ES: “No more than you, Lenny.”

LB: “Oh, I was red!”

But Bernstein never did anything for two of Elie’s most important socially-conscious works— perhaps his greatest works—of the 1960s: the 25-minute cantata on a text by Mabley after Dr. King’s speech, I Have A Dream; and the song cycle on Langston Hughes poems, The Face of War. I would not hesitate to say that these are two of the most powerful works of the 20th century, though both were virtually ignored by the press at their premieres.

I Have A Dream was originally commissioned by Cantor Solomon Mendelson at Temple Beth Sholom in Long Beach, Long Island. In the text adaptation by Edward Mabley, authorized by Dr. King, the scope of the speech is deliberately extended, so that the famous phrase “judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” becomes “not by their color nor by their creed—by their character only shall they be judged.” The concept of the “exile in his own land” relates the Hebrew exile by the waters of Babylon to the desolation of Langston Hughes’ “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” A blues fugue combines the lines “No man is an island” and “We cannot walk alone.” The music too reflects the influence of folk, jazz, and synagogue chant. In a way, I Have A Dream was Elie’s bar mitzvah. He had never before, at least consciously, used synagogue chant in his work, but this time he studied it diligently, with Cantor Mendelson. And phrases from both Torah and Haftorah blessings found their way into the solo part of the cantata, especially in the quotations from Isaiah and the assertions of universal brotherhood and the prophetic imperative to struggle for justice. (Later works drawing on his Jewish heritage included the operas after Malamud, Angel Levine and Lady of the Lake, premiered by Jewish Opera at the Y, and the String Quartet No. 3 “On Hebrew Themes”, which the American Society for Jewish Music will revive June 7, 2009.)

For the world premiere with soloist William Warfield in Long Beach, April 16, 1967, a large group of celebrities, including Senators Jacob Javits and Robert Kennedy, and Dr. King, were scheduled to attend. But 12 days earlier, on April 4, exactly a year before he would be assassinated, Dr. King gave his famous speech at Riverside Church, denouncing the Vietnam War. Immediately the American Legion threatened to picket the temple if he showed up, which he didn’t (though the John Birch Society, thinking he might, picketed anyway). Neither did most of the celebrities. Jackie Robinson, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, and Percy Sutton did. But the press stayed away. The work only really came into its own on January 15, 1989, when, in a joint celebration of Dr. King’s 60th birthday and Siegmeister’s 80th (the same day), the Metropolitan Philharmonic Chorus performed the Manhattan premiere with William Warfield at the Harlem School of the Arts, a performance that was broadcast repeatedly over WQXR and WBAI over the next several years. (The MPC revived it again in 2009 for performances in Great Neck, Huntington and Manhattan on January 4, 11, and 25.)

The Face of War, a searing 10-minute indictment of the horrors of war based on five of Langston Hughes’ last poems, was also premiered by William Warfield, on May 24, 1968 at Carnegie Hall, with an orchestra conducted by Henry Lewis, on a Composers and Musicians for Peace concert produced by Elie, in memory of Dr. King, in conjunction with the Fellowship of Reconciliation, which for a number of years sold a recording of that piece. There was virtually no press coverage, and no documented performances with orchestra have occurred since then, though there have been at least a dozen with piano.

Elie Siegmeister in 1982 Photo by Mimi Koren

In 1969 Elie founded and served through 1984 as chairman of the Council of Creative Artists, Libraries and Museums; from 1965-68 as vice president of the Composers and Lyricists Guild; in 1977 he founded the Kennedy Center’s National Black Music Competition and Colloquium; in 1987 he became chair of ASCAP’s Symphony and Concert Committee. Lorin Maazel premiered Siegmeister’s Symphony No. 4 (with the Cleveland Orchestra, in 1973); Sergiu Commisiona premiered three Siegmeister works with the Baltimore Symphony (1976-79); and the State of Louisiana made him an honorary colonel, with triple bicentennial commissions for a ballet, an opera, and an orchestra work, in 1976.

In the last decade of his life, Elie Siegmeister would journey to Albany, Oakland, and Berlin (on the way back from a residency in Bellagio) to hear his music. But mostly he stayed home, composing. His sole psalm setting, “Sing Unto the Lord A New Song” for chorus and organ (his only work for organ), proved too difficult for the Birmingham, Alabama synagogue that had commissioned it; it was premiered April 5, 1987 at Temple Beth Sholom in Roslyn, NY. His final collaborator, the poet Kim Rich, first heard her words sung to his music at the posthumous world premiere of their “Outside My Window,” on November 12, 2006 at PeaceSmiths in Amityville, NY. Siegmeister asked me to consider orchestrating his “For My Daughters” (which I’d be delighted to do, if a commission and performance possibilities can be found), and told me: “When I die, I know that if I leave anything unfinished, you’ll finish it…. I don’t want to call you my disciple, as I don’t believe in doctrine. But you’re my continuator.”

###

Leonard Lehrman

Leonard J. Lehrman is the Editor of The Marc Blitzstein Songbook, volumes 1-3 (Boosey & Hawkes, 1999-2003), author of Marc Blitzstein: A Bio-Bibliography (Praeger, 2005), and co-author with Kenneth O. Boulton, of the in-progress Elie Siegmeister: A Bio-Bibliography (Scarecrow, 2009). He is also the composer of 190 works, including 10 operas, which have been performed throughout North America, Europe, Russia, Israel, and Australia; Critic-at-Large of The New Music Connoisseur; Founder/Director of The Metropolitan Philharmonic Chorus; and Music Director/Composer-in-Residence at United Methodist Church Huntington/Cold Spring Harbor. In 1999, he and Helene Williams co-founded The Elie Siegmeister Society.

Frederica von Stade and Keith Phares in Jake Heggie’s Three Decembers; SFO Production Photo by Kristen Loken

The times have never been as dark and uncertain for composers of new operatic works. That was made clear when Metropolitan Opera General Director Peter Gelb recently announced he was replacing the premiere of John Corigliano’s The Ghosts of Versailles with a less costly revival of La Traviata next season. Couple that with the fact that opera companies with shaky finances are closing doors, while others on solid footing are shrinking seasons, and you have a perfect storm of gloom for new works. But every crisis presents its opportunities. And the times suggest that the less costly but not often performed smaller-forces opera, also known as chamber opera, may be entering its heyday.

“I think these kind of operas are attractive and cost-friendly,” said David Gockley, general director of the San Francisco Opera. Gockley’s fondness for them was evident in his programming the West Coast premiere of Jake Heggie’s new two-act opera, Three Decembers, in December. Based on the play Some Christmas Letters by Terence McNally, Three Decembers is intimate opera of truly modest proportions. A co-commission and co-production between San Francisco Opera, Cal Performances, and the Houston Grand Opera, the work demands that 11 musicians grace the rear of the stage while its cast of three singers, which in the premiere production included the venerable Frederica von Stade, do the singing. The opera was performed at the University of California at Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall. Sets were limited to things like bridge railings, podiums, and a dresser and chairs. The cost for the production was roughly $300,000 as compared to the $5 million price tag for a large mainstage production, Gockley said.

This isn’t the first time Gockley has programmed the premiere of a smaller-forces opera. He programmed Mark Adamo’s Lysistrata in 2005, and other small format operas, like Jackie O by Michael Daugherty, during his tenure as general director of the Houston Grand Opera.

One of the limiting factors to the presentation of new and smaller-scaled works is the lack of an appropriate venue, Gockley claims. “One of our great needs is a smaller proscenium house available for an extended run.” In Houston, he had the luxury of mounting such productions in the 1,000 seat Cullen Theater, which is the smaller sister to the larger 2,500-seat Brown Theater. Most opera companies do not have that option, however. In San Francisco, Gockley has yet to find the appropriate space for these works. Performing them at the 3,200 seat War Memorial Opera House is clearly not an option.

“Finding venues in a city is hard because if you’re going to produce in a traditional way, with an orchestra in a pit and scenery onstage, and fly space, those kinds of venues are not easy to find,” said Marc Scorca, president of the national service organization Opera America. But the issue of space is moot without good product, Scorca believes. “A composer has to write what he or she is compelled to write. Let’s not confuse less expensive with less quality. People are seeking quality right now.” He pointed to Benjamin Britten as a composer who excelled at large and smaller-format works. “I think he was smart enough to know that size was an issue in opera, and that works that required smaller forces might get performed more often. So it is wise for someone composing today to avoid composing for double orchestra and double chorus.”

One of the companies that has carved out a successful niche at programming the smaller-forces opera is New York City’s Gotham Chamber Opera. The company has commissioned an opera by Nico Muhly that is scheduled for its 2011 season when it celebrates its 10th anniversary, said Neal Goren, the company’s founding artistic director and conductor. That work will have a Britten-sized orchestra of 14 musicians and will be performed at the Abrams Art Center’s Harry de Jur theater in Lower Manhattan. The space, which opened in 2001, is tailor made for chamber operas as it accomodates 350 patrons, and Gotham has presented six U.S. premieres of 18th- and 20th-century operas there to date. While the company is not averse to the occasional commission, its major focus is performing rarely seen works like Mozart’s 1771 Il Sogno di Scipione or the Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu’s 1928 Dada-infused opera Les Larmes du couteau (The Tears of the Knife).

“Commissions are hideously expensive,” said Goren. Unlike a regular production, the company must absorb the costs of workshopping the opera and copying. “A commission will cost three times what a normal production costs. So we will not consider another commission until this one is over.” Goren also said that a company’s likelihood to do new and smaller works depends on the kinds of contracts it has with its musicians. “If you have a company that is required to pay a full orchestra of 70 players for a certain number of performances a year, you don’t win anything by subbing it with a 25-player production, because you have to pay your other performers as well.” Ultimately, companies that have contracts paying musicians per performance will be the ones that have the freedom to explore the less expensive nature of chamber opera.

According to Goren, “The most savvy of composers is someone like a Mark Adamo, whose chamber opera Little Women is of such manageable size that it can be done in conservatories.” That production has been mounted many times, as it fits the needs of conservatories which are always in need of repertoire for their students, especially works that call for female roles.

But that is not to say that opera on a grand scale is a closed door for composers, regardless of the expenses involved. Jake Heggie made his mark with his first opera Dead Man Walking which is extremely elaborate. In fact, Heggie admits: “When I wrote Dead Man Walking, I thought the piece would never be done because it is so huge, requires such large forces, and is a new work. But it has already been done 120 times.”

Heggie believes that chamber opera has never been an easy sell. “Benjamin Britten wrote some of the best operas ever and those are still tough sells, even though those works are now 50 years old, or older.” Nonetheless, Heggie remains cautiously optimistic about the art form. “The great thing about chamber opera is that it is a wonderfully different experience. It’s an art form I love because it’s so intimate and yet you’re dealing with this huge emotional scale.” And as a result of its intimacy, it has the potential to bring in new audiences. “I do find that younger audiences are more open to it. Everyone loves the spectacle you get with grand opera, but I think there is more of an openness for audiences in getting into opera with smaller forces.”

***

Edward Ortiz is the classical music and opera critic for the Sacramento Bee. Prior to joining the Bee, he worked as staff reporter for the Boston Globe and the Providence Journal, and is a contributor to the website San Francisco Classical Voice.

We live, purportedly, in the age of greatest compositional liberty. The tyranny of a common practice no longer constrains us: each of us may choose the most comfortable musical identity from the celebrated diversity of contemporary styles. While Neoromantic and New Complexity composers may berate one another for poor taste or lack of judgment and curse each other’s successes, neither would dare deny the other’s right to compose as he or she pleases. This is, after all, America, land of freedom and progress.

Is the freedom to pick a side, however, truly freedom, when it forces us to define ourselves through the criteria of others? Is the progress from a common practice to a diverse one truly progress, when it compels us to choose between a reactionary, audience-friendly idiom, an exclusionary avant-garde, or a sober modernism or ironic postmodernism that hovers between these two extremes? The diversity that suggests progress hides a deeper slavery to music history itself: to our compulsion to measure our accomplishments against those of the past, to prove that we are essentially better off, freer, than we were before. In the written and spoken discourse of music theory and composition, this idea appears most frequently as an ideology of tonal progress—that is, of progress towards, or away from, tonality. Ironically, our belief in a music history organized by tonal progress is our own common practice.

Tonal Histories

Tonal progress is a broad and slippery concept. There are as many accounts of tonal progress as there are historians of tonality, suggesting that such “progress” is an illusion to disguise the historian’s prejudices in neutral technicalities. The accounts themselves are varied enough to defend any particular musical bias, yet the historian invariably relies on one or more of the following three assumptions:

One: the assumption of expanding resources, particularly beloved by composers. Some swear by the infinite harmonic palette of just intonation; others by the transformations of serial technique; yet others by the carefree juxtaposition of styles. Whether through prime numbers, permutations, or collage, however, all agree that extended tonality frees today’s composers from the restrictions of the past.

Two: the assumption of structural consolidation—that is, of tonality developing from noise or gibberish into a formal language, whether syntax, algorithm, or algebra. This is the theorists’ preferred account, of course. Textbook authors use it to justify conservative pedagogy based on the “shared language” of common-practice harmony, and to imply that such a language, lost in the Babel of 20th-century styles, is necessary for aesthetic or spiritual progress. Others, seemingly more progressive, try to dress the tonal progress of old in new clothes by arguing that more recent composers, at least the good ones, also speak a unified tonal language, albeit one with a different grammar. The idea is the same: whether in support of old composers or new, the theorists use tonality to glorify “their” music as the accomplishment of an artificial speech more meaningful than speech itself—structure born of disorder.

Three: the assumption of audience accessibility, to give each account of tonal progress a moral. Technical considerations aside, tonality is something easy to like. Drawing professional analogies, a composer may work as a scientist in a musical research program that ignores the public, as the priest for a community needing musical guidance, or as an entertainer ready to satisfy the desires of the masses. Musical ethicists, depending on the argument, depict these options in the light of various types of progress: progress from the dark ages of obligatory pandering, soulless detachment, or selfish creativity. But whether it is the duty of modern composers to serve or their privilege to remain aloof, they must acknowledge an audience that will love the classic tonality and loathe its modern descendants.

Tonality as the blessing of compositional abundance; as the achievement of a perfect system of expression; as a pleasure that precedes knowledge—these three assumptions encapsulate some of our strongest feelings about the nature and power of music. Together, they support a broad musical discourse, and it is difficult to make an argument about music without relying on at least one of them for support. Their wide circulation creates the impression of essential truths: they are the ideas we cling to most tightly, in fear of the void that their absence would leave. Yet tonal progress remains, for all its power, based on assumptions that are flimsy and impermanent. We are not the privileged recipients of a gift from nature, but the victims of a recent hallucination.

The Origins of Tonal Discourse

Musicians have not always taken tonal progress for granted. They could not have: the archive, disciplines, and institutions that make it possible to organize, discuss, and propagate a tonal music history are barely two centuries old. The idea of tonal progress makes no sense without a canon of great works to support it, music criticism to write it, and conservatory to teach it; these did not exist before the 19th century. Once established, however, they generated a discourse—indeed, a vocabulary—that has remained essentially fixed since its inception. In 1844, the theorist François-Joseph Fétis used the terms “unitonic,” “transitonic,” “pluritonic,” and “omnitonic” to describe the expansion of harmonic resources through European music history. In the mid-19th century, German theorists described their contemporary music—Schumann, Berlioz, Wagner, Liszt—in terms of harmonic coherence: advocates argued that the new music shared the language of Bach and Mozart, while detractors dismissed it as meaningless noise. Finally, we can hear the murmurs of the disapproving audience in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s reviews of Beethoven’s work, which defended the composer’s genius from an incompetent public. Such continuity in the discourse of tonal progress suggests that the institutions of music education and criticism speak for us far more than we speak for them: they train us to believe in what they cannot prove. Our deepest feelings about music turn out to be little more than an imprisonment without walls.

Dismantling Tonal Discourse with the Body: Helmut Lachenmann and La Monte Young

Helmut Lachenmann

Perhaps in the future, once the institutions of the music school and review become marginal forces in our lives, we will move on to fresh (and, most likely, equally ridiculous) debates. By then, the history of tonality may seem as quaint and amusing as the music of the spheres seems to us now. But what can we do in the meantime? Of course, we could stop writing about music altogether, but music cannot—and will never—speak for itself. If tonal progress is, in fact, a myth maintained by a tremendous act of will, is it possible to acknowledge its power without becoming its casualty? This question lies at the heart of the polemical aesthetics of La Monte Young and Helmut Lachenmann, two composers whose radically different sonorities disguise a common interest in breaking the illusion of tonal progress in sound and word. Both of them dispel the illusion by reminding us of the bodies of performers and listeners; in our common practice, such bodies are incidental transmitters and receivers of tonal ideas, as easily forgotten as a conventional instrument.

It is no coincidence that when German composer Helmut Lachenmann describes composing as “building an instrument,” he shifts the locus of musical meaning from sound itself to its physical impulse. For Lachenmann, the expansion of tonal resources amounts to nothing more than a historically-conditioned mode of listening. As a clear manifestation of tradition, tonality is part of the musical “magic” which must be “broken in the name of a creative will.” This is not a matter of writing atonal music, which remains at the mercy of tonal categories and musical tradition. Rather, it is a matter of emphasizing the latent physicality of musical material, to subvert conventional acoustic interpretations. In an inversion of traditional practice, tonal content becomes gesture’s accidental side effect, the acoustic noise masking the unexplored possibility of bodily syntax. Lachenmann’s musical body language liberates the performer and audience through play, subverting the assumptions of tonal progress without contradicting them, and outlining a novel and generous approach to composition.

Lachenmann’s analysis of his second string quartet, Reigen seliger Geister (“Round of the Blessed Spirits”), emphasizes this play of gestures through its wealth of physical description. First, the composer summarizes an evolution of gestural motives: “In terms of sound technique, the work … emerges first through flautato gestures, while the mapped-out sound word gradually transforms itself into a diametrically opposed landscape of quite differently structured pizzicato fields.” He then defines the “basic” flautato meticulously, specifying not only bow speed, but also the left hand’s grip, the direction of bow movement, and the point of contact on the string. By adjusting these parameters, the flautato technique becomes “a sonic center—a central depot and hub for a characteristic wealth of variations of noise and sound. It mediates between absolute tonelessness on the one hand and full C-flat major consonance on the other.” Lachenmann is not interested in ignoring tonality; such deafness is impossible, or irresponsible. By using gesture as a unifying principle, however, he dismantles tonality by finding common ground in sounds with nothing in common acoustically. He renders the body audible and tonality powerless to speak.

La Monte Young Photo: Marian Zazeela

Young’s philosophy inverts the relationships set forth by Lachenmann. While Lachenmann breaks tonality through the activity of the performer’s body, Young breaks the listener’s body through submission to “chords of intrinsically infinite duration, amplified to the threshold of aural pain.” The notion of expanding tonal resources becomes meaningless in a sound environment that precludes referential listening. Likewise, the imposition of structure becomes unnecessary; the environment’s stasis provides its own variation, like the wind blowing through the log cabin in which Young was born. In Young’s aesthetics, taste becomes secondary to catharsis, given his faith in the power of constant tones to induce ecstasy. A continuous sound environment sweeps away any tonal difference to measure and compare, leaving only a physical space to wander and mental state to explore.

Lachenmann wants to render the body audible; Young wants to render sound corporeal. To this end, he turns his TriBeCa loft into a Dream House, to embody a “continuous” work that will “ultimately exist in time as a living organism with a life and tradition of its own.” This work is a sustained chord of thirty-two sine waves, its harmonic construction and relationships defined in a 107-word title, The Base 9:7:4 Symmetry in Prime Time When Centered above and below The Lowest Term Primes in The Range 288 to 224 with The Addition of 279 and 261 in Which The Half of The Symmetric Division Mapped above and Including 288 Consists of The Powers of 2 Multiplied by The Primes within The Ranges of 144 to 128, 72 to 64 and 36 to 32 Which Are Symmetrical to Those Primes in Lowest Terms in The Half of The Symmetric Division Mapped below and Including 224 within The Ranges 126 to 112, 63 to 56 and 31.5 to 28 with The Addition of 119. The title doubles as a comprehensive, if esoteric, analysis—a tonal Kaballah. If the frequencies live, however, it is not through the theorists’ ruminations, but rather through the tones’ appropriation of the listener’s body: as Kyle Gann writes, “Walk into The Base 9:7:4 Symmetry and you’ll hear a whirlwind of pitches swirl around you. Stand still, and the tones suddenly freeze in place.” Further description is impossible, because a body that speaks or writes is no longer a vessel of devotional listening.

New Freedom

Helmut Lachenmann and La Monte Young awake from the empty dream of musical diversity to discover the resonant body, sculpted into dynamic instruments or static environments. In either case, the new body invents music beyond the noise of tonal progress. Young and Lachenmann may renounce the freedom to define themselves through common categories, but they find a greater freedom instead: freedom from the 200-year-old nightmare of tonality that continues to haunt our music.

Alexander Ness is a doctoral composition student at New York University. A recent piece of his for solo viola, Shruti, is available on the language of, a new CD from quietdesign records. He is currently working on a dissertation on the origins of Western music pedagogy.

The DJ is the custodian of aural history.

—Paul D. Miller, a.k.a. DJ Spooky

The turntables first captured my attention while I was a graduate student in composition, after a frustrating period of experimentation with music software. The studio methods that I had been taught seemed disconnected from any direct physical interaction with the sounds. I had a hunger for a more hands-on relationship with my music in performance, and I was tired of only sitting in the audience when my compositions were played. Above all, I was assimilating many new musical interests, including underground hip-hop, dub reggae, African drumming, and sample-based electronica. My composition teacher at the time, Mario Davidovsky, opposed the use of “trance-inducing rhythm” on ideological grounds. In these circumstances, my development proceeded independently through listening sessions and political conversations with a non-musician friend who exposed me to hip-hop DJing and encouraged me to channel my musical background into new forms. My last compositions as a graduate student gradually synthesized my developing interests, as I began to sample my acoustic compositions in new rhythmic frameworks, creating hybrid hip-hop instrumentals and practicing in my bedroom on a Gemini DJ-in-a-Box set of turntables. A few months after completing my dissertation, I composed the first piece in which I was able to perform with the turntables onstage, scratching sounds that I myself had recorded. There has been no turning back.

While turntablism and its impact on the growth of hip-hop is well documented and recognized within popular culture, the turntables have not received much notice in musical academia. Composers trained in music programs since the 1990s are likely to view the turntables as musical exoticism: an instrument that is not really “of” the musical culture in which they are writing, but possibly available for flirtation within a composition or two. Through this article, I hope to introduce my fellow composers and other students of music to an instrument with great expressive potential and a history of innovation.

The main historical perspective that I will be sharing is that of turntablism as it has evolved within hip-hop. The techniques and history of the turntables in techno and other forms of electronic dance music will not be explored here, as their performance practices are more particular to the demands of the dance floor. In techno and related genres of dance music, the turntables are used primarily as mixing tools, usually focusing on smooth transitions, gradual timbre changes, and shaping a long development of musical energy through the layering of various loops in the same tempo. By contrast, turntablism will be defined here as synonymous with “scratch DJing”: viewing the turntables as an instrument to create new sounds, rhythmically defined by the performer, often transforming the source samples beyond recognition. Scratching can create an instrumental voice capable of adapting to a wide variety of musical environments. Open to any type of sound material, and containing infinite rhythmic possibilities, turntablist techniques should be of interest to composers in many different styles beyond hip-hop.

Beyond providing a basic grounding in turntablist history, this article aims to give composers an overview of musically relevant features found on the turntable and mixer. Common scratch techniques will be described, along with some extended possibilities connected with digital DJ technology. I will discuss a few approaches to notation for turntables, and finally leave you with some listening suggestions and a mix of some of my favorite artists.

NEXT: A Condensed History of Turntablism

Dada, a cultural movement triggered by the anti-war sentiments of a group of European visual artists and writers during the First World War, promulgated provocative anti-art as a response to the prevailing complacent standards of art. By 1922 Dada had self-destructed, giving way to surrealism, a movement best known for the surprise, unexpected juxtapositions of its visual artworks and writings. Both movements have had a tremendous impact on all subsequent avant-garde painting, sculpture, theatre, film, poetry, and fiction. But such a claim of influence would seem senseless in contemporary music, where the presence of Dada and surrealism is generally unrecognized or forgotten.

However, these movements exerted a pervasive influence on 20th-century music, especially on mid-century avant-garde composers based in New York—among them Edgard Varèse, Stefan Wolpe, John Cage, and Morton Feldman. In addition, these composers paved the way for a Dada/surrealist aesthetic, a “normative Dada” whose radicalism was of an entirely different character than its European counterpart. The Dadaists themselves skirted madness and prison in the pursuit of an absolute aesthetic and a new social order whose raison d’être was the senseless carnage of World War I. The American scene was very different.

The aesthetic borders between Dada and surrealism are often difficult to distinguish and are additionally related to a third movement, Futurism, which began most notably in Italy, but also in England and Russia, which incorporated visual arts, literature, and music. Le bruit, noise with imitative effects, was introduced into art by the Italian Futurists Filippo Tommaso Emilio Marinetti (1876-1944) and Luigi Russolo (1885-1947), who used a chorus of typewriters, kettledrums, rattles, and pot covers to suggest the “awakening of the capital.” Richard Huelsenbeck, in his 1920 essay “En Avant Dada: A History of Dadaism” (Collected in Robert Motherwell’s anthology, The Dada Painters and Poets, Cambridge: Belknap, 1979), noted that Dadaists borrowed the term bruitism, or noise music, from the Italian Futurists.

There is a complex of interests, techniques, imagery, and intentions that characterizes surrealism in its search for epiphany. One of the most familiar and disturbing is a seamless conjunction of impossibilities in which objects that cannot exist in the same time and place are rendered with the perfection of reality, as in the paintings of René Magritte. Another is an interest in found objects in search of the revelatory image or moment that affords access to a “superior” reality. But these images also bring with them an antinomian charge; thus an interest in alchemy and magic. Dada, surrealism, and Futurist all applied an aesthetic of shock and a panoply of approaches in order to transcend the linearity of normal consciousness: free association, frottage, and automatic writing. Such was the path to the subconscious and the dream.

These movements paid close attention to advanced and developing technology, and the repetitive beauty of machines was a ubiquitous image. Contemporaneous technologies—film and photo montage, for example—provided a means of assaulting those laws of space and time that the subconscious impertinently refused to recognize. The machine was both a sign of modern urban power (the modern metropolis was another prominent obsession) and a locus of ambivalence about the Machine Age’s destructive and dehumanizing aspects, particularly after World War I. Machines also offered a new kind of sexual allure; that of the mechanical and repetitive. The products of machines—newspapers and other mass-produced items—took on similar associations, and this source material was put to work in the formation of a new poetics.

Dada had already attracted imaginatively anarchic musicians even before the end of the First World War. By far, the most inventive and radical musical constructions were those of Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), who had taken up residence in the United States. Often working under the alias A. Klang (Klang: “sound” in German), his assemblages cunningly obscure the boundaries of text, music, representation, and notation a half-century before John Cage’s experiments in indeterminacy.

Duchamp’s Exercices de musique en creux pour sourds (“hollow [or vain] musical exercises for the deaf”) instruct the performer: “Given an agreed/conventional number of music notes, ‘hear’ only the group of those which are not played.” The first Erratum Musical (1913) (in the collection The Green Box) offers a randomly arranged sequence of 25 notes written on staff paper with treble and bass clefs and accidentals. There are no rhythmic indications to coordinate the parts. An arbitrary deployment of the dictionary definition of “to print” appears below the musical notations. The second Erratum Musical (also 1913), bearing the additional title “La mariée mise á nu par ses célibataires, même” (“The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, even”) uses a musical notation of only numbers and letters, without conventional music symbols, and with explanatory notes and diagrams. He writes, “the order of succession is interchangeable by whim,” and the piece is “unfinishable.” The second Erratum Musical is intended for “a specific musical instrument (player piano, mechanical organ, or other new instruments where the virtuoso intermediary is suppressed).”

These inventions are preludes to the provocations of Erik Satie (1866-1925), who was a crucial figure in the formation of surrealism. In a now-famous program note to Satie’s Parade (1917: produced by Diaghilev with Cocteau, Picasso, and Satie) Apollinaire coined the word, in referring to “…a sort of sur-realism [sur-realisme] which I see as the point of departure for a series of manifestations of that new spirit which promises to modify the arts and the conduct of life from top to bottom in a universal joyousness.” (Rollo Meyers, Modern French Music: Its Evolution and Cultural Background from 1900 to the Present Day. London: Blackwell, 1971, p. 20.)

But a surrealist “school” of composition never developed in France, undoubtedly because of the hostile indifference to music of the arch-surrealist André Breton, who believed that language had already subsumed and surpassed the possibilities of music.

However, as a result of the development of the tape recorder, a true surrealist music became possible in musique concrète—the art of “found” and manipulated sound. But tape recorders were not easily available until the late 1930s, coinciding with the decline of the surrealist movement. Still, surrealism served as a source of imagery for the aesthetic that grew up around this new technology. Symphonie pour un homme seul, a joint composition created by Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry in 1950, was the culmination of a series of sonic experiments, including studies of the sounds of locomotives, pots, and turnstiles. Schaeffer himself remarked that his manipulations of recordings by looping (sillons firmés) were reminiscent of the first surrealist paintings. The aim was the creation of sound-objects, objets sonores, the result of a series of transformations of original material deformed beyond recognition, at a level where “the bell becomes a human voice, the voice a violin and the violin a sea bird.” (A la recherche d’une Musique Concrète, Paris: Éditions du seuil, 1952, p. 47.) However, musique concrète ultimately rejected the possibility of musical surrealism once the sonic results of the manipulations of found sounds became more important than the ability for listeners to discern these sounds’ original sources.

EDGARD VARÈSE

Edgard Varèse

Edgard Varèse (1883-1965) arrived in the United States in 1915 and, although he maintained cultural connections to Europe, most of his works were composed in New York. The young Varèse had close ties with both Dadaists and Futurists, although he denied being of either camp. He hated being linked with art movements and was unusually secretive about influences on his work. Sometimes his caginess was excessive. Although his orchestral work Arcana bears a quotation from the alchemist Paracelsus, Varèse insisted that the passage did not inspire the work and that the work is in no way a commentary on it. However, surrealist imagery underlay what he claimed was an objective, science-based art.

Ultimately, Varèse was neither a Dadaist nor a surrealist but a kind of fellow traveler. In 1921 he signed a Dada manifesto opposing Futurism, “Dada soulève tout,” distributed in protest at one of Marinetti’s lectures. He also contributed poetry to the Dada review 391, and the poet Aragon described him as the “only composer of the Dada era.” Many of his instrumental works recall the machine language of the Dadaists. Elliott Carter describes this quality precisely:

Usually sharply defined, his rhythmic process recalls the clicking and rattling of rather complex machinery that seems to produce broken, out-of-phase cycles of sound. These rhythms shape the order of presentation of the notes of vertical harmonies that are frequently static and lead them to burst or explode in unexpected ways. (Elliott Carter, “On Edgard Varèse,” in The New Worlds of Edgard Varèse: A Symposium, ed. Sherman Van Solkema. ISAM Monographs #11: 1979, 2.)

Surviving material from Varèse’s unfinished opera, L’Astronome (1928), reveals the clearest evidence of a Dada aesthetic in his compositional output. But after an attempted collaboration with Robert Desnos and Alejo Carpentier, Varèse turned the project over to the playwright and theater visionary Antonin Artaud in 1933, who also failed to complete the libretto. (Eric Sellin, The Dramatic Concepts of Antonin Artaud. Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1968, pp. 71-75.)

Varèse’s treatment appears in Artaud’s complete works as Il n’y a plus de firmament. The action takes place in the year 2000. Dada and Futurist themes run riot; both Varèse and Artaud had gone beyond the provocations of Dada to envision sublime terrible worlds of their own. But they both spoke the Dada idiom: synesthesia, cataclysm, language beyond language, the world of machines, and the assault on all social and aesthetic boundaries. In L’Astronome, the audience was to be eradicated with a death ray (a rather unsatisfactory end for a bourgeois evening at the opera). Here are Varèse’s notes from 1928:

Discovery of instantaneous radiation – 30,000,000 times that of light. Rapid variation in the size of Sirius, which becomes a Nova. … Unexpected reception of signals – prime indivisible numbers 1,3,5,7. … During the catastrophes, it is [the scientists’] decision which turns the crowd’s rage against the astronomer …. Mysterious – in musical waves [ondes Martinot] (supple, fluctuating). Scientists study them. It is perhaps the acoustic language of Sirius. The brilliance of Sirius continues to augment, … precipitating catastrophes. Explosions, darkness, etc. … The crowds first attack the astronomer, later making a saint of him…. The crowd becomes rigid. The projector turns toward the room, blinding the audience. … A few wax mannequins look outwards, their eyes fixed and without expression.

Fernande Ouellette, Edgard Varèse (Paris: Editions, Paris, 1966, pp. 127-8.)

It is remarkable how closely Artaud’s apocalyptic visions, spatial imagination, and sense of the interrelated, constructive capacities of sound and light parallel so much of Varèse’s imagery. Artaud writes:

There is a concrete idea of music where sounds come into play like characters, where harmonies are cut in half and are mingled in with the precise interventions of words. Musical instruments are also to be objectified on the stage, and one must seek the means of producing new sounds: They will be used in the capacity of objects and as an integral part of the décor. Furthermore, the necessity of acting directly and profoundly on the sensitivity through the organs makes it advisable, from the viewpoint of sound, to seek out absolutely new qualities and vibrations of sound, qualities which contemporary musical instruments do not possess.

(Sellin, p. 84)

Compare this to Varèse:

[T]he new musical apparatus I envisage, able to emit sounds of any number of frequencies, will extend the limits of the lowest and highest registers, hence new organizations of the vertical resultants…. Not only the harmonic possibilities of the overtones will be revealed in all their splendor, but the use of certain interferences created by the partials will represent an appreciable contribution. … An entirely new magic of sound!

(Edgard Varèse, “The Liberation of Sound,” in Elliott Schwartz and Barney Childs, eds., Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music
(NY: Holt, Reinhart & Winston, 1967, pp. 197-8.)

Where Varèse perceived sounds sweeping the audience like waves of light, Artaud desired a new illuminating apparatus capable of “projecting lighting in waves, or in sheets, or like a volley of flaming arrows.” And, where Varèse describes “sound projection” as a voyage into space,” Artaud claims that “[w]ords, too, have possibilities of sonorization, various ways of being projected in space.” (Sellin, pp. 86-7)

But it is in Varèse’s electronic music that all the changes of Dada and surrealism are rung, even though both of these movements were by now long on the wane. Poéme electronique, created for Le Corbusier’s Philips Pavilion at the 1956 Brussels World’s Fair, is a vehicle for the release of decades of shored up Dada/surrealist imagery. Recalling the distortion of scale that permeates surrealism, sound events in Poéme electronique emerge from silence, giving them the weight of icons. Pure electronic sounds as well as various “found” sound objects—bells, factory noises, distorted human voices, distorted conventional musical instruments, plus a quotation from Varése’s own Ionization—all are given the same experiential weight, surging from a void. The juxtaposition of these disparate materials achieve the violations of time and space that surrealism aimed at.

STEFAN WOLPE

Stefan Wolpe

Stefan Wolpe (1902-1972) joined the Berlin Dadaists in 1920, just after poet and drummer Richard Huelsenbeck (1892-1974) had joined the group, having arrived from the Zurich Dadaists. Wolpe and his cohorts anticipated by more than thirty years works such as John Cage’s Imaginary Landscape IV for twelve radios, as well as the experiments of the concrètistes:

I had eight gramophones…at my disposal. And these were lovely record players, because one could regulate their speed.… [Y]ou could play a Beethoven Symphony very, very, slow, and very quick at the same time that you could mix it with a popular tune. You could have a waltz, then you could have a funeral march. So I put things together in what one would call today a multifocal way. …The concept of simultaneities is one of the most truly fascinating things.

Stefan Wolpe, “Lecture on Dada” (1962)

In 1929 Wolpe composed a setting of Kurt Schwitters’ Anna Blume for a tenor clown on a bicycle. After a period of intensive absorption in Schoenberg-influenced chromaticism, he dedicated himself to workers’ music, until he fled the Nazis and went to Vienna in 1933, where he briefly studied with Webern. But Dada stayed with him, as his lectures and theoretical articles attest. The concept of simultaneity was a crucial premise for Wolpe, particularly in his late-period works, and he is quite clear about the provenance of this concept. Describing his Enactments for three pianos (1950-53) he notes:

Many things are happening at the same time, curves hugely expanding, curves enormously contracting, a sound, a hit, a tone, a silence. These are not random situations, they’re highly calculated, but one experiences also the disparity of different qualities of events. … [Y]ou can have in this kind of music a kind which was also one of the early Dada obsessions, or interests, namely, the concept of unforeseeability, non-influence, non-directivity, you cannot explain. It means you cannot infer what is going to happen!” (“Lecture on Dada”)

In his 1960 lecture “On Proportions,” Wolpe proposed a mode of musical operations based on a vocabulary of symmetrical and asymmetrical pitch structures (i.e. proportions) grounded in the play of simultaneities in an abstract musical space. The second half of the lecture, however, conjures up a free-flowing, neo-Dada space in which musical proportional events could be assembled:

The proportions of the audible and the visible are twins of one and the same totality: the formal proof of unalterable nature, and of the nature of confused, inconsistent realities. The pathos of the unintentional arrangements of the wastepaper basket, the disorderly table—the general formal nature of the street scene, alienated synchronism, such pathos is the equivalent of a different, formally intended arrangement. Everything becomes the language of formal distinction, and the language is concrete, like the hieroglyphics of stones, or the distinct, engaged proportion of pitches.

Wolpe’s proportional system underlies the entirety of his late work (from about 1960 on). This considerable body of music is perhaps the most extensive to have been created on the basis of a Dada method. Wolpe’s lifelong commitment to Dada simultaneity predated by two decades John Cage’s pre-indeterminate percussion pieces of the early 1940s. The proportioning of musical works—”the proportioning of proportions” as Wolpe described it—was a common interest of Wolpe, Cage, and Morton Feldman.

THE SEEDS FOR A NORMATIVE DADA

John Cage and fluffy cat

The genealogy of an art movement follows approximately the same pattern as a political revolution. What was once a radical and even terrifying idea—universal suffrage, for example—eventually sheds its radical aura and assumes a middle class normality.

This was the fate of Dada/surrealism: its revolutionary impulse was domesticated even as its techniques stocked the instrumentarium of contemporary music. But many of its techniques fuelled the New York avant-garde: Bruitisme (noise music), machine/repetition esthetic, chance/stochastic selection, and disruption of scale (for example, Morton Feldman’s six-hour long string quartet). Also, its aura invested the New York scene with an anti-commercial radicalism hostile to traditional art and especially to commercialism.

There is a psychological chasm between the radical desperation of Tristan Tzara (1896-1963), for example, and the American optimism of John Cage (1912-1992), the classic American “tinkerer,” as he has so often been described. When Wolpe walked out of John Cage’s first “happening” at Black Mountain College, it signaled a schism between the European and American musical avant-gardes. Wolpe had strong objections to chance music; it offended his radical humanism, which relied precisely on the free and individual choice—the human fingerprint—that chance music strove to eliminate.

Dada’s mise en scène was the corpse-strewn landscape of World War I; Wolpe was an anti-Nazi agitator whose works were antifascist polemics. Witness his Battle Music, written at the height of World War II; which (according to Austin Clarkson) was a musical portrayal of Picasso’s Guernica. What could Wolpe have had in common with Cage’s Zen-flavored optimism? While the Dada-influenced works of post-war America were directed against a complacent commercialism, conformism, and cold-war ideological rigidity, looking through the writings and works of John Cage and the Fluxus group, one is struck by just how apolitical it all is.

As early as 1937, Cage was working with Merce Cunningham on dance pieces using noise elements, including found percussion instruments. In 1938 the first prepared piano piece appeared. The 1939, Imaginary Landscape No. 1 featured piano, cymbals, and turntables playing test tone recordings at different and changing speeds. Cage’s work at this point could be assimilated to both Dada and Futurist models (for example, the intonarumore of Russolo). But from the mid ’40s on, Cage fell under the influence of non-Western and “alternative” philosophies—first Indian philosophy, then Meister Eckhart, and finally the Zen aesthetic of silence. In Cage’s 1950 Lecture on Nothing, he stated, “I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry as I need it.”

Buddhism gave Cage a philosophical framework in which to rework Duchamp’s chance techniques into an aesthetic of pure sound. His credo—”embrace whatever comes along”—was a product of Zen studies, but the idea owes as much to the simultaneity of Dada and related practices as it does to Buddhism. This was the period of his study of the I Ching, which he used as a generator for chance operations aiming at a complete negation of the composer’s will, “free of individual taste and memory.” The 1951 Imaginary Landscape No. 4 for 12 radios, although radical in its time and place, was, as we have seen, preceded by the Dada assaults on Beethoven that Wolpe describes above. In his 84 Music for Piano compositions (1952-56), imperfections on ordinary paper were transformed into pitches by adding staff lines and clefs, recalling Duchamp’s assemblages of 1913.

Morton Feldman

If Cage could be construed as a latter-day musical Dadaist, Morton Feldman (1926-1987)—who had studied composition with Wolpe before aesthetically aligning himself with Cage, could be considered his surrealist counterpart. Throughout his life Feldman maintained close personal ties to visual artists, and even some of his titles suggest a surrealist aesthetic: Vertical Thoughts III (1963), Madam Press Died Last Week at 90 (1970), I Met Heine on the Rue Fürstenberg (1971), Crippled Symmetry (1983). His public persona—that of a bluff Jewish Walt Whitman—belies the fragility and nostalgia so characteristic of his music; just as one would not expect that the composer of a six-hour long string quartet could compose miniatures that bring to mind Joseph Cornell’s intimate boxes of found objects. In a certain sense Feldman, like Cornell, was a miniaturist. His characteristic manner is to reiterate a particular gesture in a series of variants whose voicings, pitch content, and shape gradually change over the course of time. The silences separating these “views” allow the listener to experience each of them as a singular moment in the manner of a late Wolpe work; although at a radically slower tempo.

Much of Feldman’s music was composed at a time when music theory extolled transparent and totalizing structure; serial composition fulfilled these expectations. From such a viewpoint, Feldman’s music was “un-analyzable.” Such an approach could never penetrate the surface of his music, whose essence lies in the specific character of sounding events, and not in their abstract organization. But there is still much to be said about the music from an analytic viewpoint. Steven Johnson’s excellent article on Rothko Chapel (1972) carefully describes the relationship between the Mark Rothko paintings, the architecture of the chapel housing them, and Feldman’s composition, all of which were commissioned by John and Dominique de Menil. Johnson applies set-class analysis to the pitch structure of the work, which he understands as a “network of pitch-class adjacent dyads or trichords, spaced so that they interlock or nest within each other. (Steven Johnson, “Rothko Chapel and Rothko’s Chapel,” Perspectives of New Music 32/2, 1994, pp. 18-20.)

But this misses an important aspect of Feldman’s technique: its indebtedness to Wolpe’s principles of symmetry and asymmetry, his careful control over the rate of chromatic circulation (noted by Johnson) and equally careful placement of sounding events in musical space. Feldman was perhaps even more sensitive than Wolpe to the subtle spatial motions that can be achieved through re-voicings of events.

NORMATIVE DADA’S LEGACY: FLUXUS & EARLY MINIMALISM

Yoko Ono

There is an element of historical re-enactment in the Cage-influenced Fluxus movement, which began in the early ’60s and continued through the ’90s. The Lithuanian-born artist George Maciunas (1931–1978) organized the first Fluxus event in 1961 at the AG Gallery in New York and the first Fluxus festivals in Europe in 1962. The idea of the “event” originated in John Cage’s class at the New School, which led to the performance scores for “Fluxconcerts.” Participants included artists George Brecht, Al Hansen, Allan Kaprow, and Allison Knowles. Other Fluxus artists included Joseph Beuys, Nam June Paik, and La Monte Young.

But Fluxus distinguished itself from Dada in its preference for Zen-influenced simplicity, for example in much of the work of Yoko Ono. Ultimately, there were a number of strategies at work in the Fluxus movement: Dada provocations, as in George Maciunas’s Solo For Violin or Larry Miller’s Patina; Koan-like works such as Yoko Ono’s Tape Piece I and Fly Piece; Theater of the Absurd events like Ono’s Wall Piece for Orchestra to Yoko Ono and Ken Friedman’s Family Planning Event. (Note the haiku-like typography.)

George Maciunas: Solo for Violin
Old Classic is performed on a violin.
where pauses are called, violin is
mistreated by scratching the floor with it,
dropping pebbles through f hole, pulling
out pegs, etc.
1962

Larry Miller: Patina
urinate on an egg until it has a nice
patina or until it explodes.
1969

Yoko Ono: Tape Piece I
Stone Piece
Take the sound of the stone aging.
1963

Yoko Ono: Fly Piece
Fly
1963

Yoko Ono: Wall Piece for Orchestra to Yoko Ono
Hit a wall with your head.
1962

Ken Friedman: Family Planning Event
Get pregnant for 18 months and have
twins
1962

(For more details on Fluxus performance works, see the Fluxus performance research e-publication 2002 edited by Ken Friedman, Owen Smith, and Lauren Sawchyn.)

Another manifestation of late-20th-century cultural re-enactment can be found in both American and European minimalism. Minimalist music was foreshadowed by the asymmetrical reiterative gestures in Stravinsky’s neoclassical appropriations from the 1920s, which also foreshadowed the normalization of Dada/surrealism. But there are also other antecedents of this style which point even more directly to aesthetic tendencies that are clearly aligned to Dada and surrealism.

For example, Steve Reich’s early music recalls “machine” Dada (Pendulum Music 1968), appropriation—both of African-American speech (It’s Gonna Rain, 1965 and Come Out, 1966) and of third-world musical culture (Drumming 1970-71). While Reich has gone on to create an expressive, even a decidedly personal music—with at least one work (the gorgeous 1981 Tehillim) even hinting at that bête noir of postmodernism, aesthetic transcendence, the technical apparatus of a typical Reich piece often proceeds by attrition, a process of dialectical transformation, which also recalls Dada/surrealist disruptions of scale and time. In Piano Phase in particular, the listener’s time-sense is effectively blurred by its gradual transformations.

A common first reaction to early minimalist works was to condemn them as machine-like and lacking soul; the digital age seems to accept them as machines with soul. This is another case of normative Dada. After all, original Dada’s sadomasochistic fascination with the robotic, machine-like, and repetitive was an expression of horror; but far from manifesting repulsion, minimalism focuses on the hypnotic and lyrical potential of reiteration.

*

Normative Dada is a common dialect in our current musical language, tamed by the blandishments of mass culture. It offers a whiff of danger, bohemianism, and a radical genealogy. It is highly compatible with progressive politics and the postmodernist blurring of high and low culture. But it is not a revolutionary movement; it is the result of a normalization process. Of course, many individuals in the United States have taken great aesthetic and political risks, hitting rock-bottom in mental institutions or getting jailed for their troubles (the Beats offer a number of examples). But music is weighted differently than other arts. The expense of musical production, a resolutely middle-class training process for musicians, and a two-thousand-year-old heritage are hardly conducive to revolution; nor should they be.

America is a great sponge for radicals; it attracts them, then absorbs them, and even the radical art communities of the ’50s and ’60s have dissolved. This is not to claim that either politicization or institutionalization are desiderata of artistic expression. But it is worth remembering that Dada concealed a significant dose of idealism. Given our current political and cultural situation, this bit of provocation is very much in order.

***

Matthew Greenbaum Photo by Cyndie Bellen-Berthézène

Matthew Greenbaum‘s compositions have been presented/performed/commissioned by the Darmstadt Summer Festival, the Leningrad Spring Festival, the JakArt Festival (Indonesia), Hallische Musiktage, the Fromm Foundation, Da Capo Chamber Players, Cygnus, Parnassus, Fred Sherry, Marc-André Hamelin, David Holzman, Stephanie Griffin, the Talea String Quartet, Network for New Music/Penn Council on the Arts, the Group for Contemporary Music, Orchestra 2001, and the Houston Symphony. Recordings appear on CRI, Centaur and New World and a new all-Greenbaum CD is scheduled for release on the Furious Artisans label next year. Greenbaum studied composition with Stefan Wolpe and Mario Davidovsky and was artistic director of the Stefan Wolpe Centennial Festival NY (2002-3). He is currently a professor of composition at Temple University.</p

In the world of classical music, as elsewhere, women have made tremendous progress over the last 30 years. Following the introduction of blind auditions in the 1970s, which greatly reduce bias, women now make up about half of the string and woodwind players in American orchestras. Women occupy prominent administrative positions in major musical institutions. Women direct and design productions at important opera houses.

Joan Tower Photo by Noah Sheldon

Women also make up about 30 percent of composition students in American colleges and conservatories. While this is a vast and positive change, it’s still not easy for women to get their works performed, especially by symphony orchestras. During the 2004-05 concert season, works by women accounted for only one percent of all pieces performed by the 300 or so member orchestras who responded to the repertory survey of the American Symphony Orchestra League (now the League of American Orchestras, or LAO). The following year, with a boost from Joan Tower’s widely-performed Made in America, the number rose to two percent.

At the orchestral level, the situation remains much the same today. During the 2006-07 season, 54 works by 31 women were performed by the member orchestras reporting repertory to LAO. Of the 31 composers, only Jennifer Higdon (12), Ellen Taaffe Zwilich (5), Joan Tower (4), Gabriela Lena Frank (3), Kaija Saariaho (2), Augusta Read Thomas (2), and Sophia Gubaidulina (2) had more than one piece performed; the remaining 24 women composers were each represented by one work each. For the sake of comparison, the most-performed living composer was John Adams, with 18 pieces, trailed by John Corigliano with 12 and Michael Daugherty with 9. Among standard-repertory composers, we find Tchaikovsky and Beethoven with 44 works each. Most individual works by those two composers received far more performances than any work by a living composer received. Made in America was still the most-performed work by an America woman, and, with 28 performances, the most frequently performed contemporary piece.

You might think this represents the plight of the contemporary composer, because contemporary music represents a sadly small fraction of the current orchestral repertory. But during the 2006-07 season, LAO members managed to program works written in the last 25 years by about 160 different composers. Only 19 of them were women. Of the 31 women represented overall in the general survey, 12 wrote the work performed more than 25 years ago; some, such as Amy Beach, Clara Schumann, and Fanny Mendelssohn, are long gone.

But what of new music ensembles and contemporary music festivals, which focus on the music of the 20th and 21st centuries? Even here there’s a mixed record of performing music by women composers. Some ensembles present little or no music by women. For example, in the 2007-08 season, New York’s Either/Or lists no women among the composers whose works they’ve performed; of the 35 composers presented by the Cygnus Ensemble, one is a woman. More encouraging is the record of counter)induction, whose enormous repertory encompasses some 80 composers, of whom 13 are women. San Francisco’s Other Minds Festival has presented 115 composers, 29 of them women, and of the 36 composers who have received a commission from the Bang on a Can People’s Commissions, 8 are women.

How Did Things Get This Way?

Hildegard

Women have composed music in the Western classical tradition for centuries, going back at least to Hildegard of Bingen, the great 12th-century composer, author, and religious mystic. The Norton/Grove Dictionary of Women Composers is nearly 600 pages long and lists hundreds of composers from every epoch. In trying to establish themselves as composers, women have dealt with the same problems they have faced whenever they enter male-dominated fields: institutional bias, outright exclusion, sexist attitudes and behavior by individuals, lack of opportunities, sexual harassment, and isolation. Women who wanted to study composition found themselves excluded from conservatories for much of the 19th century. Building on Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s work in literary criticism, Catherine Parsons Smith offers a persuasive argument that in the United States, musical modernism was, among other things, a reaction to the first wave of feminism in the late 19th century and to the emergence of women composers and musicians (“‘A Distinguishing Virility’: Feminism and Modernism in American Art Music,” in Cecilia Reclaimed: Feminist Perspectives on Gender and Music, Susan C. Cook and Judy S. Tsou, eds., University of Illinois Press, 1994).

That was then, and this is now, you might think–but women composers must still deal with these issues. For this article, I interviewed a number of composers, some of whom have academic appointments, some of whom are freelance composers. Not all were women. Almost all of the women reported some sense of isolation at the beginning of their careers. Sheila Silver, professor of composition, theory, and instrumentation at SUNY/Stony Brook, first saw another woman composer while studying in France on a George Ladd Prix de Paris award, when Betsy Jolas took a bow at the end of a concert. It was another two years before she met another woman who composed, and that was Pauline Oliveros. Linda Dusman, professor of composition and theory at the University of Maryland (Baltimore Campus), was sufficiently isolated as a student composer in the 1970s that she found an address where Ruth Crawford Seeger had once lived and sat in her car outside the house, even though it had been decades since Seeger’s death. Alice Shields, a pioneer of electronic music who for many years was associated with the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, studied composition at Columbia in the 1960s and ’70s. Neither her professors nor any texts in use ever mentioned women composers, though several women became composition students at Columbia by the late 1960s.

Silver received her Ph.D. in composition in 1976, Dusman in the mid-1980s. Music history textbooks of the time didn’t even give lip service to women composers. The 1973 edition of Donald Grout’s widely used History of Western Music lists Clara Schumann in the index, but the sentence mentioning her in the body of the text is about her pianism. The index lists Charles Griffes but not Amy Beach, the great teacher Nadia Boulanger but not her sister, the composer Lili Boulanger, though there are many entries for obscure male composers. When I was a musicology graduate student at Stony Brook in the early 1980s, a student in an elementary music class asked me why there were no great women composers. “Somebody had to take care of the children” was my off-the-cuff answer. Childbearing and family responsibilities have been important factors in limiting women’s entry into composing, especially before the 20th century, because women were expected to devote themselves to their children and husbands, not to their own careers. But I also didn’t know who to list for him, because to the extent that I knew the names of women composers, I had heard almost none of their music and had no idea of their stature as composers. I certainly wasn’t in a position to describe any of them as “great.”

Caroline Mallonée

Caroline Mallonée and Kyle Bartlett, who received their doctoral degrees in 2006 and 1999, respectively, reported to me that women were always a minority in their programs. The situation is better at some universities than others; for example, about one-third of the current graduate students at the University of California at Berkeley are women. At Stony Brook, Silver sees many more women studying composition than in the past, with women typically making up about thirty percent of the composers. Stony Brook’s composition faculty is half female, which may well make the department more attractive to young women composers than an all-male composition faculty. Still, Stony Brook’s faculty is unusual: as of 2001-2, less than 10 percent of the composition teachers in the College Music Society’s directory were women, according to an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

As in other fields, women in composition often have to deal with sexual harassment. During her studies, Silver experienced sexual harassment on several separate occasions at different institutions. The Chronicle of Higher Education article referenced in the previous paragraph outlines the sexual harassment of women in music, including both student performers and composers, and discusses a number of cases in detail.

Women composers may also be subjected to sexist remarks that are demeaning, skeptical, insulting, or clueless but that don’t constitute harassment. One of Kaija Saariaho’s teachers told her that after having children, women could only compose lullabies (“Gender Negotiation of the Composer Kaija Saariaho in Finland: The Composer as Nomadic Subject,” by Pirkko Moisala, in Music and Gender, edited by Pirkko Moisala and Beverley Diamond, University of Illinois Press, 2000). Early in her career, men would ask Pamela Z who had helped her choose, design, and set up her electronic gear–all of which she had done by herself. She told me that these comments have diminished considerably since the 1980s, however, perhaps indicating an improvement in perceptions of women’s competence.

Why Are We Even Talking About This?

We live in a world that sometimes seems post-feminist, where it’s widely–and wrongly–assumed that sexism is somehow behind us. It’s difficult to talk about the particular issues facing women composers, because of the obvious progress in the last 35 years and because of the hazards of discussing composers by their gender rather than by their musical style. The late Miriam Gideon, born in 1906, equivocated about the issue, admitting that women composers faced particular challenges while not wanting to discuss them in depth. As Kaija Saariaho’s career progressed, she became more willing to talk about the way she had been treated because she was a woman. (See Pirkko Moisala’s article referenced above.) And one young composer decided against being interviewed for this article because of her legitimate frustration with articles that focus on what it’s like to be a woman in the field rather than on the music written by women in the field. The composers I spoke with understood the past utility of staging concerts of music exclusively by women composers, while thinking that at present, such segregation is more likely to be harmful in advancing women’s careers.

This doesn’t mean there isn’t concern about the current status of women composers. Linda Dusman cited the lack of current research and statistics on women’s success as graduate students in composition, and her plans to do such research in the future. She noted, as well, that we’re still asking these questions because we’re still facing the issues. Caroline Mallonée mentioned that concerns over the small number of women composition faculty and female graduate students are discussed constantly on the mailing list of the International Association of Women in Music.

Melinda Wagner Courtesy Theodore Presser

In addition, other patterns raise concerns about the survival and influence of the old boys’ networks, besides the performance and faculty statistics cited above. Only three Pulitzer Prizes in music have been awarded to women, all since 1983, none in the past decade. Since 1980, when the Pulitzer committee began announcing nominated finalists, four nominated finalists that did not win were works by women. Seven women have served on the Pulitzer music jury, all since 1975 (Miriam Gideon 1975 and 1983 (chair); Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, 1988 and 2002; Vivian Fine, 1989; Joan Tower, 1994; Melinda Wagner, 2000; Shulamit Ran, 2001; Ingrid Monson, 2007 and 2008). It’s worth noting that Ellen Taaffe Zwilich received her Pulitzer, the first awarded to a woman, in 1983, the year Gideon chaired the music jury. Of the 562 Guggenheim Fellowships awarded in music composition since the first went to Aaron Copland in 1925, 59 have gone to women, with 30 of them awarded since 1994.

More difficult to discuss or research are questions about whether music composed by women is any different from what is written by men, or whether women’s compositional process is different from men’s. The history of past “research” on sex and racial differences makes it likely that such discussions or research would be stigmatizing or used to diminish women’s accomplishments as composers. Stephen Jay Gould’s book The Mismeasure of Man (W.W. Norton, 1981, 1996) provides a long and depressing account of such research, in which the language used to describe women and African Americans is strikingly similar, and in all cases deployed to demonstrate the inherent superiority of white men. For example, 19th and early 20th-century researchers described both women and African Americans as more passionate or emotional than logical, as timid in the world and needing guidance from white men, and so on. These racist and sexist views persisted well into the 20th century, and while they’ve gone underground and become more subtle, they’re by no means absent from the modern world.

Getting Performed

All composers face similar issues in trying to get their work performed: institutional and listener resistance to new music; financial constraints, especially for opera; the tendency of commissions to go to well-known or popular composers. Commissions from major institutions, such as the top orchestras and big opera companies, are far more likely to go to men than to women.

Pamela Z Photo by Jeff Cravotta

That said, the composers I spoke with were mostly happy with their ability to get their music performed. They write on commission, for interested faculty where they have academic affiliations, for musicians who’ve played their music before, for musicians they know personally, and for performing groups with which they’re affiliated. Those who are composer/performers have a different degree of control because they’re not dependent on others to perform their music. Pamela Z, for example, is a composer/performer and the primary performer of her own music, though sometimes she writes on commission. Elaine Fine mentioned that she often writes for unusual combinations of instruments, where there’s not much repertory but there are performers interested in playing together. She has found that only her operas are difficult to get performed, because of the time, effort, and money required to stage opera, which is admittedly a problem for all composers, regardless of gender. Alice Shields has received commissions from instrumentalists, and her new opera Criseyde, based on Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, will be presented by both the American Virtuosi Opera Theater and New York City Opera’s VOX program. Sheila Silver won the 2007 Sackler Composition Prize, which will lead to two performances of her new opera The Wooden Sword.

Getting Yourself Out There

Last year, Word World Publications issued a massive volume entitled The World of Women in Classical Music by Dr. Anne K. Gray. On its 1000-plus pages are brief biographical sketches, many including photos, of significant musical women from around the world going back to ancient times. Not limited to composers, Gray also includes chapters on female conductors, instrumentalists, singers, musicologists, industry professionals, and even philanthropists. Inevitably, as with any project that attempts to be comprehensive, there are glaring omissions. Gray’s volume does not contain a single reference to Johanna Magdalena Beyer, a maverick composer whose music has finally been collected on a recent New World 2-CD set, or to microtonal pioneer Mildred Couper. Bringing it more up-to-date, Gray also fails to acknowledge Gloria Coates, who has been described as America’s most prolific female symphonist, or even Bang on a Can co-founder Julia Wolfe. That said, the book offers valuable background on nearly 100 American women composers representing a broad range of styles, from Zenobia Powell Perry and Lucia Dlugoszewski to Laurie Anderson and Jennifer Higdon, which makes for strong supporting evidence for the tremendous progress Lisa Hirsch describes on our pages. —FJO

Every composer I spoke with mentioned the importance of self-promotion. Shields noted ruefully that she’s not at all good at this aspect of the business of being a composer, and that it has resulted in economic difficulties for her. Bartlett also said that this isn’t her strength, and while it keeps her career small, she has more time to do what she wants to do.

Alex Shapiro is a natural self-promoter, referring to herself as “very capitalist.” Her career started in commercial music, and as a result, she told me, she’s extremely comfortable with copyright, contracts, and other business matters. She uses her web site and blog to promote her music, offering samples, CDs, and the opportunity to purchase scores. She recently received a commission from the U.S. Army TRADOC concert band through her MySpace site.

Shapiro, who has led various seminars related to the music business and self-promotion, thinks that many women can do a better job of promoting themselves and presenting themselves professionally. She’s seen a surprising and dismaying number of women undermine themselves with competition submissions that included handwritten or apologetic cover letters.

Importance of Mentoring

Several of the composers told me about a mentor who had been especially important to their careers. Alice Shields told me about her deep gratitude to Vladimir Ussachevsky, one of the founders of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, who encouraged her to compose and who, she said, “gave me a future where I felt I had none.” Sheila Silver says that at the University of Washington, William Bolcom encouraged her as a composer and suggested that she leave the Northwest for a location with a more active musical community. At Berkeley, she worked with Edward Dugger, and while she was in Europe, György Ligeti was her mentor, even though he was not teaching classes at the time. Kyle Bartlett studied at the Longy School with Herman Weiss, and said that the environment at Longy encouraged everyone to pursue whatever their interests were. “If you wanted to conduct the orchestra, you could make it happen,” she said.

A well-known mentor has benefits beyond instruction: such a person can provide an entrée to an institution, or introductions to performers and presenters. It’s impossible to imagine some composers as good mentors to women. Aaron Copland didn’t believe women could be good composers; of Nadia Boulanger, he once said “But had she become a composer, she would of biological necessity have joined the automatically inferior ranks of the ‘woman composer'” (quoted in Catherine Parsons Smith’s article referenced above).

Starting Young

All of the composers I spoke to became musicians at an early age, starting music lessons in childhood. Most of them didn’t become composers until adulthood, discovering the vocation in college or even later. Elaine Fine, for example, has a flute degree from Juilliard, and subsequent to her studies there, started playing violin and viola. In her 30s, she began to make arrangements for a string quartet she played with, and as the arrangements became more complex, her own voice as a composer began to emerge. Pamela Z played the viola from grade school through high school, then studied voice in college. She considers herself lucky to have had a voice teacher who, unlike other instructors at her school, encouraged her to sing contemporary music. After school, she made her living singing and playing in nightclubs, but in the early 1980s, she encountered the music of Brian Eno, Laurie Anderson, and others in the experimental music scene and began composing herself. Kyle Bartlett, who now teaches at Settlement Music School in Philadelphia, decided to become a composer as a teenager, after a summer of study at a gifted students’ school where, among other things, the orchestra played Webern’s Five Pieces for Orchestra, music that thrilled and amazed her, because she’d never heard anything like it.

Caroline Mallonée has always been a composer: she started at 8 and attended The Walden School’s Young Musician Program, a summer music camp for youth, from age 12 to 18. Now a teacher in that program, she told me children are completely unselfconscious about composing. Like Mallonée, Alex Shapiro knew she’d be a composer from an early age, and received her first paying commission at age 16. Shapiro says that she had the best possible childhood for a budding composer, growing up in New York City with music lessons at the Julliard Preparatory Division and summers at Aspen.

One way to give women more prominence as composers is to get more girls interested in composing at an early age. This means young instrumentalists need to play and hear music composed by women, so that they have role models and can imagine themselves writing music. All potential composers need to be offered theory and composition training when they’re young, and they need access to performers so they can hear their music played. They also need access to technology, because the ability to produce and distribute your own scores and recordings is such an important part of musical life today, and girls are typically less likely than boys to seek out and learn about hardware: In the 1990s, Pamela Z taught a workshop for high school kids, and found that the girls in her class enrolled to learn about audio technology so that they’d be less intimidated by boys and boys’ knowledge.

In addition to schools such as The Walden School, the Settlement Music School, and the preparatory divisions of conservatories, at least two major orchestras now extend their outreach to young composers. The Minnesota Orchestra has an intensive Composer Institute, whose week-long immersion program includes advanced composition and orchestration classes and classes focused on the business side of being a composer. The Composer Institute has had a good number of women participating over the years. The Los Angeles Philharmonic has a Composer Fellowship Program for high-school aged composers, instituted in the fall of 2007. The program is described as follows on the orchestra’s web site:

Select fellows in this mentorship program receive private and group composition lessons with LA Phil guest composers; attend seminars presented by LA Phil musicians; learn from film composers, music arrangers, and publishers; hear their music performed in class sessions by LA Phil musicians or teaching faculty; and attend concerts and rehearsals at Walt Disney Concert Hall.

This promises to be a great program for all participants, providing them with an intimate glimpse inside this professional slice of the industry even before they enter college. Underlining the need for outreach to young women who want to be composers, the four first-year fellows in 2007 were all young men.

What’s Next?

There’s no question in my mind that women composers today are in a much better situation than in the past, between the broad acceptance and awareness of women as composers, the widespread availability of advanced training, and the multitude of ways to be heard as a composer. And there’s now a large and expanding literature on women composers throughout music history. Still, there’s plenty of room for more progress.

On the academic side, college curricula need to incorporate information about women composers in teaching music history and composition. No music student should leave school without having heard these composers and analyzed this music.

Women are likely to benefit from ongoing changes in the overall music curriculum, as it incorporates more classes in entrepreneurship, self-promotion, and career paths, perhaps even more than men, because men are more likely than women to have a strong sense of entitlement and consequently are more at home with self-promotion.

The failure of women to make much headway in getting their music performed by symphonies and opera companies is an ongoing frustration. Most big commissions still go to male composers, though in the last few years Deborah Drattell, Rachel Portman, and Kaija Saariaho have all had new operas performed by major opera companies, while Saariaho, Higdon, Augusta Read Thomas, Joan Tower, Sofia Gubaidulina and other women have received major orchestral commissions. It’s also true that big commissions are few and far between in general, because of the extent to which big musical institutions are now museums rather than major promoters of the music of our time.

I’ll never again be tripped up by inconvenient questions, because now I can name many great and important composers, from Hildegard of Bingen to Chiara Cozzolani to Fanny Hensel to Ruth Crawford to Miriam Gideon to Jennifer Higdon and Kaija Saariaho. I’ve been able to hear works by all of these composers live or on record, and they are all prominently featured in the research literature on women composers. But these composers should be as well-known as the male composers of their respective generations, and we have a ways to go before we’re there.

Lisa Hirsch Photo by Eric Lundblad

Lisa Hirsch is a technical writer, music reviewer for San Francisco Classical Voice, chorister, and martial artist. She studied music at Brandeis and Stony Brook.

Shoe String Song by Alison Knowles photo courtesy of Miguel Abreu Gallery

Back in 1969, Something Else Press published Notations, an anthology edited by John Cage and Alison Knowles that collected excerpts from hundreds of notated musical scores, many unconventional, ranging from the cautiously conceived, highly complex works of Roman Haubenstock-Ramati and Cornelius Cardew to the almost mischievous directives of artists such as Nam June Paik and Allen Kaprow. Now, forty years later, comes Notations 21, which features the work of approximately 150 contemporary composers who have developed unique forms of graphic notation.

Theresa Sauer, a musicologist who had turned to studying graphic design, found herself looking at many graphic scores as examples of visual art. She decided that the upcoming 40th anniversary of the first Notations was the time to reintroduce the public to the topic, as well as to publish some of the many individual innovators who have arisen since the first book. The new anthology will also include examples of music notation from outside the realm of contemporary music such as ancient Egyptian notation, which is based on color and has rarely been seen outside its native terrain. Sauer also commissioned essays from Steve Beck, the mystical Danish composer Henrik Rasmussen, and sixteen others. Currently at print, Notations 21 will be available at the end of March and will be accompanied by a series of concerts at the Chelsea Art Museum during the first half of October. In the meantime, there is a growing website dedicated to the project.

Unconventional notation appeared in contemporary music in order to address a range of experimental concerns. During the first decades of the 20th century, Henry Cowell made early innovations in notating tone clusters and other extended techniques, and Charles Ives and Harry Partch developed notation for microtonal composing. The 1950s and ’60s were something of a golden age for graphic notation, when the composers of the New York School—John Cage, Morton Feldman, Earle Brown, and Christian Wolff—began experimenting with indeterminacy and investigated graphic notation as a way to restrict and reinvent the information given to performers. Another important inspiration for experimental notation was the advent of electronic and tape composition. At the time, copyright laws required that a visual document be registered for each new work. However, for electronic composition, a score was after the fact and thus essentially decorative. Many early electronic works by Ligeti and Stockhausen, especially, have beautiful graphic scores.

Soon after, the Fluxus movement took the concept of the score into the realm of the absurd. Paik, George Brecht, Yoko Ono, and many others began creating unrealizable scores, as well as scores for actions that abandoned traditional musical instruments—and musicians—entirely. The original Cage/Knowles Notations reflects prolific experimental and cross-disciplinary creativity by both visual artists and composers. Knowles recalls the fertile, collegial atmosphere of the period and remarks, “People don’t really understand how much interaction there was.” Once married to Dick Higgins, she was one of the founding members of Fluxus and shares with the group an interest in “intermedia” projects, a love for permeable boundaries between art and life, and a sense of humor. Rifling through a file cabinet at her home in Soho, she discovers “Swell Song,” a short, poetic score written for her by the late James Tenney.

Onion Skin Song by Alison Knowles

Knowles creates and performs her own scores. They are visual artworks rich with chance and the material of everyday life. In Onion Skin Song, which hangs on her wall, the vegetable’s veined, transparent layers are scattered in flower-like shapes across a large sheet of paper. The minimal Shoe String Song, which she says was “John [Cage]’s favorite,” features a single, snaking brown line. Knowles points out a break in the lace, where the frayed end evokes a burst of energy. Both scores were made by tossing the “ingredients” into a blueprint machine, although she also creates versions of Onion Skin live by pressing new skins between layers of plastic wrap, projecting the results on a screen, and performing from them.

The artist also makes her own instruments: reddish, sculptural pouches she calls “Bean Turners.” Filled, indeed with beans—discovering that soy disintegrated, she turned to adzuki—that tumble from one end to the other, the stiff sacks create washes of noise that slowly crescendo and fade. Knowles’s abstract scores have also been performed on traditional instruments, and sometimes in combination with more unusual objects. She has always thought of herself as someone who brings visual art into the sonic world, though not exactly as a composer. When asked if she has any expectations about how her scores will be performed, she replies, “I like to be really surprised.” Graphic scores, she said, first crossed disciplines by becoming “useful in galleries,” where visitors could appreciate their beauty and see what performers were working from. However, the interest now flows from both directions. Recently, her work has attracted interest from music departments as well as the fine arts. “Music is so lively now because it’s open,” she adds, and she affirms that she enjoys working with any student who likes “making things.”

The 1960s and ’70s produced composers and artists who were in constant conversation with one another. In addition to its dialogue with other disciplines, composition and notation began to feel the influence of jazz, especially regarding improvisation. Earle Brown, who began as a jazz trumpeter and began exploring open notational approaches in the 1950s, describes his work both as influenced by the dynamic aesthetics of Jackson Pollock and Alexander Calder and as “secretly” exploring why classical musicians could not improvise. By removing certain expected information from his scores, he hoped to bring improvisation into the world of his interpreters. (There’s a short video featuring performances of these works on the Earle Brown Music Foundation website.)

Wadada Leo Smith, one of today’s seminal jazz composers, developed a system of notation during the 1970s that he calls Ahkreanvention. Its colors, symbols, loops, and lines represent specific improvisatory cues, although it is impossible to learn the system without studying with Smith himself. Another giant of the AACM, Anthony Braxton, also uses an idiosyncratic graphic system to notate his compositions. The titles of his works are esoteric signs that combine shapes, letters, and numbers, and Braxton himself must decipher them in order to discover how they should be played.

Douglas Wadle Amphiboly

Improvisation continues to be one of the primary partners to experimental notation. Douglas Wadle, a Los Angeles-based composer and one of Tenney’s last students at CalArts, suggests that the link between the two has in fact grown. Like Brown, Wadle transitioned from jazz performance (via comparative literature and ethnomusicology) to experimental composition, and brings a cerebral, interrogative sensibility to his work. At a philosophical level, he is interested in language—and notation—as a code and method for making sense. Wadle creates graphic scores, he says, with an eye and ear for how a performer will decode them. Unlike many other composers, he adds, he is interested in “analytic types of thought processes.” In his Logos prior Logos No. 4, for example, the interpreter overlays two or three layers of transparencies with straight and curved lines on top of a background score dotted with musical cells. Each line represents a parameter of the performance, such as temporal placement or breadth of sound spectrum, and must be read from one end to the other as a continuum. The score is then ordered by the position of the cells relative to the lines.

Wadle retains an ethnographer’s interest in performing research. He describes his composition as a process of finding ways to collect information about a perceptual question he has formulated. Recently, he wondered about how performers exchange meaning between visual and aural senses, and in pursuit of answers, his composition turned into painting. In fact, the score for his work Amphiboly was the first painting he made in ten years. When a guitarist took up the score for performance, Wadle was shocked when his “cubist-like bracketing over the notes” were interpreted as phrase markings. It wasn’t off the wall—it was obvious. “How could I have missed that?” the composer wonders.

From Marina Rosenfeld’s series WHITE LINES (2005-7)

The legibility, or illegibility, of notation also interests composer Marina Rosenfeld. She is currently at work on a large-scale sound installation that will be produced in association with the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Biennial this March. According to Rosenfeld, Teenage Lontano “covers” or “remixes” Ligeti’s Lontano as a work for teenage voices and electronics. The teens will sing while listening to “individualized headphone scores” that the composer is creating, thereby moving experimental notation off the page and into an entirely different technological register. The arrangement, she says, “[Will] allow them to create all kinds of dissonant tone clusters without having to hear each other specifically. Every singer is in a way in his or her own world, with headphones on and iPods, in that unique interiority of listening within a headset while in a social situation.”

Rosenfeld has used graphic notation throughout her career, particularly as a way to include musical novices in her ensembles. For her Emotional Orchestra, for example, she developed a notation for bowing that articulated a few essential motions and distinctions, allowing women who had never played a string instrument to quickly establish a rudimentary level of control. The score for White Lines takes a more lyrical, abstract approach, with pairs of vertical bands changing widths over a video montage. For many years, Rosenfeld has pursued a conceptual strain of composing that owes much to the cross-disciplinary dialogues that began half a century ago. Her work poses critiques of the musical insider, the value of expertise or virtuosity, and “the ideosocial construction of music-making itself.”

Score by Stephen Vitiello Listen to a performance here.

Stephen Vitiello is another artist who has found a provocative niche between music and image. Although he got his start playing in punk bands and has found it advantageous at times to describe himself as an electronic musician, he most accurately falls within the category of sound art. “For the greater part of my career,” he says, “opportunities have come from the world of (audio) visual arts, far more than music.” This means that Vitiello teaches in the School of the Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University and is represented by galleries in New York, London, and Paris. It also means that composition has arrived relatively late in his career.

Vitiello created his first graphic scores for his recent collaboration with flutist Molly Barth, formerly of eighth blackbird. She and her new ensemble, Beta Collide (with Brian McWhorter, trumpet, and Phillip Patti, percussion) invited Vitiello to write for them. “It had been a very long time since I notated anything properly,” he admits, so he cast about for a way to produce a score. He continues, “I was in Maine last summer and took some photos of reeds in water. When I looked back at the photos, I could see rhythms and long intersecting drones. More important, I could see a mood, which to me equates very much with a sound.” He turned two photos into scores and sent them to Barth, who was “maybe a bit confused.” Vitiello went to Oregon to rehearse with the group and says, “In the end, the scores were more like still images from a video that they were creating a soundtrack for. Philip dipped gongs and triangles in and out of water, and Brian poured water into his trumpet.”

Wadle and Vitiello’s scores will be included in Notations 21. As Sauer notes, there is indeed “something timely” about graphic notation. This fall, eight months after she began collecting scores, the inveterate interdisciplinary New York venue, The Kitchen, held an exhibition of graphic scores called Between Thought and Sound, and paired the show with several performances. Matthew Lyons, The Kitchen’s assistant curator, remarks that it took two and a half years to prepare the show, and that it had been an interest of the venue’s director, Debra Singer, for some time. Still, he says, interest does seem to be collecting around graphic scores. In addition to Notations 21 and its series of concerts, he notes, sound art curator Christoph Cox is planning an exhibition similar to The Kitchen’s for 2009 or 2010 at the Houston Contemporary Art Museum.

Still, why does experimental notation seem to be making a comeback? What happened after composers of the 1960s made notation an object of radical investigation? In recent years, computer notation software programs such as Finale and Sibelius have made standard notation more convenient than ever, further marginalizing the possibility of more experimental approaches. While computer notation programs are ubiquitous among composers these days, there has also been a backlash of composers who treasure the handwritten manuscript and remain resistant to the depersonalization of digitally manufactured scores. At the same time, the most sophisticated computer notation programs now contain the ability to accept symbols entered by a user, and the most techno-savvy composers now have the tools to create their own programs.

Two young composers working with unconventional notation reflect radically different approaches to our digital era. Ann L. Dentel, a long-standing member of the Southern California “Art/Anti-Art” collective Big City Orchestra, continues the contrary, DIY spirit of the Fluxus tradition with her epic 365 collection. She created a piece of music every day for a year on paper by hand, which veered heavily towards the side of graphic, bringing a highly apostatic sense of craft to notation. On the other hand, Andre Vida, an American now living in Berlin, synthesized the individuality of experimental notation and the opportunities of computer programming by creating a series of animated scores. They’re available with performance instructions on his website.

From the tentative revisions of the early 20th century to the proliferating, idiosyncratic practices of today, graphic notation has offered composers—and artists—a way to express what standard systems cannot. It has enabled them to say not just more, but also sometimes provocatively less than traditional scores. Sound art and the current flexibility of disciplines allow the visual components of music and the aural possibilities of space to manifest in beautiful, complex documents. At the same time, open scores have their own appeal for improvisers and others in search of answers to profound, evasive musical questions. Ever occupying the margins of sense and perception, graphic scores play an important role in bringing adventurous minds to music.

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Alyssa Timin

Alyssa Timin is a freelance journalist living in New York. Her writing on music and art has appeared in a variety of publications including PMP Magazine, the Finnish Music Quarterly, Visual Arts Journal, NewMusicBox, and Sequenza 21.