Category: Analysis

Marc Sabat

Morton Feldman once said that composers make plans and music laughs.

On another occasion, “My definition of composition is: the right note in the right place with the right instrument.”

With these two statements, Feldman infers a unique personal position in recent music—the experimental composer who values empiricism over methodology, and one who prioritizes traditional musical parameters (pitch, timing, and orchestration) over dynamic extremes or extended playing techniques, without denying them.

Perhaps the most continually striking aspect of Feldman’s music is its concentration—its focus on the sonority itself (like Varèse) and its awareness of the phenomenological experience of sound-time, which is mapped with complete precision and logic. In his use of notation, visual analogies and paradoxical relationships are continually exploited to suggest expressive inflections of the sound. Seemingly identical rhythms may be notated in various unorthodox ways. For example: an early piano piece consists entirely of dotted quarter notes instead of simply quarters, somehow implying a different dynamic shape, an inner division into three parts.

In his responses to harmony, Feldman poetically acknowledges the concerns of his time as a struggle between the abstract chromatic series of equal temperament and the tendency of tones to establish a chromatic field with gravitational polarities based on harmonic forces (tonality). His use of transformations applied to chromatic pitch-sets echoes the work of Schoenberg and Webern without relying on the systems of postwar serialism.

“…this could be an element of the aural plane, where I’m trying to balance, a kind of coexistence between the chromatic field and those notes selected from the chromatic field that are not in the chromatic series.”

Between 1977 and the mid-1980s, Feldman composed many pieces in which the spellings of the written pitches, especially for string instruments, evoke distinctly enharmonic variations. Tones, successive and simultaneous, are written in unorthodox ways, occurring as double-flats, flats, naturals, sharps, double-sharps. As in his notations of rhythm, Feldman here exploits the inherently paradoxical possibilities of visually distinct notations that sound ‘the same’, suggesting that they might imply shadings of difference in the sound.

What, then, is meant by Feldman’s use of the pitches Bb and B#, G# and Gbb, all in the first bar of his fragment Composition for violin (1984)? Before answering this question, let me backtrack for one moment to explain how these pieces ended up being performed at all.

Several years ago, Walter Zimmermann drew my attention to Sebastian Claren’s research about Morton Feldman. In his book Neither, Claren mentions two unpublished solo violin manuscripts in the collection of the Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel. Around the same time, I was invited to prepare a concert program for the series Ars Nova presented by Armin Koehler. I had already been in contact with the Feldman Estate to obtain photocopies of the manuscripts and permission to perform the music. (Special thanks again to the Trustees of the Morton Feldman Estate and to Universal Edition, Wien, for allowing my annotated versions of the score to be published along with this text.)

Some months later, I received an envelope with three photocopied pages. One was the completed, dated and titled score For Aaron Copland (1981), a concise monophonic composition consisting entirely of diatonic white notes (no sharps or flats). It was the other two pages, however, that really aroused my interest—an untitled fragment dated 1984, possibly the beginning of a larger solo violin work for Paul Zukofsky which had been abandoned in favor of Violin and String Quartet. The intriguing texture of this piece consists almost entirely of double-stops grouped in pairs, forming progressions which are always immediately repeated. These structures recur unsystematically throughout the score in various constellations. Immediately remarkable are the extremely unorthodox pitch-spellings—among ‘normal’ intervals like perfect fifths and major thirds are strange triple-diminished fourths and double-augmented thirds.

At this stage in his work, Feldman had recently completed major pieces for violin, including Spring of Chosroes (1977) and the 75-minute piano-violin duo For John Cage (1982) written for Cage’s 70th birthday concert and premiered by Paul Zukofsky and Aki Takahashi as Symphony Space, New York. No doubt his conversations with Zukofsky and his familiarity with John Cage’s contemporaneous use of enharmonic spelling in Cheap Imitation (1977) would have inspired Feldman to compose shadings of intonation ‘on the edge’ of the tempered chromatic intervals. But exactly how did Feldman expect this notation to be interpreted?

Feldman was certainly aware of violinists’ expressive use of intonation, referring on one occasion to Heifetz’s “Jewish octave”. In conversation, Zukofsky has related to me his own model of intonation in practice, which loosely describes equal temperament “in the middle,” Pythagorean tuning based on acoustically just fifths “on one side” and Meantone tuning based on acoustically just thirds “on the other side.” With his legendary precision, Zukofsky was able to flexibly articulate intervals in pure tuning as well as micro-subdivisions of the tempered scale.

Roughly speaking, his Meantone model is similar to Leopold Mozart’s advice that in ensemble playing one should “take the flats higher and the sharps lower” to achieve harmonious intonation, without necessarily detuning the open strings to produce narrow Meantone fifths (tempered by 1/4 Syntonic Comma). Pythagorean intonation (which many violinists know as melodic “expressive” intonation) is based on the opposite principle: raised leading tones, narrow semitones, high sharps, low flats. This paradoxical situation between melodic and harmonic tuning led some 20th-century violinists (including Rudolf Kolisch and members of the LaSalle Quartet) as well as Arnold Schoenberg to respond with an unequivocal advocacy of Equal Temperament as the “modern solution.”

Given Feldman’s close relationship to the piano, the most “naturally” equal tempered of instruments (for which he occasionally notated double-flats and double-sharps as well) one might consider interpreting his accidentals as expressive inflections which can be realized without altering the pitch. This is certainly possible. An examination of For John Cage, however, reveals a far more liberal and specific use of enharmonic notation in the violin part. There are several examples of a phrase undergoing immediate repetitions with variations of spelling. This indicates to me that he felt a violinist would be able to interpret such signs and vary the intonational shadings.

Assuming, then, that the accidentals can be read as variations from the tempered chromatic field, how can a player interpret these in the absence of any specific directions? Clearly, the two concrete starting points would be Zukofsky’s models which Feldman must have known about. But which one? Zukofsky suggests that Feldman’s intention was Meantone while Claren has argued for a Pythagorean interpretation.

In the violin version of Cage’s Cheap Imitation, the Pythagorean Tuning is specified. It adds piquancy to the chance-derived modal transpositions and melodic structures taken from Satie’s Socrate, which are largely based on tetrachords (perfect fourths divided into whole-tones and semi-tones). Playing instructions suggest that the tuning should not necessarily be realized precisely, rather at times exaggerated for expressive effect, to delineate and microtonally inflect the melodies. In general, it is a good choice for melodic music in which the acoustical purity of the perfect fourth, fifth, and whole-tone are most important and an expressive distinction between lowered flats and raised sharps is desired.

In music where many double-stops are notated, a completely different logic must come into play. Simultaneous tones are acoustically drawn into special relationships which do not always conform with Pythagorean intervals or tempered tunings, instead depending primarily on how closely the ratio of the sounding frequencies approaches a simple rational number (i.e. a frequency ratio of 2:1 produces an octave). These special relationships are the basis of Just Intonation (JI), which is a term to describe the infinite micro-variations of tuning which the ear can perceive as harmonic relations between different tones.

Aspects of JI have formed part of the theory and practice of various world musics. Ancient Greek, Indian, Arabic, Chinese as well as European music have all considered how we hear tuned pitches forming melodic and harmonic relationships. For example, the melodic practice of Indian ragas is largely based on a set of 22 tones tuned above a drone in various JI ratios produced between the first ten pitches of the overtone series and their octave transpositions.

In Europe, Helmholtz’ publication of Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen als physiologische Grundlage für die Theorie der Musik (1863) and its translation into English by Alexander Ellis (1875) inspired serious experimentation with JI amongst interpreters, instrument-builders, and composers. The initial musical research focused on pure tunings of the traditional chords based on the first six overtones, using prime partials 2, 3, and 5, and sometimes called 5-limit Tuning. In the 20th century, various composers (notably Harry Partch, Ben Johnston, La Monte Young, James Tenney, among others) have expanded this model to include new tuned sounds generated by higher prime partials, inventing the concept of Extended Just Intonation.

However, up until now, two main obstacles have slowed theoretical advances in this area. The first is notational: to date there has been no generally accepted method of reconciling conventional staff notation with the infinite variations of tunings. Standard European notation has been based on ignoring comma-sized differences of tuning, assuming that instruments of flexible pitch would make “appropriate” corrections anyway, while any successful system of JI notation would have to explicitly differentiate them. For example, consider the notes C and E played as open strings which have been tuned in a series of perfect fifths C-G-D-A-E. The interval produced between them is a comma larger than the pure major third, also written C-E.

The second obstacle has been a conceptual one: a mistaken idea that just intonation cannot “work” musically. In spite of music’s willing embrace of complexity in the parameters of instrumental timbre and rhythmic timing, a similar rigor has been avoided in the dimension of pitch and harmony. It is important to note that untempered tuning in no way restricts modulation. In fact, as in tempered tuning, any tone can be taken in any one of many harmonic contexts, and there are many tones which are enharmonic near-equivalents. What Extended JI offers is a wider palette of precisely-tuned and focused sonorities, consonant and dissonant, ranging from simple to extremely complex.

In my recent musical work, I have attempted to consider and address the practical development of intonation. (see Intonation and Microtonality) Together with Wolfgang von Schweinitz, I have co-developed The Extended Helmholtz-Ellis JI Pitch Notation, a system of accidental signs which allows pitch relationships to be written precisely using standard five-line staff notation. (This notation also allows for accurately-written tempered and irrational pitch relationships by incorporating Alexander Ellis’ notion of dividing the octave into 1200 tiny micro-intervals called “cents”). For a legend of this notation, a text describing it in detail, and various charts of pitches, see www.plainsound.org under the heading “research”.

For each interval in Feldman’s Composition for violin (1984), I interpreted his spelling by choosing a tuning in Extended JI. Since each bar repeats immediately, and then recurs later in the piece, it seemed to me more beautiful (and enjoyable) to notate a tuning for each pattern, rather than finding approximate shadings on the fly. For the most unusually spelled intervals, this meant finding “new” tuned sounds which I could reproduce reliably. At the same time, I often chose complex intervals which (in practice) would be subject to interpretative variation, as I believe Feldman would have preferred to any fixed solution.

As a starting point, I assumed that traditionally-spelled intervals would be tuned in the simplest way possible: a fifth would be a pure fifth (like the open strings) and a third would be a pure major or minor third, based on how violinists retune chords naturally. I avoided the exclusive use of any particular system (Meantone or Pythagorean), allowing context to dictate an “interesting” tuned sonority. First, I considered the size of the written interval, preferring a quasi-Meantone understanding of the accidentals which assumes sharps are relatively lower than flats. Then, I looked for nearby overtone-series based relationships from the prime partials 3, 5, 7, 11, and 13, choosing ratios which produced complex intervals that can be tuned by ear.

As I began the process of practicing to play these intervals, I realized that I would have to compose new pieces for myself to learn to accurately construct and hear the unconventional intervals I had notated. I thought of writing music in which the process of tuning would somehow become a subject in itself: a series of intonation studies, not unlike Feldman’s own early piano pieces, or perhaps Nancarrow’s player-piano studies, mapping out small corners of the new and unfamiliar terrain.

In particular, I became interested in discovering the enharmonic possibilities for modulation between different fundamentals—tuned tones which were identical or nearly identical to tones with completely different harmonic derivations. Such constructions enabled me to produce the more unusual sonorities, especially the quarter-tone and third-tone intervals involving prime partials 11 and 13. This project has developed into a book of music in just intonation for violin, containing solos and also duos with other instruments, titled Les Duresses.

contact: Plainsound Music Edition, [email protected]

Chris Plack Photo By Roger Deeble

Our perception of sound depends on the biological equipment we are born with—our ears and our brains. How does the ear decode the acoustic information that we receive, and what can we learn about music from an understanding of how the ear and the brain respond to sound?

From Air to Ear

Sound is composed of pressure fluctuations in a medium (for example, the air). The pressure fluctuations enter the ear through the ear canal that ends with the eardrum (see Figure 1). Vibrations at the eardrum are carried to the cochlea by three tiny bones—the malleus, incus, and stapes (collectively called the “ossicles”). The cochlea is a narrow fluid-filled tube curled up into a spiral. Running the length of the tube is a thin sheet of tissue called the “basilar membrane.” Vibrations of the ossicles produce sound waves in the cochlear fluid, which cause the basilar membrane to vibrate. These vibrations are converted into electrical impulses in the auditory nerve, which carries information about the sound to the brain.

Figure 1

Figure 2

The ear is exquisitely sensitive to sound. We can hear vibrations of the eardrum of less than a tenth the width of a hydrogen atom! The ear is also very good at separating out the different frequency components of a sound (e.g., the different harmonics that make up a complex tone). Each place on the basilar membrane is tuned to a different frequency (Figure 2), so that low-frequency sounds cause the membrane to vibrate near the top (apex) of the spiral, and high-frequency sounds cause the membrane to vibrate near the bottom (base) of the spiral. Each nerve cell or neuron in the auditory nerve is connected to a single place on the basilar membrane, so that information about different frequencies travels to the brain along different neurons.

Figure 3

The ear acts a bit like a prism for sound. A prism separates out the different frequencies of light (red, yellow, green, blue etc.) to produce a spectrum (also seen in a rainbow, of course). Similarly, the ear separates out the different frequencies of sound to produce an acoustic spectrum. Actually, the human eye can distinguish just three basic colors: The vivid sensation of color we experience is made up of combinations of these three sensations. The ear, on the other hand, can separate up to a hundred different sound frequencies, corresponding to the number of frequencies that can be separated by the basilar membrane. We get a much more detailed experience of the “color” of sounds (timbre) than we do of the color of light. This is how we can tell the difference between two different instruments playing the same note, for example, a French horn and a cello both playing C3. Although the pitch of the two instruments is the same, the timbre—which is determined by the relative levels of the harmonics—is different (Figure 3). By separating out the different harmonics on the basilar membrane, the ear can distinguish between the two sounds.

The sensation of dissonance is determined in part by the response of the basilar membrane. When two notes are played together, dissonance is related to the production of “beats,” which are heard as a regular flutter. We hear beats when two harmonics are too close together in frequency to be separated by the basilar membrane. For simple frequency ratios, many of the harmonics of the two tones coincide (e.g., the third harmonic of a 440–Hz fundamental has the same frequency—1320 Hz—as the second harmonic of a 660-Hz fundamental). These simple ratios are heard as consonant. For complex ratios, many of the harmonics from the two tones do not coincide exactly, and those harmonics that are close together in frequency interact on the basilar membrane to produce beating sensations that lead to a sensation of dissonance.

The brain processes the electrical signals from the cochlea using vastly complicated networks of specialized neurons in the brain. The way the sound is analyzed depends on our own personal experience to a certain extent. The strengths of the connections between neurons change as we experience sounds, particularly during early infancy when the brain is growing rapidly.

Pitch

Figure 4

Tonal musical instruments vibrate to produce regular, repetitive, patterns of pressure fluctuations (Figure 4) (as opposed to some percussion instruments, such as a cymbal, that produce irregular or impulsive sound waveforms). The frequency at which the instrument vibrates determines the frequency of the pressure fluctuations in the air, which in turn determines the pitch that we hear.

Pitch is the sensation corresponding to the repetition rate of a sound wave. Pitch is represented in the brain in terms of the pattern of neural impulses (Figure 5). When a tone is played to the ear, neurons will tend to produce electrical impulses synchronized to the frequency of the tone, or to the frequencies of the lower harmonics. An individual neuron may not fire on every cycle, but across an array of neurons the periodicity of the waveform is well represented. Indeed, if you record the electrical activity of the auditory nerve when a melody is played, you can hear the melody in the electrical impulses!

Figure 5

The highest frequency that can be represented in this way is about 5000 Hz. Above this frequency, neurons cannot synchronize their impulses to the peaks in the sound waveform. This limit is reflected in the frequency range of musical instruments: The highest note on an orchestral instrument (the piccolo) is about 4500 Hz. Melodies played using frequencies above 5000 Hz sound rather peculiar. You can tell that something is changing but it doesnÕt sound “melodic” in any way.

Pitch may be decoded by specialized neurons in the brain that are sensitive to different rates of neural impulses. It seems that the information from the first eight harmonics is the most important in determining pitch. The basilar membrane can separate out these first few harmonics, and a trained listener can “hear out” each harmonic in turn, by carefully attending to the individual harmonic frequencies. The frequencies of the low harmonics are coded individually by regular patterns of activity in separate neurons, and the brain combines the information to derive pitch. For example, if harmonics of 880 Hz, 1320 Hz, and 1760 Hz are identified, then the brain can work out that the fundamental frequency of the waveform is 440 Hz (the highest common factor of these three).

Absolute Pitch

A melody is composed of a sequence of tones with different frequencies. A melody is characterized by the intervals between the individual frequencies (i.e., the frequency ratios between the notes), rather than by the absolute frequencies of the notes. I can play “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” in any key I like, and the melody will still be instantly recognizable. We can easily form memories for a sequence of musical intervals, but most of us do not have an internal reference or memory for absolute frequency. There are individuals (perhaps 0.1 percent of the population) who can instantly identify the note being played, in the absence of any external cues. These individuals are said to have perfect or absolute pitch, and may have acquired their skill by exposure to standard frequencies during a critical learning period in childhood.

Individuals with absolute pitch have the ability to form a stable representation of pitch in their memories, which they can use as a standard reference to compare with the pitch of any sound in the environment. These individuals also have a way of labeling the pitch they experience in terms of the language of music. This latter ability is sometimes ignored. It has been argued that there are many people with a stable memory for pitch who cannot provide a musical label in the way associated with absolute pitch, but can, for example, hum or sing a tune from a recording they know with a good frequency match to the original.

Following Musical Sequences

In many situations, we experience a number of different sounds at the same time. This is particularly true if we are listening to an ensemble of musicians, when we may be receiving several different melodies at once. All the sound waves from the different instruments add together in the air, so that our ears receive a sum of the sound waves. It is like trying to work out what swimming strokes several different swimmers on a lake are using, just by looking at the complex patterns of ripples that arrive at the shore. How do our ears make sense of all this?

Figure 6

One of the ways the ear can separate out sounds that occur close together is in terms of their pitches. If the notes from two different sequences cover the same range of frequencies, the melodies are not heard separately, and a combined tune is heard. If the frequency ranges are separated (for example, if one melody is in a difference octave) then two distinct melodies are heard (Figure 6). Some composers (e.g., Bach, Telemann, Vivaldi) have used this property of hearing to enable a single instrument (such as a flute) to play two tunes at a time, by rapidly alternating the notes between a low-frequency melody and a high-frequency melody. Looking at this in another way, the earÕs tendency to separate sequences of notes by pitch constrains (to a certain extent) the melodies that can be used in music. If the frequency jump in a musical line is too great, then the ear may not be able to fuse the notes into a single sequence. The effect is also dependent on the rate at which the notes are played. Melodies with rates slower than about two notes a second can be fused even if the frequency jump between notes is quite large.

We can also use the timbres of different instruments to separate melodies and rhythms, even if the notes cover the same frequency range. For example, a melody played on a French horn can be separated from a melody played on a cello, even if the notes used are similar in frequency. Again, the separation is stronger for rapid sequences of notes. As we learned earlier, instruments with different timbres produce different patterns of excitation on the basilar membrane. The ear is very good at distinguishing different patterns of harmonics.

Finally, we can use our two ears to separate sounds coming from different directions. A sound from the right arrives at the right ear before the left and is more intense in the right ear than the left. The brain uses these differences to localize sound sources, and we can easily attend to the sequence of sounds that come from a specific point in space. Each instrument in an ensemble occupies a single location, and this helps us to separate out the different melodies. For this same reason, stereo musical recordings (which contain cues to location) sound much clearer than mono recordings.

Emotion and Meaning

Why does music have such a strong psychological effect on us?

The brain is very good at learning associations between events. A piece of music may be associated strongly with a particular place or time. If we hear a piece of music during an emotional experience (falling in love, death of a relative) the piece of music may gain the power to conjure up that emotion. A primitive region of the brain called the amygdala seems to be important in making emotional connections such as this. The amygdala controls another region of the brain called the hypothalamus, that in turn controls the release of hormones such as adrenalin, and basic bodily functions such as the beating of the heart and respiration. In this way, emotional stimuli can produce physiological changes in our bodies. Music can cause stress and fear reactions similar to those produced by events that are truly dangerous.

Some chords or sequences of notes seem broadly connected with sad feelings (e.g., minor modes) and others with happy feelings (e.g. major modes). Part of this might be due to learned associations, although even three-year-old children associate minor and major modes in this way. It is possible that consonant musical intervals, such as those involved in major triads, may lead naturally to a positive and upbeat feeling.

Another component of music that can be used for emotional effect is rhythm. I am reminded of the menacing increase in tempo during a shark attack in Jaws. Again, we may learn to associate certain rhythms with particular feelings, although it is clear that, physiologically, a slow tempo reflects withdrawal and depression (slowing down of natural rhythms) and a fast tempo reflects excitement (increase in breathing, heart rate etc.). It seems likely, therefore, that part of the emotional response to rhythm is innate. Indeed, it has been suggested that one of the reasons minor modes sound sad is that they are often played with slow tempi, and children form the association at an early age.

In many ways, music is like a spoken language, and like a spoken language we need to learn the language before we can appreciate the meaning that is being expressed. An American needs to learn to understand Chinese music, just as he must learn to understand Mandarin or Cantonese. Similarly, most children in the West receive intense exposure to harmonic, consonant, major mode, music. To break away from this brain washing requires a degree of commitment on the part of the listener. It might also help to have the right genes. The evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller has suggested that music (like other art forms) is a “fitness indicator.” According to Miller, musical ability indicates to potential mates that we have good genes that will benefit our progeny. If this hypothesis is correct, then we would expect musical ability to be inherited, and there is some evidence for this. Genetically identical twins are more alike in their musical talents than non-identical twins (although childhood environment plays a greater role). So while we may never discover a “gene for appreciation of avant-garde music” (genetics is rarely this simple), given that many other aspects of our personalities have been shown to be inherited to some extent, it is at least plausible that some individuals are naturally more receptive to new musical ideas.

Further Reading

• Bregman, A.S. (1990). Auditory Scene Analysis: The Perceptual Organization of Sound. Cambridge, USA: MIT Press. The definitive work on how sounds are organized by the ear, including a chapter on music.
• Deutsch, D. (Ed.) (1999). The Psychology of Music (2nd ed.). London: Academic Press. Covers everything from acoustics, to music perception, to music performance.
• Moore, B.C.J. (2003). An Introduction to the Psychology of Hearing (5th ed.). London: Academic Press. A comprehensive yet readable account of hearing, including the basic physiology of the ear.
• Plack, C.J. (2005). The Sense of Hearing. Mahwah, New Jersey: Laurence Erlbaum Associates. My new book—out soon!

“Whereas in the past, the point of disagreement has been between dissonance and consonance, it will be, in the immediate future, between noise and so-called musical sounds.”

—John Cage, The Future of Music: Credo (1937)

As tonality expanded and exploded in the early decades of the 20th century, performers were confronted with increasingly varied harmonic systems, systems that embraced consonance and dissonance and questioned the nature of order in radical new ways. Twelve-tone, modal, quartal, extended tertian, octatonic, whole tone, polytonal, and various other expansions of harmonic language presented a steady stream of new challenges. A contemporary music performer reading John Cage‘s statement in 1937 may have wondered how this forthcoming musical “disagreement” would further affect the nature of performance.

Pieces like Charles Ives‘ The Cage (1906), Anton Webern‘s Six Bagatelles for string quartet (1913), or Maurice Ravel‘s Le Tombeau de Couperin (1917) were already pushing the performer’s ability to navigate pitch. As the new harmonic systems were created, performers were adapting by changing their relationship with their instruments, practicing different scales and patterns.

The 1914 performances of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Luigi Russolo‘s Intonorumori noise orchestra had shocked the instrumental world by introducing explosions, whistles, whispers, creaks, percussion sounds, and human/animal voices directly to the concert stage. Russolo’s 1913 writing, L’Arte di Rumori (The Art of Noises) states the proof simply: “Ancient life was all silence. With the invention of the machine, noise was born. Today, noise triumphs and reigns supreme over the sensibilities of men.” Russolo’s belief that a “noise orchestra” was the future of music was realized spectacularly in electronic music. However, a new “intonorumori” was rising up directly within the orchestra itself. This art of instrumental noises was achieved by the so-called instrumental extended techniques.

Following the futurists, many composers brought the noise of modern industry directly into the orchestra. George Antheil‘s Ballet Mecanique (1924), incorporating an airplane motor, is just the most famous of a group of pieces that utilized this technique. Mosolov’s Iron Foundry (1928) uses a rattling thunder sheet throughout, and Varèse‘s Ionisation (1929-1931) uses sirens, anvils, and “lion’s roar.”

Added to this, traditional instruments were being played in unusual ways to embrace the world of noise. The piano was on the forefront of this trend, spirited primarily by composers who performed their own pieces in recitals. Leo Ornstein, George Antheil, and Henry Cowell were three such artists. Cowell’s Tides of Manaunaun (1915), with its massive clusters in the left arm, was followed by his pieces The Banshee, Aeolian Harp, and Sinister Resonance (1923-1925), which took the performer inside the piano for the first time. Cowell’s piano techniques included strumming the strings, plucking them, scraping them, and creating harmonics from the string fundamentals by lightly touching nodes on the instrument. In these pieces, he essentially created a new instrument from the piano.

Extended Techniques

Extended techniques, as may be inferred, require the performer to use an instrument in a manner outside of traditionally established norms. These norms are apt to change as the needs of music changes and as instruments develop. Stravinsky’s high C in the opening bassoon solo of The Rite of Spring, for example, may have been considered at the very edge of the register for the instrument in that context, something approaching an extended technique, but it is now solidly part of the bassoon symphonic repertoire. Saxophonists have seen the F# become a standard feature in recent years to the point that manufacturers added an F# key to the instrument. The saxophone high G, one half step up, remains in the realm of extended technique because it requires study of “altissimo” fingerings. Harmonics on string instruments or brass are not extended techniques but on woodwinds and piano they are. Plucking the string of a violin is not an extended technique, but tapping the body is. Playing a string instrument with a mute is not an extended technique, but attaching tinfoil to the bridge is. In the 18th century, the crescendo itself, called a Mannheimer, was considered an extended technique for the orchestra.

The threshold between extended and traditional techniques is thus fickle. However, we are less interested here with defining this boundary than we are in seeing what lies across it, firmly in the territory of extended techniques. These techniques may be idiomatic for the instrument, but they are not part of standard training. Why? The answer may lie in the concept of unity in Western classical music performance, and the ideal of uniformity in the areas of pitch and dynamics. This uniformity is upheld by the notion of virtuosity, a concept generally refering primarily to dexterity of pitch and applied ubiquitously to all instruments. Extended techniques are messy by design, exploring the chaotic aspects of instruments.

The rush to search out new sonic territories in the 20th century drove the exploration of instrumental sound production. Composers of the European and American avant-garde traditions were intent on utilizing widely different timbres in their compositions. Building on Cowell’s early pieces, John Cage invented the prepared piano (1938), filling it with a multitude of small objects that clank, thud, buzz, clink, and click when excited. The intended and audible effect is a piano with the sound of an infinitely variable percussion orchestra.

The piano has never been the same and has received more creative exploration than any other instrument. The performance notes for George Crumb‘s Makrokosmos (1972) describe in detail specific inside-the-piano techniques using small chains on the strings, plucking the strings in different ways, and carefully damping them. The piano is amplified, bringing the sound from inside the instrument out into the hall. Amplification of small instrumental sounds for art has its basis in late-1940s musique concrète and can be found as an extended technique of live music at least as early as John Cage’s Cartridge Music (1960). A nice contemporary piano example of amplification of small sounds is Marc Sabat’s For Magister Zacharias. In this piece, the Steinway piano key action of lifting the dampers without the hammer touching the string is amplified to an extreme to create a soft, percussive tone—as if someone were playing an autoharp with a heavy metal brush.

The exploration of extended techniques in the 1960s and ’70s resembles a land rush—with each composer, and in some cases each composition, boldly experimenting with some new technique of instrumental sound production. The desire for an expanded musical color pallet led composers and performers to discover increasingly creative performance techniques. Some of these include:

a) Extended Bowing and Percussive Techniques

String instruments can be bowed, and then they can be bowed. Extended bowing techniques include bowing on the bridge, behind the bridge, on the fingerboard, on the fingerboard on the opposite side of the left hand, bowing just at the tip or frog of the bow, applying pressure while bowing, slowing the bow speed until it almost stops, using very light pressure and fast bow speed, bowing with the wood (col legno), bouncing the bow (jete), striking the wood (col legno battuto), and numerous different bowing articulations by starting bow movement in different ways. Krzysztof Penderecki‘s Anaklasis (1959), Polymorphia (1961), and especially Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima (1960), contain many of these techniques used in the context of a large string ensemble.

Some composers have called for applying things other than bows to the strings, such as the glass rods used in Crumb’s Black Angels (1970). Michael Bach and Frances-Marie Uitti have worked extensively with curved bows and John Cage’s solo cello work, One⁸, (1991) was written with one in mind. For some composers, one bow isn’t enough. Uitti has pioneered a way of using two bows in the right hand on the cello. In order to access any combination of strings simultaneously, the two-bow technique can be combined with a curved bow. We also find an example of a performer using two bows in Jonathan Harvey‘s Imaginings (1994) and Julio Estrada‘s Miqi’nahual (1993) from his 1992 modular composition Doloritas. This opens up new possibilities for the bows to interfere with one another in interesting ways.

String harmonics have also been rigorously explored as an extended technique. The 90-minute composition Chronos Kristalla (1990) for string quartet by La Monte Young uses only natural harmonics, with each string specially tuned. Iannis Xenakis‘ Nomos Alpha (1966) for solo cello presents virtuosic use of the extended harmonic glissando. The “gull” effect in Crumb’s Vox Balaenae (1971) is another excellent example of the harmonic glissando as a special effect. Composers such as Gerard Grisey, Tristan Murail, Horatio Radulescu, and Salvatore Sciarrino have written for very high string harmonics, well beyond the 9th partial. Helmut Lachenmann‘s Pression (1969) for solo cello even calls for the cellist to touch harmonic nodes on the wood of the bow itself while bowing.

Bowing worked so well for the string family, musicians began applying bows to other instruments as well. String bows (especially bass bows) have been used on every possible percussion instrument including cymbals, crotales, tam tams, marimbas, vibraphones, bells, and glockenspiels. “Found” instruments such as crystal glasses, saws, and bowls have also been bowed. Curtis Curtis-Smith, George Crumb, Stephen Scott, Eleanor Hovda, this author, and others have used bowed piano, beginning with Curtis-Smith in Rhapsodies (1972). Eleanor Hovda’s Coastal Traces Tidepools 1 (1997) is a particularly nice example of the technique. The “sound icons” of Horatiu Radulescu are grand pianos turned on their side and bowed by several performers. Radulescu goes furthest in the abstraction of the piano by not even referring to it as a piano.

The EBow, popular since the 1970s with rock guitarists, is a handheld device that applies electromagnetic force to the string that results in a sustained tone. Apart from the guitar, the EBow can be used on other strings such as piano (Maggi Payne, Holding Patterns, 2004) and harp (John Cage, Postcards from Heaven for 1-20 harps, 1982).

But the exchange between bowing and percussion is not one-sided. Percussive techniques such as tapping and plucking have been applied to great affect on string instruments. The body of the instrument can be used as a resonant wooden drum achieving hundreds of differentiated sounds. Pizzicato techniques themselves are numerous and are not limited to the fingers. Plectrums and thin sticks, for example, have been used on string instruments as well (as in Crumb’s Black Angels, mentioned above).

Bert Turetzky‘s book, The Contemporary Contrabass (1989), is a wonderful guide for composers and performers. More recently, Allen and Patricia Strange‘s The Contemporary Violin (2001) has shown itself to be an excellent contemporary resource for extended string techniques.

b) Extended Blowing and Muting

Extended techniques for winds and brass include disassembling the instrument and playing various parts independently. Mouthpieces can be played alone or tapped like a small percussion instrument. With the mouthpiece alone or with the full instrument, all the extended embouchure effects are available, such as flutter, double, triple, or slap tonguing, a variety of articulations, playing the mouthpiece upside down or biting the mouthpiece and blowing (single reed instruments), bending the pitch with the embouchure, and various vibrato effects such as changing speed or wide vibrato.

With the instrument assembled, the full length of the tube offers a veritable playground of extended techniques. Colored noise can be obtained by blowing air through the instrument and changing fingerings. An unbelievable variety of multiphonics can be produced by singing while playing, using alternate fingerings, half valving, overblowing, or changing the embouchure in combination with special fingerings. Microtonal effects can be obtained by using “rips” or “smears” (fast movement between notes), “bends” (alterations of notes by loosening or tightening embouchure), and alternate or “false” fingerings which produce micro-changes in pitch and timbre. Harmonics have been used to good effect by overblowing a fundamental pitch. Luciano Berio‘s Sequenza VIIb (1969) for soprano sax uses a wide range of these extended techniques in rapid succession.

When the full length of the tube is not enough, composers have resorted to pedal tones (brass) or even to extending the tube by adding an extension such as the PVC pipe used in Judith Shatin‘s Sea of Reeds (1997) for clarinetist F. Gerard Errante.

Circular breathing allows for many techniques to be sustained over long periods of time. This author’s works for saxophone ensemble, such as Portals of Distortion (1998) and Endprint (2004), employ circular breathing over sustained trilled multiphonics.

The bell of a brass instrument has been used as an effective percussion instrument for rattling, knocking, and tapping effects. Brass players have also explored extensive use of mutes in combination with speaking and singing into the instrument and varied articulation. The Berio Sequenza V (1966) for solo trombone offers numerous examples of these. Mouthpieces from other instruments such as saxophone, clarinet, or oboe can be played on brass instruments creating strange hybrid instrumental sounds.

Robert Dick‘s The Other Flute (1989), Bruno Bartolozzi’s New Sounds for Woodwind (1967), and Harvey Sollberger‘s “The New Flute” (1975) are excellent text resources.

c) Extended Vocalization

No instrument has played a more prominent role in developing extended techniques than the voice. Theater, song, speech, emotion, and the body converge here making it the most resource rich. Extended vocal techniques include expressions such as panting, whistling, breathing (as an audible effect), hissing, sucking, laughing, clucking, barking, screaming, not to mention talking, yelling, and whispering. Almost every vocalized element found in life has been employed musically. We need look no further than Stripsody (1966), a composition by the singer Cathy Berberian. The comic book-like score asks the singer to express a wide range of emotions and sound effects in close succession. In the 1960s, Berberian was renowned for her facility with extended techniques and her performances of works by Berio, Cage, Ligeti, etc. defined a genre of experimental vocal music.

The mouth can also be obstructed in different ways while singing—by the hand, objects, or resonators such as drums, pianos, etc. Meredith Monk has used this technique to interesting effect. Joan La Barbara has beautifully employed a subtone growl (a very low, scratchy sound made by forming an Ôa’, loosening the throat, and producing a low rumble) in her pieces Rothko and Erin. Extremely high singing created by constricting the throat and inhaling has been explored by Haleh Abghari in this author’s Animus/Anima (2001). Voice multiphonics or harmonic singing, a technique prevalent in music of Tibet and Tuva, is considered an extended technique in Western music. It is used in this way in Hans Werner Henze‘s Versuch uber schweine (1969), for example.

The vocal cavity can be extended using resonators. Some examples include singing into the piano while the pedal is depressed, singing into drums (such as the bass drum in Animus/Anima), or singing into resonators such as Brenda Hutchinson‘s Long Tube performances with electro-acoustics.

The fact that all instrumentalists have vocal cavities, not just singers, has not escaped the attention of composers. Vocalizations while playing, singing into instruments, and talking have entered the world of instrumental music technique as well. Crumb’s Black Angels communicates its numerological structure in part through counting out loud in a variety of languages. And his Music for a Summer Evening (Makrokosmos III) (1974) for two amplified pianos and percussion uses vocal effects such as whistling and singing.

In Haleh Abghari’s stunning performance of Georges Aperghis‘s Recitation 8 (1977-78) for solo voice, she is coughing, singing very high notes, and talking—the intensity level growing one stanza after the next. The sounds are widely varied and their isolation and difference are magnified by the fact that they come from one singer. Yet despite the disjunctive content of the material, the patterns of difference are both amplified and grouped into a perpetual motion of timbre, and we begin to accept this collection of sound as the nature of this voice. Through extended techniques, the score activates and opens the voice of the soloist. Comparing this performance with the version by Martine Viard, we perceive how the score is personalized differently for each singer while the core of the composition remains. The music opens the timbral space, effectively drawing out the unique qualities of the voice.

After Experimentalism

Thus we arrive at the fundamental strength and limitation of extended techniques: These resources personalize the instrument, drawing out its unique qualities. Because the effects exist at the threshold of instrumental playing, they are apt to be extremely subjective, depending on the particular performer and particular instrument. While they are controllable, the aspects of control may be different for each performer.

After the 1960s and ’70s, the exploration of new techniques fell somewhat out of fashion. Some pioneers turned to more traditional styles. Penderecki—who created some of the most intense extended string music ever, followed by his detailed explorations of orchestral sound mass in De Natura Sonoris 1 (1967) and 2 (1971)—turned to more traditional writing. The same was true for Henryk Gorecki and Hans Werner Henze. To this day, extended techniques are often taught historically in music schools as merely endemic of 1960s experimentalism, or they are not taught at all.

However, a group of composers continued to refine and develop the lexicon of instrumental playing. Some of these include the German composer Helmut Lachenmann, the Romanian Iancu Dumitrescu, and the Americans Meredith Monk and Pauline Oliveros. Performers such as Evan Parker with saxophone, Vinko Globokar and Stuart Dempster with trombone, and Joan La Barbara and Thomas Buckner with the voice are just a few artists who have taken extended techniques beyond experimentalism. These days the lines between composer/performer, composition/improvisation, and instrumental/electro-acoustic are frequently blurred. Indeed much of the most interesting work with extended techniques in the 1990s appeared not in classical concert music but rather grew out of free improvisation and computer music. The world inhabited by the improvising performer has allowed for deeper development of many of the techniques discussed above. Performers are able to unlock a single technique and open it for careful exploration, creating differentiations of sound from what may be considered a single device. The cello improvisation pieces of Hugh Livingston, for example, using over 100 differentiated pizzicatos is an example of this exhaustive approach. Where a composer would write “pizz.” in the score, Livingston, as a performer, can translate this marking into a rich timbral space.

With the integration of technology into instrumental performance, a very interesting switch gradually took place in orchestration. In the context of synthesized sounds, extended techniques are useful for blending acoustic and electro-acoustic media. The two are idiomatically integrated through the implementation of extended techniques. In the early years, composers utilized extended techniques to expand the pallet of sounds beyond the confines of traditional modes. But in a world of electro-acoustic screeching, beeping, glitches, blips, and drones, instrumental extended techniques take on new meaning. They are employed precisely because they are instrumental. In fact, as we have discussed, they capture the essence of that particular instrument, drawing out its unique timbre, its grain. These techniques are no longer an “other,” disassociated from the instrument as some noise invasion. They are rather part of the sonic context of the instrument.

After experimentalism, noise has been embraced into the fabric of instrumental music. Timbre has gradually been elevated to the level of pitch and rhythm, to the point that timbre can function as the core of a musical structure. While this is most clearly heard in the arena of electro-acoustic music, it has also occurred in instrumental music. Because of the extended techniques left to us by the 20th century, instrumental performance is well prepared to face the new music, to explore this art of noise in deeper ways.

Matthew Burtner is a composer, computer music researcher, and performer. Originally from Alaska (b.1970), he is currently Assistant Professor of Composition and Computer Music, and Associate Director of the VCCM Computer Music Center at the University of Virginia. His recent music for instrumental ensembles and computer technology explores ecoacoustic, polyrhythmic and noise-based musical systems. His music has been recorded for Innova (USA), Daco (Germany), The WIRE (UK), Centaur (USA), and Euridice (Norway). His writings have appeared in the Journal of New Music Research, Organized Sound, and Leonardo Music Journal.

Thanks to Brian Sacawa for pointing out the corrections to this article which have been incorporated into this text.

Daniel Felsenfeld

A Musical Rain of Frogs
“This is the end, beautiful friend, the end…”—The Doors

Classical music, it seems, is dying; we are nearing the end of a great and beautiful tradition. Those who remain are left to wallow in the detritus of a beautiful departed era. Eleusis deserted; there is nobody left in this lovely garden. Who among us in the field of concert music has not heard these prophecies, this talk of apocalypse that would make Nostradamus blush?

In an era when record companies fold, when major musical institutions like the Metropolitan Opera claim deficits into the millions, those who write about music—the critics—seem bent on foretelling its unstoppable demise. The sky, they tell us, is falling. It’s falling. They and theirs have ridden this great wave to its breaking point, and now we have only the high water mark left with which to reckon.

And of course, it is not remotely true.

A whole article could be devoted to this idea: that what dies is not the art, but the institutions that present it to the largest cross-section. Their existence only truly matters to those who have personal investments therein, which includes the critics. When they say classical music is dying, they also seem to gloat over its desiccated corpse—a murder for which they are all, in part, responsible.

Historians like superstar musicologist Richard Taruskin presages end in order to give the sprawling narrative that is the new six-volume Oxford History of Western Music a proper coda. Taruskin, however, is somewhat innocent, not trying to end things in any other way than the abstract. He’s just reporting (albeit through an oddly built cultural prism) on what he believes he sees. Most dangerously, there seems to be, and to have always been, this problem with the “mainstream.” That what is most available, or unavailable in the most fashionable way, is what is truly worthy of discussion. This homogenization is a problem not just in our music but in our world. We want the familiar, fear the eccentric (or the elite) and criticize those who step above or make their voice heard.

It is dangerous, and does not suit the history of classical music, populated by renegades and rogues who followed their own visions, not pitching out tradition but engaging in the struggle to remap music to their specifications. Critics, true visionary critics, should be no different; they are equally responsible as the artists for the way music plays into the general culture, and should thus be held equally accountable.

A Critic and his Critic
“Words move, music moves only in time; but that which is only living can only die.”—T.S. Eliot

Richard Taruskin makes one error in his otherwise masterful summation of Western musical history. In his introduction he says:

The first chapter of this book makes a fairly detailed attempt to assess the specific consequences for music of a literate culture, and that theme remains a constant factor—always implicit, often explicit—in every chapter that follows, right up to (and especially) the concluding ones. For it is the basic claim of this multivolumed book—its number-one postulate—that the literate tradition of Western music is coherent at least insofar as it has a completed shape. Its beginnings are known and explicable, and the end is now foreseeable (and also explicable). And just as the early chapters of this book are dominated by the interplay of literate and preliterate modes of thinking and transmission (and the middle chapters cite enough examples to keep the interplay of literate and nonliterate alive in the reader’s consciousness), so the concluding chapters are dominated by the interplay of literate and postliterate modes, which have been discernable at least since the middle of the twentieth century, and which sent the literate tradition (in the form of a backlash) into its culminating phase.

In other words, he is now able, with the exegetical benefit of perspective—meaning the ability to see a thing for what it was rather than what it is—to see clearly the demise of the literate musical tradition. Yet this is, for an historian addressing the current, a dialectic impossibility. Later, in the same chapter, he says that “…historians’ transgressions often make history,” which leads me to believe that, in fact, the death of this literate tradition is convenient to him; it lends currency to his book as a sort of final, Shoah-like statement on this particular cultural phenomenon. The End is his friend, as it affords his book an air of completion. He is hoping this transgression—and it is a transgression, in the face of overwhelming evidence—will make history, and make his book a singularly valuable (even persuasive) cultural artifact.

Now it pains me to write this because the book is nothing short of spectacular. Other volumes of his (Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions and Defining Russia Musically to name only two) as well as his divisive but well-wrought critical pieces in The New York Times, have been preludes to the Oxford History, displaying a force-of-personality approach which makes him stellar, worthwhile reading. This book will (and should) be read by as many literate people as can handle its length (which is going to be alarmingly few, I fear). If as historian Jacques Barzun writes, “To be a good critic demands more brains and judgment than most men possess” in his essay “What Critics are Good For,” Taruskin is one of the happy and precious few worthy of the title.

So why is the sky falling, according to Taruskin, whose motives are no doubt higher than to simply lend his work cultural resonance? To him, it is an “ashes to ashes” sort of scenario, one that he describes without passing judgment. Simply put, it is electronic music, which needs no scribblers but rather “ear players” to compose, coupled with the advent of the recent phenomenon of “sound artists” which signals that this tradition is not so much headed for a dustbin, but destined to shake off the shackles of notation, free at last to simply be music. “For the defining feature of that history,” he writes, “as emphasized on page one, has been its reliance on written transmission; and what the digital revolution of the 1980s presaged above all was liberation from the literate tradition to which [composer Pierre] Boulez remained so unbendingly attached, and its probably eventual demise.”

From page one, he insists on the presence of a concomitant non-literate tradition—this term is not a judgment: it simply means something not dependent on a document for transmission—that has “never been fully supplanted in Western classical music or anywhere else.” This is of course true, but though he openly declares his detestation of an historical metanarrative, he seems, in these final pages, to be drawing down the curtain by invoking the lurking, peaceful nonliterate tradition as a means to The End, perhaps even a victim of the temporary, market-driven construct of literacy. “No musical repertoire,” he writes, “not even the Beethoven symphonies, is wholly fixed and transmitted by its text; there are always unwritten performing conventions that must be learned by listening and reproduced (and that, like spoken languages, change over time).” No surprises here—performance practice, a sort of preservationist society (true for all available repertoire, from chant to the avant-garde), is needed to fuel the written text. Though there were some in the recently passed century who thought music ought to be seen and not heard (Boulez for one, who gets swiped by Taruskin as retrogressive for thinking this way), to Taruskin it is the oral tradition which serves to “…surround and attack the literate tradition like pincers” that will, in the end, win the day.

To back him up, he cites Meredith Monk (“In Western Culture, paper has sometimes taken over the function of what music always was”), Nigel Osborne (“…the demise of the composer-scribe”), Paul Lansky (“[We’re] simplifying the pitch landscape to allow you to pay attention to something else”), Tod Machover (“the sampler frees the composer from the habits inculcated by Western notation”), Kyle Gann (sampling has “…led music away from atomism toward a more holistic approach”), and Anthony Tommasini (who, in reference to a sound installation, says: “So composers as we have known them may disappear someday. Yet, perhaps the concert, or at least a new kind of collective listening experience, will continue”). This is not exactly the sky-is- falling rhetoric of the futureshocker critics, but it does smack, especially in the fashion in which it is presented, of the old part-of-the-solution-or-part-of-the-problem mentality of the high modernists. Throughout the book there is a disturbing undercurrent of distaste for notation: he seems to think of it as a parasite venture to the parallel non-literate tradition, invented in the days of the printing press to fill the purses of greedy publishers—though he does not revel in the demise, nor beat his breast.

In his defense, his final sweep does not intimate that his is the last word on the topic. He says:

And so we must take our leave of it without resolution. We have observed at least three coexisting if not contending strands of literate musical composition at the end of the twentieth century. There is a thinning faction of traditional modernists, mostly aging but not without new recruits, who maintain the literate tradition at its most essentially and exigently literate. There is a vastly overpopulated stratum of composers, as yet virtually without a nonprofessional audience, who avail themselves of new technologies that presage the dilution and eventual demise of the literate tradition. And there is a small elite of commercially successful caterers to the needs of a newly ascendant class of patrons who currently control the fortunes of the mainstream performance and dissemination media, insofar as these remain open to elite art. All three are energetically active, productive, endowed with genuine talent. Which will prevail in the long run?

He goes on to say:

In the long run, it has been wisely observed, we are all dead. That long run is of no concern to the historian. At present, things remain in motion. That is all we can ask for. The future is anybody’s guess. Our story ends, as it must, in the middle of things.

The scope and arc of his book is similar to that of Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn To Decadence, which is itself a prediction of the end of a major historical period, the current era. Barzun attempts to sum up this period, drawing from such a panoply of sources that it dazzles even the most sophisticated reader. What they have in common, apart from both being extremely worthwhile reading—both should be required for anyone with an interest in how our culture got to be the way it is—is that, when it comes to the most recent developments, they both fall into the historians’ trap of leaving out critical details in order to make a point. Neither of them lie, but they both indulge the contravention of omission, choosing to focus on the worst aspects of the cultures they vivisect (for Barzun, the abhorrent decadence of our world; for Taruskin, the notion of the infirm necessity of the printed score). Barzun’s book reads a little like a history of Elizabethan England focused largely on bearbaitings and prostitution and omitting Shakespeare or Marlowe, so as to prove how dreary the culture is. Taruskin is less culpable because his argument is less extreme, but he focuses on composers he considers to be post-literate in the final chapters of his book, and while he does not omit those who work contra his thesis, there seems to still be an air of historical inevitability to the end. His consistent postulate throughout the book’s 4,500 pages is that ideas don’t exist without people to make them (“Motets don’t revel” he says, when citing someone who explains that a certain piece seems to enjoy itself), a stance undercut by his hazarding prognostications. He is not Barzun or Giambattista Vico, who believe that mankind is sinking into barbarism. Taruskin seldom makes qualitative judgments, but he still maintains something which has more participants than ever is fading, and that belies the obvious—yet somehow easily overlooked—truth.

The criticism inveighed against Taruskin, particularly by Tim Page in the Washington Post, is indicative of another dangerous line of thinking—the idea that there can, in fact, be objective observation. He says:

Richard Taruskin’s vast new book—though erudite, engaging and suffused throughout with a mixture of brilliance and delirium—does not quite live up to its title. Instead of The Oxford History of Western Music ($500), which implies a certain Olympian objectivity, these five volumes (complete with a book-length addendum with chronology, bibliography and master index) might better have been called ‘Richard Taruskin’s Greatest Hits,’ for it is the Berkeley-based musicologist, rather than his subjects, who holds center stage. What we have, then, is a highly personal (and often delightfully prickly) take on musical history from an original and eccentric mind—a mind to which anybody interested in the art of music should be exposed. But I would no more treat the results as mainstream authority than I would a chronicle written by a team of mavericks such as, say, Glenn Gould, John Cage and Spike Jones.” [Italics added]

“The results are just too strange,” he goes on to say, “in a way that history should not be strange. Take, for example, the case of the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, who is mentioned a grand total of five times in Taruskin’s 4,560 pages, and then only in passing, first as an influence on the American composer Roy Harris and later as a (seemingly baleful) model for the British composer Peter Maxwell Davies. Sibelius! This is a little like writing a history of the motion picture and mentioning Ingmar Bergman only for his effect on Woody Allen.” [Italics added]

History should not be strange!?

Page asserts that the very title, the Oxford History of Western Music, insists an “Olympian objectivity,” which, were the volumes not emblazoned with a single name, that of Richard Taruskin, might be the case. This also raises another point (which ought to be addressed in another article): the objectivity of history, or, glossing on Page’s words, if history can be told from atop Olympus. Is such a thing ever possible? Has such a thing ever been done? The best historians (read: critics), like artists, are mavericks, as history itself is fugitive, untellable, and as victim to personality as anything. The very facts of music history alone are consistently told through the lens of the Catholic Church, itself hardly objective: we swallow wholesale the notion that Pope Gregory, no musician, received chant from a whispering bird as readily as the myth of Adam and Eve in the Garden.

History is not objective, and one need only to look to the most famous tellers of it, names like Gibbon, Howard Zinn, Shelby Foote, Herodotus, Johnson, Boswell, Goethe, Lytton Strachey, Tacitus, Spengler, Carlyle, Bacon or a thousand others to find evidence of that. The only reason Taruskin’s book is thusly named is the simple fact that it is published by Oxford University Press. Even their most famous work, the Oxford English Dictionary, though authoritative and inclusive, is by no means the final statement on the language—and it, too, was rendered by mavericks of greater eccentricity than Taruskin. And lofty as this title is, it is the intentions of the book—beautifully laid out in its first pages—and not the heavy expectation, the awed hush, which immediately follows the name of the world’s most famous university, by which the work should be judged.

You cannot, as the old caveat would have it, judge a book by its cover (or its name, or its price). I understand why Tim Page was disappointed to find the book to be more subjective than his taste preferred: objectivity, were it not a mythological precept, would be nice; it is clean and easy. But, alas, it simply does not exist—anywhere.

I write this too with a heavy heart, because I enjoy reading (and agree with, largely) Page’s take on musical matters, so I bear his general critical stance no ill will. But I cannot let this go unchecked, not only because I feel it to be an unjust swipe where a thorough analysis would have been more appropriate, but mostly because I feel it is emblematic of a much larger problem—a problem not only in our music criticism, but in our culture. What is the issue with telling history from an angle that denotes a personal perspective, particularly that of an extreme mind? Analysis, be it theoretical, sociological, musical, or cultural (and Taruskin freely ranges between all of these in his book), is as much a product of a creative mind as any art, and sometimes it becomes difficult to tell the two apart. The very idea that someone should stick close to the “middle,” that there somewhere exists a safe, opinion-free mainstream, is a dangerous one that, in these oddly dark times, has sprouted wings. Who among us did not watch the floundering President-Designate George Bush at the debates some months ago, failing to address issues yet receiving cheers for saying, apropos of nothing, that there was a “mainstream in American politics” and that John Kerry was far to the left of it. It was Kerry’s alleged “elitism,” his attempt—usually through lengthy explanations of topics on which volumes could be written—to think on a greater, more intellectual level that lost him the election. On our global stage as well as in our writing and thinking about (and composing of) music, if there ever was a time for thought that catered elsewhere than to the middle of the proverbial (and always elusive) road, it is now. Partisan has become a dirty word, but partisanship is one of the most important aspects of our lives. It is one of the few things that can promote change.

Please do not misread me: I am not saying Mr. Page is anywhere near the demon that Mr. Bush has proved himself to be, but his invocation of the mainstream gives me frightened pause, as does his writing off of brilliant minds like John Cage or Glenn Gould because of their eccentricity. Would not Mr. Gould, if so inclined to spend thirteen years collaborating with Cage and Spike Jones, be capable of writing a worthwhile history of Western Music? Being of singular minds, each with a deeply personal and idiosyncratic musical tact, their opus would not only be admitted, but relished—one of the many takes we could consult on the vast panoply of our musical history. It would no doubt be as enlightened as anything, not in spite of its quirks, but because of them. And they do not work against the idea of Western music. It is not an idea which goes on its own; rather, they are Western music, or at least a portion of it. Were there to exist a mainstream, they would be it.

Since when has classical music ever been a mainstream pursuit!? For ages, composers were bohemians, and many of our great personalities were not only total lunatics (think Wagner and Berlioz), but their work excited passions too difficult to describe. At one point, there needed to be a Reformation of musical practices in the Catholic Church because what the composers were doing turned people on too much. Wagner gave genteel, “Gilded Age” ladies orgasms; Berg, Stravinsky, and Schoenberg all excited riots; Verdi‘s music aided revolutions; Mozart‘s storminess was too much for many listeners during the Age of Enlightenment to fathom. This list could continue for hundreds of pages. It is only in the last half-century that this tradition became the province of the dull, the nerdy; before that was a golden time, which lasted for around 900 years, when classical music could potentially be downright decadent. Mainstream? It is this homogenization, this push to “middle” everyone, that has created our cultural cynicism, our musical blandness, and our overall ungalvanized this-is-dying-whether-we-like-it-or-not approach.

Today our daily critics keep reminding us that classical music is dying due to its lack of cultural presence, its absence from the mainstream (where, throughout the ages, it has never really been, even among the intelligentsia, with the odd exception of the post-Victorian “Cult of Wagnerism“). We lament our work being trapped in a foursquare cultural museum, yet when someone like Taruskin comes along and presents us with a cogent explanation of our own history—by no means flawless, incidentally, but certainly expertly researched and plotted—he is roundly slapped for being left of center. This calls into question the very role of a critic: are they to simply report, allowing us to draw our own opinions based on a slew of “facts?” Or are they personalities, laying out what they—presumably a very educated, erudite, experienced “they”—think? Is a personal voice a luxury, an eccentricity, or extremely valuable? They do not exist outside, but are as inside a player and as responsible for the “death” of classical music as a composer, performer, record label, or unenlightened audience member. Perhaps even more so, since, in their role of tastemakers, they aim to tell us what to love. To explain history, or even last night’s concert, as a series of interconnected facts, an unbroken line, is one of the greatest missteps that the tellers of these (fascinating, extreme) tales can make, yet it is through this fallacious process that most of us learn about the past.

The party line in music is that chant gives way to polyphony, which births sonata form, opera, romanticism, twelve-tone, serialism, experimentalism, and so forth, leading, according to many, to crisis. Easy-to-follow facts reported in linear fashion, most often in short, uncomplicated sentences (or, sometimes, in haughty, jargon-riddled pages). This is a good German approach, “right” for hundreds of years, and no doubt the “un-strange” history that Page expected from something called the Oxford History of Western Music.

The book is not by any means written to the uninitiated; no Idiot’s Guide here, quite the opposite. The sheer complexity of the musical analyses alone is indicative of the skill needed to read this book properly: concise explanations of difficult musical notions, as instructive and thorough as any theorist or composer could manage. He presupposes a great deal of knowledge which many, even those inclined to dedicate themselves to reading this expansive book, might not possess, and clearly assumes that the person reading is not experiencing this material for the first time.

Taruskin shies from this faux-“progressive” approach, creating a narrative that is unafraid to leap around temporally, and which devotes whole essays to composers whose work he finds to be emblematic. He rejects the straight-line theory (which often excludes “conservatives” like Benjamin Britten who did not help music’s progress), and is not obligated to include everyone. And for every Sibelius or Sondheim or Elgar who does not find their way into the explanation (not to mention Barber, Menotti, or Coltrane, or any number of others), he invokes some often overlooked presences (like Gilbert & Sullivan, or Felicien David) and allows them their due. Mostly he deals with “important” figures, explaining what earns them their place—something which many histories actually fail to do.

Consequently, some composers (especially those who stray from Taruskin’s very clear line of thinking) fall by the wayside. One simply cannot cover everything, not in six volumes, not in a hundred. To criticize the author for his (admittedly frequent) omissions is to miss the forest for the few misplaced trees. Taruskin’s work is hardly a final statement; it ends, as he says, in the middle.

So What is Dying?
“The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.” —Randall Jarrell

If Carnegie Hall, the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic, Alice Tully and Avery Fisher Halls, the New York City Opera, and every record company that offers classical music were to shut down on the same day, our New York critics would find themselves out of work. And as reports regarding the state of these various concerns are seldom positive, job security is threatened and a lack of security causes fear. But these institutions, golden and feted as they are, are not music; they are conduits through which music is transmitted. If they go, classical music will continue, because other concerns will rise up in their stead. When we read about the end, that is the end about which we read. To confuse these institutions with the music is like worrying about the state of cinema because the Loews theater chain is in crisis. This will go on, it does go on, and will continue long after all of us have quit the mortal plane. This should be taken as a comfort.

When Taruskin addresses all of this motion “under the radar,” he separates it into strands—practitioners which lack a “nonprofessional audience,” others who are in bed with the elite (which seems to be, by his implication, the only way their work is performed; he does not name names, but it is not difficult to guess), and then there are those who embrace technology and are therefore, in his argument, on the proverbial, ephemeral cutting edge. This “medium-is-the-message” approach overlooks the complexity of the issues, a complexity which is heightened by a lack of perspective because it is happening today. His “end” is not the same one proscribed by the seemingly endless articles, yet he is still postulating that a tradition is coming to an end when clearly it is not—even though there are thousands of composers deeply immured in the literate tradition, many of whom conveniently escape the narrative of his final chapters. Read his book, I urge you, even beg you, because it is the most important work of its kind in existence, but be mindful of its flaws: history offers little perspective on the current, and you do not have to look further than our current socio-political situation for excellent, bone-chilling examples.

I, for one, am rather tired of the same old saw, this doom-saying which belies the truth: this discipline, though changing, is by no means on its last legs. Look around: there are more of us than ever before, and if you tap the life that teems beneath the veneer of the most visible—most mainstream—organizations, you will find thousands of tireless, dedicated souls, all working essentially in secret. One way to look at it: rats on a slag heap, foraging for the last morsels in the detritus of a dying art; another: many working without the strictures of an academy, any reigning dogma or sacred cows, freedom being, after all, just another word for nothing left to lose. Call me optimistic, but the latter seems more true.

It is a well-fashioned law of physics that observing something changes its very nature. There is no objectivity, no divorce from human contribution to phenomena, no matter how ephemeral. Of artistic or aesthetic strains of thought, all entirely manmade, observation becomes as much a part of the action as creation, so much so that a critic or historian can change the course of things, for good or ill.

Of course, like many, I look around and do not always like what I see: the absence of classical music of any kind from the cultural dialogue, especially new music, gets my personal hackles up. More than the musical culture, but the entire culture at large, its consumer-based, money-driven mentality, grooming all of us to be perfect members of the “mainstream” with oft-observed Orwellian overtones is genuinely frightening. Even in classical music, it seems that the catering to the dull (read: the lack of taking risks for fear of financial failure) has gotten us all a little jumpy. Some just sulk; others defy; many just cow to middleness, too often synonymous with mediocrity. Some critics, like many artists, leap to this or that bandwagon, hanging on for dear life, trying to maintain their lack of cultural importance by going with what is “hip.”

But I am here to tell you, forecasts aside, this is not a dying entity. Music—Western, literate music—will never die as long as there are people around who do it, people like you, like me, and like the thousands of others all over the world. We may go underground, but we won’t disappear.</P

Seth Rogovoy

As a jazz and rock critic, one of the things that excited me in researching my book, The Essential Klezmer: A Music Lover’s Guide to Jewish Roots and Soul Music (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2000), were the many correspondences I uncovered between klezmer and contemporary music. As it turns out, klezmer—the music and the musicians—has always pushed the envelope—what I like to call “rockin’ the shtetl.” From the colorful Old World wedding musicians to the boisterous, jazzy, immigrant-era bandleaders, to today’s klezmers with one foot in the shtetl and the other in the downtown avant-garde—klezmorim have always reflected the particular geographic and cultural milieu of the musicians and their audience. And their music has always spoken the very particular language or accent of its time.

I. Old World klezmer

Much of what we know of Old World klezmer is contained in the pages of 19th century Yiddish literature. Fortunately for our purposes, the colorful klezmorim were favorite characters of great Yiddish writers like Y.L. Peretz and Sholem Aleichem. If these writers couldn’t quite record the actual sound of the music, at least they did leave us with rich, colorfully descriptive, well-rounded written accounts of real and imagined klezmer musicians and their milieu.

Perhaps the most famous literary account of a klezmer is found in Sholem Aleichem’s Stempenyu. Based on the historical figure of Yosele Druker, Aleichem’s novella includes some beautifully descriptive passages of the violinist’s playing: “He would grab his fiddle, give it a swipe with his bow—just one, no more—and already it would begin to speak. But how do you think it spoke? With real words, with a tongue, like a living person.… Speaking, arguing, singing with a sob, in the Jewish manner, with a shriek, with a cry from deep within the heart, from the soul…. Different voices poured out all kinds of songs, all so lonely, melancholy, that they would seize your heart and tear out your soul, sap you of your health…. Hearts would become full, overflowed, eyes would fill with tears. People would sigh, moan, weep.” In this passage and others, Aleichem captures so much of the essence of the music as we know it—its mournful aspect, its questioning tone, its spoken quality.

The main role of the Old World klezmorim—much like today’s ordinary working musicians—was to play music at weddings. Klezmer’s happy, upbeat, frenetic quality can be traced back to its origins as a functional music intended for the highly-codified ritualistic dancing that made up a large part of the wedding ceremony. Equally important, however, was klezmer’s function as music for listening and reflection—poignant music that expressed and enhanced the serious religious and spiritual aspects of the event. Each part of the wedding ceremony had its own choreography, its own ritual, and its own style of music. The klezmorim led processionals of the bride’s and groom’s parties, greeted the arrival of the guests, entertained during the banquet, provided the rhythms for dancing, and led the guests home at the end of the night. Working in tandem with the badkhn—the overall master of ceremonies—the klezmorim gave shape and structure to the entire event.

In Eastern Europe, Jewish folk and instrumental music developed a strong identity of its own, borne of its particular cultural and geographical influences. The distinctive modes of the khazones, or synagogue music, blended with Oriental Jewish melodies creeping up from the Jewish community of the Ottoman Empire south of the Black Sea. Various native, non-Jewish musics, including Russian drinking songs, Romanian dances and shepherds’ laments, Hungarian and Gypsy melodies, and Turkish music, also exerted their influence on the repertoire of the klezmorim and the style of music they played. Through their travels throughout the region and through swapping tunes with non-Jewish musicians, klezmorim became familiar with the indigenous folk music of their particular geographic region, and local and regional songs and dances, such as polkas, quadrilles, and waltzes, made their way into the klezmer repertoire, albeit given a klezmerish spin.

II. Klezmer immigrates to the New World

The late 19th century was a time of great political upheaval across Europe, particularly in the east, and Jews of the Pale bore the brunt of the turbulence. From across the ocean the United States beckoned with the promise of freedom from persecution and the hope of prosperity. As a result, from 1880 until 1924, when the doors of Ellis Island finally slammed shut, approximately two and a half million Eastern European Jews made their way to the United States. The vast majority of these immigrants washed up on the shores of New York City, and most of them were ushered into the half-square-mile neighborhood of New York’s Lower East Side. Overcrowded tenement apartments replaced the ramshackle wooden houses of the shtetl, and busy, noisy, city streets replaced the dirt roads that spanned the countryside of the Pale.

For the musicians, this meant change. Weddings were now held in catering halls instead of at private homes and inns. As for the ceremonial rituals that comprised the Old World wedding, these were soon abandoned by the new immigrants, many of whom had already been chafing at the religious practices of their parents or grandparents’ generation. Others, on arriving in the city, were eager to shed all aspects of immigrant culture in favor of adopting the ways and manners of their new homeland.

The peak years of immigration coincided with the early growth years of the American recording industry, when New York-based record companies sought to broaden their scope beyond the “parlor songs” and all-American marching band music that comprised the bulk of their catalogs. The vast immigrant populations beckoned as valuable markets for “ethnic” recordings, nostalgic evocations of their homelands. Klezmer, heretofore a folk genre passed down orally, became a style of commercially marketed popular music; this had a significant impact on the music itself. Songs that formerly were performed in continuous twenty-minute suites for dancing at weddings and celebrations were now sold to individual consumers in the form of sheet music or 78 r.p.m. shellac platters containing three minutes of music per side that were played in private living rooms. As the music slowly left the firsthand world of live performance for the secondhand world of recording, whatever wound up on those recordings became the “record” of the music, in every sense of the word.

One of the first attempts to cater to the burgeoning immigrant Jewish population was made in April 1913, when trumpeter Abe Elenkrig and his ensemble, the Hebrew Bulgarian Orchestra, laid down some of the earliest known klezmer tracks in America. The dozen or so sides they recorded were typical of the brassy, marching-band style that predominated at the time, both in recorded klezmer and in American music at large. The violin-led kapelyes of the Old World were usurped by bands led by clarinets and horns, playing melody over a strict, oom-pah beat propelled by precise, military-style drumming.

Recordings of this era were also clearly geared toward playfully evoking nostalgia for the Old World, recreating wedding scenes with a theatrical, Vaudevillian flair, such as on “Dem Rebns Tanz (The Rabbi’s Dance)” by Art Shryer’s Orchestra, on which you can hear musicians irreverently mocking the figure of the Old World rabbi and his devoted followers. This piece is also a gem as it explicitly reveals the connection between the klezmer melodies and the nigunim, or the wordless vocal melodies of the Khsidim: the tune begins with the musicians singing the melody once through, and then playing it on their instruments, thus recapitulating the historical process that saw religious music find its way into the repertoire of the ostensibly non-religious music of the klezmorim.

The 1920s saw the emergence of the star soloist from the anonymity of the klezmer ensemble, roughly analogous to, as well as contemporaneous with, the same trend in jazz, which saw innovative, virtuosic players such as Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet eclipse their New Orleans-styled ensembles. The first such figure in klezmer was Naftule Brandwein, who was noted as much for his wild behavior as for his virtuosity. He supposedly once performed dressed as Uncle Sam, strung with Christmas tree lights that nearly electrocuted him when he perspired. Foreshadowing another moody, paranoid musical genius with an affinity for mood-altering substances, he is said to have often performed with his back to the audience, Miles Davis-style, the better to hide his fingering techniques from studious onlookers. He was a daredevil behind the wheel of a car, speeding down the curvy, winding roads of the Catskills while simultaneously serenading his passengers on the clarinet. He wasn’t above surprising his audiences by playing with his pants around his ankles, and at times he is said to have played with a neon sign reading NAFTULE BRANDWEIN ORCHESTRA strapped around his neck. Brandwein was a shikker, a gambler, a card player, a womanizer, allegedly the favorite musician of Murder, Incorporated, the so-called Jewish Mafia. His tenure with the various bands he passed through never lasted long, due to his unreliability and the refusal of his fellow musicians to bunk with him on the road.

Nevertheless and in spite of himself, Brandwein was a fantastic musician, much in demand for playing parties, weddings, and hotel gigs in the Catskills until his death in 1963. The two-dozen-plus recordings he made on his own, mostly between 1922 and 1927, remain some of the most influential of the period. Brandwein’s playing style matched his outsized personality. He played with great emotion and florid phrasing. Where just a few notes would do, Brandwein played many and in quick succession, as acknowledged in a 1924 press release which boasted, “Here’s speed for you! Observe the swiftness of this remarkable music, the clarity and ingeniousness of the melodies that come so rapidly from Naftule Brandwein’s musicians, and you will be thrilled.”

Right behind Brandwein was a clarinetist equally gifted but the complete antithesis in his behavioral and personal style. Just at the time when Joseph Cherniavsky’s musicians were fed up with Brandwein’s drunken antics, Dave Tarras came to the attention of the bandleader, whose vaudeville-style outfit played concerts dressed alternately as Cossacks and Khusids.

Unlike Brandwein, Dave Tarras could read music, and this helped him enjoy a successful career as a recording artist and bandleader, as a player in the Yiddish theater and on Yiddish radio. He and Brandwein were as different musically as they were personally. Where Brandwein’s playing was lively, elastic, and cantorial—the notes just seemingly pouring out of his clarinet in long, wailing, emotional arpeggios—Tarras’s playing is much more stately and dignified, each note and phrase carefully parceled out as its own, carefully punctuated statement. Tarras makes much more use of pauses and rhythmic gestures and seems more aware of, and communicative with, the other musicians—he is genuinely playing with the band. Tarras was so successful that he became known as “the Jewish Benny Goodman.”

The swing era ushered in the most overt and commercially successful fusion of Yiddish and American popular music. The Andrews Sisters’ recording of “Bay Mir Bistu Sheyn” was the best-selling popular record of its time, sparking a brief fad of similar attempts that saw the Yiddish folk song “Di Grine Kuzine” remade as “My Little Country Cousin.” The Andrews Sisters themselves followed up “Bay Mir Bistu Sheyn” with “Joseph, Joseph,” their Anglicized version of “Yossel, Yossel,” originally a hit for Yiddish theater performer Nellie Casman in 1923.

As for Benny Goodman himself, while there is no evidence that he ever played Jewish music, klezmer did work its way into his band. Trumpeter Harry Finkelman, better known as Ziggy Elman, played Jewish music before joining Goodman’s band. Along with his klezmer style, Elman brought to Goodman’s band the Yiddish tune “Der Shtiler Bulgar,” which he had recorded under his own name in 1938 as “Frailach in Swing.” The Goodman band rerecorded it in 1939 as “And the Angels Sing,” with vocals by Martha Tilton and lyrics by Johnny Mercer, and thus was a swing-band hit made out of a tune first recorded by the Abe Schwartz Orchestra in 1918.

These examples of Yiddish-pop crossover successes were the exception to the rule. As a popular music, klezmer had already begun a long, slow decline at the end of the 1920s. By the mid-1920s, the wave of Jewish immigration from Europe had ended. Most of those who had been in America for a while had begun the long, slow process of assimilation into the American mainstream. Along the way, they became as enamored of big-band swing, Broadway, and other popular American styles as they once were of Yiddish theater and cantorial music.

In postwar America, brides wanted to hear the latest popular tunes from the hit parade at their weddings. What little interest in Jewish music remained was confined to a few token bulgars at a party. Jewish audiences were more likely to request one of the new Israeli folk dances coming from that young nation, its new Hebrew culture edging out the old affinities of American Jews still in shock over the destruction of their Yiddish culture in the Shoah. By the 1960s, the rise of pop music and rock and roll had all but driven klezmer music underground.

III. The Klezmer Revival and Renaissance

For the most part, through the 1960s and early ’70s, klezmer was dormant. But in the 1970s, a new generation of Jewish musicians, or musicians who happened to be Jewish, rediscovered the music of their parents’ or grandparents’ generation. The revival of klezmer in the 1970s and ’80s has been attributed to a variety of causes: to a growth in ethnic pride among American Jews spurred both by the popular success of Fiddler on the Roof and Alex Haley’s book and TV miniseries Roots; to a reaction against the predominance of Israeli Hebrew culture at a time of some political disillusionment with Israel; to a more widespread folk revival and growing interest in world music; to a gradual spiritual awakening following the disappointments of the cultural revolution of the Sixties; and finally, to the sheer passage of time since the horrors of the Holocaust understandably caused American Jews to repress or ignore painful reminders of Eastern European Jewish culture.

The truth is likely to contain a bit of all of these reasons. Then again, it is perhaps best summed up by Hankus Netsky, who as the founder and leader of the Klezmer Conservatory Band, has played no small role in the revival and perpetuation of klezmer music since the late-’70s. “Archaic things come back,” says Netsky. “The blues came back….And the same thing eventually happened when our generation came of age and said, ‘Wait a minute. What happened? Where’s our folk music?'”

Or, as violinist Alicia Svigals, a co-founder of The Klezmatics says, “It was natural that klezmer should come back. The good stuff always does.”

For one pioneering revivalist, it was a case of realizing that all the different kinds of music he liked had a common stylistic influence. In 1975, when folk and jazz musician Lev Liberman stumbled upon a box of old klezmer 78s in a closet at a museum in Oakland, he found the missing link he had been looking for among all the music he liked. He and his musical partners began adding klezmer songs to their band’s repertoire of Eastern European and Balkan folk music, and they made their official debut as The Klezmorim in a series of concerts in Berkeley in April 1976—the first public performances of a klezmer revival band. The popular success of those and subsequent shows led to the release of the group’s first album the next year, thus paving the way for the full-fledged klezmer revival that was to follow. Like most early revival bands, the Klezmorim re-recorded playful versions of the early tunes by the likes of Brandwein, Tarras, and others they had found on the old 78s.

A few years after the Klezmorim kick-started the revival in the Bay Area, Hankus Netsky, a teacher at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, was asked to put together an evening concert of Jewish music. Netsky assembled various groups and ensembles consisting mostly of students from the conservatory, many of whom were not Jewish and most of whom had never played any Jewish music, including a big band that learned three, swinging klezmer numbers. The band was such a hit that by the end of the evening it got two offers for gigs. Thus in the winter of 1980 the Klezmer Conservatory Band was born.

The KCB, as it is known, remains one of the most perennially popular recording and performing groups in klezmer, and numbers among its alumni members of all the top contemporary klezmer bands, including the Klezmatics and Brave Old World. Avant-jazz clarinetist Don Byron was a founding member, and he went on to explore the work of Borscht Belt musical comedian Mickey Katz on the 1993 album Don Byron Plays the Music of Mickey Katz, which implicitly argued that Katz’s blatant send-ups of the assimilationist streak in postwar American Jewry—to say nothing of his Spike Jones-influenced musical pastiches—were brilliantly inventive social satires.

By the mid-’80s, the Klezmorim had played Carnegie Hall, and the KCB and Kapelye, another early revival outfit, had appeared on Garrison Keillor‘s public radio variety show, A Prairie Home Companion, that bastion of middle-Americana, thus solidly establishing a place for klezmer alongside other mainstream American folk musics.

In the mid-1990s, world-renowned classical violinist Itzhak Perlman suddenly discovered his musical roots and invited several of the leading revivalists, including Andy Statman, to accompany him on a journey to his ancestral home in Poland for a PBS documentary. The subsequent concert tours and recordings by Perlman and company brought klezmer to the top concert stages of the world for the first time in history, including places like Wolftrap, Ravinia, and Tanglewood.

The groundbreaking work of the pioneer revival bands did more than just popularize an old style of music. By defining the parameters of modern klezmer, they helped point the way toward a future for the music. Musicians brought up on jazz, rock, classical, and other genres could approach it not only as revivalists, but also as creative partners in its ongoing development. As we have seen, since its earliest days, the history of klezmer was in part the story of a give-and-take with other styles of music. Thus it was only a few years after the first bands learned the rudiments of so-called traditional klezmer that they and others began building upon that foundation to create a new klezmer that spoke with a contemporary voice and attitude, ushering in today’s full-fledged klezmer renaissance.

The Klezmatics embody this new dynamic; their version of klezmer combines the party music of the Old World and the New. They take the essentials of the old-time music—the repertoire, the melodies, the ornamentation—and they carefully filter them through a modern sensibility attuned to rock music and its contemporary offshoots. Their piece, “Khsidim Tants (Hasidic Dance),” based on an old Khsidic dance melody, is at once utterly traditional, but given a subtle, rhythmic tweaking which puts it into the realm of contemporary rock or even hip-hop.

IV. Klezmer and the Avant-garde

Having carefully built a bridge from functional dance music to hard-rocking nightclub music, the Klezmatics embody the Old World/New World dialectic of the klezmer renaissance, and helped chart a path for a new generation of klezmorim.

They have also opened the doors to other experiments. With his band Klezmer Madness, former Klezmatics clarinetist David Krakauer has combined klezmer with found sounds, electronic effects, New Orleans jazz, and James Brown-derived funk. On some of his more recent efforts, he has begun working with hip-hop techniques, including sampling.

Other musicians have discovered that the unique Yiddish modes are as rich a source of melodic and harmonic possibilities as blues and pop standards once were to mid-century jazz musicians. For Jewish musicians especially, the expressive potential of the ancient scales strikes a deep chord within them and within particular members of their audience who recognize and resonate with the poignant sound of the synagogue cantor.

The locus of John Zorn‘s Jewish work is his Masada project, aptly named after the hilltop fortress in the Judean desert where in 73 C.E. a band of Jewish patriots took their lives rather than surrender to and be enslaved by the Roman conquerors. It was the prototypical struggle against assimilation, and undoubtedly Zorn was attracted to the image of the relentless resisters, refusing to succumb to or to assimilate into the mainstream—a theme that runs through his entire career. For Zorn, Masada is several things at once: a jazz quartet, a group of chamber ensembles of various shapes and sizes, a set of over 200 original compositions in traditional Jewish modes that Zorn has written for these groups, and a conceptual framework and redoubt from which he could channel his creative attempt to do nothing less than to expand the Jewish musical tradition.

In the Masada Jazz Quartet, which includes trumpeter Dave Douglas, drummer Joey Baron and bassist Greg Cohen, Zorn plays alto saxophone and leads the group through the paces on compositions which veer from straight-ahead jazz to free improvisation, with snatches of blues, ballads, and traditional melodies thrown into the musical mixture—all, however, in a recognizably Jewish mode. Take, for example, Douglas’s solo on the Zorn composition “Hekhal”: what works as a post-bop improvisation also works surprisingly well as one of those Khsidic nigunim—the wordless prayer chants that were the original sources for Old World klezmer melodies.

On Sephardic Tinge, keyboardist Anthony Coleman reposits the classic Yiddish theater tune “Belz” as a bit of Afro-Cuban piano jazz—a pointed commentary on the cultural divide between the prevailing Yiddish/Ashkenazi/Eastern European Jewish heritage and the equally rich but curiously overlooked Sephardic/Ladino heritage, a tradition with glorious roots in Jewry’s “Golden Age” in pre-Inquisition Spain. Having lived much of his life in New York City rubbing elbows with its large Hispanic population, Coleman’s musical esthetic is highly informed by the Latin rhythms of salsa, mambo, and montunos. Coleman, who interestingly enough attended the New England Conservatory in the late-’70s alongside the Klezmer Conservatory Band founder Hankus Netsky, decided to explore this aspect of his “heritage” from the point of view of one whose family name was originally Cohen—hence the sly play on “Spanish Tinge” in the album’s title.

The Boston-based group Naftule’s Dream was formed by the members of the more traditional-based klezmer group, Shirim, as an outlet for their experimental inclinations (although Shirim itself was no mere reconstructionist-oriented revival band—its most popular project reinterpreted Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker as a klezmer suite, and they recently had a go at Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf on their Tzadik album, Pincus and the Pig). The individual musicians in the sextet boast a vast range of experience: trombonist David Harris was a charter member of the Klezmer Conservatory Band and Frank London‘s Les Miserables Brass Band. Clarinetist Glenn Dickson is a graduate of the New England Conservatory who has performing in rock bands and played Greek and 19th-century American music. Other musicians have played ska, rock, New Orleans, South Indian classical, military marches, and avant-garde jazz. These various influences get remanufactured as Naftule’s Dream, a borscht of free-klez, speed-klez (both descriptions are song titles) and anarchic punk-klez—sort of like what Metallica might play if it was a mostly unplugged klezmer band studying under Cecil Taylor.

The premonitions of Radical Jewish Culture were also being felt in the 1990s on the West Coast, where refugees from Hotzeplotz and The Klezmorim had formed the New Klezmer Trio. Clarinetist Ben Goldberg had been growing restless with performing music that he felt was merely recapitulating earlier styles rather than creating new ones. “I wrote a kind of manifesto then that said something like, ‘Think of the difference between John Coltrane and Sidney Bechet, yet we consider them to be of the same lineage’,” he recalls. “If klezmer music had been similarly evolving since the ’20s, then we certainly wouldn’t be here today trying to sound just like Naftule Brandwein. That was important to me.”

As a result, Goldberg began thinking about the imaginary line between “traditional” and “avant-garde” music. “I wanted to take the kind of pent-up, stuttering, neurotic energy of klezmer and spread it over a long form and see what happened.” In 1988, he began jamming with former bandmates Kenny Wolleson and Dan Seamans. Building upon a firm foundation in traditional klezmer modes and melodies, they began exploring the “claustrophobic, quick and darting, hurried, nervous” aspects of the music in extended pieces. In 1991, the group released its first album, Masks and Faces, which at the time was a truly groundbreaking effort that mixed klezmer with strategies gleaned from such jazz and avant-garde visionaries as Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Steve Lacy, Lee Konitz, and Andrew Hill, prefiguring the shape of avant-klezmer to come. Listened to over a decade later, it still sounds startlingly fresh and original and stands as the benchmark for all subsequent attempts at a progressive, klezmer-jazz fusion.

Hasidic New Wave, co-fronted by Frank London of The Klezmatics and saxophonist Greg Wall, blends free-jazz, fusion, and funk-fueled improvisations, often based upon pre-existing Hasidic dance tunes, and its instrumental lineup features electric guitar in addition to trumpet, saxophone, bass, and drums. Hasidic New Wave itself has spawned some of the most exciting recent efforts in the klezmer avant-garde, including Wall’s Later Prophets, on which he bases his jazz improvisations on trope, the ancient melodies used to chant aloud the books of the Torah, and drummer Aaron Alexander‘s Midrash Mish Mosh, which expands the Hasidic New Wave approach and applies it to an avant-big band.

Klezmer hasn’t only had an impact downtown. Uptown, too, the sounds of Old World klezmorim have begun to make their way into composers’ works.

Paul Schoenfield, born in Detroit in 1947, splits his time between Israel and the U.S. Among his major works are Klezmer Rondos (1986), a concerto for flute, tenor, and orchestra. While Schoenfield considers himself primarily a folk musician, he has variously been compared to Gershwin and Bartók for the manner in which he infuses native Jewish idioms into his orchestral forms.

While a fellow at Tanglewood, Osvaldo Golijov—born in Argentina in 1960 to a family of Eastern European Jewish origin—wrote his work, Yiddishbuk, the first of several compositions to draw upon the music of his Ashkenazic heritage. The Kronos Quartet has recorded many of his works, including The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind, which also featured clarinetist David Krakauer. Pieces by Schoenfield and Golijov are found on Klezmer Concertos and Encores, a 2003 recording released as part of the Milken Archive of American Jewish Music series on Naxos.

To coin a phrase, performers like the Klezmatics, David Krakauer, Hasidic New Wave, and John Zorn are all rockin’ the shtetl. As it turns out, that just happens to be the utterly traditional thing to do.

Brian Wise

For some 20 years, composer Gunther Schuller could be heard bemoaning the fact that concert bands and wind ensembles were languishing, becoming ever more isolated from the mainstream classical music establishment. As he saw it, band directors were not cultivating relationships with top-ranking composers. Nor were they being aggressive enough in pursuing important critics, concert presenters, managers, benefactors, and other tastemakers.

Schuller is famous for his blunt statements, but this one was hard to shrug off. He has written nearly a dozen band pieces over a fifty-year career and has long sought to break down the barriers between musical genres. In a 1991 article for Winds magazine titled “Storm the Establishment,” he concluded, “only by commissioning and performing music by the best composers in the world can you eliminate the…notion that wind band music is music of a lesser stripe, composed by lesser composers, and thus performed by lesser musicians.”

Lately, it seems that the band world has begun to heed Schuller’s arguments. A number of prominent composers are either writing or awaiting premieres of new band works, including John Corigliano (from the University of Texas), Christopher Rouse (University of Florida), Richard Danielpour (College Band Director’s National Association), and Bright Sheng and Michael Daugherty (both University of Michigan). Still others are enjoying successive performances of recent works, notably David Del Tredici, Michael Torke, Augusta Read Thomas, Joseph Schwantner, and Joan Tower, among others.

Many music professionals believe that bands and wind ensembles offer composers distinct advantages over orchestras, like vast amounts of rehearsal time, the potential for multiple performances (thanks to a well-connected network of university band directors), opportunities to reach new audiences, and sometimes significant financial incentives. But there are also questions about the character and quality of new band music. Can bands inspire composers to write their most innovative, complex, or demanding work? Is the influx of “name-brand” composers helping to put the band field on the path towards mainstream acceptance?

“This is one of the most composer-friendly communities that exists,” says Todd Vunderink, director of the publishing firm Peermusic Classical. “That makes sense, since the conductors at the major universities, who have large budgets, are consciously trying to build the repertoire. It’s a great contrast to the orchestra world, which is much more beholden to earlier centuries.”

The band world has long been dogged by an identity crisis; for every Holst Suite or Hindemith Symphony in B-flat, there are associations with parades, football halftime shows, and military services. But according to Frank Korach, a band specialist at Boosey & Hawkes, over 1,000 concert band pieces are written annually, and band programs are bigger and stronger than orchestral programs at U.S. educational institutions. “Bands are more liberal than orchestras. They’ll accept more than orchestras,” he says. “The college band world’s audience is more open to new things and non-standard repertoire.”

Any appraisal of contemporary band repertoire begins by looking at how new band pieces are cultivated. Increasingly at universities, and to a lesser extent, high schools and the military, commissioning consortia are favored, allowing each institution to contribute to the composer’s fee and then having their turn in the first round of performances. This offers a win-win solution: repertoire-starved bands get their name attached to a new piece at a small cost, and a composer gets multiple performances of a new work.

Birth of a Band Piece

John Mackey‘s Red Line Tango is one telling example. In February 2003, this nine-minute orchestral curtain-raiser was premiered by the Brooklyn Philharmonic. A couple of promising reviews followed, but interest from other orchestras was muted. When Mackey brought a CD of the piece to the 2003 Conference of the College Band Director’s National Association (CBDNA) in Minneapolis, however, word began to spread.

“Within a few weeks I heard from one of the band directors whom I gave a CD to and he wanted to commission a band version,” recalls Mackey. “I thought that was a horrible idea because it’s really, really hard, and even professional orchestras think it’s rough. I had no idea how good bands could be and I thought, well, there’s no way they’re going to be able to play that. But they totally can.”

The commission for a band version of Red Line Tango came from a consortium of eight college bands spearheaded by Emory University and Lamar University, the former of which gave its first performance last February. This season alone a dozen major bands—including the University of Michigan, Arizona State University, Eastman, USC, Florida State, the University of Connecticut, Ohio State, and the University of Kansas—are slated to perform it. In February it will be heard at the CBDNA conference in New York City, in what is being touted by organizers as a major showcase for the band world.

Mackey says that the skill levels of college-age instrumentalists may be below those of professionals, but a new piece will often receive a month or more of rehearsals, compared to one or two rehearsals by a professional orchestra. As a result, musicians will move beyond simply playing the notes and into int
erpretation. This has also allowed him to make improvements on the score. “There were some notation things that looked really cool on paper, but they were holding the piece back,” he says. After attending several band rehearsals, “there are no more 12/16 bars, it’s always just 3/4.”

Other composers report similar experiences. They find that band directors are often more adept than orchestra conductors in preparing new music, and philosophically, universities view commissioning as central to their school’s research and development mission. And as competition has raised the bar among students entering conservatories over the last two decades, the technical proficiency of bands has increased.

“The distribution of skills is much more equalized nowadays across the country,” says John Harbison, who has three band works to his credit including Music for 18 Winds written in 1984—a piece once considered nearly unplayable but which now is performed on a regular basis. Harbison adds that bands return to his pieces years after they were first performed, a practice that is less common in the orchestra world.

While Harbison came to band music through a side door—writing a piece for an orchestra’s wind section—other composers target bands as they seek new, possibly lucrative markets. “I was told that bands really need new pieces—they want new music, they commission music, and they pay well,” says Michael Torke, whose latest band work, Four Wheel Drive, features two drum sets, placed stage right and left, with a wind ensemble in the center.

Lucrative as the band market can be, naturally it is hard to lure top-tier composers without proper funding. Schools like the University of Michigan and New England Conservatory have endowed commissioning funds, the former of which gives Director of Bands Michael Haithcock $10,000 annually to commission new works. H. Robert Reynolds, the retired director of bands at the University of Michigan, says there is no standard fee. “Commissions can be anything,” he said. “Some I have done have been as little as $1,000, including parts, or as high as $35,000. It really depends on the fame of the person and who is commissioning.”

One composer who is receiving top dollar by any standard is John Corigliano, whose forthcoming Circus Maximus (subtitled Symphony No. 3) brought him $150,000 from the University of Texas School of Music. The 35- to 40-minute work features a large contingent of off-stage winds and will be premiered—after 27 hours of scheduled rehearsals—by the UT Wind Ensemble in February, first in Austin and then in New York at the CBDNA conference.

Jerry Junkin, director of bands at UT, says, “It started first and foremost with an anonymous donor who I really had not had much contact with but approached me out of the blue and said ‘I want to give you some money for a project and you can spend it however you want.’ This year Corigliano is holding an endowed chair and they were able to complete the fee.”

Bigger Names, New Challenges

The University of Texas is one of the leading schools to aggressively enlist high profile composers. In 2003, the university led a consortium of five college wind ensembles to commission David Del Tredici’s In Wartime, the composer’s first wind band piece. The work received attention outside of the band field for at least two reasons. First, there is its topicality. A response to America’s involvement in Iraq, it features hymns, battle marches, and a symbolic clash between the Persian national anthem and Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. There is also Del Tredici’s approach to sonorities. His use of saxophones and brass has been likened to Milhaud‘s La Création du Monde and he also uses auxiliary percussion sounds like the ratchet, siren, and wind machine.

Other composers have found novel ways to utilize band resources, relishing the opportunity to write for eight trumpets or six saxophones. Still, many band directors complain that composers frequently fail to tap the medium’s expressive potential, resulting in a glut of blandly similar works. Frank Battisti is the retired director of bands at the New England Conservatory and a strong advocate of new music. He says that when some composers write their first band work, they often abandon their own voice in the name of traditions.

“Band directors still give scores to study for composers who have never written for the band,” he explains. “In doing this they are asking them to model their pieces after those they give them to review. Joan Tower’s band piece is not good because she tried to write a band piece. She should have been told to write the piece in the way she wanted to write it. This is the only way to get literature that offers new viewpoints on the potential of the wind ensemble as a viable expressive medium.”

To Junkin these challenges are not exclusive to bands. “This affects our medium no differently than a guitar concerto would for a composer who has never written for guitar, or any such circumstance,” he says. “Kevin Puts wrote a terrific piece for us last year, Chorus of Light, his first wind ensemble piece. He looked at a number of scores, but again, his orchestration is fresh and doesn’t fall into any clichés.

Not every composer has found satisfaction in the band world. Michael Torke has composed several band works including Bliss, Variations on an Unchanging Rhythm, a 2003 commission by the CBDNA. While the piece received numerous performances, he found that musicians consistently failed to grasp its nuances. “Bands have a very difficult time with anything that is too unfamiliar,” he says. “It’s a weird, funky, wild piece. There’s nothing avant-garde about it. It just takes a certain out-of-the-box thinking to make it work. [But] the general level of musicianship in the band world is lower. You require a basic level of musicianship for a piece to come alive. There’s a band tradition and it has to relate to that for them.”

In his 2002 book, Winds of Change, Battisti surveys contemporary band music and presents a decidedly mixed picture. On one hand, he notes that since the 1950s, band concert programs have included fewer transcriptions and more original compositions. There are more commercial recordings than ever before and commissioning is widespread. At the same time, no composition for wind band has ever been awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music or the Grawemeyer Award and major composers—including Elliott Carter, Tan Dun, Steve Reich</a >, and Thea Musgrave—continue to be overlooked by bands.

Towards the Musical Mainstream

Of course, bands have not always struggled for the respect of the concert-going public. In the early 20th century, they were the popular music of the day, bringing marches, waltzes, and foxtrots to parks and town squares. After World War II, bands retreated into academia, and professional ensembles nearly disappeared in the United States (a few professional bands remain, including the Goldman Band of New York, the Detroit Concert Band, and the Long Beach Municipal Band. With rare exceptions, these bands often program transcriptions of light classics, arrangements of opera music, selections from Broadway shows, marches, etc.)

“Unfortunately in this country it isn’t possible for many professional bands to exist right now,” says Gary Hill, president of the CBDNA and director of bands at Arizona State University. “In certain ways the band world has been in an existential crisis. We’ve been trying to find out where we fit in beyond academe.”

Part of the challenge may be geographic in nature. Presently, the band world is centered in the Midwest and the South. New York City has scarcely a single band program in its public schools, and major conservatories like the Juilliard School, Manhattan School of Music, Curtis Institute, and the San Francisco Conservatory do not have full-time wind bands.

Hill believes audiences for band music are not much different than those who attend orchestra concerts. For that reason it would be plausible for symphony orchestra wind sections to take up band pieces (and not just a Mozart Serenade or Stravinsky‘s Symphonies of Wind Instruments) on a periodic basis and audiences and critics would follow. If orchestral works by composers like Harbison, Daugherty, or Corigliano are being programmed by orchestras, there’s no reason that band pieces shouldn’t enter the repertory as well.

Some predict that if Corigliano’s Circus Maximus is a success, band music will receive newfound attention from presenters, critics, and other composers. “If you see that Corigliano has a band piece, it’s hard to say, ‘Well, that’s below me,’ ” notes Mackey.

“The band world has missed out on some composers who could have written spectacular band pieces simply because either we didn’t ask or we waited until too late to ask,” says Junkin. He added that when composer approached the medium for the first time, conductors often “dropped the ball” and failed to follow up afterwards to encourage further efforts. “There’s a sense from a lot of people that we don’t want to let that happen again.”

Barbara Jepson

Thirty years ago, the introduction of screens during orchestral auditions helped gradually swell the ranks of women hired by major American symphony orchestras. It might be expected that an anonymous competition for young composers would, over time, show a similar increase in female winners. After all, there is no shortage of role models today, from the Pulitzer Prize winner Ellen Taaffe Zwilich to the rising star Jennifer Higdon, and any unofficial barriers to women’s acceptance into advanced compositional studies programs have vanished.

But in the case of the prestigious BMI Student Composer Awards, the opposite is true. For the third year in a row, no women were among the eight or nine individuals selected by the judges. In fact, since 1998, only 3 out of 61 BMI winners, or 5 percent, were female. During the same period, 20 percent of the 158 recipients of the ASCAP Foundation’s esteemed Morton Gould Young Composer Awards were women (excluding “Honorable Mention” and “Under-18” winners, which further elevate the percentage).

What’s going on here? The BMI submissions are “blind.” The ASCAP entries are not. Are there breaches in the BMI procedures? Is ASCAP unfairly favoring women out of a commitment to diversity? Both possibilities have been raised in an outpouring of forum posts on the subject to NewMusicBox after the 2003 and 2004 awards were announced.

Such serious questions about two organizations that do so much to help composers and new music warrant careful examination. What factors determine who submits to these awards? What percentage of current composers are women? Are a higher proportion of them submitting to ASCAP, and if so, why? Are there characteristics of the BMI contest that unintentionally work against women? Are there improprieties in the way either competition is conducted?

Both performing rights organizations collect licensing fees on behalf of the songwriters, composers, and music publishers on their rosters. Although ASCAP, founded in 1914, predates BMI by 26 years, BMI has a significantly larger number of affiliates. The two entities have been rivals for decades, vying for the opportunity to represent as many composers as possible. The awards, workshops, and programs offered by both are designed to serve their constituencies and attract new members. Indeed, some composers contacted for this article said they were discreetly lobbied at the awards ceremony itself or contacted afterwards. This courting process is viewed as a coming-of-age ritual, an important step in becoming connected to professionals in their field.

The primary factor influencing whether or not young composers apply for these awards is the interest shown by their composition teachers or departments. The real go-getter schools are reportedly Indiana University, the Eastman School of Music, Yale University, the University of Southern California, the University of Michigan, and The Juilliard School, the latter more so since composer Samuel Adler left Eastman to join its faculty. Although both ASCAP and BMI do large annual mailings about the competition to music schools, many do not participate. “We get too few entries from the large Midwestern universities like Ohio State, or the Southern colleges,” says Adler, who has served on eight ASCAP juries during the last 20 years. “We get a lot from the conservatory at the University of Missouri-Kansas City because [composer] Chen Yi encourages her students to send them. And Michigan—they swamp us!”

In a typical year, between 400 and 500 scores meet the eligibility requirements at both competitions. A majority of those submissions are from men, since composition remains a predominantly male field. One of the most striking examples of that reality comes from Chester Biscardi, head of the composition department at Sarah Lawrence College. “Men make up only about 25 percent of our student body,” he relates, “but last year I had ten composition students and six of them were men.”

According to statistics supplied by Frances Richard, who oversees the ASCAP awards as Vice President and Director of Concert Music, 15 to 17 percent of some 445 to 490 applicants in each of the last three years were women, judging by obviously female first names only. These numbers jibe nicely with the actual percentage of women on ASCAP’s concert composer roster, informed estimates by other sources, and estimated percentages of women in leading composition programs. Ralph Jackson, who administers the Student Composer Awards as President of the BMI Foundation, cited periodic, informal surveys which found that 10 to 15 percent of student compos
er applicants were identifiable as women. (In his response to forum posts from readers of NewMusicBox in 2003, Jackson put that number at 8 to 10 percent.)

If these figures are accurate, this might mean proportionally fewer female submissions to the BMI Awards, but it still leaves women under-represented as winners in recent years. Chen Yi believes that more women would win if more were encouraged to submit their works. Are mostly male composition faculty members more likely to encourage their male students to submit? Or does the paucity of women serving as jurors on BMI’s final panel—3 out of 34 during the last seven years—feed a perception that ASCAP is more hospitable to women? One young female ASCAP winner reports that “anecdotal discussion with other composers my age about attention paid in general to male or female composers, in terms of interest in their music and helping them find opportunities, led me to join ASCAP [rather than BMI].”

This did not deter her, however, from entering the BMI competition. In fact, jurors and students contacted for this article report that most entrants submit to both, and a quick perusal of recent winners shows that some win both as well—Michael Djupstrom, Vivian Fung, Martin Kennedy, and Daniel Kellogg, among others. “They’re both free, and there are so few opportunities for composers,” says 29-year-old Kati Agocs, a doctoral candidate at the Juilliard School who received an honorable mention in the 2002 ASCAP Morton Gould awards. “We have nothing to lose.”

How they submit is another matter. BMI applicants must use a pseudonym to identify their scores; only their ages are revealed to the jurors. “It’s an open secret that many men use women’s names for their pseudonyms because they think they’ll win,” says the 26-year-old Kennedy, an Indiana University graduate and doctoral candidate at Juilliard. “It’s gotten to the point where all the men put their names down as women and all the women put their names down as men.” Jackson confirms that “the vast majority of the ‘Jane Does’ are men.”

Although many of today’s successful composers never received (or pursued) these prizes, their usefulness is undeniable. “If a student has won an ASCAP or BMI award,” says Adler, “that counts a great deal towards the furthering of their career. If they’re undergraduates, it’s very helpful to get into the best graduate programs. If they’re graduate students, it looks good on their curriculum vitae for getting [teaching] positions.” David Little, 25, a two-time BMI Award winner who enters the doctoral program at Princeton University this fall, believes the awards “give a young composer a certain amount of credibility among musicians, presenters, and peers.”

But there are significant differences between the two contests. The BMI Awards, established in 1951, solicit a narrower range of applicants by virtue of their eligibility requirements: the cut-off point is 26 vs. 30 years old for the ASCAP Young Composer Awards. Interestingly enough, Jackson observes that if there’s any notable characteristic of female applicants to the BMI awards, it’s that they’re younger than their male counterparts. If more women composers are late bloomers, as were those of an earlier generation like Joan Tower, that might also contribute to the disparity between the two competitions’ results. Yet women are currently winning the “Under 18” component of the ASCAP awards in healthy numbers.

Another important distinction is that the ASCAP Young Composer Awards, established in 1979, allow performance tapes to accompany scores. BMI does not, unless the work is electronic, for acoustic instrumentation plus tape, or so experimental in notation as to preclude a full evaluation of its merits. In some quarters, the BMI awards are regarded as the more musically conservative of the two. “At BMI, I feel that there’s a certain narrowness of style,” says Tower, who has served on both the preliminary and final panels for those awards. “But that also goes for ASCAP, because they’re still not including people I’m thinking of, like the full gamut of the ‘Downtown’ crowd and the whole West Coast crowd.” In a forum post to NewMusicBox on the awards, composer Anne LeBaron wrote that “broadening the aesthetic purview of the competition might indeed increase representation by women in the prizewinners circle.” And one wonders if the restriction on performance tapes works against more unusual works by either gender. As composer Derek Bermel puts it, “the more original the premise, the more likely that a traditional score is inadequate to suggest the work’s final sound.”

Finally, BMI gives far fewer awards—eight to ten out of a similarly sized qualified entry pool of 400 to 500 vs. ASCAP’s profusion of up to 40 each year—some 22 to 25 Morton Gould recipients plus “Honorable Mentions” and “Under 18” awards. That makes the BMI Awards more selective and therefore slightly more coveted, an aura enhanced by this older contest’s higher number of well-known composers and subsequent Pulitzer Prize winners among former recipients. One might say that ASCAP’s primary mission is to encourage; BMI’s, to anoint. And these complementary features help serve a wider pool of budding talent.

There are telling differences, however, between the jury panels. Both organizations choose jurors from their respective membership lists. But since 1989, when Jackson replaced Barbara Petersen, BMI’s Vice President for Classical Music Administration, as overseer of the awards, he began relying heavily on the same three jurors for the preliminary screening process: composer Bernadette Speach, guitarist/composer David Leisner, and composer Biscardi. Occasionally Shafer Mahoney, a former BMI award winner, has served as a substitute. By contrast, the ASCAP panels—three pre-screeners, three final judges—rarely contain more than one repetition from the previous year’s jury. Typically, the pre-screeners are accomplished younger ASCAP composers like Bermel, Chris Theofanidis, and Higdon. According to BMI’s Petersen, the preliminary panel during her tenure was chaired by the noted African-American composer Ulysses Kay, and jurors including Bruce Adolphe and Frank Wigglesworth were alternated more frequently.

Alternating jurors is important for several reasons. First, the BMI pre-screening jury exerts greater influence on the awards than its counterpart at ASCAP, typically forwarding only 35 to 50 out of 400 to 500 qualified entrants to the final jury, whereas ASCAP’s preliminary panel earmarks 100 to 150 out of a similar entry pool for the final panel’s scrutiny. (On the subject of what disqualifies a score from consideration, Jackson named an absence of teacher certification and other deficiencies, such as the unaccompanied pop lyrics he receives regularly from a Texas prison inmate.) Once the
entries have been processed and numbered by Jackson and his secretary, identifying documents are placed in a sealed envelope attached to each score. The preliminary jurors typically go to BMI headquarters individually to peruse the scores in February, then meet in March to decide which entries go forward. This makes the final BMI jury’s day of deliberations more manageable—a plausible consideration where only scores are permitted—but enables the preliminary jury to wield more influence over the final results.

Second, rotation of jurors helps avoid having a particular set of musical preferences hold sway, no matter how informed the panelists. “Having the same preliminary judges year after year can lead to stagnation,” wrote LeBaron, a former BMI award winner, in the aforementioned forum post to NewMusicBox. Even Milton Babbitt, who chairs the BMI Student Composer awards as a non-voting member, acknowledged perplexity over the lack of variety in the preliminary jury. “I have nothing to do with that,” he says. “That’s determined entirely by the BMI people.”

Complicating this issue is the relationship between Jackson and Leisner, who have been partners for over 20 years. Jackson sees the true identities of the entrants. Even with the strictest of “fire-walls” between him and Leisner, this raises the specter of conflict of interest. And it is not questioning the integrity of either individual or the qualifications of Leisner, who has served as juror for other noted competitions, to say so.

“David and I…never discuss the issues at hand,” responds Jackson. “…And in the preliminary jury, specifically, it is difficult to find people who, number one, can read scores well—and I am talking about operas, brass quintets, guitar pieces, vocal music—and who are in or near New York City. It adds a certain stability to have a group which knows how to do it, knows the situation and is willing to devote the time. I personally see no conflict of interest.”

Certainly jurors who have served on both the preliminary and final BMI juries attest to the integrity of its deliberations, among them Tower and Zwilich, no shrinking violets if they believed that women were being discriminated against. Only after the scores are totaled and winners chosen are the envelopes unsealed, revealing the true identifies of the winners.

Similarly, those who have served on ASCAP panels say there are no quotas based on gender or ethnicity. “I would oppose that,” says Adler. “The diversity happens naturally; there are always some excellent female and Asian composers. Unfortunately, there happen to be many fewer African-Americans writing concert music because their interests lie elsewhere.”

Both competitions require jurors to inform their colleagues if they recognize the work of a current or former student—difficult to avoid these days when students receive instruction from faculty members, master classes, and special programs like those at Aspen or Tanglewood. Neither ASCAP nor BMI requires jurors to recuse themselves in that case, though BMI forbids such jurors to cast the deciding vote in such deliberations. (Since ASCAP gives more awards, that precaution is unnecessary.)

ASCAP does allow final jurors to see a list of all scores submitted and request that a previously eliminated entry be re-evaluated. “The pros [of that] are that the preliminary jury might have overlooked something,” says Tower, basing her comment on experiences with other panels. “It’s a lot of work, and they might have overlooked somebody. The con of that is that jurors play games—I’ll support your student if you support mine. It becomes a network of teacher-student negotiations.”

“If anybody tried that, they wouldn’t be back,” says Richard. She and several jurors maintain that the opposite more likely occurs—a juror reviews an eliminated score and decides it doesn’t measure up to the final candidates. But she did volunteer that she occasionally inserts herself into the deliberations. “Sometimes, there might be some magnificent piece I may have looked at and I see the jury is bleary-eyed,” she explains. “I might say, ‘Hey, take another look at this,’ or ‘Tomorrow, take a look again,’ because I don’t want them to be embarrassed that they missed something good. But I can’t vote for them, and in the end they have to decide.”

It would be fascinating to see how the winners would look if ASCAP and BMI did rule reversals for a few years, with ASCAP evaluating scores anonymously and BMI allowing recorded tapes to accompany all scores. It would also be gratifying if the decision to re-examine any eliminated works were left solely to ASCAP’s jurors, and if BMI’s selection of preliminary jurors utilized a wider variety of its roster. As Adler aptly put it, “BMI is not hurting for excellent composers.”

Rebecca Winzenried Photo by Molly Sheridan Location courtesy the Oliverius Game Room

One of the hottest tickets to be had in the symphonic music world this year was for a Los Angeles Philharmonic concert of music by an obscure Japanese composer. Obscure, at least, by American standards, although fans of Nobuo Uematsu who flocked to the Walt Disney Concert Hall in May to hear a concert of his music from the Final Fantasy video game series have followed the composer’s work for years and had been eagerly awaiting the opportunity to hear it played live. Tickets sold out within hours and some inevitably found their way to eBay, where at least one buyer reported purchasing a pair for $500.

Like hard-core fans everywhere, the Final Fantasy audience members were already well acquainted with the music, having lived it, breathed it in, through endless repetition while playing the Final Fantasy games. There are currently 11 games in the series, which was first introduced in 1987. But what’s notable here is how Final Fantasy made gamers fall in love with the music. Their demand for more sounds from Final Fantasy spawned sales of game soundtrack CDs and even sheet music; an estimated 48 million people own a Final Fantasy title and several concerts of the music have been performed in Japan over the past decade. No wonder that the composer himself was a little underwhelmed at the prospect of hearing his work performed by the LA Phil in the orchestra’s shiny, new concert hall, telling The New York Times, “just because it’s being played by an orchestra does not mean it that it surpasses any other form of music.”

So why should we care about a concert of what might be more readily equated with imported pop/movie music? Because as the magnitude of the Final Fantasy concert sellout demonstrates, video game music has quietly staked out territory in the hearts of U.S. consumers. There’s also been a seismic shift in the quality of game music. As the onscreen action has gotten better—thanks to ever-more-sophisticated electronics—so too has the audio capacity. Over the past couple of years, synthesized soundtracks have been replaced with fully orchestrated scores, recorded by orchestras with 80 to 100 or more players. These trends have spawned some interesting new opportunities for composers. Music from Christopher Lennertz‘s score for Medal of Honor: Rising Sun (often described as John Williams-esque) was performed last summer by the Czech National Symphony Orchestra as part of the GC Games Convention Concert at the Gewandhaus concert hall in Leipzig Germany, the first such concert in Europe. Lennertz, 32, has been kicking around Hollywood as a film and television composer for some time, but he credits the game soundtrack with providing him with an opportunity to write for a large orchestra. Rising Sun was recorded in Hollywood with a group of 88 musicians and in Prague with a choir of 32 voices—something only more established, older composers typically would have the chance to do.

Andy Brick conducting the Czech National Symphony Orchestra at the GC Games Convention Concert in Leipzig.

That thought rings true with many young composers, whether they are working in filmdom or in concert music. In any given year, how many will have the chance to hear a fully orchestrated performance of their work, much less the chance to conduct it themselves, as Lennertz did for the Rising Sun soundtrack?

In the realm of game music, producers are willing to invest ever-increasing amounts in compositions and recording sessions because they are perceived as adding such significant value to the end product. Players are starting to expect “real” recorded music from video games; they say a good score enhances the experience in the same way a well-crafted film score heightens the action on screen. Video games sales now top $10 billion annually in this country alone and the average game soundtrack budget has risen accordingly, from $50,000 three years ago to $150,000 today. At a panel session dubbed “The Art and Business of Music for Videogames,” presented during the Global Entertainment and Media Summit earlier this year in Los Angeles, Steve Zuckerman, GEMS executive producer, noted the impact games are having on the entertainment industry and asked “how are emerging artists and established composers taking advantage of this huge marketplace?”

How indeed. One way to take advantage of the market might be to push the boundaries of the music and its performance. Andy Brick, a game composer who conducted the first GC- Games Convention Concert in 2003, and who will reprise his role at the second concert this month in Leipzig, sees a real need for better-trained composers in this industry. He points out that producers have expressed concern that many game composers, accustomed to working solo with MIDI, do not have the skills necessary to orchestrate their music properly.

Brick has addressed the problem head-on by serving as music director of the Merregnon project. There actually isn’t a game component at the heart of this venture despite its fantasy entertainment-sounding title. Organized by producer Thomas Boecker, a fictional storyline was created solely as the foundation of a CD recording relying on the kinds of imagery popular in the game world—which is to say it’s heavy on Lord of the Rings-style themes and travels through misty, dragon-filled landscapes. The project was designed to boost the skills of young composers who have never dealt with a live orchestra.

For the Merregnon 2 recording, released in July, Brick and Boecker spent time working with a group of composers, most under 30, on the nuts and bolts of composing for real-life musicians, not computer. They came face-to-face with such realizations as—humans have to breathe. “Sounds strange,” says Boecker, “but if you are working with samples for a trumpet, you actually would not really have to think much about: how long could a real player do this without getting too exhausted, or simply when would he/she have to breathe?”

The goal is
to make sure composers will be equipped to handle the next assignment that involves writing a score for an 80-plus piece orchestra. Fixing things in the recording studio, where time literally is money, is not an option. It becomes easy, then, to see how composers with more traditional classical training, who already know when a horn player might need a rest or what instruments might be doubled to add more color, can have an advantage. Not to mention that a composer who already has the basic skills in hand, and has the chance to explore new instrumentation or toss in a classical reference or two, can add complexity to a score. The grandmaster of game composition, Uematsu, became popular because of his free adoption, and adaptation, of music from any number of genres—from classical motifs to electronica. The resulting quirky, hodgepodge brew became a hallmark of the Japanese game sound.

Game developers have circumvented orchestration problems by turning to film composers, many of whom have conservatory backgrounds or who, like Juilliard-trained Laura Karpman, split their time between composing for concert hall and commercial projects. Karpman has been commissioned to write works for the American Composers Orchestra, New York Youth Symphony, and Los Angeles Opera. She also wrote the score for the soon-to-be-released Everquest II game, which will be featured in the GC Games concert this month.

Karpman, too, relished the chance to work with a large orchestra; the Everquest score was recorded with an 85-piece orchestra, double the size of the largest group she’d worked with on any film project. Even more, Karpman was given free reign to take the music in whatever direction she felt appropriate, using basic scenarios outlined by the game developers. Mid-20th century composers served as inspiration. To express the idea of “Babylonian Fascism” for one, she turned to the works of Shostakovich, Britten, and Stockhausen.

But the composer also discovered that games are more complicated projects than one might imagine. Forget creating a linear structure. Musical sequences can go in any number of different directions, depending upon how the play progresses. An online game like Everquest is particular fluid, as it unfolds without any set time restrictions. In more traditional video games, musical sequences can be heard over and over again if a player gets stuck on a certain sequence.

Heard. And heard. And heard. If you accept the idea that listeners become more comfortable with new music through repeated hearings, games are a bona fide way to leave a lasting impression. Ponder this: one study of college students found that 66 percent could hum the Super Mario Brothers theme, even through they hadn’t played the game since its heyday in the 1980s. Hours spent following the antics of Mario and Luigi imprinted the music on their brains, in the same way earlier generations were imprinted with Top 40 songs.

Those same college students didn’t have a clue who composed the Super Mario Brothers tracks (that would be Koji Kondo, whose work has also been played in Japanese game music concerts). The new wave of gamers (average age 28) aren’t only able to name their favorite composers, they follow the latest soundtracks releases with fervor, facilitated by the simultaneous release of games and their soundtracks. A study last year by the marketing firm ElectricArtists found that 40 percent of video game consumers between ages 13-42 had bought a soundtrack after hearing the music in a game.

The only questions right now are about the preferred delivery system for that music: CD, iPod, computer, cell phones. The latter are rapidly lining up as all-purpose information conduits, with options including delivery of digital music files. In the meantime, there are ringtones. As we’re all too acutely aware, declaring your interest and/or musical tastes to the world through the few simple notes of a cell phone ring has become a major priority. Sales of downloadable ringtones already constitute a market that’s projected to top $4.5 billion worldwide this year, and a recently launched U.K. chart tracks the most of-the-moment selections.

Chart toppers tend toward pop tunes, movie and TV themes (Danny Elfman‘s The Simpsons theme has been a fav). Classical music fans have their ringtone choices, too — provided the tune is something by a long-dead white guy by the name of Bach or Vivaldi. A fairly substantial web search for classical music ringtones turned up one option from the past 20 years—Ellen Taaffe Zwilich’s Millennium Fantasy 2000—along with a blogger who has posted edited, ringtone-length downloads of the Philip Glass works Modern Love Waltz and Music In Similar Motion.

Apparently part of the problem lies with the complexity, or simplicity, of the music itself. A successful ringtone needs to be instantly recognizable and have an infectious hook. Beethoven’s Fifth works; Glass and company may be a little too subtle to get our attention on a busy street corner. Composer Jean Hasse recognized those limitations when she began composing for the cell phone as musical instrument in 2001. The Oberlin-trained composer has carved out a singular niche for herself by writing hundreds of 20-second ringtones to reflect different moods and attitudes. The elliptical, jazzy little tunes, with names like “Ouch,” “Get Out of Bed,” and “Wait for Me,” don’t sound anything like typical ringtones, yet they don’t sound as if they could be anything else, either. Like any dedicated composer, Hasse has figured out the quirks and character of her instrument: She knows where to place a pause for best effect; she’s learned that cell phones will raise the pitch of a melody and that tempos can go astray. Hasse has gotten so into the process that she wrote a suite for mobile phones, premiered in 2002 by Royal Academy of Music students using 10 mobile phones.

“Ring tone
s are not high art,” she told the BBC. “I’m just trying to share my music with people.” Indeed, ringtones aren’t her life. Hasse’s solo and chamber works have been performed at Tanglewood, Carnegie Hall, and the Hollywood Bowl. But she has also created sound logos for websites and music for audio books.

She’s just one of the composers out there who are exploring the everyday music of life in the 21st century, those little tunes that invade our brains. Like the five-note signature used in ads to signal that a computer has “Intel Inside,” which is probably bopping around in your brain already, just from the mention of it. You can thank German composer Walter Werzowa, who created the Intel signature in 1994, setting off a craze for corporate audio “logos.” The three-second Intel signature blends a number of sounds, including tambourine and anvil for the opening “clink” alone. Werzowa’s firm Musikverguegen has gone on to create audio branding logos for Nokia, CNN, HBO and others.

Taking that concept even one step further, electronic musicians like Bevin Kelley (a.k.a. Blevin Blectum) spend their days exploring ways to recreate the sound of gurgling water or the swish of leaves. Kelley’s specializes in sound design for electronic toys, reveling in the minimalist audio and often low-fidelity equipment she has to work with. Pick up a Fisher-Price talking book and you might just hear her work. On any given day, Kelley might be asked to come up with a way to make a dog express human emotion, while still making it sound dog-like, or to create the sound of “a crocodile eating a smushy banana.” The daily challenges of recreating life-like sounds is good mental exercise, she says, and the results often bleed over into Kelley’s own sample-happy audio projects.

Such sounds are everywhere, so embedded in our routines that we don’t even notice them much of the time. The tones that greet me as I startup and navigate around the Macintosh computer come courtesy of San Francisco sound-design firm Earwax. Co-founder Jim McKee was responsible for creating all the clicks, saves, and assorted sounds of the Mac’s operating system. On the Microsoft side, Brian Eno contributed the ubiquitous startup sound packaged with the Windows 95 operating system, a 3.25-second, slightly otherworldly arpeggio that fades to nothingness.

Do those little musical marks constitute compositions? McKee and crew at Earwax Productions, who work from the premise that sound design is composition, would argue yes, if perhaps in a different way than the film scoring work they’ve done or the musical environments they have created for museum installations. That clicking sound a Mac makes while scrolling down a menu isn’t necessary to the application, but it gives users a sense of place and helps them navigate more easily, taking the place of running a finger down the page. Like a custom ringtone, it’s a humanizing musical component that eases our way in an electronics-driven world, making the journey a more pleasant experience. At the very least, perhaps they’ll serve as an introduction for listeners who have never heard a composer’s work. Hasse cheerfully admits that ringtones are a “weird and wonderful” way to present original new music to perfect strangers. “I can carry around my phone and play them a tune—anywhere in the world.”

For the composers who create them, such out-of-the-box musical explorations are also a means to an end beyond a paycheck—a way to look at composition from a fresh new angle, practice their craft, and fit their music into everyday life. As the inevitable consumers of the aforementioned entertainment and electronics, why shouldn’t we apply standards similar to those we apply to the art we appreciate if the talent and budget are available to support it? </p

Joseph Dalton Photo by Lori Van Buren

The composers were yellow. Or rather, they wore yellow. On their nametags. It made them easy to spot, once you figured it out.

Everybody had nametags at the National Performing Arts Convention in Pittsburgh last month. But with the exception of the composers, you had to get up close to read what world they came from—symphony, opera, chorus, or dance. It would have helped to have more color-coding or other handy ways of identifying who did what.

On the other hand, it might have been a problem if the conductors had red nametags since they already got plenty of attention from eager composers.

“As soon as they hear you’re a conductor, they’ll unload scores and CDs on you,” said a smiling Michael Slon, a conductor from the University of Virginia.

Actually, convention attendees were pretty easy to categorize, even without nametags. Wardrobe, attitude, and body language often spoke volumes.

Easiest to spot were the trim and stylish dance folks. The women especially. They had messy hair and slacks that stopped above the ankles or they were earth mother types with long graying hair and loose cotton outfits. As for the men, they were fit and aloof.

The chorus people were always in groups, smiling and talking a lot.

Also chatty and groupy were the opera folks. But a bit more serious. After all, they have much bigger budgets than choruses do.

The symphony managers were the most business-like. You could usually tell the size and financial health of a fellow’s orchestra by the quality of his suit. Whether men or women, they carried lots of papers in their hands and numbers in their heads.

The groups pretty much kept to themselves for the convention’s first three days until finally, on the fourth day, the walls were broken down for joint sessions. But many were exhausted and departing by that point.

Throughout it all composers were like bees. They floated around, dropped in to the various greenhouses of artistic growth, and cross-pollinated between the disciplines.

Networking is another word for it.

“I’m here to get connections with conductors and prospective organizations that will commission my works,” said Jaroslaw Golembiowski, a Polish American composer from Chicago. “I met a lot of open minded people that said ‘Send your score’ and gave me their business card.”

Golembiowski knows first hand that such brief encounters can pay off. At an industry convention a few years ago, he met a pianist who ended up recording his complete keyboard works. But as a self-employed composer, he found it hard to take the time off to be there and suggests that some funding be provided to help composers attend in the future.

New to the industry is Cody J. Wright, a 27-year-old composer from Pittsburgh. By speaking up during the question and answer period of some sessions, he got noticed and had people approaching him. And rather than giving out CDs of his music, he invited people to listen on his iPod.

“I got a sense of the state of affairs,” he said of the over-all convention. Also a wealth of new contacts. He estimated that he would be taking home some 150 business cards.

Daniel Brewbaker of New York distributed at least 40 CDs of his music. “It’s been a lot of fun,” he says. “There’s been a lot of reconnection with old friends for all four worlds.”

After wearing himself out attending sessions and working the hallways, Brewbaker did express some concern that panels remember their primary purpose, saying, “It’s important to keep art at the center.”

With an estimated 70 composers in attendance, that represents less than two percent of total conference turnout. But that made for a strong presence, according to veteran convention goer and long-time Pittsburgh composer David Stock.

“I’ve never seen so many of us at such a conference before. We infiltrated,” Stock said with pride.

Minnesota composer Mary Ellen Childs was on hand to convene with other participants in Meet The Composer’s Composers’ New Residency Program. The group, which included composers Jon Jang, Francis Wong, and Beth Custer, all of San Francisco, met on two mornings. Childs checked out other sessions in her remaining time.

“I would say that the overall mood is stimulating,” she said. “You’re with fellow artists and people who make art happen. Ideas get sparked either in conversation or back at your hotel room when you start thinking…”

It wasn’t just composers who found the event heartening. On the last afternoon of the last day, two conductors, Slon and Frank S. Albinder, who is Music Director of the Washington Men’s Camerata, got excited when asked to name some composers that they had met while in Pittsburgh. They rattled off a list that included David Conti, Alice Parker, and Conrad Susa.

“I met more composers here today than at any other conference,” said Albinder.

Like many others Slon remarked at the irony of having to go out of town to meet people from his own area. His example was getting a chance to meet Adolphus Hailstork, a fellow Virginian. But Slon was also happy to be meeting less well-known composers. Without divulging how many scores and CDs he’d be taking home, he did say: “We have a responsibility to go through some of (these composers’) music.”

Lest it sound like the convention was one big cocktail party, it was also an opportunity for composers to gather information—both facts and impressions—on the four host organizations: the American Symphony Orchestra League, Chorus America, Dance/USA, and OPERA America.

Suffice it to say that each of these service organizations provides advocacy for its art form and training on artistic and business matters, through workshops and publications, for administrators, artists, board members, and volunteers.

On the following pages are some salient facts on each group, along with some insights garnered from convention participants and a couple of rather opinioned scores for services for and attitudes toward composers.

• American Symphony Orchestra League
• Chorus America
• OPERA America
• Dance/USA