Category: Articles

What do you feel should be the requirements for a composer to be included in the Grove? Carla Scaletti



I view inclusion in the Grove dictionary as a recognition that is, like any other award, valuable only to the extent that it paves the way for you to do your chosen work. Awards are, of course, political and geography/social class dependent. We all know that. If there is an award that could draw attention to your work (and result in more commissions or more opportunities for you to do interesting projects) then it is worth vying for that award purely for its desirable side-effect. But the moment you start thinking that an award is a validation of your work is the moment that you start mistaking the means for the ends.

What do you feel should be the requirements for a composer to be included in the Grove? Frank Ticheli



Photo by Walter Zooi

Given the large number of composers out there today and the enormous range of their activities, the task of determining who warrants inclusion in the Grove Dictionary is, at best, an inexact science. The Grove is an amazing resource; but I really have no idea how composers are selected in this country. One would suspect that the major publishers, recording labels, and performing organizations are canvassed, but that would be insufficient given the rise in desktop publishing, online recordings, and alternative performance venues. One of my colleagues (who is listed) also suggests that it might help to have a champion among the NYC critics. If so, one would also hope that critics outside New York are also surveyed carefully.

I reviewed the dictionary’s appendix containing an alphabetical listing of American composers born after 1900, and found a fairly broad representation. However, I sensed some degree of geographical bias in favor of the East Coast. There is also a bias against those whose music is perceived by the editors to be outside—or beneath—the mainstream (e.g., many gifted film composers and the almost entirely overlooked group of composers who create meaningful, artistic, and widely performed music for young musicians). I found a few composers—but only a few—whose works have rarely ventured beyond the walls of academia, while others whose music is more widespread outside of academia are overlooked.

Despite these problems, I cannot imagine a specific set of requirements for determining who gets included, but I do know one thing. Getting listed in the Grove Dictionary should not be a crucial career goal for any composer. I suppose the most important requirement should be to create good music over an extended period of time. Then, no matter how far you live from the Hudson River (or the Thames) and regardless of what type of music you compose, there will come a time when they cannot help but notice you.

What do you feel should be the requirements for a composer to be included in the Grove? Thomas Oboe Lee



I have no idea!!!

Three years or so ago when the current Grove was still in its editorial stages, the Chair of my Department at Boston College, T. Frank Kennedy, S.J., asked me how come I was not listed in the Grove. He had been asked by the Grove to contribute an article on Jesuit music. I told him that I had no idea. He said he would nominate me. No one from the Grove contacted me. Nothing happened.

I guess it would be an honor to see one’s name listed in that most sought-after book of reference. But, in all honesty, is it really that important? What is most important to me is that I continue to compose and that I continue to learn about myself through my music. And additionally that musicians want to play and audiences want to hear my work. Without modesty, I have to say I am quite content with how things are going. I have enough commissions to keep me busy year-round, and enough concerts of my music to keep me in the public eye. Recent releases of my work on commercial labels have also helped keep my music in circulation. So, ultimately it’s the work that counts, not whether one’s name is included in some list. Inclusion in any list is ultimately quite subjective. Inevitably, someone will be left out. Charles Ives once said that winning awards and prizes is for boy scouts. He was not interested in recognition; he wrote all that wonderful, visionary music in complete isolation. I applaud him!!!

What do you feel should be the requirements for a composer to be included in the Grove? Anne LeBaron



When I was invited to comment on what criteria should be met for a composer to gain entry into the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, and to reflect upon whether American composers are adequately represented in the current edition, I initially balked. How could I adequately address such a broad question in the course of a few days? What about the increasingly broad definition of “composer,” not to mention the complication of “American” composer? My solution was to bypass such roadblocks, and go to the heart of the matter.

I discovered, in the course of a modicum of research, more than a few glaring omissions from the New Grove II, despite the much-touted expansion in size and the broader coverage (when compared to its predecessor, published in 1980). Indeed, in the introduction to New Grove II, the editors (Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell) point out that the “biggest single expansion has been in the coverage of 20th century composers.”

There are 5,000 entries for composers in the present volume, compared to 3,000 in the 1980 edition. According to the editors, these additional 2,000 entries reflect the representation of composers from more countries, of more popular types of music, and of more composer-performers. Certainly, such growth in numbers represents a kind of progress. Yet, in light of such a monumental improvement, how is it possible to omit composers such as Osvaldo Golijov, Mark Adamo, Derek Bermel, Maria Schneider, Thomas Oboe Lee, Nathan Currier, David Stock, Melinda Wagner, Lori Dobbins, Jane Brockman, Ran Blake, Sebastian Currier, Reza Vali, Nancy Galbraith, Don Byron, Toby Twining, Mary Ellen Childs, Julius Hemphill, John Musto, and Richard Einhorn? (I’ll stop at twenty, but there are many more.) Within this admittedly random listing of noted composers, there are achievements galore that would presumably form the basis of criteria for representation in Grove’s—visibly important performances, recordings, publications, awards, and prizes, including a Pulitzer. So, what gives?

Three other individuals will form a nucleus for the core of my argument protesting the omission of American composers who deserve to be included in Grove II. Two of these, like the composers just mentioned, are not included in Grove II; the third is shamefully underrepresented. Unlike quite a few composers in my hastily assembled group of twenty, these three aren’t exactly spring chickens—obviating any age-based excuses for non-inclusion.

Although composer and pianist Muhal Richard Abrams merits an entry in the brand-spanking new New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, he’s nowhere to be found in the “comprehensive” Grove II. As co-founder and first president of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, he occupies an undeniably significant place in the history of American music. As a bandleader, he’s been responsible for over a dozen recordings, and has accumulated a remarkable array of commissioned works and performances. Anyone can look up his accomplishments, including international prizes and the like.

I can personally attest to the extraordinary generosity, vision, and thrilling musicianship with which Abrams surrounded his musicians in the recording sessions for One Line, Two Views (I was the harpist in this ensemble). The amalgamations of styles, fused into his personal language, were enhanced by his firm grasp of technique and his command of a variety of communicative procedures that, in the end, served the music without fail. The passion and commitment he embodied was heady, and reminded me of the time I was studying in Ligeti‘s class, in Germany—same intensive atmosphere, nothing mattered more than the music, with a palpable spirit of adventure permeating the atmosphere. The visceral, hands-on experience, with Abrams at the helm in the sessions, was another kind of educational experience altogether. Back to the main point: was the omission of this living legend from Grove II, the literal and spiritual father of a major movement in American music, and a fearless and gripping composer, a mere unfortunate “oversight?”

The second composer I’ll bring into this discussion, Alice Shields (featured in the July 2002 issue of NewMusicBox), was Associate Director of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center for a number of years. Not surprisingly, she was also one of the very first American women to compose electronic music, with several “classic” electronic works available on recording (such as the evocative The Transformation of Ani). She has been widely commissioned, recorded, and performed, creating electronic operas—such as Mass for the Dead and Apocalypse (available on CRI) and large computer works for dance—such as Dust, currently touring in India. Her intensive study of Hindustani classical vocal music, and of South Indian rhythmic recitation, has charged her more recent works with a seductive exoticism. She continues to write and lecture about the psychology of music and about electronic music. This past summer, the Santa Fe Opera asked her to serve as a panel moderator for the topic “Electronic Media and the Voice” (with panelists Kaija Saariaho, Morton Subotnick and Gershon Kingsley). As a seminal figure on the American electronic music scene, and an active composer who continues to attract commissions, why isn’t Shields represented in Grove II?

Finally, I want to protest the meager space (barely more than one-half of a page) allotted to James Tenney in Grove II. Earlier this year, on Feb. 7, 2002, Tenney served as the Invited Scholar during a symposium honoring György Ligeti, a 2002 Kyoto Prize Laureate. Ligeti wasted no time in pronouncing Tenney as one of the “greatest American composers living today, in the company of Ives, Partch, and Nancarrow.” Need I say more? Tenney’s credits, and landmark achievements, warrant far more thorough and generous treatment. Case in point: Collage No. 1—aka “Blue Suede Shoes”—is widely considered to be one of the first, if not THE first, examples of plunderphonics, way before the term itself was born.

A brief digression: I compared the space in Grove II, allocated to two British composers, with the number of pages given to György Ligeti. Peter Maxwell Davies, born in 1934, gets 10 pages; Harrison Birtwistle (b.1934) gets 7. Ligeti (b.1923) comes through with 5 1/2, nearly half that of Davies. Does this smack of blatant favoritism? Or am I missing something here? Alex Ross, in his review (“Abba to Zywny,” The New Yorker, July 9, 2001), takes Grove II to task for relegating more important figures “from other lands” to a backseat, while the “Oxbridgean tours de force” hold forth.

Perhaps it’s telling to point out that the three composers I’ve chosen to foreground (Abrams, Shields, and Tenney) are identified with genres that have had a history of marginalization, and that typically don’t feed back into the corporate structure propping up the contemporary music machine. There are more than three such “borderline” genres, but the ones I’m pointing to for the moment are improvisation; electronic music; and experimentalism. As Terry Teachout astutely recognizes in his review (“On ‘The New Grove II’” in Commentary, Sept. 2001), by exercising their power of selection, the makers of encyclopedias establish a “set of intellectual priorities.” Hence, the priorities that are established tend to be self-perpetuating, to the exclusion, or diminution, of everything else. Although Grove II has obviously become more inclusive than it was twenty years ago, there seems to be plenty of wiggle room for capitalizing on those improvements, and for aspiring toward a more even and equitable representation of composers.

Paradoxically, Charles Rosen, in his brilliant and erudite review of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (predecessor to New Grove II), in The New York Review of Books (May 28, 1981), remarks that the dictionary is “largely dominated by the Americans.” Of course, he’s making reference to the scholars who write the entries. About fifteen years later, in an article describing the challenges she faced while writing an entry defining “feminism” for the New Grove II (see “Defining Feminism: Conundrums, Contexts, Communities,” in Women and Music, Vol. 1, 1997), Ruth Solie expands upon that claim, noting the dominant presence of American reviewers in the avalanche of reviews in the wake of the 1980 edition. “Like me, reviewers are especially interested in the reflection of disciplinary change in the new edition. A strong American voice is almost universally noted.” If this continues to be the case, American writers submitting entries for Grove, along with the phalanx of reviewers critiquing it, should be aware of the discrepancies among composer entries and make an effort to achieve more of a balance. I’m talking about nothing less than musicological activism aimed at leveling the playing field, which should in the long run raise the overall level of a magnificent encyclopedia.

What do you feel should be the requirements for a composer to be included in the Grove? Paul Moravec



Considering the question of what qualifies a composer for inclusion in Grove‘s, I think first of the Dictionary’s general mission, which might be summarized in a critic’s description of J.S. Bach: “He is the spectator of all musical time and existence, for whom it is not of the smallest importance whether a thing be old or new, so long as it is true.” I look to Grove‘s to include composers whose works are, among many other admirable attributes, timeless and universal. “Timeless” is meant not only in the sense of enduring the test of time, but primarily in the quality of timelessness essential to, and inseparable from, the work itself. Both measures apply to the works of past composers, while only the latter, of course, applies to those of living composers.

A timeless work may be viewed as standing at the point of intersection between the temporal and

the eternal. It is distinctly characteristic of its particular era while seeming to transcend that era’s naturally narrow perspective. Such music frees us from the thrall of time, if only for the duration of the piece. Lifted out of self-concern, we “are the music while the music lasts.” We catch glimpses of eternity’s sublime landscape as we are carried inexorably onward.

A timely work which nevertheless stands outside of time rests on the foundation of a deeply felt experience of life and thoroughly considered world-view. I am convinced that it involves a kind of wisdom, a long-range and comprehensively encompassing perspective not necessarily expressible in words by the composer or anyone else. Such a composer does not care whether a thing be old or new so long as it is true, in his pursuit of truth in musical thought. Like such music itself, Grove‘s offers a partial corrective to our culture’s addled neophilia and ephemeral distractions. In presenting all of musical time to the present contemporary reader of any era, Grove‘s should be, and to a remarkable degree is, the scholarly complement to an art-form which offers us the pleasurable paradox of the eternal now.

In Conversation with John J. Volanski



John Volanski
Photo courtesy of the author

An interview with the authr of Sound Recording Advice
Available for purchase at http://www.soundrecordingadvice.com.

Molly Sheridan: Composers have their own recording needs and especially with the industry being less and less able to support these discs, I thought this book would be really interesting.

John Volanski: Well, I would think that a lot of composers could use a home studio as a composing tool.

Molly Sheridan: This book is a very practical instructional tool. What motivated you to sit down and organize this knowledge for the amateur?

John Volanski: Well, originally it started out as a series of articles that I was going to write for Electronic Musician, and I wrote some of those and then I put the project on the shelf and it sat there for a couple of years. Then the opportunity came up where I had the opportunity to leave my job with some stock under my wing so I thought this would be a great opportunity to sit down and at least finish what I had started writing. It turned out to be a lot more work that I thought it was going to be because every time I got to a point where I would stop and look at what I had written, I’d think, ‘Well, now I have to tell them about power and acoustics and how to mix and how to set up a gain structure,’ and on and on. Eventually I finished it but it was a lot more work that I first thought. I found that I was answering the same questions over and over again to a lot of my friends who were setting up their own home studios and so I thought well this would be a good thing to have to point them to so they could just read that and all my answers would be right there.

Molly Sheridan: What is your background in all this that you became so knowledgeable that people were coming to you for advice?

John Volanski: Originally I started out just playing around with analogue tape decks, reel-to-reels, and I got interested in that when I was a kid. Then when I went to college I studied electrical engineering and I also took audio engineering courses as a minor and got more and more interested in it. Did a lot of playing around with equipment while I was there in the music labs, things like that. And then when I got out I bought some equipment for myself and built my own mixer, bought a used analog reel-to-reel and an old monophonic synthesizer, and just started playing around and eventually figured it out. But there’s a lot of extra reading I did on the side, books and different magazines like Keyboard Magazine, Electronic Musician, things of that nature.

Molly Sheridan: Is there anything new that even you learned while writing this book?

John Volanski: That’s a good question. I think most of the stuff I knew, it was just getting it out and onto paper. One of the things that was an interesting task was trying to put together complete recording systems that I could recommend to people at different budget levels. Like if you only have $500, what can you do? What if you only have $2500? And so that was harder than I thought it was going to be because you kind of have one hand tied behind your back. You have to cover all the bases. You need a microphone, you need a recorder, you need some way to mix it, and a different recorder to mix it down to cassette or CD, headphones…it goes on and on, so that was an interesting exercise for me.

Molly Sheridan: Yeah, I was really surprised how much of it wasn’t necessarily computer based. In my limited experience with recording, it’s always involved ProTools, so the fact that there still are technically efficient ways to do this without involving a PC was very surprising to me?

John Volanski: That’s true. You know ProTools is the latest and greatest and everyone wants to jump on that bandwagon, but for the last 20 or 30 years people have been making perfectly good recordings not using ProTools so all that equipment is out there and a lot of it is on the used market right now and it represents a good deal for people to seek out and buy. Some of the older equipment can be kind of a maintenance headache but if you know what you’re doing with that kind of stuff you can turn out very high quality recordings. There are a lot of sites and in my book I must give 20 or 30 of them where you can get used equipment. There are a ton of them out there.

Molly Sheridan: Yeah, I would guess so since it seems like it almost becomes an addiction and having the new technology gets to be important.

John Volanski: It’s called “new gear lust.” They’ve given it a name, that’s how bad it is.

Molly Sheridan: I’m curious what your first studio looked like when you felt that you were completely operational. What kind of equipment was in it?

John Volanski: Well, let’s see. That’s a good question. When I started out I had 4-track reel-to-reel, a 16-channel mixer that I bought components for and put together, and I used another 2-channel reel-to-reel for my mastering deck and I also used that deck as an echo device kind of like the old tape based echoes. Now a days it’s all digital reverb, digital echo. That’s pretty easy to do, but back then those things were like $10,000 a piece and so there was no way I could afford that. So with that and an old Korg synthesizer that I bought, that’s how I started. And you know some of those recordings that I did back then are pretty lame. I think when I got to the point where I was turning out reasonably higher quality recordings was when I bought an 8-track reel-to-reel and I bought a 16-channel mixer—and it was very clean, the audio path was, no hiss or anything—and I bought a digital effects box, the Yamaha SPX90 was like the first Swiss army knife of multi-effectors, so once I had those and a good condenser mic, then I could start to turn out good recordings, but now a days people can buy those exact units on the used market for, geez, they could probably get that reel-to-reel for $300 or $400 now and when I bought it, it was like $1200. So yeah it’s really changed and the stuff you can buy now, the quality is two or three times what it was and the price is two or three times less.

Molly Sheridan: What do you think, as you look back, were some of the big lessons that you learned or hard lessons through recording disasters that still stick in your mind, that maybe even as you wrote this book you felt a need to address?

John Volanski: Having proper power and grounding is a biggie in that when I first started, the house that I had didn’t have a third wire ground in it. When I’d have ground loops or hum and things of that nature it was hard to get rid of. So getting the proper power and grounding in was one thing. Learning about how sound behaves in a small room because most everyone who is going to have a home studio is going to do it in a bedroom or a garage or something and usually the sound behaves not to your advantage in a small room like that. Not only when you record it but when you listen to it with the monitor that you have it’s going to color the sound quite a bit and it can lead you to make mistakes when you go to mix it down, because you think you’re hearing one thing which you are but when you listen to it in a different space the
way the sound is colored doesn’t appear. Another thing that I leaned is probably putting a lot of emphasis on buying at least one good microphone rather than three or four average microphones. If I were to recommend to someone just starting out what they should do, I’d definitly go with a high quality condenser microphone and the reason is because if you don’t capture the high quality sound right at the beginning anything that you do downstream like adding compression or echo or reverb or equalization, it’s not going to matter because you didn’t start out with a good clean pristine signal. So getting the signal to be the best possible at the beginning makes a big difference. Another thing I learned that took me awhile was proper gain staging and what that means is that any act of electronic stages down the line that can adjust the volume can have a big effect on the signal to noise ratio and the dynamic range of the final audio so if you don’t optimize the gain at each one of those stages and learn how to do that you’re probably going to compromise the overall signal quality and you’re going to end up either with a recording that’s not very loud that has a lot of hiss in it or one that’s too loud that has some distortion and clipping, so in fact in the book I give a lot of sites online and also a tutorial on how to set gain staging because that’s very important and one thing I didn’t know about when I first started. Those are probably some of the main ones.

Molly Sheridan: For someone who sees this book and thinks, ‘Yeah, I’m going to start my own home studio,’ is there any good way to gauge or test this out? How do you know if you’re just fascinated with the technology or if you’re really ready to invest in something like this?

John Volanski: That’s a good question because it is for most people a bit of an outlay of cash. I think what I would do is go to the local audio equipment dealer and see if you can rent probably something like an 8 or a 16-track digital recording system, a stand alone system that has a CD recorder, mixer, all built into it, and get a microphone and play guitar or violin or whatever and start laying down some tracks and see how you feel. If you’re just renting a system for a couple of weeks I think by that time you’re going to get the feel that, ‘Hey this really holds some intrigue for me,’ or ‘Geez, what am I doing this for?’ I think that strategy also works if you’re trying to decide what piece of equipment to buy—should I buy a 16-track reel-to-reel or a 16-channel digital recorder or should I just buy a new hard drive and some software for my computer. If you rent the equipment, sometimes you can make a better choice without jumping into the deep end.

Molly Sheridan: With how technology has progressed today, how close can you get in a home studio to what you would get if you used your neighborhood recording studio?

John Volanski: Actually quality wise I think you can get within 98% or 99%. In fact some of the stuff you hear that people put out is actually done in their home studios. A lot of the big stars have some pretty impressive home studios and I think what’s really going to make the difference is whether you have the audio engineering chops or not. Given that you’re a good musician, are you going to be able to capture a good quality recording, and a lot of that has to do with whether you understand acoustic principals and some of stuff that goes on behind the scenes with audio engineering. I’ve tried to give people a basic understanding of that in the book because I think it’s critical to have some of that knowledge if you’re going to be recording—like knowing what techniques you use to take a single monophonic sound like a violin and make it sound like two or three violins, how to make a violin sound like it’s up close or way in the background, those kinds of things. If you don’t know how to do that, you’re going to be at a disadvantage compared to going to a professional studio where the audio engineer will know how to do that and be able to do that for you.

Molly Sheridan: Are these things that you need an audio engineering degree to be able to grasp, or is it something you can read a couple books and practice a little bit and figure out for yourself?

John Volanski: I don’t think you need an audio engineering degree. I would think that a lot of the people who are out there and are mixing songs do not have audio engineering degrees. They may have some schooling in it but I’ll bet a lot of them just started out as apprentices watching somebody in the studio twiddling the knobs and telling them if you do this you’re going to get this result, and if you do that you’re going to get a different kind of result. It’s just a matter of getting your leg up on the technology and figuring out what things do. I think you can get a lot of that just from reading. Of course you need to put into action what you read. You can read all the books you want but if you never get into the studio and try out some of those things and experiment then it’s not going to do you any good. That’s one thing that a home studio is good for—experimentation because if you try to do that in a professional studio it’s going to cost you a lot of money because you’ve got an engineer standing there tapping his foot waiting for you to play around. You’re paying for that.

Molly Sheridan: The clock is always ticking! I guess to finish up then, I’m curious now, when people say, ‘Hey, John, I’m thinking of starting my own home studio,’ what do you think? Is there anything new that you tell them now that you’ve been through the process of writing this book?

John Volanski: I say, ‘Hey, go for it.’ I have a lot of friends who are doing just that. Right now they’re trying to figure out which multi-track to buy and what effects boxes and stuff and they’re very excited about it. And so am I. I like to help them figure that out. I get email all the time from people asking me what I think they should buy and the great thing is that technology is marching along at such a pace that we’re getting the price/performance ratio on a lot of this stuff is just taking off. It’s amazing the quality you can get for the money. I just got a flier the other day from Musician’s Friend, and they have a multi-track recorder with the mixer and effects built in and this thing is $299. It’s unbelievable and completely breaks the price barrier for multi-track digital recording. That’s the way things are going and it really only benefits the musicians and the people who are willing to take the step and create their own studio. </p

Making History

One of the most interesting aspects of this month’s discussion concerning the historical assessment of American music, is how this concern has its own deep history, a history which has played a considerable role in forming our musical community. Asserting the legitimacy and enduring value of American music has actually been an ongoing concern, even a battle, for at least 80 years. For composers such as Copland and Cowell back in the 1920s and ’30s, the struggle to see the music of their contemporaries performed and published was very much a struggle with the weight of history, and with the inertia which prevented their work from having certain kinds of access and opportunity—and from being taken seriously.

Those composers did things like form the American Music Center. We can’t overestimate how hard people like Cowell, Copland, Wally Riegger, Otto Luening, Marion Bauer, and others worked on behalf of the idea that American music belonged—belonged in concert halls, belonged in print, belonged in history. This is a history which deserves greater telling, in the manner of Rita Mead’s wonderfully detailed Henry Cowell’s New Music, which provides a picture of the roadblocks and the extraordinary critical disdain American composers faced.

What it teaches us is that the path to historical recognition is complicated and sometimes never righted, like a persistent social injustice. Ask Ruth Crawford or Wally Riegger if you could. And it is a myth that “the cream always rises to the top”—Conlon Nancarrow became known almost in spite of the arbiters of “quality” (and his fringe advocates Peter Garland and Tom Buckner can say, “I told you so”). I presented a James Tenney retrospective in New York in 1991, and must say I would have thought that eleven years later, his music would have found much wider circulation than that little concert at Greenwich House. Does he have to wait for people to jump on a Centenary bandwagon?

So, the reference books and the historians are not the only culprits here in molding our history. Actually, those of us in the world of “action”—performing, presenting, publishing, recording, teaching, advocating, writing and critiquing—play a huge role in creating the events and the cultural ecology which history chooses to document. We can point out the oversights of the New Grove, but these are perhaps not so far removed from the oversights of our musical establishment. This is why we need an activist AMC, why we need community, and why we need to never stop the dialogue.

In a culture in which history seems to be less valued, less studied, and less heeded, we need to remember. A culture which loses its collective memory loses its soul. In our field, we have a family tree, we have relatives named Johanna Beyer and Julius Eastman, and Art Tatum. The more we remember, the better the next edition of the New Grove will be. Defining, creating, and codifying music history is an ongoing process. And we are on the edge of history, where it is made.

What do you feel should be the requirements for a composer to be included in the Grove?

Alvin SingletonAlvin Singleton
“Every time your name appears somebody sees it and whether they know what you actually do or how well you do it is probably less important. But at least from my political point of view, I don’t think it means that one composer is better than another.”
John MelbyJohn Melby
“What does “adequately represented” mean? Does it imply some sort of quota system—some specific number of composers included for every 100,000 in terms of population for each country, for example?”
Carla ScalettiCarla Scaletti
“Awards are, of course, political and geography/social class dependent. We all know that.”
Frank TicheliFrank Ticheli
“There is a bias against those whose music is perceived by the editors to be outside—or beneath—the mainstream (e.g., many gifted film composers and the almost entirely overlooked group of composers who create meaningful, artistic, and widely performed music for young musicians).”
Thomas Oboe LeeThomas Oboe Lee
“I guess it would be an honor to see one’s name listed in that most sought-after book of reference. But, in all honesty, is it really that important?”
Anne LeBaronAnne LeBaron
“The priorities that are established tend to be self-perpetuating, to the exclusion, or diminution, of everything else.”
Paul MoravecPaul Moravec
“I look to Grove’s to include composers whose works are, among many other admirable attributes, timeless and universal.”

Do you still identify yourself as an American composer?

Charlemagne PalestineCharlemagne Palestine
“I was born a hop, skip, and a jump from the Atlantic Ocean in Brooklyn and I’m always ready to hop, skip, and jump to either side of the Atlantic when there’s something delicious for me to do there…”
Steve LacySteve Lacy
“I have always felt that a musician must follow his music wherever it takes him, and I do whatever it takes to keep it going, without artistic compromise…”
John McGuireJohn McGuire
“From those who told me that my music “sounds American” (and there were quite a few) I was never able to get any clear answer as to why. Certainly I would be unable to answer this myself…”
Nancy Van de VateNancy Van de Vate
“I still consider myself and my music American. Even the traits that enable me to live and work effectively in another country are American, namely practicality and adaptability…”
James DashowJames Dashow
“Well, I am an American, I am a composer, and I am living in Italy, but I am not sure whether I would want to re-arrange those characteristics into a single phrase…”
Arnold DreyblattArnold Dreyblatt
“While Europe has probably offered me creative opportunities that I might not have found in the States, I continue to see my work as American in style and in form, and European critics have generally agreed…”
Peter GarlandPeter Garland
“I suggest you look at a map. The country I live in is still America, and may be (these days) more authentically “American” than the one you live in…”

Strangers in Strange Lands

Frank J. Oteri, Editor and Publisher
Photo by United States Federal Government

O.K. True confession time. I was born in Miami, but I’ve spent almost my whole life in New York City and have therefore always thought of myself as a “native” New Yorker. As a newborn in Florida for only a couple of weeks before being whisked away to the North, it was too short a time for me to establish any kind of a Floridian identity. When I spent the better part of two elementary school years there a decade later, I never felt at home and was constantly ostracized by my classmates as “that New York kid.” Which makes me wonder: How long do you need to be in a place in order for that place to mold who you are? And how lasting are the imprints of the places that mold you?

I found it fascinating and somewhat surprising that Belgian-based composer Fred Rzewski still identifies himself as an American even though at this point he has spent more than half of his life in Europe. And I was even more surprised to learn that Rzewski, whom I’ve always perceived of as an avatar of counterculture, claimed that the first and foremost expression of any composer, himself included, is the aspiration of the national culture into which he or she was born.

At the American Music Center, we have historically always taken the broadest possible view of what it means to be an American composer, and have included among our ranks not only composers born and working in the United States, but also composers born abroad who live and create music here as well as composers who were born here who now live elsewhere. So, in the very first year of NewMusicBox, we devoted an entire issue to immigrant composers in America and how their voices have been core to our own national musical identity from the very beginning. But, as we began to explore the reverse phenomenon and examine the trajectories of composers born in the United States who have made their home somewhere else, we find the story is even more complex.

In his HyperHistory of expatriate American composers, Guy Livingston, an American pianist based in Paris, argues that the travel bug has been a defining trait of our composers and has been integral to shaping not only our own culture but also how we perceive our culture in relation to the cultures of the rest of the world.

In our previous issue of NewMusicBox, the point was repeatedly made that immigrant composers working in the United States had somehow “become” American by working here. Such has been the case for generations of composers dating back to Anthony Philip Heinrich in the mid-19th century, composers like Edgard Varèse, Kurt Weill, Schoenberg, and Stravinsky in the middle of the last century, and on to composers ranging from Tania León and Tan Dun these days, all of whom are key threads in the quilt that is American music. But, if that is true, do Americans living and creating abroad take on the national identities of their new homelands? And if they do, how does that account for Rzewski still identifying himself as an American?

That question somehow seems more difficult to answer with any kind of glib generalization. This ambivalence to divided cultural identity is reflected in the experiences of Charlemagne Palestine, Arnold Dreyblatt, Nancy Van de Vate, James Dashow, and Peter Garland, all of whom live abroad, as well as Steve Lacy and John McGuire, who lived abroad for many years but recently returned home to America.

Since “being an American” is not about ethnic origins but is rather about concepts—democracy, enterprise, manifest destiny—it is perhaps easier to “become” an American than it is to “become” French or to “become” Cambodian. Whereas other lands have always been about assimilation, the United States, despite the constant urges from commercial culture surrounding us and tempting us to conform, has established its identity as the result of its heterogeny.

Or maybe it’s even deeper than that…Maybe, it’s because most composers to some extent are strangers in strange lands, working in isolation, never quite connected to the cultural mainstream. And American composers, whose traditions by and large have been a constant struggle to fight against the traditions of previous generations and to constantly rebuild, often in the face of little to no outside recognition from so-called mainstream “culture,” are even further estranged in the strange land never quite grokking (to continue the Heinlein reference) the mainstream so as not be absorbed by it. Coming from our already disconnected environment into cultures where homogeneity and centuries-old traditions are the rule would seem to make expatriate American composers the most disconnected of all composers.

I think this all raises more questions than answers, which is one thing we always try to do with NewMusicBox. But one thing is certain, I know I’ll be feeling homesick for Manhattan when I visit friends and relatives in Florida for the holidays this year!