Music Monday: Clarke: Viola Sonata

Chances are that, even if you're not a musician, you have a general sense that the viola is the butt of a lot of jokes. There are some historical facts that help get them off the ground, but at a certain point they got enough momentum to become A Thing and simply carry on out of their own inertia. Even if often wrapped in a layer or two of irony, the viola has a reputation (or, at the very least, a reputation for having a reputation) for being a scrappy, unimpressive instrument. This is entirely unfair. The viola is a marvelous instrument with many outstanding qualities, and it's a shame that it gets so little time in the spotlight. Fortunately, there have always been composers and performers out there working to make sure the viola is taken as seriously as it deserves.

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Music Monday: Pousseur: Vue sur les Jardins interdits

“Personal style is fed by a multitude of of collective currents; we are the focus, the crossing point of intersecting trends, of colliding waves. Our own work, then, is a mirror of a great deal that hails from somewhere else.” Henri Pousseur gave that answer in 1983 to Bálint András Varga as part of Varga’s project to ask the same three questions to sixty-five then-contemporary composers [Google Book], and it serves as a good jumping-off point to get into his style. Pousseur unquestionably has a distinctive musical voice, but a core component of that voice is the bringing together of what would at first seem wholly incompatible elements.

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Circle of Tints

Despite having written about it twice before, it sometimes seems like a well kept secret that I have sound-color synesthesia. I do! This means that I “see” colors when I listen to music, but it also — and more importantly for today’s post — means that when I sit down to write music, I start by imagining colors, and those colors guide me to the sounds I need. Over the years that I’ve been composing, I’ve built up a pretty robust system of key-color associations, and today I’m going to provide a peek under the hood and actually list them out.

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Music Monday: Thorvaldsdóttir: Aeriality

There are certain strands of contemporary music making that I don't spend a lot of time swimming in. Compositions built around shifting fields of textures is one — I am a melodist at heart, and such pieces often pass right over my head, leaving me mostly unmoved. Every now and again, tho, one comes along that is so skillfully, deftly done that it breaks thru, and in those moments I feel like I really get what this style of music is all about.

One such piece is Aeriality by Anna Thorvaldsdóttir.

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Future by Flyby

New Horizons successfully made it past Pluto! At long last we have actual images of the once-planet's surface! It's all tremendously exciting and there have been many times over the last few days where I've given myself over to giggling and bouncing around with joy at this momentous occasion. I grew up when the Voyager planetary tours were already a fait accompli, and I'd always kind of resented that the decision had been made (for very good reasons, to be fair) to skip Pluto in favor of exploring Titan. Pluto was an enigma, sketched in with best guesses in the astronomy books I devoured as a kid, visible in photos as nothing more than a few distorted pixels.

That's all different now. Pluto may no longer be an official planet, but I think I'll always think of it as one, and the pictures New Horizons is sending back feel like the completion of something that's been nagging unresolved since the 70s. And personally, too, it feels like the completion of something else.

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Music Monday: Akiho: Concerto for Steel Pans

Andy Akiho (born 1979) is not your run-of-the mill composer. After graduating with a BA in performance (on steel pans) from the University of South Carolina, he moved to New York City with no contacts and no money hoping to make a career as a Jazz performer. He drove around Brooklyn until he heard another player, and within a few months had managed to establish himself as a widely respected player in the scene there. He gradually started to lengthen and intensify his solos, and soon started improvising original pieces from scratch. At a certain point, he enrolled in the contemporary performance techniques Master's program at the Manhattan School of Music, and also began to explore composition in a more systematic fashion. (In the middle of all this, in 2006, he went to Washington DC to help out in his father's sushi restaurant, but juggling performing, composing, and restauranteering proved to be too much even for him.)

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Music Monday: Seeger: Suite for Wind Quintet

Exceptionally gifted and hard working, Seeger spent the summer of 1929 at the MacDowell Colony, and, in 1930, became the first woman to win a Guggenheim Fellowship, allowing her to study in Paris and Berlin. (This, at a time when critics still wrote that she could write music “like a man”, a full 48 years before Aaron Copland would opine that “the female mind doesn't like to concern itself with abstract things, and that's what music is.”, despite having worked with numerous female composers, including Seeger herself.) It was in the brief window between 1930 and 1936 that she wrote most of her best known pieces, most notably the string quartet from 1931, which is one of the first pieces in the Western musical tradition to explore integral serialism (i.e. subjecting rhythm, timbre, loudness, and even formal structures to the same techniques that regular serialism applies to pitch).

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What Brings Us Together Today

It's 2008. November. My junior year of high school. I'm sitting in my Gay and Lesbian Literature class, still riding the buzz from last night's election victory. Obama, not McCain, is going to be our president for the next four years. My teacher, herself a lesbian, is upbeat about the presidential election, but upset about a ballot initiative that passed out in California. (We are in Massachusetts.) It's my first brush with a phrase that will cling to my life for years to come: Proposition 8, the ballot initiative that stripped Californians of the right to marry someone of the same gender.

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Music Monday: Nelson: Passacaglia

Names can be pretty exciting things for composers. If you've got the right combination of letters in your name, you can encode it into music, leaving a kind of musical signature in your works to mark them as your own. The most famous of these is undoubtedly that of Johann Sebastian Bach, whose last name, using the German system of note nomenclature, translates directly into the notes B-flat, A, C, B-natural. Bach himself used that motif in numerous pieces (iconically, it's the last subject in the last, unfinished, fugue in The Art of Fugue, and, Bach enjoying the status that he does in the musical landscape, numerous other composers have deployed it in their works as a kind of homage, some more subtly than others.

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Songs and Sommeliery

If you ever have me over for dinner, don't break out the fancy wine.

I won't be offended by it — I don't have some strange and idiosyncratic vendetta against expensive libations — I just won't appreciate it.

I have four basic categories when it comes to appreciating wine: Undrinkable, Not My Favorite, Decent, and Wow This Is Good. Beyond the most rudimentary language of dry vs sweet, I have almost no way of describing what I like; my palette is unrefined and promiscuous, perfectly happy to lap up the cheapest grocery store offering or the fanciest private reserve — and completely incapable of telling the difference between them. The complex, florid descriptions on the backs of bottles, the earnest, enthusiastic recommendations in wine stores? Completely meaningless to me. I can smile and nod as the words go by, but ultimately I'd get about the same amount of comprehension from a lecture in advanced quantum mechanics.

This isn't the fault of some defect on my tongue. I have no doubt that, given time and training and bountiful samples to sip from, I could develop my ability to dissect all the nuanced flavors that expert sommeliers pick out. I might not be able to become the very best wine taster in the world, but I'm sure I could become decent enough to have strong opinions on what I should pair with my next meal. I could totally do that.

I just don't want to.

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Music Monday: Archer: Piano Concerto

As Kimberly Archer (b 1973) notes in her program note for today's piece, composing a piano concerto is “one of those nearly obligatory ‘composer benchmarks’” that almost all of us wind up tackling at some point or other in our careers. To be sure, there are times where this kind of expectation can feel stifling — most of us want to be individuals, not cookie-cutouts — but by the same token, seeing how a new person works in a familiar genre can be a quick and powerful way to get a handle on what they're about. The sheer number of pre-existing piano concerti gives a rich field for comparison without having to dive into the treacherous waters of comparing radically different kinds of works. Here's a form with a long and storied tradition; let's see what you make from it!

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So You Want to Do Otello

The new Met Opera brochure for the 2015–16 season is here! It came on Tuesday, and even tho I don't live in NYC right now, I was still excited about it, because a) simulcasts are a thing and b) the Met is an institution of national significance in the music world I move in, and I like feeling hip to what's going on. Usually I have some gripes with their repertoire selection (predictably, all the operas they're doing were written by men, and the most recent is Alban Berg's Lulu from 1935), and while I have many thoughts about those things, there is a more pressing issue that needs to be addressed:

They're doing Otello in blackface. Again.

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Music Monday: Makris: Variations and Song

Andreas Makris was born 7 March, 1930 in Salonika, Greece, and spent the early years of his life there. His early piano studies were cut short by the outbreak of World War Two, but then his father traded salt and olive oil to a starving man in exchange for a violin, and Makris began teaching himself that instrument. After graduating from the national conservatory in Greece, he emigrated to the United States in 1950, and ultimately graduated from the Mannes School of Music in 1956, before going on to continue studying at the Aspen Music Festival and, subsequently, traveling to Paris to study with Nadia Boulanger. Instead of staying in France or returning to Greece as might be expected, he settled back in the United States, quickly taking a position in the violin section of the National Symphony Orchestra, where he played for 28 years.

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Music Monday: Lash: Moth Sketches

Hardly any information about Moth Sketches (2013) is floating around on the internet — even the listing on her publisher's site is a bare-bones rundown of instrumentation and duration — but according to an archived copy of the program from the première performance, the work started out as a score for a short animated film about a moth. Eventually, the music parted ways from the movie and became a stand-alone work, but the origins left their imprint, and she found herself thinking of different materials as quasi-dramatic characters. The form is still abstract, however; she describes it as being like a braided rope, "involving many strands of differing colors" such that the surface is constantly changing as the piece unfolds.

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Why I Listen to Music I Don't Like

This past week was the Next on Grand festival down at Disney Hall, a series of concerts celebrating contemporary American composers. I couldn't attend every single one, but I caught the bulk of them, my bus pass getting a strenuous workout in the process. Seeing this behavior, you might well think that I was rather besotted with the repertoire, in love with the pieces on the program.

By and large, I wasn't.

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Music Monday: Dillon: The Infinite Sphere

Despite the historical prominence of the genre, I don't really listen to a lot of string quartets. It's not hard to find reasons why: I'm a wind player, so I can't exactly perform in one (nor can the people I know from sitting next to in most ensembles . . . ), most of my exploratory listening is in times and repertoires rather more recent than the core of the quartet repertoire, and the music theory courses I took tended to be centered more around art songs and piano sonatas. It will come as no surprise, then, that the ones I do know tend to be rather off the beaten path. 

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Blame Your Tools

My low register was sharp.

This, in and of itself, was not terribly surprising. The bassoon is full of awkward acoustic compromises, and the low register on my instrument had never been particularly in tune, even under ideal conditions. I'd made some changes to my setup (including swapping out part of the instrument) senior year of college that had helped considerably, but still, it was hardly surprising that the first time I pulled out a tuner in LA, low B-flat was aspiring ever upwards.

So I did what I've been trained to do. I set about drilling myself with intonation exercises, training myself not only to be able to hear when notes are or aren't in their proper place, but also to be able to get them there from the moment they start to sound. For those of you unused to the joys of woodwind playing, this involves a lot of fiddly manipulations of parts of your body you don't normally think about: How high up in my throat is my larynx right now? Can I get it lower? What's the shape of the back of my tongue? Is there equal pressure coming from every direction around my mouth? All this while watching the needle on the pitch indicator stubbornly refusing to budge.

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