Don’t Be Boulez

When the French high modernist Pierre Boulez was studying with René Leibowitz, the older composer dared to suggest several places in which his student’s first piano sonata could stand some improvement. Hugely affronted, Boulez — who had been planning to dedicate the sonata to Leibowitz — screamed “Vous êtes merde!” (“You are shit!”) and stormed from the room. Later, when preparing the sonata for publication, he saw the dedication on the title page and viciously scratched it out with a letter opener.

This is, to put it mildly, not the most graceful way to handle criticism. And yet, I’ve definitely been there. Composing is intense, intimate stuff, and even mild criticism, gently couched, can feel like an attack on you as a person and everything you hold dear. When it’s not couched gently, when it digs below surface slip-ups to target the fundamental structure of a work, it can cut like the most vicious of knives. 

And yet, criticism is an integral part of creative life. You don’t get better without people pointing out where you’ve gone astray, often repeatedly and at length. How do you handle someone tearing into something you wrote without comparing them to excrement and symbolically stabbing them in the face?

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Of Magyrs and Manticores

I read a lot of fantasy as a kid. A lot a lot. Even when I basically stopped leisure reading in college, fantasy literature was never far from my mind, and now that I’ve started up again, my “books to read” list is split pretty evenly between fantasy novels and everything else. I have fond memories of many of these books, but I’d be hesitant to read most of them again. As I’ve read more and more, my tastes have sharpened — I’ve become able to appreciate things I couldn’t before, but there are also things that bother me now in narrative fiction that I used to pass by with blithe indifference. Some books, however cherished in my memory, come with big, stark signs saying “do not revisit these waters lest you rend the glowing shroud of nostalgia asunder”. (My subconscious is kind of wordy.)

The Orphan’s Tales, by Catherynne M Valente, is not one of those books.

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Music Monday: Jubilee Riots: Penny Black

Just because I mostly write classical music (or whichever of the other imperfect monikers you prefer) doesn’t mean it's the only genre of music I listen to, let alone the only genre I get excited enough to geek out about. I may not have the same deep knowledge and stylistic vocabulary to engage it with, but there’s an awful lot of great music out there that does things to me that trio sonatas simply don’t. So this week we peek out from our usual waters to check out Jubilee Riots’ album, Penny Black.

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Why Textbook Publishing Makes Me Sad

It’s that time of year again! As we get closer to the start of a new semester and a new school year, various lists of sites are going around telling you where you can find cheap used copies of textbooks, or even free downloads thereof. Many of these posts also paint textbook companies as greedy, scheming monstrosities whose sole goal is to fleece hapless college students of their paltry, desperately-needed-for-other-things funds. I’m not interested in commenting about the legality or ethics of these sites (broadly speaking, the cheap used ones are legal and the free downloads aren’t, tho there may be exceptions to that for individual cases #IAmNotALawyer), but I do want to address that portrayal of publishing companies.

My mom works as a production editor at one such company, you see, and from hearing her talk about her work, I have a bit more of an insider’s perspective on the industry. And I’m here to tell you that it’s not full of self-satisfied moguls patting themselves on the back for putting broke students thru the wringer.

It’s much worse than that.

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Music Monday: Coulthard: Cello Sonata

Unlike many of her contemporaries, Coulthard steered clear of the cutting edge of the avant-garde, writing in a language that was often criticized for being conservative and out of touch (criticisms that often carried more than a whiff of misogyny in the background), but one that she felt called to all the same. (In her last works, she did experiment with various contemporary techniques, but they were never a core part of her repertoire.) Her cello sonata, written in 1947, very much exemplifies this style.

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Beyond a Boycott

By now I'm sure most of you are aware of the problems with Roland Emmerich’s upcoming Stonewall movie. It whitewashes history and erases the contributions of trans women of color, putting a cis white gay man front and center instead of the historical people who were actually the first to fight back against the police*. It perpetuates the abhorrent transphobic myth that trans women are ~really~ “men in dresses” by casting a cis man in the role of Marsha P Johnson. Along with cutting Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, the IMDB page for the film has no roles listed for several other pivotal women of color, including Sylvia Rivera and Stormé DeLaverie.

This film, in short, is an insult both to history and to some of the people most vulnerable to oppressive violence. Do not see this movie. Tell your friends not to see this movie. Don't reward racist, transmisogynistic lies.

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Music Monday: The Red Book of Montserrat

My knowledge of Medieval Europe is somewhat patchy, to say the least. My high school’s basic world history course tracked Europe thru the fall of the Roman Empire, but then shifted south to cover the kingdoms of Africa (a curriculum that I’m very down with; it’s a shame that more public high schools don’t teach about Songhai, Mali, Kush, Axum, and the many other kingdoms and empires that have existed in various incarnations on that continent.). Then, when I took AP European History, I came down with pneumonia the week that we covered the Middle Ages in Europe, and never really made up the material. And while I did take the Medieval and Renaissance music history course in college, it was . . . considerably less politically focussed than the Baroque-to-1950s, so it did little to fill in the gaps.

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The Great Divide

There’s a lot of music out there that I fell in love with the very first time that I heard it. From Holst’s Hammersmith to Higdon’s concerto for orchestra, there are many pieces out there that I latched onto at my first exposure and never looked back. As you might expect, I listen to these pieces a lot. Not on a constant loop, necessarily, but considerably more often than I listen to other quality things that stock my iTunes and Spotify libraries. Whenever I have a strong, specific urge to listen to piece X, it’s almost invariably for one of these pieces.

There’s also a lot of music that I’ve disliked quite intensely from the first time I encountered it. Babbitt’s Philomel is not my jam, and neither is Schubert’s Schöne Müllerin (SORRY NOT SORRY).  Needless to say, I hardly ever listen to these things, unless they wind up packaged on an album with something else I’m interested in or I have to for an academic class.

But there’s another category, too, one that I may actually listen to more even than the first category: Works I don’t understand.

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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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