on hiatus

since my college classes are now under control, the past few weeks i have been getting a lot of writing in. i have sketched enough material for probably 5 or 6 new compositions. the material came fast and furious so i'm going on hiatus to get some writing done.

recently i have noticed some patterns developing in my compositional output. for some reason i alternate between writing one piece at a time (retrace our steps) or quite a few at once (music from summerland). my current project is more in the summerland camp (direct, music for popular consumption), although one of the pieces is at dealing with some longer forms.

on a daily basis i'm pretty consistent about doing something musical until the next ideas hit (transcription, score study, counterpoint, eartraining... i know it sounds really boring). this process is much like daily the practicing i used to do on my trombone.

now i need to drop most nonessential projects and let the chips fall where they may.
i'm also pushing my next vocal piece the on backburner while accumulate libretto sources. on the slow days i'll probably, jump back to mixing my cd. it used to be hard to work on more than one project at a time but i'm getting better at it. i think revisiting my previous works while creating new ones sometimes helps me get over whatever obstacles i have encountered (aesthetic, conceptual, or technical).

for the near future i'll probably be bookmarking through my del.ico.us feed. (thanks to the standing room for the idea). you gotta listen to the podcast of elvis mitchell's interview of david mamet.

minimalist jukebox part IV, minimalism is dead!

minimalism is dead! long live minimalism!

i couldn't help thinking this during the final minimalist jukebox festival concert featuring the music of john adams and philip glass.

the evening started off on a high note with a very convincing concert reduction of glass's opera akhnaten. the piece represented high minimalism at its best scored for a reduced pit orchestra without violins.

like steve reich's three movements and variations for winds strings and keyboards, john adams harmonielehre was one of the first postmodern/minimalist works that i enjoyed. unfortunately the implied direction that was exciting to me in 1986 has not been realized in his recent works. i had a curious reaction when i first heard that john adams had been chosen to lead the first ever minimalist festival/retrospective.

tonight i figured out why

its become clear to me that although adams is today's most interesting orchestrator, his musical aesthetics have very little center(for me). his compositional processes reminds me of my friends who spend more time collecting their baseball cards and analyzing statistics than watching the game. his orchestrations are unique and interesting, but the content and elements of his compositions seem to be interchangeable.

for example; harmonielehre uses harmonic and melodic elements from glass, hanson, barber, mahler, debussy and reich. he is not a plagarist at all, but created orchestrations that in many ways surpass the original source material. for me this is what listening/studying an adams piece has become; his secret mutant power is the ability to create the magic through orchestration within the limitations of the orchestra. he colors inside the lines, and is less interesting as he walks further down this path.

it was a big conceit for adams to program this festival and the final concert the way he did. minimalism is dead, he helped kill it 20 years ago by his successfully assimilating just enough elements of glass, reich, and riley's music to keep the barbarians at the gates. he is a marketers dream by giving the audience just enough of the ars nova (new) with lots of the ars antiga (old) to keep the bluehairs in the seats.

the main result of this festival (unwittingly touched upon in deborah borda's opening remarks in saturday's symposium) took us from the early days of minimalism to its consumption and absorption into the status quo of the concert hall.

to me minimalism was never about the orchestra or concert hall

to me the real revolution was just as much about their ensembles (glass, reich, riley, nyman) as the music they wrote.

minimalism was about creating new delivery systems for the musicians and audience (ensembles and venues)

ending the festival with harmonielehre was like the killer coming back to the crime scene to check on the corpse.


no problems john, still dead...

minimalist jukebox part III, terry riley

last night i got hear terry riley at the getty center. the first half featured his string trio and string quartet performed by the calder quartet who are currently in residency at julliard.

i hadn't been planning to see the concert, mostly because of all the music being performed in the festival i knew this concert wasn't featuring the any of terry's sting music that i was most interested in. particularly cadenza on a plain and salome dances for peace. so when my friend j. michael walker called and asked if i wanted to go, i figured it was good karma to take him up on the offer.

in terms of artistic achievement the first half of the concert (string quartet and trio) really deserves little mention. i cannot figure out two things:

1. why this music was programmed?
2. who's idea was it to have the calder quartet play it?

the first half of the concert resulted in a deep retrospective to show his development through two pieces; a boulez-influenced graduate thesis (string trio 1961) to the early lamont young/doug leedy influenced composition(string quartet, 1960).
because of the lack of any program notes, i'm not sure how many people in the audience came prepared with how these pieces related to the evening.
if riley's name hadn't been on the program, i'm sure many in the audience wouldn't have any idea that the music was written by the same man.

using that same fuzzy logic, i guess since the first half featured music by riley written in his 20's it only made sense to have musicians in their 20's play it. the result reminded me of too many undergraduate composers forums i have attended. and i assume they came pretty close to reminding terry of his student days back in berkeley.

the second half of the concert was much more enjoyable. riley performed improvisations of much of the music he is known for. one of the first improvisations featured much of the repetitive patterns intermixed with a jazz standards (i'm fuzzy on my titles), coltrane influenced voice leading, with a little stride and ragtime piano thrown in. i'm sure the intent was a musical lecture (in the best spirit) to show the influences and relationships between all of the music he loves. i know many "important" composers wouldn't dare show their "bag of tricks" that readily in public, but it only points to greatness of an artist when he/she is willing to show you what is behind the curtain.

oh yeah, on the last encore he played a improvised version of salome dances that i'll never forget.

thanks terry,

paul