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Some composers get really nervous leading up to a premiere. I’ve never been that kind of composer. One of the great benefits of being a composer is that I don’t have to stress over performances. At the point that I’m sitting in the hall to hear the piece, there is literally nothing I can do that will affect the outcome of the performance. This realization is, I suppose, the cause of stress in other composers. I find this unproductive at best.

Having said all that, I’m a little nervous about a premiere of mine that’s happening tomorrow. “Why?” you might ask. This is one of the first times I’ve ever had a work premiered that I wasn’t attending and that I’ve never actually heard played in person. I have great faith in my friend Tim Rosenberg who is giving the premiere tomorrow in Tempe, Arizona. But Tim has been living in New York and Florida since we started this project. In fact, I don’t think I’ve even seen Tim in person for over a year. I’ve heard him play over Skype, and we’ve talked about the piece a lot, but it’s not the same.

Writing a piece and handing it off to a performer has often been compared to raising a child and sending it out into the world. I feel like I’ve driven my toddler to the airport, dropped him off at baggage check-in, handed him a $50 bill, and wished him the best of luck. I’m just hoping he makes it to wherever it is he’s going.

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SIDE NOTE: Tim just redesigned his website. It’s both beautifully designed and humorously written. This is the kind of site all professional musicians should have. The virtuoso you can have a beer (or a bourbon) with. Click this link to go there. It will make his analytics go up, and that makes everybody feel good, right?

Remember last year when I was all hot and bothered about the arts patronage opportunities afforded by the Kickstarter platform? Well, it happened. With help from my friend Tim Rosenberg, I put together a consortium to commission a work for solo alto saxophone. It’s totally done now, YAY!!!!!1!!!!1!!!! The piece is called alone together and will be premiered by Tim at the NASA biennial in a couple weeks.

first system of alone together

I just sent an email to my Kickstarter backers with a PDF of the score, and hard copies are going in the mail today. Right after I finished sending the PDF out, I checked my usual web comics and found this gem on Married to the Sea:

Married to the Sea, 5 March 2012

This was today’s comic! I swear I didn’t plan that.

About a week ago, I first read a story about a new Golijov piece that a couple of audience members believed had been plagiarized. My first thought was “No way. Golijov is a serious composer. He works with other people’s material in a kind of collage, but he wouldn’t be so silly as to blatantly rip off another composer.”

I’m beginning to sing a different tune. Especially now that I’ve heard the two pieces (which incidentally, do not sing different tunes). To demonstrate the similarities between these two compositions, I made a video with recordings I could find on the web. ¹

Can this be a “-gate” now? Lots of smart people have weighed in on this already, notably Alex Ross, Anne Midgette, and Rob Deemer.

My thoughts:

The piece is most definitely a rip-off. Golijov claims he cleared it with the original composer, but the original composer didn’t get any credit in the program, and he ain’t gettin’ paid by ASCAP/BMI when the work gets performed. Also, this was a large commission. According to one report, 35 orchestras each paid between $1,500 and $4,500 to join the consortium. Even if they all paid the lower amount, Golijov would have received more to write that piece than I made teaching college courses last year. They paid for something original, not an arrangement. They got an arrangement.

I would be remiss if I did not add this one last thing: Sidereus is a piece of junk! My first reaction when I listened to the piece (before hearing the Ward-Bergeman) was to wonder if the music I was hearing was really distinctive enough to be considered a copy. It’s boring. It goes nowhere in the sub-4-minute original work, and it doesn’t go any further when Golijov spins it out (mostly through repetition) to 9 minutes.

Beethoven certainly had a way with openings. Of course, the “fate” motive that opens the fifth is the most known and arguably, the most dramatic. However, not far behind that are the towering octaves that open the second movment of the ninth, and the two gargantuan tonic triads ¹ that announce the opening of the third, “Eroica.” These are such iconic moments, that conductors can’t help but stress of their interpretations. One YouTube user, Erik Carlson, is here to help. He’s has cut together the opening chords of several dozen recordings and put them in chronological order in two minutes and forty-five seconds worth of earbending curiosity. You get to hear the progression of recording technology, different decisions in orchestra size, articulation, dynamic, space, and tempo. My favorite part, though, is listening to the different tunings back-to-back-to-back. Who doesn’t love a good earbender in Beethoven?

See what I mean?

[source: YouTube via The Rest is Noise]

I love streaming music services. Mog, Rdio, Spotify. They’re all great. They help solve one of the most vexing problems of being a musician, discovering new music (without going broke buying stuff). One issue that always comes up, though, is finding an exact recording. Each service has a pretty large catalog, and while there is some overlap, each service has many recordings that the others don’t. Enter: Music Smasher by Matt Montag. It searches Rdio, Spotify, Grooveshark, Soundcloud, Mog, and Bandcamp (whew!). What is really cool about the service is that it includes services like Soundcloud and Bandcamp, where files are uploaded directly by artists and catalogs often include independent artists and “unreleased” content. Go there now.

[http://www.mattmontag.com/smasher/]

I know, I haven’t blogged since November. Bad, bad blogger. I also apologize for blogging mostly about teaching and less about music recently. That trend will continue below, but I promise to write about some music in the coming weeks.

photo by brewbooks

A recent discussion with some colleagues at Grand Valley State has recently prompted me to wonder whether textbooks are still necessary for certain subjects (if not all of them). Each semester on the first day of classes, I go over a syllabus with my students. In that syllabus, there is usually at least one textbook and a CD that my students are required to purchase. I have actually had a student come up to me after the first class and say “I’m getting paid on Friday and then two Fridays after that. I can only afford to buy one of the course materials with each paycheck. Which one should I get first?” The web can and should solve this problem. Could a carefully cultivated website with a curated list of links and thoughtful commentary replace a textbook? Could a YouTube playlist and embedded videos in that site replace academic recording anthologies?

I’m going to take a few blog posts and discuss my thoughts on these questions. In this first post, I’d like to examine the virtues of the current system of textbook publishers. These are some of the things that I think a new, technology-based solution should maintain. Please share your thoughts below.

1) Books and CDs can be accessed anywhere at any time.

This is so obvious that it may be easy to overlook when examining eBooks and the web. Books do not require any other thing to use. They don’t require any particular computer software, an internet connection, or even power. CDs require a CD player and power, but a portable CD player and batteries can be had for less than $30 at the local WalMart (or Amazon). While this standard accessibility and compatibility isn’t completely achievable with digital alternatives, we need to get as close to it as we can..

2) Books and CDs are persistent.

If a student likes a course or finds it particularly useful (Hey, it could happen!), she has the option of keeping the course materials as a reference. She did not purchase a temporary license to content, but physical goods. If she doesn’t like the book, she can recover some of its purchase price by reselling it. The CD may be replaced by another audio format, but the student can always keep a local digital copy on her computer that is hers forever. Since she has a local copy of both the CD and the book, they can’t be changed or taken away by anyone else. Any digital alternative should be as portable as possible.

3) Books have a single scholarly viewpoint.

This is perhaps the single greatest advantage to the current system of textbooks. There is such an overwhelming quantity of knowledge in the world, and a good textbook author filters and organizes it with skill and care. Explaining complex subjects often requires initial simplification, long-running analogies, selective sequential presentation, and an internal consistency that may not reflect the use of this knowledge “in the wild.” Digital course materials must be more than the results of a Google search on the topic. Importantly, they still require the insightful input of scholars.

4) Books are written by other people.

Admittedly, this is not always a benefit. I have blogged previously about my disagreements with various textbook authors. Having said that, the major benefit of using somebody else’s textbook is that I don’t have to spend the time curating my own. Digital materials could be infinitely customizable, but they should not require infinite customization.

5) Books compensate authors.

Publishers pay authors to write textbooks. They edit, typeset, produce, market, and distribute them. It is prohibitively difficult to “pirate” a physical book. I do not think we should make it prohibitively difficult to copy and share digital course materials. The music industry has already proven to us that this is technologically impossible. In future postings, I will examine how we might generate enough revenue to compensate scholars for their contributions to digital course materials.

6) Books have cultural authority.

This is perhaps the steepest hurdle that digital materials have to climb. In the half-millennium since Gutenberg, books have become thought of as authoritative. Information “printed in black and white” is, for better or worse, thought of more highly than information gleaned on the web. Anyone can publish on the web, and readers are right to be skeptical of a medium with no barrier for entry. Academia is notoriously slow to change, and as new and innovative course materials take forms that gradually deviate more and more from Gutenberg’s bible, these new materials will have to work harder and harder to prove their reliability and trustworthiness.

I will continue posting about the future of course materials, discussing the ways new media might co-opt some of these benefits of books, how it might improve upon books, and how we might begin to create this new generation of educational content.

In the meanwhile, please share your thoughts in the comments. This is a work in progress. I am examining this concept because I am interested in trying to build these new materials. If this is a project you would be interested in (either contributing to or using), please email me or find me on Twitter.

So, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m a geek. I probably spend more time thinking about the web than most people. I probably spend a lot more time thinking about the web than most of my students. This can lead to problems when I say things like, “Sure, use as many web sources in your research project as you’d like. Just use your best judgement in evaluating what would make a credible source.”

In my MUS 218 World Music classes today, we talked about how to determine whether a web page might be reliable enough to be cited in a research paper. Here’s my presentation (Google Docs presentations). I’m publishing it here in part because someone might find it useful. However, I’m mostly sharing this with the world because I know there are lots of people who have spent more time thinking about this stuff than I have, and I’m hoping they might be willing to help me refine it. Please let me know what you think in the comments!

(PS – I know the GDocs embedded version chops off a little bit of the right side of each slide. Go fullscreen to fix it if you like.)

Music Composition 365 Top Pick

Gustav Mahler
Symphony No. 4
Sehr behaglich

Music Composition 365 Top Pick

Bjork
Verspertine 2001
An Echo a Stain

I’ve been party to many discussions with fellow composers about originality in compositions. When this issues has comes up, I’ve hear many of my peers (and teachers) say that originality is not a necessary element to a composition. In these instances, I’ve politely debated the point, but held back a bit out of respect. Since I’m bringing the topic up this time, let me SCREAM THIS – originality in a composition is a MUST. Perhaps it’s just me, but trying to figure out how to make your work sound original is what makes it hard. And if it’s not going to be hard, why would you bother?

And let’s be clear, original doesn’t mean ugly or dissonant. It doesn’t mean anything about the tone of the piece or how large its consumer appeal appeal might be. And it doesn’t mean that it’s good. But any piece (of a mature composer) that has no originality is bad. The argument often made by my peers during the discussions mentioned earlier is “how well the piece works.” Hmm – If figuring out how to make a piece that aspires for nothing more than “to work” is what you’re after, why not just take up transmission repair. I really like it when a mechanic tells me how well my transmission works, and I don’t care if the work was unoriginal.

In Music Composition 016 I was talking about my appreciation for singer/songwriters. An interesting label “singer-songwriter.” What is that? Words and noises and timing? I guess that would be correct; however, it’s also the personality of the composer, at least to some degree, the makes a piece by a good singer-songwriter good. John Lennon claims that writing In My Life marks the point in his life at which he truly felt like an artist.

Singer-songwriters are integrated musicians. That which is created cannot be abstracted from its creator as easily as can an orchestral work for example (or we wouldn’t have 374 recordings of Beethoven’s complete symphonies to choose from on Amazon). The Beatles track above could easily be covered (and has been many times) by many different artists. If you read the music down, the song can be made to fit with many different personalities. However, Lennon’s own voice still lives in there somewhere.

In the Robert Johnson track below however, things are different. His voice and his personality own this song. It can also be covered (and has been by many artists). However, it seems to me that any cover of this song is a completely different song.

I think that songs are often describable in terms of how linked the core of the song is to the personality and voice of the composer. In both of the extremes above, I’m envious of the singer-songwriter, because I can’t do what they do. I feel I could work up some decent poetry and if pressed I could produce a passable set of chord changes with a melody. It’s the integration of the two that is beyond me (so far). But who know what might happen? Lots of cool stuff has been written with nothing but open chords.

For some reason I feel very comfortable writing for the clarinet.

Excerpts from Soliloquies
Leslie Bassett
Meghan Merciers – Clarinet

I’ve never been a lyrics guy, or a text scholar. But some songs just get me. I envy what the singer-songwriter can do with words in time with noises.

Music Composition 365 Top Pic

Neutral Milk Hotel
In the Aeroplane Over the Sea 1998
Two Headed Boy
__
Two-headed boy
All floating in glass
The sun it is past
Now it’s blacker than black
I can hear as you tap on your jar
I am listening to hear where you are
I am listening to hear where you are

Two-headed boy
Put on Sunday shoes
And dance round the room to accordion keys
With the needle that sings in your heart
Catching signals that sound in the dark
Catching signals that sound in the dark
We will take off our clothes
And they’ll be placing fingers through the notches in your spine
And when all is breaking everything that you could keep inside
Now your eyes ain’t moving now
They just lay there in their climb

Two-headed boy
With pulleys and weights
Creating a radio played just for two
In the parlor with a moon across her face
And through the music he sweetly displays
Silver speakers that sparkle all day
Made for his lover who’s floating and choking with her hands across her face
And in the dark we will take off our clothes
And they’ll be placing fingers through the notches in your spine
And when all is breaking everything that you could keep inside
Now your eyes ain’t moving now
They just lay there in their climb

Two-headed boy
There’s no reason to grieve
The world that you need is wrapped in gold silver sleeves
Left beneath Christmas trees in the snow
I will take you and leave you alone
Watching spirals of white softly flow
Over your eyelids and all you did
Will wait until the point when you let go

Listen

Music Composition 365 Top Pick

Karlheinz Stockhausen
Mikrophonie I 1964

Music Composition 365 Top Pick

The second movement of Ravel’s concerto is one of those works (and I know there are some composers out there who understand this feeling) that when I first heard it I thought to myself, “DAMMIT! Why didn’t I write that?” Those who know me well may be surprised that I would choose such a pretty piece as one that has influenced me greatly as a composer. What can I say? You just can’t say no to some melodies.

Maurice Ravel
Piano Concerto in G major 1931
Adagio assai