the heart of the matter

most people don't talk about how they actually write. with good reason! it's like a hot dog...you don't want to know what goes into it. for me, the whole writing-with-technology thing was born out of feeling powerless to match the skill of accomplished keyboardists such as my mother, whose towering pianistic skill seemed unattainable to me. how to capture my ideas; how to produce music? the tech was a bid for immediacy, for spontaneity, for a world of unlimited sonic possibility, not the least of which was an unbounded timbral palette.

at times i feel uncomfortably caught between lacking classical skill and feeling unsatisfied by simplistic song structures that endlessly tread the same elementary harmonic and rhythmic ground. too educated for the rock and pop world, too ignorant for the classical world.

but wait! no. this surely is the same thing that, say, mid twentieth century american artists ran up against, that early twentieth century european experimentalists rebelled against. technique as a barrier to creative expression. technique as soul killer. consider this poem by walt whitman:

when I heard the learn’d astronomer,

when the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,

when I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,

when I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,

how soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,

till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,

in the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

i think that expresses it perfectly.

but wallace stevens' "on the manner of addressing clouds":

gloomy grammarians in golden gowns,

meekly you keep the mortal rendezvous,

eliciting the still sustaining pomps

of speech which are like music so profound

they seem an exaltation without sound.

funest philosophers and ponderers,

their evocations are the speech of clouds.

so speech of your processionals returns

in the casual evocations of your tread

across the stale, mysterious seasons. these

are the music of meet resignation; these

the responsive, still sustaining pomps for you

to magnify, if in that drifting waste

you are to be accompanied by more

than mute bare splendors of the sun and moon.

now the plot thickens. i think what stevens is saying is that while we lose immediacy by explanation, by grammar, by structure, it is also a necessary feature of creation: there must also be order. so, if i haven't lost you: what does this mean in practice? for me, the romantic rush away from structure, from analytical thinking, the unfettered dyonisian impulse holds immense appeal. tell it like it is. no business as usual! and yet, what kind of music do i enjoy listening to? what music moves me, takes me to another plane? 

the answer is: music that moves beyond structure into transcendence, music that embodies a more perfect universe with which body and soul is in perfect harmony, music that draws one in into a higher order that is not stifling, but transcendent.

does my work achieve this? sometimes, in live performance, i'd say, when the group starts pocketing, as bassist extraordinaire eleonore oppenheimer says. the musical material has to be there, and the group has to know it, feel it, groove it, get into something that carries us all along.

i recall this happening on stage with the premiere of "a wish for the displaced," as well as in "agency" last year at the second fse inaugural concert.

so. what's the secret sauce, professor? well, here's what works for me. initially, i need to get all tech ordered and functioning reliably. then sit down at my piano, which sends midi out to my sequencer, and just start jamming. not even record, once i know i am set up to just push the button and capture reliably. just mess around. listen, play, change up, listen, play. on a good day, something convincing will appear, which i then commit to computer memory. 

once the kernel of a phrase exists, i might try to flesh it out with a contrapuntal voice, a harmony, or simply displace it against itself by anywhere from an eighth note to three beats, depending on how it grooves. at some point a phrase is finished. usually, i then start working on another one. this might be the middle of a piece, the beginning, or somewhere toward the end. time will tell.

it has also happened that i have used the formal structure of a piece or song in order to have a scaffolding, an old bottle to pour new wine into. as stravinsky said: lesser composers borrow, great composers steal. 

once a passage exists, i may also try re-assigning and reinforcing instruments. so the violin may take over a guitar part, while the bass may accentuate the piano's bass line. once i am satisfied with the structure and sound of the mock-up, it's time to make some of the most obvious problem passages more readable for the musician. then i export the whole movement or piece into the notation program, make it look good as a score, try to devote sufficient attention to matters of parts such as note spacing and page turns, and print out a draft of everything.

finally, i listen to the mock-up repeatedly, improve certain spots or passages. then it's time to send the mock-up and parts to the musicians. over time, i have learned that if you want them to play the piece well, you need to give them four weeks to learn their parts before convening the first rehearsal.

there's more to say on the topic of what makes the compositions tick, so i'll probably return to this topic in the future.