Tuesday, February 08, 2005
Brian Sacawa
Brian Sacawa discusses, I think very compellingly, how a performer or composer develops or finds a personal "voice." Brian's description of how he went about developing his own voice rings true to me, and now I'm interested in thinking about what we mean by "voice" anyway.
"Voice" exists at an interesting confluence between Style and Technique. (As a composer it is easier for me to discuss this issue with regard to composition -- some of it may or may not apply to performance, and I would be interested to hear a performer discuss the issue.) Finding a personal voice tends to be seen a lot like going through a few different jobs before settling on a career -- maybe you are an admin assistant for a year or so, and then a pizza delivery person, and you try doing some acting, and then finally you realize that what you really want to do is go to law school, and you do, and then you're a "lawyer."
Bartok was, as I recall, a bit of a failure as a Romanticist, but he found his voice in doing weird things to folk music. Steve Reich was a frustrated grad-student, dutifully turning out "serialist" pieces until he heard Terry Reilly and discovered Phasing. I tried to be a Neo-romantic, and dabbled in high-energy post-serial atonality in college and finally found my "voice" in post-minimalism. All of these voice discoveries correspond to stylistic conversions, but obviously there's more going on than settling into a particular genre. After all, Stravinsky's late atonal work is still clearly Stravinsky. Did he change voices, or just genres? And why is it still Stravinsky? -- There must be some element of "voice" that carried over.
And so we arrive at "technique." By "technique" I mean a composer's personal strategies for dealing with the details of his/her material -- harmonic, melodic, rhythmic, etc. How long are my phrases likely to be? How do I like to mutate my motivic materials? Which kinds of chord changes do I gravitate toward? How do I write counterpoint? Certainly my strategies for all of those elements have remained relatively constant through my (admittedly short) career while I have gone through a few different Stylistic periods. I would guess that a careful analysis of Stravinsky would reveal similar consistancy.
So we might say that a big part of finding your "voice" is arriving at a place where you finally have your technique down AND you are writing in the genre that makes you happy. But in saying that I've snuck in a third component: skill. Can I say I've found my voice if my technique is bad? That seems open for debate. And what about uniqueness. If I'm brilliant at writing pieces that sound exactly like they were written by Beethoven, have I found my own voice? Again, I'm not sure.
posted by Galen H. Brown
1:13 PM
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