Saturday, January 22, 2005
the role that teachers have played in my development
My first composition teacher was Helen Lipscomb in Lexington, Kentucky. She had about 40 published pieces, most of them charming teaching pieces. She also wrote chamber music for her friends and relatives to perform, and she taught me piano when I was 14-16. She showed me that there were women composers and that it was possible to publish. She showed me how to take seemingly unrelated scraps of music and put them together into a simple composition.
In high school I wrote a term paper for American History that was entitled “Music Since 1950”. I loved the library at the University of Kentucky and in doing the research I spent most of my time reading Cage’s books. SILENCE and A YEAR FROM MONDAY must have been out then. I also followed up each of his footnotes and read those books. My term paper had way too much Cage and not enough everybody else, so I think I got a B+ instead of an A. It was a good paper but my teacher didn’t think that John Cage was a significant enough person in the 20th century to justify a whole paper in American History. I still think she was wrong but she would not let me change the title/focus of the paper and I insisted on writing about Cage. I had a little trouble dealing appropriately with authorities and being a bit too stubborn even in situations where it didn’t benefit my goals. So I didn’t get the best possible grade but I fell in love with Cage who did become my teacher when I was 19.
My high school concert and marching bands were very fine and I played 8th chair, first flute in them. In the summer I was 15 my band director, Richard Borchardt, taught me how to write 12-tone music. It was a revelation. To me it meant that I didn’t have to wait for inspiration. I could think about music and make choices within the system. I wrote a 12-tone woodwind quartet (flute, oboe, English horn, bassoon) that ended with one of the players breaking a supposedly delicate wineglass in a garbage can. It was performed on the summer band concert at Henry Clay High and on a noon concert at University of Kentucky the next year but the wineglass never broke. It survived to be sold in a box of glassware at an auction.
After high school I attended UK where the study of composition was reserved for 3rd year students and above. Since I had been composing for years I showed my work privately to the two composers on staff, Dr. Kenneth Wright and John Barnes Chance. Dr. Wright was a serialist who could play jazz piano and Mr. Chance was a tonal composer who created electronic scores for theatrical events (and repaired televisions). Dr. Wright was very kind but I don’t remember anything he taught me, except perhaps that ‘ephemera’ is a good name for short pieces. Mr. Chance taught me that it is impossible for a composer to have writer’s block since there are only 12 tones and it only takes a few minutes to try each one added onto the phrase you have just written. Then you can pick a pitch and move along.
I met Cage when I was 18 and immediately dropped out of school. When I came back at the University of California at Davis, Cage was there and I was able to have a semester with him. He told us stories and gave us mushrooms. We performed his music and did the first of several performances of Satie’s VEXATIONS. He gave us the feeling that anything was possible in music and that duration was primary among the elements of music. Of course he also told us that there was no reason to write music because we could simply open our ears and hear music all around us. I was very surprised to discover later that he was in fact writing music like crazy and had not stopped at all.
I had gone to UCD to study with serialist Richard Swift (a lovely man) and to be at the school where the famous avant-guard magazine SOURCE was published. Richard arranged for me to have a student loan and a campus job (in vegetable crops department cleaning seeds and cross-pollinating tomatoes). He convinced me that what I was writing was about 50 years out of date. Between that comment and Cage’s encouragement to be still and listen, I wandered off to both practice piano 6 hours a day, and make happenings and electronic music (with Larry Austin and Jerome Rosen).
I went to Mills College in Oakland for graduate work in piano performance and eventually became a member of Hysteresis, a women composer-performer collective. Our first concert 3/3/73 I did a new piece, PEACHY KEEN-O (which recently came out on a Pogus CD of that name only 30 years later). Robert Ashley heard it and offered me the opportunity to stay at Mills an extra year to do an MA in composition in addition to the MFA in piano that I was about to complete. Ashley told me that I could be a composer. He was the first person to say that to me. It had the miraculous effect of making it possible for me to be a composer. He also taught me the difference between collage and process.
In the process of obtaining this degree I also studied with Terry Riley who showed me how to take parts of phrases and to rearrange the parts with other parts of phrases and to make compositions. The class was entitled Cyclic Composition and consisted of learning basic Indian singing. It had a profound effect on me in its encouragement of the intuitive.
My teachers were very important to me. Their smallest remarks changed my life.
Of course, my 20 years of working with dancers was a tremendous education and being quiet and listening continues to be useful.
posted by Beth Anderson
10:06 PM
re: are teachers important?
I've been told by a Canadian colleague that teaching is the highest form of learning. I'm heavily involved in Web-based education, although not at all in the area of music/composition. That said, I probably learned considerably more from listening to a lot of different music and studying the scores on my own time than I ever did with my composition teacher at Juilliard's Pre-College division in the late 70's. Not that there was anything objectionable about my teacher; he was a very nice guy in fact. But I'm just not sure that one can successfully teach composition. How does one teach composition anyway, other than providing some additional dimensions on basic music theory and counterpoint? Eventually, I got comfortable doing my own thing, and just stopped showing up to lessons altogether. My teacher was probably just as happy, since at that time I had found my voice, and I'm sure I probably frustrated him at times.
To paraphrase the (probably apocryphal) anecdote about Gershwin and Stravinsky, why be an inferior version of one's teacher when one can be a first-rate version of oneself? There are just some things that can't really be taught, in my opinion. You can't teach someone past childhood to have common sense and compassion. I can teach a monkey how to do surgery, but I can't teach the monkey good clinical judgment, so the monkey will forever be a terrible surgeon. Similarly, one can teach the "mechanics" of composition to anyone, but one cannot teach how to be creative. Thus, I don't think anyone can really, in all honesty, teach someone how to compose.
posted by David Toub
8:54 PM
RE: Are Teachers Important?
One of my biggest regrets is the fact that I was such a contentious composition student. I was more interested in challenging my teachers than in learning from them. I had some great teachers who could have shared more with me than I allowed, because I seemed to have a profound suspicion of male authority figures.
It would have been interesting to see how I would have fared with a female composition teacher, but there were so few to be found in those days. And, truth be told, I probably would have been just as confrontational with a woman.
It’s sad to me now, because I sometimes see that suspicion among students in their dealings with me -- I can feel myself getting pegged as whitemaleestablishment, instead of being seen as a musician, an artist, who loves sharing what he’s learned. It doesn’t happen very often, thankfully, but when it does, I find myself regretting all I missed by being blinded by a similar attitude in my younger days.
posted by Lawrence Dillon
10:46 AM
Friday, January 21, 2005
Are Teachers Important?
Beth alludes in an earlier post to the important role played by many women composers as teachers and that, rather naturally, brings up the pivotal role of Nadia Boulanger, who was the Big Momma of a generation of American composers and thus among the most influential figures in 20th century music. I'd like to hear some thoughts on the role that teachers (male or female) have played in our own resident composers development.
posted by Jerry Bowles
3:21 PM
Thursday, January 20, 2005
What's Important?
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy." Music is a tapestry. The idea of music as some sort of Darwinian evolution from Bach to Mozart to Beethoven to Brahms and on down the line is to choose a thread among quilts, which is what theorists and musicologists are paid to do.
The Beatles never won a Pulitzer, nor did Duke Ellington, yet their influence is far-reaching. Major mainstream awards have been and are still typically reserved for the composers who most resemble the judges sitting on the committee--until John Adams wondered aloud if receiving the Pulitzer meant the end of his career. Well, thing change, even there… But even the greatest of classical music composers is unlikely to reach as many people through generations as a single Britney Spears tune does in a week. She’s rewarded with money and fame, and as a commercial targeted marketing construct, she is herself a work of genius, however short-lived.
Academic composition is a market too. Composers choose their markets, either academic, elitest, populist, ethnic, or whatever, whether they cop to it or not. They choose to swim either with or against the prevailing currents. But when something begins to catch hold from the edges—and Thomas Kuhn would suggest that’s where the really interesting work is done--then it runs the danger (or gains the blessings) of being co-opted by the mainstream.
Grunge. Serialism. The new simplicity. The new complexity. Rock. Hip-Hop. They are all symptoms of our times, and have more in common as social phenomena and are subject to marketing forces much more than we would like to admit. Would composers be writing much complex abstract music if academia were not footing the bills? I doubt so many would, except for those who felt some authentic internal drive to do so. But the real composers will write what they hear, what they themselves are interested in regardless. Maybe.
posted by Cary Boyce
7:59 PM
follow-up
Beth Anderson's post is dead on. I would add that in the end, unless US orchestras and music groups embrace new music, they're doomed to extinction. Downloadable music, whether performed by groups in the US or abroad, will make new music more accessible. There's nothing like a live concert performance, but if Schoenberg's op. 16 (written in the early part of the 20th century) is still considered "modern," they're not going to routinely perform more recent music. I often see an occasional modern work included in an orchestra's season as a novelty, but the focus is still on the past. Why not mix the past with the present?
posted by David Toub
1:24 PM
What is important? Future ears decide.
I think that it is not necessary (although it may be fun to try) for us to decide who is central to our understanding of American classical music, or who made the most useful experiments in music or who is a niche composer or who is part of the canon or the standard repertory. Its not a race between John Adams and Morton Feldman, or between small and big concert halls, or between influence and fame. All of these things will be decided by time.
Beauty is important. Fairness is important. Inclusiveness is vital.
Beauty is a large topic and I'll leave it for now.
Consider, just to get you started, the music and work of Elizabeth Austin, Marilyn Bliss, Victoria Bond, Alla Borzova, Chin Yi, Nancy Bloomer Deussen, Elisenda Fábregas, Jennifer Higdon, Katherine Hoover, Lori Laitman, Mary Jane Leach, Anne LeBaron, Beata Moon, Pauline Oliveros, Terry Winter Owens, Maggie Payne, Alla Pavlova, Anna Rubin, Judith Shatin, Alice Shields, Hilary Tann, Joan Tower, Nancy Van de Vate, Aleksandra Vrebalov, Melinda Wagner, Judith Lang Zaimont, and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich.
Some of these women composers have been very influential as teachers, all are an inspiration especially to other women, some have won major prizes and had major performances and recordings, but none are yet in either the canon or the standard repertory. But then neither are John Adams or Morton Feldman. Some of their music is more beautiful to me than others but all of it needs to be played and recorded and made available so that all of our ears can hear it, so that future ears have the opportunity of hearing it and deciding if they want to listen to it more or less or never. Future ears will decide what music is performed and what will languish unheard—perhaps to be rediscovered as Hildegard von Bingen’s was 900 years later.
Inclusiveness is not served by having 3 contemporary composers out of 100 performed per year by either large or small ensembles in large or small halls. It is also not served by having 3 women composers on a contemporary music festival out of 100 composers performed. The rules for funding such organizations and events must be changed to stimulate fairness and inclusiveness. Including women composers in this consideration of who and what is most important is just the tip of the topic.
posted by Beth Anderson
10:55 AM
Wednesday, January 19, 2005
who's important?
In my view, the question of a composer's importance is of no meaning, bordering on the absurd. I may like music by Glass, Reich, Feldman, Bloch, Schoenberg, Bach, etc. and that's great. Someone else might like Strauss and Carter, both of whom I can't stand. But that's fine too. Music and other art forms are just too personal. That's why I think the entire concept of teaching composition and "winning" a composition contest is silly. How do you teach someone to write music, other than the mere technical aspects? I learned more from reading through 10 or more orchestral scores each week while in high school than I ever did from my composition teacher. Similarly, it makes no difference to me as a listener if someone's music won or lost a contest. Not to sound like the great (and late) physicist Richard Feynman, but such contests are silly. Ives, as an example, won the Pulitzer for his third symphony, which in my opinion pales before many of his other works. Others, such as Feldman, Reich, and numerous others who I like did not win prestigious awards. So what?
Whether or not someone is historically important is a matter of academics, best left to historians. If someone writes music that appeals to me, then that person is pretty important to me as a composer. Similarly, if someone who is "generally accepted" to be important writes music I can't stand, then he or she is irrelevant to me as an individual.
posted by David Toub
5:23 PM
Tuesday, January 18, 2005
Re: Canon Versus Repertory
My initial responses to Jerry’s question, in no particular order:
- Is it possible to create a hierarchy of composers, ranking them in order from most to least important? If so, is it desirable?
- Programming is a complex art form, dependent on resources, relying on complementariness, hostage to accurate performance materials. Sometimes the number of performances reflects the importance of a composer, but sometimes it doesn’t.
- There is a false hierarchy of venues, in which large spaces with huge ensembles are seen as more important than small venues with intimate ensembles. Why should this be so? After all, both experiences are channeled through a pair of ears to a single brain.
- Ives is a fairly frequent feature on vocal recitals; Adams is not.
- Feldman's generation was more interested in changing the course of music history than Adams's. Changing the course of music history is, of course, very impressive, but is it always the most important thing one can do? Surely, "importance" is a relative term, depending on cultural factors outside of the individual composer's control.
That's my somewhat disorganized response of the moment. I'm curious to know what others think.
posted by Lawrence Dillon
12:07 PM
Monday, January 17, 2005
Canon versus Repertory
We all know there are many composers who are considered important and influential but their works are seldom played and are certainly not part of the standard programming repertory. The Living Composer, who apparently wishes to remain anonymous, asks a question in his first-rate blog that deserves some discussion: "..Charles Ives might be the most discussed composer in American musical scholarship. Our discussion of Ives is central to our understanding of American classical music, but his useful experiments and mind-bending ideas were never put forward in a way that became palatable to a larger audience. He’s a bit of a niche composer who appears on a series like the ‘American Mavericks.’ His music does have a place in the SR, but it is nothing like that of Gershwin, for example.
Can we simply say then that Ives is more a part of the canon than the standard repertory?" The question raises a lot of interesting questions. For example, can we say John Adams, whose works get programmed and played a lot, a more important composer than, say, Morton Feldman, whose work is rarely head in big concert halls? (This is not to denigrate Adams, who is very good, but to raise the question of influence versus fame.) What are your thoughts?
posted by Jerry Bowles
1:46 PM
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