Saturday, January 29, 2005
It's all right here. . . Right here in my noodle. . .
Greetings everybody.
Jerry asks "at what point did you realize that you had music running around in your head and when did you start writing it down? What was your first piece and how did it come about?"
The first piece I ever wrote was when I was to fulfill a requirement for the Music Merit Badge for Boy Scouts. I must have been about 10 years old. The piece was one page long, and I don't remember it anymore, although I expect my parents still have it somewhere. The interesting thing, though, is that I didn't get interested in composing at that point; it took several more years.
When I was about to start high school, my family moved to Hanover, NH (I would later return to Hanover to finish my undergrad at Dartmouth College), and I made friends with a guy named Alex Reed. One day after school, I was roaming the halls waiting for soccer practice to start (I was a terrible soccer player, incidentally) and I heard piano music coming from one of the classrooms. Alex was in there playing the piano and hanging out with a friend of his. I listened for a while, and then asked him what he was playing -- "nothing," he said, "I was just improvising." I was astonished that (1) improvisation at the piano was possible, and (2) a freshman in high school could do such a thing. I decided that if he could do it, so could I, so I went home that night and started teaching myself how to improvise. I played the piano almost every day for awhile, and started taking piano lessens again, and started writing the kinds of bad songs that angst-filled teenagers write, and Alex and I started showing our work to each other.
I didn't write anything down, and I was too lazy to figure out how to be efficient at writing on manuscript paper, so I didn't do any classical composing until probably a year later when my parents got me one of the earliest versions of the Cakewalk music sequencing program for my birthday (I'm a dedicated Cakewalk user to this day). I have just gone back and listened to some of that music, which still lives on my hard drive, and I can assure you that it has an astounding number of parallel fifths (strictly verboten in traditional harmony, for those who don't know). In the four years of high school I wrote, among other things, a set of 5 or 6 two part inventions, a three-movement piano sonata, a three-movement string quartet, a one movement piano concerto, and a 30 minute mass on the Credo text for chorus and full orchestra (sadly, all but one movement of the mass was lost during the migration from some computer to its successor). None of them were any good, but that's how it goes.
By the end of high school I knew I wanted to be a composer, and I arrived at Brandeis as one of the lucky few who has a major in mind from the get go. Alex has also gone on to be an excellent composer, and is currently ABD in Pitt's composition PhD program.
So that's how it started.
posted by Galen H. Brown
7:32 PM
Friday, January 28, 2005
A few words on teaching and being taught.
One of my teachers, Roger Sessions, once said: "it is the teacher who learns." Now, as a teacher myself, I truly understand this comment and I also have gained a greater respect for the limitations of teaching.
A good teacher, I believe, knows how to separate style from technique and a bad teacher confuses the two. Style, in essence, is who you are as a person, or, as it used to be said, "style is the man." If you are lucky in this world you will meet a few teachers who actually have style, that is, who are great human beings. You can learn the craft of music from many competent teachers, but becoming an artist requires, I believe, that you learn style by example from individuals with real character and integrity.
My principal teacher for eight years was Vincent Persichetti. He stands out in my mind now for many reasons, but chiefly because he was passionately involved with music itself and not with ideas about music. When I first started teaching I asked Persichetti how he kept his teaching fresh. He said that from year to year he would change the music he was talking about. It is widely known among his students that Persichetti happened to have photographic recall of virtually every piece of music in the Western canon. That you were in the presence of genius was understood.
A danger of teaching for a composer is that it can have a bad effect on your life as an artist. Being in an academic setting often makes students and teachers alike very self-conscious. Self-consiousness is death to creativity. My own way of dealing with this problem is to make my teaching more like my composing, that is, more improvisational.
One more idea that interests me is the relationship between teacher/composers and the respective culture that they pass along, again by example, to their students. This is especially interesting in the United States where the art of music seems marginalized by mass media and the world of buying and selling that those major media represent. The example of a strong teacher can be a bullwark against the distractions of the mercantile zeitgeist.
posted by Larry Thomas Bell
7:35 AM
Thursday, January 27, 2005
genius?
According to North Korean state television, Humankind's Greatest Musical Genius is (drumroll) Kim Jong-Il. There, it's settled.
I began piano lessons as a little boy with a local teacher named Eva Horvath. It was love at first sight. She was an older woman -- I think she was 23. I remember our first lesson: she gently lifted me onto the piano bench, placed my fingers on the lustrous keyboard, and showed me how the lines and spaces on the staff corresponded to the white and black keys.
Naturally, I was too shy to profess my deep-seated passion for her. In fact, I don't believe I ever opened my mouth in her presence. Instead, I took to expressing my devotion by writing a new piece for her every week. I began each lesson by presenting her with a scrap of music paper, on which I felt I had poured out my soul. From her reactions, I thought I was making pretty good progress. But eventually she lost patience with my wooing strategy: after one year she ran off with another man and moved far away.
I never saw her again, but, for better or for worse, I was left with the habit of composing every day. It was years before I learned that some people actually did this all their lives.
That's not genius -- it's just stubbornness.
posted by Lawrence Dillon
9:30 AM
Wednesday, January 26, 2005
The Gift That is Not Free
If what we know about Jacqueline du Pré, who would have been 60 today, is true, it suggests that being a prodigy does not come without a cost--in being cut off from people your own age, in loneliness, and in stunted emotional development and an inability to have "normal" relationships. But, then, there is the music which touches and provides joy for millions. Is that a fair tradeoff? It's human nature to want to know more about the lives of famous people but in the end does it really matter that DuPré remained forever a child, that Britten was a twit, or that Grainger was a masochist who liked being beaten to within an inch of his life? Or, even that Wagner was an antisemite? Great art doesn't care who makes it; it has a life that is larger than the individual.
posted by Jerry Bowles
8:57 AM
Tuesday, January 25, 2005
Early/Late Genius
I dabbled early on as a kid, I guess. But composition, at least as most composers of contemporary art music think of it, generally requires heavy and long years of training, despite the occasional whiz kid. I had no formal training or foundation to work with until college, self taught until then. And yeah, there are many problems to overcome if you do it that way.
I never did realize I was a genius, but that revelation will surely arrive any day now, along with the MacArthur Prize.
posted by Cary Boyce
8:52 AM
Monday, January 24, 2005
When Did You Realize You Were a Genius?
One of the things that fascinates us "civilians" about music is the phenomenon of the child prodigy. If, as Howard Gardner says, music is one form of "multiple intelligences" it is also the form that manifests itself earliest. There are no early-blooming Korngolds or Rossinis or the M-guy whose name I refuse to utter in the worlds of painting or literature but the world seems to always have a complete stock of great ten-year-old fiddle players and 15-year-old pianists and bright young composers. My question is this: at what point did you realize that you had music running around in your head and when did you start writing it down? What was your first piece and how did it come about?
posted by Jerry Bowles
9:29 PM
Sunday, January 23, 2005
Teaching composition
As someone who teaches composition (here), I have to respond to David Toub’s post (and the comments that followed) doubting the possibility that composition can be taught.
Every composer I’ve known considered him/herself self-taught in some fundamental way, and there’s no denying how much truth there is in that self-image. At the same time, there are two observations I’d like to offer to the mix.
First, it is always a revelation to me to find out how much my students don’t know about composing, how the simplest comments from me can lead to significant breakthroughs in their work. I am pretty sure that they are largely unaware that these breakthroughs are taking place, much less that they were a result of my seemingly casual comments. They may even believe that these breakthroughs are entirely their own doing.
Second, composition has traditionally been taught as a craft. Only in recent years has there been a serious inquiry into other aspects of creative pedagogy. One of the most significant roles a composition teacher can play is in keeping a student from being his/her own worst enemy. In that sense, creativity is not something given to you by a teacher, but something a teacher helps you access within yourself. An experienced teacher can guide a student toward developing a mindset that will allow a steady flow of creative work for fifty years and more, simply by helping the student avoid bad thinking habits that can lead to creative crises decades later.
Will the student recognize this gift when s/he receives it? Doubtful. But the benefits will be there even if they are unacknowledged.
But again, David is right to assert that there is nothing better for a composition student that listening and studying scores. As Vincent Persichetti used to say, “You have the best teachers in the world: Stravinsky, Mozart, Schubert...” Put whatever names you like on the list.
posted by Lawrence Dillon
10:30 PM
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