It was to be one of the most memorable nights in the career of James Dillon: a long-awaited return to his hometown to hear his compositions performed by Scotland's national orchestra.

He cannot forget the evening, but for all the wrong reasons...Last night he spoke of his sadness at the RSNO performance, which he believes was well below par. Members of the audience saw one leading player yawn pointedly before the piece began, and other musicians stare at the score as if it was impossible to understand.

Mr Dillon said: "I don't know quite how to describe it, it was certainly a sobering experience. The whole feeling was that they weren't interested."

posted by Jerry Bowles 10:36 PM

Performance and Performers

This versus That

To me, the distinction between “uptown” and “downtown” has a lot to do with the performers who have championed the music. Philip Glass, La Monte Young, Meredith Monk, Steve Reich, Yoko Ono, Tony Conrad, Laurie Anderson, etc., all had their own ensembles and/or performed their own music. Downtown performers play much differently than the typical conservatory trainee. Many downtown performers are also downtown composers (and vice versa).

Sadly, conservatories and schools of music (still) train their student performers to play in orchestras and perform traditional repertoire. Imagine how it might affect the world of new music (and traditional concert music as well) if instructors started exposing their student performers to an all-inclusive variety of styles and interpretive possibilities. If performers were taught to think more creatively (that is to say, to be more “creation-oriented” than “replication-oriented”), they might be excited and challenged by music that asks them to perform outside their comfort zone.

Imagine if every performer was required to compose an original piece of music and perform it on his/her Senior Recital in order to graduate. If performers were reminded of their own creativity and their capacity to freshly and freely interpret both new *and* old music, we might be able to stop worrying about the so-called “death of classical music.”

As it is now, many classically-trained performers are dismissive or hostile toward “downtown” music and its offspring because they’re taught (explicitly or implicitly) to be skeptical of what they’re not familiar with. Most orchestras and traditional ensembles will not touch a piece by Reich, Glass, Nyman, Cage (only the early works), Oliveros, etc., unless they’re sure it’s safe (“The NY Philharmonic will be happy to perform a work by Mr. Reich, as long as it’s an arrangement of a *pre-existing* piece…”)

Any thoughts? posted by Corey Dargel 6:00 PM

re: evil empire

(comments were not showing up for some reason, hence this post in response)

And here I was really trying to get away from this subject...

To be honest, I've never heard this regarding sexual orientation and compositional technique. Pretty silly, if you ask me. Besides, both Copland, Bernstein and possibly Tippett also wrote some 12-tone music eventually. Not their best output, mind you, but they did it. I'm probably the only person out there who likes Connotations, however.

Why compare Schoenberg with Cowell? I don't make any distinction between them. Both wrote music I genuinely love. One of the most memorable concerts I attended as a kid was the premiere of Cowell's Quartet Romantic at (I think) Alice Tully Hall. The performers had to listen through a click track to play the complex rhythms (something that could easily be realized today on my iBook). I don't think of Cowell as writing simplistic, "nice" music. Both were great, and even if one doesn't like either's music, they clearly made a significant contribution to modern music. Besides, Cowell was good enough for Ives, and Schoenberg recognized Ives' genius, so right there both are linked (and probably to Kevin Bacon as well).

Lost in all this debate seems to be the music of Berg. A great example of how the technique is less important than the music itself. Most people probably don't even realize that most of his music isn't even 12-tone (though most is serial, but then, so is Feldman and Stravinsky). If we're going to debate Schoenberg vs. Cowell, why not Young vs. Adams, or Babbitt vs Glass? It is a waste of time, much like the Schoenberg vs. Stravinsky debate we used to constantly have when I was in high school (I preferred Schoenberg, but do love a lot of Stravinsky as well, but who really cares?) posted by David Toub 9:56 AM

Evil Empire

Since I was in high school I've been encountering people talking about the evil twelve-tone thing and it's awful hegemony. The clamor seems to get louder in direct proportion to the waning prestige and power of the twelve-toning set. I'm beginning to think lately that it involves people having some early traumatic experience, like toilet training.

Nobody has mentioned that for a long time during the 50's and into the 60's, twelve-tone, or at least non tonal composers were generally thought to be heterosexual, while the people (sissies?) who wrote tonal music (Copland, Thomson, Cowell, Bowles, Bernstein, Blitzstein, Rorem, Britten, Henze, Tippett, Poulenc) were gay. (Shostakovich wrote tonal music--maybe--but he was Russian, so didn't count) There's a story of Virgil meeting Ben Weber (famous down-town twelve-tone composer and gay man) and saying, "Which is it? Do you write twelve-tone music or are you queer? You can't be both." (or something like that.) I don't exactly remember when that dissappeared as an issue.


One question regarding Kyle Gann's recent posting, though:

Does anybody seriously think that Schoenberg is a less good composer than Henry Cowell? Or even equally good? posted by Rodney Lister 9:21 AM

new topic

Disclaimer: this has nothing to do with serialism. Honest.

I'm curious about different people's experiences with how they notate. Specifically, do they still write by hand, or do they use a software package, and if so, what?

I used to write things out in pencil, then work laboriously to produce a final copy in ink on transparency paper, using an electric eraser to remove mistakes. Of course, this was the 70's and early 80's. I then just bagged that approach and wrote things out in pencil, using a xerox machine and getting the score bound. Fairly inexpensive, but still time-consuming. I even would spend some free time during my fellowship on my extracurricular activity of notating scores.

In the early 90's I got very interested in computers, particularly the use of software to notate music. At the time, the dominant application was Finale (Macintosh), and using version 3.2 I was able to get some fairly lengthy scores notated using my computer. It was legible, could easily be backed up, and changes could be made on the fly (which was much better than using an electric eraser and boring a hole though the manuscript). By version 3.5.2, Finale was a really elegant application. I even wrote a paper on it for a MIS class, extolling its virtues.

Subsequent versions of Finale have left many of us in the user community cold. It works, but much more slowly, and has become less elegant in my opinion. It still allows me to get the job done, and in some ways much faster than before. I'm currently using Finale 2005b, and the best feature IMHO is its ability to dump a notated score into MP3 format. Playback varies---I have a lot of playback kinks to iron out with one score before I can post an MP3 excerpt on my site---but it's pretty good. Not as good as real musicians, of course, but beats silence.

There are also a lot of composers who speak highly of Finale's competitor, Sibelius. This is kind of like the Mac vs PC argument, and ultimately goes nowhere, but there are fierce debates between both user communities as to which application is best. I should say that there are days when I would love to try something else, as sometimes Finale just doesn't behave itself, or else cannot do what I need it to do. But I've also heard much the same from Sibelius users on the Web, so I think each program has its pros and cons.

So to my question: how do you produce finished manuscripts: pencil or software? posted by David Toub 9:05 AM

Bad Performances

Re the 12-tone thing, to paraphrase Cage: I have nothing to say, and I’m not saying it, and that is poetry.

To answer one of Judith’s questions from last Thursday: I agree with Beth’s reply from Friday: I have a hard time justifying the cancellation of a performance after hearing the dress rehearsal. I’ve heard bad dress rehearsals lead to good performances, and vice versa.

I suppose we would all have to count ourselves lucky to get as many bad performances as Beethoven has on a daily basis.

I had a performance a few years back by a New York ensemble, for which I wasn’t able to meet with the musicians before the dress rehearsal. When I arrived, I was stunned to discover that they were playing the piece exactly half as fast as the indicated tempo. Despite the slow speed, they were still playing a lot of wrong notes.

It was a potent lesson, for which there is an unassailable axiom: At half tempo, every wrong note lasts twice as long.

I didn’t cancel the performance, but I left the hall and spent the evening in a nearby bar.

But Judith, what are your answers to your questions? posted by Lawrence Dillon 4:00 AM