Rusty Banks

While rubbing his forehead, contemplating solutions for the mess-of-a-student-work I had handed him, my composition teacher helpfully explained:

“Visual artists have a great advantage over us. They can see the whole canvas before they start. As they work, they know exactly where the latest stroke falls in the overall composition.”

His point was one typically made to young composers; get a plan.

Since then, I’ve also thought about what this might mean for the listeners. Sitting there, listening to our work for the first time, how is the audience to measure the weight of a specific event they have just heard. Were that event in the middle of the piece it might mean something different than if it had occurred in the first tenth of the piece. In older music, there are auditory signals such as pedal tones in Bach or Beethoven. In a chamber work, pedals often signal the end of a movement. What devices to we use?

This got me to thinking about the scroll bars for iTunes, YouTube, Quicktime, and other ways we most typically listen to recordings these days. The scroll bar lets me know where we are in the track, greatly influencing how I perceive an event I’ve just heard. In fact, I now find the lack of scroll bars at live concerts makes me a bit anxious (just a bit however, I still enjoy live music much more than recorded).

This raises some questions:

1. Have scroll bars affected your perception of musical form? How?

2. Is that change in how we perceive music a negative? A positive? Just different?

3. If there is a new-found dependence of scroll bars, should live presenters address this need?

In one of my theory classes as an undergrad, my comp teacher noted that the prevalent interval classes had, for the most part, evolved along the path of the overtone series: chant (octaves), organum (fifths), common practice (thirds) early 20th century (seconds) later 20th century (microtones). So what was next, he asked with a smile.

I thought unison would be a dreadfully boring place to go, but then, Reich and Andriessen were doing things with imitation at the unison that was pretty exciting. There was also the idea of heterophony. While very common in non-western music, and even some western folk traditions, heterophony is only touched on occasionally by modern composers, and more as a decorative orchestration technique than a substantive idea in a piece.

One of my first successes with a more formal approach to heterophony is a movement from Taxonomy for flute and clarinet. The movement, Elaphe, evokes the genus of snakes it is named for by presenting patterns then blurring them (the main, if pitiful, defense ratsnakes have against predators). A pattern is presented in the clarinet, and the flute grabs on to certain notes, making it seem that the clarinet has left ghosts, or echoes, or is anticipated. While a bit more complex than doubling the melody with some ornamentation, it has a similar “thickening” effect that heterophony does in the music of Ireland or Thailand. One difference, however, is that in traditional heterophony the rhythmic edges are softened, whereas in this style they become more angular.

You can see the score and listen to the effect.

Betsy Bobenhouse, Flute; Christy Banks, clarinet.

Here’s a test mix for my latest commission; a tuba, electronics and boomboxes piece called 2ba4. The work starts much more sparsely with little sounds moving around the audience. By the end, it builds to this little jam.

The work was commissioned by tubist Matt Brown, who is a total mofo on the iron bass. It premieres April 5, 2009 as part of the Millersville University Tuba/Euphonium Symposium.

Occasionally, Sequenza21 contributors have a discussion about what constitutes a “professional” composer. I always chuckle. Saying you are a “composer” is like a janitor calling himself a “mopper”:

“My mopping talents aren’t as appreciated as they should be, so I sweep and deodorize on the side.”

This week I’ll research extended tuba techniques for a commission I’m
working on, discuss libretti with a couple of sopranos, coordinate
outreach for a residency I’m doing in Wyoming, remix one of my
installation works for stereo/live performance, jury some pop music
recordings, teach a few guitar lessons, gather programs for royalties,
and try to hustle even more work of this nature. None of these distract from the others.

They all feed each other.

Most composers aren’t composers. They’re…

composers/performers/producers/educators/editors/administrators/hustlers.

Or am I the only one?

I just completed “All the One-Eyed Boys in Town.” I was asked by Mark Sheridan-Rabideau to write a work for the Continental Trombone Quartet with John Kenny as a soloist. The work makes use of Wyoming poet, Harvey Hix. I’m not that fond of works with narration, and I didn’t want to add a vocalist, so I had John (who is also a Shakespearian actor) record his readings of fragments of the poems and email them to me. These will be used in boomboxes that the players synchronize with. In the second movement the players play the same part, synchronized with their own boombox, each started about a half note apart.

Can you write a minute of music in an hour? I mean really good, keepable material. Probably. Can you write eight minutes of music in eight hours? Could you write an average of ten minutes of music every other day? If not, why?

Yay! TAXONOMY, my suite for flute and clarinet about snake genera, was selected for the S21 concert in December! Very honored. Here are links to scores/sounds for people wanting a preview. If anyone wants to perform some or all of the pieces, feel free (but let me know and send a program).

http://rustybanks.org/taxonomy.html

Also, I’ve listened to recordings Alex and Jeremy’s works, and I can say I’m very much looking forward to hearing these works live.

Hoping to meet many of you in person,
rb

A couple of weeks ago, I saw Cai Guo-Qiang’s exhibit (retrospective?) at the Guggenheim. I love the sheer power of his work and how easily people can connect with it at levels varying from the playful, to the philosophical, to the technical.

The three pieces I enjoyed most were installations, one depicting a tiger being shot with arrows, one depicting a bombed car flipping through the air, and another involving wolves running into a plexiglass wall.

It struck me how, as a composer, I want more and more to create works that are like exhibits (installations, boomboxes throughout the room) and visual artists want to be more temporal (Matthew Barney’s Vaseline sculptures, Cai Guo-Qiang’s freeze frame-inspired scenarios).

Sure, multi-dimensional works like these have existed since the 1920s, but now they seem to have a new sleekness and maturity. Earlier, artists doing interdisciplinary/multimedia/event-based work had to consciously address their defiance of convention. This defiance often served as the “point” of the work and many great works came from this approach. In the post-pluralist age, this disregard (rather than defiance) of conventions simply helps direct attention to the intended artistic expression, providing an opportunity to create works as powerful, but more sublime, in such media.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOa_fq8hg5Y]

In my last post, I discussed collaborative works. These works tend to be 3-D in nature, with performers and visuals in one area and boomboxes throughout the space. This creates a sonically rich environment with which audiences (even traditional ones) seem to meaningfully connect. I love the fact that these works can’t be recreated in an mp3, but on the other hand, the further from convention a work is, the more a working composer needs adequate documentation.

Who out there has seen brilliant strategies in documenting multi-media (hate that word) works? I love the fluidity of YouTube, but I’m talking more high-quality. DVDs seem a good choice since they have surround sound and video. Who’s seen this done (well)?

Consider the documentation below (done in the typical post-grant-report fashion) of an installation Scott M. Conard (video artist) and I did in the vestibule of a St. James Episcopal Church in Lancaster, PA before a new music concert. It’s based on a poem called World’s End. And Worlds Begin by Richard Miller. There are some nice visuals, and you can sorta tell what it sounded like, but trust me:

You just had to be there…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HM4bM1Sb0m4]

Great art is not created in committee.
–Robert Hughes

Lately, the kind of work I’ve been seeking is collaborative in nature. I suppose any composition that involves performers other than the composer must be collaborative to some extent, but I’m speaking of creating works where music is not the primary focus, but isn’t necessarily secondary either.

Some of these works are fairly conventional and easily categorized, like my current commission for large choir, trombone quartet, and the American Repertory Ballet. The work, Worlds End. And Worlds Begin, is to be a semi-evening length work that is essentially a (modern) ballet work. More on this later…

Other works may fit into categories like “installation art” and “multimedia design” though I find the first term too apt to conjure images of works from the 60’s and the latter term is just too 90’s. I suppose the word “interdisciplinary” could be used, but even that term already smells of early-00s staleness. But then, terminology has always been a problem for composers.

Anyone who has collaborated a lot (or just once and never again!) can probably recall an instance where having to collaborate was tedious rather than synergistic. I’ve had these experiences, but lately collaborating seems easy and produces work far more interesting to a broader audience than any work I could have done on my own. Because of this new found ease, I suggested to Line Bruntse, a visual artist working on an installation in Milan for which I’m designing the sound, that perhaps I’d be a total tyrant were I to encounter something that didn’t meet my vision. She emailed back:

I could see you as a tyrant, only nobody would ever know they would simply think they were just having fun with you. I don’t think they would realize they were bending to your will because they would just want to… Sneaky…

As nice as that thought is, I doubt I have that much Carnegie-like prowess. I think it would be more accurate to say I’ve just come to value collaboration. Artistically, I want to be influenced by my collaborator. Years ago, it would have been possible for me to have a vision so inflexible that it might break from trying to leave room for another’s idea. Now, not opening myself to the influence of a collaborator would make a collaborative work seem inauthentic.

Who’s collaborating? Why? Why not?