Composer Blogs@Sequenza21.com
Arnold Rosner (b. 1945) is a prolific American composer whose music has been performed in the United States and Israel. His works exceed 100 in number and steer clear, generally, of both the post-serial avant-garde movement of the 1960’s and the minimalist movement which followed it. His treatment of harmony and counterpoint, along with the occasional recourse to an ethnic, Middle Eastern flavor, places his music in the esthetic milieu of Paul Hindemith, Ernest Bloch, and Alan Hovhaness.

Rosner is currently on the faculty of Kingsborough Community College of the City University of New York, where he teaches both standard and ethnic music. Having composed since the age of nine, he received advanced degrees from the State University of New York at Buffalo while studying with Leo Smit, Allen Sapp, Henri Pousseur and Lejaren Hiller, from all of whom, in his own words, “I learned practically nothing.”
Wednesday, March 01, 2006
The Bicycle Pump

In the 36 years that I have taught music survey, or appreciation sections to liberal arts students I have always said: “All I want from you is that you allow music to address any and all aspects of the human condition”. These students’ prior acquaintance with classical music generally begins and ends in the single digits of age when they watched cartoons; many of them now require heavy rock accompaniments and charismatic, lean slightly scary artists to take music seriously. Or they may tolerate tragedy in a movie; suspense and tension on TV. A few others, however “get it” and I do the best I can with them.

But in the classical era of music history, even the composers fail to meet my condition. Inheriting an already sparse choice of two principal scales, 95% of the time they choose the brighter and lighter major; minor is too serious for them. The music mainly is heard by the aristocratic few, helping them forget what they are doing to the impoverished and overworked many. It is no coincidence that the brief life of Mozart spans the years of both the American and French revolutions. Someday we may all teach that the principal gift of the classical period is the codification of sonata form, symphonies and so forth, making a transition between the dynamic (and contrapuntally driven) Baroque period, and the expressive (and structurally driven) Romantic period.

Do I dislike them all - Boccherini, Gluck, Haydn, early Beethoven? Yes, I do, but Mozart deserves a special place. It is not true that he is the worst of all composers; his prodigious technical skills developed by age six. Sometimes it is not so great to be a prodigy,- I often feel his emotional and dramatic palette is set at the same age. Rather he is the most overrated composer of them all. The difference between the (mediocre) quality of his music and the (celestial) reverance he is accorded is a gulf simply beyond belief.

There are those who have told me: “Wait till your 40s, when you’ve lost people close to you, suffered disappointments in life, fully matured. Then you’ll see the melancholy in almost every phrase.” I am 60, and I’m still waiting. And they have told me: “Just listen to those fantastic minor-key fugues, Laudate Pueri from the K. 339 Vespers, Kyrie from the C Minor Mass.” Those would be very impressive examples if I hadn’t also heard the counterpoint of one J. S. Bach, of whose works, Mozart’s constitute A-minus student imitations. (The MAJOR-key multi-subject fugue in the finale of the Jupiter symphony DOES impress, however.)

And they told me: “Listen to the pieces, usually also in minor, where you can hear a contained smoldering prefiguring the romantic era”. Those excerpts do indeed exist, but they actually are the most convincing passages of the fact that the emperor has no clothes, as Mozart always follows them with silly kid-stuff. It is like topping off a fresh-herb flavored veal scallopine with Ready Whip. For reasons of space, I will refer only to examples in D Minor.

The quartet in that key has a remarkable minuet with dark counterpoint and some unexpected harmonic connections. But the “B” section is major-tonality broken-chord fluff - barely even a recognizable theme but just what would be accompaniment, much less anything of substance. In the outer movements of the 20th Piano Concerto we do hear music that anticipates a composer like Schumann much of the way. But at the end Mozart cheers us up (in my opinion lets us down) by asking the first trumpeter of the orchestra to play, innumerable times, a simple figure delineating a D Major chord, six fast As, then one each F# and D. A friend of mine once played that part in a concert. After the concert, he and I went for pizza and every time he went for a swig of beer, I made him laugh by humming “ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-BUM-BUM”. The poor guy might have gotten down three good sips.

But the worst is the Requiem. Commanding opening - one of the better neo-Bach fugues, ending powerfully with a surprising open fifth, and a stormy Dies Irae (which I rather find a tempest in a teapot, but that’s not the point). Now comes perhaps the worst few minutes of music ever written. The aria “Tuba Mirum” presents (loudly, but that doesn’t help) the solo voice in a melody that would be better a lullaby. The obbligato part is a solo trombone; surely Mozart did not think that just the choice of instrument was enough for the fearful, day-of-judgment words. But indeed he writes dominant 7th arpeggios, graceful and gentle and the poor trombonist sounds less like the trumpet of doom or wrath, and more like a pump refilling the tires of a bicycle with air.

See if you don’t agree. When you’ve been to your umpteenth Mozart concert this year, and already are scratching your head about the mystique, take out your CD of the Requiem, any performance will do (We know you own one), and with an open mind, ear, and heart, ignoring all standard wisdom and listening a-fresh, play the bicycle pump - oops, I mean the Tuba Mirum. See if you don’t laugh, out loud. See if you don’t say: “Goodness, is this the icon we have worshipped for one quarter of a millennium?”

I bet that is exactly how you will react; I’ll stake my own reputation
as a composer on it.
posted by Arnold Rosner

Monday, October 10, 2005
Happy Birthday to Me

I suppose curmudgeonly bitterness has dominated my Sequenza blogs thus far - two long ones and even the silly one about blogules. I promised to be nice with the next one and here it is.

There are certain things just about all of us face, or will face. Most of us are getting SOME play here and there, and few of us are household names, major prize winners - turning down some commissions because we get more than we can handle. I find myself “on the map” but not in bold capital letters, and somehow feel it will be like that, more or less, for the future. And, of course, time passes, folks younger than we are suddenly make it big for whatever reason, and our own age and frailty become ever more apparent.

So, as I will attain the age of 60 very soon, I decided such a date should not pass unmarked, and I am having a concert of my pieces. I have chosen to present piano-vocal versions of my existing operas - one in major excerpts - one complete, and a third piece which is not at opera, but rather operatic in character; The titles are The Chronicle of Nine, Bontsche Schweig, and Strictly Personals, respectively.

Out of 120 works, why reduced versions of those three? My quartets and so forth are fairly well represented on CD, easily purchased, well reviewed, and they even get a lot of airplay in some markets. Neither the Philharmonic or Chamber Society of Lincoln Center has asked me to do a birthday festival (maybe when I’m 80?), and the incredibly excellent and numerous university bands of Texas aren’t doing my complete wind ensemble works in competitions (maybe when I’m 70?). My choice of repertoire, for now, was made by this logic: How can one do “big” pieces with small (i.e. economical) forces? Answer: operas in piano-vocal rendition.

Yes, one hopes some major opera producer, or contributor thereunto, will attend and soon after there will be a major staged production of something. That should be reckoned as the improbable icing on the cake. The cake itself, simply, is that this is a party. Old friends, hopefully the chance to meet new friends, sharing the music both with those who’ve heard it before and those who have not - celebrating being on the map AT ALL, whatever size letters, and having produced what one has, and still being of sound enough mind and body, one hopes, to produce more.

Of course, there is the fear: “What if I gave a party and nobody came?” One may want to “paper” the house, but if one goes that way, one at least one wants an audience with ears, hearts and minds. And, while we argue style, and fight for whatever attention we can get in an oversupply of music, the truth is that from a spiritual, if not pragmatic viewpoint, the most important individuals we should try to reach are other composers. In that spirit, I am putting aside 40 tickets (roughly 10% of the hall’s capacity) for those who are reading this blog. We are talking about Merkin Hall, at 8PM on Tuesday Nov. 8th. (Yes, my 60th coincides with Ferrer/Bloomberg election night.) The excellent singers are Elizabeth Farnum, Alexandra Montano, Jonathan Goodman and Dominic Inferrera, with pianist Margaret Kampmeier. Many reading this have heard them before,- and worked with them.

E-mail me at ARosnerPhD@aol.com and I will send you, or reserve at the box office, a pair of complimentary tickets. I have no idea how popular this invitation will be. On one hand,- it may truly be making a party and nobody comes; readers merely giggle at this offer. On the other, 40 tix may become committed soon and I may feel compelled to offer more. Whatever, as resident curmudgeon, and compositional non-minimalist, non-atonalist old-liner, I think it is time to extend my hand to my composing colleagues and celebrate music in whatever way. I look forward to meeting many of you at this concert.
posted by Arnold Rosner

Sunday, September 25, 2005
The Observable Universe

Well, it's mid-September, and the concert season has begun, as has the academic year and--in certain religions--its New Year's time. Sorry to start the year with another dark and gloomy blog, and anticipating any number of different points of view in the "blogules" as I call them, but I have a concept to share with all of you. In a few weeks I will, in some greater mood of good cheer, extend an invitation to my 60th birthday concert here in New York, but that can wait for the moment.

There is a concept in astronomy referring to the Observable or Expanding Universe. My limited understanding of it suggests that ever since the "big bang," all the matter in the universe has been speedily moving out from the center where the "bang" occurred way back when, hurtling farther and farther afield, so that the fringes of the universe are being pushed back by great distances. And, as I understand it, the further out matter gets, the faster it continues moving. Now, nothing can move faster than the speed of light, so if matter is moving east at 90% of the speed, while other matter similarly moves west, normal arithmetic breaks down, and the total relative speed of the easterly and westerly stuff never exceeds 100% of the light speed. However, since we observe something by seeing its emanated light,- or electrical send-offs, there are things in the universe so far away, and moving even farther so fast that we will NEVER observe them,- and thus the component of the universe that we can observe is just that - only a component.

What does this possibly matter to those of us writing music these days and trying to get it on the map? We know that the percentage of the population interested in composed modern classical music is consistently decreasing - yet we also know that with the computer and the compact disc, dissemination and audition of the music we write becomes easier and easier. And with the computer and synthesizer, let’s face it - there are those whose technical skills might have been inadequate for composition generations ago, but who can easily participate now. (They are, of course, not Sequenza readers and members.) In Jerry Sterner’s wonderful play Other People’s Money, "Louis the Liquidator" says that the surest way to bankruptcy is to gain an ever-increasing fraction, of an ever-decreasing market, and somehow this proliferation of composed music feels very much like that.

Anyway, as for my analogy to astronomy, the point is this: Just how much music is being written these days? The number of composers out there is utterly staggering. Those in university music departments in North America go into the thousands, based on my last look at the College Music Society’s faculty directory. If we have 6 billion people in the world altogether and only one in a million writes music, the number of composers is roughly 6,000. OK, how much music does each one write per year? Let’s figure an average output of 10 minutes of music - thus some 60,000 minutes of music being churned out annually. So, now that synthesized mock-ups work and CDs are cheap - and computers attach and download everything except bagels - let’s say we try to listen to all of it. Yes, all of it. Do the math; divide 60,000 by 365. Does it come out to roughly 3 hours of listening per day, if you wanted to keep up with it? And this is assuming only one composer per million people, and production of only 10 minutes each of finished music. Six of eight hours might be closer. Who among your friends and colleagues has that much listening time on a daily basis?

So, we are writing it so fast and in such volume that there is simply more than anybody can keep up with. Thus we have a total universe and a rather smaller observable universe of music, newly produced year-to-year. (Good luck catching up with the music of the last five or ten years.) I claim this was not the case in more traditional periods. Yes, for every Brahms and Wagner there are some utterly forgotten composers of fairly good music, but I doubt that their actual numbers barely approached the composing population now. And in those days of no recording, no radio, no computer,it was a rare treat to go to an opera or orchestral concert, and one heard the chamber music by gathering the aunts, uncles and cousins together and actually playing it. And that made THEIR universe, indeed, quite observable. Smaller, less varied, but observable.

But back to our universe, if we can’t listen to all of it, how do we make choices with our listening time? Pay attention to critics? Check the 30- or 60-second sound bytes on one website or another? Throw darts at the wall? And what about listening to a piece not once but the several times any work of merit presumably would deserve?

And as composers, what do I think we should do? Give up composition? Do a "Brahms" (or an Alan Hovhaness) and burn three-quarters of our existing work, and then go on? Turn down paying commissions because the world is glutted with music? I don’t know. I guess I would say two things: 1. Do not encourage students to be composers unless they really have a fire in the belly - and both the technique AND some individual sound to go with it. 2. Write every piece - indeed every note, with the greatest care. There is no glut, at least not yet, of real gold.
posted by Arnold Rosner

Tuesday, August 09, 2005
Blogules

The word blog was new to me when Elodie Lauten mentioned it not long ago. Now, suppose she prints a blog and there are COMMENTS (9) about it. Do we have a name, other than "comments" that might be more telling,- considering we are starting from a "blog"?

If nobody already thought of it, I propose

"blogules"
posted by Arnold Rosner

Sunday, July 31, 2005
In the Words of Groucho Marx, or…Is there any hope left for this culture?

I would like to start by thanking my good friend Elodie Lauten for introducing me to Sequenza, and her columns here.

It is not clear to me what the rules of blogging should be. I intend to impose one restriction on myself,- and that is that I will say nothing negative about any other composer. I am in a strange place,- writing music close to the spirits of Hindemith, Nielsen or Barber, with some additional ethnic and even mathematical influences thrown in (not to mention spiritual), yet enjoying friendships with colleagues who are in the atonal, post-atonal or minimalist camps. I mean no argument with them; I just seek some room for myself.

Of course, if one does not talk about other music, what fun is it? What are we doing here other than complaining about the neglect we all feel? I will try in the future to find other things to say, but for the moment I will indeed present two perspectives on that very neglect which, however, I hope will be interesting.

The first story doesn’t involve contemporary music at all. The Games Network on cable these days presents nothing but game and quiz shows, mostly, or entirely, re-runs of programming dating back as far as 50 years. (I refer to What’s My Line episodes.) They present much more recent episodes of Who Wants to be a Millionaire. One late night I was watching this program. The contestants were all celebrities, and all their winnings were going to charity, so a much more lighthearted spirit prevailed than usual. The various individuals in a circular arrangement awaiting participation blurted all manner of helpful sounds and comments for the contestant, who, of course, had the usual three “lifelines” available, as well.

One contestant, whose name and credentials I have mercifully forgotten, got all the way to $125,000 without any help at all. Questions of history, pop culture, science, sports, and whatever, were easy prey. Then, for one-quarter of a million dollars, the question was: Which classical composer wrote the Wedding March usually associated with the words: Here Comes the Bride?: a. Mozart, b. Handel, c. Wagner, d. Strauss? The contestant, the circle of other celebrity contestants, the studio audience, Regis Philbin himself, all went entirely silent and blank. This is hardly obscure repertoire. How many individuals in that room had indeed marched down the aisle to that tune themselves?

Before going on with the story,- of course Mendelssohn could have been a choice. However, a real opera-buff’s question is to locate wedding music by all four of the composers given. I don’t know the answer to that, but there is stuff in Figaro, and Handel and Strauss both have a plethora of operas the libretti of which are obscure to me.

Seeing no help coming from the other alleged celebrities, the contestant availed himself of lifeline number 1, and asked to poll the audience. This device supposedly yields 92% success. But this audience was divided,- Handel getting the most votes, but the sample scattered nearly randomly and equally four ways. So he availed himself of lifeline number 2, and had the computer remove two choices, the result of which was that Wagner and Strauss remained. So much for the audience poll. Now he went to lifeline number 3, and phoned a friend, a supposed classical music buff. When he read the question to him he pronounced Wagner with a W, and the friend corrected him: “In the first place, its “Vagner”, but his music is too heavy,- he wouldn’t have written that”. And of course he was fairly sure it was Strauss. (I didn’t know Richard Strauss was especially prized for lightness, either.) Anyway, the contestant went with that, got it wrong,- never made the quarter million, and indeed lost most of the 1/8 million with which he could have walked away. Now, when in Millionaire history did a contestant use all three lifelines on one question and still get it wrong?

Is there any hope left for this culture?

The second story is more personal. I am approaching a “big-number” birthday and have arranged for a commemorative recital of my operatic and vocal work at Merkin Hall on that date. I hope Sequenza will list this in some detail when it gets close, but for now let’s just pinpoint the date as Nov. 8th. In such cases, when one is on the map in medium-sized letters, it is a party - almost like attending one’s own funeral,- but one hopes to bring in some people who are not already friends, perhaps even some with clout with record companies, foundations or opera houses. Accordingly, I contacted WQXR concerning advertising there. The going rate for play of a 1-minute “spot” is $400, and there is no discount for multiple airings. My college has excellent broadcast colleagues and facilities so it was easy to record what was needed with a fine announcing voice mixed perfectly with carefully selected music.

I spoke to the advertising man at WQXR, whom I will not name, but whose style was that of a crusty, cynical but well-meaning uncle. I asked if there was any chance of arranging the play of some short piece of mine before or right after the airing of the ad. “Very dubious”, said he. I further asked if he knew if my CDs were in WQXR’s library, pointing out that the record companies and I had frequently sent them or delivered them, but people I knew had reported I was not to be found there. The crusty uncle promised to call me back, and when he did he reported: “Your music is definitely not in the library”. I DID NOT say: “What do they do, use the CDs as Frisbees?” What I did say was that indeed several had been sent or delivered. He said: “Well,- send a CD or two to this one….. and see what happens”. I said: “Should I mention that I have an event coming up and spending $2000 for advertising on the station?” and he said….are you ready for this?... “Oh no, don’t mention that. That would KILL it”. I went on,- “they never took my music before, why should they take it now” Answer... “Well, they keep very little new contemporary music these days”?

Well, here’s the question. Groucho Marx once said: “I wouldn’t join a club that would have me as a member”, and my paraphrase is: “How can I advertise on a station that will not have me in their catalogue?”

Of course, the practical answer is that a lot of people listen to WQXR every day and among them may be just the audience I want to address, so I am going to bite the bullet and do it - and even bring in one CD with what I think is the most accessible tune, but:

Is there any hope left for this culture?
posted by Arnold Rosner