music in an hour

That’s not to say that music can’t serve any of the purposes above, and in fact some music is only effective in serving that purpose. Strip away the text of David Lang’s little match girl passion and you have a piece of music that is all too repetitive and somewhat meandering. Put the text back in and you have a ghastly Greek chorus that in a collection of sighs bemoans the death of a little girl on Christmas Eve. Play a low-octave half step and try not to imagine an impending shark attack. Some music is only as powerful as it is because there is a very specific image or narrative along with it. So in this case, music’s purpose is to elevate the death of the little match girl to an exalted space, or to explain to the audience why we need a bigger boat.

The question, essentially, is “what is music’s purpose?” Of course, there’s probably thousands of answers to or discussions about this question, none of them right or wrong. But most of the time, people want to take a very micro view of what its purpose is. People want to listen to music as background noise, or they want music to tell a very specific and very literal story. How many times do you play something for someone and they say, “it was like…I was on a cloud…” or some other sort of ultra-specific and narrow narrative description of how the music made them feel? That’s all fine, of course, and if you like to put that imagery in your head than so be it, but it does limit the way you can listen to music. You certainly can’t be that specific with much classical music, because the mood and tone changes so frequently. If you were to try to apply the singular description of “being on a cloud” to a Christopher Rouse symphony (not that anyone would) you would limit the stream-of-consciousness sort of brain processes that are required to listen to that sort of music.

This is important for composers to grasp because music doesn’t have to be an elaborate story or dogmatic STATEMENT of some kind, it can just be a collection of thoughts in a moment. To get too caught up in what music is saying is to get too caught up in how people will react to your work, and what they will think after it’s over. It’s completely impossible to tell how people will react to your work, emotionally and otherwise. Something you may have planned out through months of charts and planning how the end of your Piano concerto will go, and it may sound perfect to you but kitsch to another person, underwhelming to one, and even more perfect to another. That combination of major and diatonic clusters you love to use will never sound legitimate to a scholar of serialism. Nixon in China (or any opera, for that matter) will always sound “weeeeird…” to someone who has only heard Taylor Swift.

While of course I’m no authority, and I certainly cant try to tell people how to listen to or write music, I do believe that music can just as effectively serve no purpose as it can serve a very specific one. Sometimes music is just a “window” to another time, place, way of thinking, emotion, thought, etc. Music can and should defy logic, and ask more questions than it answers. It should spark heated debate and loving camaraderie. If you loved the piece, what about it did you love? What about it reduced you to tears of joy in the third movement? What sort of space did the music bring you into? Are you completely questioning every decision you ever made because of this music? Were you impressed by the soloists? Did you hate it? What about the music did you not like? Why did you fall asleep? Would you have liked the piece more if you saw it performed live? Why did the piece make you think about the conflicted relationship you have with your grandmother? These are the kinds of questions I want music to ask me, and I don’t necessarily need to ever answer them.

Wrote this short piece today. (Probably was finished in under an hour, no timer this time, though.) Wanted to try writing something by hand that I could perform myself, which are both things I hardly ever do. I'll attach a scan of the handwritten score, which likely will make no sense to anybody else except for me.

In "To Pulsate," the performer is given only the chord that they are supposed to play, an approximate duration (indicated by either "short" or "long"), and the dynamic. The rhythm of the "pulse" is improvised, with a low C drone, usually, between each chord change.

Performed by me. If you're interested in performing this piece, I'd be happy to make a more legible score at some point.

Thank you for the kind words! Music in an hour is simply just a way for me to stay motivated and get little bits of musical ideas out of my head and onto the paper. The primary "challenge" is just to set a timer, compose for an hour and have a piece that has a nice shape to it, among other things. Sometimes I'll be more specific, but not always. It’s a great challenge in that it forces you to make snap decisions about the composition of your music, rather than getting all caught up in different options or what-if’s. It’s often much easier to write music with very strict guidelines than with the freedom to use any tool out of the box at any time. Otherwise, you end up using all of your tools at once.

Excerpt from a long and extremely fruitful recording session with some wonderful musicians last week as a part of my ongoing collaboration with Sean Kiely on a short film work-in-progress. The idea is that I will take these recordings and mash them together into a sort of abstract sound-collage. This particular take was exciting and well rounded on it's own, however, so I decided to share it. Please share if you enjoy what you hear!

Lines and Objects- Piece for solo piano improvisation with live electronics.

The biggest piece I wrote this semester- somehow, in the midst of being involved with SU's production of Gianni Schicchi I was able to put together this string septet that I am quite proud of. Hopefully someday soon I will meet a large group of very good string players who would be willing to put together...I realize in hindsight that any piece with two violas is likely not going to be premiered any time soon. Still, I wrote the piece with the mentality of writing something without the limitation of writing for the people I have at my disposal, which was very freeing in a way.

Something totally different for people to listen to. Made this track over the summer in Logic Pro X. Kind of Daft Punk meets David Lang, at least in inspiration. Thinking about maybe transcribing this and a few other electronic pieces into a live new music ensemble kind of piece. Maybe if I blog about it that will make it happen.