Clockworthy Pursuits

How British is the name Clockworthy Pursuits? Well, I think it rings with old world wit. I openly admit to listening to Harrison Birtwistle a lot leading up to composing the piece that holds that name. Birtwistle is really interesting to me, with directional processes that as audio excerpts may sound random but over the duration really move.

Clockworthy Pursuits is a chamber work for saxophone, clarinet, bassoon, and violin. A lot of my music is colored by the weird assortments of musicians who I had befriended. More importantly, this piece was an expansion of a permutational technique I had developed in the piano piece Sitting Too Close to the TV. The piano work was quite similar to the etudes that Ligeti was currently composing, but also had parallels to Birtwistle's piece Harrison's Clocks, of which I had seen a score in the library. In the case of Clockworthy Pursuits, I combined layers of alternating processes into one line, overlaid with a rhythmic scheme designed to shuffle beat emphasis, and then systematically divided the line between the performers.

The modern musician can take a lesson from this piece. It is very important to have a diversified skill set. He might not use all of his skills at once, but he will use and develop them permutationally as he moves from job(s) to job(s). Proficiency in my primary interest, composition, is an important motivator for me but has provided me with very little cash. My knowledge of acoustics, DAWs, and audio recording got me a job teaching electronic music. Understanding music theory in depth and having taught it in a low pressure situation at the University of Georgia Community Music School, qualified me to teach it at the Baltimore School for the Arts. My continuing obsession with developing audio and visual applications with Pure Data has provided me with opportunities to showcase my work and to do paid work for others, providing them with software that performs in ways no other software can. As I look for jobs, I am finding that I have other skills that I have developed in jobs that I have held and hobbies that I have pursued. I can type more than sixty words a minute. I now have a year of administrative experience. I know how to hand code an html/css website, create simple equations in Excel, design things in Adobe Photoshop, and more. I even think my hours of experience with different types of computer games may have provided me with other unseen skills.

I had been depressed for a while, at the beginning of my unemployment, because I felt like I had not developed any skills beyond music. I felt that my pursuits and not been clockworthy. For anyone who feels this way, I recommend doing a job search, whether he is in need of a job or not, and he will find his hidden abilities that he may not be using currently that are applicable to alternative occupations.

I feel nostalgia for an idealized time in which I did not live, a time when people got a job and stayed with it until retirement. The reality of that time is probably closer to how we live now, where many people do not get to settle into comfortable careers so quickly. Instead, we all have the exciting opportunity to explore many different jobs and develop a variety of skills. What a great cure for boredom!

Natura

When my friend from high school got married, he asked for some kind of music that could be played while people were entering the chapel. So, I made a very strange collection of bird and insect sounds from many climates and arranged them into a composition. This piece lived on when Geodesic Gnome used it in a couple of performances as a dissociative layer on which people improvised. My original piece was entitled Natura. Geodesic Gnome's version became known as Nature Calls Collect.

Sitting at home unemployed in the city has been getting me down. My anxiety has been transferring to my wife. Not only that, but my wife has always been a bit wary of the city; she grew up in the middle states where there are no cities and people are surrounded by green things and animals. I, too, spent a lot of time outdoors, in the forests of Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Georgia. I tend to forget how much the trees and sounds of running water and insects can soothe my worries.

This evening, my wife and I went on a long walk through two sections of Baltimore's Wyman park. My wife seems surprised that cities aren't just an organized grid filled with buildings, only. We started in a very organized park where people were quietly lounging, and made our way to the east side of Hopkins where the brush grows thick. At one point we stopped and lost ourselves, watching the thick darkness of vines on trees climbing above a reed lined stream. Then, we followed a narrowing trail down to the shaded water, conscious still of the city around us by the smell, and the strange, small pieces of furniture in the mud. As the sky dimmed purple and the woods changed to a deeper green, we found ourselves on a lacross practice field where dogs and their owners took advantage of the grassy expanse.

It is good to know that our city contains at least some small patches of green. Although, I think that Wyman park might need a few cougars to keep the rabbits in check.

Dime Novel

You may have read books with characters so numerous and dynamic that it took all of your concentration to get the overall picture. Parametric Transmutations might feel a little bit like that. With continued listening/reading you are able to pull together all the interesting little details. There are other types of literature. The written word can be brilliant without being verbose. With practice, this web log may reach that status.

I named the piece I composed after my orchestral work Dime Novel. I made it short and limited in scope, yet as my mentor Theofanidis told me, it still takes the listener on a long journey. It is just over three minutes in length. The instrumentation is a mere violin and piano. Still, this is the piece for which I received an award, and I understand why.

The orchestra piece had been a working out of complexity and, in its second part, an exploration of a newer musical idea for me. I had thoroughly learned counterpoint as an undergraduate. Reaching even to the level of creating counterpoint of formal parameters, I needed a reboot. A flute diva at UGA who spent a lot of time performing new music, explained to me that Twentieth Century music for the most part would go unremembered because composers had not figured out how to form good melodies. Now, you can be the new music junky that speaks from part of my ego to say that melody is a crutch, or saying it more politely that it is not necessary to create interesting music. I would agree with you, to an extent. However, I also felt the need to explore this concept of melody, which for me became monody, the reveling in a single musical line with some kind of simplified accompanying texture.

Dime Novel did not really reach that point, although it is a single melody instrument with a generally accompanying keyboard. No, Dime Novel was one of the final opportunities I had to write a piece that took the counterpoint even beyond Parametric Transmutations. I had a violinist, Aurelie Banziger, and a pianist, John Chernoff, who were eager for a challenge. Melody would come later, in a non-repeating repetition based piece for a jazz ensemble.

What Dime Novel represented was the progression of my musical preferences towards simplicity. It was presented first on a program of other student works. At Peabody, there is a rainbow of musical styles flowing from composers of opposite personalities. Some were more liked than others, and graduate students, like me, preferred to hawk our opinions to each other in private. Underclassmen, at any music school, come in with a lot of arrogance and hard heartedness. The first piece on the program, by one of the more stubborn Freshmen, was a Mahler inspired tone poem, much longer than indicated by the program. These student composition recitals were infamous for their length already, and this piece starting the program was a harbinger for the darkness to come. However, Aurelie and John were up next. Both quirky and happy people, they took the stage with mature authority and set down to play under four minutes of whirling delightfully unpredictable music. At the end, it was like someone had thrust open the huge windows that faced the park and a sweet breeze blown through sweeping the proto-Mahlerian cobwebs out of the room. The applause glowed with genuine delighted for the contrast of brevity and with.

That moment marked the moment I opened my eyes and realized I was no longer writing for selfish narcissism. My music could connect to people if it contained the right elements to direct them in listening. I suddenly became interested in the word psychoacoustics, and what it meant to music. The contrapuntal parametric layers could remain, but the surface could be more obvious and the textures could be simpler. I began a new quest. Previously, I had traversed such easy concepts as how chords fit together, how to avoid consonance, how to totally serialize every aspect of a composition, and how to apply counterpoint to more musical elements than just melodic shapes. I would now be exploring with less defined goals. I was asking myself the question, how do I shape the listeners' experience and take him along on a journey despite the compatibility of his listening experience and my compositional style?

I believed that here the layers would serve me well. There is the surface that everyone can hear, the movement of notes, recognizable events, and the activity of rhythm. Underneath, I could do my art, with the long term transformations creating a skeleton. I was beginning to free myself from the shackles of surface detail. I believed that I could compose with any superficial musical style and still maintain my identity, because my powers lay beneath the scope of normal perception.

Dime Novel functions like that. There are moments where everything comes together. The listener does not know why or how, but it is all in the hidden structure. This is what makes many short stories and poems great. Short Story is not a very compelling title, though. Ode is too cliched a name. The words "dime novel," connote cheap superficiality, something to be read and discarded by immature readers. I can think of many briefer books, of genres long disparaged that contain works of great value. See how Philip K. Dick is revered, although he began his career forced making money from science fiction, a genre of low respect. Dime Novel represents a narrative from which one does not expect greatness, but can occasionally surprise with its novelty. A title can form intellectual counterpoint with the opus, too, you know.

Why the complicated name?

Parametric Transmutations is an orchestral piece that I composed. It began during a time in my life that is similar to the one I am in now. I was minimally employed. I spent a lot of time composing, teaching myself to program audio applications in Pure Data, and staying digitally connected to friends who were increasingly leaving Georgia. I felt very isolated then, but I was energized by my faith in my musical talent and by my acceptance into the Peabody Institute.

I had read that Peabody provided students with the opportunity to have music played by the orchestra in periodic reading sessions. So, I set about starting an orchestra piece during my year off. For me, composing had been a process to better understand the various aspects of music, a way to teach myself. While I had teachers, my eagerness to understand took me into corners of the music world that even they had not seen. The orchestra, to me, was one of the last and most significant places a composer could probe.

I was teaching a few music theory lessons to pre-college students at the University of Georgia. Before and afterwards, I would spend time on the piano with staff paper, sketching out in detail the rhythm skeleton, harmonic framework, and long changes of the first third of my orchestra piece. This was to be my most complicated work, and I put everything I knew into it. Building on the concept of form as one long transition, I wanted to explore superimposed formal units. I wanted to see how musical variables could change at different rates over time and how each parameter could have its own formal shape.

Packed up and shipped out, I arrived in Baltimore, much different from any other place I had lived. The rural farm towns in Pennsylvania and Tennessee and the amoebic suburbs of Atlanta lacked the rows of houses and the thrusting skyline that give a city a memorable shape. Baltimore had a sense of place. The conservatory was also quite different from the liberal arts college I had attended. It was filled with history, and music, but felt empty of scholarship and curiosity.

I brought the orchestra piece with me and completed it under the distracted eyes of Christopher Theofanidis. He had many insightful things to say about orchestration. He continually expressed how courageous he felt I was for sticking with a modernist esthetic. Style aside, we were quite compatible as far as students and teachers go. I feel I learned more from sitting in on his class about living composers, where I lost my fear of minimalist procedures and discovered composers like Saariaho.

The second, longer section of the piece, in retrospect, is missing a lot of the definitive shape of the first section. The piece opens with a city skyline but smears into a less defined cloud of suburbs, a counterpoint to the path my life had taken. The opening is bold, dramatic, and full of one big idea. The last two-thirds meander through an unsettled, unrepeating melody. As Tristan Murail noted, the opening cements something firmly in the mind that one expects to return in some form. At the time, I was purposefully avoiding returning form. For me, this piece was to be one long series of transitions, always moving away from what was before and becoming something else.

This was my life in a way. The earliest time I can remember was being a poor preschooler in a trailer. I remember a warmly lit Christmas scene where I was presented with fuzzy monkey slippers from my father who worked in a boot store. My parents took me to Pennsylvania, hundreds of miles from relatives. The distance was the reason they eventually moved to Georgia. Despite visits to Tennessee and one final visit to that small Pennsylvania town, I would not live there again. I was watching my innocence fade and discovering new interests, science, music, mathematics, computers. Eventually the wooden swords were put in boxes with the stuffed animals. Creating music took their place. Well, music was not the only thing that replaced my childhood, it was the desire to prove my intelligence. I had discovered that I was not athletically inclined. School quiz teams, AP classes, and comparing report cards all demonstrated my need to compete. The baseball went in the box with the wooden sword.

The funny thing about transitions is how they sneak up on unsuspecting people. I did not know that the competitive nature I had developed playing baseball would lead to me fighting to be in the top ten of my class. I certainly did not know that my religious upbringing would shape my early view of music into what were the "right" and "wrong" ways to compose. My high school self would not have predicted that my musical explorative experimentalism would lead me to be treasurer in a non-profit that runs an international improvised music festival devoted to music that cannot easily be deemed "right" or "wrong."

What is sneaking up on me now? Since graduating with two Masters degrees, I have tirelessly tried to stay connected to a musical world that is moving far away from the conservatory. I have organized and staffed concerts of intuitive music, I created a series to encourage other local musicians to compose and perform new chamber music, and I have attempted to continue to teach from this old Western tradition of discipline and fundamentals. I find myself unable to support myself with a career in music. It may be a lack of initiative to get the attention I deserve, or it may the general lack of interest our society has for music that makes them think in abstract terms. Music is a part of me, like family. It will never go away. It may mutate through many forms over the course of my life.

At this moment, there is a more urgent parameter I must shape as I move through time. I need to find the skills within me that can earn me money and establish a lasting career. Two great lessons I have learned from Baltimore's experimental music scene. The first is that one should be versatile and eager enough to play with anyone and learn what one can from them. The second lesson I observed as pervasive throughout the music scene in Baltimore. From the gigging musician to the web developer, everyone works a job to provide them with the resources to do what gives them life. The work, marginally related or not, does not matter. The conservatory tries to crank out a bunch of virtuosi who, when they have reached the end of the academic conveyor, they spill out on the floor because there is nowhere to go. I think Peabody needs to be paired up with a trade school. Come to Peabody and learn the Well-Tempered Clavier and plumbing!

I almost forgot. The orchestra piece was read at Peabody, conducted by the rising star known as Erin Freeman, may she shine brightly in the dark sky of classical music. You can listen to the recording online.