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.
No comments:
Post a Comment