(an aside: has everybody seen, recently, the Ian Bostridge videos for Winterreise? He looks SO fine in these videos although it’s too bad it’s no pictures of Julius Drake. Julius Drake, in addition to sounding like a lesser Ducktales character, is one of the best collaborative pianists ever in the history of ever. He’s done albums with everybody you’ve ever known about, and is a really sensitive and wonderful performer. Apparently he and my homegirl Alice Coote just did a Winterreise at the Wigmore Hall that made everybody throw their knickers at the stage; it’s heartening to know that it’s still music you can do in any octave about which people will lose their shit.)

Last night was strange: it’s very rare that I play music in public other than my own or, like, Thomas’s. I had an experience that I’ve never had before. We’ve been working on this piece for a few months, but only really started putting it together in the last few days. Playing David’s music, in my experience, is rather like cooking octopus, where either you do nothing to it at all or boil it for a million hours with a wine cork. Last night, our normally minimal approach to the fourth movement kind of went to the other side, and an unexpectedly tender moment happened in one of the bars and I lost track of my triplets!!! That’s never happened to me before; I’m normally super solid, but it was so B-flattish and delicious. By the time my eyes got back to the page, it was probably a half a second, but I sort of fudged a left-hand moment and made a weird face I hope is not on video. I should also point out here that David’s music is crazy-looking on the page. You really have to follow it like early Nintendo (scroll mode!) or you can get not just lost but destructively lost.

Everybody get back into the L.M.G.P., though. David’s music is often process-based, and when text is involved, the text is sort of subjected to the same process as the notes, sometimes to a kind of abstract effect. In the Passion, the texts and the processes driving the car align in a really beautiful dance, and each of the many, many movements has a toe-curlingly great moment. Shara and I watched from backstage and I still get deep deep cilice passion pangz from “Eli, Eli.”

Today, I got up at Sparrow’s Fart and flew from San Francisco to Seattle, just in time for the dress rehearsal for my new piece, So Far So Good. I blogged about this piece before; it’s growing on me despite its oddness. There’s a trumpet solo which sounds really really American and delish. There’s a horn line that I’m pretty sure I ganked from Harmonielehre and that’s fine with me because I love that piece more than garlic. Newt Gingrich wants to go to the moon and I’m also fine with that. Ludovic Morlot is absolutely heaven.

I suppose I have the same question about the showing of brand names. All the blurring makes you actually run through the visual lexicon of brands in your head and be like, “…no….no….no….ah! It’s Bacardi!” It seems to undo whatever work it was put there to do.

Another anomaly: everybody is completely honest about all the various procedures they do to their bodies: tanning, hair extensions, eyebrow trimming, hour-long hair blowouts, et cetera. However! All these boys have perfectly hairless thoraxes and at no point does anybody confess to a chest wax or anything — it’s strange, it’s like the one thing nobody’s talking about despite the fact that it is, one presumes, something that has to happen at least once every few weeks?

Anybody who is interested in how the Rhode Island accent works would be well-served by studying Pauly D, who has one of the finer specimens of the same. His family comes for a visit and his mother! Her accent was almost identical to the awesome lady who works at Venda Ravioli on Federal Hill. I’ve never been happier. It’s like when Emeril (from Fall River, which I think falls in the Rhode Island Accent Watershed) says “Lamb Heart.” The Jersey Shore is a real triumph of the editing room; I think there must be a kind of Sympathetic Linguist in there with them, who seems to be constructing mini-narratives around single words and turns of phrase just for my delight!

OMG OMG OMG you know what would be the best thing in the world on Top Chef would be if they could do a post-concert meal. That’s always seems like the biggest problem in the world, and readers of this space know that I am perpetually — especially when on the road — bemoaning post-show options. Pre-show is easy everywhere in the world because all you need is hummus and red wine and some of them Stacy’s pita chips, but afterwards is complicated. Pretend, for instance, a show ends at 10. There are people who helped organize who want to come with, and then there are some people we know who want to come with, but really, what’s at the heart of the matter is six people who have just sweated and had adrenaline and lactic acidz and need to get some unfussy food with an air of the fabulous to it, to accompany an inappropriate drinking sequence — start with bourbon and move to red wine then back to bourbon! Yes ma’am! It’s a hard chord to strike: what’s required is some combination of the St John in London and the Landmarc in New York, but without it being the One Fancy Restaurant in the Place Where You’re At because usually they’re too expensive and get nervy when people order different amounts of things. Some of the best post-show moments have been stolen ones: grab one person and run to Lupa after a show at LPR. Charlize Theron just said, “if you had to cast a bean, that would be the bean to cast” right before she ate a lamb’s heart, by the way, on this week’s episode, while wearing a white goddess-toga? Also Eric Ripert. Anyway somebody tell Padma to calllllll meeeee or more specifically to call Nadia.

How are we feeling about fancy cocktails these days? I feel like there was once a time where I would seek out a complicated thing with a million ingredients and an egg made by a dude with historical facial hair, a vest, and a bow tie? But…of late…? I don’t know. I used to crave it and now…I suppose I wouldn’t kick it out of bed. The changing tastebuds!

The baby thing is crazy. I have some friends whom I had pre-planned to visit about a week after they had the baby. In the course of things, I didn’t really confirm and then the baby was late so I ended up being the first non-family visitor to this Very Tiny Creature. I’m an only child, so I didn’t grow up around nuggets that size and it was intense for me. I’m really looking forward to being a Fabulous Uncle-style figure – I think I’m much more suited to that. I love going to the zoo and my job is basically making noise.

I just had a very heartening ride to the airport; in the course of natural banter, it came up that I was a musician, and my driver said that his daughter is in this middle school in Brooklyn. I’ve spent a few minutes nosing around the website and I’m just really happy to see all of this — the site itself is kind of nuts but it encapsulates, it seems, all the stuff going on. The model seems to be one in which kids are dancing, singing, playing a zillion instruments, acting: a kind of holistic Orff eduction. I’m into it. I wish there were some oblique way I could participate in young-ish music education; a few years ago I did some volunteer work and a few years before that worked in Colorado in a K-12 school teaching music for a few weeks and it was actually really, really great.

I’ve also been watching every second of these Republican debates. I can’t bear this whole thing with Newt Gingrich where he gets to have three wives and gay people can’t have nann and then randomly gets to still be sanctimonious about it? I can’t bear Newt Gingrich’s fake-blunt answers or that whiny scold Santorum. But it’s so fun to watch I can’t turn it off! I can’t help thinking how irrelevant my specific life is to these people and this process; I’m as involved in the process as I can be — I read everything and vote all the time, including absentee which is a Whole Process for those of you who have never done it — and yet it feels very sim-city to me. All the alarm bells in my head tell me to run far away from these people — what is up with Karen Santorum!? Have we all processed that she lived with in a sex-type way the obstetrician who delivered her? And now is homeschooling all those weeping children, see illustration? Or how about how Newt Gingrich’s second wife, with MS, was inwestigated for taking a half a million dollar bribe from some dude in Paris to win her then husband’s favor?! I get the same vibe as I do with those cancer grifters, accused molesters, Stephen Glass. Some reptilian part of my brain is constantly alerting me that something is up. Ron Paul not knowing who wrote those newsletters? The weird thing about authorship — especially before the internet — is that somebody wrote the thing. It doesn’t particularly matter who — is there anything sadder than scholarly work about the authorship of Shakespeare’s works? Yikes. Anyway, Ron Paul. Fuck that dude. Would it be so hard to find the person who wrote them and talk about it? I think that would be interesting: even if they (by which I mean The Author and Ron Paul, who may or may not be the same Entity) disavowed half the stuff and still believed in the other half, it would be, as they say, a teachable moment.

I’ve written a piece for the Seattle Symphony which premieres this coming Thursday. I’m excited! It’s been a long time since I’ve written anything purely orchestral. I’ve been in a constant state — for almost two years — of writing narrative pieces or pieces too short to have anything other than a fragmentary narrative. This commission – plus or minus twenty minutes for orchestra with no specific program – was a real challenge coming out of two operas. I have a confession: I am not naturally very good at structure. If there are four or five things that I’m fluent at, musically, structure is not one of them, and it’s always a struggle. I attribute it to the fact that my favorite favorite music in Tha Formative Years was Purcell verse anthems. I’m thinking of one in particular: Sing Unto the Lord. Check out the score here. Basically, it’s a sequence of perfect little two-minute emotional mini-statements keyed to the text. There’s an alleluia that comes and goes and comes back again. There isn’t much that relates A to B to C, which isn’t to say that the piece doesn’t work; on the contrary, it’s my favorite! Anyway, that structural model doesn’t translate very well into secular music — I’ve always said that writing sacred music is writing incidental music to a play whose plot we all know, so there is strangely more flexibility to bounce around structurally. But when I first started writing instrumental music this was sort of the model I’d use: a series of not particularly interrelated great ideas. John Corigliano, my teacher at Juilliard along with Chris Rouse, kicked my ass about it and made me listen to music with developmental (rather than additive or just Massive) structure and I can do it now! I know how to do it! But sometimes? I check back in with Purcell and those big choral works like the Te Deum which contain fast music, slow music, duets, trios, beautiful music, pomp & incense, curlicues. I’ve tried to make a version of the same for orchestra with a slightly more modern sense of structure in which stuff comes back, but changed (“stuff comes back but changed” being, I think, the one emotional gift of the romantic era I have fully unwrapped). The piece is called So Far So Good and I’m really excited! Okay now I’ve had like nineteen Delta cappuccinos and I am ready for aviation!

Steve Reich
Different Trains: III. After the War
Kronos Quartet

A few things about this. 2:05 in, there are some really delicious chords that I’ve been stealing for years. The minute this album came out (the Kronos version) I was right there sitting on the floor with a pencil and manuscript paper trying to figure out the voicings. The other thing is that around seven and a half minutes in, Reich really turns it out. In a miniature Mahlerian structure, almost, he introduces an almost folk-like melody with “there was one girl who had a beautiful voice,” followed by an anguished, central-european chromaticism on “and they loved to listen to the singing, the Germans,” which suddenly transforms into a sort of sun-dappled flautando environment for the final lines. It’s super super gorgeous.

Note that although I’m using the iconic, original Kronos recording here, there are now five or six others, including the wonderful Smith Quartet, the London Steve Reich Ensemble… more and more people, and younger people, too; this is a piece that has been so outrageously important to me, and I’m sure to a large number of young composers, and it’s great to see it falling into the fingers of our contemporaries.

The text, which Reich compiled from interviews:

Then the war was over
Are you sure
The war is over
Going to America
To Los Angeles
To New York
From New York to Los Angeles
One of the fastest trains
But today they’re all gone
There was one girl who had a beautiful voice
And they loved to listen to the singing,
The Germans
And when she stopped singing they said, “More more,”
and they applauded

…which is very exciting: the arctic expanse of an empty diary. I have a hearty to-do list, but it’s mainly smaller things — or smaller, at least, than wrangling together an opera. The big consideration at the time is a cello concerto for this cellist Olly Coates & the Britten Sinfonia, which will happen in the UK in March, and then will receive its US premiere in January 2013 with the deliciously named Zuill Bailey and the Indianapolis Sympherny, who commissioned the piece along with the Barbican. It’s shaped up very nicely but strangely: the middle section bears the traces of Qawwali and has — as much of what I’ve been writing recently does — a commitment to a single, unchanging drone.

You guys. Even though I didn’t have shit-all to do, really, putting that opera together was exhausting! It’s like a strange version of plate spinning because it feels like work without actually being work. It would have been entirely possible — and indeed, maybe preferable? — for me to be a ghost in the process, but eventually, my schedule freed up such that I could, and did, make a (productive) nuisance of myself. What is difficult about the process, actually, is negotiating degrees of perfectionism in other people. This is probably more of an issue for me and Dr. Rosenfeld, but really, what it breaks down to is this: the piece exists as the document I’ve produced (two very large scores), but then is received as a collection of various processes ranging from the way in which the pit that houses the scissor-lift is painted to the font in the programme to the morale backstage to the presence (or absence) of supertitles to the morale in the follow-spot booth and on and down and up and over. It is a series of interconnected decisions and, in some cases, negative-space decisions (actively not making a decision about something and “letting it be”) that really surrounds the piece and puts it into three dimensions.

Rebecca Taichman, the director, and I are similarly neurotic people who will obsess over the font of the apostrophe in the supertitles: this is probably a good thing, given what we do. The question becomes how to gauge the limits of others in dealing with these details. For me, it’s technical and emotional: when I walked backstage the other day, did the fly-operator seem angry? Is there anything I can do? Is there anything I should do? It’s a complicated issue, of course, of degrees of control, and one that I imagine composers struggle with their entire lives.

The insane, insane thing about operas is that they are reviewed (and really, evaluated) on their opening night; there’s a huge amount of weight given to the opening. In theater, or a musical, the show would have been open for weeks working out those unthinkable obstacles that no amount of workshops can help one 4c. For me, two operas in, it’s one of pace and adrenaline. My instinct, as a performer, is to rush — a funny thing happens to me once a month, where I’m playing with a pre-recorded tape, and when an audience is there, I’m Absolutely Positive that an Imp or a Gnome has crept into the computer and slowed down the recording by 25%. I have never performed Skip Town without feeling that I am being punked by the tempo gods. Tempo is so subjective anyway: one writes quarter equals 120 on the score when, in the presence of an audience, what’s actually desired is twice as fast. But who can know that? One thing I love love love about opera singers is that they react to the presence of an audience: little pauses became big ones, and they started making dramatic decisions in character, which is nothing you could ever really write in the score and is the magic fruit of an enormous collaborative process. But it adds time, and I would loved to have had another three days to cut, let’s say, one-hundred seconds out of Act I before being subjected to critical proportional scrutiny. It’s also a bit of a game to zone out the insane online chatter about operas: it’s a funny thing. People? Actually want operas to “fail,” whatever that means for art. There’s a community online of manic, smug, glee people who think they know anything about what we’re trying to do — those same vicious queens backseat programming opera seasons, revealing false information and writing in declamatory fragments. I always want those people to ask themselves if they’re really making the world a better place before sounding off on the internet; I’ve stopped reading years ago but imagine how awful it must be to be a cast member in a piece of mine, getting dragged down just because a crazy person wants to play World of Opera Warcraft? But it’s fine! We’re gonna do it all again in Philadelphia this summer and I’ma get in there with a scalpel and make the piece the best that I possibly can, which, surely, is all that can be expected from lovers and haters alike. I’m excited.

I went, on Advent Sunday, to Westminster Abbey in London, where they did their fabulous procession and where, after the same procession, Jamie McVinnie played my seven preludes on the Seven O Antiphons. Will Balkwill, a lay clerk, sang the antiphons and Jamie played the preludes; I didn’t think I could be happier until then we all took taxis-cab to St John Bread & Wine and ate five pheasants, a venison & pig’s trotter pie, and a quince Eton mess. And then, of course, the mandatory eccles cakes and lancashire cheese. There’s always somebody, isn’t there, who is spooked by the combination of the currants and the cheese; you should see what happens when these people announce themselves: a great cheering objection, rushing up, slices of ambitious proportion being proffered, thunderous applause and intense scrutiny at the first bite. Get over it, y’all, it’s delicious! Look, incidentally, at this salad of ham, egg, and a strange duxelles-like paste of hazelnut and fatback:

One of the most crazy-making things in the world is this bogus idea of a war on Christmas, which, for those of you fortunate enough not to know what I’m talking about, is a right-wing obsession in which stores who ask their employees to say “happy holidays” are participating in a giant act of secularization and Christian persecution. If you’re bored, google it and wallow, for a few minutes, in the stupidity. What’s doubly maddening is, of course, the real argument to be made which is in favor of Advent: a liturgically rich & complicated season that gets eaten up with all the horrifying premature explosions of ghastly tinsel.

Apropos of nothing: a gallery of Miss Havisham thru the ages.

And: a beautiful, beautiful Advent carol:

Elizabeth Poston
Jesus Christ the Apple Tree

And a concert I’m very sad to miss: Albrecht Mayer playing music written for the oboe and music not written for the oboe, as well as a new piece by Andrew Norman which sounds like it does Things with the orchestra, which is always exciting. I like this programming notion, too, which is to put a new piece with old pieces played by a great soloist, and promote both. It’s kind of win-win and doesn’t make new music seem like the mandatory but feared Brussels-Sprout, nor does it force one into a ghettoized new music space where it’s just several varieties of Brussels-Sprout in random order, with tedious percussion moving around in-between and that inevitable moment when somebody drops a cymbal.

The exception to that, however, was a fabulous concert I was part of in Dublin last week, with the excellent Crash Ensemble. This is a composer-driven band, under the moral guidance of Donnacha Dennehy (whose new CD is so great, get it right now). They play amplified and are used to playing amplified. Their programming was audaciously big/small; the order of the concert was Correct rather than Convenient, but then the stage changes were handled quickly, elegantly, and without much drama. One of the funny tricks about new music concerts is that instrumentalists have to get used to dealing with everything they normally do, plus one more thing. The nature of that One More Thing changes, but it can be: save us all fifteen minutes by taking your own stand over there, or bring an extra stand light, or unclip your own microphone as elegantly as you play your instrument. It’s a skill-set that most musicians have but usually deploy without the panache with which they play; all these Crashers were excellent at balancing all the additional clippings and hookings without it seeming like a gong show. They did three of my pieces, including a big new one, a piece by Timo Andres for piccolo, glockenspiel, and two bass drums which sounds, in reality, about sixty zillion times more awesome than you could even imagine, a piece of Missy Mazzoli’s, and a piece by Sean Friar (who looks alarmingly like recently-Grammy-nominated Jefferson Friedman, yay Jefferson & the Chiara Quartet!) It was a great show, and great to see a concert of recent works and not have it feel like a solemn litany or a procession through the Stations of the Cross.

Now I have the kind of daunting task of throwing myself immediately into another project: a cello concerto for the wonderful British cellist Oliver Coates and the formidable Britten Sinfonia. I also have to actively avoid reading reviews; it used to be easier before twitter, but now you get tagged in them by whoever runs social media for the papers, so you have to actively avoid clicking on things. There were a few English people who were trolling me by writing these screeds about how the time they spent in Two Boys is time they’ll never get back again, how really I am the most awful thing that ever happened and am indicative of a greater series of social problems, et cetera, and bury it in a link that seems innocent, so then you click, and have about twenty minutes of severe self-loathing followed by an awareness that some people really do wish other people ill. I’ve found that avoiding the entire structure is, for me, a healthier and more productive tack. I’m going to try to blog a bit more, too, and document the process of this concerto because it’s going to be sort of a Closed System, in the sense that I’m going to write it without too many distractions and in, miraculously, only four countries. It occurred to me that Dark Sisters had bits written in: Iceland, the Faroe Islands, New York, Vermont, Cambodia, Singapore, France (the CAMARGUE, outrageously), London, and some proof-reading even took place on a cruise ship near Cozumel (!).

In the last few days, we’ve put together the technical elements of the show. Like in Two Boys, the projections are integrated into the environment as elements of plot, not just decoration; this requires a lot more attention than one would imagine. A constant argument is whether or not projections can be demonstrated without the set, but of course, as projections are essentially stylized versions of lighting, one does need to see it in situ and not just on a laptop screen. Separately, the orchestra has been putting themselves together with the conductor. I’ve had a wild ride with the orchestra in this one — it’s essentially a pickup band made up of people who play with Gotham chamber opera normally. This is, however, that company’s first 21st century work, and so I’ve found myself having to explain some of the fundaments of my instrumental writing afresh. It’s a good exercise for me, as I’m very spoiled by my close circle of friends for whom the kind of string writing in Different Trains or Shaker Loops is as standard as Brahms. I’m also spoiled by a close circle of collaborators who can think site-specifically about vibrato: a little bit here, none there, full-tang Dorothy DeLay here, almost Chinese here. And Dark Sisters has, in it, many different kind of musics competing. There is a Martha Graham / Copland Americana wing of the thing that requires a mid-century borderline embarrassing technique, and then a close-up, Makrokosmos-style Meredith Monk meets Scelsi music that creeps out of the pit and into the soloists’ mouths. Then there are the kind of tight, sixth-based chords as one finds in Tehillim. It’s been fun to watch these stylistic things slowly settle into the players’ fingers.

An additional stress, of course, is doing advance press, although this time around has been marginally less hostile than I expected. There’s this fun, slightly multi-culti only in New York one here, and then this other one here, in which my interviewer slightly conflates my friendliness (perhaps misplaced?) with what reads, on the page, as if I’m experiencing an acute manic fugue (it’s been done before, by Gramophone, in which every utterance I made was rendered with several exclamation points).

A lot of people have been asking me what it’s like working with opera singers. Opera singers are, notoriously, difficult, which in itself is not a problem at all. In fact, difficulty can have its own kind of allure, in the sense of a good mark from a notoriously difficult teacher having more value than the same mark doled out by an easy one. And surely the process of becoming an adult is one of figuring out which of ones difficulties should be sanded down in the interests of being a functioning member of the community, and which can be left as distinguishing and endearing eccentricities. Our cast is excellent, and also young, so they’re still figuring out where this Difficulty Threshold is. A new piece always finds people’s breaking points, I should think, faster than rep, although I’ve heard stories of singers’ patience being tested by outrageous new stagings of older works. I’ve found an enormous joy in writing for these excellent singers, especially because I know from watching their dealings with the director and the stage management that they will not tolerate any of what they perceive to be bullshit. If a note seems weird to them or sits in a strange place in the voice, they’ll tell me. If a phrase would work better with a breath HERE rather than THERE, I’ll hear about it. Then we can negotiate. The whole thing is “difficult” only in the same way a hike can be difficult. And surely, the view from the summit is that much more delicious for it. I’ve always told the singers that once they learn the role, the mistakes they make will be in character. These singers have lived with this piece for months now, so their mistakes are always, always more beautiful than what I could have thought of at my desk. I hope everybody can come see this piece; we open in just under a week and run through November 19th, variously, in New York City. Then, this summer, on to Philadelphia! Click here for tickets & things.

We’re going back into rehearsals for Dark Sisters, which deals, in a way, with a very similar situation to the one this woman found herself in. However, now, thanks to a long but patchy history of women escaping successfully, it’s easier to ring up the police and a network of informal shelters. If you want to read a strangely wonderful account, check out Carolyn Jessop’s book Escape. It’s strange inasmuch as it’s ghostwritten but not, it seems, ghost-edited, so it follows a very casual narrative structure and occasionally dwells on enormously small details (another sisterwife stole my shampoo!) while eliding over large ones (over the next three years, I had four more children!)

One more interesting thing about that woman escaping: it seems like she got help from Willie Jessop, who used to be a sort of spokesman/enforcer for the FLDS, until one of the various internecine fights inside the FLDS shuffled him around. In a lot of the memoirs written by escapees, he is a sort of villain, and here he re-materializes as a helping hand….

Before we plunge into the thick of it, though, we’re doing a little teaser at LPR this Thursday, and everybody has to come! It’s funny, because Clarice, Yuki & I have played at LPR a million times, and the team from the opera company has not. We’re doing a bit of a puu-puu platter of things — some old things, some new things, a few things by me, a little bit from Satyagraha, you know, the ucze.

As ever, you can peep the opera’s website for information, or sign up for the iTunes channel . I would direct your attention to this wonderful essay by Ken Verdoia about, loosely, the modern implications of the FLDS’s complicated history.

And now, I want to talk about that issue just for a hot second. Real talk: the internet has made contemporary classical music in live performance exciting. People get excited for a new Adès or Reich piece; the orchestras are all up on twitter and facebook bigging it up, sometimes the composers are there too. This is, I think, a good thing. However, what it has done is call into question the amount of time between a premiere and when a recording is available. I’m thinking, specifically, about Adès’s Tevot and Reich’s Double Sextet. Carnegie was all excited about all these things, we all went to them live, and it would have been nice, I would argue, to have been able to get a recording of those pieces at that time.

Real talk: it’s bootleg recordings of these pieces. Real talk: I still bought the commercial recording. However, I was more excited about the bootleg DubSex because I was still buzzing from the performance I heard. That’s the thing: all the social media is great for orchestras to get people in the hall; I think we’re seeing that working very well. If the recording biz could get involved earlier, we’d be in really good shape.

I am also pleased that my post from a few days ago has, in fact, caused the Sequenza21 spam to stop. It’s really for their own good: if your twitter feed is caught in a feedback loop, you lose followers and people find it harder to separate content from noise.

I understand that there are union regulations about recording work, and also about the way in which recordings can get very easily exploited. However, I think that I speak for a lot of people when I say that the things young composers want to do with the recording of their orchestra piece are: (a) send it to their mom, (b) be able to play it for other composers/musicians in either an academic or social setting, (c) listen to it privately to see if they can learn anything from it, and maybe, maybe (d) put it up on their website. I can see why an orchestra would have an objection to (d), but the other 3 things seem pretty much fair-game to me, especially (c). Let me also, for those of you not fully immersed in this world, explain something about orchestra music.

If you went to Juilliard, as I did, chances are you will have written an orchestra piece and submitted it for a once-monthly orchestra reading. When I was there maybe it was twice a semester or something? Anyway, what happens is that it’s 9 in the morning, everybody’s bleary, they read through your piece, a whole bunch of cobwebs and bats and shit come flying out of the closet because writing orchestra music is really complicated. There’s a big step between writing for, say, a quartet-sized ensemble and a fifty to sixty-piece orchestra. The way line works is different, blend is different — it’s a huge learning curve. Okay, so you have thirty embarrassing and exhilarating minutes. Maybe the next year, you do this again. Then, when you’re older, you submit a piece for the orchestra concert, you win the competition, and your piece gets maybe three hours of rehearsal over 2 days, and then the show. This is, it should be said, not a complaint about any of this, but just the reality of the situation. When that concert happens — when it’s really your first time dealing with an orchestra, you sort of leave your body and barely listen. It’s the recording that lets you double-back and realize that maybe that bass clarinet shouldn’t be doubled by all the celli, but only half. It’s the recording that allows you, even more importantly, to realize that all the incredibly intricate string details that would sound like £1,000,000 in a chamber setting sound like insects in the acoustic of an orchestral hall.

So, the moral of the story is, getting a recording of your piece is really, really important. I know that I listened to the two pieces I wrote for the Juilliard orchestra obsessively with the score, and without that process, I wouldn’t be half as facile as I am — or confident, or comfortable — writing orchestrally now.

Something really maddening happened to me in the past. I was dealing with an orchestra and we had very, very limited rehearsal time. It was the end of their season, everybody was tired, it was kind of a mess. The first orchestral rehearsal I had my little desk set up with my phone out (to keep notes on), two sets of scores, a million pens, etc. The rehearsal, shall we say, left a lot of room for improvement. I experienced some classic Orchestral Sasstalk:

Me: Hi, so can the bass clarinet just play out a little bit more in bar 91?
Bass Clarinet Dude: I just don’t think you’re going to hear that.

(Suffice it to say, not only could you hear it already when he was playing it pp, despite its f marking, this is not the way that conversation is meant to go).

The other thing about rehearsals is that one tends not to give brass a hard time for flubbing high, exposed passages. Brass instruments are like those crazy dragons from Avatar or whatever; it’s some kind of spiritual connexion that has to be achieved between the lips and the metal and sometimes you just aren’t going to get that at 10 AM on a Tuesday morning. So I happily ignored some brass peccadilloes. Strings: a rhythmic passage (let’s say it’s about as hard as the Stravinsky Symphony in Three Movements in terms of counting) was a disaster. A little stroll down the stands revealed that only the concertmaster had slashed his bars (as in, showing the sub-beats to make reading the passage simpler), which, of course, was the problem. It would be as if New York City only put street signs every ten blocks; unless you know the city by heart, you’re going to need to remind yourself which is 8th and which is 9th. Anyway, that was kind of maddening, and the whole experience was pretty disillusioning and heartbreaking and awful; my reaction to a bad rehearsal is never “I hate those musicians” but it’s “I must be such an awful composer, and an awful person, that I can’t get these people to commit to this music.” At the end of it, though, came the amazing thing. Somebody from the music office said she wanted to talk to me. Oh, I thought, maybe they’re going to apologize for that not-great showing. Not so much. Apparently one of the musicians in the orchestra had made something akin to a formal complaint that I had recorded the rehearsal! Evidently, he thought that he had heard a noise coming from my iPhone that sounded as if I had been playing back what they had just played? Ooooooooooooooooooooh girrrrrrrrrrrllllllllll. It was at that time that I lost my mind. There are so many things wrong with that. I had to check myself, because what I wanted to say was, “Yes, I recorded it, because what I love to do in the evenings is draw a lukewarm bath, slit my wrists, and listen to adults sight-read my music worse than children through my phone’s speaker.”

I should also add that this organization — whom I love! – has the opposite of sent me a recording (which I know exists because I have Beheld It) of the multiple performances they’ve done of my work. In fact, the woman I attempted to (politely) hound about it, and whom my publishers also (politely) hounded, ignored our emails, until such a time as it was revealed that she had left the organization, presumably to avoid the task of slipping the CD into the mail? I mean: I get it. Shit is bureaucratic, who knows about the rights issues and nobody wants to run afoul of a musicians’ committee. But in this case I would have accepted the secret handshake, because I want to do better next time.

I am really pro-Union for musicians. I appreciate all the protections that are in place against musicians inadvertently having their work exploited in ways beyond their control. I also understand that musicians are insanely underpaid if you consider how much time it takes through practice, school, etc. to be in a professional orchestra, or semi-professional orchestra, or really to be getting paid for music-making at all. This model, though, is totally fucked. The idea that a professional musician, after a pretty bloody rehearsal, would be most concerned with whether or not the composer recorded it on a cellphone is a misprioritization on every level. If I had been recording it, the point would have been for me to sit at home obsessively going over the score in order to make myself a better composer, and better able to write better music for that same player in the future. Everybody wins if, after a concert, the composer gets a nice CD with the logo of the orchestra on it. The alternative is some James Bond shit: little Edirol recorders hidden in duffel bags, hiring a friend to sit in the hall and “check for balances” whilst propping a device on the knee. Nobody wants that. Loosening up the recording contracts is going to be an investment in getting higher quality orchestral music written across the board, because writing for orchestra is always learning on the job.

I want to give you a recent example. Excellent Conductor X conducted the Y Sympherny and soloist Z in this concerto I had written for the occasion at an outdoor festival. The rehearsal was cool — about forty-five minutes, we worked out some balance issues that you are always going to have with concerti. The dress rehearsal was basically a run and some notes: again, totally cool, totally professional. Everybody sounded awesome. Perfect showing at the concert from X and Y and a stellar performance from Z. Microphones all over the place, broadcasting the concert onto the lawn for picnickers. During the show, I was sitting there inside, nervous as anything, trying not to twitch. I was listening, but I was not listening. I was paying attention the same way you pay attention to a movie you’ve seen before.

Afterwards, you’d think that because of the microphones, it would take about thirty seconds for somebody to be like, hey, here’s a link to a Dropbox file with your piece recorded in it! The point of my owning that recording, by the way, would be to listen to it privately, and figure out what I could improve with it. I’d also send it to my mom. I wouldn’t put it online, obvs. I’d play it for the friend who introduced me to Z so many years ago at Juilliard, because that seems only polite, rather than the email I sent her being like, “you should hear this piece! But you can’t! Haha! Nobody can! Only the people who were there!” So now, we’re in the Email Thicket. Words I have heard: $200, Impossible, Working On It, Cassette Tape (!). On the other hand, I walked into the St Paul Chamber Orchestra just now and immediately signed a waiver saying that I can get a high-quality CD of the piece as long as I don’t put it online! Wa-hey! Let’s choose model b! And I’m secretly wishing somebody would send me a cassette tape.

I’d love to know what I, and other composers, can do to encourage all organizations to work with composers to ensure that we can continue working and learning based on live experiences. Leave me a note up in the comments.

Beloved, y’all, gentle readers, I have been having connectivity issues! It’s too many hard drives, too many conflicting operating systems, I can’t get Logic to talk to Reason, I can’t get the samples to let me register them, it’s crazy! It feels precisely like trying to cook in an unfamiliar kitchen that has been child proofed: those maddening plastic clips on all the drawers, the almost-invisible blueballing plugs on the sockets. Your girl is VEXÈD. The upshot is that I have taken it upon myself to completely reorganize all my media, clean out the virtual drawers of unsent emails, and the physical drawers of knotted cables and chargers for Pay-As-Þú-Go cellphones from Iceland, now obsolete.

Also, I am trying to remove the presence of Spam from my life. I have the most hideous spammers: Sequenza 21. It’s basically a new music website — I stopped going there about two years ago, because I was in Iceland trying to explain to somebody the “Uptown-Downtown” argument and happened upon a comments thread to end all comments threads. I nearly drove a car containing some of my best friends into a lake, and so it was decided that I’m not allowed to go to that website anymore by community writ. Also, they’ve repeatedly, and over the span of many years, called me (or my music; one can never quite be sure) “flavor of the month,” and (cue Sex & the City music here), I couldn’t help but wonder what kind of puranic time cycle these people are living in in which a month can last so very, very long. Anyway, every morning, on the Twitters, I wake up to:

…which is doubly stressful because my last name is misspelled, and I can’t figure out how it even turns up in my feed! It’s a disaster. So any readers who are on good terms with our friends over at Sequenza21, tell them to call off the dogs! I suspect they’re not doing it intentionally, but if they’re doing hall of mirrors stuff to me, I wonder what they’re doing to the rest of you.

I am super excited, in other, much more pleasant news, that the wonderful Swedish outfit Loney Dear is about to release a new album called Hall Music. Click on that link for information about when it’ll be available where you live at. His music is wonderful. I’d like to say that I worked on Hall Music, although what I actually did is make some live arrangements for him last year, some of which partially trickled into what you eventually hear. Here is one of my favorite songs of his, from a previous album:

Loney Dear Ignorant Boy, Beautiful Girl

I love a song that is based on drones, too — Whitney Houston It’s Not Right But It’s Okay works in a similar way. The melody is, in a sense, an agitation of a single pitch, and the friction between the drone and its neighbors is what drives the song forward. Everybody get involved.

This fall, we’re starting to make Dark Sisters happen! I’ll be occasionally blogging about it, and there is a website (about whose impending redesign I am enormously enormously excited), and a twitter account @darksistersoper. The process for this opera is, I think, relatively rare. The three commissioning organizations — The Music-Theatre Group, Gotham Chamber Opera, and the Opera Company of Philadelphia got organized way in advance, and we cast the piece before I started writing anything. Then, they insisted on having two workshops with the actual cast, which is, I think, relatively unheard of? The end result is that now that production is about to start, I have nothing to do! We’ve workshopped with the orchestra (same players as the actual show), the singers have memorized the work already, we’ve collaborated with Rebecca Taichman, the director, on the characters with the singers, and the designers (the wonderful Fifty-Nine Productions) have been with us through all the workshops. I’m excited to see how this compares to the larger, more x-factor process of putting together Two Boys. Join us in November when it happens.

Linguists, I need your help again. My favorite online personality, Funky Dineva, has released a video that has a really clear articulation of a [tr] turning into a [kr] sound; one finds this in the south.

It’s really clear at 3:45. Is there a word for this process? You see it in print, too, rendered out in the fabulous blog MediaTakeOut. But then you see it transform from speech to text to speech again, in the case of the Hoe Stroll. The Ho Stroll (as I would spell it) gets rendered “Hoe Skroll,” but then gets re-rendered thusly. Ur help needed.

[UPD8! It's called the Stream-Scream merger. Watch this space.]

Reich opens up a second meaning of the initials “WTC,” as the World to Come. He draws in the voices of some of those who attended to the Jewish obligation of shmira in the days after 9/11: sitting near the bodies of victims before their burial, reciting and singing Psalms and other Biblical passages ceaselessly. In Reich’s treatment, shmira is almost is an act of willing a new reality into being, though none of us is sure what actually is to be: “The world to come,” as one of Reich’s interviewees muses, “I don’t really know what that means.”

I took that from NPR, but it’s been discussed in other places. Reich’s music has, in the last 30 or so years, taken on a more nuanced motoric cross-referencing between the energy of New York and the devotional practices, both solemn and ecstatic, of traditional Judaism (viz. Tehillim, Daniel Variations, etc.) This is particularly poignant in his large music-theater work The Cave, which I feel like we should all take a second to appreciate:

Steve Reich The Cave
Who is Abraham?

So, what this is is speech fragments taken from interviews Reich and his wife conducted in New York in 1992 with people from artists (Richard Serra) to astronomists (Carl Sagan, who weirdly gives the most historically intense description of Ur) to scholars (Saul Rosenberg) about, essentially, Abraham, Isaac, and Ishmael and how all that ish brings us to the Cave of the Patriarchs. The speech is doubled, literally, be the instruments in Reich’s ensemble: strings, clarinets, vibraphones, pianos. It’s a combination, as much of Reich’s work is, of documentation and weaving the disturbances in real life into a fabulous and moving tapestry. He has been up to this since Phase Patterns, but for me, it really reaches a wonderful ripeness in The Cave. I bought the disc the second it came out, and remember being so insanely moved by the chords 3:14 in (“God speaking to you) and the wonderful bit of fancy at 5:05 in this excerpt: from the linear “Father of the faithful” to the percussive and dynamic “father of faith” half a minute later. That sequence delivers us to a piece of straight up technical bad-assery, when Reich doubles Carl Sagan’s folksy baritone with his percussion instruments, and slams the punctuation with bass drum and piano. It still makes me as happy as it did sixteen (!) years ago.

Ooh Fréttir! They’re gonna change the cover!

Does anybody else think that Sarah Palin’s hair is laid like the meme of Tracy Chapman looking like the predator?