…a little rocky in terms of, well, gainful employment.  As a result, the blog has been a little neglected in favor of days being spent hanging out on Craigslist and Monster.com, trying to figure out some kind of job situation.  It’s deeply concerning how lazy composing feels when you need to earn some money…well, lazy isn’t the right word.  Long story long, it’s difficult to sit down for hours and compose when you think that you really oughta be out pounding the pavement looking for a job.  I’m pretty sure that last statement is being narrated in my head by my relatives who questioned the idea of me going to school for composition to begin with.  It’s sad when doing what you love is tainted by the need to make money…rather, it’s sad that our society tends to monetize the value of things, and that valuable things that don’t make money are less valuable than, I dunno, hedge fund management (or whatever makes money these days…).

Still, I have had more than my fair share of time to compose, and compose I did.  I am putting the finishing touches on a piece for The Equinox Sextet, called Overbite.  If you’ve been following my blog, you know that I’ve been putting chunks of it on here as they’ve come up.  I’m reticent about putting the finished score up on the internet for people to just take (I really need to learn how to create read-only PDFs…if anybody can tell me, please leave a comment!!!), but I’m happy to share the Finale Garritan playback of the piece (which leaves something to be desired, but it’s better than nothing.  Check it out:

Overbite has been a long time coming, for me.  Basically, I’ve been waiting for more than five years to write a piece like this.  At the end of my bachelor’s degree, I had written Say Nothing, a piece for fourteen saxophones (who also do a fair amount of speaking).  At the time,  I was obsessed with Berio’s Sinfonia.  For the uninitiated, you can listen to the famous third movement here:

At the core of my obsession was the philosophical question of the nature of quotation and reference in music.  It is a common slogan of the Postmodern Era that no music has ever been created from whole cloth, despite what any composer may have thought.  The idea is that musical ideas are always the love children of the melting pot of experiences known as the life of a composer, blended in the creative process into something “new,” or at least “new-ish.”

For me, the Sinfonia challenged an underlying value statement in the idea above: a musical composition, in its finished form, is homogeneous.  A piece, although it may be different in sections of itself, is still made up of itself throughout.  Acceptance of, and even dependence upon, this idea can be seen in the way that most people learn how to appreciate classical music:  form is taught in a way that emphasizes return to primary materials and ideas, and how those ideas are developed from beginning to end.  Pieces are praised for their motivic unity; there is no higher compliment for a piece than to demonstrate how Idea X, no matter how different it may sound, is really a masked form of Idea A.

A great example of how influences can combine in such a way is in Adams’ music.  In this, the third movement of Harmonielehre, we encounter music that owes a debt to his minimalist colleagues, but also has distinct Mahlerian and Ravellian influences.  All of these are melted down into an alloy; in its finished state, the end product can be separated into its constituent parts:

This is not the way that the third movement of the Sinfonia works.  It’s made up of quotations, entire chunks of, other pieces, patched together.  What’s more is that we don’t encounter them as a whole, but rather as pieces floating around an axle, which is the Scherzo from Mahler’s Second Symphony.  This axle is what provides us with the notion of “glue” for the movement, as well as provides us with a teleological function.  This is the most important component of the movement: it reigns in and contextualizes the disparate pieces.

Ever since I heard the Sinfonia (which explores this idea to greater and lesser degrees throughout the whole piece), I’ve wanted to explore this idea of how to construct a piece.  To me, classical music’s notion of purity doesn’t reflect the world that I occupy (or that any American occupies.  Culturally, Americans take pride in the synthesis of many different ways of life.  Homogeneity isn’t something that can happen in our world [unless you're from northern Idaho, I guess].  There is no such thing as a distinctly “American” culture, no matter what some Americans may think.).  I wanted to create a music that was clearly made up of other musical ideas; less of a melting pot, more of a salad bowl.

Unfortunately, this idea wasn’t popular with some of my profs.  And to an extent, I see where they were coming from: I can see a need to master basic Western ideas of form.  I was told that the ideas that I wanted to explore wouldn’t get me into a good doctoral program.  So I wrote what I was told would.  And I got into a graduate program: I got into a bunch of ‘em!  So I feel that, now that I’m not trying to impress anybody with my chops, it was time to actually use them to write something that I considered worthwhile.

For Overbite, I wanted to explore musical ideas that were more like the ones I had grown up with in drum corps, one of my “folk” musics (I use that term to describe the music that I grew up with.  When you grow up in suburbia, you don’t really have a “folk” culture, at least not one marked by any geographical or ethnographic borders.  You are essentially your own private tribe.  More on that some other time…).  In drum corps, music is taken from many different cultures, and rearranged and manipulated to suit the needs of a “show,” which is like a musical form.  This means that a piece is simultaneously being referenced, deconstructed, and recontextualized when it is played by a group.  Another American music does this even more adeptly: hip-hop.  Which brings me to my first major influence for Overbite, The Beastie Boys:

On top of that, this piece is also made up of its own set of references, the most prominent one being the opening riff from Curtis Mayfield’s Superfly:

Also in the piece are references to Schubert’s Gretchen Am Spinnrade, which is a piece that I have made reference to multiple times.  These pieces of mine then come to become active parts of the piece itself.  This idea of self-reference has its precedents in the Classical repertoire, for certain, but for me it came from a place out of drum corps, where corps continually reference their earlier shows and performances.  Consider this video of the Phantom Regiment in different performances over the years:

You’ll notice that in the finales of their shows, there are similar-yet-different musical and visual ideas that are expressed.  This is a level of communication that is underused in traditional classical music.

While we’re at it, I may as well include this show by The Cavaliers for its major influence on the writing of the piece.  Surprisingly though, although the piece is made up of Daugherty’s Niagara Falls, I don’t consider that piece to be influential.

While discussing this idea with Ken Ueno on twitter some time ago, he had asked me an important question: “Does the audience member have to get the reference in order for them to understand the piece?”  After taking some time to think about it, my answer is, “no.”  Ultimately, the references augment the experience, but the piece can only be expected to be encountered autonomously.  If one encountered an Eiffel Tower in which the girders where bent in such a way as to be made of Mona Lisas, the tower would still need to be able to stand.

Ultimately, I’m proud of what I was able to accomplish in Overbite, which on the surface is a piece about white people dancing, but underneath is a conduit of my own private musical culture.  It is music made of music, unapologetically.

Okay, folks.  Here’s another update on my latest page, Overbite.  Check out the score here:

And take a listen to the Finale-Playback-Thing Here:

I’d love to hear any feedback that you have; leave a comment!

…interview on Richard Zarou’s podcast, No Extra Notes. What a trip!

…of my Trio for Violin, Horn, and Piano just around the corner (Tuesday at 3:00pm at San Francisco State University), I decided to take a final listen to the bleep-blorp-bleep playback of the Finale playback orchestra dealy.  I’m not sure what put me in the mood.  Aside from the mistakes in range in places (I apparently thought the piano had another octave at the top of its range…I think it was because I was too busy writing conceptually to think of what the actual notes should be at that point), and a misunderstanding of writing for stopped horn (which, considering I was once a horn player, is quite embarassing), I don’t think the piece is too bad.  I can always fix those mistakes up and the piece will float.  I’m thankful that Lydia Van Dreel, Sylvia Davanzo, and Sandy Holder have been so understanding, and willing to make fixes.  It’s been tough not being there to retranscribe the score alongside them.

I worry that people forget that part of the process of premiering new works is working out these sort of kinks.  I’ve got the feeling that most musicians think that all (good) music comes from some kind of virgin birth, absolutely perfect from its inception.  Experience has taught me that’s hardly ever the case.  I, for one, prefer this sort of give and take.  If there is a better way to play something for a performer, I want to hear it; the idea that I, GREAT COMPOSER dictate what will be done is a little bit not my style (don’t get me wrong, I have all the delusions of grandeur to be a GREAT COMPOSER).

I can’t help but feel anxious when I listen back to this piece, for a couple of reasons.  First, because the piece brings me back to a stressful time in my life.  Second, because of the language I used to write it.  The piece is very, very (VERY) traditional in a lot (A LOT) of places.  Now, us composers have been led to believe that we can write whatever we’d like, but the truth of the matter is that composers who ape music of the past are generally not taken as seriously as other composers.  This isn’t a tonal/atonal thing; that battle is safely over.  This is more of an “old” vs. “new” thing.  Music can sound overtly consonant, so long as it’s presented as being “new” in some way: that’s sort of how minimalism came to be recognized as an intellectual movement, as opposed to being relegated to a fetish of the sentimental.

In the Trio, I strove to create “new” music out of conspicuously “old” music.  I wasn’t interested in using the passing triad or inflection (a la Ligeti, or the minimalists, etc.), but larger chunks of tonal music patched together in unexpected ways.  I go back and forth as to whether I was able to create this, or if I simply indulged some overtly comfy, sentimental feelings.

Ultimately, I feel that if you’re going to use “old” music, it’s best to put it in as radically “new” a context as possible.  You know who does this really well?  Del Tredici, particularly in Vintage Alice. I listened to his music non-stop from 2007 to 2009, and it’s been a tremendous influence on me.  For some reading material, check out this New York Times review of Vintage Alice.  I disagree with the reviewer’s, um, review, entirely, but it at least gives some context to what Del Tredici faced during his career (not that it’s over…you know what I mean).

One thing that Del Tredici had going for him in Vintage Alice was that the pieces he was quoting were just that: quotes.  Quotation of anachronistic music is an entirely different intellectual device than outright composition in an anachronistic style.  People can recognize a quotation as a “foreign” element.  It doesn’t belong to the piece in the same way as if it came from the composer’s pen.  It took me a long time to recognize the difference.

I’m interested to see how the audience interprets my piece.  I’ve got my fingers crossed.

…stumbled upon this article in the Independent about Pierre Boulez the other day.  In it, author Michael Church pokes a stick at known iconoclast and curmudgeon Boulez.  As I read this article, I couldn’t help but ask myself, “Why does this article feel so…I dunno, icky…to me?”

I think the reason I felt this way is that it feels so forced.  I mean, I get it.  Divisive opinions make for tasty news, especially in an area so stereotypically dry as classical music.  But seriously, Boulez (despite being an insanely good musician, composer, conductor) is 86.  His world-beating remarks made a lot more historical sense in his 30′s.  Nowadays, though, it feels a little bit more like an old man threatening to steal your baseball: don’t let Ol’ Man Boulez see you fetishizing the past in his yard, he’ll call the authorities!

I think that the problem with Modernist composers seem to have is that many have lived long enough to see their ideas become outdated.  The existence of their ideas in the general post-postmodern cloud of ideas, references, and referenced ideas, makes them stand out as woefully anachronistic.  Ironically, postmodernism seems to be fueled by woeful anachronism.  Perhaps Boulez is now guilty of fetishizing the past, himself.

Here’s the first chunk of my piece for the Equinox Sextet, Overbite.

You can take a listen to the sound file (MIDI-ish Finale thing) here: http://db.tt/wfSVeuh

Lemme know what you think!

…composing when I was 13 years old.  Maybe it was because I was young and isolated, or maybe not, but I had a lot of assumptions about what being a composer is like.  These assumptions, though largely changed or negated from time and experience, still show up as prejudices today.  I wish I could go back in time and talk to my 13-year-old self, but in light time travel being…um…difficult, I guess writing a blog post will do.

Here, then, is my Letter to a Young Composer.

Dear J. M. Gerraughty,

Yup, here we go with this cliché…Hey, it’s you (um, I mean us) from the future!  As I recall, you’ve been composing for about 5 months now.  Mr. Bailey has been trying to teach you species counterpoint, and you’ve been half-assing and ignoring it.  Before we go any further, let’s talk about that for a second.  Get to work on those; you’re an idiot for ignoring species counterpoint.  I know it’s boring.  I know it feels irrelevant.  Suck it up.  Counterpoint is like scales and arpeggios for composers, or like working out for athletes.  It’ll help in the long run.

Next up, you’re gonna need to learn piano.  Why?  A couple of reasons.  First, most people in music academia know how to play piano, and if you want to have a job teaching someday, you’re going to need to learn how to play.  Second, most people assume that all composers are at least facile on the piano.  I’ll give you a peek into your future, here: you suck at piano.  I mean it.  You’re pretty damn awful.  It’s gonna cost you at least another semester of grad school (and about $7,000 in student loans) for you to barely make it past the proficiency exam in grad school.  Mostly though, you should learn piano because if you don’t, we spend our life acting like we have a small compositional penis because we can’t play it.  It’s gonna lead to you freaking out every time you meet another composer, sabotaging relationships with colleagues, and keeping you from actually doing what you love.

You’re going to feel, for a lot of reasons, that you’re not a “legitimate” composer.  The piano thing is part of it.  Another part is your lack of musical heritage.  New Hampshire is cultural black hole.  And there are still kids that are more talented than you there.  You haven’t run into them yet, but give it three years.  You’ll be up to your neck in those people.  The good news (and in another way, the heart-breakingly frustrating news) is that most of those kids will become engineers or doctors or whatever.  Either way, you’re not going to be the best at this.  No matter what you accomplish, there’s always going to be some nine-year-old kid on Oprah that’s gonna make you feel like shit for not being a child genius.

You can’t win at composing.  You’ve got to think of a new way to find meaning in your life.

There are going to be lots of composers that are from better-looking schools than you.  Kids who have been studying at Juilliard while you were studying in some guy’s basement.  Kids who have had every advantage in the world that you didn’t know about or didn’t have access to.  Just because they got into better schools than you doesn’t necessarily make them better composers than you.  You’re going to come to realize that being a successful composer is not synonymous with being the best composer. The best composer is not what you should be aiming for.

There are prize-winning composers out there who still can’t get their work done.

Make friends.  Friendships and meaningful professional relationships are how you’re going to make it as a composer.  You can’t be the composer douchebag that constantly propositions people to play his pieces.  People will get skeeved out; plus, it’s degrading to do that day after day. Still, learn to walk up to people and introduce yourself.  It will help with everything, from asking girls on dates, to getting a commission.  It never gets easy, but it gets less difficult.

Lastly, a word about the actual process of composing.  There’s a difference between struggling with ideas (which is necessary), and struggling with what you think the ideas should be (which is not).  Don’t be afraid to write the “wrong” music: compose like you breathe, or sweat, or sleep.  Go with what feels natural to you.  Your point of view is what you can offer the world that all those geniuses with rich parents can’t.  I guarantee that when you do that, composing will remain something you love doing, not just something that you do.  Never lose sight of the fact that you love this.

Sincerely,

J. M. Gerraughty

Thanks to a great concert by Glenda Bates, Kendra Hawley, and friends, I’ve gotten a good recording of a difficult piece for two oboes, english horn, and bassoon.  They want to take it to the International Double Reed Society next year, but I want to do some reorchestrating, so that they can get some breathing time in.

Take a listen!  

…with LogicPro these past couple of days, working on a full-Finale-playback-plus-electronics mockup of TWEAK, my piece for wind ensemble and electronics.  Some people said they’d like to give it a listen, so here you go!

Lemme know what you think!