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I
am dining across the table from my mother at the Three Crowns
Restaurant in Montclair, NJ, in 1966, on different sides of
the cosmos. I have just led the NJ Youth Symphony through studies
for Changings VI, a nine-minute orchestra piece that took me
two years to write. We are frozen between behaviors, as if there
were two of each of us, sitting there. Triumphal, ashamed, self-consciously
pretentious, worried....
The ear hears everything
one thing at a time. The flow of musical events is fragile and
is sustained by a combination of strength and sensitivity. Musical
discourse will admit all degrees of continuity and discontinuity.
The listening ear is mercilessly alert to each. An unmistakable
impression of either extreme alone is difficult to achieve.
Even discontinuity requires careful management. Therefore, polyphony,
rhythm, harmony, and instrumentation, are each and all subject
to the more general Law of Music; Melody: (one thing at a time,
or Serialism!): bearer of the idea, as Busoni said. The composition,
with all its textural complexity, must be regarded as a single
series of one-at-a-time (melody) events. Elliot Carter said
the most important thing a composer has to learn is how to achieve
a “convincing continuity”.
Themes: musical
items having specific melodic, harmonic and rhythmic characteristics.
They may define and establish a stable structure, or a continually
unfolding, elaborating structure. Thematic-identity doesn’t
really come from the tone-world (pitches) but from the time-world
(rhythm and duration). (Not a Thing but a Thing in Motion).
A closer look at Rhythm reveals Gesture, Energy, and Motion
as the parameters for musical designs we call themes. These
themes seem to both ‘create’ and simultaneously ‘be
situated in’ their own space. Tonality is not only harmonic.
It is melodic too (Rudolph Reti). Often an ‘interval-content-design’
seems to be a “tonal center”. Therefore, Key-Centers
are a sub-set of the larger principle of “Tonal Center”.
Expanding on this
further, themes are shapes made by melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic
design. Such shapes may establish a stable structure which does
not elaborate, or a continuous structure which does nothing
but elaborate. 19th Century art and culture became rhapsodic,
improvisational, and elaborative rather than structural.
The movement (elaborative)
of imagery replaced the presentation (stable) of imagery. Later,
Anton Webern joined Netherlands polyphonic techniques to classical
Variation-form and Sonata-Allegro form. The result? A new time-scale
for the passage of musical events.
“...Realized
more or less in that sphere where the last most refined threads
of impressionism come to their end, where they only flutter
in the air, in the atmospheric plane, in the whirlwind dance
of sounding sundust.” --Heinrich Kralik
This time-scale
became the starting place for Stockhausen. Donald Tovey rightly
detects early stages of this development in the work of Bruckner
and Sibelius. Unfortunately, Tovey mistakenly does not notice
Berlioz from whom, in my opinion, all these practices ultimately
derive. By the time the European railroads were completed, Berlioz
and Liszt had taken their discoveries throughout Europe and
Russia by horse and carriage. Remember, it was Berlioz who pioneered
the concept of “free musical discourse” and by staying
close to the example of Beethoven he ‘endowed music with
new actions’ or as Miles Davis would later put it, ‘better
the forms of music’.
My music does not
emerge from silence. I am not a stylized vanguardist but I am
an artist of my own time. This is why I spent years on Miles
Davis as a special study, and on modern jazz keyboard. What
is more distinctly characteristic of our time than the radical
inimitability of Miles Davis, on the one hand, and the self-evident
innovation of Jazz itself on the other? Becoming a complete
Jazz musician was a serious part of my program. My music (whatever
it was to eventually be) needed Jazz.
Jazz is a sub-category
of “Modern music” just like “Stravinsky”
is. Jazz knowledge is fundamental to a comprehensive and true
understanding of music of our time. That’s why I went after
it. As a practicing Jazz musician, in addition to the influence
jazz has had on my overall outlook, I play to do honor to the
art form of jazz, attempting to present the deepest possible
expression of its myriad intrinsic properties.... How is Jazz
unique? It’s improvisation? It’s Bluesy melodic figures?
West African rhythms? European harmonies? No. Jazz is an innovation
that belongs with the other innovations of so-called ‘modern
music’. Miles Davis implies this in a 1969 statement, “Don’t
use the word jazz with me, or with people I know. Maybe for
that riverboat kind of thing jazz is a word, you know. But not
for us who continue to try to better the forms of music. You
know what I mean?” For Miles, as for Berlioz, his musical
intent was to expand music and its properties of expression.
Listen closely to Boulez’ Pli Selon Pli and
Stockhausen’s Momente. Then seriously consider
Miles Davis’ On the Corner (1972) and you
may see, as obviously as I do, that Modern Jazz is surely a
sub-category of 20th century classical music, not another category.
I hold a mirror
up to music literature itself and I show it selectively through
the sensibility and the working method of a thoroughly disciplined
but free and fearless craft. I have Rauschenberg’s curiosity.
What is coming to life here? (I ask myself in my studio). I
work from behind the mirror I raise to music ... selecting (I
don’t even know how) from the vast palette of my own listening
experience ... multiplicity, variety, inclusiveness ... but
it is not personal, I portray “music” not “me”
... a portrait set, as it were, as a picture sits in the “frame”
of all the music which is left out. I am afraid of nothing ...
not even the beautiful, as Rauschenberg has said. And so everything
is, then, really possible....
For me, the disciplines
of musical composition such as, melodic writing, knowledge of
harmonic principles, form and continuity, etc. exist for the
purpose of treating the musical experience as a dramatic medium.
Dramatic in its theatrical and literary sense. The materials
of sustained musical expression are controlled by a sense of
the inner narrative associated with the sounds in my mind. However,
be sure of this ... it is an intrinsic drama in the music itself
not a semi-realistic “added on” or quasi-literary
programmatic attachment.
A piece begins.
A note is played on a certain instrument alone. It has a certain
dynamic and vibrato in time. It is followed by another note
a certain time later and a certain distance from it in pitch.
It too has its own characteristic attack and dynamic, etc. (What
Wolpe calls ‘shape’). It is related to its predecessor
by its connection or its detachment, etc... Does this suggest
an event a mood a character? Perhaps. Perhaps not. The point
is: drama is there in the music itself and that this intrinsic
dramatic element is in fact the controlling feature of the decision-making
process.
Musical materials
are defined by what they are first of all, notes, dynamics,
instrumentation, and by how they behave. Where do they come
from? Where do they lead? How fast? What instrument? Time, rhythm,
continuity ... is there disruption, interruption, resolution,
misdirection, resumption? Drama. You see? That’s how musical
events get their living-characteristics.
What I call Drama
in Music includes but is not limited by “beauty in music”
... it is a Music that creates dramatic impressions by its presentation
of not only what it consists, but, even more, by how the “what”
behaves in time....what do things become ... and how? ...and
at what rate...? (If I have a method, this is it.)
What can I make
my music do? Traveling from low to high registers ... Moving
ambiguously between the foreground and background ... polyphony,
melodies and accompaniments ... meter and non-meter ... FORMAL
TEXTURAL TRANSFORMATIONS ... towards and away from tonal and
non-tonal suggestion ... towards and away from pointillism and
continuity ... A Focus-Wheel ... turn it ... a clear image appears
... turn again ... a new image comes into focus....
Things don’t
“create themselves” as Keats contends, it is still
we, the artists, who do the creating. But there is a kind of
code for each work, as if the individual work reveals a ‘grammar’
which suggests to us as creators the works ‘language’
and ‘literature’. I work to discover the code for
each work as I invent, sketch, discard, speculate, create, and
decide ... changing and altering accordingly until the Strictly-Individual-THATNESS
of the piece comes to be. (See Duns Scotus and his literary
disciple Gerard Manly Hopkins!)
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