So Dr. Scott Rickard thinks he’s composed the world’s ugliest music using fancy math.  I’m not convinced, but you can hear for yourself: the piece, written for piano, starts at 7’48.

Rickard is not the only one to use fancy math to write music. Most notably, Iannis Xenakis beat him to the punch nearly sixty years ago. Nor is it the only piece to rely on chaos to make itself unpredictable. Alvin Lucier’s  “Music on a Long Thin Wire” does that pretty well, too. In both Xenakis and Lucier, there’s an elemental beauty I find attractive (even though I wouldn’t want to listen solely to their work), and Rickard’s new work, I would argue, fits in that vein—that is, making music out of non-musical processes.

Concerning Rickard’s “pattern-free” claim, that’s certainly true if you’re looking for motives, but Mr. Rickard clearly hasn’t read Meta-Hodos (in addition, at 6’12, to misrepresenting Schoenberg’s motivation in creating the twelve-tone method. Fail.). Try as he might, he can’t de-musical-ize music. As Tenney explains, because Rickard’s materials are differentiated, relationships inevitably emerge. The most simple of these inadvertent relationships is agogic accent. While the piano piece has no definitive melodic cadences, it does have clear clusters of events, the boundaries of which are determined by the longest note in a local area. To my ears, it sounds like a series of elided phrases. Another set of relationships emerges because of the clear differentiation of registers. Particularly at the extremes of register, you hear a sense of interrupted continuity. The notes group themselves because they sound similar with respect to pitch-height. To put it simply, “random notes” can never sound random.

That said, even though I hear musical patterns within the texture, I don’t think these relationships are nearly as important as the overall sweep of the piece—in the same way that, although you can segment a performance of “Music on a Long Thin Wire,” the segmentation of it isn’t really the point. In fact, I would say that Rickard was actually quite successful in creating a work in the “acoustical positivist” vein. In both the Lucier and the Rickard, the sum texture, incorporating all internal variation, is the music. What makes such works beautiful is that even though they are, in effect, static objects, you don’t experience them statically. Only on reflection do you realize, “Wait, this is all of a whole.” There’s a serenity to such music that’s quite similar to listening to a stream or the wind (a comparison that, if I remember correctly, Lucier himself makes).

Now, if you really want to write an ugly piece of music, your best bet is to go the route of tedium. The careful use of repetition gives you a far better foundation with which to defy expectations and create a perpetual sense of anticlimax. Throw in some bad voice-leading and gratuitous dissonance, and you’re on your way. Incidentally, another group of scientists did something like this, although they approached the effect on a tangent.

Also incidentally, I really need to go to bed. So good night.

The main exposition of James Tenney’s theory occurs in Meta-Hodos. The title is as daunting as the prose is dense, but the ideas it contains are deeply insightful.

On Tuesday, I presented a paper at BYU’s composition seminar about James Tenney and the theoretical system he developed. Without getting into its specifics (which manage to be both simple and complicated), suffice it to say that Tenney presents a highly flexible analytical system that enables its users to gain insight in practically any style of music. After describing its workings to the seminar, someone raised the criticism that the system is mostly descriptive and didn’t reflect what the composers were thinking, two criteria he hoped to see in a “music theory for the twenty-first century,” which claim I made for Tenney’s theory.

While I can see the value of his second point (after all, it is one of the major aims of musicology), I disagree with the first and maintain that Tenney’s theory is the kind of thing that twenty-first century musicians need. When I look at the way that I and many of my contemporaries listen to music, some things stand out. We listen to, and love without shame, a wide range of music that is eclectic not only because of its diverse sounds but also because of its varied reception among different social spheres. In other words, when we listen to music, what its creator intended and its circumstances of creation are largely irrelevant: everything gets thrown together into a decontextualized mix, the only common thread of which—electronic recording—further decontextualizes the pre-twentieth-century repertoire.

We really don’t experience music the way Beethoven intended. Beethoven didn’t compose a microphone part or a post-production mix for the Eroica. Even our acoustic performances will be different because our ears live in a foreign world. Beethoven’s performers couldn’t even imagine Coldplay, Miles Davis, or Claude Debussy, let alone the sounds of airplanes and refrigerators. While Beethoven’s intent is nice to know, that’s a job for musicologists and HIP-sters, not composers and theorists. Composers and theorists are responsible to address their needs of their age rather than the concerns of ages past.

Which leads me to the first criticism, of Tenney’s theory being merely descriptive. I question the very premise of this criticism: namely the distinction between description and evaluation. The use of any descriptive lens is itself an evaluation, declaring what is and isn’t worth examining. After that choice, the evaluation is limited based on what the model can describe. Theories can only effectively evaluative material within the descriptive framework they establish.

From a twenty-first century perspective, the failure of most analytical systems is that their descriptive focus comes laden with stylistic assumptions. For instance, traditional common-practice theory does a great job of describing and evaluate part-writing in that style, but grows progressively useless the more sound- or rhythm-based a repertoire is.

In contrast, Tenney’s theory enables you to look at music relative to itself rather than imposing outside criteria. It has equal power to reveal the organizing factors in Beethoven, Boulez, and the Beatles. Such eclecticism is the reality of our cultural situation. Because Tenney’s theory reflects this and enables us to make sense of our times’ stylistic catholicism, it warrants the moniker I gave it, as the music theory for the twenty-first century.

(For those interested in learning more, I’ve uploaded my term paper about it, which is probably the best place to start, considering the density of the primary sources.)

In other news, I’ve just started in on a new string quartet. Details forthcoming . . .

. . . and for something completely different, here, as promised, is the audio for Myths and Legends. Good job again to Jared, Kory, and the BYU Chamber Orchestra!

Thanks as well to everyone who came! While I was excited to hear the piece, I even more excited to share this moment with you.

Stephen Jones (my teacher), me, Jared Starr (soloist), Kory Katseanes (conductor)

An editor would use a red pencil as a baton. (Photo courtesy: Steve Ricks)

. . . and in sound:

Many thanks to the performers, Eric Hansen, Ray Smith, Scott Holden, and Ron Brough (whose head is hidden behind a music stand) and, of course, to the Barlow Endowment for making the night possible! As with the Clarinet Sonata, it was another great performance.

In other news, the BYU Chamber Orchestra recently began rehearsals of my still nameless violin concerto. Name suggestions are most welcome.

(A similar Great Conjunction from The Dark Crystal.)

Lots of things happening these next few weeks. It’s crunch week for my fantasy for violin and chamber orchestra. Earlier today, I sent Jared an update of the solo part. Next week, I need to have the whole thing, so the rest of this week will be pretty hectic.

I needed to take a quick break, though, to plug the upcoming premiere of my Clarinet Sonata. It’s being performed by Jaren Hinckley and Jed Moss at a concert of the LDS Composers Trust on Friday, September 30 at 7.30 pm. The concert will be at the Baldassin Pianos Concert Hall (441 West 300 South, Salt Lake City, Utah, 84101, 801-322-4441). Also programmed are works by Crawford Gates, Marie Nelson Bennett, and Kay Hicks Ward. Seating capacity at the hall is only 100, so if you want to attend make sure you arrive a little early. It should be a great show, and I hope to see many of you there!

Will it be worth it? Just listen to the following clip of the last movement and ask yourself, “Could I really miss hearing this live?”:

I think the answer is “no,” but then again, I’m quite biased. And if you can’t make it next week, it’ll be performed again on October 26 at the University of Utah. The nice thing about next week’s concert, though? It’s free. And if you can’t make either of those concerts, come hear the Utah premiere of A Field Guide to Natural History on October 5.

David Dzubay leads the BMCO with John Shin, soloist. (And I’m the one seated on the floor.)

At the end of my time at Brevard, I (along with the other composers) got to have a reading session with the Brevard Music Center Orchestra. The orchestra played the first two minutes of my new violin concerto that premieres December 7 at BYU. Jared Starr will be playing the solo part this December, but for the reading, it was played by another talented violinist, John Shin.

To the left is a shot of the session (courtesy Annika Socolofsky).

In the meantime, I now have to finish the piece in a month. It’s gonna be an <euphemism>exciting</euphemism> time for sure. That said, I am pleased with how the piece is progressing. Unlike my Barlow commission, this violin concerto is actually enjoyable to write. Perhaps that will take the edge off of the coming 14-hour days. Needless to say, you probably won’t hear from me till it’s over . . .

Anyway, here’s the recording from the session. Enjoy!

Over on the LDS Composers facebook page, Marden Pond asked, “What makes any specific piece of music endure? Or what makes certain music ‘popular’? Is there any relationship between the two?” To this, I responded, “Physicality makes a work popular, and insight makes it endure.” Here I wish to elaborate on that somewhat enigmatic response.

I believe that when people say they want to be “moved” by music, they’re speaking less metaphorically than they think. I think our physical relationship to music is the first aspect of it we respond to, both the interaction of our bodies’ rhythms with the music’s  and the sympathy we feel vocally to a work’s melodic traits. Thus, I don’t think humanity’s general attraction to music with a strong beat and a catchy tune has nearly as much to do with comprehensibility as it does with physical resonance. (I also think that music is a physiological art form that happens to be conveyed through sound rather than a sonic one, but that’s another post.) I would say the vast majority of popular music has these traits, though not all music having these traits will be popular.

As for a specific piece enduring, I think there are different reasons. Some pieces endure for sentimental reasons: they speak to the times and seasons of an individual or a people. Marcel Proust wrote an essay on how this effect particularly allows bad music to endure. Other pieces endure because of their reputation. I doubt most people understand why the music of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms endures, yet these same people would call those composers great because our culture says it is so. Lastly, I think that music endures because it has inherent insight, both musical and human. I can’t identify what that means in technical terms, but in terms of my response, it means that I am moved in some way by the music, that it surprises me and opens up a world of understanding, and that it always offers new insights each time I hear it.

So what does this all means for us as composers? I think the answer is actually “not much.” I don’t think our purpose is to be popular or to write “enduring music” (whatever that entails). Instead, I think it is our task to be as articulate, thoughtful, and sincere as we can in our music and let the rest take care of itself. I think that the relationship Witold Lutoslawski described in his journal is ideal: “I have a strong desire to communicate something to people, through my music. I am not working to win myself many ‘fans’; I do not want to convince, I want to find. I would like to find people who in the depths of their souls feel the same way as I do. They are the people who are closest to me, even if I do not know them personally. I regard creative activity as a kind of soul-fishing, and the ‘catch’ is the best medicine for loneliness, that most human of sufferings.”

Most music will not appeal to everyone, and much of it will only appeal to a handful of people. But to that handful, the music they love means the world. And that’s okay.