In my last blog post, I identified the gestures that compose the Latter-Day Saint hymn “Father in Heaven, We Do Believe.” Today I’ll show how these gestures are elaborated and how all these elements work in concert to make the arrival on “we receive” so striking.
Category: Music Theory
Harmony in “Father in Heaven, We Do Believe,” Part 1
I recently explained how Classical musicians understood harmony in terms of characteristic gestures. For my first demonstration of this gestural approach to harmony, I present the Latter-Day Saint hymn “Father in Heaven, We Do Believe.”
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Learning Harmony as Gestures
Lately I’ve been studying how the Italian and French masters taught harmony and counterpoint. It’s fascinating. They didn’t analyze chords or study Byzantine diagrams. They learned to perform complete textures from a single musical line.
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On Debussy and how some contrasts have more than meet the ear
Last week we looked at “Brouillards” from Debussy’s second book of Preludes. In this performance by Krystian Zimerman, you can hear Debussy’s interesting use of juxtaposition, which is the subject of this post . . .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhdXnMHqsEU
Music Theory for the Twenty-first Century
(I wrote this blog post during the SOPA/PIPA internet blackout, and, WordPress being out, I couldn’t post it till later. Along with millions of others, I oppose those bills.)
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.)
Attitudes, Thought Processes, and Their Resultant Ideas
The last few days I’ve been consolidating a general artistic statement for myself. (Perhaps one day I’ll post it. Perhaps not.) One of the things I realized while going through the exercise was that defining my musical interests flowed more naturally from describing my compositional process than from cataloging my materials. Not that the latter wasn’t doable, but I found the former to create a much more accurate picture of what I compose and why. (Artist friends: have you noticed this in your work?)
I was partially surprised by how surprised I was by this realization. I’d taken Intro to English Language. I’m aware of the hypothesis that how we talk about things shapes what we talk about. Yet up until this point, I had never thought of compositional process as having such a strong effect on compositional thought. But I suppose as Admiral Kirk said, “Well, now you have something new to think about.”
So how do I compose and what effect does that have on my music? I start by imagining the sounds of the instruments and the ways the can combine. This gives my music a strong focus on texture and sonority. Because the next step involves finding melodic embodiments of these ideas, from there my music tends to proceed along traditional, rhetorical terms. Still, because the emphasis is on texture, harmony for me becomes more of an organizing factor than a generative one.
To take a series of tangents that will return to the point: Harmony. So often I hear composers (especially my friends in the RB) talk about harmony as chord-chord-chord. I don’t subscribe to this interpretation because I was persuaded otherwise, first by Ernst Toch (I’ve linked to chapter 2 in his book, but chapter 1 is worth reading also), who describes it using the Heraclitian idea “Everything is in flux.”
My second main influence is two sentences from Alfred Mann’s The Great Composer as Teacher and Student: “For a long time, ‘harmony’ continued to be the word used to describe a fabric of independent part-writing. It was not until the publication of Jean Philippe Rameau’s Traité d’haramonie in 1722 that the modern meaning was introduced.” This quote may be brief, but in combination with Toch, it profoundly changed me. I no longer think of harmony as isolated floats in a parade of “vertical simultaneities” (as Murray Boren would have put it), but rather as a cohesive stream with an overall sonority (and often direction). For instance, I hear most of Berio’s “O King” as a single “harmony” even if the vertical simultaneities change.
These reflections in turn remind me of a Morton Feldman quote I found just the other day: “For any music’s future, you don’t go to the devices, you don’t go to the procedures, you go to the attitude. And you do not find your own attitude; that’s what you inherit. I’m not my own man. I’m a compilation of all the important people in my life. I once had a seven-hour conversation with Boulez; unknown to him, it affected my life. I admire his attitude. Varèse’s attitude. Wolpe’s attitude. Cage’s attitude. I spent one afternoon with Beckett; it will be with me forever. Not his work; not his commitment; not his marvelous face, but his attitude.”
I tend to write more traditional music than any of my teachers at BYU, but my music has been informed—and, I would say, has been greatly enriched—by the (mainly) modernist attitudes I received from their teaching, which they passed on to me from composers such as Feldman, Cage, Xenakis, and Stockhausen. These attitudes are largely the reason that I start by thinking about sound. I don’t think I personally could achieve the music I do if my musical process began with melody and motive. And I really like the music I write, so I’m glad, even proud, to be a part of this tradition, even if my connection to it isn’t immediately obvious from the sound of my music.
