In the process of apply­ing for PhD pro­grams in the fall, I exchanged email with a for­mer teacher of mine at the San Fran­cisco Con­ser­va­tory. At one point he wrote some­thing, in the prospect of pos­si­ble future con­so­la­tion, that struck me as intu­itively true:

I don’t think I learned any­thing from my alleged com­po­si­tion teach­ers… The his­tory of music — now so neatly archived (I think it’s nice that there’s a way for music his­to­ri­ans to earn a reg­u­lar salary too) — is a superb edu­ca­tional resource, non pareil. If I were to under­take to teach a young com­poser, it would largely involve look­ing at music by oth­ers rather
than the stu­dent himself.

This has prob­a­bly always been (largely) true. A good com­poser teacher is really more of a critic, I think, some­one who can take a piece of music on its own terms and dis­cern what makes it work, and what makes it fail. Being a good com­poser can’t be taught, but a young com­poser can be guided towards resources, exam­ples, and also, ide­ally, shown to a clear way of think­ing about their own work, taught how to lis­ten to what they are doing.

But this body of music is the true teacher. Since the Beethoven Piano Sonatas have been pub­lished, they’ve been the guide­book for teach­ing so much of com­po­si­tion and har­mony. How can I per­form this mod­u­la­tion, make this struc­ture? Well, let’s look at Beethoven and see how he did it. It’s no dif­fer­ent, in essence from how writ­ers learn to write (by read­ing), and jazz musi­cians learn what their music is (by listening).

In look­ing at schools, I found out that Prince­ton has a par­tic­u­lar require­ment for their fel­lows (one of a very few) that I found intrigu­ing and excit­ing — each stu­dent writes a piece in response to another piece. How sim­ple, and how great. No com­pli­cated les­son, just do the thing that com­posers do in order to learn their craft and explore their ideas.

So, if I’m not at Prince­ton next fall, I still have this enor­mous body of work avail­able to me to learn from. And in truth I’ve already started. I’ve already writ­ten music in response (some would say imi­ta­tion) to other pieces that involve me. Most have not been suc­cess­ful and are pretty much for­got­ten, like my own ver­sion of Barber’s Sym­phony No. 1. Still, it’s the way. And it’s a way for me to main­tain the Cal­i­for­nia focus, the look off the edge of the world into the future, that devel­oped so strongly in me and is so impor­tant to main­tain now that I’m back in New York.

In the scheme of things, it’s uncon­ven­tional but appro­pri­ate. There is so much music avail­able nowa­days, so many styles and such a per­va­sive effect of non-classical music on my gen­er­a­tion of com­posers, and those that come behind us. So for me, a point of influ­ence in a last­ing work of mine, a cham­ber piece called Big City from whence this blog is titled, is the work of Ingram Mar­shall, espe­cially his Fog Tropes. There’s a guy who prob­a­bly would not get into a lot of PhD pro­grams, but he’s made a lot of good music that is firmly in the Cal­i­for­nia aes­thetic. Which means it’s evoca­tive, slightly abstract, a lit­tle dark. Those are all good things.

Marshall’s work is an evo­ca­tion of San Fran­cisco Bay and the fog that can com­pletely shroud it, leav­ing one in an undif­fer­en­ti­ated greyscape. It blends elec­tronic sounds with a brass choir, ide­ally seamlessly:

Down­load: viewAlbum?i=49626185&id=49626748&s=143441

My own piece has a first move­ment meant to evoke an equally phys­i­cal expe­ri­ence of liv­ing in San Fran­cisco — there is a recorded part that plays along with the instru­ments, but their voices and musi­cal pur­pose are dif­fer­ent than Marshall’s:

I wanted a back­ground that sug­gested a phys­i­cal loca­tion, but not the emul­si­fi­ca­tion of sound that Mar­shall achieves. Also, in pefor­mance, the soprano sax and bass clar­inet were spaced as far apart as pos­si­ble to give the sense the horns were call­ing to each other, albeit in an unco­or­di­nated way, across a distance.

I revised the piece this fall, and also made a brand new audio file (party because it’s a has­sle to get the one off DAT, partly as a learn­ing exer­cise in some new soft­ware tools I have). The result, built from envi­ron­men­tal sounds, is hope­fully both more spe­cific to SF Bay and also more mys­te­ri­ous. Here’s a sample

I kinda’ like it …

… and nicely enough, I can catch a per­for­mance of Fog Tropes at Zankel Hall tomor­row evening.

And I have a lot more learn­ing to do. The study of Beethoven for har­mony and Bach for coun­ter­point never tires, and in the fall I added a lot of excel­lent books to the music library. But as for pieces to respond too, well, those pop in and out of my head all the time. Some are more chal­leng­ing oth­ers, more ambi­tious, more com­plex. A short list would be some­thing like this:

• Beethoven 3rd Symphony
• “Mir ist so wun­der­bar” quar­tet from Fide­lio

  Down­load: viewAlbum?i=863772&id=864022&s=143441
  

• “Pos­sente spirto,” from L’Orfeo

  Down­load: viewAlbum?i=857691&id=857803&s=143441
  

… and that’s just what I’m think­ing of today. There’ll be many more install­ments on this topic. Now, it’s time to see just what can be done, edit­ing sam­ples and mix­ing audio files.