Music in Trains

As the academic year comes to a close, I realize it has been a quite while since I have written a post. Initially, I thought I would just share some fun music-generating web-links that I ran across:

• http://balldroppings.com/js/ (my personal favorite)
• http://www.incredibox.fr/
• http://www.optuswhalesong.com.au/
• http://www.whitevinyldesign.com/solarbeat/ (thanks to Erin Gamble!) (not really composition per se, but it is fun…)

But then I got to thinking about the music-making involved and started asking myself questions such as “What does it to take to make an application that can generate more-or-less pleasing music regardless of musical ability on the part of the ‘composer’?” That’s just about when I began reading Jason Freeman’s NYTimes opinion piece “Compose Your Own, Part 2” and its prequel “Compose Your Own.” This led to a number of other questions that I will address in separate posts in the upcoming week.

I worked with guitarist/composer/conductor Dennis Roden for around 10 years at a church in Canton, OH where he was music director and I was pianist/organist (musicians wear so many hats, don’t they?). He recently earned the name Master Roden with his writings on the Stravinsky Mass. The research provided some interesting insights into the compositional process of Stravinsky (odd text accentuation, musical form that does not directly follow the form of the text, etc.), but I was most struck by Stravinsky’s thoughts about composers and spirituality.

Two quotes, in particular, stood out to me as calls to composers in regards to their work:

I regard my talents as God-given, and I have always prayed to Him for strength to use them. When in early childhood I discovered that I had been made the custodian of musical aptitudes, I pledged myself to God to be worthy of their development, though, of course, I have broken the pledge and received uncovenanted mercies all my life, and though the custodian has too often kept faith on his own all-too-worldly terms.

-Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Dialogues and a Diary, (London: Faber, 1968), 125.

The current issue of Spectrum (vol. 30 no. 2) opens with a line by medieval music theorist Jennifer Bain:

Since the nineteenth century, analytical studies and discussions about music often have arisen either explicitly or implicitly from organicist roots. In its most extreme form, the organicist model states that in order for a work to have aesthetic value, it must have arisen from a single musical idea or concept.

This was perhaps the most beautifully worded summary of so many of the discussions I have been a part of in recent days. Here, I will illustrate only a few.

Schenker’s theories have been a central topic of interest among my colleagues in recent days. There are some postulates of his that everyone seems fairly willing to accept and others which are either so limited as to be of little value or simply seem inaccurate. One such agreement is the idea that a Schenkerian understanding of a piece can positively inform performance. A disagreement lurks around the dubious explanation for the Neapolitan chord.

I have to admit that I am only now reading through the theories of Heinrich Shenker for the first time. I am reticent to mention this in an atmosphere of assumed understanding. This is not to say that I have been oblivious; rather, quite the opposite. What may be more accurate is that I have never taken the time to read the theories from the horse’s mouth/pen (the mixed metaphor clearly falls apart.)

One tenet that keeps sticking out in my mind as I read is the connection between analysis and performance in Schenker’s mind. Perhaps he takes it a bit far to suggest that there is only one true performance of each piece, or, even more so, that performance is superfluous to the music that exists in the score. He does, however, demonstrate that performers can lead the listener through each piece by performing an analysis (not the literal graphs that so many recognize, but rather the resultant understanding.)

One of the great things about composition in today’s world is the vast social library of styles and media. In a short span of about 100 years, we have gone from mere national stylistic differences to ‘isms’ for any and everything that comes along.

I recently read a passage written by The New Yorker music critic, Alex Ross that made clear to me the value of these enormous stylistic differences. In preparations for translations of his popular book The Rest is Noise, his goal was to include all quotes in their original languages in order to obtain the best translation. Here is an example:

“Il y a trop de musique en Allemagne,” Romain Rolland wrote, back in the heyday of Mahler and Strauss. Something was lurking, the French writer suspected, in these humongous Teutonic symphonies and music dramas—a cult of power, un “hypnotisme de la force.” Germans themselves recognized the demonic strain in their culture. During the First World War, the not yet liberal-democratic Thomas Mann wrote a manifesto titled Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, in which he praised all the backward German tendencies that he would later come to lament in the pages of Doktor Faustus. In the earlier work, Mann states that die Kunst “hat einen unzuverlässigen, verräterischen Grundhang; ihr Entzücken an skandalöser Anti-Vernunft, ihre Neigung zu Schönheit schaffender ‘Barbarei’ ist unaustilgbar…“