This afternoon (Sunday 22 April 2012), CoMA Limerick is giving the world premiere performance of my Three Whitman Songs for contralto and piano. If you’re in or near Limerick, please do go along! I haven’t been able to travel for this one, but It should be a great concert – and it’s free!
This month sees not one but TWO performances of my music! If you have a chance please come along and support me – and the other marvellous living composers on the programme.
22 April sees my first performance in Ireland – CoMA Limerick are performing my Three Whitman Songs at the Hunt Museum in Limerick. I don’t have full details yet, but will post updates here when I know the time and what else is on the programme. This will be a world premiere performance.
27 April is the premiere of my recently completed fanfare for brass quintet, Knots & Mirrors, which will be performed by Riverside Five in London at St Michael’s Church, Chester Square, SW1W 9HH at 7.30pm. Tickets at the door £12/£8 (concessions for students, LCF members). Advance tickets £8. Full booking details are on the London Composers Forum website, under Concerts.
In other news, Carrion Comfort was workshopped by London Contemporary Chamber Orchestra on Saturday, which was a very helpful and enlightening event. It was lovely to meet up with the other composers and hear everyone’s work and the feedback from the orchestra.
This post is in response to a fascinating article by R. Andrew Lee over at I Care If You Listen in which he talks about his growing preference for handwritten scores over typeset ones, but I think it may have been brewing in me for a while. This could get random. You have been warned
Andrew’s post centres largely on the personality of a piece being expressed through the presentation of the score, with an emphasis on the information that a handwritten score conveys that a typeset score does not.
I totally agree – handwritten scores can convey a lot of information – particularly about personality – which is often missing from computer-notated versions, but I think that the whole issue (partly addressed in the second half of his article) is more than just handwritten vs typeset, but instead should focus on the issues of care and who created the score. Any score created with care and an eye for design by the composer themselves should be able to convey as much – or nearly as much of this information as a handwritten score.
A disclaimer
I am an accredited music copyist1 using Finale. I don’t write my scores by hand. I find the experience tedious and frustrating, and duplication, preservation, backup and distribution are, frankly, a damn nuisance when compared to the ease of a computer-notated score. I inevitably mess up when hand-copying, then have to scrap the whole page and start again. I hate having to work out how many bars I’m going to allot to a page and how much space should be in those bars in order not to leave gaps at the end. I have too many other things to do to spend time on an activity which I am not good at, don’t particularly enjoy and which – for me – produces a sub-optimal product. I am in total awe of hand-copyists for the patience and precision the task requires.
Different approaches, different results
As I see it, there are several variants on how scores are produced, each combination of which will provide a different experience: by the composer themselves or by a copyist, with care or without, and handwritten or typeset.
Copyists will always be at a disadvantage in this discussion – simply because they are not the composer. No matter how talented they are and how good their eye for design, they don’t have the intimate relationship with a piece that its creator has. They can’t. A copyist will produce a good-looking score, but to look for the level of personality in that score that can be conveyed through a composer-created score is a bit unfair – and doubly so if they’re preparing a score for publishing within the constraints of a house style.
So let’s stick to scores produced by the composer. Poor handwritten scores are easily identified: maybe the noteheads are poorly formed or placed, making it difficult to read the music; perhaps barlines or notes don’t line up properly. These problems are caused by a lack of care taken in the creation of the score, and possibly a lack of understanding about how important a little thing like lining up notes meant to be played simultaneously is. I suspect that, in a world full of computer-notated scores, some of the minutiae of manual notation might not be generally communicated. My own undergraduate degree included a 1st-year course where a proportion of the mark was allocated to how well the score was written out, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this sort of thing isn’t generally taught now.
A poor computer-set score, however, isn’t always obvious at first glance. Usually it seems to result from an assumption that the computer will do things correctly, but this is far from the case. While a notation programme will generally put things in more-or-less the right place, to produce a really good score requires an eye for detail and a willingness to prod things which look OK to look excellent.
Usually before I send out a score I need to adjust some or all of the following: number of bars in a system, the point at which a system breaks, placement of dynamics (Finale aligns them with the notehead instead of putting them a tiny bit ahead of the note as it should), curvature of ties crossing a system break, alignment of dynamics with each other, size of the music (usually I send out parts resized to 90% because I find Finale’s default a little too big), the point at which a page turn occurs, individual note-placement within a bar… and so on. Most of these are things that a cursory look over a computer-engraved score wouldn’t pick up. The score looks OK; it’s usable – but is it really good? Is it going to be a pleasure to play from?
A private space
The score is a private space I create for me and the performer. It’s not merely a set of instructions, it’s a place, just as a piece often seems to be a person. It’s probable that the years I spent studying the music of Erik Satie have had too much effect on me, but there it is. One of my favourite of Satie’s quirks is his inclusion of bizarre comments in some of his scores. The jury is out as to exactly what he intended by them, but my opinion has always been that they are performance directions – not conveying an instruction but a mood. “What a nice rock! Very sticky!” will convey different things to different performers, but I don’t think anyone who reads that direction will play that passage in the same way as they would have were it not there. Satie uses text to partly create his score-space – something which endures regardless of who does the notation.
A score produced without care from a notation programme is like inviting your performer into a beige room – it’s so neutral it has no personality. Handwritten scores can be like walking into an Arabian Nights harem. I aim for something in between. I try to use placement of notes and other elements, spacing of the score and fonts for headings and performance notes to convey something of the feel I am looking for, but I also want to leave room for the performer to be able to make themselves at home.
I love that Andrew is embracing handwritten scores – I love that composers are still producing handwritten scores! It’s not something I do, but I like to feel that my scores to share something of their own personality, and mine. Maybe it’s all in my head, but I can’t feel good about sending something out without tweaking alignments, finding it its own personal font and generally approving the balance of the music on the page.
Which method do you prefer – handwritten or computer-set? Do you think about the design aspects of a score, or just the notes? Share your opinions or questions in the comments!
My album for RPM Challenge is complete! It’s called Lucky Dip and you can download it for free – and get all the scores with it! – from my BandCamp store (email is required for the download because there will be updates to both the tracks and the scores over the next few weeks – if I know who you are, I can tell you there’s a new improved version).
I’ll be blogging about the experience of writing 10 pieces for 10 different performers in a (short!) month soon – it’s been incredible and I’ve learned a vast amount from this project which I’m sure will affect the music I write for weeks and months to come.
I’m delighted to say that Carrion Comfort has just been chosen to be one of the 10 orchestral pieces (out of 16 submitted) that the London Contemporary Chamber Orchestra will be workshopping on 31 March. I’m really excited about this – after all the time spent on pulling it together, it’s fabulous to know that it’ll get an outing with a real orchestra. I hope they like it.
I’m also thrilled to report that my commission project for RPM2012 seems to have met with a great reception and is now fully subscribed. I’ve even written and sent off the very first piece!
As you no doubt know by now, I am doing the RPM Challenge this month, which requires me to record 10 tracks or 35 minutes of music over the course of February. As my last blog post here explains, part of the reason why I’m doing this is to work on being able to write more quickly and to experiment a bit, and this is where YOU come in!
I want to write you a piece of music. Just a little one, but for whatever instrument you play.
The only thing I ask is that you only sign up for this if you can commit to sending me a recording of the piece by the end of February.
Interested? Read on for the details:
Most pieces will be under a minute long. There may be some technical challenges but I’m aiming to keep them feasible within the limited time frame you’ll have for learning & recording.
If I write a piece for you that requires an accompaniment, I will provide a MIDI-generated recording as well as all parts, in case you don’t have a pianist or harpist or whatever lounging around with nothing to do.
Recordings don’t have to be studio-quality but they should be at least pretty clear. I don’t much care what you record on, but the higher quality the happier I’ll be. iPhone/iPad recordings are fine. Cassette tape isn’t because I don’t have anything to play them on. If you’re thinking of using your phone or computer mic but haven’t tested the quality, please test before you sign up to make sure that you can deliver at least a reasonable-quality recording.
Recordings will be made public, on SoundCloud, my website and the RPM website, so please make sure you’re happy with your performance and recording before you send it. It will have your name on it.
If you can’t commit to getting a recording to me by the end of Feb, but you’d still like me to write for you, we can talk about scheduling something. I’m ALWAYS happy to write for people, but the aim of this project right now is to end up with 10 actual recordings by the end of the month.
I reserve the right to not manage to get around to writing you a piece – it’s entirely possible I’m biting off more than I can chew here. First come, first served, up to 9 people. If you’re within those 9 and I don’t manage to fit you in during February, I’ll try to write you something anyway when I have a moment later this year.
In the interests of variety and experimentation, I will write no more than 2-3 pieces for any given instrument. Don’t want to end up only writing for piano!
If you play the sort of instrument that has a number of different ranges – e.g. Recorder, tin whistle – please specify which one you want me to write for, e.g. Tenor recorder, whistle in D
If you ask for a piece which isn’t a typical member of the orchestra and therefore unlikely to be found in a standard orchestration text, I may need you to provide additional info such as range, special considerations, effective techniques, recommended recordings. I will try to ask for these early on.
If you are open to the prospect of a graphic score or free form elements, let me know. I will only include these if you are interested in dealing with them. Other pieces will be fully notated
And finally… I reserve the right for some of these to possibly not be terribly good. As mentioned in the blog post, the idea is to experiment with writing quickly and using some techniques and approaches that I don’t usually use, so there’s no guarantee of a quality result. But I will do my best and if there’s something you feel I could use some advice on, I will be extremely happy to receive any gentle feedback you may care to give.
Still keen? Then sign up! Leave a comment on this post with your name, instrument and any other details, then join the mailing list or update your details if you’re already on there – that way I can easily keep everyone updated on progress. You can always unsubscribe later if you’re not enjoying the experience
I have a confession: I’m a perfectionist. I always spend far too long on pretty much everything I write, tweaking and poking and looking for that point where the whole thing seems to balance on a pin. So far it’s worked out OK for me. I mean, people quite often say rather nice things about my music, so I must be doing something right, yes?
But it bugs me, this perfectionism. I am positively green with envy for people who can dash off a piece in a weekend – my 60-second solo violin piece, Diabolus, which was supposed to be a quick project, took me 3 weeks to complete. The 3 minutes of Carrion Comfort has taken 10 months! So on my private list of things to work on this year, and especially with the prospect of a Masters degree coming up, has been to experiment with some techniques to get the writing happening faster.
My feeling is that if I can write faster and fuss less over the tiny details, then maybe I’ll learn more. In David Bayles & Ted Orland’s fantastic book Art and Fear, one of the authors tells a story:
The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pounds of pots rated a “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorising about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.
This story makes me wonder: if I’m currently someone who only had to produce one pot, and the work of those producing many pots was ultimately better – how much better could my work be if I could make myself loosen up and produce many more works in the time I’d usually take to write one?
So this month, I’ve let myself be talked into doing the RPM Challenge. It’s a bit like NaNoWriMo or Creative Pact, but the goal is to record an album (10 tracks or 35 minutes) over the course of February – that’s 2-3 recordings a week! Obviously for me to even try to write 2-3 pieces a week would be seriously jumping in the deep end, so I’m setting myself a goal of writing 4-5 pieces in the month – about one a week – and the rest of the work will be finishing off recordings of other pieces I have that have been languishing without even decent MIDI recordings for far too long.
If you want to follow my progress, I’ll be blogging it (more or less) daily over at One Creative Thing – and of course, burbling about it regularly on Twitter.
If you want to join in, please do! You can find out more at the RPM Challenge website and join up, then post a comment here with the address of your blog or SoundCloud feed or wherever you’ll be documenting it.
Today’s post was inspired by a couple of tweets by the pianist John Mannos from June 2011. He’s no longer on Twitter so I can’t link to his account, but what he wrote was this:
Oh, to get inside the minds of these great composers to know precisely what they wanted! How to play the accents? Phrases? !!!!!!!!!
I suppose that is the alluring beauty of playing a work by a deceased master..to have faith that your performance renders his art perfectly
I do understand what Mannos is aiming for, but given the impossibility of ever knowing whether you’ve “got it right”, I feel a different view is more valuable, both for the living performer and for the composer, represented only by the score.
These days, composers can choose whether they want pixel-perfection: they can take the option of writing directly to audio, bypassing the score entirely. Or they can choose to write music for other people to play. People with opinions, ideas, limitations of technique, the whole package.
But this is a recent development. Composers of the past had no option but to write music to be performed by real human musicians. Whether that musician was the composer or someone else, ultimately the notes on the page needed to be turned into sound by a – fallible – person. I feel that the idea of a piece being rendered perfectly would have had little meaning for them, or if it did, it would be no more than an idle fancy.
When you write for performers, you are starting a collaboration. And that goes whether or not you had any chance to choose perfection.
As composers, we create things which, sooner or later, we will leave behind. We have no power over what becomes of them, regardless of how many increasingly specific notations and remarks we litter our scores with. At some point our collaborators will have more say than we will, so we need to accept – as I suspect many of our forebears did, lacking any other model – that there comes a point where we just need to let go and let the new collaboration happen.
And for performers, this is a fantastic chance. It’s an opportunity to work *with* Bach, *with* Stravinsky. Of course, study to understand the composer’s viewpoint is vital – you can’t truly collaborate with a person you don’t know. But it’s only the first step. From understanding what they’ve written, you need to make it your own – they are no longer Beethoven’s accents, Sibelius’ phrases – they’re yours.
For my own part, I don’t want perfection. Sure, I’d like to have the right notes played in the right order at the right speed, but I want it to sound real, human. I want to find out what other people can bring to my work, the nuances they can bring out that I didn’t know were there. I want them to have ideas, test them out and bring them to life.
Obviously, this is what great performers have been doing forever, but it disturbs me that this idea of the dead composer as oracle still persists. They did exactly what we do. Or rather, we do exactly what they did. No mystery, just hard work.
A score is not a piece of music. A score is just notes. It is not sacred, not perfect. It is an incomplete thing, requiring human collaboration to make it live.
What’s your opinion? Do you think we should seek perfection or new interpretations? Or take another approach altogether? Add your rant to the comments!
When I was an undergraduate student, away, way back in the dark mists of time, I was a snob. A total and utter snob. I wouldn’t listen to anything that could possibly be termed standard repertoire. I did enjoy playing Bach’s flute works and Mozart’s simpler piano sonatas, but I never felt listening to ‘the obvious stuff’ was really worthwhile, or that I could ever really learn anything of use from it. And Beethoven? I LOATHED Beethoven. Not as much as I loathe Mahler but he was definitely next in line.
So I’m not sure why I bought his complete string quartets shortly after I moved to the UK. Something about being music I *should* listen to, I guess, but I suspect also that moving overseas liberated me a bit from my own narrow ideas. It gave me licence to try stuff I hadn’t thought about before. I also think the limitations of there being few record shops around that would actually let me listen to stuff before buying it, coupled with HMV on Oxford Street having an evil habit of putting box sets of complete works by excellent performers on drastic sale, and having to pay to borrow CDs from the library here, all these encouraged me to throw caution to the winds and just try new stuff.
Obviously, not everything I dared myself to try worked out, but there’ve been enough significant discoveries to completely change the way I think about standard repertoire.
But Beethoven. I am somewhat aghast to find myself totally enamoured of Beethoven. My early experience of him was based largely on Herbert von Karajan’s interpretations of his symphonies, and that led me to believe that Claudio Abbado’s delicate and delicious 6th symphony must be an accident. As was John O’Conor’s recording of the piano sonatas 30, 31 and 32 which sat in the bookcase beside Claudio Arrau’s more solid versions. *Obviously* these were glitches among the heavy stodge of the rest of Ludwig’s output.
So I surprised myself when I bought The Lindsays’ recording of his string quartets. And then I surprised myself even more when I discovered that I REALLY LIKED THEM. And not just the early ones, but the late ones too! And then I was hooked. I now have the complete symphonies (Mackerras), complete violin sonatas (Kremer & Argerich), a couple of piano concertos (Argerich) and – at last, for Christmas – John O’Conor’s interpretation of the complete piano sonatas.
These last are sublime and a total revelation for me. Treated with such a delicate touch, even the Waldstein ceases to be heavily Germanic and instead becomes full of light and shade and meaning.
Every disc so far is full of beautiful treats with none of that bone-jarring thumping that is, alas, so often a feature of recordings of Beethoven’s piano music. I can’t wait to spend more time with them and really explore every nuance and see what I can glean from them to use in my own music.
Have you ever experienced a complete turnaround with a composer’s music? Tell me about it in the comments!
Tomorrow is my interview/audition/test thingy for my application to do a composition Masters at Trinity Laban. I really have no clue whether I might get in or not. I’ve been told by very kind people that my compositions should come up to scratch, and my newly-acquired flute teacher says my fluting’s fine, but with it having been 15 years since I finished my undergraduate degree, I find myself wracked with terror at the prospect of the written analytical test. Given that it’s now the day before and really far too late to learn all the stuff I can’t quite remember and haven’t yet got around to revising, I am taking the Doris Day approach and singing Que Sera Sera, going through all my scores and making sure I at least know what I’m going to be talking about with my own work.
Which made me realise that I haven’t done an update on Carrion Comfort in quite some time and that consequently you don’t know yet that it actually has an ending! (Unless you follow me on Twitter, in which case you’ve known this for a while but haven’t actually heard it yet.)
No, it’s still not quite complete (more on that in a moment) but structurally I think it’s basically there – and this version is what is going to be put in front of the awesome and all-powerful Trinity Laban auditioning people tomorrow, so I guess this is as good a version as any to share with you.
The main reason it’s not complete yet is that it’s taken quite a while to get the list of percussion that would actually be available. I’ve known since almost the beginning of the composition that I wanted to include percussion, but I’ve not entirely been sure what to put in there, and knowing that resources were few for the intended ensemble, it seemed better to plough on and get the framework done, then rework as it became clear what I had to work with. Well, the percussion list only turned up on the day I had to send this to the printer to get it to Greenwich in time for the deadline, so it didn’t stand a chance there, but I have it now and am still a little unsure how to approach it. My personal desire is for generous lashings of timpani. But I’ve known from day 1 that timpani were not available, so I need to somehow find a way around that. This is what is at my disposal:
Drum kit: pedal bass drum, snare, crash cymbal, ride cymbal, hi-hat, hi tom, mid tom, low tom
Bongos
Tambourine
Mark Tree
3 Triangles
Finger cymbal
Cow bells
Wood blocks
Claves
Whistle
Tambourine
Floor tom
Snare drum
2 suspended cymbals
Glockenspiel
Marimba
Vibraphone (only if piano isn’t required)
There is only one percussionist, but the pianist can play the vibraphone if required.
So much thinking is really required to decide what and how to use it. I’m thinking the vibraphone might indeed be a useful addition, some cymbal rolls might work well with the string tremolos and maybe an assortment of toms to make up for how I was thinking of the timpani? Really not sure. Experimentation will ensue!
Oh and anything you can provide for tomorrow in the area of crossing fingers, holding thumbs or anything else you do for luck will be most gratefully received! See you on the other side!
