It’s called “A Joyful Adventure.” I wrote it after listening to this enlightened set of variations by Makoto Ozone:
This is Yoshi, a Japanese pianist, performing Ozone’s funky arrangement of Chopin’s Waltz no.7. What Ozone did to this waltz was brilliant, such a lovely mix of jazz with romantic.
Ozone’s treatment of Chopin put me in a jazzy mood, and helped free my mind from the rut of writer’s block that creeps up on me from time to time. After listening to this a number of times, I felt very creative. I wanted to play around with these jazzy colors, so I wrote the music above as an homage to Ozone. And by homage, I mean I totally stole his mojo.
Play the video starting at 3:17, and you will hear the rhythm I lifted from Ozone. I wanted to take that exact soundscape and make it my own, to write something as tasty as possible.
Of course, once I started down that road my project quickly morphed into something new, something that doesn’t feel like stealing at all. The music packs its own flavor of punch. It’s got something new to say.
By the way, I was also listening to some Gershwin while writing this music, and wouldn’t you know it, some of his mojo got sponged up into my music as well.
Who will I steal from tomorrow?… Only time will tell.
By the way, this music is based very loosely on Mazurek Dobrowskiego, the Polish national anthem. It is also the final section of my 2nd piano sonata, which you can listen to in its entirety here.
In late 2017 I picked up Quiquern again and resolved to finish it for the last time. How many times had I called this project complete, only to pick it up again a year later and tinker, tinker? Well those days are done. If I can’t finish a project, like really finish it, how can I call myself a composer, or an artist for that matter? By the New Year had I hammered out the first fragment (now equipped with a Village Dance section) and finally turned the second fragment into a real piece, rather than just a collection of unconnected ideas.
In early January, full of fresh energy and creative juice, I saw the music in a different light and dove headfirst into some new material. In two days I created an entirely original fragment: The Singing House.
Fragment 3: Quaggi – The Singing House
Come on a musical journey with me.
On the far side of the village is the Quaggi – The Singing House. Only men may enter; it is where they go to pray. In times of plenty, the men sing hearty songs of gratitude to the various gods of the Arctic. In times of desperation, they fall into a trance of smoke and dark and sweat and hunger. Arms linked, stomping the holy ground, repeating of the same syllables, the great hunters of the village reach for the gods with outstretched arms.
What does a 10 year old boy imagine of this place? Banned from entering, just like the women, but knowing in his heart, unlike the women, that one day he will be granted entry into the inner sanctum, a young boy of the village can only guess what goes on inside that large tent. He hears from a friend that the sorcerer sings his magic songs and calls upon the Spirit of the Reindeer, and his songs make the wind blow and the ice crack to reveal the seal below. Anxiety and yearning and fear wiggle through his body. One day he would take his place in the Quaggi and learn the secrets of the hunters.
But at fourteen an Inuit feels himself a man, and Kotuko was tired of making snares for wild-fowl and kit-foxes, and most tired of all of helping the women to chew seal-and deer-skins (that supples them as nothing else can) the long day through, while the men were out hunting. He wanted to go into the quaggi, the Singing–House, when the hunters gathered there for their mysteries, and the angekok, the sorcerer, frightened them into the most delightful fits after the lamps were put out, and you could hear the Spirit of the Reindeer stamping on the roof; and when a spear was thrust out into the open black night it came back covered with hot blood.
I should also note that I openly plagiarized the work of another composer in this piece: David Wise, who wrote all the music from Donkey Country (1 and 2). Here’s the tune I stole:
So good right?
The music from this game was the running soundtrack of my childhood. When I was in middle school, I used to pretend I was in a band (perhaps in some jazzy night club) performing this very song. This music shaped me and my compositional style. I feel honored to sample this man’s music.
The form of “Quaggi” is reminiscent of video game music. The first section is a long musical segment consisting of variations on a couple themes. It then repeats. In fact it could repeat on loop and just BE video game music.
Last night I was lucky enough to see a live performance of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Christmas Oratorio at San Francisco Symphony Hall. The ensemble was called Bach Collegium Japan, a group founded to spread the music of Bach across Japan. This was their SF Symphony debut, and needless to say, they nailed it.
The music lifted me up and inspired me. I especially recommend the second cantata. The opening movement of that work, called Sinfonia, is subtle and expressive to a degree I have never seen in Bach. In this music he pulls the curtain back and shows us a glimpse of his soul, as well as a preview of an era of music he never lived to see but most certainly inspired.
Always under control of his faculties, his form, his harmonies, Bach is the ultimate master of “composed” music. He leads you where he wishes to lead you and brings you back again. In no hurry at all, Bach weaves together a lovely conversation between the a full baroque orchestra and the luxurious reedy softness of two oboes. Warm baking bread on Christmas morning, the snow falling softly outside the window, papa relaxing at the table with cup of cocoa. This music is home.
Here are a couple different performances. It’s fun to compare!
Here is a nice in depth explanation of the formula behind these cantatas, as well as Bach’s use of other composers’ chorale melodies, including melodies written by Martin Luther: http://bach.org/education/bwv-248/
Today I finally completed part two of my piece called “Quiquern.” This movement is called “The Dog Sickness”. (Click here for part one).
I thought “Quiquern” was complete years ago. Time and again I would declare it officially finished. But then, months later, something just wouldn’t sit right with me. I’d pry it open again and tinker with its innards. Maybe it will never be done. Maybe I’m destined to dance with this score til the end of my days.
Don’t get me wrong, I have always loved this music. Every time I pick it up again, I’m reminded of why I have such a sweet spot in my heart for “Quiquern”. It evokes so many positive memories: of writing it over Christmas break in San Diego, of reading The Jungle Book over and over, of experimenting with new sounds (new to me anyways), of unhinging my creativity from purely classical harmonies and letting go a bit. Like this sort of thing:
I never go full atonal, I’m always chained in some way to classical forms and progressions, but this piece freed me up in some ways I had never tried. I went wandering a bit through the cold wilderness. I let the images in my mind solidify into a color palette. I focused on the story the sounds told, rather than fussing about the progression. This allowed me to express all the pain I felt after reading that beautiful, heart-breaking story.
So why, if this music was so compelling, couldn’t I call it “complete”? Well there were a few reasons. One is I just wasn’t thinking about form when I first wrote it. I was in “crank it out” mode, writing down whatever ideas popped into my head. I tried to free up my creative process and stop self-editing as I wrote. As a result, the music flowed pretty freely out of my brain, and the harmonies were weirder than I was used to. The musical nuggets that emerged were captivating and exotic. But there was no overarching shape to the piece. It was just idea after idea, with very little connectivity. Throwing a bunch of nuggets into a pile don’t make it a whole chicken.
This time around I wanted to work on that. This is the sort of pre-thought that Schoenberg went on about. In other words, real composers think about form and structure BEFORE writing, they don’t just wander around in the dark hoping to bump into a complete form. When I put some thought into this piece, I was able to picture the arc that I wanted to create with the music. A chaotic, hallucinogenic dream sequence, sandwiched on either side by a poignant but solitary theme calling out in the dead stillness of the ice-fields. Perhaps the middle is what the dogs feel as they begin to starve, giddy and terrified and angry; the beginning is what the Inuits feel watching their beloved animals suffer in the dark, knowing what awaits them if another source of food is not found soon. Or maybe the beginning is a song for a way of life that is slowly dying.
“What is it?” said Kotuko; for he was beginning to be afraid.
“The sickness,” Kadlu answered. “It is the dog sickness.” The dog lifted his nose and howled and howled again.
“I have not seen this before. What will he do?” said Kotuko.
Kadlu shrugged one shoulder a little, and crossed the hut for his short stabbing-harpoon. The big dog looked at him, howled again, and slunk away down the passage, while the other dogs drew aside right and left to give him ample room. When he was out on the snow he barked furiously, as though on the trail of a musk-ox, and, barking and leaping and frisking, passed out of sight. His trouble was not hydrophobia, but simple, plain madness. The cold and the hunger, and, above all, the dark, had turned his head; and when the terrible dog-sickness once shows itself in a team, it spreads like wild-fire. Next hunting-day another dog sickened, and was killed then and there by Kotuko as he bit and struggled among the traces. Then the black second dog, who had been the leader in the old days, suddenly gave tongue on an imaginary reindeer-track, and when they slipped him from the pitu he flew at the throat of an ice-cliff, and ran away as his leader had done, his harness on his back. After that no one would take the dogs out again. They needed them for something else, and the dogs knew it; and though they were tied down and fed by hand, their eyes were full of despair and fear. To make things worse, the old women began to tell ghost-tales, and to say that they had met the spirits of the dead hunters lost that autumn, who prophesied all sorts of horrible things.
Prayers to a cruel and fickle ice god.
And while I was working on form, I also put more thought into motifs. This piece has a lot of rich material, maybe even too much. Though I love that there are so many fun ideas in there, sometimes it plays like one of those Beatles songs with too many good ideas but no development. This time around I went through the piece with a needle and thread, and wove my favorite motifs into the very fabric of the piece. In and out they come, appearing and disappearing again, becoming more recognizable with each appearance. Just as a chef might pour a bit of the boiling gnocchi water into the sauce to bind all the flavors together, my goal was to bind all the ingredients of this music together into something coherent (and tasty).
Like this motif, which appears everywhere:
Or this rhythmic motif:
Just because Beethoven used it in his fifth symphony, doesn’t mean it’s off-limits forever.
There was something else fundamental that needed retooling: instrumentation. Originally I chose three flutes and piano for this piece, because the flutes evoked the lonely, frozen tundra. But as I was writing, I didn’t pay enough attention to the limitations of the flute. I wasn’t writing in an idiosyncratic way, I was just cranking out music. The used a lot of low C’s on the flute because I liked the sound, but I knew the notes were ringing out stronger in my head than they would on a real instrument, where that low C is easily covered up and lost in the mist. I considered an alto flute, but decided a clarinet would give me a whole other palette to play with.
When one phases in a new instrument like this, one can’t just paste the flute part into a clarinet staff and call it done. The addition of the clarinet changed the whole character of the piece. While the flute is cold and isolated and graceful and metallic, the clarinet is like warm baking bread. It’s also intense, frenetic, a bit insane at times, with low earthy tones that can feel angry or foreboding or subdued. That new voice greatly expanded the range of the piece, so I was able to open the music up a bit and let it breathe.
All these forces combined into something much different than the piece I’ve been kicking around all these years. This version feels like a completed piece of art. It’s not just a sketchbook of ideas, it’s a story arc with real meaning. In other words it really does feel done. For real this time. Seriously.
This music is about suffering, and in a way the audience suffers a bit as they listen. It is not over quickly. But the music is also about hope, and the idea that suffering is a part of life, and doesn’t necessarily cancel out the good. There are joyful memories mixed in with the pain. There is a dream that soon the pain will end. Yes there is fear, yes there is chaos and anger. But the sun still rises at the end, even if the air all around is frigid.
So you want to “work on music stuff” and feel like a productive artist, but you also want to watch Game of Thrones, drink a beer, and chill. How to balance all of this? How to make progress on creative work when you’re not feeling at all creative? Answer: create parts!
Creating parts is tedious work, but necessary if a piece is ever to be played by an ensemble. The work can be done almost anywhere: on the go, with children running at one’s feet, while watching Joffrey die at his own wedding. So if in the evening I am feeling lazy and uncreative after a long day at work, I whip out some parts and chip away.
I’ve got a somewhat efficient process for it. It mostly involves making tiny changes to the spacing to ensure that nothing bumps into anything, and creating logical page turns so the musicians don’t think I’m a total noob. Sometimes this makes the spacing a bit crammed, but it makes for a more professional product.
Exhibit A: A logical page turn.
Though there’s not a lot of magic in the process, I always feel good that I accomplished something when I finish creating parts. I have to be honest with myself though; I know I’m partly doing it to avoid the truly challenging work of creating new music. I haven’t really written something new in a while. I was working on the Polish piece for a long time, but getting nowhere, spinning my wheels, generating lots and lots of new ideas with no real plan for how they should fit together (a practice Schoenberg openly criticized). When I get stuck in such a rut, I usually turn to part creation to avoid the hard decisions I need to make about a new piece. When trying to finish a piece that has too many ideas, some ideas need to be cut and discarded. But when I’ve spent too much time “inside” a piece of music, I end up falling in love with every possible version of it. Brainstorming has its place in the creative process, but when brainstorming becomes the entire process, nothing ever gets finished.
So I’m creating parts today. I’m currently working on the parts for my string quartet (Jackdaw). It’s a piece I have always loved, very nostalgic and at times quite sad. A deep sense of longing runs through the entire work. It’s about a lot of things, but mostly my own Jewishness, my desire to feel connected to my own ancestors, their own struggle fleeing persecution and what they left behind, a way of life that is gone forever. It’s also about Kafka.
Here’s the music:
Jackdaw String Quartet mvmnt. 1: Memories of the Ghetto
Working on this piece again makes me feel connected to it even though it is long completed. It helps me feel like an artist to be reminded that I am capable of completing work and still loving it years later. Maybe this process will even help me get back to work on the real matter at hand: writing something new.
By 1890 the world’s ears had rusted shut. Debussy pried them open with a crowbar and poured jazz down the hole.
When Claude Debussy wrote toward the end of the 19th century that “any sounds in any combination and in any succession are henceforth free to be used in a musical continuity,” he probably did not foresee the likes of John Cage or Lawrence Chandler or even Frank Zappa. Yet even if Debussy might have doubted whether these later composers’ experiments could actually be called music, Debussy was a kind of father to them all. His groundbreaking use of harmony announced to the world that anything was acceptable, that composers could literally do whatever they wanted, that any colors were appropriate in any combination. He broke the rules! But more importantly he gave his successors permission to systematically deconstruct the rules to such an extent that they became like the oxidized old Beethoven statue in Bonn, Germany: a memorial to something that was once great.
The 19th century had revealed itself to be a musical landscape in full bloom, with every major genre of classical music reaching its mature peak. With demi-gods like Liszt, Wagner, Chopin, and Brahms at the reins, harmony and form were stretched and expanded past mastery to the point of decadence. Like old fish in an aquarium, 19th century composers had explored every crevice of the traditional ensembles: string quartet, symphony, sonata. And yet despite the genius of these creators, all of their music was still bound tightly with “rules”. No parallel fifths! Resolve tritones a specific way! Meter ticked away time and did not change, could not change. Rondos and recapitulations and cadential 6-4s became to us like old friends who we never tired of seeing, though we knew every nuance of their personalities. These tried and tested techniques provided a foundation upon which Beethoven had built a mighty cathedral.
But in the rough emotional seas of the late 19th century, Beethovenian constructions had begun to lose their emotional impact, and sophisticated ears demanded something strange and new, something a bit dissonant, something that bent the ear. Debussy showed composers the way toward this new realm of emotional release. The piano, the orchestra, the soloist, the old forms, the sarabande, even the bassoon all seemed to speak a new language under his spell. Never was this more true than with Debussy’s one lonesome string quartet, opus 10.
It opens as a captive flock of birds peck anxiously around their cage. They become more agitated, and soon the bolts come loose and the cage shatters. Or perhaps the music opens as a flowing river of honey, on which a tiny rudderless vessel is pulled inextricably toward the sea. Or perhaps it’s an old coat worn thin by constant use. Its owner feels naked without it. Or maybe the opening bars reveal Debussy’s rage at having to abandon his forever unfinished opera “Rodrigue et Chimène” the previous year. No matter what it means, the music pulls you up by the ears and places you down somewhere you did not expect.
That heavy opening theme appears time and time again throughout the piece, through all four movements. Like sister islands separated by miles of ocean, each reoccurrence of the theme is subtly different from the previous one. On one island clusters of triplets tumble over each other like ants. A musical idea that was angry and threatening a moment ago is in the next moment serene, only to reappear later clenching its fists in fury toward the heavens. Each time the islands appear on the horizon they signal safety, a place of rest. They give the listener a moment of much-needed peace, because like islands these reoccurrences are each separated by many leagues of turmoil and danger. Immediately after the first theme is revealed the music takes flight, diving fast down the wall of a canyon. Seventh chords stand on their heads as the voices layer over themselves like hot fudge. Upon first hearing this section of raw development, the listener may find himself lost in the chaos, alone and map-less. But soon he washes up upon the next island, a world both familiar and foreign to him, one he recognizes as his own except the sun is a different color. And that was Debussy’s specialty: changing the color.
Many composers speak languages all their own. The same year Debussy set pen to paper, Dvorak wrote a couple string quartets too. His music evokes horses galloping across the American countryside in all their pentatonic glory. But pastoral scenery, though carried by Dvorak to an almost divine pinnacle, was really nothing new. His music may sound distinctly Dvorakian (it gushes with melody and fills the soul with a sense of wonder at the beauty of the world), but it’s still built with the same hand-me-down blocks first fashioned by Haydn and Beethoven (Dvorak himself gave credit to “Papa Haydn” for inspiring his music). Even the finale from Tchaikovsky’s Symphony Pathetique, also written that same year, feels like it longs for something deeper. Though the music boils over with liquid emotion and raw hunger, it still claws toward something deeper, a different world, one just beyond Tchaikovsky’s grasp. Debussy’s string quartet may not climb to the same emotional heights as Tchaikovsky’s last great masterpiece, but it certainly lives in that “new” world that Tchaikovsky couldn’t quite reach.
Claude Debussy was the first to show us this unexplored territory, so we will remember his name forever. We will compare him to the other great innovators and bridgers of gaps. As composers we will generate our own new ideas and ask ourselves “What would he have thought of them?” We will borrow his motifs and introduce them to the 21st century. We will place him on a pedestal, discuss him in theory classes, and write his name on the music history timeline of important events. And why not, the man was an artist. His parallel fifths ring through the mist like the bells of a sunken cathedral. His timpani crashes against your head like a good hit during a pillow fight. Listening to “Danses Sacree et Profane” is like having warm paint splashed in your ears. The tritones have been sculpted with such delicacy that they not only sound consonant, but they appear through the haze to be previously undiscovered intervals, alien sounds wholly unknown to the modern world. What a perfect way to usher in that most newfangled and metallic of centuries: the 20th century. Debussy took the chords that theory teachers had been angrily crossing out for 300 years, and turned them into extraordinary art. And he made it look easy, the jerk.
