Process of Writing 26: Lagniappe

The concept of a lagniappe was one I first heard many years ago from a New Orleans native. It's the extra little bit the baker puts in your bag, or the grocer, or the fishmonger, as a gift of neighborly friendship, sometimes as a reward for one's loyal custom. The baker's dozen is a kind of lagniappe. The extra piece of candy thrown in for free. One online dictionary gives the origin of the word, naturally, as typically Cajun, a blend of cultures uniquely N'Orleans:

American French, from American Spanish la ñapa, the lagniappe, from la + ñapa, yapa, from Quechua yapa, something added. First Known Use: 1844

I felt the new music commission I've been writing all year would be complete at 18 individual pieces, and it was. 18 is a number that I've always liked, for reasons I can't always articulate. (It turns out it contains some significance to Jewish custom, and mystical interpretation. Who knew I was a Jewish mystic after all? *shrug*) And I still had a small pile of unused lyrics already written or half-written, a few stories left over from the telling, and some other ideas.

One idea was a short, sensual, somewhat erotic poem I'd written during the project, a poem of my own, from the perspective of art and memory. During the week after I had completed the commission, this poem spoke up that it wanted to be set to music after all. So I did that, and the commission now contains 18-plus-1 compositions, 18-plus-1 songs in various styles and voices.

•

Brushwork/Canvas

I draw runes on your skin
a labyrinth of circles
over your heart

I draw my name on your breast
an arrow pointing down
from navel to root of sex

I draw chevrons on your arms
sentinel of my self
warrior guarding my soul

I draw your name on my breast
and as we press ourselves together
ink runs from skin to skin
as we imprint ourselves on each other
ink brothers, blood brothers, one

naked self to naked soul
naked soul to naked skin
writing our names
on each others’ arms
blood brothers, ink brothers, one

my only loving brother
we are one

•

I wrote this song for two tenor voices, with piano. The music follows the arc of the poem—which by the way was originally written as a poem, rather than a pure song lyric—from two separate and different selves merging, in the end, into one. I had some fun with the musical setting.

In 1985-86 I lived in Surakarta, Central Java, Indonesia, on a Fulbright grant to study gamelan music. As I'm sure most other Fulbright alumni would agree, being on a Fulbright can be a life-changing experience, in which you learn a lot more than you originally set out to study. I received my grant as a composer rather than a scholar, and so I felt free to absorb as much music and art as possible during my year in Indonesia. One of the regional musics I became very involved with was West Javanese, or Sundanese, music; Sunda being the western third of the island of Java, with a somewhat distinctive culture and artistic expression.

In Sundanese music, there are three main tuning systems. (A tuning system in Indonesian music is not like a Western scale, and even less like a musical key. It contains fixed tones with more or less fixed intervals, but between different sets of instruments there can be variation in pitch and relative interval, within the recognized standards.) All of these are pentatonic in nature, meaning five notes per octave. One of the aspects of Sundanese music is that the scales can interlock, sharing one or two notes in common, while other intervals within the tuning system are very different.

This use of interlocking scale systems can be used to great dramatic effect. You are going along in one tuning system, when at a pivotal point, the singer will go off in a completely different tuning system, which will share a note or two with the main tuning, then return to the main tuning at another pivotal point in the music. This can create a powerful sense of tension-and-release, of stress-and-resolution.

I have been strongly influenced by this practice of departure and resolution as a composer, and also as an improvising jazz musician. I use the principle of leaving the home scale to go off in another direction, then return, both as a composer and player. This might sound dissonant to the Western ear, but that's okay: the dissonance is resolved into consonance when the scale-patterns reconverge at a point of release.

I wrote this song using these ideas from music theory that I learned from my studies of world music, especially Sunda. Each of the two voices has a completely different tuning system, which they never break away from, although there are notes in common. The piano part follows the lead of each voice when accompanying them alone, then combines elements when the voices sing together.

The first voice uses the notes G, Ab, C, Db, Eb, G, in an emulation of the minor pentatonic Sundanese tuning called degung. The second voice uses the notes Db, Eb, F, Ab, Bb, Db, in an emulation of the major pentatonic Sundanese tuning used in gamelan salendro (which is roughly the same as the Central Javanese gamelan tuning slendro.)

(Note that while in Western music it's conventional to sing a scale ascending, in Sunda, they sing a scale descending. I'm using the Western convention here, but it's worth mentioning the other. Note also that Sundanese exact pitches do not correspond to Western equal temperament, so what I've done is create scales that emulate the Sundanese scales, while using Western instruments and voices. You shouldn't take these are precise transcriptions or imitations; they're not.)

Note that there are three notes in common between the two tuning systems: Db, Eb, Ab. These are the only notes the two voices have in common. Otherwise they exist in their own musical universes.

I did this to paint with the music, as it were, the same emotional narrative arc that is in the poem: two individuals becoming one. So the voices alternate at first, each in their own tuning system. The piano follows the voice's lead, mostly, but is free to add harmonies and chords that fill out the music. By the end of the song, the two voices have begun to sing contrapuntally with each other, and at last merged into a unison on the same note. This is also reflected in the piano part, which resolves its own musical phrases by circling around the keys of Db major and Ab major—but there is no tonal sense of dominant-tonic, as the chords don't have to move in the stereotypical ways, but rather, follow the melodies in their discrete tunings.

This was a lot of fun for me to write, even though most listeners will never hear any of this. I suppose one must have the unique background of being a Western composer who has studied world musics, to get all the references. But the average listener will I hope be able to hear the emotional arc of two becoming one, and the tension-and-release that exists within the music, even though it's not done following the usual clichés of tonal music. I don't mind if hardly anyone "gets it," to be honest, because this was a bit of fun for myself. If all a listener gets is the tension-and-release and the story of two lovers merging, then I am well satisfied.

The Singing Dead

In most musical instruments the resonator is made of wood while the actual sound generator is of animal origin. In cultures where music is still used as a magical force, the making of an instrument always involves the sacrifice of a living being. That being's soul then becomes part of the instrument and in the tones that come forth, the "singing dead," who are ever present with us, make themselves heard.
—Jocelyn Godwin, Harmonies of Heaven and Earth

If we extend to the Earth the feeling that it's a living being, then even the metals we take, refine, and use in making musical instruments still give us that sense of the animal's soul being in the instrument. So Indonesian metallophones and gongs in the gamelan are still the voices of the singing dead. There is a reverence for gamelan instruments in Indonesia: one treats them like living beings; one does not step over them; one does not show them the soles of one's feet, which is considered rude as the bottoms of one's feet are usually dirty; one offers incense and food to the large gong, to feed the instrument that is considered the keeper of the soul of the entire ensemble. The large gong is played once at the end of every long cycle of a piece of music; gamelan music is structured cyclically rather than linearly; and the most important instrument in the ensemble, the largest gong, is played least often. It's not the front-row soloist instrument: it's the heart and root and center that we return at the end of every cycle, and the end of all music itself.

we are the stars which sing
we sing with our light

we are the birds of fire
we fly over the sky

our light is a voice

we make a road for the spirit to pass over
—Algonquian Indian chant

So many cultures have called the arm of our Milky Way galaxy, which can be seen in our night skies, the Bridge of Heaven, or the River of Souls. The pathway of the dead to the afterlife, or the next life. So many cultures have looked up at night and seen the stars look back at them, very much alive and watching. So many people have felt that the stars, apparently unchanging and eternal, have been the one thing that never changes, never lets them down. Sometimes they don't appear, when the Earth is in upheaval, or enraged; but they return when things quiet down again, still there, still lighting the night sky and the dim roads we walk in our dreams.

American Gamelan Music

An important aspect of my musical past is playing Javanese gamelan. This musical culture has had a major impact on my musical life, both as performer and composer.


bonang barung, a gong-chime instrument from the Javanese gamelan

I began playing Javanese gamelan in 1979, with the University of Michigan gamelan group Kyai Telaga Madu (Venerable Lake of Honey), directed by Judith Becker. I played with the gamelan ensemble in Ann Arbor through 1985, when I received a Fulbright grant, as a composer, to go to Indonesia to study gamelan. During the year I lived in Java, I studied much more than the traditional music; I also made many concert recordings, which I am gradually digitizing from cassette, studied batik, gathered materials including numerous books on the arts and poetry; and I got involved with the new music for gamelan scene at the school for the traditional arts in Surakarta, where I lived. I got to know several students and professors, and attended many concerts of new music and dance. When I got back to the US, I stayed involved with gamelan for several years, eventually playing with the gamelan ensemble at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, directed by R. Anderson Sutton. I eventually entered graduate school at UW-Madison, in ethnomusicology an folklore/anthropology; I was the gamelan Teaching Assistant for awhile, too. Nothing improves your own ability at something like having to teach it to others. Eventually, I moved to another city, and became less involved in performing gamelan. But all those years of being closely involved with this music left a permanent mark on me as a composer/performer, and I can trace elements in my own music compositions, as well as my style of jazz improvisation, directly to gamelan's influence.


street scene, Central Java, 1986

On one level what was really going on, at that time, was that when I had finished my Bachelor's of Music in Composition at the University of Michigan, I was wrung out and burned out and exhausted with Western music. The one thing they cannot teach you in music school is inspiration: so mostly they teach you music theory, history, and performance practice. As composers, several of graduated feeling musically constipated (the only way to describe the feeling), having had so much theory shoved down our throats that we didn't know where to begin writing music anymore. Gamelan saved me by taking me away from all that; by being completely different; by being an entirely different musical culture with nothing but positive interest for me; by being a place to turn while my composer's mind rested. I eventually learned to play jazz, and to improvise in general, and that is what eventually brought to composing for Western instruments again. I began by writing for jazz groups, and then in grad school I began composing notated music again.



Balungan is a magazine publication of the American Gamelan Institute, an organization devoted to the promotion and support of gamelan music internationally. There is, for example, a directory of gamelan ensembles, and a Gongcast podcast (available via iTunes).

Balungan used to be published more regularly, but only occasionally at present. Each issue contains articles about aspects of the traditional music, it's theory and performance practice; reviews and interpretative articles; and also scores. New music for gamelan, both within the traditional styles, and more experimental new pieces alike.


bedhaya dance, Central Java, 1986

Back issues of Balungan can be downloaded as PDFs. In the December 1986 issue of Balungan you can find a field note I wrote about my experience of studying traditional gamelan music in Surakarta, Central Java, in 1985-86. You can also find the score for my gamelan piece NightWaters, which I wrote while living in Java. I wrote a couple of other pieces for gamelan that year, and a book of poems, Solo Journey (some of which can be sampled here).

A recording of NightWaters can be heard via the Music page of my own website.

As I wrote in my introduction to the score of NightWaters when it was published:

The mood of NightWaters, as it was felt during the process of composition, is of the deep rain forest soon after the night rain has ceased; water still drips from the trees and all the leaves, pooling on the ground; frogs are chorusing; the air is thick and heavy with humidity; smells of flowers and rich decay fill the night. But also within the possibilities of "night waters" are: the moonlit ocean, light rippling on the far horizon and dancing on the crests of the waves; the silver night reflected from the shallows of a quiet stream, water ringing on the stones of the riverbed. A sense of eternally flowing, quiet waters.

You can listen to NightWaters here: NightWaters    

Or download an MP3 of NightWaters.

(I plan to post more of my gamelan music, both original and traditional, new music and gamelan-influenced music, on my website soon.)