Process of Writing

Short notes and random observations about writing a new music commission:



Still early in the process. No guarantee any given sketch will make it all the way into the finished piece. Some I already know are the seeds of final pieces. Others just tossed out at random, as they come up. One or two sketches I'm pretty sure are orphans at the moment, one or two others I'm pretty sure will grow into final flowers. it's still too early to start being picky about them. Just write and write and write, and sort it out later.

Writing away from the piano is better than writing at the piano. If you write at the piano, you tend to fall into habits based on your playing skills and habitual kinesthetic patterns. If you're a great player, you tend to write complicated music that no one else can play, just because you can, and this turns into showy music that often lacks heart; if your piano skills are only adequate, you tend to repeat what patterns you already know. When you write away from the piano, it breaks these habits, and you're more likely to write down what you hear in your head, rather than whatever patterns your fingers usually fall into.

I don't regard my own pianistic skills as virtuosic. I regard them as adequate to the task. I can sight read okay, and I can play through many things okay. But I'm not going to give a recital of virtuosic showpieces any day soon. Probably never, in fact, as I don't value virtuousity for its own sake. Give me musicality over flash anytime. I'm not an accompanist, and I'm not trying to impress anybody.

(The Taoist wheel of cycling of light and dark. Only two things that are first-tier priority in my life right now: Writing this piece of music (light), and my unresolved medical problems (dark). Everything else is second-tier priority, at best. Wheeling together like white and black carp in the moonpool of living time, each chasing the other's tale in endless cycling.)

Filling up three sketchbooks at the moment. One small pocketbook in my shirt pocket for those moments an idea comes while I'm out doing errands, or driving into town. This notebook already more than half-full, lots of ideas coming up while driving out West on the roadtrip at the year's beginning. Five-stave music score sketched in by hand on some pages. Another two sketchbooks of music paper, filling up with both words and music.

One or two pieces written at the piano anyway. One I'm fairly certain will work. It has the piano part, the chords and patterns, pretty well down. Now I just have to find the right words and vocal lines to fit with it. Not force them to fit, but follow the idea as organically naturally as possible.

Hard to write these projects at home. Twice now have gone down to a coffeeshop by the river downtown, just to get out of the house, away from the easy daily distractions, find a place to focus. Have a cup of hot chocolate, sit and write for an hour or so. Just getting out of the routine is makes things more likely to happen.

Contemplating taking a short roadtrip away from home, just for a couple of days, so I can write. Maybe drive up to Escanaba, where I know a pretty nice hotel, check in for a couple of nights, write in the cozy room, or find a café overlooking Lake Michigan. It's still winter up there, though, still new snow on the ground from the storms now passing through here as thunderstorms that further north are still winter storms.

Still trying to acquire the Finale notation software which I'll need to put the music into before all is said and done. One of the two software notation packages that dominate the field now. It's practically expected that you engrave your own performance-ready scores nowadays. I was always a good music copyist, even worked at it professionally just after college. Did orchestra parts for a couple of Broadway-bound shows. When the show was put on in Ann Arbor, the friend of mine who played the male lead in the show really stood out; later on, I've seen his name in the actor's credits of an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, playing a Ferengi. Which made me smile.

Process of writing is more than putting notes down, putting words down. There's a lot of thinking-about-it time. Non-writers never seem to understand this. You turn things over a long time at the back of your mind before you ever write them down. Lots of folks think it's easier than it really is. It's actually pretty hard. You can knead that mental dough for days before anything happens. People have this weird mythical idea that creativity is an act of conscious will. But anyone who's ever stared at the blank page knows that the only place sheer will ever matters is in the daily discipline of willing oneself to go on writing.

Of course, people also have this weird mythical idea that you can fix all of your problems merely by thinking them through; in fact, there are a lot of problems in life that can't be solved by thinking about them. Creativity is not a "problem." In fact it's ridiculous to think of it as a problem to be solved, although people do just that, maybe because they've gotten too used to writing to prompts or in response to examples provided by an instructor. But writing is not a math problem, not a "problem" to be "solved" or a broken object to be "fixed." I see a lot writers act like car mechanics, approaching each assignment in that fix-it attitude. I suppose that's why a lot of self-help literature treats the enigmas of life as mechanical problems with mechanical solutions. I suppose that's also why a lot of people try to "fix" psychological problems by taking a pill. It's a pervasive cultural attitude.

Next task I need to do, on a purely organizational/management level, is sit down, organize all the sketches, start sorting ideas about the same piece onto the same page. That will probably mean copying things out onto fresh sheets, just so everything connected to one piece is in the same place. Things are a little scattered throughout the various notebooks at the moment. Well, that's fine—you write things down when and where they materialize, on whatever is handy. At least I was smart enough on this project to designate notebooks, rather than random loose sheets, when I set out in the beginning.

I'm still sorting through the stories given to via writings and interviews from the men of the chorus. Looking for patterns and commonalities. Even though it's late to still be gathering stories via interviews, there are a few guys who haven't responded to my invitations till now, so I'm gathering material. A few of the earlier interviews have given me some incredibly good material to draw on. One man from the chorus spoke to me passionately about how, when he sings we feels fully alive. All his problems go away. "When I sing, I feel free." That is going to go into the new music, and I even know where: it's going to be the core of the finale, the last movement, which I want to be about triumph, affirmation, freedom, validation. I want to end the piece on a ringing note of overcoming and triumph. "When we sing, we are free." I can't imagine a better ending, right now.

I'm also sorting through how much of this new music is "mine" versus "theirs." The commission is intended to be based on the stories of the members of the chorus, on what it's like to live as a gay man in the Midwest, what it's like to grow up "different" in the Midwest, how we're different in our Midwest culture from the urban-dominated gay cultures of either coast. Those differences do exist, but they're hard to graph out on paper. They're not math problems, subject to being diagrammed in symbols or formulas. The rural/urban dichotomies are only part of it. At the same time, this is my piece of music that I'm writing. I've been commissioned to write it, because they hired me tow rite it, and I'm the author of the text as well as the composer of the music. All those stories are going to be filtered through my own sensibilities, into my own lyrics—not as though I was channelling the lives of others, but as though responding to them. I'm writing this piece, even though it draws on them. That's a balancing act I'm finding to be mostly like juggling: sometimes easy, occasionally requiring a great deal of attention. The lyrics will no doubt contain quotes from individual members' stories—a memorable line, an evocative description or metaphor—but it's not a collage. It still has to come through as a more-or-less unified score.

So I must take the input I'm given, digest it, and re-express it through my own means and style and sensibility. I wasn't hired to be a secretary, I was hired for my creativity, and because I write in a diversity of musical styles. I was hired because of that diversity, not because all my pieces sound alike. My own intention for the commission was always to write both light and dark, life-affirming and anti-entropy, but also including the shadows in our lives, not denying them. I found out after I'd been hired that that was the artistic director wants, too. I want to do a diverse, complicated, multi-movement piece. And I can, and will. The writing is already starting to show different voices, different tracks, different moods and tones and styles. I'm pleased with that. It feels like I'm on track, although it's still early in the process, and much editing will no doubt still happen.

When you write for yourself, when you write for you own joy, you don't have to please anyone but yourself. When you write on commission, you have others to please, too. You're expected to meet or exceed your goals. I'm trying to do both. My personal ambition is to "satisfy the customer" by writing the best piece of choral music I've ever written. The only way I know to do that, though, is to focus on making each small part the best it can be, and together they'll add up, I believe, to a greater whole. You can't overfocus on the grand scale, you need to just do your best each moment, and let them accumulate. Forward momentum, as ever.

Writing on commission, I find I have less ego about it. It's a lesson learned from being a graphic artist all those years: You can't attach your ideas about Great Art to every project. You have to be able to suspend your own taste, sometimes. When a client asks you to make a change, you do it. You don't take it personally, you don't try to talk them out of it—except on those rare occasions when they sabotaging their own best interests, and even then, you have to at most suggest—you just do it. So at some point in this new music writing process, I expect to sit down with the chorus' key artistic staff and make some changes. Polish up or fix a couple of spots. Discuss the order of pieces, maybe do some re-arranging. Improve the overall piece. And to be honest, I look forward to that. If suggestions improve the work, I'm all for them. I doubt it will be much, to be honest.

I'm still looking for an overall title. Well, that will come. I have a basic idea and outline of the overall structure, the flow of musical movements and moods, the basic shape of the overall piece. I know on what note (as it were) I wish to conclude. I have a pretty good idea about how to open the piece. I have some ideas about musical-thematic echoes, a little phrase or melody recurring later on in a new context that gives it new resonance, new meaning. Bits and pieces of several songs within the overall piece are known. One or two songs are approaching some form of cohesion, if not completion. I need to go back over all the interviews and notes and writing submissions from the members of the chorus, pick out more gems to polish, see what fits where.

Forward momentum.

Piano Etudes 3

Here's another piano étude from my music school days, rediscovered when going through some old papers in the basement. This is one of my personal favorites.

The étude aspect of this piece is that it contains both a musical palindrome, and variations on a theme. In the first part of the piece, note that the chordal/melodic pattern in each hand repeats twice, although the rhythm changes. There is a free central section, ending on a quiet, almost-tonal cadence. Then in the last few bars, the original "theme"—I hesitate to call it something so formal and apparently intentional—is repeated, using the original notes but in retrograde, while the theme's original rhythm is preserved, until the last slow ending.

This is quiet music, of a type I still enjoy playing, or improvising. There is motion, so the music is not static. But it is quiet, restrained, gentle, almost silent at times. (A lot of music doesn't leave enough room for silence.) I could go on, descriptively, but the music largely speaks for itself. I enjoyed writing and playing this étude; and I've played through it again, recently, and still enjoy the mood the music makes.


Option-Click or Right-Click on the image for a downloadable full-size PDF of the music, suitable for printing and/or playing.

Standard Note on the Music: Feel free to download and play any of these piano études. The only thing I require, in the spirit of "giving away" this music, is that if you do download and perform or record one of my pieces, you must send me an MP3 and a concert announcement, for my records.

(©AP Durkee. All Rights Reserved.)

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Previous études in this series:

Piano Etudes 2

Piano Etudes 1

New Piano Music: Celestial Road

Over the past two weeks, and reaching fruition a few days ago, sounds and ideas for a new solo piano composition have been rising up from the back of my mind. So far it's just sketches, some brief ideas, little gestures and notes and phraes that are starting to fit together into a new fabric.

The image I keep seeing in my mind is a rutted road in the high desert at midnight, with shapes of rocks and desert plants to either side, lit only by the cold clear light of more stars in the sky over the road than you have ever seen before. The stars, the celestial wanderers, are so close, at this high desert altitude, that they seem to hiss, crackle, and sing at you. You're high enough up in the mountain plateaus that the aurora borealis would be audible as well as visible. The stars are a presence, a weight, beautiful and terrible. The road, barely visible in this darkest starlit night, seems to rise up towards the sky, as if you could walk out into the stars directly.

As you walk into the sky, into the cold spaces between stars, where there is not atmosphere, nonetheless, the song the stars sing becomes clearer, stronger, louder in your ringing ears. You walk along a celestial road, a path of stars, the River of Heaven surrounding you, firm under your feet, as though you were walking along the bed of a dry arroyo in the desert, and every particle of sandstone and grit had caught light around you and become a living, flinting star. You are both on the earth in the sky, walking, all around you points of cold shimmering light.

That's what I have been seeing. This time, recording the vision will go into the music, not into a poem. Many of my poems have been records of these kinds of visions, or waking dreams, or whatever you want to label them. These days, making new music is what most interests me, what most catches my attention, my desire to express what I'm seeing and feeling. Better the music than anything else.

The cold clear stars are one of the only things in life that have remained steady, comforting, unchanged. Cold comfort, some might think, but the clarity and coldness of their gaze, especially in the high desert, has been one of the very few presences in my life that has never changed, never died, never betrayed my trust. It may seem strange to talk of betrayal; yet that is what the starlit night has never done.

The sounds that are coming forward are all in the upper register of the piano keyboard; the four octaves above Middle C. Mostly very abstract, open-ended; phrases and gestures, bell sounds, lines of melody, tones known to resonate a long time in the cold reaches of space. Things I have always heard, echoing through canyons of years, reverberant and resonant in the still midnight air.

Musical sketch excerpt: Celestial Road (sketches)    

I improvised these musical phrases and sounds at the keyboard, and now I must transcribe them. Make them into useful notation for a living piece. There will be a looseness to the notation. I don't really want the player to count beats in his or her head. This is about gestures and shapes of pitch within time, but the feeling needs to be timeless, abstract, not pulsed, not rhythmic. That will make notating this music more of a challenge, but it will be an interesting one.

A note on the process:

I've been playing—performing? improvising? transcribing?—what I've been hearing in my mind using Apple's GarageBand software, which came with my laptop. There are severe limitations to this software—for that matter, to any notation software that I know of, including Finale and Sibelius—in that the software imposes restrictions on what I can envision, and how I can write it. There are assumptions made about the nature of music and transcription in all these softwares that do not address experimental music, avant-garde music, or non-metered, non-standard notation. You end up having to force the software to remove many of its default settings, just to get close to want you want to see. In this more abstract music, for example, I use barlines to indicate phrases and gestures, not meter. A lot of this music won't have any barlines at all.

So, in the excerpt here, a brief portion of one of these early sketches, ignore the barlines and the meter: there won't be any. This was recorded using a default tempo marking of 55bpm, which also won't be used later on. The notation is going to be rubato, very slow, and very spacious; it is to be interpreted by the performer more loosely than a rigid tempo marking could ever provide.


(Click on the image for a larger version.)

GarageBand is useful for recording and transcribing these early sketches. It allows me to transcribe the pitches that I play (on my M-Audio USB keyboard controller, emulating a grand piano), which are the sounds I'm hearing in my head, as filtered through my hands. The software has a nice feature that allows you to save a track at a time as a PDF file, via the Print option; so I can look at as well as hear the notes I've just recorded. It is severely limited in that it wants to stick to a meter, it wants to put in barlines, and it attempts to fit what you play into both of those. It also cannot separate what the right hand and left hand are doing. I can later sit down with this kludged notation and sort out what I really mean to present in the final score. I can separate out the hands, and the gestures, and use grace notes where I played them, and where the notation software interpreted it all as one chord. At least it helps me get the notes down.

So don't take this notation as anything more than a vague shadow of what will come along later. But it gives an idea, hopefully, of part of the creative process.

Writing Music, Written Music 6

Last week at rehearsal, we had with us for the first time the flutist and percussionist to play through my new piece, Weavers of Light. It was a predictable jumble, as everyone was fumbling and sight-reading. Hearing it with the instrumental parts added to the choral parts, especially in the last section of the piece, gave me the feeling that it's all finally starting to come together, and the actual performance might be acceptable. The choral parts are getting rehearsed enough, now, that they're starting to smooth out, and are mostly choppy at the various section transition points. The flute and bells parted, added to the piano part, were very choppy and tentative this part rehearsal, however, hopefully they'll come along.

I learned many years ago that an excruciating dress rehearsal can lead to an exquisite performance. Having a bad dress rehearsal focuses the attention: it puts the fear of Whoever into the performers, and they Pay Attention much better during the performance itself. So I actually like it when a dress rehearsal is painful, bad, and sucks. We have dress rehearsal coming up soon, then the performances themselves the weekend after next.

Just to be clear: You should never try to make dress rehearsal. You always do the best you can, at every rehearsal. If it's going to be a bad or a good rehearsal, your job is to show up, do your very best, give it your full attention, and keep going. It's just that if dress rehearsal does happen to suck, you go with it, suffering in the surface, smiling secretly within.

Dress rehearsals are high-pressure moments. The remaining flaws and flubs and uncertainties about the performance tend to be exposed to the harsh light of reality. Since it's last full rehearsal before performance, it tends to raise the tension level, and if a mistake is made, people really do their best to not repeat that same mistake in performance. It's a last chance to screw up, to get all the mistakes out of your system before going onstage in front of the audience. It sharpens one's attention, and clarifies every remaining flaw in the weave.

When you turn in a piece of music to the group to be performed, it's no longer entirely yours. I have been consulted all through rehearsals about fine points, tempi, and other musical matters—it's very handy having the composer at hand to ask question of him—but in the end, I'm not conducting the piece, it's not my job to interpret it this time out, as I'm going to be only voice within the chorus. So, you have to give up some control, or desire for control. You have to trust that the outcome is going to be in good hands. You have to surrender to the inevitable, and have faith that everyone will do their best.

My piece has been placed in the middle of the program, where it will be part of the flow. I'm glad it's not programmed first on the menu—never a good place to put a premiere, as it's over too soon. You want to build up some excitement and anticipation in the audience before delivering the payoff. It's not at the end of the concert, when our voices and our bodies will be starting to get tired. At beginnings and ends you want to program show-stoppers, which sometimes means placing the pieces there that will make the audience laugh, or be raised to a climax of ecstasy. Bring them out of their seats, at the last, if you can.

My piece doesn't end on a showstopper moment, it ends by returning to silence; so it's good to place it in the midst of the flow, and have it be followed by a piece with similar rising and falling in its energies. People will remember it better that way, one hopes.

Writing Music, Written Music 5

A rehearsal read-through of the last section of the new piece, Weavers of Light. There are still a few corrections to be made in the final notation, but this gives a sense of the last main section of the piece. This is a recording of a read-through in which the piano is playing the vocal parts. That's how you learn parts in choral rehearsals: with the piano playing along. Eventually, the piano plays its own part. This is all part of the choral learning procedure.

Partial rehearsal recording: Weavers of Light    

Here's a sample section of the (uncorrected) score for the last section. Three contiguous pages, at the climax of the music. THis is where the long build-up crests, before fading away again to nothing. You can hear it in the rehearsal recording about a minute from the end.







(Click on any of the above thumbnails for a larger image of the page.)

Note how the weaving-together of the various musical strands and texts reaches a sort of climax here, as well. This is also where the accompaniment instruments go more poly-modal, and more poly-chordal.

Writing Music, Written Music 4

Rehearsals. Finished notation, finished scores. Announcements. Publicity. Rehearsals. The circles of preparation.

Once a new piece is made, the writing finished, that's not the end of the process. There are still rehearsals and performances to do. Notated music composed for others to perform, or indeed for oneself to perform, still requires rehearsal and performance.

This is different from improvised music, or transcriptions made of improvisations, which are notations of what somebody played without reading notation when they played. There are musicians who transcribe and study great improvisations by great jazz musicians, to study them, to analyze them, to learn from them. But then some jazz students take it further, and rehearse and re-perform the transcribed improvisation as though it were a composed piece rather than a spontaneous performance. I have very mixed feelings about that practice: the question is, why would you want to do that.

Of course, as a composer myself, a number of pieces of mine are effectively notated improvisations. It's one effective way of getting the sounds down on paper. Notation's root purpose is to be able to communicate your musical ideas to others, so that they can perform them, too. I record a lot of original music that I never bother notating; but on more than one occasion I have transcribed, or partially transcribed, a recorded piece of my own so that others could play it, too. In some cases, I wrote out a chart for a player to overdub over what had already been recorded, none of which had been notated. I have been in several bands that were based on improv, or structured improv; like a jazz band, in some cases I wrote out a chart, or a whole piece.

For example, here's the chart for "Rivers," a piece I wrote for The Barbaric Yawps. (You can here a complete studio-recorded performance of "Rivers" here.)

  
(Click on the thumbnails for a larger image of each page.)

The chart for "Rivers," like a jazz chart, is instructions for performance, with melodies and chords indicated. But interpretation is up to the musicians; they are free to depart from the chart, especially during the free, improvisatory sections. This was a fairly typical chart for this band, and many of the pieces were written out this way; the head, or theme, is precisely notated, and the free sections are left open for the musicians to improvise within. All of this is common practice in some styles or genres of making music.

Depending on the style of the piece I'm writing, I may not need to be at the piano to compose at all; such was the case for "Weavers of Light," as I knew what modes I'd be working in, and the logic of mode is such that one has a rule-set to both follow and deliberately not-follow, to create musical effects. (Some very subtle, it's true.) On other occasions, I sat and improvised at the piano, and wrote down the sounds that I liked, eventually forming them into a piece, or part of a piece. The back-and-forth between listening and writing is very obvious in this way of composing. For myself, I find this way of working to be most useful when I'm writing more complex music—more dissonant, more austere, more architectonic—which requires me to hear the resources I'm summoning, to hear the effects being produced. There may still be sections where I don't play the line before writing it down, as I can hear it in my head; in those cases, I play it back to confirm that it works. When I'm writing a piece that is more tonal, or more modal, I don't at all need to sit at the piano to write it; because those musical structures are internalized enough that I can "hear" them in my head as I write.

There is some truth to the notion that what musical instrument I have at hand will affect what I compose: different styles of music may emerge if I have a piano at hand, or my Chapman Stick, or no instrument at all but my voice and my mind. "Rivers," mentioned above as a piece written for The Barbaric Yawps, was composed on Stick. "Weavers of Light" was written completely with no musical instruments at hand. For the most part I sat in a chair in silence, and composed it based on what I was hearing rising up from within. As a long-time composer, that means that I can "hear" in my mind, with no difficulty, most of what I wrote on the page. The sounds and timbres and amplitudes of voices and musical instruments are things I have absorbed over many years, and they are now internalized. I don't always need external reference.

Looking back over the process of writing several of my older notated compositions, I believe that my usual practice is a combination of sitting at the piano, and sitting away from the piano. I can usually remember which phrases or pieces, or sections of pieces, were written each way.

But as a composer, no matter how well-intentioned the practice of re-performing a transcription of someone else's music is, I find it to be problematic. It's a bit like forging a painting to present it as your own. There are questions not only of originality, in this case, but of ethics.

I mean, if you're playing jazz, why not make up your own solo when you're playing a piece, rather than recreate Louis Armstrong's? It's one thing to transcribe and play a another jazz player's solo to learn from it—as an étude, if you will—but it's another thing to re-create that other player's solo in performance. At that point, you're playing an existing score, as though it were a written score, not an improvised solo. The processes in each case are rather different, and the intentions of the player seem rather different as well. I would go so far to say that, in my experience, the very intentions, the very thought processes in play, the things the musician is thinking about in the moment of playing, are also very different.

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When you finish a new piece of music, and give it to the performers who are going to premiere the work, you give up some control over your music. You must. You have to let the performers find their own way into the music; you must let them interpret it. Unless you are a composer/performer who only writes music for yourself to play, you are always going to have to give up some or all control over the outcome. Even an authoritarian composer working with an ensemble used to performing his or her music must give up some control over the outcome, if for no other reason than that each musician brings their individual training, experience, and breath to each piece of music they perform.

I'm a performer in the group that is going to premiere the new work. I'm a singer in the chorus that is going to premiere "Weavers of Light," and for whom the piece was written. (Although, I do hope other choruses eventually take up and perform this piece, as well.) So I'm present at virtually all the rehearsals, and sometimes the artistic director will turn to me to answer a question about interpretation, or details of notation or performance.

When I answer questions in rehearsal, I appear to be fully confident to others, sure of myself and the music and what I want. Nonetheless, I'm still feeling my way. I may appear to know what I'm saying, but it remains a process of discovery for me, as well.

As a composer/performer, I am comfortable with others bringing their own interpretations to my music. I've been aware of this with every piece I've ever notated and given to someone to be played. It's unavoidable—so I choose to embrace, and work with it, rather than against it.

Therefore, usually in my scores, I leave a few things open-ended, inviting the performers to interpret them. I will give general rather than precise tempo markings. I have written entire pieces, as well as sections of pieces, in which the performers are given the freedom, within proscribed limits, to make whatever sounds they choose. This is the element of indeterminacy I bring to most of my art-making, reflected in the music. "Weavers of Light" has no indeterminate sections, no real indeterminacy in the music, beyond the factors of interpretation that every conductor and every chorus will bring to the music: their individual touch and style, their flair and favor. I encourage that. There are factors to every creative situation that are unpredictable, and beyond the maker's control. I never forget that; and for the most part, I find creative work that is over-determined by the maker to be usually flat and dull, lacking surprise, and quite often lacking any interest whatsoever except the intellectual.

A current fashion in poetry tends towards over-determining the reader's response to the poem—even when the poet states that the poem was made using the tools of indeterminacy. I have heard poets actually state publicly that if the reader did not receive the poem exactly as the poet intended, as though it were a telepathic transmission rather than a work of art, then that poet considered the poem to have "failed." As if poetry were communication and only communication. There's a lot of that going around right now. It is one reason several current fashions in poetry are so very, very dull—and likely doomed to be never read again, a hundred years from now.

To the contrary, I enjoy discovering things in my own creative work that others have found, that I didn't know where in there, or that I had not consciously placed in there. I enjoy the process of hearing my own music as though it were brand new, as though it were someone else's, as though I did not already intimately know its every corner. This is one way in which I keep myself interested in what I'm making.

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To get the notation right, for this new piece of music, this week I've been proofreading the last sets of pages being typeset, going over them as carefully as possible. Catching some mistakes, including a few mistakes in my own original notation; nothing big, just details like having one too many beats per bar, or writing an octave indication that's wrong. Nothing that isn't corrected in a moment.

I don't own the Finale musical typesetting software myself, so the Chorus' assistant music director and accompanist has been engraving the music. "Engraving" is the word used for musical typesetting. It refers back to the days when master pages for printed scores were engraved on copper plates by specialists. The process is the same as artistic copper-plate engraving, involving the use of acid etching on the plate's surface to make the shallow grooves where the ink will lie. Now, like so much else in publishing, this can be done with computers.

Finale has some severe limitations, in my opinion: it is designed to accommodate normative musical notation for Western popular and classical musics, for the most part. It hits a wall, and hits it hard, whenever a composer asks it to do something outside its normative assumptions. Which most contemporary avant-garde music will do. Modern composers are used to having to invent new notations for specific purposes or precise effects. There are always ideas that don't fit within the norms of ordinary notation. One finds oneself having to invent new symbols. One finds oneself being required to change the software's default settings. (An example: the software always wants you to indicate a time signature. If you are writing something in free, non-metered time, you constantly have to keep turning that default feature off.) And there are things that are harder to do, for a trained music copyist and composer like me, in Finale, than on the page. I can make a clean pencil score that anybody can read, from my background in professional music copying, in a fraction of the time it would take me to do it FInale. "Weavers of Light" is not an avant-garde piece of music, per se, nonetheless, there have been issues with Finale being unable to properly engrave some of my indications in the score, certain things done for musical effect that are integral to the piece. We've had some difficulty with octave up and down markings, for example, in the piano part.

The software makes it look clean and precise and professional, so the performers really appreciate having a clean, engraved score. At the end of this rehearsal and performance cycle, I expect to have a clean engraved version of my score available to be copied as needed for future performances. The technology also allows me to send out the score to future performers, if any, in digital form, for them to print on-site and on-demand. (In a manner parallel to some innovations in contemporary book publishing.)

Yet any software that slows down the creative process, rather than enhancing it or speeding it up, is of no use to the working composer. So, I'm not going to be composing using Finale anytime soon; especially not for my music that doesn't easily fit into the stylistic expectations of popular or light classical music. And as a composer, you don't always have time to go through the software learning curve, when you're in the midst of a project. So, I have no problem with someone else engraving "Weavers of Light" in Finale. But I wouldn't attempt it myself, just now. Far better for me to do my composing with pencil, generating a clean final score, then hiring someone else to engrave the score. There isn't a skill in any trade that you can't learn, given time and practice and inclination; but the tradeoff is about how much time and effort it would take you to learn that skill, versus hiring someone to do it for you. Usually, you come out ahead if you hire an expert rather than try to re-invent the skillset for yourself.

I have other skillsets that I am far more facile at: Photoshop, typing words on my laptop, photography, cooking. If I ever choose to, I'm sure I can master Finale, too. Right now, I don't want to spend my time on that. I'd rather spend my limited time and energy on the making, rather than the engraving.

Although the end product really does look very nice. Although the engraved score doesn't feel as personally belonging to me, anymore: it feels a bit removed, a bit distanced, a bit generic, rather than my own music. That's another trade-off in giving music to others to be performed: you must let go of certain kinds of ownership, just as you let go of certain kinds of control. Performance is a collaboration with other musicians: it requires a meeting of individuals in which unity—in the form of synergy and everyone coming together with one mind, one purpose—can be achieved, but is not guaranteed.

Writing Music, Written Music 3

Completion.

That's the only word for it.

Weavers of Light is now finished. I finished it late at night, after three or four continuous days of writing, or thinking about writing, or letting the ideas come so that I could write them down. I had to stop and take breaks, then come back to it. It went on for several more pages than originally planned, but that was necessary to give the piece its full flowering, its genuinely developing form.

I'm not sure what I feel about the piece, yet—the process or the finished product. This new piece was written during a period of complicated, extremely high stress in my life. It was pointed out to me that finishing it despite all the incredible stresses of late is itself a major accomplishment. Maybe that's true; my own feelings are still mixed, even confused. I'm feeling too many things at once, right now, to be able to sort them all out. I accept intellectually that getting this done—the first real piece of notated music I've written in a long time, and the first piece of new music I've completed since my life took some difficult turns a few years ago—is a major accomplishment. I accept it in my mind, and I don't yet know what I feel about it in my heart. My hands are telling me to keep going, to start writing a new piece immediately, to keep up the momentum, to stay on that bucking horse as long as I can. To ride that emotional rollercoaster that my life has become, these past few years, and to spend the energy all this stress and drama and grief has generated by channelling it as much as possible into ongoing creative force—like a laser etching diamonds, like a high-pressure firehose, etching words into stone by sheer force of water-pressure.

I pushed hard, at the end of the writing. I had set myself a deadline, a day on which I wanted to finish. That deadline was so that I wouldn't keep going and going and never finish; that deadline was also so that I could turn over the completed piece for rehearsal, and give my mind and body a few days rest from the intense work of its making. I almost made my deadline; I got all the way to end of the first part of the last section of the piece, but then I realized that I still needed to give the ending its full due. Approaching the end, I realized I needed one more day of intensive writing, to do it right. I needed to take the extra day to make sure I got the ending right. That I didn't rush it, that I didn't shortchange the music by pushing into conclusion prematurely. That I didn't finish the piece just to finish it, but that I finished it following its own proper logic and flow and form. The piece told me it needed more than I could get done, that last afternoon; so I took one more, as needed.

The last section of the piece, which is where the sense of the many strands weaving together comes to fruition, is longer than I'd planned, and actually is made up of two sub-sections. The first half contains the polyphonic choral setting of the poem I wrote that is the heart of the piece. I even achieved my goal, in this section, of writing the music heterophonically, even more than complexly polyphonically. Simultaneous variations on the same phrases, woven together, converging at the end of the phrase, but otherwise independent. There are couple of phrases I feel very keen on, as they are exactly what I was hoping for.

The second half of the last section, the actual climactic ending, is a long slow buildup to a big climax, then a gradual fading away to silence. It's clichéd to end a choral piece on a big homophonic climactic chord; so I wrote up to that chord, then kept going a couple more pages of fading away, and returned to the opening themes for flute and bells, as echoes of the piece's origin, before the last few notes fade out.

I know that I like arch forms in my music. I have observed before that I naturally seem to write spiral structures: in which an idea returns, or comes around again, but slightly altered. There are no exact repetitions, but slight restatements, slight variations. These return the original themes to mind without exactly repeating them. They are always slightly changed. So it's not a rondo or ritornello form, not a truly circular form; it's a spiral form.

During the long buildup towards the last climax, the instrumental parts get more complex, more non-tonal, more multimodal. The complex mode I had planned earlier, alternating between Lydian and Dorian modes, also ventured into Phrygian mode at times. The vocal parts mostly stay in Dorian mode; they venture into Lydian mostly to highlight certain parts of the text. This is straightforward wordpainting, almost programmatic musical settings. The piano part goes poly-tonal underneath that, both supporting the chorus, and venturing off into other, more discordant realms. I wrote the instrumental parts growing towards the climax as if they were an increasingly cacaphonous ringing of changes: as though a giant bell orchestra was gradually getting louder and closer. Then all the various musical threads converges on a big homophonic chordal climax, before falling away again to a consonant ending. I avoided classical tonal patterns, using different means to express tension-and-release. I avoided letting the ending be a choral cliché of a Big Ending. At least I hope I did, I feel I avoided those things, although the proof will be in the performance, and the audience's response.

Needless to say, the ending became more complex overall, and longer, than I'd originally imagined. I don't mind that. Although I hope the piece isn't too long now. Later on I may go back and trim it a little, to make it absolutely tight. For now, till after the premiere, I'm going to leave it as is. I need to take time away from it, clear my head from the writing, maybe work on another, completely unrelated project for awhile, then come back to it with fresh, more objective ears. I want to hear the recording of the performance again, a month or two after the premiere; I know that will be enough time for me to listen to the piece more objectively. It takes time and distance, sometimes, before you can really look at something you've made with a clear mind and no expectations. It can take time to be more objective about your own work; you can't possibly be objective about it at the moment of completion.

When I finished, I was wrung out, elated, too wired to go right to bed, too exhausted to stay up long. I needed to tell somebody about it. I called my sister and brother-in-law in Holland, late at night for me, breakfast time for them. They were very pleased that I'd finished the work. I just need to tell somebody about it. Then I had a glass of celebratory whiskey, and finally went to bed.

So I have mixed feelings about finishing this project. I am very glad to have gotten it done. I have a small mustard-seed revelation of an archetypal feeling that writing and finishing this piece is a symbol of my own returning to life, of getting my own life back on track, of being reborn. I have just the beginning of a feeling that this is going to set the tone for the rest of my life—now that it's my life to live, and I'm not going to live it for anyone else anymore. And yet the context of writing this piece, the stress of life I was going through during the process, which was more than I can really say in words, the context was so hard that I don't know if I did the piece justice, if I made it come out right, or if I failed, strictly in terms of aesthetic and musical quality. I don't know; I reserve judgment. That will become clear over time. I do know that this new piece may not be the most important or most well-written piece that I've ever done. But it is the most ambitious choral piece I've ever written. And it will be performed. My original estimate for its duration in performance was to be about 7 minutes; I think it might be closer to 10 minutes, though. It all feels bigger and deeper than I had expected or imagined. There is a sense of being on the threshold: of the numinous, of the archetypal, in play behind those curtains of partial awareness.

i finished writing late at night, emailed off the last pages as a PDF to be typeset, called my relatives, then went to bed. The next morning I got up, loaded up the truck, and drove to the Northwoods for some R&R. I wanted to go do some photography, clear the cobwebs out of my head, sort some things out, and hopefully get some rest. Well, it didn't work out that way: the source of my recent stress followed me to the woods, and except for a few hours spent in the deep woods, far out of cellphone range, making photographs, making art, the trip became a kind of hell of an endurance test. I came home a few days earlier than planned, because I couldn't take anymore, and I had no more strength. (The stress has also triggered a relapse of my chronic illness, which made it all worse.)

•

As I noted before, when I first began writing this piece, I wrote the instrumental framework first, then discovered where the choral parts fit in. Towards the end of writing, that reversed, and I had to write out the choral parts, following the lines of the poem, first: this is what set up the structure. I then filled in the instrumental parts to accompany the voices.

But at the very end, I had to revert to writing out the instrumental parts first, to define the form as it built towards climax. More accurately, I had to do all the parts at the same time, one or two measures at a time. I had to think of many things, juggle many balls in the air, all at once. This was where the weaving all came together, you see. This is where the parts all merged. It's reflected in the structure that moves from complex polyphony to arrive at the most homophonic section in the entire work, the actual climax itself: what were once many threads become one, many voices merge into one. So it had to be written out that way, as one.

•

Looking at the overall form, in retrospect, I see that echoes and weavings-together happen at each structural point in the music. As though I'd intended it, although no part of my conscious mind was aware of this happening during the actual writing. I notice the patterns and forms, their many symmetries and echoes, after it's all been done. I only accentuate a pattern I have noticed, during the actual writing, if I'm aware of it.

Obviously some greater part of whatever portion of my self that is the creative force behind this writing has a better sense of overall form and shape and gesture than I do myself; "I" being the conscious, verbal part of the self, the most intellectual part of the self, the personality-ego interface if you will. That greater self knew what was going on, and shaped things more than I knew as I proceeded. I can look back and marvel at how intentional it all seems in hindsight; all the while knowing that during the actual writing I had no clue. I marvel at the wisdom of the greater self.

Often I can look back over the writing of a piece like this, in hindsight, and spot more patterns and detailed echoes of form than I was ever consciously aware of during the actual writing process. This is nothing new. I'm quite used to this, as part of my creative process. It is how essays, poems, other pieces of music, and many visual artworks have been made. I actually enjoy finding the hidden echoes within a piece, afterwards.

I have learned over time to always do my best to avoid analysis during the actual writing process: if I get too analytical too early on in the process, it can kill the energy of the entire project. It can turn the making into an intellectual puzzle-box, which for me yields creative objects of merely intellectual curiosity. So I always wait till later to analyze. And that's as it should be: theory is what we use to discover and analyze after-the-fact; theory is a very bad dictator, and a much better descriptor.

•

So, this new piece is done. It will performed in Madison, WI, in less than two months. The piece is harder than I'd originally intended it to be—harder, that is, for the performers. It requires them to listen and think in certain ways about their individual parts as they weave into the whole. It may stretch some performers more than I had planned. But I'm not worried about that. Once the performers get a sense of the music's internal logic—as every artwork has its own internal logic, making of itself a universe of experience—they'll be fine.

I've had many problems in these past few years years with faith, trust, and surrender. Yet I find myself trusting those things that I already know to be trustworthy: as this Making is trustworthy. I have faith that the music will find its own level, and that the performers will find their way well enough into the music to bring out of it what I hope to hear. In the end, creative work is always an act of faith: as creation itself is an act of trust.

Writing Music, Written Music 2

I am learning new rhythms of working. Or learning to pay attention to the existing rhythms. It seems important to remember, though, that after life-changing events in your life, your art changes, as does the way you make art. I am noticing as if for the first time how I write music; and it is for the first time, in truth, the first time since my parents died that I have notated a musical score on this scale, with the intention of it being performed by others.

The flood of ideas for the last section of the new choral piece continues, and I find myself "filling in the blanks" easily and with gusto. But I realize that I cannot make more than a page or two an hour, and maybe only a few pages a day—not because of my speed of writing, which is relatively facile, but because I must keep stepping away from the table, and walking off some tension or other. After a minute, all the while working over the measures in question in my mind, the proper solution appears, and I can fill in that blank where before the white void of the paper was almost frightful.

I can work for a few hours per session, then I must stop for awhile. Go off for a walk, go do some errands, go to the post office. The intensity of making this music is more than my body can sit still for. It creates a sidebar restlessness in me, that I must work off, regularly, in order to be able to hear the music arising from within. And when I come back to the writing table, the music keeps flowing. I can often multitask, when I step away. Most of my mind is still on the music, keeping that pressure on, as I prepare a meal during one break, or check the weather. If I am able, I will finish as many pages as I can per session, till I must stop, to eat, to relax, to give myself a rest from this exertion.

The feeling of being at white heat is the same as for writing an essay or poem; but the writing is more complex, and slower to accomplish, because I must handle more variables during each moment of writing. I get less done, it's harder work, and it makes me more tense, than with writing words; but then, the end result is more than words, alone. It's music, it's words-with-music, it's multisensory in ways that words alone cannot achieve.

I think of a poem written almost two years ago, a shaman's critique of pure poetry, and I realize the connections between what the viewpoint character in that poem speaks, and this (recovered, rediscovered) process of notating music. I see many parallels in how writing this music is losing the self, coming back to the self, losing the self—all in a kind of breath rhythm. I see the connections between the necessity for experience and somatic embodiment within a poem as being parallel to the immersive experience of being in music: music is something multisensory, but it is also multidirectional, in that sound comes at you from all directions, and you feel certain frequencies resonating in your physical flesh. Music can never be all in the mind, even at its most abstract, because once it is made manifest by being played, it surrounds you. The difference between poems on the page and music in the air is like a diver standing on the lip of a swimming pool: you can think about it, and keep it cerebral before you dive in, but once you are immersed in the water, your body is as engaged as your intellect, and perhaps more. You're in the water, not just thinking about being in the water.

•

I am aware that this writing is more like a diary entry than I usually present. It's a one-time process, though.

What I am doing is observing myself, observing my own creative process, as if I was doing this for the first time. Because in many ways, it is for the first time.

it's the first composed piece of music of this scale that I have completely notated in over fifteen years. It's the first piece of new music that I've composed like this since the life-changing events of my parents' passing, my own illness, and the many changes of the past four years. And it's the completion of an idea that was started before those life-changing events occurred, so it is a first return to life as I desire it to be, the return to life after a very long winter.

I'm observing myself, to learn how the process works for me now. I don't know myself this way anymore, so I'm learning about myself and my process all over again, as if for the first time. Everything else in life has been made new, so this is being made new as well.

i am recording my observations of myself and my process, then, to learn about them. I observe and record, and believe that this will lead to a better understanding of my own process, and to a renewal of these aspects of my creative life that have lain dormant and unexercised for a long time.

•

Another aspect of this project that intrigues me is that, while I feel like I'm starting all over again, I still have all my old knowledge and skills. I feel like I've returned to the very beginning, creatively, but I retain several decades' worth of training and experience in music composition and music theory. I still have my own style, if changed, and my own ways of working. I still have the knowledge of what I've learned to do, what I've taught myself to do, and what I've learned about myself in terms of what kinds of music I tend to write.

So it's paradoxical: brand new on the one hand, comfortably familiar on the other.

•

I also observe, about stepping away to do something else for awhile, that sometimes I do that so my mind can mull over what the music wants to do next. I think about the words I'm setting, I think about the musical mode I want to work in—for this concluding section an invented mode that alternates between Dorian and Lydian, but in both cases avoiding the sixth tone of the scale, as a way of leaving unresolved which "minor mode" is in use at any given time. Sometimes it's stepping away to let the back of my mind sort it out, and give me a clear answer when it's done. It's like percolating water until it comes to a boil. When the solution to the puzzle of what wants to happen in the next few bars comes into my head, I go back to the table and immediately write it down.

This is a process of distracting the personality-ego part of the mind with other things, while the rest of the mind works on what is supposed to happen next in the music. Then when the rest of the mind is done working on the problem it presents a solution, and the part of the mind that's usually in the driver's seat (or thinks it is) gets back to work.

Lots of artists, poets, and composers imagine that everything they do is done consciously, with the driver's-seat part of the mind. In fact, that is the smallest part of all the overall system of consciousness. (It likes to ignore the rest and inflate its own importance, too.) In fact, the unconscious resources of the mind are far more powerful for creative work. Whatever you choose to label this process, and there are many labels—letting your right brain work on it while your left brain does the dishes; listening to the Muse; taking dictation from the collective unconscious; trusting your intuition; whatever—it's a powerful way to work. It also makes for deeper, more resonant art in my experience. Whenever one encounters art made with only the left brain personality-ego consciousness, it tends to be marked by certain characteristics: puzzle-box complexity; ego-inflated pomposity; cleverness; logical consistency, but not in a good way; a certain cerebral detachment from emotional nuance. None of these are complete in themselves, none of them are particularly warm, none activate the kinesthetic soma and bring it into the experience of art; unless these are balanced with emotional resonance, there is no depth, no echo of infinity.

Of course to many artists this is heresy. But then, post-modern art-making has become so much a cult of personality, so much driven by the extra-artistic aura surrounding the creative process itself, that few artists seem to even realize how dead their own art really is; or how deadening.

I make no populist appeals. I am not making "art for the masses," but art to please myself. There are many layers of meaning, of resonance, in whatever I try to do; art I stand the least is the type of art that, once you've solved the puzzle-gimmick, the art dies and you never want to see it again, and I refuse to make that kind of art. I call it shallow, and worse.

I observe myself stepping away from the table whenever something isn't right, or satisfying to both structure (music theory) and essence (expression). Both must be satisfied, whichever page of music I'm working on, before I can go forward.

So sometimes you just have to step away from the table, and wait. Eventually, what is supposed to happen next is revealed.

•

When I first began writing this piece, I wrote the piano and instrumental parts first, then fit the chorus lines to them. The beginning had always been clear in my mind: a flute gesture, a response from the bells, and the piano making a context, a ground of being.

Now as I near the end, I find I am writing the vocal parts first, and filling in the piano part last. I know what the vocal lines need to do, and how they will interweave with the poem that inspires the last section of the piece. It all breathes together, and the melodies come first, followed by the accompaniment.

So the procedure, the order of writing things out, has reversed itself, at the opposite end of the process. Reversals that lead to something more true, more real.

Writing Music, Written Music

Writing a new piece of music—writing anything new, really—sometimes I get into a mode where things start to flow more rapidly than I can get them down. They spill out so fast that I am rushing to complete what comes forward, getting it down as fast as the pencil will move. Sometimes you have to stop what you're doing, and sketch out what's to come later, to preserve it for the time it will take to germinate and get your full attention.

Music is the most core, the most central, of my creative arts. It's what I'm most passionate about. It can also make me feel very vulnerable, very exposed. So I sometimes protect it by not talking about it, not revealing the process. It's not that the music can be derailed (although my attention can be), it's that it's so personal that at times it feels very naked. Although as an artist I'm used to being naked—you must learn to cope with feeling exposed, if you want to be any kind of artist other than merely cerebral—this goes a bit further. It goes deeper inside my own desires and dreams. It's more central to my own being. And thus I reveal more by it, and am made more vulnerable by it, and sometimes protect it more carefully. Not with a will to be secretive, rather with a need to keep it safe from the casual bullying of everyday life.

The new piece has a name now, over a month into its composition. I have so far produced about four final pages a week, since I began the process of notating from my sketches, giving me about 20 pages done so far. (Don't be too impressed: the pages sail by pretty fast in performance.) This past week, though, I seemed to cross a threshold, or step over the edge of a cliff, and in an afternoon of sitting at my worktable, twice as many pages as usual emerged. I only reluctantly stopped the flow, because I must, because it was necessary for me to go photocopy the finished pages, then drive into town to deliver them to the performers. Rehearsals for the premiere in December are already beginning, even though I haven't handed over all the finished pages yet. (Don't be too impressed: that's not uncommon for the premieres of many new pieces.)


Weavers of Light page 1 (Click on image for larger view)

I am now about two-thirds of the way through the final notated score for this new piece.

After the big surge that produced several more pages than usual, yesterday, I've taken a day's pause from the notating, to catch my breath and build up back-pressure for the last big push; thus I've been thinking about the score all day long. I'm writing about the process of writing music here only because I've been thinking about what's coming next, all day long; and I thought it might be interesting to pause and contemplate the creative process itself, in the midst of it.

In terms of form, there was the instrumental introduction, which led to an opening choral chant. Then the interwoven chants of the middle section of the piece; once the form and process of the chant section were conceived, most of the effort was about filling in the outline. And the last section, which I have just begun to notate in final score, will be longer, through-composed rather than pattern-oriented and cyclic, and use more complex musical modes and melodies. It's going to build up to a bit of a climax, then return to silence.

Most choral music is homophonic music: the voices tend to move in parallel, in vertical alignment, even as they move forward through time and notes together. I far prefer to write choral music that is polyphonic, with independent but interlayered and interdependent voices—and that's what I'm doing here. I've pushed some sections of this piece past polyphony into heterophony: independent voices in simultaneous variation on a core mode or theme, converging at key points but otherwise completely independent. Heterophonic music is the hardest kind of counterpoint to get choruses to sing, because they're used to being a massed mind, unity-of-many, and find it hard to break that unitive momentum and be independent voices. (Orchestras are worse about this, actually. You really have to push them hard, sometimes, to get them to think outside their usual box.)

This new piece, now named, is not the most complex piece I've ever written. I have a set of five art-songs, for piano and solo voice, that I wrote just over a decade ago, that pleases me as being almost the most advanced style, in terms of music theory, that I've written in. The piano writing in those art-songs is among the most complex I've ever attempted; and that piece was publicly performed, but never recorded. The harmonic language used in those songs is far more complex than what I am using in this new piece, which is largely melodic and modal; especially in that middle chant section. I'm indulging myself in this new piece with some blatantly "pretty chords"—still modal rather than tonal, but pleasing to the ear. Modal music doesn't have to resolve the way tonal music does; so I can indulge myself by letting certain rich clusters just hang there in the air, and not have to make them go anywhere. One way to avoid to clichés is to avoid the kind of writing that leads to clichés.

People sometimes have marveled that I can write this kind of music away from the piano. That I can sit at a table, and write it all down, and hear it in my mind, how it's going to sound, without need for sonic reference. But this is nothing new or unusual: composers have done this for centuries. (Think of Beethoven's amazing last piano sonata, Op. 111 in C, written when he was completely deaf.) You get to a point where you know your tools so well, that you don't have to think about how you're going to use them, you just use them. (A poet acquaintance once opined that this is also how I write poems: honestly, I've never studied grammar or syntax at the level some poets demand one should; but somehow the poems come out "clean" anyway. To be honest, I think it's silly to care overmuch about the method of craft; it strikes me as a waste of effort to think so deeply about what one is going to write, when that effort ought to go into the writing itself.)

Writing a piece of music, when I'm in the part of the process where I'm committing final pencil score to paper, can become so intense for me that I must break away, periodically, to come up for air, to rest, to breathe. Sometimes I become so agitated that I have to step away from the table, for five minutes, for an hour, and come back to it when calmer. There is nothing fearsome or painful in this agitation. It is, rather, the shakiness that comes of ecstasy, not from suffering. Of course at certain levels of intensity, agony and ecstasy are bound twins.

It feels very similar to the process of writing poems at white heat, in that one feels on fire, but there are differences. The pressure of the water coming out of the firehose, perhaps because it's a different kind of firehose, has a different sensation than with poems or photography.

Photography and drawing are about seeing/perceiving, rather than about merely looking at things. You see essences within forms, and you might take a long time to look at your subject before snapping the shutter. Or you might be completely spontaneous, and literally shoot from the hip, not even peering through the viewfinder, trusting that whatever light is captured to be the right light, in that moment.

I'm talking about notated music here. Recorded improvisations or composed- or structured-improvs can feel synchronistic, even magical, when all the elements fall into place, and suddenly you're in the zone, and everything is happening just as it must, and you realize it, don't try to stop it or direct, just ride that horse as long as you can. But notated music, I'm not exactly certain why, has a different sensation.

It's perhaps because everything must come out through the needle point of the mechanical pencil, or pen. There is a lake of creative water trying to come out through a very narrow aperture, relative to the other firehoses. The firehose of poetry is actually pretty wide-open and effortless. One reason I value writing music more than writing poems, other than the closeness of music to my heart as mentioned above, is that poems are actually easier to write. They seem less real to me, somehow, because they are not so demanding to produce.

Perhaps it's a vice or perversion on my part: and yet I trust more what is difficult.

•


Weavers of Light page 8 (Click on image for larger view)

The piece of music that I am writing now, for male chorus and small ensemble of instruments, is the first piece of music I have fully notated in several years. Perhaps it is causing me this feeling of pent-up pressure because I haven't used this creative channel for awhile.

And there is a history of distraction and lost time to this piece's making. I actually began thinking about and planning to write this piece early in 2004, when I was still living in the Twin Cities. I began work on it, began to pull ideas together, began to consult with the group that might potentially perform it.

Then my own life became so distracting and stressful that I set aside all writing of music for almost 5 years. I moved out West; then I moved again; then my parents became ill, and I moved back in with them to be their live-in caregiver; then they died, and I spent six months cleaning out their house so we could sell it; then I had to move; and in there I also was diagnosed with my very own long-term chronic illness; and that's only the highlights, in a nutshell.

So in some ways I feel doubly vulnerable about writing this new piece, just now, because it's a sign of my own return to life. I feel protective of it not because it's the best thing I'll ever write—that piece is always the one you're going to write next—but because it still feels fragile. Truthfully, I still feel fragile. My own health has not been fully restored, after the intense period I've just been through. Truthfully, I feel vulnerable at the moment—and it has affected the writing of this new piece—because events are conspiring to try to suck me back down into the black hole that I felt I was only just beginning to emerge from. And resisting that tidal gravitational pull, resisting that entropic inertia, has some days taken all the strength I had, just to stay afloat. Some days you're grateful to have achieved neutral buoyancy, rather than feeling like you're still drowning.

Tomorrow morning I will turn off all the phones and other distractions. I will make breakfast, then sit down at my writing table, and continue on. I am almost ready. I can feel the pressure building. It feels like notating this last, third section of the piece may be even more intense, more of a flood, than before. It feels ready to make itself manifest, already pushing at the exits. My job in all this is to make sure that nothing can distract me for two or four hours, set out the blank pages, my pencils and rulers and erasers—then get the heck out of the way.

Piano Music: Sketches

In the mid 1980s I developed a style of notating for piano score using three staves, rather than the usual two staves. This allows me to use the extended range of the piano without having to use lots of ledger-lines, which can become hard to read after awhile, or extensive use of the 8va or octavo marking with brackets.

I find the extreme ranges of the piano to be fascinating, especially in more abstract styles of music. There is a great deal of contemporary music that never gets out of the middle range, or much beyond the human vocal range. But music is about sounds, all kinds of sounds. It's also about gestures, and shapes. Musical score is performance notation, which is a visual representation of the sounds to be made, the notes to be played. There are many kinds of score notation now, especially since the innovations and explorations of the past century. My own three-stave piano score is nothing particularly radical, but I do find it convenient. I have worked with this style of extended-range piano extensively, in both finished and unfinished scores. I have a five-movement suite for high voice, either tenor or soprano, and extended piano titled Five Winter Dream Haiku. The texts are indeed five haiku on that theme. In a reversal of the usual art-song format, the voice is more like an obbligato part, while the piano writing dominates, setting the mood before and after the voice performs its poems.

Here is a cleaned-up page from one of my notebooks from that period. It's page one of a sketch for a longer solo piano piece; the title is inspired by Alan Watts' book Cloud-Hidden, Whereabouts Unknown. Each of those three words were to become a movement of a meditative, abstract piano piece, parts of a three-movement suite.


(Click on image for larger version.)

This is a piece that I plan to finish, now that it's sat idle for a long time, and now that I'm back in the mood to notate this kind of music. I have a couple of pianist performer friends again, now that I'm back in the Madison area, and involved with the music scene there again.

The philosophical note that I wrote to myself on the bottom of this score page is something I still believe, an idea that I believe remains largely unexplored. My note reads as follows:

The extreme ranges of the piano have their own voices, their own unique tone qualities. These have hardly been exploited to the fullest degree of their evocation of mood. Melodies take on different characters in these registers. [Dane] Rudhyar's "music of tones, of the rhythm of speech." No theme and developments here. Nothing classical. Only a voice singing in the wilderness.

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Non-composers often make the mistake of thinking that music must sound like what we know from popular music genres. In fact, there are no rules. That familiar sound is a time-bound and culturally-bound consensus set of habitual performance practice that defines the familiar and known recursively. In fact, the most open-ended definition I've ever encountered is: Music is organized sounds in time. That's very broad definition that emerged from the experimental music of the 1950s through the 1970s. It leaves a lot of doors open. It doesn't talk about harmony, counterpoint, melody, rhythm, or anything else we take for granted as an essential element of music. Music is intentional sound: the composer's (or performer's) intention is what organizes the sounds that are made. Even in aleatoric music, the performer makes choices of what to play, given the composer's directions or guidance. The time element of musical performance is the one thing that separates music from visual art, which, except for video art and cinema, tends to time-static and unmoving. Some kinetic sculptures do move, it's true; but they are still constrained by their mechanical limits.

So I want to point out that the piano piece above is gestural music. The notes, even though they are chosen by me, as the composer, are not as important as the gestures the music makes: the shapes in time, the flow of the notes up and down, the rising and falling of volume, pitch, and contrasting notes. Different notes from roughly the same region of the keyboard would evoke the same kind of music, as long as the overall shape of the musical gesture was retained.

Are notes in gestural music therefore arbitrary? Well, yes and no. The exact notes played might not matter as much as the overall gesture, but they do matter in terms of their relationships to each other. If you look at the piece above, you'll note that the musical shapes use notes that are not in any kind of tonal or modal relationship to each other: they are designed to be "dissonant" (in terms of the stereotypical classical rules of music in Western culture) rather than "consonant." So I picked very specific notes here, but my criterion was to be aharmonic, not atonal but non-tonal, evocative of mode to the ear but not so familiar as to be comfortable. If I had picked notes all from within one scale, the listener would develop expectations of tension and release that are stereotypical of popular and classical music alike. By avoiding that comfortable terrain, I hope to bring out the gesture of the musical line more clearly, rather than less: precisely because the ear doesn't know where it's going, so it actually listens rather than filters what it's hearing into a familiar category. I don't want the ear to collapse into familiar habits that look for a key center, tonal relationships, or counterpoint. I want to open the ear, not close the mind.

Some of the piano music that interests me the most is structured as gestures in time with no meters. I frequently, therefore, use barlines not to indicate meter, but to mark phrases, to indicate sections. You'll see this in many of my scores. I rarely write in time signatures, because what matters in this style of music is the pulse, not the meter. In this piece, there are long and short phrases, marked by barlines, which are in fact the gestures that make up the structure of the music.

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At the same time that I like to work with the extended range of the piano, I also like to confine myself to its central register. Sometimes one can create the most powerful music within the simplest means, and also within the framework of an arbitrary restriction. William Albright, my composition mentor in music school, once said to me, "Sometimes working within an arbitrary set of rules can open up more doors to inspiration." He was right. As every painter knows, sometimes the most daunting thing to look at is a blank canvas: there are too many options, too many ways to start. After laying down the first brush stroke, you've already broken the Empty Field, and now are free to work within the rules you just set up, with that first stroke.

So it is sometimes useful to set strong constraints on a piece, and work strictly within them, as a set of rules, as a way of evading stereotypes of listening and playing. One can do this by breaking out of traditional rhythmic meters; almost all Western music is written in duple (units of 2 and 4) or triple (units of 3 or 6) time, so it can be liberating to operate in odd meters such as 5 or 7, other prime numbers. Meters in prime numbers are very interesting, actually.

Returning to the idea of non-metric pulse and gesture, last year I composed a solo piano piece using several constraints that served, for me, to heighten the emotion of the piece. Here are those constraints, as I formulate them to myself, now, some time after the writing: Both hands play the same thing, homophonically, an octave apart; the left hand plays a bass chord pattern that occasionally counterpoints the main thread of music; the music is gestural, rising and falling; it occurs in minor mode, but in fact it's an equivocal minor mode because the 6th note of the minor scale is never sounded, therefore we never feel exactly what minor mode we're working in. Actually, I do that a lot lately, I've noticed: avoiding the 6th note of the minor scale, leaving it equivocal, and therefore more modal than tonal in character.

Here's the piece I composed. It is a memorial piece for my late parents.

the essential has remained. it remains

This is a piece I intend to notate from this performance soon. It's not really an improvisation, it really is a composed piece I worked out before recording it, but hadn't yet bothered to notate.

Here's an entry from my journal that talks about the piece, and its inception:

4 May 2008. It’s late at night. I just finished recording on piano the piece that I had begun to compose and record a few nights ago, that was tentative then, but is done now. Tonight I played it the best I am able. I am tempted to call it Requiem, but what I did instead was look for a line from one of my favorite poets, one who has given me many lines as titles for music: Odysseas Elytis. There is a line in his 1979 Nobel Prize for Literature acceptance speech: . . . the essential has remained. It remains. That is the title. It is a piece that is in memoriam for my parents. I just finished rendering it, and am posting it to the podcast. This is the first, best music I can make, for now, for the memory of my parents. It is as close as I can come to those unnamable feelings that have been lurking around the edges. It is the best I can do, for now. I may re-record it at another time.

The piece will be notated probably with no barlines, except to indicate sections; or as pauses for breath, if you will, between segments. I have also been hearing, in my inner ear, this piece as the piano part for an eventual elegy or threnody to be composed for male chorus and piano.

Piano Etudes 2

Another piano étude from my music school days. Again, this is a bit reminiscent of Chopin, and somewhat inspired by having played Chopin's Preludes.

This is one of my personal favorites of these little piano pieces. I still enjoy playing through it. It's a bit dark and moody, which is a mode I have been accused of spending a lot of time in, musically.

The falling chromatic style of this piece is one I have returned to, in later work, most notably in a piece for Stick I wrote a few years ago, called Kanjo. Kanjo has a rather different mood or feel to it, as well as being more martial due to the frame drums played throughout. (Listen to Kanjo here.)

One can use the same basic modal or chromatic idea in many different ways, for different effects. This is why writing music is so much fun.


Option-Click or Right-Click on the image for a downloadable full-size PDF of the music, suitable for printing and/or playing.

Standard Note on the Music: Feel free to download and play any of these piano études. The only thing I require, in the spirit of "giving away" my music, is that if someone does download and perform or record one of my pieces, they must send me an MP3 and a concert announcement, for my records.

(©AP Durkee. All Rights Reserved.)

Piano Etudes

Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when I was in music school in Ann Arbor, I wrote a series of piano études. These were occasional pieces, some more technical than tuneful, and were as much about writing for piano as they were meant for playing. I wrote them to keep my hand in. Call them compositional études as well as performance études. It's an eclectic set, no common thread, and was rather fun to do.

In going through my old files and notebooks and journals, looking for other old scores, I've come across a few of these early études. I'm going to post a few of them here, from time to time, as cleaned-up scans. I've enjoyed re-discovering some of my older scores, actually. They bring back memories. But more importantly, the best of them still retain some purely musical interest. (If I may be so bold as to say that.)

Here is an étude inspired directly by my own experiences of learning and performing the Chopin Preludes. (I can still play some of the easier ones.) It's an homage, but it's also a broken mirror, a fractured and fragmented refraction of the original. After all, a great deal of solo piano music has been written since Chopin was active. His music remains among the most important for piano, not only historically, in terms of his contributions and innovations in composed music, but also because his writing for piano is idiomatic. That is, it's music that is native to the instrument, and still sounds best on the instrument; it can't be easily transfered to other instruments, and it sounds best when played on piano. Chopin, throughout his career, wrote some of the most consistently idiomatic music for piano. It was his genius, and his legacy.

So, my homage to Chopin, a little bit strange, a little bit sad, a little bit avant-garde.


Option-Click or Right-Click on the image for a downloadable full-size PDF of the music, suitable for printing and/or playing.

I'll post more old piano pieces, no doubt including more of these études. Feel free to download and play them. The only thing I require, in this spirit of "giving away" my music, is that if someone does download and perform or record one of my pieces, they must send me an MP3 and a concert announcement, for my records.

(©AP Durkee. All Rights Reserved.)