About the Composer

This evening I had the thoroughly enjoyable experience of sitting on a panel of judges for a competition at the San Francisco Conservatory. These opportunities to judge come up from time to time, and I’m always glad to do it, not just to help the parties involved, but because it forces me to really listen and to think critically, knowing there’s a lot at stake for the person on the other end. It’s definitely not easy!

In this case, the participants were student composers who had written short works for the Conservatory Chorus, some of whom had never written for voices before. We were given their scores about a week ago, along with a CD of mostly MIDI, but some live performances of the works, and this evening the chorus performed them for an audience.

Sharing the responsibility with me in this little mini-Iowa Caucus were two conductors, both very accomplished and far more knowledgeable about choral music than I. It was interesting that the winning piece was so off-the-charts good that the three of us agreed on it hands-down, and there was very little discussion needed. My congratulations to student composer Ilya Demutsky for his a cappella setting of the Lorca poem “Dance”, which was well thought-out, well written for voices and also just plain entertaining.

Figuring out second and third place was much more tricky. Just about all of the pieces were extremely well crafted and well considered for voices. (Kudos to Professor David Conte for making sure these composers know what they’re doing in that regard.) So we had to look for other elements as a basis for ruling pieces out. (It’s more typically the other way round: the composer has great ideas, but not a clue how to execute them.) Many of these well written pieces were too wrapped up in the craft and lacked emotional content; some were weak in their structural conception; some mishandled the text, and a few chose texts that were inappropriate for musical setting.

Little by little, we were able to winnow it down to the requisite 1st, 2nd and 3rd place winners, plus some honorable mentions. I hope all of the composers involved got something out of it, in any case. It’s an invaluable exercise, and these composers are very lucky for the opportunity.

P.S. - What Are My Criteria?
We were given almost no guidelines for adjudication. My colleagues were both conductors, and so I thought I’d focus less on the practicalities of the choral writing and, instead, on the more composerly concerns.

• Variety (variety of texture, tempo, key, etc.). I don’t prefer four pages of quarter-note music.
• Structure. Is the composer feeling his/her way around, or is the piece built on a sound framework?
• Originality. I normally don’t place very high importance on originality, but when you’re looking at 16 pieces, you like a few surprises. Among the pieces that were gimmicky, some pulled it off well and others had less to show for themselves beneath the gimmicks.
• Sensitivity to Text. Does the composer seem to know what he/she is singing about? More importantly, does he or she care? Is the text setting natural to the language, or are weak syllables on strong beats. (I hate that!!)
• Aesthetics. Quite simply: does it sound good?
• Possibly the most important: Does the piece seem to achieve the composer’s goals, even if it’s not particularly my cup of tea?

About a year and a half ago, I posted a little something about my son’s taste in orchestral music. He was about to turn three then, and now he’s four and a half. Since that time, my ability to play music for him has been limited for various boring technical and life reasons.

A few weeks ago, I got a new mobile phone that functions as a music player (not an iPhone, but I love it anyway). I’m still in the wide-eyed amusement phase over the fact that I can copy music files to it from my computer via Bluetooth, so just for the heck of it I copied a few favorite pieces over to see how that worked.

The first thing I had copied to my phone was a recording of Kodály’s brilliant little choral gem Esti Dal (”Evening Song”, pronounced ESHtee dawl), which I’ve been intimate with for over 20 years. In fact, it’s known to Philo too, as I’ve been singing it to him at bedtime for a long time now. So, one night I thought it would be interesting for Philo to hear the song in its true choral form. He was absolutely captivated, and I was encouraged to load some more choral music onto my phone for him.

Esti Dal is a very short and simple piece that offers its lovely melody three times. The first and third statements are given by the sopranos, accompanied by sustained humming from the lower parts. The middle statement blossoms with majestic counterpoint, and during this part Philo moves his hands expressively, much as a conductor does, and visibly moved by the slight ritard at the end of the verse. I, of course, am thrilled.

Here’s what that middle section sounds like:

Other choral music on my phone for Philo includes “Trois Beaux Oiseaux du Paradis” from Ravel’s Trois Chansons, which has to be some of the most beautiful music on the planet. Philo doesn’t say much about this one, but he listens to it very quietly and I can tell he is fascinated. I was lucky enough to learn this piece in my choral singing days, and it’s been a favorite ever since. In case you don’t know it, have a listen. You’ll plotz.

Another piece I’m lucky enough to have performed is Hindemith’s luminous Six Chansons, which is disappointingly not as well known as it should be. These songs offer lyricism and beauty not typically associated with old Paul, whom I feel is widely misunderstood. I gravitated to his music when I discovered it as a college freshman transitioning from Sondheim wannabe to, well, whatever I am now, and I’m still very fond particularly of his vocal music. Here’s a bit of the first of the Six Chansons.

Finally, and inevitably, there’s Bartók. Philo has been treated to several excerpts from Bartók’s Twenty-seven Choruses for women’s or children’s voices. I blogged about this piece around two years ago. It almost hurts to have to choose one of the 27 pieces, but here’s Ne Menj El (Don’t Go Away).

Today was the 10th anniversary of the premiere of my first commissioned work.

Cycle of Friends, for soprano, chorus and chamber orchestra, was premiered on May 3rd, 1996 by the Music Group of Philadelphia. Artistic Director Sean Deibler had been one of my undergraduate teachers, and has been a mentor and all-around guru ever since. I was very lucky to be one of three composers he chose for a three-year commissioning binge he was on at the time, thanks to a special grant. The commission came through as I was finishing my master’s degree at the S.F. Conservatory. (I was studying with Conrad Susa when I wrote this piece; it doesn’t get better than that for choral music.)

This was a dream come true at the time. I had sung in Sean’s choruses at the University of the Arts as well as his Choral Arts Society of Philadelphia, which was then the Philadelphia Orchestra’s chorus of choice. So, thanks to Sean, I was intimately familiar choral music from a cappella gems like the Ravel Trois Chansons, Hindemith’s Six Chansons and Barber’s Reincarnations to massive symphonic masterworks including The Damnation of Faust and John Adams’ Harmonium. (I should post a complete list, just for fun someday. It’s pretty amazing.) So, I was chomping at the bit to write a big choral piece myself.

About Cycle of Friends
No guidelines were given, except that I could use any number of the four soloists who were called for in another piece on the program, and the orchestral forces, which included single winds, one trumpet, harp, percussion and strings. The rest was up to me.

After a period of agonizing over what texts to use, I settled on some things I’d found in a small anthology called Friendship Poems. This little book included a variety of poems from all over the world and from all eras. I liked the idea of taking poetry from very different times and places, and combining them to illustrate a universal theme, in this case, that of friendship.

There were a lot of poems in the book that I wanted to set, but eventually I winnowed it down to five very short ones that I arranged in such a way as to create an emotional narrative.

I. “Tell Everyone” (Sappho)

I chose this very short fragment from Sappho as an opener. The text is simply:

Tell everyone. Now, today I shall sing beautifully for my friends’ pleasure.

Here’s an excerpt:

II. “My Old Friend Prepared a Chicken With Millet”
Meng Hao-Jan (Tang Dynasty era)

This is one of two Chinese poems I used, both in shimmering translation by Innes Herdan. This one is a lilting account of a meeting between two friends.

Wait until the Autumn Festival:
I shall come again,
To enjoy your chrysanthemums.

The musical treatment is bittersweet. Will these two friends really meet again?

Have a listen:

III. “Are Friends Delight Or Pain?” (Emily Dickinson)

This is the one a cappella movement. In fact, here the chorus is divided into two discrete SATB groups for an interesting texture. The entire movement, you may notice, is on an E pedal, which I thought was fun.

Are friends delight or pain?
Could Bounty but remain
Riches were good �

But if they only stay
Ampler to fly away
Riches were sad.

Listen:

IV. “Blue Hills Over the North Wall” Li Po (Tang Era)

This movement is for soprano and orchestra with no chorus. This is a particularly moving poem, again translated by Innes Herdan, and functions as a sort of denouement in my view. It’s the emotional core of the piece. Quite simply, two friends are parting ways. We don’t know why.

Blue hills over the north wall
White water swirling to the east of the city:
This is where you must leave me �

Here’s an excerpt:

V. Friendship Aztec (Traditional)

I used this is a lush folk poem to close the piece.

Our song is bird calling out like a jingle:
how beautiful you make it sound!

The soprano emerges after a choral outburst with an extremely lyrical setting of these lines. The chorus creeps in gradually as the climax of the work approaches.

See what I mean…

This weekend, while going through some poorly tagged items in my music library, I came across a recording I’d dug up on the internet years ago of a trio of men singing a traditional Georgian folk song. This song, called Mival Guriashi, is something I first encountered in 1998 when I had a brief stint as vocal director for a folk ensemble. At that time, I had the surreal opportunity to prepare this fascinating music based on some unknown person’s (mostly accurate) transcription, and sing one of the parts.

This particular song is what’s known as a “table song”, characterized by three vocal lines, mostly homophonic. In this tradition, the melodic direction of the independent vocal lines has no concern for their resulting harmonies, flying in the face of everything we learned from our counterpoint books. So, what we have is impeccable voice leading with a harmonic mixed bag: sometimes they’re swooningly gorgeous, and sometimes they clash like crazy. You never know what you’re going to get from beat to beat.

Go on, give a listen ….(mp3. 1.1mb. 1:04)

Meanwhile, in reading up on Georgian music, I came across this page on the web site of Village Harmony , where more examples of this amazing music can be sampled. The site explains it best:

This project was inspired by recordings made in the 1980s, when singers of advanced age were invited to Tbilisi from different regions of Georgia and the Melodiya Company recorded their songs with microphones set up individually for each singer, enabling each song to be recorded both as a whole and with the voice parts in isolation.

If you only have time for one, I recommend the one called Khasanbegura: a feast of surprises for your Western-trained ears. Also, poke around on the Village Harmony site for more examples of wonderful stuff.

Georgian Voices, by the Rustavi Choir, is perhaps one of the best known (and perhaps best) recordings of Georgian choral music. You can hear a lot more excerpts on the Amazon.com page for this recording (including another version of Mival Guriashi).

My post about Doctor Atomic has got me thinking about this whole business of effectively setting poetry to music. This is something John Adams has always been exceptionally good at, even if I don’t agree with his approach to writing for the stage. But it’s certainly not a given that any good composer would be able to do this well.

Most of my career has focused on writing for the voice, whether it was for art songs, choral pieces or theatrical works, and so being able to analyze a text is something I’ve had to learn (and am still learning). I recently adjudicated a composition competition where many of the submissions were vocal pieces, and it was a big surprise how few of those composers seemed to know, or even care, much about how to handle a text.

Personally, I’ve always been drawn to theater, and that type of text setting comes to me fairly naturally. Of course, it helps that in that type of project, one normally has the ability to help shape the text according to the requirements of musical setting (or write it oneself, which I’ve been doing lately). But in the case of setting poetry, as is usually done with art songs and choral pieces, it’s been more of a struggle.

For starters, the process of choosing texts can be daunting. I’ve only once been given a specific poem to set (e.e. cummings’ “I think you God for most this Amazing”), and it was just pure dumb luck that it happened to be appropriate for musical setting. I’m very picky. For me, in order for a poem to be “settable”, it needs to have very short lines and very few ideas packed into a stanza, which disqualifies most poems. I think a lot of composers fail to recognize that most poetry stands on its own without music, and shouldn’t be monkeyed with. Poetry should be chosen that leaves space for the composer to enhance it through music — perhaps to draw out a hidden meaning. There needs to be room for interpretation.

Here’s an example of a wonderful poem by Emily Dickinson that’s short enough to allow a composer to take his or her time coloring each line. I used this poem in my chorus/orchestra piece Cycle of Friends, and used repetition to stretch the poem into a musical form (think Kyrie Eleison in a Mass).

Listen here:

Are Friends Delight or Pain?
Could Bounty but remain
Riches were good –

But if they only stay
Ampler to fly away
Riches are sad.

For composers wishing to improve their text analysis skills, a great resource was just published a few months ago. In Break, Blow, Burn Camille Paglia walks you through her own reading of 43 poems from various periods. (I’m still working my way through it.) The point isn’t whether you agree with her readings. If, like me, you haven’t had extensive training in this area, reading her explanations gives you a feel for what to look for when choosing and setting poetry. Unless you’re an English major, you probably need this book, or something like it.

Sidebar
I can’t help mentioning that Dr. Paglia was one of my teachers at the University of the Arts before her first book Sexual Personae made her a celebrity. All I can say is, yeah, she’s really like that.

Today I found myself thinking about one of Bartók’s lesser-known works, the “Twenty Seven Choruses”.

My friend M., over on Music in a Suburban Scene, has expressed disappointment in the Bartók String Quartets, making the valid point that a lot of relentless dissonance can be boring. In defending the Quartets, I found myself referring to the Choruses, because they reveal the same genius as the quartets, only in a more accessible environment.

While I agree with M. in general that dissonance for its own sake makes pretty uninteresting music, it must be said that the dissonance in the Quartets comes about through a very sensible system of voice leading and a sound harmonic framework. By building upon tiny melodic fragments, and simply letting the harmonies fall out naturally, Bartók enters an expressive sound world where it’s worth meeting him halfway. After a few listenings, you realize that it’s more about what he’s doing with his melodic material and rhythm than harmony. Yes, you’ll be disappointed if you’re insisting upon predictable resolutions and goose-bumpy chords (although, they’re there if you’re listening). If you can join Bartók in this place, you’ll find the Quartets very satisfying.

Anyone who is Bartók Quartet-curious might consider first getting to know the Twenty-seven Choruses, for women’s or children’s voices. These are in a much more lyrical style than most of his instrumental work, but display the same contrapuntal and expressive proclivities that make the Quartets great. These very attractive and entertaining little pieces, which use Hungarian folk texts but entirely original music, were written in the mid-Thirties, around the same time as Quartet #5.

Incidentally, these make great teaching pieces for choral conductors. Some of them are deceptively complicated, and an example of just about any conducting problem can be found here.