About the Composer

It had been years since I’ve looked at it, but I’ve had the vocal score of Sweeney Todd out for the past couple of weeks, having just seen the revival currently on at American Conservatory Theatre (extended for still one more week).

Years ago I used to spend hours with this score, so it’s kind of like an old friend. Right now I don’t really have time to play with it, so it’s just sitting there staring at me all day. Funny thing though: since I’ve had it out, I’ve completed two Eros at Breakfast songs, and I’m now closing in on a third. Normally I’m a hopeless slowpoke. I think on some level I know the score is watching me, and I don’t want to let it down.

Let’s call it “The Sweeney Effect”

I don’t normally ask to attend first rehearsals of my pieces, because a) I feel I would be a distraction, and b) they’re just really hard to listen to. As much slack as you cut for it being a first rehearsal, it’s just hard to be there while they’re sorting things out for the first time.

On the other hand, there’s nothing like that moment when you hear a tutti chord that doesn’t sound quite right, and before you can figure out what the problem is, you hear the conductor say, “can I have a little more from the seconds?”, and then they play it again and it’s perfect.

It’s becoming apparent to me now that I’m not as picky as some composers. This is based on the surprised reaction when I don’t have a strong opinion about some detail of bowing or articulation. Maybe I should be more exacting. Basically, all I care about is the overall effect of the piece. I’m R&D and the orchestra is Sales. Are they adequately selling the piece to the audience? That’s what really matters. I trust conductors with the nitty gritty stuff. (Someday I may learn not to, but not this month.)

Letter to Hungary receives its U.S. premiere on January 27th in the San Jose City Hall rotunda, thanks to conductor Emily Ray and the Mission Chamber Orchestra. Please consult their web site for details.

The sewer project has turned out to be a complete fiasco. It now appears that my studio is going to look like this for at least a couple more weeks.

Meanwhile, I’d been revising Letter To Hungary for its upcoming second performance, and the parts are just about due. I’ve been forced to work at my desk, where I do have Sibelius, but it’s not hooked up to any playback gear.

Yes, over the past four years or so, I’ve become spoiled by Sibelius playback. Fortunately, it’s mostly about tweaking dynamic markings and orchestration, so there’s really no need to play anything back, but today I did grapple with one very important passage that needed some relatively elaborate reworking. It was a struggle, but I got it done.

I’m not sure how I feel about this phenomenon with Sibelius. I was never one of those geniuses who writes everything in his head, but I did use to be able to accomplish a lot without being able to play back what I was writing. You know… back when it was pencil and paper. In cases where I needed to hear how harmonies progressed, I would plonk it out on the piano. But here’s the thing: I’m not a good pianist, and I rarely write for piano. Sibelius playback has saved me countless hours trying to work out composition problems by playing back exactly what’s on the page instead of the best my fingers can accomplish.

If my inner hearing has suffered, other aspects of composing have improved. Writing for strings, for example, was enhanced I think because Sibelius lets me think orchestrally. Also, I work much more quickly now than ever. I’ve learned to get my ideas down without agonizing over whether they’ll work. I play back frequently and do trial and error and triage until the problems are solved.

As for my revisions, I’m mostly satisfied. I had shown the piece to my former teacher (thanks, C.S.!), who had some wonderful suggestions. One in particular I simply can’t pull off under the current circumstances, which I regret.

After this, I’m just holding off on composing until I get my room back. I guess I’ll catch up on paperwork

Just came down from doing a bit of bedtime reading to my son. Tonight’s selection was a little on the long side compared to the usual fare, so found myself looking for ways to make it more interesting for myself as well as my son.

I thought it would be fun to see if I could make good decisions on the fly about which words to emphasize, where and for how long to pause, what to do with pitch and tone, etc. Eventually, I realized what it was I was doing:

Acting.

Not that I was any good at it. I’ve never acted before; in fact, ever since school I’ve gone to great lengths to avoid any form of public speaking. But having been involved with theater for many years, the craft of acting is something I’ve thought about a lot, and I admire people who do it well. It’s harder than most people think.

Meanwhile, during all this I was also thinking about how much fun it would be to do a little semi-staged duet based on this particular book. My “acting” choices were merging into composition choices.

Here’s the thing: to write good dramatic music you need to use the same bone in your head that actors use when they’re doing what they do. Especially in opera, where the performer doesn’t have a lot of room for interpretation, you’re the one making the acting choices.

In a straight play, an actor can trial-and-error dozens of different line readings until he or she finds the “right” one. It can even change from night to night. But, if it’s sung, the composer has already made that decision for the actor, and there usually isn’t much latitude for reinterpretation.

(Hopefully, the composer has given it some thought.)

While I wait for some red tape to clear around one project, I’ve decided to go ahead with another one (and see how disciplined I can be about finishing it quickly). Now is the time for the song cycle I’ve had in the pipeline for a while now.

Among the texts used in my 1996 chorus/orchestra piece Cycle of Friends are translations by Innes Herdan of two Chinese poems from the Tang era. Despite their being translations, they are probably the most satisfying poems I’ve ever worked with. So, I’ve decided to return to her book 300 T’ang Poems to see what grabs me for a new song cycle.

Now, setting poetry in translation raises some interesting questions to begin with. How familiar do you have to be with the original language? How much do you need to know about the given language’s literary tradition? Is it necessary to “get” each and every allusion in the poem? Etcetera.

Each composer will have his or her own set of answers for those questions, but should not begin composing without asking them. I think it is helpful to find out what one can about the traditions and conventions that the poem might be based on. However, in the end, I’m setting a poem in English, and it’s the English rhythm and the choice of English words that matters. If it’s a faithful translation, then the overall effect desired by the original poet will still inform the composition.

I enjoy Mrs. Herdan’s translations, because she is a wonderful poet in her own right, and adds that gift to her understanding of the original Chinese. Although I will find out what I can about the significance of various images in the poems, which will of course inform the resulting music, I’m also likely to respond to them as original poetry, and interpret them in my own way.

The issue of translating Chinese poetry is particularly delicate. The written language consists of characters representing whole words or ideas, as opposed to letters representing phonemes or syllables. Also, it is a very terse, elliptical language with no articles, genders, cases, tenses or other fussy grammatical concerns, which leaves the translator a lot of latitude to be creative.

Example
Here’s a literal translation of four five-character lines from a poem by Du Fu:

Fragrant mist cloud dressed hair wet
Clear brightness jade arm cold
What time lean on empty curtain
Pair shine tears trace dry

Here’s how Innes Herdan translated those lines:

In the sweet mists her cloud-like hair is damp;
In the clear shining her jade-white arms are cold.
When shall we two lean beside the filmy curtain
With moonlight on us both and the tear-stains dry?

Many of these Tang-era poems take rigid forms involving either five characters or seven characters per line. I imagine they’re quite musical to listen to in the original language. (In fact, the Chinese for “recite”, as in poetry, is literally “chant”.) It would be a tall order to even approximate that in translation, and I doubt anyone has done it successfully. Whether the translation will also “sing” just depends on the translator.

Innes Herdan keeps her lines short with “grammar words” at a minimum. The stresses in the English line correspond to the characters in the Chinese line. For example, the character “house” in the Chinese might become “in my house” in English, with emphasis on the word “house”. But the real magic is in the actual choice of words, and the occasional liberties that are taken. My favorite example in the lines quoted above is Mrs. Herdan’s use of the word “filmy”, of which there is no apparent sign in the original Chinese.

As for my piece, I’ve zeroed in on several poems by Du Fu (712�770), which I’ve organized in rather an interesting way. More about that will be posted here in the future.

While I wait for some information from an expert on a “real” post in the works. I’ll share some highlights from the period during my little break from blogging.

• For some reason, I’ve been seeking out and enjoying all kinds of folk music, including what’s known as “folk rock”. I guess I’m craving purity. Something I never thought I’d say in a million years: I like Bob Dylan.
• I have been on a roller coaster ride surrounding the possibility of my working on a very exciting project. Details will appear in a future post if the outcome is positive.
• My ability to read Yiddish has improved, but it will now all go out the window, because suddenly I want to learn Finnish. (This is a 20-year-old pattern with me.)
• Don’t even get me started on foreign names for various rodents
• I have finished a small portion of a musical theater piece, which is the only way I can get permission to use this particular source material. As I lose hair, I gain humility.
• My recent piece Letter to Hungary has been programmed by the Mission Chamber Orchestra in San Jose for next January (details coming).
• Within a matter of a few days, all of the following items broke
  • Sunglasses
  • Shoes
  • Internet connection
  • VOIP phone service
  • Drip coffee maker. (I’m now one of those annoying, self-righteous presspot people.)
• I “failed to appear” for jury duty. (No contest; I just plain forgot.) And now I must go brave San Francisco’s miserable public transportation system and the even more miserable “Hall of Justice”, and make it right.

With about a week left before I must deliver the score and parts of Letter To Hungary, this is probably my last post for the month of October.

A few days ago, I reached the ending of the piece. All along it had been a toss-up whether it would be an enigmatic tear-jerker ending or one of those really entertaining crowd-pleasing endings. I’ve decided to with the latter, because it’s appropriate here, and off the top of my head, I don’t think I’ve ever done a really fun ending before.

So, now it’s down to closing a few gaps, polishing and mundane layout stuff. If it weren’t for Sibelius 4, I’d now be slaving over the task generating and editing parts. Yay Sibelius 4! Unless I just can’t resist, the next post here will be program notes, probably at the beginning of November. The performance is November 18th in Budapest. (details…)

Wish me luck!

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.

It’s amazing what you can accomplish when you’re under the gun. I’ve always said that I prefer to work on projects where there’s a concrete deadline, and I’m sure most composers feel this way. But, there are deadlines, and there are deadlines. Because of the way concerts are scheduled, at least in the U.S., a typical timeline for an orchestral commission is roughly a year, maybe nine months or so. A film score project can be as little as a month or six weeks (or less? I’m not really sure.)

As it happens, my current project is not for an American orchestra, but a European one. Because concerts aren’t necessarily scheduled so far in advance there, the orchestra I’m working with had the flexibility to put together a very interesting program in very little time. I was contacted at the end of July about writing this 15-minute piece that will go up in the middle of November. At first it seemed like an untenably tight timeline, but this opportunity is special for both personal and professional reasons, and turning it down was simply out of the question.

Here’s what I’ve learned: tight deadline good; “comfortable” deadline bad. (more…)

Sometimes it is necessary to discard perfectly good material. The piece grows, the goalpost moves around, and not every good idea survives. This is something I learned gradually, even after I was a student. Sometimes it’s just a held bass note that makes sense in a piano sketch, but turns out to just be mud when you orchestrate it. Sometimes it’s the original idea that an entire piece was supposed to be based on.

I’ve had to do this frequently in the past, and the piece has always come out better for it. It’s particularly common in musical theater, and I’ve often had to fight over this with collaborators who find it hard to let go.

In my earlier description of Letter To Hungary, I described it as a four-movement piece, but since then I’ve been working toward building one large movement. One reason for thinking of discrete movements was my concern that my material was not well enough unified to hold together as one movement. Meanwhile, most of my material is now fleshed out enough that I can see it as one movement, but there will have to be a sacrifice.

The second movement referred to in that earlier post, the one described as “playful and macabre” and reminding me of Bernard Herrmann, needs to be taken out of the game, unfortunately. It just doesn’t fit into the emotional narrative that has evolved. I do like it, though, so I’ll probably hang on to it, and perhaps rework it for the violin sonata that I put aside for this project. I’m still not ruling out dividing the piece into movements, but I’ll still be leaving this material out of the piece.