Recently, while fishing through folders on my computer looking at old “sketches” and unfinished things, I found a folder that said “string quartet”. I had no recollection of ever having worked on a string quartet since college. Inside the folder were two files “mvt1″ and “mvt4″, dated September 2003. The one called “mvt4″ was immediately recognized as something that ended up becoming a sketch for Shakespeare’s Merchant.

When I opened “mvt1″, I had absolutely no recollection of composing it, nor was I convinced that it was even mine. (It seemed better than anything I could come up with.) After some time pounding my brain, trying to imagine how anyone else’s unfinished material could end up on my computer (was it a student? a poltergeist?), I eventually became satisfied that it was mine.

How embarrassing it would be to take this material and develop it, only to discover later that it was created by someone else. Since starting to use Sibelius about six years ago, I almost never sketch on paper anymore. If these sketches were on paper, I would have immediately recognized my own handwriting, and there would have been no dilemma.

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”

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.

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

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.)

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.

• 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.

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!

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.mp3

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.

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.

Composers are notorious procrastinators, and I’m no exception. With a longer timeline I might have waited a few months before getting serious. I live a five minute walk from Golden Gate Park, so let’s face it, I’m at a disadvantage. I also have a very entertaining two-year-old. Plus, composing can be sheer torture, especially when starting a new piece, so why would I go down to my studio and put myself through that, when I could be at the playground? After all, the deadline is months away.

Not so in this case. For this project, knowing what the terms were, and having agreed to them, I had to make a point of becoming very (well, relatively) disciplined and well organized. I made a plan and set some milestones, making sure my daily schedule included a few hours on this piece. These things are key, even if you don’t stick to your plan, and even if many hours spent on the piece yield nothing. In this case I was all-business from the beginning, wasting very little time. I’m now about three weeks from my deadline, and I have this bizarre lack of anxiety about it, because the piece is just about where it should be at this stage. (A superstitious person would point out to me what a terrible idea this post is. I may have to delete it in about two weeks.)

My last project was a film score, the terms of which were basically such that I finish it when I finish it. It took about six months. (In my defense, the project started around the time my son was born.) The timeline for my earlier two commissions on this scale were on the order of nine months to a year. In both cases I took all the time I was given. Each piece hung over my head menacing me for the duration, and everything else was on hold. By accepting this project, short timeline and all, I will now have a new piece under my belt that wasn’t even in the pipeline a few months ago, and I won’t have to wait a year to hear it played by an orchestra. Then I can move on to the next thing.

There is one unknown: would I be able to pull this off if it weren’t for the existence of Sibelius (or Finale, or whatever)?