Recontextualizing and atonality

Yet another blog entry based on a response I just made to a student comment...

A comment made about my previous blog ("Express yourself?") was: "At the same time, I don't think there needs to be an atonal section in everyones piece just to be creative and different. I think someone who has a completely tonal piece can set up unexpected passages just as well."

I agree completely!

I hope I haven’t been conveying a sense to the class that all pieces in the current project must veer into atonality, because I certainly don’t feel that way.

However, when I wrote my previous blog I was becoming concerned that, in the early stages of this project, some of the pieces I was hearing did not seem to be venturing very far beyond the cliché or idiom upon which they were based — If I were to listen to those pieces without knowing that they were intended as a recontextualization exercise, I wasn’t sure I would have been able to figure it out.

While it is clearly possible to write good music within a particular style or cliché, that was not the point of this project, so the possibility that some compositions might not have been heading in this direction concerned me.

One of the primary objectives in any of the composition assignments I give is to get students thinking about music in a way they might not otherwise do, AKA “thinking outside the box.” If a composition is not clearly distinguishable from the style or idiom upon which it is based, it probably means the student composer was not thinking sufficiently “outside the box” when writing it.

Which, to bring this back to the above student comment, is why I so often encourage/coerce(!) students to consider introducing atonality into their compositions. It is a way of recontextualizing a cliché or idiom, and it also compels the composer to make a personal discovery of a new harmonic language, something that the teacher in me feels is essential.

There are other ways, of course! But, quite frankly, I think that introducing atonality (or at least something other than diatonic or chromatic harmony) into a composition makes the task of recontextualization a lot easier than not doing so, in most cases.

Express yourself?

Possibly you saw the title of today's blog entry and were giddily anticipating reading about the Madonna song of the same name ("Don't go for second best baby, put your love to the test..."), and, if so, you may be disappointed to discover that it's just an entry on — you guessed it! — expressing yourself within the context of a composition course (like, say, Music 3100, for instance!). My apologies to all who may be feeling aggrieved over this, but perhaps you will find it an interesting topic anyway.

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Did you take this course with the expectation that it would afford you the opportunity to freely express yourself through music? Composition may be like no other music course in terms of this expectation, at least amongst some students.

We do not expect this freedom in performance-related courses, even if we can agree that performing the works of others can (and, IMO, must!) involve an element of personal expression, and we certainly don't have it in courses like 1st- and 2nd- year music theory, or renaissance and baroque counterpoint, where we learn (amongst other things) to compose "in the style of" other composers and periods.

The only other course I can think of where there might be a similar expectation of the freedom to express oneself is Improvisation, but even in that course there are conventions to be learned. Group improvisation involves listening to others and working collectively with what you hear more than it does unrestricted personal expression.

As I think you have all discovered, even composition courses involve some restrictions on expressive freedoms. Each of the project guidelines/descriptions in this course, for instance, set out goals and limits within which each student had to work.

There is still tremendous freedom within these limits, but they are there all the same. You couldn't write tonal music for the first project, for example (at least not if you wanted to do well in the course!). And yet, as I think we all heard during our class recital last Thursday, everybody managed to write very personal and individual music within the limits, which was great, and exactly how it should be!

The idea of compositional restrictions can come as something of a disappointment for some students, unfortunately, and perhaps understandably so, since composition, like writing stories, novels, or plays, or creating any art, tends to be regarded as an activity based on complete freedom of expression. What business do composition professors have restricting students' creative impulses? Who do they think they are, anyway???!

Well, here's the way I think of it:

If you were to write a short story and submit it to a magazine for publication, there would be an excellent chance that your story would be rejected. Famous writers sometimes keep boxes filled with rejection slips — it seems to go with the territory — as a reminder of how long they had to persevere before becoming successful.

But let's say you took your story to an experienced editor who told you in very specific terms what was wrong with it. Perhaps it was in need of plot development, or it had technical issues such as faulty grammar, overuse of the same words, misuse of other words, overuse of 'etc.,' etc. :p

What would you do?

1. Decide the editor is an idiot who doesn't know what s/he is talking about, and just keep sending the same story, unchanged, to as many journals as you can think of, in hopes that someone will one day see what a great story it is (after all, someone's got to win the lottery, right?).


2. Take the editor's advice to heart, and work at fixing the story.


3. All of the above (i.e., decide the editor's an idiot but take the advice to heart anyway!).


4. Berate yourself for allowing yourself to think that you could ever be a writer (believe me, most successful composers and writers have had thoughts along these lines at some point(s) in their lives!).

There are probably a few other options too, but hopefully, most of you would elect to go with option 2 on this!

Composing music is not a perfect analogy to story-writing, of course, but there are many parallels between them. Both, at their best, represent a mixture of conventions, creativity, and technique.

My goal as a composition teacher is to (a) encourage creativity, but, more importantly, (b) help you develop the technique to express that creativity.

And that is why every project has some restrictions!

Congratulations

On Thursday, 6 November, we had our first student composition concert, and all went well. More accurately, all went extremely well! I have already told you how impressed I was by the music you wrote and the professionalism with which it was performed, but don't just take it from me! Below are a couple of E-mails received from my colleagues that I thought you might like to read:

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On 8-Nov-08, at 10:27 AM, Rob Power wrote:

Hi Clark,

I just wanted to pass along my congratulations to you and the composition class for the outstanding concert on thursday night. These recitals are always fun and interesting, but this one was particularly creative. I also very much appreciated their professional attitude and support of one another. What a great bunch of composers and performers!

Please pass my thanks along to the group.

Rob

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On 7-Nov-08, at 11:18 AM, Paul Bendzsa wrote:

Hi Clark:

I was able to attend most of the first 1/2 of the concert last night. Fabulous! It was surprisingly fresh and and refreshing to hear so much originality.

Congratulations to all!

Paul

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Dr. Kristina Szutor and Dr. Scott Godin also relayed to me their enthusiastic enjoyment of the music they heard at the concert.

You did exceptionally well, so give yourselves a pat on the back (if you can reach; otherwise, ask someone else to perform this task for you)!

Using a musical style or gesture as a point of departure

Picking up on a issue raised in yesterday's class, perhaps the central challenge with in this project is the question of how to draw upon the source of your cliché (i.e., blues/disco/fiddle music, etc.) without making it sound like the actual genre upon which the music is based?

In my description for this project, I wrote:

"Your aim should be to write something that falls into the art music tradition. The question of what exactly constitutes the "art music tradition" is well worth considering and discussing, but for now just think of it as an attempt to create art through music."

and...

"Your aim in this, as in all our projects, will be to try to write music that fits somewhere in the continuum of contemporary art music."

Perhaps I should have written "the continuum of contemporary classical music," because "art music" may strike some as a rather pretentious term. What music ISN'T art music? (Rhetorical question; don't answer it!)

But all labels for contemporary classical music are problematic. Ask any composer how they respond when a stranger questions them about the kind of music they write, and chances are you will get a number of different answers, followed by an admission that we really don't know what to call the type of music we write, at least not when talking to people who don't normally hear this kind of music.

Possibly this is part of the reason this music isn't more mainstream!

In any event, the point I want to stress in today's post is this:

There is a fine line between a musical style or gesture and a work of art that recontextualizes that style or gesture, but it's a distinction that must be made by you in this project.

I am hoping that this will result in compositions that are clearly not in the style they are emulating, and just as clearly belonging to the admittedly-vague genre of contemporary classical music. If, for example, the 12-bar blues is the style/form you are recontextualizing, listeners should be able to hear the connection to the blues without thinking that it IS a blues composition.

Stravinsky wrote several compositions in this vein, such as the March from the Soldier's Tale, Ragtime for 11 Instruments, Piano-rag-music, Tango, and others.

I expect that everyone will come up with a different way of rising to this challenge, which is as it should be, but I hope no one will be offended if I express the concern that a work is sounding more like an emulation of a particular style than a contemporary classical work that uses a particular style or gesture as a point of departure.

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EDIT: And please keep this in mind as you compose (excerpted from the October 14 project description):

Form: Any form, including one of your own invention, as long as it it can be seen to be an organic, motivically-unified composition showing development of musical materials.

TIme keeps on slippin', slippin' …

This is the twenty-third year I have been teaching at the university level (5 yrs at U of T while doing my doctorate, 1 yr at MacMaster, and 17 yrs here), and the way time slips out of one's control EVERY SINGLE TERM never fails to amaze me.

One minute you're on top of things, next minute things are on top of you.

Sound familiar?

All of which is my way of explaining why my mostly-weekly blog entries have not been mostly weekly for the past three weeks. In fact, they have been entirely absent, ironically, coming very soon after my "Delinquent Bloggers" post!

My apologies for this. I'll try to get back into the regular blogging habit for the remainder of the term. And possibly beyond, who knows.

I'm catching up on my reading of student blogs as much as I can this week. I may not always leave a response, but I usually will, and I definitely read them all.

One of the secrets to regular blogging is to keep posts short, at least some of the time (it's less daunting that way), so I'll leave it at that. I'm cooking up a longer blog entry to follow this, hopefully today.