Photo By John Sutton
My very short story called “Feathered” is now published on the EveryPeople Workshop’s website, click here to read it. The story was commissioned as a part of the Very Short Stories series curated by John Sutton. Every story is less than one hundred words!
EveryPeople is a great arts and music group based in Chicago. If you’d like to know more you can read my article on this group on New Music Box.
Yes, this is a picture of the famous Surprised Kitty from youtube. I’ve put it into this post because I decided not to use the second movement that I wrote about in my last post. Unlike the kitty, I’m not really too surprised by this. It is a good reminder about the nature of the creative process, or at least what passes as my version of it.
When talking with other composers or artist types about their process in creating a work, I usually say that I “try to be ready to throw anything away, even if its painful to do so.” But today I wondered for the first time if I had developed this attitude before or after I had actually thrown away a day’s work. I think it was probably the latter, and I think it was probably I had thrown away many days of work. So, what seems like a bedrock philosophy is actually something closer to a rationalization, or perhaps a coping mechanism. I’ve heard that neuro-scientists have found that we are naturally programmed to forget the details of the most painful moments of human existence, like childbirth or broken bones or extreme trauma. So, perhaps my “philosophy” of composition is actually just a smoothing over of painful truths, a hushing of all the little unfinished pieces that cry out from my notebooks.
Okay, enough drama. I understand why most artists won’t talk about a work until its finished. No one wants to expose the uncertainty involved in the creative process because it can really contrast with the image of a confident performer on stage who has perfected his or her material, and a composer who knew all along just what he was doing. However, I feel that this is a worthwhile way to approach this blogging project. It will be interesting, for me at least, to look back and see the things I usually forget about my composition process and, hopefully learn a thing or two.
My next post will most likely occur after I’ve mostly finished the second movement. I think it will be worth doing an actual count of the different false starts of this movement that I wrote, then counting all the ideas that actually found their way into the finished version. I’m expecting to find that maybe %10 of the ideas I’ve generated so far will actually end up in the finished piece, and that wouldn’t be so bad. I’d be curious to know how other composers compare in this excercise, but then if I found out it might actually be too embarrassing. I’m sure that J.S. Bach, the Chuck Norris of the composition world, most likely had a 100% “conversion rate” as I’ll call it. I’ll keep you posted on that.
Tomorrow I’m off to the Chamber Music America conference where I will attempt to meet people all day long for four days straight. I have a hard time with events like this, but usually once I get going it works out well and I’m glad they’ve forgotten whatever it was I said to start the conversation. I imagine this conference will be like going on a first date every 5 minutes for four days. In all seriousness, I am very excited for the conference. There will be lots of people there and I’m ready to be inspired. Just as I’m now really getting into serious work with writing the commission, I’m also getting into the serious part of booking the performances for the ensemble. This is easily my least favorite part of the process, as so few presenters have been interested in what I’m doing, but when I find the ones who are even the least bit interested, it can actually be very fun to work with them. Hopefully I will meet one or two people who might be interested in the final work.
My apologies for the silence of this blog for the last couple weeks. I’ve been spending some glorious days very involved with composing and haven’t wanted to take time to write words, but I must press on with this blog, I feel the recording of this process will be interesting later on, but only if I actually write some posts! In the last two days I’ve been working on an essay about my experience performing the music of Christian Wolff with the composer and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. The experience was unforgettable, and I hope the essay will help to explain. No scoreboard this time, but I promise, next time!
Look at all them notes!
Yes folks, I feel that I’ve made a breakthrough of sorts. After writing several versions of a second movement, I finally finished one of them and feel very good that it moves the piece in a good direction. At this point I’ve settled more or less on a “theme” that I’ll use throughout the whole piece. It is a short melodic statement making use of a lot of perfect fourths and fifths. It also sticks pretty much in a diatonic field, meaning that it is pretty firmly in a key, though it has no third so it could go some different directions: minor, major, etc. I’ve been creating harmony by stacking different transpositions on top of each other, but usually the main idea of each piece comes from some sort of rhythmic or textural feeling, and then I work out the shape of the piece from there.
That was all fairly technical (even though it could be much worse!) and really the biggest deal is just that I feel like I’ve built up enough material, be they false starts, wasted time or pieces that will turn into something later, that I feel pretty confident about the direction I’ve taken so far. After this process of accumulation goes on for a while, I feel like I know the possibilities of what I’m working with, and I couldn’t have felt good about anything I had just written without any thought of the finished product for a couple weeks. At the top of the post is a picture of what I did today, or part of it anyway. My eraser also makes an appearance.
Ah, confidence. Its nice, but I could throw all of this out tomorrow. I don’t think I will, but I need to be open to the possibility. I’m off to play with Rana Santacruz’s band at Jalopy Theatre in Brooklyn.
The end of this post takes the form of a self-interview.
Me: So, about how many notes did you write today?
Also Me: Well, I think probably about 150. But, there is a lot of improvisation in there. And you know what that means.
Me: Could you be more specific?
Me Again: Oh you know, as soon as a musician sees empty space on the page its like someone gave him a bag full of bannanas!
Me: Bannanas?
Same Guy: Yes. You know what they say: if you give a monkey a bannana….
Me: Isn’t a cookie?
You know the drill: Whatever. It means I probably wrote as many notes as monkeys could have written if they were promised a bag of bannanas.
Me: Oh, I see.
Yup: Yeah. Its a lot. It was a saxophone solo.
Me: You probably could have just said that.
Mm-Hmmm: That would have been insulting to certain parties.
Me: Understood.
Clearly I won against music today:
Detrick: 1
Music: 0
One of these days I will get a little ticker thing to go on the homepage to keep track of the score. Until then you’ll have to go back and read the rest of the blog. I think I’m winning, but no guarantees!
Title: Performing with Rana Santacruz
Location: Jalopy Theatre, Red Hook, Brooklyn.
Link out: Click here
Description: Rana Santacruz
Thursday, December 15
Show starts at 10:30
$10 cover
About Rana Santacruz
Santacruz is a Mexican musician who lives in Brooklyn, NY. His music has been called “Mexican Bluegrass” or “Irish Mariachi” with a dose of rock and alternative. His sound starts in Ireland, runs through Appalachia, swings through New Orleans, and careens across most of Mexico. The acoustic instrumentation includes cajon, upright bass, accordion, guitar, banjo, jarana, violin and trumpet. He cites his main influences as The Pogues, Tom Waits, Chavela Vargas, Agustin Lara, son jarocho, tambora, and folk music in general. Lyrically, his songs tell short tales about broken hearts, sailors, dogs, turkeys, and farewells. He performs them frequently with his “Bluegrass Mariachi Band” at clubs in downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn. Rana Santacruz just finished recording his first solo CD “Chicavasco”. The album was produced by Santacruz and Alex Venguer who has also worked with Aretha Franklin, Philip Glass, Sufjan Stevens, Billy Joel and Phil Collins among others. Chicavasco will be released nationally early 2010.
Start Time: 20:00
Date: 2011-12-15
Today I did not write many notes. A lot of other business concerns came up this week that found me editing a recording from AnyWhen Ensemble’s Awake, Awake recording session to submit to a contest, taking care of some booking inquiries and other writing responsibilities, including a new project for the Festival of New Trumpet Music that will hopefully come into being this spring. So, I only had about an hour to write, and I found myself using most of that time just to reacquaint myself with the first part of a piece that I had written in my last session. When I opened up my book of paper, you know, the big one that I keep rambling on about, I looked at what I wrote last time and I just didn’t really remember the exciting part of why I had written it. So, I played through it several times, started working on something else, then came back to it, then my alarm went off. C’est la vie. (That’s French for “sometimes you just lose at music.” I believe Jean Baptiste Lully was the first composer ever to use the term, as he was working on yet another commission from Louis XIV and French for “the dog ate it” just wasn’t coming to him.)
Then I had to stop to write a blog entry. Clearly today’s score is:
Detrick: 0
Music: 1
I’m off tonight to a job-seeker’s networking event where I will hopefully help my eventual transition into an adult job. I have shaved, showered and tucked in my shirt, I think I’m ready.
Wally, my trumpet and dinner. Did some practicing while waiting for the water to boil to cook my pasta for dinner. Everybody does this right?
I’m back from a really refreshing trip to Oregon where, incidentally, I got married. This isn’t a blog about me so much as it is about the music, so I won’t really go into it, though there is a lot I could say. It was a beautiful, memorable time, and beyond that you’ll have to ask me about it if you want to know more!
I’ve gotten back into working on the piece as soon as I was caught up on email and other business. Coming home to over 100 emails in your inbox gives a guy a certain feeling. Its nice to hear back from people, but….ugh.
As it stands now, the piece has a first movement pretty much done and a second (or perhaps not second) movement about halfway done. I’ve been building up my composition muscles with the aid of an alarm on my watch. I generally the set alarm for an hour (or less if I’m feeling particularly jumpy or am short on time.) and then work for that hour and then take a break. Breaks generally include emails, stretching, tea or coffee making, exercise (when I’m feeling especially ambitious. I notice a positive difference in my mental and physical state when I do, but then, we all don’t need to be told this right? My gym teachers were all so smart!) and often some serious cat petting. This technique helps to give some structure to an otherwise daunting day: Let’s say you have four hours to work, so if you start in planning on going the whole four hours basically in the same direction I find that I get bogged down and distracted pretty easily. An hour is a manageable time that I’m not completely drained by, but also isn’t quite enough time to make a serious dent in a piece, so it is helpful in encouraging myself to put another hour on the clock and going for it.
Another thing I’ve been doing is beginning every session by listening to another composer’s music that I admire. Lately I’ve been gravitating very heavily towards Stravinsky, especially his Symponies of Wind Instruments. This is a beautiful and complex work, worth listening to over and over again. The way he brings in a texture, and then switches to another, is so inventive and communicative. Stravinsky is so interested in his material, in the texture itself. The piece is a succession of these textures, focusing on just a few ideas, and just doing them a bit different each time. There is no sense of narrative and no sense of lyricism, just an intense interest in the idea of working through these textures in a new way each time.
Other recent inspirational sources: Merce Cunningham, Bach, Bartok and Dave Douglas’ new Bad Mango album with So Percussion. I’m sure little bits of many of these sources will make an appearance in my piece. Things cycle in and out of my awareness as my life changes, or just my mood, and I think this same principle is at work in my writing. I come back to a piece on a later day and the way I write changes, so the piece comes out a bit different.
As I was looking over a finished piece I wrote for saxophonist Kim Reece, (more on this later!) I noticed it had slight (and sometime not-so-slight) differences in how I approached the main idea of the piece in each of the sections. I wrote basically the same section many times, going a bit further each time and adding some other complications here and there, but I noticed that each section had some things in common, but really was quite different from the section before, even though I tried to write fairly consistently in terms of technique. This doesn’t bother me at all now, but it did when I first noticed it.
I suppose it bothered me because I, like most people, assume that I know should know everything there is to know about a piece that I wrote. The truth is that I don’t. Perhaps I’m just a sloppy composer. I won’t argue too hard against that. I prefer to just let the piece happen rather than trying to follow a prescribed plan, even when I’ve spent a lot of time developing that plan or the practice of making plans in general, i.e. 6 years of music school. So, I try to approach every piece from as fresh a perspective as possible, and surprisingly, it takes practice.
Paul Motian, the great jazz drummer who passed today, sounded in his later years like a musician who was trying to make it sound like every time he played the drums was the first time. Perhaps that is what I’m trying to do, let’s not talk about it too much though, we might ruin it!
Today went well, I wrote many notes on my paper. I think that today I clearly won against music.
Detrick: 1
Music: 0
Happy November. Instead of going to the piano today, I went straight to the coffee. After that I went to the piano. Then I started making pencil marks on my paper. I remember I told you about the big paper that I accidentally ordered from the internet, or at least the part of the internet that traffics in manuscript paper. So this paper is very big. I’m starting to like it. The smaller staves force me to write smaller notes. So, I will write a big piece with small notes. I promised I would find the quote from poet Robert Creeley about the paper he uses. Here is is, from a transcribed conversation with Allen Ginsburg:
“When I first met William Carlos Williams, I remember he took me upstairs to show me where the bathroom was, and as we went by – I think the bedroom – he showed me the desk that had been in his office when he was in active practice; and he showed me his typewriter, which was a large old office machine, and the way it fitted under the desk; and he showed me the prescription pads he used to use. And again, Allen and I were thinking that the qualification of the size of the paper, for example, will often have an effect on what you’re writing, or whether you are using a pencil or a pen.” (From Contexts of Poetry: Interviews 1961-71, edited by Donald Allen.)
This is book is excellent, you can get it from Amazon. This is just an introduction of the idea. Creeley goes on to talk about minute details, like the sponginess of his favorite brand of typing paper, among other things. So, I’ve made a partial list of the contents of my studio at this minute:
Et cetera. I think that this particular conversation was the beginning of my interest in what people actually do and how they solve all the inherent issues of practicing their craft: how do you start? how do you finish? how do you keep going? There is no end to where this line questions can go, which is why it’s so interesting. Less interesting, to me anyway, are questions about the deeper meaning of art. These questions are very subjective, lead either to very esoteric or very personal answers that are therefore meaningless to most people, even though they can make for fun reading. Most importantly, we do what we do because its fun. Making money doing it is secondary judging from the bank accounts of most artists. (Here’s my platform: I wish more people could do things purely because they like to do them, and I’m against things that chain people up so they can’t. Detrick for president.)
That last part was beside the point. Anyway, the process itself is fun, mostly because its unpredictable and therefore takes effort to bring it to completion, and all the little stopping-offs for late night coffee on the highway of the creative process are what’s interesting to me, and what I will attempt to document here. To that end: I continued what I feel will become the first piece of the suite, I had a brief idea for the next piece, but it didn’t really stand up to further pounding on the piano, meaning that when I started to improvise with what I thought I heard, it didn’t sound quite as interesting as I thought. But, I did write 2 treble clefs and 2 bass clefs on the page, so that’s something. The score board:
Music: 1
Detrick: 1 (A for effort! Several noises were documented on my large score paper, so this is a success.)
This blog will be silent for about 1.5 weeks while I’m away from my computer. I know you’ll be fine without me.
Instead of going for the trumpet today, I went straight to the piano. As I was saying before, I’m working on a piece that is all tied together with a single theme. This can be a tough thing to do as it requires a discipline over a long period of time that, honestly, is a challenge for me. I’ve noticed over the years that I have trouble with very focused structures like this. Perhaps I will finally win the “long form” contest.
So, today I tried to just write a piece, and if I end up liking it, then I’ll keep it and just call something from the piece “the one theme to rule them all” rather than trying to come up with this magic sequence of noises before I really know what the piece is going to sound like. I made some progress on a first piece for the suite, so we’ll see if I keep all of it and pull something out of it that will be useful in the next piece.
On another note, I was ordering more of my favorite manuscript paper, and it turns out that I ordered the big size, about 12×18″, with 18 staves on each page. This sort of thing is really great from writing large ensemble music, but for my quintet its a bit on the large side. But then I remembered one of my favorite poets, Robert Creeley, who was talking about his writing process. He said that when he was writing a novel, as opposed to his short poems that he’s known for, he had to switch to a different size paper. I’ll dig up the quote later, but it made me feel that perhaps I was destined to buy big paper so I can write a bigger piece! I don’t know, I guess it makes sense to me.
Off to rehearsal with James Ilgenfritz for his “The Ticket that Exploded” at the Issue Project Room.
Began actually working on this piece in earnest, after thinking about it for several months. I decided to start improvising with some themes and played trumpet for about an hour, sometimes going to the piano and sometimes opening the refrigerator and looking inside for something, but mostly playing things on the trumpet. Read More…
This a sweet mechanical drafting pencil that I use. It's sweet.
Welcome to the first post of this blogging project.
As you may or may not know already, I was the very proud and very surprised recipient of a Chamber Music America New Jazz Works Grant in 2011. This is a great program which includes as its centerpiece a commission for a new, large-scale work for a small jazz group. When I first found out about the NJW grant I knew that it was perfect for my group. The grant supports an ensemble that has worked together with the same core musicians for at least two years, and AnyWhen Ensemble fits this bill perfectly. We had only been together a year at that point, so I waited until the next year, then I applied. It was my first application, so I feel very lucky to have been chosen as a recipient on my first go-round, though it certainly wasn’t my first application to a grant. I’ve gotten plenty of rejection letters, and will continue to get them. This was the first big one that I had gotten. Hopefully I’ll get more, but I’m not going to hold my breath. Composing for money is nice and a great honor in this case, but I’ve composed for free before and won’t hesitate to do it again. Read More…