Composing Generously

I went to a concert about a year and a half go with over 15 pieces on it. Including Xenakis, Boulez, etc. and the 11th quartet of Shostakovitch happen to be in the middle. When the concert had ended with way too much music. The person picking up the chairs started whistling one of the themes from Shostakovitch. It appears that these were the only notes that counted. The only thing that one could call resonance. How is much new music anything but another disposable commodity if it is instantly forgotten?

This is great. I started becoming fascinated with literal repetition after I read Peter Kivy's essay called "The fine art of repetition." At the time, I was composing a short piano piece called Something to do with Trains. I was struggling with how to continue from a certain point, and for some reason I had it in my mind that repetition is a copout, etc. but I'm happy to say that I convinced myself to repeat most of the first section of the piece literally, capping it all off with a coda.

I just couldn't come up with a good excuse for varying the initial material. It sounded exactly how I wanted it to sound, and the entire time I was writing the first part of the piece (the part that is repeated), I was thinking that it is all going by so fast, and it really deserves a second hearing. So, in the end, I wrote the second hearing into the piece, and I'm so glad I did. It turned out to be one my personal favorite compositions.

KG replies: Sounds like a well-informed creative decision. I'd love to hear it.

UPDATE: I see now you provided a link to it. It's lovely. Reminds me of a piece I wrote in high school, though of course it's tremendously more polished. The repetition isn't at all over-obvious.

Compositional point taken. And I'm glad to see you critique Wuorinen's work rather than dismiss it. I would hardly expect you to become a Wuorinen fan, but of the criticisms you might have made about his work, I'm surprised that this is the one. His music has long been concerned with recapitulation and return, and a varied rate of exposition. (I don't know the particular piece you are reacting to, but since you reach beyond it immediately to issues of personality, I think it is fair to consider his corpus generally.) He is intensely concerned about form, comprehensibility and clarity. He writes different kinds of pieces, some of them making greater demands on attention than others, but he is quite willing to write pieces for the public sphere of a certain deliberate obviousness, so they can be absorbed properly in their setting -- his ballet/concerto Five and the opera Haroun are good examples. Some of his chamber works, my favorites being the Horn Trio, the 3rd String Quartet, and the Piano Quintet, have a sociable flow of ideas appropriate to the shared intimacy of the form.

As for the personal characterizations you make, look, he's a problematic artistic personality, and I wonder if you aren't blending your reactions to the rate of change of his material and his other qualities. If the beautiful details to which you allude struck you as emotionally warm in and of themselves, I doubt you'd make the same criticism of his principles of development.

I believe that if Wuorinen's art strikes one as cold and arrogant, and no more than that, then one has not penetrated far enough into it emotionally. My take is that it is music which shields a deep vulnerability and a deep love, that longs for warmth but out of a mixture of deformation, shyness, pride and nobility, will not stoop to openly obtain it. Listen to him as a kind of Cyrano, not a Bush, with the sort of emotional generosity the former (and not so much the latter!) deserves, and you may find that Wuorinen is more generous in return than you expect.

KG replies: I well imagine that I could obtain a score to that sonata and, upon close study, realize the truth of what you're saying. The fact that it would require that work is not a terrible thing - but it is comparatively ungenerous.

Thank you for being so generous as to leave us these thoughts. I have long read your blog, and before that other writings, but this is my absolute favorite. Thank you.

My "yes, but" quota for the day: yes, but why does that repetition have to be of surface-level material? Wuorinen repeats plenty of stuff, it's just not the sort of stuff or the sort of repetition that's going to whack the leading edge of your conscious attention. I'm not left feeling wanting by his music, and I think it's because of the generosity of conscientious craft.

I could negatively categorize this idea: bad minimalism might be stingy with repeating good material; bad atonal modernism insists, via repetition, on bringing to the explicit surface what's better left for implicit appeal to the subconscious. (Short version: not wasting one's time can also be a generous gesture.)

KG replies: 1. It doesn't have to be surface level, but it has to be noticeable. And it doesn't have to be repetition: as Schoenberg noted, it can be evenness, regularity, symmetry, subdivision, unity, relationship in rhythm and harmony, or logic.

2. The kinds of messages that I don't want to waste my time are the ones I really don't want to get anyway. If I'm enjoying a novel, it's always too short. Bruckner's symphonies are all too short. I love music, and I only want it to be short when it's not very good.

To continue the political analogy: Notice also that Obama is not afraid of repeating his signature phrases, e.g., "there is no red America, there is no blue America" and variations thereof. Clearly these strike a chord with his listeners, and Obama is loath to deny them the pleasure of hearing them again and again -- I think each of his major speeches (e.g., DNC in 2004, the Wright speech, DNC in 2008, the post-election speech) have included them in one form or another.

Getting back to music, to expand on your point about "register[ing] in the listener's conciousness", musically-uneducated listeners (like myself) need the repetition, otherwise we have no real entry point into the piece, no way to know what the composer considers the key musical ideas and what is (by contrast) simply context for those ideas.

KG replies: I see no reason to limit that logic to musically-uneducated listeners. I think it's all of us.