{"id":1188,"date":"2017-12-11T14:38:14","date_gmt":"2017-12-11T19:38:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/?p=1188"},"modified":"2017-12-14T09:50:33","modified_gmt":"2017-12-14T14:50:33","slug":"iyer-on-iyer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/2017\/12\/iyer-on-iyer.html","title":{"rendered":"Iyer on Iyer"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/Iyer_Cole_Blindspot_2017-18_01_Wcrop-1-1.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1194 alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/Iyer_Cole_Blindspot_2017-18_01_Wcrop-1-1-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/Iyer_Cole_Blindspot_2017-18_01_Wcrop-1-1-300x200.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/Iyer_Cole_Blindspot_2017-18_01_Wcrop-1-1-768x512.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/Iyer_Cole_Blindspot_2017-18_01_Wcrop-1-1-1024x683.jpg 1024w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a>Vijay Iyer\u2019s music occupies a fascinating terrain.\u00a0 It\u2019s a world that emanates from a lifetime of improvisation and a multilayered approach to the passage of time.\u00a0 It\u2019s also music that reflects its creator\u2019s quiet defiance of unexamined assumptions of the Western Classical tradition.<\/p>\n<p>Every fall, our Composition Department chooses a single living composer to focus on, studying several scores, and sharing our discoveries. \u00a0This term, our students studied four of Iyer\u2019s compositions:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><em>Mutations I-X<\/em> for string quartet, piano and electronics (2005)<\/li>\n<li><em>Mozart Effects<\/em> for string quartet (2011)<\/li>\n<li><em>Radhe, Radhe<\/em>, a film score (2014)<\/li>\n<li><em>Trouble<\/em> for violin and chamber orchestra (2017)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>We all gathered this past week to discuss the works, then met with the composer online to discuss them and his music in general.<\/p>\n<h3 style=\"text-align: center;\"><em>the artist as seeker, a person who is always trying to look beyond his immediate horizon<\/em><\/h3>\n<p>When I asked him, at the outset of our discussion, to tell us about his life in music, the path that brought him to where he is today, he hesitated, as though concerned that the question was going to take us down a road where biography neatly explains art.\u00a0 The solution he found for this challenge was elegant and effective: he gave us a narrative that connected each phase of his life to a kind of exploration, so that all the artistic choices he has made through the years would connect to a central theme: the artist as seeker, a person who is always trying to look beyond his immediate horizon.<\/p>\n<p><em>Mutations I-X<\/em> is an immense composition that encapsulates many of Iyer\u2019s strengths and concerns.\u00a0 As the title indicates, the piece is a set of etudes on change, or mutability.\u00a0 Some of the mutations are clearly notated, others are requested, as in \u201crepeat and fade with mutations.\u201d\u00a0 When asked how he gets Classically trained string players to improvise, Iyer reminded us that his life as a musician had begun as a Suzuki violinist, a practice that trains precision but not creativity.\u00a0 As a result, he said, \u201cI can\u2019t improvise on violin, it just doesn\u2019t happen,\u201d whereas on piano, which he taught himself, improvisation comes very naturally, \u201cso I understand where these string players are coming from.\u201d\u00a0 His strategy is to get rid of the \u201ci\u201d word and just talk about ideas and different ways they can be used.\u00a0 He came up with a \u201cgesture pallete\u201d for <em>Mutations<\/em>, a page of musical ideas that are used throughout the piece as starting points for various improvisatory passages.\u00a0 By the end of the recording session, they had arrived at a place where they could take the entire composition as a gesture palette, a basis for improvisation.<\/p>\n<h3 style=\"text-align: center;\"><em>some kinds of trouble \u2013 trouble in the service of justice \u2013 are good<\/em><\/h3>\n<p>The most recent piece we looked at was <em>Trouble<\/em>, completed just this past spring. \u00a0The title refers to Congressman John Lewis\u2019 observation that some kinds of trouble \u2013 trouble in the service of justice \u2013 are good. A question was raised about the wrenching music of the third movement, which is dedicated to Vincent Chin, a Chinese-American factory worker who was beaten to death in Detroit in 1982.\u00a0 Apparently other factory workers thought Chin was Japanese and thought that Japan was stealing jobs from Americans, and decided that beating up this guy that they thought was Japanese was an appropriate action to take \u2013 as Iyer said, a double tragedy.<\/p>\n<p>At this point in our session, the composer became, if possible, even more thoughtful, reflecting on the problem of linking biography and art.\u00a0 He described working with dyads in a thread of double-stops in the violin, and how his thoughts were completely focused on the technical challenges involved, both compositionally and instrumentally.\u00a0 Nonetheless, when the music was complete, he couldn\u2019t deny there was an emotional power to the result that seemed to come from somewhere beyond his focus.<\/p>\n<p>In conclusion, we discussed the years after Iyer departed from academia, a world that has left both a lasting, positive imprint on him and given him something to push against in his search for artistic value.\u00a0 This last part of the discussion was, I believe, very helpful for our students, who all have to make serious choices and decisions about where they are going as artists, some of them as soon as next spring.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Vijay Iyer\u2019s music occupies a fascinating terrain.\u00a0 It\u2019s a world that emanates from a lifetime of improvisation and a multilayered approach to the passage of time.\u00a0 It\u2019s also music that reflects its creator\u2019s quiet defiance of unexamined assumptions of the Western Classical tradition. Every fall, our Composition Department chooses a single living composer to focus [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1190,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1188","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uncategorized","8":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1188","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1188"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1188\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1200,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1188\/revisions\/1200"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1190"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1188"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1188"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1188"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}