Endings.

Perhaps one of the most difficult aspects of composing is knowing when you’re finished with a particular piece. Glenn Gould once quipped that “…what all the great fugue writers had in common is that they knew when to stop.” It’s something that filmmakers certainly wrestle with too. I’ve often heard the expression that “…you never truly finish a film, you just run out of time, money, or both.” I don’t know to whom that quotation is originally attributed, but I suppose the same could be said of composing too, as well as any other creative endeavor.

There are different kinds of pressures that weigh upon endings. The purest, most idealized notion is that one writes until that particular thought is complete, and you’re only finished when you feel that your artistic vision has been realized. In other words, you’ll just ‘know’ it’s finished because the work takes on a life and extent of its own; there’s nothing left to write. An extreme example of this would be Stravinsky’s description that “…he was just the vessel through which Le Sacre passed.” This view seemingly renders the composer helpless—perhaps even captive—to some external imperative, in turn subordinating the decision-making process.

Another kind of pressure exists in the context and/or genre for which you’re writing. As mentioned before, both time and money play a role in determining when you literally have to stop and hand over the finished product. Unless you have some extraordinary influence on those who plan to release your project, you’re more likely to work backwards from a deadline, pushing the limit to which you can continue tinkering with an arrangement or a final mix.

Last, technological advancement can be both be a blessing and a curse. With the advent of low-cost, high-quality recording gear as well as the editing capabilities that follow with it, everyone is able to chip away at each riff, arrangement, mix, etc. until it’s “just right.” But this sense of limitless choice can sometimes lead to getting stuck in the mud. That is to say, when you can do another take, you probably will do another take—the self-auditing process of knowing when you’ve “got it” is much less influenced by time (yours, as well as others who are sitting in the control room with you waiting for you to finish) or money (every second that ticks by eats up a part of the budget). This is in contrast to the intense preparation and rehearsal that traditionally preceded a trip to the studio.

For me at least, endings have more to do with being finished whether that sense comes from exhausting all available options, to ‘knowing’ there’s nothing more left to say. Sometimes though, an ending can arrive as a kind of immovable force (or irresistible object, I’m not sure).

Emmett Chapman and The 2009 New Music Festival

Emmett Chapman — Keynote Speaker for the 2009 New Music Festival at the University of Central Missouri, March 2nd and 3rd.

         The University of Central Missouri will host the 2009 New Music Festival, March 2nd and 3rd in Warrensburg, Missouri. The theme of this year's festival is "Innovation." There will be a total of five concerts and two sessions of presentations, culminating in a keynote address and performance by Emmett Chapman, inventor of the Chapman Stick and world-renown performer. The keynote will be moderated by Sean Malone, Assistant Professor of Music Theory at UCMO.

         One can trace innovation throughout the history of music, but the period since the end of World War II has been extraordinary in the pace, breadth, and intensity of musical exploration and extension. The composers of the Darmstadt School and later experimentalists dedicated themselves to questioning all inherited assumptions about music, leading in turn to the development of reactionary aesthetics in some musicians toward the end of the 20th Century. The ongoing, intensifying impact of technological innovation on the practice and consumption of music has not only led to new forms of art but also has led to new understandings of older music. Examination of the last six decades with regard to musical innovation begets a rich, diverse field of inquiry for scholars.

There will be two sessions devoted to research, addressing questions such as:

• Following the unprecedented, exploratory nature of avant-garde composition in the 1950s and 1960s, is innovation truly possible today?
  
• What have innovations in musical instrument design since 1945 wrought in the field of music?
  
• How have musicians advanced, reacted to, embraced, or rejected innovation?
  
• What aesthetics have developed in support (or rejection) of innovation?
  
• What are the relationships in compositional strategies between innovation and tradition?
  
• How is the novelty of the present – in technique, design, and/or affect – balanced by continuity with the past?
  

For more information, visit: http://www.ucmo.edu/music/NMF/UCMNMFIndex.htm

For news and interviews, visit Overture online magazine: http://music.technicalprojects.org/

 

MyFaceSpaceBook

     Maintaining an online presence can be a time-consuming enterprise, because it not only involves establishing your own "official" site(s), but also an awareness of other sites that might appear as if I'm the one who created them. Such is the case with both MySpace and FaceBook.

     The Gordian Knot page on MySpace, as well as one for Sean Malone on FaceBook don't appear to falsely represent myself or GK intentionally. In fact, pages like this are often done by fans and it's flattering (and humbling) that anyone would go through the trouble.

     The unintended consequence, however, is that many of the people who request to be added as friends or post direct comments are friends, colleagues, and musicians I work with and they have no idea that I'm not involved with the sites. Or worse, people who have just surfed to the site leave a message thinking that it's a way to establish contact. That's when things can go awry, because it can seem as if I'm ignoring those requests, which in turn misrepresents me.

     The best I can do for now is periodically mention that I'm not involved with those sites to avoid any misunderstanding. Ultimately I'm grateful for the effort, but maintaining one's "identity" online only gets more complicated.

Blackwing • 602

Everyone has particular tastes; from clothing to food, guitar strings to hard drives, and everything else in between. Among my own particular tastes, which borders on obsession, is a pre-occupation with pencils. Well, I should say, finding the 'perfect' pencil. I can trace this interest back to an undergraduate class in orchestration, where my teacher required that all students use a #1 pencil. At that time, I had no idea that such a thing even existed, much less the difference between it and a #2 pencil.

I never liked mechanical pencils. I don't know why, but I think it has something to do with the impermanence of a woodcase pencil: no matter how much you like it, to use it means losing it. I never considered myself a collector — I'm not trying to build my own pencil museum. Instead, I'm always on the lookout for a pencil that has that certain something: just the right combination of richness, ease of effort, and aesthetic appeal.

Despite the thousands of hours I've spent, and am likely to continue spending, using Finale (fueling a different—but related—passion for typography and design), I am always transfixed when writing-out music by hand with a pencil. I'm not sure where it comes from, but I think it has something to do with the tactile experience. Without a doubt, the expression of music in hand-written notation is personal, and is the reason why I require most of my students to hand-write all of their part-writing work as well as composition projects while they're in progress. It's crucial for the modern music student to have facility with computer typesetting, but even more important is the ability to legibly—and correctly—notate music. 

Over the years, I've been shocked and concerned by the decline in students' music orthography, but it isn't really their fault or due to laziness. Instead, it's similar to the decline in spelling due to the sophistication of spell-checking. The defaults in packages such as Finale and Sibelius will almost always produce reasonable results, but the "correct" setting of music is only part of the process: readability and layout are as important, if not more important, in come cases. But, I'm getting off track here; back to pencils.

The Mirado Black Warrior has been a favorite for a long time, but for my taste, nothing beats the California Republic Palomino. I use grades B and HB for music, as well as their "Golden Bear" HB, which is their 'everyday' pencil.

As I mentioned before, I'm not a collector – not just of pencils, but of anything, really. At least, not of things that won't be used. People are often surprised to know that I only own two basses, a fretted and a fretless bass. Unless it's something I intend to use, it's rare for me to have something for the sake of having it. When you read the posts of serious pencil collectors, there is one particular pencil that always seems to come up. It's like when baseball card collectors speak of the Honus Wagner card, philatelists who dream about owning one of the 1918 "Inverted Jenny" stamps, or the 1933 "Double Eagle" for coin collectors. For pencil collectors, it is the Eberhard Faber Blackwing 602. 

I won't go into detail about the history of this celebrated, and no-longer-manufactured pencil, but among aficionados (I'm more of a fan than an aficionado), the Blackwing is, without hesitation, the - best - pencil - ever - made. They are hard to find, and become more rare by the day. They are obscenely expensive—not the amount per se, as much as it is the amount for a single woodcase pencil that will ultimately be whittled away. Because, you see, most people who seek 602s want them because they want to use them rather than put them in some creepy glass case with all the other rare pencils they might own.

At long last, I finally acquired one of these mythical pencils. They appear on eBay every once in a while, as did this one, and I took the plunge (see the attached picture). The problem is, I'm unwilling to sharpen it and use it—at least for the time being. Perhaps if I get another one I'd be willing to, but for now it will remain the only item I own simply for the sake of owning (until, or course, I can no longer resist the temptation).

Oh, and if you happen to know where I can get my hands on a few, drop me a line!

15%

When discussing progressive rock (and by extension, jazz, and classical music), one of the de facto topics—one either bemoaned or celebrated—is the small (but loyal) audience it draws. I count myself among those who celebrate this fact (with the exception of its financial implications) simply because it seems that there is a like-mindedness among devotees of challenging music. 

Part of the trouble with this topic is, that when someone (such as myself) uses a word like "challenging", it seems to intimate that those who don't enjoy prog are in some way either less intellectual, less keen, or less 'able' to appreciate it. Of course, this is utter nonsense. There is no quantitative  correlation between one's musical tastes and intellect; plenty of 'geniuses' have preferred light and entertaining music. Similarly, there are many instances of people—whose cognitive ability is so diminutive that they require help for their most basic human needs—that not only prefer, but can perform, highly complex and challenging music. So, I'll dispense with this part of the "argument", because I happen to think it's divisive at best, poisonous at worst, and ultimately, a non-question.

As a performer and composer who has, at best, passed only through the fringe of the orbit of the true "stars" of this genre every once in a while, the great comfort I take when issuing a new CD is that the audience who enjoys progressive rock — no matter how you want to define 'prog' — is always up to a 'challenge.' By that I mean, there seems to be a shared sense of wonder and excitement (the "like-mindedness" I mentioned earlier) for each new musical encounter, rather than the kind of cynical (no pun...) and baseless expectation that highly commercial music imposes upon its audience. And, even in saying that, I don't criticize popular music -- I can't begin to understand the kind of work and pressure involved in trying to forge a "star" in an over-saturated market. (Notice how the word "forge" could be taken in two very different senses). And there is a great deal of music that I deeply enjoy, which will never be accused of being "complicated."

At the end of the day, there's no guarantee that a prog fan will enjoy GK or Cynic, but what an incredible feeling it is to know that, for the most part, your work is being considered by open and eager minds who prefer a challenge, rather than a free ride.

I wrote this entry after having watched Bill Evans talk about how the audience for jazz is rather small. Evans—who a good friend of mine, jazz guitarist Bob Bunin, refers to him as being a "harmonic poet" rather than as simply being a "pianist"—is one of those musicians whose contributions remain impervious to fad or fashion; one of the few who have tapped into a sense of the eternal in all of us...so long as we're up to the challenge of trying to find it for ourselves.

Done.

Bass and Stick parts are finished, and except for a few vocal treatments, the new CD is currently being mixed. Similar to how Focus was recorded it was a tempest of creativity, though matched this time with sense of restraint. It's impossible to know how fans will react to any new recording; some will like it, some won't. But I'm hopeful that those who decide to buy the CD will spend some time with it, and expect that the music will reveal itself in layers rather than all at once. 

Sonically, harmonically, and structurally, this new CD is much more an inward journey; perhaps a reflection of the 15 years that have passed since Focus. But it's still very much a Cynic CD, and I'll be interested to see the reaction from this current generation...one that has never known an Internet-less world; often impatient and who require  relentless exposure and stimulus to maintain their attention.

With software innovation coming at such an imponderably fast rate, allowing anyone to create music without ever having learned an instrument, I wonder how long an interest for music made by instrument-playing musicians can last. It certainly won't disappear all together, but to an audience who craves instant gratification, I wonder if the time it takes to develop an instrumental voice will finally become "too long" for most. Or, perhaps things will level-off in due time and balance out. Regardless, I'm just glad that I had the opportunity to learn an instrument during a time that was less able to produce such realistic instrumental emulation, and where you were required to use your imagination rather than have everything available at your fingertips from the very beginning. I'm certainly glad to have this technology available today, I just hope that learning an instrument the old-fashioned way is something that won't become obsolete too soon.

Finding the Line

Just like the sessions for Focus, as well as most of the session work I've done, my goal has always been to try and "find" a part rather than "create" one. It's more than just a matter of semantics, especially when the music being presented to you has already gone through a great deal of arranging and consideration. For me to start suggesting things left and right at too late a stage can be overwhelming, and in some cases, inappropriate.

However, when you're working with such talented and creative people it's almost impossible to "turn off" those creative impulses -- at least ones that exceed the bass and Stick parts -- so it sometimes calls for an encouraging e-mail, or a "what would you think if we...?", or even more demonstrative "I'm sorry, but I hear that as E/G# there..."

At the end of the day we're really only adorning this amazing construct that has come together. An objective ear always helps, but the key to having some longevity in this business is in finding the appropriate times to keep your gaping maw shut.

The pics are from my ad hoc transcribing/composing station, here in my office at UCM. School's out now so it's a lot quieter and I can devote the next few weeks solely to the new CD.