Portraits of a Composition Studio: Faces that only an Ardent Postmodernist could Love

Episode the First

           Admittedly, I am pretty young in my career as a teacher of young composers.  Nevertheless, call it the time of year—the wistful (read: seasonally-affectively-compelled) reflection on the past year and past years—I find myself assembling a collage of faces and personalities before my mind’s eye.  I scroll through the memories of those faces from the recent and distant past—faces of young composers that passed in and through my studio at some point in their formation as artists, adults, and citizens who will hopefully spend their mature years voting, picking up after themselves, and yielding the right-of-way.  Each face conjures an impression replete with accompanying reminiscences.  Oddly, the depth of recollection pertaining to each former student has nothing to do with any innate talent they had or didn’t.  Perhaps this supplies further evidence that teaching composition is ultimately about more than forming a complete artist, but rather a guided exploration of one’s most intimate creative self, writing music being more than about music.  One might ask: “what could be more intimate than creativity?”  Alas, that is a topic for another day.  No, at this writing I embark on the first of several intermittent entries recalling students I have had (names will be changed to protect the unsuspecting) and my impressions of our time together, and maybe, the broader archetypes they represent as composers taking their first steps toward Parnassus.

            My first job was a visiting appointment at a small regional campus in a large state school system.  The student population in the music program (numbering about 50) was an unusual mix of local kids with few other options, extremely bright kids bemused with the ironies of conforming to the requirements of larger institutions, the financially strapped, and older students with sordid and sometimes tragic pasts attempting to re-script a new future.  Juxtaposed with this mix was a group of largely international students studying piano in a widely renowned studio—the true standout program on our campus.  Yet, the beauty of it was that ALL the students, regardless of background or talent, banded together without stratification, bound to each other like one compact island in a stream.  At the core of this unity must have been the shared sense that each was a stranger in a strange land—whether that “strangeness” was a function of language and culture, or that America’s institutional culture could not resonate with hearts and minds tuned to a different key replete with unknowable histories and indiscernible memories.  Here we all were together, teachers and students of art music, an alien discipline indeed. We refused to hear the paternal voices warning us that making music was not a useful way to contribute to society.  Not once did I receive a visit from a suspicious parent, wondering what their child would be able to “do” with a music degree, much less a degree in composition.  No, none of us were predisposed toward any kind of ‘usefulness.’  Neither were we a haven for society’s exiles, marooned to the arts building as a last resort.  We rather embodied the essence of desperation for substantive conciliation with the forlorn choreography of modern life, music becoming a means to that end for so many. 

            There is no question that the world needs its major conservatories and universities to provide the technical training for the gifted and facile.  One cannot underestimate the wonder of a perfectly wrought phrase propelled by efficient voice-leading and counterpoint.  Those of us who love this art form demand the rigorous construction and articulation in our music, and I hope it will ever be so.  At the same time, let that not thwart the nourishment of the spiritually hungry as they study the placing of one note beyond the other.  If to such an individual construction is ultimately artifice in the erection of sonic Towers of Babel, then let them come and revel anyway in the experience of laying the bricks—as workers in the discerning throes of compositional labor, ever exploring and unearthing.  This is a work for laborers irrespective of talent, indicative only of an ethic to live more deeply, more profoundly. When the air clears and the last note decays into oblivion, these are the tunes I will be humming, the lingering alien anthems discerning the gulf of experience between those who have souls that hunger, and those who don’t.  Those are the portraits I will remember most.   

Embracing Your Inner Theorist

Almost invariably, young composers join my studio with little to no formal training in composition.  Occasionally they had the good fortune of going to a high school that offered a theory class.  More typically, they simply possessed a predilection toward creativity, a will to invent, and an ear that did its very best to assimilate and reconfigure the music they had already heard.  Composing, at this stage, is an often enchanting, usually mysterious, and nearly always intuitive process.  Sometimes I think of Sesame Street’s Don Music as a patron saint of composers at this stage.  You remember Don Music, don’t you?  He was the shaggy-haired, short-tempered composer often given to head-banging tantrums when the final notes of a piece were just beyond the grasp of consciousness (apparently, Don Music was discontinued after reports surfaced of very young piano students bludgeoning themselves with their piano keyboards). 

There is a part of me that maintains a tremendous affection for Don.  I mean, on the one hand, Don is an enormously benevolent character.  His ambition does not comprise imperialistic exploitation, political office, or the Dark Arts.  Don is relentlessly in search of what Plato might call “The Good” or “The Beautiful.”  Had Don surfaced as a cultural phenomenon in another era, we might say that his pursuit yearned toward his own “Immortal Beloved.”  I daresay that having spent most of my life in pursuit of seductive, and often fugitive, sounds that there is a bit of Don in me that shall ever remain—the trace of a tendency toward visceral abandon in the throes of the creative labor.  Problem solving? Hardly! Structural deconstruction? Never!  Sometimes, one must simply thrust their head against the keyboard and allow the tears to freely flow.

The academic experience, on the other hand, tends to educate the ‘Don’ right out of us.  Let me qualify that: while Don may ultimately disappear from the studio, he most certainly resurfaces in all of his befuddled and hotly passionate glory in faculty meetings and before students in high-profile guest residencies where truly there are no words to express what the heart and tongue are wont to proclaim in piercing decibels.  No, we teach our students to begin thinking like musical mechanics and problem solvers.  Cool under fire, because we in essence extinguish the fire.  Composition becomes in such circumstances a ‘Jeux de Cartes,’ as it were, with all motion premeditated to the extent possible, and each choice thoroughly rational based upon the ‘cards’ one draws (or is dealt) at the outset of a piece.  While we might favor a discussion of the ‘deck’ for another day, suffice it to say that the ‘deck’ could represent the arbitrary choosing of structural material, with its inherent probabilities.  We are no longer “composers” in such circumstances, but “problem solvers,” solving “compositional problems.”  I admit that I too am regularly seduced by this notion.  After all, it is much closer to diffusing a war through diplomacy, or “just talking things out” as an alternative to fisticuffs.

So, here are our student composers—ready to fight the good fight upon arrival, well accustomed to the impassioned search for just the right sonority.  How do we respond?  We as academics, historically skilled at repressing our emotions and the unquantifiable, hand them Schoenberg Op. 25, Webern Op. 28, Berg’s Lyric Suite and Messiaen’s Modes of Durations and Intensities.  We teach them about compositional transparency, the imposition of limitations, and the value of rationally defending every note.  Somehow, and maybe whether we intend it or not, we teach that value is ultimately decided through explicability.  After all, such things can be deduced entirely through the means at our disposal.  We teach Don Music about ordered sets, permutations, and time point systems—that the mysteries of “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” might possibly be illuminated through inversionally-related hexachords.  

Let me be clear and propose that we do need to educate Don.  Don must understand that sooner or later all of that head-banging will lead to memory loss and hot flashes.  Student composers must begin to understand that there is a good kind of discrimination as the component parts of a piece are assembled.  There must be grounds for understanding which notes belong and which do not at any given moment.  The first partitions that a student draws in his or her work represent the first exhilerating brush of the hand of structure.  At first blush of this realization, the student experiences composition as a discipline.  The adroit student recognizes the inherent paradox that begins to emerge: the asymmetrical and irrational will toward invention and construction confronts the rational will to decompose and deconstruct.  A kind of compositional "Liebestod," it is at once a pretension to simultaneously bury and unearth.  I suppose that when my career as a composition teacher expires (or my bodily self--whichever comes first), the most common dilemma with my students will be this: how does one construct and deconstruct at once? How does one not knowing, know?

It is here, dear colleagues, that we will join hands or part ways, time ultimately telling who, in fact, took the "road less travelled by" that made all the difference.  I also suppose that our own creative biases emerge in the addressing of this question, as no honest or self-aware composer can avoid the 'unstoppable force' meeting the 'immovable object.'  In my own teaching, I try to cultivate in my students a harmonious duplicity between composer and theorist.  In my studio, the composer must lead and may in fact lean toward "not knowing" as the motives and gestures persevere into the darkness of the unknown.  The creative impulse manifesting itself in combinations of tones can often possess a will not of our making, and we are left to discern that will and pave its way forward accordingly.  If the process at this point invites struggle, so be it.  That is, as the dearly-departed Nicholas Maw once described, "the labor of composition."  

At the same time, while the Superego must restrain the Id, the inner theorist must give the composer pause.  New ideas and sounds, like a troubled soul, must find refuge in the brief psychoanalytical relationship with the theorist.  In my work, the theorist is rarely a prophetic or prescriptive agent, but rather a wise counselor, ever inviting the creative impulse to reflect upon itself and discover its contours--engaging its subject in a compassionate Socratic method of self exploration.  "No," it says, or "yes," it responds to what the impulse might be.  Never does it prescribe a path toward the future, but always a crystalline view of the past.  Having understood its history, the inner composer can forge ahead with renewed wisdom and confidence in its identity.  Here, Don Music is given license to continue on toward the darkness, until once again the theorist is invited to emerge from the shadows of the past and offer perspective.