Ruskin
David Lang told me about his Ruskin - spoofing opera. I told him how I’m all riled up about the Pre-Raphaelites lately, and he gave me a look and explained that he feels absolutely no affinity for Ruskin’s positions.
Why do I let the Pre-Raphaelites get to me? It’s a question for which I’ve found answers which will not disappoint those who expect cute nonsense from me.
The question might be rephrased–why be nostalgic about an era governed by a plutocracy of war lords in league with a corrupt religeous establishment? That would be the most obvious target for a spoof of the Pre-Raphaelites–their nostalgia for high Christendom.
My take on this - artists grow sensitive to the sense of affront that they cause by offering people things that are not what they have already come to love. As a result of this feeling that they are assaulting people with unwanted new stuff, the artist dreams of universal values. High Christendom was the model of choice from the 19th century and well into the 20th century. All the tudor, gothic, decco, architecture that we still see all around New York attest to this. Apartments buildings with gothic touches called Such and Such “Arms”.
People talk about the disintegration of values in the19th century & 20th centuries; people talk about centrifugal forces. Such talk is a sign of anxiety. This anxiety is succored by the idea of a universal culture.
Esperanto is a response to the same anxiety. So is positivism, at least in the broader use of the term.
There are also several other facts about the high middle ages that people forget now. First, the middle ages successfully shed all aspects of Hellenistic architecture. The high middle ages was a great purge, inspiring the 20th century purge of ornament. Secondly, Thomas Aquinas shifted the focus away from Plato and on to Aristotle, from idealism to empiricism.
That the Pre-Raphaelites and others were interested in the middle ages does not mean that they wanted to see people hitting each other over the head with maces and torturing heretics. Chesterton is the exception. He wanted to bring back duelling and serfdom.
The Pre-Raphaelites were not unsophisticated in their focus on the Middle Ages. Novalis has a group of aphorisims called “Faith and Love or The King and Queen”. It is one example of how the psychology of individuation usurps the notions of sovereignty that emerged in the middle ages. The Pre-Raphelites psychologize as Novalis & Goethe did. They did not have a naive take on the values of the middle ages.
In the aphorisms as well as in the title, Novalis talks of the king and queen. For example:
“The true king will be a republic…”
and cryptically:
“Does not the king become the king simply through the inner conviction of her worth?”
And then there are the Provencal poets–
Guillem de Peitau:
Friend, I would make verses…that’s understood,
But I witless, and they most mad and all
Mixed up, mesclatz, jumbled from youth and love and joy-
And if the vulgar do not listen to them?
Learn ‘em by heart? He takes a hard
Parting from men’s love who composes to his own liking.
—-
Arnaut de Marueill
…to give me to start with a kiss
and so forth, according to my length of service.
For then
we shall make a short journey often
down a short path
since her fine body
has set me readily
in this course.
(both translations by beat poet Paul Blackburn)
If you want secular poetry you can find much that still speaks to us today in the work of the Provencal poets. They even shared our sense of alienation from the rabble.
That’s the way I understand the Pre-Raphaelites’ interest in the high middle ages–that Europe came into its own, redefining itself against its Roman precursors; that many of our attitudes were formed then–our poetic stance, our empiricism. That it was a period that aspired toward universal European values
I admire David Lang for his brave shedding of the bad habits of 20th century modernism. That shedding of outmoded values is akin to the shedding of Hellenistic values that occurred in the high middle ages.
WA
Milton Babbitt at the Crux of the 20th Century
Notes on the Program
Varese Density 21.5
Babbitt’s music explores and extensively develops compositional techniques that were pioneered by Schoenberg, while making exhaustive and ongoing innovations in rhythmic structure; yet a better way into Babbitt’s sound world is through Varese. Schoenberg is accused by many, with much justification, of never having abandoned Romanticism without succumbing to neo-classicism. I think Schoenberg managed well in Moses & Aron and the violin & piano concerti and some other works, but overall the criticism holds. Schoenberg was an expressionist to the end, and an expressionist is an extreme, belated Romantic.
A way into the music of Milton Babbitt may be had via Varese, and there is an important point to be made about the aesthetic of Varese. Loie Fuller, an American dancer who became a sensation in France around the turn of the 20th Century, became a friend of the Curies. She did a piece called “Radium”. I quote Frank Kermode: “Her world was discontinuous from nature; and this discontinuity Valery, speaking of his Symbolist ancestry, described as ‘an almost inhuman state’. She withdrew from the work; as if to do otherwise is human, said Valery, ‘I must declare myself essentially inhuman’.”
Here is language, antinaturalist in flavor, that describes the aesthetic of Varese as well as that of Fuller. It is apt that Varese had this American predecessor. European visions of futurity looked for validation in phenomena from the new world. The antinaturalist impulse was consonant with a desire to purge one’s view of extraneous or exhausted dialogues. Here is a strong connection with Babbitt.
The symbolists had two sides, at least. Ravel adopted the symblists’ sensuous obscurity, while Valery & Varese picked up on the profound inhumanity that could be seen in Fuller, and elsewhere. We must admit that Schoenberg comes close to this antinaturalism, but he never lets it alone; he ususally attaches something else to it, a Swedenborgian agenda in the Jacobsleiter, for example.
If in Babbitt’s early works one can discern an antinaturalist tone that reminds us of Varese, this tone is gradually supplanted by an Emersonian tone, suggested by his choice of texts for vocal works and by some of his titles. On this program, The Crowded Air serves as a perfect example. This title comes from the Emily Dickenson poem whose opening line was used as a title by Elliott Carter for his choral work, Musicians Wrestle Everywhere.
MUSICIANS wrestle everywhere:
All day, among the crowded air,
I hear the silver strife;
And—waking long before the dawn—
Such transport breaks upon the town 5
I think it that “new life!”
It is not bird, it has no nest;
Nor band, in brass and scarlet dressed,
Nor tambourine, nor man;
It is not hymn from pulpit read,— 10
The morning stars the treble led
On time’s first afternoon!
Some say it is the spheres at play!
Some say that bright majority
Of vanished dames and men! 15
Some think it service in the place
Where we, with late, celestial face,
Please God, shall ascertain!
Speculum Musicae asked Babbitt for a work celebrating Carter’s 80th birthday, and Babbitt responded with The Croweded Air. There are cases where Babbitt defiantly opted out of an ongoing American dialogue. His Fanfare for All, takes a swipe at Copland, for example. There are many cases, however, where we can find Babbitt having truck with the Transcendentalists. He is not a transcendentalist. “We don’t transcend ANYTHING!”. He once said emphatically in a conversation. Yet the broader impulse toward self-reliance and a severing of connections to decrepit old European dialogues is a point of interest that Babbitt shares with Emerson and Emersonians. I find this broadly Emersonian stance supplants the (somewhat kindred) antinaturalist tone that we might connect with Varese.
This is also consistent with the fact that Babbitt never returned to electronic music after the RCA studio in Prentice Hall, Columbia University, was ransacked by theives in the mid-’70s. I don’t accuse Babbitt of being an antinaturalist, but his early works and his interest in electronic music follows Varese in a natural way.
Danci
Chanson madécasse
Gone for Foreign
When David Starobin requested a “national dance” for his Newdance project Babbitt responded with Danci, Esperanto for “dance”. We might think of Babbitt’s work as new grounds for music, grounds that may be taken to have claim to a certain degree and kind of universality. We may assert the objective existence of these structures, and what is objective has some claim to universality! Let’s think of the global spread of structural engineering principles (bridges, buildings, etc.), so might we assert the existence and utility of a bass line or some other musical ground. Let it suffice to say that these grounds are there for anyone who wishes to recognize their musical power, and throughout Babbitt’s lifetime these grounds have been found to be extraordinarily powerful by many musicians, composers, listeners. Universality may be claimed for the nuts and bolts, while the utility thereof is a pragmatic issue.
Ravel and Claman may both be seen as willfully taking our attention away from musical grounds. Here are a few anecdotes about musicians being exhausted by discussion of musical grounds:
Frank Brickle cites these examples from his Princeton days:
…Harold Budd telling Morton Feldman that all he wanted to do was write music that was “mindlessly pretty”.
…one of Jim Randall’s omnibus seminars where he declared that he was sick of hearing about trichords and wanted to talk about “delightful irrelevancies.”
Shoko Suzuki to Bill Anerson:
…”I don’t need to have reasons for everything.”
If Babbitt is a universalist, why is his music so universally hard to understand? Babbitt’s music is difficult because he is optimistic about communication. He likes to impart a great deal of information in short spans of time. It is lost on many listeners, yet, if one person understands, then communication has succeeded. His recent works have a remarkable new clarity and practicality that is proving to be a great inspiration to many younger composers. Moreover, there are musicians, composers and critics who find in Babbitt’s work a strong connection with The Tradition. I do, but I don’t expect my concept of the the core of The Tradition to be the same as yours; and so, we put any claims to the authority of a grand Western Tradition behind us, letting remain only the pragmatic issues.
We include on this program excerpts from Ravel’s Chanson madécasse, and David Claman’s Gone for Foreign to acknowledge openly that there is not a universal interest in universality. These two works celebrate western failures. They celebrate the opting against grounding and render that loss a positive aesthetic value in its own right.
It is here in this contrast between two positive aesthetic values that we might locate Babbitt as occupying a position at the crux of the 20th Century, the position where our ability to communicate is ever taken as a half full situation rather than half empty. What is unique and momentous in Cygnus’ position is precisely its embrace of two contradictory pragmatics. Mr. Claman accepts these contradictions as well, and wants it to be known that he has great love and respect for Babbitt’s music. We can’t speak for Ravel.
We might acknowledge that Stravinsky’s belated adoption of 12-tone techniques represented a limited triumph of a new grounds for composition on the world stage. There are some who assert that Babbitt, in conversations with Stravinsky in Santa Fe, paved the way for Stravinsky to take that plunge . With or without direct influence on Stravinsky, Babbitt’s role in formalizing 12-tone practice and exploring its diverse and powerful musical applications no one now denies. The issue of the moment is rather to celebrate the fact that the reaction to Babbitt’s success is a fait accompli, and this should make it much easier for us all to move on.
Rather than thinking in terms of periods where one mode predominates, we suggest that the opposing tendencies are always present. The perception, for a period, of the overwhealming success of Milton Babbitt’s vision, caused a reaction that we see now, but the reaction has not erased or even eclipsed what Babbitt has done.
An upcoming generation of performers and composers attest to the continuing power of the musical principles that Babbitt continues to develop as he turns 90 this year. There are armies of young Babbitt players represented here by the Second Instrumental Unit. There are also a considerable number of young composers who are flocking to Babbitt to keep abreast of his latest work.
Notnes on the Emerson Bicentennial, May 13, 2005
Poet John Hollander will host an evening celebrating the Emerson bicentennial. The event will include readings and musical settings, including five new settings of poems by Emerson, performed by the Cygnus Ensemble. The program also includes two important settings of Hollander’s work by Elliott Carter and Milton Babbitt.
There are few poets whose work has been set so frequently by major American composers as John Hollander. “Philomel,” Milton Babbitt’s landmark work is one example, and Elliott Carter’s “Of Challenge and of Love” on this program is another, as well as his collaborations with George Perle and Hugo Weisgall. Dr. Hollander has written several volumes of poetry and seven books of criticism. His honors include the Bollingen and the Levinson Prizes; the MLA Shaughnessy Medal; and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. A former chancellor of The Academy of American Poets, he is Sterling Professor Emeritus of English at Yale.
Dr. Hollander opens the program with a discu
RALPH WALDO EMERSON BICENTENNIAL CELEBRATION
Hosted by John Hollander
7pm Part I
Charles Ives Songs
Dr. John Hollander on the Emerson Bicentennial
David Leisner “Simple Songs” (Emily Dickinson)
Robert Pollock “Fable” (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
7:45 Intrada:
John Cage “Music for Four Instruments”
8pm Part II
William Anderson Bacchus (Emerson)
Dr. Hollander on Pantheism, solipsism & free will: Merlin & Fooh-Fooh
Shoko Suzuki Collage Merlin II, Fooh-Fooh (Hollander), work of young poets
Frank Brickle “Merlin I” (Emerson)
Eliott Carter “Of Challenge and of Love” (John Hollander)
Intermission
Entr’acte: David Starobin “Three Places in New Rochelle”
Dr. John Hollander on the universe vs. pluriverse
Robert Martin “Three Prose Excerpts” (Emerson)
Milton Babbitt “Pantun” (Hollander) Introduced by Dr. Hollander
Mario Davidowsky “Lost” (William Carlos Williams)
Matthew Greenbaum “Wild Rose, Lily, Cry Vanilla” (Emerson)
We have asked each composer to talk about their relation to Emerson, and their choice of text:
Shoko Suzuki
Shoko Suzuki studies at Tokyo University with Jo Kondo, and in Boston with Bernard Rands. As both a Tokyo Brahmin and a Boston Brahmin, she brings a Shinto perspective to Western Naturalism, and she assures us that there is certainly some resonance between the two.
Her work in entitled:
Around Emerson
This work uses texts by many generations, the oldest are Emerson and John Hollander, and the youngest are teenagers. The piece ends with the instrumentalists speaking, music evaporates into words.
The piece also utilizes a passage from Emerson’s Merlin II, and John Hollanders spoof of that passage.
William Anderson
Bacchus
(last stanza)
Pour Bacchus!
The Remembering Wine;
Retrieve the loss of me and mine!
Vine for vine be antidote,
And the grape requite the lote!
Haste to cure the old despair,–
Reason in Nature’s lotus drenched,
The memory of ages quenched;
Give them again to shine;
Let wine repair what this undid;
And where the infection slid,
A dazzling memory revive;
Refresh the faded tints,
Recut the aged prints,
And Write my old adventures with the pen
Which on the first day drew,
Upon the tablets blue,
Thae dancing Pleiads and eternal men.
I wrote this setting in 1997 for my parents’ 40 wedding anniversary. Phyllis Bryne-Julson sang it at Merkin Hall in February 1998.
I’m with Emerson to the extent that Emerson is a surrealist. As I understand it, the surrealists are nihilists who allow themselves a fascination with form. The compassionate surrealist shows others how to find amusement in form, untroubled by the reality that all form is transitory.
These lines from Emerson’s Merlin II alway have a powerful effect on me, perhaps not exactly as Emerson intended them; yet Emerson’s Platonizing is easily forgiven because he so often goes in the opposite direction:
The animals are sick with love, lovesick with rhyme…
The sickness is hyperbole, but also suggests the mutability and impermanence of form. (?) Emerson speaks of this impermanence often, despite the fact that he finds a kind of immortality in ideal form–(the “eternal men” that ends Bacchus)
Subtle rhyme with ruin rife
Murmers in the house of life
As with sickness, so with ruin. All forms add up to 0. (?)
Here and elsewhere Emerson sounds like a compassionate nihilist with a love for creation (form) regardless of its impermanence, its contingencies–a surrealist, as far as I understand the surrealists.
There is much in Emerson that points to the unique, the contingent, the pluriverse as opposed to the universe, and what looks like Platonizing is often so cleverly and ambiguously couched that it suggests its own antithesis.
The progression that Robert Martin maps in his Emerson songs (through his choice of text and through his treatment of them) was revelatory, showing two very different sides of Emerson.
Celebrating Emerson would be an academic exercize if we did not conisider Emerson in the light of contemporary thought. Above I am suggesting that Emerson anticipates Pierce, Wm. James and the surrealists. How does Emerson’s thought hold up for a postmodernist?
If I understand correctly, one of the arguments of the transcendenalists is that our common moral sense can be attributed only to some transcendental understanding. (The extent of the existence of a common moral sense is the interesting question that we have to leave aside for now.)
It appears to me that postmodernists conclude that we cannot understand each other within a culture, and that it is, furthermore, impossible to translate elements of one culture to another. Some postmodernists find a fascination in this lack of understanding, feeling that it makes life richer. Others are mere pessimists. I accept this half empty view as tenable.
[I formulated this theory of a postmodernist who is fascinated & enriched by the impossibility of understanding by thinking about two postmodern musical works–David Claman’s Gone for Foreign, and Steve Mackey’s Indiginous Instruments. I go into David Claman’s work in more detail at www.williamanderson.us/notes.]
My position, in contrast to either the positive or the pessimistic postmodern views, is that we do understand each other to an extent, and that whatever the extent of this understanding is just short of miraculous, regardless of how qualified and restricted. I do not espouse any transcendental, supernatural or theistic explanation for this understanding. In this regard, Emerson is much more secular than the Vermont transcendentalists; yet Emerson does appear to have been a deist to the end. In the words of Milton Babbitt, “We don’t transcend anything!” If I understand Frank Brickle correctly, understanding can be handled in a limited way through formal systems, but we can’t understand everything all the time through such systems. What is astonishing to me is precisely our ability to handle boundary situations intuitively and instinctively. The art that interests me is having fun with boundaries and honing our skills in such situations at the same time. For me, our ability to handle complex boundary situations is just short of transcendental. I dub this “secular transcendentalism”, which I’ll extend some day to “secualar deism”.
see
www.williamanderson.us
Robert Pollock
Fable
2 guitars, violin, ‘cello, fl, ob
The mountain ande the squirrel
Had a quarrel;
And the former called the latter ‘Little Prig.’
Bun replied,
‘You are doubtless very big;
But all sorts of things and weather
Must be taken in together,
To make up an year
And a sphere.
And I think it no disgrace
To occupy my place.
If I’m not so large as you,
You are not so small as I,
And not half so spry.
I’ll not deny you make
A very pretty squirrel track;
Talents differ; all is well and wisely put;
If I cannot carry forests on my backk,
Neither can you crack a nut.’
Robert Pollock - Composer and pianist
Robert Pollock now directs an arts presenting organization, Ebb &
Flow Arts, Inc., in Hawai’i. He recently performed solo piano recitals in
Honolulu, Hawai’i, Seoul, Korea (twice), and Tokyo, Japan (twice). He participated
as composer-in-residence in the Festival for New American Music, Sacramento
State University, in November1998, and Composer in Residence Day, William
Paterson University, March 2000. He was the first American to participate in the
Europe-Asia Festival for Modern Music, Kazan, Russia (1996). Some of his over
ninety (90) compositions received recent performances in Israel, Moscow, Russia,
Japan, South Korea, Spain, Honolulu, Italy, Poland, Germany, Austria, Mexico,
Russia, Bulgaria, Denmark, and throughout the USA.
He has received numerous commissions and awards including the Guggenheim
Fellowship, NEA Grant Fellowship, Martha Baird Rockefeller Fund for Music
Award, Ingraham Merrill Award, several New Jersey State Fellowships and Composers
String Quartet Award, first prize. Several of his works are recorded for CGNJ
and Union of Composers, Tartarstan, Russia, labels. Several works are
published by Mobart, E.C. Schirmer, Veritas Musicae and Rosalime Productions.
Robert Pollock received a B. A. in Music from Swarthmore College, and
M.F.A. in Musical Composition from Princeton University. He is co-founder of the
New York Guild of Composers (1975), and founder/director emeritus of the
Composers Guild of New Jersey (1980-1998). He is now a full time resident of Maui.
He has organized over 350 new music concerts. As pianist he has premiered
over100 compositions by composers from around the world.
Robert Pollock on Emerson:
What I admire most about Emerson’s writings is his ability to explain life’s secrets. Whether it is his ‘person fits event like hand in glove;’ or his holonic (Wilber) “circles,” that transcend and include the previous ones, Emerson gives us a handle on life’s deep, sometimes elusive issues.
After Bill Anderson suggested the Emerson Bicentennial project, I found Emerson’s “Fable” in an anthology of his works. Like an Aesop fable, the format is suitable for children, but the lesson is relevant for adults as well. I show this fable about a squirrel and a mountain to children in a course I’m developing, “Scaling Haleakala.” It’s designed to teach Maui’s children how to read and write music; and how nature; namely, Mt. Haleakala on Maui, inspires music. I find that children often identify with animals on the mountain. Again, Emerson in this short fable, helps to explain why: just substitute child for squirrel, and adult for mountain!
Most of all, “Fable” is a universal lesson for everyone. My setting emphasizes the humor and irony of the poem. It contrasts the light, fleet footed squirrel, with the ponderous weight and power of the mountain. Tone painting often occurs, such as in “quarrel,” sphere,” “large - small,” ” squirrel track” and “crack a nut.”
Frank Brickle
Merlin I
for guitar, mandolin, vln, vc, fl, ob
Thy trivial harp will never please
Or fill my craving ear;
Its chords should ring as blows the breeze,
Free, peremptory, clear.
No jingling serenader’s art,
Nor tinkle of piano strings,
Can make the wild blood start
In its mystic springs.
The kingly bard
Must smite the chords rudely and hard,
As with hammer or with mace,
That they may render back
Artful thunder that conveys
Secrets of the solar track,
Sparks of the supersolar blaze.
Merlin’s blows are strokes of fate,
Chiming with the forest-tone,
When boughs buffet boughs in the wood;
Chiming with the gasp and moan
Of the ice-imprisoned flood;
With the pulse of manly hearts,
With the voice of orators,
With the din of city arts,
With the cannonade of wars.
With the marches of the brave,
And prayers of might from martyrs’ cave.
Great is the art,
Great be the manners of the bard!
He shall not his brain encumber
With the coil of rhythm and number,
But, leaving rule and pale forethought,
He shall aye climb
For his rhyme:
Pass in, pass in, the angels say,
In to the upper doors;
Nor count compartments of the floors,
But mount to Paradise
By the stairway of surprise.
Blameless master of the games,
King of sport that never shames;
He shall daily joy dispense
Hid in song’s sweet influence.
Things more cheerly live and go,
What time the subtle mind
Plays aloud the tune whereto
Their pulses beat,
And march their feet,
And their members are combined.
By Sybarites beguiled
He shall no task decline;
Merlin’s mighty line,
Extremes of nature reconciled,
Bereaved a tyrant of his will,
And made the lion mild.
Songs can the tempest still,
Scattered on the stormy air,
Mould the year to fair increase,
And bring in poetic peace.
He shall not seek to weave,
In weak unhappy times,
Efficacious rhymes;
Wait his returning strength,
Bird, that from the nadir’s floor,
To the zenith’s top could soar,
The soaring orbit of the muse exceeds that journey’s length!
Nor, profane, affect to hit
Or compass that by meddling wit,
Which only the propitious mind
Publishes when ’tis inclined.
There are open hours
When the god’s will sallies free,
And the dull idiot might see
The flowing fortunes of a thousand years;
Sudden, at unawares,
Self-moved fly-to the doors,
Nor sword of angels could reveal
What they conceal.
396 words
Notes on Merlin I
First things first. I don’t really understand this poem. Despite having lived with it for over a year I could not now provide you with a credible close reading or a coherent paraphrase of it. Emerson’s Merlin is deeply confounded with Arthur, and not Malory’s Arthur, either. He is depicted as a kind of Nietzschean ueber-bard-king whose aesthetic and spiritual transcendence give him mastery over nature and destiny. Imagine Zarathustra rendered as Orpheus by Coleridge in a drug-induced haze.
Don’t misunderstand me. I have no fundamental problem with a fantasy that depicts a poet or composer as ruler of the universe. Moreover I am generally sympathetic to obscure and difficult creative work. Finding a way to embody all this musically is a challenge, however. I also have difficulties with a few of the lines, like
Nor count compartments of the floors,
which is hard to describe as anything other than mere metrical stuffing. Emerson might share in this poem a degree of Poe’s sensory febrility, but he can’t be accused of sharing Poe’s metrical fanaticism. Ever.
I do feel warmly towards Merlin I regardless. The key to appreciation is in the closing lines :
There are open hours
When the god’s will sallies free,
And the dull idiot might see
The flowing fortunes of a thousand years;
Sudden, at unawares,
Self-moved fly-to the doors,
Nor sword of angels could reveal
What they conceal.
A lovely passage, don’t you think? It is about Emerson himself, directly, not about Merlin anymore. It gives away the whole game. Here is recalled a moment of shocking transcendence in his life — what, I couldn’t guess — perhaps like the transfiguration of Herr Teufelsdroeckh in Sartor Resartus, or Larry Darrell in The Razor’s Edge. One of the signal features of ecstatic experience is held to be a sense that categories and existential boundaries are upended and dissolving. The jumble of assertions and associations attached to Merlin in this poem seem to me to constitute a valiant attempt to represent this symbolically, as a token of Emerson’s own experience. This is a classic theme and technique of Romantic literature, but the symbolic apparatus is decades ahead of its time.
These are a few of the issues I felt I was up against in devising a musical setting of the poem. Where I wound up was trying to blend a sort of turbulent and twisting urgency with a little bit of naïve word painting that reflects the informality of rhyme and rhythm in the poem. At the end, in the setting of the closing passage, the music grades into a kind of tranquil spaciousness that gives me as much pleasure as anything I have ever composed.
Matthew Greenbaum
Wild-rose, Lily, Dry Vanilla
for fl ob vl vlc gt and banjo
Matthew Greenbaum:
My interest in Nietzsche is quite possibly excessive. Nietzsche was deeply influenced by Emerson; therefore I was particularly intrigued when Bill Anderson asked me to contribute a piece to the Emerson Festival. On the surface, Nietzsche and Emerson present an opposition of darkness and light; but only on the surface. What is common to both is the creation of a character: the narrator, as it were, of an inner life; a character in dialogue with itself and with a priviledged eavesdropper, the reader. That this character may be flawed, grandiose, extreme, weloming, seductive, repellent, brilliant, ruminative, provoking, wrong, accurate or exaggerated only adds to the enticement of the reader’s peculiar intimacy with the bundle of papers that signifies the personhood of “Nietzsche” or Emerson”. The problem of setting the work of either is enormous. There is simply too much message for the amount of music in their poems (both were essayists and poets). I was delighted to find a poem of Emerson’s to set which only intermittently takes on the tone of the oracular explainer. It may be incomplete; it is also untitled. In fact, this incompleteness was one of its attractions for me; I was less frightened of mauling a poem that has never come completely into being. It is always difficult to find the right psychological volume of a setting, so that the temperature of the music, so to speak, matches that of the text. The poem in question calls for lyricism and tone-painting in a pastoral voice. (This was great fun to do). That the natural world has been assaulted, reduced and jeopardized since Emerson’s time added a note of anguish to the undertaking, and possibly to the musical results.
Where the fungus broad and red
Lifts its head
Like poisoned loaf of elfin bread
Where the aster grew
With the social goldenrod
In a chapel which the dew
Made beautiful for God
The maple street
In the houseless wood
O what would nature say
She spared no speech today
The fungus & the bulrush spoke
Answered the pinetree and the oak
The wizard South blew down the glen
Filled the straits & filled the wide,
Each maple leaf turned up its silver side.
All things shine in his damp ray
And all we see are pictures high
Many a high hill side
Which oaks of pride
Climb to their tops
And boys run out upon their leafy ropes
In the houseless wood
Voices followed after
Every shrub & grapeleaf
Rang with fairy laughter
I have heard them fall
Like the strain of all
King Oberon’s minstrelsy
Would hear the everlasting
And know the only strong
You must worship fasting
You must listen long
Words of the air
Which birds of the air
Carry aloft below around
To the isles of the deep
To the snow capped steep
To the thundercloud
To the loud bazaar
To the haram of Caliph and Kremlin of Czar
Is the verse original
Let its numbers rise and fall
As the winds do when they call
One to another
Come search the wood for flowers
Wild tea and wild pea
Grape vine and succory
Coreopsis
And liatris
Flaunting in their bowers
Grass with greenflag halfmast high
Succory to match the sky
Columbine with horn of honey
Scented fern and agrimony
Forest full of essences
Fit for fairy princesses,
Peppermint and sassafras
Sweet fern, mint and vernal grass,
Panax, black birch, sugar maple,
Sweet and scent for Dian’s table,
Elder-blow, sarsparilla,
Wild-rose, lily, dry vanilla.
Dr. Greenbaum’s work has been hailed by musicians, academic colleagues, other composers, former students and critics. His music has been performed from Manhattan to Rotterdam, from California to St. Petersburg. He teaches at Temple University in Philadelphia.
He has created a body of musical compositions during more than two decades that reflects a wide variety of new music. These have included operas, works for solo piano, for small chamber ensemble, for voice and piano, for saxophone and electronic sound on tape, and for piano with chamber orchestra.
Dr. Greenbaum’s work has won the kudos of his peers. A colleague at an Ivy League university praised his “solid craft and remarkable imagination. The rector and dean of the Rimsky-Korsakov State Conservatory in St. Petersburg, Russia, where Dr. Greenbaum lectured in 1991, lauded his “professional erudition.” TheNew York Times has called Dr. Greenbaum a member of “new music’s aristocracy.” Dr. Greenbaum studied with Stefan Wolpe and Mario Davidovsky, and has received numerous awards and honors. These include. A Fromm Foundation commission, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Martha Baird Rockefeller Grant, a U.S. Artists Travel Grant, and grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the N.Y. Foundation on the Arts.
An All-Greenbaum CD will be released on Centaur this fall, with various chamber works performed by Fred Sherry, David Holzman, Stephanie Griffin and Blair McMillen, plus and the chamber opera A Floating Island, performed by Network for New Music.
Robert Martin
Emerson Songs
No. 1–The Nature of God (1)
The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms in [sic] the
second; and throughout nature this primary picture is repeated without end.
It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world. St. Augustine
described the nature of God as a circle whose centre was everywhere and its
circumference nowhere. We are all our lifetime reading the copious sense of
this first of forms. One moral we have already deduced in considering the
circular or compensatory character of every human action. Another analogy
we shall now trace, that every action admits of being outdone. Our life is
an apprenticeship to the truth that there is no end in nature, but every end
is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and
under every deep a lower deep opens.
This fact, as far as it symbolizes the moral fact of the Unattainable,
the flying Perfect, around which the hands of man can never meet, at once
inspirer and condemner of every success, may conveniently serve us to
connect many illustrations of human power in every department.
No. 2–Travel (2)
Travelling is a fool’s paradise. We owe to our first journeys the
discovery that place is nothing. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I
can be intoxicated with beauty and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk,
embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and
there beside me is the stern Fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical,
that I fled from. I seek the Vatican and the palaces. I affect to be
intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant
goes with me wherever I go.
No. 3–Roses (3)
These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to
better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day.
There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every
moment of its existence. Before the leaf-bud has burst, its whole life
acts; in the full-blown flower there is no more; in the leafless root
there is no less. Its nature is satisfied and it satisfies nature in all
moments alike. There is no time to it. But man postpones or remembers; he
does not live in the present; but with reverted eye laments the past, or,
heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the
future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the
present above time.
(1) Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson’s Essays, with introduction by Irwin Edman
(New York, N.Y.: Harper & Row, 1926; paperback edition), p. 212. Excerpt
from the beginning of the essay titled “Circles.” I changed the twelfth
word from “in” to “is” in the musical text.
(2) Emerson, Essays, pp. 59-60. Excerpt from the essay titled
“Self-Reliance.”
(3) Emerson, Essays, pp. 48-49. Excerpt from the essay titled
“Self-Reliance.”
Musical Structure and Symbolism in
my Composition Titled Emerson Songs
by Robert Martin
Virtuoso guitarist William Anderson, founder of the Cygnus Ensemble, asked me to write a series of songs based on texts by Ralph Waldo Emerson to celebrate his two hundredth birthday. I completed the piece titled Emerson Songs during the winter of 2003-04. The instrumentation includes soprano, alto flute, English horn, two guitars, violin and cello. There are three songs, titled The Nature of God, Travel and Roses. The text of each song, as well as a discussion of the musical structure that supports the extra-musical references, are presented below.
Music is often called the most abstract of the arts. In its pure form, this abstraction tends only to reference ideas within the music itself. For example, the recapitulation of a Sonata allegro form references the exposition. There are occasions, however, when composers are able to reference extra-musical ideas using musical structure as a symbol of those ideas. Many of the great composer—including Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven —were able to use the abstraction of music to create vivid metaphors. The true connection between these structures and symbols are almost never apparent at first glance, but once discovered, they enhance the musical meaning immeasurably.
Usually I shy away from discussing structure in my music. It’s a cumbersome topic. When pressed, I usually change the subject to painting, and answer in a round-about way. For me, answering questions about my musical structures is like a painter answering questions about each brush stroke. Certainly there are more enjoyable things to do, like looking at the painting. Yet there are those who are interested in brush strokes. In my case, I would prefer others to tread that pathway of discovery by themselves.
The structures of my compositions vary greatly from piece to piece, and many have relationships within them that have only remote theoretical precedents. I recognize that it is difficult to tackle something that is new—so perhaps some guidance is necessary.
Let me stress one thing before going further. I am a big picture person. I like hierarchies, especially the important parts. True—details are important, and great music results from the attention to many details. But to be successful, these details must support the greater artistic goal—the big picture. Without this, all is lost. “What do you read, my lord?” Polonius asks. “Words, words, words,” Hamlet replies. Is Hamlet really telling us that focusing on details may result in the loss of the big picture?
However, let’s start by examining some musical words. Perhaps one analogy of a word in music—certainly there are many—is what’s known as a “tone row.” Our present musical system of tuned pitches—those found on a piano—consists of twelve distinct tones. There are many more keys on the piano, both black and white, but the others vibrate at multiples of twice or factors of half the speed of the basic twelve. When you collect one of each of these twelve basic tones, they become like prime numbers—all the other tones that exist in our system contain them in some way. If you play these tones in immediate ascending order, you get something very basic—the chromatic scale which is, in fact, a tone row.
Arnold Schoenberg was the first composer to consciously recognize the value of putting one of each of these tones together in a row. Immediately, many other composers understood the beauty of the concept. It’s useful as a unit of musical communication. Schoenberg presented several ways to modify tone rows—move them up or down (transposition), put them upside down (inversion), or backwards (retrograde), or both upside down and backwards (retrograde inversion). For many decades and for many composers, these variations, or classical transformations as I call them, provided plenty of raw material with which to build larger musical structures.
In the immediate years to follow, Alban Berg began using more than one tone row in his large musical structures in order to support a greater artistic goal. Berg used multiple rows for contrast—for example, to delineate characters in his operas. Despite this breakthrough—using more than one row in a piece—a practice emerged among most composers that a single piece of music is usually built on a single tone row (including its classical transformations stated above). All works of art have the countervailing forces of contrast and unity. This practice of one tone row per piece provides the unity; the contrast comes from elsewhere.
As composers gained a better understanding of these new tools, they made additional discoveries. Anton Webern found tone rows with special properties—if you divide certain tone rows into equal segments, these segments are related to one another in the manner of Schoenberg’s classical transformations (transposition, inversion, retrograde or retrograde inversion).
A little later, Milton Babbitt separated tone rows into halves and found patterns in how they could be recombined—without repeating any of the tones. He called this feature “combinatoriality.” This allowed composers to identify, with more confidence, how parts of the tone rows could appear with one another in complimentary ways.
Charles Wuorinen drew on yet a different feature—which requires a little explanation. Each note of a tone row can be assigned a number—one to twelve, (or zero to eleven). One of the classical transformations—the inversion—can be interpreted as multiplying each assigned number by eleven and applying a modulus twelve operation. A modulus twelve operation is nothing more than what an ordinary clock does—instead of going to thirteen o’clock, it goes back to one o’clock. This clock analogy is useful in music because the twelve hours are like the twelve notes in the chromatic scale—each time you reach the end, you just repeat it. Instead of multiplying by eleven, Wuorinen multiplied using different numbers—five and seven worked particularly well because the resulting rows still had one of each tone—they were still true tone rows.
Richard Rodney Bennett, the first student of Pierre Boulez, introduced me to these musical properties in 1971. He stressed that the presence or absence of certain intervals—an interval is the distance between two tones—gave each row a distinct “sound.” Just as Dylan Thomas was fascinated with the sound of words, I, as a young composer, was fascinated with the “sound” of different tone rows.
Here, however, is an important principle. When you rearrange the tones, you get a different tone row—but you have changed two aspects, not just one. First, you have changed the order of the tones. Second, you have changed the intervals. Of course, when stated so plainly, this seems quite obvious. The tones and the intervals are inextricably linked. However, over the years I met many composers who seemed to focus only on the tones; I attended many lectures where the intervals were never mentioned.
Let’s examine one of Schoenberg’s classical transformations—the inversion. When you turn a tone row upside down, you are really turning all the intervals upside down. If you start with an ascending chromatic scale, you end up with a descending chromatic scale—the two tone rows do not have a single interval in common. Don’t get me wrong—the inversion is a fascinating relationship. Composers well before Schoenberg knew that, and presented inversions in imaginative ways.
It’s just that as a young composer I asked the following question—if the “sound” of a tone row derives from the intervals—can there be closely related rows, based on interval content, that we are unaware of? Again, let me restate the question—is there something basic that we are missing?
The answer is—indeed—“yes.” So, I devised a way to locate these closely related tone rows. I called this newly discovered relationship by the term “organic.” These new tone row relationships could only be explained by the “sound,” that is the coincidence of their intervals. They do not fit in with the methods used to produce the classical transformations. Rather, these relationships are “organically related.”
To review, organically related tone rows sound close to a specific original row because they have much of (or all of) the same intervallic content—more so than the classical transformations.
Start with a tone row. Then, ask the question, “how close can I get to it with regard to its intervals?” Implicit in this question is, “how close can I get to the original tone row without duplicating it?” If you simply duplicate it, then it would be identical, in other words, “too close.”
If you asked “how close can I get to the ascending chromatic scale without duplicating it?” the answer would be “not very close.” The ascending chromatic scale has eleven intervals that are all the same—minor seconds. There is no tone row with more minor seconds than the ascending chromatic scale—it’s full. If we were on a train traveling in the “minor second” direction, this would be the last stop. The inversion—the descending chromatic scale—has only major sevenths (descending minor seconds). Although it is one of the classical transformations presented by Schoenberg, nevertheless, from the “organic” perspective, it is not very closely related. The two rows “sound” different, and have no intervals in common. To put it in the most elementary terms, the ascending chromatic scale sounds “up” and the descending one sounds “down.” These two do not “sound” closely related; instead they “sound” like opposites.
Again to review, the ascending chromatic scale has only minor seconds and the descending chromatic scale has only major sevenths. Let’s quickly add to this collection the circle of fourths and the circle of fifths (tone rows which only have fourths and fifths, respectively). Now we have a number of “single interval” tone rows—tone rows where only a single interval is present. We cannot go further in these directions—we must turn around in order to look for more tone rows, and the tone rows that we will discover will have more than one single interval.
I speak about travelling toward or away from these single interval tone rows. I picture a universe where tone rows are located in various positions (these are conceptual positions, and you need not think of them in three dimensional space). The single interval tone rows are at the extreme edge of this universe. There are no more tone rows beyond these final boundaries. Assume we are in the middle of the universe (the great cluster of all tone rows). As we travel toward the edges (where the single interval rows represent the final outer limits of the universe), it is fascinating to ask, “how close can we go, without actually arriving at the final boundaries?”
You might be starting to appreciate the emphasis that I place on the intervals. Each tone row contains twelve tones. In between, there are eleven intervals. One interval separates each pair of tones. Let’s try another exercise—for me, this next example is the natural opposite of the “single interval” row.
If we start at “C” and go a minor second up to “C#,” then a major second down (or minor seventh up) to “B,” then a minor third up to “D,” then a major third down (minor sixth up) to A#, and so on in this pattern, we will have a tone row that has one of each of the eleven intervals. How close can we get to this row in terms of intervals, or in other words, can we construct other tone rows that have one of each interval? Yes, we can. There are plenty of additional “all-interval” tone rows—in fact, there are 3,856 if you only start on “C.” But just remember, half of these are inversions.
So, “all-interval” tone rows have one of each tone, and one of each interval. When it comes to tones and intervals, they have one of everything.
But let’s make it harder by adding another constraint. Let’s say that the intervals in the tone row must be identical both backwards and forwards. If you think that is arcane, you are right. For example, there are not many sentences that can be read—letter by letter—backwards and forwards, but here is one—“Live not on evil.” The “L” in “Live” relates to the “l” in “evil,” the “i” in “Live” relates to the “i” in “evil,” and slowly you work your way letter by letter toward the middle—where finally you reach the letter “t.” This “t” is in the exact middle and can be read coming and going. In music, there is only one interval that can be read coming and going—the tritone (just remember, “t” is for “tritone”). The tritone has this special property because it equally subdivides the octave in halves—so in either direction this interval appears the same.
The musicians of the early Christian Church did not care much for the tritone, and they referred to it as the devil in music. If they came across it, they might have exclaimed, “Live not on evil!” Here it is again, a sentence that can be read backwards and forwards. “Niagra, O roar again!” “Was it a rat I saw?” Because of this property (the same whether backwards and forwards), these sentences are known as palindromes—they are symmetrical. I think of these as arcs or semi-circles. Visualize this scene—you’re out on the ocean and the moon has risen halfway above the horizon line. You trace your view across the horizon, around the outline of the half risen moon, and continue across the horizon. Do it backwards, it’s the same.
Remember, there are tone rows that are all-interval, but not symmetrical—and there are tone rows that are symmetrical that are not all-interval, but let’s don’t get sidetracked. As far as tone rows that are both all-intervals and symmetrical, they number 176, however, half of them are inversions—that’s 88. Each one has the interval of a tritone exactly at its center (it is analogous to the “t” in “Live not on evil”). You now have some necessary background for understanding the musical symbolism that we will examine next.
The first of the three songs is titled The Nature of God. It is the first two paragraphs from Emerson’s essay titled Circles as follows:
The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms in [sic] the second; and throughout nature this primary picture is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world. St. Augustine described the nature of God as a circle whose centre was everywhere and its circumference nowhere. We are all our lifetime reading the copious sense of this first of forms. One moral we have already deduced in considering the circular or compensatory character of every human action. Another analogy we shall now trace, that every action admits of being outdone. Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.
This fact, as far as it symbolizes the moral fact of the Unattainable, the flying Perfect, around which the hands of man can never meet, at once inspirer and condemner of every success, may conveniently serve us to connect many illustrations of human power in every department.
For the construction of this piece, I felt that all-interval tone rows were a nice symbolic building material (all interval tone rows each contain the entire set of all things—tones and intervals). However, if they were symmetrical, they would represent semi-circles, such as those circles spoken about in the text. I used exactly 87 of the total 88 tone rows (the total number that exist without counting the inversions). I deliberately left one of the all-interval symmetrical tone rows out of this piece—it is simply not there. This missing tone row represents the “unknown”—that is, what we humans have left to discover (for example, how the genetic code really works). If you think about it, this “unknown” is what separates us from God. Finding out all of the unknown is certainly the “Unattainable.”
But it’s not unattainable for music theorists. In the attached chart at the conclusion of this essay, I listed all 87 tone rows, including exactly where in the score they are located and what instruments play each one. The missing tone row does not appear anywhere. So good luck finding it, and let me know when you do.
In any artistic creation, there is a hierarchy of components—some elements are more important than others. We like order. We like things we can understand. The human mind tries to impose this hierarchy, whether it is intrinsically present or not. Heinrich Schenker was an important theorist in the early twentieth century. Just as Sigmund Freud divided the mind into three layers—the “super ego,” the “ego” and the “id”—Schenker divided classical music into three layers—the foreground, the middleground and the background. And similarly, the precise dividing lines between the layers are often unclear. It’s not an exact science and often I have been confused in lectures concerning the fine distinctions between the closer middleground and the deeper middleground.
The human mind tries to impose order over anything it perceives. Throw a handful of pebbles on the beach—see the pattern? Look up at the clouds—again, see the pattern? Watch a fire dying in a fireplace. It is no surprise that we hear musical order in the music of the great masters who were interested in creating musical order. Some tones in music certainly are more important—and we hear them more vividly and remember them longer. They might even return at the conclusion of the piece to confirm our suspicion of their importance. But there’s a problem. Just as some of my thoughts—thoughts that should have remained buried deep in my “id”—sometimes seem to leap all the way up into my “super ego,” similarly, some tones have roles in more than one layer simultaneously. Although our attempt to impose order is always at work, the precise distinction between layers is not always clear. Human minds are incessantly acrobatic, but are disciplined only reluctantly.
Today, the approach of Schenker is well known, and it affects the way we think about and even compose music. Once a theory is revealed, a composer can follow it—but he can also present the theory practitioners with deliberate problems or ambiguities. For example, some of my compositions have clouds of rapid notes in the background. These notes don’t behave in a way that encourages a music theorist to easily identify a label for them, rather they bubble, percolate, splash, drip and are sprayed over the musical space. Which drop of rain do you think is the most important? In cases like this, I cannot help but wonder which small detail does the human mind latch onto?—it must be the droplet that happens to hit you on the nose.
Along these lines, I especially like to create situations where the background and foreground, which are both clearly presented, deliberately intersect—I call these occurrences “strange intersections.” One of these strange intersections is in No. 36 in my Diary of a Seducer, at measure 129, where all three guitarists play a single note that is both in the foreground and the background at the same time.
However, in The Nature of God, I decided to play by the rules and try to follow the practice of the theory—I want to show that I really am a team player. Normally, I don’t believe that background tones need to be unduly stressed, but I find that, in face of subtly, Schenker enthusiasts are left sometimes disturbed and uncertain. There are various forms of stress in music—stress can be achieved with a longer duration, or a louder dynamic, or a thicker scoring. To be safe, I decided to use all these techniques so the background notes couldn’t be missed—by listener or theorist. The deeper background notes (a single, all-interval symmetrical tone row is used for the deeper background) are four half notes in duration, scored for all six instruments (alto flute, English horn, both guitars, violin and cello), and marked mezzo forte. Each time one of these deeper background notes occurs, it should be clear that we have moved to a new position in the background. Further, to prevent confused arguments about which note is in which level, this pattern of clarity continues in the closer background, as well as the deeper and closer middlegrounds. In fact, any musician in the ensemble, simply by examining various characteristics of a particular note in his part, can declare with confidence what level it is in. Here there is no more debate about distinctions between layers. This is a clearly ordered world. When examined, this world reveals patterns. Wherever he looks, Emerson sees the recurring patterns of circles, and at every level in the music, the all interval symmetrical tone rows represent these recurring patterns.
As you study the attached chart, these patterns will become even clearer. All moving simultaneously, there are (1) large slower structures that move through the background, (2) medium middleweight structures that move slightly faster through the middleground, and (3) light rapid configurations that sparkle in the foreground—all of this material is made only of all-interval symmetrical tone rows. Each tone row is different (like snowflakes), however, each tone row symbolically offers the same message—“within me, the universe is contained” and “I am circular.” The “universe” is the completeness of all the tones and all the intervals within each tone row. The “circularity” is the symmetrical or palindrome-like nature of each tone row. And at each level, you have the same thing—more all-interval symmetrical tone rows.
Recently, at a reception, I had the honor to meet Benoit Mandelbrot. He is an expert on fractals (natural or mathematical patterns that repeat at every level). Watching clouds is watching fractals—at a distance, they look like clouds, and closer up they still look like clouds. The closer you get, the more cloud-like detail is visible—in other words, they look the same. The big picture and the detail is identical. There really is no vantage point from which you can view a cloud so that it doesn’t look like a cloud.
The Mandelbrot set is one mathematical representation of this phenomenon. I spent many hours exploring the Mandelbrot set and pondering its equation. The visual representation makes the equation far more understandable than it would be otherwise. If you think of one end of the spectrum of colors as “high” and the other end of the spectrum of colors as “low,” you can fly or hover in immense vertical space of this mathematical definition. In this world, there are precipices and canyons of infinite height and depth. The model may appear to be simple at first, but soon you have revealed before you a world of never ending, rich complexity, and it continues forever. This world is beautiful and eerie, and one awe-struck traveler described it as “grapes on God’s personal vine.”
There has been much discussion about fractal aspects in music. Certainly there are isolated fractal occurrences. An ornament may contain the same succession of notes that are found in the underlying formal key pattern. But one instance where a single detail resembling the larger structure is far from fractal. Even if several fractal-like details are found, it remains only a collection of several fractal-like details—not an integrated fractal environment.
Trying to adapt this fractal concept successfully into music is problematic—and much of the problem may lie with us. We are accustomed to music which arrives at a goal. The visual exploration of the Mandelbrot set is not goal oriented. The wonder and excitement is in the exploration—there is no correct or best way to explore it. There is no gentle entry and no climatic arrival. It’s a continuum. If music could do this, the first requirement would be that it would have to go on forever and have no beginning.
I believe that The Nature of God represents a rather abstracted approach to capture this great fractal metaphor. I am approaching it poetically, rather than mathematically. Fractals are mathematical representations of nature, and nature seems to be filled with unending fractal-like phenomena. So, I placed the 87 all-interval symmetrical tone rows in overlapping patterns throughout the piece in an attempt to portray the idea of fractals—but never losing sight of the greater artistic goal to support the text and move toward the song’s conclusion with a sense of inevitability. Again, I believe that these greater artistic goals run contrary to a literal portrayal of fractals, however, I’m sure others will debate these points far more thoroughly.
There are 365 measures in The Nature of God—the number of days that the earth takes to make a circle, (really, an ellipse), around the sun. Actually, the length of time it takes for the earth to travel around the sun is slightly longer than 365 days by about a quarter of a day. In our calendars, we compensate for this inaccuracy by adding one day (February 29) every four years. This is not a perfect solution and we make additional adjustments based on what century it is. I have accounted for this inaccuracy by four fermata’s. But no one should try to calculate and perform the length of the fermata’s based on the actual amount that the earth takes to complete it’s yearly journey. On the contrary, this is only another symbol, and should not interfere with good taste and clear judgment in performance practice.
One fermata occurs in the first measure, and one occurs in the last measure. The other two occur at symmetrical locations on notes in the deeper middleground. Therefore, since deeper middleground tones last two measures, these locations are not precisely symmetrical in terms of measure count. These inner fermatas are followed by double bars in order to delineate the form.
The exact center of the piece is measure 183—or, more precisely, the second beat of measure 183. At this precise point, the soprano sings the word “life” as part of the phrase “Our life is an apprenticeship,” placing our “life” at the exact center of the piece. By this, I mean to symbolize that each of us lives a life that is the center of many concentric circles.
I believe that the use of melissma is the most expressive idiomatic feature of singing. Here, a melissma sets apart and emphasizes the word “God.” The word “trace” traces a melodic outline through the use of a melissma. The word “flying” flies on the wings of melissma, and the culmination of the word “never” is—for a moment—never reached, thanks to the use of melissma. Finally, the word “outdone” is, itself, outdone, by occurring on successively higher notes.
The second song in the set is titled Travel and it can be found in Emerson’s essay titled Self-Reliance as follows:
Travelling is a fool’s paradise. We owe to our first journeys the discovery that place is nothing. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern Fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.
Supporting the song is a musical structure that is based on a tone row. The tone row is “close” to the chromatic scale, but not “too close” (as mentioned above). Below, all chromatically altered notes are stated in only sharps:
C D# C# D E F G A F# G# A# B
I refer to this type of tone row as a “limited interval” row, because it emphasizes certain intervals (3 minor seconds, 5 major seconds, 1 minor third, 1 major sixth, 1 minor seventh). The tone row ends on “B,” so the next occurrence can be linked by overlapping the last note with the first note, continuing the new tone row at the transposition of a major seventh. The song is made up of eleven of these statements as follows:
C D# C# D E F G A F# G# A# B
B D C C# D# E F# G# F G A A#
A# C# B C D D# F G E F# G# A
A C A# B C# D E F# D# F G G#
G# B A A# C C# D# F D E F# G
G A# G# A B C D E C# D# F F#
F# A G G# A# B C# D# C D E F
F G# F# G A A# C D B C# D# E
E G F F# G# A B C# A# C D D#
D# F# E F G G# A# C A B C# D
D F D# E F# G A B G# A# C C#
C# E D D# F F# G# A# G A B C
Within the musical structure of the song, as shown above, each successive tone row overlaps the last one by a single note which brings the transposition to a major seventh higher (or a minor second lower). The last note of the eleventh statement is the first note of what would be the twelfth statement—so just as the sentiment of the song projects, we have traveled quite a distance, but have—in essence—gone nowhere.
Although my music is quite often highly structured—as this essay presents—nevertheless, there are sometimes questions as to whether it has any structure. And here is an excellent example of why those questions will probably always persist. This particular series of tone rows occur (in the overall musical structure) in three layers. Each layer is made of the same series of tone rows but at an interval of a major third distance above and below. However, none of these layers is presented in its entirety. Here, (and this is sometimes the case in my music), a theorist attempting to analyze this music must find clues, and then fill in the missing material in order to better understand the structure—and musical theorists are not used to assuming the role of archeologists. It is archeologists who always must approach spotty evidence, then piece together what is missing to form ideas about what has happened in the past. No one expect elements to be missing in a piece of music.
But why is anything missing, anyway? After all, I could have put it all in. The reason is artistic, not theoretical. I believe that in poetry, what is left unsaid is as important as what is said. I overheard a comment recently among people viewing a painting. One exclaimed, “It’s amazing how little you can paint in order to suggest the human body.” Here, I have erased many notes from this structure. You are hearing musical erosion, that is, until the last several measures where the full strata is revealed. Until then, although many notes are missing, they are nevertheless implied or suggested. Perhaps on successive hearings, you might hear some of these missing notes—I do. You may be surprised that it is possible to hear missing notes because the musical structure sets up a sense of inevitability. Can there be any other route of progress along the established trajectory? Therefore, to express it with less creates poetry.
Here is an excellent parallel to demonstrate the difficulties in examining a musical structure with missing notes. In pencil drawings, eraser marks may remain visible, and therefore, become part of the finished drawing. Art critic Martica Sawin writes, “Decisions are laid bare so that her {the artist’s} considerable reworking, erasing, and layering are part of what the viewer is intended to grasp.” The reason why some of my music is sometimes hard to follow from an analytical perspective is that there are never any eraser marks in the finished product. My decisions are never laid bare. The final published score is always clean and pristine. The road to this final point may have been quite messy, but those many revisions are lost, unless of course, I reveal some of them, on occasion, in essays such as this. In this particular case, the erasures are an important element when considering the final structure—including their implication in the symbolism of flaws (that is, missing elements) in human character.
The last song is titled Roses. It also in Emerson’s essay titled Self-Reliance. Here is the text:
These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. Before the leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less. Its nature is satisfied and it satisfies nature in all moments alike. There is no time to it. But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present; but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present above time.
Some years ago, I arrived in late afternoon at the West Broadway studio of a friend who was a painter. He was busy, cleaning his palette by scraping off the dried paint. As he scraped, the chips flew off and onto the floor—these were pieces of loosely mixed colors, unused and hardened. He stooped, gathered a handful, carefully picked through them one by one, and arranged them on a piece of white board. Then he glued this arrangement to fix it in place, and in several minutes it was dry. As I stared, I saw the illusion of images and depth in the abstract shapes that he had just created. “It’s for you,” he said.
In this last song, I used an analogous approach. I picked up discarded fragments of unused portions of my unfinished pieces. I tore the pages that were left intact, shuffled these scraps, then pieced them together again. Even in this approach, I was not consistent. In the terminology of painting, I splashed the canvas, watched washes of color descend, and cherished rogue drips. As my painter friends would say, I allowed accidents to happen. While I worked, I had no structural plan except to achieve the most effective way to convey the text, and thought only of the musical moment at hand. I threw away my coherent compositional technique—developed over so many decades—and relied only on my faith in my ability to compose without the conscious attempt to compose.
Consider the musical structures moving from song to song. We moved from a grandly worked out musical structure, then traveled through a structure with deliberately missing components, and finally arrived in a musical structure hewn almost arbitrarily from broken and discarded fragments.
In the text of the first song we sought knowledge of God. We looked outward from ourselves. The musical structure was intricate, with only one element missing representing the unattainable—what man has yet to discover.
In the text of the second song, we sought knowledge of ourselves. The erasure marks in the musical structure represent the flaws in humankind’s character, his defects and imperfections. A perfect human would not be missing any aspects of character, but that’s not us, and it’s not this song. Changing physical or geographic locations does not remove or improve our flaws—we take them wherever we go—we can not run away from ourselves. Therefore, despite the missing elements, the structure arrives finally at the point where it began. We cannot run away from our faults, and similarly, this musical structure cannot escape its own journey to where it started.
Don’t regret the past; don’t envy or fear the future. The message of the last song is that living in the present is an important part of a spiritual existence. And, after the conclusion of the searches in the first two songs, we were unexpectedly led in the direction of spirituality—perhaps, a footstep we could not have taken on our own—and it happened at the very moment that we were unselfconscious about musical structure. Some questions remain unanswered, but it’s time to accept the flow of the music at the moment we hear it and accept the flow of life at the moment we live it.
No plan is perfect. We must adapt to a changing situation and we must change with it. The art of music composition involves the structuring of time, and our musical structures, themselves, can become symbols of ideas outside the realm of music—even the idea that only at the moment when we cease to be conscious of musical structure, do we understand and coalesce with it.
Robert Martin began composing at age 10. After receiving Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Music Composition from the Peabody Conservatory of Music, he worked at various jobs, including as an apprentice in pipe organ restoration.
In 1976, the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the Charles Ives Scholarship for outstanding music composition, allowing him to continue post-graduate studies in New York. In 1979, he received a Fulbright Scholarship to Vienna in music composition. Returning to New York in 1980, he turned his attention to Wall Street, rising to the position of Senior Vice President in investment banking at a leading firm, and serving as financial advisor to the City of New York. As the 1999 recipient of the Japan-U.S. Creative Artist Fellowship in music composition, he spent six months traveling throughout Japan.
Active as a composer full time, he lives in mid-town Manhattan, and travels widely in Asia, Europe and North America. Robert Martin’s music is published by the Theodore Presser Company, and is recorded on the Furious Artisans and CRI record labels.
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