Oboe Sashay

This is the audio of my friend Craig Matovich playing Louisiana Sashay. As discussed in this previous post, besides playing the flute part on oboe with a midi version of the harp part, he's added hand percussion and bass. 

I knew Craig at Shenandoah Conservatory back from '77 to '80. He, I and Susan were among the handful of students who weren't fresh out of high school and tended to hang together. His oboe sound was amazing and I thought about getting one to try until he took me aside and showed me his reed making room and talked about spending as much time making reeds as practicing. Then and there I decided double reeds were not for me.

Craig went on to teach for a while at Shenandoah. He was also a founding member of Oxymora, a group that was/is sort of over in the Paul Winter Consort neighborhood. 

As Craig says, I'm giving away the music to this piece, just asking for, if it gets worked up, an mp3 and maybe some photos of the performers to make a video like this one to have the audio here on the blog to compare and contrast with other versions. Even better would be the performers doing the YouTube themselves as Craig has done so that all I have to do is embed it. (I'm on rural dial-up and uploads take a while.) I can be reached at MusicMakersMusic at aol dot com.

Craig has used the "Louisiana Sashay" title that was on the score I sent him. Carol, the harpist for whom it was written used just "The Sashay" once when referring to it and I liked that. Dr. Andy, a musical companion of over 15 years prefers the working title "Vermont Song". I blogged the composition of this piece in an effort to demystify the composition process, and that was what it was first called. I think all of those titles work and can't settle on one being better than the others.

Narratives and Enactments

Here a couple of weeks ago Craig, an oboe playing friend from conservatory days, commented on Facebook how much he was enjoying a piece with a 5/4 time signature. I sent him a email talking about how much I enjoy irregular rhythms and included links to The Sashay and Timepiece. He asked for the music to The Sashay (and a midi file, which I had to figure out how to do). He's liking The Sashay enough to work on it and send me mp3 files of each version he's recorded with his oboe, adding some hand percussion, a bass, and tweaking the midi harp playback.

For one thing, he's a wonderful oboeist and I'm having a similar response to the one I had hearing The St Clements Wind Ensemble play Timepiece. Really good players take notes I've written and bring out depths of musicality I simply was unable to even imagine before hearing them.

Another thing that strikes me is that the piece is really holding up with the different instrumentation. I can't wait to compare it to what Susan and Carol do with it, but I'm pretty sure the evoked feelings will be different, though with some overlap. I'm enough of a chauvinist to think two Louisiana ladies with flute and harp are going to excel at evoking the flirtatious movements and banter that was in the back of my mind when I wrote it for them and that I hope is gesturally embedded in the music. 

They have also been steered in that direction because of my having long conversations with Susan detailing what I was thinking at various measures along the way. She suggested I do a post of all those mental visuals that helped me compose the music, but I didn't, and Craig's work is helping me understand my reluctance.

Sometime back I linked to a post of Kyle Gann's where he said he thought of his music scores as lines for a play, that different players and groups of players would perform them differently, just as plays are performed/produced differently. I agree with that wholeheartedly. My feeling is that if when composing music I make it coherent enough for me to feel a musical narrative run from measure to measure, then players will be able to sense that narrative in their own way and enact it convincingly, even if their sense of the narrative is different from mine.

And that's what Craig has done. His take on The Sashay is exceptionally dance-like, and I think because of his amazingly textured oboe sound combining with the unusual rhythms there's an Armenian, near Eastern, Scheherazade feel to what he's doing. He keeps sending updated mp3s that clean up various things, but here soon I hope to do one of those simple YouTube embed posts with the audio as it stands now. Then blog readers can decide for themselves whether there's a convincing narrative and what a particular enactment does with it.

One of the things I most enjoyed back when I had the private practice in San Antonio was the yearly recitals with various clients playing various instruments. There were always a few piano players and I always had all of them play one piece in common with the others, along with the things only they were doing. Hearing different players present their individual enactments of  the same piece was always a wonderful illustration of just how expressive of our personalities making music can be.

V.S. Computer Playback

Here is a completely untweaked computer playback of A Louisiana Sashay, a.k.a. Vermont Song, as it now stands. There's some kind of glitch at one point where it briefly sounds as though there are two flutes, and the final chord for the harp isn't arpeggiated as it is in the score. Real people will probably play it a bit slower, with pauses and/or ritards here and there.

This playback, though, is good enough to get an idea of the piece, and it seems to work. I finished the writing of it Sunday morning and have listened to it a number of times since, and nothing calls attention to itself as needing fixing. I'm very pleased with a number of things that happen in the piece and look forward to seeing how it will come off in actual performance.

I've sent PDF scores and parts to my friends up in Vermont for whom it was written, asking if there are any awkward or unplayable bits, especially in the case of the harp. If it passes that test, I think it's nearly done.

The only problem in writing the piece (other than trying to keep straight what the harp can and can't do) was finding the time to spend with it and then having the patience to keep working at it to get something that sounded "right", measure by measure. That Thomas Edison quote about invention being 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration is very apt in my case. There were any number of places where nothing seemed to work and it took an hour or more to find something that did work for just a measure or two. Somewhere along the line I thought of using a stopwatch to see just how many hours it took me to get less than five minutes worth of music, but decided not to, being afraid that seeing an actual number might make me slower in taking up the writing of the next piece. 

More on the McGill study

The first flurry of stories coming out on the recent study at McGill talked mostly about the direct connection between listening to music and the release of dopamine. A second wave of articles is now coming, giving more detail and expanding more on what the findings suggest. The best so far is this one from Wired. Besides talking more about the research, it ties it to the work of Leonard Meyer, whose book Emotion and Meaning in Music came out in 1956. Here are some snips from the Wired article:

. . . When listening to our favorite songs, our body betrays all the symptoms of emotional arousal. The pupils in our eyes dilate, our pulse and blood pressure rise, the electrical conductance of our skin is lowered, and the cerebellum, a brain region associated with bodily movement, becomes strangely active. Blood is even re-directed to the muscles in our legs. (Some speculate that this is why we begin tapping our feet.) In other words, sound stirs us at our biological roots. . . 

. . . The question, of course, is what all these dopamine neurons are up to. What aspects of music are they responding to? And why are they so active fifteen seconds before the acoustic climax?. . .

. . . it turns out that the most important part of every song or symphony is when the patterns break down, when the sound becomes unpredictable. If the music is too obvious, it is annoyingly boring, like an alarm clock. (Numerous studies, after all, have demonstrated that dopamine neurons quickly adapt to predictable rewards. If we know what’s going to happen next, then we don’t get excited.) This is why composers introduce the tonic note in the beginning of the song and then studiously avoid it until the end. The longer we are denied the pattern we expect, the greater the emotional release when the pattern returns, safe and sound. That is when we get the chills. . . 

. . . According to Meyer, it is the suspenseful tension of music (arising out of our unfulfilled expectations) that is the source of the music’s feeling. While earlier theories of music focused on the way a noise can refer to the real world of images and experiences (its “connotative” meaning), Meyer argued that the emotions we find in music come from the unfolding events of the music itself. This “embodied meaning” arises from the patterns the symphony invokes and then ignores, from the ambiguity it creates inside its own form. . . 

. . . The uncertainty makes the feeling – it is what triggers that surge of dopamine in the caudate, as we struggle to figure out what will happen next. And so our neurons search for the undulating order, trying to make sense of this flurry of pitches. We can predict some of the notes, but we can’t predict them all, and that is what keeps us listening, waiting expectantly for our reward, for the errant pattern to be completed. Music is a form whose meaning depends upon its violation.

Another article that makes the connection to Meyer is here. The quote in this article that jumped out at me was:

. . . Zatorre said he does not know what is happening in the brain of the composer who is writing the music. "My guess is that composing is such a complex act that you may not get that emotional touch until later when you are actually experiencing it for the first time." . . . 

Somewhere in the Vermont Song series of posts talking about writing a piece of music I mentioned the amazing feeling I get the first time I hear a piece of mine performed, even though I've listened to the computer play it back many, many times over the course of composition. I characterized it as feeling in a pseudo-dream state, though fully awake. One time it even happened when I played a piano piece (I'd practiced a lot) for someone else for the first time. 

Having all this new neuroscience coming out and confirming personal experience and giving such a solid basis of music therapy is really pretty amazing to me. I always thought it would come, but never thought we'd get this much so soon. 

V.S. Composing Motivation

I've gotten back to work on Louisiana Sashay and am thinking about not doing anymore measure by measure commentary, but waiting until it's finished and put up audio of the computer playing it and make a few comments then. This post is to expand on something that was more allusively present than clearly stated toward the end of this post.

Back in the 70's a college friend developed a real talent for black and white photography. One time I asked him what it was that gave his photos a particular feeling consistency. He thought what I might be referring to was his notion that when one looks at one of his photos, there should be no sense of the ego that took it. As evanescent as that idea is, I knew exactly what he was saying and it perfectly explained what I was seeing (or not seeing) in his work.

Back when I was younger, the music I wrote, mostly imitative of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, was full of ego. Dylan's line, "little boy lost, he takes himself so seriously," comes to mind. Now, though, what ego that's present (I hope!) is just a reflection of how I go about playing the musical game I've set myself with the initial parameters of a piece. I'm never consciously trying "to say" anything. I just want the music to flow from its own nature, be fun for the players to play, and fresh to the ears of the audience. 

Having come of age in the age of angst, with academic atonalists trying to broaden my bourgeois mind and poseurs being trivially transgressive, all I want from my music is that it's fun and engaging to play. Fulfilling that simple requirement, for me, provides a much more valuable experience than trying to carry all that ego luggage.

Here's the last paragraph of the performance notes I sent out with the score and parts of Timepiece:

The feeling tone of the piece is meant to be completely

positive. No angst, anger or depression. Playfulness and
joy, yearning and reverence, exhilaration and celebration
were more of what I had in mind. If you (and an audience)
feel uplifted after playing it, mission accomplished.

V.S. Louisiana Sashay

Here's how things look for now. I may well go back and fine tune some of this, but it feels like it's working, and it's gotten to the point where I think it'll be better to take what's been done as the basis for what comes next rather than to keep adding new elements. 

These images are taken from the working file, but I've left out the alto flute staff to reduce clutter (and because I decided to do the piece first without it so it can stand as a duet), doubled the size of the notation to make it legible here on the blog, and tinkered with the layout for the same reason. My preferred format for hard copy scores is legal landscape with notation around 75% of default. That allows me so see whole sections of music like sentences in a book, as opposed to a narrow newspaper column.

Things start out with a harp solo which is answered by a flute solo. It's much easier to have one player start and the other(s) then join in than it is for everyone to start playing in synch right out of the gate. I hadn't fully realized this until now, but I think all of my ensemble pieces have a single player setting the tempo for others to join. There's also the idea of letting each voice be heard on it's own to set the aural table for the audience. 

The harp has a series chords laying out the basic sashay rhythm. The computer playback tempo is 108 for a quarter note. The chords are missing either thirds or fifths to give them that open sounding harmony I like so much and which should sound great on the harp. Only the last chord is an arpeggio so as to emphasize the rhythm. 

The flute solo generally follows the contours of the harp solo, but not quite - that mixing of the expected and the unexpected. Then another, briefer harp solo, and while it's still ringing from the last arpeggio, the flute comes in on a high C on a pickup and then the harp and flute play together with the same rhythm for three measures. I love high soaring melodies.

Then the flute breaks away doing flutey things with the harp playing simple octaves for a bit. One of the things I'm trying to do is avoid letting the harp slip out of the audience's attention because of its doing something repetitive. And in general I try to vary the textures of the sound as much as all the other elements involved. 

The flute motive in measure 21, 22 and 23 is the closest to mimicking a sashay as I've gotten.

Now the flute plays around with the little motive in measure 19

In measure 29 there's a bit of the unison rhythm again, then in 30 the harp breaks out into arpeggios, and they sort of take off on their own for a while. For now measure 35 begins a reprise of the opening harp solo and I'm thinking of having the flute join in to intensify what has already been heard once. I don't do sonata form style development, but I do like to create familiarity with various elements by bringing them back in different ways. 

V.S. Odds and Ends

I've gotten a minute's worth of music that, as of last night, seems to work. This post just to mention a few ancillary things.

Finale - I love it because it allows for my various non-standard ways of doing music notation, but that very complexity can be a problem when I can't remember how to do something, either because the latest update changes something, or because I simply forgot due to not doing that task for a year or so. Case in point is the time signature. When I was going back over Timepiece to make parts for a local quintet to read through (they liked it), noticed that I'd figured out how to have something like 3+3+2+2 all over a single 8 below back in 1996 and just had to look to see how I'd done it.

Resolution - Visually it's how many pixels per square inch. In audio it's something about how many bits per something. On tv when they pixel-ate something to obscure it, we notice the boundary of the high and low resolution. In writing music I try not to have any boundaries like that in the rhythm (no bursts of 32nd notes in a stately half note/ quarter note melody) or harmony (no sudden shifts out of key/mode. I think it also applies to other ways I judge the music I write that are tougher to write about, like gesture.

Writing for particular players/instruments - Listening to the local group read through Timepiece reminded me that I'm always thinking of what the individual players are doing, and whether or not it's interesting. Dr. Andy told me once that in the Bach B Minor Mass, in one section the cellos have the same repeated quarter note for measures on end. When I'm writing for ensembles, in my mind it's however many soloists coming together for the piece, and everyone gets some time high in the mix. In this piece it's trying to keep the harpist interested and to see just how many ways the harp (for which I've never written before) can make music.

Computer Playback - Besides not being able to write music without a keyboard, having the computer play back what I've done is essential. I don't have theory mind and simply cannot manifest the music in my head by reading a score. I've always thought the computer playback is sort of like an X-ray that clearly shows the interior structure of the piece, but that the true nature of the piece is revealed only by performance. That's part of the reason my hearing first performances of things I've written is such an amazing experience.

Attention - One of my complaints about the concert band repertoire is that most of it seems an early incarnation of the MTV gimmick of constantly shifting the image to hold the attention of an audience. I keep thinking the arrangers decide on what transitions of speed and tonality and articulation they what to teach the kids and then forage about for bits of music to put between them ;-) But I've come to realize I do the same thing, just without the shifts of speed/meter and tonality. Once I write something that seems to work for a few bars I'll often try to extend it for longer than it wants, not catching at first that it's becoming boring. Many of my deletions of the last several measures and starting over are due to this. The other deletions are, of course, trying where to go instead. It really is like some sort of glass bead game, and when it works there's a wonderful feeling being connected to something outside myself.

V.S. Various Items

Each of these could be a post in itself, but if I do that, the piece will never be written, or at least, not anytime soon.

Instrument specific music:

I've always written with specific instruments in mind, so the downside is that it's often not easily adapted to other instrumentation. To me, one of the hallmarks of Bach is that his music can sound great, no matter the instrumentation. The upside, though, is letting the way an instrument is played, and it's range and tone, be the very suggestive starting point in writing the music. 

The harp:

 I can't think of another instrument where the physical gestures of making music so closely map the music itself. I've been playing a lot of "air harp" to get some sort of feel of what it must be like to play one. The major discovery is that the little fingers of both hands play lower notes than the thumb, whereas I'm used to piano where the right thumb plays lower notes than the right little finger.

Harmony:

It keeps shifting, but right now thinking of a two flat key signature with F as the tonic. That makes the I chord a flatted seventh and the V chord minor. Also have thought to mention that I like to start out using octaves with the fourth and/or the fifth played in the middle. This is neither major nor minor, and besides having that ambiguity, it hearkens back to when thirds were thought dissonant, which they are when compared to octaves, fourths and fifths. If you use thirds from start to finish you're limiting your tonal palette to secondary colors.

Expectations:

One of the things the neuroscience is telling us is that what pleases us is a combination of the expected and the unexpected. Using modal harmonies and odd key signatures, neither of which are drastically different than the norms, makes it easier to do fresh sounding things without going too far over into the unexpected. As I write measure by measure, there's always the judgement as to whether what's written is somewhere between the expected and the unexpected in a balance I find appealing. There must be some consistency in these judgments, and everything else I'm doing, as several people have commented that I have a recognizable "style" or "sound". 

Not repeating compositions:

Every time I write something I try to push a little beyond whatever has worked before. Looking back on some of the old discarded pieces, a lot of them were abandoned because they were too much like things I'd already done, and somehow, trying to make that sound fresh is harder than setting out in a little different direction.

A real title:

If I can write something to go with it, may call the piece A Louisiana Sashay. Sometime back I wrote a piece for Susan and gave "at a moderate sashay" as a tempo indication. She liked that and played the piece that way. She and Carol both have strong Louisiana connections. Lou -si an -a  sa - shay fits the 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 1 2 rhythm if I go back and change the four grouping to two twos. Having lived in New Orleans for two years back in the early 70's, there are a lot of images and associations I can draw on. 

V.S. Time Signature

Here are a couple of sketches in the time signature I'm thinking of using, having beats in two groups of three followed by a group of four. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10. To get Finale to automatically beam the notes in a way that shows that grouping I have to use a compound time signature of 3/8+3/8+1/2. To avoid making things look needlessly complicated I'll probably hide that numeric time signature and let the beamed notes (and dotted and undotted quarters) speak for themselves.

I like using the rhythms that can spring from unusual time signatures. Trying to get something that works is almost game like, as there's that feeling of things falling into place when you get it right. I've used this beat grouping before and like it a lot, both in the third movement of Timepiece, and before that in a solo piano piece called Soaring. 

So that's the starting point. Having set the basic parameters as laid out in these posts, the next step is to write 16 measures or so that are interesting and solid enough they can be extended into a whole piece. While I think about structural stuff at this point, once I get going it's written note by note by, measure by measure, straight until the end. I recently fired up an old computer to find a piece I'd forgotten I'd written and found it, along with numerous discards that never took off. The hardest thing is when you work on something for hours and come to realize you need to toss it and use that experience to do something much better.

(Should add that the key signature went to F minor from F major due to those extra flats just coming naturally to my fingers when doodling around with this time signature and thinking about what melody to give the flute that would show off that quality of tone Susan can generate in the middle to low range.)

V.S. Key Signature

The next step is choosing a key signature (pitch set) to work with. Since the harp likes flats, since I'm contemplating an alto flute part (which adds a flat in transposition), and since strings might be involved (I think of them as having a slight preference for sharps), that narrows it down to one or two flats, three at the most (on the alto, four is my practical limit).

One flat would yield F major, which from the F above middle C to the one above that nicely covers the ambit of flute pitches in that mid range I want to really dig into having Susan's tone freshly in mind. The two octaves of D minor above middle C would probably incorporate the full gamut of pitches to use to avoid overpowering the harp.

Adding the other flat would yield G minor, which is a nice one step up from F major, and having just played around a little with it on the keyboard*, those two keys are where I'm going to start, as I think moving from one to the other can make for a pleasing and fresh sounding shift.

There are, of course, possible modal uses of those key signatures as well, and "modal" is a comment I sometimes hear about my music, so I must be doing something along those lines some of the time.

* Should say I simply can't imagine composing music without access to a keyboard. I took piano lessons as a child but never "got" what classical music was about until I heard Susan and a flute friend playing the Bach Two Part Inventions at a garden party out in the Virginia countryside early on during our time at Shenandoah. What did happen during all those years of lessons, though, was that the physical arrangement of the keyboard became the way I thought and still think about music and music theory. I do not have "theory mind", but with a keyboard and plenty of time, I can fake it.

V.S. Players and Instruments

The first thing I settle on in writing a new piece is who's going to play it on what instruments. In this case it's my flute playing friend Susan and her harp playing friend Carol. On my recent trip to Vermont, they played Mosaic for me. I wrote it in 1994 for Susan on flute and me on piano and they had worked it up as a flute and harp piece. It really works that way, but I kept thinking a piece written expressly for the two of them would better exploit that wonderful pairing of instruments.

I've known Susan since the '70's when we were at Shenandoah Conservatory together. I've never known anyone to more fully inhabit the music she makes and I've never heard better tone on the flute. She's a pro level player, so the only concerns about the instrument are those inherent in it. Her low number Hanes has a B foot, but I never write that note as other flutes might not have it. The E above high C on flutes is the hardest note and worth avoiding if possible. Being a product of the music education system Susan. tongues. every. single. note. un.less. o.ther.wise. no.ted. It was for Susan I first wrote music for small ensembles (Dr. Andy on cello and me on alto flute or piano) and she loves the new and unusual, so besides writing things for her I think suit her personality, there are no limits on what I can try.

I've just met Carol on this recent trip. She plays the harp very well, and like Susan, has a wonderful Louisiana laugh. She's also pro level, so instrument considerations are of a general type. I've never written for harp before and only know what I read up on and what Carol showed me in a brief clinic after she and Susan played Mosaic. The main things seem to be the harp prefers flat keys, too many accidentals or key changes mean a lot of messing with pedals, and she said an octave and a third was a good limit on chord fingerings. She also made the point that when a harp plays high notes, it's good to have low notes with them so they won't sound tinny. 

One thing I want to go for is having Susan in her low and mid ranges more than the high. Playing softly in the high range of the flute can be done, but it's tough. There was a blend of tones when Susan was in her mid range where the harp and flute sounds really melded. The high flute range can be used, but it will tend to overpower the harp. The other thing for me to keep in mind is that the harp strings are plucked by fingers, not struck by levered hammers as on a piano, so that loud percussive side to the piano is not something the harp can do.

Once things get going, I may add a third part for alto flute or violin or viola. When I was in Vermont and making music with Susan I mostly played an electric keyboard I'd taken, but we did try one duet I'd done years back for flute and alto flute. I didn't play that well, being very rusty on the alto, but the combo of those two flutes creating difference tones on close harmonies is an amazing sound, and one the harp would frame nicely. The alto's range is exactly that of a violin (starting down at the G below middle C) and the upper three strings of a viola and Susan has family members who play them, so the alto part could be covered by one of them when I'm not in Vermont. If written, that part would be easy enough for me to play and there would absolutely not be any E's above high C (concert B as the alto is in the key of G) and low D (concert A) would be as low as I'd want to go.

photo - yard violets, which some consider flowers and not weeds.

Composing Music

Over the years I've often had people tell me they can't imagine how it is someone can go about composing music. It happened again here a few days ago when I was on a quick visit to my flute playing friend Susan up in Vermont and I got to socialize with some artists. In a wonderful conversation with a very accomplished and well established engraver, he said something along the lines of he could see how visual artists got going on a piece and worked it to completion, but where a composer even started was a mystery to him. His being an amateur player in a community symphony orchestra made the comment more striking.

I think part of what creates this wonderment is that very few people know the basic ingredients of music. In English classes you learn spelling and grammar and then build on that knowledge to understand literature. If English classes were like music classes, you'd be taught all the fine points of recitation of great literature without ever getting that grounding in the basics of how it's put together. 

The other thing that seems to daunt people about composing is seeing it all as one fell swoop, when it's actually a series of steps where various decisions about how to go forward are made. So I've got this idea of blogging the composition of a piece of music to see if that will help illuminate the process, at least as far as how I go about it. May well jinx the piece, but seems worth trying. It's working title will be Vermont Song and posts talking about it will begin with the abbreviation V.S.

This may help as well trying to figure out how to present some aspects of theory in a non-threatening way. I'm more and more convinced some familiarity with theory needs to be part of the learning materials from the get go. Having that knowledge baked in from the beginning seems to be a better route than trying to add it on after drilling technique and nothing else for years on end.