Tortoiseshell Music Home of composer Nathan Curtis

Lately, I've gotten a little dissatisfied with my flute playing -- I have never intended for the flute to be my primary instrument, but I do perform several of my own compositions on flute, and occasionally other people's compositions as well. But recently, when hearing a much better flutist play a piece I didn't much care for, I realized that their tone quality was significantly better than mine. Their sound was clearer and more penetrating, and they had a much greater range of dynamics in all registers. It was like comparing a powerful laser to a cheap flashlight with dying batteries. I didn't care if my fingers couldn't keep up with theirs, but I sure wouldn't mind improving my sound.

After consulting with one of my flautist friends -- who now specializes in the baroque flute but still knows a thing or two about these newfangled metal monstrosities -- I acquired Trevor Wye's practice books for flute (I'm not linking to Wye's own site because he renders most of his text as images. So inaccessible it hurts!) and have started working my way through Book 1(Tone). This is actually the first time I've received any significant instruction -- written or oral -- on playing the flute. When I first decided to try my hand at my dad's old flute, he showed me where to put my fingers, but didn't remember much about the fingerings. I worked out fingerings (not always the ideal ones, it turns out) for the first couple octaves on my own, and just started playing around. A couple of times I have asked other flutists for help fingering a particular note, but aside from that I am completely self-taught on the flute. I am still going through Wye's exercises on my own, but just having those exercises in front of me is more guidance than I've ever had in the past.

So far, I think those exercises have been a great boon. I haven't been practicing a whole heck of a lot -- maybe an hour and a half per session, two or three times per week for the last couple weeks -- but already I'm hearing an improvement. My sound has a lot more presence in the lower and middle register, though the very bottom of my register is lagging. I also think I'm getting more of a consistent sound between different parts of my range. I haven't worked on the upper register just yet, and once my tone in the lower register is solid throughout I'd also like to start working on technique. Keeping my own music in mind, I have a few particular goals:

1. Work up my tone to make "Morningsong" (from Three Blues Moods and Doina sound more polished. These pieces are not technically challenging for me, but in light of that I want to get a really good sound. I'd also like a better sound on "Moanin' Low" (also from Three Blues Moods), but the multiphonics respond much differently than ordinary flute playing, so I don't know if Wye can help me on that. But I think I'll be quite happy with how I sound on "Morningsong" and Doina in another week or two.
2. Work up my technique to nail the two or three runs I always stumble over in "Mr. Monk," the third Blues Mood. I've never performed Three Blues Moods by myself because of the 5% (if that) of "Mr. Monk" that I can't quite hit. I've played "Moanin' Low" in concert since the flutists I've worked with couldn't play the multiphonics, but have usually left "Morningsong" and "Mr. Monk" in more technically competent hands. Which is also problematic, since most flutists can't swing to save their life, and step all over "Mr. Monk" as a result. Also, if I can get to this level of technical competence, then I could play some more interesting ornaments and elaborations in Doina. I don't know how quickly my technique will improve, but this goal is only just out of reach of my current abilities, so I hope it would only take a few weeks after I hit the first goal.
3. Get my technique, upper register, and stamina up to the point where I can play Triple Point. While less than 5% of "Mr. Monk" is beyond my current abilities, and that 5% is only just beyond those abilities, more like 15-20% of Triple Point gives me problems, and I'm much further from surmounting those problems. This is not surprising, as "Mr. Monk" (along with the other Blues Moods) was written with my own flute-playing abilities in mind, while I did not want to limit myself so in Triple Point. There are more runs, and they are faster (but usually not in strict time, which ameliorates things somewhat). Triple Point spends much more time in the upper register; I would guess that 10-15% of Triple Point is higher than 98% of "Mr. Monk." And one of the highest of those notes -- a third-octave G# that is difficult for me to sustain at mezzo-forte when I am properly warmed up at the beginning of a session -- occurs 12 times, piannissimo, in the last 2 minutes of a 12-minute piece that has already been stretching my limits over the previous 10 minutes. I can fumble my way through those first 10 minutes and at least leave you with a good idea of what it would ideally sound like, but I can't come close to a credible rendition of those last 2 minutes. Given the magnitude of these challenges, I have no idea how long it would take me to reach this point, if ever. My optimistic guess would be 3-4 times as long as it takes for me to reach the second goal.

So I've got a lot of practice sessions on the flute ahead of me. And I need to keep practicing the bass trombone as well. I think two instruments concurrently is about my limit for serious practice, but I long ago accepted that the clarinet would take a back seat to the flute, which in turn would take a back seat to the trombone. But I'm making progress. So far, it's been due to actually doing long-tone exercises. I never really had the patience to practice long tones on the flute, and I probably wouldn't have gone about it in an intelligent manner without having some written exercises in front of me. It's probably obvious to anyone who has seriously practiced a wind instrument that long tones would help improve my tone quality, but I was always more interesting in noodling and composing on the flute than playing boring exercises. Now that I'm sufficiently motivated to play the boring stuff before I have fun, I'm seeing some improvement.

Additionally, these long-tone exercises are having an unexpected side effect. Playing long tones seems to make me hungry. Really hungry. I'll practice for 45 minutes or so and my stomach will increasingly voice its dissatisfaction while my blood sugar starts to drop. Then I say to myself, "Oh, it's the middle of the day; I should go have lunch." (Apparently I am fond of semicolons even when talking to myself; this is not too terribly surprising.) So I'll go and have lunch. And because I'm feeling so hungry, I'll usually have a pretty substantial lunch, like I did today: a thick slice of lasagna, a glass of milk, yogurt, and some trail mix. Then I'll go back to practicing. In another 45 minutes, I'll be hungry again. I'm not sure what's going on here. Sure, practicing takes physical effort, but I've never gotten this consistently hungry practicing the bass trombone, working on long tones or anything else. My best guess is that my body is upping its metabolic rate in response to the increased intake of oxygen, but this still doesn't explain why it doesn't happen when I practice the bass trombone, as the two instruments actually make quite similar demands on one's lungs. But if I keep practicing like this, I may wind up eating myself out of house and home. Let's hope I can make it through the winter.

Since I had trouble keeping a schedule of updating every Tuesday, I have decided to be less rigorous about when I post my feature articles. Of course, I can't call them "Tuesday features" anymore, at leat not without a certain amount of irony. Since I'd rather save that irony for something that really deserves it -- I have no idea what, so maybe it's more of a strategic irony reserve -- the (hopefully recurring) feature articles will now be called "Listen to This." So, listen to this:

That's "Leeds United," from Who Killed Amanda Palmer, the solo debut of Dresden Dolls singer Amanda Palmer. Everything I've heard from the album so far has been great, but "Leeds United" is what first got my attention. And actually, I nearly passed it over. The first time I saw someone post this video, I watched about 30 seconds, and thought "Meh, another stalker song." Besides which, the video was slow to load further, so I gave up on it. Maybe a week or so later, I heard about the flak Palmer had gotten from her record label about supposedly unflattering shots in the video. Sometimes I resist the urge to pay attention to something just because it's controversial, but reading others' reactions I got the impression that Roadrunner Records was trying to step on something good.

And it was good. Quite good. For starters, it's not just "another stalker song." Yeah, there's a stalker narrative, but it's more about the stalker's bitterness than the stalking itself. At least, I think so; I have trouble piecing together the lyrical throughline, particularly in the bridge. As an aside, I have generally been bad at parsing song lyrics, both in putting together the syllables to make words and in putting the words together to make ideas. So I generally don't dwell on the lyrics so much as the music. Thus, let me dwell on the music.

There's a lot for me to like about this music. One of the most obvious for me was the backing horn section, (first entering around 1:50) which may be my favorite since They Might Be Giants' "Museum of Idiots." I love the sound of the horns on this track, from their very first entrance. The horn parts are very much in line with the cabaret style of the song, but the sound itself is more like a college pep band, which adds to the raucous tone in the latter half. That may be a product of engineering and mixing, but the horn tracks were apparently recorded just as a demo that happened to make the final cut, so I don't know how much engineering was feasible in that situation.

The horn section is admittedly a quite conspicuous element on this tune, but there are a lot of tasty tidbits hiding in other places. Two things caught my ear almost at the same time in the refrain during the second verse ("Who needs love..." starting around 1:30). One is the voicing of the bass part. The chord changes in the refrain are pretty simple: Bb/Bb/F/Gmin, repeated. And the bass part conforms to this exactly, hitting the root of each chord on each downbeat with a pickup leading into it. But instead of just parking on Bb and then going up a step from F to G, the bass jumps all over the place:

I especially like the third and fourth bars, as the bass jumps down nearly an octave rather than proceeding stepwise from F to G. This downward leap in place of an upward step in the bass is not a new invention; bass players have been using that gesture almost since they were let into the band, and it's not unusual to find whole pieces built around that motive. Nonetheless, it's an effective gesture here, one that gives this section a relaxed feel, setting it apart from the previous eight bars (which used the same chord changes but featured a stepwise ascent at the same point in the bass line) and making the entrance of the horns twelve bars later that much brasher.

The other thing that struck me during this refrain was part of Palmer's delivery. Not the notes she's singing, but rather the opposite: the breaths you can hear between notes (You can hear her breathing in several places throughout the song, but this is where I first noticed it). A classical singer would take great pains to hide her breathing, but Palmer's gasps are front and center. If she didn't want those breaths to be audible, they certainly could have gotten edited out, but they stayed in, and I think that was an excellent decision. Here, her frequent gasps -- every three or four notes, and it's not like they're particularly long notes -- highlight the desperation behind the speaker's denial. And, I have to admit, Palmer delivers the notes she sings quite splendidly as well. She claims to have been in "NO SHAPE to sing," (emphasis hers; scroll down past the first big group of pictures) and I can believe it, but I wouldn't want it any other way. She starts out as a smoky cabaret chanteuse and is practically screaming by the end, but it's so much more effective than a "properly" polished performance would have been. One of the many advantages singers in almost any pop genre have over classical is the infinitely wider range of "acceptable" vocal qualities. I don't mean that in the sense of "Bob Dylan can get away with sounding like Bob Dylan," but rather that it's perfectly normal -- and often desirable -- to sing roughly, to have more than one sound. Palmer gets a lot of different vocal colors on the other songs from her album, bringing more personality to those songs than any but the greatest opera singers can muster. Again, this is not unusual for singers of her ilk, but I am particularly fond of the colors she chose, even if she couldn't help it in this case. And I can't think of any other song that uses the singer's breathing to such effective ends off the top of my head (but "Runs in the Family" offers an interesting comparison; I think it's closer to indicating emotion rather than embodying it, but I do like it when Palmer's two parallel vocal tracks have breaths in different spots.

If I wanted to, I'm sure I could come up with an awful lot of things I think Palmer nails in "Leeds United," but I'm trying to cut down on the length of these posts. So let me just say that "Leeds United" has been running through my head an awful lot this week, and it rarely fails to bring a smile to my face. The fact that the video is a madcap rumpus doesn't hurt, either. And there's plenty to like in her other songs. "Astronaut" has a wonderfully varied accompaniment, ranging from ambient to driving to pointillistic. "Runs in the Family" scores major points with me for its Glassian touches, especially the ending. Presumably, some props go to producer Ben Folds on those tracks. "Guitar Hero" manages to seriously rock and haunt at the same time, and I'm quite taken with the melodic phrasing in "The Point of it All." A great album, and from a Boston artist to boot.

P.S.: Do you suppose "Guitar Hero" will make it into Rock Band? That'd be a good use of the irony I saved up at the beginning of this post. Given developer Harmonix's interest in local bands, I'd guess that the main thing keeping the Dresden Dolls out of their games has been the dearth of guitar-friendly songs. "Guitar Hero" is actually primarily synth-driven, with some guitar licks from East Bay Ray on top, but that's not such an obstacle for Harmonix, who have included songs by synthpop band Freezepop in all their games.

P.P.S.: There's one thing I forgot to mention in my previous post. Don't listen to Nancarrow while trying to solve crossword puzzles, sudoku, and the like. Sometimes I simply could not think straight enough to fill in the little boxes. Just so you know.

P.P.P.S.: I would also like to point out that the trombonists on the "Leeds United" video are rather brave for marching their horns through the midst of a food fight (3:50 to 4:00 -- it's a planned and presumably somewhat controlled food fight, but there are plenty of projectiles nonetheless) -- particularly the bass trombonist, (freeze it at 3:58) who has quite a nice instrument. I hope no trombones were harmed in the making of that video.

It has been far too long since I last posted. Basically, I was working on another Tuesday feature that was slated to appear back on November 4, but got caught up following the election returns. I do not deal with missed deadlines in a healthy manner, so it's taken me quite a while to suck it up and post. I do want to keep doing something like the Tuesday feature, but with a more flexible schedule. We'll see how that goes.

Posting here is not the only long overdue thing I've done recently. In the past week or so, I've also been patching up a couple of glaring gaps in my musical knowledge. For too long, the player piano studies of Conlon Nancarrow and George Russell's Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization have been on my radar, and I'm finally getting myself acquainted with them. How are those projects going? Well, I'm glad you asked.

Nancarrow's studies for player piano are one of the monolithic bodies of work in 20th-century music. Frustrated with the limitations of human performers and following a suggestion from Henry Cowell's New Musical Resources, Nancarrow purchased two player pianos and a machine for punching piano rolls and moved to Mexico City. There, he composed largely in isolation, and drew on the technical capabilities of the player piano to produce music of nearly unheard-of rhythmic and polyphonic complexity. Though Nancarrow received little recognition for his work through most of his lifetime, recordings in the 1970s brought his music to a wider audience, and other musicians realized the importance of his contributions. He was awarded a MacArthur "genius grant" in 1982, which enabled him to write new works for ensemble performance, but the player piano studies remain his most significant output.

I had known about Nancarrow's accomplishments for quite a while, and first encountered his music in 2001. I heard one of his early boogie-woogie-inspired works -- probably one of the movements of Study No. 3, but I don't remember precisely -- and I was astonished and overwhelmed by the sheer level of activity. It hit me pretty hard, but inexplicably I did not delve deeper into the studies. As my own compositional development progressed, I became more and more interested in exploring new rhythmic ideas. One of the most important ideas to come out of American classical music has been the use of rhythm, rather than harmony, as a primary organizational factor. I have gotten to be quite familiar with some of the most prominent sources of rhythmic innovation in American music -- jazz and rock and roll, minimalism, post-minimalism, and totalism -- but Nancarrow remained a glaring blind spot. So a few weeks ago, I finally acquired a recording of his music -- Other Minds' 4-CD rerelease of the 1750 Arch LP recordings from 1977.

Best Amazon gift card I ever spent. This music is nothing short of amazing. It's taken me over a week to get through all four CDs, as there's a limit to how much Nancarrow I can take in in one sitting, but that has been time well spent. His music has great appeal both viscerally and intellectually: it grabs you by the throat with torrents of scales and riffs, but while so held, you become aware of the many interrelationships between parts. At the same time, I find his music very personable: often, it sounds like something that I might pound out while noodling at the piano, if I had four extra hands and a commensurate increase in processor speed. I have to believe that Nancarrow was sometimes having a laugh as he wrote these studies; I can imagine him saying, "You think that was fast? Well, how about this!" The cartoonish absurdity of yet another tempo layer piled on top of an already turbulent maelstrom cannot have been lost on him, and he seems to have reveled in it. Just try listening to Study No. 29 without cracking a grin (or being driven crazy, I suppose):

Between the twittering sound effects and the precipitous acceleration in the last 30 seconds, it feels like the soundtrack to some bizarro Super Mario game. To me, anyway. I don't know if any of Nancarrow's ideas will insinuate themselves into my own music, but I'm grateful for his music all the same.

George Russell's Lydian Chromatic Concept is, for me, an exploration of a different sort. For all my years of training, my knowledge of contemporary music theory is not so great. I've never formally studied Schenker, Riemann, or Forte; I'm familiar with the basic ideas of each, but I don't think I could undertake an analysis of a composition through any of their means. Also, I don't need to know any of this theory to compose my music. Perhaps I will try to learn more about these subjects someday, but I don't feel any pressing need.

I do, however, feel a need to learn about the Lydian Chromatic Concept. While Schenker, Riemann, Forte, and others have certainly made important contributions to music theory, Russell's work has especial signifance, being perhaps the first codified theoretical framework to arise from the study of jazz, rather than predominantly European classical music. For that alone, the Lydian Chromatic Concept is vitally important if only for historical reasons. But it also seems to be vital for musical reasons; in a recent interview, composer and saxophonist Fred Ho called Russell the most innovative music theorist of the 20th century. With jazz being such a big influence on my own music, a theory of jazz, from jazz, and for jazz should practically be required reading. But somehow, the Lydian Chromatic Concept flew under my radar all through college and grad school; I'm pretty sure I had heard the name somewhere, but it didn't really stick. In fact, Russell's theory first really came to my attention when I was researching the musical history of the MacArthur fellowships -- I guess writing that article provided the spark for me to finally delve into both of the subjects of this current post. I had a friend check the Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization out from Harvard's music library for me, and have been dipping my toe in.

I haven't gotten very far in yet. I'm sure Russell has a lot of valuable insights, but the first couple of chapters are giving me pause. Specifically, he offers a number of specious arguments in support of the idea that the Lydian mode, rather than the major scale, should be the basic mode of tonal organization. To wit:

• He cites as evidence the fact that the 11th overtone of a C fundamental is 551 cents above C, which is closer to F# (600 cents) than F (500 cents) in 12-tone equal temperament, while completely ignoring the fact that the 7th overtone, at 969 cents above C, is closest to Bb (1000 cents), which is in neither the major scale nor the Lydian mode -- and the 7th harmonic is significantly closer to Bb (31.2 cents) than the 11th harmonic is to F# (48.7 cents). But if you decide you want to hit both the 7th and 11th harmonics as closely as possible within equal temperament, you end up with the Lydian augmented scale (C-D-E-F#-G-A-Bb), which is one of my favorite modes to draw on, along with its close cousin the Mixolydian b13 (C-D-E-F-G-Ab-Bb). Later, Russell does include the Lydian augmented mode as one of the principal "chordmodes" relating to the Lydian chromatic system, but it seems disingenuous to hold up the 11th harmonic as evidence while conveniently forgetting about the 7th harmonic. But really, the 3rd harmonic (the interval of a fifth) is the important interval in establishing the importance of the Lydian mode, and I'd be happier if Russell had stuck with that.
• He provides an "Interval tonic" justification for the prominence of the Lydian mode: all 12 chromatic intervals (or enharmonic equivalents thereof) occur as intervals above or below the tonic within the Lydian mode, while the major scale lacks a tritone above or below the tonic. Aside from the fact that early music theorists would consider the absence of the diabolus in musica above the tonic a feature, not a bug, there is another mode which encompasses all the chromatic intervals with respect to its tonic: the Locrian mode. I seriously doubt that you could find any music theorist willing to promulgate the Locrian mode as the fundamental basis for much of anything.
• In discussing the duality (and therefore instability) between the vertical and horizontal aspects of the major scale, Russell writes, "The major scale is truly a diatonic scale, as "di" is the Latin prefix meaning two." But the word "diatonic" does not derive from "di-" at all; "dia-" is the prefix, meaning "across, through." Has Russell's editor not heard of a dictionary? The edition I'm reading was printing in 2001, 48 years after the Lydian Chromatic Concept's original publication; has no one in all that time pointed this inaccuracy out to Russell? Arguments based on etymology are nearly always specious to begin with, but it doesn't help one bit to get the etymology dead wrong.

But Russell's central argument for the primacy of the Lydian mode -- that the tonic of the Lydian mode lies at the bottom of the chain of fifths between its notes, while the tonic of the major scale is only the second-lowest note in the chain of fifths -- is sound, and would on its own provide sufficient justification for at least giving the theory firther consideration. More crucially, the central idea of the Lydian Chromatic Concept as a whole is not so much that the Lydian mode is the most important mode, but that jazz and other music may be analyzed as a progression of modes, rather than of chords, and that's an idea which I think is worth hearing out. I suspect it would do me some good to shake off my misgvings and read further; I have peeked at several pages later on in the book and it looks quite interesting. As with my plan to update this blog more frequently, we'll see how that goes.

This week, I continue my Tuesday feature series with a longtime favorite piece of mine, Music for Prague 1968 by Karel Husa. First, the basics: Music for Prague 1968, for symphonic band, was composed in the fall of 1968 by Karel Husa, a Czech composer living in America. The work is in four movements -- Introduction and Fanfare, Aria, Interlude, and Toccata and Chorale -- and a complete performance lasts 20 to 25 minutes. Movement 3, the Interlude, is scored for percussion only; the other movements all utilize the full band.

I have a strong personal connection to this piece, going back to my early musical development. My high school wind ensemble played Music for Prague during my junior year, and I rate our performance of the last two movements at our pre-festival concert as one of the most profound musical experiences I have had the fortune to participate in. Our full performance of Prague at our end-of-year concert was not as stirring; we did not have enough time to adequately work up the first two movements, and we got out of practice with the last two movements. Nevertheless, Music for Prague was among the pieces that inspired me to more seriously pursue music in general, and composition in particular, when I went off to college.

Not everybody in the wind ensemble shared my enthusiasm. Music for Prague is by no means an easy piece: it is one of the most technically difficult works in the band repertoire, and it is hardly ingratiating to the ears. Some of us reveled in the ear-splitting dissonances of the piece; our motto was "Prague is Power!" But an equally vocal contingent complained that this wasn't what music was supposed to be like. Music for Prague was so divisive that the yearbook article on the wind ensemble was entirely about the band's mixed opinions of the piece. But the starkest illustration of the difficulty of appreciating Music for Prague was the pre-festival concert I mentioned previously. We put together an amazing performance of the last two movements. Many of us held nothing back, and even those students who were less enthusiastic about Prague put in a great deal of effort. After the last notes of the closing chorale died away, the parents and family members in the audience responded with polite but clearly half-hearted applause. We followed that up with Who's Who in Navy Blue, a harmless little Sousa march notable only for the fact that we had the brass section sing the melody during the trio. And that brought the house down. I felt that Prague was by far the worthier performance of the two, but what do I know? Probably too much.

So Music for Prague was controversial, at least during my formative years. But that doesn't make it great. What makes it great for me? Well, aside from my personal history with the piece, there are several things:

Music for Prague is timely. It was written in response to the Soviet invasion of Prague following the Prague Spring, and the spectre of oppression which hangs over it has sadly remained all too relevant. If Music for Prague is dissonant, anguished, even violent, there is good reason for it. Music for Prague is a piece which decidedly exists in our world, rather than some fantasy world of motives and pitch relationships and rhythms which remains untroubled by reality. Of course, some people don't want that. I welcome it. Here, dense brass clusters herald the oppressive Soviet presence in the Fanfare section of the first movement.

Music for Prague 1968, movement 1, Introduction and Fanfare. Eastman Wind Ensemble, Donald Hunsberger conducting.

Music for Prague uses its materials well. Most of the piece is atonal, deriving from twelve-tone rows and pitch-sets which are often cause for the audience to walk out before they hear anything. But it's not merely a theoretical exercise that requires a PhD to understand; while the harmonies and melodies may be completely foreign to most listeners, they are not the only expressive elements in the piece. The is a lot of content in the rhythms, melodic contours, registers, and timbres as well, and you don't need perfect pitch or a theory class to feel the impact of those elements. And Husa is adept at balancing simplicity and complexity. The opening piccolo solo of the first movement is markedly atonal, but also clearly evocative of birdsong, which Husa uses to represent the freedom which Prague has seldom enjoyed in its thousand-year existence:

Opening of Music for Prague 1968, movement 1, Introduction and Fanfare. Eastman Wind Ensemble, Donald Hunsberger conducting.

And while the disjointed melodies, implacable dissonances, and obsessive rhythmic tattoos of the Toccata in the fourth movement create an unmistakable air of terror and confusion, the chorale that follows is even more gripping for its primal nature, featuring the 15th century Hussite anthem "Ye Warriors of God and His Law"¹ symbolically rising over the tumult:

Transition in Music for Prague 1968, movement 4, Toccata and Chorale. Eastman Wind Ensemble, Donald Hunsberger conducting.

Music for Prague is an uncompromising piece for band. Concert bands gets a lot of flak from "serious" musicians, especially composers, for playing a lot of lightweight pieces. Bands definitely have one thing going for them: they play a lot of contemporary music, simply because there wasn't a lot of band music written before the 20th century.² But many of the pieces that get a lot of play on the bandstand are certainly more conservative than their orchestral counterpoints (and far more conservative than contemporary chamber music, which is where the action's really at). But harmonically conservative -- that is to say, tonal and mostly consonant -- does not mean musically inferior. My favorite band pieces tend to be those that do not compromise artistic expression for accessibility, regardless of their harmonic language: Holst's Hammersmith, Hindemith's Konzertmusik, Joseph Schwantner's ...and the mountains rising nowhere, Ron Nelson's Passacaglia, and large portions of Grainger's and Persichetti's outputs number among them, as well as Music for Prague.

Concomitant with the uncompromising nature of Music for Prague is the fact that Husa treated the concert band as a fully independent and versatile ensemble, rather than a poor substitute for orchestra, or a halftime marching band that happens to be sitting down. Music for Prague was Husa's first composition for band, although you wouldn't know it from listening. He gets a lot of great sounds out of the ensemble, and makes good use of the band's unique assets, especially the low woodwinds. Husa subsequently made an orchestral arrangement of Music for Prague, because, in his words, "in Europe this piece wouldn't have been performed with band". Frank Oteri, who is famous for being one of the most open-minded listeners in all of music, thinks that "it is through the forces of a complete symphony orchestra that [this work attains its] fullest majesty, mystery, and universality,"³ but I have to disagree. In the opening of the second movement, the low woodwinds give a doom-laden sound to the wandering melody in the original version, while the cellos in the orchestral version sound petulant:

Opening of Music for Prague 1968, movement 2: "Aria". Eastman Wind Ensemble, Donald Hunsberger conducting.

Opening of Music for Prague 1968 (orchestral version), movement 2: "Aria". The Louisville Orchestra, Jorge Mester conducting.

In the closing chorale of the final movement, it may be easier on the performers to transfer the trumpets' sustained high A to the violins, but it loses a lot of its immediacy:

Music for Prague 1968, movement 4: "Toccata and Chorale". Eastman Wind Ensemble, Donald Hunsberger performing.

Music for Prague 1968 (orchestral version), movement 4: "Toccata and Chorale". The Louisville Orchestra, Jorge Mester conducting.

There are many other moments where I strongly prefer the Eastman Wind Ensemble's recording to the Louisville Orchestra's, but these may be due to performance choices rather than the transcription itself: in the Louisville recording, I think the metallic percussion instruments are played too harshly, individual lines are singled out for undue prominence in some of the deliberately cacophonous sections, and when the full ensemble suddenly cuts out except for the ringing of the vibraphone, the effect is ruined by an excessive use of the vibraphone motor.

I in fact own four recordings of Music for Prague 1968, perhaps more versions than any other piece in my collection. In addition to the Eastman Wind Ensemble and the Louisville Orchestra, I also have recordings of my high school wind ensemble (with yours truly on the bass trombone, naturally) and the Duke Wind Symphony (before I joined, but in a performance conducted by Karel Husa himself). The Eastman Wind Ensemble gives a superior performance overall, and I fine the orchestral version superfluous on general principle, but the other two band recordings have their merits as well. The tympani are very prominent in Music for Prague, and I think my high school band offers the best rendition of the part -- we had an incredible tympanist, who was something of a cult figure in the band. And getting to hear Husa's own interpretation of Prague is quite a treat, though he makes some very interesting decisions -- he asks for the bass notes in the background of the opening of the second movement, which I believe are marked mezzo-piano (medium-soft) in the score, to be LOUD. Maybe he wanted the mood of the opening to be apocalyptic, rather than merely foreshadowing. Sadly, both of these recordings are on cassette, so I cannot share them with you. But I can share some more of the Eastman recording. I haven't yet featured any excerpts from the third movement, so here is the beginning of that Interlude:

Music for Prague 1968, movement 3, Interlude. Eastman Wind Ensemble, Donald Hunsberger Conducting

In some ways, this may be the best place to approach Music for Prague if all the dissonance scares you. There is very little pitched material here, so one would be inclined to pay attention to those other musical elements I talked about: rhythm, contour, timbre, and density. And these are the sort of things that you should listen for in the other movements as well, even if you cannot make sense of the pitch content.

So I think there are several reasons why Music for Prague 1968 is a great piece. But there's an even simpler explanation for why I love it: I'm a bass trombonist, and I love getting to play something loud and raw. Some people like heavy metal, I like thorny classical music. As they say, "Prague is Power!"

Music for Prague 1968, movement 2, Aria. Eastman Wind Ensemble, Donald Hunsberger conducting.

And, for the curious, here's more information about the recordings I've cited.

Eastman Wind Ensemble Plays Husa, Copland, Vaughan Williams, Hindemith, Eastman Wind Ensemble, Donald Hunsberger conducting. Recorded in 1989. CBS (now Sony), MK 44916.

Karel Husa: Music for Prague 1968, Apotheosis of this Earth, Louisville Orchestra, Jorge Mester conducting. First Edition Music, FECD-0009. The CD appears to be unavailable, though mp3s can be purchased online.

The recordings by the Duke University Wind Symphony and the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology Symphonic Wind Ensemble and not commercially available.

Well, I failed to get this posted on Tuesday by almost an hour, but at least it's a good bit shorter than last week's edition. See you next Tuesday!

1This song is widely recognized by Czechs, and is prominently featured in at least two other Czech nationalist works: Smetana's Ma Vlast and Dvořák's Hussite Overture.
2Although many band directors make up for this deficiency by programming a fair number of transcriptions of orchestral classics. I think that a reliance on orchestral transcriptions delegitimizes the existing band repertoire, sending the message that all the good music was written for orchestra. Of course, I don't really see the dearth of the three B's in the band world as a problem, so my opinion on this matter, as with Music for Prague 1968, may be an outlier.
3Quoted from the liner notes to the album Karel Husa: Music for Prague 1968 and Apotheosis of this Earth.

For a while, I've been meaning to have a semi-regular feature on this blog, where I take a look at a particular piece of music and try to tell you what makes it important to me. I'll be tackling a wide range of music: my own compositions and works by other artists; pieces you might not have heard before and pieces that are probably familiar to you. I'll also try to keep up a schedule of at least one featured piece per week, ideally on Tuesdays.

Why Tuesday? Well, partly because of the piece I'm featuring to kick off this series: my composition Fanfare for Tuesday, for solo trombone. And why is it called Fanfare for Tuesday? Well, I started writing the piece on Tuesday, April 8th of this year, and finished it the next day. And I think Fanfare for Wednesday would be an inferior title; don't you agree? By now you're probably wondering what this fanfare sounds like. Well, look no further:

Fanfare for Tuesday

So what's special about this little fanfare? Well, for me, it represents an important step in exploring a more plastic conception of rhythm. To further explain what I mean, I want to first look at the way musicians learn about rhythm in the Western notated music tradition. Note the use of the word "notated" in the previous sentence: not only do I wish to differentiate notated musical traditions (a.k.a. "classical music") from primarily oral/aural musical traditions ("folk music"), but I specifically wish to draw attention to the way that the notation itself has come to shape our conception of rhythm.

At the lowest level of rhythmic organization¹, we have conceptual units which are typically called "beats" and "pulses" (for now, I am ignoring higher-level conceptual units like measures and phrases). Now, what do I mean by beats and pulses? Well, it's hard to explain a priori without falling into some sort of circular definition. Peter Westergaard gives an excellent explanation of rhythmic organization at all conceptual levels in chapters 7 and 8 of An Introduction to Tonal Theory, but I don't have the time or space to do him justice here. However, I can give some illustrative examples. In general, beats are what conductors are ostensibly² demarcating when they are marking time; they are the units which a marching band will be in step with; they are the points in time that you would typically accentuate with your movements when dancing along to music. (One caveat: musicians use "beat" to denote three different things: a durational unit spanning two points in time, a single point of time which is the onset of that durational unit, or the grid of durational units or points in time generated by the individual beats. I will not attempt to explicitly indicate which sense of "beat" I am using at any given time. You have been warned.) Pulses, in turn, are a more-or-less even subdivision of the beat; the pulse typically corresponds to the shortest note-values used in a given piece, and governs the length of most longer note-values as well. Confused? Well, it's time for our music lessons.

Of course, just as kindergarteners do not start learning math through axiomatic set theory, beginning music students do not start out with such a general concept of rhythm. What they first learn is that beats can be broken down into pulses through binary subdivisions. For example, a quarter-note beat can be divided in two, generating an underlying eighth-note pulse:

Ex. 1 (mp3)

Those eighth notes could be further subdivided in two to create a sixteenth-note pulse, now with four pulses for every quarter-note beat:

Ex. 2 (mp3)

Our notational system is designed around this idea of binary subdivision, so written note values and sounding beats and pulses seem to go hand in hand. But soon, we learn that beats and pulses do not have to be related strictly through binary subdivisions. Hearkening back to our first example, we could have that same quarter-note beat subdivided into three equal parts, which we notate as triplet eighth notes:

Ex. 3 (mp3)

Conversely, we could instead maintain the eighth-note pulse of the first example, and group them in threes to create a beat of dotted quarter notes:

Ex. 4 (mp3)

At this point, a sufficiently clever observer might ask, "What's the difference between these last two examples? Sure, the beats and pulses in the second mp3 are slower, but can't we control the tempo [i.e., the overall speed of the music, often measured in beats per minute] as well? If you increase the tempo of Example 4 by 50%, isn't the second half aurally indistinguishable from Example 3?" And, to a degree, they have a valid point: if you have a steady beat with a steady underlying ternary pulse, and can set the tempo as you desire, then the only difference the quarter-note/triplet-eighth-note notation and the dotted-quarter-note/eighth-note notation is a psychological effect on the performer, which may affect the performance but theoretically should not. However, this only applies when the beat and the subdivision of the beat are both steady, which brings us to our next level of rhythmic and notational complexity: the beat and/or pulse do not have to be steady. We can, for example, have a steady quarter-note beat which is alternately subdivided into two or three parts, for a pulse which shifts between eighth notes and triplet eighth notes:³

Ex. 5 (mp3)

Or we can have a steady eighth-note pulse which is alternately grouped in twos and threes, for a beat alternating between quarter notes and dotted quarter notes:

Ex. 6 (mp3)

These last two examples are in fact quite different; there is no way that we can uniformly speed up one of the examples to exactly match the other. And we've only begun to scratch the surface of what is possible when we allow the beat and/or pulse to change. For example, we could allow both the beat and the pulse to shift at different points in time:

Ex. 7 (mp3)

Or they can both be shifting at the same time:

Ex. 8 (mp3)

Or they can get even weirder:

Ex. 9 (mp3)

And we've still only considered binary and ternary subdivisions of the beat. We can throw in higher subdivisions, like a quinternary subdivision of quarter notes into quintuplet sixteenth notes:

Ex. 10 (mp3)

However, when we start with a constant pulse and create groupings of more than three pulses at once, we usually perceive the beat as some intermediate (and possibly irregular) grouping of 2s and 3s, so we haven't opened up many new possibilities in that direction.

Now, I have been talking about triplets and quintuplets, and showing examples of them in action, but what do we mean by "tuplets" in general? A tuplet is usually thought of as a (non-binary) grouping of notes which occupies the same amount of time as one of the basic note values. What's a triplet eighth note? Well, 3 of them together are exactly as long as a quarter note. And what's a septuplet thirty-second note? 7 of them together are as long as an eight note. For many musicians, even those who are familiar with a good bit of the contemporary repertoire, this is the full extent of their trained understanding of tuplets, and taken together with the ideas introduced in the preceeding paragraphs, may be a decent summary of their full conception of notated rhythm. But to get to Tuesday, we need to go a couple of steps further.

So far, we've been looking at tuplets as subdivisions of basic binary note values. But do we always have to start with basic binary note values? What if we want to have, say, five tuplet eighth notes which occupy the space of a dotted quarter note? (note: a single dot adds 50% to the length of a note) Well, there are at least two widely used ways of notating this. One way is to explicitly specify, as part of the tuplet marking, (which ordinarily consists of a number, indicating the number of durational units grouped together, and an optional bracket demarcating the particular notes which fall into that grouping) the note value which is equal to the length of the whole tuplet together. So, for five tuplet eighth notes in the space of a dotted quarter note:

The other option is to think about this tuplet in terms of its constituent units, which are notionally eighth notes. A dotted quarter note is equal to three eighth notes, so we have five tuplet eighth notes in the space of three eighth notes. Five in the space of three. We can express this as a ratio:

In either notational convention, we may choose to omit the extra details (the note value in the first convention, the denominator of the ratio in the second example) if the tuplet is a division of a basic note value like a quarter note or half note, but if the duration of your tuplet groupings is constantly changing, you're better off overnotating in this case. I personally prefer to use ratios when applicable, but that's mostly just an aesthetic preference. Either way, when you throw in the idea that tuplets don't have to add up to basic binary note values, you reach the limit of rhythmic understanding for many experienced performers of contemporary music, and also you have the tools for understanding nearly everything I have written prior to Fanfare for Tuesday.⁴ But we're not done yet.

All this time, we've been treating tuplets as groupings of notes. Recall:

What's a triplet eighth note? Well, 3 of them together are exactly as long as a quarter note.

In my answer, I assiduously avoided talking about an individual triplet eighth note. Of course, from the definition I gave, it is immediately clear that a single triplet eighth note is one-third of the length of a quarter note. But the way we are trained to think about rhythm, that's not how we're supposed to think of it. A triplet eighth note is supposed to be part of, well, a triplet. They're like quarks; you don't encounter triplet eighth notes in isolation, only "bound" in a group of three triplet eighth notes.⁵ And there are reasonable justifications for thinking about tuplets as groupings: for example, the way most people perceive time, the easiest way to conceive of a timespan which is one-third as long as a given time-span is to divide that longer time-span into three equal pieces.

But why does it have to be that way? Once we get used to playing triplets and other tuplets, it becomes easier to conceptualize a single triplet eighth note in isolation. Why not just say that a triplet eighth note is one-third as long as a quarter note? Or, since a quarter note is twice as long as an eighth note, say that a triplet eight note is two-thirds as long as an eighth note? In fact, we can generalize: a single triplet of any note value is two-thirds as long as the original note value. For the more mathematically-inclined of you, we might even think of the "triplet" as an operator, which multiplies the length of a note by 2/3. And in general, the "tuplet" operator multiplies the length of a given note by some specific ratio. This is one of the reasons why I prefer to use ratios when writing complicated tuplets: in a "5:3" tuplet, each note is 3/5 as long as its normal value, and so on.

And now that we have a way to think about individual tuplets, why don't we treat them as individual notes? Why should triplet eighth notes always have to come in threes? What if I only want two triplet eighth notes, followed by some binary note values or even a different tuplet? Or, to borrow some terminology from computer programming, why can't we treat tuplets as first-class objects? Well, for the most part, it's just been a convention to treat tuplets as second-class objects, only found in groupings of a particular size. As I said, our system of notation is centered around binary subdivisions. And in tying music instruction so closely to notation, it usually gets taken for granted that your tuplets are going to fall into groupings which are temporally equal to an integer multiple of some binary subdivision of the basic note values. Sometimes, it is even perceived as a part of the musical syntax: a grouping of only two triplet eighth notes is considered an error, like a sentence fragment or an unclosed HTML tag.⁷

But in automatically labelling such notations as ill-formed, we are completely ignoring the concepts of beat and pulse which the notation is supposed to support. Let's think about what a grouping of two triplet eighth notes means, from the perspective of beats and pulses. We might start with a steady beat that is subdivided into two equal parts (quarter-note beat, eighth-note pulse). Then, while keeping the beat steady, we shift to a subdivision of three pulses per beat (quarter-note beat, triplet-eighth-note pulse). Then, while keeping this new pulse steady, we shift the beat to a grouping of two pulses (triplet-eighth-note pulse, triplet-quarter-note beat). If all of the previous examples of shifting the beat and the pulse around have been clear, then this should be pretty clear as well. And, if you're sufficiently comfortable switching between various note/beat groupings in your head, then going from quarter-note/eighth-note to triplet-quarter-note/triplet-eighth-note and back should be the most natural thing in the world. At least, it's natural to me, and I know I'm not the only one. Switching gears between different beat/pulse groupings in simple-but-not-necessarily-binary ratios is absolutely essential to performing a wide swath of music in the Minimalist family tree, for example, all the way from Philip Glass to Michael Gordon.

Now, we do have to take some care in our treatment of tuplets as first-class objects. Henry Cowell was among the first to explore this possibility, writing at length about the idea in New Musical Resources. He developed an alternate notation for individual tuplets which allowed them to be used with nearly complete freedom: a triplet eighth note might be followed by a quintuplet sixteenth note, and then two septuplet eighth notes. But few if any musicians could be expected to accurately perform such a passage without extensive study or mechanical assistance, and as a result, much of the music that further explores these rhythmic possibilities has been intended strictly for mechanized performance, like Conlon Nancarrow’s player piano studies and Kyle Gann’s Disklavier studies.

But I'm a human, and I tend to write music to be performed by humans like me, so I can't go to the outer limits of Cowell's insights. Instead, I need to keep the underlying beats and pulses in mind when I write. Isolated tuplets with constantly changing denominators are unfeasible for performance, but groupings of tuplets – complete or incomplete – with denominators that vary among only a handful of small numbers are much easier to handle. After all, they're just different groupings of pulses that we already recognize. And this is what goes on in Fanfare for Tuesday. At the beginning, I work with a steady quarter-note beat, which is variously subdivided into two, three, four, or five pulses. Once these subdivisions have had a chance to sink in, I start playing around with the groupings. At first I only play around with different groupings of the binary subdivisions -- the eighth notes and sixteenth notes. But then I introduce groupings of two or four triplet eighth notes. I don't go so far as to incorporate incomplete groupings of quintuplets as well, though I reserve the right to add a few of those in a later revision. Or to use them in a separate piece.

Put more simply, Fanfare for Tuesday explores some of the rhythmic possibilities that open up when you allow your beats and pulses to shift between multiple disparate yet logical and palpable groupings. While the listener may not be able to precisely identify the triplets and quintuplets when listening in the moment, I think the gist of these relationships is recognizable, and the details could be teased out through repeated close listenings: "Well, I can tell that there are “short” notes and “shorter” notes, and they seem to line up with the bigger notes somehow...oh, three of the “short” notes are as long as one of the “big” notes, which is also as long as five of the “shorter” notes. And over here there are more of the “short” notes, but they're not in a group of three...there are actually four notes there, and then we go back to the “shorter” notes..." Even without being aware of the precise numbers involved, I think the experience is like a sort of bizarre bicycle ride: you start off pedaling at a certain pace in a certain gear, and then you start changing gears and/or pace. Sometimes, when you change from a lower gear to a higher gear, you slow down your pace of pedaling by a similar factor so that the actual speed of the bike stays constant. Other times when you change gears, you keep pedaling at the same pace, so the speed of the bike suddenly increases by that same factor. And once you've gotten used to the different gears and paces and speed, you start mixing them up even more freely. Only you're not really in control of all these changes; I'm the one who's inflicting them on you.

Now, Fanfare for Tuesday is not the first time I've played around with shifting beats and pulses: in pieces like Trinkle Dance and Recombinant, I wind up shifting gears quite a bit. But whenever I shifted gears, I hewed to the binary-centric paradigm imposed by the notation. If I went from a quarter-note beat to a triplet-quarter-note-beat and back again, the number of triple-quarter-note beats would always be a multiple of three. But when I opened the door to allow incomplete tuplets in, I did more than elevate those tuplets to the status of first-class notational objects: I could now treat all imaginable beat/pulse groupings as first-class musical objects. In so doing I wound up transcending a barrier that I hadn't even been aware of in previous compositions, because I was letting the notation guide my ideas rather than the other way around.

Of course, this is all (comparatively) easy for me to say in retrospect. I did not specifically set out to subvert my dominant rhythmic paradigm when I started writing Fanfare for Tuesday, neither did I arrive at the idea of using incomplete tuplets sheerly through my own inspiration. I just started off writing an innocuous little fanfare, inspired by the penetrating sound of the muted trombone. And when I started out, everything fell neatly into a quarter-note grid. But at some point, I the music I imagined involved two triplet eighth notes followed by a larger note, and rather than simply completing the triplet with a third eighth note tied to the longer note, I decided to see leave the triplet incomplete. My decision to do so, furthermore, was informed by a couple of then-recent posts by Kyle Gann about incomplete tuplets and their implications, and enabled by Darcy James Argue's post explaining how to make the notation work in Finale.⁸

In many ways, Fanfare for Tuesday wound up being an ideal vehicle for trying out some of these new ideas about rhythm. With the sort of fanfare I was writing, I could stick to fairly simple melodic ideas – lots of repeated pitches, or alternation between two or three pitches – which made it easier to put my focus on rhythmic invention, much like the Michael Gordon excerpts that Kyle Gann cites. And writing for solo trombone freed me from worrying about the relationship of multiple parts, and also allowed me to write without regard for time signature. One of the corollaries of the assumption that tuplets must always occur in complete groups is that the time signature – which tells you how long each measure is, and the organization of the beats and pulses to some degree – should always have a denominator which is a power of 2: 4/4, 3/2, 6/8. Incomplete tuplets can break this rule: Kyle Gann's I'itoi Variations have time signatures like 2/3, 5/6, and 7/12. And many musicians will balk at that. Quite often, if you take a professional musician and put music written in 13/32 or 41/16 in front of them, they'll roll their eyes but figure out how to play it. But give them something with a few bars of 5/6 – a much simpler fraction – and they may flatly insist that it is impossible. Even when they are accepted, such time signatures are often called "irrational," which is horribly inaccurate. I call them "non-dyadic" time signatures, since fractions with a power of two in the denominator are referred to as dyadic rationals. But no time signature? No problem, as long as you don't have to sync up with anyone else.

You may have noticed that, ever since I started talking about incomplete tuplets, I have not included any score examples. That is because, as I alluded to above, incomplete tuplets are difficult (but not impossible) to notate in Finale. I'll gladly go through that kind of effort to get what I want in my compositions, but I didn't think it was worth it for the purposes of a few illustrative examples. But now I can show you some incomplete tuplets in action, by giving you the score to Fanfare for Tuesday:

Fanfare for Tuesday (PDF)

I've held off so long on giving you the score because I wanted to explain the ideas behind this piece, in terms of both rhythmic conception and notation, before having you make sense of the notation. I suggest you try to follow along in the score while listening to the recording. I'll try to give you a few guideposts:

• At about 0:27 in the recording, at the beginning of the third line of the score, I first break out of the quarter-note grid with three eighth notes followed by three triplet eighth notes. This is part of the first passage incorporating all the major beat subdivisions I use in the piece, going from eighth notes to triplet eighth notes to sixteenth notes to quintuplet sixteenth notes.
• 0:45, the beginning of the fifth line: the first incomplete tuplet. I grouped it as 2 triplet eighth notes followed by three triplet quarter notes, but I feel it more like 4 triplet quarter notes, with the first note subdivided into two parts.
• 0:55, beginning of sixth line: A tricky little passage incorporating a ***footnote 4***nested tuplet.
• 1:15, last line of the first page: Five sixteenths, five quintuplet sixteenths, four triplet eighths, and two eighths. That's a lot of gear-switching.
• 1:23, beginning of second page: Shifting from a quarter-note beat to a dotted-eighth-note beat for a few beats in a row. I don't usually stay in one of the shifted beats for that long. I also don't think I played it fully accurately.
• 1:51, page two, end of third line: One of the things I've consistently enjoyed doing in this piece is juxtaposing subdivisions of the beat into 2, 3, and 5 parts, as I do here. I've long been fascinated by the rhythmic relationship of 3 against 5, and when you throw in 2 as well, you start invoking the Fibonacci sequence and the golden ratio. I am often skeptical about aesthetic claims involving the golden ratio, but here I think it gives the changing rhythms more of an organic feeling, while the relationship of 4 to 5 (sixteenth notes to quintuplet sixteenth notes) feels more mechanical.
• 2:11-2:30, 5th and 6th lines of page 2: The busiest passage of the whole piece. Twenty seconds without any long notes (quarter note or longer). I also use dotted sixteenth notes for the first time, first as a quaternary subdvision of a dotted-quarter-note beat, and then as a building block for a ternary beat. It's tricky to play accurately, as dotted sixteenth notes are very close to triplet eighth notes in length. And at the end of the passage, a gradual slowdown of triplet eighth notes to eighth notes to dotted eighth notes represents a nested 3:2 relationship.
• 2:30, seventh line of page 2: I suddenly throw in some multiphonics – I'm playing the lower note while singing the upper note. I hope this came as a surprise when you first listened to the recording without the score.
• 3:03, beginning of third page: Septuplets. Hard to get right when my head has been so full of triplets and quintuplets the rest of the time.
• 3:34 to end, last line of page 3: Due to a combination of the choice of interval, the soft dynamic level, and the mute, these last multiphonics come of more as timbral colorations of the lower notes rather than as chords.

And that’s Fanfare for Tuesday. There are just a couple of more things I want to say before I let you go. First of all, I want to point out that all of the discussion of rhythm above, both in general and in Tuesday, have been solely concerned with horizontal relations – that is, relations between successive points in time – in a monorhythmic context. Not surprisingly, there are many more options for rhythmic complexity when you have more than one simultaneous rhythmic line. Earlier works like Trinkle Dance and Recombinant may sound more complex – and they probably are – because of these polyrhythmic relationships.

And lastly, I would like to apologize for going on so long. If you made it this far, you no doubt spent significantly more time reading this explanation than you did listening to Fanfare for Tuesday, and I probably spent more time writing this than I did composing Tuesday in the first place. But in trying to explain why this little piece was so significant to me, I had to summarize the past 20 years of my experience in learning a tradition of notated music spanning over 500 years, so I guess 5,000 words isn’t too bad in that context. In any event, I promise that next Tuesday’s feature will not be nearly so wordy.

Footnotes

¹It may be argued that there is a lower conceptual level, consisting of the absolute and relative durations of individual sonic events, which our brains perceive to a certain degree of accuracy. However, I do not consider this an organizational level of rhythm, or more properly, I consider to be on the level of sound rather than music, at least for the purposes of this discussion.
²This is not meant to be a slur against conductors. In top-level orchestras, the primary function of the conductor is not to mark time but to indicate subtler details like shadings of volume, attack, and other elements which create the "character" of a musical passage, beyond what is strictly notated in the score. The musicians of the Boston Symphony Orchestra are quite capable of keeping time on their own, for the most part.
³Usually, this does not actually indicate a change in the pulse. In most cases, one of the two subdivisions would predominate and we would perceive a steady pulse which is temporarily displaced by the other subdivision, but if multiple subdivisions appear consistently and regularly throughout the work, (as they do in Fanfare for Tuesday, not coincidentally) then we might perceive a constantly shifting pulse.
³The other tool you need to understand a very small amount of my pre-Tuesday music is that tuplets can be nested: you might start with a group of triplet quarter notes -- three of them in the space of a half note -- and then replace one of those notional quarter notes with three triplet eighth notes. It looks something like this:

⁵Or in a grouping with other note values⁶ (quarters, sixteenths, etc.) which together add up to the same length as three notional eighth notes:

⁶Or rests with the same note values, for that matter.
⁷The sentence fragment is the better analogy of the two. After all, people utter sentence fragments all the time, and we have no trouble figuring out what they mean. And the concept that incomplete tuplets represent is, at least to me, as natural as a sentence fragment, as explained in the succeeding paragraph.
⁸Actually, my initial draft was in pencil, so getting the notation right was easy-peasy. But I then needed to get the score into Finale for editing and publishing.

...well, maybe not so much with this news. But then, my news is hardly as exciting as Nixon landing in China (and be thankful I didn't type out the title with all the repetitions James Maddalena sings). But I have good news and bad news and more good news!

First, the bad news: my second recital did not get recorded. It was completely my fault. I spent 20 minutes before the recital setting up the mics and checking sound levels on my digital recording studio, and when it came time for the recital to begin, I forgot to actually press "record." Seconds after playing the final chord of the last piece on the program, this oversight dawned on me, and a quick look at the studio confirmed this. It's tough for me to juggle the roles of composer, performer, sound engineer, and many others all at once, but that's the path I've chosen for now. C'est la vie.

But there is also good news! I have finished editing the recordings from the first recital, and Anarchist Nut: Live at the Lily Pad is now available at the store. You can purchase individual works, or the complete recital, with or without my spoken introductions and segues. Please allow me to tempt you with the following tracks:

Four Little Preludes, no. 3 (Nathan Curtis, piano)
"Panic" from Song and Dance: Panic and Repose (Nathan Curtis, piano)
"Skinny Domicile (Emily Dickinson)" from the Holy Tango Songbook (text by Francis Heaney; Lorinne Lampert, mezzo-soprano; Stephen Williams, piano)

Well, what are you waiting for? Go and make me rich!

Oh, wait! Come back! I had one more bit news to share. This weekend, as part of their festival celebrating T.J. Anderson's 80th birthday, Tufts University is presenting a memorial concert for composer Jennifer Fitzgerald, who died of breast cancer last December. I will be performing Lyric Homage, a new composition based on fragments from Jennifer's Lyric II. For more information, see the event listing here.

Much noise has already been made in the music blogosphere about this year's MacArthur Fellows, particularly the nod to critic Alex Ross. I think his is an award well-deserved. Ross has been far-reaching and insightful in his criticism and commentary, which is consistently engaging to readers at all levels of expertise. His book The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, only a year old, has practically become required reading for anyone discussing classical music in modern society, but his articles for the New Yorker and essays online have been no less valuable. Consider his recent article "Symphony of Millions," an impressively researched survey of the classical music scene in today's China, or the 2004 essay "Listen to This," his exegesis on the role of classical music both in the world and in his heart. And at 40 years of age, Ross has much more writing ahead of him.

But reading the announcements of the fellowships awarded this year to Ross, violinist Leila Josefowicz, instrument maker and composer Walter Kitundu, saxophonist Miguel Zenón, and twenty-one other artists, scientists, and humanitarians led me to take a closer look at the MacArthur Fellowships in years past. Among the major awards, the "genius grants" are particularly interesting in musical circles for several reasons:

1) They are one of the few awards which are open to musicians, but not given specifically for music. The MacArthur Fellowships are potentially open to artists, scientists, and humanitarians in any field, and there are no categories for the awards. Composers, performers, and music scholars all stand on equal footing when it comes to the MacArthurs.

2) They are perhaps the most lucrative awards available to musicians, currently worth $500,000 over 5 years. The Pulitzer Prize, which probably gets the most press as it is primarily a journalism award, is only worth $10,000; only the Grawemeyer Award comes close at $200,000.

3) The fellowships are awarded not as recognition for a particular composition or body of work, but as investments in future creative potential. Hence the term "genius grant" -- they are more like grants than awards. Unlike the Pulitzers, they are seen not as a stamp of official approval, but as an indication of promise. At least, that's the idea behind the awards today; it may not have always been so in the past.

I was familiar with some of the high-profile musicians who were honored in recent years, but I didn't know the earliest history of the award. So I went to look at the list of all MacArthur Fellows, going back to the award's inception in 1981. I bring you the musical highlights from that list, with my own commentary:

1981: No musicians. Seven of the 40 or so fellows were involved in the arts; of these, six were writers and one worked in art education and curation.

1982: Composers Conlon Nancarrow and Ralph Shapey.

That's a nice combo there. Both comparative outsiders in the classical music world, each with a very unique voice. However -- and this is a big however, given the (at least current) purpose of the award -- Shapey and Nancarrow were, at 61 and 70, respectively, the oldest honorees that year. Most of the winners were under 50 that year; only author William Gaddis at age 60 came close to either composer. Now, both Nancarrow and Shapey lived and composed for another 15 to 20 years following their fellowship, and I do know that the fellowship enabled Nancarrow to produce some works for live ensemble, but looking at Kyle Gann's annotated list of Nancarrow's compositions, that only amounts to 7 new works for ensemble, plus a few more player piano pieces. But compared to some of the other well-established musicians who won fellowships in later years, both Nancarrow and Shapey were probably in a much better position to reap creative benefit from these awards. All in all, I am somewhat impressed by these initial musical choices. Clearly, someone on the selection committee had a thorough knowledge of contemporary classical music, without being academically entrenched -- a refreshing combination.

1983: Peter Sellars, theatre and opera director.

Sellars has been involved with many new musical productions, particularly the stage works of John Adams, but also works by Philip Glass, Kaija Saariaho, and others. However, all of the work I mentioned above came after the fellowship, so in retrospect it looks like a very good choice indeed.

1984-85: No music-related awards.

So in the first five years of the award, only three awards were given in the field of music, and three of the five years passed with no musical awards. That's not an encouraging start. Fortunately, musicians get more consistent recognition in years to come.

1986: Composers Milton Babbitt, George Perle, and Charles Wuorinen.

A very different group from the '82-'83 crowd. All heavily involved in some form of 12-tone music. All very much uptown and academically approved. And, in two out of three cases, old. Babbitt and Perle were both over 70 at the time of the award; Wuorinen was 48. Now, all three of them are very much alive and kicking to this day. Babbitt and Wuorinen continue to write new work, and it looks like Perle kept composing consistently until around 2000 or so. But I don't think any of them were hurting for opportunities; even Wuorinen, who had long been enjoying hotshot status as the youngest compoer to win the Pulitzer Prize in music, in 1970.

1987: Musicologist Peter Jeffery.

I had not heard of Jeffery before encoutering his name in this context, but, like many composers, I maintain an air of superiority over musicologists. Jeffery appears to specialize in liturgical music and early Christianity, so I am probably unqualified to comment meaningfully on the merits of his work.

1988: Composer Ran Blake and jazz drummer and composer Max Roach.

1989: Composer John Harbison, singer, composer, and historian Bernice Johnson Reagon, and jazz pianist, composer, and theorist George Russell.

Now we're starting to see jazz and other African-American musical styles represented. From the late '80s to the early '90s, I saw so many jazz musicians -- especially avant-garde jazz musicians -- and "Third Stream" composers, and musicians based in the Boston area (particularly at the New England Conservatory) that I at first thought that Gunther Schuller must have been on the selection committee during those years. However, I'm almost certainly wrong on that, as you'll see shortly.

I think the jazz musicians represented during this time were all excellent musicians who did great things for jazz and for music in general, but as Darcy James Argue points out when discussing the MacArthurs, they were all big names, critically and academically respected, generally well past the peak of their careers. However, I think the awards may have been more of a boon for them than they would have for Babbitt and Perle -- many great jazz musicians, lacking the long-term safety of an academic career, fell on hard times later in life. Also, the fact that some of these musicians, like George Russell, did enjoy academic positions was itself rather revolutionary. As late as 2000, when I was an undergraduate at Duke University, I observed a good deal of resistance to the idea that jazz and other music of non-European lineage could be as serious and worthy of study as the classical canon, and the situation could only have been worse ten years earlier.

1990: Composer John Eaton.

Another musician I don't know much about. Involved in the development of early synthesizers -- cool. Innovator of "pocket operas" -- cool; I think small, flexible ensembles are an important part of the future of classical music. Microtonal composer -- meh; it looks like he mostly does quarter-tone music, which is the least adventurous flavor of microtonal music. It also looks like he is better known for his work preceding the fellowship. He was 55 at the time of the award, which is younger than a lot of the other musicians honored so far but still older than most non-musical Fellows, I'd guess.

1991: Indian classical musician Ali Akbar Khan, composer Gunther Schuller, jazz pianist Cecil Taylor.

I guess Schuller wasn't on the committee after all. But more Third Stream and avant-jazz. Also, the first non-Western musician to be represented, in Ali Akbar Khan. It's always good to broaden the scope of the award. But all three artists were in their late sixties.

1992: Jazz saxophonist and composer Steve Lacy.

At this point, I started wondered about a New England Conservatory conspiracy -- Ran Blake, George Russell, Gunther Schuller, and Steve Lacy have all been on the faculty there. But Lacy wasn't at NEC until 2002. Still, I wouldn't be surprised if someone on the committee during these years had ties to NEC. And the usual disclaimer about academically approved jazz musicians late in their careers applies again.

1993: Jazz critic Stanley Crouch and gospel singer Marion Williams.

Stanley Crouch? Really? Well. On the one hand, he is the first honoree working in jazz circles under the age of 50. On the other hand, he spent years relentlessly touting Wynton Marsalis as the jazz Messiah, tearing down anyone who didn't agree with his and Wynton's limited ideas of what jazz ought to be, and keeping the "jazz wars" alive. I love Wynton's music, but I wish it didn't have to come with so much musical politicking.

1994: Composer and multi-instrumentalist Anthony Braxton, jazz saxophonist and composer Ornette Coleman, and ethnomusicologist Sam-Ang Sam.

Two more avant-jazz giants, though Braxton resists easy classification. Also, with Braxton being 49 at the time of the award, the jazz honorees are starting to trend a bit younger. In 2007, Coleman joined Wuorinen, Harbison, and Schuller as winners of both the MacArthur Fellowship and the Pulitzer Prize; I am sure there are a few writers in that category as well. Coleman's Pulitzer, for his album Sound Grammar, was somewhat controversial in that his album was not submitted for consideration, but the jury elected to nominate it as a finalist anyway. While this is unfortunately arbitrary -- and the other jazz work to win the Pultizer, Wynton Marsalis' Blood on the Fields, was also eligible due to some rule-bending -- it is also in some ways just, as for decades, jazz music was effectively shut out from consideration. Newer guidelines released in the past few years, however, are considerably friendlier to non-notated music, and it is my hope that the Pulitzer, as well as the MacArthur, will come to encompass work in genres of all sorts. But now I'm getting off-topic.

Although I am not familiar with Sam-Ang Sam's work, his aim -- to preserve and revive Khmer musical traditions -- is one that I definitely approve of. The documentation and preservation of fading cultures is an important pursuit, and many composers, including Percy Grainger and Béla Bartók, to name two of my favorites, drew great inspiration from their experiences collecting folk music that was in danger of dying out. I am also reminded, from my recent interest in linguistics, in the efforts to record endangered languages before they die out.

1995: Composer and singer Meredith Monk.

Monk is the first honoree since Nancarrow who would be what Kyle Gann calls a "postclassical" composer, which is an encouraging development. Also only the third female musician (after Bernice Johnson Reagon and Marion Williams) to win the award; interestingly, all three have been singers.

1996: No fellows involved with music.

How sad. The first dry year for music since 1985.

1997: Sound artist Trimpin.

Hot dog! Trimpin does some great stuff, creating vast computer-controlled acoustic sound sculptures of astounding ingenuity. He moved from Germany to Seattle to get easier access to spare parts, and he has made extraordinary use of those parts. He also has an important connection to one of the first musical Fellows, Conlon Nancarrow: he visited Nancarrow in 1987 and converted his player-piano rolls into MIDI files, so that Conlon's creations, difficult to convey accurately in conventional notation, could be preserved indefinitely. Like Monk, an excellent representative of postclassical music.

1998: No fellows involved with music.

1999: Jazz saxophonist Ken Vandermark.

Darcy James Argue, in the article I mentioned early, sites Vandermark as one of those critially approved jazz musicians who did more to advance the status of the award than the other way around. I think, in Vandermark's case, he may be looking at things from the present rather than the time of the award. Vandermark was 35 when he won the fellowship; how many jazz musicians can you name who were doing so well at 35 that they could take whatever creative risks they wanted? In recent years, Wynton Marsalis is the only name that comes to mind. However, Argue is doubtless better versed in jazz currents than I, so he may be right. I'm still going to give Vandermark the benefit of the doubt.

2000: No fellows involved with music.

Geez. One musician every other year is starting to get depressing.

2001: Pianist Stephen Hough and composer Bright Sheng.

I dunno. Hough is a pianist specializing in the music of dead Europeans, so I'm not as enthused as I would be of an interpreter of contemporary music. Sheng is one of many Chinese composers who have found success in the US, but I haven't been overly thrilled by the few pieces of his I've heard.

2002: Jazz trombonist and composer George Lewis and bassist and composer Edgar Meyer.

I've got to be excited about a trombonist being honored just on general principle, and if I ever decided to go back and get a PhD, the opportunity to study with Lewis would put Columbia on my short list if I could pull myself away from Boston. And while "crossover" is often considered a dirty word in musical circles, I think Meyer is one of those musicians who wears the label well.

2003: Composer Osvaldo Golijov.

I think Golijov is a bit overhyped, but he does write a lot of good music. I am not always impressed by his music, though -- the first piece of his that I heard live was Levante for solo piano, which was more or less a series of salsa montuno riffs strung together. It sounds more like a transcription exercise than a composition in its own right. But that shouldn't take away from the quality of such works as The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind and Ainadamar.

2004: Ragtime composer and pianist Reginald Robinson.

Hmm. Listening to some samples at Robinson's website, I find his pieces to be exquisitely crafted examples of the ragtime genre, but I don't come away with a clear idea of what his voice is. What makes his work so significant? Is it that he is an exceptionally skilled practioner and creator in a genre which most people may not realize is still active? I suppose that's a valid reason.

2005. Conductor Marin Alsop, violin maker Joseph Curtin, and violinist and music educator Aaron Dworkin.

A nice trio. Alsop and Dworkin have both been effective musical advocates: Alsop in bringing new music to concert audiences, and Dworkin in providing educational opportunities to aspiring classical musicians in underserved minority communities. Some people criticize the likes of Dworkin for bringing one of the mainstays of European cultural imperialism into minority communities, but I think efforts like his are an important part of breaking down the eurocentric hegemony in classical music. And Curtin's work at molding modern advances in acoustics and materials science with the long-standing art of instrument making seem very interesting.

2006: Jazz violinist Regina Carter and composer and saxophonist John Zorn.

John Zorn is definitely the higher-profile honoree this year, to the point where Stephen Colbert hilariously mocked Zorn's award on the Colbert Report. He is also a safer choice, having had a very successful career as both a musician and musical entrepreneur. As a downtown sympathizer, I am leery of the way he co-opted the focu of the downtown scene in the early '80s; I find Meredith Monk and Trimpin to both be more suitable exponents of downtown sensibilities, both musically and extramusically. Regina Carter is definitely the more adventurous choice: a relatively young (41) musician, still establishing a career as a soloist on an unusual instrument for her genre.

2007: Blues and reggae singer Corey Harris, singer Dawn Upshaw.

Dawn Upshaw is one of those very talented and accomplished musicians who by now (after looking at 25 years of MacArthur Fellows) looks like a safe but deserving choice. She is one of the most sought-after artists performing new classical music today, but has had the opportunity to branch out into Broadway and folk and other genres. It's hard to say what effect the fellowship would have on her career. Maybe she'll use the money to do some commissions? Self-serving musings from a jealous composer, I know.

2008: Violinist Leila Josefowicz, instrument maker Walter Kitundu, music critic Alex Ross, and jazz saxophonist Miguel Zenón.

A very interesting group. Josefowicz has championed the music of living composers like John Adams and Oliver Knussen. Kitundu's creations, like Trimpin's, are both sculptural and musical, but intended for human performers rather than electronic control. Darcy James Argue has more to say about Zenón's talents and accomplishments here. Compared to these three, Alex Ross now seems like an incredibly conservative choice. Compared to Kitumbu 935), Zenón (31), and Josefowicz (30), 40-year-old Ross is positively over the hill. And he already enjoys a great deal of creative freedom: working for the New Yorker, he has been at liberty to take a 2-week trip to China and Alaska doing research for the aforementioned article on China's classical music scene as well as a profile of composer John Luther Adams (no relation to the John (Coolidge) Adams I mentioned in connection with Josefowicz above), to say nothing of the many trips he took researching The Rest Is Noise.What more could a writer want? Maybe the fellowship will allow Ross to produce more. Can we expect a second book in the works? That would be nice.

So I started out by singling out Alex Ross for praise, and found that, of the four musical honorees this year, Ross may in fact be the least exciting prospect. And yet, he is an exciting prospect, for the reasons I cited at the beginning. He has produced great work, and he has much of his career to come. If he's the "safe" choice out of four this year...isn't that even more exciting?

P.S.: Looking over the list of MacArthur Fellows on Wikipedia, it surprises me how many of them are still fairly obscure. Of the 24 winners in 2007, 11 of them do not have their own Wikipedia page -- not even a stub saying "Deborah Bial is an education strategist. In 2008, she won a "genius grant" from the MacArthur foundation. Surely being a MacArthur fellow is in itself enough to meet the notability guidelines. However, I take this as a promising sign that the MacArthur Foundation is willing to take risks on people who have not achieved widespread recognition.

P.P.S.: Writing this post prompted some tangential research into the song quoted in the title. I learned that Jimmy Webb originallly intended for "MacArthur Park" to be performed by The Association. That makes so much sense. I can totally hear their harmonies in place of Richard Harris' vocal harmonies. It'd be a good sound for the song, though they might not be able to make up for the lyrics.

The first version of "MacArthur Park" that I ever heard was Maynard Ferguson's big band arrangement, so I was blissfully unaware of the lyrics for many a time. However, the song still came to haunt me, as the musical progression corresponding to the lines "Some left the cake out in the rain/And I don't know if I can take it" became inextricably linked in my brain with the opening of Beethoven's "Waldstein" Sonata. Isn't that more than you ever needed to know?

It's been over two weeks since my next recital, which is zomg tomorrow. I'll tell you about the upcoming recital in a second, but first let me tell you about the last one.

My recital on August 30th, which I named "Anarchist Nut," went quite well. In particular, the premiere of the Holy Tango Songbook was excellent, with guest performers Lorinne Lampert and Stephen Williams doing a great job singing and playing piano, respectively. Also, Francis Heaney gave a number of readings from his delightful Holy Tango of Literature, which may be worth the price of admission all by themselves. For my own part, I faltered a bit in the two older pieces on the recital -- I somehow managed to make mistakes I had never before made, not in several hours of practicing -- but held my own on the new works. Several people have told me that they couldn't hear the mistakes, which is understandable since they don't know what was supposed to happen at those points, but a little discomforting to me as a composer, because that means that the audience was reacting to