12.) Attraction July 25, 2013

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I was fooling around with some Messiaen modes trying to find ideas this week, when I noticed that a certain transposition of his third mode had a couple of mirror points on the piano.  The pitches of this mode are [D Eb F Gb G A Bb B Db D].  If one starts this scale on D and plays it in contrary motion, the right hand ascending while the left hand descends, the intervals are symmetrical and the hands mirror each other.  Later I discovered that certain transpositions of all Messiaen's modes actually have mirror points on the keyboard.

I thought it would be fun to compose a piece in which the hands mirror each other throughout.  It was interesting because often times I heard something I liked for one hand, but wasn't crazy about what the mirroring voice had to do.  I had to either change my original idea, or accept it and move on.   About halfway through composition process, I remembered that I haven't done much with non-retrogradable rhythms for awhile, and I thought that they would work out quite poetically with the mirroring idea.  So I simply used measure 15 as a mirror point and then retrograded the rhythm of the first 14 measures.  This also made for some interesting phrasing, especially in combination with the mirroring pitch structures.

I naturally gravitated toward one of few mirrored structures in the scale that had a strong tonality, that of G-flat major.  As it shaped up, it seemed that the piece became movement to and from G-flat major.  I enjoyed the experiment and wouldn't be surprised if I revisited the mirror idea before this project is concluded.

It feels good to be working at home again with my usual instrument and equipment.

11.) Polaris July 15, 2013

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This is the final post from the NY Summer Music Festival in Oneonta, NY.  I have enjoyed my time here, but as for the Messiaen Project, I am really looking forward to getting back to my usual set up in Brooklyn.  Waiting for me there is a better piano, better recording gear, and a computer that is much easier to use for this stuff.  However, I'm not in the clear yet.  Travel plans in August may mess with my schedule a bit. 

Polaris is more or less a reaction to the institutional surroundings I've been in for the past four weeks.   I think NYSMF is fantastic.  The jazz faculty I'm working with are amazing humans, players, and teachers.  I've learned a lot from them and it's been a joy working with them.  The students have also been great.  I've learned a lot from them too.  However, I do not find myself in the jazz education world very often.  I have some private jazz piano students, but one on one is a little different than functioning as part of a department.  The interesting thing is that I was extremely attached to the jazz education scene when I was in school.  I loved it both at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and the Manhattan School of Music.  But having been away from that scene for nine years, it's a bit of a shock to come back to it, even if it's just at a summer music festival.  

The most significant thing about that is that I feel having been away from institutional jazz programs has allowed me to develop my music in my own way.  Before I arrived here, I had a very free and open approach, mentally.  I felt like I was kind of off on a tangent - in my own musical world.  Maybe you hear otherwise in my work, and that's fine.  I'm really talking about where I was mentally.  Sure, I am influenced by my peers and many things - I don't live in a bubble - but I'm free to go as deep as I want in any direction.  In my scene at home anything goes.  I felt this mentality slipping away at times while here at NYSMF.  I was grasping to hold onto it.  The Messian Project was  my saving grace in that regard.  It kept me in touch with myself and my vision.  

In spending three weeks in the jazz education world of high fast loud, avoid notes, and guide tones, I felt the urge to write something as far away from that as possible.  I had been checking out Messiaen's Quatre études de rythme (Four Rhythm Studies), of which one, "Mode de valeurs et d'intensités" (Mode of Durations and Intensities) uses total serialism.  It's essentially a numerical order of not only pitches, but also rhythm, dynamics, articulation.  For my composition this week I was hearing something sparse and weird that would definitely challenge most of the people I'm surrounded by here at NYSMF.  Is it musical?  Is it music?  My answer to those questions is of course yes.  And my work as a composer is essentially to serve myself and my fellow musicians as improvisers.  So I decided I could get this sound with some experimenting with total serialism, and Polaris definitely got my into a different improvisational zone - one of sparseness, dissonance, and silence.

First I composed a row from Messiaen's sixth mode: E, B-flat, B, D, A-flat, C, G-flat, F.  I began to sketch the inversion of this row, as I would with a twelve-tone row, but I quickly discovered that the inversion yields a set of pitches that is not one of Messiaen's modes at all, so I decided to avoid all transpositions, retrogrades, and inversions of the row.  I felt that the original row would be sufficient anyway.  

Then I created a row of note values: Eighth, whole, quarter, dotted-quarter, half, dotted-half.  I avoided sixteenths for the sale of simplicity.  

Then I created a simple row of rest values: Quarter, eighth, half.  

Then I created a tessitura row.  I ordered the seven octaves of the piano.  I made sure my composition followed the following order of octaves on the piano: 3, 6, 5, 1, 7, 2, 4.

After the piece was finished I created a simple row of dynamics: ff, p, pp, f.   Every note got it's own dynamic marking.  I made a mistake with the dynamics right at the beginning.  I would have corrected this if I were using Sibelius, but I couldn't stomach it on Notion.  Besides I had already been practicing the piece when I discovered the error, and it so turned out that following these four dynamics was the most challenging part of learning this piece.  

I decided to allow myself to choose freely between notes and rests.  If I wanted a note, the value was determined for me, and if I wanted a rest,  the value was determined for me.  The other freedom was in choosing how many notes to play at one time.  These two freedoms factors were in fact plenty to work with.  The piece could have come out quite differently with different choices in these areas.  

Well, two and half more days of my time at NYSMF are left as I write this.  Last night was a definite highlight.  The jazz faculty did a concert with guest artist saxophonist Dick Oatts.  What a sound that guy has.  I learned a lot about intensity from him last night.  Every time he played he just took the rhythm section with him and off we went.  Incredible.  

10.) The Unknown July, 8, 2013

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On June 8th, my wife and I hosted our tenth edition of the Beverley Concert Series.  The night was guest curated by our friend, colleague, and upstairs neighbor Marika Hughes.  It was a fantastic night.  We heard music from Dina Maccabee and the Arun Ramamurthy Trio.  Both sets were excellent.  

The Arun Ramamurthy Trio featured Arun on violin, Sameer Gupta on tabla, and Abhik Mukherjee on sitar.  They played a fusion of North Indian and South Indian classical music, and it really spoke to me.  I had heard snippets of this kind of music before, but never live in concert and never in as focused of an environment.  Arun explained some of what they were doing, which helped to make it accessible. I've since been listening to various recordings of Indian classical music during the last month.  

The Unknown is a simple imitation of such music.  Without really studying it, I've taken some ideas and tried to incorporate them into something personal, and find a way to make them fit the Messiaen project.  

I began by choosing a scale to work with, the second transposition of mode three.  I spent a few days improvising with the scale and then decided to find a pedal tone to imitate the drone of Indian Classical music.  Then I composed the line.  It's quite minimal, and I kept thinking about adding more, but soon realized that the line and the pedal point were plenty for inspiring improvisation.  It was enjoyable as it is.  The composition is seven measures, but the piece is seven minutes.  

Humbly speaking, I think there is something honest about this simplified, unanalyzed imitation. It's perhaps similar to a child learning something new, just going for it, playing with it, exploring.   I strive to have child-like sense of discovery as I go through the day, week, year, life.  

9.) Arc en ciel July 1, 2013

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Week two of four up at the New York Summer Music Festival in Oneonta.  We've been having scattered showers all week up here and a few days ago we were treated to a beautiful double rainbow.  At that time the seed of Arc en ciel was already planted, but when it was time to title it, I wanted to reference the rainbow without being too boring and obvious, so why not head on over to google translate again.  

I do feel like the piece fits the title.  I has a degree of radiance, and it definitely copies some of Messiaen's sound.  I'm finding it very tempting to go there lately.  The piece is composed of two transpositions of mode two, which is the diminished scale, again.   I really don't think I'll ever get tired of that sound.  This time, we are entirely in the first transposition for the first three phrases.  The fourth phrase (after the melody enters) transitions us to the third transposition, and the final phrase brings us back to the first.  The melody and progression are repeated with some ornamental colors.  Anyone with synesthesia care to report if I represented the colors of the rainbow accurately?  It's probably a disturbing combination of colors.  

8.) Broken Vibe June 25, 2013

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Greetings from the New York Summer Music Festival in Oneonta, NY.  I've managed to get something posted here, and actually quite early in the week.  Being a little paranoid with the uncertainty of my schedule, I decided to take advantage of the time I've had free and get to work.

Doing this without my usual setup was a bit frustrating, but I've made do.  As I suspected, the recording quality is not as good.  I'm recording directly into Soundcloud with my telephone.  And I'm making the scores on an iPad app called Notion.  They're on the right track with Notion, but there are many things that I can't get to look exactly how I would like.  And the only way I could figure out how to get it to google docs was to take a screen shot and upload a jpg.  Hopefully it's still readable.

Anyway, moving onto the music.  I went looking through Messiaen's modes to find one that could be manipulated into a bluesy sound, and I found that the blues scale is entirely represented in mode four with the exception of the fifth scale degree.  It was very interesting how badly I wanted to use that fifth degree when composing the melody.  But avoiding it probably pushed me into some new territory, and that's what this project is all about, so...good.

It's beautiful up here in Oneonta.  Clear clean air.  Quiet.  It's nice to spend some time on a real college campus again; makes me want to practice more.

7.) Ante Meridiem June 19, 2013

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As I've made use of Messiaen's modes of limited transpositions both in this project and prior to it, I've noticed that their use alone does not guarantee my work to sound like Messiaen's.  I'm happy about that.  But I'm also curious as to what makes his music sound like it does.  It seems to have a radiant, gleaming quality to it, while I've found that many of my pieces sound dark.   I think Messiaen's harmonic choices have a lot to do with it, but his rhythmic choices must not be overlooked either.  Often times he wrote successions of chords in the middle-high register of the piano with faster rhythm that leave me hearing and feeling the mode and its overtones in totality.   Ante Meridiem is an attempt at lightening my work a shade or two.  

In The Technique of My Musical Language there is a chapter about added notes, meaning notes that he added to more traditional chords.  And in the chapter about the modes themselves, he gives each mode as a scale, and then shows a harmonized scale (the harmony being composed of notes in the mode).  Many of these harmonized scales feature chords with added notes.   The harmonization of mode two is an alternating between a major triad with an added augmented fourth, and a dominant seventh chord with the fifth being replaced with the sixth.  I used both of these chords in Ante Meridiem, especially the major plus augmented fourth, which has a shimmering quality in my opinion.  I also attempted to use a faster harmonic rhythm to bring some lightness, while keeping in mind that I had to learn to play this piece in just a few days.

The pitch material is entirely from the seventh mode of limited transposition, first transposition.   It's essentially a chromatic scale without an E-natural, or B-flat.  I first came up with the melody, which fit the scale, and then harmonized each note with chords of mode seven.  It was actually quite challenging to avoid Es and B-flats, and I kept finding mistakes throughout the whole process.  I think I fixed all of them.  But there was a considerable effort on my part to limit my harmonic spectrum even further than the mode did naturally.  There were a number of chords that I used and transposed to different keys.  Most of them ended up being a triad with an added note.

Things will get interesting and perhaps challenging now because I am heading out of town.  For four weeks I will be teaching jazz piano at the New York Summer Music Festival.   I'm hopeful that my schedule will not interrupt this project.  However I will be without some of the technology I use for it at home, so it might not be as easy.  Although I've got a plan to make it work, the recording quality and the quality of the scoring may suffer a bit.  And I really am not sure how intense my teaching schedule will be.   After NYSMF, I will be in and out of town for the rest of the summer.  But again, I'm hopeful that I'll be able to maintain the project.  I'm committed to getting fifty-two pieces written, but you'll have to cut me a little slack if a couple of them are posted late this summer.

6.) Saturated June 10, 2013

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A few years ago I was shopping at the Downtown Music Gallery, which is an amazing place to find recordings of all kinds of creative music.  As I was browsing, they were playing a recording that I found extremely interesting.  It was a solo piano composition that featured repeated chords at a very slow tempo.  Every so often,= one of the notes would be different.  And every so often a chord would be rolled.  But what blew my mind about it was that it didn't change for the whole twenty minutes that I was in there.  I kept thinking, "Okay, this has to go somewhere else soon.  It has to develop into something else."  But it didn't.  It turned out to be Tyshawn Sorey's first record, entitled That/Not.  The piece playing was Permutations for Solo Piano, which is actually about forty-five minutes long!  The owner of the store, Bruce said that it was Tyshawn's tribute to Morton Feldman.

The twenty minutes I spent in that store that day were a turning point.  It completely changed my perception of the piano.  Naturally I bought the record, listened to it, and then immediately began checking out Morton Feldman's music.  I began hearing the piano in a different way.  There are so many interesting sounds happening in the sustain of a good piano, or even a bad piano.  It's especially brought to light by repetition of short phrases with the sustain pedal held down, because it allows the listener a chance to hear beyond the fundamental pitches and pay attention to the overtones.  I supposed we could always be listening in that way, but it seems like upon first hearing a phrase, we're paying more attention to basic pitch and rhythm material.

I also learned a great deal about memory from Feldman's music.  He often repeats a short phrase several times,  which creates expectations in the listener.  I begin to expect these pitches that are coming up, and enjoy them when they happen.  Quite often Feldman will use rhythmic augmentation for later repetitions, which delays the arrival of these pitches that I so look forward to, making the expectation and enjoyment even more intense.  Check out his String Quartet No. 2 to hear what I'm talking about.  The solo piano piece For Bunita Marcus also used this.

I've emulated this sort of thing in some of my previous work.  Time Canvas I recorded with my trio on the record Magnolia.  There is a piece from my previous weekly composition project called Commune.

Saturated began with me dropping my hands on the keyboard.  I landed on a chord that I liked, and I examined it to see if it would fall into any of Messiaen's modes.  It fell into mode 7, but that mode is almost a chromatic scale, I and wanted to find a mode that would limit my pitch choices a little more.  So I changed one note and found that the chord fit perfectly into mode 4.  This chord is the one you see in measure five if you look at the score.

After I found this chord, I began repeating it and then changing notes, while staying within mode 4.  I found that it worked nicely to create melodies with the inner voices.  At that moment, the piece was basically composed.  It was just a matter of getting it out.  After getting it out, I revised it a bit, adding the single notes before each written section, adding the textural diminution (boy am I proud I just wrote that ) at the end.  I also changed some of the melodic phrases so that they were not all four measure repetitions.

We've had some rain lately.  A lot of it actually.  And more is coming today.  The monotony of Saturated seems to fit with this weather.