I could feel the flat affect on my face while my composition professor was talking to me about my new piece. He didn’t like my ideas. It wasn’t an issue of technique, but personal opinion. In his estimation, they just wouldn’t work.
I sat there not responding. I didn’t smile or nod. I didn’t comment. All his ideas were bouncing off me and sticking to him.
After a bit, he realized he wasn’t going to get anywhere trying to convince me of his opinion, and I was resolute to try my ideas whether or not he liked them.
I’m glad I stuck to my guns.
The piece in question is my most experimental to date. It is a guided improvisation of sorts, with very minute and gradual shifts within the whole tone scale. The instrumentation is flexible. There is no set tempo or rhythm, and the form of the piece follows a narration. The score is essentially useless, except for the three pages of performance notes, more like game rules, explaining the notation and how to move through the piece.
It’s almost a musical version of Stone Soup. I provided the “stone” – the idea, and the performers bring what they have to add to it.
The truth is, I didn’t know if it was going to work. How it would “taste”, how it would sound.
I was just going on a hunch, by intuition. I had a general sense of it in my head, how I imagined it would turn out. But while I could engrave the score and parts on the computer, it was impossible to use the software to create a mock-up of the piece.
I am very happy with how it turned out, and I received positive feedback from both performers and listeners. I have already submitted it to three different calls for scores because I believe it is good enough to get in front of new music ensembles.
In the process of conceptualizing and rehearsing the piece, I realized how much it not only involves a different approach to playing music, but how much it changes how the ensemble works together.
I have a background in jazz, including playing in combos, so I am familiar with what it means to listen to another player, to respond to their licks, to fill in gaps, when to become more prominent and when to back off. Listening to what is happening in real time is paramount to a successful jazz combo performance.
I don’t want to give the impression that classical musicians don’t listen to each other. Of course they do! But most of the time, the actual music that is played doesn’t change based on their listening.
My piece, though, requires players to be open to making adjustments to what they are playing in response to what others are doing around them. Is the narrator taking more time in a segment than you anticipated? Then you need to fill the space with more sound. Is the other string player now using the technique you were planning to use? Switch gears and try something different. Ultimately, the ensemble works together to come up with how they want to perform the piece. I have given the general instructions, but the specifics are up to them. Every iteration of the piece will be different. Different individuals, different instrumentations, different approaches to the improvisation, different interpretations.
My favorite aspect of music has always been its collaborative nature. When I was eight years old, I began learning clarinet and joined the school band because I wanted to make music with other people. Prior to that, I was taking piano lessons but practicing by myself, though I found meaning in that, was not fully satisfying. Music, to me, is at its heart communal.
With today’s technology, it is possible to create music completely alone. You can make a track of all electronic instruments. You can record yourself performing. Everything can happen in your own room.
But I believe something is missing in that approach. I believe that music-making is a situation where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts and is best done in partnership with others.
When I wrote The Night Sky is Always Changing, I was able to maximize on my conviction that music making is collaborative and communal, by handing more autonomy over to the performers for what they will add to the piece. Not every piece I write will be this loose, but I am definitely inspired to try something like it again.
Another way this piece reflects my conviction is in the experimental nature of the music. I believe the definition of beauty is very broad. As a Christian, however, I have come across some who share my faith but believe the definition of beauty is very narrow and limited to tonality. In their view, anything else is dishonoring to God.
I disagree, because I believe that there are aspects of the world and our own personal experiences that cannot be fully or accurately expressed through tonality.
Outer space is one example. The pictures I see taken with the Hubble Telescope and others are so far outside our everyday experience. Mind-blowing, stupefying, majestic, transcendent. Truly awesome.
How can that be honestly reflected in tonality with a predictable harmonic sequence and a singable melody? It is my conviction that it cannot. The night sky explodes with wonder. So, the music must break out of convention as well.
There is no way my music can match the sublimeness of space, but I do think the piece captures the mystery of the unknown in the outer reaches.
You can hear the premiere of The Night Sky is Always Changing below:
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