In fact, there are a few new posts, now in a new location.

A few years ago I decided to split up my web presence between blog ideas and publicity for my music career. At the time it made sense, but lately I have been struggling to consolidate my web presence again under one roof.

That time is now.

The purpose, pics, news, and info found in this blog will from now on be found at rdrussell.com

Please update your links, RSS feeds, etc at this website:

RDRussell.com

Thank you for staying tuned in! Keep creating.

Garry Trudeau, creator of Doonesbury

…but can you hear?

I thought of that as I read the October 14, 2010 issue of Rolling Stone magazine. There’s a rare interview with Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau. He describes his early days as an art student at Yale.

One of my first teachers at Yale was Richard Lytle. I waltzed into his drawing class with the bravado of a freshman art jock who thought he was going to make an impression on his professor, and I did. I whipped off the usual kind of drawings I was accustomed to making, somewhat effortlessly. One day, after about three weeks of this nonsense, we were working from a model, and he came over to my drawing board and ripped the drawing I was working on into pieces in front of the class. “Yes, yes, I know you can draw,” he said. “But what I want to find out is if you can see.” He wasn’t going to put up with this sort of facile art-student sketching that I had taken such pride in — he wanted me to do the hard work of actually looking at what I was drawing.

I see (er, “hear”) the aural equivalent all the time. Composers who are quite facile at composing and getting lots of notes down on paper, but have they actually heard what they’ve composed? Have they taken the time to listen to its effects, what it communicates? A composer should always take a moment to dig a little deeper, to delve under the surface, and actually hear.

The full interview can be found by clicking here.

Photo by Michelle V. Agins for the New York Times

This article by Joseph Plambeck is about how retailers such as Best Buy are making up for the loss of CD sales by offering musical instruments for sale. As such, it’s about business and marketing, not music creativity. And yet, this paragraph really pops out:

So far, said Candace Hoyte, a supervisor at the Manhattan store, the instruments have drawn a steady stream of attention, especially from children. They skip past the video game stations and head straight for the instruments, banging away at Roland electronic drums or tapping on one of the dozen or so keyboards, she said.

What–passing up video games?! Perhaps parents might now start to serve up a musical instrument to their child rather than a new video game system.

And what might it suggest about the human condition–and about music–that the desire to express oneself through music is so appealing and such a draw?

I find myself wondering what kind of music education, if any, these children receive. Will they ever learn to play an instrument? To read music? To compose? For the sake of our shared humanity, I hope so!

Now, perhaps this is common and perhaps not, but I already knew the Beethoven very well, as my love of classical music came from through listening to recordings. I suspect nowadays most people hear classical music for the first time as a record. When I was a junior high and high school student, I had a set of complete Beethoven symphonies which I listened to over and over again. But what a difference a live performance made!

I thought about these things as I read this article in today’s New York Times about the low quality of playback evident in the MP3 players that everyone now owns.

But iPods and compressed computer files–the most popular vehicles for audio today–are “sucking the life out of music”

states an audio engineer in the article.

True?

In fact, there is a long tradition of worry and hand-wringing over the advance of recorded technology infringing on live performance. Does a player piano, for instance, have the musical soul of a live performer? Does a record? This was one of the big concerns of Theodor Adorno, who cautioned about the commodification of  music through easy reproduction.

I won’t offer any polemics here in favor (or not) of Adorno’s argument. After all, Beethoven was exposed to me via record because, as a youngster, I did not live near a symphony orchestra. In other words, without technology, I might have missed out on classical music all together.

But I will quickly add that nothing can replace the experience of a live performance, so while you may spend lots of time listening to radio, TV, internet streaming, or whatever, be sure to get yourself to a live performance every now and then. You might be surprised!

Set your EQ as you compose

Within iTunes or any audio file, it’s possible to tweak the equalization of the playback. This means boosting the bass or raising the treble. Every piece will be a little different. This is something to think about when you compose: is your music too treble-y? Too bass-y? Too stuck in the mid-range, with no highs or lows? As you write music, think about varying the regions you write in, so that the ear doesn’t feel too stuck in one area of the sonic spectrum.

Consider a piano trio, for instance. Obviously, one can “set” the violin high, “set” the cello low, and have the piano fill in the mid-range. And yet, think of the different colors achieved in the piano’s left hand is very low, the piano’s right hand very high, with the strings taking the middle register. Or if all three instruments are in similar regions.

Of course, common sense must be used with dynamics to insure that nothing is lost “in the mix!”

“Right now, when we need musical leaders in every community, we are concerned only with training virtuosi for a nonexistent market… We must develop educated people who are musicians in order to develop music.”

Was this said last year? Surprisingly, no. It was said in a 1945 essay by William Schuman, then just beginning his 16 year leadership as president of Juilliard; and yet it sounds just as trenchant today.

For more information about William Schuman, who was also a prominent composer in his day, read Anthony Tommasini’s commentary about the lasting influence of Schuman in the 01 April 2010 New York Times.

William Schuman in his Park Avenue apartment, 1991

For instance, here’s Murphy’s Laws of Songwriting, including this bit about aiming your songs especially to an audience of women. The idea is that men sing songs for women, and women sing songs for women. It’s much more rare in popular music that songs are sung especially for men. So why not do what’s popular?

One can argue this point, of course (“Hey Jude”?), but for the sake of the argument, I’ll take this at face value, because it really got my curiosity going.

Compose for...whom exactly?

Classical music and popular music are not the same thing, of course, and most popular music is lyric driven and much classical music is not. But I had to wonder: is the classical music that is most remembered written for women? Is opera and art song more “feminine” than symphonies and string quartets?

Gendered perspectives of classical music has been a hot topic in the last 3-4 decades. I am reminded of Fred Maus’s excellent article, “Masculine Discourse in Music Theory,” which argues (amongst other points) that one reason music became so theory-based in the twentieth century was to be more scientific and less “feminine.” Male composers wanted to appear masculine for their colleagues. (See Perspectives of New Music, Vol. 31, No. 2 (Summer, 1993), pp. 264-293)

I wonder if there is anything to all this. I also wonder what is would sound like if I wrote for just a female audience only… or just a male audience! A little thought exercise that might lead to something.

Here’s something I’ve never thought to do until just now. Head over to Google and search”how to be a composer.” That might fill up an afternoon!

Is this "music"?

It’s audition time at music conservatories yet again. I thought I would share something that happens with a lot of frequency, and it’s got me thinking.

Someone will come around and introduce themselves as a composer, and we’ll say, “That’s fine, that’s great, let’s see some scores!” We composers like to share our scores and have a look and see.

A lot more often than you would think, though, the composer in question will offer CDs instead.

This is met with some collective eye-rolling in conservatories. Does this person not know how to produce a score? Does this person even know how to read music? With software nowadays most people can create some kind of music and put it on a CD, but the printed score is still paramount in classical music. In fact, when seeing a new score for the first time, I know of several composers who refuse to even listen to the accompanying CD, as if this is demeaning in some way. The printed score, for these composers, is apparently all that matters.

And yet.

I mentioned in a prior post what John Harbison calls “us notes-and-rhythms composers.” Of course  a philosophical argument can be made that music need not be limited to notes and rhythms. Almost every week the New York Times reviews some manner of concert that involves live electronics in some way: usually a laptop providing playback of samples or processing live sounds. As well, these kinds of performances are not necessarily supposed to sound the same from performance to performance. It just so happens that, as with jazz or popular styles, the ability to read music can be rather incidental to someone’s inherent musicianship.

I’m not sure who is more at a loss here. On the one hand there is the aspiring young composer who might glean more by learning about theory, notation, etc.; on the other hand there is the conservatory that creates a firewall of musical literacy, one that keeps out a genuinely talented composer.

Is there a happy medium between the two?

The kitchen sink

An important article (link below) by Anthony Tommasini in the 14 Feb 2010 New York Times asserts that for both composers and performers, the old “dogma” has been discarded and “anything goes.” This is hardly news anymore, but that’s really not the point of the essay — instead, Tommasini asks the provocative question of why some terrific composers are overlooked. Composers such as David Diamond, Walter Piston, and Samuel Barber are more easily dismissed as (to borrow John Harbison’s phrase) “notes-and-rhythms composers” while, historically, those composers who embrace electronics, unconventional instruments, and atmospherics grab all the attention. In today’s “anything goes” world, is history repeating itself? Are the “notes-and-rhythms” composers being left aside yet again?

A fascinating read, which you can access here.