music » David MacDonald, composer

I have a new favorite author and blogger, Jeff Jarvis. My first introduction to Jarvis was watching him as an analyst on one of my favorite “new tv” shows, This Week in Google, on the TWiT network. A couple of weekends ago, I drove from East Lansing, MI to Kansas City, MO and back for a friend’s wedding. On the way back, I listened to the audiobook of Jarvis’s What Would Google Do?. (Get it.You’ll thank me later.) It is instantly clear when reading either his book or his blog, BuzzMachine, that Jarvis “gets” the internet and new media as much as anyone. His book discusses Google’s philosophies about business, customers, publicness, creativity, and community, and how they all might be applied to other institutions.

Jarvis does a really excellent job of distilling some principles of Googliness (one of the many fun, Google-related words he invents) in a way that makes them meaningful while being general enough to apply to a lot of different circumstances. Here are some of my favorites:

“Give the people control, and we will use it.”
“The link changes everything…Do what you do best and link to the rest.”
“If you’re not searchable, you wont be found…Your customers are your ad agency.”
The mass market has been (or is being) replaced by the mass of niches.
“Atoms are a drag.”

…and, perhaps his most radical proclamation…

“Free is a business model.”

My favorite sections of the book, however, are after Jarvis has explained the basic tenets of Googliness. He goes through several hypothetical Googly institutions. Near then end of these is “Google U,” a hypothetical university. Appropriately, Jarvis has made this chapter available as a blog post on his website. He wonders why, in this world of seemingly infinite communications technology, why do students have to be limited to taking classes at a single university? Why can’t they take classes a la carte from programs around the country?

I’m not sure I think this is practical. How do you control the curriculum in such an institution? How do the institutions control their enrollment numbers and standards? I don’t have answers to these questions. However, one thing I do like about the idea is that a degree-holder (would they even have degrees?) would have to be evaluated on something other than the name-brand familiarity of the institutions they attended.

One of my favorite websites seems to be working toward this idea already, and best of all it’s free! You can watch videos of lectures from many courses at top institutions at Academic Earth. However, when you look through the available lectures, you might notice something missing: the arts (now we’re back to my neck of the woods). There are a handful of offerings in creative writing and a course in Roman architecture, but there are no classes in music (not even theory or musicology), and no classes in artistic “practice.” Courses that are so basic to art programs(life drawing or color theory) and music programs (counterpoint and aural skills) seem to defy the model.

I’ve been wracking my brains since reading and listening to this chapter. I really want for the arts not to be an exception to the Google U model. I really want arts education (and the arts themselves) to flourish in the Google Age. Is it the art that has to change or is it the way its taught? Or, do the arts simply defy our current communications technology? It’s probably a little of both, and of course the combination of the crusty academics and curmudgeonly classical musicians means that music programs will probably be the last parts of their respective universities to make such a change.

Is it possible to start a “free” university-style music school for the internet? I don’t know. Who wants to help me try?

I know there are a LOT of question marks in this blog post. I don’t normally like writing that way, but there are some many questions and so few certainties. If you have any thoughts on the matter, please share away in the comments!

A few weeks ago I went to Flat Black and Circular, a nice little used record store here in East Lansing. I bought an Eric Dolphy album called Out There (Amazon, iTunes), recorded in 1960. I tossed it in my backpack and forgot about it until last week. I had some time to kill before teaching a lab (20th Century Music Theory), so I popped the disc into the classroom’s CD player and pulled out the liner notes. (There are a lot of very thoughtful and creative liner notes from jazz albums of this period.)

Some of my students came in and really dug the music, others came in with a “What the $^&$@ is that crap?” look on their faces. I found a nice paragraph in the liner notes that I decided to share with the students at the beginning of class.

It would be best to acknowledge, right from the outset, that this is not the most easily grasped jazz album you are ever likely to hear. And it is also appropriate to say that, like many things which require careful attention, it repays that attention with a greater reward than you might get from music that reveals its total character the first time around.

As soon as I finished reading it, one student piped up “I disagree with that completely.” I told him that it was time to consider developing a more mature outlook on art.

In our class this semester, we will be studying music by Hindemith, Bartok, Schoenberg, Carter, Babbitt, and others whose music is not “easily grasped” the first, or even the second or seventh times around. In fact, many people might never grasp it. I do think that music should give the attentive listener some reward the first time, but if it gives you everything the first time, there’s not a whole lot of incentive to listen to it again. One of the things that appeals most to me about great music is that I can hear something new in it even after I think I know it really well.

Last year, I heard the Chicago Symphony under David Robertson perform one of the great “Top 40″ orchestral hits, Dvorak’s New World Symphony. As many times as I’ve heard (and played) that piece, I heard some brilliant counterpoint that evening that I’d never noticed before. The saying goes that you can’t judge a book by its cover, but maybe you can’t be so sure about it even after the first reading.

I don’t like a lot of old music. Mozart, Brahms, et al. don’t really whet my whistle, tickle my fancy, float my boat, or light my fire. Having said that, I’ve always had a bit of a thing for Bach. I think counterpoint is just about the coolest dang thing any musician ever thought of, and nobody’s ever done it better than Johann. That’s why I was so excited when I read about Don Freund (composer and professor at Indiana University) putting a series of lectures on YouTube called “Composition Lessons from J. S. Bach.”

They seem to be geared toward an audience that may not have a thorough technical understanding of the music already, but there is a lot of compelling information in them. Freund runs through a significant chunk of the first book of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, pointing out anything that he finds particularly interesting. That’s really a lot of what composers do when they listen to music, though. “Hey that sounds neat. I’ll take some of that.” Here’s a couple of the videos Freund has posted: part of the introduction, and part of the discussion of the C-sharp minor fugue. I encourage you to check out more of them on his YouTube channel.

My mother’s favorite movie of all time is Steve Martin’s The Jerk. If you haven’t seen it, put it in your Netflix queue right now. You won’t regret it.

In the film, there’s a very funny scene in which Navin Johnson, played by Martin, ecstatically proclaims “I’m somebody! Look! My name in print!” even though the “print” in question is the local phone directory.

I had that experience the other day when I discovered my name in the iTunes store, where the H2 Quartet‘s new album Times and Spaces is now available. Yes, I know. Just about anybody can put music in the iTunes store if they’re willing to jump through the right hoops. But I’m really proud of this piece and the recording, even though I had very little to do with the recording. In fact, maybe that’s what makes me so happy about it. It’s one of the few times in my brief career that I haven’t had to beg for performers or herd metaphorical cats in rehearsal. Yet there it is, my name in print.

Incidentally, the CD is also available as a digital download from Amazon, but they don’t list composers over there. Check it out from your preferred download dealer.

iTunes – Amazon

Composer John Corigliano (winner of an Oscar, a Pulitzer, and three Grammys) is in residence at Michigan State this week. The band, orchestra, and choir programs are putting together a program this coming Saturday night of his works, including Pied Piper Fantasy (feat. Prof. Richard Sherman, flute), DC Fanfare, and Circus Maximus. I’m looking forward to what I’m sure will be an excellent program, and I’m also planning to catch some of the rehearsals with Corigliano this week. On Saturday morning, Corigliano is giving a masterclass. I, along with my colleagues Kevin Wilt and Victor Marquez-Barrios, have been invited to present a piece in the masterclass for Corigliano and the rest of the assembled hoard to critique.

If you don’t know what a masterclass is, or if you’ve only been to performance masterclasses, composer John Adams just wrote a humorous and thoughtful essay on composition masterclasses that you should read. As a summary, I will tell you that he calls the student composer “the victim” and the process “ritual disembowelment.”

I find masterclasses to be a bit nerve-wracking in the best of situations, but this will be something else altogether. This will be a masterclass given by one of the most prominent American composers of his generation, and I imagine it will be attended by several members of the faculty from outside the composition area. Thankfully, I will be presenting a rather short (6½ min.) piece, Falling up the down escalator. Also, I happen to have a stellar, recently-released recording by the H2 Quartet.

I’m hoping to come out of the experience smarter but not in too much pain.

It is right that the historian should indicate the summits of achievement in art (the poetry, architecture, and sculpture of ancient Greece, sixteenth- and eighteenth-century music, Renaissance painting, etc.); but in a sense this is of little use to us. The claims of life are stronger than the sublimest art; and even were we to agree that we had achieved the best and most beautiful it is possible to achieve, we should be impelled in the end, thirsting as we do more for life and experience than for perfection, to cry out: ‘Give us something else; give us something new; for Heaven’s sake give us something bad, so long as we feel we are alive and active and not just passive admirers of tradition!’

-Carl Nielsen

I had a student today ask this question: “What do you do when you’re in the middle of working on a piece, and you get an idea about another cool piece?”

It’s a tough question, and it’s one that I know a lot of composers deal with, though not one we often talk about. I’m a one-thing-at-a-time kind of person. That’s bad, because it means if I get side-tracked by one of these “next projects,” I put off my main project and it loses momentum. There are some people that can successfully work on two pieces at once, but I’m not among them, and I think most of the composers I know would say the same thing. This can cause some problems. One of the most frustrating is that working on large-scale projects means that you can’t take on any new projects for a long time. Right now, I’m working on my dissertation. By the time I finish it, I’ll have been working on it for at least a year and a half. The worst part is when somebody says, “Hey, we should work on a piece. I want you to write something for me.” This doesn’t happen very often, and when it does and I can’t act, it’s pretty maddening. I have to tell them to come back in a year and ask me again.

The good thing about the one-piece-at-a-time policy is the moment I get the new idea. Nothing gets me more excited about finishing the piece I’m working on than the allure of diving into a new one. (Admittedly, the diving in can be painful, but in a hurts-so-good kind of way.) I know some composers that keep a written queue of pieces they want to write. I keep a mental list. Sometimes I bump things up and down the queue. I’ve been meaning to work on a one-act chamber opera for the better part of 5 years. But when things start to stagnate, it always helps me to start thinking of that next big thing.

David MacDonald, composer

Great Googly Moogly

Out There

Old Composers are People Too

“The new phonebook’s here! My name in print!”

Masterclassin’ up the joint

Nielsen

the next big thing

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