The Fredösphere

It's not easy to write convincing fiction when one of the characters is a great artist. The explanations of the art and its greatness usually fall flat. Two embarrassing examples from Ayn Rand's novels come to my mind instantly. In the opening pages of Atlas Shrugged, the theme of a mysterious symphony keeps popping up, one that is brilliant and perfect precisely because it was never written (oooh, that's spooky!). The other example comes from the The Fountainhead: Howard Roark's architectural masterpieces are left mainly to the imagination in the novel (I presume—I never read it) but must be shown in the movie version because of the nature of the medium. This showing is not to Roark's advantage because the artists hired to create the architectural drawings and matte paintings inevitably relied on clichés, because if they were geniuses like Roark they wouldn't be working in Hollywood. (One friend's reaction upon seeing those "masterpieces" was to blurt out, "he invented the 1950's!").

Two works of fiction from the world of SF feature characters who are musicians, and to my delight get them mostly right. First is Ian R. MacLeod's Song of Time. A supporting character, prominent in the first few chapters (the ones I've read so far) is a brilliant young pianist who dies a slow death, but not before transmitting his passion for music to his sister, the main character. I'm amazed to report that some of the lad's advice on the topic of practicing is actually useful. Amazing.

The other musician, a composer actually, is the first-person main character of the short story Empire of Ice Cream by Jeffery Ford, available from my good friends over at the Starship Sofa Podcast. I thought it regrettable that the story told of a magnum opus consisting of two-voice counterpoint (only two? To carry an extended work? I doubt it) but otherwise the depiction of the life and work of a composer felt right to me. As a bonus, the character is also a synaesthete, one of a group that, long-time readers know (hi Mom!), I have made the butt of good-natured jokes here at the Fredösphere (if jokes about concentration camps can ever be good-natured. . . and I say, when they're about synaesthetes, they are!).

Labels: AynRand, Composition, Creativity, MusicTheory, Starship Sofa, Synaesthetes

I see my evil plans to utterly warp my children's minds with piano lessons will bear--probably already have borne--fruit:

[I]f you look at a brain, either in life with an MRI, or later, you can't tell whether it's the brain of a genius or a fool, or whether it's the brain of a visual artist or a literary artist, but you can look at a brain and say, "that's probably the brain of a musician"--because musical training and involvement in music enlarges various parts of the brain: the corpus callosum (the great band which goes between the two cerebral hemispheres); parts of the auditory cortex; parts of the cerebellum; parts of the frontal lobe cortex. There are striking changes which can occur within a single year of musical training, and these are changes which are really visible to the naked eye, at least if one knows where to look. So the power of music to alter the brain is very, very striking.

Oliver Sacks, interviewed by Terry Gross. Hat tip to A Cappella News.  There's lots more where that came from; Sacks is the The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat guy, and he takes us into that territory again.

Labels: Keys, SoundClip, Synaesthetes

Via Sequenza21, Kenneth Woods has tips for composers working with performers:

2- Don’t bring antagonism towards anyone else’s music into gatherings that include anyone but you.
In any “us vs. them” match up, whether it is “new vs. old,” “tonal vs. atonal,” “US vs. Europe,” academic vs. self supporting, you, the composer, lose. More importantly, it creates unbelievable resentment among everyone whose support you need. You may hate Beethoven or Schoenberg in the privacy of your own home, but no matter what you hate, someone in the orchestra or the audience loves it, and if you convince them that you don’t listen to music with open ears, they won’t feel they owe you the same courtesy. More to the point, you may hate Mozart or Ligetti now, but someone in the building knows how much you could learn from them, and you’ll only embarrass yourself by criticizing their music.

By the way, have I mentioned lately how much I adore the music of Mozart?  He's my favorite composer.  And Ligetti.  Definitely Ligetti.

Plus, I love synaesthetes.  Just can't get enough of the little dearies.

Seriously, the tips are valuable and entertaining.  The one piece of advice that seems to be controversial has to do with the use of Italian expression markings.  The argument is, when Czech or Korean musicians sit down to play my music, the lingua franca will save them time.  I should be so lucky to be in a position to waste the time of Czech or Korean musicians.

One commenter reminds you (not me, I already knew) that choirs are not the same as orchestras:

Just some observations from the choir side - choirs are finicky beings, they don’t read well or learn fast (unless they are professional - and even then - the most avant-guard music does not come quickly). Avoid false-relations within a part, and don’t expect singers to be able to sing every interval - stick to one accidental when ever possible, (don’t write an augmented 5th when a minor 6th will do fine) Know the choir you are working for, and write for their ability and make-up. I’ll never forget the year the my chamber choir commissioned a work from a student composer, as a way of supporting the composition program by way of commission “scholarship”. The composer and I met and I explained that our 24 voice choir had only 3 tenors, so divisi should be limited in all parts, and avoided completely in the tenor if possible. We didn't care about the language, but would prefer some kind of suitable “themed” poetry, and it could have atonal elements, but should be listenable for our audience base, so some tonality would be good once in a while. Plus, we only have four rehearsals to learn it, so keep 8-10 minutes would probably be a good length. He came back six months later with a 30 minute work for 32 part choir (up to six divisi within each part) with graphic notation and nonsensical text. Needless to say, we couldn't perform it, and paid for nothing.

...and worth every penny!  Reminds of the time as a graduate student, I was asked, as a favor, to sing in an ad hoc men's vocal quartet.  I found out late in the game that the organizer paid for an "arrangement" by a student "composer" none of us knew, even though the organizer knew I had composing experience myself.  The music was a textbook case of what not to do:  no coherent base line, just dense chords following the melody up and down, centered around the C an octave below middle C.  In other words, a dense, growly, thoughtless mess.  It was completely unusable, so in our brief rehearsal time, I and the other singers rearranged and simplified on the fly, doing what we had to do to avoid disaster.  It still makes me mad.

Labels: Composer, Synaesthetes