Nico
Muhly,

This is what I came to Iceland for: this frozen, inconsiderate wind. The wind doesn’t belong to the land the way it would in Vermont (“the wind was running down the road towards the house.”) This wind doesn’t even see this house; the next thing it’s going to worry about is the west coast of Norway. It’s violent, outrageously cold, and I’m so so happy.

I’ve decamped, after all the madness of Dark Sisters and the hubbub of finishing pieces before the new year to Iceland, where my schedule looks, more or less, like this:

…which is very exciting: the arctic expanse of an empty diary. I have a hearty to-do list, but it’s mainly smaller things — or smaller, at least, than wrangling together an opera. The big consideration at the time is a cello concerto for this cellist Olly Coates & the Britten Sinfonia, which will happen in the UK in March, and then will receive its US premiere in January 2013 with the deliciously named Zuill Bailey and the Indianapolis Sympherny, who commissioned the piece along with the Barbican. It’s shaped up very nicely but strangely: the middle section bears the traces of Qawwali and has — as much of what I’ve been writing recently does — a commitment to a single, unchanging drone.

You guys. Even though I didn’t have shit-all to do, really, putting that opera together was exhausting! It’s like a strange version of plate spinning because it feels like work without actually being work. It would have been entirely possible — and indeed, maybe preferable? — for me to be a ghost in the process, but eventually, my schedule freed up such that I could, and did, make a (productive) nuisance of myself. What is difficult about the process, actually, is negotiating degrees of perfectionism in other people. This is probably more of an issue for me and Dr. Rosenfeld, but really, what it breaks down to is this: the piece exists as the document I’ve produced (two very large scores), but then is received as a collection of various processes ranging from the way in which the pit that houses the scissor-lift is painted to the font in the programme to the morale backstage to the presence (or absence) of supertitles to the morale in the follow-spot booth and on and down and up and over. It is a series of interconnected decisions and, in some cases, negative-space decisions (actively not making a decision about something and “letting it be”) that really surrounds the piece and puts it into three dimensions.

Rebecca Taichman, the director, and I are similarly neurotic people who will obsess over the font of the apostrophe in the supertitles: this is probably a good thing, given what we do. The question becomes how to gauge the limits of others in dealing with these details. For me, it’s technical and emotional: when I walked backstage the other day, did the fly-operator seem angry? Is there anything I can do? Is there anything I should do? It’s a complicated issue, of course, of degrees of control, and one that I imagine composers struggle with their entire lives.

The insane, insane thing about operas is that they are reviewed (and really, evaluated) on their opening night; there’s a huge amount of weight given to the opening. In theater, or a musical, the show would have been open for weeks working out those unthinkable obstacles that no amount of workshops can help one 4c. For me, two operas in, it’s one of pace and adrenaline. My instinct, as a performer, is to rush — a funny thing happens to me once a month, where I’m playing with a pre-recorded tape, and when an audience is there, I’m Absolutely Positive that an Imp or a Gnome has crept into the computer and slowed down the recording by 25%. I have never performed Skip Town without feeling that I am being punked by the tempo gods. Tempo is so subjective anyway: one writes quarter equals 120 on the score when, in the presence of an audience, what’s actually desired is twice as fast. But who can know that? One thing I love love love about opera singers is that they react to the presence of an audience: little pauses became big ones, and they started making dramatic decisions in character, which is nothing you could ever really write in the score and is the magic fruit of an enormous collaborative process. But it adds time, and I would loved to have had another three days to cut, let’s say, one-hundred seconds out of Act I before being subjected to critical proportional scrutiny. It’s also a bit of a game to zone out the insane online chatter about operas: it’s a funny thing. People? Actually want operas to “fail,” whatever that means for art. There’s a community online of manic, smug, glee people who think they know anything about what we’re trying to do — those same vicious queens backseat programming opera seasons, revealing false information and writing in declamatory fragments. I always want those people to ask themselves if they’re really making the world a better place before sounding off on the internet; I’ve stopped reading years ago but imagine how awful it must be to be a cast member in a piece of mine, getting dragged down just because a crazy person wants to play World of Opera Warcraft? But it’s fine! We’re gonna do it all again in Philadelphia this summer and I’ma get in there with a scalpel and make the piece the best that I possibly can, which, surely, is all that can be expected from lovers and haters alike. I’m excited.

I went, on Advent Sunday, to Westminster Abbey in London, where they did their fabulous procession and where, after the same procession, Jamie McVinnie played my seven preludes on the Seven O Antiphons. Will Balkwill, a lay clerk, sang the antiphons and Jamie played the preludes; I didn’t think I could be happier until then we all took taxis-cab to St John Bread & Wine and ate five pheasants, a venison & pig’s trotter pie, and a quince Eton mess. And then, of course, the mandatory eccles cakes and lancashire cheese. There’s always somebody, isn’t there, who is spooked by the combination of the currants and the cheese; you should see what happens when these people announce themselves: a great cheering objection, rushing up, slices of ambitious proportion being proffered, thunderous applause and intense scrutiny at the first bite. Get over it, y’all, it’s delicious! Look, incidentally, at this salad of ham, egg, and a strange duxelles-like paste of hazelnut and fatback:

One of the most crazy-making things in the world is this bogus idea of a war on Christmas, which, for those of you fortunate enough not to know what I’m talking about, is a right-wing obsession in which stores who ask their employees to say “happy holidays” are participating in a giant act of secularization and Christian persecution. If you’re bored, google it and wallow, for a few minutes, in the stupidity. What’s doubly maddening is, of course, the real argument to be made which is in favor of Advent: a liturgically rich & complicated season that gets eaten up with all the horrifying premature explosions of ghastly tinsel.

Apropos of nothing: a gallery of Miss Havisham thru the ages.

And: a beautiful, beautiful Advent carol:

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Elizabeth Poston
Jesus Christ the Apple Tree

And a concert I’m very sad to miss: Albrecht Mayer playing music written for the oboe and music not written for the oboe, as well as a new piece by Andrew Norman which sounds like it does Things with the orchestra, which is always exciting. I like this programming notion, too, which is to put a new piece with old pieces played by a great soloist, and promote both. It’s kind of win-win and doesn’t make new music seem like the mandatory but feared Brussels-Sprout, nor does it force one into a ghettoized new music space where it’s just several varieties of Brussels-Sprout in random order, with tedious percussion moving around in-between and that inevitable moment when somebody drops a cymbal.

The exception to that, however, was a fabulous concert I was part of in Dublin last week, with the excellent Crash Ensemble. This is a composer-driven band, under the moral guidance of Donnacha Dennehy (whose new CD is so great, get it right now). They play amplified and are used to playing amplified. Their programming was audaciously big/small; the order of the concert was Correct rather than Convenient, but then the stage changes were handled quickly, elegantly, and without much drama. One of the funny tricks about new music concerts is that instrumentalists have to get used to dealing with everything they normally do, plus one more thing. The nature of that One More Thing changes, but it can be: save us all fifteen minutes by taking your own stand over there, or bring an extra stand light, or unclip your own microphone as elegantly as you play your instrument. It’s a skill-set that most musicians have but usually deploy without the panache with which they play; all these Crashers were excellent at balancing all the additional clippings and hookings without it seeming like a gong show. They did three of my pieces, including a big new one, a piece by Timo Andres for piccolo, glockenspiel, and two bass drums which sounds, in reality, about sixty zillion times more awesome than you could even imagine, a piece of Missy Mazzoli’s, and a piece by Sean Friar (who looks alarmingly like recently-Grammy-nominated Jefferson Friedman, yay Jefferson & the Chiara Quartet!) It was a great show, and great to see a concert of recent works and not have it feel like a solemn litany or a procession through the Stations of the Cross.

So, last night we premiered Dark Sisters! It went great. I was incredibly anxious. During dress rehearsals, I can wander around between seats, hide if something starts going wrong, text the director or the librettist little thoughts. The thing with the performance is that you have to sit still and behave like an adult, in the presence of people who won’t have seen the show before. There are so many little insane things that can go wrong: late seating, a mysterious smell. As at any opera, the music is punctuated by the tuberculitic ejaculations of people of a certain age. A watch announces that it’s 8:00: so soon after the beginning! we must have started 15 minutes late! All of these things are happening simultaneously, in a glacially slow hyper-reality. Right at the top of the show, a mysterious rhombus of projected light appears on a scrim. The supertitles go off for about five minutes. It’s one of those things where you start imagining everything else going wrong: singers falling off the stage, the piccolo player spontaneously combusting, the cables holding the screens contorting into serpentine glyphs and strangling the baritone. And what do you do? In a rehearsal, at the first sign of the Rhombus of Mysterie, you can anxiously run around and try to figure out where it’s coming from. In the show, it’s a torture chamber. Of the three-man video/scenic team, one was in the house as an audience member, one was running the show from the light-booth, and the other had already fled home to his family, and I couldn’t even make eye contact with the one in the hall, so instead I grabbed the librettist’s thigh and assumed the brace position. But then it went away; we are talking about a (maybe) two-second apparition here. But then something kind of miraculous happened, that hasn’t happened to me before: the singers were so on top of their game, and the conductor and orchestra so in sync with them, that I floated back into my body and actually watched the piece for the first time. Details I had forgotten about became clear, theretofore buried vocal nuances became precise, and the giant rhythmic footprint of the piece started to become visible. In a sense, it felt like a heightened moment of clarity after a near-accident or after one of those vertiginous shocks just before properly falling asleep. Very exciting! Everybody come see this thing!

Now I have the kind of daunting task of throwing myself immediately into another project: a cello concerto for the wonderful British cellist Oliver Coates and the formidable Britten Sinfonia. I also have to actively avoid reading reviews; it used to be easier before twitter, but now you get tagged in them by whoever runs social media for the papers, so you have to actively avoid clicking on things. There were a few English people who were trolling me by writing these screeds about how the time they spent in Two Boys is time they’ll never get back again, how really I am the most awful thing that ever happened and am indicative of a greater series of social problems, et cetera, and bury it in a link that seems innocent, so then you click, and have about twenty minutes of severe self-loathing followed by an awareness that some people really do wish other people ill. I’ve found that avoiding the entire structure is, for me, a healthier and more productive tack. I’m going to try to blog a bit more, too, and document the process of this concerto because it’s going to be sort of a Closed System, in the sense that I’m going to write it without too many distractions and in, miraculously, only four countries. It occurred to me that Dark Sisters had bits written in: Iceland, the Faroe Islands, New York, Vermont, Cambodia, Singapore, France (the CAMARGUE, outrageously), London, and some proof-reading even took place on a cruise ship near Cozumel (!).

Dark Sisters has been a fascinating adventure for me specifically as it relates to tech, and also, my own insane desire to make everybody happy all the time. It kills me to watch singers bored while lights are focussed around their bodies; it kills me to watch designers not have enough time to work. Specifically, what seems like a form of modern white slavery for the singers seems, somehow, to the design team to be an outrageous deficit of productive time. How these things align is a total mystery to me; one presumes that composers who enjoy the luxury of being long dead are left out of these arguments. It kills me to see the insane conflicting mutually exclusive relationships of putting together an opera all a-boil, but I also realize that it’s this shuttling between agendas that creates the friction and the fun of the work as it exists on stage. My job — which is, literally, to produce a document which, when read by x amount of singers and y amount of musicians in the presence of z amount of design professionals, produces something that we can all agree is an Opera — is done, and has been done for months. So now it’s more a parade of my own neuroses, combined with the herculean efforts of the various departments and the cast. It’s a fascinating emotional bardo: the dual temptations are to hide in my apartment all day, or be there every second and try to subtly imbue every transaction in the theater with benevolence and, put simply, a good attitude. It’s easy to spiral into obsessive questioning: why is that scrim blotchy? Who are all those people talking back there? Is that pipe on fire? What’s that smell? Is this time being spent as cleverly as it could be? I’m sure the props-mistress has her own share of obsessions: Why is that little dress, which looked so good in the rehearsal room, creating an après-ski effect from this distance? What color stationery would a 15 year-old girl in Utah use, anyway? Why is everything covered in diatomaceous earth?

In the last few days, we’ve put together the technical elements of the show. Like in Two Boys, the projections are integrated into the environment as elements of plot, not just decoration; this requires a lot more attention than one would imagine. A constant argument is whether or not projections can be demonstrated without the set, but of course, as projections are essentially stylized versions of lighting, one does need to see it in situ and not just on a laptop screen. Separately, the orchestra has been putting themselves together with the conductor. I’ve had a wild ride with the orchestra in this one — it’s essentially a pickup band made up of people who play with Gotham chamber opera normally. This is, however, that company’s first 21st century work, and so I’ve found myself having to explain some of the fundaments of my instrumental writing afresh. It’s a good exercise for me, as I’m very spoiled by my close circle of friends for whom the kind of string writing in Different Trains or Shaker Loops is as standard as Brahms. I’m also spoiled by a close circle of collaborators who can think site-specifically about vibrato: a little bit here, none there, full-tang Dorothy DeLay here, almost Chinese here. And Dark Sisters has, in it, many different kind of musics competing. There is a Martha Graham / Copland Americana wing of the thing that requires a mid-century borderline embarrassing technique, and then a close-up, Makrokosmos-style Meredith Monk meets Scelsi music that creeps out of the pit and into the soloists’ mouths. Then there are the kind of tight, sixth-based chords as one finds in Tehillim. It’s been fun to watch these stylistic things slowly settle into the players’ fingers.

An additional stress, of course, is doing advance press, although this time around has been marginally less hostile than I expected. There’s this fun, slightly multi-culti only in New York one here, and then this other one here, in which my interviewer slightly conflates my friendliness (perhaps misplaced?) with what reads, on the page, as if I’m experiencing an acute manic fugue (it’s been done before, by Gramophone, in which every utterance I made was rendered with several exclamation points).

A lot of people have been asking me what it’s like working with opera singers. Opera singers are, notoriously, difficult, which in itself is not a problem at all. In fact, difficulty can have its own kind of allure, in the sense of a good mark from a notoriously difficult teacher having more value than the same mark doled out by an easy one. And surely the process of becoming an adult is one of figuring out which of ones difficulties should be sanded down in the interests of being a functioning member of the community, and which can be left as distinguishing and endearing eccentricities. Our cast is excellent, and also young, so they’re still figuring out where this Difficulty Threshold is. A new piece always finds people’s breaking points, I should think, faster than rep, although I’ve heard stories of singers’ patience being tested by outrageous new stagings of older works. I’ve found an enormous joy in writing for these excellent singers, especially because I know from watching their dealings with the director and the stage management that they will not tolerate any of what they perceive to be bullshit. If a note seems weird to them or sits in a strange place in the voice, they’ll tell me. If a phrase would work better with a breath HERE rather than THERE, I’ll hear about it. Then we can negotiate. The whole thing is “difficult” only in the same way a hike can be difficult. And surely, the view from the summit is that much more delicious for it. I’ve always told the singers that once they learn the role, the mistakes they make will be in character. These singers have lived with this piece for months now, so their mistakes are always, always more beautiful than what I could have thought of at my desk. I hope everybody can come see this piece; we open in just under a week and run through November 19th, variously, in New York City. Then, this summer, on to Philadelphia! Click here for tickets & things.

Has everybody been following all the new and exciting developments in Texas, Utah, and Arizona with the polygamist sects? Warren Jeffs, the prophet, keeps on going on hunger & masturbation strikes, getting sick, and moving around. Meanwhile, the fascinating and endless appeals process is continuing, sometimes handwritten! A 25-year old fled the twin towns of Colorado City and Hilldale! Here’s a picture of a very large house in Colorado City I took last year:

We’re going back into rehearsals for Dark Sisters, which deals, in a way, with a very similar situation to the one this woman found herself in. However, now, thanks to a long but patchy history of women escaping successfully, it’s easier to ring up the police and a network of informal shelters. If you want to read a strangely wonderful account, check out Carolyn Jessop’s book Escape. It’s strange inasmuch as it’s ghostwritten but not, it seems, ghost-edited, so it follows a very casual narrative structure and occasionally dwells on enormously small details (another sisterwife stole my shampoo!) while eliding over large ones (over the next three years, I had four more children!)

One more interesting thing about that woman escaping: it seems like she got help from Willie Jessop, who used to be a sort of spokesman/enforcer for the FLDS, until one of the various internecine fights inside the FLDS shuffled him around. In a lot of the memoirs written by escapees, he is a sort of villain, and here he re-materializes as a helping hand….

Hi everybody — it’s been a while but I’ve been rather inundated with work, about which there is not much to say except that it’s been a huge pile! The good, and exciting, news is that Dark Sisters is upon us. I’ll be blogging here and there as it gets put together, although at this point, it is sort of deliciously out of my hands. I enjoy a sort of avuncular relationship with it; it’s really being raised by the surrogate parents from the design team, stage management, lights, costumes, hair (!), and of course, Rebecca, the director. Look:

Before we plunge into the thick of it, though, we’re doing a little teaser at LPR this Thursday, and everybody has to come! It’s funny, because Clarice, Yuki & I have played at LPR a million times, and the team from the opera company has not. We’re doing a bit of a puu-puu platter of things — some old things, some new things, a few things by me, a little bit from Satyagraha, you know, the ucze.

As ever, you can peep the opera’s website for information, or sign up for the iTunes channel . I would direct your attention to this wonderful essay by Ken Verdoia about, loosely, the modern implications of the FLDS’s complicated history.

I’m really excited to see that my previous post has generated some interesting conversation in the comments threads. Scroll down or click here to read the original post and check out the comments, some of which I have replied to. The one point I wanted to re-iterate here is that I don’t think composers should put music on their website without getting permission. My primary concern here is for educational purposes. The other stuff – putting it online, promotions, etc., — all of that is a totally different issue.

And now, I want to talk about that issue just for a hot second. Real talk: the internet has made contemporary classical music in live performance exciting. People get excited for a new Adès or Reich piece; the orchestras are all up on twitter and facebook bigging it up, sometimes the composers are there too. This is, I think, a good thing. However, what it has done is call into question the amount of time between a premiere and when a recording is available. I’m thinking, specifically, about Adès’s Tevot and Reich’s Double Sextet. Carnegie was all excited about all these things, we all went to them live, and it would have been nice, I would argue, to have been able to get a recording of those pieces at that time.

Real talk: it’s bootleg recordings of these pieces. Real talk: I still bought the commercial recording. However, I was more excited about the bootleg DubSex because I was still buzzing from the performance I heard. That’s the thing: all the social media is great for orchestras to get people in the hall; I think we’re seeing that working very well. If the recording biz could get involved earlier, we’d be in really good shape.

I am also pleased that my post from a few days ago has, in fact, caused the Sequenza21 spam to stop. It’s really for their own good: if your twitter feed is caught in a feedback loop, you lose followers and people find it harder to separate content from noise.

I want to get specific for a minute about something that I think affects a lot of composers and performers (but especially composers). It’s getting recordings of new work, and making recordings of new work, and that whole matrix. I feel like I speak from a place of enormous privilege in this regard, because I have wonderful publishers both in the US and the UK who are attuned to the specifics of this, as well as relationships with two record companies who are easy and willing collaborators. But my goal, in the long term, is to get this fixed for everybody, because it’s a complete nightmare. Let me break it down. Let’s say that you’re a young composer and an orchestra decides to commission you. Wahoo! You spend six months writing this thing, spitting, crying, elated, all that. You haul ass to wherever it is that the orchestra is at. You work with them in a very limited amount of time, rushing up to the stage to investigate an errant bowing in the violas, running to the back of the hall to make sure the bowed vibraphone is speaking loudly enough. Then, it’s the day of the show, y’all. The concert happens, it goes pretty well! You see, above the stage, a few dangling microphones, so it should stand to reason that you should be able to hear a recording of the piece at some point. Not true. What then happens is an unbelievable series of Kafkaesque email threads, out-of-office messages, invented holidays, bizarre threats, secret handshakes. If you’re lucky, and very very persistent, you might end up with a CD of it, along with a note saying that “this never happened” and “don’t tell anybody you have this.” It’s really weird, right?

I understand that there are union regulations about recording work, and also about the way in which recordings can get very easily exploited. However, I think that I speak for a lot of people when I say that the things young composers want to do with the recording of their orchestra piece are: (a) send it to their mom, (b) be able to play it for other composers/musicians in either an academic or social setting, (c) listen to it privately to see if they can learn anything from it, and maybe, maybe (d) put it up on their website. I can see why an orchestra would have an objection to (d), but the other 3 things seem pretty much fair-game to me, especially (c). Let me also, for those of you not fully immersed in this world, explain something about orchestra music.

If you went to Juilliard, as I did, chances are you will have written an orchestra piece and submitted it for a once-monthly orchestra reading. When I was there maybe it was twice a semester or something? Anyway, what happens is that it’s 9 in the morning, everybody’s bleary, they read through your piece, a whole bunch of cobwebs and bats and shit come flying out of the closet because writing orchestra music is really complicated. There’s a big step between writing for, say, a quartet-sized ensemble and a fifty to sixty-piece orchestra. The way line works is different, blend is different — it’s a huge learning curve. Okay, so you have thirty embarrassing and exhilarating minutes. Maybe the next year, you do this again. Then, when you’re older, you submit a piece for the orchestra concert, you win the competition, and your piece gets maybe three hours of rehearsal over 2 days, and then the show. This is, it should be said, not a complaint about any of this, but just the reality of the situation. When that concert happens — when it’s really your first time dealing with an orchestra, you sort of leave your body and barely listen. It’s the recording that lets you double-back and realize that maybe that bass clarinet shouldn’t be doubled by all the celli, but only half. It’s the recording that allows you, even more importantly, to realize that all the incredibly intricate string details that would sound like £1,000,000 in a chamber setting sound like insects in the acoustic of an orchestral hall.

So, the moral of the story is, getting a recording of your piece is really, really important. I know that I listened to the two pieces I wrote for the Juilliard orchestra obsessively with the score, and without that process, I wouldn’t be half as facile as I am — or confident, or comfortable — writing orchestrally now.

Something really maddening happened to me in the past. I was dealing with an orchestra and we had very, very limited rehearsal time. It was the end of their season, everybody was tired, it was kind of a mess. The first orchestral rehearsal I had my little desk set up with my phone out (to keep notes on), two sets of scores, a million pens, etc. The rehearsal, shall we say, left a lot of room for improvement. I experienced some classic Orchestral Sasstalk:

Me: Hi, so can the bass clarinet just play out a little bit more in bar 91?
Bass Clarinet Dude: I just don’t think you’re going to hear that.

(Suffice it to say, not only could you hear it already when he was playing it pp, despite its f marking, this is not the way that conversation is meant to go).

The other thing about rehearsals is that one tends not to give brass a hard time for flubbing high, exposed passages. Brass instruments are like those crazy dragons from Avatar or whatever; it’s some kind of spiritual connexion that has to be achieved between the lips and the metal and sometimes you just aren’t going to get that at 10 AM on a Tuesday morning. So I happily ignored some brass peccadilloes. Strings: a rhythmic passage (let’s say it’s about as hard as the Stravinsky Symphony in Three Movements in terms of counting) was a disaster. A little stroll down the stands revealed that only the concertmaster had slashed his bars (as in, showing the sub-beats to make reading the passage simpler), which, of course, was the problem. It would be as if New York City only put street signs every ten blocks; unless you know the city by heart, you’re going to need to remind yourself which is 8th and which is 9th. Anyway, that was kind of maddening, and the whole experience was pretty disillusioning and heartbreaking and awful; my reaction to a bad rehearsal is never “I hate those musicians” but it’s “I must be such an awful composer, and an awful person, that I can’t get these people to commit to this music.” At the end of it, though, came the amazing thing. Somebody from the music office said she wanted to talk to me. Oh, I thought, maybe they’re going to apologize for that not-great showing. Not so much. Apparently one of the musicians in the orchestra had made something akin to a formal complaint that I had recorded the rehearsal! Evidently, he thought that he had heard a noise coming from my iPhone that sounded as if I had been playing back what they had just played? Ooooooooooooooooooooh girrrrrrrrrrrllllllllll. It was at that time that I lost my mind. There are so many things wrong with that. I had to check myself, because what I wanted to say was, “Yes, I recorded it, because what I love to do in the evenings is draw a lukewarm bath, slit my wrists, and listen to adults sight-read my music worse than children through my phone’s speaker.”

I should also add that this organization — whom I love! – has the opposite of sent me a recording (which I know exists because I have Beheld It) of the multiple performances they’ve done of my work. In fact, the woman I attempted to (politely) hound about it, and whom my publishers also (politely) hounded, ignored our emails, until such a time as it was revealed that she had left the organization, presumably to avoid the task of slipping the CD into the mail? I mean: I get it. Shit is bureaucratic, who knows about the rights issues and nobody wants to run afoul of a musicians’ committee. But in this case I would have accepted the secret handshake, because I want to do better next time.

I am really pro-Union for musicians. I appreciate all the protections that are in place against musicians inadvertently having their work exploited in ways beyond their control. I also understand that musicians are insanely underpaid if you consider how much time it takes through practice, school, etc. to be in a professional orchestra, or semi-professional orchestra, or really to be getting paid for music-making at all. This model, though, is totally fucked. The idea that a professional musician, after a pretty bloody rehearsal, would be most concerned with whether or not the composer recorded it on a cellphone is a misprioritization on every level. If I had been recording it, the point would have been for me to sit at home obsessively going over the score in order to make myself a better composer, and better able to write better music for that same player in the future. Everybody wins if, after a concert, the composer gets a nice CD with the logo of the orchestra on it. The alternative is some James Bond shit: little Edirol recorders hidden in duffel bags, hiring a friend to sit in the hall and “check for balances” whilst propping a device on the knee. Nobody wants that. Loosening up the recording contracts is going to be an investment in getting higher quality orchestral music written across the board, because writing for orchestra is always learning on the job.

I want to give you a recent example. Excellent Conductor X conducted the Y Sympherny and soloist Z in this concerto I had written for the occasion at an outdoor festival. The rehearsal was cool — about forty-five minutes, we worked out some balance issues that you are always going to have with concerti. The dress rehearsal was basically a run and some notes: again, totally cool, totally professional. Everybody sounded awesome. Perfect showing at the concert from X and Y and a stellar performance from Z. Microphones all over the place, broadcasting the concert onto the lawn for picnickers. During the show, I was sitting there inside, nervous as anything, trying not to twitch. I was listening, but I was not listening. I was paying attention the same way you pay attention to a movie you’ve seen before.

Afterwards, you’d think that because of the microphones, it would take about thirty seconds for somebody to be like, hey, here’s a link to a Dropbox file with your piece recorded in it! The point of my owning that recording, by the way, would be to listen to it privately, and figure out what I could improve with it. I’d also send it to my mom. I wouldn’t put it online, obvs. I’d play it for the friend who introduced me to Z so many years ago at Juilliard, because that seems only polite, rather than the email I sent her being like, “you should hear this piece! But you can’t! Haha! Nobody can! Only the people who were there!” So now, we’re in the Email Thicket. Words I have heard: $200, Impossible, Working On It, Cassette Tape (!). On the other hand, I walked into the St Paul Chamber Orchestra just now and immediately signed a waiver saying that I can get a high-quality CD of the piece as long as I don’t put it online! Wa-hey! Let’s choose model b! And I’m secretly wishing somebody would send me a cassette tape.

I’d love to know what I, and other composers, can do to encourage all organizations to work with composers to ensure that we can continue working and learning based on live experiences. Leave me a note up in the comments.

We are gearing up towards the tenth anniversary of 9/11 never 4get, and I’ve been glutting myself on late night TV documentaries and hysterical websites. Counteracting all of that is Danny Felsenfeld’s very simple project Music After. Check it out here, and read Alex Ross’s take here. They have a funding link, too, here.

Beloved, y’all, gentle readers, I have been having connectivity issues! It’s too many hard drives, too many conflicting operating systems, I can’t get Logic to talk to Reason, I can’t get the samples to let me register them, it’s crazy! It feels precisely like trying to cook in an unfamiliar kitchen that has been child proofed: those maddening plastic clips on all the drawers, the almost-invisible blueballing plugs on the sockets. Your girl is VEXÈD. The upshot is that I have taken it upon myself to completely reorganize all my media, clean out the virtual drawers of unsent emails, and the physical drawers of knotted cables and chargers for Pay-As-Þú-Go cellphones from Iceland, now obsolete.

Also, I am trying to remove the presence of Spam from my life. I have the most hideous spammers: Sequenza 21. It’s basically a new music website — I stopped going there about two years ago, because I was in Iceland trying to explain to somebody the “Uptown-Downtown” argument and happened upon a comments thread to end all comments threads. I nearly drove a car containing some of my best friends into a lake, and so it was decided that I’m not allowed to go to that website anymore by community writ. Also, they’ve repeatedly, and over the span of many years, called me (or my music; one can never quite be sure) “flavor of the month,” and (cue Sex & the City music here), I couldn’t help but wonder what kind of puranic time cycle these people are living in in which a month can last so very, very long. Anyway, every morning, on the Twitters, I wake up to:

…which is doubly stressful because my last name is misspelled, and I can’t figure out how it even turns up in my feed! It’s a disaster. So any readers who are on good terms with our friends over at Sequenza21, tell them to call off the dogs! I suspect they’re not doing it intentionally, but if they’re doing hall of mirrors stuff to me, I wonder what they’re doing to the rest of you.

I am super excited, in other, much more pleasant news, that the wonderful Swedish outfit Loney Dear is about to release a new album called Hall Music. Click on that link for information about when it’ll be available where you live at. His music is wonderful. I’d like to say that I worked on Hall Music, although what I actually did is make some live arrangements for him last year, some of which partially trickled into what you eventually hear. Here is one of my favorite songs of his, from a previous album:

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Loney Dear Ignorant Boy, Beautiful Girl

I love a song that is based on drones, too — Whitney Houston It’s Not Right But It’s Okay works in a similar way. The melody is, in a sense, an agitation of a single pitch, and the friction between the drone and its neighbors is what drives the song forward. Everybody get involved.

This fall, we’re starting to make Dark Sisters happen! I’ll be occasionally blogging about it, and there is a website (about whose impending redesign I am enormously enormously excited), and a twitter account @darksistersoper. The process for this opera is, I think, relatively rare. The three commissioning organizations — The Music-Theatre Group, Gotham Chamber Opera, and the Opera Company of Philadelphia got organized way in advance, and we cast the piece before I started writing anything. Then, they insisted on having two workshops with the actual cast, which is, I think, relatively unheard of? The end result is that now that production is about to start, I have nothing to do! We’ve workshopped with the orchestra (same players as the actual show), the singers have memorized the work already, we’ve collaborated with Rebecca Taichman, the director, on the characters with the singers, and the designers (the wonderful Fifty-Nine Productions) have been with us through all the workshops. I’m excited to see how this compares to the larger, more x-factor process of putting together Two Boys. Join us in November when it happens.

Linguists, I need your help again. My favorite online personality, Funky Dineva, has released a video that has a really clear articulation of a [tr] turning into a [kr] sound; one finds this in the south.

It’s really clear at 3:45. Is there a word for this process? You see it in print, too, rendered out in the fabulous blog MediaTakeOut. But then you see it transform from speech to text to speech again, in the case of the Hoe Stroll. The Ho Stroll (as I would spell it) gets rendered “Hoe Skroll,” but then gets re-rendered thusly. Ur help needed.

[UPD8! It's called the Stream-Scream merger. Watch this space.]

I have been watching an unbelievable amount of cable news in the last week. I had a crazy thing where I got back from London and immediately flew to Iceland and then flew home, and all the while, this debt ceiling thing has been raging. I got kind of obsessed with it, because it seems like both sides are working with entirely different sets of facts, rather than interpretations of the facts. I have never seen so many people shout at each other, “that’s just not true!” on television before! We are having a problem of definitions. I am normally used to arguments being about interpretation, as in the case of Steve Reich’s upcoming album cover for his piece WTC 9/11. Read this article (and the entire comments thread) here. One interesting thing in this post by Bob H is that he doesn’t include one of the interesting glosses Reich provides us about his title:

Reich opens up a second meaning of the initials “WTC,” as the World to Come. He draws in the voices of some of those who attended to the Jewish obligation of shmira in the days after 9/11: sitting near the bodies of victims before their burial, reciting and singing Psalms and other Biblical passages ceaselessly. In Reich’s treatment, shmira is almost is an act of willing a new reality into being, though none of us is sure what actually is to be: “The world to come,” as one of Reich’s interviewees muses, “I don’t really know what that means.”

I took that from NPR, but it’s been discussed in other places. Reich’s music has, in the last 30 or so years, taken on a more nuanced motoric cross-referencing between the energy of New York and the devotional practices, both solemn and ecstatic, of traditional Judaism (viz. Tehillim, Daniel Variations, etc.) This is particularly poignant in his large music-theater work The Cave, which I feel like we should all take a second to appreciate:

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Steve Reich The Cave
Who is Abraham?

So, what this is is speech fragments taken from interviews Reich and his wife conducted in New York in 1992 with people from artists (Richard Serra) to astronomers (Carl Sagan, who weirdly gives the most historically intense description of Ur) to scholars (Saul Rosenberg) about, essentially, Abraham, Isaac, and Ishmael and how all that ish brings us to the Cave of the Patriarchs. The speech is doubled, literally, by the instruments in Reich’s ensemble: strings, clarinets, vibraphones, pianos. It’s a combination, as much of Reich’s work is, of documentation and weaving the disturbances in real life into a fabulous and moving tapestry. He has been up to this since Phase Patterns, but for me, it really reaches a wonderful ripeness in The Cave. I bought the disc the second it came out, and remember being so insanely moved by the chords 3:14 in (“God speaking to you) and the wonderful bit of fancy at 5:05 in this excerpt: from the linear “Father of the faithful” to the percussive and dynamic “father of faith” half a minute later. That sequence delivers us to a piece of straight up technical bad-assery, when Reich doubles Carl Sagan’s folksy baritone with his percussion instruments, and slams the punctuation with bass drum and piano. It still makes me as happy as it did sixteen (!) years ago.

Ooh Fréttir! They’re gonna change the cover!

Does anybody else think that Sarah Palin’s hair is laid like the meme of Tracy Chapman looking like the predator?