blogging and composing

I haven't blogged so much about composing in the last half year (or have I and have I just been scatterbrained?) because I have hit an impasse as a composer that I only recently got around. When you write classical music you can't really get around the necessity of reading about music before too long. I owe a great deal to Charles Rosen's analysis of the Hammerklavier sonata's finale, a fugue of just sort of proportions and bearing I needed to study in order to make progress on my own piece.

The idea that a six minute fugue could be described as a "grand fugue" by a musician I was running the idea by seems ... weird. I have investigated fugues thoroughly enough to know that even from Bach's pen a six minute fugue is a little uncommon and his longer fugues tend toward more leisurely (or, if you prefer more stately) tempi. Beethoven was the one who took fugues on decidedly upbeat subjects and just ran with them. Or he hybridized sonata form and fugue. I have since taken it as a given that what the fugue provided for the Baroque era the sonata form provided for the Classic era, a way to explore ideas rigorously and with a suitable set of contrasting concepts. In fugue the contrasts are set up within the exposition while in the sonata the contrast is more discursive in the rather obviously titled "exposition".

So sonatas and fugues both have expositions. My sonata I've been pecking away at employs the same thematic seed in each movement so that it becomes a kind of monothematic sonata form by way of variation and distortion. Themes 1 and 2 respectively derive from the introduction and the embellishment of theme 2 works itself out into the middle mvoement as an independent movement before the third movement begins, which simultaneously recapitulates and mutates the concepts from the first movement. I suppose it's not for nothing I found the Hammerklavier so useful since the level at which I develop and explore the implications of the opening six measure idea would fit the bearing and conceptual architecture of the Hammerklavier. It just so happens that instead of writing that sort of sonata for piano I have written a sonata for viola and guitar ... which may or may not turn out to be any good.

There is only so much self-confidence a person can have even in the thing for which they may be known. Friends may tell me I'm a good guitarist and a good composer but that doesn't mean I really beleive it a third tohalf the time. As they say, even supermodels feel insecure about their appearances and I'll never be a supermodel.

pecking away

Well, I ihave mapped out the middle entries for the fugue for viola and guitar I have been working on for a few years. Thanks to some intensive study of a swath of scores and some reading I think I have a plan for the fugue that is to be the finale. Studying Bach and Beethoven and Hindemith has been a great reminder that when you proceed to work on a fugue having a plan for things is good. There's a lot that you can, I guess, leave to chance in the sense that once you settle on a subject it essentially dictates the nature of the material but there is something to be said, too, for knowing the implications of the material that you choose to use.

I have been learning this the long, hard way with the subject of my fugue in question. It begins in major but quickly turns to chromatic embellishment in the second measure and by the third and fourth measure has entirely mutated into parallel minor. Modal mutation in a fugue subject seems to be exceptionally rare. A modulating subject is common enough and a subject in one key (often minor) with a high dose of chromaticism is common enough as well. A subject that begins in major, adds chromaticism, and then abruptly shifts into parallel minor and just stays there for the duration of the subject without actually modulating ... that's rare.

When I came upw ith the idea I was excited, very excited, because it seemed like a modally mutating subject, beyond just sounding cool, would be fun to work with. No one expects a mutation mid-subject so it carries with it a great element of surprise. Starting off happily and abruptly taking a dark turn but keeping the upbeat rhythm has a mysterious element to it. The other thing that appeals to me about the subject is that it is essentially a working out of gestural ideas from the first movement, even the first six measures within the first movement, the core of the entire work--you could say that it is the theme from which a kind of Goldberg variations emerges only in my work the material isn't so great as what Bach used and the variations are not variations so much as a sonata, aria, and fugue that all emerge from the initial originating theme.

The first half of the subject invokes the linear element of the opening theme, while the second half of the subject invokes the rhythmic arc of the chorale element in which the guitar and viola play a chorale in pizzicato unison (four ntoe chord that expands out into a polychord that diffuses the stability of the tonality into a tonic/dominant juxtaposition that can imply a tonic with a major seventh and a ninth). All that makes it sound more complex than it really is, a soft, feintly jazzy chorale that is punctuated by a semi-bluesy pizzicato line started by the guitar in pizz but finished by the viola. All of that stuff reappears in a mutated form in the fugue subject, both looking forward to new developpmental possibilities while also looking back to the original idea. I

Years ago I wrote some little couplet about how within Eve was the entire race of Adam waiting to be born. The first couple bore within themselves the entirety of the race in its potential. Well, by analogy, the opening six bars of my sonata are like that, they reveal the potential of the entire sonata in the opening six measures. After the lengthy transformative joureny the theme is going to reappear in its original form at the end to demonstrate what it was and what it has, in a new context become. The theme becomes both the beginning and a kind of end. The coda of the first movement becomes a second ending, after the reprise of the originating theme, which itself comes after a transformed form of the subject. I could attempt to describe how this all works but that's not really the plan or the point. The point is really that I am excited to be making some progress on a very difficult sonata.

And there is a lot of personal symbolism attached to the sonata in terms of my method. Composing music in which the entire cycle of the work derives from a central thematic gesture is something I have been experimenting with for about a decade. In one sonata the central gesture may not appear into a middle movement, in other cases the central idea may be a cluster of gestures that appear immediately at the start of a work. In still other cases there may be a central idea in each movement that remains self-contained or the ideas in earlier movements become assimilated into a new arrangement later on. It's not as though there is anything new to using elements of fractals and the Fibonacci sequence in tonal music.

What makes these experiments interesting for me is employing them in an attempt to surmount the stylistic boundaries between "high" and "low" musical styles at a surface level and also to apply these concepts to the far more challenging task of structural aspects of music.

As Michael Tilson Thomas put it, a lot of Motown and pop songs have their own expressions of forms that exist in classical music. I could pick one of my favorite examples, Stevie Wonder's "Contusion" to explain how a rondo form can be employed in pop music. Most songs extend simple binary or strophic form in ways resembling what happens in classical music. Ternary or da capo aria form, however, is virtually unheard of in popular music. Most of us would not recognize the Tin Pan Alley format of verse chorus verse chorus bridge verse chorus as an extension of rounded binary form (aaba) or, depending on how you want to splice things, as an extension of ternary form.

All that is to say that if you immerse y ourself into classical music, jazz, rock, and blues you begin to discover that the way to assimilate all of these musical idioms into your language as a musician and a composer is to keep some connection to them all and assimilate them all, slowly working toward points of unity and cohesion on a piece by piece basis.

Leo Brouwer once said that fusion is probably the musical movement that has been most overlooked and underappreciated by the classical music establishment. I basically agree. Now for Brouwer, in Cuba, there may well be political implications to this. For me the impetus is fundamentally theological (no, there's no intended pun in there, sorry). If in Christ there is no Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female, then in essence there is no high or low, classical or pop, white or black, all of these musical lexicons can be integrated while respecting their individual identities yet also assimilated into a coherent vocabulary that develops as God gives each musician and composer an opportunity.

If this also seems hopelessly arcane and useless I grant all of that. For me composing is a way to explore in music how I may grasp something about the nature of the world Christ has created, what role we as people may have in it, and to explore how Christ reconciling all things to Himself can be explored and, if possible, demonstrated in music as it is written.

Having said all that what I am NOT interested in doing is writing music in such a way that a person is required to know all this theoretical, meditative stuff in order to have any appreciation of the music I write. A person MAY enjoy my music (if they enjoy it) a bit more or quite a bit more if they understand the centuries of music in different countries I am assimilating into the style I have but it should not, ideally, be necessary. I have even gone so far as to indicate sections in chamber works that can provide for improvisation while retaining strict control over the thematic and cyclical elements of the sonata. It should become simple to improvise within a sonata I have written if only because all the thematic relationships across the sonata are controlled in such a way that all the themes are branches growing out of the same seed, to stretch that metaphor. Any improvisation within this context will be okay because the macro and micro structural integrity of each theme and of the themes across each movement has been carefully controlled. I spend my time looking after the internal and cyclical development of each theme in connection to the seed or root so that the performers and listeners don't have to give it any thought, though they may if they wish to.

And beyond this I am developing things so that across each sonata in the series the different applications of these ideas, for me, have a personal symbolism of how God creates creatures who reproduce after their own kind. All the kitties may be one piece and all the doggies may be another piece while all the frogs might be still another. But here I realize this is all meaningless apart from actually hearing the music.

For songs this plays out at a more abstruse level. Text painting can be employed in choral music but I don't feel up to writing about that.

I am pecking away at a sonata, a sonata that I hope eventually gets played. It won't be necessary for anyone to know about all of this stuff I have blogged about should the piece get heard. History is full of composers who have complex inner symbolic lexicons for their music and ever since Wagner, at least, the leitmotif has been a big man on campus throwing his weight around. I am not looking at an explicit symoblism but am taking an approach ... dare I say more like Mahler, whose work I have to admit I don't particularly like?

Never mind all that, I have a plan, and this plan that I have planned should help me conquer the challenges of writing this last part of this latest sonata.

How much of a theology nerd am I ... ?

http://boarsheadtavern.com/2009/06/14/when-theology-and-dating-collide/

I read this and laughed out loud. Does that make me too nerdy on theology?

Does it seem as though God can discipline us through those things we are proud of or covet?

http://faith-theology.blogspot.com/2009/06/why-sex-tells-you-nothing-about-what-it.html


Rhetorical hyperbole is ever popular, is it not? It is a natural response to overstate yin in response to an unusually vigorous argument for yang. Everyone can argue until Jesus returns about all of these kinds of things and everyone can have a prooftext, whether it is invoking Christ as groom or mentioning that if you do not hate your father and mother and brothers and sisters and spouse you are not fit to be His disciple. Family means nothing in comparison to Christ and yet Christians in America urge us to place family first though serving Christ would certainly entail caring for family (as Paul's statements about widows make obvious). That we know in part and prophesy in part seems like the thing we so often forget.

These sorts of discussions get me thinking about God's anger at David for his sin with Bathsheba. When Nathan goes to David and confronts him the confrontation, we understand, is about adultery and murder and clearly these are both wrong, but the upshot of Nathan's rebuke reveals that David had been given much yet despised the word of the Lord. He had been given his master's rule and house and wives to care for, he had been given much and, if that was too little, more would be added! David had no shortage of wives or children or possessions at that point and yet he committed adultery and murder. Why? We can't really know for certain what the Spirit has not revealed entirely. We can surmise coveting was probably involved since to take something which is not yours you have to covet it.

David had within his day possessions beyond what we might ever think to ask for and yet that was not enough. We like to imagine in our time that materialism is a rampant problem and that in the old days more spiritual people were better about these things or men and women after God's own heart. The Lord through scripture rebukes us of this delusion about the past explicitly in Ecclesiastes where Koholeth says we are fools to ask where the good old days have gone, but also implicitly when we see even godly men such as David consumed by avarice despite having more than most could have had in their lifetimes. Whoever loves money never has money enough, whoever loves children never has children enough, whoever loves wives never has wives enough. The eye has no fill of seeing nor the ear of hearing and cannot be satisfied with those things which it would find most satisfying.

We can see that when God is gracious enough to bless us with goodness we may lack gratitude for that goodness. From that lack of gratitude we can begin to covet and from that we can turn to sin. Those things which God in His kindness gives us become how we define ourselves and then that becomes insufficient.

David had Uriah struck down by the sowrd of the Ammonites to take his wife. God's punishment is that because of that the sword would never depart from his house. And because he secretly sinned with another man's wife by taking her and killing her husband, God ordained a punishment in which his own son would publicly take his concubines in broad daylight what David did at night. The rebuke of God is to bring shame to David through the thing which he secretly did to please himself and to punish his entire household with the thing which he used to forcefully attain for himself the pleasure and quality of status he coveted.

When we embrace evil God can use that evil to rebuke us. When we prize something above Christ then Christ can use that which we prize as the means to punish us, as the source of our grief for the rest of our days. Christ, even in His mercy, can permit us to be crushed by the thing we reach out for. Now for some this may be sex, for others it may be family, for others it may be career. Whatever we take pride in Christ can use for our humiliation. David's life is instructive.

Even a man after God's own heart can be tempted by Satan to do terrible, stupid things at the behest of the Lord as a way to humble His people. Consider the census and the disastrous consequences of it at the end of David's life. Scripture reveals that Satan was the immediate agent dispatched by God as a way to punish God's people because He was angry with them. God can both use a godly leader to make a sinful decision to punish you and punish a godly leader for making a sinful decision that puts himself before you. And we can go through our lives being Davids ourselves.

Was Sor really the 'Beethoven' of the guitar?

No. He was more like a Haydn of the guitar. Now I'm aware that guitarists will say that is all inherently unfair and I agree but I'm about to devote a blog entry to explaining both why such comparisons feel necessary and why they can serve as curious lessons in how and why the guitar is a niche art in classical music. Perhaps more than anything else to say that Sor was the "Beethoven" of the guitar reveals different ways of thinking about Beethoven and the nature of guitar repertoire.



Beethoven and Bach are arguably the lead contenders for the greatest composers in the history of all Western culture. Mozart gets thrown in, too, because Mozart fans are like that but in terms of length of life and sheer volume of work and influence neither Beethoven nor Bach is likely to be surpassed. I would put Haydn very high on the list but he is in some ways a transitional figure for us in the 21st century. He was, as many seem to see him, merely a stepping stone from Bach to Mozart and Beethoven, both of whom are considered more daring and creative even though both were not as groundbreaking as Haydn was in several ways.



Beethoven did not really innovate in form as much as might be imagined. Yes, his amalgamation of fugue and sonata form is incredible but Mozart and even Haydn had made steps toward that. What was unusual in Beethoven was the intensity of emotional expression and developmental potential in his ideas ... and the intensity with which he actually developed his ideas. His later sonatas for piano are so relentless in their exploration of their respective ideas it can become daunting. Either you love the ideas or you don't and the resultant obsessive expansion and illumination of those ideas will either captivate you or infuriate you.



In this respect Sor could not possibly be a Beethoven of the guitar because while we see some bold modulations and a willingness to tackle any and every key signature these would not make Sor a "Beethoven". Legnani and Giuliani also explored keys that few guitarists like to play in and, it seems, still fewer guitarists seem eager to compose in in the classical set. Sor may have replicated the aspect of epic scope that Beethoven's works have become famous for but in terms of the intensity and focus of his ideas Sor is much closer to Haydn. Having said that, I'm a big Haydn fan and believe that many people under-rate the greatness of the man's music. So coming from me calling Sor the Haydn of the guitar is hardly a put-down!



As I wrote earlier, Hans Werner Henze wanted to write a Hammerklavier for solo guitar. I believe this reveals a great deal about Henze's assessment of the guitar literature. First of all it highlights that he must not have thought Benjamin Britten's Nocturnal qualified. Second of all it indicated that the sheer scale of Royal Winter Music suggested that even a non-guitarist writing for the guitar and wanting to emulate Beethoven's precedent worked on the assumption that bigger is better. I'm afraid that that can't possibly be the case with Royal Winter Music!



Closer to a Hammerklavier sonata for solo guitar would be, say, Nikita Koshkin's mammoth Sonata for guitar solo. I like the piece a great deal but Koshkin is so liberal in his conception of recapitulation and modulation in tonal idioms that he is arguably revealing the intensity of his earliest influences. Koshkin is more who I would call the Shostakovich of the guitar, which is still very high praise indeed for me.


Now I don't think there ever was a Beethoven of the guitar in terms of the intensity and breadth of musical ideas and feeling such as we find in Beethoven's work. Beethoven's work stretches the limits of what was considered possible or acceptable in technique. There is the small legend that when a musician complained about how difficult a part was to play Beethoven remarked that it was written for a later generation. There is, to be sure, plenty to dislike about Beethoven the person and some of his attitudes about musicians he wrote for, but we still know who he is. Then again, Hitchcock could be beastly toward his actors and actresses and we still watch his movies.

I'll admit that, though I'm a nobody, I have been slowly working through composing in such a way that I take to heart the economy of expressive and structural means Beethoven availed himself of. I am never going to be a Beethoven and frankly I would feel fortunate to have any of my music performed or published at all. Even so I believe it is good for guitarist-composers to aspire to a higher level of intensity in developing music ideas.

We so often limit our thought to what is easy or easily conceived that we are other protesting the lack of true appreciation outsiders have for our instrument on the one hand or we are defending sonic wallpaper and talking about how the limitations of the instrument are to be heeded when they may be limitations of convention and expectation rather than of what the instrument itself and two hands playing it may be able to achieve. We should neither suppose the guitar has no limits nor that it has more limits than it has and if we have our minds made up about what one person can accomplish with one guitar that may well be the last word spoken before the sentence is even finished. Regardless of whether or not he was the Beethoven of the guitar we would not have had Sor if he had had that kind of attitude.

mind power, boy! mind power! five dispositions I have found useful in slogging through composing

The more I work as a composer the more I realize that the greatest obstacles to getting work done do not so much lay in the body as in the mind. If you're blind, like Joaquin Rodrigo or Louis Vierne were, this is no obstacle to composing so long as you can feel instruments and hear. It was clearly no obstacle in the end for either Ray Charles or Stevie Wonder. If you become deaf and are Beethoven it is no inherent obstacle to you being a composer. To be fair each of these musicians overcome remarkable obstacles but I'm getting to my point about the mind's role in creativity. Mind power, boy! Mind power!

It is becoming more apparent to me as I get older (not that I'm old, I'm in my mid-30s, but I plead guilty to having always felt old at heart) that failures in creative arts (as perhaps anywhere) are failures of mind. When I was in high school I took some cermaics classes and I made a number of ambitious projects, considering I was a first semester student, like a clay doll and some whistles. But in my second semester I remember only making a series of frog whistles and I didn't even have the technique to create the whistle part of things. My more ambitious creations involved multiphonic frog whistles. I kid you not, I created these big frogs that had two chambers and options for playing a few notes. In one case one of the frogs had two chambers that were not the same size and created a surreal tremelous sound. My teacher was impressed at my luck, saying it actually sounded like a frog and that if I was going to make a mistake in the size of the chambers it was a serendipitous mistake. Yes.

Well, that's to say that when working with ceramics my mind was limited. I couldn't clearly imagine all the things I could do with clay, all the possibilities. With poetry I had a clearer sense of what was possible, how I could play with language and it was easier to play with things and branch out into new possibilities. Immersing myself in T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, and Wallace Stevens certainly didn't hurt but that was college. At the rist of pointing out something obvious the difference between an artist and a non-artist is that the artist explores the arts out of love for the art but also to learn where as the non-artist explores the arts for simple enjoyment.


What is the difference between exploring a theme as an artist and being stuck in a rut? One person's theme may be another person's rut and as many have joked Haydn symphonies all start sounding the same after you hear a dozen of them. Phillip Glass works that all sound the same to me, however, sound scintillatingly different to fans of his work just as I can hear distinctions within Haydn symphonies that other people, I'm sure, utterly fail to appreciate or even perceive. I can hear a few seconds of a guitar solo and in a few cases just hear a bass line and can identify an old rock tune. Our brains adapt themselves to become good at the things we believe we need or want to be good at.

Having said all that, the difference between being stuck in a rut and exploring a theme is a painful, obvious, yet mysterious one. If you can't think of new things to do or can think of new things but don't feel that you can or want to do them then that is a sign of a rut. A musician who spends sixty years writing different kinds of blues because that's what he or she wants to do may seem to be in a rut to the outsider but to the blues fan and to the musician this is not a rut but a theme to explore. Arguably the blues musician IS in a rut but sometimes ruts are themes. If the blues musician were to tackle Tin Pan Ally we wouldn't be surprised to see the person crash and burn. If we saw a blues musician sing Tin Pan Ally songs but not write them, that would still be an interesting avenue of creative development. Arguably what Johnny Cash and Ray Charles demonstrated to us in the last century is that singers and songwriters can assimilate nearly anything in the popular style into their artistic vision. These men were reminders that style and substance are not necessarily the same even when they are powerfully intertwined.


And when you survey the greats of pop music you begin to observe that the greats were able to assimilate a wide variety of concepts. When you survey the greats in art you see that this holds true as well. The great classical composers, most obviously in the case of Haydn, assimilated both popular and academic elements of their art. The stratification of high and low art in the 20th century is one of the more puzzling and unfortunate aspects of academic culture. There's nothing wrong with seeing Beethoven and U2 as part of the same continuum of musical heritage. The Rolling Stones and Takemitsu are part of the same heritage, too.


Now at the risk of pointing out what by now would be obvious to anyone who reads my blog I believe that since Christ is reconciling all things to Himself there is no high or low, pop or art, classical or rock. These things exist, certainly, but the divisions between them don't have to, all are united by Christ. So this means that the differences can be respected and celebrated but that they can ALSO be assimilated, minimized, and in some cases eliminated. The important caveat I feel I need to include about the "also" statement is that this assimilation and synthesis can be accomplished without obliterating the unique identity of each style of music. Perhaps an analogy might be to marriage, the man and woman do not cease to be themselves in marriage but in marriage they become not just new people as individuals but something new as a couple.


I make no bones that a theological agenda drives all of my composing. If Christ is uniting all things through Himself (Collosians) then the path for the Christian musician is clear, to explore through music how this reconciliation happens. For others this happens through direct song-writing. For me that sometimes happens but I have a less direct approach, an approach I admit may be too esoteric for most people to appreciate. On the other hand, perhaps less direct approaches that are informed by reflection are what is needed. Would Andrew Stanton have gotten to a point where he could give us Finding Nemo and WALL-E if he had spent all his career in VeggieTales level didacticism? Probably not. I covered that issue interacting with Matthew Lee Anderson's work and won't recycle that beyond saying that the older I get the more I observe how young evangelicals want the status of being "culture shapers" without actually being culture shapers. I also notice that the be fruitful and multiply set seem to think that if we just outbreed the Muslims we'll re-Christianize society.


All of that preamble is to say that I have made some important progress on a project I have been working on for years. Thanks to studying the fugue at the end of the Hammerklavier and sifting through the analysis Charles Rosen did of the sonata as a whole I have returned to a sonata I have been working on that has a fugue as its closing movement. For years I have been fascinated by exploring a three-movement cycle that goes like this: sonata, aria, and fugue. I have been attempting to find ways to tie together the three movements and inevitably I would have to study Beethoven to get a clearer sense of how this could be done. For my piano sonata that took me a decade to complete I had to study Schubert but Schubert, you know, was in the shadow of Beethoven. Now that I have studied up important works by both composers I have a clearer sense of how to proceed in my own work.


I would probably bore you if I attempted to explain how I have managed to solve the structural problems in the fugue I'm writing for viola and guitar. I will, however, take the liberty to share things I have learned from other musicians over the years. Perhaps the most important of these lessons for me in the last few months is this:

1) Some of the most important work you do is AWAY from your instruments.

I first heard this advice from a fellow composer who was a very accomplished composer and pianist and had years of experience singing in choral groups. He found that both in studying music and in writing music it was valuable to tackle a score on its own terms, studying and memorizing and analyzing it apart from being at the keyboard. There is a temptation to let your fingers do the walking and cheat your way through playing something it that you may, in truth, not really understand. Now it is just as true that many a musical work does not reveal itself until it is played but that is another form of knowing. That is also, to be a bit too simplistic, a PERFORMER'S way of knowing music. For a composer the advice that it is valuable to work away from your instrument is vital.

As a composer it is hard to emphasize this enough. The initial inspiration may come to me at an instrument, whether I am playing piano, playing guitar, or singing, but the actual WORK of the work frequently happens somewhere else. I'm not even talking about working on a computer, I'm talking about sitting down with pencil and pen and an eraser and paper and working things out by hand. I will even manipulate melodies as I go on the page and sing the results back to myself to find out how I feel about them. If a melody sounds good forward how will it sound upside down? What if I break out a fragment of it and sequence that? What happens if I sing a melody backwards? If the melody isn't very pleasing backwards what little changes can I make so that it will be pleasing backwards? Suppose I take a gesture form the melody and alter each note by changing the gap between leaps by one step each? Suppose I attempt to present the melody in its primary form over an augmented retrograde inversion in the bass line beneath? Maybe it wouldn't work but it might at least be interesting to try.

2) always be willing to change the form of the work to fit the substance of the idea.

The axiom that form follows function is essentially true. Perhaps it is TOO axiomatic but there is still something to it. I do believe Beethoven has proven to us that ideas that can work as a fugue subject can ALSO work as a sonata theme but, again, Beethoven is so far out at the conceptual limits of what is musically possible I would urge people to be careful. You won't discover a melody that can be transformed into both the foundation of a sonata theme and a fugue subject right off the bat. In fact as I have been arguing implicitly through this whole blog entry you won't even be capable of CONCEIVING of such a thing until after possibly ten to fifteen years worth of work in music.

If you find yourself committed to working on an idea as the basis for a set of variations and find that in the end none of the variations as variations are winning you over but that you can repeat individual variations over and over again as stand alone ideas you MIGHT be looking at something better used in a sonata form. That was the discovery I made for a sonata I am working on now. If you find that something you wanted to turn into a fugue presents too many difficulties for generating satisfactory counterpoint you may be looking at a variation form idea if it is pregnant enough for embellishment, or you may be looking at something better employed in a dance form.

At the risk of speaking too generally my discovery in the last fifteen years has been that if a melody does not lend itself well to a fugue exposition it will not necessarily lend itself to a sonata form either, and vice versa. I don't want to waste your time by explaining precisely why. I"ll just make an appeal that historically the sonata replaced the fugue as a way to express the most abstract and intellectually intense musical ideas in the Classic era after the high Baroque era came to a close.

3) If it is really worth doing today it will still be worth doing next week or next year.

This might seem counterintuitive but it is true for composers. Don't let your obsession with being goal-oriented blind you to art as a process. Getting something done does not in itself prove that you got that thing done well. Shostakovich used to remark that he would solve the problems of one piece when he tackled them in the next piece he wrote. Villa-Lobos clearly had a similar aesthetic. Beethoven, Brahms, and Bach pretty obviously did not. Haydn was writing works for hire and seems to have been somewhere in the middle.

If you have a scrap of melody or a chord progression that you think needs to get attention now then by all means plug away. But it doesn't hurt to also ask yourself, "How happy will I be with playing this thing exactly as it is four or five years down the road?" Think of rock bands that don't play their earliest songs anymore.

Especially if you ever consider being on the road or having works published or performed consider that when you work on something the throw-away bits may be the bits the world knows you for. Ravel rued the day he scribbled out "Bolero". He's probably even luckier to have never lived long enough to see how the music would eventually be used in some films. This is not a paragraph appealing to the ideal of timeless art that will outlive you, it's a reminder that you will have to live with what you have created so make sure you don't lower your standards so much you spend the rest of your life realizing that you, like John Lennon, have a few songs that are well-known that you hate and feel don't represent your best artistic self.

Paradoxically the works that we toss off casually may be most indicative of where we are and who we are as artists. There is a carefulness to art that can hide rather reveal the true nature of the artist. I am at a point in my life where the material I whip out in a week feels about as indicative of my work as the pieces I toil over for years. That may be good or it may be terrible.

Another way of saying this is that if there is something worth doing it is something worth RE-doing. To descend to mere jocularity a friend of mine was explaining to my brother how he and his wife were trying to have children and had not had success. My brother said, "Well, if all else fails try, try again." The friend chuckled and told my brother that put that way it didn't seem quite so frustrating. Koholeth wrote that there is nothing better for a man to do than to enjoy the work God has given him to do under the sun and lamented that when God does not give a man enjoyment of his labor or possessions the man is miserable indeed. Part of working in the arts is you can discover whether or not you find joy in the work itself or whether it is something else, something I'll get to in point 5. For now this latest thought allows me to transition straightaway into observation 4.

4) You create to continue learning not to prove what you have learned.

I'm willing to go on a limb and assert that this is the difference between an artist and a dilletante, however wildly the technical skill or appreciation may differ across the arts. The difference between scripture and a catachecism is that the first beckons us to join in the life long struggle across space and time and place to discover Truth while the second tells us what we must affirm the truth to be. Both have value but the second could not exist without the first. The second affirms the scope of mysteries revealed in the first that cannot be exhausted. So it is with the distinction between great art and other kinds (whether middling to good to bad to awful)--a great artist creates to continue exploring and learning while a middling artist may well set out to prove a point.

Hollow didacticism and truncated definitions of the human experience are hardly the sole domain of the religious but the stereotype is not without warrant. There is a role for didactic art, obviously, and Bach wrote quite a few explicitly didactic works but the process of discovery is not simply that of the student but also the teacher. THere is a difference between sharing something with someone else that is for you a moment of discovery and sharing something because you believe the world needs a public service announcement of what you know that the world would be better off for knowing. Even an ego like Beethoven's could have moments in which the core of the artistic moment is, for want of other words, humble.

This last one is more observation than anything shared with me

5) Pursue the arts out of love of the craft and not to feel special

I worked on literary magazines in both high school and college and I met a few would be poets and artists and dreamers. Since I attended a Christian college I got to see and hear stuff prefaced by the inevitable, "God gave me this ... ." A number of my acquaintences cynically took to rhetorically asking themselves whether God REALLY gave this or that person such and such, the rhetorical answer being 'no'. I opted for a different approach. God giving you a poem or a song or a story does not mean you have no obligation to shape and mold the material yourself. Whereas God might tell other people exactly what music they needed I always have had the distinct impression that God wants ME to rewrite stuff. I shared this with my composition professor and he laughed.

So far as I can hazard a guess what inspired these people to write their poems or write their songs or make their paintings is that they felt the love of God. Feeling the love of God is wonderful, feeling special is wonderful. We all want that. No one on earth or under the earth or above the earth doesn't want to feel special and loved. In a culture that worships artists of varying sorts as heroes, whether novelists or musicians or painters or actors or directors or poets or entrepreneurs it is the easiest thing in the world to want to go do something and be something so as to be special. There is a fine and puzzling boundary between embracing the arts because you feel touched by the divine participating in the arts and feel drawn closer to God (any unbelieving readers, bear with this, I'm writing as a Christian and I get that your experience will be different) and embracing the arts out of a sense of or a desire to be feeling special.

Jesus said that out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks and that the good man out of the treasure of his heart brings good things while the bad man out of the treasure of his heart brings bad. Paradoxically there is absolutely nothing about the arts that will make you feel special. Indeed, you will be a nobody. Beethoven was a nobody to many people. Many people today have no idea who J. S. Bach was. Tomorrow many people will not know who Bob Dylan is, most of the world, really. As Koholeth put it, there is no memory of that man. If your heart is not full embracing the arts will not make your empty heart full. If you attempt to fill your heart with something so that your art will be full it won't get anywhere.

Now the truth is I am not sure what I do matters or that people will much care about the music I write. I often wonder if my music is too uncompromising to get played or for people to appreciate it. I am also anxious in performance settings. I would much rather write music that other people can play that to put my head on the chopping block of an audience if I can help it. I admit to generally having a failure of nerve. I also see clearly that being a composer or a writer or whatever will not in itself confer any meaning to a person.

Man does not live by art alone and God did not design us to be alone. I bristle at the Driscollian propensity to argue that this means people should be married because of how it tends to be employed and because it seems as though it forgets that one's identity is ostensibly in Christ. Well, by the same measure, if you attempt to find your identity in your art or your boyfriend or girlfriend those things will die and shrivel up at some point. Even egos as large as those of Beethoven or Bach were working out of love, love for the craft and in their own unusually usual ways love of neighbor.

All that said, people and not things love you and make you feel special. If you want to feel special go get a boyfriend or girlfriend or spend time with your mom and dad or your friends (and you probably have a few). Don't go become an artist or a writer or a musician or a composer or an actor. You won't matter, you won't feel special, you probably won't make any money, and no one will ever know who you are, most likely. If by chance I'm wrong on all those counts you STILL won't feel special. If you feel special and in the spur of the moment write a poem of gratitude to God for feeling special, awesome. Don't send it to me. Becoming an artist of any sort to differentiate yourself from family or friends will yield nothing for you. You might even find that if you embrace something to be special that someone else will overtake you in the thing you chose because you hoped it would help you stand out. That totally sucks but then again we don't know who will be better than us and there's always someone.

Yet if the beauty of the art and the world around you is something that spurs you to continue exploring a medium; if the beauty of friends and family or some other loved one fills you with joy and the sheer work of working within a medium continues to inspire you; if after three to five stupendous challenges you happily think "What's next?"; if every setback becomes a challenge to surmount and inspiration to exploring new possibilities of learning and sharing then by all means become an artist of some kind. That's awesome, even if you're Phillip Glass and I absolutely detest your music I won't begrudge you the joy of sharing the beauty of the world with people even if I'd rather I didn't have to hear your music.

So them's my ramblings on that topic. Better that than boring all of you with technical minutae about modal mutation in a subject and how it lends itself to rapid tonic to mediant modulations, right? :)

Jesus said that it is better to give than receive. It is in giving that we receive and it is in dying we are born to eternal life. Even among those who are not Christians I find it incontestable that the artists who perservere do so out of love for their craft and out of love for their neighbor. The affirmation of the self is not the point, even the expression of the self is not the main point but a kind of fringe benefit.

slowly unpacking

I pulled a few scores out of boxes this last weekend, two very important scores for personal reasons and long-time readers of this blog will piece together why as soon as I name them:

Vaughan Williams' Mass in G minor
Frank Martin's Mass for double choir

Yep, at some point I want to tackle the Credo and Martin's mass in particular has been promising. As I have written elsewhere at some length Martin uses a thematic approach in which a melody is used to indicate the persons of the Trinity, exactly the kind of musical and theological structuring device I have been wanting to use in my own Mass, particularly the Credo. A very broad ABab structure is what I am settling on. Where the text discusses persons of the Trinity I want common thematic material, where the text discusses the life, death, and resurrection of Christ I want common material that can be redeployed in closing statements about the Church.

It is funny how I now feel as though I have spent a whole decade reflecting on musical forms and on the theological content of the Creed to just now get to the point where I have what is admittedly a tentative plan for a musical setting. I'm not like Haydn or other Classic era composers, who apparently tossed off settings of Masses that even in their own time were criticized for being a bit glib, celebratory, and lacking in theological content. I happen to like some of Haydn's masses, honestly, but I agree with Charles Rosen that sacred choral music in the Classic era largely sucks and I probably disagree with Rosen about the quality of Beethoven's sacred choral music which I like least of all among the composers from that era. Beethoven blows, Mozart wrote parts of a Requiem and a Mass that I wish he had actually finished, while it has been Haydn's Creation that stands out as probably one of the few truly great sacred choral works from that entire epoch.

Part of developing s an artist is recognizing what stuff to keep and what stuff to ignore, the stuff to ignore often being at least as imporant as the stuff to keep. Different eras of Western music employ different forms to different symbolic effect. I could attempt to get into affect and the would-be science of music emotional responses were invoked by means of thematic creation and manipulation but despite the role of music in the quadrivium in ancient thought music even asn applied sciene remains an art more than a science. I respect the social sciences as being useful and capable of keen insights ... but social sciences do not really have laws like the hard sciences do. There is no social science equivalent to the law of gravity, Newtonian observation about inertia, or observations about chemical interactions. If there are such laws in social sciences they are fraught with interpretive and applicational issues, such as the degree to which conformity should be used in social structuring and directing the thought and actions of individuals or assessing them.

And so it is with music, there is room for great disagreement about what constitutes great music or any great art. You cannot anticipate what may be great art or music and what is great art or music may arise from the quality of design and structure or language or the ideology with which a work may be freighted. Now I love the big novels of Dostoevsky and love how he explores his ideas but I come back to them because in all of his exploration of big ideas he didn't forget his story or his characters. Even Ivan Karamazov is a character and not just a cipher for whatever ideology Dostoevsky wanted to either promote or demote. Dostoevsky was not just an author of ideas, he lived in the world and had to make a living. There is a sense in which the reality of commercial viability separates professionals from amateurs. I am most assuredly an amateur.

Even among professionals, like Haydn, there are moments where great art emerges through experimentation and refinement. Haydn wrote plainly that he had time to experiment to see what worked, what didn't, what evoked emotional response, what evoked bewilderment and through all of these pieces of music he wrote adn all of these performances he was able to refine his art, understand what was likely to evoke what response he might be seeking. Haydn was, in other words, making nearly a science out of the art of selling out. Indeed, in the patronage system of his day what we would call selling out was arguably the acme of developing as an artist. He was able to attain mass popular appeal and please his employer through the same process.

I sometimes wonder if in contemporary society we overvalue artistic credibility and independence. I have been skeptical even from my teens about the propensity of this contemporary Western age to want the rules broken without having any idea what rules might be in place. It would simply matter to break whatever rules there are by breaking something. Paradoxically critics can both reinforce this and avoid it. In the past critics upheld the standards of what styles were acceptable and thus you would get things that ended up in Slonimsky's Lexicon. On the other hand there are those who want whatever is to be overturned. Free verse has become paradigmatic in our era as traditional verse was in earleir times. It was not popular for teachers to point ou tthat the best poets demonstrated a mastery of both conceptions of literature or poetry.

We live in an era in which it is hard to argue that a single unified style exists. That means that it might be possible for someone to compose a Mass based entirely on doo-whop material. It would not, so far as I can tell, be any less pious or appropriate as a means of setting the Mass than many pieces from the tiem of Haydn and Mozart. Sacred choral music, as Rosen put it, presents a challenge because of the two impulses that emerge from sacred texts, the celebration and ritual side of things, and the abstraction of theological content. Since, as the psalmist puts it, we are enjoined to sing to teh Lord a new song, at some point Christian composers must inevitably garpple with all of these things. Only those of the most rigid liturgical approaches make no allowances for new ways of singing the parts of the Mass ... even a Calvinist like Frank Martin composed a setting of the Mass and Calvinists are not, by and large, known for ever tackling that.

Solomon loved the Lord enough to walk in the ways of David, hero worship as a form of Christian idolatry

Contrary to the often glowing descriptions of Solomon's early reign 1 Kings suggests a man of blood. The time of peace and the man of peace who was to build the temple did not so much indicate that David could not build the Temple because he shed blood alone. We can point out that there was a practical, military, and political reason behind the divine delay of the building of the Lord's house--namely that it would not be until Solomon consolidated the kingdom during a peaceful time that it would be safe to begin work on the Temple without the threat of invasion.This hardly indicates that Solomon himself was necessarily a man who did not have blood on his hands!

Now I have been cruising through some discussions of Old Testament literature by V. Phillips Long and he points out that one way you can render the passage about Solomon's love for the Lord is that he loved the Lord enough to walk in the ways of his father David. David urged Solomon to keep the covenant so that the house of David would be forever established. There is more than just a whiff of "Do good, boy, so we can always have this royal dynasty." It isn't necessarily all bad but it does read a bit curiously. David tells his son to act in the wisdom he has and then we see Solomon doing that, killing political threats from the old dynastic period and those who might oppose a fully united kingdom. It is probably Solomon believed over time that how he handled things was not good or he would not have told the Lord he needed a discerning heart and wisdom because he didn't know how to do his job.

Now in the Sunday school version of things we hear that Solomon asked for wisdom and God was pleased. We are not told about the bloodshed of Solomon's early years. We are also not told that he did not swiftly tackle the issue of building the Lord's house and that because of this worship in high places persisted. People were not worshipping idols, perhaps, but they were still not worshipping in a way sanctioned by the Mosaic law. After killing potential threats Solomon goes and marries an Egyptian and sacrifices at the high places, neither particularly promising things. He also seems to understand God's faithfulness as contingent on the obedience of his father and his righteousness. This is an admittedly curious though partly true observation since David said and did a great deal that was hardly righteous at all.

We may observe, if we read Samuel and Kings as a whole, that there is a great deal of foreshadowing of Solomon's demise. Even at the beginning of his reign his capacity for harshness, for crushing adversaries, and for making marriage a matter of loving a foreign woman and opening up alliances that run counter to the Law all point toward his grim end. Certain fanciful notions about Solomon and Abishag sitting in a tree withstanding, Solomon's reign begins inauspiciously. Solomon acts in his wisdom, the wisdom his father David observed he had, but it was arguably a worldly sort of wisdom. As Iain Provan put it, Solomon was also able to "interpret" promises so as to make them favorable to him. This way of interpreting conditions allows Solomon to get what he wants even after he has overlooked the core of an agreed on element.

Christians seem to want to have it both ways with Solomon. We want to hold him up as this wise and good king when it comes to the wisdom literature but then ignore him regarding women. I have heard Christians say that a guy who had a thousand wives probably doesn't have the best advice about marriage or gender relations. Well, you can say that, but then why take seriously what he collected elsewhere? This suggests a an approach to the wisdom literature that discounts what we are plainly told in Proverbs and in Ecclesiastes, that Solomon collected proverbs and wise sayings. Having the capacity to recognize wisdom, collate it, collect it, and make observations about it is not the same thing as living by it. A man may have wisdom from God and use it for foolishness. There is more than one kind of wisdom and it is arguably part of the narrative in Kings to invite us to consider what kind of wisdom Solomon is acting from when he makes this or that decision.

The scriptures do not whitewash David or Saul or Solomon so each man presents us with a problem. David did many things that were more heinous than what Saul did yet what was a man after God's own heart. Saul had the spirit of the Lord overwhelm him and cause him to do many heroic acts but he took credit for victories his son accomplished and finally revealed that he did not trust or obey the Lord and was cut off. Solomon was an apostate who was loved by God, whose final fate we infer came to a positive end out of Solomonic attribution for Ecclesiastes, which even many conservative scholars are not universally agreed upon. Scripture presents us with ambiguous men who have, nevertheless, unambiguous hearts (except maybe for Solomon).

What inspires us as Christians to simplify the biblical narratives? Do we wish to see ourselves in certain OT figures? A book like Ezra/Nehemiah invites that sort of moral simplification. It would be easy to read through Nehemiah and either think the authors are jerks or to take their side without considering the very one-sided account they give. Now that doesn't make the account of no value, but as Long once put it, Ezra/Nehemiah presents things in starker black and white terms than the rest of the narrative books of the Bible. For people who want to bottom line things and see themselves as in the right even when they're wrong Nehemiah is a useful book. The most compelling question left open at the end of Nehemiah is why the presence of the Lord did not descend on the re-established city of God or worship. Was it because of sin? Not even Nehemiah discusses why the presence of the Lord was not with them, if you look through his writings.

But it seems that even with other narrative books the propensity to see in black and white terms what the Spirit through Scriptures reveals in shades of lighter and darker gray is hard to resist. At the risk of pointing out the obvious it is too tempting to see ourselves in biblical figures we like when we like them and too easy to see our "enemies" or frenemies in the people we don't like when we don't like them in a biblical narrative. Cultivating the capacity to see our own weaknesses in the men and women revealed in the Bible is difficult. It is difficult to see David at the end of his life loathe to rebuke his children even in their most blatant and self-serving sin whether it's Absalom or Adonijah. It is distressing to see David's advice to his son Solomon on his death bed be that of killing without mercy people who might prevent the unified kingdom and to settle old grievances. This is one of the heroes of the faith.

And we must be cautious in ripping on Solomon without a proper understanding that God loved Solomon and that Solomon's legacy gave us Proverbs, the song named after him and, if traditional ascription to him is true, Ecclesiastes. We want Solomon to be either good or bad depending on what agendas we push without recognizing how deeply flawed the sinners are who have been saved by the grace of Christ.

It has stuck with me that in evangelical Protestant circles a man like David, let alone a man like Solomon, would be denounced today. The multiple wives, the abject failure to produce children, by and large, of godly character, and even the best of his mentioned children ended up being a killer, a man prone to marry foreign women, and lapsed into apostasy before repenting late in life (which itself may be subject to some debate depending on how solid the case for Solomonic attribute of Ecclesiastes is but I set that aside as the tangent it so obviously is), these all suggest that many people would consider David unfit to lead God's people.

In fact that's what we see, a number of people saying that because David was a man of bloodshed he wasn't fit to lead God's people. Of course a few of these people were partisans of Saul, who killed a few people he wasn't supposed to kill and DIDN'T kill people he was supposed to annihilate. Yet Scripture attests that despite this many, many flaws that David was, nevertheless a man after God's own heart. There is a sense in which we, as Christians, are tempted to think we need spiritual leaders who are, in a phrase, too good. We want a level of quality in them we would not expect of ourselves ... or perhaps expect of ourselves without warrant.

Solomon, it seems, loved the Lord enough to walk in the ways of his father David. That might be the most brutal observation that can be made about anyone in Scripture, in a way, that a person loves the Lord enough to walk in the ways of a father like David. We know that David was in many respects both a great and terrible man. What might seem like a complement of Solomon's love of the Lord at first turns out to be a foreshadowing of a pending tragedy in the house of David.

If you love the Lord enough to emulate the example of another Christian, no matter how good that Christian may be, the seeds of an apostasy may be even in there for the growing but may not bear fruit until later in life. There are reasons Jesus said that in order to follow Him you must hate your father and mother and family. If you love Him enough to follow Him the way anyone you love does or did that's not good enough. You will eventually leave Him when you have the option to do so, as Solomon eventually did long after the death of David.

That David to your Solomon might be a father, a mother, a brother, a husband, a wife, a sister, an aunt, a pastor, a friend, anyone you consider a hero to you not simply for their faith but altogether. Now David did write that as for the saints in the land they were the excellent ones in whom was all his delight, but that is after he first delights in God Himself. "You are my refuge, I have no good apart from You" comes before delighting in the saints of the land.

We can and should delight in the saints God places in our lives because they do not exist apart from Christ, but even these saints have been and are those apt to sin. David himself sinned and was apt to sin yet that does not mean we cannot look to him as a guide for both what to do and not to do. What we must do, as David did, is to delight in Christ first and THEN delight in those whom He gives us. To everything there is a season and it is right to delight in the one in whom we should delight first before delighting in those lesser but still real goods we receive from His hand.

As I grow older I consider a variety of ways in which I loved the Lord enough to emulate the example of Christians I have admired. That is good, really, but it alone will not be the same as being a man after God's own heart. My prayer is that I will not simply be like Solomon loving the Lord enough to walk in the ways of the Davids in my life but to, like David, have a heart that loves God first, is grateful to Christ first, and then delights in the saints of the land, so that when the Davids in my life are taken from me I am still able to walk with the Lord and seek Him.