Several months ago, the ASU composition seminar had a guest composer named Ken Ueno give a presentation on two of his works.  This was pretty similar to most of our guest composer presentations except for the fact that Ken was still in California.  Yes, Dr. Etezady decided that we were going to have our premiere Skype session with Ken, so instead of being in the flesh, he was projected live from his office to our seminar room at the School of Music, where we discussed his techniques, music, and life as a composer.

This is all just a preamble for the fact that I never thought much about this until last week.  Jonathan Glawe, a colleague from Oregon who was working on his masters in orchestral music education while I was in my undergraduate, decided to read and then program my string orchestra overture entitled Faded White.  The really neat thing about this is that, instead of being a contact back in Oregon, or a performer I know currently living in Tempe or Phoenix, Jonathan teaches in Ann Arbor, Michigan at Pioneer High School.  Now, what I was actually expecting was I would send him the score and music and then get silence as a result of it all, but I was quickly given a different outcome.

Not only did his orchestra read the piece, they decided to program it and wanted me to listen to and give them feedback.  Without hesitation, Jonathan suggested a Skype meeting, which sounded odd to me, but because I saw it work with Ken, why couldn’t it work with me?  My only concern was that the sound would be so distorted that I wouldn’t be able to make heads or tails of what the piece actually sounded like, so we decided to test it.  Two weeks ago, I was skyped in to the music room at Pioneer High School, where Jonathan did various sound tests.  I was just simply sitting in my office, but on the other end I was amplified through a classroom sound system and projected onto an enormous screen.  The plus side to this meeting was that there were no students present, just me on a wall, and Jonathan playing a cello to check the sound on my end.

Last week was the Skype coaching, which I was quite nervous about.  I had no idea what the group would sound like realistically, let alone through an electronic filter, nor have I ever been terribly good at communicating with students younger than undergraduates.  So, I sat and waited for the call.  My computer jingled at me, and then connected, and there I was, starring at a high school string orchestra, undoubtedly prominently projected onto a wall of the classroom.  We tweaked the sound a little bit, and finally I was treated to the first 80ish bars of the piece.  Let me tell you, that was cool.  I was amazed at how well they did.  They could count, they played in tune, they played together, they played musically.  It was really nice.  After this abridged performance, I was asked to comment, and that’s where I noticed a small technical issue from the Skype setup I was now engaged with:  I could hear myself being picked up from the sound system in Michigan and being sent back to me.  It was much like talking in a stadium, except my voice is not nearly as cool as Don Essig.  It freaked me out, so I immediately started talking super slow, just to let the echo die off before I said anything more.  This actually ended up playing in my favor because it gave me time to think about what I was going to say, as well as how to say without utilizing some of the words that has sunk into vocabulary over the last couple of years.

After this rather productive coaching, we entered a question and answer session, which was pretty funny.  Instead of getting questions like, “what is your inspiration?” or, “why do you compose?”  I fielded a question asking for an explanation about the piece (please see the page for the composition), as well as whether or not I played all of the instruments I wrote for, and my favorite question of the afternoon:  ”where do you live?”  In all honesty, I was quite pleased with not having to answer the standard composer questions that I have yet to actually be able to formulate adequate answers for.  Finally, after everything was said and done, Jonathan had one more request:  ”can we get a picture with you?”  Yeah, this was an unusual experience involving the entire orchestra surrounding my massively projected head.  I could only see where the computer was looking, so instead of being able to actively participate in the picture-taking, I was stuck staring at the back of one of the student’s sweatshirts.  It read “make music.”  These pictures were later posted on the Pioneer High School Orchestra blog.

All in all, great experience that worked surprisingly well.  I would highly recommend it for composers and clinicians alike, especially when working with underfunded programs.  It saves everyone the cost of hotels and travel expenses, and if all you’re doing is donating an hour of your time to listen to a rehearsal, then why not?  I hope to work with the Pioneer High School Orchestra again in the weeks prior to their performance, as well as many more times in the future.

The SLSQ had done a residency with us earlier this year and will do yet another in early April.  This group of musicians holds a unique position in the musical world in that its members do not focus solely on performance of “new” music, much like the Kronos Quartet, nor do they inundate their audiences with record-perfect performances of standard Haydn string quartets, like the Tokyo String Quartet et al.  What makes them unique is, while they have their fingers firmly in the realm of contemporary music, as demonstrated by their lecture demo, they simultaneously excel at the re-interpretation of older pieces.  Composers like Haydn, Beethoven, Brahms, Mendelssohn, etc. all have a myriad of works for the ensemble, many of which are considered standards, regularly performed by students and professionals alike across the globe.  The difference between those performances and the ones put on by the SLSQ is that, while Beethoven died in 1827 and his last string quartet was written in 1826, it sounds as though it were written yesterday.  The ensemble’s energy and enthusiasm for performing all types of music is infectious and does not stop at recreating a familiar work, but likewise brings pieces off the beaten path into the light and reveals them as the masterpieces they truly are.

A very blurry picture of one of the most talented and approachable professional quartets in the country.

This second residency lecture demonstration was focused on John Adams’ String Quartet, a work written specifically for this unique collection of performers.  An hour with them on this piece consisted of listening to them play excerpts followed by a discussion regarding rehearsal techniques, Adams’ influences, and the formal progression of the work as a whole.  The remarkable part of this demo was talking about how the piece evolved as the two parties worked together.  They played through original forms of the work and several of the changes that both the performers and composer suggested.  I was blown away by the sound worlds that we were taken to, by how something that sounded remarkable before could become astonishingly unbelievable after.  Observing this process – or, rather, a demonstration of this process – guided me to a train of thought I would never have even been able to imagine were it just explained or had I merely read about it.  Again, it became acutely obvious that “[O]bserving different musicians [. . .] is much more beneficial than a million hours in a practice room.”

Additionally, this week I had the pleasure of talking to visiting composer Jonathan Newman, who was in town to work with soon-to-be Dr. Stuart Sims on his lecture recital for his doctoral studies entitled “The 21st Century Symphony.”  Initially, Newman was scheduled to present only for the undergraduate composition class – which many grad students decided to crash – where he would present a collection of his works, talk about how they were written, who they were written for, and why he wrote what he wrote.  In the waning minutes of his presentation, he began to talk about surviving as a full-time composer.  ”You are a business that has a product that people will pay for,” he said.  “Make it clear that you get paid to do what you do, and do not apologize for it.”

This discussion was cut short, as people started to file out of the room, but I was able to chat with him a little bit more and invite him out for a beer later that night at Four Peaks Brewery.

There, in the midst of this warehouse-like restaurant, my colleague, Jeremy Bell, and I had the opportunity to pick Newman’s brain on how he wrote, how he promoted himself, and how he kept going.  The unfiltered honesty that he exhibited was refreshing.  He discussed the decade after his graduate studies, which he spent as a freelance copyist working for composers and publishers until he decided that he just wanted to write.  He was open about the hardship of the inconsistent income from his commissions, performances, and residencies, alluded to travels where he met amazing people as well as places he hoped never to return to again, and when asked why he never pursued the teaching path, he simply said, “I have no interest in competing with 500 of my closest friends to end up in a location I don’t really want to be.”  All the while displaying his quirky sense of humor and good-natured persona, and the fact that he is “awesome” (to quote Dr. Etezady), Newman offered hope, insight, and honesty about the road many of us choose to travel, giving an education that otherwise may have taken years to absorb, whether I was doing it by myself or learning about the concepts in school.

To come back to Alyssa’s statement, while many of us may still need those million hours in the practice room to learn and discover for ourselves, take a moment to observe what is going on around you.  You would be surprised at how much more you can learn in a shorter time period by watching what others do.

I give much thanks to the St. Lawrence String Quartet, Jonathan Newman, and Alyssa Saint for their inspiration.  The time spent with them has been more enlightening than they know.

EAMA stands for European American Musical Alliance, and is run by composer Philip Lasser from the Julliard School.  It is designed to follow in the lineage of Nadia Boulanger, a French composer and – far more importantly – musical pedagogue credited for training such composers as Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, and Walter Piston.  Her lessons included rigorous training in counterpoint and keyboard harmony, and her creed was for each composer to return home to create music that was individual, and undeniably identifiable as music from their own country (in the case of the students that I had listed, this would be an American musical identity).   Lasser’s program, while incorporating a great deal of keyboard harmony and counterpoint, also includes composition lessons (for the composer section), chamber music coachings (for the chamber music section), conducting lessons (for the conducting section), analysis lectures, choir rehearsal, and either lessons in ear training or score reading.  I’ll go through each class and faculty member as best I can to give a full view of the program.

Location:

The location of this program is in Paris, France.  Classes are held at École Normale de Musique, a converted mansion in northwest Paris with highly elaborate decorations, a collection of usable pianos that used to live to Gabriel Fauré and Frédéric Chopin.  What this building is not is a school similar to what one would find in the United States.  You are literally in someone’s house, and it is obvious that the building is not designed to host lectures, or even group lessons of any type.  The only time I found this to be problematic was during choir rehearsals and the larger counterpoint and analysis lectures, simply because the only room that could hold everyone had a divide in it that made it so you couldn’t see anything if you showed up to class late (or just before it started, as the case usually was).

Everyone who seeks housing through the program is put up at the Cité internationale universitaire de Paris, conveniently located on the opposite side of the city from the school.  Most of the program will be housed in a building called Colegio de España, which is a gorgeous building on the southwest side of the campus.  They let you print things on your own at a price comparable to the United States (billed to your room at the end of the program), require you to get tokens for laundry, and have a game room and gym in the basement.  This place will also provide you with breakfast every morning if you are a resident.  It is also has one of the most evil receptionists you will ever meet.  He was nicknamed Napoleon by the resident assistant because he would constantly yell at you for being loud, even if you weren’t talking, and, if you didn’t live in the building, he would kick you out, even if you were in the designated waiting area.  The other building is Maison du Cambodge, which is cheaper to live in, but you do not get breakfast, printing is sent through the office and much more expensive, you get to do you laundry with your own money, and the rooms have bathrooms where you could bathe and sit on the toilet at the same time.  The staff was quite nice, but the EAMA students housed there are a fraction of the Colegio, and because of Napoleon, you will be quite isolated from the rest of the students if you stay here for the program.

It takes about 45 minutes to get to the school from the dorm by metro, and you will be riding it twice a day, so it is important to spend the €54,60 for the month pass.  You will use it!  The map takes a bit to figure out (at least for me), but just know you get on at the Cité Universitaire on the RER B line and need to get off at the Malesherb stop on the 3 line.  I’ve described the metro on earlier posts…

Classes:

Score Reading:  this will only be useful if you have piano skills.  If you don’t play the piano, don’t take this course because you will get left behind.  You basically sit at a piano for an hour with three other people and play a score (Beethoven, Mahler, etc.) to Mark Shapiro’s conducting.

Musicianship:  I did not take this class, but it is the alternative to Score Reading.  It sounded like extensive ear training taught by either Teddy Niedermaier or Kyle Blaha, and everyone that took it said it was a blast.

Counterpoint:  everyone takes this course, and it is broken into lectures with the full program taught by Philip Lasser,  and small group lessons taught by either Benjamin C. S. Boyle, Lane Harder, Philip Lasser, or Teddy Niedermaier (you rotate each week).  You spend a week on each of the four species of counterpoint, each with assignments.  If you’ve never had counterpoint, or very little, this is very useful.  If you’ve already had this type of training and remember it, it will just be monotonous.

Keyboard Harmony:  the majority of course work is focused into these small group lessons involving voice leading and harmony.  Taught by either Lasser, Boyle, Harder, Shapiro, or Bonet this course is designed to help you hear individual voices in harmonic progressions by singing them, singing one voice while playing the others on the piano, singing progressions in canon with the group, and harmonizing given bass lines provided by French composer Paul Vidal.  It is probably the most humbling aspect of the program, and the growth that occurs in this course is definitely the most visible.

Analysis:  this section is fascinating.  Each lecture is lead by Dr. Lasser and pertains to a different piece, usually composed by one of the three Bs (Bach, Beethoven, or Brahms).  This is not the standard type of analysis where the professor goes on and on about form and how the augmented sixth chord works in such and such a measure.  He approaches it from an aural level, teaching you how he hears the piece and what it means to him.  Lasser is completely open to alternative ideas, and it would seem his interest is only to get your ears working and thinking about how we listen.  His ideas didn’t seem forced, nor did I feel like he was trying to shove the music into a box.  Definitely some of the more fascinating lectures from the program.

Chorus:  everyone takes chorus, and you will sing old music that is out of copyright that you can print off of the internet.  Mark Shapiro conducts the ensemble, which consists primarily of untrained singers.  By the end of the rehearsal, you will be tired if you do not know how to sing because you will not be taught how to sing.  You just kind dig through the music over and over and over again until it sounds okay.  I was highly disappointed by this aspect of the program.

Conducting:  similar to score reading, except the students in the conducting section are the ones leading the pianists.  Mark Shapiro offers group lessons a few times a week, and private lessons once a week, putting great emphasis on ear training, being able to play the score at the piano and singing each part.  He teaching for the most part is really good, except I don’t understand why he wasn’t spending any time on technique, which all of the students really needed.  I never got to ask him.

Composition:  this aspect of the program is the main reason for existence, and subsequently has the most amount of students (40+).  Each student receives individual lessons from either Lasser, Boyle, Harder, or one of the two resident instructors from École Normale de Musique:  Michel Merlet, or Narcis Bonet.  I studied with Michel Merlet, and can say that he is an absolutely fantastic teacher.  He takes a great deal of time examining every aspect of your music and will explain to you very clearly what he likes and dislikes about what he sees, as well as a variety of ways to enhance and develop your music.  Needless to say, time with him is well worth it!

Chamber Music:  this is the most underdeveloped aspect of the program, having only 11 student in 2009.  The coachings that I was able to attend seemed very informative, though none of them were led by the chamber music faculty member April Clayton.  I never saw Dr. Clayton work, but the final concerts were very well prepared, so she must be doing something right.

Faculty:

Dr. Philip Lasser:  the head of the program and a past student of Nadia Boulanger, Dr. Lasser teaches at the Julliard School during the year.  At EAMA, he offers private lessons, teaches the basic analysis and counterpoint lectures, and leads a small group for the counterpoint labs and keyboard harmony.  He is highly knowledgeable, easily approachable, and an excellent teacher, open to multiple interpretations and not afraid to demonstrate the fact that he’s human and a growing musician like everyone else in the program.

Dr. Benjamin C. S. Boyle:  Lasser’s second in command, Dr. Boyle holds a PhD from University of Pennsylvania, a former student of the EAMA program, and teaches as an adjunct and free lancer composition professor in New York, Philadelphia, and areas of New Jersey.  My only interactions with him was my small group counterpoint lab – which was involved a lot of analysis of a Bach fugue – and a counterpoint lecture where he kept saying, “my friends.”  I have little opinion on how he is as a teacher, but as a person, he is quite friendly, and one hell of foosball player.

Lane Harder:  Holding a masters degree from the Peabody Institute – where he is currently a faculty associate– Harder is also a former student of the EAMA program.  Again, my only experience with him is one counterpoint lab which was spent checking over our assignments more than teaching.  He was in charge of scheduling, and whenever he would address the students as a whole, he would never look at the group.  One on one, he seemed quite friendly and had some fantastic stories about his schooling.

Dr. Mark Shapiro:  Lasser’s longest standing colleague in the EAMA program, Dr. Shapiro runs the conducting section, score reading, two sections of keyboard harmony, and the chorus.  He’s extremely dry and closed off from the students, being sure to not let them get to know him too well.  I had three classes with him, and found that he is one to pick on you if he feels you are learning something.  He also gives you extremely weird looks while you are trying to figure things out during his class.  It is questionable whether or not he is as good at what he does as it would initially seem.  His keyboard harmony class worked very well, and he did not let anyone slip by.  The score reading class, however, moved way too fast, and you were left in the dust if you were not a pianist.  Because he is so closed off, I found him hard to read and decided that he is good with a group of people at the same skill level in a subject, but is completely lost – or unwilling – to teach multiple levels of skill to a larger group.

Kyle Blaha:  I never had Kyle as a teacher, but on a personal level, he is awesome.  He loves teaching, he loves writing, and he loves smoking in excess.  I wish I was able to get to know him better.

Teddy Niedermaier:  My only interaction with Teddy was in a counterpoint lab, but it was clear that he knew species counterpoint better than anyone should.  If you were having an issue with your assignment, not only would Teddy be able to identify it, he would be able to create an amazing solution in under 2 minutes.  It was pretty miraculous.

Narcis Bonet:  Bonet was Boulanger’s closest student, and is responsible for most of her publications during the end of her life.  He taught private composition lessons, two sections of keyboard harmony, and was a guest lecturer on theory.  He is one of the nicest people I have ever met, and was more than encouraging upon every interaction you had with him.

Michel Merlet:  a student of Messiaen and a spitting image of Ravel, Merlet was an outstanding teacher, gentle in nature, and extremely informative with regards to harmony and instrumental usage.

Dr. April Clayton:  I literally did not work with Dr. Clayton at all.  She is in charge of the chamber music section of the program, and recruited many students from her program at BYU.  This section of the program needs to be drastically increased in attendance to balance out the massive amount of composers that are accepted.

The soundtrack is credited to James Horner, the same composer who developed the scores for Titanic and A Beautiful Mind (2001).  His style sounds like he has drawn heavily from the New Age genre of music, replete with accentuated and pandiatonic grooves and nonabrasive melodic ideas, though it remains firmly in the film music classification because of its sequential harmonic progressions and epic orchestrations.  Over the years, Horner has developed a unique sound in the film-scoring industry, following his greatest influences  Jerry Goldsmith (1929 – 2004) and John Williams.

Musically, the soundtrack is surprisingly subtle.  The general idea of the soundtrack is to underscore the storyline rather than to run and develop with it.  Upon a first listen without having seen the movie – or knowing anything about it, for that matter – it elicits a sense of primitive existence.  I would liken most of it to filling in the sounds that you would hear when wandering through a forest (yes, I realize that string orchestras and electronic drums usually don’t hang out in the middle of a forest, but bare with me).  Basically, it is very much in the background, and very little of it moves to the foreground.  Once I finally saw the movie, this was definitely the case.  There was never a moment in the movie where the visual aspect subsided to allow for a thematic idea to cut through and say, “I am important and will be commenting on this film from here on out.”

Unlike movies like The Lord of the Rings (Howard Shore) and The Dark Knight (Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard), which are structured off of a handful of motives that are developed and manipulated from beginning to end of the soundtrack, the Avatar soundtrack is driven at a harmonic level.  Melodic motives are few and far between, and there are two that I can find on an aural level.  The first is a collection of four notes that live in a B minor centricity, each note harmonized by triads in such a way to suggest a Lydian inflection.  This melodic fragment is usually followed immediately by three notes descending stepwise to fill in a minor third, which almost sounds like a chromatic mediant modulation, except for the fact that the harmonies under the entire melody would suggest an E minor centricity.  This motive is used relentlessly throughout the movie to point of the listener having to be deaf to have not noticed it within the first 10 minutes.

Another melodic idea that stands out is an incomplete neighbor figure followed by a downward arpeggio; however, it is present in the beginning of the score and near the end.  It might be far more present than I’m able to find without looking at the score, but at a surface level, this figure is extremely undeveloped but very much in the foreground as far as the score is concerned.  At first listen, it sounds quite chromatic, but the motive out of context is clearly diatonic.  The chromatic sound can be attributed to the motive often occurring outside of the established centricity.

From a harmonic standpoint, the score sadly embodies the stereotypical modulation by a third.  At nearly every section end, the music suddenly modulates by a third, either chromatically or diatonically.  There is no attempt to smooth out the seams between key areas, except for the occasional common tone, but more often than not, the common tone that holds through to the new harmony screams out, “Listen to the key change, and notice I that exist in both!!”  What saves the harmonic progressions from being utterly cliché is the fact that the main melodic idea discussed above is steeped in mediant relationships, easily allowing a progression from tonic to mediant to dominant, etc.  Horner must have realized this abundant relationship in the motive and decided that it should be used in excess to clearly show that it is intentional, thus blurring its potential passage into the cliché.

There are many nuances in this soundtrack that I cannot help but comment on.  The first and most obvious to me is how much this score sounds like the music from Titanic, which can be attributed mostly to the shape of the melodic gestures, as well as to the continuous flow of the music.  What separates these soundtracks in my mind is that, despite being a well-conceived score, the Titanic soundtrack is nearly completely synthesized.  I’m not sure why this was, because the budgets for both movies were astronomical, and one would think that Cameron would have allotted a little more funding to be able to hire an orchestra.  Avatar redeems the composer in this respect, as it makes use of mostly real musicians with only a bit of electronic enhancement, mostly in the form of percussion.  A second aspect of this score is how much it sounds like the theme from Civilization IV.  This theme is actually entitled Baba Yetu and was composed by Christopher Tin, utilizing a Swahili translation of the Lord’s Prayer.  This sound is closely linked with the tribal aspects that Horner was shooting for in his music to portray the Na’vi.  I was not able to place the language of the text that he uses in the score, but I think it is a safe guess that he utilized the language of the Na’vi, developed by James Cameron and Paul Frommer, much as Howard Shore set Elvin text written by J. R. R. Tolkien for the Lord of the Rings soundtrack.  The similarities are rather drastic, but I wonder if it is because of the restrictions of the industry and the use of such a standard convention for portraying something foreign and primal.

In general, the soundtrack is about what I would have expected: the imagery of the movie is only hinted at throughout the score; the motives are present, consistent, yet manipulated to show progression.  The orchestration is standard, and feels a little overused, but it is a vast improvement from his previous big film score.  The important thing is that it is not distracting.  By no means is it really engaging, but it is not distracting, and I feel as though it does what it was intended to do: support the storyline of the movie rather than evolving along with it.  Score: 5.5 out of 10.