27 April 1995
Concert Hall
School of Music and Dance
San Jose State University
San Jose, California

San Francisco, California
jmcm@dnai.com

Computer Music Journal, Vol. 19, No. 4, Winter 1995, pp. 94 - 96.

What are composers doing when they compose? Are they working or are they playing? If they are playing, is there any sense to the idea of "serious" composition, or is it merely play? Is playing to be so easily dismissed? One who believes that the act of composition is essentially playful may be offering the most significant musical communication. Composing is an activity that is creative, does not consume material resources, and, by the act of public performance, is an expression of faith in the possibility of meaningful communication.

The idea of work is not null; one could make a case for the idea of meaningful and fulfilling work. But for many, work means alienating labor that consumes most of one's time and energy, a necessary and yet diabolical pact in the name of survival. Composers are in the privileged position of being able to demonstrate if not the primacy of play, with it's emphasis on beauty, joy, and wonder, than at least on the necessity of meaningful work, and on the condemnation of that critical lack of imagination which leads so many to working lives which are so impoverished.

At San Jose State University, on 27 April 1995, the faculty composers voiced their views. Compositions by Richard Aldag, Brian Belet, Pablo Furman, Brent Heisinger, Theodore Lucas, Allen Strange, and Daniel Wyman were presented. First off was Brian Belet's [MUTE]ation for tape alone. Two pieces featured saxophone soloist with electronic accompaniment. In Music for Alto Saxophone and Electronics by Pablo Furman, soloist John Sampen was a persuasive advocate; and in Saxophone: high register , composer Daniel Wyman availed himself of the wonderful playing of saxophonist William Trimble, whose improvisational skills earned Trimble a credit as co-composer. An instrumental variation on the soloist with electronic accompaniment was offered by Allen Strange, whose Shaman: Sisters of Dreamtime was played by violinist Patricia Strange. Theodore Lucas offered Stand-Up Triple , a humorous salute to the end of the baseball strike and start of the new season. And the program was rounded out by two pieces for soprano and piano, Brent Heisinger's A Cycle of Thoughts and Two Songs from Erotica by Richard Aldag. These two solid compositions were well-performed, but this review will concentrate on the works with electronics.

Based entirely on the sampled sounds of virtuoso trombonist Scott Mousseau playing his mute sans trombone, Belet's [MUTE]ation explored a part of the sound world available from digital processing of the sampled material. Processed material was arranged around a climactic interruption at which point the original material, unprocessed, was presented. Belet revels in all the colorful possibilities made available by the technology, but at the crucial moment, backs away from the rainbow and, like a willful child, suddenly, emphatically, and exactly sure of what must happen next, chooses black! The discontinuity of breaking off the process is offset by the strength of the conviction. Presentation of the naked, unprocessed sound forges the link between the ethereal unreal world, where the miraculous may be just a mirage, to the real world, where the mundane is seen as miraculous.

Like all the pieces on the concert, this offering demonstrated the composer's high level of engagement in the compositional activity, as details sprinkled throughout testified to the care and attention to articulation manifested in good work. The interruption itself was not entirely successful. If interruption it was, than it needed to be more assertive, to announce itself more forcefully; or, if intended as just another possible member of the sound world of the digital trombone mute, it should have been prepared, perhaps foreshadowed. This minor objection aside, this was a strong offering from a clear and emphatic voice.

The play in [MUTE]ation was evident, but it also reveals that the play/work dichotomy is a false one. The "work" of a piece is the composer rethinking the initial premises over and over, or, perhaps from a slightly different standpoint, reviewing the initial improvisations. This imperative to reconsider must address two kinds of questions: 1) Was the initial idea as good as hoped? and 2) Does the articulation of the piece clearly present its essential character? The challenge is to move from the close-up detail to a less attached view, to see this new piece of music both as its loving creator and as a not-yet-oriented audience. [MUTE]ation rose to that challenge, and set the tone for the evening, with its judicious mix of finger-painting and fastidiousness.

The impetus for Allen Strange's Shaman: Sisters of Dreamtime came from a couple of diverse sources. The pieces themselves are impressions of a series of paintings by Susan Seddon Boulet, while the sounds were stimulated by Strange's recent evaluation of physical modeling synthesizers. The set is a series of six brief studies played without break. The first of these combined fast microtonal passages on the violin with the insistent drumming of a tribal ritual. The second study explored the creaking realm of the forceful bow sul ponticello , with timbral manipulation via a shifting series of partials and low pedal tones. Fast trills and percussive rattles heralded the onset of the third study, "Serpent Woman (Cihuacoatl)", while in the next study, a low pedal was the background to long-tone upper octave pitches, skirting the tonic of the low tone. In the fifth study, "Sky Woman (Selu)", violin harmonics and light sparkling bell sounds suggested the ethereal, while in the last piece, low tremolo A's on the violin gave way to rapid, ascending scales for an energetic finale.

Throughout Shaman , Strange's engagement was evidenced by a wide range of colorful timbres as well as a convincing flow of ideas, enhanced by both a nice variety of pacing as well as smooth transitions connecting the various studies. If anything, the piece was too pretty; the physical models work too well. It raises some questions similar to those encountered with Belet's piece: while Belet's interruption asserts the continuity and connection of human experience, Strange's use of familiar timbral materials suggests a similar underlying continuity. Like the performer who gets on stage dressed in his street clothes, maybe jeans and a T-Shirt: the message is not in the extraneous superficialities of dress, but rather in the conviction of both composer and his (hopefully) forcefully persuasive advocate, the performer. Strange paints in broad simple strokes, not "simple" as in "simplistic"; rather his music pulls no punches, saying what he wants to say clearly at any given moment. His music suggest an antipathy for the extremes of the tradition of the hieratic composer in isolation, not because he wants his music to be accessible, but perhaps more because his sense of political ecology cannot afford to indulge the fantasy of extreme individualism. Feisty he is, but his music suggests not so much "Don't tread on me" as "Don't tread on us."

Saxophone: high register by Daniel Wyman called on the wonderful playing of saxophonist William Trimble. The collaboration seemed organized in four sections. A slow opening section, reminiscent of an Indian alap , centered on a descending F-E-D-B tritone outline. This was succeeded by a second section in which the soloist was accompanied by a rhythmic, quasi-minimalist, Dorian-inflected background. This second section, well-anchored tonally, was followed by a third section which struck off in an entirely new direction as the soloist removed his mouthpiece and blew, sang and otherwise explored some the marginal territory of the extended sax. The last section was signaled by the replacement of the mouthpiece, a brief return to the ideas of the second section, and then a sudden change of the virtual space followed by a fast rising line, ending in a dislocated "boink."

Is there any potential in minimalism greater than, say, the potential in a dominant-to-tonic progression? In the context of this piece, the periodicity and tonality of the second section become self-conscious subject matter through the juxtaposition with the third section, focusing, as it does, on such a different sound world. Comment or parody must identify its reference, and so a piece of music concerned with the tension between rational and irrational, or between the conventional and the freshly-minted, must characterize both poles. But it's probably disingenuous to leave the analysis at that, as at least two other motivations might come into play. First, the greatest part of a musician's training has to do with the most conventional materials (i.e., scales, tertian harmony, pulse rhythms, and meter); consequently it is these materials the musicians know best. While it is precisely because they know these materials best that their overwhelming familiarity can breed overwhelming contempt, contempt is not the only possible response. Some pieces continue to resonate long after the potential of the materials in the piece would seem to have yielded all potential.

A slightly different dynamic is occasioned by the mysteries of the emotional life: sometimes one simply must yield to the irrational compulsion to hear Mahler's Sixth yet again (or Coltrane's Giant Steps , or Cline's Crazy , etc.). Similarly, composers cannot merely rely on an institutional code of respectability for a work's integrity. The imperative (and the work!) is to rigorously seek the truth of the moment. Certainly further reflection might cause the composer to see any expression in the light of a new, different moment, and most composers have felt their crests fall in the moment of "I can't believe I actually thought this was cool!" On the other hand, composers also are wary of the eternal revision, and at some point discretion and experience impose a double bar line and a move along to the next piece. Wyman's gamble was that the minimalist sword of Damocles could be mitigated by both clever sword-play, on the part of Trimble, as well as by the shifting perspective in which the guests excuse themselves from the table over which the sword hangs, perhaps stepping outside for a look at the night sky.

Pablo Furman's Music for Alto Saxophone and Electronics makes more traditional wagers, the ones familiar to most composers of contemporary work. His hunch is that strong craftsmanship, a modern pitch and rhythmic language, and a broad timbral palette, using both synthesized sound as well as processed sax sounds, can be combined to create a significant musical utterance. The opening gesture, in which a long opening tone on the saxophone is seamlessly taken up and extended by the electronics, declares the world this piece will inhabit as clearly as does that pithy Eroica announcement. But, whereas Beethoven declares a tonal anchor, Furman has something else in mind, namely, the continuum between the real, live performer onstage and the non-real-time collaboration of the electronic accompaniment.

Furman's meticulousness is evident in the aural sleight of hand which informs the piece; while the contributions of sax and electronics are often quite distinct, they continually converge to the point where the listener is not entirely sure what's what. Yet the poetic conceit seems clear, that it is the living, breathing performer (and the breathing part is important; the piece would not have worked as well on a keyboard instrument) who is breathing life into the machine, and that technology is used to extend and enhance an emphatically human expression. A microphone cannot make a poor speaker become a good speaker, but it can help a good speaker project an expression to a larger audience. Furman's piece demonstrated this principle, and his control of rhythmic, tonal, timbral, and dynamic parameters resulted in a strong and articulate work.

The faculty composers at San Jose State University are to be congratulated. Hanging out on the fringes of the fault line, they are part of the West Coast wing teetering on one of the edges of musical culture (and it is in those edges, whether they be East Coast, Midwest, or Australian, that the only truly alternative music is heard). And the evening's music, whether hard work or intense play, was a rich report.