Libby Larsen, Part 2: Finding 'your own creative vigor'

Here’s the second part of my talk last March with composer Libby Larsen, edited for digressions (mine) and the usual hesitations of speech we all use when engaged in conversation.

In this part of our talk, Larsen talks about a musical event to come on the Florida Atlantic University campus during the second part of her residency :

GTS: Dr. (Heather) Coltman mentioned that you were putting together a proposal for your second year and that you had some interesting things in mind.

Larsen: I said to the head of the school of arts last night at dinner that I think my job here is to put every student in touch with their own creative vigor as much as I possibly can. Their own creative vigor. And making assumptions that many of the kids who come here for performance have come through public school systems, and that is not about your own creative vigor. And so I said I’d like to see if with the music that we make next year we can practice both.

One: I’m going to write pieces for the ensembles as they are.

GTS: A Gebrauchmusik kind of thing.

Larsen: Yeah. I’m going to write a wind ensemble piece and a piece for chorus, but the chorus piece is going to have didgeridoo.

GTS: With Mr. (James) Cunningham.

Larsen: Right, with Mr. Cunningham. And then I’m going to write a piece for the strings of the orchestra, so we’ll have chorus, strings of the orchestra, wind ensemble piece, and then this chamber piece. So that will be a formal concert, the format that we practice.

And so, I approached the commercial music students and invited them to, between now and October, to create a 40- to 60-minute soundtrack for me. A flow track; whatever they want to do, but a flow track with sections.

GTS: With stuff.

Larsen: With stuff. And then I’ll come back October 1st … and I will explore that soundtrack with them, then I’m going to respond acoustically. I’m going then to write acoustic music with that flow track that involves all the kids from all the ensembles.

GTS: It’s like a commentary.

Larsen: Then, in April, all the kids from all the ensembles will go out onto the breezeway, and they’re going to line the area where the speakers from Owl Radio broadcast. And then Owl Radio has agreed that they will then broadcast the soundtrack and then we will do the beats, on the breezeway. And the pieces will be written in such a way that if you’re walking by and you want to join in, you can.

It’s not a Cage music circus, it’s much more like a drumming group experience, only with acoustic instruments. And also drums and electric pianos, and we’re just going to put everybody out there, you know, and make a piece that’s “we.”

GTS: That kind of reaching out to people and making music is very important to you.

Larsen: Yes, it is, it is. It’s as important as the concert hall experience. Because both are essential. It’s not an either/or proposition …. It feels like it should be either/or, and it’s just not.

GTS:…Are you trying to get to a more fluid kind of rhythm generally, not so much like a click track?

Larsen: Yeah, I am, and I’ll tell you - there are lots of reasons.

Now, when you practice African drumming, it is very precise, but the pulse is never articulated. Have you ever drummed in a drumming group?

GTS: Not really.

Larsen: It’s fascinating, because in true African drumming, the pulse is never articulated, it’s felt. And then there are always two polyrhythms going on at the same time, always, but all organized around a felt pulse. And that is the polar opposite of Western precision.

GTS: You sort of have to be in it, and then you are knowing what this other person is doing. There’s something really kind of mystical about that, something kind of weird, but it’s also very human. It’s something that’s real basic to the way we are as animals.

Larsen: I completely agree. And it wouldn’t matter, except that the culture of the music of America, that was coming out of American languages, is more and more and more pulse-based, and less and less metrically based.

…I’ve been working with, whenever I can get hold of one of them, working with music brain researchers. I just had a wonderful talk with Ed Large, here on campus, and I asked him about pulse: Is there ever a consensus about pulse? And of course without scientific data, there’s no definitive answer. But (one of) the few answers is that while there’s a sense of shared pulse, it’s never precise, because synchronicity is a brain activity.
 
And so, African drumming, you take your brain out of it.

GTS: I wanted to go back to (what you said earlier) about composers writing a lot. Are composers not writing enough now?

Larsen: They’re not writing enough.

GTS: Not enough different forms?

Larsen: Not enough different forms, and also really not getting an audience of like-minded intellect, meaning taking the music out to people who haven’t studied music but who are really smart, who love to think and listen to music, and that dialogue, that dialogue — there’s just not enough of it.

And it could happen. I think that’s why the young kids in the clubs, I think this is why this is growing so much.

It’s because the process is not complete, it’s not complete until it’s been in the air, and in the ears, and (in) the Mobius curve of energy between those who listen artfully and those who perform artfully. You know, that’s the creative process.

xxxxxx

There's a little more left of our interview, I think; I'll try to get that posted soon. In the meantime, here are some links on Larsen’s Web site with some of her audio files.

And here’s some African drumming from Ghana:

Infrequent Faure: A matter of hands?

Listening on the way into work yesterday morning to the eminent sportswriter and novelist Frank Deford on NPR, I suddenly thought of Gabriel Faure.

DeFord’s piece was based on a new study that showed renowned athletes were more likely than the regular population to be left-handed, which raises interesting questions about genetic coding for sports ability and what other parts of the human schematic it might be linked to.

I don’t know offhand about the ratio of righties to lefties in the musical world, though my younger brother David is a southpaw, and he has both athletic and musical talent, while I, a right-hander, have some musical ability but almost none for sports.

This brings me to Faure, who despite the repertory status of some of his songs, chamber works, and of course, the Requiem, beloved of church choirs everywhere, is to me an underrated writer. All of the music I know of his is music of exceptional taste, craft and bold imagination, and I wish we heard it more often at concerts.

That’s particularly true of his piano music, which is heavily influenced by Chopin, but it uses Chopin as a stepping-off point and doesn’t slavishly imitate. His nocturnes and barcarolles (and there’s one of them, in E-flat, that I can’t recall precisely and for which I can’t find my score, that surely gave Stephen Sondheim for Send in the Clowns) are beautiful in a rarified, elegant way that is also elusive. It’s not immediately entrancing, perhaps, but repeated listening wins you over to its special kind of beauty.

I find these piano pieces quite difficult to play, but the reason isn’t obvious until I sit down and really try to work through them. The reason they’re so difficult is that Faure was ambidextrous, according to Grove, and that explains a lot.

Glenn Gould used to mock “right-hand music,” which describes a lot of 19th-century writing, with plenty of filigree and acrobatics in the right hand while the left thumps away and keeps time. But Faure’s music, rather like Bach’s, requires both hands to be equally strong and independent, and when you naturally favor one or the other, it’s going to be work to get the other one to play ball (to drag the sports metaphor back into this post). For Faure, it was all the same.

I feel sure that the way Faure wrote for the piano militates against hearing his piano works in recital, because it’s much too much work to get these pieces to sound right unless both hands are working equally well. It’s easier to get something that has more immediate appeal together than to spend a lot of time on Faure, and that’s unfortunate.

I speak as an infrequent practicer, of course; it may be that real pianists find Faure easier to get ready than I know, and the music doesn’t get much currency because of its somewhat remote character. Still, I think the hands have it.

Just thinking about this has made me eager to hear someone good play Faure in recital, and I’ll pore over the program lists looking for some in the next few weeks. If anyone knows of some, please post away.

Here’s Marc-Andre Hamelin playing Faure’s Third Barcarolle:

Writer says contemporary classical a failure

The debate about whether contemporary classical music is worth much of anything is joined again in the pages of The Guardian, with writer Joe Queenan arguing that he’s been listening to the stuff for 40 years and that it still hasn’t found its public, and Tom Service, on the other, arguing that there is a much larger audience for new music than Queenan thinks there is.

You can read Queenan here, Service here, and check out the blog postings to read some very sharp debate by a lot of interesting people weighing in on this topic.

I admit to having two dogs in this hunt. First, Queenan’s point about the absence of audience interest in some of the music appears is grounded in basic journalism: he’s just reporting here, folks. Anyone who’s been to a significant number of concerts over the years, as I have, has probably seen much of the same behavior and heard many of the same kinds of uncomprehending comments.

You can’t just dismiss that as being somehow anomalous. I’ve seen and heard precisely the same thing.

And there’s something to be said for the idea that plenty of composers today likely are poor melodist, and it’s melody that provides the first and most basic interaction with music that people have, even above rhythm.

It’s no accident that human beings in stable societies composed folksongs for themselves, not just to tell stories, but to fix a certain kind of auditory memory for themselves.

But tastes change, and there’s little question that today’s listeners now have access to every kind of music there is, not only through recordings of various kinds, but through easily used, flexible technology that lets almost anyone literally make his own kind of music. Our ears have a far richer menu of choices than our ancestors did, and our music reflects that.

I personally find much classical music written today unappealing on a visceral basis, but music of this kind takes a different kind of listening. And I get a good deal of enjoyment out of some music that I don’t particularly like listening to, if that makes any sense. It appeals to me for other reasons: a ferocious display of technique, perhaps, or maybe as the only possible response to a specific, usually tragic, extra musical event.

Still, it’s worthy stuff, and I always approach new pieces with a high degree of anticipation. I’ve heard plenty of interesting new music over the years, and I am a firm believer in the necessity of replenishing our repertoires with fresh music that speaks to our times. As I’ve said before, it may be that a composer will come along who can speak to us and make his or her message memorable for future generations.

I would lay odds that this writer would have to be someone who can create a compelling melody, though. I don’t mean someone who simply writes pop tunes by other names, either. What it would take is a crafter of a modern but powerful kind of melody that would hang in the head and perhaps even help its listeners confront difficult issues by doing so.

In any case, it’s a fascinating debate, and if you are at all interested in this topic, take a look at these columns and the multiple blog posts that followed. It’s exciting reading.

German singer lauds the American approach

Over the weekend, I wrapped up a review of The Voice, a memoir by the German bass-baritone Thomas Quasthoff. It’s a good read, and a fascinating life story about a very fine singer.

It also makes a compelling cultural document in that Quasthoff has many interesting things to say about his profession and the state of the world at large. Early on, he talks about his New York Philharmonic debut at Avery Fisher Hall, and he writes about what the audience was like:

What strikes me first is the complete absence of that solemn, respectful murmur that has been flowing around German stages since the days of Goethe and Schiller. Instead one enjoys the relaxed atmosphere, the matter-of-fact attitude with which the Americans have — yes, I will put it this way — made use of their cultural temples ….Personally, I view Homo Americanus’s habit of valuing the classical arts no higher than other forms of intelligent entertainment — whether film or basketball — as a true achievement of civilization. It does not harm the quality and professional appreciation of artists; rather, the opposite is true.

I think this is very wise, and on the mark. It may not have been as true 30 or so years ago (at least, I remember it as being much stiffer when I was a boy), but it certainly is more laid-back now.

I think this is one of the secrets of the survival of this music beyond the appeal of the pieces themselves. Most of the concerts I’ve been to in the past 15 years here have been familial, warm affairs in which part of the joy of the music comes in sitting with an audience that is happy to be there.

At the same time, true devotees of the music might find this kind of casualness bordering on disrespect. After all, if you don’t really appreciate what the performers are doing, how will you know that you’ve been in the presence of great art?

It could further be argued that what Quasthoff saw was not a uniformly demotic approach on the part of Citizen America, but rather a mass abdication of manners. People have essentially abandoned dressing up for concerts (I plead guilty, Your Honor), and only recently have I been to events where everyone has remembered to shut off his or her cellphone.

But I don’t think so. I think what Quasthoff saw is the result of decades of greater access to the music, which has demystified it and shown to the average music lover that music really is just music, and that the other accretions we used to have with it are remnants of a culture that is no longer operative. He’d have seen the same reverence he sees in Germany in the New York audiences of the late 19th century and on through the first six decades of the 20th.

Not now, though. And I think he’s right: It helps the music to live as “intelligent entertainment,” and not pedestal art. Human creative effort can’t survive deification for too long.

For the Fourth, William Grant Still

For this July Fourth, I haven’t had time to put together a playlist, but I am focusing on the work of William Grant Still (1895-1978).

Still has long been known as the dean of African-American classical composers, and his long career as an arranger and composer for popular and classical venues gave him a professional polish that allowed him to write well-crafted music of several different kinds. The folks at Afri-Classical.com have several samples of his music on their site, and while the samples are short, they demonstrate Still’s melodic gift, his directness of expression, and his thorough craftsmanship.

I’m listening now to his Second Symphony, premiered in 1937 by Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra. It’s subtitled Song of a New Race, and was written as a follow-up to his First, subtitled Afro-American. That first symphony was designed to evoke American black life around the Civil War, but the Second “represents the American colored man of today,” according to Still’s program notes, which are excerpted in the Detroit Symphony’s 1993 recording (Chandos 9226) of the work. (The disc also contains William Levi Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony, also a fine piece, and Luther Henderson’s orchestration of Duke Ellington’s Harlem.)

The Second Symphony is slightly dated , sounding at times (particularly in the third movement) quite like a 1930s Hollywood score. But the bulk of the work has an elegant profile very much in the tradition of late Romantics such as Dvorak and Tchaikovsky, but with a very American language. He is more American here than Charles Ives is in his First Symphony, very much, indeed, like George Gershwin in his mixture of pop sensibility and received classical forms.

It’s a lovely work, only half an hour long, full of strong tunes and rich orchestral colors. But I can’t think of the last time I’ve encountered Still in the concert hall. The Gershwin orchestral pieces are constantly played, and perhaps his melodies are a bit more memorable, but that shouldn’t keep this composer from American concert stages.

Still’s Second deserves to be a standard repertory piece in American orchestras, and is just the sort of piece that should make up their bread and butter. There’s nothing wrong with playing the great Europeans to bring in the house, but there’s no good reason when compiling programs that conductors on the lookout for an accessible, attractive work to present should turn to something like the Mendelssohn Fourth instead of the Still.

Still wrote a large body of work that includes five symphonies and seven operas, along with instrumental pieces, songs and choral works. Every piece of his I’ve heard is instantly attractive, and well deserving of frequent performances. He trailblazed a path for other black American symphonic writers, but today that’s less important than that he was a fine American composer whose music should be far better-known than it is.

So today as we mark the Fourth, let’s spend some time listening to music by William Grant Still. It’s a way to know better our American musical heritage, which in the classical field is sorely, and unfairly, ignored.