Greg Stepanich

Webber seeks to master Bulgakov

Not sure how this makes me feel, but Andrew Lloyd Webber wants to write an opera or a musical based on The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov's great novel from the 1930s about the time that the devil went down to Moscow.

Here's Webber's blog entry on it. I think it's nice of him to say that he recognizes that this would be very difficult to do, and that it might not work. Anyone with a decent acquaintance with the novel could see some great opportunities for theater but also real pitfalls.

I've loved this novel since a former brother-in-law who loved Russian literature talked it up to the point that I had to read it, and I wasn't disappointed. Besides being a manic tale of all the havoc wreaked by Satan and his minions, it also has plenty of references to music (characters named Berlioz, Stravinsky and Rimsky), and a plot that often ventures into the central question of belief. (Another novel that probes this question well while telling a dramatic story is Iris Murdoch's A Fairly Honourable Defeat.)

If you take the novel apart bit by bit (and I admit I need to re-read it), you could devise individual songs and bits for Ivan Homeless, the poet and man of truth who is committed to an asylum after causing a scene at a restaurant for literary types. You could make something of Pontius Pilate's bitterly conflicted inner monologue as he questions Yeshua Ha-Nozri. And you could certainly make a lot out of the story of The Master and his faithful Margarita, who wants to help him return to a productive life as a writer and will do anything to make that happen, including becoming a witch.

So there are any number of attractive possibilities for drama, including — since this is Andrew Lloyd Webber we're talking about — a character named Behemoth, an enormous talking cat.

The question for me is the precise nature of the theater piece that will be created here. It would be simple to fashion an entertainment simply using the highly dramatic occurrences of the novel, and hang the subtleties. You could write pastiche music similar to the jazz the denizens of Moscow were hearing about that time, and also evoke the eminent Russian composers of the time. Do it well enough, and you draw in listeners who find the sound attractive.

But the thing I've always liked most about it is how Bulgakov deals with large questions, and makes them live again in an intellectually exciting way. It's easier to write something earnest about such questions, but it takes true artistic skill to dream up a seemingly fantastic story and make readers think at the same time. I felt, after reading the book for the first time, the sheer energy involved in big ideas, and for me that's what vital literature is all about.

It might actually be more effective to write a musical rather than an opera on this topic. An opera might deal with the flash and dash of the book in too serious a way. But a musical, with its basis in popular forms, seems to me better-suited to the flavor of the book.

Either way, it's a daunting idea. I have to wonder whether this project will get off the ground, and whether Webber's the right guy for it. It will be most interesting to see what comes of this.

Ibis reschedules: Ernesto might not have been much, but he managed to reschedule the two Ibis Camerata concerts I just wrote about for the second week of September. The group promises more details soon.

Ibis concerts might be season's first

Away from the blog for a few days under the press of work, but as I return, I’m starting to get e-mails, snail mails and phone calls about the season that’s right about to start.

One of the first events of the new concert season (or one of the last of the summer season) is down in Miami this week, and I’m going to mention it not just because they’re all that’s on the calendar right now but because they’ve got some good music on two free programs that might be worth checking out.

A little while ago, I blogged about some new music by faculty composers at the University of Miami, one of which was a fine new piece of chamber music by Dennis Kam, called Sonata (Ibis). The piece was written four a four-person chamber group called the Ibis Camerata, and I thought they gave a good performance of an interesting new piece.

The Ibis folks wrote to me this week with news of their upcoming concerts Tuesday and Wednesday, and as I look at the programs, I see that two musicians with Palm Beach County connections have become members of the group. Cellist Ian Maksin of the Delray String Quartet has taken over for Marie-Elaine Gagnon, and violinist Dmitri Pogorelov of Sergiu Schwartz’s studio at Lynn University has replaced Domagoj Ivanovic.

Founding pianist Biljana Milovanovic remains, as does clarinetist Christopher Graham. The Ibis that played the Kam sonata sounded like a very good chamber group, and I’ve heard fine playing from both Pogorelov and Maksin, so were I not tied at up at work both nights, I’d probably make the trip south and check them out.

The concerts are free. The first, on Tuesday night at UM’s Chapel of the Venerable Bede, contains the first of Beethoven’s 10 violin sonatas (Op. 12, No . 1, in D major), one of Brahms’ last chamber works, the beautiful Clarinet Trio in A minor, Op. 114, and something billed as a Trio in C by Mozart that might be the K. 548 piano trio. Also on the program is a cello fantasia by Gaspar Cassado and a piece or two by Astor Piazzolla.

The second concert, on Wednesday evening at the Steinway Gallery in Coral Gables, features a violin-less program of the Brahms Clarinet Trio, the early Clarinet Trio of Beethoven (Op. 11, in B-flat major) and the nifty Fantasy Pieces for clarinet and piano of Schumann (I used to accompany a violist friend in the string version of these works).

Here’s more information if you’re interested.

New Miami concert hall's a beauty

The new Knight Concert Hall at the Carnival Center for the Performing Arts at 13th and Biscayne in downtown Miami is a thing of sonic and architectural beauty, and South Florida audiences now have another fine venue for concertgoing.

On Sunday morning, I went down to the hall for a "tuning of the house" event, in which the Cleveland Orchestra was on hand for a two-hour rehearsal to give engineers and an invited audience to check out the quality of the sound. CSO music director Franz Welser-Möst, looking comfortable and collegial in a yellow short-sleeve shirt and blue jeans, led the orchestra in music by Bruckner, Prokofiev and Verdi.

(I took some weak pictures but haven't had a chance to download them. That's an illustration above.)

I missed the Bruckner (the Fifth), and was roundly abused by colleagues for being tardy (but car trouble is car trouble). But I did hear the Prokofiev — two big excerpts from the Romeo and Juliet ballet music — and the Verdi (a brief snatch or two from Falstaff), and the sound was marvelously clear; I wandered around the back and sides of the main floor and could hear a blended picture everywhere I was.

A word here about what a first-time visitor sees upon entering the house. In some ways, it's like nothing so much as a 19th-century lecture hall, with seats spread out in curved rows facing a stage very close to the front. It's spacious but intimate at the same time.

There also is a large amount of blond wood everywhere you look (what Carnival executive director Michael Hardy called the "psychoacoustics" of the house), from all the stairs to the huge fabric-covered sound panels, to the inlays in the boxes, to the giant canopy that hangs over the seats. It's a great oval with concentric-circle panels hanging from it, and it adds to the dual sense of bigness and personal detail you feel sitting there.

The sound of the house seemed to me Sunday to favor the strings in particular. Each entrance in the Prokofiev was rich and wonderfully alive, with all interior voices clearly audible. You could also hear the adjustments being made as the orchestra played — the sound panels are altered as the music goes along by a two-person team in the booth at the back. And so the echo that appeared at the beginning of the Prokofiev and made the orchestra sound as though it wasn't playing together had largely disappeared a few minutes later.

I found myself able to hear parts of the orchestra that get lost in a bigger, mushier hall with great distinctness in the Knight. The contrabassoon, for instance, was easy to hear, and moments later, as the orchestra shifted to the Verdi and the contra was lugged off, you could hear the big differences in orchestration style.

The difference was almost revelatory: the Verdi was clearly the work of a writer working in a much older tradition, while the Prokofiev had a much more elaborate palette of color.

In short, a beautiful house, and one that will no doubt serve the Clevelanders well in their 10 years of residency. Everyone connected with the orchestra seemed quite happy with the results and Welser-Möst himself, in brief remarks to the audience, declared it "a great hall," and initially that's what it appears to be.

Some other good news at the press conference afterward came from Robert Conrad, the longtime voice of the orchestra's radio broadcasts, who said WCLV would be working with WLRN to broadcast the Cleveland Orchestra's concerts live from Miami, which is a nice coup for the city and for the orchestra.

Also, William Hipp, the director of the University of Miami's Frost School of Music, said that members of the orchestra would be working with senior composition students at the school in rehearsals of their new work, which warms the heart of a composer and advocate of new American music like me. This is a terrific opportunity for those students, and I hope they take full advantage of it. Finish those sonatas, folks!

All in all, a worthwhile trip down south, and residents up here who are interested in seeing a great American orchestra in a splendid new setting should find the extra preparation and travel time well worth it. I only regret that the Florida Philharmonic is no longer around to call it home; it would have been a well-earned reward for some excellent local musicians, and a chance to really take that orchestra to new heights.

I'd be interested in hearing from anyone else who's heard the new hall and wants to comment. Post your thoughts below.

Does a day job make music better?

Listening to a piece this morning on National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition about a band called Oneida, I’m struck by a segment in which the players point out that they all have other day jobs — teacher, social worker, IT specialist — and that they aren’t planning to give them up.

One of them says it’s important for him to have other things besides the music to do. He doesn’t say this, but I gathered that it helped keep the music fresh for him when he got back to it.

This reminds me first off of Charles Ives, an insurance man (pictured above), and Alexander Borodin, a chemist. Both men worked on music during their spare time, and preferred it that way.

Many classical musicians today have other jobs in music, many of them as teachers, but I wonder how many have non-music day jobs. I’d bet that more of them today have unrelated jobs, and I’m thinking that number will grow.

It seems to me, basically, that habits of mind have changed for people today, and multitasking is not only the normal approach, but the preferred one. It’s not difficult for people today to enter quickly into the semi-depths of another field of interest, and it may be that in the very near future you won’t be considered a well-rounded person unless you’re pursuing several fields of thought more or less simultaneously.

What effect does that have on the music itself? Does it make it fresher, more urgent? Do you do better, concentrated work because you know your time is limited not only by necessity but preference?
I can speak only for myself in saying that my day job makes it hard to get back to the music, but that I do indeed pursue it more aggressively when I do have the time. In some way, too, I think it nourishes the music.

If I am thinking only of the music, all the time, it becomes more important for my economic functioning that I have a sure thing: the gig at the piano bar, the ringtones I’ve promised to write, the two weddings for which I’ll brush up on my organ-playing skills. When I was in music school, I found it confining to have to think about music all the time, which is why I made sure to have as many non-music electives as I could.

If I have reduced the dominance of music in my life, and earn my daily keep in fields far from home, I can approach the music with a certain newness, or even a sense of relief. The question is an open one, however, as to whether I write better music that way. It seems to me that the music is more direct when I have less time, but that I might sacrifice reaching of some small pinnacle of artistic success without total absorption in the work.

There is a certain kind of art that is only possible if you’re ruminating on its possibilities day in and day out, and perhaps as a society we’ll have less of that in the future than we do now because it won’t be fashionable to spend all that time on creative work. It just may be that people are happier and overall more productive if they are focused on several fields of endeavor rather than just the one.

Maybe what we give up is art like Proust, or van Gogh, or even Schubert. The question then is whether society is happier when more of its members are healthier, or whether by being less extreme it becomes less illuminating.

Anyway, here’s Vladimir Horowitz, playing an unaccountably neglected piece by Chopin, the Introduction and Rondo, Op. 16, in E-flat. The synchrony of sound and movement are off slightly, but not when he speaks at the very beginning. Might be better to listen than to watch too closely. But I love this piece:

Good luck to the Wunderkind

About two years ago, 60 Minutes ran a piece on a pre-teen composer named Jay Greenberg (seen here in a photo by Bill Phelps), who was being touted as the most exceptional classical writing talent to come along in 200 years.

That’s serious hype. The snippets of music I heard on the program were not very interesting, but at the time Greenberg was only 12 years old, and it could easily be argued that his best work was ahead of him.

Later this year, Sony Classical will release a disc of his music, and he’s been commissioned to write a concerto for none other than violinist Joshua Bell. And he’s still only 14, with more than 100 pieces to his credit. (Here's a piece from the New York Times this past weekend; registration required.)

If you travel over to his site, you can hear snippets from his newer pieces — his Fifth Symphony and his String Quintet. It's very well-made, highly serious music, sounding at some moments like Prokofiev, others like Shostakovich, still others something like Hindemith.

It's firmly in the mainstream of the first half of the 20th century tonally, and technically it's masterful — there's no doubt about that. One day he will develop more of an individual voice to marry to his exceptional technique, and that day probably will be an important one for American music.

There is a word for composers who say they’re not jealous of Greenberg’s accomplishments at this point, and that word is liars. It’s impossible not to see in Greenberg all the dreams you had for yourself as a composer, if only your piano teacher hadn’t moved away, or a cousin stole your favorite banjo, or, frankly, that you had enough talent.

Still, I’m a little dismayed by all the attention he’s received so far because it’s going to be very difficult to live up to all those expectations and not fall short at some juncture. I can’t help but think he’s got to be under a great deal of pressure to live up to the persona he displayed on 60 Minutes: Always humming, constantly writing, deadly serious. Somewhere along the line, he’s not going to want to be “on,� and that will mark something of a turning point.

I should also note that hearing new music in your head and writing it down is not all that unusual, especially for trained musicians. Many of us hear soundtracks in our heads all the time, and it wouldn’t be possible for commercial music to be written on very tight deadlines if composers couldn’t dream up music instantly in their heads and know whether it will work or not.

The saving grace for Greenberg will undoubtedly be that he’s interested in so many other things, such as math and philosophy. He must have an enormously active mind, and that intellectual restlessness will help him release some of the steam he’ll build up as his career progresses.

The proof, as always, will be in the music. There have been several examples in music history of exceptional talent at an impossibly early age, and the record is mixed. Mozart, of course, is one of the pillars of Western civilization, but Saint-Saëns, who wrote his first piece at age 3, lived a long life of great accomplishment but never managed to write anything sublime (though a lot of his music is underrated).

William Crotch (1775-1847), an English composer, began playing the organ at 18 months, and by age 2 had mastered God Save the King. The older Grove I have reproduces an engraving of Crotch at age 3, a bonnet on his head and a sheet of manuscript draped over his arm. His music might be better known in the United Kingdom than it is here; the article (by Nicholas Temperley) says his best work is a Handelian oratorio called Palestine.

Crotch was a painter, too, as well as a playwright and writer on a huge range of subjects from architecture to physics. Saint-Saëns also was a keen archaeologist, astronomer and devotee of language. That’s not coincidental; these are greatly gifted human beings with extensive capabilities.

But I’ve never heard a note by William Crotch, and I think it’s probably safe to say that despite his gifts, plenty of attention, a loving home and a relatively long life, he wasn’t able to create anything truly memorable; at least, not something the world now holds dear.

I’ll be very interested in following Jay Greenberg’s career and listening to his music. Good musicians such as Bell who’ve heard his stuff say he’s the real deal, and I’m going to take that on faith.

I only hope that he’s able to weather successfully the media attention that will follow him probably as long as he’s around. You can’t do anything but wish him luck.

Everything old is new again

Driving home late last night, I got to thinking about the way younger artists revitalize older art and make it new again.

WLRN’s Harry C. Sharp was playing a 19-year-old singer’s version of the great Gershwin song How Long Has This Been Going On? It was a breathy version, somewhat too melismatic in the way of contemporary singers, who tend to bring gospel stylings to everything they sing, but it was still lovely and compelling. Brother Ira’s words still worked with George’s melody, and it was still a song about a woman discovering real love for the first time.

Oh, I feel that I could melt
Into Heaven I’m hurled
I know how Columbus felt
Finding another world….

Earlier in the day, I heard part of the day’s broadcast of From the Top, the endearing radio program that features young classical musicians (and at the same time, through pianist Christopher O’Riley, pays tribute to Cole Porter and to pop artists such as Radiohead and Elliott Smith). I caught a little bit of a nice version of a Mozart song (Ein Veilchen auf der Wiese stand, K. 476), which reminded me that there are parts of Mozart’s vast output, even in this 250th anniversary year, that are unaccountably neglected.

Then it was a look at the cover story of the August Gramophone, which features a look at the young classical stars of today, including the British trumpeter Alison Balsom, who’s 27, and the Russian pianist Yevgeny Subdin, who’s 26. Paging through the blurbs about these singers, players and conductors, all apparently leading active, interesting careers, gave me a lot of hope about the musical future.

The one thing all three of these random encounters brought to mind again was that some critics of the classical life — and the jazz life, too — don’t have enough faith in the appeal of music in general, or understand how much of the spectrum of music is appealing to talented people.

While much of the critical world frets, the younger crowd is out quietly discovering the vast musical treasure house our common human culture offers them, and they’re making it their own. There’s no other reason a teenager needs to sing a 70-year-old song in a style that hasn’t been popular for decades, or that a young woman would want to begin a recording with trumpet pieces written 250 years ago, other than that the music still has something to say.

It never pays to hedge a bet on human creativity, or the capacity of talented people to take something as established as the sky and make a whole new firmament out of it.

Here’s another YouTube video, this one of the Hagen Quartet, an Austrian group, playing the opening movement of one of my all-time favorite pieces, the F major Quartet of Maurice Ravel. Head over to the site, and you can see the other three movements, too:

Citizen media doesn't skip classical

The popularity of the YouTube Web site is a manifestation of the idea of “citizen media,� the you-shoot-it, you-write-it approach to chronicling the events of daily life that our technology has made accessible and ubiquitous.

And classical music hasn’t been left out.

Above, for example, is Luke Pomorski, a Canadian cellist and Eastman grad (according to his Web site, Cello Journey) who uses the name Luke Stanley as a performer. Earlier this year he launched a podcast in which he simply plays his cello, offering chestnuts from Saint-Saëns, Fauré, Bach and David Popper.

In the first podcast, he offers the Prelude from the Suite No. 1 in G major (BWV 1007) of J.S. Bach.

This is decent playing, not flawless, but confidently and capably presented. I find something very sweet and low-key about this series that’s admirable and charming. He’s not doing anything other than sitting there and playing, assuming that if someone wants to come along and pay attention, he’s there.

The comments on the YouTube site are interesting, too, in that he gets plenty of praise from music lovers, advice from other cellists, and comments from aspiring cellists seeking inspiration.

As Hugh Sung (who is making an appearance here in West Palm as pianist for the violinist Stephanie Jeong next March) pointed out in his music-and-tech blog a while back, Stanley’s podcast is exactly the sort of thing that today’s technology makes possible and desirable for classical musicians.

It’s also an indication of what can happen when the leftover genteel-culture barriers to classical music are gone, and you’re left with a medium that leaves the music unmediated by any other expectations or stuffy accouterments. It’s the video equivalent of busking, and it makes an unvarnished appeal to listeners.

There is actually an enormous amount of music on the YouTube site, it seems to me, most of it pop, and much of that one form of advertising or another for a songwriter or a band. But there’s something touching and old-fashioned about it, too: You see a vast citizenry before you, engaged in what some would have you believe are outmoded pursuits such as playing instruments. It’s a window on our world that shows how geeky and generally nice all of us are, taking the time to drag out the old tuba, get someone to hold the camera, and play us a short solo.

I haven’t looked through all the videos on YouTube, obviously, so if there are other good classical clips you think are worth looking at, post them here.

In the meantime, applause all around for Luke Stanley and his series of cello-casts. May his tribe increase, and I don’t doubt that it will.

Bio shows art support debate is old one

Yesterday, I finished reading Rodney Bolt’s new biography of Lorenzo Da Ponte, the librettist of three great Mozart operas and the leader of an extraordinary life that ended in New York as Columbia College’s first teacher of Italian.

Da Ponte also tried, and briefly succeeded, in bringing Italian opera to New York in 1833. But Americans weren’t really ready for it:

Egalitarian America dismissed opera in a language it could not understand, and scorned the social pretensions surrounding it. The small class of people who might have supported Italian opera did not show the unstinting largesse of a European aristocracy to whom the form had so long been an integral part of society. They wanted their investment to be ‘proper and profitable.’…It was to be half a century before New York, after a few further false starts, gained a permanent opera house in the Metropolitan.

This raises those old questions about public and private patronage of the arts, and it’s no surprise to me that we have ever been thus. It’s a country founded on the idea of commerce, not patronage, and you’ll always find partisans on both sides of the debate as to whether state support or the marketplace is better for the health and spread of the music.

My question is this: Have we reached the point in which this debate is moot? In other words, has classical music been so fully integrated into the commercial mainstream as it exists now — in other words, as just another lifestyle choice — that the marketplace will support it as is?

There are some indications that this might be true. If I go to the Web sites of the Los Angeles and New York philharmonics, and to American Public Media's for the Minnesota Orchestra, just to name three off the top of my head, I can buy old and fresh concerts of old favorites (the last three Mozarts by the NY Phil) and living composers (Arvo Pärt and Louis Andriessen at the LA Phil).

I’ve still not been able to download any of these concerts, despite repeated tries, possibly because my work laptop won’t allow it, but the testimonials at the sites are worth noting. I like this one from the LA Phil:

The Pärt is one of the most entrancing pieces I’ve ever heard. The music just envelops you with sound — I didn’t think I’d like minimalism, but I was wrong. It’s not about a style — it’s about great music.

I can also cruise over to a radio slot on iTunes and hear, right now as I sit in a coffee shop in Delray (it’s Gizzi’s Coffee, a Denver-based chain that’s opened up a very nice shop here in my town — and they do live jazz on Tuesday nights), a good performance of a sinfonia concertante by J.C. Bach, in excellent sound piped right into my ears. I don’t have to move much from this keyboard to access a wealth of great performances and wonderful music.

And there are any number of Web sites that will link you directly to vast amounts of information about the music, its practitioners and upcoming events. Again, I can find out a great deal simply sitting here, nursing another 12-oz. cup of Guatemalan.

It appears to me still that this is a sign of health and of a strong niche market that will continue to improve as the years go on, and as more listeners are found through the egalitarian marketplace of the Web.

And yet, I still think it’s a good idea for there to be state support for this music. There are certain projects — new operas, for instance — that won’t ever make it off the ground without some investment, and it’s a sign of a country that cares about these things for there to be some public money to back up these efforts.

We still have the National Endowment for the Arts, but should it be expanded to say, guarantee music education in all the public schools? Should it establish orchestras, opera companies or smaller performing groups in rural towns away from cities so that people in far-off parts of the nation can hear this kind of music? (Here's a note from the NEA about when they focused on rural America.)

We used to do this — the Community Concerts, as I just wrote, brought big stars to exurban areas, and big-city symphonies routinely did national tours — but it seems to me that making certain live classical music can be heard across the country, and that there are the educators to explain it as a normal part of the life of a civilized person, is an exemplary use of my tax dollars.

We have more access to this great music than we ever did before, but we still need more access to live opera, live chamber music, live wrestling with the music in the nation’s classrooms. We might not have been ready in the 1830s, but we’re ready now, and we’ve been ready for a long time.

On the passing of Schwarzkopf

Here’s my Elisabeth Schwarzkopf memory, for what it’s worth:

I remember seeing the great soprano back in the mid-1970s, when she was on a recital tour for the old Community Concerts series. She came to our town with a program of lieder, most of which I don’t recall at this point except for the closing Richard Strauss set.

These were a revelation to the teenaged me, because the only thing I knew about Strauss was that he’d written these big, bloated pieces for orchestra that went on and on and that I didn’t like all that much. But here were these exquisite songs, songs I’d never heard, full of sumptuous melody and — this was important to me — beautiful piano parts.

I can hear right now in my mind Schwarzkopf singing Morgen!, which I now know is one of the most-loved of all Strauss songs, but which to me back then was brand-new and arrestingly gorgeous. The voice I hear now is powerful and firm, and with a darkish quality that somehow made the music more poignant and compelling.

The audience clapped in the middle of the piano postlude, as apparently it always does, according to my piano teacher, who complained about that the next day. “They ruined it!� she said, arguing that this was a well-known song that a good audience would have been familiar with, and which would have waited for the ending to play out.

They didn’t ruin it for me (and I’m sure I clapped early); the proof is that my appreciation for Strauss dates from that Schwarzkopf concert. I also learned something about the beauty of the song recital in general. Here was a format in which a great artist showed up at a hall, pianist in tow, and the two of them would simply create an entire universe of spellbinding music in the plainest of settings.

No bells, no whistles, no cannons, no magic tricks. Just a voice, a piano, and a literature of extraordinary depth and richness.

Not too long ago there was much talk in the classical world of the death of the song recital, and there aren’t enough of them most seasons to make me happy. But it survives, and with the right artist, and with a canny choice of repertoire, few other formats bring you in contact with so much great music in so brief a time.

And so I’m grateful to Elisabeth Schwarzkopf for coming to my town more than 30 years ago and opening my eyes to how much beautiful music there was in the world, and how marvelously it could be sung.

Much later, I learned about the Nazi affiliations of both Schwarzkopf and Strauss, and I admit I can't now hear their names without thinking about that. I didn't know about it at the time I heard her sing, and it hasn't affected my memory of that concert.

But it still makes me terribly sad.

If anyone else has memories of Schwarzkopf, who died Thursday at 90, please post them. Here’s how Pliable remembers her at On an Overgrown Path.

The art of writing small

I’ve been trying for the last few days to rediscover a URL I thought I’d copy-pasted, but must have erased accidentally. It was a piece from The Los Angeles Times, I think, that talked about classical composition these days, and it ended with a quote from a professor saying that he was going to add instruction in writing for podcasts and cellphones as part of his curriculum.

This truly is the art of writing small, and I personally have had a few months’ experience with this for the Post’s podcasts. And I have to say it’s a great exercise and really does tell you a lot about how to write short, and with plenty of pith and effect.

Most of the things I’ve written for our podcasts are around 15 or 20 seconds long, and here’s what I’ve learned:

a) You have to create a mood instantly. There’s no time in that short space for long argument. You have to be agitated, warm, sad, furiously energetic the second the music sounds. It’s best if the music reflects the story that’s come before it, but the same kind of music can also be heard differently depending on the piece that came before.

b) You can do any style you want, and the more the merrier. Writing for a short broadcast gives you ample opportunity to dig up every little sound bit you’ve ever heard, from jangling guitars to huge brass shouts to a mournful solo violin. I’m going to be doing more things on a MIDI or a synclavier of some kind (I hope), which will help bring up more textures, rhythms and colors, but it also makes me want to practice my guitar a little and play some things with it.

c) If you work far enough ahead, you can get other people to play for you. I’ve written things for violin, bassoon, flute, trumpet and a small concert band, and I’ve managed to wheedle my way into getting them to go through my stuff. It never takes very long, and it’s a weird kind of anonymous fame. “Hear that sax at the end of the piece on the citrus canker crisis? That was me!�

d) When trying to write for others quickly, you can’t write really difficult stuff. Sure, you want it to be challenging, so that the player gets some satisfaction out of the work, but you don’t want to make it too tough and delay its coming together. After all, you’re usually not paying for their services.

But the most important thing I’ve learned is how much you can say in a very restricted space. It’s been said many times that rules are actually less confining than total freedom, and in this case, it’s true. You have no time to say anything, you have to say something memorable, and you have to say it fast so you can get it done in a big hurry.

It’s the same sort of lesson I draw from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, actually. Those pieces show the power of one note against another, and how much music you can create with relatively small elements. As a composer, that’s been the single most important thing I’ve ever gotten from my musical studies.

And so I applaud that professor who wants to have his students write for media that will be able to use their work. It’s not only practical, but very instructive, and I think it will make better writers of them. What would be fun some day is to hear an entire concert of podcast bumps and ringtones in a series of suites. I bet we’d hear a lot of really interesting music.