PENSÉES
THE MUSIC THAT HAS ALWAYS BEEN
A preamble to Wiośnianki "Spring Songs"
If you’ve ever been to a concert where a new piece is premiered and the composer is present, there might be an opportunity for the composer to speak about the piece, in a pre-concert chat or perhaps they write about the work in the programme notes. That’s what I’m going to do right now, but in an extended format, and also articulate the fundamental reason behind my recent creative work. The impetus behind it all, so to speak.
My talk is called “The Music That Always Has Been”, because lately I feel that composing is about listening and discovering- perhaps rediscovering- the music that is ravelled up inside of us, whether we listen to it or not. To quote Gary Saul Morson and Morton Shapiro, culture is not something that we are born separate from, and then dipped into, like Achilles into the River Styx. We are cultural from the outset. Born with culture. The dilemma is, are we paying attention to it?
To speak most plainly about this piece, WIOŚNIANKI is a setting of Polish children’s folk poetry, authored and edited by Edmund Bojanowski, and was intended for singing and learning by the children at a number of orphanages established by Bojanowski. For this work building orphanages and libraries for the poor, Bojanowski was given the title “Blessed” by the Catholic church in Poland. These orphanages (ochronki) that Bojanowski established were not only for parentless children, but also for children who had been neglected or from other destitute backgrounds. Bojanowski, despite being of noble heritage, did not want the children to forget their peasant heritage, and so he composed poetry inspired by their folk songs for them to sing and enjoy.
Considering most of these children came from rural, farm-labouring backgrounds, the poetry is rich in natural imagery. Thus we form a parallel also to the ancient Slavic tradition of wiośnianki (PL), vesnianky (UKR) viasnianky (BEL), spring songs, sung often in March in order to finally dispel winter and initiate the growing season.
It might seem strange for a composer, living and working today, to compose music setting 19th century Polish peasant poetry meant to be sung to orphans, and not write music about something, say, more pertinent. But, to again speak plainly, this is what I truly love about the creative freedom of being a composer: I can do what I want. At a great cost, sometimes.
But is it actually an artist’s imperative to be current, relevant, contemporary? In some ways, yes, but the lightning strike of inspiration, that bewitchment, often occurs in funny places. This piece, like many of my recent works, comes from a place of dissatisfaction. As I read Bojanowski’s poetry, and listened to field recordings of folk singers in Poland, western Ukraine and Belarus, most of them very elderly, it occurred to me that I was studying something that was practically dead. And yet, I could not shake the feeling that it was important for me to “show off” this world, this place and time, that our contemporary living have almost forgotten about. And I was not alone in this assertion. If we study the ways of the composers before us, we will notice something interesting. Bela Bartók. Sofia Gubaidulina. Claude Debussy, Igor Stravinsky. Carl Orff. Galina Ustvolskaya. Lou Harrison. Anton Webern. Meredith Monk. What do all these composers have in common? All are considered important artistic voices of the 20th and 21st century, participating in the vast and cataclysmic changes present in modern artistic life. Despite this, and their stylistic differences amongst each other, they all had one thing in common: They looked backward, sometimes far backward, instead of forward. What we often view as radical progress in 20th century art, is actually the return of the ancient and primitive, a strangeness and otherness channeled by what has been forgotten by modernity’s short attention span. Orff, Debussy, and Bartók were so horrified by late German Romanticism that it forced them to find new ground to stand on. On the other side of the coin, globalisation allowed composers to experience other paradigms of music making. The discovery of gamelan music, that ancient Indonesian musical tradition, at the 1889 Paris Exhibition Universelle delighted Debussy so much that he was inspired enough to abandon both his formalised conservatoire training and the last vestiges of Romanticism in his music.
This desire for new ground, for fresh soil to plant new roots in, is tied up with the chaos of the 20th century. In 2025, living at the “end of history” as Francis Fukuyama described, the era of post-post modernism, an unconscious longing finally spills out in unexpected ways. Sometimes virtual realities supersede our interest in the shared experience of the common material world. It is now possible to “check out” from modernity, rather than merely criticize it. And many do. Attend a Latin Catholic mass and find yourself surrounded by people who live their religion as if it was 1920. Slow living and cottagecore Instagram aesthetics invoke both a nostalgia for the past and a deep-seated resentment of modern living. The unipolar delights of progressivism and capitalism no longer delight us, as the system feels tired and evil, and we are forced to ask the question: has the baby been thrown out with the bathwater? Have we eradicated something that makes us feel grounded, real, and inspired?
I also think this problem is distinctly Canadian. If you are a second or third generation settler, you probably have very little understanding of where your family is from. Family stories and heirlooms are lost, names and places that had meaning and importance become unfamiliar.
Canada prides itself on being a “post-state” nation, but the cost of that is we are all obliged, almost required, to forget where we came from. I think about how less than a hundred years ago my great-grandparents were farming and logging to scrape out a living in both Poland and Alberta. They would have had more in common with people during Charlemagne’s reign, than with us today. I should also point out that I know nothing about farming! Hundreds, perhaps thousands of years of collective memory has been forgotten in less than a century.
What does this mean for composers? Are we also suffering from memory loss or a sense of discontinuity? And are we worse off because of it? I have noticed that lots of composers now operate as if the 20th century never happened, picking up from where music left off around 1890 or so. It is now permissible to “memory hole” that controversial era of music making when music was jarring, atonal, and bafflingly esoteric. Many desire a continuity with the past. But first we must reconcile with it. Or alternatively, begin at a new ground zero.
In Christos Hatzis’ 1996 essay “Towards A New Musical Paradigm”, he identifies, correctly, I believe, that the new ground zero for Western classical composition arrived not with atonality in the 1910’s, but rather with John Cage and the minimalist composers after World War II. This new paradigm is by far the biggest break from the dialectical traditions of Western music, a more overt rejection of the “Faustian” values of Western culture which thrives on discourse, to use an identifier borrowed from Oswald Spengler. Western music could now be non-dialectical, spiritual, meditative, ego-less.
Meanwhile, back In the conservatory, we study fugues, counterpoint, themes and variations, classical harmony, and when we begin composing and “finding our voice”, we are taught to reject this dialectic of composing music. Then we are taught to wrestle with the epistemological rift of post-1945 music, which bears little or no resemblance to any music before it, besides the obvious. And wrestle we do with this reality! As I struggled to choose a modern piece for my RCM piano exams, I cringed at the atonal, polytonal and sonoristic selections in my book.
“Ah, but this is how composers write music today. So learn to play it!” My piano teacher said. Of course, he could not explain to me why it was considered “right” to compose in this way, or understand it… Nor could I make sense of the massive void that seemed to separate the Romantic and the Modern repertoire in my RCM piano repertoire book. At that point I had already wanted to “check out” from the 20th century. That is not to say that there are many composers who work hard to reconcile musical tradition with post World War II “whatevers”. But I think most composers working today agree that there is still a very obvious rift, and a composer’s stylistic allegiance hinges majorly on how much they choose to accept or deny the heritage of 20th century musical experimentation.
We are now at a point where a complete rejection of this heritage is completely normal. Nevertheless, as I eventually warmed up to contemporary music, and started learning Anton Webern’s Variations for solo piano during my undergraduate music degree, I could not help but be fascinated by the fact that Webern, that great future visionary of Western music, was obsessed with medieval music and wrote a dissertation on Renaissance composer Heinrich Isaac! And so, curiosity was implanted in my head. Are “good” composers actually looking forward, or do most of them look backwards? Let’s look at some examples.
Where would Stockhausen, Webern, Goeyvaerts be without the numerology and isorhythms of medieval music theory? Where would Messiaen and Duruflé be without plainchant?Orff without ancient Greek drama? Ustvolskaya without znamenny chant? What of Stravinsky, Bartók, Janaček, and the folk music tradition? Górecki and Pärt without ancient Catholic and Orthodox singing traditions? Cage without the ancient wisdom of the I-Ching?
The list seems endless to me.Even Claude Debussy, possibly the first truly “modern” composer, considered himself an ancienniste, someone dedicated to antique culture! All of these composers sought out a tradition to build a new, radical practice. But why?
Dissatisfaction with a sclerotized musical tradition, perhaps. Richard Wagner had ultimately strangled them all. But also, they had a pessimism and anxiety about a “future” music. A fear of rootlessness, and also a fear of relying too much on what has already been done.
That is all the past. Now it is 2025. What is the right path to head on? Do we continue our ground-zero attitudes, or do we reconcile with the past and memory-hole Boulez and Stockhausen? I think the answer is somewhere in between. Emerging out of this “Age of Progress”, after capitalism, communism, fascism and globalisation, we are left with the sense that the “progress” that defined contemporary culture was not so much about progressing as it was destroying. Rituals, heritage, religion, regionalism, rurality, all casualties of modernity, or the more common desire regular people to “keep up with the Joneses”. Why hold to these old ways and traditions that make me look weird, old-fashioned, and even worse- small minded?
When Bartók transcribed his first folk song, and attempted, without Romantic sentimentality or whitewashed nationalism, to integrate the authentic feeling and power of the peasant music of his culture, this act was simultaneously a rejection of Western zeitgeist and a reconciliation of his training as a composer with the ethnic roots from whence he came. Bartók died in 1945, but he must have been aware of how much was being lost in the grand sweep of modernity at this point already.
May I suggest that there is something here for artists to do? To behave, in some sense, like cultural conservationists rather than pretending that art music is an extension of the rec and leisure industry? There is too much at stake and it all risks disappearing.
“Wiośnianki” is an invocation of a time and place that no longer exists. Although the melodies and notes are my own, my hope is that there is something to understand here. To remember and not forget. I have already talked about what it means to be rootless in modernity. To feel this deeply and artistically, is the “melancholy of the conservative”. When I say conservative, I mean in its most literal sense, one who conserves, in that we believe in the vitality and value of the past, and in some sense, possess a desire to make it live again, albeit temporarily. The melancholy, I believe, is the inevitable truth that the one who conserves is ultimately fighting a never ending battle of losses. That which is “old” will eventually give way to the new. Even in environmental conservation the victories are few and far between. However, it is important that we do not allow this sense of loss to burden or discourage us, rather to embrace the melancholy, and pretend that the past is alive before us and to let it temporarily bewitch us with its strangeness.
FOR THE COMPOSER WORKING IN 2024 -
An address to the Canadian League of Composers on September 20th, 2024
“I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry.”
In 1946 John Cage brought Western music to its final, existential, and some would say absurd conclusion: an evaporation into silence. And while composers have done their best to rebuild their world after this absolute zero moment, it strikes me that today Cage’s ideas are more important than ever, as our world is enveloped in a constant low-density static of worthless information that threatens this silence. An endless stream of advertisements, hot takes, distractions, and dopamine loops are a hand’s reach away. AI bots are able to generate bottomless pits of low quality blather to fill equally worthless space. The infinite well of desire that bewitches us so often ultimately fails to nourish us.
It seems ironic that it is the composer’s job to defend that silence, that blank contemplative canvas that humanity needs to thrive. But more than ever, we need to disarm the ego-building and chatter that inundates our senses, because it is not convenience and surface-level accessibility that we as composers seek, but rather a deepness and poignancy that only counter-cultural modes of operation provide: to say, “listen, here is something that was deeply thought out, a thing incarnated from beauty and desire.” Those “things”, that we as composers create through endless struggle and rumination, are desperately needed: the constructed rituals of silence, the opportunities for intense meditation on something rich, complex and beautiful, are wanted, whether the world is only in partial realisation of this phenomenon we can provide. Composers are needed to take that silence that serves as the foundation of a new world, and build something, not out of a desire to “say something” - because the world is already full of people who are so certain of themselves - but rather to speak the poetry of the silenced ego.
---------------
A MIDDLE AGED COMPOSER -
February 2024
This year I am turning 35, which means I officially age out of any possible competition, residency or grant that favours a "young composer". So, I am becoming a middle-aged composer this year by most artistic standards, and this has spurned some reflection on what I did as a "young" composer and what I do now.
As a younger composer, I composed freely without thinking much of the consequences. This is the charge of young composers anyways, simply to compose as much as possible because there are so many opportunities and so many people to impress. There is also less of a concern to be original in any sort of way. I tried my hardest to compose the best music I could write, but it's clear the best music I have written has only materialised after I turned 30 or so. But you're not going to get there if you don't compose a lot of music before that.
As a "middle-aged" composer, the act of composing is much harder. There is a terrible anxiety of saying something that is worth, something that is original. Ironically, being older means there are less people to impress. But that freedom makes things more difficult. Composing rarely brings me joy these days, although I find the "need" to compose is even more intense than when I was in school. There is also the immensely frustrating task of choosing what to write down. Music is by nature, an immaterial thing, and composing feels like pulling things "out of the air" and making the fleeting and immaterial become crudely material. While composing, I feel like there are so many solutions and beautiful notes I could write down, and it is frustrating to have to choose one of those wonderful solutions and write it down on paper. It's like pinning beautiful butterflies.
And of course, there is the serious question of self-doubt, which does not go away with age. I think it's important to let younger composers know that the things that impede our creativity- self-doubt, overexertion, imposter syndrome, etc., really don't go away as you get older. There is rarely the sense of "rest" that you might expect as you settle into middle age. I am not sure that it is the goal of the artist to be restful in any sense, anyways. Obviously this is hard. But what can you do besides not giving up?
--------
WHAT'S GOOD? -
November 2023
The question "what makes good music good?" is considered a silly one in this era of stylistic plurality, guarded well by the sacredness of "subjective interpretation" of art and conflict-averse climates at music institutions who would perhaps take the question seriously. Is it really that silly to consider that all good music has something in common? If you take into consideration only things like style and content, then, yes, it is silly.
I have listened to hundreds, perhaps thousands of hours of music, and it never occurred to me that what I was listening "for" in music was missing the point. The point being: good music always disarms the ego. It dissolves the protective shell around its listening subject. It makes them feel, dwell, it forces them to enter into something besides themselves. This is always the case with good music, and not the case with bad music. As I attend concert after concert of bad contemporary classical music, depressingly listening to another composer "working out" some insignificant problem in their dysfunctional aesthetic life, the crisis that we, composers, are constantly missing the basic task becomes apparent.
Those who know me will know that I am not criticising any particular school in contemporary music, because this is not a question of style whatsoever. Rather, it is a question that is difficult to articulate, but which the answer is extremely obvious.
------
Stylistic Morphology in the Music of Henryk Mikołaj Górecki, 1960-1974
A preamble to Wiośnianki "Spring Songs"
If you’ve ever been to a concert where a new piece is premiered and the composer is present, there might be an opportunity for the composer to speak about the piece, in a pre-concert chat or perhaps they write about the work in the programme notes. That’s what I’m going to do right now, but in an extended format, and also articulate the fundamental reason behind my recent creative work. The impetus behind it all, so to speak.
My talk is called “The Music That Always Has Been”, because lately I feel that composing is about listening and discovering- perhaps rediscovering- the music that is ravelled up inside of us, whether we listen to it or not. To quote Gary Saul Morson and Morton Shapiro, culture is not something that we are born separate from, and then dipped into, like Achilles into the River Styx. We are cultural from the outset. Born with culture. The dilemma is, are we paying attention to it?
To speak most plainly about this piece, WIOŚNIANKI is a setting of Polish children’s folk poetry, authored and edited by Edmund Bojanowski, and was intended for singing and learning by the children at a number of orphanages established by Bojanowski. For this work building orphanages and libraries for the poor, Bojanowski was given the title “Blessed” by the Catholic church in Poland. These orphanages (ochronki) that Bojanowski established were not only for parentless children, but also for children who had been neglected or from other destitute backgrounds. Bojanowski, despite being of noble heritage, did not want the children to forget their peasant heritage, and so he composed poetry inspired by their folk songs for them to sing and enjoy.
Considering most of these children came from rural, farm-labouring backgrounds, the poetry is rich in natural imagery. Thus we form a parallel also to the ancient Slavic tradition of wiośnianki (PL), vesnianky (UKR) viasnianky (BEL), spring songs, sung often in March in order to finally dispel winter and initiate the growing season.
It might seem strange for a composer, living and working today, to compose music setting 19th century Polish peasant poetry meant to be sung to orphans, and not write music about something, say, more pertinent. But, to again speak plainly, this is what I truly love about the creative freedom of being a composer: I can do what I want. At a great cost, sometimes.
But is it actually an artist’s imperative to be current, relevant, contemporary? In some ways, yes, but the lightning strike of inspiration, that bewitchment, often occurs in funny places. This piece, like many of my recent works, comes from a place of dissatisfaction. As I read Bojanowski’s poetry, and listened to field recordings of folk singers in Poland, western Ukraine and Belarus, most of them very elderly, it occurred to me that I was studying something that was practically dead. And yet, I could not shake the feeling that it was important for me to “show off” this world, this place and time, that our contemporary living have almost forgotten about. And I was not alone in this assertion. If we study the ways of the composers before us, we will notice something interesting. Bela Bartók. Sofia Gubaidulina. Claude Debussy, Igor Stravinsky. Carl Orff. Galina Ustvolskaya. Lou Harrison. Anton Webern. Meredith Monk. What do all these composers have in common? All are considered important artistic voices of the 20th and 21st century, participating in the vast and cataclysmic changes present in modern artistic life. Despite this, and their stylistic differences amongst each other, they all had one thing in common: They looked backward, sometimes far backward, instead of forward. What we often view as radical progress in 20th century art, is actually the return of the ancient and primitive, a strangeness and otherness channeled by what has been forgotten by modernity’s short attention span. Orff, Debussy, and Bartók were so horrified by late German Romanticism that it forced them to find new ground to stand on. On the other side of the coin, globalisation allowed composers to experience other paradigms of music making. The discovery of gamelan music, that ancient Indonesian musical tradition, at the 1889 Paris Exhibition Universelle delighted Debussy so much that he was inspired enough to abandon both his formalised conservatoire training and the last vestiges of Romanticism in his music.
This desire for new ground, for fresh soil to plant new roots in, is tied up with the chaos of the 20th century. In 2025, living at the “end of history” as Francis Fukuyama described, the era of post-post modernism, an unconscious longing finally spills out in unexpected ways. Sometimes virtual realities supersede our interest in the shared experience of the common material world. It is now possible to “check out” from modernity, rather than merely criticize it. And many do. Attend a Latin Catholic mass and find yourself surrounded by people who live their religion as if it was 1920. Slow living and cottagecore Instagram aesthetics invoke both a nostalgia for the past and a deep-seated resentment of modern living. The unipolar delights of progressivism and capitalism no longer delight us, as the system feels tired and evil, and we are forced to ask the question: has the baby been thrown out with the bathwater? Have we eradicated something that makes us feel grounded, real, and inspired?
I also think this problem is distinctly Canadian. If you are a second or third generation settler, you probably have very little understanding of where your family is from. Family stories and heirlooms are lost, names and places that had meaning and importance become unfamiliar.
Canada prides itself on being a “post-state” nation, but the cost of that is we are all obliged, almost required, to forget where we came from. I think about how less than a hundred years ago my great-grandparents were farming and logging to scrape out a living in both Poland and Alberta. They would have had more in common with people during Charlemagne’s reign, than with us today. I should also point out that I know nothing about farming! Hundreds, perhaps thousands of years of collective memory has been forgotten in less than a century.
What does this mean for composers? Are we also suffering from memory loss or a sense of discontinuity? And are we worse off because of it? I have noticed that lots of composers now operate as if the 20th century never happened, picking up from where music left off around 1890 or so. It is now permissible to “memory hole” that controversial era of music making when music was jarring, atonal, and bafflingly esoteric. Many desire a continuity with the past. But first we must reconcile with it. Or alternatively, begin at a new ground zero.
In Christos Hatzis’ 1996 essay “Towards A New Musical Paradigm”, he identifies, correctly, I believe, that the new ground zero for Western classical composition arrived not with atonality in the 1910’s, but rather with John Cage and the minimalist composers after World War II. This new paradigm is by far the biggest break from the dialectical traditions of Western music, a more overt rejection of the “Faustian” values of Western culture which thrives on discourse, to use an identifier borrowed from Oswald Spengler. Western music could now be non-dialectical, spiritual, meditative, ego-less.
Meanwhile, back In the conservatory, we study fugues, counterpoint, themes and variations, classical harmony, and when we begin composing and “finding our voice”, we are taught to reject this dialectic of composing music. Then we are taught to wrestle with the epistemological rift of post-1945 music, which bears little or no resemblance to any music before it, besides the obvious. And wrestle we do with this reality! As I struggled to choose a modern piece for my RCM piano exams, I cringed at the atonal, polytonal and sonoristic selections in my book.
“Ah, but this is how composers write music today. So learn to play it!” My piano teacher said. Of course, he could not explain to me why it was considered “right” to compose in this way, or understand it… Nor could I make sense of the massive void that seemed to separate the Romantic and the Modern repertoire in my RCM piano repertoire book. At that point I had already wanted to “check out” from the 20th century. That is not to say that there are many composers who work hard to reconcile musical tradition with post World War II “whatevers”. But I think most composers working today agree that there is still a very obvious rift, and a composer’s stylistic allegiance hinges majorly on how much they choose to accept or deny the heritage of 20th century musical experimentation.
We are now at a point where a complete rejection of this heritage is completely normal. Nevertheless, as I eventually warmed up to contemporary music, and started learning Anton Webern’s Variations for solo piano during my undergraduate music degree, I could not help but be fascinated by the fact that Webern, that great future visionary of Western music, was obsessed with medieval music and wrote a dissertation on Renaissance composer Heinrich Isaac! And so, curiosity was implanted in my head. Are “good” composers actually looking forward, or do most of them look backwards? Let’s look at some examples.
Where would Stockhausen, Webern, Goeyvaerts be without the numerology and isorhythms of medieval music theory? Where would Messiaen and Duruflé be without plainchant?Orff without ancient Greek drama? Ustvolskaya without znamenny chant? What of Stravinsky, Bartók, Janaček, and the folk music tradition? Górecki and Pärt without ancient Catholic and Orthodox singing traditions? Cage without the ancient wisdom of the I-Ching?
The list seems endless to me.Even Claude Debussy, possibly the first truly “modern” composer, considered himself an ancienniste, someone dedicated to antique culture! All of these composers sought out a tradition to build a new, radical practice. But why?
Dissatisfaction with a sclerotized musical tradition, perhaps. Richard Wagner had ultimately strangled them all. But also, they had a pessimism and anxiety about a “future” music. A fear of rootlessness, and also a fear of relying too much on what has already been done.
That is all the past. Now it is 2025. What is the right path to head on? Do we continue our ground-zero attitudes, or do we reconcile with the past and memory-hole Boulez and Stockhausen? I think the answer is somewhere in between. Emerging out of this “Age of Progress”, after capitalism, communism, fascism and globalisation, we are left with the sense that the “progress” that defined contemporary culture was not so much about progressing as it was destroying. Rituals, heritage, religion, regionalism, rurality, all casualties of modernity, or the more common desire regular people to “keep up with the Joneses”. Why hold to these old ways and traditions that make me look weird, old-fashioned, and even worse- small minded?
When Bartók transcribed his first folk song, and attempted, without Romantic sentimentality or whitewashed nationalism, to integrate the authentic feeling and power of the peasant music of his culture, this act was simultaneously a rejection of Western zeitgeist and a reconciliation of his training as a composer with the ethnic roots from whence he came. Bartók died in 1945, but he must have been aware of how much was being lost in the grand sweep of modernity at this point already.
May I suggest that there is something here for artists to do? To behave, in some sense, like cultural conservationists rather than pretending that art music is an extension of the rec and leisure industry? There is too much at stake and it all risks disappearing.
“Wiośnianki” is an invocation of a time and place that no longer exists. Although the melodies and notes are my own, my hope is that there is something to understand here. To remember and not forget. I have already talked about what it means to be rootless in modernity. To feel this deeply and artistically, is the “melancholy of the conservative”. When I say conservative, I mean in its most literal sense, one who conserves, in that we believe in the vitality and value of the past, and in some sense, possess a desire to make it live again, albeit temporarily. The melancholy, I believe, is the inevitable truth that the one who conserves is ultimately fighting a never ending battle of losses. That which is “old” will eventually give way to the new. Even in environmental conservation the victories are few and far between. However, it is important that we do not allow this sense of loss to burden or discourage us, rather to embrace the melancholy, and pretend that the past is alive before us and to let it temporarily bewitch us with its strangeness.
FOR THE COMPOSER WORKING IN 2024 -
An address to the Canadian League of Composers on September 20th, 2024
“I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry.”
In 1946 John Cage brought Western music to its final, existential, and some would say absurd conclusion: an evaporation into silence. And while composers have done their best to rebuild their world after this absolute zero moment, it strikes me that today Cage’s ideas are more important than ever, as our world is enveloped in a constant low-density static of worthless information that threatens this silence. An endless stream of advertisements, hot takes, distractions, and dopamine loops are a hand’s reach away. AI bots are able to generate bottomless pits of low quality blather to fill equally worthless space. The infinite well of desire that bewitches us so often ultimately fails to nourish us.
It seems ironic that it is the composer’s job to defend that silence, that blank contemplative canvas that humanity needs to thrive. But more than ever, we need to disarm the ego-building and chatter that inundates our senses, because it is not convenience and surface-level accessibility that we as composers seek, but rather a deepness and poignancy that only counter-cultural modes of operation provide: to say, “listen, here is something that was deeply thought out, a thing incarnated from beauty and desire.” Those “things”, that we as composers create through endless struggle and rumination, are desperately needed: the constructed rituals of silence, the opportunities for intense meditation on something rich, complex and beautiful, are wanted, whether the world is only in partial realisation of this phenomenon we can provide. Composers are needed to take that silence that serves as the foundation of a new world, and build something, not out of a desire to “say something” - because the world is already full of people who are so certain of themselves - but rather to speak the poetry of the silenced ego.
---------------
A MIDDLE AGED COMPOSER -
February 2024
This year I am turning 35, which means I officially age out of any possible competition, residency or grant that favours a "young composer". So, I am becoming a middle-aged composer this year by most artistic standards, and this has spurned some reflection on what I did as a "young" composer and what I do now.
As a younger composer, I composed freely without thinking much of the consequences. This is the charge of young composers anyways, simply to compose as much as possible because there are so many opportunities and so many people to impress. There is also less of a concern to be original in any sort of way. I tried my hardest to compose the best music I could write, but it's clear the best music I have written has only materialised after I turned 30 or so. But you're not going to get there if you don't compose a lot of music before that.
As a "middle-aged" composer, the act of composing is much harder. There is a terrible anxiety of saying something that is worth, something that is original. Ironically, being older means there are less people to impress. But that freedom makes things more difficult. Composing rarely brings me joy these days, although I find the "need" to compose is even more intense than when I was in school. There is also the immensely frustrating task of choosing what to write down. Music is by nature, an immaterial thing, and composing feels like pulling things "out of the air" and making the fleeting and immaterial become crudely material. While composing, I feel like there are so many solutions and beautiful notes I could write down, and it is frustrating to have to choose one of those wonderful solutions and write it down on paper. It's like pinning beautiful butterflies.
And of course, there is the serious question of self-doubt, which does not go away with age. I think it's important to let younger composers know that the things that impede our creativity- self-doubt, overexertion, imposter syndrome, etc., really don't go away as you get older. There is rarely the sense of "rest" that you might expect as you settle into middle age. I am not sure that it is the goal of the artist to be restful in any sense, anyways. Obviously this is hard. But what can you do besides not giving up?
--------
WHAT'S GOOD? -
November 2023
The question "what makes good music good?" is considered a silly one in this era of stylistic plurality, guarded well by the sacredness of "subjective interpretation" of art and conflict-averse climates at music institutions who would perhaps take the question seriously. Is it really that silly to consider that all good music has something in common? If you take into consideration only things like style and content, then, yes, it is silly.
I have listened to hundreds, perhaps thousands of hours of music, and it never occurred to me that what I was listening "for" in music was missing the point. The point being: good music always disarms the ego. It dissolves the protective shell around its listening subject. It makes them feel, dwell, it forces them to enter into something besides themselves. This is always the case with good music, and not the case with bad music. As I attend concert after concert of bad contemporary classical music, depressingly listening to another composer "working out" some insignificant problem in their dysfunctional aesthetic life, the crisis that we, composers, are constantly missing the basic task becomes apparent.
Those who know me will know that I am not criticising any particular school in contemporary music, because this is not a question of style whatsoever. Rather, it is a question that is difficult to articulate, but which the answer is extremely obvious.
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Stylistic Morphology in the Music of Henryk Mikołaj Górecki, 1960-1974
| stylistic_morphology_in_the_music_of_hen.pdf |
APHORISMS I.
I was listening to a score/audio Youtube video of Henryk Górecki’s String Quartet #1, which opens with this quiet polytonal canonic inversion, retrograde, retrograde-inversion thing. A Youtube commenter says,
“i don’t take a stand on the melody and it’s harmonization itself, but retrograding, inverting or twisting the melody in any theoretical way, doesn’t really add any musical value to it. Theoretical compositional techniques, especially the “mathematical” ones (that inversions, retrogrades, mirrors etc. are), are only helping hands and basic tools to help organize and control the pitch structure in composition. It should not be in any way an intrinsic value of music. If a melody or harmony of a piece is empty or dull, it still is, whether its theoretically intelligent or not.“
And of course, my brain just says “BACH” but I question that chemical reaction. As an old mentor said, “nobody cares about technique anymore”. Is this true? My centralized, academic personality says that these so-called occulted details are what make art “last”, so to say. It is trained musicians, scholars, publishers etc., that make a piece famous, not so much the public who often are forced to judge the quality of a piece based on a surface-listen.
Maybe I am wrong here.
After all, a good composer doesn’t often contemplate these questions, they write intentionally and often without contemplating the historical context of what they do. In my opinion, a composer who contemplates too heavily on their place in history will eventually be eaten alive by those prospects. But with Beethoven we hear the rage and see the motivic development in the scores. We have both. That's why Beethoven lasts.
[VI 2017]
II.
By far the greatest sin of musical modernism is that it pushed too hard, and now we must deal with the flabby, insipid art of its reactionaries and enemies.
[V 2017]
III.
FROM DIAMONDS GROW NOTHING, FROM SHIT GROWS FLOWERS
[V 2017]
IV. MUSIC IS NOT ABOUT SOUND
I begin this note with a quote by a colleague of mine, who, after repeated listening to Berio’s Ritorni degli Snovidenia, retired to this conclusion:
“I wanted to understand what the thirty-minute continuum sought to achieve, where it was going, what it was communicating, what it was saying, but I could see only colors –very beautiful colors, certainly – but only colors that have nothing to say other than what they are, nothing else but themselves despite obvious intersubjective networks.”
Art music of the last 100 years has been heavily preoccupied with the manipulation of tone colour, the orchestration of sound, so heavily and to such depth that for some composers it inundates the entire cognitive process of composition. Tone-artists such as Haas, Radelescu and Scelsi, once considered side-liners, are now viewed as important composers for opposing the mainstreams in 20th century art music. In the case of Scelsi, Haas and the Romanian spectralists, the manipulation of tone colour becomes an almost mystical, intuitive procedure, though this method is often filtered through quasi-scientific processes of spectral and wave-form analysis.
None of this is very surprising when taken into account the massive expansion in the 20th century of what constitutes musical tone. In fact, the separation between tone and noise begins to dissolve as composers plumb and extend the extreme parameters of pitch, volume and technique. Man goes to space, composers expand forward and outward. In the same way that the Sexual Revolution of the 60's greatly expanded the permissibilities, methods and varieties of sexual intercourse, so too did the increasing obsession with pushing the parameters of tone and tone production.
My criticism of spectralism in some way mirrors my criticism of the Sexual Revolution. In the same way that the Sexual Revolution increased the permissibilities of sexual intercourse but did almost nothing to improve the original intension and meaning of sex- as an expression of lovemaking- the expansions of tone production have not actually elevated the quality or meaning of music, but merely diversified its modes of production.
My allusion to the Sexual Revolution continues- in the same way that the Sexual Revolution obsesses over touch, sensuality, and liberality, the obsession with sound in composition at its worst reduces the art to a materialistic- and therefore “sensual” (erotic) procedure. This is not surprising, and in my opinion falls conveniently in line with modernity’s already burgeoned obsession with hypnogogia and eroticism in the arts and entertainment industry.
My main point here is that it is bad to think “materially” about music. Music is not about sound. Good music, like good art, will naturally transcend its materials. There is nothing inherently wrong with loving sound- but it is equivalent to taking pleasure in a beautiful nude body. Sound must be a scaffold to something else.
[IV 2017]
V. CRUX
Wagner said that the Crucifixion was the most important moment in time and space, and so to paint the Crucifixion, as so many artists have done, was to get at the heart of time and space.
Francis Bacon knew this too, although he chose to crucify himself, or his lover, or a homunculus instead of Christ.
The question for today is, how do you make Crucifixions over and over again when the nails hurt so much.
[VII 2017]
VI.
Me: If Beethoven was allowed to just repeat a four bar phrase without variation, why can’t I do that?
Gary Kulesha: Beethoven wasn’t allowed to do that either.
[II 2016]
VII.
Listeners complain about the "emotional disconnect" when they listen to contemporary classical music, but this is not endemic to the genre. Pop music is rife with it: hyper slick productions, autotuning and regular pulsating rhythms may be regular pop music characteristics, but it also plays to a feeling of detachment. There is an unrealness, an angelic, non-physical presence that dominates pop music this year. Study the history of pop music, and you realize that its aesthetic simply mirrors the effects of whatever illicit drug was popular at the time. In 2016 it seems to be mainly pills.
I watched a Puccini opera and it shook me out of this paradigm. The music is so passionately obsessed with authentic displays of love, death and tragedy. When I listen to Puccini it actually triggers a physiological defense mechanism in my body.
[2016]
VIII. BRAHMS: WOOD/METAL
Brahms is one of my favourite composers, although I will admit to only caring about the late piano works. Articulating my favour towards Brahms has always been problematic- but I defend on the basis that, like most good composers, Brahms is able to express the complexities and multiplicities of emotions and the human condition: the Op. 119 Rhapsody in Eb is simultaneously joyous and terrifying, victorious and tragic.
Tonight I was thinking about an interview with Shigesato Itoi, creator of the Mother series, where he discusses the logo for Mother 3:
“The logo for Mother 3 is its title composed of both wood and metal. Itoi states that when things that do not match at all are attached to one another, it is unsettling. In the only novel Itoi has written, Family Fall Out, he wrote about a hearse, which contains a ‘casket of both metal and wood,’ a contrast between organic and inorganic that ‘makes you feel a little weird.’ “
As disconnected as it may sound, this best describes the music of Brahms to me. The Op. 118 Intermezzo in A is overwhelmingly poignant, purple-red like heart blood, but is rife with subtle rhythmic canons that have a mechanistic and fatalistic quality. Like the chaconne, the canon is “locked- in” to its fate.
That is the music of Brahms- fatalistic, melancholic, and mechanistic: it is mainly about pain. The music moves hazily in a downward motion, clad in organic material that disguises inorganic underpinnings.
[2016]
XI. FORMALIZATION/PHANTOM PAIN
Formalizing a musical structure means experiencing phantom pain, but instead of still feeling a limb/organ that has been removed, the pain is a result of making a connection with an EXTRA limb that has been more or less willed into existence. Instead of making an incision to remove a limb or an organ, we make an incision to carve something into a whole. The “phantom pain” is the sensation that something IS there because it must be there.
See also: “House in the fog” –Britten
[IX 2015]
XII. POST-WAGNERIAN TIME
Western classical music was incubated mainly in the Church. Early and common-practice music, with its Messianic cycles of exposition, conflict and recapitulation, are built from allegories of Christian doctrine. In early music this extends down to the atomic level, to the laws of voice leading and dissonance control. Much, if not most, of contemporary music today, engages with this Western tradition of poetic discourse of tension/resolution, whether we personally choose to acknowledge it or not.
It is no surprise that the last vestiges of this tradition were overthrown after WWII, as Europe witnessed a massive decline in religious observance. Composers who eradicated the traditional practices of Western music, also indirectly eradicated the "Christianity" inherent in their music. For the composers who broke with this tradition, their alternative wellsprings of creativity lay principally in two areas: pre-Platonic artistic ritualism (the archaic), and the music and philosophies of non-Western cultures (Eastern philosophy and religion, music of indigenous Asian, African, and First Nations people).
But let's take a step back to the 19th century, when this truly began to unravel. Christian time is unidirectional: it begins with the creation of the universe, it extends for several millenia, then it ends with the second coming of Christ and the redemption of the world. This concept of time is built into the microsphere of tonality: the tension must release, the dominant 7th must lead to the tonic. Pieces of music must end, have a telos. Beginning with Wagner, composers began to learn how to stretch out harmonic tension to such a point that musical time begins to lose its unidirectionality. Consider the "Tristan chord". If one analyzes it, there is nothing shocking about it. No systems are broken, it can be re-spelled as a half-diminished seventh chord, etc. But the shocking thing about it is the sound, which is multidirectional: we are totally without a roadmap with this chord. The next step is whole-tone sonorities. Because the whole tone scale has such a limited amount of transpositions (only 2) and no leading tone, its potential for harmonic multidirectionality is intense. Scriabin also corrupts the Christianity of the dominant seventh chord: he begins to build entire musical works on strings of heavily altered dominant sonorities. He does not seek the tonic, but rather mystically wades through an alternative hell-scape, where the universe is just one facet on a hideous diamond.
As harmonic practices developed through the next decades, this multidirectional approach to harmony eventually progresses to an omnidirectionality, realized in the systems of dodecaphony and free atonality. As harmonic progression represents a flow of musical time, we can longer hold to a world-view of Christian time: instead we are embracing a musical space that is circular in nature, without clear endings, perforations or corners.
I was listening to a score/audio Youtube video of Henryk Górecki’s String Quartet #1, which opens with this quiet polytonal canonic inversion, retrograde, retrograde-inversion thing. A Youtube commenter says,
“i don’t take a stand on the melody and it’s harmonization itself, but retrograding, inverting or twisting the melody in any theoretical way, doesn’t really add any musical value to it. Theoretical compositional techniques, especially the “mathematical” ones (that inversions, retrogrades, mirrors etc. are), are only helping hands and basic tools to help organize and control the pitch structure in composition. It should not be in any way an intrinsic value of music. If a melody or harmony of a piece is empty or dull, it still is, whether its theoretically intelligent or not.“
And of course, my brain just says “BACH” but I question that chemical reaction. As an old mentor said, “nobody cares about technique anymore”. Is this true? My centralized, academic personality says that these so-called occulted details are what make art “last”, so to say. It is trained musicians, scholars, publishers etc., that make a piece famous, not so much the public who often are forced to judge the quality of a piece based on a surface-listen.
Maybe I am wrong here.
After all, a good composer doesn’t often contemplate these questions, they write intentionally and often without contemplating the historical context of what they do. In my opinion, a composer who contemplates too heavily on their place in history will eventually be eaten alive by those prospects. But with Beethoven we hear the rage and see the motivic development in the scores. We have both. That's why Beethoven lasts.
[VI 2017]
II.
By far the greatest sin of musical modernism is that it pushed too hard, and now we must deal with the flabby, insipid art of its reactionaries and enemies.
[V 2017]
III.
FROM DIAMONDS GROW NOTHING, FROM SHIT GROWS FLOWERS
[V 2017]
IV. MUSIC IS NOT ABOUT SOUND
I begin this note with a quote by a colleague of mine, who, after repeated listening to Berio’s Ritorni degli Snovidenia, retired to this conclusion:
“I wanted to understand what the thirty-minute continuum sought to achieve, where it was going, what it was communicating, what it was saying, but I could see only colors –very beautiful colors, certainly – but only colors that have nothing to say other than what they are, nothing else but themselves despite obvious intersubjective networks.”
Art music of the last 100 years has been heavily preoccupied with the manipulation of tone colour, the orchestration of sound, so heavily and to such depth that for some composers it inundates the entire cognitive process of composition. Tone-artists such as Haas, Radelescu and Scelsi, once considered side-liners, are now viewed as important composers for opposing the mainstreams in 20th century art music. In the case of Scelsi, Haas and the Romanian spectralists, the manipulation of tone colour becomes an almost mystical, intuitive procedure, though this method is often filtered through quasi-scientific processes of spectral and wave-form analysis.
None of this is very surprising when taken into account the massive expansion in the 20th century of what constitutes musical tone. In fact, the separation between tone and noise begins to dissolve as composers plumb and extend the extreme parameters of pitch, volume and technique. Man goes to space, composers expand forward and outward. In the same way that the Sexual Revolution of the 60's greatly expanded the permissibilities, methods and varieties of sexual intercourse, so too did the increasing obsession with pushing the parameters of tone and tone production.
My criticism of spectralism in some way mirrors my criticism of the Sexual Revolution. In the same way that the Sexual Revolution increased the permissibilities of sexual intercourse but did almost nothing to improve the original intension and meaning of sex- as an expression of lovemaking- the expansions of tone production have not actually elevated the quality or meaning of music, but merely diversified its modes of production.
My allusion to the Sexual Revolution continues- in the same way that the Sexual Revolution obsesses over touch, sensuality, and liberality, the obsession with sound in composition at its worst reduces the art to a materialistic- and therefore “sensual” (erotic) procedure. This is not surprising, and in my opinion falls conveniently in line with modernity’s already burgeoned obsession with hypnogogia and eroticism in the arts and entertainment industry.
My main point here is that it is bad to think “materially” about music. Music is not about sound. Good music, like good art, will naturally transcend its materials. There is nothing inherently wrong with loving sound- but it is equivalent to taking pleasure in a beautiful nude body. Sound must be a scaffold to something else.
[IV 2017]
V. CRUX
Wagner said that the Crucifixion was the most important moment in time and space, and so to paint the Crucifixion, as so many artists have done, was to get at the heart of time and space.
Francis Bacon knew this too, although he chose to crucify himself, or his lover, or a homunculus instead of Christ.
The question for today is, how do you make Crucifixions over and over again when the nails hurt so much.
[VII 2017]
VI.
Me: If Beethoven was allowed to just repeat a four bar phrase without variation, why can’t I do that?
Gary Kulesha: Beethoven wasn’t allowed to do that either.
[II 2016]
VII.
Listeners complain about the "emotional disconnect" when they listen to contemporary classical music, but this is not endemic to the genre. Pop music is rife with it: hyper slick productions, autotuning and regular pulsating rhythms may be regular pop music characteristics, but it also plays to a feeling of detachment. There is an unrealness, an angelic, non-physical presence that dominates pop music this year. Study the history of pop music, and you realize that its aesthetic simply mirrors the effects of whatever illicit drug was popular at the time. In 2016 it seems to be mainly pills.
I watched a Puccini opera and it shook me out of this paradigm. The music is so passionately obsessed with authentic displays of love, death and tragedy. When I listen to Puccini it actually triggers a physiological defense mechanism in my body.
[2016]
VIII. BRAHMS: WOOD/METAL
Brahms is one of my favourite composers, although I will admit to only caring about the late piano works. Articulating my favour towards Brahms has always been problematic- but I defend on the basis that, like most good composers, Brahms is able to express the complexities and multiplicities of emotions and the human condition: the Op. 119 Rhapsody in Eb is simultaneously joyous and terrifying, victorious and tragic.
Tonight I was thinking about an interview with Shigesato Itoi, creator of the Mother series, where he discusses the logo for Mother 3:
“The logo for Mother 3 is its title composed of both wood and metal. Itoi states that when things that do not match at all are attached to one another, it is unsettling. In the only novel Itoi has written, Family Fall Out, he wrote about a hearse, which contains a ‘casket of both metal and wood,’ a contrast between organic and inorganic that ‘makes you feel a little weird.’ “
As disconnected as it may sound, this best describes the music of Brahms to me. The Op. 118 Intermezzo in A is overwhelmingly poignant, purple-red like heart blood, but is rife with subtle rhythmic canons that have a mechanistic and fatalistic quality. Like the chaconne, the canon is “locked- in” to its fate.
That is the music of Brahms- fatalistic, melancholic, and mechanistic: it is mainly about pain. The music moves hazily in a downward motion, clad in organic material that disguises inorganic underpinnings.
[2016]
XI. FORMALIZATION/PHANTOM PAIN
Formalizing a musical structure means experiencing phantom pain, but instead of still feeling a limb/organ that has been removed, the pain is a result of making a connection with an EXTRA limb that has been more or less willed into existence. Instead of making an incision to remove a limb or an organ, we make an incision to carve something into a whole. The “phantom pain” is the sensation that something IS there because it must be there.
See also: “House in the fog” –Britten
[IX 2015]
XII. POST-WAGNERIAN TIME
Western classical music was incubated mainly in the Church. Early and common-practice music, with its Messianic cycles of exposition, conflict and recapitulation, are built from allegories of Christian doctrine. In early music this extends down to the atomic level, to the laws of voice leading and dissonance control. Much, if not most, of contemporary music today, engages with this Western tradition of poetic discourse of tension/resolution, whether we personally choose to acknowledge it or not.
It is no surprise that the last vestiges of this tradition were overthrown after WWII, as Europe witnessed a massive decline in religious observance. Composers who eradicated the traditional practices of Western music, also indirectly eradicated the "Christianity" inherent in their music. For the composers who broke with this tradition, their alternative wellsprings of creativity lay principally in two areas: pre-Platonic artistic ritualism (the archaic), and the music and philosophies of non-Western cultures (Eastern philosophy and religion, music of indigenous Asian, African, and First Nations people).
But let's take a step back to the 19th century, when this truly began to unravel. Christian time is unidirectional: it begins with the creation of the universe, it extends for several millenia, then it ends with the second coming of Christ and the redemption of the world. This concept of time is built into the microsphere of tonality: the tension must release, the dominant 7th must lead to the tonic. Pieces of music must end, have a telos. Beginning with Wagner, composers began to learn how to stretch out harmonic tension to such a point that musical time begins to lose its unidirectionality. Consider the "Tristan chord". If one analyzes it, there is nothing shocking about it. No systems are broken, it can be re-spelled as a half-diminished seventh chord, etc. But the shocking thing about it is the sound, which is multidirectional: we are totally without a roadmap with this chord. The next step is whole-tone sonorities. Because the whole tone scale has such a limited amount of transpositions (only 2) and no leading tone, its potential for harmonic multidirectionality is intense. Scriabin also corrupts the Christianity of the dominant seventh chord: he begins to build entire musical works on strings of heavily altered dominant sonorities. He does not seek the tonic, but rather mystically wades through an alternative hell-scape, where the universe is just one facet on a hideous diamond.
As harmonic practices developed through the next decades, this multidirectional approach to harmony eventually progresses to an omnidirectionality, realized in the systems of dodecaphony and free atonality. As harmonic progression represents a flow of musical time, we can longer hold to a world-view of Christian time: instead we are embracing a musical space that is circular in nature, without clear endings, perforations or corners.
