minimania

Music and silence

After Gorecki’s death a few weeks back, one obituary in The Guardian gave a wonderful quote:

If you can live without music for two or three days, then don’t write – it might be better to spend the time with a girl or with a beer.

This was the answer he would give students who would ask him how to write music or what to write. And an excellent response it is – fun and to the point. But lately I’ve been thinking about it a lot and I actually think that my response would be different. My response would be "If you can live without silence for two or three days, then don’t write". I frequently go without listening to music for days at a time, not because I don’t want to listen to music but because I’ve not got enough silence in my life and if there’s more sound piling up on top of the sound that’s already causing chaos in my head – even if it’s music, and even if it’s music I’ve chosen – then I pretty quickly feel like I’m going insane. Without regular, large doses of silence, my brain frazzles and I can no longer find myself in my own head.

And I know I’m not the only one. Back in 1958, the wonderful Australian composer Peggy Glanville-Hicks wrote,

It is apparent that leisure and silence are absolute prerequisites for composers if they are to engage fully the many forms of awareness involved in creative activity. This leisure and silence have become the greatest luxuries in the modern world, and composers less than any other group in art or science are able to command it.

True leisure and silence have become incredibly rare, and even more so in the half-century since PG-H wrote those words. Of course a love of music and a need of music are of vital importance to anyone who would compose music – but I would venture to say that a love of, a need and respect for silence comes even before that.

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If you would like to find out more about Peggy Glanville-Hicks, read my article, Peggy Glanville-Hicks: A lifetime’s search for leisure and silence at minim-media.com

Reposted from caitlinrowley.com

Wrestling with counterpoint

OK. Counterpoint is just freakishly, mind-bending hard sometimes. I've been working on setting a couple of examples today and I've spent 2 hours on it and still the second one won't come good. But working through it, I'm gradually getting a better understanding of it and where I went wrong with it in the past. The various available intervals for beginning and ending ("should be an octave or unison, but can be a 5th or a 3rd" kind of thing) freaked me out before - how could I tell which was the right interval??? And so I was kind of semi-paralysed from the start. Today I really started to understand that it's a *composition* exercise. And so it doesn't hugely matter which one you pick, so long as you carry on properly and treat it right. This may seem overly simplistic and perhaps I am just a little dense, but the counterpoint course I did at uni was condensed into half a term and there just wasn't time to really understand what it was we were doing so it's taken this long to work that one out.

The other small revelation has been that, well, sometimes the given cantus firmus is just rubbish. The second one I'm working on today has a great long string of descending notes at the end of it, which makes it really, really hard to do anything interesting in the other part while sticking to the rules - there's no scope for correctly resolving dissonances, so I'm having to stick to consonances and frankly it's dull and difficult. But it's a useful lesson to learn, I guess.

I am finding, at least, that as I'm working through these exercises, I'm gradually internalising the rules. I look at an interval of, say, a perfect 5th now and find myself checking how I'm approaching it and leaving it, making sure I'm not doing anything wrong. I'm also finding that, as I'm playing through my work at the piano, I really AM hearing where things have gone wrong - when I played through the first version of the second one, I could tell instantly that the opening was wrong - and sure enough, when I looked at it, I found that I was leaving the opening perfect 5th by similar motion, with a skip in the soprano line (rather than a step as it should be), so that had to change.

I'm still a fair way off resolving the second one, but as we're going out tonight to hear Stephen Sondheim talk about his work, I should really cook our early dinner and get ready so we're not late. Tomorrow I will recommence the battle with exercise 2... then move on to the one in the alto clef. Oh boy, that'll be fun!

Notes at last

With every new piece - and doubly so when the piece has a deadline - I go through a period of trauma when ideas are starting to bubble, but there's no notes to write down. The longer this goes on, the crankier I get. Finally, of course, notes appear and are captured on the stave, and then the real composition can begin, but it's a fairly fraught time when they're there but not there. Today I got notes for the quintet, ending a tense few days. It's not really been too long this time, but the deadline factor and the inevitable socialising of having parents in the house, which makes it hard for me to really focus, made it seem an absolute aeon. In truth, it's really only been since Sunday though...

On Sunday I went to the Tate Modern with the parents and Djelibeybi, where my Da pointed out a group of Cy Twombly paintings I'd not seen before that he didn't think much of but which totally blew me away. They're not much to describe: Oatmealy-coloured giant canvases with swirls of red paint that's been allowed to drip down the canvas. Strange how something so simple can be so powerful.

Standing in the middle of these three paintings, I could feel a warmth emanating from them. And the more I looked, the more I saw. Ultimately they came to resemble a thicket of fiery willows. On second viewing on Tuesday, the bright red made me think of thorns and blood and violence - while still with the exciting, secure warmth of the original viewing in place. They set off a chain of thought which ran through concepts of enclosure - groves, fences, hugs, safety, security, claustrophobia, containment, standing stones, panic, contentment. I don't think any painting has ever elicited a response in me of such total contrasts - certainly not simultaneously.

Gradually I thought my way through all these conflicting ideas to come up with a concept for the piece. It seemed to me that I was really facing two concepts - one where the enclosure was a secure one - warm and soft and safe; the other where it was a form of containment - hard and cold and unyielding, resistant to any attempt to breach it. I started thinking about how to approach this in music and thought a bit about whether maybe the piece should be in two movements - one expressing each approach, but basically felt that this seemed a bit 'wet' and also that the safe and secure piece would be likely to be both a little dull and also stylistically unmatched to the other movement. Last night, after thinking about all this on and off for most of the day, I came to a vague conclusion that the piece should perhaps be a single movement, approximately expressing movement from safety and security to entrapment and panic and how easily something benign can seem suffocating.

So today's notes are fairly tame and - at the moment - they seem almost characterless. When I put them down this morning, they just sort of fell into place but it all seemed a little directionless. This afternoon though, I started listening to The Viola In My Life by Morton Feldman, who was recommended to me by a friend on Twitter, and I'm beginning to think that the judicious use of whitespace in the opening could be very effective in this context.

Not entirely sure what the next step will be. I'm feeling a need to do a lot of reading and listening at the moment - I'm more than halfway through John Adams' autobiography Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life, which is just awesome - I think it's one of the best composer biographies/autobiographies I've read because it focuses so much, not just on the music, but on the process of creating the music and the way his thinking changed as he composed each new piece. It's absolutely fascinating. I've also started reading Mark Rothko's The Artist's Reality which has been on my shelf for a while, and suddenly passionately wanting to start in on Alex Ross's The Rest Is Noise too. Sadly there are not enough hours in the day...

[Reblogged from caitlinrowley.com]