*  *  *
 Launch AIMradio1
*  *  *
Home
Interviews
Recommendations
Adventures in Film
ComposerRoundtable
Spotlight Artists
Sign of the Times
*  *  *

© 2005 Christopher M. Wright
All Rights Reserved

Featuring:

Brian Wilbur Grundstrom (www.brianwilbur.com) obtained a B.A. in music from Gettysburg College and an MBA in Arts Administration from SUNY Binghamton. He has twice been a finalist in the Composer's Guild Composition Competition, and received an American Composers Forum's Performance Incentive Fund award with Pianist Craig Randal Johnson. Brian recently moved to Washington, D.C. and is now a database administrator for the Washington National Opera. He continues composition studies with John David Earnest. Brian sang with the New York City Gay Men's Chorus for over eight years.

Gregg Martin (www.greggmartin.net) received his B.S. in Music Technology from the College of Saint Rose in Albany New York. He studied composition for eight years with Timothy Luby. Gregg has received grants from the New York State Council for the Arts, the American Composers Forum, the Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation, the Eugene and Agnes Meyer Foundation and was composer-in-residence at All Souls Church, Unitarian, in Washington D.C. in 2001-2002. He received a commission to write an a capella piece for the consecration of the Kunchab Ling Temple, seat of the Sakya tradition in the United States. Gregg's compositional endeavors extend to electronica and film. He currently resides in Washington D.C. with his wife Karyn and two children Tara and Riley.

Chris: The theme for tonight is extending tonality. Ever since Bach perfected the major-minor tonal system, composers have been faced with the challenge of keeping tonality interesting. Wagner stretched it to the breaking point with chromaticism and Debussy enriched it with ninth chords, new sonorities, and unusual scales. Brian, tell us about your piece and how you dealt with tonality. [Listen to Celebration! (MP3 - 7.7MB) and follow the score here.]

Brian: I wrote Celebration! without a key signature so I could use a lot of sharps and flats without worrying about what key I was in. It ends in C and, for some, that may fix it in their minds as being in C, but I didn't conceptualize it that way. When I compose, it's all about what I hear. Only if I'm in a quandary do I stop and try to figure out what's going on. I don't know what's going on theoretically in this piece, to tell you the truth. It was even weirder but I toned it down.

Chris: There is something of a tonal center. It sounds like you go in and out of tonality as the spirit moves you.

Brian: I always put practice before theory. It's how I write. Practice always preceded theory until Schoenberg, who flipped it around. I am not in the Schoenberg camp.

Chris: Have you since discovered a system in what you hear?

Brian: My first Music for Piano Solo was atonal. I was trying to find my voice. I don't write like that today. But it freed me and I still use some of those ideas.

Amazon Link Below
Gregg: Speaking of finding your own voice, the music for the film The Piano has an 18th century feel, but you still know it's Michael Nyman. His voice really comes through.

Brian: Philip Glass is another example of someone who is unmistakable with a voice all his own.

Chris: In both music and art, there don't seem to be any real strong schools drawing people in at the moment. What we have instead are unique individual voices and it will stay that way until another school comes along and takes hold.

Amazon Link Below
Brian: You still need a context for what you're hearing or it's just noise. I took a friend to Einstein on the Beach, the Philip Glass opera. The friend left after five minutes. I went back to see the second performance and all of a sudden it blossomed for me. I heard long melodic lines and it all started making sense. It's a question of how far you can take your listeners from where they are now. Philip Glass takes them a little way from familiar classics and pop music, but Schoenberg is somewhere across the Atlantic.

Chris: I'd put it a little differently. You can't ask them to stretch without first building a bridge of familiarity.

Gregg: The atonal serialist and tone row techniques of the 20th century lost out. Schoenberg stopped using tone rows and Webern's last student abandoned atonality. New music today doesn't ask people to stretch as far as atonality did. But here's the real problem: People in the U.S. don't want any new music, period. Even pop stars who drift away from their familiar style lose their audience. In Europe, it's a different story. People are dying for new music there.

Brian: OK, if atonality no longer dominates new music and we're back to writing music with tonal elements, how do you keep it interesting? Think of the deceptive cadence. A standard chord progression returns to the tonic (i.e., I-IV-V-I), which creates the expectation of finishing on the tonic (I). But if instead of returning to the tonic, it goes to the submediant (vi) (i.e., I-IV-V-vi), the expectation of returning to the tonic is not satisfied, but is replaced with a less expected possibility. The piece throws a little curve and keeps going. That's like moving somebody from 'the boy throws the ball' in a first-grade reader to 'the boy throws the chess set' - it rocks the boat a little bit.

Chris: But if you try to jump all the way from there to 'the alien excoriated the imagination,' you'll lose the audience because the bridge of familiarity has not been built.

Gregg: That's why you get a lot of substitution chords in jazz. The music of Tin Pan Alley is full of those kinds of substitutions.

Chris: Right, a bridge of familiarity and one new element.

Gregg: Do you think that Cole Porter was writing tonal music?

Amazon Link Below
Brian: Yes.

Gregg: No, he was writing singable melodies. He made so many substitutions in the harmony that you're no longer looking at common practice chords.

Brian: To make that work, you have to repeat the melodies more than once, but without being 'Bolero' about it [referring to Ravel's Bolero where the entire piece consists of a repeated melody - Amazon Link Below]. You repeat with variation. In Celebration!, I introduce the main theme in clarinet and bring it back at the end in tutti [full orchestra]. Audiences latch on to strong melodies so I make my other melodic ideas repeat also. Nebulous transitions are nice, but audiences don't leave the hall singing them. Actually, it's been argued you shouldn't repeat your melodies enough to let people sing those either, but repetition is still the key to hooking the audience.

Chris: That's because we discern beauty in patterns.

Gregg: There's something to be said for the 'one new element at a time' idea. I had a composition student who wrote what sounded like a jumble to me. I asked her what was the most important idea she wanted to put across in that section. She said it was the rhythm, which was different from what went before. I told her she should keep the melody and harmony really simple so the audience doesn't have to work to get them. Then they'll be able to absorb the crazy rhythm and the piece will have direction. She didn't believe me but she tried it and it worked.

Brian: At measure 76, I echo and layer the main theme. It repeats in different voices. I have the bass in a hard driving rhythm with a broad simple melody on top of it.

Gregg: It's a solid structure. Each line is simple.

Brian: But when you put it all together, it comes out this really cool thing.

Chris: Let's hear it again....

Gregg: It sounds like Benjamin Britten.

Brian: I'm using a lot of imitation and pizzicato strings.

Chris: I hear Copland.

Brian: People say Copland a lot. It's the open structure [wide spaces between higher and lower notes]. I added tympani and triangle later and that helped with the forward movement.

Chris: It doesn't sound dissonant to me.

Gregg: Like Duke Ellington said, 'if it sounds good, it is good.'

Chris: Let's go on to Gregg's piece.

Gregg: El Jaleo [listen here] was commissioned by a woodwind trio [Sacha Place, flutist, Theresa Antonetti-Trigiani, oboist, and Alan Michels, bassoonist]. They wanted something a little showy, but not off the wall because that wasn't the taste of their financial backers. It's a Spanish dance suite - a habañera which is grandfather to the tango, followed by an ibiza which I named for the party capital of all of Europe where trance music has a big following, and, finally, a standard bolero. If you walk around at festival time in San Mateo on Ibiza, you'll hear all of these intertwined and layered and that's what I tried to do in the fourth and final section. It was a challenge with just three instruments.

Chris: Let's listen to it.

Brian: I love the oboe... I like the fast runs.

Gregg: They're just scales. Chris, I see you're tapping your foot even after the driving bass line drops out and the melody continues on by itself.

Brian: That's a recognized technique. After establishing a rhythm, it becomes implied even though it may not be stated explicitly.

Gregg: Now we're in the fourth section. The opening bars come from the first section, but then the trance beat enters in.... Now the habañera. So I'm using elements from the dance forms, but the end result is stylized, a pastiche of them all.

Chris: How much research did you do on these forms?

Gregg: A great deal. That's the way I start all my pieces.

Chris: Me too.

Gregg: Then I map everything out - eight bars of introduction, the harmonic progressions, everything. Good music can happen by accident, but I don't want to work that way. I might noodle and get some ideas, but there's a whole process I go through.

Chris: Your use of folk elements is pretty straightforward, closer to Granados than Albéniz who abstracted a bit.

Gregg: The bassoonist I was writing for and his wife lived in Spain, so that sparked the Spanish dance thing for me. I had people come up to me after the performance and ask if I had ever been to Spain, but I hadn't.

Brian: What did you do here that influenced your later writing?

Gregg: The harmony. I had always used a lot of static harmony prior to this - like Philip Glass, F-A-C, F-A-C, F-A-D, F-A-D. This piece is where I started using more modal coloration and upper chord extensions beyond the interval of a third.

Chris: What is your approach to keeping tonality interesting?

Gregg: I go for effect. If I want something evil, I might use serialism. Or if I want something 18th century, I might start out like Mozart but then it can be anything I want it to be. But there are certain rules that shouldn't be abandoned, like the rule against parallel fifths, unless that's the effect you want, like Debussy's Sunken Cathedral [Amazon Link Below]. I also keep things interesting with high drama. I started my piece Gloria on September 13, 2001 and I knew it had to be glorious because of what happened on 9/11.

Chris: Do you follow your ear like Brian?

Gregg: Not entirely. You need a strong final progression and the climax won't work if what goes before isn't solid. The bigger the score, the more structure you need. You gotta have some sort of blueprint.

Brian: Your piece has to go someplace, so you have to think about where you want to take it. There's a craft to making music and you have to learn it, just like you have to be an apprentice before you get to be a journeyman or master. I use my ear, but I've absorbed years of study. One time, I analyzed a piece after I wrote it and I found a tonic-dominant (I-V) key relationship and I said to myself, 'aha, I can do this.'

Amazon Link Below
Chris: I once read a tortured and not very convincing article arguing that every single note Stravinsky wrote in The Rite of Spring was derived from the octatonic scale. I happen to have a vinyl LP of Stravinsky conducting Stravinsky in The Rite of Spring, and Stravinsky wrote extensive notes for the back cover. In the last paragraph, he said he was often asked whether he used a system to compose The Rite of Spring. His answer - 'There was no system. I followed my ear.' Well, he undoubtedly had internalized the octatonic scale and used it extensively in The Rite of Spring without consciously trying to do so. But anyone who thinks a single system explains the entire work is just plain wrong and we have Stravinsky's own words to prove it.

Gregg: His music sounds right because he internalized all the rules.

Chris: On to my piece, Bent for synthesizer [sample here - free full-length download here], which is a result of my study of the octatonic scales - eight-tone scales composed of alternating whole and half steps. There are basically two of them, one starting with a whole step and the other with a half step. Bent is not octatonic the whole way through, but I used octatonic patterns in my first chord progression and in the unison melody later. I haven't analyzed it closely and undoubtedly a lot if it is tonal - i.e., in a key - but the feeling I got from fooling around with octatonic runs and patterns suffused the whole piece for me. It's such an odd sound.

Gregg: You're essentially writing electronica.

Chris: Debussy was the first to really open up the color palette. Haydn wrote his symphonies mostly in strings, but with Debussy you get whole new sonorities with woodwinds out front on top of gongs and harps and other unusual instruments. With synthesizers, you can take the idea further.

Gregg: Brian Eno [who originated electronic ambient music in the 1970s] is good for that. He really opens up a range of sound beyond the standard orchestra.

Chris: Thank you both for being my guests.

SHARE 
Digg | Del.icio.us | Reddit
Facebook | StumbleUpon | My Web
Newsvine | Mixx | Dig Article