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© 2006 Christopher M. Wright
All Rights Reserved

Featuring:.

Chris: Let's begin by talking about the usual way we approach a new piece. Masa?

Masa: It's hard to say. I write instinctively and don't use systems very much. Sometimes I start with a chord or a melody. Poems directly inspire me, so I work from texts when I write songs.

David: For me, it depends on the genre. For chamber music - piano and one, two, or three instruments, I usually think of a chord progression on the piano to start with. But what's just as important to me is the voicing and the rhythm. I start with some rhythm, play the chord progression, and add instruments on top of that. One instrument plays an introductory melody, then a second instrument enters, sometimes in harmony but usually starting the same melody while the first instrument goes off to do something else in counterpoint. The piano might pick up the melody at some point. The next section might go to another melody. There might be a third melody and then I start combining them - A and B together, B and C, A and C, all different combinations. Sometimes I purposely try to make the melodies sound like there's no way in the world they could go together, but I try to think of ways they can.

Chris: Is there anything you favor in your chord progressions, like going down the Circle of 5ths or root movements of a third?

David: No.

Chris: What do you mean by voicing and how does that make a difference?

David: I like to have open voicings where, if you think of a piano, the chord tones are spread out wide.

Chris: Like Aaron Copland.

David: Sometimes.

Chris: Are you working with simple triads or something more complex? One time you showed me a G-chord that didn't have a G in it and had an F at the bottom. I was really confused by that at the time but I'm studying jazz harmony where substitutions and upper structure triads occur all the time. Is that the kind of decision you're making at this point?

David: It can be. Not necessarily triads. It can be any combination of notes that sounds good.

Chris: How about rhythm?

David: I find a pattern and repeat it, not necessarily in every measure but in every second or fourth measure in different voices.

Chris: Like David, I usually start with a chord progressions. If I find a neat chord progression, everything happens from there. I'll play the progression over and over until, one day, a melody pops out at me. It's a process I call 'pearl-stringing'. The chords are the backbone - the string necklace - that keeps it all together. I get the main melody notes or 'pearls' from the chords and run them along the string. Now let's get into how the pieces we brought tonight are different from the way we usually work.

Masa: I brought my piece for two pianos, Prologues and Dances. It was an experiment. I used the serialist technique of composing with tone-rows. I never did that before or since. The first row is 12 notes across. The same notes go down the page, each starting another row, so there are 12 rows in all. The second row starts with the second note of the first row, the third row with the third note of the first row, etc.

Chris: Where did you get the first row? Is it something you heard or picked at random?

Masa: I played around with it on the piano until I got something I liked. As for the other notes in rows two through twelve, I keep the same intervals between notes as in the first row.

Chris: Let's see... Your first row starts with A and goes to E-flat which is the tritone. The second row starts with E-flat and goes to A, which is also the tritone relationship.

Masa: Right. The music starts in the right hand in one piano with the first row. The left hand enters in the second measure with the second row. I keep going through the rows as the piece goes along, except I add triads and rhythm changes. But I keep the basic pattern through most of it . In 12-tone music, you can invert the pattern [turn it upside down] or play it back-to-front - retrograde - or do both to make melodies or build the harmony. I played around with these techniques, but I also put some Chopin in the middle because I just couldn't help it [laughter]. I wrote this piece for my mother. She's an amateur pianist and used to play Chopin mazurkas all the time when I was a kid.

David: I like the fact that you didn't stick rigidly to a system but you used your ears.

Masa: Stravinsky used systems but he didn't stick to them, either. [See related discussion here.]

Chris: Let's listen. [Listen - view the score]

Chris: It's more complicated than I can absorb in a single listening. I see the meter is 4/4 in the beginning, but the Chopinesque waltz part is in 3/4. [Listen]

Masa: Oh yeah, I like to change all the time.

Chris: I must confess to you that I do not like serial music and, when you started laying out the tone rows, I thought to myself, 'uh oh.' But this does not sound like 12-tone atonal music to me. Are you using tonal centers?

Masa: I don't know. Nothing formal. The point is to be free. I'm not a trained composer, I've been a performer all my life.

Chris: Do you get ideas out of your hands? Sometimes, your hands do things and you say, 'ooh, I like that.'

Masa: Sometimes. And it's very dangerous [laughter]. You can write for a particular instrument and the notes will lay under the hands beautifully, but come up short on musicality. I try not to be so systematic. Musicality comes first for me. I don't much care for music without emotion. The basis of that for me is harmony and I chose the chords very carefully in this piece.

David: What strikes me about this piece are the wonderful rhythms. The rhythms come out throughout the whole piece. I'm a strong believer in rhythms and I think that gives it a lot of coherence.

Chris: The rhythms are very interesting. The humorous parts remind me of Louis Moreau Gottschalk, especially his piano work The Banjo. Do you know Gottschalk? He wrote a generation before Scott Joplin and was kind of a precursor to ragtime.

Masa: No, I don't know his piano music.

David: The harmonies Masa uses are not like Gottschalk's.

AMAZON LINK BELOW
Sample The Banjo

Chris: No, but there's something of the same spirit. Let's hear some of The Banjo.....

David: Yes. It's almost an expression of the same thing in different languages.

Chris: David, what did you bring us?

David: Masa went contemporary, but I reached back one or two hundred years, to something extremely traditional. Herndon - A Town in the Old Dominion was composed differently from anything else I've done. It's for orchestra and narrator, so I'm going to perform it while the orchestra parts are playing on CD. I was asked by the conductor of the Herndon Orchestra - it's defunct now - for a piece about Herndon [now a suburb of Washington, D.C.]. I contacted the Herndon Historical Society to see if anyone was interested in writing narration. They said, "That's a great idea! No, thank you." So I wrote it myself. I researched the history, wrote the narration, and composed the music around it. The Herndon Orchestra had a mix of players - some good, some not so good - and not the usual balance of instruments. So I tried to give good parts to the ones I knew were proficient and easy parts to the rest. There's only one horn part because there was only one horn player.

It's also different from another point of view. It's a mixture of original themes and traditional American folk tunes. I tried very hard to make it sound very 'Americana'. I was really glad to find a traditional song called Eliza Lee about sailing on a packet steamship. They had sails but they also had engines. It's exactly that type of ship that the first part of the story is about. William Lewis Herndon, born 1812, was the captain of a very famous packet ship. So here goes.... [Listen - view the score] "Herndon, a name to be proud of.... Captain Herndon became a national hero after he, along with 426 men, went down with the ship... Legend has it that the man who suggested that the town be named after the captain was himself a survivor of that fateful cruise...." [continues]

You'll recognize this next melody - a little bit of Shortnin' Bread.... Now here's Yankee Doodle and Dixie at the same time. [Laughter] [Listen - view the score]

Chris: You do like to combine themes!

David: [continuing the narration] "The famous raid of Mosby's Rangers ... on the town of Herndon ... was a Confederate success...."

Chris: [at conclusion] Masa, what were your impressions?

Masa: There isn't very much for string players.

David: There were only four string players in the whole orchestra - two violinists, a violist, and a cello which make up a string quartet. The orchestra had several flute and trumpet players, so I wrote a lot for them. You can't hear the strings when the other instruments are playing, so the rest of the orchestra is quiet in the section I wrote for string quartet.

Chris: One of the things I immediately like about this is the opening theme. [Listen - view the score] It's wonderful. You bring it back a couple of times and again towards the end. When you use a folk tune, it's not simply copied. There are combinations and permutations. How do you do that? Do you hear these things? Are there formulas you follow?

David: There's no requirement to quote a famous melody exactly. The harmony and the rhythms are the same. The melody I end up with is a little bit different, usually.

Chris: In one place, you approached the end of a quoted phrase, but then you took it in a different direction.

David: I probably wanted a transition to something else and just worked the tune a little bit until I got there.

Chris: You make it sound easy, but I'm sitting here thinking how difficult it would be for me. It's something I would agonize about for hours but you've got automatic ability for it. It comes naturally to you and you're very creative with it.

David: There are many melodies you could make that would fit the spirit of the song. Likewise, a lot of these folksongs like Shenandoah have more than one set of lyrics and you can take any variation you like.

Chris: That happened a lot with the cowboy songs, too.

Masa: When Commodore Perry came with guns and opened Japan to the West, soon after we had a new government that was eager to modernize in every aspect of society, including education. The government sent a delegate to America to meet with a famous educator who later came to Japan to help with the foundation of music education. He brought some American, Irish, and Scottish tunes for the students to sing. Many of the songs were based on the five-tone [pentatonic] scale to fit the Japanese tongue. And of course they put Japanese words to the tunes. One of them was Auld Lang Syne which was sung at graduations, and I didn't know, I thought it was a Japanese song! [Laughter]

David: Is that pentatonic?

Chris: [working it out on piano] Pretty close. Masa, what did you say when you heard it for the first time in America on New Year's Eve - 'thank you for playing this Japanese song in my honor'? [Laughter]

Masa: I'm a very mixed product, musically.

Chris: David, how did you ever think to combine Yankee Doodle and Dixie? Let me explain to Masa why this is meaningful - There was a civil war in the U.S. in the 1860s where the North fought the South. The North was the U.S. and the South was the Confederacy. Yankee Doodle was the theme song of the North and Dixie was the tune for the South. Combining the themes would have been sacrilegious at the time.

David: Dixie was Abraham Lincoln's favorite song [Lincoln was U.S. President during the Civil War].

Chris: There's a story about him at the end of the war, he was at a victory celebration and asked the band to play Dixie. That was the beginning of 'binding up the nation's wounds.' David, did you find the chords were the same for both themes?

David: No, you just combine them. And sometimes you might want to bend a note here or there, just to make them go together. It depends on how dissonant you want it to get. I tried all sorts of different relative keys until I got the best fit. I kept transposing one of them until I got the combination that sounded the best.

One other remark, I wanted to use the state song of Virginia because it's appropriate to the title [A Town in the Old Dominion]. At the time I wrote this, the state song was Carry Me Back to Old Virginny which is extremely racist. So I used Shenandoah instead, which is also about Virginia. Shenandoah has become the interim state song. However, it doesn't mention the State of Virginia, it mentions Missouri. [Laughter].

Chris: Thank you, David. On to my piece. I wrote out a few lines to illustrate why this piece is different from what I normally do. It's called March of the Triumphant. I went down to the National Mall in Washington, D.C. on Memorial Day weekend in 2004 to see the new World War II monument the day before it officially opened. After touring the monument, I was sitting near the fountain and a tune popped into my head. That doesn't happen very often, so it's an unusual starting point for me. Another thing that's different is that, for the very first time, I deconstructed the melody to see if I could use little pieces of it in various ways. Classical composers have been doing this kind of thematic or motivic development for hundreds of years, but it was the first time I tried it systematically from start to finish. My work prior to this was mostly what I call 'episodic' - collections of melodies that seem to fit together by mood to tell a story but don't use the same ingredients. Let's hear the whole thing, then I'll walk you through it section-by-section....

David: You had fun here....

Chris: Line One in the illustration is the main theme. One of the distinctive features in it is this jump up from the dominant to the tonic, like a horn call. I thought I ought to be able to use that in some way. One way I used it was in the introduction, Line Two in the illustration, where it jumps up the same way.

I only state the main theme once at the beginning, because it's better to leave people wanting to hear it again, and only bring it back at the end with all forces. At the beginning, I start the theme again but immediately take it in a different direction and make a new melody with some of the same rhythmic elements in the main theme - Line Three in the illustration.

Another thing that happened for me this time is naturally occurring modulation [change of key] - Line Four.

David: Actually, you modulate quite a bit and that's why I said you were having fun.

Chris: I don't know about other modulations, but I do use false relation in this piece - chords that don't normally go together, from different keys. Line Five is an example of a new melody built from previously used ingredients - the jump up, the dotted rhythm.

I also wanted to tell you about the cadence that finishes the 'A' section and again in a different key in the last section before the main theme returns. First I go to the raised seventh [classical harmony] then the flat-seventh [modal harmony]. It's the first time I ever did that, but it sounded right to me.

For the return of the main theme, I used what's called the arpeggiator in my music software. It takes a chord and turns it into arpeggios for you automatically, so the notes sound one after the other in sequence. You can control how fast and how loud they sound. So there's a lot of little notes running up and down that you can't really hear, but they add texture to the last section. They're just smoke in the background. One of the things that bothers me about early electronic music is that composers had lots of new sounds and effects to play with, but more often than not ended up doing something unmusical or garish with them. So I tried to be very tasteful and restrained with my first use of the arpeggiator.

As for other aspects of what I did, my guiding aesthetic principle is unity and contrast - you want elements to repeat enough for the piece to hang together, but not enough to be boring. So the idea is to repeat with variation. It's kind of a universal principle you find in the visual arts as well, because people find beauty in patterns and variations on patterns. Motivic or thematic development - where you spin out new melodic lines from the same basic patterns, cells, or ideas - that's one way to put these principles into practice.

David: Do you consider Line One and Line Four to be the same theme?

Chris: No, Line Four is a new motivically generated melody using some of the same ingredients found in Line One.

David: Right, the melody is totally different, but the rhythm is very similar. That's a trick I like to use. It adds to the coherence but you get contrast simultaneously. The contrast is in the melody and the unity is in the rhythm. I think that rhythm strongly unifies it. You don't get bored with the same melody all over again, but it sounds like it's part of the same piece. It doesn't sound like you went to left field. It still belongs together, that's the unity.

Chris: I never thought about this but I guess people have a higher tolerance for hearing the same rhythm than for hearing the same melody over and over again.

David: Right.

Masa: I think you can repeat a melody as much as you want. Look at Revel's Bolero. [Laughter]

David: That's an extreme example. But he does vary the orchestration.

Chris: There's a story, I don't know if it's true or not. Ravel said he wouldn't consider himself famous until he heard one of his tunes on the street. One day, he walks by a street vendor who's whistling Bolero, and Ravel thinks to himself, 'yep, I finally made it.'

Masa: Probably not. I heard he hated to be called 'the composer of Bolero'.

David: Chris, I think you met your goal of having unity and contrast simultaneously.

Chris: Thank you.

David: What I don't like is when composers start and it sounds great, but then they go to left field as if they just took two things that don't belong together and pushed them together. You often hear that in modern composers.

Chris: Would you apply the same criticism to an episodic structure like I was describing before?

David: Sometimes you can stop and start something totally different. That can be OK. It depends on how they go together, I can't explain it. It's one of those things, you know it when you hear it.

Chris: The use of a contrasting 'B' section is a common device and that can work.

David: Of course. It's when you have a contrasting 'B' and a 'C' and a 'D' and none of them feel like they really belong to the same piece.

Masa: I think you have to ask whether it flows as a piece. You can't calculate it too much beforehand. The contrast, the development, whatever - does it flow?

David: This piece does flow.

Masa: Oh yeah, I was talking about something drastic, totally different, that doesn't flow.

David: A lot of sudden strong contrasts won't sound right.

Chris: This has been a fun evening, thank you both.

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© 2006 Christopher M. Wright
All Rights Reserved - This material may not be republished, rebroadcast, rewritten, redistributed, resold, or manipulated in any form.

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