Coincidentally, at about the same time the obituary was published, I was thanked (thanked!) by a singer for paying attention to words and writing music that allows the singer to best express art in a natural way. I was puzzled by this, and the singer explained that not every composer seems to be working with the voice.

So this quote of Hoiby really struck me:

“Singers, you can’t fool them,” he said. “When they hear a song, they can tell right away if it’s going to make them sound good. And mine do.”

One can appreciate the confidence with which such a statement is made! But it is also worth considering the merit behind this idea. Instrumentalists, especially in an ensemble, can simply play the notes in front of them and trust that there is some internal logic in whatever the composer has written. (That’s not always true, by the way.)

But there is so much more at stake for a singer. Singers are much more sensitive to the natural rise and fall of language and the inherent drama in the music. They have to “get it” if they are to stand in front of an audience and successfully offer a musical experience. When any of this fails, the singer is not likely to sound good, however polished the performance.

I would suggest that Hoiby should have taken the quote a step further: Audiences can easily be fooled, but are less likely to be fooled by a song.

The post Another Lee Hoiby quote appeared first on Richard D. Russell.

Photo by Michelle V. Agins for the New York Times

So far, said Candace Hoyte, a supervisor at the Manhattan store, the instruments have drawn a steady stream of attention, especially from children. They skip past the video game stations and head straight for the instruments, banging away at Roland electronic drums or tapping on one of the dozen or so keyboards, she said.

What–passing up video games?! Perhaps parents might now start to serve up a musical instrument to their child rather than a new video game system.

And what might it suggest about the human condition–and about music–that the desire to express oneself through music is so appealing and such a draw?

I find myself wondering what kind of music education, if any, these children receive. Will they ever learn to play an instrument? To read music? To compose? For the sake of our shared humanity, I hope so!

The post Children Choose Music appeared first on Richard D. Russell.

Someone will come around and introduce themselves as a composer, and we’ll say, “That’s fine, that’s great, let’s see some scores!” We composers like to share our scores and have a look and see.

A lot more often than you would think, though, the composer in question will offer CDs instead.

This is met with some collective eye-rolling in conservatories. Does this person not know how to produce a score? Does this person even know how to read music? With software nowadays most people can create some kind of music and put it on a CD, but the printed score is still paramount in classical music. In fact, when seeing a new score for the first time, I know of several composers who refuse to even listen to the accompanying CD, as if this is demeaning in some way. The printed score, for these composers, is apparently all that matters.

And yet.

I mentioned in a prior post what John Harbison calls “us notes-and-rhythms composers.” Of course ¬†a philosophical argument can be made that music need not be limited to notes and rhythms. Almost every week the New York Times reviews some manner of concert that involves live electronics in some way: usually a laptop providing playback of samples or processing live sounds.¬†As well, these kinds of performances are not necessarily supposed to sound the same from performance to performance. It just so happens that, as with jazz or popular styles, the ability to read music can be rather incidental to someone’s inherent musicianship.

I’m not sure who is more at a loss here. On the one hand there is the aspiring young composer who might glean more by learning about theory, notation, etc.; on the other hand there is the conservatory that creates a firewall of musical literacy, one that keeps out a genuinely talented composer.

Is there a happy medium between the two?

The post The CD as music appeared first on Richard D. Russell.

New York City

This has become (and will continue to become) less necessary. In a July 30 2009 op-ed piece in the New York Times, Bill Wasik writes:

Online…the audience can be yours right away, direct and unmediated–if you can figure out how to find it…

In other words, why move to New York when you can just go online? The whole article, with all its implications, can be read here.

The post Why move to New York? appeared first on Richard D. Russell.

Andrew Bird

Ultimately, I think that writing about music is a deliberate act and has nothing to do with creating music. The latter is mostly an involuntary response to being alive.

He also writes:

I think we’ve all got a well that can be tapped and there follows the sort of sequencing or curating of one’s own ideas.

There’s some truth to this. I mull it over when I write about music. I deliberate over each word.

I do this when I write music, too, but my first instinct when composing is to just get it out. You should curate your ideas and collect them. It’s better not to edit yourself as as you go along. (As opposed to writing words, where I do edit as I go along.) The idea when writing music is to let the inspiration carry you, involuntarily, to where you need to go! Besides, you can always edit later, after all!

You can read Andrew Bird’s comments, along with several other songwriters, at this New York Times blog for songwirters.

The post Creating music | Writing about music appeared first on Richard D. Russell.

illustration by Thomas Fuchs

There seems no end to scientists trying to tie all the abstract loose ends of music into a neat little bow. The latest efforts explore the ways music can take the place of medicine. The idea is to have specific pieces composed not for aesthetic merit, but instead:

…to deliver specific stimuli ‚Äî dosages of rhythm, harmony or dissonance and timbre ‚Äî at the appropriate time and in an effective sequence.

It’s an interesting conceit to consider that we composers–not doctors–have the power to deliver a dose of medicine!

The article references, for instance, SourceTone Interactive Radio, “the world’s premiere music health service.” The whole phenomenon is reported by Matthew Gurewitsch in the New York Times. Click here for the full article.

The post Music is medicine appeared first on Richard D. Russell.

Dowd wrote, “[Hillary Clinton] has ignored some truisms of politics that her husband understands well: Sunny beats gloomy. Consistency beats flipping. Bedazzling beats begrudging. Confidence beats whining.” (NYTimes, 27 Feb 2008)

Whether Dowd’s assessment of Hillary Clinton is accurate is debatable. But I was reminded of some composers I’ve met who have had enormous success: Paul Moravec and Chen Yi and Jennifer Higdon, for instance, truly follow this non-whining, confident way of life. It might seem hard to live every day this way, but composition careers are about more than composing; politics counts, too.

The post A political lesson appeared first on Richard D. Russell.

For the second year I can proudly announce I have received an ASCAP award from The ASCAPLUS Awards Concert Division Panel. This year’s panel included New York Times critic Steve Smith and conductor JoAnn Falletta. The ASCAPLUS Awards Program is for writer members whose catalogs have prestige value for which they would not otherwise be compensated.

The post ASCAPlus Award appeared first on Richard D. Russell.

The subject at hand is: How do you teach this art? There aren’t too many good books out there that teach you how to be a writer (or a composer).

In her review, Barton points out that a

“difficulty faced by writing teachers is, paradoxically, the lack of interest many students show in reading.”

Isn’t this true amongst many composers, too? How often do we listen to something new, or do we always go back to the same standbys when we listen? Are we frequent concert goers, do we splurge on CDs by new composers, do we show an interest in composition?

Part of the problem is that reading (or “listening”) can be a chore. Who wants to be force-fed something they are not interested in? In her book, Prose suggests that we need to savor the experience, and that to do so

“may require some rewiring, unhooking the connection that makes you think you have to have an opinion about the book and reconnecting the wire to whatever terminal lets you see reading as something that might move or delight you.”

In other words, go out and listen to some music just for the joy of it!

The post Listening Like a Composer appeared first on Richard D. Russell.

What an interesting concept! But isn’t it true? Don’t we connect to Mozart’s age by hearing one of his symphonies? Don’t we get a sense of the confusion and disarray of early 20th Century Europe by hearing a Schoenberg string quartet? And what about negro spirituals? How about the jazz age music of Cole Porter?

And I wonder: How is the music we compose today reflective of our “time and space”? Is classical music adequate? Or must we look to popular music as being more representative?

In 100 years, what music will be listened to to reflect the “time and space” of the early 2000s?

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