Letter to a Young Composer

On excavation, adjacencies, and what it means to have a "voice."

When I was in my twenties—making rent by teaching piano lessons to emotionally undernourished children of wealthy Manhattanites while carrying out my own ad hoc post-college studies in music—I held some fairly parochial and intellectually incoherent beliefs about music, particularly when it came to the concept of innovation. I believed that music had progressed, historically speaking, in a linear fashion, and that progress was synonymous with complexity. By this logic, one could trace the evolution of music from generation to generation by its increasing harmonic, rhythmic, and timbral sophistication. To have a voice, I thought, meant making a break with the past, or at the very least, moving resolutely away from it.¹

In those days, I was quick to dismiss as pastiche anything with obvious historical reference points, thumbing my nose at new concert works that were, in my estimation, too dependent on functional harmony. Meanwhile, when it came to popular song, I rejected music that was overly diatonic, that lacked the pungency of chromaticism or the slipperiness of unexpected chord changes. There were figures in my life who tried to free me from this punishingly binary view of art, but I was stubborn. And in clinging to this dogma, I turned away from a good deal of music that might otherwise have moved me.

At some point in the last decade, this attitude began to shift. Some of this I suspect has to do with getting older. With age, the polemical often gives way to the practical. But it also had to do with encountering work, which, despite having been built from a familiar set of sonic reference points, I found electrifying. Sometimes, this was music I had initially found repellant because, again, according to some arbitrary set of aesthetic metrics, it failed to meet my prescribed standard of newness. But when I surrendered to these sounds and stopped judging, I discovered that it worked on my heart in ways that were both powerfully unexpected, and unexpectedly powerful. 

All of this was on my mind a few weeks ago, when I led a performance of Julius Eastman’s Stay On It to conclude this season’s first installment of Open Music, the concert series I curate for the Oregon Symphony. Stay On It is in some ways akin to a recipe written by an impressionist. There is an ingredient list, but the directions for treating the component parts are hazy at best. The score for Stay On It comprises a series of musical cells — none more than a few bars long — which are to be played in some vaguely preordained sequence, then on top of each other, interspersed with improvisation. Some performances last no more than eight minutes, others stretch to an hour. (I’m a fan of the concise recording by the LA-based group, Wild Up.)

Julius Eastman, credit: Chris Rusniak

If one were to look at these cells on paper and in isolation, one would think them little more than the discarded scraps of a Not Particularly Distinguished Composer. The main figure is in F# mixolydian (a major scale with a lowered seventh), with a simple clave that points toward groove-based pop music. (Indeed, Eastman, writing in 1973, understood this work to be an explicit engagement with, and response to, the pop music of its day.) Some of the other cells interlock within this groove, while, later in the piece, Eastman introduces figures that lead to a deconstruction resembling controlled chaos. Here, the pop sensibility comes into conflict with the steely modernism of the early-mid 20th century. Nothing particularly groundbreaking. 

And yet, my experience of listening to the piece in various renderings—and of performing it—is one of ecstatic wonderment. Somehow, between the notes, within them, in the air that grows elastic in their midst, Eastman creates an energy that reliably infects performers and audiences with his spirit: joyful, irreverent, mischievous, incandescent. Part of me thinks that this palpable emotional current has to do with the freedom Eastman affords performers in making the work their own. That is to say, in leaving a huge number of decisions to the players, the composer creates a generous, generative space in which the work’s interpreters can express themselves. But I can point to more prescriptive works by other composers—say, the string quartets of Caroline Shaw, or those by, I dunno, Ludwig van Beethoven, who prided himself on building cathedrals out of clay—which are wrought from similarly familiar materials, and yet there, too, something wholly original emerges. 

Their respective bodies of work give the lie to the belief that voice is linked to some measurable degree of technical novelty that exists in musical language alone. I see these artists as existing within the endless continuum of a beautiful and perhaps unsolvable mystery: how is it that they, along with a small set of peers, are (or were) able to reinvent the familiar to such staggering effect, where others would arrive at something secondhand?

The late Hungarian composer György Ligeti, speaking of his landmark Études for piano, explained that, where others saw the work as appearing out of nowhere (that aforementioned “clean break with the past”), he very clearly perceived the “seams” in these pieces. Across the Études, he actively and knowingly explores his interests in the pianism of Chopin and Liszt, the polyrhythms of West African Pygmy music, the harmonies of American jazz, and, beyond music, his fascination with chaos theory, to name just a few of the influences that worm their way into the work. The recipe was quite clear to him, if not to others². 

What is significant about Ligeti’s reading of his own work is that it points us toward another way of understanding voice, that is to say, as a series of cultural adjacencies that belong uniquely to a single artist. For a composer like Andrew Norman, those adjacencies might include John Williams, Carl Stalling, Anders Hillborg, and mid-century architecture. For Gabriella Smith, they might include Kaija Saariaho, Béla Bartók, Joseph Haydn, a deep love of nature, and a fierce commitment to climate activism. But in order for those adjacencies to develop into a singular voice, artifice must be stripped away.

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For the last four years, I’ve served as the Creative Chair for the Oregon Symphony, a position, which, among other things, has enabled me to listen to a great deal of music by living composers. In the course of this work, I have spent time with hundreds of scores and recordings, encountering along the way dozens of pieces that demonstrate incredible technical facility in deploying the latest and greatest extended techniques, squeaks and squawks, smears of color, and so on. 

But so often, what I perceive in these works is a composer hiding from himself, afraid to speak plainly. I worry that some of these well-intentioned young people are being pushed into an aesthetic that doesn’t speak to (or represent) them because of academic pressure, or because of some received notion of what is en vogue. It reminds me of the way I wrote term papers in college, regurgitating academic jargon that could either be distilled down to a few sentences in plain English, or worse, which meant nothing at all. 

Increasingly, the pieces that move me the most are made of simpler stuff. What comes through most clearly is a desire to communicate. Maybe the orchestration isn’t as polished, or the structure lacks tautness, but there’s something urgent, unadorned, the artist’s hand reaching out to pull the listener into the abyss of the unknown and the necessary.

To those composers who are writing those technically advanced but sometimes anonymous-sounding works, I want to whisper: do not fear being too plainspoken. It is as much a sin against art to overcomplicate as it is to oversimplify. And then I want to ask: what is it you hope to say? How important is it to you that you say it? Are you speaking in a language that is yours, or in one you were told was correct and/or fashionable? What, as a friend once asked a student, would it feel like to write the music you’d want to play for your lover? What would that music sound like?

One might think of this as a process of excavation, of chipping away at artifice, of sweeping what is imitative from the surface in order to arrive at the rough object that is yours and yours alone. Thus, the composer’s job: to mine and nourish what is honest and authentic, no matter how mundane the materials required to say what needs saying. Listen for the midnight chord that offers a flash of light in a dark room. Find the shape of a melody in the rainslick tree-line. Do not watch or judge yourself, not now. Burrow deep into your inner ear and begin to listen.

1. The first measure of incoherence, here, being that I listened to jazz, pop, and classical musics in equal doses; to each of these aesthetic streams, I applied discretely this teleological worldview without considering that all three were in conversation with one another.

2. I’m fairly certain that I encountered this in Richard Steinitz’ book, György Ligeti: Music of the Imagination, but I cannot for the life of me locate the quotation.