I originally posted this on my Facebook page as a morning-after reflection. It received a lot of nice feedback, so I'm posting it here.
I have one high school student in Princeton. In our last lesson, she was getting ready for a recital, and I talked about the difference between preparation and performance. Bobby Previte formulates this as the difference between being a (responsible) financial planner and a firefighter. One is trying to methodically lay the groundwork for good future results, the other has to jump from one immediate decision to another based on current conditions.
After hearing her play, I told her that there are two kinds of mistakes in performance, and that most audience members are surprisingly adept at sensing the difference between the two. The first are "I am prepared and committed, and something just got past me while totally going for it." NOBODY cares about these, except for pedantic classical fetishists. Definitely non-specialist listeners don't care.
If you are not willing to make these mistakes, you are probably playing scared. All of your energy is diverted towards getting to the next plateau without too much deviation, which neuters the sense of spontaneity and surprise that inhabits most kinds of music making ever invented. None of the people who wrote the music you are working on played it that way. Worse, people's sense of classical music as a fussy, precious genre comes largely from this attitude.
The other kind of mistake is "I'm not fully prepared, I don't quite have a grasp of this material." This kind manifests as indecisive and indistinct. The listener loses the line and intent as the performer's focus dissipates.
After she ran through her program, I helped her see which mistakes fell into the former category, which the latter. We honed our work to refine and polish the program, and to never fall into the quicksand of murky intent and indecision.
Last night, Sō had a great concert here in Vilnius, Lithuania. We played Reich's "Mallet Quartet," which we will also be performing at PASIC next week. It's a piece we've played many times, was written for us, and which we first recorded. I had a total "prepared and going for it" mistake, a memory slip in a moment where it has never happened before. My first instinct was to obey my neuroticism and berate myself for being uneven and flawed. This piece is well known now, a ton of people can play it really well, and we are supposed to be setting the standard.
One of the most rewarding things about teaching is that, when formalizing and spelling out convictions to a student and asking them to believe you, you unavoidably make yourself accountable to the same principles. I remembered vividly how I evaluated the student's performance in terms of commitment, focus, and bravura, and not in listening for mistakes.
If, after decades of performing, I still make mistakes, I might as well accept that this will always occur and enjoy myself. If the world still decides that it's ok for me to be up there onstage, perhaps I should believe that the resulting equilibrium is acceptable.
Further, I'm convinced that mistake-fetish culture comes from everybody playing the same small number of very old pieces over and over and over again. The best part of that culture is observing what happens when layers and layers of interpretation pile onto and interact with each other, the way that literary and religious traditions do. The worst is that the frozen texts generate a kind of terror at approaching them, as if by picking them up you could also shatter them.
I've never felt this way about Mallet Quartet, but I can see it creeping in. The very part that I'm playing is written the way it is because I worked directly with the composer on it. The notes and chord voicings would not have been the same without my input. I of all people should feel comfortable in my own skin here. But I'm aware that, 8 years on, it is already "classical."
Paradoxically, I need to be willing to shatter the music in order to bring it to life. Maybe not as an ongoing intention, but at least as a possibility.
The following is a talk I gave on July 17, 2017 on the first day of the Sō Percussion Summer Institute.
The theme of this year’s SoSI is “New Beginnings.” Originally I called it “percussion beginnings,” but we had an internal communication error and “new beginnings” got printed. And actually, I like it better. The purpose of diving into this music from the 1930’s and 1940’s is not to make a historical obsession out of it, but to - as Basho would say - “seek what the master sought.” The beginnings of American percussion ensemble music represent a batch of fresh ideas - an attempt to revitalize our perspective on what It can mean to make music. In my opinion this is something we should always be trying to do. It’s not enough to say “ok, I guess John Cage or Lou Harrison found some new answers, so now those can be our answers.” Our answers must be different - of course incorporating ideas from the past – but in our approach we can be just as bold and enthusiastic as they were.
While preparing this talk, I thought a lot about why we want to deal with this subject at all. Is it because we’re mostly percussionists, and we’re here in a room together, so we might as well? Is it to honor the fact that these innovators established a new niche in our musical culture? Is it because we now have such things as a professional percussion career, and learning about these artists represents an important rung on the ladder of accomplishment?
I think each of those reasons is sound, but they don’t satisfy my curiosity. Composers like John Cage or Edgard Varese were not just accomplished, they were utterly original. It is almost impossible now to appreciate how far out of the mainstream their ideas were at the time. They looked at the furiously industrializing world around them, and they saw chance, mechanization, electronic media, and cultural mixture.
Those chaotic elements grew out of America’s big, glorious, mixed-up mess of a culture. Many Europeans who came here to observe it in the past found it fascinating but also unnerving. They frequently judged our culture to be immature, because it was never exactly clear who we were, aside from their certainty that we liked to make money. Varese thought it was invigorating. When he walked outside his apartment on Sullivan street, New York City was alive with construction and bustle. Many of those Europeans, including Dvorak and a number of French composers, thought we should pay more attention to our indigenous and slave diaspora music.
We in Sō Percussion identify strongly with this mess, and especially with the way it piled up in New York. Our methods of rehearsing and running our organization are tidy, but our sense of what it means to make music and be culturally American are terribly and wonderfully messy.
Cage’s relationship with Arnold Schoenberg perfectly encapsulated this paradox. Schoenberg had a set of values that informed his sense of what it meant to be a composer, reaching deeply into German music history back towards Bach. He told Cage that, for however innovate Schoenberg’s own methods and techniques were, harmony was still the inalienable building block of music. He admonished Cage that without a better intuition and grasp of it, he (Cage) wouldn’t ever amount to much as a composer. Cage seems to have shrugged at this and forged ahead, believing that rhythmic structures and time could be just as valuable.
“The Present Methods of writing music, principally those which employ harmony and its reference to particular steps in the field of sound, will be inadequate for the composer, who will be faced with the entire field of sound.”
I would often begin a talk about Cage with First Construction in Metal, from 1939. In this piece, Cage uses repeating numerical patterns on the macro and micro-levels to build a piece without harmony. But at this festival, we’ll be reaching back all the way to Quartet from 1935. This piece was written in California, during his studies with Schoenberg. It, and pieces like it, prompted Schoenberg to say that Cage was more of an inventor than a composer. Quartet is built purely of rhythmic structure, and with absolutely no indications of instrumentation. The performers are completely free to choose how many, how few, or even what kind of sounds to use. This ultimately means that it’s not even explicitly a percussion piece.
Instead of shoring up his weaknesses to gain greater acceptance, Cage struck out to find people who liked his strengths. He studied with Henry Cowell, and aborbed ideas from Marcel Duchamp. He found Merce Cunningham, David Tudor, and Robert Rauschenberg. And then he taught some people who took his ideas in new and unexpected directions: LaMont Young, James Tenney, the students of Black Mountain College. In the 1960’s and 70’s, he spent time at colleges like the University of Illinois, where a generation of percussion students liked his music and started forming groups to play it. Now, the community of people who use his work as a reference point is enormous, and I’m not quite sure we’d be sitting together in this room if he hadn’t had the confidence to follow his ideas.
Cage seemed to be especially adept at building community. His combination of genial good humor and shocking aesthetic bravery was a winning one for many people who came in contact with him. More and more, when I dig into the work of a brilliant composer, I find that his or her work usually bubbles out of a community, and they they have often found a particularly compelling way to express ideas that were being traded around within their group already.
During the crucial period between 1935 and 1943, Cage’s percussion ideas and genius for community-building lead to a brief explosion of interest in percussion. He wrote letters to composers all over the world asking for percussion music. One of the composers from this year’s SoSI, Carlos Chavez, sent Cage his Toccata. Cage was dismayed to realize that Chavez’s piece contain rolls and other techniques that only trained percussionists could execute, which none of his players were! Cage related to B Michael Williams in his Percussive Notes interview from 1987 that he (Cage) had to cajole and prod another of our composers, William Russell, to compose more percussion music for his players. Cage set up tours in the Pacific Northwest, and eventually gave a famous - perhaps notorious – concert at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York that gained him and the work of his cohorts wider fame.
Until reading Williams’ article, I didn’t even know that Chavez had intersected with Cage. Most of the other composers we feature this year were part of this same community. They traded ideas, played new works with and for each other, and probably hung out a lot.
Varese stands somewhat apart, and his landmark Ionisation comes earlier, having been started in 1929 and premiered in 1933. In this year’s reading packet, Varese describes vividly how he imagined sounds as objects in space, rather than as vehicles for emotion or tradition. Unlike Cage, it’s very difficult to pinpoint how Varese’s work came out of a community. He certainly was influenced by other artists and composers – he mentions Luigi Russolo and the futurists in particular – but we cannot see his work bubbling out of a group effort the way that Cage’s always did.
Do we innovate as remarkable individuals, or primarily as a community? It’s probably always a combination, but the weight we give to one or the other can serve certain agendas. We are inescapably social creatures, so we must see ourselves as always navigating some sort of balance between the two. Too little emphasis on individualism, and we never have a Bach, a Picasso or a Tolstoy. Too much, and we blind ourselves to our very evolutionary nature.
Recently I’ve been reading a fascinating book. It’s called Sapiens, a Brief History of Humankind, by Yuval Noah Harari. Harari cites some of the latest archeological and anthropological research to update and upend our ideas of humanity’s pre-history. He returns over and over again to the increasingly prevalent opinion among experts that homo sapiens intelligence and cognitive capabilities has existed in its current form for about 70,000 years. This means that the painters of the Lescaux caves in France 20,000 years ago, or the first humans to sail across an ocean and settle in Australia 45,000 years ago, to say nothing of the ancient Greeks or Chinese, were biologically identical to us. We are no smarter or more creative than they were.
Further, he reminds us that our picture of history is more influenced by what was left behind than what actually happened. The so-called “stone age” was named as such because the tools and structures made of stone lasted a lot better than the more prevalent wooden tools that have long since disintegrated. We can see this in our own field: the artifacts from jazz are recordings, so we focus on performance, the artifacts of classical music are published sheet music, so we focus on compositions, even though both traditions contained both elements.
This means that for any of our ancestors before the advent of written language, we are left guessing about their motivations by interpreting their artifacts. The tendency among scientists is to believe that most of their actions were a response to necessity and environment, in much the same way that evolution proceeds.
The prevailing theories of the beginnings of agriculture, then, describe it as a series of accidents. As Harari explains:
“About 18,000 years ago, the last ice age gave way to a period of global warming. As temperatures rose, so did rainfall. The new climate was ideal for Middle Eastern wheat and other cereals, which multiplied and spread. People began eating more wheat, and in exchange they inadvertently spread its growth. Since it was impossible to eat wild grains without first winnowing, grinding, and cooking them, people who gathered these grains carried them back to their temporary campsites for processing. Wheat grains are small and numerous, so some of them inevitably fell on the way to the campsite and were lost. Over time, more and more wheat grew along favorite human trails and near campsites.”
According to the normal narrative, the march of civilization proceeds from these accidents. Permanent settlements gradually spring up around these wheat fields. A larger population can be sustained, which then requires even more agriculture. Settlements become villages, which become cities. At some point, the functions of art, religion, and culture emerge out of a critical mass of these settlements, and somebody builds a temple in the middle of the town to worship their deities.
This explanation is actually not that far from what we’re taught about the role of culture in today’s society. Once we’ve done the “real” work of basic economic functioning, there might be time and resources left over for a few lucky people to study, create, wonder, and think. This view of art pervades our society, and most of us are inclined to believe that it couldn’t be any other way. We justify Arts in the schools by pointing to better SAT scores; creativity is trumpeted as an important personal attribute for economic growth in the information age - after all, Steve Jobs took calligraphy classes and now his work is worth billions! Our urge to create is seen not as an original human need, but as a link to proper productivity.
But Harari describes a wrench in these gears of economic and social progress. A site called “Göbekli Tepe” in southeast Turkey was discovered and excavated about 20 years ago. Massive seven-ton stone pillars decorated with ornate imagery were found to have been created around 9,500 BCE. They were remarkably similar to the famous pillars of Stonehenge in the UK, but 7,000 years older. Nearby, even larger pillars had been partially carved out of a quarry but never completed. Göbekli Tepe held one secret that baffled the scientists who unearthed it. Unlike Stonehenge and every other similar site ever found, Göbekli Tepe seemed to have been built by hunter-gatherers who ordinarily never organized themselves into bands larger than 100 or 150 people. Some sort of temple had taken shape here, but not by utilizing any of an agricultural society’s mechanisms for social hierarchy, record-keeping, and organization.
The pillars were utterly useless for any economic function. They didn’t grow more food, or protect from weather or predators, and in fact they drained enormous time, energy, and resources from the mysterious people who built them. Scientists were further perplexed to realize that one of the most important genetic variants of wheat from the early agricultural revolution came from about 20 miles outside of Göbekli Tepe. This discovery implied an almost unacceptable conclusion: that, in this area, wheat could have been deliberately cultivated as a response to the needs of feeding the many people who worked together on these giant sculptures.
I’m not sure whether you can turn in a successful archeology dissertation which concludes “they built this because they wanted to and then figured out the rest of the details.” And I’m the least qualified person to make my own theories about a field I know so little about. But if those people from 12,000 years ago had the same brains that we do, I know that this is at least possible. Perhaps they believed that these gods or spirits would benefit their material lives, as many ancient and frankly modern religions do. In that case, maybe they were acting out of economic interest, but not in any way that we can see from observing evolution in other animals. They were imagining something that wasn’t there in any tangible or observable way, and they created a work of art in response.
In a sense, we in our community feed and nourish each other like those Göbekli Tepe temple builders might have done. We are not just a haphazard group of disinterested economic units who cooperate for the survival of our DNA, at least not always. I don’t believe that Art provides salvation, and I don’t like it when people substitute art as a secular religion, ascribing mystical qualities to its creators. But I do believe that it provides purpose, and that it can be imagined and created for no other reason than “because we wanted to.” When enough people get together to do it, those people can do astonishing things with their shared values and goals.
During this SoSI, we will take a day out of our rehearsing and learning to feed 25,000 hungry families in Mercer County. This food-packing event at this SoSI is only happening because we decided to gather and make beautiful, expensive, time-consuming, useless music.
When John Cage wrote his new percussion pieces, the work did not arise out of necessity or expedience, and certainly not out of monetary gain. Nobody commissioned it. He made this work because it inspired him, because it suited the way his brain worked, and because he found other people who also thought it was worth making.
This is all you need in order to embark for yourself. That doesn’t mean that circumstances and finances will always cooperate. But it does mean that you do not need to wait for permission to make the work that burns in your imagination. When planning your next steps, don’t only ask “how” or “what.” Ask yourself “why,” and “who else?” Nobody, least of all four professional musicians, is going to minimize the necessity of figuring out how to put food on your table. These are problems that must be solved in all of our lives. But try not to think of Art as only a means to an end. Don’t apologize for your esoteric interests when the proverbial uncle at Thanksgiving asks “what the heck are you going to do with that?”
You are going to build big-ass pillars that don’t do anything. They will be grand, ornate, and impossible. Along the way, you and the people who join you will continue to feel your way through life, a process that will never, ever end.
Or to put it another way, sometimes you need to build the temple first.
Preparing performances of written scores is a kind of alchemy. The process of transmuting a written medium into an aural one can be mysterious. In a heavily notated art form like western classical music, this creates certain types of problems.
Writing is not sound (one of these things is not like the other).
Gaining proficiency in a wide range of music that spans cultures and time periods usually means employing a combination of score-information and knowledge/experience to decode.
Rehearsing and practicing this kind of music in a group requires you to develop techniques that assist in the alchemy.
A significant part of my current teaching involves explaining these techniques to younger musicians. What often surprises them is how concrete and methodical the process is, and also how the best way to work through a problem is sometimes counterintuitive.
It makes more sense to imagine that practicing music the “right” way as much as possible will produce the best results. This is essentially true. The recommendations in this article are not meant to completely replace that mode of working.
But in the course of changing written ideas into musical ones, the performer frequently encounters barriers to understanding what’s in the score. Tools are needed to illuminate ideas that don’t always fall naturally into your hands.
As an example: I’ve been coaching loads of Mendelssohn, Beethoven, and Dvorak chamber music since Sō Percussion started our position as performers-in-residence at Princeton University. I must admit that I’d always privately relegated Mendelssohn and especially Dvorak to second-tier status compared to a composer like Beethoven. This probably reflects my bias towards strong structural thinking, and my experiences hearing these other composers’ chamber music had left me with the impression of a lot of passionate, melody driven, soupy not-my-thing romantic music.
Through working with students, I delved deeper into these scores. I was surprised (though I shouldn’t have been) that there were so many fascinating details such as accents and dynamics that could spur endless interpretive variation. Whatever impression I had - presumably due to the performances I’d heard - didn’t match up with what I was seeing on the page. Mendelssohn in particular is kind of a maniac for score details.
I started playing around with these details in my coachings. Why, with Dvorak being so interested in cross-rhythms and rhythmic play, should we be thinking about melody all the time? I taught my groups how to feel a proper 4/3 polyrhythm in a way that they could understand the latent tension in allowing it to continue for 40 bars. Many times, the teaching techniques that drew out new results took some aspect of what they’d already hard-wired and flipped it upside down. This could be scary and unfamiliar, but it spurred growth in new directions.
I thought of Brian Eno’s “Oblique Strategies,”, a fascinating set of tools created in 1975 with Peter Schmidt. These cryptic instructions are meant to help shake you out of creative dilemmas. They stimulate multi-lateral thinking. When I visited the website, here were my first three randomly generated strategies:
“Make an exhaustive list of everything you might do and do the last thing on the list.”
“Do something boring.”
“Emphasize differences.”
A lot of the time, what I and we in Sō are doing with chamber music groups is to work through a problem by reframing it, and also to eliminate or highlight some element that might improve their understanding of the score.
I came up with my own list of chamber music strategies. They are neither as mysterious nor as catchy as Eno’s, but they represent a toolkit that we employ all the time. I explain how they apply to my teaching and to Sō’s, and what kinds of results they are meant to produce. Few of these ideas were originally mine, so I try to give credit where I can remember the source. For the most part, they reflect a foundation passed from my teachers Michael Rosen and Robert Van Sice, filtered through the last 15 years of working with my colleagues in Sō. In much of this essay, I’m describing lessons that I saw Jason, Josh, or Eric applying while we taught as a group, as well as past colleagues like Doug Perkins. Some of our core chamber music techniques were also gleaned from watching amazing ensembles like the Tokyo String Quartet as students.
Some of these ideas may seem like ordinary, obvious good practice, applicable at all times. This may be so, but I explain the context in which focusing on that particular element is a counterintuitive but effective move. I imagine that this essay will be updated and expand over time as I think of more techniques.
Here are the ones I'm starting with:
Think loud, play soft
Find the Pulse
Reverse the dynamic(s)
Put somebody else in charge
To play fast, slow down
Take away the crutch
Run it!
Get away from the instrument(s) and Sing
Learn Someone Else’s Part
Screw Up/Make it Up
Think loud, play soft
When I was an undergraduate at Oberlin, my teacher Mike Rosen explained his trick for playing soft triangle notes. Anybody who isn’t a percussionist may have a hard time appreciating how scary it is to ding a piece of metal on another at exactly the right time with exactly the right touch. Soft playing is the most difficult, and the student’s first instinct is to adopt a careful “don’t touch the stove” approach. This is inevitably the worst way to do it, because your chance of missing the instrument entirely and completely “whiffing” it increases exponentially.
The student allows his mind and body to adopt every posture of what quietness feels like: meek, careful, thin. But there’s no reason why this has to be. In fact, it’s more often the opposite, where quiet notes require extra focus, confidence, and boldness.
Mr. Rosen first had me play several notes at mezzo forte. This is relatively easy to do. He then asked me what it felt like to play those notes. I said that it felt comfortable: I knew that the amount of force I needed would produce a solid note with plenty of vibration, and also that I wouldn’t miss. He then asked me to play a soft note. I can’t remember whether I whiffed it, but I might as well have. The note was anemic.
His solution was think loud, play soft. He told me to start again playing a mezzo forte note, but to change only one thing in my body: don’t hit it as hard. It worked like magic. The act of playing softer was purely a result of the speed of my stroke (not how hard I hit, which is a misleading concept). A slow yet confident stroke produced a perfect piano note.
I’ve found that this concept applies to EVERYBODY. In a recent coaching at Princeton, I noticed that a string quartet was struggling with intonation and sound quality in an opening quiet section of a long piece. I asked them to play the section full force with vibrato, everything that a string player loves to do. They tried it, and were immediately smiling and playing to each other instead of cringing and gritting their teeth. They played in tune with a beautiful, cohesive sound.
Playing loud and within their comfort zone provided a return to what it felt like to play their instrument well. We repeated the section a number of times, gradually scaling the dynamics and vibrato back. If I felt them creeping away into timidity, we scaled back up to remember the confidence, then scaled back down. Eventually, the exercise worked, and they realized that they could have their focused, engaged sound while also playing more quietly.
This concept helped me a lot in learning how to play snare drum. Most quiet snare drum orchestral excerpts depict normal playing from far away. Honestly, as an originally military instrument, quiet snare drum playing is kind of dumb…it just happens to naturally be a bajillion times louder than a violin, so that’s your job in the orchestra. While perfecting an excerpt like Prokofiev’s Lt. Kije, which depicts a far away military march, the student often falls into these same patterns of trying to achieve soft playing via timidity. It never works, especially once the pressure is on in the audition room.
Mr. Rosen had me play Lt. Kije many times at forte. This was a march, after all, and that’s how it is supposed to feel. Gradually, over a period of days and weeks, I measured it down until I could control it at pianissimo.
Find the Pulse
This concept falls under the category of “isn’t this always a good idea?” Yes, it is, but the best moment to remember it is not when everything is grooving, but when it’s not. Whatever element is foregrounded in a passage will tend to assert itself when you practice it (emphasis on line and phrasing in a lyrical section), so that sometimes other core elements don’t develop.
This happens most often with the dreaded rubato. Rubato is a perfectly wonderful concept, but in order to “rob” the phrase of time, you need to know where the time should have been in the first place. Many players, as with the “soft to loud” continuum, suddenly abandon all sense of time and proportion when they are trying to give direction to a melodic line or a lyrical phrase.
It is exactly at this moment that I ask them to peel away expression and focus on where the notes lie against the pulse. Some of them have been advised in the past that playing a phrase in a simple, straightforward way against a steady pulse will ruin expressive potential. This is nonsense. Every angle of examination of a way to play a phrase can teach you something about that phrase’s potential. Playing against a steady pulse will teach you a lot.
What they often find is that a brilliant composer – like my new buddy Mendelssohn – may have already thought of where the phrase is going, and might perhaps have planned his rhythmic and melodic ideas accordingly on the page. The student might be so eager to infuse the passage with expressivity as to have never considered just playing it.
For percussionists, this moment happens in marimba chorales, where we play unmeasured rolls. The simplest way to start learning a chorale is just to turn on a metronome and play the chords in time first. Get the proportions in your ear before trying to find all the things you think it could do with pushing and pulling. What you’ll find is that you probably have to do less than you thought in order to make it expressive, especially with a 12-dimensional genius like Bach.
The only time I would ever say not to do this is when music is explicitly unmeasured, such as some types of plainchant or in a contemporary piece with gestural notation.
Reverse the dynamic(s)
This is specific to chamber music rather than solo playing. What excites me the most about classical chamber music is the complexity of interplay among the musicians. Haydn’s trajectory in developing this throughout his life was astonishing. Most composers after him who wrote for groups like string quartets mirrored this concern with internal complexity and equality among the parts.
Often, young players or pickup groups default to a way of playing that makes intuitive sense: melody is in the higher voice, support is lower, if there’s a piano it’s sort of doing both. But amazing composers rarely keep this default situation in place for long.
What often feels repetitive as listener in a 35 or 40-minute-long piece is when the players don’t look deeply enough to realize details in “supporting” parts that might enrich the composition or distinguish it from more ordinary music. The emotional content of the music – often, in my subjective opinion- doesn’t support the amount of time it takes to unfold, so is there something else?
“Reverse the dynamics” doesn’t have to apply literally to written dynamics. It might also mean to identify primary and supporting roles and try reversing which is foregrounded. This obviously is not how you’ll want to perform the piece, but the rehearsal room is a laboratory, not just a chance to run through the music a bunch of times (although that’s also extremely valuable).
The most important outcome of this exercise is that the player of the primary voice (say a first violinist) might be compelled for the first time to listen carefully to the rhythmic underpinning in the viola part. Certainly she never meant to ignore it, but there might have been that one detail that she was too involved in her own notes to notice. The further outcome is that you will find many more opportunities for the voices to interact than you first thought existed. Perhaps that primary voice dips out of the way for a moment while another surges. Did you really know that was happening?
This technique is also great for group morale. A powerful string quartet, for instance, feeds energy from the inside out. A sharp first violinist rides on the wave of the inner voices, rather than dragging them through the piece. Reversing roles asks all of the players to step up and explore their part, which may serve to heighten the rhythmic excitement or contextualize an unusual harmony.
Put somebody else in charge
When we were graduate students together at Yale, we bonded over a shared interest in chamber music for percussion instruments. Many university percussion programs since the 1950’s have featured this kind of music in their curriculum, but our teacher Robert van Sice approached it in a genuinely fresh way. Taking lessons from great chamber ensembles like the Tokyo String Quartet, he encouraged us to think of percussion similarly, as an intimate flux of constantly shifting energy.
Much of the decorum of classical percussion playing comes from the symphony orchestra section, where the conductor is the main conduit for expression. Performers are encouraged to be stoic and attentive to the action up in the front. Bob had a way of breaking through those norms and saying “why do we have to think this way?” He taught us how to distribute leadership roles around the ensemble in accordance with the demands of the music, and to show that energy vividly.
In any piece we play, we know at all times who is in the driver’s seat. It doesn’t mean that we defer in every way to that player, but we know if things get rocky who will give the signal to regroup. This decision comes out of evaluating our roles within the music and also our own relationships.
Some of our role assignments don’t match intuition. For instance, if one player has an ornate solo part over a steady rhythmic layer, you’d expect the soloist to be the leader by default.
We’ve found that exactly the opposite can be true: if one of the steady supporting players leads, the soloist often has more leeway to take risks with the interpretation of his part since he isn’t thinking as much about leading the other players.
Not all pieces need to be lead at every moment, but putting somebody in charge alleviates the anxiety of not knowing exactly how you’d get out of a section if something went wrong. We all know that white-knuckle feeling when a section goes well in spite of the fact that weren’t entirely sure what would have happened if it didn’t. In our group, we try to shrink the potential for these situations down to zero. Things don’t always go perfectly, but we do always know that we’ll be able to keep the ship afloat, and this instills confidence.
By using my previous strategy (reverse the dynamics), you might have become more aware of a supporting layer that could actually function as a leader. “Putting someone else in charge” could be a response to this shifting environment, or it could be completely arbitrary.
Remember, in the laboratory mindset, there are no negative consequences for trying anything, no matter how badly it turns out. All you will lose is a few minutes of your time. If a section isn’t working too well, it may be that the energy moving around the room is not moving in the optimum direction.
I’ll put this part in bold: this has absolutely nothing to do with who is the best player. If you’re even thinking in terms of the “best” player within your group, I regret to inform you that you do not have a good chamber music group. Beyond that, the choice of the proper leader of a particular section congeals out of trying it a few different ways and analyzing roles.
Try assigning it differently and see what happens. Maybe it’s just for ten bars, or perhaps it’s for a whole movement. Let other players try cueing you, and see if you like to follow. Great chamber music performers make an art out of engaged following. It should go without saying that everything you do is engaged. The word passive has no meaning within any small group playing. Following doesn’t mean that you sit back waiting for somebody else to do the work. On the contrary, it means you’re waiting expectantly on the edge of your seat, anticipating what you know is coming from your colleague, ready to fit right in to what they show you.
My favorite aphorism from Bob van Sice was this: the truth is in the sound. 99 times out of 100, you will be able to solve group problems by trying them out in the room. If somebody else takes a crack at leading a section, you’ll know if it’s right. The factors that determine whether it’s working or not are complicated and related somewhat to intuition, so if there’s a consensus about which is working better, hi-five and move on. Don’t question whether it’s because you or somebody else was “better” at anything.
Putting somebody else in charge can be employed both to decide leadership for the first time, and also to avoid getting bogged down when things aren’t quite working.
To play fast, slow down
Here’s what is going on in most students’ heads when playing fast music: THIS IS FAAAAAAAST. Up-tempo pieces or movements have a rapid real or implied primary pulse, which as a human being you naturally associate with quicker bodily movements like running or fast dancing. You can’t help but be swept up by that sensation.
Unfortunately, and similarly to “think loud, play soft,” this is exactly the opposite mindset of what’s needed to play fast music well. Like Luke Skywalker deflecting lasers coming at him from every direction, you need to be focused and relaxed in order to play fast. This means that you have to detach the physical reality of rapid notes and a quick implied tempo from the actual functioning of your brain and natural tendency for your muscles to tighten up in “fight or flight” mode.
In chamber music, this usually translates to a frantic sounding music. Sometimes that may be what is called for, but more often the music exists in some kind of dance meter like “scherzo” that still requires good rhythmic command.
Below I’ve embedded one of my favorite things of all time: Maurizio Pollini performing Prokofiev’s Seventh Sonata, movement 3. A master like Pollini understands that rhythmic tension and illumination carries far more weight in fast music than just going fast ever could. He perfectly outlines and emphasizes the odd 7/8 meter of the piece using both accent and articulation, shifting his phrasing around as the score dictates. I’ve heard other performances of this piece that felt like blurred clumps of rapid gestures, and have been so disappointed that the odd-meter groove is abandoned. By the time Pollini gets to the end, I always want to throw my hands up in a touchdown gesture. Ok, I sometimes actually do that.
If you tap your finger to the actual tempo, it isn’t really that fast. But your sense of excitement is undiminished.
What does this mean for chamber music? Try to understand the fundamentals of the score within a reasonable tempo before achieving escape velocity. A detail-oriented composer has probably left many juicy elements for you to tease out and master, such as unexpected articulations, cross-rhythms and hemiola, as well as voicing details among the instruments. My experience as a listener is that when details of a score are vivid and transparent, my brain is fruitfully occupied and inundated with plenty of information. When a player is just in frantic mode, I’m only thinking one thing: “gee, that’s fast.”
Remember one other thing: as you get to know a piece better and become more familiar with the information in the score, your perception of tempo will change. What felt fast before no longer will, and you will become more and more comfortable bumping the tempo up. But any audience member who is hearing the piece for the first time is getting all the information at once, and a slower tempo than you are hyped for might be just the way to give them an optimal experience.
Take away the crutch
Sometimes we overuse the best attributes of an instrument. This is often not a choice, but more of a habit that helps us get to an acceptable result quickly – a shortcut. Seemingly each instrument has one: the pianist’s pedal, the string player’s vibrato, the drummer using too many cymbals or toms. There is nothing inherently wrong with them, unless we are covering up a shaky or uneven foundation.
Each of these crutches allows us to blur the integrity of the underlying issue, whether it be intonation, evenness, solid rhythm, etc.
The great and colorful drummer Bobby Previte has a class he has always wanted to teach about this issue: “Cymbals: The Last Refuge of the Charlatan.” Bobby loves cymbals…cymbals are fantastic. But in drumset culture, it’s generally understood that you can go splashing around on many different kinds of cymbals when you don’t have any good ideas or a solid rhythmic foundation to contribute. The wash of sound and color masks the poverty of your playing.
Take away the crutch is a reminder to yourself and your colleagues that you may end up going around in circles trying to solve a problem unless you peel back an important layer. This layer may actually be called for in the music! But in the rehearsal laboratory, sometimes we have to remove it in order to understand what’s going on.
For instance: in a mixed ensemble of piano plus string instruments, the pianist often inhabits the role of either an orchestra or a kind of complement to all the parts in all the registers. From the first moment that the group sits down together, the pianist wants to feel like he sounds good, and throwing some nice fat pedal down opens up the grand resonance of the sound board. Wrong notes also get blurred and pushed aside. It just feels good. Furthermore, it may actually be indicated and fit the music – especially in late Romantic or early Modern music – and so why not? It would be strange to come into the first rehearsal of a Faure piece playing a piano like it was a harpsichord.
Isolating the pianist’s underlying part requires somebody in the ensemble (or an ensemble coach) to actually say “hey, let’s pull up the pedal and see what’s there.” A string player might not feel confident asking somebody who plays a different instrument to try something like this out. The ensemble struggles with rhythm in a certain section, running the passage over and over again, without ever highlighting the nature of the rhythms in the piano part that they could be listening to more closely. The pianist, meanwhile, has to find out whether she is truly connecting the notes that she thinks she is, or whether a chord could be held simply by the hands without the pedal.
Young – and honestly older – string players know that vibrato is not only idiomatic to most of the music they play, but it also gives you more of a blurry range of intonation rather than having to land perfectly on the note. Less experienced players often deploy vibrato not as beautiful sustaining resonance, but as a mimicked habit that they’ve picked up. Therefore, they do it in the same rich way every single time they strike a note. Obviously this is not my area of greatest knowledge, but I can say that I’ve been amazed at how many problems I can dig up and address just by pulling back or away from vibrato. Once a group has tried simply activating their chords together, they can hear their issues more closely.
The greatest difference I notice between amateur/student performers and professionals is this willingness to root out the deeper problems for the greater good and not have as much fun during some portions of their rehearsal (actually, I think this problem solving is a lot of fun). The musician’s pure pleasure in the music is sometimes subsumed to a greater goal, which is to put the needs of the listener before those of the performer. Each time we in Sō coach a chamber group over an extended period of time, our goal is to turn them from a competent pickup group into a true ensemble. These exercises are part of achieving that cohesion.
Run it!
Just play it down, top to bottom. This technique may seem obvious, but using it at the right time and in the right way is not always easy to know.
In this context, what I mean is to run it when you’ve become mired in detail work, not as the only thing you feel like doing and “ok see you at the bar.”
The past 5 years, we’ve been working with a theater director, Ain Gordon, who helps guide a process of synthesizing many elements in our theatrical shows – lights, video, movement, music, and everything else. I was amazed at how many run-throughs he made us do in these shows – almost to the point where I was ready to revolt.
But I learned a certain wisdom from this incessant process.
As a musician, I come from a world where many conductors delight in teasing out all of the fascinating interpretive details that make a great piece of music tick. This fascination is often propelled or augmented by the fact that they are conducting very old works that have been studied, absorbed, and reinterpreted. That conductor has a vested interest in making sure some of the details in his performance reflect a unique point of view on a well known text.
Some orchestra players would assume that a conductor who wants to run a piece frequently doesn’t have good rehearsing ideas. Further, they also may be playing a piece that they have known intimately for practically their entire lives. The ebb and flow and trajectory of that piece is imprinted, and so it makes sense to obsess on details.
Making new or unfamiliar music is nothing like this. When the big picture attributes of a piece haven’t been fully absorbed, the players may be wandering in a fog of uncertainty that they are only half-aware of. If they decide to double or triple-down on detail work, they may find that the performance is not coming together.
My recommendation for how often to run a piece is to do it often early and late, and a bit in-between. Running a piece at the beginning of your process is crucial, and you have to be less compulsive about getting everything “right.” Follow the shapes, notice the big events, and get a sense of how large it is.
Dig into the details with awareness of where each section fits into the larger whole. This goes for a passage within a movement as much as it applies to a movement compared to a whole work.
At least a week or two before a first performance, run it a lot. You are short on time for fascinating detail work at this point, and run-throughs are your best diagnostic tool for figuring out what to address. Often, it will not be what you were obsessing about.
Classical musicians can be on the compulsive side of the human spectrum, and sometimes it feels like we cannot move forward until every single detail is in place. Considering that time is our canvass, I’d invite you to step back from this mentality and consider that large brush strokes are incredibly important to the listener’s experience. You can only evaluate those within the context of your own larger experience of the music.
But, paradoxically, I think you’ll find that the big picture work helps your details enormously. Every single note or passage you play is coming from something and moving on to something else. You need to practice the feeling and habit of moving through the events that precede and follow each section, not just the section itself.
This is especially crucial in long multi-movement works. The composer often places demanding scherzo or rondo movements towards the end, and there’s a certain amount of mental energy that goes into hanging in. The only way to understand what mental resources you’ll have at this point is to play everything else first. Then you won’t be caught by surprise in the performance.
Every time I’m about to play a new piece, I try to remind myself to have a few bad performances first in front of people I trust. They’re pretty much never as good as I want them to be. Whenever I forget to do this or don’t have time, I inevitably have that first exploratory performance at the gig, realizing that I still have a lot to learn about performing the piece, but it’s too late.
Which brings up my last point in this section: running a piece in front of people is different than doing it in rehearsal. I don’t really understand why this is so, but it is. Certain human subtleties of energy-in-the-room will emerge; you will screw something up that never went wrong in rehearsal; a seemingly easy and insignificant detail mattered more than you thought it did to the audience member and you had better polish it up.
Get away from the instrument(s) and Sing
I’ve come to believe that one of the conductor’s greatest advantages and most important roles is that she is not grappling with the technical details of playing an instrument. All of us who play in large ensembles have had that moment where we see the conductor channeling the composer and emoting and we are thinking something like “easy for you to say, you don’t have 3 new timpani notes to tune in the next 8 bars!”
The nature of the instrument we play in an ensemble has a dramatic effect on the role we play. This is due not only to its place in the tapestry of the score, but also in the physical attributes of the instrument itself. Percussionists often play large, unwieldy instruments, or we assemble combinations of instruments that take up a lot of space. This affects the way we communicate with each other: it stifles intimacy and inhibits eye contact.
I’ve noticed that in many mixed piano/string ensembles, these differences are especially pronounced. The piano is an extraordinarily large piece of furniture which the performer must be in a fixed position to play. The string players need to face out in some fashion so that their sound and presence projects out to the audience. This means that the usual instruction I provide to encourage frequent communication is difficult to manage.
But there is another way. Connecting even once on an important passage helps to solidify your command of playing it together.
Leave the instruments and gather around in chairs, sort of like story time in elementary school. Now, each participant is no longer the wielder of a piano or violin or clarinet – each is simply a human musician. The physical nature of your instrument no longer dictates your role in relation to the other players. Incidentally, this also forces you not to rely on crutches!
Sing, tap on your knee, do whatever it takes to convey the character of your part to your colleagues. It doesn’t have to sound remotely good or be any of the right pitches, and you can make sure nobody else is around when you do it. Find ways that are not ingrained habits of playing your instrument to express the character of the music. This kind of work is tied to the concepts of Dalcroze Eurythmics, although I don’t use any particular methodology when working this way.
When a musician uses the voice and the body directly to convey music, magic happens.
Sō Percussion started using this technique years ago out of necessity. We found that time and instrument availability was often limited, so we learned how to sit down with our scores and rough it out. What we found is that we became that conductor who is unencumbered by instrument management. We were free to emote, lean in, or gather. Our instruments could not either hinder or hide us from each other, and all were equal within the circle.
Several years ago, we were asked to present a TEDx talk at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The organizers of the event wanted to do quick dress rehearsals at the museum to get a sense of what everybody would be talking about. Hauling percussion gear around New York City is not our favorite thing to do, so we begged permission to come in and sing through the piece to try to mock it up for them. They agreed.
We arrived at the rehearsal and explained what the instruments would look and sound like. We sang through the entire piece from memory, mimicking sounds and air drumming while frequently glancing around the ensemble to connect on score details. Once we finished, the organizer said “ok THAT’s what you’re doing for your TED talk.” They were even more fascinated by this process than they were to hear the piece!
Watching this performance will show you almost everything you need to know about how we approach the actual piece. Mimicking the instrument sound heightens your awareness of the character of the instrument you are playing. It attaches you to the sound instead of just walking through it with your hands. Singing your sound to your colleague tells them what role you think it plays in the piece.
One of the other most important benefits of singing away from instruments is that it is a great icebreaker. Whoever came in with their “first violinist” or “virtuoso pianist” psychological armor is now reduced to “goofy mimicking singer person.” This fun energy ALWAYS translates back to the real instruments. I have never seen it fail (unless the musicians refuse to commit to it).
In western classical music, we’ve drifted quite far from the original roots of most functional music making, where somebody was always dancing or partying or observing a religious ritual. We have emancipated music making from those functions, which I think is a fantastic development. But we must not let our bodies and spirits become disengaged from why we sit in a room together and make sound. Put down your instruments, leave the concerns of grappling with them behind, and be human.
Learn someone else’s part
You are playing a Beethoven string quartet. You know your part, but you and the other players just can’t make it work. As frustration mounts, you dig your heels in deeper, playing your own part with greater determination, certain that you are not the problem.
The paradox in this situation is that in 9 times out of 10, playing your part “better” is not going to fix the situation. If it could, it would be obvious: you can play the passage accurately or you can’t.
Usually this problem comes about because the players cannot wrench their version of “right” playing to fit into somebody else’s. The great law of ensemble relativity is that if it doesn’t sound good, nobody is right.
You need to devise ways to delve deeper into each other’s playing, not shrink away into your own. One of the simplest is to just ask them to play for you while you listen and/or follow along with your music. This doesn’t have to feel judgmental or critical…it can be friendly and inquisitive. Notice aspects of how their part works and ask questions: “could I help to support you when this moment happens? Is this a difficult passage? I notice that you lean forward on the tempo more than I do.”
You should also take it upon yourself to work from the score as often as possible. With the extra 30% of energy that you would devote to making a solo piece note-perfect, noodle around with other people’s parts to understand how they work. This will return results ten-fold in chamber music over practicing your own part more.
We underestimate the role that listening plays in good chamber music because we think that our immediate sphere is the one that matters most. The truth is that your anticipation of and engagement in another player’s part is how you figure out where your own playing fits in. We can all tell when we are in a conversation whether the other person is actively listening or impatiently waiting to talk again. Their facial expressions and body language shift sympathetically with our words. We know when we are getting through. Playing music is exactly like this.
Here is the best example from my own world. Below is a video of Sō Percussion playing Steve Reich’s Music for Pieces of Wood in a carpenter’s studio for the Lincoln Center Festival. Music for Pieces of Wood is deceptively difficult, but not because the notes are hard to learn and play. The continual challenge is that when another player inserts their own part one note at a time, all of the other percussionists must be anticipating where that note is going to fall so that they are not thrown off their own pattern (which happens to be identical but starting in a different place).
In this situation, knowing each other’s parts is non-negotiable. If you aren’t aware that my first note comes in a space between other notes in the original pattern, you won’t know if you need to adjust. Worse yet, the piece is ingeniously constructed to convince the listener that the beginnings of bars are shifting around constantly. The performers cannot allow themselves to be similarly tricked, or they’ll lose their bearings.
My favorite example is the very last added pattern that Eric plays. The section has three beats to the bar, and he starts adding notes that feel like a downbeat and the second eighth note of the second beat. This would be counted “ONE – two AND – three.” The problem is that his part actually occurs on the second eighth note of beat one and on beat three. The obvious, simple pattern is shifted over by an eighth note from the group pulse. We who have already built up patterns must know exactly how these new notes fit into what we’re playing, or we’ll be tempted to hear his notes as a new downbeat, and the train goes off the rails.
Students are often surprised by how difficult this piece is, because it is fully an exercise in listening more than it is in playing. As far as they’ve often come in technical facility, usually these students haven’t yet developed flexible ears to take in the context around them.
Screw Up/Make it Up
Sometimes, the way to get something right is to get it completely wrong.
Classical musicians have a common and glaring weakness, which is that we are too linear. We think and work from left to right because we play music where the entire multi-dimensional process of decision-making that went into a piece has already happened and been distilled into the score.
Great improvisers are usually great choosers. They rarely pluck an idea out of thin air, but are assembling smaller worked-out ideas in new and spontaneous ways. This is why John Coltrane would go out in to the woods for 8 hours a day with his saxophone. He imagined that it might be possible to come close to exploring everything that his instrument could ever do, and use that as a vocabulary of resources when playing his music.
As a result, when a musician like Coltrane was faced with a musical forking path, he had that entire vocabulary at his fingertips to take things this way or that. Ornette Coleman delighted in using the “wrong” notes as jumping off points for new ideas.
Much of the anxiety and difficulty of playing classical music comes from the fact that we’ve only learned to walk in one direction, usually on a tight rope. The only path is forward, and if the vagaries of life on the stage interfere, we collapse.
Chamber ensembles have a further challenge: when a fork or a barrier arises, we not only have to make a decision and change direction, we have to do it together. But there is no time to talk and plan how the new conditions “on the ground” change our battle plan. We must have worked on ways of facing adverse conditions and getting around them.
There are two important ways to develop this skill together. After you’ve made sure there there is always somebody in charge (see above), the next step is to start intentionally screwing up. This can be a somewhat orderly process.
The idea here is not to just arbitrarily play your part wrong, but to test decision points in the score. We make students do this all the time, and they absolutely hate it!
If you’ve decided who is in charge of a particular cue or arrival point, agree that nobody is moving on unless that cue is given. This flies in the face of what we’re trained to think about a score, which is that it is inviolable. Well, the composer is probably dead, and (most likely) he or she is not on the stage with you anyway, so really he/she is not the only stakes-holder in the situation.
So what do you do if the cue doesn’t come where you expect? Keep moving forward in the score and hope for the best? Make something up?
The answer depends on the context of the moment, but it approximates to “whatever sounds the best and minimizes the amount of time that nobody knows what to do.” Usually, a bar of improvisation is better than a whole lost section of players not knowing how to proceed. Your determination to press forward in spite of the fact that nobody went with you achieves very little.
We test each other to see if the cues really matter, or whether we’re just on auto-pilot. This addresses another common problem of classical music, which is that performances can become boring and rote if there’s no sense that things could change in live performance.
Allow the leader to put the cue in the wrong place. Refuse to move on until you’re sure you are together.
The second big technique, already incorporated above, is to improvise. Don’t worry about making up something good or interesting or original. Just mimic what you mostly think is happening in this section of music. Stay in the key, imitate the texture. Provide a reasonably convincing version of what the composer is doing. Yes, this is a kind of heresy, but falling apart or being lost for 50 bars is far worse.
Play a section leading up to a cue. Determine that the leader is definitely not going to put the cue in the right place. Be prepared to make something up until you get that cue, and then launch confidently into the new section. I promise that you will need this technique sometime in a live performance.
Here’s one of the greatest benefits of this way of preparing: even if you have a steady performance where all goes as planned, you will have more fun and play confidently knowing that you can handle adverse circumstances. “Playing scared” is a common issue when performing music that has only one right path. Forget that there’s only one path, play like a musician who can make choices, and you’ll have the performance of your life.
2016 represents a milestone in Sō Percussion’s work – 15 years of commissioning new pieces for percussion. In 2001 we had our first professional season, our first concert in New York City at the Bang on a Can marathon, and the initiation of our first major commission, David Lang’s the so-called laws of nature.
These four concerts featuring Sō at the Lincoln Center Festival represent a particular strand of our DNA: ambitious and lengthy works for chamber percussion. As such, they signify a very focused area of our work. Beyond these pieces, we have commissioned and facilitated commissions of many smaller pieces, developed evening-length theatrical projects of our own music with collaborators like the choreographer Emily Johnson, and participated in hybrid collaborations of original music with groups like Matmos and Buke and Gase where we often constitute a band more than a chamber ensemble.
Our original founding mission was to expand the exciting but underdeveloped repertoire for percussion quartet. This in itself is a lifetime’s worth of work, because the very nature of percussion is broad and fluid. On any given day, a percussion quartet’s palette could consist of only “un-pitched” sounds (noises or sounds that are not part of the piano keyboard scheme); a mallet quartet of two marimbas and vibes; four players around a piano; or even a consort of amplified string instruments. What defines percussion is not the specific nature of instruments and playing expertise, but rather our willingness to be flexible and diverse with what we play.
The four concerts are actually grouped as one and three, and with good reason. Steve Reich’s Drumming is the pillar that supports most of the other works. Written in 1971, Drumming stands as a singularly bold gesture at a time where very few works for percussion ensemble had been written since John Cage’s pieces in the 30’s and 40’s. Even with the excellence of Cage’s compositions, none of them lasted much more than ten minutes, while Drumming takes over an hour to perform!
Happily, it is becoming increasingly challenging to explain to young musicians how unthinkable a full program of percussion music used to be in the western world. Bela Bartok, for all of his fascination with percussion, thought the idea novel and “rather monotonous,” a fun but unserious experiment.
Sō Percussion deliberately set out to increase the number and quality of pieces that could follow in the footsteps of Drumming. We weren’t content with a splash of new ideas on otherwise traditional programs – the goal was to rethink the entire concert program as an expression of contemporary ideas. To that end, our aim was not only to produce a large quantity of new commissions, but also to inspire composers to make some of their boldest statements through the percussion quartet.
Our performance at Alice Tully Hall of Drumming on July 16th sets the stage for the entire run of concerts in the “Trilogy” series on the Lincoln Center Festival. Each performance opens with a shorter major piece from the tiny but brilliant repertoire of percussion music that existed when we started our group. From there, the three concerts explore six of the most ambitious works that have been written for us.
(note: 2016 represents two other auspicious anniversaries: Steve Reich’s 80th birthday, and 45 years since the premiere of Drumming)
When Drumming premiered in New York in 1971, it finally drew the attention of the wider New York music press to the “downtown” scene of experimental music. Tom Johnson’s wonderful coverage of this world in the Village Voice fittingly begins with the premiere of Drumming:
It’s not very often that a long complex piece of new music receives a standing ovation. What was it about Steve Reich’s ‘Drumming’ that brought the audience to its feet at the Museum of Modern Art on December 3? The simple fact that 13 musicians had performed intricate rhythms with amazing precision for an hour and half no doubt had a lot to do with it. Or perhaps it was because the simple white note scales were refreshing to ears grown weary of dissonance. Or perhaps it was the joyous blend of marimbas, glockenspiels, drums, and voices that turned everyone on. Or was it the pleasure of seeing African and European elements so thoroughly fused - almost as if we really did live in one world. Or perhaps it was because the music had spoken directly to the senses, with the sound itself never sacrificed for the more intellectual rhythmic side of the piece.
- Tom Johnson, “The Voice of New Music,” December 9th, 1971
The significance for percussionists here can hardly be overstated: not only was there a fantastic new piece that placed percussion front and center, but that work was emblematic of a new “minimalist” movement that would prove its own significance in the years to come.
Johnson notices that Drumming fuses elements of African and European aesthetics. Although Reich would be the first to assert that the piece is not African, the inspiration he garnished from the example of African and Balinese traditions provided a sort of confidence to press forward with his own ideas for percussion-centric music:
My trip to Ghana confirmed a number of things for me. First, the idea of phasing that I had before I went to Ghana was not something that the Africans do. And the rhythmic techniques used in African drumming are not what I do, but they are related to what I do. The important thing is that there is a tradition of rhythmic counterpoint in Africa (and also in Bali). Second, percussion is the dominant voice in African music, as opposed to the Western orchestra where strings are the dominant voice. So, the message to me was there’s a tradition for repeating percussion patterns, you’re not all by yourself; go, both in terms of the contrapuntal structure of the music and the instrumentation of the music. This is a solid well-trodden path. There’s a past and that means there’s a future.”
- Steve Reich, “Thoughts on Percussion and Rhythm,” from the Cambridge Companion to Percussion
The artistic climate in which Reich first emerged as a composer was very strongly influenced by the Serialists of post World War II Europe. Many wonderful composers such as Pierre Boulez and Karheinz Stockhausen used as their basic technique a rapidly changing fabric of sequence and variation. The idea of looping repetition of rhythm was not very well accepted by many of these kinds of artists, whose experience in Nazi-terrorized Europe had a profound effect on their musical aesthetics. Boulez himself mentioned late in his career that “the 1-2-3-4 of the rhythms [of pop music] reminds me of marching music.
Rhythmic repetition actually breeds variation, but not always the kind that can be noted and appreciated on the composers’ page. Every time a rhythm or motive is looped by a human being, human differences emerge and a heightened sense of awareness about the motive’s possibilities takes hold. A composer who plays in his or her own ensemble as Reich did acquires this instinct for how endlessly interesting it can be to perform these small changes. A seasoned performer of Drumming will develop the ability to transform each event at exactly the moment when those possibilities have been satisfyingly explored.
For Sō Percussion, Drumming gave us one of the greatest gifts any artist could have: permission to forge ahead. Just as Reich gleaned inspiration from the long traditions of African and Balinese music, Drumming provided an example of how the percussion orchestra in Western classical music could become its own intact medium, as well as an appropriate vessel for sweeping visions of musical unity.
Each of our concerts in the Lincoln Center “Trilogy” contains one classic work that opens the concert and launches the two Sō commissions. Music for Pieces of Wood is a masterful demonstration of a deceptively simple concept: rhythmic ambiguity. It doesn’t ruin anything to explain the process, because the delight is in the perception of its prismatic qualities.
Like Clapping Music, with which it shares its opening rhythm, Music for Pieces of Wood consists of the same rhythm displaced among different players. Unlike Clapping Music, it utilizes tuned instruments which create a harmonic tapestry. These displace rhythms are introduced one note at a time, but in a carefully crafted sequence that masks their identity and suggests many possible ways of hearing where the main pulse and “downbeat” of the music might be.
This seemingly simple conceit actually makes Music for Pieces of Wood a consistently challenging piece to play, no matter how many times we’ve done it. Any musician, no matter how seasoned, must concentrate intensively on the task of keeping a pattern steadily offset. The experience is akin to seeing yourself through a dimensional portal, maybe half a second into the future. That disorientation never goes away, but you develop coping strategies such as the reassuring feel of the physical pattern in your hands and arms.
Reich’s original version of Music for Pieces of Wood calls for tuned claves. When we first started playing it, we grabbed some of the wooden planks that were strewn about our studio for David Lang’s the so-called laws of nature. Reich first heard us do this version in New York at the Look and Listen Festival. He was enthusiastic about the energy and feel of our performance, and I’ll never forget what he said about the planks: “well, I guess I didn’t say you couldn’t do that, they are pieces of wood!”
Indebted to Reich for both title inspiration and substance, this work has become one of our most popular concert pieces. It demonstrates an evolving and important part of our group philosophy, which is that “percussion” is a style of engagement and an attitude more than an instrument category. The newly invented instruments (called “chordsticks”) that Dessner created for this piece stretch that premise for us, because they are essentially string instruments.
When we perform it, one of us usually sticks around afterwards for a “show and tell” with the the audience. They are invariably fascinated by the mechanics of the chordsticks, which we play in a manner most similar to a hammered dulcimer or cimbalom. Where many string instruments like guitar or violin are designed with capabilities to play a full spectrum of pitches alone, the chordstick is purely an ensemble instrument. Each register of strings is tuned to a fixed chord for the duration of the piece, and the pitch of those strings can only be altered by an octave with the damper in the middle of the instrument.
Dessner deftly composes each chordstick to have a slightly different tuning, so that more complex melodies can result from the performers trading back and forth in the ancient technique known as “hocket.” In this way, although the chordsticks sound very similar to the electric guitar, the composer actually utilizes a common percussion performance technique that is especially prominent in music from Africa and Bali. We initially experimented with #2 pencils to strike the strings until a better implement could be found, but that turned out to be just the right tool!
The most unique instrument is the bass chordstick that Josh Quillen plays, which possesses one bass string with frets built into the frame. Dessner composes several important sections of the piece to take advantage of the melodic possibilities of this bass string, which satisfyingly turns the usual melody/accompaniment arrangement of high and low voices upside-down.
One of my favorite aspects of the performance of this piece is that we decided to forgo any electronic effects such as distortion or delay, electing instead to explore the percussionist’s toolkit of sound-making. In this way, our pencils could strike with the metal eraser-holding end for a sharp sound, and also be turned around to a soft mole-skin wrapping on the other end for a warm sound. At several points we bow the instrument (this was actually the hardest part to get the hang of), or turn the bows over to play with the legno side. We found that smaller bows built for children obtain the best sound from the strings.
“The whole modern conception of the world is founded on the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena. Thus people today stop at the laws of nature, treating them as something inviolable, just as God and Fate were treated in past ages. And in fact both were right and both wrong; though the view of the ancients is clearer insofar as they have a clear and acknowledged terminus, while the modern system tries to make it look as if everything were explained.”
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
When we were students at Yale, one of our original members received a medium-sized grant to pursue further educational enrichment. He decided to use it to help Sō commission a new work. We approached David Lang, who said bluntly “you either have enough money for me to write you a very short work or a very long one.”
As he explained his reasoning, it started to make sense: most professional new music groups at the time were busy premiering many pieces, and it would be difficult to write the kind of huge work he had in mind unless the ensemble had a crazy work ethic and loads of time to devote to it. As graduate students, we had both.
Lang imagined a new kind of percussion quartet, written in homage to Drumming, that would spark the entire category of pieces we are celebrating in this Lincoln Center Festival series. The scale of the work – about 36 minutes long – results partially from the unfolding of “gradual processes” inspired by Reich.
Much of the so-called laws of nature depends upon perceiving the four players as reflections of each other. The first movement calls for woodblocks to be crafted and tuned, but not to a scheme of keyboard tones such as Ab or C. They are tuned relative to each other, such that each player’s top three notes are identical to every other player, but as the bottom four blocks get larger with each player, they also get larger respectively down the line. This means that players one and four will have the same top three notes, but there will be a substantial range of size and pitch between the lower four notes.
The entire first three minutes of the first movement of the so-called laws of nature is played in perfect unison. Because of the tuning scheme, many different high and low pitches will be contained in those unisons. About a quarter of the way through the movement, sequences begin to activate where players split off from each other, but always joining or leaving a pattern related to another player. These moments of change can be thought of as behaviors, a kind of musical game of “follow the leader.”
The second movement, for tuned metal pipes and drums, places the performers in permanent stasis fractions of a second apart using the technique of canon. As the players stand in profile, this heightened version of “row row row your boat” builds in complexity for 12 minutes.
The third movement, for tuned flower pots, teacups, bells, woodblock, and guiro, is unison throughout. Importantly, the tuned flowerpots do alternate pitches among the players, so that a ceaseless chorale animates the entire movement. It might seem strange to compose a quartet as four unison performances of a solo composition, but there is a careful and breathless drama in the fragility of watching the performers navigate such delicate instruments in this way.
Each of the commissioned works in our series comes after the so-called laws of nature, which sets a precedent and an identity for these kinds of large scale pieces for percussion quartet.
Iannis Xenakis’ work has had a seismic impact on the percussion repertoire. He is one of many composers in the 20th century who uses percussion as an avenue for a very new kind of music, one that frequently explores time and space as scientific variables. For some listeners, that mode of creation was (and still is) jarringly antithetical to the emphasis on personal expression and the imitation of the human voice that dominated 19th century music.
As a Greek, Xenakis allied himself not only with more modern radical impulses, but also with the rich veins of rationalistic thought that stretch back to the ancient Greek philosophers. To him, devotion to understanding the mathematical laws of nature and probability was exceedingly humanistic. He theorized extensively in his book Formalized Music about how we might understand sound and its underlying patterns both inside and outside of listening in time.
Like most European composers of his generation, Xenakis was deeply affected by his experience during World War II. He suffered a dramatic disfigurement from a British tank shell in 1944 that destroyed his left eye and damaged his face. One of his most arresting descriptions of his own music draws on this experience in a strikingly matter-of-fact way:
Everyone has observed the sonic phenomena of a political crowd of dozens or hundreds of thousands of people. The human river shouts a slogan in a uniform rhythm. Then another slogan springs from the head of the demonstration; it spreads towards the tail, replacing the first. A wave of transition thus passes from the head to the tail. The clamor fills the city, and the inhibiting force of voice and rhythm reaches a climax. It is an event of great power and beauty in its ferocity. Then the impact between the demonstrators and the enemy occurs. The perfect rhythm of the last slogan breaks up in a huge cluster of chaotic shouts, which also spreads to the tail. Imagine, in addition, the reports of dozens of machine guns and the whistle of bullets adding their punctuations to this total disorder. The crowd is then rapidly dispersed, and after sonic and visual hell follows a detonating calm, full of despair, dust, and death. The statistical laws of these events, separated from their political or moral context, are the same as those of the cicadas or the rain. They are the laws of the passage from complete order to total disorder in a continuous or explosive manner. They are stochastic laws.
- Xenakis, Formalized Music
Xenakis was fascinated by the idea that unpredictable individual elements like a human being or a molecule were still subject to forces that affected the behavior of large groups in predictable ways. Actually his primary training was in engineering and architecture, and he lead a consequential career in the Atelier of the Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier while developing his musical theories.
His great percussion sextet Pleiade provides a thrilling illumination of these theories. We chose the Metaux movement for our Lincoln Center Festival concert because in it Xenakis calls for the construction of an entirely new instrument called Sixxen (six players + Xenakis). Many of the works on our Trilogy series call for either invented instruments or new combinations of objects. This is one of the primary ways in which percussion composers distinguish the sound world of their music.
Sixxen are made of metal, and their sound closely resembles that of a Balinese Gamelan orchestra. As with the wooden planks in David Lang’s the so-called laws of nature, the metal keys are tuned to more of a general scheme rather than specific notes. One of the key components is that they are tuned intentionally very close to each other from one player to another, but not exactly the same. These small variations in micro-tuning mirror the molecular changes that ripple through the parts during the piece.
A listener might notice that many moments of the piece carry a sense of confusion and density, while others seem monolithically unified. This is part of the appeal and impact of Xenakis’ music, and from the quote above, it is not hard to see that it is all by design.
All of the works written for us fall somewhere on a spectrum between utilizing very specific sounds and imagining categories of sound. David Lang calls for wooden blocks, but the performers are given enormous leeway in what kind of wood to use, how high or low the pitch is, or how large the spread from one player to another might be. Bryce Dessner, on the other hand, calls for one-of-a-kind instruments. It is literally impossible to perform his piece properly without them.
Cenk Ergün’s work Proximity veers towards the specific. It is a gorgeous, focused, meditative piece that consists entirely of metals: vibraphones, cymbals, bells, tam-tams, and more. Cenk rummaged through our studio in Brooklyn cataloguing and sampling our exact instruments. As Cenk was raised in Istanbul, the languorous sonic environment that he conjures up with these is directly related to that upbringing. In Proximity, Ergün invites the listener to turn off the part of her brain that seeks argument or resolution from music, and to focus instead on the sensual nature of sound.
Cenk has a fascinating way of talking about the origins of this piece:
Traditional Turkish music is monophonic. Melodies are played by a large variety of instruments in unison or at octaves, and always in rhythmic unison. Instruments like the saz, ud, ney, kanun are impossible to tune perfectly together and thus create a unique sonority when playing in unison. This sonority is the impetus for Proximity and is clearly audible especially in the opening minutes. Another influence present on the opening was Japanese Taiko drumming. I remember when I finally felt ready to puts notes down on paper after months of preparation - I was at a Kodo concert. It was their concentration and the focus on the music - the intensity of the moment - I decided I wanted to begin the piece that way.
I love the highly amplified sounds of quietly played instruments. These sounds do not have the harsh quality of loud playing, and yet because they are amplified they are loud enough to reveal all their detail to the ear. This is why Proximity is scored for amplified percussion quartet. It's a relatively loud piece produced by amplified quiet playing. The pitch content in my works is usually extremely limited. I like to focus on a specific, limited set of pitches for long spans of time - as my goal is always to establish a single sound texture and maintain it for as long as possible with minimum variation. Regardless of the tuning method I'm using, or the length of the piece, I often find that by the end of a piece I've used only about 7-8 different pitches as well as their siblings at different octaves. The first 8 minutes of Proximity is only 3 pitches, played at several different octaves on several different instruments.
Electronic music as such will gradually die and be absorbed into the ongoing music of people singing and playing instruments.
-Steve Reich, 1970
I think the key phrase in this quote from Steve Reich is “as such.” While his assertion is debatable, in the sense that nothing has really died, it has also largely come true. In 1970, when he incorporated this aphorism into a series of predictions about the future of music, electronic music was a fixed medium. With the advent of magnetic tape around the time of World War II, composers even started referring to their creations in this field as concrete. This was actually one of its benefits! For centuries music could only be transmitted via oral tradition and notation. In this sense, an indication of how somebody should go about making sound was possible, but the sound itself could never be preserved. With the advent of recordings, sounds could be preserved, but with magnetic tape they could be manipulated. This opened up a whole world of possibilities for composition and assembly. Now a composer wasn’t working with a symbolic representation of a sound - he or she was working with the sound itself.
For a composer like Reich, the evident weakness of this fixed medium was that it cut out one of the most fun parts of music making – the people! Making fixed works of electronic music has not died at all, but new technology has enabled fascinating ways for the human musician to utilize and even interact with it.
Dan Trueman embodies this duality in a striking way. On any given day, he is as likely to be coding the software for a new digital instrument as to snatch his Norwegian Hardangar fiddle off of its peg on the wall and compose tunes for it. Ultimately, all of the electronic instruments he creates are subsumed into “the ongoing music of people singing and playing instruments,” rather than existing just as a set of instructions for the computer to execute.
Trueman’s work neither Anvil nor Pulley throws down the digital/human gauntlet in a way that peculiarly suits Sō Percussion’s approach. In similar fashion to David Lang’s the so-called laws of nature, it explores the outer reaches of both mechanical alienation and human intimacy. The computer programs that he developed for both 120bpm and Feedback are strikingly innovative on a technical level, but that aspect is always subsumed into an aesthetic purpose.
120bpm contains a simple premise that is laden with possibilities: If the percussionist strikes a note that triggers a metronome, that pulse will be rigid and fixed. But if four players strike them at different times, each of their fixed pulses will be scattered according to human timing. This creates a considerable musical challenge for the ensemble, because it requires the performers to develop machine-like execution at precisely the same tempo. If the hocketing notes aren’t timed correctly, a wonky off-kilter rhythm will result. From the composer’s point of view, this is also an opportunity, because it means that the rhythms can be wonky and off-kilter on purpose, creating a stark contrast with the (hopefully) perfectly square notes.
Somehow, Trueman also figured out how to hack into video game controllers, tethers that snap back into place when released. We use these as highly physical and visually exciting sound controllers towards the end of 120bpm, a steady chorale over the relentlessly reducing rhythms of the machine.
Feedback is a kind of simultaneous homage to Karlheinz Stockhausen, J.S. Bach, and Jimi Hendrix. Our concert bass drum is converted into a noisy amplifier, much in the way that Stockhausen’s Mikrophonie filtered resonance from a giant tam-tam (this was an intentional reference on Trueman’s part). In this case, our laptops actually take the microphone feedback and squish it into cycling harmonies from the C major prelude of book one from Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier.
But feedback isn’t only a microphone trick: it’s a process that can execute on multiple levels. Two drum machines begin cycling rhythms back in on themselves, counting down, over and over again. Jason Treuting is tasked on the drumset with keeping track of these very asymmetrical cycles and playing along with them. In his playing the man and the machine begin to rip each other apart - as the algorithms spin faster and faster, the human tries desperately to keep up. All the while, the bass drum feedback continues to escalate…
After Trueman constructed these two movements, he realized that he had, in a sense, created a monster. Some relief for the listener was needed. He crossed his home studio from the computer console to the stacks of fiddle tunes that he had been compiling and writing for years. These pieces, coming as they do out of unwritten folk traditions, express odd and unusual performance ideas. The neat binary world of computer language would never create something as lopsided as the “springar” Norwegian dance meter, where each beat is a slightly different length than the last. These fiddle tunes can’t be quantified; they must be felt. We orchestrated them for our own resources: steel drums, vibraphone, drumset, crotales, melodica.
Ultimately, our interaction with technology creates both opportunities and perils. The great debate about how machines affect our humanity has now muddled into alerts and notifications that remind us of our constant attachment to them. Artists will continue to probe, articulate, and question that evolving relationship.
(note: The following is taken from my chapter in the Cambridge Companion to Percussion, where I write about Cage’s Third Construction as it relates to the whole of the percussion chamber music repertoire.)
Percussion music is a contemporary transition from keyboard-influenced music to the all-sound music of the future. Any sound is acceptable to the composer of percussion music; he explores the academically forbidden ‘non-musical’ field of sound insofar as is manually possible.
- John Cage, 1937
A third concept … is to eliminate sounds of determined pitch from music. Or, in other words, to write pieces for percussion instruments alone. This idea seems to have been propagated mostly in this country the U.S.A.; in fact, I have seen whole programmes made up only of percussion music. However interesting the use of rhythmic and other devices, I think it is nevertheless a rather monotonous experience for the listener to sit through a programme made up exclusively of percussion music. This is my feeling despite my high personal interest in the exploitation of percussion instruments in various new ways.
- Bela Bartok, 1943
These conflicting statements by two major composers of the twentieth century highlight one of the great rifts in contemporary discussions about music: what do we do about noise? ‘Noise’ in this case refers not only to sounds that are loud or irritating, but more broadly to any that do not correspond with a tone on the piano keyboard (A, Bb, etc). The history of how we arrived at tuning those keyboard tones is fascinating: they are compromised tunings, designed to create a symmetrical and flexible instrument that can modulate to different keys. Since Johann Sebastian Bach’s time, our musical discourse has revolved almost entirely around how to use them.
The role of the percussionist in western music has long been to provide punctuation, color, and rhythmic drive. Within certain bounds of taste, composers employed noise to enhance their ambitious works. But it was taken for granted that for any piece of music to have real legitimacy and substance, it must consist of melodies and harmonies derived from the keyboard tones.
When, in the early twentieth century, Arnold Schoenberg took the seemingly radical step of systematizing the way the twelve tones were used in modern composition and breaking away from the traditional harmonic framework, he left this assumption of tone-based thinking completely intact. It was John Cage, a student of his in California, who took the most assertive step towards an all-encompassing world of ‘organized sound,’ an approach to composition that embraced the world’s chaos and stillness all together.
As happens with most artistic breakthroughs, this idea was already in the air. The Italian Futurists glorified the grinding cacophony of the industrial age decades earlier, and Edgard Varese imagined music as massive sound objects colliding with each other, attracting and repulsing like celestial bodies. In 1931, Varese premiered Ionisation, an elegantly assembled but raucous collection of sirens, drums, rattles, and bells, and the most important early work for percussion ensemble. Ionisation articulated a new insight that Bartok casually dismissed: percussion was not only an extension of colors and exotic flavors that comprised a new niche group of instruments. It represented, as Cage famously claimed, an artistic revolution.
Along with my colleagues in Sō Percussion, a quartet that I have performed in since 2002, I teach a course at Princeton University to Ph.D. composition students on writing for percussion. We always begin the semester by examining Cage’s Third Construction from 1941, a work written for a fantastic variety of percussion sounds that, in my opinion, is his greatest feat of craftsmanship. We do this because some composers have not yet tried their hand at building a piece of music without using tones as the primary organizing element. Cage’s work is so dazzlingly brilliant that it is hard to deny that he has created something more than a novelty out of purely rhythmic and coloristic elements.
Cage achieves this in an ingenious way: instead of taking a tiny kernel motive and expanding its possibilities outward (Beethoven’s duh-duh-duh-duuuuuuuh from his Fifth Symphony is an iconic example), he starts composing by deciding upon an outer shell: twenty-four sections of music consisting of twenty-four measures each (which creates a kind of square-root or fractal pattern). By determining this sturdy structure, he can add noise into the composition without each sound needing to justify its own existence as a cause or effect of other sounds; it can be just sound, and the piece will still hold together.
For instance, a shaker can be composed inside the shell structure to provide a nervous layer of noise for 8 measures, pulsating on each bar, without justifying what the purpose of its existence might be for the goal of the piece. The shaker sound takes up time and space, making noise, and that is its justification for being in the scheme. But we can be assured that it will not go on shaking forever, because the larger section will have 16 more measures no matter what. I don’t want to leave the impression that Third Construction is static and does not build or climax – it does in the most spectacular way. However it owes its existence more to a carefully planned subdivision of sections and rhythmic ideas than would any tonal piece (which relies on harmonic resolution for structure, not time).
Cage is most famous for his provocative 1952 ‘silent piece,’ most commonly referred to by the duration of the premiere performance: four minutes and thirty-three seconds. His great insight in composing 4’33” was that the one indispensable element of music was not melody, harmony, or even necessarily rhythm, but duration. Sound must exist during a span of time, and that is all. The duration of the piece is also its structure, much like the 24x24 measure structure of Third Construction.
In 4’33”, the performer indicates the beginning of the piece, and then does not make any intentional sound, incorporating only a few more visual gestures (like the opening of a piano lid) to indicate sectional divisions of the work. Of course, no performance space is completely silent, and so diverse combinations of sound permeate the space of the work (audience coughing or snickering, air conditioner vents, outdoor sounds).
Third Construction was composed eleven years earlier, so it is not quite as radical (Cage’s output seems only to get more daring and abstract over the years). Its noises are more controlled and intentional. Of course, there is still a lot of variation between different interpretations of what rattle or shaker should be used, but at least the noises are composed on paper in measures and beats, which makes them easier to compare to other music from the notated past.
My first exposure to any of Paul's music was unwitting, as I'm sure it has been for many people: the gnarly, distorted portion of Mild und Leise that Jonny Greenwood found in the back of a record shop and pasted into Radiohead'sIdioteque from Kid A. I was astounded to learn years after Kid A came out that this loop was actually the tiniest passing chunk of an 18-minute long computer piece from 1973 based on Richard Wagner's Tristan chord (and making reference to one of his most famous bits of music).
To talk to Paul about the evolution of computer music is to hear its entire history: when he was working at Princeton and Bell Labs in the 1960's, the computers were "as big as this room and less powerful than your cell phone" (as he told an audience of our Summer Institute students who were sitting in a very large room).
I highly recommend reading Paul's keynote speech from a recent ICMC (International Computer Music Conference). For a younger person or percussionist who only knows Lansky through his acoustic compositions, this speech provides a powerful sense of where he is coming from and his place in the last 50 years of music history.
Paul wrote Threads for us in 2005. When Sō searches for composers to write percussion music, we consider many factors, but the most powerful is our desire to find a voice that speaks naturally through percussion instruments. As a result, we sometimes find ourselves off the beaten path of contemporary chamber music. There are many wonderful composers out there, but percussion has a special voice.
We approached him to write for us after a concert of student pieces that So performed at Princeton in 2004. He was hesitant at first, saying that he "had never actually written for percussion before." We protested that three decades of computer pieces said otherwise, especially his work Table’s Clear.
In fact, many of our favorite percussion composers were heavily involved in electronic media (Cage, Reich, Xenakis). We thought that Paul's work with algorithms and computer processing might yield fascinating results. The conversation went something like "if you write interesting music on four lines, we'll help you figure out what instruments to put it on."
Paul came out to our studio the next year with a series of 10 etudes in hand, exploring toys, melodic instruments, and drums. We talked about timbres, limitations, all of the issues inherent in playing acoustic instruments with human hands. He was a voracious student of the medium. Interestingly, he carried none of the baggage that a life-long percussionist has... to us, sleigh bells meant Leroy Anderson’s “Sleigh Ride,” while to him they sounded quirky and interesting.
Astonishingly soon after this workshop I travelled down to Princeton to see what he had come up with. I sat mesmerized in his studio as he played a continuous 30-minute, ten movement piece for me. He kept looking up as if to ask "is this any good?" I was spellbound. Threads quickly became a staple of our touring repertoire. In my opinion, it stands toe-to-toe with pieces like Cage's Third Construction in defining what percussion chamber music can be.
When we coach young ensembles that are playing Threads, the first question we always ask is "have you heard any of Paul's computer music?" The answer is almost invariably "no." At which point, we ask the students to hang out for 20 minutes or so while we play excerpts of Table's Clear, NotJustMoreIdleChatter, or The Sound of Two Hands.
Edgard Varese wrote percussion music partially because he could not yet realize the electronic music he was hearing in his head. Lansky pulls a sort of reverse-Varese move: what might have been ideal material for synthesized sounds is now converted into bottles, ceramics, and sleigh bells in movement 5 and throughout.
In that session with Paul, my excitement grew with each passing moment: it was obviously a terrific piece. But as the last movement began, a chill ran up my spine. There were no exotic rituals, no virtuosic displays, just rolling vibraphone harmony and a chorale for glockenspiel and metal pipes.
If you play or listen to Threads without encountering Paul's computer music, you will certainly enjoy it, but it's more difficult to appreciate how hard-won those beautiful melodies are. His journey as a young composer began in the studios of Milton Babbitt and George Perle, steeped in the intoxicating complexity of post-tonal music. And yet that journey continues, after numerous achievements, with recitatives for glass bottles and heartfelt arias for metal pipes.
In Sō Percussion, everything is equal. We make artistic decisions by consensus, everybody has the same vote, and we do our best not to present the group as having hierarchy. A lot of our repertoire features this same dynamic, even to the point where each of us plays identical instruments in layers of complexity (Reich, Lang, Xenakis). It Is Time is designed to break the pattern of anonymity within our music, while still setting us all on equal footing.
In order to do this, Steve Mackey sat us down over barbecue and asked a simple question: “what instrument do you want to play?” This is perhaps a question that only composers writing for percussion get to ask in this way. It burrows to the heart of our individual identities as musicians, probing not only what skills we have in common, but also what makes us unique. We each answered differently, and he structured the piece around those preferences. This not only brilliantly provided him with a jumping-off point for the composition, it also ensured that the performers would be maximally invested in the process. The following is an account, by each of us in turn, of our collaboration with Mackey on the making of It Is Time.
Movement I: Metronome (Eric)
Working with Steve on It Is Time was a huge challenge for me, and it was really helped that Steve was interested in true collaboration. I didn’t have a strong idea going into the project about what specific instrument(s) to play, and I was worried that he wouldn’t be inspired to do anything interesting if I didn’t already have an idea for him. But the discussion with Steve about what exactly to write for inspired him in a different way than would have been possible otherwise.
I still have the list of instruments that I suggested. For each one I wrote a little description and recorded myself playing it for about a minute. He used almost all of them: glass bottle, china cymbal/hi hat, Estey child’s organ, frame drum, metronome, noah bells, and small bells. I also recorded a little concertina, some other drums, and a stack of poker chips – those three things were the only instruments I sent him that didn’t end up in the piece.
Estey Organ: a bellows reed organ that used to be made by the Estey Organ company in Brattleboro, Vermont.
China Cymbal / Hi-Hat: This is a simple setup of a hi-hat made up of a china cymbal on top and a mute on the bottom – in this case, the mute is actually a smaller cymbal that is wrapped in a few towels.
Musical Saw: The one complete instrument that Steve asked me to learn how to play from scratch. He toyed with the idea of a Theremin as well, but his first inspiration was the saw and I agreed to learn how to play it.
Frame Drum: This is a standard frame drum mounted on a snare drum stand so that I can play it with one hand.
Metronome: This is an analog Wittner metronome that I amplify with a contact microphone and run through a digital delay pedal.
Noah Bells: These are simple copper bells that traditionally come from India or Pakistan.
Wine Bottle: This is a wine bottle filled with an amount of water that tunes the bottle to a specific pitch.
Small Bells: These are traditional celebration bells from India.
Movement II: Steel Drums (Josh)
What struck me the most about Steve’s way of learning the steel drums was his desire to hear me play the way I naturally wanted to play. He was curious about my idiosyncrasies as a player because this was an instrument he had never written for. I often wonder: if he had written this for another steel drummer, would it have turned out completely differently? Maybe it wouldn’t be different at all, but once the music starting arriving via email bit by bit, I found that it challenged me like no other music written for the steel drum, while at the same time, somehow, showing clearly how I should make it my own. Steve strove to push me as a player to interpret his music the way I would Calypso music, and it meant a lot that he was being so thoughtful about tradition while writing incredibly difficult music.
Along the way, I expected to have to tell Steve that things needed to be re-written so they would flow better, but his thoughtful obsession about what he was writing kept me from having to do that. He had diagrams of my instruments at home so he could slowly “play” every note he was writing. If he could play it slow, then in his mind, I could play it fast. Well, it worked!
Writing for the steel drums is a difficult, but the two of us broke new ground together, coming across something that I am sure doesn’t exist yet elsewhere in the steel drum world. Steve started asking me if I could re-tune metal bowls to have a few of the higher lead pan pitches “detuned” a bit by a quarter tone (ie. microtonally detuned). I did mess around with a few of the bowls, but the setup started to get a little unwieldy to deal with, and they just didn’t sound as good as the steel drum. It occurred to me that I had an older “Invader” style lead pan. It was really out of tune and beat up, but on a whim I called the tuner I was using to ask him if he could tune the entire pan back into shape, but just leave the whole thing a quarter tone sharp of A440. His response was, “well, I’ll just set the strobe tuner a quarter tone sharp and roll with it.” When I got the pan back, it sounded in tune with itself, but as soon as I put it with the newer lead pan (tuned to A440), a whole new world opened up. It doubled the amount of notes Steve could write for between middle C and the F above the treble clef staff.
As a player, collaborating with Steve Mackey on It is Time pushed me to augment my already existing skills as a steel drummer in ways I would have never dreamed. He is an endless reservoir of wild ideas that seem to have no filter at first glance, but on second look are masterfully crafted innovations and a thoughtful flushing out of brilliant ideas.
Movement III. Marimba (Adam)
By the time the first two movements were sketched out, Steve realized that It Is Time was approaching epic proportions, and its story was turning darker. His meditation on the concept of time had lead him to a more melancholic place, where exhilaration at the thought of controlling and harnessing it also revealed its indifference and inevitability.
I was thrilled that Steve would throw this kind of challenge at himself in a percussion piece. My favorite moments in Sō’s work happen when a composer finds these spaces for introspection: sometimes elegiac, often conflicted. Each one seems to take the creator by surprise. I’m thinking especially of the flower pots and teacups in David Lang’s the so-called laws of nature, the final Chorale Prelude in Paul Lansky’s Threads, and the second movement of Steve Reich’s Mallet Quartet. Some of Jason’s music from amid the noise is unbearably melancholic to me, precisely because it isn’t exactly.
The third movement of Is It Time begins with the simplest gesture: a bouncing ball, releasing its potential energy with a burst of optimism, but always returning to rest. Steve wanted “time” - such as it is here - to come to a screeching halt at the beginning of this section. What had built up into a huge menagerie of instruments and colors is now reduced to the solo marimba: a quiet roll on one note that barely erupts into the first bouncing ball.
For awhile, this single gesture repeats: winding down, restarting, over and over again. While Steve and I were working together, this was straightforward enough, as learning to control the natural bounce of a stick is one of the first things that a percussionist has to do. But he wanted to take it further. How could we create polyphony, the perception of overlapping wind up and release? He wondered if notating gestures with general overlap indications would be effective. Not trusting my own ability to be convincing with that, I told him how much I admire the way composers like Xenakis use precise notation to achieve chaotic results. In the end, he decided upon a way of notating the gesture as an accelerating rhythm, so that an overlapping gesture could be placed anywhere, worked out for performance as a complex polyrhythm. Paradoxically, this kind of detailed execution frees the performer from his own tendencies and limitations. Often as an artist you want to celebrate those personal tendencies, but in this case we needed an impersonal, inevitable force.
His final touch took me completely by surprise: While I toil away at my fateful gestures, the other members of the group rise up from their instruments and start walking around, placing little dinosaur wind up toys all over the stage. It’s chaotic, distracting, and frankly takes a bit of attention away from the soloist. To my mock-dismay, it was also pitch-perfect, exactly what the movement needed. After all, the music that I’m playing is not in any sense about me. Gravity and nature are indifferent to our need for attention, which is why we hold them in awe.
Movement IV: Drums (Jason)
I first heard Steve Mackey play electric guitar on a concert of his music as an undergraduate student at the Eastman School of Music. I was a double major at the time, studying classical percussion and drumset. I checked out Steve’s show and didn’t quite know what to make of it. It was mostly composed music, but had a feel of discovery and freedom in the moment. So when I met Steve five or so years later at the Yellowbarn Chamber Music Festival, I begged him to improvise with me in the evenings when the long rehearsal days were over. During those sessions, I really got to know him as an electric guitarist and improviser before knowing him as a composer.
I have long been anxious about working drumset into in Sō’s chamber music, because in my opinion it rarely succeeds in that medium. The drumset is essentially a folk instrument where each player is expected to have a unique approach. Attempts to codify it through standard notation tend to squash that uniqueness. And when the drumset is used to obliquely reference the popular styles that it has come to define (jazz, blues, R&B, funk, rock, latin jazz styles, etc), things can go drastically wrong.
I didn’t have these fears with Steve. It didn’t cross my mind to shy away from drumset: we knew each other very well as players and he knows the instrument(s) very well as a composer. In this sense, much of the work was already done. The time needed for a composer and performer to feel each other out and discover what is possible had happened over and over again each time we played together. So, now was the time to feel out which direction to choose from the many we knew were possible. I wasn’t quite prepared for the new rhythmic language he would innovate and how fascinating it would be to learn to translate that to the drumset.
In movement IV, steady time is bent and warped. In the many improvisations and little pieces Steve and I made together, we often explored the limits of how malleable groove can be, especially in duo situations. But in the case of a quartet, where a larger group is tasked with bending and warping together, a common reference is needed. Steve chose two angles to explore.
The first looks back to the analog metronome that was so central to the first movement. In this last movement, the steadiness of the metronome is warped by physically tilting it on a block. Steve and Eric discovered that if you set the metronome at just the perfect angle, you can take 2 steady beats and turn them into a longer and shorter beat and thus warp the groove.
For the second, Steve references common latin patterns from cowbell and clave playing to serve as warp-worthy grooves. In the drum set music that I play, he composes these patterns and their variations in all four limbs - my left foot alternates between a pedal cowbell and hi hat - which shift back and forth between warped and “straight” settings.
Many great drummers warp groove and play around with time as an expressive tool in their improvisations. Steve embraces this sensibility, but he mixes it with the craft of a composer who methodically develops musical ideas throughout a piece. When the drum set is incorporated into contemporary chamber and orchestra music, it is usually a more static element for other things to develop against, but in this movement, he gives the drum set the ability to take themes, both rhythmic and melodic, and develop them as the driving force. That is not common and not so easy.
