Ok, so Harmonielehre. John Adams. The best thing about Harmonielehre, besides everything, is that it has the most satisfying structure I can think of. What John Adams is probably the best at is knowing when it is time to change to some new music, and, perhaps most importantly, what music needs to come next. Every moment is placed precisely at the perfect point in the journey of the piece.

I think a big reason why I connect with Adams’ music so deeply is that I <3 Structure. It is my absolute favorite thing. It is the first thing I notice about a piece as I hear it. (I can’t tell you how many times I have thought to myself during a recital, “Thank God, a Rondo! I can tell when this will be over.” Have I mentioned Classical structures bore me?)

An aside: Isn’t it kind of awesome and sad how there will always be those three flutes just arpeggiating away at the beginning of Harmonielehre, but you will never hear it for those incredibly orchestrated and spaced E minor chords?

Structure is also the first thing I think about before writing a piece. I take all these 11×17 pieces of paper and draw these huge graphs and shapes and things all outlining what the piece will look like when it’s finished. When I’ve finished these sketches, I tape it on my office wall, so I can always see exactly where I am in the Big Picture. This can sometimes turn into a problem of “This section doesn’t want to go there” but more often than not, the original drawing is correct and it is an extremely helpful way to keep your work focused.

For the past 3 or so years, that is how I have always worked. Structure first, the write the notes to fit the story. But for some reason, I decided I wanted to try something different this time. I’m currently working on a piece, tentatively titled Knock on Wood, as a thank you gift for a mentor of mine. Right now, the piece is basically an explosion of my favorite hymn O God, Our Help in Ages Past. I was so excited about working on the piece, that I didn’t bother trying to sketch out a structure; I just wrote a whole bunch of notes. This has been fine and dandy until now, when I am trying to figure out how all of this fits together. I had a similar problem when I was writing Leaves of Greens: I had written all this music to fit this poetry, but I had absolutely no idea how it all worked together. I’m still not even sure how Leaves of Greens all works together, if it even does. I don’t really have an answer to this right now, so this storyline will have to be continued in a later episode.

At any rate, Structure. Here are some examples of what I deem Satisfying Structures:

Adams – Harmonielehre. (Duh.) If you do nothing else, listen to the last 6 minutes of the last movement.

Jonathan Newman – Symphony No. 1, “My Hands Are a City” Make sure to catch the awesome, awesome ending of the last movement. (This won’t be a theme, I promise.)

John Corigliano – Clarinet Concerto. Unbelievably amazing.

Price Walden – hydrogen jukebox. just kidding. but really. just kidding.

Here’s the other thing: I don’t think I could name an Unsatisfying Structure if I had a gun at my head, because I don’t really listen to pieces that I would consider unsatisfying. But they exist. Here is where I reckon they main offenders would exist:

Choral Music (or any music with a text): Music with a text automatically is a problem in that the text 99% of the time will govern the structure. This is usually not a bad thing in and of itself, but it can turn into this never ending rhapsody where the composer just follows his heart and you are left wondering what the heck has happened at the end. Samuel Barber was really awesome at making sure the text left you with a satisfying structure at the end. See: Knoxville: Summer of 1915, where he took a prose chapter of a book and turned it into one of the most moving things you will ever hear. David Lang is really awesome and taking the text and letting it have absolutely nothing to do with the structure of the music. Instead, it just becomes another aspect of the music that he can manipulate. See: the little match girl passion. (The best piece of all time.)

Renaissance Music: Back circa the 16th century, they basically just pretended that structure didn’t exist. Their philosophy was basically “It’s over when it’s over.” All of that music always will sound to me like a Giant Polyphonic Jam Session, which can either leave me So Excited or like “Really, Dudes?”

Classical Music: This suffers from exactly the opposite problem as the Renaissance. The Classical period was all about structure, but they were too much about structure for me. There is a certain amount of time that I can sit through a Sonata Allegro and it is about 16 bars. Once we start modulating to the Dominant the first time, I instantly zone out. A big exception to this is Beethoven, who, especially toward the end of his live, was usually wildly inventive in his structures. He also created one of my favorite structures of all time: the final movement to his Piano Sonata in Ab Major, Op. 110. It is Recitative: Arioso: Fugue: Arioso II (the same arioso in a different key and heavily ornamented): and then he does the Fugue again except HE INVERTS IT. HE TURNS THAT FUGUE UPSIDE DOWN AND YOU HAVE TO PLAY IT. YESSSSSS. Go listen to it right now. It is absolutely my favorite thing. I’m gonna be playing it on my recital next year, so go ahead and put April 2013 on your calendars for the best recital ever. I’ve also decided I’m doing Phrygian Gates on that recital, but that is Another Structure for Another Time.

What’s great about Romantic Music is that’s when composers learned about Transformation. They were the best at learning how to really manipulate the emotions through transformation and such, which kind of turned out to be their downfall. But they were always good at giving you satisfying structures, even if you were mad that they were able to leave you so devastated through a tone poem.

Here is Glenn Gould doing that last movement of Beethoven 110.

I am super in love with this video because:

• A: That chair. I have recently been doing the Glenn Gould thing where I sit as low at the piano as possible, and it is amazing how it effects your touch and motion.
• B: He takes the opening recit. so incredibly slow and it drives me wild.
• C: I love the choices he makes about what voices to bring out when in the fugues.
• D: He does the best arm motions when the bass has the subject
• E: Stacy Rodgers would eat me alive if I ever played either of the Ariosos like that
• F: All the other typical Glenn Gould things that I hold dear

Speaking of Glenn Gould, the Bach Goldberg Variations also have one of the Most Awesome Structures. They are typical variations, but Bach gives you these surprises along the way to keep you interested psychologically: Canons at all the different levels, different forms like the Overture etc., and then that awesome Quodlibet.

For an altogether different thought, I have always to do one of those tests where they put people in an MRI or whatever and see what parts of their brain light up when they flash certain pictures or whatever, except I want to get in there and then them play the last 6 minutes of Harmonielehre and watch my brain explode with colors like a Jackson Pollock painting on LSD.

OK, so moving on from all this rambling.

I was on the front page of the Tupelo Daily Journal! Here is the great little article by Scott Morris. It was very strange and extremely exciting to walk up to the newspaper stand and see my face staring back at me.

If you have never seen Waiting for Guffman, do yourself a favor and go find it right this second. Go watch this video of a song from it. Some amazing things about this song: The name of this song is Stool Boom. It’s in Lydian mode, so there is all kinds of I-II action. The intro has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the song. That awesome MIDI clarinet run in the second verse. The absolutely inexplicable deccelerando at the end. The lyric, “Stools are where/Once upon a time, you’d find a chair.” And every single other thing about it. Catherine O’Hara and Parker Posey are delivering some especially fine vocals. Go now. You won’t regret it.

Ok. I can’t think of one more thing to say in this extremely random post, so until next time, I hope you all have a wonderful time being entranced by Harmonielehre. The next blog post, I promise I am going to talk about programming, both at the MET, at the major orchestras, and about the programming for my recital next month.

Forgive me for the incoherence,

PW

OH and PS, I don’t know why the YouTube videos are showing up so enormous. I am going to see what I can do about it. Forgive me until I can get it fixed.

Lots of exciting things have been happening that I could not have foreseen, the most prevalent being that I am featured in the March issue of Southern Living Magazine! For those of you from another country, such as New York or Kansas, Southern Living is basically the monthly guide by which we Southerners lead our lives. So, it was a great honor to be named as one of their first ever Heroes of the New South! Interestingly, the Arts and Culture category contained the youngest honoree (me, at 20) and the oldest honoree (Vollis Simpson, at 93!). You should all go and read about Vollis Simpson right this second. I’ll wait until you get back. This man is impossibly cool. Basically, his whole thing is that he makes these huge carnival-like sculpture out of pieces of scrapped farm equipment and appliances, most of which fall under his general term “whirligig.” The best part is that what started out as a hobby became kind of a phenomenon. He’s been in the New York Times and PBS, and his pieces have kind of taken the art world by storm. And the structures are just impossibly fun and cool. If I was ever going to be runner-up to someone, I am glad it was him. (A funny note is that the very first thing we learn about Vollis in the SL article is that he has “enormous hands.” Imagine if my first sentence read, “Price Walden’s enormous hands scribe thousands of notes, creating chugging rhythms, etc..”)

Another very cool thing that happened is I am nominated for the Music Composition award for 2012 from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters for Leaves of Greens. Two fun facts: I’m the youngest nominee, and from what I can ascertain, I am the only person nominated in my category that has not won the award previously. The winners will be announced in March, so everybody keep your fingers crossed.

The last announcement, for now, is that on April 12, I will be having my Junior Piano Recital, which you are all required to come to. I will be playing a lot of fairly hard piano music, which is still yet to be determined. The problem is the amount of piano music that I like is far greater than the amount which I am Allowed to Play. At this point, I am considered just learning like 15 pieces and doing some crazy John Cage I-Ching chance thing with the whole program so I don’t ever have to actually decide anything. But at any rate, everybody come, I might be playing a new piano piece if I can actually write one between now and then.

This week, I have had the extreme pleasure of visiting with the Dance Composition class here at Ole Miss to talk about the relationships between Dance and Music. I got to share a lot about my feelings about dance, and I got to share with them some of my favorite composers they had not heard of such as Nico Muhly, John Adams, Steve Reich, etc., which is always very satisfying. Today, we did this extremely fun exercise, where they would show me a phrase of movement a couple times, and then I would improv a phrase at the piano that I thought would match. From there, we would experiment with letting the dancer lead me, or letting me lead the dancer, or sort of a back-and-forth exchange. It was an absolute blast, and incredibly insightful into the very strange marriage of music and dance. If you ever have a chance to do something like this, I highly recommend it. I am very excited that I’ll be collaborating with the resident dance company on something for the fall, but I will talk more about that later.

A very interesting comment came up today in class that I wanted to talk more about here. One of the young ladies mentioned that she thought it would be much harder to be a Music Composer rather than a Dance Composer because, while modern dance has been around only since the mid-20th century, formal music has been around for hundreds of years and would, therefore, require a greater more knowledge of the history. Now, this is a very interesting notion to me, because I don’t think I have once ever felt The Weight of History bearing on my shoulders. Like, yes, I think it is important to know a rough guide to the history of music, but I don’t think it’s important to know all the words and plots to all the verismo operas before you try to write one. Now, this isn’t to say that I don’t love to devour music. I could talk to you about every piece John Adams ever thought about writing and about why Fearful Symmetries would beat up Naïve and Sentimental Music if they met in a dark alley, but I think I am fine at this point in my life without knowing the formal content of every Mozart symphony (which totally bore me, but that is both Unimportant and For Another Time).

A quick round-up: Everybody go learn everything you can about the ENO’s new production of The Death of Klinghoffer (which will be coming to the Met, but I can’t talk about that right now or I might get too excited and throw up). Click here to watch Meredith Monk and her ensemble perform part of her absolutely gorgeous Songs of Ascension inside this crazy spiral staircase tower structure. And everybody go buy Austin Kleon’s new book Steal Like an Artist, based on his mega-hit blog post, where he discusses the lines between influence and plagiarism and how they relate to creativity, both past and future.

Posts to come: My new list of 50 books that I am going to read this year, and why the Met’s new season is The Worst.

Until next time

PW

Recently, for whatever reason, I have been really attracted to the Psalms, most likely a byproduct of being asked to write a lot of vocal music and going through a difficult time in my life. I already set one Psalm over the Christmas holiday, and am currently working on a bouquet of Psalm excerpts for soprano and piano and a Psalm setting for choir and organ. If I set any more Psalms, I am going to change my name to David.

Setting all these Psalms has made me go back and look at the 3 major Psalm settings in my life. Namely, the Sympherny of Psalms, Tehillim, and the Chichester Psalms; each of which deal with the Psalms in similar ways, from non-similar points of view. To me, all these different settings take the general idea of the Psalms and deal with them on purely musical terms. There is no detailed text painting or reactions; rather, we get meditations on the general meanings. The one exception to this rule is the Stravinsky, where sometimes the music has nothing to do with the text, but it’s arguably the best music of the 3, so we really can’t complain.

I have recently come to realize how much individual moments play into my experience of music. Instead of taking away impressions of the overall piece, I’m more likely to remember isolated moments that fill me with enormous amounts of pleasure. A few examples:

Sometimes, a composer will set a text in such a way that drives me wild. The way John Adams sets “a penny for your thoughts” here in Act 3 of Nixon in China is so longing and melancholy and delicious. It also has a lot to do with the harmony and how it comes in over the second part of Madame Mao’s song. Madame starts at around 2:18, Pat Nixon comes in with the delicious part circa 4:35.

Another, more typical encounter, is a harmony that just curls my toes with glee. The most famous example, and the one that will always make my eyes roll back into my head, is the crazy, insane, head-kissing chord from Salome. It is F# major on top of A7 and just big, orgiastic and so so good. Here is none other that my girl Birgit Nilsson singing the final scene; said chord occurs at 14:51, but listen to the whole thing for the full effect.

I have also come to realize that I am maybe the least prolific composer that has ever existed. Perhaps besides Dutilleux. Nico Muhly is always coming out with some new amazing piece. And I think Christian Ryan (who is amazing, go check him out) posts a new amazing piece like every day.

One last thing, I’ve added a new Works in Progress so you can all see what I am working on and hound me about them until I finish.

Until next time

PW

“Oh if life were only moments, even now and then a bad one. But if life were only moments, then you’d never know you had one.”

• I wrote a saxophone concerto! Written in January and premiered by Dr. Wade Irvin and the University of Mississippi Wind Ensemble in late February.
• From there, I wrote 3 new marching shows, one of which helped Booneville High School to become the back-to-back-to-back MHSAA/MBA 3A State Marching Champions!
• Somewhere in the meantime, I created this new website.
• The most important thing I did this year was also the Most Crazy. I’m lookin’ at you, collard green opera. I wrote a while back about the creation of the opera, but I haven’t gotten a chance to talk about the actual event. Let me tell you, I have never, nor will I ever experience anything like it. The Southern Foodways Symposium draws every type of person from just about everywhere, and oh boy can they throw a party. It was one of the most fun and educational weekends of my life. And I got to do an opera! We were blessed with a ton of great press for the event, including the Huffington Post! I can’t thank John T. and the Southern Foodways Alliance enough for such an amazing opportunity. If you missed it, head on over to the Leaves of Greens page for the video, libretto, and the podcast from the premiere. And while you’re there, check out all the other cool podcasts from the Symposium. (My personal favorite is from the poet Kevin Young.)
• I finished up the year by writing a new sacred song for a dear friend of mind and by finally starting work on this new chamber commission.

It doesn’t look like much on paper (screen?) but that all totals out to about an hour or so of music, which is a lot considering I am very slow to start pieces and I am also a full-time student. I hope you all had as busy and productive a 2011 as I had, and I hope your 2012 continues in that tradition.

Resolutions: Read more, Write more, Blog more, Eat more, Live more.

Auld Lange Syne, Hakuna Matata.

PW

We had the first full run through yesterday and it went a lot better than I expected. This music is about eleventy times harder than I thought it was, which is usually the case, but the singers are doing an excellent job navigating this strange new territory. Singing traditional vocal music and then singing this music is like somebody making you paint the Mona Lisa and then turning you around and making you paint “Nude Descending a Staircase.” They are both great in their own right, but it’s an entirely different skill set. This is also really different for me because I have never worked with singers before on my music. And they scare me. A lot. Mainly because I’m always worried I’m going to offend them.

Speaking of offensive, I get the most insane spam comments on this blog. The spam bots are always saying stuff like “I found this bolg post realy heplful.” Lately, though, these comments have been getting really passive agressive! Here’s a little taste:

Whoa-k now, spam bots. Let’s turn this all down a notch, OK?

Moving on, here’s some links: Here Nico Muhly talks about what it’s like to put on a project such as the opera and why it is so inherently stressful. Here is where you should all go to learn about Nico’s new opera and hear these great podcasts about what it’s like to put on a contemporary opera.

In other music news, I think there are about 4 different ensembles doing hydrogen jukebox this semester, which is a new record! I’ll announce more here when I find out for sure dates and stuff.

I’ve got Part 1 of a 2-part Spanish midterm in half-an-hour and then a press meeting for this collard green thing immediately after that, so I better go. Maybe I’ll try to post a teaser for the opera as we get closer to time. In the mean time, eat your collard greens.

PW

(Was everybody aware that the Bernadette Peters version is not on YouTube? This is a travesty.)

Back towards the end of June, Ms. Amanda Johnston, our fabulous vocal coach here at Ole Miss, emailed me saying that she had been approached by the Southern Foodways Alliance, a national organization on (you guessed it) Southern Food, hosted here on campus. They had come up with the idea to do a collard green “opera” and she had suggested me as the composer.

I have to admit, I had to think about it for about 10 minutes. For one, they wanted 30 minutes of music in about 3 months, which is a ton of work. Secondly, what the heck is a collard green “opera”, anyways? But in the end, I decided that it was too good of an opera-tunity to pass up. (I’ve been waiting 2 months to type that.)

The Southern Foodways Alliance gave me a set of poems to start from. Apparently, the world’s largest collard green festival is hosted in Auden Ayden, North Carolina every year. In 1984, they hosted a poetry contest and published a whole book of poems on collard greens, wittily titled Leaves of Greens: the Collard Poems. To my surprise, there were actually some really good things to be found in there. There were also some really bad poems. Were you aware, dear reader, that there is an entire sub-genre of poems dealing with collard greens that are all parodies of famous poems? I counted 3 “How do I love thee?’s, 1 “‘Twas the night before Christmas” and 1 “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time.” (The last actually made it in the opera.) It was akin to reading that book of poems about Mississippi your class published in 4th grade.

I knew from the get go, the actual content of the opera would be the hardest part. I literally can’t say the words “collard green opera” without laughing. And I’m writing this thing. So the first issue was how to write 30 minutes of music about collard greens without it being a novelty piece. I decided then, that instead of explicitly talking about collard greens the entire time, we could talk about other things, but through the lens of collard greens. That proposed the question of what other issues to deal with that were still relevant to the vegetable at hand. Then, one magical Sunday, while eating Sunday dinner with my extended family at Grammy’s, I came to the realization that for us Southerners, eating food is rarely purely about the food. We tie food to very specific times and places. For instance, eating Sunday dinner at your grandmother’s, cooking with your mom, throwing mashed potatoes at your sister’s head, that sort of thing. From then on, it was settled. The subject matter would be how we, as Southerners, view food in society, focusing on collard greens the entire time.

I ended up stitching poems from the aforementioned collection, plus some others that fit very well in the structure, Doctor-Atomic-Style. From there, I separated them out into 5 different scenes. Scene One is a very Psalm-like and proclamatory chorus dealing with different preparations and praises of collard greens. Scene Two deals with collard greens and parents. A woman recalls how she and her mother used to make collard greens, a man remembers he and his father tending after his mother’s collard garden after she passed. Scene Three shows how collard greens became a cultural symbol, with a special reference to Thelonious Monk. Scene Four, similarly to Scene Two, deals with grandparents, with just a bit more nostalgia. Scene Five wraps up the work in a huge chorus for the whole company in general praise of collard greens. (Every line end-rhymes with collard. Have fun with that, vocal coach!) (Also, if somebody wants to get me an IPA of the different pronunciations of the word ‘collard,’ I want it framed above my mantle.)

I keep using scare quotes around “opera” because this is anything but a conventional opera. It’s turned into much more of a staged oratorio or cantata. Lots of chorus, no real plot, etc. Think La Damnation de Faust minus the plot and plus a lot of hamhocks. Maybe something closer to El Niño, but then again, a lot more hamhocks.

At present moment, I am about halfway done with the music. The full work is due to be completed by mid-September and we will start rehearsals immediately after. We meet next week to finalize casting. Typing that was really scary, in that we are choosing people to sing music which I have not even written yet. After casting is done, we start work with the costume designer and it’s a big snowball from there! All of this has been so surreal and more than I could have ever dreamed of. I keep joking that if you had told me 5 years ago that one day I would write an “opera” about collard greens, I would probably have told you, “Yeah, that sounds about right.” But in all seriousness, I cannot thank Amanda Johnston and the Southern Foodways Alliance enough for this opportunity. (A very special shoutout to John T. Edge and Melissa Hall for all their generous help!)

The première is October 30th, 2011, with the University of Mississippi Opera Theatre Ensemble, at the Lyric Theatre in Oxford, MS, as part of the 2011 Southern Foodways Alliance. I will be sure to announce more and maybe get up some sneak previews as the piece gets completed and we get closer to that time!

And as I announced on Facebook, if you see me anywhere, ask me if my opera is done yet. If I say no, slap me in the face. Thank you and good night.

-PW

For my next trick, I will attempt to pick up the pizzas without getting struck by lightning.

Every once in a while you have to take a break from writing your own music and write someone else’s. So, yesterday afternoon I took about an hour or so and arranged my favorite Radiohead song. There’s a long tradition of mushy piano versions of Radiohead songs, so I added a dash of Steve Reich just for fun. (But mostly because I’ve been listening to those You Are Variations non-stop for the past two weeks.) So I threw this arrangement together, hopped over to ye olde church and recorded it really quickly. The audio quality is questionable and there are like 3 mistakes, but perfection is overrated. So here y’all go.

(As a side note, I’d really love to do more of these arrangements and record like a mix tape or such. If you guys have any songs you’d like to hear me do, holla @ me.)

This current version was instigated by Steve Jobs and the upcoming dismissal of iWeb. (We love him anyway.) I finally decided to buck up and join all the big kids using WordPress, and it was a lot easier than I expected at first. The new design is really plain jane, but hopefully I can spice it up more as time goes on and more pages get added. Be sure to head on over and drop me a line with any suggestions you have!

I have a million things to blog about, including a performance last week and a whole bunch of new commissions, but for now, I leave you with this: