ROCC 2017

“I would rather quit composing, period, than be viewed as a neo-Romantic, or a reactionary, or a naïve composer.” So avowed composer Andrew Norman in a 2015 interview with the New York Times. Why is Norman so loath to be labeled neoromantic? Why group this label with reactionism and naivety, words with undeniably negative connotations? This seemingly innocuous statement reflects a reality of contemporary music criticism, which dates back a half century to the stylistic tyranny of serialism. A backlash against serialism’s perceived oppressiveness opened the floodgates for eclectic mixtures of styles; critics today extol such novel stylistic mixtures. But one aesthetic continues to be left behind, implicitly dismissed as “backward-looking”: “reactionary” and “naïve” neoromanticism.
The fetishization of stylistic fusion and fluidity ends with the hint of a post-Romantic idiom, scorned as unadventurous and derivative. Contemporary music’s insatiable striving for “newness,” a drive famously highlighted by serialist-turned-neoromantic George Rochberg, does not sour us on idioms dependent on Stravinsky, Messiaen, or even Couperin (as in the music of Thomas Adès); rather, critics laud the incorporation of their styles today.
Does the condescension reserved for neoromantic music by critics and composers alike indicate a new, subtler brand of stylistic tyranny? This investigation forces us to consider how we understand the concept of influence today: why are certain models legitimate and celebrated, while other models are disdained? It is vital to examine this reality, because it affects how we teach young composers, program concerts, and excite audiences about the artistry of contemporary music.

The Anxiety of Influence in Contemporary Music

Electrocaoustic music has allowed for a profound development of narrative structures through a complex exploration of the human voice. From soundscapes exploring fragmented text in the work of Elainie Lillios to multi-level narratives such as in the work of Francis Dhomont, to new ‘instruments’ of vocal shards in Paul Lansky’s work, composers have teased and pulled at traditional vocal story-telling. I would like to explore some of these approaches to speech composition in the work FAMILY STORIES: SOPHIE, SALLY which was co-composed by Anna Rubin and Laurie Hollander, while reflecting on Lillios, Dhomont and Lansky’s approaches.

FAMILY STORIES is a text/sound piece using narrative, sampled ambient sounds and computer-generated music. Through a series of vignettes, it tells the story of a few years in the early life of Rubin's mother, Sophie Rubin, the child of Russian Jewish immigrants in Atlanta. Fragments of Yiddish, her mother tongue and klemzer music were part of her childhood memories of her early life. She was also deeply attached to an African-American woman, Sally Johnson, who took care of her after her mother became seriously ill But her mother’s death and the surviving family’s leaving Atlanta – without Sally Johnson – suddenly robbed her of both women who had nurtured her. The racism and anti-Semitism in early 20th century Atlanta are the atmosphere in this story of a child's unbearable loss The text was written by Rubin with help from actress/choreographer Aleta Hayes who portrays Sally Johnson in song and text within the piece.

Family Stories

American jazz guitarist/ composer and a professor the University of Michigan, Miles Okazaki released the revolutionary debut album Mirror in 2006, which he described as “my goal in writing the music for this album was to offer the listener a selection of rhythmic compositions that attempt to imitate the blending of formal order and organic beauty of form found in nature.” All of the music in this album owns a particular rhythmic concept as a structure of work, which is more like math and architecture along with a variety of musical styles such as Brazilian popular music, Indian, Middle-Eastern, African, classical and traditional/ contemporary jazz. In this paper, I will provide the analysis of the first track “Theme I” and the fourth track “Howl” from album Mirror which presents the best of Okazaki’s compositional style. These compositions exhibit how he utilizes rhythmic groupings, which sometimes shows a mirror/ symmetrical form over common meter as a metric structure of the piece to create a unique sound and feel. Since one part always keeps a repetitive rhythmic pattern expressing a common meter, music always produces a polyrhythmic feeling. “Howl” also features a metric modulation from 4/4 to 12/8 to 4/4 time signatures. I will also discuss how he adapts interesting melodic and harmonic structures on top of rhythmic structures, including the usage of a palindrome, pentatonic mode adaption over the augmented chord progression, slash chord, and a twelve-tone row.

Metric Structure of the compositions by Miles Okazaki

Catherine Likhuta’s music is emotionally charged, programmatic in nature, rhythmically complex, and demands the full control of the entire range of each instrument employed. While this is not a premiere, it is my belief that Let the Darkness Out (2011) is an important new work that has been added to the continually evolving repertoire of the 21st century and serves to strengthen the overall body of music heard at the conference. My performance/presentation will briefly discuss the jazz-influenced elements as well as the rhythmically complex and demanding aspects of this work and serve to introduce the audience to a general set of composer traits followed by a complete performance of the work.

Let the Darkness Out

For the Research on Contemporary Composition conference, I propose giving a lecture recital focusing on the lives, music, and musical philosophies of avant-garde Black composers, highlighting CMOP (Chicago Modern Orchestra Project) founder and director Renee C. Baker. The lecture will be divided into three sections:
I. A brief overview of the Black avant-garde, briefly discussing the music and select musical and personal philosophies of Black avant-garde composers, with music samples. The types of music discussed will span free jazz, minimalism, complexity/simplicity, experimentalism, serialism, music theater, and more. (Approximately 9 minutes)
II. A more in-depth discussion of the creative output of Renee C. Baker: composer, conductor, performer, visual artist. The discussion will include insight into how her life and her myriad of experiences (in the realms of music, visual art, travel, cultural studies, and more) influence her creative output, and how her visual art and music personalities interact with and/or inform each other. Audio clips as well as slides with professional images, music score examples, and visual art samples, will accompany this part of the lecture. (Approximately 6 minutes)
III. A performance/interpretation of a recent work entitle Rage (Approximately 15 minutes). This performance will come directly after a bit of contextualization, and will conclude my 30-minute presentation.
If it is at all possible to allow for questions after the lecture/recital, a Q&A period will be greatly welcome.

OUT OF THE BLACK BOX: the next music and avant-garde Black composers

Gabriel Kahane’s (b. 1981) diverse musical output includes two pieces with a special relationship: a song called “Bradbury (304 Broadway)” (2014) and a string quartet, Bradbury Studies (2015). Kahane calls Studies a deconstruction of the song. I take a two-fold path in this paper, arguing that the paired Bradbury Pieces embody deconstruction in both a loose, popular sense, and in a strict Derridean sense. Studies is what I call a popular deconstruction of “Bradbury” in that it reconfigures and re-presents formal sections and smaller aspects of the song with varying degrees of abstraction from their original appearances. Popular deconstruction occurs on the small scale and is also writ large across the form of the piece. Studies is in a cumulative form that gradually reveals the original song. The pairing of the song and Studies, what I call the Bradbury pieces, also comprises a deconstruction in the Derridean sense. Jacques Derrida’s method of deconstruction involved short-circuiting hierarchies. By examining a hierarchical binary (like melody/harmony or nature/culture), he could undo the premises of the hierarchy and instead show that the terms are contained within each other. Anything falling within one of these binaries wasn’t one or the other, but rather existing in a liminal area between the two. The Bradbury pieces together deconstruct the hierarchical binary of concert music and popular music, and thus the binary of composer and singer-songwriter. Deconstructing these binaries is important to Kahane because he sees them as too often dominating journalists’ and others’ discourse regarding new music.

Gabriel Kahane’s Bradbury Pieces as Popular and Derridean Deconstructions

Recent work on phrase rhythm in jazz explores how various parameters interact with hypermeter - meter deeper than the measure. Despite the importance of hypermetrical regularity, however, deviations in phrase length do occur, and the exceptions warrant exploration. This paper addresses hypermetrical deviation in the works of active jazz composer Maria Schneider.
I posit that Schneider enters into a dialogue with tendencies of phrase rhythm established through the century-long jazz tradition. As James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy (2006) have argued regarding music in the decades surrounding 1800, works are placed into “a dialogue with a community-shared pool of preexisting works, probably including some well-known ones, that formed the new work’s context of understanding.” Rather than comprising some body of previous works, I take the “context of understanding” for Schneider’s music to be the normative eight-bar phrase.
My argument centers around two claims: (1) the normative phrase design from the jazz tradition at large is Schneider’s most common compositional choice, and (2) most of Schneider’s deviational phrases dialogue with the norm directly. A corpus study of 24 works composed between 1984 and 2007 confirms that 61% of phrases conform to the norm, and another 31% of phrases dialogue with the norm directly. This paper establishes the characteristics of the normative phrase, describes the analytical procedure, and summarizes the evident deviational phrase types.

Deviational Phrase Types in the Compositions of Maria Schneider

Over the past two years, the University of Oregon Campus Orchestra has commissioned and premiered four new works involving aleatoricism, graphic notation, atonality, and extended techniques. For many of the musicians in this ensemble, which is pedagogically based and open to students from all academic disciplines, these pieces were their first exposure to contemporary compositional techniques. It is essential to provide pedagogical ensembles with new works that both challenge and excite students about contemporary music. Numerous pedagogical advantages result from studying new work, including the focus on color and timbre, the experience of collaborating with a composer, and the expansion of the musicians’ definition of music.
In this presentation, we draw from our personal experiences conducting and composing for the UO Campus Orchestra to demonstrate the importance of creating a body of musically engaging contemporary works for pedagogical ensembles, and of introducing such works to these ensembles. We will focus on the collaborative process between conductor, composer, and ensemble, and the challenges faced when approaching this type of ensemble. To do so, we explore two of the pieces commissioned and performed by the UO Campus Orchestra: Cara Haxo’s Out of stone (2016), and Martín Quiroga’s A Quaint Snowfall (2016). We provide suggestions for both conductors and composers who are interested in incorporating contemporary techniques in hopes of encouraging more pedagogical ensembles to commission contemporary compositions. While this presentation is geared towards composing for orchestra, the concepts can easily be applied to the band, choir, chamber, and solo medium as well.

Commissioning, Composing, and Conducting Contemporary Pedagogical Orchestra Music

At the time of the Florentine Camerata and the rise of Opera, in my opinion, music had the same value as silence today. In the quieter society back then, listening to music was as special as listening to the silence today. For many human beings around the world, achieving this is almost impossible.
How does this value exchange affect in the minds of composers today?
I would like to present and explain two works of mine focusing on silence. One of them, the serie “Still-Leben mit Stille” (Still life with silence), is intended to contemplation focusing on the graphic value of the silence in music. In this series, different topics are analyzed (I.e. “Is it possible to do “Poli-Phony” with silence? Do we need different terminology for today´s new silence values in music, like “Polisiopy”?).
The second work is the opera “The Rest is Silence”. Written after Shakespeare´s quotation, the musical rest is obviously silence. This opera is very similar to those created by the time of the Florentine Camerata (mythological theme, instrumentation, etc.), only adapted to the new values of our society. At the same time silence is used as a protest for the damage our civilization is doing to our planet.

ROCC 2017

Items in this collection

The Anxiety of Influence in Contemporary Music

Family Stories

Metric Structure of the compositions by Miles Okazaki

Let the Darkness Out

OUT OF THE BLACK BOX: the next music and avant-garde Black composers

Gabriel Kahane’s Bradbury Pieces as Popular and Derridean Deconstructions

Deviational Phrase Types in the Compositions of Maria Schneider

Commissioning, Composing, and Conducting Contemporary Pedagogical Orchestra Music

The Value of Music and the Value of Silence

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Items in this collection

The Anxiety of Influence in Contemporary Music