If you asked any new music player to describe the music of composer Jason Eckardt, chances are you’d get a simple one-word answer: hard. There aren’t too many other composers who’d elicit that same answer—Iannis Xenakis, Milton Babbitt, and Brian Ferneyhough come to mind instantly—which makes composers of the musical hard stuff into kind of an exclusive little club. Now clearly these composers have their reasons for doing what they do, reasons probably as diverse as the sound of their music. In a recent Counterstream Radio Spotlight Session, Jay spoke about why he writes such complex music:
I thought I’d write a little bit about Jay since I’ll be performing his new solo baritone saxophone piece, Still on the next Mobtown Modern show called Hard As F#@!. We also thought that it might be good to give some explanation as to why the music on Hard As F#@! is considered “hard” since a good portion of our audience is made up of non-musicians, who might just equate hard with fast. And while fast usually = hard, there are lots of other things that can make musicians strap on the seat belt, which is definitely the case with Still.
Compared to Jay’s other scores, Still looks positively barren—long held, slowly changing sustained events interrupted and punctuated with short punchy attacks of various sorts. Certainly not the 16-in-the-space-of-7-within-a-dotted-eighth-note we’ve come to expect. So what makes Still so hard despite it’s lack of nested tuplets, 17 notes crammed into the space of one quarter note, and no other players to contribute to the (written out) chaos? Well, here’s a list:
1. Multiphonics. By themselves as isolated occurrences within a work, I wouldn’t generally consider multiphonics to be an element that makes a piece difficult (that is, unless you’re Ken Ueno and like to interject them within long streams of ridiculous 16th-note runs jumping around every which register, illustrated below by yours truly performing Ken’s whatWALL?):
But the multiphonics in Still—even though they’re of the long, held variety—are one of the reasons I’d call the piece difficult; and for a couple of reasons. First, most of them occur at a very soft dynamic, which makes it difficult to balance the “chord,” especially when you’re contorting your oral cavity to produce the voicing that will sound the right notes. Along those same lines, each multiphonic is separated by vast expanses of silence and since it’s possible to sound several variations of the chord with the same fingering, it requires you not only to have to aurally anticipate the correct chord, but also the correct oral cavity configuration.
2. Phrasing. Okay, in addition to being a musician, I’m also an endurance athlete, so I’ve got a pretty well-developed set of lungs on me. But when you’re blowing through what is essentially a very large tube, even the best of us feel the need to tank up 75% of the way through a phrase sometimes. I hear what you’re saying, “Just circular breathe, you pansy!” Well, I would, except it’s simply not possible to do so while playing soft low A’s and Bb’s, multiphonics, and extreme altissimo notes (see below). So not much to be done here other than regulating better.
3. Extreme Register. Again, like multiphonics, altissimo is generally not an occasion to get all hot and bothered, but there are some really high notes in Still, like Xenakis high. In fact, I think this is the only other piece I’ve ever seen double altissimo A’s, A#’s and B’s besides XAS. Even though the Still altissimo notes are not careening by at breakneck 32nd-note speed, like they do in the Xenakis, they become difficult for a lot of the same reasons as the multiphonics in the piece (see above). They’re soft. And the expansive silence preceding each altissimo entrance becomes for the performer not the sustained stasis that you’re hoping to project to the audience, but rather a prolonged period of prayer during which you plead for proper partial to sound.
