Being admitted into a graduate program for music composition is extremely competitive. More and more young people are getting into classical composition these days, especially since institutions of higher learning no longer require students to check their popular music influences at the door. But the application process, especially for graduate programs, is still quite arduous and it’s always helpful to get some sage advice from someone who knows the ins and outs of what it takes to be admitted. So as a public service, we here at SLN have compiled some useful tweets for aspiring composition students from University of California at Berkeley Professor Ken Ueno. Ken was kind enough to share with the world the following tips on how not to apply for a graduate composition program.
First, if you’re applying to a graduate program in composition, chances are that you spent a good amount of time being a composer during your four years as an undergraduate. And during those four years, you were probably around lots of performance majors, or at the very least, a few decent music ed majors, whom you could have befriended and had record your music. A little effort on the social front would likely make Ken’s first piece of advice unnecessary:
Because even though you may consider MIDI a “real” instrument, the players in your Second Life Orchestra aren’t real people.
Gone are the days when students can simply pour themselves into one academic pursuit and hope to land a teaching gig as a professor of that pursuit. Nowadays it’s important for aspiring academics to be well-rounded individuals so they are more marketable, and that usually means supplementing your primary area of emphasis with a secondary discipline. It’s nice if they compliment each other—say, music composition and music theory—but not exactly necessary. However, make sure that when you’re applying for a graduate program in your primary area of emphasis that you gauge the proportions of your application essay to reflect that:
It’s imperative that students these days embrace technology. From notation, recording, and performance software to fluency with web design and various types of new and social media, we’re in the midst of a zeitgeist in our musical culture that may render “traditional” content delivery systems completely obsolete. The good news for composers is that because of all this technology, they can save bundles of money on printing and copying costs—money that they can use to purchase the latest software updates and buy beer and weed. Just email your scores and parts to the musicians and make them print out their own freakin’ parts. Yeah! But if you do this, make sure you follow certain protocols:
It’s also helpful to have a dictionary on hand so you can understand all those big words they use at graduate school. And though you’re likely a computer whiz, please don’t skip Chapter One of your PDFs for Dummies book:
Finally, be careful not to inadvertently insult the faculty at the institute you are applying to:
For more how-to tidbits, SLN urges you to follow Ken on Twitter.
Next month, Mobtown Modern will present Home Grown, a retrospective of recent works by super-cool Washington D.C.-based composer Alexandra Gardner. As a way of helping the audience get to know some of the musicians who’ll be performing on that show, Alex has begun posting a series of interviews with them over on her blog. The first one, hot off the presses, is with yours truly. Warning: I admit something quite shameful.
In celebration of the 100th year of Olivier Messiaen’s birth, the Boston Symphony Orchestra has seen fit to pre-load a virtual sampler with snippets of the composer’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps along with improvised Carnatic drum patterns and field recordings of birdsong, allowing you to make your own Messiaenic composition. Release your inner Madlib.
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.
SLN is pleased to welcome awesome violinist Lisa Liu as a guest blogger. Last month, Mobtown Modern was fortunate to have Lisa play on our final concert of the season. But she almost didn’t make it—something she was quick to attribute to ‘the curse of Nico Muhly.’ I’ll let her explain. . .
Sitting on the sticky floor at Penn Station, with a glazed look on my face, waiting for the gate number to appear on the board… I’m supposed to be placated by an announcement every fifteen minutes of, “please wait for further announcements.” followed by, “please be patient.” It makes me violent. My 2:00 p.m. train never arrived to get me into Baltimore by 4:30 p.m. to rehearse with the musicians at Mobtown Modern . . . lovely people, I’m sure, but I never got to speak with all of them. I was lucky enough to elbow my way to the front of the Amtrak line to get the last spot on a 5:00 p.m. express train that ended up being 40 minutes late. The mission was to get to the hall by 7:45 p.m. for an 8:00 p.m. show. The large man next to me on the crowded train kept insisting that we discuss the life works of Sylvester Stallone for the entire ride. Somehow, I decided, this whole thing was Nico Muhly’s fault.
Violinist Lisa Liu is considering having an exorcism performed on Nico Muhly’s piece.
Our friendship grew out of Juilliard, and revolved around an absurd consumption of dumplings and coffee. He wrote Honest Music for me in 2005, and we recorded it in my kitchen, catching the silences between the grumbling of the refrigerator and the other unidentifiable murmurings of kitchen appliances. A year later, Nico pulled together a budget, and collaborated with Valgeir Sigurdsson to record Honest Music and a handful of his works for Speaks Volumes, his debut album.
Minneapolis
In the fall of 2007, a group of old friends from Juilliard, including Nico, myself, Nadia Sirota and Sam Solomon, along with Sigga Sunna from Iceland, traveled to Minneapolis to perform a collection of works by Nico and Valgeir Sigurdsson. Valgeir was to fly in from Iceland and meet us there to rehearse the night before the concert. Armed with all his audio equipment in suspicious looking bags, he was treated like a terrorist at the infamous Minneapolis Airport and was immediately deported back to Iceland. Valgeir and all his gear were replaced by a few pre-recorded tracks of his music, and we were forced to make last minute revisions and arrangements that could be done without him. There was a lot of tension throughout the rehearsals leading up to the concert, and much of it was comically dumped onto me, with random contests of who could be more racially offensive. In the end, it was definitely between Sam’s and Nadia’s Beijing opera mimicking and Nico’s bombarding of me with erhu sounds off his keyboard every time I’d pick up my violin.
We were running through the program up to an hour and a half before the doors were to open, when I placed my violin on a stool and fumbled around to take off my jacket, too frenzied to remember that my clip-on mic was still attached to the violin. The mic was also accidentally hooked onto a button of my jacket, and as I swung around to throw my jacket down, my violin came crashing to the floor, face down, along with it. Nadia made the most horrific sounding, “Liiiiiisssssaaaa!†roar that still haunts me whenever she says my name. The entire fingerboard popped out of the violin and slid across the floor. As I ran in circles screaming for Krazy glue, Nico calmly dialed the first number that appeared under ‘violin repair’ in the directory and sent me out in a panic to find another instrument. The beautiful people from Claire Givens Violin Shop had two violins waiting for me to choose from, and I made it back to the hall right in time for the show. My violin was thankfully pieced together for the following concert only a week later.
New York
This Honest Music show date was by far the most traumatic-all unrelated to Nico, but I’ll for sure find a way to make it his responsibility. Valgeir was able to fly into New York, and my violin had been returned to me in perfect condition, all just in time for the concert. A huge project I had been undertaking was to help develop a singer whom I truly believed in. I introduced her to all sorts of musicians, producers and songwriters so that, eventually, her own relationships would evolve that would further her career. Looking back, I probably should’ve mentioned that sleeping with everyone along the way would probably be a bad idea. Her husband, fondly nicknamed, “The Android” by our colleagues, finally realized that he didn’t like sharing her with everyone, and threatened to walk away if she didn’t drop out of the band, in which one of her multiple sordid relationships was spiraling out of control. After investing a couple years of hard work into creating an act for her, she broke up the band, and our friendship, the night before the Wordless Music Concert. I was in no shape to perform, but I poured my heart out into Honest Music. Afterwards, I tried to remain somber for A Long Line, also a solo violin worked backed by tape, while Nico, with his demented sense of humor, crashed gongs behind me and cleverly inserted koto, erhu and other ’sounds of Asia’ into my performance. Jackass.
Baltimore
It was 7:45 p.m. and the audience was already seated as I ran in, disoriented and frantic. I hid out in a small room in the side of the performance space where I could change and do a little yoga to calm myself down. Before walking out to perform Honest Music, with no sound check, and then Terry Riley’s In C, without having met any of the musicians or had any rehearsal, I actually felt comforted knowing that this experience couldn’t possibly nearly as stressful as the last two. Despite the hellish commute, nobody was deported, nobody broke-up, and my violin was intact. Although I could never ultimately say, ‘no’ to Nico, there’s going to have to be a lot of begging involved to convince me to perform, Honest Music again.
There’s a little Q&A with composer William Bolcom in today’s Wall Street Journal, which contains this exchange about one of his upcoming works:
WSJ: You’ve written eight symphonies. Do you have a ninth in the works?
Bolcom: The ninth will be for a concert band, which I will deliver by September. To get an orchestra to spend more than three or four rehearsals on something is like pulling teeth.
Stockhausen’s passing last week was well documented by the new (and not so) music community. I’ve yet to chime in, but here goes. Honestly, I was scared of Stockhausen. My fear wasn’t based on any personal experience with him—I never met him—but came from when I was learning his composition In Freundschaft.
All the reading I’d been doing to help me prepare for the piece, led me to believe that he was an overbearing control freak. I mean, there are 57 very specific instructions on how to perform most of the material in the piece, leaving little room for personal interpretation. There are even specific directions on how the performer should move while playing the work. What if I played that quarter note tied to the sixteenth note one sixteenth note too long or cheated the three whole notes tied to a half note by two sixteenth notes? I imagined what he would do upon learning of my irresponsibility—maybe seek me out, berate me publicly, and have me arrested by the German police if I ever had the audacity to perform his music again. Irrational and ridiculous, I know, but I once heard a story of him storming out of a student performance of Kontakte at the University of Michigan, cursing at the performers’ inaccuracy and inattention to detail.
But those very things that frightened me—his exactness, precision, and scrupulousness—were what made me admire his work so much. Take In Freundschaft, for example, which is one of his “process planning” pieces, meaning that everything—everything—in the piece is derived from a single formula. Intervals, pitches, duration, register. The idea of a piece controlled so rigidly sounds positively icy. Yet the end result, a work that is full of energy and emotion, belies the oppressive parameters. Perfectionism could be considered an affliction. And in musical composition, that type of control and detail orientation can often lead to negligible sonic results. But, in my mind at least, Stockhausen transcended that stigma, taking a small idea, and spinning it into a meaningful work. Isn’t that what great composers do?
Stockhausen also spoke one of my favorite quotes on developing a musical voice and the meaning of being a musician, which is what I’ll end with:
Musical training has nothing to do with musicality. You can train someone for years in a conservatoire of music and develop the ability to recognize pitch constructions, harmonies, chords, melodies, intervals—all intellectually. But what I call a musical person is someone who can imitate any sound that he hears, with his voice, directly, without thinking about hitting the right pitch, but just doing it. And not only imitating the pitch, but the timbre as well. Great musicians always start off as great imitators. Afterwards, building on the talent of imitation, comes the talent to transform what you hear. Many don’t reach that far, but those who attain the ability to transform, incorporate and identify sounds, they are the better musicians. Then comes the last stage of perfecting this ability so that it becomes almost automatic.
(From an informal conversation with an anonymous reviewer, London 1971. Contained in Stockhausen On Music, Robin Maconie, compiler.)
Counterstream Radio, the adventurous new music radio station from the American Music Center, is airing a Spotlight Session with one of my all-time favorite composers and collaborators, Michael Djupstrom. Give thanks for the broadcast on November 22 at 9 p.m., but don’t worry if you miss it—there’ll be leftovers on November 25 at 3 p.m. Did I mention that the program will include a performance of Mike’s piece Walimai that we gave at the North American Saxophone Alliance conference way back in 2006? Though it’s not quite Thanksgiving, I don’t think anyone will mind if you have a little taste and sample the cooking.
Reminiscing about last year’s SPARK Fesitval a couple of posts ago reminded me about the experience of meeting Alvin Lucier, who was the event’s feautred guest composer. On my third concert of the festival—actually a joint recital with violinist Maja Cerar—I performed Lucier’s Spira Mirabilis for bass sustaining instrument (a.k.a. baritone saxophone) and amplified electric light. (To capture the sound of the light, you take a solar cell and route it through an amplifier so that when the light shines on the solar cell, you hear the sound of pure electric light, which happens to be a somewhat flat concert B-natural.) Here’s what happens in the piece: The saxophonist sounds a tone, whose duration, in seconds, and pitch, in cycles (beats) per second, above the tone of the sounding light. The length of each tone—in order of performance above the sounding light: d5, M3, m3, M2, m2, unison 4x—follows a descending Fibonacci sequence, starting at fifty-five seconds and ending at zero. As the performer sounds these tones, he is instructed to walk towards the light in eight constant angles, describing an equiangular spiral. Pretty specific, right?
I have to admit that I’ve always been slightly scared of and intimidated by Alvin Lucier. His music seems so serious to me. He amplifies brain waves. And the performance directions in his scores are so utterly precise. He sounds like a man who knows exactly what he wants. Why else be so specific with your directions to the performer? Stockhausen is notoriously anal about such matters. So every time I performed the piece without breaking out my protractor and making sure that I had inscribed the correct angles on the stage, I would honestly think, “Oh shit, he’s totally going to know that I didn’t walk at the proper angle and he’s going to get eff-ing mad and have a fit and think I’m completely incompetent and then tell everyone and I’ll be ruined!” And now he was at the dress rehearsal, watching and listening to me play his piece, for which my preparation certainly had not included a protractor.
I set about performing the work with grave seriousness. With shoes off and in socked feet so as not to disturb the trance-like effect of dissonance and harmony with an electric desk lamp—it’s a rather soft piece—I played the tritone. Then I walked and played the major third. And then the minor third, all the while hoping he wouldn’t notice that the angle of my trajectory across the stage was wrong. (N.B. In my opinion, one of the most beautiful things in Spira Mirabilis—and there is a sort of indescribable beauty in many of Lucier’s works, particularly the soft pieces and the sine tone stuff—is the alternation between dissonance and consonance. The tritone, a rather harsh dissonance, gives way to a satisfying and restful-sounding major third. The major third transforms into a minor third, which changes to a major second, and so on, until you arrive at the unison, which sounds utterly satisfying when you reach it. At this moment, the whole room seems to vibrate and all seems right with the world. Similarly, in the sine tone pieces you have these episodes of intense dissonance, which only increase in severity as the two tones approach unison, followed by the arrival of the unison, which is fleeting but ends up sounding even more beautiful because of its transience.)
If I may say, it really was quite masterful, my dress rehearsal performance. My circular breathing was stunning. My spiral seemed convincing. And the metronome clicking quietly in my ear at a steady 60 beats-per-minute ensured that I’d held each note for the proper duration. That’s when I heard it. From the darkness—the piece ends with the light turning off—Alvin Lucier emitted a short burst of laughter, followed by this quizzical statement: “Did I write that?” I was stunned. Was it the way I played it? The way he said it made it sound like the piece was kind of trivial or a joke or something. How could that be though with solar cells routed through amplifiers, and electric lights, and all that mathematical and scientific Fibonacci stuff? However, at that moment, although the light on stage had been turned out, a light over my head turned on. I realized that despite all of those cold calculaions in the work, that it is a little humorous and that Alvin Lucier has a great sense of humor to boot.
The rest of the rehearsal was focused on how we could “sell” the piece better. His first suggestion was actually a deviation from the score. (He was flexible (!), which came as a complete shock to me after having had this image of him built up in my head solely from what I’d know of his compositions and writings.) Instead of each tone moving to the next without a break between them, I was to seperate each tone by a few seconds. Next, he got into the theatrics of the performance, giving me directions like, “Look more perplexed as you walk forward,” and “Stare at the light in a suspicious manner,” and “Take slower, more deliberate steps, like you’re creeping around somewhere.” These extra directions actually made me feel much freer during the performance of the piece. And it made it much more fun and enjoyable to play. Before our coaching in the dress rehearsal I was always nervous to do anything that wasn’t notated or suggested in the score for reasons stated above.
To say the least, meeting and working with Alvin Lucier was delightful experience. Listening to some of his stories at dinner following the concert only confirmed his keen sense of humor. When I got him talking about a famous colleague of his, he imparted the following wisdom for those serving on faculty search committees: “You’ve got to hire the crazies.”
If you asked any new music player to describe the music of composer 
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:
We were running through the program up to an hour and a half before the doors were to open, when I placed my violin on a stool and fumbled around to take off my jacket, too frenzied to remember that my clip-on mic was still attached to the violin. The mic was also accidentally hooked onto a button of my jacket, and as I swung around to throw my jacket down, my violin came crashing to the floor, face down, along with it. Nadia made the most horrific sounding, “Liiiiiisssssaaaa!†roar that still haunts me whenever she says my name. The entire fingerboard popped out of the violin and slid across the floor. As I ran in circles screaming for Krazy glue, Nico calmly dialed the first number that appeared under ‘violin repair’ in the directory and sent me out in a panic to find another instrument. The beautiful people from Claire Givens Violin Shop had two violins waiting for me to choose from, and I made it back to the hall right in time for the show. My violin was thankfully pieced together for the following concert only a week later. 
