jwilzewske: George Benjamin: The Sound of Paper or Software, The Sound of Violas

I figure one day at MacDowell is the equivalent of three days at home. It is very intense.”

— Jane Brockman, on walking into her cottage at the MacDowell art colony, where the battered piano used by Copland and Bernstein waits for her, and the immediate surge of creative energy that greeting this instrument in that cottage brings to her.

CMT: George Benjamin’s ‘Viola, Viola’ was performed on Thursday night, 29 March, at Zankel Hall, Carnegie Hall, in New York. Misha Amory’s and Hsin-Yun Huang’s rendering of ‘Viola, Viola’ had wonderful texture and clarity. This piece evokes an orchestra of violas, not just two. George Benjamin is 47 now. Famed as a British prodigy, he began playing the piano at 7 and soon after that began composing. He studied music at King's College, Cambridge, under Alexander Goehr, and emerged in his early twenties as a mature and confident voice. His ‘Ringed by the Flat Horizon’ was written for the Cambridge University Musical Society and premiered in Cambridge under the direction of Mark Elder on 05 March, 1980. It was performed at The Proms that summer, making him the youngest composer ever to have had music performed at the Promenade.

DSM: Critics have written that George Benjamin’s music has always been hard to pin down, stylistically. I disagree: his chromaticism, atonality, and colorings are distinctive to me. Maybe critics would prefer to put him in a smaller “box” than he chooses to go into voluntarily. There’s clearly widely-held critical suspicion about composers who don’t stylistically specialize ... about humans who don’t specialize, for that matter. Then again, maybe it was his stretches of low annual output that made the stylistic contrasts more apparent—or less readily understandable—than would’ve been the case had his writing been more prolific and continuous . . .

CMT: Over the past 20 years, Benjamin has done quite a lot of commission work, including Sudden Time for orchestra, Three Inventions for chamber orchestra—and Antara for ensemble and electronics, performed at IRCAM and the first composition ever published using the Sibelius MusicXML application software. The latter is sufficiently iconoclastic and outside-the-box to cause the pundits to allege “hard to pin down”. As if a composer’s goal—any artist’s goal—is to become easily classifiable by idiots! Lacking a voice; vs. having an unreliable or inarticulate or disingenuous voice; vs. trying out a variety of new, competent, cogent voices: There’s a difference!

DSM: But Benjamin’s music is seen by most as carefully crafted and governed by an overriding seriousness, yet colorful and even flamboyant in style—but hardly ‘heretical’. Highly capable. I think his detractors have to turn their critical gaze on themselves and away from their victim/object . . .

CMT: True! In January 2001, Benjamin succeeded Sir Harrison Birtwistle as Henry Purcell Professor of Composition at King’s College London. And his composition students have been notable in the quality of their output. Benjamin himself did have a period of creative self-censoring, though, in the 1980s and 1990s, it’s generally agreed. He himself said “Sound is lovely, but unless it is somehow more than itself, it’s of no interest”. He clearly went through a period of harsh introspection about his composing.

DSM: So he was finding or re-finding his authorial voice during that period?

CMT: Maybe. But, too, I think that with early fame came an appreciation of the permanence of his published statements. His overriding seriousness prevailed over the flamboyance.

DSM: It wasn’t writers’ block? Is wasn’t procrastination? It wasn’t the intimidation of the compulsion to produce and live up to the acclaim that had been showered on him so early?

CMT: It doesn’t seem so. Procrastination strikes writers of all types. And, yes, composers are notorious for procrastinating, and this can be caused by writers’ block. Beethoven spent 12 years composing his 9th “Choral” Symphony and was unable to write at other times, sometimes going months or years when the ‘drag’ exceeded the ‘lift’. Schubert began writing 13 symphonies but only following through to complete eight, the final one of which only has two movements and, to us, is “The Unfinished Symphony.” Maybe the bipolar manic-depression tips a bit toward the depressive pole for awhile . . .

DSM: The pressure to produce is so intense that people will try anything to make their deadline. For instance, Sergei Rachmaninoff, fed up with waiting for his muse to return, sought the help of a hypnotherapist, who apparently helped locate the missing muse. Rachmaninoff dedicated his second piano concerto to the hypnotherapist.

CMT: How long can a writer’s block last?

DSM: Well, it can be permanent, of course. Why did Clara Schumann stop composing? Was it totally because of Robert? Nicholas Ludford apparently stopped composing altogether after about 1535, when he was 50. Henri Duparc simply stopped composing in 1885, at age 36, in the midst of a promising career. Charles Ives stopped in 1925 at age 51 (29 years before his death in 1954), supposedly on account of health issues stemming from his heart attack 7 years earlier. Howard Ferguson stopped composing at 51, claiming that “I’ve said all I wished to say.” Conlon Nancarrow from 1960 to 1965 experienced a period of clinical depression and stopped composing, instead copying out neat versions of his compositional sketches in case anyone ever showed an interest. Bruno Walter and George Szell—they stopped composing, maybe because they were consumed by their conducting careers and had no time. Much like George Benjamin, Luigi Dallapiccola stopped composing for four years (1921-1924) when he was 18, supposedly because he was captivated by Debussy’s work! The pianist Artur Schnabel thought of himself more as a composer. He wrote five string quartets and much other chamber music, including sonatas for violin, cello, and piano—admired by Krenek and others. But it was a largely unrewarded endeavor, despite his fame as a performer, and he quit composing early. It’s very “busy” Schoenbergian music for the most part, contrapuntal and manic. Meter changes almost every bar; rhythms are unstable; phrases have irregular lengths. Stream-of-consciousness stuff, excessively long for both performers and listeners, honestly. And Life’s events can supervene and prevent further output for reasons other than writers’ block. So there’s a ‘publication bias’ that prevents us from knowing the reasons why some composers’ output flagged. But there are ‘acute’ and ‘chronic’ forms, as in Martin Kantor’s book. Kantor characterizes writers’ block as one manifestation of one of several related disorders. These disorders can affect all creative people. He takes a DSM-IV-based psychiatrist’s approach and puts forward a taxonomy of 10 different types of writers’ block, classified according to the underlying disorder causing the block.

CMT: And there are psychological traps composers fall into, corners they back themselves into. How do they get out of them?

DSM: Oh, go try continuing in a slow minor key, then return with a variation on your opening theme. No, seriously! Or try using the “Composer’s Assistant” plug-in, in the Finale software. See what that comes up with. That’ll get you un-stymied! I must confess: that’s one of the nicest little tools when you’re “stumped”. Now I wouldn’t say that what it autogenerates is great music by any means. And the voice-leading the the MelodyMorph tool generates is sometimes impractical or inelegant. But, honestly, it is amazingly helpful in throwing off plausible ideas—‘straw men’ that you can explore and modify, adopt or cast off. Invariably, what the software generates serves to catalyze a flood of ideas and phrases that can move me forward!

CMT: Very different situation for me! For me the issue is my own flood of ideas—and the convolutions of each idea and its extensive and intricate interconnectedness with all of the other ideas that I’ve already laid down, and all of the still more ideas that I have planned to use in the piece that I’m writing.

DSM: And there are composers who get very attached to a project, partly because of the time and effort they’ve already invested in the piece. They have a hard time deciding when an idea isn’t going to work at all, ever, versus when it just needs a new approach. Sometimes we just need to apply relaxation techniques.

CMT: We do this as an avocation. I suppose we should look at writing like any other job, with set hours and required levels of output. That’s a frequent refrain of therapists who treat writers’ block, and that’s what professional composers would do . . .

DSM: How many composers suffer because the writing space or living arrangement isn’t conducive to the work?

CMT: Sometimes it’s just time to pick a new genre or idiom to work in.

DSM: Mostly, I think you should knock the editor/censor off your shoulder and just write. Thankfully, these days with Finale and Sibelius and other application software you’re not blowing through reams of expensive manuscript paper—you’re just putting a few more megabytes on your disk drive or burning the files to another cheap CD-ROM. Look at the proliferation of photography now that that’s predominantly digital and captured to re-usable DRAM, SRAM and CompactFlash CF and SD memory cards. It’s freed picture-takers from the tyranny of worrying about the expense of shooting analog film. Photorhea! You can break free from your photographers’ block by just shooting, shooting, shooting, and edit and rediscover your impetus in reviewing the lot. Same thing with Finale: just sit at your midi keyboard and HyperScribe, HyperScribe, HyperScribe away, and then review and rediscover. Doing this really gets the internal editor/censor off your shoulder. You don’t have to continue it and drink from the Composer’s Assistant plug-in fire-hose. Just use the software “crutch” sparingly!

CMT: So you’re recommending ‘soldiering through’ by continuing to ‘show up’, by continuing to crank out whatever, just for the sake of cranking.

DSM: Well, I think that a flow of output is an effective antidote to fear of failure. Fear of rejection is a later and gentler issue for many of us. The stronger inhibitor of composing is the fear that we will not meet our own internal criteria of good music, that it won’t be sufficiently vivid and memorable by our own standards.

CMT: So you think the composer’s deep ambivalence about the adequacy of her/his own approach to the subject is the most frequent factor then? What about clinical and subclinical depression? Think of Robert Schumann. I especially like Alice Flaherty, a neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School—her writing about hypergraphia and hypographia; how she copes with these things.

DSM: And I especially like Irene Deliege’s book last year, with Geraint Wiggins. She got her credentials at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels. After a twenty-year career as a music teacher, she went on to train in psychology. She got her PhD in 1991 from the University of Liege. A founding member of ESCOM, she’s served since its inception as the Editor of its journal, Musicae Scientiae. She’s the author of several articles and co-edited books on music perception and psychology of music. Her co-author, Wiggins, studied at Corpus Cristi College, Cambridge, and at Edinburgh’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) Department. He’s Professor of Computing in the Department of Computing at Goldsmiths’ College, University of London, where he leads the Intelligent Sound and Music Systems (ISMS) group. He chairs SSAISB, the UK society for AI and Cognitive Science and is Associate Editor of Musicae Scientiae . . .

CMT: You and your computing! Writing is essentially a spirtual or meditative—not to say ‘mystical’—practice, according to Natalie Goldberg and others.

DSM: Often what we mistake for block is really the incubation stage of the creative process, the still time between envisioning a project we might want to do and going ahead and making that vision a reality. We need a quiet mind and some emotional peace in order to receive and act upon the inspirations that come from all that incubating. Thinking that we’re blocked and beating ourselves up for it just shuts down the creative process.

CMT: I do think it’s usually fear that stops us from working. The various dimensions of this are well-addressed in Bayles’ and Orland’s little book. This discomfort can be about what other people might say or come from self-doubts about our talent. When our inner voice tells us fear is the culprit, we need to ask ourselves what the anxiety is about.

DSM: Pressfield disputes the standard motivational cliché that you can have, do, or be anything if you follow the right formula and just work hard enough. Rather, he says: “We are not born with unlimited choices ... Our job in this lifetime is not to shape ourselves into some ideal that we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it.”

I n everything that yields gracefully there must be resistance. Bows are beautiful when they bend only because they seek to remain rigid.”

— G.K. Chesterton, quoted by Igor Stravinsky

CMT: Uggh. I don’t believe it. Is that to say that even Mozart and Bach already had as children all of the capabilities and insights that they displayed in their maturity? “What you already are; Become that!”? Hogwash! Every thought, every act, every compositional decision we take extends our experience in some way—and we become something more and different than we were. I do think that we resist taking risks. We resist going outside our comfort zone. There are two occasions when resistance will be the most relentless, and they’re related. The first is when something really matters to you. The more important a call or action is to our sense of identity and self-esteem, the more resistance we will feel toward actualizing it. If your lifelong goal is to be a composer, a rejection by an audience or publisher is a far greater risk than if you submitted your manuscript in a casual, devil-may-care way. The second occasion that resistance is most dangerous is a point on which I can agree with Pressfield—what Pressfield calls “The Mother of all Fears,” namely, the fear that you will actually succeed. Resistance builds as you get closer to the finish line. At this point, Resistance knows we’re about to defeat it. It marshals one last assault. There’s a real paradox here: the closer you get to reaching that proverbial tipping point, where things are really starting to click, the more likely you are to engage in self-sabotaging resistance behavior.

M ost of us swim on the surface of life until a storm of illness impels us to dive within and discover new sources of inspiration and strength—yet they were there waiting for us all the time.”

— Tobi Zausner

DSM: Tobi Zausner found her life and art transformed after a 1989 diagnosis of ovarian cancer. Zausner writes about the lives of artists she believes underwent similarly transforming illnesses. The practice of art, in her view, is healing. And convalescence can prompt artists to explore and more deepen their mastery and range of expression. Behind great art one can find painful—and inspirational—human stories.

CMT: Chronic illness may feel like an impassible barrier, but it can become the gateway to a new or renewed creativity. In the face of pain and disability, people showed perseverance and ingenuity, revealing that life’s lowest moments can hold great potential for creativity and growth. Many classical composers have felt this . . .

DSM: And Galenson takes up an aspect of creativity that I haven’t encountered before: what accounts for the timing of an artist’s success within her/his own life chapters. His explanation for the division he makes is persuasive both for its face-validity and on the basis of the data he presents. Are there compositional forms or musical concepts that require the years of maturity to be possible? What role does an artist’s character play? At the piano I cannot make my fingers do what my mind wants, in the way I once did when I was young. And when I am composing, I am sure I cannot yet make my mind do what my later self will do some years from now . . .

CMT: Take a look at Kathleen Stein’s new book—her neuroscientist/journalist capsule-summary of how the human brain works, the prefrontal cortex (PFC). Readable, like Oliver Sacks’ books. Clinical narratives of patients, neural deficits in the PFC leading to behavioral problems, such as criminal violence, but leading also in other instances to unique creative gifts. Ultimately, our creativity—and the fits and starts we experience in it—at bottom it’s all enabled by, or inhibited by, our biology!

DSM: Viola, Viola will be performed on 14-April in Brussels, Belgium, at the Palais des Beaux-Arts, by Tabea Zimmermann and Antoine Tamestit.

T he germ of a future composition comes suddenly and unexpectedly. If the soul is ready it takes root with extraordinary force and rapidity, shoots up through the earth, puts forth branches and leaves, and finally, blooms.”

— Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

jwilzewske

Saturday, April 7, 2007

George Benjamin: The Sound of Paper or Software, The Sound of Violas

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