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For the week of October 25 through 31, 2000

The demystification of music

A lecture series on listening to and composing music


By ADAM TANOUS
Express Arts Editor

Fiction writing is a discipline that seems to mystify us. It is as if the best fiction writers have access to a world of language and vision that the rest of us do not. The composition of music—conceptually similar to fiction writing—may be even more confounding to the average person. Music seems to reside on an even higher level of abstraction than does language.

In an attempt to demystify music and its composition, the Sun Valley Center for the Arts and the Sun Valley Summer Symphony will present a series of lectures and discussions by classical composer and music historian David Smooke. The talks, free of charge, will be held at the Sun Valley Center for the Arts on Nov. 1, 2, 7, 8, and 9 at 7 p.m. During his stay in the area, Smooke will also present lectures for students at the Silver Creek Alternative School, the Carey School, and The Community School.

Over the course of the lectures, Smooke will address two topics: the art of listening to music and the process of composing. He will discuss how the elements of music interrelate and produce varying sounds, how we perceive melodies and melodic shape and how musical details connect in the course of a composition.

Smooke recently took time out of his busy schedule teaching music history and theory at Chicago Musical College of Roosevelt University to participate in an interview via e-mail.

Mountain Express: In layman's terms (i.e. those of us light on music theory) could you describe and/or characterize the elements of music composition?

Smooke: If music can be defined as sounds that are organized in time, then a closer look at this definition will help the answer to become a little clearer. "Sounds" can refer to any noise or even the absence of noise. These sounds can be ugly or pretty, they can be simple harmonies or complex rhythms or long beautiful melodies, they can be birdsongs or the sound of trashcan lids clattering to the ground. Each composer decides what types of sounds he or she wants to hear. The real work in creating a composition is in how these sounds are "organized in time." Each sounds has a duration and each composition has a duration. The composer creates an aural experience for the listener by juxtaposing the chosen sounds.

Mountain Express: What is the basic process you go through in composing? Do you hear musical phrases in your head and then try to write it out or vice versa? Or some combination of the two?

Smooke: If you asked ten composers to answer this question, you would receive ten different answers. For me, the compositional process begins with an aural vision of sounds emanating from a specific ensemble. I do my best work when I know exactly who will be premiering the piece and I have heard them perform live. Each player makes his or her instrument sound slightly different from everyone else’s, so an intimate knowledge of each player generally sparks ideas as to what sounds I would like to hear emanating from that instrument.

After this initial vague vision, I begin to think about the piece on a large scale. This stage is similar to planning a long driving trip. I'll plan the general route of the piece, which exits to take and where to turn. If it's very complex, I might even draw a "road map" of the piece as a reference.

For me, these initial stages generally take several months to over a year, although I can plan more than one piece at a time. Only then do I begin writing the piece, or following the journey that I've mapped. This last step is the most rigorous--it's one thing to know what road I want to take and

quite another thing to bring every road sign and tree along the way to life. Also at this stage I almost invariably find that I change my mind about details from the road map, following unplanned detours or continuing on a path where a turn was planned.

Mountain Express: In a press release you referred to composing as "sculpting time." What do you mean by that?

Smooke: Visual art works are formed in two dimensions (painting) or three (sculpture). When someone goes to a museum or reads a book, they control the time. They can stop at something they find particularly striking or retrace their steps to check details or skim past things they find boring. Music, along with theatre and film, is a medium in which the audience can only engage the work for the length planned by its creator. The composer controls the audience's experience of time. The composer, not the audience, decides how many times to repeat an idea and how quickly to skirt over less relevant material. The power that the audience gives the composer in this relationship cannot be underestimated. By understanding how music is perceived by the listener, a composer can fool the audience's sense of time. An enraptured listener might not notice any time passing at all during a five-hour Wagner opera while an annoyed listener might fidget during a three- minute pop song. The best composers (and I don't claim to fit this category) can control this perception of time so that the audience can experience a breathless ten minutes or a transcendent hour. That is what I strive towards.

The biggest difference between music and theatre and film is the degree of control the composer has. In the latter two fields, the writer and the director vie for control, each with a vision that is at the mercy of the producer and actors. Music composers notate their ideas exactly enough that the performers' interpretations add to the original vision instead of changing it. That is why I gave up theatre shortly after receiving my B.A. and went full-time into composing.

Mountain Express: Does narrative play a role in classical composition?

Smooke: Of course! There is a strong tradition of classical songs, generally called "art songs" or, in a typically frustrating obfuscation, "lied" (which is German for art song). Classical music has its songs and also its operas.

The real meat of your question, I think, is whether a piece of music without a clear text can tell a story. Once again the answer is an unequivocal "yes." Beethoven was the first composer to create a symphony with a narrative structure or program (his Sixth). This tradition continues today, with composers giving the audience a story that their piece should follow.

Personally, I find this type of narrative to be too constricting, both as a composer and as an audience member. Music is an abstract art in the sense that no two people perceive it exactly the same way. In painting, even though three-dimensional objects are being represented in two dimensions, a square is a square and a face is a face, with no room for argument. Music doesn't have such easy correlations. So, in my music, I try to make the experience of time passing a narrative in itself. I try to express the ephemeral, a sense of vertigo as opposed to a story of rock climbing.

Mountain Express: In writing a piece, how does a composer hear or visualize different sections playing simultaneously? Or does he? Perhaps it is a layering process in which you build on a base?

Smooke: This is just a matter of training. You listen to a lot of music and follow the score to see the details. Then you study the score, trying to recreate the music in your head. Then you write a lot of bad music, hearing it performed and finding your mistakes. If you stick with it long enough, by the end of the process you can picture what the piece will sound like before it's been performed—in all its detail. This is the easiest thing to teach novice composers, because it's a trick that anyone can learn with a lot of practice.

Mountain Express: Do you have a goal when sitting down to write a piece, i.e. are you interested in overall emotional impact? Or something else?

Smooke: This is the most difficult thing to teach novice composers and is what separates the good composers from the reprehensible. I think that it's impossible to write an interesting piece of music without having some goal in mind first. This goal can be to tell a narrative or to allow a group of performers to display their hard-earned virtuosity or to express an emotion. Personally, I am most interested in the overall impact of the work; however, this is not always an emotional impact per se. By the overall impact, I mean how a piece might change the way people hear a specific sound or how well someone can dance to it or what emotions the piece might evoke.

But in the end the audience determines for itself what the true purpose of the music is.

 

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