In The Score, American composers on creating classical music in the 21st century.

Tags:
Bela Bartok, composing, J imi Hendrix, Music, throat singing
A few years ago, when I was composing a concerto for myself as vocalist, I rediscovered some tapes I had
made when I was 6 years old. Back then one of my favorite things was a portable Aiwa cassette recorder and I
used it to make non-linear musique concrte that is a fancy way of saying I recorded weird sounds around
the house, rubbing my toy cars against the microphone, alternately growling and counting off numbers in
J apanese like some spastic MC.
~~~
I am a composer and a vocalist, but not in the traditional classical sense. As a vocalist, I have learned how to
make sounds inspired by different vocal traditions from around the world sub-tone singing and screaming
from heavy metal, throat singing from Tuva and Tibet and have also invented new techniques like singing
multi-band multiphonics inspired by jazz saxophonists. In each new piece I compose,
Waka UenoPortrait of the artist as a young MC.
I start by finding a sound that embodies a feeling that I want to be central to the piece. I write pieces for
myself and for others to perform. In the pieces written for others, I often use an instrument to discover new
sounds. In both instances, I feel that the lab is in the body. When we learn an instrument, when we practice
and learn a new piece, we are, essentially, transforming our bodies. It is there that memory can be embedded
too.
~~~
When I was 16, I was abandoned in a mountain cabin. I went there on a skiing trip with my brother and his
friends, but when I awoke that morning, they were gone. They had ditched me to go fishing. Stranded there all
day, and not finding a television to keep me entertained, I snooped around the house. Eventually, I came
across a turntable and a box of LPs. I started going through the records, one by one. Crosby, Stills, and Nash;
Led Zeppelin; Cream. After about a half-day survey of classic rock, I put on a record with the most earth-
shattering, alien sounds I had ever heard. I was converted. For the rest of the day I kept replaying it J imi
Hendrixs Are You Experienced? I immediately knew I had to learn to play the guitar.
~~~
Hendrixs electric guitar is visceral. It is somatic in Whitmans sense the song of itself and emphatically
American. Hendrixs guitar is immediately recognizable in the way speaking voices of loved ones are
Hendrix, Bartok and the Throat-singing Composer - NYTimes.com http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/22/finding-the-score-within/
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immediately familiar. It taught me that a sound, in and of itself, can embody a feeling and that there is a
meaning that can only be expressed with that sound, that voice, that guitar playing in that unique way. It also
taught me, by extension, to look for my own voice, my identity, in sounds. Yes, rather than putting on a
uniform, or trying to fit in with people around me. To not only embrace my idiosyncrasies, but to amplify
them.
~~~
But at 16, I had already determined my life plan: go to West Point, become a general, serve my country, return
to California, become a senator. Bound up in that plan was a search for identity. In my formative years, my
family lived in J apan and Switzerland, and I was always insecure of my identity as an American. As a nave
16-year-old, I thought that if I put on a uniform and was willing to fight for my country, then others would
have to accept me as one of their own. Two years later, everything was on schedule. West Point had accepted
me after high school and I had just completed my plebe year. But then I suffered an injury during an exercise
in gymnastics class, and had to leave. My life plan had to be revised.
~~~
During the period of my convalescence, all I did was go to physical therapy and play guitar for eight or more
hours a day. I started writing songs and playing in bands, and, eventually, after all the lofty motivations of
public service, I had enough courage to consider completing my college education in music instead. I found a
school, Berklee College of Music in Boston, which accepted the electric guitar as a legitimate instrument in
which to major. There, I was introduced to the music of Bartk and Stravinsky. I experienced a second
musical epiphany, and began studying to become a composer.
~~~
When I first heard Bartks Fourth String Quartet at Berklee, I felt like my body understood it. It was visceral.
It spoke to me on a plane similar to the Metallica and Black Sabbath I was playing with my friends. But in
another sense, I felt there was an entirely separate cabalistic code embedded in the written score, one I did not
yet understand. It was the desire to understand that code, to hopefully someday be able to compose notated
music as beautifully complex as Bartk did that turned me into a composer, and led to 12 years of graduate
school. It was only years after finishing my doctorate that I began to reassess my relationship to the written
score and reclaim some aspect of what I was doing naturally as a kid.
~~~
I was converted to Hendrix by a recording. It was a recording, too, that introduced me to throat singers in
Tuva. I somehow felt that I could learn to do it, and I began to practice. The recording served as a score to
teach me how to make those sounds. The sounds, transmitted through time and place on a recording, as an
external mode of memory, were translated, through practice, into the body.
Hendrix, Bartok and the Throat-singing Composer - NYTimes.com http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/22/finding-the-score-within/
3 of 14 9/20/2012 3:35 PM
When I listened as an adult, and as a trained musician, to the tapes I made when I was 6, I was shocked to find
that I wasnt just growling I was singing multiphonics. So, in some sense, I had been non-semantically
broadcasting my identity before I ever thought to transcribe those sounds. The tape recorder, serving as a kind
of score, helped me reclaim myself. Nodding to that, the beginning of my concerto, On a Sufficient
Condition for the Existence of Most Specific Hypothesis, starts with an edited mix of my 6-year-old self
singing on tape, over which I sing live. The tape allows me to sing in counterpoint with myself, 30-plus years
apart. The opening also includes excerpts of me counting in J apanese as a kid. At the end of the piece, during
the cadenza, I recite some numbers in J apanese, which, to me, not only recapitulates the tape part, but
reconnects me to that moment when I was 6, when I recorded myself counting. The real score, in this sense, is
in the body.
Courtesy New J ack Modernism Music
CLICK TO ENLARGE
Courtesy New J ack Modernism
MusicSample pages of the score for Kaze-no-Oka, a duo concerto for biwa and shakuhachi, which uses
graphic symbols and instructions. CLICK TO ENLARGE
~~~
Working with non-traditional sounds in this way, I have to create graphics and signs to represent my sounds.
Yet, since these signs and sounds are not standard practice, I often have to make clear what my intentions are
in non-traditional ways. Put in another way, my music ventures into the realm where the limitations of
traditional notation are tested. A reader has to know what the sounds are before a syllabary can be useful. This
is where technology has proven handy. Nowadays, I can send recordings of my multiphonics, as well as
videos of me demonstrating instrumental techniques and sounds to supplement my scores. I consider
recordings and videos employed in this way as an extension of the score. It is somewhere in between an aural
tradition and a written one, albeit a digitally facilitated one. Between Socrates and Plato a contemplative
space between the oral and written.
Hendrix, Bartok and the Throat-singing Composer - NYTimes.com http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/22/finding-the-score-within/
4 of 14 9/20/2012 3:35 PM
~~~
When a Western ethnomusicologist transcribes foreign music using the system of Western notation, there are
potential neocolonial subtexts at play, as well as the potential for filtering out sounds difficult to represent in
Western notation. Not belonging to the dominant cultures of classical music, I am critical of Western notation
at the same time as I am embracing and participating in the use of it. The invention of new graphics and signs
and the incorporation of recordings and videos as extensions of Western notation, however, gives me the
space to tap into a language that feels to me more personal.
~~~
Sometimes, I imagine my music as being like a tribe in the Amazon forest, a tribe without a system of writing.
One day, a missionary comes to learn my language. I discern later that his main purpose in learning my
language, however is to translate the bible to my language, to use it as a tool to convert me.
~~~
The cadenza of On a Sufficient Condition is not notated. It is improvised, but I follow a pre-determined
phrase structure. When I perform it, I am also constrained by the sounds my body knows how to make. The
score is the body and the instrument is the body as well. Notated music and non-notated music have different
expressive modes, and a different feeling of time. The tape part recalls my youth; the notated orchestral score
recalls those months as an adult when I composed the piece; and the live cadenza expresses that moment in
the present, as shared with the audience. There is also a vector that looks to the future. Acknowledging that
my body and voice will change, my plan is to make another version of the piece 30 years from today by
incorporating vocal sounds I can make today with those from my childhood in the opening tape part. My
greatest artistic ambition is to be able to make at least two iterations of this process during my lifetime. There
is risk involved in this process intangibles of survivorship implicit in the score, on the page, in the body
and on tape but it is inspiring to me and I hope it can be inspiring for others as well.
Hendrix, Bartok and the Throat-singing Composer - NYTimes.com http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/22/finding-the-score-within/
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