Sticky & Smoothe

I have been fulminating on something about music for the last few weeks. It has been spurred by four recent experiences: what my students have been recommending in our music business class at the University of St Thomas, Dominick Argento’s Casanova’s Homecoming, the seven new works featured on the Minnesota Orchestra’s Composer Institute, and what I have been listening to on Pandora.

I ask my students to come to class every day with a music performance in the Twin Cities that they can recommend to the class. Before class begins, we visit the websites (usually on YouTube or MySpace) to hear/see the music. It was during one of these pre-class listening sessions that I first heard someone mention “sticky” music (e.g. music that is instantly memorable or sticks in the memory).

Last weekend, I attended the opening night of the Minnesota Opera’s second production of Dominick Argento’s Casanova’s Homecoming. The first production opened the Ordway Music Theatre 20-some years ago. If anything, the musical and literary accomplishments of this opera have grown in stature in those two decades. Argento wrote the libretto and the Straussian score is magnificent in ways that few works of any age can boast. It is a tour de force.

But it is not sticky.

I laughed. I cried. My jaw dropped at the drama, the music, and the performances. The production was excellent in every detail. But the music is not sticky. I don’t claim to be anything but average when it comes to aural memory so I checked in with people more talented than me who also went to a performance. We can all remember specific musical gestures, dramatic moments, and the general excellence of the score but no one is capable of singing, humming or even imitating more than two seconds of the score.

Does this mean that the score is no good? Absolutely not.

It has been a struggle to find a metaphorical term that describes the excellence of the Argento score and that would also correlate to “sticky.” I fumbled around with “polished” and “shiny.” But course things can be polished and the word shiny carries a negative connotation related to tinsel and Las Vegas. I prefer “smoothe” because it has a tactile equivalent to “sticky” and implies that it has either been smoothed in nature or by gentle, persistent attention to rough spots.

The Minnesota Orchestra has produced an impressive composers’ institute that is equal parts boot camp and concert for seven young, talented composers. I attended the concert last night and heard seven works that were marvels of orchestration. As the program unfolded, each new work exceeded the last with its imaginative, coloristic approach to the ensemble. And all of them, but one, were exceedingly smoothe. The common traits were: an underlying andante tempo with rapid flourishes or clouds of color that added variety, a stasis created by drones and clusters, extended but clearly-defined tonalities that moved (if at all) slowly, formal structures that unfolded into ever-new galaxies of musical material, and an absence of melody. Roger Zare’s Aerodynamics and Carl Schimmel’s Woolgatherer’s Chapbook developed motivic material but from this no melody grew. As a result, I heard what I would call six smoothe pieces: excellent, impressive, remarkable accomplishments that will soon be forgotten.

Kathryn Salfelder’s Dessin No. 1 had the remarkable ability to use modest musical ideas in an unfolding form that felt both inevitable and brand-new. We were able to visit familiar musical material and, as a result, felt as though we had been taken on a journey to terra incognito and returned home again, changed by the experience. And she used a melody that went with us on that journey. A wonderfully “sticky” piece and one I would like to hear again.

So what music is sticky and what is smoothe? Pandora, the streaming audio website, has figured out many interactive ways to help each of us define that quality for ourselves. I don’t think there is one-definition-fits-all for sticky or smoothe music. That isn’t how music works.

I have been listening to Pandora more intensely for the last few weeks, trying to get a sense of what I think is sticky. My students have had an impact on my quest. I am listening to The Trashmen, Great Lake Swimmers, The Shins, and The Decemberists with great joy. I do not know if there are lessons to be learned in these observations, but I wonder why contemporary classical music composers would choose to avoid sticky music – it is so much more fun for the musicians, the audience…and the composers.

Convergence

I have just gotten back from a road trip through five midwestern states looking at colleges with my son. He's 18 and wants to find a college or university that will provide an education that supports and cultivates his interest in becoming a composer.

This can be seen as an affirmation of my own calling to become a composer until you understand a little more about his interests and how they significantly diverge from my path. He has always been someone interested in invention and creative work and so it does not come as a surprise to me that composing/song-writing are attractive channels of expression. What marks him as a different generation is his complete embrace of popular music.

Back in the olden days, an interest in composition was fired by the likes of composers like Mozart and Beethoven and if you were really hip, Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein. If you were an egghead, you might get excited by Shostakovich or even Stockhausen.

My son's library of songs on iTunes includes works by all of these composers but his definition of a composer blows the wheels off of mine when I was his age. He embraces Rhymesayers and the Atmosphere crowd that live down the boulevard from our house, he embraces traditional Persian and Balinese gamelan music, and all the things that a teenager might find at LimeWire or iTunes. His musical practice is actually (as opposed to virtually) Catholic. There is no stylistic filter.

What I have observed, however, is that musical literacy is given the same weight as the aural tradition. Improvisation is equal to (and possibly even more important) than performance of notated music. This Catholic acceptance of all traditions and styles has altered the expectation he has for what kind of education he wants. And that expectation is not being met by his prospective colleges/universities with the same degree of passion or openness.

And I can understand the position of institutions. They are trying to keep up but must measure their reaction to students' demands against their responsibility to educate their students fully in the foundation concepts that hold our culture and country together. In other words, institutions must evolve incrementally and not take radical, revolutionary steps forward without first considering the threats, opportunities, costs, and benefits of change.

Students don't have that luxury. They have four years (or five) in college and then they will move on to whatever comes next -- grad school or work or travel or a change of direction. And music is moving fast right now. It has been accelerating for at least 15-20 years. That increasing tempo is being driven by technology.

And this is where the theme of this little essay comes from: convergence. We normally think of convergence as describing a phenomena of the uniting of media functions into a single platform or hardware device. The iPhone is held up as the epitome of this convergence: a phone, a camera, a video camera, a web browser, a gaming device, a computer with email access, a television, a movie screen. All in one device.

Students today experience this kind of convergence everyday and have come to anticipate -- and more importantly expect -- their life experience to be one series of convergences after another.

As I have learned from teaching a class in music business at the University of St. Thomas, students see themselves as customers and they believe that they can demand - and get - value and convenience. If not, they turn away.

I think that there are a few colleges/universities who are engaging in this new expectation and some who seem to have thrown up their hands in frustration or confusion. In music composition, the schools that we visited on this last road trip fall into these two categories with most folks trying desperately to keep up with their students.

But music composition education is still moving too slowly. Is any school ready to think about improvisation as a true equal to notated music? What would that mean in the organization of music theory and ear-training classes?

Is any school ready to educate if Brother Ali is equal in importance to Ludwig Spohr? And if this is possible, do we need to think of music composition education as a collaborative or inter-media art form since the next generation of composers will need to know how to create lyrics/poetry, create computer animations or make music videos, create interactive games, create images for their merchandise?

Is convergence happening quickly enough in music education? I know, for my son, that schools that open themselves to the aspirations of students' creativity will become more and more attractive. Schools that offer professional training with a prescribed, defined job outcome are going to decline.

So - who is creating convergence in music education? My son wants to know.