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.