Week 2

Preface: I have at best an ambivalence toward internal languages as a way of constructing meaning. Any concept cuts both ways: as you attain more specificity and in-group use of specific words for specific concepts, you remove possibilities. I find that a lot of my most interesting musical thinking happens when I stop using pre-set terms, although of course it’s important to understand them in the first place. These three terms represent some ways in which I like to organize my musical thinking. 

“Form” or “Structure” I like to think of form as what holds a piece together, what delineates the piece from the world outside of it— in other words, the form is the justification for the material to exist at any given point within the piece, or rather that it defines the role of material within the piece. It is also “the piece” in an objective sense. I like to think of form as a way to think about the movement of time, less in terms of progression and more in terms of tendency. 

“Syntax”: Brahms thought that a form can only be a consequence of the material it contained. Similarly, Joan Tower said “when people don’t like the syntax of a piece, they like to discuss form” (I’m paraphrasing from something a teacher told me). Form is subordinate to syntax, the various musical elements creating a tendency that can be articulated by a structure. We don’t experience a building architecturally, we experience it room by room.

“Energy” or “Gesture”: This is the hard part: to put some kind of raison d'etre to inanimate notes. It's what keeps music looped into experience. I like to think about music as a metaphor for our experience with gravity, but of course our ability to defy its laws is an important source of magic.

I do a lot of different things, so trying to explain what I’m studying is difficult. I’ve lately been just telling people that I’m a “composer” or even better, that I “write music.” Frequently what I get is either some vaguely impressed bewilderment that just leaves me embarrassed or “so it’s like you write classical music?” I don’t… really do that. Even when I write a string quartet there’s nothing “classical” about it. Really, I just wish people who don’t really care about what I do would stop talking to me about what I do. Even talking to other musicians largely makes me feel misunderstood.