I’ve written before about the complicated dance between composers and performers, the composer’s need for constant innovation and desire for things to sound a certain way jostling against the musician’s existing skill set and desire for the instrument s/he plays to sound a certain way. So it was fun this week to discover a blog post on the same subject from the other side of the relationship. Here’s New York composer Kyle Gann…
One of the issues I deal with every day as a composer (every day I get to compose, that is), is the tension between what I want to hear and what’s “grateful” for the performer to play. I suspect a lot of us are in this boat now. It started with minimalism. There are a lot of postminimal pieces I love listening to, and then I open the score and see page upon page of streaming 8th-notes without rests, or multiple tied whole-notes for wind players, or intricate permutational passages within small ranges, and think, “Boy, I love hearing it, but I’m glad it’s not me who has to play it.”
It’s actually a great relief to know that composers do care about this issue (which is not to say that I really suspected that they don’t. Most of them, anyway.) But history is loaded with incidences of musicians publicly declaring this piece or that “impossible” to play – Beethoven, Stravinsky, and countless other composers heard it time after time – only for the piece in question to become completely standard rep within a generation. So if I were a composer, I think I’d be extremely suspicious that most musician complaints were coming from a stockpile of laziness.
Fortunately, Gann is far more enlightened (or less cynical) than I am…
[A] lot of my compositional technique has gone toward preserving the qualities I want from minimalism while giving the performers something graceful and rewarding to play. I’m writing a string quartet. My impulse would be to keep the players pretty much confined to one string for ten minutes at a time, but I want them to use the whole range of their instruments, not get too tired, and feel each phrase as something musical. So I’m wracking my brain to introduce frequent variety and gently nuanced phrases without introducing any drama, anguish, or climaxes whatever, anything that will disturb the placid, uniform surface I want.
Now, that’s fascinating to me, because this is exactly the kind of thing I never, ever think about when I’m listening to a new piece. I might think, “wow, that last part sounded really hard to play,” but it would never occur to me to wonder whether a composer had written a phrase a certain way just to give the performers a breather. It’s a much appreciated gesture, though: you simply would not believe how common repetitive stress injuries are among musicians, and as great as composers like John Adams and Philip Glass undeniably are, many of their scores look to us like carpal tunnel syndrome and tendonitis personified.
Gann goes on to talk about the limits of this approach with some of his current work, in which he’s trying to create new ways for live performers to create music based on electronica, which is by nature extremely repetitious. In the end, what he’s really pointing out is the very human limitations that can occasionally be placed on cross-genre experimentation.
It’s strange, when you think about it: Ligeti should have made electronic music, Michael Gordon should have been a rock star, and I should have made ambient music, but instead we pick up new paradigms in these areas and bring them back to torture string quartets and orchestras with.
He’s not wrong…
He’s joking, of course, and I’ve always said that I’d rather have a composer write whatever s/he wants and then be open to negotiation than to self-censor in advance just because s/he’s worried I’ll balk at what’s in my part. But as a performer, it’s great to know that composers really do think of us as human (and therefore breakable) collaborators, rather than just the machine that plays their music…
(By the way, be sure to read the comments appended to Kyle’s post. They’re all interesting, especially one from a faculty member at Haverford College in Philadelphia, pointing out that physical concerns are only part of the problem some musicians have with minimalist music: “…it’s not only the repetitive stress syndrome for both brain and fingers playing minimalist and post-minimalist music, but the lack of opportunity to make any meaningful artistic contribution to the music as a performer that is equally if not more off-putting.”)
