About: Writings
The Accidental Music Lesson
By Michael Gordon
The New York Times, The Score
January 25, 2010
In a way, this is a tale of two cities.
This past November I went to my hometown, Miami Beach, for a performance by the New World Symphony of my orchestral work, Gotham, a three-movement symphony that takes the city of New York as its subject. It is part of an ongoing project of 'film symphonies' that I am creating with filmmaker Bill Morrison to capture the aura of cities.
My family moved to Miami Beach from Nicaragua when I was eight years old. I grew up not far from the art deco building on Lincoln Road that houses the N.W.S. Back then, Miami didn't have much to offer a culture-starved teenager and at age 17 I left, eventually ending up in New York City. I've been returning to Miami Beach regularly to visit family and I've seen the city's deteriorating Art Deco buildings transform into the ultra-hip South Beach of today.
Along with the rise of South Beach came the birth of the New World Symphony, an orchestral training academy founded by Michael Tilson Thomas that has turned the area into a Mecca for young classical musicians. This trip home for me was a bit surreal — returning after more than 30 years for my first professional date, and returning as a composer.
Gotham - mvt 1, excerpt from Bill Morrison on Vimeo.
When the N.W.S. discovered that I was from Miami Beach they asked if I would speak to students at Miami Beach High — my alma mater. This got me thinking about my high school music teachers. I was amazed to see that the popular guitar teacher, Doug Burris, was still teaching there. I had the chance to chat with him and we spoke about the school's former orchestra director James McCall. When I was in 11th grade I had nervously asked Mr. McCall if I could write for our high school orchestra. He turned to me and said, 'You're not only going to write for the orchestra, I want you to conduct it as well.' And I did. It was a fabulous opportunity for me.
Visiting Beach High and thinking of Mr. McCall started me thinking about the other music teachers who impacted my life in ways they never knew.
Florence Kutzen, my piano teacher, endured countless unprepared lessons. At age 10 I started distracting her from my lack of preparedness by showing her piano pieces that I had composed. It worked.
Once, at my last piano lesson before heading off for vacation, I asked Mrs. Kutzen what her plans were for the summer. Her reply: 'Michael, musicians don't take vacations.' I filed this line away in a special part of my brain, an informal collection of 'accidental music lessons.' My interpretation of Mrs. Kutzen's words has changed through the years, like a Talmudic discourse that is argued from different points of view:
1. Musicians just don't ever feel quite right going an extended period of time without playing their instrument.
2. Music isn't a job that you punch in and out of. It's an obsession, a calling and your purpose in life.
3. Musicians don't make a lot of money and you're not going to be able to afford a vacation anyway.
With my compositions encouraged by Mrs. Kutzen and Mr. McCall, I asked my parents to help me find a composition teacher. Through a family friend they found the composer Francis Simon, who seized the moment in my very first lesson and 'performed' John Cage's 4'33'. I was stunned. I had started lessons with Mr. Simon for practical advice — like how to write correctly for the oboe. I didn't realize at the time that my music teachers had opinions.
These accidental lessons weren't the lessons I'd thought I was supposed to be learning, but they might have been the most important ones.
After I left Beach High I forgot all about the symphony orchestra. My compositions became focused on smaller, amplified groups devoted exclusively to playing newly written music, and I swore off the symphony orchestra as an out-of-date, past-its-prime mode of musical expression. But in 1999 I was encouraged by John Adams to write a piece for orchestra. That concert, which Adams conducted, included the premiere of his score for the Peter Martins ballet Naive and Sentimental Music, Charles Ives's Fourth Symphony, and my own new work, Sunshine of Your Love. The mysterious power and beauty of the orchestra spoke to me. I was hooked.
At Beach High I stood in the auditorium with 800 or so restless teenagers, talking about the upcoming performance with the New World Symphony. At the Q & A one teenager stood up and said, 'Your music doesn't sound classical at all.' He compared my music to both heavy metal and film music and called it 'experimental.' That made me smile. For most people, 'classical' is the musical equivalent of Shakespearean English. It's wonderful to see 'Hamlet' but no one wants text their friends in 16th-century lingo. As a composer today I have always felt that my music has to have meaning in the vernacular.
I was also happy because I thought that for this student and those who came to hear Gotham, maybe hearing my music, and its connection to 'classical music' was one of those accidental lessons.
Gotham - mvt 2, excerpt from Bill Morrison on Vimeo.
The New World Symphony performed Gotham along with music written by my longtime friends and colleagues David Lang and Evan Ziporyn. When I was growing up I couldn't have possibly imagined that a concert like this would ever take place in Miami Beach and that I would be part of it. A few blocks away and 35 years ago I was dreaming of being a composer. James McCall, Florence Kutzen and Francis Simon were preparing me for a musical life. Those preparations, both intended and accidental, set me on the path that lead me to New York and then, eventually, back to Miami Beach. And so here I was, suddenly, in the city of my youth, a homecoming of sorts, presenting a work about the city I have now made my home. It was a rare moment for these worlds, past and present, to collide.
Orchestra Hero
by Michael Gordon
The New York Times, The Score
October 31, 2009
What is the hottest thing in music right now? A pair of video games ─ Guitar Hero and Rock Band. Anyone can play. The games allow you to become a member of the band. Each game offers a range of pop music hits on game controllers that look and feel like guitars and drums. What makes these video games so much more impressive than 'air guitar' is that through the use of something called the instrument game controller the player actually experiences the visceral feeling of performing music. You can even improve if you practice.
So, why not Orchestra Hero? What if I could 'play' the horn solo in 'Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks' on a 'controller horn' or the bassoon solo at the
opening of 'The Rite of Spring' on a 'controller bassoon'? What if I could bang out the timpani part in the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony or the clarinet solo at the beginning of 'Rhapsody in Blue'? What if I could stand in front of the entire orchestra and conduct Mahler's Ninth Symphony, or sit in the brass section for a rendition of Janáček's 'Sinfonietta'? The possibilities are astounding.
And the good news is that Rock Band will soon be opening its format to classical music. (Please feel free to post a comment and add your favorite orchestral moments to this list. What would you most like to play or conduct?)
The period from the early 1700s through the mid 1930s boasted a rich palate for the Western orchestra. From the Baroque (think Bach‘s Brandenburg concertos and Vivaldi's 'Four Seasons') through to the transformative Beethoven symphonies and onward to the huge works of Mahler and Shostakovich, the orchestra evolved into a massive vehicle for musical expression. This is where big statements were made ─ statements that impacted the cultural and political dialogues of the West. Unfortunately this is a claim the orchestral world can no longer make. Competing now with movies, television, the Internet and popular music, the orchestra no longer has the platform for cultural dialogue that it once held. But, for me as a composer, the orchestra still holds an allure, a mystery and a sonic power that is hard to beat.
One simple reason is that the orchestra has all the best toys. Some of my favorites include the contra-bassoon, standing five feet tall and covered with knobs and gadgets. It howls deep and dark grumbly tones. (I use two of them in my work 'Decasia.') The French horn is a conch-like curl of silvery metal plumbing that blasts a clear pure tone – and can be like an angel singing above the choir. (The standard orchestra has four of these.) The glistening sleek trombones with their sliding tubes are the go-to power machines. When they get boisterous they can easily shake the audience to their core. (There are generally three of these in an orchestra.)
There are certainly great solo moments in orchestral works that feature these and other instruments ─ but for me the magic is in the synchronicity of the ensemble ─ what makes it a whole. Anyone who saw the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics marveled, as I did, at the precision with which the cast of thousands performed. Years in the making and with months of long rehearsals, the Chinese performers put on a dazzling show. But the classical orchestra is even more dazzling, even more virtuosic, and so much more precise that it boggles the mind. A hundred instrumentalists can, with exact accuracy, divide a second into 16 micro-parts and play an off-beat note on any one of those 16th notes. In fact, they do this as a matter of course.
A string player can control the rapid movements of the bow. A wind player can control the speed at which the air vibrates. A brass player can not only reach extreme volume but can also produce warm and quiet tones. As a whole the instruments can play at mind-numbing speeds, produce an infinite array of sparkling colors, and thanks to the high octane boost of music notation, a huge work can be rehearsed and performed in a matter of hours.
Over the past 15 years I have written a lot of music for the orchestra. Some works acknowledge the past directly, like my string orchestra piece 'Weather,' which is a handshake across the centuries to Vivaldi. In other works, like 'Decasia,' I break with established traditions by having the orchestra re-tune ─ making it sound like a giant out-of-tune piano (the kind that might be found in someone's basement after sitting there for 35 years).
Perhaps the most interesting interaction with classical music that I've had was a commission from the Beethoven Festival in Bonn, Germany, to write a new piece for orchestra that referenced Beethoven in some way. It was a challenging request and for a while I wasn't sure how to proceed. In the end, I decided to take one theme from each movement of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony and work with them as if they were my own.
From the slow second movement of the Beethoven I took the exquisitely beautiful melody. Like Beethoven, I repeated the melody many times, but with a twist. In my version, each time the theme finishes it has spiraled harmonically so that it is one tone higher. With each repetition, I add other instruments playing the theme just slightly ahead or behind the one before. Eventually a gigantic canon builds up with more than 20 parts. (A canon is a fancy way of saying 'round,' as in 'Frère Jacques.')
The audience at the premiere of my new work, Rewriting Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, was one of the most musically conservative I've ever faced. I fully realized that what I set out to compose was going to be controversial, especially to Beethoven purists. When the music was over, the audience was decidedly mixed. In the lobby, the festival had set up computerized overhead projectors, where audience members took turns writing down their thoughts about what they had just heard. I got pans and raves. I was booed and I was called a prophet. I had tread on hallowed ground – no, I was leading the way into the future. Well, all in a days work.
One of the successes of Rewriting Beethoven's Seventh Symphony was that it engaged an audience that usually turns off when new music is presented. The piece built a bridge from the new to the old as it drew from a music that the audience revered. On the opposite end, perhaps Orchestra Hero could be a way in for those who are versed in video games but barely know that classical music exists. Controller bassoon, anyone?
Another Sort of Diplomacy
By Michael Gordon
The New York Times, The Score
April 1, 2007
I’m writing from Sicily, where I just arrived with my ensemble, the Michael Gordon Band. We’re playing a concert at the Etna Festival in Catania. As I’m sitting here in this beautiful Italian hotel, I’m thinking about how lucky I am to be able to travel around the world playing music. There’s no way that this could be possible without the weighty investment that most Western and Asian countries make in the arts. Those of us who perform and compose semi-popular music — that is, experimental, art, classical and jazz — cannot survive in the free market like rock, urban and country musicians do. Although there is a fan base for these more esoteric types of music that numbers in the millions, it just doesn’t add up to the large CD sales and stadium tours that the popular music stars enjoy. (...)
To read the entire article, please download the pdf.
Finding ‘Lost Objects’ in Germany
By Michael Gordon
The New York Times, The Score
March 22, 2007
(...) Concerto Köln, which has about 30 members, is a collective: They own their work and manage themselves. The members are involved in the creation of every project. This is very unusual. Orchestras usually are run from the top down. The board of directors hires the management, which hires the conductor and the orchestra. The low people on the totem pole are the musicians, whose professional lives are dictated to from above. Here with Concerto Köln, and with a few other orchestras that I have worked with (mostly in Europe), management is hired by the orchestra. The result is that the individual musicians are intensely involved in the major artistic decisions. (...)
To read the entire article, please download the pdf.
What If I Like Your Politics but Don’t Like Your Art?
By Michael Gordon
The New York Times, The Score
March 13, 2007
(...) One question I’ve asked in recent years is, If I don’t like your politics can I still like your art? Or put a simpler way, would you want a fantastic painting hanging on your wall that was made by a Nazi? It may sound like a bizarre question, but anyone with Carl Orff, Richard Strauss or Herbert von Karajan CDs in their collection should give it some thought. The throngs lined up around the block to see Karajan conduct the Berlin Philharmonic, as many New Yorkers did on repeated occasions, should have asked themselves this. And if we care about this question, do we need to examine the politics of other composers, like Wagner, whose views we know, along with perhaps Beethoven and Bach, whose views we know less about? (...)
To read the entire article, please download the pdf.
What Kind of Music Is This Anyway?
By Michael Gordon
The New York Times, The Score
March 5, 2007
(...) I have always felt uncomfortable with the word “classical.” It sends an instant message to most people that you are involved in something other. And, vainly, I am very aware that classical music has the squarest image on the planet. A bigger problem is that my music is not what most people think of as classical music. It doesn’t sound like Mozart, it is not genteel, will not serve as pleasant background music at a dinner party, and it can not be used to sell a Mercedes. (A passport control officer at Kennedy Airport once told Julia Wolfe that he thought all classical composers were dead.) (...)
To read the entire article, please download the pdf.