Valedictory Lecture
John Donald Robb Composers' Symposium
University of New Mexico
March 23, 2012
Intro to Part I
I am a creative person. And because of that everything I do
is connected. There has never been, for me, any distinction between art and
life. I live my life and living it is making art.
I want to thank Karola and Peter for inviting me to give
this talk. They have organized the daytime activities of this year's symposium
and in the past, when I was organizing them, UNM faculty never gave talks. Just
guests. So now that I've retired and am a guest I give a talk. And I appreciate
the opportunity.
I'll read this lecture as I usually do and have organized it
in three parts. The first and last I wrote in Pennsylvania before I left,
leaving the middle to write, through inspiration, here in New Mexico. This
mirrors what happened when I wrote my first fully-notated piece, between 1995
and 2000, the outer two parts were written in Germany, the middle in New
Mexico. That piece, "a little light,
in great darkness" is on the CD (Devisadero,
Navona Recordings) I gave you earlier.
Part I
After a long night, collapsing into bed at 8:30 PM ON A
FRIDAY (which never happens even at my age) due to a week of constant
frustration putting the final program together for this very symposium, I began
to dream. Can't repeat all of them but there were two important ones: UNM
German professor Katja Schroeter, with whom I studied German for many years,
walking along with me, on the UNM campus, as I'm headed for my Korean class
(which I actually take at the University of Pennsylvania International House),
I ask her what she's doing at the moment, recommending instead that I just skip
the Korean class and we go drink some beers and catch up. Naturally this is all
happening in German. And this is
an example of nostalgia. Looking back. I'm not going to do that in this talk.
In the second dream, I am waiting to give a talk, traveling constantly, don't
even know where I am when asked: I say "Los Angeles," the person next
to me corrects: "Denver." I'm rifling through my notes, there's not
much paper and it's not empty, I'm writing over printed paper, thinking that my
talk shouldn't be written anyway but that's just an excuse. I don't have much
time, and all of a sudden I realize I don't need the paper, which has
everything scribbled on it, completely disorganized, even as I write down the
one thing I need to know. And doing that on one of those sheets of completely
full paper, the pen writing not in black ink but in white shaving cream, can't
even fit it on the bottom and thus writing around to the side (like I'm sure
you've also done), the words: "cohesion and difference." Not separate
but together: "cohesion and difference." As if that were the whole
thing that matters. At this point, I awoke from my dream.
Well, cohesion and difference are important, in my opinion,
when making art of any kind and today, at the beginning of a symposium for
composers, it might seem that this is what I plan to talk about. But no, that
too, is nostalgia. What I remember instead from when I woke up is that such
dichotomies are necessary, for me at least, to make a path on which I can walk.
And I've walked that path. But now, as a simple introduction to what I want to
say, a discussion of my recent work, without nostalgia, all I can say is that I
felt that a young composer in my time needed to find their own way by the usual
method of killing the father, I'm still quite Freudian, and in the late 1980s,
when I began composing, that father was not who everyone thought he was, be
that Schoenberg or Stravinsky, neoclassicism or serialism, or the current (at
that time) minimalism and complexity. For me that father was experimentalism
and its "fathers" were Charles Ives and John Cage. The results of that was a book (Silencing the Sounded Self: John Cage and
the American Experimental Tradition, Northeastern University Press, 1998) that
compared and contrasted the experimentalism of them both, using the terms
control for Charles Ives and co-existence for John Cage. John Cage had come to New Mexico for
this very symposium in 1988, at my invitation, and I had prepared an
evening-long performance of all periods of Cage's music. At that time, Cage was
still quite famous, but he was not considered all that compositionally relevant anymore,
especially not in the United States. In fact, when I prepared to write my
dissertation on Cage in the early 1990s, only two people had written recent dissertations
on Cage and both were in music theory.
The results of my study found that experimentalism (then a period of
music in which I was an active participant and not a style like today) was not
so together as everyone thought. In fact, when James Tenney heard about my
dissertation, as we were driving back to Albuquerque from something we had both
attended in Santa Fe, he said "why would you separate the tradition? Isn't
it already isolated enough?" Well I separated it because it had divisions
within it--that's all. But, and so this doesn't go on too long, it was through what
Cage said, indirectly, about co-existence, which has a long history in Asian
thought and is certainly how Cage learned about it and I through him, regarding
intention and non-intention, that led me to that place: when one is intentional
there is no room for non-intention, but non-intention is so open it even
includes the intentional. Cage
himself, as my book proves, needed to be intentional to create something he
regarded as fully non-intentional.
That was how I "killed the father." But of course the father,
dead or not, remains within you doesn't he? For us physically it's in the DNA,
and for us artistically it's in the memory. And what I carry within me, and which will be part of my
presentation to you today, is co-existence. In my creative work, I seek not to
control my materials but co-exist with them, listen to them, let them (in many
instances) tell me what to do, not vice-versa. And this is still a pretty
radical way to work. It is also (I think) Cage's greatest legacy to
composition, not chance and not indeterminacy--these are compositional tools
anyone can use, regardless of personal orientation. It is Cage's compositional attitude that I share and that is
a desire to not completely control and instead co-exist with your compositional
materials. And, for that matter, with the rest of the world!
Part II
At this point, I'm in the middle part of the talk, writing
atop of a mesa (Tsankawi) in the Bandelier National Monument wilderness area. Much of it was destroyed by a fire last
summer.
Now I write in Pennsylvania woods and Korean mountains and
that's the topic of what comes next: a piece I wrote for gayageums, a Korean
instrument similar to a zither, close to a Japanese koto if you know that, now
re-written for string quartet, and which will be premiered next Monday night in
Keller Hall by the Del Sol string quartet. It's hard to imagine that piece
sitting here with 360 degrees of space all around me and not a cloud in the
sky. This piece Circlings is
connected to feelings of enclosure not openness, not one circle (like the
prayer circle I saw at Bandelier last weekend), but many circles. Where the
text that accompanies my piece states "in the woods, all directions seem
the right ones." Getting lost in other words. In the New Mexico wilderness
you get lost too, I did rather frequently and sometimes on purpose. But in the
mountains you still have up and down, the sun ever-present gives you north,
south, east and west most of the time. In the woods these circles that inform
my piece, moving forward--with time of course--what option is there? But in
what direction? And how do you know? What is the natural road map when the sun is obscured and the trail goes around
and around, a flat surface, where repetition is only noticeable if you've paid
careful attention to your surroundings and even then, what if the distinctions
themselves are repeated as they sometimes are?
The east coast seems so safe and civilized in wealthy parts
of its cities and suburbs. But in the Pennsylvania wilderness, and those thick
dark woods, getting lost is something you don't
encourage, and when it happens there are different dangers than snakes, bears,
mountain lions, elk, steep mountain climbs, dangerous winds: all those things
you learn to accept in the New Mexico wilderness--all seem safer and more
approachably open than the darkness of circling walks in the Pennsylvania
woods. So that's one aspect of Circlings
for me.
The other, more positive (thank goodness), is its overt influence:
Korean culture and the natural landscape it is rooted within. As you probably
know, Korea is an extraordinarily beautiful peninsula dotted with mountains
just about everywhere you turn. And Koreans share a similar love of nature to
what I experienced in Germany. One side effect being that in the wilderness you
are almost never alone like I was when I wrote this in Tsankawi. So one
noticeable thing that changes with Circlings
is my intentional mingling of nature and culture in the electronic part of the
piece. The source material of that is primarily made up of field recordings on
long mountain walks in Korea. You hear insects, electronically altered and not,
water altered and not, and the sound of two Buddhist chants, one male and one
female, that I recorded in temples I found deep in the mountains of Seoraksan
and the Gyeryong mountains near Daejeong. Below are photos of those temples.
Seoraksan:
And Gyeryongsan:
The other sounds are Korean instruments, the gayageum itself, paired
with a temple block I purchased at one of the temples similar to what they use
while chanting. As I say I
recorded these sounds in Korea, in the summer of 2009, and then the following
fall, with the help of my friend and fellow composer Thomas DeLio, we created
the electronic parts interspersed with by "silences" I recorded at
Pulpit Rock, on the Appalachian Trail in Pennsylvania, for an installation I
made with my wife, the visual artist Hee Sook Kim, in 2007 titled Encounter. It
was the installation piece for that year's composers' symposium. Here is a photo of me at Pulpit Rock around the time of those recordings:
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The video for Circlings was filmed in the mountains of
Korea, also by Hee Sook Kim, during the same walks where I recorded the sounds. So that's what's happening with the electronics. What about
the instrumental writing? Well, first I knew nothing about the gayageum, a
fantastic instrument that can do many, many things and with a long tradition in
Korean musical history. I made contact, through my friend Hyo-shin Na, a Korean
born American composer who I met through the Del Sol String Quartet who played
her music at the same 2007 symposium I just mentioned. And it was her who asked
me to write a piece for gayageum quartet which was later premiered at a festival
of Korean art and music co-directed by Hyo-shin Na and Hee Sook Kim at
Haverford College (October 2010) where Hee Sook teaches printmaking. Hyo-shin
gave my name to the Cultural Ministry in the Korean government and they sent me
hundreds of CDs and DVDs of Korean music--an extraordinary and overwhelming
collection of which I've still barely scratched the surface. In the meantime I
was a scholarship recipient for a workshop at the National Gugak Center in
Seoul (Gugak is the Korean word for native folk music), where I studied
gayageum, danso flute, folk singing and dancing, and Korean Changgo, the first
drum I had played in more than a decade and the instrument that returned me to
once again being a performing percussionist. So I'm very partial to this drum!
Anyway this was all after I'd written the piece, and in fact
my having written the piece, as an indication of my interest in Korean music,
is probably what got me the full scholarship to study there. So what did I do then, while writing a
piece for an instrument I didn't know, from a musical culture I knew very
little about? I returned to my
experimental background and treated the gayageum, not as a cultural marker,
which it so obviously is, and instead wrote for it as a sound generating
instrument. Finding my way to that
place took a long time, but after that things moved more quickly, with the
piece (so atypical for me) actually completed in time for its premiere in
October 2010. So quickly a sketch
of the form of the electronic part of the piece. There are fourteen tracks,
four which are silences of the same length, the rest sounds as described
previously.
And it is at this point that my long-term interest in pop
music as a material generating source comes into play. The CD I gave you has lots of pop music
references--sounds that I love, isolated and recontextualized in ways that are
not likely hearable but important to me as material. Content in other words.
But form had always been another matter that had been more experimentally
derived in a way better associated with modernist ways of thinking about form
and structure.
But I already had a structure remember? The sounds and
silences of the electronic part. So I could either choose to ignore that
structure and have the two co-exist--that's what Hee Sook did with the video,
in fact it is how we always work together, a kind of Cage/Cunningham relation
of independent connection between sight and sound. Or I could use the form of
the electronic part as a template and write short modules that correspond in
time with the sections of the recorded sounds. I chose the latter and here's one score example (Circlings, like all of my music, is published by American Composers Edition):
Anyone that knows me knows that I love Brian Wilson's music
and think he is one of the greatest composers of the 20th century. I know
pretty much everything there is to know about his music and I've studied it
like a scholar; taught it in class. Basically I have internalized it to the
point that where the influence leaves off and my creativity begins would be
difficult to say. Except I was definitely not thinking about him when I wrote Circlings! Instead I was thinking about
this while trying to write my string quartet--writing short modules of sound
like Wilson did when he wrote Good
Vibrations and began working on Smile.
I was using texts from the Jefferson Airplane's Volunteers album, John Lennon's Revolution--political work from the late
60s influencing me in a time of alarmingly reactionary conservatism in this
country. Thinking revolutionary thoughts.
But it wasn't working. A frustrating time and time was
running out.
Then the original Smile
sessions came out and it was possible to hear what Wilson was trying to do with
his great lost unfinished masterpiece. Not only lost in terms of it not being
finished. HE was lost. He COULDN'T finish. You can hear that all the way
through the Smile sessions,
especially now that we know from the 2004 completion of it, what he finally had
in mind and what took him so long.
One of the best module-type pieces on Smile is Cabin Essence, which
I'll play for you now.
After studying the Smile
session CDs I realized that I'd already written my "module" piece,
I'd already written my string quartet. Except it was for Korean strings not
European ones.
Thus began the process (a quite simple one actually) of
translating from gayageum to violins, viola and cello. What I especially like
about my new way of composing is that I can finish unfinished things. My Waldmusik--unfinished but one part (for
two pianos) can be seen on YouTube (links below):
Here's the first movement:
Here's the second and third:
This video is a performance by Scott Ney and Tzu-feng Liu from
last year's symposium; my concert length Preludes
and Miniatures for solo piano, part of which can be heard on my website
(Four Romantic Miniatures performed by Falko Steinbach):
Another part is Devisadero, the title track of my Navona
recordings CD (you can find a live recording by Curt Cacioppo, for whom it was written, here):
And finally how I am now writing Circlings--also unfinished and being written in parallel, with
instruments from my native cultural background and instruments from my wife's
native cultural background--a collaboration that continues, for electronics
(audio and video) and instruments, Asian and European, a never ending place of
creativity which can be heard in part even as I continue to search for its completed whole.
Here's a link to the completed string quartet (including a
recording of its premiere by the Del Sol String Quartet) with video by Hee Sook
Kim:
And now to conclude:
Part III
I said I wouldn’t be nostalgic, but as you can tell from my presentation, sometimes nostalgia can itself be material. I certainly feel that way about Brian Wilson’s final work Smile and how that can be useful in the present and that, in a sense, isn’t nostalgic at all. As my brother once said about his own art, pretty much at the beginning of his career, and it’s such a strong statement he continues to use it:
I said I wouldn’t be nostalgic, but as you can tell from my presentation, sometimes nostalgia can itself be material. I certainly feel that way about Brian Wilson’s final work Smile and how that can be useful in the present and that, in a sense, isn’t nostalgic at all. As my brother once said about his own art, pretty much at the beginning of his career, and it’s such a strong statement he continues to use it:
That's a more idealistic statement than I would make, he's
still an idealist after all, but I do think like Gertrude Stein did that
although the materials themselves are constant, their composition, through the
inventive activity of a creative artist can still be "made new."
And I'm intentionally using not just "old"
material, but material that on the surface can be heard as anachronistic (if
you want to make a valueless judgment) or even reactionary (if you want to connect
the material to some ideological construct as so often happens nowadays) and,
to be sure, my use, for example, of tonality in the music I wrote over the last
fifteen years was not made in some naive place, walking around alone in the
desert and listening to the Muses who then told me what to write. I knew what I
was doing, began using tonality as material for a reason, and I am just as
concerned now as I was then in trying to resist the placement of what I do
stylistically which I think is the best way to find success and, at the same
time, the surest way to be sure that success will be shortlived. When I started
composing notated music in the mid-90s, I knew that Neue Musik and its progeny
in the complexity composers and New Music with its successors in minimalism was
dead. That's the only time Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf and I have ever agreed on
anything. He heard that in Darmstadt in the early 90s and I heard that in, of
all places, Akron Ohio at around the same time. New Music as a musical period
is over and still being discovered in its fullness, at least I've noticed that
to be true where I live now on the East Coast. Neue Musik still exists as a
style with lots of practitioners, some of them interesting some not. And I still like the music anyone writes
in this style better than most of the possible alternatives available today.
Well in closing I want to be truly nostalgic, going way way
back, to when I was in high school and thought I was going to be the next
Jackson Browne. In fact, back then I knew I wasn’t good enough to another Paul
Simon, but did think I was better than Jackson Browne. Oh the vanity of youth!
Anyway, I didn’t write classical music as a kid, I listened to it a bit, I
remember in particular listening to the 2nd piano concerto of Brahms
on my car’s 8 track stereo (that was a trip), but my goals were simple. I was
going to go to college and learn how to write my songs down on paper so that,
like Paul Simon, I could be my own publisher and not have to share my millions
with some corporation like the Beatles did. I always used to tell my students that I would have been a
songwriter if I hadn’t in retrospect been such a bad one. But of course as a
Distinguished Professor I could never actually demonstrate that, way too
embarrassing, and besides I couldn’t have found those old sheets of paper with
lyrics (all bad) and chord symbols written on top anyway, packed away as they
were somewhere in my office, not even seen since I arrived at UNM as a 22 year
old in 1980.
Well, when I moved from my office to where I live now, I
found a battered yellow envelope with this written on it: “Bad Lyrics and Songs
from H.S.” And now I’m going to prove to everyone, right here, how bad they
really were.
Now why would I embarrass myself like that, sharing such a
bad song, in front of all of you? To make a point that some of my former
students may remember my telling them, but never demonstrating. Being in school
is the best time to make as many mistakes as possible, and you never get
another chance to be a student composer so make them all, take all the chances
you want, what are you worried about--a bad grade? As a composer? What a
ridiculous idea! Especially since we all know the best composers never went to
school anyway so already we are at a disadvantage. So at least use that
disadvantage to get all the crap out of the way as soon as possible. To be
honest this is what I’m learning now that I’m finally out of school, having
never left one from the time I was four until fifty four, is that school is the
place where you take risks, find yourself, don’t worry about consequences
(within reason, or maybe not even that) and if there is any proof I can offer
it is that awful song, which I thought was so great when I was sixteen, and how
crucial that time was for me, to make that music, to pour my soul into its
awfulness, and get it out let it exist and then reflecting back to its
existence realize that it has no reason to exist other than as an example of
its awfulness—to me and maybe to you—as a way of showing that nostalgia and
looking back really is what the Bible says it is, with Lot’s wife looking back
and becoming a pillar of salt, and yet its lessons are necessary, that’s what
school is about after all, looking back so you don’t make the same mistakes
everyone else (even you) made, and so in closing I invite you to write all the
awful music necessary in order to get it out of your system as soon as possible
and maybe, with any luck, you’ll be able to leave school much sooner than I
did, now finally and truly a college graduate at the age of fifty-four.
Shultis Composers' Symposium Lecture Sources
www.chrisshultis.com
chrisshultis.blogspot.com
www.heesookkim.com
www.navonarecords.com
Christopher Shultis.
Silencing the Sounded Self: John Cage and the American Experimental
Tradition (1998)
Beach Boys: The Smile Sessions Box Set (2011)
Gertrude Stein. "Composition as Explanation" from Selected
Writings.
Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf. "Die Neue Musik ist tot, schon
lange ..." in "Komplexismus und der Paradigmenwechsel in der Musik.
" MusikTexte 35 (1990) pp.20-28.
Christopher Shultis. Waldmusik (2009), part one and
two:
www.youtube.com
Tsankawi, White Rock NM:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsankawi
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