Idea vs. Execution (part three)

When someone hears that I am a composer, sometimes (though, this probably doesn’t happen to composers as often as it does, say, to writers of fiction or screenwriters) he or she might say, “I’ve got a great idea for a piece.” He or she will then expend a great amount of energy describing an idea for a piece of music. Some recent ideas that people have narrated to me in great detail include:

a programmatic piece describing, through music, the annual spawning of salmon

a slow song for mouth harp and banjo that morphs into a symphonic work and then morphs back again

a multi-orchestra piece depicting the 9/11 attacks

I do not begrudge the tellers of these tales their creative whims. In fact, I say that as long as they have the ideas, they are the ones who should write the pieces, not me. No matter how much they try to convince me that their ideas are good or at least worthy of following, the composer must bear the burden of his or her own creative need. To deign to speak or write according to someone else’s style or fancy (except as a style study, perhaps, or as a satire), is the antithesis of art.

Conceiving of a piece and finishing one are two wholly different matters. One may have an idea for a piece (a system, a procedure, a gestalt), and if one follows that idea slavishly, eventually the piece will come to an end. How satisfying that end is is quite another matter, and this speaks to execution, not to the idea. When I was much younger, I brought a fairly slavish, systematic work-in-progress to a lesson. My teacher, a British composer of considerable renown, responded to it by imploring me to analyze some large-scale works by Ligeti. I liked Ligeti (and still do), but I could not figure out what Ligeti had to do with me. Our styles seemed to be polar opposites. My teacher then remarked at how deft Ligeti was at orchestrating the general principle of musical decay. “He spends a long time setting up these beautiful systematic structures and then exerts just as much attention to detail in tearing those systems down.” He concluded with this, and I have always remembered it: “It is perfectly ok to follow a set of rules that you set for yourself within a piece. How you break those rules is what tells me about you as a composer.” In other words, anyone can follow a system. Further, anyone can have an idea. It takes a composer to write a piece.

In my podcast, I recently referenced a hilarious and well-written article by Colin Holter about composer and computer scientist David Cope who is given to using artificial intelligence to “compose” music in various styles. I quoted the following passage, and it bears repeating:

“I distinctly remember my first encounter with the Mozart knockoffs produced by Emmy, Cope’s first maid: They sounded a lot like Mozart. They could have (indeed, did) fool lots of listeners. But they lacked the “perverse flashes of insight,” to borrow from Ferneyhough—the complex play of semiosis, middle-ground structural articulation, and occasional batshit crazy digression that put Wolfie in his own league.”

This is the issue with execution. The execution of an idea must be done with sensitivity, not with systems. Close friend and colleague Benjamin Boyle, writing on his website (under “news”) recently addressed this matter rather poetically:

“When one considers the infinitely elegant and variable substance of what our musical tradition has given us to craft – i.e. the endless palette of color produced by the ever-shifting tendencies of pitch, the limitless possibilities of notated metrics, and the subtle and oft-ignored symbiosis of these two concepts (counterpoint and metricity), one has to wonder why that wasn’t material enough? (I haven’t even mentioned Harmony.) Since the combinatory effects of the Western musical tradition, both moment to moment and over the course of a large scale form, are infinite, why do so many ignore the exploration of these topics (which are like grammar to poetry) in favor of abstract and often non-musical ideas?”

Composer and organist Kurt Knecht recently weighed in on this subject on his blog:

“I once had a friend that got some sort of mathematical sequence from a lab for the AIDS virus. He created a tone row from the sequence and wrote a piece based it. He got a Fulbright. I tried to hear it at a concert once, but I honestly fell sound asleep when he started playing and never heard the thing. The music was uninteresting, but it received national attention because of the non-musical aspects. All of which is to say, if Uncle Milton really didn’t care if we listened or not, why did he bother to write the article?”

Pieces must be COMPLETED, however, for them to be meaningful. An idea for a piece, in addition to not being interesting by itself, isn’t worth anything. Hemingway wrote in Green Hills of Africa, “Finishing is what you have to do. If you don’t finish, nothing is worth a damn.” One does not read ideas, after all. One reads books. A product has to be finished. An item. A completed thing with its outer dimensions fixed that one can show to someone else. A work of art, not an idea for art. Noel Gallagher even weighed in on this issue once when he said that his band mates in the band Oasis would often come to him with guitar riffs, melodies, or ideas for songs. He would tell them to go away and finish the songs themselves. His conclusion was that one could only evaluate how appropriate a completed song was for a band, not an idea for one.

So it is in the concert hall. Again, we don’t go to concert halls to listen to ideas. The music has to make sense at the aural, moment-to-moment level FIRST to be truly engaging, no matter what the idea is. This speaks to the craft of execution, not to the idea. Too many composers are idea factories when they should be idea warehouses.

Podcast 6.21.11

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Happy Monday, everbody, even though it’s Tuesday.

Thanks to new listeners in Italy, Poland, England, Romania, Iceland, Mauritius.

Supermaren and Becky Oehlers continue to bring the thunder.

Kurt Knecht and Benjamin Boyle, two students of Robert Helps, weigh in with blog posts of their own.

www.cuppalit.com – love, love, love

David Patrick Stearns and the need for good music journalism.

Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra hiring a development associate. Musicians, fear not!

Lady Blunt Stradivarius sold. Could be the best (or worst) name for a female rapper.

vixnyc: the Twitter campaign that wouldn’t die. New York Philharmonic’s Vice President for Communications Eric Latzky responds to the haters.

Gustavo Dudamel should get the NFL “Gatorade dump.”

Johann Christoph Friederich Bach: still obscure.

Idea vs. Execution, Ernest Hemingway, Steven Pressfield, Adam Carolla, and more.