Help Write a Symphony, Part 2 - #twittercomposition continues!

I've posted before about British composer Sam Watts and his cooperative composition project. Basically, he's looking for 420 different people (who use Twitter) to send in one note for his crowd-sourced composition.

It's been a while since he's posted an update, but as of February 1, 2011, he's received 219 notes. The rules for contributing are pretty straight-forward. As Watts explains in his blog A Composer's Campfire,

I’m asking as many Twitter users as possible to tweet me with a musical note (A-G, naturals, sharps and flats) and these notes will, in the order I receive them, be the melody of the composition.  It will be a three or four movement symphony (depending on how many notes I get).

Tweet me (@i_is_sam) with your choice of note (you can even specify note duration if you like) and include the hashtag #twittercomposition! Only one note per tweeter please! Then please tweet about it to all your followers to get them involved.  That’s it. I’ll do the rest. 

You can also just do a search for #twittercomposition to find out more.

So what can you do to move this project forward?

1) If you have a Twitter account and use it regularly, send a tweet to @i_is_sam with your note, and the hashtag #twittercomposition

2) If you're one of those people who opened a Twitter account and only tweeted a couple of times before giving up, for goodness sake revisit it and tweet Watts a musical note!

3) If you're either 1) or 2), please send the word out to your followers and ask them to get the word out to their followers as well. Here's how to do it. Just send the following:

Please RT: Send @i_is_sam a musical note for #twittercomposition

4) If you're not on Twitter, but know someone who is, clue them into the project and ask them to send Watts a musical note.

5) If you're not on Twitter, but are on some other form of social media, like Facebook (or even MySpace), post a link to this blog post, with a little bit of info.

I've already sent in my note, and sent the word out to all my followers on Twitter to do the same. So the only thing I can do to further help the project along is to do a blog post. Like this one.

Repertoire analysis -- how the sausage gets made (or conducted, rather)

One of the great things about the Internet, in my opinion, is that it's very easy to publish online -- especially in blogs. Take this one, for instance. There's no money in our budget for a hard copy newsletter, but online? It's free to us (and to you) and we can embed videos!

Kenneth Woods is a conductor and cellist who has recently completed an interesting self-study of the works he's conducted during the 2009-2010 season, entitled "Which Composers Are Getting Played?" I find it an interesting read for a a number of reasons:

1) It's an interesting balance of basic repertoire, unusual works, and modern composers -- which goes against my perception that conductors only want to do works by dead white Europeans.

2) Woods talks about the process of working with orchestra and orchestra boards, which explains in part why certain works get done infrequently, or not at all.

3) It's thought-provoking. If you had to learn 75-125 works to conduct in a season, which ones would you choose? How many would you be willing to learn that you might not like very much, but orchestras expect you to perform? How much new music would you program, and how new is new?

That last question's not irrelevant. As Woods says as he goes through his list,

Other composers dear to me, however, have not been lucky. Bartók has been completely absent. This makes me crazy, but I get tremendous (and completely incomprehensible) resistance when trying to program his music. 

Incomprehensible is right! Bartók is an acknowledged master, whose works are mainstays of the repertoire (at least among musicians). Modern? Well, maybe for 1948 -- but that was over a half century ago. Could we please move him to the dead white European male category so we can get his music performed more often? (if that's what it takes)

Just asking...

Indie classical - sonic spice

A very interesting article appeared in Capital New York. Entitled Indie classical goes uptown: Judd Greenstein on new music, it presents some concepts about contemporary classical music that I (in my own modest way) am trying to accomplish with "Gamut."

Judd Greenstein is a young composer who's equally comfortable in the classical and pop music worlds, and one of many new talents looking for ways to use current popular music gestures to create classical works of substance. Sound like a retrogression? That was what many thought when Brahms wrote waltzes, using the popular music form of the day to create classical works of substance. And some religious leaders were very uneasy about late medieval church composers using popular chansons (songs) as the basis for their masses -- especially when the original tunes had NSFW lyrics!

The indie classical philosophy, while in line with what composers have traditionally done (like Mozart's German Dances, or Mahler's use of landler), is at odds with the overall aesthetic of contemporary music, which has tried to make a clean break with the past. Unfortunately, in doing so, it seems to have made a break with the audience.

As Greenstein says about building an audience for new music, "“You don’t do it by shocking people. You do it by adding spice to their food gradually, by introducing new flavors, by broadening their palette in a way that feels simultaneously comfortable and exciting because it’s both new and familiar.”

It's how music evolved in the past, and it's also part of the philosophy behind "Gamut." Sure, I program plenty of prickly contemporary music -- but only if I think it's worth your while to hear (at least once). I also play a lot of newly-composed music that's tuneful, appealing, and sometimes just plain fun to listen to. Consider it a little sonic spice.

As I like to say, the two things I don't like are bland music and bland food. Don't worry -- on my show we're not talking Thai hot, just a dose of Tabasco every now and again. And yes, when I get some recordings of Judd Greenstein's music in, "Gamut" listeners will be the first to know it!