I’ve taken an extended break from composing in the last few years, only creating two pieces since composing Groundhog Night. That piece marked a turning point in many ways, and my world has shifted significantly since. Audience engagement, bringing realizations about music to participants, building community, creating an enjoyable experience, teaching through doing… all erode the control-oriented composing I was doing before.
Not that I dislike the results of my earlier efforts… far from it, I love what I’ve produced, much as Messiaen stated that his music was always an authentic expression of where he was at the time. I’ve had a companion thought for a long time, that I want to allow the ideas I use to be fully themselves while working with others to create a unified outcome, and that idea seems to grow in the meta-composition context. That is, I want to compose a vehicle, a potential shape whose realization audience members working together can direct.
Until writing this blog post, it hadn’t fully dawned on me that I am aiming for the same thing in this kind of piece that I aim for with my SEA theory: to provide a vessel that can hold the input of many and yet have a quality of holding together, creating a way to move into the next phase with meaning. It’s a big thought, and it makes me stop, become aware of long-term thoughts connected to these ideas.
What is it that is so good for me about composing, and how is that shared by the SEA approach to musical understanding? First, it seems that I just don’t feel right without that morning access to the depths of creative action. I have developed a compositional practice allowing that I open my mind to think about possibilities, let them expand, self-select (as it were), join together and allow me to find how they can work together. Composing is a process of discovery. It is all mine, no external scrutiny can shake it so long as it holds together on its own. My broad acceptance of any idea that comes along and patience in finding connections ensure that this will be the case. All of this is much the same as when doing musical analysis using the SEA: a patient, open mind allows connections to reveal themselves.
Never have I been comfortable telling people what to do, and I don’t like bending musical ideas to my will. My teaching, my leadership, has always been through encouragement, drawing forward what is helpful and productive. That is the very essence of my composing practice as well. It’s a slow process. Not slow forever, but patience is certainly its hallmark. When an idea clarifies, things move quickly. Likewise with musical analysis: not forcing a particular view on the music, the key is allowing insight to arise.
And now I have the influence of Pauline Oliveros. This semester, my class, Contemplating Music, took on John Cage and Pauline Oliveros. Everyone knows Cage, but Oliveros is a person I’d always heard of but didn’t know much about. Having read a lot now, gained experience with her Deep Listening practice, and listened to much of her music, I see how much my thinking aligns with hers, and it reinforces my commitment to composing music that builds community. Now I find that Oliveros’s Deep Listening Practice, for which she is most widely known, came many years into her composing life, and grew from community-building experiences in sound. And the name came from a performing experience. So I find myself having composed a piece that turns out to represent a turning point in my life, something that reflects a life-long fascination with sound, something that has led me to hold back on composing for a while. Lots of parallels, gratifying to know.
And what composing am I doing? I am following up an intuition about a piece, Groundhog Night, as the beginning of a way of composing to explore more fully. I’ve had a long time to ruminate, have many thoughts on how to extend the concept, and now I’m doing it. I’m working on a piece for another specific-yet-generic ensemble to be shaped by co-composers, generating energy changes the audience will estimate. It’s going to be a calm one, since Groundhog Night (Hear What the Earth Says) is rather a cry for help from the earth, and deals with an unsettling emotional profile. I want to create one that brings calm now. It will be the second in the Groundhog Night series, subtitle yet to be discovered.
The Groundhog Night experience has shown me how much fun a group can have—a group of performers, a group of co-composers, and a group of listeners— working together to create a loosely predicted outcome. As I delve into it further now, I am beginning to realize just how much possibility there is to work with, how much nuance is created by the way I put the piece together, the way I ask for input from and define the responsibilities of co-composers.
What’s brewing in my head as I prepare a new Groundhog Night, so far just subtitled “calm”, is to develop a concert experience of a series of such pieces using several versions of organization and differing energy profiles, allowing different co-composer groups to take control. So much of the original idea grows from doing a real-time SEA piece that I’ve tended to think of the experience as mostly educational. But the very real potential exists for a concert experience to bring these factors forward, in the process creating a new paradigm for what a concert can be.