why compose 

I've found that every piece I finish that I'm happy with was, in some way, the result of a new method of working, some kind of exploration. sometimes there is extramusical "content" or "inspiration" or "what I have to say", but the real pleasure in composing, for me, is derived from the solving of new puzzles, which sometimes "inspiration" provides, or even is, in itself.

I don't think this makes my music any less meaningful to me; there is a real joy in the purposeful arrangement of elements that really does transcend the merely topical. if I can find in myself ideas strong enough to withstand any other mental/spiritual barrier, that is meaningful to me.

it's absurd, really, and I'm indeed actively searching for an avenue to explore worldly matters in my work, to use composition as a means of apprehension – but again, the inspiration is not fully found in the topic but in the quest(ion) of how to confront it.

• artful, as opposed to artlessness
• "arts and crafts", craft as in work, technique (well-crafted)
• technique, as in art (the art of doing something). art as "work" – we say *work* of art

Crudele, acerba, inesorabile morte… (2017)
after a madrigal by Luca Marenzio
string quartet

Just finished a small project yesterday, for string quartet, based on a madrigal by Luca Marenzio ("Crudele, acerba..."). I suppose it leans more toward being an arrangement than a composition, but I feel that I've shaped the material in certain (even "invasive") ways that it feels very much mine (you can't "collaborate" with history, right? Only co-opt it?).

Unfortunately it's one of those pieces that is difficult probably for very annoying reasons (lots of octave doublings on a single instrument, thick polyphonic texture, copious senza vibrato passages... I expect intonation and balance issues to be unreasonable), so who knows if/when I'll get to hear it.

But in the meantime, the score for this piece is available on IMSLP. Please let me know if you are interested in performing it.

Die Heimat (Home)
from Sechs Hölderlin-Fragmente (1958)
by Benjamin Britten
transcribed by yours truly for solo piano

it's been almost three weeks since I moved to this city, which I've spent largely without a piano. as you can imagine this has been rather disorienting for me, and I've been spending much time composing and arranging as a way to stay musically (and spiritually) moored.

I've loved this song by Britten ("Home", on an originally German text by Hölderlin) since I first heard it, and had always wanted to get my hands on it somehow – in the first few days upon my arrival it seemed only fitting to transcribe it for piano, and I couldn't be happier to finally give it a whirl.

---

home
Friedrich Hölderlin (translated by Emily Ezust)

the boatman turns homeward on the mute river
from distant islands, where he has been gathering his harvest;
gladly would I also turn toward home now;
but what have I gathered except sorrow?

you lovely banks that brought me up,
can you still love's grief? 
ah, can you give me,
when I come to you woods of my childhood,
can you give me that peace once again?"

Composer, n.

• "compose," to make, to integrate. " "composite", "complete"
• we say something is "composed" when it is whole, has unity.
• something's "composition" is what it is comprised of, what elements came together to form it.

• to be a composer is to be an integrator; classical ideas of "harmony" relating to cosmic perfection and balance ("music of the spheres")
• music as the reconciliation of elements into a "harmonious" unity.
• I've lately thought of composing as like a jigsaw puzzle where the composer also has to make the pieces. 

A triumvirate

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951-1982) – writer, performance artist, visual artist (Dictée, Exilée, Vidéoème)

Julius Eastman (1940-1990) – composer, singer, pianist (Crazy Nigger, The Holy Presence of Joan d'Arc, Gay Guerrilla)

Claude Vivier (1948-1983) – composer (Wo bist du Licht!, Lonely Child, Glaubst du an die Unsterblichkeit der Seele)

• "involuntary martyrs"
  • how are these artists' works haunted by their deaths? their art is so defined by their lives, and death only further mystifies, mythologizes.
• sui generis as artists and figures within their respective communities
  • refused to fall into tropes of Asian, woman, black, queer. through the most liberal strains of western/American art (performance art, experimentalism, etc), they created highly original bodies of work as if "from scratch" – "Ur-beings" realized by following interests, deeply informed by their personal histories
• each grappled with issues of identity politics
  • who else was like them in the landscape in which they operated? who could they look up to to become without assimilating or playing into cultural presumptions of who they are? ("Asians wearing yellowface", for instance)
  • assertion of complex selfhood, self-realization in an environment where such spiritual liberation is historically only completely granted to white cis men

I'm prouder than I should be of this hardly-blog-worthy meme.

left to right, up to down: Takemitsu ("A Way a Lone"), Boulez ("Sonatine"), Donnacha Dennehy ("Bulb"), Feng ("Figments in Fracture"), Beethoven ("Moonlight" Sonata), Rzewski ("Down by the Riverside"), Adès ("Mazurkas"), generic, Feldman ("Patterns in a Chromatic Field")

Feelin' extra (staves)?

Two examples from Yvar Mikhashoff's virtuosic piano trilogy, Elemental Figures. 

If you thought Rachmaninoff's 4 staves was extra, Mikhashoff more than triples that! At first glance, I'd guess that Mikhashoff employs (/deploys?) an outrageous number of staves to graphically represent the explosiveness/expansiveness of the gesture. A glissando on two staves with 8va lines may sound the all the same but this does look significantly more striking (and ridiculous), which may offer something for the performer's psychology. 

To show stratification of voices, different "bells"... 

"Searched music"

• piano miniatures as avenues of self-discovery:
  • Boulez, Bartók, Schoenberg, Kurtág – experiments, sketches
  • Janáček, Schumann, Mompou – intimacy in microcosm, reaching for innermost sentiment
  • Ligeti, Musica ricercata, literally "searched music"/"found music"; striving for the creation of an Ur-self/Ur-language
    • Lachenmann (Ein Kinderspiel): composition as self-discovery; one must approach new frontiers of self in each piece, poetry of searching
      • Ein Kinderspiel both as "music for children"/"child's play", but also a "going back to the sandbox" approach to composition, invention of idiosyncratic approach to the piano
• form of ricercar – "searching" for key
  • Bach, Ricercars from the Musical Offering
  • Beethoven, String Quartet in B-flat (Op. 18/6), Mvt. 4 "La Malinconia", long searching introduction
  • Mozart, "Dissonance" quartet opening (arrival in C major)
• other "searching music"
  • Joni Mitchell (Blue, Hejira; "All I Want," "This Flight Tonight," "Amelia", "Hejira", "Let the Wind Carry Me")
  • Björk, "Hunter" ("if travel is searching / home what's been found / i'm not stopping / i'm going hunting")
  • Andrew Norman, "Try" (trial-and-error as a form)