Category Archives: music

Music for peace? War questions musical meaning?

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[From a recent list discussion about music, war and peace. The anonymous writer of the quoted passage — that is, I can’t remember the name of the list member who posted it, and I don’t think it was relevant to mention even if I knew it — was just one among many who posted their thoughts and supplied facts about experiences from “peace missions” with music making among people in countries and regions suffering from wars and conflicts:]

Though not an expert in this area, I wish to add that one of the things that war does to students and scholars of music is that it questions the relevance, meaning, and limitations of their/our practice.

I’m sorry to be harsh, but perspectives — and experiences — like these are painfully common: why does it take a war to get us to “question the relevance, meaning, and limitations of their/our practice”? If we don’t know what we’re doing, what its relevance is, what it means to our societies, to our fellow human beings — if we cannot address these crucial questions in the luxurious calm of peace, it will be far too late in wartime. It is what we must do, and not await catastrophe as a stimulus.

MW Morse

(listen to this mp3 — a demo version of Undiminished Hope, an original tune by MWM, now arranged for jazz quintet.)

Claude Ranger

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My good friend Terry King has mentioned [on this tribute site] our introduction to Claude Ranger in 1970:

“I was playing jazz violin in Montreal around 1971, when I met Claude along with my friend, bassist Mike Morse. At that time we had never played with a musician of Claude’s stature (I’m not sure I’ve ever played with anyone of his stature since, either).”

We were the house band in a jazz coffee house in Val David called Jazz et Café. Some amazing people trooped through there, including Marius Coulthier, Peter Leitch, a very young Steve Hall, and Brian Barley. Brian amazed us, of course, and told us about Claude’s playing and writing. He showed us some of Claude’s tunes, and explained some things about Claude’s unique and insightful concept of harmony, based on the extensions of a seventh chord.

Terry and I went down to Old Montreal, and heard him with Billie Robinson, Peter Leitch, and Freddie McHugh. Growing up in NJ/NYC, I had already heard many great musicians — but nothing like this. The energy and creativity never flagged for a second, nor did the utter beauty of sound from the drums.

Shortly afterwards, Terry and I asked Claude to play a set at a college concert. To our amazement he said yes, and even agreed to do a rehearsal. We played in the basement of the McGill student centre. Claude was affable but quiet, setting up with seeming unconcern. The first tune we called was Claude’s “Le Pingouin,: which we had learned from a record of Claude, Brian, and bassist Daniel Lessard. The bass line is a simple chromatic pattern in half steps. I started playing it, and after a few measures, Claude started to play. That first few moments was one of the defining moments of my life. He was playing the most complex things I had ever heard from a drummer, yet it fit so beautifully and simply with the bass line he composed.

We finished the rehearsal, and played the concert a few days later, in a kind of ecstatic daze. We finished our set, and had to find the promoter to get our salary. 20 or 30 dollars for all three of us? Something like that; we gave it all to Claude, naturally. In any event, Claude waited backstage. The next act had already started, a loud rock band. When we found Claude, he was sitting with his back to the wall, which shaking from the volume of the rock band–composing music! Thunderstruck, we asked how he could do this, and he said something like “only what you hear inside matters.”

Many folks have rightly mentioned Claude’s capacity to turn any musical event into something extraordinary and artistic. I remember once going to hear Claude up on St. Hubert someplace, with Terry and Jerry Labelle. The group was just a trio, an amiable but utterly pedestrian organist, singer — and Claude.

The music was the most banal bar trash of the day. One of the numbers was a merengue. The hook to the commercial merengue beat is four sixteenth-notes on the snare drum at the end of the second bar of the pattern, leading to the downbeat: ducka-ducka-DUM; ducka-ducka-DUM. When the tune started, my friends and I suddenly felt something utterly marvellous, and didn’t know immediately what it was. We soon figured it out. Claude was playing all of the standard accents for merengue, but was playing the principle figure on the ride cymbal instead of the snare. The first sixteenth note, he left out altogether. The next was piano-pianissimo, the next pianissimo, and the fourth and last piano, in a slight, incedibly controlled crescendo. The effect was magical, profoundly musical, and danceable, too! Even if someone else had thought of this ingenious variation, it demands virtuoso control of dynamics to pull it off. Who else but Claude could do that?

Claude always played the complete music, never just a drum part. I had the opportunity to work four nights with Claude in Ottawa, a trio gig with baritone saxophonist Charles Papasoff. It was all standards and jazz tunes, and Claude played with such sensitivity to the music that you actually hear the chord changes, both in his accompaniment and solos. Here was a drummer on the level of the greatest in jazz, a composer and theorist of the same calibre, and a profoundly inspiring bandleader and teacher to several generations of musicians.

I once spent half a year composing a postcard to Claude, in French. The substance was: if I have been able to glimpse a small part of the true glory of music, revered friend, it is thanks to you above all.

MW Morse

Here is a tune inspired by Claude Ranger’s musical ideas.

Jazz listening on radio

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Yesterday I heard a recorded concert from jazz club Fasching in Stockholm. The aired program was from Maria Schneider’s visit to Sweden in October 2005. She worked with a Swedish big band, and you can read about the concert at Sveriges Radio’s pages about it (and read more about the program here, and if you are lucky with the technology, listen to the program!).

“Favourite Composer?”

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[The following sermon by MWM is a republished posting from a composer forum discussion on the topic “Who is your favorite living composer?”]

Let us, dear brethren & sistren, attend the word at issue. “Favo(u)rite” does not mean “greatest,” “most admired,” nor even “best.” It entails a notably more relaxed and personal commitment than value judgment.

At the least one could say this: ever since the pantheon set up shop, more than a century ago, composers have had to deal with the question of why they bother, put in the pointed, accusatory fashion “why should we listen to you(r music), when we can listen to [fill in the icon of choice] instead?” At the very least, the answer to that has got to be that one thinks fondly of one’s own music; “proudly” is a bonus that, it seems, a dwindling number of composers can embrace. Whether that is due to the increasing imposition of bellicose challenges like the one I cited, I couldn’t say.

I agree, however, with Taylor Silver’s comments (*): in addition to all our other problems, striking some sort of sane balance between arrogance and modesty seems difficult for composers. I feel this is because the core notion of compositional art and craft is obscured. That is not so much due to decadence, to a decline in the standard of excellence, but to a general historical confusion that overwhelms us. Even within a single tradition, there is not just too much too learn, but too many things, too many different kinds of exemplars to absorb and understand.

Too many of the lessons [of the past] offer at least contradictory interpretations, if not indeed contradictory realities. To take a simple example, Mahler & Webern proffer directly contradistinctive lessons on musical economy. Yet it’s fair to say that a real understanding of either composer presupposes a keen insight into the other. A professed enemy of Mahler will be a limited, if not piss-poor conductor of Webern. The development section of “Veni, Creator Spiritus” was not only a direct inspiration to Webern’s Cantatas, but a case of genuine musical affinity. That affinity is one of the deepest levels of both composers’ music, and so indispensable for performers and students of their music. It can take years to appreciate that affinity; without it, though, an admirer and would-be emulator of either composer is virtually certain to catch nothing but mannerisms. Absent the real sympathy of musical understanding, what they will be able to learn is so superficial that nothing but disconnected phrases will result from their effort: in a (dreaded) word, pastiche.

It does seem to me that the vigorous, surly, and bloody-minded defense of mere exercises as real music, and the defiant/triumphant confusion of simulacra with reality, is uncomfortably close to a symptom of decadence. The SibMus world can’t be that different from the music world at large. And every week, there will be literally dozens of reviews that read, en clair: “Hey! Like, wow! Here’s a staggeringly crude imitation of Mozart/Rachmaninoff/Dvorak that’s got as much in common with its original as an coarsely manufactured mannequin does with a person. But: a. I’m easily swayed and fooled, because I haven’t spent any time studying the originals — hey, I’m busy, and I don’t love them that much; b. the composer is a personal friend/only a kid/someone I feel sorry for/’sincere’/etc; c. who’s to say? it’s all just opinion anyway, namsane?”

It’s becoming clearer to me that people only invoke such pathetic, relativistic standards because they don’t know any better, because they haven’t any (or enough) experiences to ground them in anything more solid. And, despite my grave philosophical issues with the term, I will say it, because it belongs here, inescapably: they have not experienced anything more real.

I’m saying that a cultural atmosphere of profound cluelessness is anything but a nurturing one for both the humility and the pride of a committed composer. As I’ve repeatedly (and shrilly, by now) argued, relativism is no victimless crime. If/when enough people flat out refuse to recognize any difference between some shockingly far-off (and inept) imitation of Mozart, and Mozart — then the capacity of Mozart’s music to teach is, to that extent, compromised, or even at an end. In such circumstances, clearing away the debris and weeds of misunderstanding to a path to Mozart is exponentially harder for everyone, very much including composers. Unless we want to argue that our culture plays no role whatsoever in our learning processes — and only the most aggressively brainless relativist will step up to the plate on that one — then we have to accept that the general conditions of our musical understanding present many of the particular obstacles we face as musicians. In the present circumstance, being able to enjoy our own music without delusion or (residual) self-loathing can seem a distant triumph indeed.

MW Morse

*) “Its funny how two totally different types of people – one too modest and one too arrogant – can produce equally impressive pieces of music. Think about the differences in the creative process they must have.”
Written by Taylor Silver, in a discussion at SibeliusMusic.com

The Viol That Casts The Longest Shadow

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Memory is hard to catch, for where its shadow falls, often the details and emotions that could make it a really good story are impossible to find again.

Maybe it was like this:

Around 1991-93, in a music school in southern Sweden, I was in a group of students who were rehearsing for a performance in “ensemble class” – an activity where we were supposed to try other instruments and genres than we usually studied as main subjects. In my group were, as I can remember: Jakob the Nervous Trumpeter; Sara the Energetic Singer & Dancer; Hanna the Humorous Clarinetist; Dermot the Cool Irish Organist; Stefan the Smiling Trumpeter; and me – Maria the Motherly Composer & Singer.

We had decided to perform two songs. I remember one of them was “Fever”, in a simple arrangement. We were gathered in the room otherwise used for voice lessons. A small classroom with a sturdy electric piano, a cassette deck and microphone, a mirror, some desks and chairs, book cupboards with sheet music, framed posters from musical productions, and, in a corner, a double bass.

Jakob and Stefan decided to alternate as bass players and tenor singers. Sara, Hanna and Dermot took care of the other voice parts, plus assorted percussion instruments. I sat down at the piano and tried to play some chords, with a jazz organ sound and appropriate rhythms.

We worked on it for some time, and with much of the energy spent on the wrong things, since nobody except perhaps Sara had enough self-confidence and ensemble experience to rely on for a concentrated effort, we got tired and decided to take an early coffee break. I left the piano and was about to head for the door, while the others continued to make jokes about our coming performance, and suggested ideas for how to improve it with gestures and other routines. Jakob and Stefan had been competing over who played the bass the best – or in the silliest way, and Jakob still danced around with it, but with his attention more on the discussion than on the instrument.

I can’t remember if I saw or understood what Jakob tried to do next. If it was an attempt to treat the double bass as a simple guitar, and just let it rest for a while – leaning it to a chair, or if he thought he could let go of it where it stood, as if gravitation did not exist, I don’t think he even knew this himself. Our music school’s double bass died an instant and disgraceful death a second later, when it slipped on the floor and crashed into the electric piano.

Personal diary style

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I will try to write something like a diary style blog today:

Lazy morning. Breakfast. Tea made from cheap Ceylon teabags in the low, small and plain brown Chinese teapot. Milk in the teacup. Soft Fazer rye bread; one with cheese and one with liver pâté. Grapefruit juice. No yoghurt today.

Very few emails. Re-read a couple of letters from yesterday instead. Read the news on the web. Looked through the latest threads on a music forum.

Listened to “Allegresse” by Maria Schneider (the jazz composer, not the actress..). Very nice music – playful and beautiful, and not much of a normal busy big band sound, which I was grateful for (I am not so fond of conventional big band stuff – all the aggressive brass chords, and such things – so I don’t like all pieces on other cd’s with Maria Schneider Orchestra). I ordered the CD Tuesday night last week, at online order from Artist Share, and got it in the mail on Friday morning. Surprising, as I know it normally takes 6 days for letters to go from New York to Stockholm.

(photo of Maria Schneider by Jimmy Katz)

Tried to play through a collection of ten old piano pieces by Steve Dobrogosz (check the link for info about his appearence on the Stockholm Jazz Festival 2006). Good to practise again, to play the timed sounds, to hear something new, but this isn’t really my kind of music – not interesting enough. The pieces were fairly easy to read and understand, but since I haven’t heard them before, I couldn’t figure out why some things were composed like they were, and how to interpret them (even if there were some ideas – comments and suggestions – printed on the back cover.)

Made some pasta with beans for lunch. I like it, and it is nice to cook something new instead of heating leftovers in the micro.

Putting the things in order for tomorrow’s painting class. Had to scrape dry and half-dry paint with a sharp knife from the palette I used a month ago. I had imagined that I would continue on the two pictures I am working on, so it was better to leave the paint that was left. Not. A few days is okay, with the water soluble oil paint I use at home, but not weeks in thin layers on the palette. I used the last of a quantity of still soft white to fill an empty space on a sketch I have been dabbling with.

Packed a jeans jacket I got through mail order yesterday again, in a tape-sealed plastic bag, to send it back to the mail order company. The jacket was for my son, but I had miscalculated the size (was some confusing info in the catalogue, with everything presented in French sizes instead of S-M-L or EU standard system), so he needs a bigger one. This one was more in my size, but I don’t need a Levi’s jacket just now.

Laundry. Sorting things in the dishwasher. Cleaning/dusting some floor boards in the rooms upstairs, and the staircase.

Not a bad day, after all.

MaLj

“Why are you listening to this?”

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[MaLj:] Some say it surprises them that I listen to music that they can’t imagine is “my” genre, like some of the older songs by Madonna. Maybe they don’t know I have a history of also listening to Bob Dylan; Elvis Costello; Carole King; Abba; Roxette; Cardigans; Paul Simon; Art Garfunkel; Leonard Cohen; Neil Diamond; Toto; Bryan Ferry; Beatles; Anne Murray; Barbra Streisand; Helen Reddy; Sally Oldfield; Hothouse Flowers; Elton John; Chicago; Blood, Sweat & Tears, and many many more, mostly from the 1970’s. So it seems to be a problem to understand why I am not listening *only* and always to the music I explained many years ago was “my music”: Bach, Beatles, folk songs, romantic Lieder, piano sonatas, hymns, and Christian pop music, but forgetting that I purchased records with and listened to jazz, Tibetan monks, opera, and symphonic music with interest and very little prejudices even then, that long time ago.

[MWM:] No matter what a list like this contains, it should never be a surprise to anyone that a composer would listen attentively to every possible expression. As I attempted to explain, in vain, to our rather dull-witted and intolerant colleague [on an internet forum for composers], the default setting for a composer must be that music is potentially useful, until proven otherwise. Useful comes first, and whether it’s good or bad is, literally, secondary (and therefore trivial), to be discovered after the fact. There are some quite inept performers. for example, who have been instructive to me; I know it, and I know how and why. Groucho Marx singing Gilbert and Sullivan is one such, Anna Russell, Captain Beefheart and Marlene Dietrich some more. I’ve learned things about orchestration and (legato) phrasing from Muzak®, things about rhythm and sonority from Elvis & the Ventures; hell, even a trick or two from the ever-tedious mister Handel..

Madonna at McDonalds

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Musak is always a horror – because it is injustice done to musical ideas (if you can say so). Background music in shops and restaurants can be very annoying – but it can be a bliss, too.

Sometimes the “silence” without it isn’t enough relaxing or interesting, so an added musical pattern can make the environment more bearable. Or – which I suppose is the idea behind the phenomenon – make people comfortable and happy when they hear a favourite song. The commercial secrets with background music are also to influence the behaviour of customers. Play calm music when you want them to stay for a long time and buy more; use uptempo music when you want a larger crowd of people to move around and buy as fast as possible; chose group-specific music when you want to attract some people and repell other.

My best memory of background music is from a small and cozy McDonalds restaurant in Gothenburg – believe it or not! It was a lazy day just after the end of the term in June 1996, and I had been to the university to collect some printed copies of my thesis and talk to a professor. On the way home, I decided to sit down and drink some Fanta and eat something McDonald-ish, all on my own (very unusual behaviour for me). The restaurant was nearly empty, and I got a table with a view over the Avenue (there is only one avenue in Gothenburg, so it’s called “Avenyn” – the Avenue). And suddenly the music started. It was a cd I liked very much, and they played it from the beginning, so I stayed there for half an hour, to hear all my favourite songs on it. (OK. I’ll reveal which music this was. Ahem. It’s a cd with Madonna’s greatest ballads…)

My worst memory of background music is from a Zara fashion shop in a shopping centre near Stockholm. I went there to look at clothes for the autumn, but could hardly concentrate on the nice things for sale, because there was music playing – and stopping – and starting – and stopping – and starting again. Nice jazz music, but a torture to hear just a few seconds of it on full volume, and then silence, and a new start. The strangest thing was that the staff people showed no reaction to this audio terror. (And of course I was too polite – and angry – to tell them what I thought of it.)

Come, Sweet Jesus!

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(MW has got his song Come, Sweet Jesus featured on the first page of the worship category at SibeliusMusic.com today. In the program note for the piece you can read:)

“A new ecumenical spirit is abroad in these United States, a new pride in the triumph of our Faith®, and its capacities to solve all our woes, once and for all. If it isn’t exactly a spirit of tolerance and compassion, it is instead–and ever so much better–a firm respect for the exact letter of the sacred scripture, as interpreted by great and pious men like Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and of course our beloved president, George W. Bush, who was chosen for us by the Almighty® Himself.

I pay tribute to that powerful spirit with this hymn of praise and thanksgiving. If you’re right, you don’t need to be tolerant, or even curious. If you’re washed in the Blood of the Lamb®, that washes away the blood of others. Hallelujah! — and God help us all.”

As this bizarre case shows, getting “featured” depends entirely, far as I can tell, on quantity of comment text. There’s no other explanation for how this adolescent-blasphemous score would become featured on the worship page. They look at quantity, not content; indeed, it’s conceivable that there is some sub-routine in the webpage program that randomly selects pieces within the category that have 50 words or more of text, and jams them onto to the highlights page.

Rod adamantly refuses to play this game, and so never gets featured. We’ve discussed this, and I agree with Rod, writing programme notes for compositions is turnip-witted in most situations. What does pointing out that your piece was premiered by the Tuscaloosa Firefighters’ Light-Heavy Symphony Orchestra do to change the fact that the work in question is a poorly-wrought mess? Or, for that matter, that it’s a near-masterpiece? Never mind that the inspiration was the lamentable passing of your favourite pet cat, Herbert, who was a dear and jolly fellow, tragically taken away from us at the still-too-young age of 19 years, 4 months, and 357 seconds.. If there was a poetry page, would the poets’ be similarly obliged? (I doubt I’d care for the real answer to this..) I mean, we do know the realities; the pretense that this is a composer/arranger’s list, with all the professionalism that implies, is just that, a pretense. The absent “professionalism” I have in mind is precisely expressed by the prominence and prevalence of programme notes. It’s bad enough that these things are a virtually ironclad prerequisite for audiences–but for composers, examining each others’ works? It’s a sign of the times, and not a good one.

Again, there have been numerous composers since Schumann and Berlioz (who seem to have been among the first) to babble on cheerfully about their music, its meanings, aesthetics, life on earth, and the very best recipes for potato salad. And we all know, or strongly suspect, that “letting the music speak for itself” is itself just one position among many, and itself perhaps a canard, of sorts. What animates me here is personal experience, with scores both online and off. I can honestly say that personal knowledge has never once animated or directed anything I’ve learned from score study. Reading and studying Beethoven’s opus 18 quartets, composed when he was healthy, is no different from the same experience with the last five, when he was deafer than Dick Cheney’s conscience. Put another way: I have had moments, many even, of insight into the personal aspects of music. Mahler’s despair in his last few works is impossible to overlook or mishear, for instance. But I have never once had a moment of “Aha! that‘s what s/he’s doing!,” or “right, now I get it!” that was based on such things–“such things” as can be expressed in words at all, much less in maudlin perorations about dying cats, regional premieres, philosophical and political convictions, divorce and travel plans, favourite restaurants, cherished [“Kodak®”] memories, heartwarming anecdotes, or the rest of the sentimental detritus that, however much it powers our lives, has got buggerall to do with what’s happening in music.

MWM