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A brief defense of music theory

As occasionally happens, yesterday in a conversation with a performing musician, I was told that she feared that learning music theory might stifle her musical creativity. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised by that, as that thought seems somewhat commonplace. Nevertheless, whenever I hear it, I am taken aback. Music has a history that dates back to the very beginnings of our species and as it exists today, is the product of thousands upon thousands of years of accumulated experience and knowledge. That anyone who has made music their calling can willfully ignore all of that on the presumption that their creativity is somehow tied to their lack of knowledge of their own craft is, at best, depressing.

That misconception has at its root yet another misconception about music theory, namely, that theory is a rigid set of rules that sets boundaries about what can and cannot be done in music. It is not a set of rules. To the contrary, it is simply a vocabulary that allows us to describe what happens in music. As an example, I have on occasion read remarks that even Bach occasionally “broke the rule” against parallel 5ths. There is no such rule! Rather, there is an accurate observation of the music composed during Bach’s time that parallel 5ths were generally avoided in order in order to maintain the independence of the different moving voices. Earlier periods of music used parallelism extensively, but as Western music became more contrapuntal, that changed. That’s not a rule, it’s a description and explanation of the techniques employed by composers in order to achieve a certain kind of sound.

It is the descriptive language of music theory that provides the analytical framework to understand what is happening in any sort of music – and, more importantly, to understand what differentiates great music from the rest of the pack. That is the opposite of a drag weight on creativity – but rather an essential tool to create better music. Music is a craft, and like any other craft, the more you know about it, the more you practice it, and the harder you work at gaining both a deep and broad understanding of it through the ages, the better musician you will be.

AHIMSA | TRANSFIGURATION

The following article is from the Trinity Church Wall Street program description by writer James Melchiorre.

Mahatma Gandhi.
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
John Lennon.
And a teenager emigrating from Poland at the start of the 20th century.

Those four persons form the foundation of Ahimsa, a sacred dance presentation of Trinity Movement Choir in St. Paul’s Chapel on Friday, May 19 at 8pm.

The title refers to Ahimsa, non-violence or non-harm, to all living beings. Ahimsa is a principle of Jainism, Hinduism, and Buddhism, three of the major faiths in India.

The journey of Ahimsa as a work of performance art began in the depths of Covid with musician Stanley Grill writing the score while locked down in his attic in New Jersey.

“I’ve had a long interest in being an advocate for peace. I joined an online group called Artists4Peace. And saw Mariko’s work on the site. And reached out to collaborate,” Grill said.

Mariko Endo is a dancer and choreographer trained in Modern Dance and Butoh, a dance form originating in Japan. She and Stanley Grill first collaborated on American Landscapes-Contemporary Dance in 2021. In Ahimsa, their second work together, Grill combines the life of his grandfather, Louis Rekort, with the lives of Gandhi, King, and Lennon, to tell the unfolding story of advocacy for non-violence in the world.

Mariko Endo says that dancing the four parts of Ahimsa is a challenge, albeit one she welcomes.

“It really feels like every person who joined this movement from 1905 and Gandhi, and people around Dr. King, and John Lennon—­everybody in this magnificent movement and history—is moving through my body. And it’s really physically demanding.

“I started to take spin class, cycling class, to make sure my legs are strong enough, my lungs are strong enough,” Endo said with a laugh.

Mariko Endo has danced frequently with Trinity Movement Choir. Founder and director, Marilyn Green, noted that Trinity Movement Choir’s work has always been rooted in Butoh since its performances began more than a decade ago.

“The Movement Choir is involved in this with huge screens. So we have a two-part choreography here,” Green said.

“We’ve coordinated so that screens that are nine feet by 16 feet, two of them, will be placed near the altar. And they’ll create a world for Mariko to dance in.”

By recording their performance on video, members of Trinity Movement Choir can dance alongside Mariko Endo.

While Gandhi, King, and Lennon are internationally known historical figures, Stanley Grill felt compelled to begin Ahimsa with his grandfather, a teenage Polish immigrant who heavily influenced Grill’s commitment to non-violence.

“My grandfather grew up in a little shtetl outside of Warsaw in a family of 13. That was a very religious family. In those days if you were in a religious family, you could only study the Torah. And he didn’t want that,” Grill said.

“At age 15, he picked up and he came to America.”

As they collaborated on Ahimsa, Mariko Endo and Stanley Grill decided to add a separate work, Transfiguration, a creation of Mariko which she dances with Gerald Baugh, a parishioner of Trinity Church Wall Street and frequent dancer with Trinity Movement Choir.

Both hold lighting instruments, which they call “magic wands,” made by Kiichiro Adachi.

“A lot of times when performing a piece you sort of get the intent behind the music and the story you are portraying,” Gerald Baugh said.

“Mariko and Stanley created the music and idea of this so I am working with the people who actually had a vision of what this should look like.

“It is a tremendous help for finding the mindset necessary when performing.”

Stanley Grill thinks Transfiguration, with music for four violas, and a message of non-violence, is a perfect way to end the performance.

“We’re living in very dangerous times. With the rise of populism and all these authoritarian-leaning societies, that era of violence can start all over again,” Grill said.

“But people can change. They can be transformed. We don’t have to be our same old selves.”

Mariko Endo draws encouragement from the persons whose lives she is commemorating in Ahimsa.

“Gandhi was shot and killed, Dr. King was shot and killed, John Lennon was shot and killed, but truth never dies. That means they are still living,” Endo said.

“I wish this piece will encourage people. You’re not alone. We’re together in this. How can I be encouraged keep the hope alive?

“That’s a big question that I ask every day on working on this piece.”

Music for Ukraine

Reflecting on the underlying reasons for my obsession with the war in Ukraine, I’ve concluded that the primary driver is that the war upturned my entire worldview. Prior to Russia’s invasion, I had been convinced that the world, despite numerous setbacks, had been on a slow path towards globalization, spurred by ever increasing economic connections between countries who were formerly antagonists and, of course, by the global span of the internet which allowed individuals everywhere to learn more about the world at large.

And, hand in hand with globalization, the world seemed to me to be on a slow path towards liberalization, also driven in part by the internet, which allowed people insight to how others think, act and believe. Despite the chaos of the internet, it seemed that taken overall, it was a force that could lead to a gradual acceptance of the enormous diversity of peoples around the world which could, in turn, potentially lead to a a reduction in the sort of tribalism that has fueled perpetual war on earth.

My general, if guarded, optimism ended when Putin decided to invade Ukraine. Over the past year, the more I learn, the more I become convinced that I should have relied more on the evidence of history rather than the apparent superficial changes that I have observed over the course of the short span of my life – a life that just by chance happens to have coincided with an unusual hiatus in the history of global conflicts. With the start of this war, we are back to history as usual. Today’s conflict is nothing more than a continuation of the same conflicts that have afflicted the region for centuries, if not millennia, with an even greater potential to expand well beyond the borders of Ukraine.

I had also somehow convinced myself that the lessons of World War II had not been forgotten, that the horrors perpetrated by Hitler and his Nazi brethren remained imprinted on our consciousness so deeply that none would repeat them. But, that too, was a happy illusion. The rise of populism across the globe is a clear indicator that Nazism could return, anywhere, at any time. And the ease with which Russians commit war crimes on a daily basis is, similarly, an indicator, that old human habits don’t die. Bitter lessons are not learned. The evil that drove Hitler and his enthusiastic followers always lurks, even in good times, just below the surface.

Not pleasant thoughts. But, as there is little I can do about the horrific turn of world events in recent years, such thoughts drive the music I write, leading to a growing catalog of music written in support of Ukraine. So far, a song for baritone and orchestra, a string quartet, a chamber symphony and a symphony for string orchestra. No doubt, more to follow…

The Bridge – Press Release

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Announcing the upcoming release of my latest album, THE BRIDGE, a fantasy for viola and orchestra inspired by Hart Crane’s epic poem of America. A premiere recording with the brilliant violist, Brett Deubner and the Czech Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra Pardubice conducted by Marek Štilec. Available on streaming sites beginning on March 31, 2023.

A small, blue edition of Hart Crane’s masterpiece had been living in my library for decades. The thought of doing something musically with it popped into mind now and then, but I never quite mustered the courage to embark on such an ambitious project. However, with the onset of the COVID shutdown in early 2020, thoughts about the impact of isolation on everyone across the country and the importance of human connectedness, led me back to that little blue book – and as I re-read its fifteen poems, ideas for a musical portrayal sprang to mind.

For those so inclined, read the poem. It attempts to encapsulate the essence of America in the 1920s, as Crane experienced it, capturing the complexities of American history and American life – from its violent beginnings as the culture of native Americans was crushed by expanding European cultures, to the crass commercialism that erupted at the turn of the century, tempered by the buoyant optimism and hope for mankind in spirits like Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and the American transcendentalists. Above all, the poem relies upon the Brooklyn Bridge as a metaphor for connection, spanning the myriad of events across time and geography that culminate in what America was like in Crane’s day as well as the promise of its future.

Crane’s poem attempted perhaps too much. The span of the Brooklyn Bridge became a symbol of everything connected to everything else – the past to the present, urban America to rural America, a vast dream of America from its pre-European existence to the bustling America of big, industrial cities and great railroads spanning the continent.

In this music, dedicated to my friend and long-time musical collaborator Brett Deubner, the solo viola is the voice of the Bridge itself, its rich middle range spanning between the low and high instruments, between the dark, swirling eddies of water the flow beneath the Bridge to the searing sunlight piercing the harp-like cables of the Bridge, while seagulls soar overhead. It also is the voice of the poem’s author, seeking redemption in a violent and crassly commercial world.

Reading the poems, it is apparent that Crane had a broad appreciation of music, as frequent references to songs and other music he had heard are to be found in the poems. As I planned out the score, I researched all of his musical references and fragments from those melodies can be found, scattered like leaves throughout the score, like apparitions from the past – a melody from a court composer to Ferdinand and Isabella, an Irish gig, bits of jazz and flashes of tunes from the 1920s.

As Crane, following in the path begun by Walt Whitman and T.S. Eliot, attempted to write the great American poem for his century, THE BRIDGE is my attempt to write a great American symphony, one that speaks to the history and spirit of our country.

Composer: Stanley Grill
Conductor: Marek Štilec
Viola solo: Brett Deubner
Producer: Jiří Štilec
Recording Engineer: Václav Roubal
Graphic Design: Stanley Grill
Orchestra: Komorní filharmonie Pardubice

YouTube video for THE BRIDGE
Stream THE BRIDGE

2023 recording projects

Two years of isolation at home allowed me the time and mental space to embark on several ambitious projects that, were it not for COVID, I would probably have never even considered doing. The first was taking out my edition of Hart Crane’s epic poem of America, The Bridge, and deciding to do something musically with it. With fifteen poems in the book, it was too long to set the texts, so instead, I wound up writing a symphonic fantasy for viola & orchestra, in fifteen movements, each a musical reflection of one of Hart Crane’s poems.

As the world returns to normal (more or less), I’m working to record the music I wrote during COVID. I started with a recording of a short symphony, AHIMSA, which was released in mid-2022. Last September, with the brilliant violist (and long-time friend and collaborator) Brett Deubner, I went back to the Czech Republic to record THE BRIDGE. With the edited and mixed files arriving this past week, I anticipate being able to release THE BRIDGE as my next album sometime in the spring.

Next up, with soprano Lisa Rombach (who was one of the vocal soloists on my 2022 album collaboration with Pandolfis Consort), I will return to the Czech Republic to record DIE ERSTE ELEGIE, a symphonic setting in five movements of Rilke’s great poem. During the same week, we will record SYMPHONY OF SIGHS, a more recent one movement work composed in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Later in 2023, dates still to be set, I plan on again partnering with Lisa Rombach to record AGAINST WAR, settings of poems by various poets written in protest of the American invasion of Iraq, and EVERYTHING PASSES, settings of Zen poems about the impermanence of life.

And, then, there’s 2024! More to follow…

Living (and composing) in the Anthropocene

By nature, I’m a loner and a contemplative – not an activist. By practice, I’m a composer – and music has, since childhood, been a source of solace and a world more real to me than the world of people and all of their strange beliefs that strike me, by and large, as entirely unhinged from reality. I am not a religious person, but inclined to believe that most of the stories people tell themselves to explain the world are fantastical illusions.

The view of mankind as a unique species somehow granted dominion over the earth, a view held by many of the world’s dominant religions, seems evidently false – an example of humanity’s limitless hubris and nothing more. It seems to me that for the entirety of our existence on the earth, we have told ourselves such stories in order to silence the sheer terror that comes with an awareness of our insignificance. Perhaps R.M. Rilke said it best and most poignantly when he wrote, in the opening lines of the first of his Duino Elegies, “Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angels’ Orders? And even if one of them pressed me suddenly to his heart: I’d be consumed in his more potent being. For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we can still barely endure, and while we stand in wonder it coolly disdains to destroy us. Every Angel is terrifying.”

Dating back to the very beginnings of human civilizations, our primary driver seem to have been the desire to subdue the terrors of that great Angel, the Earth, with its (incomprehensible in their vastness) forests, deserts, mountains, oceans, storms, earthquakes, volcanoes, and wild beasts. As our skills with technology grew, we walled ourselves in, we paved over the ground, we burned or hacked away at forest and jungle, we wantonly destroyed creatures we feared, and worst of all, abandoned our elemental connection to the Earth and its bounties, perceiving ourselves as somehow separate and apart from (and superior to) the myriad living creatures with whom we share the planet.

Our exact trajectory along that path is largely unrecorded and lost. What role did we play in the destruction of many long extinct species as our species spread across the globe? How many once flourishing habitats did we transform into barren desert? Wreaking environmental havoc is not something new for us – it is a very ancient habit. Our relatively recent recognition of our role in climate change – and the fact that we’ve coined a new name for it – doesn’t change our past. We’ve always done this, even if the full extent of our impact on the planet is far from understood, remaining, perhaps forever, unknowably lost to time. The Anthropocene started a very long time ago.

While our need to tinker with the world without comprehending the consequences and ripple effects of our actions has been in our DNA from the start, the speed of those ripples has grown exponentially in the past century, exacerbated by vast increases in our numbers and our technological capabilities. It was only recently that I learned about the disappearance of the Aral Sea, one of all too many examples of overly confident people setting out, perhaps with good intent, to change one thing, without having a clue as to the consequences. The connectedness of everything was understood, to some extent, by at least a minority of people, since the beginning of time, but lost time and again. And occasionally rediscovered. While his books may now collect dust in libraries, Alexander von Humboldt discovered it for himself in the late 18th century, writing that “in this great chain of causes and effects, no single fact can be considered in isolation,” becoming perhaps the first explorer with a modern scientific outlook to acknowledge and document human-induced climate change. Those who tinkered with the Aral Sea would, one wants to hope, thought better of their plans if they had read some of Humboldt’s books describing the impacts of deforestation that he witnessed during his journey through South America. But, perhaps not, especially if profit is the driving motivation.

As I write this, struggling to frame out my thoughts, trying to piece together into a coherent whole the bits and pieces I’ve picked up without any organized study over the years, I always wind up face to face with the reality that, as bleak as our prospects may look from today’s vantage point, I am entirely powerless to do anything about it. For sure, all of this was beyond my ken as I was growing up. The inventions of our age all seemed so exciting and the future so filled with promise. Looking back, the repercussions of our actions seem evident, but then, we are all far more ignorant and stupid than we ever think we are. But, one fact stands out – the planet and the life on it is all one interconnected web and we tug and pull or tear any strand of it at our peril.

Which brings me around to where I started. Whatever my feelings and thoughts are about this subject don’t really matter much. I can do little or nothing about it. But I am a composer – and while notes and ideas have little intrinsic connection, my feelings about climate change and the bleak future we’re careening towards at an ever more rapid pace, do have a way of turning into music. We humans have always told themselves stories to explain what we don’t understand or can’t control – and, guilty as charged, I tell myself stories for the same reasons. I started a MUSIC FOR THE EARTH series a few years ago, with the idea that perhaps, through music, I could have some small influence on any who heard it, putting small black dots on paper that transform into vibrations in the air that might serve to evoke in others a feeling of connection with the natural world and of our obligation to be caretakers, rather than destroyers, of the life that everywhere surrounds us. A story I tell myself…

Links to my MUSIC FOR THE EARTH —

Scores and parts

Music for the Earth (album)

Canciones de la Tierra (EP)

Remember (music video)

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