Books I'm Reading: Orchestration

I just finished Walter Piston's Orchestration (Norton, 1955). I can't say I absorbed it all, but I' m very impressed by Piston as a writer. Rarely does someone discuss any subject with the kind of economy and clarity he achieves in this book. I see now why it is still recommended after more than half a century. I must read more about basic music theory before going on to Piston's other two books (Harmony and Counterpoint), but I suspect they, too, will eventually make for good reading--for the intellectual exercise, if nothing else.

I've wanted to write music for decades, having first tried at college in St. Louis (1978-79). I got nowhere because I had no feedback. I couldn't hear any of my ideas. Once or twice I bullied musical friends into playing for me something I had painstakingly worked out on a recorder or in one of the music department's piano cubicles (usually no more than a measure or two), but it was hard to impose on people, and hand-written notation was so cumbersome for me that I abandoned my efforts quickly. It wasn't until 1993 that I tried again. In that year I bought my first computer, a Macintosh Centris 650, for what seems in retrospect an astounding $4,800. I took the plunge because I happened to see the machine set up in a music store connected to a digital keyboard and equipped with Performer 2.0 and a Proteus Plus orchestral synthesizer. I bought the lot. I remember the rush of excitement on first hearing massed strings coming out of the speakers. While I put the computer to good use, the rest of the equipment languished. I never wrote anything. Performer was so poorly designed for my purposes, that I gave up almost as soon as I started. 

Last August, I discovered Sibelius (not the composer--already an old friend, figuratively speaking--the software). Setting aside judgments about the quality of my earliest forays, I was writing within minutes of first launching Sibelius. While I'm now frustrated by difficulties using the program for more advanced notation (glissandi, for example) and by the quality of the playback sounds available to me, with Sibelius I can experiment and immediately hear what I've written. I push a button and the computer plays. I do more in an hour than I achieved in 30 years of vaguely thinking about composition. I find it very pleasurable to write.

I'm not much interested in writing for large ensembles. Chamber music interests me. I want to write short pieces for chamber ensemble--carefully constructed tone poems, each one an attempt to encapsulate one of the traumas that pepper life and to thereby render the trauma harmless. These encapsulations are effective as therapy to the extent that they're expressive of the underlying emotions--a powerful incentive to write something that feels genuine. My skills and my ambition are in different leagues, but I'm learning, quickly, and I know that being overambitious is a better way to get something done than is starting with circumscribed expectations. At the very least, this study will continue to make me a better listener of music. I've begun taking composition classes with Dr. Charles Sepos, known around here as a composer, radio personality, and teacher. Stay tuned.

Pun intended.

[Update: I quickly abandoned the lessons, but I continue to write music.]

Books I'm Reading: Second Nature

I finished Michael Pollan's Second Nature over the weekend. Have moved on to Walter Piston's textbooks Orchestration, Harmony, and Counterpoint--all over my head at the moment, but I hope something useful rubs off. If nothing else, they'll look good on the bookshelves when I get frustrated enough to shelve them in disgust--although I have no idea where they'd fit. Too many books, never enough shelves.

Pollan is always a good read. This book is a very personal look at what gardens mean to the author, to people today, and to select figures out of the past. I had never thought of gardens as a political statement before. Pollan set me to thinking about that. I've come to no useful conclusions yet, but I'll never look at a lawn the same way again--which is not to say that I'd never contemplated the meaning of a lawn before. Here, in desiccated California, a lawn has come to seem a faintly arrogant extravagance to me. One of the first things we did when we moved into this house was to remove the lawn and replace it with thyme and rocks. Quite a few aloes have crept in among the rocks since then--all plants that tolerate drought. When I was growing up in Brooklyn, lawns weren't part of my daily experience. Asphalt and concrete were. In Ohio, my mother's house had a wonderful wide lawn. Lawns make more sense in a place with summer rain. 

On a less serious note was an analysis of the social and political slants of  plant catalogs (in one of the eerie coincidences that have been haunting me for the past year or so, three fat seed and bulb catalogs arrived in my mailbox the morning I finished reading the book--from companies I've not dealt with in years--as if on cue). 

Pollan's descriptions are hilarious. I found myself laughing out loud at his parade of catalog classes--from the very conservatively augmented East Coast catalogs with their white roses and lilies-of-the-valley to the voluptuous (but somehow still upper crust) catalogs of the southern growers, to the anything-goes-and-bigger-is-definitely-better catalogs still targeting the everyman of an America that hardly exists anymore, to the save-the-planet socially conscious catalogs of the West Coast (and elsewhere). Recommended.