Metclassical Music?
The thing about approaching decade birthdays is how they encourage us to look back and count things up. For example, I realized just the other day that I’ve been writing music for more than fifty years – wait, what, how?! Then it occurred to me too that every one of my composer-teachers has now passed away and I began to reflect somewhat specifically on what I have gained from each of them. It is easy to get wrapped up in the past. So, in an attempt to avoid nostalgia and be more proactive, I am trying instead to understand how the past informs my artistic present and painfully finite future. Two months from now, my new song cycle, Muriel’s Songs will be premiered. It is a piece based on deeply personal family history. This premiere has started me thinking about how I actually have processed many histories musically over many years. Muriel’s Songs is just the most recent example, wrestled from memory, with attributes that I have now decided constitute Metaclassicism. Yes, I have tried diligently to avoid being labeled over the years, what with all the “uptown-downtown, tonal- serial” political baggage I grew up with. Still, having been, annoyingly and wrongly, labeled a neoclassical composer years ago by none other than neoclassical posterchild, Harold Shapero, and following a couple of decades of discussion on related topics with my friend, the brilliant thinker/composer Martin Brody, it now feels necessary to admit that there are patterns to my way of composing worth naming. There is also the Brandeis composer legacy to consider I suppose. And that legacy has deep and well-documented neoclassical roots, from Stravinsky to Copland to Bernstein, Fine, Shapero and Berger. And so, I propose metaclassical, with features that overlap that tradition but depart from it in substantial ways. An essay with specific features and examples will have to wait. My intention at the moment is just to introduce this notion into discussion as I consider the trajectory and features common to much of my own music.
After some intense and productive teenage struggles teaching myself to write big band charts, I took composition lessons with, in chronological order, Elliott Schwartz, Tom McKinley, George Edwards, Jack Beeson, and Mario Davidovsky. Aside from Beeson, an opera composer, all were composers of “abstract music”. In other words, the pieces they wrote were without any extramusical narrative or (conscious) reference to other music. And yet, I realize that long ago my own work evolved differently. I would never write in a program note that my piece “tells its own story”, or as Stravinsky famously wrote, the piece is “about nothing”. My music deliberately seeks a heightened drama through story-telling, carried out at various levels of abstraction. Texts can engage listeners in powerful ways, whether spoken or sung. At the most basic, visceral level, a poem becomes a song because that combination of words and music is more than the sum of the parts. But there are all kinds of rich texts and all have a music in them that can become a piece. There is found poetry in sound recordings, newspapers, journal articles, voice-mails, casual conversation and myriad archival sources.
Over the years I have written about my process in using a variety of historical sources for texts, especially related to a series of composer portraits from 90’s that started with Left to His Own Devices, a Milton Babbitt tribute that combines recordings of his voice and reimaginings of his music. My thoughts on writing from archives appeared in the article, Composing From Memory, in the journal, Organised Sound. Now I realize, though, that much of my thinking in that article is applicable across my catalog. I am the most motivated to compose when some confusing swirl of disparate bits of text starts to come into focus and creates new shapes and a context. The counterpoint of sound and semantics naturally embedded in text pieces makes for some of the most exciting music I know. It is this layering of abstract with concrete meaning that my friend Marty once referred to as “meta-musical layering” in observing what made my setting of John Berryman’s Dream Songs (2001) for orchestra and tape interesting. This perspective has informed my musical thinking since, but I realize in retrospect that it also helps in understanding the music I composed prior, as early as 1992 with my electroacoustic setting of a poem by Anne Sexton, The Fury of Rainstorms or maybe even 1990 in my First Quartet.
In addition to text, the primary issue for me is the ability to make deliberate reference to music of any style or period and bring my ideas into dialog with the past. In reviewing my 2020 album/song-cycle, critic Tim Page graciously wrote: “The critic and professor Edward Mendelson explored the concept of the “encyclopedic novel”—a work of fiction that combines the full range of the knowledge and beliefs of a given culture into a narrative that goes far beyond storytelling…I would nominate Eric Chasalow’s Ghosts of our Former Selves as “encyclopedic music.”
All new music makes reference to other music, either consciously or not. Composers are free to proceed through unconscious influence (unconscious bias?), seeking to create something sui generis. But throughout music history, composers have deliberately incorporated pre-existing music in a wide variety of ways. I have always admired the way Charles Ives does this, for example. My own point of departure in consciously using preexisting music was through “sampling”, though at the time in the 70’s and early 80’s the term did not yet exist. In some of my earliest work at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Studio, I processed old recordings to make new material. That work hid the sources, completely transforming them into new sounds. Starting in the 1990’s though, I began to purposefully reveal things – at times quoting recognizable, even iconic music. For example, my ‘Scuse Me (1998) is in dialog with Jimi Hendrix and Crossing Boundaries (2000) is a piece that incorporates quotations from Stravinsky, Wagner, Beethoven, The Beatles, and others too numerous to list. In revealing sources that are familiar to many listeners though, there is a great risk. How do I create a conversation with the past instead of losing the listener to the powerful sense-memory embedded in quotations and recordings? The more iconic the source, the harder that task becomes. I have to constantly ask myself about the motivation. Does the piece demand the reference? How do I write something that derives new meaning by engaging some shared cultural landmark?
