Aaron Gervais, composer

Searching vs. Finding

Aaron Gervais — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 05:52:46 +0000

A recent article in Slate by Jan Swafford got me thinking about one of the major distinctions between information on the Internet and off the Internet. As I’ve been arguing for years, the way we interact with art has fundamentally changed. Swafford looks at this from the perspective of a writer to argue “Why e-books will never replace real books”.

Basically, it comes down to directed or active activity versus non-directed or passive activity. When you turn on the radio, the selection is passive. You can choose the station, but you can’t choose the programming. When you search for music on YouTube, however, the selection is always active.

Both approaches have their merits, but they lead to different kinds of experience. Passive interaction with art, in my experience, is more likely to lead to serendipity: We are more likely to have transcendent “ah-ha!” moments, as if the universe were in tune with our feelings at the moment. That’s why when the perfect song comes on the radio, it’s so great. If you had chosen the song from your iPod, you would not have the same satisfaction.

On the other hand, directed experiences that require a lot of effort also tend to be rewarding. This is one of the main reasons I enjoy composing more than doing the dishes. This is also probably why any artistic or athletic activity is enjoyable.

The Internet gives us an easy directed experience most of the time, and I’m not so sure that’s good for art. Or at least, it might change the kinds of art we use. Back before recorded music, people were much more receptive to any kind of musical sound, because it was relatively hard to hear music—basic economics at work. But people also rarely had a choice of what to listen to, which affected their relationship to the music. Once people have choice, they become more picky.

Having instant access to anything, as we now have de facto, is incredibly powerful. But it also imposes limitations on us. It degrades the quality of our experiences with the things we do choose, because we know there’s so much more available. In order to really enjoy art—which is the point, after all—we occasionally need to purposefully let go of purpose.

For me as an artist, this is tricky. I imagine it’s even harder for people who don’t think about the arts all day long. I hope that as our relationship with “everything all the time” matures, enough people will realize the need for purposelessness to make it easily accessible for everyone.

Elegy of Others

Aaron Gervais — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 07:01:10 +0000

Much of my recent work deals with the issue of reappropriation. Where do we get our ideas? What do we owe, if anything, to our sources of inspiration? Historically, composers have stolen ideas from each other regularly, reworking these into their music and taking all the credit (and the money, if they could). The invention of copyright was the first attempt at giving credit to the originators of ideas, but this has evolved over time into a corporate-controlled system of property that promotes the fiction that new ideas somehow spontaneously appear out of nothingness.

Composers have always taken each others’ ideas, and if they didn’t, there would be no composing. But now the big music companies would want us to believe that this is somehow wrong. It is, certainly, wrong to profit from the work of others without making any contribution oneself, but there are many uses of existing music that do make new, meaningful contributions. For this reason, I’ve taken an interest in quotation, collage, and related techniques. It’s a way to pay homage to the music that has influenced me while at the same time exposing the false idea that creativity comes out of nothingness. So here I am, cards on the table, showing everyone the music I was thinking of when working on this piece—by quoting that music.

Thus the title Elegy of Others. I wanted to write a piece that was reflective and sombre, and I wanted to make it a collage of the work of others. This was a particular challenge, because I have found collage better suited to fast, upbeat music than it is to the slow and sombre; quotations tend to lose their character when the tempo is slow, and phrases made up of long quotes do not cohere very well. For this reason, I had to approach this piece differently than in my previous work, transforming the material in more extreme ways for the sake of musical expression. In Elegy of Others, therefore, the quotations are not always immediately recognizable, though they do come to the surface periodically. Nevertheless, almost every note in Elegy of Others is quoted, with few exceptions. The pieces quoted are, in order of appearance:

The Four Seasons, “Drunkards Asleep”, Antonio Vivaldi, 1723
“The Girl from Ipanema”, Antonio Carlos Jobim, 1962
“Everybody Hurts”, R.E.M., 1992
“Dazed and Confused”, Led Zeppelin, 1968
Die schöne Müllerin, “Des Müllers Blumen”, Franz Schubert, 1823

Hockey Story

Aaron Gervais — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 06:07:44 +0000

I wrote Hockey Story for Brazilian-Canadian pianist, Luciane Cardassi. Luciane had immigrated to Canada a couple of years beforehand and was interested in exploring the hockey culture of Canada. She was also looking for a piece that involved electronics and speaking or singing, which was a good fit for my compositional interests. A hockey theme is somewhat outside of my usual work, but I decided it would be a good challenge and provide me with some fresh perspectives.

The text is taken entirely from hockey terminology. I weave together short word-units in order to create a narrative that references what I see as aspects of the spirit of hockey, playing with both the meaning and sound of the words. Throughout the piece, there is a counterpoint between the voice, electronics (controlled by the pianist), and piano, creating a three-way dialogue.

Performance Videos

New Website Design

Aaron Gervais — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 04:50:57 +0000

The culmination of a lot of planning, evaluating, and work, I’ve now got a new look for my website. There are still a few minor tweaks to be made, but the majority is there. Now that this project is completed, stay tuned for updated content that is on the way in the next month or so.

The Starving Artist: Full Time versus Part Time

Aaron Gervais — Sun, 02 May 2010 03:26:42 +0000

A few weeks ago, a friend’s link to a rant about a rant about the Hype Machine, a music blog aggregator, got me thinking about the issue of whether it’s better to do art full time or part time. The short answer to that question, of course, has to do with what better means to you. But I still think there are meaningful distinctions that can be made between the kinds of art that get made in either situation.

The question of better can be addressed to a large extent using economic scenarios, though not by relying on classical economics. Basic economic theory would say that the more reward you get for your work, the more devoted you will be to it, hence ensuring value. Also, we would expect the best artists to receive the most money because their work is in the highest demand. So full-time artists, by this definition, should always be better artists.

Unfortunately, great art usually implies an audience learning curve. Beethoven’s early symphonies were panned by critics and audiences for being too long and complicated. Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, booed and pelted with tomatoes at its première, is now the most performed “modern” orchestral work. Economics relies on people knowing what they want, but anyone who has ever been in a relationship with another human being knows this is a bad assumption to rely on. Great art is usually ignored, then vilified, then widely accepted, to paraphrase Schopenhauer.

Consequently, the motivations of artists tend to be more internal, or community-based, than directly economic. This is where the stereotype of the starving artist comes from: There are enough examples of great artists scraping by—or dying in poverty after achieving considerable fame—to make some people think this is how art should be made. How many times have you heard the argument that a given band’s independent, debut album was their best work? The starving artist model implies the superiority of part time, because the struggling artist must do something other than art in order to survive, until he or she makes it big . . . but at that point the artist is at risk of being corrupted by money, and hence sucky follow-up albums ensue.

Internet utopians like Clay Shirky and Chris Anderson also espouse the part-time theory. They believe that the internet should make it possible for anyone to plug into the niche market of their choice, because there are no barriers to publication online. But their arguments avoid the problem that not everything valuable is salable: A lot of the value of art is intangible, and as I have argued previously, intangible value is automatically assigned a value of zero, despite our best intentions. So I don’t think the internet is ever going to make it possible for all artists to go part time. Or at least, if we did all go part time, art would suffer.

The pro–full-time argument comes from the modernist camp, which created the idea of the academic artist, paid handsomely by the academy or the government to create great art that would eventually trickle down to the masses. The rationale is that expansive, complex, sophisticated art can only be made by people who devote their entire lives to doing it—specialization is a prerequisite to greatness, in other words, as it is for a surgeon or a lawyer. This argument led us to the extravagant works of the 1950s and 1960s by composers like Stockhausen (his Helicopter String Quartet is a good example). Yet while the modernists did create a lot of influential work and many masterpieces, they also produced their fair share of mediocrity.

Trying to determine whether part time or full time is more successful would make for an interesting study, if this were feasible. But what is clear is that regardless of how artists pay the bills, most art is bad, some is good, there are a few masterpieces, and the definition of masterpiece is constantly changing. So let’s look at the benefits and limitations of both approaches.

Nitsuh Abebe summarizes these fairly succinctly. Part-time artists are free to focus on whatever kind of work they think is valuable, they aren’t bound to the salability of their work (whether selling it to consumers or to an academic audience), they can pursue other interests, they have a perspective other than the myopic art world, and they lead more comfortable lives materially. The strengths of part time are also its downsides, however: Part-time artists often lack direction, they are less accountable, they are more likely to be self-indulgent, and they get distracted by the more quotidian aspects of life.

Full-time artists have the resources and time to create more expansive, engrossing work like operas or feature films; they are held responsible to a community of colleagues and their audiences; and they are generally more educated and have spent more time refining their craft. Conversely, they are less likely to think outside the box, they can be straightjacketed by the need to earn a living through their work, and they can become rigid in their aesthetic convictions.

There’s no intrinsically better way. Girl Talk and Charles Ives both had day jobs that supported their music, at least until they became more successful. Composers like Harry Partch and Edgar Varèse never did achieve financial success, although they were well respected and influential. On the other hand, we have Stockhausen, Xenakis, Schoenberg, Prince, and the Beatles, artists who were fairly well supported and yet still managed to continue one-upping themselves artistically.

People are very different. Successful artists have taken advantage of both the part-time and full-time paradigms to give us work that wouldn’t have been possible if it were done any other way. And as with any venture, most artists fail. But then again, anything worthwhile should be hard to do, otherwise it wouldn’t really be that worthwhile.

2010 JUNO Awards

Aaron Gervais — Sat, 01 May 2010 05:14:26 +0000

Now that the JUNO Awards are over for the year, I can announce that I was invited to be a judge for the 2010 edition of Canada’s music industry awards. As such, I ranked recordings submitted for the “Classical Composition of the Year” category, participating in two rounds of voting, first to select the five finalists, and then to choose the winner. This year, Toronto-based composer Marjan Mozetich won the award. Mozetich is the co-founder of ARRAYMUSIC and he won for his recording of Lament in the Trampled Garden by the Penderecki Quartet.

Concert Review: SFCMP’s His Own Space of Freedom—Theatrically Engaging and Musically Diverse

Aaron Gervais — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 07:42:58 +0000

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

The San Francisco Contemporary Music Players presented their final concert of the 2009/2010 season tonight, 26 Apr 2010, at the Herbst Theater in downtown San Francisco. On the program were pieces by Greek composer Manolis Manousakis, American Tan Dun, Chinese Guo Wenjing, and Frenchman Philippe Hurel. This program was presented coherently and engagingly, because proper attention was paid not only to selecting and preparing the music, but also to lighting, staging, and technological aspects—a rare achievement.

A major criticism I have of many new music concerts is the programming. When an audience is presented with complex music, much of it often music they have never heard, it is crucially important to help the audience find a path into the music. In my opinion, concerts should be transcendent experiences (as opposed to listening exams), in which the audience hears something in a new and satisfying way. Toward this end, how a piece is presented in concert is often more important than what piece is presented.

The first piece on the program was Manousakis’s A Time to Break Silence, Speaking Truth to Power. This solo bassoon piece was commissioned by Rufus Olivier, who played it tonight. Musically, A Time to Break Silence is a success. It is challenging and full of craft, but not at the expense of musicality. What stands out is Manousakis’s beautiful phrasing and a lyricism that is unexpected in a piece consisting largely of multiphonics and quartertones.

The one area in which the piece falls short, however, is its extramusical theme. Olivier had asked for a piece about the American civil rights movement—a theme that Greek composer Manousakis was clearly uncomfortable with. The performance was preceded by a video collage about the civil rights, after which Olivier entered and began performing. Unfortunately, the contrast of a giant, frenetic video projection to a subtle, solo bassoon piece was jarring. Manousakis may have tried to write a civil rights piece, but he didn’t—this is simply a beautiful solo bassoon piece and should be presented that way, without the awkward video.

Next was one of Tan Dun’s more well-known pieces, Water Music, and from this point onward, the concert was completely engaging. The four percussionists entered from the back of the hall, which had been darkened more than usual, playing as they walked. After reaching the stage, they set to work on their “water drums”: giant glass bowls full of water on pedestals. The hall stayed unusually dark, but the bowls were illuminated with blue light, which placed the focus on the hands of the percussionists as they played with the water.

Additionally, the piece was messy, with water flying everywhere; at one point a percussionist carefully turned a soggy page of music, to comic effect. Tan Dun wrote Water Music so that natural water sounds would weave in and out of more musical structures. Sometimes it seemed like we were listening to water as we hear it every day; at other times, the sounds were distinctively those of a percussion ensemble and it was easy to forget that the instrument was in fact water.

A fantastic performance aside, what made the piece a success was the lighting and staging. Focusing our attention on the water bowls helped to draw the audience into Tan Dun’s musical concept. Furthermore, the darkened hall and focused beams of light allowed us to see not only the hands in the bowls, but the water splashing out. At times, the percussionists were so in tune with each other that water would fly out of all four bowls at once and land in unison on the stage, which was thrilling to watch.

Next on the program was Guo Wenjing’s Parade, written for six Chinese opera gongs and three percussionists. Guo Wenjing uses complex choreography and a mixture of sticks and mallets to build a varied and interesting percussion piece. However, as interesting as it is to hear, it is even more interesting to see close up, due to the intertwining of the percussionists’ mallets. In another intelligent programming decision, SFCMP mounted a camera over the table holding the gongs and projected a live feed of the percussionists’ hands. This close-up perspective felt like an augmentation of the focused lighting of the previous piece.

The last piece on the program was Hurel’s Figure libres, conducted by Christian Baldini. In this piece, Hurel shows clear harmonic influences from Grisey and orchestrational and formal ideas taken perhaps from Rihm. In any case, the result was a connoisseur’s piece. A certain knowledge of the spectral repertoire and a love of microtonal harmonies is required to fully appreciate Figure libres’s colourful counterpoint.

However, Figure libres would not have worked with a light show or theatrics. The theatricality of Figure libres is in the virtuosic trading of themes between players. Figure libres is a challenging tour de force for the conductor and ensemble, and Baldini was able to bring out the nuances in Hurel’s score and coordinate the syncopated counterpoint between the players. Anything more than the music would have been distracting in such an intricate piece.

Taken as a whole, His Own Space of Freedom worked well as a program. Despite the fact that all four composers on the program come from very different aesthetic places, the concert felt unified because SFCMP made an effort to present each piece in its best light—quite literally. The effect was similar to that of having four interesting people over for dinner and getting to know each of them in turn, in their element. Too often new music concerts feel more like drawn-out small talk. His Own Space of Freedom was very satisfying as an event and I hope that it ends up serving as a model for future concerts at SFCMP and elsewhere.

Christian Baldini Interview

Aaron Gervais — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 17:13:44 +0000

Recently, I interviewed conductor/composer Christian Baldini for the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players. Christian is conducting a piece by French composer, Philippe Hurel for SFCMP’s upcoming concert on April 26. Baldini is an Argentine musician by birth, currently teaching conducting at UC Davis near San Francisco.

Interestingly enough, in the process of the interview, we discovered we have some things in common, including a love of contemporary music and new opera!

ASCAP Foundation 2010 Morton Gould Young Composer Awards

Aaron Gervais — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 15:44:40 +0000

I’m please to announce that I was awarded honorable mention in this year’s Morton Gould Awards. Founded in 1979, the awards are open to composers under 30 who are American citizens, permanent residents, or foreign students in the US. This year, there were 730 entries, making the Morton Gould Awards extremely competitive.

The piece I submitted was Kiss Around the World, commissioned by New Works Calgary for Ensemble Resonance in 2009.

The press release for the awards lists the judges and other recipients. Composer Carolyn Chen, who studied at UCSD with me, was also awarded honorable mention.

No Extra Notes—Podcast Interview

Aaron Gervais — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 16:26:41 +0000

Composer Richard Zarou recently did a podcast interview with me, for his blog, No Extra Notes. No Extra Notes is a weekly podcast about up-and-coming composers. The interview deals with why I write music, some of the inspirations behind my work, and a range of other topics. It also features two recent pieces of mine, Sensational Revolution in Medicine and Kiss Around the World.