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:

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

Love in the Time of Con­nec­tiv­ity is a col­lage. In fact, even the title is a col­lage: I took the title of Gabriel Gar­cía Márquez’s novel, Love in the Time of Cholera, and com­bined it with a ref­er­ence to the cul­ture of Inter­net file shar­ing. I have been inter­ested in col­lage and the reap­pro­pri­a­tion of mate­r­ial for some time, because as the say­ing goes, good artists bor­row but great artists steal. Col­lage is the most hon­est way to hon­our that prin­ci­ple, and I spent most of 2008 work­ing in this direction.

Col­lage, as well as related ideas such as sam­pling, remix, and mash-up, are among the few uni­fy­ing forces dri­ving artis­tic change today. Through video sites like YouTube and audio sites like ccMix­ter, these ideas have been respon­si­ble for renew­ing ama­teur art on a mass scale, for chal­leng­ing the stan­dards of cre­ativ­ity, for expand­ing musi­cal taste, and even for influ­enc­ing legal precedent.

For the first time in his­tory, we are drown­ing in art. There is too much music of the high­est artis­tic qual­ity for any­one to ever hope to expe­ri­ence. So how can artists con­tribute to cul­ture in a sit­u­a­tion like this? I think col­lage is an impor­tant part of the answer, and the proof is in the atti­tudes of those who grew up with the Inter­net. For many of them, art is not some­thing sim­ply to be expe­ri­enced, it is a resource to be adapted, changed, built upon, and shared.

While com­pos­ing Love in the Time of Con­nec­tiv­ity, I gave myself some restric­tions in order to inspire cre­ativ­ity. For exam­ple, I decided to try to present all quo­ta­tions in as rec­og­niz­able a form as pos­si­ble. I did not allow myself to trans­pose frag­ments from their orig­i­nal tonal­i­ties, and I did not allow myself to com­pose my own new mate­r­ial to bridge together the quo­ta­tions—every note is bor­rowed. I also made tempo an inte­gral part of the musi­cal devel­op­ment, and I tried to make gram­mat­i­cal sense of all the text frag­ments I com­bined. Finally, every quote relates to the oth­ers in some way, either in terms of theme, title, text, artist, or (obvi­ously) musi­cal sounds.

Only a small part of music is actu­ally about sound. The major­ity of music-making has to do with social inter­ac­tions more than any­thing else. Music ful­fills cer­tain func­tions (usu­ally pre-determined) within cer­tain social sit­u­a­tions, or serves as a replace­ment for var­i­ous social func­tions when we use it in pri­vate. There­fore, music can be said to be a community-normed phe­nom­e­non: what makes music music are the peo­ple who find a use for it, usu­ally by listening.

On top of that, the most use­ful (or best) pieces of music are gen­er­ally those for which there is the most con­sen­sus on usage: Beethoven’s ninth sym­phony and Michale Jackson’s album, Thriller are both “good” because a lot of peo­ple agree that they are good; i.e., a lot of peo­ple have found those two pieces of music use­ful for cer­tain social functions.

Any­way, these were some of the thoughts run­ning through my head while writ­ing this piece, and they influ­enced my choice and usage of musi­cal materials.

Jack­ham­mer Lul­laby is an arrange­ment of Community-Normed, which was com­mis­sioned by the Con­tin­uum Ensem­ble in Toronto in 2008. I’ve become increas­ingly inter­ested in pre­sent­ing pieces in mul­ti­ple ver­sions and com­bi­na­tions. Jack­ham­mer Lul­laby, with a few changes, is also the mid­dle move­ment of Community-Normed. I’ve also writ­ten a third ver­sion, for a cham­ber music con­fer­ence in Ver­mont in July 2009, with dif­fer­ent instru­men­ta­tion and adapted for ama­teur performers.

Why mul­ti­ple ver­sions? Because music today is mul­ti­ple. Every­one is exposed to music from mul­ti­ple cul­tures all the time, from mul­ti­ple time peri­ods, and in mul­ti­ple ver­sions. DJs remix pop songs, which are avail­able in numer­ous ver­sions, and do mash-ups that inter­twine mul­ti­ple tracks in the space of a few sec­onds. I think this is a good way to deal with the fact that we are, for the first time in his­tory, drown­ing in more music than any­one knows what to do with. For this rea­son, cre­at­ing mul­ti­ple ver­sions is an impor­tant project of mine.

Musi­cally, Jack­ham­mer Lul­laby presents a humor­ous musi­cal set­ting of try­ing to fall asleep with con­struc­tion going on out­side the window.

This piece is based on the sound of the word shit in twelve dif­fer­ent lan­guages. It trav­els from west to east geo­graph­i­cally across the world. The lan­guages were cho­sen either because I speak them, or because I could find a native speaker of that lan­guage to teach me how to say shit. I did, how­ever, attempt to keep a some­what even spac­ing between geo­graph­i­cal areas, although a com­pletely even dis­tri­b­u­tion would have been, of course, impos­si­ble to realize.

Cul­ture no.3 is the last in a series of pieces that deals with the ways that mod­ern pop­u­lar cul­ture can inform West­ern art music. More specif­i­cally, Cul­ture no.3 is involved in explor­ing the inter­re­la­tion between the vis­ceral ele­ments of pop­u­lar music and tim­bre. By vis­ceral ele­ments, I mean, for exam­ple, the sense of motion, the force­ful­ness of the artic­u­la­tions, or the char­ac­ter of the rhythm or tempo, to name a few. The tra­di­tional pitch resources of the pop­u­lar sphere have required that vis­cer­al­ity and tim­bre play a greater role in defin­ing pop­u­lar gen­res (and sub­se­quently in deter­min­ing what we find inter­est­ing within them) than is seen in the major­ity of West­ern art music. Cul­ture no.3, with a greater empha­sis on tim­bre and vis­cer­al­ity and a sub­se­quently lesser empha­sis on other aspects of the musi­cal whole, uses the resources of the West­ern ensem­ble to fea­ture this aspect of pop­u­lar music.

Why call a piece Noth­ing? Well, in a word, curios­ity—most of my music has as its theme the ques­tion, “What hap­pens if…?” At the time I was writ­ing Noth­ing (win­ter 2004), I was both­ered by the almost total reliance on motivic devel­op­ment and form to gen­er­ate local and long-term inter­est in West­ern music. I won­dered if it might be pos­si­ble to “hear” some­thing as a coher­ent (and enjoy­able) piece of music with­out recourse to any for­mal or motivic rep­e­ti­tion. Hence, the title Noth­ing is a ref­er­ence to the cen­tral prob­lem of the piece: “What hap­pens if I have noth­ing (in the tra­di­tional sense) to con­nect with?”

I have since come to view this issue as a spe­cific case of the gen­eral prob­lems of musi­cal cog­ni­tion and our (largely) unques­tioned appro­pri­a­tion of orga­ni­za­tional par­a­digms devel­oped for and by eighteenth-century empiri­cism. Nev­er­the­less, the result remains the same, and as any­one who has tried to com­pose can tell you, hav­ing noth­ing is the same as hav­ing every­thing—there are end­less choices. So I had to find an alter­na­tive focus, and I decided to return to very basic meth­ods of hear­ing as a way of con­nect­ing musi­cal mate­r­ial. For exam­ple, instead of using melodic/harmonic motives, the open­ing of the piece uses a jux­ta­po­si­tion of pitched and non-pitched ele­ments to grab the listener’s atten­tion. Exactly which spe­cific pitched and non-pitched ele­ments are used is rel­a­tively unim­por­tant; the low-level con­trast between har­monic and inhar­monic sound spec­tra is what makes the music interesting.

Of course, this doesn’t com­pletely side­step motivic and for­mal orga­ni­za­tion, but it does push it back to a level that is gen­er­ally not dealt with exclu­sively. Motives and form become syn­ony­mous with tech­niques and mate­r­ial: pitched ver­sus non-pitched; rhyth­mic ver­sus non-rhythmic; these instru­ments together ver­sus those instru­ments together; and so on. Nothing is not the kind of piece that is inspired by sym­met­ri­cal pat­terns or pyra­mi­dal short-term/long-term inter­re­la­tion—there are con­nect­ing links, as demanded by musi­cal cog­ni­tion, but if you come look­ing for devel­op­men­tal strate­gies of that sort, be pre­pared to end up with a whole lot of nothing.

The title of the piece is in ref­er­ence to an argu­ment between two of the composer’s friends, regard­ing the mean­ing of form in new music. The piece explores this ques­tion musi­cally: is it in ternary form or not?