Tufts Music Department Pre-Orientation Workshop
Tuesday, August 27, 2019, 10-11:30 AM
Granoff Music Center Room 251
Tufts University, 20 Talbot Avenue, Medford, MA 02155
INTRODUCTIONS
THREE ACTIVITIES
1. Listening Exercise (courtesy of R. Murray Schafer [born 1933]; from A Sound Education: 100 Exercises in Listening and Soundmaking) 15 minutes
[Julia Moss ’21, Group Leader]
Almost everyone carries a set of keys. Would you recognize the sound of your own? All key rings are passed in and everyone listens, eyes closed as the group leader shakes each in turn. Put your hand up if you think you detect your own and it will be dropped behind you. Have all sets of keys found their rightful owners at the end?
2. PLAY ME SOMETHING: Short Composition Project 30-40 minutes
TJ Anderson Jr. (born 1928) celebrated his 91st birthday on August 17, 2019. He was the First African American to be a successful Composer-in-Residence for an American Symphony Orchestra (Robert Shaw and the Atlanta Symphony; 1969-71); Three Firsts in One Year (1972): first African American to chair a music department in a predominantly white university (Tufts University); first composer to orchestrate Scott Joplin’s opera Treemonisha; first chairman of the Black Music Caucus (NASPAM); First African-American to conduct the Boston Pops (1973); First Music Department Chair to create a joint degree program with two independent institutions: Tufts University and New England Conservatory. The program continues to this day (since 1976; 42nd Anniversary); First Composer invited to a residency at Wolf Trap, Vienna, VA (Milton Babbitt [1916-2011] was the second); First composer to receive a fellowship at the National Humanities Center, and more.
Anderson’s Play Me Something (1979), for solo piano, “small hands,” was composed for the Rivers Conservatory in Weston, Massachusetts, which sponsors a Seminar on Contemporary Music for the Young each year. The dedicatee, Kathy Mortenson, was a young student at the school when she premiered a version of the piece.
Play Me Something (“hey—you’re a musician?—play me something—do you take requests?”) is really more of a menu from which to choose a sonic meal than a “piece” in the accustomed sense. The composer writes:
Play Me Something is not a piece or etude though it contains elements of both. The composition is a series of musical gestures or events which may be performed in any order. The gestures which repeat may be played as many times as the performer wishes. The pianist may or may not use all events and an attacca or slight pause may be placed after each gesture. Once an event is completed, the performer may not play this episodical material again. Multiple performance possibilities can enable the total work to have a duration between five seconds and five minutes.
Our task is to make our own playing menu that embraces:
- a novel performance plan that uses all or some of what you write down—figuring out how to engage performer choice is part of the mission
- “gestures” or “events” that can be shaped, repeated, ignored, celebrated
- an exploration of varied styles of playing
- a questioning of continuity and the meaning of “development”
- more (to be discussed); your “scores” can be in staff notation, prose instruction (or bullet points, lists, etc.), visual cues (pictorial), or in a combination of formats
Protocol for today:
After hearing a short demonstration of TJ Anderson’s piece in one or two versions, take 20 minutes to devise/write something of your own that will become part of a group composition. You can go anywhere in the Granoff building to do this. Then we will all return to Room 251 with our excerpts, briefly discuss them, and perform what we have for each other.
3. CLIME CLIMB (in-progress project for discussion)
Clime Climb—Music for Solo Traverso or Modern Flute [with optional/encouraged Flute(s), Piano(s), and Speaking Part(s)]
Draft Proposal and Description (sent to potential participants/commissioning parties)John McDonald, composer/pianist
July 30,
2019
Na’ama and I met to talk last week, and I think we’ve come up with a general plan/proposal for a piece entitled “Clime Climb”—(environment/climate—climbing as in “integral steps”).
I have some melodic material to work with to make a solo traverso piece that would be played twice. The second time through, students and/or other professional musicians would/could join with their own melodic and/or harmonic parts (as in flute parts and piano parts in short snippets to play in free repetition patterns). This “community section” of the piece will be planned with enough freedom to let people play what they have and be somewhat inventive with it—all while the soloist is playing a “second verse” of traverso music. A solo CODA will close the piece.
Every phrase in the piece will ascend, as if climbing steps. Some people climb stairs several at a time, others one at a time. Slower, faster, rushing, patient—but all these steps are incremental. In this way, the playable parts for community members can vary quite a bit. Much like the small things we do in our lives to make inroads in what we believe will make life more tolerable or livable. [My version is not having owned a car since 2010; walking, public transport, and urban car sharing have covered all of my local and some long-distance transport for nearly a decade].
The last and potentially crowning idea for the project is to commission a poly-lingual text to be recited during the above-mentioned second verse of the “solo Climb” (when all the other musicians are also playing). This text could be performed chorally or by soloists, or freely divided between speakers in some way depending on performance. Na’ama mentioned her daughter Shira as perhaps the ideal poet/author of such a text, which would minimally find its way into English, French, German, and Hebrew. My in-laws are Sri Lankan, so a short English text could also be translated into Sinhalese either by my wife or my brother-in-law (and read phonetically). Reciting Shira’s text in these several languages brings the participating community together with one purpose.
My thought is that the second verse is really where a lot could happen in terms of performative action. The first verse and CODA would be comparatively reflective, but the idea of a unifying ascent will permeate the proceedings.
What does everyone think?
Thanks for reading and considering!
CONCLUSION: Your Thoughts and Questions
[Handouts will include scores of “Play Me Something” by TJ Anderson; Orientation poster of Fall Tufts Composers events; sample Music 118/119 Syllabus; and “Aphorisms for Composers”]