Author Archives: john.mcdonald@tufts.edu

Aphorisms for Composers – May 2018

May 31, 2018

If you concentrate on small, important things, does the urge to create spectacle fall away?

May 20, 2018

Dispense with niceties, frills, surface distractions. But retain respect for all attempts at honest expression.

May 17, 2018

Dying strains come back to some kind of life each time they are sung/played.

May 11, 2018

Sometimes writing more music just can’t be helped.

Just when you think you’ve developed your language enough, you realize you have nothing to say. But when the language fails and you can’t quite articulate, ideas sprout anew from your very inability to speak! You are again at the beginning—after all that.

May 10, 2018

One harmony; myriad worlds.

Can there be variety in regularity?

Think about rates of change.

Get the right schwung.

Aphorisms for Composers – April 2018

April 30, 2018

Exercise “textural taste” at all times.

April 18, 2018

Music is not real estate. Composers are not developers. [reaction to a critic stating that a colleague’s new piece was “thin on development”). Ask the question: what is development? Figure out what it means every time you write something new.

You start over every time. Even after hours, weeks, months, years, decades of practice and increasing fluency, does ‘ample technique’ ever make the endeavor easier? Not if each new project leads to new territory where you’ve never been. More experience and more ready technique just up the ante; with more tools you are compelled to build more innovatively. Continue to honor your ability by creating ever-new blank slates.

When working on a big project, with your inching-forward music commanding your attention, days blend together. Non-day in, non-day out. Inspiration can be depressing!

Aphorisms for Composers – March 2018

March 27, 2018

Do you hear what I hear? The composer who has figured out a piece provides you (the listener) with an open invitation to hear “their way.”

What part does fear play in your evolving work process? Can you use the fear in order to harness or conquer it?

March 26, 2018

To encompass yet penetrate with music, study and listen like hell for maximal intake, then minimize to find exactly what you want/what you can offer.

How do you “interview” your sounds before you use/embrace them? Is this interview process an “art form in and of itself?” Can the process be presented as “performance”?

Parameters do not equal rules, but they ARE informative directives.

Is staff paper a “blank page to fill”? Even if it has those staves?

March 24, 2018

To be able to do what you ask performers to do is a composer’s imperative (within reason). Prepare to demonstrate your intentions in some effective musical way (conduct, song, play, describe). If you are unsure of something, admit it and take well-intentioned advice. But don’t wait or hold back specifics out of uncertainty or the rationalization that a performer will “take freedom” and decide for themselves — commit; regroup later if you have miscalculated.

March 21, 2018

Using a digital notation program from the get-go squeezes chunks of personality out of a score well before it is performed.

March 20, 2018

Contradiction/Negation 2: You’ve proposed a new musical skills course after long-standing encouragement from your colleagues. As it is about to run, they suggest that a student teach it.

March 16, 2018

What you say isn’t what you play. [This refers to vocal notation that organizes declamation in syllabic, neumatic, and melismatic divisions; this obscures the rhythmic clarity of “beaming notation” that would be necessary in instrumental notation in favor of the “sculpting” of the words/text]

March 13, 2018

Question from performer: Why on earth do you put a natural sign in front of every single note that doesn’t have a sharp or flat? I am now having to go through and white out every one of them…too hard to read

Answer: [Explanation for the extra accidentals]: chromatic harmony that sometimes changes unpredictably to most ears (or so I think). A cellist previously flagged the same problem some years back when I took it to a really ridiculous extreme. Another way to say it is that my “courtesy” accidentals are in the end discourteous. Maybe it’s a pianist thing in the end (harmonic thinking).  Sorry if it is taking you extra work! Hope the scores are readable otherwise.

March 6, 2018

If music is medicine, “pieces” of music are doses.

Fountain pen found: inflow rhythm regained. (for Peter Desmond, poet/writer and tax preparer).

(Follow up from March 3, 2018) The big issues of your compositional language are perhaps best addressed in brief, specific offerings. Writing big, important-sounding pieces is a different proposition that may or may not develop your personal quirks and qualities.

March 3, 2018

Big things can often be best addressed in small forms.

Aphorisms for Composers – February 2018

Six-Word Aphorisms for February:

February 19, 2018

Surfaces often change. Fundamentals underneath don’t.

February 17, 2018

Composing. Separate yet close, ordering world.

February 15, 2018

You think you’re finished. Are you?

February 11, 2018

Stimulus, refuge, protection, insecurity: your music.

Oh to revise! Erase and replace. (while reducing an orchestration at the request of a conductor)

February 10, 2018

Be aware. Work well. No delusions.

February 6, 2018

Closed system: lid on the saucepan.

Wine/coffee stains: signs of devotion?

Season manuscript: spill wine on it.

February 3, 2018

Requiring other composers’ constraints=style tyranny?

February 2, 2018

Remain poised on your creative precipice.  What will happen?

Aphorisms for Composers – January 2018

January 31, 2018

Musical compositions as assertions—positive statements shaped in rarely positive conditions; resistances; positing possibilities otherwise unseen or unheard.

January 29, 2018

Go out on a limb and hang there for a time. Experience a little creative danger.

January 24-25, 2019

Questions:

1. What does/should a composer do when performers disappoint them?

2. How does a composer align intended expression with stylistic choices? What happened when intended expression and daily life are apparently incongruous?

January 22, 2018

Suddenly I hear Blake Stern (1917-1987) singing Wolf. A memory like a bolt or flash; the realization that something formative and fundamental happened to me in 1987 when Blake performed Hugo Wolf songs at his Yale retirement concert. All the more poignant when he died six months later. This was a voice that stuck to the bones, a fiber that continues to thread itself into my composing, only now with my full realization of its presence.

January 21, 2018

Freshness and originality most likely depend on how well you cook up leftovers.

January 19, 2019

If you take all of your irrational tendencies and harness them into forms of musical expression on a daily basis, do you end up more rational as a result?

January 7, 2018

Creative kiss of death: a formula that works.

January 6, 2018

Too technical. Too philosophical. Too dry. Too unbridled. Too broad. Too precise. Too repetitive. Too sweeping. Change too small; small change. Too ambitious. Too short. Too inward. Too testy… …Put too and too together, and you might have something. (Pore, Sri Lanka).

Aphorisms for Composers – December 2017

December 28, 2017

Composing can be a refuge, and a hiding place. Yet one must be clear on what to hide from/what constitutes a musical refuge. How one emerges from the hiding place—realizing there is no actual refuge, but having manufactured a workable/working “peace”—makes the difference. The re-emergence with music written that was previously ‘unreachable’ is what listeners and performers wait for from you. Come back after hiding. Hide again, come back again.

December 20, 2017

In composing, as in political and social thinking, things we assume have changed for the better with time haven’t. Have they? The composer’s ever-renewable role is to address this stasis by moving—by tinkering tirelessly with sonic languages, by seeking new strains, by making clear first-time statements. Put this work in the service of healing the future for listeners, performers, and for all involved.

December 18, 2017

Automacy and intuition (working “by ear”), in a particular balance, promise to yield strong expression.

Contradiction/Negation 1:  Green building drive-thru.

December 17, 2017

To develop, composers would do well to understand the importance of what they don’t know.

December 11, 2017

To a group of composers:

Why are you all so selfish? Paying attention just to yourselves and your sounds like that so much of the time. Why aren’t you out buying? Conspicuously ‘saving the world?’ Why are you in a room practicing instead, trying to process what you observe by forging a new premise every time you exercise your urge to start over and write a new piece? What gives you the right to make blueprints in sound for how your life and others’ lives might revise themselves emphatically for the better? Why are you so selfish? Why do you put on the oxygen mask first? Who said that rehearsing what you and you alone hear each day is a worthy pursuit?

December 6, 2017

Keep grasping at those slivers of time to do your composing.

How important is it to identify each piece as an entity, an item to be heard, digested, admired, or remembered as a “sonic object?”

December 4, 2017

Resist thinking about the masterpiece. Free the mind to consider the tiniest, slightest musical Notions as complete, presentable thoughts while reserving the right to write large if needed. Why should one even think about making monuments? A breath, a breeze, a wave– all are taken, felt, experienced; but none stay. Same with phrases of music, visual materials, these words…

What can you make from debris?

December 1, 2017

How do sensation and listening work cooperatively to refine the making of sound in piano playing? Can one listen in the act of playing if hearing is compromised? How is accurate “aim” accomplished in various ways of playing? If one can’t hear or can’t hear well, are there compensatory ways to listen and probe music that can be profitably developed? What about “the imagined” and “the heard?” What about physical hearing? Can you hear with your hands, arms, spine? Can you feel with your ears?

Aphorisms for Composers – January to March 2017

March 4, 2017.

There are no people anymore—only credentials.

February 16, 2017.

Regarding time (1): If a substantial musical statement can be made in under eight minutes, aren’t we all better off? (I think here of interminable string quartets)

Regarding time (2): On the other hand, patience may be required (long hauls CAN be rewarding).

February 9, 2017

What goes wrong with the big thing can’t be fixed if the small thing doesn’t work; if the big thing doesn’t work, try to fix the small thing. Conceiving of music happening in limited, malleable spaces is all one can do to envision the big picture.

January 20, 2017.

Most feelings are mixed.

Lecture and Demonstration by Professor John McDonald: “Stirring Up the Music: The Life and Works of Composer T.J. Anderson”

As Amherst College’s 2016-2017 Valentine Visiting Professor of Music, I was invited to present a talk on my in-progress biography on T.J. Anderson Jr. at the college’s Frost Library.

My talk partitioned and analyzed Anderson’s work and influence in five chronological phases.

Aphorisms for Composers – October 2016

October 25, 2016.

Honor yourself. Don’t become a victim of the “neo-sharecropping digital economy“ or of the “non-profit military industrial complex!”

October 6, 2016

The more we learn, the less we know for sure.

“Accent Language.” Symbols and words for punctuations that have found their way into my notational M.O. over the years:
^=sharp accent (note with less “body” than >, but not quite staccato; > would be a typical strong emphasis).
<> is an expressive, small swell on a note–Schubert and Sessions both write it in piano music for the notion of a cushioned, expressive touch (almost tender, but could also be for lamenting or expansiveness). (01.10.16)