An Overthinker's guide to music-making

Dear Reader,

This week I’ve been working on a performer’s guide for Unsnared Drum, four amazing pieces for snare drum which I was fortunate to commission and record. My goal is to open up the works to as many performers as possible. I hope to do this by highlighting what I find innovative in these works, contextualizing the works within each composer’s output, and then honing in on what I’ve found to be the most transcendent moments in the works. I’m going to focus on how one might learn these pieces, with an eye towards flexible and dynamic interpretations. Of course I’ll cover how the composers might have envisioned some of the more complex techniques to sound, but I’d rather focus on setting a frame for what these works could sound like, a box that’s larger than my own interpretation. I’m finding that in our YouTube era, the first recorded performance tends to have an imprinting impact. While it’s great to get so many recordings that have the stamp of “authorial intention,” in percussion I’m finding these recordings have a narrowing impact on interpretive possibilities: people tend to play the piece like performer X does rather than bringing their own compass and sextant to the score.

The question: how does one explain how to play a piece of music? We could look closely at the text, the score. Problematic, since the “text” does not really encode everything a performer might need to execute a work with grace and panache. Why not? As I’ve written earlier, musical notation is prescriptive, vague, and designed to activate the intuitions of contemporary performers. It leaves out information that might have been obvious to contemporary performers, right? For us percussionists, I love to think that so much snare drum music never actually says to turn the snares on before you play!

We could leverage oral performance practice: our own interactions with the composer to determine authorial intent, or talk to someone who did work with the composer. That’s fine when you’re close to the composer and are steeped in their style, but it can be dangerous over many generations as the circumstances of original performance become more hazy. The more distant the piece, the more we conflate performative desire with authorial intent: Richard Taruskin argues (as he is wont to do) “all who claim to speak directly for the composer are in fact asserting their own authority.” In fact, sometimes those who claim to have an inside track on authorial intent actually have a more narrow frame of view. I encountered this first hand working with Ensemble Modern in Frankfurt, where the group’s interpretations of repertoire on which they had worked directly with the composer over a number of years was far more calcified and inflexible (and often really romanticized) than of less familiar works. Inspiring for sure—where else could one learn about how Stockhausen preferred Kreuzspiel to be performed, but dangerous to transmit these beliefs as the only possibility.

My strategy on the music of the past is to think big first, and then small. What was in the air at the time? What were general trends in visual art, architecture, dance, food, writing, style (of the sartorial variety)? What was assumed about music, and what would have been norm-breaking? What was mediocre music like then? This is not to say that there is no free will in the creation of art. Instead, by focusing on what a composer might have done that is norm-breaking, innovative, or inventive, we as performers are better primed to examine the specifics of their music, and better equipped to bring those qualities to 2022. Style is really important!

Historical How-Tos

As I’ve been planning my own little contextualization videos, you can bet I went overboard in historical research, specifically musical treatises.

Before the advent of recording technology, treatises were an essential companion to printed music. What might induce someone to write a text on how to play a musical instrument? Perhaps a lack of information on the subject? A desire to set the record straight, or correct perceived wrongs in contemporary performance practice? Or a desire to articulate with the clarity the style of a particular location, time, or performer? The thing I really like, though, is the clarity with which these books speak. They offer a very clear vision of the world with clearly defined "right" and "wrong" ways of doing things. Unlike the Renaissance conversational style, the 18th and 19th century brought a wave of confidence in expression.

While most treatises get specific—and we can learn a LOT from what kinds of exercises writers include or don’t—I like the more general and prosaic moments about style. Some favorites:

​CPE Bach: Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments (1755)​

Beloved for providing a detailed description of how CPE’s father JS thought about ornamentation. You do have to love a work that starts with “those who expected a voluminous work from me are in error”

​Francesco Geminiani: The Art of Playing the Violin Containing All the Rules Necessary to attain to a Perfection on that Instrument, with a great variety of Compositions, which will also be very useful to those who study the Violoncello, Harpsichord, etc” (1751)​

Before articulating the 14 essential moves a violinist might master, Geminiani articulates with clarity the purpose of musical performance:

“The intention of Musick is not only to please the Ear, but to express Sentiments, strike the Imagination, affects the Mind, and command the Passions. The Art of playing the Violin consists in giving that Instrument a Tone that shell in a Manner rival the most perfect human Voice: and in executing every Piece with Exactness, Propriety, and Delicacy of Expression according to the true Intention of Musick”

I might prefer Geminani’s other seminal work,

​A Treatise in of Good Taste in the Art of Musick (this one has a recommendation letter from George II) (1748)​

“What is commonly called good Taste in singing and playing, has been thought of for some Years past to destroy the true Melody, and the Intention of the Composers.”

“I only assert that certain Rules of Art are necessary for a moderate Genius, and may improve and perfect a good one”

​Johann Ernst Altenburg: Versuch einer Anleitung zur heroish- musikalischen Trompeter- und Pauker-Kunst (1795)​

A deep dive into the world of Baroque timpanists, Altenburg pulls back the curtain on the mysterious and proprietary Schlagmanieren an adroit timpanist might be able to add to their playing. The heavy implication is that the written timpani parts of the period are insufficient, and that a good player would be actively adding their own Zungen, Schläge, and all sorts of other visual improvisations. Don’t try these at home!

​Ernst Pfundt: Die Pauken (1849)

Pfundt—a cousin of Clara Schumann—was the timpanist of the Gewandhaus Orcehstra and deeply involved in the milieu of 19th century German music. Pfundt draws upon both the secretive guild traditions of Baroque trumpeters and extant orchestral repertoire to offer fascinating thoughts on how a timpanist might adapt to a strange new world of performance practice: complicated parts, different mallets, extended ranges, and no longer playing in unison with trumpets.

​George Hamilton Green: Instruction Course for Xylophone (1926)​

This was a serialized, mail-order xylophone instruction book. Seriously! Each week the player would receive a lesson in the mail from noted Ragtime expert GH Green. Green gives almost NO stylistic information, instead focusing on the technical. He urges players to avoid striking wrong notes, keep their hammers low, and slow down (seriously, these instructions are on every page).

​George Lawrence Stone: Stick Control (1935)​

Decrying drummers whose work “is of a rough-and-ready variety,” master drummer Stone seeks to legitimize the art of percussion playing with a set of exercises designed to give snare drummers the kind of control a pianist or violinist might have. His distinction between orchestral and rudimental drumming is particularly fun:

​What are some of your favorite treatises? I'd love to know!​

Negative Style

Speaking of negative style…

A few weeks ago I wrote about Strunk and White and their notions of “style” in writing. What I really love is when they posit style as a negative trait, not a positive attribute. Some examples:

• “rich, ornate prose is hard to digest, generally unwholesome, and sometimes nauseating.”
• Young writers often suppose that style is a garnish for the meat of prose, a sauce by which adult dish is made palatable.”
• “If the sickly-sweet word, the overblown phrase are your natural form of expression, as is sometimes the case, you will have to compensate for it by a show of vigor, and by writing something as meritorious as the Song of Songs…”
• “Whitman…. let loose the hordes of uninspired scribblers who would one day confuse spontaneously with genius”
• “the breezy style is often the work of an egocentric, the person who imagines that everything that comes to mind is of general interest and that uninhibited prose creates high spirits and carries the day.”
• “to air one’s views gratuitously, however, is to imply that the demand for them is brisk, which may or may not be the case.”

Yikes!

​

Strunk and White also articulate some “bad” examples of famous writing. Thomas Paine wrote: “These are the times that try men’s souls”

• A few S&W options that, while correct, are not ready for prime time…
  • “Times like these try men’s souls”
  • How trying it is to live in these times!
  • These are trying times for men's souls.
  • Soulwise, these are trying times

Sometimes, what NOT to do is a more powerful tool than what TO do, no?

--Mike

Learn with Mike

through November and December, I led three live learning classes on some topics of particular interest to me these days: pre-practice work, musical analysis, and writing. If you’re interested, you can take a look at the videos here.​

Looking forward to sharing more about where this project is going!

Kansas

Was great to be back at the University of Kansas to give a lecture with Hannah Collins as part of the Hall Center’s Humanities out Loud series. We talked about our work with Christopher Stark on his Language of Landscapes project. In between 1900 Barker croissants, we also did some recording. Watch this space for both the LoL album and another disc of NMC music.

Cortona

I’m lucky to return to the Cortona Sessions this summer for 2 weeks focused on contemporary music and composer-performer collaboration. This year my dear friend Ji-Hye Jung is also leading a marimba-focused program. Applications are due soon: hope you can join us! There’s also an “auditor/groupie” program for those interested in some time under the Tuscan sun (yes, THAT Tuscan sun).

More interesting stuff

• For a fascinating look into the question “Do we really know how to read the musical notation of the 18th- and 19th-century masters?” take a look at this lecture from Malcolm Bilson​
• ​This 2021 article from Nate Sloan and Charlie Harding about how the structure of pop music really hit home when I first read it. Essentially, their argument is that the way in which musical streaming services value listening has changed how pop songs are structured: shorter songs, best material in the first 30 seconds. I thought about that while listening to The Car’s Just what I Needed (1978), where the best melody comes in 3:10 into the song.

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