In The Score, American composers on creating “classical” music in the 21st century.
Last September, my best friend, Susan, told me that I didn’t make enough music anymore. She was right; between 1996 and 2003, I put out a new record every year, played a few shows a month and did quite a bit of composing, mostly for solo musicians or small ensembles I’d met over the years.
Like most composers these days, I use a computer to compose music; unlike most composers, my compositions are created with software tools that I write myself. In the 1990s I began to integrate visual media into my work, originally using projected imagery as a way to amplify and embody the underlying structure of some of my compositions. At a certain point the visual side of my creative life began to dominate and I found myself juggling several artistic identities. “Composer” was just one of the many labels regularly attached to me, along with those of more modern pedigree — “new media artist,” “software designer,” “live visualist” (a great term), or “laptop performer” (a more problematic one).
The composer in me, which I’d always thought of as paramount, was being snowed under by other things that didn’t have much to do with music composition: gallery shows, film shoots, public art commissions, improvised audiovisual performances, and the development of software made for use by other artists. I stand by that body of work, but as Susan pointed out, I should never forget that I started my creative life at 18, by falling in love with splicing tape and restoring 40-year-old synthesizers up at Columbia University.
This conversation happened about a week before my birthday (and Susan’s, right after mine). So I decided to give myself a little creative challenge: to create a piece of music every day, for an entire year. I decided to call the project “a year in mp3s,” and I put the pieces online as I made them, posting a notification on my Facebook page so that my friends could listen to them. I didn’t give them titles, just numbers and dates, beginning with my 34th birthday last September 10th.
The pieces were, in general, not composed and recorded in the traditional sense, with musical notation given to musicians to perform with a live microphone somewhere in the room, though there are a few of those sprinkled in there, mostly preliminary sketches for an evening-length work to be interpreted through the musical genius of violinist Todd Reynolds.
Nor were many of the pieces improvised live onstage and recorded, though there are a few of those as well, many featuring the beautiful voice of my collaborator, Lesley Flanigan.
The overwhelming majority were created entirely by yours truly, at my kitchen table, or in bed late at night, or in hotel rooms around the world, foggy with jet lag, wearing headphones and listening to my trusty Mac laptop, using a variety of little programs that I’ve made over the years to work with sound using a software environment called Max — named after Max Mathews, a very nice man without whom we would not know how to make sound on a computer. Max is made by some friends of mine in San Francisco at a company called Cycling’74; it lets you program computers by dragging boxes around on the screen and connecting them with little wires … it’s great fun. Along the way, I kept a record of the work process for each piece, so that I could write up and post liner notes and “recipes” for each piece once the entire project was finished, encouraged to do so by my friend and mentor Brad Garton.
While working on the project, I discovered a few things. One is that I have five or six techniques that, when left to my own devices, I fall back on as compositional habits. I like to stretch and compress pre-existing recordings to see what a radical shift in time-scale does to a familiar piece of music (50). I find myself drawn to physics equations, mapping their results into musical parameters of pitch and rhythm (89). I also like to compose with random sets of musical probabilities, drawn either from my imagination or from the analysis of existing music (232). Failing that, I enjoy making a huge racket with field recordings run through different computer algorithms that splice, dice, distort, and otherwise mangle the original (359). So part of the challenge was avoiding my comfort zone of repetitive practice; with 365 pieces to make and no real expected listenership outside of my friends in my various creative communities, I felt, for the first time in years, that I could experiment and fail. So mixed in with the sonic time lapses of American folk songs, granulated recordings of home appliances, and musical deconstructions of film scores, I found myself making well-intentioned stabs at electronica ( 250), incidental music for contemporary dance (176), and long-form synthesizer pieces based on tracings of Kandinsky drawings (38). I even cover an Alex Chilton song (200). I can’t guarantee that all (or any) of this is good music, but I invite you to judge for yourself. Over the course of the year I wrote 72 hours of it, so there’s plenty for everyone’s taste. If you listen to every piece and still hate all of it, I’ll gladly give you a refund.
The second (and more important) thing I learned was that, within a few months, making music every day became not only second nature, but a necessary part of my routine, like a morning coffee or remembering to feed my cat. By six months in, it had become my favorite thing to do; the only hour or two of guaranteed privacy I would allow myself, to focus on something that I really enjoyed. What at first was mainly anxiety and stress, as I feared I had walked straight into an impossible, pointless, and irritatingly Hemingway-esque routine which threatened to derail all the other things I had going on, fell away and was replaced with a different anxiety and stress: now that I’m turning 35, what will I do each day, instead?
I have a tattoo. It’s on my left arm, and consists of a bass clef and a coda symbol interlocked. I got it a few years ago, to remind myself that, whatever other creative endeavors I stumble into in my life, I should always end with music. The tattoo was probably a bad decision, but this year has certainly taught me that the thought behind it was a good one.
Happy birthday, Susan. And thanks.
R. Luke DuBois is a composer and artist living in New York City. He teaches at the Brooklyn Experimental Media Center at New York University’s Polytechnic Institute. His work can be found at his Web site, lukedubois.com.