Transcript - S2 Ep3: What even is form?
Intro:
This is Mission: Commission. [theme music]
Melissa Smey:
This is Mission: Commission, a podcast where we demystify the process of how classical music gets made. I'm your host, Melissa Smey, and I'm the Artistic Director of Miller Theatre at Columbia University in New York City. For this podcast, I commissioned three composers to write new works of classical music and to do it in six weeks.
I'm interested in helping audiences find a roadmap for what can be kind of unfamiliar terrain in classical music, and to help get through that terrain, you need some markers - that's where form comes in. In pop music, form can look like verse-chorus. In classical music, we think of form as an opera, or a symphony, or sonata form, for example. It's the underlying structure of the way things happen in the music.
Those forms are very proscribed with an age-old set of rules, but composers today don't usually want to follow those rules. And often there's an outright rejection of that in favor of making your own rules. I'm curious to hear about how our composers think about form as they work on their pieces. They're working with some ideas of form, though. They know the instruments: two violins, a viola, and a cello - the iconic string quartet form. And they know duration: between five and ten minutes long. And all our composers are about midway through their creative journey, so let's check in with them and hear how their pieces have evolved.
We'll start with Kate Soper's audio diary this week.
Kate Soper:
Now that I kind of have a harmonic palette and a basic structure, I'm realizing the music. It's kind of like a compositional thing to say, like "making it real," turning it into music that, you know, exists in time. So for this, it's sort of like these static chords, but then I want them to be alive inside with motion from the instruments and voice. So, you know, if I have this chord [plays keyboard], then for the voice I have my metronome here [turns on metronome], I've kind of got, let's see. [sings and plays keyboard]. So that's a little passage of that chord moving around and now I have to do that for the other four instruments. And then do that same process for all these chords and think about which ones move more internally, which are more kind of thrumming under the surface, and which are more static, and if they transform.
Melissa Smey:
Hello, Kate. So thinking about your piece and what it's about and this idea of how we can't know what's going to happen in the future, it feels so relevant right now.
Kate Soper:
Yeah, I have been thinking about the oddness of this because things seem to have changed so much since I even started writing the piece. And I guess a lot of my work is sort of, "this is how I'm relating to the pandemic." It's just like, well - I don't know - can I make some allegory of this feeling? And it's happening again here, so...
Kate Soper:
It's funny, I'm writing this piece about this magic communication device where you can contact the future to try to prepare for the unknown. And even since I started writing it a few short weeks ago, things have happened in the world that it would've been nice to be prepared for. So some feeling of stasis, but also like low-level dread of what's coming. And I think a lot of the music and other things I've been writing - creative work - has been trying to puts some kind of an optimistic spin on it, on this feeling. And I think this piece has that, too. This idea that I guess that's what the music is for. That - okay, trying to throw some lifeline to the future. Trying to do something to alleviate this terrible sense of not knowing. Craning your neck to see what's around the bend, but if what keeps coming back is music, and you keep sending music forward, then eventually you stop. You kind of lift from the timeline, and you just are in the music, and there's a nothing scary or dreadful about that, I guess. We'll see. Who knows?
Melissa Smey:
Well, so something that you had said in your audio diary that I found so beautiful and that really struck a chord for me because there's something so beautiful about it - about the idea of being, I don't know, enveloped by the music or embodied by the music, embraced by the music. And I wondered if I could ask you to respond to that a little bit, or to kind of tell us more about what you were thinking when you recorded that in your diary.
Kate Soper:
I think it's like just this idea with this piece and maybe with what I was talking about - it's not so much, or just that you are enveloped in beautiful music, so you kind of like enjoy that and it's a different level of experience. It's really just that music doesn't really care about our lives or comment upon it because it can't. It's not what it's for. Like, we use it for a lot of emotional reassurance or remind us of things, but itself, it's not like an entity that reciprocates - like this music will then exist and it will have been written now, but it's some other kind of witness to the human experience that is sort of untouched by what we're going through, even if it's like being born out of that. So, yeah, I don't know. It's like being in another dimension or something, which I think probably relates to this sci-fi scenario or whatever.
Melissa Smey:
Mm-hmm.
Kate Soper:
I have a title for the piece. It's called "Telephone," and it just sort of occurred to me. I mean, it's funny because that in one way, it's a word we use every day, but we don't actually use the full word. No one really says "telephone." And I was reading about the word, and it means "far voice." Tēle - Greek, and then phōnē, - voice; hearing a voice from a distance. It's perfect. Actually, it's a great word. And then it has this great kind of poetic etymology... Et-ee-miology? I don't know how you pronounce that. So yeah - "Telephone."
Melissa Smey:
Another insight that I gained from listening to your diary is that you've come up with a title, and that seems incredible. Can you tell us about how that came to you?
Kate Soper:
Sure. Well, I'd sort of had this idea before this project arose, just in the back of my head, and I didn't know what it was going to be, but I was thinking about "message in a bottle," and so that was kind of like a working title, but it's kind of long, and it's kind of dumb, and it's already like, you know, a Police song or something. So then I didn't really think about it for a while. And then, I think I was just thinking like, "Okay, well, what is the title?" And then I think I just was like, "Oh, it's Telephone." It's a very quotidian word at the same time that it actually doesn't get pronounced very often. So I kind of liked that, that it still seems like it has enough remove to be a title, and then it has this beautiful meaning, and it had kind of has a beautiful sound. And yeah, like just the idea that like the surtitle is "far voice" in parentheses, or this idea of throwing the voice - practical, but also has kind of interesting metaphysical connections with what the piece is about and what I've been thinking about.
Melissa Smey:
I love it. And so, tell us more about the progress that you've made on the piece we last spoke.
Kate Soper:
Yeah, I've actually made a lot of progress because all my plans got canceled! So I'm pretty much rounding up a draft of the whole thing. You know, I kind of had the - for this piece, I think I knew the kind of formal parameters and I had this narrative, and my pre-compositional materials were this kind of harmonic progression and coming up with these chords in this relationship and then changing the harmonic rhythm. So, you know, doing all the kind of like technical work, and then just writing it out, and then changing my mind and rewriting it a few times, and then putting that into the computer. So, yeah, it's basically been a sort of a little bit more compressed version of just, you know, writing music.
Melissa Smey:
And thinking about chords and then translating that into the sketch that you've drawn, is there anything that you would like to say about form in your work, either like in your work broadly or in the form of this particular piece that you're working on?
Kate Soper:
Well, I think form - I mean, I like surprise. So, in order for there to be a surprise, there has to be an expectation. And in order for there to be an expectation, there has to be some kind of coherent thing that's presented. So that's something I think about in a lot of works, and you know, what comes back doesn't come back in a surprising way. So, I could talk about everything I've ever written in some way, not that I always have a surprise, but in ways I think about the form, but I think for this piece... I feel like this is like a musical theater thing, like the "I want, I need" or whatever. You say like, "This is what I'm trying to do." And since I am talking a lot in my music, I can say, "Okay, everyone, this is what I'm doing." And then together, we all realize, oh, that's not what I was doing at all. You know? So again, how do you express that in music? How do you express that in narrative? How do they interact and, together, strengthen that feeling of, oh I didn't expect this, but it seems inevitable. You know, it's like that has to be formal in terms of just like it is about what happens when, and next, and last, and finally,
Melissa Smey:
There's an awful lot of humor in your work, which is so fun and engaging for a listener to experience that. And maybe not what you might kind of typically expect - right? - in classical music.
Kate Soper:
As a performer, too. It's so reassuring, if people are, like laughing with you.
Melissa Smey:
And it's a beautiful way to engage with an audience also, right? That it doesn't have to take itself so seriously. It doesn't mean that you can't convey a serious topic or thematic idea or convey something of great seriousness, but it's good to have humor also.
Kate Soper:
Yeah, I think so.
Melissa Smey:
And now onto our next composer, Oscar Bettison with a glimpse into the human side of balancing work and life in 2022.
Oscar Bettison:
Installment five in my diary, I think it's number five. I've been working on a sketch for the past couple of days. And as I say, it's a sketch. It's not very long, but I'm putting it together and I want to get it to the quartet. I think I'll probably get it to them later on today. On my desk is sitting - I've done a COVID test, and I've got this little testing machine. I have to go to an event in a couple of days, and so I've got to do some testing for it. So, yeah, I'm waiting on the results of a COVID test whilst I record this, which is very 2021 - well, I suppose, 2020, 2021, 2022, probably. So, um yeah, I'm - you know, in the same boat as everyone else with all this, so, yep.
Melissa Smey:
Oscar has been thinking about writing a set of miniatures, but somewhere in the middle of this week, he comes up with a new idea, which he documented in his next audio diary.
Oscar Bettison:
This is installment six in the compositional diary. This one's going to be a bit of sort of, musing, I think, but, sort of talking aloud really, but having sent the quartet the sketch, I suddenly was struck with an idea - something that I've tried before. It's a kind of - I don't know if I'm going to describe it right now because I think I want to think about it a little bit, but this thing could work actually quite nicely for the quartet. It's a very lo-fi kind of electronics idea, but it's not really. It would probably scuff up my plans for doing a bunch of miniatures, so there's that. I'm sort of very much on the fence about this, but I think what I'm going to do rather than write to anyone is just think it over. It's a Friday, so I might think it over the weekend and see how I feel about it. But I think it could be a nice idea, or I think it could work really well for this, but... Yeah. Well, so there's nothing concrete here, but, anyway, those are my musings.
Melissa Smey:
From the sound of the diaries that you shared with us this week, your ideas have evolved. And so you talked about a lo-fi element and that maybe - maybe the miniatures, we're gonna say goodbye to the miniatures possibly. Can you tell me a little bit about that?
Oscar Bettison:
Yeah. So I'm recording my audio diaries on my phone using the app that's, you know, on the phones to just record things. So I thought, well, why not get the string quartet to do that? When they play, everybody hits record on the phone, so they play through a whole sequence, a whole passage, and then they play it again, but hit play on the phones and they play on top at the same time. So what you get is a kind of weird shimmer to the sound because nobody hits record at the same time, even trying to time it, there'll be slight differences. And also because phones are not, you know - they don't have the best sound; like speakers are not great. So you get this kind of weird little kind of shimmery distorted sound, but it's quite - it sounds really nice actually. Oh, behind the quartet. And so the idea that I had was to try out the sketch that I'd written. Just one time, just trying it out, and then another time trying it out with this thing. So just the quartet, just hit record and start playing. And then get to the end and hit play and start playing.
So I've tried this before with a couple of instruments on something else. So, I know - I kind of know what it's going to do, so I think it's going to sound pretty good, but it's also just this idea of like, you know, we're doing these things where we're recording, right? This whole medium is like recorded. This is the only thing we can do. So it's sort of a really nice thing to like, make the piece part of that medium, you know? So like, instead of saying, "Well, if we could do this in real life, then we would do it". You know what I mean - like, why not? Why not like do it? Why not make something that's like - well, like take the problem and make it a solution, you know? So getting back to the idea of the miniatures and the whole idea of that is that I don't see in my thinking of the piece, how those two ideas work together. That's the crossroads that I find myself at.
Melissa Smey:
And so you've been in touch with Parker Quartet about it, and they are not based in the same physical location as you are, they're based in Cambridge. And so how will you be working with them?
Oscar Bettison:
Yeah, I haven't told them exactly what I want to do yet. [laughs] I just was like, "Well, can we do a Zoom session?" The other thing is it's nice because everybody's got a phone - like everyone can do this. I really like very, very lo-fi solutions to things that, to me, there's a little bit of a romance to it.
Melissa Smey:
Okay. So, we're going to switch gears, and now we're going to talk about like the really big weighty topic... of form. [laughs]
Oscar Bettison:
Oh yeah.
Melissa Smey:
I feel like that should be punctuated by some like amazing audio theme - [sings in unison] dun dun dun! Okay, so biggest, big picture. How do you think about form in your work?
Oscar Bettison:
It's not something that I think about at the beginning. I mean, it really isn't, and I think that for me, form should come out of the musical material. You know, there's a certain point, I think, along the process where I have to start actually thinking, "Well, how's this going to work as a structure?" But I always want to get quite a long way into the piece before I start thinking about that, so that I feel that it's kind of coming out of the material sort of coming organically. And then I'm sort of trying to understand what it is and then put those kind constraints on the material, rather than like, this is like a mold and I'll pour things into it. I just, I don't find that very interesting.
For me, it's sort of - it's also like the idea of like "what is form?" Like, it's one of those things that, you know, I talk to students about this and like, we talk about form like we all know what it is. You know, I'm like, do we? Because, you know, I think it's also because of the way that we're in classical music, the way that we're taught about form, right? You got sonata form, right? Sonata form is something that's describing something after the fact. It's like putting something on something that already exists. It's like, "Well, that's sonata form," but in the days when that emerged, no one was talking about, I mean, it wasn't like a thing. For me, it's that thing of like - well, really, you know - form is perceptual. What is perceived is really, I suppose, the true form.
Melissa Smey:
Is the duration of a piece or the instrumentation a piece factors that you consider?
Oscar Bettison:
Yeah, sure. I think duration is pretty central to just the first initial ideas. I think everything has to go into that, you know? Like the idea of like a very long piece versus a very short piece and sort of maybe what the piece is really makes you think about it. Like, yeah, coming back to this whole idea of harmony and material, you know? I mean, oftentimes, if you write a very short piece, you probably need a lot more material than actually if you write a long piece, you know? That duration thing is definitely - yeah, form sits in that, you know?
Melissa Smey:
Yeah. So then do you, as the composer, do you decide that duration? Does the piece reveal itself in the duration? Like, does the exploration arrive at that for you? Is it a factor that you're thinking about right from the start?
Oscar Bettison:
Sometimes. I mean, I did a piece years ago, like 2005, that's called "O Death" that was written for Ensemble Klang in the Netherlands. That was the first big, like structured piece - a big, umm, duration. I mean, it's like 65, 70 minutes. And that was like the first piece where I was like, "I want to try and write an instrumental piece that lasts an hour." I really wanted to see if I could sustain like a kind of narrative for that long of an instrumental piece without anything else. You know, that was the first time. Since then, I've been - there've been pieces - or I just, you know - having done one of those, then it seems pretty obvious how long a piece is kind of going to be. And like also, sometimes, pieces can kind of just go, you know, and sometimes they get longer just as a kind of result of the way that the piece goes, I suppose. And then sometimes, you know, you get a commission, people say, "Well, I want a piece that's five minutes" and you get that.
Melissa Smey:
[laughs] Thank you, Oscar. It was so lovely chatting with you.
Oscar Bettison:
Thanks, Melissa!
Melissa Smey:
And onto our last composer in this episode, Vijay Iyer.
Well, hello, Vijay! To start with, I would love to check in with you about how did it go this week on composing your new piece.
Vijay Iyer:
[chuckles] Well, I have been kind of accumulating little bits of material, but that's not the same thing as composing exactly. It's sort of more like collecting, you know? That needs to be a sort of a backbone, a purpose for it all, or else it's just this kind of motley assortment of things that showed up [laughs]. But I actually realized yesterday that I think I kind of finally arrived at something, some perspective on it, both in terms of what I want it to feel like and what I want it to do.
You know, a lot of it has to do with both losing Greg Tate and also the passing of Bell Hooks. And thinking about what both of them meant to so many of us and thinking about elegy, but then also thinking about joy, you know, and about a certain kind of celebration that isn't mournful. And then I've also just been thinking about how the piano quintet is this kind like iconic, Classical, you know, Western, and even kind of Romantic format. And I don't really want to fall into that trap too much. Kind of like had to remind myself maybe that most of my musical influence comes from outside of - at least outside of what's called “Western Classical music” and actually largely just outside the West in general. And so just thinking about other ways of articulating form and feeling, and other ways of expressing, and other ways of creating ensemble. It was partly through just sort of listening to stuff. I guess there were a couple of points of reference. One is Andy Akiho's piece, the big percussion quartet that got the Grammy nomination and that's really fabulously recorded.
[MUSIC – “PILLAR I” BY ANDY AKIHO]
Vijay Iyer:
And that was just a nice reminder, like, oh yeah. I think he has this in common, like this sense of place for himself that's largely outside the West.
[MUSIC CONT. – “PILLAR I” BY ANDY AKIHO]
Vijay Iyer:
And so it was, you know, it was just nice to kind of revisit that piece, which has these like, ways of generating form and intensity and drive that are really like - I can hear relationships to like Gamelan music and to South Indian percussion and to West African drumming, North African drumming, you know, and all of that is meaningful to me too. A lot of that speaks through the way I play the piano. I can't even remember what I put in the folder this week in terms of those little like audio snippets, but there was one thing that was - I overdub myself on piano, violin and viola.
Melissa Smey:
Yes.
Vijay Iyer:
[Vijay playing in audio diary] Just to make some sounds, because I was actually - I wanted to get at these both like percussive sounds from the piano and sort of not not explicitly pitched sounds in the violin. Yeah, that was one, and then another point of reference was I was listening to the Piano Quintet by John Harbison.
[MUSIC – PIANO QUINTET: II. CAPRICCIO, BY JOHN HARBISON]
And the second movement of that involves mostly pizzicato from the strings, and the way it combines with percussive piano - mostly triads, actually, and stuff - has this unique - just an interesting sonic kind of intensity and specificity.
[MUSIC CONT. – PIANO QUINTET: II. CAPRICCIO, BY JOHN HARBISON]
Vijay Iyer:
And I just kind of felt like, oh, actually, I kind of want to make drumming music.
Melissa Smey:
As a follow up, something that you've said a couple of times is that you've always wanted to challenge yourself to do something different - that you don't want to do a retread. You don't want to do something that you've done before, and, if it feels comfortable, you want to do something else. And so I'm curious when you said that you were collecting things and like kind of finding a shape for the piece, is that always part of your process?
Vijay Iyer:
There's no "always." [chuckles] The only thing I can say always happens is that, always at the end, it's this tedious chore of like polishing and editing and real like intensive detail work.
Melissa Smey:
Hmm, why is it tedious?
Vijay Iyer:
It's just dealing with minutia. It's not drudgery, exactly, but it's not as fun as just kind of like wandering around the house and having ideas. And it's more like, "Okay, this is it now." [laughs] Like, and then you really have to commit to it, and construct it, and put in all that time. It's mainly that it takes a lot of time, like kind of exorbitant amounts of time.
Melissa Smey:
Sure. Knowing that, how does the six weeks feel to you right now?
Vijay Iyer:
[laughs] Oh, I don't know. Let the record show that I haven't shaven in several days. I've got my composer's semi-beard.
Melissa Smey:
Well, so a question I've always wanted to ask you and haven't ever: I've always wanted to ask both like how you think about form in your work, kind of whether you think about form in your work, and when you think about form in your work. Because hearing you describe the process, it's kind of —it is and isn't guided by you, right? And there's an element of discovery and kind of exploration. And so it's not like you sat down and said, "Okay, I'm writing a string quartet for this, so we're going to use sonata form, and it's going to like follow these conventions." Right? Like, that's just not how I think about your work or your creative practice, but there is a form; there is a shape to it. There is, if not conventions, there's a roadmap that you can see when you're looking back. And so I would love to hear you talk about that.
Vijay Iyer:
Sure. With form, I like to kind of zoom in and zoom out rather than adopt the sort of burdensome historical baggage of that term and like Eurocentric musicology or music theory. I'd rather just think of it as the shape of an experience - not that I haven't studied all that other stuff. You know, like I know that it's there [chuckles] and it informs something about what all of us do. I mean, even like what it is when you hear like Charlie Parker "Live at Birdland," and they play this version of "How High the Moon," okay? - which is a song that they kind of repurposed from a Broadway show and turned it into something else, right? But what they do is they take the center of it - the like the 32 bar shape - and then they make it into a cycle and then they build modularly from that block. So then like one person might play on eight or nine times through that cycle. And then someone else might play like on five or six times through that cycle, and then they might break it up into little blocks and trade. So then you get these like episodes that are built out of that form to make a larger form, you know? So that's another approach to form that is quite distinct from the sonata allegro form or something like that.
So I guess I think about these different shapes of experiences. You know, if you think about it that way, there are lots of different forms we live by. I mean, even sonata allegro form is often embedded in a larger shape, like a symphony or something like that. Right? And then, so that occupies maybe 40 or 50 minutes. Right? And then, that itself might be part of a larger program of music that then is balanced out. So that's itself a form.
I also grew up listening to albums, so I think about the album as a form - an aggregate of episodes that carry you somewhere before everything got atomized as tracks [laughs], you know? It was really like the album as an arc.
And then there's also this set - like when I play a set, I think of it as a form, and then each piece is serving that larger shape. And usually when I perform with the group, like with my trio or somebody, some group like that, even with the sextet, we don't really plan the whole thing because, again, it's often built out of these modular episodes, so like one piece could kind of go anywhere, actually, even though you know what its ingredients are, what its building blocks are. It could still open up into something unexpected, and then sticking with the plan is going to maybe undermine what just happened. You know? You want to kind of with what's actually happening; not what you thought or hoped or intended would happen.
Melissa Smey:
It's kind of a beautiful life lesson right there. Isn't it?
Vijay Iyer:
Exactly [laughs]. Go with the flow? I don't know - something like that.
Melissa Smey:
Yeah. Well, and be prepared.
Vijay Iyer:
Yeah, be prepared to change course and have some options, you know? "Okay, well, that's clearly enough of that. Let's do this now." [laughs] So it's like that accumulated experience that I have - a lifetime of listening to and being in music, being in bands of others, and leading my own band, and seeing thousands of concerts as a listener, you know, and then listening to thousands of records. That's all like giving me information about form, about like how we listen, how we might be carried through something, how a listener feels guided through the arc of an experience.
Melissa Smey:
[theme music] Well, I hope we've shared some insight into how classical music gets made in this episode of Mission: Commission.
Mission: Commission is a production of Miller Theatre at Columbia University.
Major support for Mission: Commission is provided by the Francis Goelet Charitable Lead Trusts. Support for Miller Theatre is provided by the New York State Council on the Arts and the Howard Gilman Foundation. Additional support is provided by the National Endowment for the Arts. Support for contemporary music at Miller Theatre is provided by the Aaron Copland Fund for Music and the Amphion Foundation.
This episode was produced by Golda Arthur and me, with Adrienne Stortz, Lauren Cognetti, and Taylor Riccio. Erick Gomez is our sound designer and engineer.
This episode featured audio excerpts of pieces written by Vijay Iyer and Kate Soper.
Visit missioncommissionpodcast.com for a full listing of pieces, performers, and recordings included in this and every episode.
If you enjoy this podcast, please subscribe wherever you get your podcast and, even better, leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It really helps the show. Thanks for listening. See you next week.
