I’m in Houston, finish­ing up a piece for my friend Maggie, who will play it in Pasadena, Cali­for­nia in February. Pasadena is the ances­tral home of one of my pianos. 

Somehow I can’t bring myself to set entire poems. The Maggie piece is just a couple of lines by Hart Crane (with repe­ti­tion, of course). One of the reasons most “art song” (for want of a better term) is unsat­is­fy­ing to me is the dutiful tele­ol­ogy of it— here’s the poem, set it to music, and when you get to the end, you’re done. Poetic form is almost always differ­ent from musical form, and letting one dictate the other seems to me like a huge cop-out. 

This is the first time I’ve incor­po­rated live elec­tron­ics into a piece— in this case, a looping pedal. Maggie sings the piece over her own live, looped bass accom­pa­ni­ment. Looping Pedal Music is another one of those Niches of Modern Compo­si­tion that almost always feels lacking in some way. A pretty musical loop is another crutch, like a poem, that can provide an easy form, but the music ends up a strange combi­na­tion of direc­tion­less and predictable. (The huge excep­tion to this is of course Ingram Marshal­l’s music, which incor­po­rates live elec­tronic elements in a beau­ti­fully unself­con­scious and seamless way). Using a loop as the basis of a piece can be compared to using a passacaglia, or chaccone, or any other type of repeat­ing ground, except that once you’ve set it running, it’s very diffi­cult (if not impos­si­ble) to alter it. This rules out most of the inter­est­ing things you can do with such a tech­nique— trans­for­ma­tions, distor­tions, and other deviations. 

I think I’ve justi­fied the use of loops to myself in this partic­u­lar piece, but in the process, made things a lot harder on Maggie; she’ll have to set and reset multiple loops on top of each other several times through­out the piece, while singing and playing the bass, that most unwieldy of instru­ments. It’s going to involve some fancy footwork, that’s for sure. 

My brother Guthrie has been live-tweeting the current blizzard, which I think makes him the first person in history to attempt such a feat of mete­o­ro­log­i­cal hilarity. Though maybe they do it all the time in New Hamp­shire, I just don’t know. What with all the stories of pond-skating, drift-shov­el­ing, and snow-homuncu­lus-making crowding all of my news sources (facebook, twitter, and nytimes.com) I’m starting to feel rather left out. We’ve been attempt­ing our own versions of winter­time activ­i­ties here: tried out the skating rink at Discov­ery Green, a poor showing; our attempt to build a ginger­bread house turned out better, if a bit rough around the edges. 

At least winter makes for much better biking here! I’m happily tooling around on a borrowed Cannon­dale, thankful that I need not invest in studded snow tires. Those things are expen­sive! Sadly, drivers in Houston are quite unac­cus­tomed to encoun­ters with law-abiding cyclists; even on streets with bike lanes and “share the road” signs, I hear “get off the road!” (and other choice epithets) much more often than on the suppos­edly-rough streets of NYC. 

I’m also happy because I think I may have just found my own Niche of Modern Compo­si­tion: wheel-building! I may not know how to tune my own piano, but perhaps I’ll soon learn how to achieve melo­di­ous spoke tension.