Another summer draws to a close; here’s a mawkish seascape to commem­o­rate the occasion. 

I spent mine finish­ing one piece (Every­thing Happens So Much, for the Boston Symphony) and starting another (a yet-to-be-titled two piano concerto). I prac­ticed little and gardened abor­tively (you should see how well I do in the winter). 

A new 2016–17 season calendar is up, too, with bold new format­ting that’s kid tested, mother approved. 

Closing in fast: a lovely new concerto for piano and chamber orches­tra that Ingram Marshal­l’s written me. The later part of the season will fill out as things get confirmed. I’m partic­u­larly excited about a series I’ll be present­ing at National Sawdust, and a couple of addi­tional events in London.

I was happy to read Timo’s response to David Allen’s article; it put his comments from the article in context, and revealed that he and I have much common ground in how we think about these “response pieces” (I’m not a big fan of the word “sequel”, here). 

Because much of the article focused on my Beethoven/5 Project, of which The Blind Banister is the first fruit, and because my own aspi­ra­tions in embark­ing on the project did not really make it into the piece, I’m happy to have this oppor­tu­nity to clarify a few points. Early in the article, Mr. Allen asks: “Why this, and why now? After all, in an ideal world composers would be allowed to write whatever they please.” And soon after, he boils it down to this: “The core assump­tion is that many, if not most, clas­si­cal concert­go­ers have a built-in distaste toward modern music.” While I certainly cannot speak for every performer or concert program­mer, I can say that that is not my “core assump­tion”, nor my moti­va­tion in solic­it­ing new music that is, somehow, inspired by old music. 

I’ve often felt troubled by the way the clas­si­cal world segre­gates new music from old. Ensem­bles and present­ing orga­ni­za­tions devoted exclu­sively to new music provide a vital service—facilitating the creation and giving bril­liant perfor­mances of new work in a volume that would be impos­si­ble without them. But the notion of “new music” as its own genre, and the atten­dant impli­ca­tion that it lacks a deep connec­tion to music that was written 20, 50, and 200 years ago, is distress­ing to me. It is a notion that flatters neither old nor new music. To my ears, anyway, a truly great perfor­mance of Mozart or Beethoven will always be relevant, but it’s deeply danger­ous to think of them as exem­plars of an art form that died in 1917 after a long illness. And while yes, in an ideal world, composers would be able to write whatever they please, I hardly think that that ideal world would be some sort of vacuum. A piece of music’s rela­tion­ship to the past needn’t be explicit, or admiring, but I have a hard time imag­in­ing that any piece worth listen­ing to would be discon­nected from it. 

So, that was the genesis of Beethoven/5: my desire for everyone involved—composer, performer, and listener—to think of old and new music as existing on the same contin­uum. And why Beethoven specif­i­cally? Because composers have been using him as inspi­ra­tion, source material, and light­ning rod since his death nearly 200 years ago. Schubert’s A Major Piano Sonata (Beethoven Op. 31 no. 1), Mendelssohn’s String Quartet Op. 13 (Op. 132), Schumann’s Fantasy (An die ferne Geliebte), and John Adams’s Absolute Jest (several of the late string quartets) are just the first four examples to occur to me. Given that composers have been wrestling with him for close to two centuries, I thought that asking a diverse and fasci­nat­ing group of composers to think about Beethoven was sure to produce diverse and fasci­nat­ing results. 

That those four works I cited have roots in Beethoven’s music is not debat­able. But equally, those roots are not the reason those pieces are being performed again and again—if they weren’t capti­vat­ing on their own merits, their antecedents wouldn’t make them so. And that is the thinking I’ve applied to Beethoven/5: I want the composers to take the Beethoven concerti as a starting point, and in their first airings, at least, I want them to be heard in that context. But beyond that, I’ve spec­i­fied nothing—I haven’t asked for the works to contain a quota­tion, or resemble the Beethoven in length, or form, or any other partic­u­lar. And I greatly look forward to the day on which I sit in the audience and listen to The Blind Banister played by another pianist, in the context of a completely differ­ent program. The specifics of the commis­sion will no longer matter; the work will have joined several hundred years of concerto reper­toire. And if a composer is in that audience as well, perhaps The Blind Banister will itself provide the germ for a new piece of music. To me, that isn’t inertia, but artistic regen­er­a­tion: a key compo­nent of my ideal world. 

–Jonathan Biss

David Allen’s article in this weekend’s New York Times looks at “sequel” compo­si­tions, a topic well worth explor­ing. I’m using “sequels” to mean: pieces written explic­itly as compan­ions to preex­ist­ing, often well-known, works. The article, in which I’m quoted a couple of times, portrays sequels as a perni­cious program­ming trend initi­ated mainly by conser­v­a­tive admin­is­tra­tors, afraid to scare off their audi­ences with anything truly “new”. But I think the real story is some­thing quite a bit more nuanced. 

When I was just starting to write music, the impulse grew out of my piano playing. My early pieces were imita­tive of the music I admired and knew best: Brahms, Ravel, Prokofiev, Beethoven, Copland. This is how any anybody starts writing music—pick a template you like and fill in your own notes. As my knowl­edge of the world (musical and other­wise) increased, so did my confi­dence to start design­ing my own templates, taking charge of the bones my pieces. 

An Aborig­i­nal shell midden.

I’ve always found this process extremely interesting—the trans­for­ma­tion of raw mate­ri­als drawn from the great heap of music history into some­thing totally new. So writing musical compan­ions was some­thing I orig­i­nally did of my own volition and became somewhat known for, which resulted in commis­sions to write more such pieces. As present count, 19 of my fifty-some­thing pieces have histor­i­cal antecedents, begin­ning 10 years ago with I Found it in the Woods, which takes two chords from Brahms’s A major violin sonata as its gener­a­tive material. I’ve since used several differ­ent compo­si­tional processes to refer to, learn from, or simply have a good time with preex­ist­ing music: Auster­ity Measures and I Found it by the Sea work back­wards, finding their way to the source material through layers of my own vari­a­tions; my “re-compo­si­tion” of Mozart’s Coro­na­tion concerto imposes my own music directly on top of its source; the Piano Quintet and The Blind Banister abstract Schumann and Beethoven, through oblique struc­tural refer­ences rather than outright quota­tion. Writing these pieces has not been an exercise in pastiche or post­mod­ernism, but rather an integral part of my compo­si­tional development—investigating distant connec­tions, filling in the space between. 

I also think the article didn’t give a true sense of what it might be like actually to write such a piece of music. Simply working in the clas­si­cal music tradi­tion is, for me, a great source of material (by which I mean: writing detailed instruc­tions in a document which is given to perform­ers, who then follow the instruc­tions, produc­ing a version of my piece). And part of this is acknowl­edg­ing that people have been making music in this strange, round­about way for a thousand years. So it’s under­stand­able to want to look back­wards once in awhile, maybe now espe­cially, as the history-renounc­ing tele­ol­ogy of Modernism recedes. 

But is it a kind of pander­ing? I don’t think it’s pander­ing to think about your audience now and then (and I know that by saying that, I’ll have lost a certain number of the people who read this). Any music can pander—if not to audi­ences, then to grant panels or tenure commit­tees. Simply putting new music on the same program as Beethoven may not be enough to convince audi­ences of their common­al­ity; a well-consid­ered response can show without telling. 

The context for my quote in the Times about nearing “the end of my rope” was in discussing whether or not these commis­sions have become a hack­neyed program­ming trend. As with all trends, there are of course thought­less and bad examples. Not every living composer can respond to every long-dead one and expect to illu­mi­nate. Perhaps not every master­piece of the past demands a response. Winking quota­tions or musical inside jokes are a blind alley, a self-appre­cia­tive pat on the back. And an overdose of nostal­gia for lost musical idylls tends merely to remind us who was excluded from the supposed “golden age”—women and minori­ties, who are still hugely under­rep­re­sented in contem­po­rary music commissioning. 

David Allen’s article failed to differ­en­ti­ate among the forms of responses composers have written, as well as the condi­tions under which they might succeed or fail. If composers were in fact being talked into writing certain kinds of pieces by new-music-wary orches­tral admin­is­tra­tors, as the article seems to imply, this would indeed have a chilling effect on creative freedom in our field. 

But in my own expe­ri­ence, this couldn’t be further from the case. For The Blind Banister, the pianist Jonathan Biss approached me with an idea for a project that he had devised inde­pen­dently (the Beethoven/5 commis­sions). So I had one more piece of infor­ma­tion than I usually do when begin­ning a piece: the soloist, the instru­men­ta­tion, the duration, plus Beethoven’s second concerto. A handful of orches­tras signed on to commis­sion it (on the strength of their faith in Jonathan, more than anything else), the piece was premiered, another small handful of orches­tras decided to program it (one, auda­ciously, Beethoven-less!)—and so a new piece of music makes its tenta­tive way in the world. 

Jonathan Biss will respond with his perspec­tive as a performer and commis­sioner later this week; watch this space.