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. 

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.