Through Alan’s Eyes
Chapter 6
On the Tyranny of Style, etc.
The Quartet’s first movement piles bits of melodic and harmonic material over a consistently nervous rhythmic pulse intensified by constant changes of meter, pushed even beyond their standard use in my work by the frequent fermatas and phrases abruptly cut off at their climactic points. This movement also marks one of the more complex developments to date of what I suppose you could call a personal obsession – making use of quotation from the obscure Temperance Hymn, “O, Could I Sing The Righteous Worth,” which I discovered quite by accident in a Protestant Hymnal in 1968, and have since inserted into works both large and small, ranging from tiny snatches of melody to complex harmonic and contrapuntal development, sometimes semi-comically, at others with the utmost seriousness since the fateful year I first laid eyes on it. I suppose one could call this quirk a ‘trademark’ of my work, but I have never used it without reason nor in any context in which I felt the musical flow of the work could progress equally well or better without making use of that particular material, a trait I hope I can correctly ascribe to my mature work in general.
The First Movement is largely an exercise in quickly-changing rhythms and free atonality. The Second is slow, highly contrapuntal though not strictly fugal, and unabashedly tonal. The predominant tonality is C-sharp Minor, though key signatures per se are never present. It begins with a long melodic cello line, taken up in turn by viola, then second and first violin, the material being batted about melodically and harmonically, until a slow crescendo, driven by a steady accelerando leads to a pedal-point climax on a low G-sharp in viola and cello, from where the line slowly winds back to a variant of the opening theme, stated once more in all four instruments before fading away into nothingness.
During the period I was composing this piece I was faced with a life-situation which I could no longer ignore – the real and ultimately fatal nature of my mother’s battle with Alzheimer’s disease. Though she was to hang on, physically at least, until February 2003, the idea occurred to me of arranging this slow movement for full string-orchestra to be used at some future date as a memorial piece, which I finally got around to doing circa 2000, thus giving us two versions of the movement – the original for string quartet, and what I now call Elegy for String Orchestra, meant to stand alone as an independent work. This sort of action on my part yet again feeds the critics who would like to prove at least one of their utterly incorrect theses, i.e., that when all is said and done, I can’t even make a clear decision about how, where, and how often to use my materials, even in a relatively simple matter like this, and maybe, just maybe, this might indicate a lack of creativity on my part. I can barely restrain myself from breaking into fits of laughter, but let ‘em have their fun. If I have attained my present age with so little command of my artistic medium and am still plugging away at it, clearly I should be locked up someplace safe rather than having my works recorded on respected labels and nominated for The Pulitzer Prize in Music and various other honors. As I seem to be walking free and continue to fill music paper with my scribbling, perhaps the ladies and gentlemen of the press ought to think twice before they pounce.
The Finale of the String Quartet opens on a fortissimo in unison, with sudden and rapid changes of tempo every few bars. At the risk of sounding sacrilegious, personally I find it reminiscent of Late Beethoven – not the opening bars of a symphony, certainly, but whether Sonata or Quartet I cannot say, nor do I need to. After a roughly ninety-second introduction, this material gives way to another highly contrapuntal theme marked Presto, a good deal more “modern” than that in the Second Movement. This final movement combines Rondo and Scherzo forms, and when the modernity of the semi-fugal outer sections are contrasted with a more neo-Romantic trio, they blend rather than clash, a sign, to me at least, that I am growing closer to my ultimate goal of a seamless unity formed from opposite or seemingly unrelated materials. (I will have much more to say on this subject before the conclusion of this, the final chapter of the article.) The movement diverges from the vast majority of my post-pubescent output in a significant way, less by design than by default, namely that with the exception of the introduction, the entire movement is written in a quick and unrelenting 3/4 time, with no metric variation whatsoever.
Despite its relative success, String Quartet #1 (this would seem to indicate the existence of a #2 but there isn’t one) represents my last attempt to compose a purely abstract instru-mental work until the past year or so (this sentence being written in 2009). I discussed earlier that, whatever the reasons, it is often easier for me to kindle the fire of inspiration needed to begin a new work with the aid of a poem, or at least some kind of text to work with. I by no means see this as a failure on my part, especially as what I and many others consider my most significant accomplishment to date. The choral symphony “The Mystic Trumpeter”, completed in 2006 is, despite the designation “symphony,” is primarily a vocal work for soprano and tenor soloists, large mixed chorus, and an orchestra heavy on wind and brass instruments (including a prominent concertante part for an unseen solo trumpet, playing offstage throughout), a percussion section so large and diverse as to almost require its own conductor, piano, celesta, pipe organ, and a string section notable for the absence of both violins and violas.
The orchestral component enumerated above should indicate that between the completion of the String Quartet in 1995 and the present, I have never lost interest in the possibilities presented by instruments of all types. I recently challenged myself to do something I had (incredibly) not done since my teenage years – write an extended work for my own instrument, the piano, which for reasons I can’t (or haven’t really tried to) figure out, I have ignored except as a partner in chamber music, an accompaniment for the voice, or part of a percussion battery in one of my larger scores requiring sounds which can only be produced by the instrument’s extreme registers. Nonetheless, let me predict that you will see the completion of Alan Seidler’s Piano Sonata before long. Of course, there really isn’t (nor should there be) such a thing as a Sonata in the Classical sense in this day and age. As with so many recent developments in the world of music, there are too few words to describe too many new forms, or the abandonment of obsolete ones in any way that makes sense. Sooner or later, we revert to a term we’re familiar with, vague or improper as that usage may be.
If you’re still with me, except for the last paragraph, you might think that the chief purpose of this chapter was to let me vent about the sadistic corps of critics we performing artists are unlucky enough to have in our midst. This has been pointed out innumerable times by innumerable people both inside and outside the musical professions. If only the reviewer was lambasting the creator, it would be bad enough.
The problem, however, has grown into a group neurosis amongst all but a few of today’s up-and-coming composers. They feel that they must heed the reviewer’s words, almost certainly written about another, worrying whether they, too, have not yet found the voice which truly represents them, and so wasting valuable time that could be used to compose.
Here are the facts: We who would be composers are and have always been gifted with a nearly infinite supply of raw materials to use, draw upon and expand into what will become the body of our work. We need not spend valuable hours, days, and sad to say, sometimes years agonizing over the manner in which we choose to use these materials and whether our use is a sufficient sign of our own “originality” as creators, or whether we have fashioned a “style” for ourselves which separates our work from others, past, present or presumably future. We are gifted with the whole body of our musical heritage left for us to draw on, taking and combining those parts which most befit our individual spirits to produce some combination of melodies, harmonies and rhythmic activity, which, regardless of critical opinion, did not exist previously. For those of us who have that little “extra” gift which it seems is bestowed at birth rather than by any amount of teaching or practice, we may end up among those fortunate ones who add our little bit to that near-infinite supply of raw materials which another talent may one day draw upon to help build their own personal adventure.
I have been extremely fortunate, both in terms of what I have chosen for my creative journey and what has, so to speak, chosen me, to form a complete picture which today I can call “Alan Seidler, composer.” I don’t know the precise formula I used to reach the creative synthesis which has developed and I hope will continue to expand with each new work I produce. There is no such an animal as “complete originality.” If there were, it would take several decades until such work became comprehensible to a large-enough audience to fill even a fraction of the average-sized recital hall. Even then, there is no guarantee that listeners would exit the hall with any greater degree of enlightenment than that with which they entered. In fact, the opposite might be true when all was said and done. Musical tradition – “the past” – was not created to be ignored or stepped over on the road to nowhere. I use that phrase more literally than advisedly. If you take any six or seven-year-old with an obvious feel for a musical instrument, enough imagination, innate talent and / or persistence, who craves the basics of musical notation, spends long periods of time improvising on rather than practicing his assigned pieces – enough to convince his parent or ‘supervisor’ that he is indeed practicing instead of goofing off – you’ve got a promising beginning. But to quote Robert Frost, still “miles to go before I sleep.”
Though I didn’t yet have the wisdom to grasp this concept, did I? There went the twenty-one symphonies, three operas, etc., all composed at a single-digit age, out the window as I began again and again the “true” catalogue of my “real” compositions.
As I pointed out much earlier, I had the ability to turn my attempts, imitative of my most admired composers, into something often closer to forgery than to imitation, with the end result that to those who lacked the training could not tell them apart. I will again pause to give thanks that I became aware of this tendency of mine before it had the chance to ruin my career (and possibly my life) in any number of ways. At very least, I would have ended up at the center of a group of friends who gathered in somebody’s living room every Saturday night to “groove with the vibes, man”, to quote the mid-‘60s late-beatnik/early-hippie parlance I learned so well. Having sampled that way of life for longer than was of any lasting value, all I can say with assuredness is that “That Old Gang Of Mine” has without exception been blown to all four corners of the earth, or for those less fortunate, interred beneath it. For all the years of my “wild youth,” I have less than a handful of friends I can still phone or e-mail on any given night with any hope of receiving a response.
At the other end of the (dramatic) spectrum, though I’d like to give myself credit for being a little bit wiser (even if not yet too old) for this, I had trained myself to write and perform in so many varied genres, “POP THRU OPERA/RAGTIME TO ROCK”, to quote one of my old vocal-coaching ads from the mid-‘80s, that I actually indulged myself in at least a couple of nightmares in which I was led away by FBI agents to face charges of copyright infringement, among other sordid odds and ends. Happily to say, this never came to pass in my waking hours, but the experience I gained by exposure to so many different types of music, old and new, could not help but rub off on a person of my talents and aspirations. Having accepted the premise that 100% originality does not exist, it is not that big a jump to the slogan, “Never close your ears to anything you could be listening to—you may be able to use it someday when it’s the last thing on your mind!”
Some of the little vignettes and slogans I’ve come up with here, while I have found a great deal of truth in them for myself, are only included to demonstrate ways I have incorporated the results of formal instruction with what I have taught myself, either instinctively or by trial and error. In most cases, they are not to be taken literally, but the next paragraph or two, which involve preserving my presumed “originality” in the face of the varied listening ‘binges’ of early childhood, through my mid- or late 30s, were indispensable to me, because they taught me to look back at what I already knew about myself in terms of the obsessive listening and reading patterns I would get myself into – when I fell in love with a composer’s or a performer’s work, when it was time to move on in order to combat a deep-seated tendency to let these strong influences steer me away from my own direction and the next place I needed to go.
Thus, Tip #1 about Style, and the only one you really need: YOU KNOW YOU HAVEN’T FOUND YOUR OWN STYLE WHEN YOU LET WHAT YOU MOST EXPOSE YOURSELF TO, TO SWALLOW YOU UP. This tip, which I will go on to demonstrate, is the only one a composer really needs to follow unless, of course, he never possessed the basic inventiveness and talent needed to begin with. If this is the case, there is very little more I can tell you. Otherwise, you’ll most likely be O.K. as long as you remember that you are you, and not a second ————————-(fill in the name of your favorite composer here).
