What I Love About Music

This is what I love about music. A composer, speaking about myself and thus using pronoun "he", doesn't really know what he is doing. Often it requires an interpreter to fully locate what is going on in a piece. Once written, it's only an idea put into notes on a page. Writing. But music is not writing. Writing is what makes it possible, (music written in score form that is), for someone to make it sound. And how it sounds is what then is heard and considered "music."

"Walden Miniatures," my contribution to music in 2013, and which receives its premiere performance this Sunday, uses the last four sentences of Henry David Thoreau's Walden. I've always known someday I would use those four lines musically--so enigmatic, so open to interpretation: "the light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star." I'd originally only used three lines, not using "there is more day to dawn." And yet when I found myself sitting on the banks of Walden Pond last October, near the cabin site where Thoreau lived for the two years that made it possible for him to write Walden, the final miniature, "the sun is but a  morning star," which I literally wrote right there as the sun rose, required the addition of "there is more day to dawn." And those lines comprise the only moment in the "Walden Miniatures" that uses the chorus in a traditional way. "There is more day to dawn"--the sunrise made those lines no longer enigmatic but actual--an experience I personally had. So that the enigma, what does it mean "the sun is but a morning star," aligning day with the night, lightness with the dark, somehow made possible the reality of "more day to dawn." An optimism that really isn't found at the end of Walden but is found in my miniatures.

Sunrise at Walden Pond October 2013

How fortunate I am to have met a great interpreter who discovered the truth of this--that the end of my "Walden Miniatures" is not really an end but a beginning: sunrise on Walden Pond, so beautiful, and an opening to possibilities. An open-ended result. Marsha Core, the remarkably gifted director of the Chamber Singers at Haverford High School, for whom I wrote the piece, sent me a late night email--" Mvt 3 is the  DAWN!!! It doesn't end down, it's UP--it's the SUNRISE--'there is more DAY to DAWN--there is MORE DAY TOOOOO DAHHHHHHHHHWN--the sun is coming up ... -it represents the rays as they peak out, more and more then build as the rays gather and the sun bursts through at the 'crack of dawn' Right? And so the end is the satisfied feeling that the sun portrays as it's in its 'rightful morning position.' Quietly satisfied but not a finality...a quiet but still intense BEGINNING of the day not END." Yes that's it. Not what the composer intended but instead what the music has to say. Anything I've ever written worth listening to has been about finding a way to take my ephemeral listening, what I hear in those fleeting moments, and bring it to a more permanent state of life, something that can be heard. Again and again. And often quite differently each time. I've now listened to these miniatures, beautifully sung by these gifted young people under the direction of the best choral director I've ever met, many times. Heard how it is changing through continued listening, finding what there is to hear and singing it. This "process of singing" as John Cage would have put it: "and when you sing, you are where you are. All I know about method is that when I am not working I sometimes think I know something, but when I am working it is quite clear that I know nothing." I knew that "Walden Miniatures" would be difficult to sing. But I didn't realize until I started hearing them sung how hard it had been to write these miniatures. To "know nothing" when you compose is the hardest thing. I love the sound of that in my "Walden Miniatures." And it took the great interpretive gifts of Marsha Core to make it clear that the pleasure in this music is the "nothing" at its center. This is what I love about music.