WRITING

FROM CACOPHONY TO SYMPHONY

Holistic listening and how engendering a musical sensibility to the soundscape might help to heal the environment, and enrich our culture.

Music may be the avenue that will enable us to communicate with and comprehend the environment we come from and live in. Humans have differentiated themselves from the animal world with the evolution of symbolic language. However unique the lexical component of human language, it also contains many essential musical components that increase the richness of its
information content. This musical, supra-lexis meaning is conveyed in the form of speech prosody. By exploiting pitch, rhythm, cadence and phrasing to convey emotional and perhaps symbolic content, human linguistic communication preserves the musical roots of language and keeps alive an ancient connection to other forms of non-linguistic, musical communication
common to primates, birds, cetaceans and perhaps millions of other species.


Re-auralizing Nature, Musical practice as a means to a greater understanding of the natural world

Recently, my interest has moved away from the beautiful, self-contained, syntactically bound world of the post-tonal musical language and gravitated back to the soundscape around me as the source of my creativity. In different ways, the conceptual basis for my recent compositional and artistic work arises from the direct experience of my immediate acoustic surroundings, ideas garnered from scientific insights into phenomenological aspects of the natural world and from the emotional stimuli of visual art. I’ve discovered that the extra musical sound world provides infinitely rich materials for musical composition and artistic creation.

This untraditional approach to the musical task of composing demands a more intuitive process. To combine such seemingly disparate influences with musical language requires that I abandon notions of right and wrong acquired in the long process of learning the western music style – and to a certain degree, to dispense with the stylistic and expressionistic aspects of the music that I have composed up to this point.


Wandering in the Wilderness, Music as a Mediator Between Humans and the Environment

My recent musical compositions and sound pieces explore the connection between the human condition and acoustic ecology.

Using these works as a focal point, this paper investigates this connection and the unique function of musical practice as a cultural storage cell for latent listening skills essential to any future reconciliation between humans and the environment. I will examine the idea that the listening techniques essential to our early hunting and gathering ancestors, subsequently adapted to the activity of listening to and creating music, are being re-utilized to listen to the natural world with more refined attention. Additionally I will discuss how an exploration of the pre-historical roots of music are relevant to my own compositional practice and to the furtherance of a future application of the ideas of acoustic ecology.

Using my own interviews with David Dunn and Cheryl E. Leonard, I will explore the relationship between speech and music and how musical practice serves as a proxy for our learned ability to listen to and communicate with the millions of species that co-exist with us. I will also discuss ways in which contemporary composers­ represented in the membership of musical communities exemplified by such organizations as “The Acoustic Ecology Institute,” and “Deep Listening”­ are aided by improvements in audio technology and the concepts of acoustic ecology, and how their work is contributing to a greater understanding of the natural world, and a renewed public concern for the environment.


The Influence of Mysticism and the Science of Sound on Ruth Crawford Seeger and Music for Small Orchestra Mov. One

This thesis explores some of the influences on Ruth Crawford Seeger’s compositional process in the years between her study with Adolf Weidig of the Americcan Conservatory (of music) in Chicago and her departure for New York in September of 1929 and how they affected teh composition of Music for Small Orchestra (1926). Many of the ideas that Crawford encountered through her contacts in Chicago formed the artistic basis for the strong compositional style that distinguished her as an American innovator before her studies in New York. Music for Small Orchestra is representative of this period prior to her immersion in the rigorous compositional aesthetics of “dissonant counterpoint” and the beginning of her long association with Charles Seeger that began in the 1930’s.


Morton Feldman the Abstract Artist and the Lens of Criticism

Morton Feldman was a self-described “well educated autodidact” composer, an avid collector of modern art and sometimes critic of the visual arts (he contributed to Art News and Art in America and also wrote essays for exhibition catalogues). His approach to composing was deeply influenced by his associations with the avant-garde of American visual artists in the 1950s.

The elimination of symbolism, the simplification of gesture, the avoidance of marked contrasts found even in the earliest iterations of Feldman’s music, owe much to the Abstract Expressionists and more specifically the Color Field artists. By adopting procedures particular to the Abstract Expressionists, he approached the composition of music as those visual artists might have approached painting a canvas. He was in many ways more akin to his peers in the visual art world than he was in to his contemporaries in the music world.

Though his lifelong friendship with composer and philosopher of the arts – John Cage was a defining relation hip for him, it can be argued that Feldman was more directly preoccupied with the artistic problems that his friends Philip Guston and Mark Rothko were intrigued by, than the musical problems his associate composers were.