Archive for the 'university' CategoryPage 2 of 10

Your Will Will Be Done

Published
by
michael lee
on 29 May 2008
in emerging church, faith and theology, university and writing workshop
. 3 Comments

I’m working on a new composition, a setting of The Lord’s Prayer for slovenly pirates and bellicose ne’er-do-wells. Or, I guess they just go by “Men’s Chorale”, but you get my point.

The Lord’s Prayers (the Matthew version, which all the cool kid use) is traditionally understood as 7 petitions:

“Our Father, who is in heaven,

  1. Make holy your name,
  2. Bring your kingdom,
  3. Manifest your will on earth, as in heaven,
  4. Give us our daily bread,
  5. Forgive our debts, as we forgive our debtors,
  6. Do not lead us into temptation,
  7. Deliver us from the Evil One.”

In writing this piece, I’ve been thinking about the theological implications of composition. I know, I know, make fun of me later. For now, just smirk to yourselves and read on.

I’m working out the 3rd petition in the piece right now, Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

This is no great mystery to the songwriters in the crowd, but that phrase can be sliced and diced and setup across the music in dozens of ways, and each one shifts the weight around on the ideas contained in the phrase. The words are the words, and they carry their own meaning, but the shades of emphasis are mine to play with.

If I make your a pickup, and land the word will on the downbeat, the emphasis moves. If I shift the phrase over, and begin with your on the downbeat, again, the emphasis moves.

When Albert Malotte write his well-known setting of the piece, he chose to put a strong divide between be done and on earth. I think that one choice has made a permanent shift in how most English-speaking people understand the prayer. Malotte made “on earth as it is in heaven” a descriptive supplement to “thy will be done.” In his rendering, there is almost an implied “(so that it will be) on earth as it is in heaven.” It makes the petition wistful, almost mournful.

Matthew’s greek text does not have that same grouping. It places the break (as nearly as we can tell; this kind of thing is always a bit subjective) between on earth and as in heaven. With that reading, the emphasis is on the present, immediate manifestation of God’s will, here, now, on earth, in this place. It’s not a far off vision of some future transformation, it’s a call to arms for the establishment of the Kingdom (in line with the first 2 petitions).

I’m sensing, as I write this piece, the power of setting words to music. There is actually the ability to shift theological meaning in the mind of the listener, and the performer, based on choices we assume are merely aesthetic.

It’s the mind of the performer that’s been heavily on my own mind as I write this piece. This is not a pretty piece of music. It’s an epic, Fortissimo! final judgment, second coming kind of piece. It emphasizes the prayer as an eschatalogical petition, a subversive rendering of the Hebrew Kaddish to invoke the overthrowing of the world, and the establishment of God’s Kingdom. It’s a call to arms.

The men’s chorale that will be performing it has a special place in my heart. The conductor has made it a workshop for turning awkward boys into godly men. They come in, adrift and insecure, cut loose from family and friends and home church, and are thrown together on campus with 10,000 people they don’t know. Men’s Chorale becomes a band of brothers, a sanctuary, and a training ground for how to grow up into a man. The way they sing reflects that.

When I finish this piece, I will hand it over to them, and they will learn it. Any given audience will hear it once, but they will sing it dozens of times, they will memorize it and perform it with passionate intensity. The meaning of the words will not be lost on them - I talk to these men frequently, and they are thoughtful and articulate. They chew on things.

As I spill ink on this new composition, I’m very aware of my obligation to these men, to take care for the ideas I hand over to their repetition and consideration.

Mourning Into Dancing

Published
by
michael lee
on 24 May 2008
in audio, church and university
. 12 Comments

Ain’t no arranger like a former small group leader arranger!

All right, kiddos. It’s nostalgia time here on ye ole’ Addison Road blog. I wanted the summer small group to tackle something that was a little more “sport vocal” than their standard fair, something with a little movement, a little harmony to it. So, I pulled out an old favorite and twisted it up 9 ways stupid. Enjoy, complete with me screaming out lead soprano vocals.

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Rhythm Chart
Vocal Score

Those of you who are astute will notice that it even has a breakdown section in the middle for the leader to introduce the band. Do you feel it? I know you feel it. You feel it like soggy turkey sandwiches and shared pull-out beds!

Big Shoes to Phil

Published
by
michael lee
on 15 April 2008
in technology and university
. 26 Comments

As of yesterday, I am the new Phil.

In a tense, embittered, deeply sectarian 30 second meeting with the Dean, I was officially made the Director of Music Technology for the APU School of Music. The position comes with, among other things, new business cards, and the long-sought respect of my peers that I so deeply crave. Well, for sure the business cards, at least.

It’s easy to forget, now, what a visionary Phil was when he started building this program. In the early 1990’s, Phil was insisting that facility with music software was going to be an essential skill for musicians, regardless of their particular emphasis. He fought the uphill battle of getting all of our faculty teaching theory, arranging, and orchestration using notation software, which gave us the ability to hear, analyze, and modify student projects live in class. Because of his efforts, we were one of the first programs in the country to make musical technology a required part of the curriculum for all music majors. He pushed hard to make laptop leases mandatory for the school of music, so that we are still one of the few programs in the country where every music student has an identical setup, and uses music software as an integral part of their
writing and arranging.

Those of us who teach here take all of these things for granted - we just assume that any student who has a question about brass voicings for big band can simply email us the file they are working on, and we can both have copies open to modify and change, that we can be hearing exactly the same thing while we are working. We take for granted that we can ask our jazz piano students to sequence their own rehearsal combo to practice 12 bar blues solos. We assume that our education students can create and print technical exercises to help the community children who are part of the youth music academy that we run. We don’t even pause when suggested that our composition students email a copy of the file they are working on to the string section leader, to get suggestions for bowings - we know they are using the same laptop and software, and will be able to view each other’s work without difficulty.

None of these things happened by accident. They are all the result of Phil’s visionary efforts to make music technology a core part of our curriculum, so that when our students graduate, no matter what their degree or emphasis within music, they find themselves unexpectedly equipped for the present state of the industry. I was the beneficiary of that foresight as a student, and I am the beneficiary of that effort as a faculty member.

Thank you, Phil, for building this program, and for trusting me to carry it forward.

How Michael Got His Groove Back

Published
by
michael lee
on 12 April 2008
in art and culture and university
. 3 Comments

Thank god for the Yellowjackets. I was just barely hanging on until then.

The APU “A” Big Band played a gig last night for a few thousand people in the events center, and the pianist had a conflict, so I sat in. 30 tunes, all sight reading, with everything from thick-fisted George Shearing voicings to awkward non-pianist attempts at writing quartal stacks, with insane rhythmic jumps. A few standards thrown in for taste.

Fun stuff to play, really fun. Not fun stuff to read through with no rehearsals.

I was really anxious leading up to the gig. I don’t do this kind of playing anymore, and haven’t for quite a while. I’m a pop guy, all about tone and time, the small tasty part in the bridge, that kind of thing. It’s been probably 10 years since I’ve had to sight-read big band charts, and that skill fades very quickly with time. I was talking with Doug about it the night before, and he said, “Oh, you’ll do great - it’s just like riding a bicycle.” It’s not. It’s almost exactly the opposite of that.

I wasn’t anxious about the crowd, or about the director, I was anxious because it was a band full of students, and they are all really, really good. Really good. Missing class to sit in on recording sessions good. Monteray Jazz Festival kind of good. On the regular sub list for Les Brown kind of good. Publishing and playing their own charts kind of good. I was anxious because I felt like I needed to prove something.

For musicians, there is a kind of currency, of legitimacy, that comes from what you can do with your instrument. It’s how you prove you belong in the club. More than arranging, composing, pedagogy, conducting, the thing that defines you as a musician is what you do when you pick up your axe. That carries over to how they view those of us in the faculty as well - the profs who can still swing rank higher in the students’ eyes than those who “just teach.” The Dean of the school has huge credibility because “he plays.”

So, I felt like I had to prove that teaching wasn’t an escape from having to play hard, that I could still handle my business, that I belonged in the club. It some way, I felt like I was proving my right to stand up in front of them and talk about wave physics, binary conversion, software and hardware, studio production techniques, ethics, everything that I teach that is tangential to the act of playing. I needed to back up my credibility, so that when I tell them that being a musicians includes all of these things, I am speaking as a musician, and not just as someone who used to play, and now teaches. For them, that means being able to handle unison be-bop runs at 200 BPM with the trombones hitting ostenato stabs.

I did … well, OK. I handled my business pretty well, hit the hits, played some tasty 8 bar solos that arrangers like to drop in as palate cleansers between horn rips. I missed a few difficult reads, at least one of them really exposed.

Then, we pulled up an arrangement of a Bob Mintzer tune, New Rochelle off “Blue Hats” by the Yellowjackets. Medium fusion shuffle, right in my wheelhouse. There was an extended piano solo in the middle of tune. I killed it, absolutely killed it. It felt great, sounded great, and everybody was into it. Started slowly, built the themes, stacked the voicings, went way outside, twisted the subdivisions up, got bigger and bigger until it just exploded into the horn hits, and then it was done. It felt … fantastic.

So, I’m hanging my hat on that moment. My raging insecurities were quelled, at least for now, and I can go back to teaching about MIDI data bytes and how to build a velocity-switching sample instrument. Only now, I get to do it as “a player”.

A Short Survey of Interesting Topics

Published
by
michael lee
on 29 March 2008
in faith and theology, groupthink, philosophy and university
. 35 Comments

I have 7 students in my Music and Ethics class this semester. They’re just about cresting the first difficult climb in writing their thesis papers. They’ve done the bulk of the research, and had to turn in a full footnoted outline of their argument. All that’s left for most of them is to spill the actual ink, and turn it into something readable. And then, of course, the editing.

They’ve picked some pretty interesting topics, so I thought I’d throw them out here for you folks to peruse. These are their thesis statements, roughly, along with some background.

  1. Sacredness is an ascribed quality, not an objective quality, therefore music that is sacred is always sacred to some person, or group of people. It is sacred because it serves the function of producing desired internal states, considered spiritually significant by people who call the music sacred. This means that 1) people outside of that group have no obligation to the “sacredness” of the music, and 2) it is inappropriately limiting to the creative process to force composers to work within a certain genre of music because of its “sacredness”.
  2. The emphasis on competition within High School music programs is detrimental to the education process. A music educator has an obligation to select repertoire for their ensemble based on artistic merit and educational value, and not competitive value.
  3. A film composer’s evaluation of a potential project should be based on the over-arching primary theme of the film, rather than content that serves that theme. She may choose to work on a film with a strong positive primary message, even if the film also contains graphic sexuality and violence. If the strength of the primary theme outweighs the presence of objectionable content, the project as a whole can be considered good, and worthwhile.
  4. There are three categories of repertoire that are frequently controversial in music education: music with sexual themes (sensual and explicit operatic works), music with overt religious themes (everything written between 600 and 1600 C.E. in Western Music), and music by controversial composers (Wagner’s pro-genocide stance, for example). A music educator has an obligation to perform these works, in spite of the controversy. To avoid them both limits that artistic experience of the students, and presents a skewed perspective on the scope and history of musical literature.
  5. A composer’s original intent is the fundamental guiding principle for the interpretation of a work. Contemporary performers and conductors have an obligation not to deviate from the best understanding of the composer’s intent in their interpretation and execution of a work.
  6. A musician has an obligation to only create works that best express their aesthetic judgment. It is a violation of the purpose of music, and the nature of the musician, to make choices based on values of broad appeal or commercial viability. There are strong parallels between a musician using their craft for less-than-art purposes, and prostitution, in that both treat the person as a means to an end, in violation of the second formulation of Kant’s categorical imperative. (This is going to be a helluva paper - this student is incredibly bright, and is making some very, very strong arguments in support of this thesis. Once he’s finished, I’ll give more of my thoughts on this topic).
  7. The lyrical content of music is capable of making moral claims, even in poetic and non-propositional formats. Songwriters have an obligation to produce works whose moral claims contribute to social unity. Songwriters may not plead ignorance in their understanding of these moral claims, and must take responsibility for their social impact as contributing factors to social change. To claim that songs are not sufficient causes for any particular social change is not an argument against their contributory power to those changes. The two primary case studies will be the identification by Klebold and Harris with the music of Marilyn Manson prior to the Columbine High School shootings, and the release of the song F*ck Tha Police by NWA prior to the 1992 Los Angeles riots. (I think this student is going to argue that the moral claims of F*ck Tha Police actually fulfill the obligation toward social unity, by exposing an underlying reality that then prompted broader attention and calls for change.)

It’s fun to sit in conferences with these students and read through their arguments, to see the evidence of their critical thinking. I love the fact that I don’t have to prod any of them to find the value in this process - they all seem to understand that spending time thinking deeply about these themes will be beneficial to their development as musicians, and as people.