Annual Member Meeting in Portland

Presentation by Elliott Schwartz, Professor of Music at Bowdoin College

"The Composer's World: Puzzles, Menus, Maps, Memory"

May 7, 2009

Glickman Library, University of Southern Maine, Portland, Maine

This talk offered an introduction to “the composer’s workshop,” and some of the tools a composer uses. Four broad areas were discussed. Three of them can be approached by way of analogy, using familiar objects as models. (I’ve brought them into the classroom when working with composition students.) These objects are:

(A) crossword puzzles, which require one to perceive the grid in two dimensions at once (horizontal vs. vertical), encourage pattern recognition (filling in the blanks of a word), seeing relationships across the board (the overall theme of a puzzle), and the arrangement of building blocks in space.

(B) restaurant menus, which invite one to explored sensual qualities and responses. Tone color, as we experience it, can be thought of as the equivalent of taste (the sound of an oboe or trumpet, the taste of avocado or orange. And if a concert – or individual composition – is the equivalent of a meal, we might profit from studying the order of a menu. Why is the soup first? (In a number of Asian countries, the soup may be served last.) Why the concerto always played before the intermission? Why, after the year 1825, is the last movement of a symphony frequently the longest?

C) maps. Music is a time art, and during the time available it creates a flow, a narrative, a trajectory. A map is the pictorial representation of this trajectory or journey. More interestingly, it’s the sum total of many possible journeys. Which ever narrative you choose,-- by looking at the map, you can see where you are, where you have been, where you’re going. A musical score is like a map — and the experience of hearing music, performing music, or composing it is a journey.

Unlike the physical models of menu, puzzle and map, the fourth critical area is less tangible. But the composer needs it to translate these three models into music. That fourth area is memory. Let me discuss memory from a number of angles.

(1) Performance. Composers draw upon their memories of performance – we have all been performers – and our experience of working with instruments, their relation to the people who use them, their potential for creating a range of sounds, and articulating relationships.

(2) Sensitivity to issues of time and how time passes – clock time, psychological time, or dramatic time. As it deals with relationships, memory (both short term and long term) enables us to navigate the trajectory or “map” Composers delight in creating subtle changes in the narrative, as it passes through time. (Here I performed brief excerpts from the music literature. Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” was one such example.) In each of these examples, a passage from the beginning of the work was compared with the same passage as heard late in the narrative. I asked the listeners to note the subtle differences.)

(3) The composer makes use of his/her memories of, and references to, other music. These may be intended as private communication for only a few others (example: Elgar’s use of Beethoven models in the “Enigma Variations”), or they may pre-suppose widespread audience recognition of the pre-existing “source.” (For example: many works which use the Gregorian chant “Dies Irae.” These are meant to shock or terrify or scandalize, because of their cultural associations with the original.)

Memory, then, is the critical factor which helps the composer – and performer and listener – merge elements of the “menu,” “map” and “puzzle” into a coherent satisfying whole.