Notes on some new solo piano music

I have been committing some new music for solo piano to recorded documentation. Eventually some of this will be a full album, a selection of which, Townsend Detective Agency, I covered in the previous post. 

It is hard for me to write about my process and the final result. I really enjoy thinking about music in both musical and philosophical terms and I remain, thankfully, most passionate about it. But as far as translating that into nonmusical terms is concerned isn't always easy.  The difficulty, if that is the correct formulation, consists in trying to clarify what was or is important in a particular musical project.

If I had to come up with a formula of my "hard listening" style it would go something like this: start with the formal and modern rigor of concert music, that is, longer forms. (I map out my scores with many sections. The instructions can be quite loose, involving improvisation, but the content for the improvisations can also be very strict.) Then, after the larger formal idea, I draw on an array of disparate languages from American popular music history. Finally I improvise over these frameworks much like an improviser taking choruses. But I always use lots of structure. Themes appear and reappear and develop. Speaking philosophically, I aim to create a kind of time travel in my artistic practice. My friend Amanda Williams Galvin spoke about coming to own one of her grandfather's button down shirts from many decades ago. My music is like that.  I want the listener to be reminded of, say, a hit song that would have been playing on a radio at the time when the grandfather had originally put on the shirt, and then for the listener to be jolted to yet another time period, perhaps thirty or forty years later.

The result is to violate the ordinary, linear sense of time, and to call into question and subvert the one-to-one association of a particular music with the time of that music's creation or popularity. I am also interested in durational or "slow" filmmaking (Andrei Tarkovsky, Chantal Akerman, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Abbas Kiaorstami, Frederick Wiseman) and applying some of those ideas to music making. I agree with Miles Davis that art, music and life are all about style.

https://mitchhampton.bandcamp.com/track/mtm

A good example is my MTM piece. The attitude of the piece is very much like a classical piano work for the concert or recital hall. (Indeed all of my music is like that in a way). It is a piece a pianist is to perform in a concert setting, But the content of the work is partly gleamed from some of the most commercial gestures and stock arrangements found in the writing of background music over many decades. Thus, some of this content is not from the concert hall at all, but from film and television. To make matters more complicated, I approach them the way a jazz improviser would, with that kind of freedom and interest in a richer color palette than you would ever find in most commercial music.

Finally, the piece changes styles radically in a short compression of time. One example of this is the use of jagged and repetitive lines in the opening only to be followed by resting chords with greatest possible contrast. I have developed my own system of doing this over many years. One of the ways I am able to do this is through that tonality system I ranted about on my previous post. My concept of tonality combines modality as well as traditional harmonic relations with the free tonality found in a lot of music of the 1960s and 70s. In this piece I use very opposed and separable languages. On the one hand there is the open and "minimalist" (I hate that word and its connotations since it tells us so little ultimately about what is being done) use of suspended chords or punctuated chords you found in a lot of Broadway, film and television writing in the 60s and 70s. On the other hand there are traditional stock figures of dense harmonic sequences. I use these things simply because I really like them.  

Major influences for the particular projects are composers normally associated with what is considered commercial musicianship and arranging. I love the writing of Patrick Williams and Allyn Ferguson and Jack Elliott.

One inspiration for my recent work in general, not just MTM, was the score to a 1978 made for t.v. movie called  GUIDE TO THE MARRIED WOMAN, by Ferguson and Elliott. Of particular note is a long credit sequence, featuring a both comic and bittersweet visual montage of the passing time of a couple's early married life. But the audio is essentially a mini jazz suite for studio orchestra, with lots of motivic development and top flight playing from Los Angeles players like Bud Shank and Bill Watrous.

Though the following clip is not from that particular film (which appears commercially unavailable), the clip shows what Ferguson was like in the studio - leading a recording of one of his own compositions for the great Freddie Hubbard. Notice above all, the harmonic language which is a once simple and relatively uncluttered, non busy, and yet still filled with color and dramatic interest. The harmonies are similar to the kinds I described above.



Stephen Sondheim, Burt Bacharach, Henry Mancini, and Claus Ogerman are large influences. This is partly one of the reasons I utilize their languages. If I didn't like the languages I would not do it. It would be the greatest mistake for a listener to assume that I mean such references or influences as an ironic commentary or have any reservations about their work.  Indeed, I consider these kind of writers of the highest caliber and believe it to be only a function of fashion and sociology that they are not taken more seriously.  Now that is not to say that there aren't figures in the music that aren't "amusing" because they might feel or seem from a distant time but that is part of their charm and I purposely want to invoke similar feelings in my listeners.

And of course in keeping with my "hard listening" tag, these elements were critical in light or "easy listening" music in some earlier eras. I especially like to have very long sections with a minimum of harmonic change: again, a device that has been critical to so many forms of American popular music. Conversely, since one of my rules is that when I go in one particular direction for a time the music must therefore go in an opposite direction at a later time in the music, I always intersperse some colorful changes when before I have had stasis. It is built into the whole piece from the beginning.  I believe it is rare for any composer to change styles like this. The exception would be a composer who makes such change itself into their style.

Since this piece is called MTM and is in memory of the late Mary Tyler Moore, it also helps that some of this language would have been heard as the background to the projects in which she was employed as an actress.  During this piece I also break into an earlier stride feeling in rhythm and I can never resist an opportunity to bring out some bebop things, or some of the things that I gleamed from my studies with Stanley Cowell so long age in the late 1980s: the conceptualization of the piano as an orchestral instrument and the necessity of treating it accordingly.

I remember when reading John Adams' memoir Hallelujah Junction, being very inspired and feeling a sense of vindication by my personal commitment to tonality. I consider him a masterful composer. My music is not designed to be free of such influences as if the absence of said influences made for a purer artistic music; rather it is designed to be full of such influences. But one quote that stuck with me from that book was his insistence that every composer must find their own language  in which to work and stick with it or develop it. I took that to mean something like finding your calling. You have to choose the language and really commit to it and go all the way with it. I think it matters less what the language in question is, and matters more your love and faithfulness to that particular language when you write.

New "Album" Hard Listening and Easy Listening

"I sit at the piano and write at the piano. I will freely improvise for an hour or two, to try and get this stuff out of my system. I'm writing a piece right now that has an orchestral feeling to it, with bursts of sound and energy. When I compose a piece it has to have a few elements to it. It has to be beautiful whatever that word may mean to you. Part of what that means is that it might have to be ugly in places, in order to be beautiful. I look to develop enough contrast. I also think in terms of color and texture, and will often write a piece of music where I will stay on one chord to develop it and really violate that chord. I'll take that chord and play it inside and out, then throw a pop thing in there, or something Elton John did. i'll do it consciously in a way to irk or disturb the listener who isn't expecting it. Or maybe I'll bring you to 1933 with Harlem style piano. I like breaking down boundaries and making a single piece of music feel like it has the whole history of music within it. I want people to be reminded of what musicians have done in the past. So it's almost a way of honoring the past. My goal is not to reinvent the wheel but rather for the music to be interesting and exciting and reflect the past. I think we as humans have to understand that we humans make and create stuff. We could debate about whether what we make is the Sistine Chapel or some junk, but what's most important is that humans create things." (from bdcwire interview, Mitch Hampton)

My last post was on that most important of themes Love, last February, on Valentine's Day.

You might be tempted to ask what I have been doing over the spring and summer. Well mostly I have been working on my music. After months of deblogging I am back to do a little promotion and little philosophic reflection.
http://bdcwire.com/list/know-your-neighbors-back-bay-pt-i-mitch-hampton/
Now when that great of an amount of time has gone by, especially given the rapid rate of change you could worry about all of the newness that you would feel pressured to reflect, assuming that it could even be processed.

Luckily I am back to discuss music, in particular the release this month, on October 14th of my first solo recording work in, well, over fifteen years. It is called Hard Listening, I suppose to reflect the influence of Easy Listening. I am most happy with it. Not only are all of the pieces original, they were all recorded on the most beautiful piano I could ever hope to find, and for the most part were done in a single take, "live" with no digital manipulation.

There were so many inspirations for this particular album. The oldest and most important inspiration was studying with the great pianist and composer Stanley Cowell, at New England Conservatory of Music. he taught me so many things, chief among them was the truth that though a pianist should be a good ensemble player and comp in a rhythm section, the central focus should be on a pianist's ability to be a complete solo pianist. Doubtless this conviction was in part inspired by the fact that the greatest pianist of them all, Art Tatum, played on Cowell's family piano when Cowell was still a child, in Ohio.

Cowell would have his students come in and prepare any piece of music as if that piece of music were meant to be written and performed by the piano alone, regardless of the original material. He wanted to hear good bass, and the full orchestral range of the piano and all registers. I cannot underestimate the spiritual and aesthetic value of studying under a master like him. It was the kind of experience for the ages, like a real apprenticeship from an older world. Here was a musician that could and would go from something as funky and "contemporary" as this:

 to this:

Maybe my so-called extreme eclecticism is similar.

One inspiration for Hard Listening were those album covers from the past.

Another inspiration was an obscure indie film by Pamela Corkey called Easy Listening.

The other inspiration was the fact that I consider a lot of what is called easy listening music to be good or enjoyable music and was curious about it being considered dated or irrelevant and also curious about why it was demoted or rejected by so many people.

I almost want to write an essay called the Myth Of Relevance.

The most recent inspiration was from rewatching the movie Lifeguard from 1977, about which I wrote on this very blog a few season ago herehttp://themoderatecontrarian.blogspot.com/2012/10/towards-aesthetic-of-1970s-cinema.html One scene depicted a woman bringing a man home and her worrying that her female singer-songwriter album with a pensive and mellow piano and guitar would offend her date's presumably more masculine tastes.

She says, "if you don't like that kind of music I can put something else on". It was very effective that this was Anne Archer delivering the line.

My heart and brain reeled. Kind of music. Something else on. Appropriate music. Good music. Bad music. Cool music and uncool music. Music for "getting it on." Easy listening music. Mellow music, Art music. THAT kind of music. What does this all mean?

I'm a trained musician and I have played just about every kind of music you can think of. I don't like all of it, much of it is not even my favorite. Little of the music I like as much as the music of my mentor Stanley Cowell. I am not as eclectic as this album might have you guess. But I can't but help respond to the world's music and find in it a limitless fount.

I do have preferences. I would really rather listen to any Soul Train show from the 1970s that practically the whole corpus of "classic" rock. I really find the trumpet and flugelhorn of Freddie Hubbard more inspirational to me than many pianists. I would rather listen to Duke Ellington than Brahms. I would rather listen to Patrick Williams' television scores than most contemporary concert music! Influence is a mysterious thing.

I agree with Miles Davis that art and life are "all about style." Styles are made up of little gestures or details.

For example the late and very great Bobby Short had a habit of punctuating in between the musical phrases he sung these wild upward arpeggios on the piano. Even more remarkably, he would often hit or slap the top C key of the keyboard as part of these arpeggios, seemingly in indifference to whatever the key of the song was.
In a similar vein, the pianist Bill Evans would start a solo portion of a piece with the most glowing and radiant statement of the dominant of the key, usually with added extensions, really usually what some call a sus chord of some kind. It set the tone, the stage for the piece, it always struck me as like a plant and the sun meeting in sympathetic harmony. Both of these ideas were the initial inspiration for the very first piece on the recording, The Royal Blue Trickle. Yet I doubt anybody listening is going to think necessarily of either Bill Evans or Bobby Short even though both, in so many ways, are guiding spirits behind this whole recording.

I grew up watching Soul Train every Saturday so that would have to be a spirit or a soul guide on this album as much or more than anything else especially as Don Cornelius passed away recently.



As a result of such inquiry, forms of pop made their way in, but on my own personal terms. Yes you might hear rock in here but I hope the articulation will be more Cedar Walton than Steve Winwood. (Nothing against Steve Winwood).



Even though I have some sympathy for Stravinsky's hyperbolic claim that music doesn't express things, especially in a contemporary climate in which tendentious and irresponsible musical scholars try to claim that there is a spirit of sexual pathology or masculinist flaws in something as wonderfully abstract as Beethoven, I nevertheless wanted to make a philosophical argument but in musical language, in the most abstract musical form no less, music without words: piano alone. Music might not have the specificity of narrative representation but it is the most highly expressive art of which I am aware perhaps because of the very absence of such specificity.

Thus, when I write and perform a twelve minute work called Feminist Singer-Songwriter Without Words it is a nod to Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words, a musical interpretation of the story of women's liberation in the Berlioz programmatic mode, a way for me to "wrestle" with cliched folk material about which I have some ambivalence, a way to celebrate political feelings that I endorse, and a way to embrace "Americana", folk rock, and 1970s culture more generally - all at once. I asked myself - philosophically, conceptually, rhetorically - if I didn't have any words and I were a woman in the mid to late1970s and wanted to do something instrumental and though unconstrained by any particular stylistic restrictions but still acknowledged my love for Bob Dylan and Carole King and Elton John like a lot of my peers, and by some fluke I got assigned to write a "classical" piece of music for some feminist anniversary of some kind, what would the resulting music sound like? This imagined hypothetical though experiment of a woman would be confronting many things at once: love for the identity and meaning of a certain music, need to stretch and expand out of an alleged comfort zone, the need to communicate as well to a wider public than her sisters in the revolution.

Except there is a catch. That piece doesn't end like that. Now the way I would write it is to take the end result I just described and hand it over to Charles Ives or maybe through some ideas of Bill Evans. I like to go out once and a while and I do like dramatic contrast. As much as I experiment on this album with trance-like ostinatos and repetitions, I do have to deliver some contrast. Music for me is a very delicate matter; the end result may have a rough texture at times, but it has to be right, and I might spend a long time indeed to get it to where I am satisfied.

A lot of my love for things has very little and at times frankly nothing to do with all of the things surrounding that thing that I love, all of that context that academics and now popular audiences go on so much about. That is why, in the end, when I hear a Patrick Williams or Henry Mancini piece it matters not in the least that it was intended to accompany this or that banal or forgotten television show because I find the music to be itself so good. I am using my ears to hear what was created and am not interested in having my attention distracted unduly by all of the stuff surrounding this musical creation. The world needs both a Patrick Williams and Gustav Mahler. It needs both a Pedro Coasta and Sam Peckinpah. It matters not whether we call it high or low or popular or unpopular, but whether in some way, in the most generous sense, it moves us.

I do hope everybody enjoys the music on this album as much as I enjoyed making it, I even enjoyed writing about it on here, which is a rare thing for me.