Coming to Terms Together - Dr. Nicholas DeMaison

Coming to Terms Together

Dr. Nicholas DeMaison Director of Orchestral Studies John J. Cali School of Music Montclair State University

What exactly is an orchestra1 good at?

This question assumes an orchestra is good at something, and that the something an orchestra is good at is essentially unique, otherwise the orchestra as a social practice would have been abandoned long ago. Further: it must be that I/we (still) care about the uniqueness of orchestral engagement, because there are few collectives outside of professional sports that are so expensive, require such an absurd amount of training of its membership, demand such specific and not terribly versatile spaces to work in, and (perhaps most egregiously) subsist on a group of technologies that are between 100 and 500 years old. In what other sphere of life do we strive for mastery of 200-year-old technologies?

Yet, when our musical lives vanished in a disorienting flurry of forced abandonment due to COVID-19, it felt like a deeply acute loss.

Why? We have not lost music. The idea that “humans can lose music” lands logically impossible. We are human, therefore we music. It’s just that right now, it’s more complicated.

Please note: I don’t just mean that making music together has become more complicated because we cannot gather. At a faculty meeting of the John J Cali School of Music, a representative from a student organization called Musicians for Social Justice2 raised a number of concerns to the faculty. One that struck me in particular (yet again) was the issue of representation. The point was (is), quite simply, that representation matters. It matters if the composers we program are culturally homogenous or not. As we know, the banding together of a mixed body of wind, brass, percussion, and string instruments, tuned in equal temperament (etc.) was a social practice cultivated in aristocratic Europe, and the body of literature extracted from said practice is, therefore, not exactly one of diverse authorship. The possibilities for representation within pre-1900 classical composers, is, to say the least, limited.

If we are working solely from within this received canon, is it possible to overcome the problem of inadequate representation?

Sometime after that meeting, a professional violist friend of mine introduced me to the Instagram account @OrchestraIsRacist. I’m not so naïve as to think that the Classical-Industrial-Complex isn’t inherently racist, but reading such a long stream of personal narratives brought home for me in a different way just how hard it can be to be a person of color striving to achieve within classicallyoriented musical-social spheres. The kinds of discussions being initiated here are not the kinds of discussions that have been readily or openly held in the classical music world.

So given the above, we have two crises we all must address, both of an existential nature:

a.) we cannot gather together to make music, and

b.) even if we could gather together, we would find ourselves in the rather dubious business of attempting to forward what has been a pervasively racist institution.

I submit here a path forward, one embraced at Montclair State this fall, and one that, given a degree of persistence beyond the pandemic, I believe can address both crises for better and in the long run.

Have you watched Olympic Synchronized Diving? It’s worth an excursion down a YouTube rabbit hole. It’s beyond beautiful and mind-boggling that two people can do that together. For my money, it’s more impressive than Pairs Figure Skating because while two figure skaters do their best not to fall, two divers are never not falling. Imagine a tier of Olympic Synchronized Diving for, say, teams of ten divers diving from a really wide platform. That would be phenomenal! What about a team of 90 divers? Or another brief thought experiment: Google has over 10,000 engineers who are, on average, organized into teams of 30. Individuals within teams work along the same schedule of development to role out new features. Imagine wherein for Google to roll out a new feature, the development team had to enter code while typing in perfect synchronicity for, say, 48 minutes. Then imagine the scenario wherein the development of a more complex feature required, let’s say, three teams simultaneously working together. Imagine 90 developers typing code in perfect synchronicity for an hour. That image turns out to be the opposite of 90 divers diving in unison, evoking something more along the lines of dystopian corporate nightmare.

This is exactly what orchestras3 are good at: thinking, communicating, and acting in synchronicity (without, hopefully, evoking a corporate dystopian nightmare, or risking multiple simultaneous spinal injuries). Unfortunately, as we ALL know by now, the one thing that even the best internet-based communication platforms are truly dreadful at is…synchronicity.

I am prepared to hear all of the counter-arguments about how platforms attempting to deal with synchronicity problems are “getting very close.” Bassist Mark Dresser, who has been working in telematic performance for the last twenty years acknowledges, “Do I see telematics as a replacement for live performance? Of course not.”4 On the Getting Started page of the newly developed Rehearsal Live Share platform, the developers state: “The holy grail for this type of feature is to have a full ensemble singing, playing and - most importantly hearing - together as if they are in the same room…We realized that the holy grail, as cool as it undoubtedly would be, is really more of a performance experience.”5 These platforms may be getting very close, but I would submit that “getting very close” is not enough of an approximation to justify the continued pursuit of the art form. In a Zoom-based future, the orchestra as we have known it does not exist.

In addition to continuing in-person instruction as much as possible by way of a number of logistical interventions (rehearsing in rotations of no more than 15 students, in chunks of time no more than 45 minutes long with gaps in between, AND working with larger groups in outdoor spaces like the MSU Parking Garage6), the Montclair State University Orchestra is undertaking two much lower-profile aesthetic interventions. I regard both of these, essentially, as experiments.

The first experiment is a remote recording project of Frederic Rzewski’s Coming Together. 7 The piece consists of a written out bass line and a series of instructions for how musicians are to move to and from playing the bass line into a set of guided improvisational gestures derived from the bass line. For the improvisational gestures to work properly, the bass line, which is continuously running 16th notes throughout, must be essentially metronomic. For our process, we will have one student record the bass line on the piano. This track will be shared with the rest of the orchestra; players will record themselves playing a metronomic duet with the bass line. Rzewski notes the piece is usually performed with eight to ten players; we will try it with around fifty.

This project mitigates a number of problems inherent in the Zoom-orchestra recording projects attempting to simulate “traditional” orchestral practice (i.e., attempting to “replicate what an orchestra is good at”):

• Intonation discrepancies have the opportunity to be minimized as players will be listening to the actual sound of the part they are trying to synchronize with. • Because the piece is designed to sit so squarely “on the grid” (rhythmically speaking), achieving an acceptable degree of rhythmic unison should be manageable…and… • Because the piece is designed with sharp outlines that are “smudged” by way of personal improvisation, the aesthetic does not call for perfect synchronicity throughout. Achieving an “acceptable degree” of rhythmic unison is all we are after. • Because the piece is designed in modular sections, it is not necessary for any one student (other than the pianist) to provide a continuous recording of the entire piece, which would be daunting even for undergraduate music majors. All students can work in

small chunks over the course of the semester. And further, because the piece functions better as a piece when players come in and out of the texture at will, it allows for the possibility of editing out individual passages when, invariably, a fire truck passes by the home of a student making a recording.

If so inclined, we could generalize on the parameters that ought to make this project succeed, and it would be possible to create another project, perhaps original to the ensemble, exploiting the above qualities.

What other types of projects might succeed in the absence of synchronicity?

The second such project we are undertaking this fall involves a much more open-ended (but guided) improvisational format. It demands a high degree of listening and creative response, along the lines of pieces presented in Pauline Oliveros’ Anthology of Text Scores, 8 or like group-sing improvisational-arrangements regularly workshopped by Alice Parker.9 This project will be realized in small groups of musicians working together over a platform where they can hear each other while recording themselves, which means that it will be fundamentally non-metric. The final product will be a conglomeration of small group exercises based on simple parameters: limited groups of notes and the concepts of foreground/ middle ground/background.

I think of this kind of improvisational (or semiimprovisational) ensemble performance as “performing with agency.” The basic musical demands placed on the performers are similar to those of a notated score: execute your own part while listening to the parts of others. Bring all that you have learned to the table and share it with the group. Only the details of execution change. And this kind of embrace of the new is at the heart of the tradition of the orchestra and at the heart of American music making.10 Prior to Hector Berlioz, orchestras played exclusively the music of their time and their place. Berlioz looked a generation back to champion the music of Beethoven…and since then we have allowed ourselves to linger within Berlioz’s Beethoven-Centric worldview. In my own move from working almost exclusively in contemporary music back towards the traditional orchestral world, this is a dilemma I have often wrestled with: the canon matters, but how much? What could it do to our The Radical Cultural Benefit of Agency

If musicians perform with agency, they are performing with their own voice. Scholarship uncovering the long-suppressed voices buried beneath the received canon is absolutely necessary,12 but is it not at least as necessary to amplify the voices and personalities of our time and our place? In so doing, the question of equity is not just one of “representation” but of “presentation.”

What I am attempting is not musically revolutionary, but were it to be adopted on a wide scale, might be socially revolutionary. Guided improvisational work is central to the pedagogical practices of Orff, Kodaly, and Dalcroze but somehow it feels subversive in the social context of a large-ensemble performance environment, as though such improvisational undertakings were to be abandoned once music makers knew how to read notation. Why should one’s ability to read notation fluently equate to the inability to make one’s own sounds?13 Learning to read does not lead one to ignore the urge to speak. Why does the knee-jerk mindset of classical training that compels us to hear things as “right or wrong” rule our vision of the entire cultural phenomenon? If we are to address the racist nature of the Classical-IndustrialComplex, is not opening a space for every person in the room to have a voice a reasonable place to start? After all, it was hearing the individual voices of the Musicians for Social Justice (the voices of my students) that forced me to finally confront the real social nature of the musical practice I so deeply love.

I admit that this semi-live, very surreal semester feels like the best possible time to try such an initiative, not only because our practical situation compels us to do so, but also because there is no pressure for us to present a well-polished “classical orchestra” to an audience expecting exactly that. The public health stakes are too high. The aesthetic stakes induced by this social isolation are wide open, and have perhaps indirectly yielded a safer, more open-minded time for us to potentially fail in our first undertaking. And is not the embrace of potential failure central to education?

Beyond the specifics of large group improvisation, I am lobbying for the cultivation of malleable artistic practices, practices that grow along with our practicing

of them, and practices that do not call themselves diverse because there happen to be a variety of skin tones performing Beethoven, but practices that are diverse because of the variety of voices they are able to amplify simultaneously.

We will return eventually to more normalized music making. In the course of the education of our students, they will still have ample time to practice being ensemble musicians in the traditional sense. Ongoing scholarship around the world will bring us new lost voices to better represent diverse historic viewpoints. But an already anachronistic art form that persists in upholding a pervasively racist worldview will not continue to be valued in our society.

Let us dive together…

1 In this article I use “orchestra” as shorthand for any music ensemble, instrumental, vocal, or mixed of any cultural tradition. Sometimes, however, I refer to the phenomenon of the Western Classical Orchestra specifically.

2 A short article about the group: https://themontclarion.org/news/musicians-for-social-justice-persist-with-paneldespite-zoombombing/ also, their public Facebook: https:// www.facebook.com/groups/MSUMSJ/

3 And again, I use “orchestra” as shorthand for “large ensemble of musicians.”

4https://jazztimes.com/features/columns/mark-dressermichael-dessen-play-telematic-music/) 6https://www.today.com/video/hallelujah-music-students-have-choir-practice-in-parking-garage-91306053918

7Rzewski has made most of his scores available for free online. The score for Coming Together is available here: https:// imslp.org/wiki/Coming_Together_(Rzewski%2C_Frederic)

8Oliveros, P. (2013). Anthology of text scores. New York: Deep Listening Publications

9https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEhMt7OzDCk

10See also: Lewis, George E. “Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives.” Black Music Research Journal, vol. 22, 2002, pp. 215–246. JSTOR, www. jstor.org/stable/1519950

11Relatedly, Seth Colter Walls wonders aloud why it isn’t already the case that orchestras embrace improvisation: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/25/arts/music/classicalmusic-orchestra-improvisation.html

12https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/22/arts/music/ black-mozart-joseph-boulogne.html

13For more, see a discussion between composer/performer Sam Pluta (University of Chicago) and composer/trumpet player Peter Evans about the current generation of new music performers moving freely between notated and improvised music: http://archive.wetink.org/archive-03/future-visions