This Isn't Band Music
by Steven Bryant
Originally published in Volume 8 of the WASBE Journal (2003)
"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture."
Elvis Costello, in an interview by Timothy White entitled "A Man out of Time Beats the Clock." Musician magazine No. 60 (October 1983), p. 52.
"How about a square dance?"
Laurie Anderson, Home of the Brave (video, Warner, 1986)
When we write about music, it is necessarily a process one step removed from the actual power, beauty, and wonder of direct musical experience. Discussing music you've never heard is even less fruitful, and is perhaps akin to knitting about quantum physics. For this reason, I encourage the reader to listen to a few of the pieces I discuss below to see if I put my music where my mouth is. Despite the title of the article, these pieces are written for the band medium (generally defined as a large, somewhat changeable core group of wind and percussion instruments - any further refinement always seems to incite vehement disagreement). It's not the instrumentation which I deny, it's the particular sound and compositional clichés of the music so commonly referred to as "band music." While there are necessarily certain inherent characteristics of an ensemble of winds and percussion, I believe the majority of works narrow this sound-world to only a sliver of its potential domain, and that this is a key factor in the discussion of creating quality music for this ensemble. I'm basically reiterating a common topic from the previous issue of this Journal: the segregation in our assessment of quality between music for bands and music for other ensembles (primarily, but not limited to, orchestra and large chamber groups). Why measure the quality of music for band against only other works in the "band ghetto" (as termed by Paul Somers in the 2000 issue)? Why does a band have to sound like a band has always sounded? Well, it doesn't, and I hope my music demonstrates this to some degree.
But first, why do I write for band at all? My first impetus come from my familiarity with the band medium. My father was a band director and music administrator for 36 years and an assistant to J. Raymond Brandon (past president of the American School Band Directors' Association), so I grew up immersed in the band world. In addition, growing up in the southern United States meant I had little experience of orchestras and string players. These are all reasons I was drawn to writing for band in the beginning, but the two sustaining reasons I've continued to write for the wind ensemble medium are, first: there is a much higher chance I will hear my music performed, and second: commissions. There are simply more commissions available in this realm than in the others, and when it comes to a choice between doing something I enjoy (such as writing an orchestral work), or doing something I enjoy and being paid for it (such as writing for band), I will place the higher priority on the latter. This may be more honest than some some people are comfortable hearing, and I hope I am not misunderstood: I do not advocate writing music you don't wish to write, simply because you will get paid for it. I enjoy writing for band, and I enjoy listening to the power and energy a band can create. I was writing pieces for the ensemble long before there was any money involved. My first work was for my high school band, which I conducted on our final concert my senior year. (If I had known beforehand how much work simply copying the parts would be, I probably wouldn't have attempted it...) And, as an undergraduate student of Francis McBeth, I wrote a new work each year, simply because there was a guaranteed performance by the Ouachita band each Spring (for those of you doing the math, yes, that means I have five band works that predate Chester Leaps In, and no, you'll never hear them). This reiterates my first point above: I wrote music for band because I knew I would get to hear it performed, whereas if I'd written an orchestra work each year, I would never have heard any of them. McBeth hammered this point home repeatedly as my teacher: you never learn more about composing than when you hear your music performed. I believe I've learned more quickly by writing for bands than if I'd written for orchestra or other ensembles. While one could argue I've mainly been learning how to write for band, I'd counter that the larger formal issues transcend the particular instrumentation, and that I can handle the temporal aspects of large-form composition for an orchestra (or other groups) more skillfully now than I could have if I'd only been writing for orchestra the entire time (and never hearing what I'd written). Ultimately, my job as a composer is to shape the listeners' experience of time, and the more of my music I'm able to experience as a listener, the more fully I learn my craft. There is no substitute for experience.
So, should writing for band be treated identically to writing for other ensembles? Obviously, writing for band does require a different approach than for other ensembles, primarily because you don't know exactly what instrumentation will be performing the piece. This results in the doubling so prevalent in much of wind music, and thus the stereotypical diluted, homogeneous texture found throughout many pieces. This sound - the "band music" sound - is not a physical requirement of the ensemble. However, as soon as you approach composing for the band in an orchestral manner, that is to say, with a soloistic emphasis, the piece is immediately labeled "for advanced groups" because it contains so much "exposed" writing. Precisely. If you want the variety and expressivity of an orchestra, then you can't limit the range of orchestrational choices to simply "the brass" or "the brass and percussion" (with the woodwinds serving as largely inaudible decoration). Don't tell me about the variety of color available with a band unless you're prepared to actually use them. Don't tell me to cue the oboe with a muted trumpet (they are most certainly NOT the same), or to double the horns with the alto saxophones again - what if the sound I really want (and expect every single time the piece is performed) is a beautiful soaring horn line, not a gaggle of saxophones covering up the two horn players in the band? Then I guess I shouldn't write for band. That's the answer that I'm afraid many composers arrive at when they face the challenges of writing music for the wind ensemble medium. This safety-in-scoring mentality is (I believe) a strong factor in the watered-down nature of so much band music, and while it has its roots in necessity, at least among young educational ensembles, its effects on the perception of all music for the band community are pervasive.
Despite my focus on the orchestrational weaknesses of band music, I should make it clear that I'm not advocating a complete denial of all tradition and practice. My music has plenty examples of common band scoring, and there are reasons of physics and practicality that compositional practices for winds have evolved as they have. The band's most obvious characteristic is its power and volume, and I fully intend to continue taking advantage of that fact - I'm simply urging all of us to broaden our assessment of the potential of this ensemble.
In assessing my own compositions for this genre, I believe the strongest characteristic of my music is its large-scale formal progression: the temporal and perceptual balance of unity and variety the listener experiences. My music always "goes somewhere," and usually attempts to drag the audience along whether they want to go or not. This has long been my stated motto of composing: "I want to create music that gives you no choice but to listen." While I've been guilty of doing this through the loud, fast, relentless-barrage-of-energy method (see Monkey, Loose Id for Orchestra, and RedLine [unreleased]), I don't believe it's the only approach.
For example, pieces such as Chester Leaps In and Interruption Overture rely on the juxtaposition of two disparate musical elements for their formal design, but the placing and timing of these interruptions is far from random. In order to interrupt an idea, it must be presented fully and convincingly to begin with, and the interrupting material mustn't overstay its welcome, lest it lose its quality as a humorous intruder, and simply become annoying. To put it more analytically: these pieces rely heavily on establishing a context, and then puncturing that context at just the right intervals, and for just the right duration, without destroying its continuity.
What follows is a brief overview of several of my works for band. These are not analyses of the pieces, merely descriptions with some anecdotal background. If you have a specific question about a particular work, please contact me directly through my website.
Chester Leaps In
Chester Leaps In is intended as a humorous, cartoonish piece, contructed from the juxtaposition of two divergent musical ideas: a chromatic, angular melodic motive, repeatedly interrupted by the harmonic simplicity of William Billings' well-known hymn tune, "Chester."
The original incarnation of this piece, scored for two marimbas and piano, was created in 1995 while I was a graduate student at the University of North Texas. I remember walking around the campus with the first fragment of "Chester" incessantly repeating in my head. At first it was just below the level of consciousness, but eventually I could no longer ignore it, and knew I had to exorcise it in some fashion.
At the same time, I was playing with a silly-sounding motive (which is now the opening of the piece) - one of those many fragments of music that I toy with, never intending to let anyone else hear it. These ideas are the equivalent of doodling with pencil and paper while talking on the phone - not intended as Anything of Significance. Sometimes, however, that's the best way to let the subconscious do its work without impedance from the internal critic of the trained, conscious mind. In this case, I was stuck on another piece (which eventually became Loose Id for brass quintet and percussion), and needed something fun as a diversion. Over the course of five consecutive afternoons, Chester Leaps In was born in its entirety, almost completely by accident. It wasn't until the fourth day or so that I admitted to myself this was actually going to be a complete piece of music, and that I would let others hear it. A few months later the piece was premiered, but it wasn't until the following year, while at Juilliard, that my friend and fellow composer Eric Whitacre suggested transcribing it for band. In retrospect, this seems an obvious evolution of the piece, given the familiarity of the original tune in the band community.
It is a short work, and I anticipate composing future movements in the same vein, ultimately forming a sort of parody suite. ImPercynations is the second in this series, with a march-like work in progress.
Monkey
Shortly after completing Chester Leaps In, I began work on a piece I'd joked about for several months, called Monkey. Commissioned by Thomas Leslie and the University of Las Vegas Wind Orchestra, it is the quasi-narrative of a group of young primates, shrieking in unbridled, unsurpervised pandemonium, who eventually come face-to-face with the ominous threat of adult discipline. They rebel. Discipline fails. The hour of scampering erupts, and mayhem escalates until young and old alike are indistinguishable. Simian hysteria overtakes all.
The piece is quite fast and involves almost continual orchestrational volleying, something I see as an evolution of the cartoonish figures in Chester Leaps In. Monkey was also a natural extension of my ongoing fascination with visceral experience in music, and since several of my pieces during that time were energetic and primal in nature, this seemed natural, explicit compositonal direction.
Interruption Overture
As difficult as it is to compose a frenetic, virtuosic work such as Monkey, it is perhaps even more difficult to write music for beginning musicians, a challenge I faced when commissioned to write Interruption Overture for the Bartle School sixth-grade band in Highland Park, New Jersey. Producing a viable piece of music, while working within the limited tessitura and dynamic range inherent in a young ensemble, proved to be a daunting challenge for me. Common characteristics of my music up to this point had been fast tempi, sustained intensity, extreme tessitural peaks, and a general tendency toward virtuosic orchestration. I sought to strip away these elements and find compositional tools that were musically useful, educational, and playable by beginning musicians. I also wanted to somehow avoid or defy the common trappings of most "educational music" for young bands. This certainly wasn't going to be another piece named after a suburban subdivision in middle America, and I knew it was incumbent upon me to find my own solution to the common results of the "safety-in-scoring" mentality I mentioned earlier. In this case, instead of trying to avoid the typical band sound (nearly impossible with most younger groups because of the simple lack of orchestrational choices and musical experience), I sought to subvert the familiar "beginning band" piece by creating a straight-forward melody in Bb major, with familiar harmonic accompaniment, and then rudely interrupting it at certain moments with, alternatively, blasting dissonance or frenzied aleatoric bursts. In this regard, Interruption Overture is the musical inverse of Chester Leaps In - in Chester, it is the twisting, chromatic material that is interrupted by straight-forward, familiar harmony, while in Interruption Overture the reverse is true. By giving the musicians a familiar sound world, and subsequently the opportunity to step outside this world for brief, controlled moments, I hope to give them renewed, invigorated interest in their band experience, while producing a piece of music that is structurally solid and engaging for the audience. I'd like to thank William Kellerman and the Highland Park Educational Foundation for raising the funds to make this commission possible. I believe such active community involvement is one of the most powerful tools in furthering education, and consequently strengthening the health and vigor of our society.
A Million Suns at Midnight
When the Arkansas State Band and Orchestra Association and the Arkansas Choral Director's Association first contacted me about composing a work for the year 2000 All-State convention, I was both excited and reluctant. After all, they wanted me to write a work for the First Band, the String Orchestra, and all three choirs, combined - nearly 650 performers in all. On top of that, I was to conduct the whole thing! After conquering my fear, and succumbing to the incredible opportunity this commission presented, A Million Suns at Midnight was born. I subsequently created a second version for band and chorus alone (no string orchestra). The work is just under ten minutes in length, and instead of describing the piece, I will simply include the program note from the score. Though written long before the events of September 11th, 2001, and with a different set of societal and technological changes in mind, it seems particularly relevant now. The full text (written by my good friend Kevin Dunlop) is available on my website.
Though somewhat dark and dramatic in character, A Million Suns at Midnight is ultimately a hopeful, optimistic work, evoking the struggle of humanity to grow, achieve, and evolve, finally overcoming our fear (and its most common manifestation: violence ) to transcend our physical and mental boundaries. The arrival of the the year 2000 is a potent marker for this transcendance. The pace of societal and technological evolution in the world is accelerating exponentially, and we seem to be on the threshold of truly revolutionary changes in the way the human species (co)exists. The potentials of genetic manipulation, nanotechnology, and the creation of computers powerful enough to be called conscious (projected by Ray Kurzweil, Hans Moravec, and others, to occur within the next three decades) may provide us with the ability to either provide food and shelter for every person on the planet, or destroy its human habitability altogether. When this level of power is available to common individuals, we must all become more than common individuals. We must ensure that the million suns at midnight are not those of fiery destruction, but of a bright hope.
Alchemy in Silent Spaces
Alchemy in Silent Spaces is music of transformation. A large-scale 20-minute, three-movement work, Alchemy was commissioned by Ray Cramer and the Indiana University Wind Ensemble, and I hope it, perhaps more than the others, transcends the typical expectations of "band music" I mentioned above. This was a perfect opportunity to explore subtlety and space in my music, and no longer "hide behind the notes." The music originates from a work for solo flute and piano I had written as an undergraduate student of Francis McBeth, and while I had long considered orchestrating it (and in the process recomposing much of it), it wasn't until the summer of 1999, when Ray Cramer proposed the project, that the process of bringing this music to life began.
The first movement, the logic of all my dreams, opens with a bright sparkling burst of sound from the piano, harp, glock., vibes, and crotales. These instruments form the basis for the first 3'20" of the piece, establishing a sparse texture propelled only by a quiet, repeated, whole-note "F" in the piano. The opening is intended to create a sense of floating timelessness, while evoking an inexorable undercurrent of forward motion. It is also about establishing mood: in order to transform spacious music of quiet delicacy and beauty, the silence and space must exist in more than just the concert hall - it must penetrate the minds of the audience. Music is more than just the sound itself, it is also the context of its presentation, and the space around a piece of music affects its experience as profoundly as the music itself does. Concert music takes place in a concert hall, and I believe it is a composer's job to bear in mind the audience's context, whether said audience consists of students who've minutes before been immersed in Eminem blasting from their car stereos, band parents arriving at the concert after a stressful day at work filled with gossiping colleagues and elevator Muzak, or faithful community concert-goers, simply there to enjoy the rousing March at the end of the show. With this in mind, I purposely have over three minutes of music, in a wind ensemble piece, where no wind instruments play. This heightens the power of the first entrance by the solo flute. The percussion, up to this point, have established a GbM7 tonality, and the flute's entrance on E-natural is somewhat startling in its shift of tonality, and the following warm, F major chord in the low brass brings a sense of resolution to the tonal instability inherent in the opening. The music begins to increase in motion, with the flute melody serving as the unifying motive throughout the rest of the movement. The music continues building until, around the 7' mark, the anticipated all-encompassing blanket of harmonic consonance arrives, continually washing over the audience in waves of warmth. The movement ends, however, with a single chord repeated four times in the vibraphone and piano, quietly setting the stage for the solo flute to return in the second movement.
Movement ii., points of attraction, opens with an extended flute solo built from a motivic fragment from the first movement. In fact, all three movements are built from related material. The movement has a superficially similar form, in that it grows gradually from spaciousness to density, picking up momentum along the way. However, the pervasive optimism of the first movement gives way to an increasingly frantic pace, as the music spirals upward and outward, and instead of reaching a climactic plateau, winds itself out and comes to a grinding halt in the upper range of the ensemble. Five brief, solemn chords conclude the movement, which immediately erupts into the still point of destruction.
The third movement is built from an intervallic construction found in the first two (or perhaps it's just a motivic fragment? I'll leave it to the theorists to tell me what I've done). However, the character of the music has been transformed, and is now of unceasing, but also unsettling, motion, propelled by a driving ostinato which is repeatedly interrupted by bittersweet moments of lyricism, all the while pushing toward an unforgiving climax. These abrupt shifts of character spring from the same compositional tendency that gave birth to Chester Leaps In and Interruption Overture, though in this guise, they are not intended for comic effect. This movement finally fulfills the anticipatory nature of the first two in a five-minute burst of driving energy that, nevertheless, retains remnants of their lyricism, ultimately concluding in a nearly catastrophic frenzy of sound.
While the titles of the movements are intentionally evocative, they do not connote a specific, discernible storyline. There is no explicit narrative to the piece, though many particular elements do have personal quasi-biographical significance. Ultimately, this music is about transformation, both personal and musical.
Now that you have an overview of some of my works for the band genre, I'd like to close by stressing that while I have explored different emphases in different pieces, I haven't "evolved beyond" any of these styles, nor ruled any others out - I simply like to have options, and avoid becoming stuck in a rut. I also write electronic and electro-acoustic music, and would never want to confine myself to any particular style or genre. So, while this is the journal of an organization dedicated to Symphonic Band Ensembles, and this article is a discussion of my music for such groups, I believe it is important to share other areas of my creative output. I invite the readers to listen to some of my other "non-band" music on my website as well. This brings me to a final point of discussion I wish to raise: the use of electronics with the wind ensemble. This is obviously an enormous topic, and I will simply say that perhaps, despite the difficulties of incorporating electronic elements into the standard rehearsal and concert experience, the use of electronic techniques offers a possible solution to the instrumentation/orchestration problem from above. When a synthesizer, tape playback, or other type of sound generation is used, it can be as virtuosic as desired, and fill any timbral void, without necessarily requiring the same advanced musicianship or experience from the live performers. This is just one of a vast number of possibilities that present themselves when the sound world of the band is augmented with electronics. While I expect there to be reluctance, even resentment, to accepting this evolution of the wind ensemble, it's already happening. Regardless of the instruments and methods used in its creation, the key is to always strive for the goal of quality music.