One of the issues I deal with every day as a composer (every day I get to compose, that is), is the tension between what I want to hear and what's "grateful" for the performer to play. I suspect a lot of us are in this boat now. It started with minimalism. There are a lot of postminimal pieces I love listening to, and then I open the score and see page upon page of streaming 8th-notes without rests, or multiple tied whole-notes for wind players, or intricate permutational passages within small ranges, and think, "Boy, I love hearing it, but I'm glad it's not me who has to play it."

I wouldn't want to seem critical by naming pieces, but the locus classicus I show to students in this respect is Steve Reich's Variations for Winds, Strings, and Keyboards of 1979. Stunning piece, I love hearing it, but I look at those wind parts, and my first thought is "oxygen deprivation." My second is, "Imagine the kind of concentration needed to keep all those fast patterns lined up right through changing meters for 20 minutes." And Tehillim? Jeezus, what a workout! I remember when the Netherlands opera orchestra started working on Glass's Satyagraha and the players leaked bitter complaints to the press about having to saw away on 8th-notes for quarter-hours at a time. The paradigms for that music came from Reich's and Glass's personal ensembles, either keyboard- or mallet-percussion-based, and - I don't really know about mallets - but it's kind of easy to lose yourself in a mechanical groove fingering away endlessly at the keyboard. Breathing's not an issue, nor do you have to continually keep your elbow in the air.

Glass and Reich also had a few wind and string performers, like Jon Gibson and Barbara Benary, who developed the technique for it; plus, in those early works it was sometimes acceptable to drop out occasionally for a few notes and come back in again.

In general, though, performers aren't too happy to be handed endurance tests, and a lot of my compositional technique has gone toward preserving the qualities I want from minimalism while giving the performers something graceful and rewarding to play. I'm writing a string quartet. My impulse would be to keep the players pretty much con fined to one string for ten minutes at a time, but I want them to use the whole range of their instruments, not get too tired, and feel each phrase as something musical. So I'm wracking my brain to introduce frequent variety and gently nuanced phrases without introducing any drama, anguish, or climaxes whatever, anything that will disturb the placid, uniform surface I want. And page turns! - boy, did that get me in trouble with my guitar quartet Composure. We all agreed that having a page-turner next to each guitarist would look pretty silly, so I went back and finagled some two-measure rests in so they could keep going. But the postminimalist textural paradigm I favor tends to keep everyone playing all the time. This was more feasible when the music was so repetitive that the score would fit on two pages, like In C.

I'm also working on a piano piece whose concept keeps the pianist's left hand in the lower half of the bass clef throughout, and it's a pretty quick piece. So I'm carefully arranging rhythms in intuitively graspable hierarchies so the pianist's brain can proceed by phrases rather than tediously note-to-note. One of the most dangerous things I ever did in this respect was the last movement of Transcendental Sonnets, in which each of the chorus's SATB parts never strays more than a minor third from the pitch it starts on; turned out to be kind of exhaustingly di cult, as I taught myself before turning it in by singing through all the parts myself. I went back through and added occasional appoggiatura in flections to make it a little easier, and that helped. I love that effect of the chords hovering almost motionless as the harmony changes, but the singers would have had a much easier job leaping around from time to time.

The problem is that I'm trying to introduce into live performance a paradigm that comes from ambient music, and whose origins are electronic. In the abstract, this is not a novel concern. In the '50s and '60s, composers like Boulez and Stockhausen and Ligeti were introducing concepts from electronic music (like bandwidth) into their music, which gave the performers some new challenges. Many from my generation infuse postclassical music with the gestures of rock. Classical music isn't really a receptive medium for all these foreign paradigms. It's strange, when you think about it: Ligeti should have made electronic music, Michael Gordon should have been a rock star, and I should have made ambient music, but instead we pick up new paradigms in these areas and bring them back to torture string quartets and orchestras with. The serialists, finding safety in numbers, managed to create a class of performers specialized to play their atomized rhythms and textures. (I know of one soprano who's made such a career of singing major sevenths and minor ninths exquisitely that she sounds pretty shaky trying to effect a major scale.) Will we postminimalists ultimately nurture a repertoire of performers suited to our exorbitant needs? Well, we've got Joe Kubera the human player piano, who's great for all those relentless devices that drive everyone else nuts. But other players I know will play such things when they have to, and hope they don't have to too often.

Some composers, of course, take the attitude (and will write in with it here), "Just write the music you want to hear and let the performers deal with it, it's their problem." But I really want my performers to enjoy playing my pieces, and most of all, I want the music to sound like the performers are really into it. After one concert I reviewed for the Voice I remarked that I wanted to go onstage and cordon off the performers with a yellow "Men at work" banner. I want to hear performers play, not work. I treasure the fact that Sarah Cahill finds my Private Dances fun to play. And I'm going to continue losing sleep over this string quartet until it plays like Schubert and sounds like me.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

COMMENTS:

Rodney Lister says: As my composition teacher Malcolm Peyton used to remind me, pieces (parts) that are interesting/fun to play/grateful get practiced more. I don't think that the "write what you hear" mantra means that you're not supposed to make what you write playable and grateful for what ever instrument/ensemble you're writing for. So, I guess the point of this is to offer my affirmation of/agreement with everything you wrote.

Daid Anchel says: I totally agree. I performed on the first recording of Glass’ “Einstein on the Beach.” as the bass in most of the ensembles. There was one section that was supposed to be sung by a 32 person choir, but there were only four of us. In addition, it required about 10 minutes of music where there was no place to breathe. We accomplished this by singing 2 measures and resting 2 measures and then going back, resting 2 measures and then singing the missing 2 measures. Of course, we had to do this about 4 times to create a choir of 32.
After several hours, we finished and the ensemble and some of the singers rushed to the recording booth to hear the finished piece. By that time, I never wanted to hear that music again and hid in the studio. I have to say that subsequently I have enjoyed listening to the recording, but the memory of how unpleasant it was to record still remains.
KG replies: Wow.

Andrea says: A friend of mine recently commented that I was a marathon runner trying to write marathon music for sprinters. I'm glad she figured this out, though, because I now have a better idea of how to write for her and some of my other colleagues. I understand better what they are good at. It doesn't solve the problem, of course, of getting continuous music played continuously.
I found it eye-opening in college when our wind ensemble worked on David Maslanka's Symphony #2: pretty much anything that is moto perpetuo is split up between two players. While I am fond of the kind of solo virtuosity that can handle mechanic motion, I have to realize everyone has their limits. Expanding the ensemble is not a bad solution.
@dtoub
Circular breathing unfortunately does not equal endless stamina. Circular breathing is actually fairly exhausting for long periods of time, because it's not like normal breathing. Then there's the issue of saliva build-up... If you haven't read Robert Dick's book on circular breathing, check it out.

karl7777 says: While reading your post, I was reminded of this Charles Rosen quote:
"The music that survives is the music that musicians want to play. They perform it until it finds an audience. Sometimes it is only a small audience, as is the case so far for Arnold Schoenberg, and I am not sure if he will ever capture a large one, but he will be performed as long as there are musicians who insist on playing him. The most significant composers are those that gain the fanatical loyalty of some performers." - Charles Rosen ("Critical Entertainments: Music Old and New")
Your concerns seem valid. Devoted and enthusiastic performers are worth their weight in gold.

Mclaren says: If the composer has the attitude "write what you want and don't worry about the performer"...well, that's what computers and Pro Tools are for, aren't they?
Why does anyone have to perform the thing? Make it as hard to play as you want, then use MIDI or Csound or MAX/MSP or PD or Blue or a multitrack digital recorder whatever. We're no longer living in the 19th century.
As for the claim that "the music that survives is the music that performers want to play" -- oh, really? So Pierre Schaeffer's tape music and Tod Dockstader's tape music and Vladimir Ussachevsky's tape music and Richard Karpen's tape music and John Chowning's computer music and Bill Schattstaedt's computer music and Paul Lansky's computer music survives and keeps selling on CD because those computers and tape recorders really really want to play it, huh..?
KG replies: The biggest mistake of my life was to drop out of electronic music. Shoulda hung in there. And it's difficult to get a commission for an electronic piece anyway.

Erling Wold says: s usual, a great article and a great conversation. I've been worrying about all this with my latest tune, which is nowhere near as relentless as some of the pieces you mention, but still has a touch of the no-rest problem and the how-many-times-have-I-played-this problem.
I've attempted the solution suggested by Mclaren, back when my performance problems stemmed from religious belief in microtonality, and I do agree with him fundamentally, but I found it hard to be all things: composer and performer and recording engineer. Also, I do simply like live performance. Composition and realization is a small part of the musical experience for me, the fullness of which extends into so much more, not the least of which is the social aspects, drinking and flirting with the performers. There is also a stir craziness that comes with sitting in the basement tweaking a parameter here and nudging an timing there night after night.
Sometimes difficulty is fun in itself. Performers love to complain about everything, but they still are attracted to a good piece and they really don't want something too easy. I'm sure you've heard the Ives quote about the pedal part in Variations on America. I think about that quote all the time while I'm writing and wonder if the moment I'm constructing will be one of those that clicks into place once you get it. Success is also a great way to engage a performer. Even the most daunting piece is remembered with pleasure after a few curtain calls.

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