I’m writing a piece for the NDSU Clarinet Choir, which they’ll perform at ClarinetFest 2020 in Reno, Nevada. Well, I mean, I’m not actually writing it this very minute, I’m writing this blog post. But I have been writing it. Except when I haven’t been. Which has been a lot.
This post isn’t so much a list of excuses so much as it is an exploration into the creative procrastination that goes into writing.
I didn’t want to start the piece until January–I finished the percussion quartet in mid-December, and wanted to take a break. By the time I ended up getting back to Fargo and got settled in, it was already the 10th, with classes starting the following Monday.
I had no idea what the clarinet choir piece was going to look like, so the first several days of writing were just bouncing ideas around. I ended up with this weird musical line in my head, which reminded me of some song I heard in college, and I wanted to make sure I wasn’t ripping it off. That resulted in several days of trying to remember what that song was.
It ended up being Little Talks by Of Monsters and Men. And the line stuck in my head ended up resembling this not at all. Score one for me.
Also this video is trippy.
Of Monsters And Men – Little Talks (Official Video)
So that line I heard, I still haven’t worked into the piece, because every time I start thinking about where it could fit in, it merges with MacArthur Park. I had never actually listened to the lyrics of MacArthur park until I listened through trying to figure out where it fit in.
Also the lyrics are trippy.
Part of this time has been spent looking for other clarinet choir pieces.
…
Crickets.
There’s a lot of transcriptions, but not a lot of pieces originally for clarinet choir. So inspiration is scarce. The NDSU Clarinet Choir will be playing Schickele’s Monochrome III and Curtis’s Klezmer Triptych, so I know what else is on the program.
And I almost know how this piece is going to go too.
All throughout my college career and the beginning of my teaching career, I never had a good system for keeping track of research–after all, my experience was in composing instead of research.
Within the past couple of years, I’ve finally figured out a system that works for me: Index cards.
As I read through books, I mark particularly interesting passages by earmarking pages and margin notes. Getting over the idea of writing in books took a while. When finished, I copy the passages onto index cards, note the author/title/page number, and give the card a sequential number.
I’ve scanned in the first hundred, mostly dealing with creative research, and they’re available at: https://ip.vanderburg.io/files/document/F7D4AAFB-6A53-4102-BF27-70392AFEBDAE/
Back to music projects. Some of the things we do in the music curriculum are essential operational knowledge, such as theory, history, and aural skills. While we can (and often do) put together projects as assignments, the importance is primarily the underlying knowledge, not the “how to” part. Working musicians need theoretical, aural, and historical knowledge as a skill, not necessarily as a project in itself. As such, the business suggestions mentioned earlier don’t necessarily track.
Lessons, Concerts, and Compositions are all musical projects where the process is repeated: the work is never done. Composers don’t write one piece and quit, performers don’t just give one recital. These are (usually) discrete events that must be repeated to make a musician’s career.
And yet, this is the part that it appears we don’t teach. We have students give recitals, but are we teaching students how to give recitals?
I say appears, because all I see is the result. Perhaps our students are being taught a project-based view of the music curriculum, but they’re not internalizing it, and by extension they’re not displaying it.
One of the things that I like about my job (and I mentioned this earlier) is that I get to have ideas that other people don’t, by virtue of being a composer in a music department. Since most of my job is creating things, I get to think about things in a different way. Often I refer to this as throwing “smoke bombs.”
You think you know how things work, and then someone makes a suggestion and it reframes your idea of how things work. That’s a smoke bomb.
I got to try this out recently in a committee meeting. We were discussing general education requirements and how we could rework an undergraduate certificate. The idea came up of how we structure the program, and how to get faculty buy-in for keeping track of another list of classes, and different hoops to jump through.
After sitting for a while, I suggested the idea that we make the certificate student directed. What if the students put together their curriculum and we approved it on an individual basis, rather than doing all of the work to create a unified standardized curriculum. This was not a terrific idea, but the conversation that happened after I made the suggestion was substantially different. The smoke bomb that I threw changed the nature of how we thought about the problem and how we might find a solution.
This isn’t all that different from the work that I do in composition. Students bring in different ideas, and by and large it is my job to give them other ideas that might interact with the ideas they have. Often the ideas that I suggest are painfully obvious to the student once I say them.
It’s not that they would not would not have come up with the idea on their own, but they needed a second set of eyes, a second pair of ears, or a second brain to make that obviousness known to them.
I never had the chance to take a music entrepreneurship class or a music business class in college. Drury was too small, and Oklahoma at the time wasn’t interested in such things. And with a school the size of OU, there’s a diversity of thought, and unfortunately a fair amount of thought I saw rejected music as a commercial enterprise. If you wanted to do commercial music, there was the Academy of Contemporary Music in OKC, if you want to find out how to make money with your art, well, we don’t really do that here.
This wasn’t stated, and it may even have been a minority view, but it was my perception. And I think I understand the idea. I made a conscious decision early on that I wouldn’t pursue algorithmic composition, despite my interests in both music composition and programming. My reasoning was that I wanted my art–the creative process itself–to be as organic as possible, and all the other parts of being a composer (marketing, self-promotion, deciding what to compose, etc.) should be as systematized as possible.
I happened upon–and quickly integrated–a quote by Gustave Flaubet: “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”
The question, it would appear, is where to draw the line between work and life.
After two and a half years, I’m finally giving my first faculty recital at NDSU, featuring all music written in North Dakota.
The planned program is:
The Notes Between The Notes – My song cycle featuring poems by Jamie Parsley. Michelle Gelinske (who premiered the cycle nearly a year ago) wasn’t able to perform in February, so Dr. Kelly Burns, our new voice faculty member, will be performing the cycle with Dr. Amy Mercer.
Next up is the world premiere of Tape Piece, a tape piece featuring…tape sounds.
We’ll round out the evening with the world premiere of Calibrating the Moon, commissioned and premiered by Connor Challey, and featuring Dr. Tyler Wottrich on piano.
The recital poster also features North Dakota:
I hope to see you at Beckwith Recital Hall at NDSU, on February 10 at 7:30 PM!
I don’t want to give the impression that we should blow up the music curriculum. There’s a lot we have to go through in not a lot of time.
Some of the things we have to address in the music curriculum: Grammar and/or Math (Music Theory), Fluency (Aural Skills), History (Musicology), Individual Technical and Artistic ability (Lessons), small group work (chamber music), large group work (ensembles), performance practice (recitals), and then for music education majors there’s a universe of ed classes.
Engineering doesn’t necessarily include history of science. Communication doesn’t go all the way back to grammar. We cover a lot of ground in a four-year music degree–we assume that all students read music starting out, but it’s not an absolute requirement.
But even with these challenges, there are still opportunities for entrepreneurial music teaching. There’s another problem.
Everything we do in Music is a project.
We very much do not teach music this way.
Thinking back to the list of things from the College of Business, they’re all project- or product-driven. You don’t need Idea Generation for existing, you need Idea Generation for improvement or for something new.
In Music, every new composition is a project that requires Idea Generation, Business Model creation, Audience identification, and so on.
In Music, every concert is a project that requires the same or more.
In Music, every ensemble is a project that requires the same or more.
In Music, every lesson is a project that requires the same or more.
And so on.
Continued from yesterday.
Some of the suggestions that the College of Business suggested we change or include in Music Entrepreneurship involve the following topics:
Idea Generation, Creation, and Evolution.
Customer Interviews
Project Management
Value Proposition
Business Model Canvas
Channels
Minimum Viable Product
Exit Strategies
As I mentioned, my knee-jerk reaction was “But we don’t DO this in music!” And that tapped in to the issue I have with a lot of books on music entrepreneurship–several that I’ve read are along the lines of “You’re a musician already! Here’s how to write a business plan!” (more on this later)
Getting this list from the College of Business (and to be clear, the list was far more detailed and informative than what I’ve included–I’ve excerpted to protect their ideas and mine) forced me to question why we don’t do some of those things, and it started becoming clear that we should.
About 10 months ago, NDSU ramped up their Entrepreneurship efforts, all branded as NICE: NDSU Innovation, Creativity, and Entrepreneurship. As part of that push, the NICE Center started a faculty fellowship (called NICE Fellows. Seriously.) of which I’m pleased to be a part. One of the things I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about since is how we teach music entrepreneurship at NDSU and elsewhere.
Our Music Entrepreneurship class is a music business class originally intended for juniors and seniors seeking elective credit, and has become a requirement for all music majors. Which is great to have in the curriculum, but it creates a challenge in developing curriculum, especially as sophomores through seniors take it. It’s in a perpetual stage of being tweaked.
Recently I submitted the course in consideration to substitute ENTR 301, the College of Business’s “Entrepreneurship Toolbox” course. Business responded with a list of suggestions of how we could bring our course in line with their course, which my first thought was “These are great, but we don’t…do…this in music.”
And then I started wondering why.