During this heat wave in the Delaware Valley, I am keeping cool by practicing a new piece by the Italian composer Franco Cavallone entitled “Ombre allungate,” which he graciously dedicated to me.  Inspired by winter shadows cast by the pine trees on the mountainsides of the Dolomites, it draws its harmonic processes from the theories of Roberto Lupi.  Lupi published his treatise “Armonia di Gravitazione” in 1946, and there seems to be a resurgence of interest in it, particularly among a group of composers in Torino, where Cavallone resides.  It intrigues me, as the main thrust concerns a systematic approach to the possibilities of major and minor triad combination, something already central in works of my own, especially the “Trilogia dantesca.”  I am eager to start reading it.

Two entries paraphrasing remarks on inspiration and the creative process, apropos of what I said and quoted in earlier posts.  The first from Ian Frazier, from an online reminiscence about his mentor, conductor William Appling.  The second from Johannes Brahms.

     Frazier:

To be an artist is hard. Unlike mastering a subject or a skill, being an artist partakes of mystery. In the arts, at the highest levels, technique engages with leap-of-faith, oblique transfer, E.S.P., and unknown elements.

Being a writer, or any kind of artist, involves something of magic; as an artist, you’re generally apart from most people, you’re not where any system or bureaucracy wants you to be, and what you’re doing combines things of the spirit with, basically, messing around. Art is artifice is a trick, definitely, but with endless, powerful consequences: a frail wand, but a profound spell.

[Again the outward appearance of the creative mode being mistaken for “messing around” reminds me of a reference in Emerson’s notebooks in which Ralph Waldo complains that he can’t sit in contemplation more than 5 minutes without someone in his company asking whether he has a headache – here the impression taken is that the person’s perceived lack of industry is due to illness rather than sloth. 

I wonder if Frazier’s notion of art as “trick” has any origin in e.e. cummings’ play “Him.”]

     Brahms:

There is no real creating without hard work.  An inspiration from above for which I am not responsible is a present, a gift, which I’ve made mine by dint of hard work.  And there doesn’t have to be any hurry about that…it germinates unconsciously.  Once I’ve found the first phrase I might shut the book there, go for a walk, do some other work, and maybe not think about it again for months.  Nothing, however, is lost.  If afterward I approach the subject again, it is sure to have taken shape on its own, apart from myself.

[Biographer Jan Swafford views Brahms as presaging Freudian theories of the subconscious and its workings.]

A few more comments on the Diabelli Variations, following up on my post of April 1. 

Katherine, the musicologist/protagonist in Kaufman’s play, is more affected by the maestoso aspect than the martial.  For her the variation regally announces embarking on an odyssey that will demand courage.  Let us think of another situation in which Beethoven marks “maestoso,” the introduction of Op. 111.  There seems to be nothing regal about this, unless the scene means to depict the regent desperately embattled, perhaps with a deity hurling bolts of lightning.  Rather than majestic reassurance in the face of trepidation, Variation 1 in my mind embodies more of the rude juxtapositioning that Diane Walsh alludes to (see the recent issue of LISTEN, article by Linda Fowler, p. 30), and which Beethoven is so well known for.  A further confrontational interpretation comes from Dary John Mizelle, who explained the contrast in more nationalistic terms, that Beethoven’s first variation aimed to Germanicize the Italianate theme. 

And about that theme, once examined more fully, it shares much more musical DNA with themes of Beethoven beyond those already discussed.  For instance, the great c-minor sonata for piano and violin, Op. 30, No. 2, readily offers comparative examples.  Take the first four notes (plus initial grace note) of the Scherzo – same gesture as Diabelli’s motif.  We have just been discussing triple vs. duple meter.  The rhythmic argument of the Scherzo is founded upon this rivalry.  Then think of the opening motif of Beethoven’s first movement, and relate it to the eighth note bass figure of the Diabelli theme, measure 3 into 4.  This same grouping is then the principal subject of the 8th Symphony.

To further my attempt at discussing inspiration (blog entry August 1, 2008), I quote Peter Malone, who writes that “influence and inspiration make an uneasy pair.  Inspiration is the recognition of something perhaps already present in the deepest self, and in any case only knowable intimately.”  By contrast, “influence is a force that may spring from any point in the surrounding cultural environment.  The difference between them is that an artist can choose to respond to influence, while inspiration is felt on too deep a level for discourse.  An artist’s ability to accept or reject influence is often taken as a sign of growth and maturity.  But inspiration is not even perceptible until its transfer is complete.  Inspiration is private, idiosyncratic and easily relates to intuition, sensibility, and those properties we associate with feeling.  Influence on the other hand is public.  It transpires in a shared environment.  It can be located, mapped, imitated, absorbed or discarded.”  Malone sees power in inspiration, weakness in influence.  “Unlike influence, the purely instinctive nature of an artist’s inspiration is often difficult to convey in words.”  He quotes Arthur Koestler: “true creativity often starts where language ends.”

The complexity and mystery of the inward process by which inspiration ultimately manifests itself in a finished externalized work are difficult to unravel. A case in point for Malone is Barnett Newman, who “wrote eloquently of an inspirational visit to ancient Native American burial mounds; yet “finding a visual correlation to burial mounds in Newman’s work is at best a challenge.” (from Inspiration, Influence and Choice: The Education of Ying Li, exhibition brochure March 2009, KCC Gallery/Bklyn/CUNY) 

Sylvano Arieti spoke of true creativity as a “magic synthesis,” an interconnected process involving disciplined and directed thought, deceptively “inactive” outward behaviors, dreams and visions, and sudden illumination.  He noted that the mind itself, once supplied with the crucial stimuli, seemed to work things out on its own.  James Gleich remarked also about the gestation phase of the process as often giving a mistaken impression of indolence or lack of industry.  Stravinsky was concerned about what a composer does in his non-composing time, hoping that it lend itself to the unconscious working out of creative problems, rather than constrict the flow toward solutions (for instance, by having to correct counterpoint assignments!).  Apropos of all this is a passage from a study on sleep apnea, published a while back in Harvard Magazine.  The researcher used as a simile that process which allows the pianist, who finds one day a figure almost impossible to get into the fingers no matter how long he practices it, but after a restorative night’s sleep, wakes up the next day suddenly able to play it with ease.

In Malone’s essay on Ying Li, one discovers that the experience of an almost insignificant image can trigger a dynamic response on canvas and even point the direction for a painter’s stylistic evolution.  The Diabelli Variations are attracting much attention these days as a result of the new Kaufman play.  Over the course of 33 variations,  Diabelli’s trivial waltz theme is ultimately transformed by Beethoven into a monument that rivals Bach’s Goldberg Variations.  (I say ‘ultimately’ because at the outset, Beethoven’s strategy is to summarily obliterate Diabelli’s waltz by making his first variation an aggressive march.  Violent!  Hilarious!  Necessary.  ’Must reduce example into heap of its parts, then rake through wreckage for salient materials overlooked by author…’ What did Beethoven think of the theme – it was a “cobbler’s patch”?  Further hilarity in the choice of metaphor – an old shoe heel or snippet of sole that finally fell off after dancing too many bad waltzes!  It is only after the vehement repudiation of the ¾ theme accomplished by the march that we are permitted again to utilize triple meter – immediately after the march, we have 7 variations in a row in three; eventually 21 of the variations will assume either simple or compound triple meter.) 

What is it about the theme that offers genuine catalyst?  Maybe the use of the raised tonic pitch in the pickup to bar 5 (Beethoven loves this coloration).  Possibly the melodic motif in the sequential phrase that starts with the pickup to bar 9 (compare this to the opening theme of the last movement of Op. 10, No. 3).  Perhaps the B-flat to A and C to B-natural component of the bass line at that point, not so much as a “B-A-C-H” quotation, but for the chromatic potency it holds for Beethoven.  It becomes the countersubject of the Var. XXXII fugue in a slightly re-ordered – actually retrograde — form (E to F and D to E-flat). And with the transposition, we realize that it is that same four note nugget that the composer develops in the Eroica Symphony and the Eroica Variations, having formulated it in the incidental music for Prometheus from an otherwise negligible contradance he had written even earlier on (so plain is the contradance version that the octave leap in the bass has not yet been made – the B-flats of m. 2 & 3 of the theme remain in the same register). The absence of the pitch E-flat in Diabelli’s theme might also have intrigued Beethoven.  What a miracle that from these minute elements such a complex organism has arisen.  It’s tantamount to creating human beings from clumps of raw earth.  Of course the old proverb reminds us that “great oaks from little acorns grow.” 

How does the inspiration/influence distinction obtain in this Beethoven example?  The ingredients that I identified, which fascinated Beethoven in various contexts, are the acorns, the inspiration.  Among the external forces that fuel or “influence” the project complementary to inspiration are the inferiority of the variation theme and its originator (Diabelli), and the indisputably superior standard set by Bach in his Goldberg Variations. The first impetus arouses dynamic self-assertion, the second invites emulation and offers challenge.

One might suggest that complementarity is required for the creative process to be complete, that successful artistic outcomes depend upon both internal motivators (inspiration) and external motivators (influence), and that both must be present in some combination.  An example of an external motivating factor that in my own mature experience has always served constructively the externalization of inspired forms: the deadline.  Can seem ominous and fateful at first, but almost always turns out to be a blessing…

Kudos to soprano Jessica Cain and cellist Stephen Marotto of the University of Connecticut at Storrs, and pianist Nathaniel Baker of the Hartt School, for their impassioned performance of my piece “Wolf” last Wednesday afternoon in Hartford.  It not only showed a high degree of preparation and conviction, but offered encouragement to other young musicians to take the risk and venture into contemporary repertoire.  Thanks guys!

George Cacioppo was born in the same year as my dad, in Monroe, Michigan.  He was a great composer, a charter member of the ONCE group, head of the WUOM radio station, and an intermittent professor in the school of music there.  He studied with Ross Lee Finney, among others, and at Tanglewood was a student of my own mentor, Leon Kirchner.  People began asking about our relatedness as soon as I got to music school as a freshman.  In the late 1970’s my parents moved from Ohio to Michigan, taking up residence in a town maybe 40 minutes from Ann Arbor, where George lived.  When I’d visit them, I’d drive on up to Ann Arbor to see George, and it was during that period that we first got to know each other well.  We talked endlessly about all sorts of musical questions, hung out in the radio station and listened to rare tapes, ate lunch at one of his favorite restaurants, The Cracked Crab, or made spaghetti together in his kitchen, all the while discussing issues like determinacy vs. indeterminacy, tonal vs. atonal, urban vs. folk, the efficacy of -ism’s, the limits of notation, etc.  We had had the intention to figure out how exactly we might be related, but never seemed to have gotten around to it, because it was more urgent and interesting to talk about these other things.  So I still can’t answer the question definitively. 

George’s reputation reaches nationally and internationally.  I was on a panel with George Crumb not long ago, who was recalling how when he first came to Penn, he conducted “Advance of the Fungi” with his contemporary music ensemble.  In Venice last November, the Ex Novo Ensemble played a new music concert at Teatro La Fenice,  which included one of my pieces, and various members and other participating composers were asking about George.  His “Cassiopeia” score I believe toured extensively as part of a Library of Congress exhibit of contemporary American music, along with those of Cage and others.  At this point I’ve had the opportunity of meeting two fellow members of the ONCE group, Robert Ashley and Gordon Mumma, owing to my involvement with the University of New Mexico Composers Symposium.  I teach George’s music in some of my classes, especially “Time on Time in Miracles,” a real masterwork.  His untimely death in 1985 was a tragedy.  Bill Albright set up a memorial fund in his name at Michigan, and not long after, when he came to Haverford to do a concert with me, Bill and I did a 4 hands performance of George’s “Piano Piece No. 11” in his honor.   Actually I think that recording was aired a year or so ago by Chris Shultis on his KUNM radio program.  Equally sad was the loss of Bill a decade or so later, just as he was reaching the peak of an already prodigious career.  I regret that my sons, both composers now in their own right, never had the chance for direct contact with either George or Bill.

In the U.S. the Cacioppo name is rather unusual, but in Italy it’s not at all uncommon – you never have to instruct anyone on spelling or pronunciation.  And particularly in Sicily, it occurs frequently, and in towns like Sambuca, Camporeale, or Montevago, it proliferates.  It’s difficult then to determine how closely individuals from different branches might be related.  Thanks to the efforts of my uncle, Dr. A. J. Cacioppo, I can trace my own genealogy with certainty to the early 1500’s.  Further heraldic investigation suggests that the line may go back to centuries previous, as the coats of arms that have come down to us incorporate motifs from the time of the Crusades (the Templar insignia and the crescent moon, for instance).  The origin of the name itself is still debated.  George assumed a direct derivation from the Greek Cassiopeia, and my Uncle Tony also saw this as a possibility.  After all, Sicily was part of Magna Grecia.  But Sicily was also ruled by Arabs for a long while, and there are still today as many place names in use that stem from Arabic as Greek.  So this becomes very difficult as well.  The Coccia Institute in Florence asserts that “cacioppu” — with a “u” instead of an “o” at the end — indicates an etymology in a term from Sicilian dialect that refers to the trunk of a tree, and is used to designate someone engaged in woodcraft. Who knows?  Maybe the earliest Cacioppo’s were Arab wood carvers in the employ of King Roger or Frederick II making psalteries, flutes and fiddles for use at Court!  

This is another FAQ that I hear.  To answer it, I might cite the two extremes.  There’s the school of thought that says the composer does him/herself a disservice by being concerned with audience reception, that you’re first and foremost writing for you.  You can’t worry about who’s going to like it, the important thing is that you carry out your mission in a way that satisfies you.  I recall a faculty composer scolding me when I was an undergraduate, saying, “You’ve got too much of the listener in you.”   Of course that was back in my Beethoven phase, when I wrote strictly tonal music, so maybe he was justified in some degree.  But this philosophy is still prevalent.  Just last spring, at a very animated composers symposium at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, much of the discussion reinforced the notion that you can’t be true to yourself creatively if you allow the prospective audience to look over your shoulder.  On the other hand, there’s the approach that aims to placate or appease the audience, calculating the palatability of what is served up, at times even pandering to the poorest tastes.  (Remember The Fountainhead?)

I don’t subscribe to either point of view.  I’m proud to be a fellow listener, a part of the audience, and I have a player’s background.  Also, I have a sense of adventure, and I trust that altogether this orientation allows me to produce music that others will find rewarding.  “Accessible” AND “challenging” – this is said repeatedly about my work, one of a number of pairings that I am happy to accept.  Truthfully when I’m writing, I don’t think about listener accessibility or challenge, but just keep the faith that if it pleases me, it will please someone else too (I’m not that different from the next person).  It comes back to what I was saying above – if the music stems sincerely from the emotions, it is bound to communicate on a human level.

I do, however, think consciously about the performers and how they are going to regard the work and the task of preparing it.  I intend to challenge them, but at the same time offer a vehicle for their own self-expression and application of skill.  If the performer can come to the piece each time and find something new in it, bring new energy to it and not have the interest wane, then I am delighted.  If the performance experience is gratifying, the reception will be that much more positive.

Certainly there is no greater feeling of fulfillment than to receive the applause of a warm and appreciative public.  But you can’t always predict the reaction to a work, and that in itself may be a reason not to fret about it too much.  Things come across differently depending region, country, etc.  Now and then you can be very surprised.  I remember one time I presented my music in a recording-plus-commentary format to a small gathering.  Among the listeners was a Belgian engineer who had moved to the U.S. after the Second World War.  He had been in a concentration camp and seen it all.  One of the examples I played was a vehement, atonal Klavierstück.  This appealed to him greatly.  By contrast, I then played an elegiac Largo for strings, a tonal piece in E major.  This threw him into a rage: how could anyone in good conscience write anything beautiful again after the horrors that had been perpetrated during the war?  It was the most difficult and polemical situation of my career, an anomaly, but one that I’m not sure I have fully resolved.

Another question commonly asked. I’ve been blessed with the privilege of having some of the finest ensembles in the world present my music, and of having many other equally dedicated and amazingly skilled musicians (some still in the students years) perform it as well. No matter who it is, and no matter how much preparation and detail work has been done, there’s always an element of risk in a first performance that makes it special and can often give it an exciting edge. I’ve had the opportunity to be involved in the preparation of most of my premieres, so that increases the sense of security for both the performers and myself. Much of the anticipation or Erwartung is in the fact that you’re witnessing the birth of something that didn’t exist before, its complete form made aural reality for the first time ever by the artists on stage. Even when I haven’t been able to attend rehearsals for a premiere, things have generally worked out well. Many questions can be dealt with via email, fax or phone, and if your notation is clear and accurately reflects what you intend, it can be incredibly reliable in ensuring a good result, especially if you’re dealing with a superbly trained musician. I can’t say that I’ve ever had to sustain a genuinely disappointing or disastrous premiere.

No. Strangely enough it’s the same, if not more difficult. I learn the score just as I would any other, making decisions about fingering, phrasing, fine articulation, going over the gnarly spots endlessly, etc. It might be a little easier to memorize, but that trades off with the problem of having to correct bad habits that may have formed while playing through passages less than meticulously in the haste of writing. If it’s a piece with other players or voice, the process is the same as it would be if preparing the Brahms quintet or the Book of the Hanging Garden of Schoenberg. That includes working through all of the various possibilities of nuance and balance with my collaborators. I should say that I usually wait until a piece has gone through rehearsal and performance to enter all of the fine markings into the score, and the contribution of the players in terms of bowings, dynamics inflections, even little rubatos, becomes part of the final edition. I am quite receptive to suggestions the musicians might have, and within a certain framework, am curious to see how interpretation of a piece changes from player to player, or concert to concert. Chopin never played any one of his pieces the same way twice. The structure invites a plurality of readings – that’s precisely what classical performance is all about.

This is discussed more fully in the interview with Joe Horowitz in the site’s media section, but to give a brief response here, as a youngster in Ohio there were many markers and allusions to the original inhabitants of the area.  The name of the state itself, and the river, the name of the town I grew up in – Cuyahoga Falls – and the Cuyahoga River and Valley, the meaning of the word “portage” – Portage County, Portage Path, Portage Lakes, all of which referred to the portage that the Indians made on foot overland, carrying their canoes over their heads, to cut the distance from one point in the crooked river to another – and a monument depicting the portage, an image that I drew over and over again as a school boy.  That’s where it began, as early as these motifs registered in my mind.  The history of Goose Egg Island, in the stretch of the Cuyahoga River that ran past our house, and the band of Seneca that had camped there during the days of Tecumseh, fascinated me.  I used to stay up all night to watch the sunrise over that little island…  Fast forward to the present, and I’m a veteran professor of a social justice course called Native American Music and Belief.  I helped endow a Native American Fund at the Quaker college where it is taught (Haverford), which some of my CD proceeds go to.  It has helped to promote Native American awareness by hosting visitors such as Mary Youngblood, and has contributed to projects such as the preservation of music from one of the Navajo chantway ceremonies.  To find out how to donate to the Native American Fund directly, please feel free to contact me via email through this site for information.