Rhapsody on Anglo-American Ballad Tunes Musings on a Thin, Erasable Line: Composing vs. Arranging

I have spent as much time as an arranger and editor as I have as a composer over the past (roughly) five decades, if not more—and have wound up equally obscure in all three fields. Part of the reason why this is so, especially regarding arranging, is purely practical: many performance situations require music tailored to a very specific situation. Most of the time, that required tailoring results in something that isn't widely marketable.

So: this will be the first, probably, of many musings, semi-rants, and occasional behind-the-scenes posts on this other creative process.

I think I have always viewed composing and arranging as two sides of the same coin: the only difference is whether the material to be worked over is one’s own or someone else’s.

Having said that: a distinction should be made between the brand of arranging that is really transcription—changing a given piece’s instrumentation or adding or subtracting parts; as opposed to working with only a melody line, sometimes a harmonization (& sometimes not), and fashioning a whole new musical environment for said melody. These are two completely different approaches requiring completely different skill sets.

Shuttling back and forth between these two fields has led me to wonder, at times: if a piece prominently quotes or utilizes preëxisting material, is that piece automatically an arrangement? Or is it an original composition that happens to use preëxisting material? Please feel free to weigh in and discuss!

Herewith a piece that, I believe, falls into this category and poses the question: my Rhapsody on Anglo-American Ballad Tunes, a work for 11 solo strings (or string orchestra) and piano (covering what, someday, will be wind and harp parts). It uses two different tunes to which the Old English ballad “Barbara Allen” may be sung, and its influences and models are threefold:

One was Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Five Variants on “Dives and Lazarus” for large string orchestra and harp—one of my all-time favorite orchestral works. Here is one of a number of excellent performances; I would rather have you see an actual performance video than hear a commercial recording with nothing but a slide for a visual.

Another was a less well-known rhapsody for oboe and strings: Wayne Barlow's The Winter's Past. Watch and listen here.

The third was Art Garfunkel’s achingly beautiful rendition of “Barbara Allen” (to one of the tunes used here) from his solo album Breaking Away. The Rhapsody itself is based on an earlier choral piece that had a not-so-terrific text, reworked into its present instrumental form.

The performance on Soundcloud.com is the world premiere; and so far, the only performance, anywhere, ever. The track has additional information posted which I won’t repeat here, except I must thank the late Gregg Smith (1931–2016) for programming it at his Adirondack Festival of American Music in Saranac Lake, NY in 1995. You may listen here.

Update: RIP Robert Page (1927–2016)

My opening post mentioned Robert Page in passing as having programmed my May the Words on the last concert he conducted with the Temple University Concert Choir in May of 1975, before he left Philadelphia for a post at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

Today, August 9, I learned of his passing on August 7. (So much for two-week spacing between posts here for now...)

I can honestly say that I would not be the musician/composer/conductor/educator I am today had I not sung in his Concert Choir in the '70s; and I may not have even gone to Temple for undergraduate school had I not also been a student in his High School Choral Workshop (sponsored by Temple) the summer between my junior & senior years in high school—where I first sang Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana—with the Pennsylvania Ballet & Orchestra (the first of some two dozen performances as an undergrad), & Arthur Honegger's King David—in a staged performance with chamber orchestra, no less.

That was only the beginning of what would prove to be an unrivaled undergraduate choral experience. The repertoire we did completely warped my musical thinking (these are the highlights):

Ligeti: Requiem (in its entirety; the Kyrie movement is the “Obelisk” music heard in 2001: A Space Odyssey)

Bernstein: Chichester Psalms

Beethoven: Choral Fantasy

Rachmaninoff: The Bells & 3 Russian Peasant Songs w/the Philadelphia Orchestra & recorded on RCA Red Seal

Page: 3 Christmas Motets; two of which were for triple chorus; inspired by his work preparing the Temple choirs for Penderecki’s Utrenja, Part I (“The Entombment of Christ”), premiered with the Philadelphia Orchestra & recorded on RCA Red Seal the year before I arrived.

Ives: Psalms 54, 67 & 150

& that was just my freshman year!

Subsequently (& we may have done some of the following in my freshman year as well; I’d have to go back & look):

Penderecki: St. Luke Passion with the Philadelphia Orchestra—that was the Philadelphia premiere; Page himself conducted

Berlioz: The Damnation of Faust (concert version); Eve Queler, conductor

Bach: St. Matthew Passion (tour concerts w/chamber orchestra)

Ives: Psalm 150 (again); 3 Harvest Home Chorales, & the Holidays Symphony (also w/Philadelphia Orchestra & just the symphony recorded on RCA Red Seal)—though the Holidays Symphony involved exactly one page of unison singing at the end of the 4th movement…

Puccini: La Boheme (Concert Choir was drafted to be the chorus for that year’s opera production)

Rossini: The Turk in Italy (Concert Choir was drafted to be the chorus for that year’s opera production as well, but I had one of the lead roles in that one)

Karl Korte: Pale is This Good Prince; an oratorio; world premiere; recorded on a private label

Ariel Ramirez: Misa Criolla (on which I was one of the percussionists—that's for a separate post, perhaps…)

Max Reger: Vater Unser—imagine a work using the tonal language of Wagner’s Prelude & Liebestod from Tristan & Isolde—but in a setting of the Lord’s Prayer in German for triple chorus, a cappella…

Arthur Honegger: Cantique de Pacques (women’s chorus) & La Danse des Morts

Poulenc: Six Chansons, Un Soir de Neige & Mass in G

Ravel: Trois Chansons (Ravel’s sole contribution to the a cappella repertoire; all on his own texts, by the way)

Schönberg: De Profundis (a late, atonal setting of Psalm 130 in Hebrew)

Webern: Enflieht auf Leichten Känen (Op. 2; pre-atonality [but not by much...])

...over & above the standard historical (Renaissance through Romantic era) motets, folk songs, spirituals & show tunes that flesh out tour programs. Nor does this enumerate the additional, equally wide range of repertoire performed on graduate conductors’ recitals in which I sang and, occasionally, soloed.

RP, as many of us used to speak of him, never took no for an answer—that’s what made this dizzying array of professional level rep possible. To be honest, he carried a measure of contempt for “singers” as opposed to “musicians” (something I do not perpetuate in my own practice) which often led to sarcasm & abusiveness in rehearsals—it came off as funny if you weren’t the target of it; but certainly not if you were the target thereof. Once upon a time, that was the norm for working “effectively” with choirs; one can’t do that & get away with it any more (as Robert Shaw once learned the hard way—singers actually walked out of rehearsal after one particularly egregious fit of abuse).

But RP also brought a profound depth of study and background to everything he conducted, such that simply rehearsing and performing any given work was an education in itself.

While I was never a one-on-one student of his, nor did I ever take an academic class with him, singing with RP provided a wildly wide exposure to and education in choral literature, along with performance experiences like no other, all at an impressionable age. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

Thank you, RP...please give Gregg Smith (1931–2016) my regards.

A New Beginning: May the Words (1973)

This, in a few words, is long overdue.

Having been recently added to the composer roster of MusicSpoke.com is the impetus for the appearance of this new venture, which has been in the planning stages only since May of this year.

I owe gathering up the courage and resolve to embark hereupon to two small and wondrously useful books by visual artist Austin Kleon: Steal Like An Artist and, probably more so, Show Your Work!

Of the latter book, he says:

“In ten tight chapters, I lay out ways to think about your work as a never-ending process, how to build an audience by sharing that process, and how to deal with the ups and downs of putting yourself and your work out in the world:

1. You don’t have to be a genius.

2. Think process, not product.

3. Share something small every day.

4. Open up your cabinet of curiosities.

5. Tell good stories.

6. Teach what you know.

7. Don’t turn into human spam.

8. Learn to take a punch.

9. Sell out.

10. Stick around.”

I highly recommend it! (No, I haven't become Mr. Kleon’s publicist—credit where credit is due, that’s all.)

For decades now, I have been working in relative obscurity, as countless composers now and before me have done; always hoping for That One Big Break(through) that will change my fortunes for the better. That’s hard enough to come by in the music industry, let alone if one, like me, is classically oriented, and, worse yet, not regularly writing for the concert hall. And said break(through) probably has to be not singular, but at least several in number, if not many.

That’s not to say that my work is completely unknown and unheard, as is the fate of far too many. Indeed, I am very fortunate in that there are a few places (mostly houses of worship, as it turns out) where some music of mine is heard with some regularity. Alas, that brand of journeyman work—liturgical music miniatures of one sort or another, original or arranged—true gebrauchsmusik, if you think about it—somehow doesn't count as being a successful composer nowadays—if, indeed, it ever did.

We in the classically-oriented end of the field tend to think that we have no choice but to work and create in obscurity. If no one knows or cares about what we’re doing, we remain obscure. Couple that with fear of rejection, and it becomes a vicious, depressing, and soul-draining cycle.

This is the source of the name for this blog: No More Rusty Paper Clips! Too many of us have had them handed to us: we submit a work to a competition or for consideration by a conductor for programming, and it is returned to us after some months (or years) with a rusty paper clip in one corner—meaning: it was never unclipped and looked over.

No more, I say! Of course, electronic media and sending .pdfs out makes paper clips somewhat obsolete, but still…No more, I say!

In this day and age of social media and the blogosphere, there’s really no reason not to put one’s work/works-in-progress out for examination and scrutiny any more. True, it’s still possible to have one's work met with indifference (been there, too; far too many times…), but the chances of that should be smaller the bigger the population one reaches—I hope!

So: at this point in my life (the youth of my old age, I guess) it’s time to start showing my work intentionally and committedly, and to start following Mr. Kleon's 10 Steps. I don’t see these as 10 easy steps, nor, I suspect, would he—some are easier than others. In fact, each of these steps seems to call for commentary of one sort or another. (Oh, boy! Material for another 10 posts at least!)

Initially, many of the pieces I'll be talking about here have recordings posted on Soundcloud.com; more specifically: <https://soundcloud.com/robert-ross-9>, where my handle is <Robert Ross 11>. (I can't explain the "robert-ross-9" in the URL…) Soundcloud.com is free to join (though you don’t have to join; & once you do, you don’t have to post anything or spend any money there). It will simply be nice to know if you've listened to something of mine there. Soundcloud.com has mobile apps for iOS and Android as well.

The bottom line is that when I talk about a work of mine, you’ll be able to listen to it, come to your own conclusions, comment thereon…and, maybe even become interested in performing it? Buying it? Recording it? Etc., etc., etc. it?

And that’s my goal: to generate interest in/inspire performances and/or recordings of/inspire commissions for more of—my music. In short: to become less obscure and more in-demand—to establish a brand! (Hmmmnnnnn: “Establish a brand/be in demand!” Catchy…)

How often will I be posting? Good question! Blogs are, after all, a big commitment requiring fresh material regularly! I’m going to aim to post once every two weeks or so initially—I’m not certain this is a topic that necessarily merits a daily or even a weekly post, despite what Mr. Kleon’s Step #3 advises. Then again, maybe I’ll discover he's right…

Every once in a while, I reserve the right to veer into an area not directly related to my music, but I don’t plan to do that very often.

So: I invite you to become part of an interested, supportive community here—not just of me, but of everyone who participates herein. Sign up for Soundcloud.com now and check out what’s there, just in general! I may create related FaceBook and Twitter accounts specifically for this blog—it depends on what happens once it’s out in cyberspace. If you know other potentially interested musicians/conductors/composers, please help me spread the word—<insert cliché of your choice regarding greater numbers…>.

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As this is a beginning, it seems fitting that it include some sort of invocation/benediction; and so my initial offering here is an early work: May the Words (1973) for SATB choir a cappella on Psalm 19:15 (14).

This piece was inspired by having sung David Amram’s setting of a longer version of the text in English translation found in his Shir L’erev Shabbat (pub. C.F. Peters; now, apparently, out of print) which the Temple University Concert Choir (then under the direction of Robert Page) sang to open its Spring, 1973 tour concerts. It was on June 14, after completion of that year’s tour, that I sat down that afternoon and composed this setting in the space of about an hour.

My musical goal in this piece was to create something mystical-sounding by striking a balance between Renaissance-style polyphony (that year’s tour program also included the Josquin DesPres Ave Maria…Virgo Serena—my first exposure to the music of DesPres) and thoroughly modern tonal language. That the piece practically wrote itself that quickly is still an exhilarating memory!

I submitted it to Mr. Page in the Fall of 1973. It took until his very last concert with the Temple University Concert Choir in May, 1975 for him to program it—but program it, he did!

To this day, I think it works well—it has been sung any number of times in synagogue services (mostly High Holy Days) and Judaica concerts in which I have been involved. It is suitable not just for synagogue (as a post-Amidah meditation), but also church (introit, short anthem, or communion meditation), or as a concert opener.

The recording (to which you may listen here) comes from a concert by the Yavneh Ensemble under my direction. It is now published by MusicSpoke.com and purchasable from them here . MusicSpoke.com co-founder Kurt Knecht’s reflections about May the Words may be found here.

Enjoy, and see you again soon!