Monday, August 8, 2016

In Honor of The Day After Marilyn J. Ziffin's Birthday

I had intended to build up to the 90th birthday, yesterday, of Marilyn J. Ziffrin, American composer, musician, biographer of Carl Ruggles, and about the best music teacher I ever had.  I'd intended to do that but I'd rather go beyond the day to post pieces by her and posts about her after the day.  

Here is an interview, a conversation between her and Bruce Duffie in June 1994.  I had quoted from the section dealing with Carl Ruggles last month but the part in which she talks about music and her life and work is quite interesting, itself.  It contains things I'd never known about her.  But in the way she talks about music, the practical side of it, of the act of composing, of what music is and means and its importance as a serious activity I remember the conversations I heard and had with her, her lectures - they were never really like lectures, more of demonstration and practical advice - and her willingness to go with the spirit.  I remember one time when, after hearing, I believe, Joseph Silverstein performing the Schoenberg Violin Concerto with the Boston Symphony, she scrapped her lesson plan and played a record of it.  As I recall it was the one with Wolfgang Marschner playing violin, I don't recall the orchestra or conductor - just as an example of how you can remember things that happened in classes you took almost a half-century ago, or think you do, and what impression they might have made on you.

Apropos of my earlier post, today, I can guarantee you that even so recent a period in rural musical culture described is quite past in New England.  In talking about how she relocated from the Chicago area to rural New Hampshire and how she could tolerate it she mentioned the vital role radio played:

BD:    So you’re influenced by what you hear, but not so much by the green around you or the concrete around you?

MJZ:    No, I don’t think so.  It’s what I hear and what I had heard.  I try very hard to hear a lot of music.  In New Hampshire you don’t hear very much live, but you do by public radio.  I probably could not live there if I did not have access to public radio.  We have in New Hampshire only one professional symphony orchestra but where I live I can get three different public radio stations — Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine — so I have access to an enormous amount of music.  And then, as I say, I get to Boston within an hour and a half.

BD:    On the radio, do you pay particular attention when new pieces are being played by symphony orchestras or chamber groups?

MJZ:    Yes, exactly.  I subscribe to all three, get program guides, and if there’s a new contemporary piece, or even a contemporary piece that I think I even know, I make a point of being around to hear the piece and really listen.  A lot of people put the radio on and they don’t listen, but I listen!

I can, or could, get those three stations and the Boston stations as well and was also a paying member of two of them, plus one in Boston, and I can tell you that just about all of them have pretty much or entirely abandoned classical music for all-yack, having first stupified their musical programming to a degree where it could pretty much only serve the purpose of aural wallpaper, the equivalent of elevator music to have on in the back ground of little shops.  You have to be online to have something similar, today.  If someone can't be or isn't, they're out of luck in the matter of hearing much in the way of unfamiliar music.

But, enough of my grousing.   I found what Ms. Ziffrin said about composing to be especially interesting.

BD:    When you’re writing a piece and putting some notes on paper, are you always controlling what goes on the page, or are there times when you see something on the page and you don’t know where it came from?

MJZ:    It’s a very good question!  There are always surprises.  I have described being a composer very much like being an athlete.  You get in training as an athlete and when you’re composing you spend so many hours a day doing your composition, your thing.  When you’re in training, the wheels are greased and it moves, and when it moves sometimes you don’t know where it’s going and you are indeed surprised.  Then you have to be your own worst critic and use an eraser as well as a pencil, and that’s dreadfully important.  Then this is one of the joys — as performers take up your piece, they will find things you didn’t know you had put in.  As they make the music their own, they don’t change the notes, don’t misunderstand me, but they discover things that you didn’t know were there.  If the piece is good, it has that quality so that the same piece can be played by many different people and have different interpretations.  That’s really one of the great joys.

BD:    Do you purposely build in this leeway, or is it just automatically there?

MJZ:    It’s automatic.  If you’re in training and it goes well, it gets in there and I have no idea how.  For me, this is one of the tests of whether a piece works or not.  If it works, then it will have that quality, and you may not even know it exists.  In fact you can’t know it.  That ability to move around within those parameters does not happen until the performers take it.

BD:    Do you know as you’re writing it whether it’ll work or not?

MJZ:    Oh, yes!  That is the mark of a good composer — to be your own worst critic.  Yes, you have to know if it’s going to work.  If you don’t know that much about a piece, then you have some studying to do.

BD:    Studying of technique?

MJZ:    Studying of technique, self-study, studying of what you’ve done.  You really have to stand back every day and understand what you did yesterday is either good or bad, or has possibilities.  I’m very, very serious about the use of an eraser.  You have to willing to know you thought it was wonderful yesterday but today we have to erase it.

BD:    It wouldn’t be back to being wonderful next week?

MJZ:    If you really feel it’s no good, it won’t get back to being wonderful.  If you’re not sure, give it a chance, but if you really know the next day it’s no good, get rid of it.  You can’t fall in love with your own stuff.  You have to stand back and know if it is good or bad.  You can make a judgment.  This is terribly important.  I had a teacher who said that everybody can learn to be an acceptable composer.  There are rules just like there are rules of writing poetry and so forth, and if you study long enough, everybody can do it.  Everybody gets ideas.  People sing in the shower, and those are motives.  Those are nice little tunes and things that may be their own.  Techniques will teach you that, and then the X quality comes in.  But as a composer, you have to be able to know what you did and that there are flaws, and maybe you can fix the flaws.  If you can’t, is the piece still good enough to stand on its own two feet?  If it isn’t, then you have to get rid of the piece!

BD:    Just completely toss it out?

MJZ:    It’s been done!  [Both laugh]

BD:    When you’re working with the piece and tinkering with it and you have all of the notes down and you’ve fussed with it, how do you know when it’s ready and when you can give it away?

MJZ:    Oh, that’s the best question of all!  If you think I know the answer, you’re wrong.  I don’t!  I once asked a poet how he knows when a poem is over, and he said, “When they take it away from me!”  [Both have a huge laugh]  I don’t know.  I write syntactical music, music where one thing follows another and follows another and follows another, like language.  There are other ways to write music, like music of chance or aeleatoric music where you don’t have that thing.  But mine is syntactical, therefore you set up certain sound expectations as you write.  One seems to know the piece is over when those expectations have been fulfilled, so I suppose that’s a technical way in which you know.  Another way is that they take it away from you!  In all truth, one is never totally satisfied with the piece.  Every piece has certain flaws, and it’s just that you know that you’ve done the best you can at that moment.  You hope nobody else knows that those flaws are there, and if you’re honest with yourself you think that even if I didn’t do so well at this point, this is the best I can do now.  When I do the next piece, I won’t make that same mistake.

What she said about the difference between music of the classic period and today is, especially interesting, as well.

BD:    You say you’re creating.  Are you creating something out of nothing, or are you creating something out of something?

MJZ:    You’re creating something out of something.  You don’t do it in a vacuum.  What you do is you hear all kinds of sounds — sounds of streets, sounds of jazz, all kinds of musics and all kinds of sounds.  Then, if you have that creativity within you, and the guts, and the stick-to-it-ness, and all the rest of it, you take all of that and it gets mingled with your personality and comes out sounding like you.  I don’t think it comes out of nothing, I really don’t.  It has to come out of other sounds.  But they can be all kinds of sounds.  They don’t have to be any one kind.

BD:    At least from what I’ve been able to hear, you have consistently written music that derives from tonal centers.  Are you glad that we seem to be coming back to that in a general sense?  We seem to have lost it in the ’60s...

MJZ:    Yes, that’s interesting.  There are my conservative friends and they’re not tonal sinners.  There are moments of stability to which one comes back, gestures of stability they would say, and yes, I think it’s good.  I also think, though, that it’s very hard to be a composer in today’s world because there are so many possibilities.  It was much easier when you had one style, when Beethoven and Mozart were around.  Bach already moved a little bit because he had the modes and he moved into the major-minor system.  But there were preconceived notions of what classical music would sound like, so the composer knew that ahead of time and wrote in that style.  He didn’t really have too much to worry about, whereas today’s serious composer has so many possibilities.  There’s minimalism, there’s neo-romanticism, there’s electronic music, there’s you name it, there’s so many styles.  And no matter how difficult it is for the composer, it’s also very difficult for the listener.  A listener goes to a concert, and unless he knows the composer’s music ahead of time, he or she has no way of knowing what to expect.  When the composer sits down, there are so many styles to choose from, so what you do?  You ultimately have to be true to yourself and do whatever comes out, but for a young composer it may indeed be very difficult situation.  I have fortunately gone beyond that, but I can see that it’s not in any way an easy time. 

BD:    You say the composers back then only had one style.  Didn’t Beethoven push that style along, and develop it, and didn’t Wagner especially change it?

MJZ:    Yes, but by the time Wagner came along, he did romanticism to death.  They had to change it.   There was absolutely no place else to go.  But take a composer like Mozart.  There was the sonata allegro form, and he had his some of his students finish his movements for him, because...

BD:    ...it could only go one way?

MJZ:    Yes.  You had a first theme in the tonic and the second theme in the dominant, and then you had the development section.  Of course, Mozart would do that, but by the time you’d get back to the recapitulation, both themes had to come back and both themes had to come back in the tonic so you could end the piece.  So he could give them to an advanced student and have him finish it.  We can’t do that today!  You don’t have the certainty.  Also, in those days when the audience went to a concert, they knew what to expect.  Don’t misunderstand me, they could marvel at the genius of these people who were able to work within this set of parameters that everybody knew and still write absolutely write incredible and glorious music.  But they knew from when they sat down what the parameters were.  Now, somebody in the audience sits down and will wonder what she’s going to hear!

BD:    Are the parameters out there, or are there no parameters?

MJZ:    Precisely the point!  There are none.  Each piece has to set its own, or each composer has to set his or her own parameters.  So if you don’t know the previous music of the composer when you go into the concert hall, you really have to have a totally open mind.

I had better stop or I'll end up posting the whole thing.  I've had many music teachers in private lessons, in school, in a number of universities and colleges but none of them, not even my dear old piano teacher in college, ever said so many things to me that I reference, certainly every other day if not every day than Marilyn Ziffrin did.  

Note:  As for aeleatoric music, I will say that I have never seen any point in doing it, "writing" it or listening to it or playing it.   And I did try it.   I got to that point by playing some of it and attempting to write a college paper on Christian Wolff which I struggled with for two months before deciding there was nothing to it and nothing to be said about it.  I'm with Lou Harrison, I'd rather chance a choice than choose a chance. Though our choices might often be different ones, as MZ says, you're on your own in what choices you make.

1 comment:


  1. "You're the standard white-focused pop-music hack who proved he was ignorant of a major black artist."

    You mean Prince? Oh wait -- when he died, YOU were the one saying he was unimportant, not me.

    ReplyDelete