Notes about Music: Trio Nearly in C-minor (Bach Corrects a Student's Composition Exercise)

This trio (for Flute, Bb Clarinet, & Contrabass), bears the sub-title "Bach Corrects a Student's Composition Exercise". Although the title suggests a lighthearted "the-dog-ate -my-homework" attitude, the music is nevertheless a serious two-minute micro-essay encapsulating a musico-pedagogical issue which bothers me deeply. In fact, one might claim that the entire future of serious music composition - and acceptance by audiences - depends on discovering solutions to it. Yep, it's another angle on the "old-VS-new" debate.
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Rather like fiddling with prayer beads, my piece obsessively counterpoints the melodic fragment (at left) which is to some extent counter-intuitive to "normal" diatonic musical syntax. It stubbornly resists 'working' in the conventional ways which the diatonic ear has long been propagandized to expect. Trio Nearly in C-minor sets out to reconcile this "square-peg-in-a-round-hole" issue, and at one point even gets the benefit of a little subtle encouragement and modelling from the Master (originally, of course, in red-ink quill pen).
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Connect your device to a decent sound system or enclosed headphones, and click the orange PLAY button. Apologies in advance for the lousy quality recording - my Sibelius file corrupted [grr].

Alternatively, if you're on a smartphone, you could listen to the music at its original URL:
http://soundcloud.com/peter-gore-symes/trio-nearly-in-c-minor
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And if you wish, you can read the pdf score here.
The transposing score is here.
Both the music (mp3) and score are downloadable and free. Prospective performers are only requested to acknowledge me as the composer on programs, fliers, sleeve notes or announcements. I'd also be kinda flattered if you let me know, too :)

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A genuine forensic reconstruction of the real face of J.S. Bach.
In this link, you can witness a historically unprecedented gallery
of photos of Bach as a child, a teenage rapper, and even one taken
during His previously unknown concert tour to Thailand in 1733.

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Trio Nearly in C-minor is a token attempt to absolve myself of the sin of years of preaching the Holy Musical Rules (yes, 'those' Common Practice Rules handed down to you on tablets of stone from Bach and Moses during those endless Harmony & Counterpoint tutorials). Thou Shalt Not end a piece with a first inversion. Thy Leading Note must rise, not fall. Parallel fifths or octaves are sinful, etc etc. Sure, you could recite them too?

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I knew that continuing to teach The Rules, ultimately, was to knowingly collaborate in creating a poisoned chalice for the future of Composition. There I was, assisting to brew up an educational potion which had the potential to cause serious long-term paralysis of our culture's collective creative/receptive mind. A doh-ray-mi straight-jacket to anaethsetize the creative musical brain which had been born free-and-curious. What had I been thinking?? OK, here comes the excuse: I had to earn a living, mate. Yep, some people do it for money, lol. (Blush) This still happens in educational institutions ranging from the "ta ta tee-tee ta" pre-school variety right through to undergraduates honing their skill at writing four-part harmony. Been there, done the lot. Cramped a lot of imaginations. Ruined countless lives.
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Music Composition is surely the ultimate candidate for nomination as a Rule-Free Creative Zone. Therefore it bothers me that The Rules get handed on so unquestioningly, usually with rather vague understanding of why they even exist, or who made them up. People have been fed the idea that music is somehow controlled by inviolable universal natural laws which could not possibly be questioned. Musicians get awarded impressive Degrees and Diplomas for reproducing and obeying The Rules. They then go out and, in turn, pass on their half-knowledge to other victims, usually younger and powerless to resist. And thus the cycle repeats down the generations... a virtually identical process ever since the start of the 19th century when musical academies kicked off in a big way. And even Arnold Shoenberg's commented wryly that "Zair iss shtill a lot off goot music to be reeten in C-machor, ya?". Yes, undeniably true - I've done heaps myself, of course - but my point is: Why limit oneself to a bread-only diet?
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The problem is inflexible and difficult to tackle - music is arguably THE most conservative of the Arts. Most people will accept innovative modern art, architecture, literature, etc, as a cool thing, but when it comes to music most folks, even some "music lovers", just want something familiar and easy, a safe and predictable armchair ride, mindless chewing-gum for their ears.
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And from the music teacher's point of view it is all too easy to continue to teach an established method which clones exactly such safe and un-challenging panaceas. You can buy ready-made mass-produced text-books divided into neat eminently teachable chunks designed to fit conveniently into semesters. To teachers, the alternatives seem all too hard, requiring too much thawing of mindsets, re-jigging of knowledge, curricula, texts, and test papers... and probably wouldn't even occur as useful (let alone desirable) to most conventional musicians.
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Yes, one certainly needs to know [and understand] The Rules sufficiently well in order to break them successfully, but they are but one of the many systems of musical thought which have evolved over the last 2000 years or so. How about if schools were to codify and teaching the style of the Notre Dame School of 12th century Paris? Or the Burgundian School around Dufay with their ear-tickling cadences? Or the Palestrina Style? The Debussy Style - (which actually requires parallel fifths)? Pan-Diatonicism? The Schoenberg-Webern Style? Quartal harmony? Minimalism? Raga? Micro-tonal scales? There are so many possible musical universes and systems apart from the narrow constraints of our beloved Bach. You need to break eggs to make omlettes.
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Many contemporary composers who have consciously challenged and overcome the mental shackles of their Education (and, consequently, have grown Ears to Hear) are certainly using all these alternative doctrines - and more - but (crucially) their audiences, the vast public, are mostly limited to making judgements according to the fosillizing doctrines of Bach - whether or not they are aware of it. ("I dunno the first thing about music, mate, but I do know what I like, eh"). Indeed, they may not know a Leading Tone from a First Inversion, but they do have a surprisingly sophisticated understanding (albeit untutored, 'naive' and rigid) of what constitutes 'normality' in western music.
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Theirs is is an inarticulate understanding, partly intuitive, partly acquired, which has been absorbed simply by years of unconsciously hearing and absorbing "normal" music in locations ranging from supermarkets to concert halls. Everyone's a sponge... to varying degrees. Everyone will "learn" that just about all western music from Machaut to Mozart to Madonna has structural elements in common when it comes to topics like harmonic progression/regression, phrase structure, melodic conventions, key/tonality, form, etc.

This mute concensus, those understood commonalities of musical grammar and syntax are precisely what permits musicians to improvise together without rehearsal. They "know" the language - they intuit its grammatical conventions. Through sheer experience, they have learned the traditional hierarchy of probablities - a B7 chord is highly likely to be followed by some sort of chord based on E, not E-flat. The average listener (and even some musicians!) will instinctively squirm if phrases aren't symmetrically equal in length, if they can't tap their foot because the beat is ambiguous or absent, or if the harmonies deviate significantly from the expected Cycle of Fifths. People often prefer to reach for the OFF button than be forced to actually focus attention in the same way they would if, say, reading a book or (especially) the more passive activity of watching movies.
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The end result of limiting options, simplifying and cloning musical education is that the average person tends to emerge with a clamped mind about what is Right or Wrong, Good or Bad in music. Those who become music students end up being able to write a stylistically correct Bach Chorale (in fact, so correct that it's boring as batshit), and that ol' magic just, well... evaporates.
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At this point the proverbial elephant in the room ought to be apparent to the observant reader: relatively few musicians of any age - or audiences, for that matter - are likely to be craving new Bach Chorales in the year 2012. There are heaps of them out there to nick anyway, if you need to google something up for next Sunday's choir...
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Let's face it, The Rules are nothing but a codified instruction manual for imitating the very specific style of music used in Protestant churches in (northern) Germany during the first half of the eighteenth century. A fairly narrow slice of musical history, one might observe. But even today that slice is preserved in historical ether and presented as Eternal Immutable Law to unsuspecting young devotees. The teaching of these precepts mostly happens in sterile tutorial rooms, soundless but for the scratching of pencils and rubbers. Very few students can actually hear anything they've written, but hey, they obeyed The Holy Rules, step-by-step, and passed their assignments with an A+. May we present you with your shiny new BMus degree... now Go Ye Forth and propagate likewise.
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In terms of a liberal Arts education, this is totally outrageous propaganda in the league of Chairperson Mao or Joe Goebbels. The method has fossilized into little more than a musical notation version of a "Join-the Dots" puzzle, a Composing-By-Steps 'How-To' Manual for tone-deaf people who can't hum two consecutive notes in tune let alone distinguish the three notes of a triad. It offers prescriptions which allow novices to write complex counterpoint which doesn't actually sound entirely "wrong", even if it is terminally klutzy, awkward, and uninspired, the dumbed-down musical equivalent of literature's opening line "It was a dark and stormy night". And for goodness sake, don't embarrass people by asking them to explain WHY they can't end with a first inversion, make their leading note fall, or write [gasp!] parallel fifths.
Yes. We. Can.
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In my piece Trio Nearly in C-minor, Bach personally intervenes at one point to suggest a harmonisation of the melodic fragment in the style to which He is accustomed. I'm confident you'll detect when it happens (Clue: it's the bar in the score marked Lento Serioso Quasi Chorale). You'll be relieved to know that during that fragment He committed no parallel fifth sins. Bach judiciously decides to squeeze the fragment into the tonal straight-jacket of C-minor. To our ears, His sweetly familiar harmonic language with its formulaic predictable cadences homing in relentlessly towards the inevitable tonic c-minor chord seems, in this context, to be oddly and ironically out of place ...even 'wrong', or at least inappropriate.
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The poor student whose work he is correcting :) thankfully appears to be entirely unrepentant - except that the piece does actually end on a (albeit extremely brief) token triad of C-minor as a polite concession to Great Teacher. It's as if the music's embarrassed not to cadence in C-minor, having spent most of the piece nowhere near C-minor or any other type of minor or major for that matter. And [*shock*] the final triad isn't even in first inversion! My my, isn't tradition tenacious?! But hey, ya haff please the teacher if you vant to pass, ja? Er, 7 out of 10 was OK, I suppose... Hmm, let's see, what do I need to do to score 8 next semester?

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Dear Reader, having joked thus, I must emphasize that I certainly do not disrespect Bach. On the contrary, if you've heard my other compositions, you'll know that I meekly worship His music, and take his Holy Rules seriously. They are part of the cultural DNA inherited by all of us, practising musician and non-musician listeners alike. But unless we really do want yet another Chorale, The Rules should only be a point of stylistic departure, merely one of the available options in the 21st-century's incredibly rich Global Style Buffet. An unexpected mixture of systems, even conflicting ones, can produce interestingly tasty results: fusion cuisine comes to mind. Impossible opposites can be a great source of inspiration, if you grant them an educational visa to enter your mind. Someone should tell the Music Educators.
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For your delectation and relief, here's my latest piece of Concept Music, cereally composed over breakfast this morning with the textbook Harmony & Counterpoint for Dummies open on my lap.
The easy-to-perform musical score goes as follows:

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..... 1. Close your eyes and gaze into your Blackness...

..... 2. ...then into that Vast Silence begin to imagine a

........... .tender duet between a Whale and a Mosquito.

..... 3. Allow them each to solo, then to sing together.....

..... 4. Gradually allow the performers to fade away.

..... 5. When the music is finished, open your eyes and

..... 6. if you enjoyed the performance, applaud.

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*Try performing the music again to discover if it is the same on the second time around.
*Try performing it a third time with animals/sound-sources of your own choice.

Thankyou thankyou thankyou

You've been a wonderful audience I love you all.

Apologies for the noise in this recording - there was a problem with the file [grr *shrug*].
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