Composers' Forum Spring 2019

John Zorn is the quintessential New Yorker. His unabashed sense of self is apparent in every part of his persona–the way he talks, dresses, walks–it's so distinctive and so east village that I feel like I'm watching a movie. And it's awesome. There's an intense of amount of character and experience that seems to emanate behind every sentiment he shared that I'd rather get a beer with the guy as opposed to having him sit in a stuffy classroom. Either way though, it was a talk I thoroughly enjoyed, even though I disagreed with parts of it. Firstly though, let's start with the parts I liked, which were a lot. I think there is something to be said about how intensely focused is on humanity. I've been in this place recently where I've been looking at my work as a tool of expression, rather than a "goal". In other words, I think it's important to think of art as a ways to expand the mind, expand the ways we see the world, which when you're i...

John Zorn - Reflection From a distance, John Zorn sounds like one of those very successful people in the world who has figured a lot of stuff out, and has no problem “enlightening” everyone around them, like they alone have any answers. Especially looking back at my notes from his visit to class, and seeing quotes like “limitations are liberating” and “I don’t play the sax—I play the room”, it really feels like he should’ve been an insufferable guest to host. However, I can honestly say that I never got that impression the whole time he was visiting, even when he would bite back at students’ questions, or challenge Julie herself every now and then.   The vibe that I did get from him was brutal honesty, with other musicians, with other people and with his own experience. The advice he gave—which also included things like “balance challenge with ability” and “with every piece I write, the first thing I ask is ‘Does the world need this?’”—seemed to stem from his ow...

Let’s throw it back to late February when the celestial Bora Yoon came to visit us at forum. Yes, it has been over a couple months, and yes I’m still thinking about her visit. Because for the first time at forum, I was able to sit in on a talk given by a young woman of color, more specifically, a young Asian-American woman. Most weeks at forum I would prepare myself to sit and listen to another man or another white person talk about their successes in the composition world and beyond, but as a young Asian individual, that sense of resonance never existed between me and one of our guest speakers. Until Bora Yoon. It is not very often at NYU that I come across professional Asian-American musicians whose work is outside of The Box––The Box defined as anything inherently classical in genre or those stereotypes of piano prodigy Asians. I’ve been craving a connection between my Asian culture and my music and my choice of career for the longest time––I needed a sign that my choice to study co...

  Zorn...of course seek out the "best" people to perform your music I became familiar with John Zorn’s music in the mid 80’s when I moved to New York City to attend the New School’s Jazz Program. John had formed a bond with the then new Knitting Factory (and its owner Michael Dorf). The Knitting Factory in its original location (on Houston Street just off Elizabeth) as well as in its second location (in Tribeca on Leonard Street) was a home for experimental and/or improvised Jazz and rock music and Zorn had regular appearances at both. Tonic was another spot where he would perform on a fairly regular basis.  John Zorn’s recorded output is somewhere in the hundreds whether credited as saxophonist, composer, arranger or producer. While his work was released on American, European and Japanese labels from his emergence in the mid 70’s to the early 90’s, it was in 1992 when he formed his own Tzadik record label to release not only his own recordings ...

John Zorn, the guest speaker last week in the composers' forum, is the cooooooooooooool artist that I really appreciate. He is true to himself and his music. As a young nobody-knows composer, it’s very common that the musicians you cooperated with are not that serious to your music, they may play the music correctly, but they refuse to dig further your piece to make an excellent interpretation. John Zorn is the person that will not yield to this situation, he suggests composers should be the “band leader” of the music group: Composer has the responsibility to inspire other people and make people become emotionally committed to the music. As John Zorn said he is the composer that got high standard and low tolerance. I think nowadays composers are easy to compromise to orchestra ， ensemble, or musician because they hardly get an opportunity to officially perform their piece. So, I and my friends established our own contemporary ensemble in China in order to give more opportuni...

As composers, the concept of social relevancy in our music comes up often. For film composers, we are often asked to underscore films that carry social commentary. It seems that art must be created to raise awareness for some social issue, always. at least to me, that is how it feels. Because of these art projects based in social change, often, people like to associate creators with the social extremes of the world. but what does this have to do with Jonathan Bailey Holland? I feel Mr Holland is an eloquent, and beautiful story teller, taking advantage of the music world to make his social commentaries the most effective.  This takes me to the piece “Synchrony.” While he never labeled it as a social commentary, the subject matter, performance, and mixture of live and recorded audio tells a different story. Sadly, in today’s world many people fear being labeled an “activist” as it is a heavily stigmatized word. Even I, if labeled an activist, would probably push back just a li...

ANNA CLYNE by Mikhaila Alyssa Smith "My passion is collaborating with innovative and risk-taking musicians, film-makers, visual artists and, in particular, choreographers. Creating new works through a fluid artistic dialogue has consistently fuelled my music from new perspectives and has maintained a fresh and exciting creative environment. Inspired by visual images and physical movement, my intention is to create music that complements and interacts with other art forms and that impacts performers and audiences alike." - Anna Clyne. Part of my personal creative process as a composer almost always involves having an image in my mind or having an image quite literally in front of me - whether it be through film, visual arts or literature. I have always been influenced by other art forms and I have always been absolutely fascinated and thrilled by the joining of those worlds to  convey a greater sense of meaning in music, so it was an absol...

deep data for real connection Since shortly after its inception, the computer has been used for nefarious means, whether it be calculating the launch of a torpedo with moving targets, or predicting what kind of advertisements will sell a product the most effectively. Data is naked and thanks to a computer, we may compile and organize data in such a way that its nakedness is illuminated. This illumination has been used to bring harm to others because it exposes necessary information. It becomes the responsibility of the computer engineer to decide what information is necessary to illuminate. Luke DuBois believes that good data elucidates and bad data anesthetizes, but all data reduces people to numbers. Remember, data is naked, and that nakedness exposes people as numbers, which may in turn illuminate patterns in their behavior. In a wonderful presentation by Luke DuBois, he cycles through a few different artistic representations of data which remind us that these illuminations c...

                  The visit from John Zorn was super interesting, and it was a nice change of pace to hear is rather raw, off the cuff, honest answers to the questions that he gave no matter what it was. He said a few things that were super interesting for me, and that was that he writes for friends because he wants the players that he knows for sure will give the most honest and intense emotional commitment to the music that they can and that the first performance of the piece is only the beginning, not the end of the process of shaping and molding the piece.                    The fact that he writes for players that he knows as opposed to players that he doesn’t know, is something that I think is very important. His preoccupation with getting the absolute best performance out of the players is not uncommon, but I believe it can be somewha...

How can music provide healing if it does not have the ability to heal its composer? How can music make a difference when money and politics are the only governing forces? How can music last for generations without the impacting ones feelings in some way or another? These are questions I have asked myself as a composer and songwriter. These are questions I have also asked of those who perform my music. During John Zorn’s lecturer, it was comforting in knowing that I am not the only composer who seeks to have others understand the emotional and intellectual side effects of music. Don’t get me wrong, while money and politics are very much needed for a work to be performed and to even establish a certain level or impact on the world, it is the feeling, energy, or vibe of the composer and performer that does most of the work in making a piece of music, a piece of music. Without energy, music means nothing. Because of this, in my opinion, while the composer may write a wonderful pi...

Josie Brechner What are the costs of 'irreverence'? I had a difficult time at the John Zorn lecture last week. Reflecting on it after the fact, I decided that it was principally because his views and approach to making art are so diametrically opposed to my own. From a basic standpoint, his general tenor and attitude were so dismissive and abrasive. So much so that at least one student felt uncomfortable enough to walk out. He dismissed entire groups of musicians as "lazy" and "weak", complained about unions in one breath while saying musicians need to stand up for themselves in the next, and said that his Masada performers were only playing his music correctly if they were straining or hurting themselves. Zorn never claimed to speak for anyone else but himself, but one can't help but wonder how less-than-receptive the industry would be to an artist acting in all these ways if they weren't a cis white man. When challenged on the privilege he ...

Go beyond your comfort zone I really enjoy the talk by Jonathan Bailey Holland on Monday. The works he presented to us are really diverse. I learn a lot from all of them. From his website, I read that Jonathan likes to get inspiration from classical, jazz, hip hop. I totally agree with it. I think being an composer, especially as a film composer myself. It is important to have a wide range of style in your portfolio and never stop exploring the other genres and try to go beyond your comfort zone. The first piece Jonathan shows us reminds me of the composer Alfred Schnittke, who are famous for polystylism. I love how Jonathan adapts different styles in the piece. He blends the atonal and tonal contents smoothly. The orchestration is colorful. There are some certain degrees of comedy aspect in the piece, which is quite different from the other stuff he shows in the class. The second piece, Radius Ensemble (2015) is my favorite one. He explains the concept of incorporating so...

John Zorn. It was an incredible experience to have such a hero of contemporary music as John Zorn come to speak to us. I remember back in Australia when we were taught about Zorn's work in contemporary music history classes. It was fascinating to see him in person and to hear him talk. When you hear about someone from afar, you often see their work as the key element about them, the category they fit into, their contribution to history. For me hearing John talk opened up the humanity that is every present in what we do, and is sometimes forgotten when we look at artistic contributions from afar. I think the most important takeaway from John's talk was how to be a human, not how to be a composer of musician. Or maybe more accurately, how to live as a human who is involved in the musical world. Much of John's work is just stuff he does with his friends that happens to be art. There is no pretention about him in my mind, though some of the things he says may come across as a...

Reed Pryor, 5-5-2019 Comment based on Paper by Margy Hayes that Explores the Lecture of John Zorn I agree with you that what a composer puts forth “might be vastly different from an audience’s perspective,” thus making it very important for every composer to have their own voice and to define that by their own terms. That brings me to this idea of the piece ‘belonging to everyone,’ which I think is an essentially stupid thing for Zorn to have stood by. I think that the audience member should take in the piece based on their own interpretation, but the creator should also not be principally concerned with creating a trend in reactions. It is more valuable, for instance, to have someone in the front row hate it and another in the back think of the work as the greatest thing since sliced bread. Get the argument to happen, make it impassioned, and do not expect any sort of cookie-cutter resolution. The overall problem with the art ‘community’ Zorn represents, in which he cannot ...

After John Zorn’s intense talk on Monday night, there were a multitude of interesting ‘takeaways’, from the importance of band leading to the controversy of commissions. However, there was one that stuck out to me, which got to the heart of a question that probably plagues many artists - Does the world need this work? I’m sure many have found themselves in both categories (at least I have), where you know exactly what you want to say from composing your next piece, to writing it and then finding meaning through the ‘sculpting process’. However, what about a work that has no purpose - no meaning - do we even call it art? And if you have nothing to say, then does it not go against contributing to culture? I think in this scenario it is all about perception. A work with no rhyme or reason still can be perceived as having meaning in someone’s eyes, even if the original intent was no intent at all. I think it is extremely important to have something to say, yet everyone interprets thi...

My knowledge of John Zorn was marginal at best before this talk, although I did perform some Cobra improvisations while studying abroad in Prague two semesters ago. It was refreshing to hear someone speak with such strong opinions and no reservations about making them known plainly—Zorn can, of course, afford to do this because he is a well-established figure in the experimental music world. With past Forum guests, I’ve found that there has been more of an emphasis on playing and speaking about their music in a more piece-by-piece way, versus Zorn pulling examples from his catalogue or anecdotes from his sprawling career as it seemed appropriate based on the questions he was receiving. Zorn’s talk put a large emphasis on the composer-performer relationship, which he views as the central pillar of musical performance. Most composers, myself included, have been told time and again to write for friends and/or familiar players with a specific level of difficulty or aesthetic in mind tha...

Last week’s presentation by John Zorn left me with plenty to reflect upon. Having carved his own path in life with such conviction, there were a lot of ideas and principles that warrant such review in my own creative endeavors. Recently for some of my current media projects, I have been laboring over casting the musicians to record these new scores. I feel that this additional step, more than just finding x-player or y-instrument, can make the difference between a good and great recording/performance. Upon hearing Zorn’s opinion on the matter of performers, I felt reassured that this additional step I have been taking has been worth it. Now of course, we cannot all have the JACK Quartet premiere all our compositions; however, the attention and detail that Zorn gave to each performance—looking well beyond correct notes—is something that I find commendable: especially since many new works tend to receive less attention than they deserve. When one then applies this previous di...