Student Samples

Student Sample 1

Jill Teasley

Several years ago, maybe around 1958, Luciano Berio invited me to Milan.  I had been teaching at Darmstadt; he offered me the chance to work in the Milan radio station’s tape studio — this was where I composed my tape piece Fontana Mix.  It was a wonderful time, those four months.  Italy in the summer is a beautiful place, and that was before the air in Milan was still pleasant.  But the most outstanding thing in my memory of that summer is of my involvement with an audience-interactive television program.  Someone in the business heard of my interest in mycology and asked me to appear on the television quiz show ‘Lascia o raddoppia’ to answer questions on mushrooms.  I lasted five weeks on the program, at the end of which I received a large prize, and I created and performed preludes to the game sessions, including Water Walk and Sounds of Venice.  This summer was not the best time of my life (there has been no best moment or season of my life, as I am constantly adapting to the things around me in such a way that I neither like or dislike them.  I find beauty and meaning in all of them).  But it was certainly a time in which I found beauty and meaning immediately, everywhere I looked. 

I had great hopes upon returning to the United States in the fall.  The audience for my music was growing, and I hoped it would continue doing so, partly because it is nice to be appreciated and understood, but mostly because I really did believe (as I still do) that my life’s task was to make the human world a more joyful and serene place, and if people were being affected, then I was accomplishing something.  My favorable experience with television led me to hope that in America, I, or someone with similar goals, might appear and perform on a popular broadcasted series.

Yet when I took my idea to the studios, no one was interested.  They didn’t think anyone would understand it, and it didn’t matter that the Italians had.  People would find me pretentious, they said, or else be scared and change the channel to something more comfortable.  I was told that the advertisers would never support it.  For a few weeks I would stare at my reflection in my shaving mirror and think, "this is the face that would frighten people away?"  I looked at some of my scores, at the little black heads of notes and bold-colored lines, and thought, "this is scary?"  I always expected it would make people happy to hear something new, to know that music, like everything else, can change.  I was baffled, but it wasn’t the first time that my efforts at sharing my music and ideas were discouraged.  So I waited, and worked on other projects.

In the meantime, I died.

II

In the summer of 1998, forty years after Berio’s invitation to Milan, a woman named Esvelda read my book Silence.  Its detailing of the importance of human sensory awareness led her to develop her psychic abilities, which became so sharpened that she could awaken the dead: she discovered that we (the dead) were all simply lying in shadows, eclipsed by the living’s idea of determined past and present.  The living believe in only one present; my friend believes in timelessness, and can see into all of what we call eras of history, because for her they are all happening at the same time — so time does not really exist for her, at least not the chronological kind.  Without its barrier, she looked for me and found me where I had sunken into shadow beneath an oak tree by a mushroom field in Northern California.  I had been hoping someone would come along and I am ever-grateful, for her recognition of me was enough to bring me out of my resting place.  The forty years were never boring, as I was always studying some aspect of my surroundings, like the wind shuffling through the field’s long grass in the spring — and after all, I am famous for quoting Zen ideology that says that "If something is boring for two minutes, try it for four," or eight or thirty-two and all that, so I really can’t complain, and I have no reason to, anyway — but it is lovely to be working again.

Back in New York I found that the major networks were even worse off than when I approached them in the late ‘fifties; they were ruled by their sponsors more than ever before.  Someone told me about Jon Bon Jovi, a rock musician whose audience had left him behind.  He wanted to start a talk show but couldn’t get his idea carried by anyone either.  So I tracked him down and said, "Jon, I made a mistake forty years ago when I thought that to reach mainstream audiences one must start mainstream — there are other ways, countless possibilities that all lead to the ocean of American people.  Let’s start our own show, back it and air it ourselves."  He gave it some thought.

I must confess that I did too: I recognized that Jon is a kind and intelligent man, but I had doubts as to his willingness to incorporate many of my ideas into the show.  Even though he shares my wish to relax the stiffness of the American public’s attitude towards music and the world at large, he thinks we would be better off starting with what everybody else does.  I don’t even care what everybody else is doing, because I had had this plan for so long of showing the interactions between music and speech, dance and mathematical graphs, food preparation and painting and so on by inviting people of different vocations onto the show, and making them play different games together which would require demonstrations of their work — I was really thinking that highlighting the commonalities between seemingly disparate things would make the world a less divided and happier place.

Jon told me that successful talk shows are fueled by conflict, not amity, and that my ideas were already well-planted in people’s minds.  "Rap has already done that," he said regarding my view of the relation between music and speech, for instance.  He envisioned something more rooted in the pop culture we wanted to affect, something with rock and roll and sex, something to amuse people.  Since I had been dead for a few years, and was thus lacking in experience with mainstream television performance practices, I accepted his idea with the furtive plan of learning as much as I could and making changes for the better.  For instance, I would really like to run the show by chance operation. Jon is not ready for this yet.  But maybe he’ll at least let me compose theme music by next season.  What is really important is that we are making a start.  My taste is not everybody’s taste, but I will still get to share it.

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Student Sample 2

Jill Teasley

Beth Orton, Trailer Park (1997, Heavenly Records)

Beth Orton’s 1997 album, Trailer Park, is reminiscent of the catch-phrase "Don’t let the bastards get you down."  Her music flows ocean-like from elation to inspired gloom and back, giving a dose of optimism to the weary and lovelorn.  In "Someone’s Daughter," she sings, "Keep looking for the reason high and low to let it go… I wanna know how it feels to be the sunshine in your hair."  Musically, this is one of the most upbeat songs on the album, with a bouncing bassline and a cheerful melody, showing that unrequited love can be more adventure than pain.  Her band uses an assortment of instruments in satisfying ways: the first track "She Cries Your Name" starts with slow-twisting and mesmerizing violin duet, and in other pieces, dulcimer, cello, and electronics combine with guitar, bass, and drums into a richly colorful sound, providing an uplift any day.

Madeleine Peyroux, Dreamland (1996, Atlantic)

Madeleine Peyroux may be the best vocal reincarnation of Billie Holiday to date.  Her lackadaisical phrasing, for instance, is extremely reminiscent of the late great.  But Peyroux can stand on her own.  Her compositions are terrific, especially the title track.  The continuous quarter-note propulsion played alternatingly on harpsichord, Mellotron, and guitar combined with the dry sultriness of Peyroux’s singing make it both a love song and a moving-along song, providing the listener with a few great minutes of musing.  Also to Peyroux’s credit is the life she brings to standards such as "Muddy Water" and "Walkin’ After Midnight."  In "A Prayer" her delivery of the word "paradise" is heavenly.  Hearing Peyroux sing the accordion-accompanied "La Vie En Rose" is another fiesta, so lazily loaded is her voice in its native language.  Peyroux’s singing on "Dreamland" makes one shiver, and better yet, makes one want to sing along.

Sinéad O’Connor, Universal Mother (1994, Chrysalis Records)

Sinéad O’Connor has a tremendous gift for writing music that is simultaneously rich and simple.  On Universal Mother her lyrics are strongly political, yet her music, rather than becoming a moralistic tirade, as easily it could, is an intelligent contemplation.  Take the song "Red Football," which begins with her quiet singing and some sparse piano block chords.  As the words unfold she remains calm, but the bass guitar’s fierce stamps depict her intention of "leaping up and getting you."  The vicious "la-la-la" chorus ends the song abruptly, leaving no doubt as to her sincerity.  A gentle guitar-driven cover of Kurt Cobain’s "All Apologies" is similarly emotionally ripe, as is "A Perfect Indian," which uses piano for waves of color.  "Famine" is a sample-loaded spoken piece detailing Irish repression.  Ranging in method but unrelenting in its passion, "Universal Mother" provides an epiphany of thought and beauty.

Please note: These musicians all performed at the Lilith Fair within its first two years of existence.

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Student Sample 3

A Tramp through R. Murray Schafer's "Snowforms"

Jill Teasley

In the introduction to the score of "Snowforms," a piece for women’s choir, composer R. Murray Schafer describes his experience watching "soft foldings of snow" through the windows of his farmhouse during a snowstorm in the winter of 1981.  It so moved him that to he wrote "Snowforms" to evoke a musical impression of the snowfall.  He did this by using original and daring techniques: graphically notated and straying from conventional melodic and harmonic forms, "Snowforms" bridges the gap between traditional and modern choral music, between the perennial "Ceremony of Carols" and the stuff that never gets programmed by your average musically adventurous choral director.  Here, both as a chorister who has sung this piece and as a music student who greatly admires it, I will attempt to describe this composition and to show its inventiveness.

The score alone is striking: the paper used for the score is turquoise, and the music is printed in white.  Schafer, a talented calligrapher, drew the two parts as lines, creating an image of horizontal infinity like the fields of snow his piece portrays.  As he explains in the score, Schafer had been giving children sight-singing exercises in which they sang drawings or shapes on the horizon.  "Snowforms", which Schafer intended for children to "sing, listen to and perhaps draw pictures to," is thus a picture of the composed sounds.

At the same time, this kind of notation makes for a smoother sound, which helps depict the snow images.  When one of the parts’ pitch changes, the line moves up or down accordingly, with pitch names provided.  At times each line breaks into sections in which singers are instructed to divide and occasionally improvise around assigned melodic shapes; with the pitches drawn as a continuous line, singers move from less distinctly from note to note, particularly when they are humming.  A log of five-second increments gives the meter and there is no sense of pulse.  Singers are lost in the music except for the cues they know are coming, just as they might guide themselves through a snowcovered field with a few recognizable lumps.

"Snowforms" is obviously not easy to learn and perform.  It takes a while to get used to the conductor’s timed five-second pulse; reading the music alone takes some practice and requires close attention.  The improvisatory passages require more confidence than demanded by traditional part singing, and the parts collide at intervals that initially ring dissonantly.  Yet these roughnesses soften as the structure of the piece surfaces and performers begin to understand what they are singing.

Interesting to examine are the nine Inuit words for snow that form the main themes of the piece (audience members are usually given translations at concerts); unlike most choral songs, the lyrics are interspersed through sections of hummed notes.  Each word is painted by the music, flurrying or focusing the audible soundscape.  For instance, the sopranos sing the word "Qanit", meaning "falling snow," out of time with one another so that the descending minor third from Db to Bb and the chromatic cascades down the octave overlap onto themselves — the result is an aural impression of snowflakes gliding in the air and then falling. "Akelrorak", or "newly drifted snow," is sung as a vibrant Bb minor/9/11/13 chord, evocative of dense but transitory snow catching the sun’s light.

Note relationships in "Snowforms" take cues from Western tonic-dominant harmonies, but like Schafer’s use of lyrics are shaped by his vision of snow more than anything else.  The piece’s tonal center, which up to this point had loosely been C, temporarily shifts to Db at the singing of "Akelrorak"; meanwhile the parts divide and increase in rhythmic intensity.  The altos stay on G, the dominant note in the scale of C, as this chord fades out, beckoning the music back from its focus around Db.  But after repeating the brooding beginning section in which still is again central, the piece concludes on the unison humming of D via pentatonic scales.  Leaving the piece floating on D makes it seem weightless — like snow, Schafer’s music can change form, melt into water, and evaporate into the air.

This page was last updated on 01/02/03.