Music in Practice: "The Urge You Feel...", Mammoth Words and the World of Webern

I firmly believe that musicologists can and should also be composers, at least to a minimum degree.  Part of what allows us to understand the compositional process -- and thus make assumptions about it and write about it in detail -- is to experience the process yourself.  One of my favorite professors, Dr. Christian Asplund, also believes strongly in this.  Thus, for his classes he requires all students to compose as well as study the works of great composers.  This is a daunting task for me; I usually don't adhere the word "composer" to my list of identity aspects.  But, as a musicologist who wishes to understand the nature of the composer's mind as he/she writes, I must rise to the occasion.  Not only must I write, but I must also feel comfortable sharing what I have created.

Thus, I present this recurring segment, entitled Music in Practice, in which I share compositions that I have written that are related to my career and current areas of research.

My respect for Webern is great, but my affection toward his music has always been rather low. I only study his works when I am told to for a class.  It's not that I don't like atonality.  It doesn't make me uncomfortable.  Webern's music isn't even that boring to me.  It just doesn't stir me like, say, Berg's Wozzeck (written by another scholar of Schönberg alongside Webern) does.  That being said, my appreciation for Webern has significantly grown after writing in his style.  Along with analyzing his works, I've also had to write some serialist works as exercises, and I was never really pleased with the outcome.  Somehow Webern is able to catch a great row pattern or pitch class that I just don't have much of an ear for.  I'm too trapped in tonality to be a good serialist composer.

 A new opportunity to achieve Webern's heights was placed before me last week. Dr. Asplund's first composition exercise that he assigned to us for 20th-Century Counterpoint was to write a piece in the style of Webern. The directive was to create a pointillistic inversion canon with an additional voice outside of the canon.  All content needed to be in serial rows, and only thirteen pitches could be used.

Although I kept true to the directions given to me, I breached Webern's style in several small ways.  I chose to keep things very simple and to use more sustained tones, which you could say stepped out of Webern's wheelhouse.  I also chose to use a text.  However, I feel like I captured some of Webern's conceptual spirit by presenting a very short piece that hopefully encapsulates an idea more fully than any other rendering might.

I chose to use a text that is essentially a very long compound word, modeled after the German idea of Mammutwörter.  This term exactly translates into "mammoth words": long strings of words that are melded together to create a new word with its own unique meaning (the word Mammutwörter itself is a simple example of a mammoth word).  A good example of a mammoth word is the word given to Wagner's idea of the "total art work": Gesamtkunstwerk.  It literally is the three words smooshed together, but there a new, more complex meaning is implied when they are juxtaposed in this way.
English-speakers do this too. We have compound words like marketplace and inchworm and takeout.  As with German compound words, there are rules that are usually followed in creating these new terms (here's a link to the Wikipedia article about this).  But we often break our own rules when the need arises, sometimes stepping into the realm of ridiculousness.  The hashtag (#) phenomenon requires us to see more complex, multi-word ideas as just one unit (example: #throwbackthursday is essentially a compound word that contains a compound word, thus upping the complexity level). Sometimes this compounding of words is done to an extreme degree for the sake of humor. In the internet sensation A Very Potter Musical, Harry Potter (played by the affable Darren Criss, see this link) calls his beloved Cho Chang supermegafoxyawesomehot.  This new, preposterously long word has begun to engrain itself into the everyday vocabulary of young people (at least in my circle of friends, anyway).

I extrapolated on the compounding process to a similarly extreme level.  I took a very specific idea idea (more like a situation, I guess) that I felt could be better described simply by a long string of words.  There's this urge I feel sometimes to stroke a man's beard when it would be the most inappropriate time to do so.  It is especially annoying when I feel the impulse with a professional colleague, especially as we are sitting across from each other at a table during a meeting.

So I made up a long word that describes this sensation:
Awkwardbusinesscoffeearmfacehairjoyfeelies  
(Ex: I always get awkwardbusinesscoffeearmfacehairjoyfeelies when I go out to conferences with Dr. Matheson.  It's terribly distracting.)

This word can be broken apart into three additional mammoth word combinations:

Awkwardcoffeejoy -- a coffee-shop romance between strangers
(Ex: I think there's some awkwardcoffeejoy going on between the guy behind the counter and that blonde girl over there by the fireplace. They're always smiling at each other.)

Businessface -- possession of deep focus and determination as one endeavors to complete a career-oriented project
(Ex: Sheila really had some businessface as she presented at today's conference. I bet she really wants that promotion.)

Armhairfeelies -- The sensation you feel when your long hair touches the back of your upper arms.
(Ex: I hate armhairfeelies, so I always wear long-sleeved shirts.)  

I could use these words-within-the-word to create a pointillistic effect in the music.  Three different voices sing these three smaller words in a hocketted fashion, so when you hear them sing it together, the larger word forms.

You can see this best with the score.

Click on the image for a closer look.

My choices for rows were pretty arbitrary.  Both were taken from Webern's works themselves, and one of them (the one designated to the inversion canon) begins with the oft-used BACH motif (notes that spell out Bach's name: Bb-A-C-B, seen as B-A-C-H in German notation).  I mainly chose these specific rows for their potential use of major and minor sevenths (a very "Webernian" practice, according to Pousseur*) and for their "singability."

Composing serial pieces for voice presents a number of challenges.  I, myself, needed some pitch prompts from the piano as I quickly recorded this piece for class.  However, when it comes to atonal works, I would argue that it is far easier for singers to keep track of a few fragments of the row at a time than it is for them to try and sing all twelve pitches in succession.  Fortunately, awkwardbusinesscoffeefacearmhairjoyfeelies is twelve syllables long, so each syllable can have its own pitch.  Thus, each vocal part is in charge of only a fraction of the entire row.  By the end of the piece, the entire row has only been sung by the singers one time.

All of this occurs over an inversion canon of the BACH row, which can played by piano and baritone ukulele (or guitar, if you haven't a uke on you).  This instrumentation was mainly chosen out of necessity; I can't play much else.

Of course, the word groups I used for text are probably far too long and abstract to be used in  real-life sentences.  I don't quite have the gift for words that allows me to create a new vocabulary that really fits the current linguistic context of English. But for the sake of a musical text, they serve their purpose well.  Instead of taking several long sentences or more to describe these detailed and complicated sensations and situations to you, I can just tag in this word string instead, and you get the idea without excess explanation.

To emphasize this, I presented the "definitions" of these word clusters as the title, which should take more time to digest than the musical work itself:

The Urge you Feel to Reach across the Table to Touch the Beard of your Professional Colleague during a Lunchtime One-on-One Business Conference over Coffee
OR
The Sensation of Long Hair Brushing the Back of your Forearms
OR 
A Coffee-Shop Romance between Strangers
OR
The Demeanor of One who is Incredibly Focused on a Career-Oriented Goal

Webern's brief, twenty-second-long pieces exhibit this same idea; why use a million notes when only a string of twenty-four-or-so very aptly placed notes would do?  According to Schönberg, Webern's well-crafted pieces, though brief, speak for themselves and require no additional justification.  They probably get the job done better than any full-blown, Beethoven-sized symphony written in the same serialist style could.  So while it doesn't sound quite as true to Webern as it does to say, Boulez's Les Marteau sans Maître (a later total-serialist work that has a sung text), I consider The Urge You Feel... to be written with the spirit of Webern in mind, using some of his best-known techniques such as pointillistic texture, twelve-tone rows, the inversion canon, and rapidly-changing dynamics.

*All sources included in this essay are either hyperlinked or provided in the source list given in this earlier post.