TCC 38. Becoming Tangible - Dr. Amelia Brey

[Aaron] Welcome to the Theorist Composer Collaboration, a podcast interview series highlighting modern composers and music theorists. My name is Aaron D’Zurilla, I'm the host of this podcast and also a music theorist myself. Today I will be talking with the composer Dr. Amelia Brey alongside her piece Becoming Tangible. I talked with Dr. Brey about her background, compositional process, musical philosophy, and much more. Without further ado, this is an excerpt from Becoming Tangible and welcome to the TCC. Again, the music that you were just listening to is from the piece Becoming Tangible by the composer Dr. Amelia Brey. Speaking of which, Amelia, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing?

[Dr. Brey] I'm doing well. Thanks for having me.

[Aaron] Yes. How about you go ahead and introduce yourself personally, professionally, academically, whatever you choose.

[Dr. Brey] I came to music a little later than some. I really delved into it when I was in high school. I started, actually, playing bluegrass as a guitarist and playing in hardcore punk bands in Tallahassee, Florida. Went to Vanderbilt University, studied composition, studied two summers in Paris at the IMA Institute and master's and doctoral degrees at the Juilliard School.

[Aaron] Wonderful. So you're doing some good work. And so you are done with your doctoral studies at Juilliard. Is that right?

[Dr. Brey] I am. I'm composing now. I'm working on some music theory projects and looking for where this all leads.

[Aaron] Looking for where this all leads. Certainly everything that we're all trying to pine for, even myself at this moment. You know, you're here on the Theorist Composer Collaboration. And although I originally contacted you just for your composition work, particularly in vocal work, which we'll get to, I also find it very interesting to find out that you also have quite the music theory bona fides as well. And, you know, a central topic of this podcast. How do you, in your personal life, or in your head, quantify the world and practice of music theory and composition?

[Dr. Brey] So my research has two thrusts. My personal research has emphasized different methods of counterpoint that are based in the species that you learn in school, but are not following the same rules of consonance and dissonance. So I look for surrogate methods of intervallic hierarchy. That's some good words there. I've done some work on Ruth Crawford Seeger, who I feel combines really some Chopin-esque romantic sort of formal techniques with dissonant counterpoint. In which the consonance takes the place of the dissonance, and the dissonance takes the place of the consonance. So I'll find a dissonance that can be prolongated using contrapuntal analysis. This can give structure to a piece that's written without conventional functional harmony. I've worked on the music of György Kurtág. Hungarian names are a little tricky to pronounce.

[Aaron] It sounds like you did it right, at least.

[Dr. Brey] And in that work, he uses the axis system with minor third substitutions and tritone substitutions in order to really substitute the functional harmonies that we learn 1, 4, and 5. This is something he gets from Bartok, who in Ernan Envai's research is revealed to have used these third and tritone substitutions to chromatically densify the language. And Kurtzhoff's work is known as being 12 -tone, especially the early works I focused on. Am I rambling?

[Aaron] No, no. I mean, you're certainly speaking like a theorist. I would know. But certainly, and dissonant counterpoint is something I've always found very fascinating. It's not something that I mess with very often. I've never had any formal instruction in it. I also study rap and hip hop so it's not well I don't know some of the mumble rap might be dissonant counterpoint incidentally but certainly not on purpose like this. Anyhow so there's a little background on your theoretical work certainly a lot to meet to a lot of meat to chew on there. But let's steer towards, at least for right now, we'll come back to the theory stuff. Let's steer towards right now to your compositional work. How would you describe the music that you write?

[Dr. Brey] How would I describe the music that I write? So when you asked me this question initially, something that came to mind was the feeling of resonance in a large space is incredibly important to me. I would say this comes from Renaissance music, resonance in a church, Renaissance lush counterpoint like Josquin or Palestrina. I'm applying the dissonant counterpoint methods to these techniques. I've studied species counterpoint quite a bit, including in Paris. This enables one to control voice leading while necessarily substituting in creative new intervals to get a new sound that is exciting. I think Debussy composed this way. He was notably private about how he wrote, but if you listen to a piece like the Sunken Cathedral with those big stacks of fifths that just hang in the air, that was the piece that really inspired me to start to compose.

[Aaron] I'm actually going to say I'm not familiar with that piece, so I'm going to have to go ahead and check that out. So the idea of resonance as a compositional tool, I'm sure others have done it as you were just citing, but not actually something I've thought about too much. And so when you're in your compositional process and you're thinking about the resonance of the space that the music will be heard, that will be performed, I'm thinking particularly when you can't necessarily control the space sometimes that will be performed. or done in, or you're not sure where it will be. How are you thinking about or controlling that space during the compositional process? Is it mostly intervallic, like you were speaking, or are you thinking timbral as well?

[Dr. Brey] I'd say interval comes first, and what spectral analysis will teach us is that timbre is interval. there are intervals in every particular tone color that we have I start generally developing a sonority usually at the piano usually when in doubt I’ll hear the piano in the room and try to luxuriate in this. If it's a dead little apartment room, which isn't resonating much, and I can get something interesting there it'll certainly develop something interesting in space. In Becoming Tangible, on the other hand, I had the privilege of writing for a venue, National Sawdust, that had a complex installed reverb system. So in this case, I had distant mics to the instruments, not close mic. This is not an amplified ensemble piece like George Crumb might have written. However, the instruments were mic'd and recorded, and actually, because it was the pandemic, the premiere was given in recorded form.

[Aaron] Yeah, so Becoming Tangible. Let's get on to that, which obviously is the piece that we're featuring today. And you just said it was premiered and sounds like it was a little bit ago because of the pandemic. But can you give a little context to the premiere of the work and what that was like?

[Dr. Brey] This was through National Sawdust's Blueprint Fellowship Program. I was selected for the program before the pandemic began, and we were thinking all the way through how we were going to adapt this. I had my texts all ready. I met the poet Julian Harmon Evans through a Facebook group. Knew just through conversation that they wrote poetry, and out of curiosity one day asked for a selection of things they might like et. These three in particular hung together. I would say they depict spaces in their own right. which, of course, during the pandemic, we were all thinking about other spaces we'd like to be in.

[Aaron] Well, certainly.

[Dr. Brey] This comes in three sections. The first is Zurich. It's a depiction of the city, Zurich. The second is called Burnt Orange, which is an intimate interior indoor scene. And then the third is called After Rain, which, while it does not name the city, clearly describes London and the humidity in the air and the sort of street side, vine-covered wall vistas that you might see there.

[Aaron] Let's take a quick pause. So in collaboration with this poet, what's their name again?

[Dr. Brey] Julian Harmon Evans.

[Aaron] Sure, sure. I'll try to get their contact and put it in the episode description. The three parts to your piece. Are those three parts intact within the original text, or was that through your interpretation?

[Dr. Brey] They're intact in the original text unto themselves. I chose the three and spliced them together, and they were perfect to set as they were. In many cases when I'm working with a poem, especially if it's in the public domain, I will extract sections according to what sings most naturally, what fits the compositional pacing, but these were perfectly self-contained.

[Aaron] Yeah, so the setting of poems is something that I've encountered here and there. And to me, as someone who's like not up to standard mentally about literature of that kind, I'm not incredibly knowledgeable. I always find it incredibly fascinating. And particularly when it comes into the vocal medium. like we have right here. As we talked about in our preliminary, you actually have quite a lot of experience in vocal composition. And so this is like a two-part question is, what draws you so much to vocal music? And two, do you have other experiences, it sounds like you do, how you handle adapting existing text?

[Dr. Brey] I would say initially, my love of vocal music comes from a great love of poetry. The way it can set a scene in minimal words and the way it can then provide source for imagination provides the space that I can very nicely circumscribe in composing. I would like to ask you to repeat again the second portion of the questions.

[Aaron] Yeah, of course. I have a bad habit of asking compound questions. The second part is, how do you go about, since you have experience in adapting existing text, what is your general method behind that?

[Dr. Brey] I experience in adapting existing text. So for many years, what I would do is, I love this poem, I'm going to set it. And this often works. I find, very often, poems naturally go together, often by the same author, not necessarily by the same author. I don't believe I've ever done a cycle that wasn't one. No, I have done a cycle that was more than one author. Something in their internal structures and spirits, which is entirely suggested, makes these things clearly belong to the same space. Then working from there, I would say my text setting begins being quite rhythmically straightforward. I try to take the shape of the poem itself very, very literally. And this is played against some kind of imagism in the accompaniment. Depends on what the instruments are, of course. It depends on the nature of the space. Depends very heavily on the nature of the poetry. I would say that the design of the accompaniment is a very large part of writing vocal music. And admirers of, for example, the orchestral songs of Mahler or the songs with piano of Schubert or Hugo Wolf. I know the German, well, will clearly evidence this. Do you know the work of Schubert der Leiermann, the finale of Venturisa?

[Aaron] I'm going to be honest, I have no idea, no.

[Dr. Brey] I recommend playing a little bit of it.

[Aaron] Sure, sure. And, well, here's one thing that just came to mind. So, this is backtracking a little bit, but how did you go from punk rock band in Tallahassee to this kind of stuff?

[Dr. Brey] It was following pure intuition.

[Aaron] Hey, that's good.

[Dr. Brey] I would honestly say that they were dovetailed from the beginning. If you play music of Thursday, the band Thursday, do you know the band Thursday?

[Aaron] No.

[Dr. Brey] They were a significant post-hardcore innovator in the early 2000s. Sure. If you play that sort of music with all those power chord stacks of fifths on the piano, it sounds like Debussy.

[Aaron] I can, studying popular music, I get that. I can see that.

[Dr. Brey] And so adapting one technique to the other was fairly natural. I played the cello as well, and the natural chords you see on the cello are also stacks of fifths very similar. You can play power chords on the cello. Rashad Eggleston, I don't know if you know him.

[Aaron] Not familiar.

[Dr. Brey] He comes to Tallahassee reasonably often. I would recommend looking him up. But he was in Crooked Still, the Newgrass group. And you'll very often see power chord guitar-like formations in those arrangements.

[Aaron] Very cool. Very cool. You know, I'm thinking about, you know, the discussion of stacking fifths and coming back to the piece for today, Becoming Tangible, I'm thinking about in the texture. Particularly in the interaction between the voices, a lot of pentatonic action going on in the intervallic content, chordal and quintal harmonies, not, I didn't mean to say pentatonic chordal and quintal harmonies between the voice layers. Which is something that can be reflected through this sort of stacking that you're talking about. Also let's get further refocused back onto Becoming Tangible. And can you list again what those three major sections are?

[Dr. Brey] the first section is Zurich the city in Switzerland. The second section is Burnt Orange. This is the intimate interior scene. And then the final section is After Rain, which I thought very much sounded like London.

[Aaron] Sure. In your compositional process, since we have like a three-part thing, it's relatively seamless throughout the piece, but we have this three-part structure. Did you compose them out of order, straight through? How did you handle that?

[Dr. Brey] I usually am writing straight through, even if they're not continuous. Because I feel one necessarily prepares the next. I feel multiple short things that go together are necessarily one larger thing. And I have a handful of cycles like this. My Eurydice is like this. My Songs to Joannes is like this. But those that have more separation, nonetheless, and for an example from the repertoire, I would say, Finzi's Let Us Garlands Bring. This is very, very popular standard repertoire for vocalists. It's a favorite work of mine. Very, very often, individual songs from a set like this are extracted. And it doesn't explicitly tell a story from one end to the other, like Schumann's Dichterliebe. And the sequence between these naturally follows in a way that could be described through patterns of repetition and contrast at similar tempo levels and similar levels of ornamentation.

[Aaron] Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, to compose what comes next for the audience, it makes sense to see it in the perspective of, well, this came before, so, you know, what comes next is generated out of it. And one of the most unique elements of the piece, close listeners in this episode are certainly going to be able to hear it, but especially if you look at the score video, which is going to be linked in the description. Oh my goodness. The amount of metrical changes. It is something special, and it's a big feature of the piece, the flowing metrical elements. And we're going to talk about meter for a bit here. But let's just start with a very simple question. Why so many meter changes?

[Dr. Brey] They were implicit in the voices.

[Aaron] Implicit in the voices. Okay.

[Dr. Brey] The important thing to note about modern poetry is that most of it is in free verse. typically you're not going to see the exact metrical pattern, metrical foot of the text repeated. In blank verse, like many works of Shakespeare, you will. And you can write a dum -da -da -dum -da -da -dum -da -da -dum sort of rhythm out of that that's quite consistent. I do have songs like that. In this particular case, the narrative was much more, not quite haiku-like, but with that approach to text space. And I would say there were no obvious implications of a demanded meter other than how naturally one read the text. And for me, that ended up with quite a lot of metronome markings. And I noticed you interestingly identified my preference for double zero, zero over zero.

[Aaron] Yes.

[Dr. Brey] This was a means that I simply thought of conveying clearly to the conductor. It could have been a big letter X. I've seen that in scores before too. of moments that are not necessarily governed by a time signature. These are not cadenzas. Cadenzas don't have a time signature, but cadenzas can clearly be written out in one dimension. They're played by one person. In this case, I wanted play across the ensemble space with contrasting instruments responding to each other that were not necessarily governed by the equal proportions that a meter would give. I gave general durations in seconds, but primarily I showed this with connections from one instrument to another, dotted lines across the score. This is a technique I've cribbed from both Lutoslawski, also Takamitsu, Penderecki, many composers of the late 20th century are writing unmetered sections with some other means of showing coincidences.

[Aaron] Yeah, it's funny that you bring up Ludus Vosky. I only know this because there was a Ludus Vosky piece on the Florida State Comprehensive Exam that I just took. So I only know this because of that. But a theorist named Michael Klein called in Ludus Vosky's music, and I would apply it to this, as controlled aleatory. Because it's in effect, to the audience, somewhat aleatoric or gives that effect. But of course you're controlling it in a good number of ways you know duration, the choice of pitches, and so on with that. And I'm also wondering about in terms of controlling, so as a composer you were talking about you know the choice of meters was almost implicit in the way that you were interpreting the text. On a technical level, when you're like, okay, this is my interpretation, I now have to orchestrate it and then make it make sense and think about how a rehearsal would go and how a conductor would interpret it. That's where the zero over zero time signature came from. And I also want to say, we talked about in the prelim, but I only brought up the zero over zero because it would make a theory one student throw a book at me if I tried to show them zero. But it was a practical means. Back to my train of thought. So when you're in a compositional process of you're like, OK, this is my interpretation. I now need to explain it, quote unquote, with all of these changes. How are you intellectually managing these, what for a lot of musicians or compositions can be titanic shifts in how meter is perceived? How do you organize all of that when you're like working on and finessing the different parts of the piece?

[Dr. Brey] For me, I've always been attracted to the notion that meter is suspendable. Music is beautiful if it is something that exists outside of linear time. This is not necessarily to say that music needs to somehow have a sense of timelessness constantly. I do admire, for example, Lamont Young, but this is not an aesthetic prescription for me. I am drawn to the notion that music is very much its own space-time continuum, however. What this means, as far as a compositional process, is that a rhythmic fabric can absolutely be created by the natural progression of either motivic development in an instrumental texture or the natural pacing of poetry, although there are ways to take both of those things and handle them a-metrically. In cases such as the zero-zero sections, I was interested in diving so far into sonority that the material had to unfold without necessarily following a tempo. I would say I get this from Sonic Youth, if anybody. Sonic Youth, noted rock band of the no wave movement, New York City, 1980s, who will have a rock and roll, you know, four chord song going on. And they'll have some nice decorations with that. There's lots of detail in the guitar writing, but nonetheless, it hangs together as a rock song. And then all of a sudden, a sort of a drop and you get disjunct guitar noise that doesn't follow any discernible pattern. This way of ripping right into the texture. And allowing it to sort of, you know, rediscover itself without the metrical surroundings is very, very attractive to me. And in Becoming Tangible in particular, I emphasized how can these components, how can the voices, how can the instruments play off of each other successively responding to one another without necessarily responding to waiting for the next downbeat? And it is conducted. And the conductor has to cue these people in.

[Aaron] Yeah, that's the next thing that I want to touch on. How much it, was the pandemic so there, was a lot going on but how much were you able to witness the process of the rehearsing and the performing in a live medium especially with all this stuff going on in the music?

[Dr. Brey] We did a good bit of Zoom and the players were masked in the room together on the Zoom. But when I came in on the very first session, the conductor had the entire thing choreographed. It's almost choreographic because you're waiting for one thing to happen before another thing happens. It was remarkably effortless. Some of this is the fortune of having truly great players who are very experienced with modern music. Some of this may have been the happenstance of writing responding to the sort of Zoom conditions. Yeah. Or I like to think it would be.

[Aaron] Could you say, arguably, that, especially for people who are deep into classical repertoire, especially larger ensembles, a conductor is going to bring out of an ensemble a different interpretation? There's some debates of certain conductors doing Beethoven symphonies, is this approach approach or this ritardando, whatever, so on. Not to delegitimize that conversation, but it can get pretty granular. In this case, I feel like that discussion is even more warranted that arguably a different conductor or ensemble would have a really different interpretation of those sections depending on how they take it. Would you agree or disagree with that?

[Dr. Brey] That's something I desire and embrace.

[Aaron] Okay.

[Dr. Brey] The effect that I’m really after where the temporal fabric of music can be torn into is, if anything, greatly enhanced by quite a lot of interpretive subjectivity. Not only does it give significant room to the conductor in order to understand, you know, how long are these pauses really literally, with what type of energy do I bring this player in? I would say there's a lot of agency given to the performers. I'm a big fan of the very Ludislavski technique of the repeated box, where the performers have a figure notated as if it's going to be repeated outside of meter. And they layer on top of each other over and over again, which creates that aleatoric effect of some random pitches. But they're not random pitches. The sequence is given. And even some framework of the rhythm is given. But we in classical music should know a quarter note in quarter equals 60 is not always exactly one second. Good performers are going to shape not just ritardandos that are written in, but speeding up and slowing down that's implicit in the nature of the line. And I want to give the performers chance to embrace that in a way that's not necessarily even governed by the conductor or governed by the other instruments. It's not necessarily just to create a washy effect, although that's very important to me, but it's to create, you know, the effect of this individual performer as an individual agent acting on their own way that merges into the crowd very much like hearing one person speaking in a crowded room. You can hear everyone speaking, you hear one person speaking, you understand what they're saying in moments, and then maybe you don't if you're not tuned into it.

[Aaron] So we did not touch on it before I meant to. We got caught up in other things. Is that where the title Becoming Tangible is derived from?

[Dr. Brey] The title simply was two words that were very powerful in one of the texts. And I was thinking really of humidity, damp air becoming tangible.

[Aaron] Oh, okay.

[Dr. Brey] However, the way the piece works over and over again is these reemergence of coherent. really clear moments, particularly the vocal enunciation, and then return to the reverb wash. So the humidity in the air, the ambience, is in fact the background that is prolongated throughout the entire work. And absolutely, I would say the rhythmic melodic moments do become tangible. And I have some moments of even literal canon Renaissance counterpoint in some places, although I've distorted the interval somewhat. And I tried to embrace something a little more textural. This uses percussion. I don't write for percussion very often. And there are few, far between, very prominent percussive moments that are largely demarcating what the texture is going to be in these suspended moments. And I like to think that there's a texture to that, too.

[Aaron] Oh, sure. Certainly. Implicitly, at least.

[Dr. Brey] That's not a case where I used any technique like spectral analysis to get intervals out of the texture. But I would say through intuition, they fall into it.

[Aaron] So it seems like from what I'm getting from your compositional process, you have a, you have an interesting combination of experiencing like in an intuitive process of experiencing what you're working off of, let's say the poetic text, for example, get like capturing in your mind, what is my reaction? What is my interpretation of this? And then using technical know-how, like let's say a spectral analysis. To then achieve in a tangible way, becoming tangible in some ways. Creating a tangible audience experience of that initial intuition, but through a lot of technicality. And I'm just remarking, this might sound like, well, yeah, of course. But I'm just remarking on this because in your position as both a theorist and a composer, and also in my personal experience talking with composers, it's a lot more leaning on the intuition part. It seems like, tell me if I'm wrong, of course, that you get an intuitive spark and then you take that spark a hundred miles away using other means as well.

[Dr. Brey] You came to something really interesting there, and I really, really appreciate the way you framed that. Because there is a method of composing which exists, which has been historically embraced in a sort of research method of presenting composition. I'm not going to point to any particular people because the usual suspects that are highlighted in curmudgeonly complaints about the direction of modern music don't necessarily target the right musicians.

[Aaron] That was very polite but continue.

[Dr. Brey] Well I see that from both sides personally. I definitely see the pressing need to have some technical basis to composing but I don't want the techniques to provide a necessary framework they don't make the music and that's a danger that I’ve fallen into when I make a plan I don't stick to it never happens rather I would say and Contrapuntal, prolongatory, post -Chenkerian sorts of analyses can be a really good basis for this. I see, yes, there is that initial motivation and there is that inspiration from a particular sonority. The means of working it out are not necessarily architectural realizations of that basic form. There are composers who can work that way really well. For me, I simply have the impulse to think, maybe this technique has something in it that might be good for me and I'll start working out a canon. Something good to hear. And shape my work with those techniques by that impulse. Periodically, I'll mimic a guitar effect, mimic delay. I have like delay echoes written out across the ensemble in some works. Or either I'll be charmed by a sound and do a spectral analysis and play with the noises that come out of that. Or use the spectra in harmonies to get more harmonies, if I can see this one thing developing in some strange ways. It's very much the end mof the mad scientist in the laboratory, tinkering around with various gadgets with no particular mgoal in mind.

[Aaron] Certainly, the goal comes to you through the process. And before we move on to the latter half of this podcast, is there anything else you want to say about Becoming Tangible?

[Dr. Brey] I would say to watch for the different directions that it charges. Because some of them, when I still listen to it, it feels like they came from nowhere. And I wanted them to come from nowhere. I wanted them to emerge from that sort of mysterious shadow realm and take the whole thing off in another direction. So I would say let it impose its order because its order is very strange.

[Aaron] I like that. Let it impose its order because it's really strange. That's nice. So I encourage everyone to use the link in the description to look at the very nice score video and the wonderful recorded performance that it is. So we're moving on to the last part of this podcast, and I'm going to ask an incredibly general question that I love to ask everybody, which is, what does music mean to you?

[Dr. Brey] What does music mean to me? When I first answered that question, I would have been very taken by the sort of John Cage idea that it's any sound that you want to call music. Or perhaps even Virgil Thompson's idea that music is what musicians do. This incredibly open-ended notion really drew to me when I began to compose. However, I wouldn't necessarily say that what I do tests the limits of those generalizations. So I'm inclined to reframe the question. I would say I am drawn to this sort of ancient Greek notion that music is itself harmony, things happening together. These are not necessarily sounds. The Greeks were into the idea that the movements of the planets were musical. And our basic principles of harmony are derived from astronomy and geometry. Frequencies are in proportion to one another. An octave is double. And a fifth is three to two. And these are coming to mind, I would say, every time I compose. I'm still thinking of the divisions even of a string. As a guitarist, this is intuitive. And I would say that the relations that these forms are where music ultimately exists. I would say it exists as even a gestural shape to me. I can sort of feel music happen without hearing it. Think about, think about, fermata, cutoff. That was simply the idea of a moment in a score. or a moment that a conductor would have shown I’d say conducting shows music if you don't have the score on and you watch a conductor silently you're not going to hear the piece necessarily it's not automatically encoded in those gestures but you're going to feel some kind of movement in the room that movement is I think what I’m sonorating when I write.

[Aaron] Interesting, interesting. a lot to chew on there, especially with the Greek philosophy. A harmony of objects or ideas, not western harmony like a chord or something of course. But how about so you're a professional musician in a number of capacities what does music mean in your own personal life to you? To get personal in that way.

[Dr. Brey] I would say music is a place. Music is both a thing that happens and a way of organizing things. But music is also a place, and especially when one is out of the conservatory environment where music is engineered to be everywhere, one can walk back into that space and notice that it still hasn't changed. Lots of other things in the world have changed but music is still doing the thing that it did before, and even if it isn't you can understand it on those terms. It's a very metaphysical way of putting it but that's what I experience.

[Aaron] It's very thought provoking. That's something that I'm also thinking about right now in my own capacities where I just finished a master's at Florida State and I am not going directly into a PhD program. I'm working right now, but I'm also still doing my own research and of course this podcast. But that is, that's, I feel like. I'll have more perspective on that in the coming months as I spend more time away from the university classroom. But I'm going to leave it at that. I'm not sure what else to say. That's very thought-provoking. That's very interesting. Thank you for your insight on that. And so perhaps in that context, what does composition mean to you?

[Dr. Brey] I'm very attracted to the idea of space creation. Before I started composing, I originally wanted to be an architect. I don't necessarily think these things are very different, even though I don't necessarily follow what someone would call an architectural compositional process. It is nonetheless space control, and the shaping of surroundings according to something that is basically number. Music can be reduced to number. It can be reduced to multiple different numerical interpretations. You could use the 12 tones as numbers, or you could use proportions as numbers. There's many ways to do this. Relative pitch, absolute pitch, so forth. But then without having been said, I'm necessarily creating a space when I compose. But I'm also following a sort of figure down the rabbit hole. I'm very often sitting and writing and something is emerging that is extremely different than both what was there before and what I was thinking about. And composing, especially when I'm working on something that's not necessarily constrained, is a beautiful way to follow such things. The space exists somewhere in the unconscious. And going after that thing can be profoundly exciting. this is the in eternal sort of tension for me between the tension to plan and design and follow maybe even something like the 12 -tone method or what have you against the idea of delving into some forms and seeing what the forms can be.

[Aaron] Certainly and I suppose on the flip side, or maybe interconnected, because I feel like a theme of this episode is interconnectedness. Because Becoming Tangible has so many elements of that, and I have a feeling I understand what flavor your answer might be to this, but on the flip side, what does music theory mean to you in that context, or music theory as an idea or practice?

[Dr. Brey] For me, the sort of grammar illusions I was once really drawn to, the idea that music is necessarily organized according to some agreed upon principles that we're all going to know what we're listening to. That drew me at first, but that really puts me off now. And what I'd say is replacing it is music theory is a set of tools. There again, they're numerical tools, really, for looking at complexity of texture and finding deeper patterns that are underlying it.

[Aaron] The way that you initially described your attraction to music theory, I know personally what puts me off with that description, which is a very common one, a very common way that people think about it. What put you off from that? I don't remember exactly how you said it, the agreed upon language of music.

[Dr. Brey] The problem with an agreed upon language of music is music does not necessarily signify something. Why do you need grammar to organize shapes that are not referring to something? Music can absolutely have reference outside of itself but they're codes, they're patterns, they're suggestions, they're not words mean things. Music is this incredible defiance of words mean things.

[Aaron] That's a nice clippable moment. Music is the defiance of words mean things. I like that. I suppose I came from, I came from my own discomfort in from a slightly different angle. In that I start to wonder who's agreeing upon what and why did they agree upon it? And what music are they agreeing upon to be the standard bearer for the rules quote unquote of everything else? That's what I start to question, personally, because then you get into power structures and then personal motivations and so on. And it sounds like you're saying that although that may not be the mode that you approached it with that, is that music goes beyond what can sometimes be a more simplistic framing by people.

[Dr. Brey] These concepts dovetail. You can absolutely do a power analysis that has some political sorts of ramifications. And you can absolutely see a lot of suffering there. Or you can delve into music for what it is when these things are not mediating it. And try to see and see if you can even use music theory to more fully immerse yourself into what's happening that's unique. And then when you start to see the sort of denotative structures imposed on it, it becomes agony. You can feel the thing suffering under these generalizations.

[Aaron] Yes, I fully believe that. I'm going to take a personal example. Rap scholarship is something that has become more and more popular and more and more accepted. But, and I'm certainly not going to name names, but every once in a while I see, not necessarily a paper because at that point it gets peer-reviewed out, but when I see someone embarking on some work or something about, I don't know, they'll talk about the chord progression of a Wu-Tang Clan song. And talk about the musical meaning of the chords or whatever, and they'll come up with this entire apparatus of a story of what this song means. But they're entirely ignoring the literal meaning of the words, about how it's like how it's like the cycle of poverty and the degradation of black spaces by white Americans, so on, so on, so on, so on. But the point is like completely missing the point when the meaning for the music is literally right there. Now you can use theory, of course as you're saying, to supplement or to further yourself in the space that already exists in the music but not imposing something on the music.

[Dr. Brey] I hesitate to even there because there could be a flip side of that You could, in a very facile way, and I've seen papers that do this too, use music theory to find some incredibly simplistic generalization of what the words mean on the musical text. Yeah. Or what the composer's biography means on the musical text. That's a particularly dangerous one. So conversely, the music itself can struggle against you too. And one could make an argument that these things are necessarily orthogonal. But you also can't impose, you can't follow an intentional fallacy. You can't necessarily assume that the pattern that you've got is the intentional one and that's necessarily the way that this is designed. So, there are a lot of pitfalls when you get intentional about this. And there are a lot of pitfalls when you try to claim that one thing is necessarily the essence of a work. I try when I write to as much as possible reserve. I mean, when I write theoretical work, I try as much as possible to reserve any judgment about necessarily this is the way that this is meant to be. I noticed that these things did that. and that alone can be enough to be a discovery.

[Aaron] Interesting. You know, I have to say Dr. Brey you have quite the philosophical way with words. Something that I hope I can have at some point on a better scale. Because I don't know a lot of what you're saying I just have to chew on for a little bit.

[Dr. Brey] I have gone down my share of deep dives into some other field of inquiry. And I'm not necessarily applying a critical theory sort of apparatus by default. Like, I'm not necessarily reasoning as Adorno would or as Lacan would. But nonetheless, that can demonstrate a sort of way of dealing with an idea. For me, they're models of intuition in their own right. I would say a philosophical means of dealing with either aesthetic or psychological or unconscious products necessarily should be if anything, art itself, it should be about following these strands of thinking in the strangest directions that you can. I really love, for example, George Bataille. Do you know him at all?

[Aaron] No, I don't.

[Dr. Brey] Surrealist philosopher. Many of his essays describe some very strange phenomena like an eye coming out of the top of your head and the eye necessarily releasing something into the universe. It's not arguments he's making. He's just thinking about something that might look like a distorted Dali painting. And that's philosophy.

[Aaron] Personally, at least where I am in life right now, maybe a little bit beyond myself. But I hope to dive into actual philosophical thought at some point, not just music philosophy, but some of the classics that you're talking about there. And before we close, another thing I want to ask is, so you have a pretty diverse background in terms of the music that you're consuming, the music that you're playing, and that you're writing and doing. And you went through a number of pretty prestigious, Vanderbilt and Juilliard, some of the most prestigious places in the country and at the forefront of new musical thought, particularly in composition. And I just want to ask your perspective on the current field of composition and it as a profession and an art form?

[Dr. Brey] I think, now it would always probably have been easy to say that we're at some kind of inflection point. Because things in, not necessarily because it's not true, but because things inflect very fast in the world now.

[Aaron] That's a good point. Yeah.

[Dr. Brey] We will have like giant aesthetic trends that look like the entire 19th century going by in a matter of five or six years. And what this looks like in the arts that I worry about is that when these movements become so small and granular, they then disappear into the background. And too much of the culture is about, I’m not going to condemn individualism. I believe very much in a sort of individual liberation, but about who somebody is rather than what they do. I am somewhat concerned about who you are mattering more than what you do.

[Aaron] Can you say more on that? Because my initial question is why is that a bad thing? Or what is the resultant? Is the lightning pace of everything the resultant of that? Or why is that a negative thing?

[Dr. Brey] Because if the intuitive creation is not necessarily prioritized, I was always into this idea that a composer would be somewhat anonymous. Because then you're hearing the music. Actually, this circles back to my issue before with, you know, facile application of biography to the texture of absolute music. The infamous example being, you know, Tchaikovsky was gay because the second violin had the melody. I don't think that's the way to look at things. I think we can know what we do about composers. And I think that's important because there's some anthropological critical study into why they were doing what they were doing. But I really, really worry about the value of art being entirely hinging on the biography and the construction of cults of personality that you can get in reference to this. I will confess I have had very little patience in my life for Beethoven.

[Aaron] Why is that?

[Dr. Brey] Partially the hero cult puts me off. But also because I can hear him constructing the hero cult rather deliberately as he goes.

[Aaron] That's really interesting. I agree. I agree. That's something as I've become more educated in the history of music. I also hear that as well. That's interesting. Go on.

[Dr. Brey] I don't necessarily say it's implicit because clearly my assessment of the piece is not necessarily an absolute knowledge of what was going either through his head or how it was understood at the time. His works that were most famous at the time, like the septet, really don't sound like that at all. And it's a completely different way of listening. But sometimes I find like maybe some of those late symphonies. I can find the insistence can be exhausting. And I feel like it's wanting to solicit me as a follower in a way that I don't want to be.

[Aaron] Huh. All right. That's fascinating. Obviously, as you said, some of it is like the culturalization that we have to look at some people as like compositional deities. Yes. Like Beethoven. Like, maybe this is more controversial to say, like Stravinsky.

[Dr. Brey] That's interesting.

[Aaron] Because am I falling into the trap when I say that Stravinsky's a little bit more deserving? Then I don't know if I'm falling into the trap there. But again, fascinating with that.

[Dr. Brey] Deserving of the accolades or of the criticism?

[Aaron] Ooh, deserving of the accolades, I suppose. And see, the part that I'm latching onto that I find particularly fascinating is that you can hear an intentional self-deification by the composer. That, I’m not sure if I’ve thought about it in this way before, and I don't know enough about Stravinsky’s repertoire to label that as such,

[Dr. Brey] I don't feel he does that. No, I think he just leaves things. I feel he actually he inspires what I said about the the vision of the composer is sort of a mad scientist playing around with the gadget.

[Aaron]  Well, okay. His interviews, certainly.

[Dr. Brey] For me, I feel Stravinsky does this. The deification of him, I feel like, is on a completely different plane to what he's writing. And then there are, I'm going to try to think of an example of a composer who's quite the opposite, where they're trying to expose, where they're trying to impose their ego, but then they're not deified.

[Aaron] Oh, that they're not deified?

[Dr. Brey] Yeah, I'm trying to think, is there an inverse?

[Aaron] I was going to say, Schoenberg is a perfect example of someone who wants to be deified.

[Dr. Brey] I could see that in Schoenberg. It depends on the work.

[Aaron] But he is deified, though. I'm trying to think of a composer who really wants to be, but is not.

[Dr. Brey] Oh, Rager.

[Aaron] Not familiar. I'm not familiar, personally.

[Dr. Brey] He's written some noted viola music, but it's all very complicated and heavy, and he had this harmonic system that's rather, oh, I won't make a value judgment. But I do feel he's not treated as a compositional god and I do feel there is this totalizing impulse with him nonetheless.

[Aaron] Interesting, this is so fascinating the evocation of a composer's personality, because then this gets into maybe our own personal psychologies and why we're interpreting things as a certain way. Because I feel as though when I listen to certain composers, there's like an earnestness or there's a genuine element to the music that is untangible. Yeah. Unlike your piece, which Became Tangible. I'm sorry. But like when I'm thinking of an earnestness, I'm thinking of with John Cage, I believe. I believe every note. And I also believe every not note. And another one is Caroline Shaw to something more recent. Where when I'm listening to the music, I'm taking it as it is because it feels so genuine in a way that I can't connect to with like Schoenberg or Beethoven.

[Dr. Brey] It's not demanding it be contextualized immediately. Cage is a fascinating example here because he is contextualized in a very different way. He's contextualized because what he did was just so different.

[Aaron] Certainly. Well, one of the beautiful things about Cage is that maybe this is deifying in a different way, but he didn't really care, it seemed like. This is one personal thing I've never been a big fan of with Brahms and Mahler. They wrote fantastic music. I'm not going to take that away from them. But this obsession that we know about, that they were so, so concerned about where they were in the history books and the lineage and living up to and so on, so obsessed with that historicization, that that will be found upon them. And I've never liked that that much. It's felt disingenuous.

[Dr. Brey] I'm going to defend Mahler here.

[Aaron] Okay, go for it.

[Dr. Brey] I think he's scared of Beethoven.

[Aaron] Okay, yeah, I see that.

[Dr. Brey] And you see that anxiety in the infamous prevarication about his Ninth Symphony. He was so convinced that he would die when he finished his Ninth Symphony that he called his Ninth Symphony Dossaline Fonte Erda. Did not die, wrote a Ninth Symphony, started a tenth, died. Well, yes, it is great. Whatever, whatever it is there.

[Aaron] I would I would argue, though, to say that I'm going to die because of this. You're putting yourself in the shoes of that lineage, though.

[Dr. Brey] Exactly. But I don't know. There's the question here. Actually, Schoenberg has anxiety, too. There's a question here. Are you trying to anoint yourself successor or are you weighed down by history? And in Mahler, I think he does a little bit of both.

[Aaron] You know, that's, that's an interesting distinction. I would argue that Brahms wanted to wear the crown. Mahler wanted to be part of the lineage.

[Dr. Brey] I can see that. I feel much gentler. Yeah. I find Brahms simpatico.

[Aaron] What's that word mean? Sympathetic. Okay, yeah. I'm a sucker. I know that it's in a formal and temporal plan, very similar to Beethoven's Ninth, but I'm very much of a fan of his first symphony. It does have some of those Beethoven-isms that you were talking about, about trying to create the aura, essentially, in the music. But, man, this has been an interesting, I feel like we've just taken a trip to a doc seminar on, like, musical expression and compositional expression this is this is fascinating.

[Dr. Brey] I'm like this with all my friends. I give everyone a reading list.

[Aaron] Certainly, I mean I’ve been working on a, I'm going to be quite honest. I haven't thought about western canonical music in a little bit because I’ve been so steeped in a rap corpus study. And my more classical edged research has been on very recent composition. So, but this, this is very, all these ideas are great. And thank you for bringing them up.

[Dr. Brey] I'm going to point out something interesting.

[Aaron] Oh, go for it. Yeah.

[Dr. Brey] So did you notice that when you asked about the trajectory of modern music, I brought up opinions entirely about dead people? There's a reason for this. It's not that I'm necessarily up in older music necessarily. I don't listen to that much 19th century music. I do, but it's not necessarily a daily thing for me. I worry that we are, again, under the thumb of the canon. I think I might be scared of Beethoven in a way not entirely unlike Mahler. I'm not saying that I am. necessarily anything particularly like Mahler, but necessarily that these figures of the past are quite domineering. And that if you want to become a modern person that stands toe -to -toe with them, you have to become a Beethoven. I do not want this. This is not something that I ever signed on for.

[Aaron] Do you see in the field of composition a requirement to go toe-to-toe?

[Dr. Brey] Yes.

[Aaron] You see it that as a requirement, like even if you don't want to, you still see that as a requirement?

[Dr. Brey] Well, when I was in undergrad, we had this idea of the long tail economy, that I don't remember which field this originally came from under the realm of business analysis. But there was this notion that if we were going to have an information economy interconnected on the Internet, then it would necessarily it would lift up certain musical heroes. Quite highly. But then the tail would be long enough and all of those people would have audiences. At the time, this smelled fishy. Now it smells rotten. I think quite the other way. The effect of the long tail is the tail looks like a whole lot of nothing. And I don't like that. I really, really don't like the idea that one has to style oneself into being an essential part of the canon the way Beethoven is. The distribution of performances of things that's very, very much looking like Beethoven against everybody else, even among living composers. And we have to make too much of who we are in order to look like this. I wrote an essay for New Music Box some years ago. And particularly, it was about my experience as a woman composer. I felt like women that are composers are asked to compete to be the woman on the program. And I felt like this was not a good way of creating. It was not a good way of listening. I, at the end of that essay I called to choose music almost anonymously based on what moves you and not necessarily think about what you've been told is good. This is not to say, and I was misconstrued at the time, as saying everything is good. I think we're taking other people's opinions too much on this and it is because people style themselves as heroes. And I do not want to style myself as a hero and I do not want to look like I'm the living composer that might as well be a dead composer.

[Aaron] Fascinating. I mean, it’s like a running joke, if you want, tell me if you’ve heard this. Let’s say there’s a concert program. The main attraction is like Beethoven’s Fifths. Then maybe a clarinet concerto by someone mid 20th century. And then a diverse new composer for like a five-minute piece at the beginning. Yeah, we've all seen concerts like that. So thank you for um including that and continuing that discussion, we could go on forever about all that. Yeah. We have in a way, but it's fun. That's the point of this. But we're coming to a close here. And what's up for you next? Any big projects in the work?

[Dr. Brey] I would look out for a violin sonata. I would look out for some new choral work. I would look out for a new song cycle or two. You can go to my website. It's myname .wordpress .com. And you can go to my YouTube channel. And you'll see these things as they come up.

[Aaron] Yes, wonderful. All those links will be in the description. And I'm assuming that would be the best way to contact you through your website?

[Dr. Brey] I have a form. You can write me an email through the form. I'll get it. I respond.

[Aaron] Wonderful. Wonderful. Before we end out this episode, I always like to leave this open. Dr. Brey, is there something else that you want to share with the audience adding on something earlier or something new about music, about life, composition, anything in general?

[Dr. Brey] I really appreciate that we got to talk about listening to the music and not the composer. And I think if I have one priority with both composing and any way I advocate for composers and for analysis. All of these are to be mindful of who the composer is and be sensitive to them and try to pay attention to what they're doing, but not reduce them to some simple generalization. This is something I strongly believe in.

[Aaron] Certainly a struggle for any artist and seems like particularly in the world of composition. Thank you very much, Dr. Amelia Brey, for coming on to the Theorist -Composer Collaboration. And thank you for sharing your piece, Becoming Tangible. It was wonderful and wonderful. I feel like I just got brought back into a college classroom when we were talking about this philosophy and interpreting music. A great, wonderful conversation. Thank you for coming on to the podcast.

[Dr. Brey] Thank you for having me.

[Aaron] Hello, this is Aaron again, and I want to thank you for listening to this episode of the Theorist Composer Collaboration. I also want to give another big thank you to Dr. Amelia Brey and for sharing her piece Becoming Tangible. Dr. Brey's contact info is listed in the description. I would appreciate it if you could show her some support. For further updates and notifications on the Theorist Composer Collaboration, make sure to follow our Instagram and Facebook pages. You can listen to future episodes through our host website, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, iHeartRadio, and YouTube. So make sure you subscribe to the platform of your choosing. If you want to monetarily support the work of the TCC, you can click the link to our Buy Me a Coffee page. All donations are highly appreciated. All of the relevant links to follow, listen to, and support the show are in the description. TCC episodes are posted every other week on Mondays. Don't miss our blog posts, which go live a few days before a new episode is added. Make sure to follow our social media accounts and relevant streaming platforms because you won't want to miss it. But, until then, this is Aaron, and thank you for joining the TCC.