Having watched Jim McConkey dream this course into
existence over the past several years, I am full of admiration
for his vision and perseverance. Still, I have to confess that
finding myself on Jim's list of guest stars leaves me more than
flattered; it leaves me feeling a little cowed. It's not simply
good manners - the decency not to consider oneself worthy to share
the bill with Archie Ammons or Tom Eisner or Paul West. It's the
fact that as an expert on creativity, I feel myself a bit of a
fraud.
In my line of work, I often overhear myself described
as a "creative person," yet I can never recognize myself
in that description. One hears about artists transported to an
altered state: Paul West entering a sort of trance when he writes;
Van Gogh painting feverishly, as fast as his brush can move; Hugo
Wolf and Robert Schumann producing their masterpieces of German
song in astonishingly short order. When Schoenberg wrote his Erwartung
and Bartok his Divertimento in just two weeks' time each, those
composers apparently were living in some Olympian province for
which I can't seem to get a visa.
Yet however keenly I might sometimes envy such artists,
and however nicely their stories might satisfy popular, romanticized
ideas of the "creative" life, I identify much more readily
with those working stiffs who slug it out down in the trenches,
day in and day out: with Thomas Edison and his "5 percent
inspiration, 95 percent perspiration"; with Paul Hindemith,
the great German composer, who, when asked where he got his ideas,
simply held up his pencil, with Sir Harrison Birtwistle, the best
English composer of our day, an authentic genius and gruff, no-nonsense
bloke who, when asked by an interviewer some high-flown question
about making art, replied, "What preoccupies every working
artist is simply how the hell you do it.Ó"
For me, composing means long, hard, unglamorous hours
spent with pencil and paper and (especially) eraser, trying by
hook or crook to tease something from nothing. Still, I do know
what inspiration feels like. It's rarely a supernatural flash
of insight from the Muse; for me, it's more often a soul-nourishing
encounter with the work of a sympathetic fellow artist. It's the
sly, lapidary prose style of Nabokov, which sparked my 1980 composition
Transparent Things.
It's the brilliant textures and finely judged juxtapositions of
Stravinsky's Petrushka,
which forms a backdrop for my own Son et lumiere of 1988. It's
the humane, lyrical voice of poet Archie Ammons, who inspired
my 1992 song cycle Four Poems of A.R.
Ammons.
Recently, I joined the long list of composers who
have written works inspired by paintings (Musorgsky's Pictures
at an Exhibition, Respighi's Three
Botticelli Portraits, Schuller's Seven
Studies on Themes of Paul Klee, and many
others). The paintings are by Rufino Tamayo (1899Ð1991), one
of the greatest Mexican artists of this century. In April 1991
I visited the Tamayo Museum in Mexico City. I had never even heard
of the artist, but immediately I found myself drawn to his work,
and I stood for a long while, transfixed by his painting La
gran galaxia (The Great Galaxy, 1978).
Indeed, that first encounter with his vibrant, mysterious, deeply
human paintings is indelibly fixed in my memory as one of the
great epiphanies of my life. I began to read about Tamayo and
to see as many of his works as possible, at least in reproduction.
Some years later, when the Chicago Symphony commissioned a new
work from me, I felt ready to act out my admiration for this painterÑto
pay homage in my own language, music. I composed a suite of pieces,
each in some way based on a Tamayo painting, and called the result
Pinturas de Tamayo
(Paintings of Tamayo). I finished the piece in December 1995,
and the first performance took place in March 1996 in Chicago.
The five short movements that comprise Pinturas
de Tamayo are not translations or interpretations
of the paintings. There are a handful of literalisms, to be sure:
the suggestion of a guitar in Sleeping
Musicians, shrill woodwinds dominating
Friends of the Birds,
continually rising gestures in Women Reaching
for the Moon. But the music is not really
illustrative in the nineteenth-century manner of, say, Richard
Strauss. Instead, I took formal elements from the paintings and
my own emotional, poetic responses to them and then simply wrote
my own kind of music embodying these same elements.
Still, music this closely linked to nonmusical inspirations
is by definition "program music": music inspired by
an extramusical idea - a poem, a novel, a painting, a historical
event. At one time, program music was in bad odor in academic
circles (one excellent reason to write some, for a start!), since
so-called absolute music, unsullied by outside contaminants like
painting or literature, was held to be the highest form of musical
art. This was nonsense - a reflection, really, of naively romantic
notions about "art for art's sake." I suppose that by
now this prejudice must have weakened considerably, because nowadays
many musicologists study opera - about as impure a form of music
as there is.
There is a serious question here, though. I would
agree that if a piece can be intelligible only
when read in the light of some external source, it is not much
of a piece. Either each one of my Tamayo movements makes sense
on its own, in purely musical terms, even if the listener has
no inkling about the paintings, or else I will have failed to
do the composer's job properly.
The Great Galaxy, my
first love among Tamayos, forms the last movement of my composition.
For me, Tamayo's characteristically skeletal, X-ray-like view
of the human figure makes it appear vulnerable, defenseless in
the face of the universe. Does the figure raise his hand to his
mouth in awe? elation? longing? fear? loneliness? Or all of these?
In any case, the contrast between the humanity of the character's
gesture and the distant formality of the galactic geometry on
which he gazes is, for me, a source of deep emotional resonance.
Thus the music, too, must combine geometry with longing.
Of course, deciding to write a piece of this description
and actually writing it are two different things. Ideas are one
thing, execution another. I love that story about Degas and his
sonnets. When Degas, the Impressionist painter, took up writing
poetry, he found it unexpectedly difficult. The story goes that
he complained to his friend, the poet Stephane Mallarme, "It
isn't that I lack ideas. They come in waves, but to turn them
into sonnets - how painful that is!" "Edgar," Mallarme
replied, "you don't make sonnets with ideas. You make them
with words."
So, too, in music. You don't make music with ideas,
or poetic dreams or wishful thinking. You make it with notes -
with technique, with hard work, with Edison's 95 percent perspiration.
It is technique that paints paintings, writes poems, builds buildings.
And it is technique - chord charts, arithmetic rhythms, tricks
of the trade - that creates a music of geometry and longing.
Steven Stucky is professor of music and chair of the Department of Music. A well-known composer who has been commissioned by many of the major American orchestras, he served as composer-in-residence of the Los Angeles Philharmonic from 1988 to 1992 and is currently that orchestra's New Music advisor.
This article is Copyright © 1996 Steven Stucky. All Rights Reserved.