christi denton
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biography
c.v. english (pdf)
see also chaikana.org |
I started composing at a very young age- to me, that was part of playing music. My father played in a square dance band, and they let me play percussion- I didn't know how to read music, nor am I even sure that they had anything more than a fake book, and so I learned to improvise quickly, and would write other percussion music for myself, sans square dancing band. When I started to play the flute, we spent the first few days on the "classics" - Hot Cross Buns, and then adding a fourth note in Mary Had A Little Lamb. It seemed obvious to me that other things needed to be written, so I immediately set to work on that. I practiced with a friend, and the local music store didn't seem to carry beginning flute duets, so I wrote some of those. As I grew older, and got to be a better and better musician, it just seemed easier to write my own music- it could be for the group that I wanted, it could be at the appropriate levels, and it was what I wanted to hear. In high school, I joined the local youth philharmonic and began taking the required theory classes. Theory was just like math- there's a set of rules, you follow them, you get to the end and you have the right answer- so straightforward and easy. I applied to Interlochen as a bassoonist, and when they sent my acceptance letter, they asked if I wanted to take theory or composition classes. If I wanted to take theory, there would be a test when I got there for placement, if I wanted to take composition, could I please send them things that I had written. I didn't care at all what level they put me in, but I hated taking tests, and I did have all these compositions lying around. I sent them off, and they stuck me in the top class, which I appreciated because it was so small. There were two people in the class with me that I hung out with - both were far better than I was, but I was female, and they were male, so they put up with me. One of the two was a child prodigy- he had perfect pitch, and he'd written a piece that the Chicago Symphony had played when he was 10. He had a horrible temper, and was incredibly religious, and when people swore, he would rise up and preach at them. The other one was a very quiet bassoon player who communicated far better through music then he ever did with words. We were an odd bunch, and we'd spend hours and hours and hours at a time working on our symphonies, which the World Youth Symphony Orchestra were planning on playing. In the midst of this, we had our composition class. We all knew the basic western European theory, that's what we worked with, and the teacher worked with us on orchestration and all the standard things one needs to know in order to compose music. She started us on 20th century music, bringing in scores by George Crumb, and John Cage. I liked them, but I didn't get them- how had they gotten from where I was to where they were? I couldn't see the leap, and so in my mind, their works were unrelated to mine- I could have been looking at a painting or a sculpture the same way- it was nice enough, but it was unrelated. One day, the teacher introduced tone rows. She explained the theory behind them, and asked us to write a piece. I took it home, and tried. It was very easy - it was just another set of rules. But I couldn't deal with it- I took it back to the teacher and told it that it wasn't music, it was just rules. No one else in my class seemed to have a problem with this, and when I told my teacher, and was just rules, and it didn't sound any good, she asked me why. I couldn't come up with a good answer- "it just doesn't" wasn't cutting it. I am very analytical, and my answer didn't work for me either. So, I spent several days researching this, and started to form an answer. The answer was sound waves- serial music sounded bad to me because it didn't take into account how things sounded - a V doesn't have to resolve to a I, you just don't get things lining up the way that you do in "tonal" music. Another hour of research shot that down though- Tonal music is now all equal tempered, so it's just arbitrary anyway. A division of 12 notes in a scale is arbitrary. Western Music is arbitrary- tuning systems, everything. Why did I think a major scaled sounded better than a true pentatonic scale? My view of music sort of broke down. It was all just rules. If I wrote with these rules I could sound exactly like Bach, if I write with these rules I could sound like Mozart, and now with this new set of rules I could sound like Schoenberg. And all of them had already done this stuff, and they had done a good job at it. There wasn't anything I needed to add to it. Just because I hadn't been able to find beginning flute duets didn't mean that they weren't already there, and I wasn't adding anything of musical value to the world of music. I was copying someone else's ideas that had been printed in my textbooks, and passing them off as my own, that was all. And this was acceptable because that's the way we all did it. We all sounded like Mozart, Bach, Schoenberg, and we were proud of our ability to do so. I didn't know what to do with this knowledge. I couldn't stop writing though- I'd been writing music for 8 hours a day, and practicing music 7 hours a day, and dropping the composing- what would I do? Go for a walk? I finished the symphony, which I called Contradiction because there was an obvious and sudden change in my musical style in the midst of it- I would have thrown it out, but I didn't have time to deal with re-writing it, and I couldn't see not finishing it. When it was played, some people enjoyed it, some people didn't. Everyone thought the title was appropriate. Comments that I received tended towards "that really moved me.. but I don't know where to.." or "I couldn't figure out what your influences were, but I think that's okay." The comments meant a lot to me- If someone had said "oh, that sounds like Chopin, and I mean that as a compliment" I wouldn't have taken it as such. I knew I wanted to study music in college, but I didn't want to perform, I didn't derive joy from it. Performing terrifies me, and I didn't see the point in working through it. Music History would have been interesting, but I didn't know what to do with a degree in that. Theory- well, that was where all my problems had started from. I still didn't know what to do with composition. The act of it felt like solving a page of math problems - the only creativity was picking whether you felt like dealing with derivatives or the multiplication tables. I had a lot of music though, so I shipped off a lot of recordings and lot of scores. They accepted me with scholarships, which surprised me at the time, but was really unsurprising. If a 17-year-old ships off 500 pages of carefully written symphonies, sonatas, concertos, etc, the admissions people probably don't analyze whether or not they managed to break new ground. I didn't know what to do, so I did what I did know how to do- follow the rules. I wrote stuff, I turned it in, people enjoyed it, and I didn't. And I was worried that people would figure out that I was a fraud, that I was just following these rules, or at the very least didn't even like it. Hearing my stuff performed made me very nervous, and I didn't know what to do with compliments like "Oh, that sounded like Grieg- It was wonderful". Of course it sounds like Grieg- I followed his rules, that what you end up when you do that. I got to college and my advisor looked through my pieces and gave me the phone number of the classically trained composition teacher. She'd studied with Nadia Boulanger, she was very good, and he was sure that I'd get a lot out of it. I went to my first lessons, dragging my ever-growing stack of math problems with me, and showed them to her. She looked through them, looking over the top of her glasses at all of them, and frowning a bit. "This is fine" she'd say, and move on to the next one. She got through them all and looked at me. "They're all fine." she said. "What should I do?" I asked. "I suppose you should write something else." So I did. I brought it in, she looked at it, and said "This is fine. You know what you're doing." I asked what I should do with it. She sighed "Well, I suppose you give it to someone who wants to play it in a concert." I said "well, but I don't like it." And she responded with "well, what don't you like about it?" and I explained. My music teacher hadn't wanted to get a bunch of people who composed traditional music. She didn't compose traditional music. But she was very highly trained in it, and it paid the bills. She gave me entirely different assignments. She made me listen to Henry Cowell, and George Lewis, and Don Buchla. She sent me off to talk to the graduate teachers who didn't have a tonal bone in their body. We spent hours and hours going through scores, listening to things like water, freeway noise, winds in the trees, and birds singing. And then I knew how to compose. |
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