The Composer's Voice - February 1, 2010
I just got back from Sudbury, attending the premiere of my work "Wistful Thinking" for string quartet and accordion. The accordion player was Alexander Sevastien of Quartetto Gelato fame; he is an unbelievably talented musician. Nice guy, too, down to earth and generous. The strings were the Silver Birch String Quartet, headed by my old Oshawa friend Christian Robinson, now concertmaster of the Sudbury Symphony.
Writing a piece for this concert proved to be an interesting challenge. I knew that the program was tango-themed and would feature some music of Astor Piazzolla, and I knew that Alex could handle the most virtuosic writing possible, so it seemed like a natural choice to write a blistering, up-tempo, flashy accordion showpiece with standard tango rhythms accompanying in the strings. But after trying a few of these - and even a few slower, tango-inspired melodies - I didn't feel like I had hit on a solid idea, and I was stuck. (Or "blocked", if you want, but I hate that term.)
I was inspired by this story about Piazzolla from his autobiography (which I found on Wikipedia), which described him taking his music to the renowned composition teacher Nadia Boulanger:
When I met her, I showed her my kilos of symphonies and sonatas. She started to read them and suddenly came out with a horrible sentence: "It's very well written." And stopped, with a big period, round like a soccer ball. After a long while, she said: "Here you are like Stravinsky, like Bartók, like Ravel, but you know what happens? I can't find Piazzolla in this." And she began to investigate my private life: what I did, what I did and did not play, if I was single, married, or living with someone, she was like an FBI agent! And I was very ashamed to tell her that I was a tango musician. Finally I said, "I play in a night club." I didn't want to say cabaret. And she answered, "Night club, mais oui, but that is a cabaret, isn't it?" "Yes," I answered, and thought, "I'll hit this woman in the head with a radio...." It wasn't easy to lie to her.
She kept asking: "You say that you are not pianist. What instrument do you play, then?" And I didn't want to tell her that I was a bandoneon player, because I thought, "Then she will throw me from the fourth floor." Finally, I confessed and she asked me to play some bars of a tango of my own. She suddenly opened her eyes, took my hand and told me: "You idiot, that's Piazzolla!" And I took all the music I composed, ten years of my life, and sent it to hell in two seconds.
So Piazzolla realizes that producing well-written Ravel or well-written Stravinsky does not make him an artist; only Ravel can do Ravel, and only Stravinsky can do Stravinsky, and tango is the way for Piazzolla to do Piazzolla.
Anyway - what I was writing, I realized, was bad Piazzolla. It was tango-ISH music, and it sounded alright, but it didn't have the nuance of Piazzolla's music, which is understandable because tango was in his blood. And even if I worked my tango ideas hard, and polished them, the best I could hope to produce would be "well-written Piazzolla". Odds are it wouldn't stand up to the real thing, though, and I'd have spent all that work producing music that has nothing to do with Rob Teehan.
So at that point, I went back to the drawing board and started fresh; I found a melody, and a groove, and some beautiful textures, and put them together in the simplest way I could, using my favourite tricks. It might not have been the most original thing I've done, but it was ME. And it sounded good, and the musicians killed it, and the audience loved it, and everybody was happy. So, a success.
The interesting thing is that there were a few other contemporary pieces on the program that were tango-inspired, and they were fine and well-written, but as I expected, they were kindergarten music in comparison to Piazzolla, whose mastery of the tango tradition is untouchable. Two lessons here for a composer: one, trust your instincts, and two, be careful when appropriating the music of other cultures or traditions; it's all too easy to lose your voice in exoticism.
