Too Many Notes
by Andrew McKenna Lee
“Why do you write so many notes? I think you do because you’re insecure. You think that if you write enough, somehow you’ll hit upon the right ones eventually!?”
My composition teachers have imparted many words of wisdom to me over the years, and these in particular struck me quite acutely when they were hurled at me as a sophomore in college. I forget exactly what it was that prompted them, and no doubt, I likely deserved the comment. I admittedly had little or no idea what I was doing most of the time in those days. As one visiting composer, describing his own student experience, expressed to our weekly composers’ forum at the time, “I knew how to begin a piece, and sometimes how to end it, but never knew what to do in the middle!”
A lot of time has passed since then, and in spite of the increased confidence I’ve gained – sometimes painfully – over the ensuing years of trial and error in composing, the syndrome of “too many notes” seems to have persisted. I have come to the conclusion that it is simply part of my nature, and have accepted it as something to be embraced rather than something to be eradicated. Healthy or not, it is an obsessive-compulsive desire to try and get the most out of my music at any and every point in its trajectory – a need to always maximize my resources.
While I think that this pathology asserts itself most dominantly in my music for guitar, I have to cede that all of my music tends to embody this quality to some extent. I am not sure where it comes from, only that I somehow “feel” a certain density within me that ultimately expresses itself in the form of music that has a similar quality. I have a hard time writing a three-note chord, and find it nearly impossible to write a melody without resorting to copious grace notes, turns, trills, harmonics, arpeggios, and other forms of embellishment. When it comes to textures, I like 4 against 5 against 6. I don’t care if they’re played exactly together – what’s the point? I only want them to sound like churning, boiling clusters. I like that feeling of contained chaos being directed along a carefully and clearly directed path. Maybe that’s how I perceive my own life to some extent.
“What we really love is resonance – we’re all resonance junkies!”
Obviously, I am a guitarist, and I love the instrument, but I will be the first to admit that it presents many problems. For one, it is very quiet, and its sound tends to die away almost immediately after the onset of its attack. With little sustaining power – at least relative to a bowed string instrument or even a piano – creating a resonant body of sound can be a challenge. There are ways to work around this by using open strings (which resonate quite nicely), but overuse of this particular aspect can lead to tired chords and sonorities. The other way is to simply flood the air with a steady stream of notes – cram it so full of vibrations that the illusion of a luminous body of resonance is perceived. I admittedly have a particular fondness for this last method, as it tends to feed my obsession with notes quite satisfactorily, albeit at an often great expense of practice time.
I think it is this desire to create resonance – along with an obsession with complicated surface textures – that has caused many to describe my guitar music as virtuosic. As a composer, however, I feel compelled to confess that I have never really consciously attempted to make my music difficult in a “virtuosic” sense. The instrument is always there to serve the composition, and the concept of the music always comes first. That being said, and as a player, I also have to admit that I will stop at next to nothing to realize an idea if it falls even remotely within the boundaries of what I might consider to be technically possible upon the instrument, and I will practice a passage or even a bar obsessively over long periods of time before even considering whether or not I should give up on it or change it. I have this mentality that I will not be defeated, at least not in the studio!
For me, when it comes to composing, there is definitely an interplay between the physical and the imaginative, regardless of the intended instrument or ensemble. To some extent, my intuitive interaction with the guitar in the form of improvisation often leads me to ideas when I am writing pieces, but these beginning phrases rarely last more than a few bars, and I am fairly soon left trying to give a voice on the instrument to things that I hear in my mind. At this point, the whole process seems to become something of a game. Sometimes the things I hear are impossible, but with some compromise, I can find a way to render a “kernel” of what I originally conceived – the “soul” of the idea, so to speak. Other times, what I hear turns out to be very manageable, and I realize that I may have an extra finger or two left over with which I can elaborate and ornament the idea further. It is in this last situation where my previously mentioned neurosis seems to assert itself. Never let a finger go to waste! Add another note to that chord, find a way to include that unused string, and put a trill or a tremolo before that other note because that would sound really good! All of this, no matter what the cost.
“To play the guitar well is easy, to play the guitar poorly is difficult.”
–Pepe Romero
When it comes to performing, I have never really thought of myself as a “virtuoso.” While there are certain aspects of playing the guitar that come quite naturally to me, I essentially feel that I have to work too hard to get to a place where I really feel comfortable with a piece. Some pieces I wrote 5 and 6 years ago are finally beginning to feel somewhat automatic for me now. From a technical standpoint, I have never thought of myself as possessing that super-refined level of technique that the ordained virtuosi have – that sense of truly inevitable effortlessness. While I don’t mean to come across as self-deprecating, I think of my playing as being too labored over and self conscious to truly cross the threshold into the upper echelons of what this term has come to signify in the "modern-concert-music-world" sense.
At the same time, however, I do feel that my bull-headedness when it comes to finding ways to work around limitations have given my technique a somewhat unorthodox quality, which is then recycled back into the composition of new works. Perhaps, in the end, if I am considered to have some virtuosic qualities as a performer and a composer, it will perhaps be more from a conceptual angle than a sheer technical one. If there is just one thing that I would love to try and accomplish through my life as a creative artist, it would be to contribute some body of work for this instrument that shows it to be one capable of great artistic depth, sensitivity, and integrity. I don’t know if I have managed to do this yet, but I hopefully will have some years ahead of me and a few more chances.