For composer Dmitri Tymoczko, writing music in a post-iPod world means opening our ears to influences beyond the accepted classical tradition. Beyond that, it means synthesizing these influences into something new.
Tymoczko’s new album, “Crackpot Hymnal” (Bridge Records 9383), contains four invigorating works which freely imbibe from a number of traditions, yet live firmly within the classical world.
“I really like classical and romantic music,” says Tymoczko, a music professor at Princeton University. “I want to write a music that is not totally divorced from the 19th or 18th century. Part of the challenge for me is to give people a way of thinking about what I’m doing, where I can convince them that I’m not completely retrograde or just sort of burying my head in the sand. And I want to try to tell a story about why this music should still be inspirational to me as a composer.”
As he states in his articulate liner notes, “This would be music that eschews grand narratives, playfully constructing something new from the baubles left strewn about by our ancestors.”
These baubles are assembled from the bric-a-brac of seemingly diverse sources, placing classical side-by-side with jazz, blues and rock.
Content finds its perfect match in form in the second work on the album, titled “Typecase Treasury,” a set of bagatelles assembled in the manner of a small table the composer owned as a boy, which had been fashioned out of a printer’s typecase. Each of the tiny compartments was filled with a mineralogical curiosity: a crystal, a shark’s tooth, a fossilized trilobite. Tymoczko’s musical typecase offers seven giddy miniatures, inspired by everything from Paul Klee to “Robocop.”
In conversation, the composer cites a review of which he is particularly fond, which describes his work as “serious music that doesn’t take itself seriously.”
Tymoczko’s approach would have been a difficult row to hoe 40 years ago, when it was still the norm to regard music history as having developed more or less linearly.
But the 20th century was always a mish-mash of “-isms.” Impressionism. Serialism. Neo-classicism. Minimalism. For anyone with a bird’s-eye view, the mighty river of Western tradition stemmed from many tributaries.
In the 21st century, however, it turns out even the birds were myopic, as our concept of the classical tradition shut out the lateral development of popular trends. Sure, popular dance forms were always admissible, provided they had been digested by Bach or Schubert or Chopin, but when American music was first spiked with jazz, for instance, it may as well have been served up in a speakeasy.
“It’s really hard to do,” Tymoczko says, “because you’re always a half step away from chaos. You want to avoid the situation where you’ve got a little bit of baroque music and then there’s an off-stage funk band, and it’s this kind of collage without meaning.
“I’m working on trying to make these musical ideas speak to each other and serve a kind of large-scale expressive or formal goal, where you can hear a whole movement as being a big energy trajectory. I want to avoid a sense of willy-nilly juxtaposition.”
Very much like his music, Tymoczko’s character is made up of innocuous contradictions. He hails from an academic background: his father was a professor of mathematics, his mother was a professor of comparative literature, and his wife is a professor of philosophy. He himself has been professor of music at Princeton University since 2002.
He studied composition at Harvard with Milton Babbitt, Leon Kirchner and Bernard Rands. He was serious enough as a philosophy student to be accepted as a Rhodes Scholar to Oxford University (though he was eventually asked to leave for thinking too far outside the box). He earned his doctorate in composition from the University of California, Berkeley.
In 2006, he made a splash with an article, “The Geometry of Musical Chords,” which was published in Science magazine, the first article on music theory to be included in the periodical’s 127-year history. That was followed in 2011 by a book, “A Geometry of Music.”
Yet, for all his academic accomplishments, Tymoczko is very much down to earth and as much a product of the world of pop culture as the rest of us.
As a teenager, he played in rock bands while “pretending to study classical piano.” At the same time, he is an admirer of jazz pianists Art Tatum and Bill Evans. His first album, “Beat Therapy” (Bridge Records 9353), combines the sounds and rhythms of jazz with a classical sense of form and development. There are saxophones, drums and synthesizers. The music is largely notated, but with elements of improvisation.
He also likes to improvise when writing for classical acoustic instruments. To explore various possibilities, he sometimes employs modern technology to try out certain ideas.
“There are moments scattered all throughout the pieces on this CD that come into being through the use of computers in various ways,” he says. “I often use computer programs as a kind of sketching tool.”
This is particularly true for certain ideas in the album’s opening selection, “The Eggman Variations.” (And yes, the title is a reference to the Beatles.) He cites the big romantic chords in the second movement, with each string instrument playing in its own rhythm.
“Instead of just writing it out, to explore that kind of idea I write a little computer program,” he says, “and then I can improvise with the program by playing at my synthesizer and telling it what chords I want to hear. It’s a really nice way of interacting in a very hands-on, intuitive way with an abstract musical structure or texture or idea. It’s computer music without computers, because the computer goes away.”
Tymoczko, who was born in 1969, has been working with computers since he was about 10.
“As a kid, it’s just fun to write a program and make it work,” he says. “When I was in graduate school, I found that the computer was a really useful way of making connections between my theory brain and my composing brain. Basically, you can’t get a computer to do anything even remotely musical without knowing a decent chunk of theory, because theory is what tells you sort of which combinations might work and which ones definitely won’t work.”
The music on “Crackpot Hymnal” seems to flow intuitively and organically. One can detect the influence of jazz, blues, and rock, with the occasional dash of minimalism, but the overwhelming impression is one of reclaimed Romanticism.
Tymoczko is a romantic at heart, a composer with a healthy respect for 20th century and contemporary masters like Debussy, Stravinsky, Messiaen, Shostakovich, Steve Reich, John Adams, and Gyorgy Ligeti. But he waxes most enthusiastic about the music of Johannes Brahms, who, for all his influence on the late romantics, Tymoczko feels is underappreciated in the contemporary music scene.
He also regards film music as a kind of continuation of the tonal and emotional ethos of Romanticism, which went underground and continues to thrive a hundred years past its alleged expiration date.
Tymoczko is very much a proponent of the tonal system. He also believes distinctions are too readily drawn between certain genres of music. In particular, he has been fascinated with finding connections between the jazz and classical worlds.
The fusion of high art and pop culture is most evident on the new album in the concluding work, “Another Fantastic Voyage.” In essence a piano concerto, its title conjures associations with the 1966 science fiction classic about a miniaturized team of specialists who race against time through the circulatory system of a Soviet scientist to remove a blood clot from his brain.
Tymoczko’s work, though wholly unrelated to Isaac Asimov’s original screenplay, contains evocative fantastic titles like “The Mad King,” “Changeling,” and “An Evil, Evil Carnival.” He compares the piece, in his entertaining liner notes, as “playful and serious at the same time — rather like a novelist infusing a pulp or science fiction scenario with unexpected emotional depth.”
There is certainly a narrative quality to the opening movement, with a recurring fanfare that seems to lose its way. The composer describes the last movement as “sort of a campy ‘Night on Bald Mountain.’”
Tymoczko is an unabashed fan of science fiction, which he’d read voraciously as a boy, but has only fairly recently rediscovered.
His enthusiasm for the genre led to his current project, a science fiction cantata, which he is writing on a scenario of his friend, Princeton writer Dexter Palmer, whose debut novel, “The Dream of Perpetual Motion,” appeared in 2010.
The cantata, which will incorporate parts for computer and film, promises to continue Tymoczko’s perpetual dream of breaking down perceived boundaries.