Or, how one choral piece came into being thanks to The West Wing.
A few weeks ago (or perhaps months? who knows anymore), posts about the relationship between anxiety or stress and watching TV, particularly re-watching favorite shows instead of consuming new content, began circulating:
As the Youths™ would say, I felt seen. It takes a lot to get me to watch an entirely new TV show, especially a regular series with many episodes (as opposed to a limited run). It takes something pretty darn compelling and relevant to my interests to get enough of my attention to make that kind of commitment.
I watch a lot of TV, but often in the background while doing other things. Perhaps this is a failing or a poor habit on my part, but it is quite ingrained at this point. I’ve realized in recent years, and especially in recent months, that there are more productive places to put my effort than breaking myself of certain behaviors just because I feel some sort of abstract judgement from the world about it. So, I don’t worry about it too much anymore. I work better on certain things with a bit of background noise – that’s just the way it is. My quintessential show for this is The West Wing.
The West Wing has been one of my favorite shows since I was about twelve or thirteen years old. (I was a very nerdy twelve-to-thirteen-year-old. I regret nothing.) For the uninitiated, The West Wing was a drama following an ensemble cast in the fictional administration of Democratic president Jed Bartlet, airing from 1999 to 2006. The show was particularly known for its rapid, witty dialogue – a hallmark style of Aaron Sorkin, its creator and lead writer for the first four seasons – and its continuous “walk-and-talks” through the corridors, alongside other cinematic and editing elements which highlight the engaging dialogue and characters. Throughout the series, the president and staff negotiate issues such as the role of the federal government, social programs, education, religion and faith, and many others, all the while somehow maintaining their humanity and relatability.
As with all things, the show was not without its flaws. Sorkin is not exactly renowned for his ability to, say, pass the Bechdel Test with flying colors. And a few (or more) particularly neoliberal moments throughout the series feel dated at best to me now. However, I still enjoy it as clever entertainment and a thoughtful and thought-provoking (albeit painfully optimistic) look at certain aspects of politics and American life.
Of course, most of all, it has been a foolproof security blanket for me over the years. The constant dialogue is both compelling and soothing. I’ve fallen asleep to it countless times. While its speed makes it challenging to catch every plot point and witticism on first watch, I appreciate things that reveal more and garner more appreciation with multiple experiences. This means they don’t dry out into boredom as quickly.
As I said in my last entry, ideas come from all kinds of unexpected sources if we keep our minds open and curious. Here is a case in point. With the number of times I have watched and re-watched this show, I have no doubt that this has led to a certain amount of intangible influence on my perspective, and therefore on my musical work.
For one thing, the emphasis on communication in the show echoes themes that persist throughout my music. The president and his staff must constantly work to define and communicate the administration’s agenda, how they will accomplish their goals, and why their values and policies are important to them – to those outside the administration in the form of other branches of government, the press, and the general public, as well as in discussions with each other. This is the crux of the entire show. Similar themes of communication (and failure to communicate) crop up throughout my work as a composer, whether in more concrete ways in the texts I choose such as my commissions for Harmonium Choral Society or Portara Ensemble, or in the way I construct the music itself. I wrote about this extensively in my PhD, and I have no doubt this idea will crop up elsewhere in my articles as well.
The rhythm of the show’s famed trademark dialogue is also tremendously musical. Musical theater references throughout the show – especially to the works of Gilbert and Sullivan, also known for their rhythm and wit – betray Sorkin’s influences from that arena. Alongside the wit and intelligence of the content, the dialogue makes use of classic strategies like parallelism, calculated repetition of sounds, words and phrases, variation of sentence length and structure, and of course, the vocal intonation of strong actors to create a strong sense of rhythm. Throughout much of the show, this pulse feels constant but not monotonous, just as one might expect life in a place as hectic as the White House would be. The drive and cadence in the writing is a key component to the show’s dramatic success – even if the content were still there, without the rhythm and sound of the writing style it would not be the same. Composers must take similar considerations into account when writing music, including using the sounds of the words themselves (if there are words in the music) to further the goals of the piece.
This last point is something I have considered a great deal in recent years, and it is a key element of many of my favorite choral and vocal compositions. David Lang’s the little match girl passion, for example, makes extensive use of repeated syllables to paint images such as a flickering flame or chattering teeth. In Györgi Ligeti’s otherworldly setting of Lux Aeterna, popularized partly by 2001: A Space Odyssey, the slow shifting of the harmony and texture would not be the same without the sprinkling of consonant sounds like X’s and T’s throughout the sound and the gradual morph from one syllable to another.
Twentieth and twenty first century composers are certainly not the only music makers who have taken full advantage of the sonic properties of words, either. Medieval and early Renaissance composers such as Pérotin, for instance, crafted masterpieces of early polyphony by writing tropes on pre-existing chant melodies. In works like Pérotin’s Viderunt Omnes, the voice singing the original chant extends some of the chant’s notes and syllables quite a bit – sometimes over the course of multiple minutes – while the other voices create more active counterpoint on top of it. In this context, what might otherwise seem like a small or straightforward change from one syllable to another has a huge impact on the sound of the music, especially when the vowel changes.
Did the show influence my interest in these ideas and techniques in any way? Possibly. Possibly not. It’s impossible to say for sure. But regardless, The West Wing has also inspired me in more concrete ways. Most notably, it set in motion a stream of ideas which resulted in my piece O God Thy Sea.
In a sixth season episode called “Faith Based Initiative,” President Bartlet struggles with his multiple sclerosis symptoms, which have progressed to the point of affecting his ability to fulfil his many duties and responsibilities as president. In addition to the progressive paralysis he had experienced over the previous episodes, his sense of balance is now coming and going, affecting his ability to stand and walk. While negotiating his new symptoms, he is attempting to resolve a conflict instigated by a conservative senator who attached an amendment to the federal budget banning same-sex marriage nation-wide, despite the senator’s professed dedication to federalism and state or local control of most governmental policy.
In several shots throughout the show, a small plaque reading “Oh Lord, Thy sea is so great and my boat is so small…” can be seen on Bartlet’s desk in the Oval Office. In one of the final shots of the episode, the president is seen alone in front of the desk and plaque, using his braced crutches to walk to his desk with much exertion, grasping the desk’s edge, and finally managing to stand independently for a moment. We then learn that he has successfully convinced the senator to remove the amendment. This was based on a plaque which originally read “O God, Thy sea is so great and my boat is so small…” that was given to new submarine captains by Admiral Hyman Rickover. The Admiral also gave one to President Kennedy, who kept it on his desk in the Oval Office. The line was the beginning of an old Breton fisherman’s prayer.
It says a great deal in few words. It is relational. It has a sense of scale. I’d been attracted to this line for some time when I finally decided to set it to music in 2017.
The brevity of the text was a deciding factor in my attraction to it, but it is unusual for a choral or vocal piece. Most shorter pieces still have more than one line of text. How do I set such a short text in a way that feels like a complete piece, especially with as immense a scale as the line implies?
When choosing to set a text that must be “stretched,” for whatever reason, there are a few options. I could simply repeat this line multiple times, for instance. However, in this case, I believe this would have severely compromised the dramatic arc of the piece. The second half of the line places the immensity of the great sea into the intimate perspective of one individual. If I give this line away too quickly, I will lose the drama of that shift and this relationship will not be portrayed as effectively. So, the first half of the line, “O God, Thy sea is so great,” must really be stretched out so that I can leave the following clause for the piece’s final moments.
Again, repeating the whole phrase a number of times might accomplish this, but that might get dull quite quickly. In this instance, I determined that I would be much better off building the phrase not by repeating the whole thing, but by repeating the individual words one or two at a time until the climax of the piece, perhaps a little bit akin to how Pérotin extended his syllables over long stretches of music. In addition to giving the text and music the appropriate amount of time for the piece, this would allow us to experience the sound of each word to the fullest and perceive the introduction of new syllables as a true shift in the music, contributing to a sense of motion and direction.
In Pérotin’s work, short rhythms – rhythmic modes, in fact, like those used in poetry – dance above the sustaining voices in repeating and evolving counterpoint with each other, resulting in quite a steady pulse. In Ligeti’s Lux Aeterna, he introduces voices and syllables at complex rhythmic intervals from each other. What texture or rhythms am I going to create with my repeating words?
I wanted the piece to sound organic and fluid, like a rolling ocean. While I might have been able to achieve this fluidity with something like Ligeti’s use of more complex rhythms, this makes for an immensely challenging piece to perform:
Ligeti uses off-beats within odd-numbered beat divisions to disguise the beat itself and make the entries sound unpredictable or randomized for significant portions of the music. For my piece, I want a somewhat similar result, but I want to be certain that it truly sounds as if flowing organically. Both for an oceanic effect and for ease of performance, I decided that the entire piece will be aleatoric, or “left to chance” in some fashion.
Instead of writing out all of the rhythms that will be performed, for most of the piece, I wrote one or two-note phrases and used a box and a dark line to direct the singers to repeat this cell at their own speed, independently of each other. This improvisation achieves an undulation and flow better than I ever could with fixed rhythmic notation. It also gives the listener a sense of individual voices within an expansive, interconnected group, just as the text refers to one tiny boat in a vast ocean.
This also gives me the opportunity to build the piece’s sense of immensity by doing the converse of what the text does – by starting small and building up. To create the ocean, I start with one note sung by some of the sopranos and build the music outward gradually from that note, one note at a time. Harmonically, I aim for a balance of half steps – the smallest possible interval between two notes in our Western pitch system – and whole steps, which are slightly wider.
The music builds and builds until it reaches a C Major chord and continues in a more grounded, declamatory way until the sparseness returns for the final phrase. It ends with one singer.
I hoped the piece would celebrate humility and placing one’s self in proper perspective with respect to the vastness of the world – particularly when it comes to leaders and those with power, considering where I found the words. In practice, the piece also gave me a lesson in musical humility and perspective through its illustration of the consequences of making decisions. With all of the elements “left to chance” in a piece like this, it is easy to think that writing the piece will involve less decision-making, or that choices made by the composer will have fewer consequences for the sound of the music. This could not be more false. In writing (and subsequently rehearsing) the piece, I quickly realized that any minute decision I made –when to introduce a new word, whether to use one pitch or two in a particular cell, what articulation marking, dynamic, or even punctuation mark to use – had far greater consequences in this context. Because of the repetition of each cell, and the impact of every detail on how the performers will interpret that cell, what may seem like a minor detail on the page will ripple throughout the texture for an extended period of musical time. For instance, the introduction of the word “sea” marked a dramatic shift in the music to my ear. In a piece with fixed rhythm, the word may have an impact, but still flashed by in a moment. In this context, when the consonant “s” is introduced, it cuts through each time an individual sings it, dramatically changing the sound of the passage. The brightness of the “ee” vowel is also markedly different than the sounds that came before. While aleatoric or improvisatory techniques may not be every composer or performer’s stylistic cup of tea, I do believe that any musician can find value in attempting a piece like this, both as an exercise in the importance of each decision for composers and in encouraging agency and independence for performers.
Overall, it is one of my works of which I am most proud. And who knows – perhaps without this impetus, I would never have fully embraced these “left to chance” techniques in my work, a development which has taught me a great deal and invited me to consider musical decisions in my work more deeply.
This piece is available from Seeadot Publishing.