Schirmer books (250 pp.)

MIDI files used with this book available at http:/arts.ucsc.edu/faculty/cope/home

Techniques of the Contemporary Composer offers a concise, practical and varied spectrum of musical ideas. It is a useful resource for scholars and composers of music composition and analysis. Techniques is not for beginning composers, unfamiliar with traditional music terminology. Rather, it is designed to be used as a textbook for classroom study, and assumes that a reader get additional information, either from instructor, private teacher, or other books.

The book covers both traditional nineteenth-century harmonic and melodic techniques and more avant garde structures. Cope believes that knowledge of as many procedures as possible produces true freedom of expression. Techniques is certainly a vast array of procedures that composers have employed through the years. If you are unfamiliar with history and theories of traditional musics, Techniques may be just a shopping list of ideas that a composer could merely muddle their way through. Despite the chapters on "Experimental Music" and "Decategorization", overall the book idolizes "craft and consistency [as] fundamental to [music]."

Techniques encompasses twenty-one chapters, organized to coincide roughly with two semesters of composition classes. There is an extensive bibliography, excellent composition exercises, and examples in each chapter that make the book conducive to extended study. The book is not particularly an interesting read (there is almost no narrative nor historical context), but rather is a practical reference guide for emerging composers. "Not a set of rules, but resources," Cope writes, "Techniques can help a student gain some background knowledge on composition, while at the same time fostering experimentation and discovery of personal style."

Although Cope's intention is probably not to be prescriptive, Techniques is a pedagogically-oriented and written to be an authoritative textbook. The work suffers by trying to cover a wide variety of genres, continually presenting a cursory treatment to complex subjects like serialism, tonality, and multimedia (there is only one page devoted to MIDI). By trying to remain inclusive, yet pragmatic, Cope attempts to encourage experimentation, but remains within the range of already accepted techniques. The book is much more a summary of where we have been in music than an inspiration to students looking to radicalize contemporary music techniques.

Cope writes "Most audiences of (minimalism) are more critical of what they perceive as the composer's pretension than of the work itself." One might stand for this type of comment during a lecture, but as written it does nothing to inspire new composers to challenge old forms. Often the book wavers between a State-of-Twentieth-Century-Music address, and textbook.

Techniques makes an extraordinary attempt to cover the ideas, resources, and technologies of composition of the twentieth century. Indeed, a lofty an perhaps unrealistic goal for any book. Full understanding assumes the ability to read traditional music notation. One must get well over half-way through the book before electronic music is mentioned. "Many composers confronted with an electronic studio of computer music software, no matter how simple or complex it may be, feel that previously learned techniques are obsolete and a new spectrum of techniques must be developed. Nothing could be further from the truth." Must a composer need to know all such previous techniques in order to begin their experimentation in the electronic music studio? How has electronic music suffered from such controlled experimentation? How has the field benefitted from novices with no understanding of past or Western musics?

There is a section of Techniques devoted to multimedia. Like other chapters, it explains what it is, but not what to consider when composing a multimedia work. The book seems to imply that only multimedia composers, separate from computer music or even instrumental composers, need to spend too much time learning new techniques that the work remains inferior. Perhaps this is a sign not of constantly changing tools, but of our limited understanding of new forms, or our conservative approach to experimentation. Cope's often used 1971 academic New Directions in Music combined with Techniques of the Contemporary Composer would make for an interesting and challenging course in Twentieth-century music. Combine these two books and CD-ROM technology with vast audio and score examples available at the click of a mouse and perhaps Cope would achieve the straightforward course in twentieth-century techniques he desires - using a form often maligned by traditional academics.

Techniques explores many musical ideas, and presents them concisely with hundreds of musical examples, composed exclusively by Cope. When reading about prepared piano, Cope cites Cage, but displays no Cage scores, makes available no Cage sounds. Although the Cope musical examples can be downloaded as MIDI files from a web site, they lack the immediacy and diversity necessary for thorough investigation. Techniques remains ahistorical in its explanation of new ideas and methods.

Cope is an active composer and is Professor of Music at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He has been teaching music composition for thirty years.

MIDI files used with this book available at http://arts.ucsc.edu/faculty/cope/home