4. Modest Mutilation - Gabriel Gekoskie

[Aaron] Hello and welcome to the Theorist-Composer Collaboration, a podcast interview series highlighting modern composers and their compositions, hosted by music theorists. My name is Aaron D'Zurilla and I'm a graduate music theory student at Florida State University and I'll be your host for today. The music that you were just listening to is an excerpt from a piece titled Modest Mutilation by the composer Gabe Gekoskie, who is the featured guest on this week's episode alongside his music. That leads me to welcome Gabe Gekoskie himself to the program. How are you?

[Gabe] I'm doing great. Thanks for having me, Aaron.

[Aaron] Of course. It's been quite a while since we've spoken. To everyone, Gabe and I went to the same school for our undergrad, which was University of Florida.

[Gabe] Yep, go Gators. It's fantastic to see you going in your own direction and me going in mine, both at state schools now. Yeah, you're at Florida State and I'm up here at Penn State.

[Aaron] Up in the great white north. I'm sure you miss the humidity.

[Gabe] No, not at all. Not one bit. The snow makes me very happy.

[Aaron] Okay. So, Gabe, go ahead and tell the audience about yourself, your background personally, professionally, academically, whatever you choose.

[Gabe] Yeah. So, I mean, my name is Gabriel Gekoskie. I use he, him pronouns. I'm currently doing my Masters of Composition up here at Penn State University, working very closely with Dr. Baljinder Sikhan. And yeah, I mean, I did my, like Aaron had mentioned, I did my undergrad in composition and theory, a dual degree at the University of Florida, which was great, you know, happy to be moving on, you know, next chapter of the life and whatnot, but I've always been pretty active musically. From a young age, I started playing violin through the Suzuki method for about eight years. Then I picked up trumpet in middle school, high school. And then, you know, I got to college and I was like, I want to keep going with this. I felt in a sense that I had to do something music related. And then I didn't want to just, I kind of wanted to prove to myself that I could like do something else. So I was going to go performance and then I got into theory and then I was like, oh, I really like writing music. So now I'm writing music and that's what I love doing. So here we are.

[Aaron] Yes, here we are indeed. And you mentioned it at the very beginning there. And I wanted to ask you, you're the first person that I've had on here, one of, I hope more in the future, that is something of a music theorist yourself, not just a composer, as you said, a dual degree. And I remember in the fall of our senior year, sitting through a music theory presentation that you gave on a paper that you were doing in our informant analysis. So can you, we're going to talk more about the fields themselves later on, but can you speak to more on a personal level or even in your career so far, what it's like having a foot on both sides of the fence in a way?

[Gabe] Yeah. I remember that day so well. I was so very nervous. I've never taught a class and now I'm teaching, which is fantastic. But I was doing a presentation on, oh, what was it?

[Aaron] It was something with prepared piano.

[Gabe] Yes, it was, well, it was a player piano.

[Aaron] Player piano.

[Gabe] It was Conlon Nancarrow's piano study number seven. And I remember because this was form and analysis one, I believe, or was it two?

[Aaron] Yes, it was one.

[Gabe] Okay, it was one. So it was dealing a lot with sonata form, rondo, all that. And so I was like, okay, this piece is in a sonata form, but instead of being divided by key areas and by this tonal structure that we normally base form off of, it was divided by rhythmic canons, which is something that Conlon Nancarrow really liked doing. So I was like, why not present this? And I remember all of the looks of bewilderment when I played the music and had everybody try to follow the score, because it was really fast. And I had only like 30 minutes to try to cover the whole thing. I bit off a bit more than I could chew for that one. But as far as, when I first started picking up composition, I was very much into theory first, and then I was like, let me try writing some music, took some of the required composition skills courses for the major, for the theory major. And then that just kind of sparked my love for the whole discipline. I used to think, oh, being a better theorist makes you a better composer, being a better composer makes you a better theorist and vice versa. I've kind of graduated to a different mindset of nothing really exists in that clear of a binary, where it's like, oh, are you a theorist or are you a composer? Everybody's kind of a little bit of both. I'm under a great belief that everybody should write music and can write music. Anybody that practices music should include writing music into that. And we can talk later about the discipline and how it's taught itself. But yeah, the further that I got with music theory, the more abstract my own thoughts on the discipline became. And in a roundabout way, the music that I write now is not as theoretically intense as the music that I would analyze, because that's not the aesthetics that I'm concerned about. It's like the aesthetics are the law. There's a Debussy quote that says pleasure is the law when he was using all these planing dominant chords and being called impressionistic when he hated that label. I just took a French music course. This is right off the top of the dome for me. My music is very aesthetically driven and I see it more so as theory is a set of tools that I'll be able to, you know, whatever I want to say, theory is not going to necessarily help me form what I want to say. It'll just give me a vessel to do it. It will give me a medium to do it.

[Aaron] In reference to the first half of what you said with that class that you taught, I think our professor Dr. Pellegrin could have prepped us a little bit better in that at the time, yes, we were talking about sonata form, but it was the Rhenish symphony. It wasn't, it was certainly not an abstract sonata form. And I think back to that presentation and now I'm in a graduate music theory program at a pretty high up university and that's right up there with the sort of presentations I see on a weekly basis. But at that point in undergrad, it was like, Oh my gosh, what is happening. It was fantastic though. You talked a bit about your compositional aesthetics and compositional style a bit. Can you speak to what that is? If you were to describe broadly or abstractly, if someone came up to you and said, what does your music sound like? Whether that's a style or a composer, however you choose to describe it.

[Gabe] Yeah. I mean, since I'm, I'm pretty early in my compositional career and you know, I, I, I think one of the hardest things when people are just first starting out is really creating a voice and like some, some level of consistency, but I find the more that I write, the more, you know, consistently it sounds like, Oh yeah, Gabe wrote that piece, you know, and you could kind of like pick it out. But I I've bounced around from a few different aesthetic camps and right now I'm really, really hooked on hyperpop. I love hyperpop so much. I love how tongue in cheek it is. I love how self-aware the genre is. I love how queer the genre is and it's just this amalgamation of being a homunculus grown out of the digital age. Like I love it so much and I, I like the, the level of overt self-awareness that I try to apply it to some of my music. You know, I'm still trying to find more sophisticated ways to do that, but I think this division of music being either high brow or low brow, not only does that have like very racist connotations with eugenics, but also it has this connotation that like music can be qualified, you know, in a spectrum of good and bad when I think it's more of a question of whether, you know, a composer's idea was successful or unsuccessful, how they, you know, wanted it to be conveyed. And so with that, you know, some of the, I look at some of the things that are typically seen as this not as advanced, not as complicated, like a four chord melody or a really catchy tune or, you know, a simple chord progression, catchy melody, you know, annoying sounds, repetition. That's a huge one too, just like blatant repetition, which kind of, you know, ties into some of my minimalist inspirations of, you know, really driving something home. But I also, you know, I'm composing through the lens of somebody with ADHD appealing to, you know, an ADHD focus of, oh, if I'm listening to Mahler number five and, you know, I'm trying to draw a line and follow a small unfolding idea for the whole symphony, that's going to lose my interest. You know, that might lose my interest and I want to stay interested. I want my music to get stuck in my head.

[Aaron] I totally support, and I'm so happy you said that because I feel exactly the same way. And it's like the music that I feel weird saying this, but I guess the music I specialize in analyzing or at least do the most often is pop music. And I say that with a big capital P. I just did my final presentation on like the compositional history of Rick Astley.

[Gabe] That's great. That's that that has taken the bit to the nth degree.

[Aaron] Yes. Yes, it is. So I can, I really appreciate that. That's not to say anything less of Mahler's music, but I also understand that train of, I know you're not saying that either. I just, I understand that train of thought greatly.

[Gabe] Right. And I think it's, you know, I actually am just finishing up a seminar on Mahler, which is really funny. Oh, you know. I'm just, you know, scraping exactly what I remember from my two semesters here so far. And you know, one of the things that I've talked about, I even in one of the semesters, the seminars that I audited at UF with Dr. Dahlman on music and audience, right? Like analyzing the audience. The audience has really like changed from the time that Mahler was writing music and Strauss around that time, you know, to today, where we see it a lot with music critics, like music critics now are just trying to get space, like real estate on a column. So they'll say heinous things or attention grabbing things and whatnot. But back in Mahler's time, you know, music critics would get the score in advance and analyze it. You know, everybody was a theorist that would engage with classical music because that was like the popular thing to do. It would be, you know, like today going to Forever 21 and buying a childish Gambino vinyl, you know, and reading all the liner notes and, you know, studying that before listening to it. And, you know, that's seen as kind of like indie today or whatnot or cool or false or aesthetic. But there's definitely just a different profile of how people listen today. And music historically is, you know, one of the slowest changing art forms. If we look at visual arts, you know, it's worlds ahead. We look at, you know, if you look at like the music curriculum that we're being taught in our institutions respectively today and from 50 years ago, like if you take the syllabus of what it takes to get a master's in theory from 50 years ago to today, it's probably going to be like identical. It really is.

[Aaron] You know, it really is.

[Gabe] It's going to be like post like 20th century theory and then like everything before that. And that's the two like it's a binary. It's easier to do it.

[Aaron] Let me tell you the four classes I took last semester and three of them were required. It was Intro to Schenkerian Analysis, Music Theory Pedagogy, Post-Tonal Analysis, and Counterpoint.

[Gabe] Yeah. I mean, and that's that that would have been the same thing, you know, back then.

[Aaron] It's not to say that those aren't valuable subjects. They were great classes and they're still important to learn in their own right. But it's just, you know, like you're pointing out, it's a funny parallel of immovability.

[Gabe] Yeah, it's this idea of what I like. And it's just kind of perpetrated by our field in general about, you know, the past being the good old days. Oh, we have the geniuses and we have the masters and the masterworks, you know, that we keep performing as if earlier was a better time than now. And that I feel like that sentiment just perforates every aspect of institutional music from where we are. And reacting to that is a big part of, you know, my compositional process of trying to think about all of that, you know, and at the same time, like thinking about I have had a really good conversation with one of my professors, one of the musicology professors here, Chuck Youmans. And we were talking about how sometimes it can feel really insignificant putting all this effort in, you know, to write a major work or to publish a book or, you know, do all of this research when like there's an active genocide happening on the other side of the world, you know, and like, how do you grapple with trying to make a difference and like make your surroundings a better place when there's like the nth magnitude of other things going on, which is a very like Malarian way to look at things, kind of poetic in a sense, considering I just spent so long with this guy's music of, you know, this kind of fear of mortality or like, you know, what's it all worth anyways, kind of vibe. So not to get depressing on the situation, but these are things that I think about when I write my music. And ultimately, I kind of come back to the idea of building the world you want to live in and trying to affect the community around you and making it, you know, trying to make the world a little bit of a better place for what you can experience in the current moment.

[Aaron] This is a beautiful conversation. And I almost hate to move on from this area.

[Gabe] It's okay.

[Aaron] But we will return to it. But, we need to be or I'd like to spotlight your piece that we're going to be talking about.

[Gabe] Yeah, that little old thing.

[Aaron] Yeah, that little thing. And so I actually I think in a way, this is a good segway because you're speaking about how you conceptualize music, the story within it and the purpose behind it. And so the piece that we're going to be looking at today, the one that you sent me and the one that the listeners will be hearing as well, is Modest Mutilation. Now Gabe, explain yourself with that title. I say that a little accusatorily. I had a strange reaction to that at first. And it obviously, as most things do, it made much more sense with the program notes. But can you speak to the audience about what that title is, the message of the piece or what you were thinking about with it?

[Gabe] You know, I like titles. I keep a running list of like, oh, that'd be a badass title, you know, or like, I really like that.

[Aaron] Such a composer.

[Gabe] It's OK, sue me, you know, guilty as charged. But specifically with this piece, I knew how I was going to write it. You know, I knew that for a really long time, tracing back to, you know, when I first started composition, which wasn't too long ago, I was really drawn to Philip Glass, particularly, you know, Einstein on the Beach and Knee Five from Einstein on the Beach. You know, like we could even put a segment in here of clips from almost every single one of my pieces that derives from that. The first sound installation I ever, you know, did was called Measuring the Ocean with a Teaspoon. And that comes from the monologue that the narrator is saying in Knee Five when he's talking about the story of love and how, you know, the guy can't explain how much he loves the girl. So he says, measure the waters of the ocean with a teaspoon, you know, number the grains of sand on the beach, count the stars in the night sky, you know, it's impossible tasks. And so I knew that this piece influenced me a lot. Knee Five influenced me a ton, and I was kind of getting sick of it. You know, I love the piece so much. I could turn around and just, you know, go play it because I mean, minimalism, you only got to know like 30 seconds of music and just repeat it, you know. I mean, we'll talk about performing minimalistic music because that's a whole other ride, you know. But yeah, so I knew that this influenced me a lot and I kind of wanted to do a farewell to it. I wanted to, you know, write a piece that was as blatantly influenced by Knee Five as possible and, you know, make it my own and send it off and be like, I'm done here, you know, moving on to the next inspiration.

[Aaron] You know, there's kind of a sadness in that almost. It's like, it's not to like infantile all of it, but it feels like the end of Toy Story 3, like saying goodbye to like a whole mode of life, you know.

[Gabe] It definitely does. And I, you know, I felt prepared to do that. A lot of the music that I write, you know, I like to write about the human condition a lot and, you know, specifically being in a digital age and, you know, not just like the 2000's version of that where it's like, oh, the internet, it's so fast, you know, but just what that actually means and how that's affected, you know, everybody. So I try to take individual moments that I feel and try to make them larger. I know there are a lot of composers and I'm not saying there's anything wrong with this. I need a disclaimer, like straight up, you know, that write music based on their own experiences like exclusively. And that's completely fine. But I like to abstract those in a sense of like, you know, if I'm feeling this, then maybe somebody else has felt something like this too, or could get something out of it. So in that sense, you know, I wanted this, the title, Modest Mutilation is referring to the more that you hold on to something that you love, like the tighter that you hold it, the less like itself it's going to become. So, in the sense of me holding this piece really close to me, you know, it got distorted into something that it's not. But if you hold like a loved one, if you're really overprotective of like a loved one, say like a child or whatnot, that child's not going to be like that child anymore after a while, they're going to be a reflection view, you're going to mutilate them, even though you have, you know, this, this positive intention of protection and of shielding. And I think it's it's poetic in a way of like letting art exist in isolation, sometimes or letting it have, you know, a timeline of its own and not messing with it.

[Aaron] Oh, my gosh, this is this is making me feel kind of sad.

[Gabe] I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

[Aaron] No, no, no, no, no. Just to say sad is kind of simplistic. I think although at first I thought the title was a little absurdist, which I guess in some ways it is a little bit, but for sure, but especially after reading the program notes, and I'm sure the people listening will be able to feel this after hearing the piece some and hearing your rationalization just there about it, it really does make you just zoom out a little bit about thinking about what you're holding on to, what you should be and should not. Is it really what it was and so on. So I like what you're saying about how, you know, I'm personally one that prefers to engage with music that has an explicit meaning or message or story or so on. Doesn't need to be music for music's sake is always fun. But, I like, even if it doesn't have an explicit compositional meaning, I like to attach things to it. But I really appreciate your abstraction of experience in that you can mold, within limitations, mold the meaning of your piece to adapt to whatever the listener, the analyst or whoever's experiencing the music can adapt that experience to their own in different changes and ways. So I think that is a very thoughtful way to interpret musical meaning.

[Gabe] That's, I'm happy to hear you say that, because I've been called out for that being BS sometimes of like, oh, it's so vague that you can say it means whatever you want it to. But I try to be so intentional with that. I really do. And I appreciate, you know, you recognizing that because I, you know, I do a very similar thing if I'm listening to a piece of, let's say, absolute music, music for music's sake. I'm going to try to attach a meaning to it, something that, you know, will allow me to relate to it. So as a composer, I want to make a space for somebody else to do that, you know, for somebody else to interact with this piece and be like, oh, yeah, that's what I felt, you know, or to just zone out and be like, that was cool. Oh, that was a beat drop. That sounds great. You know, like four on the floor right there. That's groovy, you know, for them to encourage a reaction instead of just a complete zone out is, you know, to reduce my goals into just like one statement. That's what it is. You know?

[Aaron] Yeah. And then on the comment of if you make it so abstract or so loose that it can really mean anything, that criticism gets thrown at so many different kinds of art and art analysis that in some ways it's true, but I feel like that criticism is used without moderation if you know what I mean.

[Gabe] For sure. Yeah. It's kind of reckless and overstated in a sense. And you know, similarly to how I was describing music reviewers earlier, sometimes people just want a reaction. They just want real estate. They want a column, you know, they want to call art BS or they want to look at a very simplistic piece of art or let's say like people rag on minimalist art a lot. So if a columnist will write a review about a piece of minimalist art and either tear it to shreds or absolutely adore it, it's going to generate a reaction, which I think is it's almost poetic in a way because I see the purpose of a lot of art is to, you know, get a reaction, you know, inspire some sort of thought. What that thought is can be like handicapped and you know, it can also be super free, which is kind of what we're talking about here. But then when somebody reacts to it and wants their reaction to get a reaction, I like that, that is a level of, you know, that is it's abstracted because that itself like the column of you know, then you're creating a canon around this initial piece of artwork where there's now a reaction to the artwork and there's a reaction to a reaction. And even the artwork could have been inspired by something else. So I'm really drawn to that ecosystem and that like lineage of like, oh, I wrote this piece Modest Mutilation and it's based off of a Philip Glass piece. And where did that come from? Oh, it's Einstein on the beach. So something about Einstein, you know, some people might love or hate this piece, but they'll go write about it. You know, X, Y, Z, it's a funny world we live in. It certainly is a funny world that we live in.

[Aaron] Yes. And I appreciate your takes on that. I think that's very insightful to an artist's intention and grappling with the reaction to such intentions. Now, so, to speak about Modest Mutilation on more of a technical level, you use, you detail this in the program notes, you use a particular method of analysis or data collection, granular synthesis to help construct the piece. Can you explain, as generally as possible, to the listeners what granular synthesis is, what it entails, how you applied it and how you decided on that as something to use for this piece?

[Gabe] Yeah. So, I mean, just to talk about granular synthesis, we got to talk about what a grain is really fast and like, I think the term was popularized, if somebody cites me on this, please do, but in Microsounds by Curtis Rhodes, I think maybe it had been like thrown around or used or published before then, but that's where I know it from. And essentially like, you know, a grain of sound is the smallest perceptible unit of a sound. It can just be like a little blip, but if it's audible, you know, it doesn't necessarily mean that you can hear the content of it, but it comes from a greater thing. And so grains have been used in a lot of electroacoustic compositions on the electronic side to create a different way of listening, of taking these and either screwing with your perception of time of where is that coming from or creating sound masses. So grain clouds are like a huge thing. And that's just when there's a bunch of little tiny sounds happening that may have come from the same source, may not have, but they're these small perceptible sounds that together create a mass. And that mass is like a different way of engaging with music apart from melody, harmony, rhythm, where it's just this blob, you know, per se, of something that you can feel like a block, whatever, and that you can perceive as a mass. So with that, right now that we know what a grain is, I got the idea from my colleague Brendan Sweeney, currently dissertating at University of Florida.

[Aaron] Is he almost done?

[Gabe] I believe so. I believe he's almost done. He's living in DC right now, but is completely ABD. So yeah, all his coursework is done. He's just dissertating, dissertating on dissertating. Yeah. So I got the idea from him. He wrote a piece for the Jack Quartet and he took one of Beethoven string quartets and threw it through this sample granulator. And he, you know, aesthetically, he wanted to create a new type of variation technique, where if we think about, you know, a theme and variations theme is laid out and then you just kind of add more ornamentation as time goes, gets more virtuosic, more whatever. But he wanted to put that through a granulator and break it up and then completely rearrange like this piece from an original thing. So I was like, I really like that idea too. I would love to see that patch. So he sent me that Max patch. I messed around with it, edited it, you know, on my own and essentially took sections of Knee Five, put them into the granulator, which this granulator, it would go from either really small grains to large. So when we're talking about length of grains or, you know, size of grains, it's just how much you can hear in that. You know, I think it would go from like a fraction of a millisecond, which you can still hear. It might sound just like static or like, you know, an audio artifact up to like a second. And so I could like reverse which way they would go, whether it would, you know, get really, go from really small to really large or vice versa. And I could also change the envelope of what each grain was. So the attack, right? The attack, decay, sustain, release, I could change that. And most of the, with most of them, I just kind of made like triangles of, you know, it's either going to start really quiet and get really loud over the course of it or vice versa, or it's going to sound like super staticky because I just drew scribbles in the envelope box. You know, I just played around with it. I took this, made a mock up in logic and then I transcribed it. So I transcribed that this piece that is now like completely granulated, you know, all over the place and is also for violin, narrator, choir, and synth. And I was like, I'm going to take this and I'm going to make it for a sax quartet. So there was this level of abstraction of like, how am I, you know, how am I going to do that? Which I guess kind of goes into, you know, the process a bit more. But I essentially sounded a piano and I learned the whole thing. And so every, just about, I'd say like 95% of the material in the piece are direct sonorities from my granulated mockup. So throughout the piece, you know, I was saying I could take the granulator and make it go from big grains to small ones. That happens quite a few times. And it gives this like speeding up effect because the grains are getting smaller and smaller or, you know, I think, yeah, that's the only, the only way that I really go is like small to large. And then I think I did, or sorry, I large to small, but I think I did small to large and then like flipped it. So there's some like reversal in there. And then I was, I was posed with this, you know, since I learned it all on piano, I could tell just by listening to like a single grain, if I just looped it, I could tell what part from the baseline of the song that it was at, you know, what part of Knee Five was it on. So if it was like, if it was an A, then I knew it had to be this set of other pitches that were happening or so on and so forth. Right. Then I got to the problem of speaking. I didn't want my performers to speak verbatim. I wanted to abstract it just a little bit. So I came up with this idea of using voiceless articulations, which it's an imperfect system. I worked with a linguist and I then found out after working with a linguist that like actual linguistic IPA and musical IPA aren't approached in the same way to interject.

[Aaron] What does IPA stand for? 

[Gabe] The international phonetic alphabet. So if you think, you know, back to the Phoenicians trying to trade all throughout the Mediterranean Sea creating the first alphabet, they are just like the basic units of sound internationally that like the mouth can produce and different symbols will mean a different type of sound that you can produce. So if you can read IPA, you could read any language, essentially, not necessarily like the meaning that's just talking about the phonetics or what it orally sounds like. But yeah, so I decided I don't want them to speak. And the speech is also, I mean, part of that was the speech was getting so messed up that I didn't want them necessarily saying gibberish, but I still wanted it to kind of sound like gibberish and fit the vibe. So I went with these voiceless articulations that ended up coming out kind of like air. And I liked it. It was good. It kind of, you know, I wanted it to be like you are articulating, you know, on your instrument. But in these different, I tried to really go for voiceless plosives. So things that don't require like vocal cord activations and are really just done with like the lips and the tongue and, you know, hitting the teeth. And it kind of worked. It kind of didn't. It was an imperfect system. I really liked the end result, that project fusion, which was the quartet that I wrote this for. Definitely check them out. I'll send you links so you can put it in the description.

[Aaron] Yes, of course. And so to surmise a couple of things, not to summarize, because thank you for the description of granular synthesis and what a grain is. And if any of it was lost on people, that's okay, because it is a very difficult subject to grasp upon. But I think you did a fantastic job of describing it. So you essentially use that method to compile different modes of data to then use those as tools to construct the piece, to taking portions of it on a fundamental level and plugging it in or adapting it. Is that about right?

[Gabe] Yeah, essentially. I mean, it was, think of it almost like a filter, you know, like if you're going to put reverb on something, you know, I just kind of did that. But I was selective with what parts and how I was doing it. But I put it into the patch and then it came out the patch into a new piece.

[Aaron] Yeah. And what I did, my method for these interviews and analysis is to always listen to the piece. Of course, I read the title because I see the audio file, but I listened to the piece first as if I was an audience member and tried to guess what's happening. And I could tell just without any context, I wouldn't go as far to call it, Modest Mutilation, a minimalist piece, but as you've very well described and as anyone could probably guess by now, the aesthetic is there. And we've talked about aesthetics previously. And if you listen to Knee 5 and Modest Mutilation back to back, it's a tricky thing to say because there's obviously inspiration. But you didn't take it. And it's interesting because the granular synthesis accomplished taking direct inspiration but transforming it into abstract inspiration. It is a very interesting technique of adapting without directly adapting. I don't know how to quite describe it. And so, as you know, as a maybe former minimalist composer, if you want to say that, or formerly minimalist inspired composer, when you choose the pitch material, it is of course any composition, it's essential, but most especially minimalist because you're dealing with an economy of means. You're only using so much or you miss the point of minimalist. So when you're choosing what to take from the granular synthesis and the analysis from that, how did you balance between keeping the aesthetics but also keeping the aesthetic intact because you really could have gone crazy with it and taken all the grains you wanted and manipulated them as much as possible. So how did you keep yourself in check to keep the aesthetic while also going further because it clearly does?

[Gabe] I really appreciate this question. I'm also so thankful not only to be here but that you listened to my piece more than once. That's fantastic. I love it. So I mean, part of it was I knew... So I wrote this for Project Fusion, which you should definitely check them out. They're super cool people, love them all. And they were coming doing a residency at Penn State. They were working with the sax studio and whatnot, but they also... We got them to do some reading sessions for us for the composition studio. So the three current composition graduate students, we all wrote a sax quartet for them and it was a reading session. So part of what kept me in check was knowing that this had to be feasible in about an hour of sight reading in a controlled environment.

[Aaron] That is a very responsible reason and answer.

[Gabe] Yeah. So I mean, that was definitely part of it, but I also... I realized... I've talked about my aesthetics previous on this episode about my influences of hyperpop and attention grabbing and whatnot. But I'm realizing that... I really realized with this piece that I can sit just a little bit longer on some of my ideas. I can let them germinate for a second, not to like a Malarian, Wagnerian length of six hours. I hate Wagner, whatever. But I can allow them a little bit more time to breathe and give it... Just like respecting what I just wrote, respecting this idea and respecting the space and respecting the aesthetics of minimalism because I was trying to operate reacting to that canon where it's almost pseudo minimalist. It's got direct inspiration from this minimalist piece and moving forward from there. But I appreciate the question about the pitch material. I kind of just took it all from the grains, like what I could figure out. So through analyzing Knee Five myself and using inspiration, I'm really drawn to the fact... Glass does it a lot of kind of abandoning the tonic dominant pole that we think of a lot of tonic being home and dominant being this pool that will take you back home or just sitting in those two realms. Because like I had mentioned, I see so few things now as binaries. And that even applies to theory where I... That's like one way to do it. But with minimalism, it's almost creating other benchmarks of... In Knee Five, it's just like a four chord cycle that keeps going. It almost reminds me of like a hexatonic cycle like in neo-Romanian theory of going major to minor, then moving a third away, major to minor. It creates almost a... you start at any point in it and you can stay within the cycle. And that's something I really like about Glass' music and I particularly like about Knee Five is it's so simple and you could listen to it for hours. And then it grows just a little bit, changes to something else. And yeah, the work was kind of done for me using this much inspiration from the piece. Yeah, I've also interacted a lot with like analyses of Philip Glass' music and there's a lot that people can get into the weeds of when I really think it just comes from having a head for that aesthetic and being like, this is the world I'm living in and I'm going to replicate this. Some people can really get in the weeds of like, this note comes back 60 measures later and this specific tessitura is important because...

[Aaron] I know that you're not in school. I know you're not in grad school for music theory, but don't call us out that hard.

[Gabe] Okay. All right. I love all the music theorists. That's why I'm here. This is my community service to the theorists. I'm kidding. I'm kidding.

[Aaron] Community service. So, you say that a lot of your work was done for you, but I think the practice of purposeful compositional restraint is a practice in developing your musical maturity because that can be difficult. You probably remember earlier comp lessons. I had to have comp lessons in undergrad too. You write like a theme every two measures or something like that. Of course, this is not that extreme, but yes, I think that modest mutilation is definitely a great practice in how to adapt a style and inspiration and be in this almost uncanny valley of new and old, which it goes into the theme of the piece itself, which is what makes it really cool. And so, to go back to the IPA notation and the incorporation of mouth sounds and such, let's say we're doing a narrative reading of the piece. I know that it accomplished a timbral goal that you had to create variation and whispery sounds and so on, but what in the story, the idea of the piece, the narrative, why were the IPA notations, where did you decide to place those within the piece? What is it saying, the intensity or lack of intensity of those elements?

[Gabe] So they correspond to the grains where people are speaking. So the whole piece is, it starts with the synth going like A, G, C, not like, that's exactly what it is. And then it has the chorus coming in saying one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, five, six, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. And then it has two speakers saying, what did it get or the sailboat and all these little blips of things. And then it launches into a triple meter section of a narrator describing something else. So when I took these grains, the synth sounds or the sung sounds, I corresponded to actual pitches so that I could get those sonorities still preserved in Modest Mutilation. But when it came to speaking, that's when I decided to use the IPA. I was like, okay, so this part of speech, maybe it's the middle of her saying, the, so it comes out as like, you know, or sailboat or, you know, things like that. It's chopped up, not necessarily perfectly or right on the beat. And so instead of using actual words to approximate that in a, that would be a bit more of a literal approach if I just used the exact same words and had them speak them, but chopped up how the grains chopped them up. I kind of wanted to smooth out the edges and that's where the IPA came in. It abstracted it in a way that like rounded it out and didn't make it feel as jerky as the premise of the piece is. The premise is very much section, section, section, section, grain, grain, grain, grain, you know, one does not have to relate to the other. It could be choppy if I wanted it to, but that was kind of the experiment that I did with this of I purposely didn't put in a lot of indications that I wanted it to sound artificial and choppy so that the musicians, when they read it, that they would smooth it out on their own and it would breathe the new life of like organic mass into it, which I really appreciated, you know, how Project Fusion approached that. And they did a fantastic job. I'm just, I'm so indebted to them. Yeah. Shout out Project Fusion, if you ever listened to this.

[Aaron] I hope they will, I'll be finding their social media accounts too.

[Gabe] Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I'll send it to them. Absolutely.

[Aaron] Yes. And so about the mouth sounds, this really wasn't with IPA, but one of the, I'm not going to say confusing because it wasn't disruptive, but one of the most unsettling parts of the piece, something that maybe purposely was meant to not sit completely peacefully within the listener is at the very end of the piece, you finish your texture, your melody, what you're doing, and you have a fermata over measure of rests. So an indefinite pause of rests or somewhat indefinite. And then a return of clicking keys that comes up in volume and then slowly fades away. When I say it's confusing, I don't mean that it doesn't fit. It fits just well with the aesthetic, but what are you saying when you have that? What are you doing?

[Gabe] Yeah. So, you know, going back to the, how I organized the piece through the sample granulator, I either had small to large or large to small grains. Each chunk that I took had a progression of large to small for the most part, you know, it had a progression. And my challenge then, you know, was to create a system or multiple systems of representing this density, these grain clouds that, you know, end up at the end. And how do I represent that? How do I represent this very electronic thing? So through it, you know, the very beginning, you know, very long grains and it goes, you know, to smaller until it gets to that 32nd note flurry of just a massive sound. And then I was like, okay, massive sound, great. Let's try metering it next time. So I have all those like metric modulations towards the end of the second section. And then with this final section, with the key clicks, I was like, what if we just abstract, you know, like pull out all of the harmonic language and we just leave the essence, like the vibe of what I was trying to do, which was in this case, it was take the small grains and make it big. So it started with a grain cloud with the flurry of clicks, and then it got longer. The grains got longer at the end. So it was kind of like large to small, large to small, small to large, flip them up on the third time.

[Aaron] Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. I suppose I saw I was thinking more of it in a personal experience, almost spirituality way of, oh, what is this meaning to me? Which I guess in a way is, you know, your intentions of abstracting the purpose of the piece to be adaptable to the audience was successful in that light, because you got me thinking immediately without even having context of what was happening. So one last thing about Modest Mutilation that I want to talk about is something unique so far with people that I've interviewed is instead of sending just an audio file, you sent a specific link to your YouTube page where it was accompanied, the recording of the piece was accompanied by an animation. One that I'm going to have a, of course, going to be included in all of the social links to your information, but I'm going to have a specific link to this animation with the piece and I encourage everyone to watch it with nice headphones. It's a very neat experience. And I wanted to ask, how did that collaboration with the animator come around? What was that like?

[Gabe] Yeah, so, you know, it initially started of I wrote this piece, I got it recorded, you know, I've worked with Project Fusion. That was, it was great. One of the things in the curriculum for our composition master's program here is we'll have these career building things. And one of them was like, oh, make a piece and attach a video to it. And I was like, okay, I mean, like, yes, I can do that. I could just record, you know, people playing a piece, but I wanted, I've always wanted to work with an animator. And so I was really set on that, I was like, I'm going to find an animator who's going to animate this piece. The problem is, I'm a master's student, and I'm broke. And animators are really expensive. And rightfully so, because it takes so much work to do a little bit like a lengthwise of animation. So I approached some people, cold called them, you know, and I ended up finding through a friend of a friend, Durnis Markov. And I will also give you the link to his socials, fantastic animator. He's the one that animated the accompanying video for Modest Mutilation. And he would, you know, he didn't do it for an exorbitant amount of money. I, we, you know, we cut a deal and decided to start working together. And he was really drawn to my music from what he said. He really liked it. And he was like, this will be great. I have some ideas. And I specifically didn't give him any creative direction. I was like going back to abstracting the meaning. I wanted him to listen to it and be like, take whatever meaning you feel and then do that. So that's what he did. And he did, he hand drew all of the panels of this animation, which was insane. And I worked together with Project Fusion to fund it so that he could be properly commissioned for this project. And when he finished, it was, it was great. I premiered the video. It's great having the video now because I can just, it can be its own fixed media piece of it's taking that recording and the video, but also I have capability to make the video accompanying so people could play with like a movie score live if they, if that's something they're interested in.

[Aaron] Yeah.

[Gabe] So it was, it was just a really, you know, all around a fantastic experience. And if I ever work with an animator again, it will probably be Durnis, because he was just, he was really good, really, really fantastic.

[Aaron] Yes. Right, there's a whole area of both composition and theory, as you well know, that is completely dedicated to the relation of the visual arts and audio and music specifically. So much analysis with it. And I feel like there's a lot of meat on the bones when it comes to even a earpiece with that animation. It was so artful and impactful. I can imagine it in a dark room on a projector alone in an art museum as an installation with that video and surround sound. It's just absolutely surreal to watch and listen. And of course I'll make sure that the artist, the animator, what's his name again?

[Gabe] Durnis Markov.

[Aaron] Yes. We will make sure that it gets plenty of attention and notoriety for the beautiful work that he did. And I thought that was a great addition to your piece. Now we're in the part of the podcast. Now we already kind of discussed a whole bunch of it at the beginning, which was really fun and natural, but let's talk about the fields abstractly. What does composition mean to you? What does music mean to you?

[Gabe] You really like questions. Yeah, I was about to say this is, I could throw around the, it's too vague BS that we were talking about earlier. I'll subtweet you about this actually.

[Aaron] I'm giving you the keys to the car. You can drive wherever you want.

[Gabe] Right. Right. Yeah. So composition as a discipline or theory or...

[Aaron] No, just to you, the art of music and what you do every day and what you're going to school for and hoping, you know, again, very light question. But what does it all mean to you?

[Gabe] Yeah. I mean, it's, to me, like, it's a creative escape. There's like, there's, there's no doubt about that. That's kind of a, you know, a given. I know very few people that like survive in any form of music without loving it. You know, it's like, and sure, people will fluctuate, you know, I'll fluctuate of like, oh, am I really doing the right thing for me? Is this, you know, should I just go pursue something else? You know, especially when I'm broke, I'm like, you know, it would be really nice to do anything else right now. Go to trade school, you know, drop out a little bit. I actually, I was, I was talking to somebody, one of the professors who will go unnamed and he was like, yeah, I actually really like it when people drop out of music school because it shows a level of self preservation and like self care that the rest of us don't have.

[Aaron] I guess, I guess you get an A for honesty, but what kind of, what kind of comment is that?

[Gabe] You know, it was, it was definitely like, you know, tongue in cheek kind of thing of like, you know, like no professors like, oh, I hope you drop out, but it's, it's kind of like a silver lining, you know? But yeah, I mean, music to me, like I was, I was talking about is really, you know, building the world that you want to live in. And I, I really like all the people that I've met, you know, for the most part, like in, in the contemporary music field, performers, composers, and it's, it's a world that I really want to be a part of and I want to contribute to, and I want to give back to this ecosystem and participate, you know, and be around these, these creatives and because it's, it's a very fulfilling thing for me to be able to talk about music and to, you know, like talk to you on this podcast. This is fantastic. This is the most fulfilling to me is being able to like talk with other creatives about music. Music is like, I mean, I don't think it's universal language. I think it's, it's more than words. It's, it's, it's very transcendental in that way. And it's very broad and it's very, and it needs a lot of change too, you know? And so I feel like the more people that are in music, the more variety of approaches that we can find. And so I kind of feel like, you know, I'm doing a small part of that of just adding variety and notice there's no, there's no qualification to that of like good variety, bad variety, because I don't think that really exists. Just having more people expressing themselves in a, in a vulnerable public way, I think is, is healthy and you know, and empowering to other creatives.

[Aaron] Yeah. I understand that perspective. It's a very all encompassing one as well. And so maybe more specific to, you've already somewhat answered this. If you want to expand on it more or you can just repeat yourself, it's really up to you. Composition as an entity, music theory as an entity. I find it interesting that you said, you know, that in of itself, and even the dynamic of this podcast is somewhat of a binary. You have the whole intention is to have one theorist and one composer, or at least one person who mostly identifies as a composer, one who mostly identifies as a theorist. And I mean, even at Florida state, I don't know what it is at Penn State, but it is a binary within our department or one department, but there is the composition side, there is the theory side. And you talked about earlier about the conjoining or at least not necessarily the conjoining, but the spectrum between the two different areas and the usefulness, the utility or the importance, so on and so forth. What are your thoughts on the field of music theory and composition? The intersection of such, the efforts to combine them or even separate them?

[Gabe] Yeah, I mean, great question. Again, you really came with the heavy hitters. You know, what I really mean by like, I don't really, I try not to see things in binaries as is, I think there's a lot of beauty in nuance. There's a lot of beauty in the specifics and whatnot. If we overgeneralize everything, then you miss out on a lot of great things with everything. You know, like if you said every tree is just a tree, then you wouldn't get to, you know, notice the difference between a maple or an oak or a yew, you know. So with theory and composition, I feel more so strongly about that, about them existing on a spectrum, you know, of not like, oh, it's theory or it's composition or somewhere in between. But when you think about like the field of musicology and theory and composition, they all existed at one as one at one point before breaking off and being specialized, right? Because you couldn't essentially like do history without knowing a level of theory or composition, you know, because with theory comes like a knowledge of like how to write things. The difference I mainly see when we get into like the disciplines of theory and composition is they both might have the same tool sets, but they're applying them in different ways, which again, I like the beauty of nuance. I'm glad, you know, these fields are separated and whatnot. But I think people's identities as a theorist or a composer or a musicologist or a musician are multifaceted. And to say that you're one more than another, I think is just kind of what you spend most of your time on. I currently, you know, I'm wrapping up because as it comes to the end of the semester, a techniques of composition course here at Penn State where I'm teaching non-majors, non-composition majors how to compose in like a one semester crash course. And I always tell my students they're just as much of composers as I am. The only reason I have the title is because that's what I spend all day, every day doing. That's what I want to identify as and like a group of people that I feel comfortable putting that identity on myself. And sure, like I have a composition degree, but I don't think that's as much of a qualifier, you know, other than just kind of a proof that I took a set of institutionalized classes, you know, which I think there's I like that there's nuance and there's people doing nuanced things, you know, I really appreciate that because it's you can really get into the weeds of what maybe somebody else doesn't care about, you know, and you can spend a lot of time having a lot of fun with that, you know, at the end of the day, we're all just trying to, you know, be happy, you know, be happy with what we're doing. And so who am I to say that that should like go away? The problems that I do see, you know, going forward in what have already reared their ugly head, especially in composition, there's a lot of predators in composition. There are quite a lot. I know this kind of like a curve ball.

[Aaron] I was talking about like the academic side of things, but I did not expect that.

[Gabe] Right. I mean, it's, it's just it's it's clear as day. And it's perforated, you know, all musical institutions, you know, just recently with New York Philharmonic. And prior to that, like numerous ones that don't get public coverage because it's yeah, I mean, there was a really good I'm forgetting her name right now, but it's she had equated or, you know, discussed the the issues with how the New York Philharmonic had handled the situation with, you know, the two assailants and the predators that they invited back to the orchestra as like when when these kind of things happen, everybody knows that they're already going on. Right. It's just whether or not the story is going to break, whether or not the journalist is going to fight hard enough to get that story to break. So it's you know, it's kind of this good old boys like cover up of, oh, that shit's happening, but we're going to stay quiet about it because I want to keep my job. I want to, you know, I want this person to keep my job. Oh, they're my friend. You know, there's there's not a moral accountability in I mean, a lot of the arts, you know, not music exclusive. There's a lot of like of morality that that has been lost and that needs to be accounted for needs to really come back. And I think, you know, the institution itself, especially when we think about our theoretical approach being very Schenkerian based, you can kind of draw a lineage of like how that influences, you know, our way of thinking about music and, you know... 

[Aaron] Oh, Gabe, yes, you can. Yes, you can.

[Gabe] You know, it's yeah. And I know that's like that's a lot. And I'm definitely I don't feel qualified or comfortable to, you know, talk in depth about necessarily these subjects, but I think it's a it's an important thing that, you know, it has to be at the forefront of everybody's mind for for things to change. And it sucks that that's the way that it has to be. But that's how it has to be.

[Aaron] Yes. And although that was certainly a curveball in a way, though, you know, philosophically. it's very interesting to hear your thoughts and to hear any guest thoughts. But, you know, theory, just like theory to composition, there's also reality. And that is, you were just naming a very deep and dark reality of parts of the field of music, composition, theory to all sorts. So that's still important to highlight, as you said.

[Gabe] So on that note, this is that was a really good connection you drew. I do appreciate that. Spoken like a true theorist, that is not, that is not a derogatory remark.

[Aaron] I'll take it. I'll take it in stride. I'll take it. I'll take it. Good. So, you know, this has been a phenomenal conversation. I really have loved having you on. And how can listeners, you know, I'm going to be listing the different things that you sent me. But how can the listeners best contact you for any questions or inquiries or comments?

[Gabe] Yeah. I mean, you can follow my Instagram at Gabe dot Gekoskie, which I mean, that'll be in the description. You can also check out my website at Gabriel Gekoskie. That's how I, you know, sign all of my compositions. But you can just call me Gabe. You could DM me. You could, you know, go to the contact form on my website or contact Aaron and he'll, he'll set you up directly. That's fine.

[Aaron] Yes, I certainly will. That's part of the point of all this. Yes. And as Gabe said, all of these things will be in the description of wherever you're listening to this. Gabe, thank you very much for coming on to the Theorist Composer Collaboration. This has been a fantastic conversation and thank you for sharing your piece, Modest Mutilation.

[Gabe] Great. Thank you so much for having me.

[Aaron] Hello, this is Aaron again, and I want to thank you for listening to this episode of The Theorist Composer Collaboration. Another big thank you to Gabe Gekoskie for joining the program alongside his composition, Modest Mutilation. In the description of this episode, regardless of the platform you are on, there will be links to Gabe's website, email, and social media, and I would appreciate it if you could show him some support. His information will also be readily compiled on the corresponding contributor page on our host website as well. Modest Mutilation was performed by the ensemble Project Fusion, as Gabe mentioned in the episode, and a link to their website will also be in the episode description. Additionally, there will also be a link directly to the YouTube video containing the animation that Gabe mentioned, created by Durnis Markov. I would encourage you to go and show support to Gabe, Project Fusion, and Durnis altogether. For further updates and notifications on The Theorist Composer Collaboration, make sure to subscribe to our email listing on the homepage of our host website, and follow our Instagram and Facebook pages. Relevant links are in the description. You can also listen to future episodes through our host website, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, and YouTube, so make sure you subscribe to the platform of your choosing. Again, all relevant links are in the description. TCC episodes are posted weekly on Mondays, and don't miss our weekly blog post, which go live a few days after a new episode is added. I'm also very excited to promote that our next featured composer is Dr. Nico Gutierrez, with his masterful orchestral composition, Teogonia, featured as well. You won't want to miss it, but until then, this is Aaron, and thank you for joining the TCC.