Putting The Name Before The Work

Putting The Name Before The Work

By Frank J. Oteri
Just as specific verbal prods can straitjacket you, a lack of them can sometimes just keep you in limbo.

Written By

Frank J. Oteri

Frank J. Oteri is an ASCAP-award winning composer and music journalist. Among his compositions are Already Yesterday or Still Tomorrow for orchestra, the "performance oratorio" MACHUNAS, the 1/4-tone sax quartet Fair and Balanced?, and the 1/6-tone rock band suite Imagined Overtures. His compositions are represented by Black Tea Music. Oteri is the Vice President of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) and is Composer Advocate at New Music USA where he has been the Editor of its web magazine, NewMusicBox.org, since its founding in 1999.

Richard Brautigan has remained one of my favorite writers since first reading Trout Fishing in America and In Watermelon Sugar more than thirty years ago. One of the great joys of reading Brautigan is for his titles, not just the names of his novels, but individual chapters. Brautigan even admitted that he frequently came up with titles before the actual content so named. E.g. The last chapter of Trout Fishing in America is called “The Mayonnaise Chapter”, which is explained by the preceding chapter in which he explained that he always wanted to end a book with the word mayonnaise (I hate mayonnaise, but I love the book!). And four of the poems in Rommel Drives on Deep Into Egypt are completely blank, either because once he came up with the title he had nothing left to say or he couldn’t come up with a poem to match the title.

As a writer of both music and words, I have also found that coming up with a great title can sometimes be a barrier to creating something worthwhile to go with it. Years ago I came up with a title that I really liked—until all dreams are gone—but have yet to find the music for it. And last week, I was struggling with making sense of the intro essay I wrote to accompany our Spotlight feature on Christopher Campbell, partially because I was so attached to the title “Breaths That Groove on Grooves That Breathe.” Although that title seemed to perfectly capture what both his music and aesthetics are about, it proved to be a roadblock. As soon as I rechristened it with the far less poetic, but perfectly workable “For The Record”, I was finally able to get the job done.

Ironically not naming something at all can be even more problematic. I’m currently struggling to focus on a Brass Quintet that’s been ruminating in the back of my mind for a couple of years now. I have loads of ideas, but because I haven’t locked into a title, even one that’s just a placeholder, I can’t seem to find a narrative for it and, as a result, I have yet to be able to shape something that sounds right to me. I know that music is abstract and exists beyond language, etc. and I don’t really write program music. But just as specific verbal prods can become a straitjacket, a lack of them can sometimes just keep you in limbo.

In the science fiction novel Babel 17, Samuel R. Delany posits a world where people could build anything if only they had the words to describe it. But settling on those words can also be a point of no return. I’ve known prospective parents who have entire sets of names worked out, both male and female, before confirming their future offspring’s gender, but I’ve also known many others who refused to name their child before he or she was born in order to make sure that the name fit the newborn. Admittedly, all of these things seem much larger than a struggle to name a poem, an essay, or a piece of music. But perhaps the struggle to grapple with how something is identified and how that identification helps to shape what is created, both for the person creating it and hopefully for its eventual audience, is a key to inspiration. That said, Jackson Pollock did just fine calling paintings by numbers, just as numerous composers have done in the past with their numbered symphonies, string quartets, and piano sonatas. Yet somehow giving an abstract work—whether a painting or a musical composition—a name that’s less generic seems a better way to engage in dialogue with the eventual spectators or listeners of the work.