PostClassic

Sort of looks like an old faded-then-digitized photograph of the Alps, doesn't it? I should make you guess the piece, but given my current obsession it's too easy. This is the MIDI info, player-piano-roll style, for the first six systems of the Concord Sonata. After the initial wedge motive Ives descends down to the lowest A# on the piano, and then ascends again to the highest G at the bottom of page 1, while the second half of the "Human Faith" theme is isolated, almost visually foregrounded here, in the lower register. Musical notation gives … [Read more...]

Just before writing the Essays Before a Sonata, Ives had read a 1902 article by an Oxford tutor named Henry Sturt, called "Art and Personality." It's not a great article, and it's odd that Ives's imagination was caught by it, but he quotes it in the Essays more often than he acknowledges. (For instance, the line about the "Byronic fallacy" is Sturt's, but Ives doesn't attribute it.) Sturt seems to be building up to some kind of objective criterion to judge art by, but at the end (which is by far the most interesting part) he does a kind of … [Read more...]

I've always loved David Garland's songs, and have written about them many times. He's still making them, and he's got a new album coming out, Conversations with the Cinnamon Skeleton, that he's made - believe it or not - with Sean Lennon, supermodel Charlotte Kemp Muhl, and English songwriter Vashti Bunyan. Whew. One song from it, The Long View, is up on Vimeo with a charming animation, pictured here. Even better, David's moved into my neighborhood, so he's about the only former denizen of the old Downtown scene that I get to rail against the … [Read more...]

Not really, but I am a total bardolator. I worked as a security guard in 1978-79, a year I took off between my master's and doctorate, and while "working" could basically do whatever I wanted as long as I kept my butt in the seat. The two self-improvement projects I completed that year were reading all the Shakespeare plays and analyzing all the Beethoven quartets (by "analyzing," I don't mean any more than formal and Roman numeral analysis, but I did get to know them). In the 1980s I watched the BBC productions of Shakespeare on TV, and have … [Read more...]

A repeated criticism that I get for my writing is that I am inconsistent in the level of expertise I assume in the reader. For instance, many people who don't know much about music assume that musicians always get paid for their work (hah!), and so their first response to 4'33" is that Cage got paid for not doing anything. In my book on 4'33", it was well worth taking one paragraph at the beginning to dispose of that objection, rather than let it stew unresolved in the minds of the uninformed. On the other hand, I indulge a bit of technical … [Read more...]

Here's a You Tube trailer for John Sanborn's video to my piece The Planets. The images are from all different movements, but the music is all "Mercury." The film will be featured at the Videoformes festival in France March 14-18. Relache will begin touring with it in the fall.   … [Read more...]

I have nothing to say, and I'm not saying it. Or rather, I do have things to say, but not in this format for the moment. I am beginning my sabbatical, and withdrawing from the world somewhat to work on two of the most ambitious projects of my life. The more immediate is a long (hour-plus) work for three retuned Disklaviers. This will give me the opportunity, for the first time since Custer and Sitting Bull (1995-99) to combine my two great obsessions, the completely free-sounding rhythms of multitempos, and the free-sounding pitch space of … [Read more...]

Twenty-five years ago this week my first Village Voice column appeared. … [Read more...]

A particularly invidious form of comparison arises when critics appoint themselves to the rank of H[er]. M[ajesty's]. Customs and Excise officers whose function it is to spot composers smuggling contraband ideas from one work to another. To ask a composer if he has anything to declare while he is busily unrolling his music to public view is not a very intelligent question. Each act of composition is a declaration. If it did not owe something to somebody it would be intelligible to nobody. Elgar may be said to have "smuggled" the closing pages … [Read more...]

I play around a lot with microtones in class when I probably shouldn't. My counterpoint students, for some reason (and they're not the first class to do so) find the Picardy third hilarious. One day I ended a three-part counterpoint in aeolian with a major third, A-C#, and they laughingly objected. So I offered to split the difference with them and made it a quarter-tone C half-sharp (a lovely 11/9 interval). I played the result with Sibelius's pitch-bend plug-in, and it was deliciously sour. One student immediately dubbed it the "Picardy … [Read more...]

I will generally not use this blog as a forum to draw attention to other events, artists, or organizations, but this one is just too important. Sign up. UPDATE: In fact, the following comment in reaction to a Times article about the UC Davis pepper spray incident is enough to make me return (temporarily) to blogging political: The police use of violence to quash a peaceful protest serves one aim, and one aim only--to intimidate those on campus and off campus from engaging in lawful, peaceful protest throughout our cities. Living in Chapel … [Read more...]

Björk - 46 Voltaire - 317 Marlo Thomas - 73 Rene Magritte - 113 Friedrich Schleiermacher - 243 Goldie Hawn - 66 Coleman Hawkins - 107 Judith Shatin - 62 Kyle Gann - 56 … [Read more...]

The PTYX ensemble in France will be playing a number of my works over the next year in a series they're calling "(d') apres SATIE," of music by living composers who followed Satie in some respect or another. They've certainly got me pegged right. You won't be able to read the light print at the top of the poster, but it lists the composers on their Dec. 1 concert: Birtwistle, Duckworth, Gann, Sellars, Skempton. I presume that's James Sellars, whose music I greatly admire, as I do the others. They're playing my Kierkegaard, Walking and Minute … [Read more...]

I've been doubtful about how much journalistic attention the 50th-anniversary edition of Cage's Silence is going to get, but the distinguished literary critic Marjorie Perloff wrote a column about it in the Los Angeles Review of Books, and made several generous comments about my foreword. I appreciate her point that we all think of Cage as such a sunny character, but in retrospect some of those stories in Silence seem darker than we first thought. … [Read more...]

Nuts and bolts music history today. In my keynote address to the festival of Charles Ives's complete songs, I noted that nothing was known about Anne Timoney Collins, author of the poem on which Ives based his song "The Greatest Man," a poem printed in 1921 in the New York Evening Sun. Liner notes to recordings of this song give no information, or merely mention that she "flourished" in the 1920s. A couple of weeks ago, however, I was contacted by Anne Timoney Collins's god-daughter, and between her and her mother and the internet I've been … [Read more...]

Here's a MIDI version of a microtonal rag I just wrote for pianist Aron Kallay, a fantastic West Coast player who's specializing in microtonal MIDI piano performance. It's the second (and shorter) movement of a piece called Every Something Is an Echo of Nothing - the title, as some of you will recall, is a quotation from Cage's Silence. Aron will premiere it next summer - I tend to complete my commissions pretty early. And I made it virtuosic because he's got the chops, but it is humanly playable. Think of the piece next time someone claims … [Read more...]

[UPDATE BELOW] On October 12 the Third Annual Conference on Minimalist Music will open at the University of Leuven, Belgium, with my keynote address, "The Boredom of Eventfulness." (Louis Andriessen will present the other keynote address on the 14th.) One of the urgent topics during the conference, among us Society for Minimalist Music members, will be the proposed location for the Fourth Annual Conference, to take place in 2013. We agreed from the beginning to alternate conferences between Europe and America, but finding an American host … [Read more...]

Yesterday, after almost polishing off my article on postminimalism for The Ashgate Companion to Minimalist Music, I posted a description of my LexisNexis search for the origins of the musical use of the term postminimalism. Perhaps you read it before it disappeared. I traced the term back to a Jon Pareles review of March, 1983, and added some references by Joshua Kosman, K. Robert Schwarz, and Keith Potter. Then the inexhaustible Galen Brown wrote in to tell me about some earlier references I had missed. He was right. But then I noticed, in the … [Read more...]