Archives for January 2006

Probably no one but me gives a damn whether John Luther Adams’s music is postminimalist or totalist. As far as the specific terms go, I don’t give a damn either. But when I started surveying, in the 1980s, all the music that passed through New York (and, via recording, the rest of the country as well), I couldn’t help but notice that, among composers who were continuing and developing the minimalist aesthetic, there were two groups of qualities that almost always went together. The composers whose music was based on a steady beat virtually throughout, usually an 8th- or 16-th note pulse, also tended to use diatonic tonality, quasi-minimalist structures like additive process or permutation, mostly quiet dynamics, and acoustic timbres augmented by the occasional synthesizer. Those who used competing tempos, either simultaneously or interlocked somehow, tended to use more dissonant sonorities, more global large-scale rhythmic structures, mostly loud dynamics, and amplified or electric instruments such as guitars. For the former I appropriated the already-current but undefined word postminimalism; for the other the word totalism was provided. The distinction between the two styles was so striking and consistent that it would have seemed capriciously anti-intellectual, an act of scholarly irresponsibility, to have neglected to articulate my observations. Yet, judging from the comments I’ve received in subsequent years, the vast majority of musicians wish I had done exactly that: leave my musicological data on the ground where I found it.

Very few composers wrote music that combined different qualities from those two styles, but one major one who did was John Luther Adams. More often than not his tonality is diatonic, using a seven-note scale (often the “white” notes) with no pitch ever given precedence. Yet some of his pieces, like Clouds of Forgetting, Clouds of Unknowing and his piano cluster piece Among Red Mountains, have proved that he is just as happy to use the entire chromatic spectrum and a maximum of dissonance. His music for pitched instruments is almost always soft; his percussion music is mostly fortissimo. Nominally, his music falls square in the totalist camp because it almost always layers different tempos together. But some of John’s implied tempos are very slow, giving a new pulse only every 10 or 15 seconds, so that the effect seems more postminimalist, without the gear-shifting surface complexity you find in much totalist music. Even when he has 4-against-5-against-6-against-7 in each measure, the effect – achieved pianissimo with mallet percussion, celeste, and harp – is not so much one of tempo contrasts as of indistinct clouds of notes. No other composer from the minimalist tradition so resists being pulled into one definition or the other.

Dream in White on White (1992) has been surpassed in its ambitions by many of John’s works, but it became a prototype for one side of his ouput, and was a watershed in his development. Scored for string quartet, harp, and string orchestra, the piece opens with the string orchestra playing seven-note chords, changing to a new one every 2 and 2/3 measures. The solo quartet enters with chords changing every two measures, for a slow 3:4 rhythm. The harp then enters in four-note phrases in quintuplets, a new phrase every 1 and 3/5 measures. Thus the phrase rhythm is 20:15:12 by duration, or 3:4:5 by tempo, coming back in phase every 8 measures. At measure 53, the string quartet launches into what is marked as the “Lost Chorales,” outlining out-of-phase 4- and 5-beat loops between the two violins versus viola and cello. You can see those relationships, against the recurring harp and string orchestra pulses, in this example:

The next section has plucked notes in the quartet and harp outlining faster 3:4:5 rhythms in each measure, over a chord periodicity of 1 and 1/3 measures in the orchestra:

The chorales return, the string orchestra’s tempo increases, but in a final section the original tempo relationships resume.

You can hear Dream in White on White here. The work’s template has become the basis for at least two much larger works by Adams (and two of my favorites), Clouds of Forgetting, Clouds of Unknowing and In the White Silence. In the White Silence is in fact a magnificent expansion of Dream in White on White, stretched out to 75 minutes and with lovely solo lines for the quartet members. Clouds of Forgetting, Clouds of Unknowing achieves much denser clouds using mallet percussion and the entire chromatic scale. In each of these a large-scale process, implicit in Dream in White on White, is carried out more rigorously: an slow, stepped expansion of melodic intervals from 2nds through 3rds, 4ths, and on up to 7ths. (I kid John that when I start hearing tritones in his music, I know the piece is half over.) More aggressive aspects of totalism appear in John’s drum music, which hammers out more obvious intricacies at a more virtuoso tempo; but that’s for another day.

We have an MFA program in conducting, and I teach a course for it in 20th-century Orchestral Repertoire. I used to start chronologically with Busoni, Reger, and Holst, and work my way through the decades, but the class always broke down at some point into a discussion of the problems of programming 20th-century music for orchestra. The usual objections would arise: 20th-century music is more complicated than most orchestra subscribers can understand. It’s more anxious and dissonant than they like. You have to have followed the course of 20th-century music to understand the recent stuff.

So now I teach the course backwards, 2005 to 1900, and I start with Sara’s Grace by San Francisco composer Belinda Reynolds, which you can hear here. The performance is by Dogs of Desire, an orchestra that is a subset of the Albany Symphony, and that doesn’t market itself as an orchestra. The piece sets the whole discussion on a different footing. Turns out, some 20th-century music is difficult to figure out. Some of it depends on a familiarity with old styles. And some orchestra subscribers will reject Sara’s Grace just because the composer has the effrontery to not be dead yet – but then it becomes the audience’s problem, not the music’s. After all, anybody who can’t “get” what’s going on in Sara’s Grace might as well realize that music isn’t their thing.

Lovely article, painstakingly accurate in its description, about Meredith Monk by Ann Midgette in today’s Times. It is overdue compensation for Ed Rothstein’s scandalously contemptuous dismissal of a great artist in those pages after the premiere of Monk’s Atlas in the mid-’90s.

Speaking of totalists, John Luther Adams turned 53 Monday; Mikel Rouse turned 49 today; Art Jarvinen turns 50 tomorrow (January 27). Had Mozart gotten a little more daring with his cross-rhythms, I might have noted his 250th as well. Those are the breaks.

Come to think of it, though, the party scene from Act I of Don Giovanni, with dances going in three meters at once, is quite audibly metametric. Consider him celebrated.

For whatever reason, I was never much drawn to the type of nested 3:2 and 4:3 crossrhythms that I described in my last metametrics post, but I did use it once, and could have mentioned it. In 1985, on the verge of turning 30, I was under some psychological pressure to write something ambitous. I decided on a big set of variations for two pianos, somewhat inspired by the two-piano tradition of Busoni’s Fantasia Contrappuntistica, Wallingford Riegger’s Variations, The Art of Fugue, and such huge solo piano variations as the Diabelli and Brahms’s Handel. (This was before Larry Polansky wrote his Lonesome Road Variations, which dwarfed mine.) My I’itoi Variations was a set of eleven variations on the “Black Mountain” song from the I’itoi cycle of the Papago Indians. I was very involved in collecting, transcribing, and analyzing American Indian music in those days, because I was attracted to its, um, proto-totalist rhythmic character – specifically the way it shifted back and forth among tempos.

Another influence on I’itoi Variations (and on much of my music) was Beethoven’s Op. 111 Sonata – variations 1 through 6 were stormy and tense like Beethoven’s first movement, variations 7 through 10 were impersonal and calm like the second movement, and no. 11, in an attempted tour de force, went back through the first ten variations in reverse order. Variation 8 was based on a nested 3:2. The idea was simple. (I try to make all my ideas simple). There were two foreground lines, the bass line in piano 2 and the right-hand melody of piano 1, plus a line of quarter-note chords shared by both pianos. The bass was in dotted quarters, the treble in triplet quarters, for a 4:6:9 tempo resultant. I hoped the treble and bass would float in seeming unrelatedness to each other, though subtly mediated by the chords in between. Here’s a passage from the beginning of the variation:

and another from the end, where the treble and bass lines have doubled in tempo:

The bass line is the inversion of the theme, with the intervals doubled in size (a trick I picked up from Messiaen’s bird song music). I suppose it won’t much harm my reputation to admit that the changes of key are timed according to a descending sequence of Fibonacci numbers. Everyone who studied Bartok’s music had to try them once. This was back in 1985 when I had not yet heard of Mikel Rouse, Michael Gordon, or Art Jarvinen, and was blissfully unaware that they were using the same ideas.

Here’s the recording of Variation 8 from I’itoi Variations, played by the Double Edge duo – Nurit Tilles and Edmund Niemann, who premiered it at Cooper Union in New York circa 1990.

Next Monday night in New York my friend, classroom nemesis, and jazz harmony teacher John Esposito is involved in a concert in which will be premiered a couple of 1960 tunes by John Coltrane, recently discovered, that had never been recorded. The titles are “Out of a Dream” and “The Backbeat,” the handwriting on the manuscript John recognized as Coltrane’s, and since John is amazingly adept at historical styles (or so he keeps telling me), he was asked to harmonize and arrange them. He’s playing with the Eric Person Quartet, of which he is a regular, but he’s not sure where the gig is (jazz musician, you know…). Something to do with the Public Library, he thinks. I’ll find out and give an update here. They look like really nice bebop tunes.

UPDATE: Oops, turns out the concert by Eric Person and Meta-Four is a private affair. My announcement has news value only. But you can get info at their website.

Composer and Sequenza 21 loiterer Steve Layton ran across this article pairing the two of us and discussing our gradual divergences from minimalism. It’s the kind of composer-centered thinkpiece that I didn’t think anyone wrote anymore except to praise Ligeti, Boulez, Adès, and that crowd that people praise to look cultured. Seems like old times.

As a performer – and I was a pretty good pianist in college, it’s the regret of my life that I didn’t keep it up – I never liked the feeling of complicated tuplets that couldn’t be expected to be played exactly right. I imagine you know what I mean: septuplet quarter-notes over a 4/4 measure, or an 11-tuplet with a couple of notes missing, and the composer says, “It doesn’t have to be exact, just make sure you end the phrase on the downbeat.” I never liked cheating, and I was so obsessed with polyrhythms that I didn’t want to fudge them, I wanted to feel them and feel secure playing them. Even with an ornamental quintuplet in Chopin, I worked to get it mathematically right. I had fallen in love with the three-against-four, two-bands-at-two-tempos section of the “Putnam’s Camp” movement of Three Places in New England, and at age 14 I said to the Universe, “Sir, it will be an honor to devote my life to replicating this effect.” So the fake polyrhythms, the little flurries that didn’t need to be accurate to achieve their goal, bothered me.

Judging from the music of my contemporaries, I wasn’t alone. The evolution of multitempo music in the wake of minimalism during the 1980s was an exploration of playable tempo relationships. When Conlon Nancarrow went this route, not relying on performers, he followed the arithmetical logic of numbers, going from tempo contrasts like 14:15:16 to 17:18:19:20 to 60:61. Those were impractical for the guys of my generation who wanted their bands to play multitempo music. Instead, they started out with simple relationships anyone could play, like 3-against-2 and 4-against-3, and then nested them. For example, take four drummers:

No. 1 plays a steady beat.

No. 2 plays a triplet against every two beats of 1.

No. 3 plays a triplet against every two beats of 2.

No. 4 plays a triplet against every two beats of 3.

This triply-nested 3:2 yields a pretty complex tempo resultant of 8:12:18:27, Drummer 4 playing 27 beats to every 8 by Drummer 1. This is exactly what Art Jarvinen does in one section of his Ghatam for sculptural percussion (1997), as you can hear here. He builds up the rhythm slowly, as a process, and doesn’t try to notate it, just gives instructions, because the notation would be needlessly complex.

This is also the same rhythm, though, that Ben Johnston used in the first variation of his “Amazing Grace” Quartet, No. 4 (1973). Going up one more 3:2, to 16:24:36:54:81, Ben did notate it, using different simultaneous meters to handle the overload. (You can hear that variation here, in the brand new recording by the Kepler Quartet.) Two variations later, Ben achieves (with great difficulty for the performers) a large-scale rhythm of 35:36, the same way one arrives at it in tuning pure pitch intervals: as the difference between a 9:5 and a 7:4 (or, rhythmically, 9 in the space of 5 and 7 in the space of 4). For Ben, as for Cowell in New Musical Resources, the methods of extending rhythm flowed by analogy from traditional ways of handling pitch, which was one of the core meanings of the word totalism in the first place.

In fact, Ben (who was my postgraduate composition teacher) could be taken as one of the leading and underacknowledged pre-totalist composers, perhaps even the most influential one. It was he, after all, who, in 1967, translated a 12-tone song in pure tuning into analogous rhythmic ratios, and those ratios into a rhythm-only piece of conceptual theater that was to be beaten on the outside of a piano with any available mallet-like objects. Titled Knocking Piece, the work was played all over the Midwest in the ‘70s, and was an obligatory virtuoso showpiece for young percussionists. It always had two tempos going at once, in ever-changing ratios determined by the 12-tone row the song had been based on:

The equal signs between measures indicate that the same pulse continues across the barline at that point. (No recording I know of available, unfortunately. If you know something about tuning, you can figure out the original pitches from these rhythms: taking the first as C, it continues G, E, B, D#, A#, F#…) Ben’s reputation never took off on the East Coast to nearly the same extent. But insofar as some of the totalists had been educated in the Midwest, Knocking Piece may well have been a seed that quietly (or rather, noisily) blossomed in the music of 1980s New York.

The piece that went furthest in exploring this kind of performable tempo layering, as far as I know, was Michael Gordon’s Four Kings Fight Five of 1988. Scored for three winds, three strings, percussion, electric guitar, and synthesizer, the work starts out with a melody that pits quarter-notes against dotted quarters in 6/4-slash-12/8, because the other rhythms (the four kings who fight against five) are going to be drawn from this concurrent contrast. The pounding opening, with much unison, is the part most relevant to the piece’s dedication, which is to Glenn Branca – of interest to those of you who may doubt whether the Branca/Chatham artrock of the time had any immediate connection to totalism. (Branca produced Gordon’s first record, as well.)

At 3:08 (three minutes, 8 seconds) into the recording of Four Kings Fight Five, the music pauses, and a rhythmic continuum starts to build up that will proceed through eleven different tempos, as many as seven of them at a time. The tempos are represented by the following note values, repetitively articulated:

quintuplet 16th-notes in the space of 6 (a dotted quarter)

triplet 8th-notes

dotted 16th-notes

8th-notes

triplet quarter-notes

dotted 8th-notes

quarter-notes

quarter-notes tied to 32nd notes*

dotted quarter-notes

half-notes

half-notes tied to 16th-notes

*(Gordon notates the quarter-notes tied to 32nd notes as dotted 8ths in a tuplet over the three 8ths of a dotted quarter beat, but it works out the same. Don’t worry about it.)

The eleven available pulses are given here with the ratios of their relative tempos and durations:

These ratios can be seen as analogous to pitch. If we take the quarter-note as C and the triplet quarter as G, we get the following “harmony” of tempos:

A – 60 tempo – quintuplet 16th-notes in the space of 6

G – 54-tempo – triplet 8th-notes

F – 48-tempo – dotted 16th-notes

C – 36-tempo – 8th-notes

G – 27 tempo – triplet quarter-notes

F – 24-tempo – dotted 8th-notes

C – 18 tempo – quarter-notes

Bb – 16-tempo – quarter-notes tied to 32nd notes

F – 12-tempo – dotted quarter-notes

C – 9-tempo – half-notes

Bb – 8-tempo – half-notes tied to 16th-notes

Note the self-inversional character of this harmony, except for the fastest A-tempo. At the work’s most complex point (long before the halfway point, at about 5:47), there are seven tempos going at once:

You can sort of see that everyone else is playing off either the quarter-note beat or the dotted-quarter beat, which are unified in the keyboard part. The viola and bass clarinet play triplets off the quarter-note beat. The violin, less obviously, is playing 2 beats to every 3 dotted-quarter beats. The oboist, poor dear, is having to play 4-against-3 to the dotted-quarter beat, or 16 even pulses over three measures; actually twice the tempo of the violin, but not lined up in rhythmic unison with it. Here six of the lines are cued to the dotted quarter beat and three to the quarter-note beat, but one assumes that elsewhere the ratio is four lines against five, as per the title.

From here on, the piece gradually floats into a more static continuum, which became typical of Michael’s music about this time. At 19:22 a viola starts up in free rhythm over the throbbing G major continuum underneath, and at 20:56 a snare drum rhythm in military time joins it, and the piece dies away. You can hear Four Kings Fight Five in its 23-minute entirety here; the rhythmic points I’ve been making are all illustrated within the first seven minutes.

Please don’t get too exercised over whether you “like” the piece or not. Frankly, I don’t find it, overall, one of Michael’s most compelling works, though I certainly love parts of it – I somewhat prefer Thou Shalt!/Thou Shalt Not!, Yo Shakespeare, Trance, and the Van Gogh Video Opera, among others. The question is not whether you “like” it, but whether you understand what it offered in terms of multitempo composition. In that respect it was not only remarkable for 1988, but offered possibilities that have still not been fully explored since.

What’s common to all three pieces, by Jarvinen, Johnston, and Gordon, is that the performers achieve a remarkable degree of rhythmic complexity – a true “harmony of rhythms” in Cowell’s sense – by selectively listening to some performers within the ensemble whose pulses they play off of, and having to ignore others. The ability to maintain a 4-against-3 rhythm over a steady-beat reference point, and the relative impossibility of securely maintaining a more difficult 27-against-16, is the same in rhythm as it is in pitch: a perfect fourth (4:3 pitch ratio) is easy to tune, a Pythagorean major sixth (27:16) extremely difficult. Gordon could still have gone a little farther than he did by factoring in more 5-against-4 rhythms, both as quintuplets and as quarter-notes tied to 16th-notes. I have sometimes succeeded in getting a class of students to clap 25-against-16 by conducting a quarter-note beat and having half clap quintuplet quarters while the other half clap quarter-notes tied to 16ths. Gordon goes only so far as a quintuplet over the dotted-quarter beat. I don’t know of a piece that went further in drawing so many competing rhythmic layers at the same time in a large, live-ensemble texture. It wouldn’t surprise me if Gordon’s Trance does, but I haven’t seen the score.

Via Mary Jane Leach, here’s a Honda ad that brings the early ’60s avant-garde into the mainstream at last.

UPDATE: Here’s all the info on the ad, including the composer, Steve Sidwell.

Pianist extraordinaire Sarah Cahill, whose browser somehow won’t let her interact with Arts Journal comments pages, nevertheless chimes in on the dynamics issue:

Leo Ornstein… was an excellent pianist himself, and wrote fabulously for the piano.  But most of his piano scores have absolutely no dynamic markings whatsoever.  He believed that it was the pianist’s responsibility to come up with dynamics in the process of interpretation.  It’s so interesting, because there will be a passage which to one person is a climax, to be played forte, and to another person it will be an opportunity to back off and have it be more powerful as a pianissimo passage.  So his scores can be played in a variety of ways, and it’s fascinating to hear different performances.

…[W]hen a piece leaves dynamics out, it makes us as performers explore it in an entirely different way.  We can’t rely on superficial expression (playing dynamic markings as notated), we have to dig deeper and get to the heart of the piece to figure out what’s going on, how to best interpret it, and how dynamics figure into that interpretation.  It can be a more satisfying experience.

Not that everyone should compose the way Ornstein did – but if someone’s imagination works that way, why shouldn’t he be allowed to do it? How did conformity become such a cherished attribute among composers? And I can’t resist re-quoting the following note that Ellen Zwilich appended to her Lament for piano of 1999, a warning that Chopin would have found ludicrously obvious, but that today’s notation neuroses have made necessary:

Throughout, whether the passage is marked liberamente or not, the performer should feel free to ‘sculpt’ the rhythm and dynamics for expressive purposes in order to give a spontaneous, improvisatory quality to the piece. It would be ideal if no two performances were exactly alike.

For years I have fought within musical academia for the right (for myself and students) to minimally notate dynamics, to not use dynamic contrast as one of the ways of structurally articulating a piece if you don’t want to do so. I have seen student works cancelled or excluded because they were soft (or loud) throughout, or because within a certain range they wanted to leave dynamic nuances to the performer. I have paraded around with copies of manuscripts by Bach and Rzewski that are devoid of dynamic markings, to prove that their absence does not indicate musical idiocy, and I have argued myself blue in the face to composers adamant that dynamic particularity is synonymous with “professionalism.” But such a discussion came up on Sequenza 21, and Peter Gordon, of Love of Life Orchestra fame back in the ’80s, gave an eloquent rationale for dynamic reticence that had never occurred to me:

I don’t know whether dynamics is so much about compositional contrast, but more how much you want to signal for the listener within the composition. More static dynamics allow the listener more freedom and offer a contemplative space to explore other parameters, often at the listener’s own pace. More active and extreme dynamics can involve the listener on a more physiological level, which can be good or bad. Overactive and domineering dynamics can, if cynically used, run the danger of becoming – like the work of Steven Spielberg – emotionally pornographic.

UPDATE: One more point in response to some comments, because I hadn’t planned on getting into another notation argument – the whole issue has come to disgust me because of the neurotic, historically myopic concensus that has come to exist among 95 percent of today’s composers.

I have found a tremendous difference in responses to notation between performers who specialize in 20th-century music and those who play mostly Classical/Romantic repertoire, and far prefer the latter. One of my colleagues intimidates students who hand her music that is “deficient” in dynamic markings by saying, “This is the way they’ll play it:” – and then she plows through the music at the piano with the most unimaginative uniformity. In my experience, that can indeed be true with 20th-century specialists, who have been trained to react to the printed page with the literalness of a computer; but hand the same music to a Beethoven specialist, and they’ll do what they do with Beethoven, interpret it and invest it with feeling, coming up with the most delightfully varied and creative responses.

Whenever possible I prefer to work with conventional classical musicians. If I know in advance I’m writing for 20th-century specialists, I try to dutifully nail down every tiny nuance, as if I were making electronic music, because I know they’re not bringing any creativity to the table. The process is so much nicer, though, when the performer comes with her own human and musical instincts. Pianist Sarah Cahill is such a creative performer, even if she does specialize in 20th-century (but recent, not the academic stuff) – and the way she plays my Private Dances is more beautiful than I imagined them, and surprising in some cases. Thank goodness I didn’t load the pages down with hairpins, slurs, accents, and precisely calibrated tempo changes that would have kept her from following her muse.

For the other 31 reasons why I think most composers have their heads up their asses where notation is concerned, I once again refer the reader to my article The Case Against Over-Notation.

The venerable Jerry Bowles of Sequenza 21 reminds me that I should be attending to my own PR, and I need the reminder. It never becomes a reflex, for some reason.

But three members of the Da Capo ensemble, joined by myself and my son Bernard, will perform my new piece The Day Revisited this Tuesday, January 24, at 7:30 PM at the Knitting Factory, 74 Leonard Street. It’s my first NYC gig in a year or two, I guess, and if Stockhausen can perform with his son Markus, I can perform with mine. Flutist Pat Spencer and clarinetist Meighan Stoops had asked me to write them a microtonal piece, and after having their heads examined I complied with a work in a 27-tone, just-intonation scale, for flute, clarinet, two keyboard samplers, and fretless bass, this last played by my son, who’s pretty inured to my tunings by now. Though slow and mellow it’s a damned difficult piece because of the tunings, but I’ll just be sitting there playing chords. Also on the program are works by a bunch of famous people: Eric Moe, Martin Bresnick, Derek Bermel, Michael Gordon, Gene Pritsker, and Philippe Hurel, which I guess means I’m a real composer too. Da Capo’s calling this a world premiere – the only other performance was here at Bard, and we had technical problems then that we’re not going to have this time, knock on wood. Call 212-219-3006 and bother the Knitting Factory about it.

Pianist extraordinaire Sarah Cahill will also play two of my Private Dances at REDCAT in Los Angeles on February 18, but I’ll remind you about that later.

I’ve had a hell of a time with my microtonal music lately. I’ve outgrown the samplers I’ve been using for the last 12 years, and am at the epicenter of a complete technological overhaul. Nowadays everything is software-based, so I’ve acquired Kontakt 2, Max/MSP, and Scala (newly available for the Mac) in an attempt to get better sounds and more feasible playability in my microtonal stuff. For years I’ve taken a lot of crap from people who find my electronic timbres amateurish, which has always seem unfair, since I’m using the most expensive microtonal samplers I can afford. So what if I use the sounds that come with the box? – I make up my own pitches, and everyone else uses the pitches that come with the box, which strikes me as a worse infraction. If I can get Kontakt to work (still touch and go at the moment), I’ll reorchestrate as much of my early music as I can stand to. Suggestions on how to get good sounds with microtonal-friendly software are always welcome. It’s a huge barrier between me and the continuation of my career at the moment. As for The Day Revisited, I usually don’t write microtonal music for acoustic instruments because the performance hurdles are just too great, but I was asked, and they’re working their butts off.

While I’m blowing my own horn here, Christopher DeLaurenti has officially given my book Music Downtown its jaunty first review.

I am hugely chagrined to learn from the latest issue of Signal to Noise that composer Luc Ferrari died last August 22 and I never even heard about it. Along with Henri Pousseur and Bruno Maderna, Ferrari was one of those figures peripheral to Darmstadt serialism who seemed so much more intriguing than the central protagonists. I can’t say I ever quite understood Ferrari’s music – in fact, that was what was so damned interesting about the three of them, whereas what Boulez, Stockhausen, and Nono were doing was so obvious, so minutely explained and explainable. The signal piece for Ferrari was, of course, Presque Rien No. 1, a 1969 piece of musique concrète of which I find this decription at the Other Minds website:

By 1970 he had completed Presque Rien No. 1, a kind of musical photography, in which unassuming ambient sounds of a small village in Yugoslavia, recorded throughout a long day, are telescoped by means of seamless dissolves into a 21-minute narrative in which no apparent “musical” sounds are included.

That’s more detail than I’d ever gotten before, and I had never understood exactly how Ferrari seemed to crowd so many sounds into a 20-minute tone poem. Many of his concrète pieces are similar, but he also wrote strange, more serial-sounding instrumental works, and seemed obsessed with the naked female form, which figured on his CD covers and several titles. I kept thinking something would happen to bring him out into the open, and I was excited when, in 1991, he made a seeming comeback and began to put out CDs after a long absence from public visibility. And now he’s dead at 76, with my having been little wiser about him than I was in 1980. I hope some critical dialogue arises around him, brushing away the unfortunate clouds of serialist mystique that obscured the movement’s less dogmatic masters.