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 … [Read more...]

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 … [Read more...]

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. … [Read more...]

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. … [Read more...]

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 … [Read more...]

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 … [Read more...]

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. … [Read more...]

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 … [Read more...]

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. … [Read more...]

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, … [Read more...]

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 … [Read more...]

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 … [Read more...]

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 … [Read more...]

Thousands of people consider Elliott Carter a great composer. He’s won two Pulitzer Prizes, and gets performances and even retrospectives out the wazoo. He is assured his chances with posterity, regardless of what I do, or what any other individual does. Aside from the royalties he’s missed by my not buying all of his recordings, twenty years of my expressing misgivings about Carter’s music has not caused five dollars’ worth of harm to his finances or his career. If I really thought any of my ideas could truly do harm to Carter, I would … [Read more...]

I thought I’d put up a more detailed example of an early totalist piece, to show precisely how composers started breaking away from minimalism in the early 1980s. Mikel Rouse’s Quick Thrust of 1984 is a work that both reaches back into minimalism’s most formalist concerns and also forecasts ideas that would later become widespread. For one thing, it was one of the first fully notated pieces for a pop instrumentation, written as it was, like most of his music of the ‘80s, for his rock-instrumentation quartet Broken Consort, consisting of … [Read more...]

The most frequent and bitter complaint I've gotten about my book on Nancarrow over the years has been about the price. But I've just learned - over the internet, with the rest of the world - that a paperback edition is finally appearing this coming May. No price has been set yet, but I figure this should bring it down to no more than £150,000,000,000, or, in US dollars, approximately the monthly salary of an Exxon/Mobil CEO. So hold on a few more months and you'll save. I wish I could also correct a few of the errors in the book, most of which … [Read more...]

David W. Galenson’s new book Old Masters and Young Geniuses (Princeton University Press) is an apparently unprecedented study of the relationship of age to creativity. Galenson, an economist with a yen for painting, charts out for many famous painters the age at which each one peaked creatively. His method, brilliant in its empirical objectivity if rather obvious in hindsight, is to rate each painting by three criteria: its top selling price, how often it is included in academic art textbooks, and how often it is included in retrospectives of … [Read more...]

Just heard a conductor from the Wichita Symphony (whether the conductor, I didn't catch) participate in the NPR word puzzle show. The host asked him what Wichita was playing this season. His reply: "Oh, everything from Mozart and Beethoven up through Verdi and the Alpine Symphony. Something for everyone." No, Maestro, not quite for everyone. … [Read more...]

Composer Art Jarvinen, known as “the West-Coast totalist” (poor guy, he never got to come to any of the parties), writes to remind me, in detailing qualities of totalist music, that there was a characteristic totalist instrumentation as well as rhythmic style: For totalist music to really work requires an edge. A lot of totalist composers have guitar or saxophone or electric keyboards (Rhodes, Hammond, Mini-Moog), or drum set, as their main instrument. I wrote for chromatic harmonica and baritone sax. I don't want to hear a totalist piece … [Read more...]

In my extensive post on Metametric music (you know, The Style Formerly Known as Totalism, c’mon, man, get with the program) I mentioned that I could never figure out how the California Ear Unit performed the three meters at once of Art Jarvinen’s Murphy-Nights. To save you from having to look, the piece starts off with an 8/4 ostinato (32 16th-notes) in the electric keyboard against a 33/16 ostinato in the electric bass - on top of which the rest of the ensemble enters in changing meters, starting in 6/4. (You can hear the effect here.) I … [Read more...]