What character figured in the lives of both John Cage and James Bond? (I'll refrain from posting any answers until there are several right ones, as there are bound to be.)[UPDATE] As five of you came up with in eight hours: Goldfinger. Ernö Goldfinger, the architect with whom Cage studied in Paris, was Ian Fleming's model for the villain Auric Goldfinger. Fleming altered many personal characteristics (the fictional Goldfinger was 14 inches shorter), but both were naturalized emigrés who liked fast cars, and the architect Goldfinger was a … [Read more...]

Public radio station WAMC from Albany runs pretty continuously in our house, and I support it and get a lot from it. But the stupidity of their music stories lately is about to drive me to random acts of violence. On Thanksgiving they did a vapid, all-morning "analysis" of the complete Beatles' White Album with a bunch of variously educated talking heads, of which the only comment I remember was the insightful, "Ooooooh, the maracas!" And this week they've been promising a "mathematical" analysis of the striking opening chord to "It's Been a … [Read more...]

It's not every day that I read Christopher Hitchens in Slate and he's lambasting people I know personally. But you know Rick Warren, the rightwing homophobe who's giving the prayer at Obama's inaugural? It turns out that one of his "leading allies and defenders" is Dr. Robert Jeffress, pastor of First Baptist Church of Dallas, whom I knew in Sunday school as a kid. And Warren's mentor was Wally Amos Criswell, former pastor of the same church, whose sermons I grew up hearing weekly, and who, if memory serves, may have baptized me (I was six). … [Read more...]

A couple more reviews of my Private Dances CD, one from Devin Hurd, and a trés formidable one en français. They've all been favorable, but so rare!I'm in those precious few moments between the end of my semester and my son's birthday (Dec. 23). Meanwhile, amuse yourselves, as I do, by rereading Alex Ross's holiday hiatus message. … [Read more...]

This was inevitable, but it hadn't happened to me before. We now have a student composing both string quartets and jazz tunes using Sibelius notation software. I found it amusing that he prints the string quartets in Sibelius's "normal" notation and the jazz pieces in its "inkpen" script:         I asked him why and he shrugged and didn't know. But it does subtly look like in the notation on the left the notes are fixed and must be played correctly, while the ones on the right are sort of just the "suggested" notes, and if you can think … [Read more...]

This quote from the great Morton Feldman, supplied by Jodru, deserves its own entry:"There is something rotten here, and we don't have to go to Denmark to look for it. It's not the public. That was always a lie. It's not the mass media. A bigger lie. It's not the capitalist system - another lie. It's my colleagues. My fellow American composers. The most pedantic, the most boring, ungenerous bunch of human beings one can meet on an earth so crowded with the last men that hop and make it smaller and smaller. This earth, I mean."It's the college … [Read more...]

The world hardly needs my voice added to the roar of acclamation attending the hundredth birthday of Olivier Messiaen. However, lest someone get the wrong idea, let me affirm:Without Turangalila, my creative life would have turned out far less rich than it has been. The 20th century afforded no clearly more magnificent musical work. … [Read more...]

Someone wrote to chide me for pretending that Elliott Carter has more influence in the new-music world than he currently has. And then today I got a message from a teenaged composer:  I'll never forget when at a summer camp a distinguished guest composer came in to give us composers a lesson, and she informed me that my music "lacked that Elliot Carter mentality" and I ought to listen to his entire repertoire again before writing another piece.AAAARRRRGHHHHHHH CHOKE HACK SPIT GULP SKKKKKKKKKH GAG NNNNNNGHHH VOMIT NYANG NYANG NYANG OUCH I … [Read more...]

Here are three measures of a new piano piece for your perusal: Now, imagine something like that going on, pretty much the same texture and same intensity, for 53 solid minutes. That's Michael Byron's new Dreamers of Pearl (2005), just released on a New World CD by possibly the only pianist who could currently achieve such a feat, human player-piano Joe Kubera. There's a key signature, admittedly, but so many accidentals that it seems more hindrance than help, and the first movement has five flats in the right hand and none in the left. The … [Read more...]

Statistically speaking, you probably don't agree with a word I say. Out there in the larger world of contemporary music, Elliott Carter is king, we are smack dab in the middle of the modernist period which will never end, the purpose of serious music is to convey how terrible the world is, and art is infinitely superior to entertainment and should never be confused with it. This blog is a repository of minority opinion, a haven and beacon for those few of us who happen not to agree with those propositions. We are painfully aware how tiny our … [Read more...]

My own research and study into the quote-unquote avant-garde has revealed two distinct poles. There's the avant-garde of privilege, the avant-garde that primarily emphasizes quote-unquote art for art's sake aesthetics above everything else. Then there's what I would call the populist or the radical avant-garde. In America, I think those two kind of poles happened during the late '50s, and through the '60s and early '70s. I think the privileged avant-garde really wanted to create this wall between social activism, political radicalism, and … [Read more...]

In my Analysis of Minimalism seminar - most rewarding course I've ever taught at Bard, at least for me - we finished with Michael Gordon's loud, propulsive Yo Shakespeare in the same class in which we started on Peter Garland's calm, delicate I Have Had to Learn the Simplest Things Last. The contrast moved me to get into one of my digressions (I live to digress) about the importance of kickass qualities in music of the Downtown scene in the 1980s and '90s. For several years there, kickass was the highest praise a Downtown composer could recieve … [Read more...]

Composer-video artist Betsey Biggs, currently completing graduate work at Princeton, presented some lovely work at the Sacramento State Festival I returned from last week. Her latest piece, Ton Yam I, was based nostalgically on the idea of California, and used as sound material only slowed, looped, and altered samples from the Beach Boys' song "God Only Knows." (The title read backward makes the point.) More bloggable is a Morton Feldman anecdote she mentioned in her talk that I hadn't heard before. It seems that one of his assignments was to … [Read more...]

I am quoted in Rick Schulz's article about the toy piano as serious instrument in last Sunday's L.A. Times. It's a preview piece for a toy piano concert being given by Phyllis Chen this coming Sunday. The thing that Rick and I discussed that didn't get in the article - and having written for daily papers myself, I completely understand what limitations kept it out - was that, before Margaret Leng Tan began championing the instrument, composer Wendy Chambers had commissioned a whole repertoire of works for it in the late 1980s, including my own … [Read more...]

Many of you know that in the early 1980s magnetic recording tape was made via some kind of process that facilitated quick deterioration, and that you can reclaim tapes from that era by baking them. Eric Bruskin has kindly done that for some reel-to-reel tapes of my own early music and several early postminimalist pieces by Peter Gena, my grad school composition teacher and (since he was only eight years senior) close friend. I hadn't heard any of these in many years. Peter's pieces - Beethoven in Soho, Unchained Melodies, Stabiles - First … [Read more...]

4 = 11. Or, 8 = 20. Symmetry without equivalence. Perfection without art. … [Read more...]

Heavens, I've gotten so involved here that I've forgotten to publicize a second performance I have today. Pianist Aron Kallay is playing three of my microtonal keyboard works this afternoon, Fugitive Objects and the world premieres of Triskaidekaphonia and New Aunts. The concert is at 3 PM at Ramo Recital Hall at the University of Southern California, 820 West 34th Street, Los Angeles. My apologies for the late notification. Aron is doing very interesting-sounding graduate work on microtonal keyboard performance. I won't be there because … [Read more...]

Sacramento - Harold Meltzer's new sextet Brion, played by the Cygnus Ensemble here at Sacramento State last night, opened with a quiet piccolo solo playing the same motive over and over. It was a high note followed by several staccato repetitions of a low note. Pianissimo string chords played underneath. At first the relation between them was tonal, but it branched out into bitonality and mild dissonance. Lasting maybe a virtual minute in experienced musical time, it was lovely. But what was better was that, almost halfway through the piece, … [Read more...]

Though I've done it in other cases, I see little point in posting the keynote address I delivered yesterday for Sacramento State's 31st (!) annual new-music festival. The bulk of my spiel, about why the so-called American maverick composers aren't really loners but a pretty tightly-knit group, was sewn together from bits of material already available on this blog. But toward the end I changed subject and addressed another issue that's been on my mind lately, and I've been meaning to bring it up anyway. So I've adapted and expanded it for the … [Read more...]

I'm from Texas, but the family story is that during the Civil War my ancestors were Northern sympathizers. One great grand-uncle was hung by the Confederacy for giving shoes to a Union soldier. I'm also a Civil War buff, and have read dozens of histories of it and visited more than 30 battlefields. And it feels like the Civil War finally ended tonight, with me here to see it happen. Not only because an eloquent Black man became president, but because Nixon's "Southern strategy" finally crashed to ignominious failure. I couldn't be happier. God … [Read more...]