Musically At Home in the Land of Fountains and BBQ

We've got grad student Jedd Schneider, singer and musicologist, who's written an analytical paper on M.C. Maguire's A Short History of Lounge, and whose contribution to the conference will be a paper on the operas of Michael Gordon. We've got Scott Unrein, the Harold Budd of the midwest, who keeps coming up with minimalist CDs I didn't know existed. We've got pianist Andy Lee, who's playing music by Bill Duckworth. We've got musicologist Andrew Granade, who's writing a book on how Harry Partch's hobo years, and the image of the hobo in American culture, influenced Partch's music. Most amazing of all, the UMKC conservatory has a brand-new dean, conductor Peter Witte (only three weeks on the job), who reads my blog (hi, Peter!) and who knew about this conference even before he applied for the job, and who's fully committed to it. What a cast. And David and I are such Virgil Thomson freaks (he's promised to show me the great man's grave an hour north of KC) that we joked all week about how we were going to slip a panel about Virgil onto the program.

I also met amazing electronic composer/motorcycle enthusiast Paul Rudy, whom students had raved about to me, and who shares my penchant for native American spirituality. Paul makes incredibly beautiful music from musical tones and environmental sounds of widely varying recognizability, and I've uploaded his CD-length work In lake'ch* (Mayan for "I am another yourself") to PostClassic Radio. Paul and I devoutly agreed that there's no line between art and entertainment, and that all good art is entertaining - though he holds the theory, which impressed me, that art = entertainment + ambiguity; in other words, if it's completely unambiguous, it's merely entertainment, but the more ambiguity you add in, the more the listener has to mentally participate to parse what's going on, the more it becomes art. I like it. 

And so now I'm so charged up that it kills me that the conference is still a year away. We're featuring Charlemagne Palestine, Tom Johnson, my old friend Robert Carl (keynote speaker, having freshly completed a book on In C), and Mikel Rouse. I spend a lot of time feeling like my view of music is a minority within a minority within a minority, but some of my gigs out there in the heartland lately have made me think that, actually, much of America and I are right in sync, and it's only the dying Northeast that's nostalgically gazing into the past. We talked a lot all week about how, if you're a composer who made out like a bandit in the world of orchestral modernism, then of course you cling to modernism with all your might. But if you didn't really make it in that world - and a lot of those composers ended up out west in KC and other less visible places - you just shrug, move on, and stay abreast of the times. As Paul Rudy said, "We're going through a big paradigm shift, and I want to be on the front end of that shift, not the back end." Amen to that. Still, also at UMKC are orchestral star Chen Yi and high-tech composer Jim Mobberley, whom David credits with for department's incredibly open-minded aesthetic attitudes. There was also independent KC composer Brad Fowler (hi Brad!), whose music I haven't heard yet, but look forward to. Suffice it to say that for a few days I was surrounded by simpatico aesthetic allies, a situation I could never get here in the Hudson Valley. I felt more at home than I have in years. This minimalism conference is going to be an incredible trip.

*By the way, I've also been adding other new music to PostClassic Radio lately by Joseph Pehrson, Stephen Scott's Bowed Piano Ensemble, Rodney Sharman, Carl Stone, the Rara Avis Duo, Mark Hagerty, Guy Klucevsek, Cynthia Folio, James Tenney, and Bernard Gann. If you haven't listened lately, lots o' new content.