David McIntire and I had been wanting to visit the grave of Virgil Thomson, and came up with a minimalism conference as the simplest way to create the opportunity. So early this morning four of us headed off for Slater, Missouri (pop. 2083), the town Thomson was born in. Only we found the town more willing to take credit for a different favorite son:This led to my idea for my paper for the next conference: "The Great Escape and The Mother of Us All: Slater's Impact on Modernism." But I digress. We (that is, Scott Unrein, Andrew Granade, … [Read more...]

Kansas City ain't Wales, but it has its impressive features:One of them is Luyben Music at 4318 Main Street, the kind of old-fashioned, full-of-obscure-scores-oh-my-god-look-at-this music store that I thought had ceased to exist. I bought scores to Milton Babbitt's All Set, Elie Siegmeister's Third Symphony, Max Reger's Requiem, Martin Bresnick's My Twentieth Century, Henry Brant's Ice Field, a slew of Arvo Pärt choral music, John Becker's Third, and Philip Glass's Arioso No. 2 (one of his pre-minimalist pieces), all for whatever prices they … [Read more...]

The Kansas City Star previews our minimalism conference.  … [Read more...]

I am not the first person to play through Dennis Johnson's November, but on August 12 I became apparently the first person to listen to an entire recording of it. You can be the second. In honor of the sixth anniversary of this blog tomorrow (Saturday), among other things, I have uploaded a complete performance of November, one of the earliest (1959) major minimalist works. The first public performance of the piece since the early '60s at least will take place in Kansas City on September 6, with myself and Sarah Cahill alternating at the … [Read more...]

Composer Mikel Rouse carries a sketch pad with him wherever he goes. Today I ran across this treasured cartoon he drew in 1993 depicting himself, me, and Ben Neill sitting at Rudy's Bar at 44th and 9th, as we did almost weekly (they with beers and me with a scotch, scrupulously so depicted), capturing the moment at which we went from merely talking about the kinds of multitempo structures we were interested in to actually considering it a new musical movement. Mikel and Ben look 16 years younger here than they do now, but somehow I already look … [Read more...]

I have been too busy to give timely notice to the nice attention that Galen Brown (whose paper on minimalist means and ends will be featured) has given to our minimalism conference over at Sequenza 21 via an interview with me, in my usual punchy style. … [Read more...]

Here's one of my prize possessions, that's always been in my school office but I moved it home today: While I was working on the Nancarrow book, one of his cousins ran for judge in Dallas, my home town. I guess he won. (Nancarrow and I grew up only 180 miles apart, but 180 of the dreariest, flattest, least picturesque miles you can imagine - a true minimalist stretch of highway.) My dad, bless his heart, saw this sign in a vacant lot, stopped his car, and stole it for me. I asked Conlon about it, and I believe he referred to his cousin as a … [Read more...]

OK. The night was Friday, July 9, 1982. I was administrative assistant for the New Music America festival in Chicago. I had a big argument with my then-girlfriend (whom I later married nevertheless) which turned out, surprisingly enough, to be all my fault. In a huff brought on by my inability to invent a benign rationale for my behavior convincing enough to satisfy even myself, I sulked out and vowed to walk from our apartment to the festival. As the distance was something under three miles, I had an hour to make it in, and it was a mild … [Read more...]

I got a big laugh out of Yale UP's jacket design for my Cage book (pictured). It's David Tudor's 1989 reconstruction of the original (but lost) score to 4'33". There have been so many delays on this book I had quit feeling like it was ever going to come out, but this makes it seem real again. We went to see Julia and Julie (or vice versa) the other night. Didn't realize half of it was about someone struggling with her blog, the other half about someone struggling to get a book out. Hey, Hollywood! - I go to the movies to escape. … [Read more...]

David McIntire, Andrew Granade, Andy Lee, Scott Unrein, Jedd Schneider, and the UMKC gang have been doing magnificent work getting the Second International Conference on Minimalist Music (September 2-6) together, and I, in my role as wise WASP co-director, have been sending them good vibes and the occasional encouraging e-mail, and generally nodding sagely, even when they can't see me. Mikel Rouse will present and talk about his films Funding and Music for Minorities; Charlemagne Palestine will perform his organ … [Read more...]

Words from a great composer:There was an agreement among journalists after about 1970, when America took a sharp turn to the right, to call all music that did not use traditional instruments - the orchestra or combinations of orchestral instruments - "experimental." This was a greater disappointment to me than most things that journalists do, because it showed a deep misunderstanding of the way things were. There were noble aspirations among a few younger conductors to revive the relationship between the composer and the orchestra, but there … [Read more...]

Dave Seidel, who makes some of gentlest and most natural-sounding purely-tuned music around (sort of in the Eliane Radigue/Phill Niblock vein but with even softer edges, kind of happier), has a beautiful new album on the web called Elementals. I was about to write him and say it's too bad I don't have an internet radio station anymore, or those would go right on it. Then I had a thought. "Wait a minute!," I said to myself. "If only I possessed some means of communication with other new-music lovers, I could alert them and they could listen to … [Read more...]

You know, this health care debate is setting the groundwork nicely. Everyone is familiarizing themselves with the concept that for-profit insurance companies cannot possibly act in their customers' best interests because they're trying to maximize profits, which means giving minimum service for maximum return. The obvious next step is that art is the same way. The corporations that produce most of our art and entertainment (one of those distinctions I don't make, sorry) are trying to maximize profit, which means they give us art (entertainment) … [Read more...]

The composer friend I referred to recently who loves most new music but doesn't like Feldman told me why: he doesn't care for his harmony. Well, I had to grant him that. Your typical late Feldman piece starts out with a pitch set like B-C-C#-D, and while sometimes there's a third thrown in so it's C#-A-C-D, he doesn't vary a lot in that respect. I don't even think it's a fault: Feldman needed to create a floating musical stasis, and harmony tends to mooooove somewhere, so to do what Feldman needed to do, he had to put harmony on the back burner … [Read more...]

I've loved Robert Ashley's Perfect Lives for 30 years, but I'd never gone through it line by line until this last couple of weeks. I frequently teach scenes 1 ("The Park") and 4 ("The Bar"). But scene 6, "The Church," is the climax of the piece in terms of word density and everything else, and while I had certain passages memorized, I'd never pieced the throughline together. It is absolutely astonishing. The scene is Ed and Gwyn's elopement in Indiana, and the marriage sermon gives them the three rules, which represent three eons of human … [Read more...]

Recognize the style?I was looking for some old papers and stumbled across this piece that I wrote as a first-semester freshman at Oberlin, in 1973. It's a setting of a poem by Jean Valentine, The Knife, which I've written about here before. This isn't the final score, which is lost, but a first draft - and since we did actually perform it, I hope to god I was forced to put in bar lines and rhythmicize all those damn grace notes in the piano. I was somewhere between Berio's Circles, Stockhausen's Klavierstücke, and George Crumb, with lots of … [Read more...]

I don't know that I have a musical style, but I think that one of my compositional strengths - for those who consider it a strength rather than a limitation - is that I draw out the idea of each piece, each movement, very clearly. That is, given recordings of the first five measures of most of my pieces, plus a random measure from later in one of those pieces, I think even a child could match the random measure with the correct opening. The first conductor of my Transcendental Sonnets expressed amazement at how clearly the five songs were … [Read more...]

If nature is not enthusiastic about explanation, why should Tschaikowsky be?- Ives, Essays Before a Sonata I suppose I shouldn't be so enthusiastic about explanation. It's a reaction to frustrations of my youth, in which there was so much information I couldn't get access to: all those years of knowing the names La Monte Young and Charlemagne Palestine, and not being able to hear their music, all those hints of how Le marteau was written in Boulez's On Music Today, but the final key withheld. Composers like Boulez build up a mystique by … [Read more...]

Every composer has his champions, and I'm always happy to see people leap to a favorite composer's defense. It gives me a warm feeling inside, actually, even if I don't much care for the composer's music myself, because I think, "Someday that could be my music someone like that is defending." A friend whose tastes otherwise often parallel mine recently admitted that Feldman's music drove him up a wall, which I find amusing, rather than threatening. I have lived all my life with musicians around me putting down my favorite music. One of my … [Read more...]

I live 50 miles from Tanglewood, but I've never been there until today. Not my kind of crowd - too much Mozart and Carter, not nearly enough Glenn Branca and Eliane Radigue. But I've also never heard Leonard Bernstein's "Age of Anxiety" Symphony live until today, and the temptation smashed my resistance. "Age of Anxiety" is kind of a piano concerto, and I worked on the piano solo part in high school because I loved it so much. My old friend, former student (from 20 years ago), and sometime employer Tony DeRitis got me a ticket for the Boston … [Read more...]