Conference Blog Goes the Way of Other Good Ideas

Well, the idea of a conference being blogged daily by the co-director of same conference has pretty much been derailed. I’ll have to wrap it up when I get back. Let me leave you for now with another group photo, taken remotely by Scott Unrein on the roof of his apartment building. This followed Sarah Cahill’s absolutely dynamite recital, in which the revival of Harold Budd’s Children on the Hill rang out perfectly; as Scott said, close your eyes and that was Budd up there playing. Sarah closed with Terry Riley’s sophisticatedly jaunty “Be Kind to One Another” Rag – another improvised piece, which Terry wrote down after improvising it for Sarah to play. Here we are – Charlemagne Palestine, Sarah, me, Kerry O’Brien, Scott and his wife Judy, David McIntire and his wife Michelle, Andrew Granade, Galen Brown, Andy Lee, Jedd Schneider, Andy Bliss, Sumanth Gopinath, Rachel McIntire, and Kansas City:

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Political Interlude

Here in Missouri I saw a car festooned with the most virulent anti-Obama bumper stickers, plus one that read: “I’ll be as gracious to your president as you were to mine.” That settles something I’d wondered about: a lot of the anti-Obama vitriol, I feel certain, is little more than revenge for decent peoples’ justified anger over things W. Bush actually did, and for the Right’s embarrassment for having supported a moron, while we have a nice, well-spoken, dignified president.

Narayana’s Cows with the Perfect Sauce

The big minimalist event today was maximalist indeed – a celebrity dinner party at Arthur Bryant’s, just about the most famous barbecue place in the world. The photo below just postdated Mikel Rouse’s departure, but still we had Rachel McIntire (David’s daughter, video-documenting the conference); composers Paul Epstein, Charlemagne Palestine, and Scott Unrein; pianist Sarah Cahill; and musicologists Keith Potter, Dragana Stojanovic-Novicic, and Pwyll ap Sion: 

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For over a decade I had pictured Arthur Bryant as some really plush, elegant place, but it’s just kind of a barbecue shed in a desolate part of town:
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But the sauce was pungent, the meat fell apart at the touch of a fork, and it didn’t take Charlemagne to get me to finish my dinner:
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I’m getting too busy to attend all the papers, especially since I gave my own Dennis Johnson paper today. But we had a lovely panel on Julius Eastman. Ellie Hisama has been interviewing Julius’s family, and fleshed out a long overdue biographical picture. Andrew Hanson-Dvoracek surprised me with a hardcore pitch analysis of Eastman’s Gay Guerilla, finding some meticulous structures I hadn’t noticed when I coached a performance of the piece; and even suggesting, startlingly if not illogically, that he was aiming for some rapprochement between Uptown and Downtown methods. Jeremy Grimshaw, author of an upcoming book on La Monte Young, and I traded stories, and David McCarthy gave a concise analysis of Young’s “The Black Album” that I was glad to have someone else take off my hands. Among the hours and hours of Steve Reich papers, Kerry O’Brien detailed a little-known history of Reich’s performances from 1967 to ’69 to show that his brief flirtation with electronics, which he rather hushed up in his subsequent writings, paralleled the cybernetics fad that faded in the ’70s into a post-Vietnam disillusionment with technology. 
This evening the newEar Ensemble presented a near-marathon concert. My favorite was a gorgeous little work for piano and cello by the Serbian Vladimir Tosic that seemed to melt away onstage, and also the gently rippling Sun on Snow by Barbara Benary, violinist for the original Phil Glass Ensemble and an underrated composer. The final work by Tom Johnson, Narayana’s Cows, applied a speciously simple mathematical problem to the creation of a progressively expanding melody, charming the ear while making the brain work overtime. More tomorrow, I hope; I’m exhausted.

Watching History Turn on a Dime

What an amazing first day of the 2nd International Conference on Minimalist Music. Maarten Bierens from Belgium demonstrated how Louis Andriessen’s subtly subversive use of quotations gave his music a dialectical significance quite foreign to American minimalism; Pwyll ap Sion detailed the amazing range of self-quotation in Michael Nyman’s output. But what blew me away were three papers on Phill Niblock by Keith Potter, Richard Glover, and Rich Housh, who had gotten access to Phill’s files and could exhibit the varied ways he shapes his slowly moving drones. Apparently, Phill’s music has taken on a new life since he started working directly in ProTools, which gives him greater control over the out-of-tuneness of his pitch clusters. As UMKC musicologist Andrew Granade remarked to me, we’ve each known maybe three people in academia before now who had even heard of Niblock, and suddenly the room was full of Niblock aficionados, shouting answers to each other’s questions and deconstructing his music as matter-of-factly as if it was Mahler and we all had the Kalmus scores. Suddenly, “drone minimalism” is a topic that can hold its own against repetitive minimalism, as though it had been all along. What a feeling, sitting there and watching the official history of music reel, switch trajectory, and transform itself around you!

Mikel Rouse joined us to present his music/film Funding, and so here is musicological documentation of the first night’s festivities. First, me and Mikel with UMKC doctoral student, Michael Gordon expert, and conference superman Jedd Schneider looking on:
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(photo by Dragana Stojanovic-Novicic)
Four Musical Minimalists author Keith Potter, postminimalist composer Galen Brown, and Nancarrow scholar Dragana Stojanovic-Novicic:
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Musicologist Maarten Bierens (on account of whom rumors are flying of the next conference possibly taking place in Belgium) and Welsh former conference director Pwyll ap Sion:
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D-Day Minus One

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:

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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, myself, and David) found Virgil between his parents and the sister who died in infancy, on a wind-swept plain between two cornfields:
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After paying our respects, we stopped back through Lee’s Summit (home of Pat Metheny, similarly state-uncredited) for just about the best barbecue I’ve ever had, and certainly the hottest barbecue sauce, at an establishment called the Filling Station, which could only have been named for the ballet by Thomson:
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For desert the place sold a rotund little candy bar called the Cherry Mash, which used to be my favorite sweet in the 1960s; I hadn’t had one in four decades, and couldn’t resist. For a few minutes I felt that maraschino paste on my tongue again and stepped back into the world of junior high school. It was horrifying.
Yesterday I got to hear sneak previews of a couple of conference papers. Andy Lee, UMKC doctoral student and pianist of postminimalism, in a paper analyzing David Borden’s two-piano piece Double Portrait, cited Jonathan Kramer’s distinction between vertical and horizontal time, vertical denoting a timeless stasis in which music seems to have no forward motion, horizontal indicating the more usual classical narrative of beginning, middle, and end. While minimalist composers are usually concerned with vertical time, postminimalist composers, Andy noted, are often ambiguous, concerned in some respects and times with the vertical, and in other respects and moments with the horizontal. I nearly leaped from my seat shouting “I confess, I confess!” and threw myself at his mercy, but he didn’t seem to hold the ambiguity against us. That’s one of those hidden-in-plain-sight truths that postminimalist composers tend to skirt around gingerly, but since several other papers deal with the postminimal, I look forward to the distinction being squarely faced and unraveled further throughout the week.

D-Day Minus Two

Kansas City ain’t Wales, but it has its impressive features:

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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 were marked at the day the music entered the shop, lo these many decades ago. The owner, Annette, told me more details about the tragic demise of Patelson’s Music in New York than I had ever learned from anyone in New York. Then we stepped out the door, left the 1950s behind, and re-entered the sad 21st century.
The crew has begun to arrive – David McIntire (my co-director), Pwyll Ap Sion (director of the 2007 conference), Andy Lee (pianist and major help for this year), myself, and Tom Johnson:
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November Already

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 keyboard. I have recorded a version of the entire work here, conveniently formatted in four parts [UPDATE: I have replaced my private recording with the one Sarah Cahill and I made at the Second International Conference on Minimalist Music, Sept. 6, 2009, so the next paragraph no longer applies]:

Part 1 1:03:09

Part 2 1:13:48

Part 3 1:06:54

Part 4 1:05:19

It’s not a professional-level recording, though I made it on my wonderful Sony PCM D-50, which has totally changed my life. I had to switch pianos at one point, because the freshmen arrived at Bard halfway through, and the piano I started on was in a room where high heels clicking through the hallways were too audible (and those were the guys!). But it’s the first complete recording, with all the material contained in the score. It lasts only four hours, and I think I could have gone longer, but every note you hear is in the score, and there is virtually nothing omitted.

Dennis’s surviving recording contained only the first 112 minutes of the piece. What I am playing is an exact transcription of those 112 minutes, as identical to the original as I could make it, and then I improvise the remainder of the piece according to rules I obtained by analyzing the relationship of the recording to the score. The reason for sticking to the transcription for the first 112 minutes is that there are aspects of the piece not ascertainable from the score; the score was derived from the original tape rather than the other way around, and Dennis’s letter to me about it stated that “the recording must stand as the primary definition example of the piece.” Subsequent performances need not be so slavishly faithful to the recording, but this first exposure has got to get the piece across as Dennis played it, so musicologists can know exactly what they’re dealing with. Before you go there, the idea of this piece from the beginning was that it is a (loosely) notated piece, that any so-minded pianist could play it with complete authenticity. Dennis was not a great jazz pianist, not a jazz pianist at all in fact, and there is nothing technical nor idiosyncratic about his playing that another pianist couldn’t sufficiently imitate. Dennis is flattered that Sarah Cahill and I are doing this, just as Harold Budd is flattered that Sarah is playing Children on the Hill. If the composers are thrilled, you have no theoretical basis on which to disapprove. 

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

There is a hilarious sequence of situations in Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad in which Twain and his fellow tourists drive an Italian tour guide to absolute distraction with questions of surreal incomprehension:

Our guide there fidgeted about as if he had swallowed a spring mattress. He was full of animation – full of impatience. He said:

“Come wis me, genteelmen! – come! I show you ze letter writing by Christopher Colombo! – write it himself! – write it wis his own hand! – come!”

He took us to the municipal palace. After much impressive fumbling of keys and opening of locks, the stained and aged document was spread before us. The guide’s eyes sparkled. He danced about us and tapped the parchment with his finger:

“What I tell you, genteelmen! Is it not so? See! handwriting Christopher Colombo!–write it himself!”

We looked indifferent – unconcerned. The doctor examined the document very deliberately, during a painful pause. – Then he said, without any show of interest:

“Ah – Ferguson – what – what did you say was the name of the party who wrote this?”

“Christopher Colombo! ze great Christopher Colombo!”

Another deliberate examination.

“He write it himself! – Christopher Colombo! He’s own hand-writing, write by himself!”

Then the doctor laid the document down and said:

“Why, I have seen boys in America only fourteen years old that could write better than that.” 

“But zis is ze great Christo- ”

“I don’t care who it is! It’s the worst writing I ever saw. Now you musn’t think you can impose on us because we are strangers. We are not fools, by a good deal. If you have got any specimens of penmanship of real merit, trot them out! – and if you haven’t, drive on!”

Half of the comments I got on my recent Harold Budd posting, several of them by people criticizing me while admitting that they hadn’t listened to the music they were criticizing me for, were about on this level. It’s not as funny from the tour guide’s perspective. I’m offering you the minimalist equivalent of Christopher Columbus’s handwriting, neither for your critique nor for your approval, but because I have the information, I enjoy disseminating it, and I know there are people interested. The claims I make for this music are that the tape said the piece dated from 1959 and the performance from 1962, and that La Monte told me that this piece inspired The Well-Tuned Piano. If you have evidence to confute these claims, I’ll be curious to hear it; otherwise, criticizing me for this reveals a misunderstanding of the situation. This is musicology, not American Idol. If this recording or the piece isn’t your cup of tea, that’s OK, I understand, but I can’t alter the results of my research to suit your squeamish and waffling tastes. If you want your comment posted – respond appropriately. 

Great Moments in Music History

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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 as old as I do now – sort of a Dorian Gray effect? I’m only a few months older than those guys.

UPDATE: Several years ago Mikel and I went into Rudy’s. Standing at the bar, I said, “Look, they’ve added some nice tile and decorations behind the bar.” Mikel looked at me and said, “That’s always been there – they’ve just outlawed smoking in bars.” I’d never been able to see the back wall for the cigarette smoke.

Minimalists Prepare for Counterattack

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.