Archives for 2009

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 summer day, this was a less self-punishing exercise than it may sound. As I trudged up to Navy Pier, Harold Budd had just started playing the performance of his piece Children on the Hill that you can hear here. I stood in one of Navy Pier’s huge doorways simply transfixed. Rarely in my life have I heard another performance so lovely from beginning to end. Navy Pier is enormous, the crowd was huge and casual, and I have always been chagrined about the baby who wails like a banshee at many points during the recording. 

For many years I have toyed with the idea of transcribing this wonderful recording, but given the speed of Budd’s cascading arpeggios in the 13-minute middle section, I doubted the feasibility until digital software rendered it possible to slow it waaaaay down (sometimes to 1/5th-speed) without changing the pitch, EQ-ing it to bring out selective registers. It’s taken dozens of hours of ear-stretching work over the last two years, but I’ve done it, and the amazing Sarah Cahill will finally recreate this performance at Kansas City on Friday, Sept. 4, at the Second International Conference on Minimalist Music. It’s the most difficult musicological feat I’ve ever attempted. The Well-Tuned Piano was child’s play by comparison.

You may (and should) be familiar with the five-minute version of Children on the Hill on Budd’s 1981 recording The Serpent (in Quicksilver) on the Cantil label, rereleased in 1992 on All Saints. That version never changes key or tempo, nor deviates from a B-major scale. This version is recognizably similar in motive and atmosphere, but enormously more complex. The main motive on the Cantil version is B-D#-E; here it is inverted, D#-E-G#. The opening section is based in B major, but abruptly shifts to D, C, and C#. The rapturous middle section, a torrent of Budd’s trademark major-seventh chords, alternates at first between E and Db, but moves upward though D and Eb to an alternation of F and Gb before finally settling back to C# for the ending recapitulation. At no time does the key jump more than a minor third away. Interestingly, each key is associated with a particular textural configuration, so that every return of a key is also the return of a type of arpeggio and melody. Often transitions between keys are introduced by the right hand entering the new key first, so that the left hand resolves a poignant moment of bitonal dissonance. Budd says that he would sometimes use written-down motives on a scrap of paper as a guide, but that these notations are long gone. And, looking at my transcription, he wrote, “I couldn’t play that in a thousand years.”

Below I post my transcription of the segment from 10:30 to 11:32 on the recording. My rhythms are pretty conjectural, often simply an attempt to get all the notes in the right order. The fact that the piano is run through a harmonizer added to the difficulty. Sarah’s working hard, though, and practicing along with the recording to get the unnotatable nuances of rhythm and pacing. I am thrilled that I’m finally going to get to hear this music live again, and get a recording without the crying baby. That kid must be 27 now, and in Kansas City bouncers will be on the lookout for a suspicious 27-year-old.

Comments closed. I thought this Budd was for you, but I guess it was for someone else.

Hans Otte: Das Buch der Klange (excerpt)
Harold Budd: Children on the Hill (long version, transcribed by me from a 1982 performance at New Music America)
Mamoru Fujieda: Patterns of Plants (excerpt)
Bunita Marcus: Julia
Meredith Monk: St. Petersburg Waltz
Elodie Lauten: Adamantine Sonata
Eve Beglarian: Night Psalm (world premiere)
John Adams: China Gates
Harold Budd: Children on the Hill (short version, from the recording)
Terry Riley: Be Kind to One Another

Tom Johnson: Twelve for solo piano
Terry Riley: Autumn Leaves for flute, violin, alto sax, bass clarinet, cello, piano, percussion (the piece just after In C, only heard once since the ’60s)
Phill Niblock: Tow by Tom
Vladimir Tosic: Arios for cello and piano
Barbara Benary: Sun On Snow for soprano and mixed ensemble
Jakob ter Veldhuis: The Body of Your Dreams for piano and boombox
Tom Johnson: Narayana’s Cows for flute, violin, alto sax, bass clarinet, cello, piano, percussion (Tom Johnson, narrator)

‘The music you write is about the composers you like’: Intertextuality in the work of Louis Andriessen – Maarten Beirens (KU Leuven, Belgium)

Metamorphic Meanings? Exploring Glass’s Intertextual Soundtracks – Tristian Evans (Bangor University, Wales, UK)

‘Taking a Line for a Second Walk’: Mapping Intertextuality in Nyman – Pwyll ap Sion (Bangor University, Wales, UK)

Phill Niblock and identity in reductionism -  Richard Glover (University of Huddersfield)

Phill Niblock: Documentation, Analysis, Listening – Keith Potter (Goldsmith College, London)

Minimalism and the Moving Image: The films and music of Phill Niblock – Rich Housh (University of Kansas)

Same Music, Different Perceptions? Steve Reich’s Six Pianos and Six Marimbas as Case Study – Kyle Fyr

Tehillim and the Fullness of Time – Gretchen Horlacher (Indiana University)

Early Steve Reich and Techno-utopianism – Kerry O’Brien (Indiana University)

Perceptible Processes in Reich’s Ostinati: Arch Form and Multiple Downbeats in
Music for Eighteen Musicians – Brad Osborn (University of Washington)

Samples and the Material they create in Steve Reich’s City Life – Abigail Shupe (University of Western Ontario)

Good Trains and Bad: Steve Reich and the Holocaust in American Musical Life – Sumanth Gopinath (University of Minnesota)

Images of Lincoln: Glass’s Minimalist Contribution to American Historical Memory
of the Civil War – Thomas J. Kernan (University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music)

Meaning in minimalist opera: Investigating the subtext of Doctor Atomic – Sean Atkinson (University of Texas at Arlington)

Portraits of the Chinese Landscape in John Adams’s Nixon in China
Timothy Johnson (Ithaca College)

From Arles to zaftig: an introduction to the operas of Michael Gordon – Jedd C. Schneider (University of Missouri – Kansas City)
 
Disorientation and Loss as a Response to Arvo Pärt’s festina lente – David Dies

“They Just Go Round and Round”: Circularity and Dystopia in The Truman Show – Rebecca M. Doran Eaton (The University of Texas at Austin, Texas State University-San Marcos)

A Postminimalist Analysis of Julius Eastman’s Crazy Nigger – Andrew Hanson-Dvoracek (University of Iowa)

Julius Eastman’s Musical Worlds – Ellie M. Hisama (Columbia University)

Becoming Temporal and Entropic: The aesthetics of time in Tenney’s Having Never
Written a Note for Percussion and Robert Smithson’s earth work – Joseph Di Ponio

David Borden’s Double Portrait: Minimalist Aesthetic With Linear Time – R. Andrew Lee (University of Missouri-Kansas City)

A Personal Encounter with the Shaman of Vertical Temporality: Charlemagne
Palestine – Phillip Henderson (The University for the Creative Arts)

La Monte Young: Time and identity of the work – Jean-Pierre Caron

Reconstructing November – Kyle Gann (Bard College)

Mikel Rouse’s Failing Kansas – David McIntire (University of Missouri at Kansas City)

An Ethnography of Acoustical Positivism – Jeremy Grimshaw (Brigham Young University School of Music)

La Monte Young’s 1960’s: The Black LP – David McCarthy (University of Minnesota)

Process as Means and End in Minimalist and Post-Minimalist Music – Galen Brown

Prime Times – Paul Epstein

Beyond Drumming: Process in the Music of David Lang – Kevin Lewis (College-Conservatory of Music, University of Cincinnati)

Metal as a Gradual Process: Minimalist Rhythmic Practices in the Music of Dream Theater – Greg McCandless (Florida State University)

David Lang’s Postminimalist Work: the so-called laws of nature and the Influence of
Steve Reich – Andrew M. Bliss (University of Tennessee at Martin)

The Fear of Forgetting: Decasia and Contemporary “Memory Culture” – Jason Hibbard (University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music)

Morton Feldman, Proto-Minimalist
Brett Boutwell (Louisiana State University)

Dialectic of Dialects: American Minimalist Composers Talk Tradition – Sara Melton (University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music)

Minimal Music and the Influence of Abstract Expressionism – Elisa Weber (Florida State University)

Painting in Time and Music through Space: A Comparative Analysis of the Music of
Phill Niblock and the Art of Ad Reinhart, Mark Rothko, Richard Serra, and Carl Andre – Erika King (Bennington College)

An artistic paradigm realised: Negative space, musical minimalism and
compositional technique – Christopher Garrard (University of Durham)

Speaking Through Singing: The Spoken In the Vocals of Steve Reich’s Different
Trains and Arnold Schoenberg’s Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte, Op. 41 – Andrew McIntyre (Indiana University)

“How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” – John Pymm (University of Wolverhampton)

The Reductionist Model as the Forerunner of Minimalist “Action”: Six Two-part Chorales by Vladan Radovanovic – Dragana Stojanovic-Novicic (University of the Arts, Belgrade)

Jim Fox’s The City the Wind Swept Away: Considering Juxtaposition and Decay as
Structure – Scott Unrein (University of Missouri-Kansas City)

Sample Savvy: Identification and Structure in Electronic Dance Music – Travis A. Allen (University of California, Santa Barbara)

Phasing and Form – Ryan Tanaka

Maximizing Minimalism in Michael Torke’s Four Proverbs – Kathy Biddick Smith

Eric Richards and the Empirical Search for Truth and Beauty - 
Eric Smigel (San Diego State University)

The String Theory of Repetition in Sound: From the mid-20th century to the Post digital – Greg Shapley (University of Technology, Sydney)

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 were no orchestras to speak of… there were no commissions of the sort that might be valuable to the composer, in the sense that a commission involves some sort of discussion between the composer and the orchestra; and most important of all, there was never any rehearsal time, in case an idea did not work. Orchestra commissions of the time always sounded like they were being sight-read, which in fact they were. I am sorry to say that this is still largely the case….

I think that even for the best composer (better than I am), ideas don’t always work. That is why the orchestra pece without lots of rehearsal is in some way doomed. And dreaded by the composer… [A] friend told me that a distinguished violinist told him that in his youth he had played La Mer with Ernest Ansermet’s Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, and had remarked to Ansermet that the violin part was not the same that he had known with other orchestras. Ansermet replied that Debussy said that he had always regretted the published violin part, and so with Ansermet’s approval had written a new violin part. (Which one do we hear now?) So, in this situation it is actually the American orchestra music that is truly “experimental.” When you have thought about other kinds of musical ideas, and worked with, say, electronic music for most of your composing life, the composition is anything but experimental. It is the epitome of expertise. It may be aleatoric or purposefully unpredictable in its specific sounds, or purposefully exploratory of a sound, but experimental is the wrong word, and its use has more or less divided composers among themselves….

It is a problem to write orchestra pieces that can be played after one or two rehearsals. I can’t even learn my own compositions in a six-hour rehearsal. (Recently I was listening to a performance of La Mer on the radio and remarking to myself on its difficulty and it occurred to me that is a composer wrote La Mer today, no orchestra could play it. Not enough rehearsal time.) If it were not for this drastic restriction, orchestras and orchestra literature would not be in such dire straits. And there would probably be a very different idea about electronic music, and so probably a different kind of electronic music….

– Robert Ashley, liner notes to Superior Seven, 1995

In 1997 the American Composers Orchestra, urged by board member Tom Buckner and with evident reluctance, commissioned Bob to write When Famous Last Words Fail You, for singers and orchestra. The orchestra members in the piece are cued by the lead singer’s words, so the conductor merely adjusts volumes, as at a mixing board. Dennis Russell Davies ran through the piece Thursday morning before a Saturday performance. The parts had just been handed out, so everyone was clearly sight-reading. There was a planned meeting afterward to discuss the technique of the piece; that was cancelled. There was a scheduled dress rehearsal; that was cancelled. The performance was the second run-through of a piece that had never been rehearsed, and sounded awful, not at all the way Bob imagined it.

A classical music world that treats great composers that way deserves the worst that can possibly happen to it.

Comments closed.

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 the music themselves, without me as intermediary!” Brilliant, and only my second cup of coffee. Enjoy Elementals.

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) that appeals to the widest number of people on the most superficial, attention-getting level. To make that art thoughtful would be counter-lucrative, because they want us continually unsatisfied and coming back for more as quickly as possible. So our television and movies consist largely of pretty people mouthing innocuous banter; we can’t stop watching, but we don’t get anything from it. (Well, I haven’t had TV reception in 20 years, but even I reflexively glance at Jennifer Aniston when she catches my peripheral vision.*) Art that feeds us, that sustains us, that makes life worthwhile, cannot be reliably produced by an organization whose primary goal is profit. Europe offers a lot of examples that art is one of those things that the social collective, represented by government, can do better for us than people trying to turn a buck on it. Next: socialized, government-supported art. Watch how health care does, keep an eye out, and be ready to strike.

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 and turn it down to simmer. His sonorities are in technicolor, but when you reduce them to pitches and ignore timbre and spacing, there’s not a lot there. In fact, I would charge that some of the young composers who picked up where Feldman left off, like John Luther Adams and Bernadette Speach and Peter Garland and me, did so thinking: “Hmmm, I could do the same thing and use funner harmony.” So if one of your ear’s big things is harmony and you hear everything in Feldman but that – well, case dismissed. You’re off the hook.

Truth, as has been said, is in the details.

There have been some comments to this blog lately lamenting relativism in aesthetic judgments, saying that if we give up the idea of objective musical standards, then we can’t argue that classical music should be supported over pop music, everything is relative, and our entire art is doomed, everyone will listen to rap and pop because there’s no factual standard on which to defend classical music. I believe there is no such thing as complete objectivity, but I also believe there is no such thing as complete subjectivity. There’s always something there that our perceptions did not create. (Had a fun e-mail argument about this with Glenn Branca, once. He proved to me there was no complete objectivity and I proved, I think, the impossibility of total subjectivity. It ended amicably.)

I’ve alluded here before to an unforgettable conversation I once had with John Luther Adams, trudging in high winds and freezing cold through the snowy woods around Fairbanks, and I’ve promised to tell you about it someday. Maybe this is the time. John and I put together a registry of musical virtues that was isomorphically analogous to a classification of audiences.

For instance: there are people for whom the best music must involve innovation. These people are likely to value Varese, Partch, Cage. There are others who value craftsmanship above all else. These people tend to like Hindemith, Sessions, perhaps Ligeti. Other people feel that music should be, above all else, emotionally true; perhaps they gravitate toward Barber, Vaughan Williams, maybe Messiaen. There are people who love music for its sonic lushness and sensuousness, who may relish Takemitsu and Feldman. There are people who value clarity, who value simplicity, who value intellectualism, who value memorability, who value physicality, who value theoretical rigor. Most people value several of these virtues, and we could create Venn diagrams of audiences who love different new musics because of the specific virtues they possess. The innovation + emotive sincerity intersectors love Ives. The intellectualism + sensuousness people love Takemitsu. That’s what John and I were coming up with.

I think these virtues could be categorized, and I think it would be a worthwhile and revealing musicological exploit. I think it could become the prolegomena to a sociology of new-music (and other) audiences.

Where subjectivity comes in is that there is no objective criterion by which we can proclaim that craftsmanship is a higher virtue than innovation or sensuousness. We just can’t. One type of personality will value the careful, revising craftsman over the visionary innovator who comes up with something radically new, and that’s what makes horseraces. There is no way to objectively rank the artistic virtues. They are too closely allied to the structure of personality. Where objectivity comes in is in determing what innovation or craftsmanship is. Say you love innovation but don’t believe Varèse was innovative? Good luck. I want to read the treatise proving your point, but if it doesn’t grab me in three sentences I’m trashing it. We can prove on paper that Varèse was an amazing innovator, whether that impresses you or not. I happen not to care much for Varèse because, for me, innovation is kind of wasted if the music doesn’t grab me emotionally, and his doesn’t; but I grant he was innovative. You think Crumb is a better composer than Sessions? You have my blessing. You think Crumb was a better craftsman than Sessions? You’re an idiot. If there was a virtue that Sessions nailed to the floor immovably and for all time, it was craftsmanship. Maybe lacking in spontaneity, lacking in originality, in imagination, in goal-directedness, in sensuouness, arguably, but craftsmanship? If craftsmanship means anything in music, Sessions had it in spades. We can argue whether Partch’s music shows good craft, and give examples; that’s a still partially subjective but more limited and rational dispute than whether he was a “good composer.”

The only question then is, how high is craftsmanship in the list of musical virtues? For me, personally – and no one else is bound by this – craftsmanship is one of the secondary virtues. I fancy that there is considerable craftsmanship in my music, but I do not want it calling attention to itself, and I try to keep it in the background. Though I do value craftsmanship, I’m not a fan of the sound of exposed craftsmanship, but a believer in Mozart’s “artless art.” I feel that what an artist has to say is more important than how well he says it, and for an impetuous sincerity or an uninhibited imagination I will easily forgive a shortage of craftsmanship. If you disagree I cannot refute you, nor can you argue me out of that position because there’s no objective basis to do so with. It’s just my personality. Or at least, having made more defensible determinations about which music possesses which virtues, perhaps we can have a different argument about which virtues should be accorded a higher place. After all, I have reasons for placing imagination and convincing emotion above innovation, and innovation above craftsmanship, and if I have reasons (as opposed to irrational personal preferences), I can be wrong.

There are people for whom depth is the major musical virtue – and by depth in this context I mean not profundity per se, but the ability of music to reveal more and more layers of meaning on repeated hearings. Depth is certainly a virtue. Many people use this virtue to prize classical music above popular music. I have often had the experience, though, of listening to a pop record and not really appreciating it the first time, but having it grow on me more and more. I’ve had that experience with pop music as often as I’ve had it with classical music. Many people who push this virtue use it to prop up the reputation of complex music. But in the early 1980s I turned off a recording of Carter’s Double Concerto on what must have been my 75th listening with the score precisely because of that: I wasn’t getting any more out of it than I had at the last ten listenings. I had milked it dry. It wasn’t yielding anything else.

You want a composer with depth? Robert Ashley. There is so much in his music that pieces I’ve listened to and even studied for 30 years are yielding up phrases and patterns I’ve never noticed before. He is utterly inexhaustible. And yet, I don’t think Ashley is the kind of composer the depth advocates have in mind. In general I think depth is kind of a red herring, a nice virtue but not truly at the top of anyone’s list. The last time I listened closely to Beethoven’s Appassionata sonata, I savored it, but I don’t really think I found anything I hadn’t heard ten years ago. Satie is one of my favorites and I find him extremely profound, but I don’t think I’ll hear things in Embryons Desséchées the next time I hear it that I haven’t noticed before. What’s important to me is that I can keep listening to a piece without growing tired of it.

This is where some pop music I like, but not all, falls apart for me. I’m a Waylon Jennings fan, which I don’t often admit – must be something in the Texas water. I find his songs inventive and emotionally satisfying, but I can’t listen to them often because the production values – canned audience shouts, instrumental bridges so identical that they sound cut and pasted in the audio software – seem plastic and articifical. Once every other year I can ignore that for the great word/tune relationship and the fuck-you attitude, but too soon a second listening and I feel sick.

But in the pop music I love best, like Brian Eno and the Residents, the virtues I enjoy are exactly those I love in the classical music I love best: imagination, inventiveness, emotional connection, memorability. Earlier in my life I searched hard for the DNA that separates pop music from classical, and you know what? I never found it. The more I looked at the pop music I loved, the more exactly its virtues resembled those of my favorite classical music. I never found a line I could draw. The only pop/classical distinction that ever made sense to me was the one Bob Ashley told me on a bar stool in Chicago in 1986: “Over five minutes it’s classical, under five minutes it’s pop.” Accordingly, I’ve always thought of Schubert’s songs as really, really good pop music. And of Brian Eno’s Evening Star album, with its long tone poems, as utterly classical. Imagination is near the top of my virtues list, and I hear more imagination in almost any Eno song than in all the Elgar I’ve ever heard put together.

So all these bloggers who reel on endlessly about the pop/classical problem, and how we have to protect classical music in a pop-oriented world: I simply will not partake. I believe in genres defined by specific, pin-pointable qualities, from reggae to heavy metal to totalism to postminimalism to impressionism to spectralism to to space-age bachelor pad music to bluegrass, but “classical” and “pop” are industry-created categories, economic categories, and they leave no traces for me in the music. Whether I’m listening to a song by Loudon Wainwright III or Brian Eno or Charles Ives or Sir William Walton, I want the relation of melody and accompaniment to words elegantly and creatively handled.

What I will defend is the right of people with different values to have the music of their favorite virtues preserved. Thus I suppose I end up having the same aim as the elitists, but I will not use elitist rhetoric to achieve it. I will not say that “depth,” or length, or complexity, or intellectualism – or simplicity, or communicativeness, or innovation, or memorability, or sincerity – is a higher virtue than some other. But I do feel strongly that minorities have their rights, and that those who want to hear craftsmanship, or sensuousness, or intellectualism, or depth have the right to have their music supported. Insofar as most pop music is songs, there are some virtues that no pop music has, virtues that can’t be demonstrated in three minutes. The “objective standards” that some of my commenters use against pop music has just as often been used against minimalism and a lot of the other music I love. There are no objective standards. But there is an infinity of objective facts, there is a quasi-infinity of musical virtues, and no majority or plurality has the right to proclaim that we all have to content ourselves with the music that embodies their particular favorite virtues. That is as true for those who would defend classical music from pop-music encroachment as it is for those who would defend minimalism against the classical snobs.

1. Don’t talk to yourself
2. Speak only when you’re spoken to
3. Make sense

Language has sense built in. It’s easy to 
Make sense. To make no sense is possible,
But hard. Language does not have truth built in.
It’s hard to make truth, which is to stop the search. 

Everything in the transitory category turned out to be
the particulars of our existence,
and these were divided into physical, mental, and others
that were neither physical nor mental.

Recognize the style?

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 differentiated from each other, no two having the same approach to harmony. Many composers are language-based; by many, I mean almost everyone from Bach to Schoenberg and beyond, and by language-based, I mean that they have a continuing musical language evident in piece after piece, in which their ideas are expressed. But I’m more image-based, meaning that for each piece I choose a handful of elements, some of which appear nowhere else in my music. I’ve got pieces entirely in 2/4 or 4/4, some with constantly changing meters, and some with 2 or 4 or 7 tempos always going at once, so characterizing “my rhythmic language” is a fool’s errand. (On the other hand, I think I have a certain melodic style that no one has ever drawn attention to, and I am a little overly addicted to encompassing my music between high, sustained flute tones and a pizzicato bass line.) One of the main questions I’m always asking my composition students is, “What is the idea of this piece?” It’s one they are often reluctant to answer, sometimes even seem to resent, and perhaps it’s not as universally applicable a query as I try to make it. But, for instance, one could ask Beethoven for the idea of the Appassionata sonata, and I would imagine the answer having something to do with going from the tonic precipitously to the Neapolitan chord and working one’s way back. That answer would not explain as much about the piece, though, as my answers about my own pieces tend to do, because Beethoven was implementing that idea within a common classical language. 

If nature is not enthusiastic about explanation, why should Tschaikowsky be?
– Ives, Essays Before a Sonata

1/1, 65/64, 33/32, 15/14, 35/32, 10/9, 9/8, 8/7, 6/5, 39/32, 5/4, 9/7, 21/16, 4/3, 11/8, 10/7, 35/24, 3/2, 99/64, 13/8, 5/3, 27/16, 12/7, 7/4, 9/5, 117/64, 15/8, 40/21, 63/32 

Nine chords gave me 72 possible progressions from one chord to another. I made up a chart of all 72, and, listening over and over, subjectively characterized each one by quality: “weak,” “piquant,” “subtle,” “strongly cadential,” “save for special moments,” and only one “wonderful,” the progression from the 13th to the 11th harmonic (last chord change in the piece). About a fourth of the progressions I prohibited as ineffective. In short, I was merely replicating for this set of chords what hundreds of years have done for the conventional tonal system, learning that IV-ii is much stronger than ii-IV, that IV-I and V-I have different effects, and so on. Then, using those characterizations, I began composing chord progressions into phrases, and still found that whether a chord progression worked or not depended on context and voice-leading, and wasn’t entirely predictable.

The abundant computations I put into making a microtonal scale lead some people to conclude that I compose according to some quasi-serial, left-brain, precompositional scheme, but nothing could be further from the truth. Once I had the chords in place, I had to improvise my way through the piece by trial and error, constantly correcting by ear things that my brain had mistakenly thought might work. I had no idea where the piece was going, except that I was trying to keep it from going anywhere.

To that end I severely limited my materials, giving leeway only to the melodic patterns in the piano, and adjusting the sustained oboe/flute line at a few places where the piano paralleled it too closely. One of my favorite quotations is Kierkegaard’s “Purity of heart is to will one thing.” I wanted, as I often do, to write a piece that was nothing more than one sustained idea. I’m proud of the fact that the piece has no climax, though various parameters hit their extremes at different points; the highest note comes at about six minutes out of 14, and is not an emphasized moment. The piece settles more and more into mid-register as it progresses. I’m even prouder of the fact that, to keep the piece going, I kept coming up with new things I could do that didn’t violate my initial restrictions; the piece’s inventiveness kept moving inward, toward the center. I also like that what form there is is global rather than linear. There is absolutely no logic as to why the piano does this and now that, though overall there are things in the second half that balance things in the first half; the same rhythm or microtonal effect will happen in the treble here and the bass there, or with one pitch here and two pitches there. I aimed for a “vessel of the eternal present,” though certain connections become evident in hindsight.

Clearly, I have a strong affinity for the kind of intense, immobile textural focus one finds in Phill Niblock, John Luther Adams, or Michael Gordon; but if I try to imagine my music as just harmony, rhythm, and texture, and can’t hear the melody in there, the tune, it just doesn’t sound to me recognizably like my music. The impulse that prevents me from retreating behind the objectivity of pure process is the same impulse that prevents me from magisterially keeping my methods secret. I have to have the melodic, the communicative, the human element in there, and it’s not even an ideological decision: I’m not as good at process as those other composers, but I think I have a real talent for the melodic, the personal.

In short, there’s something essentially in-between about me. A passage from the Upanishads reminds me of my composing:

In dark night live those for whom
The world without alone is real; in night
Darker still, for whom the world within
Alone is real. The first leads to a life
Of action, the second to a life of meditation.
But those who combine action with meditation
Cross the sea of death through action
And enter into immortality
Through the practice of meditation.
So we have heard from the wise.

I get my compositional kick by mediating between the objective and the subjective, the public and private, left-brain and right. It’s not enough for me to know secrets of postclassical music, I have to communicate and contextualize them. Similarly, that piano is bringing you (clarifying) the secrets contained in the harmonic structure.

Another conundrum: all my life I’ve been trying to rewrite Harris’s Third Symphony, and I think this is as close as I’ve gotten. If you can hear the connection between that piece and this one (and if it’s impossible I can hardly blame you), my entire life will have just flashed before your eyes. The piece is dedicated to Bob Ashley, for whatever that tells you.