One of the things I love about Richard Taruskin's Oxford History of Western Music is its emphasis on how an evolving public narrative privileges some composers and marginalizes others. For instance, he writes about how when Ligeti came to Darmstadt, because he was Hungarian he had to rewrite (with Erno Lendvai's help) Bartok's reputation from that of a collector of folk music to that of a formalist using golden sections and axis systems. Communist Hungary needed to see Bartok as a champion of he proletariat (Lendvai's decadent-formalist book … [Read more...]

OK, you really do have to watch the video of Cage Against the Machine recording 4'33". Its good-natured absurdity would have made a joyful climax to my book, had I not already finished it. … [Read more...]

The semester is over, and so is my 12-tone analysis class, which made me work harder than any class I've ever taught. I added about 18 works to my analytical repertoire, including behemoths like Mantra, Sinfonia, Le Marteau, and Threni. Even having analyzed most of the music over the summer, I still spent most weekends checking rows and poring over dense JSTOR articles. And aside from me having wanted to learn all that stuff anyway, it was a continually rewarding class. I especially enjoyed showing the row matrix from Ben Johnston's String … [Read more...]

For hundreds of years people believed that water contracts when it freezes. Why? Because Aristotle said so, and Aristotle was an unimpeachable authority. During hundreds of winters someone could have learned the truth and refuted the great man by leaving a bottle of water outside on a frosty night, but the force of authority overruled experience.Wikipedia operates by the same medieval principle. When I was researching Stockhausen's Mantra for my 12-tone class, I finally turned in some desperation to the Wikipedia page on the piece. It contains … [Read more...]

I suppose that people will keep e-mailing me until I acknowledge the "Cage Against the Machine" campaign in England, whereby musicians are trying to make a recording of 4'33" the hit single at Christmas time in order to irritate or otherwise inconvenience someone named Simon Cowell. I admire the wordplay, and am just hip enough to get the reference. On the chance that it might positively affect sales of my book, I hope they succeed. I presume Simon is no descendant of Henry. Otherwise, this falls into the same category as all the incessant … [Read more...]

This Thursday, December 9, at 7 PM, I'll be giving a talk, "The Silences of John Cage," based on my 4'33" book, at the Unsound Lounge, presented by the Goethe Institute, 5 East 3rd St. between Bowery and 2nd Ave. in New York City. Hope to see some of you there.  … [Read more...]

I had an interesting conversation with composer John Halle at a party last night. We were talking about how difficult it is to get information from books and articles about how certain serialist works were written. In European writings on the subject, and certain American academic writings as well, we agreed, it seems to be almost bad taste to state flatly how the rows are derived, what the rhythmic processes are, how the music is actually written. One is expected to know such matters but be coy in expressing them, and to talk more about the … [Read more...]

I had a notice from the post office of a package waiting for me, so I stopped to pick it up on the way to school. It was a CD set. I get a lot of those sent to me. This one was Minimal Piano Collection Volume X-XX, a bunch of minimalist pieces for multiple pianos put together by Dutch pianist Jeroen van Veen on the Brilliant Classics label. I had seen the first Volume (I-IX because it contains nine CDs) in Amsterdam, but hadn't bought it because I already had other recordings of some of the music. So I was glad to get this, and didn't think too … [Read more...]

My article "Reconstructing November," detailing the process of coming up with a performance score for Dennis Johnson's epic 1959 piano piece, has just appeared in the journal American Music. I prefer not to repost it on the blog; it contains hardly any more information than I've already posted here, here, here, here, and here. It's available through JSTOR, or will be soon, I guess, for those who have access to that through their schools. This issue of American Music, by the way, is chock full of experimentalism: aside from myself, Maria Cizmic … [Read more...]

I have an article on John Luther Adams's orchestral music coming out soon in a book about him. In it I describe a condition of his music that is not exclusive to him, and that I think could be profitably expanded upon. And since Carson Cooman and I are currently engaged in a thought-provoking correspondence on the role of the idea in experimental music, I'm moved to try to unfold the concept further here. My premise is that there are left-brain aspects of music, and right-brain aspects, that can occur independently. My beginning here owes much … [Read more...]

Warren Burt writes to tell me that Canadian composer Ann Southam died on Thanksgiving day. She only came to my attention two years ago when we both had pieces featured on the same Musicworks disc. So I don't yet know much about her except that her piano works In Retrospect and Simple Lines of Enquiry are attractively meditative, and seemingly process-oriented in a thoughtful, non-obvious way. Hopefully, as so often happens in such cases, we'll now be treated to a steady stream from her back catalogue. … [Read more...]

I find it a little odd that, to accompany John Coolidge Adams's review of Kenneth Silverman's new John Cage biography, the Times added a little side feature by asking Adams whether he actually listens to Cage's music. Adams's answer, in part: "It sounds absurd to say that Cage was 'hugely influential' and then admit you rarely listen to his music, but that's the truth for me, and I suspect it's the same for most composers I know." For the record, it's not true for me. In a Landscape, Experiences 1 & 2, Dream, and The Wonderful Widow of … [Read more...]

I have in my possession a handsome book titled Musica per Pianoforte negli Stati Uniti - Piano Music of the United States - by pianist Emanuele Arciuli (EDT). It's in Italian, but I can read that there are sections on postminimalism and totalism in which I am quoted heavily. I see Daniel Lentz mentioned, and John Luther Adams, Eve Beglarian, Janice Giteck, William Duckworth, Harold Budd, Jerry Hunt, Jonathan Kramer, Ingram Marshall, Mary Jane Leach, Elodie Lauten, Peter Garland, David First, Jerome Kitzke, and other names that formed the daily … [Read more...]

Listen to this eleven-minute excerpt, and don't bother clicking unless you'll commit to the whole thing. It's the ending of David First's Pipeline Witness Apologies to Dennis, and I hope the mp3 format doesn't dumb it down too much. First's new three-disc set Privacy Issues, on Phill Niblock's XI label, is the greatest new recording I've heard in awhile, and I've been relistening to it every few days. It's all drone-based works from the last 14 years. David's work is sometimes (amazingly) solo and sometimes ensemble; I picked an ensemble piece … [Read more...]

In anticipation of a seminar I'm teaching on the Concord Sonata next spring, I'm finally reading through the selected Ives correspondence published a few years ago by Tom C. Owens (U. of California Press). I feel a little guilty reading the sweetie-pie letters between Ives and Harmony during their engagement, never meant for my prying eyes, but I'm fascinated by the responses he received to the Concord itself when he mailed out privately published copies to total strangers in 1921. This one was from John Spencer Camp, a Hartford music … [Read more...]

I am surprised to realize how much difference age makes in my teaching routine. Generally speaking, the older I get, the less students pay attention to me - and, admittedly, the less patience I often have for them. This doesn't apply to the students who have a particular interest in my areas of specialization, nor to the ones whose ambitions I applaud and encourage. Those students are as devoted as ever. But it does seem to apply to the casual students, the ones who take my general theory courses to fulfill requirements. I can guarantee that … [Read more...]

I occasionally get invited lately to visit music departments and lecture about my own music "and/or the current scene." I appreciate that one of my functions in academia is that I will expose the students to crazy music that the resident faculty won't touch with a ten-foot pole. But I'm always surprised that anyone ever supposes that, given the choice of talking about my own music or someone else's, I would ever waste a sentence on someone else's. For one thing, I know very little about the current scene: I can describe the Downtown scene of … [Read more...]

...with a nice microtonal piano piece by Chris Vaisvil using the Pianoteq system tuned to a segment of the harmonic series. Pianoteq is supposedly the state of the art digital piano simulator; I had never bought it because at first it wasn't fully retunable, but apparently that's changed. Good news. … [Read more...]

I've loved George Rochberg's Serenata d'Estate (Summer Serenade) since I was in high school. Yesterday, for the first time, I finally analyzed it in the classroom. The little repeated-note gestures in the senza battute sections:have always reminded me of similar figures in George Crumb (Eleven Echoes of Autumn, Mikrokosmos I, and other works): In fact, such figures don't appear again in other Rochberg works I know (though I'm sure I've heard only half of his output at best), but they become very important in Crumb's 1970s music. Rochberg wrote … [Read more...]

Yesterday I had the great pleasure of lecturing on Cage and my own music at the Hartt School in Hartford, at the invitation of Robert Carl and Ken Steen. I'm always joking with them about doing endorsements for the place, and I might as well proceed. Hartt is one of the few graduate schools I recommend for my own students and for those who share my anti-establishment musical interests - others are CalArts, Mills College, Yale, and Wesleyan. But Yale and Wesleyan accept only a tiny number of students and are all but impossible to get into; Hartt … [Read more...]