Composer Andrew Violette writes in to tell me that the only movement of 4'33" he really likes is the second. The others, he says, are too short. … [Read more...]

There were so many sides to Art Jarvinen that I can't possibly represent most of them here, but I offer several drops from his mercurial musical output, some of them commercially unavailable, others on extremely obscure labels:Egyptian Two-Step - the first piece I heard, and which made me sit up and take notice with its aerosol spray cans as percussion, performed by the E.A.R. UnitBreaking the Chink - performed by Icebreakerfrom Sgt. Pecker, his Beatles parody:Taller than JesusMan, My Guitar Playing Really ReeksWhere Can I Bury My Shark?9 … [Read more...]

[TWO UPDATES BELOW] I begin the morning blindsided by the terrible news that one of the wildest and most imaginative composers of my generation, Art Jarvinen, has passed away at age 54. He was a bassist, percussionist, and co-founder of the California E.A.R. Unit, and one of the most thoroughly integrated rock-classical musicians around. His pieces Murphy Nights and The Paces of Yu were staples of my totalist lectures. He put out a scabrously funny Beatles satire CD called Sgt. Pecker. He sent me transcriptions of music he'd played with Captain … [Read more...]

I was happy to read this in the New York Times, in an essay by novelist Michael Cunningham (The Hours):I teach writing, and one of the first questions I ask my students every semester is, who are you writing for? The answer, 9 times out of 10, is that they write for themselves. I tell them that I understand -- that I go home every night, make an elaborate cake and eat it all by myself. By which I mean that cakes, and books, are meant to be presented to others. And further, that books (unlike cakes) are deep, elaborate interactions between … [Read more...]

Alex Ross has penned a long, informative essay on John Cage in this week's New Yorker (subscription required to read the whole thing, but you all subscribe, right?) which kindly quotes my 4'33" book at various points. More informatively to me, it also relies heavily on the new biography of Cage, Begin Again by Kenneth Silverman, which looks to be admirably thorough and chock full of new information, and which Amazon lists as due to appear Oct. 19. One bit I didn't know: I'm on record as being a little dubious about Schoenberg's having … [Read more...]

I've always had a fascination with canons, even long before I wrote a book about a composer (Nancarrow) whose major works were mostly canons. In the late 1980s, when I was in the habit of lecturing on the history of Chicago's new-music scene at the School of the Art Institute and other places, I ran across, in a Chicago used bookstore, a little book called Canonical Studies, by Bernhard Ziehn (1845-1912, pictured). I recognized the name. Ziehn was one of two German composer-theorists who were living in Chicago when Ferruccio Busoni toured … [Read more...]

My article on Nancarrow for IRCAM's contemporary music documentation archive is now online - in French, of course. I couldn't write it in French, but I did brush up enough of my high-school French (three years) to carry on the relevant correspondence in that language. Amusingly, the archive is called BRAHMS, which musicologist Nicolas Donin tells me was originally derived from something like "Base de données Relationnelles Hypermédia sur la Musique de notre Siècle" - though no one now remembers for sure, and it's now called something … [Read more...]

One of the most striking things Morton Feldman said when I worked with him briefly in 1975 was, "In the '60s, my students were all using a tempo marking of quarter-note = 60. Now my students are all using 72." That was a revelation to me: that even something as neutral as a tempo marking might be a cliché, a learned behavior, an unconscious imitation, a hint of groupthink. Ever since then, for 35 years, every time I've put down a tempo marking, I've thought, is this really the tempo I want? Did I see another piece with this tempo lately? Am I … [Read more...]

In response to my writing on the subject, my attention has been drawn to an article, "The Cowell-Ives Relationship: A New Look at Cowell's Prison Years," by Leta Miller and Rob Collins, in an issue of the excellent journal American Music (Vol. 23, No. 4 (Winter, 2005), pp. 473-492) - don't know how I missed it, since I receive the journal. The story has always been that, once Cowell was imprisoned in San Quentin from 1936 to 1940 on a homosexual morals charge, Ives was disgusted to learn about Cowell's homosexuality, and cut off all contact … [Read more...]

On our recent trip to Concord, we took a side trip to Salem, where my friends Jim Dalton and Maggi Smith-Dalton, microtonal composers and early-American-music experts, took me to the grave of Jones Very (1813-1880), the temporarily-mad Emerson poet protégé whose ecstatic sonnets I set to music in my Transcendental Sonnets. (Jim's an isolated, Johnstonian just-intonationist in the officially 72-tet Boston crowd.) Very's tomb is in the Old South Cemetery, founded in 1689, and quite visible from a fairly busy street. Just one member in a family … [Read more...]

Ineresting evening, we had tonight. We had a meeting of all the Bard composers, faculty and students. In the course of it a student challenged me, Joan Tower, and George Tsontakis to name the Schoenberg pieces we really like. I don't think Joan and George will begrudge me reporting the meager results. Joan and I basically agreed on the Op. 11 piano pieces, especially the second one. George and I agreed that Moses und Aron is "great" - the two acts that he wrote. I'll never forgive Arnold for not finishing his magnum opus just because he … [Read more...]

In my pedantically wonkish way, I'm excited to be teaching my sonata-form classes with William E. Caplin's book Classical Form (Oxford, 1998), as I have been for several years now. For those who don't know it, Caplin went through the complete sonata-form works of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, and catalogued everything that happens in all of them - what theme the development starts with, what relative keys get referred to in the codas, and like that. I don't use the book as a textbook: even though Caplin's writing style is admirably clear, it's … [Read more...]

I'm not a critic anymore, and don't want to be one. But I am bothered by a couple of things lately, and hope that a word to the wise won't be resented. (Like anything I say ever goes unresented by a lot of people.) I will, at least, refuse to specify what music I'm talking about.There is, in general, a problem with postminimalist opera. I keep hearing new operas that, to my ears, all keep making the same mistake. Namely: it sounds like the composer writes the instrumental accompaniment first, and then lays the vocal line over it. The vocal … [Read more...]

I hadn't listened to Schubert's Fifth Symphony in far too long, and I did today. I have a special relationship with that piece - or rather, it has one with me. It was one of the pieces I heard on recording from my first weeks out of the womb. I knew how it went before I could talk. And whenever I play it, I'm transported into feeling like I'm a child hearing music again, as something magical and captivating that I can't figure out. It links me to a preverbal relationship with music, and reminds me, in a way unlike any other work, of how music … [Read more...]

The grim history of the twentieth century - something Brahms or Franck could never have foreseen, to say nothing of Matthew Arnold or Charles O'Connell - played its part as well both in discrediting the idea of redemptive culture and in undermining the authority of its adherents. The literary critic George Steiner, one such adherent, after a lifetime devoted (in his words) to "the worship - the word is hardly exaggerated - of the classic," and to the propagation of the faith, found himself baffled by the example of the culture-loving Germans of … [Read more...]

We went to Concord, Mass., a couple of weeks ago. It's my default short-vacation spot. I love the bookstores: The Barrow, the Concord Bookshop, Books with a Past, as well as the gift shops at local museums and authors' houses. I always find a dozen books there I didn't know about, many about Transcendentalism. And we walk around Walden Pond, and I wonder how much quieter it might be if Thoreau hadn't turned it into such a shrine.  In The Barrow, I was going through poetry, and my eye ran across a title: Sonata Mulattica. I did a double … [Read more...]

If you imagine that I'm relentlessly driving myself to complete my Robert Ashley book before school starts, you would be correct. I'm not quite going to make it, but I'm very close. This is in addition to having written a piano piece, a viola piece, and two string quartets this summer (and reading three volumes of Taruskin's Oxford music history). I'm never again going to work this hard during the summer without a compelling financial incentive. This week I transferred all of my interviews with Bob to compact discs, and found that they fill up … [Read more...]

Oops - I was supposed to help publicize that microtonal wunderkind Jacob Barton is giving a concert tonight on the microtonal instrument he's invented, the udderbot. It's at 8 PM at the Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center. In Illinois, in other words. He's playing his own version of my piece Fractured Paradise, along with works by Susan Parenti, Aaron K. Johnson, Joseph Pehrson, Edwin Harkins, Bohuslav Martinu, and, well, there are a lot of names as you can see for yourself. The udderbot is made of a glass bottle, a rubber glove, and … [Read more...]

I found this curious, that in these days in which the erstwhile existence of an Uptown-Downtown split in new music has been forcibly shoved down the memory hole, an organization called The Field is sponsoring a workshop to bring Uptown and Downtown artists together. Their definitions:For the purposes of this program:• An Uptown Artist is an artist who lives and/or focuses their creative activities or aesthetic above 110th Street.• A Downtown Artist is an artist who lives and/or focuses their creative activities or aesthetic south of 14th … [Read more...]

You can't hear my son Bernard say anything in this Revolver magazine interview with his black metal band Liturgy, but you can watch him look cool. He claims the things he said got edited out, but he's kind of a quiet guy. Didn't get it from me. I'm shy around people I don't know, but I tend to blossom when you stick a microphone in my face.Bernard Gann, Hunter Hunt-Hendrix … [Read more...]