Twenty-five years ago this week my first Village Voice column appeared. … [Read more...]

A particularly invidious form of comparison arises when critics appoint themselves to the rank of H[er]. M[ajesty's]. Customs and Excise officers whose function it is to spot composers smuggling contraband ideas from one work to another. To ask a composer if he has anything to declare while he is busily unrolling his music to public view is not a very intelligent question. Each act of composition is a declaration. If it did not owe something to somebody it would be intelligible to nobody. Elgar may be said to have "smuggled" the closing pages … [Read more...]

I play around a lot with microtones in class when I probably shouldn't. My counterpoint students, for some reason (and they're not the first class to do so) find the Picardy third hilarious. One day I ended a three-part counterpoint in aeolian with a major third, A-C#, and they laughingly objected. So I offered to split the difference with them and made it a quarter-tone C half-sharp (a lovely 11/9 interval). I played the result with Sibelius's pitch-bend plug-in, and it was deliciously sour. One student immediately dubbed it the "Picardy … [Read more...]

I will generally not use this blog as a forum to draw attention to other events, artists, or organizations, but this one is just too important. Sign up. UPDATE: In fact, the following comment in reaction to a Times article about the UC Davis pepper spray incident is enough to make me return (temporarily) to blogging political: The police use of violence to quash a peaceful protest serves one aim, and one aim only--to intimidate those on campus and off campus from engaging in lawful, peaceful protest throughout our cities. Living in Chapel … [Read more...]

Björk - 46 Voltaire - 317 Marlo Thomas - 73 Rene Magritte - 113 Friedrich Schleiermacher - 243 Goldie Hawn - 66 Coleman Hawkins - 107 Judith Shatin - 62 Kyle Gann - 56 … [Read more...]

The PTYX ensemble in France will be playing a number of my works over the next year in a series they're calling "(d') apres SATIE," of music by living composers who followed Satie in some respect or another. They've certainly got me pegged right. You won't be able to read the light print at the top of the poster, but it lists the composers on their Dec. 1 concert: Birtwistle, Duckworth, Gann, Sellars, Skempton. I presume that's James Sellars, whose music I greatly admire, as I do the others. They're playing my Kierkegaard, Walking and Minute … [Read more...]

I've been doubtful about how much journalistic attention the 50th-anniversary edition of Cage's Silence is going to get, but the distinguished literary critic Marjorie Perloff wrote a column about it in the Los Angeles Review of Books, and made several generous comments about my foreword. I appreciate her point that we all think of Cage as such a sunny character, but in retrospect some of those stories in Silence seem darker than we first thought. … [Read more...]

Nuts and bolts music history today. In my keynote address to the festival of Charles Ives's complete songs, I noted that nothing was known about Anne Timoney Collins, author of the poem on which Ives based his song "The Greatest Man," a poem printed in 1921 in the New York Evening Sun. Liner notes to recordings of this song give no information, or merely mention that she "flourished" in the 1920s. A couple of weeks ago, however, I was contacted by Anne Timoney Collins's god-daughter, and between her and her mother and the internet I've been … [Read more...]

On October 12, the same day I will be in Belgium giving my keynote address at the Third International Conference on Minimalist Music at the University of Leuven, John Sanborn's video to my piece The Planets (as recorded by the indomitable Relache ensemble) will premiere at the Mill Valley Film Festival at 6:45 at the Smith Rafael Film Center, San Rafael, CA. (Above, a still from "Uranus.") A second showing will occur Friday, Oct. 14, at 8:45. The 11-day festival draws 40,000 audience members, and I'm very excited by the opportunity to get one … [Read more...]

Here's a MIDI version of a microtonal rag I just wrote for pianist Aron Kallay, a fantastic West Coast player who's specializing in microtonal MIDI piano performance. It's the second (and shorter) movement of a piece called Every Something Is an Echo of Nothing - the title, as some of you will recall, is a quotation from Cage's Silence. Aron will premiere it next summer - I tend to complete my commissions pretty early. And I made it virtuosic because he's got the chops, but it is humanly playable. Think of the piece next time someone claims … [Read more...]

[UPDATE BELOW] On October 12 the Third Annual Conference on Minimalist Music will open at the University of Leuven, Belgium, with my keynote address, "The Boredom of Eventfulness." (Louis Andriessen will present the other keynote address on the 14th.) One of the urgent topics during the conference, among us Society for Minimalist Music members, will be the proposed location for the Fourth Annual Conference, to take place in 2013. We agreed from the beginning to alternate conferences between Europe and America, but finding an American host … [Read more...]

Yesterday, after almost polishing off my article on postminimalism for The Ashgate Companion to Minimalist Music, I posted a description of my LexisNexis search for the origins of the musical use of the term postminimalism. Perhaps you read it before it disappeared. I traced the term back to a Jon Pareles review of March, 1983, and added some references by Joshua Kosman, K. Robert Schwarz, and Keith Potter. Then the inexhaustible Galen Brown wrote in to tell me about some earlier references I had missed. He was right. But then I noticed, in the … [Read more...]

I am all in favor of peer-review on principle. Like everyone else I am prone to typos, misplaced bits of information, and unnoticed logical inconsistencies. I am thrilled to have these captured and remedied pre-publication. But in my case, the external reader then invariably goes on to characterize my style as unacceptably "breezy," "journalistic," and "colloquial," which means that my sentences flow well and are varied and to the point, so that the reader doesn't have to keep slapping himself to stay awake. And if I don't have enough clout in … [Read more...]

I've been interviewing my good friend Bill Duckworth for an eventual biography or something. He told me about meeting Virgil Thomson in the late '70s. David Stock was giving one of his new music concerts in Pittsburgh, and Duckworth and Thomson were the featured composers. After the pre-concert dinner, Thomson put his arm around Bill and said, "Young man, don't take it personally when you look at me during your performance tonight and see that I've fallen asleep. If you look at me during my piece, I will be asleep then too." Bill says, "And I … [Read more...]

The current issue of the journal American Music (Volume 29, No. 1) contains an article by my Serbian musicologist friend Dragana Stojanovic-Novicic titled "The Carter-Nancarrow Correspondence." It will doubtless be available on the web via JSTOR soon, and if you're not in academia (we professors can access it for free), a private subscription to JSTOR would be well worth the money; I'd say 85% of the footnotes in my scholarly writing lately are references to articles i've found there. Dragana is the person who has gone most thoroughly through … [Read more...]

After giving my lecture on Feldman at yesterday's Feldman festival being presented in Philly by Bowerbird, I spent a half-hour talking to - Feldman's niece! Feldman's personality was so universally described as "avuncular" that I told her she must be one of the most effectively uncle-d people in history. She remembered, as a humiliating experience for a 13-year-old, Feldman (and Cage) being booed in 1964 when Leonard Bernstein performed their music with the Philharmonic. And when I told her that I considered her uncle the greatest composer of … [Read more...]

This Sunday at 4:30 I'm giving a lecture on Morton Feldman as part of American Sublime, Bowerbird's two-weekend tribute to Feldman with performances of several of his most important late works. I come at the end of an all-afternoon series of talks by Feldman experts, of whom I am probably the least knowledgeable - and I know a few things. That event is at Nexus at CraneArts, 1400 N American Street in Philadelphia. Later in the month, the West End String Quartet will be giving four performances of my Concord Spiral in four cities over two … [Read more...]

Speaking of criticisms of Ives, I was a little startled to read this in Martin Bresnick's op-ed in The New York Times yesterday, speaking about the composer Eric Stokes: Eric was the first “Ivesian” composer I ever met. There were very few of them in those days and there are not many now. I always felt vaguely embarrassed by Charles Ives. I found his music too candid, too forthright. It stuck out like a crazy, opinionated uncle at a polite social event — too unsophisticated for a sophisticated new music audience. He afterward says "I am … [Read more...]