I have often written about the 1989 review in which John Rockwell called my music "naively pictorial," and the fact that I liked it so much that I've ever since adopted "naive pictorialism" as my stylistic moniker. Recently I ran across the 1944 review in Modern Music in which Elliott Carter disparaged Charles Ives's music as - guess what? - "naively pictorial." This is company I will gladly keep. I wish Charlie and I could share a good laugh over that one. I wondered, when I was writing the 4'33" book, whether a renewed involvement with … [Read more...]

I have been so deleriously busy in the last several months that I am having a harder time transitioning into summer than usual. I feel like a puppet whose strings have suddenly been cut. I am so accustomed to being driven by exigencies that the self-management of free time comes as an unfamiliar shock. I have also been a little discouraged by changes in this blog resulting from the reformatting. Journal-meister McLennan has managed to make the "Older Posts" button at the bottom of the main page start working, but, unlike in the older format, … [Read more...]

Composer John Luther Adams is teaching at Harvard this semester, and he had never been to Walden Pond before - only 16 miles away, after all - so I drove out and we did the tour together. As you may recall, John is a hard-core Thoreauvian, I'm the Emersonian. Here we are united, however, on the site of Thoreau's cabin: So sharply do our mental processes differ and complement each other that we talked much about the Emerson-Ives-Gann world of ideas versus the Thoreau-Cage-Adams world. It amazes us that beings so overlapping in sympathy … [Read more...]

In Michigan a few weeks ago, I saw the second copy I'd ever seen of Kathleen Hoover's and John Cage's 1959 book Virgil Thomson: His Life and Music, in the possession of Thomson scholar Jennifer Campbell. The first copy I saw was in Thomson's own apartment in 1989. I realized I had to have it, and of course was able to find a copy in pretty good shape via Amazon, for $75. Hoover wrote the biography, and Cage wrote about Thomson's music, in tremendous detail. Were one of the authors not so famous, the book would not at all deserve republication. … [Read more...]

Thanks to the good music faculty of Central Michigan University, I have a number of new recordings of my music up on my web site: Olana for vibraphone, New World Coming for bassoon and trio, and Minute Symphony (kind of a joke piece, a symphony in 80 seconds) for flute, clarinet, violin, and cello. This was kindly intentional on composer Jay Batzner's part; he programmed pieces that weren't on my web site. Also, Contemporaneous's recording of my string quartet Concord Spiral is now available, and with Pianoteq I've made a nice … [Read more...]

Tomorrow night my string quartet Concord Spiral is being premiered by Contemporaneous, the remarkable new-music ensemble of Bard students run by Dylan Mattingly and David Bloom that's not connected with Bard, they just do it. They give several concerts a year here, and tour from Hudson to NYC. This concert's at 8 PM at the Bard Chapel, and also includes world premieres by Ryan Chase and William Zuckerman. And I'm still on a high from my residency at Central Michigan University, who on Tuesday presented the best-performed one-composer concert … [Read more...]

I'm in Mount Pleasant, Michigan, which the locals freely admit is smack in the middle of one of the flattest expanses of real estate in North America. Were it not for fences and the occasional bridge over a highway, I think I could roll a golf ball from here to Detroit. Here, the music department of Central Michigan University is kindly presenting a concert of my music for this Tuesday evening, and I'll be meeting with composition students until then. I was invited by Director of Music Events John Jacobson, but my host has been composer Jay … [Read more...]

Nervous as I get when I’m in charge of something, the minimalism colloquium I directed at Bard last weekend was nevertheless a continual pleasure. Eight of us musicologists got together to air the more-or-less-completed torsos of our chapters for the Ashgate Companion to Minimalist Music. The Brits (Keith Potter, Pwyll Ap Sion, John Pymm) were the energy behind this, and it seems a rather British way of doing things; I’d never been through such a process before. But we do want to make sure that the different chapters balance each other … [Read more...]

I never liked Facebook. I joined by accident. Someone contacted me asking about a pianist who played my music 30 years ago, and I looked her up and found a Facebook page. I had to join to see her page, and it turned out to be the wrong person anyway. I didn't understand the privacy controls at first, and my Facebook page was a morass of conversations by people I'd mostly never heard of. I figured most of the people who wanted to friend me were musicians advertising their concerts and recordings, and I had no particular reason to turn anyone … [Read more...]

I'm recovering from our highly successful minimalism colloquium I ran at Bard, which I hope to write about soon. Meanwhile, free-jazz-or-whatever pianist Jason Moran sent me a couple more pics from Other Minds. One's me and Louis Andriessen at Djerassi: Another is me soaking up some of that MacArthur vibe from Trimpin and Jason at our hotel in San Francisco:   … [Read more...]

Here, courtesy of OM-Radio director Richard Friedman, were the composers at Other Minds this year: Louis Andriessen, I Wayan Balawan, Han Bennink, myself, Janice Giteck, David A. Jaffe, Jason Moran, Agata Zubel, and Other Minds director (and fantastic composer himself) Charles Amirkhanian: Here I am giving a presentation on my music and suddenly realizing that I had subconsciously plagiarized the theme from "Baywatch": Here the Djerassi landscape takes a long look at me and notable Dutch jazz drummer Han Bennink: Here I am … [Read more...]

More about the recently-ended Other Minds festival soon, but first it is rather urgent to announce that my music department is hosting a colloquium on minimalist music this Saturday and Sunday, March 12 and 13. Eight scholars from Great Britain and America will convene to give papers, and the purpose is to initiate the process of putting together the Ashgate Companion to Minimalist Music, scheduled for publication in 2013. The papers will be presented as follows: Saturday, March 12: 10:00               Keith Potter, … [Read more...]

The Djerassi Foundation: Somewhere out there, beyond Neil Young's cattle ranch, lies the Pacific Ocean: Here  are composer David A. Jaffe, a Djerassi board member whose name I've forgotten, Other Minds co-founder Jim Newman, composers Agata Zubel, Louis Andriessen, I Wayan Balawan, and the legs and hands of photographer John Fago, listening to Janice Giteck's music: Here's Agata, Janice, David, regular PostClassic reader and Other Minds radio producer Richard Friedman (hi Richard!) and me at the far end of a long, hilly, muddy … [Read more...]

This coming Sunday, Feb. 27, my friend Marka Gustavsson and her accompanist Frank Corliss will premiere a new work of mine for viola and piano, Scene from a Marriage, at a 3:00 concert at Olin Auditorium at Bard. Other composers on the concert are all dead: Bach, Enesco, and Stravinsky (Duo concertante, a lovely and uncharacteristically lyrical work). Only I survived! Mwa-ha-ha-ha! (Sorry.) Scene from a Marriage is a rather light, lyrical work itself, and a touch humorous. I'm sad to say I won't be there. For Saturday I'm flying to San … [Read more...]

Last night my philosopher colleague Daniel Berthold gave a reading from his new book The Ethics of Authorship: Communication, Seduction, and Death in Hegel and Kierkegaard. I haven't read the book, but will have to now. He's a very impassioned speaker, and talked eloquently about the implications of writing in one style or another, and how no style is ever ethically neutral. In passing he referred to eleven tricks he'd discovered that help philosophers get their papers published in journals, and how every trick will make your writing worse. So … [Read more...]

I do think of totalism (a style of complex tempo relationships, usually with limited harmonies and some vernacular influence) - or metametrics, as we used to call it in the verdant groves of Postclassica [he mused, stroking his chin] - as a style that crystallized in the 1990s and then waned. OK, we finally said, you can get your ensemble to play rhythms of eight against nine. What else can you do? But my colleague John Halle is one of the great unsung totalists, and occasionally I realize he's still riding higher than ever on the tempo … [Read more...]

We went to see The King's Speech yesterday. Very enjoyable film, superb script, good performances, a classic feel-good movie yet a little unusual in its pacing and subject matter. But I'm not a film critic. Two things struck me. One was that it shared a lot of subject matter with Robert Ashley's operas. Ashley overcame a temporary speech deficiency in high school, and his doctoral research (since Ross Lee Finney prevented him from becoming a composition major) was on stuttering. The tendency of swear words to slow down speech and allow the mind … [Read more...]

I wish I had enough time on my hands to come up with videos of hollywood celebrities performing minimalist music. That's not what I'd do with the time, but I wish I had the time. (h/t Bill Duckworth) … [Read more...]