My friend George is looking forward to a respite from Cage performances now that the centennial is ending. He says it got so bad he couldn't even enjoy "Silent Night" anymore.   … [Read more...]

A week from today and tomorrow, I'll be in Amsterdam for the University of Amsterdam's conference on Phil Glass's Einstein on the Beach. I'm taking part in a panel discussion January 5, and on the morning of the 6th I'll give a paper on my analysis of Einstein, the writing of which I am interrupting briefly to make this announcement. My interest is in the intuitive and nonlinear (right-brain) structuring of the piece's music, which was such a departure from the process-oriented minimalism of previous years. In fact, while it's easy to see … [Read more...]

People are telling me they've received their copies of my Robert Ashley book from Amazon. (I still have only one myself.) There's one story Bob told me that I didn't include in the book, just because a scholarly book like this didn't seem the right place for it. (Well, there are several stories, but one he didn't ask me to keep to myself.) When Bob was a toddler his mother and grandmother were giving him a bath in the sink, and he managed to stick his finger into an empty electrical socket. He lost consciousness and they frantically tried to … [Read more...]

For reasons not yet clear to me, the Oxford University Press blog has been doing a series of articles about Mars, and they asked me to write an entry on Mars and music, from an astrological point of view, which is now up. They are plotting some major announcement about Mars, and apparently I am one of the few musicologist-composer-writer-astrologers around since the death of Dane Rudhyar. I almost declined, but then reflected that Uranus is trining my ascendent, which suggests that benefits may come my way from totally out-of-left-field … [Read more...]

A single copy of my new book Robert Ashley has just arrived in the mail, inexplicably delayed these last few weeks but just as welcome now. Amazon is still giving the official release date as Dec. 16 10, so perhaps there's time to get it for Christmas. A few weeks ago I put what are, for now, the finishing touches on my Robert Ashley web site of musical examples, with charts and transcriptions from six of the operas, the piano sonata, and Outcome Inevitable. While musical examples in the book would have been nice, these have the advantage … [Read more...]

From the Society for Minimalist Music website, here's the invitation for the Fourth International Conference on Music and Minimalism, Long Beach, CA, 3-6 October 2013: You are kindly invited to submit proposals for the Fourth International Conference on Music and Minimalism, jointly hosted by UCLA and the California State University, Long Beach on the campus of CSULB in Long Beach, CA, 3-6 October 2013. All scholars interested in music and minimalism are invited to submit paper proposals. The conference welcomes all papers concerning … [Read more...]

A recording of my 2011 orchestra piece Serenity Meditation has arrived, courtesy of the Bowling Green State University New Music Festival, and conducted by J.J. Pearse. The piece, curated for this event by John Luther Adams, is based on three Ives songs, mostly "Serenity" and to a smaller extent "Sunrise" and "General William Booth Enters into Heaven." It's dedicated to Neely Bruce, who commissioned the keynote address in which I mentioned those three songs as examples of Ivesian stasis. I've had so little experience with orchestras that it's … [Read more...]

When I moved my web site I didn't re-upload the four-plus-hour recording Sarah Cahill and I made in Kansas City of Dennis Johnson's minimalist piano classic November. Several people have asked me to reinstall it and I keep forgetting, but it's up here now. Andy Lee is recording the piece for the Irritable Hedgehog label, so there will be an excellent commercial studio recording out soon. I'll let you know. … [Read more...]

"I might end up never firing the pistol. Contrary to Chekhov's principle." "That's fine, too," Tamaru said. "Nothing could be better than not firing it. We're drawing close to the end of the twentieth century. Things are different from back in Chekhov's time. No more horse-drawn carriages, no more women in corsets. Somehow the world survived the Nazis, the atomic bomb, and modern music." - Haruki Murakami, 1Q84, p. 1108 And I started reading the book because it mentioned Janacek's Sinfonietta in the second … [Read more...]

Since his memorial service I've been desperately longing to hear William Duckworth's Simple Songs about Sex and War, but I couldn't find my old tape of it. (There's a commercial CD, but the performance is weird and too disappointing to listen to.) Finally I ran across an mp3 on a hard drive - he and Nora must have given it to me last time I visited - and for all those similarly susceptible I post it here. Based on poems written for Bill by Hayden Carruth, it is the perfect postclassical song cycle, sung by the incomparable Barbara Noska (a … [Read more...]

I am not much given to commemorating accidents of the calendar - anniversaries, centenaries, and so on - but given my history with the subject, I would be remiss, I think, if I failed to note that Conlon Nancarrow was born a hundred years ago today. Next weekend I will be in Berkeley for the Nancarrow at 100 conference/festival being presented by Other Minds. I have been interviewed frequently these last few months for radio programs and newspaper articles on Cage and Nancarrow, and I haven't received many of the URLs at which those interviews … [Read more...]

Tomorrow afternoon will hear the world premiere of my chamber orchestra piece Serenity Meditation at the Bowling Green New Music Festival. Written in the summer of 2011, it's based on Charles Ives's song Serenity, which I've always wished was much longer. I'm grateful to John Luther Adams for curating it; he's there now, and speaking this afternoon. I had hoped to go, but with Bill Duckworth dying, I've already missed more classes than I could afford this semester, and my course continuity is threatening to get out of control. … [Read more...]

I let myself get talked into becoming chair of the arts division at my school this year. No musician had ever done it before. I get to teach one less course per semester for doing it, so in effect my position is 40 percent administrative for the next three years. This does not come naturally to me at all. What comes naturally to me is being the disgruntled rebel outsider, not the authority figure who's charged with haranguing his colleagues to live up to their responsibilities. Problem is, that seems to be pretty much true of all the other … [Read more...]

In 2004 I completed a setting, for soprano and soundfile (tape? CD?) of a wild text by humorist S.J. Perelman called "Scenario." I haven't been able to find what year the text was first published, but I suppose Perelman (one of the funniest writers ever, and with an unparalleled genius for wordplay) had been slaving away in Hollywood, where he worked on the scripts for the early Marx Brothers movies. "Scenario" is a stream-of-consciousness satire of a scenario for a movie, a hysterical profusion of not only scene descriptions and actions but … [Read more...]

I'm remiss in not having let you know earlier that a tribute concert to Bill Duckworth is taking place tomorrow night (Tuesday) at Le Poisson Rouge in Manhattan, at 7:30 (doors open at 6:30). Neely Bruce, Lois Svard, Margaret Leng Tan, Tom Buckner, and others will perform his indelible music. … [Read more...]

[UPDATED] It strikes me lately that there are basically two types of performances in a composer's career, or at least in a half-assed composing career like mine. One is, you're invited to an event, they offer to play a piece of yours, it gets one rehearsal the day before, maybe, and they nominally play it. The other is, a performer (in my case, Sarah Cahill, Lois Svard, Relache, Aron Kallay) chooses to tour with a piece of your music, and he/she/they is/are highly motivated to show the world what wonderful performers they are, and so of course … [Read more...]

One sentence in Essays Before a Sonata has already cost me more time and trouble, I think, than the entire sonata:  "And there sits the little old spinet piano Sophia Thoreau gave to the Alcott children, on which Beth played the old Scotch airs, and played at the Fifth Symphony." The full paragraph sounds as though Ives is describing Orchard House in Concord, Mass., after a visit there, which is entirely plausible; Orchard House opened to the public as a museum in 1912, Ives wrote the essays in 1919, and he and Harmony liked to visit … [Read more...]

A memorial service for Bill Duckworth will be held this Friday, September 28, from 5 to 8 PM in the penthouse of Westbeth Artist Housing, 55 Bethune Street in New York City. There had been a memorial for John Cage there, and Bill wanted his memorial there as well for that reason. A tribute concert is being planned for Oct. 2; more on that later.   … [Read more...]

Wednesday morning at 9:15, Sept. 19, in Jordan Hall at New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, I'm giving the keynote address for a Harry Partch conference hosted by NEC and Northeastern University where my incredibly brilliant former student Anthony DeRitis runs the music department. It's scheduled (my keynote, that is) to run until 10:30, and I'm making it as long as possible to leave no room for questions, and then I'm DONE. All I have to do for the next three days is listen to microtonal performances and papers on aspects of Partch. My … [Read more...]

For those who may not know Bill Duckworth's music, David McIntire is making Andy Lee's lovely recording of The Time Curve Preludes on Irritable Hedgehog a free download through Sunday night. What hurts today is the visceral sense I have that Bill's sense of humor has disappeared from the earth. Bill had an attractive knack of finding life humorously absurd. Seen through his eyes, the world seemed petty, laughable, and nonthreatening, like it wasn't big enough to scare him. Even though I hadn't seen him much lately, I already miss that, like … [Read more...]