Many of you were invigorated by my colleague John Halle's provocative article "Occupy Wall Street, Composers and the Plutocracy", which I posted in this space last year. He's now written a kind of historical prequel, tracing the changing relationship between music and leftist politics through the 20th century: "'Nothing is Too Good for the Working Class': Classical Music, the High Arts and Workers’ Culture." I find particularly intriguing a mid-century view articulated by Hanns Eisler that “simple music does and can reflect only simple … [Read more...]

I am perhaps a little overly susceptible to end-of-the-world scenarios, despite having lived through a few that came to nothing. But I'm a little freaked out about this, and hope that someone knows more than I do. My laptop went dysfunctional from a rare condition two weeks ago - the screen simply went blank and would no longer transmit light, though happily the hard drive, logic board, and desktop remain operational. When I considered the possibility of buying a new laptop (the ill one is less than two years old), I was warned that I would … [Read more...]

The kindly editors of Ashgate Press are scurrying to cross all the final t's and dot the i's of The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music, with the expeditious assistance of the book's three editors, Keith Potter, Pwyll Ap Sion, and myself. The goal is to have it published and available by October, to sell at a special price to the attendees of the Fourth International Conference on Minimalist Music in Long Beach. (The regular price, I understand, will be around $150; it's one of Ashgate's hefty, library-aimed tomes, … [Read more...]

What an unexpected pleasure to see New Music Box absolutely dominated this weekend by my long-time comrade-in-arms Robert Carl - unexpected because, though we've been trading e-mails lately, he never mentioned it was coming up. Two Chicago grad students who managed to get East Coast teaching jobs within a couple of hours of each other, Robert and I have been talking regularly for more than thirty years. I used to think we were from different sides of the tracks, but actually Robert skips all over the tracks. I believe I once described him as … [Read more...]

A few months ago electronic composer Nic Collins sent out a heartfelt questionnaire to several of his new-music maven friends. (I should say, I don't know whether "electronic composer" is still a meaningful term, but I'll qualify it by adding that Collins makes the most touching and humanistic examples of electronically-produced music I've ever heard.) Nic was having a kind of intellectual crisis due to his perception that there was no aesthetic revolution going on among his students comparable to the Cage/sound art/minimalism revolution of the … [Read more...]

Here I am, the third-string composition teacher at a small undergraduate college. I write uncontroversial, peer-reviewed books about Nancarrow, Cage, Ashley, Ives, three of whom are dead. I never sit on the Guggenheim committee, the Fromm commission committee, the Pulitzer committee, and I can count the prize committees I've been on with less than one hand: the Grawemeyer one year, and no one I voted for won; the Herb Alpert Award about ten years ago; and the ASCAP Young Composer Awards about 18 years ago. I used to be a music critic and have … [Read more...]

I noticed about a year ago that the centennial of Le Sacre du Printemps was coming up fast, and I wondered if a big deal would be made about it - of course, the interest has been immense. Amazing to think that a piece that still sounded so revolutionary when I was a kid is now passing into the category of history-more-than-a-century-old. I don't know of a better convenient way to celebrate the anniversary tomorrow than by watching Stephen Malinowski's elegant videos of the entire MIDI information here: Part I and Part II. … [Read more...]

Daniel Felsenfeld asks, as someone does occasionally, what is wrong with being an academic composer. I’m tempted to say, if you have to ask, then you won’t understand the answer; but let me try a new tack. My wife is a professional arts administrator; she started out at the St. Nicholas Theatre in Chicago, founded by David Mamet. She’s back in professional theater again now, but in-between she spent quite a few years presenting theater, dance, and music in academia. Her academic colleagues didn’t always appreciate why she was such a … [Read more...]

Conductor Leonard Slatkin is conducting all four of Charles Ives's numbered symphonies in New York tonight. Good for him. Wish I could be there. It's kind of too bad, then, that he marred the occasion by writing a rather condescending article about the works for New Music Box, with undue but apparently characteristic emphasis on how much he hated Ives's music when he first heard it. I myself found Mahler's symphonies overblown and too grandiosely emotional when I first heard them at 17, but I've been musically mature for quite awhile now and I … [Read more...]

Sorabji enthusiast David Carter has given me a link to Jonathan Powell's world premiere performance of Sorabji's Sequentia Cyclica Super Dies Irae Ex Missa Pro Defunctis (1948-9) - at seven hours, apparently Sorabji's longest, and some say greatest, work. [UPDATE: Oops - Sorabji's Symphonic Variations for piano (1935-7) is nine hours long, so not true.] (After you click the play icon, don't be put off by the brief orchestral passage that announces the show.) It is indeed magnificent and exhausting. UPDATE: David warned me that the piece was … [Read more...]

This time of year I am always preoccupied with getting the students whose senior projects I supervise graduated, and though I am teaching less, I have more seniors (six) than usual (one to three is what most Bard faculty have). In addition to that, this year for the first time, as chair of the arts division I am trying to corral our arts faculty into all the necessary committee slots for next year. The number of committee positions that require tenured faculty is just barely smaller than the number of tenured faculty, and so what with the … [Read more...]

With all of the classical prototypes for musical minimalism that are so perennially trotted out - Perotin, the first six minutes of Das Rheingold, Bolero, Vexations and other Satie works - I'm surprised no one ever mentions the duet between Point and Elsie, "I have a song to sing-O," in Gilbert and Sullivan's The Yeomen of the Guard. The entire, rather long song is sung over a drone on D, and the verses follow a strict additive process, adding four new measures with each verse, somewhat akin to the early works of Glass and Rzewski: This … [Read more...]

We don't often bring guest composers to speak at Bard, and sometimes we feel guilty about that, and make an effort. So a few weeks ago we brought in a fairly well-known composer of my own generation, who told the students that "the problem with minimalism is that it's self-indulgent to make attractive music just because people like it." I spent a long time trying to parse that - that it's self-indulgent to make music that people like. And today a composer slightly older than myself came to Bard - where we house the John Cage Trust, offer a … [Read more...]

I'm a big fan of the comic strip xkcd. I wish today's strip had been around to include in my 4'33" book: … [Read more...]

If there's anything I remember about being a grad student, it's what a ruthless and unobstructed view one has of the world. You are not yet complicit in its ubiquitous ills, you are not yet bought off by its bribes, you have made no moral compromises, and your judgments are made with a relentlessly clear eye. In the intervening decades I have learned to make admissions of self-interest and allowances for human frailty and differences of taste, but I do not at all feel more right today than I was then. A certain amount of willful blindness has … [Read more...]

Andy Lee links me to a lively interview with the resurrected Dennis Johnson. (Wow, I'm blogging this from an Amtrak train to Buffalo, where I'm lecturing on the Concord Sonata for the musicology grad stoonts this afternoon.) … [Read more...]

My analysis of Phil Glass's Einstein on the Beach is now up at New Music Box, thanks to Frank Oteri. … [Read more...]

Via pianist Andy Lee and David McIntire's Irritable Hedgehog record label, Dennis Johnson's November is taking its place in the repertoire. Andy is giving the five-hour, 1959 piano work its European premiere at Cafe Oto in London on March 9 (and I'm thrilled to see that he's playing music by the greatly underrated Paul Epstein there the previous evening). Then he'll give the New York premiere at Issue Project Room on March 16, starting at 2. And Andy's absolutely lovely four-disc recording, which I've been enjoying mp3s of, is now available, … [Read more...]

I'm rather obsessed with bitonality at the moment, and the three composers who are much on my mind and stereo lately - Charles Ives, Kaikhosru Sorabji, and Darius Milhaud - all have a strong bitonal streak in their music, though that's not as well known about the first two as it is about Milhaud, who wrote a book on bitonality. My wife Nancy gave me a three-octave toy piano for my recent birthday, and as a kind of sketchbook I wrote a suite for it called Surrealities; of the seven movements, two are atonal, one tonal, three bitonal, and one … [Read more...]

This Thursday I will escape this long frigid spell we've been having in the northeast - to go to Miami! Where I will give a talk on John Cage's 4'33", at 6:30 Thursday evening, to open the New World Symphony's John Cage festival, which lasts through the 10th. And I'm staying down there for it. Beachfront hotel, smoke a few cigars with my friend Mikel Rouse who's down there doing an installation, sit on the beach, high near 80 degrees every day. If this is what musicology can get me in my old age, I'll take it. I've been thinking lately, these … [Read more...]