Archives for 2014

All that is currently clear is that Essays After a Sonata: Charles Ives’s Concord will be delayed, as musicologists argue over whether I’ve flattered them enough. But they can’t silence me, and as I’ve been chary of posting excerpts of the book for fear of getting scooped on some of my ideas, it is perhaps time to spring some of those ideas out into the world. This way you can judge the book, piecemeal, for yourselves, and savor the naughty thrill of reading a book someone doesn’t want you to read. Of course, it may be – who knows? – that my blog readers will quickly tire of my personal insights and demand that I add in more and more quotations from other Ives books already in print. In that case I will be humbled, and forced to concede that the musicologists were right after all.

So I start here with the passages explaining why I think Ives’s opposition between substance and manner may have had its source in the art critic John Ruskin. In an early review of my book proposal, an anonymous prof sternly warned me that the subject of Ives’s intellectual inheritance had been exhaustively mined by Peter Burkholder in his Charles Ives: The Ideas Behind the Music, and that I would find nothing new to report. Peter’s book is indeed excellent, but Ruskin is not mentioned in it (nor is Tolstoy, Hegel, or Henry Sturt, all of whom I discuss in terms of their appearances in Essays Before a Sonata). Peter had his priorities and I have mine. My book does not render his superfluous, nor vice versa. It would be as ludicrous to fault him for not doing what I did as it would to fault me for not duplicating him. There is room in Ives’s world for at least two people to frame complementary narratives of his mental development.

One recurring idea in my book is that when one traces the quotations in Ives’s Essays to their source, the original context often tells us more about what Ives was thinking than the specific quote does. (All pages numbers within the text refer to Ives’s Essays Before a Sonata.)

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From Chapter 4: Emerson: The Essay

…A sentence from the 19th-century art critic John Ruskin (1819-1900) at this point seems almost like a non-sequitur, but carries an unsuspected weight once one is aware of its original context: “Suppose I like the finite curves best, who shall say I’m right or wrong? No one. It is simply a question of experience [p. 23].” This is from a chapter in Modern Painters11 in which Ruskin is discussing the geometry of forms which imitate nature. He demonstrates, first, that curves such as a circle or oval are less pleasing than more gradually expanding curves that reach out to infinity (the spiral of a nautilus shell, for example), because we can perceive their (the former’s) endpoint and necessary repetitiveness; and, secondly, that the curves of a landscape tend toward the spiraling and infinite because of the natural forces which created them (for instance, a river flowing downhill gains more momentum as it descends, and gradually increases the angle at which it cuts into a hill; Ruskin was a natural historian before painting became his passion).

And so, contrary to what one might think on reading Ives’s isolated quotation of him, Ruskin is not acquiescing to the subjectivity of the perception of beauty, but indeed grounding it in a kind of geometrically natural objectivity. Ruskin continues: “[W]hen we find on examination that every form which… has been received as lovely,… is composed of these infinite curves, and that Nature uses them for every important contour, small or large, which she desires to recommend to human observance, we shall not, I think, doubt that the preference of such lines is a sign of healthy taste, and true instinct.”12 In other words, those with little experience might find the simpler, more self-contained forms more pleasing, but a more developed perception will learn to recognize that the curves that point to infinity, if more challenging to perceive, are closer to nature and therefore more profound. Thus Ives uses Ruskin, if you’re aware what Ruskin was really saying, to justify the more complex curves of the Concord Sonata as more analogous to nature, thus more satisfying to comprehend in the long run, than the quickly-apprehended outlines of a simple sonata form. And we can cite, though Ives doesn’t, this explicit example of Emerson’s agreement on this point: “A beauty not explicable is dearer than a beauty which we can see to the end of.”13 (We will have much more to say about Ruskin in Chapter 12 where we discuss Ives’s Epilogue.)

11 Ruskin, Modern Painters, Vol. 4, IV. Banks, Chapter XVII (London: George Allen, 1902), p. 283.
12 Ibid, pp. 283-84.
13 Emerson, “The Poet,” in Essays, p. 212.

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From Chapter 12: A Harmony of Imperfections: The Epilogue

…Let us address more directly, then, before going further, the aspects of substance and manner. We know of no precedent for Ives’s use of these specific terms to indicate higher and lower artistic values, but 19th-century criticism is rife with such categorical oppositions.7 David B. Robinson notes in this connection Emerson’s distinction between genius and talent in his essay on “The Poet”: “Talent may frolic and juggle; Genius realizes and adds.”8 Ives’s demotion of the composer Max Reger from “genius” to “man of ‘talent’” on page 88 is perhaps an echo. But there seems to me to be a striking parallel between Ives’s project here and that of John Ruskin in Volume 2 of Modern Painters (1846). Ives quotes Ruskin only three times, but the contexts from which those quotes are taken are so apposite as to make me think Ruskin’s influence on Ives was more pervasive than has been noticed. The Emerson essay mentions Ruskin’s “imagination penetrative”; the “Imagination Penetrative” chapter of Modern Painters is preceded by one on the “Imagination Associative,” which Ives certainly also must have read. Here Ruskin draws a distinction between fancy and imagination parallel to Ives’s manner and substance, though referring to the artist’s process rather than the quality of the art. He describes the painter of mere fancy:

When an unimaginative painter is about to draw a tree… he probably lays on his paper such a general form as he knows to be characteristic of the tree to be drawn, and such as he believes will fall in agreeably with the other masses of his picture, which we will suppose partly prepared. When this form is set down, he assuredly finds it has done something he did not intend it to do. It has mimicked some prominent line, or overpowered some necessary mass. He begins pruning and changing, and, after several experiments, succeeds in obtaining a form that does no material mischief….

Where the powers of fancy are very brilliant, the picture becomes highly interesting; if her images are systematically and rightly combined, and truthfully rendered, it will become even impressive and instructive; if wittily and curiously combined, it will be captivating and entertaining.9

Sounds like manner to me. Ruskin then describes the process of an artist who is capable of imagination:

If… the combination made is to be harmonious, the artist must induce in each of its component parts (suppose two only, for simplicity’s sake,) such imperfection as that the other shall put it right. If one of them be perfect by itself, the other will be an excrescence. Both must be faulty when separate, and each corrected by the presence of the other. If he can accomplish this, the result will be beautiful; it will be a whole, an organized body with dependent members;—he is an inventor. If not, let his separate features be as beautiful, as apposite, or as resemblant as they may, they form no whole. They are two members glued together. He is only a carpenter and joiner.10

The one painter composes a painting from images of nature stored in his memory, each one of them perfect independently; the other imagines the painting as a whole, full of imperfections in the individual forms which harmoniously balance each other and create a texture reflecting nature in its complexity and underlying emotive expression. (Ruskin’s visual examples, too lengthy to cite here, are impressive and worth looking up.) Though Ruskin is difficult to quote succinctly, here he is again on the fanciful painter:

Now, I suppose that through the whole of this process, he has been able to refer to his definite memory or conception of nature for every one of the fragments he has successfully added… But, as far as the process of combination is concerned, it is evident that, from beginning to end, his laws have been his safety, and his plague has been his liberty. He has been compelled to work at random or under the guidance of feeling only, whenever there was anything left to his own decision… He has walked as a drunken man man on a broad road; his guides are the hedges; and, between these limits, the broader the way, the more difficult his progress.11

Now, imagine how much Ives may have recognized himself in the subsequent contrasting portrait of the imaginative painter, and what a heady compliment it must have felt:

The advance of the imaginative artist is precisely the reverse of this. He owns no laws. He defies all restraint, and cuts down all hedges. There is nothing within the limits of natural possibility that he dares not do, or that he allows the necessity of doing. The laws of nature he knows; these are to him no restraint. They are his own nature. All other laws or limits he sets at utter defiance; his journey is over an untrodden and pathless plain… He saw his tree, trunk, boughs, foliage, and all, from the first moment; not only the tree, but the sky behind it….12

Ruskin’s division is more severe than Ives’s: a painter is capable of either fancy or imagination, but the processes are mutually exclusive. And, like Ives (with his Beethoven/Strauss pairing), he draws this line not between good art and bad, but between sublime, permanently relevant art – and pretty good art that people like, but which does not manifest eternal values and will probably go out of fashion. In the “Imagination Penetrative” chapter, Ruskin takes Dante as an Imagination example in poetry, and Milton (no minor poetaster) as the poet of mere Fancy, whose description of Satan “is too far detailed, and deales too much with externals; we feel rather the form of the fire-waves than their fury, we walk upon them too securely….”13

Now the reader has in mind the very clear distinction (possibly too speciously clear to be true, once one contemplates it) that Ives had in mind before writing, and that he was going to recreate in the sphere of music; this juxtaposition may throw the entire essay into relief. The word fancy was not going to retain any intellectual heft by 1919. In using substance and manner, he focuses on not the creative faculty of the artist but qualities of the artwork, which already reduces the rhetorical dynamism a notch, and is going to be harder to make stick in a medium as immaterial as music. He does not possess Ruskin’s phenomenal powers of description. The aspects that make music transcendent are not as easy to pinpoint as those of poetry and painting. A Ruskin-like analysis of why the “Archduke” Trio is an objectively better piece than Also Sprach Zarathustra might serve his purpose, but would mire him in endless details. In 1846 Ruskin was straining to preserve an Enlightenment tradition that landscape painting was a scientific branch of natural philosophy, and that, rightly done, it imparted true scientific knowledge of natural forms14; by 1919, artistic perception had come to be understood as more subjective, and Ives has Henry Sturt on his other shoulder lamenting the impossibility of objective criteria. But as part of his philosophical and moral (but not artistic) conservatism, he feels the force of Ruskin’s dichotomy.

I would venture that by not making more of his Ruskin quotes, Ives is soft-pedaling his indebtedness; possibly recognizing that in the 19-teens Ruskin’s reputation was at the bottom of a slump, and would not aid his case.15 In a sense, Ives himself was in the position of the great Romantic painter J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851), whom Ruskin began writing Modern Painters in 1843 to defend: pursuing goals outside the boundaries of the art form as currently understood, but which Ruskin could justify as embodying “a more essential truth than is seen at the surface of things.”16 Ives, too retiring to even bring up his own music, is hamstrung trying to do for himself what Ruskin did for Turner. It’s fascinating, though, that Ruskin pointed to imagination as a harmony of imperfections conceived as a unity, as opposed to a collection of self-sufficient types. I think we could recognize the Concord Sonata in that characterization.

And so Ives Ruskinizes as best he can. Substance (to collect Ives’s scattered near-synonyms) has to do with reality, quality, spirit, character, spiritual consciousness, inspiration, affection, a divine spark, and truth. To return to his Emerson essay, “It gives the sincerity to the constant spiritual hopefulness we are always conscious of, and… a note of exultation in the victories of ‘the innate virtues’ of man [p. 31].” Paraphrasing one of Ives’s quotations of Thoreau (p. 32), it “satisfies hunger” rather than merely “gratifies the palate.” If an artist’s work lacks substance, it may, in a sense, be not his own fault (or at least not from lack of hard work), except insofar as every person is responsible for his or her own spiritual development. An artist needs to cultivate a kind of radical honesty, a larger insight into the workings of the human mind not based on his own education or prejudices, but in a universal sympathy, let us say even a love of one’s fellow man that makes him or her want to reach out through art to share with the world. As Ives states it most clearly,

Substance in a human-art-quality suggests the body of a conviction which has its birth in the spiritual consciousness, whose youth is nourished in the moral consciousness, and whose maturity as a result of all this growth is then represented in a mental image. This is appreciated by the intuition, and somehow translated into expression by “manner” – a process always less important than it seems…. (p. 75)

The superior artist is, then, a superior person, or at least one who has overcome his or her own psychic limitations. “The finer the sense of justice, the better poet,” writes Emerson.17 A mean, petty, limited, and/or unevolved person could not produce art of surpassing substance.18 Ives seems to have been quite serious about this. In an insert intended for a possible second edition of the Essays (included by Boatwright as a footnote, since Ives didn’t specify where it should be placed), Ives hypothesizes about an artist who pretends to value freedom when he really means selfishness: “He must be free to express his great soul but forgets, that unfair & impatient, or even indecent treatment of his wife – means that he hasn’t got a great soul to start with… [p. 253]” And thus we must displace Charles Dickens, who treated his wife shamefully (and who was, incidentally, one of Ives’s favorite authors), from among the novelists of substance based on his biography, for the sake of whatever supposed traces it may have left in his fiction. (Likewise, forget about Ernest Hemingway.) Ives goes on to describe a composer who left his family to fend for themselves: “Look into this man’s or any similar character’s (art) music – live with it long enough – & you will gradually feel the decadent part of the man’s soul – making a strenuous perhaps beautiful sound, – but you can’t live with it long – any more than he could live with his family….”19

Such a belief in the necessary morality of great artists, which seems to arise in history periodically, is one of Ives’s affinities with Ruskin, who wrote that “no supreme power of art can be attained by impious men,”20 and, “It is, of course, true that many of the strong masters had deep faults of character, but their faults always show in their work.”21 The German Idealists (of whom we can take Sturt as a neo-Hegelian) separated knowledge and morality into independent spheres, and believed that art transcended its social context; Ruskin, coming from another tradition, fused art with morality, locating truth outside art and insisting that art be judged according to knowledge.22 There are, in the literature, innumerable anecdotes of famous artists and composers acting selfishly or vindictively, and occasionally someone will cite a munificent and generous human being who was, nevertheless, a mediocre artist (in fact, Ives had a good friend who he was forced to admit was just such an example: the composer John Becker23). Still, the correlation Ives posits here is a perennially attractive one. We run into a different strain of the same conviction among those who suspect T.S. Eliot’s poetry on the basis of his antisemitism, or Ezra Pound’s poetry due to his public advocacy for Italian fascism.

7 Burkholder notes that Ives’s mentor John Cornelius Griggs uses the words content and manner to discuss Debussy in Griggs, “Claude Debussy,” in Wilbur L. Cross, ed., Yale Review, Vol. 1 (New Haven: Yale Publishing Association, Inc., 1912), pp. 484-494. But they are not used as oppositional categories. Charles Ives: The Ideas Behind the Music, p. 71.
8 David B. Robinson, “Charles Ives on Emerson and Art,” in Cody & Budd, On Emerson, p. 186.
9 Ruskin, Modern Painters (edited and abridged by David Barrie), (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), pp. 249, 247.
10 Ibid., p. 247.
11 Ibid., p. 250.
12 Ibid., pp. 250-51.
13 Ibid., p. 255.
14 Teukolsky, The Literate Eye, p. 36.
15 As a book on Ruskin would note in 1932, Ruskin’s reputation had fallen because he “invariably introduced a social, moral, or religious interest into the brilliant but dictatorial criticism of pictures.” Henry Ladd, The Victorian Morality of Art: an Analysis of Ruskin’s Esthetic (New York: Ray Long and Richard Smith, 1932); quoted in Teukolsky, The Literate Eye, p. 26. Plus, of course, the painter Whistler’s 1878 libel suit against Ruskin had made the latter look stodgy and a little ridiculous to the younger generation at the time.
16 Ruskin, Modern Painters (edited and abridged by David Barrie), (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), p. 266.
17 Emerson, “The Sovereignty of Ethics,” p. 179.
18 Hegel, though, with respect to musicians, provides a dissenting observation: “we often enough see very great expertness in musical composition, as also in execution, subsist along with remarkable barrenness of mind and character.” Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, p. 32.
19 Ives, Essays, p. 253.
20 Ruskin, Modern Painters (edited and abridged by David Barrie), (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), p. 238.
21 Ruskin, Lectures on Art: III: The Relation of Art to Morals, §72.
22 Mary Ann Stankiewicz, “The Eye Is a Nobler Organ,” Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 18, No. 2 (Summer, 1984), pp. 55-56.
23 Budiansky, Mad Music, p. 232.

All material copyright © Kyle Gann 2014

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Had some previous book or article alerted me to this Ruskin-Ives connection, I would quote and footnote it with an obsequiousness that would make your head spin. But I had to come up with this myself.

Stay tuned, if interested, for more soon.

One of the things my Concord Sonata book is being criticized for is that all I do is analyze the music. Apparently I’m supposed to be bringing in multidisciplinary approaches: I dunno, historiography, reception history, gender studies. Musicology has moved on from the mere analysis of music, and by analyzing a piece I must be implicitly asserting that all I care about is the glorification of Dead White Males and the Great Western Canon. I am accused of a “music in a vacuum” approach (I thought that was called music theory) – and seriously, that’s being taken as a reason to prevent publication of the book. But as I say in the book, you have to see what something is before you can compare it to everything else in the world, and a lot of nonsense has been written about the Concord because no one’s ever written a close textual analysis of it. And what if analyzing music is what I’m trained at, and what I’m good at? Really, musicologists? To ply the trade I was academically trained in makes me a racist and sexist troglodyte? No good insight can some merely from close examination of a complex score? Even if I’m not trained in those other fields, even if other people are already doing that work, I have to do it too? As Larry Polansky once said to me, “Composers are now doing the work that musicologists used to do, while the musicologists are all off doing gender studies.” And now composers aren’t even allowed to do that in books anymore.

I was recently at a reception where I found myself among three other authors who had written admirable, major books on American music. Every one of them said he or she was thinking about putting their next book on the internet, specifically to avoid the peer-review process. I empathized completely. I’m going through it now with my Concord Sonata book, and I’m committed to it one more time, for my Arithmetic of Listening book with U. of Illinois Press, and, because microtonalists are so argumentative, I’m already dreading that ordeal. It’s mission creep: peer review is supposed, one assumes, to prevent the publication of misinformation, to verify that an author knows what he’s talking about, but anonymous readers take the opportunity to tell you how they would have written the book and push you towards conformity with their opinions. “I can’t recommend publishing this book until the author rewrites it to agree with my views!” And it’s insidious: a phalanx of scholars who have decided that a certain reading of the facts is the only legitimate one can prevent a writer who disagrees from being published; enough like-minded book reviewers can succeed, for a time, in stifling dissent. Peer review’s effect is to discourage all would-be writers except for the most sycophantically conformist. I find that just mentioning peer review is often enough to make a colleague’s face wrinkle in disgust.

So far, I have only been a reviewer in the cases of young, inexperienced scholars on their first book. They tend to make typical mistakes. The ambitious young scholar (the male especially) is eager to show off how smart he is, yet paradoxically convinced that his readers have read all the same up-to-date books and articles he has, and so he makes confoundingly elliptical reference to abstruse concepts and obscure writers that haven’t yet entered public currency. That was exactly me, at age 29. And my role as reader has been mostly to say, “You seem to know your business, but I have no idea what you’re talking about, and since I don’t want to read all those other books before I can read yours, will you please unpack your references and provide some context?” I tell them what I can’t understand as a reader, but I would never presume to tell them how to write the book, nor what opinions to express. But then, this isn’t really peer review, because I’m an old, experienced writer looking at a first-timer. And I insist that when scholars who have published less than I have are reviewing my work, that’s not really peer review either, but the less experienced taking potshots at the more experienced. I think by the time you’re on your fifth or sixth book and still in good academic standing, publishers should pay you the compliment of skipping the process.

I really shouldn’t complain about the readers’ reviews for my Concord Sonata book, because they were broadly complimentary and willing to attest that the path I had taken was both sound and original, and for once they didn’t even cavil about my colloquial writing style. (Perhaps my blog harangues are having some effect.) But their stern admonition du jour is that my writing shows “insufficient engagement with work in the field.” I’ve been studying the Concord since 1969, and 99 percent of what I have to say about it I learned on my own, but apparently if I mention a chord on page 17, and another author mentioned the same chord in a book written in 1994, I’m expected to preface my remark with, “As Professor X has aptly pointed out….” – lest the reader think I am arrogant enough to speak on my own authority, or – saints preserve us! – that I must not have read Professor X’s book!

Let me say at once that I quote many, many Ives scholars in the book, to an extent that guiltily felt, to me, like I would be perceived as going overboard to flatter my colleagues. I usually write books about topics that hardly anyone else has written about, but I knew what would be expected of me in this well-traveled terrain and gamely tried to comply. And yet, apparently, I should have done ten times more in this regard. I was directed toward an exemplary journal article, which I read, and saw what my reader meant: every paragraph contained quotations from other writers, strings of such quotations in series, a veritable quodlibet of borrowed scholarship, written in the apparent conviction that the juxtaposition of these familiar gems from the Ivesian literature would add up to some new and revealing picture. But since I had already read every book and article quoted, the essay gave me no new information, just the ersatz glow of a trip down memory lane. What would conceivably compel a scholar to collect so many sentences from other writers to bundle up in new packages? Outside of an upcoming tenure review, I can’t imagine. Can’t a person stand up in public and speak his or her own mind? I’m curious to know what the writer thinks.

A quotation is an ornament to a piece of writing when the quoted phrase is so striking and memorable that the author couldn’t have come up with anything as evocative himself. But if I can state an idea clearly (and little academic writing is as readable as mine), why would it carry more authority if put into a sentence I stole from another writer? If what I say is false, and its falsity has been demonstrated in a previous publication, then I should be told to do my homework. But if what I say is demonstrably true, what does it matter whether someone else has said it before? We are not medieval monks, that we fear to record the fact in front of us unless we can find a citation for it in Aristotle.

The hard truth, which perhaps they suspect, is that I sometimes ignore a book or article because I find it wrongheaded and uninsightful. (Perhaps the reviewer even wrote one of those books.) I have no reason to create new enemies by criticizing the argument of some journal article that my reader may not have read. If my argument diverges from Professor X’s, the reader can judge which is more convincing without my trying to downgrade Professor X. Part of my reason for writing the book, as I detail in the preface and footnotes but try not to bore the reader with, was my strong dissatisfaction with tendencies in recent Ives scholarship, and it was my gentlemanly strategy to set a superior example rather than engage others in intellectual combat; I was a critic for decades, and I’m tired of arguing. Books I read and disagreed with are listed in the bibliography along with the rest. If you decide to assume that because I didn’t refer to one I must not have read it, so what? And then, I don’t always disagree with everything I don’t quote. Occasionally I will say to myself, “Well, that’s a clever insight, but I didn’t come up with it, and there’s no need for me to partly obviate the reason for reading her book by reprinting its best idea elsewhere.” Sometimes an author is right, but his sentences are too clogged with jargon to be of use to me. I’m really good at analyzing music, and I read hardly anything analytical about the Concord that I hadn’t already figured out myself: if I had the insight independently, why quote someone else?

Is it not obvious how vanity-driven all this is? A friend of mine in the philosophy department says that to get published young philosophers have to quote articles by the editors of the journal they’re trying to get into; this is not intellectual discourse, but a petty brand of payola. Is the scholar’s life really so meager of reward that we have to ostracize the writer who fails to scatter enough crumbs of citation for his fellows on every page? Do we let external readers blackmail authors into mentioning their books? I will confess, when I see a new book on American music, to sometimes looking first in the index to see how often I’m cited, but I don’t think we should warp the discourse by catering to this; the absence of my name stings for a second, and then I forget about it. About a year ago I read an article that quoted me so many times that I felt rather more plagiarized than flattered, and wondered why the author couldn’t have come up with his own ideas. A wise and mature person will not take offense every time a subject he’s written about is written about again without paying him obeisance.

I did not write a book to flatter my colleagues, but to give a truer picture of the Concord Sonata than has been given before. I am already ashamed of the extent to which I went obsequiously fishing for quotations beyond the ones that leapt to mind as felicitous. Like Thoreau, I’m always regretting my good behavior. If we’re stuck with the peer-review process, as we seem to be for now, we could all contribute to making it a cleaner, more honest experience. It should not be an opportunity for getting ego strokes at the author’s expense and settling professional grievances. The author of five books does not need to be told how to write a sixth. Is the logic clear? Are the statements arguably true? All else is vanity.

From Bernard Shaw’s January 25, 1893, review of Dame Ethel Smyth’s Mass in D:

Whenever I hear the dictum, “Women cannot compose,” uttered by some male musician whose whole endowment, intellectual and artistic, might be generously estimated as equivalent to that of the little finger of Miss Braddon or Miss Broughton, I always chuckle and say to myself, “Wait a bit, my lad, until they find out how much easier it is than literature, and how little the public shares your objection to hidden consecutives, descending leading notes, ascending sevenths, false relations, and all the other items in your index ex-purgatorius!”

…Since women have succeeded conspicuously in Victor Hugo’s profession, I cannot see why they should not succeed equally in Liszt’s if they turned their attention to it.

Shaw’s review of Smyth’s noble and impressive if conservative mass was somewhat condescending, though he preferred it to the choral music of Dvorak and Brahms, with a suggestion that that was faint praise. Upon convalescence from minor surgery, I’m contemplating a course on woman composers. I don’t even dare make a public repertoire list for fear of controversies.

From one of the anonymous readers’ reviews of my Concord Sonata book:

There was a time when scholars would have dismissed an informal, personal tone for a work of scholarship, but I believe that those days are gone. Frankly, Gann has earned some license to write in whatever style he prefers. And even when the prose is technical and dense, it is a model of clarity.

It is ludicrous how difficult it has been to advance in academic circles the principle that clear, unpretentious, readable prose, even in the discussion of technical topics, is a feature, not a bug.

The news is so disgusting these days I try not to follow it. But I have followed the Michael Brown case in Ferguson, MO, closely. Because we are all Michael Brown.

UPDATE: Look, before anyone else writes in, I did not mean to say that we are all literally Michael Brown. I, for instance, am Kyle Gann. But in 2004, some of my students peacefully protested the election and were physically harassed by the cops, one girl pushed to the ground and injured for having “stepped over the white line in the street.” Some local cops pulled a gay gentleman out of a public meeting, a business leader of the community, and beat up on him just because he was gay. I myself have been treated with unwarranted rudeness by local police, all of whom are Republican and at least some of whom hate Bard as a liberal bastion. You don’t have to be black to get mistreated by the police, though it certainly helps. My students were deeply affected by the verdict, and left class early today to attend a vigil on campus, with my blessing. So I am going to express my solidarity with the victim, and, because I don’t give a damn what anyone thinks of my doing so, close comments.

 

Composer Andrew Violette came to Bard to give a composer’s forum last week. I’d followed his music via CDs for years and we’d corresponded, but I’d never met him. He’s known for some really long, intense pieces, such as his three-hour-long Seventh Piano Sonata, which I wrote about years ago. He looks less tough in person than he does in his photos, and he spent several years as a Benedictine monk. He wanted to play something live, and since he hadn’t written anything for piano since that 2001 sonata, he chose to play half of a book of chorale harmonizations he’d written decades ago, 1982-3. And they were quite amazing, partly because he played them with such grace and energy. He puts his recordings on YouTube, and you can hear his Harmonizations here, here, here, here, and here. He harmonized hymns for the entire liturgical year using atonal modes – Messiaen’s “modes of limited transposition,” and all subsets of the octatonic, made up of triads with roots a tritone apart. I knew almost all of the hymns and chorale melodies, and it was kind of wonderful hearing the familiar tunes relegated to such exotic contexts. I had an advantage in this respect over my students, who seemed to enjoy the Christmas tunes most because they recognized those.

Andrew then played an excerpt from his two-hour, six-voice, a capella Mass, an absolutely stunning work of Gesualdo-like chromaticism, continuously vibrant throughout its marathon length. Astonishing that he got six singers to sing so difficult and demanding a work so beautifully. He puts all his scores up for free at ismlp.org, too, so I’ve been on a downloading frenzy since he left. He’s a total original, what some would call an eccentric, a dropout from the new-music world (trained at Juilliard, refuses to teach), and someone who, as he puts it, is driven to write long works from the need to create an entire world with each piece. [UPDATE:] In addition, talking afterward Andrew and I discovered that we share some enthusiasms for insufficiently recognized composers in common, including M.C. Maguire and Monroe Golden – and also a conviction that there is no correlation between those composers who are most celebrated and those who make the best music.

I wrote a symphony. It came to pass in this wise. I visited my friend Robert Carl at Yaddo. He was telling me his plans for his next two symphonies, one of which would be an orchestration of a two-piano piece he had written. I replied that I had a two-piano piece myself, in five movements (Implausible Sketches) that I think of as an unorchestrated symphony. He said I should arrange it for orchestra. I replied, Nah, I wouldn’t do that. The next morning I woke up obsessed with the certainty that I needed to make an orchestral version of Implausible Sketches. Of course, all the movements needed to be expanded as well as orchestrated, so the Symphony is forty minutes long, as compared to the two-piano piece’s thirty-one. Because of the source and because no performance is remotely anticipated (I haven’t been able to get Implausible Sketches played either, despite several piano duos looking at it), I call it the “Implausible” Symphony. I’m thinking of following it up with Symphony No. 2, the “Irredeemable,” and Symphony No. 3, the “Unforgivable.”

And that’s not all, for I’ve unaccountably been spending every spare minute composing. Alex Ross has called blogging “public procrastination,” and I haven’t been blogging because I haven’t been procrastinating. In the past two months I’ve written a 23-minute song cycle – unusual for me to complete so much music during the semester, especially when as division chair I am overwhelmed with administrative meetings lately. But I had always, for thirty years, wanted to set a group of Transcendentalist poems to music. I had written a few small ones, only two of which I’ve kept, but singers are so hyper-cautious about taking on new repertoire that I never felt encouraged to expand my song output. Some of them I had written enough of in my head to go around humming vocal lines from them all these years. After I finished my Ives book (which is now stewing over at Yale UP, no news yet), I felt an urge to linger in a Transcendentalist mode, so I got out Perry Miller’s anthology and plunged into a project I’d carried around in my head for decades. I came up with seven new songs, on poems by Emerson, Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Frederick Henry Hedge, Christopher Pearse Cranch (two songs), and Jones Very; Emerson and Thoreau are not the most settable poets, and the poems that had always been most urgent to me were philosophical ones emblematic of Transcendentalist thought, Cranch’s “Enosis” and Hedge’s “Questionings.” Hedge was central to the Transcendentalist Club formed in 1836, and his poem is a statement of the epistemological problem of solipsism:

Hath this world, without me wrought,
Other substance than my thought?
Lives it by my sense alone,
Or by essence of its own?
Will its life, with mine begun,
Cease to be when that is done,
Or another consciousness
With the self-same forms impress?

Doth yon fireball, poised in air,
Hang by my permission there?
Are the clouds that wander by
But the offspring of mine eye,
Born with every glance I cast,
Perishing when that is past?
And those thousand, thousand eyes,
Scattered through the twinkling skies,
Do they draw their life from mine,
Or of their own beauty shine?….

So it’s rather the philosophical song cycle I’ve always wanted, to complement the raft of philosophy courses I took at Oberlin and Northwestern. The other poems can be read here, and the score of Transcendentalist Songs is available on my web site. My songs may seem puzzling to new-music fans, because I write them imagining how the poem itself would want to be sung, and if it’s a 19th-century poem, it’s likely to come out in a 19th-century harmonic syntax; the whole song cycle may seem an effort more scholarly than creative. I don’t care. What interested me in this case was to translate the intellectual atmosphere of Transcendentalism into a musical atmosphere congruent with it, and since the American musical idiom of that era lagged behind the poetry and philosophy, I had to retrofit a kind of appropriately mystical, American-sounding impressionism. As with the symphony, I have no performances in sight, but Bard has so expanded its vocal program in recent years that I’m hoping someone there can be persuaded to take an interest.

Thursday, invited by composer Michael Hersch, to whom I am grateful for it, I gave a lecture on my music at Peabody Conservatory, and I give another this Wednesday at Hartt School of Music. I hadn’t done such a thing in two or three years, and my composing has become such a private, impulsive, unmotivated activity that I hardly know how to talk about it anymore. Plus, I’m creating a backlog of unperformed and unrecorded pieces, so to play examples I have to go back a ways and try to remember what I was thinking seven, eight years ago. But I feel like what I have to explain lately is how I got to where I am, because the composers who were my major reference points are ones students no longer hear about. The young composers seem totally attuned to Europeans these days – Haas, Dillon, Ades, Lindburg – and the ones at Peabody were accustomed, as guest lecturers, to orchestral regulars like John Adams, John Corigliano, Jennifer Higdon, and Christopher Rouse. So here I come out of left field, with my microtones and Disklaviers, and while the students were welcoming and curious, their questions expressed a skepticism understandable in context. I have to explain myself as an alien visitor from that mythical Brigadoon called the American Experimental Tradition. On the other hand: now I’m a symphonist. That ought to count for something.

This is late notice, but my son is supposedly on television tonight. His black metal band Liturgy is being used in the plot of the cop show The Blacklist, the episode featuring Peter Fonda as guest star. Fonda supposedly appears as a drummer in the band. No idea yet whether they’ll be on for 10 seconds or three minutes, but they filmed. I don’t have TV reception, so somebody please know what happened if you watch it. Thanks.

[UPDATE:] Well, somebody noticed, anyway.

One of my students decided not to apply to a certain grad school because it had too many white men with dreadlocks in one department. I agreed that that was probably indicative of a certain aesthetic narrowness.

 

I am in receipt of James Klosty’s handsome new coffee-table volume John Cage Was, a book of photographs of John Cage, many of them rare and unseen before, all of them telling. For the margins Klosty asked a lot of people connected with Cage to write descriptions of him of a hundred words or less, using the words “John Cage was….” For those who are unlikely to shell out for the book, here’s what I wrote:

John Cage was the figure who, for thousands of musicians, opened the door to the world beyond rationality. By introducing us to the I Ching, and showing us how to use it both artistically and practically, he made it seem safe and creative and irresistible to explore not only Eastern thought and Buddhism, but astrology, Tarot, Jungian theory, and any discipline based in an ineffable synchronicity. He freed us to not understand what we were doing, and making art has been more interesting ever since.

In college I did indeed spend years consulting the I Ching, though I found it rather opaque, and never settled into it well; it seemed to be forever telling me that “it furthers one to cross the great water.” In retrospect, I guess it was directing me to expatriate to Europe posthaste, and I wish I’d complied. Tarot cards (which Cage used in composing 4’33”, though no one knows how) I found attractive, and still do, but wasn’t intuitive enough to interpret them with any subtlety. Astrology was the synchronicity system that clicked with my mathematical brain. I once consulted with Cage’s astrologer, Julie Winter, and many of the books I read on astrology early on were by another composer whose music I am devoted to, Dane Rudhyar. The new-agey/occult side of Cage’s influence gets whitewashed from his public persona, but for some of us it was explicit.

 

The faculty is once again rethinking the distribution requirements, the obstacle course of varied classes every student has to take to make sure they all have a more well-rounded education than I do. So we’re having meetings about how to pitch courses to non-majors. I enjoy these. My colleagues in literature, the sciences, and the social sciences are so brilliant, so eloquent and thoughtful, that I’ve come to realize that I’m not all that smart – I’m just really smart for a musician. Today they asked what one thing I would want a non-music-major to get out of one of my classes. As so often happens, my mouth started rattling before my brain was even engaged, and what it said was good enough: “I want every student to realize that it is possible to fall completely in love with a piece of music that he or she didn’t like at all the first time they heard it.”

Because this is what I’m having a lot of trouble with. The closed-mindedness of some of my students seems like the worst thing about my life these days, and if that’s the biggest tragedy I’ve got to deal with, I guess I’ll survive. I’m talking about my composition students. I am prepared for our opera singers to turn up their noses at Stockhausen and Nancarrow, but these are young composers refusing to give modern masterworks a third hearing (actually, one of my singers is bugging me for the most dissonant Ives songs I can give her). I’ll play the Concord Sonata, or Bartok’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, for a student, a music major, and they respond, “No no, I don’t like that, and I’m sure I never will.” Or I’ll play some astounding microtonal music, and they’ll say, “Oh, that just sounds out of tune, no one’s ever going to accept that.” No curiosity whatever, no openness, no wonder. Worse: it’s like, if they spend three hours listening to a 20- or 40-minute piece a few times, that’ll be three spoiled, precious hours of their life they’ll never get back. Or, maybe, if they learn to enjoy some peculiar-sounding piece, it will split them off from their peers, to whom they would have trouble relating the experience. I don’t get it. No one has ever called me un-opinionated, but when I was 18, I was going to be damned before I would admit that there was a piece of modern music in existence that I couldn’t understand. I’d listen to the same record a dozen times in a row until the piece started to make sense to me. I wasn’t committed to liking everything I heard, but I was going to understand every single piece well enough to understand why somebody liked it, even if I didn’t, and I was going to be able to articulate why, of all the complex and opaque pieces ever written, I’d decided I didn’t like this one. I withheld judgments for years, decades, until I felt I had done sufficient analysis to come to an opinion. After 20 years of full-time teaching, I’m still waiting to come across a student as totally committed to understanding the entire classical repertoire as I was at 18. Haven’t found one.

Part of the problem is that “the canon” carries no weight anymore (and little enough with me). Students come to school already knowing everything worth knowing, or so they think, having heard the first minute of thousands of mp3s, and with a calcified, corporate-determined idea of what is musically acceptable. With so many alternative histories of music available, why should mine be privileged? I like Giacinto Scelsi, but they like some hiphop artist I’ve never heard, so we’re even, right? But I’m the 59-year-old professor, and I can look back at the opinions I firmly held at age 20 with embarrassment and condescension. It alienates me from them. When they refuse to consider, despite detailed argument, that there may be incredible qualities in modern works that they haven’t understood yet, attempting to teach them becomes a tedious bore. What the hell are they in college for? Why am I baby-sitting people who aren’t impressed with my experience and opinion? Is this a generational thing? a product of iPod and internet culture? Why would smart, likable, upscale students be so determined that no one’s going to educate them?

And while I’m at it, get off my lawn.