I have no idea why I plan out dream courses I could teach, when it's the middle of the summer. One of my great regrets (there are so many) is that I've never taught an American music course. It just doesn't fit our curriculum. To do it the way I want to, it really ought to be a graduate seminar somewhere, because I'd want to get into Riegger's Study in Sonority and the Becker Third and Martirano's L'sGA, which I can't do if they don't know who Ives is yet. I taught a History of the Symphony once and I'll never do that again because it was waaay … [Read more...]

...alias, Musicology as Schadenfreude. Poor Charles Ives. He never got over his father's death, and kept trying to fill in the gap. He was driven to keep using certain tunes and instruments in his music because they reminded him of George. He kept pretending that he'd learned more from his father than from his college teacher Horatio Parker. Unlike most composers, Ives couldn't make up his own tunes anyway, so he'd find one and rearrange it until no one could recognize it. He never knew what he really wanted. He claimed that he didn't need … [Read more...]

One of the fascinating things about going through Ives's manuscripts has been getting a feel for his composing method. I'm not likely to become an expert on it, because I'm only dealing with the piano sonatas, and I have more to do with the rest of my life than decipher Ives's creaky handwriting, as others have heroically been doing. But I have found interesting patterns. Early sketches for the First Sonata are more revealing than for the Concord, which is one reason I'm analyzing it too. There's an early sketch for the First Sonata, dated … [Read more...]

Essays After a Sonata is in publishable form, and I’ve got six weeks left to think and rewrite, and think and rewrite, and reread other books and think and rewrite, which is just how I wanted it. And now I have to decide how and whether to address what’s bothered me about most of what’s been written about Charles Ives in the last thirty years. Maybe writing about it here will show me how not to write about it in the book, which is something this blog is sometimes good for. At some point in the 1980s, all the musicologists started trying to … [Read more...]

Today is not only the 197th birthday of Henry David Thoreau, but the milestone 60th birthday of the composer (and my good friend) Robert Carl. His Fourth Symphony is on my web site if you'd like to celebrate. (Be warned, the beginning is very soft.) … [Read more...]

I've been sitting on the scoop that the black metal band Liturgy is indeed reuniting for a new tour and record, but Pitchfork broke the news. That's Bernard Gann in the back, I think, though with enough hair he and Greg Fox can look almost indistinguishable. Bernard's other band (or rather, one of his other bands) Guardian Alien was interviewed by High Times magazine back in May, but for some reason it was only in the paper magazine, and never appeared on the internet. … [Read more...]

I'm kind of fascinated by the First World War, which I think of as a catastrophe unparalleled for its combination of massive scale and utter pointlessness. I particularly recommend Adam Hochschild's book To End All Wars, one of the most fascinating history books I've ever read; and Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory is a film I can always watch again, as is Paul Gross's Passchendaele. I'm commemorating the centennial of the war's inception by listening to music of George Butterworth (1885-1916), who, as far as I know, was the most well-known … [Read more...]

Here's an interview with Daniel Lentz, one of my favorite composers. I love that the critic quotes John Schaefer as saying, “His works look back to an earlier time when music was not so divided between serious and popular. This is music that will appeal to a broad range of listeners.” Yeah, that was back during my lifetime. Good to have it validated that that period's officially over, I guess.   … [Read more...]

I have just completed a first draft of Essays After a Sonata: Charles Ives's Concord. It is currently something over 136,000 words, which is just about the length of my American Music book; plus, there are hundreds of musical examples. There are fourteen chapters, as follows: The Story of the Concord Sonata, 1911-1947 The Programmatic Argument (and Henry Sturt) The Human Faith Theme and the Whole-Tone Hypothesis Emerson: The Essay Emerson: The Music The Emerson Concerto and its Offshoots Hawthorne and The Celestial Railroad Hawthorne: … [Read more...]

I am sitting here trying to write microtonal polytempo music on Sibelius. I have found the most aggravating, patience-requiring method of composing in the history of music. I have spent the last two hours trying to fill three measures of music - largely because Sibelius will not allow a pitch bend command to be pasted onto a note in a tuplet. If Schoenberg really was trying to make it impossible for his students to compose, as Cage claimed he said, he would have made them do it this way. Future generations of composers will look at my music and … [Read more...]

After Bob Ashley's death, Ed McKeon put together a group of video tributes to him by his friends, and he's now put them up on the web. This first video has personal statements from Pauline Oliveros, "Blue" Gene Tyranny, Roscoe Mitchell, Alvin Lucier, David Behrman, and Peter Gordon. The second one features Fast Forward, me, Jacqueline Humbert, Tom Buckner, Joan LaBarbara, Chris Mann, Alex Waterman, Sam Ashley. Just in case you're only interested in me (Mom), my part begins at 3:28 in the second video, and you can see what my living room … [Read more...]

...to curmudgeonly people: I am not very sanguine about the advantages of the composing life these days, but let it be noted that one can be sitting on one's screened-in porch savoring a Romeo y Julieta [that's a cigar, kids] while talented young people are giving one of your works a gratifying world premiere on the opposite side of the planet. The Australian National University New Music Group, with soprano Jelena Mamic, did a lovely job on my The Stream (Admonitions), as you can hear in the linked video. And since I had forgotten writing it, … [Read more...]

I awoke this morning to the rude shock of learning that my close friend Elodie Lauten has died, a fabulous composer whose music I've been championing ever since I was at the Chicago Reader in the early 1980s. Earlier this year I wrote her to congratulate her on winning the Robert Rauschenberg Award, and it took her quite a few days to respond. She said she had been in the hospital, lost a kidney to cancer, and was having trouble walking. We shared a couple more e-mails, and she sounded upbeat about the then-upcoming performance of Waking in New … [Read more...]