Archives for February 2014

Carson Cooman, Harvard organist, musical polymath, and extraordinarily prolific composer, wrote to me a couple of weeks ago after reading my blog and asked if I’d ever reconsidered writing something for organ. It was something we had talked about long ago. In the mid-1980s my friend Gerhard Stäbler, German political composer and also an organist, had told me if I ever wrote something for organ he’d play it. I had tried, but the medium defeated me several times. As much as I love a lot of music that uses drones, I had never come up with a good strategy for employing drones myself, and the organ’s capacity for endless ones tempted me too far, so that I was in danger of trying to write a piece that was basically all one chord.

But this time I had just been playing the end of my instrumental suite Catskill Set, which closes with a chord that I found attractively poignant: from the bottom up, and voiced only this way, Eb, Ab, Gb, Db, F. The great thing about getting commissions is that the moment someone expresses an interest in my writing something, a musical image springs into my mind and I can frequently hear the piece before they’ve finished asking the question. In this case I realized that that voicing would sound lovely on organ – large intervals, no seconds, with the smallest interval on top – and that by putting the lowest (and thus hardest-to-reach) note in the pedals I could weave chromatic counterpoint around a long series of such chords. Carson also gave the perfect invitation: “For some time,” he wrote, “I’ve imagined broadly in my mind a extremely nice Gannian organ piece in your quiet, beautiful, tranquil/gentle vein. No particularly significant dynamic or timbre change, but just happening.” He also cautioned me against the first-time organ composer’s amateur mistakes of trying to get too fancy with the pedal work and using all the instrument’s bells and whistles in one piece. Given my habitual style, they were hardly miscalculations I would tend toward, but it was a good recipe for writing an effective organ piece. In the next eight days, two of them snow days in which leaving the house was hardly an option, I sketched out a fifteen-minute piece escapistly titled Summer Serenade, and then spent another week revising it. For me, that’s very fast composing; for me to write so much in mid-semester and around class-teaching is just about unheard-of.

But I am as a snail compared to Carson. I sent him the score yesterday, and he, with his tireless and endlessly competent steamroller energy, recorded it last night. He noted that the copy I sent him had no dynamics, and that he presumed it was to be soft throughout. Actually, while I think mezzopiano on a little Baroque organ is probably better in general, I could also hear in my mind the charms of a very loud church organ, the latter preferably heard from several blocks away. And so, mirabile dictu, he recorded both versions for me. I strongly recommend that to listen to the soft version you plug your computer into a sound system with decent-sized speakers, because the bass drones are very low, inaudible through my computer speakers. And to listen to the loud version, I recommend that you turn it up really loud, leave your door or windows open, and stroll down to the end of the block.

(The entire music composition world will be unanimous in its mandate that I MUST DECIDE what dynamic the piece should be played at, and notate it as such – and the entire music composition world can go suck an egg, and I mean just one egg, which they can pass around, just as they all suck their received wisdom from the same teat.)

Spoilers follow, so the easily influenced might want to listen before reading further. Summer Serenade uses a form that I’ve been gravitating toward and using more explicitly lately, which I call “relenting minimalism.” That is, the bulk of the piece seems austerely static, but simmering beneath the surface is a melody which finally, after the static part climaxes in some way, emerges, mediating an apparent disjunction between modernist strangeness and tuneful “normalcy.” “Rewarding the listener,” if you will. More technically, there are nine chords in the piece, transposed to seven keys chromatically from D to Ab (the pedal notes), and they are fairly similar: either minor, dominant, or major seventh chords with various added notes. So the piece’s romantico-minimalist wall-of-sound stasis is more or less built up bebop-style through a series of modulating ii-V and ii-V-I progressions, with added notes contributing to the smooth voice-leading. I do delight in using familiar musical materials in unfamiliar contexts, another thing about my music that composers commonly object to. The PDF score is here.

And I’m very grateful to Carson for his advocacy and numerous superb talents.

 

This morning I was looking through the evaluation file of a colleague who’s up for tenure. He’s someone who uses abundant humor in his work, and one of the external evaluators, noting that humor is always risky, said something so striking that I wrote it down: “Humor in art is an audience divider; you are automatically paring your viewership to a core that shares your sense of humor and sensibility.”

Never thought of that before. I rather pride myself on some of my pieces being jokes, even if I think they’re rather deep and extended and insightful jokes, and would like to think that Ives, Satie, Haydn, and I have that in common. The pieces of mine I consider funny include several Disklavier pieces, such as Despotic Waltz, Petty Larceny, Tango da Chiesa, Nude Rolling Down an Escalator, and Bud Ran Back Out; Scenario; the second movement of Echoes of Nothing; “Uranus” from The Planets; Scene from a Marriage; The Aardvarks’ Parade; and “The Goodbye Fugue” from Implausible Sketches. I’ve never heard the ending of the first movement of Sunken City fail to produce a general chuckle. I certainly feel that I have proudly turned my back on the pervasive contemporary aesthetic that deems it necessary to be so goddamned serious and solemn and angst-ridden all the time, that sees every recent Columbia comp graduate as in immediate competition with the late works of Beethoven (which, actually, are sometimes pretty witty). I tell my students that profundity is an occasional and unpredictable side effect, not something one can reliably hit by assiduously aiming at it. Like happiness, it shows up when one isn’t looking for it.

I hope it goes without saying that I do not at all consider my funny works lightweight or lacking in depth, any more than Ives’s TSIAJ (“This scherzo is a joke”) or Haydn’s “Joke” Quartet. But I suppose I should face the fact that people who don’t share my allegedly peculiar sense of humor (which I suspect is a good 90 percent of the population) aren’t going to appreciate the music either. I am haunted to this day by the audience reaction I received in 2007 in Hamburg to Petty Larceny, which is a collage entirely composed of quotations from the Beethoven sonatas. I think the piece rather cleverly demonstrates how Beethoven tended to gravitate toward certain chord progressions in certain keys, but when it ended I looked out at the audience and saw the most uniformly distraught and horrified group of faces I’ve ever seen in my life.

I liked what Nicholas Kristof wrote in the Times about academics using jargon to remove themselves from public relevance, and considered blogging it:

A related problem is that academics seeking tenure must encode their insights into turgid prose. As a double protection against public consumption, this gobbledygook is then sometimes hidden in obscure journals — or published by university presses whose reputations for soporifics keep readers at a distance.

Jill Lepore, a Harvard historian who writes for The New Yorker and is an exception to everything said here, noted the result: “a great, heaping mountain of exquisite knowledge surrounded by a vast moat of dreadful prose.”

But today on his blog Paul Krugman stepped in, upped the ante, and as usual got to the real point:

But it’s really important to step away from the math and drop the jargon every once in a while, and not just as a public service. Trying to explain what you’re doing intuitively isn’t just for the proles; it’s an important way to check on yourself, to be sure that your story is at least halfway plausible.

And again:

I once talked to a theorist… who said that his criterion for serious economics was stuff that you can’t explain to your mother. I would say that if you can’t explain it to your mother, or at least to your non-economist friends, there’s a good chance that you yourself don’t really know what you’re doing.

All musicologists who feel compelled to add several pages on Lacan or Deleuze to the first chapter of your book/dissertation when they’re not really germane to your subject matter, please keep this in mind.

The other night before his wonderful concert, pianist Emenuele Arciuli, who is a great advocate for American piano music and has published a book, Musica per Pianoforte negli Stati Uniti, told me and composer Martin Bresnick that in Europe he often has to defend American music, which is attacked by composers there as being superficial, commercial, and lacking in technique.

The next day, at New Music Box, web site of the American Music Center, composer Mara Gibson described how inspiring it was for her to study with German composer Helmut Lachenmann at Darmstadt:

Lachenmann vehemently told us (particularly the Americans, a.k.a. the “zombies”) to forget everything we had learned up to that point. He encouraged us to develop our own material independently of our teachers. He explained that we are part of a “North American syndrome” that potentially results in work without any “real artistic provocation, just frustrating and boring.” His musical outlook could be encapsulated in the following quote:

With conventional or unconventional sounds, the question is how to create a new, authentic musical situation. The problem isn’t to search for new sounds, but for a new way of listening, of perception. I don’t know if there are still new sounds, but what we need are new contexts.

Now, in response let me see if I can recreate, from memory, the line that is perennially used by those defending European high modernist music from American composers:

Wasn’t that debate over twenty years ago? Haven’t we yet reached the point at which we can celebrate the world’s musical styles in all their wonderful diversity? Can’t we just all get along?

It is time again, next fall, for me to teach my Analyzing Beethoven class, which I am always happy to do. But I have been threatening for years to make it a Late Beethoven class, and I am on the point of succumbing. Every time I’m frustrated at how little of the late music I get around to teaching. I always spend two weeks analyzing the Hammerklavier and at least a week on Op. 111, and we go quickly through the C#-minor Quartet and the Grosse Fuge. Maybe I can get through the Kyrie and Gloria of the Missa Solemnis, and one year I dawdled for quite awhile on the “Archduke” Trio. I use Beethoven as my sonata form class, and it takes weeks of early Beethoven to get through the sonata-allegro possibilities, the five types of slow-movement form, and so on. But next semester I’m determined to start with the “Archduke” and not listen to or analyze anything written before 1811. So, damn the Eroica and Appassionata, I’m going to get through all five of the late quartets and the last six sonatas if it kills us.

I started looking, though, at the list of works Beethoven wrote from 1811 to 1827, and I got fascinated by all the incidental pieces: the multitude of canons, the dozens of Irish and Scottish song arrangements, the little cantata for Princess Lobkowitz’s birthday, the funeral pieces for multiple trombones, the tritely conventional choral works and marches. I think students should know about those, and hear some of them, to flesh out their ideas of what even a great composer does with his time. When Beethoven’s English publisher complained that a folk song arrangement was too virtuosic, he politely wrote a new one, and when the publisher asked him to find some German, Venetian, Polish, Russian, Tyrolian, and Spanish folk songs for the collection, Beethoven didn’t write back, “I’m goddamned BEETHOVEN, you nitwit, and I’m working on the frickin’ MISSA SOLEMNIS, go find your own crappy folk songs!”, but rather cheerfully asked around and found just the items needed. Even the greatest composers have things to do, often for money, besides sitting around writing masterpieces and torturing their nephews. At the risk of once again diluting my late-masterpieces class, I think the students should know that.

I also swore that I wouldn’t teach a Beethoven course again until Jan Swafford’s Beethoven biography appears in print, and happily it is scheduled for availability in early August. At 992 pages, it’s a hefty prospective sidebar for a theory class, but judging from Jan’s magnificent Ives and Brahms biographies, I expect it to be far more astute and readable than any other I’ve read. (Even freshmen found the Maynard Solomon biography psychologically obtuse.) But I’ve been looking through the Barry Cooper biography, too, which is shorter and entirely serviceable as a detailed record of all the compositions, as well as being extremely well-documented in its revisionism. Someday, perhaps, I will teach my intensive seminar on every aspect of the late quartets and piano sonatas – I guess I’ve really got a graduate-level seminar in mind – but I’m getting there by stages.

In addition to Emanuele Arciuli playing my Earth-Preserving Chant tomorrow evening in New York City, and my recent Helsinki premiere, this Saturday Nicolas Horvath is playing my piano piece Going to Bed: Homage to Philip Glass in Kiev, at the Night of Minimal Piano #2. I’ve been noticing for awhile, from my Hostmonster statistics, that the Ukraine is regularly in the top rankings of countries from which my web site gets hits; this week it’s fourth, behind the U.S., Lithuania, and the U.K., in that order. For a long time Romania was near the top, but it’s lately slipped down to 13th, right after China, Australia, and Turkey. Why are the Ukrainians and Lithuanians paying so much more attention to me than, say, people in countries I’ve visited, like Holland, Poland, and Serbia? I can’t imagine. I never hear from any of these people. And while my microtonality pages tend to be visited more than the rest of my web site, and “Venus” from The Planets is generally the top download, the rest of the mp3s and pages vary widely from week to week in popularity. Aside from the twenty or so people who comment on this blog, I feel rather ignored, but in odd places around the globe people are silently checking me out. Crazy.

Two new PDF scores went up on my website this week. One is not a terribly new piece: Mystic Chords (2012), which I’ve written about here before, and which consists entirely of quarter-notes with a different tempo marking on each beat. I had been waiting on putting up the score until I revised the opening, which I have now done. So there’s a new recording as well, and I’m much happier with it. As often happens with mp3s, my computer keeps going back to the old mp3 when I click on it, and no amount of reloading has yet succeeded in bringing the new recording up; but I’ve been successful when trying from other computers. Presumably you will be too.

The other, new piece is a suite of five brief movements for flute, clarinet, trumpet, vibraphone, piano, and string trio called Catskill Set. It started out as a song cycle on poems by someone who, as it turned out, had no interest in song cycles, and so I followed Ives’s example by rearranging it for instrumental ensemble and calling it a “set.” It’s been good for me, lately, I think, to learn to reuse earlier materials in new pieces; I can more easily see how Ives developed the complexity of his style by adding on new layers to simpler pieces he’d written before. My erstwhile terror of repeating myself was a little exaggerated. I enjoyed (re)writing the piece, it’s a little different for me, more linear and imagistic, and perhaps someone will be moved to play it. I’ve got no commissions or performances pending, just composing for pleasure. And geographically I’ve finally moved from all the desert-themed titles of my youth to admitting that I’m pretty well ensconced in the Hudson Valley.

Awhile back I tried to get my friend at the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel interested in buying all my scores for the archive there. I promised I’d send him the original PDFs, not just copies. He looked at me a long time.

Wow: famous Japanese composer I’d never heard of admits his music was ghostwritten. I sometimes wish I could claim that my music was ghostwritten, but I’m afraid I must accept responsibility for every note.

UPDATE: Actually, subsequent reading about this has made me think that the real scandal is that this patent mediocrity was ever considered “the Beethoven of Japan” – showing that compositional celebrity is just as uncorrelated to talent or achievement in Japan as it is here.

A week from tonight, Italian pianist Emanuele Arciuli (pictured) will play my piece Earth-Preserving Chant at a 7:00 concert at Columbia University’s Italian Academy, 1161 Amsterdam Ave. between 116th and 118th. The Hungarian/American program includes works all by my kind of guys: Haydn, Bartok, Liszt, John Adams (Phrygian Gates), Martin Bresnick (Ishi’s Song), and my piece, which Emanuele commissioned. The day he first wrote me, I had just been reading about the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and was pretty despondent about the projected fate of the human race and its ability to relate sanely to its environment. Emanuele asked me for a piece with a Native American subtext, and a kind of musical prayer for the earth flashed into my ear – I started composing almost immediately. Earth-Preserving Chant is a metaphor for husbanding one’s resources: it all takes place over repetitions of only three drone dyads in the bass (F-C, F#-B, G-Eb), and introduces new material only a little at a time, returning over and over to the accumulating prayer-like cadential formulae with which it opens. The dynamic is fundamentally pp and should never exceed mp. I’d like to think it will make a nice companion piece with Martin’s fabulous, and similarly themed, Ishi’s Song. This is the East Coast premiere.