Search Results for: november

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, with my liner notes (which you can read in their entirety at the link). This definitely changes our picture of the history of minimalism – it will be difficult for anyone ever again to refer to Reich, Glass, and Riley as three of “the original minimalists.”

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.

My article “Reconstructing November,” detailing the process of coming up with a performance score for Dennis Johnson’s epic 1959 piano piece, has just appeared in the journal American Music. I prefer not to repost it on the blog; it contains hardly any more information than I’ve already posted here, here, here, here, and here. It’s available through JSTOR, or will be soon, I guess, for those who have access to that through their schools. This issue of American Music, by the way, is chock full of experimentalism: aside from myself, Maria Cizmic has an article on Cowell’s under-explored piece The Banshee, Zachary Lyman interviews Johnny Reinhard about his controversial completion of the Ives Universe Symphony, David Nicholls’s witty article on the Ultramodernists’ influence on Cage (which I heard him deliver ten years ago) finally appears, and there’s even a review of my Cage book by Branden Joseph, author of a wonderful Tony Conrad book, and a review by Brett Boutwell of John Brackett’s John Zorn: Tradition and Transgression – which quotes me! Whew. 

I am not the first person to play through Dennis Johnson’s November, but on August 12 I became apparently the first person to listen to an entire recording of it. You can be the second. In honor of the sixth anniversary of this blog tomorrow (Saturday), among other things, I have uploaded a complete performance of November, one of the earliest (1959) major minimalist works. The first public performance of the piece since the early ’60s at least will take place in Kansas City on September 6, with myself and Sarah Cahill alternating at the keyboard. I have recorded a version of the entire work here, conveniently formatted in four parts [UPDATE: I have replaced my private recording with the one Sarah Cahill and I made at the Second International Conference on Minimalist Music, Sept. 6, 2009, so the next paragraph no longer applies]:

Part 1 1:03:09

Part 2 1:13:48

Part 3 1:06:54

Part 4 1:05:19

It’s not a professional-level recording, though I made it on my wonderful Sony PCM D-50, which has totally changed my life. I had to switch pianos at one point, because the freshmen arrived at Bard halfway through, and the piano I started on was in a room where high heels clicking through the hallways were too audible (and those were the guys!). But it’s the first complete recording, with all the material contained in the score. It lasts only four hours, and I think I could have gone longer, but every note you hear is in the score, and there is virtually nothing omitted.

Dennis’s surviving recording contained only the first 112 minutes of the piece. What I am playing is an exact transcription of those 112 minutes, as identical to the original as I could make it, and then I improvise the remainder of the piece according to rules I obtained by analyzing the relationship of the recording to the score. The reason for sticking to the transcription for the first 112 minutes is that there are aspects of the piece not ascertainable from the score; the score was derived from the original tape rather than the other way around, and Dennis’s letter to me about it stated that “the recording must stand as the primary definition example of the piece.” Subsequent performances need not be so slavishly faithful to the recording, but this first exposure has got to get the piece across as Dennis played it, so musicologists can know exactly what they’re dealing with. Before you go there, the idea of this piece from the beginning was that it is a (loosely) notated piece, that any so-minded pianist could play it with complete authenticity. Dennis was not a great jazz pianist, not a jazz pianist at all in fact, and there is nothing technical nor idiosyncratic about his playing that another pianist couldn’t sufficiently imitate. Dennis is flattered that Sarah Cahill and I are doing this, just as Harold Budd is flattered that Sarah is playing Children on the Hill. If the composers are thrilled, you have no theoretical basis on which to disapprove. 

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

There is a hilarious sequence of situations in Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad in which Twain and his fellow tourists drive an Italian tour guide to absolute distraction with questions of surreal incomprehension:

Our guide there fidgeted about as if he had swallowed a spring mattress. He was full of animation – full of impatience. He said:

“Come wis me, genteelmen! – come! I show you ze letter writing by Christopher Colombo! – write it himself! – write it wis his own hand! – come!”

He took us to the municipal palace. After much impressive fumbling of keys and opening of locks, the stained and aged document was spread before us. The guide’s eyes sparkled. He danced about us and tapped the parchment with his finger:

“What I tell you, genteelmen! Is it not so? See! handwriting Christopher Colombo!–write it himself!”

We looked indifferent – unconcerned. The doctor examined the document very deliberately, during a painful pause. – Then he said, without any show of interest:

“Ah – Ferguson – what – what did you say was the name of the party who wrote this?”

“Christopher Colombo! ze great Christopher Colombo!”

Another deliberate examination.

“He write it himself! – Christopher Colombo! He’s own hand-writing, write by himself!”

Then the doctor laid the document down and said:

“Why, I have seen boys in America only fourteen years old that could write better than that.” 

“But zis is ze great Christo- ”

“I don’t care who it is! It’s the worst writing I ever saw. Now you musn’t think you can impose on us because we are strangers. We are not fools, by a good deal. If you have got any specimens of penmanship of real merit, trot them out! – and if you haven’t, drive on!”

Half of the comments I got on my recent Harold Budd posting, several of them by people criticizing me while admitting that they hadn’t listened to the music they were criticizing me for, were about on this level. It’s not as funny from the tour guide’s perspective. I’m offering you the minimalist equivalent of Christopher Columbus’s handwriting, neither for your critique nor for your approval, but because I have the information, I enjoy disseminating it, and I know there are people interested. The claims I make for this music are that the tape said the piece dated from 1959 and the performance from 1962, and that La Monte told me that this piece inspired The Well-Tuned Piano. If you have evidence to confute these claims, I’ll be curious to hear it; otherwise, criticizing me for this reveals a misunderstanding of the situation. This is musicology, not American Idol. If this recording or the piece isn’t your cup of tea, that’s OK, I understand, but I can’t alter the results of my research to suit your squeamish and waffling tastes. If you want your comment posted – respond appropriately. 

I’m almost done transcribing and analyzing Dennis Johnson’s November, the ostensively six-hour 1959 piano piece that La Monte Young says inspired him to embark on The Well-Tuned Piano. I’ve listed some of November‘s innovations elsewhere. If it was indeed the first multi-hour continuous minimalist piece, the first tonal very slow work, the piece that pioneered additive process – and it may have been all that – those in themselves are enough to make it worth reviving and getting into the history books. But beyond that, I’ve become more and more impressed with its internal logic, which is almost mathematical (and Johnson left music to become a mathematician). The piece is organized into families of motifs based on the same pitches, which can proceed improvisatorily to other families of motifs at specified points. Johnson begins each new pitch field additively, bringing in one note or chord, then another, then another until they’re all present. But the overall formal concept is not simply additive but more like a series of circles, as each pitch field has a point of entry and exit, and within each section one can go back and forth among the motifs in that field. It’s really elegant, and in its glacial way makes a certain large-scale sense to the ear. Feldman’s wonderful masterpiece Triadic Memories (a much later work, 1981) is similar in its reminiscent effects and equally intuitive, but November is generally diatonic rather than chromatic, and its logic lies a little closer to the surface. I thought that in September Sarah Cahill and I would be re-premiering a kind of crazy, off-beat experiment of the late ’50s; instead I’m thinking we’ll be unveiling a whole new formal paradigm that deserved to have more of an after-history than it’s had. 

The performance notation has been a big problem. Johnson’s own manuscript:

is kind of a wonderful mess, full of arrows, cross-outs, and hesitant verbal directions sometimes taken back with the afterthought “No!” Still, the piece can be played from the ms. – if you’ve studied the recording closely and know how it works. (The recording contains only 100 minutes of the piece, marked by enigmatic discontinuities.) Renotating the piece to reflect the performance practice is perhaps the toughest musicological nut I’ve ever tried to crack. The piece can all be written in stemless noteheads, and should be, so that the performer isn’t lulled into observing some underlying pulse that isn’t there. And yet, the rhythm isn’t unimportant, because Johnson’s motifs fall into coherent and rhythmically characteristic phrases, and without those intuitive note groupings, the form won’t make any sense. I had to start with the tedious process of notating not only the pitches but the time placement of every note. My first method was to take a 5/4 measure, 8th-note = 60, and put the notes in ten-second measures grouped by sixes into minutes:

Still, this is an unnecessarily complicated notation for the pianist to read, and would result, I think, in a stilted performance. Plus, it doesn’t do anything for the four hours of the piece omitted from the recording. So I think what I’m going to do is finish writing it all out this laborious way, and then transfer all the notes by hand, as stemless noteheads, into proportional notation. Then Sarah and I (who will be alternating at the keyboard) will have the intuitive groupings to follow on the page. I’m also mapping motifs from the manuscript to the recording, so I can extrapolate to create some kind of performance score for the remaining four hours. The re-creation should preserve the recorded passages almost exactly, and if I do it right, the listener shouldn’t be able to tell when we switch from the re-creation of the recording to the improvised remainder of the score. I didn’t expect this to be one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done.

In fact, as with my Harold Budd transcription, I’m looking forward to stealing some ideas for my own music. I’ve worked with a kind of terraced or altered additive process myself. My “Jupiter” movement from The Planets uses a slowly shifting additive form: AB, ABC, ABCD, BCD, BCDE, DEF, EFG, and so on. November is similar, but more circular and less linear in its process, and offers a methodology for building a much longer and more recurrent structure. So, say, instead of A, B, and C, you have A, A’, A”, A”’, and A”” leading back to A, then B, B’, B”, and so on. But F”’ might have a couple of pitches in common with B’, so that from here you have a portal back into the B material – large, formal reminiscences. How tragic it is that it’s taken almost half a century to rediscover all this – but how lucky I feel to get to do it!

Here’s a few minutes from the middle of the 1962 recording, to whet your appetite and show you what I’m up against.

AMSTERDAM – I’m not over here just turning European musical society on its ear, you know. In fact, I don’t seem to be doing that at all. I haven’t yet had to place a revolver on the piano to quell potential riots, the way Antheil did when he came to Europe – audiences here have simmered down over the years. But besides performing and lecturing, I’m also working on my book, whose title had already changed from Music After Minimalism to Music After the-Music-Formerly-Known-as-Minimalism, and now may have to be titled The-Music-Formerly-Known-as-Minimalism and its Aftermath. Oh, I know what you’ll say, that if I wanted to research American music I could have stayed and done that in America. But that’s just what they were expecting me to do. No no, the thing to do, obviously, was to load everything on my hard drive and come study it over here, so I can give it the faux-expat perspective.

The latest title change is due to my realization that I can’t simply begin my story in 1978 and build it on the current absurd caricature of what the general public thinks minimalism is, as revealed at Wikipedia and elsewhere. I don’t want to spend a lot of time on well-traveled territory like Music for 18 Musicians and In C, but I do have to give enough of minimalism’s early history to clarify that it was more of a 20- or 30-composer movement, not just a four-composer movement, as the public thinks (nor a 500-composer movement, as Wikipedia’s indiscriminating savants imagine). I can’t explain postminimalism to people who will assume that what the postminimalists were reacting to was The Death of Klinghoffer; nor can I fully clarify Peter Garland, Larry Polansky, and Band of Susans to people who don’t know the crucial contributions to minimalism made by Harold Budd, Jim Tenney, and Phill Niblock. And so I’m getting resigned to greatly expanding the section on minimalism, which will also make the book more marketable to publishers, since books on minimalism already exist, and publishers are petrified of taking chances on anything that threatens to convey too much new information. By temperament, new information is the only kind I enjoy imparting.

Toward this end, one of the projects I’m enjoying working on is transcribing little-known minimalist keyboard works. Some minimalism was improvisatory, and even some that wasn’t is documented only by recording. At the moment I’m working on November by Dennis Johnson, the 1959 piano piece that La Monte Young credits as having inspired The Well-Tuned Piano. Johnson was one of a trio of students at UCLA in the late 1950s who were exploring La Monte’s idea of slow, static music, along with La Monte himself and Terry Jennings. Terry Riley joined in soon afterward. Johnson figures heavily in La Monte’s semi-famous “Lecture 1960,” and is also credited with (among several conceptual pieces, including one that consisted of just the word LISTEN), a work titled The Second Machine that uses only four pitches drawn from La Monte’s Trio for Strings. Soon afterward, however, Johnson abandoned music and went into computer science. November seems to have been the magnum opus of a heavily abbreviated career.

At one point La Monte mentions that November was “theoretically” six hours long. The hiss-filled, barely audible surviving recording, however, made on reel-to-reel by Jennings and Johnson (which I’ve never played on Postclassic Radio because the quality just doesn’t make for pleasant listening), cuts off abruptly after 100 minutes. It’s slow enough that one could almost take all the pitches down in dictation in real time, but I’m trying to painstakingly document all the exact rhythms in order to facilitate replicating the performance. Below, I give the first four minutes of the piece, but this isn’t a good notational solution: what I want to use eventually is just stemless noteheads proportionally spaced, but I’m not sure I can do that in Sibelius. Still, I’ve played this excerpt (on Sibelius) simultaneously with the original recording, and the notes line up almost exactly:

We can’t ask Dennis Johnson about it: he’s disappeared. La Monte’s last e-mail from him said that he was sick and tired of battling internet problems, giving up on the 20th century, and going out of e-mail contact. He lived in California, and at one point lost his house in one of those humungous wildfires they have out there, and if there ever was a score to November (as La Monte thinks there was, but doesn’t remember much about it), it’s probably lost. Jennings, of course, died long ago. So it’s just me and the recording, on our own.

If anyone knows of Dennis Johnson’s whereabouts, please get in touch.

But think about what was going on musically in 1959, look at the example above, and tell me that wasn’t a radical thing to come up with. The classical world was pretty much divided up at the time among the crazy-mathematical 12-toners, the chance-obsessed Cageists – both groups resolutely atonal – and the neoclassicists who were still writing huge, brass-climaxing symphonies. Feldman was writing slow, soft music, and as late as 1965 Jennings’s slow music was atonal and rather Feldmanish. But November caresses a spare, sad G minor from the piano, protominimalist in both diatonic tonality and repetitiveness. Keep in mind that in the above notation I’m trying to preserve the specific performance, not recreate the score. There is no reason to assume every note was notated: the entire first five and a half minutes of the score might easily have boiled down to this:

And look how many aspects of later music the piece anticipates:

1. Diatonic tonality. The standard minimalist line is that Terry Riley reintroduced diatonic tonality into minimalism with his String Quartet of 1960, but this turns out not to be true. That mythic quartet wasn’t in circulation until recently, and I and other scholars were misled by Edward Strickland’s Minimalism: Origins book into characterizing it as being in C major, but what Strickland evidently meant was merely that it had no key signature. Musicologist Ann Glazer Niren corrected this notion in her talk at the recent Minimalism conference in Bangor, and played some excerpts of the piece, which is basically atonal, though entirely soft in dynamics. (Keith Potter’s book gets the facts right, too, but without examples.) Riley’s diatonic music came later, first toyed with in a May, 1961, String Trio, later developed in In C (1964) and the ensuing Keyboard Studies. (There is an important precedent for diatonicism, of course, in Cage’s piano pieces of the 1940s like In a Landscape and Dream, and some of Lou Harrison’s pieces as well, but it’s unclear whether these had any impact on the early minimalists.)

2. Phrase repetition, which Johnson does not seem to have picked up from La Monte, though he did follow La Monte in using slow tempos.

3. Additive process – since each phrase adds more and more notes as it repeats, in a manner that La Monte would later use in an odd little 1961 requiem called Death Chant (with the same pitches: G, Bb, C, D), but more famously adopted as the method of Phil Glass’s early minimalist works.

Plus, there are other aspects specifically relevant to The Well-Tuned Piano:

4. First of all, the idea of letting a continuous piano piece run six hours, if indeed November was originally that long.

5. The very gradual introduction of new pitches, which is The Well-Tuned Piano‘s recurring M.O.; and,

6. the partitioning of a long piece into various contrasting pitch regions. At 9:37 in the recording, November adds in E and F# as the initial transition to a kind of B-minorish area. This is also almost exactly the point in the 1981 Well-Tuned Piano recording at which the music begins to move from the Opening Chord (on Eb) to the Magic Chord (on F#); the coincidence itself is insignificant, because the onset of that transition varies from performance to performance, but it points up how closely Johnson’s harmonic conception anticipated La Monte’s.

7. Plus, IF the piece wasn’t fully notated – and that’s an if we probably can’t resolve – it would have given La Monte a model for a piano solo only indeterminately notated.

Of course, November is for conventionally tuned piano (Tony Conrad brought just intonation into the mix somewhat later), achieves no powerful acoustic overtone effects, employs no elaborate over-arching thematic scheme (at least, not one observable in the first 100 minutes), and is not the mind-blowing, sumptuously evolved masterpiece that The Well-Tuned Piano eventually became. Nevertheless, it is monumental on its own terms, and certainly marks more historic firsts than we have a right to expect from any one piece. And until we revive what’s left of it, which I hope to do in both performance and an article for the next minimalism conference, we miss a key piece of the puzzle of how minimalism sprang into existence.

Another spare-moment project I’m undertaking, incidentally, is a transcription of Harold Budd’s 1982 New Music America performance of Children on the Hill, one of the most gorgeous things I’ve ever been present for. Though well preserved, that’s another tape not suitable for public consumption because a remarkably loud and obnoxious baby, seemingly closer to the mike than Budd was, wailed like a demon through 50 percent of it. That kid’s about 25 now, and I hope he finally got whatever it was he wanted. Budd recorded Children on the Hill for one of his early, Eno-produced records too, but that’s a stripped-down five-minute version; at NMA he extemporized gloriously for 23 minutes. Some of the best minimalism ever made is still languishing away on private tapes.

Over the last eleven years, I’ve given at least twenty-two keynote addresses and conference papers, and in recent weeks I’ve managed to post all but six of them (three of those rather redundant, given my other writings) on my web site. I also didn’t put up my keynote to the 2013 Earle Brown conference in Boston, or my analysis of Glass’s Einstein on the Beach, since both are coming out in books soon, nor my Geiringer lecture on Ives’s First Sonata, which I want to rewrite [UPDATE: now that’s up too]. Several have already been blogged here, though some of those were afterward altered or expanded. They include:

My keynote address for the 2012 Harry Partch conference in Boston, which I am proud of as one of the few statements on Partch’s elegantly intricate rhythmic innovation;

Elodie Lauten as Postminimalist Improviser, which I delivered at the 2015 minimalism conference in Helsinki, and which I think is the first academic paper on someone who was a leading female postminimalist figure;

Robert Ashley as Minimalist (already blogged here), which I delivered at the 2013 minimalism conference in Long Beach;

Silence in the Rearview Mirror (also already blogged here), which is my criticism of Cage’s rhetoric in Silence, delivered at the 2012 Cage110 centennial symposium in Lublin, Poland, and subsequently published in Polish;

A Pre-Concert Talk on Ives’s Concord Sonata, written in 2015 for a general audience;

The Boredom of Eventfulness, my keynote address for the 2011 Minimalism Conference in Leuven, Belgium;

Regarding Ben (already blogged here), my keynote address for the 2010 microtonal conference at Wright State University;

Reconstructing November, a paper on my process for creating a performance version of Dennis Johnson’s six-hour, 1959 piano piece November – first delivered at the 2009 Minimalism Conference in Kansas City and subsequently published in American Music (and overlapping in content with several blog posts here);

The Longyear Lecture (already blogged here), my critique of Americanist musicology delivered at the University of Kentucky in 2008, and subsequently published in American Music;

How the 13th Harmonic Saved My Sorry Ass, a paper on my microtonal methods for the Beyond: Microtonality conference at the University of Pittsburgh in 2015;

A Talk on John Cage’s 4’33”, delivered at the New World Symphony’s John Cage Festival in Miami in 2013 – largely drawn from my book, but with a few added ideas that occurred to me afterward;

The Uneasy, Unarticulated State of American Music (somewhat expanded from the version blogged here), delivered at the 2013 ISCM conference in Vienna;

From Hits to Niches (already blogged), my keynote address for the Canadian New Music Network in 2007;

My keynote address for the Extensible Toy Piano Conference at Clark University in 2005; and earliest and possibly least,

The Percussion Music of John J. Becker, my first scholarly article (1984), published in Percussive Notes journal.

In addition, I’ve been moving some of my more substantive blog essays to my web site, since I have no control over what goes on at Arts Journal, and didn’t want them vulnerable to potential disappearance. In short, the amount of Gannian verbiage on my web site is now well more than twice what used to be there. The collected writings are catalogued here. I hope some of these extra tens of thousands of words, with many score examples and audio examples (eat your heart out, books), will be of some interest to students of the more radical side of American music.

I peer-reviewed all of these papers myself, and enthusiastically recommended that they be web-published as submitted. That sure as hell saved a lot of time.

Proença Band: Jennifer Lacy, Michelle Allen McIntire, Jennifer Wagner, Brian Padavic, Virginia Backman; photo: Manon Halliburton

I am excited that I’m going to have three world premieres within eight days this month, amounting to some two hours of music. On February 12 and 13 I am the featured composer at the Symposium of Contemporary Music at Illinois Wesleyan in Bloomington, Illinois. On Friday, February 12, I give a lecture at 7:30 on the Concord Sonata at the School of Music. The following evening, also at 7:30, my two-piano piece Implausible Sketches (2006/11) and my song cycle Transcendentalist Songs (2014) will be performed at Westbrook Auditorium. I’ve been waiting years for the premiere of the two-piano piece, which I consider one of my best works. The symposium dates back to 1952, and previous honorees include Roy Harris, Shulamit Ran, Stephen Paulus, Arvo Pärt, John Corigliano, David Diamond, Karel Husa, my Oberlin teacher Edward Miller, George Crumb, Wallingford Riegger, and quite a wild variety of composers with whom I do and don’t identify. Crazy.

The following Saturday, February 20, will see the official premiere of my new song cycle Proença, based on Ezra Pound and a few troubadours, written for and sung by Michelle Allen McIntire. She’s put together the Proença Band, with Virginia Bachman on flute, Jennifer Lacy on electric piano, Jennifer Wagner on vibes, and Brian Padavic on bass (above). They’re actually giving a pre-premiere performance this Saturday, February 6, at Vinyl Renaissance in Overland Park, Kansas City, at 2pm, on a bill with the Ensemble of Irreproducible Outcomes. The official world premiere, which I will attend, is at the Bragg Auditorium in the All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church in Kansas City on February 20 at 7:30. This is the same beautiful space in which Sarah Cahill and I gave the re-premiere of Dennis Johnson’s November in 2009. They’ve put a ton of rehearsal into the piece, and I can’t wait to hear it. Next, they’ll be playing it at Bard College on March 2, in Bito Auditorium.

Next week I’ll be in Santa Barbara giving the Karl Geiringer Lectures, named for a famous musicologist who taught there, one (public) on microtonality, and the other (for musicologists) about what we can learn about Ives’s compositional process from his sketches. The latter is mostly about the First Piano Sonata, since we have many more preliminary sketches for that than for the Concord, and there’s really only one page I’m discussing at length: the presumptive first sketch written at Pine Mountain, CT, and dated Aug. 4, 1901. But it’s a fascinating page, an abbreviated and prescient outline for what would become a much longer movement. I’m also relating that at some length to Ives’s discussion of composing in the Essays Before a Sonata, which I think has never been taken seriously enough as a philosophy of what makes music great. When I get back I’ll publish the Ives lecture somewhere on the internet – here, if no more prestigious locale presents itself. I guess the UCSB people decided having a photo of Ives on the poster would bring in more people (or repel fewer) than a photo of me.

If you’re in the area, that’s November 3 at 5 in Geiringer Hall for the microtonality lecture, and November 4 at 3:30 in Music Room 1145 for the Ives lecture. I’ve already given the Kushell Lectures at Bucknell, the Poynter Fellowship Lecture at Yale, and the Longyear Musicology Lecture at the University of Kentucky. I just Googled “named musicology lectures” to see if there was a list I should be crossing off somewhere, but nothing came up. Hit ‘n’ miss, I guess.

Gannian events abound. This weekend I’ll be in Philadelphia participating in workshops devoted to performing the works of Julius Eastman, run by the Bowerbird Ensemble. Sadly, my teaching schedule precludes my being there for the opening performance of Crazy Nigger tomorrow night.

A week from Saturday, on Oct. 24, the NewEar ensemble is playing my 75-minute suite The Planets at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in Kansas City, the first ensemble to do so besides Relache, who commissioned it. Lee Hartman is conducting the piece, which I think is a good idea; Relache did it sans conductor, which is difficult in some movements.

And on November 3 and 4 I’m giving two lectures at UC Santa Barbara, the second one the Geiringer Musicology Lecture. The latter is titled “A Harmony of Imperfections: How Charles Ives Composed.” The first one, for a more general audience, is “Beyond G#: Escaping the Tyranny of 12 Pitches.” These don’t seem to be listed on the schedule yet. Nor have I finished writing them, but I’ve certainly got all the material in my head. Busy times.

UPDATE: I forgot to include a performance of my Romance Postmoderne this Friday in Pasadena by micro-pianists Aron Kallay and Vicki Ray. And I’m a little disappointed no one commented on the Simpsonian provenance of my headline.

Thanks for indulging my mystery pianist contest. I was less interested in stumping the listeners than in collecting a set of comparison pianists to relate the style to. I am grateful to all who obliged.

Not surprisingly, my Downtown comrade Tom Hamilton confidently nailed the answer: it’s our late friend Elodie Lauten, playing her Variations on the Orange Cycle. Elodie was not only an early punk singer, Allen Ginsburg groupie, and composer of beautiful postminimalist operas, but a phenomenal improvising pianist. I wanted to introduce a little of the end of this version, which gets wilder and more dissonant than the style she’s usually associated with; the first long stretch of the recording is rather static (if meditatively beautiful), and I was afraid some people would listen to it, decide it’s simplistic, and turn it off before it got more athletic. Here’s the entire 40-minute recording. Made in a studio on November 21, 1991, it was “released” on a cassette (I have a slew of cassettes Elodie gave me over the years) on her private label, Cat Collectors. (I couldn’t resist including her voice at the beginning.) It has since been rereleased on two of Elodie’s CDs, Piano Works and Piano Soundtracks, and somehow on the former it is transposed up just over a half-step and correspondingly shorter; the cassette was more correct, because the piece is supposed to be in G, and the CD has it between Ab and A.

Pianist Lois Svard made another recording of the same piece on the Lovely Music label (with my Desert Sonata on the “flip side,” in fact). What Elodie did for that, in 1995, was to play the piece on an electric keyboard into a computer, recording the MIDI output, and then convert the MIDI input to notation and give it to Lois. Anyone who has experience recording live into MIDI can imagine what a morass of irrational complexity that resulted in, so when Lois despaired of reading it, Elodie took it back and revised a lot of it by hand, though the notation is still a little cumbersome; as you can see here, the left hand alternates between G and F for a long time, but the score has the F in the treble clef, and the rhythms are a little arbitrary:

Lois’s recording, only 25 minutes long, is parsed into four concise, well-shaped movements, which division greatly clarifies what Elodie’s overall plan was. It makes the piece seem stronger and more compact, but I love Elodie’s 1991 recording as well for being a little more all-over-the-place and stream-of-consciousness.

I was afraid the pianist’s identity might be guessed by those who read my blog closely enough to remember that I will be giving a paper, “Elodie Lauten as Postminimalist Improviser,” at the upcoming minimalism conference in Torku and Helsinki, Finland. The bulk of my paper will be on two pieces of which I have two quite disparate recordings, the Variations on the Orange Cycle above, and her Sonate Ordinaire of 1986 – which I reviewed in one of my first Village Voice columns. I have two of Elodie’s recordings of the latter, one an undated cassette copy and the other from Piano Soundtracks, in a performance dated 1986. The former is 17 minutes long, the latter 23, and they’re quite different in form, though distinctly similar in material. The piece’s main material is based on a kind of chromatic sequencing that also appears in the 1991 version of Variations, but not the 1995:

At one point I had hoped that I could prepare an entire performance score for either version of the Sonate Ordinaire, as I did for Harold Budd’s Children of the Hill and Dennis Johnson’s November, but this is looking doubtful; overlapping chromatic lines in the piano’s deep bass are hard to disentangle, and some passages have such rapid flurries that, even electronically slowed down, I don’t know whether I can decipher all the notes with any certainty. As you can see, the rhythmic aspect of most of the piece is straightforward, and I will transcribe what I can. I might also include Elodie’s Adamantine Sonata of 1983, which I don’t have alternate versions of, but I’ve already transcribed the one I have.

I am fascinated by how Elodie could have such a distinct sonic identity for each piece and still introduce so many major deviations from one performance to another – and keep such large structures in her head. Also, there are strong postminimalist traits to these pieces – the first Orange Cycle variation is entirely in G mixolydian, the second mostly in Phrygian, and the Sonate Ordinaire keeps up a steady pulse momentum for most of its length. Postminimalism is a style that has not been conducive to improvisation, and I’m hoping to get inside Elodie’s head and figure out how she conceived the music. I keep thinking I can just call her up to ask questions, and it’s too late.

As always, I will print no comments disparaging another person’s music showcased on my blog, especially for someone so recently deceased and sorely missed. If you feel a need to put it down, ask yourself why.

Holy shit. Critic Steve Smith of the Times has proclaimed Dennis Johnson’s November, which I reconstructed and Andrew Lee recorded on Irritable Hedgehog, as the number one best classical recording of 2013. Of all of the ventures I’ve taken on in my life, I would not have picked this one to garner as much public resonance as it’s received. I was talking to my good friend, radio personality, and songwriter extraordinaire David Garland about it recently, and pointed out that I had also resurrected Harold Budd’s Children on a Hill, which is incredibly beautiful. “Incredibly beautiful by itself is never enough,” he said. There’s something about Dennis Johnson being an underappreciated underdog, he thought, that made a story that resonates with people. It’s not just that November‘s a wonderful piece, but that it disappeared for fifty years, that it anticipated so many of aspects of minimalism, and that Dennis didn’t get credit for all that. The public (and critics) don’t just want great music, they want a stunning narrative to go with it. If I go down in history as primarily the resurrector of November, I will be very disappointed, but it will make a certain kind of sense.

[I should clarify that while Steve Smith does write for the Times, this particular list appeared in Time Out.]

I received in yesterday’s mail several copies of pianist Aron Kallay’s new CD Beyond 12: Reinventing the Piano, the first installment of his project of playing microtonal music on virtual pianos. (I love the unmatched black keys on the cover art.) The disc includes my own Echoes of Nothing, which I wrote for him in 2011; also non-12 pieces by Isaac Schankler, Aaron K. Johnson, John Schneider, Tom Flaherty, Vera Ivanova, Jason Heath, and Brian Shepard. It’s a disc of remarkably delicate and gentle and colorful music, though ranging from the vertiginously out-of-tune to the exquisitely in-tune. I’m afraid I have to mention that the names of the movements in my piece got reversed: the opening long, dreamy meditation is “Nothing,” the subsequent boogie-woogie is “Something.” It’s the third disc on the Microfest Records label, and they are well worth supporting.

I also remembered that I failed to draw attention to David Garland’s recent interview with me about Dennis Johnson’s piano piece November, which you can hear here on WNYC’s website.