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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Microtonal pianist Aron Kallay alerts me to a YouTube video of him playing part of the "Nothing" movement from my Echoes of Nothing. The full movement is a few minutes longer (and, there's kind of a superfluous one-minute intro to this five-minute video). … [Read more...]

Below is a page from Conlon Nancarrow's Piece No. 2 for Small Orchestra of 1986. If it is sufficiently readable here, you may be able to see that the different instruments are in three meters at once: some in 5/8, some in 6/8, and some in 7/8. Very difficult to play convincingly, because part of the orchestra will be playing every fourth 8th-note in the 7/8 while others are playing every third 8th-note in 5/8, and so on. The conductor gives the downbeat of each measure, and the poor sods have to fit their 5 or 7 into it as best they … [Read more...]

Apparently the Utrecht Wind Ensemble played the second movement of my piano concerto Sunken City in Utrecht at their concert of last Saturday night, along with works by Stravinsky, Donnacha Dennehy and others: I remember they had contacted me about the possibility several months ago, but hadn't heard anything more. They have a short audio clip at their general web site. Don't know why only one movement, but it's the "serious" one.   … [Read more...]

My old friend Tony DeRitis, composer and chair of music at Northeastern University, took the above nice photo of me and Carolyn Brown at that school's Earle Brown symposium over the weekend. Long-time Merce Cunningham dancer and Earle's first wife, Carolyn was making some meltingly gratifying comments about my 4'33" book. The previous day she had publicly presented a touchingly personal story of her life with Earle: he had fallen in love with her at age 12 (she was 11) in Lunenberg, Mass., where she was his best friend's sister. Carolyn's … [Read more...]

Friday morning at Northeastern University in Boston, I'll be giving the keynote address for Beyond Notation: An Earle Brown Symposium. Though I'd met him a few times, Brown is someone whose music I had never studied in detail, and it's been revelatory getting to know it better. Just hope I come up with something insightful to say, because the experts start talking after I finish.   … [Read more...]

That's Phil Glass, Keith Potter. Photo by Jelena Novak. … [Read more...]

I'm back from the Einstein on the Beach festivities in Amsterdam, and Friday at 3 I'll be giving a reading from my 4'33" book at the National Academy Museum in New York City. [No, I won't stand there without saying anything. Ha-ha.] UPDATE: You can ignore the following. Frank Oteri wants to put my Einstein analysis on New Music Box, where it will reach a wider audience. Going commercial, at whatever modest level, is always better than going academic when you have the chance, if you can do so without compromises. So I've pulled the article … [Read more...]

My friend George is looking forward to a respite from Cage performances now that the centennial is ending. He says it got so bad he couldn't even enjoy "Silent Night" anymore.   … [Read more...]