Toward the end of the "Hawthorne" essay in Essays Before a Sonata, Ives refers to “the old hymn-tune that haunts the church and sings only to those in the churchyard to protect them from secular noises, as when the circus parade comes down Main Street….” In writing my Concord Sonata book I've read, or in many cases reread, almost all of Hawthorne, especially the stories and novels in which this kind of reference might arise, and I can't find anything Ives could have been referring to. As I continue slogging through the remainder (and I … [Read more...]

A brief new tuning study for the 232-key piano of my imagination: Romance Postmoderne. As I was playing it, my wife said, "Boy, the pitches in that are really bendy." Then she looked at me suspiciously and added, "You can't hear it, can you?" And I had to admit I couldn't. It sounds so normal to me; I'd love to hear how weird it sounds to other people, but I've just grown too accustomed to thirteenth harmonics. The tuning is really elegant, all harmonics of Eb: the odd numbers from 1 to 15 multiplied by each other, an 8 x 8 grid comprising 33 … [Read more...]

You can hear here an eleven-minute interview that Steve Paulson did with me for "The Best of Our Knowledge" about Cage's 4'33".  I couldn't listen to all of it, my own voice on the radio makes me squirm. I'm in love with my own words - when I see them in print, not when I'm speaking them. I wish I spoke more slowly and evenly and with more gravitas, though my style does seem to be entertaining in the classroom. It didn't really occur to me that I had written books about two composers both born in the same year, 1912, until the joint centennial … [Read more...]

For the next three days, June 1-3, I'll be at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina, for the annual Nief-Norf Summer Festival, which is devoted to John Cage in this centennial year, and particularly to his percussion music; I deliver yet another of my signature keynote addresses Saturday at 3:30 in Harper Hall. It's not so difficult finding new things to say about Cage as to bring my ever-shifting understanding of him into focus. Given the average youth of the festival participants, festival organizer Andy Bliss suggested I include my … [Read more...]

LUBLIN - I'm publishing - to exactly coincide, through the wonders of technology, with the moment of my delivering it in Poland - my talk for the Cage100 symposium in the charming town of Lublin. It's a rather curmudgeonly examination (and I hope I won't be stoned by the Cage aficionados here assembled) of Cage's occasional twisting of logic in certain articles in Silence. I must say, writing it has gotten some things out of my system, and I find I can more freely commit to everything I love about Cage's writing now that I've snaked out the … [Read more...]

The Nancarrow conference produced by the Trinity Laban Conservatoire at the Southbank Centre, London, was pretty spectacular, given its modest timeframe. All of the player-piano studies were played on an instrument virtually identical to Conlon's, Jim Greeson's documentary on Conlon was premiered (Alex Ross shows an excerpt here), the London Sinfonietta played transcriptions superbly, and Conlon's widow Yoko presented a very touching portrait of him in words. What one drew from her talk, and also from a paper on the Nancarrow correspondence by … [Read more...]

I'm on my way to London this week to give one of the keynote addresses (Charles Amirkhanian is giving the other) at the Nancarrow in the 21st Century conference at the Southbank Centre, organized by Dominic Murcott of the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance. My talk is at 11:15 AM Sunday, April 22. Trimpin will be there, and composer Nic Collins is giving a paper on computer analysis of Conlon's music, and Conlon's widow Yoko Segiura Nancarrow, whom I haven't seen in some 17 years, is making a rare public appearance. And there will … [Read more...]

At the recommendation of our viola professor Marka Gustavsson, I just finished reading Ian McEwan's 1998 novel Amsterdam, which she urged on me because the main character is a composer. It's a brief book and an enjoyable read, but what impressed me most was the insightful realism with which McEwan describes, at considerable length, the composer's thought process. Here's his description of the composer, the Englishman Clive Linley, early in the book: For Clive Linley the matter was simple. He regarded himself as Vaughan Williams's heir, and … [Read more...]

If you sense I'm in microtonal heaven lately, that's pretty much true. Except for a six-minute piano piece, I haven't written one of the normal pitches since December. One event that I would have highlighted in advance, but somehow I didn't have the final information for, was a microtonal performance of Satie's Vexations that took place last Sunday at the Against the Stream Buddhist Meditation Center in Los Angeles. Pianist Aron Kallay and guitarist John Schneider asked seventeen microtonalists, myself included, to come up with a microtonal … [Read more...]

I dreamed this morning that Morton Feldman was still alive, that he had made a string quartet arrangement of Ives's Fourth Symphony that the Arditti had recorded, and that he was advertising to make a string quartet arrangement of any piece for an appropriate fee.   … [Read more...]

A new, brief piece, a rhythm study: Mystic Chords, 6:20. It's the most austere thing I've written in decades. The main idea of the piece is an attempt to determine rhythms not by duration, but via tempo, thus creating rhythms incapable of metric notation. Here's an excerpt from the score: These aren't the actual pitches. The piece uses a rather wonderful symmetrical pitch set I discovered, 27 harmonics above an extremely low F#, specifically harmonics nos. 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 21, 25, 27, 33, 35, 39, 45, 49, 55, 63, 65, 77, 81, … [Read more...]

I love this insight from Slate's interview today with Noam Chomsky: Q: In your new book, you suggest that many components of human nature are just too complicated to be really researchable. A: That's a pretty normal phenomenon. Take, say, physics, which restricts itself to extremely simple questions. If a molecule becomes too complex, they hand it over to the chemists. If it becomes too complex for them, they hand it to biologists. And if the system is too complex for them, they hand it to psychologists ... and so on until it ends up in … [Read more...]

Awhile back I noted composer Henry F. Gilbert's response to receiving, from the unknown Charles Ives, a copy of the Concord Sonata and accompanying essays: a friend of Gilbert's, admiring the essays, had remarked, “Depend upon it, this fellow is a bad composer – good composers are usually non compos mentis on every other subject.” Only yesterday, though, in Jan Swafford's superb Ives biography, did I notice Ives's justifiably arrogant yet heartbreaking answer to him: Your friend, the critic, is wrong again. I am not a bad composer - … [Read more...]

Next week, March 29 and 30, I will be the featured composer at the fourth annual Open Space Festival of New Music at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley. Previous composer recipients of this honor have been excellent electronic composer Paul Rudy, Christian Wolff, and French computer composer Jean-Claude Risset, so it's difficult to imagine where this trajectory is going. They're planning to perform my Olana for vibraphone, On Reading Emerson for piano, my mixed quartet Kierkegaard, Walking, Siren for five flutes, and my choral piece … [Read more...]

I had to change my e-mail address and web site location. I've been using Earthlink for 17 years, paying $62 a month (which I understand is rather high), and last month my rate jumped to $562 - that's not a typo. So I challenged the charges and the bank got my money back, and, looking around the internet, I see that Earthlink has devolved into a gang of thieves: charging people for things not wanted, refusing cancellation, all kinds of stuff, and if you try to complain you're talking to someone in India whose English you can hardly understand. … [Read more...]

New piece: The Unnameable. 12:10 UPDATE: For many years I have been trying to compose using the harmonic series, and in a series of studies for my three-Disklavier piece, including this one, I've finally figured out how to do it. The harmonic series in its natural pitch order (high harmonics on top) is a rather thin thing to work with, creating wan parallels. But if in one chord you use the 13th harmonic near the bottom and the 5th on top, and in the next chord you have the 11th on the bottom and the 9th on top, and so on, one can create a … [Read more...]

Peter Gena writes with the saddening news that composer Phil Winsor died in January, and he'd only just now heard. In the 1980s in Chicago, Phil, Peter, and I had a truculent, short-lived organization called the Chicago Interarts Ministry. Phil was one of the early Downtown-style electronics composers at the San Francisco Tape Center (participated in the premiere of In C, as I recall), and a writer of books on electronic-music topics. He became a postminimalist, and was featured on New Music American 1982, the Chicago year. Later, after I left … [Read more...]

I keep hearing that people are seeing Facebook photos of me interviewing Phil Glass. I won't join Facebook again, and I can't find them. I would be grateful (perhaps eternally) to anyone who might send me a couple. E-mail address at my website. … [Read more...]

I have a complaint that I've never seen addressed publicly, but talking to colleagues has made it clear that I'm not the only one affected. For better or worse, the bulk of my professional life takes place these days in academia. Schools, universities, invite me to lecture, give concerts, and so on.  I'm grateful to them. Most of them ask me to arrange my own plane trip, promising to reimburse me for the airfare. Recently this happened with several schools at once, involving flights to Europe, and I don't have that kind of cash on hand, so … [Read more...]

My friend and colleague John Halle is the most politically astute and engaged composer I know. He was one of the organizers, with Judd Greenstein, of the Occupy Musicians web site that I featured recently. Now John has written a two-part article about issues surrounding what he perceives as a relative lack of commitment to the Occupy Wall Street movement on the part of composers, suggesting that our interests are sometimes entangled with those of the 1%. Unsurprisingly, the article has been turned down as overly provocative by several music … [Read more...]