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...]