PostClassic

For those in the Hudson Valley or thereabouts tomorrow, September 13, the Relache ensemble is playing my suite The Planets live, with the amazing video by John Sanborn, at Bard College. It's in Olin Auditorium at 8. Nothing like airing your astrological interests to your colleagues in the science division. … [Read more...]

Due to a rather hectic first week of school (I've been appointed chair of the arts division, with administrative duties - hope they know what they're getting into), this is a possibly too-late reminder that Relache will be performing my ten-movement suite The Planets tonight, for the first time playing it live with John Sanborn's wonderful video, at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, 2025 Benjamin Franklin Parkway; call 888-616-0277. It's part of some big "First Friday" celebration fo all things Philadelphian, apparently. The event is … [Read more...]

My son's other band (besides Liturgy), Guardian Alien, is beginning to take off; just coming off a Midwest tour, they've got a new album out on Thrill Jockey, See the World Given to a One Love Entity, with an accompanying video. The album is one forty-minute track, high-energy and improvised but well structured, and fun to listen to. In fact, Bernard told me he took to heart some of the criticisms I had made of free improv in my early Village Voice writings, and took care to avoid the worst clichés. The genre, he says, is psychedelic rock. I … [Read more...]

John Cage used to enjoy what repeating what he said was a quotation from Thoreau. Thoreau's first book A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers did not sell, and at some point the publisher sent him back the remaining 700 copies. According to Cage, Thoreau said in response, “It makes me feel so good that no one is interested in my work, because it leaves me free to go in any direction that is necessary.” I fear that I have played some role in the dissemination of this misquote, for when I Google it my name often comes up. But for a long … [Read more...]

After a dry spell, I'm suddenly having eight nine performances in five months, with six world premieres included. (I guess for a lot of composers, nine in five months still sounds like a dry spell.) Two of the premieres slipped by me because I'm not very good at keeping track of dates. On June 23, Aron Kallay premiered my Echoes of Nothing at Beyond Baroque in Venice, California. Last Friday, August 17, Italian pianist Emanuele Arciuli premiered my Earth-Preserving Chant on a program of American Indian-inspired music by Peter Garland, John … [Read more...]

ELK LAKE, NEW YORK - Charles Ives wrote in his Memos that he got the idea for the Concord Sonata in the summer of 1911 at Pell's. Pell was Henry Pelletier Jones, a friend of Ives's father-in-law Joseph Twichell, his establishment more formally known as Pell Jones's Cabin. The Twichell family used to spend a few weeks in August or September there, and Ives and his wife joined them in 1909, 1910, and 1911. Ives suffered from what was then called neurasthenia, kind of a tendency toward nervous breakdowns (and his first heart attack came in 1906, … [Read more...]

[T]he $1,800,000 that I made, though made openly, legally, and in accordance with rules etc. of the business, was all out of proportion to the "idea," to the service that I rendered society. A blacksmith who has made a shoe so that a horse will slip less, and incidentally $18 per week, has come nearer earning that $1,800,000 than I did. - Charles Ives, "George's Adventure," 1919 (in Memos, p. 226)   … [Read more...]

The black metal band Liturgy is down to just two members plus electronics. I don't know how they do that yet, but I'll see them play in Hudson, NY, Friday night and find out. Meanwhile, you can see them here, backstage at the Pitchfork festival in Chicago last month. Hunter Hunt-Hendrix does most of the talking, but you can see my son Bernard look really, really cool, and he talks a little about having been born in Chicago. Not a life I could have chosen, but I'm envious. … [Read more...]

One of my sabbatical-and-summer goals, which I have now achieved, was to finish five out of the fifteen chapters of my book on the Concord Sonata. In particular, I wanted to finish the analytical chapters on "Emerson" and "Hawthorne." Between them those two movements account for more than 3/4 of the sonata's pages, and by far the most complex ones as well; comparatively, "Alcotts" and "Thoreau" will be a snap. If I could finish "Emerson" and "Hawthorne," I thought, accounting for every measure and system - and I have, with 14,000 words and 80 … [Read more...]

Last time a commenter called me a fascist, I wrote an Idiot's Guide to PostClassic. Guess it's time to remind people it's there. Thugs from the Conventional Wisdom crowd do fall in here accidentally from time to time. I'd rather they just go here and leave us alone. … [Read more...]

David Patterson, whose copious and well-researched writings about John Cage I've quoted nearly every time I've written about the man, has a new obsession these days: William Carey Wright (1825-1904), a composer whose son Frank Lloyd Wright became a famous architect. The video linked to is part of a Kickstarter program to finance a recording of W.C. Wright's music, and you get to hear some of it, along with speculation about why F.L. Wright considered his buildings "symphonic," and why he built them up with motifs and variations the way a … [Read more...]

Apparently "The Silence Does Not Exist" (as Google retranslates it) can now be read in Italian. UPDATE: I do enjoy Google's automatic translation of Amazon's Italian synopsis: In the world of contemporary music is a before and after "4'33" "of John Cage. This composition is not known, this silence" active "- not a pianist who plays for 4 minutes and 33 seconds - is one of the works art's most famous, controversial and misunderstood of all time. Kyle Gann tells the imaginative life of John Cage and analyzes his masterpiece, illuminating … [Read more...]

I just received Michael Hicks's and Christian Asplund's book on Christian Wolff, part of the University of Illinois Press's "American Composers" series in which my Robert Ashley book will be coming out in October. Don't have time to read it at the moment (my current summer pleasure reading is another wolf: Virginia Woolf's Orlando), but I'm looking forward. Browsing through it I immediately notice two startling things. The first is a reprint of one of Wolff's early exercises in first-species counterpoint with parallel and hidden fifths and … [Read more...]

Will Robin over at New Music Box had the inspired idea to write an homage to the Pierrot ensemble, since the centennial of Pierrot Lunaire is upon us. The flute/clarinet/violin/cello/piano combination took a few decades to take off, but it has conquered: we are awash in such ensembles, and no student achieves professional status until he or she has written his or her "Pierrot piece." It's the lingua franca of the (academic) new-music performance world. As I mentioned in a comment there, I'm not thrilled about the development. I wrote one piece … [Read more...]

I've been meaning to mention that my March profile of David Borden was my last "American Composer" column for Chamber Music magazine. It was a great gig, but in recent years it was becoming an onerous burden to interrupt my other projects every two months and have to get my head into someone else's music. Overall I wrote 69 articles for the bimonthly magazine from 1998 to 2012, profiling 61 composers individually plus several others in the September articles I wrote about more general subjects. When I started, my predecessors in that column … [Read more...]

Some of you may recall the Consumers Guides, the full-page record review columns, that we used to run in the Village Voice. They may still do so, I haven't looked in years. The format and its accompanying grading system were invented during the late medieval era by the Voice's dean of critics Bob Christgau; at least, so the legend was passed down to me by my forefathers, whose knowledge I would never presume to challenge. The grading system was intended to be unalterably strict. A B was the top grade for music that would be considered excellent … [Read more...]

Here's a pop quiz for a lazy summer day. One person played a role in advancing the reputations of both Charles Ives and Ronald Reagan. Who was it? I'll save up answers until I get a few before posting them. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * UPDATE: Wow, I'm rather surprised no right answers today, but the experiment does confirm something about my perception of the literature. Henry Bellamann (1882-1945) was one of the first people to respond to receipt of Ives's Concord Sonata, the first to write an appreciative public … [Read more...]

I've been devouring novels all my life. I discovered Louisa May Alcott in third or fourth grade, and, having inhaled Little Women and Little Men, would quietly slip library copies of her lesser-known books into my backback, knowing that the Texas bullies who kept an eye on me would declare open season if they caught me carrying femmy-looking titles like Rose in Bloom or Jack and Jill. I remember that I was reading The House of the Seven Gables in July, 1969, because my mother dragged me away from it to come watch the moon landing. It’s kind … [Read more...]

In a vivid dream, I took my son to a new day-care center. (In waking life, he's a 27-year-old rock star on his way back today from a gig in Denmark.) I stayed around to observe the class, and was appalled at how simplistic the musical activities were. I was carrying around a large metal can, like a lidded watering can, in which I kept all the knowledge of music I go around disseminating, but it was unwieldy, and I kept bumping people with it. I ran into Alex Ross, who sympathized and explained to me that one could never draw from the general … [Read more...]

(UPDATE BELOW) Some photos from last month's Cage conference in Lublin, Poland, have arrived, taken by conference photographer Marcin Moszynski. Here's a shot of most of the participants (minus David Revill and Margaret Leng Tan, for some reason). I will make a hash of it if I try to identify them all, but that's Chris Shultis fifth from left, conference director Jerzy Kutnik behind two women and just under the lamp, David Nicholls between Jerzy and me, Gordon Mumma slightly crouched in front of me, and behind me Stanford political scientist … [Read more...]