PostClassic

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...]

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...]