Archives for October 2003

I was highly gratified by what Nicholas Thompson, the subway-station musician and Washington Times editor, had to say (linked here on Arts Journal) about the failures of the recording industry. In particular, what he said that was relevant to the new music I follow was this:

The music industry tends to divide both bands and audiences into broad, set formats: alt-music, hip-hop, and modern country. There is an obvious reality to these categories, but in truth, they exist largely for the benefit of record companies, which can then narrow and target their promotion efforts. Unfortunately, most bands and artists can’t get to first base unless their music fits one of these formats, and there are many other bands and other types of music – like mine – that don’t fit into any set genres. Many people’s tastes stretch well beyond formats, and they might want to buy some of this music if they heard it. Indeed, it’s almost guaranteed that somewhere between these formats, the next big thing in music is brewing. But figuring out how to profitably micro-market heterogeneous bands to scattered audiences is something the music industry has not yet figured out how to do.

Said more concisely here than I’ve probably said it, this nevertheless overlaps with a general point I’m been making for many years. One of the explicit aims of composers of my generation has been to close up the huge gulf between classical and popular music, to recreate the possibility of music having as much foot-tapping energy as rock, but also the theoretical interest and structural weight of experimental music. The greatest emphasis of musical creativity in the last 20 years has been on working between genres, specifically on work that is not “contemporary music” in the good old classical sense, but that belongs in some third section at Tower Records in between pop and classical.

For instance, William Duckworth’s Time Curve Preludes for piano – much of this hour-long work transfers bluegrass patterns to the piano, adding in the piano style of John Lee Hooker, yet also threading in Gregorian chant and Eric Satie quotations in rhythms structured according to the Fibonacci series. This is absolutely enchanting music on first listening, and interesting to analyze, too. I’ve never played this disc for anyone (Lovely Music, with Neely Bruce on piano) without the person going out and buying it.

Or how about Pamela Z? Her song with the Qube Chix, “Bald Boyfriend” (Ishtar/Dice Records) is pretty strange, three voices with only clarinet, drums, and an electric razor for accompaniment, yet it causes riots of laughter when I play it in classes, and everyone wants a copy:

I want a bald boyfriend!

I want a bald boyfriend!

I want a guy who’s well-behaved,

Who’s neat and clean, whose head is shaved!

I want a man who’s on the move,

Who’s charming, smart, whose dome is smoooooth.

But where would you classify it? It’s absolutely not commercial pop, but it’s thoughtful, funny, smart, and too much fun to stick in the classical music bin, and the same is true of Pamela’s music in general.

Or, even more explicitly, Carl Stone’s Hop Ken, an electronic piece that samples a recording of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, but repackages it in pounding rock rhythms laced with Celtic folk (EAM Discs).

Or Mikel Rouse’s opera Dennis Cleveland (New World). This well-known opera in the form of a talk show, with characters singing and speaking from the audience, revived last year at Lincoln Center, is entirely in a pop beat with pop-style lyrics. Yet the scenes are around 10 minutes each in length, and the form so sophisticated that passages recur superimposed over each other in different tempos and keys at once, without ever becoming unintelligible. At its 1996 premiere, it was the first show at the Kitchen in New York to ever attract scalpers.

I could multiply examples all week; this music is my life. My generation has produced an enormous body of in-between music, inventive in its structures and techniques, but fun and foot-tappingly infectious. And it officially doesn’t exist because it’s too much trouble for the record companies to invent a new category for it. Which leads to endless speculations for me and my composer friends: Is there really no audience for in-between music, what I’ve called music of the excluded middle? Are pop fans completely happy with pop conventions are they are, violently resistant to all innovation, and do classical fans really only want notated acoustic music with an orchestral or chamber-music style of rhythm? If so, why do audiences react with so much enthusiasm when I play this music?

Or is it simply that the recording industry kills new genres, or music between genres, because they can’t efficiently market it and make money off of it? I’ve long felt that what we have here is a huge body of lively music, the most important and characteristic music of our time in fact, artificially separated from its potential audience by narrow-minded, bottom-line-oriented corporate thinking – and composers punished explicitly for trying to heal a disastrous breach between the art and entertainment worlds that should never have been allowed to calcify in the first place. The recording industry has made tons of money from shoring up our cultural neuroses. And if they’re finding that cash cow impossible to sustain, under the pressure of musical energy seeping through the infinitely porous internet – well, maybe that’s the best thing that could have happened. Down with the big music corporations, down with classical music as an empty, iron-clad category – and up with a healthy music scene that sees no reason to honor categories!

I was slow to start blogging this week. For one thing, I had to finish up a lengthy “hyperhistory” on music and politics for New Music Box, which will debut Nov. 1, so watch for it. More pertinently at the moment, I also moved my web site to a larger virtual space, from home.earthlink.net/~kgann/ to www.kylegann.com. Those of you who’ve checked know you’ve always been able to find me at kylegann.com; there was an automatic redirect to my free space at Earthlink. But that space wasn’t large enough to store MP3s, and I’ve now opened a new web site (though it looks the same, for now) to accomodate recordings of my music. My excitement will be attributed to the egotism of getting my music out to the public, but it has at least as much to do with my overcoming of what seemed to be incredible technical hurdles. I do business through Earthlink, but I had registered the kylegann.com domain at Yahoo, and I didn’t dream how much trouble I’d have when I decided to conflate the two. I had to get a “registry key” from Yahoo (and to be honest it was so long ago I didn’t even remember whom I had registered with), and it took three weeks and many, many phone calls, e-mails, and tech support chat lines to get everything transferred. Be careful who you register a domain with – they may make it difficult to swap. Back then (just two years ago) it seemed so self-aggrandizing to name a web site after oneself – I remember Roger Reynolds telling me apologetically about his dotcom – but now everybody and his grandmother can be found at everybodyandhisgrandmother.com.

But I will self-indulge a few words about my MP3s. I spent 1977-86 in Chicago, and then from 1986 to 1991 I endured a near-hiatus in my composing life. For one thing, I had risen from Midwestern obscurity to my job at the Village Voice, and felt under a lot of public pressure. For another, I had discovered just intonation – an alternate approach to tuning using potentially many more than 12 pitches to the octave – in 1984, and for seven years I filled entire notebooks with grids of fractions, trying to rethink music from the ground up. Having been introduced to just intonation by my teacher Ben Johnston, it took me until 1991 to finally write a piece (Superparticular Woman) that could make sense only in that tuning system. Between the unaccustomed spotlight of the Voice job and my obsessive theoretical explorations, I wrote only a handful of brief studies in the late 1980s, and didn’t really accelerate back to full speed until 1994.

And so the music I wrote before 1986 lies on the other side of a divide – performed in Chicago and then forgotten. Some of the pieces now up as MP3s haven’t been heard publicly since 1983, and I’m pleased to have the means to expose them again. Heavily under Brian Eno’s influence from his Music for Airports on, I made my experiments with improvisation and ambient music in those years, and while I abandoned improvisation due to the difficulty of getting my intentions across to improvising musicians, I always meant to return to the ambient thread. (I’ll be really impressed if anyone can find the quote from a relatively obscure Eno album in my MP3s.) I remember in 1982 meeting Steve Reich and describing my music to him as a cross between Morton Feldman and Harold Budd – that ceased to be true, and my music became rhythmically energetic under additional Native American influences. As any artist will tell you, work produced that long ago feels as though made by another person, and I have a distanced affection for some of these pieces similar to what I might have for a Roy Harris symphony or Morton Feldman chamber piece that hasn’t yet been given its due. One’s own opinion of early works goes up and down with time as well, and right now I think much more highly of my early ’80s pieces than I did a few years ago. I wish now I could recreate the outpouring of continuous contrapuntal melody that I did in Baptism (1983), and I’ve always meant to return to the ambient, unsynchronized feel of Long Night (1980-81), and have just never gotten around to it.

As Emerson so beautifully says, “In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.” Not that they’re works of genius, but that’s how I sometimes react to my early music, reproached by anticipations of directions I had intended to go in.

Of course, I also have MP3s of recent music up, and if I can get performers’ permissions, I’ll put more. I’m augmenting my CD collection by downloading and burning to disc the music of composers I can follow only on the internet, and I’m happy for others to do the same with me. I trust that the RIAA won’t come snooping around a bunch of aging new-music composers trying to trade soundfiles so someone can hear their music – not when there are so many 12-year-old Brittany Spears fans with parents ready to make cash settlements.

Speaking, as I was in the Erling Wold entry, of trying to get information about new music in the ’70s, I remember once I was confused about something that composer Henri Pousseur had written in an article in Die Reihe, the then-awe-inspiring journal of the Darmstadt crowd. My friends and I, feeling entitled to some clarification, stayed up half the night trying to find a long-distance operator in Liege who spoke English, trying to get Mr. Pousseur’s home number from information. Today, we’d be able to go to henripousseur.com and send him an e-mail. Once, at the June in Buffalo festival, a bunch of us tried to get Stockhausen on the phone, too.

Lately I’m fawning over the internet to an extent that worries me. Yesterday I was talking to Matt Wellins (Mr. New Music at Bard), and, ransacking my brain for references he might not already know, I suddenly asked him if he was familiar with the music of San Francisco composer Erling Wold. The name rang a bell, and I mentioned that I hadn’t heard any new music from Wold in years, and wondered what he was up to. No sooner did the thought occur to me, of course, than I whirled around to the computer, pulled up Google, and there I was at erlingwold.com. Wold’s got a superbly simple but well-designed web site (like his music), and to my delight had not only mp3s of most of his music, but PDFs of the scores. I went to a piano piece titled Veracity, clicked a couple of times and hit Apple-P, and less than five minutes after his name had popped into my head, I was holding the sheet music to a new Erling Wold piano piece.

Now I realize that to anyone under 30 the delight I take in this makes me sound like an addlepated old man. But sonny, (HACK HACK, SPIT) let me tell ya about the old days. I remember my friends and I in college, when we were avidly searching out the latest musical news, which in those days had to do with Xenakis, Feldman, Berio, combing through music stores for the occasional C.F. Peters piano piece or Universal orchestral score that would set us back 50 bucks or more, hanging out at big-city record stores with import sections, spending all available time and cash to keep up some feeling of being conversant with the latest thing going on. Decades pass: “import sections” at record stores become a dim memory (HACK), European labels quit marketing new music to dull-witted America, music stores where scores are sold go out of business a half-dozen at a time, record distributors throw out new-music labels like moldy vegetables. If I managed to stay current in the 1990s, it was largely because I knew personally the composers whose work I was trying to follow, and could hound them for CDRs and Xeroxed scores myself. The feeling that there was a musical cutting edge to follow was getting difficult to sustain, and it felt like the culture was closing up shop.

This is a key to many of my attitudes toward new music, toward my own music, music distribution, and so on – the sense of frustration I felt in college over how difficult it was to get information. I declared silent, internal war on Pierre Boulez, for instance, because in On Music Today he revealed almost enough hints to tell us how to analyze his music, but intentionally withheld crucial details. And I swore to commit myself to the free, unimpeded flow of new-music information, to the point that I now put more tuning information about my scores on my own web page than anyone’s likely to ever be interested in.

So now, as I held in my hand that Erling Wold piano score whose existence I hadn’t even suspected moments before, I imagined how I would have felt in 1975 if I could have pushed a button and gotten a free score to, say, Xenakis’s Mists, or Berio’s Circles, or Feldman’s Out of Last Pieces. Not only is there a future to new music, we just might be able to make it infinitely more open, information-wise – and maybe even infinitely less expensive – than the hallowed past.

It added to the sense of heaven that Wold’s site is so clearly designed. His mp3s and PDFs pop up instantly. And I appreciate, for him being the hip kind of composer he is, that he is so score-oriented. These days the world sometimes seems divided between two stereotypes: the old-fashioned, modernist composers who write complex, gorgeously notated scores of tedious, unintelligible music that they can’t get recorded, and the postmodernists who put out CDs by the bushel but don’t bother putting anything readable on paper. Wold writes simple but tonal and rhythmically unusual music, sometimes microtonal, atmospheric yet lyric. I seem to have once called him “the Eric Satie of Berkeley surrealist/minimalist electro-artrock” – I think that’s my Village Voice quote he’s got on his bio. Not all of his music has scores (the score line in the grid sometimes marked “N/A”), but most of it does. The PDF scores look a little blotchy on my screen, but they print out beautifully, and I’ve always got people asking me for the latest new piano music – here it is. I’m grateful for Wold’s sense that audio files and notes on paper are equally meaningful, and complement each other. And after a couple of centuries of music publishers taking composers to the cleaners, I’m thrilled that the technology exists for Wold to put his paper scores directly into my hands without any intermediary. He didn’t make any money on the transaction, but it might lead to a performance or two, and it’s better than having his scores sit in boxes in warehouses as a tax write-off for some snobby classical publisher that doesn’t give a damn.

I went back today and heard some excerpts from Wold’s new opera Sub Pontio Pilato, mystic and thoroughly enjoyable, and printed out another intriguing-looking piano piece called Albrechts Flugel. That solves the mystery of what Erling Wold’s been up to these last few years. Only thing left: why don’t I yet have any of his last five CDs? I guess I’m still caught in the old critic paradigm, by which I wait for people to send me things. I’ll catch up.

On the issue of burning playable CDRs, some words to the wise from our wise readers:

William Mericle advises burning CDRs with an Emagic Waveburner, a dedicated mastering software package, and claims that the resulting cds are more reliably played than when burned on I-tunes. Michael Robinson, an extremely prolific Los Angeles composer with massive experience in CDR burning, highly recommends Mitsui Gold inkjet printable CDRs (not Mitsui silver!, he adds) as being the best in terms of sound quality, compatibility, and longevity. He also strongly recommends recording at 1X speed, claiming that the result is warmer and less digital than at faster speeds. He learned all this through being entrusted to commit rare ethnological recordings to CD for the UCLA ethnomusicology department, and found that musicians could tell the differences in quality in blindfold situations. I’m willing to try it.

Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985) has long been one of my favorite artists. His cartoonish figures, often etched in thick paint and as if drawn by a child, with a child’s exaggeration of identifying anatomical features, have an archetypal immediacy, yet also betray sophistication in their uniform covering of the entire canvas. (Yikes! Now I see why art critics write the way they do.) As examples of two of his characteristic styles, for those who may be unfamiliar with him, I link you to Bustle 1 from the Cleveland Museum, and Gare Montparnesse Portes des Lilas from the Tehran Museum, no less (scroll down to #57).

In 1973 (the year Vietnam ended, Nixon resigned, I entered college, and all things still seemed possible, I remember it well), the Turkish electronic composer Ilhan Mimaroglu (interesting character, whatever happened to him?) released, on his small Finnadar label, a record of musique concrete pieces that Dubuffet had made. Dubuffet had gone into a room with an early Grundig tape recorder and a passel of noisemakers, and, with a friend, proceeded to improvise. “In my music,” the liner notes quoted Dubuffet,

I wanted to place myself in the position of a man of fifty thousand years ago, a man who ignores everything about western music and invents a music for himself without any reference, without any discipline, without anything that would prevent him to express himself freely and for his own good pleasure. This is what I wanted to do in my painting too, only with this difference that painting, I know it – western painting of the last few centuries, I know it perfectly well – and I want to deliberately forget all about it…. But I do not know music, and this gave me a certain advantage in my musical experiences….

Putting aside a certain philosophical sleight-of-hand – How would a man of 50,000 years ago ignore western music, since it wasn’t there to ignore? How could anyone, let alone a primitive man, invent a music without any reference? How would a prehistoric man have arrived at the idea of music as organized sound, divorced from meaning or ritual? – Dubuffet’s concrete pieces live up to his description beautifully. They are noisy, pure, crazy, exuberant, yet also focused and inventive. Dubuffet creates an impression of frenetically playful improvisation, yet each piece has a strong concept, and even a form. As with his paintings, background and foreground seem reversed, the shape of each piece etched into a thick layer of scruffy noises.

In the liner notes, Mimaroglu noted that the eight pieces on his record were selected from 20 that were issued on six limited-edition LPs; he added that 11 other pieces were released on four more LPs in 1960-61 (he didn’t note what year the first set appeared). So the record contains eight wonderful, amazing, totally original pieces out of an alleged 31 – where are the other 23? Does anyone still own those recordings? Can they be released?

In the process of transferring the old Finnadar disc to CD, I got curious once again and searched the internet. There, on the fantastic site for all kinds of crazy new music, Ubuweb, I found 9 of the tapes, including three I already had and six new ones. Ubuweb is a huge, wonderful site with hours and hours of concrete poetry, tape pieces, Fluxus documents, and other oddities of the mid- to late 20th century (including, for instance, Robert Ashley’s Wolfman and David Behrman’s Wave Train). I should check Ubuweb more often for the obscure underground gems that I need to play for students, or that I’ve always wanted to hear; somehow I forget it’s there. But on their Dubuffet page I found six of the 23 pieces I’ve been waiting to hear for 30 years. Several of them are as exciting as the ones Mimaroglu had chosen, especially Coq a l’oiel, a frantically rippling piano piece that sounds like late Nancarrow; and Longue Peine, which uses two bassoons and a cello as cowlike drones beneath its continuum of scratching noises. There’s also a strange 24-minute piece Le Fleur de Barbe with Dubuffet (or his friend) singing in French over various noises, sounding a little like a drunken revel. At their best, these pieces are just as free, spontaneous, and amazing as Mimaroglu thought they were 30 years ago, with a rough, earthy energy that matches his paintings, and yet a sense of focus that sets them apart from all other musique concrete. I’m thrilled to now have 14 of Dubuffet’s tapes out of the 31.

Anyone know the status of the remaining 17?