Archives for 2003

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?

I lived in Chicago from 1977 to 1989, where I frequently heard Georg Solti conduct the Chicago Symphony, and several times reviewed him and wrote about him. Around 1985, Solti held a press conference which I wasn’t present for, but a tape recording was made that I transcribed shortly afterward. Someone asked why the orchestra didn’t perform more new music. Solti responded to the effect that new music was always experimental, and that a great instrument like the Chicago Symphony Orchestra could not be used for “experiments.” This is why, in my previous blog entry, I called him an anti-new-music snob. He then continued, “And why should I conduct a symphony by Mister X when there are Haydn symphonies I haven’t conducted yet?” This is why I called him self-indulgent: his pleasure in conducting the repertoire he already loved was more important to him than his sense of responsibility toward keeping classical music a living art. Chicago’s composers (notably Ralph Shapey) were livid, and damned Solti for months in conversation and print. I remember Solti conducted (and commissioned) Lutoslawski’s Third Symphony during those years, but I remember nothing he did for any composer born as late as 1920.

So with all due condolences to the person who wrote me royally pissed off about my glancing snipe at St. Georg, my opinion stands, for the period I was familiar with and for that incident in particular, and I am entitled to it. Perhaps after I left in 1989 Solti became a heavy-metal freak and commissioned seven symphonies from John Zorn, but if so I didn’t hear about it.

Yes, that’s right – hard to believe, but my blog is a month old today, and it’s time to assess how I’m doing. I’ve been a music critic since February of 1983 (my first appearance in the Chicago Reader), and not once have I ever marked one of my own anniversaries – nor, except for a couple of modest conflict-of-interest disclosures and a couple of articles on my own web page, have I ever drawn attention to my own music in print. So no one, I think, can charge that I am habitually self-promoting. But in one month on this blog I’ve e-printed more words than I do in a year at the Village Voice and Chamber Music magazine combined, and it’s time to examine the self-searching question: Can an introvert blog?

For an introvert I undoubtedly am. I use the word in its strict Jungian sense (though he spelled it “intravert”): someone who makes judgments more on the basis of internal feelings than on external events. (Not many who know me would call me shy, I guess, though I am more shy in person than in public, if you know what I mean.) I now read the blogs of others frequently, and it strikes me that bloggers are typically attuned to the outer world. They react to items in newspapers, call attention to current events, link the reader to other articles that appeared yesterday. It’s unlike me to do this, though I make the occasional effort to fit in. (Intraverts, says Jung, tend to overcompensate by overestimating the significance of public opinion.) I’m far more interested in reporting on recent insights I’ve had and my current state of mind, frequently having to do with realizations that have come to me slowly. A new interpretation of Boulez’s Pli selon pli may suddenly occur to me, or it might dawn on me that I no longer hold the opinion of Dallapiccola that I did in the mid-1980s when I last thought about him much, and I end up reporting things months or even decades after the fact. And that fits with the kind of music I write about. My friend and fellow blogger Sandow may keep track of the classical music world on a week-to-week basis, but given the low simmer of the postclassical music performance scene today, there are not daily earthquakes in the postclassical world to elicit my attention. I am most interested in new wrinkles in compositional technique – my current Voice article on Andrew Violette’s Piano Sonata No. 7 is a case in point. In the 1970s new musical techniques seemed to come thick and fast, but today gradual synthesis seems to be more common than striking innovations – or is it just that the innovations no longer strike me? In any case, catching on to “news pegs” as they fly by has never been my strength as a critic, and I am by nature slow to react, mulling things over for a long time before speaking. It’s why I stank at football as a kid: I was 6’2″ and could catch the ball, but I’d spend too many seconds studiously considering which way to run.

Overall, this appears to be more of a liability to editors than it is to readers. I’m honored by the people who have written in to thank me for expressing thoughts they’d had themselves, and equally by the people who’ve taken intelligent exception to something I’ve said. I rarely change my mind based on reader input, but I will readily change the way I express myself. For someone obsessed with the avant-garde, I am in many respects old-fashioned. As you can see, I’m not really attuned to the fragmentary nature of the “blog entry”: I still write articles, each with a beginning, middle, and end, and I edit myself for completeness and overall form. I still write as though for the printed page, and don’t know whether I want to change that. My articles are pretty long by blog standards, and I treasure the internet precisely for its lack of space limitations.

It’s not true, as some think, that I took on this blog primarily to publicize the fact that the transmission on my Toyota Prius died mysteriously after only ten months, and that Toyota refused to honor the warranty, dishonestly claiming that I must have done something to injure the car. There were other reasons as well. After all, that issue will cease to exist someday, when I trade in that piece-o-crap lemon that Prestige Toyota of Kingston sold me for a nice new Honda or Subaru. Discouraging readers from ever buying a Prius, or from patronizing those crooks at Toyota, is only one of my aims, and hardly the most important one.

For one thing, for 17 years at the Voice I’ve been charged with writing only about Downtown Manhattan music, and it’s not the only music I know well or am interested in. I love writing about classical music as well, and it’s been a relief to de-pigeonhole myself, to return to the wider range of music I wrote about in the 1980s. Unlike Sandow I am not terribly concerned about the continuance of the classical music world, but the word postclassical itself implies music written by musicians trained in the classical tradition, of whom I am one. As critic and as composer, I don’t believe in jettisoning musical devices that have worked in the past, and I believe in taking with us anything we can glean from classical music that still seems useful, as well as throwing away anything that no longer fits the contemporary worldview. Yet despite my affection for classical music as a repository of ideas, very little that goes on in the commercially-defined world of classical music concert life interests me, and that’s been true all my life. So I haven’t been to Zankel Hall at Carnegie, nor do I give a damn whether the NY Philharmonic merges with Carnegie Hall or with Barnum & Bailey Circus – neither is likely to lead to performances of music that interests me. To some I may seem overly concerned with musical academia, but it’s where I’ve spent half my professional life, and in many ways that’s where our potential musical culture gets cut off at the source, so to speak: the convictions of professors, just as trendy and biased as those of any other special-interest group, get transferred to students, who then go out and form each new generation of composers and performers. There is a tendency among the more high-powered critics, too, to be inordinately cowed by the academic musicologists, so when some neurosis takes over academic music departments, it eventually shows up in concert practice, and I find the situation worth policing.

Whether I will be able to continue blogging at this pace I have no idea. Over the last few years, as my space at the Voice and elsewhere has shrunk, it’s been more and more difficult to say what I want to, and right now I have a lot on my mind that’s gone unexpressed for a long time: the literary equivalent of “blueballs.” I do write compulsively, though I edit myself just as compulsively, and I will have to discipline myself to keep from letting blogging interfere with my composing. You’ll know when I’m composing, because I get into a relatively nonverbal universe in which words begin to blur.

So how I’m doing depends on who’s reading, and whether anyone out there agrees with the delayed views of a cud-chewing introvert who shrinks further and further from the mainstream the more conservative and commercially oriented the culture becomes. At the age of 13 I wrote, for an English class assignment, a paper decrying and attempting to analyze the neglect of contemporary music, and if you could see how little my basic views have changed over 34 years, you’d realize how glacially stubborn I am and how permanent my mission in life has been. I’m a mourner at the funeral of classical music, sentimental but hardly wracked with grief, and seeking similarly forward-looking mourners who want to get on with life. Classical music had two debilitating diseases that I’m glad to see it put out of its misery from. One was a star system that put goofballs like Pavarotti and self-indulgent anti-new-music snobs like Georg Solti at the top of the pyramid, inevitably tossing composers into the ninth circle of hell. The other, deeper rooted and more insidiously tubercular, was a connection with European aristocracy and the concomitant genius myth which, transplanted to America and talked up by pious elitists like 19th-century Boston music critic John Sullivan Dwight, had always given classical music in America a foul odor of combined class distinction and moral superiority. Good riddance. Now that 4’33” has wiped the slate clean, let’s build up a postclassical music scene integrated in American life, conducive of democracy, perception-stretching, enlivening, and expressing our innermost desires devoid of contamination by the pretentions of a mythic past.

Apropos of nothing, and only because I’ve had a virtual 17-year hiatus in writing about classical music (limited as I’ve been to postclassical music at the Voice and living composers in Chamber Music and the Times), here are some more of my classical music views considered heretical in my academic milieu:

– Greatest piano work between Schubert and Ives: Liszt’s Annees de Pelerinage, three hours’ worth of remarkably sustained inspiration, with innovations that had an obvious impact on Debussy and thus helped jump-start the 20th century. In fact, given the size of the work and its consistently superb quality, one could make an argument for it as the greatest piano monument since Bach’s W.T.C., equalled in ambition only by works patently less perfect like Sorabji’s Opus Clavicembalisticum – and yet only a handful of pianists play more than a “Sonetto del Petrarca” or two from it. Similarly, Liszt’s Christus is the 19th century’s greatest oratorio, an opinion in which I am backed up by no less than the great musicologist Karl Dahlhaus, whose revisionist views of the 19th century have bracingly clarified our image of that era. And yet, a couple of years ago at a conference I told an ambitious ivy-league musicologist that I was teaching a Franz Liszt course, and from the look of disdain with which she recoiled from the news, you would have thought I had said Lawrence Welk.

– Greatest romantic piano concerto: that of Ferruccio Busoni, 1905.

– We’re supposed to find Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto far superior to his First, and I don’t. Brahms wrote some of his best large works in his youth (the Horn Trio, for instance), and the First Concerto’s opening movement, with its slow chromatic slide in the basses from D down to A, and its surprise recap of the theme a tritone away from where we’ve been led to expect, is one of the 19th century’s most vivid examples of large-scale tonal structure made audible and expressive. I hear nothing nearly so powerful in the Second Concerto.

– As a grad student, I took as my project for a rhythmic analysis class the Adagio of the Bruckner Seventh Symphony. My classmates were disdainful, but I found a convincing example of Bruckner’s large-scale rhythmic displacement masterfully supporting the overall harmonic resolution. To this day, academia remains condescending to Bruckner, not generally acknowledging him, as I do, as at least an equal symphonist to Brahms and certainly above Mendelssohn and Schumann. One of those cases in which the critics and record collectors diverge from the musicologists, and I side with the critics. Also the minimalists – a surpising love of Bruckner is found among Downtown composers like Glenn Branca.

– Mozart is overrated. Actually, despite the scorn Woody Allen heaps on the idea in Manhattan, this is a less rare opinion than is often admitted. Quite a few composers I know think that Mozart’s perfection is greatly overstated. That’s not to deny that there are quite a number of perfect pieces, like the late piano concerti. But so many passages in his music (as Charles Rosen mentions) can be transferred from one piece to another with no change in meaning, like interchangeable musical bricks, a shortcoming that modern composers don’t easily forgive. In my sonata class I analyze Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven alongside tremendously underrated composers like Clementi, Dussek, and Hummel, and side by side, Mozart’s hastily-composed piano sonatas don’t always fare well next to the lyric perfection of late Clementi or the daring innovations of Dussek.

I know, I know, this is classical music, not postclassical – but I’m getting it out of my system. And if the postclassical era is going to draw on the classical, it will need to reinterpret it to suit its own needs, as well.

I heard the Beethoven Seventh live the other night. It was a superb performance, the Albany Symphony under the very energetic direction of David Alan Miller. I doubt that I’ve ever heard a Beethoven symphony so dashingly rendered live, so I’m sure the performance had nothing to do with the discomfort I felt. But there are passages in the first movement of that piece that I’ve always found rather stunningly slipshod, as though Beethoven didn’t take the trouble to write a convincing transition. The piece too often strips down to single repeated pivot notes, and in a couple of places the pivot note blankly segues to an unresolved harmony in a way that seems unmotivated and arbitrary. The second movement is a fantastic idea, possibly the first time in music that a melody was defined by its harmony, in which the inner voices carry more weight than the melody. But once the delight of that idea has been absorbed, the lengthy repetitions of it (probably necessary for the audience to “get it” at the first performances) seemed awfully tedious this time. I’ve never felt that Beethoven’s symphonies reach the artistic heights of his string quartets and late sonatas; you have to go to Mahler, I think, to find symphonies as subtle and dense with meaning as the Hammerklavier Sonata, Op. 111, the C# minor Quartet, or even “Les Adieux.” The Beethoven Seventh is a pretty fine piece, I guess, but palpably imperfect, and I was surprised at how little I got out of hearing yet another performance, even one this spirited.

Out of some numerological synchronicity, the next day I found myself writing program notes for a performance of Dvorak’s Seventh. Though I’ve been familiar with Dvorak’s symphonies since my teenage years, I’m not a big fan: there’s too much corn meal in Dvorak, too many blustery, unsubtle brass climaxes with the same rhythm over and over. (Brahms, they say, used to correct Dvorak’s carelessly written counterpoint, and I can imagine it.) All the reference works I looked into agreed: Dvorak’s Seventh is his greatest symphony, while the Eighth is too episodic, lacking in a main point, too much like a series of Slavonic Dances. But the thing is, the Seventh has always been about my least favorite Dvorak symphony, and it’s the Eighth I enjoy most. The Seventh opens with an instant harmonic ambiguity that I find off-putting, ungrounded, and the awkwardness it expresses infects the entire movement. According to all the holy books, the Eighth is a favorite of unsophisticated audiences. Yet for me, the Eighth sounds like Dvorak finally declared independence from his patron Brahms, quit trying to achieve the portentous tragic sonata form thing that he wasn’t very good at, let his hair down and created a kind of original continuity that was much more natural to him. Does that make me unsophisticated? I’m a classical music fanatic, but my tastes always seem upside down, my every opinion a minority one, never in sync with the community of connoisseurs. I’m always asking myself the question that tortured Charles Ives: Are my ears on wrong?

Though it’s not just music. The Shakespeare character I immediately gravitated toward, as a young man – Better it is to die, better to starve, / Than crave the hire which we do first deserve (and I’m quoting from memory) – was Coriolanus. And I read in my Riverside Shakespeare that Coriolanus is the one Shakespeare hero with whom it is impossible to identify, his least sympathetic creation. I fall in love with the great art of European history, but my reactions all seem upside down to everyone else’s. Is that why the Post-Classical world seems such a safe refuge? Because it’s always seemed to me, since adolescence, that we too easily glorify the classical world’s partial and superficial successes, and shy away from its rare bold strokes of truth?

Sorry, a little light on the blog this week. I got an opportunity to do some concentrated work on my almost-completed microtonal chamber opera, The Watermelon Cargo (libretto by Jeffrey Sichel). With the exception of my Transcendental Sonnets for chorus and orchestra – which netted a large enough commission to justify my refusing all other work for a month or a little more – every note I’ve written in the last fifteen years has been written during time stolen from something else I was supposed to be doing for money. And now I’m stealing time from my blog. Perhaps this in itself is enough food for thought for a day or two.

Matthew Wellins responded at some heat and length to my piece on the Reich Remixed album. Matt is a student of mine, a published critic, and Mr. New Music around Bard. He’s always bringing me new music discs from obscure labels I’ve never heard of, including rare recordings I’d never heard by composers I’m obsessed with, and he’s been my primary source of information about Jim O’Rourke and the techno crowd. He knows that, in sympathy, I believe in keeping up with the absolute latest music out there, and he’s disappointed that I no longer fulfill that ideal in 2003 as I may have in 1992 – which I don’t. I publish his response here to let him speak for his generation, not as a typical member, but as one of its savviest aficionados. I’ve edited him for style, consistency, and potential libel charges. (I thought of editing him for length too, but given my recent rant against censorship by word count, it seemed hypocritical.) Possibly as a deliberate rhetorical ploy, he exaggerates the scope of my complaint; he treats it as a diatribe against pop music, when it was really only a gripe about people blinded (deafened?) by pop-centric conventions and limitations. Matt’s point is primarily that classically-trained musicians have their own blind spots about pop – a complementary, not a contradictory, argument, and he’s got some good points. If you read through to the end, you’ll find a crescendo of indignation that exactly mirrors sentiments I would have nurtured at that age:

I can’t help responding to these posts, especially when my generation (and classmates) are in danger of being digitally immortalized as impatient and uninformed consumers.

Now, I love Branca and Galas, but I don’t know if the long-form is the entire point. Minimalism was a return to tonalism and populism! It was a refuge for the people, who were tired of being alienated by abrasive tone clusters and total serialism. Is it any wonder that the next postminimalist generation has made another step towards inviting people rather than turning them away? Isn’t it possible that there is an increasingly thin line between new-music and pop groups? Is anything three minutes and under in the “pop” category, like Robert Ashley says? I think that the rock group itself is probably one of the decisive post-minimalist statements, heralded by artsists like Tony Conrad and David Behrman who saw minimalism as leading towards “the death of the composer.” The most often-cited example is probably Sonic Youth, a pop band with members who’ve recorded with Branca and recorded pieces by Cage, Kosugi, Oliveros, etc. In fact, that New York scene with Branca and Chatham, the downtown “No Wave” scene, was filled with bands that would be called pop under standards based on duration or rigorous composition. Why is Branca’s contribution more important than DNA, James Chance and the Contortions, or Teenage Jesus and the Jerks? Because he decided to become an autonomous composer of “serious” music? What about Faust, the German band that backed Tony Conrad on “Outside of the Dream Syndicate”? Or any of the other contemporary, experimental “rock” bands that studied directly under Stockhausen?

At the bottom of it, “This pop response to postclassical music – ‘Hey, you could do something with that’ – is, it seems to me, not uncommon.”…. That reminds me of the postclassical response to pop music.

And if you’ve only listened to single songs by pop groups your students have brought in, how can you accurately assess the music? It would be the equivalent of listening to 3-5 minutes of La Monte or Eliane Radigue or whoever else. In experimental pop (or whatever other nomenclature is apt), the full album can range up to the longest pieces by minimalists. There’s a DVD out by a group called Farmers manual with 48 hours of music. I also recently received a CD with 150 songs on it by an avant-pop musician, Jan Fair. And hell, if it’s just an issue of length, does that make the Grateful Dead an avant-garde band? If you look into the backcatalogs of any of that electronic music released on the Reich Remixed CD (which I will be the first to admit is a poor release, though for different reasons), or rave/electronic music in general, you’ll read about all-night concerts, meditative and sometimes chemically-induced states of mind, ritual and tribal imagery, etc…It’s familiar, yes?

Finally, in regard to this comment: We don’t need backbeats and chord progressions and the familiar accoutrements of everyday music to keep us from feeling like we’ve left home. With varying intentions and success, those Reich Remixed DJs did to Reich’s music what the planners of Staples business supply stores do, make every store have exactly the same process and layout so that you never have to face the anxiety of being somewhere unfamiliar. Are you trying to tell me Philip Glass is still pushing the envelope? that Reich’s “Nagoya Marimbas” is a major break from the past? that no one knows what La Monte will do next? Hell, I love Ashley, I loved Celestial Excursions, but were you really surprised by the processes and layouts he used? These composers have paid their dues, but now they’re stuck in their ways. Even Branca, who recently surprised everyone by doing a orchestral symphony that sounded exactly like his guitar symphonies, has a musical conception that is already 25 years old. It would make me feel anxious and unfamilar if I bought a Phil Niblock album, and he was strumming a guitar and singing folk songs. Nothing against Niblock, I love his music too, but it was only unfamiliar the first thousand times I listened to it – eventually I adapted. I still find new nuances, new things to love, but I crave that anxious feeling. I crave finding a music that will make me lose my bearings completely. Does the world begin and end with postclassical music? I find hints of it in different places, be on a hip-hop record produced by the Neptunes, an Arnold Dreyblatt record, a whirlwind of a noisy Neil Young guitar solo, an old field recording from the pacific islands reissued on Nonesuch’s Explorer series, Haydn’s “Surprise” symphony, or a sparse, droning folk record by Richard Youngs, who has released albums on the reputable Table of the Elements and less-praised experimental pop labels. Can you really say hearing the new piece by Duckworth will unsettle you like the first time you heard Satie or Conlon Nancarrow? Don’t you think those kinds of experiences are still out there? That maybe some of that stuff that seems superficially to exist in that world of 7-11s and strip malls might actually be tongue-in-cheek? That there might be a subversive spark in a beat or a melody, just to lure your average consumer into its lair and devour him or her whole? Who had more political effect, Rzewski or Dylan? Granted, I prefer Rzewski’s subtlety to Dylan’s cliched sentimentality, but looking at the world right now, maybe more subversive pop music wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

When I initially stumbled onto Downtown music, I saw its eclecticism as being at peace with popular music. These were composers who decided they weren’t part of the popular music tradition, but enjoyed popular music, and used it. This acceptance of popular culture wasn’t new, but this was music that dealt with a popular culture I had some direct relation with. I never assumed that they did this because they thought popular music was inferior, I just assumed they, invidually, felt restricted. Yet, the longer music stays around, the more dogmatic it becomes, and personally, I can’t imagine restricting myself to the idioms of the avant-garde because of its intellectually priviledged status. The DJ/remix phenomenon that you claim to be “too old to care about,” is affecting the changing climate of music in this day and age, like it or not. I didn’t for a long time, but as a new music composer and critic, can you really afford to distance yourself from the present?

See? After I am gone, others will rise up in my place, and God help us all. I do have to insist that I have never inveighed against the DJ/remix phenomenon in general, simply admitted that I don’t understand the criteria by which it is to be judged. There’s more to say about that, another day. And thanks, Matt.

A reader suggests that the fragment of Steve Reich’s Piano Phase that I heard blip by on NPR might have been from a Nonesuch disc called Reich Remixed, an album of DJs playing around with various Reich recordings. It wasn’t; the piece on that disc that riffs off Piano Phase uses the actual sampled recording of two pianos, whereas what NPR flashed by was a synthesizer version, with glitzy electronic timbres, that had to have been completely reprogrammed. But to prove my memory hadn’t misled me I listened to Reich Remixed for the first time since just after it came out a couple of years ago, and I’m glad I did. Because when I first heard it I thought it was a stupid disc, and I felt guilty about that because I think I’m just too old – 47, after all – to understand the whole DJ/remix phenomenon. Today, I still think it’s a stupid disc, and in the meantime I’ve grown too old to feel guilty for thinking something’s stupid.

The problem is that Reich Remixed comes across as blatantly condescending to Reich’s music. It’s as though the DJs listened to Piano Phase, Proverb, Music for 18 Musicians, and other fantastic Reich pieces and thought, “Hey, that’s kind of nice. You could do something with that: add a backbeat, layer some vocals over it, it’d start to sound like real music. Then you could sell it.” They were honoring Reich, sure, and having fun playing with someone else’s notes, but in their bells-and-whistles variety is an element of implied criticism, that Reich’s gradual processes and additive forms aren’t sufficiently interesting by themselves.

This pop response to postclassical music – “Hey, you could do something with that” – is, it seems to me, not uncommon. (As Stockhausen similarly told Morton Feldman, “Your music could be a moment in my music.”) The music that comes out of the various streams of minimalism, in particular, is pretty and restful, or maybe brooding and unusual, but too eccentric and austere for the pop ear. “If only the composer could have thought of more things to do with it.” And pop musicians, devoting lifetimes to the 3- to 5-minute song form, seem to focus on timbre and sound quality, and miss the large-scale formal processes classical composers build their music around. (The converse is also true: classically trained composers, myself notably included, often show less sensitivity to details of sound quality than pop musicians.)

That’s why I quit teaching my course American Music After Minimalism. For years and years I had yearned to teach this class, to have a chance to pass down everything I know about the Downtown scene, to lecture to fascinated students about the exact repertoire that I’m the leading expert on. But when I finally had the chance, I was very disappointed. For after every piece I played, whether Robert Ashley, Diamanda Galas, Glenn Branca, Annea Lockwood, Eve Beglarian, Mikel Rouse, didn’t matter – the piece would end, and a student’s hand would shoot up. “Yes?”, I’d inquire. Invariable response: “I know a rock group sounds just like that.” “Welllllll,” I’d indulge dubiously, “why don’t you bring in the recording and we”ll listen to it.” And the kid would, and it would inevitably be some band that would start with a 20-second intro that sounded just like Ashley, or Diamanda, or Branca, etc., and then the drums would come in and the conventional song would take off and sound like any other pop song. I would patiently try to explain (while feeling that all was already lost if explanation were needed) that there’s a decisive difference between opening a pop song with a 20-second weird drone and making a 90-minute-long piece of music that consisted of nothing else but a weird drone, like Alvin Lucier’s Music on a Long Thin Wire. But my experimental-rock-obsessed students couldn’t seem to think formally, or in increments longer than a minute: a sound was a sound, and if they’d heard that sound before, well, my new-music composers weren’t really any better than their favorite pop groups.

And maybe they’re right. Maybe the austerity of postclassical music is neurotic in some way. Maybe it’s due to some mental or personal deficiency that we can listen to Lucier’s voice slowly become indistinguishable over 45 minutes, or Ashley’s calming voice mutter nonsequiturs for three hours, or for god’s sake La Monte Young doodling on a bizarrely out-of-tune piano for six hours. But some of us feel a deep need to go out into a vast musical desert where we can commune with a sound or a process or a tuning and really get into it, and we don’t want the route cluttered up with convenience stores and shopping malls. For many of us, the large-scale course of the piece is precisely the point, even (or especially) if it goes nowhere. We don’t need distraction: we need focus. We don’t need backbeats and chord progressions and the familiar accoutrements of everyday music to keep us from feeling like we’ve left home. With varying intentions and success, those Reich Remixed DJs did to Reich’s music what the planners of Staples business supply stores do, make every store have exactly the same process and layout so that you never have to face the anxiety of being somewhere unfamiliar.

But the postclassical music I love most goes to the ends of the earth, through impenetrable forests and across harrowing mountain gorges, to take you to someplace far from daily life where you’ve never been before. And if most listeners taking that trip would feel compelled to set up 7-11s and Starbucks’ along the way to make the route seem more consumer-friendly, I guess it’s just as well that we don’t often bring them along with us.

In response to my general query, a helpful reader has given me a helpfully non-technical rundown on how CDRs differ from CDs, from the machine’s point of view. To avoid hearing from the lawyers of Sony, Verbatim, and Maxell, he wishes to remain anonymous, but his detailed account is much appreciated:

…[A]s it’s been explained to me (by people who probably refer to me as a mouth-breather in the technology arena), while real CDs transmit the 0s and 1s to the computer by physical pits in the surface of the medium, CD-Rs do a fake version of that chemically…. When the player’s laser encounters a pit, it registers a 0 or 1, and when it encounters no pit, it registers whatever the other one didn’t …. CD-Rs mimic the level of shininess, or whatever, to the laser. Some media do that better than others, and some CD players – especially older ones, and especially especially older high-quality ones – seem to be calibrated so sensitively that the fake pits on CD-Rs simply are not “seen” by their lasers. I’ve seen many newer CD players on sale at Best Buy that now specifically say “reads CD-Rs and CD-RWs”, meaning, I suppose, that their laser scanners are calibrated so as to expect the kind of surfaces that are encountered on most CD-Rs. Obviously that specification would not be on the specs page if the same problem you are having were not fairly common….

My experience is anecdotal, and goes like this: CD-R surfaces tend to be yellow, green, blue, or black (only Memorex has the black surface, and I had great luck on everything except one car CD player with them). I have read that the yellow surface ones have the longest life expectancy, though the yellow ones seem to have the most problems being read by any players. Green and blue ones seem to be the best ones, but they are not universally the best. The black ones, as I said, have been good on everything except one car (Toyota, alas) CD player.

Still, no hard and fast rules have emerged, and I have had to go by personal experience for the brands of CD-Rs I recommend. If I have sent an important professional CD to someone who calls to say he/she can’t play it, then I’ve dropped that brand from my list. So at this point, I do not buy: store brand CD-Rs, Sony, Imation, Verbatim, or Maxell. I have had some problems with Memorex CD-Rs, but not the ones I’ve sent out, yet. So far, no problems with TDK and Fuji. My go-to brand is thus TDK when they are Staples, and Fuji when they are at BJ’s. I also think the Memorex black ones are just COOOOOOL looking, so I get them when I can, and when I know I won’t be listening to them in the car. I do NOT buy CD-RWs, which seem to be unreadable in at least 75 percent of all players manufactured. Other people may have exactly the OPPOSITE experience from me. Which is what makes the whole thing so frustrating.

The tech guy here says any really important CD should not be burned at any speed faster than 1x. I don’t have time for that speed.