Archives for 2005

Most of the reviews are presumably in on my CD Long Night, and as I said earlier, though complimented by the general positivity, I didn’t feel any of them exactly grasped the piece, so I thought I should maybe show how it’s done. After all, there’s no Kyle Gann out there to review me – except for Richard Taruskin, actually, who once wrote an evaluation of my work so detailed and deadly accurate, in both positive and negative points, that I changed my compositional priorities in response to it…. anyway, I decided that if I was really going to get Long Night summed up, I’d better do it myself. So watch.

Long Night is an early work – only the fourth or fifth on Gann’s worklist to later escape his “juvenilia” bag – and like many young works it inadvertently says something different from what its composer intended. Gann’s program notes for the piece, back to the original ones he wrote in 1982 for New Music America, note the influence of Martin Heidegger, with particular regard to that philosopher’s characterization of moods. For Heidegger, moods are perception-altering, and also come and go with an independence of our volition that imposes a certain nonlinearity on not only our emotions, but our very cognition of our environment. What Gann tried to do in Long Night, then, was to bring nonlinearity to a succession of musical moods – to create a moment form, in fact, a series of textural nonsequiturs in illustration of Heigegger’s description. Only, instead of the sharply intercut moment form familiar from works by Stravinsky, Stockhausen, and others, he – under the influence of ambient music – tried to create a gradual moment form, in which each texture would blur into the next.

To do this Gann fused, as young composers so often have to start by doing, two strong influences that were not terribly commensurate. The basic technique of Long Night is that of Terry Riley’s In C: three pianists play repeating figures, moving on to the next whenever they feel like it (though there are certain aural cues to be followed, to preserve the integrity of the work’s seven sections). The differences from In C are that the pianos do not play identical material, but are contrasted by tessitura; and that they are not rhythmically synchronized, which is why on the recording it is no problem for pianist Sarah Cahill to overdub all three pianos. Technically the work comes straight from Riley, but melodically and texturally it owes more to Morton Feldman and especially Harold Budd, whose slowly meandering tonality had a tremendous impact on Gann in the late 1970s. (There is also a touch of Eno, especially Music for Airports and Discreet Music: Gann’s original idea for Long Night, never fulfilled, was to have the pianists widely separated in a casual environment, providing ambience for something less formal than a concert setting.)

The problem is that over 25 minutes the Heideggerian idea becomes evident only in two places, one in particular. The first four sections are in C Dorian mode, the fifth in A major, and the last two in C# minor (the pitch A being common to all three). It is in the peculiarly sharp overlapping change from the C Dorian to A major that the Heideggerian nonlinearity suddenly asserts itself, and the essence of the piece is heard. One reviewer has pointed this out as an arbitrary-sounding weak point; actually, the correct response would be, “That’s the most interesting moment in the piece, Gann should have fulfilled its implications more throughout so that it doesn’t sound arbitrary.” A similar but less shocking change comes with the gradual move from A major to C# minor. Lacking the audacity to repeat such puzzling effects, the rest of the piece changes moods by texture but not by key, and is a little too monochrome to make its central point clear.

And so for the listener, who after all is unlikely to reinterpret the entire piece around a change that comes 4/7ths of the way into it, the piece loses its intended nonlinearity and becomes simply about mood, a single if gradually transforming mood, and secondarily about the accidental melodies that arise from the random interaction of the three pianos, which years of being steeped in Cagean thought had led Gann to accept. The In C device, creating mini-echoes among the pianos, is fertile enough to survive the lack of synchronization, and the soft, pandiatonic wash of minor scales can hardly help but be pretty – an insight that, two years later in 1983, drove Gann to veer into a more challenging, rhythmically precise idiom. Aside from the bitonal moments, the one gesture that seems like more than a reflexive response to the minimalist/ambient concerns of 1980 is the quasi-autobiographical summing up of the piece’s melodic motives at the end, in ten loud notes as the music dies away – an effect Cahill manages with grace and dignity. Yet this too is another Eno-esque touch: the isolated melodic figure as self-evident sonic icon, which Gann attempts to integrate into a structure more ambitious than Eno’s ambient vignettes.

Otherwise one can hear in the work’s inchoate, scattershot prettiness the confusion of a young generation eagerly responding to minimalism but not quite sure how to do it yet. The real legacy of Long Night is that its watery textures of bobbing notes will return two decades later in Gann’s Disklavier music, where the technology will make the problem of key changes in multitempo music much easier to negotiate.

There ya go. It’s the most negative review the disc has received, but the most intriguing because it locates the piece historically, and also the most flattering because it takes the structure seriously. You’ve got to tear into the piece with your teeth a little, and if it doesn’t survive, then it didn’t deserve to.

The ever-helpful Eric Bruskin notes that the book SoundVisions that I hawk below is easier to obtain through Amazon.com’s German web site, which he says will have access to your American Amazon info. Thanks, Eric!

Big changeover on Postclassic Radio today – more than a 30 percent change in content since yesterday. For one thing, Charlemagne Palestine month continues, and I’ve got some new tracks that will surprise you even if you know his work. Last week I went to Other Music in New York, the store where I go to find things so obscure even I don’t know about them, and I came across four new Palestine discs, of which I bought two. One I’m playing for you is a hauntingly strange little vocal performance, only four minutes, from a gig at Sonnabend Gallery (in 2001, I’m guessing, though there’s almost no info on the disc). The other is a very peculiar 1998 soundscape called Jamaica Heinekens in Brooklyn. Charlemagne made an environmental recording during the Jamaica Day parade in Brooklyn, then superimposed it beneath a multilayered drone texture. Very weird and beautiful, and I hope not too irritating for radio, because it’s 61 minutes.

Also, I’ve put up a choral festival. There’s very little Downtown choral music, but a few people have cultivated it. I’m playing three large works for chorus and orchestra:

Daniel Lentz’s Apologetica (50 minutes), a work in honor of the indigenous people wiped out by European colonization of the New World;

Janice Giteck’s Tikkun – Mending (42 minutes), a work on Jewish spiritual texts featuring tenor John Duykers (her former husband) (and unless you live in Seattle or California you haven’t heard this, because it’s unreleased); and

my own Transcendental Sonnets (35 minutes), based on poems by Emerson’s mad protege Jones Very, which will surprise you.

Around those I’ve interspersed four lovely a capella works by Mary Jane Leach, from her CDs Celestial Fires and Ariadne’s Lament. I’m not including Bill Duckworth’s Southern Harmony, because I played that in its entirety last November. But it’s already some three hours of choral music, all in a row. I hope you like choral music. I meant to ask, forgot to.

Plus, a major chamber work by political composer Jeffrey Schanzer, No More in Thrall, a tribute to an armed uprising of prisoners at the Buchenwald Nazi concentration camp in 1945. If you’re as tuned in to the Left as you should be to be listening to this station (and a man of your age, after all), you’ll recognize the title as being a quote from “The Internationale.” New mbira music by Richard Crandall and music box music by John Morton, too. One nice thing about Postclassic Radio – if you’re not springing for the ad-free version, you’ll hear fewer ads here because I play a lot of pieces longer than half an hour.

Do you remember John Cage’s book Notations – a 1970 compilation of pages from more than 300 various composers’ scores, mostly presented without comment, and ranging with wild diversity from conventional notes to graphs to pictures to unintelligible scrawls? I used to look through it when I was young and wonder what all those notations meant. The fantasy they offered pushed me into some of my own notational experiments.

Well, there’s sort of a new Notations out. Composers Torsten Müller, Kunsu Shim and Gerhard Stäbler have put together a book called SoundVisions with excerpts from about 150 scores. You might expect that musical notation in 2005 wouldn’t exhibit anything near the same experimentalism or diversity as in 1970, but actually, it nearly does; if the experiments are not quite so ambiguously outrageous, the different ways in which music can be precisely notated have increased, and there are more routes today for even relative traditionalists to take. There is a Max/MSP diagram by Kenneth Atchley and another by Achim Wollschied, a digitzed map of the world showing locations of sound recordings by Klarenz Barlow, eight channels of audio waveforms by François Bayle, a diagram of slide-projector placement by Maria Blondel, instructions for creating video and music by Gene Coleman, Philip Corner’s scrawled ms. for his piece “At some point during this concert the hall might be blown up or bombed,” directions for representing shifts in the resonant frequency of the earth by Pauline Oliveros, a John Oswald score for brass and Ondes martenot that looks like it melted in the middle, a kooky-looking score to Stockhausen’s Hoch-Zeiten of 2002, a real minimalist-looking work with noteheads and numbers by Michael Pisaro, instructions for making your own Larry Polansky canon, a musical score with cartoon interpolations by Sven Herman, some splotches showing how to play Judy Dunaway’s Molto for balloons, plus sketches by György Kurtag and Helmut Lachenmann, and precompositional drawings of parameter curves by Julio Estrada. There are also pages from more conventional scores: two pages of the ms. of Boulez’s Sur Incises, and excerpts by, among many others, Sofia Gubaidulina, Steve Reich (Three Tales), Lois V Vierk (Europa for brass quintet, 2003), Jo Kondo, Alvin Lucier, Wolfgang Rihm, Frederic Rzewski, my friend Frank Abbinanti, and two pages from my own Disklavier piece Bud Ran Back Out. It’s a truly international collection with composers from at least three continents (I’m in because I’ve known Gerhard Stäbler for 20 years), and there are a lot of European women composers I hadn’t heard of.

I don’t know what your chances of getting SoundVisions are, but the publisher, PFAU Verlag in Saarbrücken, has a web page for it here. No free examples given, unfortunately, and the price is 39 Euros.

I note with satisfaction that there are now, finally, “Gann” bins at the uptown and downtown Tower Records stores in Manhattan. But at Other Music, which is devoted to Downtown, experimental, ambient, and other oddball genres, my CDs are still under “Miscellaneous G.” My brilliant son suggested that I become a rapper and take “Miscellaneous G” as my stage name, which will then make that my bin.

I’m going to talk about myself as a composer for a moment, so if my own music isn’t what you read Postclassic to learn about – if you agree with the blogger who recently complained that my blog is too introspective – this is one to skip.

I’ve written about 60 musical works, or a little more, depending on which pieces I’m in a mood to acknowledge on a given day. Nominally, 20 of those pieces, one third, are now available on commercial CDs, ten of them on this most recent disc. It’s ironic how much getting a CD out feels like having just scaled a mountain – considering that the bulk of the work was done years ago, and I’ve hardly done anything to bring this one about in recent weeks, it just arrived in the mail. Unrecorded pieces feel like children still living at home. I’m directly responsible for whatever exposure they get, I tell them when to get up and when to go to bed, I exercise control over how they’re presented to other people. Now that they’re on CD, they’re like children who have left home and are living somewhere else. In a way they are no longer my pieces, they have to make their own way in the world based on what merits they possess. And the world will soon judge them, which I guess accounts for the mountain-scaling feeling – the echo of my achievement is about to come back to me, and I will be forced to accept, with humility, whether the world thinks it was a large achievement or a small one.

Very different from giving a concert, especially one in New York. New-music concerts, at least the Downtown, non-orchestral variety, are given largely for one’s friends, and it is primarily one’s friends who walk up afterward and say something. What they say, of course, is mostly flattering, or at least only unintentionally discouraging. Rare is the Downtown concert reviewed by more than one critic, and a single critic is an unreliable barometer. A CD on a well-distributed label, though, will be written about by people in Lafayette, Arkansas and Spokane, Washington, people who have never met me and never expect to. I’ve always said that a review is like a snapshot – you can always claim that it caught you from an unflattering angle, but only in rare cases of patent incompetence can you claim that it contained no grain of truth. In the welter of reviews that arrive I will have to look at the average between the best and worst as some kind of objective index of what resonance the music has found publicly. At age 49, I have been thickly involved in this process for 23 years, but I have not been much on the receiving end. The majority of the reviews I’ve had in my life have all come from one CD – my recent Long Night on Cold Blue. They have far outnumbered all the concert reviews I’ve ever had, and the existence of the internet has vastly increased their number. I can’t say that any particular review of Long Night has nailed the piece, with its strengths and weaknesses and achievements, the way I hear it and them. But I can say that, on balance, the proportion of positive and negative comments has pretty precisely matched what I hear as the proportion of strengths and weaknesses in the piece.

But I wrote Long Night when I was 24, 25 years old. The present disc, Nude Rolling Down an Escalator, is far more representative and intensely personal. Representative, because I wrote these pieces between ages 42 and 48, and no excuse is permissible. Personal, because I produced every note of these Disklavier pieces myself, and don’t even have a performing intermediary to share the blame with. That’s not to say the “performances” are perfect: the Disklavier is a less tractable machine than you’d expect. You move the damn thing into a recording space, it gets jostled, the acoustics have changed, and all the subtle balances you labored to achieve are now a little different, and there are thousands of notes, and you do your best to reshape the nuances, but the recording engineer is waiting, the recording space time is limited, and at some point you have to say, “Oh well, close enough.” But I chose the medium, and the medium is no excuse. It is commonplace to assume, presumably rightly, that the dozens of little imperfections I notice will not garner much attention from those who know the music less intimately.

Being such a personal collection, the reaction will feel like a referendum on my personality itself. My sense of humor is much in evidence, also my morose streak, and my innate melodic tendencies, some of them arguably sentimental, are everywhere. I fret that the stylistic variety will prove confusing – inside, I feel like I keep writing the same piece over and over, but they come out almost as though composed by different people. The disc begins in chaotic hilarity and dies away in pensive mourning, which is much more me than the other way around would have been. And there are places (most recently the last minute or two of Tango da Chiesa) that make me shout, “Yes! Yes! That’s exactly the effect I’ve been aiming at my entire life!” The possibility is always there, as it is for every composer, that, as Charles Ives worried, “my ears are on wrong.” But to learn that once and for all will be infinitely preferable to sitting and wondering. Best of all, I feel like I suddenly have loads of psychic space available for new composing – because that’s ten fewer pieces I have to carry around with me anymore.

My new CD on the New World label, Nude Rolling Down an Escalator, has just arrived – at my house, anyway. Details, including cover and liner notes by John Luther Adams, here.

A.P. wire story:

Bursting into tears, eighth-grader Anurag Kashyap of California became the U.S. spelling champ Thursday, beating 272 other spellers in a tough two days of competition. He said he felt “just pure happiness.”

Anurag, 13, of Poway clinched “appoggiatura,” a melodic tone, to take home some $30,000 in prizes. He won in the 19th round of the 78th Annual National Scripps Spelling Bee.

“A melodic tone,” my ass. But after all these years of trying to teach students how to spell “appoggiatura,” I can finally prove that it can be a helpful thing to know.

George Rochberg’s Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth String Quartets, written for the expert Concord Quartet and thus referred to as the “Concord Quartets,” represented a return to startingly traditional tonality in the dissonantly 12-tone 1970s. Composer Mary Jane Leach tells a story of their premiere:

I was at the premiere of Rochberg’s 4-6th String Quartets at Alice Tully. People’s jaws were dropping right and left. However, the funniest thing happened on the way out – I was walking behind two older women after the concert and one of them said “that group didn’t make nearly as many mistakes as the other modern music groups we’ve heard.”

John Bolton in his own disgusting words.

Are you ready to chill out for the summer? I sure as hell am. That’s why I’ve made Charlemagne Palestine June composer-of-the-month on Postclassic Radio, so you can lie on your deck in the sun and get lost in 50 minutes of Strumming Music, or 70 minutes of pipe organ drones in Schlongo!!!daLUVdrone. (That’s probably some kind of litmus test – if you can’t take seriously any piece titled Schlongo!!!daLUVdrone, no matter how transcendent it sounds, you’re no Downtowner.)

If you don’t know Palestine’s music, consider yourself lucky that you can catch up. He was notorious in the ’70s underground for long, long performances in which he hammered away on the piano for hours with relentless endurance, creating masses of overtones that seemed to give his music relevance in microtonal circles. Then, circa 1979, he left music and New York at once, and disappeared to Amsterdam. For years he was a famous name whose music you couldn’t hear for love or money. Finally, in 1995 CDs of historic and even new performances started coming out, and now there are at least six on labels like New Tone, Barooni, and Organ of Corti – you know, the important labels that you have to go to Other Music in New York to find. And at last, in September of 2000, Charlemagne appeared in New York in person to give one of his historic performances, with cognac and teddy bears, just like old times, an experience I documented with a review in the Village Voice – and I even got to have lunch with him! (In the on-line review the Voice has replaced the nice photo of Charlemagne with an ad, dammit, but I don’t make their policies.)

Interestingly, born in 1945, Charlemagne is ten years younger than La Monte Young or Terry Riley, half a generation removed from the original minimalists with whom he’s associated. There’s a lot of time left to study his music with his cooperation, and I hope someone’s doing it. Meanwhile, enjoy getting the sounds for free that I longed for for 15 years.

You might assume that the late George Rochberg (1918-2005) was not the kind of composer a Downtowner and experimentalist like me would be interested in, but you’d be wrong. In everything I’ve ever written about Rochberg – and there has been a lot, notably the long lead section of my chapter on the New Romantics in my book American Music in the Twentieth Century – I always cited him as one of the best 12-tone composers ever. His works from the 1950s, notably Serenata d’Estate and the Sonata-Fantasia, were important to me as a teenager, and I still think of them first as intriguingly introverted and thoughtful modernist works, only secondarily as examples of “12-tone music.” I worked hard on that Sonata-Fantasia in high school, and performed the first section publicly (the rest was a little much for my technique at the time). The sheet music has been sitting on my piano for the last few months, and I still enjoy reading through its craggy counterpoint.

If anyone could have continued the 12-tone idiom with integrity, I thought it was Rochberg, but when his son died, and in his grief he came out and railed against the technocratic, obfuscatory music of his peers, I watched his courage with admiration. I wasn’t always wild about the directions it led him in – as an ambitious grad student, I didn’t see aping the styles of Handel and Mahler as any key to the future. But I was in awe of the thoroughness with which he cast off ideology from his shoulders, and I gave him the benefit of the doubt as he stumbled about in the uncharted, ahistorical wilderness outside the academy. Rochberg’s book of essays The Aesthetics of Survival was a heartfelt plea for musical sanity, and even though it excoriated Cage along with Boulez and Babbitt, I found myself nodding in agreement with its compelling common sense.

Of course, in retrospect Rochberg’s neo-tonal and quotation-based music has fallen into an ironic genre popularly understood as postmodernism, but he never claimed that title for it, nor pursued the directions he did trying to be hip. Today the Third through Sixth Quartets with which he abandoned modernism sound no longer like pointers to a potentially sterile future, but like bold thought experiments of someone trying desperately to breach the present crisis. To have arisen to prestige through the academy and then apostatized against it as Rochberg did, threatening what could have been career suicide – except that he was so palpably right – was a move as brave as Monteverdi’s embrace of the “secunda prattica” around 1600. I remember even Time magazine documenting the charges that Rochberg had “sold out,” but he never faltered or looked back.

I never had contact with Rochberg but once. When I reviewed The Aesthetics of Survival in the Voice, he sent me a letter taking thoughtful disagreement, and telling me I had misunderstood the gist of some of the essays. In my youthful arrogance I was prepared to argue, but needed to reread much of the book, and, in the haste of carrying on three careers while raising a son, never got around to rereading, and thus never answered. I’ve always regretted that. Because of all the composers who inhabited points distant from me on the spectrum of musical politics, he alone exhibited an honesty and courage that transcended all differences of ideology. “We are not slaves of history,” he wrote; “we can choose and create our own time.”

I’m told that among Latin American countries Costa Rica is second, after Chile, in its standard of living, and that due to the excellece of its health care system, the country has now surpassed Japan to become number one in the world in the average longevity of its population. Certainly a lot of Americans flock to Costa Rica for dental work and plastic surgery, for professionals in those fields are well-trained in the U.S. and Europe, and their fees significantly cheaper than those at home. Americans are also buying up land for retirement purposes, the country is considered favorable for business investment, and, most tellingly, the number of Costa Ricans who live abroad in Europe or the U.S. for years and then nostalgically gravitate back home is quite remarkable. Some decades ago (so I was told by a seemingly knowledgeable tour guide) the government took 80 percent of the land away from the wealthiest landowners who were basically enslaving the rest of the population and made it available for the poor to afford at cheap rates. The constitution does not permit the country to maintain a standing army. The Costa Rican Cumbres cigars I brought back legally are smoother and richer in flavor than the bandless Cuban Cohibas that, to my surprise, turned up in one of the shoes in my suitcase when I got home. Aside from the nerve-wracking craziness of trying to drive in San Jose (no worse than Manhattan, and no better), Costa Rica does seem like a jewel of the Western hemisphere.

I say all this up front to mitigate the negative PR value of the fact that within ten hours of my arrival, two men jumped out of a cab, pointed pistols at me, and took my wallet. This was apparently a fluke. Pickpocketing and petty crime are common, as in all Latin American countries and many U.S. cities, but violent confrontation is extremely rare, especially in the neighborhood around the Universidad de Costa Rica where I was staying. At six foot two I am taller than the average Central American male by several inches, and thus identifiable as a presumptive American from blocks away. Moreover, foreigners have often told me that I am the most American-looking and -sounding person they’ve ever met, and so in countries where Americans are pinpointed by thieves, beggars, and police as likely to be carrying cash and credit cards, I?m a sitting duck. Attempts to cultivate a swarthier, more Mediterranean persona have not met with success.

But the University music department’s fourth annual Seminario de Composicion Musical, in which I participated, ran smoothly and without further disturbing incident. The music students at the University are hard-working, curious, and uninformed, an odd blend of innocence and innate musicality. According to their teachers they are well trained in the European classics but have had little chance for contact with contemporary music; names such as Reich, Glass, Ligeti, and Feldman drew only the slightest recognition among a student or two. Yet pieces I saw and heard by young composers, if uniformly tonal, were sophisticated in both counterpoint and especially rhythm – and I don’t mean the stereotypical kind of 3+3+2 “Latin” rhythms one associates with music south of the border, either, but more complex cycles of 11 or 21 beats. One would almost call such pieces postminimalist, though they seem to have arisen from a blend of classical tradition and pop guitar, with no discernible influence from either modernist or anti-modernist sources.

Similarly, in the Costa Rican music on the Composition Seminar, I heard among my own generation an attempt to create a new music not noticeably indebted to either the USA or Europe. The best, freshest pieces were by Eddie Mora – professor at the University, and my host – Alejandro Cardona, and Carlos Michans. All three composers are capable of a sustained Impressionist quiet dotted by outbursts of melody, though Mora has a more active rhythmic side as well, and Cardona’s earlier music is couched in a pensively muted Expressionism. Mora (born 1965) studied violin in Russia for ten years, and his music inherited something of the Shostakovich/Schnittke sense of humor. (Russian-Costa Rican links are common; apparently the Soviet Union used to court Central Americans with generous scholarships to Russian schools.) Rather than try to characterize Mora’s music from the sampling I heard, I am posting two pieces from his recent CD, Concierto “Amighetti” for strings, piano, and percussion and Girl and the Wind for strings, synthesizer and piano (both 2003), to Postclassic Radio; I also upload the latter work here so you can check it out at your convenience.

I wish I could play you Mora’s Dos Retratos for flute, clarinet, violin, and cello, which I heard played in concert by the Seattle Chamber Players (with whom I was traveling, and who also premiered my own Minute Symphony Friday evening). It was a series of calm, still textures, through which little recurring melodic figures kept reacclimating themselves. Very beautiful, and original. Mora has gigs coming up in Austin and at Cornell in 2005, and may well become the first Costa Rican composer with an international rep.

I also wish I could play you La Delgadina by Alejandro Cardona (born 1959) for clarinet, viola, and piano, a lovely work of sustained tones breaking into bits of Italian opera melody. The three string quartets on the CD he gave me are a little less postclassical, a little more modernist, yet highly musical and not really reminiscent of anyone. I post to Postclassic Radio his Third, subtitled “En el Eco de las Parades” (1999-2000) – because 21st-century Costa Rican music is making a strong bid for independence and international relevance, and it’s high time you heard some.