Archives for 2005

That young whippersnapper Alex Ross has taken pity on an old man and mentioned some nice things about my Nude Rolling Down an Escalator CD, namely: “some of the pieces (‘Texarkana,’ ‘Despotic Waltz’) draw Chaplinesque comedy from the hyperkinetic action of the computerized piano, while others summon clouds of Ivesian mystery (‘Unquiet Night’) or simply make you happy (‘Bud Ran Back Out’).” I’m in a wrap-up along with recordings of Arvo Pärt, Mozart, Chopin, Victoria, Michael Finnissy, and my contemporary J.S. Bach.

Quand j’etais jeune on me disait: Vous verrez quand vous aurez cinquante ans.

J’ai cinquante ans. Je n’ai rien vu.

Erik Satie

Satie’s Dream (1975)

Composer Nic Collins was here the other day. He had an interesting insight that had never occurred to me. He tells his students that between five and ten minutes is the most dangerous length for a piece of music. A piece under five minutes can bore no one. A piece 15 minutes or more seems profound simply by virtue of its length, and generally receives the benefit of the doubt. But in between, a piece flirts with a certain attention threshhold, and can easily seem too long, or not serious enough in content to have gone past that five-minute mark.

Slate has a series on college education running lately, and in it is this statement about the “liberal” approach to education, as formulated by one Astrida Orle Tantillo, associate dean and associate professor of history and Germanic studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago:

The assault on liberal education from the left presumes that pedagogy must be “student-centered,” with professors no longer “teaching” but “facilitating” or serving as “architects of interaction” who “enable” students to teach one another. The assumptions underlying this methodology are democratic and, as such, inimical to a type of education that prizes the difficult or esoteric. For example, the “communicative approach” is the most popular one in foreign-language classes across the country. Beginning students interact with one another more than with the instructor. Instructors are further discouraged from correcting mistakes for fear of inhibiting self-expression. This model emphasizes oral communication (and students do speak with greater ease), but at the cost of precision, knowledge of grammar, and ability to read serious texts…. One could draw similar parallels to other courses, including English composition, where many instructors do not teach or correct grammar. As the National Council of Teachers of English would have it, students have the “right” to their own language. Paradoxically, this approach is more insidiously hierarchical than the old teacher-centered one: Teachers consciously withhold their knowledge and high-culture experiences, thereby limiting the students’ educational opportunities.

Give me a break. This is the kind of crap that conservatives make up and attribute to liberals so that Rush Limbaugh can come along and discredit us for allegedly believing it. I consider myself pretty far left, and certainly people are under the impression that the college I teach in is one of the most liberal liberal arts schools in the country. And there is no way in hell my college administration would put up for a minute with this anti-intellectual claptrap, nor would anyone on the faculty ever ask them to.

I thought I’d never live to see the day that more than three hours of Julius Eastman’s music would be commercially available. But today is that day, for New World’s three-disc set of archival recordings (New World 80638-2) – titled Unjust Malaise, an anagram of Eastman’s name – is now in my hands. In case you haven’t been tuned in to the recent buzz, Eastman (1940-1990) was a gay African-American whose rivetingly powerful postminimalist music confronted issues of race and sexual identity, and who died under rather mysterious circumstances at the age of 49. (He died at Millard Fillmore Hospital in Buffalo, but the cause of death remains maddeningly vague. Some assume he had AIDS – the family says not so.)

The New World set contains, in its entirety, a January, 1980, concert at Northwestern University at which I was present as a grad student, including three pieces for multiple pianos – Gay Guerrilla, Evil Nigger, and Crazy Nigger – along with Eastman’s own remarkable spoken introduction. Also here are his early signature piece Stay On It, which the Buffalo Creative Associates toured all over Europe in the ’70s, plus If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Rich? and The Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc. Rich, powerful stuff, based on Eastman’s “organic” conception of music whereby new information is gradually added to a repeating sequence as old information is gradually taken away. And the copious liner notes are by moi – I was surprised, thinking back, to realize how many encounters I had with Eastman between 1974 and ’89. He was a friend of my grad-school composition teacher Peter Gena, but I knew him even before I knew Peter, from appearances at Oberlin (with Petr Kotik) and, notoriously, at June in Buffalo 1975. Naturally, Eastman will be Postclassic Radio‘s Composer-of-the-Month for Nov. 16 to Dec. 15 (hey, at Postclassic Radio we think outside the box) as soon as I can load up Crazy Nigger here, and I’ve got some other archival performances to play not on the New World set.

Photo of Eastman in Perugia, 1974, by Peter Gena.

…it pours. After no performances in about a decade, my toy piano piece Paris Intermezzo was played last week in Worcester, Massachusetts, by John MacDonald – a really lovely performance – and it’s about to be played again seven times. French pianist Wilhem Latchoumia will play it on November 18, 19 , 22, 23, 24, 25, and 26 with the Compagnie de Danse Stanilaw Wisniewski at the Centre Culturel Charlie Chaplin à Vaulx-en-Velin, near Lyon. If anyone’s in the area (I won’t be). Space is limited, and reservations are recommended, at 04 72 04 81 18 ou 19. Also on the program is toy piano music (some with electronics) by Bernadette Speach, P. Regana-Baron, and others. Paris Intermezzo dates from 1989, and it’s a piece I had rather forgotten about, but it held up beautifully in MacDonald’s ravishing interpretation, and I thoroughly enjoyed hearing it again. I have a performance of my Transcendental Sonnets coming up in Paris in the spring, so maybe the French have discovered me. Maybe I’m the Jerry Lewis of new music!

I’ve written a little keyboard work (for a retuned electronic keyboard, playable by human hands) that I’m proud of for reasons with which the reader has no reason to sympathize. One is that I’ve finally, after years of trying, broken past the barrier of the 11th harmonic to base a piece on the 13th harmonic and its resultant intervals. This will seem a small achievement to some microtonalists, many of whom run wild with 43rd and 79th harmonics and 53- and 72-tone scales, but I have always found myself unable to compose merely theoretically, without internalizing and being able to hear, almost more in my heart than in my head, the materials I’m using. Thus my approach to microtonality has always been slow and gradual, and I’ve had a devil of a time getting the 13th harmonic into my system. The other reason is that the scale is the simplest I’ve ever come up with (simplicity being an artistic virtue, if not inherently the best or most necessary virtue, and having been considered one for many hundreds of years, no matter how fervently the complexity mavens try to rationalize it out of existence). The scale, defined as ratios to a fundamental (this way of discussing pitch is explained at my just intonation page if you’re interested), comprises nothing more than all possible ratios among whole numbers 1 through 13:

13/12, 13/11, 13/10, 13/9, 13/8, 13/7 (13/6, 13/5, and so on, are merely octaves of those already mentioned)

12/11, 12/7 (12/10 is the same as 6/5, 12/9 = 4/3, and so on)

11/10, 11/9, 11/8, 11/7, 11/6

10/9, 10/7 (10/8 = 5/4, 10/6 = 5/3)

9/8, 9/7, 9/5

8/7, 8/5

7/6, 7/5, 7/4

6/5

5/4, 5/3

4/3

3/2

1/1

It’s 29 pitches in all, all with fairly simple relationships to the tonic, because of which the whole piece takes place over a rhythmicized tonic drone. I figured out that I could make different scales within this network by taking all notes expressible by the form 13/X, or 11/X, or X/7, and the scales with the smallest numbers would be closest to simple tonality, while the larger-numbered scales will have a much more oblique relationship. Thus, by wandering through the 29 pitches on these different scales, the piece goes “in and out of focus,” sometimes comically random-sounding, sometimes purely and simply in tune, with every gradation in-between – and all with a tremendous economy of means. I’ve put it up for you to hear it here. The duration is just under five minutes, the title: Triskaidekaphonia. More detailed information about the tuning and compositional strategy is here. Only a trifle, perhaps, but it provides yet another bit of proof of the miraculous nature of the whole number series.

There are two web sites that I think you should check out – not right this minute, but when you have some leisure time, for they both require and deserve a lot of time to get into:

1. The best paper I heard at the toy piano conference at Clark University last week was by the irrepressibly enthusiastic Helen Thorington, of NPR and radio sound art fame. She came to tell about her Networked Performance blog, a site where she and other bloggers keep track of internet performance projects from all around the world. The stuff she showed us ranged from unbelievable to hilarious, and mostly involved technologically brilliant attempts to get lay audiences more involved in art. The best approach to the site, I think, is to go down to the menu on the lower right hand side and look through the categories of different types of art. I was most tickled by the “Wearables,” new high-tech clothing, like:

Wearable Keyboards by a Professor Tsukamoto of Kobe University, piano key patterns sewn into the fronts of dresses, or the arms of shirts, that create sound when touched (giving new meaning to my oft-repeated expression that [French accent, please] “a beyootiful woman must be played like an eenstrument”);

Aware Cuffs, knitted cuffs for your wrists with lights that will light up when you’re within range of wireless internet service;

Random Search underwear, developed by Ayah Bdeir, that responds to metal detector searches in airports with rippling LED lights.

But there’s tons of more stuff – sites that you can draw on and have the drawings turn into sound, mirrors that can recognize your identity and give a personalized digital response, communal iPods, and tons more. A few hours’ immersion will make the timid old 20th century seem to fade away from consciousness, and will bring to life the famous statement by science fiction writer William Gibson: “The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.”

2. Composer/video artist/whatever-he-wants-to-be-called-these-days Henry Gwiazda has just inaugurated a web site to accompany (and sell) his imminent Innova DVD titled, “She’s Walking….” But this is more than an informational web site: it’ll let you listen to excerpts of Gwiazda’s music and watch clips from the DVD, but will also ask you personal questions and offer bits of wisdom like, “Perhaps each day is about the same because we need the time to practice what to see and what to hear.” And you can upload a photo of yourself (or anything else) and have it diffracted via Gwiazda’s abstracting imagery. Gwiazda’s music is made up of samples of real-life sounds combined with a humorous sense of poetry; his videos focus over and over on details from daily life in an attempt to make us see the world around us differently. Beautiful, touching stuff. And there’s also a link to the program notes I wrote for the DVD, though not to my filmed interview with Gwiazda that comes with it.

Enjoy!

The American Composers’ Orchestra is performing a transcription of Conlon Nancarrow’s Study No. 7 (perhaps the best of his early works) at Zankel Hall on November 11. They asked me to write a little article for their web site about Nancarrow as a person, and it’s now posted here.

My Rochberg talk out of the way, I am now focused on this week’s events. First, as previously noted, the premiere of my microtonal quintet The Day Revisited occurs this Wednesday, November 2, at Bard College’s Olin Auditorium. My son Bernard and I will be performing with the Da Capo ensemble, and other Bardian composers are featured, including faculty members Joan Tower and Thurman Barker, temporary faculty Keith Fitch, a very talented student Marcus Parris, and local composer Jonathan Talbott.

Then I’m giving the keynote address at a festival/symposium called The Extensible Toy Piano Project. The brainchild of directors David Claman and Matt Malsky, the event takes place Friday and Saturday, November 4 and 5, at the Razzo Recital Hall at the Traina Center for the Arts at Clark University in Worcester, Massachussetts. My speech is Saturday evening at 7. I’ve never given a keynote address before, and have spent the last couple of weeks thinking about what the toy piano means to me. A lot, actually: on the Saturday concert will be my 1989 toy piano piece Paris Intermezzo, and I also used the instrument (sampled and microtonally retuned) in So Many Little Dyings. Naturally, my talk, as the festival itself, probably, will revolve around John Cage’s Suite for Toy Piano of 1948, which first brought the instrument to serious attention – and which I have added to Postclassic Radio as an homage.

Some readers have a few issues with the “comments” option, and I have a couple of disappointments about the new format myself – or rather, with what the new format does to the old entries. I thought that rather than post them as comments I’d forward them to Doug McLennan and post them here.

First, my issues. Somehow, in moving all my files to the new space, an awful lot of apostrophes and quotation marks got swallowed up, making the posts look a little illiterate. I’ve been restoring those in the articles I care most about, but it’s unlikely I’ll ever get to all of them. Also, internal links from one post to another are now all incorrect (as are, one presumes, all links ever made to one of my blog entries from the outside). I’m trying to correct those – if you find one that no longer works, I’d appreciate knowing about it.

Readers are concerned that the “Preview” button doesn’t work when you post a comment – you apparently just get a blank screen. I’ve been asked if it’s possible to provide some kind of “your comment is awaiting moderator approval” message to those who try to post, and also if I can create a list of “approved commenters,” so that some people will get carte blanche after the first couple of posts. I’m not so sure about the latter – I’d hate to have to create a two-tier system of people I trust and people I don’t. But I’ll pass the other concerns on to Doug. It’s like any time you move to a new house or new computer or new office, for awhile nothing seems to work right.

UPDATE: I’m assured that the preview problems are fixed – at least posting comments works like clockwork for me and Doug – and there’s a message explaining that comments are screened before posting. Let me know if you have a recurring problem, and tell me what browser you’re using so I can check if there’s some compatability problem. Thanks.

Robert Ashley’s brand new recording of his opera Celestial Excursions is up in its 111-minute entirety on Postclassic Radio. I think it’s his most musically beautiful opera ever, even though there’s not particularly much more music in it than in the other ones – something about the rhythms of the words, the way the repeated phrases make music. It’s his opera about old people:

Old people are special because they have no future. The future is what to eat for breakfast, or where did I leave my shoes. Everything else is in the past. Is this understandable?

So, sometimes old people break the rules. Especially the rules of conversation and being together. They laugh a lot. I mean real, full laughter. Did you ever notice that? They break the rules because, for one reason or another (illness, anger, damage, enough of that, whatever), the rules no longer apply for them.

Or to quote the song about the baguette:

The plate was taken away. The heavy door shut. I heard the lock.

I thought to myself, if Beckett wrote in French,

He must have had to have a baguette for breakfast.

You can’t write in French after a breakfast of oatmeal.

That is, when Beckett decided to write in French,
He had to have a baguette for breakfast.

No, I thought to myself, think clearly. This is your chance.

Beckett wanted to have the baguette for breakfast, though he knew this desire would lead

Him irrevocably to writing in French.

You can’t have the baguette for breakfast and write other than in French.

He chose. It takes courage to be a writer.

Yep.

I neglected to notice that the Village Voice turned fifty this week – the first issue was dated Oct. 26, 1955, and I was born soon afterward. My editor Bob Christgau gives a capsule history of music criticism there. True to form, he doesn’t sugarcoat anything:

In 1985 I became a parent and relinquished the editorship to a talented series of successors who know why I’m not name-checking them—they experienced firsthand the space cutbacks that have continued for 20 years (and hey, now pay rates are dipping too!). [I came to the Voice in November 1986. – KG] Many claim our section lost authority around the time I left, and they’re right. This had nothing to do with editing. It was structural. The professionalization and expansion of music coverage, together with the DIY-ization and expansion of music production, topped off by the online DIY-ization of music coverage, have rendered authority, which in any aesthetic matter is provisional at best, an utter chimera, no matter how many 100 best this-es and 50 top thats music media sell ads with….

This is not a great time in alternative rock or alternative journalism—mainstream pop or mainstream journalism either….