Kyle Gann on music after the fact
Saturday morning at 10 I’ll be giving the keynote address for the biennial conference of the Canadian New Music Network, in conjunction with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra. I can’t quite discern from their website where it’s taking place, but I guess anybody in Winnipeg can tell you. So if you’re near Winnipeg this weekend on your way to… on your way… well, I’ll tell you about it afterward.
Sarah Cahill’s goading me about my piano skills (in the comments) brings to mind an incident from my youth that I’ve been remembering lately. I foolishly quit taking piano lessons late in my undergrad career. Three years go by, and, finishing my doctorate at Northwestern, I thought I should study piano again while I still had the chance. I was assigned to Lawrence Davis, a sharp, meticulous, expert chamber musician who spent his life grooming his hotshot undergrads to become concert pianists. (He’s no longer listed on the faculty; seems like he was in his 50s 27 years ago, and may well still be around.) He was not happy about having to mentor this great, hulking composition student with rusty finger technique, but to his eternal credit, he realized I was more knowledgeable than his budding Horowitzes, and he gave me music to work on that would challenge me intellectually, even if it was too difficult for me.
The most ambitious thing Davis had me play was Beethoven’s Op. 90 sonata, to this day nearly my favorite Beethoven. The piece opens with the same chord played twice:
One day, five times in a row he yelled “Stop!” during that little eighth-note rest between the first and second chords and made me start over. He just did not like the way I played that first chord. We spent quite a bit of time on the first two measures without me really grasping what was wrong. At last he let me go ahead and run through the entire movement. After the final chord, no immediate comment seemed forthcoming. I looked over and saw that he was turned away from me, quietly weeping.
Actually, this spurs me to make a complaint about grad schools that I’ve nurtured for a long time. In grad school I took piano lessons with a professor who did not want to be teaching a non-major; I took conducting classes with a conductor who did not want a non-conducting-major in his class; and I took philosophy seminars with professors who resented having a music major sit in. By and large, these were some of the best things I did in grad school. The theory courses I was supposed to be in were mostly a linear continuation of what I’d studied at Oberlin, and I could have learned that material on my own. With the exception of Peter Gena’s fantastic late-Beethoven course, it was the courses outside my major that did the most for me – and it was a shame that I had to draw that benefit under the nagging discomfort of the professor’s visible and continuing disapproval. Because of that experience, I have always tried to be especially supportive of non-majors whenever I’ve taught graduate courses – and undergrad ones.
My biggest regret about my life is that I didn’t continue practicing piano. In 1982 I started typing instead, and that was that. Now I’m writing a piano concerto, and it would be energizing to imagine myself playing it with an orchestra someday – but that’s not going to happen. When I was 19, playing Chopin polonaises and Brahms rhapsodies along with my Wolpe and Rochberg, it would have seemed a possibility.
My other big regret is how seldom my intensely busy life allows me to see my close friends, who are scattered out from Alaska to Germany. A related regret is the difficulty of even keeping in sufficient touch by e-mail. The longest, most meaningful, most searching e-mails are the hardest ones to find time and mental space to answer. The succinct e-mails that require no reflection have a split-second turnaround time:
“Did you ever find a punching score for Nancarrow Study 13?”
“No.”
“Thanks.”
The e-mails that deserve a long, thoughtful response, not only from close friends but from strangers with strong mutual interests, pop up as I’ve just finished editing a recording and have to dash to the post office before it closes, and I make a mental note as I’m off to a concert, and I don’t get back to them that night while fifty more e-mails come in, and they start drifting down my e-mail box, and someday I have an hour to spare and I go searching for the e-mails I most wanted to answer. I imagine it’s the same for us all – the messages most deserving of a response hang in the ethernet as unanswered questions. The feeling of muted, unfulfilled, but tangible connectedness that remains, which the internet does much to reinforce (even if it also heightens our awareness of the facile negativity that flows around the world), will have to be sufficient consolation.
I hadn’t replenished PostClassic Radio in well over a month, and to my horror Sarah Cahill told me that a friend of hers, a devoted listener (so that’s who’s logging on), had now heard the entire current playlist. Well, it’s no longer true – 19 new recordings just went up by a crowd of composers mostly quite a bit younger than myself: Andrea La Rose, Matt McBane, Paula Matthusen, Andrian Pertout, Teresa Hron, David Toub, Jim Altieri, the amazing M.C. Maguire, Carolyn Mallonée, Kevin Volans, Scott Unrein, Jo Kondo, plus a Flute Trio by Feldman newly out on New World with flutist Dorothy Stone. Nice stuff. More to come, don’t stop listening now.
UPDATE: Someone actually complained that I don’t have any of my own music programmed lately (all right, it wasn’t a complaint exactly, he was just wondering, and come to think of it, he did sound a little grateful), so I’ve fixed that. I try not to repeat pieces, and I just don’t compose fast enough, or rather record fast enough, to keep contributing.
I treasure your comments, which at this point, I believe, take up well over half of my total blog space. There’s no way I’d turn off my comments feature: the dialogue is too good, I’ve gotten tons of helpful feedback, and being able to put up your comments directly saves me a lot of time. From my own experience reading comments on other blogs, though, it detracts from the enjoyment when someone posts a comment that goes on for paragraph after paragraph, all out of proportion to the other comments and sometimes longer than the blog entry itself. You don’t want to miss anything because someone might respond to it, but you begin to suspect that someone’s nerve has been struck and he’s going to go on for pages about his pet peeve. Also, this not being a group site, it’s not an effective place to grandstand, shout down the other commenters, and try to get in the last word. On your blog you get the last word, and I get the last word on mine. For more general and democratic discussions, go to Sequenza 21 or New Music Box. I’ve deleted a few comments lately for various combinations of verbosity and bellicosity, and I always feel guilty doing it, but I’m the bouncer here, and I do it to preserve the enjoyment of others.
Another bounceworthy infringement, as I’ve noted before, is writing in to disparage music I write about. Say, Carl Stone or somebody is sitting off in Japan minding his own damn business, and I put up a fragment of an mp3 of his music, and five people write in to say how much it sucks, and Carl’s being spat upon, when he didn’t have any control over the presentation, and maybe I didn’t explain his music correctly, and maybe I played an old version or the worst two minutes, and it’s not fair to judge composers on fragmentary work of theirs I present for analytical or musicological purposes. Sometimes I’m merely trying to illustrate a point. I’m writing about postminimalism now, and there’s a lot of great postminimalist music and a lot of bad postminimalist music and a lot in-between. So if I play or describe something that’s in-between because it illustrates my thesis, that’s not a cue for everyone who doesn’t like that fragment to roar in exulting that, Aha!, just as they suspected, postminimalism sucks. We’ve got to be able to discuss music without instantly confronting the earth-shaking question of whether you LIIIIIIIIKE the music or not, as though being LIIIIIIIKED was music’s sole purpose for existing. There are people who are very quick to reject new ideas without thinking about them much, or studying the scores of the music that inspired them, and usually those people seem to be in gradyooate school. Well, I was in gradyooate school once myself, and I knew everything. Someone should have given me a high-powered job just at that moment, because I had the entire world figured out, and I knew for sure which was the good music and which was the bad and why. And now I’m 51 and confused and can’t figure out how the world works or where it’s going, nor where to draw the line among the 171 shades of gray I see everywhere, and guess what? Now they let me teach. Go figure. But at least I don’t sit here going onto blogs of musicians more experienced than myself and tell them their ideas are bullshit, and neither should you.
I’ve been too busy recording a new CD to take note, but in response to my postminimalism essay composer Galen Brown has started his own history of postminimalism over on Sequenza 21. It’s in installments, and he got to talking about conceptual art, and I don’t know where he’s going with it yet, so it’s kind of a cliff-hanger. I look forward to Episode 2.
For years I’ve wished some younger Kyle Gann would come along and take over the responsibility I still feel of chronicling music of my generation. I strongly suspect that the Village Voice, under new and less idealistic management, would no longer hire a person to do this, but it might be worth a try. Of course, Tom Johnson’s devout fans were terribly disappointed in Greg Sandow, and Greg’s fans were just as disappointed with me, and so if someone does come along and make a career out of describing and contextualizing the new music, he or she’ll likely make no friends among people who like what I do. But I’ll root for him anyway.