Archives for March 2007

My three weeks at Atlantic Center for the Arts flew by in a pleasant blur. Getting tremendous free tech support from the composers who came to work with me, I achieved my long-delayed goal of being able to play keyboards off of my new laptop, and wrote and performed a little 13-limit tuning study, Fugitive Objects, to celebrate the fact. But I was kept busier than the other composers, and composing took second place to a very helpful kind of networking. The nine of us met every afternoon; I taught a lot about microtonality, and they coached me on technological skills, everything from programming the “Dashboard” on my laptop to how to get microtones in Logic, the music software program that’s been declared verboten in the Bard College electronic studio, but that I’m about to buy and start using anyway. The more significant meetings, though, were those we had between 10 PM and 1:30 AM, where, over liberal amounts of single-malt scotch, we listened to tons of music from half a dozen iPods, as well as from my 13,000-mp3 hard drive. I got to know my composers’ music very well, and I am happy to introduce you to them – listing them in reverse alphabetical order:

Scott Unrein, a doctoral student at University of Missouri KC, was the one whose iPod so matched my own new music list that I started exulting when I found a rare piece he didn’t know – a feat in which he reciprocated all too often. He is a devotee of the quiet, atmospheric aesthetic typified by Jim Fox’s Cold Blue label, and his own music has migrated from a rhythmic, Reich-influenced postminimalism to a sustained lyricism of tenatative saxophone lines over tremoloing chords and ostinatos quite elegant in their simply metamorphosing logic. Scott’s also an active podcaster of new music, and his Nonpop station runs parallel to my Postclassic Radio and garners many times as many listeners.

Maria Panayotova, originally from Bulgaria but completing a doctorate at Cincinnati College-Conservatory, used to write soulful, metrically fluid acoustic music, often with vocals that evinced an almost unconscious-seeming influence of Balkan folk music, falling into lovely patterns of quick 5/8. In recent years, however, she has switched entirely to electronics, and has started making her own video as well, based in one case on geometric patterns found in forest images, and in another on a cute children’s story about a traffic light that baffled a town by starting to glow blue. An accomplished pianist, she embedded a section of Schumann’s Kinderscenen in the shimmering electronics of her In the Forest video, which became clearly audible after she pointed it out. She kindly introduced me to Soundhack, showed me how she did it, and now I’m Soundhacking away like a hipster.

Matt McBane recently moved to New York City from Los Angeles, where he has started an ensemble of violin (himself – no fewer than three of our composers were violinists), cello, bass, piano, and drums. The ensemble is yet unnamed, but has several upcoming performances booked, to which I’ll try to alert you. One of his formative experiences was conducting a performance of Reich’s Eight Lines, and his music is often marked by a fanatically detailed sense of slow textural transformation. A new work, Drivin’, replaces rests with notes in a maniacal 5/4 rhythm demanding a concentration that only the fearless enthusiasm of youth could negotiate, but other of his pieces are simpler and more pop-influenced.

Due to her formidable resumé and creative prolificity, Caroline Mallonée, who’s got a doctorate from Duke and teaches at the Walden School, earned for the duration the nickname “Alpha Male.” Carrie’s ambitious chamber pieces, such as Throwing Mountains, play off of permutational schemes developed as an expansion of Reich’s technique in Piano Phase (notice how often that name comes up?). Capable of the kind of bristlingly impressive ensemble works that are good for getting commissions, she also has a penchant for simple pieces exploring clear tonal and microtonal phenomena with a Tom Johnson-like directness, and the violin trio she whipped up for herself and her fellow violinists in the last few days explored the harmonic series in a fetching idiom of light folk fiddling.

Andrea La Rose was familiar to me, and will have been to many readers, as the feisty flutist-composer from New York’s Anti-Social Music ensemble who weighs in with considerable fire at Sequenza 21. She’s completing a dissertation on Rzewski at CUNY, and when a horoscope reading attributed to her an “excess of vitality,” it was considered apt enough to become a running gag. She writes high-energy music that usually forays into improvisation at points – thus the Rzewski interest – combining it with minimalist tendencies, so that some of her pieces achieve the odd effect of differing considerably from performance to performance, but maintaining a strong sense of identity in any one reading. I particularly admire her Concerto for Anyone (PDF available at her web site), an entirely instruction-based piece that so reduces concerto form to its essence that a concerto is bound to result no matter what players are used. Prolific and an expert performer, she’s bouncing among a dozen good ideas, and wherever she lands will doubtless cause merriment, consternation, insight, and possibly the End of Civilization As We Know It.

No description of Teresa Hron will sound very credible. A Canadian living in Amsterdam, Terri plays the recorder, travels with a bass recorder almost her own height – and is one of the most challenging rhythmic minds of the age. She studied Carnatic Indian music in India, absorbed unnerving subtleties of rhythm, and came home to apply them to music she plays with her recorder ensemble, as well as more pop-oriented groups with which she’s associated. So she sets up these long, complex isorhythms (e.g., 7 + 5 + 3 + 3, 7 + 5 + 3 + 3, 7 + 5 + 3 + 1), within which certain rhythmic motives recur at tempos of 4-against-3 and 7-against-5, often over the barline. It’s a notational nightmare, though, as she insists, the music is quirkily melodic, and doesn’t sound complex. I’d have declared her crazy, except that she played recordings of herself and her Dutch Indian-rhythm-aficionado friends performing her scores quite competently. Suffice it to say: I nearly fried my brain trying to disentangle her rhythmic structures, and I wrote the Nancarrow book.

(At the final concert Andrea and Terri played duets they had written using copious quantities of 4/6 and 5/6 meter, and if you think that’s impossible, then go back and read the “Rhythm” chapter of Henry Cowell’s New Musical Resources.)

Jim Altieri I’ve written about here before, for he’s the genius who implemented John Luther Adams’s The Place Where You Go to Listen installation in Max/MSP. He’s the kind of guy who, if you muse aloud about some weird transformational effect you’d like to hear, will come to you the next day with a disc containing software he devised to effect it. One of the heirs to the James Tenney aesthetic, he’s writing (among other things) string pieces that glissando slowly through various overtone and undertone series’, elegantly simple in conception and quite sensuous and surprising in effect. He was also the third violinist, and much of his compositional technique is based on the fact that, like Tony Conrad, he can play microtonal intervals on his violin and bring out the difference tones and missing fundamentals quite clearly. (Jim and Carrie play together in a band called Glissando bin Laden and his Musichideen, but you didn’t hear about it from me.)

Along with Mike Maguire, whom I’ve already written about, that was the group. They impressed not only me but the poets, architects, and administrators at ACA with their omnipresent energy and professionalism. The final concert, in which most of them performed, was remarkable for its absence of reference to any 20th-century idiom – no hint was left that modernism had ever existed, and the future sounded wide open. I imbibed their musical optimism and curiosity like a healing nectar, and washed it down with 12-year-old Bowmore. You’ll be hearing more about them all, and not only from me.

(I’d also like to mention two alternate composers, who, had we had world enough and time, I wish could have joined us: Paula Matthusen, a composer of lovely music for voice and electronics, and Jacob Barton, a young take-no-prisoners microtonalist who’s already attracted attention in the pitch-splitting world. I hope to get to work with them someday as well.)

My choral work My father moved through dooms of love, based on E.E. Cummings, received a lovely premiere in New York last night, with James Bagwell conducting the Dessoff Choir, Rachel Handman playing solo violin, and Steven Ryan on piano. I’ve posted the recording. Rachel was nearer the microphone than the chorus was, with the result that the violin is a little overly foregrounded on the recording; heard from inside Merkin Hall, she slipped more easily into and out of the choral texture, which was my intention. The text can be found here among other places, and a PDF of the score is available here (click on “choral”). Jeff Lunden’s interview with me about the work here. That’s all the info there is.

As a teaser for my upcoming CD on New Albion, provisionally titled Private Dances (not due until September), I upload a pre-final edit of The Day Revisited, my microtonal piece for flute, clarinet, fretless bass, and two sampler keyboards. Twenty-nine pitches to the octave, unequally spaced. Though you can occasionally hear the effort that woodwind microtonality involves, I’m really happy with it, one of those pieces that asymptotically approaches the perfect Kyle Gann piece I hear in my head every day. Pat Spencer plays flute, Meighan Stoops clarinet, Bernard Gann bass, and Blair McMillan and I keyboards. The other day I gave a talk about my music at Stetson University down here in Florida, and a student asked, “How do you feel about form?” I told her that my favorite form was to start something and then just keep going.

I suppose it is redundant to alert my readers here to the highly visible blog that the Times is running by an rotating quartet of four composers: Annie Gosfield, Alvin Curran, Michael Gordon, and Glenn Branca. I might note, however, that all of them are what I might have called “Downtowners,” and all thus refreshingly devoted to free-thinking creativity, and unlikely to harangue us about the importance of credentials, knowledge of the European repertoire, and solid education in traditional theory. (I wondered aloud why no composers from the academic establishment or orchestra circuit were represented, and a friend theorized, “Maybe none of them knew what a blog was.”) I also note that Gordon, despite Bang on a Can’s habitual refusal to take sides on the Uptown/Downtown issue, points to a time in his career in which he did take sides:

If I had to choose I would have without question sided with the downtown school. I found the modernists were totalitarian in their belief, misconceived in my opinion, that the point of writing music was to show off how smart you were…. Not only was the downtown school more expansive in its ideas and concepts, they also began to reembrace the misbegotten audience by reintroducing the now forgotten idea that music, in order to be good, needed to actually sound good.

Good for him. Of course, he locates the whole argument to the generation preceding his, thus perhaps obviating the need for any defense of Bang on a Can’s arm’s-length treatment of the Downtown scene during the 1990s.

Far more entertaining is Branca’s wacko tirade (and I mean this in the best possible sense) today about the “secrets of harmony”:

One example of a chord that defies analysis is the “unison cluster.” This is a type of dense cluster in which the tones are placed very close together using small microtonal intervals. The effect is neither of a cluster nor a unison. But the sound is rich with a strange, singing choir-like quality. The clash of harmonics which occurs in a standard cluster does not occur here because the harmonic interaction that creates the harsh sound is so high that it’s outside the range of hearing….

Music is not pure. It cannot be pure. Sound is noise. In the 70s it was popular for studio engineers to try to get the “cleanest” possible sound, a vogue that lasted for years and was a complete failure. The only clean sound is silence.

It’s lovely to see a composer go flying out into the public eye with all the kinds of thoughts we music weirdos usually try to keep people from realizing we have.

One of my expected pleasures of being here at the Atlantic Center for the Arts has been the opportunity to learn more about the music of M.C. Maguire. (I’ll introduce you to all my ACA composers presently, but Maguire, older than the rest, deserves his own day.) Mike’s a Canadian composer, used to live in Vancouver, but moved to Toronto four years ago, and makes his living making soundtracks for films, commercials, and the like. His work for hire is rather amazingly sophisticated, and you can hear his imaginative commercials for Nike, Smirnoff, Fruit Loops, and others here. But I first became aware of him via a torrential sound continuum called Seven Years on the 1989 Bang on a Can marathon, and I’ve been trying to figure him out ever since.

Because his music – wild, noisy, intense, relentlessly high-energy – is nearly opposite in style to most of the music I like, but it is nothing at all like most modernist music characterized by those qualities, and I always have to admire fanaticism. Most of his pieces are what he calls “concertos,” by which he means pieces for solo instrument accompanied/obliterated by tape or electronic soundfile layered with from 200 to 400 tracks. The noise periodically parts for pop references and quotations: lightly-altered pop songs, the scherzo from Bruckner’s Eighth, Brazilian pop, heavy metal, all cascading by like someone trying to find his favorite radio station during a hurricane. Two of his pieces, which he analyzed for us – Got That Crazy Latin/Metal Feelin’ for guitar and tape and Short History of Lounge for piano and tape – will be released on the Tzadik label in May, and he had to alter some of the quotations to avoid copyright infringement. He claims that he replaced the vocal parts with vocalists singing software manuals in Portugese, but Mike’s humor is so dry that it’s hard to discern where reality ends and satire begins – probably somewhere within his music.

It turns out, though, that beneath all the wildness runs a detailed sense of proportion and structure as obsessive as that of the Berg Chamber Concerto or the middle studies of Nancarrow. Got That Crazy Latin/Metal Feelin’ is based on 49 tonalities that alternately rise and descend by thirds. As Mike helpfully charted out on a blackboard for us, the piece ascends to chord 7, returns to 1, slogs its way up to 14, returns to 1, and so on until it finally climbs the mountain of 49. The central tonality is the E power chord of the guitar solo, and you can sometimes hear the music dramatically return to it via a circle of fourths – though Maguire’s moments of repose and respite start about where Mahler’s climaxes end. Short History of Lounge, its title notwithstanding, is – at least on paper – a conventional three-movement concerto form, though enlivened by background quotations and sections that greatly accelerate and decelerate. The finale runs through an incredible gradual deceleration from quarter note = 900 to quarter note = 4. The magnitude of such gestures leaves you exhausted. In retrospect, though, I should have figured that his sense of form was knitted together by obsessively detailed structure, because it would be extremely difficult to make music of such rich complexity without a plan to generate all the various moments: the musical analogue of Bruno’s Theater of memory.

I’ve included some Maguire on Postclassic Radio, but I’ve also uploaded Short History of Lounge here on my website, so you can hear it. It’s the easier-listening of the two pieces, if that term can be used in this case, and I’ll take it down when the CD appears in May, and remind you that it’s out. I can see why Zorn likes the music – perhaps a rare point at which our tastes overlap. Maguire’s not completely isolated in Canadian music, for his friend Paul Dolden also makes take pieces of mammothly superimposed hundreds of tracks, and has gained a little more attention for doing so. But with his peculiar blend of postmodern style juxtapositions, pop appropriations, and fanatical intellectual structure, I think Maguire’s the most original Canadian composer since R. Murray Schafer – and I don’t know Schafer’s music well enough to be certain the qualifier is necessary.