Archives for 2008

I haven’t blogged about Alex Ross’s The Rest Is Noise simply because I hate being one of a crowd, and if someone else is saying the things I would say, I have little incentive to say them myself. But I find myself rather delighted by the mini-controversy of Alex getting carped at by a couple of European critics on British radio, as detailed at Sequenza 21 (you can get a link there if you want to hear the original radio program, I found it difficult to operate). That the European critics’ arguments are so pathetically, blusteringly weak is the surest sign yet of the strength of Alex’s book.

One of them finds it unfathomable that Copland gets more pages of the book than Debussy and Ravel put together. Hmmm… well, let’s see, Debussy lived from 1862 to 1918, Ravel from 1875 to 1937, and Copland from 1900 to 1990, and if your project is to chart the rising and falling course of modernism after Strauss’s Salomé (1905) up to the end of the century, it looks reasonable to me that Copland put a lot more of his productive years into that era than… well, than Debussy and Ravel put together. (For that matter, the kneejerk assumption that either Debussy or Ravel had more impact on the direction of music than Copland strikes me as old-fashioned and in need of its own defense at this point.) Another complains because Ralph Vaughan Williams is not presented as a major figure. To each his own. Another considers that Alex’s bleak assessment of post-Stockhausen German music is flatly contradicted by the liveliness of the current scene in Berlin.

Well, I do hear a lot of good things about Berlin over the past several years, partly because a thousand American musicians seem to be over there. But the context of Alex’s discussion was German music of the 1980s and ’90s, of which he has this to say (redundant, because I know you’ve already read it):

…the emergence of the new Germany as the dominant player in the European Union failed to distract the country’s composers from their wary brooding over the past; indeed, Germans and Austrians seemed more conscious than ever before of the “danger of resembling tonality,” as Schoenberg once put it. Sixty year after the Wagner-loving Hitler killed himself in Berlin, pundits could still be heard declaring that clear-cut repetition of material or a nonironic use of triads betrayed a fascist mentality…. [T]he mantle of greatness fell on Helmut Lachenmann, who has said, “My music has been concerned… with the exclusion of what appears to me as listening expectations performed by society.” One analyst approvingly notes that Lachenmann’s work is “uncontaminated” by the world around it….

…[M]uch contemporary music in Austria and Germany seems constricted in emotional range… The great German tradition, with all its grandeurs and sorrows, is cordoned off, like a crime scene under investigation.

Upon first reading the book, I had written to Alex and singled out this passage for praise. Not only does the description perfecly capture my impression of German composing culture in the period 1980-2000 – more significantly, it jives exactly with what I’ve been told about that scene by young German and Dutch composers who have left or avoided the scene to escape it. If you hold up a mirror to a people and they say, “Don’t make me look like that,” the only response possible is, “Then don’t look like that.” I do get a sense that things have been changing rapidly in Germany and Austria in the last several years, but the 21st Century is not the subject of Ross’s book. As commonly noted, it says “Twentieth Century” right on the cover, and its European critics have had to attack by charging him with having unfairly omitted the 19th and 21st.

One point brought up in the blogosphere in Ross’s defense is that The Rest Is Noise is a narrative, not a music history text. As someone who has argued for the primacy of subjective narrative in musicology, I see this as something more than a defense. Were I to teach a general 20th-century course, I could easily imagine using The Rest Is Noise as my textbook. It would give me a second subjectivity to use as a foil to my own, like having another professor in the classroom to argue points with, rather than duplicate my own idiosyncratic views. Plus, and not unrelatedly, it’s so readable that the students would actually read it and remember things. For similar reasons I would have loved to use Carl Dahlhaus’s wonderful 19th-Century Music in classes as an intelligently revisionist history, but Dahlhaus is over my students’ heads; he assumes the reader already knows the history he is about to refurbish. The Rest Is Noise does not have that pedagogical liability. It would be a mistake for musicologists to dismiss The Rest Is Noise on account of its frank subjectivity of viewpoint, and I don’t get the impression that American musicologists are flirting with that mistake.

It would likewise be silly, I think, or at least premature, to take this handful of logic-challenged critics as representative of European reaction in general. The show’s host, after all, praises the book highly after the others have vented their spleen. But it’s curious to see European musicians now in the position that Americans have occupied for a century, as the ones who feel marginalized and left out in the classical music dialogue. Their horror that a mere American has wrested the steering wheel of classical-music history out of their hands is palpable. It makes me want to go back and review several generations’ worth of European music books that condescended to American composers, including the recent British compendium I once wrote here about that included the blithe statement,

“It is difficult not to come to the conclusion that in terms of musical impact, and in the reflection of the wider human condition and the narrower expression of the ethos and ideas of the day, none of the American composers has yet matched their European counterparts.”

Poor Brits and Germans – they’re beginning to see what it feels like.

This YouTube video of a young John Cale playing Satie’s Vexations on the TV show I’ve Got a Secret is indicative of a time when our civilization was very, very different than it is now. I don’t remember this episode, but I well remember watching I’ve Got a Secret when I was a kid, and I remember Garry Moore. (Thanks to Alex Martell for the tip.)

Having some free time this week (translation: none of the people I owe work to were hounding me), I started revamping my web site once again. The aim is to both streamline and expand it, in imitation of composer web sites I envy like Erling Wold’s, Alex Shapiro’s, and Eve Beglarian’s. I’m obviously not much concerned with graphic sophistication. The Hudson Valley doesn’t provide me with kelp to drape over myself, like Alex has out there on the Pacific Coast (though if I took a walk through the Hudson I’d probably emerge with some pretty picturesque, if carcinogenic, muck). But it bothered me that my mp3s were on one page, PDF scores on another, program notes accessible somewhere else, and I’m remodeling it on Erling’s everything-in-one-table format. My brother Darryl set up my web site in 1996, and for 12 years I’ve been getting by on what HTML tricks were available in the primitive 1990s. I know now I could probably do something cool like make the eyes in my photo blink, but I’m putting utility above aesthetics.

As for the expansion, I took off most of the recordings that you now have to go buy my new CD Private Dances to hear, but I’ve added lots of obscure recordings that no human has heard in years. Like my Homage to Cowell (1994), the piece that got cut for space from my Custer’s Ghost CD, and which uses a single looping, carefully-tuned drum sample to imitate Cowell’s Rhythmicon; Imaginary Isle (2003), the little piece I wrote for Trimpin’s installation of nine MIDI-operated toy pianos; and Snake Dance No. 1 (1991), which I had quit listening to because I like No. 2 better, but No. 1 has some advantages I’d forgotten about. Plus I’ve put up everything from the out-of-print Custer’s Ghost until I can bring it back out in some new format. Clicking on the pieces that are commercially recorded will take you straight to Amazon.com, so have your credit card ready.

I reiterate that I do all this not because I perceive a hue and cry begging for my minor works, but because I’m so physically disorganized that it’s reassuring for me to have everything on my web site, where I’ll know where to look for it and how to find it. I’ve even started keeping documents there to which there is no public access, because I’m weary of losing things in the Bermuda Triangle I call my office.

While I’m at it, anent our discussion of online PDF scores, I had forgotten that Eve Beglarian offers her scores online. And I’ve been meaning to note that Art Jarvinen’s Leisure Planet site has a very interesting collection of scores for modest prices. Music-score culture’s transition to the internet continues slowly but surely.

This may be a subject that has been widely discussed since I was in grad school, I dunno, I don’t ride the theory circuits much. But does anyone know why Bartok so meticulously put timings on each section of his scores, showing exactly how long they were supposed to last? Joseph Szigeti asked Bartok about it, and he evidently replied, “It isn’t as if I said: ‘This must take six minutes, 22 seconds…’ but I simply go on record that when I play it the duration is six minutes, 22 seconds.” I can buy that with Bartok’s piano pieces, and there have been studies comparing the timing of his recordings with that given in the scores. But with ensemble works like the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, or even an orchestra piece like Music for SP&C, how did he know? I’ve read that he timed his performances, divided by the number of beats, and used the timings to set the metronome markings. What, did he look at his watch while conducting? Anyone know more than I do? It seems totally crazy to me, and students will ask again this year, as they do.

Wow. WOW.

As you can infer, I am holding in my hands a copy of the score to Einstein on the Beach. I can hardly put it down. I ordered it from Chester Music, and it just came in the mail. I had come to think I would never own such a thing, because for so long Philip Glass had refused to release the music written for his ensemble, since performing it was how he made his money. But it’s finally available, and next semester I’m teaching an analysis class based on minimalism and its offshoots. So before I committed to the course, I searched around to see what minimalist scores I could get, and I found more by Glass and Terry Riley than I had thought would be available.

It’s not that I consider Einstein that great a piece – or at least consistently great – but it was crucially important in my development. The opera premiered on my 21st birthday (I wasn’t there), and I bought the Tomato recording about a year later, sometime in 1977-78. It was my first year of grad school, I had put my undergrad years behind me, and I was ready to embark on something new. You know what a deep impact new music encountered at that age can have. I never liked all of Einstein, was even irritated by some of it, but I wore that 4-record set down to slick vinyl wafers, trying to capture every process. What impressed me most was the difficult rhythmic patterns that Glass’s technique made available – and, trying to play through the keyboard parts in the score, they seem even more brain-twisting than I realized – and also the chromatic voice-leading among his harmonies. The “Bed” scene instilled in me a new conception of harmony that I use to this day. As I’ve reported before, years ago I had the opportunity to interview Phil in public, and told him that I was still trying to compose the “Bed” scene from Einstein. He replied, “So am I.”

So I think it’s only recently that a course in the analysis of minimalism has really become viable. I did receive a score of Dennis Johnson’s groundbreaking piano piece November, by the way, and with that, the score to The Well-Tuned Piano, the Boosey and Hawkes Steve Reich scores, Riley’s early string quartet pieces available from his web site, and what Phil Glass has now released, I think I can cover the early part of the movement. (Maybe we’ll try to dissect some Charlemagne Palestine by ear; he was pretty elusive when I quizzed him about scores.) Of course, some early minimalism is too transparent to be analyzed in any conventional sense. I’m not going to hand out the score to Music in Fifths to pore over a pattern that can be easily grasped in a minute or two. At the Music and Minimalism Conference in Wales last August, William Lake presented a thorough analysis of Riley’s In C, but making a larger statement about the work than the obvious one required more analytical prestidigitation than I can expect of my undergrads.

But I do think there are secrets of rhythm to be teased out from Einstein, a clear structure to be charted in Music for 18 Musicians and Octet, and afterward we’ll move on to some Phill Niblock frequency charts, John Adams’s Phrygian Gates, Duckworth’s Blue Rhythms, Lois Vierk’s Go Guitars, John Luther Adams’s Clouds of Forgetting, Clouds of Unknowing, Peter Garland’s Jornada del Muerto, and so on. Student enthusiasm has already been apparent. And this will all help me toward not only the book I’m writing, but the minimalism conference I’m directing with David MacIntire next year.

And by the way, Einstein: not a dynamic marking in the entire score.

[UPDATED] Thursday night, March 6, at 7:30 the amazing University of Kentucky Percussion Ensemble will play my Snake Dance No. 2 at the SCFA Recital Hall there in Lexington. The program also includes works by Jay Batzner, Lou Harrison, David Crowell, Russell Peck, and Paul Lansky. I’ve head these guys do it, and though they’re young, they’re incredible. (I’ve also been thinking about what a great place to live Lexington seemed. I was treated to lunch in a huge natural food coop where everything was great, and there were some lovely bars and restaurants. We on the coasts think of flyover country as pretty deadly, but there are some amazing pockets of liberalism, enlightenment, and good living, and Lexington was one of them. Plus, during the Kentucky Derby, Maker’s Mark sells bottled mint juleps. Those truly are deadly.)

The following night at 8:30, Friday March 7, pianists Sarah Cahill and Joseph Kubera play at Roulette in New York, 20 Greene Street. It’s a largely Terry Riley program, filled in with pieces by Ingram Marshall, Michael Byron, and my own On Reading Emerson, which Sarah plays beautifully on our new CD Private Dances.

My new electric guitar quartet Composure, on which the ink would still be wet if I still composed in pen, is premiering in Montreal April 4 at the Voyages: Montreal-New York festival, organized by the tireless Tim Brady.

Rodney Lister plans to include my Long Night for three pianos and Paris Intermezzo for toy piano on a program at Boston University on April 11.

On May 6, the Bard College Chamber Singers and Symphonic Chorus, conducted by my friend James Bagwell, will perform my Transcendental Sonnets at Bard’s Fisher Center, only the second time the work has been done.

However, the Relache ensemble’s May performances of my suite The Planets have been postponed to the following fall, though we’ll still be recording the work for the Meyer Media label this summer. Mmm… think that’s it for the forseeable future.

UPDATE: Heavens, forgot the most important of all. On May 9, Williams College is offering the American premiere of my piano concerto Sunken City.

No obituary I’ve seen for the record producer Teo Macero (1925-2008) has mentioned that he was also a composer, though the Times notes that he studied with Henry Brant. I offer the only piece I’ve heard of Macero’s, One-Three Quarters (sic): a six-minute quarter-tone piece for two pianos and ensemble from 1968. It’s pretty cool. It was on an Odyssey vinyl disc, with Ives’s Quarter-Tone Pieces and other 24tet works.

As a just-intonationist, I officially disapprove of quarter-tone music and would never write any, but I harbor a secret affection for it anyway. My music starts to sound all too normal after awhile, but quarter-tone music just never stops sounding weird.

UPDATE: Tom Hamilton sends a link to recordings of Macero’s music. I always feel bad making a big deal out of a composer just after he dies. That’s why I’ve devoted the bulk of my musicology work to living composers while they’re around to appreciate it.

No comment. Completely speechless, in fact.

UPDATE: For that matter, you can market aleatory music and totalism, too.

As an introvert who grew up as a classical musician in Texas, I tend to apologetically assume that everyone in the world knows more about pop music and jazz than I do. For instance, I didn’t read Miles Davis’s incredible autobiography until I was in my 40s, while I assume any hip musician would have read it in his 20s if not earlier. (The fact that I was 34 when it was published does not allay my suspicion.) But it appears that not everyone knows the context in which Miles referred to classical music as “robot shit,” and the story – heavily underlined in my own copy of the book because it had so much relevance to my own experiences, and made me feel so good – is worth retelling as often as possible. The occasion was the recording of Davis’s and Gil Evans’s Sketches of Spain, for which they hired some classical brass players to play some of the background parts:

…I just went to Gil and told him, “Gil, you don’t have to write music like that. It’s too close for the musicians to play. You don’t have to make the trumpet players sound like they’re perfect, because these trumpet players are classically trained and they don’t like to miss no notes no how.” So he agreed with that. In the beginning, we had the wrong trumpet players because we had those who were classically trained. But that was a problem. We had to tell them not to play exactly like it was on the score. They started looking at us – at Gil, mostly – like we were crazy. They couldn’t improvise their way out of a paper bag. So they were looking at Gil like, “What the fuck is he talking about? This is a concerto, right?” So they know we must be crazy talking about “play what isn’t there.” We just wanted them to feel it, and read it and play it, but these first ones couldn’t do that, so we had to change trumpet players, and that’s why Gil had to reorchestrate the score. Next we got some trumpet players who were both classical and could feel….

Then we had to have some drummers who could get the sound that I wanted….

…Legit drummers can’t solo because they have no musical imagination to improvise. Like most other classical players, they play only what you put in front of them. That’s what classical music is; the musicians only play what’s there and nothing else. They can remember, and have the ability of robots. In classical music, if one musician isn’t like the other, isn’t all the way a robot, like all the rest, then the other robots make fun of him or her, especially if they’re black. That’s all that is, that’s all the classical music is in terms of the musicians who play it – robot shit. And people celebrate them like they’re great. Now there’s some great classical music by great classical composers – and there’s some great players up in there, but they have to become soloists – but it’s still robot playing and most of them know it deep down, though they wouldn’t admit it in public.

So you have to have a balance on something like Sketches of Spain, between musicians who can read music and play it with no feeling or a little feeling, and some others who could play with real feeling. I think the perfect thing is when some musicians can both read a musical score and feel it…. [pp. 243-244, emphases added]

Just like Downtown music. Just like Downtown music. Do you hear what I’m sayin’? JUST LIKE DOWNTOWN MUSIC. Not that you have to be able to improvise, but that you have to be able to feel a musical score, not just replicate the marks on the page.

And as for you, Mr. Edgard “Feel-sorry-for-me-I’m-a-misunderstood-genius” Varèse, you who insists that every note in a score has to have multiple dynamic and articulation marks on it: Why? To turn it into robot shit, to prevent musicians from deciding how they feel it. Because otherwise [in the most simpering possible French accent] “zey do not know how zay vant zere museek to soooooouuuuund.” Well, fuck you, Varése. Fuck you and your pseudo-scientific approach to music. (And while I’m at it – Octandre: nice piece.)

That felt good.

I love this score layout from William Billings’s hymn “Modern Musick” from The Psalm-Singer’s Amusement, originally published in 1781, a reprint of which I picked up at a used book store this week. Notice how the sharps in the key signature are written as much as possible straight up in a line, F-C-D-G:

Notice too how the note-stems are all on the right, and the treble clef in the soprano is indicated by a “g” on the second line. For awhile in college I wrote my treble clefs that way myself, on the reasoning that a treble clef is just an ornate Baroque Italian G written around the second line, and there was no reason for us to go on writing a “g” in that ridiculously festooned manner 300 years later when even the Italians don’t write them that way anymore. I had to choose my battles, I was destined to become engaged in so many, and I rather quickly gave that one up. But I love the insouciance with which the sacred order of sharps in a key signature is ignored, and how little difference it makes in reading the music.

So many conventions of notating music we take as sacred, ancient, and unalterable are actually of relatively recent vintage, and used to be quite malleable. In Bach’s day the customary way of indicating a minor key indicated what we now think of as Dorian mode; for a violin suite in E minor he would notate two sharps, F and C. Nowadays, of course, we “correct” him, for old Bach clearly hadn’t taken first-year theory class. In the 1890s, theory textbooks (Rimsky-Korsakov’s, for example) taught the “harmonic major” scale:

based on the idea that the minor iv chord had become so common in major as to necessitate a special scale. Fashions come and go, theoretical premises change, but we teach notational conventions as though they are somehow ontologically necessary, and browbeat young musicians into a terrified conformity to which Billings was happily oblivious. Why? For efficiency’s sake, so that none of our orchestral musicians will ever have to encounter a piece of music that doesn’t look pretty much like every one they’ve ever seen, which otherwise might force them to actually pause and think a moment.

I had a friend many years ago, who died at a tragically young age. Bill Hogeland will know who I’m talking about. Right out of Oberlin she got a job as bassoonist for the Dallas Symphony. I saw her one morning, and she was tired because, she said, the orchestra had performed the night before.

“Oh, what did you play?,” I asked.

“Ummmm… Mahler, I think.”

She was a sweet young conservatory product, but her conception of her job was to prepare her reeds, sit down in her chair onstage, and expertly and automatically play the notes on the page some functionary had placed on her music stand, without ever thinking about who the composer was or what the notes meant. And to make sure that such nice people never have to think, never have to pause a moment and figure out anything they haven’t seen a million times before, our young composers have to have notational conformity beat into them on pain of excommuncation from all decent musical society. Yesterday a student brought me an orchestra piece with the following rhythm:

It’s a perfectly nice rhythm of a kind I might have well used myself. But not in an orchestra piece you don’t! I knew enough to put the kibosh on that. Because efficiency, sight-reading, automaticness, and thoughtlessness are at the heart of turning out classical music, that hallowed repertoire that Miles Davis so aptly termed “robot shit” – because it was played by robot musicians who couldn’t be bothered to deviate from or even think about what they saw on the page.

Don’t bother writing in to tell me how communist and retarded my opinions are, ’cause I already know what the robots think of me. I’m an evolutionist, who thinks music has evolved and has a right to keep evolving, whereas most classical musicians are creationists who think Beethoven created it 200 years ago and it has to stay that way eternally. As Mark Twain said, “I don’t give a damn for a man who can only spell a word one way.”

This Thursday at 2:30 I’m delivering the Poynter Fellowship lecture at Yale University. I’ll be illustrating the problems of my career by mixing up musicology, microtonal theory, and composition in one big indecipherable melange, with some rare scores and manuscripts by Nancarrow, La Monte Young, and myself and my contemporaries. It’s at William L. Harkness Hall, Room 207, 100 Wall Street, reception to follow. See ya there.

To serendipitously follow up on my post about publishing and the unavailability of scores, I had dinner with a friend tonight who’s a tremendously successful composer, scads of orchestral performances, awards out the wazoo, you name it. And he’s telling me how he abandoned his big-name publisher, bought a fancy Xerox/scan/printing machine, and is publishing his own scores, with the same kind of binding and exactly the same quality he got from his publisher. He’s sick and tired of people not being able to get his music, or having to pay outrageous prices merely to rent it. And his publisher is nervous and wants a meeting, because my friend hasn’t sent them anything in four years. It’s kind of delicious. So if you were thinking of trying to get a commercial publisher, or fuming because you don’t have one – just forget about it. “What do they do for me?,” he kept asking. And there was no answer.

I note with pleasure that my old friend Bill Hogeland, my only college pal I’m still regularly in touch with, got to write the Times‘s op-ed piece on George Washington for Presidents’ Day. Bill, a brilliant novelist and playwright, has taken on a career as historian of American politics much as I’ve redefined myself as a historian of American music. Seems to be where the money and respect are.

The longest I’ve ever gone without seeing Bill is maybe six or seven years, once. But regardless, when we meet we immediately resume the thread of whatever conversation on aesthetics we were last having, as though the interruption had been momentary. As Kurt Vonnegut would say, he’s a member of my karass.