Archives for May 2009

Teaching, its Unexpected Rewards

From a student’s music-history senior project about Japanese Noise artist Yamataka Eye comes what is surely one of the most magnificent understatements in the literature:Â

By destroying a club with a bulldozer, Eye, in a very
direct way, called into question the way music is consumed by the public.

Renske Descends Upon Annandale

The young Dutch composerÂ Renske VrolijkÂ (young relative to me, anyway) is in New York this week, and she’s making an appearance at Bard College this Thursday. She’s the composer of the delightful cantata based on the wreck of the Hindenburg, titled Charlie, Charlie, which I wrote about from Amsterdam a couple of years ago. She’ll play her music and show video examples at 4 PM in the Blum music building at Bard, room 217. She’s a fabulous composer, somewhat at odds with the ironic, Stravinskian idiom that all Dutch composers are expected to write in, and I hope she’ll tell the story about the time John Adams admitted that he stole an idea from a piece of hers.Â

Living Inside the Notes

Despite it being the busiest part of my school year and busier than usual, I have taken advantage of odd moments to complete my transcription of Harold Budd’s 1982 piano solo Children on the Hill. A friend asks if I couldn’t persuade Harold to transcribe his own damn solo, but that’s beside the point: there is nothing, I think, more educational than transcribing or arranging a work of art you particularly admire. I could never have internalized the piece so deeply from playing through another person’s transcription. And I do a lot of such work for no practical benefit beyond the enlargement of my own musicality. I have a full, playable piano transcription of Ives’s Third Symphony that I wrote several years ago and presumably can do nothing with, because of copyright issues; and also partial piano arrangements of Harris’s Third Symphony and Sibelius’s Fourth, works whose inner logic I wanted to imbibe in full. Mozart learned to compose by copying out the works of others and turning sonatas by lesser composers into his own early concertos. I don’t know a more efficient way to become a composer.

My success in getting a good 98 percent of Harold’s notes on paper, I flatter myself, has emboldened me to start similar projects with other composers. People forget how much early minimalist and postminimalist music was improvisatory: besides Budd, Elodie Lauten, “Blue” Gene Tyranny, Terry Riley, Pauline Oliveros, Alvin Curran, among others. Back in the 1980s I was criticized by New York musicians for being allegedly anti-improvisation. Actually my views on free improvisation (I’m not talking about jazz or rule-based Indian-type improvisation, which are entirely different matters to which no general objection is conceivable) were pretty nuanced and targeted case-by-case. It seemed to me at the time – and free improv was almost all you could hear in New York City in the ’80s – that many of the improvisers did a lovely job when playing solo, but that the group improvs often fell into the most patent clichÃ©s unless some structure was agreed upon beforehand. There were exceptions like the fearless AMM group, who seemed to truly stay in the moment with no preconceptions, thinking and feeling with an egoless and unsentimental independence. But in general I quickly tired of the inevitable group climaxes 3/4 of the way through, and every piece ending with a long trail-off, each performer trying to be the one to add the last little flourish. What I especially objected to was a collective philosophy which excused all improvisation, however poor or unsuccessful, on the grounds that it was “risk-taking,” and therefore should never be criticized. But if criticism was disallowed, then the risks, it seemed to me, were only assumed by the audience, and not by the performers, whose philosophy gave them an automatic safety net. And, lacking self-criticism, they had neither the means nor the incentive to improve as improvisers, to benefit from what did and didn’t work and use the knowledge to push their art to a new level.

And now that I’m involved in a big project to preserve minimalist improvisation for posterity, a composer writes to tell me I’m wasting my time, that improvisation can’t and shouldn’t be preserved, that if Sarah Cahill (the pianist who’ll be playing the Budd) can’t improvise herself, I should just get a pianist who can. You truly can’t win: if I criticize improvisation I’m bigoted, and if I analyze and try to immortalize it, I’m wasting my time. But actually this is the same attitude I encountered in the ’80s: someone who doesn’t want to analyze improvised music and learn from it how to improvise even better, but who thinks improvisation is somehow sacrosanct and should only be experienced in the moment and then forgotten. It is not through such willful ignorance that jazz produced a Miles Davis, a John Coltrane. I’m proud of what I’ve learned from living inside Budd’s recorded notes for so many months, and eager to let it bear fruit in my own music. And to refrain from sharing what I’ve learned with other listeners, audiences, and composers would seem absolutely churlish.

UPDATE: Harold responded with a nice note after I sent him the score, and added, “I couldn’t play that in a thousand years!”

Â¿Donde esta la musica?

Here’s a query that came up with a student the other day. Decades ago, in the early ’80s, my wife and I attended the wedding in Chicago of a couple of Hispanic friends. The reception was marked by the most amazing music played by a huge mariachi band: over half a dozen brass players, multiple guitars, wild percussion. It was hot, rhythmically intricate stuff whose meters were difficult to parse, and whose melodies took several repetitions to pin down. Le Sacre‘s complexity paled before it. If it wasn’t in meters like 13/8 or 17/16, I couldn’t have proved it myself. The counterpoint had more voices than I could count. I was spellbound. I had never heard anything like it.

And I haven’t since. I’ve bought various recordings of mariachi music, and never found anything particularly more challenging than “Cielito Lindo.” I’ve consulted experts, I’ve taken recommendations, and I can’t find any recorded mariachi music remotely as difficult or sophisticated as I heard at that wedding. Some of it’s rhythmically lively, of course, but none of it had that level of metrical complexity. Does anyone know where such mariachi music can be found? And why the recorded examples seem so ridiculously watered down? Did I stumble across the one Mexican group whose musicians had all studied with Nancarrow?

Billy Schuman Celebrated

My review of American Muse, Joseph Polisi’s biography of William Schuman, is just out (after some delays) in Symphony magazine. The book is a solid and detailed summary of Schuman’s life as administrator of Juilliard and Lincoln Center, but I found it a little lacking in appreciation of, and insight into, Schuman’s career as a brilliant symphonist. A couple of week ago I noticed Lincoln Center had posters up advertising the book, so I’m glad he and it are getting some attention. Polisi, of course, is president of Juilliard and holds the post Schuman long occupied. We still, I think, need a book on Schuman by a composer, or at least by someone who relishes the music as much as I do, but Polisi’s is well worth reading.

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