Listen to this eleven-minute excerpt, and don’t bother clicking unless you’ll commit to the whole thing. It’s the ending of David First’s Pipeline Witness Apologies to Dennis, and I hope the mp3 format doesn’t dumb it down too much. First’s new three-disc set Privacy Issues, on Phill Niblock’s XI label, is the greatest new recording I’ve heard in awhile, and I’ve been relistening to it every few days. It’s all drone-based works from the last 14 years. David’s work is sometimes (amazingly) solo and sometimes ensemble; I picked an ensemble piece here thinking it might have a little more profile over computer speakers, but he can make just as much noise by himself. It’s all music gradually going in and out of tune. You could say that Niblock’s music is the same, and it is, but while Niblock’s music is slow and marvelous and creeps up on you unawares if you have the patience, David’s is considerably more dramatic and high energy. You don’t have to wait for it, it’ll come get you. He’s always been really interested in the liminal area between consonance and dissonance, and the amazing places in his music are those in which you suddenly realize where the music’s going, and you can’t believe it’s about to get there – buzzy and jangling for a long time, but then it starts to slide into tune and this gloriously consonant sonority emerges that you couldn’t imagine was in there. It really feel symphonic to me, like a symphony stripped down to just its harmony, and blurred; Carl Nielsen comes to mind, because Nielsen has these great harmonic clashes in which some major key wins out in the end, and it does in First’s music too, just far more gradually. I wore out three laptops trying to make First famous via the Village Voice, and I’m thrilled that after a long silence he’s got this incredible CD set out, every piece a knockout. I wish I could write music like this, but I can’t. I tried. I just can’t make anything work without a melody to it, but some of First’s passages almost sound like you could analyze them with Roman numerals, except for the buzzy parts in-between. If I were a young composer today this would be my Stockhausen, except that First is already older than Stockhausen was when I was a teenager. In a sane world, grad schools would be hosting conferences on this music, but everything’s so conservative these days that it’s more fringe now than it was 20 years ago.Â
Archives for 2010
Reeling from a Masterpiece
In anticipation of a seminar I’m teaching on the Concord Sonata next spring, I’m finally reading through the selected Ives correspondence published a few years ago by Tom C. Owens (U. of California Press). I feel a little guilty reading the sweetie-pie letters between Ives and Harmony during their engagement, never meant for my prying eyes, but I’m fascinated by the responses he received to the Concord itself when he mailed out privately published copies to total strangers in 1921. This one was from John Spencer Camp, a Hartford music critic:
…You have evidently aimed at impressionistic word pictures, striving to avoid the commonplace and trivial. Whether your musical inspiration has been able to meet the demands you have placed upon it is an open question, and one I should like to defer until I hear your sonata adequately performed. My present impression is that, in spite of the great amount of work you have put into this composition, the fundamental inspiration and glow are lacking. It is, however, a very interesting work. I question whether in the interest of musical beauty such an effect as you call for in page 25 [clusters played with a stick of wood] is good. A “strip of board” does not appeal to my sense of artistic piano music….
…As for the “music,” I confess with thousands of others who have seen it, that it is incomprehensible to me. I do not ridicule you, I do not criticize you, philistine-like, because it would do no good anyway, so all I venture to say at this time is that I hope you will find pleasure in the satisfaction of understanding what you yourself have set down in the seventy pages of your work! No doubt it took a great deal of time to prepare all that notation… Were you not, perhaps, trying to put into “form,” expressions that were entirely (to use a term of our Theosophical friends) ASTRAL – with a modus operandi that granted only PHYSICAL possibilities? This is not sarcasm because I do not mean it as that….
I wish you to know that I do not take your work lightly. I say, frankly, that I do not like this manner of sound-association, for I am too fully grounded in the habits (I admit that they are, to some extent “habits”) of the classic methods. To my mind, these classic methods are correct ones for I find them, in every detail, confirming the eternal physical laws which govern tone as well as stone. But I am not, in conviction, a heartless and brainless conservative, who recognizes the “Last Word” in anything that Bach, Beethoven, or Brahms have said in tone – no, nor Ives. And therefore these newer methods, or experiments, interest me keenly. And, since I am absolutely convinced of your sincerity, and see many admirable evidences of that logic, which is a part of my pet physical law, in your work – note that I hesitate to call it “music,” for I believe in accurate definition – I declare that these experiments of yours interest me particularly….
As for the accompanying book Essays Before a Sonata, composer Henry F. Gilbert commented:
I was very surprised to receive such a book from a musical composer. I showed it to a friend of mine (one of the Boston critics) and called his attention to certain striking passages. He was most interested and enthusiastic but said: “Depend upon it, this fellow is a bad composer – good composers are usually non compos mentis on every other subject.”
The Aging Professor
I am surprised to realize how much difference age makes in my teaching routine. Generally speaking, the older I get, the less students pay attention to me – and, admittedly, the less patience I often have for them. This doesn’t apply to the students who have a particular interest in my areas of specialization, nor to the ones whose ambitions I applaud and encourage. Those students are as devoted as ever. But it does seem to apply to the casual students, the ones who take my general theory courses to fulfill requirements. I can guarantee that I’ve been using many of the same first-year theory pedagogical routines for sixteen years now, and far from them feeling stale, I think I’ve refined them and perform them with more energy than ever. But it doesn’t matter – when I was in my early 40s, a little younger than their parents, the casual students saw me as a role model, potential ally, and someone to identify with. They laughed at my jokes, hung on my every word, and appealed to me for help when the older professors were unsympathetic. Now, just noticeably older than their parents, I’m already an old man to be politely smiled at occasionally and then turned away from. They take their personal problems to my younger colleagues, which is admittedly a blessing. I have to confess to a reciprocal decline in sympathy; excuses I’ve heard 75 times have a blunted impact, and I’ve grown better at predicting which ones will not fulfill their promises. Worst of all, this semester, for the first time in my life, I’ve had to turn disciplinarian. I’ve always encouraged creativity in theory class, emphasizing the freeing effectiveness of the rules once they’re understood rather than imposing them as a restriction. But – and as students do go through generational changes, I can’t be sure of the cause and effect – I’m finding lately that rather than joining me in creativity, they take it as license for rowdiness and distraction, and I have to clamp down. Teaching becomes a chore. I am unusual among my friends in that I’ve never come to mind teaching the fundamentals of theory every year, but lately I’m beginning to fantasize about turning it over to someone else.
Reputations Never Die
I occasionally get invited lately to visit music departments and lecture about my own music “and/or the current scene.” I appreciate that one of my functions in academia is that I will expose the students to crazy music that the resident faculty won’t touch with a ten-foot pole. But I’m always surprised that anyone ever supposes that, given the choice of talking about my own music or someone else’s, I would ever waste a sentence on someone else’s. For one thing, I know very little about the current scene: I can describe the Downtown scene of the 1980s and ’90s in great historical detail, but like most composers of a certain age, I’ve quit paying attention. I don’t mind being paid to lecture on one of my topics of musicological research, whether Nancarrow, Cage, totalism, whatever, but if you’re looking for enthusiasm rather than dutiful professionalism, ask me about my own music. If I thought Glenn Branca, David Lang, and Diamanda Galas were out there lecturing about my music, I might reciprocate by lecturing about theirs, but something tells me this isn’t going to happen. I agree that composers in college ought to be exposed to less mainstream forms of musical creativity, but it’s time for composition teachers who think so to start doing that on their own. Please, if you’re interested in bringing me to your department, don’t expect me to dilute the interest in my own music by talking about other people’s – unless you’re specifically bringing me in as a musicologist, and then I may require a higher fee because I have less incentive.Â
Start Your Day
…with a nice microtonal piano piece by Chris Vaisvil using the Pianoteq system tuned to a segment of the harmonic series. Pianoteq is supposedly the state of the art digital piano simulator; I had never bought it because at first it wasn’t fully retunable, but apparently that’s changed. Good news.
A Serenade Out of Season
I’ve loved George Rochberg’s Serenata d’Estate (Summer Serenade) since I was in high school. Yesterday, for the first time, I finally analyzed it in the classroom. The little repeated-note gestures in the senza battute sections:
Safe Haven for Us Oddballs
Yesterday I had the great pleasure of lecturing on Cage and my own music at the Hartt School in Hartford, at the invitation of Robert Carl and Ken Steen. I’m always joking with them about doing endorsements for the place, and I might as well proceed. Hartt is one of the few graduate schools I recommend for my own students and for those who share my anti-establishment musical interests – others are CalArts, Mills College, Yale, and Wesleyan. But Yale and Wesleyan accept only a tiny number of students and are all but impossible to get into; Hartt has significantly more slots open. Hartt doesn’t seem to have the reputation it did in the mid-20th-century, and I can’t figure out why. I was certainly aware of it as a teenager, possibly because my first composition teacher Alvin Epstein studied and taught there, whereas I was in my 30s before I heard of Bard. One never really knows what goes on in a department from the outside, but the atmosphere there seems enviable, the faculty open-minded and mutually supportive. I’ve sent two students there now, and both of them have been amazed what’s been required from them in learning ear-training, score-reading, and other nuts-and-bolts topics. They take musical education very seriously. The students call it “Boulanger Lite,” and the curriculum does seem copied from the Paris Conservatoire. Nevertheless, it’s one of the few places where one could pursue microtonality, Downtown music, and even conceptualism without drawing down faculty discouragement, PLUS study electronic music in friendlier softwares than Max/MSP and Supercollider. I was very impressed this time with the level and camaraderie of grad students. I got to sit in on Robert’s “Cage, Carter, and Crumb” class, and he was running circles around me in the Cage analysis department. Maybe being slightly underrated is what gives a music department a vibrant energy, while acquiring the “prestige” label turns it into a nest of vipers. If I could do grad school again, I can’t imagine a place I’d rather do it than Hartt.
Thought for the Day
Composer Andrew Violette writes in to tell me that the only movement of 4’33” he really likes is the second. The others, he says, are too short.
An Art Jarvinen Portrait
There were so many sides to Art Jarvinen that I can’t possibly represent most of them here, but I offer several drops from his mercurial musical output, some of them commercially unavailable, others on extremely obscure labels:
Egyptian Two-Step – the first piece I heard, and which made me sit up and take notice with its aerosol spray cans as percussion, performed by the E.A.R. Unit
Breaking the Chink – performed by Icebreaker
from Sgt. Pecker, his Beatles parody:
Taller than Jesus
Man, My Guitar Playing Really Reeks
Where Can I Bury My Shark?
9 Revolutions per Minute
Endless Bummer – with Miroslav Tadik: third track, titled Part 1
25 Lines for 25 Quires – listen closely to the lyrics
The Queen of Spain – third movement, harpsichords and drums, based on Scarlatti
Serious Immobilities – an excerpt from his theme and variations on Satie’s Vexations, the whole thing lasting 24 hours
The Great Art Jarvinen, 1956-2010
[TWO UPDATES BELOW] I begin the morning blindsided by the terrible news that one of the wildest and most imaginative composers of my generation, Art Jarvinen, has passed away at age 54. He was a bassist, percussionist, and co-founder of the California E.A.R. Unit, and one of the most thoroughly integrated rock-classical musicians around. His pieces Murphy Nights and The Paces of Yu were staples of my totalist lectures. He put out a scabrously funny Beatles satire CD called Sgt. Pecker. He sent me transcriptions of music he’d played with Captain Beefheart. I know no details about his demise. Ironically, Art and I had only met in person for one lovely evening together at his home in LA, though for years we corresponded weekly and he used to comment on this blog. He had bought property in Vermont, was supposed to stop by and see me on his way there but we failed to communicate somehow, and I heard a rumor only a few days ago that he had precipitously moved back to California. David Ocker at the blog Mixed Meters has a little more information. Art’s web site is here. I’m just stunned.
In Arthur Jarvinen’s music, spray cans hiss, mousetraps snap, window shutters flicker, pencil sharpeners grind away, and harpsichords cavort among drums with elephantine grace. You may conclude that I am describing gimmicky or at least humorous music, but you would be wrong: this music is contrapuntal, thoughtful, purposeful, and rhythmically intricate. It’s just that Jarvinen works with musical ideas so essentially rhythmic that spray cans and window shutters are sufficient to bring their essence across. I’ve always had this idea that a really great musician, stranded on a desert island, could make a good piece just hitting two sticks together, and Jarvinen lends credence to the idea. The more humble media you can communicate with, the closer you are to the bone marrow of music.
Again, though, put aside any notion of an American primitif. Jarvinen’s The Queen of Spain – source of the harpsichords and drums mentioned above – is an almost satirical transformation of three keyboard sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti, scored for harpsichords (or electric keyboards) and percussion. He diffracted Scarlatti’s transparent harmonies by adding mathematically-derived extra tones, keeping the rhythmic character of the original but blurring the lines into massively bouncing sonorities. And in Murphy-Nights, the electric keyboard and bass provide a groundwork for four wind players by playing two ostinatos over and over, one in 33/16 meter and the other in 8/4, so that with each repetition one gets a 16th-note ahead of the other.Â
I have no idea how this latter feat is accomplished in performance, by the way. No common bar lines connect the two parts: they just have to start with the same 16th-note pulse and keep precisely in tempo, sans conductor. Somehow on the California Ear Unit’s recording (O.O. Discs 28) they get it perfect and secure.
This latter trick, abstruse as it may sound, actually points to what connects Jarvinen to his generation. If you’re minimalism-conversant, it may have already occurred to you that that 33-against-32 cycling is a direct descendent of Steve Reich’s Piano Phase and Come Out, which introduced different-lengthed rhythms going out of phase as a peculiarly American structural device. Like many American composers born in the 1950s, Jarvinen absorbed Reich’s lessons well. Also like many of those composers, he sees no reason to limit his music to the simple contexts and pretty tonalities that formed the basic features of minimalist style.
The body of music by younger composers that evolved from minimalism to a complex rhythmic style heavily influenced by world musics has come to be called Totalism. It is primarily a New York City phenomenon, but Jarvinen, rooted in Los Angeles, is the most visible West-Coast example so far. The word totalism (far from universally accepted yet) has implications of having your cake and eating it too, being accessible and clear on one hand, yet also intricate and complexly structured enough to sustain the interest of cognoscenti. As Mozart wrote to his father about the quartets he was writing in 1782, the totalists can say of their music, “There are many passages here and there from which connoisseurs alone can derive satsifaction; but these passages are written in such a way that the less learned cannot fail to be pleased, though without knowing why.”Â
Without courting collage, totalists pack a lot of disparate streams into their music, especially jazz and world musics: listen to the jazz trombone solo that opens Jarvinen’s Erase the Fake; the improvised violin solo in the middle of Murphy-Nights; the charmingly authentic, Piazzola-esque melody of his Cheap Suit Tango. Some features, however, are quintessentially totalist. I direct your attention to the wild unison line played by sextet at the beginning of The Vulture’s Garden. or the jazzy unison melody played by quartet in Murphy-Nights. This kind of ensemble doubling evolved out of the Philip Glass-Steve Reich ensemble concept (though Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time is a first cousin), and is turned here toward athletically non-minimalist ends.
This is difficult music to play, even though clear-lined, melodic, and devoid of the 11-against-9 grupetti and rhythmic fragmentation of an Elliott Carter or a Pierre Boulez. And why, since it scorns such complexities, is it so difficult? Because, like every new style, it demands of performers a certain sensibility that must be internalized. The unison lines and rhythms of totalist chamber music entail an ensemble unity of gesture quite different from the heavily-counted Babbitt serialist work or the flexible, diversely-functioned give-and-take of a Schumann piano quintet. The smooth uniformity of line, casual yet without swell or nuance, demands ears nurtured on the minimalism of Terry Riley and Phillip Glass, and hands and lips that can swing like John Coltrane.Â
If I may ascend my soap box and preach just the briefest sermon, very few chamber ensembles have learned to negotiate music derived from minimalist influences because they don’t perceive the difficulties involved. They glance at the score, see a line of unison 8th-notes, say to themselves, “Oh, this is nothing, I played the Carter Fourth String Quartet,” and then they proceed to underrehearse and perform miserably. I’ve heard it all too often. I’ve heard members of the New York Philharmonic do a laughable job on a piece as simple as Terry Riley’s In C. A handful of groups, like the California EAR Unit, Relache, Kronos Quartet, and Essential Music have superbly cultivated the technique needed for post-minimalist music. What are the rest waiting for, a message from God? As Schoenberg said – and it applies again in each new generation – “My music isn’t modern, it’s only badly played.”
You won’t find any such problems, however, on Jarvinen’s CDs, mostly performed by the California EAR Unit, of which Jarvinen is a percussion-hitting and guitar-wielding member. For the most extreme instance of his bizarre timbral imagination, listen to The Paces of Yu, scored for mousetraps, window shutters, fishing reel, and – the one pitched instrument – Brazilian berimbau, a kind of one-stringed violin. Such music has the awkwardness of sincerity. It is meditative, not in the hypnotic sense, but in the thoughtful, slowly-turning, Emersonian sense of examining a musical idea from every angle. Jarvinen is sufficiently immersed in history to be a true representative of his generation – and honest and original enough to set himself apart from it as well.
Cakes for Oneself
I was happy to read this in the New York Times, in an essay by novelist Michael Cunningham (The Hours):
I teach writing, and one of the first questions I ask my students every semester is, who are you writing for? The answer, 9 times out of 10, is that they write for themselves. I tell them that I understand — that I go home every night, make an elaborate cake and eat it all by myself. By which I mean that cakes, and books, are meant to be presented to others. And further, that books (unlike cakes) are deep, elaborate interactions between writers and readers, albeit separated by time and space.
I remind them, as well, that no one wants to read their stories. There are a lot of other stories out there, and by now, in the 21st century, there’s been such an accumulation of literature that few of us will live long enough to read all the great stories and novels, never mind the pretty good ones. Not to mention the fact that we, as readers, are busy.
We have large and difficult lives. We have, variously, jobs to do, spouses and children to attend to, errands to run, friends to see…
What the writer is saying, essentially, is this: Make room in all that for this. Stop what you’re doing and read this. It had better be apparent, from the opening line, that we’re offering readers something worth their while.
I should admit that when I was as young as my students are now, I too thought of myself as writing either for myself, for some ghostly ideal reader, or, at my most grandiose moments, for future generations. My work suffered as a result.
He describes meeting a very tired divorcée named Helen, holding down three jobs, whose only great diversion in life was reading:
Helen had no school-inspired sense of what she was supposed to enjoy more, and what less. She simply needed what any good reader needs: absorption, emotion, momentum and the sense of being transported from the world in which she lived and transplanted into another one.
I began to think of myself as trying to write a book that would matter to Helen. And, I have to tell you, it changed my writing. I’d seen, rather suddenly, that writing is not only an exercise in self-expression, it is also, more important, a gift we as writers are trying to give to readers. Writing a book for Helen, or for someone like Helen, is a manageable goal.
Unlike Cunningham, I have never said that I wrote for myself. I always liked Gertrude Stein’s declaration, “I write for myself and for strangers” – because it embarrassed her to have friends read her writing – but in truth I am disappointed if my music is playing and a passerby, any passerby, doesn’t stop to ask, with a twinkle of curiosity, “What is THAT?” I write music that I want to hear, of course, but there are musics that I myself dearly love, like those of Phill Niblock and Stefan Wolpe, that I would never write, because they are esoteric enough to seem predestined for only a narrow specialist appeal, even though it’s wide enough to include me. If that makes me a middlebrow composer, then I’ll proudly wave the middlebrow banner. “I write for myself” is one of those self-defeating clichés that academia acculturates young composers into, like “The music should speak for itself!” I can’t imagine that any young artist starts out thinking that his work need only bring pleasure to himself. It’s a defense to be used against having failed to engage the interest of others, which happens to us all now and then.
I also liked Cunningham here:
Here’s a secret. Many novelists, if they are pressed and if they are being honest, will admit that the finished book is a rather rough translation of the book they’d intended to write. It’s one of the heartbreaks of writing fiction. You have, for months or years, been walking around with the idea of a novel in your mind, and in your mind it’s transcendent, it’s brilliantly comic and howlingly tragic, it contains everything you know, and everything you can imagine, about human life on the planet earth. It is vast and mysterious and awe-inspiring. It is a cathedral made of fire….
A novel, any novel, if it’s any good, is not only a slightly disappointing translation of the novelist’s grandest intentions, it is also the most finished draft he could come up with before he collapsed from exhaustion. It’s all I can do not to go from bookstore to bookstore with a pen, grabbing my books from the shelves, crossing out certain lines I’ve come to regret and inserting better ones. For many of us, there is not what you could call a “definitive text.”
This is partly why I can’t get into highly detailed notation. I put staccato dots on a few notes and call a piece finished, and the next day I wake up and look at it and say, “No no, that should be legato!”, and draw in a slur instead, and afterward I’ll change my mind again. The piece changes for me too much in my head to try to obsessively pin it down with interpretive markings. The score is a guide, like lines in a play, not a fixed objet d’art.
Such things should be admitted in the music world more often, and would be, if we were more concerned with being artists and less with being professionals.
The Rest Is Sometimes Silence
Alex Ross has penned a long, informative essay on John Cage in this week’s New Yorker (subscription required to read the whole thing, but you all subscribe, right?) which kindly quotes my 4’33” book at various points. More informatively to me, it also relies heavily on the new biography of Cage, Begin Again by Kenneth Silverman, which looks to be admirably thorough and chock full of new information, and which Amazon lists as due to appear Oct. 19. One bit I didn’t know: I’m on record as being a little dubious about Schoenberg’s having supposedly called Cage his best American student (“an inventor – of genius”), but apparently Cage was the only American student to attend a private 1937 reading of Schoenberg’s Fourth String Quartet at Schoenberg’s home. Curious.
My Chicago Roots
I’ve always had a fascination with canons, even long before I wrote a book about a composer (Nancarrow) whose major works were mostly canons. In the late 1980s, when I was in the habit of lecturing on the history of Chicago’s new-music scene at the School of the Art Institute and other places, I ran across, in a Chicago used bookstore, a little book called Canonical Studies, by Bernhard Ziehn (1845-1912, pictured). I recognized the name. Ziehn was one of two German composer-theorists who were living in Chicago when Ferruccio Busoni toured through. Busoni was trying to solve the puzzle of how the four fugue subjects
fit together in the unfinished fugue from Bach’s The Art of Fugue, and Ziehn solved it for him, enabling Busoni to write his Fantasia Contrappuntistica, which has long been one of my very favorite works in the world. His tour over, Busoni wrote an article about Ziehn and his colleague Wilhelm Middelschulte, titled “The Gothics of Chicago,” by which term he meant that they were masters and fanatics in the ancient art of counterpoint. Ziehn and Middelschulte taught a lot of the early Chicago composers, including John J. Becker (one of the “American Five”), whose widow I knew in Evanston. So I had multiple connections to Ziehn, and snapped the book up at once.
All but forgotten today (there’s a brief entry about him on German Wikipedia, none in the English one, and the second reference that came up on Google was a page of my own), Ziehn was ahead of his time. Books he published in the 1880s anticipated and classified chords (such as those based on the whole-tone scale) that the impressionists and Schoenberg would use considerably later. In the intro to Canonical Studies, Ziehn writes,
A canon is by definition strict. Our greatest authorities assert “strict” canons can be carried out in the Octave of Prime only. The examples given in this book demonstrate that real canons are possible in any interval…
And he gives examples of chord progressions that modulate to every possible interval away from the tonic, showing how one can continue repeating those progressions in ever-moving transposition to write canons not based on the octave or unison.
I was intrigued, and in 1987 wrote what I call a “spiral canon” as the third movement of my violin piece Cyclic Aphorisms, a canon at the major second. Then, more ambitiously, in 1990 I wrote Chicago Spiral, a nine-part triple canon also at the major 2nd, putting a postminimalist spin on Ziehn’s idea. A canon is easy to perceive as such at the unison, octave, or even fifth; it’s more
challenging at a more distantly related interval. A canon is also easier to process aurally if the beat-interval of rhythmic imitation is something symmetrical like 4 or 8 beats, more difficult if it’s 13 or 31. One thing I’ve realized is central to my music is that I love to fuse the simple with the incommensurable, making the listener think it ought to be easy to figure out what’s going on, but keeping it just out of reach. My Ziehn-inspired spiral canons ought to be simple to figure out by ear – they’re only canons, after all – but the complexity of the imitation intervals, both rhythm and pitch, keep the ear, I think, from ever quite settling into them. I also use the technique as kind of a postminimalist gradual-texture-metamorphosis generator, which is a little beyond what old Ziehn had in mind, I imagine. Paradoxically, the longer the rhythmic interval of imitation, the less gradual the changes can be made.
And now in recent months I’ve written two more such canons, Hudson Spiral and Concord Spiral, both for string quartet. Along with the middle section of my orchestra piece The Disappearance of All Holy Things from this Once So Promising World, I’ve produced five spiral canons altogether, at the following rhythmic and pitch intervals:
Cyclic Aphorism 3: 5 beats, major 2nd ascending
Chicago Spiral: 7 beats, major 2nd descending
Disappearance: 17 beats, minor 3rd descending
Hudson Spiral: 83 beats, major 6th ascending
Concord Spiral: 19 beats, minor 7th descending
The major 6th and minor 7th are the optimal intervals for a string quartet canon; using a major 6th, the cello can play down to its low E-flat (echoed by the viola’s low C string and second violin’s low A), and the first violin can play down to the F# above middle C, whereas with the 7th the cello can descend to D and the first violin only to A-flat in the treble clef. Concord Spiral generated some nice passages of what sounds like tonal Webern:
The scores are on my web site if you’re interested, and no performances are yet forthcoming. Spiral canons and Snake Dances are the two personal genres I feel I’ve invented for myself, along with my more generic tuning studies and Disklavier studies. And I hope Ziehn would have been happy to know that, 98 years after his death, his idea is still out there making the rounds.