Archives for May 2011

Speaking of criticisms of Ives, I was a little startled to read this in Martin Bresnick’s op-ed in The New York Times yesterday, speaking about the composer Eric Stokes:

Eric was the first “Ivesian” composer I ever met. There were very few of them in those days and there are not many now. I always felt vaguely embarrassed by Charles Ives. I found his music too candid, too forthright. It stuck out like a crazy, opinionated uncle at a polite social event — too unsophisticated for a sophisticated new music audience.

He afterward says “I am ashamed now to recall unspoken, unexamined feelings of condescension I felt toward Ives….” But I imagine that this sums up the way a lot of composers feel about my music as well. Candid and forthright I can only think of as virtues, whereas sophistication, if it is one at all, is one of the minor, almost negligible virtues, way down the list after imagination, vigor, honesty, sincerity, inventiveness, emotiveness, simplicity, integrity, and fifty other qualities.

Oh, I love the Bruckner Eighth Symphony, it’s so sophisticated! – No.

I was just overwhelmed by The Rite of Spring, it’s so sophisticated! – No.

I can’t stop listening to Rothko Chapel, it’s so sophisticated! – No.

The idea that what audiences want from your music is sophistication is a composer’s disease, a neurosis, a lie your grad-school teachers infected you with. To “sophisticate,” says the dictionary, is to cause to become less simple and straightforward through education or experience. And I’m continually trying to shed my education and experience to become more simple and straightforward. Call me a crazy uncle – and don’t invite me to any polite social events!

 

I have often written about the 1989 review in which John Rockwell called my music “naively pictorial,” and the fact that I liked it so much that I’ve ever since adopted “naive pictorialism” as my stylistic moniker. Recently I ran across the 1944 review in Modern Music in which Elliott Carter disparaged Charles Ives’s music as – guess what? – “naively pictorial.” This is company I will gladly keep. I wish Charlie and I could share a good laugh over that one.

I wondered, when I was writing the 4’33” book, whether a renewed involvement with Cage’s music would have any effect on my own. I don’t think it did. But I do think my recent semester spent with the Concord Sonata has had some impact. Most noticeably, I’ve become more open to the idea of re-using material from piece to piece. I could never do it before. I hate repeating myself. I don’t like giving the same lecture twice, I don’t like repeating a class without a long time-lapse in between, and I’ve never been able to re-use material. Even quoting someone else’s music is difficult for me, though I’ve managed it several times. I get into a musical context and I’m feeling my way through it, and the idea of lifting a passage from a previous work or sketch and dropping it in (as Ives did with that Country Band March in “Hawthorne” and so many other pieces) just upsets everything. I don’t seem able to re-say sincerely something I’ve said before. The music leading up to it never quite fits, and I can’t hear the lifted passage as flowing naturally from the preceding new material. I’m amazed Ives could do it. It may come from a habitual tendency toward organicism, which I’ve tried to overcome, since I really don’t think organicism is an essential musical virtue. But if I write a lecture, the first time I read it publicly I feel impassioned; the second time, I feel like I’m lip-synching, like I’m slightly guilty for not having come up with something new to say. Isn’t that odd? As though I change so much with the passage of time that I couldn’t possibly mean the same thing twice (yet all my friends know what a creature of immutable habit I am).

Nevertheless, I have just finished making an orchestral version of the first movement of my Implausible Sketches for piano four-hands. Listening to the piece, I started hearing various lines played by strings, horn, harp, and so on. The piano wasn’t big enough for how I imagined the piece. So I started to orchestrate it. John Luther Adams had just done something similar with a chamber piece of his own, and he told me, “It’ll be a bigger project than you think.” Of course he was right. Starting a new piece from scratch might have been easier, because I wouldn’t have had to spend so much time whittling away at material I had already perfected, and relinquishing assumptions I’d already grown committed to.

First of all, since the Implausible Sketch (first movement: “The Desert’s Too-Zen Song”) was for piano four-hands, it used all seven octaves of the keyboard almost continuously. Some quarter of the music, if not more, would have had to be entrusted to contrabasses and piccolos, which would be ridiculous. The bottom had to be brought up, the top brought down, middle lines subsequently disentangled. Much of the piece has a drone on a low C, and keeping the basses so continuously on that pitch seemed ineffective, if not cruel. I had to reconfigure the piece’s long, long ostinato to let them move around. Then, at eight minutes, the piece seemed too brief for its orchestral incarnation, so I had to perform heart surgery, and move major events further apart. I had to produce three minutes of filler material that didn’t sound like mere afterthought. Repeated-note lines that sounded resonant on the piano sagged in the bassoon. Probably 90% of the piece had to be rethought. I’m still tweaking the details, but I do think I find the result – more simply titled Desert Song – grander than the original.

(To answer your next question, no performance is impending, I just followed an inspiration. But last summer I wrote three string quartets with little hope of performance, and now a friend’s quartet has offered to play them all. One big change in my life is that I’ve quit following Cage’s advice to never write a piece without a performance lined up.)

The only time I’d done something similar before was to base my string quartet Love Scene on the brief third act of my opera The Watermelon Cargo – though I did that because I noticed that I hardly ever had more than four lines going at once. The number of measures and basic content didn’t change, though I did have to make some lines more string-idiomatic. And I’m slowly orchestrating my octet The Planets, though since that has strings, wind, and percussion to begin with, it’s an easier conversion so far. As one gets older, I can imagine that it might be profitable to be able to rely on earlier, more vigorous inspirations. There was certainly a period after 1990 when Nancarrow’s inspiration failed him (he was 78 and had had a stroke after all), and he started pulling out earlier, unused sketches to rework. It does seem a useful part of a composer’s economy to have a cache of previously used or unused material to draw on, and with Ives as a model, I’d like to get over my reluctance.

Part of the problem with orchestration for those of us of a certain age – and it applies not only to writing orchestra music but to working with classical musicians in general – is that some of our music originates in an electronic paradigm. For instance, my “Neptune” from The Planets has a gradually changing synthesizer chord that plays solidly throughout, a kind of cloud from which the other lines emerge. In the orchestra, that cloud will get transfered to the strings. So I find myself wanting to use long, long chords with staggered bowing in the strings, though I had a rather disastrous experience trying this with a subprofessional orchestra in my piece The Disappearance of All Holy Things. I handled it better in Desert Song by having lines move around almost unnoticeably within the cloud. I notice, though, that in Alvin Singleton’s Shadows – one of my very favorite recent orchestral pieces, and there are damn few works I’d apply that phrase to – he keeps the strings holding notes for dozens of measures at a time, and the Atlanta Symphony does a great job with it. It is not very fair, though, to the string players that I want them to be a massive synthesizer. I’d be interested in hearing from others who’ve wrestled with this postminimalist technical dilemma.

 

I have been so deleriously busy in the last several months that I am having a harder time transitioning into summer than usual. I feel like a puppet whose strings have suddenly been cut. I am so accustomed to being driven by exigencies that the self-management of free time comes as an unfamiliar shock.

I have also been a little discouraged by changes in this blog resulting from the reformatting. Journal-meister McLennan has managed to make the “Older Posts” button at the bottom of the main page start working, but, unlike in the older format, I (and you) can no longer look up old posts by title, only by month, and by searching for unusual words. Some of my longer posts have had their line formatting entirely screwed up, making them difficult to read. Something similar happened years ago with our first platform conversion, and, in my free time, I painstakingly went through and reformatted a few hundred old posts to read smoothly again. (A particular issue is changing slanted quotation marks to vertical ones, the former apparently unreadable by some softwares.) That was 900 posts ago; I can’t possibly go through and redo all the injured ones now. I used to write my longer posts in Word and then paste them into the blog software. This, it turns out, was a mistake. I do think I’ve done some of my best writing ever in this blog, and I’m now facing the potential ephemerality of the venue. In partial amelioration, urged on by the usual Scorpionic conflict about being dependent on others, I’ve started a special page on my web site as an archive for my longer blog essays, where they can be looked up by title and where I can keep better control of them. I’m trying to retain the comments as well, and have figured out some “find and replace” tricks to make the reformatting less onerous.

In addition, my recent activities have not been very bloggable. I’ve been involved with the Charles Ives Society and the Society for Minimalist Music, and while interesting things are going on, I am not authorized to make them public. My laptop died the last weekend of the semester (no information lost, fortunately), and I am in the agonizing process of trying to reintegrate all of my music software on a new computer. Much tech support is involved. In short, my life revolves around technology, and I am in a period of resenting that changes in that technology get imposed on me, and that, for whatever reasons, such changes are not always improvements. Sibelius 6, for instance, seems more cumbersome than Sibelius 2 was. I can accept the decrees of the gods with some patience; I have less for the decrees of the super-nerds who, willy-nilly, redesign the tools of my trade.