Archives for 2011

I am all in favor of peer-review on principle. Like everyone else I am prone to typos, misplaced bits of information, and unnoticed logical inconsistencies. I am thrilled to have these captured and remedied pre-publication. But in my case, the external reader then invariably goes on to characterize my style as unacceptably "breezy," "journalistic," and "colloquial," which means that my sentences flow well and are varied and to the point, so that the reader doesn't have to keep slapping himself to stay awake. And if I don't have enough clout in … [Read more...]

I've been interviewing my good friend Bill Duckworth for an eventual biography or something. He told me about meeting Virgil Thomson in the late '70s. David Stock was giving one of his new music concerts in Pittsburgh, and Duckworth and Thomson were the featured composers. After the pre-concert dinner, Thomson put his arm around Bill and said, "Young man, don't take it personally when you look at me during your performance tonight and see that I've fallen asleep. If you look at me during my piece, I will be asleep then too." Bill says, "And I … [Read more...]

After giving my lecture on Feldman at yesterday's Feldman festival being presented in Philly by Bowerbird, I spent a half-hour talking to - Feldman's niece! Feldman's personality was so universally described as "avuncular" that I told her she must be one of the most effectively uncle-d people in history. She remembered, as a humiliating experience for a 13-year-old, Feldman (and Cage) being booed in 1964 when Leonard Bernstein performed their music with the Philharmonic. And when I told her that I considered her uncle the greatest composer of … [Read more...]

This Sunday at 4:30 I'm giving a lecture on Morton Feldman as part of American Sublime, Bowerbird's two-weekend tribute to Feldman with performances of several of his most important late works. I come at the end of an all-afternoon series of talks by Feldman experts, of whom I am probably the least knowledgeable - and I know a few things. That event is at Nexus at CraneArts, 1400 N American Street in Philadelphia. Later in the month, the West End String Quartet will be giving four performances of my Concord Spiral in four cities over two … [Read more...]

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 … [Read more...]

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 … [Read more...]

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, … [Read more...]