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PostClassic

Kyle Gann on music after the fact

Archives for 2011

The So-Called Editing Process

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 the matter, they will proceed to gelatinize my liquid paragraphs with the usual academic ambiguities, qualifications, and obscurantisms, until the final product is just as miserable and inedible a porridge as the average musicology screed. Peer-review ought to mean critique by someone who can do it as well as you can. It’s maddening. What is it about a graduate degree that automatically turns its recipient into a lifelong devotee of barren and congealed prose?

 

Concert Etiquette of the Greats

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 looked at him, and he was.”

During Thomson’s Herald Tribune days, a reader once wrote to him to protest a positive review he had given to an inferior soprano. Thomson wrote back, “I sleep very lightly at the opera, and if anything had gone amiss on stage, I would have awoken instantly.”

Meeting of Minds

The current issue of the journal American Music (Volume 29, No. 1) contains an article by my Serbian musicologist friend Dragana Stojanovic-Novicic titled “The Carter-Nancarrow Correspondence.” It will doubtless be available on the web via JSTOR soon, and if you’re not in academia (we professors can access it for free), a private subscription to JSTOR would be well worth the money; I’d say 85% of the footnotes in my scholarly writing lately are references to articles i’ve found there. Dragana is the person who has gone most thoroughly through Nancarrow’s correspondence, and she has another article in process for Musical Quarterly on his letters to and from Gyorgy Ligeti. I’m urging her to write the first Nancarrow biography, because she’d do a hell of a job, and she’s taught me a lot about his life.

According to the article, Carter studied Spanish briefly with Nancarrow, who had just returned from fighting in the Spanish Civil War. One of Carter’s first letters to Nancarrow, from as early as 1939, asked about the possibility of his writing a ballet for Lincoln Kirstein’s Ballet Caravan, for which Carter was then music director; obviously this never came to pass. Can you imagine an early Nancarrow ballet? What a wrinkle in music history that would have caused. The letters document aesthetic agreements and disagreements between the two composers. Nancarrow loved Carter’s First String Quartet (which rhythmically quotes Nancarrow, though opinions differ as to where), Cello Sonata, and Double Concerto, but liked the second movement of the Piano Sonata better than the first: “For me the complex rhythms simply don’t sound” (1952). Composer of perhaps the most complex rhythms ever penned, Nancarrow was dismissive of complexity for its own sake, and brought this charge against Messiaen, no less, in 1957: “Messiaen’s music looks complex and sounds even more so, a muddy mess.” (I wonder what he was looking at. Though reclusive, Nancarrow subscribed to all the major new-music journals.) For his part, Carter left Nancarrow “disillusioned” by admitting that he couldn’t understand “by ear” the mathematics of the acceleration canons of Nancarrow’s Study #23, of which the latter had sent an enthusiastic analysis. Nevertheless, for decades Carter expressed warm solicitude for getting Nancarrow’s music out (the longest hiatus in their surviving correspondence was from 1974-87), and in 1968 even invited Nancarrow to come stay with him and his wife in Rome. One is struck by how much earlier Nancarrow could have ventured into the professional world had he only taken advantage of his opportunities. Dragana’s footnotes are among the longest and most detailed in the musicological literature, and she’s an incredible stickler for exactitude of expression. I won’t give away any details yet from the Ligeti article (I help her make her translations from Serbian idiomatic), but it’s, if anything, even more enlightening.

By coincidence, as I was writing this, a copy arrived of the book Trimpin: Contraptions for Art and Sound, compiled and edited by Anne Focke (U. of Washington Press). It contains my article “Trimpin, Nancarrow, and the Transfer of Memory,” along with articles on Trimpin by Charles Amirkhanian, Steve Peters, David Mahler, David Harrington, and others. Along with my Ashley book (which I’m finishing up the final re-edits on), I’ve got three more articles coming out in books this fall: forewords to Ashley’s Perfect Lives and the 50th-anniversary edition of Cage’s Silence, and an article on John Luther Adams’s orchestral music in Bernd Herzogenrath’s book on him, The Farthest Place. I’ve spent the last two years writing like a scholarly madman, and the results are now appearing in quick succession. But this summer: only composing, smoking cigars, and drinking 18-year-old Bowmore. I’ve earned the respite, I’d like to think.

Kiss Off, Purists

Liturgy, the band my son plays in, received an interesting review in the Times today.

Vertiginously Relative

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 his era, it seemed to blow her mind. It’s one thing for an artist to face early disapproval and eventually be vindicated, we kind of expect that. But what must that steep trajectory look like to a closely-involved younger family member not in the arts herself? The mind boggles.

 

Upcoming Appearances

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 weekends, presented by Rhymes with Opera. The dates and venues are as follows:

Friday, June 17 at 7: Café Orwell, 247 Varet St, Brooklyn, NY
Saturday, June 18 at 6: Windup Space, 12 W North Ave, Baltimore, MD
Friday, June 24 at 7:30: Real Art Ways, 56 Arbor St, Hartford, CT
Saturday, June 25 at 2: Yes!Oui!Si! Space, 19 Vancouver St, Boston, MA

I’m not listed on all the PR materials yet, because Concord Spiral was a late addition to the program (thanks to my old friend Robert Carl). I’ll be at least at the New York performance. Hope many of you can come to some of these.

 

Call Me a Crazy Uncle

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!

 

Repeating Myself

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.

 

Curious Genealogies

My son’s black metal band Liturgy has put out a four-minute video of their song “Returner.” Apparently there’s some big controversy (like father, like son) connected to the fact that they’re “hipsters” playing black metal; Bernard says the fans would prefer that they be wearing bullets on their belts and rusty nails sticking out of their shoulders. I don’t get it. After playing the South by Southwest festival they stopped in McKinney, Texas, and visited my 83-year-old mother. If you knew my mother, you would find the idea of her entertaining a black metal band in her kitchen tremendously enjoyable. Anyway, Liturgy’s new album Aesthetica (on Thrill Jockey – a label I’d actually heard of) got a very nice placement in one of New York Magazine’s “Approval Matrices,” halfway between highbrow and lowbrow and almost all the way towards brilliant.

The pivot repertoire that links Bernard’s musical tastes with mine is Brian Eno and the Residents. He came home and we had an Eno-fest last night, both of us singing virtually all the lyrics to all the songs. I doubt that anyone has noticed, but a thesis could be written about Eno’s influence on my music (hint: think Another Green World).

UPDATE: When the band mentioned to my mother the possibility of her coming to one of their concerts, she said, “That would redefine the word ‘anachronism.'”

Forced Conversions

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.

In Which I Am Poeticized

I would be loath to argue that seeing me talk about 4’33” in front of the Maverick Concert Hall adds anything worthwhile to what can be gleaned from my book on it, but filmmaker Cambiz A. Khosravi, a historian of Woodstock, NY, has created such a video from an interview he did with me. As it ends, note the length (you can guess). Toward the end I overstate the dearth of indigenous American musical influences prior to 4’33”; perhaps what I said made more sense in the context of the complete interview. I’m a good writer partly because I’m a good editor and reviser of my own words. I’m a middling extemporaneous speaker because time, at least insofar as I’m equipped to experience it, only goes one direction. Another thing I’d love to revise about the video is the 30 pounds I’ve shed since it was filmed. But I find my white hair blowing in the Catskill wind kind of poetic.

And speaking of poetry, a Boston poet friend of John Luther Adams, John Shreffler, wrote the following poem in response to JLA’s and my pilgrimage to Concord:

For John Luther Adams

The experience aspires to communion,
But the art is various, so many
Different ways to do it, sometimes you feel
It wrap its arm around you as its other
Hand reaches in and neatly lifts your wallet;
That would be Wagner, while Beethoven and Ives
Storm Heaven, locked in wars into which you’re drafted,

But sometimes, now and then, the artist nods,
Lost in his thought and fumbles with the keys
And turns the pauky lock and opens the door
And inside lie mansions, where the conversation
Is real and equal and, as well, ecstatic
And shimmers like the Northern Lights laid out
In a Heaven into which you’re invited.

 

Descendants of the Prophets

Composer John Luther Adams is teaching at Harvard this semester, and he had never been to Walden Pond before – only 16 miles away, after all – so I drove out and we did the tour together. As you may recall, John is a hard-core Thoreauvian, I’m the Emersonian. Here we are united, however, on the site of Thoreau’s cabin:

So sharply do our mental processes differ and complement each other that we talked much about the Emerson-Ives-Gann world of ideas versus the Thoreau-Cage-Adams world. It amazes us that beings so overlapping in sympathy can be so disparate in perception and capacity. Later we photographically took sides, I at the grave of Emerson:

and John looming larger above Thoreau’s more modest stone:

For nine hours we pondered Transcendentalism, wondered what we were supposed to transcend, marveled at Thoreau’s wooden flute in the Concord Museum, compared teaching experiences, commiserated each other on the condescending looks that female students cast on old fart professors like us, sagely assessed our impression that the music Pulitzer, which had seemed to run amok a few years ago, is back on its familiar track, plotted music’s future, and, like druids in an ancient ritual, took turns trading stories bearing on the significance, influence, and ultimate fates of Tenney, Harrison, Nancarrow, Budd, Feldman, Young, Ashley, Cage, Ives, Cowell, and other luminaries. This world, this private world I share with John and a few other friends, keeps me sane. In it musical justice is ever meticulously meted out, brilliance is steadily recognized, mediocrity deplored, the superficial attraction of fancy musical devices dismissed, the underlying truths of art kept in sharp focus, the mathematics of spirituality grasped in all its paradox. It is, in short, in almost every way the opposite of the world outside our discussions.

 

Fanfares and Funerals

In Michigan a few weeks ago, I saw the second copy I’d ever seen of Kathleen Hoover’s and John Cage’s 1959 book Virgil Thomson: His Life and Music, in the possession of Thomson scholar Jennifer Campbell. The first copy I saw was in Thomson’s own apartment in 1989. I realized I had to have it, and of course was able to find a copy in pretty good shape via Amazon, for $75. Hoover wrote the biography, and Cage wrote about Thomson’s music, in tremendous detail. Were one of the authors not so famous, the book would not at all deserve republication. It’s the only writing I know of of Cage’s in which he subordinates his personality to his subject matter, in plain, expository prose. He’s stylish as ever, but flat, often euphemistic-seeming, searching for words and sometimes ending up without a point to justify his laborious cleverness. The discussion of Four Saints in Three Acts is about as unenthusiastic as I can imagine:

For the composition of Four Saints, Thomson applied a new creative method: seated at his piano, text before him, and singing, he improvised an entire act at a time until it became clear to him that the vocal line and harmony had taken stable form. This procedure placed faith in what he terms the “well-springs of the unconscious,” and does not view as a pollution the intrusion of individual taste and memory into those universal waters. [Interesting intrusion of Cage’s Zen ideas.] One may question the purity of such a modus, however, for the thematic relationships in his score are very knowing, and few of them differ from his earlier practices. This score stands apart from his previous Stein settings in that it defies analysis. Scholarly study of it yields nothing but statistics. These give the impression that the materials of music, in contrast to those of poetry, are becoming impoverished. There are 111 tonic-dominants, 178 scale passages, 632 sequences, 38 references to nursery tunes, and one to “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee.”…

Some find the opera too long, though its playing time is only ninety minutes. Actually, it is as long as might have been mathematically expected. Susie Asado is 3 pages; Preciosilla, 9; Capital, Capitals, 34; Four Saints (in piano score) takes up 144. The implication is a continuation of a series of works, respectively, 648, 3,240, and 17,826 pages long.

Have you ever seen a music writer sound so utterly bored and uninvolved? The book apparently caused quite an understandable rift in the Cage-Thomson relationship. However, there are nevertheless some wonderful glimpses of Thomson’s pithily reductive view of the world:

This was the period of WPA. With Orson Welles, John Houseman, and others, Thomson became part of the non-relief 10 percent professional assistance quota permitted. The group achieved a notable production of Macbeth, staged by Welles at the Lafayette Theater in Harlem with Negro actors and with voodoo chants and dances directed by Asadata Dafora Horton. Musical arrangements were assigned to Thomson, who orchestrated Lanner waltzes and worked out with Welles weather effects calculated to build up the sound of the actors’ voices. His original contributions were trumpet fanfares, one of which involved three players in the production of a tone-cluster. Then, as now, he was generally unenthusiastic about the musical possibilities of a Shakespearean script. “One can get in a little weather music,” he says, “and, once the characters are dead, sometimes a funeral. Otherwise it is mostly fanfares to get the actors on and off the stage.” He points out further that Shakespeare, initiating a theatrical movement in an England that had a strong and established musical life, had arranged matters so that his speeches and scenes would be forever free of competition from musical quarters.

 

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American Mavericks - the Minnesota Public radio program about American music (scripted by Kyle Gann with Tom Voegeli)

Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar - a cornucopia of music, interviews, information by, with, and on hundreds of intriguing composers who are not the Usual Suspects

Iridian Radio - an intelligently mellow new-music station

New Music Box - the premiere site for keeping up with what American composers are doing and thinking

The Rest Is Noise - The fine blog of critic Alex Ross

William Duckworth's Cathedral - the first interactive web composition and home page of a great postminimalist composer

Mikel Rouse's Home Page - the greatest opera composer of my generation

Eve Beglarian's Home Page- great Downtown composer

David Doty's Just Intonation site

Erling Wold's Web Site - a fine San Francisco composer of deceptively simple-seeming music, and a model web site

The Dane Rudhyar Archive - the complete site for the music, poetry, painting, and ideas of a greatly underrated composer who became America's greatest astrologer

Utopian Turtletop, John Shaw's thoughtful blog about new music and other issues

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