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PostClassic

Kyle Gann on music after the fact

Archives for 2011

Five New (Old) Tunes for Spring

Thanks to the good music faculty of Central Michigan University, I have a number of new recordings of my music up on my web site:

  • Olana for vibraphone,
  • New World Coming for bassoon and trio, and
  • Minute Symphony (kind of a joke piece, a symphony in 80 seconds) for flute, clarinet, violin, and cello.

This was kindly intentional on composer Jay Batzner’s part; he programmed pieces that weren’t on my web site. Also, Contemporaneous’s recording of my string quartet

  • Concord Spiral

is now available, and with Pianoteq I’ve made a nice MIDI realization of my piece for piano four hands Implausible Sketches (2006), which I think is one of my best works, and which has yet to be premiered. The four movements are here:

  • 1. The Desert’s Too-Zen Song
  • 2. The Goodbye Fugue
  • 3. Frigid Azure
  • 4. Don’t Touch My Pint

The first movement in particular, “The Desert’s Too-Zen Song,” is what I think of as quintessential Gannianism. Altogether, it’s about 55 minutes of material not available before. Andrew Spencer plays Olana, MaryBeth Minnis plays the bassoon solo in New World Coming. I always thought bassoonists would pick up on the latter, as a rare jaunty chamber work for bassoon with small ensemble, but that hasn’t happened either. Almost all of my works are now publicly available in audio, with the major exceptions of my opera The Watermelon Cargo, my string quartet Hudson Spiral, and my theater piece Scenario (coming up this summer, I hope), and a few early works.

 

Students without Sleep

Tomorrow night my string quartet Concord Spiral is being premiered by Contemporaneous, the remarkable new-music ensemble of Bard students run by Dylan Mattingly and David Bloom that’s not connected with Bard, they just do it. They give several concerts a year here, and tour from Hudson to NYC. This concert’s at 8 PM at the Bard Chapel, and also includes world premieres by Ryan Chase and William Zuckerman.

And I’m still on a high from my residency at Central Michigan University, who on Tuesday presented the best-performed one-composer concert of my music I’ve ever had. It was nice being back in the midwest, the vibe less snobbish, the students more eager to learn – though perhaps one can’t generalize just from CMU. It’s a subject for when I have time to write more, which I may not for a few more weeks.

 

A Pawn in the Schemes of Young Composers

I’m in Mount Pleasant, Michigan, which the locals freely admit is smack in the middle of one of the flattest expanses of real estate in North America. Were it not for fences and the occasional bridge over a highway, I think I could roll a golf ball from here to Detroit. Here, the music department of Central Michigan University is kindly presenting a concert of my music for this Tuesday evening, and I’ll be meeting with composition students until then. I was invited by Director of Music Events John Jacobson, but my host has been composer Jay Batzner, whose name I hear all over the country, but whom I’d never met. In fact, he seems to be one of a group of former UMKC/University of Louisville grad students, including also Brent Miller, Rebecca Doran Eaton, David McIntire, and Brian Herrington, whose names I encounter so ubiquitously in my travels that I’ve concluded that they’re a cabal intent on taking over all new-music activity across much of the United States, in which venture I wish them every success. CMU is a farflung campus of large buildings, with a huge, stone, yet dashingly designed music center. The concert is Tuesday night, March 29, at 8 in the Staples Family Concert Hall in said music building. Students and faculty are playing my Snake Dance No. 2, New World Coming, Olana, Minute Symphony, and Kierkegaard, Walking, and I’ll play Charing Cross and Solitaire. If the only way you can get here is by bicycle, at least it’s a straight shot.

 

The Happier Profession

Nervous as I get when I’m in charge of something, the minimalism colloquium I directed at Bard last weekend was nevertheless a continual pleasure. Eight of us musicologists got together to air the more-or-less-completed torsos of our chapters for the Ashgate Companion to Minimalist Music. The Brits (Keith Potter, Pwyll Ap Sion, John Pymm) were the energy behind this, and it seems a rather British way of doing things; I’d never been through such a process before. But we do want to make sure that the different chapters balance each other well, and that every aspect gets covered. We meet with the European contributors in Birmingham in a few weeks. We’ve already found that some of the people mining Reich’s It’s Gonna Rain for political resonance will have to find another example, or else truth in advertising will require that we retitle the book the Ashgate Companion to It’s Gonna Rain. For some reason, that piece is an unsuspected mother lode of semiotic treasures. Emphasis on Reich, Glass, and Riley is pretty overwhelming, and I realized in mid-paper that we have no one slated to cover Harold Budd, which would be an unforgivable omission. For some of my California composer friends, he was the Alpha Minimalist, and from afar he was a tremendous influence on me as well. A history of minimalism without him would be laughably incomplete.

Interesting insights arose. Jonathan Bernard wrote about minimalist influences on pop music (the reverse would be an equally worthwhile topic), and he pointed out that almost all of his examples were instrumental; because, he said, once you put vocals over a minimalist-sounding track, it ceases to sound minimalist. David First, who was in attendance because I had brought him in to punctuate the proceedings with a concert, murmured, “Same with minimalism.” David and I had already talked about his feeling that the distinguishing feature of minimalism is that you’re listening to a background, and that the moment you add a distinct foreground element, the impression of minimalism vanishes. This fits hand in hand, I think, with my own formulation that minimalism separates out and dissociates left brain and right brain aspects of music, leaving the left brain somewhat at sea because of the resulting lack of time-orientation. (I mentioned to Bill Duckworth the next day that David had said minimalism was all background, and he responded, “But there’s a transient middle-ground.” I’ll have to think about all this.) There are certainly different repertoires covered by different emphases of the word minimalist, which Keith Potter sums up by separating the “radical” minimalism of La Monte Young and Phill Niblock from the “conservative” minimalism of post-1975 Glass and Reich; it occurred to me to call these the “raw” and “cooked” forms. Wide as the cultural applications may ultimately be, there are those of us who still want our minimalism raw and difficult, and I had picked David to get that point across, which his growling music, pulsing in acoustic beats rather than notated meters, certainly did.

One more quote I can’t resist repeating came from Rebecca Eaton’s paper. She had compiled an exhaustive history of film music by the major minimalist composers, and cited a critic who wrote that minimalist music, once considered weirdly experimental, had by now become a kind of “spray-on gravitas” for Oscar-seeking films.

The occasion also confirmed what’s been dawning on me for a while: that, in general, musicologists are a lot more fun to hang out with than composers. Each composer sees most of the others as his or her competitors for the same small list of gigs and honors. I find these days that most composers come out of grad school with a long list in their heads of what composers aren’t supposed to do in a piece of music, and they use those don’ts to disqualify other composers, if possible, from serious consideration. When I walk into a room of composers I’ve come to expect to encounter a certain veil of resistance and disapproval. Musicologists, by contrast, are all in this together. When one publishes a book on Michael Nyman, it doesn’t step on the toes of the one who’s writing a book on Gavin Bryars, but rather provides welcome information. We’re all contributing to the same edifice of knowledge, and no one is expecting personal immortality to be the reward. As reluctant as many composers are to consider me a composer, the musicologists have unhesitatingly embraced me as one of them, even though all my degrees are in composition. No one tells me, “That’s not really serious musicology.” And I’m not the only one who feels this way; some of our minimalism mavens (David McIntire, Pwyll Ap Sion, David Dies) are also composers, and I’ve noted here before that I meet more and more young composers getting their graduate degrees in musicology. It’s a happier and more open-minded field. The realization is changing the direction of my career. Five years ago I’d determined not to write any more books and to concentrate only on my music, but I’ve since decided to keep musicologizing, simply because I like hanging out with those guys.

 

Don’t Take It Personally

I never liked Facebook. I joined by accident. Someone contacted me asking about a pianist who played my music 30 years ago, and I looked her up and found a Facebook page. I had to join to see her page, and it turned out to be the wrong person anyway. I didn’t understand the privacy controls at first, and my Facebook page was a morass of conversations by people I’d mostly never heard of. I figured most of the people who wanted to friend me were musicians advertising their concerts and recordings, and I had no particular reason to turn anyone down. I have a phobia about crowds (I’ve always said that determined my choice of musical genre) and Facebook seemed like a virtual Chinatown. Then a couple of composers started a thread bewailing my malign influence on American music, and I was receiving notifications of each new insult. It was Christmas Eve, and so I joined the thread to post, “And a very merry Christmas to you gentlemen as well.” Then I went to Facebook (I just now typed “Fecabook” as a Freudian slip) and found the FAQ “How do I delete my Facebook page?”, which I thought it was interesting that that was a FAQ, and I followed directions. I’m happier. My e-mail in-box is far less cluttered, I have more spare time, and I was already the easiest person on the internet to contact via e-mail anyway.

But now I’m getting the occasional plaintive query from friends, “Why did you remove yourself from my Facebook friends?” Please know that you weren’t singled out. It was a grid that I never liked being on.

 

Does Greatness Rub Off?

I’m recovering from our highly successful minimalism colloquium I ran at Bard, which I hope to write about soon. Meanwhile, free-jazz-or-whatever pianist Jason Moran sent me a couple more pics from Other Minds. One’s me and Louis Andriessen at Djerassi:

Another is me soaking up some of that MacArthur vibe from Trimpin and Jason at our hotel in San Francisco:

 

What Other Minds Look Like

Here, courtesy of OM-Radio director Richard Friedman, were the composers at Other Minds this year: Louis Andriessen, I Wayan Balawan, Han Bennink, myself, Janice Giteck, David A. Jaffe, Jason Moran, Agata Zubel, and Other Minds director (and fantastic composer himself) Charles Amirkhanian:

Here I am giving a presentation on my music and suddenly realizing that I had subconsciously plagiarized the theme from “Baywatch”:

Here the Djerassi landscape takes a long look at me and notable Dutch jazz drummer Han Bennink:

Here I am breakfasting with one of my best friends in the world Janice Giteck, trying desperately to remember why I never stand in front of a light source:

Here Louis Andriessen, Agata Zubel, Janice, and Charles discuss contemporary music as I seriously contemplate finding another line of work:

And here’s the barn in which we met every day:

Thanks to Richard for all the great photos. They’re not coming out well-focussed here – I have no idea why, they look perfect on my computer. (UPDATE: Richard says to click on them and they open in-focus.)

Trimpin, whose mischievously adolescent sense of humor is one of his most endearing qualities, had the best joke of the week. David A. Jaffe had inherited a bunch of percussion from his teacher Henry Brant, and he used those instruments in his piece The Space Between Us. Included were about 25 chimes, and Trimpin had the idea of suspending the chimes from the ceiling and having them played via MIDI. So David’s piece had two string quartets, one on each side of the audience, plus a Disklavier onstage, a couple of MIDI-played xylophones, and the chimes hung from the ceiling. On the preceding panel, as the audience sat underneath those chimes, David explained that Trimpin had suggested suspending the chimes, but that he, David, was afraid that they would fall down and strike audience members. Charles asked, “So Trimpin, how are the chimes suspended from the ceiling?”, and Trimpin answered, “Oh, with very thin twine….” The Space Between Us was perhaps the festival highlight, with the string quartets playing ethereal melodies with the disembodied chimes in rhythmic unison. It was a fantastic week. I’ve found so many composer gigs disappointing that my expectations are permanently set at zero, but this was a crescendoing pleasure.

Minimalism at Bard

More about the recently-ended Other Minds festival soon, but first it is rather urgent to announce that my music department is hosting a colloquium on minimalist music this Saturday and Sunday, March 12 and 13. Eight scholars from Great Britain and America will convene to give papers, and the purpose is to initiate the process of putting together the Ashgate Companion to Minimalist Music, scheduled for publication in 2013. The papers will be presented as follows:

  • Saturday, March 12:
  • 10:00               Keith Potter, “Precursors: Mapping early Minimalism”
  • 11:00               Pwyll Ap Sion, “Reference and Quotation in Minimalist and Post-Minimal music”
  • 1:00                 Rebecca Eaton, “Minimalism/Post-Minimalism and Multimedia: Film, Television and Video”
  • 2:00                 Kyle Gann, “Postminimalism” (most minimalist title I could come up with)
  • 3:00                 David McIntire, “Totalism” (I’ve been a big influence on David’s titling style)
  • Sunday, March 13:
  • 10:00               John Pymm, “Minimalism and Narrativity”
  • 11:00               Jonathan Bernard, “Minimalism and/versus Pop: Some questions (and maybe some answers)”
  • 1:00                 David Dies, “Defining Spiritual Minimalism”

These papers represent almost half the book; we’ll be meeting with the European authors at the University of Wolverhampton in England, April 8-10. This one at Bard is a rather informal gathering, intended primarily for the scholars invited, but it is open to the public, and we’d be glad for anyone interested to attend. I am greatly indebted to my department chair James Bagwell and our dean Michéle Dominy for making the event possible. The location is Room 211 in Blum music building at Bard College. E-mail me for directions if you’re interested. 

However, one component of the event is completely public, and that will be David First’s concert on Saturday, March 12, in that same room at 6 PM. David is going to present some of his minimalist drone/slow-glissando music. Guitarists, of whom there are thousands at Bard, will be particularly interested, but David is someone who has not only kept a minimalist aesthetic alive into the 21st century, but made it dramatic, thrilling, and completely accessible, paradoxically while holding on to its most austere premises. I’m looking forward to giving all these minimalist scholars a big dose of his hair-on-the-back-of-the-neck-raising out-of-tuneness. So please feel free to join us. We give these smaller colloquia in off-years in-between the International Conferences on Minimalist Music, and the atmosphere at our gigs is positively effervescent. It’s not your grandfather’s musicology.

Hearing from Other Minds

The Djerassi Foundation: Somewhere out there, beyond Neil Young’s cattle ranch, lies the Pacific Ocean:

Here  are composer David A. Jaffe, a Djerassi board member whose name I’ve forgotten, Other Minds co-founder Jim Newman, composers Agata Zubel, Louis Andriessen, I Wayan Balawan, and the legs and hands of photographer John Fago, listening to Janice Giteck’s music:


Here’s Agata, Janice, David, regular PostClassic reader and Other Minds radio producer Richard Friedman (hi Richard!) and me at the far end of a long, hilly, muddy walk:

 

And Trimpin showed up!:

The landscape rather seduced us into overextending ourselves, as Janice realized:

Composers not pictured yet: jazz drummer Han Bennink, and pianist Jason Moran, the latter of whom just showed up.

With the Living and the Dead

This coming Sunday, Feb. 27, my friend Marka Gustavsson and her accompanist Frank Corliss will premiere a new work of mine for viola and piano, Scene from a Marriage, at a 3:00 concert at Olin Auditorium at Bard. Other composers on the concert are all dead: Bach, Enesco, and Stravinsky (Duo concertante, a lovely and uncharacteristically lyrical work). Only I survived! Mwa-ha-ha-ha! (Sorry.) Scene from a Marriage is a rather light, lyrical work itself, and a touch humorous.

I’m sad to say I won’t be there. For Saturday I’m flying to San Francisco to be composer-in-residence at the 16th Other Minds festival. The first few days I’ll be at the Djerassi Foundation, and the festival itself is March 3-5 at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco. My pieces Time Does Not Exist, Triskaidekaphonia, and Kierkegaard, Walking are being played by Sarah Cahill, Aron Kallay, and the Seattle Chamber Players, respectively. The other composers-in-residence are all alive: Louis Andriessen, Janice Giteck, Jason Moran, David A. Jaffe, I Wayan Balawan, Agata Zubel, and Hans Bennink. Hope to see some of my Bay Area readers there. There’s said to be a certain eclat to not being able to attend one’s own premiere, as though one is just too much in demand, but I do wish I could hear Marka and Frank too. On the other hand, I’m looking forward to getting out of the icy northeast for a week.

Empty Professionalism

Last night my philosopher colleague Daniel Berthold gave a reading from his new book The Ethics of Authorship: Communication, Seduction, and Death in Hegel and Kierkegaard. I haven’t read the book, but will have to now. He’s a very impassioned speaker, and talked eloquently about the implications of writing in one style or another, and how no style is ever ethically neutral. In passing he referred to eleven tricks he’d discovered that help philosophers get their papers published in journals, and how every trick will make your writing worse. So afterward I asked him about these tricks. Among them: having lots of footnotes; using citations from articles by the editors of the journal; attacking some particular writer or viewpoint; putting the main point early in the article (which he doesn’t like to do, and given the crescendoing style he exhibited, I can see why); and so on. He admitted having learned to use these when he was untenured, and regrets having “sold out” to that extent, however temporarily. Coincidentally, another philosophy professor friend of unconventional leanings had just written me a note about how difficult it is to fight the “empty professionalism that surrounds one in a university.” I think of my colleagues in the more academic departments as being more at home in this environment than I am, and it’s interesting to find that even they find their creativity curtailed, their most sparkling assets as humans and scholars turned into professional liabilities. 

Meanwhile, a talented and recently graduated young composer just told me that his composition professors wouldn’t allow him to write music with a steady beat – because it was “shallow.”

Out-Totalized

I do think of totalism (a style of complex tempo relationships, usually with limited harmonies and some vernacular influence) – or metametrics, as we used to call it in the verdant groves of Postclassica [he mused, stroking his chin] – as a style that crystallized in the 1990s and then waned. OK, we finally said, you can get your ensemble to play rhythms of eight against nine. What else can you do? But my colleague John Halle is one of the great unsung totalists, and occasionally I realize he’s still riding higher than ever on the tempo complexity wagon.

John’s not strictly my work colleague, because he’s at the Bard Conservatory and I’m in the Bard music department, which, confusingly, have little to do with each other. Although we’re based in the same building, I run into him about twice a year, less often than I see, say, John Luther Adams who lives in Alaska. But the student composers have started having Conservatory/music department forums, and the other night John Halle played us some music of his I hadn’t heard. How’s this for totalism?:

John Halle: Spheres, excerpt from 1st mvmt.

 

The piece is an homage to Thelonious Monk, called Spheres, and the first movement is based on the Monk tunes Straight, No Chaser and Brilliant Corners (you can see the former in the viola and the latter in the cello), the tunes used almost as tone rows. And, as in Nancarrow’s orchestra works, there are several tempos going throughout: quintuplets in the first violin, regular 8ths and quarters in the second violin, triplets in the viola, and septuplets in the cello. It’s crazy, but the centripetal force of those tunes ties the whole thing together, and, as in a lot of John’s music, the freedom of the tempos creates a lovely aural impression that the music isn’t notated or coordinated, it just happens. 

I’ll write rhythms like this for Disklavier (which I haven’t finished anything for in a long time, though I’m toying with returning). But I don’t write them, nor microtones, for live performers, on the grounds that performers seem to have enough reasons to avoid my music, and I don’t like to give them any new ones. And sure enough, the quartet John wrote Spheres for a few years ago, which will remain nameless here, never touched it. But he notes, as many have, that rhythmic complexity standards have risen miraculously among the younger generation, and he’s now gotten the first movement played by the young Afiara Quartet. I’ve uploaded a recording for you here. He says they play it even better now than on the recording, but he and I agreed, it’s a pretty damn accurate performance on the recording. Amazing. 

And, as I also do in my Disklavier pieces, John gets a wide range of densities by varying the repeating durations within individual lines, creating tempos within tempos. He may be the most metametric of us all, and refusing to mellow out. It’s inspiring:

Fucking (Excuse Me) the Tempo

We went to see The King’s Speech yesterday. Very enjoyable film, superb script, good performances, a classic feel-good movie yet a little unusual in its pacing and subject matter. But I’m not a film critic. Two things struck me. One was that it shared a lot of subject matter with Robert Ashley’s operas. Ashley overcame a temporary speech deficiency in high school, and his doctoral research (since Ross Lee Finney prevented him from becoming a composition major) was on stuttering. The tendency of swear words to slow down speech and allow the mind to think is a theme that runs through Atalanta, Foreign Experiences, and other Ashley works, and The King’s Speech reminded me of him over and over again. King George VI uses profanity as a way of getting past his speech impediment, something that Ashley alludes to frequently:

Instead, I learn to swear. Fuck, how simple!
It’s so mother-fucking simple. You Swear.
Instead of talking all the time, you swear.
And since foul language fucks the tempo,
The fucking thing slows down, and you start
Thinking again! [Foreign Experiences, Act III, lines 133-138]

Point two: The film’s major flaw, the one thing that jerked me out of it and deflated my suspension of disbelief, was the slapdash insertion of pieces by Beethoven in the final scenes. During King George’s historic address to the nation after Germany’s declaration of war, the background (or almost foreground) music is the slow movement of Beethoven’s Seventh. That was a little cheap, but arguably effective enough. But then, during his triumphant denouement, they play the second movement of the Emperor Concerto. First of all, the slow movement did not sound like an ending, but an inconclusive middle.* Secondly and most heinously, to celebrate this triumph of British determination over the Germans by playing German music in the background was absolutely tone-deaf (and yes, I am very well aware of the use of Beethoven’s Fifth in war-time as an Allied symbol for its dot-dot-dot-dash “V for Victory” association, but this was completely different in its effect). I could far better have accepted the Pomp and Circumstance marches as at least imbued with some cultural resonance. Instead, it was like the audience was assumed to be totally ignorant: “here’s a really touching moment, let’s throw in some classical music to make it sound appropriately solemn.” Thirdly, the scene deserved its own made-to-order music, not some DGG CD half-heartedly thrown on in the background. I had been wrapped up in the movie, and the music score ruined the ending for me completely. There’s no telling whether it was a stunning failure of imagination by the composer (Alexandre Desplat) or a resoundingly boneheaded decision by the director. But to anyone sufficiently educated to be even slightly susceptible to the cultural overtones, it was mother-fucking stupid.

*This same piece, the Emperor Concerto’s second movement, was also used for the Australian film Picnic at Hanging Rock, in which ambiguous and deceptively pastoral context it is infinitely more effective.


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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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