Archives for June 2012

Cageans in Poland

(UPDATE BELOW) Some photos from last month’s Cage conference in Lublin, Poland, have arrived, taken by conference photographerÂ Marcin Moszynski. Here’s a shot of most of the participants (minus David Revill and Margaret Leng Tan, for some reason). I will make a hash of it if I try to identify them all, but that’s Chris Shultis fifth from left, conference director Jerzy Kutnik behind two women and just under the lamp, David Nicholls between Jerzy and me, Gordon Mumma slightly crouched in front of me, and behind me Stanford political scientist Fred Turner, who had a fantastic paper relating Cage’s chance techniques to Cold War politics:

Most evenings ended up with me, Gordon and his wife Michelle Fillion, and David Nicholls ensconced in the cozy little hotel bar, drinking vodkas unavailable where I live.

For my lecture I made some word-clouds from articles in Cage’s Silence to illustrate historical changes in his concerns; you see one of them behind me in this moment which captures me in an uncharacteristic burst of enthusiasm:

Here’s Jerzy introducing me:

And, one of those very rare photographs in which one looks exactly as one imagines one does:

UPDATE: And here’s me and pianist Margaret Leng Tan, who both performed and lectured:

Not sure what that strap around her neck was, I assure you I wasn’t trying to strangle her.

A Concordian Hail-Mary Pass

Toward the end of the “Hawthorne” essay in Essays Before a Sonata, Ives refers to â€œthe old hymn-tune that haunts the church and sings only to those in the churchyard to protect them from secular noises, as when the circus parade comes down Main Streetâ€¦.â€ In writing my Concord Sonata book I’ve read, or in many cases reread, almost all of Hawthorne, especially the stories and novels in which this kind of reference might arise, and I can’t find anything Ives could have been referring to. As I continue slogging through the remainder (and I have to admit, I really, really don’t like Hawthorne – he’s a brilliant describer of certain psychological states, but I weary of his reflexive circumlocutions and the inevitable supernatural shticks that clog his narratives) – is there any Hawthorne scholar or lover out there who recognizes where this could have come from? There’s a thank-you in my acknowledgements in it for you.

Bendy Pitches

A brief new tuning study for the 232-key piano of my imagination: Romance Postmoderne. As I was playing it, my wife said, “Boy, the pitches in that are really bendy.” Then she looked at me suspiciously and added, “You can’t hear it, can you?” And I had to admit I couldn’t. It sounds so normal to me; I’d love to hear how weird it sounds to other people, but I’ve just grown too accustomed to thirteenth harmonics. The tuning is really elegant, all harmonics of Eb: the odd numbers from 1 to 15 multiplied by each other, an 8 x 8 grid comprising 33 different pitches once the duplicates are accounted for (7 x 11 = 11 x 7, for instance). In other words, eight harmonic series’ each up to the 15th harmonic, based on the 1st, 3rd, 5th, 7th, 9th, 11th, 13th, and 15th harmonics of Eb. Hate the piece if you want, but admit that if musicians could learn to hear these intervals, there’d be enough new material here to invigorate new music for at least the next century. UPDATE: complete tuning chart here.

AFTERTHOUGHT: The main difference between this and impressionism, or bebop harmony, is that there are fewer pivot notes between chords. Except for the 3rd harmonic (V chord), which is a special case and I don’t use it much, any two (potentially eight-note) chords tend to contain only one pitch in common. Of course, the result of that is parsimonious voice-leading heaven.

(Incidentally, I tried to turn the file into an mp3 in iTunes, as usual, and the aiff – which had sounded fine when I made it in Logic – got all distorted. I looked around the internet and found that everyone’s complaining about distortion in iTunes in the latest Mac OS. I had to find an internet audio converter to change the file. What a pain. Damn you, iTunes!)

Interviewee of the Year

You can hear here an eleven-minute interview that Steve Paulson did with me for “The Best of Our Knowledge” about Cage’s 4’33”. Â I couldn’t listen to all of it, my own voice on the radio makes me squirm. I’m in love with my own words – when I see them in print, not when I’m speaking them. I wish I spoke more slowly and evenly and with more gravitas, though my style does seem to be entertaining in the classroom. It didn’t really occur to me that I had written books about two composers both born in the same year, 1912, until the joint centennial rolled around. Now I’m much in demand for interviews and conferences, always on the same two subjects, about which I have decreasingly little to say. Meanwhile, I’m hip-deep in all the Ives music that relates to the Concord Sonata, and would love to talk about that instead. When Cage died I wrote three Village Voice articles about him in quick succession. For the next few months I was deluged by organizations trying to get me to come to their Cage concerts, since I was obviously a Cage fanatic; my editor, on the other hand, was saying, “That’s enough about Cage for awhile, maybe you should find something else to write about,” and I fully agreed. How quickly we get pigeonholed!, and people assume that what we’ve already done is all we want to continue doing. Luckily, I’ve also been asked to give keynote addresses at Partch and Earle Brown conferences in the coming months, both at Northeastern University, so that will give my brain a chance to exercise on a couple of new tracks. However, since I do love getting free airfare to travel to exotic places, it occurred to me to quickly churn out books on Babbitt, Bernstein, and Lou Harrison, to take advantage of the next round of centennials coming up.