Archives for August 2013

I am not a particularly prolific composer, and have always been a little sensitive about it. The sensitivity started in college. In high school I spewed forth inept sonatas and chamber pieces by the ream with a frightening incapacity for self-criticism, and I swept into Oberlin with guns a-blazing. But my undergraduate composition teacher was intimidating and unsympathetic, and after a few months with him I found myself too petrified to compose anything. It took me many years to fully overcome the sense of insecurity that took root in me under his weekly lack of enthusiasm. It is common among a certain type of professor to say that, if a student can be dissuaded from becoming a composer, he should be; but if he can’t be dissuaded and you try for years anyway, the damage can be considerable and long-lasting.

At any rate, later there were other excuses for my relative lack of productivity. I’ve had to work like a dog to make a living all my life. The early years of being a high-profile critic took up a lot of psychic energy; it wasn’t like selling shoes while secretly working out musical plans in my head. And I got into the habit of writing books, which bring me more professional advantage than my music does these days, and writing them is so easy for me that I’m not likely to quit. I am selfish enough that I will deny the world the music I could be writing if I’m getting more jollies somewhere else.

But the real reason for the slow growth in my opus numbers, or probably more real than these other reasons anyway, is that I’m something of a conceptualist with a populist conscience. That is, to get inspired with a piece I need a concept, an idea, some friction of irreconcilables, that applies only to that piece. I do not have a habitual musical language that I can turn on and off like a spigot, or roll out by the yard, as so many composers do. So I get these inspirations like, hey, what if you had a rhythmic structure like this, but a harmonic rhythm that was totally independent of it, and you had to make it work and sound good anyway. Sounding good is the sticking point. I’ve had some compositional ideas I’ve carried around for decades, and I just can’t make them work, so I start a lot more pieces than I finish. And I am not like some of my fellow experimentalists I could name, who will find the concept sufficient and roar ahead with the work whether the listener can afterward tell what what the hell the piece was about or not. I conceive each work in some kind of arcane musical algebra, but if the initial results don’t sound wonderful and seductive, to me, I just won’t go through with it. Sometimes I try the same idea over every few years, and in several cases I’ve eventually figured out how to bring a recalcitrant concept to heel, usually by making my grandiose, austere premises simpler and/or more flexible.

Somehow I got, rather early, the idea that as long as I wrote over a hundred pieces in my career, I would consider that a respectable output. For some reason I did not want to be one of those composers known for their miniscule worklists of only 20 or 35 works: Webern, Varèse, Ruth Crawford, Ruggles, even Nancarrow (65, officially). For one thing, to make an impression with such a small catalogue requires not only a high consistency of quality but a trademark idiom, and I’m a little too variable in style and quality for that. And on the other hand, Beethoven only has 138 opus numbers, and though many of them are multiple works, anything over a hundred sounded vaguely in the ballpark. And some time in the past year, depending on what early works I feel like copping to in any current mood, I passed the one-hundred mark. With the two works I’m finishing up this week – a septet for the Ghost Ensemble called Sang Plato’s Ghost, and a chamber suite called Catskill Set – my official list has 105 titles. I made it!

And neither would I have wanted to be one of those composers who bombards the world with his or her fecundity. Darius Milhaud is one of my favorite composers, but a large percentage of his music sounds phoned in, and past the sixty or so fabulous pieces you quickly run into works that make you wonder why he bothered. Alan Hovhaness, similarly. I’m trying to figure out how much of Kaikhosru Sorabji’s music I really need to get familiar with. Composers like these need someone to write a book covering their complete output and letting all of us know what the gems are. It seems to me that extremely prolific composers create a perceptual barrier for themselves, because nobody after Schubert writes 500 masterpieces, and even a listening fan gets discouraged trying to profitably fill in the complete profile.

So “over a hundred” sounds good, and I can psychically relax a little. Breathes there the composer, today, who doesn’t occasionally stop and reflect that there’s already way too much good music in the world anyway, and that it seems either sadistic or masochistic to continue adding to it? I can keep composing when I’m really enjoying it, without the tad of psychic pressure in the back of my mind that I haven’t yet written enough. My worklist looks sufficiently respectable; a dozen or so of the works exceed a half-hour. And with having passed ten years as a blogger today as well, and finished the five chapters of my Ives book (out of fifteen, six of them already done) that I was determined to write before the semester started, I think that’s enough landmarks achieved for one summer.

REMINDER: Until the domain name transfers, my web site is currently here.

My web site is down at the moment. I was informed by Hostmonster, where I keep it, that my domain registration was going to expire. My domain was held by Melbourne IT. Melbourne IT informed me that they had sold it to Yahoo. Yahoo’s customer support is undoubtedly the absolute worst in the history of the internet. I keep circling through their website, and being told that I need to go to my “Business Control Panel,” and the link to that instead takes me back to the beginning and tries to sell me a domain name. I’ve tried everything. The other day I gave up after being on hold for 40 minutes. I did update my credit card info, and Hostmonster now tells me that my domain is good for another year, but I still can’t change the redirect for the same reasons given above. I don’t know how to negotiate this. Any advice welcome. In the meantime, if you have a Gann emergency and need to get to my website, there’s an alternate link here, thanks to Hostmonster, whose tech support is quick and efficient.

UPDATE, Aug. 27 – Transferred the domain name to Hostmonster, just waiting for Yahoo to release it, which could take a few days. Finally found a sympathetic text-support guy at Yahoo, too, ameliorating my above sentiment somewhat. Again, go here for the website in the meantime.

UPDATE, Sept. 2 – Web site is now functional again.

 

The International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) has asked me to give a talk on the state of American music at their November conference in Vienna – which strikes me as analogous to making Noam Chomsky the U.S. ambassador to the UN. I had to write a statement for their catalogue, which will be translated into German. Since it won’t appear in English, since the tenth anniversary has inspired me to think more about potential purposes for this blog, and since I have to expand it into a fuller paper, I thought I’d run it up the flagpole here and see who shoots at it. Also, the core of the argument relates to a book I’ve been asked to write and am mulling over, so feedback might help push me one way or another. Warning: the paper includes the words Uptown and Downtown, which is a blood-pressure hazard for some composers.

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The Uneasy, Unarticulated State of American Music

The term “American music” is devoid of specific connotative content today, even if we limit it to composed music in the concert tradition. If it means music made by Americans, Americans today come from all over the globe – and some whose ancestors were born here are working in global traditions. The American educational system pretty reliably exposes young composers to analysis of European modernist masterworks; jazz harmony; musical software; indigenous innovators such as Henry Cowell, John Cage, and Conlon Nancarrow; and a number of third-world musical traditions, most notably Indonesian gamelan, African drumming, Japanese gagaku, and Indian classical music. In addition, young composers absorb pop music and mass culture on their own. From this increasingly de-centered pedagogic tradition, they are understandably flung in all directions, flowing into a sea of aesthetic proclivities with myriad flavors but few demarcations or distinct categories.

This absolute openness in terms of aesthetic choices contrasts markedly, though, with drastic limitations on what kind of visibility or impact the composer can expect to achieve in American society. Major record labels continued to promote new music as a public service through the 1960s and ‘70s, but the corporate-friendly Reagan years made any such altruistic principles a thing of the past. Corporations now so heavily push kinds of music that can be easily categorized and that return a reliable profit that the amount of public distribution accorded new classical (or postclassical) music has decreased to a tiny trickle. It was reported during the 1980s that there were 40,000 self-identifying composers in the U.S. – by now the number must be considerably more than that. A few hundred of those, perhaps, can expect to become visible within a particular musical subculture. Those who manage to get a foothold in the orchestra circuit will receive marginally the most attention, for the capitalist reason that orchestras, which advertise heavily in newspapers, therefore get dependably reviewed by said newspapers. But even here, the bulk of the general audiences of those orchestras are more likely to consider the occasional living composer a necessary evil than a cultural leader.

It is arguable, I think, that there are no American composers today who have achieved the same public stature since 1980 as Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and John Adams did just prior to that date. While the obvious conclusion to be drawn from this would be that the generations of composers born after 1950 are rather lame, I suggest that another explanation is more compelling. The creativity of the best composers continues at a high level. But the skewed economics of distribution, combined with the sheer numbers of working composers and their smoothly-modulated rainbow of styles, makes it increasingly unlikely that any major figures commanding a wide consensus will emerge in the near future.

In 1967, musicologist Leonard Meyer published a fiery book that was widely read at the time: Music, the Arts, and Ideas. In it he predicted “the end of the Renaissance,” by which he meant that there would cease to be a musical mainstream, and that instead we would settle into an ahistorical period of stylistic stasis in which a panoply of styles would coexist. This seemed an outrageous forecast at the time, but Meyer’s prescience has been greatly confirmed.

The first stage of the breakup of the mainstream in American music was a separation in the 1960s and ‘70s into three large trends. The first was the stream of serialist music along an American adaptation of European 12-tone principles, which grew in political power and visibility during those decades. Almost at the same time, minimalism grew from the world of ideas John Cage had opened up, and offered a more timeless, less articulated aesthetic parallel to certain non-Western musics. Minimalism found a home in the lofts of Downtown Manhattan, and the music of the freer post-Cagean world came, by the late 1960s, to be called “Downtown music.” Serialist music grew to be mostly associated with academic music departments and ensembles, and after awhile – partly due to its association in Manhattan with Columbia University – earned the back-formation “Uptown music.” In the 1980s, some composers who rejected both minimalism and serialism, opting instead for a continuation of a more intuitively Romantic, conventionally orchestral modernist aesthetic, insisted on being called “Midtown” instead. Several of the most prominent “Midtowners,” such as George Rochberg, David Del Tredici, John Corigliano, and William Bolcom, actually returned to employing the conventions of late Romanticism (Mahler’s idiom being especially popular) with an accompanying dose of irony, satire, or collage. In 1983 the term “New Romantic” was coined for this development.

These divisions played havoc with the paradigmatic modernist duality of conservative versus avant-garde. Most obviously, the prior association of tonality with conservatism and atonality with avant-garde fell apart. The Uptown serialists could claim to be avant-garde for posing the most challenges to the audience’s perception. The Downtown minimalists could claim avant-gardeness by having transcended European genres and embracing a world aesthetic. And the Midtown New Romantics could claim avant-gardeness for having jettisoned even the modernist assumption of stylistic homogeneity. A composer writing a highly tonal piece might be taking Benjamin Britten (conservative) as a model, or Arvo Pärt (avant-garde); and who cold tell for sure?

The battles among these three segments of the composing community, each trying to take on the mantle (and attendant funding and distribution) of the new mainstream, were fierce, played out in newspaper diatribes, college classrooms, and lecture halls. After a few years, though, this state of things began to dissolve. First of all, the number of 12-tone pieces (or at least the number of composers publicly extolling 12-tone principles) fell off dramatically in the late 1980s. Minimalism, entering the orchestra world through commissions given to Glass and Adams in particular, became somewhat watered down from its original hard-core principles, and morphed into a textural lingua franca. The extremes declined, as did the prestige of being on the extreme. The shape of American music went from looking like three separate streams to more like a bell curve. There are still adherents of the “New Complexity” in the U.S., Jay Alan Yim possibly the best known. At the other end of the curve, there are those attached to the Wandelweiser school of silence and extreme duration and simplicity, like Michael Pisaro. But that the guru of New Complexity is a British composer, Brian Ferneyhough, and the Wandelweiser a European group, may further suggest how un-American it is to be an extremist these days.

It is against the background of those battles that many of the composers born after 1975 have defined themselves. The new generation of composers is conflict-averse, its discourse reduced to a broadly tolerant pragmatism. However much the young composers believe they have blessedly transcended ideology and partisanship, though, they have nevertheless inherited some of the previous attitudes in a less articulated form. Instead of distinct categories, what we have is a continuum of opinions along the accessibility/difficulty scale: how much should the composer keep the audience in mind? What should be the relation, if any, to pop music? Is the educated elite of academia a sufficient audience? Should the composer ignore all questions of perceptibility and follow his pleasure? Is there, indeed, any way to predict what music will go over well with an audience and what won’t? Does the long tail phenomenon of internet distribution render all such questions moot? What is most typical of American music at the moment, I would argue, is a large-scale, implicit, almost publicly unarticulated debate on the social use of music, of what it is made for.

For obvious reasons, the composers who actively court public relevance have been the most visible. Starting in 1987, the Bang on a Can festival, run by Michael Gordon, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe, has championed music of a hard-hitting, exciting profile. The baseball-cap-wearing founders have distanced themselves from the perceived elitism of classical music presentation, presenting in unusual and informal spaces and replacing the formality of program notes with personal appearances by each composer performed. A certain amount of rock-star wanna-beism is in evidence. The much quieter Common Sense collective, a bicoastal group of eight composers including Dan Becker, Carolyn Yarnell, Belinda Reynolds, and others, has banded together to seek group commissions from ensemble to ensemble, like a roving herd of compositional locusts. With these new paradigms begin the strategies of most composers who have become visible since. 1. Eschew elitism and traditional formality in presentation, regardless of what the music is like. 2. Control your own distribution and the means to create your own performances. In either case, take your music into your own hands and be independent of existing institutions.

The Bang on a Can people eventually formed their own label, Canteloupe. Probably the most visible group of younger composers in recent years is that united by another such startup, the New Amsterdam label, including Judd Greenstein, Nico Muhly, William Brittelle, Corey Dargel, and others. Brittelle’s theater music tackles the conventions of television. Dargle’s works are elaborately composed pop songs on texts of sometimes shocking personal honesty. Anti-Social Music, despite its ironic name, is a group (including Pat Muchmore, Andrea La Rose, and others) that has specialized in extreme informality of presentation, often setting off the music with abundant humor and surreality. ThingNY, run by Paul Pinto, is an ensemble that has tried publicity stunts such as commissioning brief works via mass e-mailings. The resulting styles of all this music are not always predictable from the format, the emphasis being on finding a new presentation paradigm free from associations of either conventional classical music performance or the stylistic subcultures of the 1980s.

That these groups have garnered the most publicity does not mean their approach is numerically dominant. A probably larger number of composers still move through more traditional channels, attending the most prestigious possible grad school, studying with influential teachers, applying for prizes and awards, and angling for orchestral commissions. Even here, a correlation with style and idiom cannot be assumed. One of the most successful young composers on the orchestra circuit, Mason Bates, moonlights as a club DJ. His orchestral works such as Omnivorous Furniture (2004) typically include him playing a noisy music of pop beats from his laptop in the center of the orchestra. Even so, there is an intermittent streak of lyric romanticism in his music, possibly drawn from his studies with one of the seminal New Romantics, John Corigliano. Some mention should also be made of how widespread the influence of John Adams has become on young musicians’ orchestral music. His propulsive repeating brass chords, dotted by abundant and explosive percussion, have become a rather well-defined style of their own. And since so many commissions for living composers are in the form of ten-minute concert openers, this style/format combination has acquired the jocular nickname “subscriber modernism.”

Microtonality is a steadily growing field, more so on the West Coast. Composers working in equal-step scales are far more numerous, and their music tends toward esoteric complexity; those fewer working in just intonation, with Ben Johnston and La Monte Young as models, often opt for meditativeness. Boston has its own microtonal subculture based on a 72-pitch-to-the-octave scale, based on the practice of Ezra Sims and the late Joe Maneri. This overall trend remains impeded by technological hurdles and performance difficulties. John Adams, though, made an unusually public microtonal statement with his 2003 orchestra work The Dharma at Big Sur, which incorporated natural harmonics in the brass.

Moving outward from these recent, more definable trends, it is fairly impossible to generalize further about what’s going on in American music. American composers write for Javanese gamelan with or without orchestral instruments and electric guitars (Evan Ziporyn has been active in this area); perform music from their laptops; write symphonies; create sophisticated MIDI versions of orchestral music; subvert pop-music conventions (a specialty of Mikel Rouse); base their music in Balkan singing styles. While many composers make an ambitious bid for social relevance, many, many others are content to accept their marginalization in American culture in return for total autonomy. One thing we all grow slowly more aware of is our increasing disadvantage, as individual low-subsidy artists, in terms of technological sound production compared to the massive resources of corporate film and popular music. Wealth brings a sonic sophistication that the autonomous sound-experimenter can only envy.

One can only report that musical creativity continues at a high level in the United States, pursued under a troubling and sometimes debilitating set of circumstances. At one end is the corporate world of commercial music with its untold riches and aesthetic co-optation; at the other end, the rarified air of the unpublic career totally subsidized by academia. In between are thousands of composers trying to strategize an artistically fulfilling career in a capitalist society run amok, poisoned by money and ruled for the benefit of the richest 0.1 percent. In short, we are all, every one of us, trying to discern what kind of music it might be satisfying, meaningful, and/or socially useful to make in a corporate-controlled oligarchy. The answers are myriad, the pros and cons of each still unproven. We maintain our idealism and do the best we can.

 

The new-music blogosphere seems to have exploded into existence in the summer of 2003, judging from the number of such blogs celebrating their tenth anniversaries lately. Although I wrote a couple of entries beforehand, I saved the official unveiling of my blog for August 29, 2003 – without even reflecting, as I recall, that it was the 51st anniversary of the premiere of 4’33” (and of course not knowing that it would become the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina). I also, inexplicably, failed to check the prevailing astrological transits, whose oppositions of Mars and Uranus to practically everything else guaranteed, in advance, plenty of heated argument. Anyway, PostClassic’s own tenth anniversary is upon me, and I suppose it would be churlish of me not to complete the cultural moment with an accounting of my own activity.

Scattered among the celebrations are some laments, apparently initiated by the always sympathetic Elaine Fine, that new-music blogs are attracting fewer and fewer readers, or in other cases going inactive (though others have applied more technological sophistication than I possess to disputing these impressions). I imagine that I am one of the blogs considered as having arrived at the inactive category, down from as many as 27 posts in a month to as few as two quite often lately, and those mostly announcements. I’m sure that my readership is a small fraction of what it used to be, and I am quite happy about that. Weary of finding my most bedrock perceptions deemed controversial, I am content to preach to the choir that remains (Hi David!, Paul, Lois, Doug, Lyle, Brian, John…). It is tasteless, I realize, to repeat compliments one has received privately, but I was told this weekend I had become the Bad Boy of music just by thinking too deeply about matters that everyone else takes for granted. I’m sure others would formulate it differently. As I’ve said before, I write my music for the multitudes, but I would prefer PostClassic be a haven for that tiny minority of musicians who share my views on new music – such as, that it should be written for the multitudes. If my audience further dwindles to the point that this becomes an unnoticed site for my private musings nicely typeset and illustrated, that will be sufficient. In my 20s I kept a journal, and I enjoy the hobby.

The truth is, I’m in rehab. My decades-long lifestyle as a music critic had made me an attention addict, and I consciously decided to recover. Unable to get a composing career quickly off the ground in the years following grad school, I made it my strategy to flash my name into the public eye every week. In the ’90s I was publishing more than a hundred articles a year (with considerable economic incentive, mind you, since I had no other living). The Village Voice began shaving down my column starting around 1999; PostClassic gave me a panoramic word-count again, and, miraculously releasing me from the necessity of news pegs, left my subject matter wide open as well. You may have noticed that I’m a compulsive writer. I believe I’ve published more than four million words. A year ago a magazine editor called me, begging for a 1500-word article to fill an unexpected gap; I wrote it in 75 minutes and sent it to her. I’m not the best, but I’m sure as hell the fastest. Spewing words out into the world every week had become a habit. At some point I realized I was being buoyed along by my own momentum, and getting less and less of what I wanted from it in return. My son worried about his black metal band Liturgy getting “overexposed,” and I started to feel somewhat overexposed myself.

On the morning of July 1, 2011, for whatever internal reason, I woke up and abruptly realized that I was tired of the effort, and most of my other efforts as well. I had been living as a martyr for certain benign forces in new music (Downtown, experimental, accessible), and I didn’t want to be a martyr anymore. I wanted to self-indulge, satisfy my own aims more directly, and let the culture-at-large go to hell if it was so adamantly determined to. I had already been complaining for a year. I was, and remain, particularly weary of the composing world. We raise young composers with grand expectations that will almost certainly remain unfulfilled, and the chief proficiency they emerge with is a vast verbal and conceptual framework for invalidating the music of others. There has to be something about the way composers are trained that makes us all so competitive, rigid, and ungenerous; an education that prepares anyone for that kind of life is a mockery. This past weekend some colleagues from another school and I marveled at how many kids keep coming to college to be composers, and wondered what in hell they think they will ever get from doing so. On that day in 2011 I changed course, though it’s still not fully clear what my new direction is yet. That month I wrote only one blog entry, a brief paragraph. I needed to relearn what not being heard from frequently felt like.

This past weekend I also had a visit with Russian musicologist Olga Manulkina, who has written a thick history of American music, in Russian. She wanted some advice about teaching American music, she said, because the composers at her school harshly disparage John Cage and minimalism, and tell her she shouldn’t be teaching them. She looked astonished when I chuckled and replied, “Just like in America.” She wants to bring me to St. Petersburg to lecture for a new music criticism and arts management program she’s involved in, and she asked me what kind of vision I would present to the students. Pressed, I fell back almost by rote on my old catechism: “I believe that music can be intelligent, innovative, and original, and still be attractive and accessible to large audiences.” That was the philosophy behind the New Music America festivals (1979-1990), which ran from when I was in grad school to my peak years at the Voice, and of which I rather consider myself a product, having been involved with the second and fourth and having reviewed the later ones. I think it’s also the philosophy of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which I consider the country’s most honorable large arts presenter. So like most of us I’m a creature of the time and place of my youth: a relic of the late-’70s new-music boom, and withal something of a dinosaur.

“Music can be intelligent, innovative, and original, and still be attractive and accessible to large audiences.” That’s the vision I would keep rooting for in PostClassic, but I’ve said it in these pages every way I can think of, and they’re all available in the archives. The idea seems to achieve less and less traction. There is no longer any visible sector of the music scene that embodies it, and so all my explanations start over from scratch. Every restatement brings arguments I’ve defended myself from a hundred times. No progress is made. Every year hundreds of new composition graduates descend on the world having dutifully absorbed from their teachers that audiences can’t be thought about, and that musical obscurity is a sign of integrity. Meanwhile I’ve discovered the cool contentment of writing about long-dead composers, and am getting interested enough in 19th-century religious disputes as part of my Ives research that I wonder if my next big phase shouldn’t take me outside of music altogether. Unlike music, scholarship can become more fun the more esoteric it gets.

In short, the relative quiescence of PostClassic should not be taken as constituting evidence that the music-blogosphere is dying, or that fewer people are reading music blogs, or any other collective trend. Any synchronicity between me and them is purely coincidental. It’s just a certain point in my life.

 

During the Civil War, Joseph Twichell, future father-in-law of Charles Ives, worked as a Congregational chaplain in the Union Army next to a Jesuit priest named Joseph O’Hagan, with whom he became lifelong close friends. After the 1862 Battle of Fredericksburg, the two exhausted themselves helping the wounded, and then slept huddled together beneath blankets against the December cold. O’Hagan laughed, and, when Twichell asked him what was funny, replied, “The scene of you and me – me, a Jesuit priest, and you, a Puritan minister of the worst kind, spooned together under the same blankets.” Twichell loved telling this story at renunions. I found it on page 97 of Steve Courtney’s excellent Joseph Hopkins Twichell: The Life and Times of Mark Twain’s Closest Friend, which is an eminently enjoyable history of a lot of pre-Ives background, though eccentric son-in-law Ives is only mentioned in a few spots.

So this clearly explains the oddly uncontextualized comment Ives drops in on page 85 of his Essays, where he says that Beethoven, upon having his orchestration updated by Mahler, was probably “in the same amiable state of mind that the Jesuit priest said God was when He looked down on the camp ground and saw the priest sleeping with a Congregational chaplain.” What a weird little personal thing to include (and potentially confusing given today’s euphemistic use of the phrase). I’m finding a lot of little explanatory factoids about the Essays and am having trouble placing them in the narrative; maybe easier to put them here.

 

My good pianist friend Lois Svard, with whom I used to teach at Bucknell and for whom I wrote my Desert Sonata, got interested in her last years at Bucknell in neurological aspects of creativity and taught classes in it every year. She’s done creativity workshops for corporations, too. And now she’s started a blog on the subject called The Musician’s Brain. I look forward to it.

The past two days have been among the most remarkable I’ve had in years. John Luther Adams and his wife Cindy came up from the city to visit, composers Robert Carl and Ken Steen came from Hartford to attend some of the Bard festival, and we all spent part of yesterday attending the performances of Robert Ashley’s Perfect Lives by the New York group Varispeed, which took place in various spots west of Woodstock. Here are Robert, Ken, Cindy, and John (wearing my new hat) on my deck:

(You can click on these photos and they’ll open in better focus.) The Perfect Lives performances, which I missed when Varispeed did them in New York two years ago, were quite remarkable, uncannily true to the spirit of Ashley’s work though somewhat altered in format. A new movement was performed every two hours, each one in a different space corresponding to the setting of that scene in the opera. We arrived in time for the “Supermarket” episode, which took place in the IGA store in Boiceville (Ashley can be seen in a light blue shirt sitting in the back on the right):

 
Here’s Bob and John:

For each scene a different performer played the Ashley/narrator role, and at the IGA Paul Pinto (seen here a little in the back left with a microphone) did a stunning job of channeling Ashley through the store’s PA system:

With instrumentalists in pursuit they threaded up and down the isles of the supermarket, followed by a staunch Ashley crowd of about 75 who were there all day, plus dozens of shoppers who were just trying to buy groceries; one man, John told me, got disgusted and stormed out without his purchases, and I replied, “Just like a regular concert.” Ashley, meanwhile, looking pleased as punch, stood around using a grocery cart as a walker; here he’s joined by John and my wife Nancy:

The fun of having an opera meander through a grocery store, around real customers, was too fun to be believed. Ken asked me “Is this the future of opera?” I said, “I think you’re being optimistic.”

Before heading to Phoenecia for the “Church” scene, we made a slight detour to see the Maverick Concert Hall, where 4’33” was premiered, and which the others had never seen before. Though the hall was closed, they assembled in the outdoor seating as though they thought they could get a lecture out of me about it:

Singer Aliza Simons did a beautiful job in Ashley’s role presiding over the opera’s wedding scene at Phoenicia United Methodist Church, her voice at the end starting to sing more in the inflection style of Ashley regular Jacqueline Humbert:

“The Backyard” (the scenes were played out of order for logistical reasons that will be obvious if you think about it) took place in the vegetable garden of Mount Tremper Arts, the organization that bravely sponsored the marathon. As Ray Spiegel did a ripping job on tablas, Gelsey Bell sang the role of Isolde, standing in the doorway to her mother’s house, and Aliza Simons walked around the perimeter barefoot playing the occasional accordion riff:

Ashley (here with his wife Mimi Johnson standing behind him, John Luther Adams in the background) was transfixed:

It was an incredibly moving, incredibly poetic event. Unfortunately we had to get John and Cindy to a train station, and missed the last two scenes, but a Pittsburgh performance is planned that I may try to make it to. Varispeed did a phenomenal job of taking Perfect Lives apart, putting it back together their own way, and keeping the spirit completely intact.

The previous evening we had all eaten at Mexican Radio in Hudson:

Ken, Robert, John, and I are, I suppose, as simpatico a group of four composers you could find anywhere. All being ardent Ivesians, we were discussing my Ives book, and John reminded us all why he’s John Luther Adams by asking a pointed question that I, with my habitual verbosity, would have never ventured, but which elicited his usual profound results. He challenged each one of us to come up with the one word that summed up Ives’s significance for us. Ken said “Freedom.” Robert said “Miscegenation” – and then explained that what he meant by it was “reconciling irreconcilables.” John, for himself, said “Space.” And I said “Oversoul” – maybe because I’m reading too much Emerson lately, but also because a close reading of the Essays has convinced me that what Ives most valued was the suprapersonal expression that came from beyond the artist’s individual ego, which has always been a concern of mine as well. I’m sure each of us said something deep about our own music in the process.

And then, because all four composers had brought bottles of expensive scotch, we went home to continue the discussion.

 

I had not planned to get into Charles Ives’s actual religious beliefs, but I find that I can’t fully dissect his Emerson essay without addressing them. Four times in Essays Before a Sonata Ives refers approvingly to “Dr. Bushnell.” This is Horace Bushnell (1802-1876), a Congregationalist minister whose sermons were widely read in the 19th century, and who is sometimes described as having caused a revolution in liberal Christianity. He preached in Hartford from 1833 to 1859. Like the Transcendentalists, he rebelled against his Calvinist training, did not believe in taking the scriptures as ultimate truth, and promoted a “theology of the feelings” over a “theology of the intellect.” He was, in fact, accused of heresy by the Congregationalist church, and denounced by most ministers of his denomination, and his North Church in Hartford had to separate from the Consociation to prevent him from being removed. And yet, although Bushnell looks from today’s perspective like a congenial fellow traveler with the Transcendentalists, he was actually scandalized by their emphasis on nature, their interest in Buddhist and Hindu scriptures, and their reliance on personal intuition. In his Nature and the Supernatural he wrote of Emerson,

Who is a finer master of English than Mr. Emerson? Who offers fresher thoughts in shapes of beauty more fascinating? Intoxicated by his brilliant creations, the reader thinks, for the time, that he is getting inspired. And yet, when he has closed the essay or the volume, he is surprised to find – who has ever failed to notice it? – that he is disabled, disempowered, reduced in tone. He has no great thought or purpose in him; and the force or capacity for it seems to be gone.

[To continue from the draft of my book:]

Ives’s evident but non-specific admiration of Bushnell would hardly concern us were it not for the more immediate influence of Bushnell’s chief protégé. In 1865, Bushnell’s supporters built the Asylum Hill Congregational Church in Hartford, and accepted as pastor, on Bushnell’s fervent recommendation, a former Union chaplain just back from the Civil War with whom he had been highly impressed: Joseph Hopkins Twichell (1838-1918). Twichell, of course, would later father a beautiful daughter named Harmony, whom Ives would marry in 1908. Even so, Bushnell’s reputation had been so besmirched that the church’s examining council had to be carefully assured that Twichell would tread a less radical path than his mentor….

And so Ives wrote the Emerson essay around the time of the death of his beloved father-in-law, who had been the close protégé of a theological writer who considered Emerson a dangerous heretic. Ives does not directly adjudicate among their beliefs, and in fact probably felt rather sharply that he was stepping through a minefield of theological controversy between two (if not among three, including Bushnell) of his heroes. He must have had little interest in doctrinal specifics, and a tremendous personal incentive not to step on toes. Consequently his essay provides mixed evidence on how far he will follow Emerson theologically. He refers, for instance, to Emerson’s denial of the validity of the Lord’s Supper as “a youthful sedition,” seeming to equate it with an “excess of enthusiasm at the inception of a movement [that] causes loss of perspective….” (p. 18); and yet it was this issue that led Emerson to the fateful point of resigning his Unitarian ministry….

[Aside from the various Transcendentalist and non-Transcendentalist precepts he alludes to,] I suspect Ives was tightly drawn to Emerson because of the parallelism he saw between their respective projects. The Transcendentalists rejected the primacy of scripture, considering it “merely the words of men who interpreted the divine Logos in their own languages and through their own cultural dispositions.” Relying on linguistics and examination of manuscripts, they subjected the truths of religion to rigorous scientific examination. They came to believe, no longer in a God who was separate from man, but in a divinity in which each man partook. Therefore, a human being could draw on his own intuition and psychology for religious truth, rather than accepting the dogma of scriptures and the established church that mandated their correct interpretation. However strongly or weakly Ives may have felt this religious truth, musically, he was in exactly the same situation the early Transcendentalists had been in theologically. He had been taught that he must use the same chords, the same voice-leadings, the same genres and forms used by the great European composers. His intuition, his psychology, his knowledge of acoustic science told him something different. He did not have to accept received authority in his field any more than the Transcendentalists did in theirs. Like them, he had to make a complete break and rely radically on his own intuition.

Emerson left the Unitarian Church in 1832, nominally because he could no longer believe in the sanctity of Communion, but more deeply because he could no longer teach the church’s required dogma. In a strikingly parallel way, Ives left his church organ job and the music world in 1902 because he could no longer believe in the limited, conservative music that world required. Emerson’s break came at age 29, Ives’s at 27. This lends a certain poignancy to Ives’s whimsy about how the theory-pedagogue Jadassohn wouldn’t have been able to analyze Emerson’s harmony, “if Emerson were literally a composer” (p. 24); as though Ives recognized that he and his hero were not so much in agreement as in parallel situations. The difference between the Transcendentalists and Ives, one that he probably knew little about and wouldn’t have cared about had he known, is that they were spurred on by European models: Victor Cousin, Swedenborg, Coleridge. Ives had no European models to begin with, and such ones as came by – Debussy, Scriabin – seemed comparatively timid and inadequate. His ultimate unity with the Transcendentalists was not that he shared their religious beliefs, but that he, too, was fated to break away from teaching, tradition, and authority, to make up a new kind of music out of his own intuition and imagination.

* * * * * * * * *

What’s really puzzling me is the last line of Ives’s Emerson essay, which refers to “the Soul of humanity knocking at the door of the Divine mysteries, radiant in the faith that it will be opened – and the human become the Divine!” This concept of deification (reminiscent of certain early Church fathers like Athanasius) doesn’t seem to be a Transcendentalist idea, and it sure as hell isn’t Bushnell, either!

 

 

My family origins are humble. My Texas grandfather Frank Gann was a cotton farmer, my Louisiana grandfather William Henry Harris a bank robber – or so claimed Grandmother, who threw him out and we never heard from him again. My favorite uncle Irvin was a greyhound racer and drive-in restaurant manager (Prince of Hamburgers, Lemmon Ave., Dallas), my sainted aunt Rita spent her career as cashier at Jay’s Cafeteria. My dad, who parlayed his GI-Bill-financed SMU degree into an accounting job at Mobil Oil, was the family success story. But my mother’s mother, if poor, was fanatical about education, and that’s the family force, booming through my music-teacher mother, that resulted in me. Grandmother (1899-1986, pictured below in 1939) was a grade-school history and English teacher in Jennings, Louisiana, and the sole distributor for World Book Encyclopedia for the whole state. Three husbands swelled her full name to Frances Gill Harris Ross Dyess, but for most of the three decades she and I overlapped she was known as Frances Ross.

I’ve been back in McKinney, Texas, for a few days visiting my mother, and have become heir to some of Grandmother’s papers. A poet and painter, she self-published a little book of poetry titled “Sylvan Sweets” when I was a kid, and her paintings hung on the walls of our house. I’ve looked through her 1952 Master’s thesis, about regional theater in small towns of southern Louisiana. And while I was never too impressed with “Sylvan Sweets,” I’ve found that some of her poems that weren’t included seem better, to me, than the ones that were. She wrote a whole lot more poetry than I’d realized. She wasn’t the T.S. Eliot of Louisiana; she wasn’t even the Ella Wheeler Wilcox. Nevertheless I feel compelled to air a few of her poems here, not for the sake of their literary merit, about which I make no claims, but because I hate to see so much creativity run aground in a plastic container in the attic, and it deserves one chance to fly free to whomever might find something in it. So here are a few poems of the mid-century Louisiana poet Frances Ross, with a couple of her paintings, of which her portraits of magnolia blossoms were the most accomplished.

Jenny

“Jenny,” he said, as she lazily swung
In an old hammock securely slung
Beneath two aged oaks. They towered above
Him as he sprawled nearby. “Now if it’s love
You are speaking of, you are so surely right.
She has everything of beauty, – bright
As a yellow daffodil.” Jenny’s release
Of her breath and prayer to hold her peace
Were hard – full well she knew her sister’s charms.
How many times they had filled her with alarms.
“Please,” her prayer resumed, “don’t let him see
Just how much this is affecting me.”
“Jenny,” his voice came again, soft and slow,
“It’s you I love, somehow I thought you’d know.”

* * * * * * * * * * *

Seventeen

Would that you were seventeen? Ah, no!
For each day brings its tale of woe.
Misunderstood at every turn;
Seems as if I can never learn
If I am nice they say I’m bold,
If but polite they call me cold,
If I laugh not they say I lack
A sense of humor and some tact,
But when I grin and try to see
Just how humorous I can be
They call me down and say I’m cute,
Oh, would that I could ever suit.
But what care I for what they say?
For I am I, and they are they,
For surely when I older grow,
Their artful ways I’ll get to know.

* * * * * * * * * *

February

February
is a facetious lady
Lightly joking
Her time away,
Cold, aloof,
Intriguing, shady,
In an inappropriate way.

* * * * * * * * * * *

A Flower (1967)

In my youth a slender wild flower grew
Fragile, white, it took me half a lifetime
Its name to know, its stem to safely chew.
Of its brave charm I knew no lilting rhyme.
Across many a lot it followed me;
It waved to me of flaunting love;
It shared my burdens a faith fit to see;
It counselled me of God’s will above.
It solaced me when my plans went astray
And left me unconsoled by former friends;
It nodded to me when life was free and gay,
ANd offered its star-shaped petaled joy to lend.
A rare specimen was this? Ah, no.
A wild onion flower with heart aglow!

* * * * * * * * * *

Love

Love plays no favorites, it greets and goes,
Capricious it follows the whims of chance;
As fresh as dew, as fadeless as the rose,
Born of a searching gaze, a passing glance.
Unheeding its true worth, we let it go;
Or is it better to aspire a new
And unexplored love to lend a glow
Than tend the altar of ashes we knew?
Old loves dominate my evasive dreams;
I resist, or surrender to their fate,
Until my yesterdays, torn at their seams,
Recapture a Neptune charm, all too late.
Love is the golden thread of brightest gleam
Shining through material of lesser mien.

* * * * * * * * *

And here are the magnolia paintings, one sentimental and conventional, the other rather more abstract and modernist: