Archives for January 2014

I hope that the music world has been focusing plenty of attention on Sarah Cahill’s recent concert at San Quentin of works Henry Cowell wrote while he was incarcerated there. The more I read about it, the more historic it sounds, not only in terms of an understanding of Cowell’s life, but also in terms of touching the musically talented inmates held there now. Apparently there’s a long tradition of music as an outlet for prisoners there, Cowell being only the most celebrated (if that is the proper word yet) example.

Minimalists in the news: The Society for Minimalist Music now has a Facebook page, where the Society’s events will be publicized along with various performances and analyses of minimalist music. (I am on Facebook under an assumed name, so you won’t know me when you see me there.) The buzz at the moment is about Tom Johnson’s series of radio programs about composers of his generation, Music by My Friends. Not mentioned on the Facebook page yet, though it should be, is a festival this weekend at Wright State University, “Steve Reich and the Heritage of Minimalism.”

Juhani Nuorvala tells me that my Finnish debut, his playing of Fugitive Objects, went well. But he adds, “the problem with these microtonal concerts is that the intervals are so small there’s never enough time for a decent drink.”

(Sigh.)

I find out too late to make the trip, but Juhani Nuorvala informs me that he’s playing my retuned keyboard piece Fugitive Objects on a program of experimental music in Helsinki tomorrow. There’s also music by Pauline Oliveros, Steve Reich, Roger Smalley, Maija Hynninen, Timo Tuhkanen, and others, plus a celebration of Alvin Lucier that extends through the 26th. Helsinki, of course, will be the site of the 2015 minimalism conference, and I’m much looking forward to being there myself in a year and a half.

Pardon a little self-indulgence, but wow, what a great gig I had in Buffalo today. It was a Gann/Ives program at the Unitarian Universalist Church; Paula McGirr sang my song “Faith” (which she’d sung 25 years earlier) and Ives’s “Serenity,” and Daniel Bassin conducted The Unanswered Question and my Transcendental Sonnets, with the UUCB Choir and members of the Buffalo Philharmonic. TS was a stretch for the choir, but they sang their hearts out, were totally focused, the momentum grew with each movement, and it was one of those occasions in which I was touched deep down by the emotionality of my own music. One thing I loved was that the Buffalo News critic said in an advance article that the piece might remind listeners of Benjamin Britten. I’m proud of the fact that I can use ostinatos of seven against eleven going out of phase, quintuplet polyrhythms, postminimalist structures of tritone-related harmonies, and still pass as a conservative. And quite a few singers told me afterward what I’m used to hearing from performers: “At first I thought the music was impossible and you were asking too much from us, but then I suddenly got a feel for how to do it.”

I have two public gigs this month. The first is this Sunday, Jan. 12, at 2, when I will appear on a panel at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum called “John Cage and the Contemporary Cultural Landscape,” being presented in connection with an art exhibit on the theme of silence. I appear to be the only musicologist, along with featured artists Xaviera Simmons and Simon Blackmore, and Fluxus curator Jon Hendricks. The Aldrich is at 258 Main Street in Ridgefield, CT.

The more ego-gratifying event will be a performance of my Transcendental Sonnets the following Sunday, Jan. 19, also at 2 PM. Dan Bassin, who graduated from Bard’s master’s conducting program and who now directs the U. of Buffalo orchestra, will conduct the UUCB Choir and members of the Buffalo Philharmonic at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Buffalo, 695 Elmwood Avenue. It’s only the second performance with full orchestral accompaniment, the first having been the Indianapolis premiere in 2002. The Transcendentalists having broken off from the Unitarians, I like to think of this as something of a rapprochement.

Make sure you don’t miss David First’s cosmic and bumptiously entertaining article “The Entertainer” that went up on New Music Box today. Along with his own personal view of music history, it’s a plea for composers to start making music that actually heals people and makes life better, a return to the Renaissance concept of music as magic. As someone who’s followed David’s career closely for a quarter-century, I can attest that this is an endpoint he’s been visibly and aurally heading towards for decades. And I’m very sympathetic. It was reading about the astrological healing music of the 15th-century Marsilio Ficino that led me to writing The Planets, and I have bought and tried out Chinese healing CDs that are supposed to lower your blood pressure, balance yin and yang, and stuff like that. But in my own music I’ve always been content with metaphor, ambience, and suggestion; David’s actually hoping to rearrange your molecules. Somebody’s gotta try it.

UPDATE: Also, make sure you listen to the drone piece clickable at the top of the article. It made very cool interactions with my tinnitus, seeming to draw my usual drone pitches into it and make them go in and out, neutralizing them at times. It’s the first time I’ve ever noticed my tinnitus while listening to music and could actually enjoy it.

From my minimalism seminar, I received analysis papers on Reich’s Double Sextet, Dan Becker’s Gridlock, Rzewski’s Coming Together, Pärt’s Tabula Rasa and Fratres, Laurie Spiegel, and Mikel Rouse’s Dennis Cleveland. My 20th/21st-century history class yielded papers on Ives; Laurie Anderson; Julius Eastman (an analysis of Evil Nigger); a comparison of Emeralds, Eliane Radigue, and La Monte Young as drone groups/composers; Steve Reich (by a kid who had sworn he had no interest in minimalism); Cage as postmodernist; Henry Flynt and Milton Babbitt compared (!); and text usage in Schoenberg, Berio, and Ashley. I have certainly taught my share of Beethoven, 19th-century, and Renaissance counterpoint classes, but I spent this semester doing what I spent my life training to do, which is an opportunity not to be sneezed at.

It is instructive and often gratifying to see what my students choose to write about, for I give them wide latitude. That their choices show evidence of my influence is rarely the correct assumption. When I started to bring up Becker’s Gridlock, the student who wrote that paper instantly begged me not to analyze the piece in class, because he had his heart set on writing his final paper about it. The violinist who wrote about Coming Together had played in it many times before taking my class. Henry Flynt was not someone I had thought of mentioning. Two students in the history class brought up Julius Eastman before I did, and regaled me with the story of how he took off a man’s clothes during a performance of Cage’s Songbooks; I enjoyed responding, “Yeah, I was there.” Some of them harbor their own obsessions with exactly the history of music I’m most involved with, and I can’t always tell how much they connect me with it. It is certainly reassuring, though, to see young people independently attaching tremendous importance to the same things that were important to me.