Archives for March 2014

This comment on the Concord Sonata by John Kirkpatrick, included by him in a July 25, 1937, letter to Ives, is very perceptive, attests to the depth of Kirkpatrick’s aesthetic taste, and is well worth keeping in mind given the occasional charges of formlessness (unjustly) brought against the work:

I don’t know any long work that is so triumphantly sure in the instinctive justness of its timing – and it’s not a piece that has anything to do with nice balances, but the kind of rhapsodic outburst of strong substances that ordinarily makes for disappointing proportion as in Emanuel Bach or betrays the effort of adjustment as in Beethoven. But this treats its subjects in great free round shapes of music that move or plunge into each other with obvious spontaneity, and yet when one gets off at a distance and looks at it in perspective, there is no aspect of it that does not offer an ever fresh variety of interesting cross relation and beautifully significant proportion.

– Tom C. Owen, Selected Correspondence of Charles Ives, pp. 256-7

In the flurry of information going around on Robert Ashley, I just learned that Dalkey Archives, publisher of Ashley’s libretto for Perfect Lives, has my introduction to the new edition available online. I’ve always been proud of it, and Bob told me at one point that he had read it over and over, because, he said, “it makes me feel good.” Plus, via Carson Cooman, here’s Ashley’s Lullaby for violin and piano written in 2011, from an Australian recording I hadn’t heard before. A fitting memorial and quite a surprise.

There’s been some discussion, a little of it uncharitable, about whether Ashley was as misunderstood and insufficiently recognized as some of his admirers claim. The obvious rejoinder to that is that he wrote his operas for television, and only one of them got produced and broadcast in that medium. The expense was too overwhelming. He was a visionary dreamer at a time when our culture was quickly losing its capacity to dream, and its desire to make dreams come true. Those of us who love his operas are sadly aware that we can’t completely experience them the way he envisioned them,

as a television series, with each episode having some meaning and humor in itself, but ultimately part of a larger something that only makes sense when you come to know it. Television devotees who have watched The Honeymooners for most of their lives finally come to know something that they wouldn’t know if they had only seen one episode. Same for Star Trek. These were my models. I have had to compromise the form of the presentation of my operas, because I was not able to get into television. But they are pure television. They are meant to be heard and seen by two people sitting on a couch, having a drink, occasionally a snack, occasionally going to the toilet, finally giving up and going to bed because of a hard day of work. They are meant to be seen many times. The details pile up, and finally there is a glimmer of the larger idea. This is my idea of opera.

I imagine some more advanced civilization, hundreds of years from now, coming back to Ashley’s operas and finally realizing them in their intended form, the way we revive Baroque opera in detailed technological splendor now.

And then there’s the perennial classical-music snob’s reaction to Ashley, so anticipatable that I reflexively brace for it: “But is that really opera?” A primeval fish watches a lizard learning to scramble around on the dry land, and asks, “But is that really swimming?” “Don’t you love opera enough,” I want to reply, “to get excited about the next step in its evolution?” Bob was a giant, come too late in the sense that the civilization he lived in had quit believing in progress, and too early in the sense that few people could see the future he imagined with such detailed foresight. Even so, I’ve been gratified by all the reports yesterday of how many people are deeply, deeply attached to his music.

 

It’s already speeding around Facebook, but Tom Hamilton wrote an hour ago to inform me that Robert Ashley died at 1:30 this afternoon. Around last June Bob got a confirmed diagnosis of cirrhosis of the liver, and he lost 30 pounds over the summer. I went down to see him one time after my book on him was published; I had hoped to see him around last Christmas, but my books always get delayed, and by the time it came out I was lost in the semester’s maelstrom, and didn’t see him until after the diagnosis. His butt had become so bony he had to sit on a cushion. He wrote a gratifying inscription in my copy of the book, and we had a wonderful talk, which I think we both knew would be our last, although he urged me to come back again. He would have been 84 by the end of this month. He drank considerably all his life, and I suppose it finally caught up with him – though I told him, a man ought to have a right to decide what he’s going to die from, and if I thought I could drink vodka and tequila like a fish and live to 84 firing on all pistons like he was, I’d throw moderation to the winds. Good for him. I don’t begrudge him one drink. It was part of his persona and part of his music.

Having published a book on him fairly recently, I don’t know how much else I can say. But the reason for writing the book wasn’t because I thought I’d get much from it academically or monetarily, just for the opportunity to spend 28 hours interviewing the most scintillating personality I’ve ever known. He was so incredibly brilliant and original and alert and non-repetitive. His enthusiasm was unremitting and contagious. My every visit with him left me in a joyous, hyped-up mood, buoyed by his devil-may-care Aries courage. I’d ask a question about his music (I say this in the book), and he’d close his eyes and start telling a seemingly unrelated story, and I’d think maybe he was getting senile, but half an hour later he’d get around to answering my question, which needed a nested set of stories to be intelligible. I’d ask about a piece he wrote thirty years ago, and he’d sit down and play the chord progression it was based on on the piano. Once, out of the blue, I needed the chord structure for eL/Aficionado, and he reached over, picked up a piece of paper, and said, “Here it is.” For a wild creative type, he was the most organized person, inside and out, I’ve ever seen. He seemed to have total recall of his entire life and his entire output. He was bitter that he hadn’t gotten more attention for his astonishing creative achievements, but the bitterness only burst out in moments, and his sunny enthusiasm for everything in life would quickly crowd it out again. He was a fabulous role model.

And let it be set down, Bob was one of the most amazing composers of the 20th century, and the greatest genius of 20th-century opera. I don’t know how long it’s going to take the world to recognize that. And it hardly matters. He knew it. That the world was too stupid to keep up was not his problem.

UPDATE: I just learned that Bob apparently completed, before he died, a piece called Mixed Blessings, Indiana. It was one of a list of seven-syllable titles he had come up with many years ago for all future pieces, and he was particularly proud of it.

One of my visual-art colleagues asked me to come into his Art and Technology class today and lecture on John Cage, which I was looking forward to. I actually get to teach Cage very little; someone else at Bard has a course on Cage, and I am not really tempted to devote an entire semester to him, as I have done with Ives and Liszt and Beethoven and have considered doing with Bruckner or Partch or Ashley. But I can certainly fill a few hours talking about him off the top of my head.

Since it was Art and Technology, I started with the 1966 Everest recording of Variations IV, a collage of tapes of musical selections, lectures, conversations played in overlapping juxtaposition. About a minute in, it occurred to me that every student in the room had on his or her computer the software needed to replicate a very similar performance, and that they were not at all likely to be impressed. I tried, but I had no words with which to convey the vast gulf I had crossed over in high school between what the music world seemed like before I heard Variations IV and what it suddenly seemed like after, a half-hour later. I had, in fact, taken that record to play in my high school theory class, where the teacher thought Cage couldn’t possibly be serious and the other students suspected I was mad. That music came from so far out in left field that in 1972 I couldn’t convince any of my acquaintances it was really music. Then the sampler was invented, and many years later my current students were born, and they not only know how to make that music, they regularly hear weirder concoctions on YouTube.

And in fact, the first question I got was, “How did Cage make that? Did he have to cut up pieces of tape that had the music on it?” So I gave a little explanation of how, in the ’70s, we spliced bits of magnetic tape with razor blades and splicing blocks. Then I gave a demonstration of how to churn butter and can your own blackberry preserves. All right, I didn’t really, but it would have felt about the same. That the avant-garde of my youth would be commonplace to today’s students should hardly come as a surprise. But I’ve always got plenty of music they haven’t “caught up” with: Maderna, Ashley, Diamanda Galas, Charlemagne Palestine, and so forth. And in this case, the technology had leapfrogged over Variations IV, so that I struggled to make them imagine a world in which sampling hadn’t even been thought of as a concept yet.

Of course, it can also work the other way. I have a composition student who fills the titles of his pieces with deliberate misspellings and typographical oddities. I took no notice, and he tried to squeeze a compliment for his originality from me by half-apologizing for his roguish whimsicality. I just said, “Contemporary music titles used to be pretty sedate and objective. But then one day David Lang wrote an orchestra piece called Eating Living Monkeys, and since that day it’s been a full-scale competition to see who can come up with the most shocking title, even among people for whom everything else about the music is academic. I don’t even notice anymore.”

 

My surviving musical output (first half of it, anyway) from 1962:

I must have quickly decided that two-part counterpoint was too much work. I’d love to know, though, how seriously I meant that A-flat key signature in the bass. I’m sure I thought I should fill out the end of each line with rests rather than leave it blank. The piece ends with a V6-I cadence in whole notes. Seven years later, at age 13, I still didn’t know what a fugue was, but I embarked on a career in music with a tritone-filled imitation of the Bach inventions I’d been playing:

 And four years after that, at the end of high school, I had not only discovered quartal harmony, but attempted (and maybe succeeded) to exhaust its fertility in a single piece, titled “Impacts,” which I played at my senior recital:

Note the fractional meter, an Ives inheritance. You’ll notice I kept lengthening my name – afraid I’d be confused with all the other Kyle Ganns around. Were time travel possible, I would go back to Dallas, August 1969, and tell the young me, “Kyle, I know it looks like fun now, and you imagine that people will pay favorable attention someday, but don’t even get started.” I surely would.

 

Next month So Percussion is playing my Snake Dance No. 2 at Bard. They wanted the keyboard sampler part that I used to play when I joined in to perform the piece. I hadn’t seen the thing in years, and in fact it was not notated in full detail, because whenever I played in my own pieces I tended to improvise somewhat (like Mozart and Beethoven). So that meant I had to go through the randomly-organized manuscripts in my music cabinet to find and upgrade the sheets of paper they needed.

Going through my manuscripts is always a heavy psychological trip, a confrontation with the subconscious state of my youth. My paper files of scores, sketches, and various versions basically run up to 2000, after which most of the materials are on my computer. I ran across the repetitive little piano piece titled “Go Walking with Me,” in 8/8 meter with a curious key signature of simply an A-flat on the bass staff, that I wrote at age six. I found, once again, the brief, one-movement, tonal but pointlessly dissonant piano sonatas  I wrote in high school, with their evident influences of Copland, Bernstein, Schuman, Ruggles, and Ives. But this time around I also found a completed, seven-and-a-half-minute piece for voice and percussion ensemble that I have no memory of composing, dated 1987; and also a three-minute, finished piano piece from 1993 whose score just barely rings a bell. They are in my handwriting, with the same silly rhythmic reflexes I’ve always composed with, on my usual 40-stave manuscript paper flanked by sketches for pieces in my acknowledged output, and the vocal piece’s text is one of my favorite passages from Thoreau’s journals, so there’s no doubt that I wrote them – but how did I completely forget having done so?

The low point in my composing life, in terms of both quality and quantity, was around 1986-1990, when I was in my early 30s. In general I wrote better pieces, and made more astute musical decisions, in the early ’80s and even late ’70s, than I did during that post-graduate period. It was during my early years as music critic for the Village Voice, and the pressure of my suddenly heightened visibility was an intense distraction. I had also been introduced to microtonality by Ben Johnston, and I spent years filling notebooks with fractions and logarithms, trying to learn how to be musically intuitive in the post-12tet world. But none of that fully explains the weird detour I took. Before 1985 I was heavily into Harold Budd and Brian Eno, and exploring the avenues that minimalism had opened up. To this day, I know people who think my best piece is Long Night, from 1981. But for a few years, starting with I’itoi Variations (1985), I got back into dissonance and pitch complexity, using algorithms and tone rows (never 12-tone rows, but shorter or longer than that), and my music went through an ambitious, bombastic phase whose motivation is still a mystery to me. I was in search of some compositional system, and hadn’t yet learned that systemic thinking isn’t part of my personality. By 1992, microtonality was beginning to feel comfortable, and with the early movements of The Planets in 1994, I put all that grating spikiness behind me, returned to my minimalist roots, and I have never been tempted back. I’m sure that getting into therapy had a lot to do with my recovery. I highly recommend it.

I keep track of my composition students after they graduate, and it does usually seem that their momentum grinds to a halt in the first years after college. (I finished my doctorate in 1983.) Their lives become unstable, they work with this group of musicians and then that, they form an ensemble that doesn’t last, they have performance disasters, they get a brief chance to provide music for theater or dance, they take exhausting day jobs, and the clear trajectory they had as students wobbles badly. They lurch from one project and one style and one composing paradigm to another, with no clear continuity. Some of them leave music, while the others eventually gather themselves together and start up again in some new aesthetic place once their lives stabilize. Their experience, combined with my own, makes it seem patently absurd to me that the classical music world goes around looking for hotshot 23-year-old musical geniuses, assuming that compositional talent will always manifest in brash but competent works written in one’s twenties. The young composers I know fall apart in those years, as I did, and when their music finally begins to flower at age 35 or 40 , they are no longer considered “young composers,” and thus attractive for orchestral-commission careers. The entire profession seems based on clichéd misconceptions from history books, and an unwarranted assumption of a smooth evolutionary trajectory.

In any case, the forgotten pieces I found seemed worth saving. Both needed revision. The piano piece was too frantically virtuosic for the simplicity of expression it aimed for. The vocal/percussion piece was pretty and well-conceived but too austere, the vocal lines too slow and drawn out, the text too fragmentary, and it was a quick job to speed up the vocal lines and insert more of Thoreau’s text in the resulting gaps. Titled The Stream (Admonitions), I’m now delighted with it, and hope to hear it someday. The piano piece I called Untitled Phase Study. Perhaps revising abandoned works from more than two decades ago isn’t the best use of my time, but a weekend’s retouching did allow me to add two pieces to my worklist. And it must be one of the strangest features of a creative artist’s life that the history of your subconscious is stacked away in a cabinet somewhere, available to be pored over like a doctor examining a patient who is actually himself.

UPDATE: I should add that my lowered tolerance threshold toward my own minor and abandoned works is probably conditioned by the little-known Beethoven pieces I’ve been researching for next semester’s Beethoven class. I listened to twelve of his contredanses, some canons, and a couple early sets of variations this week, and so I’m thinking, what the hell, as long as you write an Appassionata and an Eroica, people are glad to listen whatever trivial tidbits you penned to kill time or make money.