Archives for August 2014

In the earliest years of the 20th century, Charles Ives was working for Charles H. Raymond & Co. insurance company in Wall Street. On weekends he would escape the city to Pine Mountain, a beautiful nature reserve south of Danbury where the Ives family owned land, in order to compose there. Some of his early works are marked with the notation “Pine Mountain,” including the First Piano Sonata, whose earliest sketch is dated Aug. 4, 1901. And today there is a long trail through the Pine Mountain nature reserve called the Ives Trail, running from Ridgefield to Bethel. And so as the end of our book-buying Concord, Mass., vacation (the only kind I let my wife take, but she claims she doesn’t mind), Nancy and I came back and took in some of the Ives Trail. (Among other things I bought The Oxford Handbook of Transcendentalism, $120, as well as a used copy of Glenn Watkin’s The Gesualdo Hex, which I unaccountably hadn’t known about, plus the new Murakami novel. I passed up a first edition of Bronson Alcott’s sonnets for $150. Oh well.)

The Ives Trail runs for several miles, but I only wanted to see Lookout Point where Ives and his brother Moss built a cabin. The trail is a hell of a lot more rustic and rocky than I anticipated, and pretty stiff climbing:

You know, I grew up in Texas, and I rather thought all the East Coast states had been paved over decades ago. It’s way out of the way, on a narrow little road outside Ridgefield, CT, and it’s marked all along with little Ives Trail signs with treble clefs on them:

I didn’t get the impression that any of the hikers we ran into had the slightest idea who Charles Ives was. (I kept expecting to run into musicologists.) I would have been happy to conduct a tour. And the spot where Ives and Moss built their cabin in 1903 was at Lookout point, which I would have to think is the most exquisite panoramic view in the state of Connecticut:

We couldn’t take a photo that would do the cliff behind me justice. Had I fallen backward here, I would have hit a rock about eight feet below, and if I bounced off that, the next plunge would have been forty feet or so. But this rock was apparently the site of Ives’s cabin. Here’s another photo:

(Please click for better focus; my legs are well worth it.) It was all Nancy and I and our tiny little dog Gita could do to get the mile and a half to this point. I’ve been realizing more and more how wrapped up Ives’s philosophy of music was with the aesthetics of nature, and that he conceived so many early pieces here made perfect sense.

So now I’ve been to the places both piano sonatas were conceived. And I’m just a few hours of work away from having the manuscript ready to turn in. Seeing Pine Mountain was one of my last check-off points.

[UPDATE] A couple more:

And the size of the dog we brought. Gita is a seven-pound shih-tzu/yorkie mix, but she scrambled up those rocks like a labrador:

 

 

The gold of Beethoven’s day, of which he was himself the purest nugget, comes down to us bright and untarnished, so that we forget all the dross that has been thrown on the scrap-heap of time. Our own gold is almost hidden from us by the glitter of the tinsel.

The world of music, says Sir Charles Stanford [“Pages from an Unwritten Diary”], is not substantially different from what it has been. It has always exalted those of its contemporary composers who dealt in frills and furbelows above those who considered the body more important than its clothes. Only a few wise heads knew of the existence of Bach. Rossini was rated by the mass of the public far higher than Weber, Spohr than Beethoven, Meyerbeer than Wagner. Simrock said that he made Böhm pay for Brahms.

It is always necessary to wait for the winnowing process of time before we can see the true proportions of an age. Hence we can never see our own age in its true proportions, and since the second- and third-rate elements in it are ever more acclaimed by the majority than the first-rate, we always see it worse than it is. We live, so to speak, in the glare of noon-day, and cannot see the true coloring of our world, which will appear only at evening. Hence in every age the tragi-comedy is repeated of acclaiming the mediocre and the meretricious, and ignoring worth. The Gounods always patronize the Francks.

– Daniel Gregory Mason, Contemporary Composers, 1918; pp. 36-37

I like this interview with Branford Marsalis in the Seattle Weekly, and completely agree with him:

You put on old records and they always sound better. Why are they better? I started listening to a lot of classical music, and that really solidified the idea that the most important and the strongest element of music is the melodic content.

In jazz we spend a lot of time talking about harmony. Harmonic music tends to be very insular. It tends to be [like] you’re in the private club with a secret handshake.

I have a lot of normal friends. ‘Cause it’s important. [When] you have a bunch of musicians talking about music and they talk about what’s good and what’s not good, they don’t consider the larger context of it…

When laypeople listen to records, there’re certain things they’re going to get to. First of all, how it sounds to them. If the value of the song is based on intense analysis of music, you’re doomed. Because people that buy records don’t know shit about music. When they put on Kind of Blue and say they like it, I always ask people: What did you like about it? They describe it in physical terms, in visceral terms, but never in musical terms.

But then he says what so many musicians say:

Everything you read about jazz is: “Is it new? Is it innovative?” I mean, man, there’s 12 fucking notes. What’s going to be new? You honestly think you’re going to play something that hasn’t been played already?

And I always think, Well, actually there are a lot more than 12 fucking notes if you want to use them, and with the other ones I think I have played some things that – worthwhile or not – at least hadn’t been played before.

 

A couple of summers ago I had the odd idea of writing some simple microtonal pieces for kids, and maybe calling them “Nursery Tunes for Demented Children.” I had forgotten about them (odd how often I forget pieces I’ve written) and ran across them today, found I had completed two. I had been wanting to use some complex scales in a simple context, and maybe also thought that if kids were exposed at a tender age to something other than the 12-pitch scale they might grow up as weird as I am. Here they are:

Down to the End of the Town
Tiger, Tiger, Turning Right

Should I keep going? I have no idea how you’d perform them.

This is a rather idle comment, so don’t take it too seriously and get all outraged. I’m sitting here putting in, and fixing, footnotes in my book. I try to put them in as I’m first writing, but sometimes I write one from memory and don’t pause to look it up; or I find it in another book and don’t have the original book to look it up in; or I’m quoting something I had used in a less scholarly publication; or I’m just on a tear and don’t want to pause for footnotes. So I’m making a final pass, and I see an incomplete footnote. It’s from a book I already returned to the library. So I put the phrase in Google, and it takes me to a page of that book in Google Books, and I put in the page number. The next footnote is from a book that’s sitting on my piano, but it’s six feet away, and I’m comfortable in my Adirondack chair with my cigar. So I put the phrase in Google, and it takes me to Google Books and I get the page number and publication information. And then I start imagining footnotes I’d like to put in. Like, I had wanted to quote Richard Strauss’s boast that he could represent a fork in music, but I’d never really read that, I only heard it. So I Google “Richard Strauss” + fork, and bang!, fourth try, there it is in Brian Gilliam, The Life of Richard Strauss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 81. And it’s even better: Strauss claimed that he could differentiate between a fork and a knife in his music. And since I’ve looked up a hell of a lot of published footnotes myself lately, it occurs to me that it would be simpler for my reader to put the phrase in Google himself and find where I quoted it from than it would for him to note the chapter and page number he’s in and leaf through the footnote section in the back of the book until he finds the right footnote number.

So remind me: why, in the age of the internet, are we still using footnotes?

 

Well, I don’t know how he did it or who got paid what, but David First somehow got me mentioned in People magazine. It’s in connection with his Star Ballads band that my son Bernard plays in, and someone thought People readers would gain some kind of helpful context from knowing that Bernard is the son of a theory professor. That does it. Now I’m going to get David’s name in The Journal of Music Theory.

 

Amazing to say, Bard College has been ranked number one school in the country by the Princeton Review on the criterion of student satisfaction with classroom experiences, and as this reflects directly on me and my 200-and-something colleagues, I thought I’d trumpet it. We also ranked high on “Most Liberal Students” and “Most Accessible Professors,” and it’s true. I’m really, really accessible. The students sometimes wish we’d go away and quit hovering over them. The photo provided is across campus from me on “Stone Row.” They teach biology, or anthropology or something over there, god knows what they’re doing.

Syracuse University came in for top party school. Good thing, it sure snows a lot up there.

 

A week from tomorrow, August 9 at 10 AM, I’ll be delivering a lecture on American opera at the Glimmerglass Festival. It’s a favorite subject of mine, and one I rarely get to talk or write much about. Other professors than myself teach copiously about opera at Bard, and one dream course I’ve never ventured is a completely non-overlapping one on experimental American opera: Virgil Thomson, Harry Partch, Robert Ashley, Philip Glass, Mikel Rouse, maybe Cage’s Europeras. But then I start thinking how reluctant I’d be to omit Copland’s The Tender Land, and The Cradle Will Rock is way too important to leave out, and Porgy and Bess would be so fun to talk about, and Nixon and China, and I have a score to Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah, and a rare recording of Bernard Herrmann’s Wuthering Heights, and I get an itch to cover the entire canon – if indeed anything as neglected as American opera can be called a canon. In any case, next week I’ll be playing brief examples from:

The Mother of Us All (my favorite opera ever)
The Tender Land
Candide
Delusion of the Fury
Einstein on the Beach
Perfect Lives
Nixon in China

and trying to wax clever about them. Toward this end I recently spent much of a day playing through the vocal score of The Tender Land, and then in the evening listened to all of Copland’s most famous pieces – a juxtaposition that convinced me that The Tender Land is his greatest work. I can’t understand why it’s not performed in this country far more often than La Boheme, it’s so fabulous. Critic Andrew Porter, late of the New Yorker, shared so few of my opinions that he refused to speak to me the one time we met, but we both considered The Mother of Us All the greatest American opera. And I don’t know whether Bob Ashley and Harry Partch are what the Glimmerglass audience expected to be exposed to, but the people who invited me said they were looking for something different. Meanwhile, my wife and I will get to see Tobias Picker’s An American Tragedy, Ariadne auf Naxos, Madame Butterfly (well I’ve never seen it), and Carousel.