Kyle Gann on music after the fact
“[Composer Rinaldo Di Capua] thinks composers have nothing to do now but to write themselves and others over again, and the only chance they have for obtaining the reputation of novelty or invention must arise either from the ignorance or want of memory in the public – as everything both in melody and modulation that is worth doing has already been done over and over again.”
– Charles Burney, Music, Men, and Manners in France and Italy, 1770
It’s every bit as true now as it was then.
I am told that my copy of the French translation of No Such Thing as Silence – titled No Silence: 4’33” de John Cage (Allia Editions) – is in the mail.
UPDATE: The French edition, which has arrived, is very classy, and is decorated with hundreds of photos of Cage, Tudor, Rauschenberg, Coomaraswamy, and others that weren’t in the more austere American edition. Perhaps I should just publish my Ives book in French, they seem to have the money.
It’s almost official: my next book will be The Arithmetic of Listening: Tuning Theory and History for the Impractical Musician. I had given up trying to interest publishers in microtonality, but it seems to finally be an idea who’s time has come. This will be basically a textbook, though in my characteristic style which the New York Times has designated as “chatty.” There are worse words, I guess.
And yet I’m not in any hurry to sign the contract. I haven’t yet turned in my Concord Sonata book, which has been finished for weeks, because the publisher says I went way over my limit on musical examples (by about 30 percent). I had predicted how many examples I’d need, and wish now I’d cited a higher number – and that editor is gone anyway, as the original editor always is by the time one finishes a book. This Ives book is, I think, the greatest achievement of my life, and now I’m painfully poring through it trying to amalgamate and eliminate musical examples without making it harder to read. For my Robert Ashley book, of course, I had to put the musical examples on my web site, which I knew in advance was required. And now this new editor is suggesting that some of my microtonal charts and diagrams may have to go on the internet as well. Such a theoretical book will be rendered useless if the correlative web site is ever discontinued.
It used to be that a writer wrote a book, and the publisher published it. Then a writer wrote a book and the publisher made the writer pay for his indexing, and next the writer had to pay the fact-checker if he wanted one, and then the writer had to pay permissions for every quotation over 300 words, and there were some things you couldn’t say at all because you couldn’t get permission. And now the writer can’t use the illustrations needed to make the book readable. One might hope that, by age 58, with my sixth book going to press, I would have earned the right to say whatever I needed to say and no longer have to compromise, but in the current, increasingly corporate climate compromises are thrown at one from right and left. And it’s not like I’m going to make any money from any of these books. It has reached the point at which the completion of a book manuscript is just the beginning of the author’s tedious paperwork and heartbreak, and I really don’t know whether it will prove worthwhile to write another one. I’ve always threatened to internet-publish The Arithmetic of Listening, and I’d rather do that and give it to the world for free than put it out in a compromised state. If part of the book has to be on the internet, why refrain from putting the whole thing?
Several years ago I turned my energies to writing books because the new-music performance world was so unsatisfying, and now obsessions with copyright and cutting corners have made book-publishing equally unpalatable. I really can’t think what to do with the rest of my life that wouldn’t prove dispiriting in this corporate-poisoned world.
My good friend Anne Garland, wife of songwriter David, gave me some html code with which to make my Just Intonation Explained page far more convenient and practical by embedding the mp3s so that they don’t jump to a new page to play, and you can keep reading the text while listening. She warned that it doesn’t work on all browsers, and so if any of you find you can’t access the recorded examples, please let me know and I’ll put the original version back up as an alternative. This is going to open up a lot of possibilities: I’ve been considering putting up a Listener’s Guide to the Concord based on my analysis.
Just prepared my “Late Beethoven” syllabus, about to walk into my first class of the semester in three hours.
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:
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.
I have no idea why I plan out dream courses I could teach, when it’s the middle of the summer. One of my great regrets (there are so many) is that I’ve never taught an American music course. It just doesn’t fit our curriculum. To do it the way I want to, it really ought to be a graduate seminar somewhere, because I’d want to get into Riegger’s Study in Sonority and the Becker Third and Martirano’s L’sGA, which I can’t do if they don’t know who Ives is yet. I taught a History of the Symphony once and I’ll never do that again because it was waaay too much material. But I had an idea the other day for an “American Symphony” course, one symphony per week, sort of creating the idea of America through symphonic form:
Anthony Philip Heinrich: The War of the Elements and the Thundering of Niagara (c. 1845)
George Frederick Bristow: Arcadian Symphony, Op. 50 (1872)
George Chadwick: Third Symphony (1894)
Amy Beach: Gaelic Symphony (1896)
Charles Ives: First Symphony (1899)
Charles Ives: Third Symphony (1911) [might ought to do the Fourth, but sentimental about Third]
Virgil Thomson: Symphony on a Hymn Tune (1928)
James P. Johnson: Harlem Symphony (1932)
Roy Harris: Third Symphony (1938)
Florence B. Price: Symphony No. 3 (1940)
George Antheil: Symphony No. 4, “1942†(1942)
Aaron Copland: Third Symphony (1946)
Leonard Bernstein: Second Symphony, “Age of Anxiety†(1949/65)
George Rochberg: Second Symphony (1956)
Roger Sessions: Third Symphony (1957)
William Schuman: Eighth Symphony (1962) [Sixth would do, too]
William Bolcom: Fifth Symphony (1989)
Glenn Branca: Symphony No. 6, “Devil Choirs at the Gates of Heaven†(1989)
Philip Glass: “Low†Symphony (1992)
This is a few too many. Chadwick could go, kind of a dutiful inclusion. Everything would hinge on being able to get a score to the James P. Johnson Harlem Symphony – that’s key, and I won’t do that without a score. The archive seems to be at Rutgers. Still’s Afro-American Symphony, nice as it is, would be a disappointing second choice. I don’t know how to get Bristow’s Arcadian, either, whereas I can get the earlier Jullien – but the Arcadian is significantly better, and more evocative of the American wilderness. The Florence Price 1st and 3rd symphonies are published, and either would provide a piquant highlight. And I need an analysis of the Sessions Third, I’ve tried and can’t do it myself. Blitzstein’s 1946 Airborne Symphony might be a wild, corny substitute for the Antheil.
I should set up one of those web sites that fly around on Facebook: “Which American Symphony Are You?” And of course it’s rigged so that no matter kind of wine you like, everyone gets Morton Gould’s Latin-American Symphonette. (Which I used to enjoy.)
UPDATE: Actually, I’ve always thought the relatively unknown Bristow was the best of the 19th-century American symphonists (admittedly, not saying a lot), and the reason he was on my radar screen at all is because I heard his music in a course on American music at the University of Texas, from Delmar Rogers. I got to looking around, and found that Prof. Rogers’s doctoral dissertation was on Bristow, which I hadn’t known. Couldn’t find anything else about him, I suppose he’s no longer around. But he left me with a strong impression of Bristow and I appreciate it. That class also occasioned my first attempt at an analysis of Emerson from the Concord Sonata, and I still have it.