Archives for February 2015

I had my most fun day at school ever yesterday. The reason will be arcane to explain. As chair of the arts division, I am on the executive committee, and currently chairing that as well. Last week we made an administrative decision to restrict the divisional listserv for official announcements by the division chair, after a two-year experiment in having it unmoderated, which latter privilege had never been announced and was little used, as far as I know. Anyway, the first non-chair professor to attempt to use the divisional listserv raised a hue and cry and accused the administration of censoring our attempts to send messages to other faculty. The dean called me and ordered me, as committee chair, to put out a message to the faculty posthaste. I did, politely, explaining that it was a return to the previous status quo, made due to a few complaints about faculty abuse, and that a faculty committee had made the change without administration involvement.

Well, we have a few paranoid faculty members, and some bad blood from previous power struggles, and quite a few eyes fell on me. Who were these faculty members who had complained? Why did they have privileged status, and why was I shielding them? What I had called “moderation” of the listserv (I had never used the word) was nothing more than censorship. Why had the committee made this change without widespread faculty discussion? What were we trying to hide? Aside from one polite response to the ringleader I kept my mouth shut, knowing that once it became clear what an insignificant change this was (back to the system we’d used without complaint until 2013) the people attacking me were going to feel awfully foolish, and that I would only compound their embarrassment by needlessly defending myself. And sure enough, once the details were explained at the afternoon’s division meetings, the issue died down and today had vanished from faculty discourse.

But for a few hours I saw myself portrayed in the popular imagination as the kind of nefarious, Machiavellian schemer I only wish I could be in real life – and also was defended by others who don’t know me, but who saw me as an innocent victim of sectarian faculty paranoia. It was an awful lot of heated attention for someone who keeps as low a profile on campus as I do. And it demonstrated how easily the quotidian motivations behind an action can be vastly misinterpreted from the vantage point of an environment rife with long-standing political tensions. This, multiplied by thousands, is what happens in our political discourse every day, but one rarely sees it happen up close.

Students are inscrutable. I’ve taken over first-year theory again this semester, as a favor to a younger colleague. So far I’ve brought in, as examples for musical analysis, “Take Me Out to the Ball Game”; Tom Lehrer’s “Bright College Days”; two ragtimes by Scott Joplin; two barbershop quartet songs, “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles” and “Lida Rose” from The Music Man; “Yesterday” by the Beatles (unrecognized by half my class); and the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows.” The other day a songwriting guitarist kid came to drop the class. His reason: “I’m not sure this classical theory track is the right one for me.”

I’ll contextualize. I don’t teach modulation until March, and nearly all classical music modulates, while in ragtime and barbershop I can get a dense wealth of varied harmonic functions without having to worry about changing key. Plus, classical music is so varied in its techniques that I used to spend a lot of time cherry-picking my examples to find pieces with which to teach a certain principle. Contrariwise, if I want to teach common-tone diminished sevenths, almost any ragtime will do; if I want secondary dominants around the circle of fifths, any barbershop quartet will do. If I need further examples, I just turn to the next page. When I teach pivot-chord modulation I’ll turn to Schubert and Schumann, though even there, mid-century Broadway tunes offer wonderful modulation paradigms within a three-page song, and West Side Story gives me both those and a lot of imaginative uses of the French sixth chord. Besides, the complexities of these chords from “Lida Rose” already had the students pretty distraught:

Brahms would have been easier. I don’t mind letting it viscerally sink in that they would need to develop a stricter range of technical skills to pursue a career in Broadway music or film scoring than to hang out a shingle as some anarchic avant-garde composer. They need some respect for the amount of expertise even a supposedly “fun” musical career will demand of them.

I’m a classical music nerd, and when I was a young snob I probably bought into some foolishness about the inviolable line between high and low art. But I studied aesthetics in college, I worked as a music critic, I’ve analyzed a ton of music, and I never tripped over that line; nothing ever went “click” when I crossed it. It is, at the very least, pedagogically irrelevant. I’ll take my chords wherever I can find them rich and juicy and in vast quantities. (And still the students think I’m some highbrow classical martinet.)

UPDATE: Further evidence: I have a smart young woman doing a senior project on rap. I’ve never heard any of the names she mentions. In a meeting she went on and on about how the industry makes a few rappers famous and they’re disgusting and misogynist, while the really great rappers are people you’ve never heard of, and they have too much integrity to to the things that would get themselves commercially exploited, and they speak truth to power. My eyes grew wider with wonder, and when she paused I exclaimed, “It’s just like the composing business!”

UPDATE 2: From Wikipedia’s Barbershop Harmony entry: “BHS arrangers believe that a song should contain dominant seventh chords anywhere from 35 to 60 percent of the time (measured as a percentage of the duration of the song rather than a percentage of the chords present) to sound ‘barbershop’.”

It also brings to mind one of my favorite Marx Brothers jokes, which comes at the beginning of Monkey Business before the Marx brothers even appear:

Sailor: Captain, we’ve got four stowaways on board, but we can’t find them.

Captain: If you can’t find them, how do you know there are four?

Sailor: They were singing “Sweet Adeline.”

 

 

My life has been sedentary and uneventful of late, but that’s about to change. In the month two weeks beginning next week I give nine seven lectures in locations across the nation. First I head for the University of Missouri at Kansas City, where I’ve already had such happy times, to teach classes on the Concord Sonata, microtonality, and such. I will also give my lecture “Thoreau’s Flute and Charles Ives’s Concord Sonata” at the Kansas City Central Library, 14 West 10th Street, at 6:30 on the evening of Thursday, Feb. 19. Then I’ll teach some Friday classes at Missouri Western State University where my minimalist co-conspirator David McIntire teaches, and on February 21 at 7 I’ll give a pre-concert lecture about the Concord Sonata prior to Robert Pherigo’s performance of it at that school. (My dog Gita’s face made it onto the poster at right.)

The following week, weather permitting, I’ll be in Pittsburgh for the Beyond Microtonal Music Festival at the University of Pittsburgh. On Saturday afternoon, February 28, I’m giving a talk on my microtonal composing techniques that currently bears the working title, “How the 13th Harmonic Saved My Sorry Ass.” I’m trying to come up with a more polite official title, but drawing a blank. The next evening at the Andy Warhol Museum, Aron Kallay and Vicki Ray will give the world premiere of my Romance Postmoderne (though you’ve heard it here before). I’ve also been asked to give a talk on La Monte Young’s Well-Tuned Piano, though I don’t see yet that on the schedule.

I then get a week’s respite, and on March 11 I’ll be presenting the Geiringer Musicology Lecture at the University of California at Santa Barbara; my bold-yet-qualified title is “How Ives Composed (in at Least a Few Instances),” this time actually mainly about the First Sonata, and I’m giving another lecture as well. I’ll give you final information for all that later. Oops – this event has now been postponed until next October. My fault for posting during Mercury retrograde.

I then spend a summer on my screened-in porch smoking and drinking more than is good for me, and the following September is really exciting. From September 8 to 13 in Bari in southern Italy, pianist and American music crusader Emanuele Arciuli, courtesy of the Bari Conservatory where he teaches, is throwing a Totalism festival, of all things, at the Teatro Petruzzelli (pictured), featuring music by me, Bernadette Speach, Mary Jane Leach, John Luther Adams, Lois Vierk, Evan Ziporyn, Eve Beglarian, Larry Polansky, Julia Wolfe, and Michael Gordon. My Transcendental Sonnets for chorus and orchestra will get its European premiere, and Bernadette’s Embrace the Universe, for the same forces, its world premiere. What a fantastic week that sounds like! I told Emanuele it looks like I programmed the music myself. And two weeks later, Sept. 24-26, comes the Fifth Annual International Conference on Minimalist Music in Helsinki, for which I am the guest composer and also probably submitting a paper on Elodie Lauten. I’m trying to figure out reasons to stay in Europe from Sept. 14 to 23, if any of my European friends are reading. After a few slow years everything’s about to speed up again.

 

I was saddened this morning to hear from Mathew Rosenblum of the death, at age 87, of microtonal patriarch Ezra Sims. He was the pioneer of a 72edo (72 equal divisions of the octave) notation that spread among his younger colleagues in Boston and gave that city its own microtuning culture distinct from the rest of the nation. I only met him once, briefly at a Dinosaur Annex concert, but I respected his music from the first time I reviewed it in Fanfare, and we shared some jovial correspondence surrounding some liner notes I once wrote for him a 2011 profile I wrote of him for Chamber Music magazine.* His music was variously capable of gnarliness, wit, and soulfulness; for the second of these, I think of his choral setting of the epigram, “There is no need / Of Andre Gide.” And of course he entered theory-class anecdotal history when Baker’s Biographical Dictionary erroneously listed him as having written a String Quartet No. 2 in 1962, and he retroactively corrected the error in 1974 by writing a quintet for winds and strings and titling it “String Quartet No. 2 (1962).” As sometimes happens, he was clearly charming beneath a curmudgeonly reputation.

I found Sims’s microtonal notation a little counterintuitive: I once inherited a composition student from him, and could never keep track of which accidentals were which. But I notice from a statement on his own web site that his interests in the harmonic series were actually pretty similar to mine:

 Since 1961, most of what that Ive done all my major pieces that haven’t been tape music has been microtonal. At first, it was ¼-tone, but from 1964 it has been 72-note, using at any moment one transposition or another of an asymmetrical mode of 18 or 24 pitches drawn from a 72-note division of the octave, much as Tonal music used a 7-note mode drawn from a 12-note chromatic. The mode consist of a 8 pitches of superior importance, the 8-15th harmonics of the tonic of the moment, plus 10 (or 16) chromatic pitches also drawn from its harmonic series. The 72-note division permits an all-but-exact description of the sequialteran succession of Just ratios making up the mode (25/24–30/24 [or in the alternate version: 33/32 –5/4] followed by 21/16–31/16), while retaining the conceptual and modulatory convenience of a closed cyclic notation. I trust the performers naturally to play as near Just perfection as their musicality permits, but sometimes it helps to remind them.

I suppose one could say that, aside from Harry Partch in the beginning, three seminal microtonalists seem to have determined the nature and direction of microtonal culture in the U.S.: Erv Wilson on the West Coast, Ben Johnston in the Midwest, and Ezra Sims on the East Coast.

*UPDATE: I remembered he had sent me scores of all the works on this then-most-recent CD, which is what often happens with liner notes. And since that profile isn’t online, I attach it below as a tribute:

* * * * * * * * * * *

American Composer: Ezra Sims
By Kyle Gann

Ezra Sims is probably best known, even among those who haven’t heard a note of his music, for his wry response to a musicological misprint in Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Music and Musicians. In the ‘60s that edifying tome, then edited by Nicolas Slonimsky, attributed to Sims a work he hadn’t written, a String Quartet No. 2 dated 1962. In 1974 Sims gallantly agreed to ameliorate Slonimsky’s embarrassment to the extent that he could by writing a piece entitled String Quartet No. 2 (1962) – scored for flute, clarinet, violin, viola, and cello. As Sims notes, a title is not necessarily a description, and he cites as precedent the White Knight in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, whose song was called “Haddock’s Eyes” even though its title was “The Aged Aged Man,” etc. The score is dedicated to Slonimsky, “that he (or rather Baker’s) may now be less in error.”

This classic and oft-noted absurdity is far from the only bit of humor in Sims’s output; he has a piano piece charmingly called Grave Dance, and a song cycle titled Brief Glimpses into Contemporary French Literature whose recurring refrain is “There is no need of Andre Gide.” But for some of us Sims (www.ezrasims.com) is less important for the dry wit threaded through his work than for his status as one of the leading composers (along with Ben Johnston) of microtonal music for traditional acoustic instruments. More specifically, Sims is the doyen of a Boston-based microtonal world in which 72 equally-spaced pitches per octave is virtually the official lingua franca. Since 1964 Sims has written in his own notation which inflects pitches upward or downward by a 12th-tone, a 6th-tone, or a quarter-tone, and the local microtonalists (James Dalton being the one exception I know of) all seem to swear by the same notation.

The advantage of 72 tones per octave (or as it’s known among the cognoscenti, 72tet – 72-tone equal temperament) is that it renders close approximations to some of the lower but still more exotic overtones not in common use. (Please excuse the theory for the moment, we’ll resume practicality next paragraph.) A cent is defined as one 1200th of an octave, and with a new pitch every 17 cents one can achieve pretty clean 7th, 11th, and 13th harmonics. In fact, despite his equal-step grid Sims makes it clear that overtones are what he’s generally aiming for. At least in most works, he typically selects notes from the 72 possible to form an 18-note scale based on the 16th through 32nd harmonics, with a few “tendency tones” to fill it out. The varied transpositions of this18-note scale ultimately necessitate all 72 pitches.

The advantage of the 72-tone system with its mere three extra accidentals, as the Bostonians love lecturing the rest of us, is its practicality for live performance (as opposed to Johnston’s notation with its open-ended accidental system and difficult-to-find perfect consonances). Every sixth pitch is a familiar one on the piano, and the rest can be interpolated via a regular system that requires little explanation. As a result Sims’s output consists primarily of chamber music, and he has a special penchant for combining winds and strings, and playing the strings and winds off against each other. Like his String Quartet No. 2 (1962), Musing and Reminiscence (2003) and Landscapes (2008) reprise the two-wind/three-string combination; his Sextet of 1981 is scored for clarinet, alto sax, horn, and three strings; Night Piece (1989) is for flute, clarinet, viola, and cello with a background computer tape; and there’s a Flute Quartet (1982) and Clarinet Quintet (1987). Sims also has some delightful piano music and choral music using only the usual 12 pitches (12tet), and some orchestral work, but it’s the small wind-and-string groups in which he brews his microtonal aesthetic.

And a well-focused aesthetic it is. Sims tends to start off with a close set of pitches, often in repeated notes or in tremolo, whose evolution into wider and more complex harmonies evolves in accelerando. His music’s journey is always linear and easily followed by the ear – a wise thing, given the wild unfamiliarity of the ground he likes to cover. For some reason that psychologists will have to explain some day, composers who love splitting the half-step also love applying the same mathematics to rhythm, and Sims (much like Johnston) is fond of suggesting different tempos running at the same time. Quintuplets are everywhere, as well as fours-in-the-space-of-five. Tempos of fast movements run extremely fast, slow movements can be almost stationary. Between the 72 pitches and the phasing rhythms, it looks like extremely difficult music to play, but the types of difficulty are closely limited. So consistent is Sims’s language that I imagine once you learn to play one piece well, the others come much more easily.

For the listener, it’s a walk on the wild side indeed. The music is a pulsing, shifting continuum, dotted all round with contrapuntal echoes that maximize the tuning’s oddities. Yet if conventional moorings fall by the wayside, the music nevertheless projects a sense of restraint and logic. The microtonality comes off as exotic, yet the music’s linear motion and motivic cohesiveness keep the ear engaged. Music and Reminiscence opens with a series of parallel almost-fifths between the flute and clarinet, slightly changing in size. The first movement of Night Peace closes with a long, fluctuating drone on a wide tritone of 633 cents – bet you’ve never gotten to savor that ambiguity before. The music throbs, churns, dances, hibernates through pitch complexes you’ve never heard before, and the rhythm – though you’d rarely be able to identify a meter or locate a downbeat – has a pulse-based naturalness to it.

As with so much music that fascinates me, I regret having to describe Sims’s so technically. But it’s thoroughly abstract, with no programmatic associations, no typical musical forms, little melody in the traditional sense, no clear relation to minimalism or serialism or New Romanticism or heavy metal or polka or anything else. It’s just a unique brand of musical experience, and the only alternative to hearing it is describing how it’s made in hopes that you can imagine from that. And as Boston’s young microtonalists seep out across the rest of the country from the East Coast, the sense of Sims’s seminal influence is going national. He’s been one of our most original undergound musical legends for decades, and the mystery has built up too much pressure to keep quiet any longer. The good jokes he’s gotten off in his career are merely foils for realizing how serious and unprecedented his music is.