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PostClassic

Kyle Gann on music after the fact

Archives for 2015

Even the Most Brilliant Musicians Are Mortal

marthaherrDeath is not taking a holiday. I learned on my way to California that my good friend Martha Herr died on Halloween. She had survived breast cancer twice, and this time succumbed to a brain tumor. She was a phenomenal singer, and though she started out working with the Creative Associates at SUNY Buffalo, she spent the bulk of her career teaching at The University of São Paulo, where she became the world’s leading authority on Portugese diction for singers. She and her then-husband John Boudler commissioned an early work from me, Cherokee Songs for voice and percussion. And I am even more grateful to her for having made a recording for me of one of my best works, Scenario (2004) for soprano and soundfile, based on a wild S.J. Perelman text. I had lost touch with her and hadn’t seen her in years when she started teaching as a sabbatical replacement at Bennington, and she started visiting me; and she spent a day with me in the studio getting Scenario down. I’m hoping to release the piece on a CD next year. She was a lovely person, a consummate musician, and fun.

Upon my return, Peter Gena wrote to tell me that my graduate medieval music history professor Theodore (Ted) Karp has just died. I’ve written about him here before, as my model for the old-fashioned kind of professor who didn’t feel the need to entertain, but whose dignity and generosity made being in his classroom feel like a rare privilege. It was because of him that I always push the music of Johannes Ciconia (c. 1370-1412), who despite his obscurity was, I think, the first great composer, the one who realized things that music could do (echoes, imitation, form through repetition) that no other art form could do. In the class I took with Dr. Karp we pored over every 15th-century music manuscript in detail, though there are probably new ones now that were undiscovered then. I wrote for him a paper comparing the respective Missa Ecce Ancilla Domini’s of Dufay and Ockeghem (a topic he had assigned, characteristically unsexy but therefore all the more challenging); I still refer to it occasionally.

Martha Herr told me a story about working with Morton Feldman that she didn’t want me to publish, and I had promised not to do so during her lifetime (though she was only a few years older than me). She sang the world premiere of Feldman’s opera Neither – that’s how good she was. There is a section in that piece with constant meter changes of the Feldman variety – 3/8, 6/2, 5/4, and so on – that she found impossible to memorize, so she wrote it out on a long strip of paper and attached it behind the footlights onstage so she could read it when she came to that part. One day the conductor, whoever he was, came to her and pointed out that the entire passage could have been made quite simple if one simply remetered it in 4/4. She took it to Feldman, and said, “Morty, you know this really complicated passage would work out just fine in 4/4.” She says Feldman chuckled and said, “Yeah, isn’t that cool?”

 

A Gentle Rain of Adjectives

My Romance Postmoderne has now been called gorgeous and calming; my suite The Planets has been dubbed weighty and cerebral. I can think of some award-winning composers who would be baffled by at least the second assessment.

Like I Said

In The Atlantic: “Academics, in general, don’t think about the public; they don’t think about the average person, and they don’t even think about their students when they write… Their intended audience is always their peers. That’s who they have to impress to get tenure.” What have I been saying?

How Ives Did it

Geiringer-lectureNext week I’ll be in Santa Barbara giving the Karl Geiringer Lectures, named for a famous musicologist who taught there, one (public) on microtonality, and the other (for musicologists) about what we can learn about Ives’s compositional process from his sketches. The latter is mostly about the First Piano Sonata, since we have many more preliminary sketches for that than for the Concord, and there’s really only one page I’m discussing at length: the presumptive first sketch written at Pine Mountain, CT, and dated Aug. 4, 1901. But it’s a fascinating page, an abbreviated and prescient outline for what would become a much longer movement. I’m also relating that at some length to Ives’s discussion of composing in the Essays Before a Sonata, which I think has never been taken seriously enough as a philosophy of what makes music great. When I get back I’ll publish the Ives lecture somewhere on the internet – here, if no more prestigious locale presents itself. I guess the UCSB people decided having a photo of Ives on the poster would bring in more people (or repel fewer) than a photo of me.

If you’re in the area, that’s November 3 at 5 in Geiringer Hall for the microtonality lecture, and November 4 at 3:30 in Music Room 1145 for the Ives lecture. I’ve already given the Kushell Lectures at Bucknell, the Poynter Fellowship Lecture at Yale, and the Longyear Musicology Lecture at the University of Kentucky. I just Googled “named musicology lectures” to see if there was a list I should be crossing off somewhere, but nothing came up. Hit ‘n’ miss, I guess.

 

There’s Doin’s a-Transpirin’!

Gannian events abound. This weekend I’ll be in Philadelphia participating in workshops devoted to performing the works of Julius Eastman, run by the Bowerbird Ensemble. Sadly, my teaching schedule precludes my being there for the opening performance of Crazy Nigger tomorrow night.

A week from Saturday, on Oct. 24, the NewEar ensemble is playing my 75-minute suite The Planets at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in Kansas City, the first ensemble to do so besides Relache, who commissioned it. Lee Hartman is conducting the piece, which I think is a good idea; Relache did it sans conductor, which is difficult in some movements.

And on November 3 and 4 I’m giving two lectures at UC Santa Barbara, the second one the Geiringer Musicology Lecture. The latter is titled “A Harmony of Imperfections: How Charles Ives Composed.” The first one, for a more general audience, is “Beyond G#: Escaping the Tyranny of 12 Pitches.” These don’t seem to be listed on the schedule yet. Nor have I finished writing them, but I’ve certainly got all the material in my head. Busy times.

UPDATE: I forgot to include a performance of my Romance Postmoderne this Friday in Pasadena by micro-pianists Aron Kallay and Vicki Ray. And I’m a little disappointed no one commented on the Simpsonian provenance of my headline.

Memories of an Early Frost

My mother often told me, and I half-remember it, that when I was a toddler I would listen patiently to her reading poetry for as long as she would do it. It is to this that I attribute my love for writing vocal music. I have always been extraordinarily fascinated by the simple fact that words have their own inherent rhythms without which they can hardly be understood. For me to set words is like setting gemstones, and I always have to choose a setting that makes the sound of the word, not necessarily its meaning, shine to advantage. I know there are other philosophies and methods of text setting, and I don’t disparage them, but I don’t respect them either. Handel and Virgil Thomson are my allies on this point. And the principle was impressed on me by my mother’s voice even before I could read (which was at age four).

My wonderful cousin Ann tells me that as recently as last week my mother recited an entire poem from memory, Emily Dickinson’s “Because I would not stop for death,” on what was virtually her deathbed, following her surgery at Baylor Hospital in McKinney, Texas. The surgery went well, but its aftermath did not. Whether Mom’s funeral, Wednesday, went well was, I suppose, a matter of perspective. The churchly elders who officiated but who hardly knew my mother wreathed her in Christian boilerplate and claptrap that attempted to reduce her to just another devout little old church lady, assuring us that we shouldn’t be sad because she had been welcomed into heaven and was sitting at the right hand of the Father – as though our concern for what she was going through at the moment was uppermost among our anxieties. It was, in bulk, a funeral that would have sufficed for any interchangeable number of old ladies who never missed Sunday school.

My mother was devout and certainly prayerful, and seemed to have become more so in recent years, under the influence, I suspect, of church friends who assailed her from all sides. But she also complained to me that she had to hide from her Baptist friends some of the novels she read, of which they would not have approved. She had an acerbic side and a sarcastic sense of humor, and could manage a sharp tongue. I arranged for some time for the funeral attendees to speak in turn, and at my turn, I rather truculently insisted on reading in its entirety Mom’s favorite poem – “Wild Grapes” by Robert Frost, which she had read to me so many times when I was a boy – even though it was three-and-a-half pages long, even though there were octogenarians standing in the warm Texas sun to wait for me to finish, even though it interrupted the revival-meetin’ atmosphere with a secular intrusion, and with little regard for what her church friends must have thought.

The poem is too well-anthologized and –known to repeat here, but I thought its closing lines were admirably calibrated for ending a funeral:

I had not taken the first step in knowledge;
I had not learned to let go with the hands,
As still I have not learned to with the heart,
And have no wish to with the heart – nor need,
That I can see. The mind – is not the heart.
I may yet live, as I know others live,
To wish in vain to let go with the mind –
Of cares, at night, to sleep; but nothing tells me
That I need learn to let go with the heart.

I read it, as much as I could, with the inflections I remember my mother reading it with. (I can clearly recall, from fifty-five years ago, how she intoned, “I said I had the tree. It wasn’t true. / The opposite was true. The tree had me.”) My voice broke a few times near the end. I don’t know what kind of spectacle I made of myself; several people did thank me afterward. I wish I could tell her that I did it, that I personalized her funeral by revealing what I most learned from her. I had made, to those who could understand it, the point that my mother was not simply a Sunday-school conformist: she had a brain, and wide literary and historical interests, and she thought for herself, and she did not let the bromides of organized religion occupy so large a space in her life as to divide her from the wider world.

Diffident Leviathan

Accordionist Veli Kujala did a lovely job on my piece Reticent Behemoth for his quarter-tone accordion. Here’s the recording from the world premiere last Thursday in Turku, Finland (duration five and a half minutes). I do love the accordion, and Veli made the piece sound more delicate and nuanced than I could have expected. I’m hoping to write him another piece or two.

Strange Bedfellows

PianomaniaI’ve got a performance coming up at Bard College [where I teach] this Saturday. My office Disklavier will play my Bud Powell homage Bud Ran Back Out, and famous composer Joan Tower, no less, is slated to play the second dance, “Sad,” from my Private Dances. As you can see from the accompanying poster, Kurtág, Corigliano, Ligeti, and I are making a once-in-a-lifetime appearance on the same program. If it weren’t for Crumb and Bolcom I’d feel a little out of place. The MIDI graphic on the poster is a section from my Nude Rolling Down an Escalator, taken from my eponymous CD cover.

 

Postminimalism Takes Finland

HelsinkiHarbor

The Fifth International Conference of Minimalist Music, in Turku and Helsinki (harbor above), Finland, was a smashing success. I ate sautéed reindeer and plenty of herring. We ended up Sunday night with only a few people left in the upstairs bar at the Torni Hotel, with Helsinki in the background (clockwise: my wife Nancy, Kay and Keith Potter, Dean Suzuki, Jonathan Bernard, Patrick Nickleson):

NancyetalHelsinki

And here we are eating at the Sea Hors Restaurant: Dean, Nancy, Pwyll Ap Sion, Kay, Patrick, Keith, myself, and Jonathan:

HelsinkiNightCrowd

A concert of mostly my music, including my Unquiet Night, Reticent Behemoth, The Unnameable, and Snake Dance No. 2, was presented at the gorgeous Music Centre building in the middle of town, its magnificent lobby shown here:

HelsinkiMusicCentreLobby

And I gave what I imagine is the first conference paper on the music of Elodie Lauten, whose reputation seems limited to New York; no one seemed to have heard of her. (I’ll put that paper up in this space soon, but it will take considerable reworking for non-oral presentation.) David McIntire spoke on Ann Southam, Frank Nawrot on Julius Eastman, Dean Suzuki on fine British postminimalist Andrew Poppy, Jedd Schneider on the surprising connections between Krautrock and American minimalism, and Dragana Stojanovic-Novicic on Conlon Nancarrow’s (generally negative) attitude toward, yet interesting connections with, minimalist process. Patrick Nickleson gave a fine paper on the curious ontological status of so much minimalist music, that it tends to not be score-based, but finalized by performance or recording, the score often constructed after the fact by someone other than the composer – with Marc Mellits’s Boosey and Hawkes score to Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians as the quintessential example. I told him that was almost my definition of Downtown music.

At the Finnish music panel I wrote down a slew of names of Finnish postminimalists to look up: Petri Kuljuntausta (whom I enjoyed talking with), Erkki Kurrenniemi, Jan-Olof Mallander, Pekka Jalkanen, Seppo Pohjola, Pekka Kuusisto, Adina Dumitrescu, Pehr Hendrik Nordgren, and of course Juhani Nuorvala, who co-directed the conference with John Richardson. None of us could make head or tail of the language. It seems that, despite some early appearances in Helsinki by Glass and Reich, minimalism and its offshoots have gained a foothold in Finland only in the last decade, largely thanks to Juhani’s efforts.

Here, waiting for the bus from Turku to Helsinki, are Justin Rito (whose paper was on David Lang), Joy and Andrew Granade just past him, Juhani with the glasses, and musicologist Robert Fink and wife in the back:

HelsinkiBusCrowd

The Sixth International Conference is now tentatively scheduled for June of 2017 in Knoxville, Tennessee, in connection with the Nief-Norf festival run by Andrew Bliss. It gives me something to look forward to. The passage of my life is measured out in minimalism conferences.

 

Fun with the Finns

I’m off to Turku and Helsinki, Finland, this week where I will be the featured composer at the biennial conference of the Society for Minimalist Music. There will be a concert of mostly my music Saturday night at the Sibelius Academy Music Centre (since there’s “Mostly Mozart,” I’ve always pictured a “Generally Gann” festival), and I am to be interviewed onstage beforehand. It’ll be old friends week, and you can see the conference schedule here. Robert Fink and Jelena Novak are the keynote speakers. I didn’t need to give a paper this year, but I am: “Elodie Lauten as Postminimalist Improviser,” which I just finished today, or at least enough to stumble my way through it. And I imagine I’ll post it here, or at my web site. We have an idea where in the US the next one will be in 2015, and I’ll let you know when it’s official. I think I probably won’t give papers in the future, just go and listen and hang out. I take way too much unnecessary work onto myself.

Hyperrealism: Chamber Music from Mars

Creshevsky-PulpYou may not have heard of Noah Creshevsky (born 1945), but he is, and has been for decades, one of the most amazing figures in current American music. His music, all electronic as far as I’ve heard, which he aptly terms “hyperrealist,” is a surreal mix of samples, chamber music from Mars. Weird as hell on first listening (and second and third), it nevertheless flows with its own inner logic, and is easily acclimated to. I’ve told him that, if I had the amazing electronic-music chops he has, I’d be trying to do something similar. Perhaps because I just returned from southern Mexico, it strikes me as bearing a kinship to mesoamerican art, very cleanly etched and clear in its intentions yet extraordinarily strange in its shapes and materials. I can’t think of anyone whose aesthetic is more original. He hasn’t received his due because there are so few distribution venues for bizarre electronic music, and because his lifestyle, as he likes to claim, is highly reclusive. Nevertheless, Dennis Bathory-Kitsz wrote a lovely tribute to him in New Music Box several years ago.

So Noah’s newest CD Hyperrealist Music, 2011-2015 is now out on EM records. The first piece on the disc is titled Pulp Fiction, and in it he used samples from my Disklavier CD Nude Rolling Down an Escalator. I think it the best piece on the disc, though not by much, and his use of my rapid piano gestures is extremely flattering, like overhearing myself complimented by strangers. And I obtained his permission to post the piece here, for awhile. You should get the disc, and all his discs, because they’re phenomenal.

 

Mezcal, Pulpo, and the Long View of Culture

OaxacaZocalo

Oaxaca was a blast. It’s in the mountains and doesn’t get hot, and in the tropics so it doesn’t get cold. The peso is really low at the moment, so we felt like we could buy anything that caught our fancy. The worst meal we had was better than the Mexican food we get at home, and that includes the ones we scarfed down at Mexico City airport. At the best restaurant in town (so we were told), Los Danzantes, we had mezcal margaritas and wine, fantastic mole entrees, and as appetizer I had one of my favorite foods, octopus – not rings of calamari, but a big slab of pulpo with ancho chile sauce. We ate and drank like there was no tomorrow, and the bill for two was $855 – that’s pesos, about 50 American dollars at today’s exchange rates. Other scrumptious meals didn’t even cost us twenty bucks. Waiters were relieved that we gringos could take it as spicy as they could dish it out.

Protovecka, an arts advocacy organization run by Juan Alaya that’s only been around for a couple of years, had invited me and about a dozen other art, film, and music critics for a specifically non-academic conference trying to make connections among the arts. Protovecka and its staff reside in Mexico City, but they kindly decided that the participants would have more fun in Oaxaca. The accommodations were generous, the events well organized, and the refurbished convent in which the latter took place quite lovely. Here are Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo, music critic and moderator José Wolffer (who knows everything about new music and with whom I had a great time), music critic and prolific author Paul Griffiths, and film critic Richard Pena, colloquy-ing on Sunday’s panel, with expert simultaneous translation for the various languages:

ColoquioPAC6

That foregrounded black rectangle is actually a fountain, a thin film of water over a black marble surface, creating a nicely asymmetrical open space in front of one side of the stage. In the U.S., there would have been yellow cones warning people of the danger of stepping on it, but Mexico seems more civilized than that; people are treated like adults.

It’s difficult bringing the arts together these days, and the problems were as I expected, though I applaud the effort. Film is so much part of everyone’s cultural life that the film critics get to live in the real world, even if they endlessly wish that the general public shared their rarefied tastes. The visual arts seem isolated in a self-ratifying loop in which artists, curators, critics, and rich collectors speak a language full of familiar words used in a way that the rest of us hardly comprehend. And the music critics, Paul, José, and myself, share a jaundiced view of how irrelevant (post)classical music has become to the rest of the culture. We struggled gamely to speak the same language (metaphorically) for a few days, and enjoyed each other’s company even when we failed. I was one of only two or three Americans, and it was viscerally comforting to spend a few days conversing with professionals from Mexico, France, Italy, and England, who seem free of the defeatism and pessimism that pervades the U.S. worldview these days. I left with a feeling that things will eventually be all right here, too.

And to get the really long view of cultural change, Nancy and I took a cab (24 bucks round trip) out to Monte Albàn, the mountain site of the center where Zapotec civilization flourished strangely from 500 BC to about 850 AD:

MonteAlban5

As many as 17,000 people lived in this space at some time, which took us an hour and a half to circumnavigate; there were underground tunnels through which priests could run from temple to temple, and an altar for human sacrifices. Certain sites were dotted with carved figures which, when originally discovered by Europeans, were referred to as “the dancers” – Los Danzantes. Turns out they seem to have been portraits of neighboring kings who were castrated and mutilated upon capture:

MonteAlbandancer4

I guess if the Zapotecs could last here for 1350 years, we Americans can hold on for a few more centuries. Aside from maybe our minimalism conferences where I get to see all my old friends, I can’t think of a cultural event I’ve ever been invited to that I enjoyed more. Next week: Minimalists in Helsinki!

UPDATE: A couple of things. One refreshing difference between this and most of the American conferences I’ve been to lately is that there was almost no mention of critical theory. I didn’t attend every lecture, but only the name Deleuze came up, and only once. There was a lot of talk about Heidegger, whom I’ve read a lot of and took a graduate course in once, and Vattimo mentioned the aesthetician Mikel Dufrenne, whom I read a lot of in college but hadn’t heard of since. So, in terms of intellectual history, I felt rather at home. And it made me wonder if critical theory is only an American obsession.

Also, I always buy Cuban cigars in Mexico, and in every other country I visit. But in Oaxaca I didn’t see a single cigar store, or even anyone smoking a cigar, and when I asked at the front desk, the bewildered employees couldn’t think of anything, and finally located on a map a kiosk in the zocalo. Well, I wasn’t going to go search out a crummy kiosk for a cigar, so for once I came home without any. I was surprised to find that there are places in Mexico where cigars are virtually unknown.

 

Mole and Tequila

A few months ago, I was supposed to be in Italy this week for a totalism festival at Bari Conservatory. That got canceled or postponed due to massive administrative changes at the Conservatory, so maybe it will happen later, or not.

So instead I accepted an offer to lecture at Coloquio PAC in Oaxaca, Mexico, a symposium on contemporary artistic production. Paul Griffiths, José Wolffer, and I will be the speakers on music, and I am supposed to talk for 45 minutes about (clear throat) The State of Music – something I feel I currently know nothing about, except that the public state of music excludes just about any musical ideas I could imagine ever taking an interest in. I’ve got some Usual Things to Say and bits from my blog, and I have to leaven the whole with enough humor and optimism to not become an old man’s rant. I once saw Luciano Berio, whose music I respect and sometimes love, give an old man’s rant about how everything was going to hell, and it was not edifying. Luckily the target of my diatribe is not (and never is) Young People Today but rather the reigning corporate dictatorship which is guaranteed to warp or marginalize any honest musical impulse, and I am hardly the only writer around demonizing that particular bugbear. And if I succumb to gloom, Oaxaca is rumored to be the world center for mole and tequila, two things that could cheer me up even in the direst circumstances.

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Sites to See

American Mavericks - the Minnesota Public radio program about American music (scripted by Kyle Gann with Tom Voegeli)

Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar - a cornucopia of music, interviews, information by, with, and on hundreds of intriguing composers who are not the Usual Suspects

Iridian Radio - an intelligently mellow new-music station

New Music Box - the premiere site for keeping up with what American composers are doing and thinking

The Rest Is Noise - The fine blog of critic Alex Ross

William Duckworth's Cathedral - the first interactive web composition and home page of a great postminimalist composer

Mikel Rouse's Home Page - the greatest opera composer of my generation

Eve Beglarian's Home Page- great Downtown composer

David Doty's Just Intonation site

Erling Wold's Web Site - a fine San Francisco composer of deceptively simple-seeming music, and a model web site

The Dane Rudhyar Archive - the complete site for the music, poetry, painting, and ideas of a greatly underrated composer who became America's greatest astrologer

Utopian Turtletop, John Shaw's thoughtful blog about new music and other issues

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