Archives for 2015

John Halle is the most politically savvy composer I know:

For while some of us want to avert our eyes, the left always recognized that the war by the rich against the poor is a war just as much as any other.  An economic war does not involve missiles, antipersonnel weapons and M-16s. Its weapons are state enforced privatization schemes, debt swaps and interest rate manipulation.  Rather than puncture wounds, severed limbs and  the casualties take the form of thousands of unnecessary deaths due to [in]adequately staffed and supplied hospitals, bacterial infections due to inadequately maintained sewage treatment facilities and collapsing buildings, food poisoning epidemics due to the mass layoffs of inspectors in regulatory agencies. An almost endless list can be compiled of the social collapse resulting from economic warfare carried about by fountain pens rather than guns.Varoufakis has now woken up to the reality that his country has been attacked by an axis of foreign powers, that they are bent on its destruction and have one goal in mind: claiming the spoils of victory, disbursing to their owners in the investor class.It is time the rest of the left joined him there and here-on our feet and ready to fight them, in whatever way we can.

What precedes this rousing coda is the clearest analysis of what happened in Greece that I’ve read.

UPDATE: Of course, I wrote the following on New Music Box in 2003, and was scoffed at and insulted for saying it:

We are indeed involved in a class war—a war waged by the corporate class, who have obscured the fact by somehow making the very term “class warfare” a term of derision. It is, moreover, as Chomsky says, a “perfectly conscious” class war “against working people, the poor, the unemployed, minorities, even members of the middle class.” For it to succeed—and it is succeeding—it is equally necessary for the corporate/political class to understand that there is a war and to pretend to the rest of us that there isn’t.

My Concord Sonata book is the most ambitious thing I’ve ever done, and one of my proudest achievements, but it seems to bear the mark of Cain. It will indeed be published, but according to the schedule it will appear in fall of 2016. Having waited ten months since I turned in the manuscript, I have fifteen months to go, by which time I can’t imagine I’m going to care anymore. Anything could happen by then. I want to make the information I have public and move on, and so I might as well blog the remaining best parts of the book. The world has afforded me here a venue with several dozen devoted readers, to whom I am grateful, and whom I can approach at any time without censorship, alteration, or delay. So be it. I am through writing for publication, I am through composing for performance. The rest of the world can go to hell, which it seems very much in a hurry to do.

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One of the irritating leitmotifs of Concord scholarship is the supposed seven-part structure of the Hawthorne movement. This originated with pianist John Kirkpatrick, whose sense of musical analysis was fuzzy at best [I put this more diplomatically in the book manuscript]. In his preface to the 1965 score of Ives’s Symphony No. 4, Kirkpatrick offered a formal picture of the Hawthorne movement (on which movement 2 of the Symphony No. 4 is partly based) as a seven-section palindrome:

phantasmagoria – nocturne – ragtime – contrasts – ragtime – nocturne – phantasmagoria

This has some relevance to especially the first half of the piece, but is misleading. It seems to suggest an arch form, as is often found in the music of Bartok, but the paired sections are not materially related; the second “nocturne” section, for instance, is much shorter than the first, more a brief pause than a section; it uses no thematic material from the first “nocturne,” and transitions smoothly into the final “phantasmagoria,” while the “contrasts” section (a loosely-defined grab-bag of gestures, as the title implies) shares some material with the first “ragtime.” And so on. In the manner of a hallowed document being reverently quoted by scholar after scholar who arrive at nothing better to supplant it with, Kirkpatrick’s seven-part division has earned considerable purchase in the Ives literature, but it is time to retire it. It correlates to the 2nd edition (1947) score as follows:

Systems:
21-1 to 24-4 phantasmagoria
21-4 to 26-1 nocturne
26-2 to 33-1 ragtime
33-1 to 37-1 contrasts
37-1 to 42-2 ragtime
42-3 to 42-4 nocturne
42-4 to 51-5 phantasmagoria

I would merge the last two sections; the second “nocturne” is so brief, and flows so smoothly into the final phantasmagoria, that I hear no sectional division there. In addition, I would break up three of the other sections, dividing the first half of the first ragtime away from the grand statement of the “Human Faith” theme in C# major/minor (which is not ragtime-like at all); dividing the contrasts section between the interrupted fragments of Martyn and the long evocation of a marching band; and dividing the final section among the fantasia on “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean,” the blizzard of 16th-notes in a dotted-8th beat, and the recapitulation of material based on the Human Faith motto. [The Human Faith theme is the main theme of the work, exposed in final form at the end of The Alcotts, and the motto is its first four notes, C-D-E-A.] In all, this gives us ten well-defined sections, which can be correlated to Kirkpatrick’s hallowed ones as follows (click on the image to make it legible):

[System 21-1 means the first system on page 21; sys. 49-3 b. 5 means the fifth beat of the third system on page 49, and so on.] This is not yet entirely satisfactory; for instance, it fails to acknowledge that the first interruption of Martyn uses material from the first ragtime. It does, however, avoid the misconception of some kind of arch or palindromic form, and also acknowledges the inner unity of the Country Band March section and the one based throughout on “Columbia,” as well as the parallel of both halves culminating in the Human Faith melody. It is based on unity of material rather than (like Kirkpatrick’s scheme) merely raw changes of speed and dynamics, and will make it easier to encapsulate each section, as I will do now.

Phantasmagoria/Frost/Railroad/Demons’ Dance, syss. 21-1 to 24-4 m.1: a classic example of moment form; each phrase, each moment is basically static (aside from occasional transitions), all ostinato-based, none relates linearly to the next, and each could be increased or decreased in length without violence to the musical effect. G# is a low drone note for the first six systems (out of 17), D and then E become drone notes for the last three systems. The section is punctuated by three “human faith” mottos, in F#, F, and F# respectively. [Ives in his Memos wrote that the opening suggests frost on the window pane in Hawthorne’s Tanglewood Tales. Demon’s Dance was a now-lost piano piece incorporated into Hawthorne, and based on demons dancing around the witch’s pipe in the story “Feathertop.” And the general perpetual motion in this section relates to its origin in Hawthorne’s satire “The Celestial Railroad.’]

Nocturne (Phoebe’s Garden), syss. 24-4 m.2 to 26-1: In terms of the whole, this could of course be considered another moment, but it is quasi-self-contained. It begins on a middle Db (sys. 24-4, m. 2, end of beat 1), which is repeated four times, and it returns to that Db, also repeated four times, starting at sys. 26-1, beat 12. In between there is some linear development with a clear climax at the white-note cluster in sys. 25-3. No particular tonality appears in the contrast of white against black keys, but Eb is a lowest note in the introduction, G more or less through the cluster section, and the phrases of the brief denouement all begin on a low A. Ives mentions Phoebe’s Garden from The House of the Seven Gables in his essay on Hawthorne, and this passage strikes me as the most likely candidate for what he had in mind; could the pandiatonic chords depict her innocence and charm, ever shadowed by the black-key clusters representing the cursed and guilty past of the Pyncheon family?

Ragtime 1, syss. 26-2 to 31-1: With its gradual rises and falls in register, this section seems more organic than the Phantasmagoria, but each phrase has a different principle: the first based on the ragtime motive, the second whole-tone, the third octatonic, and so on. The section contains the movement’s only real large structural repetition: the section from sys. 27-3 through nine beats of 28-3 recurs, with alterations, from sys. 29-1 through the first two beats of sys. 30-1. Between these “A” repetitions there is a repeated “B section” at sys. 28-4. Soon after the second repetition in sys. 30-2, the music begins focusing on the human faith motto, as a transition into the next section. Assigning tonalities isn’t easy, but F# is tonicized at sys. 27-4, there are drones on A, B, and C# in syss. 28-1/3, Eb is tonicized in the structural repetition at sys. 29-2, followed by drones on G#, G, and F.

Human Faith Statement, syss. 31-2 to 33-1: This section is a development of the second half of the Human Faith theme centered on E, but harmonized in C#-major/minor with a continual drone-arpeggio. Its quick disintegration starts with the Eb-Bb-F sonority at sys. 32-4, b. 3 1/2, providing a harmonic link to the next two sections.

Martyn with Interruptions, syss. 33-1 to 35-1: Eight chords of the hymn Martyn (“Jesus, lover of my soul”) are played in G, followed by a return of the ragtime motive and some whole-tone ostinatos over stacked-fifth sonorities. Then Martyn returns for a longer period in F#, interrupted by a tonally fluid dissolution.

Marching Band Evocation, syss. 35-1 b.7 to 37-1 m.1: Opening and closing on an Eb-Bb-F sonority, the marching band section is relatively self-contained, mostly more linearly developmental rather than moment-form, and containing the movement’s most conventionally tonal music. Despite the beginning and ending on Eb, the main tune in the middle is clearly in Ab [echoing the first section’s emphasis on a G# drone, and marking an important point in the harmonic structure of the entire sonata, as I’ll explain another day]. The section ends when the tune is interrupted by drumming patterns.

Ragtime 2, syss. 37-1 m.2 to 42-2: As documented elsewhere, this moment form is quite complex. We include in it the buildup to the fist clusters at sys. 41-2, m. 2, because the neighbor-note motive beginning here has been foreshadowed earlier in the section. The section begins seemingly in Db Lydian mode, but keeps returning to A as a grounding bass note, with occasional jumps to Eb [A and Eb being oppositionally related in every movement of the sonata].

“Columbia” Section, syss. 42-3 to 46-5 m. 1: After a ghostly appearance of Martyn in F, the dotted rhythm of “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean” dominates this entire section. The gradual emergence and development of the patriotic tune prevent any feel of moment form. The tonality is ever-evolving, but it opens oscillating between G# and G as drone notes, lands on a low A several times, and there is a section clearly in Bb-major at syss. 46-2/3.

Perpetual Motion in 6/16, or “The Blizzard,” syss. 46-5 m.2 to 49-3 b.4: This, I think, is the most radical music in the sonata, an abstract barrage of notes with few motivic hooks, and little for the listener to hold onto; not that it is unpleasant, only confusing, and deliberately so as a climactic descent into chaos. Disparate events are foregrounded one-by-one, most notably a statement of the first half of Human Faith at sys. 47-4. Some of Ives’s complex local transformations of material are evidently not meant to be heard as such. I got so tired of referring to this as a blizzard of notes that I just started calling the section “The Blizzard.”

Recap of Human Faith Material, syss. 49-3 b.5 to 51-5: This final section, marked by reliance on both halves of the Human Faith theme, begins and ends with a D-major emphasis, and with keys of C# and Eb both making an appearance. The rhythmic organization by dotted-8th beats continues intermittently. The feel of a recapitulation comes at once with repetition of material from Ragtime 1, though the left hand part is altered to turn into the first half of the Human Faith theme. Next the left-hand recapitulates, in part, the C# statement of the second half of Human Faith from that section of the piece. The final page brings back quotations of “Columbia” in D/G over Human Faith motives alternating between D and Eb. There is a final reference to Martyn in Eb and a final gesture taken from the first Phantasmagoria grounded in D.

There are features, mostly melodic ones, that tie the movement together as a satisfying whole. Chief among these is the Hawthorne motive [a leap upward followed by a descending second]. Of the ten sections, it dominates the 1^st, 3^rd, part of the 5^th, 6^th, and 9^th; plus, because it is integral to the tune “Columbia,” also the 8^th and 10^th. The neighbor-note motive of the second ragtime [e.g., A-G-A-C, the final note being a downward leap] might be called, in part, its retrograde. The theme of the Country Band March is related to it. The Demons’ Dance and Slaves’ Shuffle [two lost Ives piano works that he claimed were incorporated into Hawthorne] might have been conceived independently, the March and “Columbia” may have originated elsewhere, but every element seems to have made its way into this movement because it fit motivically. Beyond that we have the Human Faith melody, which dominates the 4^th and 10^th sections, and makes appearances in the 1^st, 2^nd, 3^rd, and 9^th. (In fact, the retrograde of the four-note Human Faith motto is itself a Hawthorne motive.) And since the Human Faith theme quotes Martyn, the 5^th section based on Martyn links to the others. For all the movement’s formal complexity and discontinuities, it possesses a notable organic quality, and is quite distinct from the other movements.

All material copyright © Kyle Gann 2014

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More to come. If any of you scholars out there see fit to print some of this information elsewhere, an attribution to this blog will be greatly appreciated.

 

I am thrilled to report that the University of Illinois Press has officially confirmed that they are going to publish my book Essays After a Sonata: Charles Ives’s Concord.

Here’s what happened. Yale UP doesn’t have a music series anymore. Nevertheless, a humanities editor there liked the idea of my book and accepted it, some three years ago. Naturally, he left. I had broken my own rule: Never approach a publisher until a book is virtually finished. Editors rarely stay at one publisher for the amount of time it takes to write a book. I don’t know why, but editors and publishers play a game like musical chairs. One former editor calls me up offering to do a new edition of American Music in the Twentieth Century every time he lands at a new publisher, which seems like about every two years. And the new editor is likely to have completely different interests and criteria. Out my my six books, three have now gone to a different publisher than I started out with for pretty much that reason.

Anyway, a new, inexperienced, surly, and non-musically-savvy editor inherited my manuscript. I could tell from her first week she wasn’t interested. She kept throwing up hurdles in my path. She sent it to terrible readers. Finally, I challenged her to explain why my defense against the readers wasn’t sufficient and to detail what changes she wanted and why. Didn’t hear from her for months. In the meantime I approached my lovely former editor for my Robert Ashley book. She was all enthusiasm. She sent it out to two readers who basically had no complaints whatever, just unadulterated praise. (I suspect they were not musicologists, but one a composer and the other a pianist who’d played the Concord.) Part of being an editor is knowing whom to send the manuscript to; you need two professionals to sign off on it, not to give the author pretentious advice on how to write his sixth book.

Anyway, the Yale editor finally, in May, sent an email saying the book was accepted. I told her I had another publisher interested, and that if she wanted to get out of this contract, as she manifestly did, this was her chance. She jumped at it. It was the fastest I’d ever heard back from her. I returned my $750 advance, which I thought was a totally unfair demand on Yale’s part, but I would have paid more than that to get out. And I afterward heard that that editor is leaving Yale UP for a publisher I’ve never heard of, so I gather that I wasn’t the only one unhappy with her. If only she’d left a few months sooner.

So – following a totally pointless eight-month delay, Essays After a Sonata is back on track. I made none of the substantial changes demanded by the Yale readers. They accomplished nothing, except to make me change publishers. Despite years of booing and hissing from the musicological community (including being turned down for three years’ worth of NEH and ACLS grants), my book will come out exactly as I intended it.

 

 

Here’s an audience listening to a live performance of Nancarrow’s Study No. 25 at the Whitney Museum yesterday:

(As always, clicking on photos makes them appear in a new window in better focus. Don’t know why.) There was a player piano roll of Nancarrow’s Study No. 36 draped across one side of the room. Here are some high points:

And, via Susan Schied of “Prufrock’s Dilemma” blog fame, here I am standing in front of it. I had subconsciously chosen a shirt for the day that everyone thought was a player-piano-roll pattern:

High points of my evening took place at dinner with (L to R) Susan Schied, Liturgy guitarist Bernard Gann, his singer-girlfriend Heidi Farrell, my wife Nancy Cook, musicologist and Cage scholar Sara Haefeli, and one of those Pulitzer-Prize-type composers, John Luther Adams:

And in various other, more picturesque reconfigurations:

(Sara, who’s quite tall, is standing off the curb.)

Not pictured, unfortunately, because they’d already left: composers Mikel Rouse and Tom Hamilton, director of the John Cage Trust Laura Kuhn, and Nancarrow’s stepson Luis Stephens. Thanks to Jay Sanders of the Whitney and Nancarrow expert Dominic Murcott for involving me in a wonderful event.

 

Several people have noted that I am mentioned in connection with the Nancarrow festival at the Whitney Museum this week. (I’ve been quoted in the Times and the New Yorker.) I will indeed be present for it next Wednesday, the 24th. At 1 PM and again at 4 I’m supposed to give an informal talk on Nancarrow, and bring up my favorite Player Piano Studies, which will then be played “live” on an Ampico player piano like Conlon’s. Sounds like a fun gig, but I can never decide which studies to play. The ones I wouldn’t play are easy to pick, but I always want people to hear nos. 3, 4, 6, 7, 20, 21, 24, 25, 27, 33, 36, 37, 40, 41, 43, and 48 and the unofficial roll M. It’s too much. I never know how to choose. No. 3 is so fun for the uninitiated, 4 is lovably cute, 6 is fun to explain, 24 is perfect, 25 is a riot, 40 is transcendentally exciting, 21 is a crowd-pleaser, 36 is a miracle, 37 is a modernist classic, 48 is hugely ambitious. I could do it all given enough time, but I never know where to start or stop. And I’ll have a dozen friends there to catch up with, including Luis Stephens, Nancarrow’s stepson by his second wife, who’s been an invaluable font of information about Conlon in the 1940s.

And to bring up another important composer, my friend John Luther Adams has a long excerpt from his upcoming memoir in this week’s New Yorker, in which he was kind enough to mention me. Good reading. John says I once told him, “John, you’re always so earnest, but I like you anyway.” John and I have been sober for a modest percentage of our times together. He greatly heightened my appreciation of expensive single-malt scotch, and I’ve never recovered.

I remember Morton Feldman saying in the ’70s that if there was one musical idea that was finally dead, it was multimovement form. (Was I present when he said it? I can’t recall.) That seemed about right at the time, and, like most of the progressive composers I associated with, I pretty much wrote only one-movement works in the 20th century. But starting with Transcendental Sonnets in 2001-2, I became interested in the multiple movement problem. In recent years many of my works have divided into movements, and I’ve had to grapple with what my conception of the form is. My aesthetic is postminimalist – and by that I mean I do have my own aesthetic, and by comparison with other composers whose style it resembles, I can locate it as postminimalist, but it is simply the style I feel driven to write in, and I could just as easily call it Gannian and leave everyone else out of the picture. It is personality, not ideology; not a political strategy, but simply the route my imagination takes. The style itself produces highly unified movements of little internal contrast. (I could have adopted “No-Drama Gann” before it got applied to Obama.) My music shuns development, rarely relies on tension and release, nor am I comfortable bringing back the same main idea in one movement after another. In this sense I am not really a symphonist in the sense of most modern symphonists, as my friend Robert Carl is; my ideas do not progress from movement to movement. I have often felt that I produce suites, not sonata- or symphony-type works.

I’ve finished a draft of Proença, my song cycle on Ezra Pound. I think it’s one of the best things I’ve ever done, though one tends to think that when the ink is still wet, and especially when the piece is ambitious. Unlike my other song cycles, it is not merely a collection but a large structure, and I’ve come closer than ever to feeling what multi-movement form means for me. At 47 minutes, it’s my second longest work next to The Planets. The timings of the Sibelius files are as follows:

I was aware as I was composing that I was selecting poems and song idioms to balance each other off, and that the tendency of one song in one harmonic or textural or rhythmic direction seemed to imply the necessity of another song going in the opposite direction. Once the sixth song clicked into place I realized I was finished, because there were no more variables within my system with which I could create further contrast. And once I got nearly finished I made up a chart showing the kinds of symmetries I ended up with (click on images for better resolution):

Two of the songs are original Provençal poems; two are Pound translations of Provençal poems; and two are poems Pound wrote in response to response to Bertrans de Born’s poem “Dompna puois.” In addition, the 1st, 3rd, and 5th songs are each set in a single, unchanging tonality; the 2nd, 4th, and 6th have no central key. Songs 3 and 4 are characterized by neo-Riemannian chord progressions (closely chromatic voice-leading), one in the context of a stable tonality, the other in a kind of free-floating (though consonant) atonality. Song 2 uses more of a jazz sense of progression; Song 5 has jazz elements in the harmony as well, though it doesn’t change key. In Song 4 the root movement is typically by major 3rds, in Song 6 it is mostly by minor 3rds. Actual troubadour melodies are quoted only in Songs 1 and 6, foregrounded in the former and backgrounded in the latter. Songs 1 and 3 both follow a kind of additive process, 1 and 4 both have an articulated steady pulse, 1 and 5 share a pointillistic texture. Songs 1, 3, 4, and 5 are stanzaic, and I handled stanzaic form four different ways:

Song 1: Static accompaniment, three different melodies
Song 3: Melody becomes more developed with each repetition; final envoi switching to a slower tempo
Song 4: Through-composed, no repetition
Song 5: Repetition of both melody and accompaniment; final envoi switching to a homophonic texture

There are other, smaller ways in which the songs echo each other.

I planned out none of this structure in advance, but kept adding new poems as I instinctively felt gaps in the overall conception. There is no particular narrative arch to Proenca, but I think this is typical of how I tend to create variety in a multimovement piece, mixing and matching an array of qualities from movement to movement for a gradually shaded set of perspectives on similar material. The movements share family resemblances; given seven qualities, each pair of movements may share four or five of those qualities in diverse combinations. No linear energy runs from movement to movement, but each balances the others and helps complete the total picture. And while I kept changing the order of the songs, a certain logic finally dictated the order I came up with, so that too-similar songs weren’t placed too close together. (Complete program notes for the piece are here. And parenthetically, I hope someone can suggest how to get a C with a cedilla to happen in html.)

Looking back, I can see that I’ve instinctively operated this way in other multimovement works. I rarely reuse material from one movement to another (though little melodic ideas do sometimes get transposed, since I like to work on the movements simultaneously), but all the movements together do provide a series of different perspectives on not a single idea but a group of associated ideas. In short, I guess what I’m leading up to saying is that I think I’m a pretty damn good composer, I just don’t do what people expect. But who knows.

 

 

My apologies for false notices. Sometimes I work on a blog post for several days. The “Save Draft” and “Publish” buttons are close together, and if I hit “Save Draft” 25 times it’s nearly certain that one of those times I’ll inadvertently hit “Publish” instead, and then I have to save my text and delete the entry. Meanwhile, apparently those of you who get automatic notices when I post are instantly notified that something new is up. I think WordPress should build in a five-minute delay in case of recall, but there it is; so many technological things we can do in the 21st century, and some we can’t. The post you were about to see will be up later today.

 

I complained to the singer I’m working with that some of my composer colleagues insist that virtually every note in a score should be marked with a dynamic and articulation marking – something I refuse to do. She replied: “Oh, I hate it when I feel hemmed in by the composer. I want to look at the notes and think, ‘What do I need to do to bring this line to life?'” That’s why I’m working with her. I would be irritated working with a performer who needed to be spoon-fed every phrase-shape, just as I would be bored writing a piece that sounded the same no matter who performed it.

I had a vivid dream this morning that I was working for a music festival, which has happened to me in real life before, and in the course of my administrative work came across a conceptual piece by some early modernist artist (which I seemed to recall having known about before). It was a test tube with a scroll inside it directing one to open the much smaller test tube inside in case of suicidal thoughts. And the smaller test tube contained a tiny scroll of paper reading, “The usage is, instead of committing suicide, to write a canon.” This seemed so familiar to me upon waking that I Googled the phrase (in vain), thinking I must have read it somewhere.

I hasten to add that it has been very many years since I was plagued with what I believe is now called suicidal ideation. I am not depressed, but I am still writing canons. The odd wording instantly brought to mind the Almighty fixing his “canon ‘gainst self-slaughter” in Hamlet, and also the annotation to Satie’s Vexations, at the bass line where it says “À ce signe il sera d’usage de présenter le thème de la Basse.” I don’t possess the insight to tease out what this little constellation of meanings signifies, but now, when a student comes in depressed, I might start saying, “Why don’t you try writing a canon?”

 

Today marks my first appearance as a writer in the New York Times since 2003. They asked me for a review of Phil Glass’s new memoir Words Without Music.

 

I was unaware of the Entourage Music and Theater Ensemble, which started in Baltimore and operated from 1970 to 1983 – surprisingly unaware, because though those were my college years, I was seeking out Terry Riley, John Cale, Brian Eno, and any shards of information I could find on La Monte Young and Charlemagne Palestine. I was spending hours a week in record stores, and their ambient style was right up my alley. But Wall Matthews, the group’s “last surviving member,” is launching a new web site for this group that was somewhat parallel, in the dance world, to Young’s Theatre of Eternal Music, and so there’s a chance to discover them long after the fact. I’m curious whether they were on the radar of my fellow minimalism aficionados.

 

“I knew at fifteen pretty much what I wanted to do… I resolved that at thirty I would know more about poetry than any man living, that I would know the dynamic content from the shell…”
– Ezra Pound, “How I Began” (1913)

A thrill ran up my spine when I read those words in college, for I harbored an identical ambition with respect to music. I recognized a kindred spirit, someone who was not only obsessed with an art form, but for whom creating in that art form was not enough: he had to devour and digest the entire history of the art, the repertoire going back to the dawn of recorded history. The obsession was not with “my art,” but with “all art leading up to mine.” (Pound was not yet thirty when he wrote that.) I became an Ezra Pound fanatic for several years, and the Pound preoccupation intersected with a burgeoning love for medieval music to promote my self-immersion in the troubadours (or, as I prefer to spell them in Provençal rather than French, trobadors). I actually studied Provençal for a semester with a Pound scholar, named Peter Way, who was living in Oberlin, Ohio, at the time but not teaching there. I memorized passages of Pound’s early poems, especially the Provençal-inspired ones; the Cantos I found forbidding. Perhaps the disturbing reputation of Pound’s later decades played some role in Pound’s finally dropping outside my focus. Still, when our medieval literature professor at Bard teaches the troubadours, she brings me in to lecture on the music, and I have a blast doing it.

In February I went to Kansas City to lecture on Ives, partially at the invitation of my friend David McIntire. Michelle McIntire, his wife and a singer and voice teacher, expressed a desire to perform some of my music, suggesting I write something for her. Michelle has a wide range but a low tessitura, with an especially nice quality in the octave around middle C. All of my songs for female voice are written in soprano register. I came home, pulled out the usual suspects among my poetry books. Low female voice I associate with sensuality, the sotto voce side of life. The troubadours registered in the back of my mind Рin my youth early-music groups sang them in the style of sacred music, but I always thought their celebrations of illicit sex would have been more at home in smoke-filled jazz clubs. I pulled out my old friend Pound and conceived of his troubadour poem Na Audiart sung with a cool, jazzy accompaniment of flute, vibraphone, electric piano, electric bass. Poem quickly led to poem, and a huge song cycle with the title Proen̤a (the Proven̤al word for Provence) exploded in my head.

So now Proença comprises six songs lasting a projected forty-five minutes (of which I have a half-hour completed), and I’m not sure that will be the end of it. I have two Pound songs based on the warrior-troubadour Bertrans de Born (pictured), Na Audiart and Near Perigord* (excerpted); two Pound translations of troubadour poems, Arnaut Daniels’s “L’aura amara” and the anonymous alba “En un vergier sotz fuella d’albespi” (which Pound called the best alba ever written**); and two settings of 12th-century poems in Provençal, Bernart de Ventadorn’s “Pois preyatz me senhor” (with the original melody), and the Comtessa de Dia’s “Estat ai en greu cossirier,” which I picked in order to have a poem by a woman for which no pre-existing tune had survived. I could so easily go further, there are so many troubadour poems I love and Pound poems, and my poet friend Michael Ives introduced me to the tautly energetic troubadour translations of Black Mountain poet Paul Blackburn (1926-71), which I’d also consider. On the other hand it’s a lot of music to pour into Michelle’s brain, and an odd instrumentation to ask an audience to listen to for half an evening. As it is, she’s thinking about a winter premiere and recording it next summer.

So I’m not sure how much further to go. I mentioned to a distinguished poet on the faculty that I was writing a song cycle on Pound and she spit out, “That bastard!” I know, but I do not believe in holding the artist’s faults against the art. Who knows but that I may be in the doghouse myself someday? And should my music therefore suffer? Pound’s later fascist sympathies aside (and I’m using only pre-1920 texts), those poems have been lovingly settled into the back of my brain for so many decades. Pound planted the seeds of a troubadour fascination forty years ago, and they only needed a drop of attention to blossom into a tropical forest of inspiration.

*It’s difficult to refer to Near Perigord when you’re very used to talking about the Danish composer Per Norgard.

**An alba is a formulaic medieval poem warning two lovers who shouldn’t be found sleeping together that the dawn is visible – presaging Romeo and Juliet and Tristan und Isolde.

I heard Mahler’s Ninth live today, for the first time since 1977 in Cleveland. I got a ticket (for an instantly sold-out concert) from the conductor, my employer, based on the fact that I wrote my senior paper at Oberlin on the piece. I analyzed the entire thing, but my paper was on the third-movement scherzo, a contrapuntal miracle. I know every note, and I registered every performance mistake. The performance was 85 minutes of me being consumed with envy. How did Mahler develop that continental sense of architecture? How did he know he could always keep going? How could he make fifteen quick key changes in a row and have every one sound fresh when there are only twelve keys? It’s a gigantic piece, yet when I’m not listening to it it telescopes back into a compact 45-minute form. How could he keep those same themes coming back over and over without ever sounding repetitive? When I listen to Ives I am filled with admiration, worship, and humility, because I’m convinced that Ives just had a brain unlike ordinary musical mortals. But what I try to do in my pieces is pretty similar to Mahler harmonically, and I can’t come close to filling out that kind of harmonic span. I feel like, intellectually, I could do what Mahler did, but I just don’t possess the imaginative energy. The sonuvabitch, how did he do it? I feel like Salieri contemplating Mozart in the film Amadeus.