Archives for May 2016

Over the last eleven years, I’ve given at least twenty-two keynote addresses and conference papers, and in recent weeks I’ve managed to post all but six of them (three of those rather redundant, given my other writings) on my web site. I also didn’t put up my keynote to the 2013 Earle Brown conference in Boston, or my analysis of Glass’s Einstein on the Beach, since both are coming out in books soon, nor my Geiringer lecture on Ives’s First Sonata, which I want to rewrite [UPDATE: now that’s up too]. Several have already been blogged here, though some of those were afterward altered or expanded. They include:

My keynote address for the 2012 Harry Partch conference in Boston, which I am proud of as one of the few statements on Partch’s elegantly intricate rhythmic innovation;

Elodie Lauten as Postminimalist Improviser, which I delivered at the 2015 minimalism conference in Helsinki, and which I think is the first academic paper on someone who was a leading female postminimalist figure;

Robert Ashley as Minimalist (already blogged here), which I delivered at the 2013 minimalism conference in Long Beach;

Silence in the Rearview Mirror (also already blogged here), which is my criticism of Cage’s rhetoric in Silence, delivered at the 2012 Cage110 centennial symposium in Lublin, Poland, and subsequently published in Polish;

A Pre-Concert Talk on Ives’s Concord Sonata, written in 2015 for a general audience;

The Boredom of Eventfulness, my keynote address for the 2011 Minimalism Conference in Leuven, Belgium;

Regarding Ben (already blogged here), my keynote address for the 2010 microtonal conference at Wright State University;

Reconstructing November, a paper on my process for creating a performance version of Dennis Johnson’s six-hour, 1959 piano piece November – first delivered at the 2009 Minimalism Conference in Kansas City and subsequently published in American Music (and overlapping in content with several blog posts here);

The Longyear Lecture (already blogged here), my critique of Americanist musicology delivered at the University of Kentucky in 2008, and subsequently published in American Music;

How the 13th Harmonic Saved My Sorry Ass, a paper on my microtonal methods for the Beyond: Microtonality conference at the University of Pittsburgh in 2015;

A Talk on John Cage’s 4’33”, delivered at the New World Symphony’s John Cage Festival in Miami in 2013 – largely drawn from my book, but with a few added ideas that occurred to me afterward;

The Uneasy, Unarticulated State of American Music (somewhat expanded from the version blogged here), delivered at the 2013 ISCM conference in Vienna;

From Hits to Niches (already blogged), my keynote address for the Canadian New Music Network in 2007;

My keynote address for the Extensible Toy Piano Conference at Clark University in 2005; and earliest and possibly least,

The Percussion Music of John J. Becker, my first scholarly article (1984), published in Percussive Notes journal.

In addition, I’ve been moving some of my more substantive blog essays to my web site, since I have no control over what goes on at Arts Journal, and didn’t want them vulnerable to potential disappearance. In short, the amount of Gannian verbiage on my web site is now well more than twice what used to be there. The collected writings are catalogued here. I hope some of these extra tens of thousands of words, with many score examples and audio examples (eat your heart out, books), will be of some interest to students of the more radical side of American music.

I peer-reviewed all of these papers myself, and enthusiastically recommended that they be web-published as submitted. That sure as hell saved a lot of time.

Bari – Pianist Emanuele Arciuli, director of the “Embracing the Universe” festival that ended yesterday, likes to casually mention that America is currently producing the best music in the world – and he doesn’t mean pop or jazz. He means postclassical. I didn’t know the whole program when I first wrote about it last week, but here’s a list of all the pieces performed on two concerts and during the conference:

Bernadette Speach: Embrace the Universe and Viola

Michael Gordon: Romeo

Mary Jane Leach: Prospero’s Sigh and Bach’s Set

Eve Beglarian: Fireside and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Philip Glass: Etude No. 13

John Adams: American Beserk

Andrew Thomas: So Far Beyond the Faint Edge of the World

David Lang: Before Gravity, After Gravity

Julia Wolfe: Believing

Larry Polansky: Ensembles of Note

me: Serenity Meditation; “Faith” from Transcendental Sonnets; Earth-Preserving Chant; and Sang Plato’s Ghost

With one exception, they’re all friends of mine, all people I’ve written a lot about, and all postminimalists or totalists. (The exception, Andrew Thomas, was chosen by the performers, and his thoughtfully virtuosic percussion showpiece fit in well.) The concerts, well attended and well-received, consisted of the kind of repertoire that would be ubiquitous today had my plans for world domination worked out successfully. The conductors, Giovanni Pelliccia for the orchestra and Filippo Lattanzi for the chamber concert, are both dynamic visionaries. It is so common in the US for me to show up and find the performers not really understanding the piece, that I sometimes fear I don’t capture the idea in the notation well enough; but here, each conductor had a compelling vision for the piece that was obvious from the first notes, and I needed add only the tiniest cosmetic touches and check the occasional questionable note. It was the most thrilling week in my life as a composer.

One of the papers was on the important Italian jazz figure Giorgio Gaslini (1929-2014), who promoted a concept called “Musica Totale,” which involved a blending of classical and vernacular styles. I told Emanuele that if I could prove that totalism originated in Europe, America would start to take it seriously.

Below: the ancient city of Matera, kind of an urban Grand Canyon, and where we ate there:

And the Bari Conservatory Orchestra rehearsing my Transcendental Sonnets:

Next week, May 9-12, Bari Conservatory in southern Italy, on the Adriatic, is hosting a totalism festival, titled “Embracing the Universe.” It was organized and is directed by pianist Emanuele Arciuli, who is perhaps Italy’s greatest advocate for recent American music of a more populist bent. (I had announced the festival for last September, but it was postponed.) You may remember totalism. Emanuele and the Conservatory Orchestra will play four of my works – Serenity Meditation, Sang Plato’s Ghost, Earth-Preserving Chant, and excerpts of Transcendental Sonnets, along with music by friends of mine: Bernadette Speach, Mary Jane Leach, and Michael Gordon (see poster below). Bernadette, whose ancestors are from that part of Italy, is finally getting a premiere of her 2001 chorus and orchestra piece Embrace the Universe , and, since it ties in with the idea of totalism, thus the festival’s title. I’m giving a lecture on totalism on the 11th, and since I have to miss a week of teaching anyway, my wife and I are spending the weekends as well. I may eat a lot.