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[Update below] I’ve been intending to write more about my European sabbatical, but I’m rather frantically composing on deadline. I have five world premieres coming up in the next several months, and two of the pieces aren’t finished. Thanks to my extended leave from teaching, I wrote seven works in 2007, totaling some 85 minutes of music – not much by some people’s standards, but a personal record for me. And I have two movements of The Planets to finish before school starts, so that the Relache ensemble can start practicing the entire 75-minute, ten-movement work – my own Turangalila, I like to think of it as – for their performance in Delaware in May. Also, my European trip was a lot to process: seven countries in eleven weeks, giving six concerts and ten lectures, meeting lots of composers, and hearing tons of new music. Unlike the American businessmen in novels, every American artist goes to Europe hoping to be changed. I’m not sure I was, but I did need time to think about it.

What I can do, though, is tell you about the most astonishing composer I learned about there: Matthijs Vermeulen. The Dutch call Vermeulen (1888-1967) “the Charles Ives of Holland,” and also their Varèse. He is the archetypal undiscovered composer. His Second Symphony – considered by many his most groundbreaking work (second page pictured below) – received its first performance in 1953, and Vermeulen himself first heard it in 1956. He had written it in 1920. The tone clusters, polyrhythms, percussion, and atonal counterpoint it opens with are easily as daring as anything Varèse would write in the next decade. To throw yet another comparison in, the Dutch refer to it as “the Dutch Sacre du Printemps.” Curiously modest about promoting their national composers, they won’t tell you anything about Vermeulen unless pressed, but if you mention how remarkable he was, they look proud as punch.

On top of the fact that he was decades ahead of his time, Vermeulen was just my kind of guy. Autodidact and too poor to buy concert tickets, he learned the repertoire by listening to orchestras play from outside the Concertgebouw, sitting in the garden. He found work as a music critic, one whose sharp and outspoken views earned him enemies and injured his chances for performance. (My apartment in Amsterdam was about six blocks from the Concertgebouw. After romanticizing the place for my entire life, I was pretty let down to find that it simply translates as “Concert Building.”)

The most famous incident of Vermeulen’s life, the one every commentator mentions, occurred while he was working as a critic in November of 1918. Following a performance at the Concertgebouw of the Seventh Symphony of the rather conservative Dutch composer Cornelius Dopper, Vermeulen, to express his contempt, yelled “Long live Sousa!” – by which he meant that even the little-respected John Philip Sousa was a better composer than Dopper. Much of the audience understood him, however, to have shouted “Long live Troelstra!”, which was the name of a socialist revolutionary who had attempted to start an uprising only days before. For awhile Vermeulen was banned from the Concertgebouw by the orchestra’s management. Unable to make a living in Amsterdam, he moved to Paris for a 25-year exile, eking out a living as a music journalist and travel writer. You can see why my heart goes out to the guy. I have a feeling Vermeulen and I would have been thick as thieves.

After World War II, and the war-related deaths of his wife and son, Vermeulen moved back to Amsterdam, and his works started to be heard. There is a “Complete Matthijs Vermeulen Edition” of his recordings on two three-CD sets on Donemus, sold in every record store in Amsterdam but rather difficult to locate on internet retail outlets. His twenty-odd works are easily listed:

Symphonies:

No. 1, “Symphonia carminum” (1912-14)

No. 2, “Prelude à la nouvelle journée” (1919-20)

No. 3, “Thrène et Péan” (1921-22)

No. 4, “Les victoires” (1940-41)

No. 5, “Les lendemains chantants” (1941-5)

No. 6, “Les minutes heureuses” (1956-8)

No. 7, “Dithyrambes pour les temps à venir” (1963-5)

Chamber music:

Cello Sonata No. 1 (1918)

String Trio (1923)

Violin Sonata (1924)

Cello Sonata No. 2 (1938)

String Quartet (1960-61)

Songs with piano:

On ne passe pas (1917)

The Soldier (1917)

Les filles du roi d’Espagne (1917)

Le veille (1917; also in orchestral version of 1932)

Trois salutations à Notre Dame (1941)

Le balcon (1944)

Preludes des origines (1959)

Trois chants d’amour (1962)

Other:

Symphonic Prologue, Passacaglia, Cortège, and Interlude to The Flying Dutchman (1930)

That’s it: Vermeulen’s life’s work. The symphonies – only the Fifth of which is divided into movements – are amazing. All of his music is tremendously contrapuntal, with many lines competing in a vast rhythmic heterophony. Throughout his life he complained that musicians who looked at his scores warned that the music would never sound, but that no one would play it to prove the point – and when he finally heard his works, they sounded just the way he wanted. He flows back and forth across the threshhold of tonality and atonality, occasionally sounding like Ives or Ruggles depending, though really sounding very much like himself. One of his most lovely and characteristic effects is the atonal (or dissonant) background ostinato, over which lengthy melodies unfold. It’s complex music, difficult to become familiar with, but not at all without personality. In weight and density one might compare the symphonies to those of Karl Amadeus Hartmann, although they are not nearly so complicated in form as Hartmann’s, and easier to take in as a whole.

I was directed to Vermeulen by a casual comment from Anthony Fiumara, director of the Orkest de Volharding. The name was totally unknown to me. I would have never believed that I, lifelong connoisseur of obscure composers, someone who teaches Berwald and Dussek in the classroom, would discover, at 51, a major composer I had never heard of, let alone one who would quickly become one of my favorites. At Donemus I bought the scores to the Second, Third, and Sixth Symphonies. It turns out that my erstwhile Fanfare magazine colleague Paul Rapoport wrote a book titled Six Composers from Northern Europe, about Vermeulen, Vagn Holmboe, Havergal Brian, Allan Pettersson, Fartein Valen, and Kaikhosru Sorabji, which remains one of the fuller treatments of Vermeulen in English; the one existing biography is only in Dutch. And since I hate to tell you about any music you can’t hear, I upload Vermeulen’s Third Symphony for your listening pleasure. Keep in mind it was completed in 1922. It’s amazing what you can reach your fifties without knowing, but delightful to realize how much left there is to learn.

UPDATE: I found an insightful and thorough article on Vermeulen here.

As a music critic, I’ve sat in the middle of hundreds of audiences, and I’ve observed them closely. I’ve seen them all gasp in unison at a right turn in a daring improv; I’ve seen them break into laughter at a clever one-chord quotation in a Rzewski piece; I’ve seen them fooled by an energetic performance into approving mediocre music; I’ve seen them let their minds wander during a performance and then clap loudly because it was something they were supposed to like. In short, I’ve generally seen audience members get swept into a collective dynamic, especially if a piece or performance is extreme in one way or another – extraordinarily boring, virtuosic, touching, and so on. I’ve also talked to people at intermissions and found that, despite a tremendous variety of opinions, it’s usually pretty easy to reach agreement on the details. It’s one’s evaluation of the details that makes for differences of opinion.

And so, from my own observations, I’ve always thought that that omnipresent composer mantra – “I never think about the audience when I write, because there is no such thing as the audience; everyone listens differently” – was hugely exaggerated. Within reasonable social-group similarities, people don’t listen that differently. Everyone drives differently, too, but it’s funny that when I press on my brake, the guy behind me nearly always does too.

So I think about the audience when I compose. Constantly. Of course I don’t simply try to write what will please them. I have my own kind of musical content I want to get across, and always have: overlapping rhythmic schemes, intricately interlocked harmonies, smooth forms whose seams (if any) are carefully brushed over. That stuff is me, and if I couldn’t put that into music, I’d quit composing. But when I was younger I often noticed that I’d stuff a piece with everything I wanted to say, and the audience wouldn’t get it. They’d just be mystified. I realized that my message wasn’t coming across. I went through a lot of self-criticism, and learned to give the audience what I call “points of entry” so they’d recognize something right away. If I wanted to get them to perceive a 13-against-29 tempo clash (in my piece Texarkana), I’d couch it in stride piano technique, so they’d have something familiar to start with. To seduce them into a tonal flux of microtonal harmonies in Custer and Sitting Bull, I added a military snare drum beat. I don’t call that compromising – I just call it learning how to get your message across, giving the listener something to hold onto, something that interests them, acknowledging their part of the transaction. It’s not up to me whether audiences like my music or not, but if they listen to a piece of mine and have no idea what I was trying to do, I consider that my failure. Frankly, I feel composers should forget about Schoenberg (who railed against people who please the audience) and start taking lessons from Spielberg.

Out of a purported 40,000 composers in America, I thought 39,999 disagreed with me, but it now turns out the number is only 39,997. As revealed in the comments on my previous post, Jeff Harrington and Samuel Vriezen also believe in composing with the audience in mind. That makes three of us.

UPDATE: Actually, let me add one more thought. Beethoven gave us what I consider an admirable model: he wrote the Grosse Fuge, which almost no one understood, and also the Ninth Symphony, which no one can fail to understand. And I’ve never figured out why today’s composers seem to think that they need to choose one point along this continuum and compose only from that point. Why not write one piece with a typical symphony audience in mind, and the next as a puzzle just for yourself and friends? As I once asked in a Village Voice column, “Isn’t Craft a god who must be propitiated, and won’t an occasional offering do the job?”

From recordings, I’ve known and loved Aaron Copland’s opera The Tender Land for over thirty years, but I had never seen a production of it until last night at Bard’s Summerscape Festival. It’s true the piece is a little more stage-awkward than I’d imagined: some of the lyrics are more pictorial than dramatic, and the first love scene between Laurie and Martin takes place at an otherwise racuous party, which must be imagined silently continuing in the background. (Staging also failed to clarify Top’s peculiar second-act story, which scandalizes Laurie’s mother, and which must have some underlying denotation I can’t discern – please explain for me if you “get” it.)

Nevertheless, the piece is far tauter and more cogent than Blitzstein’s Regina, and I find myself more than ever baffled by its continuing negative reputation. The score is gorgeous, deftly woven together in a web of both background and foreground motives, and the emotional emphases are in all the right places. As a mere love story it would be unconvincing, but Laurie’s line when she leaves home to look for Martin – “I don’t leave for that alone, maybe I don’t leave for that at all” (which soprano Anne Jennifer Nash unfortunately rushed through in an otherwise stirring performance) – elevates it to a more potent American archetype, the young person stifled by a narrow upbringing. It’s a lovely yet fearlessly unsentimental picture of Depression-era rural America – a lyrical one full of stock characters, though, not realist as this production tried to make it. After seeing it at last, The Tender Land remains probably my second favorite conventional opera ever (leaving aside Robert Ashley for a moment), after The Mother of Us All. And yet the musical intelligentsia came out shaking their heads and clucking their tongues about how poor Copland “couldn’t write an opera.” More evidence, if more were needed, that I hear things upside-down from the rest of the world.

February is the shortest month, mercifully, and I’m going to leave all of John Luther Adams’ music up on Postclassic Radio for a few more days at least as compensation. But I hereby proclaim Robert Ashley Composer-of-the-Months for not only March but April as well – on account of, I’m sick and tired of having classical musicians and even composers respond, “Who’s Robert Ashley?” “I’ve never heard his music, what’s it like?” And so if you’ve never heard his music you’re going to hear it this month, and if you have, you may revel in it to your heart’s content. I’m starting with his operas Perfect Lives and Improvement: Don Leaves Linda in their entireties, the longest complete works I’ve posted to the station. I’ll add other pieces as the months proceed. Ashley is the greatest and most innovative opera composer of the late 20th century, yet his work is so unconventional in genre and medium that the classical establishment has hardly bothered to become aware of it. In fact, for me there are four composers whose innovations could provide enough of a working foundation for a new musical language to supply my generation and another one or two afterward: Conlon Nancarrow for rhythm; La Monte Young (or alternatively, Ben Johnston) for pitch; Morton Feldman for texture and continuity; and Ashley for the relation of text to structure and music. In the work of those composers we have a new American musical revolution, for those who want to take advantage of it. It’s no exaggeration to say that my creative life has been a halting attempt to integrate what I inherited from the four of them.

Sorry, however, that I’ve been blogging about so little else besides the radio station. Paradoxically, I have too much time. Having stepped down as department chair, I now have time to pursue other projects, and so I’ve been composing, as well as writing loads of articles for print media, which leaves me little left to say. Blogging is a great spare-moment activity, and now I suddenly have too many spare hours to cut them up piecemeal.

The next repertoire I’m transferring from vinyl to CD is my collection of Ralph Shapey recordings: I believe I have every vinyl recording he ever produced. Shapey (1921-2002), whom I knew in Chicago, is not the kind of composer I’m supposed to like – his music is atonal, thorny, somewhat complex, relentlessly abstract – and I mystify some of my Downtown friends by championing him. But he was a tremendously misunderstood figure. He became grouped with a lot of the more academic composers, both because he taught at the University of Chicago from 1964 on – and because he wanted to be. He had no college degrees, was a little defensive about what he jokingly called his “iggerance,” and was very proud that someone of so little academic background (though superb musical training) could get a university job and associate with the musical “intellectuals.” But, to his credit, that’s not where he belonged.

The correct comparison figure for Shapey wasn’t Babbitt or Wuorinen or Elliott Carter, but Morton Feldman. Both Shapey and Feldman studied with Stefan Wolpe, both eked out meager livings in New York before getting university jobs, and both were closely associated with the abstract expressionist painters – Shapey even married one, his second wife Vera Klement. In superficial ways Shapey’s dissonance and complexity remind one of Carter or Davidovsky: major sevenths and minor ninths all over the place, unrelieved dissonances, triplets within quintuplets. As with Feldman and Messiaen, though, the unity of Shapey’s music is very much a unity for the ear, a unity based in sonorities, not something that works out best on paper.

I’ve defended Shapey on these grounds before, notably in the obituary I wrote for him a couple of years ago in the Voice. What moves me to write tonight is the stunning beauty, whose intensity I had forgotten, of his Fromm Variations, a set of 31 variations for piano gorgeously played on an old CRI disc by Robert Black. The “theme” is no more than a chorale of 20 four-note chords, uncompromisingly dissonant and undifferentiated. It’s not quite clear from listening what each variation has to do with the theme, except that the type of chord repetition in the theme recurs over and over. Shapey’s sonorities jostle back again and again with the same kind of familiar insistence as the chords in Cage’s middle-period works like the String Quartet. You can’t really figure out how the music works, but there’s a clear argument going on whose terms are continually brought back into play. Plus, Shapey sets each variation with a well-defined sense of rhythm that characterizes it, but also brings back rhythmic motives on unexpected offbeats so that you’re always surprised by the reappearance of what you recognize.

Most striking of all: each variation ends with the same final two chords as the chorale theme, and sometimes the last two or two-and-a-half phrases are left intact. It’s as though each variation digests part of the theme, sometimes more, sometimes less, but there’s always something left over at the end that’s recognizable. Those mysterious chord progressions mean nothing on first hearing, but they reappear like magical incantations and eventually create an amazing atmosphere, stern and granitic, but also mystical and meditative – not something your average American university atonalist felt called upon to do. I’m hard put to name another piece of such absolutely abstract, atonal, “difficult” music that engages you so directly and makes such ineffable intuitive sense.

And I’m afraid that Shapey – ignored by the Downtowners, mistrusted by the academics as insufficiently systematic, and with a bitter personality that could drive away would-be supporters – may fall through the cracks. His discography as currently represented at Amazon.com is discouraging in its paucity, and only of a couple of my vinyl discs are represented there as reissues, not including the Fromm Variations. I’m not a fan of all of Shapey’s music; he didn’t write too well for voice, in my opinion, treating it as though it were a clarinet, with unattractively awkward leaps. But his instrumental works, especially the Seventh String Quartet, Three for Six, and all the piano music I’ve heard, are magnificent, and much of his music remains unexplored. Programmatic concerts comparing Shapey, Feldman, and Wolpe would bring out some interesting affinities, and reveal more of an “abstract expressionist school” in music than most people suspect. (The Fromm Variations, 52 minutes long, would make a stellar companion piece to Feldman’s Piano or Triadic Memories.) I do hope there are musicians out there working to preserve Shapey’s uncompromising musical legacy.

And speaking of art’s ability to sharpen our perceptions (which I was), Beth Anderson’s Ocean Motion Mildew Mind has given me a new appreciation for the counterpoint between word sounds and word connotations. If you’re not familiar with her – and you should be, for she’s been producing fantastic music for a long time, even if not the kind lionized by classical institutions – Anderson writes what is just about the prettiest music of any composer today, with the possible and very different exception of Californian Harold Budd. But she didn”t always. She started out a noisy John Cage devotee with a yen for chance processes and hard-core conceptualism, and that early tendency, along with her patented style of text pieces, is the subject of her new CD Peachy Keen-O (Pogus Productions P21030-2).

A disc titled Peachy Keen-O better be damn good, or else it’s going to be really bad, and thankfully Anderson has a knack for turning cute, vulnerable ideas into cool, sophisticated pieces. Six of the nine works on this disc are the kind of text-music poems she became fairly well-known in New York for in the 1970s. In Torero Piece, she makes repetitive mouth sounds as her mother tells touchingly frank stories about their mother/daughter relationship; it’s almost like Beth is gleefully ignoring her mother, indulging in her own adamant brand of nonsense as her mother frets about her. Ocean Motion Mildew Mind, which is based on those four words and “wishin’, Titian, swishin’, swine” (“mind” and “swine” rhyming in Anderson’s Kentucky accent) is a subtractive process piece with a rock beat behind it – it’s little remembered that Anderson was one of the first Downtowners to add vernacular elements to her work. She was rapping long before anyone dreamed of rap.

It’s the instrumental pieces, though, that especially give the lie to Anderson’s current reptutation as a composer of pretty music. The noisiest is Tower of Power, in which organist Linda Collins uses her body to hold down as many organ keys and pedals as possible, as loud as possible, multiply amplified, and squirming somewhat, for ten minutes – new music offers no more grinding mass of audio waves, no more opaque wall of noise. And the piece I had heard about for years and was glad to finally discover is Joan, a kind of oratorio – here arranged for multiple pianos – based on the trial of Joan of Arc. The alphabet letters of the words of Joan’s defense are mapped onto the white notes of the scale, ABCDEFG, in a subtractive process that leaves everyone playing only A and B by the end. Restful in tonality yet bristling with energy, the piece is a particularly human and listenable example of conceptual art.

Starting in the early 1980s, Anderson switched to writing chamber music in a beautiful, lyrical, yet collage-based and stream of consciousness style. Her best-known works are a series of what she calls Swales, which is a term for meadows in which diverse collections of plant species live together, and despite her use of lovely, even sentimental string quartet textures, there remains something radical about the insouciance with which she juggles passages of aeolian mode, country fiddling, dissonance, fugue, classical melody, and Glassian argeggios in her work. Her music is too simple for the highbrows to take seriously, but the simplicity is entirely deceptive; I’m always impressed by the subtlety with which she smoothes out fissures among unrelated-seeming materials that start to feel like they belong together. You might even think of her as a feminine John Zorn, quietly finessing her collage seams instead of trying to jar and shock.

And while this new Pogus disc of her long-ago music from the ’70s is very different, it is equally engaging, attractive, and enjoyable, and rounds out a picture of an artist who has never been awarded credit for her deserved stature, but who has been convincing at every stage in a varied career.

I’m out here in the wilds of Devonshire, lecturing at Dartington College of the Arts, a school that resembles my own home institution in many ways: rural setting, size, priorities, student interests. As with all such liberal institutions, technology is not at the top of its priority list, and it took me a few days to get fitted with my own internet connection, one that would allow me to e-mail and blog comfortably and at leisure.

In the process I missed a very important American-musical birthday this week: William Duckworth turned sixty. [Oops – 61. Is this 2004? Why wasn’t I informed?] One of the first postminimalist composers, possibly the first depending on how you define the style, Duckworth remains one of the best. (By the way, unlike some writers I don’t use “postminimalist” to refer to general minimalist influence, but as a very specific American style of the 1980s. You can read my New Music Box article on postminimalism for details.) Duckworth’s music is elegant, logical, tuneful, and yet leaves room for improvisation, dissonance, collage, and chance techniques without losing its own identity. His break-through came in 1979 with his hour-long piano work The Time Curve Preludes, a subtle, mesmerizing cycle of pieces weaving together bluegrass banjo techniques, chant, Erik Satie’s Vexations, quasi-Indian modes, Messiaen-like rhythmic structures, and subtly veiled minimalist processes into a smooth fusion. I first heard it at New Music America in Minneapolis in 1980, which might pinpoint the true beginning of Duckworth’s public career. Everyone I’ve ever played the CD for has expressed a desire to run out and buy it. It’s a classic.

And it remains Duckworth’s signature work, though I feel he’s surpassed it. His choral cycle Southern Harmony drew on shaped-note hymn-singing techniques from early rural America, and shaped it with a minimalist ear. His Imaginary Dances is another stellar piano cycle: charming, more nuanced than The Time Curve Preludes, its liveliness begging you to analyze the tricky rhythmic devices through which he creates it. Blue Rhythms is a delightful trio for clarinet, cello, and piano, with a springy jazz feel. Mysterious Numbers, with its syncopated counterpoint of melodies rising and falling against each other, is the piece with which he started transferring that aesthetic to orchestra. If there is any composer from the 1980s and ’90s whose music is sturdy, enduring, and universal enough to go into the standard repertoire, it is Duckworth’s. In fact, come to think of it, if you’re a Lou Harrison fan looking for who might follow in that tradition, Duckworth is a logical next step.

In recent years, Duckworth has divided his career between composed works and his massive internet project, Cathedral, which you can access here. Cathedral has drawn him into the world of listener-contributed sound samples, improvisation, and DJ-ing: live performances of his Cathedral Band are grounded in the disc-spinning of Seattle’s DJ Tamara. One of the main features of postminimalism, though, and especially in Duckworth’s conception of the style, is that it can draw so many disparate elements into a smooth fusion that doesn’t seem eclectic at all. As I’ve written before, everything Mr. D eats turns into Mr. D. Now that he’s past 60, it’s time to recognize him as one of America’s leading musical statesmen, a major influence on a generation or two of younger composers (myself included), and someone whose music elegantly crystallized a refreshingly calm moment in the otherwise chaotic late 20th century.

One of the advantages of this blog is that it allows me to indulge in the news-pegless item. Those of us journalists who have a soft spot for obscure music, or who have even become leading experts in bodies of music few people have ever heard of, get frustrated waiting for the “news peg,” the external event that justifies a subject to editors. When, after all, is there going to be an Ivan Wyschnegradsky concert in New York? How long will I wait to give my opinion of Ben Weber (1916-1979), if I am dependent on the prodding of external events? What excuse do I give an editor for injecting Giancarlo Cardini into an essay? And yet, if circumstances prevent me from bringing up artists who I feel are vastly underrated, how will they ever begin to be evaluated properly? So as a new, ongoing feature of this blog, I offer the Academie d’Underrated, a series of totally gratuitous articles bringing to your attention composers who aren’t visible anywhere on the cultural radar – and SHOULD be.

As it turns out, I’ve been planning for months to begin this feature with Dane Rudhyar (1895-1985), and just when I get the chance, a news peg actually appeared in the form of a new compact disc, along with the advent of an excellent Rudhyar web page. Had Rudhyar continued composing through the Depression, he would doubtless be one of the more famous names in American music; instead, even rabid new-music fans of my acquaintance have often never heard of him. An emigre from Paris who had come straight from hearing the premiere of Le sacre du printemps, Rudhyar landed in New York with a splash, getting two orchestral works (now lost) performed within months of getting off the boat. Spreading the twin gospels of Theosophy and Scriabin (a much more popular composer before World War II than seems imaginable now), Rudhyar made his way to San Francisco, and ended up in the proto-New Agey Halcyon community with Henry Cowell.

Had he been born a few decades later, Rudhyar’s heavily spiritual approach to composing would doubtless have landed him in the same milieu as La Monte Young, Charlemagne Palestine, and Terry Riley. As it was, he had to make do with the resources of early 20th-century modernism. Many composers in the 1920s, Rudhyar leading a banner in this regard, drew an equasion between dissonance and spirituality, the idea being that the irreducible sonority of dissonant chords elicited a new kind of meditative listening. Rudhyar felt that by playing dissonant sonorities on the piano, one turned it from being a rational instrument into a mystical one; like Scriabin, he seemed to imitate gongs and bells in resounding chords that played off the odd notes of the overtone series. Rudhyar wrote mostly brief works on principle, feeling that the emphasis on form and relationship necessary that a long piece demands detract from the magical quality of pure sonority. In fact, I regard Rudhyar as a kind of important midpoint between Scriabin and La Monte Young: less formally conservative than Scriabin, not yet aware what he might have been able to do in terms of sonority by retuning the piano as Young does in The Well-Tuned Piano.

The craggy, dissonant style of modernism, however, was hard hit during the Depression. The American composers who had championed dissonance in the 1920s either simplified their styles considerably in the 1930s (like Copland, Antheil, Cowell, and Thomson), or quit composing altogether (Crawford, and temporarily Arthur Berger). Rudhyar’s composing slowed to a trickle in the 1930s, and he got sidetracked into a career as the country’s most esteemed astrological writer. I highly recommend Rudhyar, actually, as a starting point for astrology, especially his first and seminal book, The Astrology of Personality – that was my introduction to the subject, and I became interested because I was already such a fan of Rudhyar’s music. Rudhyar can be a dense writer, and he often desperately needed editing for clarity; the following sentence, if rather brief by Rudhyarian standards, is otherwise not atypical:

In most ancient cosmologies with a metaphysical foundation – that is, that speak of a transcendent, spiritual realm of being antedating material existence and becoming – a release of sound is said to cause the “precipitation” of the Forms of a spiritual realm (noumena and archetypes) into the objective, perceptible, and measurable materials constituting the foundations of existential entities.

Not that one can’t figure out that sentence, but when Rudhyar starts generalizing about the history of mankind, several paragraphs in a row of such material can leave the reader desperate for a concrete bit of solid ground. Nevertheless, Rudhyar was a revolutionary figure in astrology whose influence is still much felt today: someone who championed the planets as spiritual forces leading one to self-knowledge rather than as implements of inevitable, therefore predictable fate.

And so Rudhyar’s composing pretty much dried up in 1934, as he wrote more than three dozen books about astrology. In the 1970s, due to interest expressed by young composers like James Tenney, Charles Amirkhanian, and Peter Garland, he resumed composing – and his style didn’t change one iota. Though I’ve heard only a little of Rudhyar’s orchestral output (and only his Five Stanzas for string orchestra has been commercially recorded), his best work seems to be his piano music, especially the series’ of brief works called Pentagrams, Tetragrams, Paeans, and Granites. The music is as tough and granitic as that of Charles Ives or Carl Ruggles, but instead of being melodic or contrapuntal it is an interplay of sonorities that reappear and evolve, impressionistic and atmospheric and yet stern and commanding at the same time. There are also a pair of string quartets he wrote for the Kronos Quartet, but I don’t find them as compelling.

The new compact disc (Furious Artisans FACD 6087 – you can hear a brief soundbite here) is a recording of piano music by pianist/composer Richard Cameron-Wolfe, who does justice to Rudhyar’s abrupt and impassioned side. (The disc also includes a rare Erik Satie ballet, Uspud, and one of Cameron-Wolfe’s signal achievements is that he has performed Satie’s Vexations, a 24-hour repetitive work, by himself rather than as part of the usual team of pianists.) Cameron-Wolfe includes two previously unrecorded early Rudhyar works from his Parisian period, Lamento (1913) and Cortege Funebre (1914), dark, original, and not as Debussyan as you’d expect from the fact that the young avant-gardist had written his first book on Debussy in 1913. The other Rudhyar works are Tetragrams Nos. 3 and 8, from the late 1920s, which as far as I know are also world premiere recordings. This is absolutely top-shelf Rudhyar, taut, mystical, thoughtfully explosive.

The Rudhyar web page, in which Rudhyar’s astrologer widow Leyla Rudhyar Hill is involved, is also exciting news. It offers not only a fairly detailed biographical sketch outlining Rudhyar’s musical and astrological achievements alike, but a list of works, twelve of his swirly, geometrically symbolic paintings, some of his portentously abstract poetry, and best of all a generous selection of his writings, including the entirety of his late book about music, The Magic of Tone and the Art of Music. Please avail yourself of it all: Rudhyar was an important central influence of the 1920s (on Ruth Crawford and John Cage among others), and musically ahead of his time in many ways. His insistence on brevity as a way to avoid abstraction, parallel to Harry Partch’s emphasis on corporeality, makes him a postclassical composer who arrived decades before the world was ready for him.

Having been unexpectedly drawn into writing here about grid-pulse postminimalism, I’ve decided to publish my most important article on the topic here, because the book it’s in is prohibitively expensive, and I need people to be able to refer to it to see exactly what I’m talking about. It’s from the Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music, which I coedited with Pwyll Ap Sion and Keith Potter, and the succinct title of the article is “A Technically Definable Stream of Postminimalism, its Characteristics, and its Meaning.” In my introduction to the whole volume, I managed to name 32 minimalist composers; here I named 49 associated with grid-pulse postminimalism. This was a widespread movement, involving composers from Hawaii to Massachusetts and Florida to Seattle, plus several Europeans that I knew of.

One of the pieces highlighted here I’ve realized I’m remiss in not featuring more widely on this blog: Dan Becker’s Gridlock, which is practically the poster-boy piece for this movement. It’s the only piece I can think of whose title even alludes to the grid aspect of this music, and in the liner notes Dan talked about the idea of men thinking in grids while women’s concepts are more fluid (although I am struck by by the fact that 14 of my 49 – 29%, which is high for any classical idiom – are women, and their music is just as likely to be grid-based as the men’s). Written in 1994, Gridlock did not appear early in the style’s history, whose beginning I date to Duckworth’s and Lentz’s works of the late 1970s. But it expresses the purest crystallization of the style’s idea, and I’m temporarily putting a recording up here.

Also, since it fortuitously just appeared, here’s the latest disc of music by a central grid-pulse postminimalist composer, Paul Epstein’s Piano Music played by R. Andrew Lee.

And one other recording: “Alone in a Crowd,” the first track from Jeff Beal’s soundtrack for the movie Pollock, the only film soundtrack I know of which fits perfectly in the grid-pulse postminimalist aesthetic (and the only non-Glass soundtrack I own and listen to for pleasure). That’s a 50th composer. So you don’t know about grid-pulse postminimalism? You can now if you want to, 8000 words worth. And from now on when I refer to the topic I’ll link here.

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A Technically Definable Stream of Postminimalism, its Characteristics, and its Meaning
By Kyle Gann

As scholars, we strive to efface ourselves in favor of the phenomena we study; as music historians, we shape history, but only after we let the data we take in shape us. Working as a music reviewer in the 1980s and ‘90s, I became aware of a new repertoire of music whose stylistic commonalities were too striking to ignore. The music, mostly American in the concerts I heard, was overwhelmingly diatonic in its scales and harmonies. A grid of steady beats was almost always maintained, often throughout an entire work or movement without change of tempo. Dynamics tended to be monochrome or terraced, with little of the kind of expressive fluidity one associates with music of the Romantic or modernist eras. In its circumscribed materials and emotional staticness (which is not to say the music was unemotive, but rather that it tended to maintain one affect throughout), the music was analogous to certain genres of Baroque music, particularly German and Italian instrumental music of the late Baroque, though using a harmonic syntax that was in no way conventional. One of the most intriguing aspects of this repertoire was that it ranged in typology from highly structured to completely intuitive and every nuance in-between.

From the beginning it seemed clear that this music was on the most obvious level a collective response to the somewhat earlier style known as minimalism. The differences, however, were decisive. Many of the major minimalist works of the 1960s and ‘70s, now too familiar to us to list here, seemed to embody a new performance paradigm. Minimalist works were often evening-length and suited to a listening mode more ambient and less formal than that of the standard classical music concert; audience members might lie down or sit on the floor, and could come and go as they pleased. Instrumentation for these works was often open and variable from one performance to another. The composers sometimes had their own ensembles dedicated to their works alone. The pieces were sometimes not set at a composed length, but could stretch on longer depending on the performance circumstances.

The subsequent repertoire that had imposed itself on my attention represented a return to the conventional classical-music concert paradigm. It was almost always written in standard notation, though with a minimum of expression markings. The duration of pieces returned to the conventional concert-music length of, say, five to 25 minutes. Most of the music was for chamber ensembles or solo instrument, occasionally involving electronic instruments such as guitar or synthesizer, but rarely with much emphasis on electronic timbres. However, certain aspects of minimalist music, in particular the phase-shifting found in Steve Reich’s early music and the additive process of Philip Glass’s early music, were often taken over as structural devices. In minimalist music, these devices are generally meant to be obvious to the listener; it is one of the primary changes wrought by this new repertoire that it used them in a more underlying, even occult manner. Minimalism, moreover, was not the only musical influence. Beneath a patina of stylistic homogeneity, the music made reference to a panoply of genres: Balinese gamelan, folk music, pop, jazz, 18th-century chamber music, Renaissance music, and even national anthems and specific tunes and pieces. It was a remarkably eclectic body of music, ironically so, beneath its seamlessly even surface.

The number of pieces I encountered as a music critic at concerts and on recording in the 1980s and ‘90s that fit all of these criteria was too copious to ignore. Ubiquitous similarities made comparisons inescapable. It was as though an entire generation born in the 1940s and ‘50s (and thus a little younger than the original minimalists) was writing chamber works that were conventionally classical in format, but with harmonies, processes, and textures inspired by the more unconventional minimalist works that poured from the Manhattan and San Francisco avant-gardes. No survey of 18th-century symphonies could have revealed more striking overlaps and consistencies of style and method.
A word was needed to encompass this far-flung musical language that so many composers were working in. The word postminimalism was floating around, especially among musicians in conversation. Critic John Rockwell was referring to post-minimalists in music in The New York Times at least by 1981 [1], and in 1982 he could start off a review by mentioning, “One hears a good deal about post-Minimalism these days.”[2] In 1983 he referred to John Adams as a Post-Minimalist, describing the idiom as “a steady rhythmic pulse and a shimmering adumbration of that pulse by the other instruments and voices.”[3] Just prior to that article and in the same newspaper, Jon Pareles – reviewing composers David Friedman, James Irsay, Amy Reich, and others unknown to me – attempted a capsule definition of postminimalism as “using repetition for texture rather than structure, and embracing sounds from jazz and the classics.”[4] There is, indeed, a strong continuity between especially this latter definition and the usage I will propose here.

My own earliest use of the term postminimalism, at least in the Village Voice, was five years later on March 26, 1988, in an article mentioning composer Daniel Goode as an example.[5] I made my first attempt at a full definition of the style on April 30, 1991, in a review of the Relache ensemble (perhaps the most important commissioning ensemble for this style of music) performing Janice Giteck, Mary Ellen Childs, and Lois Vierk.[6] A week later critic Joshua Kosman applied the term to Paul Dresher’s music in the San Francisco Chronicle[7], and he later used it to describe Steve Martland in 1994[8], and David Lang in 1995 and ’96.[9] Then, in his 1996 book Minimalists, K. Robert Schwarz mentions that the term post-minimalism had “been invented” (presumably by Rockwell, though he gives no citation) to describe the neoromantic postmodernism of John Adams’s music.[10] At the end of that year, Keith Potter used the term postminimalism in The Independent in a review of the Icebreaker ensemble performing music of David Lang and Michael Gordon.[11]

I supply the exact type-setting of the term in each case to bring out the curious coincidence that those (especially Rockwell) who used the term in these early years to describe John Adams’s music, and also the post-1980 music of Steve Reich and Philip Glass, tended to spell it with a hyphen, post-minimalism (and often with a capital first M). Those who applied the term to younger composers who had not been among the original minimalists tended to use the non-hyphenated form. It is as though, on whatever conscious level, those who described the later music of previously minimalist composers separated the term into post-minimal, emphasizing the connotation of post as after; those who referred to a new style by younger composers applied to it the sleeker, more unified postminimal. From this tendency I will take license, then, for purposes of this article, to use un-hyphenated postminimalism to denote only the repertoire of music whose style characteristics I have described. Perhaps ultimately some further restricting term will be necessary: for instance, “grid postminimalism,” referring to the music’s tendency to place every note on a 16th-note or 8th-note grid and to eschew expressive or expansive rhetorical models of any kind in favor of stepped contrasts (if any). No new musical term is ever introduced without controversy, and there are always those who protest that the mapping of a word to a variety of musical practices is never literal enough. This can’t be helped. I may lack a precise term, but I can define the body of music I venture to write about here with the utmost specificity. I may have to beg the reader’s indulgence for my circumscribed definition, but that the repertoire I describe was a widespread and clearly recognizable idiom of the 1980s and ‘90s can be established by evidence too voluminous to contradict.

Despite the catalogue of similarities that will ensue, I would not want to give the impression that postminimal music was in any way conformist or derivative. Its paradigmatic conventions (due perhaps to whatever personal proclivities on the part of its creators, ranging from a desire to sit in chairs to an lack of interest in hallucinogenics) remained those of the concert hall. Within those conventions, a new musical language appeared in full bloom almost overnight. The valorization of idiosyncrasy has become so prevalent in the arts that we forget how much advantage can accrue from a large number of people speaking the same language. Differences between pieces sharing this language could be subtle and distinctive. Composers working on the same problems could learn from each other and push the language’s evolution to a new level. Listeners were freed from having to confront a new set of expectations from concert to concert and record to record. Continual innovation can be excitingly mind-opening, but development of a common language promotes depth in public discourse.

Not that any of this happened by conscious intention. The first pieces of music that used minimalist harmony and processes in an abbreviated and fully-notated format appeared in the late 1970s from composers who were unaware of each other’s work. I would count, among those pieces, William Duckworth’s Time Curve Preludes (1978-9) and Southern Harmony (1980-81), Daniel Lentz’s Wild Turkey and The Dream King (1983), Janice Giteck’s Breathing Songs from a Turning Sky (1980), Ingram Marshall’s Fog Tropes (1979/82) and Gradual Requiem (1979-81), Peter Gena’s McKinley (1983), and Jonathan Kramer’s Moments In and Out of Time (1981-3).

In addition to these, composers who have written notated music within postminimalism’s diatonic harmonies and grid-like tempo constructs include (in alphabetical order) Thomas Albert, Beth Anderson, Eve Beglarian, Dan Becker, David Borden, Tim Brady, Neely Bruce, Gavin Bryars, Giancarlo Cardini, Mary Ellen Childs, Lawrence Crane, Paul Dresher, Paul Epstein, Graham Fitkin, myself, Peter Garland, Daniel Goode, Judd Greenstein, Jean Hasse, Melissa Hui, Dennis Kam, Guy Klucevsek, Joseph Koykkar, Jeremy Peyton Jones, David Lang, Paul Lansky, Elodie Lauten, Mary Jane Leach, Bunita Marcus, Steve Martland, Sasha Matson, John McGuire, Beata Moon, Maggi Payne, Belinda Reynolds, Stephen Scott, James Sellars, Howard Skempton, Bernadette Speach, Kevin Volans, Renske Vrolijk, Phil Winsor, Wes York, and many others. When this many artists have written music that can be similarly characterized in both technical and contextual terms, to refrain from applying a common terminology would seem like a perversely ideological nominalism. Admittedly, this is clearly a larger repertoire of music than can be even cursorily digested in an article such as this; I select my examples primarily based on relevance to certain generic technical points, as well as based on availability of scores and recordings.

I might add parenthetically that there is another repertoire of music, consisting of the 1940s music of John Cage and the later music of Lou Harrison, Alan Hovhaness, and others, so similar to 1980s postminimalism that I have sometimes jocularly referred to it as “protopostminimalist.” Examples would certainly include Cage’s In a Landscape, Dream, and Three Pieces for Two Prepared Pianos, as well as Harrison’s Serenade for Harp, Koro Sutro, and quite a few other pieces. Since that music was written by composers whose styles were formed prior to the advent of minimalism, it would be misleading, I think, to attempt to include it within the postminimalist rubric. Those works themselves, moreover, were clearly among the several influences on the postminimalist movement.

As the term is used here, a piece of music can be understood as being only partly postminimalist, and there are phases in which we can sense a transitory state between minimalism to postminimalism and between postminimalism and something else. The former is especially clear in works which retain some of the strict processes associated with minimalism: most notably, phase-shifting and additive (or subtractive) process. (Jon Pareles used postminimalism in 1983 to connote “using repetition for texture rather than structure”; likewise, we could also say that it uses phase-shifting and additive phrase-lengthening for structure rather than as audible process.) In addition to Piano Phase and Come Out, the phase-shifting tendency can also be traced to Henry Cowell’s book New Musical Resources (1930), in which Cowell suggested basing works on a “harmony of links,” by which he denoted different rhythmic cycles running concurrently and going out of phase with each other.

Strict Process

As a seminal example, William Duckworth’s Time Curve Preludes from 1978-79 exhibit, in their 24 movements, a stunning variety of postminimalist techniques, some more transitional than others. Prelude XI, for instance, is one of the examples closest to its minimalist roots. It consists of 15 successive melodies, with occasional rhythmic augmentations and pauses. The relation among the melodies is probably more obscure than any listener could analyze by ear, but it is noticeable on some level that all the melodies use the same pitches, and use them each the same number of times; the not-completely-diatonic pitch set aids this perception, since within the general E-minor mode there are two G-sharps per melody that change their position within each iteration.

Analysis reveals that the melodies result from one 16-note melody (itself based on the shape of the Dies Irae, one of the work’s recurring references) going out of phase with itself. (In Example 1 the unchanging melody is given in the upper octave and the moving melody in the lower octave). Notice – and this is a telling departure from minimalism, ultimately with major consequences – that the process in not carried out with complete strictness. Within each pair of notes, sometimes the moving melody note appears first, sometimes the unmoving melody’s note, and the decisions were made intuitively with melodic and pianistic criteria in mind. And yet the piece is a clear expansion of the idea of Reich’s Piano Phase, with different and less obvious effect.

Piano Phase also had a major impact on another composer, Paul Epstein (b. 1938), who wrote a 1986 Musical Quarterly article titled “Pattern Structure and Process in Steve Reich’s Piano Phase,”[12] analyzing Reich’s opus in great detail, and who subsequently based much of his own composing techniques on the insights involved. The first movement from his much later piano piece Interleavings (2002) is exactly like Duckworth’s Prelude XI in principle. The movement is titled “15 x 16,” and again it is an inscrutable melody that keeps coming back to all the same notes, and similar rhythm patterns, over and over again with some apparent underlying logic that the ear can’t decode. Again, analysis reveals that the overall melody results from two other melodies, one 15 8th-notes long and the other 16, offset by a 16th-note (Example 2). Whereas Duckworth’s Prelude XI phased a melody against itself, Epstein uses two different melodies for a more complex process.

In other Epstein works this idea is tremendously expanded. His Palindrome Variations (1995) for flute, cello, and piano, is entirely based on phase relations in one 12-note, palindromic melodic figure using only five pitches. Within the 6/4 meter this figure gets rotated to every possible position (Epstein calls the version that begins on the third 8th-note Rotation 3, that which starts on the 7th 8th-note R7, and so on), and at any given moment certain pitches are “filtered” out in a given instrument. It becomes audibly clear that the five pitches of that melodic figure are the only ones in the piece, and some underlying logical ordering seems apparent; the attraction of Epstein’s music, for me, is that it makes you think that if you could just listen hard enough you could figure out what the process is, so it irresistibly encourages very close listening. The range of textures and subsidiary figures he achieves with that one 12-note figure as source material is rather dazzling, and, in fact, the chamber version of Palidrome Variations is greatly reduced from a 22-minute version for synthesizer based on the same principle. I like to refer to Epstein as “the Milton Babbitt of postminimalism,” due to the fanatical rigor of his structures.

From the works of Philip Glass postminimalism also inherited a tendency toward additive process, as well as subtractive process. Time Curve Prelude IX uses as its basis a pitch row taken from the bass line of Erik Satie’s Vexations. The row appears first in half notes, then in double-dotted quarter-notes, then dotted quarters, then quarters tied to a 16th, and so on, speeding up geometrically with each repetition until it seems to disappear in a spiraling acceleration. Likewise, the Music for Piano No. 5 of Jonathan Kramer employs both additive process (more in the manner of Steve Reich, keeping the metric unit constant) and subtractive process. The piece opens in 11/16 meter, with only one note per measure, repeating over and over. A second note is added within the measure, then a third, and so on until a steady 11-note pattern is built up. Then, underneath a freer right-hand melody, Kramer begins subtracting notes from the ostinato, also shortening the meter to 10/16, 9/16, 8/16, and so on.

Dan Becker’s Gridlock for mixed ensemble (1994) is a virtual manifesto for postminimalist formalism. Becker mentions in the program note to the piece that he attempted to make a virtue of the “male” tendency (though we will find that women composers do it too) to map out everything onto a grid. The entire piece is drawn from a 20-note sequence (given in Example 3) that roughly traces the circle of fifths. Then, in 16th notes, he additively creates a longer series by taking in series the groups of notes in an additive pattern based on the Fibonacci series: 1, 1, 2, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 5, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 – and then starting over similarly on the second note, later on the third, and so on. The harmony, then, tends to cluster around one area in the circle of fifths for awhile before systematically progressing to another, and the accompanying lines pick notes out from the sequence, with accented rhythms resulting from where certain pitches fall in the 16th-note continuum.

[In case the system seems arcane, the note series is apportioned like so:

1

1 – 1 2

1 – 1 2 – 1 2 3

1 – 1 2 – 1 2 3 – 1 2 3 4 5

1 – 1 2 – 1 2 3 – 1 2 3 4 5 – 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

and so on.]

My own works frequently use phase-shifting as an underlying principle. My orchestra piece Desert Song (2011, based on a 2006 piano composition) is grounded on an ostinato 83 beats long, interrupted by an orchestral tutti every 149 beats; certain foregrounded melodic elements recur at equally regular intervals. I had been interested in this type of structure ever since my piece for soprano and mixed ensemble Satie of 1975, in which lines went out of phase with each other within a C-major scale, with the additional structural principle (known to British bell-ringers as a “change-ringing” pattern) that pitch dyads within each phrase would be switched in the next phrase: ABCDEFG, BADCFEG, BDAFCGE, and so on. (I later learned that similar patterns were also used by Jon Gibson and Barbara Benary.)

While the minimalist roots of these strict-process pieces are quite evident, much, perhaps most, postminimalist music is not so highly structured. It is one of the features of the style that strict process and free composition can coexist in the same composer’s output, and indeed within the same work; the Time Curve Preludes are a telling example. In Prelude No. VII we find a trace of additive process, but a freer overall structure. This languorous dance is made up of only three elements: a slowly arpeggiated bass line whose final dyad sometimes gets extended (A); a melody that here and there breaks the continuity (B); and a set of six chords that create an impression of bitonality by wandering conjunctly through scales from various keys, though the lower two lines are not actually diatonic (C) (Example 4). There is some inheritance from Glass’s additive minimalism here in the systematic way the phrase lengths expand at first according to lengths proportional to the Fibonacci series, but even this structural element recedes as the B melody intrudes more and more.

Mary Jane Leach’s Mountain Echoes (1987) is based on an evolving strict process. The music, written for eight female singers staged in two square configurations, opens with a single pitch echoing from singer to singer, from singer 1 to singer 8 and back again. Other pitches are introduced, and gradually new echoes start up on new beats, until, within each two-measure phrase, three pitch-echoes start with singer 1 and three more from singer 8 (Example 5). Other pitches, increasingly echoed, fill in the gaps between the main echo lines as they cross the texture. At maximum density in this process, all the pitches are echoed at a quarter-note delay. Gradually Leach begins omitting pitches until two different lines of echoes are moving in a double braid, from singer 1 to 3 to 5 to 7, and from singer 8 to 6 to 4 to 2. Step by step the melodic lines expand in length, and so do the echo distances, from 4 beats to 5 to 6 to 8. The entire pitch content remains on a seven-pitch, non-diatonic scale within one octave: F, Gb, Ab, A, Bb, C, Db, F. The process, taking eleven minutes, sounds deceptively strict and at certain moments repetitive, and is impossible to disentangle by ear, creating a sense of mystery.

Quotation

For whatever reason, quotation of other music and styles is common in this vein of postminimalism; the style’s unvarying tempo and adaptability to any repertoire of harmonies seem to invite the abstracted, sometimes ironic or playful quotation of earlier tonal music. Leach’s Bruckstück (1989), for six female voices, slowly works its way though the opening harmonies (plus a few melodic motives) of the Adagio from Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony – assuming the singers perform their rhythms accurately, one might even pick that fact up from the pulsing of the opening multi-voice drone on Db. The music proceeds in rhythmic ostinatos which change every few measures, inflecting the pitches to move from, say, the opening Db minor triad to a German sixth chord to the unexpected (in both Bruckner and Leach) key of B major. The Time Curve Preludes are partly unified by the quotations that recur in various movements, including the Dies irae chant and the bass line of Erik Satie’s Vexations, as well as references to bluegrass banjo style and the piano style (greatly abstracted) of Jerry Lee Hooker. Likewise, Belinda Reynolds’s Sara’s Grace for orchestra (1999) is couched in a fully-notated and slightly restrained boogie-woogie style, and is largely based on the old hymn “Amazing Grace,” reworked into 4/4 meter from the original 3/4. Thomas Albert’s A Maze with Grace of 1975 is another postminimalist piece based on the same hymn.

Eve Beglarian’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1994), for voice and mixed chamber ensemble, is a setting of texts of William Blake, including one of his “Proverbs from Hell”: “You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.” Just before this text enters near the end, a four-note ostinato begins in the piano and bass and repeats 150 times: Eb-F-G-A. These are the first four notes of Bach’s chorale “Es ist genug,” “It is enough.” The piece smoothly segues, in its final measures, into a quotation of the entire chorale. A similarly scored piece, The Bus Driver Never Changed His Mind (2002) makes reference to the diminished seventh chords of Mahler’s Second Symphony – because the text includes the words “Keep going,” used also by Luciano Berio in Sinfonia, which is based on the third movement of that symphony.

The most quotation-prone postminimalist is Daniel Lentz, whose music is wilder and more wide-ranging than that of any other composer mentioned here. Scored for female voice and orchestra with multiple electric keyboards and digital delay, his The Crack in the Bell (1986) is an extended setting of E.E. Cummings’s poem “next to of course god America i.” On the lines “oh / say can you see by the dawn’s early my / country ’tis of…”, Lentz quotes, in the voice, the melodies of both the songs referred to. (Duckworth, in his Music in the Combat Zone of the same year, uses the same poem and does the same thing.) More unexpectedly, though, where Cummings mentions beauty (“why talk of beauty what could be more beaut- / iful than these heroic happy dead”) Lentz works two passages of pure Renaissance counterpoint into his bouncy, repeated-note texture (Example 6). Certain parts of the piece apply digital delay to the voice and keyboards, so that the repetition of phrases builds up to a texture thicker and more layered than the notes sung and played in the score.

Lentz’s WolfMass (1986-7) is perhaps the biggest quotation bonanza in the postminimalist repertoire; the collage-like Credo contains bits of Machaut’s “Ma fin est mon commencement,” the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” “Yankee Doodle,” “Battle Cry of Freedom,” “Johnny Comes Marching Home Again,” “Off We Go into the Wild Blue Yonder,” and “America the Beautiful,” with many of the lyrics altered or replaced with the Latin mass text, all more or less smoothed into Lentz’s trademark repeated-chord textures.

Limitation of Materials

Moving further along the continuum from the strict to the intuitive, we find postminimalist works devoid of any strict process but greatly limited in their materials. The fourth movement of Janice Giteck’s Om Shanti, couched in a pelog gamelan scale and audibly indebted to gamelan music, revolves around a continuous melody in steady 8th-notes that runs through the piano and clarinet for almost the entire duration of the movement. The melody’s limitation to the notes E, F, G, B, and C creates an impression that the melody must be repeating or systematically permutative in some way, but it fact there is no repetition at all of any phrase longer than five notes, and no systematic transformation. Likewise, the accompanying stately, slower melodies on those notes in the voice, flute, and vibraphone come back over and over to the same motives, but without any “left-brain” arrangement, entirely intuitive.

What such works reveal as the essence of postminimalism is its reliance on a small, circumscribed set of materials. The second movement of Peter Garland’s Jornada del Muerto (1987) is an extreme case. The entire movement employs only five chords in the right hand, with no transpositions or octave displacements, plus the pitches B, D, and E in the left hand, usually as octaves, and in one section as single notes. No process or continuity device informs this music; it is entirely and intuitively melodic in conception, if chordal in execution. Yet despite its extreme paucity of material, this lovely five-minute movement goes through seven sections touching on four different textures and rhythmic styles, undulating between two tempos. Likewise, the first movement of Garland’s I Have Had to Learn the Simplest Things Last for piano and three percussionists (1993) goes through nine varied sections using only triads on B-flat, C, D, F, and G as its only harmonic material.

This aspect of postminimalism in particular is hardly limited to American works. Kevin Volans’s Cicada for two pianos (1994) is a tour-de-force of limited materials. The two pianists alternate chords in each hand throughout, each chord almost always immediately echoed in the other piano. The entire piece takes place on a scale Bb, C, C#, D, E, F, G, A, with a low F as a bass drone and Bb heard as a tentative tonic. There are subtle exceptions: in m. 53, less than halfway through the piece, an Eb is introduced, and Bb is momentarily the lowest note; at four points, in m. 114 (just past the halfway point) and mm. 150, 155, and 174, the chords are interrupted by a single line of notes in mid-register. Top notes, perceived as the melody, are restricted to D, E, F, G, and A. The piece is not quite in a single tempo throughout, as the phrases weave subtly among tempos of 138, 126, 112, 108, 120, 96, and 132 to the quarter-note, a small repertoire of recurring tempos. The single-note sections are considerably slower. Many of the phrases, bound on each side by brief pauses of varying lengths, are repeated as many as eleven times. Dynamics range, by phrase, from ppp to mf, and in a couple of places are differentiated between right and left hands. There are no landmarks in this lovely 25-minute continuum, no way to form expectations except that the sonority with its undulating scalar melody, will continue, ever unpredictable in its details.

The Serbian postminimalist Vladimir Tosic has written a series of works – Altus for baritone saxophone and piano (2001), Dual for flute and contrabass (1992), Varial for piano (1990), Voxal for piano and strings (1995) – all based entirely on what might be called an “overtone scale” [or Lydian dominant] based on C: C, D, E, F#, G, A, B-flat, B. All four pieces remain within an uninflected 16th-note grid. Voxal, in particular, has the pianist play a moto perpetuo of up-and-down arpeggios over which the strings move limpidly among phrases that add and subtract pitches one at a time: GCD, GDF#, GBbF#, ABbF#, ABbE, ABE, CBE, CB, C, CD, and then repeating the progression. The Italian composer Giancarlo Cardini has written piano pieces that move among recurring harmonic or arpeggiation figures, often with a steadily flowing 8th- or 16th-note motion. His Lento Trascolorare dal Verde al Rosso in un Tralcio di Foglie Autunnali for piano (“Slow Change from Green to Red in a Bough of Autumn Leaves,” 1983) is based almost throughout on undulating alternations of 8th-notes with a slowly changing harmony, giving way to quarter-notes and finally half-notes at the end (Example 7).

Duckworth’s music at times seems to use limitation of materials to explicitly mimic a strict background structure. Time Curve Prelude No. 15 takes place entirely within a non-diatonic seven-pitch scale: Eb, F, F# (or Gb), G, A, Bb, D. A sense of shifting tonality is created by switching back and forth between drone pitches Eb and D in the bass (stabilized by their fifths, Bb and A). When the drone is on Eb, the melody seems to be a Lydian scale with a major-minor ambiguity; when on D, it seems to be a quasi-Arabic scale with a flat second and major third. Given the Fibonacci structuring of many of the Preludes, and a free tendency toward subtractive rhythm at the end of the piece, one is tempted to assume that the drone pitches are outlining some predetermined structure, but analysis shows that this is not the case. Where some of the Preludes obscure a strict precompositional pattern, this one seems to point to a precompositional pattern that is in fact not there.

One could say something similar about Dan Becker’s Fade for flute, piano, vibraphone, and cello (2003). The piece starts in a diatonic scale with three sharps, moving by stages to two sharps, one sharp, and then after a chromatic transition, to five sharps. Repeated phrases create a sense of gradual process that turns out to be entirely illusory as the piece wends its slowly changing rhapsodic way. Slow transformation is the music’s modus operandi, but each transformation is eventually abandoned for a move in another direction.

Like Becker’s Gridlock, the title of Joseph Koykkar’s Expressed in Units (1989) seems to imply the sense of composing within a grid. The first and last of three movements begin by reiterating melodic/harmonic figures in rhythmically unpredictable arrangements (a Stravinskian strategy as well as postminimalist). One by one, other figures are introduced, and take turns dominating the continuity. The opening figures of the first movement use only the pitches D, E, F, F#, G, G#, and A, with undulating shifts between F and F#, and G and G#, particularly prominent. The first eight pages of the second movement flow entirely within the scale D, F, G, A-flat, B, and C, with other pitches introduced in succeeding figures. The piece is a rather wild rhythmic ride, though loud figures are supplanted by quiet ones for a thoughtful overall shape.

Beth Anderson is an interesting case study, a composer of music so simple and mellifluous that someone unaware that she studied with Cage, Terry Riley, and Robert Ashley might not suspect minimalist influences. Her Piano Concerto (1997, with strings and percussion) uses a steady dotted-quarter beat throughout, in meters ranging up to 21/8 and 27/8. Flowing melodic figures and rhythmic ostinatos recur with an almost stream-of-consciousness insouciance, often with long periods of static harmony; the key signature is mostly two sharps, but some passages suggest A mixolydian mode more than D Major. One could almost suppose that the work was an early-20th-century British composition based on English folk song sources, a sign of how easily postminimalism can approach more naïve earlier historical styles.

Anderson’s breezy Net Work for piano (1982) is more process-oriented, but playfully unstrict. The opening spells out chords in a thirds-descending sequence on A, F, D, Bb, G, Eb, E, and back to A, after which a simple, syncopated theme arrives. The theme then appears in a succession of all of these keys, going through them twice with variations of meter and rhythm, and then modulating through the same keys again phrase by phrase. She also has a series of pieces called Swales, denoting a kind of meadow in which many different kinds of flowers grow, and marked by an almost stream-of-consciousness technique within very simple tonalities. Rosemary Swale (1986) for string quartet, for instance, is almost entirely within the A natural minor scale, with a few isolated patches of chromaticism.

Although Robert Ashley’s operas are hardly postminimalist, he often bases his works on a quasi-minimalist structure, and resorts to a classically postminimalist style in his late instrumental works. One such work is Outcome Inevitable (1991), scored for the Relache ensemble (flute, oboe, saxophone, bassoon, electronic keyboard, percussion, viola, and bass). The piece is grounded in an insistent repeating middle C in the bass, in constant 16th-notes. The structure is set by repeating rhythms tapped out softly on a bass drum in odd groupings; first a 7+10 pattern (counted in 16th-notes), then 3+3+3+3+5+3+5, and so on. Because the number of 16th-notes in each pattern is odd, the repetitions have to occur in multiples of 4 so that the section will end at the end of a measure. These rhythms create a seven-part structure, each part of which accompanies a solo by a different instrument:

The oboist doubles on English horn, the clarinetist on soprano sax, and the flutist on alto flute.
The melodic aspect of these solos is simple in concept, and beautiful to follow. Almost all of the melodies consist of rising scales interrupted by occasional leaps (or steps) downward to keep the line within a fairly narrow range. Each phrase consists of a number of 16th-notes (from 0 to 6) leading to a sustained note. The sustained notes last durations divisible by a dotted quarter note, from 1 to 7. The sustained notes are also accompanied by chords in the electric keyboard, and “shadowed” by a note in the viola that starts in unison in the first section and moves a step further away in each section. Lasting 16 minutes, the piece is a lovely evocation of timelessness, drawn from a clear and endlessly elaborated idea, but quite unpredictable in its details.

Some of my own microtonal pieces use a limited repertoire of chords partly to keep the number of pitches from getting out of hand. Charing Cross (2007), for instance, for electronic instruments, uses only six chords on the 1st, 7th, 9th, 11th, 13th, and 17th harmonics of C. A simple, quasi-pop, eight-beat ostinato runs through the work, increasingly altered in rhythm by subtraction of beats.

In certain postminimalist pieces we hear the style begin to bleed into something else. The first 25 measures of Belinda Reynolds’s Cover (1996) certainly seem to be those of a postminimalist piece. Again, only six pitches are used – E F# G A# B D# – with E in the piano as a low drone note, and a certain obsessive reiteration of characteristic figures, particularly the competing fifths E-B and D#-A#. However, the music crescendoes to a sudden new chord at m. 26, and subsequently every few measures the music ups the energy by shifting to a new scale. There might be no reason to call this curvaceous, quasi-organic piece postminimalist except that, within each “moment” (to use the Stockhausenesque term), it tends to build up pitch sets and melodies additively, starting as an undulation of two notes and adding in others, almost like a memory of minimalism. Ultimately, Cover‘s form is not postminimalist – there are no more implied limitations on where the music could go than there are in Mozart (fewer, in fact) – but its technique is. One of the advantages of defining postminimalism (or any style) in terms of its central idea is that we can treat the style itself as an ideal form, and talk about degrees to which a particular piece participates in that style. Just as Time Curve Preludes lies slightly on one side of postminimalism, coming from minimalism, Cover is a piece evolving from postminimalism and leaving it behind toward something else, but with its origins still much in evidence.

So insistent is this grid-rhythmed, diatonic, flat-dynamic paradigm in minimalist-influenced (but not conventionally minimalist) music in the quarter-century following 1978 that the observer and listener is tempted into a realist, as opposed to nominalist, position: that postminimalism, in this specific definition, was not simply a set of qualities drawn from a widespread coincidence of occurrences in a diversity of pieces, but virtually a self-contained paradigm inspired by minimalism in many minds, and which became instantiated in hundreds of different pieces. This is not in the least to imply that those pieces are identical in meaning or content, any more than a group of 18th-century symphonies are identical, but that some ideal style conception seems to have occurred to many minds in the same period of time.

As a critic I also noticed a difference between what I am calling postminimalism and another style, also with an inheritance from minimalism, that has been called totalism. Totalism is a more rhythmically complex style, and its harmonies are often more dissonant. In certain works and with certain composers, postminimalism and totalism can bleed into each other; in particular the music of John Luther Adams seems to straddle the two styles, and I myself have written examples of both genres. For me, postminimalism is distinguished by the feeling of a unified rhythmic grid in a consistent tempo, whereas totalism is characterized by a feeling of different tempos superimposed in layers. The music of John Luther Adams is often characterized by the diatonic pitch language of postminimalism with the tempo layering of totalism, though (unlike in the totalist music of Michael Gordon and Art Jarvinen, for instance) the temporal dissonance is not always perceptually obvious. In short, there is no real line separating postminimalism from totalism (just as there is no strict divide between minimalism and postminimalism), though most of the composers involved tend toward one style or the other.

What It All Means

So what, in this restricted definition I’ve given, does (“grid”) postminimalism mean? More precisely, what does it say about the world? What is implied in the act of limiting one’s materials and creating a structure that doesn’t step outside its opening parameters? Why did this particular form of expression come to appeal to such a diverse group of composers in the 1980s?

First of all, postminimalism was an explicit acknowledgement that, as Stravinsky put it, “All art is artificial.” (In certain areas of postminimalism, particularly among Dutch composers, the Stravinsky/minimalist influences seem inextricably mixed.) Throughout the Romantic and modernist eras in the history of music, the sonic means employed expanded in diversity and scope, and early minimalism, with its drones and tape loops, continued, in a sense, that expansion, if along a narrow plane. The phenomena minimalism asked us to attend to, such as slow phase-shifting, expanding form, and unintended resultant acoustic effects were genuinely new to composed music. Postminimalism, on the other hand, advanced no such claims. It constituted an equally radical and more arbitrary reduction of means, to a repertoire of harmonies and rhythms whose contingency, or arbitrariness, seemed all the more palpable in contrast to the former modernist abundance. The limitation of postminimalist music to a handful of chords, or a certain scale, and an unchanging tempo constitutes a negation of the common expectation that the music will evolve freely, that sudden inspirations will change its course, that it will move toward points of tension and release. The inspiration for the piece is perceived not as moment-to-moment, but as global, the materials of the work seemingly conceived as a whole rather than as a linear thought process.

A postminimalist piece seems self-contained, not pointing outward; the references to other music sometimes contained therein are cut off from their source, preserved in abstract notes but not in emotional content, like a fly preserved in amber. It’s as though the composer has made a small universe, the way a mathematician will set up a problem with only a few chosen variables in order to illustrate a larger point. Given the small number of variables, some sort of logic is almost necessarily evident to the listener; it is all the more ironic, then, that postminimalist music so often hides its logic just beneath the surface, creating a slight air of mystery within an otherwise fairly transparent musical environment. We are given only a circumscribed fragment of the musical universe to work with – and even within that truncated segment there is more going on than our ears and minds can account for. This in itself is a metaphysical statement, and a very different one from that embodied in classic minimalism. The world, postminimalism seems to tell us, is understandable, but our perception is so limited that it (our perception) is easily overwhelmed by the interaction of even a few restricted elements and processes. Described this way, postminimalism is a denial of a kind of widespread musical realism, the conceit that music is a metaphor for consciousness, ever capable of self-renewal. It asserts that the part can stand for the whole, that in the behavior of a few restricted elements we can hear the behavior of music itself, and in a context all the clearer for its limitations. The listening process elicited suggests that, while we cannot understand reality in all its complexity, we can begin (at least) to make sense of the world in small bits. In this sense, postminimalism might be cited as an artistic analogue of the “ordinary language” school of philosophy exemplified by John Wisdom, Stanley Cavell, Richard Fleming, and others.

Another, perhaps more practical, way to characterize postminimalism is negative: it was the exact antipodal opposite of serialism. Like the serialists, the postminimalists sought a consistent musical language, a cohesive syntax within which to compose. But where serialist syntax was abrupt, discontinuous, angular, arrhythmic, and opaque, postminimalist syntax is often precisely the opposite: smooth, linear, melodic, gently rhythmic, comprehensible (as to materials, if not always as to process). The postminimalist generation, most of them born in the 1940s or ‘50s, had grown up studying serialism, and had internalized many of its values. Minimalism inspired them to seek a more audience-friendly music than serialism, but they still conceptualized music in terms familiar to them from 12-tone thought: as a language with rules meant to guarantee internal cohesiveness. (One might note, as contrasting recent compositional trends, both totalism and the “New Romantic” postmodernists like Bolcom and Rochberg, whose music throws the idea of cohesiveness to the winds.)
Additionally, or to put the same point in other words, postminimalism’s style of hard, clean lines, often with a jumpy and/or propulsive rhythm, made a welcome contrast, in the early 1980s to serialism’s cloudy and heavily nuanced textures, and without risking the sense of boredom that many listeners found in minimalism. It was simply an excitingly new style at the time.

Beyond that, postminimalist works offer a wide variety of expression, particularly depending on how strictly structured they are, and in what parameters. A postminimalist composer can intuitively write a piece with materials so limited that some background logical procedure seems evident; he or she can start out with a strict background structure and then obscure it with surface detail; or he or she may create a strict logical structure so nonlinear that while its presence can be intuited, it can’t be analyzed by ear. Dan Becker, for instance, characterizes two approaches in his music: “1. Pieces with a bunch of strict processes that I then ‘intervene’ in and try to ‘humanize’ by coloring and sculpting and adding directionality. 2. Pieces that are initially very intuitive, even improvisatory, where I then try and ‘inject’ some structural support by overlaying different (usually rhythmic) processes onto the music.”[13]

Highly structured postminimalist works, like those of Epstein and sometimes Duckworth, can seem like brain-teasers; they hide a half-evident logic just below the surface and dare the ear to parse it and start anticipating what might happen. In less highly structured postminimalist works the effect can be equally mystical, in a different direction. Creating a through-composed, intuitive structure with only three or five elements (as in Cicada, or Peter Garland’s works) evokes a kind of spiritual virtuosity. “Look what I can do,” it says, “look how long I can sustain musical interest without needing to add anything; look how much variety is already possible with only the most modest means.” Once I asked La Monte Young why the five movements of his early string quartet On Remembering a Naiad all used the same material, and after a second’s reflection he responded, “Contrast is for people who can’t write music.”[14] Postminimalism seems an extension of this cantankerous sentiment.

In fact, I think that postminimalism staked out a pleasant halfway position between minimalism and the repertoire of music encompassed by both serialism and chance techniques. In certain classic minimalist works (Come Out, Piano Phase, Music in Fifths), the analytical left brain could quickly figure out what was going on, and quit analyzing, as the right brain enjoyed the unexpected perceptions. In John Cage’s change-composed music (Music of Changes, for instance) and certain complex serialist works (Le marteau sans maitre, Gruppen) either there were no phenomena that could be analyzed by the left brain at all, or the underlying structures were so complex that no aural analysis was possible without the aid of the score and some knowledge of the techniques involved. Moreover, in conventional classical music of the 18th and 19th centuries, left brain and right-brain phenomena tended to go hand in hand, so that both sides of the brain were equally entertained.

In postminimalism, however, either the ear can tell that there is some underlying logic, or some underlying logic is suggested by the limitation of materials or gradual transformation; but either that logic is usually not entirely accessible to left-brain analysis, or turns out to be a deliberate illusion. The left brain remains involved, hoping (perhaps) to figure out the underlying pattern, but the ear is more often left with a sense of mystery, enjoying the opaque process without being able to pin very much down. It’s a pleasant listening mode, because without some left-brain involvement, many listeners will simply become bored (as many do, with serialist and chance-composed music); but the right brain, once well engaged, loses any sense of time, and becomes wrapped up in the energy or atmosphere. This is why it seems so significant that there are postminimalist works – the Time Curve Preludes and Om Shanti are examples – in which strictly structured movements jostle with intuitively written ones, and the ear can’t tell which is which. There is no significant difference, postminimalism tells us, between intuition and arithmetic. Through different paths they come to the same result. This suggests that at the base of our intuition is a kind of arithmetic – and perhaps vice versa.

Attempts to define the principles of this postminimalist repertoire begin to fall apart as we spiral outward to the periphery of the style. But I hope this overview has suggested that, for a time in the 1980s and ‘90s, at least, a large number of composers became fascinated by a certain identifiable paradigm of compositional and listening patterns. I would also like to suggest that this enjoyable repertoire, so common on the concert stages of New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and other cities during that period, has been greatly underrated and under-recognized, and is well worth considerable performance and study.

[1] John Rockwell, “News of Music; 1982 Festival to Honor Cage” in The New York Times, October 1, 1981, Section C, p. 24.

[2] John Rockwell, “Avant Garde: Johnson,” in The New York Times, June 13, 1982, Section 1, Part 2, p. 69.

[3] John Rockwell, “Concert: New Music of California” in The New York Times, June 6, 1983, Section C, p. 13.

[4] Jon Pareles, “Music: Six at La Mama” in The New York Times, March 6, 1983, Section 1, Part 2, p. 64.

[5] Kyle Gann, , “A Tale of Two Sohos” in the Village Voice, January 26, 1988 (Vol. XXXIII No. 4, p. 76).

[6] Kyle Gann, “Enough of Nothing” in the Village Voice, April 30, 1991 (Vol. XXXVI No. 18, p. 82).

[7] Joshua Kosman, “’Pioneer’ Boldly Goes into Satire” in the San Francisco Chronicle, May 7, 1991, p. E3.

[8] Joshua Kosman, “Steve Martland – Heady and Eclectic” in the San Francisco Chronicle, October 16, 1994, Sunday Datebook, p. 42.

[9] Joshua Kosman, “’Modern Painters’ a Bold Stroke” in the San Francisco Chronicle, August 4, 1995, p. C1; “Kronos Picks Up a Theater Credit” in the San Francisco Chronicle, January 14, 1996, p. 31.

[10] K. Robert Schwarz, Minimalists (London: Phaidon Press, 1996), p. 170.

[11] Keith Potter, “Classical Music: Icebreaker; Queen Elizabeth Hall, SBC, London,” in The Independent, December 4, 1996, p. 23.

[12] Paul Epstein, “Pattern Structure and Process in Steve Reich’s ‘Piano-Phase’” in The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 72, No. 4 (1986), pp. 494-502.

[13] E-mail to the author, August 12, 2011.

[14] Comment to the author, 1992.

For forty-five years, since I was a middle-schooler in Dallas, Ives’s Essays before a Sonata has been one of the most important books in my life. Lately it’s become tremendously underrated. Some Ives scholars have dismissed it nearly entirely as a jumble of psuedo-intellectual bloviations. The literature about the book has mined it piecemeal, a few sentences at a time, for insights into Ives’s biography, or to prove that he was highly influenced by Emerson and considered himself a Transcendentalist – or to prove the opposite. One of the themes of my book is that the Essays are undergirded by a more stable and coherent aesthetic project than Ives’s scattershot prose style leads one to suspect. As I rhetorically ask in the preface, “What if Ives had things to tell us, not about himself, but about musical creativity, that only a composer of his stature was in a position to know?” He was tremendously well-read and clearly spent years forming a rational justification for his compositional waywardness, and while his manner of verbal expression may not have been the most efficient for getting his points across, it’s clear that he deliberately wrote prose in a way analogous to the way he wrote music. The book is indeed kind of a mess, but so much of its language sends chills up my spine.

I’ve written here before about Henry Cecil Sturt (1863-1946), a rather undistinguished. post-Hegelian Oxford tutor whose essay “Art and Personality” Ives wrote the Essays partly in response to. The musicology world has virtually ignored Sturt, but more than a little of Ives’s rhetoric was borrowed from him even when Ives doesn’t acknowledge the quotation. The passages below are the run-up to the climax and the climax, though not the end, of my 15,000-word essay on Ives’s Epilogue, remarking on Ives’s relation to Tolstoy and Hegel as well as Sturt. Again, page numbers are from the standard edition of Essays before a Sonata. One of the things I’d love to accomplish with my book is to get the Essays taken more seriously than they ever have been.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

From Chapter 12: A Harmony of Imperfections: The Epilogue

The part of Ives’s argument that may have seemed most radical at the time is his separating off beauty from substance. Beauty has nothing to do with substance (p. 76), he affirms, and then gives examples of circular reasoning to show, a little disappointingly, that beauty can’t be defined. “The word ‘beauty’ is as easy to use as the word ‘degenerate.” Both come in handy when one does or does not agree with you [pp. 76-77].” In claiming that we can reach no consensus on the meaning of beauty, Ives may be following the lead of an 1898 book he had rather cursorily dismissed in the Prologue: Leo Tolstoy’s What Is Art? Tolstoy, preparing to encapsulate the entire history of the various theories of beauty, throws up his hands in advance over writers’ inability to define the term: “…after whole mountains of books have been written on the subject by the most learned and profound thinkers… the question What is beauty? remains to this day quite unsolved, and in each new work on aesthetics it is answered in a new way.”[1]

Yet, despite this disclaimer Tolstoy, once he’s gone through definitions from an impressive wealth of historical treatises starting with Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s Aesthetica of 1750, does manage to distill all the answers down to derivations of two fundamental concepts: beauty is a manifestation within an object of “the Perfect, of the Idea, of the Spirit, of Will, or of God”; and that beauty is “a kind of pleasure we receive which does not have personal advantage for its object,”[2] i.e., that is disinterested and does not create desire. (“Selfish pleasure,” writes Sturt accordingly, “is the death of art.”[3]) His feigned complaint aside, Tolstoy ends up demonstrating that there is far more unanimity on the definition(s) of beauty, at least in modern times, than Ives follows up on. Likewise, these conceptions align with the definition given in George Santayana’s The Sense of Beauty, published in 1896 and based on lectures given at Harvard just prior to that. “Beauty,” Santayana concludes, “is pleasure regarded as the quality of a thing.”[4] Moreover, as Sturt had also written, the perception of beauty has the subjective experience of seeming objective:

When I judge a thing to be beautiful, my judgment means that the thing is beautiful in itself, or (what is the same thing more critically expressed) that it should seem so to everybody. The claim to universality is… the essence of the aesthetic; what makes the perception of beauty a judgment rather than a sensation.[5]

Apparently, Tolstoy is the only other writer on aesthetics in the two centuries before Ives to deny beauty (defined as pleasure) a major role in the value of art. (Coming close, Sturt soft-pedals the role of pleasure, and defines beauty otherwise; “Beauty,” he writes, “is a kind of high vitality,”[6] a more ambiguous phrase that Ives takes over from him.) Tolstoy considers the idea of beauty/pleasure as all-determining in art a perversion of the upper classes once they left traditional Christianity behind. He points out how often writers on aesthetics begin with a repertoire of approved artworks and then stretch the theory to fit them: “There exists an art canon according to which certain productions favored by our circle are acknowledged as being art… and the aesthetic laws must be such as to embrace all these productions.”[7] The truth all these writers since Baumgarten have missed, by Tolstoy’s lights, is that the importance of art lies not the pleasure it gives, but in “the purpose it may serve in the life of man and of humanity.” He seizes on the common ability of one person’s narrative or means of expression to recreate his inner emotional state in, or transmit it to, another person, and concludes that, “To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and having evoked it in oneself, then, by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others may experience the same feeling – this is the activity of art.”[8] Tolstoy’s corollary to this is, that as “Humanity unceasingly moves forward from a lower, more partial and obscure understanding of life to one more general and more lucid,” the best art is that which communicates feelings which will be most conducive to the spiritual improvement of society. And for Tolstoy, what determines the fruitful direction of spiritual improvement is the great truths of religion.

In a sense this is so parallel to Ives’s intent that I’m a little surprised he didn’t seize on Tolstoy as more of a potential ally. Both wanted to remove beauty/pleasure from the criteria for art and emphasize instead a perception of spiritual truth and inspiring example. It’s true that Tolstoy’s criteria were relentlessly Christian in a statically conservative way, and that, since for him aesthetic theory superceded individual works of art, Beethoven’s Ninth must be accorded bad music for perverted tastes because it was unintelligible to the common man: “I am unable to imagine to myself,” he wrote, “a crowd of normal people who could understand any of this long, confused, and artificial production, except short snatches which are lost in a sea of what is incomprehensible.”[9] Though Tolstoy’s vision allowed for the improvability of mankind, it did not include the possibility of art that could be ahead of its time, that might be incomprehensible at first but understood later. And so Ives waves Tolstoy off completely: “From his definition of art, we may learn little more than that a kick in the back is a work of art, and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is not [p. 5].” It seems to me, though, that Ives and Tolstoy were theoretically similar in their aesthetics: the purpose of art for both was not to give pleasure (pleasure often being a symptom of a temporary perversion or “under-value”), but to lead man toward further spiritual enlightenment. It was mainly their religions that differed, Ives’s being more ineffably mystical and less church-bound. Then again, Ives – writing a sonata that remains “difficult” to average listeners even a century after its completion – was surely uncomfortable with Tolstoy’s insistence that art should be understandable, and instantly understandable, to the working class…..

[1] Tolstoy, What Is Art?, p. 20.

[2] Tolstoy, What Is Art?, p. 41.

[3] Sturt, “Art and Personality,” p. 308.

[4] Santayana, The Sense of Beauty, p. 31.

[5] Santayana, The Sense of Beauty, p. 26.

[6] Sturt, “Art and Personality,” p. 313.

[7] Tolstoy, What Is Art?, p. 44.

[8] Tolstoy, What Is Art?, p. 51.

[9] Tolstoy, What Is Art?, p. 158.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

It may seem peculiar, in retrospect, that Ives writes this long Epilogue to a book meant to accompany the Concord Sonata without any direct allusion to his own music (except, glancingly, in the second paragraph). Without seeming to make a special case for his own work, he is attempting to arrive at an aesthetic groundwork that will justify his deviations from musical normalcy. One passage from Sturt must have offered a particular point of identification, though he only quotes the second sentence of it: “Suppose that we come upon a strange artist who is producing work which he affirms to be art. The work may not be quite like any other work in the world, but it is art so long as he feels in doing it as true artists feel, and so long as his object is akin to the objects that true artists admire.”57 Ives must indeed have felt like that “strange artist” he refrains from mentioning, the one whose “ears were on wrong,” and Sturt seems to offer the artist permission to make this judgment for himself. Accordingly, Ives needs to arrive at a viewpoint in which his own confidence in his music can be set equally against all those musicians who, over the years, thought he was doing something incomprehensible, if not amateurish or insane.

Sturt begins his essay with a complaint that aesthetics has too often been written about art experience from the viewer’s standpoint, and not enough from the artist’s.58 And Ives writes at times as though the validity of art lies less in the listener’s recognition than in the experience the artist had while creating it. “Whether he be accepted or rejected, whether his music is always played, or never played – all this has nothing to do with it – it is true or false by his own measure…. [p. 81]” And again, leading to the Sturt quotation, “The artist does feel or does not feel that a sympathy has been approved by an artistic intuition and so reflected in his work. Whether he feels this sympathy is true or not in the final analysis, is a thing probably that no one but he (the artist) knows but the truer he feels it, the more substance it has…. [p. 81]” As to the question of whether Debussy’s music contains substance, “Debussy himself, doubtless, could not give a positive answer. He would better know how true his feeling and sympathy was, and anyone else’s personal opinion can be of but little help here [pp. 80-81].” Ives veers close to admitting that the substance of music might not be entirely accessible to the listener, in a rather astounding statement: “what music sounds like may not be what it is [p. 84].”

In this connection, Ives pulls a Hegel quotation from Sturt’s article, and it is one of his rare deliberate and admitted misquotations:

If we may be permitted to leave out two words, and add a few more, a sentence of Hegel appears to sum up this idea, “The universal need for expression in art lies in man’s rational impulse to exalt the inner…world (i.e., the highest ideals he sees in the inner life of others) together with what he finds in his own life – into a spiritual consciousness for himself [p. 81].”

This is from a passage that Sturt quotes at greater length, in which Hegel discusses the question, “What is man’s need to produce works of art?” Hegel’s answer is that man “reduplicates himself” “in order to strip the outer world of its stubborn foreignness, and to enjoy in the shape and fashion of things a mere external reality of himself.”59 The original form of the sentence Ives takes pains to change (after unconcernedly misquoting so many other lines) is: “The universal need for expression in art lies, therefore, in man’s rational impulse to exalt the inner and outer world into a spiritual consciousness for himself, in an object which he recognizes as his own self [emphasis added].”60

Now this is odd, coming from a composer who painted, in his music, a child’s Fourth of July, Manhattan’s Central Park in the dark, the voices of Americans singing a hymn at a train station after the sinking of the Lusitania – Hegel speaks of art as exalting the inner and outer world, and Ives pointedly deletes the “outer.” In addition, he appends his own new apposition to “inner world”: “the highest ideals he sees in the inner life of others.” It is as though he is limiting substance to the inner world of someone, if not specifically of the artist himself, perhaps thinking that portraying the outer (physical) world – as Debussy did in La Mer, and Strauss in the Alpine Symphony? – comes too close to what he defines as mere manner. In any case, we’re in somewhat dangerous territory, aesthetically speaking, if only the artist him- or herself can determine with exactitude whether the sympathy and artistic intuition in an artwork rise to the level of substance. For if only the artist knows whether his own work is spiritually and emotionally true, what artist, speaking for himself, would confess otherwise? Perhaps Ives, with his long history of being told that his ears were on wrong and his music was distasteful, needed exactly this permission to make the determination for himself, and without external ratification. And what artist reading this – or writing it – can vouch with assurance that his or her creative experience was as intense as Ives’s?

Let us not shy away from Ives’s intent, nor politely assume that he couldn’t have meant to assert anything so heterodox, but grasp his point explicitly though it lead to absurdity. The entire force of his life might reside in his most extravagant claim. The artist has an experience while creating his art, and the spiritual intensity of that experience constitutes or determines the substance of the art. (This does not equate, we will remember, to feeling the specific emotions he may be depicting.) The listener to the music, the viewer of the art, may not recognize the quality of the substance – that is of no matter. Only the artist can “know how true his feeling and sympathy was, and anyone else’s personal opinion can be of but little help here.” We cannot found an aesthetics on the reception of the subjective and fallible, so often imperceptive, so easily misled, audience. Nor is it necessarily fatal if the artist lack the manner (the technique? the competency?) in which to communicate his or her vision, as long as the vision is embodied in the art. In the Prologue (p. 6) he speculates that “A true inspiration may lack a true expression,” though he admits that if it is not true enough to result in a true expression, we might have to conclude that “it is not an inspiration at all.” We perhaps find ourselves in the territory, mentioned in Ives’s Memos, of the old stone-mason John Bell, whose raucous and off-key singing George Ives excused to a parishioner who complained: “Don’t pay too much attention to the sounds. If you do, you may miss the music. You won’t get a heroic ride to heaven on pretty little sounds.”61 (Ruskin’s “harmony of imperfections” comes to mind.) It was the fervency with which John Bell believed what he was singing, not its technical polish, that made it art. What has sound got to do with music? What music sounds like may not be what it is. There might be a great work of art, and only the artist knows about it – only the artist experiences it. In retrospect, in fact, this is a simple description of pretty much the state Ives was in in 1919, and had been for many years. It is a state many an artist knows at a moment of triumph alone in her studio.

Of course, what is desirable, what makes the slow, difficult, inconsistently remunerative process of art socially worthwhile, is that that private state is generally deemed temporary. The art is shown, the music is listened to, and through whatever process of neuron mirroring makes artistic perception possible and potent, a psychological process occurs that recreates, according to whatever inexact process of analogy, a frame of mind within the viewer or listener something like the one that was originally in the artist. Even the listener to old John Bell might be spellbound by the inspiring sincerity of his flawed performance. As Ives had already seen, this process is infinitely vulnerable to failure, and in the 1920s, as a result of mailing that sonata out, he was about to gather a huge new wealth of evidential experience. It was possible that no one would ever respond to the Concord Sonata in the way that Ives hoped. It is hypothetically possible, according to this theory, that there exists, somewhere in the world, a great work of art whose substance no one has ever perceived, that has gone unrecognized, that might even be inaccessible to anyone living. Perhaps what was important about it was that the artist had the experience. Perhaps the mere fact of having created the glorious, never-to-be-understood work would make its way into the collective unconscious and indirectly elevate mankind’s perception of art. In that sense, perhaps theory will have to eternally presume the artist innocent – at least, an artist who has created a work we don’t understand.

Ives’s own musical vision was validated in the end, though hardly universally; of all the world’s music lovers, it is a safe guess that only a relatively tiny percentage would choose to continue listening to the Concord Sonata. And what does the quantity or percentage of appreciative listeners matter? It is tempting, though useless, to wonder whether Ives might have formulated the point differently, could he have foreseen how much lasting and universal substance music lovers would have indeed found in his difficult music by the 21st century. Perhaps we must assume a Platonic world of art, inaccessible to general knowledge, of which the public reception of art is only an imperfect mirror. We can admit the theoretical point while also granting its pragmatic inutility. On the other hand, perhaps the mere recognition of that occulted Platonic realm might serve to inspire a little welcome humility among those who are so quick and confident to affirm that our musical society is an efficient meritocracy, and that the artists who get the most visibility, attention, and honors are certainly those who deserve them. Occasionally we find that it was not Louis Spohr who was so great, as we thought, but the obscure Franz Schubert; and who knows but that another Charles Ives might be composing unheard-of things, today, in isolation? If Ives can teach us that the public world of art is a mere caricature of the real thing, and that we should revere aspects of creativity that don’t seem obvious or available to us, perhaps that is a worthwhile and sufficient lesson for the Essays Before a Sonata.

 

57 Sturt, “Art and Personality,” p. 328.

58 See Sturt, “Art and Personality,” pp. 291-92.

59 Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, p. 36. One of Hegel’s examples in evidence is charming: “Even the child’s first impulse involves this practical modification of external things. A boy throws stones into the river, and then stands admiring the circles that trace themselves on the water, as an effect in which he attains the sight of something that is his own doing.”

60 Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, p. 36.

61 Ives, Memos, p. 132.

Via pianist Andy Lee and David McIntire’s Irritable Hedgehog record label, Dennis Johnson’s November is taking its place in the repertoire. Andy is giving the five-hour, 1959 piano work its European premiere at Cafe Oto in London on March 9 (and I’m thrilled to see that he’s playing music by the greatly underrated Paul Epstein there the previous evening). Then he’ll give the New York premiere at Issue Project Room on March 16, starting at 2. And Andy’s absolutely lovely four-disc recording, which I’ve been enjoying mp3s of, is now available, with my liner notes (which you can read in their entirety at the link). This definitely changes our picture of the history of minimalism – it will be difficult for anyone ever again to refer to Reich, Glass, and Riley as three of “the original minimalists.”