As a rare token Downtown composer in academia, and at a Northeastern college with strong classical music connections, no less, I inhabit a strange, slim intersection between different worlds. Sometimes I suddenly find myself thrust into the world of “Uptown” composers, the “mainstream” and arguably successful composers who live on the fringes of the orchestra circuit. It happened again recently, and while institutional secrecy prevents me from detailing the circumstances – I’ll leave you to speculate what panel or award I was involved with – I’m still free to describe the experience.

And what a different experience it was from my get-togethers with the composers in my usual circles! These were composers who actually live off their orchestral commissions. They traded gossip about who had been nominated for the Academy of Arts and Letters; who was up for the Ives Award (no one Ives would have respected, certainly); who had kept whom out of the Century Club; how long it had been since various colleagues received Guggenheims; who was trying to get on the board of what artists’ colonies. Every person mentioned was a composer, but what different lives these people live from those of the composers I know! It was clear that they spend their careers clicking off a series of expected honors and awards, pre-ordained notches in a composer’s belt. You’ve apparently got to get in there early, studying with a big name in grad school, and starting to apply to artists’ colonies in your 30s, or you’ll miss the boat. To their credit, the colleagues with whom I was dealing expressed some self-conscious embarrassment over attaching such importance to such external signs of a composer’s success, many of them won, by their own admission, more through politicking than through the observable high quality of anyone’s music. They expressed disdain for a number of composers who allegedly feel themselves entitled to such honors, who canvas for them incessantly and become furious when passed over. (As Milton Babbitt lamented when Bill Duckworth interviewed him: “Where’s my Guggenheim?”)

It’s a very different life than the one the Downtown composers I know lead, the experimental composers who work in postminimalism, conceptualism, electronics, and improvisation. I think I know one Downtown composer who’s actually been to the MacDowell Colony, none who’ve been to Yaddo, none in the Academy of Arts and Letters, none who’s ever taught at the Aspen festival, none who’s had a premiere at Tanglewood, none who’s won the Prix de Rome, none who’s won a Guggenheim. (Generally speaking, only three major awards are open to Downtown, or experimental, composers, and none of them can be applied for, you have to be anonymously nominated: the Herb Alpert Award in California, the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts in New York, and the MacArthur “Genius” Award.) The Uptown composers barely know that my world exists, and they exhibit no curiosity about it. They’ve never heard any of Robert Ashley’s operas, speak slightingly of Alvin Lucier’s “boring” music, yet are aware that an occasional Downtowner like Morton Feldman or Steve Reich rises to a popular success beyond their wildest dreams. That seems to bother them, but they don’t think about it much.

Save for the sole fact that the rewards of that life enable composers to spend somewhat more of their time composing than my friends and I can, I don’t envy it – it seems so much more about prizes than about art. Some of the honors, like the Prix de Rome, entail long residencies, so that those composers’ lives seem to get swallowed up in the obligations the honors bring. The amount and level of politicking required would turn my stomach. Many of the Uptown composers are excellent musicians, but it seems to me that their music often gets warped at some point along the way, it becomes so little focused on personal artistic necessity or audience reaction and so focused instead on the opinions of fellow professionals. And ultimately it seems like a class thing: you become a composer so you can live in the beau monde of famous orchestra conductors, society matrons, people with enough money to commission a $200,000 opera here and there, so you can drink martinis at Tanglewood with Leonard Slatkin or whomever. I’m happy to be, instead, in the poverty-stricken, overlooked, little Downtown music scene where instead of enviously whispering to each other about who got what award, and plotting to get the next one ourselves, we go on with our work uninfluenced by prizes we have no chance of winning anyway, and argue, over inexpensive red wine, about where music itself should be heading.

Have I mentioned lately that I love the internet? Writing an article and needing a citation from Charles Ives’ Essays Before a Sonata, I put the phrase “the nearer we get to mere expression of emotion” into Google, and it took me straight to the online publication of Ives’s Essays by Project Gutenberg. I’m so happy to have it as a text file on my computer: I’m always quoting it, and having to search for the phrase I want. And carrying it around on my laptop, I remember again the vernacular yet mystical prose style that so thrilled me as a teenager, putting its mark forever on my writing:

On the other hand is not all music, program-music, – is not pure music, so called, representative in its essence? Is it not program-music raised to the nth power or rather reduced to the minus nth power? Where is the line to be drawn between the expression of subjective and objective emotion? It is easier to know what each is than when each becomes what it is. The “Separateness of Art” theory–that art is not life but a reflection of it–“that art is not vital to life but that life is vital to it,” does not help us. Nor does Thoreau who says not that “life is art,” but that “life is an art,” which of course is a different thing than the foregoing. Tolstoi is even more helpless to himself and to us, for he eliminates further. 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 9th Symphony is not. Experiences are passed on from one man to another. Abel knew that. And now we know it. But where is the bridge placed? – at the end of the road or only at the end of our vision? Is it all a bridge?–or is there no bridge because there is no gulf? Suppose that a composer writes a piece of music conscious that he is inspired, say, by witnessing an act of great self-sacrifice–another piece by the contemplation of a certain trait of nobility he perceives in a friend’s character–and another by the sight of a mountain lake under moonlight. The first two, from an inspirational standpoint would naturally seem to come under the subjective and the last under the objective, yet the chances are, there is something of the quality of both in all. There may have been in the first instance physical action so intense or so dramatic in character that the remembrance of it aroused a great deal more objective emotion than the composer was conscious of while writing the music. In the third instance, the music may have been influenced strongly though subconsciously by a vague remembrance of certain thoughts and feelings, perhaps of a deep religious or spiritual nature, which suddenly came to him upon realizing the beauty of the scene and which overpowered the first sensuous pleasure–perhaps some such feeling as of the conviction of immortality, that Thoreau experienced and tells about in Walden. “I penetrated to those meadows…when the wild river and the woods were bathed in so pure and bright a light as would have waked the dead IF they had been slumbering in their graves as some suppose. There needs no stronger proof of immortality.” Enthusiasm must permeate it, but what it is that inspires an art-effort is not easily determined much less classified. The word “inspire” is used here in the sense of cause rather than effect. A critic may say that a certain movement is not inspired. But that may be a matter of taste–perhaps the most inspired music sounds the least so–to the critic. A true inspiration may lack a true expression unless it is assumed that if an inspiration is not true enough to produce a true expression–(if there be anyone who can definitely determine what a true expression is)–it is not an inspiration at all.

Those words, the words of a true artist-philosopher with an insurance salesman’s knack for persuasion, knock my socks off today as they did when I was 15. How vague, how rambling, how colloquial, how erudite, how deeply thoughtful!

And while we’re at it, I have a query for the masses. A few months ago, I similarly did a search for Beethoven’s piano sonatas, and found all 32 as free PDF files on the internet. Lately I’ve looked again, and they’re gone! All I find is a few million sites trying to sell me scores and recordings. What happened to that wonderful PDF site, where you could refresh your memory about a Beethoven passage from any internet connection? Surely there wasn’t a copyright problem? Does anyone know where it is, or what happened to it?

In case anyone out there in blog land is within driving distance of Santa Fe, NM, I’ll be performing there next weekend. Friday March 12 and Saturday March 13 at 8 PM I’ll be at the Center for Contemporary Arts, 1050 Old Pecos Trail. The box office is at (505) 982-1338. I’ll perform my one-man microtonal music theater piece Custer and Sitting Bull along with a couple of microtonal synthesizer pieces and several of my Disklavier pieces, including the world premier of Petty Larceny – a piece made entirely of quotations from the Beethoven piano sonatas, tempo-shifted so that their harmonies fit together. Come see if my music is as batty as my opinions. (It’s even worse!)

On the second page of Cardew’s Stockhausen Serves Imperialism are words that, had they been listened to earlier, would have derailed many pointless arguments of my youth:

…it is clearly impossible to bring work with a decidedly socialist or revolutionary content to bear on a mass audience. Access to this audience (the artist’s real means of production) is controlled by the state.

“Access to the mass audience is controlled by the state.” And by “the state” it is now obvious that we mean, not the U.S. Government, but the corporations that own the U.S. Government and the TV stations, newspapers, and radio stations. The corporate state owns access to mass audiences. Why would they freely give that prize over to… living composers? Why would they give it to classical musicians at all? What’s their incentive? The state grants mass-audience access to those who promise to make money for it, to those who will put making money as their top priority, and to those who promise not to contradict the ideology that keeps the corporate state in power. (Howard Stern, a big money-maker in radio, was just yanked from all Clear Channel radio stations for his obscenity – just days after he turned against the Bush administration. Interesting?)

And so all those years of new-music hand-wringing and soul-searching seem silly now. “Why are audiences turning away from classical music?” “Why does no one like our music?” “What can we do to reach out to audiences? Add a backbeat, maybe?” It wasn’t that audiences were turning away: it was that the State was taking over control, an enormous hand slowly turning off the spigot. What seemed like contentious Marxist theory in Cardew’s writings 30 years ago seems like only too obvious fact now.

Benito Mussolini said (and he should know), “Fascism should properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of State and corporate power.” Ever wonder what it was like to live in a Fascist state? Wonder no longer.

Maybe the Web is even God: it does answer prayers. UbuWeb, the fearless site for the history of radical new music, has published as a PDF Cornelius Cardew’s rabble-rousing little 1974 book Stockhausen Serves Imperialism, his Maoist/Marxist, over-the-top, but sometimes dead-on critique of the avant-garde. You can get it here, and you should. Just weeks ago I was moaning because I don’t have a copy, and a moment ago I downloaded it onto my computer. (UbuWeb also includes, as introduction, the article I wrote about Cardew for New Music Box, which I don’t think I recall giving them permission for, but never mind: they’ve more than paid me back.)

David Patrick Stearns follows the Master Narrative in his piece on minimalism linked from Arts Journal. Minimalism is a dead style. Never mind that it started evolving into something else in the late 1970s. Never mind that hundreds of composers from Alaska to Florida and from Maine to Mexico have been heavily influenced by it and continue to write music evolved from it. Never mind that several generations of composers now have cited Riley’s In C and Reich’s Come Out as the pieces that first sparked their desire to become composers. Minimalism’s just dead, having left no trace behind, aside from the occasional pathetic wretch who hasn’t heard the news and it still writing it. It is, in fact, the first publicly successful musical style in history to have vanished after only 20 years without leaving the slightest residue. Apparently. According to the Master Narrative.

In response to my “Master Narrative” entry of February 23, Steven Ledbetter sends the following story from his student years in the 1960s, a little long but worth reading to the end. It’s about studying with Gustave Reese, an important scholar who wrote massive standard reference works like Music in the Middle Ages and Music in the Renaissance:

Gustave Reese was my dissertation adviser and, though he was most famous of course for his books on Medieval and Renaissance music, he was always interested in new music as well, and I ran into him more than once at a concert of recent music.

At one point in class, when the discussion came around to recent trends in music (this was about the time of Carter’s Double Concerto, for example), someone asked him where he thought music was heading.

Reese made the point that the history of music, from at least the 14th century on, has consisted of a series of waves of development in which the style reaches a level of complexity beyond which it seems impossible to go (perhaps for reasons of apparent limits in human perception on the listener’s side or of technical ability on the performers’), and that this “crisis” leads to a radical simplification in one or more elements of music, after which the process begins again.

He was referring (for the late 14th century) to the so-called French “mannerist” composers who made music so rhythmically complex that even modern performers found it challenged them enormously. The reaction to that was the more flowing rhythms of the early Renaissance, and a greater emphasis on the sonority of the “contenance angloise.”

Then during the course of the 15th and 16th centuries, the interaction of more and more polyphonic lines reached a level of complexity such that textures often sounded indifferentiatedly dense, so that one piece ran the risk of sounding like all the others.

The radical change came about with the development of the basso continuo, which allowed virtually all of the contrapuntal lines to be subsumed in a harmonic context over which one or two (normally) melodic lines could be the primary expressive interest, colored by the bass line and harmony.

Another such re-simplification, in this view, occurs in the middle of the 18th century, and leads to the “high classical period” with its balanced phrase structures and architectonic use of harmonic shape.

So when put to the specific question in class about what would happen next in contemporary music, Reese responded, “I have no idea, but I’m sure that it will involve some dramatic simplification, because we seem to have gone about as far as we can on the current track.”

When I first encounted Terry Riley’s “In C,” for example, I though immediately of Reese’s prediction, and I still think that his version of the Master Narrative makes a lot of sense.

Here, from Gustave Reese no less, comes validation for what I’ve been saying for years, and not only about minimalism being a logical next step in the progress of history. If the only music history you know is that from Haydn through Stockhausen, then the death of the orchestra [assuming it is indeed happening, questionable] looks like the end of everything, a mammoth tragedy, a Götterdammerung. But if you know the history of European music from the 11th century on as Reese did (and medieval music was my secondary area of specialization in grad school as well), then you know that there have been many deaths of classical music, many rises and falls of musical institutions, each death preparing the ground for the rise of a new practice. As Nietzsche said, “What is falling, that one should also push.” I’m pleased to learn from Mr. Ledbetter that the world looked much the same to Gustave Reese as it does to me.

That Reese could see the logical necessity of a drastic simplification of music in the 1960s, while a thousand academic composers and music professors continue to rail against it, shows up how little music history most composers know.

If you’ll watch now, I’m going to do something very different, for me: an actual short, informative blog entry referring to something I found on the internet, to prove to you that I don’t always have to write a 2500-word essay wrapped around a sinuous argument emerging in a moral at the end having to do with the heinous superficiality and crass commercialism of today’s world. Watch:

If there were any new music composer of my lifetime whose work I would have thought would be lost to history, it was Arthur Russell. I used to review his performances of his quiet cello songs in my early days at the Voice; he’d sing barely audible lyrics with a Buddhist sensibility over a slight, droning, anti-virtuoso cello part. I found him charming if enigmatic, sort of a shy Downtown Erik Satie. Then he died of AIDS complications in 1992, at 40, and seemed to disappear from public consciousness. Turns out now that he had a whole other career in dance music, and that people who loved that aspect of his work have been busy all these years collecting and preserving his recordings, making sure his legacy isn’t lost. I was vaguely aware of such activities, and today Ben Ratliff wrote a big article on Arthur Russell in the Times. Apparently there are several CDs of both sides of his music coming out.

See? I can be trained!

As you may know, I live near a pretty rural town town in the Hudson Valley, and there are interesting advantages to this part of the country. To wit: this morning we ate breakfast in the local diner. The somewhat elderly couple at the next booth were reading the morning paper of a Sunday, and complaining about the political news with a “What’s the world coming to?” kind of tone. And the complaint I overheard was: “It’s terrible that John Kerry won’t just come out and unequivocally say he’ll support these gay marriages.”

How many rural areas of this country can offer that particular brand of outrage?

Last year I performed at a festival in Birmingham, Alabama, curated by composer Monroe Golden. Also on that festival was a local quartet called Liquid Brick – two percussionists, electric guitar, and acoustic bass, as I recall. Their heavily rhythmic music, with slower harmonic effects on the pitched instruments, was very interesting, and was intertwined with a computerized video show with moving images intercut among each other, both real and abstract. The complex interrelation of sounds and images was entertaining, and represented, I thought, the beginning of a new type of visual-audio synthesis that might draw a large, younger audience to music that, without the visuals, might be a little too weird for them. The fact that such a sophisticated group was down there in Bush-country Alabama only added to the mystique.

Because I was a fellow performer on that festival, I didn’t write about Liquid Brick. But today I was recommending them to a student, Googled them, and found, lo, that they have a website at liquidbrick.org with music and visuals, including the film/music I heard, a piece called Eyedrum. Seems to me they would go over very well in New York and other places. I see them described on the web as a noise band, and I’m not always a noise band fan (though I do appreciate Borbetomagus, from a safe distance), so they’ve evidently achieved some crossover appeal. Check ’em out.

One of New York’s self-admitted curmudgeonly composers, who wishes to remain anonymous for understandable reasons, responds to my “Master Narratives” blog entry, going even a little further than I would have:

It has always been curious (and frustrating) to see that contemporary musicians are so willing to anchor themselves to the very narrative that you write about. How many times have you been in a conversation nominally about new music, only to have someone in the group say things like “well, its just like what Bach did in The Art of Fugue” or “If Mozart was alive, he’d definitely have dual processors in his Macintosh” – and my personal favorite, “Beethoven was a great improvisor.” Or even composers who bring in historical references into their new works by titling them “Sonata” or “Variations” or the worst – “Ars [fill in the blank].”

My point being, all of this falls into the linear narrative of Eurocentric concert music from the Great Centuries. Yes, the press wants to talk about orchestras, but look at how many of our composers (friends, even!) are still trying to knock on the doors of the concert world (and taking their knocks), speaking in the rhetoric of that world, and perpetuating the myth that they are a welcome part of it.

“Chamber music” – give me a break!

Well, yes, when was the last time a string quartet was actually played in a “chamber”? My own pet peeve is American composers who pretentiously write not only “Adagio” in a score when they mean “slow,” but “al niente” and even “con gran espressione.” When it’s students, I always taunt them: “You have an ensemble in Italy you’re sending this score to?” Beethoven rebelled by writing “Hammerklavier” instead of “Fortepiano” on his Op. 106, but many Americans have yet to make so bold a break from the old country.

And another composer writes:

Every generation believes civilization will die with it. It’s a mystery to me exactly what the classical music establishment gets from its members-only doomsday scenario. Still, I have to say: The sooner, the better.

Note to orchestras: don’t expect a lot of sympathy from the composing community.

Through Salon.com, I was turned onto an article from Jay Rosen’s blog Press Think about the Master Narrative in journalism, a term borrowed from literary criticism. The Master Narrative is the big, behind-the-scenes story that generates all the other stories, that structurally contains them, but that is itself almost invisible, rarely examined, assumed without being acknowledged. His example in political journalism:

In standard coverage of political campaigns, where one goal is always to appear nonpartisan and above the fray, the master narrative has for a long time been winning – who’s going to win, who seems to be winning, what the candidates are doing to win, how much money it takes to win, how the primary in South Carolina is critical to winning and so on….

Most people who pay attention to politics know that candidates who cannot win are safely ignored by the press until they threaten to affect the outcome. Then they become part of the story because they fit its terms. Winning, then, is the story that produces all (or almost all) the other stories; and when you figure in it you are likely to become news. This is a relatively non-partisan, apparently neutral, sometimes technical and of course reusable device, easily operated, and it maintains an agreed-upon narrative, which then maintains the press tribe as one tribe. In this way, master narratives resemble myths as anthropologists understand them.

Like journalism, music has its master narratives, and I can use this idea to describe the predicament I and the music I love are in vis-a-vis the musical culture at large. For instance, we have a great endemic crisis concerning the imminent death of classical music. The focus of this story is inevitably: the orchestra. Look at Arts Journal: every music writer here is focused on the orchestra except me. Here and in a hundred other newspapers and magazines, the death of classical music and the death of the orchestra are treated as coextensive.

Like the political narrative about winning, this one carries a certain unreality for me. Most of the composers I know and admire have written very little orchestra music; typically a piece or two (I’m thinking of Eve Beglarian, Bernadette Speach, Mikel Rouse, Dan Becker, and many others). Most of them write mostly chamber music, unless their work is primarily in electronics. Even if all orchestras disbanded tomorrow, 98 percent of the rather diverse spectrum of brand new classical music I cover would continue to exist as it exists now. Even John Adams, perhaps the most successful orchestra composer of our time, has admitted publicly and repeatedly that most of the good music being written today isn’t for orchestra.

And a few years ago I was on a panel at Chamber Music America, just at a time when there had been a spate of articles about the death of the orchestra. It was clear that chamber music organizations did not share the orchestras’ sense of doom, and when Mark Swed, speaking for chamber ensembles on the panel, said, “I don’t feel any sense of crisis,” the audience burst into applause. Classical music exists in many forms, at many venues, on many levels, with many audiences, but in terms of the journalistic Master Narrative, its health is solely and exclusively gauged from its own most inefficient, resource-intensive, financially precarious organization, the orchestra.

Judging from the current health and optimism of many chamber music organizations, and from the fact that so many hundreds if not thousands of composers get by without orchestral performances, it is entirely plausible that the orchestra could die as a public institution, and classical music continue to exist and even thrive. But no one ever says that – it’s not part of music journalism’s Master Narrative. And no one ever looks to young composers, or to chamber music organizations, for evidence as to whether classical music is truly likely to die.

(For that matter, only last year when I was writing the script for the American Mavericks radio show on MPR, I contacted the American Symphony Orchestra League to get dire statistics I could quote about the death of the orchestra. As it turned out, of the 15 orchestras that had famously folded in the 1990s, 14 were back in business. Ticket sales were up all over. I was being a good boy for once, trying to follow the Master Narrative, but got tripped up on the facts. According to the Master Narrative, apparently, an orchestra’s bankruptcy is Big News, but its resuscitation merits barely a mention.)

Another Master Narrative has posited an unacknowledged end to the history of music. The history of music is understood as a series of great patriarchal figures, each of whom extended the musical language further toward abstraction and complexity: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Wagner, Brahms, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Webern, Stockhausen, Boulez. No dot dot dot to follow. Classical critics and academics will get momentarily excited when it looks like some youngster is going to extent that modernist line another inch or two – Brian Ferneyhough with “the new complexity,” for instance, or Thomas Ades. But it never lasts, because that direction of history is played out. By the rules of the Master Narrative, it doesn’t matter how good a composer is: if he (and I mean he) is not going to extend the line of patriarchs in the direction of further modernity, then he’s not worth taking seriously – and if he does, he’s too elitist. For some reason the Master Narrative has made an exception for a trio of publicly successful composers – Steve Reich, Philip Glass, John Adams – and then drawn the line. There are no important young composers anymore worth keeping an ear on, and there aren’t going to be any more.

And so in academic departments and newspaper music sections, you find people still making a big deal about Elliott Carter and Pierre Boulez as though they were, not revered old men whose cards have been on the table for decades, but The Latest Thing. The composers that music writers and professors get excited about – Ligeti, Boulez, Berio, Kagel – are the same composers my friends and I were excited about in college, 30 years ago. What about the important composers born after 1940? Well, mmm, ahem, uh, you know, there aren’t any, really. Any composer still trying to extend the 12-tone tradition is old-fashioned, and if he’s not trying to extend that tradition, then he isn’t really great, is he? Catch-22. And gee, by the way, it’s really pop music that’s important now, isn”t it, and classical music is dying anyway, so I’ll be damned if I’m going to invest any interest in some new composer when the whole field isn’t going to last. Except no one says this, everyone just acts as though it’s true without admitting it.

So this is why I’m the Dennis Kucinich of music criticism, because I won’t talk within the Master Narratives. In our respective fields Rep. Kucinich and I don’t want to preserve the status quo and tinker with it, we want to tear it down and replace it with something better, and that’s too radical, so no one will pay any attention to us, except maybe anecdotally. Whatever insightful, even revolutionary truths we might express will be ignored because, 1. Kucinich isn’t going to win anyway, and 2. no great young composers are going to be acknowledged anyway. To prove that none of the 40,000 composers working in America today is writing music that could last would require lots of research, lots of critical examination and thought. Luckily, the Master Narrative assures us that this is not necessary, because any greatness out there would have spontaneously appeared by now, despite critical and institutional neglect. (Sort of like the crusader’s cry, “Kill them all, God will recognize his own!”) According to the Master Narrative, the history of classical music had come to an end anyway, the great line of composers is over – how fitting, how convenient, that it and the orchestra, and therefore classical music itself, all died at the same time. Is this really true? Or does it become true just because everyone conspires to write as though we’ve all now assumed that it is true?

Is there really no great music written any more? Is classical music truly about to stop being played and listened to? Or is this just the script that those in power have agreed to follow? Does it become a self-fulfilling prophecy if enough people follow it? And what do they get from following it?

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.