Pick up a camera. Close your eyes. Spin around, and point the camera somewhere at random. Open your eyes and look through the viewfinder. Just as a thought exercise, think of the image you’re seeing as a work of art. Consider its composition, its shapes, how the things in the image relate to each other, however randomly placed.

Sometimes I will begin a new class by having the students be quiet and listen for four and a half minutes. I have them note down, quietly, a thumbnail description of every sound they hear. They hear stairs creaking, pianos playing in the music building, the scratching of pens, heaters humming. After the four and a half minutes is up, I tell them that they’ve just heard a performance of a famous piece of music, John Cage’s 4’33”. Sometimes they get very excited, and once a girl exclaimed, “I never realized there was so much to listen to!” The only negative comments I’ve ever gotten are along the lines of, “You mean, Cage got paid for doing that!?” I assure them he didn’t.

Contrary to some popular belief, 4’33” is not four minutes of silence, nor four minutes of outraged audience protest: it is four minutes of unintended, accidental sound considered as music, a frame placed around a random set of noises. It shows the arbitrariness of how we decide to perceive something as art. It begins to attune us to our sonic environment, to disable the filters we keep in place to ignore our daily life. It is such a whimsical, wise, harmless, cheerful, edifying, non-commercial gesture. So I’m thrilled the BBC broadcast the piece over the radio (see the story here), and shocked that, 51 years after it became part of music history, there are still people who can think Cage was trying to pull something over on the world. What he was trying to pull over on you, mate, was your own damn life. Take a listen to it sometime.

Totnes, Devon – I wish I could show you the 15th-century church I’m looking at – next to a tree believed to have stood here for 1500 years – as I smoke a Cuban cigar in the garden on a lovely Sunday morning, while back home my friends endure the coldest New York winter in a century.

When I was a student, composers used to come to my school and tell us about their work. Now I go to schools and tell students about mine. Things have changed. One thing my musicologist friend Bob Gilmore and I discuss with some unease is the discontinuance of aesthetic argument. In the ’70s there were so many issues to argue. Is 12-tone music an inevitable development in musical language? Is chance a valid compositional technique? Is returning to tonality a copout? Can the process aspect of minimalist music be divorced from its prettiness? In college I remember one of my friends asking, why couldn’t Steve Reich have used a 12-tone row for Piano Phase?

And on and on. Any composer who came to visit a college was not just an artist, but a salesman. He or she had techniques to sell. One assured us that 12-tone music would be the wave of the future. Another demonstrated that microtones were the only place left to go. Another brought a feminist critique of the avant-garde, and offered a more holistic, nurturing approach. Still others used Marxist terminology, and shook their heads over the “elitist” avant-garde, enjoining us to examine our musical intentions in terms of the class struggle. Students took sides, some boycotting certain composers’ presentations as a political statement. When Petr Kotik and Julius Eastman played some long, austere, chance-inflected pieces at Oberlin in 1974, one of the 12-tone students tried to disrupt the concert by banging on the door from outside. Students challenged the famous composers. Some years before me at Oberlin, Christopher Rouse is said to have asked Morton Feldman, after his lecture, “Mr. Feldman? Why is your music so boring?” (Feldman’s incredulous answer: “Borrrring? BORRRRing?… You should BE so boring!”)

I’m not so sure that the composers, many of whom had comfortable careers and secure teaching positions, saw themselves as selling something – that may have been the perception only because we were in the market to buy. We were picking a horse to bet on – Who do you favor in the fifth race, Minimalism, Conceptualism, or Twelve-Tone? We were buying stock, and watching the ticker tape carefully. Ambitious, we wanted to get ahead, and looked for assurance that the musical movement we latched onto would still be hot when we graduated. We were also artists, and looking for something to believe in, something that felt right and offered us creative room to grow.

Today, that sense that there are winners and losers among musical styles is gone, somewhat to everyone’s relief. More prevalent is the feeling that all styles have lost, and the entire scene is in danger. Yet there is no lessening of interest in making avant-garde music, whatever that is. 21-year-olds are inherently idealistic, and have been scoffing at society’s Philistine threats for as long as this tree’s been standing here, probably. The pleasant democracy of styles, however, does not mean there aren’t aesthetic issues to discuss, and all the more reason that we should discuss them now, when the situation isn’t so polarized, now that the names Reich, Feldman, Ferneyhough, Carter, Partch, Meredith Monk, can all be raised without much fear that anyone will jeer at any of them.

For instance, most of my music can be considered tonal. Among students, the fact doesn’t seem to raise any eyebrows. One composition professor here seemed slightly disappointed that some of my harmonies are so simple. I do feel, and I think it would still be found to be a controversial opinion if one asked around, that complexity versus simplicity of harmony is a dead issue, beaten to death by the last generation, and that any type of harmony can now be legitimately used to articulate musical structures; that the large-scale structure is more expressive than any particular means used to delineate it. But no discussion ensues on this topic.

More interestingly, I find among students a concern for linear processes, and both James Tenney and Steve Reich have been influential in this area. Some young composers go through tremendous calculations to work out their musical forms to be geometrically exact. Personally, I find this type of thinking too literal, and I consider literalism the great disease of late 20th-century music. Twelve-toners started it: the 12-tone row and its permutations were a very literal technique. By basing one passage on a pitch row and the next on its retrograde inversion, one created a literal kind of unity, but with no assurance that a unified impression would result. One practically had to torment the 12-tone method, as Dallapiccola sometimes did, to create a meaningful appearance of musical unity. Likewise, the objective calculation of an exact process is not always the best way to convey the metaphor of a gradual process. To his great credit, Reich quickly moved from the physically exact process of his tape-loop piece Come Out to the metaphorical, far more expressive nonlinear process of Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices, and Organ. It was an important lesson, and one I benefitted from.

James Tenney was one of the most recent composers to visit Dartington, and his love of exact processes survives as a student interest. Tenney is a great musician, and I love much of his music, but I collegially disagree with the emphasis on exact process that his musical example encourages. We are not machines, taking in numerical data, but human begins, who communicate through symbols, whose meaning is often arbitrary in its basis, but collectively agreed upon. I love the idea of a piece of music starting as one thing and gradually metamorphosing into something else. But I find it more rewarding, as a composer and as a listener, when the process is suggested humanly and intuitively, in stages, with detours and surprises, and in terms of harmonies, rhythms, textures that the listener can recognize and assimilate as they go by.

More important than my stand on that or any particular issue, though, is my (and Gilmore’s) disappointment that there is very little apparent argument these days about which direction music should take. I don’t single out Dartington: I find the same experience almost everywhere, and no public forum available for composers to debate aesthetic convictions. Musical decisions made collectively, through controversy, survival of resistance, and mutual correction, carry authority. No one needs or wants musical polemics to be as vitriolic and dismissive as they were 30 years ago, but the lack of discussion today leads to a dull acquiescence in everything, and a lack of community. Perhaps now everyone’s too afraid to hurt each other’s feelings. But Bob’s playing me CDs of spectral music, I’m playing him postminimalist music, each of us dubious about the other’s tastes and defending our own – and it sort of feels like old times.

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.

I’m off to England. I fly out tomorrow for two and a half weeks of teaching at Dartington College of the Arts down south in the moors of Devon, courtesy of my good friend Bob Gilmore (he wrote the Partch book, I wrote the Nancarrow book, we both want to write a Rudhyar book). I don’t know what the e-mail situation will be, how much free time I’ll have, whether there will be anything to blog about. So don’t necessarily expect to hear from me before I’m back January 25, though I may surprise you earlier with a wealth of anecdotes about English musical life. And Totnes is a short cab ride from Torquay, so I’ll be making my usual pilgrimage to the land of Basil and Sibyl Fawlty.

Another fantastic music book already out of print, though only published in 1990: The Apollonian Clockwork by Louis Andriessen and Elmer Schonberger, a wildly imaginative series of essays exploring odd but startlingly revealing corners of the life and music of Igor Stravinsky. It opens with a copy of the mug shot taken of Stravinsky when he was arrested in Boston in 1942 for having made his own orchestral arrangement of the “Star-Spangled Banner” (‘tampering with national property” was the charge, no kidding), and discusses such subjects as why Stravinsky’s counterpoint trips into parallel unisons that don’t sound like unisons, and why he was the only major 20th-century composer no one could get away with imitating. It is the most creative literary homage I ever seen made to a composer, not to mention a gold mine of clever quotations by and about Stravinsky. OUT OF PRINT.

I’ve been a Jung groupie since I was a teenager, and I’m reading the new biography of Jung (Jung: A Biography, published by Little, Brown) by Deirdre Bair, which is excellent and notable for its nonjudgmental, objective look at Jung’s life. I am blown away by the account of Jung’s first meeting with Freud, which took place on March 3, 1907. Jung arrived for lunch at 1, and the two talked nonstop (mostly Jung, apparently) until 2 AM. This account really points up differences between the two men:

Jung wanted to know what Freud thought about parapsychological phenomena and precognitions…. Freud never offered a sustained account [of the conversation], but in Jung’s version, he “absolutely” rejected both, which caused Jung to accuse him of “materialistic bias” and to persist stubbornly in describing his own personal experiences. When he told of the knife that shattered [a large knife lying in a drawer in Jung’s house had once spontaneously shattered into pieces in the presence of his psychic cousin], Freud “expressed such a flat positivism” that Jung found it difficult “not to respond in a way that would have been a bit too biting.”…

Suddenly, there occurred such a noise from the glass-fronted bookcase in front of which they were sitting that they both jumped, fearing it would fall on them. “Now this is a so-called catalytic exteriorization phenomenon,” Jung insisted. “Oh, no, that is complete nonsense,” Freud replied. To prove his point, Jung insisted that there would be another noise, and immediately there was “an indescribably terrible noise in the cabinet!”

“Freud looked at me with horror then,” Jung remembered. “This raised a distrust of me in him, for you see, something like that isn’t possible, something like that doesn’t exist in his worldview. Consequently, for him, I had to be absolutely out of kilter somewhere….” They never spoke of this incident again and the conversation moved to other subjects chosen by Freud.

Not to waste one more word on Lost in Translation, but it circuitously reminds me of a similarity between Wagner and Woody Allen that I’ve never seen anyone pick up on. Sounds crazy, but stay with me a moment. The basic fantasy of Lost in Translation, if you will, is the fantasy of an older man tempted to have an affair with a young woman, and who maturely decides not to, right? (Perhaps, becoming an older man myself, the assumption that an older man should know better than to see himself as a romantic lead doesn’t sit well with me lately.)

Richard Wagner wrote his masterpiece Die Meistersinger in the 1870s. It’s about an older man, Han Sachs, who flirts with a young woman, Eva. Eva is to be wed off to the best singer in a singing contest, and as the greatest of the meistersingers, the widowed Sachs, as the libretto hints, could conceivably want that prize for himself. Instead, he paternally helps Eva win Walther, the young man she’s in love with.

Zip ahead 110 years. Woody Allen makes the film Husbands and Wives, in which he plays a college professor tempted to bed a beautiful young graduate student who flirts with him. Allen’s character decides, at film’s end, not to get involved with her.

Here’s the parallel. While Wagner was writing Die Meistersinger, he was having an affair with Cosima Wagner, his best friend’s daughter and the wife of his young conductor protege Hans von Bulow. He stole Cosima from von Bulow and married her. In short, in the character of Han Sachs, Wagner portrayed a man who, in the same position as Wagner, made the admirable choice that Wagner couldn’t bring himself to make.

And Woody Allen wrote and directed Husbands and Wives while he was involved with his girlfriend’s adopted daughter Soon Yi, whom he subsequently married. In the film he protrays himself making the opposite of the choice he made in real life.

Now: why would two artists as disparate as Richard Wagner and Woody Allen, both getting scandalously involved with young women to whom they originally seemed to be paternal figures, both create works of art depicting, as honorable, men who made exactly the opposite decision?

Is there perhaps a kind of artist who succeeds in his art to allow himself to fail in his life?

There’s a useful term that I’ve only seen in French – deformation professionel – and I don’t see why it would lose anything in English translation as “professional deformation.” It refers to the things that begin to separate us from the rest of the population as a result of our evolving according to the pattern of our different professions.

I thought about this as I read film critic after film critic include Lost in Translation among his or her top ten films of 2003. As someone who was tempted to leave half an hour into the film, and irritated, when it finally slithered to its pointless end, that I had bothered to stay, I searched for reasons to consider it one of the niftier things since sliced bread. They didn’t convince me. “Atmosphere” was one. And Sophia Coppola’s atmosphere was OK, but I couldn’t see that the film gained anything from being set in Japan aside from a couple of cheap, not very funny jokes about Japanese culture. The one that came closest to making sense was, and I paraphrase, “It’s rare to see a director show as much appreciation for an actor’s talent as Coppola does for Bill Murray.” And I thought, well, that sounds like a film critic’s reason to like a film. That’s his professional deformation. It sounds like someone who watches films virtually continuously, perennially gets annoyed by good actors who are underused, and as Lost in Translation wafts by right after The Return of the Ring and before Mona Lisa Smile, thinks, “Boy, Bill Murray got a lot of screen time.” But for someone like me, who watches maybe a film DVD a week and can spare time to go to the local bijou somewhat less often than once a month, the fact that Coppola appreciates Murray’s talent is slim compensation for the fact that the plot never comes to any point of fruition, that all obvious avenues of complication are simply sidestepped, that the wealth of cultural detail turns out to be gratuitous and never adds up to anything – not to mention the fact that Bill Murray only gets to deliver about 1/100th as many clever lines in Lost in Translation as he does in one of my favorite comedies, Groundhog Day. After all, I kind of thought it was my prerogative, as audience member, to appreciate the actor’s talent, not the director’s prerogative.

I also suspect that the fulsome praise given the film (since none of my friends are film critics, and few of them thought much of the film either) contains an elitist element of savoring the avoidance of the cliché. Romances are about people who get drawn into affairs, and if you watch eight romances a week among your dozens of action films, thrillers, goofball comedies, etc., it must be a refreshing reversal to see an obvious romance not turn into a romance, like easing up on an overused muscle. But films are not so much part of my daily routine that I can savor the avoidance of something. I’m happy to see a romance not turn into a romance if it becomes something else, but I don’t get any thrill, as professionals must, from seeing a director cleverly get a film through studio production without it ever achieving its painfully obvious goal.

So do I have a bee in my bonnet about film critics liking Lost in Translation? Nah, don’t listen to me, what do I know from film? Among my favorite flicks are Eraserhead and Greaser’s Palace, which gross all my friends out. The reason I bring it up is that the disconnect between me and the film critics makes me scared about my own professional deformation. After all, I live a weird life. My apartment is lined all round with brim-filled, floor-to-ceiling CD cabinets, and for various periods I’m listening to things almost continuously – a little of this, compare it with that, write down the lyrics from this, figure out a chord progression there, play two minutes of this old disc as a reminder, listen to this brand new disc already writing the review in my head as soon as the first sound blares out. It’s not a “normal” relationship to music. In music, I can appreciate a piece that does little more than avoid the predictable cliché. I can listen to La Monte Young sing raspily over a drone for an hour, and as long as he doesn’t hit an out-of-tune note, think, “Wow, that’s amazing.” I hear what happens in a piece, but perhaps I also too much hear every piece IN RELATION to every other piece in roughly the same genre. Music is never an isolated pleasure for me, but exists as a segment in a continuous web in which I spend nearly every waking moment wrapped, and rapt.

So I’m an expert. Everything I say about music is true, and insightful. But it doesn’t follow from that that you, assuming you can afford fifty bucks a month to blow at the CD store, should jump at my every recommendation. I read film critics for interesting insights, but I don’t automatically run to films they rave about, and the more prestigious their publication, the less, in a way, I trust them. It has struck me over the years that there are “critic’s composers,” composers who get rave reviews from critics for decades – Elodie Lauten and David Garland come to mind in the new-music world – without ever catching on with audiences. Of course, concert presenters and record producers have to be taken into account too, since they have their own professional deformations, and I’m always privately ranting about the perverse tastes of people who run record labels. We live in a world of specialists, and all things considered, it’s amazing we communicate as well as we do. We experts have to remember to look at our field from the outside, as a small part of everyone else’s cultural life, and offer our more esoteric insights not as pronouncements from on high, but as interesting examples of how to think – examples that may or may not expand the range of what non-music-experts can enjoy. We need to distinguish between perceptions that can be legitimately developed and deepened and those that are illusions of our professional deformation. (There are certainly movies I’ve learned to understand more deeply on repeated viewings, such as Greaser’s Palace, but I can’t imagine any “levels” I missed in Lost in Translation; the story sets you up to believe the two characters will have an affair, and, Ha ha! – they don’t. Fooled you.) And every now and then, I think critics should take a sabbatical from concerts and their CD collection, something I’ve never been able to afford to do.

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.

Well, the week before Christmas is a difficult time to blog, especially when my semester only ended six days earlier, and I had been prevented from Christmas shopping the last two weekends by a blizzard and cold, respectively. (My son’s birthday is Dec. 23, too.) So I’ve been absent. And I’m not really the type to send out the obligatory Christmas greeting – just because it’s obligatory. For the record, I am happy to express the usual lip service to peace on earth for us all, and all that.

But I do have a triumphant bit of Christmas information to report. Every year on Christmas morning I get out of bed, and my first act is to put on a CD of Christmas music. All my life, my dad would play Handel’s Messiah, interspersed with recordings of Christmas songs by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. So over the years I’ve tried different recordings of the Messiah, Bach cantatas, choral music by the American William Billings, Renaissance choral music, English choirs singing Holst and Walton arrangements, and so on and so on. Some of it’s too hackneyed, some too familiar, some too intrusive. But this year it finally occurred to me to play the nativity music, in fact the entire Christmas oratorio section, from Franz Liszt’s oratorio Christus. It was the perfect accompaniment to a mellow Christmas morning. The Christmas oratorio section is mostly instrumental (in imitation of Berlioz’s Romeo et Juliet), the choral parts are mostly low-key and lovely. The nativity music is fully as charming as any Waltz of the Sugar Plum Fairies and far more interesting and original – surely the only Christmas music ever written in 5/4 meter (actually, 2/4 and 3/4 in alternation). The Easter music on CD 3 is heavily dramatic and emotional, of course, but for Christ’s birth and the “March of the Three Kings” Liszt showed for an entire hour what a delicate, light touch he was capable of with chorus and orchestra. No less an authority than German musicologist Carl Dahlhaus has called Christus the greatest oratorio of the 19th century, and I totally agree – yet Liszt is vastly underrated in America, excoriated because he was far too complex and Protean a figure, and mixed in a ton of superficial showpieces along with his masterworks.

In any case, sorry the recommendation comes too late for this year, but if you received a Tower or Amazon gift certificate and have an eye to next Christmas (or even Easter), Liszt’s Christus is one of the 19th century’s mostly undiscovered gems. And there’s a superb recording by Antal Dorati on Hungaraton. So, happy holidays. Back to the postclassical world soon, but even I can’t steer you towards much postclassical Christmas music.

1/1 is the unlikely name of a small but important journal published by Other Music, Inc., little known to the public but eagerly awaited and closely read by microtonal musicians. It’s the most significant periodical devoted to the system of pure tuning known as Just Intonation – i.e., the practice of tuning pitches according to whole number ratios. And the current issue offers a cover article by LA microtonalist Bill Alves partly analyzing Toby Twining’s Chrysalid Requiem. What’s rare and exciting about this is that Twining’s choral magnum opus is only three years old, true 21st-century music, and it’s exceedingly rare to get analytical information about music that recent. Plus, Chrysalid Requiem, a revolutionary work in its approach to tuning, represents the choral music of the future.

Perhaps not the immediate future – with everything so conservative these days, and arts funding rolling unidirectionally backward, and the free fall of our culture into corporate fascism and the general ignorance necessary to allow it, Twining’s vision may remain an oddity for decades, possibly even centuries. But fusing as it does a Renaissance choral concept, advanced systems of tuning inherent in Harry Partch’s music, and overtone-singing techiques traditional to Tibet and Tuva and increasingly explored in the west, the time will inevitably come when this kind of music will represent more of a common practice. Like myself, Twining studied with microtonalist Ben Johnston, who, after working with Partch, invented his own incredibly flexible and logical microtonal notation based on extensions of Renaissance practice. In addition to the usual sharps and flats, the notation has pluses and minuses, little “7′”s and upside-down “7′”s, arrows pointing up and down, “13”‘s right-side-up and upside-down, and so on. Twining, working out sequences of harmonic progressions not terribly complex in themselves, nevertheless wanders into harmonies so far afield that the notation ends up as an incredible morass with sometimes more than ten accidentals per note; the mind-boggling examples Alves gives are not even the most complex in the piece. The only way to perform the piece was for Twining to create a synthesizer realization, and for the singers to listen to it over headphones while performing.

If sometimes stark and austere, Chrysalid Requiem is just as often warm and thrilling, and most spine-tingling when it buzzes with overtone-singing techniques (in which the 12 singers each sing more than one pitch at a time). I’d even recomend the piece as thoughtful new music for the Christmas season. There’s a recording on Cantalope that I reviewed in the June 4, 2002, Village Voice, and you can hear several excerpts at Just Intonation Network. Alves’s analysis is only a few pages and far from exhaustive, but it offers a wealth of musical examples, correlated with the audio examples at Just Intonation Network, and gives the basis of Twining’s numerical rhythmic structuring techniques, rich with Christian symbolism, along with the modulation patterns through which he achieves tonal contrasts never before heard. At least in concept, Alves makes this complex work seem simpler than it sounds.

1/1 is selflessly kept in operation by David B. Doty, who would love for you to subscribe at www.justintonation.net. Or write to the Just Intonation Network at 535 Stevenson Street, San Francisco, CA 94103, whence you can also order a T-shirt emblazoned with the 12th root of 2 with a slash through it – a microtonalist’s arcane way of protesting our ubiquitous, out-of-tune, equal tempered tuning. One gets so sick and tired of reading interviews where unimaginative composers and rock stars opine that everything’s been done, there’s nothing new under the sun, and we’re in a postmodern period in which we can only rearrange elements from the past. The fantastic reach of Chrysalid Requiem into one possible future shows how ignorant and superficial all such assertions are.

A second thought about Berlioz. When we think of Brahms’s life, we think of his works being championed by Joachim, Clara Schumann, Hans von Bulow. We think of Beethoven’s aristocratic patrons begging him to remain in Vienna and pooling their resources to give him a salary. We think of Chopin and Liszt playing piano to entertain at aristocratic soirees. But when we think of Berlioz’s life, it’s of him consumed with scribbling newspaper reviews, writing about musical nonentities for money, forced to put together his own early performances without institutional help. He did enjoy considerable success as a conductor on tours outside France, but he never lived to hear some of his projects performed, the complete Les Troyens in particular. Likewise, in a more profound sense than any other major 19th-century fiigure, we think of him composing in a vacuum. The extraordinary innovations of Symphonie Fantastique and Romeo et Juliet (stream of consciousness, ostinato, col legno, motivic linkage between movements, free rhythm of fermatas) often waited until the 20th century to find an echo. If his early works were too incendiary for the early Romantic movement he electroshocked into existence, later in life he retreated to an objective, Gluck-obsessed classicism that seemed even more strangely unrelated to his surrounding context. (One movement from the much-underrated L’enfance du Christ he actually passed off at first as a new 18th-century find.)

Composing without finding cultural resonance, pouring energy into a dayjob, unsupported by institutions and on his own – though incomplete, this thumbnail sketch makes Berlioz sound like a proto-American, even a Downtowner, a first draft for Charles Ives. More than any other 19th-century figure (although Mozart in Vienna was somewhat in the same boat, and the Swedish Franz Berwald worked as a glasses manufacturer, Ives-like), Berlioz faced the artistic conditions that we American composers face. We see him with a shock of self-recognition that we don’t get from Brahms, Mendelssohn, Mahler. It makes me wonder if more than just Berlioz’s wild music and wonderful sense of rhythmic surprise were involved in my early fascination for him. I devoured his Memoires and collected all his recordings years before it ever occurred to me to become, like Berlioz, a critic.

No one asked me to use the words “miserable failure” and “George W. Bush” in a sentence (I do it often enough without being asked – and look up “miserable failure” on Google if you don’t know what I’m talking about), but I was asked to participate today in a “blog burst” for Beethoven’s birthday. I don’t have very original thoughts about Beethoven at the moment. Count Waldstein set the stage for a three-person Classical Era when he wrote to the young Beethoven, who was leaving for Vienna, “You will receive the spirit of Mozart from the hands of Haydn,” and against that aristocratic fiat I’ve long agitated for a more complex view of that era, teaching the finer works of Clementi, Dussek, and Hummel for a fuller picture. Many of Beethoven’s works, it strikes me, are played too often, but I’ll admit that the last six piano sonatas and last five string quartets are played far too seldom. And the slow movement of Op. 111, which has had a tremendous continuing impact on my own music, is just a miracle.

If begged to comment on classical music, I would rather comment on Hector Berlioz, whose bicentennial (1803-1869) has passed without too much hoopla. All of us Berlioz fans – and I’ve been one since way back – seem incapable of eulogizing him without simultaneously noting how sadly neglected his music is. And yet what composer in history (before Henry Brant, anyway) ever made his work so inconvenient to present? How often can the Requiem, with its four brass choirs and 16 timpani, actually be pulled off? Lelio is a logistical disaster, Beatrice and Benedict similarly between genres. Violists don’t seem to like Herold in Italy, though I love it. Les Troyen is a mammoth effort, and, though nobly beautiful, a little slow once you mount the thing. Isn’t what we love about Berlioz that his idealistic vision led him to places no one would ever be able to afford to revisit often? He’s like a gorgeous canyon too difficult of access for the mere tourist. And as Charles Rosen has shown in The Romantic Generation, even the idiosyncrasies of Berlioz’s composing technique come too much from a certain kind of training, and from his being a guitarist and clarinetist rather than the more usual pianist or violinist, to have led to much influence. I suspect that Berlioz must be a more popular composer than widely assumed, but we addicts all feel a little isolated by the understandable scarcity of performances. And in the wickedness of his literary humor, he yields not even to Shaw.

It was, admittedly, shocking to go to the Paris Conservatoire a couple of years ago and see statue after statue devoted to French mediocrities like Scribe and Auber, and no monument to the Conservatoire’s most famous graduate. (The faculty there allegedly forbade its students to attend the premiere of Symphonie Fantastique, and then repeated the feat decades later with Debussy’s Pelleas.) But I’m not sorry to have one hero whose pedestal is so high and inconveniently placed that experiencing him becomes a special pleasure of rediscovery every time. Since my Berlioz fanaticism is of such old origin, my complete collection of his work remains largely on vinyl, so let it be recorded that I marked his centennial by purchasing the Metropolitan Opera’s ponderous but classic DVD of Les Troyens.