Last time a commenter called me a fascist, I wrote an Idiot’s Guide to PostClassic. Guess it’s time to remind people it’s there. Thugs from the Conventional Wisdom crowd do fall in here accidentally from time to time. I’d rather they just go here and leave us alone.

I just received Michael Hicks’s and Christian Asplund’s book on Christian Wolff, part of the University of Illinois Press’s “American Composers” series in which my Robert Ashley book will be coming out in October. Don’t have time to read it at the moment (my current summer pleasure reading is another wolf: Virginia Woolf’s Orlando), but I’m looking forward. Browsing through it I immediately notice two startling things.

The first is a reprint of one of Wolff’s early exercises in first-species counterpoint with parallel and hidden fifths and octaves marked for correction by – John Cage! That’s right, apparently Wolff’s first composition lessons with Cage were in species counterpoint, like they were frickin’ Haydn and Beethoven or somebody! I had no idea Cage ever insisted that a student learn counterpoint. My entire mental universe is in flux at the moment. “The purpose of these technical studies, Cage explained, was to learn how one develops discipline.” (p. 10) Right on! Right on! I guess.

Less earth-shaking yet peculiar is that there is a footnote quoting one of my replies to a comment on this blog. This is a whole new way to get quoted. Maybe I’d better watch what I say to people.

Will Robin over at New Music Box had the inspired idea to write an homage to the Pierrot ensemble, since the centennial of Pierrot Lunaire is upon us. The flute/clarinet/violin/cello/piano combination took a few decades to take off, but it has conquered: we are awash in such ensembles, and no student achieves professional status until he or she has written his or her “Pierrot piece.” It’s the lingua franca of the (academic) new-music performance world. As I mentioned in a comment there, I’m not thrilled about the development. I wrote one piece for it (Hovenweep, 2000) and found it gummy to work with, though I think I succeeded in making into something; Da Capo has played the piece many times, and it’s been done by the Seattle Chamber Players and St. Luke’s Orchestra Players as well. It’s on a New Albion CD.

Half of what I dislike about the instrumentation is a lot of little built-in tendencies. The strings don’t really balance the winds. The winds provide a dollop of color, but nothing exotic. The piano fits like a table-top over the combined ranges of the other pairs of instruments. Everything’s centered toward a homogenous middle, with few extremes of register or timbre. The symmetry is both oppressive and deceiving. Making the ensemble work is a problem, but doesn’t seem like one because the instruments are so normal and speciously balanced. One’s initial idea is to write for the strings and winds, leaving the piano to function as ornament, pointillistic percussion, or filler; or to basically write kind of a piano chamber concerto, though the wind/string quartet isn’t really a strong balance for a virtuoso piano part. I watch my students struggle with it, thrashing between polyphony and homophony. My solution, which took much rewriting to arrive at, was to write almost in rhythmic unison for the entire ensemble at the beginning and end, while breaking the group up into smaller subsets in a middle section. It comes off well in performance, but the piece feels like an outlier in my output, because I had to bend to meet the instrumentation.

The other half of what I don’t like are the ensemble’s virtues, which are all academic. It teaches students to write, or, alternatively, proves they can write (because everyone has to prove that, don’t they?), for both strings and winds. (No one feels bad if they graduate without brass experience.) It’s kind of a mini-orchestra that gives a full sound without stretching the school budget. Get the winds to double on piccolo and bass clarinet, and the student gets a range of experience that stands in, in the professor’s mind, for a much larger range that they might well never receive access to. In other words, it’s a great compromise medium that doesn’t challenge the imagination and makes modest institutional demands. (I think of Wolpe’s Quartet for trumpet, tenor sax, piano, and percussion – an oddball grouping that makes originality mandatory.) And the more composers write for it, the more advantages there are in continuing to write for it because ensembles can make up a repertoire.

If somebody wanted to commission another Pierrot piece from me, I’d happily accept, because overcoming technical challenges is part of the fun. But I find it disappointing that this rather drab, difficult-to-spark medium has become the new standard chamber ensemble, and that compositional academia is committed to pushing it for perhaps decades to come. A great Pierrot piece is a great piece period, but many students will rein in their imaginations to fit the requirement, and fail to make anything special. The string quartet, the former universal chamber medium, was a more neutral canvas to work on, though admittedly it’s become a difficult slog as well – partly because there are so many thousands of great string quartets to compete with, partly because the ensembles have their hands full with current repertoire. I’ve had a hard time getting my string quartets played, and my students do too. Sax quartet seems like an almost explosively fertile medium, or at least I’ve been impressed with most of the sax quartets I’ve heard; but I guess there aren’t that many non-jazz sax players around. So I don’t see any alternative. But neither have I ever believed in gamely pretending that the status quo is the best of all possible worlds.

Remember, Morton Feldman had a perennial challenge for his students: he’d buy dinner for whomever could come up with the worst orchestration. No one ever won, he said, because the more bizarre their orchestrations became, the more original and imaginative the music got. Last semester I made one of my students write a piece with accordion, melodica, harmonica, toy piano, mandolin, and other exotica – her result was amazing! But the Pierrot ensemble has become somebody’s idea of a sane, reasonable, one-size-fits-all orchestration. I think Feldman owes Schoenberg dinner just for thinking of it.

UPDATE: Just had a happy thought. Replace Pierrot with the Herzgewächse ensemble: celesta, harp, harmonium. Lovely!

I’ve been meaning to mention that my March profile of David Borden was my last “American Composer” column for Chamber Music magazine. It was a great gig, but in recent years it was becoming an onerous burden to interrupt my other projects every two months and have to get my head into someone else’s music. Overall I wrote 69 articles for the bimonthly magazine from 1998 to 2012, profiling 61 composers individually plus several others in the September articles I wrote about more general subjects. When I started, my predecessors in that column had, to date, profiled 70 composers – all of them famous, and 3 – three – of them women. For most of my years, I conscientiously split my articles equally between male and female composers, and also wrote about quite a few young composers and those who weren’t very well known yet. I’m proud of how much I expanded the column’s purview in several directions. Then, when we had the minimalism conference at UMKC in 2009, I got criticized because there were no papers submitted on women composers (as if I could have influenced that), and I decided to quit keeping count. I figured if women composers were going to damn me, after all I’ve done to publicize them at the Voice and elsewhere throughout my entire career, then they didn’t really want to be championed as much as they wanted to complain. I thought of listing here the 61 composers I wrote about for Chamber Music [26 of them women: I went back and counted], but I’ve learned that it pisses composers off (myself included) to see lists of celebrated composers that they’re not on. A lot of my favorite composers didn’t get written about, because given the venue and its presumed readership, I did try to focus on people who wrote chamber music, which quite a number of my musical protégés don’t do.

The upshot is that I’m finally no longer a music critic – my last such gig has ended. I worked as a critic from December 1982 to March 2012 – 29 and 1/2 years, which the astrologically minded will realize is a full Saturn cycle. Major life phases tend to come to an end after 29 and 1/2 years, and so this one happily did. Now I’m going through an odd period in which I don’t really know what I am, publicly, besides being a music theory professor. That happens when Saturn passes through the eleventh house in your horoscope – some new phase of your life starts up without you really knowing what it’s going to be, as one did for me in 1982. At age 56, I’m in the mood to only write about what I deeply feel like writing about at the moment. Criticism is a noble profession, or could be if we took it seriously enough and applied rigorous standards to it, but you get pigeonholed as a bystander, someone valued for your perspective on others rather than for your own potential contributions. I fell into the profession pretty much by accident, it did very well by me – I can only imagine I would have ended up pushing a broom somewhere if I hadn’t happened into it – and I’m relieved and happy to leave it behind.

Some of you may recall the Consumers Guides, the full-page record review columns, that we used to run in the Village Voice. They may still do so, I haven’t looked in years. The format and its accompanying grading system were invented during the late medieval era by the Voice‘s dean of critics Bob Christgau; at least, so the legend was passed down to me by my forefathers, whose knowledge I would never presume to challenge. The grading system was intended to be unalterably strict. A B was the top grade for music that would be considered excellent only by fans of that genre. In order to get an A, a record was supposed to be “beyond category” (in Duke Ellington’s memorable phrase), music that would appeal even to people who didn’t usually listen to that genre. This was an impressively high bar. In other words, if something I reviewed was fantastic but would only appeal to new-music fans, the highest grade I was supposed to award it was a B-plus. A’s were reserved for new music broad enough in its appeal to cross boundaries. I was occasionally called on the carpet, gently, for grade inflation, for being too liberal with my A’s, because I couldn’t stomach giving a superb recording of a Cage chance piece, or a wonderful Niblock drone piece, a B just because its potential audience seemed limited. I fudged.

This category distinction was always something of an unwieldy fiction, because it presumed, especially in the case of new music, a specious link between excellence and accessibility. Strictly followed, it was likely to assign a B to a beautifully performed Milton Babbitt record, and a potential A to one of Steve’s Reich’s more mediocre pieces. Nor was it simply a new-music problem, since the most dynamite heavy metal album was still unlikely to find too many listeners outside fans of that genre. (I remember a small scandal when it was learned that a heavy metal fan in the production department had been quietly nudging the grades upward for metal albums after Christgau submitted them.) Even within one sub-genre, the line could be fluid. I think of Niblock as a hard sell for the average listener, but he’s got an occasional piece so transcendent, so clear in its effect, that I think almost anyone could be bowled over who really gave it a chance – as, sadly, few non-new-music fans were likely to do. That, one could argue, was the purpose of the A/B line, to mark off the truly amazing moments when the music burst beyond its premises.

I started remembering all this in connection with my recent post about literature. Were I a literary critic in this position, I presume I would have to give B-pluses to both Finnegans Wake and The Making of Americans, two books that I think are funny and wonderful and profound - neither of which, I have to admit, I’ve ever finished reading. One of my retirement plans is to read The Making of Americans out loud, which is how I fell in love with it, hearing it read publicly, and, I think, the only way to make it sink home or even make sense. I don’t have time in my life, obviously, for many books in this category. Not having to make my living via my literary expertise, I have the luxury of quitting novels that don’t fairly promptly engage my interest. I don’t mind having to think hard and figure things out, but if I’m going to do that the payoff better be ground-shiftingly transplendent and not held off until the last chapter, or I won’t still be there.

As someone who does make a living off my musical expertise, I have put the requisite brain power into a lot of esoteric works, some of which repaid the effort and some didn’t. I cherish a ton of music in the Voice‘s excellent-but-B-plus category. Maderna’s Grande Aulodia, Christian Wolff’s Snowdrop, Babbitt’s Vision and Prayer, Xenakis’s Bohor, Scelsi’s Fourth Quartet, Rochberg’s Sonata-Fantasia, Stefan Wolpe’s Enactments: these are not pieces that I’d give CDs of to my mother for Christmas, or play to impress non-musicians who come over for dinner, but I love them dearly and will listen to them when alone, even play them for students. In many cases I have inside information about how they’re written, which conditions the way I listen to them and helps me enjoy them more. Enactments, his three-piano piece that I digitized from vinyl this week, is Wolpe’s most austere and relentlessly abstract music, but I understand he used to watch fish in his fish tank to get inspiration for his playful jumps and darts, and I can hear the subtle surprises and twists he sets up, without quite being able to explain them in a way that a non-musician might grasp. On the other hand, there’s all the (equally) great new music I do play for guests and even at parties: David Garland’s songs, Paul Lansky’s Conversation Pieces, Ingram Marshall’s Evensongs, Beth Anderson’s Piano Concerto, anything by “Blue” Gene Tyranny, Elodie Lauten’s Waking in New York, Ben Neill’s Songs for Persephone, Mikel Rouse’s Living Inside Design and Love at Twenty, Duckworth’s Time Curve Preludes, Beglarian’s Five Things, Epstein’s Palindrome Variations, Lentz’s Wild Turkeys, and on and on and on – all that 1980s and ’90s “accessible” music that I suppose marks me as an old fogey at this point, but that most people have still never heard before and can very often be charmed with. Music that, when it comes on in the background, someone stops and says, “Ooh, what’s that? Can we hear it again from the beginning?” Music that I don’t particularly admire more than I do Vision and Prayer or Enactments, but that I could give an A to in a Consumers Guide with a cleaner conscience toward Christgau, because it does reach out to people who aren’t professional new-music mavens (the latter meaning composers, basically).

I think it was the American Mavericks website that had the inspired idea of dividing its listening streams into peanut-butter categories of “smooth” and “crunchy,” one for the accessible “new music” in the postminimalist 1970s sense, the other for more superficially off-putting fare. Of course, crunchy already divides into music that is complicated and multilayered (Carter, Ferneyhough) and music that may be far less structured but harsh and transgressive (Merzbow). Young people of a certain type in any generation will get excited about transgressive music, as separating them off from their parents and peers; I certainly went through such a phase, back when Stockhausen’s Mikrophonie I was about as far as crunchy went. The complicated-analysis style appeals to would-be know-it-alls, true elitists – though perhaps not only to those. In reality, “crunchy” does not guarantee profound anymore than “smooth” guarantees simplistic. “Venus” from my Planets is my most oft-downloaded mp3, with hundreds of hits a month lately; it’s smooth as hell, and I grin to think of all the people who listen without registering the layering of 3/4 and 25/16 meters that runs through it. Postclassic Radio, back when I had it running, was about 96% smooth, and to that extent not fully representative of the wide range of new music I admire. Seduction was the intent.

Grades are silly, and I hope no one was ever fooled (or insulted) by the Consumers Guide categories, but it is interesting to imagine grading pieces not mostly on quality, but on a multidimensional spectrum of opposites with no value judgments attached to either side:

• smooth vs. crunchy
• original vs. traditional
• simple vs. complex
• meditative vs. exciting
• carefully crafted vs. messy

And then with an evaluation thrown in at the end, where Virgil Thomson thought it should be if included at all. Not that pieces of music can be summed up by their generic attributes, as the Pandora people would encourage us to think, but correlating the evaluation to the other sliding scales might reveal more about the biases of the person doing the evaluating. Of those above, my strongest preference leans toward meditative rather than exciting. I often call myself a devotee of the “slow, boring, depressive” aesthetic, and occasionally someone of similar tastes (Feldman, Harold Budd, Eliane Radigue) responds with a twinkle and a nod because they know exactly what I mean. Boring, much as I love it, can be just as effective as transgressively crunchy at relegating music to that B-plus, specialists-only arena.

So this A/B line maps on to my divided consciousness as a composer/critic/reader. I’m glad that crunchy music is out there, but I’m not likely to write any. I want my music on the potential A list for reasons of both personal vanity and ethics. I want my music to grab the listener the way the novels I reread grab me. Maybe I grew up weird enough as a child and just want to be liked, or, as I suspect, perhaps I’m a historical relic of the “accessible” new-music boom of 1977-83, a living fossil conditioned by the ambience of his formative years. I’m happy that my analytical knowledge allows me to listen sympathetically to a lot of music that’s opaque to novices, but I would feel glum if I had to explain about the 3/4 vs. 25/16 before someone could enjoy listening to “Venus” – feel like I’d only half done my job, in fact. A tension between innovation and populism runs through my entire output, and I feel a little guilty when innovation wins. I do not disapprove, either in music or literature, of all that thorny art praised by the elites. Someone’s got to see how far out we can go and still bring something back. As a musicologist I’ll take time to study all the music, no matter how rarefied. As a reader, I’m happy to leave certain reputedly forbidding novels to the experts, unless I get a strong recommendation from someone who similarly has no axe to grind. As a composer, I never want to be relegated to the B-pluses because I didn’t take the time to appeal to more than the experts.

Here’s a pop quiz for a lazy summer day.

One person played a role in advancing the reputations of both Charles Ives and Ronald Reagan. Who was it?

I’ll save up answers until I get a few before posting them.

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

UPDATE: Wow, I’m rather surprised no right answers today, but the experiment does confirm something about my perception of the literature. Henry Bellamann (1882-1945) was one of the first people to respond to receipt of Ives’s Concord Sonata, the first to write an appreciative public article about him (in 1921), possibly the first to lecture about the Concord (accompanied in several lectures by a pianist named Lenore Purcell who may have been the first to play the whole thing), and he was the co-author (with Ives) of the program notes to the 1927 performance of two movements of the Fourth Symphony. In 1940 he published a novel, Kings Row, which became a bestseller and the basis for a 1942 movie which has gone down in history as Ronald Reagan’s best screen performance ever. Reagan’s most dramatic line in the movie, “Where’s the rest of me?” (he’s awoken to find his legs amputated), is straight from the novel, and became the title of his pre-presidential biography. But if you read the Ives literature, Bellamann is described as a music professor, Scriabin devotee, and poet (Ives set two of his poems), and it may mention that he wrote a novel called Kings Row. If you read the slim literature about Bellamann, there’s never any mention of Ives, and most of it concerns the famous movie made from the novel. So there’s almost no overlap between the two spheres of discourse that would highlight this man who moved from Ives’s world into Reagan’s and Hollywood’s. Bellamann seems to have visited with Ives only during the 1920s, and perhaps they had long been out of touch by the time he wrote the novel, but still. (Another early Ives supporter who went to Hollywood was Bernard Herrmann.)

Out of curiosity aroused by a lifetime of running into Bellamann’s name, I finally read Kings Row this week and became thoroughly engrossed in it, devouring its 674 pages in four days because I couldn’t quit. It has to be one of the earliest American novels to sympathetically portray the tribulations of a gay character, and there are several major themes (incest, extramarital sex) that the Hays office wouldn’t allow the movie to depict. It’s a dark book, an act of merciless revenge against Bellamann’s home town of Fulton, Missouri. Several of the characters are musicians, and I was super-alert to any possible reference that might bring Ives to mind, but no go. The dialogue in the movie manages to stick close to the book when it can, but they sentimentally mangle the ending – no surprise. What’s surprising is that the novel Kings Row, once so popular, seems to be out of print; at least, I could only obtain a used copy through one of Amazon’s associated sellers.

Want another such connection? Somewhere I heard that Dick Cheney was a grand-nephew or something of the composer Mrs. H.H.A. Beach – alias Amy Marcy Cheney Beach. But I haven’t been able to confirm it, so don’t quote me. If you have any relevant facts, the world is waiting to hear.

In a vivid dream, I took my son to a new day-care center. (In waking life, he’s a 27-year-old rock star on his way back today from a gig in Denmark.) I stayed around to observe the class, and was appalled at how simplistic the musical activities were. I was carrying around a large metal can, like a lidded watering can, in which I kept all the knowledge of music I go around disseminating, but it was unwieldy, and I kept bumping people with it. I ran into Alex Ross, who sympathized and explained to me that one could never draw from the general culture any pleasure concerning the field one is an expert in, because extreme specialization isolates us from the general population in just that area of life we enjoy most. By way of illustration, he showed me a fake New Yorker article he’d written and pasted up for me in New Yorker format, full of musical diagrams and detailed and arcane references to rare pieces that I know well (Wolpe, Busoni, Johnston). It was indeed the music journalism of my dreams, but he said he obviously couldn’t publish it, because the number of people capable of reading it would fit in a small bus. I woke up and ran into Alex at an outdoor concert where some big modernist concerto was being performed, told him about the dream I’d had, and he was just delighted. I promised him I’d blog about it. Then I woke up again, of course, found myself in my bed with my wife gone to work and my little dog snoring at my feet, and Alex presumably off wherever he is when he’s working on a book.

I used to write about extremely obscure music in a widely-read newspaper. Now I’m writing a highly technical book about a famous piece of music. So I guess these issues of whom I’m writing for and why – and, consequently, what my connections to the rest of the world are going to be for the rest of my life – are much on my mind.

Toward the end of the “Hawthorne” essay in Essays Before a Sonata, Ives refers to “the old hymn-tune that haunts the church and sings only to those in the churchyard to protect them from secular noises, as when the circus parade comes down Main Street….” In writing my Concord Sonata book I’ve read, or in many cases reread, almost all of Hawthorne, especially the stories and novels in which this kind of reference might arise, and I can’t find anything Ives could have been referring to. As I continue slogging through the remainder (and I have to admit, I really, really don’t like Hawthorne – he’s a brilliant describer of certain psychological states, but I weary of his reflexive circumlocutions and the inevitable supernatural shticks that clog his narratives) – is there any Hawthorne scholar or lover out there who recognizes where this could have come from? There’s a thank-you in my acknowledgements in it for you.