A repeated criticism that I get for my writing is that I am inconsistent in the level of expertise I assume in the reader. For instance, many people who don’t know much about music assume that musicians always get paid for their work (hah!), and so their first response to 4’33” is that Cage got paid for not doing anything. In my book on 4’33”, it was well worth taking one paragraph at the beginning to dispose of that objection, rather than let it stew unresolved in the minds of the uninformed. On the other hand, I indulge a bit of technical analysis on the Cage String Quartet at the end of the book. And so a few academic critics took umbrage that I was writing for the general public at the beginning, and for experts at the end – I couldn’t decide who my audience was! My editor at the Village Voice taught me that if I wanted to present technical information, to save it for the last fourth of the article – anyone who’s read that far, he said, is not going to stop reading just because one paragraph goes over his head. I found that excellent advice, and it worked for the 4’33” book as well. The couple of pages of technical analysis are in the fifth of six chapters, and I never heard of anyone who stopped reading at that point. As a professional writer, I’m trying to reach as many people as possible. Academic writers, of course, gain more prestige the fewer people are capable of reading them, and so they criticize me, the professional writer, for not aiming my discourse at as narrow a sliver as possible.

And now, in my book on the Concord Sonata, I’m deliberately and intentionally doing it again. Some chapters will be wonkish and readable only by trained musicians, and some will be general interest – since I know how to make even general interest material interesting to the experts, and sometimes how to make wonkish material entertaining for the novices. And once again, in the “peer”-review process, and in reviews afterward, the academics will criticize the professional writer for casting too wide a net (as well as for my “breezy, casual, journalistic” style). I can feel it coming, and there’s no side-stepping it. Fuck ’em.

I have nothing to say, and I’m not saying it. Or rather, I do have things to say, but not in this format for the moment. I am beginning my sabbatical, and withdrawing from the world somewhat to work on two of the most ambitious projects of my life. The more immediate is a long (hour-plus) work for three retuned Disklaviers. This will give me the opportunity, for the first time since Custer and Sitting Bull (1995-99) to combine my two great obsessions, the completely free-sounding rhythms of multitempos, and the free-sounding pitch space of microtones. (And even in Custer the rhythmic aspect was somewhat limited by performance requirements.) I tried to start the three-Disklavier piece last year, but I had initially come up with a terribly complicated scale, based on some idea of encompassing seven tonalities. I spent much of the month of August devising a better scale, and I’m finding the one I came up with (which I shall detail at a later date) extremely elegant. And according to my conception of microtonal music, if you get an interesting enough scale, you can just explore all the inherent possibilities of that scale, both the ones you built into it and the ones that appear unexpectedly, and the piece practically writes itself. In fact, all music, I insist, is the exploration of a tuning, which is why the 12tet repertoire has become so tired.

I haven’t mentioned this project partly because, based on my experiences last year, I was afraid it might prove beyond my conceptualizing ability. I’ve used as many as 37 pitches to the octave before, and here, by the fact of three pianos, I have 36. But generally, due to MIDI limitations, I only have three or maybe four octaves of pitch space, and here I have a full seven, 264 different pitches in all (88 x 3) if you disregard octave doublings! And I was having a terrible time, with the old scale, remembering which pitches were on which piano! A triad might be made up of one pitch on Piano 1, another on Piano 2, and a third on Piano 3, and there was no way to simply play a chord progression and judge its effect, I’d have to laboriously assign each pitch to the right piano and listen to them, like composing with some awkward prosthesis. But the new scale is so logical, though with a few quirks (which of course become the most playful aspect of the piece), that, after having written 15 minutes of the music, I now have the scale firmly in my head, and it’s just like composing any other microtonal piece; almost easier than most of mine, in fact, since each octave on the pianos is the same pitches as every other octave, which isn’t usually the case in my MIDI pieces.

Plus, the virtue of the scale is that it is organized such that the three pianos can be played as three separate tonalities – or, they can all be integrated into an overtone series on the central tonic of B-flat (which is not to say that, as in The Well-Tuned Piano, all the pitches are harmonics of the tonic). And I am having the time of my life exploring something that I’ve always wanted to try: just-intonation polytonality. There is a little bit of it in the “Sun Dance” movement of Custer, and I’ve got passages of 12tet bitonality in Long Night, War Is Just a Racket, and Kierkegaard, Walking, but nothing compared to what I’m able to do here. As a teenager, I was absolutely enchanted with the bitonal music of Darius Milhaud, and for decades I’ve been meaning to get back to exploring that effect. I find it difficult to pull off charmingly; Milhaud was ingenious at it, and also had an influence in that respect on Philip Glass, whose music, as he’s shown me, contains more bitonality than people suspect.

Polytonality would seem to be theoretically precluded by just intonation, in which every pitch is defined in relation to a single 1/1 tonic – thus the facile, inaccurate joke so many uninformed composers make about all of Partch’s music being in the key of G. (Might as well say all orchestra music is in A because they tune to the oboe’s A.) But in this case I have enough pitches for three separate tonalities, which, with the right relationships emphasized, can be reinterpreted as more distant reaches of a central tonality. As light can be measured either as a wave or as a particle, so the harmonies in this piece can seem incommensurably unrelated, like random pianos not tuned to each other, or as more complex harmonies in a single spectrum – and I have a continuum to move along between those extremes. It’s a fascinating way of working. And in addition to that I can set the different tonalities at different tempos, slicing up the audio surface in two dimensions at once. What I’m hearing is stretching my ears in a way they’ve never been stretched before. Maybe I’ll write a great piece, maybe a dull one, but I don’t think anyone has ever before done what I’m doing – and how many people would know better than I?

The other project will be a book on Ives’s Concord Sonata. Here again I’ve got plenty of ideas and new information, including things in the sketches that have changed my conception of how Ives wrote the piece. Musicologists have written a ton on the Concord, mostly picking out musical borrowings, both real and (in my view) imagined. But no composer has written about it at length, and no one has really attempted a harmonic or formal analysis; I’m convinced I can do it. I think I’ve figured out what harmonic plan Ives had in the back of his head. But again, it might be years before the book comes out, and I don’t want to publish details here that others might be able to get into print before I can. So it’s the depth and breadth of my projects, rather than any lack of activity, that makes blogging about them inadvisable. I don’t know why it is that my psyche seems to need to veer back and forth between creative work and scholarly work, but it is the case. They feed each other. It may seem bizarre, and it is certainly sometimes self-defeating, but it’s who I am. Perhaps that’s what I have in common with Ives, who insisted that his insurance work informed his music and vice versa.

In other news (and there seems to be less news in my life at the moment than at any time I can remember), composer George Tsontakis has made me one of his “affiliate composers” at his publishing company Poco Forte Music. At the moment the position is merely honorary, but it may result in my (self-)publishing some nicely bound editions of my scores. Nothing could be a clearer indictment of the contemporary music publishing business than that a composer as successful in the orchestral world as George is would withdraw from it and begin self-publishing. I asked for some orchestral scores for Christmas, and the only ones that were “backordered” and didn’t arrive were by a living composer – two symphonies by William Bolcom. Now why is it, that I can order symphonies by someone as widely honored and performed as Bolcom, and his publisher can’t simply mail them to me? Was there a rush on them? Bolcom symphonies a hot Christmas item? Featured on Oprah? It’s a rotten business. To sign up with a classical music publisher these days is a fool’s vanity.

More personally, I had cataract surgery a few weeks ago, and can finally see the world in focus again. Happy new year.

Twenty-five years ago this week my first Village Voice column appeared.

A particularly invidious form of comparison arises when critics appoint themselves to the rank of H[er]. M[ajesty’s]. Customs and Excise officers whose function it is to spot composers smuggling contraband ideas from one work to another. To ask a composer if he has anything to declare while he is busily unrolling his music to public view is not a very intelligent question. Each act of composition is a declaration. If it did not owe something to somebody it would be intelligible to nobody. Elgar may be said to have “smuggled” the closing pages of Tristan into the final bars of his own Second Symphony. But the comparison is so obvious only a bad critic would make it; and only a fool would “devalue” the Elgar as a consequence. The likeness sheds no light whatsoever on the respective “value” of either work. The way pieces resemble each other is the least interesting thing about them. It is one of musical criticism’s blind alleys.

-Alan Walker, An Anatomy of Musical Criticism, p. 8

I found this thoughtful little 1966 book at a used bookstore in Hudson over the weekend. I often buy books about music criticism and its history. It’s an important topic, and not enough is written about the activity itself. We ought to teach music criticism intelligently and discuss its principles, but instead we let people stumble into it and make up their own rules, which usually turn out to be stupid ones, with the result that what ought to be a prestigious discipline is generally a rightly despised one. As a former critic, I sometimes toy with the idea of writing something lengthy about the topic myself, although interest in it seems more in decline than ever.

Walker – better known today for his superb three-volume biography of Liszt – argues compellingly that music criticism should be placed on an objective basis, not via the old-fashioned route of coming up with rules for how music supposedly works, but by beginning with our collective ability to identify with some pieces more than others, and explicating our perceptions of why the music elicits our sympathies so strongly. At the same time he sets this principle against the observed fact that tastes do change historically, and that audiences do “catch up” with composers who seem outrageous at first – and sometimes move past them. He is a little too impressed with Rudolph Reti’s The Thematic Process in Music, which was popular in the 1960s but which has come in for its own share of debunking, despite some undeniable insights. But he also develops a principle that is central to the way I teach composition. Giving many successful and unsuccessful examples, he writes about how a music idea can be given an utterance that does or doesn’t completely express it in its clearest form. He goes on,

The very act of teaching composition is a tacit acknowledgement that you can not only diagnose a distinction between “idea” and “utterance” but that you can also remedy the situation. A good composition teacher does not merely re-compose his students’ work. He helps them to search for its truer expression. It is his chief function to help his students to keep re-formulating the “utterance” until they have captured the “idea.” (pp. 72-73)

This is exactly how I think about my students. I don’t mind my students writing in any style they want to (right now I have one student writing rock songs, one neoromanticist, one mystical pandiatonicist. and one postminimalist). Nor do I push them, as so many colleagues I know do, to write “20th-century music,” whatever that is, since the 20th century is over and we’re in a pluralist situation. Instead I push them to isolate the idea or ideas most important to them and make the expression of those ideas so clear that the listener can’t help but grasp what they are. And I help them steal solutions from other music, reminding them, in effect, that if their music “did not owe something to somebody it would be intelligible to nobody.” Most bad music today, I think, is bad not because its ideas are weak, but because the composer doesn’t work hard enough to find the perfect, clearest expression of those ideas; in fact, there seems to be a general reluctance to say outright what one means, preferring to hedge one’s bets and clutter the musical surface with obfuscating bells and whistles. If I ever teach criticism again, I could do worse than Xerox and assign Walker’s little out-of-print book as an attempt to find an objective starting point, with a route that leaves the blind alleys behind.

I play around a lot with microtones in class when I probably shouldn’t. My counterpoint students, for some reason (and they’re not the first class to do so) find the Picardy third hilarious. One day I ended a three-part counterpoint in aeolian with a major third, A-C#, and they laughingly objected. So I offered to split the difference with them and made it a quarter-tone C half-sharp (a lovely 11/9 interval). I played the result with Sibelius’s pitch-bend plug-in, and it was deliciously sour. One student immediately dubbed it the “Picardy turd.”

I will generally not use this blog as a forum to draw attention to other events, artists, or organizations, but this one is just too important. Sign up.

UPDATE: In fact, the following comment in reaction to a Times article about the UC Davis pepper spray incident is enough to make me return (temporarily) to blogging political:

The police use of violence to quash a peaceful protest serves one aim, and one aim only–to intimidate those on campus and off campus from engaging in lawful, peaceful protest throughout our cities. Living in Chapel Hill, over the past decade I have witnessed bonfires set in the middle of Franklin Street with thousands of students shutting down the street after a basketball victory over Duke, or NCAA championship. Each year, thousands of Duke students camp out in tents to secure basketball tickets for the big game against UNC. Police have never appeared in riot gear, never doused anyone in pepper spray, and to my knowledge never arrested any students. There is never any attempt to clear the tents from campus, or keep students off the street. Why? Because the powers that be have no opposition to the message being sent by the students after a basketball victory. Yet last week when squatters trespassed at an abandon Chapel Hill car dealership that has been vacant for almost a decade, the SWAT team showed up in riot gear with semi-automatic rifles pointed at the protesters.

Amen.

Bj̦rk Р46
Voltaire – 317
Marlo Thomas – 73
Rene Magritte – 113
Friedrich Schleiermacher – 243
Goldie Hawn – 66
Coleman Hawkins – 107
Judith Shatin – 62
Kyle Gann – 56

The PTYX ensemble in France will be playing a number of my works over the next year in a series they’re calling “(d’) apres SATIE,” of music by living composers who followed Satie in some respect or another. They’ve certainly got me pegged right. You won’t be able to read the light print at the top of the poster, but it lists the composers on their Dec. 1 concert: Birtwistle, Duckworth, Gann, Sellars, Skempton. I presume that’s James Sellars, whose music I greatly admire, as I do the others. They’re playing my Kierkegaard, Walking and Minute Symphony on this concert, and they seem to have already played my “opus 1,” which is just titled Satie, a setting of some of his wry comments. And they’re performing in Tours at the Salle Ockeghem, named for another of my favorite composers. Jean-Baptiste of the ensemble says that my music is very different from what they’re used to playing, which I suppose is all to the good.

I’ve been doubtful about how much journalistic attention the 50th-anniversary edition of Cage’s Silence is going to get, but the distinguished literary critic Marjorie Perloff wrote a column about it in the Los Angeles Review of Books, and made several generous comments about my foreword. I appreciate her point that we all think of Cage as such a sunny character, but in retrospect some of those stories in Silence seem darker than we first thought.

Nuts and bolts music history today. In my keynote address to the festival of Charles Ives’s complete songs, I noted that nothing was known about Anne Timoney Collins, author of the poem on which Ives based his song “The Greatest Man,” a poem printed in 1921 in the New York Evening Sun. Liner notes to recordings of this song give no information, or merely mention that she “flourished” in the 1920s. A couple of weeks ago, however, I was contacted by Anne Timoney Collins’s god-daughter, and between her and her mother and the internet I’ve been able to put together a sketch of her life.

The problem is that, after 1921, the poet used the name Anne Collins professionally, which is a pretty common name. But she collaborated with her sister Alice Timoney on at least three plays – Cloaked in Green (1925), Bottled (1928), and Wilderness Road (1930) – and if you look up Alice Timoney, facts start pouring in. The daughter of Irish immigrants, Anne Timoney appears to have been born in June of 1885; Alice was born Aug. 26, 1892. They lived in Boyle County, Kentucky in the early decades of the century, were living in New York City in the ’30s, and ended up in Dade County, Florida, where Anne, according to my informant, died in the 1970s; Alice died in 1980. They seem to have had some success on Broadway in the ’20s, for their play Bottled received positive reviews in the New Yorker of April 28, 1928 and the Time magazine for May 7. Time calls the authors “sisters, southerners, journalists,” the New Yorker says Bottled was “written and acted by unknowns.” It’s a “quiet and delicious” Prohibition-era comedy about siblings who inherit a money-losing distillery from their father and end up bootlegging under their mother’s nose.

So all those programming “The Greatest Man” can now use 1885-ca. 1970 as the poet’s dates, and perhaps the other information will prove useful. Much thanks to the god-daughter and her mother. Any further information is, of course, welcome. It turns out “The Greatest Man” was not Anne Collins’s greatest claim to fame during her lifetime, even if Ives made it the key to her immortality.

UPDATE: A reader has found a record of an Anne T. Collins, born June 1, 1885, and died in Florida May 3, 1979. To obtain the record I’d have to join one of those services like ancestry.com, and I’ve been down that road before: you join, find no information, then they start billing you monthly and you have a devil of a time trying to unsubscribe. Calling them a scam might be too harsh, but they are certainly run unethically. I list the information provisionally. Someday I’ll try to get it straight from the Dade County records office.

SECOND UPDATE: Dennis Aman, composer and genealogy hobbyist, sends me an obituary for Anne T. Collins from her home-town newspaper:

From: The Advocate-Messenger, Danville, Kentucky, Monday, May 07, 1979

DANVILLE NATIVE ANNE COLLINS DIES AT 94

 Anne Timoney Collins, 94, a playwright, poet and prose writer and a Danville native, died Thursday in Miami, Fla. During the 1920’s two of her plays, “Bottled in Bond” and “Bald Mountain,” were produced in New York City. She had also been a reporter for the old New York World and was a contributor to the New Yorker, the Catholic Digest and the New Orleans Item. Survivors include a sister, Alice F. Timoney of Miami, and a brother, the Rt. Rev. Francis J. Timoney of Nazareth, Ky.

So 1885 to 1979 seem to be the confirmed dates. Of course, since she was born in June, that would mean she was actually only 93 when she died, but the obit writer seems not to have had her birth day. I’d also take the New Yorker‘s word for the title of her first play, since their fact-checking is legendary, over that of the Danbury Advocate-Messenger. Dennis has promised me a death certificate, too. It’s amazing the ambiguities that can accumulate about the simple facts of a life.

THIRD UPDATE, March 26, 2013: I’m in the Ives archive at Yale, and I notice that Ives wrote to Anne Collins asking permission to use the poem on Aug. 20, 1921, and that she replied in the affirmative on Sept. 17.

Here’s a MIDI version of a microtonal rag I just wrote for pianist Aron Kallay, a fantastic West Coast player who’s specializing in microtonal MIDI piano performance. It’s the second (and shorter) movement of a piece called Every Something Is an Echo of Nothing – the title, as some of you will recall, is a quotation from Cage’s Silence. Aron will premiere it next summer – I tend to complete my commissions pretty early. And I made it virtuosic because he’s got the chops, but it is humanly playable. Think of the piece next time someone claims that new (or microtonal) music is an elitist enterprise.