[UPDATE BELOW] On October 12 the Third Annual Conference on Minimalist Music will open at the University of Leuven, Belgium, with my keynote address, “The Boredom of Eventfulness.” (Louis Andriessen will present the other keynote address on the 14th.)

One of the urgent topics during the conference, among us Society for Minimalist Music members, will be the proposed location for the Fourth Annual Conference, to take place in 2013. We agreed from the beginning to alternate conferences between Europe and America, but finding an American host institution has not been easy. To answer the obvious question first, Bard College where I teach is not an option. Bard is a rural college three miles away from a few small towns whose hotels fill up quickly. Transportation and housing for a sizable conference with high-profile evening performances would be logistical nightmares here. On top of that I haven’t a single ally here who gives a damn about minimalism, and no grad students. Funding is nonexistent and in competition with well-established music programs run by others. I would encounter resistance and skepticism at every step, while trying to solve insurmountable difficulties by myself. I can’t turn a conference here into a comfortable situation for the attendees.

Some of these problems are endemic to this field. Most of us American academics in the SfMM find ourselves the token minimalism-lovers in our departments. A few have said that their musicology departments might be interested; almost everyone says that the composers in their departments would be unalterably opposed. The academic composition community still sees this 50-year-old movement as a threat and an embarrassment. UMKC, where the second conference was held, was a unique situation, with several passionate/young and sympathetic/old professors, eager and talented grad students, and an unbelievably supportive and knowledgeable Dean of the School of Music, plus a comfortable urban environment in which zipping among restaurants, hotels, and the university was fairly easy. Duplicating all that elsewhere is a daunting prospect. Naturally, it would be optimum for organizational continuity to use a school where one of our SfMM members is on faculty, but this is proving difficult. The University of Washington and Indiana University have both been strongly considered, but with reservations from the relevant faculty. I’m wondering if there’s some scholar out there who would love to be involved, or some department where minimalism is taken seriously, but whose faculty haven’t become involved with the conference yet.

I must say, the first two conferences have been among the most exciting experiences of my life, and I wouldn’t say anything remotely similar about any other conference I’ve ever attended. The scholarship is exciting and new, developing rapidly. Major composers and performers are easily available as star guests. The music has been fantastic – hearing Charlemagne Palestine live at UMKC changed a lot of lives. This is a tremendously energetic venture surging in an era of economic uncertainty against a headwind of idiotic academic prejudices. I hope that someone in a sympathetic department might read this and become interested in laying the groundwork for future involvement. If so, please speak up.

UPDATE: Wow, my heart is absolutely warmed by the interest expressed so far (and I’ve had a few serious private offers). Of course, what we need is someone at the institution willing to take it on; the SfMM isn’t in a position to administrate from afar. I’m thrilled to hear of so many spots where minimalism has taken root in academia. And there’s no reason not to start looking ahead to 2017 as well.

 

Yesterday, after almost polishing off my article on postminimalism for The Ashgate Companion to Minimalist Music, I posted a description of my LexisNexis search for the origins of the musical use of the term postminimalism. Perhaps you read it before it disappeared. I traced the term back to a Jon Pareles review of March, 1983, and added some references by Joshua Kosman, K. Robert Schwarz, and Keith Potter. Then the inexhaustible Galen Brown wrote in to tell me about some earlier references I had missed. He was right. But then I noticed, in the list he sent, that all of his new references were for post-minimalist and post-minimalism – with a hyphen. This about doubled the references for the period I was looking at, 1980-1996 (and LexisNexis seems to only go back to 1980, so data earlier than that remains in doubt). I started to add updates to the blog post correcting it for Galen’s new info, but I needed one for about every other sentence, and it was a potential mess. Ridiculous. I’d screwed up. So I just took the post down, sending Galen thanks and a promise to rewrite it.

But then I did my own search for hyphenated post-minimalism, and it was very interesting what came up. The bulk of the early hyphenated references, going back to 1981 (and who knows if any further?), were from Times critic John Rockwell. He tended to use the term either as a non-specific vague category, or to refer to the post-1976-or-some-other-point outputs of Reich and Glass, as well as the more flamboyant music of John Adams. Schwarz, whose reference was from his book Minimalists, and thus not from LexisNexis, also applied it to Adams, and also used the hyphenated form. (A couple of morons like Donal Henahan employed the hyphenated form sarcastically, and without having the vaguest idea what they were talking about.) The critics who used the non-hyphenated form, Pareles, Kosman, Potter, and myself, used it in articles about younger, then-less-famous composers writing in a style rather markedly different from minimalism. Search post-hyphen-minimalism (often typeset post-Minimalism with a capital M), and you find articles about Reich, Glass, Adams, maybe Andriessen; search postminimalism, and you find articles on Paul Dresher, Steve Martland, David Lang, Janice Giteck, Rocco diPietro. There’s a little bleed-over, and it’s not always possible to know whether the decision to hyphenate is editorial, but the consistency is sufficiently compelling. In a couple of cases, the same critic will use the hyphen for Reich or Adams, and abandon it for anyone younger. So there seems to be a palpable critical tradition for using post-hyphen-minimalism to distinguish the 1980s music of Glass, Reich, and Adams from their more repetitive 1970s music, and using postminimalism straight up as a style pioneered by younger composers who were never minimalists to begin with. In a sense I had been right all along: Pareles presciently identified the unhyphenated form of the style, and I was the second, in 1988, to refer to it in print. And that distinction will prove very useful to my article.

(I will add that I’ve always been leery of the tendency to draw some big, ripping distinction between the early and late styles of Glass and Reich. Every composer develops as he goes through his career, of course, but these two have changed far less than most composers do, and I’ve never been able to find some major dividing line that’s supposed to separate out the radical early Reich and Glass from the allegedly more palatable later stuff. In Reich’s case, the scores to his recent Sextet and Double Sextet look so similar to those for Six Pianos, Music for 18 Musicians, and Tehillim that I can’t see that much territory has been traversed in-between. And in Glass’s case, any distinction between early and late seems dwarfed by the eternal gulf between his orchestral music and his far more rhythmically interesting music for his own ensemble. The use of post-hyphen-minimalist in the articles mentioned above seems less a firm distinction than a deferential gesture to famous composers who hate the term minimalism, made by critics who want to keep getting permission to interview them. Anyone who can give me a hard-and-fast criterion for post-hyphen-minimalism that will work for every Glass/Reich piece is welcome to try.)

 

I am all in favor of peer-review on principle. Like everyone else I am prone to typos, misplaced bits of information, and unnoticed logical inconsistencies. I am thrilled to have these captured and remedied pre-publication. But in my case, the external reader then invariably goes on to characterize my style as unacceptably “breezy,” “journalistic,” and “colloquial,” which means that my sentences flow well and are varied and to the point, so that the reader doesn’t have to keep slapping himself to stay awake. And if I don’t have enough clout in the matter, they will proceed to gelatinize my liquid paragraphs with the usual academic ambiguities, qualifications, and obscurantisms, until the final product is just as miserable and inedible a porridge as the average musicology screed. Peer-review ought to mean critique by someone who can do it as well as you can. It’s maddening. What is it about a graduate degree that automatically turns its recipient into a lifelong devotee of barren and congealed prose?

 

I’ve been interviewing my good friend Bill Duckworth for an eventual biography or something. He told me about meeting Virgil Thomson in the late ’70s. David Stock was giving one of his new music concerts in Pittsburgh, and Duckworth and Thomson were the featured composers. After the pre-concert dinner, Thomson put his arm around Bill and said, “Young man, don’t take it personally when you look at me during your performance tonight and see that I’ve fallen asleep. If you look at me during my piece, I will be asleep then too.” Bill says, “And I looked at him, and he was.”

During Thomson’s Herald Tribune days, a reader once wrote to him to protest a positive review he had given to an inferior soprano. Thomson wrote back, “I sleep very lightly at the opera, and if anything had gone amiss on stage, I would have awoken instantly.”

After giving my lecture on Feldman at yesterday’s Feldman festival being presented in Philly by Bowerbird, I spent a half-hour talking to – Feldman’s niece! Feldman’s personality was so universally described as “avuncular” that I told her she must be one of the most effectively uncle-d people in history. She remembered, as a humiliating experience for a 13-year-old, Feldman (and Cage) being booed in 1964 when Leonard Bernstein performed their music with the Philharmonic. And when I told her that I considered her uncle the greatest composer of his era, it seemed to blow her mind. It’s one thing for an artist to face early disapproval and eventually be vindicated, we kind of expect that. But what must that steep trajectory look like to a closely-involved younger family member not in the arts herself? The mind boggles.

 

This Sunday at 4:30 I’m giving a lecture on Morton Feldman as part of American Sublime, Bowerbird’s two-weekend tribute to Feldman with performances of several of his most important late works. I come at the end of an all-afternoon series of talks by Feldman experts, of whom I am probably the least knowledgeable – and I know a few things. That event is at Nexus at CraneArts, 1400 N American Street in Philadelphia.

Later in the month, the West End String Quartet will be giving four performances of my Concord Spiral in four cities over two weekends, presented by Rhymes with Opera. The dates and venues are as follows:

Friday, June 17 at 7: Café Orwell, 247 Varet St, Brooklyn, NY
Saturday, June 18 at 6: Windup Space, 12 W North Ave, Baltimore, MD
Friday, June 24 at 7:30: Real Art Ways, 56 Arbor St, Hartford, CT
Saturday, June 25 at 2: Yes!Oui!Si! Space, 19 Vancouver St, Boston, MA

I’m not listed on all the PR materials yet, because Concord Spiral was a late addition to the program (thanks to my old friend Robert Carl). I’ll be at least at the New York performance. Hope many of you can come to some of these.

 

Speaking of criticisms of Ives, I was a little startled to read this in Martin Bresnick’s op-ed in The New York Times yesterday, speaking about the composer Eric Stokes:

Eric was the first “Ivesian” composer I ever met. There were very few of them in those days and there are not many now. I always felt vaguely embarrassed by Charles Ives. I found his music too candid, too forthright. It stuck out like a crazy, opinionated uncle at a polite social event — too unsophisticated for a sophisticated new music audience.

He afterward says “I am ashamed now to recall unspoken, unexamined feelings of condescension I felt toward Ives….” But I imagine that this sums up the way a lot of composers feel about my music as well. Candid and forthright I can only think of as virtues, whereas sophistication, if it is one at all, is one of the minor, almost negligible virtues, way down the list after imagination, vigor, honesty, sincerity, inventiveness, emotiveness, simplicity, integrity, and fifty other qualities.

Oh, I love the Bruckner Eighth Symphony, it’s so sophisticated! – No.

I was just overwhelmed by The Rite of Spring, it’s so sophisticated! – No.

I can’t stop listening to Rothko Chapel, it’s so sophisticated! – No.

The idea that what audiences want from your music is sophistication is a composer’s disease, a neurosis, a lie your grad-school teachers infected you with. To “sophisticate,” says the dictionary, is to cause to become less simple and straightforward through education or experience. And I’m continually trying to shed my education and experience to become more simple and straightforward. Call me a crazy uncle – and don’t invite me to any polite social events!

 

I have often written about the 1989 review in which John Rockwell called my music “naively pictorial,” and the fact that I liked it so much that I’ve ever since adopted “naive pictorialism” as my stylistic moniker. Recently I ran across the 1944 review in Modern Music in which Elliott Carter disparaged Charles Ives’s music as – guess what? – “naively pictorial.” This is company I will gladly keep. I wish Charlie and I could share a good laugh over that one.

I wondered, when I was writing the 4’33” book, whether a renewed involvement with Cage’s music would have any effect on my own. I don’t think it did. But I do think my recent semester spent with the Concord Sonata has had some impact. Most noticeably, I’ve become more open to the idea of re-using material from piece to piece. I could never do it before. I hate repeating myself. I don’t like giving the same lecture twice, I don’t like repeating a class without a long time-lapse in between, and I’ve never been able to re-use material. Even quoting someone else’s music is difficult for me, though I’ve managed it several times. I get into a musical context and I’m feeling my way through it, and the idea of lifting a passage from a previous work or sketch and dropping it in (as Ives did with that Country Band March in “Hawthorne” and so many other pieces) just upsets everything. I don’t seem able to re-say sincerely something I’ve said before. The music leading up to it never quite fits, and I can’t hear the lifted passage as flowing naturally from the preceding new material. I’m amazed Ives could do it. It may come from a habitual tendency toward organicism, which I’ve tried to overcome, since I really don’t think organicism is an essential musical virtue. But if I write a lecture, the first time I read it publicly I feel impassioned; the second time, I feel like I’m lip-synching, like I’m slightly guilty for not having come up with something new to say. Isn’t that odd? As though I change so much with the passage of time that I couldn’t possibly mean the same thing twice (yet all my friends know what a creature of immutable habit I am).

Nevertheless, I have just finished making an orchestral version of the first movement of my Implausible Sketches for piano four-hands. Listening to the piece, I started hearing various lines played by strings, horn, harp, and so on. The piano wasn’t big enough for how I imagined the piece. So I started to orchestrate it. John Luther Adams had just done something similar with a chamber piece of his own, and he told me, “It’ll be a bigger project than you think.” Of course he was right. Starting a new piece from scratch might have been easier, because I wouldn’t have had to spend so much time whittling away at material I had already perfected, and relinquishing assumptions I’d already grown committed to.

First of all, since the Implausible Sketch (first movement: “The Desert’s Too-Zen Song”) was for piano four-hands, it used all seven octaves of the keyboard almost continuously. Some quarter of the music, if not more, would have had to be entrusted to contrabasses and piccolos, which would be ridiculous. The bottom had to be brought up, the top brought down, middle lines subsequently disentangled. Much of the piece has a drone on a low C, and keeping the basses so continuously on that pitch seemed ineffective, if not cruel. I had to reconfigure the piece’s long, long ostinato to let them move around. Then, at eight minutes, the piece seemed too brief for its orchestral incarnation, so I had to perform heart surgery, and move major events further apart. I had to produce three minutes of filler material that didn’t sound like mere afterthought. Repeated-note lines that sounded resonant on the piano sagged in the bassoon. Probably 90% of the piece had to be rethought. I’m still tweaking the details, but I do think I find the result – more simply titled Desert Song – grander than the original.

(To answer your next question, no performance is impending, I just followed an inspiration. But last summer I wrote three string quartets with little hope of performance, and now a friend’s quartet has offered to play them all. One big change in my life is that I’ve quit following Cage’s advice to never write a piece without a performance lined up.)

The only time I’d done something similar before was to base my string quartet Love Scene on the brief third act of my opera The Watermelon Cargo – though I did that because I noticed that I hardly ever had more than four lines going at once. The number of measures and basic content didn’t change, though I did have to make some lines more string-idiomatic. And I’m slowly orchestrating my octet The Planets, though since that has strings, wind, and percussion to begin with, it’s an easier conversion so far. As one gets older, I can imagine that it might be profitable to be able to rely on earlier, more vigorous inspirations. There was certainly a period after 1990 when Nancarrow’s inspiration failed him (he was 78 and had had a stroke after all), and he started pulling out earlier, unused sketches to rework. It does seem a useful part of a composer’s economy to have a cache of previously used or unused material to draw on, and with Ives as a model, I’d like to get over my reluctance.

Part of the problem with orchestration for those of us of a certain age – and it applies not only to writing orchestra music but to working with classical musicians in general – is that some of our music originates in an electronic paradigm. For instance, my “Neptune” from The Planets has a gradually changing synthesizer chord that plays solidly throughout, a kind of cloud from which the other lines emerge. In the orchestra, that cloud will get transfered to the strings. So I find myself wanting to use long, long chords with staggered bowing in the strings, though I had a rather disastrous experience trying this with a subprofessional orchestra in my piece The Disappearance of All Holy Things. I handled it better in Desert Song by having lines move around almost unnoticeably within the cloud. I notice, though, that in Alvin Singleton’s Shadows – one of my very favorite recent orchestral pieces, and there are damn few works I’d apply that phrase to – he keeps the strings holding notes for dozens of measures at a time, and the Atlanta Symphony does a great job with it. It is not very fair, though, to the string players that I want them to be a massive synthesizer. I’d be interested in hearing from others who’ve wrestled with this postminimalist technical dilemma.

 

I have been so deleriously busy in the last several months that I am having a harder time transitioning into summer than usual. I feel like a puppet whose strings have suddenly been cut. I am so accustomed to being driven by exigencies that the self-management of free time comes as an unfamiliar shock.

I have also been a little discouraged by changes in this blog resulting from the reformatting. Journal-meister McLennan has managed to make the “Older Posts” button at the bottom of the main page start working, but, unlike in the older format, I (and you) can no longer look up old posts by title, only by month, and by searching for unusual words. Some of my longer posts have had their line formatting entirely screwed up, making them difficult to read. Something similar happened years ago with our first platform conversion, and, in my free time, I painstakingly went through and reformatted a few hundred old posts to read smoothly again. (A particular issue is changing slanted quotation marks to vertical ones, the former apparently unreadable by some softwares.) That was 900 posts ago; I can’t possibly go through and redo all the injured ones now. I used to write my longer posts in Word and then paste them into the blog software. This, it turns out, was a mistake. I do think I’ve done some of my best writing ever in this blog, and I’m now facing the potential ephemerality of the venue. In partial amelioration, urged on by the usual Scorpionic conflict about being dependent on others, I’ve started a special page on my web site as an archive for my longer blog essays, where they can be looked up by title and where I can keep better control of them. I’m trying to retain the comments as well, and have figured out some “find and replace” tricks to make the reformatting less onerous.

In addition, my recent activities have not been very bloggable. I’ve been involved with the Charles Ives Society and the Society for Minimalist Music, and while interesting things are going on, I am not authorized to make them public. My laptop died the last weekend of the semester (no information lost, fortunately), and I am in the agonizing process of trying to reintegrate all of my music software on a new computer. Much tech support is involved. In short, my life revolves around technology, and I am in a period of resenting that changes in that technology get imposed on me, and that, for whatever reasons, such changes are not always improvements. Sibelius 6, for instance, seems more cumbersome than Sibelius 2 was. I can accept the decrees of the gods with some patience; I have less for the decrees of the super-nerds who, willy-nilly, redesign the tools of my trade.