Composer John Luther Adams is teaching at Harvard this semester, and he had never been to Walden Pond before – only 16 miles away, after all – so I drove out and we did the tour together. As you may recall, John is a hard-core Thoreauvian, I’m the Emersonian. Here we are united, however, on the site of Thoreau’s cabin:

So sharply do our mental processes differ and complement each other that we talked much about the Emerson-Ives-Gann world of ideas versus the Thoreau-Cage-Adams world. It amazes us that beings so overlapping in sympathy can be so disparate in perception and capacity. Later we photographically took sides, I at the grave of Emerson:

and John looming larger above Thoreau’s more modest stone:

For nine hours we pondered Transcendentalism, wondered what we were supposed to transcend, marveled at Thoreau’s wooden flute in the Concord Museum, compared teaching experiences, commiserated each other on the condescending looks that female students cast on old fart professors like us, sagely assessed our impression that the music Pulitzer, which had seemed to run amok a few years ago, is back on its familiar track, plotted music’s future, and, like druids in an ancient ritual, took turns trading stories bearing on the significance, influence, and ultimate fates of Tenney, Harrison, Nancarrow, Budd, Feldman, Young, Ashley, Cage, Ives, Cowell, and other luminaries. This world, this private world I share with John and a few other friends, keeps me sane. In it musical justice is ever meticulously meted out, brilliance is steadily recognized, mediocrity deplored, the superficial attraction of fancy musical devices dismissed, the underlying truths of art kept in sharp focus, the mathematics of spirituality grasped in all its paradox. It is, in short, in almost every way the opposite of the world outside our discussions.

 

In Michigan a few weeks ago, I saw the second copy I’d ever seen of Kathleen Hoover’s and John Cage’s 1959 book Virgil Thomson: His Life and Music, in the possession of Thomson scholar Jennifer Campbell. The first copy I saw was in Thomson’s own apartment in 1989. I realized I had to have it, and of course was able to find a copy in pretty good shape via Amazon, for $75. Hoover wrote the biography, and Cage wrote about Thomson’s music, in tremendous detail. Were one of the authors not so famous, the book would not at all deserve republication. It’s the only writing I know of of Cage’s in which he subordinates his personality to his subject matter, in plain, expository prose. He’s stylish as ever, but flat, often euphemistic-seeming, searching for words and sometimes ending up without a point to justify his laborious cleverness. The discussion of Four Saints in Three Acts is about as unenthusiastic as I can imagine:

For the composition of Four Saints, Thomson applied a new creative method: seated at his piano, text before him, and singing, he improvised an entire act at a time until it became clear to him that the vocal line and harmony had taken stable form. This procedure placed faith in what he terms the “well-springs of the unconscious,” and does not view as a pollution the intrusion of individual taste and memory into those universal waters. [Interesting intrusion of Cage’s Zen ideas.] One may question the purity of such a modus, however, for the thematic relationships in his score are very knowing, and few of them differ from his earlier practices. This score stands apart from his previous Stein settings in that it defies analysis. Scholarly study of it yields nothing but statistics. These give the impression that the materials of music, in contrast to those of poetry, are becoming impoverished. There are 111 tonic-dominants, 178 scale passages, 632 sequences, 38 references to nursery tunes, and one to “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee.”…

Some find the opera too long, though its playing time is only ninety minutes. Actually, it is as long as might have been mathematically expected. Susie Asado is 3 pages; Preciosilla, 9; Capital, Capitals, 34; Four Saints (in piano score) takes up 144. The implication is a continuation of a series of works, respectively, 648, 3,240, and 17,826 pages long.

Have you ever seen a music writer sound so utterly bored and uninvolved? The book apparently caused quite an understandable rift in the Cage-Thomson relationship. However, there are nevertheless some wonderful glimpses of Thomson’s pithily reductive view of the world:

This was the period of WPA. With Orson Welles, John Houseman, and others, Thomson became part of the non-relief 10 percent professional assistance quota permitted. The group achieved a notable production of Macbeth, staged by Welles at the Lafayette Theater in Harlem with Negro actors and with voodoo chants and dances directed by Asadata Dafora Horton. Musical arrangements were assigned to Thomson, who orchestrated Lanner waltzes and worked out with Welles weather effects calculated to build up the sound of the actors’ voices. His original contributions were trumpet fanfares, one of which involved three players in the production of a tone-cluster. Then, as now, he was generally unenthusiastic about the musical possibilities of a Shakespearean script. “One can get in a little weather music,” he says, “and, once the characters are dead, sometimes a funeral. Otherwise it is mostly fanfares to get the actors on and off the stage.” He points out further that Shakespeare, initiating a theatrical movement in an England that had a strong and established musical life, had arranged matters so that his speeches and scenes would be forever free of competition from musical quarters.

 

I’m recovering from our highly successful minimalism colloquium I ran at Bard, which I hope to write about soon. Meanwhile, free-jazz-or-whatever pianist Jason Moran sent me a couple more pics from Other Minds. One’s me and Louis Andriessen at Djerassi:

Another is me soaking up some of that MacArthur vibe from Trimpin and Jason at our hotel in San Francisco:

 

Here, courtesy of OM-Radio director Richard Friedman, were the composers at Other Minds this year: Louis Andriessen, I Wayan Balawan, Han Bennink, myself, Janice Giteck, David A. Jaffe, Jason Moran, Agata Zubel, and Other Minds director (and fantastic composer himself) Charles Amirkhanian:

Here I am giving a presentation on my music and suddenly realizing that I had subconsciously plagiarized the theme from “Baywatch”:

Here the Djerassi landscape takes a long look at me and notable Dutch jazz drummer Han Bennink:

Here I am breakfasting with one of my best friends in the world Janice Giteck, trying desperately to remember why I never stand in front of a light source:

Here Louis Andriessen, Agata Zubel, Janice, and Charles discuss contemporary music as I seriously contemplate finding another line of work:

And here’s the barn in which we met every day:

Thanks to Richard for all the great photos. They’re not coming out well-focussed here – I have no idea why, they look perfect on my computer. (UPDATE: Richard says to click on them and they open in-focus.)

Trimpin, whose mischievously adolescent sense of humor is one of his most endearing qualities, had the best joke of the week. David A. Jaffe had inherited a bunch of percussion from his teacher Henry Brant, and he used those instruments in his piece The Space Between Us. Included were about 25 chimes, and Trimpin had the idea of suspending the chimes from the ceiling and having them played via MIDI. So David’s piece had two string quartets, one on each side of the audience, plus a Disklavier onstage, a couple of MIDI-played xylophones, and the chimes hung from the ceiling. On the preceding panel, as the audience sat underneath those chimes, David explained that Trimpin had suggested suspending the chimes, but that he, David, was afraid that they would fall down and strike audience members. Charles asked, “So Trimpin, how are the chimes suspended from the ceiling?”, and Trimpin answered, “Oh, with very thin twine….” The Space Between Us was perhaps the festival highlight, with the string quartets playing ethereal melodies with the disembodied chimes in rhythmic unison. It was a fantastic week. I’ve found so many composer gigs disappointing that my expectations are permanently set at zero, but this was a crescendoing pleasure.

More about the recently-ended Other Minds festival soon, but first it is rather urgent to announce that my music department is hosting a colloquium on minimalist music this Saturday and Sunday, March 12 and 13. Eight scholars from Great Britain and America will convene to give papers, and the purpose is to initiate the process of putting together the Ashgate Companion to Minimalist Music, scheduled for publication in 2013. The papers will be presented as follows:

• Saturday, March 12:
• 10:00               Keith Potter, “Precursors: Mapping early Minimalism”
• 11:00               Pwyll Ap Sion, “Reference and Quotation in Minimalist and Post-Minimal music”
• 1:00                 Rebecca Eaton, “Minimalism/Post-Minimalism and Multimedia: Film, Television and Video”
• 2:00                 Kyle Gann, “Postminimalism” (most minimalist title I could come up with)
• 3:00                 David McIntire, “Totalism” (I’ve been a big influence on David’s titling style)
• Sunday, March 13:
• 10:00               John Pymm, “Minimalism and Narrativity”
• 11:00               Jonathan Bernard, “Minimalism and/versus Pop: Some questions (and maybe some answers)”
• 1:00                 David Dies, “Defining Spiritual Minimalism”

These papers represent almost half the book; we’ll be meeting with the European authors at the University of Wolverhampton in England, April 8-10. This one at Bard is a rather informal gathering, intended primarily for the scholars invited, but it is open to the public, and we’d be glad for anyone interested to attend. I am greatly indebted to my department chair James Bagwell and our dean Michéle Dominy for making the event possible. The location is Room 211 in Blum music building at Bard College. E-mail me for directions if you’re interested. 

However, one component of the event is completely public, and that will be David First’s concert on Saturday, March 12, in that same room at 6 PM. David is going to present some of his minimalist drone/slow-glissando music. Guitarists, of whom there are thousands at Bard, will be particularly interested, but David is someone who has not only kept a minimalist aesthetic alive into the 21st century, but made it dramatic, thrilling, and completely accessible, paradoxically while holding on to its most austere premises. I’m looking forward to giving all these minimalist scholars a big dose of his hair-on-the-back-of-the-neck-raising out-of-tuneness. So please feel free to join us. We give these smaller colloquia in off-years in-between the International Conferences on Minimalist Music, and the atmosphere at our gigs is positively effervescent. It’s not your grandfather’s musicology.

The Djerassi Foundation: Somewhere out there, beyond Neil Young’s cattle ranch, lies the Pacific Ocean:

Here  are composer David A. Jaffe, a Djerassi board member whose name I’ve forgotten, Other Minds co-founder Jim Newman, composers Agata Zubel, Louis Andriessen, I Wayan Balawan, and the legs and hands of photographer John Fago, listening to Janice Giteck’s music:

Here’s Agata, Janice, David, regular PostClassic reader and Other Minds radio producer Richard Friedman (hi Richard!) and me at the far end of a long, hilly, muddy walk:

 

And Trimpin showed up!:

The landscape rather seduced us into overextending ourselves, as Janice realized:

Composers not pictured yet: jazz drummer Han Bennink, and pianist Jason Moran, the latter of whom just showed up.