I do think of totalism (a style of complex tempo relationships, usually with limited harmonies and some vernacular influence) – or metametrics, as we used to call it in the verdant groves of Postclassica [he mused, stroking his chin] – as a style that crystallized in the 1990s and then waned. OK, we finally said, you can get your ensemble to play rhythms of eight against nine. What else can you do? But my colleague John Halle is one of the great unsung totalists, and occasionally I realize he’s still riding higher than ever on the tempo complexity wagon.

John’s not strictly my work colleague, because he’s at the Bard Conservatory and I’m in the Bard music department, which, confusingly, have little to do with each other. Although we’re based in the same building, I run into him about twice a year, less often than I see, say, John Luther Adams who lives in Alaska. But the student composers have started having Conservatory/music department forums, and the other night John Halle played us some music of his I hadn’t heard. How’s this for totalism?:

 

The piece is an homage to Thelonious Monk, called Spheres, and the first movement is based on the Monk tunes Straight, No Chaser and Brilliant Corners (you can see the former in the viola and the latter in the cello), the tunes used almost as tone rows. And, as in Nancarrow’s orchestra works, there are several tempos going throughout: quintuplets in the first violin, regular 8ths and quarters in the second violin, triplets in the viola, and septuplets in the cello. It’s crazy, but the centripetal force of those tunes ties the whole thing together, and, as in a lot of John’s music, the freedom of the tempos creates a lovely aural impression that the music isn’t notated or coordinated, it just happens. 

I’ll write rhythms like this for Disklavier (which I haven’t finished anything for in a long time, though I’m toying with returning). But I don’t write them, nor microtones, for live performers, on the grounds that performers seem to have enough reasons to avoid my music, and I don’t like to give them any new ones. And sure enough, the quartet John wrote Spheres for a few years ago, which will remain nameless here, never touched it. But he notes, as many have, that rhythmic complexity standards have risen miraculously among the younger generation, and he’s now gotten the first movement played by the young Afiara Quartet. I’ve uploaded a recording for you here. He says they play it even better now than on the recording, but he and I agreed, it’s a pretty damn accurate performance on the recording. Amazing. 

And, as I also do in my Disklavier pieces, John gets a wide range of densities by varying the repeating durations within individual lines, creating tempos within tempos. He may be the most metametric of us all, and refusing to mellow out. It’s inspiring:

We went to see The King’s Speech yesterday. Very enjoyable film, superb script, good performances, a classic feel-good movie yet a little unusual in its pacing and subject matter. But I’m not a film critic. Two things struck me. One was that it shared a lot of subject matter with Robert Ashley’s operas. Ashley overcame a temporary speech deficiency in high school, and his doctoral research (since Ross Lee Finney prevented him from becoming a composition major) was on stuttering. The tendency of swear words to slow down speech and allow the mind to think is a theme that runs through Atalanta, Foreign Experiences, and other Ashley works, and The King’s Speech reminded me of him over and over again. King George VI uses profanity as a way of getting past his speech impediment, something that Ashley alludes to frequently:

Instead, I learn to swear. Fuck, how simple!
It’s so mother-fucking simple. You Swear.
Instead of talking all the time, you swear.
And since foul language fucks the tempo,
The fucking thing slows down, and you start
Thinking again! [Foreign Experiences, Act III, lines 133-138]

Point two: The film’s major flaw, the one thing that jerked me out of it and deflated my suspension of disbelief, was the slapdash insertion of pieces by Beethoven in the final scenes. During King George’s historic address to the nation after Germany’s declaration of war, the background (or almost foreground) music is the slow movement of Beethoven’s Seventh. That was a little cheap, but arguably effective enough. But then, during his triumphant denouement, they play the second movement of the Emperor Concerto. First of all, the slow movement did not sound like an ending, but an inconclusive middle.* Secondly and most heinously, to celebrate this triumph of British determination over the Germans by playing German music in the background was absolutely tone-deaf (and yes, I am very well aware of the use of Beethoven’s Fifth in war-time as an Allied symbol for its dot-dot-dot-dash “V for Victory” association, but this was completely different in its effect). I could far better have accepted the Pomp and Circumstance marches as at least imbued with some cultural resonance. Instead, it was like the audience was assumed to be totally ignorant: “here’s a really touching moment, let’s throw in some classical music to make it sound appropriately solemn.” Thirdly, the scene deserved its own made-to-order music, not some DGG CD half-heartedly thrown on in the background. I had been wrapped up in the movie, and the music score ruined the ending for me completely. There’s no telling whether it was a stunning failure of imagination by the composer (Alexandre Desplat) or a resoundingly boneheaded decision by the director. But to anyone sufficiently educated to be even slightly susceptible to the cultural overtones, it was mother-fucking stupid.

*This same piece, the Emperor Concerto’s second movement, was also used for the Australian film Picnic at Hanging Rock, in which ambiguous and deceptively pastoral context it is infinitely more effective.

My students might have expected that an entire course about one piece of music would have a short listening list. But I’m asking them to listen to the following:

• Concord Sonata (seven recordings)
• Four Transcriptions from “Emerson”
• Emerson Concerto
• The Celestial Railroad
• Fourth Symphony, second movement
• Songs: “Thoreau,” “He Is There!,” “They Are There!”
• Brant/Ives: A Concord Symphony
• Piano Sonata No. 1
• 19 tracks of Ives playing or improvising on Concord Sonata material

 

 

Except for the First Sonata, thrown in for comparison, all of this is material directly drawn from or leading to the Concord Sonata. The piano piece The Celestial Railroad is a distillation of the “Hawthorne” movement programatically based on Hawthorne’s eponymous short story, and Ives orchestrated it to make the second movement of his Fourth Symphony – or else the piano piece was based on the symphony movement, experts aren’t sure. The Emerson Concerto, reconstructed by the late David Porter, seems like an odd and unfinished piece, but as an earlier version of some of the “Emerson” material, it gives revealing insights into the Concord. And of course, the seven Concord recordings differ remarkably not only in interpretation but in content, since some include the flute in “Thoreau” and some don’t, only two (Pappastavrou and Kalish) include the small viola part in Emerson as well, and all differ in which variants they used among the ones Ives penciled into a few dozen copies of the published score. It’s interesting working with students on a piece of music that has no definitive text. 

In addition, this is the most intensive reading course I’ve ever taught, with essays and stories by Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Bronson and Louisa May Alcott, as well as Ives’s Essays Before a Sonata. I’m using a selection from the Journals of Bronson Alcott, which I bought at considerable expense once at The Barrow used-bookstore in Concord. Hawthorne’s “The Celestial Rail-road” is a satire on Pilgrim’s Progress, a famous old classic none of the students seemed to have ever heard of, though it still seemed famous when I was a kid; I thought of requiring that for background, too, but it seemed a little much. I did finally track down the article by Oxford professor Henry Sturt (1863-1946) that Ives quotes at length in the Essays. He cites it as Philosophy of Art and Personality, but it’s actually an article by Sturt called “Art and Personality” in an old 1902 collection titled Personal Idealism. (The copy in the Bard library is so brittle that pages snap off like matzo crackers if I’m not careful.) It’s not a great article, steeped in platitudes that may have seemed unassailable in 1902 and backed up with little more than appeals to conventional wisdom, but it’s easy to see why his emphasis on “enthusiasm” as the prime artistic emotion and his rejection of the alleged subjectivity of artistic criteria would have appealed to both Ives’s imagination and his conservative streak. It’s also interesting how many of Sturt’s phrases, like “high vitality” and “Byronic fallacy,” work their way into Ives’s prose even when he’s not intentionally quoting. Ives seems to have written the Essays much with Sturt in mind, granting the poor old Oxford don his one touch of immortality. 

I just hope the ice storm that’s getting under way here doesn’t interfere with tomorrow’s class. I’m getting too obsessed to consider canceling.

UPDATE: According to his obituary in a 1947 issue of Mind, which can hardly be taken as unobjective, Sturt was a proto-Fascist who believed in allegiance to the state and the superiority of northern Europeans. Yikes!

George Tsontakis just wrote to tell me that Milton Babbitt died this morning, just in time for me to get his death date into both my Ashley book and my introduction to the new edition of Cage’s Silence. I’ve written so much about him that I don’t have much left to say; it was a love-hate thing. I was looking up a reference in one of his Perspectives articles just this morning. The one time I met him (I was representing the ailing Nancarrow on a Babbitt/Nancarrow panel) he didn’t seem too thrilled. He was certainly a sharply-defined character. Had he not lived, we should have had to invent him.

Holy cow! The ancient comic strip Mary Worth quotes John Cage today!. And Josh Fruhlinger of Comics Curmudgeon (a very funny blog I’ve mentioned here before) responds to it with a 4’33” reference. It’s kind of a Hallmarky sentiment by Cagean standards, but I’m having fun picturing the comic with some other Cage quote in there. Like, “If you have no particular togetherness in mind, there are chronometers. Use them.” (h/t David McIntire, though I would have seen it myself by afternoon.)

UPDATE: I have to include Ernest Ambrus’s cartoon he sent in response. A whole book of these could be hilarious:

UPDATE 2: Ernest outdoes himself (and see comments):

It’s all that much funnier if you keep up with these strips to read Comics Curmudgeon. And, while I’m at it, what else have I got to do?:

Good lord, what have we begun?

UPDATE 3: And again:

 

 

In response to a question after one of my recent Cage lectures, I happened to mention Emerson, Thoreau, Ives, and Cage in the same sentence, and then said with a chuckle, “That’s the rectangle I’ve spent my entire life in.” This month it’s come to seem like more than a joke. I’m writing a piece of music about Thoreau, as a companion piece to my On Reading Emerson, for which I read a little of Thoreau’s journal each morning, which has given me quite a few sonic inspirations. For instance:

I am brought into the near neighborhood and am become a silent observer of the moon’s paces to-night, by means of a glass, while the frogs are peeping all around me on the earth, and the sound of the accordion seems to come from some bright saloon yonder. I am sure the moon floats in a human atmosphere. It is but a distant scene of the world’s drama. It is a wide theatre the gods have given us, and our actions must befit it. – June 2, 1841

I am also preparing for a seminar I’m teaching starting next week entirely on the Concord Sonata. We’ll be comparing the 1921 and 1947 editions of the piece with the original manuscript, as well as with other pieces based on the same material: Four Transcriptions from Emerson, The Celestial Railroad, and the Emerson Concerto. I’ve never felt like I fully grasped the “Hawthorne” movement, so one thing I’ve been doing in odd moments is entering it into Sibelius, note by note, both so every note will register with me, and also so I’ll have a MIDI file of it. On top of that I’ve been asked to write a foreword for a 50th-anniversary edition of Cage’s book Silence, which appeared in October 1961. So I’ve reread Silence for about the tenth time, and this time cover-to-cover and more intently than ever, trying to fix once and for all an impression of the book that has rotated wildly over the years.

So I’ve been immersed in these four figures, who for me epitomize what I love about America – and from whom America seems so distant these days, with its tea partiers and Second Amendment obsessions and anti-intellectualism, that I start to think my four heros were all eccentric outsiders, hardly American at all, and the real America is something utterly foreign to me and fairly repugnant. It’s dubious to say that Cage was to Ives what Thoreau was to Emerson, but it certainly seems that Ives was to Emerson what Cage was to Thoreau. Cage didn’t like to talk about Ives, which puzzles me; because Cage’s close friend Lou Harrison did yeoman service as Ives’s copyist-conductor-assistant, and because Ives’s comment on Thoreau seems so perfectly Cagean: “Thoreau was a great musician, not because he played the flute, but because he did not have to go to Boston to hear ‘the symphony.’” (Cage didn’t care for Emerson, either.) I identify more strongly with the Emerson-Ives side of the equation, the Thoreau-Cage side being a little ascetic for my taste. Which is also odd, because I’m also a minimalist, and Thoreau is more minimalist than Emerson.

But Thoreau is easier to marinate oneself in. Since I was in Boston over the weekend, I stopped at Walden Pond (only 16 miles away, Thoreau used to walk it) and tromped around it through the deep snow. I sat on a hillside and even made an ambient recording, my own Walden 4’33” extended to 18 minutes, to bring home and meditate to. That gave me some strong musical images as well, even though the woods were so still that, except for the occasional plane and the lonely train whistle that went by, it was about as quiet as Cage’s anechoic chamber. (Sorry the photo’s not Walden, but I didn’t take my camera.) I rarely teach verbal texts in my classes, but we’ll be reading Emerson and Thoreau (as well as Hawthorne and Bronson Alcott) for my Ives course, so the feeling of getting back to my roots will only intensify in coming months.

Composing has been going slowly because in addition to the Silence foreword I also have the following writing gigs for this month and next:
* finish the Ashley book (done)
* a foreword to a new edition of Perfect Lives
* liner notes for Meredith Monk
* an article on Julius Eastman for a book about him
* a paper on postminimalism for the Ashgate Companion to Minimalist Music, of which I am co-editor, and
* updates for 18 Grove Dictionary bios, of which I’ve completed five.
I’m determined to spend my summer composing, so I hope American music can get by without me for three months.

 

 

The Relache ensemble conceived the really brilliant idea of getting a grant to commission a video piece to accompany my suite The Planets when they tour it. So I approached John Sanborn of Perfect Lives fame, thinking he was probably way out of my league, and to my surprise and gratification he leaped at the chance. Now he’s finished Venus and Mars, and they are absolutely magnificent: dancers, galaxies, poetry, astrological symbolism, paintings, planetary landscapes, labyrinths in whack, a whirling universe of imagery. So what Relache will do is tour the piece live in the fall with these wonderful video portraits projected on a screen behind them. And I am rather astonished at how quickly the music goes by while you’ve got something to watch. For this purpose I could have made the piece 150 minutes instead of 75. Still, with pauses it will be an evening-length multimedia show (and hopefully, some day, a DVD). 

Now I’m off to Boston to hear my string quartet The Light Summer Land, at Harvard’s Memorial Church, 8:30 tonight.

I couldn’t attend the performance of two of my Planets at Williams College Saturday because there was a snowstorm, and the roads leading from the Hudson Valley into northwest Massachusetts are slow two-lane roads up and down mountains behind trucks, uncomfortable driving even in sunshine. So I e-mailed Steven Bodner, the ensemble director, to say I wouldn’t make it, and he e-mailed back that he wouldn’t be there either because of a bad flu. And now Eve Beglarian informs me he died Monday night! I’m absolutely shocked. Steven was a vital, energetic, supremely talented conductor who had great rapport with his students and a creative, progressive approach to programming. He got in touch with me about performing my piano concerto Sunken City, and ably conducted the American premiere; then at my recommendation he was called to Bard on a kind of emergency basis to lead a performance of Feldman’s Rothko Chapel, which he executed beautifully. He was a real up-and-coming conductor, whom I saw potentially playing a national role on the new-music scene. What an inexplicable loss.

Sunken City is a tremendously difficult piece rhythm-wise, with constant changes in the first movement among meters like 17/16 and 11/8; and many of the students in Steven’s ensemble weren’t even music majors. When I asked him how he pulled it off with such precision, he said, “I never let them know it was difficult.”