Thanks for indulging my mystery pianist contest. I was less interested in stumping the listeners than in collecting a set of comparison pianists to relate the style to. I am grateful to all who obliged.

Not surprisingly, my Downtown comrade Tom Hamilton confidently nailed the answer: it’s our late friend Elodie Lauten, playing her Variations on the Orange Cycle. Elodie was not only an early punk singer, Allen Ginsburg groupie, and composer of beautiful postminimalist operas, but a phenomenal improvising pianist. I wanted to introduce a little of the end of this version, which gets wilder and more dissonant than the style she’s usually associated with; the first long stretch of the recording is rather static (if meditatively beautiful), and I was afraid some people would listen to it, decide it’s simplistic, and turn it off before it got more athletic. Here’s the entire 40-minute recording. Made in a studio on November 21, 1991, it was “released” on a cassette (I have a slew of cassettes Elodie gave me over the years) on her private label, Cat Collectors. (I couldn’t resist including her voice at the beginning.) It has since been rereleased on two of Elodie’s CDs, Piano Works and Piano Soundtracks, and somehow on the former it is transposed up just over a half-step and correspondingly shorter; the cassette was more correct, because the piece is supposed to be in G, and the CD has it between Ab and A.

Pianist Lois Svard made another recording of the same piece on the Lovely Music label (with my Desert Sonata on the “flip side,” in fact). What Elodie did for that, in 1995, was to play the piece on an electric keyboard into a computer, recording the MIDI output, and then convert the MIDI input to notation and give it to Lois. Anyone who has experience recording live into MIDI can imagine what a morass of irrational complexity that resulted in, so when Lois despaired of reading it, Elodie took it back and revised a lot of it by hand, though the notation is still a little cumbersome; as you can see here, the left hand alternates between G and F for a long time, but the score has the F in the treble clef, and the rhythms are a little arbitrary:

Lois’s recording, only 25 minutes long, is parsed into four concise, well-shaped movements, which division greatly clarifies what Elodie’s overall plan was. It makes the piece seem stronger and more compact, but I love Elodie’s 1991 recording as well for being a little more all-over-the-place and stream-of-consciousness.

I was afraid the pianist’s identity might be guessed by those who read my blog closely enough to remember that I will be giving a paper, “Elodie Lauten as Postminimalist Improviser,” at the upcoming minimalism conference in Torku and Helsinki, Finland. The bulk of my paper will be on two pieces of which I have two quite disparate recordings, the Variations on the Orange Cycle above, and her Sonate Ordinaire of 1986 – which I reviewed in one of my first Village Voice columns. I have two of Elodie’s recordings of the latter, one an undated cassette copy and the other from Piano Soundtracks, in a performance dated 1986. The former is 17 minutes long, the latter 23, and they’re quite different in form, though distinctly similar in material. The piece’s main material is based on a kind of chromatic sequencing that also appears in the 1991 version of Variations, but not the 1995:

At one point I had hoped that I could prepare an entire performance score for either version of the Sonate Ordinaire, as I did for Harold Budd’s Children of the Hill and Dennis Johnson’s November, but this is looking doubtful; overlapping chromatic lines in the piano’s deep bass are hard to disentangle, and some passages have such rapid flurries that, even electronically slowed down, I don’t know whether I can decipher all the notes with any certainty. As you can see, the rhythmic aspect of most of the piece is straightforward, and I will transcribe what I can. I might also include Elodie’s Adamantine Sonata of 1983, which I don’t have alternate versions of, but I’ve already transcribed the one I have.

I am fascinated by how Elodie could have such a distinct sonic identity for each piece and still introduce so many major deviations from one performance to another – and keep such large structures in her head. Also, there are strong postminimalist traits to these pieces – the first Orange Cycle variation is entirely in G mixolydian, the second mostly in Phrygian, and the Sonate Ordinaire keeps up a steady pulse momentum for most of its length. Postminimalism is a style that has not been conducive to improvisation, and I’m hoping to get inside Elodie’s head and figure out how she conceived the music. I keep thinking I can just call her up to ask questions, and it’s too late.

As always, I will print no comments disparaging another person’s music showcased on my blog, especially for someone so recently deceased and sorely missed. If you feel a need to put it down, ask yourself why.

 

Here’s a three-minute excerpt from a piano improvisation:

 

The style varies considerably over the course of the excerpt. See if you can guess the pianist or at least tell me who it sounds like – I know many of my readers are far more steeped in the improvisation world than I am. I’ll provide the answer, and the complete 40-minute recording, in a separate post. Thanks for the help.

 

Believe it or not, my music is featured on this Sunday’s Bang on a Can marathon at Mass MOCA. The last time I had a piece on Bang on a Can was either 1989 or 1990, I can’t remember. They requested, this time, to perform my Snake Dance No. 3, a 2010 piece I’m a little dubious about. It’s the piece in which I added synthesizers and fretless bass playing a 19-tone (non-equal) scale to the core percussion ensemble of my previous snake dances. The piece had some problems at its premiere, which was well played, but there was no attempt to sonically integrate the percussion and synthesizers, and the current recording sounds oddly artificial. There were also some things I didn’t like about it, which this performance has given me the impetus to correct, tightening up the form and melodic lines. I hope it pleases me more this time.

Eleven days ago my friend, colleague, and department chair James Bagwell wrote me to ask me to write a piece for the May Festival Youth Chorus in Cincinnati, which he conducts. The premiere is to take place in a Catholic basilica, and so the text needed to be suitable. Ezra Pound was not going to do the trick. But among Catholic writers I have always found Thomas Merton enormously appealing, and among his voluminous poetry output I quickly settled on In Silence, which begins thus:

Be still.
Listen to the stones of the wall.
Be silent, they try
to speak your

name.
Listen
to the living walls.

Who are you?
Who
are you? Whose
silence are you?

Who (be quiet)
are you (as these stones
are quiet). Do not
think of what you are
still less of
what you may one day be….

It’s a wonderfully mystical poem about silence and listening, and so I used more silence within the piece itself than you’d find in any dozen recent pieces of mine. (I’m kind of a nut about continuous flow – I resisted my instincts this time). It must also be one of Merton’s best-known poems, because my wife remembered the nuns teaching it at Marywood Academy in Grand Rapids fifty years ago.

It is the centuries-old strain of Catholic mysticism that Merton represents that prevents me from becoming quite as cynical about the Christian church – horrifying as I agree it is in most contemporary manifestations – as most liberals are these days, and makes the writing of music with spiritual overtones still a possibility for me. (I had a grad student turn away from my Transcendental Sonnets with a shudder a few years ago because they mentioned God.) I encountered Merton first of all through my readings in Zen, and it was the commonality he could see underlying the original Christianity and Asian religions that gave his writing a not only palatable but attractive depth. One of my favorites of his more-than-seventy books is The Wisdom of the Desert, which is mystic sayings of the church fathers from before Christianity ever became a state (or even tolerated) religion, sort of a collection of Christian koans. In his “Letter to Pablo Antonio Cuadra” Merton wrote,

One of the tragedies of the Christian West is the fact that for all the good will of the missionaries and colonizers… they could not recognize that the races they conquered were essentially equal to themselves and in some ways superior….
If I insist on giving you my truth, and never stop to receive your truth in return, then there can be no truth between us…
Whatever India had to say to the West she was forced to remain silent. Whatever China had to say, though some of the first missionaries heard it and understood it, the message was generally ignored and irrelevant. Did anyone pay attention to the voices of the Maya and the Inca, who had deep things to say? By and large their witness was merely suppressed. [Emphasis in the original]

Merton has an almost Mark Twain-esque streak of sarcasm in his contemplation of the infinitely fallible and self-important human race, and there are other Merton poems I could imagine setting, including Sincerity, a very appropriate poem for our politically divisive times:

As for the liar, fear him less
Than one who thinks himself sincere,
Who, having deceived himself,
Can deceive you with a good conscience.

One who doubts his own truth
May mistrust another less:

Knowing in his own heart,
That all men are liars
He will be less outraged
When he is deceived by another…

So, when the Lord speaks, we go to sleep
Or turn quickly to some more congenial business
Since, as every liar knows,
No man can bear such sincerity.

The painting above is titled And Then They Were Gone, and it’s by New York artist Natalie Levy. I chanced across it in the window at 510 Warren Gallery in Hudson, NY, and at first thought it was a photograph; then there was a delicious fifteen-second transition in which I slowly realized it was a painting. I went in to enquire; I thought I couldn’t justify buying it, but I bought the gallery’s postcard of it; I stole the artist’s jpg of it (above) off her website and put it on my computer desktop; I went back later to see it again. And finally my wonderful wife bought it for me as a surprise. It now hangs in our living room.

It was an odd obsession, because I’m not generally attracted to urban landscapes, nor am I one of those who automatically considers graffiti art (unless it’s especially clever), nor have I ever lived anyplace that looks like this. But there are things about it in which I find affinities to my music: the symmetrical elements within a non-symmetry, the simple contrasts of color, the personal and playful embedded with the geometrical, the evident constructed-ness of something that nevertheless looks very natural. (In the actual painting, the sky is a little bluer and lighter than here, slightly luminescent.) I find it postminimalist in a musical sense, though that word means something entirely different in visual art than it does in music; postminimalist in the way it makes up a form through the irregular repetition of almost identical forms. And despite its simplicity, every time I look at it I find details I hadn’t noticed, which is an effect that I try to build into my music as well. Even the quadruple repetition of the smokestacks relates to my music, for I tend to repeat things in fours (ever since an undergrad composition teacher told me one could only get away with repeating something three times). I’ve never had another painting that I was in a position to acquire grab onto me and hold me the way this one does.

As a composer, I find it a bizarre concept to make art that someone else can buy and own, and that the artist might never see again. I think if someone owned my Transcendental Sonnets or Summer Serenade I would have to contact them every six months or so to ask how my piece was doing, and if it needed anything. So I contacted the artist so she’d know where it was and how much it meant to me. They must be used to the products of their talent going out the door, and I have no idea how they feel about the owner contacting them.

The only other original art I’ve ever bought was a biblical painting of Moses and the Golden Calf, which I got for a fraction of its undoubted value at a N.A.M.E. Gallery benefit in Chicago in the 1980s, by Chicago artist James McNeill Mesple:

 

This one is particularly hard to photograph; the frame and some of the interior paint are highly reflective, and the calf is actually bright gold, so it’s altered by whatever lights you’ve got on nearby. It being square, I’ve always thought it would make a lovely record cover for Moses und Aron. I love this one too, though it seems less related to my music.

 

The next conference of the Society for Minimalist Music will occur September 24-26 at the University of Turku and the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, Finland. Once again we will be discussing where the following conference will be in 2017, again in the U.S. this time (we alternate between Europe and America). We are not without ideas and offers, but we would like to have some solid alternatives to vote among, and it’s not at all too early to begin preparations. As I’ve written before, it is difficult to find a school here with enough music faculty interested in the subject to provide support; European sponsors are more easily found. If there’s a chance that your organization would be interested in hosting it, please contact me or indicate your interest in a comment below. For those of us involved, this conference has been central to our academic (and social) lives since it began at the University of Bangor, Wales, in 2007. It’s not only a lot of fun, but a predictably mind-blowing experience.

John Halle is the most politically savvy composer I know:

For while some of us want to avert our eyes, the left always recognized that the war by the rich against the poor is a war just as much as any other.  An economic war does not involve missiles, antipersonnel weapons and M-16s. Its weapons are state enforced privatization schemes, debt swaps and interest rate manipulation.  Rather than puncture wounds, severed limbs and  the casualties take the form of thousands of unnecessary deaths due to [in]adequately staffed and supplied hospitals, bacterial infections due to inadequately maintained sewage treatment facilities and collapsing buildings, food poisoning epidemics due to the mass layoffs of inspectors in regulatory agencies. An almost endless list can be compiled of the social collapse resulting from economic warfare carried about by fountain pens rather than guns.Varoufakis has now woken up to the reality that his country has been attacked by an axis of foreign powers, that they are bent on its destruction and have one goal in mind: claiming the spoils of victory, disbursing to their owners in the investor class.It is time the rest of the left joined him there and here-on our feet and ready to fight them, in whatever way we can.

What precedes this rousing coda is the clearest analysis of what happened in Greece that I’ve read.

UPDATE: Of course, I wrote the following on New Music Box in 2003, and was scoffed at and insulted for saying it:

We are indeed involved in a class war—a war waged by the corporate class, who have obscured the fact by somehow making the very term “class warfare” a term of derision. It is, moreover, as Chomsky says, a “perfectly conscious” class war “against working people, the poor, the unemployed, minorities, even members of the middle class.” For it to succeed—and it is succeeding—it is equally necessary for the corporate/political class to understand that there is a war and to pretend to the rest of us that there isn’t.

My Concord Sonata book is the most ambitious thing I’ve ever done, and one of my proudest achievements, but it seems to bear the mark of Cain. It will indeed be published, but according to the schedule it will appear in fall of 2016. Having waited ten months since I turned in the manuscript, I have fifteen months to go, by which time I can’t imagine I’m going to care anymore. Anything could happen by then. I want to make the information I have public and move on, and so I might as well blog the remaining best parts of the book. The world has afforded me here a venue with several dozen devoted readers, to whom I am grateful, and whom I can approach at any time without censorship, alteration, or delay. So be it. I am through writing for publication, I am through composing for performance. The rest of the world can go to hell, which it seems very much in a hurry to do.

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One of the irritating leitmotifs of Concord scholarship is the supposed seven-part structure of the Hawthorne movement. This originated with pianist John Kirkpatrick, whose sense of musical analysis was fuzzy at best [I put this more diplomatically in the book manuscript]. In his preface to the 1965 score of Ives’s Symphony No. 4, Kirkpatrick offered a formal picture of the Hawthorne movement (on which movement 2 of the Symphony No. 4 is partly based) as a seven-section palindrome:

phantasmagoria – nocturne – ragtime – contrasts – ragtime – nocturne – phantasmagoria

This has some relevance to especially the first half of the piece, but is misleading. It seems to suggest an arch form, as is often found in the music of Bartok, but the paired sections are not materially related; the second “nocturne” section, for instance, is much shorter than the first, more a brief pause than a section; it uses no thematic material from the first “nocturne,” and transitions smoothly into the final “phantasmagoria,” while the “contrasts” section (a loosely-defined grab-bag of gestures, as the title implies) shares some material with the first “ragtime.” And so on. In the manner of a hallowed document being reverently quoted by scholar after scholar who arrive at nothing better to supplant it with, Kirkpatrick’s seven-part division has earned considerable purchase in the Ives literature, but it is time to retire it. It correlates to the 2nd edition (1947) score as follows:

Systems:
21-1 to 24-4 phantasmagoria
21-4 to 26-1 nocturne
26-2 to 33-1 ragtime
33-1 to 37-1 contrasts
37-1 to 42-2 ragtime
42-3 to 42-4 nocturne
42-4 to 51-5 phantasmagoria

I would merge the last two sections; the second “nocturne” is so brief, and flows so smoothly into the final phantasmagoria, that I hear no sectional division there. In addition, I would break up three of the other sections, dividing the first half of the first ragtime away from the grand statement of the “Human Faith” theme in C# major/minor (which is not ragtime-like at all); dividing the contrasts section between the interrupted fragments of Martyn and the long evocation of a marching band; and dividing the final section among the fantasia on “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean,” the blizzard of 16th-notes in a dotted-8th beat, and the recapitulation of material based on the Human Faith motto. [The Human Faith theme is the main theme of the work, exposed in final form at the end of The Alcotts, and the motto is its first four notes, C-D-E-A.] In all, this gives us ten well-defined sections, which can be correlated to Kirkpatrick’s hallowed ones as follows (click on the image to make it legible):

[System 21-1 means the first system on page 21; sys. 49-3 b. 5 means the fifth beat of the third system on page 49, and so on.] This is not yet entirely satisfactory; for instance, it fails to acknowledge that the first interruption of Martyn uses material from the first ragtime. It does, however, avoid the misconception of some kind of arch or palindromic form, and also acknowledges the inner unity of the Country Band March section and the one based throughout on “Columbia,” as well as the parallel of both halves culminating in the Human Faith melody. It is based on unity of material rather than (like Kirkpatrick’s scheme) merely raw changes of speed and dynamics, and will make it easier to encapsulate each section, as I will do now.

Phantasmagoria/Frost/Railroad/Demons’ Dance, syss. 21-1 to 24-4 m.1: a classic example of moment form; each phrase, each moment is basically static (aside from occasional transitions), all ostinato-based, none relates linearly to the next, and each could be increased or decreased in length without violence to the musical effect. G# is a low drone note for the first six systems (out of 17), D and then E become drone notes for the last three systems. The section is punctuated by three “human faith” mottos, in F#, F, and F# respectively. [Ives in his Memos wrote that the opening suggests frost on the window pane in Hawthorne’s Tanglewood Tales. Demon’s Dance was a now-lost piano piece incorporated into Hawthorne, and based on demons dancing around the witch’s pipe in the story “Feathertop.” And the general perpetual motion in this section relates to its origin in Hawthorne’s satire “The Celestial Railroad.’]

Nocturne (Phoebe’s Garden), syss. 24-4 m.2 to 26-1: In terms of the whole, this could of course be considered another moment, but it is quasi-self-contained. It begins on a middle Db (sys. 24-4, m. 2, end of beat 1), which is repeated four times, and it returns to that Db, also repeated four times, starting at sys. 26-1, beat 12. In between there is some linear development with a clear climax at the white-note cluster in sys. 25-3. No particular tonality appears in the contrast of white against black keys, but Eb is a lowest note in the introduction, G more or less through the cluster section, and the phrases of the brief denouement all begin on a low A. Ives mentions Phoebe’s Garden from The House of the Seven Gables in his essay on Hawthorne, and this passage strikes me as the most likely candidate for what he had in mind; could the pandiatonic chords depict her innocence and charm, ever shadowed by the black-key clusters representing the cursed and guilty past of the Pyncheon family?

Ragtime 1, syss. 26-2 to 31-1: With its gradual rises and falls in register, this section seems more organic than the Phantasmagoria, but each phrase has a different principle: the first based on the ragtime motive, the second whole-tone, the third octatonic, and so on. The section contains the movement’s only real large structural repetition: the section from sys. 27-3 through nine beats of 28-3 recurs, with alterations, from sys. 29-1 through the first two beats of sys. 30-1. Between these “A” repetitions there is a repeated “B section” at sys. 28-4. Soon after the second repetition in sys. 30-2, the music begins focusing on the human faith motto, as a transition into the next section. Assigning tonalities isn’t easy, but F# is tonicized at sys. 27-4, there are drones on A, B, and C# in syss. 28-1/3, Eb is tonicized in the structural repetition at sys. 29-2, followed by drones on G#, G, and F.

Human Faith Statement, syss. 31-2 to 33-1: This section is a development of the second half of the Human Faith theme centered on E, but harmonized in C#-major/minor with a continual drone-arpeggio. Its quick disintegration starts with the Eb-Bb-F sonority at sys. 32-4, b. 3 1/2, providing a harmonic link to the next two sections.

Martyn with Interruptions, syss. 33-1 to 35-1: Eight chords of the hymn Martyn (“Jesus, lover of my soul”) are played in G, followed by a return of the ragtime motive and some whole-tone ostinatos over stacked-fifth sonorities. Then Martyn returns for a longer period in F#, interrupted by a tonally fluid dissolution.

Marching Band Evocation, syss. 35-1 b.7 to 37-1 m.1: Opening and closing on an Eb-Bb-F sonority, the marching band section is relatively self-contained, mostly more linearly developmental rather than moment-form, and containing the movement’s most conventionally tonal music. Despite the beginning and ending on Eb, the main tune in the middle is clearly in Ab [echoing the first section’s emphasis on a G# drone, and marking an important point in the harmonic structure of the entire sonata, as I’ll explain another day]. The section ends when the tune is interrupted by drumming patterns.

Ragtime 2, syss. 37-1 m.2 to 42-2: As documented elsewhere, this moment form is quite complex. We include in it the buildup to the fist clusters at sys. 41-2, m. 2, because the neighbor-note motive beginning here has been foreshadowed earlier in the section. The section begins seemingly in Db Lydian mode, but keeps returning to A as a grounding bass note, with occasional jumps to Eb [A and Eb being oppositionally related in every movement of the sonata].

“Columbia” Section, syss. 42-3 to 46-5 m. 1: After a ghostly appearance of Martyn in F, the dotted rhythm of “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean” dominates this entire section. The gradual emergence and development of the patriotic tune prevent any feel of moment form. The tonality is ever-evolving, but it opens oscillating between G# and G as drone notes, lands on a low A several times, and there is a section clearly in Bb-major at syss. 46-2/3.

Perpetual Motion in 6/16, or “The Blizzard,” syss. 46-5 m.2 to 49-3 b.4: This, I think, is the most radical music in the sonata, an abstract barrage of notes with few motivic hooks, and little for the listener to hold onto; not that it is unpleasant, only confusing, and deliberately so as a climactic descent into chaos. Disparate events are foregrounded one-by-one, most notably a statement of the first half of Human Faith at sys. 47-4. Some of Ives’s complex local transformations of material are evidently not meant to be heard as such. I got so tired of referring to this as a blizzard of notes that I just started calling the section “The Blizzard.”

Recap of Human Faith Material, syss. 49-3 b.5 to 51-5: This final section, marked by reliance on both halves of the Human Faith theme, begins and ends with a D-major emphasis, and with keys of C# and Eb both making an appearance. The rhythmic organization by dotted-8th beats continues intermittently. The feel of a recapitulation comes at once with repetition of material from Ragtime 1, though the left hand part is altered to turn into the first half of the Human Faith theme. Next the left-hand recapitulates, in part, the C# statement of the second half of Human Faith from that section of the piece. The final page brings back quotations of “Columbia” in D/G over Human Faith motives alternating between D and Eb. There is a final reference to Martyn in Eb and a final gesture taken from the first Phantasmagoria grounded in D.

There are features, mostly melodic ones, that tie the movement together as a satisfying whole. Chief among these is the Hawthorne motive [a leap upward followed by a descending second]. Of the ten sections, it dominates the 1^st, 3^rd, part of the 5^th, 6^th, and 9^th; plus, because it is integral to the tune “Columbia,” also the 8^th and 10^th. The neighbor-note motive of the second ragtime [e.g., A-G-A-C, the final note being a downward leap] might be called, in part, its retrograde. The theme of the Country Band March is related to it. The Demons’ Dance and Slaves’ Shuffle [two lost Ives piano works that he claimed were incorporated into Hawthorne] might have been conceived independently, the March and “Columbia” may have originated elsewhere, but every element seems to have made its way into this movement because it fit motivically. Beyond that we have the Human Faith melody, which dominates the 4^th and 10^th sections, and makes appearances in the 1^st, 2^nd, 3^rd, and 9^th. (In fact, the retrograde of the four-note Human Faith motto is itself a Hawthorne motive.) And since the Human Faith theme quotes Martyn, the 5^th section based on Martyn links to the others. For all the movement’s formal complexity and discontinuities, it possesses a notable organic quality, and is quite distinct from the other movements.

All material copyright © Kyle Gann 2014

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More to come. If any of you scholars out there see fit to print some of this information elsewhere, an attribution to this blog will be greatly appreciated.

 

I am thrilled to report that the University of Illinois Press has officially confirmed that they are going to publish my book Essays After a Sonata: Charles Ives’s Concord.

Here’s what happened. Yale UP doesn’t have a music series anymore. Nevertheless, a humanities editor there liked the idea of my book and accepted it, some three years ago. Naturally, he left. I had broken my own rule: Never approach a publisher until a book is virtually finished. Editors rarely stay at one publisher for the amount of time it takes to write a book. I don’t know why, but editors and publishers play a game like musical chairs. One former editor calls me up offering to do a new edition of American Music in the Twentieth Century every time he lands at a new publisher, which seems like about every two years. And the new editor is likely to have completely different interests and criteria. Out my my six books, three have now gone to a different publisher than I started out with for pretty much that reason.

Anyway, a new, inexperienced, surly, and non-musically-savvy editor inherited my manuscript. I could tell from her first week she wasn’t interested. She kept throwing up hurdles in my path. She sent it to terrible readers. Finally, I challenged her to explain why my defense against the readers wasn’t sufficient and to detail what changes she wanted and why. Didn’t hear from her for months. In the meantime I approached my lovely former editor for my Robert Ashley book. She was all enthusiasm. She sent it out to two readers who basically had no complaints whatever, just unadulterated praise. (I suspect they were not musicologists, but one a composer and the other a pianist who’d played the Concord.) Part of being an editor is knowing whom to send the manuscript to; you need two professionals to sign off on it, not to give the author pretentious advice on how to write his sixth book.

Anyway, the Yale editor finally, in May, sent an email saying the book was accepted. I told her I had another publisher interested, and that if she wanted to get out of this contract, as she manifestly did, this was her chance. She jumped at it. It was the fastest I’d ever heard back from her. I returned my $750 advance, which I thought was a totally unfair demand on Yale’s part, but I would have paid more than that to get out. And I afterward heard that that editor is leaving Yale UP for a publisher I’ve never heard of, so I gather that I wasn’t the only one unhappy with her. If only she’d left a few months sooner.

So – following a totally pointless eight-month delay, Essays After a Sonata is back on track. I made none of the substantial changes demanded by the Yale readers. They accomplished nothing, except to make me change publishers. Despite years of booing and hissing from the musicological community (including being turned down for three years’ worth of NEH and ACLS grants), my book will come out exactly as I intended it.

 

 

Here’s an audience listening to a live performance of Nancarrow’s Study No. 25 at the Whitney Museum yesterday:

(As always, clicking on photos makes them appear in a new window in better focus. Don’t know why.) There was a player piano roll of Nancarrow’s Study No. 36 draped across one side of the room. Here are some high points:

And, via Susan Schied of “Prufrock’s Dilemma” blog fame, here I am standing in front of it. I had subconsciously chosen a shirt for the day that everyone thought was a player-piano-roll pattern:

High points of my evening took place at dinner with (L to R) Susan Schied, Liturgy guitarist Bernard Gann, his singer-girlfriend Heidi Farrell, my wife Nancy Cook, musicologist and Cage scholar Sara Haefeli, and one of those Pulitzer-Prize-type composers, John Luther Adams:

And in various other, more picturesque reconfigurations:

(Sara, who’s quite tall, is standing off the curb.)

Not pictured, unfortunately, because they’d already left: composers Mikel Rouse and Tom Hamilton, director of the John Cage Trust Laura Kuhn, and Nancarrow’s stepson Luis Stephens. Thanks to Jay Sanders of the Whitney and Nancarrow expert Dominic Murcott for involving me in a wonderful event.

 

Several people have noted that I am mentioned in connection with the Nancarrow festival at the Whitney Museum this week. (I’ve been quoted in the Times and the New Yorker.) I will indeed be present for it next Wednesday, the 24th. At 1 PM and again at 4 I’m supposed to give an informal talk on Nancarrow, and bring up my favorite Player Piano Studies, which will then be played “live” on an Ampico player piano like Conlon’s. Sounds like a fun gig, but I can never decide which studies to play. The ones I wouldn’t play are easy to pick, but I always want people to hear nos. 3, 4, 6, 7, 20, 21, 24, 25, 27, 33, 36, 37, 40, 41, 43, and 48 and the unofficial roll M. It’s too much. I never know how to choose. No. 3 is so fun for the uninitiated, 4 is lovably cute, 6 is fun to explain, 24 is perfect, 25 is a riot, 40 is transcendentally exciting, 21 is a crowd-pleaser, 36 is a miracle, 37 is a modernist classic, 48 is hugely ambitious. I could do it all given enough time, but I never know where to start or stop. And I’ll have a dozen friends there to catch up with, including Luis Stephens, Nancarrow’s stepson by his second wife, who’s been an invaluable font of information about Conlon in the 1940s.

And to bring up another important composer, my friend John Luther Adams has a long excerpt from his upcoming memoir in this week’s New Yorker, in which he was kind enough to mention me. Good reading. John says I once told him, “John, you’re always so earnest, but I like you anyway.” John and I have been sober for a modest percentage of our times together. He greatly heightened my appreciation of expensive single-malt scotch, and I’ve never recovered.

I remember Morton Feldman saying in the ’70s that if there was one musical idea that was finally dead, it was multimovement form. (Was I present when he said it? I can’t recall.) That seemed about right at the time, and, like most of the progressive composers I associated with, I pretty much wrote only one-movement works in the 20th century. But starting with Transcendental Sonnets in 2001-2, I became interested in the multiple movement problem. In recent years many of my works have divided into movements, and I’ve had to grapple with what my conception of the form is. My aesthetic is postminimalist – and by that I mean I do have my own aesthetic, and by comparison with other composers whose style it resembles, I can locate it as postminimalist, but it is simply the style I feel driven to write in, and I could just as easily call it Gannian and leave everyone else out of the picture. It is personality, not ideology; not a political strategy, but simply the route my imagination takes. The style itself produces highly unified movements of little internal contrast. (I could have adopted “No-Drama Gann” before it got applied to Obama.) My music shuns development, rarely relies on tension and release, nor am I comfortable bringing back the same main idea in one movement after another. In this sense I am not really a symphonist in the sense of most modern symphonists, as my friend Robert Carl is; my ideas do not progress from movement to movement. I have often felt that I produce suites, not sonata- or symphony-type works.

I’ve finished a draft of Proença, my song cycle on Ezra Pound. I think it’s one of the best things I’ve ever done, though one tends to think that when the ink is still wet, and especially when the piece is ambitious. Unlike my other song cycles, it is not merely a collection but a large structure, and I’ve come closer than ever to feeling what multi-movement form means for me. At 47 minutes, it’s my second longest work next to The Planets. The timings of the Sibelius files are as follows:

I was aware as I was composing that I was selecting poems and song idioms to balance each other off, and that the tendency of one song in one harmonic or textural or rhythmic direction seemed to imply the necessity of another song going in the opposite direction. Once the sixth song clicked into place I realized I was finished, because there were no more variables within my system with which I could create further contrast. And once I got nearly finished I made up a chart showing the kinds of symmetries I ended up with (click on images for better resolution):

Two of the songs are original Provençal poems; two are Pound translations of Provençal poems; and two are poems Pound wrote in response to response to Bertrans de Born’s poem “Dompna puois.” In addition, the 1st, 3rd, and 5th songs are each set in a single, unchanging tonality; the 2nd, 4th, and 6th have no central key. Songs 3 and 4 are characterized by neo-Riemannian chord progressions (closely chromatic voice-leading), one in the context of a stable tonality, the other in a kind of free-floating (though consonant) atonality. Song 2 uses more of a jazz sense of progression; Song 5 has jazz elements in the harmony as well, though it doesn’t change key. In Song 4 the root movement is typically by major 3rds, in Song 6 it is mostly by minor 3rds. Actual troubadour melodies are quoted only in Songs 1 and 6, foregrounded in the former and backgrounded in the latter. Songs 1 and 3 both follow a kind of additive process, 1 and 4 both have an articulated steady pulse, 1 and 5 share a pointillistic texture. Songs 1, 3, 4, and 5 are stanzaic, and I handled stanzaic form four different ways:

Song 1: Static accompaniment, three different melodies
Song 3: Melody becomes more developed with each repetition; final envoi switching to a slower tempo
Song 4: Through-composed, no repetition
Song 5: Repetition of both melody and accompaniment; final envoi switching to a homophonic texture

There are other, smaller ways in which the songs echo each other.

I planned out none of this structure in advance, but kept adding new poems as I instinctively felt gaps in the overall conception. There is no particular narrative arch to Proenca, but I think this is typical of how I tend to create variety in a multimovement piece, mixing and matching an array of qualities from movement to movement for a gradually shaded set of perspectives on similar material. The movements share family resemblances; given seven qualities, each pair of movements may share four or five of those qualities in diverse combinations. No linear energy runs from movement to movement, but each balances the others and helps complete the total picture. And while I kept changing the order of the songs, a certain logic finally dictated the order I came up with, so that too-similar songs weren’t placed too close together. (Complete program notes for the piece are here. And parenthetically, I hope someone can suggest how to get a C with a cedilla to happen in html.)

Looking back, I can see that I’ve instinctively operated this way in other multimovement works. I rarely reuse material from one movement to another (though little melodic ideas do sometimes get transposed, since I like to work on the movements simultaneously), but all the movements together do provide a series of different perspectives on not a single idea but a group of associated ideas. In short, I guess what I’m leading up to saying is that I think I’m a pretty damn good composer, I just don’t do what people expect. But who knows.

 

 

My apologies for false notices. Sometimes I work on a blog post for several days. The “Save Draft” and “Publish” buttons are close together, and if I hit “Save Draft” 25 times it’s nearly certain that one of those times I’ll inadvertently hit “Publish” instead, and then I have to save my text and delete the entry. Meanwhile, apparently those of you who get automatic notices when I post are instantly notified that something new is up. I think WordPress should build in a five-minute delay in case of recall, but there it is; so many technological things we can do in the 21st century, and some we can’t. The post you were about to see will be up later today.