I love, and by “love” I mean “am nearly made physically ill by,” this paragraph that’s been added to the Wikipedia entry on Downtown music:

The term “downtown music” can mean something entirely different, depending on the type of downtown a city has. For example, in a city with a very historic downtown, the associated music is generally popular music from the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s charachterized [sic] by smooth vocals, prominent use of string instruments, and often a very important role for the background singers. In a more stereotypical “inner city” type of downtown, the term can refer to hip-hop and rap.

It’s difficult to tell whether this is a put-on, or whether the guy thinks he’s making an actual contribution. But hey, kids, Wikipedia is the new paradigm for knowledge! Get used to it!

UPDATE: Ah – the writer appears to have been banned from Wikipedia for adding nonsense to several sites, and subsequent to my posting, these lines were quickly removed. But, superficially plausible as they looked, on what authority could a knowledgeable expert have removed them himself?

OK, kiddies, gather around, it’s time to reap the benefits of your uncle Kyle’s globe-trotting. I’m back, having paid $50 US to carry an extra 10 kilos of new CDs onto the plane in my suitcase, not to mention the box of CDs that I paid good Euros to mail home from Dublin. I must now be considered southern Columbia County’s leading expert on Dutch and Irish composers, and so I pass the expertise on to you via Postclassic Radio, which will be very heavy in Dutch and Irish music for awhile. Line up the bottles of Guinness and Hoegaarden, and be ready to mix.

First, music from The Netherlands. I had already put up several pieces by Dutch sampling champion Jacob Ter Veldhuis, who performs nonlocally as Jacob TV. (Good idea; one problem Dutch composers have getting exported is that their names often require diphthongs we Englishers just don’t have on our tongues.) Now I’ve added several pieces by Peter Adriaansz, a composer of slow, sensuous drone music who’s spent time in the States, and whose music sounds like a real Dutch-American hybrid. Particularly keep an ear out for his Prana, a 63-minute, glacially moving continuum that I enjoyed hearing live at the Bimhuis in Amsterdam. There are several pieces up by Anthony Fiumara, composer of nicely nonobvious process pieces, plus works played by the Orkest de Volharding, which Fiumara directs, composed by Geert van Keulen, Wim Laman, Paul Termos, and Willem van Manen.

Interspersed with this is a travelogue of Irish new music. Some of the liveliest pieces are by Donnacha Dennehy, the postminimalist who was my gracious host at Trinity College, and whom musicologist/raconteur Bob Gilmore has been describing to me as “THE best young composer in Europe.” Well, I haven’t heard every 30-something composer in Europe yet, so I defer to Bob for the time being. A more unexpected find, in-between new music and pop, was Roger Doyle, who, as virtuoso of the recording studio, appears to be kind of the Brian Eno/Harold Budd of Ireland. I’ve put up several virtual piano pieces from his disc Baby Grand, Satie-like in their humor, plus music from his five-CD set Babel. Gerald Barry is, of course, by all acclaim the leading Irishman of my generation, and I’ve posted a couple of quite listenable chamber works for your validation. And I let in one very knowledgeable young composer I met in England, Neil Campbell, whose Assembly and Mass are so relentless that the “post” in postminimalist begins to fade away.

The Netherlands has a national style, against which people like Peter Adriaansz and Renske Vrolijk can profitably rebel. The Irish seem to be all over the place, but I’ve got a couple more Irish complilation discs to make my way through, and the Irish Music Center was very helpful. But along with Serbian music by Vladimir Tosic, Postclassical Radio has taken on an international cast, and it’s all guaranteed postclassical.

LONDON – I’ve heard a lot of music in Europe, but the concert I was most excited about, that I’d planned on hearing months in advance, was the premiere of my Dutch composer friend Renske Vrolijk’s Charlie Charlie. To hear it, in fact, I had to leave England between lectures and fly, then train it, back to Den Bosch in The Netherlands (a town whose more official name is S’ Hertogenbosch, and no one was quite able to explain why it has two names). Let it be some small window into the logistics of my journey that it was cheaper for me to fly back to Amsterdam and stay in a hotel there than it was to continue staying in my hotel in London. Mention London to anyone on the Continent, and they roll their eyes at the expense. I will too.

In any case, Charlie Charlie is a 65-minute… opera? cantata? oratorio?… about the wreck of the Hindenburg in 1937. The premiere took place at the Verkadefabriek, one of those wonderful European new-music spaces that’s a converted something-or-other with its own restaurant and a great place to hang out for hours following a premiere; performances in other cities run through December 1. Renske is an aviation nut who flies gliders as a hobby, and last spring in the U.S. she actually got permission to tour the military installation at Lakehurst, New Jersey, that now sits where the Hindenburg came down in flames. Charlie Charlie is what she calls a “documentary in music,” and portrays the event with an enlightening wealth of detail.

The Hindenburg was, of course, one of history’s best-photographed disasters, and Charlie Charlie‘s accompanying video by Bart Visser contains amazing footage of people running in horror from the descending firebomb. Between the historical film footage and suavely postminimalist, often almost meditative music, Renske mediated by a series of steps involving sampled vinyl noise (which gave a grainy historical feel even to the live music played in front of us), historical recordings (including a post-disaster conversation between Hermann Göring and the Hindenburg’s captain, who survived), and contemporary accounts of and letters about the event whose phrases were posted visually, played as samples, and sung live. In short, the most notable aspect of Renske’s strategy was her closely-woven integration of visual, audio, and performance elements so that ideas and phrases flowly smoothly among all dimensions of the production. In Lex Bohlmeijer’s libretto of historical texts, phrases returned again and again at various lengths, creating both musical cohesion and a poignant atmosphere of mourning:

for you would have felt nothing

you would have felt nothing…

everything would have been tranquil and peaceful…

you would have expressed only one regret[:]

the voyage is over so soon.

The example is suggestive of Renske’s meditative response to such a violent tragedy, though there were also climactic passages of pounding percussion. Still, seamless musicality is one of Renske’s signal traits as a composer. The Dutch have their own national post-Andriessen postminimalist style which is quite impressively widespread (and of which more later), but it’s a hard-edged style grounded in continual Stravinskian rhythmic surprise. Renske’s idiom is less macho and more affecting: her ostinatos less jumpy, her melodies smoother and quite suited for theatrical singing. She told me later about historical references in the music – like “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” played slowly in the background – that I’ll have to listen for on recording. It’s a beautiful, well-shaped work, and as soon as I get a copy, you’ll hear it on Postclassic Radio. Meanwhile, here I congratulate the composer after the premiere:

I have two more lectures, at Goldsmiths College on Tuesday and York College on Thursday, and I return to the U.S. Friday.

[Update below]

DUBLIN – One of the best things I’ve done in Europe was spend 25 bracing hours with one of my composer heroes, Charlemagne Palestine. I’m astonished to have had the opportunity. I had heard stories of Palestine from the early ’70s on, but never heard a note until 1994, when his old Shandar vinyl disc Strumming Music was finally released on CD. I had come to figure that he was a legend whose music was lost to history, but since 1994 more than a dozen Palestine recordings have appeared, some of them old archival recordings, others documenting brilliant new work. He says now that he gave up music in the ’80s because the categories of that conservative era left no place for his music, but he’s never quit making art and film. I had had lunch with him years ago in New York, and finally got to hear him perform in 2000, but it was even more amazing to see him at his home in Brussels – a truly wonderful, livable, charming city – and to be treated by him to an incredibly hospitable tour.

Endlessly energetic and endearingly immodest, Charlemagne is a wealth of hysterical stories, all of which will have to appear in a book about him someday. For now, one that relates to my life will suffice. In 1969, Charlemagne recalled, someone asked Morton Feldman at a public interview whether his music was part of the “Downtown style.” “What Downtown style?,” Feldman answered dismissively. “I don’t know anything about any Downtown style.”

Well, Charlemagne was outraged. (Keep in mind that at this point he was 22 and Feldman was 43.) He went home and wrote Feldman a hilariously obscene letter which I won’t try to replicate here, because it wouldn’t be nearly as funny as hearing him tell it with appropriate hand gestures, but it had to do with where Feldman could stick something. And Charlemagne ended by signing it, “The Downtown community.”

In 1969 as this happened, I was an awkward 13-year-old kid at T.W. Browne Junior High School in Dallas. So for those of you who think that Downtown music was my invention (as has been publicly asserted more than once), or, even worse, a figment of my imagination, there you have vivid evidence of the Downtown scene, and its aggressive self-assessment, in 1969. I first heard about Uptown and Down ten years later, in 1979, when my teacher Peter Gena returned from the New Music New York festival. Then in 1986, as Village Voice critic, I inherited the Downtown scene that Tom Johnson had long been covering – I did not will it into existence through my verbal magic.

After that letter, Feldman could never bring himself to speak civilly to Charlemagne, which the latter sees as a major failing – if Feldman had had the same real kind of Brooklyn Jewish sense of humor as Charlemagne, he says, he would have just laughed it off. (The impressive number of important people Charlemagne has alienated makes me feel like a rank amateur in the provocation department.) Nevertheless, around 1969, Charlemagne and La Monte Young and Terry Riley and some other Downtowners were starting to give performances four, five, six hours long, and Charlemagne – who is a tremendous fan of Feldman’s late music – is convinced that by drawing Feldman’s attention to what was going on Downtown, he helped inspire Feldman’s ambition to write longer and longer pieces. So if anyone wants to partly credit Charlemagne’s scabrously funny letter with having contributed to one of the great repertoires of late-20th-century music – well, suffice it to say he won’t mind.

UPDATE: Another of Charlemagne’s alienation stories is a little more heart-warming. He and James Tenney didn’t speak for 30 years. What happened was, in the interview with Walter Zimmermann for Desert Plants, Zimmerman mentioned Tenney, and Charlemagne responded, “He’s the Mendelssohn of new music!” What Charlemagne was thinking, he says, was that Mendelssohn was a central figure of Romanticism who did a lot for other composers, and he was trying to say that Tenney held that same position. But apparently Tenney had such a low opinion of Mendelssohn’s music that he was terribly offended, and thought Charlemagne was calling his music facile and superficial. In any case, months before Tenney died the two of them were invited to a dinner party together and humorously made up. Aren’t you glad?

DUBLIN – Henry David Thoreau’s wonderful dictum:

My life has been the poem I would have writ,

But I could not both live and utter it.

will have to be modernized:

My life has been the blog I would have writ,

But I could not both live and update it.

I’ve been living rather than blogging, but I can pause long enough to announce that I will be performing Custer and Sitting Bull – perhaps for the last time ever, if I have anything to say about it – tomorrow night at 8 in the Printing Room at Trinity College in Dublin. Ireland. Along with a couple of other out-of-tune pieces.

Thanks to those who’ve been waiting desperately for audio documentation of my piano concerto Sunken City. I’m still waiting for the same thing, and as soon as I have it, you’ll have it.

Now to go check out Irish sushi. Who knew?

Pianist Geoffrey Douglas Madge and the Orkest de Volharding, conducted by Jussi Jaatinen, play my Sunken City three times this week. The entire program is:

Huib Emmer – Electric Shadows (2007)

John Luther Adams – For Jim (rising) (2007)

Philippe Bodin – Elastique (2007)

Kyle Gann – Sunken City (Concerto for Piano and Winds In Memoriam New Orleans) (2007)

John Coolidge Adams – The Chairman Dances (arranged by Anthony Fiumara)

This is the first concert I know of to include pieces by both John Adams’s. Three performances in The Netherlands:

October 30, 20.30

Kassa de Doelen

Schouwburgplein 50, Rotterdam

October 31, 20.15

Felix Meritis

Keizersgracht 324, 1016 EZ, Amsterdam

tel. +31(0)20 626 23 21

November 4, 15.30

Concert en Gehoorzaal

Doopsgezinde Kerk, Lange Noordstraat 62

Middelburg

See you there.

I stayed in Aarhus, Denmark, courtesy of Wayne Siegel, a California-born composer who’s lived in Denmark since 1974, moving up to the position of the country’s only official electronic music professor. Wayne and his wife, the novelist Elisabeth Siegel, have a pet jackdaw named Alice. A jackdaw is a raven-like bird, though smaller, native to Europe. Having been rescued as a baby bird by a man with a beard, Alice loves men with facial hair, and took to me right away. She’s noisy, as birds tend to be, and every sound I would make in her presence she would instantly answer with a loud chirp, so instantaneously that we were practically in sync. Wayne has a piece for bass clarinet and tape called Jackdaw, heavily laced with samples of Alice’s singing. And here she and I are together (that sliding glass door is open, and sometimes she goes out for a spin, but always comes back):

Everyone with an opinion about the future of classical music should read Richard Taruskin’s elegantly brilliant article “The Musical Mystique” in last week’s New Republic. Once again, with razor-sharp points and machine-gun energy, he’s articulated things I deeply believe that I had never gotten around to formulating in words. His target this time is the Germanic view, prominent among the musical elites of America and Britain, that art and entertainment are different spheres, and we owe it to ourselves to eschew entertainment and cultivate a love of art because, well, because it’s art. His impetus is a trio of “Oh-my-god-classical-music-is-dying” books, and his well-supported conclusion is, classical music isn’t dying – it’s changing. Hallelujah, and pass the popcorn.

In my callow youth I was a proponent of the view Taruskin attacks, a real Adorno-ite, art-is-good-for-you, pop-music-dismisser. I’m stubborn as hell, and yet I got over it: why can’t other people? One of my best assets, I think, is a strong sense of musical reality, which I attribute to having been deeply exposed to music before I could talk. And even though I grew up rather shockingly distant from my generation’s beloved rock ‘n’ roll, my sense of reality told me fairly early on that there was nowhere to draw a line between the pleasure I got from listening to, say, Bruckner or Feldman, and the pleasure that I got from the occasional Brian Eno or Residents song that I was driven to listen to over and over again. And I slowly realized that I didn’t get that pleasure from listening to, oh, Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto, or Carter’s Second Quartet, which I did out of a rather pious sense of duty and a feeling that they would build character. And then, of course, the new music, or Downtown music, or experimental music, or whatever delicate euphemism you terminophobes want to apply to the music that I wrote about at the Village Voice for 19 years, was a repertoire dedicated to plastering in the gigantic crack between pop and classical. Some of that music was more conventionally entertaining than other pieces, but there was no way to deeply appreciate that music and pretend that art and entertainment were separate human activities. I can boast a virtuoso range of ways to be entertained, but any music I’m not entertained by I quit listening to, no matter how highly ranked it is in the history books.

And this is the common-sense tack Taruskin takes, with plenty of erudite historical context. Why does any of us get into music except for pleasure? And why would a composer try to do anything in his music except elicit pleasure? Keeping in mind that there are thousands of varieties of musical pleasure, from the algebraic to the sensuous to the perverse to the brain-teasing to the cathartic – and that the pleasure of feeling smugly superior to one’s fellow man, which is also in there, is not a very healthy one. The people who praise Art and decry the lazy blandishments of Entertainment, he says, just happen, coincidentally, to be the very people who take upon themselves the prerogative to define what Art is for all humanity. What, Taruskin asks, are these authors’ “objective and abstract criteria of musical worth? Merely what any university or conservatory composition teacher will tell you they are.” “It is all too obvious by now,” he continues,

that teaching people that their love of Schubert makes them better people teaches them nothing but vainglory, and inspires attitudes that are the very opposite of humane….

There are at least as many reasons why they listen to classical music, of which to sit in solemn silence on a dull dark dock is only one. There will always be social reasons as well as purely aesthetic ones, and thank God for that. There will always be people who make money from it–and why not?–as well as those who starve for the love of it. Classical music is not dying; it is changing.

Let it change, let it change, let it change – that is this blog’s ubiquitous mantra. But I can’t do his rapier-etched argument justice, and I’m reduced to quoting him. You should just go read him.

UPDATE: Thanks to those who offered to translate: I took the first person up on it. As for reading the fine print, you can drag the image to your desktop and it will open as a much larger image (at least this works on my Mac).

ON THE TRAIN FROM BASEL TO HAMBURG – For years I’ve wanted to visit the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel and look through the Conlon Nancarrow archive there, full of manuscripts that I last saw in his studio in 1994, while he was still alive. I’ve finally done it. It wasn’t quite the cornucopia I had imagined. While all of the official works in his oeuvre have been catalogued, the great bulk of his papers await classification. Hit-and-run interlopers like myself, Nancarrow book or no Nancarrow book, aren’t allowed to charge in and start throwing precious manuscripts around. I had to request specific folders like anyone else, and was unable to satisfy my mind on many mysteries of the man’s music that continue to puzzle me.

However, I found myself working elbow-to-elbow with two other Nancarrow experts: Dragana Stojanovic-Novicic of the University of the Arts at Belgrade, a surprisingly knowledgeable aficionado of American music who is writing monographs on both Nancarrow and the trombonist-composer Vinko Globokar; and Wolfgang Heisig, a fellow composer from outside Berlin who writes copiously for player piano. We quickly gravitated toward each other and indulged heady conversations relentless in their musicological detail. No need to remind us that Nancarrow published only five articles in Modern Music, nor that it was between Studies Nos. 21 and 22 that he filed off the limiting notches on his roll-punching machine: we all knew all about it. Any divergences of opinion we ran across were so picayune as to require a microscope. And so we, an American, a Serb, and a German in Switzerland, spent every precious available moment in the bowels of the Sacher Stiftung, poring over Conlon’s piano rolls – the rolletariat, Wolfgang dubbed us – and spent our evenings at restaurants comparing notes and stories.

Dragana knows my books better than I remember them myself, and was at no loss for conversing about a figure as obscure as Dane Rudhyar, which is more than I would be able to say for all but a very few American musicologists. She’s going through Conlon’s correspondence, and was able to relate detailed content of letters I wrote to the great man from 1988 on, letters of which I have no memory. I was forced to admit she knows details of my relationship with him better than I do. (I figured at least she didn’t have the letters Conlon wrote me, because they’re sitting at home in my file cabinet, but it turns out he made copies before sending them – perhaps showing more concern for posterity than he generally evidenced?) Wolfgang gives concerts of the Player Piano Studies on his player piano – not a Disklavier – and he’s convinced that the methods of translating the rolls into MIDI information aren’t sufficiently accurate. So for years he’s been painstakingly copying the piano rolls by hand, tracing them with various tools onto transparent paper. He’s even restored some notes included in Conlon’s scores, but that Conlon neglected to transfer to the piano rolls, so Wolfgang prides himself that his rolls are even more complete and accurate than Conlon’s own. Wolfgang has even made a piano roll of my Disklavier piece Texarkana. I hope to hear it someday on the more authentic instrument.

As for my own research, I managed to type a complete copy into Sibelius of Para Yoko, a 1992 player piano piece that I was never able to photocopy while Conlon was alive, as well as pore over the long-lost manuscript of Study No. 13, and give a few baffled glances at the original player-piano score of his final work, the Quntet for the Parnassus ensemble. If I ever write another article about Nancarrow, it will be an annotated, rhythmically precise score of Study #41, and I was also able in a couple of days to gather all the numerical information I needed from the work’s punching score to accomplish that. That’s Conlon’s best and most important work, in my opinion, from among the ones whose final score (as published in Soundings) gives only an approximate and insufficient idea of the actual rhythms involved. The scores of his late works scatter notes in proportional time notation as though they were thrown down in a fit of inspiration, but analysis of the earlier punching score shows that he always had in mind a rigorously beat-oriented tempo conception. An annotated score of that piece (also needed for Studies 20, 25, 28, 29, 42, 45, 46, 47, and others) would make that clear, and is necessary to nail down exactly what Nancarrow accomplished.

Stiftung director Felix Meyer apprised me of a raft of new Nancarrow recordings that will be appearing shortly, bringing to light hitherto unknown pieces and new versions of old pieces. And he confirmed that the recent “mystery piece” that appeared in the tape used by the Merce Cunningham dance that I recently wrote about was an early study, originally called No. 3, abandoned, and in more recent years resurrected as an homage piece titled For Ligeti. You would have thought that Nancarrow’s official 65 works, almost all for one instrument, represented as cut-and-dried an output as the 20th century afforded, but an army of researchers is proving that we’ve so far only scratched the surface.

The Sacher Stiftung

Tomorrow night (October 18) at 8, pianist Lois Svard is playing my music in a program at Muskingum College in Concord, Ohio. She’ll play my recent work On Reading Emerson (which is coming out on a New Albion disc with Sarah Cahill any minute now), along with “The Alcotts” from the Concord Sonata, Bill Duckworth’s Imaginary Dances, and George Tsontakis’s Ghost Variations. Gann and His World, indeed.

Thursday, October 25 [note – I had originally listed the wrong date], I’m giving a concert of microtonal and Disklavier works at the Mendelssohnsaal of the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Hamburg, Germany. My solo program will include Unquiet Night, Charing Cross, So Many Little Dyings, Bud Ran Back Out, and my own C#-minor Prelude Custer and Sitting Bull. (Anyone still get that joke?) Address in Hamburg: Havestehuder Weg 12, showtime 8 PM.

In other news, microtonal composer Jarod DCamp (a Henry Gwiazda student from the Fargo flatlands) has started a Live-365 internet radio station for microtonal music called 81/80 Microtonal Radio. Among people who never listen to it, microtonal music often has a reputation for dry convolutedness, a devotion more to theory than to sound. It is and isn’t true: the proportion of lousy music in microtonalia is about the same as in any other genre, but sometimes the inability of people’s ears to adjust to the intonation gets blamed for nonexistent sins. The initial strangeness is what turns me on, and Jarod’s station will prove that there are a million varied reasons to step outside the bland 12-pitch scale, since he’s showcasing all of them. I’m already astonished by all the bizarre new music I’ve heard by composers I didn’t know. Way to go, Jarod!

As for Postclassic Radio, it got an infusion of British music when I visited England and Wales, and as you’d expect it’s about to be flooded with Dutch music. Keep listening, dank u wel. And hey, all you foreign postclassical composers: You want your music played on Postclassic Radio, just invite me to your country and make a big deal out of me!

AMSTERDAM – I’m not over here just turning European musical society on its ear, you know. In fact, I don’t seem to be doing that at all. I haven’t yet had to place a revolver on the piano to quell potential riots, the way Antheil did when he came to Europe – audiences here have simmered down over the years. But besides performing and lecturing, I’m also working on my book, whose title had already changed from Music After Minimalism to Music After the-Music-Formerly-Known-as-Minimalism, and now may have to be titled The-Music-Formerly-Known-as-Minimalism and its Aftermath. Oh, I know what you’ll say, that if I wanted to research American music I could have stayed and done that in America. But that’s just what they were expecting me to do. No no, the thing to do, obviously, was to load everything on my hard drive and come study it over here, so I can give it the faux-expat perspective.

The latest title change is due to my realization that I can’t simply begin my story in 1978 and build it on the current absurd caricature of what the general public thinks minimalism is, as revealed at Wikipedia and elsewhere. I don’t want to spend a lot of time on well-traveled territory like Music for 18 Musicians and In C, but I do have to give enough of minimalism’s early history to clarify that it was more of a 20- or 30-composer movement, not just a four-composer movement, as the public thinks (nor a 500-composer movement, as Wikipedia’s indiscriminating savants imagine). I can’t explain postminimalism to people who will assume that what the postminimalists were reacting to was The Death of Klinghoffer; nor can I fully clarify Peter Garland, Larry Polansky, and Band of Susans to people who don’t know the crucial contributions to minimalism made by Harold Budd, Jim Tenney, and Phill Niblock. And so I’m getting resigned to greatly expanding the section on minimalism, which will also make the book more marketable to publishers, since books on minimalism already exist, and publishers are petrified of taking chances on anything that threatens to convey too much new information. By temperament, new information is the only kind I enjoy imparting.

Toward this end, one of the projects I’m enjoying working on is transcribing little-known minimalist keyboard works. Some minimalism was improvisatory, and even some that wasn’t is documented only by recording. At the moment I’m working on November by Dennis Johnson, the 1959 piano piece that La Monte Young credits as having inspired The Well-Tuned Piano. Johnson was one of a trio of students at UCLA in the late 1950s who were exploring La Monte’s idea of slow, static music, along with La Monte himself and Terry Jennings. Terry Riley joined in soon afterward. Johnson figures heavily in La Monte’s semi-famous “Lecture 1960,” and is also credited with (among several conceptual pieces, including one that consisted of just the word LISTEN), a work titled The Second Machine that uses only four pitches drawn from La Monte’s Trio for Strings. Soon afterward, however, Johnson abandoned music and went into computer science. November seems to have been the magnum opus of a heavily abbreviated career.

At one point La Monte mentions that November was “theoretically” six hours long. The hiss-filled, barely audible surviving recording, however, made on reel-to-reel by Jennings and Johnson (which I’ve never played on Postclassic Radio because the quality just doesn’t make for pleasant listening), cuts off abruptly after 100 minutes. It’s slow enough that one could almost take all the pitches down in dictation in real time, but I’m trying to painstakingly document all the exact rhythms in order to facilitate replicating the performance. Below, I give the first four minutes of the piece, but this isn’t a good notational solution: what I want to use eventually is just stemless noteheads proportionally spaced, but I’m not sure I can do that in Sibelius. Still, I’ve played this excerpt (on Sibelius) simultaneously with the original recording, and the notes line up almost exactly:

We can’t ask Dennis Johnson about it: he’s disappeared. La Monte’s last e-mail from him said that he was sick and tired of battling internet problems, giving up on the 20th century, and going out of e-mail contact. He lived in California, and at one point lost his house in one of those humungous wildfires they have out there, and if there ever was a score to November (as La Monte thinks there was, but doesn’t remember much about it), it’s probably lost. Jennings, of course, died long ago. So it’s just me and the recording, on our own.

If anyone knows of Dennis Johnson’s whereabouts, please get in touch.

But think about what was going on musically in 1959, look at the example above, and tell me that wasn’t a radical thing to come up with. The classical world was pretty much divided up at the time among the crazy-mathematical 12-toners, the chance-obsessed Cageists – both groups resolutely atonal – and the neoclassicists who were still writing huge, brass-climaxing symphonies. Feldman was writing slow, soft music, and as late as 1965 Jennings’s slow music was atonal and rather Feldmanish. But November caresses a spare, sad G minor from the piano, protominimalist in both diatonic tonality and repetitiveness. Keep in mind that in the above notation I’m trying to preserve the specific performance, not recreate the score. There is no reason to assume every note was notated: the entire first five and a half minutes of the score might easily have boiled down to this:

And look how many aspects of later music the piece anticipates:

1. Diatonic tonality. The standard minimalist line is that Terry Riley reintroduced diatonic tonality into minimalism with his String Quartet of 1960, but this turns out not to be true. That mythic quartet wasn’t in circulation until recently, and I and other scholars were misled by Edward Strickland’s Minimalism: Origins book into characterizing it as being in C major, but what Strickland evidently meant was merely that it had no key signature. Musicologist Ann Glazer Niren corrected this notion in her talk at the recent Minimalism conference in Bangor, and played some excerpts of the piece, which is basically atonal, though entirely soft in dynamics. (Keith Potter’s book gets the facts right, too, but without examples.) Riley’s diatonic music came later, first toyed with in a May, 1961, String Trio, later developed in In C (1964) and the ensuing Keyboard Studies. (There is an important precedent for diatonicism, of course, in Cage’s piano pieces of the 1940s like In a Landscape and Dream, and some of Lou Harrison’s pieces as well, but it’s unclear whether these had any impact on the early minimalists.)

2. Phrase repetition, which Johnson does not seem to have picked up from La Monte, though he did follow La Monte in using slow tempos.

3. Additive process – since each phrase adds more and more notes as it repeats, in a manner that La Monte would later use in an odd little 1961 requiem called Death Chant (with the same pitches: G, Bb, C, D), but more famously adopted as the method of Phil Glass’s early minimalist works.

Plus, there are other aspects specifically relevant to The Well-Tuned Piano:

4. First of all, the idea of letting a continuous piano piece run six hours, if indeed November was originally that long.

5. The very gradual introduction of new pitches, which is The Well-Tuned Piano‘s recurring M.O.; and,

6. the partitioning of a long piece into various contrasting pitch regions. At 9:37 in the recording, November adds in E and F# as the initial transition to a kind of B-minorish area. This is also almost exactly the point in the 1981 Well-Tuned Piano recording at which the music begins to move from the Opening Chord (on Eb) to the Magic Chord (on F#); the coincidence itself is insignificant, because the onset of that transition varies from performance to performance, but it points up how closely Johnson’s harmonic conception anticipated La Monte’s.

7. Plus, IF the piece wasn’t fully notated – and that’s an if we probably can’t resolve – it would have given La Monte a model for a piano solo only indeterminately notated.

Of course, November is for conventionally tuned piano (Tony Conrad brought just intonation into the mix somewhat later), achieves no powerful acoustic overtone effects, employs no elaborate over-arching thematic scheme (at least, not one observable in the first 100 minutes), and is not the mind-blowing, sumptuously evolved masterpiece that The Well-Tuned Piano eventually became. Nevertheless, it is monumental on its own terms, and certainly marks more historic firsts than we have a right to expect from any one piece. And until we revive what’s left of it, which I hope to do in both performance and an article for the next minimalism conference, we miss a key piece of the puzzle of how minimalism sprang into existence.

Another spare-moment project I’m undertaking, incidentally, is a transcription of Harold Budd’s 1982 New Music America performance of Children on the Hill, one of the most gorgeous things I’ve ever been present for. Though well preserved, that’s another tape not suitable for public consumption because a remarkably loud and obnoxious baby, seemingly closer to the mike than Budd was, wailed like a demon through 50 percent of it. That kid’s about 25 now, and I hope he finally got whatever it was he wanted. Budd recorded Children on the Hill for one of his early, Eno-produced records too, but that’s a stripped-down five-minute version; at NMA he extemporized gloriously for 23 minutes. Some of the best minimalism ever made is still languishing away on private tapes.

This Tuesday, October 9, at 8:30 PM I’ll be presenting half of a microtonal concert at the Karnatic Lab in Amsterdam, at their De Badcuyp space, 1st Sweelinckstr. 10 in Amsterdam. The Karnatic Lab is a concert series run by Ned McGowan, devoted to music that takes off somehow from the classical music of southern India, and by extension therefore any music exploring microtuning in general. This concert features myself, Ned playing a duet with recorder player Susanna Borsch, and the Scordatura Trio, which consists of vocalist Alfrun Schmid, violist Elisabeth Smalt, and on keyboards my good friend Bob Gilmore. Bob is the Irish musicologist who wrote the excellent Harry Partch biography, edited a recent volume of the writings of Ben Johnston, and has now nearly completed a biography of Claude Vivier – while playing microtonal keyboard with his other hand. They’re offering music by Phill Niblock (a 23-minute piece wriggling slightly around an E-minor triad – now that’s minimalism!) and Guy De Bièvre.

I’ll be playing So Many Little Dyings, my 1994 sampler piece based on Kenneth Patchen’s voice, off of my laptop for the first time, along with the premiere of my new version of Custer and Sitting Bull, freshly sound-engineered by composer M.C. Maguire. Also a world premiere of a new piece I whipped up for the occasion called Charing Cross, named for where I was sitting when the idea poured into my head. It’s a quirky, cheerful little tune with 39 pitches to the octave, which is the most I’ve ever used, and the only thing in doubt about the performance (aside from whether I can remember the words to Custer) is whether I can get the 88-key keyboard I need. 61 just doesn’t do it for me anymore. I’ll post a recording after the concert, but I don’t want to spoil the premiere.