Thoughts on traveling:

Little things about England make you feel more adult than the U.S. makes you feel. Like, in most public restrooms, the water in the sink stays on until you turn it off, instead of auto-switching off after six seconds. The bathroom does not send you a message, “You’re probably too irresponsible to turn the water off yourself, jackass, so we’ve already arranged to do it for you.”

On the other hand, while the British I end up talking to are preternaturally and enviably articulate, soft-spoken, and intelligent-sounding, their newspaper journalism always reads like it’s shouting at imbeciles.

And why do Brits invariably serve coffee at 211 degrees Fahrenheit? It’s half an hour before you can drink it. As for the other kind of hot, I ordered the penne arrabiata at an Italian restaurant, and the nice waitress said, “I have to warn you it’s extremely spicy.” “I can take it,” I replied confidently. It was about as spicy as children’s canned Spaghetti-O’s. “You’d be surprised at how many people complain it’s too spicy to eat,” she protested afterward.

By allowing myself to pretend that British pounds were actually dollars, I got by without too much trepidation at the money I was spending, but at the tobacco shop, even that stratagem failed. The Cuban Cohibas I had been whetting my lips for for months were £21.50 – some $43 under current exchange rates. I had never spent more than $16 for a cigar in my life, and the thought of suddenly more than doubling that was almost enough to make me give up cigars for a couple of weeks. I said almost. I compromised on a couple of examples of a cheaper but still-Cuban brand, and made a note to bring my perfectly nice Nicaraguans from the U.S. when I return.

I tell people lately that I leave the U.S. as often as possible on the same theory that one jumps up and down in a falling elevator – so as not to be there when it crashes. But no one in the UK mentioned politics, I never had to apologize for being an American, and as I got off the plane I realized that the horrific name “Dick Cheney” hadn’t flashed through my mind in ten days. The nicest thing about being over there was no longer walking around with an oppressive sense that My Country Is Doing Terrible Things, and We’re Helpless to Do Anything about It. It wears you down, all this constant monitoring of the criminals who are ransacking the government, reinstituting medieval torture, and cutting long strips out of the Constitution. It was such a relief Not Knowing, and being among people who seemed to shrug it off. Maybe they’re naive or cynical, or just too polite, or too implicated by their own government, but there’s no question that living every day with the consciousness that your government has gone maliciously berserk lacerates one’s spirit, reinforcing every guilty and self-loathing tendency. I’m looking forward to heading for Copenhagen and Amsterdam next week and forgetting about it again – I hope the Danes and Dutch are as forgiving.

Trying to get from JFK to Penn Station, I was herded on to a $15 bus that was promised to take me there. During the 20-minute wait it occurred to me that the cab would have been only $20, and would have left immediately – and then the bus dumped me out at Grand Central, the driver directing me to a nearby van for the rest of the trip. And both drivers kept mentioning that tips were greatly appreciated. The London Tube service hadn’t, in my experience, improved as much as I had been assured, but then you walk into an institutionalized, unashamed scam like New York City, and you only want to go back.

The Menai Bridge, built in 1826:

This morning in a book store in Wales I found a fat, impressive tome titled, “Hanes Cerddoriaeth y Gorllewin.” It meant nothing to me until I read down to the authors’ names: Grout and Palisca. Yes, that’s right, the Grout History of Music, that scourge of music undergrads, is translated into Welsh. (“Cerddoriaeth” is Welsh for “music.”) At £25, it was almost worth buying to display prominently in my office, but too heavy to lug around in my suitcase.

The FIrst International Conference on Minimalism and Music ended impressively Sunday morning with a session of papers looking toward the future. David McIntire of the University of Missouri at Kansas City gave a paper, “Terminology and Meaning in a Post-Minimalist Style:The Case of Totalism,” in which he quite accurately recounted, with photos and score examples in a Powerpoint presentation, the history of the movement’s recognition so far – including a photo of Rudy’s Bar in New York where the word was coined! It was the first time I’ve ever seen anyone besides myself talk on the subject, and David reports widespread enthusiasm for totalism among UMKC students.

Local composer Geraint Lewis was charged with the obligatory summation of minimalist activity within Welsh music, and since there’s hardly been any, his sense of humor about it was a blessing. (But can you name the three most famous recent Welsh composers? Grace Williams, Daniel Jones, David Wynne.) Tara Wilson closed with a paper on Russian postminimalists (Martynov, Batagov, and others) that insightfully differentiated their attitudes from those of their American counterparts. Noticeable, she said, and it accorded with my experience of the music, were the Russians’ lack of interest in acoustic phenomena, their ironic use of tonal materials as historic references rather than a neutral markers within a process, and the practice of kryptophonia: the derivation of melodies from secret messages, sometimes via correspondences between pitches and letters in phrases. I immediately added the word to my vocabulary, but first mistook her to say kleptophonia, which also offers intriguing possibilities.

It had never occurred to me how helpful it might be to hear other people analyze so much of the music I’m specifically interested in. Usually at an academic music conference I’m lucky if I can find two or three papers of any particular interest at all, but every paper on this entire conference, if not all necessarily stellar, was on a subject dear to my heart. I’ve been working alone in the analysis of minimalist and postminimalist music for so long that I had forgotten that it was possible to learn from colleagues, that for some things five, or thirty, heads are better than one. Others must have felt much the same way, for after the final session, organizers Pwyll ap Sion (author of a new book on Michael Nyman) and Tristian Evans gathered together all who’d stay for a discussion of the conference’s possible future history. We spontaneously formed the Music and Minimalism Society, members pictured below (except for me who’s taking the photograph):



and agreed that the conference should be held every two years, alternating between Europe and the U.S. As a member of the new steering committee, I’ll keep you apprised of plans. Meanwhile, let it be noted that minimalism now possesses a strong and undeniable base of support and scholarship in international musical academia. And we ain’t going back.

Meanwhile, back in London: TUBE STRIKE! Just spiffy.

First International Conference of Music and Minimalism, University of Wales, day 2:

I’ve been asked how many people are here: there are 34 papers over the three days, and I’d guesstimate that accounts for about half the people attending. Today was a little more diverse than yesterday, not quite as consistently exciting, but long and dense. A lot of us have been talking about how great it is to be able to indulge our enthusiasms for various obscure minimalisms amidst other academics without having them sneered at. Jonathan Bernard (U. of Washington) stepped in to play pop music indistinguishable from minimalism (Orbital, Eno, King Crimson, Sigur Ros, Villalobos, Plastikman, and others), and to warn us that someday soon minimalism may seem like merely a classical tributary into a much larger worldwide movement. John Pymm (U. of Wolverhampton) analyzed how Reich’s recent works warn us about technology, John Richardson (U. of Jyväskylä, Finland) deconstructed Glass’s La Belle et la Bête, but had to admit he was as clueless as the rest of us why Glass couldn’t turn off the arpeggio machine now and then. I learned a hell of a lot about John Adams’s music, which I’ve barely ever analyzed – everything I ever wanted to know except why he’s considered a minimalist. And Scott Cook (U. of British Columbia) revealed that Gavin Bryars has made a career out of the same kinds of third-related triad shifts I’ve been composing with since I first heard Einstein on the Beach.

Amid all the theorists (who now spout neo-Riemannian theory about L and LPL transformations and UTTs as though we’re all supposed to know what those are), there was one geniune composer celebrity. Christopher Hobbs, one of the original British minimalists whom I’d not heard a word about in decades, surfaced and played some of his new music, based on Sudoku puzzles, which he’s been using much as Cage used the I Ching. May sound hokey, perhaps, but he came up with a surprisingly varied and attractive array of ambient and percussive textures, and one piece that reminded you of Japanese Gagaku music was titled Sudogagakuku. You’ll be hearing some on Postclassic Radio shortly.

Of more immediate impact, perhaps, was Virginia Anderson’s talk on British “systems music.” This was a ’70s movement involving Hobbs, John White, Gavin Bryars, Michael Parsons, Michael Nyman, High Shrapnel, and others, who got into making music via strict numerical systems. For months now, the Minimalism article at Wikipedia has claimed that “the term was used informally as a term for all minimalism in the 1980s.” Anderson explained: by the 1980s, the systems movement was in decline, and as its original referent faded from memory, critics who weren’t very sympathetic to the movement in the first place (like Paul Griffiths) continued attaching the term to Nyman, as he became famous. Since Nyman changed style to write more like Reich and Glass, lazy and uninformed writers (whom she named, with citations) who didn’t know the original context started lumping in Riech and Glass with Nyman as “systems composers.” But as Anderson said, “With that kind of definition, it doesn’t mean anything anymore, does it? We have a perfectly good word for [what Glass and Reich were doing]: minimalism. Systems music was a different kind of music with a divergent and separate history.”

In other words, Wikipedia’s claim is trivially true that systems music “was used informally as a term for all minimalism in the 1980s” – by people who didn’t know systems music from a hole in the ground. Anderson, who appears to be the leading expert on that movement – at least Hobbs, who was there, seemed to think so – has corrected Wikipedia’s ignorant claim, but the infinite sages there keep putting it back.

Christopher Hobbs and Virginia Anderson.

Bangor Pier:

The University of Wales’ First International Festival of Music and Minimalism is chock-a-block with such intriguing developments that I feel I should be live-blogging it, but under the circumstances it would be intrusive. Conference directors Pwyll ap Sion and Tristian Evans had planned for a one-day conference, but were overrun with so many interested parties – even ones willing to find and fund their way to this lovely out-of-the-way burg – that they expanded to three days. No trendy kneejerk revisionism here. Keynote speaker Keith Potter, England’s premiere minimalism expert, set just the right tone by pronouncing upfront that despite the cultural emphasis on Riley, Reich, Glass, and Adams, there were many more than four minimalists, and a tremendous variety in the movement. And with the exception of yours truly, the first day’s speakers focused very hard indeed on the-music-formerly-known-as-minimalism, and, here in Wales, still so known. Maarten Beirens surprised everyone with protominimalist music from 1952 by the Belgian composer Karel Goyvaerts (1923-93), who had also just invented European serialism. Ann Glazer Niren treated us to ne’er-before-heard recordings of Terry Riley’s String Quartet of 1960 and String Trio of 1961, and William Lake analyzed In C with scrupulous thoroughness. Evan Jones gave us an encyclopedic tour of early Glass chord progressions – Mad Rush, Einstein, Modern Love Waltz, Another Look at Harmony, up through String Quartet No. 4 – and showed how Glass achieves strange tonal puns via incommensurable hamonic shifts with oddly-placed pivot tones. Jones called this “diatonic drift”; not a term I’ve heard Glass use, but I have heard him talk about this exact phenomenon, and it was good to see a real theorist tackle it detail. Even the fluffiest minimalism taken very seriously here.

So, so far, even if the composer names are old hat, the music has been indisputably hardcore. True to habit, the musicologists have taken the era up from its most exotic edge, and are examining its history piece by piece. That’s why the pop revisionsist view of Adams, Andriessen, and Gorecki as the quintessential minimalists is doomed; ultimately, critics listen to the musicologists, and the latter, taking no scrap of paper for granted, are getting it right. Of course, we do have a session on John Adams tomorrow (chaired by myself), and – what I’m looking forward to most – Sunday morning a session on postminimalism and totalism. David McIntire, a composer with whom I’ve corresponded regularly, is offering a paper: “Terminology and Meaning in a Post-Minimalist Style: The Case of Totalism.” Brazil’s Dmitri Cervo follows with “Minimalism and Post-minimalism: Necessary Distinctions.” And I had dinner with Marija Masnikosa from Belgrade, who did her master’s doctoral thesis on Serbian postminimalism, using my American music book as a primary reference. D’ya hear that? Serbian postminimalism. American music departments are still digging their toes in the hot sand trying to decide whether to allow Glass and Reich into the canon, and the Serbs have already sprung ahead to tackle the next movement. What the hell is wrong with American musical academia? Why did I have to come 3800 miles to this hard-to-reach outpost in Wales to hear diehard minimalism scholars nonchalantly express opinions, as though they were the merest common sense, that I get attacked for expressing at home? Why can Britain, Serbia, and Brazil embrace postminimalism and totalism, while U.S. musicians remain squeamish about “-isms”?

Whatever the reason, it’s a breath of fresh air being here among tough-minded, analytical academics who all think minimalist music is really, really neat. We were treated to a piano duo concert by Kate Ryder and David Appleton, who started off with Colin McPhee’s Balinese Ceremonial Music of 1936, a protominimalist essay if ever there was one, and included, among more predictable fare, Glass’s extremely obscure In Again, Our Again of 1968, Gavin Bryars’s My First Homage, and John Adams’s keyboard-smashing Hallelujah Junction. And as you can see below, there’s nothing minimal about our post-conference get-togethers.

Back table: Keith Potter, David McIntire, and my own graying eminence; front table, Jelena Novak, Marija Masnikosa, and fine Serbian minimalist composer Vladimir Tosic.

Enough said. Purchases so far (scores):

Sibelius: Voces Intimae

Busoni: Suite Campestre

Busoni: Berceuse Elegiaque (orchestral version)

Cage: 0’0″

John White: Piano Sonatas Nos. 53, 62, 65, 75, 78, 84, 86, 90, 91, 95, 96, 103, 110

Monteverdi: Messa III and Messa a 4 voci M XV, 59

Shostakovich: Symphony No. 8

Being en route to London yesterday, by the way, prevented me from noting Postclassic‘s fourth anniversary.

We have a winner! Richard made me realize the perfect term for the slow-changing music of La Monte Young, Charlemagne Palestine, Phill Niblock, early Reich and Glass, Eliane Radique, and so on, so obvious I didn’t even see it: the-music-formerly-known-as-minimalism! It’s so perfectly accurate, evocative, unmistakable, and even compresses a whole historical critique into one phrase.

Of course, the working title for my new book, formerly Music After Minimalism, is now Music After the-Music-Formerly-Known-As-Minimalism. I’m going to have a hell of a time getting it past a publisher, but hey: musicology is a cruel bitch-goddess.

UPDATE below.

Listen to this excerpt of minimalist music, and then tell me what kind of music this is.

I think I’ve made a mistake. I’ve often written that the most essential characteristic of minimalism was obvious surface structure, but I’ve realized that that’s not necessarily what makes me most feel that a piece is minimalist. Taking the plethora of recent advice that Democrats need to argue from the heart rather rely on rational discourse, I’m going to say, then, that what convinces me that a piece is minimalist is its low information content, the fact that what’s first noticeable about it is that less is going on than in conventional classical (or pop) music. A piece starts, and you pause expectantly for a certain number and frequency of syntactical units to tell you what’s going on, – and they don’t arrive. You can decide a priori that that’s unacceptable, declare yourself bored and the piece boring, and turn it off or leave. Or you can quiet yourself, lower your expectations, and hone your attention to the subtle, slow, long-term changes that some of us find fascinating to listen to once you let that music into your psyche. Minimalism, for me, was always a different kind of music, requiring (to misquote John Rockwell) a different kind of listening. It wasn’t for everybody. It acquired a cult following of unusually patient listeners. It was, and is, a different type of listening experience than the attention-holding narrative of conventional classical music.

I was on John Schaefer’s WNYC Soundcheck show yesterday with Times critic Steve Smith, and we discussed a little of this, but radio time flies by so quickly that you’re lucky if you can get 500 words, cut into five or six soundbites, into a half-hour show. The point is, as keeps coming up over and over again, most people no longer define minimalism the way I always have. They think of minimalism as connoting the orchestra music of Glass, Reich, and John Adams. The Death of Klinghoffer is, as everyone but me now knows, a minimalist opera, and what’s Strumming Music? Who’s heard of that? No one. So every time I make one of my quixotic attempts to limit the word to what it meant in the ’70s, I get a rash of “Let usage prevail!” comments.

Well, just so. Let usage prevail. The large, record-company-owning corporations have won, as they always do: they have redefined minimalism for the mass public. Let us prostrate ourselves before their infinite PR resources. Our musicology is no match for their press releases. I am nothing if not pragmatic. I would even volunteer to write the new Wikipedia article on the genre:

Minimalism: a rhythmic, wildly syncopated, rambunctious form of orchestral music with lots of repeated brass chords and propulsive percussion, usually tonal but sometimes atonal, and often breaking into 19th-century style Romantic melody; almost always found on a Nonesuch CD, but the only essential quality is that the composer’s last name must be Reich, Glass, Adams, or Andriessen….

Everybody OK with that? Fine, we can polish up the details later, but we’re all on the same page, and everyone should be happy.

However, one problem remains. Those of us who love that near-eventless, attention-compressing music I described in the first paragraph, need a name for it. We need to be able to refer to it, and by “it,” I mean the following specific repertoire:

Music of the 1960s and ’70s by

Terry Jennings

Dennis Johnson

Richard Maxfield

Pauline Oliveros

Steve Reich

Philip Glass

Barbara Benary

Julis Eastman

Jon Gibson; and

Music of that era and continuing up to the present time by

La Monte Young

Charlemagne Palestine

Harold Budd

Phill Niblock

Tom Johnson

Eliane Radigue

Tony Conrad

The co-optation of minimalism was, after all, to a considerable extent, a deliberate move to marginalize all that boring old drone music that the classical people never liked anyway and the musical academics were embarrassed by. You could sense their relief when John Adams and Louis Andriessen started funnelling those repeated notes into big orchestral gestures, and breaking into actual melody. “Oh, thank god,” all the classical mavens and music professors sighed in chorus, “we couldn’t take another minute of those endless repetitions, those drones moving by infinitessimal degrees. Let’s call this stuff minimalism, and hopefully everyone will forget about that old boring minimalism.” Even the title of Jon’s show yesterday – “The Maturing of Minimalism” – seemed to imply that the ’60s minimalism wasn’t the real stuff yet, that the real flowering of minimalism came in the Nonesuch orchestral music that is now so popular. But – the old boring minimalism was exactly what many of us loved and still love, thank you very much and keep yer damn mitts off our musical proclivities, and what some very important composers still produce.

What would chemists do, if the public, motivated by whatever bizarre fad, decided that any blue, flaky substance should now be called aluminum? Well, first the chemists would protest, then they’d stick to their guns for awhile and maintain a secondary, professional usage, and if public opinion refused to budge, they’d probably eventually let the public have their blessed flaky blue aluminum and come up with some new name for the actual 13th element in the periodic table. It sounds ludicrous, but it’s not too dissimilar to what happened to the word gay. We still need synonyms for cheerful and carefree, and no longer have a word that means exactly what gay used to mean. Nor do we any longer have a word to specify what the Theater of Eternal Music, Phill Niblock, and early Philip Glass had in common, without falsely implying syncopated brass chords and big Romantic melodies.

So help me figure out what to call the-style-formerly-known-as-minimalism. I’m tempted to suggest something arbitrary like Cogluotobusisletmesism, or Btfsplkism, some ungainly, difficult-to-parse term that the critics can’t pronounce nor the public remember, so they won’t appropriate it again and make it mean something else. After all, fans of that music, and musicologists who study it, have a right to refer to it. The concertgoing public does not have the privilege of deciding what music counts as Baroque, nor what a fugue or a cantus firmus is. Musical experts do that. But when it comes to minimalism – let usage prevail! So now we need a musicological term, a specialist term, for the repertoire I describe above with which the public is not allowed to tamper at will. The list I give is, arguably, not closed; other composers and works could fit the definition (Zoltan Jeney and early Michael Nyman and Gavin Bryars come to mind). But no one who can’t name a single Phill Niblock piece gets to argue which ones. We need a scholarly term such that, if you’re not an expert on the specific music denoted, you no more get to futz around with the definition than you get to redefine “quark” if you’re not a physicist.

For now, I’ll make do with an obvious back-formation, “hardcore minimalism.” But I’m not satisfed: I’d rather come up with a word as far dissociated from minimalism as Charlemagne Palestine’s drones are from Louis Andriessen’s bumptious brass climaxes. Steve Smith, on John Schaefer’s show, pointed out that Tom Johnson, in 1971, originally used “minimalism” to describe the conceptualist music of Alvin Lucier, and referred to Glass and Reich as “hypnotic music.” I don’t much care for that, since I don’t find the music hypnotizing. Maybe “compressed attention” music, or “slow change music.”

Once we effect this change of terminology, it will be evident that minimalism is a music I have no more particular interest in than I do in Ravel or Debussy or Shostakovich, which it greatly resembles. Hardcore minimalism, or compressed-attention music, or Cogluotobusisletmesism (if you like that), is music I care deeply about, listen to often, and continue to analyze, study, and write about. But minimalism is just another orchestral fad, a new wrinkle in neoromanticism. In fact, “minimalism” can go mean anything anyone wants it to mean: the Spanish Civil War can be minimalist, lovers can roll over after a hot session in bed and exclaim, “Wow!, that was really minimalist!”, the sentence “I have to minimalism a root canal next Tuesday” can be adjudged grammatically correct, since minimalism is apparently one of those contentless words that function as a Rorschach test, able to mean anything to anyone. Let usage prevail! But let’s come up with some ironclad musicology word, some word that will specifically and centrally denote the static, slowly-changing music of Young, Palestine, Niblock, Budd, Johnson, Radigue, Jennings, Conrad, and the ’60s and ’70s music of Reich, Glass, Benary, Eastman, and Gibson. Something besides “minimalism,” because who, in our wonderful world of strange and alternative and postclassical music, gives a shit about minimalism?

(I leave today to go attend the First International Minimalism Conference at the University of Wales at Bangor. Maybe some of the smart guys there can help me think of a new word.)

UPDATE: I just looked at the comments left to yesterday’s Soundcheck show, and liked this one from Downtown musician David Linton:

my particular generation of downtown musicians felt as early as 1980 that we were entering into a post minimal period…

in our current cultural phase it’s interesting to note that minimalism prevails as though this “post”phase had never happened…

i attribute this to a kind of perpetual cultural amnesia that occurs with every new generation (5 years) of young artists coming to ny in addition to the more obvious institutional cultural hegemony that has always been afforded the anointed biggies from the seventies

Also, Galen Brown repeats his distinction (which I had forgotten about) between “big-M Minimalism,” by which he means the original compressed attention kind, and “small-M minimalism,” by which he means the popular application of the term to Adams, Andriessen, and so on.

In the past when I’ve gone to England to teach and lecture, I lugged over about 70 pounds of scores in my suitcase. No more. I’ve got a scanner. The first sea change in my teaching methods came when I loaded 14,000 mp3s onto my external hard drive, and could now instantly play for classes any piece that occurred to me, without having to rummage through my CD collection. The second change is that I’m now loading PDFs of every minimalist, postminimalist, totalist, or microtonal score I would ever want to teach. (I even got major assistance in the scanning last week from Kerry O’Brien, an Indiana U. grad student who’s doing research in totalism, believe it or not. She’s a dynamite percussionist, and one of the few expert performers who did not switch to musicology because of an injury – she actually fell in love with the discipline. How strange is that? And how many percussionist-musicologists are there out there? It gives her Steve Reich papers an enviable authenticity.)

I had my first chance at trying out the PDFs at Northeastern last month. The hard-copy scores I used, I had to Xerox 20 copies, collate them, and continually tell the class what measure I was referring to. The PDFs that I could project on a screen needed no Xeroxing, killed no trees, and I could simply point to whatever I was referring to. In addition, for some of the fast-moving Nancarrow scores that need virtuoso page-turners, I could simply click the page turns myself, and, voilá!: no more students lost on the wrong page (or, at least, all of us on the same page). It was so much easier that I came home, bought a scanner, and swore I would never lug paper scores around again. (Actually, I lectured in February at a school in Florida where the computer-equipped classroom also had a projection machine that would shine a light on a hard copy score and project the image on a screen. That was fantastic, too. Can anyone tell me what those are called? And why Bard College doesn’t have one?)

Of course, in addition to the incredible postminimalist PDF library Kerry and I have amassed, there are the public domain scores at I’m Asleep.org, which I’ve already written about. So there you have your Beethoven sonatas and Rite of Spring, and yesterday I downloaded the complete Liber Usualis – which means I no longer have to choose and Xerox Gregorian chants for my Renaissance class, just flash the Liber on the screen and pick some out on the spur of the moment. The musicology world is getting a lot more convenient – and ecological.

UPDATE: And by the way, Postclassic Radio fans (or should that be singular?) – I’ve updated just over half the playlist since Monday, and since I’m taking my iPod From Hell (external hard drive) with me to England, I’ll try to keep uploading. You’ve been very, very patient too long.

UPDATE 2: Now if I could just digitize my clothing, so I could dial up PurpleShirt.fab and put it on, I’d have this traveling business down….

“I’m in the US mostly because it allows me to write the music I want. I feel the US are freer aesthetically, and also, politically (in music, that is).”

– from a note I received today from a European composer living in the U.S.

Here’s what’s shakin’. This Monday, from 2 to 3, I’ll appear on WNYC’s Soundcheck program along with Steve Smith from the Times. John Schafer’s interviewing us about that minimalism brouhaha that occasioned such an outpouring of comments recently, but since I think Steve and I see fairly eye-to-eye, I doubt that it will bring any new controversy. You never know. Sometimes I feel like Dick Deadeye in H.M.S. Pinafore, who is considered such a disreputable character that his most innocuous platitudes are reflexively greeted with horror and revulsion by the rest of the characters.

Tuesday the European half of my sabbatical begins. I fly to London and take a train to Bangor, Wales – apparently there are no airports in Wales – to participate in a minimalism conference sponsored by the University of Wales. My friend Keith Potter, author of Four Musical Minimalists, is making the train trip with me and giving the keynote address. My talk is oddly early in the event, given that I’m talking about the influence of phase-shifting on postminimalist music. Those of you who read me regularly will already have an idea what I’ll say and what examples I’ll be playing. And then I chair a panel about John Adams, no less. Bangor is a riverfront town of 17,000 souls whose only famous attraction seems to be the Menai bridge, built in 1826 as the first suspension bridge, and whose name I’ve known since childhood from a nonsense poem in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass:

I heard him then, for I had just

Completed my design

To keep the Menai Bridge from rust

By boiling it in wine.

Since I have to fly out of London anyway, I’m taking the opportunity to meander there for a couple of extra days, and re-explore one of my favorite cities.

September turned out to be a bad time to arrange European gigs, so I’m flying home for a couple of weeks, and thence to Copenhagen. The Times travel section recently ran a piece on tracking Soren Kierkegaard’s steps through Copenhagen, and since I was, during one of the more depressive tracts of my youth, a devout Kierkegaard fanatic, I’ve always wanted to do that, and I’m finally going to. September 26 I lecture on American music at the Royal Conservatory in Aarhus, Denmark, courtesy of the fine American expatriate composer Wayne Siegel, who teaches there. From there I head for Amsterdam in time to hear John Luther Adams’s music at an electric guitar festival. I give a concert of my music at the Karnatic Lab in Amsterdam October 9, then another in Hamburg on October 25. My piano concerto Sunken City premieres in Rotterdam October 30, then in Amsterdam the next day, and again on November 4, with the formidable pianist Geoffrey Douglas Madge accompanied by the Orkest de Volharding. Sometime in the middle of all this I plan to leave for Basel for a few days to do some Nancarrow research at the Sacher Foundation.

The last leg of my trip is back in England, where I lecture at the University of Liverpool on November 13 and at Goldsmiths College in London, where Keith teaches, on November 20. Other plans are pending. But for the next three months I’ll be blogging mostly from other other side of the Pond.

The tendency of composers to have too much time on their hands and not know what to do with themselves is an ongoing crisis. Two more have recently decided to deal with it in the traditional manner: blogging. American composer [oops! – Canadian, sorry] Matthew Whittall writes The Short Road to Nirvana from his post in Helsinki, and opened with an interesting anecdote about Debussy’s The Engulfed Cathedral. Miguel Frasconi’s Well-Weathered Music starts off, appropriately enough, with reminiscences of new music in the late 1970s that bring back all-too-familiar memories. They lean toward the minimalist/new-music side of things (though Whittall expresses fondness for Kaija Saariaho’s music, a taste shared by several of my friends that I haven’t been able to fathom), so maybe it won’t feel so lonely out here in Blogland.

I grew up attending the First Baptist Church of Dallas, the south’s largest Baptist Church, and the one of which Billy Graham was officially a member. Many of my peers there seemed to me the worst kind of religious hypocrites, and some were just ruffians stuffed into Sunday suits, but there was one kid named Robert Jeffress who was quiet, likable, humble, and genuinely nice, mature beyond his years. I didn’t run into him often, but he played the accordion precociously well, so we occasionally discussed our common interest in music. My mother informs me that Dr. Robert Jeffress, author of 16 books, has just been appointed pastor of First Baptist of Dallas. He looks astonishingly little changed.

UPDATE: On the other hand…. (And I had just finished reading Elmer Gantry, too.)

The papers blown off of the Adirondack chair were the first sign that something was amiss. A new nip was in the air, almost chilly. The mountains etched the horizon with a crisp, purple line that he hadn’t noticed in months. A sense of time passing settled slowly on him like dust stirred up from a long-neglected cabinet. Old enmities had passed; recent inequities were etched in stone with a certitude that no hand could revoke. He struggled to rid his mind of the remnants of insistent issues that now needed no longer ever be thought of again. But as more troubling thoughts cleared, it occurred to him that internet radio was still alive. How could it be possible? The pronouncements had been so dire. Yet that woman from Washington had hinted that there was never really any danger. Was it all a game, a distraction concocted by CEOs and political lobbyists to divert onlookers from the real crimes being committed, the money being siphoned from foreign governments, the restrictions being tightened on some form of expression no one was watching at the moment? Again, as so many times before, he chafed at his inability to see behind the curtain, his ignorance of the machinations of those expert outside his field, those who affected his future but were forever exempt from responsibility for it, hidden behind a veil of corporate secrecy.

No point in thinking about that now. The altered circumstances, however outside his control, dictated a certain responsibility. He made an effort to notice the stack of compact discs on his desk which, despite its steadily increasing height, had come to blend in with the rest of the furniture. Names that had flown by so fast as not to register now stood out with accusatory frankness. Slow Six? An ensemble of some kind, with compositions credited to one Christopher Tignor. Songs by pretty Molly Thompson, whom he hadn’t seen in years. An enormous piano work from 1977-78 by Lubomyr Melnick, titled simply KMH, was listed as a rerelease. Why had he not owned the vinyl original? No way to puzzle that out at the moment. A new Noah Creshevsky CD awaited. Emily Bezar’s “Angel’s Abacus,” with its Feldman-like minor sevenths, had been haunting his memory, from which he hoped to excise it by adding it to the mix. Kerry had recommended This Window Makes Me Feel by one John Supko, and he uploaded it almost absent-mindedly. And of course there was Gloria Coates’s Fifteenth Symphony, which had made such a riveting impression on him only days before. Art Jarvinen had sent him a CDR of Breaking the Chink, and there was a new Mary Ellen Childs album out too enticing to ignore. More difficult to fathom was the recording of intermission noises by Christopher DeLaurenti, the tall, shaved-headed Seattleite whom he had just run into at school. Names, names, each attached to a trail of memories, except for a few curious in their absence of evocations. There would doubtless be other names, many, many others, and beneath the shadow of the political charade, the work would continue.

But now the harsher noon-day light edging around the deck and through the sliding glass door prompted reflections that there remained alternate histories to write, additional ephemera to be entered into the record of events. He allowed his eyes to close for a moment, and, shaking off melancholy, returned to books still laying open from yesterday….