A student asks for recommendations for a violin piece (with or without piano) written in the last 15 years. Paul Dresher’s Double Ikat is a little too long in the tooth by this point, and I’m having trouble coming up with compelling, more recent examples. So I bring it to you. Personally, I’d be much more interested in something arguably postclassical than in the usual high-modernist glop, but I suppose anything post-1992 would fulfill the assignment.

UPDATE: Please, feel free to recommend your own works. I’m gonna keep talking about my music, go ahead and talk about yours.

[See update below] I’ve been neglecting PostClassic Radio, because it’s been difficult, with all the other work I need to be doing, to justify investing time in an enterprise that might be shut down soon. Here’s the message I received from Live 365 this week:

In answer to the top question on broadcasters’ minds: we have no plans to shut down on July 15th when the billions in per channel minimums and significantly higher rates come due, unless forced to by SoundExchange.

We believe Congress and the public share our outrage over the fundamental inequity in performance royalty rates. Why is it that terrestrial radio pays NO royalties and satellite and cable radio pay much lower royalties than Internet radio to SoundExchange? Many artists have also contacted us to voice opposition to new CRB rates that will decimate Internet radio and eliminate their chance to be heard. The momentum of public opinion and business sense is on our side and we plan to continue to fight for artists, webcasters and their audiences until a resolution is found.

In the meantime, let us assure you: webcasters covered under the Live365 SoundExchange license will not be responsible for any retroactive fees. Upon resolution of the new rates, Live365 will honor its obligation to provide advance notice of any change in pricing with the option for you to continue services or not, prior to imposition of any increases.

Awhile back, a Washington insider who seemed to know things told me that internet radio would almost certainly squeak through. Today, however, two days before the deadline for massive rate changes, things don’t look hopeful, but last-minute negotiations are keeping everyone in suspense; at least, everything is apparently not going to change Sunday as threatened. This next week I’m in Boston, teaching a summer course in American music for international students at Northeastern University. When I get back, if internet radio is still alive, I’ll work on a big playlist update.

UPDATE: There’s been a reprieve, and internet radio stations are allowed to continue at the old rates until some kind of compromise is worked out. I think the gist is, Nell’s still tied to the train track, but Dudley Doright has stopped the train, for now. My Washington informant knew this would happen.

I wonder if other there are other composers who have the same relation to tempo that I do. I sometimes struggle with the beginning of a piece until I get the tempo right. In recent months I’ve written sketches for a piece commissioned by the Seattle Chamber Players for next January. I wrote a passage at quarter-note = 88. Didn’t feel right. Wrote further passages at that tempo. All fell limp the next time I looked at them. Tried a new passage at 112. Even worse. Finally, today, I got an idea at quarter-note = 84 and suddenly wrote 100 seconds of music in an hour. 84 is a good tempo for me, and one I’ve used before: calm, unhurried, and yet with a little energy. Yet after I’ve written a piece, I generally give the performer(s) considerable leeway with tempo. In the case of The Day Revisited, though, I learned from experience that the piece only works at half-note = 50, which was the first tempo I’d marked – not a beat more or less.

On the other hand, for my Disklavier pieces I’ve gotten in the habit of accepting Sibelius’s default tempo of quarter-note = 100, and, since there are no performers to worry about, simply used quintuplets or septuplets or 13th-lets or whatever to get the speed I want.

I’ll never forget how at the first June in Buffalo festival, 1975, at dinner one night Morton Feldman talked about how young composers used to write everything at 60, but lately they had all started using 72. That was my first inkling that even a tempo could become a cliché. One of the great things about Feldman was that he could pick out clichés no one else would have recognized. I hope 84 isn’t becoming a fad.

1. A few years ago, Gloria Coates completed her 13th symphony, and in so doing became the most prolific female symphonist in history, one up on the obscure African-American Julia Perry (1924-79) of Kentucky. Yesterday, Gloria told me she has completed her Symphony No. 15, which ties her with Shostakovich. It will be available on Naxos in a few months. Gloria characteristically does a lot with long, slow string glissandos, often overlaid with tonal passages for a bizarre but gripping effect. I particularly recommend her Symphony No. 4, “Chiaroscuro.”

2. Really odd offerings continue to appear on the International Music Score Library Project. A pianist in Kansas has posted Sonatas Nos. 7 and 8 by Johann Nepomuk Hummel. It is enshrined in the literature that Hummel wrote only six piano sonatas, very important and impressive works: the fifth, in F-sharp minor, was considered the most difficult piano work ever written, and Beethoven is supposed to have written his Hammerklavier Sonata in competition with it. Grove Dictionary still lists only six Hummel sonatas, but apparently there are three earlier ones, werke ohne opus, which have been numbered 7, 8, and 9 as coming after his recognized ones – much as the three Bonn sonatas that Beethoven published when he was 12 are enigmatically listed as Nos. 33, 34, and 35 in certain complete editions of the Beethoven sonatas. Very curious. One of my favorite assigments in my “Evolution of the Sonata” class is to give students the first eight measures of Beethoven’s first Bonn sonata (without divulging the author) and have them write the remainder of an exposition, to see whether they can do as well as the prepubescent Beethoven did. Perhaps Hummel’s early sonatas will work as well.

IMSLP also offers some chamber music scores of the short-lived Hermann Goetz (1840-76), whom Bernard Shaw raved about as one of the greatest of 19th-century composers. I don’t quite agree, but I have found Goetz’s music as compelling, overall, as, say, Mendelssohn’s. And I’ve also enjoyed the opportunity to look through the two piano concerti (in four movements, like the Brahms No. 2) of the Swedish patriarch Wilhelm Stenhammar (1871-1927). They’re not very good. Stenhammar went through a tremendous style change later in life, and, studying Beethoven and Haydn in detail, became a neoclassicist. I am fond of his admittedly extremely conservative String Quartets Nos. 4 through 6, and I hope those will appear in due course. In any case, IMSLP offers an opportunity to study a much richer and more varied 19th century than one learns about in school.

3. I bought a scanner today, and can now upload as PDFs my scores that only exist in the old obsolete Encore notation program. Accordingly, my Desert Sonata is now available on my web site, where it will soon be joined by my early Disklavier studies, as well as Custer and Sitting Bull. I’m inspired to do this partly by IMSLP. My early scores are available from Frog Peak Music, but I love having 13,000 mp3s on my external hard drive, and I’m enjoying having PDF scores there as well. There’s something about being able to check out a PDF score online before going to the trouble of obtaining it, and I like giving people a chance to do that with my own music.

4. On a completely unrelated political note: There was a wonderfully telling moment in Sara Taylor’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee that doesn’t seem to have gotten much attention. She started out saying that, as a deputy assistant to the president, she “took an oath. And I take that oath to the president very seriously.” Senator Leahy was forced to point out to her that the oath she took was not to the president, but to the Constitution. She conceded her error. Doesn’t that just about sum up everything that’s been wrong with the Justice Department?

It may be worth noting that John S. Koppel, a civil appellate attorney with the Department of Justice since 1981, has published a satisfyingly scathing indictment of Bush’s Department of Justice out west where you might not run across it, in the Denver Post.

Forgive me for not blogging. I have little to say to the world at the moment, and, aside from the heinous political stuff in which you are as expert as I, the world doesn’t offer much to attract my attention. I am involved in the little ditzy administrative tasks of getting my music in order, and since I gather that 96 percent of you reading this are composers, you are, or have been, or will soon be, involved in the same species of tasks, and so there is little point in describing them. I acquired a PDF merger (a free one – PDFmergeX), and so am getting all of my multimovement works into single files, which will make them more convenient to download. Mike Maguire and I are redoing the electronic backgrounds to Custer and Sitting Bull, which ought to improve the sound quality immensely. I’m getting new or improved copies of scores printed up, and mailing them off. And I have program notes to write.

This last task is one that almost all composers seem to hate, but that I rather look forward to as a final bit of dessert after the feverish and anxious effort of writing the piece. I love writing about music, and I especially love writing about my own music. I am not, as I suppose I hardly need repeat, one of the predominant “The music should speak for itself!” confraternity to which most composers belong. The music should speak for itself, and I hope it will, eventually. Until then, even the most experienced listeners benefit from a little noodge as to what there is to listen for in a new work, until its style becomes so familiar that many people can hear it for themselves. Relationships that will become obvious on a third hearing may at least be sensed on a first if attention is drawn to them, creating better odds that there will be a third hearing. Nonverbal musicians greatly romanticize “pure” experience, but, except for perhaps the first five years of my life, I don’t believe I’ve ever had a “pure” experience. An artistic culture results not only from perceiving but from discussing what we perceive, putting it into context, comparing it with other experiences. A thousand “pure” experiences, never interpreted, never analyzed, never compared, would lead, it seems to me, to very little. I would not rather be a novelist than a composer, but I have always envied novelists and their world: since words are their medium, no one ever questions the appropriateness of writing about novels, and at great length. I consider music more like the novel in that respect than most people admit. No need to write in and disagree; I take it for granted that I am nearly alone, among composers, in my belief that words have much to contribute in making music digestible and memorable. In fact, perhaps it’s not so much that I have little to say to the world at the moment as that I am simply tired of being disagreed with.

In any case, I have written program notes for Sunken City, my piano concerto. I also, since there is scant chance that anyone else would try to perform the piece before its premiere in Amsterdam next October, release a PDF score. (Warning: don’t click unless you really want to deal with a 135-page PDF.) These aren’t the most literary notes I’ve ever written, but they explain some important things that happen in the piece, and since I have nothing else to offer at the moment, I offer these:

Sunken City (Concerto for Piano and Winds in Memoriam New Orleans) was a departure for me, whose direction was determined by the medium. Anthony Fiumara asked me for a work for piano and the Orkest de Volharding of Amsterdam. Being an American of postminimalist tendencies, I could have responded with a one-idea piece of continuous textural transformation, which would hardly have been outside my stylistic proclivities. But to write a slowly changing sound continuum for brass, reeds, and piano seems impossible; the piano will barely have space to be heard. The first requirement that imposed itself was that orchestra and piano would have to alternate, which led me to the dramatic shape of a true concerto. I’ve always wanted to write a piano concerto, but had always thought of strings, woodwinds, drums. I considered the few classical models for piano with brass, and was not impressed. (I am familiar with two wonderful concerti for piano and winds, Stravinsky’s and Kevin Volans’s; but both employ woodwinds, which I didn’t have available.)

The successful model for brass, reeds, and piano that came to mind was 1920s New Orleans jazz. At the same time, I had just been deeply touched by Spike Lee’s documentary When the Levees Broke, detailing the tragedy of the government-allowed destruction, and subsequent forced evacuation, of much of New Orleans. (My childhood was dotted with visits to southern Louisiana, where my mother grew up, and some of our oldest friends became Katrina evacuees.) In the documentary, officials from New Orleans visit Amsterdam to see how levees are supposed to be built. So there was my Amsterdam connection, dovetailing with the New Orleans jazz, and I acquiesced to my subject matter as irresistible. The title Sunken City, I thought, might draw a link between Amsterdam and New Orleans – though, hopefully, never with similarly catastrophic connotations.

The first movement is pure fun, the Mardi Gras New Orleans of my imagination, a stylized portrait of the energy level and harmonic language of the 1920s music of Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, and Bix Beiderbeck. There are two simple main themes, or perhaps only motives, used in the piece: an alternation of two notes a step apart (sometimes expanded to a third, as in the opening), and a rhythmically irregular repetition of a single note. Only one actual quotation appears in the first movement, a re-voiced chord progression from Frankie Trumbauer’s song “Jubilee.” Premonitions of the tragedy cloud the coda, which ends in a hasty retreat. The much longer second movement is a kind of interrupted chaconne, based on its opening 17 chords (spelling out the repeated-note theme). Successive variations suggest stages of grief, outrage, nostalgia, and acceptance, but finally the piano drifts into Jelly Roll Morton’s “Dead Man Blues” (or rather, its chord changes, with some abstracted bits of the tune), which spreads into the orchestra. The last few minutes return to the chaconne chords, no longer in strict order. The single pitch that runs through all 17 chords is A; the “Dead Man Blues” passages are in B-flat, and the major seventh A above B-flat major provides the movement’s rare moments of solace.

The obvious model for a two-movement work with a vastly larger second movement, of course, is Beethoven’s Op. 111 (also Mahler’s Eighth Symphony). With Beethoven in mind, I had planned to suggest some sort of transcendental acceptance, but as a friend [John Shaw of Utopian Turtletop] reminded me, there can be no acceptance of what happened in New Orleans; not the natural tragedy, which was so foreseeable (and actually didn’t happen, since Hurricane Katrina downgraded into merely a level 3 storm before reaching the shore), but the unforgivable political tragedy: the levees never built to last in the first place, the uncaring abandonment of the population to heat, thirst, and death by drowning, the politicized gutting of government agencies meant to respond to disasters, the turning back at gunpoint of honest citizens trying to escape the city by walking over bridges. My friend was right, and the piece ends as it must, in bitter inconclusiveness.

Awhile back my Australian composer friend Andrian Pertout – I should say, one of my multitudinous Australian composer friends – e-mailed me a font for Ben Johnston’s microtonal pitch notation. I’m not very good at this kind of technological challenge, and we had been down this road before, so I filed it away to deal with later. But being in between compositions this week and without any particular idea in my head, I tried it out and got it to work! What this means is that now, for the first time, I can notate my microtonal music on the computer with the correct notation. Until now, all my microtonal pieces have had to be hand-written scores, or else with some jerry-rigged notation showing cents sharp or flat, and so on. But I got inspired – or rather, remained uninspired, and thus in need of some mind-numbing busywork project – and renotated my piece The Day Revisited in Ben’s beautiful notation. I’m very excited about it.

It took me something like 14 hours to place all the accidentals in a 13-minute quintet. You can see a sample here:

And if you want, you can download the entire score here. The little sevens in Ben’s notation lower notes to make them 7th harmonics, and the upside-down sevens raise them the same amount. The upward arrows (which I hope you can see at least on the PDF; they’re undeniably faint here) raise a pitch a quarter-tone to make it an 11th harmonic, and down-arrows lower the same amount. The pluses correct for the syntonic comma, and if that’s Greek to you, well, sonny, you’ll understand when you get older. But enough about that. The important thing is that now I have a downloadable copy of The Day Revisited which, even if you don’t understand the notation, reveals much more about how the piece works than the old cents-sharp-or-flat score does. And if it took 14 hours, that’s a shorter job, and a less exhausting one, than it would have been to copy the score by hand, which I once assayed to do and gave up.

Andrian uses Finale; I use Sibelius. (O when, o when, will these Finale users see the light and bend to the inevitable?) He says the font is more convenient in Finale, where it can be programmed to punch in next to a note like a regular accidental. In Sibelius, I had to treat it like text (apple-T) and painstakingly drag each accidental next to the note. But I’m impressed with the way it looks, at least on my print-out; I’d be curious to hear others’ results. He’s not quite ready to go public with the font yet. Meanwhile, a recording of The Day Revisited, which will be released in September on my CD Private Dances from New Albion, is still on my web site for now, where you can listen to it here and compare it with the score, if that kind of thing appeals to you. I think, and have been told, that it’s my most ear-opening microtonal work yet.

I fantasize that, on my deathbed, someone is going to run in with the news that a new software has been developed that will not only notate Ben’s pitch notation with seamless ease, but play it back in incredible acoustic fidelity. Someone like Alex Ross, or Michael Gordon, or one of those guys (they’ll all be there) will turn to me and jeer, “Seems you were born at precisely the wrong time, Gann: late enough to find just intonation irresistible, but too early to find it feasible!” The pained expression with which I depart this vale of tears will have nothing to do with my final illness, I assure you.

I’m late with this, having regressed through space and time (lifetime-wise) for a small home-town vacation in Dallas. But every Sunday, wherever I am, I click on the Times music section with a pessimistic sigh expressing the unlikelihood of their ever mentioning any music that might actually interest me. And this week I was encouraged by Daniel J. Wakin’s and John Schwartz’s article about composer Joseph Bertolozzi, who is writing a piece to be performed, percussively, on the Mid-Hudson Bridge in Poughkeepsie. This looks like the kind of crazy, creative, innovatively public new-music project that composers used to pursue in the halcyon days of the New Music America festival: electronic sounds on the subways, music in the form of a baseball game, singers and instrumentalists drifting on boats, and like that. I’m thrilled to see Mr. Bertolozzi (to refer to him Times-style) pursuing it, and I look forward to driving down to hear his piece. What’s less gratifying is that this kind of creativity has so receded from our musical life that the authors treat it as whackily out of the ordinary (“bizarre,” “quixotic,” actually playing the bridge). Back in the old days, before Reagan somehow made the entire world conservative, using a bridge as a musical instrument – however newsworthy – would have hardly raised eyebrows.

I also failed to bring timely attention to Dennis Bathory-Kitsz’s very impressive article in New Music Box about the hyperrealist music of Noah Creshevsky: hyperrealism being defined as “an electroacoustic musical language constructed from sounds that are found in our shared environment, handled in ways that are somehow exaggerated or excessive.” Dennis offers us a depth of aesthetic thought, about a very good composer, that we rarely encounter in any medium these days.

Composer Adam Baratz, whom I’ve long corresponded with via Sequenza 21, and finally met this last month, has alerted me to two online texts well worth reading. One is the speech given by Peter Garland at the 1997 Henry Cowell centennial conference, which is posted at Other Minds. The passage in question is one in which Peter talks about Cowell’s early piano pieces, and in which he, in one fell swoop, justifies even Cowell’s simpler works as radical, outlines the philosophy underlying Peter’s own gorgeous music, and demonstrates the derivation of his aesthetic from Cowell’s. Of the early piano pieces, he says,

I think their simplicity is their strength, and the reason for their continued freshness. In this regard they share something with modern-day pop songs, in that relatively little information is conveyed, so that communication is immediate and right there on the surface. Many of the pieces have very simple, modal melodies, so the harmonic language is likewise very basic. I don’t really take Cowell’s justification of the tone cluster as the incorporation of the major and minor seconds into our harmonic/ melodic language along some sort of musical evolutionary line too seriously. Okay — sure, fine. What blows me away about these pieces is that by compressing the interval relationships so tightly, they virtually cease to exist as such. So you are sidestepping the harmonic implications of the concept of interval, and what you are left with is: pure RESONANCE. That is the glory, the originality, the freshness of these pieces. By reducing melody and harmony to a background function, that of the simplest framework possible, one is affirming music not so much as a question of relationships, but rather of pure sounding and resonance. That is very radical, to me.
One does not need to use tone clusters necessarily to achieve this effect. By severely limiting melodic and harmonic movement and by emphasis on repetition, the same effect can be achieved.

(Adam uses this as a personal motto for his own music.) I was present for the speech, but didn’t remember this resounding passage. All I remember is that for 30 minutes Peter harangued us that none of us understood the real Henry Cowell – and that afterward we gave him a rousing standing ovation of several minutes’ duration.

The other text just appeared this week in The New Republic, David Hadju’s “The Breathtakingly Bad John Zorn,” and as many of us don’t subscribe to that journal, someone has finally posted the piece here. Rather than live up to its ferocious title, I find the piece rather even-handed, and I must say I find its conclusion about his music well-put:

Zorn is an exceptional artist, without question, because he prizes and seeks exceptionalism above all. This is not to say that he is exceptionally good at his art. What he is good at–so very good as to suggest a kind of genius–is being exceptional. Unfortunately, uniqueness is not an aesthetic value; it is a term of classification. To say that Zorn is one of a kind, as he certainly is, is to ignore the larger matters of his nature as an artist and, more significantly, the nature of his work, much of which is thin and gimmicky, and some of which is elementally corrupt.

Through his fiercely individualistic modes of working, Zorn deters attention to the work itself. He is obsessed with processes and systems, and he is often cavalier about their results….

The first music I heard by Zorn was Archery, in 1981, which sounded to me like Mauricio Kagel – whom I later learned had been an early influence on Zorn. The second was The Big Gundown, which appeared on Nonesuch in 1986, and which I found clever, genre-busting, and attractive. I’ve been waiting 21 years to hear something else of his I liked nearly as well.

I’ve never succeeded in getting my music on NPR, but I now have a relative who has. My brother-in-law Tim Cook has a CD of his harmonica playing, Lucy is the Guy with Diamonds, up on NPR’s Open Mic site. For the last few years Tim’s been living in northern Thailand at a Buddhist monastery, playing harmonica for the monks. (In Thailand, I could imagine that the line “Lucy is the Guy with Diamonds” might be more than just a Beatles parody.) Soon after Tim disappeared into the jungle – all we’d heard was that he’d headed for Thailand – the country was hit by the big Tsunami of December 26, 2004. No one heard from Tim for three months. I was scouring Thai-language web sites for names of known victims, and found two Tim Cooks, one from Australia, one from Austria. Finally, Tim phoned home, said, yeah, he was fine, just playing harmonica for the monks. You can listen to what the monks hear on NPR.

Though he never made his living as a musician, Tim was the clarinetist for whom I wrote my clarinet piece Dakota Moon and my clarinet quintet arrangement of Grieg’s Wedding Day at Troldhaugen – played at my wedding, and never used since. Anyone wants a copy, I’ll be happy to send score and parts.

Art Jarvinen, whose rhythmic intricacies are second to those of no one I write about, offers a different genealogy for how he came to metametric complexities. In ninth grade (circa 1971) he discovered Captain Beefheart & the Magic Band’s then-brand-new album Lick My Decals Off, Baby, which he found, as he puts it, thoroughly “post-minimal/totalist, with the crunch that was supposedly added to the prettier pattern/phase things of Reich et al by my generation of composers.” As evidence he sends an mp3 of the song “I Wanna Find A Woman That’ll Hold My Big Toe Till I Have To Go,” which you can listen to by clicking the link. Art didn’t hear of Steve Reich till he got into college, and never heard the word phasing until his senior year, 1978, when percussionist Jan Williams lectured on the topic. By then, the metametric idea had already long been sown in him, via Captain Beefheart.

The idea of different-length loops running at the same time and going out of phase with each other, which I wrote about in the Totalistically Tenney post, is one I’ve been working with for more than three decades. It would be, if anyone knew much about my music, the idea with which I am most associated. I first used it in 1975 in Satie, my Opus 1, so to speak (here the loops are 11 against 19 against 6, as measured in 8th-notes, and the upper lines use a note-permutation technique that I later learned Jon Gibson and Barbara Benary were using as well):

and most recently in Sunken City, the piano concerto I just completed (with indicated loops of 7, 5, 13, 11, 9, and 21 quarter-notes):

In between it’s been the basis of perhaps half the pieces I’ve written, and the most characteristic half at that. Most people I mention my piano concerto to ask me if I retuned the piano. I guess everyone associates me with microtonality, but only about a third of my music is microtonal, including almost none of the acoustic music, and rhythm has always been more crucial to my music than pitch. I became electrified by microtones in 1984, but my fascination with polytempo goes back to 1969, the year I discovered Three Places in New England, and I have rarely written a piece in which the primary interest wasn’t rhythmic.

And so much of my music uses repeated phrases of different lengths, played at the same time. The question is, what does it do for me? And even before that, what do I call the idea? I sometimes refer to my “nonsynchronous simultaneous loops,” which is a horrific phrase; no antibiotic has so off-putting a moniker. I wish someone would come up with a name for my particular -ism, but I am reluctant to do so myself, even though I am far from being the only person to widely explore the idea. In any case, out-of-sync-loopism is not an inherently rewarding device. Unlike the gradual phase-shifting Reich discovered, it does not immediately arrest the ear. Unlike the 12-tone row, it does not offer any theoretical guarantee of deep underlying unity. In fact, it’s a difficult idea to make work. As you can see from the first example, Satie, it’s pretty easy to do if you want to float around in an unresolving, unchanging, pandiatonic cloud, which was the first solution I came up with. That much is easy, but it didn’t satisfy me for long.

The idea of out-of-sync loops has many roots, all of them (so far as I know), American, although it would probably be possible to cherry-pick examples from The Rite of Spring. Henry Cowell implies the device in New Musical Resources, and momentary examples are common in Ives. Nancarrow’s early music bristles with the device, especially Studies Nos. 3, 5, and 9; but I was already using it in 1975, and heard none of Nancarrow’s music until the New World recording came out in 1976. The other root for the technique is easy to overlook: it is John Cage, for if you start a couple of loops repeating against each other, and agree in advance to accept whatever unforeseen clashes and unisons arithmetically result, that’s much like accepting the results of a chance process. And it was originally a strong interest in Cage that made me willing to repeat a 31-beat melody against a 43-beat melody and be willing to accept whatever dissonances and consonances would eventually arise from their relatively unforeseeable combinations.

And so I’ve worked with the idea, and worked with it, and worked with it, and some of the attempts have been disastrous, others merely dull, and a few glorious. Blake’s inspiring line, “If the fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise,” has always been my motto, and I have exhibited a stubborn Scorpio persistance in my faith in this device that the consequences alone would never have justified. Set a bunch of repeating loops going, and certain uninteresting eventualities are virtually guaranteed. Take a loop of 11 beats against one of 13: in 143 beats they will have cycled through every possible combination, and unless you’ve calculated shrewdly, some of the results are bound to be awkward or redundant. In addition, the music is guaranteed to remain fairly static: the device generates ever-new combinations for awhile, especially if you have enough lines going, but the component materials themselves never change. A lot of the effect depends on what numbers you pick. Back in the ’80s, I leaned on the Cagean aspect of the idea, with loops of 103 beats against 173 against 211 (all prime, of course), so that truly unplanned combinations would result. More recently, I use smaller numbers to create a more audibly pulsing texture, and play free and loose with harmonic alterations to ensure more surface interest.

Still, between the Scylla of unpredictable collisions and the Charybdis of predictably unvarying content, the out-of-sync loop device would seem to harbor more pitfalls than advantages. I have to ask myself, from time to time, why I keep trying to make it work; and I answer myself here, not only in the quest for self-knowledge, but because I’m giving a paper on this subject at a minimalism conference at the end of August, and I need to be able to explain not only why I but why other composers have been so fascinated by this problematic paradigm.

Number 1: it relates to some vague idea we all have of the medieval Music of the Spheres. Watching the 19-year cycle of the moon’s orbit go out of phase with our revolution around the sun is a primordial human experience: too slow to observe on a weekly basis, but crucial for agriculture and calendar-making. The visible planets Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter also exhibit phasing relationships against the background of the stars, and the cycles of those planets (along with the invisible orbits of Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto) connect the nonsynchronous-looping idea with astrology. So looping at different rates has a deep philosophical connection with our experience of the moon and other planets. Certainly some of my interest in the idea was encouraged by all the grad-school work I did in medieval music, in which the Music of the Spheres was a potent theoretical paradigm.

Number 2: Looping segments of different lengths is one way to create a static musical texture without allowing any literal repetition. A couple of my pieces, like Windows to Infinity (1988) and Cosmic Boogie-Woogie (2000-1) employ the idea mechanically, and thus would eventually begin repeating literally if played for thousands of years. I am not much interested in literal repetition, but I am very partial to pieces that never stray from their opening premises. In some pieces I have learned how to use lines that inflect the harmony chromatically, so that the confluence of loops doesn’t limit me to a static pandiatonicism. My favorite such passage is one in plain quarter-notes from Time Does Not Exist (2001) (with loops of 13 against 19 against 23):

Number 3: It’s a way to suggest the idea of different tempos at the same time in an ensemble context without actually asking people to play at different tempos. In the early ’80s I was writing pieces (Long Night being about the only successful one) in which performers watched silent, blinking metronomes to play repeating phrases at different tempos. And of course, several of my Disklavier pieces, most notably Unquiet Night, use the idea with actual polytempos.

Number 4: It allows for a feeling of pulse, but destroys any overriding sense of regular meter. There is a vague sense of melodies, high notes, rhythmic motives, recurring; but since each line recurs at a different place with respect to the others at every repetition, there is a non-metric wash to the sound that, when it really works, I find rather ecstatically trancelike.

Number 5: Morton Feldman was inspired by the mobiles of Alexander Calder to write pieces in which various repeating motives float by one another in continually changing temporal relationships. Why Patterns? is a particularly clear example. As far as I know, all such instances in Feldman’s music allow the players to play at their own rate, unsynchronized, so that exact relationships among the repeating figures are, in a detailed sense, unpredictable. Using repeating loops in a synchronized, metric context allows one greater control over the resulting relationships. There is, of course, no strong reason to maintain a mechanical rate of repetition, and in recent years I have sometimes only approximated the effect, conveniently avoiding unwanted clashes.

For me, these are potent philosophical, psychological, practical, and perceptual reasons to continue trying to make the idea work. It has often not worked, and (like Cage with his chance processes) I have often had to revise and revise until I liked the results. One of my best successes, I think, is in the last movement of Transcendental Sonnets, in which the entire orchestral texture (except for the climax about 3/4 of the way through) is pervaded by nonsynchronous loops, filtered through periodic changes in harmony; you can hear the result here. Every few years I seem to make some breakthrough to a more effective use of the idea. Out-of-phase loops can also be heard in Mikel Rouse’s songs of the 1990s, and in Michael Gordon’s pieces of the same period, like Yo Shakespeare (1993) and Trance (1995); and one can, of course, find similar ideas – usually with only the rhythms looped, and not the pitches – in the musics of John Luther Adams, Art Jarvinen, Joshua Fried, Diana Meckley, Larry Polansky, Evan Ziporyn, Eve Beglarian, Rhys Chatham, Glenn Branca, and others. I’m afraid I’m probably fated to keep working with the technique. It’s like the speck of dirt that gets into an oyster, irritating him until he builds a pearl around it.

I promised you awhile back that I would let you know when M.C. Maguire’s CD Meta-Conspiracy appeared on Tzadik, and I’m a couple of weeks late. It contains his piano “concerto” Short History of Lounge and his guitar “concerto” Got That Crazy Latin/Metal Feelin’, both resplendently recorded. I put “concerto” in quotes, because these are pieces for solo instrument and envelopingly noisy electronic soundfiles. Compared to Maguire, Berg was a doodling improviser: these are stunningly complex works, built along the lines of astonishingly intricate tempo and tonal systems that govern most of the details. But they don’t sound like that, for fragments of pop song weave in and out, and rock-style guitar riffs, and computer-voice messages, and everything but samples of the kitchen sink. I described the pieces better in my original post, and, as promised, I’m deleting Short History from my web site so as not to cut into Mike’s (and Zorn’s) sales. But it’s one of the most astonishing CDs I’ve ever heard, not intended for the faint-hearted, and if you listen often and closely, you’ll hear tempo and collage effects you’ve never heard before.