I am going to be the composer-in-residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts next February 19 through March 11, down in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. (February and March in Florida, can you imagine? I saw the location and accepted before I knew what it was they wanted me to do.) Composers are invited to apply to come hang out with me and be Associate Artists, meeting for at least two hours a day. The rest of the time, we’ll work on our own projects; I’ll be writing a Concerto for Piano and Winds commissioned by pianist Geoffrey Madge and the Orkest de Volharding. Poet Marie Ponsot and architect Steve Badanes are the other artists who’ll be in residence. The application deadline is Ives’s birthday, October 20. I am told by a former Associate that it’s a good idea to advertise this on my blog, to get the word out so people apply. You can read all about my ideas for the residency here, frequently asked questions here, and more general stuff about the Atlantic Center for the Arts here. If you’re reading my blog, you know what I’m all about, and did I mention it’s February in Florida? I’d apply even if I didn’t like my music.

I am proud to have been among the 17% of Democrats who voted in New York State today for Jonathan Tasini for U.S. senator – someone who did not support the invasion of Iraq nor has ever advocated an anti-flag-burning amendment.

Good lord, what a superb crop of comments my last post elicited! I seem to have stumbled on a topic – the mandates of “historical progress” – that many composers think about a lot and rarely get to discuss. My readers have outdone themselves, most beyond my capacity to improve on with further comment, notably Galen Brown’s points about film music. But I’ll respond to a few.

Matthew Guerrieri (whose thoughtful blog is worth checking out) pinpoints a dilemma that often has me dancing around in circles:

It’s not so much the choice of vocabulary (out of the composers I went to school with, I can only think of one who wrote in a classic mid-century serialist style; the rest of us were too in love with John Williams to ever give up tonal centers) as the attitude among a lot of student composers that they simply don’t need to know anything about non-tonal music that I find ridiculous. If you already think you know everything you need to know, what are you doing in school? And I’m deeply skeptical of any composer who isn’t curious about the inner workings of every single piece he or she comes in contact with–and who doesn’t constantly re-listen, and reassess, the entire repertoire. (If I had settled on my 19-year-old opinions, I would like neither Brahms, Barraque, or soul music.)

It’s a big problem for me: at one point I rejected the premises of serialist and related music, but it was tremendously important in my development, and I still love a lot of it. So how do you teach a body of music that you’ve rejected as a creative artist, but still feel your students need to encounter and learn to understand, especially when the music exhibits a difficulty that raises automatic resistance in most of them, and seems so irrelevant to their prior interests?

This morning I went to Patelson’s Music in New York and bought the score to the fifth movement of Boulez’s Pli selon pli – for $100, which means I now own scores to four of the five movements, at considerable financial commitment – along with Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony, Wuorinen’s Piano Sonata, and Ligeti’s Continuum (not one of my favorites, but only ten bucks and a great teaching piece). Though I criticize a lot of this music, you can’t say my attitude is unaffectionate, let alone unknowledgeable. It bugs me when I don’t know how a piece works, or don’t understand why it was written, and I study the music that perplexes me. I want my students to learn to do the same. I teach lots of serialist music, and present it as enthusiastically as I can, though I make it clear that, as with any body of music, there is a wide range of quality. I love Babbitt’s Philomel, sort of like his Canonical Form, and don’t care for Sextets. Nono’s Contrappunto Dialettico alla Mente is fantastic, but Il Canto Sospeso leaves me cold. Stockhausen’s Mantra is terrific, and I enjoy Kontrapunkte, but I wouldn’t bother playing the first four Klavierstücke. The first two movements of Carter’s Sonata for Flute, Oboe, Cello, and Harspichord are lodged in my heart, but his Variations for Orchestra seems empty and clichéd.

Ultimately, I believe it’s high time to treat this music like any other historical repertoire. My students need to learn all the subtleties of sonata form, too, though Schumann and Brahms are difficult to interest them in. The difference between me and some of my colleagues is that I immerse them in the music – and then don’t bother them about whether they want to apply anything they’ve learned from it to their own music. As trained musicians they have to understand why it was important to write this music, but as artists, they are free to ignore not only it, but all “historical progress,” and anything else that doesn’t touch them deeply. Still, the question, “Well, if this music is so freakin’ wonderful, why doesn’t your music resemble it in any way?” – can be difficult to evade.

Guerrieri adds:

I always get my best ideas when I’m sitting through a piece I don’t like: I start to think of all the sounds I’d rather be hearing, and the imagination takes off. I know at least a couple colleagues who have had the same experience. Are we the only ones?

Absolutely not. I find nothing more inspiring than sitting in a concert and listening to bad music. As a critic-composer, I’ve started some of my best pieces while listening to music that bored or disgusted me. Often when it looked like I was taking copious notes, I was actually drawing staves in my little notebook and sketching out chords and melodies in a burst of anti-cliché inspiration. The opportunity to hear lousy music live is greatly underrated.

The always sincere John Shaw of Utopian Turtletop confesses:

I’m uncomfortable with the equation of aesthetic esotericism and political conservatism.

There’s nothing “elitist” about esoteric interests. But feeling bitter that “the masses” don’t share your esoteric interests does reflect — or lead one to — an elitist attitude.

I will have to ponder for a while, uncomfortably, why Aaron Copland may have felt that esoteric aesthetics were akin to political conservatism, and why he may have been justified at that time.

Personally, I’m uncomfortable with the fact that so many of these guys are politically liberal, yet manifest such authoritarian views in their music, or at least in the rhetoric with which they surround it. If a composer is fascinated by esoteric musical goals, but humbly realizes that his perceptions lie outside the range of the average listener, that strikes me as a perfectly reasonable attitude. That seems true of many of the best “advanced” composers: Nancarrow, Scelsi, Sorabji, even Partch. But the serialists, and the New Complexity guys who inherited their hubris, often sound like the musical equivalent of Donald Rumsfeld: “We’re the experts, we know what’s best, so just shut up and take what we give you, and if you’re smart you’ll learn to appreciate the bold new world we’ve created for you.” And that bold new world, whether Rumsfeld’s or Wuorinen’s, is usually a hell based on theories that they’ve done a great job of rationalizing for themselves, but that are based on self-delusions that most people have too much common sense to accept. Given the assumption that their political views are sincere (though I’ve been told that Wuorinen and Babbitt express horribly right-wing opinions in private), I can’t imagine how they reconcile that for themselves, or even how they look themselves in the mirror each morning. It’s true, too, of not only the serialists (nearly extinct at this point, after all), but of my immediate colleagues who insist that their students use the proper modicum of “20th-century-sounding” dissonance, atonality, and pitch complexity whether it expresses what they want to say or not.

Finally, Ryan Howard asks:

I’m curious what you make of Charles Rosen’s comments (in Piano Notes) of what he terms “neotonal” music. Rosen seems to advance the argument that the gradual move toward equal temperament destroyed one of the fundamental elements of 18th century tonality–the directionality of modulation in either the sharp or flat direction–and that “neotonal” music, consequently, can provide only a “hollow simulacrum” of 18th or 19th century tonality, in which classical tonal structures are “either abandoned or given a simplistic form which does not recognize the emotional intensity of full triadic tonality.”

Unlike some of Rosen’s comments about 20th-century music, I think this is a really profound point, and one that many microtonalists have made in one way or another as well. Lou Harrison liked to say that 12-tone music was the only style that 12-tone equal temperament supports. I myself gravitated toward microtonality partly because I was so interested in minimalism, and I always get a gnawing feeling that a lot of Reich’s and other minimalist music (Glass’s Music in Twelve Parts, for instance) would sound so much better in meantone or just intonation. Those of us not attracted to writing strictly atonal music confront an unconscious conflict, I believe, in the fact that the conventional tuning we use is at odds with the underlying meaning of the harmonies we use. My non-microtonal music (which is most of it) has been influenced to some extent by my work in just intonation, but not as pervasively as I’d like. When writing piano music, for instance, I often revert to a considerable amount of half-step clashes because simple harmonies just don’t sound that good on a modern piano. It’s a problem – one my teacher Ben Johnston feels is well-nigh insurmountable until we start moving away from the bland out-of-tuneness of modern 12-pitch tuning.

Thanks to all for a fascinating dialogue.

The other day on New Music Box some guy, a young guy I presumed, characterized composers who write tonal music as having ignored all the progress made in the 20th century. That was certainly the kneejerk complaint my old-fart college professors were making in 1975 when minimalism first reared its diatonic head. It didn’t take too many years for the charge to get laughed out of court, so I’m always surprised to hear of someone still learning it in school now – like those Japanese soldiers stranded on desert islands who went months without hearing that World War II had ended.

The new course I’m teaching that I wrote about recently is titled “Progress Versus Populism in 20th-Century Music.” It describes classical and postclassical music since 1913 as racked between two contradictory convictions. One is the idea that music should continually increase in subtlety and sophistication, each new generation learning everything that came before and moving continually forward in a linear evolution. The other is the idea that music not understandable by untrained listeners is elitist and therefore politically suspect; that by appealing only to the super-educated it marginalizes itself and becomes safe, soaking up cultural resources without doing anything to break down the advantages that the elites – financial, corporate, cultural, and otherwise – have over the common man.

Notice that these two convictions do not directly contradict each other. The belief that music should continally become more subtle and complex – though where that “should” acquires its moral force is difficult to ascertain – does not deny the proposition that complex music removes itself from the sphere of political action. One can believe that music should remove itself from political action. But the way I’m characterizing the first two thirds of the century is that, for those decades, the contradiction seemed unresolvable. In 1933 – which, as a historian, I see as the year of the century’s most abrupt and diametrical change in musical attitudes, at least in America, the year that the repercussions of the stock market crash began to affect American lives in a widespread way – the idea of writing complex, dissonant, increasingly shocking music became about as totally discredited as an aesthetic attitude can become. It became “self-indulgent.” Every American composer who continued writing in the Depression simplified his or her style to reach out to the masses, starting with Copland’s El Salon Mexico. Some of the composers most committed to modernity, like Crawford, Rudhyar, Varèse, and Arthur Berger, temporarily ceased composing. Others, like Cowell, Antheil, and John Becker, felt forced to switch to an undistinguished conservatism. Those who managed to simplify their styles without weakening their music (or who were already writing simple music anyway), like Copland, Thomson, Barber, and Harris, took over the lead. Interestingly, Soviet composers of the same era had the exact same change forced on them by governmental fiat. Later, after the next war led to an era of financial prosperity, between 1948 and 1960, a tremendous countercharge swung the pendulum back toward complexity and increasing sophistication, in both America and Europe.

In any case, it seemed a foregone conclusion in those post-1920s decades that one could not be both politically and musically progressive. One either believed in participating publicly in musical life by writing music for the masses or in retreating from public presence by writing the most sophisticated music possible and hoping that society would eventually catch up. Political convictions and musical aspirations became extremely difficult to reconcile.

Around 1960, however, an interesting new possibility seemed to open up – at least that’s the way a lot of composers I know saw it. Minimalism, at least once its early, noisy, austere phase was over (by 1967), was certainly a move toward widespread understandability. It also made claims in terms of musical progressivism. The “metamusic” in those early Steve Reich pieces began to elicit subtle new listening modes not known before. Process pieces by Philip Glass and gradually retuning continua by Phill Niblock stretched musical perception – just as serialism had stretched musical perception, though in a different direction, one not closed off to the lay listener. Many composers, like this guy at New Music Box, denied that returning to pitch simplicity in any respect constituted a perceptual stretch. I remember a friend saying circa 1974 that he liked what Reich was doing in Piano Phase, but wished he had used more dissonant pitch sequences to make the point. For many of us, however, that phase of minimalism from 1967 to 1979 created a whole new perception of how music could be progressive and increasingly sophisticated without being elitist. Then Glass wrote Satyagraha and Reich wrote Desert Music, and those who saw minimalism as musically regressive seemed, for awhile, to have won their point.

But the seed had already been sown. For a lot of (you will excuse the term) Downtown composers, that 1964-to-1979 phase of minimalism was the movement’s only creatively exciting phase. By 1983, a small segment of the generation born in the ’50s had begun developing minimalist ideas in the direction of greater sophistication. Limitation of harmonic materials (either consonant or dissonant, it hardly mattered) allowed an increased focus on more interesting kinds of aural illusions. Rhythmic dissonance and formal process appeared to be more fertile avenues of new perception than intricately convoluted pitch structures. Elliott Carter-type rhythmic complexity, with no beat-grid to hear it against, seemed tame compared to beats at different tempos running at the same time. Though left in the lurch by minimalism’s subsequent development, we felt emboldened to believe that one wasn’t forced to choose between political and musical progressiveness. Employing electric guitars, drum beats, and other materials borrowed from pop music in processes derived from Nancarrow and the unrealized visions of Henry Cowell, we felt we could have it both ways at once.

And that will be the surprise ending of my course: that it just might be possible that the “versus” in “Progress versus Populism” can eventually be dissolved away.

Of course, the progress made by the totalists (as some of us call the rhythmically complex/harmonically simple composers who tried to have their cake and eat it too) has been ignored by the great majority of composers, who either never recognized the inherent political pitfalls of elitism or took a defeatist attitude toward them. And that’s the great tragedy – that the decisions get made by composers rather than by the public. The corporate dictatorship unleashed by Reagan’s policies drew a curtain between newly evolving music and the wider public, with the result that by the late 1980s we found that the audience for new music primarily consisted of fellow professionals – other composers.

Personally, I don’t write my music for composers. I don’t expect other composers to appreciate my music, and most don’t. There is no way I could impress, or would want to impress, composers superficially trained to make a kneejerk association of pitch complexity (even the watered-down, New Romantic type) with forward-looking musical thinking. The number of composers whose taste I trust enough to learn anything from their reactions to my music is relatively tiny – I could name them in a brief paragraph. Yet I learn tons from the reactions of colleagues in other fields, from unbiased listeners, from students, from nonmusicians who come up to me after concerts. Unfortunately, those people – whose perceptions I deliberately aim to expand and seduce, and who frequently express delight with what I’m doing – are not the people making decisions about what music gets supported. The world of new composition, of commissions and awards and grants that make creative work possible, is run by composers, the vast majority of whom have ignored the types of progress made by my kind of music, and who oppose its dissemination.

That’s been the tragedy of new music for more than 20 years. We invented a new music that we thought would create a new audience. Then our potential for influencing any mass audience (which Cardew accurately notes is the composer’s true means of production) was taken away by the corporate elites. It’s extremely difficult for us to understand how so many composers can cling to a musical elitism that is precisely analogous to the corporate, financial, and cultural elitism that keeps new music out of the public ear. That false conception of “musical progressivism” does seem tied to political regress, to an ultimately right-wing notion that only the experts should be in control. Society doesn’t need to “catch up” with our music – it only needs to hear it. And the composers commited to elitism, who would rather consolidate their power within the professional institutions than by eliciting love and admiration from audiences, prevent audiences from hearing it – on the grounds that it “ignores all the progress made in the 20th century.” It looks to me like they’re the ones ignoring the progress.

This Friday night, some music of mine is included in a solo recital by boffo new-music pianist Blair McMillen. It’s at 8 PM at the Tenri Cultural Institute at 43A W. 13th Street in New York, between 5th and 6th Avenues. Read all the details here. He’s playing two of my Private Dances, a NYC premiere, along with pieces by Annie Gosfield, Peter Flint, Feldman, Ives, Scelsi, C.P.E. Bach, and a trio arrangement of King Crimson’s “21st-Century Schizoid Man” from 1969. Sounds like I’ll have one of the quieter moments.

I finally put together a listening list for my 20th-century music survey course, and, in best masochistic blogging tradition, I provide it here – not in the least because I’m proud of it, but simply to add my two bits’ worth to the mountain of evidence that creating a decent listening list for a one-semester course covering an entire century is impossible. I guarantee, if you blogged your listening list for your course at your own college, and it matched mine piece for piece, I would turn away from it in scorn, just as you will here. I’m shocked at the names I omitted: Hindemith, Thomson, Maderna, Branca, J.L. Adams, Lauten. But in my (weak) defense, the course isn’t a straight survey, but is entitled Progress Versus Populism in 20th-Century Music. The focus (since I needed some focus just to winnow out a few pieces and movements) is the effect of politics on issues of elitism versus politically-motivated accessibility. Electronic music is poorly represented, since its politics are somewhat different than the public ones of concert performance. My aim is to address the issue of making compositional and stylistic choices in the age of commercial democracy, and thus I begin with World War I, when the aristocracies that supported Romanticism were wiped out. Politically-charged figures like Cardew and Eisler will loom large, even though no specific pieces of theirs are on the roster. And this is only a small sampling of the music I’ll actually play. I promise to cover a lot more bases, but the list is already inconvenient lengthy:

Charles Ives: Three Places in New England, 2nd movement

Igor Stravinsky: Le Sacre du Printemps

Igor Stravinsky: Symphony of Psalms

Arnold Schoenberg: Variations for Orchestra

Bela Bartok: Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta

Darius Milhaud: La Creation du Monde

Anton Webern: Cantata No. 2

Roy Harris: Symphony No. 3

Aaron Copland: Billy the Kid

George Antheil: Ballet mecanique

Dmitri Shostakovich: Symphony No. 10

Harry Partch: Barstow

John Cage: Sonatas and Interludes, Sonatas I & II, Third Interlude

Olivier Messiaen: Turangalila Symphony, movements 1, 4, 6

Milton Babbitt: Philomel

Pierre Boulez: Pli selon pli, 2nd movement

Karlheinz Stockhausen: Mantra

Luciano Berio: Sinfonia, movements 2 & 3

Pauline Oliveros: I of IV

Frederic Rzewski: The People United Will Never Be Defeated

Morton Feldman: Why Patterns?

Robert Ashley: Perfect Lives, “The Bar”

La Monte Young: The Well-Tuned Piano, disc 1

Philip Glass: Einstein on the Beach, “Bed” and “Spaceship” Scenes

William Bolcom: Songs of Innocence and Experience, movements 3 to 8

Clarence Barlow: Variazioni e un piano meccanico

Claude Vivier: Lonely Child

Daniel Lentz: The Crack in the Bell

Laurie Anderson: O Superman

Mikel Rouse: Failing Kansas, movements 1, 2

Maria De Alvear: Sexo

I’m proud to have included Shostakovich and Vivier in there, which, for me, represent branching out. My post-1975 European music (counting the Canadian Vivier as European) does lean toward the accessible side, but that’s in keeping with the topic of the class. You can’t paint an oil painting of 20th-century music in four months, but if anyone can squint at this rough charcoal sketch and think it looks remotely the same shape as the era, I’ll be pleased enough. My textbooks are Paul Griffiths’ Modern Music and After and my own American Music in the Twentieth Century. I also include as required reading the following articles:

Milton Babbitt: “Who Cares If You Listen?”

Pierre Boulez: “Schoenberg is Dead”

John Cage: “History of Experimental Music in the United States,” “Lecture on Nothing,” and “Lecture on Something” from Silence      

Cornelius Cardew: “Stockhausen Serves Imperialism”

Kyle Gann: “Making Marx in the Music” –

Charles Ives: Essays Before a Sonata, Prologue and Epilogue

Pauline Oliveros: “The Contribution of Women Composers”

George Rochberg: “No Center” and “The Composer in Academia” from The Aesthetics of Survival

Arnold Schoenberg: “New Music, Outmoded Music, Style, and Idea”

Elmer Schönberger and Louis Andriessen: “1966-Requiem Canticles,” “No Copyright Problem Here,” “Ordeals of the Memory,” and “On Influence” from The Apollonian Clockwork

As for your comments, compliments will be ignored as insincere, complaints as redundant. Remarks are welcome.

[UPDATE in response to comments: As I should have made clearer, the pieces on the list are only a small fraction of the music I’ll be playing – they’re the pieces I’ll be sending the students to the library to listen to. I’m already afraid it’s more than they can handle. And since we have an excellent jazz program, and I’m only an amateur in jazz, I wouldn’t presume to teach it when there are top-notch experts down the hall: nor popular music, about which I know very little. I promised no one would be happy with the list, which reflects what some may consider my too-specialized body of knowledge.]

I have sometimes used this space to complain about brilliant music books that have been allowed to go quickly out of print. This month, one of the best, perhaps the most brilliant music book written next to Charles Rosen’s The Classical Style, has just come back into print: The Apollonian Clockwork by Louis Andriessen and Elmer Schönberger. Amsterdam University Press is reissuing it, officially this month. The astounding thing about the book is that, like Stravinsky’s music itself, it is circuitous, unsystematic, unconcerned with completeness or consistency, a continuously inspired array of intellectual bric-a-brac. The essays are a potpourri of odds and ends. One explains why Stravinsky was the only mid-century composer whom no one could get away with imitating; another why Stravinsky’s melodies are impossible to memorize; another, “The Utopian Unison,” why his music is filled with false parallelisms;
another details the incident in which Stravinsky was arrested by the Boston police for the unconventional major seventh chord in his arrangement of the “Star-Spangled Banner,” illustrated with a reproduction of Stravinsky’s mug shot; another explains why Stravinsky didn’t subscribe to the aesthetics of his own Poétique musicale; another describes finding the piano on which the Rite of Spring was composed; another researches the 17th-century dance steps on which Agon is based; another offers an insightful point-by-point comparison of Stravinsky and Schoenberg. Andriessen and Schönberger can say things like:

Requiem Canticles is the Requiem for the Requiem. After that, every composer who writes a liturgical requiem for large choir and orchestra, perferably in his old age, will seem like a taxidermist. He will be stuffing a skeleton with ersatz meat and then be putting a black hat on top of it. Then he will say: here is a man. But he will be wrong. It is no longer possible. Stravinsky’s Requiem Canticles is Berlioz’s Grande Messe des morts, shrivelled to an aphorism.

And again:

It is particularly because the late sonatas of Scriabin and the Sacre sound so different that it is interesting to look at their similarities. The ear easily passes over them. They are structural similarities. The glowing lava of Scriabin has solidified into the pumice of Stravinsky. Harmony, the clearest manifestation of the kinship, has coagulated…. The bars from Scriabin’s Etude, Op. 65 No. 3, form the same chord that dominates the last page of the Sacre.

If you have any abiding interest in 20th-century music, buy this book and read it at once. If music as culture means anything to you, buy this book. It made so little splash the first time around that I’ve hardly run into anyone who’s aware of it. But any composer living would give his left arm to be assured that so witty, wise, creative, simpatico, and insightful a book would be written about him after his death. Richard Taruskin has aptly called it “The one book about Stravinsky Stravinsky would have liked.” And, thanks to an editorial miracle, it has reappeared after some 15 years’ unforgivable absence.

As Alex Ross notes and I had just heard, Robert Christgau, dean of American music critics, has now been fired from the Village Voice. I think it’s official: I no longer know anyone working there. I’m sure I would have been fired too, had I stayed around to find out.

Now Amy Bauer’s posts have got me thinking about music that adheres to theoretical paradigms versus music that doesn’t.

In theory class, I feel as much as any professor the pull of pieces that behave nicely. It’s so satisfying to pass out the Webern Piano Variations, the D# minor Fugue from WTC Book I, Chopin’s B-flat minor Nocturne, Schubert’s G-flat Impromptu, the Maple Leaf Rag, Clementi’s First Sonatina, and know that the analysis is going to go just the way you think it will. That’s why Beethoven’s First Sonata is in every theory book: not that it’s his most impressive piece, but it exquisitely fits the textbook definition of sonata form you’re about to give them, and convinces them you know what you’re talking about. How inconvenient that K. 545 C-major Mozart Sonata is, with its recap starting in the subdominant! It’s cute and everyone knows it, but you can’t use it until you’ve taught ten other sonatas and throw it in as a wierd exception. Otherwise the students look at you funny.

Every theory teacher, I feel sure, collects over the years a repertoire of pieces for analysis guaranteed not to make him look stupid in class. But if the teacher always looks so smart, doesn’t the music start to look stupid? I have to use those pieces, because sometimes you have to make a specific point in a circumscribed amount of time, but I consciously resist limiting myself to them. I have some pieces I analyze – the bitonal Saudades de Brazil of Darius Milhaud, a symphony (Second) by Martinu, Liszt’s Sposalizio, that just don’t behave well. I give them William Caplin’s rules for the sonata, distilled from Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, and then analyze – Dussek!, who never read Caplin’s book. Every other year I wade a group of students into “Emerson” from the Concord Sonata and we try to figure out what the hell Ives had in mind, with perennially sparse results. I have learned to savor that stupid feeling of not being able to explain a piece fully, and not being able to justify its existence any better than pointing out that I like it. Sometimes I bring in pieces I’ve never analyzed, with no idea what we’ll find, and we just start rummaging around. I even teach an entire course that way, my Advanced Analysis Seminar, in which we spend all semester on three works I’ve never analyzed, chosen specifically because I don’t understand how they work. Once we got lost in the Stravinsky Piano Concerto, practically my favorite piece of his, and thought we’d never get out.

Of course, there are repercussions. The students form the dangerous idea that not all music is nice and neat and compact and explainable. They gather that spontaneous inspiration, subjective taste, and irrational will are part of the composer’s arsenal. Of course, discipline, rigor, structure, and foresight are too, but why skew the weight so far in favor of one set of values over the other? Why parade Apollo onstage, and bind and gag Dionysius in the dressing room? Let us admit, at the risk of sacrificing some of our unquestioned authority, that the academic canon of Music Acceptable for Analysis, the music we put forward as The Best Mankind Has to Offer, is actually The Music that Makes Us Look Smart, because it follows the rules we’ve been taught to explicate. Then we can play in class whatever music we most love, and if it works out neatly on paper, or if it doesn’t, those are both lessons. “Let us try for once not to be right” – Tristan Tzara. And maybe young composers – rather than either slavishly follow our directives or guiltily break away from us – will learn that the proportion between freedom and order is one every artist has to work out for himself.

[I’m going – gasp! – offline for a couple of days, and will print your comments when I return. I gotta stop staring at this screen.]

Reader Amy Bauer responds with mild indignation to my post on composers overlooked by academia:

I think you’re unfair to music academics! I love Sibelius, Dvorak, Martinu, and many other supposedly ‘unacademic’ composers, and loathe the music of. . (um, afraid to say, as it may get me in trouble 😉 )

Seriously, many of my musicologist friends adore much of the music you’ve noted
above. I fear you may confuse academic taste with what are acceptable topics of
research, which – as in any other field – are subject to changing fashion.

There are plenty of Nielsen scholars now; he represents only one of the many composers
rehabilitated by academia in recent years. It is true that there are egregious conventions
regarding what is worthy of study, and it takes a paradigm shift by those with power
and influence to let new works into that particular canon (Taruskin’s influence
is a case in point). But in my experience, what academics write about and what
they actually listen to often have very little overlap.

I will leave tilting at the windmills of compositional fame to those in the know.

Well, there’s some truth in this. I was primarily not thinking of musicologists, but of theorists and composers, who seem loathe to subject to analysis any music not granted paradigmatic status. And I was also thinking not so much of “academic taste” as much as “acceptable topics of
research.” I’ve never quite gotten over how perplexed my fellow grad students were that I lowered myself to write an analytical paper on Bruckner.

Still, while I haven’t spent much time consorting with musicologists, I have spent enough to learn what a strict composer-based hierarchy the world of musicology is. I was once on a panel with some big names, and highly complimented a famous scholar on his book on Muzio Clementi, which had been a great help to me. He seemed almost irritated that I had brought it up, as though it were some secret from his past that he didn’t want mentioned in front of his colleagues. He had now written a book on Beethoven, which meant he had climbed a couple dozen steps up the musicology ladder. And I have learned in that world that to have written the first book on Nancarrow was a miniscule accomplishment, almost negligible, compared to writing the 67th book on Bach, Beethoven, or Brahms. In the world of music historians, your stature is exponentially proportional, not to the quality of your research and writing, but to the prestige of the composer you can claim to be an expert on.

(Many years ago I spent a pleasant evening with a new acquaintance who was writing a book on Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf. I’d love to hear from him, and learn how that project went. We had a better time, down there at the bottom of the musicology ladder, than the bigwigs were having up above.)

Perhaps a deluge of unpopular opinions foreshadowed a deluge of unwelcome waters, but this August 29 – the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina – is also the third anniversary of the debut of my blog. On the last anniversary, as New Orleans braced for the worst, I announced that I had written fewer blog entries in my second year than my first, and that the third would doubtless exhibit a further decline. This year I have an opposite announcement: despite my August slump, I have written more blog entries than in either of the previous years, and on the average they have been considerably longer. I complained last year that I was unable to back up my unpopular opinions with musical examples. That difficulty has been overcome. Meanwhile, my readership has expanded enormously. (Many readers report a weight gain of 30 to 40 pounds, which I can only attribute to their absent-mindedly munching down doughnuts while absorbed in my totalist analyses.)

I sometimes wonder why I blog and what good it does me, but there have been occasions on which the advantages are quite apparent, and in which I have been overcome by gratitude to my readers. Upon my mentioning an admiration for the Danish composer Per Norgard, reader Christopher Culver directed me to a web site that drew me far closer to an understanding of that master’s most characteristic music. And recently David DeMaris drew my attention to the software Click Repair ($25), which has allowed me to transfer my record collection into playable form. I had long been recording records on CDs, but Click Repair removes all the pops and clicks, and make me forget that I’m listening to a recording of a vinyl record. I have since transferred several dozen records to CDs and MP3s, with tremendous psychological impact. A lot of my records, pressed on substandard vinyl in the early ’80s, have never been listenable, and I’m suddenly hearing them for the first time as they were intended. The musical tastes of my youth have sat for years in boxes and then in cabinets in a spare room, mute reminders of the influences that formed me. All of a sudden they’re back, pristinely recorded, as though I inherited the CD collection of someone with remarkably similar tastes.

It’s always been an observation of mine that music professors have very different musical tastes than record critics, and that I possess that of the latter. Academics harbor a conceit that only the very best music is worth listening to – Brahms, Schoenberg, Berg, Ligeti, and then Brahms again – and that anything lesser is almost contaminating. Record critics are far more catholic, and pervasively doubt that history has done its job unearthing the best music. Carl Nielsen is one of the most delightful and underrated composers of all time. Franz Berwald is one of the great Romantics; Liszt predicted that he would never be appreciated during his lifetime, but opined that he was highly original and should keep composing. Max Reger wrote some incredible music, stretching tonality to the breaking point, and achieving far more subtle effects than Schoenberg. There is no Dvorak symphony I love listening to as much as the “Easter” Symphony of Josef Bohuslav Foerster: and yet, no other Foerster symphonies are recorded, so I can’t find out for myself whether that work is an anomaly. A couple of my favorite piano concertos ever are by Hummel. The music of the short-lived Hermann Goetz was championed by Bernard Shaw, and his symphony and chamber music are similar to Mendelssohn, only livelier. Muzio Clementi’s late sonatas are unbelievable, fantastic, yet he remains known only for those stupid sonatinas. The inordinately subtle Jan Ladislav Dussek is listed as a Romantic, a post-Beethoven composer, even though he was born ten years earlier than Beethoven – incredible. Ferruccio Busoni, of course, is one of my favorite composers, and my own music contains several homages to him. Other composers are less compelling, but I made it a point to seek them out: Sir Arnold Bax, Hans Erich Apostel, Nikolai Myaskovsky, Lord Berners, Alexander Zemlinsky, Cyril Scott, Franz Schmidt (whose Fourth Symphony and Piano Quintet are magnificent, but Das Buch mit sieben Siegeln? Don’t bother).

These are all names one never encounters in academia – nor in American concertgoing, unfortunately – but that record critics scarf up by the bundle. The strange thing is, I didn’t get interested in them because I became a critic – I was already seeking them out in college. If there’s anything that has characterized every move I’ve made as a musician, it is a kneejerk distrust for the mechanisms by which composers become famous. The routes by which composers gain visibility in the orchestra circuit today are patently bogus, and I suspect it was more or less ever thus. I don’t know whether I will ever have opportunity to teach these names in the classroom; it’s difficult to justify analyzing Berwald’s Simphonie Singulaire, remarkable as it is, to students who don’t know Schumann yet. But I love listening to them, and they contributed something to my musical personality, Nielsen, Reger, and Busoni most of all. For 20 years much of this wonderful music has been sitting mutely in my vinyl collection, inciting waves of nostaglia whenever I glance into what I call my “vinyl room.” Now it’s unleashed, with pops and clicks erased. It’s been like a college reunion, and I’m thrilled to have them back.

The great James Tenney died last night [actually, the night before, August 24]. Word went around a few weeks ago that his old lung cancer had returned after a long remission of many years. He was a great teacher, great drinker, great companion, and an interestingly odd personality. As a composer he was a kind of hard-core conceptualist driven by theoretical curiosity. As a result his music could be awfully dry at times, but in about half of it or more the conceptualism transformed in kind of an amazing alchemy to an extreme sensuousness, lovely, slow sound-metamorphoses that you just couldn’t believe. I’ll repeat here what I said about him in American Music in the Twentieth Century:

In a way he stands at the center of American music, a kind of focal point: he studied and worked with seminal figures such as Varèse, Partch, Ruggles, Cage, Kenneth Gaburo, and Lejaren Hiller; he performed in the ensembles of his contemporaries Philip Glass and Steve Reich; and he has taught some of the leading young composers, including John Luther Adams, Polansky, and Peter Garland. Though his music and interests put him squarely on the side of the experimentalists, he is the only such composer so admired by the academic establishment that an entire issue of the academic journal Perspectives of New Music was devoted to his music. No other composer is so revered by fellow composers, and so unknown to the public at large…

It’s difficult to believe he’s gone, and he will be sorely missed.

UPDATE: Read the comments for a number of personal reminsicences about Jim by his students, colleagues, and young composers who met him.

A correspondent brings to my attention a statement by Tristan Tzara:

“Let us try for once not to be right.”