In my extensive post on Metametric music (you know, The Style Formerly Known as Totalism, c’mon, man, get with the program) I mentioned that I could never figure out how the California Ear Unit performed the three meters at once of Art Jarvinen’s Murphy-Nights. To save you from having to look, the piece starts off with an 8/4 ostinato (32 16th-notes) in the electric keyboard against a 33/16 ostinato in the electric bass – on top of which the rest of the ensemble enters in changing meters, starting in 6/4. (You can hear the effect here.) I wish I could show you the actual score: in its postminimalist way it’s as scary as any early Stockhausen outside of Gruppen. I’ve known Art for years and could always have asked him how they did it, but sometimes when I’m amazed by something I enjoy not knowing the secret, and just letting my imagination run wild. Well, Art decided to dispel my imaginings, and I provide his explanation – which will ring familiar, I think, to every composer/performer who has performed in his or her own chamber music. The trick, he says, was

rehearsal, mainly. But some other factors played in.

First of all, it’s just not that hard for the melody instruments to lock into the keyboard, which is in straight 8 – might as well be four-four. The bass is the one that has to be on his toes, and that was me. When I came up with the idea, I test drove it at home, playing bass over a tape of the keyboard part. No problem. Knowing I could hang with it, the rest of the group just had to follow the keyboard, and trust me to be with them at the next big downbeat. We played the piece live exactly 14 times, and no, we didn’t always get it right, but we did most of the time. For the recording we put down bass and keyboard together first. That was the only take (he said somewhat proudly, but not smugly). It was such a treat to work every day with such great players.

Almost the whole group had a couple of advantages over most conventional players such as orchestra section players. We had played a LOT of Reich, as well as Michael Gordon, Andriessen, etc. We cut our teeth on music made from these sorts of schemes. And of extreme importance I would add, is that most of us played in rock/jazz/pop bands, and understood groove as a collective thing, not just accuracy within one’s own part. The one time we had some difficulty getting the piece to work was when we broke in a new keyboardist. Fabulous player, but zero pop music experience. Even played “accurately” the groove wasn’t happening. So we had a sectional with just bass and keyboard, with clarinetist Jim Rohrig coaching the keyboardist on feel, not counting. It all came together again pretty quickly after that.

Back when I used to perform in my own ensemble pieces, I’d write rhythms in my own part that I wouldn’t have dared put anyone else through, and also left parts blank to fill in in performance. Art also adds commentary to my post on Lucky Mosko’s music:

You definitely zeroed in on a couple of major issues, things he was consciously trying to do, such as sabotage the listener’s sense of temporal placement. His succession of “nows” forms a coherent continuum – of sorts – but it’s not a “classical/logical” formal argument he makes. I always thought of all of Lucky’s pieces as “middles” of a much larger, eternal, piece, that we are given samples of now and then. None of his pieces really start or end. They just happen.

While I’m at it, I was about to say (before Samuel Vriezen anticipated me) that I could imagine making a distinction between metametric music and totalism. Part of the idea of totalism, beyond the rhythmic issues, was that it brought together elements from rock, jazz, and world musics, and also appealed both to pop music fans and postclassical fans. The term metametric focuses in on just the rhythmic angle, and (since coined by a Dutch composer in response to an American style) could indicate a broader realm of music, defined more technically and less by style and milieu. Don’t goad me on this, you don’t want to know how anal I can get when it comes to defining musical terminology.

I always feel bad making a big deal out of a composer right after he dies. If I knew in advance, I’d make a big deal out of each one just before he died. (Don’t any of you write and tell me you’re not feeling well. I’ll need a note from a doctor.) It’s always made me happy that, a few months before he died, I called Morton Feldman, in print, the Greatest Living Composer, and he saw it. But even had I known in advance that Lucky Mosko (1947-2005) was going to die at 58, who knew he was that old already?

I had never heard Mosko’s music, but was well aware of his activities as a conductor. I once reviewed his Newport Classic recording of Feldman’s For Samuel Beckett as being the best available. Last week Art Jarvinen was kind enough to send me the O.O. Discs CD of Mosko’s music, performed by the California Ear Unit, and he tells me there’s a hard-to-find one on Cambria as well. I had no idea what to expect. Mosko’s music is thorny – or gnarly, in the parlance of our time – but his time sense is distinctive. Even when the music’s individual gestures are quick, it sustains its focus for many moments in succession, and changes slowly. It is quasi-atonal in a way that allows tonal passages to happen in a non-quotation-like way, almost as if it simply makes no distinctions among sonorities. Therefore it is playful rather than tense, with highly soloistic instrumental writing, and reminds me, more than anyone else, of Stefan Wolpe’s music. There is much stasis, dotted by delicate bursts of activity that build up no momentum. His early influences include Webern, Feldman, Cage, Icelandic folk music, and Sufi music, the first three more evident than the others.

While Mosko’s style is distinctive, each individual piece is difficult to characterize on just a few hearings. My favorite so far is Psychotropes of 1993, which, according to Josef Woodard’s liner notes, is structured as a series of 22 palindromes. If so, they’re well disguised; I can find fleeting phrases coming back in retrograde, but I have a devil of a time catching points at which things turn backwards. Mosko’s most famous pieces, by which I mean I had already heard of them, were a series of Indigenous Musics, which he wrote because he was the only composer living in Green Valley, California, and felt he had a right to determine what the area’s indigenous style was. He seems to have had a sense of humor as cute as his father’s, who nicknamed him Lucky because he was so lucky to have such a father, and it manifests in the music.

In any case, I’ve put up about an hour of Mosko’s music on Postclassic Radio, including the 1997 String Quartet that someone sent me an mp3 of. Let the critical absorption of his music begin, or if it has already begun, expand.

A helpful reader with a fake e-mail address has written in to accuse me of “writing myself into history” by including myself in the discussion of totalist music in my previous post. Lest there be any further confusion: This is my own personal blog, which I am not paid to write. While I do not knowingly publish falsehoods here, I may sometimes cast myself in a favorable light. The blog is not intended to replace scholarly musical reference works. If you would like to read scholarly accounts of the totalist movement that make no reference to me, I recommend the ones I have written in Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, in my book American Music in the 20th Century, and in the final chapter of Wiley Hitchcock’s Music in the United States. These are all intended to be objective and historically factual. Remember, kids, don’t rely on blogs as research for your homework.

Oh, and while I’m at it, be warned: Sometimes on Postclassic Radio, I play my own music. I wouldn’t want anyone to be surprised and feel shystered.

Meanwhile, Samuel Vriezen, who names a couple of Dutch composers who work with totalist rhythmic ideas, himself included – I hope our anonymous friend doesn’t mind Sam mentioning himself – has come up with an alternative name for the movement: Metametrics! Metametric music, metametric music…. I like it! Sounds steely and machine-cut.

We call Monet’s Rouen Cathedral an Impressionist painting. Imagine a skeptic challenging this statement. “Let us put the painting under a microscope,” he says, “analyze it, and determine once and for all whether it is actually Impressionist.” Can we go along with his experiment and prove him wrong? No; more appropriate to say, paraphrasing Wittgenstein, that this skeptic doesn’t understand the rules of the word game we’re playing.

I don’t know whether it’s symptomatic of the decline of culture, but it seems that most people these days no longer understand the word game of artistic -isms and movements. A term denoting inclusion in an artistic movement is a kind of performative utterance masquerading as a descriptive one. A performative utterance, as J.L. Austin defined it, is one that is itself an act, one that changes the truth value of something by being spoken, like “I pronounce you man and wife,” or “I accept your offer.” If someone with the authority to make this statement says, in appropriate circumstances, “I pronounce you man and wife,” you can’t contradict him by saying, “That’s not true, they aren’t married.” The fact that he says it is what makes it true. Of course nothing in physical reality is changed by the utterance. The statement is a command that we should consider something to be changed.

Likewise, using an artistic term is an act of political demarkation; it only pretends to be a descriptive, and that pretense is its power. When critic Louis Leroy, in the April 25, 1874, issue of Le Charivari magazine, dismissed Monet, Pissarro, Degas, Renoir, and others as “Impressionnistes,” he was not describing them, as if he had said they were “tall,” or “Catholic,” or “wearers of berets.” The word “Impressionist” did not yet exist; the moment before he wrote it, it didn’t mean anything. His intent was to marginalize those painters, by insinuating that they had attached themselves to some deficient and trivial artistic principle (snidely inferrable from the indistinct word “impression”). By coining an adjective that had the appearance of objectivity, Leroy was performing the act of commanding the reader to regard those artists as mistaken and insgnificant.

The artists, however, as often happens, grabbed on to the word and subverted its meaning. They called themselves “Impressionists” in their next group show – not because it was an adjective with specific denotations that accurately depicted them, but as an act of self defense. By calling themselves Impressionists, they were telling the public, “Do not regard us as painters who have tried to master the conventions of realism and failed, but as painters who are working on something new, who have collectively perceived that there could be a different approach to visual phenomena.” By calling themselves Impressionists, they protected themselves from what they considered false criticisms, charges of deficiency based on inapplicable criteria. Years later, once those criticisms ceased to be common, they abandoned the term and went back to calling themselves merely painters. But the term itself has lasted in history.

Of course, our skeptic could have said, “There is no such thing as an Impressionist painting, there are only paintings.” In a certain trivial sense this is true. But all it really says is, “I refuse to participate in your culture of word games.” Today everyone understands that there is nothing metaphysical about the word “Impressionist.” It is simply, as defined by its historical usage, a part of cultural literacy.

And so it is with all historical terms which purport to isolate similarities among bodies of art works. Minimalism, coined for music by Michael Nyman in 1968 (these terms never just happen, they always start with an individual), means “Do not criticize this music for having a slower rate of change than you expect based on your experience of other types of music.” If Phil Glass doesn’t want to be called a minimalist, then he doesn’t want to be protected from such criticism, and doesn’t want to be seen as agreeing that his music needs any special apology. That refusal is quite within the rules of the word game. But to find the word “minimalism” contentless, to assert that there is some mismatch between the word’s chimerical “intrinsic meaning” and Music in Fifths, is merely to betray ignorance of cultural norms. “You haven’t been reading the papers.” Had Nyman christened the movement “Herbertism” instead of “minimalism,” little would have changed. The happenstance that there might be anything minimal about minimalist music is little more than a convenience, a mnemonic device. What is “Fluxus” about Fluxus art? What was “dada” about Dada? Someone coined the word, and we know what it means by how it was applied.

For that matter, what is “jazz” about jazz? Like Glass with minimalism, many Black musicians now reject the term “jazz,” saying instead “jazz music” or “the music referred to as jazz,” because they no longer want the stigma of seeming to need a special term to protect their music from false criticism. Easy enough to say now; but how would we tell the history of that great art form if, from the beginning, musicians had objected that the word had no validity? The Black musicians understand the word game: now that the music is out of danger, the term seems limiting. Still, it’s difficult to imagine how we’d function culturally without it.

Some terms, like minimalism and jazz, are positive, connoting a new technique or perception to which artists are drawn. Others are negative, open-ended, communicating little more specific than “get off my back.” The social mores of concertgoing are a cement keeping in place a whole host of listening expectations, from which composers periodically have to forge linguistic crowbars to free themselves. “Experimental music” was a euphemism coined back when the composition of music was hemmed in by a set of unspoken assumptions so obligatory that today we can hardly remember what they were. “Experimental music” meant, “I’m going to step outside those assumptions and try something else, don’t give me crap because I’m not doing what you expect.” A lot of composers, notably Robert Ashley and recently David Toub at Sequenza 21, have objected to the connotations of the word “experimental.” Many others have used the word while admitting that there’s nothing experimental about experimental music – just as one of the “New Complexity” composers once candidly admitted in Perspectives that there was no difference between the New Complexity and the Old. “Sound art” is an interesting and still-current subgenre, an island off the coast of music, and a refuge for people devoid of nostalgia for Mozart or even the piano, who don’t want their listeners reminded in any way of the world in which tuxedoed conductors shake hands with concertmasters.

”Downtown” is a term of self-defense: “don’t criticize me for not notating my music in detail and having the same types of formal contrast and information rate as European classical music, I’m not trying to do that.” Accordingly, “Uptown” was coined to relativize the dominant culture. Before “Downtown” appeared, “Uptown” didn’t exist as such, and was merely mainstream contemporary music. By assigning it a back-formation, Downtowners were able to make it appear contingent, as arbitrary in its assumptions as any other music scene – which was not only a marketing ploy, but, in fact, a valid insight. In a positive sense, “Downtown” also has the additional advantage of referring to a specific group of people at a time and place, so that we can use it to refer to musicians who performed at Roulette and the Kitchen and Experimental Intermedia in the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, with no ambiguity whatever. If you performed at New Music New York in 1979, you’re a Downtowner by definition, no matter how many 12-tone string quartets you’ve written since.

Unlike Impressionism, “Totalism” was not coined by a critic, but by composers in self-defense. In New York circa 1990 there was a group of composers in their 30s who were really into rhythmic complexity and tempo structures, using 4, or 7, or 11 tempos at the same time, looping isorhythms of different lengths against each other, setting up beat-complexities that had never been heard before. Because it was static or highly limited in its use of harmony, newspaper critics, year after year, especially at the New York Times, kept calling this music minimalist, with the clear implication that minimalism had been a 1970s movement, and so this was nothing new. It was incredibly ignorant, tin-eared, dismissive, and unfair. It was driving us nuts. Someone coined the word “totalism.” Ed Rothstein wrote an article about it in the Times. I wrote another in the Voice. It was like snuffing out a candle. References to minimalism ceased. As far as I can vouch personally, it was the most successful -ism-coinage in the history of music. Faster than “impressionism,” faster than “minimalism,” faster than “Fluxus,” it put an end to the criticism overnight. It forced a perception, and then an acknowledgement, that we were doing something different. “Marketing,” you may call it. “Long overdue perception of the truth,” I call it. Most people can’t see the truth until you package it for them.

So what do we do with the term now? Who gives a damn? There are a couple of lame rationales for having chosen “totalism” instead of some other word, but it doesn’t particularly make more sense than “Dada.” One claim the word has is historical authenticity: it’s the one the composers used. Another is that totalism as a musical style has been discussed in the leading German reference work Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, in the final chapter of Wiley Hitchcock’s Music in the United States, in the book American Music in the 20th Century, in Wikipedia, and on New Music Box. It’s true that I wrote all of these – but since no one has ever written about this music besides me, it’s also true that 100 percent of the scholarly literature on this music refers to it as totalism. The second person to write about it will have to decide whether to keep the term or come up with another one. If someone comes up with a better term, I’ll cheer for it and switch. But since the movement is, as I argue, more or less over, and part of history, the incentive factor for coming up with a new moniker is likely to remain low.

What you can’t do is claim that there was no movement. You can’t claim that about a dozen New York composers never got interested in the same rhythmic ideas in the 1980s – because I’ve got the scores to prove they did. You can’t claim that some of us didn’t sit around Rudy’s Bar in 1990 talking about our rhythmic ideas – I was there. You can’t claim that none of us influenced each other. You can’t claim that, once the word totalism was introduced, the newspaper tendency to refer to our music as minimalism stopped. And since naming a movement is a performative utterance, you can’t claim that calling ourselves totalists didn’t make us totalists. So the musicologist who doesn’t want to acknowledge the word, but still wants to talk about the music, is in a bit of a quandary. You never heard any totalist music? So what? You’re ignorant, therefore totalism doesn’t exist? If you’ve never heard Italian Futurist music, does that mean it never existed? Does Mbuti pygmy music not exist if you’ve never heard it? A tree falling in the forest doesn’t make a sound unless you, personally, are present? You never heard the music? Catch up.

There are more movements around than we acknowledge. A few years ago I was hearing interestingly similar pieces come out of the Bonk Festival in Florida, so I briefly wrote about Bonk music. Haven’t heard anything from them since, which may be no fault of theirs. One movement that has gained universal acceptance, I suppose simply because it’s European, is spectral music, which was self-so-called, self-defined, self-promoted – it’s difficult to imagine audiences listening to pieces by Murail, Vivier, and Grisey and noticing family traits in the music. Why spectral music gets celebrated at Miller Theater, while totalism is attacked and disenfranchised from all sides, I can’t fathom, judging from the structure and histories of the two movements. And of course pop music, not being suicidal, births a new movement – grindcore, thrash metal, illbient, Euro-house, drill and bass – with every other CD.

The really sad thing is, I think, that the kneejerk adamant resistance to new movements indicates a loss of faith that new perceptions are possible. “I refuse to participate in your culture of word games,” means “I no longer want to build this culture up, I’m ready to start tearing it down.” Impressionism happened because a bunch of people realized about the same time that realistic art didn’t do justice to the way we really perceive color. Totalism happened because a bunch of people realized that, within minimalism’s stripped-down context, it was possible for people to perform and keep in their heads several tempos at once. A person convinced that there will be no more movements is a person for whom the history of culture is basically over, a person who believes that everything possible has already been perceived, and that there are no new avenues left open to us. We whine about the sanctity of the individual, but art grows by leaps and bounds when groups of people start to have collective realizations. 18th-century music sprang out of a 30-year slump in 1781 when Mozart and Haydn started copying and combining each other’s ideas – neither of them had been able to do it alone. Wagner’s music burst into flames when he discovered Liszt’s harmonic innovations. Modern art changed forever when the Abstract Expressionists started meeting every night at the Cedar Bar. Occasionally one person creates a compelling new language on his own, but it’s extremely rare. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our music, and consciousness of those things is not likely to dawn on only one person at a time. Artists need each other, and the anti-ism diehards want to imprison them each in solitary confinement. A sense of creative community, so crucial to the development of an art, is devalued by the ideology that pooh-poohs purported movements.

Or to personalize it: In the early 1980s, I had a lot of cool ideas about rhythmic structure. I thought those ideas alone would make me the King of Composers. When I got to New York and it dawned on me that Rhys Chatham, Mikel Rouse, Michael Gordon, and Ben Neill had all had the same ideas, I had to jump up off my butt, steal what I could from them, and raise my music to a whole new level to avoid being just one of the crowd. That’s how music history happens (even among the so-called American Mavericks) far more often than the more popular lone-genius theory. Now on all sides I’ve got people assuring me that that whole transaction never happened. It’s humorous.

Amazon is now listing my new book as available. As a special treat for all those who HATE it when I talk about Downtown music, the book is titled: Music Downtown! Amazon’s editorial review is beyond flattering: “As provocative as Lester Bangs’s rock writing and as uncompromising as Nat Hentoff’s jazz and blues work” – Whoa! Hyperbole indeed. But oddly, they continue, “Although he regrets that some of his longer pieces are not included….” That’s not true. All my worthwhile long pieces from the Voice are in the book, including my 1994 interview with Glenn Branca, which was my longest ever. Don’t know how that “regret” idea got in there.

I’m sitting here writing an article about the composer Melissa Hui. I’m engulfed in Hui, drowning in Hui, can’t see the forest for the Hui’s, and I finally say to myself, “Gann, look: you need a new composer-of-the-month for Postclassic Radio anyway. Why not Hui?” Why not indeed. So if you ever wonder how executive decisions get made here at Postclassic Radio, that’s pretty much the gist of it. The most recurring word in Melissa Hui’s titles is “still,” and there’s a real stillness to her music, even when it’s fast or bumptious, that’s quite lovely. Beautiful stuff. And she’s only 38! And she gets all these great commissions and performances. Because she’s Canadian. Dammit, I wish I was Canadian. If I were Canadian, I wouldn’t be sitting here writing articles about other composers, because I’d be too busy attending rehearsals of my chamber orchestra pieces, and giving interviews in French to Québécois radio.

http://www.mcphee.com/items/11507.html

UPDATE: Steve Layton informs me that Bach’s not the only one: http://www.presspop.com/en/shop/archer_prewitt/moog_doll.html

My post on the postclassical paradigm for meter, though it dealt with Janacek, was particularly relevant to progressive music of the last 20 years. The tendency to think about meter as quantity, without heirarchical subdivisions of the measure, was avidly developed by the composers who were part of the totalist movement of the 1980s and ‘90s: Mikel Rouse, Michael Gordon, John Luther Adams, Art Jarvinen, Ben Neill, Evan Ziporyn, Tim Brady, Diana Meckley, David First, Larry Polansky, myself, arguably Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham, and a few others. In the wake of minimalism we created a new conception of ensemble rhythm that left the traditional concept of meter behind. (I speak of totalism in past tense now, because I have no clear evidence that the movement is continuing as such, most of its original proponents – myself included – having more or less moved on to other issues, relegating rhythmic complexity to the background.) Minimalism is still, to this day, ignorantly caricatured as a simplistic music. But by 1983, the young composers most impressed with it were hearing it as a technical basis for a new rhythmic practice so sophisticated that there are still only a handful of music ensembles who have learned to negotiate it.

In particular, totalism was, almost centrally, concerned with using conventional musical notation as a language with which to generate a feelable and performable rhythmic complexity. Some of the simple polyrhythms (usually 3-against-2 or 4-against-3) embedded in Steve Reich’s and Charlemagne Palestine’s music, as well as the irregular phrase rhythms found in Phil Glass’s early work, suggested that minimalism’s stasis might support even greater rhythmic complexity. Of course, the previous few decades had been awash in rhythmic complexity, but mostly of a conceptually abstract kind: the polyrhythms of Elliott Carter, Stockhausen, et al usually avoided articulating a steady beat for any period long enough to register tempo contrasts. Inspired by minimalism, rock, and world music, the totalists wanted a music of steady beats that allowed the listener to focus on tempo contrasts in a sustained way. Nancarrow’s player piano music offered a model, but his music generally wasn’t performable, nor was his emphasis often on sustained steady beats. What the totalists wanted was a new kind of ensemble performance that retained minimalism’s clear, doubled lines and motoric rhythm, but also offered a perception-stretching simultaneity of rhythmic layers, usually within the confines of comfortable live performance.

The trick was to use the inherent polyrhythmic implications of different note durations. The most common totalist strategy was to mix different pulses of quarter-notes, dotted quarter-notes, and triplet quarter-notes. Michael Gordon had gone down this road as early as 1983 with his Thou Shalt!/Thou Shalt Not!. By 1993, in pieces like Yo Shakespeare, he had stripped down to almost pure rhythm (the doubled instruments here being guitars and electric keyboards):

(Hear the excerpt here. I have chosen the excerpts here for their rhythmic clarity, not because they are the most well-developed or beautiful examples of the style. If I were trying to convince the reader that totalist music is a compelling repertoire, I might in some cases have chosen other and more recent examples. My purpose at present is merely to prove that in the ‘80s and ‘90s, these composers were generating their music from strikingly similar rhythmic ideas.) Note the use of triplet quarter-notes in groupings of other than three. This was not unprecedented; Henry Cowell suggested it in New Musical Resources, Boulez toyed with the idea in Le Marteau sans Maitre, and I used it myself starting with my I’itoi Variations of 1985. What it means performance-wise is that the performer has to forget about the meter entirely (though it still conforms to 4/4 in this example) and, having internalized the tempo of the triplets, play them in tempo irrespective of bar lines. The meter’s 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 must be forgotten about.

The most fertile totalist contrast was that between triplet quarter-notes and dotted 8th-notes, either of which could easily be sustained against a dominant quarter note beat. The typical totalist ensemble circa 1993 would keep a quarter note beat in common by tapping their feet or nodding their heads, and achieve a faster 8-against-9 rhythm by having half the ensemble play triplet quarters and the other half dotted eighths. It was amazingly effective – even if the effect of everyone nodding their head to a beat no one ever played was, visually, a little humorous.

My own technique has often been not to play these tempos simultaneously, but to shift back and forth between them, as in my Snake Dance No. 2 of 1994:

(Hear the excerpt here.) By this point, of course, the “meter” has become an irrelevant bookkeeping activity: the fact that 13/8 follows 23/16 is of no importance whatever, for either the performers or the listener. One performs this music by getting a feel, throughout the piece, for how fast to go when the beats are quintuplet 8ths, how fast when they are dotted 8ths, and so on. It takes awhile to rethink your rhythmic sense this way. The day the group Essential Music started rehearsing Snake Dance No. 2, I came home to two answering-machine messages from percussionist Chuck Wood. The first was: “We just started rehearsing your piece. We hate you.” The second, from an hour later: “Actually, we’re getting the hang of it. It’s going to be all right.”

Some totalist rhythmic strategies bear a closer conceptual relationship to minimalism. For instance, one can see the influence of Reich’s Piano Phase and other phase-shifting pieces in Murphy-Nights by Art Jarvinen, in which the keyboard plays an ostinato in 8/4 (32 16th-notes long) while the bass simultaneously plays an ostinato in 33/16, thus going out of phase one 16th-note with each repetition:

(Hear the excerpt here.) The other instruments come in over this in 6/4 meter. To this day I have no idea how the California E.A.R. Unit achieved this in performance, since it doesn’t seem possible to conduct it.

Mikel Rouse has engineered some of the most complex effects of totalism, inspired by his readings in A.M. Jones’s Studies in African Music and also his early immersion in Schillinger technique. Early pieces like Quick Thrust (1984) were based entirely on rhythms generated from patterns like 3-against-5-against-8. Much of his 1995 opera Failing Kansas was energized by five-beat phrases falling across the 4/4 meter, or the superimposition of 4/4 in the accompaniment with 12/8 in the lyrics (the 8th-note being equal). Mikel has also used intricate isorhythmic effects in which lyrics (and/or pitches) go out of phase with repeated rhythms, such as this devilishly difficult passage from “Never Forget a Face” on his 1994 album Living Inside Design:

(Hear the excerpt here.)

Too, John Luther Adams has achieved more notationally conventional but still difficult polyrhythmic textures by dividing a standard measure into 4, 5, 6, and 7 equal beats, much as Cowell suggested and as Nancarrow continued doing his entire life. Simply from rhythms alone, Adams’s In a Treeless Place, Only Snow (1999) is not too visually different from Nancarrow’s Piece for Small Orchestra No. 2:

Unlike all the other totalists, though, John’s music is soft and gentle, creating cloudy textures rather than perceptible tempo clashes.

Much more loudly, Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca used totalist rhythmic structures in their works for massed electric guitars. Glenn has used simultaneous tempos of 3:4:5 in his Symphony No. 6 (1987-88) and a quasi-tempo canon of 7:8:12 in the second movement of his Symphony No. 10 (1994). In An Angel Moves Too Fast to See for 100 electric guitars (1989), Rhys solved the problem of many guitarists not being able to read music by employing a totalist strategy. He gave various sections of the guitar orchestra single chords to play at varying rhythmic intervals: every 5 beats, another evert 7, 8, 9, 11, and 16, the music resulting naturally from the rhythmic process. (Hear the excerpt here.)

Not all totalist music is live-ensemble-oriented. Ben Neill and Larry Polansky have both made computer-generated tempo continua with rhythms similar to those of the enesmble composers. For instance, Neill in his 678 Streams performs on trumpet over a computer-generated ambient texture in which tempos of 6-against-7-against-8 are apparent. Among many other types of experiment, Polansky has made rhythmic canons of prerecorded samples, using similarly Nancarrovian tempo relationships. My own Disklavier pieces, notably Unquiet Night, have gone much further out than my ensemble pieces, articulating steady beats of 7:9:11:13:15:17. Even so, the principle remains the same: the fact that we use inherent notation-based properties of MIDI sequencing means that we’re still using notation to generate ratio-based tempo relationships.

In terms of live performance, however, there’s a limit to how far one can take these rhythmic relationships, which strikes me as one reason totalism has probably ceased to cohere as a movement. Rouse, having reached the perceptible extreme of his type of complexity, has become more interested in overlayings and spatial separation in his home-produced recordings. Gordon has been writing for orchestras, which can’t be trained to execute these rhythms in any reasonable manner. As I write more and more for existing ensembles, I’ve had to sublimate my rhythmic schemes to the more subtle background level of structure. Perhaps only Adams continues to write in the same rhythmic style, and he was always more interested in a certain kind of cloudy sound and texture than in discrete rhythmic perception anyway. Many of these rhythms can’t be conducted; Essential Music can feel my 23/16 followed by 13/8, but how would you indicate it with hand motions? I’m not convinced there’s not a way, but the gung-ho incursion of strictly totalist music into the repertoire of conventional classical ensembles was never a very feasible option. Even so, classical musicians need to start learning to deal with some of these rhythmic techniques that have become quite common.

Of course, none of this is officially recognized in musical discourse. Some of the most authoritative critics in the business have stated publicly that the totalist movement never existed, so by mentioning it you’re likely to subject yourself to the most withering looks of condescension. If you happen to accidentally mention it, try to cover by saying, “Ohh… it’s just something I read in Kyle Gann,” with a dismissive wave of your hand, and you might get away with it. Remember: there’s no such thing as totalist music (wink, wink).

I’m writing a choral piece for my choral director friend James Bagwell, and am hip-deep in e. e. cummings. I’ve learned that I had him all wrong. From cute poems with words like “mudluscious” and “puddlespring,” I had gotten, in high school, an impression that cummings was a pixieish little man with a coy sense of humor and a mischievous twinkle in his eye – quel misconcepción! And my high school literature texts aren’t to blame, for the average cummings poem, it turns out, contains too many obscenities and sexual references to make it past the school board censors. Here’s a sonnet-picture that absolutely knocked me over, a photorealist word portrait of nightlife in the 1930s (and one I haven’t found elsewhere on the web):

helves surling out of eakspesies per(reel)hapsingly

proregress heandshe-ingly people

tickle curselaughgroping shrieks bubble

squirmwrithed staggerful unstrolls collaps ingly

flash a of-faceness stuck thumblike into pie

is traffic this recalls hat gestures bud

plumptumbling hand voices Eye Doangivuh sud-

denly immense impotently Eye Doancare Eye

And How replies the upsquirtingly careens

the to collide flatfooting with Wushyaname

a girl-flops to the Geddup curb leans

carefully spewing into her own Shush Shame

as(out from behind Nowhere)creeps the deep thing

everybody sometimes calls morning

I start to feel hungover just reading it. And here’s another cummings ditty that wasn’t included in my high school literature text. See if you can guess why:

may i feel said he

(i’ll squeal said she

just once said he)

it’s fun said she

(may i touch said he

how much said she

a lot said he)

why not said she

(let’s go said he

not too far said she

what’s too far said he

where you are said she)

may i stay said he

(which way said she

like this said he

if you kiss said she

may i move said he

is it love said she)

if you’re willing said he

(but you’re killing said she

but it’s life said he

but your wife said she

now said he)

ow said she

(tiptop said he

don’t stop said she

oh no said he)

go slow said she

(cccome?said he

ummm said she)

you’re divine!said he

(you are Mine said she)

And, no, this probably isn’t one I’m going to set for chorus. Yet.

I have a couple of articles out this week, unfortunately neither viewable on the web: a profile of composer Lawrence Dillon in Chamber Music magazine, and a review of some composer biographies by Daniel Felsenfeld in Symphony magazine. Sorry to go so legit on you, but in difficult times, even the most disreputable of us have to attach ourselves to the mainstream.

And while I’m at it, the comments on my last few posts have taken on a life of their own, more interesting than the original posts. Since I have to OK them all individually, I’m beginning to feel like a freakin’ webmaster here. Question to Sequenza 21‘s Jerry Bowles: How do you go about getting paid for all this work?

My post on the ages at which composers find their mature styles elicited some correspondence from an economist named David Galenson who has written a book called Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity. The book deals with the chronology-related creativity patterns of painters, sculptors, poets, novelists, and movie directors – no composers, unfortunately, but maybe that’s where we come in. Don’t ask me why an economist is writing about this, but he has some interesting ideas, and he offered me a 1916 quote from Wassily Kandinsky that applies to the imitative young composers I wrote about who get orchestral commissions: “Such artists are like starlings who do not know a song of their own, but imitate more or less well that of the nightingale.” I want to read the book.

To continue on that track: I write a lot of program notes, as you know – for three different orchestras this year alone. In the case of very recent works, this usually involves getting a copy of the score, and a CDR of a performance if the work is not a world premiere, and I pretty much have to superficially analyze the piece to describe it and tell the audience what to expect. Recently I was assigned a piece written by a composer in his 20s, the piece for which he is best known. I have rarely seen so inept a work. Unable to sustain or even fully form an idea, he fell into the habit of completely changing texture every two measures on the barline, and one of the “themes” he pointed out as significant in his own program notes was so undistinguished I couldn’t be certain where it was in the score, nor notice it in the recording. Moments that seemed intended as romantically expressive used instruments in the most ineffective registers. It was not an issue of stylistic bias on my part; it was a basically a type of tonal and partly bitonal piece that, had it been competent, I might have been expected to like. Had one of my students written it, I would have patted the culprit on the head and thought, “Well, that’s not too bad for an undergrad, I hope grad school straightens the kid out.” But the piece has been performed by a more than half a dozen orchestras, and has resulted in several new commissions.

And good lord, the reviews in this composer’s press kit: “Beethoven.” “A young master.” “Audiences are ecstatically enthusiastic.” I don’t mean the Winona, MN, Times-Picayune, I mean some of the biggest-name critics at some big-city papers have prostrated themselves before the coming of this Messiah of ineptitude. The hip-deep hyperbole seems almost a compensation for not having anything explicit to say about the music. Since I usually get press kits for the young composers I write about, I notice that this is quite common. Every one of them can boast press notices bulging with the most lavish praise. The critics exhibit all the wise, skeptical, cautious, seasoned judgment of the White House press corps, which is to say, they salivate on command. Bless them, they do advocate for orchestras to play new music, and for that I thank them. But they are ridiculously quick to assume that the composers who make it into the orchestra circuit are the best around, quick to convince themselves that these pieces by young composers are masterpieces, and also to assume that those who haven’t “made it” into the orchestra circuit must not be very good. Hearing only a tiny smidgen of the new music that’s happening, they grab at what the orchestras give them, and exercise no independent judgment.

The result? A Potemkin music scene, in which our spirits are demoralized not only by the great music that goes unrecognized, but also by the bland and incompetent music into which tremendous resources are poured. And how can anyone protest with the critics so avidly warming to their assigned puppy-dog role? The bios of these young composers, at least the American ones, all read the same: they attended Eastman, Juilliard, Peabody, Curtis, or a couple of other places, studied there with big-name composers (who made their careers the same way), and who took up the youngster as a protégé, introducing him or her to conductors, giving them the awards on whose panels they sit, and getting their pieces played. In these press kits, I read the repetitive process over and over again. Often the young composers themselves shyly reveal, in interviews, that they’re aware that their style hasn’t really coalesced yet, and seem a little embarrassed by the grandiose expectations that have risen around them. But that doesn’t matter. They’re being fed into a machine, as the successful orchestral composers I know readily admit, and the machine will take care of them.

And the orchestras have little choice but to trust the machine. The only new music they know is what the older composers tell them about. I recently wrote an article about a 28-year-old composer whose music I really like, Mason Bates. For it I interviewed an orchestra conductor who told me that the great thing about Bates’s music was how utterly distinctive it is, and how it doesn’t sound like anyone else’s. Well, Bates is something of a postminimalist who works DJ rhythms into his music, and if you’ve never heard the 20 or 30 other postminimalists whose music his vaguely resembles, yes, he must seem completely distinctive. The historical note here is that now, such are the attractions of minimalism that even the big conservatories can no longer avoid putting out a generation of 20-something postminimalists who are getting taken up by the orchestral circuit. Does this mean that the composers who’ve been pioneering postminimalism for the last quarter-century will now get their reputations rehabilitated? HA! Sorry, fellas, if you didn’t get famous by 30, the next bus leaves at 65. The consolation prize will be all the apologies I receive in a couple of years from all those critics and musicians who kept pronouncing minimalism dead as I kept insisting it was only getting started. (I’m not holding my breath.)

I’m happy to see young composers get attention and experience having their music played. It’s a shame that so many hundreds of performances and awards are concentrated in just a handful of them, and that those few are inevitably picked by the same people at the same schools. And it’s more of a shame that we have only that one mechanism for entering into a well-commissioned composer’s career, one which has no place for composers who blossom in their 30s, 40s, or 50s. One organization I really respect is the Herb Alpert Award, which is intended for emerging composers: but explicitly admits that some composers don’t emerge until they’re 45, 60, even 70. The orchestra world should learn to take this patent reality into account.

Meanwhile, every other year I analyze Rothko Chapel in class, and describe the life of Morton Feldman: three recordings issued during his lifetime, dozens more suddenly appearing in the years after his death, plus a recognition as one of the century’s great composers that he didn’t live to enjoy. And now Lucky Mosko (of whom I’ll be writing shortly), highly regarded by his colleagues, has died at 59 without my having had a chance to hear a note of his music. We are no better than in Mozart and Schubert’s day at rewarding great composers while they’re still alive: worse, in fact, because you no longer have to die young to achieve only posthumous acclaim. Instead we have the permanent, institutionalized razzle-dazzle of composers who made propitious connections in grad school.

As a music critic, I’ve sat in the middle of hundreds of audiences, and I’ve observed them closely. I’ve seen them all gasp in unison at a right turn in a daring improv; I’ve seen them break into laughter at a clever one-chord quotation in a Rzewski piece; I’ve seen them fooled by an energetic performance into approving mediocre music; I’ve seen them let their minds wander during a performance and then clap loudly because it was something they were supposed to like. In short, I’ve generally seen audience members get swept into a collective dynamic, especially if a piece or performance is extreme in one way or another – extraordinarily boring, virtuosic, touching, and so on. I’ve also talked to people at intermissions and found that, despite a tremendous variety of opinions, it’s usually pretty easy to reach agreement on the details. It’s one’s evaluation of the details that makes for differences of opinion.

And so, from my own observations, I’ve always thought that that omnipresent composer mantra – “I never think about the audience when I write, because there is no such thing as the audience; everyone listens differently” – was hugely exaggerated. Within reasonable social-group similarities, people don’t listen that differently. Everyone drives differently, too, but it’s funny that when I press on my brake, the guy behind me nearly always does too.

So I think about the audience when I compose. Constantly. Of course I don’t simply try to write what will please them. I have my own kind of musical content I want to get across, and always have: overlapping rhythmic schemes, intricately interlocked harmonies, smooth forms whose seams (if any) are carefully brushed over. That stuff is me, and if I couldn’t put that into music, I’d quit composing. But when I was younger I often noticed that I’d stuff a piece with everything I wanted to say, and the audience wouldn’t get it. They’d just be mystified. I realized that my message wasn’t coming across. I went through a lot of self-criticism, and learned to give the audience what I call “points of entry” so they’d recognize something right away. If I wanted to get them to perceive a 13-against-29 tempo clash (in my piece Texarkana), I’d couch it in stride piano technique, so they’d have something familiar to start with. To seduce them into a tonal flux of microtonal harmonies in Custer and Sitting Bull, I added a military snare drum beat. I don’t call that compromising – I just call it learning how to get your message across, giving the listener something to hold onto, something that interests them, acknowledging their part of the transaction. It’s not up to me whether audiences like my music or not, but if they listen to a piece of mine and have no idea what I was trying to do, I consider that my failure. Frankly, I feel composers should forget about Schoenberg (who railed against people who please the audience) and start taking lessons from Spielberg.

Out of a purported 40,000 composers in America, I thought 39,999 disagreed with me, but it now turns out the number is only 39,997. As revealed in the comments on my previous post, Jeff Harrington and Samuel Vriezen also believe in composing with the audience in mind. That makes three of us.

UPDATE: Actually, let me add one more thought. Beethoven gave us what I consider an admirable model: he wrote the Grosse Fuge, which almost no one understood, and also the Ninth Symphony, which no one can fail to understand. And I’ve never figured out why today’s composers seem to think that they need to choose one point along this continuum and compose only from that point. Why not write one piece with a typical symphony audience in mind, and the next as a puzzle just for yourself and friends? As I once asked in a Village Voice column, “Isn’t Craft a god who must be propitiated, and won’t an occasional offering do the job?”

The guys (and the occasional gal) over at Sequenza 21 had their liveliest conversation ever this week, racking up 143 comments before spilling into another thread that went to 71. It was mostly young guys, balanced by house curmudgeon Jeff Harrington and official instigator Jerry Bowles, enthusing about the return of complexity to music – gnarliosity became the operative word – and morphing into a discussion (the same one my friends and I had all through the 1980s, to little effect) about how to market the music to get it out there. Finally Lawrence Dillon, social conscience of Sequenza 21, brought the thread to a dead, unanswerable halt with a simple-seeming question:

What will listeners gain that they don’t currently have?

It was a sharper form of a line of questioning he had begun a few posts earlier:

1. What is the goal of marketing new music? Is it personal, i.e. I want more people to love me, I want enough money to live comfortably so I can create, etc. Or is it cultural, i.e., the world would be a better place if more people listened to the music of living composers, the world would be a better place if all living composers could just write music instead of having to hold down other jobs, etc. Or is there some other reason?…

2. What do you imagine people will replace in their lives to make more room for new music? Should they watch less television? Read less? Listen to less pop music? Blog less frequently? Spend less time lying around doing nothing? You can’t expect to add something more to anyone’s plate without acknowledging what they are giving up.

What are we giving people in our music? What’s in it for the audience? How can we write our music to make the world a better place, perhaps even fulfilling needs that people didn’t realize they had until hearing it? Excellent questions. The central holidays of a season of giving seem like the perfect time to stop and think about them. I’m grateful for the reminder to do so.