I am in receipt of James Klosty’s handsome new coffee-table volume John Cage Was, a book of photographs of John Cage, many of them rare and unseen before, all of them telling. For the margins Klosty asked a lot of people connected with Cage to write descriptions of him of a hundred words or less, using the words “John Cage was….” For those who are unlikely to shell out for the book, here’s what I wrote:

John Cage was the figure who, for thousands of musicians, opened the door to the world beyond rationality. By introducing us to the I Ching, and showing us how to use it both artistically and practically, he made it seem safe and creative and irresistible to explore not only Eastern thought and Buddhism, but astrology, Tarot, Jungian theory, and any discipline based in an ineffable synchronicity. He freed us to not understand what we were doing, and making art has been more interesting ever since.

In college I did indeed spend years consulting the I Ching, though I found it rather opaque, and never settled into it well; it seemed to be forever telling me that “it furthers one to cross the great water.” In retrospect, I guess it was directing me to expatriate to Europe posthaste, and I wish I’d complied. Tarot cards (which Cage used in composing 4’33”, though no one knows how) I found attractive, and still do, but wasn’t intuitive enough to interpret them with any subtlety. Astrology was the synchronicity system that clicked with my mathematical brain. I once consulted with Cage’s astrologer, Julie Winter, and many of the books I read on astrology early on were by another composer whose music I am devoted to, Dane Rudhyar. The new-agey/occult side of Cage’s influence gets whitewashed from his public persona, but for some of us it was explicit.

 

The faculty is once again rethinking the distribution requirements, the obstacle course of varied classes every student has to take to make sure they all have a more well-rounded education than I do. So we’re having meetings about how to pitch courses to non-majors. I enjoy these. My colleagues in literature, the sciences, and the social sciences are so brilliant, so eloquent and thoughtful, that I’ve come to realize that I’m not all that smart – I’m just really smart for a musician. Today they asked what one thing I would want a non-music-major to get out of one of my classes. As so often happens, my mouth started rattling before my brain was even engaged, and what it said was good enough: “I want every student to realize that it is possible to fall completely in love with a piece of music that he or she didn’t like at all the first time they heard it.”

Because this is what I’m having a lot of trouble with. The closed-mindedness of some of my students seems like the worst thing about my life these days, and if that’s the biggest tragedy I’ve got to deal with, I guess I’ll survive. I’m talking about my composition students. I am prepared for our opera singers to turn up their noses at Stockhausen and Nancarrow, but these are young composers refusing to give modern masterworks a third hearing (actually, one of my singers is bugging me for the most dissonant Ives songs I can give her). I’ll play the Concord Sonata, or Bartok’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, for a student, a music major, and they respond, “No no, I don’t like that, and I’m sure I never will.” Or I’ll play some astounding microtonal music, and they’ll say, “Oh, that just sounds out of tune, no one’s ever going to accept that.” No curiosity whatever, no openness, no wonder. Worse: it’s like, if they spend three hours listening to a 20- or 40-minute piece a few times, that’ll be three spoiled, precious hours of their life they’ll never get back. Or, maybe, if they learn to enjoy some peculiar-sounding piece, it will split them off from their peers, to whom they would have trouble relating the experience. I don’t get it. No one has ever called me un-opinionated, but when I was 18, I was going to be damned before I would admit that there was a piece of modern music in existence that I couldn’t understand. I’d listen to the same record a dozen times in a row until the piece started to make sense to me. I wasn’t committed to liking everything I heard, but I was going to understand every single piece well enough to understand why somebody liked it, even if I didn’t, and I was going to be able to articulate why, of all the complex and opaque pieces ever written, I’d decided I didn’t like this one. I withheld judgments for years, decades, until I felt I had done sufficient analysis to come to an opinion. After 20 years of full-time teaching, I’m still waiting to come across a student as totally committed to understanding the entire classical repertoire as I was at 18. Haven’t found one.

Part of the problem is that “the canon” carries no weight anymore (and little enough with me). Students come to school already knowing everything worth knowing, or so they think, having heard the first minute of thousands of mp3s, and with a calcified, corporate-determined idea of what is musically acceptable. With so many alternative histories of music available, why should mine be privileged? I like Giacinto Scelsi, but they like some hiphop artist I’ve never heard, so we’re even, right? But I’m the 59-year-old professor, and I can look back at the opinions I firmly held at age 20 with embarrassment and condescension. It alienates me from them. When they refuse to consider, despite detailed argument, that there may be incredible qualities in modern works that they haven’t understood yet, attempting to teach them becomes a tedious bore. What the hell are they in college for? Why am I baby-sitting people who aren’t impressed with my experience and opinion? Is this a generational thing? a product of iPod and internet culture? Why would smart, likable, upscale students be so determined that no one’s going to educate them?

And while I’m at it, get off my lawn.

 

“[Composer Rinaldo Di Capua] thinks composers have nothing to do now but to write themselves and others over again, and the only chance they have for obtaining the reputation of novelty or invention must arise either from the ignorance or want of memory in the public – as everything both in melody and modulation that is worth doing has already been done over and over again.”

– Charles Burney, Music, Men, and Manners in France and Italy, 1770

It’s every bit as true now as it was then.

 

I am told that my copy of the French translation of No Such Thing as Silence – titled No Silence: 4’33” de John Cage (Allia Editions) – is in the mail.

UPDATE: The French edition, which has arrived, is very classy, and is decorated with hundreds of photos of Cage, Tudor, Rauschenberg, Coomaraswamy, and others that weren’t in the more austere American edition. Perhaps I should just publish my Ives book in French, they seem to have the money.

 

It’s almost official: my next book will be The Arithmetic of Listening: Tuning Theory and History for the Impractical Musician. I had given up trying to interest publishers in microtonality, but it seems to finally be an idea who’s time has come. This will be basically a textbook, though in my characteristic style which the New York Times has designated as “chatty.” There are worse words, I guess.

And yet I’m not in any hurry to sign the contract. I haven’t yet turned in my Concord Sonata book, which has been finished for weeks, because the publisher says I went way over my limit on musical examples (by about 30 percent). I had predicted how many examples I’d need, and wish now I’d cited a higher number – and that editor is gone anyway, as the original editor always is by the time one finishes a book. This Ives book is, I think, the greatest achievement of my life, and now I’m painfully poring through it trying to amalgamate and eliminate musical examples without making it harder to read. For my Robert Ashley book, of course, I had to put the musical examples on my web site, which I knew in advance was required. And now this new editor is suggesting that some of my microtonal charts and diagrams may have to go on the internet as well. Such a theoretical book will be rendered useless if the correlative web site is ever discontinued.

It used to be that a writer wrote a book, and the publisher published it. Then a writer wrote a book and the publisher made the writer pay for his indexing, and next the writer had to pay the fact-checker if he wanted one, and then the writer had to pay permissions for every quotation over 300 words, and there were some things you couldn’t say at all because you couldn’t get permission. And now the writer can’t use the illustrations needed to make the book readable. One might hope that, by age 58, with my sixth book going to press, I would have earned the right to say whatever I needed to say and no longer have to compromise, but in the current, increasingly corporate climate compromises are thrown at one from right and left. And it’s not like I’m going to make any money from any of these books. It has reached the point at which the completion of a book manuscript is just the beginning of the author’s tedious paperwork and heartbreak, and I really don’t know whether it will prove worthwhile to write another one. I’ve always threatened to internet-publish The Arithmetic of Listening, and I’d rather do that and give it to the world for free than put it out in a compromised state. If part of the book has to be on the internet, why refrain from putting the whole thing?

Several years ago I turned my energies to writing books because the new-music performance world was so unsatisfying, and now obsessions with copyright and cutting corners have made book-publishing equally unpalatable. I really can’t think what to do with the rest of my life that wouldn’t prove dispiriting in this corporate-poisoned world.

My good friend Anne Garland, wife of songwriter David, gave me some html code with which to make my Just Intonation Explained page far more convenient and practical by embedding the mp3s so that they don’t jump to a new page to play, and you can keep reading the text while listening. She warned that it doesn’t work on all browsers, and so if any of you find you can’t access the recorded examples, please let me know and I’ll put the original version back up as an alternative. This is going to open up a lot of possibilities: I’ve been considering putting up a Listener’s Guide to the Concord based on my analysis.

Just prepared my “Late Beethoven” syllabus, about to walk into my first class of the semester in three hours.

In the earliest years of the 20th century, Charles Ives was working for Charles H. Raymond & Co. insurance company in Wall Street. On weekends he would escape the city to Pine Mountain, a beautiful nature reserve south of Danbury where the Ives family owned land, in order to compose there. Some of his early works are marked with the notation “Pine Mountain,” including the First Piano Sonata, whose earliest sketch is dated Aug. 4, 1901. And today there is a long trail through the Pine Mountain nature reserve called the Ives Trail, running from Ridgefield to Bethel. And so as the end of our book-buying Concord, Mass., vacation (the only kind I let my wife take, but she claims she doesn’t mind), Nancy and I came back and took in some of the Ives Trail. (Among other things I bought The Oxford Handbook of Transcendentalism, $120, as well as a used copy of Glenn Watkin’s The Gesualdo Hex, which I unaccountably hadn’t known about, plus the new Murakami novel. I passed up a first edition of Bronson Alcott’s sonnets for $150. Oh well.)

The Ives Trail runs for several miles, but I only wanted to see Lookout Point where Ives and his brother Moss built a cabin. The trail is a hell of a lot more rustic and rocky than I anticipated, and pretty stiff climbing:

You know, I grew up in Texas, and I rather thought all the East Coast states had been paved over decades ago. It’s way out of the way, on a narrow little road outside Ridgefield, CT, and it’s marked all along with little Ives Trail signs with treble clefs on them:

I didn’t get the impression that any of the hikers we ran into had the slightest idea who Charles Ives was. (I kept expecting to run into musicologists.) I would have been happy to conduct a tour. And the spot where Ives and Moss built their cabin in 1903 was at Lookout point, which I would have to think is the most exquisite panoramic view in the state of Connecticut:

We couldn’t take a photo that would do the cliff behind me justice. Had I fallen backward here, I would have hit a rock about eight feet below, and if I bounced off that, the next plunge would have been forty feet or so. But this rock was apparently the site of Ives’s cabin. Here’s another photo:

(Please click for better focus; my legs are well worth it.) It was all Nancy and I and our tiny little dog Gita could do to get the mile and a half to this point. I’ve been realizing more and more how wrapped up Ives’s philosophy of music was with the aesthetics of nature, and that he conceived so many early pieces here made perfect sense.

So now I’ve been to the places both piano sonatas were conceived. And I’m just a few hours of work away from having the manuscript ready to turn in. Seeing Pine Mountain was one of my last check-off points.

[UPDATE] A couple more:

And the size of the dog we brought. Gita is a seven-pound shih-tzu/yorkie mix, but she scrambled up those rocks like a labrador:

 

 

The gold of Beethoven’s day, of which he was himself the purest nugget, comes down to us bright and untarnished, so that we forget all the dross that has been thrown on the scrap-heap of time. Our own gold is almost hidden from us by the glitter of the tinsel.

The world of music, says Sir Charles Stanford [“Pages from an Unwritten Diary”], is not substantially different from what it has been. It has always exalted those of its contemporary composers who dealt in frills and furbelows above those who considered the body more important than its clothes. Only a few wise heads knew of the existence of Bach. Rossini was rated by the mass of the public far higher than Weber, Spohr than Beethoven, Meyerbeer than Wagner. Simrock said that he made Böhm pay for Brahms.

It is always necessary to wait for the winnowing process of time before we can see the true proportions of an age. Hence we can never see our own age in its true proportions, and since the second- and third-rate elements in it are ever more acclaimed by the majority than the first-rate, we always see it worse than it is. We live, so to speak, in the glare of noon-day, and cannot see the true coloring of our world, which will appear only at evening. Hence in every age the tragi-comedy is repeated of acclaiming the mediocre and the meretricious, and ignoring worth. The Gounods always patronize the Francks.

– Daniel Gregory Mason, Contemporary Composers, 1918; pp. 36-37

I like this interview with Branford Marsalis in the Seattle Weekly, and completely agree with him:

You put on old records and they always sound better. Why are they better? I started listening to a lot of classical music, and that really solidified the idea that the most important and the strongest element of music is the melodic content.

In jazz we spend a lot of time talking about harmony. Harmonic music tends to be very insular. It tends to be [like] you’re in the private club with a secret handshake.

I have a lot of normal friends. ‘Cause it’s important. [When] you have a bunch of musicians talking about music and they talk about what’s good and what’s not good, they don’t consider the larger context of it…

When laypeople listen to records, there’re certain things they’re going to get to. First of all, how it sounds to them. If the value of the song is based on intense analysis of music, you’re doomed. Because people that buy records don’t know shit about music. When they put on Kind of Blue and say they like it, I always ask people: What did you like about it? They describe it in physical terms, in visceral terms, but never in musical terms.

But then he says what so many musicians say:

Everything you read about jazz is: “Is it new? Is it innovative?” I mean, man, there’s 12 fucking notes. What’s going to be new? You honestly think you’re going to play something that hasn’t been played already?

And I always think, Well, actually there are a lot more than 12 fucking notes if you want to use them, and with the other ones I think I have played some things that – worthwhile or not – at least hadn’t been played before.

 

A couple of summers ago I had the odd idea of writing some simple microtonal pieces for kids, and maybe calling them “Nursery Tunes for Demented Children.” I had forgotten about them (odd how often I forget pieces I’ve written) and ran across them today, found I had completed two. I had been wanting to use some complex scales in a simple context, and maybe also thought that if kids were exposed at a tender age to something other than the 12-pitch scale they might grow up as weird as I am. Here they are:

Down to the End of the Town
Tiger, Tiger, Turning Right

Should I keep going? I have no idea how you’d perform them.

This is a rather idle comment, so don’t take it too seriously and get all outraged. I’m sitting here putting in, and fixing, footnotes in my book. I try to put them in as I’m first writing, but sometimes I write one from memory and don’t pause to look it up; or I find it in another book and don’t have the original book to look it up in; or I’m quoting something I had used in a less scholarly publication; or I’m just on a tear and don’t want to pause for footnotes. So I’m making a final pass, and I see an incomplete footnote. It’s from a book I already returned to the library. So I put the phrase in Google, and it takes me to a page of that book in Google Books, and I put in the page number. The next footnote is from a book that’s sitting on my piano, but it’s six feet away, and I’m comfortable in my Adirondack chair with my cigar. So I put the phrase in Google, and it takes me to Google Books and I get the page number and publication information. And then I start imagining footnotes I’d like to put in. Like, I had wanted to quote Richard Strauss’s boast that he could represent a fork in music, but I’d never really read that, I only heard it. So I Google “Richard Strauss” + fork, and bang!, fourth try, there it is in Brian Gilliam, The Life of Richard Strauss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 81. And it’s even better: Strauss claimed that he could differentiate between a fork and a knife in his music. And since I’ve looked up a hell of a lot of published footnotes myself lately, it occurs to me that it would be simpler for my reader to put the phrase in Google himself and find where I quoted it from than it would for him to note the chapter and page number he’s in and leaf through the footnote section in the back of the book until he finds the right footnote number.

So remind me: why, in the age of the internet, are we still using footnotes?

 

Well, I don’t know how he did it or who got paid what, but David First somehow got me mentioned in People magazine. It’s in connection with his Star Ballads band that my son Bernard plays in, and someone thought People readers would gain some kind of helpful context from knowing that Bernard is the son of a theory professor. That does it. Now I’m going to get David’s name in The Journal of Music Theory.

 

Amazing to say, Bard College has been ranked number one school in the country by the Princeton Review on the criterion of student satisfaction with classroom experiences, and as this reflects directly on me and my 200-and-something colleagues, I thought I’d trumpet it. We also ranked high on “Most Liberal Students” and “Most Accessible Professors,” and it’s true. I’m really, really accessible. The students sometimes wish we’d go away and quit hovering over them. The photo provided is across campus from me on “Stone Row.” They teach biology, or anthropology or something over there, god knows what they’re doing.

Syracuse University came in for top party school. Good thing, it sure snows a lot up there.