John Updike, in his long essay on writers’ last works in this week’s New Yorker, said something about writing novels that I’ve long believed was true about writing music: “It’s like sex, either easy or impossible.” The less severe way I’ve always put it to my students was, I can write a good piece in three weeks, but a bad one takes me six months.

Schoenberg said something to that effect, when asked about composing without inspiration: “Impossible!” And yet, to counter that, I’ve long repeated two helpful slogans from Virgil Thomson:

Ninety percent of composing is keeping your ass in the chair.

and

My muse and I had an appointment, and at least I showed up.

The point is, of course (I’m learning I’d better always spell out my points), is that composing without inspiration may be a grind, but the surest way to catch inspiration is to be sitting in your chair when it shows up.

Come to think of it, I’d better qualify even that. Composition isn’t always easy in the sense that it flows smoothly. For instance, in writing my piece Chicago Spiral, which is a nine-part triple canon at the major second in 14/8 meter, I spent three days working on one three-measure passage. (The three days were December 24-26, 1991). But it was because the form was so strict that I couldn’t get the notes to come out right, and it wasn’t hard to work on in the sense that I couldn’t keep engaged; on the contrary, I couldn’t leave it alone, and started up again as soon as the Christmas presents were opened. In that sense, working on it was easy, though the problem was difficult.

It’s the middle of the night – prime blogging time when insomnia strikes – and I’m sitting here thinking about vinyl. I’ve been, as I’ve related, transferring dozens of vinyl records onto CDs and MP3s. I started out doing it for teaching purposes, but have run into more creative reasons. A couple of performers have recently expressed an interest in my returning to writing music based on American Indian sources (I know, Native American, but it just never sounds clear), and since the bulk of my Native American recordings are on vinyl, I need to transfer them if I’m ever realistically going to work closely with them again. I had veered away from borrowing on Hopi, Zuni, Sioux, and San Juan music in the last eight years, but I find that repertoire as inspiring again now as when I first started out. The melodies are elegant, and the rhythmic sense is so deliciously non-European.

But back to vinyl. It’s remarkable what a wide range of apparent media the word covers. I worked at Laury’s Records in Desplaines, Illinois, in 1979-80, and remember that it was at about that time that record companies started advertising “audiophile” recordings on “virgin vinyl,” for only a few dollars more. In an interesting coincidence, at that same time, non-“audiophile” records started being made out of what one would have to call, by analogy, “aging syphilitic whore vinyl.” Thus they created a powerful incentive to start shelling out $18 to hear records of the quality that you used to get as a matter of course, instead of the $12 you’d pay for “normal” records which now sounded like garbage can lids. I put on my late ’70s Deutsche Grammophon recording of Henze’s Sixth Symphony, pristinely undisturbed since I last listened to it for, oh, maybe the third time circa 1980 – and it pops and scratches and bristles like I had gleefully run back and forth over it with a snowmobile. You might as well try to listen to a bowl of oatmeal. Go back a few years into the early ’70s, though, and the vinyl improves tremendously in stability. I bet between 1965 and 1985 I could date a record within a couple of years by the scratchiness of its surface.

And yet, with some trepidation I pulled out my old American Indian records made in the ’60s and early ’70s, which had been listened to relentlessly for transcription purposes, and manufactured by cheap little labels like Canyon Records and Indian House: perfect. Side after side without a single scratch and hardly ever a pop. Even the historic old Frances Densmore ethno recordings, made in the 1920s on portable cylinder equipment and issued by the Library of Congress in the early 50s, sound far better than that Henze symphony. There may be some anthropological explanation I’m unaware of, such as that the Indians used every part of the vinyl and didn’t throw away the hooves or something, but it does remind you of what a sturdy, near-perfect medium vinyl used to be, before the industry deliberately trashed it in order to force us to pay for something with a larger profit margin.

Still, I’m a child of the record. I’ve never had my music on a vinyl record, but I spent my youth dreaming about it, and I can’t relinquish the dream. No little square, plastic, ephemeral-looking CD case with my name on the front will ever thrill me the way a record of my music could, with 12″x12″ cover art and copious, readable liner notes on the back to peruse in the record store. It’s a quixotic urge, but I know there are still vinyl records being bought up by young audiophiles – and it would fulfill a dream of my life to someday see my name on the front of a beautiful, readable, playable 12-inch record. I only hope that, if it ever happens, the vinyl hasn’t been around the block too many times.

I have to reflect that vinyl is a metaphor for the life I grew up wanting, and which no longer exists. I wanted to hold in my hands a record with my name on it, and I probably never will. I might have wanted Time magazine, or perhaps the Village Voice, to discuss my music, but Time hasn’t written about new composers in many years, and no longer does the Village Voice. I perhaps thought orchestras would play my music, but the new music orchestras play now is dreadful, and the process one of constant compromise, based more on youth and looks than musical quality. I rather fancied that C.F. Peters or Presser or Schirmer might pubish my music; now I would quite sensibly turn down any such offer, since “publishers” no longer do anything but take your royalties, tie up your rights, and make your music difficult to find. I thought my musical ideas might be discussed, but no one discusses ideas in new music anymore. I can’t envy anyone, for there is no one of my generation, or even a decade or so older, who’s achieved the life I had in mind. No one I know has put out a vinyl record since the ’80s, nor had any other kind of success I used to dream about. The post-Reagan corporate stranglehold put an end to that kind of cultural life, or perhaps it was only a dream of the 1960s, an optical illusion. Not very flexible by nature, I set my heart on a life that, if it ever existed, was starting to disappear by the time I was a record-store clerk, and if it no longer exists, financially secure obscurity will do as well as anything else currently offered.

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried. Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact, makes much impression on him, and another none….

A boy is… independent, irresponsible, looking out from his corner on such people and facts as pass by, he tries and sentences them on their merits, in the swift, summary way of boys, as good, bad,
interesting, silly, eloquent, troublesome. He cumbers himself never about consequences, about interests; he gives an independent, genuine verdict. You must court him; he does not court you. But the man is as it were clapped into jail by his consciousness. As soon as he has once acted or spoken with eclat he is a committed person, watched by the sympathy or the hatred of hundreds, whose affections must now enter into his account. There is no Lethe for this. Ah, that he could pass again into his neutrality! Who can thus avoid all pledges and, having observed, observe again from the same unaffected, unbiased, unbribable, unaffrighted innocence,– must always be formidable….

These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world. Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each
shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist… Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

– Emerson, “Self-Reliance”

I had coffee yesterday with a rising young orchestral conductor, one of the assistant conductors to the New York Philharmonic. He made the remark that he had never seen an orchestra that showed a strong commitment to new music run into financial trouble. When I mentioned the obvious counterexample of Louisville, he said that they had abandoned their interest in new music (or rather, lost funding for the program) ten years before folding. He also commented that conductors who cultivate new and adventurous repertoire (e.g., Salonen and my boss Paavo Jarvi) seem to last in their posts longer than the average six to ten years. He agrees with what I’ve been saying (and said it before I did): that for audience members born after 1975, post-Rite of Spring music is a much bigger draw than 18th- or 19th-century repertoire, and the orchestra needs to start pinning their hopes on it.

I love talking to conductors. They all tried their hands at composing, and they all (though I only meet relatively young ones) feel an idealistic commitment to extending the repertoire toward the present. It’s like living next to a mountain range and then hearing it described by someone who lives on the other side. Of course, the relationship isn’t symmetrical. The eyes of a composer who’s just met a conductor light up with a concupiscence otherwise reserved for scantily-clad statuesque blondes, but the conductors are always nice about it.* Their only collective fault is that they rely too credulously on the composing profession’s official award structures for validation of the music they select. I told the Maestro I thought that being a conductor was the most difficult career anyone could choose; he countered that he felt that dubious honor belonged to composition. He had seen several composer friends reinvent themselves over and over again trying to find a way to survive finanically. But, I replied, when I don’t have a commission, I can always amble into my studio and write another Disklavier piece; I don’t need a group of people to agree to work with me just to exercise my art. I’m sure that my road as a composer would have been easier had I possessed a little charisma, but being a conductor without it is unimaginable.

[*Footnote: Bard has a small MFA program for conductors. I always kid the students that, as they walk across stage to pick up their diplomas, Joan Tower, George Tsontakis, and I will be at the end of the line with stacks of our orchestral scores to give them.]

I don’t know much about the Schoenberg scholar Dika Newlin, who just passed away. But from 1965 to 1978 she taught at North Texas State University, and I remember my high school composition teacher speaking of her with reverence and awe. Then one day in college, in a library, I ran across her name and realized she was a woman. I had always thought he was saying “Deacon Ewlin,” as though it were a religious honorific, like “Reverend.” Perhaps because of that, I never managed to bring her into focus. The composer Mason Bates studied with her in Virginia, and speaks highly of her as well.

I bought, because a reader recommended it, The Pimlico Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Composers (1999), by Mark Morris – not the famous dancer, of course, but a Welsh music critic resident in Canada. It is organized by country, which creates some curious ambiguities: for instance, Foss is listed under the U.S.A. and Wolpe under Germany, even though both were born in Germany and emigrated to America. (I think of Wolpe’s late music as highly American, while Foss retains his German accent.) But it has certain advantages, such as listing Iceland’s Thorkall Sigurbjörnsson, New Zealand’s Douglas Lilburn, and Norway’s unfortunate and distinctly underrated Geirr Tveitt, whom most survey histories are unlikely to mention at all.

What’s interesting is the opportunity to see our music world in an exceedingly British mirror. For example, this comment in the section on the U.S.A.:

“It is difficult not to come to the conclusion that in terms of musical impact, and in the reflection of the wider human condition and the narrower expression of the ethos and ideas of the day, none of the American composers has yet matched their European counterparts.”

This is refreshingly frank, and brings up two Eurocentric criteria with which I might have been sympathetic when I was 20, before I became more acclimated to the changes that came with postmodernism. On one hand we have “the wider human condition,” i.e., the programmatic holdover from Romanticism that music is supposed to encapsulate some echo of the bourgeois man’s relation to society. On the other, “the narrower expression of the ethos and ideas of the day,” which seems to reflect a modernist belief that the Hegelian World Spirit, moving ever westward (and stopping for the time being in London, at least until the trains are in better repair), is embodied in a mainstream of music on which all “serious” composers must comment, and to which they all contribute. No dirty rumor of “pluralism” taints these pages. British composers, from that country which the Germans used to call “das land ohne musik,” occupy 72 pages; Americans only 50; Germany gets 49, and Russia 45. Harry Partch, La Monte Young, and Morton Feldman (the most influential composer of the last 25 years) are mentioned only in passing, not granted separate entries, while the names Conlon Nancarrow and Robert Ashley appear nowhere. Meanwhile, the entry on the United Kingdom begins, “The history of British music in the 20th century is a remarkable one,” and includes separate essays on William Alwyn, Ivor Bertie Gurney, Daniel Jenkyn Jones, Elizabeth Maconchy, and Grace Williams, all of whom surely outrank the marginal Feldman.

To an extent, the book indeed complements my own American Music in the Twentieth Century. But I have trouble thinking how I’ll explain away its anglophile exaggerations, and I have ended up taking Paul Griffiths’ more equitable Modern Music and After for my 20th-century music survey class.

My old friend Joshua Kosman, irreverent critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, whom I don’t see often because he’s on the wonderful coast and I’m on the dull one, has succumbed to the tempation to start a blog, titled On a Pacific Aisle. It promises to be entertaining. Joshua is the coiner, among other things, of “Kosman’s Law”: never trust a piece whose title is a plural noun. (Think of all those horrible academic ’70s pieces with titles like Algorithms and Perspectives and Concatenations.)

[UPDATE: The final two sentences of the above entry contain a joke that Joshua and I considered a riot 15 years ago. You may not find it funny, but there’s no reason to get indignant about it. You can’t expect all the jokes to be funny.]

I am informed that my Private Dances will be performed August 12 by pianist Kentaro Noda, at Tokyo Music University, at the end of a four-day piano festival. Mr. Noda’s program for that afternoon (1:00), titled “The Next American Piano,” is:

Justin Henry Rubin: Monumentum pro Giacinto Scelsi ad annum C (2005)

Kyle Gann: Private Dances (2000-2004)

Larry Polansky: tooaytoods #1-11 (2001-2005)

Dary John Mizelle: Piano Sonata no.4 (2001)

Dary John Mizelle: Transforms 1-34 (1976-1994)

All of these are Japanese premieres, and the Polansky and Mizelle are world premieres. This is not only my first performance in Japan, but the first time (as far as I know) that someone’s performed one of my works from downloading it off my web site.

American pianist Blair McMillen will be playing two of the Dances at Caramoor on August 16, and at the Tenri Institute in New York on September 8. Details later. They’re getting around.

My son’s band Architeuthis played CBGB’s last night. (I know, I should have advertised it in my blog. But he had thought they’d play after 10, then they were supposed to start at 8, until they found out there was an opening singer and they were moved to 8:30, so I wouldn’t have been able to tell you when they’d be on anyway. That’s what I always hated about reviewing groups at CBGB’s and Tonic and even the Knitting Factory – the lackadaisical time aspect, the lack of printed information, the casual conviction that you should just hang out with the scene and expeeeeeerience it. For one thing, ten years ago when I’d review groups at CBGB’s I’d be the only audience member over 25, and last night I was really the only audience member over 25. I skulked around in the back with my umbrella, looking, I imagined through the youngsters’ eyes, about as hip as Sydney Greenstreet in Casablanca. A friend of Bernard’s recommended that I pass myself off as a record company talent scout. I realize there’s something to be said for just experiencing the music, never knowing what or whom you’re hearing, or when any particular performer is playing, or titles of pieces, or names of players, and that a lot of groundbreaking music has been introduced this way. But when I was a critic trying to write about what I heard it was tremendously frustrating, and now that I’m twice the age of even the bartender, it’s no fun “hanging out” quasi-enthusiastically with people who suspect you just wandered in from Paramus and that someone, as a joke, gave you the wrong address for the theater where you had tickets for Rent. I always had a policy – if I was the only person there over 22, I’d refuse to review the concert, and around 1998 I just swore off those three spaces altogether. I’m an old fart and a classical musician, and I want to sit in a cushioned chair, consult the concert program, and have the music start five minutes after the hour. Respect me less if you want, but I’ll know what I’m listening to.)

As I say, Architeuthis played CBGB’s, or rather the CB Gallery downstairs. Bernard Gann on guitar, Sam Brodsky on bass, Greg Fox on drums. They played seven pieces based on repeated riffs, with some 13/16 meter, a 7-beat ostinato at one point, considerable forays into atonality, and a tendency to suddenly cut off a mass of sound to strip down to one element and then build up again. Somewhat early-Sonic-Youthish, I thought, with loud energy, wider textural range than I would have credited from only two guitars, and considerable compositional finesse. I was thrilled to hear it whatever the circumstances.

It doesn’t get better than this. I just had another serendipitous conflation of recordings. I’m transferring Zemlinsky’s Fourth Quartet, with its marvelously nervous fugue theme in the sixth movement, all 8th-16th-16th, 8th-16th-16th, 8th, and on the other computer was, precisely in tempo, the Balinese monkey chant: “Chaka chaka chaka chaka chaka!” Perfect.