Eric [sic] Satie’s chief defect is that he did not know his place…. Lack of musicianship and discriminating invention, incapacity for clear and continuous thinking, set Satie fumbling for some sort of originality until he hit upon the idea of letting his poverty-stricken creations face the world under high-sounding names. – Eric Blom

Astonishingly, one of our student singers – it was Elizabeth Przybylski, the same young woman who premiered a song of my own – sang Erik Satie’s magnificent Socrate as her senior project. Even more astonishingly, as a double major in French she also wrote a 90-page paper examining Socrate’s place in 20th-century aesthetics. Drawing on a wide range of writings in the psychology and history of art, including T.W. Adorno (who was urged on her by Bard’s French literature professor, I was proud to learn), Liz placed Satie in a tradition of artists who develop a style that is misunderstood and reviled by the public at first, but eventually persuades enough artists of its power and validity that it brings about a paradigm shift – to use the phrase coined and popularized in the history of science by Thomas Kuhn.

Liz’s paper exposed two contradictions that didn’t strike her as sharply as they did me. One was that, after describing for pages how Satie drew on popular musics like ragtime and dance-hall songs for his compositional idiom, she mentioned that he went on to write in an “unpopular” style. You have to be pretty steeped in classical-music culture for this not to sound oxymoronic. Yet I spend much of my life writing about composers whose reliance on, and attempts to integrate, popular-music idioms has rendered their music “unpopular.” But unpopular with whom? Every year I play Satie’s Embryons desséches for some class or another, and the students always love it and want copies. His famous Gymnopedies are among the most recognizable pieces in the repertoire, widely appropriated and imitated. I have no trouble selling my analysis students Socrate, whereas sparking an interest in Wagner or Webern takes considerable explanation and effort.

On the other hand, Liz’s voice teacher considered Socrate a waste of time – not dramatic enough – and wondered why she bothered, while a couple of other faculty members admitted that they had trouble sitting through it. When I taught a graduate analysis course at Columbia a few years ago, I mentioned that Robert Orledge’s book Satie as Composer was probably the best in the Cambridge composer series, and the grad students gasped in disgust. You would have thought I was advising them to study the music of Lawrence Welk. So who is Satie’s pop-influenced music unpopular with? Musical academics, and classical-music professionals. They’re the ones who are so well-trained, whose expectations for classical music are so precisely calibrated, that Satie’s brilliance goes right under their heads.

For the other contradiction is that the paradigm shift that Satie set in motion has stalled, and never been completed. In fact, Satie and Schoenberg are the opposite extremes whose trajectories call the very notion of artistic paradigm shift into question. The idea is that an artist picks up on a new perception, uses a new method, it is resisted by audiences and all but the most perceptive artists for a generation, but eventually it becomes the foundation for a new and widespread understanding of music. One could say that that happened with Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Bartok, and other modernists. But while Schoenberg’s new paradigm became extremely popular with musical academics and “serious” classical-music mavens – precisely the group who don’t take Satie seriously – it never caught on with the general mass of music lovers. His paradigm shift grew impressive branches, but failed to sink very deep roots, and is now in danger of toppling. Satie’s paradigm shift earned him a permanent place in the periphery of popular culture that the academics never succeed in expunging, try as they might. (I’ll never forget Frank Zappa making a nonplussed rock ‘n’ roll audience sit through Socrate at the beginning of his final New York concert.) But, though permanent, Satie’s paradigm never grew outward into the mainstream culture of music. Consequently, 90 years after its composition, Socrate continues to arouse utterly contradictory impressions, a masterpiece to some and a hollow experiment to others.

The string of composers in love with Socrate’s understated pathos constitutes a virtual musical underground, and the composers whose own music Satie has influenced – starting with Virgil Thomson, extending through John Cage and William Duckworth, and by no means ending with myself – make up a confraternity whose music will forever embarrass and irritate musical academia. Satie infected us all with a virus – a lamentable lack of ambition, perhaps, an unwillingness to be pompous except in jest, an appreciation of pleasures too simple and obvious for school-room explication, a refusal to spend one’s life trying to get into the history books by outdoing one’s competitors. Even more than Cage, he’s a litmus test, and I can hardly imagine feeling comfortable discussing music over the long term with anyone who doesn’t “get” Satie. He did create a new paradigm, and a resoundingly potent one – but one so at odds with the continuing macho, power-grabbing one-upmanship of Western culture that perhaps only a total change in our mode of civilization would create a new environment in which one could declare it victorious.

Meanwhile, if I can ever someday return from the afterlife and find that my music is scorned by musical academia but stubbornly kept alive by generation after generation of music lovers devoted to it, just like Satie’s – I’ll feel like I will have been one of the blessed ones.

Postclassic Radio badly needed a fresh infusion, and it received one this week via a whole stack of new CDs that just arrived:

Corey Dargel: Less Famous Than You (Use Your Teeth)

Ingram Marshall: Savage Altars (New Albion)

Eve Beglarian: Tell the Birds (New World)

Warren Burt: The Animation of Lists and the Archytan Transpositions (XI)

plus a couple of welcome CD reissues:

Daniel Lentz: On the Leopard Altar (Cold Blue)

Lou Harrison: Chamber and Gamelan Works (New World)

All of these are now represented on the playlist by multiple tracks. Also there are a few pieces from the Cold Blue concert at REDCAT that I wrote about recently, and a major new work by Stephen Scott, The Deep Spaces, for bowed piano and soprano. This last one contains a long, oddly reorchestrated quotation from Franz Liszt’s Années de Pelerinage. If you haven’t listened for awhile because you’d heard everything, try it again!

My early music continues going through an odd renaissance lately. A week ago Sunday, the Bard flute ensemble – with no prodding from me – played my 1979 work Siren for five flutes, which hadn’t been heard publicly since the year it was written. And tonight, at Bard, student vocalist Liz Przybylski and accompanist Sharon Bjorndal are giving the world premiere of a song I wrote in 1985, “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service,” on a poem by T.S. Eliot. I once wanted to write a whole T.S. Eliot song cycle, but I read that his estate disallows musical settings of his poems, so I assume that the song can’t be performed in any for-profit occasion, and I discontinued the cycle. Still, it’s the best, most ambitious song I ever wrote, and it’s been a blast to hear it coming from outside my head for the first time in 21 years. I guess the damn poem will go into public domain someday.

UPDATE: At the risk of representing the song badly, here’s the recording. Liz was having vocal problems that day and had been warned by her teacher not to sing, but she did anyway to avoid disappointing me. Given that, I thought it was a charming world premiere performance. And, since the poem’s in public domain after all (see comments), here it is, made-up words and all:

Polyphiloprogenitive

The sapient sutlers of the Lord

Drift across the window-panes.

In the beginning was the Word.

In the beginning was the Word.

Superfetation of to en,

And at the mensual turn of time

Produced enervate Origen.

A painter of the Umbrian school

Designed upon a gesso ground

The nimbus of the Baptized God.

The wilderness is cracked and browned

But through the water pale and thin

Still shine the unoffending feet

And there above the painter set

The Father and the Paraclete.

The sable presbyters approach

The avenue of penitence;

The young are red and pustular

Clutching piaculative pence.

Under the penitential gates

Sustained by staring Seraphim

Where the souls of the devout

Burn invisible and dim.

Along the garden-wall the bees

With hairy bellies pass between

The staminate and pistilate,

Blest office of the epicene.

Sweeney shifts from ham to ham

Stirring the water in his bath.

The masters of the subtle schools

Are controversial, polymath.

I’ve been absent. From about mid-April to mid-May at Bard, we start having student concerts every night and senior and moderation boards every morning, crammed in around teaching all afternoon. Senior and moderation boards are Bard’s idiosyncratic system for evaluating student projects just before graduation and at the point of declaring a major, respectively. It becomes common, in this final month before summer, to go in at 9 or 10 AM and not drag home until 9, 10, or 11 at night, and there are always student crises to deal with. President Botstein let drop the telling statistic recently that every student who’s ever committed suicide at Bard (none in the last five years, knock on wood) was a senior.

In addition, I’ve been up to my chin in the academic bullcrap of territoriality and politics. I am hardly an injured innocent bystander, but I do seem to be the faculty member always fighting for more diversity and variety in the department, and I am still pollyannaish enough at 50 to be surprised when that urge incites a fight. I attract the renegade and refugee students too individual to fit into the classical, jazz, and electronic programs, and every pop-music-bound student has me on her board – not because I know diddly about pop music, but because I’ll defend her right to do that in college. College is where you see self-described far-left-liberal professors casually expose the authoritarian streak by which they’ve determined that, past some arbitrary boundary their musings have brought them to, there are certain things that students should not be allowed to be taught. And this is at a really, really liberal college, so I guess I wouldn’t last a week at Indiana U., while at Yale I’d fry instantaneously like a strip of aluminum foil tossed into a microwave.

So any thought I could have expressed in the last month would have sounded like a complaint about a job that everyone agrees I’m lucky to have. I will content myself with the observation that I always preferred the atmosphere of a newspaper office to that of academia. At a newspaper, differences of opinion carry no negative charge. Opinions are what critics sell, and no critic wants to find that another critic is vending the same set of wares. As a music critic, I had far more reason to be threatened by someone like the poor late Rob Schwartz, whose opinions and interests were quite close to mine (and thus with whom I ended up competing for the same gigs), than by, say, some serialist complexity maven like Paul Griffiths or Andrew Porter. So you’d meet someone and start talking, find that they disagree with you about almost everything, and think, “Whew, that’s a relief.” And you’d have no qualms dealing with people whose views you found heinous, because their opposition made your uniqueness all the more valuable. I’m inclined to wish that academia could be a little more like that. Of course, I never went into a newspaper office five days a week like I go in to teach, and I’m sure those who do have a different perspective. As Tolstoy, I think, said, though I can’t find it anywhere, “Men are never so cruel as when they bind themselves into institutions.”

I hope to return to the world shortly.

Death is stalking me lately. I was greatly saddened to learn, via Alex Ross, of the death of my long-time Village Voice colleague Leighton Kerner. When I started there in 1986, Leighton proposed, by phone, to meet me at a concert, and added, with his usual self-effacing charm, “You’ll be able to recognize me – I’m overweight and badly in need of a haircut.” Alex says he wrote for the Voice from 1955; I had thought he was only regular from 1960 or ‘61, but I’m not going to check the archives to find out. Either way he had a few decades’ seniority over me, but he always insisted on dividing our duties to mutual advantage, and often gave me precedence when he didn’t have to. He was the only critic of his generation, as far as I kept track, who didn’t glorify the past in memory. He was fully capable of comparing an opera production he had just heard with a famous one from the 1950s, and admitting that the recent one was better. He was no purveyor of the elitist impression that classical performance, or composition, is endlessly headed down the toilet. He was a continual musical optimist, with no trace of condescension. Nevertheless, he provided one of my favorite Voice headlines ever when he reviewed a wretched late Menotti opera: “How the Mediocre Have Fallen.” He continued attending concerts seemingly seven nights a week even after the Voice lost its faith in classical music and cut his reviewing back to nothing. His wife worked for an airline and he could get free airline tickets, so he would fly to San Francisco, review an opera, and submit only a hotel bill for reimbursement. He was a mensch. He was a gentleman. He was a model for classical music critics everywhere.

Sarah Cahill alerts me to an internet radio program from Other Minds, in which Richard Friedman plays works from the concert of music from the Cold Blue label at REDCAT last February 18. The program opens with two of my Private Dances beautifully played by Sarah – and then the rest of the music, by Michael Jon Fink, John Luther Adams, Larry Polansky, Rick Cox, and others, is absolutely lovely. I am honored to be in such incredible company. Go here, and click on Program No. 61 in the upper right-hand corner. Limited time only.

My father sang in church choirs most of his life, and his favorite pieces were Handel’s Messiah and Beethoven’s Ninth. Once he sang in the chorus for the Dallas Opera production of Boris Godunov. Along with the Steinway baby grand he bought me when I was 15, which stands in my living room today, such was his contribution to classical music. He was an accountant for Mobil Oil, and spent the last three of his 29 years there as an office manager in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Having grown up dirt-poor on a farm in what is now a rather stylish section of Dallas, he landed at Omaha Beach three days after D-Day, and was a corporal in the 7th Armored Division under Patton at the Battle of the Bulge. He heard the gunfire of the massacre of American prisoners at Malmedy as he was frantically trying to fix a tire on his halftrack.

Luckily – since I was stubborn – he attempted his paternal duty only once. In my last year of high school he warned me that to be a musician was a difficult and insecure life. What would I do about retirement?, he asked. As an artist, I replied, I had no wish to retire. It seemed to me, at 17, unwise to plan one’s entire life around retirement. But Dad eventually retired at the age of 57, and enjoyed his leisure for 23 wonderful years. On my side, I know that he sometimes hated going in to work – whereas I, in my often financially precarious adult life, have never once woken up and had to go do anything for a living that wasn’t music-related. The jury on who won that argument is still out. Meanwhile, my son’s middle name is Marvin.

Dad died Saturday, and we buried him Monday, in Frisco, Texas.

Composer-songwriter Corey Dargel, of whose music I am unabashedly a fan, asks a question, with regard to my anti-objectivity post, that I feel like answering: partly to defuse a myth that’s growing up around me, partly because I’m supposed to be writing a very dull departmental report filled with statistics, and would rather be doing almost anything else:

What are the advantages and/or disadvantages to being entrenched in the scene you are writing about? Have you ever second-guessed your ability to maintain a “critical distance” from your subject matter, or is that just a fancy term for objectivity?

I think there’s a perception growing that when I became the Voice new-music critic, it was a tremendous boon for all my composer friends because they were all hailed as geniuses. The reality is, when I came from Chicago in 1986, I didn’t know anyone in New York. I was as “objective,” as “unentrenched,” as a Borneo tribesman would have been. For the first couple of years my family was still in Chicago, and I didn’t even have a friend who could put me up in New York; I stayed at the 23rd Street YMCA for $26 a night. Downtown (you will please excuse the expression) composers hated me because I wasn’t part of the scene. They complained that I was presuming to judge them without (as Elliott Sharp once put it) hanging out at their rehearsals. I was too much an outsider, too “objective.” So you will understand the curious irony that now, like Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, by the end of the book I, who never even lived in NYC except for eight months in 1992, have somehow become, in the new-music public mind, the quintessential insider.

I was loathe to make friends my first several years as a New York critic. Some may remember that I was always the last to arrive at a concert, and that I shot out like a bullet before the final applause ended. I started cautiously getting to know people, but never acted too friendly until I had heard a lot of a person’s music. I never wanted to find myself in a position of being personally beholden to someone whose music I didn’t like. One by one I found people whose overall talent impressed me, and whose musical aims seemed healthy and progressive, people whose musical instincts I came to implicitly trust.

Like Meredith Monk: her music has blown me away, brought me close to tears, again and again and again. If I have the great luck to become friends with her, why would I turn it down? If she were to produce a piece now that I didn’t like, what would it matter? Every brilliant composer has written an occasional dud (except for you, Corey – I love everything you’ve done so far, but you’re still young). When one of my friends, one of the composers whose music I strongly believe in – and those are virtually synonymous – writes a piece that doesn’t work, I’m as disappointed as anyone. I often just didn’t write about it; or else I’d pass over it as, “well, not their best work.” One likes a composer not only for the quality of his or her each individual work, but also for their aesthetic aims, their overall vision, their insight into what music needs at the moment. I never became friends with anyone on the (you will please excuse the expression) Downtown scene before getting a pretty complete idea of their aesthetic aims and vision. I’ve written the occasional negative review of a friend’s piece, and more often a positive review of music by someone I personally dislike.

Due to various contingent circumstances I have several dear, close friends who are (you will please excuse the expression) Midtown composers. They are all aware that I’m not much in sympathy with their aesthetic aims, nor they with mine, and we have wonderful conversations figuring out why. Some of those conversations have been grist for this blog. When they do occasionally write a piece I truly enjoy, a “crossover” piece if you will, I’m eager to record the fact. But I have never in my life come to feel that I had overvalued a piece of music because I liked, or felt loyal to, the person who wrote it. Hell, I know where the flaws are in my own music. I thought my recent review of my own Long Night CD was deadly accurate, both positive and negative. Just last week I named to a friend what I thought were my four best pieces, and he thought I was dead on.

Performances of my own music in New York in those years, and I mean prior to 1997, were very few. John Kennedy and Charles Wood surprised me by giving my first NYC performances in 1989, but after that there were only a handful, and most of my performances were in Philadelphia and on the West Coast. Composers even told me that they’d considered programming my music, but didn’t want to be seen as “sucking up to the critic.” The number of people who supported my music, to whom I arguably owed favors, was, and remains, extremely small, and the majority of them – like Joseph Franklin and the Relache Ensemble, and Sarah Cahill – weren’t in the scene I was reviewing. Of the hundreds of musicians I wrote about, five or ten gradually became close friends, and on the rare occasion I ended up writing about a friend, it was always someone whose music I had championed before getting to know them. I simply continued developing points I had already made before meeting them.

By 1997, reviewing was quickly declining in my life. I began teaching full-time, the Voice cut me way back, and soon I was writing more scholarly articles than journalistic ones. The scholarly articles were analytical, not evaluative, and required extensive familiarity, not “critical distance.” I let down my guard, and relaxed into being just friends with a lot of wonderful composers whose music I had praised years earlier. I also gave up writing negative reviews, only positive ones about stuff I liked. So the perception that I was “entrenched” in the (you will please excuse the expression) Downtown scene between 1986 and 1997, the years in which I took on an explicit role as aesthetic judge and tastemaker, is a humorous illusion, one that would have surprised anyone involved, had it been expressed at the time.

So what is it that seems so “subjective” about me as a critic? There is one big difference between me and all the other classical music critics. Every other classical critic in America, without a single exception that I know of, has one thing in common: they all trust that the classical music world does a pretty good job of rooting out who the best composers are. They all assume that the composers who fight their way to the top, who get the most commissions and performances, who have the most presence in the orchestra world, must be, by and large, the ones who write the best music. They all assume that the composers who don’t get heard about much must not be very good. They all assume, in other words, that the Daniel Gregory Masons and Leo Sowerbys and Howard Hansons of our day are the only composers worth serious consideration, and that no latter-day Charles Ives’s or Harry Partches will ever emerge. They don’t do the homework that I consider basic to a music critic’s job, and scour the periphery of the music world for great composers who might be overlooked. They don’t consider that there are plenty of ways to get celebrated as a composer without writing great music. They don’t doubt the public illusion.

In other words, they buy into the system, and they play the game. Some of them want the big critic jobs – which you get by proving you understand Elliott Carter, not by waxing eloquent about some unknown genius whose CDs no one can find. (When Ed Rothstein was retired as chief critic at the Times, the Times asked me and Paul Griffiths, great champion of the Darmstadt High Modernists, to both apply for the job. I did. Guess who got it. Figure out why. And then tell me why no one calls Griffiths “subjective” for having written the libretto to Elliott Carter’s opera, which is a closer collaboration than I’ve ever had with a composer.) They want to interview big-name conductors. They want to feel important, part of the visible music world – and you don’t get there by befriending composers whose major performances are at Roulette. And so they train themselves, or come to believe, that the music they really like, the music they can intellectually approve, is the music that is celebrated in that world. Oh, not every piece and not every composer, they’ll exercise a little free will within the choices given. But they will not deny that Thomas Adès is a young genius. They will not argue that Elliott Carter’s music is not music for the ages. They will applaud Jennifer Higdon’s orchestration. They will not reject the range of choices offered, nor will they pay serious attention to choices not offered. That’s what’s called objectivity.

And what about me? I’m subjective. I am no respecter of awards or reputations. I rely completely on my ears, my heart, my brain, and when the Pulitzer committee or the Times music section contradicts my inner voice, I say to hell with the Pulitzer committee or the Times music section. Had I wanted to be loved (you will please excuse the expression) Downtown in 1986, all I needed to do was hop onto the John Zorn bandwagon. Instead, I didn’t like his music, and fought him all the way. Some of the composers who became somewhat known in the ’90s did so because I championed them – it wasn’t that I championed them because they were big names on that scene.

One of my most unusual personal qualities has always been, since childhood, an absolute imperviousness to peer pressure. I took it to such an extreme that it was a failing in many respects, and an obstacle to my social life. A student once asked me, “You don’t know what it’s like to be intellectually intimidated, do you?” With a surprised grin, I answered, “No, I don’t.” And so, somewhat arrogantly perhaps, I have put together my own musical Pantheon completely from my own aesthetic judgments, influenced of course by my own perceptions as a composer, but without regard for fame or friendship or self-interest or credentials or “objective” reinforcement from the established commercial world of classical music. That’s why I’m a “subjective” critic. My opinions must come from the fact that I’m “entrenched.” To have your opinions formed by the social world you want to be accepted by is to be “objective.” To form them yourself, and then take the consquences, is “subjective.”

I have sometimes been described as a critic who refuses to observe the usual professional standard of objectivity. That fit the paper I wrote for, of course, since the Village Voice was always known for its “advocacy journalism.” I never figured out what “advocacy journalism” meant – or rather, what was supposed to be the alternative. I always advocated a healthy, lively, diverse music scene, whereas if I had been a truly “objective” music critic, I suppose, I wouldn’t have given a damn whether new music concerts thrived or ceased to exist. In any case, this excellent article by Michael Kinsley at Slate perfectly expresses my feelings about objectivity, that it is a self-delusion, an unattainable goal, and a goal that would be inhuman if obtainable; that it is a dishonest foundation on which no truth can be erected.

Nobody believes in objectivity, if that means neutrality on any question about which two people somewhere on the planet might disagree. May a reporter take as a given that two plus two is four? Should a newspaper strive to be open-minded about Osama Bin Laden? To reveal–to have!–no preference between the United States and Iran? Is it permissible for a news story to take as a given that the Holocaust not only happened, but was a bad thing–or is that an expression of opinion that belongs on the op-ed page?….

Opinion journalism can be more honest than objective-style journalism because it doesn’t have to hide its point of view. It doesn’t have to follow a trail of evidence or line of reasoning until one step before the conclusion and then slam on the brakes for fear of falling into the gulch of subjectivity. All observations are subjective. Writers freed of artificial objectivity can try to determine the whole truth about their subject and then tell it whole to the world. Their “objective” counterparts have to sort their subjective observations into two arbitrary piles: truths that are objective as well, and truths that are just an opinion. That second pile of truths then gets tossed out, or perhaps put in quotes and attributed to someone else. That is a common trick used by objective-style journalists in order to tell their readers what they believe to be true without inciting the wrath of the Objectivity cops.

Factual accuracy, he points out, is something different, and is vitally important. But objectivity is, after all, the principle on which Republicans have managed to finagle equal time for creation science whenever evolution is mentioned, as well as the principle by which the Pulitzer Prize winners continue to be presumptively regarded as America’s greatest composers. If “opinion journalism” indeed becomes the norm, maybe I’ll suddenly find myself in fashion.

For those interested in what tuning software will make microtonality most convenient for them (assuming you can be seduced down the primrose path, my pretty), microtonal programming expert Bill Sethares has offered an authoritative comparison, over at the tuning list, between Li’l Miss’ Scale Oven (LMSO) and Scala:

[W]hile they do overlap in some functions, they
do differ. The similarities: both will generate scales, both will save
to a variety of formats, both are written by dedicated people who have
done a lot to make it easier to explore microtonality. Strengths of
Scala: many analysis features, huge library, available on all
platforms. Strengths of LMSO: easy to use with a large variety of
synths and softsynths, great manual (clearly written and easy to
follow). For my personal taste, I think of Scala as better for
analysis and LMSO as better for performance. With specific reference
to Kontakt support, both work by writing a Kontakt script file that
can be added into any instrument. Scala’s implementation is limited to
a single scale at a time (I know — I helped Manuel debug the Kontakt
scripts). LMSO can have many tunings available instantly in a single
script, and you can switch between them slickly and easily. It’s
biggest liability is that it is Mac-only.