If you hurry and look right… now, the playlist for Postclassic Radio is currently accurate and up-to-date.

Oops, too late! You weren’t quick enough.

(New pieces by Frank Denyer, Peter Gena, Walter Zimmermann. At this point I’ve played well over 600 pieces, something like 130 hours’ worth of postclassical music. And there’s plenty more where that came from.)

I don’t understand why the electric guitar orchestra hasn’t become a compositional focus for more composers, for practical reasons alone. It certainly looked like it was going to in the 1980s, with works and ensembles by Rhys Chatham, Glenn Branca, John Myers, Wharton Tiers, Phil Kline, and Todd Levin. The old joke is,

Q.: How do you get a guitarist to stop playing?

A.: Put some sheet music in front of him.

and certainly dealing with guitarists who don’t read was part of the challenge, especially starting in 1989 when Rhys Chatham initiated the 100-guitar tradition with An Angel Moves Too Fast to See, premiered in Lille, France. “Guitarists who can’t read can at least count,” Rhys liked to say, and this insight led the guitar-orchestra genre into totalist territory, however inadvertently. Glenn Branca couldn’t read music himself until he had finished several guitar symphonies, and at least his Sixth Symphony (also 1989), notated on graph paper, has rhythmic grids showing some players how to change chords every four beats while others are changing every five beats and still others every six. His 1994 Tenth Symphony for nine guitars, more normally notated, contains at one point an approximated Nancarrovian tempo canon at tempos of 7:8:12.

In An Angel Moves Too Fast to See Chatham solved the reading problem by dividing his 100 guitarists into an inner and outer circle, with the musically literate in the inner circle. In the fifth movement (he now calls the piece his First Symphony, though I think he avoided that at the time because Branca was for some reason being criticized for calling his pieces symphonies), he divided the orchestra into six rhythmic layers, each repeating a chord or phrase at diverse regular intervals (monomial or binomial periodicities). As you can see in the example below, one rung of guitarists played E and B every 7 beats; another E and G# every 8 beats; another an octave A every 9 beats; another, after a pause, A and F# every 5 beats, and then two more groups on longer patterns:

Put them all together, and the following process-generated melody is clearly audible:

What you can’t get from the recording (excerpted here, and available on Table of the Elements) is the totally original correlation of space and pitch that resulted. (I just missed the Lille performance by hours, but heard the North American premiere in Montreal.) A hundred guitarists, each with an amplifier and enough room to swing around and look cool, take up a tremendous amount of space; and since each group was herded together, the E-B chord might come from the middle, while the A-F# came from 60 feet away on the left, and the G# an equal distance on the right. Note by note, the melody bounced over wide distances as though the audience members were ants sitting in the middle of an enormous keyboard. Listening was like watching an arrhythmic tennis game.

This is not new information, by the way; it’s all in my book American Music in the 20th Century. Now that Branca is gathering 100 guitarists to reprise his 13th Symphony in Los Angeles, it may be worth recirculating at the moment.

At about the same time I was experimenting with a similar process to generate textures in a considerably more modest setting. My Windows to Infinity for piano (1987) was a reflection on Nietzsche’s concept of the eternal recurrence. I had been amused to read philosopher Arthur Danto parse out the statistical likelihood of eternal recurrance in his book on Nietzsche, and in response wrote a piano piece stretching out to infinity, tracking a recurring combination of notes as it gathered coincidences through millions of repetitions. As you can see below, there’s a middle D# every 5 8th-notes, a middle C# every 7 8th-notes, a lower F# every 29 16th-notes, and so on up through four-digit primes. Every phrase comes back to the C#-D#-E-G# “theme” found in the 4th and 5th measures (a motif also used in my two-piano piece Long Night):

In theory, this nine-minute piece would eventually repeat itself if extended for thousands of years. No one’s ever played the piece but me, and as I’m not terribly satisfied with my one recording, I think I won’t post it here. I used a similar technique soon after in the first movement of Cyclic Aphorisms for violin and piano. I’m sure others have stumbled across this interference of pitch-periodicities concept, but I don’t know of any examples of such an atomistic totalist technique past 1989. It may be worth noting that Nancarrow used the interference of much longer, more complex periodicities in his Study No. 9, way back in the 1950s.

At 8:00 this Friday, March 3, at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Santa Fe, pianist Sarah Cahill will perform a concert for Santa Fe New Music that includes my own Time Does Not Exist. The devoutly American experimentalist program of mostly 21st-century music is as follows:

Kyle Gann: Time Does Not Exist (2000)

Bunita Marcus: Julia (1989)

Peter Garland: Walk in Beauty (1989)

Johanna Beyer: selections from Dissonant Counterpoint (1934)

Guy Klucevsek: Don’t Let the Boogie Man Get You (2005)

Andrea Morricone: Studio I  (2005)

Ruth Crawford: selections from Preludes (1925-1928)

Annea Lockwood: RCSC (2001)

Pauline Oliveros: Quintuplets Playpen  (2001)

Maggi Payne: Holding Pattern (2001)

And you can find out more here. All of these composers are ones that SFNM director John Kennedy has done a lot for in the past – for instance, he gave the first one-woman show for the almost-forgotten pioneer Johanna Beyer. (If you’re wondering, Andrea Morricone is the son of the film composer.) The concert is worth it for Bunita Marcus’s Julia alone, one of the most beautiful pieces in the recent repertoire.

The next day at 2 PM at the same place, Sarah is playing a concert of pieces about childhood, including works by Debussy, Schumann, Rzewski, and Family Piano by Kennedy himself. Kennedy’s One Body has been playing lately on Postclassic Radio. You can get more info about these concerts by calling Santa Fe New Music at 505-474-6601.

Wish I were there. I love Santa Fe. There’s a great cigar store just west from the southwest corner of the town square, and across the street from it an incredible store for Spanish-language books that also has a huge stock of scores of works by Mexican and Central American composers. It’s heaven. Maybe I’ll retire there, and time really won’t exist.

The February theme of Postclassic Radio was “doldrums,” or perhaps “passivity,” since I’d been too involved in other matters to add any tracks in several weeks. But I’ve made up for that today with more than 35 percent new content, including works by David Lang (Slow Movement), improvising violinist Kaffe Matthews, Ben Johnston’s Ninth String Quartet from the new Kepler Quartet recording, Sarah Cahill playing Pondok from the new Evan Ziporyn album, a smattering of works by Barbara Benary, Janice Giteck’s classic Breathing Songs from a Turning Sky, several songs from Amy Kohn’s new disc I’m in Crinoline, Sub Rosa by Gavin Bryars, Circa from Belinda Reynolds’s brand new CD, Kilter by Peter Hess of Anti-Social Music, some more of Mikel Rouse’s Love at Twenty (his best new album in years), and Compassion, a rare 63-minute piece for violin and piano by the inimitable Chris Newman. Take note that the textures of Love at Twenty are largely composed of sampled notes from Cage’s prepared piano for Sonatas and Interludes. No official composer-of-the-month for March, but I’m pushing Benary these days, who has few recordings out, and I’ve obtained some CDRs. Enjoy!

Live 365 is now giving me error messages if I fail to provide “e-commerce info,” such as label and copyright. It’s all about selling things at Live 365, but not at Postclassic Radio.

I got to see composer George Tsontakis onstage tonight – as Otto Frank, the father, in The Diary of Anne Frank. George, who’s always telling me how tired he is of composing these piano concertos and violin concertos he keeps getting commissions for, has taken up acting as a sideline. (I noticed from his bio in the program that he even studied acting in college.) Last year I missed him in Barefoot in the Park, so I made sure I got out to the Shandaken Theatrical Society Playhouse in Phoenicia, NY, to see him bring a certain benevolent gravity to his role as the wise father who’s always calming everything over among the eight Jews hiding from the Nazis in a Dutch attic. As the only family member to survive, he even had the emotional closing monologue. He acquitted himself well… though I have to say I still think he composes a little better than he acts, so I hope he won’t quit the day job.

Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare is entertaining and insightful throughout, but when it reaches the year 1600 and Hamlet, it becomes brilliant. Greenblatt attributes the transcendence of Shakespeare’s late tragedies to a technical device that he labels excision of motive. In each case, Shakespeare made his story less logical than his historical sources by removing an obvious motivation. For instance, in the original Hamlet saga, Hamlet’s uncle kills Hamlet’s father the king in plain sight, so that there is no secret as to who the murderer was. Young Hamlet feigns madness for a manifest practical reason, so that his uncle will think he is not dangerous; otherwise, the uncle would have to kill Hamlet for fear that he would eventually avenge his father’s death. Making the murder a secret revealed only by the ghost, Shakespeare removes the rationale for feigning madness, relocating it in Hamlet’s own psychology.

By excising the rationale for Hamlet’s madness, Shakespeare made it the central focus of the entire tragedy. The play’s key moment of psychological revelation – the moment that virtually everyone remembers – is not the hero’s plotting of revenge, not even his repeated, passionate self-reproach for inaction, but rather his contemplation of suicide: “To be or not to be, that is the question.” [p. 307]

Likewise, in the original sources for King Lear, the king poses a test to find which of his daughters loves him most because he is about to divide his kingdom proportionally. But at the opening of Shakespeare’s version, Lear has already divided his kingdom in three equal parts to give to his daughters: thus there is no rationale for the love-test, which seems like an arbitrary neurosis on his part. Shakespeare made his plays more powerful, Greenblatt argues, because the mainspring for the characters’ actions is no longer the logic of the situation, but something gnawing at them from the inside, which we and the dialogue must now focus on to figure out. It’s a compelling reminder that a work of art draws its highest power not from making rational sense, but from clearly-delineated contradictions whose non-sense draws us into the work.

Aside from printing “Caution: Contents may be hot” on a therma-foam coffee cup, I think the silliest disclaimer in common use is the one that seems to precede every compliment paid to a critic, viz.: “Although I don’t always agree with him, Kyle Gann is an OK critic,” etc. I thought it was understood that only Rush Limbaugh has Dittoheads. It makes me imagine distancing myself from all kinds of analogous syllogisms:

“Even though I agree with his every utterance, I find Alex Ross a lousy critic…”

“Although I am not her identical twin, and, in fact, look nothing like her, I consider Angelina Jolie very pretty…”

“Despite the odd coincidence that he and I are both featherless bipeds with hair and opposable thumbs, I consider George W. Bush a malevolent moron…”

You spend your life analyzing, explaining, trying to bring a little clarity to your corner of the chaos, and you get measured against a checklist of someone’s opinions.

There’s a lovely article on New Music Box today by Corey Dargel, about the difference between the traditional art song or lieder of the classical music world and the new “artsongwriters” who write and sing their own lyrics – just like pop artists, but with a whole different structural sensibility. One of the prime practitioners of this 25-year-old art form, Dargel knows whereof he speaks.

As an addendum to my post on 4-against-5 rhythms, I should mention Paul Epstein’s 1998 harpsichord piece, 57:4/5/7. I think of Paul as a postminimalist rather than a totalist, but he goes the totalists one better: the piece is based on interfering periodicities of 4-against-5-against-7. (I tend to call pieces postminimalist when based on a steady beat unit throughout, and totalist when conflicting tempos are implied. For the record, I don’t give a damn whether anyone joins me in this.) I don’t know a mnemonic device for figuring out 4:5:7 – if you’re dealing with durations of 4, 5, and 7 16th-notes, you’d need 70 syllables to fill out the 140 16ths it would take those rhythms to come back in phase, and you’d need a mnemonic to help you remember the mnemonic, and probably another mnemonic to help you remember that. (If you’re simply dividing a measure into 4, 5, and 7 simultaneously, layering tempos rather than durations, you’d only need 14 syllables, but how to space them would be a knotty problem.)

But you can see Paul’s compositional use clearly here at the beginning of the piece, the three lines moving in tempos of 4, 5, and 7 16th-notes, switching register at the points where the 4:5’s, 4:7’s, and 5:7’s coincide:

Since the piece is for amplified harpsichord, there are no dynamics indicated, though in every other respect the notation is meticulous. And before influencing your perception of the piece by reading how it works, you can hear the ten-minute piece here, performed by harpsichordist Joyce Lindorff.

This is a work of art as abstract as Mondrian’s Composition No. 2, as Milton Babbitt’s Three Compositions for Piano or Webern’s Op. 24 Concerto. It is music about the logic of music – but its logic is perhaps easier to process audibly than Babbitt’s or Webern’s, and more playful. His interest sparked decades ago by Steve Reich’s early music and the logical processes of Tom Johnson, Paul Epstein has long nurtured an interest in attractive surfaces generated by tight, self-replicating melodies. 57:4/5/7 is spun from a 57-note series structured in such as way as to replicate itself every 4, 5, and 7 notes, as can be seen in this breakdown whose lower three lines correspond to the opening measures above:

However, Paul’s music is never as mechanical as this correspondence suggests. Like many of his pieces, 57:4/5/7 is kind of a theme and variations on a logical concept. As you’ve heard or will hear, it changes key, it goes through a series of different textures, sprouts melodies, and its 16th-note momentum speeds up to various densities. Rarely does Paul simply set a process in motion and let it run. I sometimes call him “the postminimalist Babbitt” because of the ingenuity he expends twisting these logical constructs into an obvious-sounding but elusive series of processes. (And contrary to what you may assume, Babbitt is the composer of many pieces I have long been fond of.)

What I get from Paul’s music is a pleasurable but slightly exasperating feeling that I could figure out what the music’s doing if I could just listen a little harder. Motives repeat, tunes emerge, voices echo in canon, and I keep thinking that the piece will resolve into something obvious any minute now. This is a common experience for postminimalist music, which, more than totalism, has often become a strategy for setting up cognitive dissonances. In its most intricate form (of which Esptein is the extreme and William Duckworth another strong example), it tends to create structures that sound consistent and logical, but in such a way that the ear can’t quite tease out where the logic comes from.

It seems to me that postminimalism, and to a lesser extent totalism, have suffered in the public ear from having flourished at a time when formalism had acquired a sour reputation, following the long-awaited demise of 12-tone music. After I wrote the article “Downtown Beats for the 1990s” that sparked recognition of totalism, one of my Midtownish composer friends (Scott Wheeler) remarked with surprise, edged with disapproval, that “the Downtowners seemed to pick up where the Darmstadt composers had left off.” It’s true that postminimalism and totalism were united by the exploration of technical devices, as a way of creating a new musical language. Outsiders to the style have not had much patience for this particular aesthetic goal over the last 25 years. Even though serialism’s strictly formalist period was the 1950s, and it had evolved into something else by the 1970s, it created an understandable public perception that to “merely” play with formal structures was an intellectual self-indulgence, an elitist retreat into professional concerns. Minimalism was sometimes formalist too, of course, but its processes were so perceptually obvious as to be self-effacing – so exaggeratedly foregrounded, one might say, that you forgot about them. Postminimalism certainly attracted some composers – Janice Giteck, Elodie Lauten, Daniel Lentz – whose music dealt with political issues and diverse cultural influences. But the emphasis of the music, and its most original features, were on aspects of musical material, process, and syntax.

The 1980s – decade of performance art and world music – were all about teasing out music’s political significance, under a deconstructionist-driven assumption that one could read a person’s politics, conscious and unconscious, in the structure of a work. Abstraction seemed exposed as the irrelevant mind-game of privileged white males. It has certainly been that, at times. But one of the pendulums that swings back and forth in the history of art is that between society’s claim on artistic meaning and art’s own need to define its inner principles. Perhaps postminimalism picked an inauspicious cultural moment to develop a new musical language of auditory illusions based on minimalism. But at some point people will once again become fascinated by music’s inner workings, and when this happens, I hope there will be some recognition of all the wonderful territory postminimalism has explored.

I’m not someone to whom “stories” tend to happen. But I told a story from my youth in class yesterday that I don’t believe I’ve ever made public.

In 1982, the New Music America festival was in Chicago, directed by Peter Gena (my by-then-former composition teacher) and Alene Valkanas. I was “administrative assistant,” third in command. Fresh out of grad school, I had reached the hoary age of 26. The festival was being funded by the city of Chicago, via Mayor Jane Byrne’s office; the official title was “Mayor Byrne’s New Music America.” The day before the opening, Dennis Russell Davies was rehearsing Steve Reich’s Tehillim with members of the Chicago Symphony in Orchestra Hall, for the festival opener which would be one of the work’s first performances. The meter changes in that piece are a nightmare. At the end Reich started complaining that the piece wouldn’t be ready, that he’d have to cancel the performance unless they could get another hour’s rehearsal. Dennis Russell Davies called out from the stage and asked for authorization to keep the orchestra working for an extra hour. I was the only representative in the hall of either the festival or the city. It was explained to me that the orchestra cost $15,000 an hour.

I ran out to the pay phone in the lobby. I called Alene; she was nowhere to be found. Called Peter; he was nowhere to be found. I hung up the phone, pasted a smile on my face, sauntered back into the auditorium, and with a completely unjustified air of false confidence, gave the Maestro an OK sign and yelled, “Go right ahead!” They rehearsed for another hour, and the subsequent performance went swell.

My salary for that year was $12,000, so if they had decided to take the $15,000 out of my salary, there wouldn’t have been room. But before the bills got presented to the city, Jane Byrne was voted out and Harold Washington was voted in. I imagine his staff had no idea what the NMA ’82 cost overruns were all about; they just paid them and no one ever said anything.