The rhythm in question, perhaps totalism’s second-favorite rhythm after 8-against-9, is an interference of two periodicities, one five units long against another 4 units long. It is given here with its standard American mnemonic device, and also with the one I learned in England:

Several of Mikel Rouse’s pieces for his totalist rock quartet Broken Consort from the mid-1980s revolved around this rhythm. One that did so entirely was High Frontier. In High Frontier Mikel applied a Schillinger technique to this rhythm that was interestingly close to one of Stravinsky’s 12-tone usages. Stravinsky would sometimes rotate through the 12-tone row, moving the first note to the end of the row and then the second note, and so on; likewise, Mikel would take two notes off the front of the rhythm and place them at the end, then do the same with the next two notes, and so on, resulting in the following rhythmic patterns:

Every rhythm in High Frontier, except for the steady 8th-note pattern in the keyboard and drums, is either one of these rhythms or a 2X or 4X augmentation of it. Through these he runs a permutation pattern of six pitches: low F, A-flat, B-flat, B, D-flat, and high F. As I once wrote about the work,

High Frontier sometimes sounds like it is in 5/4 meter, at other times like 4/4 with quintuplets; at other times the listener can perceptually move back and forth at will between these meters, as in an optical illusion. The various rhythms are predetermined numerically to support each other; a slower-rhythm bass line, for example, may coincide with a quicker saxophone melody on every fifth beat, outlining a subtle secondary accent. The surface of Rouse’s music is lively and varied, while the background exerts a consistent, unifying structural influence. The listener can rarely identify by ear what process is going on, but gets a strong sense of an unfolding, internal logic. [“Downtown Beats for the 1990s: Rhys Chatham, Mikel Rouse, Michael Gordon, Larry Polansky, Ben Neill,” in Contemporary Music Review, 1994]

You can listen to High Frontier here.

In my own music based on moving among various pulses, inspired by Hopi and Pueblo rhythms, I often used a quarter-note tied to a 16th as a basic pulse, along with quarter-notes, dotted 8ths, and so on. In “Venus” (1994) from my multi-movement work The Planets, I decided to divide the ensemble in half, one half playing a 5/16ths pulse against the others playing a quarter-note pulse – much like the middle movement of Ives’s Three Places in New England, only 5:4 instead of 4:3. “Venus,” couched in 3/4 meter with a running 16th-note arpeggio in the synthesizer, is filled with durations and phrase lengths of five 16th-notes, five 8th-notes, and/or five quarter-notes. These durations pile up subtly in the beginning, and then when the main theme begins, the eight-member ensemble begins to split in two, the synthesizer and lower winds marking the 3/4 meter as the flute, oboe, and bass play a beat only 4/5 as fast:

The theme, moreover, is in five-beat groupings, a kind of virtual 5/4 meter that imposes a 25/16 meter over the notated 3/4 meter. As the two tempos thicken and continue, it can be difficult, as in High Frontier, to tell whether you’re listening to 3/4 with a 5/16 beat superimposed over it, or 5/4 with quintuplets. At the end of the piece, however, the four and five trade roles, so that the woodwinds are now playing the quarter-notes, and the synth is grouping 16th-notes into fives:

You can hear “Venus,” from The Planets, here, played by the Relache ensemble.

Both of these pieces represent totalism’s earlier, “heroic” phase, in which we were willing to go to great lengths of ensemble difficulty to achieve sonic illusions from polyrhythms. The next two works, though, relax into a milder polyrhythmic usage.

Rouse’s 1995 opera Failing Kansas, based on the murders of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, returned to the 4-against-5 rhythm on a less virtuosic level. A five-beat isorhythm, divided 3+3+1+3 in 8th-notes, is a recurring idea in the work:

The middle of the second scene, “The Last to See Them Alive,” is based on five- and ten-beat cycles over which a more “normal-sounding” 4/4 sometimes asserts itself. The effect is less illusionistic than in High Frontier, but you still have a continual choice as to which meter to tap your foot to (notice the 5/4 ostinato in the bass, reinforced by the harmonica):

You can listen to the two-and-a-half minute excerpt of Failing Kansas that illustrates this tempo effect here. Or, you can listen to the entire ten-minute scene, “The Last to See Them Alive,” here. If you listen to the whole scene, you’ll hear a different, equally elegant effect at the beginning. The opening lyrics are from a hymn favored by Perry Smith, one of the murderers:

I come to the garden alone

Where the dew is still on the roses

And the voice I hear

Falling on my ear

The Son of God discloses

This hymn is in 12/8 meter and spoken that way, though the instrumental music is in 4/4 (the 8th-note equal between the two), creating a subtle out-of-phase relationship of 3+3+3+3 against 3+3+2 patterns. It’s so simple one could easily miss it – in 1995 it took me several listenings to analyze why the rhythm of this passage is so charmingly off-kilter.

Several years later, in 2004, I came back to the 5:4 idea in the “Saintly” dance for the Private Dances I wrote for pianist Sarah Cahill. Since one player needed to play both rhythms, this was a simple matter of placing 4/4 phrases (marked with accents only for illustration) above a 5/4 ostinato:

You can listen to “Saintly” here. Once again, at the end, I couldn’t resist switching the rhythmic roles as I had in “Venus,” changing to a 4/4 ostinato in the left hand with five-beat phrases in the right.

And, as a bonus track, here’s a four-minute percussion work by John Luther Adams, Always Coming Home, which will give you your fill of five-against-four tempos if you hadn’t had it already. It’s from a larger work called Coyote Builds North America, from 1990, the great heyday of 5:4.

Couple of soundbites I’ve run across on the web deserve wider play. One comes from Mary Jane Leach’s capsule history of Downtown music posted to Sequenza 21. She mentions that the Bang on a Can festival “elbowed out what had been the real downtown scene.” I’ve heard other Downtowners (or former Downtowners, if you insist on regarding the scene as dead) state this matter-of-factly too, that Bang on a Can came in, sponged up all the available funding and PR for Downtown music, rode off into Lincoln Center, Banglewood, and the sunset with it, and left an empty shell behind. Certainly they convinced those outside the scene that Downtown music is what they represented, even as they explicitly denied having any interest in Downtown.

Second is a quotation given in Elodie Lauten’s blog of what the irrepressible Jon Szanto (of Harry Partch performance fame) said the problem with Postclassical music was: “It’s too hip for the straights, and too straight for the hips.” I had said something similar in many articles with titles like “Music of the Excluded Middle,” but I lack Jon’s talent for turning a phrase. He shoots straight from the hip.

I have two performances on the opposite side of the continent this week, while I’m stuck here in the snow. First is Friday, February 17, by the Group for New Music at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, directed by Michael Hicks. He’s giving a “live” performance of my Disklavier piece Tango da Chiesa, on a program in honor of Morton Feldman’s 80th birthday. The program:

Bunita Marcus: Untrammeled Thought

Jürg Baur: Petite Suite (for flute quartet)

Leo Brouwer: Cuban Landscape with Rain (for guitar quartet)

Kyle Gann: Tango da Chiesa

Michael Hicks: Lamentation, and

Feldman: Palais de Mari , played by Hicks

 

Then this Saturday, February 18, Sarah Cahill will play two of my Private Dances at the REDCAT Theater in Los Angeles, starting at 8:30. The program features 14 composers who are all recorded on the Cold Blue label. The lineup is as follows:

Read Miller: Come out, sit awhile; break the bottle, and you is lost

Kyle Gann: “Sad,” “Saintly” from Private Dances

Michael Jon Fink: I Hear It in the Rain

Larry Polansky: Eskimo Lullaby

Steve Peters: Paris, once

Rick Cox: Later

John Luther Adams: The Light That Fills the World

Peter Garland: Hermetic Bird

Chas Smith: P770

Daniel Lentz: Lovely Bird and Requiem

David Mahler: La Cuidad de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Angeles

Michael Byron: as she sleeps

Jim Fox: Colorless sky became fog

Barney Childs: Variation on Night River Music

About half the music is for piano, played by Sarah, but several are ensemble pieces, including the Robin Cox Ensemble playing John Luther Adams’s The Light That Fills the World. Cold Blue is a lovely label, and it sounds like a great program, if I say it myself that shouldn’t.

The first weekend in March, Sarah plays my Time Does Not Exist at Santa Fe New Music, but I’ll fill you in on that later. Somebody show up and tell me how they went!

If anyone would like to present my music on this coast, please speak up.

I’ve put up a little display on my office door, Xeroxes of the opening pages from seven pieces of music:

J.S. Bach: Violin Sonata in G minor (autograph)

Josquin des Prez: Alma Redemptoris Mater

Erik Satie: Pièces Froids

Leo Ornstein: A Reverie

Wayne Shorter: Nefertiti

Christian Wolff: Snowdrop

Frederic Rzewski: Attica

What do they all have in common?

There’s not a printed dynamic marking in the bunch. Not a p, not an f, not a hairpin.

Student composers in my environment are mandated to fill their scores with dynamic markings, crescendos and articulation markings on each phrase, with the implication that every phrase must have a nuanced, curvilinear dynamic envelope. By exhibiting successful works that all break that rule, I demonstrate that there is nothing that every piece of music has to do or have. Nefertiti, you will object, is jazz; exactly, the new music I’m interested in often exists in a state in between classical and jazz or pop, and does not micromanage the performer. Wolff’s Snowdrop doesn’t even specify clefs. Alma Redemptoris Mater was written before dynamic markings existed; much of the new music I love comes from a Renaissance influence. The Rzewski score has some dynamics lightly pencilled in by a performer, showing how each performance gets to reinterpret the piece anew.

Do I have anything against music of fluid, specified dynamics? Not at all. Just last semester I made one student fill a score with dynamics, because it was awash in energetic gestures that would have looked confusing without the dynamic volatility acknowledged. What I do have something against is conformity, especially the coerced kind.

I am in receipt of a book by Luca Conti entitled, Suoni di Una Terra Incognita: Il Microtonalismo in Nord America (1900-1940). It’s published by Libreria Musicale Italiana. As you may have surmised, it’s in Italian. There is much discussion of Ives, Cowell, Chavez, and Partch. I am mentioned, and several of my articles are listed in the bibliography. There are diagrams with lots of numbers and strangely configured keyboards. It looks interesting.

Jan Herman sent me this link, and I absolutely laughed my ass off. It would be churlish not to share such effective medicine with the world. (If the link doesn’t still take you to Ten Worst Album Covers, try this: http://salamitsunami.com/archives/91.)

Now that I’ve got more than 7500 mp3s on each of two external hard drives, one for home and one for school, my attention has turned to PDF scores. I’m collecting a lot of Beethoven from the Sheet Music Archive, and I recently wrote an article about Melissa Hui entirely from PDFs she sent me. Now I’ve found out, through a post at Sequenza 21, that Leo Ornstein’s son is inputting Ornstein’s music and offering it to the public through Other Minds, so in a few minutes yesterday I went from years of wishing I had scores of Ornstein’s early piano music to carrying around more than I could possibly need of it on my computer. And from a comment on the tuning groups, I chanced to learn that the manuscript scores of Tui St. George Tucker – a quarter-tone pioneer who, it turns out, died in 2004 without my being informed – are available at her web site. Of course, a dozen or so of my scores have long been available as PDFs, although if I’ve received a single performance from the fact, no one’s ever apprised me. I love having hard copy, which is indispensible for certain purposes. But I also waste a tremendous amount of student time, and mine, looking for scores that I know are in my library somewhere, that somehow never manage to get placed back where I think they live. With my PDF scores, it’s a problem I’ll never have. (Though I’ve also run into the difficulty that my own PDF scores don’t seem to print out correctly on certain computers. I’ll be glad when all this gets standardized.)

Had my G4 Mac laptop in my lap. Smelled smoke. Felt hot place on my knee. Sparks flew. Screen went blank. Please expect communications to be on special schedule for a few days.

Art Jarvinen weighs in on the relation between totalism and dance:

I just watched Blow Up again. Had not seen it in a long time. There is a slightly interesting moment around 50 minutes in, where the bored photographer guy and the scrawny uninteresting woman are smoking and listening to groovy music. She’s trying to move to it, and she’s really lame. He gets her to move slooowly, "against the beat." She starts to get it, and it’s a totally Totalist moment….

I always wondered why I couldn’t dance. I couldn’t dance to The Twist, or "I Wanna Make It With You." But I could not NOT dance to Captain Beefheart. "Lick My Decals Off Baby" is my disco record. I have to move when I hear it, both knees going in different rhythms, one arm not knowing what the other one is doing – until it all comes around after…a while – or not.

We understand difference tones. You talk about ratios all the time. Totalist rhythmic structures usually add up to something – a big honkin’ downbeat that is so satisfying, and that you feel coming for a long time before it hits.

Composer Paul Epstein told me the other day that the only thing wrong with my Disklavier disc was that he couldn’t exercise to it – the different tempos kept throwing him off. I had had the same experience. When working out on a treadmill I often listen to Postclassic Radio. One day Michael Gordon’s Trance was on. I almost fell off. I could not keep moving in tempo to the jerking around of all those dotted quarters and triplets fighting with each other. Wherever we totalists make our money, it’s not going to be through the sale of totalist exercise videos.

 

Probably no one but me gives a damn whether John Luther Adams’s music is postminimalist or totalist. As far as the specific terms go, I don’t give a damn either. But when I started surveying, in the 1980s, all the music that passed through New York (and, via recording, the rest of the country as well), I couldn’t help but notice that, among composers who were continuing and developing the minimalist aesthetic, there were two groups of qualities that almost always went together. The composers whose music was based on a steady beat virtually throughout, usually an 8th- or 16-th note pulse, also tended to use diatonic tonality, quasi-minimalist structures like additive process or permutation, mostly quiet dynamics, and acoustic timbres augmented by the occasional synthesizer. Those who used competing tempos, either simultaneously or interlocked somehow, tended to use more dissonant sonorities, more global large-scale rhythmic structures, mostly loud dynamics, and amplified or electric instruments such as guitars. For the former I appropriated the already-current but undefined word postminimalism; for the other the word totalism was provided. The distinction between the two styles was so striking and consistent that it would have seemed capriciously anti-intellectual, an act of scholarly irresponsibility, to have neglected to articulate my observations. Yet, judging from the comments I’ve received in subsequent years, the vast majority of musicians wish I had done exactly that: leave my musicological data on the ground where I found it.

Very few composers wrote music that combined different qualities from those two styles, but one major one who did was John Luther Adams. More often than not his tonality is diatonic, using a seven-note scale (often the “white” notes) with no pitch ever given precedence. Yet some of his pieces, like Clouds of Forgetting, Clouds of Unknowing and his piano cluster piece Among Red Mountains, have proved that he is just as happy to use the entire chromatic spectrum and a maximum of dissonance. His music for pitched instruments is almost always soft; his percussion music is mostly fortissimo. Nominally, his music falls square in the totalist camp because it almost always layers different tempos together. But some of John’s implied tempos are very slow, giving a new pulse only every 10 or 15 seconds, so that the effect seems more postminimalist, without the gear-shifting surface complexity you find in much totalist music. Even when he has 4-against-5-against-6-against-7 in each measure, the effect – achieved pianissimo with mallet percussion, celeste, and harp – is not so much one of tempo contrasts as of indistinct clouds of notes. No other composer from the minimalist tradition so resists being pulled into one definition or the other.

Dream in White on White (1992) has been surpassed in its ambitions by many of John’s works, but it became a prototype for one side of his ouput, and was a watershed in his development. Scored for string quartet, harp, and string orchestra, the piece opens with the string orchestra playing seven-note chords, changing to a new one every 2 and 2/3 measures. The solo quartet enters with chords changing every two measures, for a slow 3:4 rhythm. The harp then enters in four-note phrases in quintuplets, a new phrase every 1 and 3/5 measures. Thus the phrase rhythm is 20:15:12 by duration, or 3:4:5 by tempo, coming back in phase every 8 measures. At measure 53, the string quartet launches into what is marked as the “Lost Chorales,” outlining out-of-phase 4- and 5-beat loops between the two violins versus viola and cello. You can see those relationships, against the recurring harp and string orchestra pulses, in this example:

The next section has plucked notes in the quartet and harp outlining faster 3:4:5 rhythms in each measure, over a chord periodicity of 1 and 1/3 measures in the orchestra:

The chorales return, the string orchestra’s tempo increases, but in a final section the original tempo relationships resume.

You can hear Dream in White on White here. The work’s template has become the basis for at least two much larger works by Adams (and two of my favorites), Clouds of Forgetting, Clouds of Unknowing and In the White Silence. In the White Silence is in fact a magnificent expansion of Dream in White on White, stretched out to 75 minutes and with lovely solo lines for the quartet members. Clouds of Forgetting, Clouds of Unknowing achieves much denser clouds using mallet percussion and the entire chromatic scale. In each of these a large-scale process, implicit in Dream in White on White, is carried out more rigorously: an slow, stepped expansion of melodic intervals from 2nds through 3rds, 4ths, and on up to 7ths. (I kid John that when I start hearing tritones in his music, I know the piece is half over.) More aggressive aspects of totalism appear in John’s drum music, which hammers out more obvious intricacies at a more virtuoso tempo; but that’s for another day.