I hadn’t visited Ubuweb in several months. I don’t know what I was (or wasn’t) thinking. I think what happened was that I gave up on Mozilla as my browser – every so often it would just suddenly erase all my bookmarks, so I switched to Safari, and haven’t relocated all my usual watering holes again. But a reader alerted me to the fact that Ubuweb now offers Robert Ashley’s Music with Roots in the Aether, a series of seven two-hour film interviews with great young composers of the 1970s: David Behrman, Philip Glass, Alvin Lucier, Gordon Mumma, Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley, and a sort of performance art piece by Ashley himself. Right now I’m watching Terry Riley milking a goat on his farm, and giving Ashley a glass – kind of surreal, but real, I guess. I had seen most of these 25 years ago at New Music America, and then they disappeared, though still referred to from time to time in reference works. And now, here they are on my laptop! At present they play on RealOne, and AVI’s for Quicktime will appear soon. I’m thrilled. Also, Ubuweb now has the mp3s for Riley’s soundtracks to La Secret de la Vie (1975), and No Man’s Land (1985). (Why not Journey from the Death of a Friend yet, my favorite?) In fact, you should just bypass Postclassic from now on, and spend all your time on Ubuweb. It’s an incredible resource.

“Of course, criteria for what constitutes an ‘idea’ in the first place have shifted and changed in this century, especially since the advent of radical modernism. So much so, in fact, that, for some composers, texture, color, layered sounds – none of which are particularly memorable or indelible to the ear because they are over-generalized sound-complexes, too diffuse and non-specific – take the place of ‘idea’ in the sense I mean it.”

George Rochberg

I had always assumed, and written, that Rochberg had never quite had his ear bent out of whack by his 12-tone training because he was born earlier (1918) than most of the hard-core 12-toners (mostly born in the 1920s), and had too much other experience before the 12-tone idea took over. It turns out, however, that due to fighting in World War II he got off to a little bit of a late start, and that his differentness within his milieu seems to be more due to his working as an editor for Theodore Presser during the 1950s, before rejoining academia at the age of 42 (the same age Morton Feldman and I took teaching jobs). That means that he had a lot of the same experiences that a composer-critic gets: writing music while being deluged with other people’s music, seeing the full range of styles available in one’s time, and becoming acutely aware of each style’s clichés through endless repetition. (At least, that’s what it would have meant in the 1950s; today, working for a music publisher, you’d come across only a tiny sliver of the most conservative possible music, and would receive a totally unrealistic picture of what’s going on.)

Of course, Rochberg found rock music abhorrent (the ultimate fruition of Russolo’s “art of noise,” he said) and had no sympathy for the post-Cage attempt to treat ambient sounds as aesthetic objects. But on music before his own, his opinions match mine remarkably well: for instance, the only Schoenberg piano piece he found attractive was Op. 11, and had no use at all for the late 12-tone piano pieces, Opp. 23, 25, and 33, which he found totally counterintuitive and abstract. (And this coming from America’s best 12-tone composer!) For Rochberg, the sine qua non of music was memorability; if a piece didn’t stick in his mind, creating an aching desire to hear it again, he deemed it unsuccessful. I’ve fought with this criterion, trying to keep in mind that there are other, sufficient musical virtues – but when push comes to shove, I ultimately have to admit that I feel exactly the same way.

There seemed so little celebration of Rochberg’s life and music after he died that I’ve been wondering if the neglect was an expression of academia’s resentment that Rochberg quit playing the game. As a famous composer at the University of Pennsylvania, he rejected 12-tone technique, stylistic organicism, Schenkerian analysis – did they pay him back by ignoring him? Many other composers also quit playing the game after Rochberg led the way, of course, but his apostasy was not only first, but very public and damningly articulate. I have a few Uptown composers I’ve adopted over the years, whose music I loved as a teenager, before I knew any distinction between Uptown and Down-, and which never lost its attraction for me: Ben Weber, Ralph Shapey, Stefan Wolpe, George Rochberg. They all turn out to have entered academia late, if at all, and to have remained outsiders in some way, not considered entirely respectable by the “ruling elite.” I didn’t know that about any of them when their musics first grabbed my attention – and until recently I wasn’t aware of how true it appears to be of Rochberg.

I’m running behind due to a confluence of recent deadlines, but I’m happy to announce Peter Garland as Postclassic Radio‘s Last-Two-Thirds-of-October-Through-First Third-of-November Composer-of-the-Month. Maybe I’ll go on a five-week cycle and get back in phase. But this will coincide with my profile of Peter in Chamber Music magazine this month, and I’ll play at least a couple of pieces from every CD he’s got. So far, Jornada del Muerto, Bright Angel/Hermetic Bird, The Fall of Quang Tri, and Nostalgia of the Southern Cross, all for piano, plus Dreaming of Immortalilty in a Thatched Cottage, I Have Had to Learn the Simplest Things Last, and Palm Trees-Pine Trees. This last is not commercially released, and I have quite a few unreleased Garland recordings to offer.

I finally updated the playlist, too. Check it out quick before it’s out of date again!

Because I just never seem to have enough to do to fill up my time, I guess, I sometimes serve as a “reader” for publishers who want a professional opinion on whether a manuscript should be published. Right now I’m reading a personal memoir by the late George Rochberg – possibly because I was one of the few to express public sympathy for his music and aesthetics after he died. I must say I’m amazed, considering what a different type of composer he was from me, how simpatico I find his opinions.

One gratifying thing I’ve learned is that Rochberg had no patience whatever with Schenkerian analysis, nor with those courses of study comprised under the title “form and analysis.” There seems to be something that links Schenkerian analysis and the “form and analysis” curriculum together with 12-tone music and High Modernism, some kind of belief in absolute rationalism and a specious objectivity devoid of cultural influence or context. I studied Schenkerian analysis with a brilliant man (best not named in this connection), and all we did was argue over what I saw as the arbitrariness and subjectivity of what purported to be scientifically rigorous criteria. I hear that Europe quit paying attention to Schenker decades ago, but he’s still much in vogue in certain American college departments that want to see themselves as top rank. My employers would be prouder of me if I could buy into that whole pretentious mindset, and it’s refreshing to know that someone as academically respectable as Rochberg – only too honest to kid himself – was on my side.

The other thing I find attractive is Rochberg’s characterization of history. As he scopes it out, the history of music was always inclusive and cumulative, each era receiving what was valuable from the previous one and building on it – until the mid-20th century, which decided to exclude and prohibit aspects of the musical practice that preceded it. Rochberg felt that this negative new attitude was a sure road map to oblivion, that a prohibitionary approach to composing would inevitably become a dessicated practice that would blow away with the first wind. For me, this is why bebop harmony is a more sane continuation of the theoretical tradition than the sterile pitch-set analysis I learned in school, because it folds in, retains, and elaborates what came before. And I do find something weirdly schizophrenic in the fact that I spend my afternoons teaching students how to use a certain harmonic vocabulary, and that some composers tell those students that, having learned that vocabulary, they’re not allowed to use it. Old, Eurocentric curmudgeon Rochberg may have been, but like me he believed in a Post-Prohibitive Age, and he was elaborating that belief before I was old enough to know what the issues were.

UPDATE: I am told by an authoritative source that my comment about Schenker analysis being ignored by Europe used to be true; but that there has been a resurgence of the technique in England (which is sort of the Columbia University of Europe anyway), and in Finland and Estonia, whence it has been spread by expatriate Americans.

I love teaching with my external hard drive, which now contains 6844 mp3s, perhaps something like ten percent of my record/CD collection. Today we were analyzing Ives’s Concord Sonata. I wanted to make the point that Ives didn’t invent the tone cluster (or at least wasn’t the first to invent it), and so I plugged in my hard drive, pressed a couple of keys, and played the Combat Naval for harpsichord by Michel Corrette (1707-1795), which uses forearm clusters to simulate cannonfire. The students expressed surprise that something so wild could have been written in the 18th century, so I assured them that the Classical Era was a lot more varied than standard music history admits and, to illustrate, played a jew’s-harp concerto by Johann Georg Albrechtsberger (1736-1809), who was Beethoven’s composition teacher. (Having been a record reviewer for Fanfare magazine for many years, I know quite a bit of repertoire never run into by those whose education is primarily academic.) The downside of teaching this way is that I digress considerably more often, and for longer periods.

I have to say, though, that my first Maxtor hard drive suffered a very light fall onto a soft carpet, and quit working altogether, after I’d had it only five months. Maxtor made it extremely difficult to return: I had to download some voluminous instructions in fine print, and wrap it in foam (styrofoam peanuts were not acceptable for honoring the warranty) and an anti-magnetic wrapper that was difficult to obtain. Since then, the Maxtor’s icon sometimes fails to appear on my desktop when I plug it in. I’ve been told that La Cie makes the best external hard drives, and I’m thinking of getting one.

“Music nowadays is merely the art of executing difficulties, and in the end that which is only difficult ceases to please.”

Voltaire, Candide

I had a meeting with an editor from a major publisher today, as happens frequently. They want to know what textbooks I’m looking for, and are polite enough to ask what books I’m planning to write. My esoteric plans don’t generally thrill them. But this one asked what kind of textbook I’d like to see. I told her that I’d love a beginning music theory text that isn’t so exclusively classically oriented, one that would have examples from Broadway tunes, folk music, and pop music, like maybe some musical examples from the Beatles, so that I can connect the theory to music that my students, of whom only about half are classical musicians, already know. And she told me that, the way things are legally right now, nobody, but NOBODY is allowed to quote Beatles songs in a textbook. She said that her company even published a book on pop music, and were prevented from using a single example from the Beatles. This explains a lot – how can you have a theory textbook that includes pop music if the stuff’s all under copyright, and pop musicians won’t let you use their work? Thus we end up with all-classical music textbooks. Very interesting. How do we get past this impasse, Sherlock?

UPDATE: Carl Voss writes to inform me that Robert Gauldin’s Harmonic Practice in Tonal Music “liberally cites folk, pop, and jazz tunes along with the classical repertoire,” including a passage from the Beatles’s “Something” to illustrate the use of bVII. I will check, it, out!

Joseph Horowitz’s article on Gershwin in today’s Times reiterates the usual historical positions on him. One one side are the musicians (Copland and Thomson are quoted) who considered Gershwin’s music lowbrow and never took it seriously. On the other side are those who find in longevity irrefutable evidence of artistic success, and therefore consider Rhapsody in Blue and An American in Paris among the great classics of American music. As usual, allow me to distance myself from both sides.

I have always taken Gershwin completely seriously as a composer. As a matter of fact, when I was a 11-year-old fan of Mozart and Schubert and Grieg and Rachmaninoff, it disturbed me that there were, seemingly, no composers from America. Then I discovered Gershwin, and it was like a window opened into a wonderful world I had thought I could only look at from outside. I remember in grade school being so intently absorbed in a biography of Gershwin that it took a teacher yelling my name most of a minute to get my attention. I played the solo piano version of Rhapsody in Blue at 12, and ingested it as ravenously as though it had been a succulent cheese and I a starving man.

As my taste matured, however, I came to feel that Rhapsody in Blue – Gershwin’s first major work, after all – and An American in Paris were kind of inept in their piecemeal pastiche technique, a new tune every few measures, attempts to write classical music by someone who hadn’t figured it out yet. I graduated to the Concerto in F, the piece with which I think Gershwin hit his stride, and I also came to love the Cuban Overture and even the little-played Second Rhapsody. And of course Porgy and Bess is one of my favorite operas (and to those who claim it isn’t “really” an opera, I would ask, what are the meanings of “isn’t,” “really,” and “opera” in that sentence, and what do you get out of making such an empty argument?). So today I find Rhapsody in Blue and An American in Paris kind of painful to listen to – but otherwise I remain a tremendous Gershwin fan. And, as with the bulk of my opinions, I never find this position echoed anywhere in the repetitive media discourse about the subject.

Alaskan composer John Luther Adams and I were out grouse-hunting the other day, and got into a conversation about our generation of composers. We had flushed out a couple of coveys we weren’t expecting, peppered the air with some 7 1/2 shot, and my spaniel Nellie had done a noble job of scouring the bracken for anything we might have hit – but came up empty. Finally, dropping my gun, I suggested that maybe the reason composers our age hadn’t gotten enough attention was that we showed too much respect for our elders, and hadn’t presented ourselves as individuals worthy of attention ourselves. John removed his orange cap, wiped his forehead with a weary arm, uncocked his 20-gauge, and asked what I meant.

OK, we weren’t actually grouse-hunting, we were drinking at the Broome Street Bar after a La Monte Young concert, but it was just as picturesque, believe me.

After all, John was just about to premiere a piece titled For Lou Harrison, dedicated to one of his mentors. I had just released a CD of basically player-piano music, after having written a book about Conlon Nancarrow. I describe John’s music as a kind of cross between Henry Cowell and Morton Feldman, and he’s always been OK with that. My microtonal music doesn’t sound like that of my teacher Ben Johnston, but I use his notation, and I inherited his approach to harmony. Our mutual friend Peter Garland has evolved an entirely original musical idiom, but he’s always staking his claim to the Partch/Cowell/Rudhyar aesthetic. Our friend Larry Polansky is the continuation of James Tenney experimentalism, and his greatest piece yet is a set of variations on a Ruth Crawford-harmonized folksong. Mikel Rouse dedicated his most groundbreaking opera to his pioneer-predecessor Robert Ashley. The great composers of my generation, at least the ones I think are great, have not exactly revolted against their elders. We have not reinvented the wheel nor the world, nor announced that all music before we arrived was worthless and should be forgotten.

That’s part one of the argument. Part two is that we have also not excommunicated anyone. We have not indulged in the age-old gambit of announcing that our way of writing music was the only way. We have not penned manifestos declaring that “Anyone who has not felt – I do not say understand – but felt the necessity of the postminimalist/totalist/microtonal language is USELESS.” We haven’t done the Stockhausen/Boulez thing, the Picasso/Braque thing. We haven’t even claimed, as John Zorn did, that Carl Stalling, not John Cage, was the REAL father of the avant-garde. I remember in the mid-80s Zorn starting off a liner note, with a startling lack of prescience: “Like it or not, the era of the one-composer piece is just about over….” He seemed to abandon that tack soon after.

There are several things I feel in response to all this. First, I am proud of my generation for not excommunicating anyone. We were scarred by the battles our teachers fought, which appear stupid in retrospect. We absorbed pluralism with our mother’s milk. We learned 12-tone music and sometimes loved it, while nodding our head to the Beatles, while zoning out to Terry Riley, while feeling a warm kinship with Virgil Thomson, while absorbing amazing rhythmic complexities from Henry Cowell, while buying up one Coltrane record after another. I had always felt that working as a critic robbed me of the luxury of believing that my own aesthetic was uniquely privileged, but more and more I find all my peers in the same boat. Many of us may feel (John certainly more than I) that THIS is the way I must write my music, but I’ve never met a composer my own age or younger who feels like only one kind of music is valid today for everyone. Minimalism nurtures no mandates. There were a couple of years back there that the Bang on a Can composers went around saying that new music, to be relevant today, must be based on the vernacular – but what vernacular they meant was a question no one could answer, and the argument petered out quickly in the face of non-vernacular-based great music by Feldman, Varese, Tenney, Niblock, and others. Thank the gods for my generation of composers: we are, by and large, a goddamned tolerant bunch.

The other part is harder to answer. Beethoven claimed that he had learned nothing from Haydn – I will not say that about Nancarrow, nor John about Harrison – quite the contrary. This does not mean that John’s music isn’t a whole different kettle of fish from Harrison’s. Peter Garland can go on about the mantle of Varèse all he wants, but his own gentle, subtly non-repetitive style couldn’t be further from the acerbities of Octandre and Hyperprism. And there’s been little notice that, while Nancarrow’s player piano music is laced together with brilliant large-scale canonic and isorhythmic structures, my own Disklavier music is almost the opposite: whimsical, intuitive, stream-of-consciousness. We’re proud to be card-carrying members of a Maverick tradition (if that is not an oxymoron), but that doesn’t mean we haven’t each staked out his own territory.

My own take on the 20th century was that it was a tremendous unearthing of new ideas – and that now those new ideas are ready to be knit into a more elaborate language. In particular, for me there are four (or five) composers whose music created a space that younger composers could inhabit for several generations:

Nancarrow, for rhythmic structure;

Ben Johnston (or, alternatively, La Monte Young) for pitch structure;

Robert Ashley for text setting and theater; and

Morton Feldman for texture and continuity.

Personally, I feel like a composer could run wild for decades through the rainbow canyons opened up by these composers, without repeating anything they did. In my Nancarrow book I list 26 devices that he used only once each in his output, any one of which is susceptible to further development in other, quite different contexts; plus several ideas implied by his music that he never used at all. It seems silly to walk away from all those untouched riches in search of more pristine ideas. The modernists opened up new continents to musical habitation, and there’s little point in that if someone doesn’t come live in them.

To the extent that the arbiters of musical discourse have not recognized the musical leaders of my generation because we don’t kick ass in the musico-political discourse, that’s their loss. Our commitment to pluralism is a commendable ethical position; our refusal to chase after empty novelty while so many barely-unwrapped new ideas lay waiting to be developed means we are living in a reality that the taste-makers just haven’t caught up with. There are times for innovation, and times for assimilation, and critics and entrepreneurs need to be on their toes when the paradigm shifts.

But I’d be willing to admit that our rhetoric is perhaps not sufficiently self-serving. Every time we justify our willingness to stand alone in some weird sonic territory by pointing to Tenney or Feldman or Young, perhaps the world understandably dismisses us as epigones. We fought the academy, but maybe we forgot to psychically kill off our father figures – at least the ones inside us. Perhaps Peter needs to make a more belligerent case for Garlandism without reference to Cowell, perhaps a manifesto telling what Polansky renounced in his teachers’ music is in order. It’s time for a “Cage Is Dead” article. John, in between puffs on his meerschaum (oops, not true, sorry), admitted that he once told Tenney how much he owed to his music, and Tenney practically got mad: “But John, you’ve gone way beyond what I’m doing, the music’s all yours now!” He was right. We’re too proud to make like Stockhausen, none of us yearns to play the Grand Inquisitor. But we all have strong reasons for making our music precisely the way we make it, for reasons that apply to this exact historical moment that wouldn’t have been relevant 40 years ago. And maybe we need to state our own cases with a little more ego, and less reverence for the composers who meant so much to us – but whose music we’ve indisputably grown beyond.

My, oh my – it turns out the good people at New England Conservatory are reeeally touchy about that Charles Ives line I quoted in connection with them (“You never hear negro spirituals mentioned up there to the New England Conservatory!”). I got blown away by my own little personal Hurricane Katrina of sarcasm, via e-mail from their PR department. Number one, Charles Ives said it, not me. Number two, it was more than 80 years ago – you think they’d laugh it off by this point. Number three, I didn’t really consider the line a reflection on NEC – it was Ives, fairly or not, making fun of a hypothetical schoolmarm who considered NEC the respectable final arbiter on all things musical. I suppose I shouldn’t have referred to it as “Ives’s complaint,” then, and I happily withdraw the term.

Number four, I’m from the wrong side of America’s musical tracks, and that quote is about all I have to connect with NEC. The school doesn’t come up often in discussions of Harry Partch, or Diamanda Galas, or Charlemagne Palestine. If I had some historical quotes like the following, I would surely have used them instead:

Harry Partch: “I can never thank New England Conservatory enough for supporting my work on the instruments I needed to complete Delusion of the Fury.”

Glenn Branca: “It was New England Conservatory that nurtured my efforts to write symphonies for electric guitars.”

You go into a blog entry with the historical references you have, not the ones you wish you had, or might hope to have at a later time.