My favorite Jonathan Kramer story from his memorial service today, about Jonathan teaching music theory class:

Jonathan: Most of you have probably learned the fiction that there are three kinds of minor scale.

Student: If that’s the fiction, what’s the reality?

Jonathan: There is no reality.

Fuckin’ A, Jonathan.

This note from the ever-vigilant Herb Levy:

Thought you’d be interested/amused/whatever: the clue for 24 across
in the NY Times Crossword puzzle for June 5, 2004 is “Piano composer
______ Nancarrow.”

While I don’t see the puzzle everyday, I think this is the first such
mention of Nancarrow.

Thomas Arne, move over.

And now I’ve just learned that the New York singer Kate Sullivan has died – what age I don’t know, but younger than me. [Update: turns out she was only 40.] I first became aware of her from her expert, street-smart performance in Mikel Rouse’s opera Dennis Cleveland, on the basis of which I engaged her to sing the part of the Mother in my own opera Cinderella’s Bad Magic. I had hoped to work with her again when I restage the opera next season. (In fact, I was writing the lead for my next opera with her elegant mezzo in mind.) She was a lovely person and a dynamite singer.

I’m getting afraid to check messages.

I just received the shocking and very saddening news that my old friend, a good composer and a very important theorist, Jonathan Kramer died yesterday of leukemia at the age of only 61. (He’s survived by his father.) Jonathan was best known as a sort of postmodern theorist, hired as such at Columbia (in 1989) and for years not really recognized there as a composer as well. He was probably best known for his book The Time of Music, which dealt with goal-directedness versus stasis in our conceptions of musical time; powerfully argued with well-chosen and extensive examples, the book lent academic credence to the experience of time aimed at in minimalist music, relating it to kindred trends in European music.

But Jonathan was one of those rare people in whom analytical prowess and creativity went hand in hand. His music of the 1980s was what I’d have to call postminimalist: it used no repetition or grooves, but he would limit himself to only five or six or seven pitches with such inventiveness that you’d never realize the pitch spectrum was curtailed. My favorite pieces from this period were his Music for Piano Number 5 (1979-80), a Terry Riley-ish romp in mostly 11/16 meter; Moments in and Out of Time (1981-83), a big, Mahleresque orchestra piece that stubbornly adhered to the E minor scale; and a mercurial chamber piece called Atlanta Licks (1984). The limitation to a few pitches led Jonathan to experiment with using such limitations to subtly unify passages of otherwise widely varying style, and in his Notta Sonata for two pianos and percussion (1992-93) he achieved a true postmodernism, a fractured idiom in which unreal musics jostled each other in an impression of split consciousness. I never had the chance to hear his more recent music, but he was in the process of bringing out a new disc.

According to his ex-wife, Jonathan developed a blood disease last August which turned into myloproliferative syndrome, and only last weekend suddenly turned into acute leukemia. There will be a memorial service this Sunday, June 6, at 1 PM at Plaza Jewish Community Chapel in New York, 630 Amsterdam at 91st. He mentored hundreds of students, and was a loved teacher.

Jonathan, in a move that must have made colleagues question his sanity, brought me to teach a semester at Columbia as part of an attempt to loosen the place up and encourage diversity. He combined a roving, curious mind with blunt honesty, incisive opinions, and a genuine desire to make the music world a livelier, freer place. I had long looked forward to his someday receiving his just due as a composer. I hope it happens posthumously. For now, I’m stunned.

As detailed by Anthony Tommasini in an article in today’s Times, the Pultizer board was appropriately stung by John Adams’s criticism of the Pulitzer for music when he won in 2003. “Among musicians that I know,” Adams said in a comment much publicized at the time, “the Pulitzer has over the years lost much of the prestige it still carries in other fields like literature and journalism.” As Tommasini accurately notes,

Anyone perusing the list of winners, he continued, cannot help noticing the absence of most of America’s greatest musical minds, from mavericks like John Cage, Morton Feldman and Harry Partch, to composer-performers like Steve Reich, Laurie Anderson, Thelonious Monk and Meredith Monk. These creative spirits, he wrote, had been passed over year after year, “often in favor of academy composers who have won a disproportionate number of prizes.”

Very true, and well said. So far, so good. It would be wonderful to have the Pulitzer board acknowledge that the Pulitzer has concentrated on a stylistically narrow range of composers, specifically avoiding the more accessible composers whose music has the most public impact. I’d love it if Downtown composers like Steve Reich, William Duckworth, Janice Giteck, Glenn Branca had a crack at the Pulitzer along with the usual academic crowd.

So what’s the Pulitzer board’s beneficent response? They’re broadening the music category to also include music theater, film scores, and jazz, including even possibly jam sessions.

Anything, ANYTHING, rather than admit that Downtown music exists.

Pardon the unintended qualitative implications, but this is a little like telling someone their dinners are all meat and that they could stand to include some fruits and vegetables, and them responding, “OK, I’ll throw in candy bars and chewing gum. NOW are you satisfied?” The response completely misses the point of the complaint. First of all, musical theater has always been eligible for the drama award anyway, and Tommasini lists musicals that have won a drama Pulitzer: Rent, Sunday in the Park with George, South Pacific.

Secondly, it could make perfect sense to institute a separate Pulitzer prize for jazz, a Pulitzer prize for pop recordings or songs, even a Pulitzer for film scores. Those genres deserve to have excellence recognized. But to have a prize for best music in which one has to comparatively evaluate film scores along with notated concert pieces, and jazz performances, and musicals, will put the committee in the position of having to decide to pick the best apple this year, the best orange next year, and the best pomegranate the year after that. Say the committee includes a composer, a film scorer, and a jazz soloist: the composer will presumably want to give it to a concert piece, the film person to a film score, etc., and how will they form any intelligent opinion regarding each others’ categories? How do you weigh a great jazz performance of a particular night against a fine chamber orchestra piece against an excellent score for a good or bad film? It’s meaningless. And this “broadening” will water down an already meaningless prize until it is meaninglesser than ever.

What takes my breath away, though, is the arrogance (I suppose one could more charitably say ignorance) with which they deliberately sidestep the explicit intention of John Adams’s criticism. “Hell no, we’re not going to give our precious music Pulitzer to any of those damn Downtown composers. Before we do that, we’ll open it up to jazz and film scores and Broadway music, just so they’ll quit bugging us about our damn elitism!”

Still on a political note but in a very different mode, I pass on, from a friend who alerted me, a link to a timely Eric Idle song, laced with charming obscenity directed at all the right targets, and with particular compliments to the FCC. Be advised of “adult content” in the lyrics, but it’ll certainly leave a better aftertaste than the Nick Berg video – unless you don’t get the irony in the line, “Save the Great White Males!”

All right, it’s off-topic, but I’m getting pretty freaked out by the amount of speculation, accompanied by detailed video analysis, that the Nick Berg decapitation video was a fake. At first I thought I had stumbled onto a whacko conspiracy web page (not that I mind, I’ve rarely heard a conspiracy theory I couldn’t believe), but then I Googled the subject, and there seems to be a rapidly growing chorus of doubters. Main points:

1. The editing is sloppy, with unexplainable time lapses.

2. One of the “Arabs” is wearing a gold ring, contrary to religious practice; another is wearing American running shoes.

3. The terrorist who reads the paper has been identified as Musab Al-Zarqawi. But Zarqawi is known to have a prosthetic leg, which the terrorist in the video doesn’t; and besides, Zarqawi was announced as having been killed in April, 2003.

4. At one point the ear and apparent military cap of a white man comes slightly into camera view, only visible when the tape is slowed down.

5. Berg is sitting in the same kind of chair visible in Abu Ghraib photos, wearing the same kind of orange prison outfit worn by Abu Ghraib prisoners. The wall is the same color as Abu Ghraib’s walls, and Berg’s last known job was working on the tower at Abu Ghraib.

6. The famous scream appears to be a woman’s voice and is not accurately cued to the video.

7. Medical experts attest (excuse me for saying it) that much more blood would come from a beheaded man than appears in the video, suggesting that Berg, if it is indeed he, was already dead.

Of course, the video softened the public response that was calling for Rumsfeld’s resignation after Abu Ghraib, and for some people (not myself) made the Abu Ghraib torture seem tame by comparison – and it appeared oh so conveniently after the Abu Ghraib photos were released, though the beheading supposedly had taken place weeks earlier. I haven’t even begun to touch on all the inconsistencies. A few of the many, many web pages are here, by people ranging from liberals to libertarians to “patriotic” Republicans to anti-government survivalists to Arabs to Europeans to Chinese:

Asia Times

www.vanallens.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=4157

Al-Jazeera

globalresearch.ca/articles/HAV405A.html

globalresearch.ca/articles/CAR405A.html

globalresearch.ca/articles/SAT405A.html

www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/5/15/22827/0477

genmay.com/showthread.php?t=354134

www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1137968/posts

www.libertyforum.org

Believe it, don’t believe it, but it proves beyond doubt how malleable video reality is.

UPDATE: I guess I no longer read my own newspaper religiously enough. It took Jan Herman to point out to me that this week’s Village Voice has its own article on the speculations about the Nick Berg video.

FURTHER UPDATE: Harry Shearer discussed the possibility of the Berg video being fake on his NPR news program Le Show on WAMC radio, May 30, the soundfile of which you can find at harryshearer.com. Under an administration as secretive as Bush/Cheney, conspiracy theories will no longer be limited to the lunatic fringe.

I haven’t been blogging, and have no better, nor worse, excuse to offer than the euphoria that accompanies the ending of the school year and my annual opportunity to plunge back into composing. But the year-end hysteria prevented me from recording a very interesting concert that took place a couple of weeks ago at Bard, which was quintessentially postclassical if the word has any meaning at all. Student composer Matt Wellins (Mr. New Music of Postclassic fame) brought to campus a Chicago-based quartet I’d never heard of before named Town and Country, consisting of multi-instrument performers Ben Vida, Liz Payne, Josh Abrams, and Jim Dorling. Switching around among violin, upright bass, bass clarinet, squeezebox harmonium, and a plethora of handheld percussion, this quartet has developed its own style of mostly brief minimalist pieces, somewhat improvised, somewhat collectively composed. They were catchy, engaging vignettes with often intricate rhythms, and they metamorphosed as they droned along, the players picking up not only different pitches but different instruments as well. I’ve been looking for a long time for someone to come up with an improvisation paradigm that is neither jazz nor “free,” capable of creating original pieces with a recognizable identity but with plenty of leg room for give and take in performance. Town and Country has done it. To come up with a group improv style grounded in minimalism was no small conceptual feat.

And they weren’t even the top bill! Minimalist violin pioneer Tony Conrad performed with them, and also gave a one-hour slice of his “Early Minimalism,” playing violin raspily over loud, prerecorded string drones. Conrad’s maintaining the style of performance I first saw him with at New Music America in Miami in 1988, playing behind a curtain kept in constant motion by electric fans, with a lamp projecting his silhouette on the curtain. (Don’t worry, the music is more than loud enough to completely drown out the fans.) Within this theatrically evocative setting you could hear 11th, 13th, even 17th harmonics over the drones, although Conrad believes in a roiling mercuriality rather than harmonic precision. I keep waiting for Conrad to develop his shtick to the next step, but the students (and faculty) who hadn’t heard him before got a bracing close-up glimpse of history.

Town and Country have a new recording out, called simply 5, on Thrill Jockey, and you can read more about it in this Prefix magaine article about them. They’re well worth checking out.

Another thought on Ives, if you can stand it, from reader Jacob Smullyan:

[W]hile the attempt to characterize Ives as fraudulent should be condemned outright, a related thesis is worth considering seriously, namely, that his later revisions may not be
entirely satisfactory. He had grown distant from the roots of his inspiration, and wanting to get re-involved, gilded the lily a bit (perhaps gold is too trite a mineral — mica?). Some of the thickenings (I’m thinking of Concord here) are inspired, and some are merely
uniformly thick. I liked Kirkpatrick’s way of picking and choosing those variants. I think of the 1947 Concord as being a bit like Wordsworth’s rewrite of The Prelude; each line is strengthened, and the whole is weakened (although 1947 Ives is a lot better than 1805 Wordsworth).

There’s a lot of sense to this. One of the satisfying but perhaps dangerous things about being a composer is that, while you can’t change notes in Mozart, you can change notes in your own music whenever you want. I’ve been inputting into computer notation music I wrote 20, 25 years ago, and I can rarely resist the temptation to change a few notes here and there to accord with my present taste. If I make a major change I’ll mark it “revised version,” but otherwise I’ll leave it. And I would hate to think of some student whom I’ve trustingly taken under my wing watching me make these changes and later putting the most malevolent possible construction on them, implying that I was trying to lie about my place in history – as Elliott Carter did to the man who helped him get into Harvard, Charles Ives. Many interconnected and contradictory impulses, good and bad, go into revising a piece of music, and it shows a paucity of psycholgical insight to isolate just one and claim it’s THE one. Nor, as Smullyan notes, did even Ives’ revisions always improve. I’ve always wanted to hear one recording of Ives’ Second Symphony without the final Bronx cheer, the closing 12-pitch chord, that Ives added decades later as a way of expressing disdain for his own work for being too conservative. That’s a noble, if fun, work, and it deserves to end unironically.

Happy Erik Satie’s birthday, by the way. Seems like that should be something of a holiday in postclassical music circles.