Despite being a cool, avant-garde guy, I am a college professor, and the semester activity is at its height. You wouldn’t want to hear what I’m up to this week – faculty evaluation committee meetings, written justifications for replacing retiring faculty, queries from prospective students – it would bore you to tears. What makes me so sure? It’s boring me to tears.

But the upside of committee meetings is that they give me plenty of time to think about my blog, and I have been thinking. Experimental musician/reader William Lawless had a query:

Something I haven’t seen you discuss – and that also seems absent on sites like New Music Box – is the kind of music that’s being released by outfits like Erstwhile, For4Ears, Grob, and related labels. This music is going by names like electro-acoustic improvisation and lower-case sound (and filed under genres, if you can call them that, of “post-AMM” or post-concrete music). The aesthetic here is pretty hardcore improvisational, but not exclusively: Polwechsel comes to mind as a composing group whose sound nevertheless is squarely in this aesthetic. And Cage and Feldman seem to come up again and again as a cited influence for much of this music-in artist interviews, in liner notes, and in online discussions by fans and critics. (And correct me if I’m wrong, but there’s a counter-gesture, too, on the part of many contemporary classical musicians who incorporate improvised passages, concrete elements, non-canonic instruments like electronics or sheets of metal or what-have-you.) So my question is, how do you see this new stuff fit into the contemporary (and/or academic) classical scene – if one can imagine this homogeneity, at least for the sake of discussion? Do you see these musical worlds communicating with or influencing each other in any valuable, innovative ways?

By interesting coincidence, this question came the same week that student Matt Wellins brought just such a quartet to Bard, actually four European laptop performers who had never performed together as a quartet before: Peter Rehberg (who goes by the name Pita, at times), Thomas Lehn, Marcus Schmickler (who occasionally goes by the name Pluramon), and Gert Jan-Prins. I’m not very hip in this field, but enjoyed what I heard. It always seems to me that this kind of music seems successful when the players know enough to make it subtle. When you have a million possibilities and use a hundred in the first minute or two, the music gets boring very quickly. When the laptop performers have enough self-discipline and knowledge of interesting software capacities to bring about slow, interesting transformations and unusual textures, the results can be quite lovely. Beyond those criteria, though, I do have a little trouble telling one group from another, and I feel like I’d need to have a better notion of how the software operates than I do in order to offer a detailed critique. I certainly have no principled objection to the music, but as with DJs, I’m not sure what criteria one would use to claim that one group is better than another. And I do appreciate it when I don’t have to wear ear plugs. I’m 48 and getting a little old for the unrestrained noise business, but my sympathies are still with it.

My long-term historical doubt about electronic improvisation is the same as with regular free improv: I don’t get a convincing impression that sustained self-criticism is going on, that improvisers listen to each other perform, hear and identify things that don’t work well, and keep refining their techniques to make the music more powerful. Perhaps the mindset of this kind of sustained self-criticism only comes from a world in which pieces of music are semi-permanent, replicatable entities. But it’s why, after writing extensively about free improvisation in the 1980s (unsympathetically, some thought, but I took pains to discuss performances I liked as much as those I didn’t, and it seemed to me the very fact that improvisers found that “unsympathetic” was a sign of their unwillingness to self-criticize), I pretty much decided to leave that scene alone.

But Lawless goes on to wonder: these “post-concrete” composers are heavily inspired by the musics of Cage, Feldman, Varèse, and a lot of people in the composing world. Are composers likewise inspired, influenced by (I’m beginning to hate the ubiquitous word “influence,” but that’s a blog entry for another day) the electronic improvisers?

While I’m on anecdotes, long-time correspondent John Dinwiddie sends a charming one:

I have a good Henry Cowell tale for you, starring David Tudor and Lou Harrison. In 1967, I drove David Tudor down to the Lansing Speaker Corp. in Sunnyvale to pick up some speaker drivers for the first version of the Rainforest circuit. Afterwards, David decided that I needed to meet a man of real culture – still true – and that we should head down to Aptos to drop in on Lou.

That we did, and late into an evening that would take a long chapter to describe, Lou holds up before his guests around his sunken long table a sheet of paper and asks in his great, Vincent Pricey voice, “David, do you have any idea what this is?” (No.) “Well, it’s Henry Cowell’s first composition, written when he was eight. It’s called, [dramatic pause] ‘I Want An Ice Cream Cone.'”

The last few days I’ve been analyzing the slow movement of Roger Sessions’s Third Symphony to present it in class. (Yes, it’s true – I may denigrate 12-tone music as a critic, but as a historian and theorist I scrupulously study and teach it, and in fact compared works by Sessions, Copland (Inscape), Wallingford Riegger (Third Symphony) and Dallapiccola (Piccola Musica Notturna) to show different ways in which second-generation 12-tone composers slowed down the rotation of the twelve pitches to give the style more harmonic contrast. As a critic I would never undertake a sustained criticism of a style I hadn’t fully understood.) Anyway, I was reminded of a 19-year-old story that I’ve never had opportunity to make public, because the person it concerned didn’t want it printed. But now that the late, great Ralph Shapey is dead, I feel free to release it.

I interviewed Shapey in the summer of 1985. Ralph, a first-class ranter, embarked on a tirade against conductors who wouldn’t program American music. “Like Roger Sessions,” he bellowed. “They never play his symphonies, never. Oh, I know what Roger Sessions’s problem is, everyone knows the problem with Roger Sessions, but that still doesn’t mean they shouldn’t play his music!”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” I interrupted. “What’s the problem with Roger Sessions?”

“Well,” Shapey hesitated, glancing around his apartment in search of the right word, “he’s… he’s… he’s DULL! But that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t play his music!” And then, realizing I was sitting there with a tape recorder and notepad, he panicked and pleaded, “Please don’t print that! Please don’t print that I said that!”

So I never did – during his lifetime. Shapey would use the f-word in all kinds of contexts and tell me to “write that in,” but he was scared to death of the music world learning that he considered Sessions’s music dull.

And the slow movement of the Sessions Third is indeed gorgeous, beautifully written, impeccably crafted – and dull.

I gave a little cheer this morning reading my friend Greg Sandow, confirming something I absolutely believe:

What about serious musical scholars, who sit there [at concerts] reading scores? Now, I — speaking now as a musician, though not all musicians would agree with me — think that’s one of the worst ways to listen to music. You notice the trees, not the forest. You police the composition (and, above all, the performance), but you don’t truly hear it. You notice details, but you miss both the flow of the composition, and the sheer taste and impact of the sound.

Hooray again! Pompous Uptown critics who think Elliott Carter is the greatest thing since silced bread look down their noses at us critics who don’t read scores at concerts, but I used to do it, and I learned that afterward I was able to point to dozens of notes that were played wrong, but had completely missed the emotional impact of the performance, and had nothing to report that a non-musicologist would be interested in. In fact, I think it was the practice of score-reading during concerts among certain critics that fostered a kind of specious enthusiasm for 12-tone music; the stuff could be fascinating to watch, and you didn’t want to hear the emotional impact anyway. Now I’ll look at a score before a performance and again afterward, but never during, and I wouldn’t trust the judgment of any critic who listened to a work with his face buried in the score.

On the other hand, Greg’s plumping for a hand-held device called the Concert Companion, which can provide rolling program notes during a concert, keyed to events in the music. As a composer, if I knew that such a device was going to be applied to a new work of mine, I would meticulously avoid writing into the piece any event that could be described. (Hmm, sounds like the way I’m composing lately anyway.)

I took the quiz to see which New York Times columnist I am. Turns out, I’m Maureen Dowd.

And by the way, I’ve been listening to Air America over the internet. It isn’t anywhere near as hilarious as they promised, but neither is it as dull as the reviews I’ve read charge. It’s just radio, sufficiently entertaining to keep on in the background, and often satisfying in the truths it reports. Maybe they shouldn’t have raised false expectations by hyping up the funny side so much.

Picking up on my entry about Europe, Art Jarvinen tells an anecdote about the Dutch composer Joep Franssens:

I met him at an E.A.R. Unit concert at the Icebreaker in Amsterdam, where we played that piece of mine you like so much, Murphy-Nights. Afterwards Joep said “That’s the kind of piece a lot of us here would like to be writing, but we can’t yet. The pressure is still too strong to do what’s expected.”

Murphy-Nights, by the way, is a brilliant, jazzy piece in which three instruments play a crazily syncopated line in unison while the electric keyboard and bass play ostinatos going out of phase, one 32 16th-notes long and the other 33 16th-notes. Very lean, surprising yet logical, based in minimalist techniques but wacky and angular, humorous, very American.

I get a lot of contradictory mail on topics like this. Some aver that the hegemony of complex atonal music was over years ago; some find it very much alive, but more in Europe these days, it seems, than in America. Personally I find it sad and anachronistic that in 2004 any composer still takes the tonal/atonal distinction or the consonance/dissonance distinction as being crucial, or feels that complexity is a necessary musical attribute. As Charles Ives so wisely wrote, “Why tonality should be done away with completely, I can’t see. Why it should be always present, I can’t see.” Isn”t it obvious that there is too much great tonal music for anyone to think music should always be atonal, and too much great atonal music for anyone to dismiss atonality? And yet a student of mine recently applied to grad school and was asked by a professor, “I see you’ve used a key signature – don’t you find that awfully limiting?” Did Bach find it limiting? Has anyone ever proved that limitations on creative work were a bad thing? Nietzsche wrote that “one should remember the compulsion under which every language so far has achieved strength and freedom – the metrical compulsion, the tyranny of rhyme and rhythm.” As for those convinced that a certain historical period necessitates a specific kind of music, defined by superficial qualities such as consonance, dissonance, tonality, complexity – can they prove their assertion? prove that it is more than a personal preference or received professorial mandate turned around into a weapon to blast away at the careers of others?

Of all the despicable follies of modern music, the most despicable is the devaluation of simplicity. Simplicity has always been an artistic virtue, and it remains one still – not an essential virtue, for there is too much enjoyable complex music to believe that. But other things being equal, one remembers simple music far better than complex music, and I come back to the simple pieces that have impressed me far more consistently than I do the complex ones. Beethoven’s sketches reveal that his first ideas were rarely simple and rarely good, and that in revising them he invariably simplified them and made them infinitely more powerful in so doing. To get your music to where it is simple, and therefore memorable, and therefore powerful, takes tremendous effort, and many composers lie about that fact because they don’t want to put forth the effort. It is just over 200 years since Friedrich von Schiller wrote that

True genius is of necessity simple, or it is not genius…. The most intricate problems must be solved by genius with simplicity, without pretension, with ease; the egg of Christopher Columbus is the emblem of all the discoveries of genius. It only justifies its character as genius by triumphing through simplicity over all the complications of art…. Simplicity in our mode of thinking brings with it of necessity simplicity in our mode of expression, simplicity in terms as well as movement; and it is in this that grace especially consists. Genius expresses its most sublime and its deepest thoughts with this simple grace; they are the divine oracles that issue from the lips of a child; while the scholastic spirit, always anxious to avoid error, tortures all its words, all its ideas, and makes them pass through the crucible of grammar and logic, hard and rigid…. (“On Naive and Sentimental Poetry”)

That last sentence sounds like a definition of grad school to me. More compellingly (because more simply), George Sand wrote that

Simplicity is the most difficult thing to achieve in this world: it is the last limit of experience and the last effort of genius.

And even more simply still:

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

– Leonardo Da Vinci

Has European music forgotten? Have we?

Well, I thought someone else would eventually say it, but no one has. The MPR American Mavericks radio series on American classical music that won the Peabody Award? It was based on scripts written by me, which were reworked slightly for radio, with interviews added, by Tom Voegeli. Tom did an excellent job, but the Minneapolis Star described him as “writer” of the series and omitted me, and subsequently I’ve been getting e-mails from friends saying, “But I thought you wrote the series.” (Even the Arts Journal link, o unkindest cut of all, failed to mention me). I take a little drink in my own honor.

After all, I don’t want anyone to think I falsely took credit for being involved with a radio show that won a Peabody. That would put me on the same level as… Bill O’Reilly!

Oh yes – an alert reader caught that I glibly roped Claude Vivier into a roundup of European composers. Despite his considerable professional presence in Paris, Vivier was, of course, Canadian, and it would be churlish indeed to deprive the perennially underrated Canadian new-music scene of credit for so fine an ornament.

My comments about new music in Europe received more resounding validation than I would have ever expected, from a composer in Amsterdam, Renske Vrolijk:

I read your entry about New Music in Old Europe with great interest, since
I am one of those “young” composers trying to free ourselves from the
Darmstadt liberation. And I am not the only one….

In brief, the landscape looks as follows:

1 – The nomenclature still firmly in the saddle [by which she means, I presume, the postserialists from the Darmstadt era].

2 – The Hague school, especially strong in the Netherlands (If you know Bang On A Can, you know what this is about): Louis Andriessen, Cornelis de Bont (in the US people like David Lang)

3 – The (semi) religious school (followers of Arvo Pärt, like Tuur and Joep
Franssens).

4 – The European American school (the cultural U-turn), people like Jacob ter Veldhuis and me.

5 – The spectralists (I’ve heard about them but haven’t investigated them much, yet).

My latest attempt to break the barriers (I did not succeed) was when one of my orchestral compositions was turned down in a competition with the jury telling me my music was too tonal. The funny thing is that after the competition I was invited by the chairman of the jury to his home address. He told me that he found my music refreshing after another bunch of academic works, but he couldn’t find a majority in the jury. Mostly avant-garde diehards.

To be honest, it was the domination of the avant-garde that made me quit composing for over six years and do something entirely different. The pressure to compose scores that looked complicated and sounded complicated made my brains melt. I just wanted to compose music that is allowed to sound nice! Music in a traditional way, or pop or whatever, but at least music, not organized sound with a lot of intellectual blah blah to make it easier to swallow.

When I visited Gelbmusik a while ago, I felt the same jitters as when I decided to quit. And don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed Le Grande Macabre by Ligeti very much last year in the Komische Oper in Berlin. But it is time for Europe to look ahead again.

Decade after decade, those composers who rail against the conservatism and forced homogeneity of the music scene of their day – Cowell, Varese, Partch, Cage, Reich – have turned out to be the visionaries who opened up a new era. And yet I can already anticipate the kind of carping responses Ms. Vrolijk must get (because I’ve so often gotten them myself), dismissing her as an unsuccessful malcontent. In music as in politics, those who thrive even moderately under status quo conditions are quick to gun down anyone who points up corruption or timidity in the status quo. But the criterion for how seriously such complaints should be taken is clear. You can apply it by checking out Renske Vrolijk’s web page, which opens with the following manifesto:

Who is afraid of tonal music

Many people believe that contemporary music is about putting as many dissonances in a unit of time as possible. Some contemporary composers think that contemporary tonal music is lazy composing.

Both are wrong!

Good contemporary classical music is not about consonance or dissonance but about reaching out and getting a message or feeling across to your public. It has a link to its own time and to society as a whole. And it has the guts to be linked to tradition, to be sentimental, to be consonant and dissonant with meaning and be intellectual at the same time.

Brava! Checking out the MP3 samples of her music, which are admittedly brief excerpts, I find her work original, gripping, and quite unlike anything else I hear from Europe – a cultural U-turn indeed, but not in the American neoromantic sense. When an artist can back up her tirades against the status quo with good music, they demand to be taken seriously.

On a boat going up the Spree River in Berlin, Tom Johnson introduced me to Wolfgang Heisig. Heisig punches player piano rolls and writes music for player piano. Naturally, he has a strong interest in the music of Conlon Nancarrow, and we agreed to trade MIDI files of my own music for computerized piano, his music, and Nancarrow’s. Wolfgang doesn’t speak English, and I don’t speak German, but we managed a warm conversation nevertheless. Afterward, Tom expressed surprise that Wolfgang and I managed to chat for so long. “But Tom,” I replied, “the language we speak is universal: MIDI.”