London Gatwick Airport – I allowed myself one heady self-indulgence in England: I bought facsimile editions of Dr. Charles Burney’s travel books, The Present State of Music in France and Italy (1771) and The Present State of Music in Germany, The Netherlands, and United Provinces (1773). I not only found them at Travis and Emery, the delightfully overcrowded little used-music-book store on Cecil Court near Leicester Square, they are published by Travis and Emery in the last few months, in the store’s move to branch out into reprint publishing.

It might seem odd that a critic of postclassical music is so excited about Burney (1726-1814), but I’ve always felt a special kinship for the peripatetic old music scholar. Burney was a composer of sonatas and theater music whose career pressures pushed him into writing music history – in itself, this description does not distinguish him from me. Moreover, as a composer-historian Burney projects a delightful sense that history was being made all around him, and that the most worthwhile thing a scholar could do was chronicle his own time – deficient and superlative, the ephemeral along with the enduring. Had the Village Voice existed in 1770, Burney would have written for it. Aside from Gretry, Traetta, and other relatively trivial theater composers of his day, he reported on military bands and pipe organs in each new town, visited C.P.E. Bach, and chronicled the beginnings of the symphony in the hands of Wagenseil, Canabich, and the celebrated Mannheim Orchestra. One has to remember that these two books appeared before either Haydn or Mozart had written the works for which they are now remembered, during one of music history’s most forgettable lulls, yet one does not get the feeling that Burney is disappointed with his era, nor considers it inferior to music of the past – another point of resemblence.

The only problem with the edition is, being a facsimile, it follows the the 18th-century English practice of using for every “s” not at the end of a word the character that looks like an “f” but with the right half of its cross-line missing. So “founding” and “sounding,” “finger” and “singer,” “foul” and “soul” are difficult to distinguish quickly, “bassoon” turns into “baffoon,” and one does a series of double-takes in sentences that look like, “all was fo diffonant and falfe, that notwithftanding the building is immenfe, and not very favorable to found,… in fpite of two or three fweet and powerful voices among the boys, the whole was intolerable to me….” Like reading someone with a speech impediment. Aside from that, Burney is as entertaining as his reputation suggests, if quite a complainer about travel conditions, and as 18th-century musicology goes, it’s a quick read.

Today, when the musicological community has almost totally turned their backs on recent creative music, deciding en masse that music history ended in 1976 with Einstein on the Beach, we need more of Burney’s spirit, his conviction that searching libraries for old manuscripts was fine but not nearly as exciting as visiting living composers and documenting their activities. It reminds me of a remark composer Larry Polansky once made to me. Polansky and I were comparing notes, talking about his work on manuscripts by Harry Partch and Johanna Beyer, and mine on Conlon Nancarrow and Mikel Rouse. Finally he said, “Composers today are doing what musicologists used to do, while all the musicologists are off doing gender studies.” Perhaps that was true for old Burney as well. So I toasted him in the most English way I could think of, reading him in a London pub over beef-and-ale pie and a few pints of Theakston’s Old Peculier.

My divagations about literalism versus intuition sparked an interesting sympathetic comment from the excellent San Francisco composer Dan Becker, director of the Common Sense composers’ collective. As he admits, it may sound like a “stoner” reaction, but it captures the psychology by which composers incorporate the real world into their musical thinking, especially for those of us attuned to the phenomena that minimalism brought into awareness:

During grad school, I drove across the country several times. Once on a desolate four-lane highway, I remember that I wanted to pass a car that seemed to be using cruise control. For fun, I decided to set my own car on cruise control just a bit faster than the other. I remember “phasing” past that car ever so slowly, thinking and feeling that this was like being in the guts of an early Steve Reich piece.

But I also had a personal insight that for me was crucial. I realized that if I were doing the same basic thing without cruise control on, I would have reacted very differently. There’s a lot of psychological tension when you get close to that other car. You don’t want to be in their blind spot, etc. I’m sure that without the cruise control on I would have sped up and passed him as I got close. A silly stoner-type thought maybe, but for me it was mental fireworks!

I realized the element of “human consciousness” was absent when using cruise control. So in music if a process is a mechanical one, it might be beautiful and elegant, but in the end for me it was doomed to be sterile. What was needed was to inject human consciousness into the process. As the composer, I needed to jump inside, dance around, see how it felt. Push it, stretch it, speed up, slow down. In other words, turn OFF the Cruise Control.

Knowing Becker’s music, which has a general postminimalist momentum and shape but great freedom within the note-to-note details, I can easily see how this realization about free will would translate into compositional technique.

Alert new-music maven and record producer Herb Levy notes that James Tenney’s Diapason has indeed appeared on CD, on a Col Legno collection of recordings from the 1996 Donaueschingen Festival. The catalog number is WWE 3CD 20008, but something tells me you’re not going to rush to your local CD purveyor and find it in the bin.

In sketching out my thoughts about literalism in 20th-century music, I inadvertently maligned a composer I very much admire, James Tenney, by failing to articulate some important distinctions that I had in mind. If not well-known to the public, Tenney is certainly well-known to composers, and he has an interesting underground reputation: as sort of the concentrated, prescription-strength form of whatever drug Steve Reich is the name-brand, over-the-counter variety of. Reich dresses the idea of gradual process up for the concert hall, but many of the best-known of Tenney’s varied works (Spectral Canon, Koan, For 12 Strings (Rising), Chromatic Canon, Critical Band) give it to you straight in a more uncompromised, even severe form that doesn”t always sound like what you think of as music but is often surprisingly sensuous. Critical Band, for instance, slowly opens up an overtone series the way you might watch a flower open up, and it’s an enchanting experience. Bob Gilmore, a Tenney expert, played me a recent similar orchestral work called Diapason, which is exponentially more beautiful: no rhythm, no tunes, just a slow, rich timbral metamorphosis before your astonished ears. I wish I could tell you how to hear Diapason: we badly need more of Tenney’s music on disc.

American music in particular has always had a recurring back-to-nature element, and it comes at opportune moments. In the 1970s, 12-tone music, serialism, stochastic music, chance music, all left us up in the air about what music was supposed to be, and Reich and Tenney, along with La Monte Young, Phill Niblock, Tom Johnson, and some others, returned us to a kind of secure bedrock of sonic processes. Johnson, purveyor of pieces based in simple arithmetical logic, came up with the motto, “I want to discover the music, not compose it,” which well expresses the extreme endpoint of a kind of objectivist mindset. That music grounded us in the nature of sound, and opened up a new era. My own proclivity, especially as a composer but pretty much as a listener as well, is that objectivity is not endlessly satisfying, and that eventually the human element needs to reappear, since music is (and this is not so self-evident or uncontroversial as it sounds), for me, a communication between human beings.

But what I see as the problem of literalism in music is something much wider and deeper. The gradual processes of Reich and Tenney are at least right on the surface and you can listen to them: the musical interest is in the tension between the objective process and the subjective listener. The bulk of the iceberg is all the literal process and method and structure in late-20th-century music that you can’t hear. One notable example is Elliott Carter’s piano piece Night Fantasies, which is structured around a cross-rhythm of 175 against 216. Buried within the mercurial texture are accented chords which mark off that slow phase relationship over a 20-minute period. You can’t hear 175 against 216 over 20 minutes with a lot of other stuff going on: from the listener’s subjective apprehension of the appearance of the piece, it’s unimportant that that’s in there. Neither is it a criticism of the piece that it contains that inaudible structure, but it is symptomatic of the late-20th-century situation in which many, many composers came to believe that as long as they knew some objective structure was in the music, it didn’t matter whether the audience could hear it, or indeed what the audience heard. As Babbitt says in Words about Music, “It’s not whether you can hear it, but how you conceptualize it.” And by the latter “you,” he clearly seems to have meant the composer, not the listener.

So you can’t hear everything that goes on in late-20th-century music: this is hardly a novel complaint, and hardly worth reiterating. What I am urging is an explicit revival of the ancient aesthetic principle that art is about appearances, not about reality. I complain about a piece of music and the composer thinks he has refuted me because he can show me in the score the fascinating structure I missed. (I once heard a very erudite lecture analyzing Carter’s music at a prestigious college. Hanging around afterward, I overheard the lecturer sadly tell a friend, “You know, you find all those wonderful structures in Carter’s music, but then when you listen to it, you can’t hear them.”) We still let certain composers get away with justifying their music via things that are “really” there but that we can’t hear, and, worse, in teaching composition we still tend to emphasize inner musical structure over audience perception. The problem is admittedly on the wane, but making a plea for “what the audience can hear” will still garner looks of condescension and contempt in many composers’ circles. What I’d like to see in our musical discourse is for “You can’t hear that” to become a damning critical interdiction, and for “but it’s really there” to become an inadmissable defense.

My work has taken me into theater lately, and the theatrical attitude offers a good lesson for composers. The script calls for a sausage. The director, looking around, picks up a stuffed sock. “That doesn’t look like a sausage,” I say. “It will from the audience,” the director calmly replies, and he’s right. And how it looks, or sounds, from the audience is all that matters.

Totnes, Devon – I was privileged yesterday evening to hear a brief presentation by Dr. Trevor Wiggins, who is head of the Dartington music department, an ethnomusicologist, and an acknowledged master of the drumming style of Ghana. I was struck by a fact he told us. There have always been ethical issues involved in taking the traditional music of another country and using it for your own purposes. The best-known example is Paul Simon’s use of South African music in his Graceland album – Simon supposedly paid the musicians whose songs he appropriated, but not everyone has been so scrupulous. But now, according to Professor Wiggins, Ghana has become the first country to charge royalties for use of its culture’s indigenous music. In other words, if you visit Ghana, learn a traditional tune, and go back and use that tune on a recording or concert, you’ll owe some fee to the state of Ghana. It’s an interesting new model, because no one individual is responsible for traditional music, and other countries are likely to pick up on it. Among other things, it means that ethnomusicologists will acquire a new role: as legal experts in court cases over the unremunerated theft of ethnic musics.

Pick up a camera. Close your eyes. Spin around, and point the camera somewhere at random. Open your eyes and look through the viewfinder. Just as a thought exercise, think of the image you’re seeing as a work of art. Consider its composition, its shapes, how the things in the image relate to each other, however randomly placed.

Sometimes I will begin a new class by having the students be quiet and listen for four and a half minutes. I have them note down, quietly, a thumbnail description of every sound they hear. They hear stairs creaking, pianos playing in the music building, the scratching of pens, heaters humming. After the four and a half minutes is up, I tell them that they’ve just heard a performance of a famous piece of music, John Cage’s 4’33”. Sometimes they get very excited, and once a girl exclaimed, “I never realized there was so much to listen to!” The only negative comments I’ve ever gotten are along the lines of, “You mean, Cage got paid for doing that!?” I assure them he didn’t.

Contrary to some popular belief, 4’33” is not four minutes of silence, nor four minutes of outraged audience protest: it is four minutes of unintended, accidental sound considered as music, a frame placed around a random set of noises. It shows the arbitrariness of how we decide to perceive something as art. It begins to attune us to our sonic environment, to disable the filters we keep in place to ignore our daily life. It is such a whimsical, wise, harmless, cheerful, edifying, non-commercial gesture. So I’m thrilled the BBC broadcast the piece over the radio (see the story here), and shocked that, 51 years after it became part of music history, there are still people who can think Cage was trying to pull something over on the world. What he was trying to pull over on you, mate, was your own damn life. Take a listen to it sometime.

Totnes, Devon – I wish I could show you the 15th-century church I’m looking at – next to a tree believed to have stood here for 1500 years – as I smoke a Cuban cigar in the garden on a lovely Sunday morning, while back home my friends endure the coldest New York winter in a century.

When I was a student, composers used to come to my school and tell us about their work. Now I go to schools and tell students about mine. Things have changed. One thing my musicologist friend Bob Gilmore and I discuss with some unease is the discontinuance of aesthetic argument. In the ’70s there were so many issues to argue. Is 12-tone music an inevitable development in musical language? Is chance a valid compositional technique? Is returning to tonality a copout? Can the process aspect of minimalist music be divorced from its prettiness? In college I remember one of my friends asking, why couldn’t Steve Reich have used a 12-tone row for Piano Phase?

And on and on. Any composer who came to visit a college was not just an artist, but a salesman. He or she had techniques to sell. One assured us that 12-tone music would be the wave of the future. Another demonstrated that microtones were the only place left to go. Another brought a feminist critique of the avant-garde, and offered a more holistic, nurturing approach. Still others used Marxist terminology, and shook their heads over the “elitist” avant-garde, enjoining us to examine our musical intentions in terms of the class struggle. Students took sides, some boycotting certain composers’ presentations as a political statement. When Petr Kotik and Julius Eastman played some long, austere, chance-inflected pieces at Oberlin in 1974, one of the 12-tone students tried to disrupt the concert by banging on the door from outside. Students challenged the famous composers. Some years before me at Oberlin, Christopher Rouse is said to have asked Morton Feldman, after his lecture, “Mr. Feldman? Why is your music so boring?” (Feldman’s incredulous answer: “Borrrring? BORRRRing?… You should BE so boring!”)

I’m not so sure that the composers, many of whom had comfortable careers and secure teaching positions, saw themselves as selling something – that may have been the perception only because we were in the market to buy. We were picking a horse to bet on – Who do you favor in the fifth race, Minimalism, Conceptualism, or Twelve-Tone? We were buying stock, and watching the ticker tape carefully. Ambitious, we wanted to get ahead, and looked for assurance that the musical movement we latched onto would still be hot when we graduated. We were also artists, and looking for something to believe in, something that felt right and offered us creative room to grow.

Today, that sense that there are winners and losers among musical styles is gone, somewhat to everyone’s relief. More prevalent is the feeling that all styles have lost, and the entire scene is in danger. Yet there is no lessening of interest in making avant-garde music, whatever that is. 21-year-olds are inherently idealistic, and have been scoffing at society’s Philistine threats for as long as this tree’s been standing here, probably. The pleasant democracy of styles, however, does not mean there aren’t aesthetic issues to discuss, and all the more reason that we should discuss them now, when the situation isn’t so polarized, now that the names Reich, Feldman, Ferneyhough, Carter, Partch, Meredith Monk, can all be raised without much fear that anyone will jeer at any of them.

For instance, most of my music can be considered tonal. Among students, the fact doesn’t seem to raise any eyebrows. One composition professor here seemed slightly disappointed that some of my harmonies are so simple. I do feel, and I think it would still be found to be a controversial opinion if one asked around, that complexity versus simplicity of harmony is a dead issue, beaten to death by the last generation, and that any type of harmony can now be legitimately used to articulate musical structures; that the large-scale structure is more expressive than any particular means used to delineate it. But no discussion ensues on this topic.

More interestingly, I find among students a concern for linear processes, and both James Tenney and Steve Reich have been influential in this area. Some young composers go through tremendous calculations to work out their musical forms to be geometrically exact. Personally, I find this type of thinking too literal, and I consider literalism the great disease of late 20th-century music. Twelve-toners started it: the 12-tone row and its permutations were a very literal technique. By basing one passage on a pitch row and the next on its retrograde inversion, one created a literal kind of unity, but with no assurance that a unified impression would result. One practically had to torment the 12-tone method, as Dallapiccola sometimes did, to create a meaningful appearance of musical unity. Likewise, the objective calculation of an exact process is not always the best way to convey the metaphor of a gradual process. To his great credit, Reich quickly moved from the physically exact process of his tape-loop piece Come Out to the metaphorical, far more expressive nonlinear process of Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices, and Organ. It was an important lesson, and one I benefitted from.

James Tenney was one of the most recent composers to visit Dartington, and his love of exact processes survives as a student interest. Tenney is a great musician, and I love much of his music, but I collegially disagree with the emphasis on exact process that his musical example encourages. We are not machines, taking in numerical data, but human begins, who communicate through symbols, whose meaning is often arbitrary in its basis, but collectively agreed upon. I love the idea of a piece of music starting as one thing and gradually metamorphosing into something else. But I find it more rewarding, as a composer and as a listener, when the process is suggested humanly and intuitively, in stages, with detours and surprises, and in terms of harmonies, rhythms, textures that the listener can recognize and assimilate as they go by.

More important than my stand on that or any particular issue, though, is my (and Gilmore’s) disappointment that there is very little apparent argument these days about which direction music should take. I don’t single out Dartington: I find the same experience almost everywhere, and no public forum available for composers to debate aesthetic convictions. Musical decisions made collectively, through controversy, survival of resistance, and mutual correction, carry authority. No one needs or wants musical polemics to be as vitriolic and dismissive as they were 30 years ago, but the lack of discussion today leads to a dull acquiescence in everything, and a lack of community. Perhaps now everyone’s too afraid to hurt each other’s feelings. But Bob’s playing me CDs of spectral music, I’m playing him postminimalist music, each of us dubious about the other’s tastes and defending our own – and it sort of feels like old times.

I’m out here in the wilds of Devonshire, lecturing at Dartington College of the Arts, a school that resembles my own home institution in many ways: rural setting, size, priorities, student interests. As with all such liberal institutions, technology is not at the top of its priority list, and it took me a few days to get fitted with my own internet connection, one that would allow me to e-mail and blog comfortably and at leisure.

In the process I missed a very important American-musical birthday this week: William Duckworth turned sixty. [Oops – 61. Is this 2004? Why wasn’t I informed?] One of the first postminimalist composers, possibly the first depending on how you define the style, Duckworth remains one of the best. (By the way, unlike some writers I don’t use “postminimalist” to refer to general minimalist influence, but as a very specific American style of the 1980s. You can read my New Music Box article on postminimalism for details.) Duckworth’s music is elegant, logical, tuneful, and yet leaves room for improvisation, dissonance, collage, and chance techniques without losing its own identity. His break-through came in 1979 with his hour-long piano work The Time Curve Preludes, a subtle, mesmerizing cycle of pieces weaving together bluegrass banjo techniques, chant, Erik Satie’s Vexations, quasi-Indian modes, Messiaen-like rhythmic structures, and subtly veiled minimalist processes into a smooth fusion. I first heard it at New Music America in Minneapolis in 1980, which might pinpoint the true beginning of Duckworth’s public career. Everyone I’ve ever played the CD for has expressed a desire to run out and buy it. It’s a classic.

And it remains Duckworth’s signature work, though I feel he’s surpassed it. His choral cycle Southern Harmony drew on shaped-note hymn-singing techniques from early rural America, and shaped it with a minimalist ear. His Imaginary Dances is another stellar piano cycle: charming, more nuanced than The Time Curve Preludes, its liveliness begging you to analyze the tricky rhythmic devices through which he creates it. Blue Rhythms is a delightful trio for clarinet, cello, and piano, with a springy jazz feel. Mysterious Numbers, with its syncopated counterpoint of melodies rising and falling against each other, is the piece with which he started transferring that aesthetic to orchestra. If there is any composer from the 1980s and ’90s whose music is sturdy, enduring, and universal enough to go into the standard repertoire, it is Duckworth’s. In fact, come to think of it, if you’re a Lou Harrison fan looking for who might follow in that tradition, Duckworth is a logical next step.

In recent years, Duckworth has divided his career between composed works and his massive internet project, Cathedral, which you can access here. Cathedral has drawn him into the world of listener-contributed sound samples, improvisation, and DJ-ing: live performances of his Cathedral Band are grounded in the disc-spinning of Seattle’s DJ Tamara. One of the main features of postminimalism, though, and especially in Duckworth’s conception of the style, is that it can draw so many disparate elements into a smooth fusion that doesn’t seem eclectic at all. As I’ve written before, everything Mr. D eats turns into Mr. D. Now that he’s past 60, it’s time to recognize him as one of America’s leading musical statesmen, a major influence on a generation or two of younger composers (myself included), and someone whose music elegantly crystallized a refreshingly calm moment in the otherwise chaotic late 20th century.

I’m off to England. I fly out tomorrow for two and a half weeks of teaching at Dartington College of the Arts down south in the moors of Devon, courtesy of my good friend Bob Gilmore (he wrote the Partch book, I wrote the Nancarrow book, we both want to write a Rudhyar book). I don’t know what the e-mail situation will be, how much free time I’ll have, whether there will be anything to blog about. So don’t necessarily expect to hear from me before I’m back January 25, though I may surprise you earlier with a wealth of anecdotes about English musical life. And Totnes is a short cab ride from Torquay, so I’ll be making my usual pilgrimage to the land of Basil and Sibyl Fawlty.

Another fantastic music book already out of print, though only published in 1990: The Apollonian Clockwork by Louis Andriessen and Elmer Schonberger, a wildly imaginative series of essays exploring odd but startlingly revealing corners of the life and music of Igor Stravinsky. It opens with a copy of the mug shot taken of Stravinsky when he was arrested in Boston in 1942 for having made his own orchestral arrangement of the “Star-Spangled Banner” (‘tampering with national property” was the charge, no kidding), and discusses such subjects as why Stravinsky’s counterpoint trips into parallel unisons that don’t sound like unisons, and why he was the only major 20th-century composer no one could get away with imitating. It is the most creative literary homage I ever seen made to a composer, not to mention a gold mine of clever quotations by and about Stravinsky. OUT OF PRINT.