As I said in my first blog entry, the purpose of this blog is to entice people to send me information I’m looking for. It works beautifully. Publisher Joseph Zitt informs me that one can still order Robert Cogan’s and Pozzi Escot’s magnificent book Sonic Design privately from their web site, at http://www.sonicdesign.org/order_form_book.htm. There’s also a workbook to go with it, which I’d never seen. Maybe I’ll get to teach my Sonic Design class after all.

Zitt, of Metatron Press, also lusts to republish Cardew’s Stockhausen Serves Imperialism, warts and all. Our little Bard College library copy is about worn to a frazzle from me and my colleagues fighting over it. If you don’t know about the book, I wrote about it in my New Music Box article on political music, Making Marx in the Music.

I had opportunity this week to teach with a classic music book that I rarely get to use: Sonic Design (Prentice-Hall) by Robert Cogan and Pozzi Escot. Published in 1976, the book was an amazing and long-awaited achievement: a culturally neutral attempt at general, analytical musical principles. Starting with abstract, non-Eurocentric concepts such as pitchspace, contour, and density, and usually starting by graphing scale steps and rhythms onto graph paper, Cogan and Escot came up with methods for approaching music that worked equally well with a Josquin des Prez mass movement, a Bach keyboard work, an Elliott Carter string quartet, the Ives First Sonata, a Zuni buffalo dance, a piece called “Plum Blossom” for Chinese Ch’in, Indian raga improvisations, John Cage’s chance works, and Gregorian chant. They approached each piece from the outside via descriptive analysis, only moving in toward culturally determined features of musical language after coming up with general insights about shape and gesture. In fact, it was their Zuni buffalo dance analysis that, in 1977, spun me off into a life of visiting American Indian reservations and studying Native American music and dance for integration of its rhythms into my own music. Add to that the fact that the Forward is by Elliott Carter, and it’s clear that this was an important, even revolutionary book with very widespread appeal and no axes to grind.

I’d construct a class around Sonic Design if I could order it for students, but, of course, I can’t: it’s out of print. (I Xeroxed a couple of chapters this week.) I don’t know how long it was in print, a few months, it seemed like. It can be just about guaranteed that any important book about music will disappear from print almost before the music community is aware of its existence.

For instance, Henry Cowell’s New Musical Resources is the most influential book in the history of American music: it was published in 1930, remaindered in 1935, brought out briefly again in 1969, and picked up by Oxford again in 1996, and I’ve just heard a rumor that it’s going out of print again. For many years another crucial book in American music, Harry Partch’s Genesis of a Music, was unavailable, though Da Capo managed to bring it back a few years ago with CRI’s help; I hope when I order it for class next week it’s still out there. Jonathan Kramer’s 1988 book The Time of Music was a ground-breaking study of 20th-century concepts of musical time: out of print. Cornelius Cardew’s Stockhausen Serves Imperialism: still relevant today, but a collector’s item that you can make a good profit off of on E-bay. And as for books on tuning, fugeddaboudit. My keyboard temperament bible is Owen Jorgensen’s Tuning: Containing the Perfection of Eighteenth-Century Temperament, the Lost Art of Ninteenth-Century Temperament, and the Science of Equal Temperament, but you’ll never find it. In 1992 Patelson’s Music in New York had a stack of them on the cut-out table and I grabbed several for friends, though the tome weighs a good ten pounds. And every microtonalist I know would give his left little finger for a copy of J. Murray Barbour’s Tuning and Temperament (Da Capo Press, 1972). Somehow Cage’s Silence and Charles Rosen’s The Classical Era manage to stay in the bookstores, but any other good-looking music book I snap up on first sight, because I never expect to see it again. There are thousands of musicians out there searching for rare copies of books that no one will publish because – “there’s no demand for them.”

The Noam Chomsky passage to which I alluded in my last blog entry is worth reprinting here, worth memorizing, in fact, and worth being plastered on a wall of every building in this American Republic:

…In our society, real power does not happen to lie in the political system, it lies in the private economy: that’s where the decisions are made about what’s produced, how much is produced, what’s consumed, where investment takes place, who has jobs, who controls the resources, and so on and so forth. And as long as that remains the case, changes inside the political system can make some difference – I don’t want to say it’s zero – but the differences are going to be very slight.

In fact, if you think through the logic of this, you’ll see that so long as power remains privately concentrated, everybody, everybody, has to be committed to one overriding goal: and that’s to make sure that the rich folk are happy [italics mine] – because if they’re happy, then they’ll invest, and the economy will work, and things will function, and then maybe something will trickle down to you somewhere along the line. But if they’re not happy, everything’s going to grind to a halt, and you’re not even going to get anything trickling down. So if you’re a homeless person in the streets, your first concern is the happiness of the wealthy guys in the mansions and the fancy restaurants. Basically, that’s a metaphor for the whole society.

Like, suppose Massachusetts were to increase business taxes. Most of the population is in favor of it, but you can predict what would happen. Business would run a public relations campaign – which is true, in fact, it’s not lies – saying, “You raise taxes on business, you soak the rich, and you’ll find that capital is going to flow elsewhere, and you’re not going to have any jobs, you’re not going to have anything.” That’s not the way they’d put it exactly, but that’s what it would amount to: “Unless you make us happy you’re not going to have anything, because we own the place; you live here, but we own the place….” [U]nless you keep business happy, the population isn’t going to have anything.

Understanding Power: The Indispensible Chomsky, pp. 63-64

This applies to us all, whether Republican or Democrat, whether aspiring pop star or experimental composer, whether homeless person or general in charge of deciding when and where to drop the nuclear bombs. Everything we say, everything we can say, about art and the arts on these blogs is limited by the confines of that external condition. Of course, the arts have always, through recorded history, been about keeping rich folks happy. The glory of the European 16th through 18th centuries was that back then rich folks were artistically well-educated and had excellent taste. The taste that rich folks have today, you can see in our major institutions. On any widespread scale, a society gets the art its rich folks want it to get.

Alan Licht, composer and critic, came to speak at Bard the other night. He gave as a lecture an article that he had written for the e-magazine Bumpidee, “Improvisation and the New American Century,” and which you can read either here or here. His anti-Bush-imperialist comments merely echo what I’ve long believed myself, but I was struck by parallels he draws between the acquiescence of Congress today and the acquiescence of critics who glorify whatever the industry releases. Here, from the middle of the article, are the relevant paragraphs:

“What strikes me about pop criticism of late – and this afflicts the broadsheets as well – is the tyranny of received opinion. I have yet to meet anyone, obsessive fan or otherwise, who thinks the last two Nick Cave albums come close to 1997’s The Boatman’s Call in terms of emotional depth and songwriting skill, but both releases were greeted with an across-the-board acclaim that bordered on instilled reverence, and an attendant lack of critical rigour. What gives here? Maybe writers are too hidebound by the notion of providing their readers with glorified consumer guides rather than informed criticism.” Sean O’Hagan, “Can”t I trust anyone these days to tell me if a record is any good?” the London Observer, March 30, 2003

Jonathan Rosenbaum launches a similar complaint against his fellow film critics in his excellent book Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Conspire to Limit What Films We See (Acapella Books, 2000). He exemplifies the problems with current film criticism with the now-retired NY Times critic Janet Maslin, who wrote based on audience expectations rather than her own opinions (and references a critique by Sarah Kerr in Slate titled “Janet Maslin: Why Can’t the New York Times Movie Critic Tell Us What She Thinks?” – compare with O’Hagan’s title). [You can read this original 1999 Slate article here.] I remember her review of The Cable Guy, which she panned because fans of the lovable Jim Carrey would be disappointed by his memorably dark characterization in the film. Nice market research there, Janet, but was it a good movie? She’s providing a glorified consumer guide/career advice rather than informed criticism. One of the more galling aspects of the slide into war was Congress’ silence as Bush steamrolled over the U.N. and into Iraq (save for Senators Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd–who’s also a violinist). Talk about a tyranny of received opinion! Congress abdicated its responsibilty for informed criticism of the President’s doings when it gave him a blank check to go to war after 9/11. That responsibility, in the form of legislation, is what we elect our representatives for, and they’re not doing their job.

It’s interesting to see this tendency on the part of critics put into a political framework. It’s as Noam Chomsky says, at greater length: the only chance for survival today is keeping the wealthy class happy, whether you’re a senator or a newspaper critic. I think it explains why I’ve hit a glass ceiling in my career as a critic. It has been hinted to me at times, ever so delicately, that it would be appreciated if I would write more about the goings-on at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, since that’s where the advertising money comes from, and that’s the stuff larger audiences hear. And I’ve tried. I think my last attempt to take Carnegie Hall seriously, new-music-wise, was lukewarmly reviewing the Giovanni Sollima concert there in 2000: a rather nice postminimalist concert overwhelmed by its PR (“the Jimi Hendrix of the cello!”) and the cellist/composer’s patently stellar opinion of his own lackluster music. But those glorified spaces are not where the intellectual life of new music takes place, and these days the great new music never even seems to get there eventually. So, perhaps unwisely given free rein to define my own critical bailiwick, I’ve obstinately continued reviewing small spaces and tiny CD labels, and have integritized myself into commercial irrelevance. Luckily, I have tenure.

I don’t believe, however, that the classical critic makes a career by raving about every new effort that comes from the large corporations, as Licht claims that film critics and pop music critics do. It’s always seemed to me that classical music critics make their way into the presitigious posts by disparaging almost everything recent and seeming extreeeeeeemely hard to please. That’s another problem with me: contrary to a reputation that enigmatically clings to me outside Downtown new-music circles, the vast majority of my reviews have been enthusiastic. I rarely write about concerts I didn’t like unless they were institutionally high-profile, and I rarely attend institutionally high-profile concerts because they look so boring.

And then, with Licht’s words in my head, I went last night to see the Bill Murray movie Lost in Translation. I’d been primed and pumped by rave reviews at my favorite liberal news sources NPR and Salon, fed snippets of its sizzling dialogue, seduced by reports that director Sophia Coppola was possibly a greater director than her father, even to the point of giving her a cover spread on the Times Sunday magazine. Why didn’t anyone mention that the movie was relentlessly dull, deliberately unfulfilled, monochrome, inflated with pointless detail, and unfocused? If this is the kind of movie that can earn raves as a “thinking man’s comedy” these days, film critics’ standards have indeed become more debased than I’d realized.

Long-time electronic composer and general Downtown raconteur Tom Hamilton sends me an interesting fact in response to my perceptions of the guitar’s takeover of the composing world:

In 1995, an industry group called the Guitar and Accessories Marketing Association (GAMA), along with the NAMM and MENC, started a launched a program to train teachers to start guitar programs in middle and high schools. That group estimated that by 2001, over 200,000 students have learned guitar in school, and over 38,000 students bought their own guitar. They project a trend that by 2010, will have over 1.5 million students learning guitar in school programs, and over 300,000 students purchasing guitars. And that’s just through one school-based program! My observation is that most guitarists learn through woodshedding and private lessons without any institutional structure at all.

So no wonder young guitarists seem to be coming out of the woodwork: it was a calculated industry initiative! Tom also notes that when he was in school (and he and I are roughly the same antediluvian age, struggling together to figure out these youngsters), guitarists had to major in piano and take guitar lessons on the side. Bard, I might note, and to brag about my own institution for a moment, allegedly boasts the country’s oldest college guitar program, begun around 1968 by our cellist/guitarist Luis Garcia-Renart. Perhaps that’s why, to this day, a good half of my students are guitarists.

The deeper insights I get into the guitar, though, come from my son Bernard, who plays electric, acoustic, and (fretless) bass. When you practice the piano, as I did as a teenager, the piano sits in the living room, everyone in the house hears your painful learning process and your mistakes, and you drive your parents nuts playing scales up and down after school. (Thanks for the denials, Mom and Dad, but I know it was a drag sometimes.) When you’re a guitarist, you can go off in your room, turn the amp off, experiment to your heart’s delight, work out your technical issues in private, and emerge showing off your best work. I think that’s one reason, along with the macho Eric Clapton/John Lennon image, that the guitar and piano attract different personalities, and I suspect that’s partly what’s behind the guitar’s ascendancy: because young men today, it seems to me, have a harder time making their mistakes in public than young men used to. Not only due to its deafening volume and visual appearance as a kind of oversize, substitute phallus is the guitar a more macho instrument.

And speaking of laptops, Tom reiterates a question that my friends and I agonize over all the time: is it necessary for electronic composers to acquire keyboard or other conventional-instrument skills? Why?

Something else I meant to add about my students and the piano: Perhaps it’s just Bard culture, but I see many students today, perhaps a majority, coming to musical creativity from the guitar rather than the piano, as they used to, or any other instrument. This could have profound consequences. In the Renaissance, composers usually got their start as child singers. Baroque and Classical composers were often string players (Corelli and Haydn, the violin; Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, the viola). Romantic and modern composers were more often than not pianists. Such choices have profound consequences, and if there really is a sea-change of composers now coming from the guitar world rather than the piano, that alone could bring about a rift in musical eras. Berlioz, who played the clarinet and guitar, was almost the only non-pianist composer of his era, and as a result became its most innovative orchestrator. Guitarists visualize music theory in more contextual, less fixed and abstract, ways than pianists do. Interval size is less of a constant for them, melodies more conveniently leap throughout the register than proceed by steps, and their instruments are easily retunable and portable, tremendously louder (if electric), and carrying no upper-class connotations. By their 20s, these composers have been conditioned by a completely different relationship to pitch and volume than the pianist-composers of my generation and earlier. I’m curious as to whether professors in other music departments notice the same demographic change.

And this is not to even mention the other new musical instrument nearly as ubiquitous as the guitar: the laptop computer.

Matt Wellins add his own words to my account of his postclassical approach to writing for classical instruments:

Just wanted to clarify: The piano does speak to me as a cultural icon, though not necessarily one that reeks of “high European culture.” As you said, it is very much in any number of different worlds. I think we even discussed several other composers in addition to Cage and Feldman today, I think Nancarrow and Zorn came up. But hell, any number of 20th century composers seem to have reinvented the piano, I can’t believe Messiaen hasn’t been mentioned yet.

The question, then, for me, is which piano history do I choose? This is that “postclassical” dilemma again, even the genre mash-ups of any number of Downtown composers seem dated (I mean, with Ives’ work, another great piano mind, going back to the early 1900s, let’s face facts, even ‘post’ isn’t so ‘post’). I wonder if the problem isn’t every composer’s problem. That is, to find an approach that is decidely personal, in face of a detrimentally influential history. This, however, only deals with half the issue. What I want to achieve and what I imagine listeners hearing are two very different things.

Despite all of these reinventions of the piano, could I lightly tap birdsong on the keys, and expect people to think of Messiaen? Did Messiaen’s audience honestly confuse the piano with birds? Even our perceptions of Cage as the liberator of ego-driven approach or Feldman as the liberator of timbre and space, seem possible for an audience to completely ignore. In fact, even fans of Cage and Feldman, in general, might not have the fetishistic dedication to their work that truly reveals the mentioned distinctions.

I’m completely cognizant of the great tradition of experimentations within the boundaries of piano. I’m worried that at the end of the day, people will hear the tritest aspect of my work. That they won’t be listening from the “bottom upwards”, as opposed to me working from the “outside inwards”, that instead they will be hearing the “High European culture” if I compose a piece to be performed at the Fisher Performing Arts Center, or the “Jazz” culture if I’m playing Bud Powell, or the “Rock” if I’m playing Jerry Lee Lewis. They will hear the piano in regards to any of those cultures, any of those lineages, any of those worlds..but they will not HEAR the piano in the sensual, Feldman way, they will hear it in regards to something else. Who knows exactly what.

Maybe my fears about the audience are unfounded or condescending, I don’t know. Some of these feelings are drawn from my own skepticism in listening. Everything seems to point back to attempting to re-establish a dominant folk culture – something regional, instead of historical, something participatory, but not hokey, something shared, remembered, and collectively created..Something that exists for the pure joy of music and music-making, rather than the hierarchy and the historical constraints.

North Carolina composer and faithful reader Lawrence Dillon also weighs in with an interesting perspective, traditional yet perhaps in today’s climate bracingly revisionist:

I enjoyed your musings on Matt Wellins’s problems with writing for piano. You correctly call his misgivings “nonsense” because the piano is capable of so much flexibility, but there’s another level of nonsense to his position: one can make a case that any medium of artistic expression is tainted by cultural associations. Electronic music, with its reliance on technology, is an easy case in point: technology distances us from one another, lines the pockets of unscrupulous corporations, employs near-slaves in foreign sweatshops, finds ever more effective ways to wipe out entire populations, destroys the environment, etc.

The piano, on the other hand, served as one of history’s most effective means of connecting amateur with professional musicians, enabled countless members of oppressed races to sidestep segregation, provided a cultural connection for young people who couldn’t excel at sports, wedded the mental, emotional and physical acts of making music through a single, consistent sonority, etc.

Rather than not buying into the illusion of transparency, we should encourage our students not to buy into rationalized constructs of political necessity. These constructs are usually used to give the illusion of objectivity to what is, and should be, a subjective choice. The composer’s job is to write what s/he wants to hear. Period. It’s not necessary to consider any type of music-making outdated or culturally inferior in order to justify ones tastes and artistic needs.

It’s certainly true that “rationalized constructs of political necessity” are all around us today, and there is much pressure to buy into them. For instance, the recording companies tell us that the extremely constricted range of what they intend to sell is coextensive with what the public wants; of course, no intelligent, naunced research is done to determine whether this is true, and for decades we composers assumed that the public’s taste was devloving toward lowest-common-denominator pop. Only in the last few years have I seen people realize and assert that the corporate drive toward drivel is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Perhaps the alleged association of classical music conventions with upper-class elitism has its origin in similar political motivations.

[P.S. – or P.B., or whatever the correct abbreviation might be for an updated blog entry: Responses are leading me to think that I may have inadvertantly misrepresented Matt’s point. It’s not that it’s difficult to write for piano because of its European, elitist connotations – as he puts it, it’s “Which history do I choose?” For composers used to dealing directly with sampled sounds that carry specific extramusical connotations, the idea of merely using simple notes and abstract intervals comes to seem rather meaningless. The same might have been said for composers of musique concrete 40 years ago, but the feeling is far more prevalent today among young composers who have grown up with recording software. Music, in this respect, has become more like painting, photography, theater, and performance art, which have long dealt with social realities. Especially coming from a pop music world in which every sound, every chord, every timbre, every singing style seems to point to some social provenance, today’s young computer composers deal with more connotative aspects of sound. Trying to paint a picture in the undifferentiated notes of a piano, then, must feel like painting entirely in one-inch squares, or in black and white.]

Speaking of the piano, I’ve been cleaning out my garage, and I found (among many, many other sentimental items you’d be grateful I’m sparing you) a cassette tape of the piano recital I gave as a high school senior, on May 18, 1973, at Skyline High School in Dallas. The program was ambitious, well over an hour, and, as you can see, studded with 20th-century American music, for which I was already a staunch advocate:

Johannes Brahms: Rhapsody in E-flat, Op. 119

Robert Muczynski: Solitude

” ” : Night Rain

” ” : Jubilee

George Rochberg: “Prologue” from Sonata-Fantasia (1956)

Kent Kennan: Three Preludes (1938)

John Cage: 4’33” (1952)

Kyle Gann: Commentary on Hope and Meaninglessness (1973)

” ” : Impacts (1973)

William Swafford: “Ah, Ja! Ein Kleiderschrank” (1973)

Marcus McDaniel: Four Pieces (1973)

Alexander Scriabin: Etude in D# Minor, Op. 8, No.12

Aaron Copland: Piano Sonata (1939-41)

Frederick Chopin: Polonaise in A-flat Major, Op. 53

Yes, that’s right, at the age of 17 I played 4’33” for my bewildered friends and their parents, though with a lengthy explanation of Cage’s philosophy preceeding it, so the audience sat obediently quiet. Marcus McDaniel and William Swafford were friends of mine; Marcus subsequently went into computers for a living, but we’re still in touch. Kennan and Muczynski were middle-of-the-road composers better known then than they are today. I must say, I played pretty damn well, which I no longer do today, and I won’t ask you to take my word for it – out of pure vanity I’ve temporarily put the Copland Sonata performance on my web site, at kylegann.com (scroll down to the bottom if you’re really intrigued). The thing I regret most about my life is that I didn’t maintain my pianistic skills, because I get tremendous pleasure from playing: but around 1983 I started typing instead of practicing, and it took over my life. The moral here, kids, is Practice! Practice, practice, practice, and never stop!

Somewhere between me and Matt Wellins lies the postclassical dilemma. Matt, you’ll recall, is a student of mine at Bard, of aggressively postmodern tendencies. He writes mostly electronic music, with samples and environmental sounds: old recordings, noises outside his apartment, kids playing in Central Park, old TV cartoons. He thinks about the cultural provenance of each noise he includes, and is politically aware of the sonic associations he invokes. Now he’s writing a piano piece, though, and having a predictable problem. The piano, to him, is a cultural icon that speaks of European music, of high culture, of industrial mass production, of the elitism of virtuosity. He’s having trouble making it matter what he writes for piano, because the very fact of it being a piano overwhelms any nuances in the musical material. The medium’s message drowns out its ostensive content.

Of course, on one level this is nonsense. Piano pieces do differ: the grace of a Mozart sonata, the languor of a Chopin Nocturne, the fluid pile-up of sonorities in Art Tatum’s version of “What’s New,” the frozen abstractions of Stockhausen’s Klavierstuck Nr. 9, the athletic banging of Jerry Lee Lewis in “Great Balls of Fire,” the fireworks of Nancarrow’s Player Piano Study No. 25 – these mean different things, and evoke different worlds, activities, audiences, even social classes. But I’m speaking from inside the illusion that the piano is a transparent medium; I take its 12-equal tuning, its late-medieval-Germanic 7-white/5-black keyboard, its industrial cast-iron frame, its European manufacture, its expensive price, its relative immobility, its history of elephant tusk exploitation, its canonic repertoire, for granted. I shut them all out, ignore their imperialist origins, their contingent nature, their imposition of a worldview. (Composers haven’t always done so. The 16th-century Nicola Vicentino was acutely aware of the homogeneity imposed on the world’s melodies by a 12-pitch keyboard, and invented his own 31-pitch keyboard as a multicultural alternative.) Having grown up within classical music I can easily believe in the piano as an a priori structure, a transparent transmitter of intentions. But Matt comes to the piano from the outside. Used to dealing with sound itself, not the intervals between sounds, he can’t hear the tone of a piano as innocent. “The moment I write a note on paper,” he says, “I enter into the illusion.”

I know what Matt means, partly because that’s the way I feel about the orchestra. I grew up with a piano in the house, but the orchestra is something my parents dressed up to go hear, as if it were church, in a big hall in downtown Dallas. There was something infrequent, inconvenient, and foreign about it. Its overture/concerto/symphony repertoire was cumbersome and inflexible, each concert more or less like the last in emotive expression (though I must say, I remember one special American music concert I heard as a teenager featuring works by Feldman, Varese, and Ruggles). I can think in piano terms and find it transparent, but when I write for orchestra I am heavily conscious of passing through a veil, of threatening to impinge on a social world in which I am neither comfortable nor, as a living composer, entirely welcome. The orchestra is a hierarchical structure: the violins are most important, strings play most of the time, winds are for color, brass for climaxes, percussion for punctuation. The tuxedos, the applause for the concertmaster, the exaggerated respect for the conductor, even the dignified demeanor of the men who move the music stands, all remind me that the orchestra was a product of a different age and country, geared to please the aristocracy that supported it. The fact that my friend Sandow can campaign to save the orchestra while I always instinctively considered the orchestra moribund I attribute to the facts that he grew up in New York, with culture all around and orchestras within walking distance, while I grew up in Dallas.

But back to the piano. Matt and I found common ground in the piano works of Cage and Feldman. Cage’s Music of Changes and Etudes Australes, while they do not remove the veil from the piano’s illusion of transparency, do not blindly play into it, either. Cage’s chance techniques articulate the piano, causing its keys and hammers to create sound, but the end result is not expression, but merely the sounds of a piano. He does not make a point of the piano’s social context, but neither does he invite you to imagine that it is anything more or less than a piano. Feldman’s piano works, from Out of Last Pieces to Triadic Memories and beyond, are more specific: drawing attention to physicality, they demonstrate that the piano is not truly a melodic instrument, but that its notes instantly begin decaying, and that the instrument can produce nothing but rapidly decrescendoing sound envelopes. Feldman fashioned an entire aesthetic around the piano’s inability to sustain, a kind of continuous metaphor for our lifelong propulsion toward death.

So what of electronic music mavens of Matt’s generation, for whom Cage and Feldman may represent the earliest piano music that doesn’t seem foreign and artificial? I’m more and more thinking these days that traditional music theory is bound to give way to acoustics and the technology of sound reproduction. More and more we find young composers who can string chords together without needing to know what they’re called, but whose more detailed expertise is invested in reverb, delay, filtering, sampling, 3-D sound placement. Pitch theory (except for microtonality, and that’s a long article for another day) had pretty much reached a dead end in the 1970s anyway, and I consider much of the “pitch set” theory I learned in grad school a waste of time, worth telling my students about only as an example of intellectualism gone awry. Harmonic relationships between pitches, lamentably finite, are today taking a back seat to sound processing, and while I’m not always technologically savvy enough to follow along, I?m not convinced it’s a bad thing.

Nevertheless, I encouraged Matt to write for the piano and also for the orchestra, from the outside. Think of its sounds, think of its cultural associations, and perhaps you’ll find a new way to use those instruments and give the medium new life. The challenge is to write those notes on the page, but not think of them merely in terms of idealistic musical logic, but as concrete sounds connected to cultural realities. I’m fascinated to see what he’ll come up with. Me, I’m old-fashioned in terms of the piano, I still write piano tunes, and I can buy the illusion untroubled. But somewhere in here is the disjunction in lived experience that will separate the classical from postclassical worlds. Just as white-maleness can no longer be taken as emblematic of human experience in general, the musical media we use are losing their transparency, their veneer of political neutrality. It’s gradually becoming impossible to write for the piano without thinking of the piano as just a piano.

I mentioned awhile back Art Jarvinen‘s 24-hour piano piece. I said he was producing a one-CD excerpt of it, and he has, on Los Angeles River Records, and he sent it to me. The piece is called Serious Immobilities, which, if you’re new-music literate, should bring a ready reference to mind: Erik Satie. “To play this motif for oneself 840 times in a row,” Satie write in somewhat ambiguous French on a little scrap of music found after his death with the title Vexations, “it will be good to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the greatest silence, through serious immobilities.” John Cage took that odd sentence as a performance instruction, and, on September 10, 1963, presented a complete performance of Vexations lasting approximately an entire day. Since then, there have been many such performances, usually with a team of pianists taking shifts; I’ve been involved in three myself, in Austin, Chicago, and New York. For its audacious protominimalism, Vexations has become a real touchstone for new-music buffs. Among other composers, William Duckworth quotes it in his Time Curve Preludes.

What Jarvinen’s done, and which only he would be crazy and dedicated enough to do, is write a theme and variations on Vexations. That’s right – he wrote 840 variations on Satie’s little four-line scrap of music, of which 81 are offered on this disc. The variations maintain the same general slow tempo and harmonic ambiguity as Satie’s original, but listening to them is different in interesting ways. Mainly, the piece is unpredictable in detail – you know generally what harmonies are coming, but the music switches at times to triple meter, notes you’re used to in the bass come back in the treble, harmonies get offset so that part of each chord gets combined with the next. One variation is all in trills, sounding as though there’s a touch of Beethoven’s Op. 111 thrown in, and in another, the tune from Satie’s popular Gymnopedie No. 1 comes creeping over the murk of Vexations‘ tritones. And yet, for all this added interest, there’s still the endless ambiguity of the original, never resolving, always coming back to the same semi-dissonant harmonies. Bryan Pezzone is the patient pianist, and does a devoutly sustained job.

Jarvinen is a trickster whom Satie would have undoubtedly found amusing. A couple of years back he produced his own fairly obscene Beatles parody CD on Lakefire Records, called Sgt. Pekker. That disc has songs like “We All Ride in My Yellow Limousine,” “Man, My Guitar Playing Really Reeks,” and “I Never Make Any Money”:

I never make any money

And I seldom get laid

Well, I can live without cunny, honey,

But I need to get paid

Yes, I need to get paid

For all that, Jarvinen is a wildly inventive postclassical composer as well, and Serious Immobilities transcends its anecdotal interest.